Comment by tman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tman | Hacker News Reader

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The picture with the subtitle "Professor Abbi and Boa Sr became firm friends" is rather striking evidence of the diversity of human types present in that area of the world.

Some Google searching brings up an article with a descriptions of mitochondrial sequencing done on the Andamanese. Apparently they are of African pygmoid descent.

It's a rather good object lesson -- if you want to be a professor (the one on the right), don't let your ancestors get trapped in a genetic backwater for tens of thousands of years, missing out on all those good brain gene selection events.

EDIT: Not pygmoid after all. The pygmoid features are the product of convergent evolution. The evolutionary trend towards small stature seems to be due to resource competition from living on an island with barely enough space to support human habitation. It looks like they came through southern Asia.

Don't you think it's a little premature to conclude that the quality of her brain (and not, say, geography) accounts for the difference?

Uh, no, this subject is a tangent and we shouldn't really get into it here.

However, a couple of general statements: There are reams of genetic and psychometric data available. More than enough to develop pretty good idea when and where the most probable selection events for good brain genes occurred and how fast they spread. Your word 'premature' tells me something about your acquaintance with that data.

Also, there is one very simple rule: totally genetically isolated communities only have access to their own mutations. Their population is small, so the number of mutations is also small. Non-isolated communities get swept by every positive selection event that comes along.

I agree that this is a tangent - my point was that it's not a relevant tangent because (without disagreeing on any of your genetics) this woman's odds of becoming a professor after being born in a tiny soon-to-be-extinct tribe on a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal were negligible regardless of her intelligence or genes.

It's tangent, but I'm interested. Are you alluding to particular events in recent history or kinds of events?

Any pointers to reading on this?

A recent book on this and various other topics related to recent human evolution is "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending.

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