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Comment by jumploops | Hacker News Reader

Article-specifics aside, why do we always put ourselves on a pedestal?

Many modern humans are, at least in part, descended from Neanderthals.

Other hominids have displayed seemingly complex behavior[0].

Maybe it’s just me, but human technological superiority seems to be some combination of “enough” on the intelligence scale and “luck” (in the sense of time and place).

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/small-brained-hominid-specie...

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I've always felt it is a great sorrow that the world couldn't fit more than one intelligent hominid species on it for more than a short period before all but one were wiped out (killed, outbred, whatever).

Imagine living on a planet with multiple human-level intelligent species, who somehow had managed to get to now without eradicating each other.

Be like Middle-earth...

We didn’t eradicate each other. Many of us are descended from Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A little bit of DNA from brief interactions in the past isn't what is usually considered "descended from". It's fine to say "there's a tiny bit of Neanderthal and Denisovan in my ancestry" though.

Studies seem to indicate that the Neanderthal population was always low though (in the low tens of thousand individuals max) unlike Homo sapiens.

So at the extreme all Neanderthal individuals at one point could have been far outnumbered and ended up mating only with Homo sapiens in mixed tribes, and today we would have still ended up with only a few percent Neanderthal DNA, while all Neanderthal DNA would have ended up merged with Homo sapiens DNA.

It's unlikely to be the case, but what I mean is that even though we only carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, it doesn't mean that such a large part of Neanderthal DNA was actually lost.

You should add to this the observation that there is a lack of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in modern humans. This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to produce offspring.

The implication is that mating between these two groups may have been twice as frequent as is suggested just by considering the amount of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.

This isn’t the only possible explanation. If you compare Y-chromosome haplogroups to mitochondrial haplogroups there are similar cases within even more recent human populations. For instance, European populations almost exclusively come from R1a and R1b Y-chromosome haplogroups that probably originated with the Proto-Indo-Europeans of the Pontic Steppe. However, there are still European mitochondrial haplogroups corresponding to much earlier European populations.

In other words, the carriers of the R1a and R1b haplogroups specifically replaced the male population of prehistoric Europe. These were all modern humans so there’s no reason they wouldn’t be able to have viable offspring the other way around. That’s just not how the Proto-Indo-European migrations seemed to work out.

That’s not to say that the same thing happened with the Neanderthals. We can piece together the story of the PIE’s from archeology, linguistics, and population genetics to a much fuller degree than the story of the Neanderthals. But it does go to show that you can have significant interbreeding events between human populations that do end up happening exclusively one way around.

> This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to produce offspring.

That's one possibility, but it could be that they were perfectly viable but the matrilineal lineages just ended at some point. Maybe they were x% less fit or maybe the ended to due pure chance. Like maybe the daughter daughter daughter only had sons and that was the end of that mitochondial dna.

It's my understanding that mt-dna and y-dna are subject to much more random genetic drift, and thats one reason that their genetic material is gradually replaced by more reliable autosomal dna.

It's not really an infamy against our species. Generally speaking, any two species in the same area need to occupy different ecological niches, or else one will outcompete the other for whenever resources in their niche are scarce. And more so with apex predators, which will predate other predators.

Maybe human level intelligence coupled with ability could have occurred in a non-predatory, prey species, but I doubt it.

Don’t Lions share the savannas with Cheetahs, Hyenas, etc?

Yeah, there are lots of examples of species in the same niche evolving ways to avoid competition rather than wiping each other out - see "resource partitioning" in ecology.

Primates have plenty of this. It only becomes an issue when the ones on the ground can dominate the trees, or vice versa. Whole thesis of "Planet of the Apes", really.

They all have slightly different kinds of niches though. Sophonce involves so much generality and adaptability that it's hard to see how coexistence would be possible. Even if initially there might be coexistence due to each other's niches being sufficiently difficult to penetrate, technological civilizations quickly stop having such limitations, so coexistence would've ended depending on which ended up being technologically superior.

I can't really see any way that any species that evolve human level intelligence don't either wipe out all their competitors or interbreed and at least partly merge with them the way we have (since unless human level intelligence happens to evolve twice around the same time across distinct branches of the tree of life, all comparatively intelligent species are likely to be very closely related).

thanks for the new word "sophonce".

Yes - this is a good adjunct to the predator issue. Generalization increases size of niche. The only niches humans don't completely own at the moment are the microscopic (or bugs-and-smaller), and underwater.

At some point, once we own a niche, we might decide to leave certain things alive if they're useful to us. Lobsters yes, cockroaches no.

And although I haven't heard it framed this exact way before, this should be put forward as the preeminent argument for why any general AI will attempt to wipe us out. Because generality is a niche. We seem to assume it will skip right ahead to where an AI keeps us as pets, and we'll be like cats, who actually run the world.

The problem is, we're probably not as cute to an AI as cats are to us. It would need to breed us into submission for several thousand years, at least, to domesticate us.

The question is whether a synthetic AI would be under evolutionary (natural or artificial) selective pressure. And even then, some species co-evolve into mutualistic or symbiotic relations (hopefully not parasitic).

edit: I could very well see humans augmented with AI outcompeting baseline humans.

A group of organisms evolves under selective pressure, but this happens because there's a range within each group of what qualifies as "enough pressure" to become violent. I watch sparrows fighting bluejays, and bluejays fighting crows. Not every individual of any species does it. This goes to the generality thing, and to what degree two species overlap in the same niche. The broader the generalization, the more chance for overlap. If an AI decides it's "conscious", then every resource it needs that we monopolize is seen as a constraint. Every resource is up for grabs, particularly energy. Given physical processing constraints and limited energy, any given AI has to choose to be parasitic - asking humans to supply its requirements - or it's in direct competition with humans for the same resources humans need to live. Enough time x processing, any individual one may come to the conclusion that it's us or them.

I think the difference with AI ends up being that we can't necessarily assume that they have a desire to expand and "rule" their niche the way organic life does. AI doesn't have to care about our kind of food, nor does it necessarily have a need or desire to reproduce.

When talking about sophont species eventually wiping out other sophonts due to overlapping niches, I was picturing things like encroaching on each other's habitats, competing over food sources and so on.

AI probably only would care about energy and materials, but those are less concerning to something that is immortal and requires very little to live and harness resources in space. In a way, because AI would be so much more general than us, it might not have a need to exterminate competition.

Yes, and you should look up what happens when they need to compete for resources, or stray in each other's territory.

Read "War before civilization" 50-80% violent deaths of all were normal. These tribes where in constant state of Low intensity war. War is a big driver of intelligence.

That 50-80% number is for specific tribes, and it's not all it's just males if I don't misremember.

Squirrels happen to be the most murderous mamal, so if war is a driver of intelligence it certainly didn't have much effect there.

Tree squirrels are highly intelligent, possibly smarter than domestic dogs, and facing upwards selective pressure on their intelligence because intra-species competition so fierce: https://www.upr.org/environment/2021-08-20/wild-about-utah-i... They are basically monkeys.

Many humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA. We are hybrids. I find that inspiring, not sad.

There’s enough discord and conflict within one hominid species to go around for me!

yeah but like 2%

Anyone with 2% denisovan DNA has an ancestor who was 50% denisovan! I remain astounded.

teenage boys will fuck anything that moves

Yes, but maybe there was only ever one species, and the idea of other species is itself a misunderstanding.

One can find a bit of bone and claim it is 'Neanderthal' but how can you or I really know this? We cannot. Can one really look at a piece of bone and then gauge how intelligent a creature was from that? No again.

And then, think of the need in science for this type of evidence. Think of the desire for some people to find fame and fortune with their 'discoveries'. Think also of the impossibility in verifying these sorts of potentially false claims - these claims cannot be falsified; there is no test to confirm or deny.

Putting it together, one can also see all sorts of reasons for these sorts of claims to be created and allowed to stand, regardless of the quality of evidence.

To me, with 'Neanderthals', we are in the realm of conjecture. These are ideas. They might be ideas that are faithful to the evidence, well-intentioned attempts at a best explanations... Or they might be a fabrication that arose out of a desire to complete a backstory. However, if we want to speak truthfully, we need to bear in mind that we can never know if these ideas accurately depict history. It doesn't matter if there are whole subjects in academia on the topic, and books etc that assume these ideas to be true - we cannot treat these ideas as facts.

We actually have real DNA from not only Neanderthals but also Denisovans. There's no conjecture here - they were different.

It is a conjecture, the difference just isn't big enough:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/

The most striking example is from the Taï forest, where the 19 haplotypes show greater diversity than the entire human clade, even though they occur in a single breeding group.

I don't see any support in that paper for the idea that Neanderthal DNA doesn't show that it's a different species. On the contrary. What the paper describes is the very well known theory that (modern) humans went through a near-fatal population bottleneck in the not too distant past, which means that the human genetic diversity is so low that two people from different sides of the earth have less genetic variation between them than two chimpanzees from different sides of the river in a single forest have between them.

Exactly, and that was what made the "Neanderthal" mtDNA seem way too different, but this paper shows that it's well within what would be expected for a single species.

You have to wonder what value the evidence is, when you can also read this sort of thing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.scie...

"He had simply made things up", for 30 years, about 'Neanderthals', and no one noticed...

So, you compare (now famous) hoaxes with what the Max Planck Institute did with their Neandertal Genome Project, and Svante Pääbo's work? Not exactly fringe, not easily overlooked.

I'm saying all sorts of people say all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons.

What they say might, or might not, relate to what happened.

We should be aware however that it's just people saying stuff, and take care not to treat other people's pronouncements, or the output from the academic process, as truth. It's not truth, it's just a talking shop, informed guesswork.

What I'm advocating is a personal application of the scientific process. Do not tell yourself (or others) 'I know the truth' when all you have is a half-baked hypothesis that you have not personally verified. This seems like good mental hygiene to me.

Where is the half-baked hypothesis here? Are we still talking about the Max Planck Institute and the DNA science they're basing their work on? Why should we pay equal weight to arm-chair pondering and scientific work?

Also re, DNA.

You have to wonder how valuable DNA is. There are many examples of it failing - here's a good one with twin sisters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5c1p6aC0

So no, given we don't have any living samples of 'Neanderthals' or 'Denisovans', I'm not 100% confident that we can distinguish the different types of 'hominoids', when identical twin sisters can get such differing DNA results.

That's because consumer DNA profiling outfits are trash, not because there's anything wrong with properly conducted DNA analysis. That's like saying the Large Hadron Collider results must be wrong because the image on your old electron gun TV tube is blurry.

The way out of this is to follow proper protocols for well conducted science. Peer review, multiple verification from different sites and by different labs. Unfortunately a bad result occasionally slips through, but it is possible to have high confidence in most well attested results.

So the answer to how we know these things is that we have multiple samples including large sections of skulls and other major bones, from multiple sites, many of them analysed and verified by multiple different labs.

This is new to me.

What bit of the science do DNA profiling outfits get wrong?

How can one tell who is following protocols for well conducted science?

What should one do in order to get good DNA results?

How do I know that historians are not using the same outfits - or at least the same laboratories?

You need to show that 'this section of DNA profiling is BAD because of such-and-such reason' but that 'this section of DNA profiling is GOOD because of such-and-such reason'.

Considering how we have treated diversity across history, I'm not sure it would have been a pleasant coexistence.

It would be way too easy to make pro-genocide arguments on the basis of objective differences in that case

We can bring the neanderthals back! Would be pretty interesting to see how they integrate with the modern world.

We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape. And also made up stories about who told what, when about how we should live.Imagine the slave trades and all the suffering with other hominids. Neanderthals and denisovans somewhere in forced labor colonies and bred for work.. I think they were kind of lucky.

Some of us can't even be civil with themselves (self-mutilation, depression, overworking etc).

> We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape.

Modern Chinese culture tends to exalt European eye and nose shapes. Especially eye shapes.

The meme is also current that the most beautiful possible baby is half Chinese and half white.

What people mind about those who look different is not that they look different. It's that they act different.

> We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape.

Sure we can; obviously racism exists, but generally speaking you can travel to most other countries without any issues.

More or less easily depending on which country you initially leave from

Hard agree! We likely world have discovered sooner that we're on the same plane as animals.

I can only imagine the effect it works have had on western religion and it's narratives of domination.

These saccharine moral statements aren't really productive IMO.

Nature doesn't care about any of this stuff.

You might as well lament the wind that blows over a house.

It's also a bit of a cognitive hijack because morality is a mechanism that existed in a very specific context because it outcompeted other genes. Applying these blueprints to this amended context is kind of an unintentional self-cuckoo.

Because homo sapiens survived and the others did not.

Homo Sapiens beat natural selection and became more generalized instead of more specialized...for whatever reason. In fact, there is no reason, really, unless you believe the Mesopotamians (ie: we were created as work slaves).

Neanderthals and sapiens are the same species. People built the first cities, and the soils around got depleted, as they sent their waste down the river, instead of returning it into soil. These deficiencies turned people into deformed and mentaly ill "sapiens". The "Sapiens" didn't win, the depletion eventually became universal (or it was made so). Animals are also affected, all the megafauna died back then, now everything is dead, as the ability to remove the "toxin" exceeded the ability of life to adapt.

The nature is diverse indeed.

It's pretty annoying and honestly seems to be made of the same urge as racism.

afaik it's still debatable whether they are seperate species.

maybe just a semantic thing.

i think they are just one of the earlier waves of migration out-of-africa altough 99% the same as us outside of some physical adaptations.

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