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Ancestry Surprises From New Genetics Analysis Method
An anonymous reader commends a recently published study involving a new way to analyze genetic variation in human populations (full article published in PLOS Genetics): "[S]cientists from Ireland, the UK and the US analysed 2,540 genetic markers in the DNA of almost 1,000 people from around the world whose genetic material had been collected by the Human Genome Diversity Project. The results include a number of surprises... the Yakut people of northern Siberia were found to have received a significant genetic contribution from the population of the Orkney Islands, which lie off the coast of Scotland... there must have been a period of gene flow from northern Europe to east Asia. The study also shed light on the peopling of the Americas, as the results suggest that the native populations of north and south America have different origins."
A lot of people didn't want to give up on the idea that the arctic bridge was the only way people got to the Americas, when it made much more sense that some people could've traveled the ocean to settle here.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Well, there's anthropological evidence that there were several migrations from Asia to the Americas, namely, two island-hopping sea routes and one over the land bridge in the north. This just sort of confirms this idea.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This story sparked my interest so I searched for a while on the internet to find some maps of what the world looked like back in the ages and where evidence of people has been found linked with DNA evidence of how people actually have moved.
I sadly came up with nothing... anyone who knows where to find anything like this?
This isn't to say Polynesians were the first to South America, as Easter Island was populated around 2000 years ago while S.A. was populated many thousands of more years before that. However, it seems likely that there might have been genetic mixing between Polynesians and South American coastal tribes.
...and fuck a lot when we get there.
The end of WWII supposedly brought an end to eugenics in Germany, but it was, even then, thriving in the English speaking world and continues to do so.
The weakness of our civilization has become a lack of any moral vigor. Pretty much every time there is protest on moral grounds it is trivialized by the media and the whole thing is treated like a sport between nay-sayers and scientists.
It's a weakness because it breeds distrust and fear in the community. if we don't come up with/maintain some kind of moral integrity in our scientific community, we will be overrun by groups who will impose an extreme opposite on us. And yeah, you're right, someone will come up with a logical but crazy conclusion and we'll have another wave of white-coat slaughter happening.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Extensive studies of mitochondrial DNA have pretty much confirmed migrations from east Asia to northwest America, then down south. There were, of course, more than one wave of such migrations. I doubt very much that the natives of north and south america "have different origins", because that would contradict well-established evidence that this is not so. However, they could certainly have a different mix of dna mutations showing various mixes from different areas.
Well, primitive tribes _were_ extremely aggressive, and did fight all the time.
On the other hand "contributed to the ancestry of the native North Americans" implies interbreeding, rather than genocide. I.e., they fucked their way across two continents.
It's not exactly surprising, though. A staple of tribal warfare, and it even lasted well into Iron Age in Greece for example, was raiding for another tribe's women, not just their food.
Life expectancy for women was rather disproportionately lower than for men in primitive societieties, and for men it wasn't as high as to reach andropause first. So eventually a lot of still able men were left with the prospect of either finding another woman somehow, or playing with Miss Rosy Palm for the next 5 to 10 years. Meanwhile the next tribe had plenty of women. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
Of course then the next tribe had an acute shortage of women, so the cycle of violence continued.
So I'm saying that interbreeding would have been inevitable. When the newly arrived East Asians won a raid, they got some women from the previous populations, when they lost one, the opposite would happen.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You'd be wrong there.
Depends on what period of history and what area you're talking about, actually.
There's evidence of Jewish presence in China as early as the 7th century. There were reports in the 9th century of Christian, Muslims, and Jews killed in a massacre in the 9th century. And Marco Polo reported encountering Jews in China in the 13th century. They lived mostly in Kaifeng, where a synagogue was built in the 11th century.
However, it wasn't until the 15th century that Jews in China had much recognition by the local government. In 1421, Jews were finally allowed to take the civil service test. The population in Kaifeng was discovered by European Christians in the 17th century, who used their version of the Torah to crosscheck it against the versions being used in Europe. They were identical.
So... yeah. Not many Jews, but there are signs dating back to the 7th century that Jews were present.
'Course, that's not nearly early enough to match up with Mormon scripture.
Yakut people of northern Siberia were found to have received a significant genetic contribution from the population of the Orkney Islands, which lie off the coast of Scotland.
My wife's pregnant with her first. We had a girl's name picked but were having hell trying to find a boy's name. She was having trouble so we had another ultrasound. We now KNOW it's a boy. I think this story has settled it. I'll be naming my first born Vladamir McHaggis. Being beaten up will build the boy's character.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yes, Eugenics has a bad rap because of the way it used to be done forcibly in Nazi Germany, the US and other places.
But what's wrong with it if it's done in an ethically responsible way? [Prospective] parents have access to genetic testing/counseling if there's known risks like hereditary diseases, and embryos can be tested and aborted if they have severe [genetic] defects. If a couple has significant genetic defects they can choose to adopt. That's eugenics, pure and simple. What's wrong with that?
And don't start with a slippery slope argument. It's up to legislation to set the proper limits and it's up to society to apply scientific results in the proper way. We are able to read the genome today, and it's getting cheaper and cheaper. Applied properly, this can be very beneficial. Applied badly, see Gattaca.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Hint: its what happens right after "tested and".
OK, so you don't agree with me about abortion. And you probably don't think that in 50 years people will think aborting one in three black children is 1920s eugenics, except with scaleability added.
But lets talk about legislation. See, I don't think saying "If there is a problem, fix it with a law" is an adequate response to "Law consistently fails to solve some problems, for structural reasons". Take the abortion regime in the United States, for example. Ignore the moral dimension for the rest of this post -- you don't have to agree that abortion is bad, you just have to make objective judgements of when it is legally available and when it is not. As a statement of fact, the United States has one of the most permissive abortion regimes in the Western world. Yeah, really.
Has the legal system in the United States hithertofore successfully discriminated between good reasons for abortions and bad reasons? No. Its set up so that it is essentially impossible to force that distinction into law. As a result, despite having a massive political movement dedicated to opposing abortion, and extraordinarily conservative attitudes about sex and abortion relative to peer nations such as many in Europe, the United States in actual practice prohibits far fewer abortions that peer nations in Europe do. (Really: take a look at the gestational limits in Europe. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6235557.stm That is 12 weeks in Belgium, Denmark, etc -- that limit would be and has been stricken as unconstitutionally restrictive in that noted liberal hotspot, Kansas.)
There's a bunch of reasons for that. One is the particularized development of the US abortion regime through the courts. Another is that the current American political consensus is somewhere between "I really do not want to hear about this, ever" and "Well, certainly SOME fraction of abortions are justified, for terrible circumstances which I would never, ever inquire about in polite company". A third is that the primary providers of abortion, who theoretically would end up as expert decisionmakers for legal compliance, are a political movement dedicated to keeping abortion restriction free. As a result, the questions which could theoretically ferret out "good" abortions from "bad" abortions, if one believed that such distinctions existed, can't be legislated and don't get asked.
The same will be true of eugenics.
Would America be socially willing to ask prospective eugenics parents "Excuse me, heard about your problem, so sorry. By the way, was that problem 'Your child is 78% likely to be missing a limb' or 'Your child is 83% likely to be left-handed'"? (Presumably that would be "bad" eugenics, right?) No, we won't be -- egads, that would be a ghastly thing to ask someone, particularly someone who just lost a child because he was headless. So nobody will be asked anything, just like nobody is required to substantiate why they want an abortion.
Would America be willing to impose a coercive state apparatus on eugenicists to ensure that some crazy 1920s-reject racist doesn't recommend 1/3 of black kids for termination? No. Heck, no need for a hypothetical here: we actually do terminate 1/3 of black kids, in the status quo. There is no national coercive apparatus monitoring abortion.
Eugenics will be worth billions upon billions of dollars, with a well-funded lobby, like reproductive medicine is and like abortion is. Children with birth defects, and children with "birth defects" like being left-handed or not predisposed to being athletic or possibly being gay, do not typically have much campaign cash to spend. Which group do you think is going to win in the US political system?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Eugenics has a bad rap because it's been throughly disproven as complete pseudoscience.
That's not eugenics... That's just genetic screening.
Eugenics is the process of sterilizing "lesser" peoples, such as the poor, and non-white, because of the (false) theory that their offspring were doomed to be similarly intellectually handicapped, regardless of the amount of education they received. This is basically the same (racist) argument long used to suppress negros, being applied instead to poor "white trash" classes of people.
On the (entirely separate) question of genetic screening, I would certainly discourage it. People's desires for their children, and culturally-influenced impression of what traits are "good" and "bad" are not necessarily correct. Some of the smartest people to ever have lived suffer from physical and mental defects, and it's currently impossible to know if their intelligence was in spite of, or perhaps because of that very handicap. If anything, I think modern history has proven that genetic diversity is a GOOD thing. Yet, people have proven to be irrational beings, by and large, and need to be protected from their own desire to establish a monoculture in selecting their offspring.
What happens when everyone on the planet is selecting their unborn children for intelligence, only to find out that our current established theory of what genetic traits lead to intelligence turn out to be wrong, and the world is filled with a generation of mentally handicapped children?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If it's science, it should ALWAYS be open for reinterpretation as more data is collected and as analysis techniques improve or are replaced with better procedures.
IMHO, an open mind should be, well, open.
Invenio via vel creo
Context. It's called context. When you're talking thousands of years ago, it gives context to the term.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Nice soundbite, but impractical.
Take one common cause of genetic problems - inbreeding.
Either you use force (making incest illegal) or you use force (tax money) to look after the resulting crop of web-footed 'tards.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
The movies they attach are not very good.
I have some Python source code for doing similar things with the case of European nations on http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/animated_mds_co.html (there is an animated GIF there).
A bit more discussion about my methodology is at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/nations_of_euro.html
I'm not trying to perpetuate a religious argument or anything, but I would just like to point out two or three things in response. First, map 34 in Figure 4 shows the Colombian people having some origin in the regions around Eastern Iran and Western India, not China. The Jewish nation was taken captive into Persia (modern Iran) circa 722 B.C. A couple of other contemporary invasions also sent descendants of Israel all over the old world. That is early enough to match Mormon scripture, though the migratory pattern doesn't match the scenario described in the book. Second, the Book of Mormon states the people described therein were of the tribe of Manasseh, not Judah. "Jew" only referred to their nationality, not their ethnicity. Third, most Jews in Israel today are descendants of the European Jews of the Diaspora rather than those present in the land of Palestine during the later Biblical periods.
You are forgetting gunpowder guns, steel armor, and horses. Those improved the chances significantly. The fact that at least in Central America the natives were a bunch of bickering and warring tribes helped as well. Try reading about how Cortes invaded Tenochtitlan. If I was getting my place raided and my people enslaved to provide for live sacrifices, I would have joined the Spanish too. Besides, they may have got smallpox, but we got gonorrhea.
Disease made all the difference. Europeans had gunpowder, gun, steel armor and horses over the Africans too, but Africa had it's own terrible diseases. The dominant population in Africa is still black. It's estimated that 80-95% of North American natives died from disease. For comparison, the black plague killed 30-50% of the population of Europe.
There is some suggestive evidence: the Fu Sang legends, South American folktales about "people from the sea", old stone anchors found off the Pacific coast, certain artistic motifs found in both Chinese and South American art. Joseph Campbell spends a few pages on this idea in one of the essays in Flight of the Wild Gander, but I'm too lazy to dig up my copy at the moment. I don't mean to suggest that it's a well-established mainstream theory, but IMHO there're enough hints to call it a sensible possibility.
Just because Columbus and Company got slavery and rapine on their minds the moment they arrived, doesn't mean previous visitors did.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood