I always joke to my students that everyone I taught about the settlement of the Americas at the start of my career could ask for their money back, because basically everything I said then has turned out to be wrong. It's been exciting along the way! But I hope my former students have either read the news about it or forgotten everything I said :)
It's really, really, such an exciting time for understanding the whole human story. So much of anthropology is a total mess, but that there is so much interesting stuff to be figured out gives me hope that it will simply have to turn itself around -- or be replaced as a discipline by scholars who will.
Small point. You mentioned that Cohanim are Jews with the surname Cohen. That is not true. Cohanim can have any surname. The status is passed down verbally from father to son. I am a Cohan, it has been verified by YDNA analysis. But my name is not Cohen. From what I understand Ashkenazi Jews did not adopt surnames until the late 18th century.
It would be great to read a 'state of the field' post on the genetics of IQ. We can read Sasha Gusev posting one thing and Stephen Hsu posting something else, but there's nothing like this Substack for giving the big picture on these things.
Good posts. I think that more thematic -crosscutting posts as compared to chronologically developed posts would make a nice addition to your writings. It helps to tie stuff together.
"Below are some key cases in the field where I can look back and say I stand corrected, sometimes even just a few productive years later. Where there is one, I include a relevant paper or podcast conversation. Here's to the interesting times rolling unpredictably on!"
Of course, this is the case with all endeavors to gain knowledge. Hardly a day goes by that scientists in chemistry, physics, and cosmology, among others, must reevaluate past theories.
I would not be too quick to rule out theories that do not involve out-of-Africa scenarios. There are a host of alternative possibilities which involve independent hominid evolution.
"Now we know intelligence resembles height dynamics, except ratcheted up a notch: the effects on the characteristic are distributed over thousands of positions across the genome, with mostly small, almost imperceptible, effects."
This always seemed the best explanation to me. There has to be a large number of genes responsible for intelligence since the intelligence of humans is a spectrum. If there were only one gene for intelligence, people would be either intelligent or dumb, and since the spectrum is continuous, many genes are responsible.
"In the year 2000, I trusted that natural selection was not a major force on human evolution in our time. First, since our small population meant we were drift-dominated, random changes should be dominant even without the conditions of modernity. Second, exactly what selection pressures applied in the late 20th century? These views remain rather common, but I no longer share them, because I think natural selection remains ubiquitous for our species."
Excellent point.
"This one is simple: even in 2004 I did not anticipate that companies like 23andme, Family Tree DNA and Ancestry would take consumer genetics so far, with tens of millions of customers."
I was one of the beta participants with 23andMe. I was very interested in my genomic makeup and my ancestral history.
"This is why AI-assisted science is probably going to become indispensable sooner rather than later, if we’re going to have any chance of increasing human productivity to match the rate of data generation."
Rather than fear AI, one should embrace it. It is and will become more so as you say 'indispensable.'
It is the only efficacious means available in the area of extensive data evaluation and manipulation. Some areas showing great promise are protein folding and building better cosmological models using the wealth of observational data, genetics, and human evolution.
Razib --- I so enjoy your posts and to be able to participate in the joy and amazement of this interesting time in human evolution.
I came to this field through paleo-linguistics, at the beginning of what Colin Renfrew called the “Emerging Synthesis” of archaeology, linguistics and genetics. How could he (or I) have imagined what genetics would reveal? I was thrilled when Cavalli-Sforza’s HGHG appeared; it seemed to offer real answers to so many questions of the Human Diaspora. Little did I realize it was but a bare beginning.
The “Out of Africa” theory seemed to offer such a clear answer to the basic question of the development of modern HS. As a linguist, I imagined that the beginning of the ‘great leap forward’ was the development of human language, some 100,000 years ago. Nope, not that simple nowadays.
I was an early participant in the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory. ASLIP brought together linguists like Joseph Greenberg, archaeologists like Renfrew and geneticists like LL C-S. It was a wonderful brew. Now it seems so long ago. I remember arguing with Loring Brace about Multi-regionalism, but we both agreed that Neandertals were not a part of that equation. Guess we were both in error.
I wonder: do you have any sense about whether one can still argue for a human “Proto-language”, associated with the beginning of the Diaspora? There is still the fact that any small human can learn any language as a native, so the abilities are in common. But linguistics seems to have been left in the dust of the Emerging Synthesis.
I always joke to my students that everyone I taught about the settlement of the Americas at the start of my career could ask for their money back, because basically everything I said then has turned out to be wrong. It's been exciting along the way! But I hope my former students have either read the news about it or forgotten everything I said :)
It's really, really, such an exciting time for understanding the whole human story. So much of anthropology is a total mess, but that there is so much interesting stuff to be figured out gives me hope that it will simply have to turn itself around -- or be replaced as a discipline by scholars who will.
Small point. You mentioned that Cohanim are Jews with the surname Cohen. That is not true. Cohanim can have any surname. The status is passed down verbally from father to son. I am a Cohan, it has been verified by YDNA analysis. But my name is not Cohen. From what I understand Ashkenazi Jews did not adopt surnames until the late 18th century.
It would be great to read a 'state of the field' post on the genetics of IQ. We can read Sasha Gusev posting one thing and Stephen Hsu posting something else, but there's nothing like this Substack for giving the big picture on these things.
Good posts. I think that more thematic -crosscutting posts as compared to chronologically developed posts would make a nice addition to your writings. It helps to tie stuff together.
"Below are some key cases in the field where I can look back and say I stand corrected, sometimes even just a few productive years later. Where there is one, I include a relevant paper or podcast conversation. Here's to the interesting times rolling unpredictably on!"
Of course, this is the case with all endeavors to gain knowledge. Hardly a day goes by that scientists in chemistry, physics, and cosmology, among others, must reevaluate past theories.
I would not be too quick to rule out theories that do not involve out-of-Africa scenarios. There are a host of alternative possibilities which involve independent hominid evolution.
"Now we know intelligence resembles height dynamics, except ratcheted up a notch: the effects on the characteristic are distributed over thousands of positions across the genome, with mostly small, almost imperceptible, effects."
This always seemed the best explanation to me. There has to be a large number of genes responsible for intelligence since the intelligence of humans is a spectrum. If there were only one gene for intelligence, people would be either intelligent or dumb, and since the spectrum is continuous, many genes are responsible.
"In the year 2000, I trusted that natural selection was not a major force on human evolution in our time. First, since our small population meant we were drift-dominated, random changes should be dominant even without the conditions of modernity. Second, exactly what selection pressures applied in the late 20th century? These views remain rather common, but I no longer share them, because I think natural selection remains ubiquitous for our species."
Excellent point.
"This one is simple: even in 2004 I did not anticipate that companies like 23andme, Family Tree DNA and Ancestry would take consumer genetics so far, with tens of millions of customers."
I was one of the beta participants with 23andMe. I was very interested in my genomic makeup and my ancestral history.
"This is why AI-assisted science is probably going to become indispensable sooner rather than later, if we’re going to have any chance of increasing human productivity to match the rate of data generation."
Rather than fear AI, one should embrace it. It is and will become more so as you say 'indispensable.'
It is the only efficacious means available in the area of extensive data evaluation and manipulation. Some areas showing great promise are protein folding and building better cosmological models using the wealth of observational data, genetics, and human evolution.
Razib --- I so enjoy your posts and to be able to participate in the joy and amazement of this interesting time in human evolution.
I came to this field through paleo-linguistics, at the beginning of what Colin Renfrew called the “Emerging Synthesis” of archaeology, linguistics and genetics. How could he (or I) have imagined what genetics would reveal? I was thrilled when Cavalli-Sforza’s HGHG appeared; it seemed to offer real answers to so many questions of the Human Diaspora. Little did I realize it was but a bare beginning.
The “Out of Africa” theory seemed to offer such a clear answer to the basic question of the development of modern HS. As a linguist, I imagined that the beginning of the ‘great leap forward’ was the development of human language, some 100,000 years ago. Nope, not that simple nowadays.
I was an early participant in the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory. ASLIP brought together linguists like Joseph Greenberg, archaeologists like Renfrew and geneticists like LL C-S. It was a wonderful brew. Now it seems so long ago. I remember arguing with Loring Brace about Multi-regionalism, but we both agreed that Neandertals were not a part of that equation. Guess we were both in error.
I wonder: do you have any sense about whether one can still argue for a human “Proto-language”, associated with the beginning of the Diaspora? There is still the fact that any small human can learn any language as a native, so the abilities are in common. But linguistics seems to have been left in the dust of the Emerging Synthesis.
best regards, Randy Foote