Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.
Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.
The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.
Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) I remember him being huge into 'HBD' despite not being credentialed in any way beyond dropping out of his PhD program to get in on the 'consumer genomics' grift. Not a good look imo.
If you want a real overview of current population genetics check out Graham Coop's lectures, he's a prominent professor in the field and his teaching materials were inspirational for many people. Alas, he does not have a substack, neither does he make contrarian takes for a living (probably due to having a real job)
You're misrepresenting him, and it sounds like you have an ideological stake in this.
> Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.
He never claimed or hinted that Africans do not have Neanderthal DNA.
He says "non-African modern humans were discernibly more similar to the Neanderthal sample than Africans were", which is factually accurate, given that there's about a 1.5-2.5% gap in the amount of DNA that's shared, at least according to best current knowledge.
> The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong
No such thing is insinuated.
He makes it explicit that he's talking about the "total-replacement plank of the old out-of-Africa model", and he spends a while talking about how we're all descended from a single male and single female within Africa, it's only the case that certain populations outside of Africa mixed with other hominids and got up to 5-7% of their DNA from them (Neanderthals and Denisovans), which is far more than what Africans have.
There was a Eurasian introgression back into Africa from either the Arabian Peninsula or (less likely) across the Sahara into Chadic ethnic groups visible in Y-DNA haplogroups. Most likely that's the source of the 0.3%
That ancestry comes from later interactions with West Eurasians and is at trace levels compared to the substantial 2-3% in non-Africans. This does not change the point that non-Africans received input from Neanderthals just before expansion outwards.
>The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.
You've misread the article if you believe that. The point is that the total replacement model of out of Africa imagining a small band of hunter gatherers expanding out of an East Africa giving rise to all of humanity popular in the 2000s was proven wrong. The point was that single locus markers like mtDNA and Y-DNA can create biases that allowed for such a consensus that was changed by the whole genome of the Neanderthal. The ancient DNA we have now suggests a multi-regional model for modern human evolution within Africa.
The remainder of the post (other than the first nitpick) is non-substantive ideological claims that appears to be largely because Razib's politics lean conservative. Interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.
The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.
I just want to comment on this: opposing 'scientific racism' is an ideological claim now?! The dude has a pretty large record making claims about race and IQ and 'human biodiversity', works in an industry that's banking heavily on grifting money out of rich people with PGSes, and mainstream scientists debunking it are the ones being ideological? I feel like I'm dreaming here, imagine a Philip Morris lobbyist accusing you of being 'ideological' when you point out flaws in their 'actually cigarettes are pretty good for you' studies. (Wait, that actually happened)
> The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.
No, the trace levels of Neanderthal DNA in Africans is very unlikely to change by gathering more diverse range of cohorts. It is a matter of identifying major strands of ancestry within Africans (by admixture over thousands of years to now be in various African populations) which all are distinguished by a lack of Neanderthal DNA outside of West Eurasian admixture.
And for the last point, I did not condone scientific racism. To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.
Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.
>To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.
That's a needlessly stilted PR-like statement that basically hides the meat of the whole 'controversy': behavioral and IQ differences between populations and their genetic origins. Khan has a position, mainstream scientists another. Oftentimes fallacious arguments are invoked involving 'but look at domestic animal breeds' (not unlike your repeated admonition that 'humans are animals' which I will assume is just a boring triviality on your part for the sake of charity).
> Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.
There's no reason to not. Holocene expansion of farming/pastoral populations all over the world (including Africa) has largely homogenized human ancestry into identifiable distinct strands that is in varying proportions. Africa is indeed diverse genetically but it is not magic or anything. It most likely comes from the earlier mentioned multi-regional model within Africa through drift and admixture with highly drifted populations. And almost all of these populations outside of those of North Africa were outside of the Neanderthal range and we have archeological evidence to support this as well. There is no logical reason to believe in an (outside of the obvious example of historic West Eurasian admixture in the Horn/North Africa) African population with non-trace levels of Neanderthal ancestry. High levels of diversity in Africa does not imply a significantly large population with non-trace levels of neanderthal ancestry.
>Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.
Finding a subpopulation within Africa with more Neanderthal DNA would not overturn the the fact that African populations in general have less of this DNA than elsewhere.
"sub-Saharan Africans have some genetic differences from other clades" is not tantamount to scientific racism and you're doing yourself, them, genetics, and the scientific community a disservice. Neanderthal DNA is not magic fairy dust. The differences between Neanderthal and H. sapiens brain cell organelles in vitro are well known.
>Who aren’t Africans, but for the most part are of mixed background of Africans and Europeans in the last 500 years.
Again, broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with my skin color and facial features. I think you'll find it a hard sell to much of this country, within and without the scientific community, that black African-Americans are not... you know, African. To an extent. For different reasons, depending on who you ask, of course.
>Which is why it’s odd anyone is getting defensive about it.
Assuming that you're an American, the notion that you don't understand the defensiveness strains credulity. It validates quite a bit more in the eyes of some.
> Again, broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with my skin color and facial features. I think you'll find it a hard sell to much of this country, within and without the scientific community, that black African-Americans are not... you know, African.
The average Black American is almost 1/4 European descent due to mixing that occurred recently. My son has light brown hair—because his mom is Irish and Dutch. They’re irrelevant to a discussion of the genetics of Bangladeshis.
> Assuming that you're an American, the notion that you don't understand the defensiveness strains credulity. It validates quite a bit more in the eyes of some.
I don’t think we can confidently state that currently. Given that substantial amount of admixture persisted so many generations, it is quite possible that there has been at least some evolutionary advantage associated with it. The rest of your comment, however, is correct: we have no reason to believe that humans with bigger admixture derive huge value from it today, and no reason to be defensive about not having it.
Not everything he says is wrong just because he has lots of nutty beliefs more generally. Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything terribly controversial or wrong in the article.
It’s undeniable that racial egalitarianism is part and parcel of the ideological complex of the postwar world and its attendant ethical commitments also shape our scientific discourse. It might be correct in its claims, but anti-racism can absolutely form the basis for an ideology just like its opposite can.
The New Yorker published [a decent article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...) recently about a geneticist—not a “race scientist”—who has to contend with hysterical, hyperbolic backlash from progressive scholars for simply exploring the genetic components of human behavior. The fear is that her work will somehow rationalize racial and sexual inequalities, so it must be suppressed.
>“There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.” By the time he wrote again, several hours later, one of Harden’s few supporters among the fellows had changed the thread’s subject line from “new genetics paper” to “Seriously? Holocaust deniers?” Darity responded, “I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”
>Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.
Could also be your typical sour grapes over a dissenting view on the science. Academia is full of childishness like this (especially but not exclusively as you go further away from stuff that can be unambiguously measured and into the realm of the squishy soft sciences).
I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist. (Btw by "Scientific racism" I'm talking about the pseudoscience movement)
I'd suggest you take a look at some of his work yourself and make a judgement of how unscientific he really is:
Here's a paragraph for instance (trust me reading it in context doesn't make it any better)
> Also, I am not sure the blonde preference is as dominant among people from Asia as it is among Europeans, and Asians have not been as culturally dominated by Europeans as Amerindians have. Though certain European features were traditionally praised by Asians (fair skin), others have not been emulated (large noses, reputed body odor due to diet, hirsute body, etc.). In addition, though Japanese may comment on the nice figures that European women have (i.e., Europeans tend to exhibit more sexual dimorphism), they will also comment that many American women are too large and, as they would say in the States, "big-boned." In other words, even if blondeness is preferred by Eurasians, there are other attributes that work against them (their size in comparison to petite Asian women, the perception by many Asians that European women, and Europeans in general, age faster and don't keep their appearance up after the bloom of youth, etc.).
> I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist.
Given that Bangladesh has one of the lowest average IQs in the world, that suggests a strong motivation for Kahn not to make assertions lightly.
The paragraph you point to is blunt, but not “racist” and not inconsistent with what I’ve heard in “just among us Asians” conversations. (You’re very sheltered if you think it’s controversial to point out that East Asians think that Americans are fat and age quickly.)
> they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.
This comment is so full of intellectual dishonesty. Razib Khan's controversy is a result of his so called cancellation by Left-liberal media like NYT/Times which are decidedly against Hindu nationalism.
In fact, Razib Khan is the founder of Brown Pundits, which is arguably more center right and has more Hindutva supporters than left-liberals. I found Razib Khan and Omar Ali both to be a prudent and neutral observers of the developments in subcontinent and are more leaning towards Hindutva (in its original spirit)
> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good
If wikipedia had existed in the time of Copernicus, Plato, Giordano Bruno, Galileo or Darwin, I do not think they would be without their own large ‘controversies’ section ;)
He’s clearly not arguing that, but maybe you’re angry at him because some of his other points hit too close to home for you?
> These include many people who I know personally, who are diversity loving progressives, but who seem to fall into the trap of disaggregation. Since I don't love diversity and don't care about that issue I don't bring it up with them often. But it's what I call a revealed preference. Or, to give an amusing example, I said something offensive in one of my posts apparently a few years back, which prompted one outraged reader to leave a long shocked rant about my racism. The comment was trashed, and the reader banned. Nevertheless, I traced their Facebook account. The individual was a young white professional resident in San Francisco. And, their friends list was visible. I did a quick spot check, and estimated that ~90 percent of their San Francisco friends were white. In contrast, about ~50 percent of San Francisco's population is white.
> And one last thing: I am sure no one who reads VDARE has watched any pornography of late, but if anyone would care to, they would find that the only class of women that rivals busty blondes in disproportionate numbers in American pornography is East Asian females. Unlike brunette European females, Asian females don't look particularly impressive when blonded in my opinion, and the fact that few Asian females in these films bleach their hair like their European counterparts seems to confirm that most porn viewers share my impression. In other words, Asian females (whether it be for cultural or biological reasons) are in some cases competitive with blondes. (From personal experience in a region of the country where there are many Eurasians- due to the fact that the area is 95%+ white and the non-white marriage pool somewhat limited - I can attest that many Eurasian men prefer Asian females for the same reasons as some European men do).
It's a bit of a weird look to try to rehabilitate an argument that is literally being made under the VDARE masthead. We don't so much have to dissect the spirit in which that kind of writing is made.
Razib is a bit of an edge lord, but I think he gets an unfair amount of flak for challenging white American notions of race and culture. I haven’t read that website, but I assume @Culi brought forth his best evidence, and there’s just nothing damning in the quoted material. East Asians think white people are thick and age poorly? Men find blondes and Asian women especially attractive? This isn’t even the top half of controversial things my Taiwanese and Chinese friends would say.
Debating the bona fides of someone writing in VDARE (and, apparently, Taki's Mag, too!) is a little like debating the bona fides of someone who gives speeches before a White Citizen's Council. Wait, no, it's exactly like that. There's a level of edgelordery past which you forfeit the presumption of good faith.
I don't doubt your bona fides at all, but this person's good name is a bad hill to die on.
I think we should decline to enter into debates framed by racists, and, weirdly, maybe even more avoidant of debates framed by ironic edgelord racists who may well just be trying to get people to have the dumbest possible debates so they can point and laugh. The rule of goats is dispositive here.
The difference is that Kahn is a brown guy in an interracial marriage, and is presumptively not a “racist.” His main fault seems to be having insufficiently assimilated into white American sensitivities regarding race and culture—treating these discussions as third rails where the appearance of impropriety is as bad as actual impropriety. And that’s all I’ve seen in the aspersions directed at him—guilt by association and the appearance of impropriety. That’s unfortunate because he’s quite an insightful commentator on racial and culture issues in America.
I’m reminded of a comment you made the other day about different Asian groups not being equally advantaged in America, or something like that. That struck me as an extremely American framing—that’s not how the Chinese or Taiwanese immigrants I know would frame the issue of different outcomes between Asian groups!
If a brown guy in an interracial marriage started a company with David Duke and Richard Spencer and then gave "edgelordy" speeches about race, I wouldn't have to think too much about how "American" my framing is before writing them off. What I'm alerting you to is that writing in VDARE and Taki's Mag is approximately (and not hyperbolically) the same thing. People should write this guy off. He made his own decisions, and can now deal with their consequences. Or not. Either way, we're not losing much.
Whatever point you want to make here, I promise better people have made those points, more cogently.
As a total aside to all of this, and leaving out hyperbolic campus-culture and woke-ism stuff, the American framing on these issues is good, superior to the framing of most other cultures. I'm continually disappointed that American conservatives don't do a better job of reclaiming this issue from the left. It's a place where "American exceptionalism" actually holds somewhat true!
> If a brown guy in an interracial marriage started a company with David Duke and Richard Spencer and then gave "edgelordy" speeches about race, I wouldn't have to think too much about how "American" my framing is before writing them off.
Razib didn’t start a company with anyone. As far as I’m aware, he has no relationship with those magazines other than having published some articles. If David Duke’s newsletter publishes an article from someone about how Asians think white people are fat and age poorly, I’m not sure I’d jump to the conclusion that the author is of a piece with David Duke.
> People should write this guy off. He made his own decisions, and can now deal with their consequences. Or not. Either way, we're not losing much.
I disagree. Folks in the left align themselves with actual insurgents like Angela Davis. I’m not going to write them off based on that association.
> the American framing on these issues is good, superior to the framing of most other cultures. I'm continually disappointed that American conservatives don't do a better job of reclaiming this issue from the left. It's a place where "American exceptionalism" actually holds somewhat true!
I’m socialized into the American framing myself, but I can’t condone the white supremacy of universalizing these beliefs. If white people want to say “you brown people have wrong ideas about the nature of social disadvantage and our ideas are superior” let them make that case transparently.
> I don't think someone arguing that Africans shouldn't be classified as humans[0]
Having read this interesting reference, I can only conclude that you either didn't actually read it, or that you're intentionally trying to mislead your fellow HNer in the hopes they don't actually read it.
Scientific racist is a funny term. If a scientist shows that "race" X has a different distribution of traits than "race" Y, does that mean that they are a scientific racist? Doesn't racism also have to have an associated hatred, prejudice, or antagonism against a different race? Is it scientifically racist to say that blacks get a certain blood disease more frequently than whites?
To put it another way, if a scientist does a study and shows that the Ainu people of northern Japan are statistically taller than the Mbuti people of the Congo, does that mean the scientist is a "scientific heightist"? Wouldn't they need to amend their report with something like "...and therefore, Ainu people are better than Mbuti" or something like that?
No. A scientific racist is a racist (someone who thinks one race is inferior to another) who uses science to back up their claim. Not sure this person is one.
Anyway, David Reich argued in the NYT that there are genetic differences between populatons which do influence behaviour and mental traits. It is only a question if we want to find these (or leave the field to racists):
> since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.
Note, some people do have genetic conditions that affect their ability to take IQ tests - these include Down syndrome, phenylketonuria, even IBS if you’re giving them a test without bathroom breaks.
The point of knowing this is so you can treat it. You can raise the IQ of a phenylketonuric by not feeding them Diet Coke. It doesn’t seem like the HBD people would be happy seeing this, because they just want to prove someone is inherently superior and someone else isn’t.
"Thanks to Razib Khan, Sharon Browning, and Don Conrad for several useful discussions"
you can nitpick the piece but this is from an attack piece on me:
"MANY PROMINENT geneticists familiar with Khan’s work do take him seriously. “I don’t agree with everything that Razib writes, but I think that he does write about population genetics very clearly,” said Graham Coop, a population genetic"
so yes, put your faith in graham :-) you know his work so little you weren't aware i was going to easily pivot in this direction
You will find that 'some races just have the dumb SNPs, you know' is indeed a fringe and unserious position often posited by Pioneer Fund recipients (you know, the organization founded in the 30s for the 'purpose of race betterment' that literally inspired Hitler) to justify that we abandon all welfare and remedial programs toward the poorer demographics. If that's not scientific racism, I wonder what's your definition of it.
I didn't get the vibe that this particular article was rejecting OoA, but simply pointing out that the modern approach is OoA + "it's complicated".
The HBD stuff is troublesome and it's certainly worth regarding the author more critically, but I found the bones of what was linked fairly pedestrian and uncontroversial. I suspect that will not be true of the follow-up article about origin models within Africa though.
Edit: ah, answered in another comment. It was this part:
> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.
> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.
Just to add a little bit.
They discovered the 3D structure, but the structure (specifically, the base pairing) made it quite clear that the mechanism of inheritance was due to each complementary strand serving as a template for information copying.
For me, that was the stunning bit of the discovery.
> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.
From Wikipedia, it goes back to at least 1927:
... In 1927, Nikolai Koltsov proposed that inherited traits would be inherited via a "giant hereditary molecule" made up of "two mirror strands that would replicate in a semi-conservative fashion using each strand as a template".[186][187] In 1928, Frederick Griffith in his experiment discovered that traits of the "smooth" form of Pneumococcus could be transferred to the "rough" form of the same bacteria by mixing killed "smooth" bacteria with the live "rough" form.[188][189] This system provided the first clear suggestion that DNA carries genetic information.
Ah, he also believes in "Ashkenazi IQ" stuff. And is best friends with Greg Cochran who thinks homosexuality is caught by germs. Very instructive stuff
Also if they’re wrong (those being contrarian) who cares? Hypothesis and there’s should be able to defend themselves rationally against any attacks if they can’t then they are not studied well enough to have rigorously tested the hypothesis
At least imo, sure misinformation is one thing but if we’re talking about other scientists I assume, not some layman on facebook
Once the mud slinging stuff like "he's a scientific racist!" comes out (especially when it's clear the author would vehemently disagree with the label), you gotta somewhat adjust your Bayesian priors that the person slinging the mud isn't doing it because he ran out of rational arguments.
Yes, this is the usual precanned retort when faced with the fact that one's fringe viewpoint isn't in line with the mainstram science. It's not an argument though, in that it doesn't tilt the balance of probabilities (from a Bayesian point of view) away from the initial prior (i.e. the fringe is likely wrong and experts are likely right - note that I said likely, not 100%, like a good Bayesian). If anything, his elementary mistake about Crick, his failure to stay up to date with recent findings about African DNA, and motivated agenda with roots in scientific racism are tilting in the opposite direction.
I have no skin in the game; didn't even read the article. "You're just being contrarian so you're wrong" is a weak and lazy retort. I did appreciate that op provided a counter-perspective though; that's rare.
I knew nothing about the author of the text, and read it with interest, but the fact that he didn't mention Franklin was certainly a surprise and warning sign. To anyone who studied the issue, it's clear that Franklin should be credited at least equally with Crick&Watson.
It's quite possible not to be familiar with the issue, or only aware of it peripherally. "Crick & Watson" is the way it was taught to almost all Americans, correct or no.
Peer-review has its problems but I don't think the solution is 'we need more people carelessly injecting themselves and others with things with unknown effects'. I think the covid crisis aptly showed that the 'plucky outsider that defies a reactionary authority' archetype doesn't actually exist in real life. And biohacking itself is largely a grift.
> I think the covid crisis aptly showed that the 'plucky outsider that defies a reactionary authority' archetype doesn't actually exist in real life.
How so? I think if anything it shows the many flaws of the Nation-State model, and its inability to curtail the hygienic issues (wet markets) from rapid Industrialization in China in the best case scenario, and at worst that this is in fact a weaponized form of the COVID strain created by the CCP.
The CCP has been guilty of many crimes against Humanity, you need only look at Tibet, Xianjing, and Hong Kong to affirm that; moreover the CCP actively tried to spread this into Hong Kong when they were lying to the World about its ability to be transmitted between Humans and then forcing HK to keep its borders open to mainlanders to use a vectors despite HK medical professionals stance (who had to deal with SARS before this) and were dissapearing journalists and punishing physicians who spoke out in the Mainland.
I fail to see what you are seeing, its not like random injections led to this outcome, this is solely a result of malfeasance and corruption of the CCP, which in my view should see them be tried for Crimes Against Humanity.
> And biohacking itself is largely a grift.
I would take this statement more seriously if you didn't do it behind a throwaway so I can see what background you have to substantiate this, so I will just use this opportunity to elucidate some notable Biohackers: Gregor Mendel (the father of Modern Genetics) was a Biohacker with no formal education in Biology; Charles Darwin was the son of generational physicians in England, but detested school and completed a degree in what could best be described as 'general studies.' He dropped out of medical training but remained interested in Botany and Insects, this then turned into him developing his theory of Natural Selection when he took the trips to Galapagos, again Biohacking his way into a theory that quite honestly couldn't hold up without the work of the aforementioned biohacker: Gregor Mendel.
So, you see, Biohackers have come to define Biology and make some of the most notable breakthroughs in the Life Sciences and are hardly a 'grift' if you actually know what you're talking about. Robert Hooke, the man who would invent microscopy and Cell Theory, was a polymath and architect with a deep fascination of Natural Philosophy that too led him to Biohack his way into Scientific prominence.
In a more modern view of Biohackers: Josiah Zayner, a PhD and former NASA researcher at AIMS involved in the terraforming of Martian soil was one of the first to introduce the idea of fecal transplants from patient to patient to alter his gut biome, an notion that had previously been thought to be absurd and has now become mainstream. Not only did he do so successfully, but he was lauded for his efforts by the very same Media that subjected him to a great deal of scrutiny and ridicule, and is what he is best known for, not his PhD in Bio-physics nor his time at NASA. Also worth noting, he came from a rural part of Illinois where he was deeply fascinated with Nature and got see and interact with it from a very young age, and like most of us fell in love with it. He is honestly one of my favorite Humans ever.
He now runs the Odin, and runs a convention called Biohack the Planet.
I can tell you this, many Life Scientists I've known often go into a deep depression sometime around our junior year when we realize that what was sold to us in University was a total farce. I personally had a deep interest, bordeline obsession, with Vitamin D (particularly in inducing apoptosis via P53 in certain Cancer cell lines) and was constantly told by my professors that while it had merit it wouldn't warrant further research because it couldn't be monetized and that it would be in my interest to forget it entirely and move on to a career in Lab benchwork if I didn't want to continue my studies to the MS/PhD level.
Flash forward to today where we see a DIRECT CORRELATION of Vitamin D deficiencies and severe COVID symptoms that require hospitalization and often lead to death.
I was never after fame or recognition, and I knew money was not going to be the deciding factor in pursuing this as I just wanted to contribute and be a part of the study of Biology that I was so enamored of. But the fact that studies like these were never explored is why I detested my time in University the most after all the negative things that took place: that's what hurt the most as I know I will never be as driven as I was back then.
I've done some crazy things before and after, like walking into one of my lab practicals and midterm exams with pieces of glass in my arms as I replaced my tire on the side of the freeway on my way to school after work. I was literally picking some of it out when I was waiting in line to drop off my exam. I've done crazy things before and after, but I wish I still had that kind of drive in my 30s, especially because by then I had already accepted University had let me down and could still some how justify doing that anyway.
Brilliant, young minds get their wings clipped at a time when they are most able and inclined to want to radically change the World, only to be told that what awaits you is the dreary, pathetic World of 'publish or die' mantra of academia that ends up pushing papers that no one reads, much less ever re-creates [1] before you ever get close to being able to receive grants and a lab to do it.
I'd say the World needs Biohackers now more than ever, and I hope we can make that happen as I would absolutely love to be able to teach anyone who wants to listen about Plant, Food and Agriculture Science as I have had a presence in all of those fields despite my background as an Educated and Trained Cellular and Molecular Biologist.
As I said, in terms of the Sciences: Biologists are as punk as it gets and many of us are proud of our motley crew and adventurous history.
You have put a lot of thought in your post and I actually agree with most of it but I just want to interject about a few things:
-Darwin, Mendel etc. are seen as foundational because we as humans need plucky heroes in our narrative of history. But they are anything but. Natural selection did not spontaneously arise as an idea when Darwin put it into written words. Early farmers, herders and semi-nomadic gatherers knew all about artificial selection (which is just natural selection speeded up and driven by humans) and have been doing it for thousands of years, so the knowledge was definitely out there. There are also quite a few ancient texts conjecturing that "man came from apes and the more primitive lifeforms" etc. Of course this is not proper wording for a modern educated scientist, but again, the ideas were there. Only, Darwin was the first person with a name (and what's more, a Western and English name) to notice it, and so he became a legend. Anonymous accounts don't.
-Likewise, there's absolutely no way the Odin guy was the first to come up with the idea of fecal transplants. He's just the first public figure that you've heard of who did, because he's flashy and fancy and trendy and lives in a fancy and trendy place where all the fancy and trendy people congregate. Even excluding the studies suggesting it prior to his stunts, people knew for a while that farm kids eating soil (dirt) from time to time turned out to be suspiciously healthy for their gut.
So I maintain my previous assumption, that biohacking is largely a grift that attempts to repackage previously obtained knowledge from more obscure and less widely acknowledged (read: non-American, non-Western, etc.) sources and fashion it into a cool-looking product to swindle rich people out of their money.
The scientific world doesn't need biohackers, stunt-pullers and other grifters, it needs to acknowledge the humble and the lesser-known and the anonymous common knowledge.
We don't really know how feasible multithreading is, but the community suspects at least some tasks could be computed on different threads, such as e.g. the pathfinding stuff that one of the worst offenders when it comes to FPS.
DF is much more forgiving and easier than it used to be. Follow the wiki, setup DFHack for a lot of bugfixes and UI improvements and you're pretty much set. You don't even need Therapist anymore when you have the in-game labor manager. Yeah there's a bit of fiddling involved but I can't possibly believe this can be a problem for Hacker News readers.
He's hinted that he could release the sources if the Steam/Itch sales make enough money that he could stop worrying about the stability of his income in the long term. The worry was that if DF got open-sourced and forked, people would give more money to the forked, polished version as opposed to the one version Toady is working on, but he wouldn't mind if he had enough money in the long term.
> He's hinted that he could release the sources if the Steam/Itch sales make enough money that he could stop worrying about the stability of his income in the long term.
The saddest part of Tarn's decision to put the game on Steam is to make enough money to pay off medical bills for his brother.
You'd be surprised at how popular Stalin seems to be in Russia and Central Asia countries. Forgot the link but I read that 45% of Russians have a positive opinion of him. Yes he did all those atrocities but more importantly he brought national pride. After all, he did win WW2 and turned the country into a world superpower that rivaled with the US for decades. As time passes the memories of the atrocities fade and the national pride grows. Just like the French praise Napoleon who led hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths in ruinous wars, the British praise Churchill who orchestrated a famine that killed millions of Bengali people, Americans praise the slave-owning founding fathers, etc.
Mao Zedong, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Mohammed, Nelson Mandela, all responsible for varying amounts of human death and suffering - yet revered or worshiped today.
Mandela's many years in prison were the result of his leadership of a "terrorist" organization that killed thousands, mostly fellow blacks, frequently in horrific ways. You're right that this was not on the scale of Genghis Khan's crimes. Yasser Arafat is a better comparison.
Based on past experience in understanding other cultures as an outsider, i am pretty sure there is something else for disliking Mandela which can only be explained by a person from within who understands the different sections of the South Africa. Can someone shed light on this ? The above argument is very weak.
You'd be surprised at the number of "basic phenomena" that turned out to have cultural origins. Look up the language of the Piraha people, who famously does not contain any concept related to numbers or counting (because they have no use for it and introducing it would disrupt the trades they have), among many other things.
Also, cursorily reading a study that contradicts one's preconceptions and going like "nah, my gut feeling doesn't agree with it" is so quintessentially Hacker News ;-)
The cost of many false negatives is an overall worse quality of life for everyone, especially for targeted groups, and the enactment of a massive surveillance apparatus to enforce that QoL degradation.
Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.
Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.
The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.
Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) I remember him being huge into 'HBD' despite not being credentialed in any way beyond dropping out of his PhD program to get in on the 'consumer genomics' grift. Not a good look imo.
If you want a real overview of current population genetics check out Graham Coop's lectures, he's a prominent professor in the field and his teaching materials were inspirational for many people. Alas, he does not have a substack, neither does he make contrarian takes for a living (probably due to having a real job)