Miko, the modern civil rights liberals in my social circles seem to see equality of results, not equality of opportunity, as the goal; unequal results due to unequal diligence or unequal talent seems anathema to them. That’s what I would mean by “egalitarianism”, though its actual philosophical roots seem to trace only to Rawls.

There are threads on Neanderthal and Denisovan SNPs at 23andme.com. Comparing my self to the 5 SNPs 23andme recognizes from the Denisovans I get the following results:

My results at the 4 v.2 tested SNPs:

rs17324735 (C or T) CT chr 9 results AFR 0/46 CEU 4/44 ASN 0/48
rs10971319 (A or G) AG chr 9 results AFR 0/46 CEU 4/44 ASN 0/48
rs1148274 (G or T) TT chr 10 results AFR 0/46 CEU 8/40 ASN 0/48
rs2241970 (A or G) AG chr 10 results AFR 46/0 CEU 38/10 ASN 39/9

The last seems so wide spread as to not be a reliable marker for Denisovan ancestry and to indicate a marker from before the split.

rs17226291 is recognized as a SNP but says “Not Tested” in my results

Hopefully the Denisovan SNPs, the Neaqnderthal SNPs, and the archaic Asian(?) SNPs Hammer found, can be placed on a chip so we can compare to them.

Thanks for your article and blog.

Maybe, but I feel like most civil rights liberals explicitly see equality as a rule of law issue or equal protection entitlement and are understandably suspicious of biological bases for anything political. That said, when a prominent biologist like Gould emits handy sound bites they are happy to selectively include biology. Dennet–raving liberal that he is–is good on the general misinformed-ness created among non-scientist intellectuals by Gould.

in any case, as paul krugman noted in the USA sj gould was the evolutionary biologist par excellence in the public eye. so his confused and convoluted musings held great weight, and from what i can tell his readers did connect the dots that recent human ancestry refuted human equality in some ethical sense.

‘biological egalitarianism’ is probably used by detractors precisely because it is in some sense a default position held in polite society. the converse of the mainstream position in the west between 1850 and sometime in the early-mid-20th century.

Ha! You know I won’t defend the master confuser…I have no idea what he could mean by “equality” if not an ethical principle or the same thing as equal treatment.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18185121/Human-Equality-Is-a-Contingent-Fact-of-History

words lose meaning in the mouths of ideologues, but the discourse here is normally somewhat elevated above such nonsense. your rant was so typical of paranoid noisemakers that i found it difficult to tell if it was genuine, and your baseless assertion about the cognitive effects of archaic genetic admixture (and calling it “parsimonious”) was such a crystalline example of ideological dumbing down of three or four branches of the life sciences at once, i felt it warranted comment.

It isn’t hard to come up with multiple models with fairly weak assumptions that eliminate mtDNA and NRY traces while preserving autosomal DNA in low frequencies, and the models that achieve that result for Neanderthal admixture work just as well for the Denisovians.

Ever since the publication by Hammer et al. (the same Hammer as you mentioned in conjunction with a 2 MYA coalescence in East Asia) of “Out of Africa and Back again” (mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/4/427.pdf), there’s been a recurrent argument that the majority of African Y chromosomes (the huge pan-African E clade characterized by YAP+) are in fact derived from Asia. This would mean that immediately before the founding migration of the would-be E lineages to Sub-Saharan Africa (roughly at 40-45K YBP) there were two big clusters of Y-DNA diversity in the world – the African one, or the AB cluster, and the extra-African one – most likely East Asian, which encompassed CF and pre-DE lineages.

“The Y chromosome data rooting to Africa did provide evidence that a majority of our genes were from Africa.”

In fact it provided the opposite: evidence that the majority of African lineages (hg E) are derived from outside of Africa. We ended up with hg AB in Africa and CDEF outside of Africa at about 40-45K (all pre-YAP+).

“Kenichi Aoki of the University of Tokyo published a lovely simulation showing that after a colonizing cascade the root of a gene tree was as likely to be any of the daughters, oldest to newest, as any other. The implication was clear: the root of the mitochondrial tree in Africa could well mean nothing. ”

Very good. Now let’s look at the map of linguistic diversity. (And let’s ignore Greenberg and Ruhlen.) Interestingly, Melanesia, the inhabitatnts of which “admixed” with Denisovans, is one of the two regions with the highest levels of linguistic diversity. The other region is the New World.

Is a common feature of any inter group competition, why should it be that it be seen as “much worse” when the groups are distinguished by ethnic criteria?

Different gene frequencies do not justify disparate treatment but can serve as
an excuse for it. That’s why racism is bad, irrespective of the science, to the extent that dominant groups use it to justify subjugation, and severe mistreatment of groups designated as the “other”. Unfortunately, some people seem to have a need for a group they can look down on. Such groups are social constructs, and sometimes (e.g. Eta in Japan) are physically indistinguishable from the dominant group.

“I can never tell if people like you are merely stupid or willfully pretending that egalitarianism means something it doesn’t for ideological reasons.”

Sometimes I can’t tell if people like you are merely stupid, or willfully pretending that terms can’t be borrowed from other contexts or have different meanings in different contexts. Or are didisdainful of Google:

First result for “biological egalitariansim” actually happens to be our own gnxp: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/10/biological-egalitarianism.php

Ironically, we don’t have egalitarianism under the law (e.g. affirmative action, which is in violation of the equal protection clause but is exceptioned by the courts due to a “compelling state interest”), in part due to an unsubstantiated belief in biological egalitarianism.

“enjoy imaging themselves victims of an ideological conspiracy, which is creepy and sad.”
Do you mean sort of like how some blacks and latinos believe that “the white man” is constantly trying to keep them down? But I assume you mean some whites and Asians in respect to things like affirmative action, because they’re socially acceptable targets .

For most of the behavioral and cognitive traits that certain kinds of people fetishize, there is nothing approaching adequate evidence for causal gene variants between groups, and there often seem to be highly emotional motivations for or against particular kinds of biological explanations for historical specifics. For this reason, I’m agnostic on most of these and suspicious of the motives of people who whine that one interpretation or another is obvious but politically suppressed. My other annoyance is that very few of the people who seem obsessed with this seem to be involved or conversant with obtaining evidence, or even have a clear sense of what it would look like, and seem to actively enjoy imaging themselves victims of an ideological conspiracy, which is creepy and sad. Same goes with convoluted and baseless explanations for how some kinds of admixture must make you smart while other kinds make you stupid.

And before you post a bunch of social science citations with “evidence” for group genetic differences driving cognitive traits (or–my favorite–correlations between SNPs and Likert scale responses in college students), consider what a behavioral geneticist might consider compelling evidence. I’ve said it before: just because human data is hard to get doesn’t mean we should use lower evidentiary standards.

Rogers, Eswaran, and I published a paper a few years ago claiming that genomic patterns denied the exclusive African origin model. Again few paid attention although no one told us we were wrong. People like Hammer and Wall and Long have also pointed out the same thing.

One interesting story here is the interaction between laboratory technologies and population genetics theory. For the last decade or two the focus of our interest has been lab stuff, while before that much of the action was in population genetics, like coalescence theory. Hence by citing the ‘majority of researchers’ you are obscuring some interesting history.

And, BTW, Merry Christmas to you and everyone here.

Henry