11 ms·

Multiple inaccuracies there. Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in co

Multiple inaccuracies there. Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure. Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that. Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) I remember him being huge into 'HBD' despite not being credentialed in any way beyond dropping out of his PhD program to get in on the 'consumer genomics' grift. Not a good look imo. If you want a real overview of current population genetics check out Graham Coop's lectures, he's a prominent professor in the field and his teaching materials were inspirational for many people. Alas, he does not have a substack, neither does he make contrarian takes for a living (probably due to having a real job)

sega_sai 5y ago
I knew nothing about the author of the text, and read it with interest, but the fact that he didn't mention Franklin was certainly a surprise and warning sign. To anyone who studied the issue, it's clear that Franklin should be credited at least equally with Crick&Watson.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  It's quite possible not to be familiar with the issue, or only aware of it peripherally. "Crick & Watson" is the way it was taught to almost all Americans, correct or no.
Mary-Jane 5y ago
Science, indeed any intellectual thought, won't progress without contrarian views challenging the/your status quo.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Also if they’re wrong (those being contrarian) who cares? Hypothesis and there’s should be able to defend themselves rationally against any attacks if they can’t then they are not studied well enough to have rigorously tested the hypothesis At least imo, sure misinformation is one thing but if we’re talking about other scientists I assume, not some layman on facebook
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    Once the mud slinging stuff like "he's a scientific racist!" comes out (especially when it's clear the author would vehemently disagree with the label), you gotta somewhat adjust your Bayesian priors that the person slinging the mud isn't doing it because he ran out of rational arguments.
    - amusedcyclist 5y ago
      Using the word bayesian doesn't make you sound smart, You might want to try something new
- throwaway4666 5y ago
  Yes, this is the usual precanned retort when faced with the fact that one's fringe viewpoint isn't in line with the mainstram science. It's not an argument though, in that it doesn't tilt the balance of probabilities (from a Bayesian point of view) away from the initial prior (i.e. the fringe is likely wrong and experts are likely right - note that I said likely, not 100%, like a good Bayesian). If anything, his elementary mistake about Crick, his failure to stay up to date with recent findings about African DNA, and motivated agenda with roots in scientific racism are tilting in the opposite direction.
  - Mary-Jane 5y ago
    I have no skin in the game; didn't even read the article. "You're just being contrarian so you're wrong" is a weak and lazy retort. I did appreciate that op provided a counter-perspective though; that's rare.
Zigurd 5y ago
Here is his page on the takimag site: https://www.takimag.com/contributor/razibkhan/130/ https://www.takimag.com/contributor/razibkhan/130/ Decide for yourself if he is a "scientific racist." Takimag is not shy about stuff like that.
- throwaway4666 5y ago
  Ah, he also believes in "Ashkenazi IQ" stuff. And is best friends with Greg Cochran who thinks homosexuality is caught by germs. Very instructive stuff
  - proxyon 5y ago
    Do you have an actual refutation for Ashkenazi IQ or are you simply using it as a cheap smear?
traject_ 5y ago
>Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. That ancestry comes from later interactions with West Eurasians and is at trace levels compared to the substantial 2-3% in non-Africans. This does not change the point that non-Africans received input from Neanderthals just before expansion outwards. >The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that. You've misread the article if you believe that. The point is that the total replacement model of out of Africa imagining a small band of hunter gatherers expanding out of an East Africa giving rise to all of humanity popular in the 2000s was proven wrong. The point was that single locus markers like mtDNA and Y-DNA can create biases that allowed for such a consensus that was changed by the whole genome of the Neanderthal. The ancient DNA we have now suggests a multi-regional model for modern human evolution within Africa. The remainder of the post (other than the first nitpick) is non-substantive ideological claims that appears to be largely because Razib's politics lean conservative. Interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.
- throwaway4666 5y ago
  The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that. I just want to comment on this: opposing 'scientific racism' is an ideological claim now?! The dude has a pretty large record making claims about race and IQ and 'human biodiversity', works in an industry that's banking heavily on grifting money out of rich people with PGSes, and mainstream scientists debunking it are the ones being ideological? I feel like I'm dreaming here, imagine a Philip Morris lobbyist accusing you of being 'ideological' when you point out flaws in their 'actually cigarettes are pretty good for you' studies. (Wait, that actually happened)
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    Not everything he says is wrong just because he has lots of nutty beliefs more generally. Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything terribly controversial or wrong in the article.
keewee7 5y ago
>Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) He is a Bengali-American (with a Muslim name) who has repeatedly debunked Hindu nationalist claims about ancient human migrations in and out of India. Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth. Could also be your typical sour grapes over a dissenting view on the science. Academia is full of childishness like this (especially but not exclusively as you go further away from stuff that can be unambiguously measured and into the realm of the squishy soft sciences).
- Dharmakirti 5y ago
  > they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth. This comment is so full of intellectual dishonesty. Razib Khan's controversy is a result of his so called cancellation by Left-liberal media like NYT/Times which are decidedly against Hindu nationalism. In fact, Razib Khan is the founder of Brown Pundits, which is arguably more center right and has more Hindutva supporters than left-liberals. I found Razib Khan and Omar Ali both to be a prudent and neutral observers of the developments in subcontinent and are more leaning towards Hindutva (in its original spirit)
- culi 5y ago
  I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist. (Btw by "Scientific racism" I'm talking about the pseudoscience movement) I'd suggest you take a look at some of his work yourself and make a judgement of how unscientific he really is: https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply-america-s-imported-caste-system https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply... Here's a paragraph for instance (trust me reading it in context doesn't make it any better) > Also, I am not sure the blonde preference is as dominant among people from Asia as it is among Europeans, and Asians have not been as culturally dominated by Europeans as Amerindians have. Though certain European features were traditionally praised by Asians (fair skin), others have not been emulated (large noses, reputed body odor due to diet, hirsute body, etc.). In addition, though Japanese may comment on the nice figures that European women have (i.e., Europeans tend to exhibit more sexual dimorphism), they will also comment that many American women are too large and, as they would say in the States, "big-boned." In other words, even if blondeness is preferred by Eurasians, there are other attributes that work against them (their size in comparison to petite Asian women, the perception by many Asians that European women, and Europeans in general, age faster and don't keep their appearance up after the bloom of youth, etc.).
oh_sigh 5y ago
Scientific racist is a funny term. If a scientist shows that "race" X has a different distribution of traits than "race" Y, does that mean that they are a scientific racist? Doesn't racism also have to have an associated hatred, prejudice, or antagonism against a different race? Is it scientifically racist to say that blacks get a certain blood disease more frequently than whites? To put it another way, if a scientist does a study and shows that the Ainu people of northern Japan are statistically taller than the Mbuti people of the Congo, does that mean the scientist is a "scientific heightist"? Wouldn't they need to amend their report with something like "...and therefore, Ainu people are better than Mbuti" or something like that?
- culi 5y ago
  Scientific racism is a pseudoscience. To think that it's actually scientific is to get caught up in semantics. It is a very unscientific fringe group
- sjtindell 5y ago
  No. A scientific racist is a racist (someone who thinks one race is inferior to another) who uses science to back up their claim. Not sure this person is one.
  - throwaway4666 5y ago
    Scientific racists don't use such crass words like 'inferior', they'd rather say 'have a lower mean IQ and impulse control due to genetic differences'
    - astrange 5y ago
      Note, some people do have genetic conditions that affect their ability to take IQ tests - these include Down syndrome, phenylketonuria, even IBS if you’re giving them a test without bathroom breaks. The point of knowing this is so you can treat it. You can raise the IQ of a phenylketonuric by not feeding them Diet Coke. It doesn’t seem like the HBD people would be happy seeing this, because they just want to prove someone is inherently superior and someone else isn’t.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
I didn't get the vibe that this particular article was rejecting OoA, but simply pointing out that the modern approach is OoA + "it's complicated". The HBD stuff is troublesome and it's certainly worth regarding the author more critically, but I found the bones of what was linked fairly pedestrian and uncontroversial. I suspect that will not be true of the follow-up article about origin models within Africa though.
- throwaway4666 5y ago
  Yeah I'm not saying literally everything in the article is trash, my thought process basically went as follows: "Wait this is an elementary mistake. Also he's not really up to date on the science. Who wrote this again? That name rings a bell...oh dear..."
  - tempestn 5y ago
    What exactly what the elementary mistake? Edit: ah, answered in another comment. It was this part: > Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.
pezzana 5y ago
> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure. From Wikipedia, it goes back to at least 1927: ... In 1927, Nikolai Koltsov proposed that inherited traits would be inherited via a "giant hereditary molecule" made up of "two mirror strands that would replicate in a semi-conservative fashion using each strand as a template".[186][187] In 1928, Frederick Griffith in his experiment discovered that traits of the "smooth" form of Pneumococcus could be transferred to the "rough" form of the same bacteria by mixing killed "smooth" bacteria with the live "rough" form.[188][189] This system provided the first clear suggestion that DNA carries genetic information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History
Leary 5y ago
I didn't know claiming a genetic component in explaining differences in racial averages for IQ is scientific racism.
- throwaway4666 5y ago
  You will find that 'some races just have the dumb SNPs, you know' is indeed a fringe and unserious position often posited by Pioneer Fund recipients (you know, the organization founded in the 30s for the 'purpose of race betterment' that literally inspired Hitler) to justify that we abandon all welfare and remedial programs toward the poorer demographics. If that's not scientific racism, I wonder what's your definition of it.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    What is one to do when science itself is considered taboo or racist, independent of the veracity of the findings? I would argue that racial genetics science itself is not racist, but it can be executed in bad faith, and has a high potential for misuse. One can ask the following in good faith, absent of racism: 1) Is there a genetic component to intelligence 2) Is it heritable? 3) Are there differences in these genetics across groups? What policy conclusions one draws from any conclusive findings is the controversial part.
- bsanr 5y ago
  That's... quite the statement to make with a straight face.
throwaway73838 5y ago
> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good If wikipedia had existed in the time of Copernicus, Plato, Giordano Bruno, Galileo or Darwin, I do not think they would be without their own large ‘controversies’ section ;)
- culi 5y ago
  - rayiner 5y ago
    He’s clearly not arguing that, but maybe you’re angry at him because some of his other points hit too close to home for you? > These include many people who I know personally, who are diversity loving progressives, but who seem to fall into the trap of disaggregation. Since I don't love diversity and don't care about that issue I don't bring it up with them often. But it's what I call a revealed preference. Or, to give an amusing example, I said something offensive in one of my posts apparently a few years back, which prompted one outraged reader to leave a long shocked rant about my racism. The comment was trashed, and the reader banned. Nevertheless, I traced their Facebook account. The individual was a young white professional resident in San Francisco. And, their friends list was visible. I did a quick spot check, and estimated that ~90 percent of their San Francisco friends were white. In contrast, about ~50 percent of San Francisco's population is white.
    - culi 5y ago
      yeah ok > And one last thing: I am sure no one who reads VDARE has watched any pornography of late, but if anyone would care to, they would find that the only class of women that rivals busty blondes in disproportionate numbers in American pornography is East Asian females. Unlike brunette European females, Asian females don't look particularly impressive when blonded in my opinion, and the fact that few Asian females in these films bleach their hair like their European counterparts seems to confirm that most porn viewers share my impression. In other words, Asian females (whether it be for cultural or biological reasons) are in some cases competitive with blondes. (From personal experience in a region of the country where there are many Eurasians- due to the fact that the area is 95%+ white and the non-white marriage pool somewhat limited - I can attest that many Eurasian men prefer Asian females for the same reasons as some European men do).
csee 5y ago
You're misrepresenting him, and it sounds like you have an ideological stake in this. > Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. He never claimed or hinted that Africans do not have Neanderthal DNA. He says "non-African modern humans were discernibly more similar to the Neanderthal sample than Africans were", which is factually accurate, given that there's about a 1.5-2.5% gap in the amount of DNA that's shared, at least according to best current knowledge. > The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong No such thing is insinuated. He makes it explicit that he's talking about the "total-replacement plank of the old out-of-Africa model", and he spends a while talking about how we're all descended from a single male and single female within Africa, it's only the case that certain populations outside of Africa mixed with other hominids and got up to 5-7% of their DNA from them (Neanderthals and Denisovans), which is far more than what Africans have.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  There was a Eurasian introgression back into Africa from either the Arabian Peninsula or (less likely) across the Sahara into Chadic ethnic groups visible in Y-DNA haplogroups. Most likely that's the source of the 0.3%
wyager 5y ago
> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good)... Not a good look imo. Is "having a good look" a core part of your epistemology?
busyant 5y ago
> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure. Just to add a little bit. They discovered the 3D structure, but the structure (specifically, the base pairing) made it quite clear that the mechanism of inheritance was due to each complementary strand serving as a template for information copying. For me, that was the stunning bit of the discovery.
davisYC 5y ago
graham was on my committee and i know him personally even before grad school (this is razib). from the acknowledgments his 2013 paper https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... "Thanks to Razib Khan, Sharon Browning, and Don Conrad for several useful discussions" you can nitpick the piece but this is from an attack piece on me: "MANY PROMINENT geneticists familiar with Khan’s work do take him seriously. “I don’t agree with everything that Razib writes, but I think that he does write about population genetics very clearly,” said Graham Coop, a population genetic" so yes, put your faith in graham :-) you know his work so little you weren't aware i was going to easily pivot in this direction
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- culi 5y ago
  Hey Razib! I was wondering if you ever had a chance to revisit this old piece of yours and if the views expressed in it still hold up: https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply-america-s-imported-caste-system https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply...

sega_sai 5y ago

I knew nothing about the author of the text, and read it with interest, but the fact that he didn't mention Franklin was certainly a surprise and warning sign. To anyone who studied the issue, it's clear that Franklin should be credited at least equally with Crick&Watson.

marcellus23 5y ago
It's quite possible not to be familiar with the issue, or only aware of it peripherally. "Crick & Watson" is the way it was taught to almost all Americans, correct or no.

Mary-Jane 5y ago

Science, indeed any intellectual thought, won't progress without contrarian views challenging the/your status quo.

edgyquant 5y ago
Also if they’re wrong (those being contrarian) who cares? Hypothesis and there’s should be able to defend themselves rationally against any attacks if they can’t then they are not studied well enough to have rigorously tested the hypothesis At least imo, sure misinformation is one thing but if we’re talking about other scientists I assume, not some layman on facebook
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  Once the mud slinging stuff like "he's a scientific racist!" comes out (especially when it's clear the author would vehemently disagree with the label), you gotta somewhat adjust your Bayesian priors that the person slinging the mud isn't doing it because he ran out of rational arguments.
  - amusedcyclist 5y ago
    Using the word bayesian doesn't make you sound smart, You might want to try something new
throwaway4666 5y ago
Yes, this is the usual precanned retort when faced with the fact that one's fringe viewpoint isn't in line with the mainstram science. It's not an argument though, in that it doesn't tilt the balance of probabilities (from a Bayesian point of view) away from the initial prior (i.e. the fringe is likely wrong and experts are likely right - note that I said likely, not 100%, like a good Bayesian). If anything, his elementary mistake about Crick, his failure to stay up to date with recent findings about African DNA, and motivated agenda with roots in scientific racism are tilting in the opposite direction.
- Mary-Jane 5y ago
  I have no skin in the game; didn't even read the article. "You're just being contrarian so you're wrong" is a weak and lazy retort. I did appreciate that op provided a counter-perspective though; that's rare.

Zigurd 5y ago

Here is his page on the takimag site: https://www.takimag.com/contributor/razibkhan/130/ https://www.takimag.com/contributor/razibkhan/130/ Decide for yourself if he is a "scientific racist." Takimag is not shy about stuff like that.

throwaway4666 5y ago
Ah, he also believes in "Ashkenazi IQ" stuff. And is best friends with Greg Cochran who thinks homosexuality is caught by germs. Very instructive stuff
- proxyon 5y ago
  Do you have an actual refutation for Ashkenazi IQ or are you simply using it as a cheap smear?

traject_ 5y ago

>Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. That ancestry comes from later interactions with West Eurasians and is at trace levels compared to the substantial 2-3% in non-Africans. This does not change the point that non-Africans received input from Neanderthals just before expansion outwards. >The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that. You've misread the article if you believe that. The point is that the total replacement model of out of Africa imagining a small band of hunter gatherers expanding out of an East Africa giving rise to all of humanity popular in the 2000s was proven wrong. The point was that single locus markers like mtDNA and Y-DNA can create biases that allowed for such a consensus that was changed by the whole genome of the Neanderthal. The ancient DNA we have now suggests a multi-regional model for modern human evolution within Africa. The remainder of the post (other than the first nitpick) is non-substantive ideological claims that appears to be largely because Razib's politics lean conservative. Interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

throwaway4666 5y ago
The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that. I just want to comment on this: opposing 'scientific racism' is an ideological claim now?! The dude has a pretty large record making claims about race and IQ and 'human biodiversity', works in an industry that's banking heavily on grifting money out of rich people with PGSes, and mainstream scientists debunking it are the ones being ideological? I feel like I'm dreaming here, imagine a Philip Morris lobbyist accusing you of being 'ideological' when you point out flaws in their 'actually cigarettes are pretty good for you' studies. (Wait, that actually happened)
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Not everything he says is wrong just because he has lots of nutty beliefs more generally. Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything terribly controversial or wrong in the article.

keewee7 5y ago

>Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) He is a Bengali-American (with a Muslim name) who has repeatedly debunked Hindu nationalist claims about ancient human migrations in and out of India. Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
>Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth. Could also be your typical sour grapes over a dissenting view on the science. Academia is full of childishness like this (especially but not exclusively as you go further away from stuff that can be unambiguously measured and into the realm of the squishy soft sciences).
Dharmakirti 5y ago
> they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth. This comment is so full of intellectual dishonesty. Razib Khan's controversy is a result of his so called cancellation by Left-liberal media like NYT/Times which are decidedly against Hindu nationalism. In fact, Razib Khan is the founder of Brown Pundits, which is arguably more center right and has more Hindutva supporters than left-liberals. I found Razib Khan and Omar Ali both to be a prudent and neutral observers of the developments in subcontinent and are more leaning towards Hindutva (in its original spirit)
culi 5y ago
I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist. (Btw by "Scientific racism" I'm talking about the pseudoscience movement) I'd suggest you take a look at some of his work yourself and make a judgement of how unscientific he really is: https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply-america-s-imported-caste-system https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply... Here's a paragraph for instance (trust me reading it in context doesn't make it any better) > Also, I am not sure the blonde preference is as dominant among people from Asia as it is among Europeans, and Asians have not been as culturally dominated by Europeans as Amerindians have. Though certain European features were traditionally praised by Asians (fair skin), others have not been emulated (large noses, reputed body odor due to diet, hirsute body, etc.). In addition, though Japanese may comment on the nice figures that European women have (i.e., Europeans tend to exhibit more sexual dimorphism), they will also comment that many American women are too large and, as they would say in the States, "big-boned." In other words, even if blondeness is preferred by Eurasians, there are other attributes that work against them (their size in comparison to petite Asian women, the perception by many Asians that European women, and Europeans in general, age faster and don't keep their appearance up after the bloom of youth, etc.).

oh_sigh 5y ago

Scientific racist is a funny term. If a scientist shows that "race" X has a different distribution of traits than "race" Y, does that mean that they are a scientific racist? Doesn't racism also have to have an associated hatred, prejudice, or antagonism against a different race? Is it scientifically racist to say that blacks get a certain blood disease more frequently than whites? To put it another way, if a scientist does a study and shows that the Ainu people of northern Japan are statistically taller than the Mbuti people of the Congo, does that mean the scientist is a "scientific heightist"? Wouldn't they need to amend their report with something like "...and therefore, Ainu people are better than Mbuti" or something like that?

culi 5y ago
Scientific racism is a pseudoscience. To think that it's actually scientific is to get caught up in semantics. It is a very unscientific fringe group
sjtindell 5y ago
No. A scientific racist is a racist (someone who thinks one race is inferior to another) who uses science to back up their claim. Not sure this person is one.
- throwaway4666 5y ago
  Scientific racists don't use such crass words like 'inferior', they'd rather say 'have a lower mean IQ and impulse control due to genetic differences'
  - astrange 5y ago
    Note, some people do have genetic conditions that affect their ability to take IQ tests - these include Down syndrome, phenylketonuria, even IBS if you’re giving them a test without bathroom breaks. The point of knowing this is so you can treat it. You can raise the IQ of a phenylketonuric by not feeding them Diet Coke. It doesn’t seem like the HBD people would be happy seeing this, because they just want to prove someone is inherently superior and someone else isn’t.

AlotOfReading 5y ago

I didn't get the vibe that this particular article was rejecting OoA, but simply pointing out that the modern approach is OoA + "it's complicated". The HBD stuff is troublesome and it's certainly worth regarding the author more critically, but I found the bones of what was linked fairly pedestrian and uncontroversial. I suspect that will not be true of the follow-up article about origin models within Africa though.

throwaway4666 5y ago
Yeah I'm not saying literally everything in the article is trash, my thought process basically went as follows: "Wait this is an elementary mistake. Also he's not really up to date on the science. Who wrote this again? That name rings a bell...oh dear..."
- tempestn 5y ago
  What exactly what the elementary mistake? Edit: ah, answered in another comment. It was this part: > Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

pezzana 5y ago

> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure. From Wikipedia, it goes back to at least 1927: ... In 1927, Nikolai Koltsov proposed that inherited traits would be inherited via a "giant hereditary molecule" made up of "two mirror strands that would replicate in a semi-conservative fashion using each strand as a template".[186][187] In 1928, Frederick Griffith in his experiment discovered that traits of the "smooth" form of Pneumococcus could be transferred to the "rough" form of the same bacteria by mixing killed "smooth" bacteria with the live "rough" form.[188][189] This system provided the first clear suggestion that DNA carries genetic information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History

Leary 5y ago

I didn't know claiming a genetic component in explaining differences in racial averages for IQ is scientific racism.

throwaway4666 5y ago
You will find that 'some races just have the dumb SNPs, you know' is indeed a fringe and unserious position often posited by Pioneer Fund recipients (you know, the organization founded in the 30s for the 'purpose of race betterment' that literally inspired Hitler) to justify that we abandon all welfare and remedial programs toward the poorer demographics. If that's not scientific racism, I wonder what's your definition of it.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  What is one to do when science itself is considered taboo or racist, independent of the veracity of the findings? I would argue that racial genetics science itself is not racist, but it can be executed in bad faith, and has a high potential for misuse. One can ask the following in good faith, absent of racism: 1) Is there a genetic component to intelligence 2) Is it heritable? 3) Are there differences in these genetics across groups? What policy conclusions one draws from any conclusive findings is the controversial part.
bsanr 5y ago
That's... quite the statement to make with a straight face.

throwaway73838 5y ago

> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good If wikipedia had existed in the time of Copernicus, Plato, Giordano Bruno, Galileo or Darwin, I do not think they would be without their own large ‘controversies’ section ;)

culi 5y ago
- rayiner 5y ago
  He’s clearly not arguing that, but maybe you’re angry at him because some of his other points hit too close to home for you? > These include many people who I know personally, who are diversity loving progressives, but who seem to fall into the trap of disaggregation. Since I don't love diversity and don't care about that issue I don't bring it up with them often. But it's what I call a revealed preference. Or, to give an amusing example, I said something offensive in one of my posts apparently a few years back, which prompted one outraged reader to leave a long shocked rant about my racism. The comment was trashed, and the reader banned. Nevertheless, I traced their Facebook account. The individual was a young white professional resident in San Francisco. And, their friends list was visible. I did a quick spot check, and estimated that ~90 percent of their San Francisco friends were white. In contrast, about ~50 percent of San Francisco's population is white.
  - culi 5y ago
    yeah ok > And one last thing: I am sure no one who reads VDARE has watched any pornography of late, but if anyone would care to, they would find that the only class of women that rivals busty blondes in disproportionate numbers in American pornography is East Asian females. Unlike brunette European females, Asian females don't look particularly impressive when blonded in my opinion, and the fact that few Asian females in these films bleach their hair like their European counterparts seems to confirm that most porn viewers share my impression. In other words, Asian females (whether it be for cultural or biological reasons) are in some cases competitive with blondes. (From personal experience in a region of the country where there are many Eurasians- due to the fact that the area is 95%+ white and the non-white marriage pool somewhat limited - I can attest that many Eurasian men prefer Asian females for the same reasons as some European men do).

csee 5y ago

You're misrepresenting him, and it sounds like you have an ideological stake in this. > Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. He never claimed or hinted that Africans do not have Neanderthal DNA. He says "non-African modern humans were discernibly more similar to the Neanderthal sample than Africans were", which is factually accurate, given that there's about a 1.5-2.5% gap in the amount of DNA that's shared, at least according to best current knowledge. > The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong No such thing is insinuated. He makes it explicit that he's talking about the "total-replacement plank of the old out-of-Africa model", and he spends a while talking about how we're all descended from a single male and single female within Africa, it's only the case that certain populations outside of Africa mixed with other hominids and got up to 5-7% of their DNA from them (Neanderthals and Denisovans), which is far more than what Africans have.

selimthegrim 5y ago
There was a Eurasian introgression back into Africa from either the Arabian Peninsula or (less likely) across the Sahara into Chadic ethnic groups visible in Y-DNA haplogroups. Most likely that's the source of the 0.3%

wyager 5y ago

> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good)... Not a good look imo. Is "having a good look" a core part of your epistemology?

busyant 5y ago

> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure. Just to add a little bit. They discovered the 3D structure, but the structure (specifically, the base pairing) made it quite clear that the mechanism of inheritance was due to each complementary strand serving as a template for information copying. For me, that was the stunning bit of the discovery.

davisYC 5y ago

graham was on my committee and i know him personally even before grad school (this is razib). from the acknowledgments his 2013 paper https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... "Thanks to Razib Khan, Sharon Browning, and Don Conrad for several useful discussions" you can nitpick the piece but this is from an attack piece on me: "MANY PROMINENT geneticists familiar with Khan’s work do take him seriously. “I don’t agree with everything that Razib writes, but I think that he does write about population genetics very clearly,” said Graham Coop, a population genetic" so yes, put your faith in graham :-) you know his work so little you weren't aware i was going to easily pivot in this direction

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culi 5y ago
Hey Razib! I was wondering if you ever had a chance to revisit this old piece of yours and if the views expressed in it still hold up: https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply-america-s-imported-caste-system https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply...