As I understand it, most of the ingredients are just extracts from or purifications of natural products. I'm not just saying this to defend plant-based meats - it's true of many chemicals with scary-looking names in other foods. "Calcium pantothenate", for instance, is just a salt of the essential vitamin B5. "Ascorbic acid" is vitamin C. And so on.

And it's worth bearing in mind that the ingredients list of a steak would be just one item - beef - but red meat consumption is nonetheless associated with increases in certain cancers and cardiovascular problems. This is even more true for processed red meat which, realistically, represents a big share of most people's red meat consumption.

Here’s the ingredient list for a beyond burger [0], I don’t think your point is relevant, as while the ingredient aren’t necessarily scary, there are many of them and the product is highly processed.

“Water, pea protein, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Peas are legumes. People with severe allergies to legumes like peanuts should be cautious when introducing pea protein into their diet because of the possibility of a pea allergy. Contains no peanuts or tree nuts.”

[0] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger

The point does seem relevant. Most of the non chemical ingredients are recognizable natural or naturally derived (rice/pea protein). methylcellulose is the only odd one out.

Hamburger Pattie’s have a single ingredient: beef.

I thought it wasn’t relevant because the ingredient list is still complex compared to cow burgers. It’s nice that the long ingredient is mostly recognizable, but the point is that there’s a long list of ingredients, not that the ingredient list included toxic waste or something.

It's even more remarkable that Paabo never really had much of a relationship with his father but still managed to follow him in getting a Nobel Prize. Something to fuel nature-nurture debates...

Are you underestimating the choices of his mother and her capacity for creating an unprecedented intellectual atmosphere?

Please try not to be tedious. If you want to stir the pot, bring up the fact his mother selected a Nobel prize winner to have kids with, so clearly had bias, or something more creative.

Your statement leaves little doubt to my unsettling question, thanks for the clarity!

Or, I just pointed out that you went into the conversation with a boring assumption. It's transparent.

so this guy had nature and nurture on his side, nice!

That is the clear and smart way of phrasing it, I did not have enough clarity to make the point, thanks!

Moral of the story : choose your parents wisely.

I hadn't considered that Reich and Patterson might have deserved recognition. I think a case could possibly be made for that, especially if the prize-winning work had been defined more broadly as ancient DNA research in general rather than sequencing archaic hominins and identifying introgression into modern humans more specifically. Reich and Patterson were after all heavily involved in the analysis identifying gene flow from Neanderthals into modern non-Africans. But Reich's and Patterson's (very successful and important) careers have focused on more recent, within-sapiens population history, and I think their role in archaic hominin work was less "irreplaceable" than Paabo's. There are plenty of very important archaic hominin papers from Paabo and collaborators which did not involve Reich and Patterson at all: the earliest Neanderthal mtDNA and autosomal sequences, Denisovan mtDNA (which came out before the autosomal paper), much of the biochemically focused work on gene expression differences between species and so on, Sima de los Huesos... Reich and Patterson also came into the picture quite a bit after Paabo initiated the whole ancient DNA field - I think about 10 years later. So, even though I would have for personal reasons preferred that Reich and Patterson be recognised too, I think Paabo's contributions in the more narrowly defined field of archaic hominin research are very clearly much more comprehensive and vital than theirs.