<p>To start off my father is a tribal member of the Blackfeet Nation, but i am not. I’m currently trying to contact the tribe for their qualificatons, but in the meantime I was wondering what to put on the common app. I think that it requires a tribal id, which I dont have, but is there any other way that I can prove my heritage? I even have a letter from the tribe stating that my brother and I are direct decendants of a member, but i dont know if i can attach the form to the app or not…
I dont really know if i have the right to claim it, but it is in my background so… idk lol</p>
<p>You keep using the word “argument” for statements of fact. </p>
<p>The correspondence between the genetic clusters and the population-group labels (which were given as part of the data but not used in forming the clusters) is an empirical finding of Feldman’s study. It is reported as such in the paper. The study authors don’t argue for the correlation of the genetic and social labellings, they state it as fact (because it is one) along with similar findings such as the consistency between the genetic groupings formed under different specifications. </p>
<p>Every other study has found similar facts, a phenomenon which is itself a fact. </p>
<p>Something that is not a fact, only an argument and a speculation, is the idea that if any study in the past few decades had discovered a serious genetic challenge to conventional race labels, it would be front-page news all over the world, and would thereafter be an automatically cited talisman in every discussion of the issue. </p>
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<p>No, I disagreed with utterly false factual assertions in that essay, such as the incredible claim that junk DNA is insignificant.</p>
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<p>You continue to confuse facts and arguments. I’ve reported the fact that, at present, social and genetic classifications are highly correlated. They could decorrelate in the future, or there could be genetic divergence driven by all sorts of factors. How does speculation on the future in any way affect the viability of classification today?</p>
<p>“Can we please end this post?
There’s way too many replies”</p>
<p>I agree that the format to which this broad discussion has been isolated is inappropriate. It’s very difficult to go through dozens of pages of discussion.</p>
<p>^ The new Common Application form and several other downloadable college application forms should be available by soon, making convenient opening a new thread. The FAQ posts at the beginning of the thread answer most of the commonly asked questions.</p>
<p>The correspondence between the genetic clusters and the population-group labels (which were given as part of the data but not used in forming the clusters) is an empirical finding of Feldman’s study. It is reported as such in the paper. The study authors don’t argue for the correlation of the genetic and **social labellings, they state it as fact<a href=“because%20it%20is%20one”>/b</a> along with similar findings such as the consistency between the genetic groupings formed under different specifications…
<p>That’s incorrect, and has been refuted above. To repeat: Feldman does not in any way, shape, or form, “dispel” the social labellings. He dispels exclusively geographic classification, which is very different from the social labelling, by noting that the Middle East population has geographically diverse ancestry. </p>
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<p>Once again: Feldman has not displayed any destruction of social race “typology”. The within-group versus between-group remarks are fallacious, for reasons that I have pointed out (and you have not answered) several times already.</p>
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<p>The central claim of the essay what that junk DNA is phenotypically insignificant, so that genetic clustering revealed by studies looking at that DNA cannot have “salient” consequences (ones going beyond classification itself). That is pure hogwash; the junk DNA regulates the expression of the coding DNA, among other known and suspected functions. It is silly to dismiss the function of junk DNA as nonexistent when biology is just starting to understand it.</p>
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<p>It is the central argument of the essay and is the reason you quoted the essay in the first place. If that central point is hogwash, your use of the essay collapses with it. That is the very opposite of straw-man argumentation; it is attacking precisely the point that was raised.</p>
<p>Another fallacy from that essay is that it’s possible for the junk DNA to do nothing and for it to still make a big difference. All that is needed is for the classification by the 300 or so junk DNA markers to <em>correlate very highly</em> with the (unperformed) classification by some other, meaningful and possibly unexplored loci. Which is exactly what one expects to be the case: these 300 or those other 500 features will display similar patterns of correlation; one needs only a small slice to see the genetic clustering. See, for instance, the papers by Nick Patterson and David Reich on eigenanalysis (PCA) where they quantify this using some modern statistical tools.</p>
<p>That’s the Lewontin who famously committed “Lewontin’s Fallacy” (arguing as though all traits are independent, when their frequencies are correlated).</p>
<p>Are you done quoting Feldman? It’s interesting to compare his lecture with Lewontin’s essay, since Feldman predicts that “everything” of importance will be found to differ statistically between populations and be reflected in genomic differences. In his lecture, he specifically predicted that SNP’s related to intelligence will soon be found, and will vary (somewhat) in frequency between populations. His remarks against an overly racial picture of the world were given as sound bites that the “emergency response team” of scientists could use against the “negative comments” such discoveries could generate. The words in quotation marks are all his, from the lecture.</p>
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<p>It’s a mistake to assume that only genes can encode differences. Gene regulation, not genes themselves, may account for most of the evolutionary difference between chimps and humans. </p>
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<p>Measurable differences exist, are significant, and are detectable whatever the type of genetic markers used, as long as there is enough data.</p>
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<p>“Failure” is a strange way to describe the PCA studies. The one Lewontin points at was several decades ago. The statistical methods have gotten sharper and sharper, and the data more abundant. A look at some of the recent papers with their clustering diagrams, and some theoretical papers describing the basis for the inference of cluster structure, should dispel any such easy dismissals.</p>
<p>And no, it’s not confined to humans. Rosenberg, Feldman and several of their coauthors from the human genetics studies had a paper on breeds of chickens being separated by the same methods, using a very small number of markers.</p>