And thank you all for the honor of your invitation.
HCH
harpend
Karma: 244
Hi Carl:
No word on that yet. They identified regions of the genome where there are (1) deep gene trees in Europe and/or Asia, (2) we share variants with Neanderthals, and (3) these shared variants are absent in Africa, and they found a lot of them. But if some variants in Neanderthals were positively selected in humans very early on then they would have spread through all humanity, and no one has scanned for those yet.
Our favorite candidate is the famous FOXP2 region, without which one has no speech. Every human has it, and the diversity hear it on the chromosome suggests that it is 42,000 years old in humans. Neanderthals have the human version (so far), so a likely scenario is that we stole it from Neanderthals.
HCH
Very nice summary—thanks.
@SilasBarta:re our careers:
I would certainly never encourage a graduate student to follow up in this area because it would be a career kiss of death. But I am at retirement age, no one is going to fire me, and most important of all I do not have federal grant support. Cochran is not an academic: his real career is in laser physics. So we enjoy a kind of freedom that few academics do.
@JanetK re skin color:
According to standard ag-sci 101 theory the number of loci makes no difference at all to the speed of change of a multi-locus trait. Six is close enough to infinity that skin color should change no faster than, say, IQ. OTOH you may be right in the real world because of the complexities of epistasis of loci.
I think your perception is correct, but I am no expert. I sense that evolutionary psychologists are really interested in human universals: the famous experiments of Tooby and Cosmides go right to that point. Why are we all afraid of snakes? Why are our babies do hard to toilet train? But they generally don’t have a lot to say about variation among humans in these traits.
The other sort that you and I both perceive are interested in human diversity and aren’t much concerned with the bigger questions of the ev psych people.
No, they don’t “play nice” with each other mostly. It is an exaggeration to say that each regards the phenomena of the other as nuisances. They certainly should see different things: C&T see evolved cheater detection in a logic game while psychologists of the London school see G playing itself out in the diversity of correct answers.
The two areas will come together soon: they are already starting. As some of the comments here indicate, we can’t really understand what “Neanderthal intelligence” might mean until we understand the evolution(s) of intelligence. We can examine data all day and still have not an iota of insight about that bigger issue.