Nathan Pearson

New talk, from the heart...on what #DNA teaches us about history, sharing, and how to secure a justly equitable future. youtube.com/watch?v=-dEL2y…

@knockinthenight @dwarkesh_sp You've qualified this claim with so many subjectives ('meaningfully', 'broad', 'much more', 'massively') as to make it unfalsifiable. But we human geneticists have long *presumed* strongly spacetime-varied adaptation to pathogens/climate/diet (themselves entangled), etc.

@GenomeNathan @dwarkesh_sp I don’t disagree with you, however, selective pressures meaningfully differentiated by environment on a broad scale in distribution of alleles disposing much more than skin colour is massively controversial, especially without the idea that adaptation sped up given timescales

David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution. By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up. Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That's when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the genetic predictor of cognitive performance up by roughly a full standard deviation — most of it between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. After we finished recording, David sketched out on a whiteboard his new heretical model about who the Neanderthals really were. Luckily, I took out my iPhone and managed to record it. He thinks the standard story (that Neanderthals are some separate archaic lineage we interbred with a little) just doesn't fit the evidence. Instead, he proposes that Neanderthals are essentially genetically-swamped modern humans. A small population somewhere around the Caucasus invented Middle Stone Age technology roughly 300,000 years ago and expanded outward. The ones that moved into Europe interbred with local archaic humans, got genetically swamped, and became Neanderthals. The same expansion went into Africa, met much more diverged archaic Africans, and that mixture became us. This means Neanderthals and modern humans share the same cultural ancestry — the only difference is which archaic humans they mixed with afterward. David is a brilliant and rigorous scholar. It was a real delight to learn from him again. 0:00:00 – Ancient DNA suggests strong selection over last 10,000 years 0:16:24 – Natural selection intensified during the Bronze Age 0:35:40 – Why didn't evolution max out intelligence? 0:58:00 – Evolution is limited by time, not population size 1:09:40 – Why no farming before the Ice Age? 1:17:52 – The Neanderthal puzzle David can’t stop thinking about 1:54:40 – The methodology behind this breakthrough

So plants?

Two sharp folks.

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger No, you're just mired in a Jewish-exceptionalist circularity, for whatever reasons. Not anyone else's problem. Good day.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger Its a strawman argument.

We have never been "just a religion" except when forced on us to rob us of our history and identify forward.com/culture/770941…

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger No, I responded with clear counterexamples, and with a reminder that without Jewish-exceptionalist circularity you're then declaring anyone acknowledging Copt or Mandaean identity as more than 'just a religion' must be [checks notes] Zionist and/or Nazi.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger Instead of responding to the point, you send me to ask someone else about irrelevant groups. I don't define 'Jewish', Judaism does that. You want to use the same word while ignoring the source so again - only Zionism and Nazism.

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger 1. Go ask. Though apparently you'll circularly define their answers as 'zionist' or not by whether they agree w/me. 2. No, *you* circularly define 'Jewish' as 'a religion'; the counterexamples (incl. my & many others' existence as non-religious [group X] members) debunk that.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger "Ask any anthropologist" - Appeal to authority "Assyrian, Copt, Mandaean, Samaritan, etc" - Strawman argument. These are not religions. What I wrote is a fact so instead of reflecting, you have to use logical fallacies.

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger Again, flatly false, however enamored you are of your silly, pointless theory. Ask any anthropologist if Assyrian, Copt, Mandaean, Samaritan, etc. identities (let alone those of peoples farther from Palestine) are 'just religions' — or at all entail statist/other supremacism.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger The only ideologies that consider "Jew" as "not just a religion" are Zionism and Nazism. Nazism is allegedly gone, but some people, including Jews, insist on maintaining the same ideology.

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger Uh, no, the world does not accord your wishfully silly declarations of what others believe. Good day.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger There is a perfect correlation between Zionists and those who believe that "Jew" is an ethnic group, it is the fundamental lie that enabled Zionism, the essence of it.

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger No, you have it backward. Setting aside rife *religious* supremacism, grasping that ancestors' religion drove cultural (even genetic) differentiation, or vice versa, doesn't entail any right to rule others anywhere. Cf. many other groups sans statist/supremacist movements.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger No, you don't. You need Zionism in order to believe that you are a Jew by race or whatever it is instead of religion. You hate Zionism like Israeli-liberals hate Netanyahu - a scapegoat to compensate for the dissonance.

@DidiMatityahu @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger Uh, no. Like many secular Jews before and now, I loathe zionism.

@GenomeNathan @_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger If you believe that Jew is more than a religion then you are a Zionist.

@_ZachFoster @TaliaRinger Zach, non-religious antizionist Jew here. Ethnicity and culture can, and do, transcend not just genes but also particular beliefs. And one needn't reduce Jewishness to religion to staunchly and vigorously oppose zionism (or indeed any form of Jewish-supremacism).

The Jewish-Zionist obsession with being more than "just a religion" is a strange pathology. As if being a religion is a problem. As if Jewish converts undergo a DNA transfusion when they convert. As if black Jews, brown Jews & white Jews have shared common ancestry. As if shared values, rituals, & traditions are inferior than having shared blood. If only Jews thought more like the Nazis! Sincereley, -Zionism

@The_Yokay Palestinian families are indeed the long-resident native majority of Israel. But yes, we (like Jackson and Geyer) clearly grasp that having a settler-supremacist state in the first place requires subjugating, exiling, or/and attritionally genociding such native majority.

@GenomeNathan Palestinian Arabs are not Israel's native majority. For good reason. There would be no Israel. And I suppose that half of the world's Jewry will not take the risk of annihilation for the sake of some lofty idea that white American slaveholding colonialist claim they're upholding.

Huh? What other 'democracy', since pre-1994 South Africa, still expressly bars its own native majority from voting majority, by exile or any other means?

@The_Yokay Uh, no. As noted, Israel does indeed bar its native majority from voting majority.

@GenomeNathan Israel doesn't bar its native majority from voting. The ethnostate of Palestine does.

@josemaforts22 @carolinadayan1 Palestinians are c/s Levantines who (as al-Maqdisi) so identify. Like *most* human groups (Kurd, Romaniote, Sotho, Vlach, Zuni...), they won't appear in your consumer DNA results, for sundry reasons: company panel omits them, groups them w/others, or shows scant match to you.

@carolinadayan1 @GenomeNathan

Queria que me agilizassem uma resposta. O que é um Palestino? Por que Palestino não é uma categoria presente em nenhum teste de ancestralidade? Aguardando…

@kthalps Katie, note that the last signers were actually Irma & Stefan Wolpe (not Wolfe)...presumedly distant patrilineal cousins to South African ANC stalwart Harold Wolpe.

I’m sorry, but you don’t get to lecture anyone about how they misrepresented Einstein’s relationship with Israel if your alleged corrective omits that he compared the party that turned into Likkud to Nazis.

@LibyaLiberty @KR3Wmatic It's a great question — and, of course, applies equally well to any notional creator of such matter. And especially one not just notionally invisible and relatably intellligent/otherwise characteristic of human social imagination, but immortal too.

@KR3Wmatic Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Where did it come from.

My atheist daughter asked me to prove God's existence. What do I tell her? She is 19.

@MichaelRosenYes @VividProwess Even Yellin-Mor saw that light... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_A…

@VividProwess Pretty well most of it is Canaan and it precedes any Jewish kingdom. People like you, interested in historical origins will want to join me in re-establishing the city-states of Canaan and, like me, be a Canaanist. I propose a Canaanite federation of city-states. Join me.

All of it is Israel. There was never a "Palestinian" state.

'nOt aPaRthEid'