> 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".