aluren

You're brushing off my point, why no selection on the allele? Why did they all die out? Easiest answer is it never made it.

Evolution works in more complicated ways than the toy model of sickle-cell disease/malaria you've been taught in high school. Just having an edge in a particular situation is no guarantee for your alleles being selected. But even then, there could very well have been very little mixing while still everyone shares the same set of ancestors. Even a little mixing is enough.

The simulations are nice, and make a theoretical lower bound but a single remote tribe somewhere on earth would push it back tens of thousands of years.

The subject is well-refined and the results are old news so I'm going to go on a limp and assume that the researchers who did the simulations know how to do their jobs and accounted for that possibility you described.

DNA Sequence an Andaman islander and every bushman and Amazonian, then we'll see.

Ignoring the fact that the various peoples in the Amazon have not been isolated at all, or that the Adamans have been settled approximately in the time range of the estimated IAP and have known a few exchanges since, that's not how genealogy works. See, if a single outsider gets into the Adamans or Australia and starts having children with locals, and assuming the line doesn't die out, there's a statistical certainty that eventually every current living person in that territory will be descended from that outsider. Just one is enough. It doesn't matter that their genetic contribution is diluted to the point of being barely detectable. I invite you to read the link about IAP in more detail and do some rudimentary math on why it has to be the case (or more accurately, why the opposite is so statistically improbable as to be pretty much impossible).

You're conflating market economies (that have been around since basically forever and that no one except the most hardcore anarcho-primitivists are attacking) and modern day capitalism (which has been around since the Industrial Revolution and is characterized by its lack of upper limit on wealth accumulation).

Last I heard Stallman isn't forcing anything on anyone, even in the loosest sense of the word. Criticism isn't authoritarian.

Genealogical mixing and genetic mixing have little to do with each other - the pool is too diluted at these scales and there can be much local variation.

By the way, the fact that all of us share the exact same set of ancestors from a few thousand years ago isn't new, shocking or controversial, only the exact date is still subject do debate. You may find this link useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point

Fines should not exist. Anything that gets punished by a fine is basically codeword for 'you can break that law if you're rich'. The most spectacular example being Facebook's stock rising after being fined for a few billions because it was pocket money for them.

Alternatively, if you really want to punish minor things, fines could be dependent on your income.

That’s assuming that the human population is well-mixed

Yes that's why I took the conservative estimate of 7000 years, otherwise with the panmixia hypothesis it only goes back 3000 years or so.

The Genghis Khan thing doesn't really say much - there's a statistical near-certainty that liteally everyone today is descended from every single human that 7000 years ago (whose line didn't die out obviously).

There should be a moratorium on invoking evolution unless you're an evolutionary biologist. It's quite telling that whenever I read the word 'Darwin' on this site I immediately go 'aw shit, I'm not going to like this' and it never fails.

I don't think there's a single person today that knows all the rules. If you want to annoy any judge just ask about an interaction between 3+ cards involving Opalescence and Humility. On top of that the rules get more complex with every set, though they do attempt to cut things down. Fortunately for competitive play you only need to worry about a few hundred strong enough cards or so.

That's awful to be honest.

I don't have anything against online dating in principle, though I do find it pretty weird, but there's got to be a better way than relying on obscure matchmaking algorithms, shitty apps optimizing for engagement and your being single (remember, if you're not single you're not using the app), run by shady companies harvesting all of your data. Americans will always surprise me in their ability to surrender every single aspect of their life to megacorporations, even the most intimate and personal ones.

Of course science is political. What isn't?

I have a feeling that non-scientists see science as an invisible ethereal, platonic construct that's slowly being unveiled by hardy explorers, uh I mean scientists, until at last the whole of the Truth and nothing but the Truth fully shines in its enlightening splendor.

Except that's not how it works. In practice, science works by scientific consensus. What is true is what the community decides is true. The community can be convinced otherwise by contradicting evidence (or not) but the process of convincing is then subject to all the biases affecting our feeble human minds: it can be contradictory with other evidence, misinterpreted, misunderstood, deemed insufficient, coming from the wrong person, etc. It takes a lot of time for the consensus to evolve, and it's a rather a messy and political affair. There's often a running joke that a theory's acceptance depends on the old guard dying out and being replaced by the younger, more open-minded generation (relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works)

Btw, just in case you're wondering, math is absolutely not immune from this either. Cathy O'Neil wrote an excellent post detailing how mathematical proofs work in real life (and not in some platonic imaginary world invented by laymen): https://mathbabe.org/2012/08/06/what-is-a-proof/ also with a relatively recent example: https://mathbabe.org/2012/11/14/the-abc-conjecture-has-not-b...

I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard?

In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.

DNA is nothing like source code. Why do people keep repeating this analogy.

At any rate, cell differentiation/compartmentation within a tumor has been observed, so things do get blurry indeed. It's also worth noting that there isn't a single definition of 'species' and it's all just semantics that changes depending on your field. (The traditional 'inter-fertile over two generations' you learn in high school is helpful but doesn't stand up to many observations.) Ultimately a species is what biologists say is a species.

My (fairly rudimentary) understanding of the United States is that the right wing controls most of its governmental apparatus as well as the biggest news outlet. How are they being 'deplatformed' or segmented in any way?

Lol at 'American wine is better'. It sure feels nice to pay $17 for a much-touted fancy bottle that turns out to be meh at best when in the States. Meanwhile you could just pick anything at random for like 3€ in any French or Italian grocery store and still get something decent. I probably didn't try everything the land of the free has to offer but this offside remark really makes me wonder what is considered good there.

To be frank, a 3% tax is too little too late.

Alright, I wasn't talking about you specifically, sorry if you took it that way.

On HN curation: while I certainly look up to this community when it comes to coding, technology and latest new software tools in general, I'm sorry to say the standards are not even remotely up to par when it comes to genomics. I assume it's because neither the mod team nor the majority of the community has a relevant background, and it's perfectly understandable. It does mean however that I, more often than not, encounter some pretty egregious stuff on here, especially when some dreaded words like "evolution" or "heritability" get mentioned. I sometimes try to chime in (and keep in mind I'm no authority beyond being a rando who happens to work in the field and knows plenty of people more qualified than me) but sometimes the disconnect between HN discussions and actual scientific community discussions is unreal.

On the paper itself: I didn't only mention its IF and voiced other concerns further in the thread. Ultimately there's a limited amount of time one may allocate to reading papers when there are literally millions of the damn things.

Low-IF journals are easier to publish to by definition. You first try to publish in a high-IF journal, if they reject you then you try one with lower IF, and so on. I'm all about not taking IF as face value and don't need a n-th reminder about the metric's issues seeing how rehashing them is something of a favorite pastime among scientists, but in this specific case other more qualitative assessments don't line up either:

-Journal is completely obscure to the genomics community

-No causal genetic mechanism is shown, everything is shoved into a "heritability" black box that some people seem to think is like your video game character starting stats or something

-Authors don't have a genetics background

-It's not my field, but there appears to be a wealth of literature on how fertility rates decrease in history, none of them involving "heritability" and little is done to address, reconcile or unify that

-There does seem to be darker political overtones that are exacerbated by commenters, leading me to think the arguments are not being made in good faith

Journal IF is just a (flawed) heuristic but in this case it sets a low prior and the "updates" didn't help

While I agree there are plenty of issues in academia among which too much emphasis on IF is certainly a thing, it does provide a helpful filter (or prior, if you will) to quickly assess whether some material is worth your time. In this case, stuff in low-IF journals that are virtually unknown in the community (e.g. there are a few journals like Bioinformatics that are also fairly low-IF but very well respected), whose conclusions can't help but provide ammunition for a political point, all accompanied with commenters hinting that there's some grand omerta in the community (lol, as if we didn't already have problems pushing the obvious stuff like climate change first), all of that adds up to something rather suspicious.

Please don't regurgitate common talking points about academia issues if you're just trying to score points in support of a fringe political position, that's not at all the direction we (as scientists that are critical of academia) want to go.

It's not "obvious" at all and I've never heard anyone in the community express such sentiments, even in more informal settings. I don't even know what "courage" you're referring to. The courage to be associated to a journal with an IF < 4, maybe?

A lot of people love to chime in about "genetics" or "heritability" despite having no background in actual genetics (no, evopsych or behavioral "genetics" don't count) and publish in low-impact factor journals that are virtually unknown in the actual genetics community (or derided as a joke, like plos one). I'm not sure what to make of this paper to be honest.

India is rich though? There are also plenty of non-European countries offering free healthcare?

why shouldn’t it be in Sweden’s interest to one, either stop the flow or alternatively take control and annex Denmark in order to bring it into the fold?

Because Sweden is not ruled by a dictator? The moral thing to do would be for the government to ask "jeez, what are we doing so badly that half our population is telling us to fuck off?" and implement policies that give incentives for the population to stay there. The immoral thing to do is to go full iron curtain.

In any case, I see it eventually resulting in a new colonialism where elites and businesses are the main ones deriving advantage and wealth from this new arrangement. Localities lose power to distant and disconnected power.

So would you advocate for the borders between US states to close down and all citizens to require a visa to change states within the US?

Why shouldn't groups of individuals have self-determination including the power to limit who can enter their country?

Why shouldn't groups of individuals have self-determination including the power to marginalize any subgroup or wage wars to others? Because it is immoral no matter how many people agree with it. Not letting people fleeing other countries' misery, war or repressive regimes is immoral no matter how many ways one wants to spin it. There are all sorts of questions on the implementation of it but the basic question (should we abandon people to misery, war or political persecution) is pretty much answered from a moral point of view.

Different groups make different decisions about how they want to run their government (which is a good thing).

Most 'groups' are run by a single dictator imposing theie view on the rest, and even modern democracies are subject to interferences such as disenfranchising, lobbying etc. There's little legitimizing to be had on 'self-determination' there.

For example, if you didn't control who can live in your country, you'd never be able to have a generous social safety net.

Is there any evidence for this? I mean most rich countries have both open borders within the EU and their social safety nets seem to be doing pretty fine.

The US defense budget is more than that of the rest of the top 10 combined. There are many things that could be said about it, but underrated is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. You could cut it by two thirds and the so-called pax americana people like to mention wouldn't be threatened in the least.

hundreds of years by plundering, enslaving, and colonizing the rest of the world.

This has got to be the most egregous case of pot calling the kettle black I've read in a while.

India and Pakistan have very hostile relationships and a tumultuous past so it is one of the more understandable cases. (Still not an excuse seeing how the EU came to be half a century after one of the bloodiest wars of history ravaged the continent.) For other countries that are at peace and don't have any inclination to go to war with one another though, why enforce borders at all, if not as a vested interest for both parties to control their population on one side and appease xenophobic fear on the other?

I think it makes an excellent point for borders not really making sense in the first place and having little reason to exist beyond adding leverage for dictators in poor countries and assuaging people's fear of foreigners. Both are probably linked.

Interestingly, ragtime had been out of fashion for 20+ years by the time of The Sting's setting (early 1930's). I also love ragtime and associate it with The Sting as well though, it's just amusing to think that our association between the music and the era was made up by George Roy Hill.

I am dumbfounded that uBlock Origin, arguably the single most important extension in modern web browsing, and one that makes millions of lives easier by making their web experience bearable at all, all of this depends on one single person, working for free.

Now there's also the list maintainers, who also work for free. Still makes you wonder about how the world works. There's probably many other similar instances. In any case, I think these people deserve more recognition than they currently do and we shouldn't take anything they do for granted.

Facebook and social media in general is already horrible as is, why would you want to infect academia with it as well? The community does have a lot of issues but a social network and more blog posts are not the solution.

The traditional way is to organize meetups in the way of conferences, workshops, symposia, etc. It has a number of issues since some labs can't afford sending students or postdocs overseas and some countries are disadvantaged (for geographic or visa restriction reasons) but the organizers are usually well-aware of it and e.g. give out grants to cover expenses for students who apply for it.

I think the onus is on English speakers to reach out for the hidden knowledge out there, and not for the majority of the community to adapt to the native English-speaking minority. Right now they don't feel challenged because Anglo-Saxon univeristies are pretty much 'where it's at' and European ones more or less follow suit, but with the rise of Chinese research the situation may be about to change.