6 ms·

Expanding on this, CGP Grey had this amazing video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk) of why European dis

Expanding on this, CGP Grey had this amazing video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk) of why European diseases in the Americas were so bad on the people that were already here when the two worlds met but you hardly heard of Europeans getting any super contagious illness from the people living in the Americas. Meaning European genomes had some adaptations (as well as antibodies?) from dense and unsanitary living, as well as animal farming in European prior to contact whereas that type of living setup was rarer in the Americas.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
It's been discussed in many places on the internet before, but CGP Grey has a lot of profound misunderstandings around the Columbian Exchange and the new world as a whole. Some of it is that he's not an expert, some of it is that he chose particularly bad sources (e.g. the zoonotic hypothesis he cribbed almost directly from one of Diamond's older papers), and some of it is that there's a lot of misinformation about this particular topic on the internet. The reality is that dense urban settlements (many without good hygiene), domestic animals (e.g. parrots), unsanitary conditions, and widespread trade/social networks all existed, subject to the usual caveats of time and place. We even have strong evidence of highly contagious diseases like Kirsten Bos' paper on zoonotic Tuberculosis in ancient Peru. There are still many open questions regarding why the Columbian Exchange happened the way it did. Academics are still trying to work out the truth through centuries of mistaken narratives about what went down, including the now-suspect idea that there was ever a single continent-wide epidemic wave. We can reject some ideas (like innate genetic susceptibility) on the basis of scanty evidence, but most of them are hard to definitively reject and few people have the knowledge base to write books challenging the dunning-kruger type academics that are comfortable talking about continent-wide phenomena with simple narratives. Covid made the social dynamics of epidemics a particularly interesting research topic to grad students, so maybe there'll be more consensus about big questions in a few years.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  Interesting! But wouldn’t a tb outbreak in ancient Peru line up with what cgp grey is saying, in that they had close contact with Llamas?
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    The tuberculosis came from pacific seals, so no. I wouldn't put it past the llamas to have planned it though.
    - bigmattystyles 4y ago
      Good thing we have Winamp then.
- nixcraft 4y ago
  >It's been discussed in many places on the internet before, but CGP Grey has a lot of profound misunderstandings around It is not just CGP Grey; other popular channels also share tons of misunderstandings and stuff related to tech or science. I believe YouTube also favours popular channels because of the high likes and comments. They dominate both Google and YouTube searches. I started noticing this around topics like Firewalls, RPis, Linux, Coastal Erosion, Global Warming, open source etc. The reason why top YouTubers are popular is because of their presentation style. It would be best if you did your research using multiple sources. Ask a question to university professors on Twitter (or email them), and they will happily guide you to the right resources. At least, that is how I do it and it worked better for me. YMMV.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Yeah I love some of these pop historical/sociological youtubers - until they venture into one of the tiny domains I know a little about, and I listen to their misunderstandings. Then of course I think about how likely their knowledge of other topics - on which I "trusted" them due to my own ignorance - is similarly surface level.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      The best presentation is the most suspect, particularly if the presenter has little focus and follows on to trending topics (you start to notice a topic does the rounds in several information entertainment venues and presenters in a short time). Popular science presentations whether it be books, podcasters, or videos are quite low signal to noise.
    - unmole 4y ago
      https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
  - Manu40 4y ago
    On the topic of Linux: To properly install Arch Linux (The way I want it setup) on my machine without any hitches, I need to use like.. 7 different videos, because they each leave something out that the other included. Yes, yes, I know I should/could just use the Arch wiki. I really should just go do a deep dive into it someday. But my method works, so why fix it?
- jcampbell1 4y ago
  > We can reject some ideas (like innate genetic susceptibility) on the basis of scanty evidence This is an article about genetic selection due to the plague in Europe. Lol.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    The idea I'm talking about here is an older one that virgin soil epidemics devastated American populations because they were innately susceptible to them, often as a result of genetic homogeneity or something. That's not supported by decades of research into those kinds of questions. This article is talking about selective pressure as a result of epidemics, which is absolutely a thing.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Selective pressure impacts genetics though, so doesn't it come full circle to the same argument?
      - AlotOfReading 4y ago
        No, it's best to think of them as unrelated. On one hand, you have an argument that "virgin soil" epidemics in the columbian exchange were deadly because Native Americans had no genetic diversity (not true) and thus effectively no differential susceptibility. That's a complex narrative causally linking many different processes and observations over centuries. On the other, you have a statement that disease can cause selective pressure. The only relationship is that they're both about genetics and disease.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        "Native Americans had no genetic diversity (not true)" That feels a bit like a strawman. Few people would claim that Native Americans had no genetic diversity. But the claim that they had less genetic diversity than Old World populations is plausible. After all, there was a massive population bottleneck/founder effort in their relatively recent history. The groups of people who walked across the Beringia and settled the Americas had to be small-ish, with their total size not exceeding several tens of thousands. Siberia is, until today, very sparsely populated. Compared to the Old World, the New World population squeezed through a population bottleneck of perhaps 0,1-0,5 per cent of the total human population of that time. It then started diversifying again, but genetic drift is a longish process.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  You're correct that some cities existed in the Americas on par or larger than most European cities (ie Teotihuacan). I don't know why people don't just chalk it up to an accident of viral/biological disease evolution. You could imagine an alternate timeline where the native Americans had survived similarly horrific incidents as the Justinian and Black Plagues, as well as Smallpox, but then Colombian exchange brought back the diseases to Europe. Maybe it was just an unfortunate coin flip of history. Maybe the racial diversity in the Eurasian-African land mass contributed to the disease diversity and acuity?
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    If you just want my idle speculation, my personal guess is that diseases did exist in the Americas, but 1) we lack the ability to see them in the record and 2) the dynamics of how those diseases originated/spread is significantly different between afroeurasia and the new world. One of the problems with archaeology is that things have to be archeologically visible in order for us to realize they exist. Diseases usually don't leave skeletal evidence and many American cultures were big on cremation besides. It's only under very unique circumstances with certain diseases (e.g. the mummies with tuberculosis mentioned previously) that we can clearly see the evidence to say "hey, these people died in a disease outbreak". In Eurasia we rely heavily on literary sources to supplement this issue, but we have few American sources and they're mostly focused on other things. The nature of continents is also substantially different. The Americas were hugely affected by late quaternary extinctions that destroyed the mammalian diversity, a main factor in zoonotic transmission [1]. The places where that diversity exists post-LGM like the Amazon basin are very remote and their pre-Columbian history is not well studied, let alone the history of disease there. We have little understanding of how they integrated into broader American trade networks either. Eurasia's biodiversity is spread across large areas of the continent, which happen to be crossed by continental trade routes. If plague had originated in Venezuela instead of from rodents in central Asia, we might not even know about historical outbreaks and simply label it a new disease when modern farmers in the highlands caught it. [1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919176117 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919176117
  - mcculley 4y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Teotihuacan had an estimated population of 125,000 or more, "making it at least the sixth-largest city in the world during its epoch at its zenith", which is thought to be no later than 550 CE. Rome is estimated to have had 1,000,000 inhabitants around 0 CE. Certainly the Europeans had much greater population and density. How could they not be carrying around more virulent parasites?
photochemsyn 4y ago
Apparently native populations had a different immunogenic profile and that made them more susceptible to European diseases such as smallpox, and this was amplified by the lack of any immunity acquired by childhood exposures: https://psmag.com/news/how-native-american-genes-tell-the-story-of-europeans-arrival https://psmag.com/news/how-native-american-genes-tell-the-st... Charles C. Mann has a whole chapter on the epidemics that ravaged the Americas after the European arrival, in "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Colombus (2005)", and discusses this and other theories. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491
billfruit 4y ago
Syphilis is a disease thought to have come from the Americas to the Old World.

AlotOfReading 4y ago

It's been discussed in many places on the internet before, but CGP Grey has a lot of profound misunderstandings around the Columbian Exchange and the new world as a whole. Some of it is that he's not an expert, some of it is that he chose particularly bad sources (e.g. the zoonotic hypothesis he cribbed almost directly from one of Diamond's older papers), and some of it is that there's a lot of misinformation about this particular topic on the internet. The reality is that dense urban settlements (many without good hygiene), domestic animals (e.g. parrots), unsanitary conditions, and widespread trade/social networks all existed, subject to the usual caveats of time and place. We even have strong evidence of highly contagious diseases like Kirsten Bos' paper on zoonotic Tuberculosis in ancient Peru. There are still many open questions regarding why the Columbian Exchange happened the way it did. Academics are still trying to work out the truth through centuries of mistaken narratives about what went down, including the now-suspect idea that there was ever a single continent-wide epidemic wave. We can reject some ideas (like innate genetic susceptibility) on the basis of scanty evidence, but most of them are hard to definitively reject and few people have the knowledge base to write books challenging the dunning-kruger type academics that are comfortable talking about continent-wide phenomena with simple narratives. Covid made the social dynamics of epidemics a particularly interesting research topic to grad students, so maybe there'll be more consensus about big questions in a few years.

bigmattystyles 4y ago
Interesting! But wouldn’t a tb outbreak in ancient Peru line up with what cgp grey is saying, in that they had close contact with Llamas?
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The tuberculosis came from pacific seals, so no. I wouldn't put it past the llamas to have planned it though.
  - bigmattystyles 4y ago
    Good thing we have Winamp then.
nixcraft 4y ago
>It's been discussed in many places on the internet before, but CGP Grey has a lot of profound misunderstandings around It is not just CGP Grey; other popular channels also share tons of misunderstandings and stuff related to tech or science. I believe YouTube also favours popular channels because of the high likes and comments. They dominate both Google and YouTube searches. I started noticing this around topics like Firewalls, RPis, Linux, Coastal Erosion, Global Warming, open source etc. The reason why top YouTubers are popular is because of their presentation style. It would be best if you did your research using multiple sources. Ask a question to university professors on Twitter (or email them), and they will happily guide you to the right resources. At least, that is how I do it and it worked better for me. YMMV.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Yeah I love some of these pop historical/sociological youtubers - until they venture into one of the tiny domains I know a little about, and I listen to their misunderstandings. Then of course I think about how likely their knowledge of other topics - on which I "trusted" them due to my own ignorance - is similarly surface level.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    The best presentation is the most suspect, particularly if the presenter has little focus and follows on to trending topics (you start to notice a topic does the rounds in several information entertainment venues and presenters in a short time). Popular science presentations whether it be books, podcasters, or videos are quite low signal to noise.
  - unmole 4y ago
    https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
- Manu40 4y ago
  On the topic of Linux: To properly install Arch Linux (The way I want it setup) on my machine without any hitches, I need to use like.. 7 different videos, because they each leave something out that the other included. Yes, yes, I know I should/could just use the Arch wiki. I really should just go do a deep dive into it someday. But my method works, so why fix it?
jcampbell1 4y ago
> We can reject some ideas (like innate genetic susceptibility) on the basis of scanty evidence This is an article about genetic selection due to the plague in Europe. Lol.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The idea I'm talking about here is an older one that virgin soil epidemics devastated American populations because they were innately susceptible to them, often as a result of genetic homogeneity or something. That's not supported by decades of research into those kinds of questions. This article is talking about selective pressure as a result of epidemics, which is absolutely a thing.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Selective pressure impacts genetics though, so doesn't it come full circle to the same argument?
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      No, it's best to think of them as unrelated. On one hand, you have an argument that "virgin soil" epidemics in the columbian exchange were deadly because Native Americans had no genetic diversity (not true) and thus effectively no differential susceptibility. That's a complex narrative causally linking many different processes and observations over centuries. On the other, you have a statement that disease can cause selective pressure. The only relationship is that they're both about genetics and disease.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        "Native Americans had no genetic diversity (not true)" That feels a bit like a strawman. Few people would claim that Native Americans had no genetic diversity. But the claim that they had less genetic diversity than Old World populations is plausible. After all, there was a massive population bottleneck/founder effort in their relatively recent history. The groups of people who walked across the Beringia and settled the Americas had to be small-ish, with their total size not exceeding several tens of thousands. Siberia is, until today, very sparsely populated. Compared to the Old World, the New World population squeezed through a population bottleneck of perhaps 0,1-0,5 per cent of the total human population of that time. It then started diversifying again, but genetic drift is a longish process.
chrisco255 4y ago
You're correct that some cities existed in the Americas on par or larger than most European cities (ie Teotihuacan). I don't know why people don't just chalk it up to an accident of viral/biological disease evolution. You could imagine an alternate timeline where the native Americans had survived similarly horrific incidents as the Justinian and Black Plagues, as well as Smallpox, but then Colombian exchange brought back the diseases to Europe. Maybe it was just an unfortunate coin flip of history. Maybe the racial diversity in the Eurasian-African land mass contributed to the disease diversity and acuity?
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  If you just want my idle speculation, my personal guess is that diseases did exist in the Americas, but 1) we lack the ability to see them in the record and 2) the dynamics of how those diseases originated/spread is significantly different between afroeurasia and the new world. One of the problems with archaeology is that things have to be archeologically visible in order for us to realize they exist. Diseases usually don't leave skeletal evidence and many American cultures were big on cremation besides. It's only under very unique circumstances with certain diseases (e.g. the mummies with tuberculosis mentioned previously) that we can clearly see the evidence to say "hey, these people died in a disease outbreak". In Eurasia we rely heavily on literary sources to supplement this issue, but we have few American sources and they're mostly focused on other things. The nature of continents is also substantially different. The Americas were hugely affected by late quaternary extinctions that destroyed the mammalian diversity, a main factor in zoonotic transmission [1]. The places where that diversity exists post-LGM like the Amazon basin are very remote and their pre-Columbian history is not well studied, let alone the history of disease there. We have little understanding of how they integrated into broader American trade networks either. Eurasia's biodiversity is spread across large areas of the continent, which happen to be crossed by continental trade routes. If plague had originated in Venezuela instead of from rodents in central Asia, we might not even know about historical outbreaks and simply label it a new disease when modern farmers in the highlands caught it. [1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919176117 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919176117
- mcculley 4y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Teotihuacan had an estimated population of 125,000 or more, "making it at least the sixth-largest city in the world during its epoch at its zenith", which is thought to be no later than 550 CE. Rome is estimated to have had 1,000,000 inhabitants around 0 CE. Certainly the Europeans had much greater population and density. How could they not be carrying around more virulent parasites?

photochemsyn 4y ago

Apparently native populations had a different immunogenic profile and that made them more susceptible to European diseases such as smallpox, and this was amplified by the lack of any immunity acquired by childhood exposures: https://psmag.com/news/how-native-american-genes-tell-the-story-of-europeans-arrival https://psmag.com/news/how-native-american-genes-tell-the-st... Charles C. Mann has a whole chapter on the epidemics that ravaged the Americas after the European arrival, in "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Colombus (2005)", and discusses this and other theories. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491

billfruit 4y ago

Syphilis is a disease thought to have come from the Americas to the Old World.