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Comment by throwaway4666 | Hacker News Reader

Multiple inaccuracies there.

Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.

The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.

Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) I remember him being huge into 'HBD' despite not being credentialed in any way beyond dropping out of his PhD program to get in on the 'consumer genomics' grift. Not a good look imo.

If you want a real overview of current population genetics check out Graham Coop's lectures, he's a prominent professor in the field and his teaching materials were inspirational for many people. Alas, he does not have a substack, neither does he make contrarian takes for a living (probably due to having a real job)

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You're misrepresenting him, and it sounds like you have an ideological stake in this.

> Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.

He never claimed or hinted that Africans do not have Neanderthal DNA.

He says "non-African modern humans were discernibly more similar to the Neanderthal sample than Africans were", which is factually accurate, given that there's about a 1.5-2.5% gap in the amount of DNA that's shared, at least according to best current knowledge.

> The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong

No such thing is insinuated.

He makes it explicit that he's talking about the "total-replacement plank of the old out-of-Africa model", and he spends a while talking about how we're all descended from a single male and single female within Africa, it's only the case that certain populations outside of Africa mixed with other hominids and got up to 5-7% of their DNA from them (Neanderthals and Denisovans), which is far more than what Africans have.

There was a Eurasian introgression back into Africa from either the Arabian Peninsula or (less likely) across the Sahara into Chadic ethnic groups visible in Y-DNA haplogroups. Most likely that's the source of the 0.3%

>Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.

That ancestry comes from later interactions with West Eurasians and is at trace levels compared to the substantial 2-3% in non-Africans. This does not change the point that non-Africans received input from Neanderthals just before expansion outwards.

>The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.

You've misread the article if you believe that. The point is that the total replacement model of out of Africa imagining a small band of hunter gatherers expanding out of an East Africa giving rise to all of humanity popular in the 2000s was proven wrong. The point was that single locus markers like mtDNA and Y-DNA can create biases that allowed for such a consensus that was changed by the whole genome of the Neanderthal. The ancient DNA we have now suggests a multi-regional model for modern human evolution within Africa.

The remainder of the post (other than the first nitpick) is non-substantive ideological claims that appears to be largely because Razib's politics lean conservative. Interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.

I just want to comment on this: opposing 'scientific racism' is an ideological claim now?! The dude has a pretty large record making claims about race and IQ and 'human biodiversity', works in an industry that's banking heavily on grifting money out of rich people with PGSes, and mainstream scientists debunking it are the ones being ideological? I feel like I'm dreaming here, imagine a Philip Morris lobbyist accusing you of being 'ideological' when you point out flaws in their 'actually cigarettes are pretty good for you' studies. (Wait, that actually happened)

> The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.

No, the trace levels of Neanderthal DNA in Africans is very unlikely to change by gathering more diverse range of cohorts. It is a matter of identifying major strands of ancestry within Africans (by admixture over thousands of years to now be in various African populations) which all are distinguished by a lack of Neanderthal DNA outside of West Eurasian admixture.

And for the last point, I did not condone scientific racism. To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.

>To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

That's a needlessly stilted PR-like statement that basically hides the meat of the whole 'controversy': behavioral and IQ differences between populations and their genetic origins. Khan has a position, mainstream scientists another. Oftentimes fallacious arguments are invoked involving 'but look at domestic animal breeds' (not unlike your repeated admonition that 'humans are animals' which I will assume is just a boring triviality on your part for the sake of charity).

> Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.

There's no reason to not. Holocene expansion of farming/pastoral populations all over the world (including Africa) has largely homogenized human ancestry into identifiable distinct strands that is in varying proportions. Africa is indeed diverse genetically but it is not magic or anything. It most likely comes from the earlier mentioned multi-regional model within Africa through drift and admixture with highly drifted populations. And almost all of these populations outside of those of North Africa were outside of the Neanderthal range and we have archeological evidence to support this as well. There is no logical reason to believe in an (outside of the obvious example of historic West Eurasian admixture in the Horn/North Africa) African population with non-trace levels of Neanderthal ancestry. High levels of diversity in Africa does not imply a significantly large population with non-trace levels of neanderthal ancestry.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2016.10.012

>Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.

Finding a subpopulation within Africa with more Neanderthal DNA would not overturn the the fact that African populations in general have less of this DNA than elsewhere.

"sub-Saharan Africans have some genetic differences from other clades" is not tantamount to scientific racism and you're doing yourself, them, genetics, and the scientific community a disservice. Neanderthal DNA is not magic fairy dust. The differences between Neanderthal and H. sapiens brain cell organelles in vitro are well known.

>No, the trace levels of Neanderthal DNA in Africans is very unlikely to change by gathering more diverse range of cohorts.

Black Americans? Broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with the ginger whiskers I see every time I look in the mirror.

What is the value of slightly more Neanderthal DNA, anyway?

> Black Americans? Broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with the ginger whiskers I see every time I look in the mirror.

Who aren’t Africans, but for the most part are of mixed background of Africans and Europeans in the last 500 years.

> What is the value of slightly more Neanderthal DNA, anyway?

There isn’t any, which is why it’s odd anyone is getting defensive about it. It just validates particular models of human expansion out of Africa.

>Who aren’t Africans, but for the most part are of mixed background of Africans and Europeans in the last 500 years.

Again, broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with my skin color and facial features. I think you'll find it a hard sell to much of this country, within and without the scientific community, that black African-Americans are not... you know, African. To an extent. For different reasons, depending on who you ask, of course.

>Which is why it’s odd anyone is getting defensive about it.

Assuming that you're an American, the notion that you don't understand the defensiveness strains credulity. It validates quite a bit more in the eyes of some.

> Again, broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with my skin color and facial features. I think you'll find it a hard sell to much of this country, within and without the scientific community, that black African-Americans are not... you know, African.

The average Black American is almost 1/4 European descent due to mixing that occurred recently. My son has light brown hair—because his mom is Irish and Dutch. They’re irrelevant to a discussion of the genetics of Bangladeshis.

> Assuming that you're an American, the notion that you don't understand the defensiveness strains credulity. It validates quite a bit more in the eyes of some.

Those folks need their eyes checked.

> There isn’t any

I don’t think we can confidently state that currently. Given that substantial amount of admixture persisted so many generations, it is quite possible that there has been at least some evolutionary advantage associated with it. The rest of your comment, however, is correct: we have no reason to believe that humans with bigger admixture derive huge value from it today, and no reason to be defensive about not having it.

Not everything he says is wrong just because he has lots of nutty beliefs more generally. Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything terribly controversial or wrong in the article.

What specifically are you saying is an example of his scientific racism?

It’s undeniable that racial egalitarianism is part and parcel of the ideological complex of the postwar world and its attendant ethical commitments also shape our scientific discourse. It might be correct in its claims, but anti-racism can absolutely form the basis for an ideology just like its opposite can.

The New Yorker published [a decent article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...) recently about a geneticist—not a “race scientist”—who has to contend with hysterical, hyperbolic backlash from progressive scholars for simply exploring the genetic components of human behavior. The fear is that her work will somehow rationalize racial and sexual inequalities, so it must be suppressed.

>“There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.” By the time he wrote again, several hours later, one of Harden’s few supporters among the fellows had changed the thread’s subject line from “new genetics paper” to “Seriously? Holocaust deniers?” Darity responded, “I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”

What is that if not pure ideology?

>Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good)

He is a Bengali-American (with a Muslim name) who has repeatedly debunked Hindu nationalist claims about ancient human migrations in and out of India.

Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.

>Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.

Could also be your typical sour grapes over a dissenting view on the science. Academia is full of childishness like this (especially but not exclusively as you go further away from stuff that can be unambiguously measured and into the realm of the squishy soft sciences).

I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist. (Btw by "Scientific racism" I'm talking about the pseudoscience movement)

I'd suggest you take a look at some of his work yourself and make a judgement of how unscientific he really is:

https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply...

Here's a paragraph for instance (trust me reading it in context doesn't make it any better)

> Also, I am not sure the blonde preference is as dominant among people from Asia as it is among Europeans, and Asians have not been as culturally dominated by Europeans as Amerindians have. Though certain European features were traditionally praised by Asians (fair skin), others have not been emulated (large noses, reputed body odor due to diet, hirsute body, etc.). In addition, though Japanese may comment on the nice figures that European women have (i.e., Europeans tend to exhibit more sexual dimorphism), they will also comment that many American women are too large and, as they would say in the States, "big-boned." In other words, even if blondeness is preferred by Eurasians, there are other attributes that work against them (their size in comparison to petite Asian women, the perception by many Asians that European women, and Europeans in general, age faster and don't keep their appearance up after the bloom of youth, etc.).

> I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist.

Given that Bangladesh has one of the lowest average IQs in the world, that suggests a strong motivation for Kahn not to make assertions lightly.

The paragraph you point to is blunt, but not “racist” and not inconsistent with what I’ve heard in “just among us Asians” conversations. (You’re very sheltered if you think it’s controversial to point out that East Asians think that Americans are fat and age quickly.)

What is that paragraph indented to demonstrate? It looks like he making a decent point using generalities as examples.

> they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.

This comment is so full of intellectual dishonesty. Razib Khan's controversy is a result of his so called cancellation by Left-liberal media like NYT/Times which are decidedly against Hindu nationalism.

In fact, Razib Khan is the founder of Brown Pundits, which is arguably more center right and has more Hindutva supporters than left-liberals. I found Razib Khan and Omar Ali both to be a prudent and neutral observers of the developments in subcontinent and are more leaning towards Hindutva (in its original spirit)

> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good

If wikipedia had existed in the time of Copernicus, Plato, Giordano Bruno, Galileo or Darwin, I do not think they would be without their own large ‘controversies’ section ;)

Scientific racist is a funny term. If a scientist shows that "race" X has a different distribution of traits than "race" Y, does that mean that they are a scientific racist? Doesn't racism also have to have an associated hatred, prejudice, or antagonism against a different race? Is it scientifically racist to say that blacks get a certain blood disease more frequently than whites?

To put it another way, if a scientist does a study and shows that the Ainu people of northern Japan are statistically taller than the Mbuti people of the Congo, does that mean the scientist is a "scientific heightist"? Wouldn't they need to amend their report with something like "...and therefore, Ainu people are better than Mbuti" or something like that?

No. A scientific racist is a racist (someone who thinks one race is inferior to another) who uses science to back up their claim. Not sure this person is one.

Scientific racists don't use such crass words like 'inferior', they'd rather say 'have a lower mean IQ and impulse control due to genetic differences'

But does Razib Khan do that?

Anyway, David Reich argued in the NYT that there are genetic differences between populatons which do influence behaviour and mental traits. It is only a question if we want to find these (or leave the field to racists):

https://archive.md/z3TlJ

> since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

Note, some people do have genetic conditions that affect their ability to take IQ tests - these include Down syndrome, phenylketonuria, even IBS if you’re giving them a test without bathroom breaks.

The point of knowing this is so you can treat it. You can raise the IQ of a phenylketonuric by not feeding them Diet Coke. It doesn’t seem like the HBD people would be happy seeing this, because they just want to prove someone is inherently superior and someone else isn’t.

Scientific racism is a pseudoscience. To think that it's actually scientific is to get caught up in semantics. It is a very unscientific fringe group

graham was on my committee and i know him personally even before grad school (this is razib).

from the acknowledgments his 2013 paper https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

"Thanks to Razib Khan, Sharon Browning, and Don Conrad for several useful discussions"

you can nitpick the piece but this is from an attack piece on me:

"MANY PROMINENT geneticists familiar with Khan’s work do take him seriously. “I don’t agree with everything that Razib writes, but I think that he does write about population genetics very clearly,” said Graham Coop, a population genetic"

so yes, put your faith in graham :-) you know his work so little you weren't aware i was going to easily pivot in this direction

Hey Razib! I was wondering if you ever had a chance to revisit this old piece of yours and if the views expressed in it still hold up:

https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply...

I didn't know claiming a genetic component in explaining differences in racial averages for IQ is scientific racism.

That's... quite the statement to make with a straight face.

You will find that 'some races just have the dumb SNPs, you know' is indeed a fringe and unserious position often posited by Pioneer Fund recipients (you know, the organization founded in the 30s for the 'purpose of race betterment' that literally inspired Hitler) to justify that we abandon all welfare and remedial programs toward the poorer demographics. If that's not scientific racism, I wonder what's your definition of it.

What is one to do when science itself is considered taboo or racist, independent of the veracity of the findings?

I would argue that racial genetics science itself is not racist, but it can be executed in bad faith, and has a high potential for misuse.

One can ask the following in good faith, absent of racism:

1) Is there a genetic component to intelligence

2) Is it heritable?

3) Are there differences in these genetics across groups?

What policy conclusions one draws from any conclusive findings is the controversial part.

> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good)... Not a good look imo.

Is "having a good look" a core part of your epistemology?

I didn't get the vibe that this particular article was rejecting OoA, but simply pointing out that the modern approach is OoA + "it's complicated".

The HBD stuff is troublesome and it's certainly worth regarding the author more critically, but I found the bones of what was linked fairly pedestrian and uncontroversial. I suspect that will not be true of the follow-up article about origin models within Africa though.

Yeah I'm not saying literally everything in the article is trash, my thought process basically went as follows:

"Wait this is an elementary mistake. Also he's not really up to date on the science. Who wrote this again? That name rings a bell...oh dear..."

What exactly what the elementary mistake?

Edit: ah, answered in another comment. It was this part:

> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

Just to add a little bit.

They discovered the 3D structure, but the structure (specifically, the base pairing) made it quite clear that the mechanism of inheritance was due to each complementary strand serving as a template for information copying.

For me, that was the stunning bit of the discovery.

From Wikipedia, it goes back to at least 1927:

... In 1927, Nikolai Koltsov proposed that inherited traits would be inherited via a "giant hereditary molecule" made up of "two mirror strands that would replicate in a semi-conservative fashion using each strand as a template".[186][187] In 1928, Frederick Griffith in his experiment discovered that traits of the "smooth" form of Pneumococcus could be transferred to the "rough" form of the same bacteria by mixing killed "smooth" bacteria with the live "rough" form.[188][189] This system provided the first clear suggestion that DNA carries genetic information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History

Here is his page on the takimag site: https://www.takimag.com/contributor/razibkhan/130/

Decide for yourself if he is a "scientific racist." Takimag is not shy about stuff like that.

Ah, he also believes in "Ashkenazi IQ" stuff. And is best friends with Greg Cochran who thinks homosexuality is caught by germs. Very instructive stuff

Do you have an actual refutation for Ashkenazi IQ or are you simply using it as a cheap smear?

Science, indeed any intellectual thought, won't progress without contrarian views challenging the/your status quo.

Also if they’re wrong (those being contrarian) who cares? Hypothesis and there’s should be able to defend themselves rationally against any attacks if they can’t then they are not studied well enough to have rigorously tested the hypothesis

At least imo, sure misinformation is one thing but if we’re talking about other scientists I assume, not some layman on facebook

Once the mud slinging stuff like "he's a scientific racist!" comes out (especially when it's clear the author would vehemently disagree with the label), you gotta somewhat adjust your Bayesian priors that the person slinging the mud isn't doing it because he ran out of rational arguments.

Yes, this is the usual precanned retort when faced with the fact that one's fringe viewpoint isn't in line with the mainstram science. It's not an argument though, in that it doesn't tilt the balance of probabilities (from a Bayesian point of view) away from the initial prior (i.e. the fringe is likely wrong and experts are likely right - note that I said likely, not 100%, like a good Bayesian). If anything, his elementary mistake about Crick, his failure to stay up to date with recent findings about African DNA, and motivated agenda with roots in scientific racism are tilting in the opposite direction.

I have no skin in the game; didn't even read the article. "You're just being contrarian so you're wrong" is a weak and lazy retort. I did appreciate that op provided a counter-perspective though; that's rare.

I knew nothing about the author of the text, and read it with interest, but the fact that he didn't mention Franklin was certainly a surprise and warning sign. To anyone who studied the issue, it's clear that Franklin should be credited at least equally with Crick&Watson.

It's quite possible not to be familiar with the issue, or only aware of it peripherally. "Crick & Watson" is the way it was taught to almost all Americans, correct or no.

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