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Hes basically saying neanderthals didn't go extinct, humans absorbed them as part of our evolution.

Modern humans are extremely insanely diverse. There are billions of us and we are everywhere. We've beaten up natural selection and all had sex with each other.

Neanderthal genes have not evolved for tens of thousands of years. Meanwhile humans have been getting crazy. So we still have those neanderthal genes, and a bunch of new ones too.

This, too, makes sense. Thanks.

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also need active trade and industry to collect taxes from, which requires robust laws and property rights.

Ok actual geneticist/ evolutionary biologist here: The two numbers (30,000 and 3 million) refer to different things.

The human genome is made up of about 3 billion nucleotides, like a string with 3 billion beads on it. Each of those nucleotides can be one of 4 variants: A, T, G or C - like having 4 different colours of beads.

There's inherent variation in the genome, different people will have different variants in different orders, so everyone has a unique string of nucleotides. However, that variation is not evenly distributed. There are some positions that are "polymorphic" (variable) where at a specific position different people have different variants, and there are positions that are "fixed" where virtually every person has the same letter at that position.

When we compare two people or two individuals of the same species we compare polymorphic sites, so if you pick two random people, on average 3 million of those 3 billion nucleotides at polymorphic sites will be different from each other.

When we compare species, we compare fixed sites. Those 30,000 differences between humans and neanderthals means that there are 30,000 sites in the genome where virtually all humans have one nucleotide, and virtually all neanderthals have a different nucleotide (eg, virtually all humans have a C while virtually all neanderthals have an A).

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I think this is a case of "we can't tie those 3 million differences to neanderthals specifically". Maybe they also had them but we don't have enough sampling to know. What we do have is relic neanderthal genes that have mostly spread throughout all the population in the few hundreds of generations since they mixed in.

It is a misleading statistic. The extent of variation in neanderthals is poorly known simply because identification of that type of variation requires thousands upon thousands of samples to be analyzed, and we don't have that. All we have is enough data to say what all neanderthals had in common with each other (what makes them specifically neanderthal). The extent of variation in existing humans is well known because there are millions of analyses. Not really comparing the same details either (comparing apples to oranges, in a way). Major components that are unique to Neanderthals are being compared to major components of existing humans in the one case, and in the other, trace components among humans are being compared to trace components in other humans. They don't differ from other humans in the 10,000 ways (almost?) all humans differ from neanderthals.

Comparing apples and oranges and saying they are different in 10 easy to identify ways ways and then pointing out there are hundreds of varieties of apples, and then pretending that this proves that apples are more varied than oranges.

IIRC the last like year or two, has seen a reduction in average global temperatures(i haven't taken the time to verify this so grain of salt). As opposed to the predicted models that used exponential growth rates to pollution.

Not a denier. I just think a lot of the internet has never really looked that close into whatever they spew about science, and have a limited view of statistics. For me it's been a while since I've dived into this particular topic, hence my big qualifier on my claim, but there's this strange faith like behavior everyone has about science, like you aren't allowed to question it, despite unlike in religion, science has all of their data and methods public record.

Idk it just irks me the wrong way when I try to have a real discussion about something, like expressing the flaws I see in the methods, and the discussion is taken over by imbalanced expletives(meaningless statements) and politics.

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Hmm, is this the "Lottery Fallacy"? The odds of *me* (specific) winning the lottery are very long. The odds of *someone* (general) winning the lottery are very good.

That is one reason genetic disorders can occur but far from the only reason.

Often times it’s just a one-off mutation that “breaks” a gene.

It can also just be a rare, recessive hereditary trait that would require both parents to be carriers of the affliction and still only give a 1 in 4 chance of the offspring having it.

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Lol. Here I am worried I came off as too defensive, but now that I've slept on it, I feel it was reasonable. They strike me as the person that thinks they are an expert on every subject because they read an article after taking some photos. Probably cans his farts to smell them later.

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it's a meaningful distinction. Think of it like a potato peeled by a peeler or by a knife. Both are peeled(eroded), but when observing the result you wouldn't miss that the process was different.

Glaciers erode by chunks, water by bits? But by being more specific and less poetic you start to introduce errors.

Yep, nothing better for weapons technology than requiring better cannons to stop your enemy

And you need Good taxation structure to be able to obtain the wealth necessary to pay for those cannons

And good taxation structure leads to stronger, more centralized governments

I never said civilizations required deepwater ports to begin. I am stating that larger empires or interconnected civilizations benefit from them.

Obviously, no early civ started by trading across the seas and oceans. Rivers, especially navigable ones, were key to the early governments that we see in Mesopotamia, Egypt, indus river valley, etc...

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