The fact that people believe this demonstrates an egregious misunderstanding of how genetics works. People have never been "bred" in any meaningful sense (e.g. for a long enough or in a consistently isolated way for selection to be relevant) in human history.

What does being bred have to do with the pattern of genetics influencing behavior?

Are you saying there aren’t enough differences in human genetics to allow us to group them in a meaningful way?

I'm saying it's sad people still think eugenics has merit, despite being profoundly debunked and disproven repeatedly over the past century (and more).

> a consistently isolated way

The San diverged from the rest of humanity ~200,000 years ago. Australian Aboriginals ~40,000 years ago. Amerindians ~12,000 years ago.

No one’s been breeding humans but there’s been plenty of reproductive isolation. Enough that differences in selection pressures could easily lead to differences in traits. For a visible example 5,000 years ago there were no populations that looked like Swedes. Humans that pale did not exist apart from albinos.

I don't see how one leads to another. The effect of living in Australia on a population of humans is entirely different than the effect of selectively being breeding dogs to be small and obedient. Just because both circumstances can exert selective pressure does not mean they are the same. Humans the world over, despite different geographies, have the same problems to contend with-- that's not the same thing as what we do when we selectively breed chihuahuas and great danes.

I’m not saying there are differences in (pick a trait, any trait). I’m saying that anyone who tells you that differences don’t exist has to prove it. Rice farming is a very different way of life to pastoralist is very different to hoe agriculture is very different to hunting and gathering. Some populations have been following the ~same lifestyle for over a thousand years. There’s no principled reason that can’t cause populations to diverge. If someone wants to say different populations are the same in some non-metaphysical way they need to prove it. They can’t just assert it. Religion works on faith. Scientists bring facts.

>Religion works on faith. Scientists bring facts.

What does religion have to do with this? I didn't say to to rely on faith, rely on the scientific institution that already came to a concensus a long time ago. The studies are out there, if you want to see proof. Just because I don't have them on hand doesn't mean they don't exist and need to be taken on faith

> Just because both circumstances can exert selective pressure does not mean they are the same.

Selective pressure makes change. Different selective pressure makes difference. Reproductive isolation makes large differences possible. Humans have lived in very different environments and been reproductively isolated. There is no a priori reason to believe human populations are the same on every trait. And they’re not. Similar on most things but not on everything.

The main reason differences don't exist is that the group of people they always want to claim has the differences (black people) aren't genetically related to each other and have more diversity than the rest of humanity.

Skin color is a useful adaptation to getting enough Vitamin D and folate but predicts approximately nothing else about you or your genes, or how related you are to people with different skin color. A single generation more of population mixing and you can have a direct sibling with a completely different appearance.

All that is true. How does it relate to the possibility or not of large differences between human populations? Interbreeding will reduce variation extremely quickly but we know reproductive isolation was very high between continents for a very long time. Even individual villages in India have jatis that have been living next to each other for centuries that haven’t interbred for over 1,000 years.

Genes run in families, not villages. How are the traits spreading across the entire population in that 1000 years enough to make the "large difference" instead of being averaged out again? Existing cases of that are founder effects or mating with someone truly different like a Denisovan[0].

More importantly this knowledge would be useless if you found it, because the only reason to know things is to make predictions, and this doesn't let you predict anything about the next generation. We're in modernity now and they can just move somewhere else.

[0] which funny enough isn't considered a subspecies and doesn't have a Latin name because the scientist who discovered them thinks Latin names are pretentious.

> How are the traits spreading across the entire population in that 1000 years enough to make the "large difference" instead of being averaged out again?

Mating isn’t random. People are more likely to mate with those who live near them. So Southern Chinese are more like each other than Northern Chinese. Geography matters. Distance matters. If there’s reproductive isolation difference can emerge and persist. If there isn’t it won’t.

Geography isn’t the only way populations stay distinct. Religion, language, means of sustenance can do it too but interbreeding can reduce difference very, very quickly as you note.

None of this is true, there are no known human subspecies, not to mention human subspecies differentiated by geography.

Who said anything about subspecies? All human groups can breed with no issue. Humans are clearly differentiated by geography. Swedes don’t look like Arabs. Arabs don’t look like Sub Saharan Africans. None of these groups look like Indians or East Asians. Quite visible geographic differentiation.

If the specific claims I made about the length of reproductive isolation are false you will find it easy to provide sources to that effect.

Polar bears and brown bears can breed and produce fertile offspring, but we reckon them to be not just subspecies, but separate species altogether. Whether to lump or split is rather arbitrary.

Thus, it's observably true that the position that there are no human subspecies isn't a scientific one, but rather a moral one. Personally I'm comfortable with that, because being Catholic I account all human beings to be created in the image of God and equal in worth in His eyes. Whether or not there are genetically determined differences in mean behavior between different ancestry groups in Homo Sapiens doesn't change that one bit. Neither for that matter does how scientists choose to classify them.

All of those people you've named can and do look like one another, depending on circumstance. Every trait you can think of that you'd list as a "characteristic" of one of the groups you've named can be found in abundance in numerous other places as well, or accounted for due to environmental factors. There is no "canonical" "Swede" or "Arab".

Your reliance on stereotype is not only racist but it's factually wrong.

This is well studied, and if you are actually curious, there are many, many sources of information about this topic you can find yourself.

Race does not exist, genetically. Period.

> Race does not exist, genetically. Period.

And yet ancestry.com can comfortably tell anyone which continental scale human population or populations they are descended from and that happens to map pretty neatly to the US Census Bureau's notion of race.

Being aware that major geographic features of the Earth such as the Atlantic Ocean, the Himalayas, and the Sahara Desert were more or less impermeable barriers to gene flow between continental human populations until about five centuries ago isn't racist and you should stop calling people names.

It can tell you which ancestral population you come from decently well, not totally accurately - on 23andMe "French & German" is a group but has really poor recall, and "Latin American" is not a group nor "Aboriginal Australian" despite how possible they look.

But that's just clustering and it would work on any random groups you chose. In particular, it would still work if they picked a group where none of the members were related to each other (and indeed that's how it works now). As long as you're related to one of them it'd still be able to show you're a member of it.

Ancestry.com simply does not do what you're claiming here. The whole "fun" of ancestry.com is that each person who does it shows up in surprising places across the globe, regardless of their supposed "race", because genetics don't adhere to any concept of "race" as it exists in culture.

And the this Barrier Theory was proposed by eugenicists in the 20s and thoroughly debunked by the 30s.

Please tell us more about the significant gene flow between Europe and North America prior to the Age of Sail.

I didn’t say anything about race. The word is useless, imprecise.

There’s no canonical Swede or Arab? You don’t say. As I mentioned no one who looks like a Swede existed 5,000 years ago. That there is overlap between population characteristics does not mean they are identical. Some populations don’t overlap though. Healthy Pygmy and Maasai adult men do not overlap in height distribution. If you restrict your sample of Swedes to those with all ancestors born in Sweden in 1800 and do a similar restriction for Congolese there will be no overlap in skin color.

You definitely keep on talking about race. "Swede" is a race. "Arab" is a race, as you use it.

There absolutely were ancient people who shared genetic traits (and therefore some expressed characteristics) with modern Swedish people. There literally must have been, that's how genetics work, and 5,000 years is barely a blink, genetically.

What you are conflating (among many, many things) are environmental impacts on human maturation with genetics, and in exactly the same way that the eugenicists of the early 1900s were attempting to do.

Every single thing you've said so far has been thoroughly debunked in the ensuing 100 years. You are spouting old, racist tropes, and I assume don't even know it.

But maybe you do know it, and maybe that's the point.

> There absolutely were ancient people who shared genetic traits (and therefore some expressed characteristics) with modern Swedish people. There literally must have been, that's how genetics work, and 5,000 years is barely a blink, genetically.

That’s kind of my point. 5,000 years ago there were no people who looked like Swedes. Now there are because of selection pressures. A new genotype came into existence by working on standing variation and some de novo mutations. If we agree that selection pressures can radically change the appearance of a people then there’s not much to disagree on. Evolution can work on many things apart from physical appears.

Different places have different selection pressures, with the obvious consequences.

> 5,000 years ago there were no people who looked like Swedes. Now there are because of selection pressures.

100% false. You need to realize that. 5,000 years is not enough time to do anything significant, genetically.

Are you saying that there have always been people who looked like Swedes in Sweden? Because from my reading of the literature 5,000 years ago there people living there had blue eyes but dark hair and a complexion we’d associate with Mediterranean peoples.

Most dog breeds were created in less than 150 years. Call it 150 generations. 5,000 years is 200 generations at 25 years per generation. Enough time to change quite dramatically.

There is no such thing as a genetic "Swede". Literally every trait you could name is neither exclusive on its own or in any particular combination with Swedish people.

And no, humans were not bred like dogs, so your math is both offensive and completely useless.

At this point I'm beginning to think you're being intentionally hateful.

> humans were not bred like dogs

That the selection pressures on dogs were due to humans performing artificial selection and those on humans due to the environment does not mean that they weren’t both selection pressures. Thus brown ancestors to the very pale Swedes.

Many, if not most, human populations spent the majority of their existence with some kind of arranged marriage system. I wouldn't say "bred like dogs" because it's insulting, but human mating and procreation isn't remotely random. This is true even in societies that no longer practice arranged marriages.

> Many, if not most, human populations spent the majority of their existence with some kind of arranged marriage system.

We’re only confident agriculture has existed for ~5,000 years. Hunter gatherers don’t have the kinds of complex societies that can do organized coercion in a sustained way over generations. Even if you restrict yourself to post agriculture arranged marriage is far from universal and there’s no evidence I’m aware of of a sustained breeding programme selecting for some trait among humans.

Not random and selectively bred work at very different speeds.

> Hunter gatherers don’t have the kinds of complex societies that can do organized coercion in a sustained way over generations

Extrapolating from the few extant hunter gatherer tribes that never achieved complex civilization to the tribes that invented agriculture is obviously wildly erroneous.

This is so completely false it borders on offensive.

You are speaking about sensitive matters you know very little.

People were never "bred", arranged marriages were never genetically consistent across even one generation, let alone many, and your continued ignorant speculation aligns disturbingly well with how eugenicists described human evolution through the early 20th century.

There were no meaningfully powerful selection pressures on Swedes, such as the pressures we applied to dogs, not in the time period you've specified.

Please stop spouting racist ideas, these were debunked thoroughly in the 1910s by Franz Boas and then over and over again by his students.

It absolutely is if there is a severe population bottleneck that selects for some trait in the survivors.

...which has never happened in human history. Bottlenecks? Yes. Bottlenecks that selected specifically for a specific gene? No.

It has happened countless times in history.

See the sickle cell trait for instance.

I feel you're unable to discuss productively on this matter because you seem to think that believing in the concept of phenotypes means support for eugenics... which no one here is advocating for.

Tibetans and Andeans both have adaptations for living at high altitudes. The Tibetan ones are better because they come from Denisovans, predating the existence of modern humans. There’s been massive positive selection on lactose persistence. 5,000 years ago no human adults could digest lactase. The differences in diabetes among human populations track closely with length of time they have been using agriculture.

That is not an example of a bottleneck, nor is it an example of a genetic adaptation occurring recently, as both happened more than ten thousand years ago.

And none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the cultural concept of race. There are people who are not "Tibetans" who have this genetic adaptation, and there are "Tibetans" who do not have this genetic adaptation.

Further, the pairing of this genetic trait with other genetic traits does not exist. Having this genetic trait does not make you more likely to have a set of other genetic traits, and none of the genetic traits add up to a specific "Tibetan" set of features or traits, all of which you would need to have to be called "Tibetan".

There is no such thing as "genetic race".

Please stop violating the HN guidelines. I get that you're emotional about the subject and have a religious zeal for it, but that's no excuse for name-calling.

There is no evidence that anyone you're replying to is writing in bad faith. They may be wrong, although you've failed to show that in any way that satisfies intellectual curiosity, but that doesn't justify personal attacks and slimy rhetoric[1].

[1] http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist32.htm

It's not your job to police Hacker News. If I've violated a rule, that's up to the moderators of this site to police, not you.

You are a user, same as me. I'd even argue attempting to enforce the rules as a user is a violation of those very same rules.

I believe the people I'm talking to right now are supporting racist ideas and policies, and that makes those people, definitionally, racists. Including you! I apply no moral judgement to that term here; if you do not want to be called a racist, do not support ideas and policies that are racist.

> And none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the cultural concept of race.

Quite true. Race is a useless and imprecise term and it’s a pity you felt the need to start talking about it. The clustering of traits among human ancestry population groups and the reasons for that don’t need that baggage.

I didn't start talking about it, you did when you started talking about "Swedes" and "Tibetans".