[throwaway6449]

Lol Carl is a hack and he got fired because of that. Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. Meanwhile Saini's books got inputs and reviews from all prominent scientists in the field (Graham Coop, Ewan Birney etc.) none of which are HBD proponents.

HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.

[xyzzyz]

> Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear.

I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book:

> At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.”

> He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something.

> They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...)

> Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.”

Reich means here people like Saini herself.

> Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease.

This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right.

> There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another.

This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in?

These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.

[throwaway6449]

It's pretty nice to see that Reich is literally hammering home that HBD as HBD proponents see it isn't real yet you think it furthers your argument. Three things:

1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure. They're also subject to evolutionary convergence. For this reason they can't be a good proxy for classifying populations phylogenically, even though they do come up in medicine. Also, because of the very one-dimensional and extreme selective aspect of it, it is highly dubious that very complex traits (let alone undefined traits like "intelligence") could be involved.

2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works. You can't treat selective breeding the same way you treat natural selection. You need to look up basic concepts before we have a reasonable discussion.

3. You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field. I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.

[xyzzyz]

> It's pretty nice to see that Reich is literally hammering home that HBD as HBD proponents see it isn't real yet you think it furthers your argument.

I have no idea what HBD is, but you keep repeating it, and ascribing a "proponent" label to me. Can I ask you to explain my position to me, so that I know better what I'm guilty of?

> 1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure.

These things are simply not true, and Reich is pretty clear about it in his book. There are tons of papers about that too. You can keep repeating it, and Saini can keep repeating it, but it won't make it any more true. The papers won't just disappear. Common conception of race matches the ancestry extremely well. There are average differences found in many traits, many of which didn't see "extremely strong selective pressure". Reich brings up evidence for selection for taller height in northern Europeans in his book: what was "extremely strong selective pressure" there? Or, for that matter, what was the extremely strong selective pressure to select for short height in various Pygmy populations?

The above is bunch of falsehoods, and anyone who has any familiarity with recent (and not so recent) results in genetics and heritability is perfectly aware of that.

> 2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection

You're welcome to explain where I "lump" them, and what it actually means, because this is simply a contentless attack that's designed to deflect the attention from the core of the argument.

> (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works.

You can, and in fact, you do. Price equation simply doesn't care about what causes the generation-to-generation selection, for example. Again, this is a contentless attack on my imputed knowledge of the field.

> You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field.

Of course I addressed that. For example, she received input from Reich, who trashes her argument. I also mentioned that some people in the field are also twisting science to further their political causes, and this has been true at least since Lewontin and Gould, and probably much earlier.

> I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.

I don't trust Saini to accurately relay what she was told, because what she is saying is clearly against the understanding in the field, and as Reich's points out, many people in the field are in the business of obfuscating science themselves.

[thrawoway5773]

>Reich brings up evidence for selection for taller height in northern Europeans in his book: what was "extremely strong selective pressure" there? Or, for that matter, what was the extremely strong selective pressure to select for short height in various Pygmy populations?

Just because we couldn't isolate it doesn't mean it's not there (or wasn't there in the past). Also, Pygmies and Northern Europeans are very niche populations with little extant diversity compared to the rest of mankind.

>The above is bunch of falsehoods, and anyone who has any familiarity with recent (and not so recent) results in genetics and heritability is perfectly aware of that.

Idk what to tell you. It's literally my job to work in this kind of stuff. As in, I get paid for working in this, I clock in, have coffee with, have lunch with, clock out and sometimes binge drink with people who get paid for doing this as well. Feel free not to believe me but at this point it's just useless to fling "no you're the one who's wrong" one more time.

>Common conception of race matches the ancestry extremely well.

Common conception of race isn't well-defined and changes depending on culture and whatever the researcher had in mind when they wrote their paper, I'm not surprised it fits whatever they think it is.

>Price equation simply doesn't care about what causes the generation-to-generation selection, for example.

Models have evolved a little bit since the 19th century. In practice you don't model artificial selection the same way you do with natural selection, the latter is much messier.

>Of course I addressed that. For example, she received input from Reich, who trashes her argument. I also mentioned that some people in the field are also twisting science to further their political causes, and this has been true at least since Lewontin and Gould, and probably much earlier.

You conveniently ignored Birney and Coop's approval. Also the fact that you're bringing up Gould and Lewontin for no apparent reason, just to trash them, as well as the useless snark when pretending to not know, not even google the term HBD, leads me to think you just want to rehash the old wars of the 1990s and aren't in fact debating in good faith. So much for 'obsfuscating science' indeed.

[xyzzyz]

> Just because we couldn't isolate it doesn't mean it's not there (or wasn't there in the past).

As I said, the God-of-the-gaps argument.

> Also, Pygmies and Northern Europeans are very niche populations with little extant diversity compared to the rest of mankind.

How is this in any way relevant to what I said? I brought these two just as examples. I could bring you examples like these all day long, despite Saini confidently stating these don't exist.

> It's literally my job to work in this kind of stuff. As in, I get paid for working in this, I clock in, have coffee with, have lunch with, clock out and sometimes binge drink with people who get paid for doing this as well. Feel free not to believe me but at this point it's just useless to fling "no you're the one who's wrong" one more time.

I find it funny that you're claiming institutional authority from an anonymous throwaway account. That's not quite how authority works. You cannot just say that you have it, you need to credibly signal it in a non-falsifiable way.

> Common conception of race isn't well-defined and changes depending on culture and whatever the researcher had in mind when they wrote their paper

Same argument is true for dog breeds, and yet people have no difficulty distinguishing a chihuahua from a greyhound. Just like Saini, you keep saying things that are true, but irrelevant, hoping to deflect the attention from the core argument without having to actually address it.

> Models have evolved a little bit since the 19th century.

There were no real models of population genetics in 19th century to speak of. It was basically pioneered by Ronald Fisher in the 1920s. The Price equation I mention was published in 1970s. You'd have known that if you were the expert you claim you are, but as it turns out, you can't even be bothered to consult Wikipedia.

> Also the fact that you're bringing up Gould and Lewontin for no apparent reason, just to trash them

I'm bringing up Lewontin, because Saini brings up Lewontin. I'm also bringing up Gould, because the duo is a famous pair of agenda-pushers in this very field in the name of science.

> as well as the useless snark when pretending to not know, not even google the term HBD

I'm still waiting for you to explain the wrongthink I'm accused of.

> leads me to think you just want to rehash the old wars of the 1990s and aren't in fact debating in good faith.

It's Saini that wants that, of course. By the way, this is another contentless attack designed to deflect attention. I can't help but notice that in the whole thread, you haven't cited a single scientific finding, not a single one indeed. You just keep deflecting, attacking my perceived lack of credentials, while claiming institutional authority from an anonymous throwaway account, accusing me of some wrongthink you cannot even be bother to describe, asking me to consult google what I'm guilty of instead, and at the very end you have the gall of accusing me of not debating in good faith.