Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Human Genetic History/Archive 4

Useful sources on human genetic history
Wikipedia has a lot of interesting articles based on the ongoing research in human molecular genetics that helps trace the lineage of people living in various places on the earth. I've been reading university textbooks on human genetics "for fun" since the 1980s, and for even longer I've been visiting my state flagship university's vast BioMedical Library to look up topics on human medicine and health care policy. On the hypothesis that better sources build better articles as all of us here collaborate to build an encyclopedia, I thought I would suggest some sources for improving articles on human genetic history and related articles. The Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine provide a helpful framework for evaluating sources.

The guidelines on reliable sources for medicine remind editors that "it is vital that the biomedical information in all types of articles be based on reliable, third-party, published sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."

"Ideal sources for such content includes literature reviews or systematic reviews published in reputable medical journals, academic and professional books written by experts in the relevant field and from a respected publisher, and medical guidelines or position statements from nationally or internationally recognised expert bodies."

The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that all "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources" (emphasis in original). They helpfully define a primary source in medicine as one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. By contrast, a secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources, usually to provide an overview of the current understanding of a medical topic. The general Wikipedia guidelines let us know that "Articles should rely on secondary sources whenever possible. For example, a review article, monograph, or textbook is better than a primary research paper. When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised: Wikipedians should never interpret the content of primary sources for themselves."

On the topic of human genetic history, a widely cited primary research article is a 1972 article by Richard Lewontin, which I have seen cited in many of the review articles, monographs, and textbooks I have read over the years.



As Wikipedians, we can evaluate where the findings in Lewontin's article fit in the current understanding of the topic of human genetic variation by reading current reliable secondary sources in medicine.

Some Wikipedia articles give weighty emphasis to commentary essay published years after Lewontin published his primary research article on human diversity, when his primary research results had been replicated in many other studies and his bottom line conclusion that "about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups" had been taken up by many textbooks on genetics and medicine. In 2003, A. W. F. Edwards wrote a commentary essay in the journal BioEssays



in which Edwards proposes a statistical model for classifying individuals into groupings based on haplotype data. Edwards wrote, "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification," pointing to his own work with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the author of the book



which I read soon after it was published in 1994. In general, Edwards cites a lot of publications from his collaboration with Cavalli-Sforza, and mentions that collaboration prominently in his subsequent review article



in which he describes their method for tracing ancestry with genes. Edwards even shows a photograph of Cavalli-Sforza with him in 1963 in his 2009 article, emphasizing their scholarly friendship.

So I wanted to look up Cavalli-Sforza's current views as well while I traced citations of the Lewontin 1972 article and the Edwards 2003 article in subsequent secondary sources. Through searches with Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, both from my home office computer and from a university library computer, I found a number of books and articles that cite both the Lewontin paper and the Edwards paper. Through a specialized set of wide-reaching keyword searches (for example, "Lewontin Edwards") on the university library's vast database subscriptions, I was able to obtain the full text of many of those articles and of whole books that discuss what current science says about grouping individuals of species Homo sapiens into race groups. I also found more up to date discussions by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Human Genome Diversity Project.

Listed here are sources that have the following characteristics: (1) they cite both previous articles by Lewontin and the 2003 article by Edwards, discussing the underlying factual disagreement between those authors, (2) they are Wikipedia reliable sources for medicine (in particular, they are secondary sources such as review articles or textbooks rather than primary research articles), and (3) they are or have been available to me in full text through book-buying, library lending, author sharing of full text on the Internet, or a university library database. They are arranged in approximate chronological order, so that you can see how the newer sources cite and evaluate the previous sources as genetics research continues. The sources listed here are not exhaustive, but they are varied and authoritative, and they cite most of the dozens of primary research articles on the topic, analyzing and summarizing the current scientific consensus.



This first book (Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008) is useful because it includes a chapter co-authored by Richard Lewontin in which he updates his views.









The book chapter by Barbujani and Colonna (2011) above is especially useful for this article as a contrast between biodiversity in other animals and biodiversity in Homo sapiens.





By the way, the Barbujani, Ghirotto, and Tassi (2013) article has a very interesting discussion of SNP typing overlaps across the entire individual genome among some of the first human beings to have their entire individual genomes sequenced, with an especially interesting Venn diagram that would be a good graphic to add to this article.



An author who is intimately familiar with Edwards's statistical approach, because he has been a collaborator in fieldwork and co-author on primary research articles with Edwards, is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Cavalli-Sforza is a medical doctor who was a student of Ronald Fisher in statistics, who has devoted most of his career to genetic research. In an invited review article for the 2007 Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Cavalli-Sforza joins issue directly with the underlying factual disagreement among previous authors, but cites different previous publications.



"GENETIC VARIATION BETWEEN AND WITHIN POPULATIONS, AND THE RACE PROBLEM

In the early 1980s, Lewontin (11) showed that when genetic variation for protein markers is estimated by comparing two or more random individuals from the same populations, or two or more individuals from the whole world, the former is 85% as large as the latter. This means that the variation between populations is the residual 15%, and hence relatively trivial. Later research carried out on a limited number of populations and mostly, though not only, on protein markers has confirmed this analysis. The Rosenberg et al. data actually bring down Lewontin’s estimate to 5%, or even less. Therefore, the variation between populations is even smaller than the original 15%, and we also know that the exact value depends on the choice of populations and markers. But the between-population variation, even if it is very small is certainly enough to reconstruct the genetic history of populations—that is their evolution—but is it enough for distinguishing races in some useful way? The comparison with other mammals shows that humans are almost at the lower extreme of the scale of between-population variation. Even so, subtle statistical methods let us assign individuals to the populations of origin, even distinguishing populations from the same continent, if we use enough genetic markers. But is this enough for distinguishing races? Darwin already had an answer. He gave two reasons for doubting the usefulness of races: (1) most characters show a clear geographic continuity, and (2) taxonomists generated a great variety of race classifications. Darwin lists the numbers of races estimated by his contemporaries, which varied from 2 to 63 races.

Rosenberg et al. (16 and later work) analyzed the relative statistical power of the most efficient subdivisions of the data with a number of clusters varying from 2 to 6, and showed that five clusters have a reasonable statistical power. Note that this result is certainly influenced by the populations chosen for the analysis. The five clusters are not very different from those of a few partitions that had already existed in the literature for some time, and the clusters are: (a) a sub-Saharan African cluster, (b) North Africa–Europe plus a part of western Asia that is approximately bounded eastward by the central Asian desert and mountains, (c) the eastern rest of Asia, (d ) Oceania, and (e) the Americas. But what good is this partition? The Ramachandran et al. (15) analysis of the same data provides a very close prediction of the genetic differences between the same populations by the simplest geographic tool: the geographic distance between the two populations, and two populations from the same continent are on average geographically closer than two from different ones. However, the Rosenberg et al. analysis (16) adds the important conclusion that the standard classification into classical continents must be modified to replace continental boundaries with the real geographic barriers: major oceans, or deserts like the Sahara, or other deserts and major mountains like those of central Asia. These barriers have certainly decreased, but they have not entirely suppressed genetic exchanges across them. Thus, the Rosenberg et al. analysis confirms a pattern of variation based on pseudocontinents that does not eliminate the basic geographic continuity of genetic variation. In fact, the extension by Ramachandran et al. of the original Rosenberg et al. analysis showed that populations that are geographically close have an overwhelming genetic similarity, well beyond that suggested by continental or pseudocontinental partitions."

A year later Cavalli-Sforza joined seventeen other genetics researchers as co-authors of a review article, published as an "open letter" to other scholars, on using racial categories in human genetics.



Other current review articles related to human genetic history include



I look forward to collaborating with many Wikipedians in updating articles in the scope of this project. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 20:23, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Statistics: are stubs being expanded?
In a deletion discussion at the Dutch Wikipedia, I stated that an existing article invites improving, much more than a non-existant article invites creation adding that statistics show the truth of this statement. Naturally, people required me to come up with the facts, but I am unable to find the statement I remember to have read.

If I am true, the statement was not in Wikipedia itself, but in a more or less scientific article defending the creation of large numbers of bot stubs about genes, perhaps by someone who was involved in creating the bot articles. All of this has happened a few years ago. Can anyone remember or find this article or stats about improvement in Wikipedia texts? Regards, Bertux (talk) 06:43, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * B.t.w.: As English is not my native language this text will surely not be spotless. Feel free to correct it. Bertux (talk) 06:43, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * FYI: I left the same message at Talk:WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology. Bertux (talk) 06:54, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Zhivotovsky method
Let us delete all age estimates based on "Zhivotovsky method". YOMAL SIDOROFF-BIARMSKII (talk) 21:30, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Requesting community good article review by project members--thanks for your help
Haplogroup E-V38, an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:41, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

AfC submission - 27/05
Draft:Scladina. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 17:12, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!


Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

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Harej (talk) 16:57, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

There is an RFC that may affect a page in this project
There is an RFC that may affect a page in this project at WikiProject Tree of Life. The topic is Confusion over taxonomy of subtribe Panina and taxon homininae (are chimps hominins)?

Please feel free to comment there. SPACKlick (talk) 17:03, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

ITN candidate Australopithecus deyiremeda
Hello. The article Australopithecus deyiremeda has been proposed on In the news candidates -- Aronzak (talk) 16:39, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

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The Kalash
Hello there, I hope this project isn't as inactive as it seems. A bit of text has recently been added to Kalash people that uses some genetic data to make some bold statements. The source looks sensible enough, but the wiki editor's interpretation seems a bit off the mark. Would anyone be able to have a look and set it straight? Many thanks. Uanfala (talk) 23:56, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
 * After getting some help from the reference desk it's been resolved now. Uanfala (talk) 12:56, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

"Forensic Genealogy"
I recently came across the term "Forensic Genealogy" for the first time, meaning loosely the "use of something other than standard records to add to your family history", to encompass scientific/technological methods such as photo enhancement, as well as genetic genealogy. An alternative definition suggests essentially that "forensic genealogy" would be genealogy suitable for use in a court of law (ie applicable to such a use, and carried out to an appropriate standard etc).

Is this term in widespread use?

In particular it was recently added multiple times in this edit to the article Colleen M. Fitzpatrick, by User:CFitzp, the apparent subject of the article, who is styled as "widely regarded as the founder of modern Forensic Genealogy", as well as having authored a book by the name.

I have opened a section at WP:COIN asking for input on the article, but specific input from members of this project might be appropriate on the extent to which "Forensic Genealogy" is indeed a meaningful / well-specifed / common term in widespread use; or whether caution is appropriate in using a neologism which appears to be closely associated with the author. Jheald (talk) 23:09, 21 March 2016 (UTC)


 * This term seems rarely used in the academic literature. The individual does get some press, as in this Scientific American article but it seems like a marketing term more than anything. We have articles on DNA profiling for forensic genetics and Genealogical DNA test for genealogical genetics. I'm not sure that Forensic Genealogy adds anything new to these topics from a genetic point of view. --Mark viking (talk) 00:05, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Should sections on genetics be removed from pages on ethnic groups?
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Jheald (talk) 16:47, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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Extension of 'Topic Page' review articles from PLOS Computational Biology to PLOS Genetics
T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 12:38, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Caucasian race
Caucasian race is in need of attention and improvement, I am discussing how to improve the article with another user particularly regarding the currency of typological views of human races (as opposed to a genomic/population based view). Any input will be appreciated. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:18, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

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RfC
Please see Reliable_sources/Noticeboard Jytdog (talk) 17:04, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

RfC: Origin of the Romanians
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WikiProject Genealogy
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