Svante Pääbo: ‘It’s maybe time to rethink our idea of Neanderthals’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The article states that Pääbo is described as being "a bit overwhelmed" by the attention he received after receiving the Nobel prize and he admits "It’s a bit of a burden, to be honest, all the attention I’ve been getting. But it’s a pleasant burden, and one for which I know I can’t expect much sympathy." He also mentions that at his Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, his co-workers did their best to stop the award from going to his head by "throwing him in the pond outside" and "removing his glasses and taking his phone away beforehand." Additionally, he acknowledges that the prize is as much his colleagues' prize as his, showing humility and team spirit.
> Another surprising discovery relates to pain perception. Using data from the UK’s biobank – the world’s largest biomedical database which contains the genetic information of around half a million of the country’s citizens – Pääbo was able to establish that people with a specific Neanderthal variant are more likely to feel pain and to therefore age quicker. “It’s maybe time to rethink our idea of Neanderthals as brutish individuals,” Pääbo quips. “Maybe they were actually quite sensitive.”
Does feeling pain cause quicker aging?
Or, really, their football team. (Zing)
I am relatively successful in that I have a job I can do, met a partner and married, and have children - so this DNA hasn't held me back in any way I can see - but does it set me apart in any ways? How many of the things that are specific to my experience of the world are shaped by this DNA?
Hair Color and Type
Immune System Benefits
Sleeping Patterns
Depression and Addiction
Blood Clotting Issues
Protein Malnutrition
Eye Color
Light and Dark SkinI think Neanderthal genes are especially common if you have heritage from between east asia to europe - you share this with a lot of people.
Edit: The method they use only allows them to discover negative things. Many of these same traits probably offer some advantages as well, but they only have quantitative data on disease.
> One of the first of many surprises in his research was to find out that the genetic differences between Neanderthals and all modern humans(amounting to about 30,000) are far less than the differences between two random human beings alive today – around 3 million [bases ?]
> At least half of the Neanderthal genome – probably as much as 60 to 70% of it, Pääbo believes – is to be found in living humans
This does not compute in multiple ways. Some information is obviously missing, but all we get is these two paragraphs next to each other.
edit: I think the idea is that if you take the total set of all genes all modern humans possess, then there's only 30000 of genes the neanderthals have that aren't part of this?
(consider intra- vs inter-group differences in h sap genomes)
[edit: yeah, maybe the 30k means 30k in the parts of the population blobs which don't overlap: card(neander XOR sap)?]
Below that it suggest that 60-70% of the [distinct from other hominid ancestors] Neanderthal genome is shared with a [typical, Eurasian] modern human, which again without more careful wording clashes with general assumption that our DNA has 99.7% overlap with Neanderthals, 98% plus with modern apes (and 60% with fruit flies!)
That’s a very strong claim without any evidence. Not only that, it’s the kind of claim that you could never have evidence for. It’s purely speculation on your part.
The mainstream accepted view on human population differences is so schizoid to me. On the one hand, you're supposed to believe that "race is a social construct", and indeed many aspects of race/ethnicity are arbitrary and socially constructed.
On the other hand, it's well documented and widely accepted that huge number of measurable and physical traits including skin color, eye color, hair color, hair consistency, face shape, height potential, facial hair growth, and susceptibility to both genetic and infectious diseases (see for example, Cystic Fibrosis and Northern Europeans, Sickle-Cell anemia and Sub-Saharan Africans), are strongly correlated with race and ancestry.
But you're supposed to believe that the same genetic variation that causes all of these physical differences between groups has no effect at all on behavioral differences. Personally, I don't understand how one can honestly reconcile that. I understand why it's not discussed in the current milieu, and I understand that it's potentially very dangerous to the existing social order, but as far as I'm concerned it's a pretty obvious thing to anyone who is willing to see it.
That’s all we’re talking about here isn’t it?
But my comment wasn't about saying any one group is "better" than another, I was just pointing out how incongruous it is to believe that population group genetics have a significant effect on physical features and disease susceptibility, while having zero effect on temperament and behavior.
Since we don't set goals for humanity at large, there's no definition of "best" to optimize for, just complex combinations of sub-behaviors that may or may not be beneficial to certain groups under certain conditions, nothing more.
> But you're supposed to believe that the same genetic variation that causes all of these physical differences between groups has no effect at all on behavioral differences.
Well, yes. None of those differences you mentioned are in the brain. Why should they lead to behavioural differences?
Also: culture is not nearly as conserved as genetics. Populations can change languages within a few generations, and most culture shifts come from wanting to assimilate into the culture of the perceived elites, rather than population replacement or large-level mixing. The exceptions (European settlement in the New World, the Bantu migration, and possibly some others that don't immediately come to mind) are notable because they are the exceptions to the norm.