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Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Polytypic My Ass

CONTENT WARNING: RACISM

Looking up at the sunny sky; so shinny and blue - there's a butterfly!

It's gonna be a fantastic day~

Oh wait, no it's not, because of this shitty, racist paper by Michael A Woodley - someone who basically constantly whines about a supported 'dysgenic' - a talking point amount eugenicists saying that 'genetic fitness' is decreasing - decline in 'intelligence' and always tries to frequently justify scientific racism, such as with this paper. Entitled "Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications," it's published in the journal Medical Hypotheses, one distinctly known for publishing AIDS denialism and other ridiculous bits of pseudoscience you can find on its Wikipedia page.

What a great start we're off to!

The essential crux of the paper is trying to argue that, get this, there are human subspecies, or even different human species. I wish I was fucking joking, because good lord this is going to be god awful. But it's frequently cited by scientific racist types as evidence for their trash, and as far as I'm aware no comprehensive rebuttal to it exists yet, so someone's gotta clean up the trash.

Woodley starts off by claiming that the concept of 'race' is akin to subspecies by citing a paper by Alan R Templeton and an entire book by W.F. Bodmer and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. As far as I'm aware this isn't a book about taxonomic classifications and, since no pages are cited, I'll just talk about the Templeton paper.

Alan Templeton is a well known geneticist who argues against the existence of race - and this paper is pretty much no exception to it, as the whole point of it acknowledges there being very little human genetic diversity and there being no good rationale for race or subspecies as concepts. Templeton further goes on to point out many scientists actually do differentiate between the two, and that both concepts are vague and subject to much debate. This is something that I'll get into in a bit. For now, let's go through some more of his claims.

Next is a citation to a paper by Jeffry C. Long and Rick A. Skittles. This is one that I'm personally a fan of, for reasons that'll be detailed later on in my next post. For now, Woodley essentially paraphrases various proposed definitions of race detailed there and, while the paraphrases are accurate, I'll nonetheless incorporate the initial table of the definitions for a later usage, since it's inevitably going to be important for this shit.



With that said, Woodley then ironically presents a great argument against 'races' existing by saying,


"The table would seem to suggest that there is no universally agreed upon definition of race or subspecies and that the use of any particular race concept in the apportionment of human biological diversity is to a degree arbitrary. This situation has not been helped by inconsistent historical usage in the anthropological literature, where the term would frequently be used in the description of human populations at a variety of scales ranging from sub-continental to global"


Essentially, the very fact that so many definitions exist show that it's not based on any natural categories or observations that people are trying to develop classifications but rather just ad hoc explanations that aren't based on any actual scientific data to justify social norms. It's all entirely arbitrary and unscientific. But of course, Woodley believes in races - so let's see how he handles this.

"The problem with social constructivism is that it attempts to engage racial classification on a normative rather than a scientific level. Using the idea that scientific race concepts stem from a desire to apportion people into ‘inferior’ vs. ‘superior’ categories as grounds for claiming that they are wrong is simply an appeal to motive and therefore is not a logical counter to scientific theories of race, which must be assessed purely on their merits. The notion of arbitrariness in the definition of race is a significant and legitimate scientific issue in need of redress however."

So, according to Woodley, ideas that aren't based on scientific merit but rather social categories don't matter - motive is just entirely irrelevant towards assessing the validation and reason for ideas! What an annoying, centrist take this is. I see it espoused a lot, and frankly it's incredibly naive - as I said, it ignores how the ideas lack any justification and are only ad hoc nonsense formed to try to validate a socially formed idea that has racist roots. But also, I've never once seen this claim before as an argument against race per se alone, that because ideas have racist roots they're wrong. I wouldn't necessarily disagree for reasons said, but it's not really the main crux used against racial categories. It's frequently noted to point out the unscientific nature of definitions and arbitrariness of them (which, to Woodley's credit he does note is a "significant and legitimate scientific issue," but of course since he's motivated to find race in the first place rather than to realize that it isn't a valid taxonomical category he instead aims to continue research on it), but it's hardly the main point. For instance, the American Anthropological Assocation's Website's Position on Race argues against it primarily with a statement about humans having continuous and not discrete variation as well as, overall, minimal variation. While these points are disputed among scientific racist types (which I'll handle in later posts), they're empirical claims used against it alongside the points about arbitrariness. 

Woodley tries to justify that this is argued by citing two books - "Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race" by Charles Mills and "Race: The Reality of Human Difference" by Vincent M. Sarich and Frank Miele - the latter of which is an explicitly racialist book, while the former recognizes the history of racism behind the concept. Since no page is cited in either, and the latter is likely extremely biased in its view, I'd say it's fair to dismiss this claim here in light of AAA statements.

Woodley then next summarizes the controversy called "Lewontin's Fallacy," which, while I won't elaborate on here since it's a beast of it's own, you can read about it here if interested. I'll be covering it specifically at a later date. For now, I will say that he does accurately summarize the controversy, though of course supports the problematic conclusions of A.W. F. Edwards as is expected from any racialist type.

He uses this to try to form his own definition of 'race,' being "populations expressing a composite number of traits whose distributions intercorrelate in such a way so as to give rise to a particular, distinct correlative structure." It's not at all clear what he means by a 'composite number of traits' nor what he means by a 'distinct correlative structure,' and there's extreme vagueness to it that's only supported by his attempts to say it's consistent with all four given definitions up above. From his brief elaborations though, he's essentially just repeating the 'Essentialist' definition but also positing that the traits are 'intercorrelated,' which would necessarily have to be the case if they're linked by different ancestral environments and differ by populations. But this is a pretty useless definition, because what exactly constitutes as a trait? What's the criterion for differentiation on it? Even by standards of random genetic variation, this would even be consistent with very minor differences in allele frequencies producing very minor differences in a given phenotype, which includes between say towns or villages, of which can be ancestrally differentiated. It's ultimately a vague and useless definition - both the initial Essentialist one and Woodley's - because it's not clear what's considered a different trait, or what the boundary should be, or how many traits are needed, etc. Just about any two separate groups, taking this to its extreme, can be considered different racial groups, no matter how minor. It's just silly and biologically useless. The fact that Woodley's definition can be aligned with four very different definitions too is further emphasis of how vague it is - it can essentially be shaped and fit to any definition, as it's vague enough to suit just about any desires behind it rather than serving to be an accurate classification. It's little more than racist pseudoscience.

But anyway, all of this is pretty irrelevant for the rest of the paper, hilariously enough, since now we're getting to the bulk of the claims.

After boasting about his 'demonstrations' done prior, he aims to deal with intraspecies diversity and arbitrariness by first claiming that

"An old morphological method for determining the appropriateness of a subspecies classification is the 75% rule, which holds that if 75% of the members of a given population can be grouped by eye then they constitute a subspecies."

Every time I read this I burst out laughing, because it's just so fucking incorrect it's hilarious. Woodley is referring to this classic paper by Dean Amadon, which aims to describe a criteria for subspecies. Amadon describes two interpretations of what the 75% rule is -  the first, being that, 75% of a population is grouped on a specific, measurable trait in an extreme manner such that 75% of the population is differentiated from 75% of a separate population on the trait. As Amadon put it,

"Rand had 70 specimens of the population of canadensis and 15 specimens of osgoodi which he distributed among nine color categories (shown by Roman numerals) as indicated. The brownest birds are in class III; they become progressively grayer through class IX. Seventy-five per cent of a sample of 70 is 52.5. Beginning at the left, classes III-VII, indicated by the upper bracket, will include 75 per cent of this sample (classes I and II were set up for other populations not considered here). Similarly for osgoodi 11.2 specimens are 75 per cent of a sample of 15. Beginning at the right, 75 per cent of this sample fall in the last three classes (lower bracket). Since these 75 per cent segments of canadensis and osgoodi do not overlap, the brownest 75 per cent of canadensis are browner than the grayest 75 per cent of osgoodi, at least in these samples. Rand concluded that osgoodi is subspecifically distinct from canadensis. (He has since told me that he now would prefer a separation of about 90 per cent from 90 per cent.)"

Amadon is talking about a paper by his colleague A.L. Rand, where he determined the coloration of two subspecies of spruce grouse - a North American bird. With this method, Rand was able to determine that 75% of each population is distinct from one another without overlap in traits of coloration - although he'd rather 90% separation. This serves as an example of at least one interpretation - though Amadon notes that there's an important problem with this interpretation, being that using this alone as a method, we won't know how the other 25% of each population overlaps. Because of this, we can't end up knowing whether a given individual from a population goes into one or the other immediately.

This leads Amadon to point out a second method that he and other ornithologists he's talked to find preferable - differentiating 75% of one population from over 99% of another one on a given - or multiple combined - traits. He points out this can be mathematically shown to be equivalent to 97% of each population being differentiated from one another, This is likely what Woodley was referring to, but it's clear he blatantly misrepresented it, because this measure isn't designed to group people differently 'by eye,' but rather by any given trait(s) for taxonomic classification. It's also especially important to note that this very paper points out subspecies can often be 100% differentiated from one another on a trait, which show that this method proposed is pretty liberal, albeit arbitrary. While trying to apply it to humans suffers from issues of arbitrariness for deciding what traits may be measured, it's nonetheless misrepresented by Woodley, making some his next points moot - although we'll investigate them anyway.

It's next claimed there's controversy over the 75% rule by citing a paper by Smith, Chiszar, and Montanucci. I wasn't able to find the original, but I was able to find a repost on... a white nationalist website.

Fuck me.

If we're to assume it's accurate at all towards the source, there's no mention of controversy over the 75% rule - however this isn't to say controversy doesn't exist in regards to it. James Rising wrote a paper where he, albeit briefly, criticized the rule for being arbitrary (which, as I pointed out, while true, isn't necessarily too accurate since it's useful for identifying what's a common trend), and, more effectively, not being sufficient enough alone as a criteria, instead requiring them to be genetically independent with "distinct gene pools that predict variation in traits not originally considered." There's also more in depth discussion about what a subspecies concept needs among other important caveats that are noted within this paper, of course. Specifically, it's four points needed for a subspecies concept (I'll be paraphrasing a bit):

1. To be informative about the population's migratory history as well as their isolation from other populations.

2. To be informative of the early stages of speciation in these populations.

3. To be predictive about potential differences that may arise from the geographic location of the population

4. For it to be helpful for potential research, including into the evolution of the populations.

It should be obvious that the sole 75% rule criteria satisfies absolutely none of these requirements, so it's an inherently invalid measure. While we could stop here, let's go even further in going all out against him.

Next it's yet another pageless book citation - "Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 4. Variability Within and Among Natural Populations" by Sewall Wright. This book is among a series that's considered somewhat classic to population genetics, especially since, as will be seen in later posts, Sewall Wright is pretty crucial to the whole race debate. With that said, it's baselessly claimed that humans are 'accurately' grouped by race more than 75% of the time, which, might I add, is only begging the question. It's next claimed that, via a nonscientific visual overview, there's difficulty identifying chimpanzee subspecies. This claim is cited with a paper by Anne Stone and colleagues which doesn't at all test what was claimed. However, I assume it came from a small paragraph noting technical limitations that prevented the authors from assessing subspecies status. It's not at all clear what relevance this has for the claim since this was specifically a genomic analysis, and it likewise they never noted that an indirect - i.e. visual - measure of subspecies status was difficult or impossible.

Next of course is another pageless citation to the Sarich and Miele book that the morphological differences among human populations are either equivalent to or greater than that between different species. What a fucking claim.

Now, we're getting into the bulk of his argument, being a reference to different values of heterozygosity -  which is a measure of genetic variability, although more specifically it's two different alleles at a locus - for humans and different species. He points out that values for humans typically are higher than other animals with subspecies, and, while this is technically correct¹, is a demonstration of a really poor understanding of genetics. As detailed on pages 164 and 165 in the book Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, Woodley completely failed to understand what these measures mean, as he was essentially believing that it measured the variation between different populations - which is patently false. As the authors of RGR point out,

"The problem with this analysis is that the process of speciation (by which geographic races would develop) does not proceed by overall heterozygosity, but rather by the differences between the heterozygosity of the subpopulations from the total heterozygosity of the species: FST = (HT - HS) / HT, where this FST is the average for multiple loci; HT is the average of the expected heterozygosity in the total population over loci, and HS is the average expected heterozygosity over subpopulations. Thus, geographic races form subpopulations and begin to diverge from each other in allele frequencies. A species might have high heterozygosity, but if it is evenly distributed across its populations, then it isn't undergoing genetic change that will form geographical races that might eventually form new species."


Essentially, he applied a measure of an entire species' genetic variability, or even variability within certain populations, and assumed that measured between population variability - which isn't the case. It's entirely possible to have high genetic variability but also have no populations arise from it, as population heterogeneity is irrelevant for the differences between them. Instead, a measure of FST, or Fixation Index² is preferable. He likewise implies the 75% rule applies here, but it's clear, given prior analyses, it doesn't.

The next claim we've ought to address is his claim of different 'major races' existing, utilizing incredibly racist terms that I'd frankly rather not say here - of course, to cite this, the incredibly racist work called "The Origin of Races" by Charleton S. Coon. If only I were joking here.

He next claims that this is outdated (what an understatement - it was never dated to begin with, it's fucking pseudoscience), and that "molecular data" reveals five "continental populations (major clades or races)," being, Sub-Saharan African folk, Caucasian individuals, Northeast Asian people, Southeast Asian folk AND Pacific Islander individuals, as well as Native American individuals - I paraphrased to remove the clear racism there. It's pretty great how he lumps entirely heterogeneous ethnic groups and cultures together into large 'races,' isn't it? Isn't it just fine and dandy how it magically just so happens to be almost identical to that of which was arbitrarily formed centuries in the past to justify racism? What a coincidence.

To justify this, he cites, in order, "Evolutionary Relationships of Human Populations on a Global Scale," a paper Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, which only deals with the evolutionary history of ethnic groups and does not try to form any sort of homogeneous 'races,' a pageless citation of two books by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (the latter also being by Paolo Manozzi and Alberto Piazza), "Genes, Peoples, and Language" and "The History and Geography of Human Genes," and lastly a paper entitled "The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense" by Robin O. Andreasen, which only contains evolutionary trees (which help detail the geneaology of different ethnic groups) and not any sort of indication of 'major races.' So he just pulled that out of his ass, didn't he?

He then claims that his vague ass 'correlation structure' explanation is supported by the cladistic race concept defended by Andreasen, and that the problem of arbitrariness is resolved by this paper.

Except, it isn't.

While the initial papers defends a pretty shite concept I'll detail in a much later post, essentially Andreasen argues that 'races' can be best conceptualized as a geneaological concept to detail the ancestral history confined to various population groups - he points out that concepts of genetic variation and phenotypes are irrelevant for it, as the latter, while it can be a proxy for ancestry, is not actually required and often will be an inaccurate proxy. He also only refers to aspects of say skin color there and notes that how we measure geneaology is going to essentially be irrelevant for phenotypic traits that Woodley is implying we refer to. While technically his proposal may be coherent with it, it'd be little more than a burden towards the definition than anything and is ultimately an unnecessary given modern genetic methods. Further, it doesn't at all absolve the issue of arbitrariness, and Andreasen's proposal is in of itself arbitrary - where do we define what's an acceptable different population? Taken to it's extreme, different towns or even neighborhoods may be considered separate 'races!' I'll be giving more of a critique of this at a later date, though, as I said.

Now, with the subspecies concept debunked, let's delve into an even worse thing - a claim of different human species.

It's important to understand what's being argued here. As Woodley correctly identifies it, one common conception is the biological species concept - being members of populations that can interbreed. While there's valid issues with it, it's sufficiently used quite a bit.

The other concept Woodley refers to - and it's the one for the crux of the shitty attempt at a point - is the phylogenic species concept. Now, Woodley cites "Phylogenetic patterns and the evolutionary process: Method and theory in comparative biology" by Niles Eldredge and Joel Cracraft in essentially saying that

 "Species are the result of clear divergence within a group of organisms sharing an ancestor whose lineage remains intact with respect to other lineages throughout time and space"

While not only is this is an inaccurate paraphrase, it's incredibly misleading towards what's actually stated about phylogenic species and how it's defined. For one, this is what's referred to as a monophyletic concept - but even then it's a misunderstanding of what it entails. See, the overall phylogenic species concepts are based on phylogenic analysis, which represents a sort of hierarchic relationship of descent. The results of this are often represented in a phylogenic tree, an example of which from that Long and Skittles paper can be seen below in humans.




This is as far as Woodley would have you believe the concept goes. This concept is nearly identical towards the 'cladistic race' concept noted before, and suffers from the fact that just about any distinct populations, regardless of phenotypic and genetic similarity, will be separate species! I don't believe I need to point out how this is ridiculous.

Fortunately, there's much more to the monophyletic concept than was let on - but to fully understand it, we'll first need the actual quote from the book:

"A diagnosable cluster of individuals within which there is a parental pattern of ancestry and descent, beyond which there is not, and which exhibits a pattern of phylogenetic ancestry and descent among units of like kind." Quoted in (Wheeler, 1999)

What does this exactly mean, one might wonder? Fortunately, John Hawks, an anthropologist and popular paleoanthropology blogger explains it well for us on his post about species concepts. As he says,

"Key to the phylogenetic species concept is the idea that species must be "diagnosable." In other words, members of the species should share a combination of characteristics that other species lack."

Indeed, as noted by Jerrold I. Davis and Kevin C. Nixon in their 1992 paper, the phylogenic species concept requires all members of a species to have a given characteristic and none of the members of a separate one to have it - such as say, two arms in humans but none in cats for a bit of an elementary example to grasp the basic idea. As they point out, different populations within a species are entirely consistent with the idea that they're still a unified species provided they're defined by 'character(s),' or fixed traits in the population, that can be linked back to a common ancestor with said character(s). This spells a clear and obvious issue for Woodley, so it's clear why he omitted it - as far as I'm aware, there's no characteristic that universally is present in one human population that isn't present in another. Even folk taxonomic concepts such as skin color are, as Alan Templeton points out in a 2013 paper, incredibly variant both within and between populations and aren't clearly or reliably linked towards ancestry. From this margin it's clear that this concept fails.

Before continuing on and getting into some more problems with trying to apply human populations to the phylogenic species concept, I'd like to further point out that there are indeed other concepts - such as being defined by genetic clusters unique to that population that don't contain subgroups, being defined as exclusively monophyletic 'units,' and others detailed here and even more in its cited sources. While the exclusive monophyletic concept is proposed, it was only an example of potential  species concepts (and as a potential temporary placeholder concept called a 'metaspecies' while more research is done, though the criticisms still apply to it) in a paper by Kevin de Queiroz and Michael J Donoghue (which, incidentally, contains more concepts). So essentially, Woodley proposes a measure that isn't upheld by anyone and is completely inaccurate to the literature. In fact, his overview of species concepts so inaccurate that it neglects that there are more concepts of species beyond those listed - such as the cohesion concept, phenetic concept, and more that can be found here and in the other cited sources that I do recommend you check out if interested.

With that said, there's other objections to make with the very concept as a whole - such as Kevin Zelnoi pointing out that it ultimately results in a severe and potentially challenging inflation of the number of species or Amal Aldhebiani pointing out the difficulties in even constructing evolutionary pathways, but one of the biggest is that of gene flow - something that, as you'll see, is distinctly relevant to humans. As John Hawks points out, in populations like humans that are connected with a substantial degree of variation between populations such that we follow a clinal (more evidence in the 2013 Templeton paper above) - or gradual change, essentially a spectrum of variation - we won't be able to reliably identify populations from one another, and this can create problems for groups such as paleontologists who may note a lack of historical correspondence or even having to change their very understanding of evolution to accommodate it. Considering this important caveat, it's clear that it's hardly a good concept to even try to apply to humans in the first place.

Of course, Woodley does try to address this argument, which he claims by Norman I. Platnick and Quentin D. Wheeler in chapter 15 (A Defense of the Phylogenetic Species Concept) of "Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate" by Quentin Wheeler and Rudolf Meier. While no page was cited, I was able to find what I believe Woodley was referring to, though more on that in a minute. Woodley demonstrates his inability to science even still by claiming that the crux of this concern is interbreeding between established populations and not gene flow itself (to his credit, the source does claim this (although it actually claims that we can expect there to be no more 'human species' in due time rather than it being gone now, as disgusting as that is that it's even something believed)). However, even if he were right, how he tries to rebut it is laughable - first a citationless claim about a lack of admixture -  in spite of rising interracial marriage rates - and then a citation towards noted racial pseudoscientist J. Phillipe Rushton's main paper on his flawed 'genetic similarity theory' (contra to Wikipedia's claims, there's no support for it - I'll detail it at a later date) and Frank Salter's book (it's two citations, but Woodley just cites the original 2003 version and the republished 2005 version) that basically are a pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical view trying to justify white nationalism (I'll cover these at a later date as well. I'll likely cover both Rushton and Salter's "theories" since they're pretty similar, and the latter frequently cites the former). The main arguments in these are basically attempts to justify ethnic nationalism by saying it's 'natural' to associate with people of your 'racial group.' There's an abundance of criticisms you can find on the Wikipedia pages of them, and I'll do an in depth overview of both at a later date. For now though, it should be clear the type of 'quality' research to anticipate from them.

None of the citations at all handle the rate of racial admixture though - I should know, I've read through them.³

With that said and done, and after more pageless citations to Cavalli-Sforza claiming a quantity of different 'species' - an absurd number approaching 40 - and another pageless citation to the Sarich and Miele book about human differentiation, Woodley writes a rebuttal - and, mind you, he treats this source as a valid scientific work - to Richard D. Fuerle's incredibly, incredibly racist and psuedoscientific work that, of all things, tries to debunk the Out of Africa hypothesis, something widely accepted and only rejected by obscure racists. Beyond legitimatizing such a ridiculous source, his response isn't something I'll address - partly because it handles FST, something I'll talk about in a later post, and partly because I see no need to respond to it currently since no pages are cited in the initial book to try my hand at a better response than Woodley's, which frankly seems particularly sympathetic.

Finally we jump to the last bit of the paper - the discussion. After promoting himself for doing some sort of great scientific achievement (he hasn't), whining about the James Watson incident (how dare we not tolerate racist hogwash), and by claiming that we need race as a concept because there's different populations (which doesn't imply a need for taxonomic classifications).

Now, next we get to a couple more empirical claims - being that, survival of transplants in surgeries varies by race (this is evidenced by citing by a paper by Abiodun Omoloja, which indeed it does vary between black and white individuals) due to a lack of ethnic matching. This claim isn't backed up by any specific source Woodley gives, although this paper by Eric Spierings is cited as evidence. It's a study dealing with ethnic differences in the frequencies of "minor histocompatibility antigens" which affect whether a transplant will be compatible varying by racial group. The authors of it themselves note that the bulk of the variance is ultimately small and practically nonsignificant, and that much of the variation (though not all - some does vary geographically but they never seem to statistically assess these patterns) is random in them. Further they also note differential phenotypic expression in each ethnic group for the specific antigens. Nonetheless I'm skeptical of this paper due to the significant replicability issues in candidate gene studies, which in my eyes is due to an inadequate p value used - though that's, again, for another time, much like discussions of race and medicine is. All of this is beyond the scope of what this post is assessing.

Next is a citation to a small, two page paper by Constance Holden about supposed racial differences in responses to medical treatment. I can't actually view it, making this pretty irrelevant, but I should note why Woodley cites all this - as supposed evidence of substantial variation. Even if it all were true, that doesn't magically make race a valid taxonomical category. Bare in mind the point of these categories is essentially to help understand the evolutionary history of populations, and they're generally given to those that exhibit great genetic differentiation. This doesn't mean there isn't any - no geneticist would deny this. What's denied is what taxonomic significance or even relevance it actually has.

And finally we conclude our endeavor by witnessing Woodley cherry pick sources of people arguing against his views (by failing to actually rebut them in any form, might I add) in medical ethics - being a paper by Troy Duster and an actual survey (of a nonrepresentative sample of geneticists) by L.M. Hunt and M.S. Megyesi that, hilariously enough, goes against him as the geneticists still argue to use race, contrary to what he implies by people being sympathetic towards 'social constructivist' arguments - and in law - by citing a paper by Dorothy E Roberts and a separate one by Erik Lillquist and Charles A. Sullivan that both argue against using rate in legal affairs of medicine - to fearmonger among his racialist types about a mass, anti-scientific, PC Egalitarian SJW Cultural Marxist Post-Modernist agenda.

I may have paraphrased there at the last bit, just slightly. What can I say, shitposting is fun!
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1. He cites this page by John Goodrum - or it was, as evidenced by web archive (which does contain the original webpage he was likely referring to). Currently, however, it's, hilariously enough, a page arguing against the existence of race by a Bobby Crawford.

2. There's many problems with FST as a whole - I'd refer back to the Long and Skittles citation for an elaboration - but I'll save that for the next post, as it's irrelevant here since none of his arguments rely on FST.

3. Although granted, I only read most of the chapters in Salter's book. There were some I skipped over because they dealt with his things that I didn't care about - like his 'policy recommendations' that I've read through a debate he had with a reviewer over - or aspects that were handled in papers he wrote on this subject. 

58 comments:

  1. OK, so you have no argument why humans are not polytypic. Or maybe your argument was that subspecies are arbitrary or vague, and therefore don't exist.


    I'll just leave you with a quote from Charles Darwin:

    "But since he attained to the rank of manhood, he has diverged into distinct races, or as they may be more appropriately called sub-species. Some of these, for instance the Negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species."

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    1. "No argument," even though I pointed out in the post why there's no good reason to suspect humans as polytypic? It looks like you, anonymous individual, essentially just skimmed the whole thing to come to this sort of conclusion.

      But nonetheless if this doesn't satisfy you, anticipate more posts in the near future.

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  2. Wow...this post is really terrible. And I'm someone who's not totally opposed to skepticism about race!

    You say he pulled that one Andreasen 2004 citation out of his ass, but look at this from page 437 of Andreasen 2004: "At the most general level, the cladistic concept identifies five major races – namely, Africans, Caucasians (European and Non-European), NE Asians, SE Asians and Pacific Islanders (including New Guineans and Australians), and Native Americans." So clearly you aren't actually reading these articles like you pretend you do.

    I read the paper you're attacking. He doesn't only use heterozygosity. He talks about FST too. I also used googlebooks and looked at that Graves paper from Race and the Genetic Revolution. When I saw it was written by Graves I knew I was in for some dumb shit. If you want a smart race deconstructionist find someone else. Graves completely misrepresents Woodley. Woodley's table 4 is in there to show how crazy Fuerle's argument is. Graves misread the paper so badly he thinks Woodley is presenting everything in table 4 as good data! What was he thinking!? Also I don't have any idea how you think Woodley's response to Fuerle is sympathetic...I mean wtf are you reading? Basically you're complaining about the fact that he responded to it at all. You call this "legitimatizing." So aren't you "legitimatizing" Woodley by responding to him? Woodley is about as critical of Fuerle as you are of Woodley. The difference is that Woodley's paper is in an academic journal and has to have a neutral tone. What matters is he completely rejects Fuerle's argument.

    I searched the 75% rule and it looks like there are conflicting interpretations. But Woodley's doesn't seem weird compared to what's out there. Look at what these authors say about Ernst Mayr's rough "rule of thumb" definition of the 75% rule. Go to page 102 if it doesn't come up: https://books.google.com/books?id=B_07noCPc4kC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mammals+of+africa&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwipk-rkwbjaAhXPpFkKHae_CUgQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=rule%20of%20thumb&f=false. It's effectively the same as what Woodley said. The fact that one guy you cite doesn't like it doesn't change the fact that like the book says "most taxonomists" are fine with the 75% rule. Don't people like you usually freak out about attacking scientific consensuses? Btw this goes to show that definitions in biology can be pretty vague. You complain and complain about his definition of race being too vague, but basically all of them are. Look at one point from the subspecies definition you provided. "To be informative about the population's migratory history as well as their isolation from other populations." Well what's "informative"? What counts as "isolation"? Blah blah blah. We can all do this nitpicky dumb shit.

    One more thing. Woodley is just mentioning an implication of the phylogenetic species concept. He doesn't say that he approves of it. He definitely doesn't because he argues against the idea that human races are different species.

    I could go on but you seem kind of unhinged and it should already be clear to smart people reading that your post is awful.

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    1. Whew this is something else. You really don't know what you're talking about here, so this'll be fun to attack.

      First bit about the Andreasen paper, that's a deliberately taken out of context quote, so let's go in context for it.

      So yes, Andreasen points out that a 'general' race category is *compatible* with his conception of race. Keyword compatible. The concept itself doesn't rely on any ancestral groupings inherently as you describe, as Andreasen himself points out

      " According to the cladistic race concept, races are
      ancestor-descendant sequences of breeding populations that share a common
      origin. Rather than relying on sets of well-defined species, the branching structure used to define cladistic races would be constructed out of human ‘breeding populations’. The nodes in the tree would represent breeding populations and the branches would represent ‘the births of new breeding populations’. A ‘breeding population’ is a set of local populations that are
      reproductively connected to one another and is reasonably reproductively
      isolated from other such sets. For example, a gaggle of geese living in Carousel Farms would constitute a local population. When there is interbreeding among two or more local populations, this totality makes up a breeding population. A breeding population is ‘born’ when a local subpopulationb becomes separated from its parent population and is, for the most part, reproductively isolated from that population. Separation often results from the introduction of a geographic barrier, however, in the case of humans, it can also be due to socio-cultural factors (Kitcher 1999)."

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    2. "
      Essentially, it's not a concept that requires any specific organization - that's just a broad one that the author defines it can be generally reduced to, but it doesn't have to be nor requires it - and nowhere did I deny this to be the case. I openly state "While technically his proposal may be coherent with it." Further in support of the lack of validity of "classical race" for the cladistic concept though is when Andreasen says "of the term ‘race’ in everyday discourse. Moreover, although similarity is
      not used to define cladistic races, it is not irrelevant to the cladistic concept.
      Thus, it is hard to make the case that the cladistic concept deviates too far
      from CS. That being said, I continue to hold that the term ‘race’ is ambiguous (Andreasen 1998, 2000). As already noted, when contemporary race scholars deny the biological reality of race, they are arguing that the division of humans into three major races (blacks, whites, and Asians) is explanatorily and predictively weak – at least when it comes to explaining or predicting biologically based socially significant traits. I do not disagree with this claim; races in this sense are social constructs. Nonetheless, I maintain that the cladistic race concept provides a biologically objective definition of race."

      You next talk about Graves, even though he never wrote the book. Nonetheless, you're correct Graves misreads what Woodley said about FST - though admittedly I did too at first. However the criticisms still apply - Woodley never said it's 'bad data,' he only pointed out what the RaRG book did about the inapplicability of FST across species, and problems with using FST for gorilla taxonomy. This is a pretty minor point though and is irrelevant towards the main discussion.

      As for why I say Woodley treats Fuerle with academic integrity, it's because he implies that Fuerle's argument comes from simply another academic work, and that his argument is only flawed. It'd be akin to an astronomer criticizing the theory of another whilst still upholding their academic integrity. It gives him a legitimacy he doesn't deserve. Rather, he should've criticized him as a racist fuck as I'm doing to Woodley.

      As for the 75% rule, if you put that as an equivalence to what Woodley says, that's a blatant misreading. The quote is, ""Most taxonomists would probably follow the rule-of-thumb proposed by Mayr (1963): that is, 75% of individuals in a population should be distinguishable from all other members of the same species. Statistically, this is equivalent to a 90% non-overlap between two populations, and is especially useful for morphological comparisons." This is exactly equivalent to my reading of the initial paper about the 75% rule - that it's about a phenotypic characteristic being differentiated, as the authors note this with the 'morphological' point. A cherry picked third party representation though is irrelevant for the initial citation of the paper.

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    3. "The fact that one guy you cite doesn't like it doesn't change the fact that like the book says "most taxonomists" are fine with the 75% rule."

      So, an assertion in a book you found contradicts an author who cites examples of people having problems with it, and noting fundamental issues it has? Fair logic there.

      As for scientific consensus, I aim to tackle that in another post. I'm not going to make this post longer than it needs to be - there's no point in shoehorning in subjects not directly related to it.

      I openly admit that biology definitions are vague - see the section about 'species' concepts. That's a huge controversy I'm going to discuss later. But it's not 'nitpicky dumb shit.' If you can't define a taxonomic category properly, then it has very severe problems.

      "One more thing. Woodley is just mentioning an implication of the phylogenetic species concept. He doesn't say that he approves of it. He definitely doesn't because he argues against the idea that human races are different species."

      I'm strongly suspecting you didn't read the article, because he directly said that "The implication of this is that racial and sub-racial populations likely continue to remain distinct enough, despite increases in demographic mobility, to make them still potentially diagnosable as phylogenetic species." Further, I pointed out that there's two different concepts being talked about - Woodley supports the phylogenetic concept, and Fuerle supported the biological (which, mind you, it isn't even applicable for Fuerle's arguments) concept.

      "I could go on but you seem kind of unhinged and it should already be clear to smart people reading that your post is awful."

      Dunno about you, but any smart person reading your reply can tell you just skimmed what I said.

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    4. What a surprise. You've made a mess of everything and have failed to understand each point.

      "So yes, Andreasen points out that a 'general' race category is *compatible* with his conception of race. Keyword compatible. The concept itself doesn't rely on any ancestral groupings inherently as you describe, as Andreasen himself points out"

      This is your claim that I was responding to: "lastly a paper entitled 'The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense' by Robin O. Andreasenwhich only contains evolutionary trees (which help detail the geneaology of different ethnic groups) and not any sort of indication of 'major races.'"

      To emphasize, you said "not any sort of indication of 'major races.'" And yet Andreasen said this: "At the most general level, the cladistic concept identifies five major races – namely, Africans, Caucasians (European and Non-European), NE Asians, SE Asians and Pacific Islanders (including New Guineans and Australians), and Native Americans." Andreasen never disputes that these major races exist. You claim he never says anything about major races. Can you read at all? And how is "compatible" the key word? The word "compatible" doesn't appear anywhere in Andreasen's paper! How is your argument this bad?

      "You next talk about Graves, even though he never wrote the book."

      The book you cited is a collection of papers! Graves wrote the paper you quoted from!! What are you thinking!?

      "Woodley never said it's 'bad data,' he only pointed out what the RaRG book did about the inapplicability of FST across species, and problems with using FST for gorilla taxonomy. This is a pretty minor point though and is irrelevant towards the main discussion."

      He very clearly takes issue with the Fuerle data in table 4. I don't understand how you can possibly deny this. Reread the section.

      "As for why I say Woodley treats Fuerle with academic integrity, it's because he implies that Fuerle's argument comes from simply another academic work, and that his argument is only flawed."

      He completely rejects Fuerle's argument. You're trivializing what he does.

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    5. "Rather, he should've criticized him as a racist fuck as I'm doing to Woodley."

      Inappropriate for an academic journal. News flash: it isn't good to look like a political ideologue when you're a scientist!

      "As for the 75% rule, if you put that as an equivalence to what Woodley says, that's a blatant misreading."

      Don't want to take up space quoting everything that follows the above, but you don't address anything I said. Their definition of the 75% rule, which is clearly a rough rule of thumb, aligns completely with Woodley's. The fact that Woodley didn't go on about the 90% implication is irrelevant.

      "So, an assertion in a book you found contradicts an author who cites examples of people having problems with it, and noting fundamental issues it has? Fair logic there.

      As for scientific consensus, I aim to tackle that in another post. I'm not going to make this post longer than it needs to be - there's no point in shoehorning in subjects not directly related to it."

      It's a major reference work in biology, but you dismiss it as giving a mere "assertion." This is just ridiculous. You're looking for any disagreement with a consensus science view because it runs up against your political bullshit. So you found one guy who disagrees. Might as well cite a creationist next time and try to argue "see, humans didn't evolve at all!"

      "I openly admit that biology definitions are vague - see the section about 'species' concepts. That's a huge controversy I'm going to discuss later. But it's not 'nitpicky dumb shit.' If you can't define a taxonomic category properly, then it has very severe problems."

      You define as improper definition whatever creates problems for your politics, without showing why your preferred definitions are better than those you dislike. It's all politically motivated embarrassing crap.

      "I'm strongly suspecting you didn't read the article, because he directly said that 'The implication of this is that racial and sub-racial populations likely continue to remain distinct enough, despite increases in demographic mobility, to make them still potentially diagnosable as phylogenetic species.'"

      The problem is that your post runs together the ideas. You express your horror at the idea that there are different human species, without making clear that saying there are "species" in the phylogenetic sense is not absurd in the way that saying there are multiple human biological species is. That's why Woodley says this "the phylogenetic species concept does not recognize the validity of subspecies as a division, opting instead to label the most basic monophyletic unit as ‘species’" and this "No substantial evidence exists in favour of the idea that there are multiple human biological species however" both on page 199 but you don't quote either. Woodley clearly prefers the concept of subspecies over the strict phylogenetic species concept, so what I said is accurate. He uses the PSC to support the existence of "minor clades" while also recognizing subspecies or major races (page 199).

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    6. Also the Nei and Roychoudhury paper does identify "major population clusters" (page 930). For Woodley those are races. So Woodley doesn't miscite them. You amazingly get everything wrong!

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    7. Jesus how obsessive are you. I made this reply, and you respond in barely a few hours.

      The first claim you respond to is out of context; I do a complete overview of the concept in the next two paragraphs and explain how he pulled it out of his metaphorical ass. So keep on focusing on cherry picked quotes to try to win a shite little debate on a poor coment section.

      "And how is "compatible" the key word? The word "compatible" doesn't appear anywhere in Andreasen's paper! How is your argument this bad?"

      Yes, he never directly uses the word, but as I explained and elaborated with actual fucking quotations it's implied. Either you're a dunce or trying to misrepresent me deliberately.

      You're also correct that Graves wrote the chapter - I don't own the book so misread that bit.

      "He very clearly takes issue with the Fuerle data in table 4. I don't understand how you can possibly deny this. Reread the section."

      I did. I summarized his entire argument against Fuerle.

      "He completely rejects Fuerle's argument. You're trivializing what he does."

      No, not really. You making assertions isn't an argument mate.

      "Inappropriate for an academic journal. News flash: it isn't good to look like a political ideologue when you're a scientist!"

      Science is inherently politicized. Even accepting what you said, describing a racist book as racist is hardly something that ought to be a sin.

      "Don't want to take up space quoting everything that follows the above, but you don't address anything I said. Their definition of the 75% rule, which is clearly a rough rule of thumb, aligns completely with Woodley's. The fact that Woodley didn't go on about the 90% implication is irrelevant."

      That isn't at all what I said, amd you're just lying now, but alright.

      "It's a major reference work in biology, but you dismiss it as giving a mere "assertion." This is just ridiculous."

      It has no citation beyond to Mayr. It is an assertion. Likewise, it's not a 'major reference work in biology;' it's a chronicle of all African land mammals.

      "You're looking for any disagreement with a consensus science view because it runs up against your political bullshit."

      So a random assertion in a very specific book you found is a consensus, rather than a survey of scientists? Gotcha, thanks Anon.

      "So you found one guy who disagrees. "

      Yes. A scientist who highlights actual problems with the measure. You really must just be a dullard.

      "You define as improper definition whatever creates problems for your politics, without showing why your preferred definitions are better than those you dislike. It's all politically motivated embarrassing crap."

      This is how I know you aren't interested in actual discussion of the matters; you're just inclined to see any criticism against you as political and immediately dismiss it, bring up minor, irrelevant points or misrepresent.

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    8. "You express your horror at the idea that there are different human species, without making clear that saying there are "species" in the phylogenetic sense is not absurd in the way that saying there are multiple human biological species is. "

      Woodley himself differentiates the two concepts; but yet now you argue they're the same. Good lord.

      "Woodley clearly prefers the concept of subspecies over the strict phylogenetic species concept, so what I said is accurate."

      God you're just dumb.

      "Also the Nei and Roychoudhury paper does identify "major population clusters" (page 930). For Woodley those are races."

      Yes, I'm aware they identify 'clusters' in the sense of population groups at the end of a phylogenic tree. They didn't do a principal component analysis as Woodley implies.

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    9. "Jesus how obsessive are you. I made this reply, and you respond in barely a few hours."

      You're mad you've been called out on your bullshit.

      "The first claim you respond to is out of context; I do a complete overview of the concept in the next two paragraphs and explain how he pulled it out of his metaphorical ass. So keep on focusing on cherry picked quotes to try to win a shite little debate on a poor coment section."

      There's no "context" you give. All you say is that the concept of major races is racist! You're just trying to distract from the fact that you're totally wrong. You claimed the paper gives "no indication" of major races. It does. Just admit you're wrong.

      "
      Yes, he never directly uses the word, but as I explained and elaborated with actual fucking quotations it's implied. Either you're a dunce or trying to misrepresent me deliberately."

      You threw up more shit to distract. He accepts "major races." You denied he does. You're wrong. Pointing that out is the whole point of this part of my argument. Stop distracting.

      "No, not really. You making assertions isn't an argument mate."

      Guess you didn't see some of the quotes I put in. And guess you read like a child.

      "Science is inherently politicized. Even accepting what you said, describing a racist book as racist is hardly something that ought to be a sin."

      According to shitty philosophers. Most science journals expect a neutral tone, whatever dumb philosophy of science you subscribe to.

      "That isn't at all what I said, amd you're just lying now, but alright."

      Looking back now, what you really mess up is reading this "especially useful for morphological comparisons" as somehow implying your interpretation of the 75% rule. It doesn't. The key for you to grasp this should be in the word "especially." The Mammals of Africa summary of the 75% rule shows that Woodley's is completely legitimate. You invent a strict interpretation of a rough rule of thumb just to have a point. It's so insignificant for Woodley's argument that this shows you're desperate for points. He even emphasizes that the rule has some controversy surrounding it.

      "It has no citation beyond to Mayr. It is an assertion. Likewise, it's not a 'major reference work in biology;' it's a chronicle of all African land mammals."

      You can say whatever you want. It is an authoritative biological reference work. You want to have your stupid little criticism. You'll deny anything you don't want to be true even when it's from authoritative sources. At minimum its inclusion in that book shows Woodley's def is completely reasonable. But you won't even concede that. Politically motivated hack.

      "Yes. A scientist who highlights actual problems with the measure. You really must just be a dullard."

      Talk about cherry picking! How long until you start citing creationist scientists who also highlight so-called "actual problems"? And Woodley even allows for some disagreement on 75% rule. So who cares? You just are desperate for something to have a problem with.

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    10. "This is how I know you aren't interested in actual discussion of the matters; you're just inclined to see any criticism against you as political and immediately dismiss it, bring up minor, irrelevant points or misrepresent."

      Actually this is justified by everything I've already pointed out. You never show any problematic vagueness in Woodley's definition. You just assert it. This is what shitty race deconstructionists always do. They never realize that they're "proving too much" and would undermine tons of established concepts in biology if their political crap were consistently applied.

      "Woodley himself differentiates the two concepts; but yet now you argue they're the same. Good lord."

      I didn't argue they're the same at all!!! Can you fucking read you dolt!? Look what I said! "without making clear that saying there are 'species' in the phylogenetic sense is not absurd in the way that saying there are multiple human biological species is."

      "God you're just dumb."

      Wow isn't that horrible ableism by your lights? Sorry you're too slow to grasp what is said in the paper's discussion. But what I said is right. Woodley accepts subspecies and therefore does not accept the strict phylogenetic species concept. In his preferred taxonomy what the PSC calls "species" are "minor clades," but there are subspecies at a higher taxonomic level.

      "They didn't do a principal component analysis as Woodley implies."

      He implies nothing like that about that paper. He's just citing papers finding major genetic clusters/races you clown! He doesn't speak to their methodology other than noting use of "molecular data"!

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  3. btw I know you are aware Woodley talks about FST and not just heterozygosity. I talk about that in my comment to respond to Graves's paper, because he's clueless about what Woodley writes. He makes it out like Woodley doesn't know the difference between heterozygosity and FST when Woodley discusses both. Woodley never makes it out that heterozygosity is enough to establish race.

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    1. Graves didn't write that book, and nowhere does it claim that Woodley doesn't know the difference between the two. It points out how he actually admitted they were distinct, or at least implied it.

      Did you read my response or even the initial article? Heterogeneity is one of the main points he used.

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    2. Like I said in new posts above, Graves wrote the essay you cited from the book! The book has multiple authors because it's a set of papers from different people! How could you not know this!?

      "It points out how he actually admitted they were distinct, or at least implied it.

      Did you read my response or even the initial article? Heterogeneity is one of the main points he used."

      Graves criticizes Woodley for relying on heterozygosity and not FST. Woodley discusses both!!! Graves is clueless! Also to expand on my point above, Woodley disputes Fuerle's human FST data, though Fuerle got them from Salter. "Arguments based on the use of comparative genetic distances between biological species that are suggestive of the idea that the distances between major major racial groups within H. sapiens are greater than the distances recorded between certain other primate species; collapse on the basis that such comparisons have been made by incautiously comparing FST estimates derived for different gene-types with different potential selection histories" (page 199). Graves makes the same complaint against Woodley, not noticing Woodley made it against Fuerle! Graves is terrible at his job!

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    3. I should clarify. Woodley discusses FST before he gets to Fuerle, but Graves ignores that part. He makes it out like Woodley uses heterozygosity first because he doesn't understand FST and then uses Fuerle's bad FST data in a stupid way. Woodley cites realistic FST values early in paper, not Fuerle's idiotic ones, which Woodley criticizes as my quotes above show.

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    4. "Woodley discusses both!!! Graves is clueless!"

      You literally admit in the same paragraph a sentence later that he only discusses FST to dispute Fuerle.

      "Graves makes the same complaint against Woodley, not noticing Woodley made it against Fuerle! Graves is terrible at his job!"

      Not really, when it's a small mistake that doesn't detract from his point, as FST is frequently used in race discussions.

      As for the second paragraph, you yourself admit Woodley only uses heterogeneity. Woodley knows jack shit.

      By the way, it'd be nice if you would stop replying; I'm certainly going to after the third paragraph, considering you're clearly just interested in playing contrarian. Anyone reading this can see how much of a dullard you are, so I don't know what game you think you're really playing.

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    5. False. Woodley says this before he discusses Fuerle, and I mentioned this above where I said "Woodley discusses FST before he gets to Fuerle": "When measures of genetic distance are used such as Wright’s FST, which describes the fraction of the variation attributable to population subdivision, values indicative of great levels of genetic differentiation have been obtained for humans (0.156) based on the analysis of autosomal loci [39] (great levels of genetic differentiation correspond to values of between 0.15 and 0.25 [40])."

      Guess your reading comprehension is as shit as Graves's! You want me to stop replying because you don't like people pointing out that you're too dumb to talk about this stuff.

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  4. If you want to reject genetic similarity theory you have to reject Hamilton's rule. Good luck with that. it is funny how your post is mostly you saying you are going to address things later. Yeah, because you are talking out of your ass the whole time and do not have any good arguments. Just "racist, racist, wrong wrong wrong." Your idiot left lunatic worldview is dead.

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    1. Genetic similarity is based on a misreading of Hamilton's rule. It also violates his "identity by decent" criteria, among many other things. I know Salter makes the ridiculous claim that IBD was irrelevant, but he's incredibly wrong about that as Hamilton never threw the concept away like he claims.

      I'm going to address things later because they're not directly relevant to the post at hand. I'm currently working on one about FST, actually.

      Anyway if you wanna live in your little racist echo chamber and yell that I'm wrong and you're right, go on ahead, I can't stop you.

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    2. Since I've responded to your stuff above I might as well jump in here too! You're just clueless on this, as with everything else. Everyone who studies Hamilton's rule knows Hamilton dropped the common descent crap in 1971! It makes no sense at all that it should be a factor! Genetic relatedness is all that matters for inclusive fitness!! https://f1000research.com/articles/5-776/v1. Not surprising then that there's plenty of evidence for GST! https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/friends_are_genetically_similar

      You only see what you want to see and just want to scream everyone down as a racist. The genetic similarity comment didn't say anything racist at all! You're just a bully.

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    3. "Everyone who studies Hamilton's rule knows Hamilton dropped the common descent crap in 1971!"

      Yes, he did. Which is an incorrect move, for reasons detailed here. https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/rushton.html

      The article you link about genetic relatedness says this by citing Dawkins, who hilariously was the one to detail IBD's necessity here - http://www.richarddawkins.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/12-Misunderstandings.pdf. Anyway though that very article criticizes group selection as used for kin selection, which is another fun bit of irony.

      Second link is just evidence of something akin to say assortative mating; unless you posit an unrealistic greenbeard effect, it's not plausible.

      The comment was pretty clearly by a right winger type trying to misrepresent me as yelling about everyone being racist and not giving merit to ideas, which hilariously you're basically doing by being stupidly persistent in trying to debunk me by pointing out the most hilariously incorrect trite. As I said though, last I'll be responding because I don't see a point in debating someone who clearly won't listen.

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    4. It's "tripe" not "trite"! "Trite" is an adjective, idiot! More evidence you're stupid.

      You cite crap from 1989, failing to notice that everyone working on inclusive fitness now accepts common descent is irrelevant! Tooby and Cosmides were and possibly still are among the many who used to be ignorant of Hamilton's 1971 dropping of the common descent nonsense. But now everyone seriously working on Hamilton's rule knows that.

      Dawkins even says this in the piece you link! "The trouble here is that simple verbal reasoning, including thought experiments of the ‘green beard’ type, suggest that selection will in principle favour genes that help copies of themselves that are identical, not merely copies that are identical by descent." The authors you criticize for allegedly misusing Dawkins, because you're dumb, also include a reference on the greenbeard concept, completely consistent with what Dawkins is saying there! You think you know better than real scientists when you're a complete moron who literally can't understand simple written text!

      "Second link is just evidence of something akin to say assortative mating"

      A major prediction of GST is assortative sociality based on genetic similarity! How are you this dumb!?

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    5. Gee look at this "Expositors often add the qualification that the copy of the focal allele in the recipient must be identical by descent. However, the identity by descent qualification is irrelevant. Hamilton’s rule deals with the current distribution of gene frequencies and the current fitness costs and benefits; how they came to be what they are does not enter into the analysis. Moreover, most identical alleles are identical by descent since the probability of two unrelated but identical alleles being maintained in the population is small (McElreath and Boyd 2006). Finally, the recipient allele need not be identical, by descent or otherwise. It must only produce the same protein and RNA products, or otherwise have the same phenotypic effects as the focal allele. This shows that identity by descent is not important for Hamilton’s rule." http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/sociobiologyofthegenome.pdf

      you have been BTFO'd

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    6. I'll respond to Unknown here, less obnoxious than Anon.

      So you basically must've looked really hard to find a link that supports you huh? Because the criticisms given by Gintis in that paper have been responded to by the links I provided.

      First, I'll provide a bit of context for that paper since you enjoy to leave that out, because that one is actually one that's a lot more supportive of me than you believe. Essentially, the crux of that criticism is based on the flawed assumption that the degree to which two organisms are related, or genetically similar to one another - defined by gene frequency - is equivalent to IBD. This is, of course, a main point of Salter and Rushton - yet Gintis in the very study you link mathematically demonstrates that to be unfeasible!

      Of course the assumption that they're the same is false, and in fact Dawkins, Tooby, and Cosmides all note this. Dawkins says

      "A lazy way of qualifying it is to announce that we are only talking about rare genes; if I have a gene that is very rare in the population as a whole the probability that my child or my brother has it is about 50%. This is lazy because it evades the important fact that HAMILTON’s reasoning applies at all frequencies of the gene in question; it is an error (see Misunderstanding 6) to suppose that the theory only works for rare genes."

      And Tooby and Cosmides both say,

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    7. "The answer to the first question is straightforward: "genetic similarity" does not arise independently from relatedness in the real world, because of the size of the genome (e.g., Bachmann 1972), and the free recombination it displays when genotypes are compared between non-related (i.e. genetically distant) individuals. Although one might, as a thought experiment, imagine random assortment creating by chance individuals who are very similar genetically, given the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 freely recombining genes present in the human genome, the probability that a Pleistocene human during his lifetime would encounter a non-relative who was substantially more "genetically similar" than the local population average was negligible. Nor would it matter if he did. No plausible mechanism can assay genetic "similarity" across all loci in the genome: the most that can be imagined is a mechanism that monitors a restricted subset of the genotype, comparing a limited number of heritable phenotypic markers between individuals. Assuming such a mechanism detected "genetic similarity" in the sense of such shared markers between two non-relatives, this would still provide no basis for the evolution of altruism between them, because, in the absence of common ancestry, the existence of "genetic similarity" at some loci predicts nothing about the identity of alleles at other loci. Because tracking genetic markers provides no information relevant to whether an unlinked gene is present in a non-relative, an independently assorting gene cannot use such information to pursue an altruistic strategy towards non-relatives. Rushton's invocation of hypothesized linked genes and supergenes cannot save "genetic similarity theory" as an evolutionary principle, because sex and recombination interpose so many recombination events between individuals who are genetically distant enough to qualify as "non-relatives", that few or no linked genes are likely to remain (in fact, the dissociation of linked genes throughout the genome is probably the function of sex; see, e.g., Tooby 1982; Seger & Hamilton 1988).

      In contrast, kinship (common ancestry) does create what amounts to linkage -- probabilistic associations between alleles across loci. In the presence of common ancestry, sampling genetic similarity (i.e. recognizable heritable phenotypic markers) at distributed loci becomes a useful predictor of the presence or absence of genetic identity at other loci, and hence provides information on which to base a strategy for the regulation of altruistic acts. Because kinship creates these probabilistic associations across loci, it creates the circumstances in which polygenic adaptations regulating altruistic acts towards kin can evolve."

      The quote by Tooby and Cosmides, in fact, forms the response to the misinterpretation by Gintes, at least the first bit; "Hamilton’s rule deals with the current distribution of gene frequencies and the current fitness costs and benefits; how they came to be what they are does not enter into the analysis." As Tooby and Cosmides point out, while IBD might not enter into the direct equation, for how it genetically would function it absolutely is a crucial aspect for the two individuals to be biological relatives for the 'tradeoff,' so to speak, of one 'alturism gene' for a relative's can only work provided they function in an equivalent manner, which makes the point that Gintes has a bit irrelevant.

      This also serves as a response to the "Moreover, most identical alleles are identical by descent since the probability of two unrelated but identical alleles being maintained in the population is small" quotation (the citation he gives is an entire book without a page number).

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    8. It also responds to the final quotation mostly, being "Finally, the recipient allele need not be identical, by descent or otherwise. It must only produce the same protein and RNA products, or otherwise have the same phenotypic effects as the focal allele. This shows that identity by descent is not important for Hamilton’s rule." This one is essentially rejecting identity by descent by appealing to it! Tooby and Cosmides have pointed out why IBD is necessary, making this criticism incorrect since IBD, on the contrary, actually accounts for recombination.

      But anyway, the paper you linked is interesting, and ironically makes many great points against the line of reasoning behind Rushton's "Genetic Similarity Theory." I'll be sure to use it in my response to this later down the line.

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    9. I meant to respond to you here, but created a separate thread somehow. Anyway, my response in two comments is below.

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  5. If possible I would like to avoid any personal attacks to keep this as constructive as possible. This then will not devolve into the sort of hostile back and forth you had with Anon.

    The first thing to emphasize is that I did not have to "look really hard" for a supportive link. I am highly familiar with scholarship on group selection and Hamilton's rule. Here is more support for my claim that I've known about since long before posting here, from one of the most important figures doing research on Hamilton's rule, S.A. Frank, making largely the same point about identity by descent that Gintis makes in the piece I linked above: "Hamilton’s theory is ultimately about causal interpretation. The proper generalization arises from a clearer understanding of causal decomposition. With regard to the causal analysis of relatedness, Hamilton (1970, 1975) had already given up on the limited interpretation of the theory with regard to pedigree relations and classic notions of kinship. Instead, he realized that the theory could be extended to deal with genetic similarities no matter how those similarities arise. Causally, selection must be indifferent to the process that generates genetic similarity. Selection can only act on the current patterns of genetic variation and the current processes that influence fitness. Subsequent generalizations continued to refine the causal interpretation of selection. The theory naturally transformed from its initial emphasis on identity by descent and lineal kin relations to statistical associations of genotypes and then to broader aspects of correlated characters in social interactions."

    The second thing to emphasize is that in earlier posts, you very clearly rejected Hamilton's dropping of the identity by descent criterion. Here are some of the things you said, with important claims put in bold:

    "Genetic similarity is based on a misreading of Hamilton's rule. It also violates his "identity by decent" criteria, among many other things. I know Salter makes *the ridiculous claim that IBD was irrelevant*"

    "Yes, he did. *Which is an incorrect move*, for reasons detailed here." That was you responding to Anon pointing out that Hamilton dropped the identity by descent criterion.

    Gintis writes the following: "the identity by descent qualification is irrelevant." Here he is in agreement with Hamilton, Salter, and Rushton. By contrast, you insisted that Hamilton made a mistake in dropping the IBD qualification and asserted that Salter calling it "irrelevant" is "ridiculous" and "incredibly wrong."

    Despite your effort to rebut Gintis, you concede the crucial point that he and others, including Hamilton, have made where you say that "IBD might not enter into the direct equation." That's the whole point. What matters is genetic similarity, not the mechanism by which it arose. Salter, Rushton, Gintis etc. have never denied that kin are more genetically similar than non-kin, including ethnic kin, or that descent is the key mechanism by which genetic similarity arises. They deny only that descent matters over and above genetic similarity. They have the same reasons for rejecting T and C’s fixation on close common ancestry and instead realize genetic similarity is what ultimately matters.

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    1. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I do not think Rushton or Salter have ever argued that "genetic similarity" is "equivalent to IBD." That would be completely at odds with everything I know about their arguments on the topic we are discussing. For the longest time, Salter has argued that IBD is irrelevant by drawing on Hamilton's 1970s work. Earlier you acknowledged that Salter treats IBD as irrelevant, but now you say he treats IBD and genetic similarity as equivalent. Salter thinks genetic similarity is very relevant to his analyses, so what you are writing does not add up. Similarly, in his 2005 piece on genetic similarity theory, Rushton does not argue that IBD and genetic similarity are equivalent. He simply follows Hamilton's 70s work, like Salter, in rejecting IBD. What seems to have gone wrong here is your reading of the Tooby and Cosmides critique of Rushton. T and C take issue with Rushton dropping IBD and focusing on genetic similarity. They do not contend that Rushton equates IBD and genetic similarity. This is clear in the following from their reply to Rushton: “the question that Rushton addresses is the significance of "genetic similarity", measured across loci, as hypothetically distinguished from genetic relationships that arise due to common ancestry.”

      I wish I could respond to the following, but it makes no sense to me because it does not seem to address the point from Gintis to which it is directed: "This one is essentially rejecting identity by descent by appealing to it! Tooby and Cosmides have pointed out why IBD is necessary, making this criticism incorrect since IBD, on the contrary, actually accounts for recombination."

      "the citation he gives is an entire book without a page number". That is not a compelling rebuttal to that point from Gintis. But I'm unsure why you even want to rebut this "Moreover, most identical alleles are identical by descent since the probability of two unrelated but identical alleles being maintained in the population is small."

      There are many problems with the Tooby and Cosmides piece. First, it is ignorant of Hamilton's 70s papers. Second, it depends on an unrealistic model of the so-called environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and like a lot of evo psych work it assumes significant human evolution stopped in the Pleistocene, an idea that recent research has completely disconfirmed: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753. What is very strange is that in saying genetic similarity "does not arise independently from relatedness in the real world", Tooby and Cosmides are much closer to erroneously equating IBD and genetic similarity than anything I can find in Salter or Rushton, but you level this charge at the latter and not former. I'm not saying Tooby and Cosmides actually conflate the two, just that they come closer to doing so than Salter or Rushton, as far as I can tell. In any case, genetic similarity *does* arise independently from what Tooby and Cosmides call “common ancestry” and is significant, contra Tooby and Cosmides, otherwise GCTA GREML heritability estimation would be impossible. See the following: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004269.

      I do not have much motivation to spend hours defending everything in Hamilton's 70s papers. All I can say is that people working on Hamilton's rule seem to overwhelmingly accept Hamilton's dropping of IBD. Tooby and Cosmides apparently believe that there is no way altruism toward ethnic kin could have evolved. But Henry Harpending, among others, has shown in many papers that this is false, and mathematically demonstrated in 1979 that altruism toward ethnic kin can be adaptive, supporting Hamilton's 70s work. I also think you have misinterpreted the stuff from Gintis. Gintis takes his work on inclusive fitness theory to be compatible with his many explicit defenses of group selection models, the same sort of models that Rushton and Harpending have defended.

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    2. So first, it's pretty clear to me your 'familiarity' comes from Salter and other far right jargon about Hamilton's rule, which is pretty evident by later citations of yours being the same recycled studies in their circles.

      The first quote you link by SA Frank is one I was unable to find looking it up, but for the sake of the discussion I'll accept it. I myself still contend that they misread Hamilton; of course an analysis of this isn't exactly going to suffice for comments so I'll save it for a later post.

      As for my inconsistencies, you're right; I ended up claiming later on that he did drop IBD later on mistakenly. I had misread the point of Anon at the time, so thanks for pointing that out; hopefully it'll be noticed by anyone reading through this.

      Your last paragraph is really fucking ill conceived. You're essentially arguing that the mechanism by which genes function is irrelevant towards how they may help to influence a behavior - in this case being kin altruism. I never contended IBD was relevant for the initial equation, nor did Dawkins, Toby, or Cosmides. What's contended is its theoretical significance for interpretation.

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    3. It's clear that, like most of your sort, you don't know a lick of what you're talking about here; Gintis himself says "The argument to this point has nothing to do with genealogy, and hence says nothing about altruism among family members." He defines social structure as "the probability that the donor will interact with the recipient type." He spends the entirety of section 3.1 demonstrating that the relatedness coefficient (which is a measure of 'genetic similarity' - see http://ess.nbb.cornell.edu/relatedness.html) to be unrelated. So no, he doesn't realize 'genetic similarity' matters, because that's something he explicitly demonstrates to the contrary.

      As for your next point, I admitted I worded that paragraph poorly - I had meant to say that Rushton and Salter both content that Hamilton's rule is contingent on how related two individuals in the same population are.

      In regards to the next point, I really don't see how you don't see it but I'll try to explain it for you then. Basically, genes only affect a phenotype via a complex coaction with RNA, protein, etc - Gintis admits that genes, along with these aspects, must at least interact to produce a phenotype sufficient to account for Hamilton's rule. This of course is what the IBD argument by Tooby and Cosmides posits - that IBD functions in a complex manner independent of inheritance.

      I explicitly don't reject the point about most alleles being IBD based solely on the lack of an adequate citation (I only point that out because I intended to fact check it) - rather, I use Tooby and Cosmides' response instead.

      Your attempt to rebut Tooby and Cosmides is laughable. For one, they hardly use Hamilton as a citation in the first place, beyond as an introduction to kin altriusm and, ironically, cite a *1988* paper coauthored by him about sexual selection. Unless you want to claim that Hamilton managed to rebut them in his prior papers in advanced, you give no reason to reject it with this response. As for the second, you demonstrate you either didn't read them or don't know what they're talking about, because nowhere do the reference the (very flawed, but for different reasons than you list) EEA. As for the claim about heritability in GCTA studies, you further demonstrate this because all humans are related - so of course they'd be able to use meaures of IBD to account for genetic variation for a trait. But the veryIt's clear that, like most of your sort, you don't know a lick of what you're talking about here; Gintis himself says "The argument to this point has nothing to do with genealogy, and hence says nothing about altruism among family members." He defines social structure as "the probability that the donor will interact with the recipient type." He spends the entirety of section 3.1 demonstrating that the relatedness coefficient (which is a measure of 'genetic similarity' - see http://ess.nbb.cornell.edu/relatedness.html) to be unrelated. So no, he doesn't realize 'genetic similarity' matters, because that's something he explicitly demonstrates to the contrary.

      As for your next point, I admitted I worded that paragraph poorly - I had meant to say that Rushton and Salter both content that Hamilton's rule is contingent on how related two individuals in the same population are.

      In regards to the next point, I really don't see how you don't see it but I'll try to explain it for you then. Basically, genes only affect a phenotype via a complex coaction with RNA, protein, etc - Gintis admits that genes, along with these aspects, must at least interact to produce a phenotype sufficient to account for Hamilton's rule. This of course is what the IBD argument by Tooby and Cosmides posits - that IBD functions in a complex manner independent of inheritance.

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    4. I explicitly don't reject the point about most alleles being IBD based solely on the lack of an adequate citation (I only point that out because I intended to fact check it) - rather, I use Tooby and Cosmides' response instead.

      Your attempt to rebut Tooby and Cosmides is laughable. For one, they hardly use Hamilton as a citation in the first place, beyond as an introduction to kin altriusm and, ironically, cite a *1988* paper coauthored by him about sexual selection. Unless you want to claim that Hamilton managed to rebut them in his prior papers in advanced, you give no reason to reject it with this response. As for the second, you demonstrate you either didn't read them or don't know what they're talking about, because nowhere do the reference the (very flawed, but for different reasons than you list) EEA. As for the claim about heritability in GCTA studies, you further demonstrate this because all humans are related - so of course they'd be able to use meaures of IBD to account for genetic variation for a trait. But the very study you link even points out this isn't necessary, as they can use genome-wide markers or IBS for their purposes as well, neither of which rely on ancestry.

      A quick note before I get onto your last paragraph about Harpending, that Hawks study is seriously flawed in so many ways. It tells us nothing useful; genes aren't causal agents in of themselves and require knowledge of the processes under which they function to influence a phenotype and not just the gene itself, as well as the fact that nonfunctional regions of the genome can be under selection too (see here for both claims' evidence - http://www.pnas.org/content/111/17/6131). Not to mention we have no knowledge of the potential phenotypes it affects.

      As for Harpending's little analysis, while I can't access the initial 1979 paper, I can access this repost of it by Salter in his shite overview (http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/articles/Salter,%20Frank.%20%22Misunderstandings%20of%20Kin%20Selection%20%20and%20the%20Delay%20in%20Quantifying%20Ethnic%20Kinship.%22%20Mankind%20Quarterly%20XLVIII,%20no.%203%20(2008).pdf). It's a huge mess, his equation, and to start with the first error, is that it looks like he gravely doesn't understand how to assess genetic variation within a population, as the correct equation - what he should've used - is the Hardy-Weinberg equation (https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/hardy-weinberg-equation-299). He then, without any actual theoretical basis, partitons the variation in half - something that, for measures like FST, we can't do because they're impossible to disentangle. These two both invalidate the rest of his equations, which lead to the completely fucking ridiculous conclusion of generalizing variation in a single gene to the whole population, and, along the way, having no sense of arithmetic - I mean he basically just shifts the equations to give him the results he wants, since he blatantly says that pq(1-1 / 4) is equvalent to pq(3/4)! He also seems to imply that couples have an EQUIVALENT KINSHIP TO FULL SIBLINGS by saying that 0.25 of the genetic variance is among them - in other words that couples would share 25% of their genes! And his final claim is a complete non sequitur, as he somehow generalizes within population variance to between population variance as a 'loss of diversity!' It's a completely ridiculous and bad equation with little science behind it.

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    5. Your comments have been garbled, with a lot of parts repeated. You chose not to refrain from personal attacks, so neither will I.

      I hope that other readers can tell from your writing that your verbal intelligence is too low for you to be trying to read scientific papers in the first place, and that this is probably the cause of your persistent misreadings of both comments and cited academic works. Take this for example: "You're essentially arguing that the mechanism by which genes function is irrelevant towards how they may help to influence a behavior - in this case being kin altruism." I cannot imagine any reasonably intelligent adult ever writing such a sentence, let alone paragraph after paragraph of sentences of that sort.

      I did not say anything about the "mechanism by which genes function" where I wrote of IBD. You continue to fail to understand the point that has been made repeatedly about IBD. I will quote the relevant part of S.A. Frank again: "With regard to the causal analysis of relatedness, Hamilton (1970, 1975) had already given up on the limited interpretation of the theory with regard to pedigree relations and classic notions of kinship. Instead, he realized that the theory could be extended to deal with *genetic similarities* no matter how those similarities arise. Causally, *selection must be indifferent to the process that generates genetic similarity*. Selection can only act on the current patterns of genetic variation and the current processes that influence fitness." What Frank writes there is the basic point I have argued with respect to the dropping of IBD, and it is the same as what Gintis argues.

      From Gintis: "The argument to this point has nothing to do with genealogy, and hence says nothing about altruism among family members." How are you too stupid to understand that this does not contradict anything I have written in this entire exchange?

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    6. Your confusion with respect to section 3.1 in the Gintis piece, and my argument as a whole, stems from the fact that you cannot seem to understand the difference between the IBD qualification and genetic similarity. The S.A. Frank quote demonstrates very clearly that those are distinct concepts, but you repeatedly conflate them. If Gintis were denying the significance of genetic similarity and not just the IBD qualification, he would be rejecting Hamilton's rule. Gintis makes it clear that he is merely dropping IBD, and obviously not genetic similarity, in section 5 where he writes the following: "The point of this example is to show that Hamilton’s rule in principle has no necessary relationship with genealogy or kin selection, but rather is an expression of the social structure of the reproductive population. This model is based on Hamilton (1975), where the author develops a similar model *for the same purpose*." Gintis is there dropping IBD, like Frank does. Notice that he is indicating that his argument is in keeping with Hamilton's from 1975, where Hamilton argues that it is genetic similarity and not IBD that matters? Notice how S.A. Frank cites the *same paper* of Hamilton's in also concluding that it is *genetic similarity*, not IBD, that matters? "With regard to the causal analysis of relatedness, Hamilton (1970, 1975) had already given up on the limited interpretation of the theory with regard to pedigree relations and classic notions of kinship. Instead, he realized that the theory could be extended to deal with *GENETIC SIMILARITIES* no matter how those similarities arise. Causally, selection must be indifferent to the process that generates *GENETIC SIMILARITY*." Notice how I have emphasized repeatedly that the 1970s Hamilton papers are consistent with Gintis and Frank? Are you seeing that Frank and Gintis are making the same point here yet, you embarrassing cretin? Note that Gintis does *not* treat genetic similarity as unrelated to the “the social structure of the reproductive population”: “I have suggested that the notion of the core genome as replicator may facilitate this process of integration, by directing attention away from the dynamics at individual genetic loci and the dynamics of higher level social groupings, *whose character is in fact a product of the complex organization of the core genome*.”

      See also the following from the Gintis paper: “A decade after Hamilton’s seminal inclusive fitness papers, motivated by new empirical evidence and Price’s equation (Price 1970), Hamilton (1975, p. 337) revised his views, writing: ‘Kinship should be considered just one way of getting positive regression of genotype. . . the inclusive fitness concept is more general than kin selection.’ Hamilton illustrates his new position with a *model similar to that of Section 5* of this paper.”

      This, by the way, is why the T and C response is as terrible as it is: they are unaware of this line of argument from Hamilton, which has convinced Gintis, Frank, and almost every other reasonably intelligent person familiar with Hamilton's 70s work that IBD should be dropped. The 1998 paper is quite unrelated and T and C’s use of it shows only their own confusion, which is revealed by the fact that Hamilton did not reject his work from the 70s at any point after its publication, even though, as you point out, he was an author on the 1998 paper. That you support T and C’s use of the 1998 paper is just further evidence that you are completely ignorant of this subject.

      Tooby and Cosmides appeal to the environment in which humans evolved as *part* of their argument that altruism toward *ethnic* kin, as specified by Hamilton’s rule, could not have evolved in humans. That is the environment of evolutionary adaptedness or EEA. Again we see evidence of your remarkably low verbal intelligence.

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    7. “For one, they hardly use Hamilton as a citation in the first place.” That is one of the problems. The point is obviously not that Hamilton explicitly rebutted them. It is that they could have spared themselves some embarrassment had they known Hamilton had already demonstrated that IBD is irrelevant, contrary to the poor arguments they offer to save IBD.

      T and C (incorrectly) argue that close common ancestry is the only mechanism by which sufficient genetic similarity will arise so as to enable altruism as specified by Hamilton's rule: "Although one might, as a thought experiment, imagine random assortment creating by chance individuals who are very similar genetically, given the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 freely recombining genes present in the human genome, the probability that a Pleistocene human during his lifetime would encounter a non-relative who was substantially more 'genetically similar' than the local population average was negligible." In thinking Gintis is in agreement with them, despite the fact that he strenuously opposes this idea, and thus insists that kin selection and inclusive fitness are distinct, and when he explicitly rejects IBD, you reveal again that you know nothing about Hamilton's rule and how understanding of it has developed over the past half of a century, definitely including what Gintis has to say.


      "Hawks study is seriously flawed in so many ways." The paragraph including that sentence fragment contains nothing but baseless or irrelevant assertions, and therefore merits no response. It is amusing that there are certain authors none of whose work you will take seriously because they have published even one analysis of which you disapprove. That does not stop you, somehow, from approvingly citing a different Hawks paper in your main post even as you treat his 2007 work as complete garbage, without having any intelligent basis for doing so. It is apparent that you have not even read the paper.

      "As for the claim about heritability in GCTA studies, you further demonstrate this because all humans are related - so of course they'd be able to use meaures of IBD to account for genetic variation for a trait. But the very study you link even points out this isn't necessary, as they can use genome-wide markers or IBS for their purposes as well, neither of which rely on ancestry." The nonsense you write about GCTA yet *again* shows that you do not understand the difference between IBD and genetic similarity. If you could not figure this out from the Gintis paper, there is probably no hope for you to ever do so. Even Tooby and Cosmides, whom you cannot stop writing about, recognize the difference, as I noted in an earlier post. Perhaps the GCTA GREML paper’s use the term “unrelated individuals” will give you a clue as to the distinction?

      What I wrote about Hawks is important given what you write about Harpending at the end. Harpending's analysis in the Salter paper is *not* the same as his 1979 analysis, which is why Salter had to publish it as an appendix. He explicitly states that it was previously unpublished. You miss such obvious details because you are simply unintelligent. I have no intention of wasting time replying to your astoundingly bad criticisms of that appendix, since they do nothing but distract from the central points in dispute here. If you want to be remotely intellectually consistent, you cannot respond by saying that there is no reason to consider Harpending's 1979 paper because you think that his appendix in the Salter article is bad. Otherwise you would have to reject everything Hawks has written, not just his 2007 paper that your apparent emotional disorder has motivated you to dismiss. You would have to retract your fawning citation of him in your main post, to spell things out for you.

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    8. I cannot resist mentioning this one. "since he blatantly says that pq(1-1 / 4) is equvalent to pq(3/4)!" And what exactly is wrong with this? 1 - 0.25 = 0.75. To make it even clearer for you, pq(1-0.25) = pq(0.75).

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    9. Good lord you're pretentious as fuck in every way you write, even in your shallow attempts at insults.

      Anyway my response will be brief; I've already rebutted most of your points in prior arguments and you're essentially just trying to play contrarian now because you can't admit your own fault. It's typical of you HBD cultists, really.

      Your first paragraph really shows you don't know what you're talking about - I never said you wrote about the process by which genes result in phenotypes, I said that's the conclusion your argument leads to. Hilariously your quote - which you still haven't cited, and I still can't find, mind you, by saying "selection must be indifferent to the process that generates genetic similarity," as Rushton and Salter would predict it *would* result in this via the arival of different ethnic groups. Also, I never argued IBD and genetic similarity are the same - I've been arguing that how genes enact on phenotypes is relevant, not for the actual equation, but for how it should be empirically predictable and observed, and how the genetic similarity required for kin altruism requires IBD. Either you're the one with poor "verbal intelligence" (god of course you worship IQ), or you're just trying to play the card of being 'right.'

      So an additional paragraph I'll make before continuing is to address your obsessiveness with the term 'genetic similarity' because Rushton entitled his little hypothesis that. It's not just a catch all term to refer to homogeneous ethnic groups - it's a general term in genetics to refer to two homologous genes matching one another (https://msu.edu/~jhjacksn/Reports/similarity.htm). In other words, exactly what's necessary for kin altruism - selection based on the *altruism gene itself,* which, as Dawkins, Cosmides, Gintis, and Tooby elaborated, is independent of genetic variation.

      Now, as I expected you hinge on the fact that Gintis tried to argue against kin selection - something I already responded to him in the beginning of the discussion - so the fact that you're latching onto it is hilarious to me. You're lengthy paragraph is basically just repeating what's already been said so I won't bother, especially since I already responded to the points in it. A brief note, though, is that in that the core genome - which, mind you, Gintis flat out describes in this paper as representing the 99% of the genome universally shared across a species, which, again, supports my interpretation a lot more.

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    10. After some more points I responded to in this reply or in prior ones already that you just want to ignore to drive the argument into circles, your rejection of Tooby and Cosmides is basically that you believe Hamilton's paper rebuts their points fundamentally - even though you haven't pointed out how it actually responds to their points. None of the quotes you gave, either, show how it responds to them - they all just detail aspects of Hamilton's rule that *I already pointed out is rebutted by Tooby and Cosmides.* I've already detailed my point, and you're just effectively repeating yours and saying "NO!" Also, I flat out pointed out that the 1988 paper was unrelated. Nice novel observation there bud.

      They don't appeal to the EEA - you're confusing entirely different concepts. It's a vague concept of the environment in which a species evolved in, without actually detailing any specific characteristics about it - there's no empirical predictios from it. (http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/human/epfaq/eea.html) Tooby and Cosmides, on the other hand, describe what you say *only superficially in the last two paragraphs.* They closest to a reference to the EEA they get is saying that our psychology evolved in the Pleistocene... which is when humans evolved. They then say that we were too geographically separated to have evolved any reaction to different 'races,' and that competition would only be between neighboring tribes, and, as they say, we'd expect this to evolve not in any sort of way about selection against 'races,' but rather via a hypothetical preference for an ingroup - even if environmentally formed. While I believe there's a lot to criticize evolutionary psychology for and I generally consider it a pseudoscience, in this instance their rebuttal to Rushton is entirely on the nose and lacks the vague speculation typical of EP.

      You then keep on saying IBD is irrelevant, without showing *how he demonstrated this.* I've read his paper, and all it shows is that other people with said kin altruism allele - but even in an environmentally formed group! - could be preferred over family as well. Of course, this is only a mathematical demonstration and not an empirical one, and Tooby and Cosmides' response give every reason to prefer them over Hamilton, who gives no empirical justification for what he says.

      After more rambling about points I've responded to already, you then dismiss my rebuttal of the Hawks study as flawed (I never said it was garbage) by saying nothing more than that it's just 'baseless or irrelevant assertions,' which is hilarious since I cite my rebuttals, and then act like that, because I reject one paper by an author, I'm obligated to reject all of them. This makes an abundance of sense, clearly.

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    11. Your points about the GCTA studies is again just more shit I've responded to. God you're repetitive.

      As for the final bit about Harpending's analysis, you're right it wasn't entirely a repost - I had misread what Salter wrote about it. Nonetheless, as I said in my response, I can't access the initial 1979 paper - last I checked its DOI isn't on Crossref and I couldn't find it online to be able to access scihub. Given that, I'm only assuming that the bulk of his analysis parallels, at least somewhat, his 1979 analysis due to the fact that this one deals with an attempt to respond to Lewontin - which you haven't rebutted my points, mind you, responding to Harpending's shite analysis - by dealing with within vs between family variation and then implying a relevance of kin altruism towards it. The 1979 one clearly is more detailed, of course, being several pages larger. You then assume that, after saying I painted them as the same, that I said they're different, therefore I reject all of Harpending's work? I do tend to reject Harpending's work, but it's because I've found he's been consistently bad at publishing anything of a remote quality, not because of one paper. I do of course find it reason to suggest that the 1979 likely isn't going to be of any sort of great deal of quality due to the lack of mathematical prowess in this one. Hawks' paper, on the other hand, I just reject the interpretation of, not the methodology, which as far as I'm aware is fine.

      And your final point about my fuckup with basic maths is completely right, that was a pretty silly error on my end, so thanks for pointing that bit out; gonna take that as a lesson to start to try to actually focus on one thing at a time.

      Anyway though, this is clearly going to be going in circles, so I'm going to refrain from responding now, don't see the point in clogging up the page with a debate with someone who insists on repeating points since responded to. As I said to Anon, I'd prefer if you didn't respond since it's just more shite to read through but I can't stop you.

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    12. You continue to humiliate yourself.

      I hope that my reply here will be short.

      "I never said you wrote about the process by which genes result in phenotypes, I said that's the conclusion your argument leads to." Statements such as the preceding reveal that you are not even remotely intelligent or informed enough to write about any academic subject, let alone advanced topics in a hard science (biology). You claim that my arguments entail a certain "conclusion," but you never actually specify the conclusion even though your sentence is structured in such a way as to imply that you have done so. This sort of total confusion and incoherence riddles everything I have seen you write, and evidences a depressing poverty of intellect.

      Rushton, Harpending, and Salter, just like Frank and Gintis, are interested in the consequences for social behavior of genetic similarity among organisms and groups of organisms. Ethnic solidarity, out-group hostility, and related phenomena that Harpending, Salter, and Rushton have written about are outcomes of selection having acted on what Frank calls "current patterns of genetic variation and the current processes that influence fitness." There is very clearly no contradiction between Frank and Salter/Harpending/Rushton on this issue. All of them, yet again, are united through the theoretical framework for inclusive fitness theory that Hamilton provided in the 70s. If you cannot understand the difference between what selection acts on at any given point in time and the outcomes of selective processes, you are cognitively hopeless.

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    13. "Also, I never argued IBD and genetic similarity are the same." What you are trying and failing to respond to here is my critique of your horrendous misreading of Gintis. To refresh your shockingly poor memory, which is probably half of the reason you cannot sustain a consistent argument, consider what you wrote here about Gintis: "He spends the entirety of section 3.1 demonstrating that the relatedness coefficient (which is a measure of 'genetic similarity' - see http://ess.nbb.cornell.edu/relatedness.html) to be unrelated. So no, he doesn't realize 'genetic similarity' matters, because that's something he explicitly demonstrates to the contrary." At no point in section 3.1 does Gintis reject genetic similarity. Everything there is consistent with his endeavor to show that what Frank calls "pedigree relations and classic notions of kinship," not genetic similarity, are irrelevant, congruent with his explicit statement that IBD is irrelevant for Hamilton's rule. You could have only misread Gintis as attacking the significance of genetic similarity if you did not understand the difference between genetic similarity and IBD. And as I noted in an earlier post, it would be impossible for Gintis to reject the importance of both IBD and genetic similarity and still defend Hamilton's rule/inclusive fitness theory. In case you were unable to figure that out either, the entire Gintis paper is an elaboration and defense of Hamilton's rule and inclusive fitness theory, of a sort that is *explicitly* consistent with Hamilton's reformulation of inclusive fitness theory in the 70s. For your reading of Gintis to be correct, Gintis would have to be rejecting the r term in Hamilton's rule! As Frank observes, the r term is, of course, a measure of genetic similarity: "Hamilton’s 1970 paper also greatly advanced the analysis by using Price’s equation (Price, 1970). With this method, Hamilton established the correct measure for genetic similarity, r, between actor and recipient." Yet again, Gintis explicitly notes that his argument is consistent with Hamilton's 70s formulation of inclusive fitness theory.

      "I've been arguing that how genes enact on phenotypes is relevant, not for the actual equation." The sad thing is that you are so cretinous you still have not figured out that the relationship between genotype and phenotype has nothing to do with IBD. If something so fundamental to biological understanding were lost by dropping the IBD qualification, you could be sure that Hamilton, Gintis, Frank, and the rest would never have set IBD aside. To reiterate, what matters is the genetic makeup of organisms at a given time and the relations among those genotypes. That is what selection acts on. Selection is necessarily "blind" to the mechanism by which the current genetic composition of populations came to be.

      "god of course you worship IQ." I am completely unsurprised that you are stupid enough to reject another well-established bit of mainstream science for political reasons. I would detail at length how your opinion is completely at odds with the consensus among experts in psychometrics and intelligence research (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-07714-001) but I do not want to give your defective brain too much more research to mangle.

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    14. "So an additional paragraph I'll make before continuing is to address your obsessiveness with the term 'genetic similarity' because Rushton entitled his little hypothesis that. It's not just a catch all term to refer to homogeneous ethnic groups." I use the term "genetic similarity" to emphasize the consistency of S.A. Frank and Gintis's arguments with those of Salter/Harpending/Rushton, at least with respect to the dropping of IBD. Note that Frank repeatedly uses the term. By the way, simply Googling any of the Frank quotes I have offered will bring you to the paper. Are you too stupid to use Google? For you to think that I believe that "genetic similarity" is somehow a property maintained only by "homogeneous ethnic groups" demonstrates, again, that you are stupid to a degree that would make any reasonably intelligent person incredulous. I have cited S.A. Frank over and over, and his statements make manifestly clear that genetic similarity is the general phenomenon on which inclusive fitness theory is founded. Since inclusive fitness theory explains altruistic behavior throughout the animal kingdom, and has even been employed in analyses of the evolution of plants and microbes, it very obviously does not have to do only with "homogeneous ethnic groups." You are an idiot for even thinking that that has to be clarified.

      "Now, as I expected you hinge on the fact that Gintis tried to argue against kin selection." Another embarrassing misapprehension on your part (the sentence preceding what I just quoted is so fantastically stupid I chose to simply pass over it). At no point does Gintis "argue against kin selection." Here is Gintis's summary statement of his actual view of kin selection: "Much confusion would be avoided if kin selection were reserved for the sociobiological notion of behavior that is fitness-enhancing due to differential association based on the recognition of kin through social nature of family life." What Gintis objects to are those "who equate inclusive fitness and kin selection." Gintis's arguments on this matter are consistent with those of S.A. Frank, 70s Hamilton, and all the others I have named over and over: "Inclusive fitness theory, however, does not assert that kinship is a necessary causal agent in all social behavior." Gintis is saying, consistent with Hamilton's realization in the 70s, that inclusive fitness is more general than kin selection. This further aligns with Frank's reading of Hamilton's revision of inclusive fitness theory: "With regard to the causal analysis of relatedness, Hamilton (1970, 1975) had already given up on the limited interpretation of the theory with regard to pedigree relations and classic notions of kinship."

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    15. "Gintis flat out describes in this paper as representing the 99% of the genome universally shared across a species." More stupidity. Gintis offers a rebuttal to Washburn's argument that because of the high genetic similarity that exists among all members of any given species (this is where the 99% figure comes from) evolution should have favored "universal altruism." Gintis's paper is in part devoted to showing that this is untrue. In developing his answer to Washburn, he rejects IBD: "Expositors often add the qualification that the copy of the focal allele in the recipient must be identical by descent. However, the identity by descent qualification is irrelevant." Note that Gintis takes Washburn's challenge seriously because Hamilton's rule turns on genetic similarity among organisms. So contrary to your idiotic assertion ("he doesn't realize 'genetic similarity' matters"), Gintis is fully aware that defenders of Hamilton's rule have to make sense of exactly *how* genetic similarity matters, such that Hamilton's rule favors greater altruism between the more rather than the less genetically similar within species even as all members of any particular species are highly genetic similar.

      You go on to say some idiotic things about Tooby and Cosmides's response to Rushton. T and C believe that Hamilton's rule only pertains to close kin. No one who understands the modern interpretation of Hamilton's rule believes this anymore. I cannot improve on Gintis's meticulous demonstration that arguments of the kind T and C offer are incorrect, because inclusive fitness, and as a result altruistic behavior, extends beyond close kin. Perhaps if you had just admitted that you are too stupid to understand Gintis's paper, rather than ludicrously contend that his paper in any way supports your idiotic beliefs and misapprehensions, this all could have been avoided.

      "They don't appeal to the EEA." "They closest to a reference to the EEA they get is saying that our psychology evolved in the Pleistocene." If you were not a complete imbecile, you would have learned that Santa Barbara School evolutionary psychology, of which Tooby and Cosmides are two of the founders, posits that the Pleistocene African Savanna is the EEA. So yes, they are, in part, appealing to the EEA to contend that altruism beyond that directed at close kin could have evolved in humans.

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    16. "You then keep on saying IBD is irrelevant, without showing *how he demonstrated this.* I've read his paper, and all it shows is that other people with said kin altruism allele - but even in an environmentally formed group! - could be preferred over family as well." It is not my responsibility to explain to you material that you are too stupid to understand. Nevertheless, I have explained the key point, over and over, but you are incapable of fully grasping the simple distinction between genetic similarity and the mechanism by which it arises, and instead offer confused, barely intelligible nonsense about the relationship between genotype and phenotype. Gintis and his collaborators have done an enormous amount of empirical work in support of the view that altruistic behavior toward individuals more distant than close kin has evolved in humans, consistent with modern inclusive fitness theory. Only an idiot would try to hang on to a paper from 1989, which has in fact not withstood the test of time, without checking on the recent literature from scientists, such as Gintis, doing major contemporary work on Hamilton's rule. T and C have made no significant or lasting contributions to understanding Hamilton's rule. Gintis, Frank, Harpending, and, of course, Hamilton, including through his 70s work (which has withstood the test of time), indisputably have. Your lack of sufficient background knowledge to even *begin* talking about these things is not my problem. My goal is only to make clear to readers that you are an outstanding moron willing to write with great confidence on things you do not and cannot comprehend.

      You do not cite "rebuttals" of the Hawks study. You cite irrelevant work that, through your stupidity, you mistakenly think rebuts the Hawks study. You think that neutralism in population genetics still has a prayer, when the recent outpouring of work in molecular genetics has erased all reasonable doubt about the fact that human evolution has recently accelerated and is ongoing. It has not stopped and indeed it is ridiculous to assert it ever has or will (as long as humans continue to exist). Have a look through bioRxiv if you think otherwise. Even David Reich has had to concede the truth of this matter in his latest book.

      "I'm obligated to reject all of them." You are too dumb to understand that this is the only intellectually consistent thing you could do, for reasons I already presented.

      "Your points about the GCTA studies is again just more shit I've responded to. God you're repetitive." You did not respond to what I wrote. You misunderstood the very nature of GCTA GREML, which can work only because there is significant genetic similarity among individuals that has arisen without the mechanism of close common descent.

      "you're right it wasn't entirely a repost." "Nonetheless, as I said in my response, I can't access the initial 1979 paper." How can you comment on the nature of the 1979 paper *at all* if you have not read it? You go on to admit that you are "only assuming" and yet agree with what I have written as if you have confirmed my claim directly. Again, you write in an incoherent and stupid way.

      "which you haven't rebutted my points, mind you, responding to Harpending's shite analysis." Why would I bother? In the first place, your "critique" was just a diversion. Second, I pointed out only that one error because that was enough to demonstrate that you are so mathematically illiterate, you do not understand that 1 - 0.25 = 0.75. You admit this completely humiliating error and yet continue to presume you are competent to assess the work of a highly accomplished population geneticist. Go fuck yourself.

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    17. One final observation. It is funny how in the cases that you have a mixed opinion of the quality of academics' research, it is only where their conclusions align with your political prejudices that you think they have done a good job. So the Hawks study that offers findings inconvenient for leftist nuts is rejected, but when you think Hawks has something to offer in your incompetent and futile crusade against race realism, then he can be trusted. Similarly, you are willing to hang close to the entirety of your pathetic "rebuttal" of Harpending/Salter/Rushton, and by extension Gintis, Hamilton, and Frank, on one bad paper from Tooby and Cosmides, two people whom you think have devoted their whole scientific careers to "pseudoscience." What a coincidence that you judge they are not doing pseudoscience only when they can be put to the end of combating "racism."

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    18. There is a typo in this sentence of my above reply: "So yes, they are, in part, appealing to the EEA to contend that altruism beyond that directed at close kin could have evolved in humans."

      It should read as follows: "So yes, they are, in part, appealing to the EEA to contend that altruism beyond that directed at close kin could *not* have evolved in humans."

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    19. Unknown friend you are a fucking retarded, you are the idiot of not knowing a fucking shit about genetics and you do too much cherry pinckin to defend your racist shit, if you know how the statistics work you will know that you are wrong but it is obvious that you do not know, although I do not because the author of this blog allows you to the other mentally retarded (racialist) and still lets you have the last word, you fucking idiot, I took the trouble to read all the links that you passed as well as read them, review them and refute them, to To begin with, what you publish are about 5 studies with not so large samples, and my friend, notice that in the statistics there are false positives all the time.
      Your supposed biggest argument is that the racialist guy you quote has few studies showing that people behave altruistically depending on the time, with people estranged from them, or that supposedly close friends had more similar genes, which is likely that some were related , but assuming you insist not, such studies are very few, compared to all paleanthologists and geneticists who cannot determine race based on genes alone and recourse to other forms such as books, archeology, traits etc.
      And this is how statistics work if there are few studies that supposedly confirm something but there are even more studies that disconfirm it, the former can be attributed to chance or to the manipulation of data that occurs a lot with racialists and that cannot be replicated.
      for example you quote a pseudo-scientific page psyt and a shitty article by a certain russell in favor of the genetic determinism of intelligence me and other experts made a counter response to that article full of selection biases where it takes about 8 topics and only quotes for each one like 5 or 6 studies, but deliberately ignores, as of 20 studies that disprove it, such as Afro-America's low income, biases that linda gottolieb's neo-Nazi elderly woman deliberately ignores and there are already rebuttals to her cherry picking data, ignore the data from children who will improve in the long term and data from children who cite and who return to their original results are over-represented, the same with the risk of stereotype, that the fact that in some studies it was not something relevant, does not change the fact that the other half was a partial factor, which is against a straw man.
      Jay's rebuttals to twin studies that aren't even as many as racialists like to brag about, and if the field of neuroscience hypotheses is full of scams, false positives, I have a lot of pages about it, same with ad populum that many neuroscientists who only hypothesize partially agree with determinism and something that I criticize on my page especially the confirmation bias of doing it on the internet and on pages in favor of determinism.
      more than 1000 cases of people and animals who do not have most of their brain and are perfectly normal or even become more intelligent.
      the logical fallacy of comparing genetic diseases and traits as well as reproduction with 1 percent of genes, when something so small in the brain is contradicted by people who attribute more percentage to genes, as well as the supposed cherry picking studies
      For each of the topics that he touches, we have more than 8 years of research and refutations to studies in favor of biological determinism, his counter answer

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    20. sorry for my english, but as i said there are also quite a few rebuttals to the shit pscyt article citing cherry picking shit and manipulated intelligence bell data, over 2000 deliberate neuroscience fraud, over 1000 cases of people and animals that do not have the majority of the brain and are equal or more intelligent, and so I could go on to refute the fucking pseudo-scientific shit of genetic determinism and racialism, another thing that that study shit ignores are the many studies of lack of money for discrimination, studies where the richest and for bribes enter the university, the false positives between iq exam and (success), and flat no success correlated with exams, the results where the child returns to its original score when it is larger is perfectly compatible with disinterest in studies and standardized tests that correlate with playful games, good eyesight and video games that provide almente is not much in the culture of the black, etc. also the exaggerations and fallacies in black and white of the article
      Long ANSWERS on pages that we manage as
      future and cosmos, and head truth

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    21. German cartoon,

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    22. germancartoon, you're such an illiterate ESL retard you can't even spell Gottfredson's name correctly. You promote blogs full of paranormal bullshit. You don't understand the difference between neuroscience and differential psychology. You don't actually address anything in your shrieking, incoherent, third world screed. Kindly choke on a dick because you are a complete fucking moron.

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  6. cope harder you are wrong gay and lib so you brain does not comprehend truth or fact

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  7. you should add waring - autism becouse its autstic

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  8. this is so fucking retarded

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  9. You should edit this to make it an actual "comment on" paper.

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    1. Why publish a retarded mess full of lies and embarrassing misunderstandings of everything?

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