Spider biologist denies suspicions of widespread data fraud in his animal personality research. There is a lot more talk on backchannels than you see in this piece, partly because until the full investigation is complete people don’t feel comfortable airing suspicions and rumors. But, it is likely to get worse before it gets better from everything I hear.
Last week a friend in psychology asked whether this was similar to Diederik Stapel. I said at the time that it wasn’t that bad, but I’m really not sure anymore.
Is It Fair to Award Scholarships Based on the SAT? Being WSJ the piece at least mentions Asians. “Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts stopped using the test for merit scholarships last year, said Andrew Palumbo, dean of admission. Instead, the school is weighing grades, community service and leadership.” Biased against Asians, since it is known Asians lack “leadership.” Also, grades will basically disappear as a useful measure since all mostly pre-college prep high schools will be under pressure to give good grades. As for community service, which economic class has the most time for this?
Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe. I quite enjoyed the last Mercier book, The Enigma of Reason.
I would appreciate more positive reviews for The Insight on Apple Podcasts. This week we’ll be posting an episode I recorded with Anders Bergstrom on the genetics of New Guinea.
Her Uighur Parents Were Model Chinese Citizens. It Didn’t Matter.
Family History Assessment Significantly Enhances Delivery of Precision Medicine in the Genomics Era.
Phylogenetic signal is associated with the degree of variation in root-to-tip distances.
Global reference mapping and dynamics of human transcription factor footprints.
I got Coalescent Theory about five years ago. Finally starting to go through it.
Genomic novelty versus convergence in the basis of adaptation to whole genome duplication.
Chiefs Defeat 49ers in Stunning Super Bowl Comeback. Twenty years ago I would have cared because the Steelers still have more wins than the 49ers.
I haven’t been tracking the impeachment or coronavirus since I don’t think they’ll seem too consequential in a few years.
What nonsense that NYT article on the Ugyhurs. As if the Tang dynasty did not control the Tarim Basin back when it was dominated by Tocharians and Iranians. That only after the Turks had ‘culturally genocided’ those Indo-European peoples we can talk about who really should control that area. Whatever China is doing that is wrong has no bearing on when certain people were in those areas. They don’t care about that with Turks in the Balkans, Anatolia, or Central Asia, Tutsis in Central Africa or countless other non-European groups that took land in recent centuries. They just want a weapon to use against their political and ideological enemies.
Indeed, or how much did the USA care for Kurds, Palestinians or Shia muslims in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain?
If its about close allies and deep connections, “human rights issues” become at best an asset for negotiations about other issues of real importance.
And I’m not even starting to talk about what the USA did in Latin America for its own (corporate) interests or how it treats its own citizens in the social dumping sphere and prison system.
Every time I read an article about an organization that is changing its scholarship criteria, in a way that will make selection both less problematic and more problematic, I wonder why they don’t switch off and mix different criteria randomly from year to year. That way it’s more fair to different groups.
Wonder if at some point AI will be able to detect data fudging.
Having found Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh on a remainder table, I am finally reading it myself after once or twice giving it to friends’ high-schoolers based on reviews and on Zimmer’s columns. Perhaps due to more than a decade of reading this blog, I find that most of what is new to me concerns (relatively obscure) details in the history of science (I had no idea that Mendel was part of an already established stream of research in his monastery); or more than I feel I need to know about the practice of eugenics in the early 20th C US. (Luther Burbank’s biography was of mild interest; imagine my surprise at learning that he lived in northern, not southern CA!).
However some trivial assertions that I have some feel for bother me. First (and perhaps reflecting some mild idiot savant tendencies on my part), Zimmer writes:
But in a genome stretching over three billion base pairs [p. 184] … Yet despite [my brother’s and my] differences, we still have many long stretches of identical DNA in common. DNA.Land could confidently recognize 112 identical segments, each one stretching 100 million bases or more. [p. 186]
112 * 100 million > 11 billion. Even allowing for the word “pairs”, that is still off by a factor of roughly 2.
In a second example that bothers me more, Zimmer writes, apparently with some care (notice the 2nd “who” clause):
Everyone who was alive five thousand years ago who has any living descendants is an ancestor of everyone alive today. (p. 190).
I have heard similar assertions before, and I understand the important implication here, but I wonder: Are there no San or Hadza entirely lacking in non-African ancestry from 5 millenia ago? No remaining Aborigines or individuals in Papua New Guinea, lacking ancestry from outside those areas as recently as 5K years ago? No Amerindians or Andaman Islanders lacking ancestry from outside their own populations as recently as 5K years ago?
Or turn these questions around. Does everyone of European ancestry have at least one ancestor from 5K years ago who belonged to each of these populations: Hadza, San, Aboriginal Australians, Amerindian, Andaman Islanders, PNG? I suppose it is possible, but it certainly stretches credulity.
Neither is central to Zimmer’s theme. However, off-topic mistakes that one can recognize shake confidence in on-topic assertions that one lacks the knowledge to assess.
@Marcel: Concerning that quote:
“Everyone who was alive five thousand years ago who has any living descendants is an ancestor of everyone alive today. (p. 190).”
That quote is a mixture of ideology and ignorance. In its absoluteness its not even true for Europeans at all!
Anybody saying something like that disqualifies himself on the topic.
Who came up with this idiocy first? If I’m not mistaken someone invented this statement and it was repeated since then. Its older.
Like the statement of two Swedes of which one could be genetically closer to an African Pygmy than to his neighbours if I remember correctly.
That too was quoted ad infinitum in various publications. More often in newspapers, teaching and sociological-political material than in biological science papers.
there is a difference btwn ancestors and distinctive ancestry. everyone is related to everyone else.
otoh it could be there are some people in highland new guinea without austronesian?
@Razib: The crucial aspect of the quote is the time frame: 5.000 years.
And the assertion: Ancestor of everyone.
That’s just complete nonsense.
It would be interesting to know when that statement would have been true. I couldn’t say.
But its for all of humanity about tens of thousands of years in any case.
Even then the statement would need more qualication: What about the archaics?
Denisovans with living descendants: Their last point of common ancestry with all of mankind?
Include those and you end up when and where for a common root ancestor of all living people? Its ridiculous to make such a statement like quoted. We can’t even know. But if taking it seriously, not excluding anything, you end up half a million years back in time or more.
@Razib: The crucial aspect of the quote is the time frame: 5.000 years.
And the assertion: Ancestor of everyone.
google ‘last recent geneaological ancestor’
it’s not ridiculous, though debatable
Even in New Guinea neighboring groups had occasional intermarriage. I’ve read a couple times where officials\missionaries were able to communicate with some guy in a newly contacted group because he was originally from another group whose language was already known. It’s likely Austronesian genealogical ancestry would have worked its way to the highlands in the 120 generations since the Lapita reached the area. The Tasmanians would have been the last people without a recent common ancestor. The Andamanese were isolated but they’ve had ships wrecking there for a couple thousand years.
I agree though most recent genealogical ancestor has only symbolic meaning. Even if everyone in China counts some 13th century Italian merchant as an ancestor 30 generations back, hardly any would have inherited genetic material from him.
@swampr: “Occasional contacts” is not the issue, but the very idea that all humans shared the same ancestors just some thousand years ago.
Look at it differently, how far did Papuan genes penetrate into Asia, yet alone Europe or Africa?
The “Denisovans”/Homo erectus of SEA contributed ancestry to some SEA and Australo-Melanesians. But when the Homo sapiens colonisation took the region, this affected only this regional branch.
Other branches of humanity got little or rather nothing from this Southern Denisovans. So they are not ancestors of all, but just this branch of our species.
Going back to a shared ancestor for all might mean to have to go back to the basic split, before the sapiens-neanderthalensis split.
The same applies to the possible archaics (Iwo Eleru?) in West Africa. Even if genes from West Africa would have been omnipresent in Europeans, what I doubt, its very unlikely American Indians and Papuans got it. So again, going back to a common ancestor of all would mean to go back to the splitting time.
But even if just looking at AMH sapiens strains alone, there was no panmixture happening after dispersion and branching! When was the last time San and Papuans shared ALL their ancestors? Probably 200.000 years ago? Longee? Or did the San patriarch in South Africa father direct descendents of relevance for Papuans? Or the pre-Papuan chief in SEA anything which reached the San? No they did not.
All in all, the last time you could have really said that quote to be true would be therefore some Homo erectus group, who knows where, which was ancestral to all human forms which produced living descendants. Sometime between 1.000.000 and 500.000 years ago I guess.
For regional populations, things could be much closer, but even for Europeans a time frame of 5.000 years is completely off. Even if ignoring small scale more recent local admixture from abroad. If you include these, you end up with hundreds of thousands of years again…
google ‘last recent gene
aological ancestor’.Apparently it is Yadam and Meve (i.e., Y-chromosomal Adam & Mitochondrial Eve).
BBut for Europe alone,
Our research confirmed what Chang suspected—that everybody who was alive in Europe a thousand years ago and who had children, is an ancestor of everyone alive today who has some European ancestry,” Ralph said.
no that’s last genetic ancestor. genealogical ancestors don’t usually contribute any distinctive genetics
Oops.
google ‘last recent gene
aological ancestor’ shoulda beengoogle ‘last recent genea
ological ancestor’(Lost connection briefly, so posted my correction before seeing your response. Which of my assertions are you correcting: about Yadam & Meve, or the point about Europe?)
“Apparently it is Yadam and Meve (i.e., Y-chromosomal Adam & Mitochondrial Eve).”
Well, if yDNA and mtDNA of e.g. Neandertals and Denisovans didn’t survive, but contributed genetically, they are still among the genealogical and genetic ancestors of those to which they contributed and that’s way before the current estimate for the y-Adam and mt-Eve.
“Our research confirmed what Chang suspected—that everybody who was alive in Europe a thousand years ago and who had children, is an ancestor of everyone alive today who has some European ancestry,” Ralph said.”
Absolute nonsense. That never works out, neither genealogically nor genetically. Impossible.
You don’t have such dramatic gene flow from one end of the continent to the other. That’s just not feasable. Take for example some Iberians which have Moorish ancestry which they got just one hundred years before 1.000 AD. Now for making the statement real, everyone in Europe would need to have at least some ancestor from this village in their tree. But that won’t happen. The populations were at that time too large and distinct and people not mobile enough anyway. If they would have been, and there the uniparentals play in, the haplogroups would be distributed almost randomly across Europe (or the world), which they are not.
There were metapopulations, populations and subpopulation which had no constant gene flow. Some had virtually none (even inside of Europe) and for others its restricted to individuals here and there.
E.g.: Some Iberian genes of these North African admixed Spaniards might have reached Finland or North Eastern Russia too of course, but at a much too late date, and with a much too low impact, even if they were artists, traders or aristocrats. So there would be some people in Finland with this ancestral component or genealogical ancestor around, but this should be a fairly small minority of the total population. And even the Finns don’t descend all form the same couple which lived 1650 or the like. That’s far too close. And even if, how many people from this Spanish region would have moved to North Eastern Europe? Just a fraction of the people living there at 1.000 and they wouldn’t have taken the complete genealogical representatives of 1.000 AD to the North East.
1.000 years ago… if reading something like that, the only idea I get is “fake science”. Its unworthy. But now I know that these meme is indeed older and probably know where it was coming from (or at least one source?). Things like that being quoted among the usual newspaper suspects. Thinking twice before printing would help, but not if its part of the agenda.
You read: “”The fact that everyone has two parents means that the number of ancestors for each individual doubles every generation,” Ralph said. “By using basic mathematics, we can calculate that ten generations ago each individual had a thousand ancestors, and 20 generations ago they had a million and so on.”
Yeah, you can make up nice computational models which prove nothing, because reality doesn’t work like that and most people were used to live largely endogamic within their ethnosocial/-religious unit. Like in most “orthodox” economic models: They would work just fine if reality wouldn’t be at odds with these “great computational models” and theories about economy.
The good thing about genetics and biology is that most of these models are easier to test and falsify. Definitely a fail.
MP, the point about europe has to do with identifiable segments of DNA. different from genealogical ancestor, which is a line of descent.
Can’t wait for the Insight episode on New Guinea genetics. Razib, I’ve seen you comment before that there are interesting (maybe as yet unexplained) results in Papuan/New Guinea DNA. I remember either on a podcast or article where you referenced geneticists trying to reconcile DNA results from the region pre-Denisovan discovery/sequence. Just a question from a lay person, do you feel that the current interesting results stem from a similar situation where there are signals from an admixture event for which we don’t have a reference aDNA sample? Or is it something else. Keep up the great work! (Leaving positive reviews on the pod now).
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/ancient-trace-in-papuan-genomes-suggests-previously-unknown-expansion-out-of-africa
Razib- I highly recommend Christopher Caldwell’s new book, The Age of Entitlement, I think you will find it unique and interesting. It’s essentially a history that spans JFK’s assassination and the election of Trump, and which argues that the 1960’s saw the creation of a rival and powerful US Constitution, one enforced by bureaucrats and judges.
It also unearths many fascinating little historical nuggets.
Next on my list is Michael Lind’s The New Class War….
Thanks for responding Razib! That paper is so exciting. I’ve never wanted a time machine more than I do now after reading that article.
A little while ago you posted about problems of meritocracy, which is a theme that crops up from time to time on alt-right discussion groups. I made the comment that we’ll always have meritocracy because, despite its flaws, does not have the silly situation of a non-merit based social structure where intelligent, competent people would somehow defer to those less than themselves. Then I realized, perhaps any emergence of a non-meritocratic social order is essentially a variant of the idiocracy scenario, where the competent intelligent people die off and are replaced by those of less intelligence.