[ExI] The Yamnaya question

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 2:52 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>
> Quoting Rafal Smigrodski:
>
>
> > This said, there are huge research consortia that are collecting DNA
> > from various human populations, so there is a lot of data on human
> > nucleotide diversities, it's just I have been out of the loop long
> > enough as a geneticist that I don't have the references handy. It
> > might be an evening's worth of trawling through PubMed to get some
> > estimates.
>
> https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/for-scientists/
>
> In the above link is an email address that scientists can write to in
> order to receive access to the databases of one of the largest of the
> research consortia you mentioned.
>
> Email them and tell them you are a scientist. Let them give you access
> to the raw data to test your theory. If you want help mining the data,
> then tell them I am your assistant and get me access too.
>
> Your hypothesis is important because if it is true, then it refutes
> racism entirely. And that is something I would be willing to help with
>

### I am an amateur in population genetics, my actual work was in
mitochondrial genetics and Parkinson's disease, so I would be poorly
equipped to work on substantiating the hypothesis.

While the idea that increased mobility in a population may trigger changes
in fitness related to improved mating distance occurred to me
independently, I would be surprised if nobody else among population
geneticists ever though about it before. It's kind of obvious once you
think about it. However, if the hypothesis has indeed never been published,
it might be the basis for an interesting research project, maybe even a PhD
thesis. If anybody here knows an aspiring young population geneticist, feel
free to forward my Yamnaya post to him/her.

I doubt that the hypothesis justifies jettisoning out-group hostility based
on different levels of genetic relatedness. After all you could interpret
it as saying that to have smart, strong and beautiful children you should
invade foreign lands, slaughter the local males, and take their women as
concubines, the Yamnaya way. Also, it might justify increased hostility to
anybody who is farther away than the OMD, on their way to speciation. I
would be very wary of speciation among cognitively generalist sentients,
that can only bring war to extinction of one of the species. Based on what
I know about interspecies conflict, the presence of multiple species in a
single ecological niche is unstable, and it leads inevitably to the
eradication of all but one of the species (assuming absence of refugia,
geographic discontinuity, etc.). Since the niche for general intelligence
if very large, it may be difficult for more than one cognitively general
species to exist in a single solar system.

Rafal
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