On phylogenetic instrumentalism

ADMIXTURE and STRUCTURE tests aren’t formal mixture tests. Yes! In fact, in the “open science” community this issue is repeated over and over and over, because people routinely get confused (our audience does not consist of population geneticists and phylogeneticists by and large). So sometimes it is necessary to lay it out in detail as in the post above. The key point to always remember is that population genetic & phylogenetic statistics and visualizations are a reduction and summary of reality in human palatable form. They tell us something, but they do not tell us everything. A common issue is that for purposes of mental digestion it is useful to label ancestral elements “European,” or on PCA refer to a “European-Asian” cline, as if the population genetic abstractions themselves are the measure of what European or Asian is. But European and Asian are themselves human constructions, and subject to debate ...