7 ms·
The Neanderthal correlation (2008)
- jndsn402 12y agoThe gang gets DNA tested and discover Sheldon is descended from cavemen, while Penny is related to Einstein! Meanwhile, Leonard and Raj have a run-in with the building super (Harrison Ford guest stars)
- 3solarmasses 12y agoI don't understand the appeal of that show. I almost cringe every time I see a clip, and the popularity suggests that the world actually thinks nerds are like that.
- jndsn402 12y agoI think it's popular because everyone has a character they can relate to.
- JonnieCache 12y agoWhy would you downvote this? It is indeed correct: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtsmluPK7Ug http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtsmluPK7Ug
- _almosnow 12y agoI just saw them yesterday, they had it running on a restaurant where I had dinner. Oh god, what a terrible show, and yeah I can confirm that 99% of people in science is made of jerks like those.
- furyofantares 12y agoI don't see how the popularity suggests people think it is realistic. Most entertainment I enjoy is known to me to not be realistic.
- ivanhoe 12y agoIt's a comedy show, characters have to be exaggerated a bit to be funny, and IMHO they are most of the time
- Yhippa 12y agoTo 3solarmasses' point I do cringe every time they do the bit where the "Indian guy who is very awkward and shy around women and never gets better about it" happens.
- tomp 12y ago1) He gets better about it; first he manages to talk to women, then gets a girlfriend. 2) It's not like the non-indian guys are really that much better.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI watched the first few seasons and really liked them; they resonated with my inner geek pretty well. Actually, at some point I got quite worried about the extent to which I can relate to the main characters. I also liked the fact that I could actually understand the quantum physics jokes that to most people sounded like "blablabla science blablabla hahaha" ;).
- T-hawk 12y agoThere's a disconnect in the show's treatment of parts of the characters' lives, which accounts for the divisive polarity of opinions on it. The show manages to be both pro-intellectual and anti-intellectual in different areas. The professional side, the science, is held up with great respect and considerable accuracy. These guys are doing really neat stuff at the university and we get to see their enthusiasm and success with it. That's very cool and appealing and a positive light on STEM professionals that's uncommon in popular culture. The personal side, the geekdom, is held up for mockery. The show brings up comics and science fiction and video games mostly as punching bags for the girls to trash and feel socially superior. That's the negative vapid stereotyping that critics complain about. Whether you like TBBT depends on which of those has more impact on you. If you like the science and don't mind the anti-geekery, you'll like the show. If the anti-geekery hits too close to home, you'll hate it. (Side note, I'm conflicted on whether to participate in this subthread. It's Reddit-style topic drift on intentionally misinterpreting the submission title and ignoring its content. But there's good discussion happening here anyway.)
- vorg 12y ago> I watched the first few seasons The first 3 seasons are quite funny and with plenty of sciency stuff, but it starts declining around the 3rd or 4th season. The season 4 episode featuring Sheldon's robotic telepresence and the Steve Wozniak cameo is perhaps the high point in humor, after which the whole thing goes pointless.
- LordKano 12y agoBut some are. I certainly share certain character traits and life experiences with some of the characters of that show. That's a part of why I like it. It's like when any show features a group, there will be people from that group who do not like the way they're being depicted. It's like when a show features black people, there are always black people who get upset because they're not like that or when a show features asian people, there will always be asian people who get upset because they're not like that. In these cases, just like with nerds and geeks, some are like that and the ones who are, are the ones about whom an entertaining show can be made. Virtually nobody is going to watch a show featuring a middle-class, college educated black dude who manages a small restaurant unless there is some other hook. Virtually nobody is going to watch a show about a middle-class, westernized son of Japanese immigrants who works as an accountant, unless there is some other hook. Virtually nobody would watch the Big Bang Theory if all of the characters were average looking, well adjusted people who have passable social skills and just so happen to be very smart and work boring jobs. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a TV show is just a TV show. If you can accept that the message isn't "This what they're ALL like" and that it is "This is what THIS group of people is like", I think you can reduce the amount of discomfort you feel.
- sopooneo 12y agoThe winners create the notion of writing history books.
- mabbo 12y agoJust to be clear, is this fiction, or a dramatization of reality? Both would please me, but not knowing which does not.
- beagle90 12y agoThe author seems to have contributed to New Scientist on the subject matter[1], therefore I'm hoping (and expecting) it to be the latter of your two possibilities. 1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224452.100-inside-the-neanderthal-mind.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224452.100-inside-th...
- rthomas6 12y agoI think it's science fiction, but I'm not sure. The reason I think this is because it's in a section called "futures", which Nature describes elsewhere as "Science fiction from the home of science".
- skywhopper 12y agoFiction. See the author's website: http://www.jeffhecht.com/fiction.html http://www.jeffhecht.com/fiction.html
- yitchelle 12y agoYou would think that as nature.com advertises itself as "Internation weekly of science", it would clearly mark fictional articles very clearly. I read the article, and it could be fact. However, I think that due to the writing style with plenty of dialogue thrown in, it is would almost fiction.
- tstactplsignore 12y agoNature's "Futures" section is an ongoing science fiction short story series, so this is fiction. (Also, the genetic data doesn't say anything in that direction, especially not in such a simplistic way.)
- chestervonwinch 12y ago> ... she smiled so broadly that she looked almost attractive despite her unkempt red-grey hair and nondescript clothes. Why is this necessary?
- louhike 12y agoIt is a fiction so its necessity is based on wether or not the author thinks it will make the story appealing.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoIt's necessary. Read the story again and see if you realize why.
- rgrieselhuber 12y agoFeeling kind of dull, but I still don't get it...
- interesting_guy 12y agoits april fools
- kyberias 12y agoBecause it's a work of fiction. Read it again, then re-read the final sentence.
- asciimo 12y agoJust clicked for me. Thank you. Might have gotten the joke the first time if I knew it was fiction.
- arbitrage 12y agoThis would make a great science fiction piece, if elaborated on. The moralizing at the end, however, was a little heavy-handed.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago"There's a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger's syndrome" Is there such a gene cluster? I guess that finding such a cluster will be an enormous discovery on itself. Otherwise, the plot is pretty obvious. And reeks of New Age mythology.
- tokenadult 12y agoThank you for asking. No, there is no such gene cluster. This fictional story submitted for our discussion here on Hacker News (I don't like that it was submitted, really) is much more optimistic about the results of gene association studies than the actual study results warrant. So far, genome-wide association studies (GWASes) have proved only that almost any human behavioral trait of interest is influenced by dozens or even hundreds of genes of small effect, with unknown interactions among the genes, and most genes still not detectable with very large sample sizes, because statistical power of GWAS is weak when gene effect sizes are small, as they always are.
- bjourne 12y agoTo put it bluntly, the "you can't handle the truth!" bit is because Neanderthal genome is present in European and Asian populations, but not in Sub-Saharan African populations. But that analytical intelligence would have been a "gift" from the Neanderthals, like the article states, is afaik not backed up by any data. Here is one interesting TED talk by Svante Pääbo, one of the leading experts on the Homo Sapiens/Neanderthal link: http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inner_neanderthal http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inn... Edit: eggs on me, I didn't get that the text was fiction
- faitswulff 12y agoAs per skywhopper's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607542), this piece is fictional.
- barbudorojo 12y agoSpoiling the joke at the end of the article: "I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone." The woman has the genes of the Neanderthal that is the mathematic and logic skills, while the boss has the genes of social intelligence. May the day come when she pass away, no intelligence will be left, so he will be in trouble. Edited: Grammar 3 or more times. I have an additional theory, that allow you to classify yourself, those without Neanderthal genes would never read the last lines since that is too much to ask to such a social intelligence creature. (Just want to add my own joke, sorry for that).
- barbudorojo 12y agoJust to add some science: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction: Division of labor. In 2006, two anthropologists of the University of Arizona proposed a new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals.
- PabloOsinaga 12y agoCould this explain the exponential growth in ASD diagnoses we are observing? (i.e., neardenthal genes are dominante and we are becoming less and less sapiens as times go by) ?
- barbudorojo 12y agoI don't think being an intelligent and logical parent is correlated with having children with ASD. It could be that nowadays exigent jobs, with long hours for parents and stress, can contribute to less time for the family and this one can be a source of disorders.
- interesting_guy 12y agojust how strong is the responsibility of genes for mathematical capabilities?
- 6fBliuulVsmTCe8 12y ago> I'd always succeeded before; that was why after two decades at the university I was department chair and Beth was still a research assistant. Maybe it's because she is a woman.
- 6fBliuulVsmTCe9 12y agoI assumed they were both women. Care to point out which part of the text states otherwise?
- kyberias 12y agoThese are wonderful! They recently had a micro-short-story competition (200 chars or less). This was one of the runners up: "off that switch, Professor! Your time machine can't travel back in time past the moment of its own creation and instead will trap the Universe in an endlessly recursive time-like loop! Take your hands" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7494/full/508144a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7494/full/508144a...
- netcan 12y agoI have a couple of things I don't understand about the Neaderthal interbreeding and the Denisovan stuff: (1) If we interbred, doesn't that mean we're the same species. IE, These were two subspecies like dogs and wolves. (2) How does the idea of distinct human populations without Neanderthal DNA work with the genetic bottleneck theory? Wasn't there a bottleneck after this interbreeding took place>
- ajuc 12y agoSpecies are artifical divisions, nature isn't that strict. If species worked 100% of the time there would be no evolution. Horses and donkeys can interbreed, tigers and leopards too, and there are more examples, sometimes the ofsprings can breed too. Almost all rules in biology should have "except when not" added.
- Amezarak 12y agoI think of it like this: there's not really any such thing as a "species" in nature. It's an abstraction we developed to make sense of the world. In reality, organisms exist on a huge continuum composed of individuals which are more or less genetically similar/related. Often there are huge "chunks" missing where lines died out or went their separate ways. We arbitrarily declare that such-and-such collection of organisms between this point and that point on the continuum are a distinct species. Sometimes, this species can interbreed with another and even have fertile offspring, but they just don't - even if they live in the same locale! Sometimes two species are even more genetically similar than the first example, but they can't interbreed at all. Sometimes two organisms could interbreed, but it's physically impossible for some reason (very small dogs and very large dogs) without some kind of assistance. Sometimes they can, but the offspring is not fertile. And as you get further and further away on the continuum, the less likely they can interbreed at all. In nature there's really all kinds of different scenarios like these and it doesn't necessarily make sense to demarcate the species-line where we do - but it was done that way for historical reasons or simply because that's the best we can do with our abstraction.
- bpodgursky 12y agoInter-breeding success isn't always all-or-none. A lot of the time you'll get sterile or un-viable offspring when the species are on the brink of incompatibility. So the fact that it was successful some of the time (which is clear now) doesn't necessarily mean most offspring survived.
- givan 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_accelerated_region_1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_accelerated_region_1
- happyscrappy 12y agoWeird little speculative fiction piece. From Wikipedia: Although some populations of modern humans share some nuclear DNA with the extinct Neanderthals, the two species do not share any mitochondrial DNA,[32] which in primates is always maternally transmitted. This observation has prompted the hypothesis that whereas female humans interbreeding with male Neanderthals were able to generate fertile offspring, the progeny of female Neanderthals who mated with male humans were either rare, absent or sterile (in line with Haldane's rule). While interbreeding is viewed as the most parsimonious interpretation of the genetic discoveries, the authors point out they cannot conclusively rule out an alternative scenario, in which the source population of non-African modern humans was already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa.