3 ms·

I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movem

by falaki 2y ago

I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it is similar to religion). See this article for a logical explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-about-the-levant-da6ff702974f https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-ab...

adastra22 2y ago
You can’t. But if population A and population B share a ancestor X years ago, and they also speak languages that appear to have drifted apart by X many years, the inference that their ancestor spoke a common proto-language is the simplest explanation.
- eddiewithzato 2y ago
  Well you can and in fact they have narrowed down the language to a haplogroup even. R1b in the case of greek for example
eddiewithzato 2y ago
[flagged]
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mateus1 2y ago
    I’m sorry, where do you get that communist countries negates genetically science? A quick search shows that Cuba, for example has plenty of geneticists, researchers and healthcare initiatives around hereditary diseases…
    - raddles 2y ago
      They are likely referring to Lysenkoism. This was the USSR's alternative to natural selection, partially because they believed natural selection was not compatible with Marxism. (There were other justifications, but this is the one relevant to the parent comment) "Some Marxists, however, perceived a fissure between Marxism and Darwinism. Specifically, the issue is that while the "struggle for survival" in Marxism applies to a social class as a whole (the class struggle), the struggle for survival in Darwinism is decided by individual random mutations. This was deemed a liberal doctrine, against the Marxist framework of "immutable laws of history" and the spirit of collectivism." Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
      - ants_everywhere 2y ago
        Yeah Lysenkoism is what I was referring to about flat out denying genetics. But a softer version of genetics denialism has been a running theme historically. Marxists are committed to a sort of historical determinism that requires social conditions to be more important than biology in a way that's not scientifically defensible. That's why they were the first to research classical conditioning, why they continue to support pseudoscience like linguistic determinism, why they've experimented so much with "brain washing" (e.g. trying to program prisoners of war through propaganda) etc. Some of this stuff (like conditioning) has turned out to be useful. Some of it (like Lysenkoism) turned out to be tragically catastrophic. But all of it is an attempt to make science subservient to political needs.
        inkyoto 2y ago
        Lysenko was widely discredited and ridiculed in the late 1960's following the demise of his main proteges (Stalin and later Khrushchev). The widespread damage Lysenko had brought about upon the Soviet genetics was widely acknowledged and openly discussed in the Soviet Union at the time. What on Earth is this bloviation all about?
        ants_everywhere 2y ago
  - astrange 2y ago
    Deepseek doesn't give very Chinese-sounding answers in my experience unless you mention China. Like all LLMs, it mostly feels like it's reading from English Wikipedia.
astrange 2y ago
Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya") and this study is about tracking down where they originally lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the previous European population rather than transferring the languages to them. David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  > replaced the previous European population Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher proportion of the female population survived. Of course that’s an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.
  - acadapter 2y ago
    Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved. Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  For people that are interested to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
- leoc 2y ago
  I can't find it now, but I've seen at least one claim that the ancestral-human-DNA world inside biology is fairly dominated by a clique, and if you're not seen as fully on the team you can't expect to be funded, published and so on. Which isn't to say that any specific claim is wrong, of course, and on the whole it seems very unlikely that they're far wrong on the bare facts, as opposed to more speculative interpretations.
philwelch 2y ago
You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it seems that they do. If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.
bregma 2y ago
You don't need rationalism or the scientific method if you really really strongly believe you are right. This is absolutely true.

by falaki 2y ago

adastra22 2y ago

You can’t. But if population A and population B share a ancestor X years ago, and they also speak languages that appear to have drifted apart by X many years, the inference that their ancestor spoke a common proto-language is the simplest explanation.

eddiewithzato 2y ago
Well you can and in fact they have narrowed down the language to a haplogroup even. R1b in the case of greek for example

eddiewithzato 2y ago

[flagged]

ants_everywhere 2y ago
[flagged]
- mateus1 2y ago
  I’m sorry, where do you get that communist countries negates genetically science? A quick search shows that Cuba, for example has plenty of geneticists, researchers and healthcare initiatives around hereditary diseases…
  - raddles 2y ago
    They are likely referring to Lysenkoism. This was the USSR's alternative to natural selection, partially because they believed natural selection was not compatible with Marxism. (There were other justifications, but this is the one relevant to the parent comment) "Some Marxists, however, perceived a fissure between Marxism and Darwinism. Specifically, the issue is that while the "struggle for survival" in Marxism applies to a social class as a whole (the class struggle), the struggle for survival in Darwinism is decided by individual random mutations. This was deemed a liberal doctrine, against the Marxist framework of "immutable laws of history" and the spirit of collectivism." Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      Yeah Lysenkoism is what I was referring to about flat out denying genetics. But a softer version of genetics denialism has been a running theme historically. Marxists are committed to a sort of historical determinism that requires social conditions to be more important than biology in a way that's not scientifically defensible. That's why they were the first to research classical conditioning, why they continue to support pseudoscience like linguistic determinism, why they've experimented so much with "brain washing" (e.g. trying to program prisoners of war through propaganda) etc. Some of this stuff (like conditioning) has turned out to be useful. Some of it (like Lysenkoism) turned out to be tragically catastrophic. But all of it is an attempt to make science subservient to political needs.
      - inkyoto 2y ago
        Lysenko was widely discredited and ridiculed in the late 1960's following the demise of his main proteges (Stalin and later Khrushchev). The widespread damage Lysenko had brought about upon the Soviet genetics was widely acknowledged and openly discussed in the Soviet Union at the time. What on Earth is this bloviation all about?
        ants_everywhere 2y ago
- astrange 2y ago
  Deepseek doesn't give very Chinese-sounding answers in my experience unless you mention China. Like all LLMs, it mostly feels like it's reading from English Wikipedia.

astrange 2y ago

Well, you can't. In this case I believe they're already pretty confident about who the PIE speaking people are (the "Yanmaya") and this study is about tracking down where they originally lived. And they have shown that they mostly replaced the previous European population rather than transferring the languages to them. David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.

wqaatwt 2y ago
> replaced the previous European population Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher proportion of the female population survived. Of course that’s an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.
- acadapter 2y ago
  Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved. Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.
4gotunameagain 2y ago
For people that are interested to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
leoc 2y ago
I can't find it now, but I've seen at least one claim that the ancestral-human-DNA world inside biology is fairly dominated by a clique, and if you're not seen as fully on the team you can't expect to be funded, published and so on. Which isn't to say that any specific claim is wrong, of course, and on the whole it seems very unlikely that they're far wrong on the bare facts, as opposed to more speculative interpretations.

philwelch 2y ago

You are correct that the spread of genetics and the spread of language do not have to coincide. However, in this case, it seems that they do. If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.

bregma 2y ago

You don't need rationalism or the scientific method if you really really strongly believe you are right. This is absolutely true.