Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…This is 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. This is the population that’s ancestral to West Africans, to most East Africans, to all non-Africans. There are a couple of populations in Africa that have substantial ancestry coming from more divergent groups. For example, Khoisan from Southern Africa or Central African rainforest hunter-gatherers have substantial fractions of their ancestry from groups that diverged maybe 200,000 years ago from the other lineages. But all of these groups today are able to go to college and do everything everybody else does. There is no evidence that there is any key mutation lacking in some groups that is not present in the others. The differences we see between different groups of people, especially if this group 50,000 to 100,000 years ago had a very small population size… I think last time we were discussing on the order of 10,000 people. So almost everybody in the world, or the variance we see between different humans today, was latent in this group. I get your point that if you just stack up different things across the genome, stacking them up really has a big effect. But it’s interesting that we have so many different groups in the world today, and all that diversity comes from a very small population size. A lot of us in human genetics think that our population contains within it the clay that’s needed to make almost any trait. And that depending on environmental conditions or selection conditions, the mean value of these traits will move in different directions. There’s an empirical question about how much selection there’s been in different human populations over time. One of the things this new work we’re involved in is showing is that at least in the last 18,000 years in this part of the world, there has been significant movement, at least for a handful of important traits. We looked at more than 500 traits. About 100 complex traits showed significant movement in a systematic direction over this time period. It really does seem that there is a response to the environments people are living in that has occurred over this period, and that is potentially stronger than in previous periods.…

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