The Neanderthal correlation (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The Neanderthal correlation (2008)

nature.com

92 pointsDigit-Al44 comments

Just to be clear, is this fiction, or a dramatization of reality?

Both would please me, but not knowing which does not.

The author seems to have contributed to New Scientist on the subject matter[1], therefore I'm hoping (and expecting) it to be the latter of your two possibilities.

1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224452.100-inside-th...

I think it's science fiction, but I'm not sure. The reason I think this is because it's in a section called "futures", which Nature describes elsewhere as "Science fiction from the home of science".

Fiction. See the author's website: http://www.jeffhecht.com/fiction.html

You would think that as nature.com advertises itself as "Internation weekly of science", it would clearly mark fictional articles very clearly.

I read the article, and it could be fact. However, I think that due to the writing style with plenty of dialogue thrown in, it is would almost fiction.

Nature's "Futures" section is an ongoing science fiction short story series, so this is fiction. (Also, the genetic data doesn't say anything in that direction, especially not in such a simplistic way.)

To put it bluntly, the "you can't handle the truth!" bit is because Neanderthal genome is present in European and Asian populations, but not in Sub-Saharan African populations. But that analytical intelligence would have been a "gift" from the Neanderthals, like the article states, is afaik not backed up by any data.

Here is one interesting TED talk by Svante Pääbo, one of the leading experts on the Homo Sapiens/Neanderthal link: http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inn...

Edit: eggs on me, I didn't get that the text was fiction

As per skywhopper's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607542), this piece is fictional.

> ... she smiled so broadly that she looked almost attractive despite her unkempt red-grey hair and nondescript clothes.

Why is this necessary?

It is a fiction so its necessity is based on wether or not the author thinks it will make the story appealing.

It's necessary. Read the story again and see if you realize why.

Feeling kind of dull, but I still don't get it...

Because it's a work of fiction. Read it again, then re-read the final sentence.

Just clicked for me. Thank you. Might have gotten the joke the first time if I knew it was fiction.

The gang gets DNA tested and discover Sheldon is descended from cavemen, while Penny is related to Einstein! Meanwhile, Leonard and Raj have a run-in with the building super (Harrison Ford guest stars)

I don't understand the appeal of that show. I almost cringe every time I see a clip, and the popularity suggests that the world actually thinks nerds are like that.

I think it's popular because everyone has a character they can relate to.

Why would you downvote this? It is indeed correct: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtsmluPK7Ug

I just saw them yesterday, they had it running on a restaurant where I had dinner. Oh god, what a terrible show, and yeah I can confirm that 99% of people in science is made of jerks like those.

I don't see how the popularity suggests people think it is realistic. Most entertainment I enjoy is known to me to not be realistic.

It's a comedy show, characters have to be exaggerated a bit to be funny, and IMHO they are most of the time

To 3solarmasses' point I do cringe every time they do the bit where the "Indian guy who is very awkward and shy around women and never gets better about it" happens.

1) He gets better about it; first he manages to talk to women, then gets a girlfriend.

2) It's not like the non-indian guys are really that much better.

I watched the first few seasons and really liked them; they resonated with my inner geek pretty well. Actually, at some point I got quite worried about the extent to which I can relate to the main characters. I also liked the fact that I could actually understand the quantum physics jokes that to most people sounded like "blablabla science blablabla hahaha" ;).

There's a disconnect in the show's treatment of parts of the characters' lives, which accounts for the divisive polarity of opinions on it. The show manages to be both pro-intellectual and anti-intellectual in different areas.

The professional side, the science, is held up with great respect and considerable accuracy. These guys are doing really neat stuff at the university and we get to see their enthusiasm and success with it. That's very cool and appealing and a positive light on STEM professionals that's uncommon in popular culture.

The personal side, the geekdom, is held up for mockery. The show brings up comics and science fiction and video games mostly as punching bags for the girls to trash and feel socially superior. That's the negative vapid stereotyping that critics complain about.

Whether you like TBBT depends on which of those has more impact on you. If you like the science and don't mind the anti-geekery, you'll like the show. If the anti-geekery hits too close to home, you'll hate it.

(Side note, I'm conflicted on whether to participate in this subthread. It's Reddit-style topic drift on intentionally misinterpreting the submission title and ignoring its content. But there's good discussion happening here anyway.)

> I watched the first few seasons

The first 3 seasons are quite funny and with plenty of sciency stuff, but it starts declining around the 3rd or 4th season. The season 4 episode featuring Sheldon's robotic telepresence and the Steve Wozniak cameo is perhaps the high point in humor, after which the whole thing goes pointless.

But some are.

I certainly share certain character traits and life experiences with some of the characters of that show. That's a part of why I like it.

It's like when any show features a group, there will be people from that group who do not like the way they're being depicted.

It's like when a show features black people, there are always black people who get upset because they're not like that or when a show features asian people, there will always be asian people who get upset because they're not like that.

In these cases, just like with nerds and geeks, some are like that and the ones who are, are the ones about whom an entertaining show can be made.

Virtually nobody is going to watch a show featuring a middle-class, college educated black dude who manages a small restaurant unless there is some other hook. Virtually nobody is going to watch a show about a middle-class, westernized son of Japanese immigrants who works as an accountant, unless there is some other hook. Virtually nobody would watch the Big Bang Theory if all of the characters were average looking, well adjusted people who have passable social skills and just so happen to be very smart and work boring jobs.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a TV show is just a TV show. If you can accept that the message isn't "This what they're ALL like" and that it is "This is what THIS group of people is like", I think you can reduce the amount of discomfort you feel.

These are wonderful! They recently had a micro-short-story competition (200 chars or less). This was one of the runners up:

"off that switch, Professor! Your time machine can't travel back in time past the moment of its own creation and instead will trap the Universe in an endlessly recursive time-like loop! Take your hands"

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7494/full/508144a...

Spoiling the joke at the end of the article:

"I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone."

The woman has the genes of the Neanderthal that is the mathematic and logic skills, while the boss has the genes of social intelligence. May the day come when she pass away, no intelligence will be left, so he will be in trouble.

Edited: Grammar 3 or more times. I have an additional theory, that allow you to classify yourself, those without Neanderthal genes would never read the last lines since that is too much to ask to such a social intelligence creature. (Just want to add my own joke, sorry for that).

Just to add some science: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction: Division of labor. In 2006, two anthropologists of the University of Arizona proposed a new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals.

Could this explain the exponential growth in ASD diagnoses we are observing? (i.e., neardenthal genes are dominante and we are becoming less and less sapiens as times go by) ?

I don't think being an intelligent and logical parent is correlated with having children with ASD. It could be that nowadays exigent jobs, with long hours for parents and stress, can contribute to less time for the family and this one can be a source of disorders.

> I'd always succeeded before; that was why after two decades at the university I was department chair and Beth was still a research assistant.

Maybe it's because she is a woman.

I assumed they were both women. Care to point out which part of the text states otherwise?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_accelerated_region_1

I have a couple of things I don't understand about the Neaderthal interbreeding and the Denisovan stuff:

(1) If we interbred, doesn't that mean we're the same species. IE, These were two subspecies like dogs and wolves. (2) How does the idea of distinct human populations without Neanderthal DNA work with the genetic bottleneck theory? Wasn't there a bottleneck after this interbreeding took place>

Species are artifical divisions, nature isn't that strict. If species worked 100% of the time there would be no evolution.

Horses and donkeys can interbreed, tigers and leopards too, and there are more examples, sometimes the ofsprings can breed too.

Almost all rules in biology should have "except when not" added.

I think of it like this: there's not really any such thing as a "species" in nature. It's an abstraction we developed to make sense of the world. In reality, organisms exist on a huge continuum composed of individuals which are more or less genetically similar/related. Often there are huge "chunks" missing where lines died out or went their separate ways. We arbitrarily declare that such-and-such collection of organisms between this point and that point on the continuum are a distinct species. Sometimes, this species can interbreed with another and even have fertile offspring, but they just don't - even if they live in the same locale! Sometimes two species are even more genetically similar than the first example, but they can't interbreed at all. Sometimes two organisms could interbreed, but it's physically impossible for some reason (very small dogs and very large dogs) without some kind of assistance. Sometimes they can, but the offspring is not fertile. And as you get further and further away on the continuum, the less likely they can interbreed at all. In nature there's really all kinds of different scenarios like these and it doesn't necessarily make sense to demarcate the species-line where we do - but it was done that way for historical reasons or simply because that's the best we can do with our abstraction.

Inter-breeding success isn't always all-or-none. A lot of the time you'll get sterile or un-viable offspring when the species are on the brink of incompatibility. So the fact that it was successful some of the time (which is clear now) doesn't necessarily mean most offspring survived.

"There's a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger's syndrome"

Is there such a gene cluster? I guess that finding such a cluster will be an enormous discovery on itself.

Otherwise, the plot is pretty obvious. And reeks of New Age mythology.

Thank you for asking. No, there is no such gene cluster. This fictional story submitted for our discussion here on Hacker News (I don't like that it was submitted, really) is much more optimistic about the results of gene association studies than the actual study results warrant. So far, genome-wide association studies (GWASes) have proved only that almost any human behavioral trait of interest is influenced by dozens or even hundreds of genes of small effect, with unknown interactions among the genes, and most genes still not detectable with very large sample sizes, because statistical power of GWAS is weak when gene effect sizes are small, as they always are.

This would make a great science fiction piece, if elaborated on. The moralizing at the end, however, was a little heavy-handed.

The winners create the notion of writing history books.

Weird little speculative fiction piece.

From Wikipedia:

Although some populations of modern humans share some nuclear DNA with the extinct Neanderthals, the two species do not share any mitochondrial DNA,[32] which in primates is always maternally transmitted. This observation has prompted the hypothesis that whereas female humans interbreeding with male Neanderthals were able to generate fertile offspring, the progeny of female Neanderthals who mated with male humans were either rare, absent or sterile (in line with Haldane's rule).

While interbreeding is viewed as the most parsimonious interpretation of the genetic discoveries, the authors point out they cannot conclusively rule out an alternative scenario, in which the source population of non-African modern humans was already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa.

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