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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Experts: "Demagogues whipping up distrust in us is irrational, unfair and disruptive to progress."

Also experts: "We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam."

What's funny to me is that all the "splitters" magically become "lumpers" when we're talking about hominids

@The_Nybbler replied to you above:

Extant hominids, anyway. I don't think it affects the arguments over the Neanderthal or whether H. Habilis and H. Erectus are the same species.

I'm kind of replying to you both. West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population, a population less related to modern humans than Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians). That is, this ghost population split from the modern human line prior to Neanderthals and Denisovans.

As this ghost population gets better characterized genetically (or maybe even fossily, but fossils are tough to get in Sub-Saharan Africa) and the admixture percentage in Sub-Saharan Africans is better ascertained, I suspect that there will be an increased push to consider this ghost population as a sapiens subspecies or population (and thus Neanderthals and Denisovans would get lumped in, as well), especially if the admixture percentage from this ghost population in Sub-Saharan Africans is in the mid-single digits or higher.

Can't have Sub-Saharan Africans with the most archaic non-sapiens admixture, especially from an even more distantly related member of Homo.

Black interracial marriages have the highest divorce rate, so maybe not a wise public policy

In fact, marriages between black women and white men have a substantially lower divorce rate in the US than between white women and white men.

The greatest predictor of divorce is whether a white woman is involved:

White woman + black man: more than twice the white/white divorce rate (wwdr)

White woman + asian man: 1,60 times the wwdr

Whereas white man + asian woman is at the wwdr and white man + black woman at half that.

https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/But-Will-It-Last--Marital.pdf

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