This is an incorrect or at least incomplete description. The common ancestors of all of us (commonly assumed to be h. Heidelbergensis) branched into the ancestors of both Neanderthals and Denisovans on one side, and our ancestors on the other. Then the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans branched a second time. Before that branch, there were no Neanderthals or Denisovans. One of the three "species" is not the offshoot of any of the other, but geographically separated cousins (with occasional mixing) evolving in slightly separate directions.
Joking, right? The sapiens males raped the neanderthal females. It's rape culture, unchanged to this day.
I recommend you read up a bit on genetics of Neanderthal and modern man, and especially research on mitochondrial DNA (which only pass through the maternal line) and Y-chromosome alleles (which only pass through the paternal line). In short, what you would expect to find if your WAG was correct would be extant Neanderthal mitochondrial lines, but little to no Y-chromosome contamination. That's not what we find.
Due to scarcity of uncontaminated Neanderthal DNA, most of it coming from a single cave in Croatia, our picture is far from good, but the scenario where human men raped Neanderthal girls and that being the reason for Neanderthal DNA in our genome is pretty much ruled out.
One of the species classifications now[*] is that Neanderthals were Homo Sapiens. In this system, we're h.s. Sapiens, and they were h.s. Neanderthalensis.
[*]: The whole species classification system is fictional and only intended to aid human minds that wants to pigeonhole everything and create boundaries where none exist. You were the same species as your parents, who were the same species as their parents, and so on, going back millions of generations. There is no point where you can say a parent was a different species from the offspring. This means that the whole species concept is fluid and open to interpretation. There is no "archehuman" from which you can define who is the same species and who isn't.
Nonsense. Immune system traits are not trade offs... what a brain dead idea.
TANSTAAFL applies to evolution too, and even more so than most other situations. We only have around 30,000 genes, which are largely multi-purpose and used in combination with other genes. Because the gene itself has multiple effects, any genetic mutation is also likely to have more than one effect. Given that any change is far more likely to be for the worse than for the better, this means that any good change is often linked with one or more bad changes too. For the mutation to survive and propagate, the good change has to outweigh the bad change in that particular environment.
The most commonly cited mutation that has multiple effects, both good and bad, is sickle cell anaemia, where an affected individual also has high resistance to malaria. That trade-off is why sickle cell anaemia has not been either bred out or become ubiquitous. There are others, like the HLA-B27 antigen which not only drives up the risk of conditions like Ankylosing Spondylitis, but also increases the resistance to influenza type A, and has a small but significant correlation with slower progression of HIV. At some point in the past, the tradeoffs must have been good for the population where this antigen is most prevalent.
Well, we all heard the dummy phrase "512 KB ought to be enough for anyone", but today is 2018 not 1985....
This is true, and compilers today should be much better at generating compact code, making the existing code smaller, allowing you to add extras within the same space.
0.6 MB just to boot + 0.5 MB for loading ROM modules + 0.9 MB for free memory....
That's just obnoxious. Did they change handcoded assembly and BCPL to C++ or something?
At any rate, that makes it a "no thanks". Good luck selling this.
About the only reason why people would want to run an Amiga these days is nostalgia. That means they don't want to change out hardware and run modern bloatware. Bug fixes and optimizations would be great, and even new feature apps as long as they can run on the old systems. But changing things so requirements also change, and justify it with it not being 1985 anymore? That's missing the point completely - when I run my Amiga, it's because I do miss the 1985-90 period. If I wanted modern apps and bloat, I have modern machines that do that much better.
As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
What is the level of understanding, though? Knowing the mechanics doesn't necessarily imply understanding the impact or risks.
Of course, I'm an old curmudgeon who still believe that commoditization of personal information is fundamentally wrong and that privacy rights need to be inalienable and untradeable. Much like selling yourself into indenture is illegal, selling and buying personal information needs strong regulation too, like in the EU and other European countries.
It's ironic that you ask for evidence of sexism in an article about a guy who was fired because he (apparently) exhibited sexism publicly. If that isn't evidence I'm not quite sure you understand the meaning of the term.
You're begging the question.
He may well be a sexist - I don't know, but you can't justify the claim using the claim itself as evidence.
He was not wrong in that "Physics was invented and built by men". By and large, this is undoubtedly true, with a few outliers. That observation in itself is valid science. What would have been wrong if he had said that this needs to continue.
Science and physics should be blind. Whether you're a man, woman, hermaphrodite, black, white, green or invisible is irrelevant for producing theorems and testable hypotheses, and moving science forward.
There is still sexual selection though. People like making babies with healthy looking partners.
True, there is sexual selection. But sexual selection isn't primarily about picking someone healthy looking, but picking someone likely to produce children that also are attractive as a partner. A peacock or bowerbird isn't ideal from a health perspective, but because females are likely to pick the most outrageous male, those are the genes that flourish. The only reason why peacocks don't have house sized tails is that they'd die before evolving that far.
In humans, that limitation of not being viable if going too far is quickly becoming a non-issue due to modern medical science.
And we see this happening. Women pick taller men. They may claim they don't and that their partners being tall is just a coincidence, but statistics (and dating site preferences) show that they really do. It's sexual selection. So men are becoming taller and taller, and it's not just due to nourishment. Wealthy and well-fed people a few hundred years ago were shorter than poor people are today. At a (fairly average) height of 182.5 cm, I'd stand out as a giant among, say, Vikings or Romans.
Women become taller too, but that is a by-product because many of the genes for height are not controlled by sex hormones. And not at the same rate as men are growing, because some of the growth genes are triggered by male hormones.
Many of the tall men today would not have done well a few centuries ago, because the cost of raising a tall child is higher, and as an adult, there's a higher resource consumption too, and quite a few medical problems that tend to come up. But these days, that's less of an issue, and women, by picking taller men, are really peahens, driving the human species into dimorphism. Men, on the other hand, are not nearly as picky - there's no genetic advantage to refusing a copulation. While there are preferences, men will take what is available, and pick from the B shelf or C shelf if the A shelf isn't available.
Anyhow, the end result is that yes, humans are changing, but not towards a species that is more robust, smart and with a better long term survival prospect as a species. We've replaced evolution with devolution and peacocking, and the gap between the sexes is widening.
Indeed. Our immune systems and overall health is so bad that a great many of us can't live without advanced medicine.
No, I did not get my flu shot in 2018. Or 2017. Because vaccines work and are reasonably safe. That's not a good thing, because we become reliant on vaccinations.
For evolution to work, we need higher death rates among children and young people. If everybody is selected for, there is no selection and no evolution. Influenza and other diseases are culling factors that can help keep the herd healthy, by picking off the less fit before they have a chance to reproduce. Exposure to diseases that most survive and a few don't seems like a better long term strategy for humanity than vaccinations against them. Inoculation allows weak immune systems to propagate through the gene pool, and makes future humans more likely to perish when the next superbug comes along, as it one day will.
Yes, I'd say people programming voice recognition thought it might be used by consumers to talk to a computer that would then take action.
In other words, you have not thought much about the implications either, assuming both that it must be the consumers who do the talking, and that it's a computer that takes action. That's two misplaced trusts in one sentence.
And that, I think, is the problem a nutshell - inventors, engineers and programmers tend to trust that their products won't be to serve other purposes. It's an old problem. Good old Montpelier likely didn't consider all the nasty things that could be dropped from a balloon, or how it could be used to hinder other types of flying machines that were only ideas and not reality. And Ray Tomlinson probably did not consider forgeries when the first e-mail was sent. If he thought about it at all, it was likely dismissed because why would anyone forge the account name or arpanet host, because then they wouldn't get a reply!
The devs usually know very well what their tech is worth, both in design and implementation.
Yes, but not always the consequences. Do you think those who wrote video image letter recognition algorithms considered how it was going to be used by law enforcement dragnets and advertisers alike? Do you think those who programmed voice recognition or IoT message queueing considered the implications of something like Alexa?
I really don't see anything there that would attract programmers or scientists or engineers. What's the actual incentive for the non-journalist side, so they can attract the resources? More than market rate for short-term assignments?
Sued is worse than criminal charges. If found guilty, and given that this happened in a public forum, he will be, the SEC has the potential to ban him from running a public company, just like they did to Elizabeth Holmes. In addition, they can fine him sufficiently high enough to force him to sell Tesla stock to meet the fine, if he doesn't then he goes to prison in contempt of court. The result is the SEC has the power to remove him from Tesla completely.
It wouldn't be the first or second time Musk's ousted from a company he started. Zip2 and Paypal both gave him a swift kick in the posterior. There might be Reasons.
The difference is that if the SEC suit succeeds, he can be barred him from holding a leadership position in any traded company.
I guess graphical adventure games are lost in the mysts of time.
Personally, I'd go a bit farther back. Infocom text adventures is what I remember with the most fondness. From before they became semi-graphical. Trinity and Leather Goddesses of Phobos were just awesome. These days, however, they are kind of pointless, because you can find solutions online. Which defeats the purpose of these games, which were meant to be difficult.
I agree fully that a smart watch is a dumb idea. A time telling wrist watch, on the other hand, is a clever idea. And a fitness device can be a good thing too.
But something that tells me I have a phone call or text message, or that the weather is sunny, or streams music or does tap payments which the phone does already, no, I have no need for that on my wrist.
So I wear a mechanical watch for easy telling of the time, and a fitness device on my other wrist, to monitor my heart rate and speed during workouts, and to tell me how long I've been running. Never would I want to combine the two, any more than I would want an all-in-one entertainment centre. Discrete components that do their job well is much better than jack-of-all-trades.
Since you take your phone with you anyhow, you don't really need the watch to track heart rate for you; you could use the phone and a strap, and get even more accurate results, both because the GPS in the phone is more accurate (it can latch on to more simultaneous satellites) and a chest strap is more accurate than optical wrist reading. A Polar H10 strap is around $70, and the battery life is about 400 hours. With a phone mount for your bike (unless you already have one), you won't miss the watch at all.
I love my fitness watch, but for long sessions where I either don't need GPS or carry my phone, a strap is far more dependable and accurate.
True, but for an initial cost of a thousand dollars plus a monthly fee of $30 or more, I can think of a lot of things that would increase survival expectancy far more for most people, like exercise gear and healthier food. And a "wellness alarm" (I believe that's the latest euphemism) around the neck would work just as well for young people as old, with far better battery life, but I don't see many buying one for themselves.
You kids and your fancy mainsprings and escapements in my day we used the sun and were happy about it.
I use my watch and the sun in combination as a compass - does that count?
(Point the small hand at the sun; North is halfway between it and the twelve o'clock position. If you want to be more exact, add or remove the amount of arc minutes you're distant from the meridian for your time zone, and thirty arc minutes if DST.)
Response to artr1: Yeah, but if what you're doing with your hands is so important, you don't NEED to know the time.
From this, I gather that you never ride a bike, or never walk to the bus/tube/train/plane with bags in both hands, wondering if you'll make it on time.
Imagine this then: You're eating wings and drinking beer, and wonder if you have time for another beer. Your fingers are too greasy to pick the phone out of your pocket (unless you're a slob who doesn't care), so wot do? Just glance at your wrist.
Being able to quickly tell the time with just a glance is effective. That's why wrist watches became disruptive technology, taking over for pocket watches. Using a phone to check the time is using it as a pocket watch, which is a step back.
You misunderstand, itÃ(TM)s not that my parents have any issues with mobility. ItÃ(TM)s that sometimes accidents happen, and if itÃ(TM)s really serious even a few minutes of delay in getting help can make a big difference.
Oh, I understood perfectly, but that is not prevention, it's reacting to something you didn't prevent. You used "an ounce of prevention..." as justification, which is what is faulty logic.
I don't doubt that there may be other justifications, but the fall detection is not preventative, it's reactive.
But just like I wear a seatbelt no reason not to layer on a bit more insurance against some problems.
A seatbelt doesn't prevent accidents, but unlike the Apple Watch Series 4, it can prevent injuries, which puts seatbelts in a completely different class. The Apple Watch 4 is much more like Navstar calling automatically in case your car crashes, which isn't preventative at all. Still good to have, but you can't use "an ounce of prevention..." as justification for it. "In emergencies, every second counts" would be a valid justification.
Slashdot Mirror
Denisovans branched off from Neanderthals
This is an incorrect or at least incomplete description.
The common ancestors of all of us (commonly assumed to be h. Heidelbergensis) branched into the ancestors of both Neanderthals and Denisovans on one side, and our ancestors on the other. Then the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans branched a second time. Before that branch, there were no Neanderthals or Denisovans.
One of the three "species" is not the offshoot of any of the other, but geographically separated cousins (with occasional mixing) evolving in slightly separate directions.
Joking, right? The sapiens males raped the neanderthal females. It's rape culture, unchanged to this day.
I recommend you read up a bit on genetics of Neanderthal and modern man, and especially research on mitochondrial DNA (which only pass through the maternal line) and Y-chromosome alleles (which only pass through the paternal line).
In short, what you would expect to find if your WAG was correct would be extant Neanderthal mitochondrial lines, but little to no Y-chromosome contamination. That's not what we find.
Due to scarcity of uncontaminated Neanderthal DNA, most of it coming from a single cave in Croatia, our picture is far from good, but the scenario where human men raped Neanderthal girls and that being the reason for Neanderthal DNA in our genome is pretty much ruled out.
One of the species classifications now[*] is that Neanderthals were Homo Sapiens.
In this system, we're h.s. Sapiens, and they were h.s. Neanderthalensis.
[*]: The whole species classification system is fictional and only intended to aid human minds that wants to pigeonhole everything and create boundaries where none exist. You were the same species as your parents, who were the same species as their parents, and so on, going back millions of generations. There is no point where you can say a parent was a different species from the offspring. This means that the whole species concept is fluid and open to interpretation. There is no "archehuman" from which you can define who is the same species and who isn't.
Nonsense. ... what a brain dead idea.
Immune system traits are not trade offs
TANSTAAFL applies to evolution too, and even more so than most other situations.
We only have around 30,000 genes, which are largely multi-purpose and used in combination with other genes.
Because the gene itself has multiple effects, any genetic mutation is also likely to have more than one effect. Given that any change is far more likely to be for the worse than for the better, this means that any good change is often linked with one or more bad changes too. For the mutation to survive and propagate, the good change has to outweigh the bad change in that particular environment.
The most commonly cited mutation that has multiple effects, both good and bad, is sickle cell anaemia, where an affected individual also has high resistance to malaria. That trade-off is why sickle cell anaemia has not been either bred out or become ubiquitous.
There are others, like the HLA-B27 antigen which not only drives up the risk of conditions like Ankylosing Spondylitis, but also increases the resistance to influenza type A, and has a small but significant correlation with slower progression of HIV.
At some point in the past, the tradeoffs must have been good for the population where this antigen is most prevalent.
Many East Asians also have Denisovan DNA, and Denisovans also had some Neanderthal DNA.
Well, we all heard the dummy phrase "512 KB ought to be enough for anyone", but today is 2018 not 1985. ...
This is true, and compilers today should be much better at generating compact code, making the existing code smaller, allowing you to add extras within the same space.
0.6 MB just to boot + 0.5 MB for loading ROM modules + 0.9 MB for free memory. ...
That's just obnoxious. Did they change handcoded assembly and BCPL to C++ or something?
At any rate, that makes it a "no thanks". Good luck selling this.
About the only reason why people would want to run an Amiga these days is nostalgia. That means they don't want to change out hardware and run modern bloatware. Bug fixes and optimizations would be great, and even new feature apps as long as they can run on the old systems. But changing things so requirements also change, and justify it with it not being 1985 anymore? That's missing the point completely - when I run my Amiga, it's because I do miss the 1985-90 period. If I wanted modern apps and bloat, I have modern machines that do that much better.
No support for A1000 (kickstart floppy) it seems.
Nor for the CDTV model.
It is no coincidence, then, that 85% of new novels are absolute shit.
That has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with Sturgeon's Law.
As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
What is the level of understanding, though? Knowing the mechanics doesn't necessarily imply understanding the impact or risks.
Of course, I'm an old curmudgeon who still believe that commoditization of personal information is fundamentally wrong and that privacy rights need to be inalienable and untradeable. Much like selling yourself into indenture is illegal, selling and buying personal information needs strong regulation too, like in the EU and other European countries.
Look how many female novelists in the old days used to post under male pseudonyms... and that was for something as harmless as a novel.
For that, the pendulum has swung back pretty radically. Near 80% of new novels are now written by women.
It's ironic that you ask for evidence of sexism in an article about a guy who was fired because he (apparently) exhibited sexism publicly. If that isn't evidence I'm not quite sure you understand the meaning of the term.
You're begging the question.
He may well be a sexist - I don't know, but you can't justify the claim using the claim itself as evidence.
He was not wrong in that "Physics was invented and built by men". By and large, this is undoubtedly true, with a few outliers. That observation in itself is valid science.
What would have been wrong if he had said that this needs to continue.
Science and physics should be blind. Whether you're a man, woman, hermaphrodite, black, white, green or invisible is irrelevant for producing theorems and testable hypotheses, and moving science forward.
There is still sexual selection though. People like making babies with healthy looking partners.
True, there is sexual selection. But sexual selection isn't primarily about picking someone healthy looking, but picking someone likely to produce children that also are attractive as a partner. A peacock or bowerbird isn't ideal from a health perspective, but because females are likely to pick the most outrageous male, those are the genes that flourish. The only reason why peacocks don't have house sized tails is that they'd die before evolving that far.
In humans, that limitation of not being viable if going too far is quickly becoming a non-issue due to modern medical science.
And we see this happening. Women pick taller men. They may claim they don't and that their partners being tall is just a coincidence, but statistics (and dating site preferences) show that they really do. It's sexual selection. So men are becoming taller and taller, and it's not just due to nourishment. Wealthy and well-fed people a few hundred years ago were shorter than poor people are today. At a (fairly average) height of 182.5 cm, I'd stand out as a giant among, say, Vikings or Romans.
Women become taller too, but that is a by-product because many of the genes for height are not controlled by sex hormones. And not at the same rate as men are growing, because some of the growth genes are triggered by male hormones.
Many of the tall men today would not have done well a few centuries ago, because the cost of raising a tall child is higher, and as an adult, there's a higher resource consumption too, and quite a few medical problems that tend to come up. But these days, that's less of an issue, and women, by picking taller men, are really peahens, driving the human species into dimorphism.
Men, on the other hand, are not nearly as picky - there's no genetic advantage to refusing a copulation. While there are preferences, men will take what is available, and pick from the B shelf or C shelf if the A shelf isn't available.
Anyhow, the end result is that yes, humans are changing, but not towards a species that is more robust, smart and with a better long term survival prospect as a species. We've replaced evolution with devolution and peacocking, and the gap between the sexes is widening.
Indeed. Our immune systems and overall health is so bad that a great many of us can't live without advanced medicine.
No, I did not get my flu shot in 2018. Or 2017. Because vaccines work and are reasonably safe. That's not a good thing, because we become reliant on vaccinations.
For evolution to work, we need higher death rates among children and young people. If everybody is selected for, there is no selection and no evolution.
Influenza and other diseases are culling factors that can help keep the herd healthy, by picking off the less fit before they have a chance to reproduce. Exposure to diseases that most survive and a few don't seems like a better long term strategy for humanity than vaccinations against them. Inoculation allows weak immune systems to propagate through the gene pool, and makes future humans more likely to perish when the next superbug comes along, as it one day will.
Yes, I'd say people programming voice recognition thought it might be used by consumers to talk to a computer that would then take action.
In other words, you have not thought much about the implications either, assuming both that it must be the consumers who do the talking, and that it's a computer that takes action. That's two misplaced trusts in one sentence.
And that, I think, is the problem a nutshell - inventors, engineers and programmers tend to trust that their products won't be to serve other purposes.
It's an old problem. Good old Montpelier likely didn't consider all the nasty things that could be dropped from a balloon, or how it could be used to hinder other types of flying machines that were only ideas and not reality.
And Ray Tomlinson probably did not consider forgeries when the first e-mail was sent. If he thought about it at all, it was likely dismissed because why would anyone forge the account name or arpanet host, because then they wouldn't get a reply!
The devs usually know very well what their tech is worth, both in design and implementation.
Yes, but not always the consequences. Do you think those who wrote video image letter recognition algorithms considered how it was going to be used by law enforcement dragnets and advertisers alike? Do you think those who programmed voice recognition or IoT message queueing considered the implications of something like Alexa?
I really don't see anything there that would attract programmers or scientists or engineers.
What's the actual incentive for the non-journalist side, so they can attract the resources? More than market rate for short-term assignments?
Sued is worse than criminal charges. If found guilty, and given that this happened in a public forum, he will be, the SEC has the potential to ban him from running a public company, just like they did to Elizabeth Holmes. In addition, they can fine him sufficiently high enough to force him to sell Tesla stock to meet the fine, if he doesn't then he goes to prison in contempt of court. The result is the SEC has the power to remove him from Tesla completely.
It wouldn't be the first or second time Musk's ousted from a company he started. Zip2 and Paypal both gave him a swift kick in the posterior. There might be Reasons.
The difference is that if the SEC suit succeeds, he can be barred him from holding a leadership position in any traded company.
I guess graphical adventure games are lost in the mysts of time.
Personally, I'd go a bit farther back. Infocom text adventures is what I remember with the most fondness. From before they became semi-graphical. Trinity and Leather Goddesses of Phobos were just awesome.
These days, however, they are kind of pointless, because you can find solutions online. Which defeats the purpose of these games, which were meant to be difficult.
I agree fully that a smart watch is a dumb idea.
A time telling wrist watch, on the other hand, is a clever idea.
And a fitness device can be a good thing too.
But something that tells me I have a phone call or text message, or that the weather is sunny, or streams music or does tap payments which the phone does already, no, I have no need for that on my wrist.
So I wear a mechanical watch for easy telling of the time, and a fitness device on my other wrist, to monitor my heart rate and speed during workouts, and to tell me how long I've been running. Never would I want to combine the two, any more than I would want an all-in-one entertainment centre. Discrete components that do their job well is much better than jack-of-all-trades.
Since you take your phone with you anyhow, you don't really need the watch to track heart rate for you; you could use the phone and a strap, and get even more accurate results, both because the GPS in the phone is more accurate (it can latch on to more simultaneous satellites) and a chest strap is more accurate than optical wrist reading. A Polar H10 strap is around $70, and the battery life is about 400 hours. With a phone mount for your bike (unless you already have one), you won't miss the watch at all.
I love my fitness watch, but for long sessions where I either don't need GPS or carry my phone, a strap is far more dependable and accurate.
True, but for an initial cost of a thousand dollars plus a monthly fee of $30 or more, I can think of a lot of things that would increase survival expectancy far more for most people, like exercise gear and healthier food.
And a "wellness alarm" (I believe that's the latest euphemism) around the neck would work just as well for young people as old, with far better battery life, but I don't see many buying one for themselves.
You kids and your fancy mainsprings and escapements in my day we used the sun and were happy about it.
I use my watch and the sun in combination as a compass - does that count?
(Point the small hand at the sun; North is halfway between it and the twelve o'clock position. If you want to be more exact, add or remove the amount of arc minutes you're distant from the meridian for your time zone, and thirty arc minutes if DST.)
Response to artr1: Yeah, but if what you're doing with your hands is so important, you don't NEED to know the time.
From this, I gather that you never ride a bike, or never walk to the bus/tube/train/plane with bags in both hands, wondering if you'll make it on time.
Imagine this then: You're eating wings and drinking beer, and wonder if you have time for another beer. Your fingers are too greasy to pick the phone out of your pocket (unless you're a slob who doesn't care), so wot do? Just glance at your wrist.
Being able to quickly tell the time with just a glance is effective. That's why wrist watches became disruptive technology, taking over for pocket watches. Using a phone to check the time is using it as a pocket watch, which is a step back.
You misunderstand, itÃ(TM)s not that my parents have any issues with mobility. ItÃ(TM)s that sometimes accidents happen, and if itÃ(TM)s really serious even a few minutes of delay in getting help can make a big difference.
Oh, I understood perfectly, but that is not prevention, it's reacting to something you didn't prevent. You used "an ounce of prevention ..." as justification, which is what is faulty logic.
I don't doubt that there may be other justifications, but the fall detection is not preventative, it's reactive.
But just like I wear a seatbelt no reason not to layer on a bit more insurance against some problems.
A seatbelt doesn't prevent accidents, but unlike the Apple Watch Series 4, it can prevent injuries, which puts seatbelts in a completely different class. The Apple Watch 4 is much more like Navstar calling automatically in case your car crashes, which isn't preventative at all. Still good to have, but you can't use "an ounce of prevention..." as justification for it.
"In emergencies, every second counts" would be a valid justification.