I don't understand what you are talking about. My background is political science. Like I wrote in my previous post, political science is part of the social science. Scientists with the social science background (sociology, politicology, psychology and EVEN history) have to use descriptive & inferential statistics all the time. Otherwise their studies and theories would never be considered 'scientific'/academic. Social science tries to explain the behavior of humans, political actors, interaction of societies on different levels. To explain behavionarism and explain different (historical) paradigms you have to use statistics.
History doesn't mean only field research or just read a historical book or something like that. It is to UNDERSTAND the history and make future 'predictions'. I know people who studied just history and they are using statistics all the time, since history repeats itself and since there are many patterns in human behavior truth history. That's how you can 'predict' the downfall of dictators (political entities/actors), since there is a correlation (patterns) in their behavior. That's why (and how) you can predict the downfall of let say Turkey.
I don't understand what you are trying to prove. You are 'tilting at windmills'...
You must be kidding, right? There is no serious maths in social sciences. Using statistics, making statistics, making predictions, calculating probabilities and stuff like that aren't real maths. That's the kind of things everybody does. I consider that if something is not harder than university entrance level, then it's not worth mentioning it. I have compiled the statistics table for the haplogroups on this sites, which underlie all my research and my articles and were used to make my haplogroup frequency maps. But I would never say that this is mathematics. If I go to the supermarket and add up mentally the price for all the items in the basket, I am not turning into a mathematician. That's something everybody does. When I translate my articles into French or Italian, I don't consider myself a translator, because that's not my job or my field of research or interest. That's just something I have to do. I made all the web design of this site but you never see me call myself a web designer. I can replace a light fixture or fix a leaky pipe under a sink in my house, but that doesn't make of me an electrician or a plumber. The maths used in social sciences is so basic compared to those used in physics or artificial intelligence that it falls into the same 'everyday use' category. And by the way, I also studied economics and I know that theoretical models in social sciences are far from accurate and sometimes dangerously wrong.
My disagreement with Mark and Debbie above comes mainly from the fact that they seem to believe that it is possible to make useful predictions about historical population migrations solely based on theoretical models, completely disregarding all the other fields I have cited in this discussion. You can predict the trajectory of a comet using theoretical models and maths, but you simply can't do it for haplogroup migrations. I have never seen it work, and I can't imagine how it could possibly work. But I remain open to a demonstration. We seem to hold two completely opposite positions:
- I favour a transdisciplinary approach using logic, statistics and analysis of all evidence from every discipline to maximise our understanding of human population history. I favour hard facts over abstract theoretical models. From my point of view, each large migratory event in history (e.g. Neolithic expansion from the near East) is unique and should be used very carefully to extrapolate on other migrations in different ages, cultures and environments (because humans are not just numbers and their behaviour and success is by nature unpredictable).
- They insist that the only valid and recognised methods in population genetics is based on theoretical models that can be mathematically tested. They believe that once we have found a model that works, it can be applied in any population, like the immutable laws of physics. From their standpoint, my methodology is useless because it is case by case and cannot be tested and re-used (which would be understandable if we were working on exact sciences, but we aren't).
I also believe that there are too many unknown factors even for simple mathematical models to be accurate in that field. For example, the age or TMRCA of haplogroups can be calculated from the accumulated mutations, each tempered by the statistical chance of a mutation occurring at that position in the DNA sequence (since mutations are known to happen more frequently in some places than others). But that doesn't take into account the
historical population size at each point in the phylogenetic tree, nor the local radioactivity, which increase the chances of mutation happening. A major difference in population size between two branches of a same haplogroup, for example between Siberian R1a (low population) and Indian R1a (high population) can lead to a number of accumulated mutations hundreds or thousands of times superior in the Indian group over the same period of time. Without knowing exactly where a subclade evolved and what kind of population size it had during this development, calculations are doomed to be mistaken, especially in region with unusually high or low population densities or growth.
In other words, I blame them for having a too simplistic mathematical approach that cannot possibly taken into account all these factors. There has actually been quite a few population geneticists claiming that haplogroup R1a originated in India because genetic diversity was higher there, not realising that this diversity was the result of extremely high historical population size since the Bronze Age. This is what
Sharma et al. (2009) claimed, and their study was not only published in a peer reviewed journal, but the most prestigious of them all, Nature. So much for the peer review system filtering out the pseudoscience. That 'peer' word doesn't mean anything. Having graduated in a scientific subject is not a proof of intelligence, critical sense or discernment. In fact the average IQ of university graduates is quite low; 115 to 130 in the US according to
this site. Most wouldn't even make it to Mensa.