Thursday, September 30, 2004
DOQRAPS, Population Edition
Scientists are some of my favorite people. They do all sorts of wonderful things, and make life much better. However, sometimes they say some really stupid shit. A Yale researcher has published a study claiming that the most recent common human ancestor lived between only 1,000 and 3,000 years ago. Now, not having any of the details of the study or its methodologies, I can say that this is Bloody Daft.
There is, to my knowledge, absolutely no reason to suspect that the Mayas or Incas had any contact with Europeans. They were in America 2,000-3,000 years ago, Europeans were not. Unless reproduction was a very different process back then, those are very separate genealogies. Clearly, the Australian aborigines were not interbreeding with even the Chinese that recently.
I'd like to defend scientists everywhere by pointing out that the author of this paper is a mathematician (famous for ignoring reality in favor of an elegant model), but the editors of a certain journal did, in fact, publish it.
There is, to my knowledge, absolutely no reason to suspect that the Mayas or Incas had any contact with Europeans. They were in America 2,000-3,000 years ago, Europeans were not. Unless reproduction was a very different process back then, those are very separate genealogies. Clearly, the Australian aborigines were not interbreeding with even the Chinese that recently.
I'd like to defend scientists everywhere by pointing out that the author of this paper is a mathematician (famous for ignoring reality in favor of an elegant model), but the editors of a certain journal did, in fact, publish it.
Comments:
Post a Comment
