Tags: review (book), race, sex differences
Status: draft
-[This is a pretty good book](https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/) about things we know about some ways in which people are taxonically different from each other! Honestly, I feel like I already knew most of this stuff?—sex differences in particular are kind of _my bag_—but some of the details were new to me, and it's nice to have it all bundled together in a paper book with lots of citations that I can chase down later when I'm skeptical or want more details about a specific thing! The main text is littered with pleonastic constructions like "The first author was This-and-Such" (when discussing the results of a multi-author paper) or "Details are given in the note<sup>[n]</sup>", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work".
+[This is a pretty good book](https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/) about things we know about some ways in which people are taxonically different from each other! Honestly, I feel like I already knew most of this stuff?—sex differences in particular are kind of _my bag_—but some of the details were new to me, and it's nice to have it all bundled together in a paper book with lots of citations that I can chase down later when I'm skeptical or want more details about a specific thing! The main text is littered with pleonastic constructions like "The first author was Thisand-Such" (when discussing the results of a multi-author paper) or "Details are given in the note<sup>[n]</sup>", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work".
In the first part of this blog post, I'm going to summarize what I learned from (or was reminded of by) _Human Diversity_, but it would be kind of unhealthy for you to rely too much on tertiary blog-post summaries of secondary semi-grown-up-book literature summaries, so if these topics happen to strike your scientific curiosity, maybe you should skip this post and [go buy the source material](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y82KNS1/)—or maybe even a grown-up textbook!
Murray devotes a section discussing [dimensions which they lie]
-The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as [Li _et al._ found in 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and dimensionality-reduction algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "race". Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from _K_ ancestral populations where _K_ := 2, and it'll
+The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
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+Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from _K_ fictive ancestral populations where _K_ := 2, and it'll infer that sub-Saharan Africans are descended entirely from one, East Asians and some native Americans are descended entirely from the other, and everyone else is an admixture. But if you set _K_ := 3, populations from Europe and the near East (which were construed as admixtures in the _K_ := 2 model) split off as a new "pure" cluster. And so on.
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+These ancestry groupings _are_ a "construct" in the sense that the groupings aren't "ordained by God"—the algorithm can find _K_ groupings for your choice of _K_—but _where_ it [draws those category boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) is a function of the data. The construct is doing _cognitive work_, concisely summarizing regularities in the dataset (which is _too large_ for humans to hold in their heads all at once): a map that reflects a territory.
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Humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff