HPGG Debates:
Can we agree to disagree?
The HPGG journal is launching a new and original type of scientific contribution which we believe will be useful to our community. By community we do not limit ourselves to the community of scientists interested in human population genetics and genomics. We aim at a much bigger community. A community that certainly includes the people interested in the interpretation of genetic and genomic data, but the community we wish to talk to is a community that looks beyond humans, as we both do. Our “Debates” may always start from an issue that is important for human population geneticists, but we believe that it should always interest the wider community of evolutionary biologists or, more widely, people interested in evolutionary biology and evolutionary processes, in the interpretation of genetic data.
The debates we wish to promote should thus interest those who are trained in social sciences but wish to understand the current state of the art and the controversies that cross our ever changing field. Rather than representing our science as a monolith of widespread consensus, we wish to illuminate as well, the tiny (or not so tiny) corners from which future consensus may one day emerge, first as a minority view and later as a widely accepted view. A widely accepted view that will itself be the target of new debates.
Our objective is to present in a respectful but possibly opinionated way, the two (or more) sides of an ongoing controversy. In some cases, when a consensus is questioned for instance, many outsiders or even practitioners may not even know that a debate is going on.
Our “Debates” section is the place where we would like to see these conversations. They should reflect the conversations which can take place after a conference, when two scientists or groups of scientists disagree and start arguing in a respectful way, when we as outsiders have this incredible luck to hear specialists identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing theories. Subjects should all be related to what makes the heart of the journal, and should thus have something to do with our species, Homo sapiens. However, methods and theoretical frameworks applied to human populations often end up being applied to other species. Conversely, work carried out in other organisms can also influence human population genomics. We thus see these debates as central and crucial for any evolutionary biologist, working on any species, and for anybody wishing to understand some of the most exciting advances in biological sciences.
