07:49 – Today I’m supposed to receive the QC1 pass of the biology book, which is a PDF of the way the book will actually look in print. It’s been about six weeks since I last worked on the book, so this read-through counts as “semi-fresh eyes” in terms of catching any remaining mistakes. Obviously, I’m not the best proof-reader, because I wrote the thing, but I expect I’ll still catch a few mistakes. Once I return my corrections/comments, they’ll be incorporated into the master document and I’ll get one final chance with the QC2 pass in a couple weeks.
Barbara and I made up the first batch of 30 small-parts bags for the biology kits yesterday. The only thing still missing is the methyl cellulose, which I hope will arrive this week. This coming weekend, we’ll start assembling finished kits.
10:08 – Well, so much for the Greek default last Friday putting Greek debt on a “sustainable” footing. As of now, those New & Improved Greek bonds announced on Friday have already achieved junk status. The shortest-term of the new Greek bonds, those maturing in 2023, are now selling at prices that reflect 20% yields. The market is pissing all over Greece. Portugal is in the on-deck circle.
Here’s something amusing. For the first time in my life, someone has actually mistaken me for a young-earth creationist. It happened in a thread on the Well-Trained Minds forum where a literal Adam and Eve were being discussed. That kind of segued into a discussion of humans’ most-recent common ancestor. I said that it’s extremely probable that our MRCA lived within the last 5,000 years, probable that our MRCA lived within the last 2,000 years, and possible (although not likely) that our MRCA lived within the last 1,000 years. IOW, there is a small probability (maybe 0.1 or less) that everyone now alive descends from one person who was living 1,000 years ago. Someone took my arguments in favor of a recent MRCA as evidence that I was a YEC. I was rendered momentarily speechless (well, writeless), but I quickly understood how he could make that jump. For the record, no, I am not a YEC. I refer to YECs as “religious nutters”, which is actually being kind to them.
RBT wrote:
“I refer to YECs as “religious nutters”, which is actually being kind to them.”
Not all religious nutters are YECs.
BTW, how is it possible that our MRCA lived within the last 1000 years?
Most of the religious nutters I know think YECs are religious nutters! While religious nutters may not all be YECs, all YECs are religious nutters, and I understand the kindness being displayed. I’m sure Bob will shake it off by Tuesday at the latest.
I know a couple who are YECs, and their kids are figuring it all out on their own, and they are heading for some sad times.
I know a bunch of families where the mothers (and tacitly the fathers) took totalitarian approaches, either with religion, food (vegetarians abound) or “violent” toys, such as video games or cap guns, or in some cases, all three, and the results have been mixed at best, by my assessment.
ALL the religious ones have had their older kids completely rebel by rejecting the religion, and their parents along with it. I can see it happening with their younger kids, so the parents aren’t learning anything. But then, if they were capable of learning, they wouldn’t be YECs.
Most of the vegans (there a not as many as vegetarians) have “lost” their kids to meat in their teen years. I remember my own insatiable appetite for food at that age, and teen vegan males literally have to eat like cows and graze all day, just to stay alive.
And of course, the kids just play with violent toys at their friend’s house, so even that prohibition doesn’t work. In fact, my house is FULL of violent toys for boys to play with! I’m considered a “cool” dad, by my son’s friends, and that was the plan. I would rather my house be the party house, then someplace I don’t have control over. And this way I don’t miss out on the fun!
Not the same thing, obviously, but actually, by my definition, all religious nutters are YECs. Not all YECs are christian, remember. All of islam is also YEC.
As to our MRCA possibly living in the last 1,000 years, the short answer is that 1,000 years is 40 or 50 generations. Raise two to the fortieth or fiftieth power, and each of us has, say, a quadrillion 50-times great grandparents. A thousand years ago, the population of the planet was on the close order of 50 million people, so obviously a huge percentage of your 50-times great grandparents weren’t discrete individuals.
Also, although it’s counterintuitive to people who don’t understand cell division, just because someone is your ancestor doesn’t mean you’re genetically related to him.
*there IS not as many as vegetarians
“Write, or do not write, there is no edit” – Yoda, on the new forum
Speaking as a teen vegan male, that’s not necessarily true. I just eat four large meals a day. My meat-eating father eats more frequently than I do.
I agree with the opposition to totalitarianism in child rearing. You can’t and shouldn’t force views onto people; you can only explain your reasons, and hope that they’ll agree.
Well, perhaps I kid a bit. The young man I’m referring to is constantly “grazing” on something, as he always complains of hunger.
I know a vegetarian family (eggs, fish and dairy allowed), where the males are just HUGE and I mean that in the Norse sense. The father (who eats meat) is 6’7″ and built like a linebacker, and is a natural for Viking re-enactments. His S&H#1 is following in his footsteps, but still wants to avoid meat, and is finding it harder to feed the machine. If he does what my son did, he’s about to grow exponentially. My son went from eating like a bird to eating everything in sight in six months. “You gonna finish that?” has become commonplace.
Considering transportstion problems, and the relative isolation of the continents, any number less than tens of thousands of years seems unlikely.
Wasn’t there some study of mitochondrial DNA that placed the most recent female ancestor at something like 50k years?
Fish eaters who call themselves vegetarians are kidding themselves.
I couldn’t imagine becoming a vegetarian, let alone a vegan. I adore veggies but I couldn’t possibly give up meat. I gave up booze for eight months just to see if I could do it but I draw the line at giving up meat.
My parents gave us kids a fair degree of freedom and so we didn’t really rebel. I, and I assume the others, had some crazy ideas that the folks wouldn’t agree to, but I appreciated the latitude. I also saw a number of totalitarian parents at my fundamentalist church in the Seventies and Eighties whose kids went *right* off the rails because their parents gave them no freedom (no television, no dancing, no booze, no Hollywood movies, etc.) Two girls I asked for a date at this fundie church later became single mothers. (Arguably, they had lucky escapes.)
I also suspect that there are enough isolated populations to rule out MRCA of less than 5000 years, probably a lot longer.
No. There is no such thing as an “isolated” population, and there hasn’t been for many thousands of years. “Isolated populations” are isolated only in a relative sense. Genetic exchange still takes place.
You know, I find this whole thing puzzling. It’s completely obvious to me, both intuitively and analytically, but a lot of very bright people simply don’t understand. I don’t have time to go into this now–I’m furiously editing the QC1 PDF–but I did go into some detail in this thread, starting at the bottom of page 3. (It’s actually interesting to read the thread from the beginning if you have the time and inclination.)
http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=356756&page=3
LOL @ Crimson Wife! Early hominids aren’t “human” as they have no soul.
This isn’t so hard to understand for people who have been around fertile dogs and cats…
I see where you discuss statistics, but your unspoken assumption is a degree of even distribution that is just not given. There were, in fact, isolated populations, and statistics do not cross oceans by themselves.
According to the references cited in Wikipedia, 200k years is the current estimate on the female side. To claim something as dramatic as 1000 years, you’ll need something more convincing than exponents…
Miles_Teg: Yes, you’ve got that exactly right. I was going to say something about over-strict parents and teenage rebelliousness, but you beat me to it. An example: A former coworker’s wife was a religious nutter who stayed at home because that was a woman’s place and home-schooled the kids to make sure they were brought up right. (He was a devout Catholic himself, but slightly this side of the nutter line.) When the eldest, a girl, left the nest and went to college, just in the first semester she had to be treated twice for VD and was hospitalized for a very high blood-alcohol level. I’m thinking there was an abortion or miscarriage in amongst the other drama, but don’t remember for sure. Oh, and she flunked out. Good job, mom!
No, what you’re talking about is not MRCA. See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#MRCA_of_all_living_humans
They say 2,000 to 5,000 years, which is a reasonable range for probabilities ranging from, say, 0.5 or thereabouts to 0.99+. At 10,000 years, we’re at 1.0 for all practical purposes.
I am *not* assuming even distributions, and there in fact have been zero truly isolated populations since prehistoric times. Name one, I dare you. Even the most isolated tribes have interbred with outsiders: shipwreck victims, women stolen from neighboring tribes (which tribes in turn stole women from their neighbors), and so on.
It takes only one link to graft on huge remote populations. For example, somewhen one of my ancestors had some African ancestry. That single link grafts Africa onto my tree. Multiply that (exponentially) by all of the trillions of other interlinks and do the math.
Actually, it’s not just math. Using math alone to build network models gives us an answer of most like 2,000 to 5,000 years, but phylogenetics gives us the same range using an entirely different method.
The problem most people have understanding all this is apparently because they seem to believe that “isolated” population groups exist. They don’t now, and they haven’t existed in so many thousand years that it’s immaterial (both mathematically and genetically) if they ever existed.
Good job, mom!
Mom probably did not tell her how you got pregnant. Taboo talk. Babies came from the stork or a blessed event. Some guy comes along and convinces her that nothing will happen during intercourse and she believes him.
I don’t care if parents educate their own children and educate these children according to the parents belief. It is not for me to inform people how to raise their children. But in my way of thinking the parents better darn well teach their kids about the reality of the world beyond the church doors. To do otherwise is not fair to the child and opens them up for being taken advantage of when they leave the nest. The child, will after all, be forced to live in the world unless they become a nun.
And want to know why they call them nuns? Because they don’t want none, gonna get none.
And why do they travel in pairs? The first one makes sure the second one don’t get none.
People have said for a long time that if you have any recent European heritage, then you can claim to be descended from Charlemagne. I take Robert’s point about interlinking populations, though. It wasn’t appreciated for a long time, but it’s the “six steps to Kevin Bacon” phenomenon. If you trace links between individuals, they’ll mill around locally for a while, filling in everyone there, then for someone there’ll be a sudden LONG jump to somewhere else, then profuse local linking again, then another long jump.
As an example, the Mongols swept across the world in the 1200’s, looting and raping. About 8% of the men around there have a nearly identical Y-chromosome, with the evidence being that they are descended from Genghis Khan. That’s half of a percent of every male in the world. Moreover, there were a lot more Mongols than just him, so if you followed them back three or four generations they’d probably have a common ancestor; and their descendants would cover a lot more than those marked 8%,; and cover a lot of females as well.
Working from the other end, very probably the Venetians had a big part in it. No, not the Venetian blinds, but the Venetian traders. They’d be all round the Mediterranean, and that includes Africa. Traders from Northern Africa would trickle all down through that continent. Then there was Marco Polo. His trek to China passed all through or near the Middle East, and passed near India and Mongolia. I’m sure he and his men littered their path with little Venetian bastards as they travelled, and those people would have grown up in trading centres and been likely to travel themselves. The Venetians followed the Silk Trail, which was really a series of interconnected shuttle routes. However, traders were probably leaving genes at one end of their route which they’d picked up at the other, and it wouldn’t take many generations for everyone to be interrelated, with many ancestors in common. Step forward just a few generations, and that network of ancestry would have smeared out into a common pool. That happens very rapidly in any “closed” society, but we still have those occasional long leaps happening.
Or take me as an example. I’ve got close relatives all through Australia. I’ve got known relatives in Canada and the USA, although I’ve never met them in person. That’s just 150 years of family movement – back to my great-grandfather and his siblings. I know I could trace relatives in England, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Germany and France. I’m sure if I did, I’d find that their descendants had fanned out to many other places.
I’m not convinced a thousand years would be enough, but it would come close. Fifteen hundred years would be just about a sucker bet.
E&OE
“someone has actually mistaken me for a young-earth creationist.”
Our host has to be careful about his forum postings … these kind of mistakes could get him into heaven.
There seems to be some conflict between various points of view. A pretty substantial conflict, as near as I can tell…
RBT’s reference does indeed suggest the MRCA lived 2000-5000 years ago, based on computer modelling.
The article I referred to refers only to the female MRCA, and says that she lived around 200,000 years ago. This is based on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA.
While there may be some difference between male and female MRCA, it seems intuitively unlikely to be a factor of 100. Naively, it ought to be at most one generation; if you want to use the actual genes inherited (rather than just ancestry), the picture gets somewhat more complicated.
I suppose my skepticism comes from the computer models. The assumptions made for migration and travel between distant populations will have a huge effect on the result, and there is little way to justify the assumptions made. Rather like using the Drake equation to calculate the chance of extraterrestrial life: your assumptions are everything. The proof is in the pudding, in this case, the DNA. Which is why I personally give more credence to the article based on DNA analysis.
No, there’s no conflict. What you’re referring to isn’t the same thing as MRCA. See the fallacies section of the article you linked to.
As I said, this is confusing for anyone who doesn’t understand how cell division works. I know it’s not intuitive, but as I said earlier it’s possible to be someone’s direct descendant without being genetically related to that person. The MRCA is someone from whom everyone now alive is descended. What you’re talking about is someone from whom everyone now alive is descended *and* to whom everyone now alive is genetically related.
Incidentally, my Viking forbears around a thousand years ago may have had a great deal to do with just how recent the MRCA is. They raped their way acr0ss most of the then-known world and a great deal of the unknown world.
Actually, “possible” is a gross understatement. Everyone now alive on the planet descends from many, many people to whom he is not genetically related. In fact, you are genetically related to only a tiny percentage of your ancestors, and those are the recent ones. If that’s confusing, think about homeopaths, who repeatedly dilute an original solution to the point where mathematically there’s not even one molecule of the original compound in the solution. The same thing happens with genes.
RBT wrote:
“If that’s confusing, think about homeopaths, who repeatedly dilute an original solution to the point where mathematically there’s not even one molecule of the original compound in the solution. The same thing happens with genes.”
Ahh, thanks for that. I didn’t understand until I thought about it that way and have been too slack to read the “falacies” section you mentioned before.
“….to whom everyone now alive is genetically related.”
So how far does that go back? Would this be the African Eve of whom I have heard stuff in recent years? Or am I just totally ignorant here…
“Would this be the African Eve”
That’s the 50,000 year one, proven by mitochondrial DNA.
However, as Bob says, mathematically there MUST be more recent common ancestors. It’s just that we can’t prove it.
In the case of the Mitochondrial DNA, once everyone had those markers, then… well, we lose that line of proof for the more recent ones.
In the case of the Genghis Khan Y-chromosome, we lose that proof in 50% of the cases, in the first generation, simply because the offspring are daughters. When those daughters have sons, the sons will only have that Y-chromosome if they’ve mated with their brothers or male-line cousins, so while their kids are descended from Temujin (Genghis Khan), they no longer have the genes carried on his Y-chromosome.
The fact is, every generation, every offspring loses half the genes from each parent. In the parent, when the chromosomes divide to form gametes (sperm or egg), only half go into each gamete. The other either go into another cell, or are discarded. Then the parental gametes combine to form the new zygote. If you follow one particular line, then the second generation has half that genetic information, the third has one quarter, and then it ramps up (or down) by powers of two each generation. Pretty soon your proportion has dropped below number of chromosomes, then it swamps even genetic crossover between chromosomes.
In fact, theoretically it would be possible for a brother and sister to be totally genetically unrelated (except through common genetic ancestors), while obviously having VERY recent common ancestors. The halves discarded in making the genes for one sibling would be the ones used for the other, and vise versa. In fact, Robert Heinlein used this device in “Time Enough for Love” – Lita and Joe, IIRC.
In passing, and going radically off the previous topic, this is why incestuous offspring are such a crap-shoot. The outcome can depend greatly on how many identical genes are passed on from each parent. It’s also why line-breeding has good outcomes in lifestock. By culling heavily, you eliminate defective genes from the common gene pool. Thus, when common genes are shared in offspring, they are much more likely to be GOOD ones. Incest can be a GOOD thing, IF offspring are culled and the gene pool statistically cleaned. It must have been common back in our hunter-gather days (for instance, just after the African Eve), but then external events, the world at large, and “Mother” Nature aided and abetted by the smilodons, were doing the culling.
In a sense, it’s also why hybrid plants are so productive – the parent lines have been culled rigorously, so there are many more good genes and fewer bad genes in each line than average open-pollinated populations. When the lines cross, the good genes from each line are likely to mask bad or indifferent ones in the other line. You CAN save seed from hybrids and get a good open-pollinated outcome, but it will take generations, the first few of which will be extremely variable; you will need to cull heavily before plants flower; and because of this total yield will be lower than average.
Interesting stuff, thanks, guys. I know more today than I did a few days ago, for sure.
!!!???
Intolerable!
Quick! Drink heavily to wash away your new knowledge.
SteveF, you make me LOL, didyaknowthat?
I make my daughter laugh, too, but she’s laughing at me, not with me. -shrug- What can I tell you? Four-year-olds don’t appreciate the sophisticated humor of my wordplay.
Also regarding her, it’s a good thing I’ve been married for years and therefore have no remaining self-esteem. Otherwise it would be difficult to deal with letting her win a race and then watching her dance around singing “I am the winner! You are a loser!” It’s not a problem, though. Just wait until she’s a teenager and has her first serious, true-lover-forever boyfriend. The embarrassing pictures will be brought out, printed in 8×10 color glossy, you betcha!
Yes, children can be so cruel. Be careful, though. My two sons have grown scar tissue, or something, over the years, and I can no longer embarrass them. The picture I have of S&H#1 vacuuming naked at age two has lost it’s power over the years. If anything, he’s more embarrassed about being seen vacuuming. Perhaps I erred in frequency of use?
Don’t forget to teach her to place her right hand to her forehead, while extending the index finger straight up and her thumb to her left to make Loser Hand to complete your self-esteem training.
Note that the person in the Wiki article, is herself a loser for making the gesture with the wrong hand.
LOL, Wikipedia, which earlier had an article called Loser (hand gesture) now claims it does not, if you follow my link. Or is it how I did the URL?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loser_%28hand_gesture%29
It woulld appear that it’s how you did the URL. Of course what I posted below probably won’t work after I post it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loser_(hand_gesture)
My daughter who isn’t even 11 months old yet just looks at me and giggles. I was hoping this would get better with time. But Steve’s comments would leave me to believe it won’t. I guess I just have to take more embarrassing photos for future use.
Color prints for blackmail? I was thinking of being more modern, and plugging my cell phone into a USB port on the TV and displaying them that way.
We probably should not go by my own father-daughter experience. From age about twelve she loathed and despised me, and if I had gone up in a puff of smoke at any point in front of her, she would have danced a jig and broken out the noisemakers and party favors. Her behavior drove me utterly batshit and I reckon mine did the same for her, but now everything is more or less copacetic and she is nearly twenty and has had to work at shit jobs and go to college classes. And been messed over by at least one Lothario type in Italy. And I got off the sauce and started acting like a reasonable facsimile of a human being again. (though some would question that, I am sure)
I also have incriminating photos AND the stories but am holding them in abeyance for the nonce, at least until the prospective husband shows up.
Here’s the embarrassing picture story to end all embarrassing picture stories (except that the wrong person was embarrassed).
When my brother was in high school–this would have been around 1970 or thereabouts–he asked a girl out on a date. When he showed up at her house to pick her up, she wasn’t ready yet. Her parents invited him in to sit in the living room and wait. In the living room, over the fireplace, was a large oil painting of the girl. Fully nude.
I’m pretty surprised that a painting like that would be displayed in the living room, but not shocked or offended.
When my elder niece was having her 21st she sent out invitations with a picture of her as a toddler sitting on the potty, stark naked. I knew that the photo existed but was surprised that she’d sent it out to all and sundry. Her then boyfriend, now husband was a cop, her mother an primary school teacher and sister in law a lawyer, so I didn’t have any concerns about the legality of it, but I wouldn’t want to have received this in the US. I’d probably get 500 years in some hellhole for that. But I think it’s a bit undignified to be sending out stuff like that. I’d die of embarrassment.
We live in a strange world, made strange by our fellow human beings, I reckon.
In Robert’s brother’s stead I would have been flummoxed, no idea what to think and it would have showed. In fact, if it happened to me now at my age I would still be flummoxed.
As for Greg’s example, my guess is that so long as it is the woman herself who sends out a pic like that, even here in the U.S., all is probably OK, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it, depending on what state it was in or what local yokels would wanna make something of it.