graham was on my committee and i know him personally even before grad school (this is razib).

from the acknowledgments his 2013 paper https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

"Thanks to Razib Khan, Sharon Browning, and Don Conrad for several useful discussions"

you can nitpick the piece but this is from an attack piece on me:

"MANY PROMINENT geneticists familiar with Khan’s work do take him seriously. “I don’t agree with everything that Razib writes, but I think that he does write about population genetics very clearly,” said Graham Coop, a population genetic"

so yes, put your faith in graham :-) you know his work so little you weren't aware i was going to easily pivot in this direction

Hey Razib! I was wondering if you ever had a chance to revisit this old piece of yours and if the views expressed in it still hold up:

https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply...

you can infer sizes from genetic diversity ('effective pop')

for the out of africa group i've seen sizes from 100 to 10,000. i used 1,000 to 10,000 as a likely moderate number, and the range also points to the census size being larger

we can assume that conditional on the size of OoA the other groups were way larger (10x or more). otoh, the main thing i did not explore is that i am now believing that africans themselves especially agriculturalists are 'compounds' of various bottlenecked groups (why west africans are closer to eurasians than they are to khoisan)

It's worth noting that effective population size != actual population size. The former is simply a lower bound on it. If the population is structured enough and in the right ways, the actual size can be orders of magnitude higher. This has been an issue with several supposed bottlenecks within African populations.

the rule of thumb for mammals is Ne is 30% of census size.

i think this is probably an overestimate tbh (assumes poisson distribution of offspring).

I'm not sure that's super applicable to humans. Doesn't it also assume panmixia and non-overlapping generations?

Either way, my understanding is that all indications point to middle and late Pleistocene populations being highly structured and "unusual" as far as standard assumptions go.

i talk about introgression in this post https://razib.substack.com/p/here-be-humans

the piece was not exhaustive and meant to be an intro

Dang, you created this account back in 2015 and your first comment is from 1 hour ago.

yeah. no idea why it's even called 'davisYC' aside from the fact i lived in davis then -razib

I followed you on Twitter for several years and also heard your interview on the New Liberals podcast. Would love to see you around here more often as well.

Cheers. These blogs are a treat.