Concepts taken as the basis of a world view not existing at all tends to throw people off as they cannot shake the later ideas of fixed hard boarders and citizenship by blood. To their worldview there should be a fundamental traceable line to back before these distinct entities existed. It is the us vs them line to many.
Their ideas of ethnicity are fundamentally lies which while old aren't as old as they claim to be. People tend to freak out when foundational beliefs are revealed to be lies regardless of how innocous - see the reaction to imaginary numbers, non-Euclidian geometry not only being proposed but proven to be real and the legendary Pythagorean freak out over pi proving that not all numbers are rational.
People from the Nordics had trade relations with Southern Europe and Asia all the way back in the bronze age. Alas, records are vague at best, but there's definitely reason to believe there was an influx of people and ideas from the Black Sea area before and during the migration period, just a few hundred years before the viking raids and Norse settlements all over Europe.
And as if that wasn't enough, the Norse were quite infamous for taking captured women as wives and they also took slaves from the peoples they raided. Those people didn't just dissapear from the gene record.
Using a PCA to prove an intrinsic point about ethnicity is as laughable as it gets. You're aware the vectors in a PCA are just linear combinations of the observed features, right? You're just staring at the same data a different way.
But of course I didn't expect any less from someone who quotes Slate Star Codex of all sources to prove a point.
> You're aware the vectors in a PCA are just linear combinations of the observed features, right?
Yes, I am. Do you have a reason to think that means PCA is bad at representing similarity and kinship because of this?
As for the Slate Star Codex source - that wasn't to prove anything, just to define the "weak man" term. I would have used "straw man", but then you'd dig up some idiot that genuinely believes whatever it is you're debunking as proof that it's not a straw man.
>Do you have a reason to think that means PCA is bad at representing similarity and kinship because of this?
I suggest you read up on the definition of "distance" and "similarity" before drinking the PCA kool-aid. You don't get to define an ad hoc distance just because it fits your ideas about ethnicity. But then, I only have the popgen community to back me up on this. What do you have?
>As for the Slate Star Codex source - that wasn't to prove anything, just to define the "weak man" term.
SSC, providing ammunition to online HBD proponents since 2013.
There's nothing ad hoc about it - PCA is an extremely fundamental statistical tool, and commonly used in genetics, especially to evaluate population structure. A few random examples:
And I know what intrinsic means, but I don't know what an "intrinsic point" is supposed to be, or what makes my point "intrinsic", as opposed to just a regular point.
Their ideas of ethnicity are fundamentally lies which while old aren't as old as they claim to be. People tend to freak out when foundational beliefs are revealed to be lies regardless of how innocous - see the reaction to imaginary numbers, non-Euclidian geometry not only being proposed but proven to be real and the legendary Pythagorean freak out over pi proving that not all numbers are rational.