Support NeoGAF

[Antiochus]

Sometime ago, there was thread here:

(http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89388)

regarding an article from Nicholas Wade, the veteran scientific affairs reporter for the NY Times, detailing how scientists have discovered how humans not only evolved 200,000 years ago, but have continually do so since then, with a particular boost among the last 10,000 years.
That was 8 years ago. And now, after poring over all the most relevant and cutting edge research, Mr. Wade has formulated his gradual understanding and perspective regarding that issue into this book, released just last week:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594204462/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Official Book Summary:

Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.

Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.

Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.

Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

Yesterday, Mr. Wade also penned a condensed primer about his book, one that gives a brief yet comprehensive overview about the latest research and his conclusions about them:

http://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/

A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.

In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.

New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.

The question is therefore, selection for what exactly? But before venturing further, Mr. Wade attempts to give some assurances to ensure one is not overly "offended" about what he is about to write

Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. That said, it is hard to see anything in the new understanding of race that gives ammunition to racists. The reverse is the case. Exploration of the genome has shown that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes. Each gene exists in a variety of alternative forms known as alleles, so one might suppose that races have distinguishing alleles, but even this is not the case. A few alleles have highly skewed distributions but these do not suffice to explain the difference between races. The difference between races seems to rest on the subtle matter of relative allele frequencies. The overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind.

Now, the crux of his argument:

Human evolution has not only been recent and extensive, it has also been regional. The period of 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, from which signals of recent natural selection can be detected, occurred after the splitting of the three major races, so represents selection that has occurred largely independently within each race. The three principal races are Africans (those who live south of the Sahara), East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans), and Caucasians (Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and the Indian subcontinent). In each of these races, a different set of genes has been changed by natural selection. This is just what would be expected for populations that had to adapt to different challenges on each continent. The genes specially affected by natural selection control not only expected traits like skin color and nutritional metabolism, but also some aspects of brain function. Though the role of these selected brain genes is not yet understood, the obvious truth is that genes affecting the brain are just as much subject to natural selection as any other category of gene.

Anything that has a genetic basis, such as these social instincts, can be varied by natural selection. The power of modifying social instincts is most visible in the case of ants, the organisms that, along with humans, occupy the two pinnacles of social behavior. Sociality is rare in nature because to make a society work individuals must moderate their powerful selfish instincts and become at least partly altruistic. But once a social species has come into being, it can rapidly exploit and occupy new niches just by making minor adjustments in social behavior. Thus both ants and humans have conquered the world, though fortunately at different scales.
Conventionally, these social differences are attributed solely to culture. But if that’s so, why is it apparently so hard for tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan to change their culture and operate like modern states? The explanation could be that tribal behavior has a genetic basis. It’s already known that a genetic system, based on the hormone oxytocin, seems to modulate the degree of in-group trust, and this is one way that natural selection could ratchet the degree of tribal behavior up or down.

Human social structures change so slowly and with such difficulty as to suggest an evolutionary influence at work. Modern humans lived for 185,000 years as hunters and gatherers before settling down in fixed communities. Putting a roof over one’s head and being able to own more than one could carry might seem an obvious move. The fact that it took so long suggests that a genetic change in human social behavior was required and took many generations to evolve......
The various races have evolved along substantially parallel paths, but because they have done so independently, it’s not surprising that they have made these two pivotal transitions in social structure at somewhat different times. Caucasians were the first to establish settled communities, some 15,000 years ago, followed by East Asians and Africans. China, which developed the first modern state, shed tribalism two millennia ago, Europe did so only a thousand years ago, and populations in the Middle East and Africa are in the throes of the process.

Two case studies, one from the Industrial Revolution and the other from the cognitive achievements of Jews, provide further evidence of evolution’s hand in shaping human social behavior within the recent past.

Here Mr. Wade details two examples of possible recent neuro-evolution in action:

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was a quantum leap in society’s productivity. Until then, almost everyone but the nobility lived a notch or two above starvation. This subsistence-level existence was a characteristic of agrarian economies, probably from the time that agriculture was first invented..........................
This development, known as the Industrial Revolution, is the salient event in economic history, yet economic historians say they have reached no agreement on how to account for it. “Much of modern social science originated in efforts by late nineteenth and twentieth century Europeans to understand what made the economic development path of western Europe unique; yet these efforts have yielded no consensus,” writes the historian Kenneth Pomeranz. Some experts argue that demography was the real driver: Europeans escaped the Malthusian trap by restraining fertility through methods such as late marriage. Others cite institutional changes, such as the beginnings of modern English democracy, secure property rights, the development of competitive markets, or patents that stimulated invention. Yet others point to the growth of knowledge starting from the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century or the easy availability of capital.

This plethora of explanations and the fact that none of them is satisfying to all experts point strongly to the need for an entirely new category of explanation. The economic historian Gregory Clark has provided one by daring to look at a plausible yet unexamined possibility: that productivity increased because the nature of the people had changed.

Clark’s proposal is a challenge to conventional thinking because economists tend to treat people everywhere as identical, interchangeable units. A few economists have recognized the implausibility of this position and have begun to ask if the nature of the humble human units that produce and consume all of an economy’s goods and services might possibly have some bearing on its performance. They have discussed human quality, but by this they usually mean just education and training. Others have suggested that culture might explain why some economies perform very differently from others, but without specifying what aspects of culture they have in mind. None has dared say that culture might include an evolutionary change in behavior — but neither do they explicitly exclude this possibility.

Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a highly plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save, and the propensity to work.
Homicide rates for males, for instance, declined from 0.3 per thousand in 1200 to 0.1 in 1600 and to about a tenth of this in 1800. Even from the beginning of this period, the level of personal violence was well below that of modern hunter-gatherer societies. Rates of 15 murders per thousand men have been recorded for the Aché people of Paraguay..................................
These behavioral changes in the English population between 1200 and 1800 were of pivotal economic importance. They gradually transformed a violent and undisciplined peasant population into an efficient and productive workforce. Turning up punctually for work every day and enduring eight eight hours or more of repetitive labor is far from being a natural human behavior. Hunter-gatherers do not willingly embrace such occupations, but agrarian societies from their beginning demanded the discipline to labor in the fields and to plant and harvest at the correct times. Disciplined behaviors were probably evolving gradually within the agrarian English population for many centuries before 1200, the point at which they can be documented.

Clark has uncovered a genetic mechanism through which the Malthusian economy may have wrought these changes on the English population: The rich had more surviving children than did the poor. From a study of wills made between 1585 and 1638, he finds that will makers with £9 or less to leave their heirs had, on average, just under two children. The number of heirs rose steadily with assets, such that men with more than £1,000 in their gift, who formed the wealthiest asset class, left just over four children.

The English population was fairly stable in size from 1200 to 1760, meaning that if the rich were having more children than the poor, most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class.

Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class — nonviolence, literacy, thrift, and patience — were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and increase in literacy that Clark has documented for the English population. Moreover, the behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.
......................................
Economic historians tend to see the Industrial Revolution as a relatively sudden event and their task as being to uncover the historical conditions that precipitated this immense transformation of economic life. But profound events are likely to have profound causes. The Industrial Revolution was caused not by events of the previous century but by changes in human economic behavior that had been slowly evolving in agrarian societies for the previous 10,000 years.

This of course explains why the practices of the Industrial Revolution were adopted so easily by other European countries, the United States, and East Asia, all of whose populations had been living in agrarian economies and evolving for thousands of years under the same harsh constraints of the Malthusian regime. No single resource or institutional change — the usual suspects in most theories of the Industrial Revolution — is likely to have become effective in all these countries around 1760, and indeed none did.

A second instance of very recent human evolution may well be in evidence in European Jews, particularly the Ashkenazim of northern and central Europe. In proportion to their population, Jews have made outsize contributions to Western civilization. A simple metric is that of Nobel prizes: Though Jews constitute only 0.2% of the world’s population, they won 14% of Nobel prizes in the first half of the 20th century, 29% in the second and so far 32% in the present century. There is something here that requires explanation. If Jewish success were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a zeal for education, others should have been able to do as well by copying such cultural practices. It’s therefore reasonable to ask if genetic pressures in Jews’ special history may have enhanced their cognitive skills.
Just such a pressure is described by two economic historians, Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, in their book “The Chosen Few.” In 63 or 65 AD, the high priest Joshua ben Gamla decreed that every Jewish father should send his sons to school so that they could read and understand Jewish law. Jews at that time earned their living mostly by farming, as did everyone else, and education was both expensive and of little practical use. Many Jews abandoned Judaism for the new and less rigorous Jewish sect now known as Christianity.
Botticini and Eckstein say nothing about genetics but evidently, if generation after generation the Jews less able to acquire literacy became Christians, literacy and related abilities would on average be enhanced among those who remained Jews.
As commerce started to pick up in medieval Europe, Jews as a community turned out to be ideally suited for the role of becoming Europe’s traders and money-lenders. In a world where most people were illiterate, Jews could read contracts, keep accounts, appraise collateral, and do business arithmetic. They formed a natural trading network through their co-religionists in other cities, and they had rabbinical courts to settle disputes. Jews moved into money-lending not because they were forced to do so, as some accounts suggest, but because they chose the profession, Botticini and Eckstein say. It was risky but highly profitable. The more able Jews thrived and, just as in the rest of the pre-19th century world, the richer were able to support more surviving children.As Jews adapted to a cognitively demanding niche, their abilities increased to the point that the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is, at 110 to 115, the highest of any known ethnic group. The population geneticists Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran have calculated that, assuming a high heritability of intelligence, Ashkenazi IQ could have risen by 15 points in just 500 years. Ashkenazi Jews first appear in Europe around 900 AD, and Jewish cognitive skills may have been increasing well before then.

The emergence of high cognitive ability among the Ashkenazim, if genetically based, is of interest both in itself and as an instance of natural selection shaping a population within the very recent past.

Finally, Mr. Wade's conclusion:

The hand of evolution seems visible in the major transitions in human social structure and in the two case studies described above. This is of course a hypothesis; proof awaits detection of the genes in question. If significant evolutionary changes can occur so recently in history, other major historical events may have evolutionary components. One candidate is the rise of the West, which was prompted by a remarkable expansion of European societies, both in knowledge and geographical sway, while the two other major powers of the medieval world, China and the house of Islam, ascendant until around 1500 AD, were rapidly overtaken.
In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the economic historian David Landes examines every possible factor for explaining the rise of the West and the stagnation of China and concludes, in essence, that the answer lies in the nature of the people. Landes attributes the decisive factor to culture, but describes culture in such a way as to imply race.

“If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference,” he writes. “Witness the enterprise of expatriate minorities — the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews and Calvinists throughout much of Europe, and on and on. Yet culture, in the sense of the inner values and attitudes that guide a population, frightens scholars. It has a sulfuric odor of race and inheritance, an air of immutability.”

Sulfuric odor or not, the culture of each race is what Landes suggests has made the difference in economic development. The data gathered by Clark on declining rates of violence and increasing rates of literacy from 1200 to 1800 provide some evidence for a genetic component to culture and social institutions.

Though equivalent data does not exist for the Chinese population, China’s society has been distinctive for at least 2,000 years and intense pressures on survival would have adapted the Chinese to their society just as Europeans became adapted to theirs.

Do Chinese carry genes for conformism and authoritarian rule? May Europeans have alleles that favor open societies and the rule of law? Obviously this is unlikely to be the case. But there is almost certainly a genetic component to the propensity for following society’s rules and punishing those who violate them. If Europeans were slightly less inclined to punish violators and Chinese slightly more so, that could explain why European societies are more tolerant of dissenters and innovators, and Chinese societies less so. Because the genes that govern rule following and punishment of violators have not yet been identified, it is not yet known if these do in fact vary in European and Chinese populations in the way suggested. Nature has many dials to twist in setting the intensities of the various human social behaviors and many different ways of arriving at the same solution.

For most of recorded history, Chinese civilization has been pre-eminent and it’s reasonable to assume that the excellence of Chinese institutions rests on a mix of culture and inherited social behavior.

The rise of the West, too, is unlikely to have been just some cultural accident. As European populations became adapted to the geographic and military conditions of their particular ecological habitat, they produced societies that have turned out to be more innovative and productive than others, at least under present circumstances.

That does not of course mean that Europeans are superior to others — a meaningless term in any case from the evolutionary perspective – any more than Chinese were superior to others during their heyday. China’s more authoritarian society may once again prove more successful, particularly in the wake of some severe environmental stress.

Civilizations may rise and fall but evolution never ceases, which is why genetics may play some role alongside the mighty force of culture in shaping the nature of human societies. History and evolution are not separate processes, with human evolution grinding to a halt some decent interval before history begins. The more that we are able to peer into the human genome, the more it seems that the two processes are delicately intertwined.

It should be noted that in the current sociopolitical atmosphere of the NY Times, Mr. Wade's endeavor into such topics are usually....frowned upon. Yet, he has not only managed to write many such articles over the years delving into such topics, but has managed to produce this book in the end, not to mentioned being featured at Time Magazine. His book may yet prove to be one this year's most consequential publications.

 

[HolyBaikal]

This sounds a little bit creepy and suspiciously racist.

Like the "Bell Curve" book. Someone trying to expose inconvenient "truth" about race and really "brave" in the face of "political correctness" and things like this. Racism is bad. And neuroracism is really creepy. And I don't normally call things creepy. But there's something disturbing and really bothers me on a deep level when people trying to come out with the "I know this isn't politically correct, but populations are different and we need to study and accept these genetic differences."

It's like people are trying to bring back and do some really creepy and disturbing things. And like people are trying to tell me that my mind is different from people of other races and it gives me this whole Nazi feeling which is really scary.

 

[squidyj]

This sounds a little bit creepy and suspiciously racist.

Like the "Bell Curve" book. Someone trying to expose inconvenient "truth" about race and really "brave" in the face of "political correctness" and things like this. Racism is bad. And neuroracism is really creepy. And I don't normally call things creepy. But there's something disturbing and really bothers me on a deep level when people trying to come out with the "I know this isn't politically correct, but populations are different and we need to study and accept these genetic differences."

It's like people are trying to bring back and do some really creepy and disturbing things. And like people are trying to tell me that my mind is different from people of other races and it gives me this whole Nazi feeling which is really scary.

So we should put it in a box and never look at it? I think his work should be closely scrutinized by his peers, but it doesn't seem like a good policy to blindly turn away from knowledge or the potential of knowledge because it makes us uncomfortable.

 

[badcrumble]

If the sympathetic reviews are at all accurate, the book's big arguments are "geographic region shows up in factor analysis" and "most genes under selection are under selection in a particular region" and both of these claims are completely trivial. Nothing the book has to say is daring, nor is it useful for the repugnant "race realist" crowd so desperate to attach IQ or cultural traits to race.

Humans are generally quite similar. Regional selection exists but has mostly been for disease resistance and so on, which should be no surprise.

 

[benjipwns]

1. I thought the recent human evolution and it being regionally effected was old hat?
2. Everyone knows there are four separate races, one in each of the four separate hemispheres/worlds corresponding to the four 24-hour simultaneous days, educators are lying bastards and promote academic stupidity and evil.

 

[Fusebox]

Interesting theory. If it were true, wouldn't it mean that there has to be genetic information for the traits he mentions such as thrift, docility and nonviolence? If he can show the genetic markers and prove that those traits increase your likelihood of survival in a particular environment it makes sense that those traits would start dominating in that environment given enough time.

 

[Durask]

Ordering it from Amazon right now.

I find it ironic that the crowd who puts a Darwin fish on their cars is so quick to embrace magical thinking when it comes to human behavior.

 

[Zaptruder]

Within group differences in pretty much all categories of modern discrimination worth mentioning are greater and more variable than between group differences.

So even if there is a general sense of applicability to the between group differences of a stereotype - on any individual level, there's a great chance of that stereotype been proven wrong.

As a result, there's little efficacy to using stereotype based rule of thumbs in discriminating, especially since the act of discrimination itself is a limiting factor on the development of people.

 

[Blackstarhat]

this seems a bit eugenic.

 

[titiklabingapat]

I believe the gist of it, that humans are continually still evolving. Some humans can breathe underwater for longer period of time than a 'regular' human. Some can also breathe in thinner atmosphere better. Some of us can even process certain types of food better than others.

The race construct, however, is old and outdated. Regional selection seems more apt. There are alot of variations and diversity even within the same race ('white' for example encompass Scandinavians all the way to Southern Europeans, Middle Eastern and North Africans. 'Asians' are even more complex and arbitrary. Indians may or may not be asian, depending on where they live (UK vs USA)/ Traditional east 'Asians' in North America also encompass Northeast Asians and Southeast Asians which are both very culturally, linguistically and genetically distinct.

 

[HolyBaikal]

this seems a bit eugenic.

Yeah, that's how it sounds to me, too. It kind of gives me the creeps.

 

[Conciliator]

I would never ask science to censor itself in the name of sensitivity, so if there is truth to it, there is truth to it. Assuming of course that the people involved are not coming from a place of agenda, which would completely illegitimatize it something as controversial as this.

The tragedy of course would be to giving some kind of ammo to racist organizations. Which is terrible, but really they don't need ammo. They're going to believe whatever they want to anyway.

 

[badcrumble]

I would never ask science to censor itself in the name of sensitivity, so if there is truth to it, there is truth to it. Assuming of course that the people involved are not coming from a place of agenda, which would completely illegitimatize it something as controversial as this.

The tragedy of course would be to giving some kind of ammo to racist organizations. Which is terrible, but really they don't need ammo. They're going to believe whatever they want to anyway.

I think it's important to be careful because "why do u hate science" is the go-to defense for scientific racists like the Bell Curve dude and then it turns out that they cite shitty studies, they cite straight-up discredited white supremacists, et cetera. They tend to claim a conspiracy shutting them out, but... people claiming that the broad scientific consensus is a conspiracy are generally full of shit and have more of an agenda than the scientific community does.

 

[badcrumble]

There's also a *lot* of aggressive ascription of basically all behavior to genetics in this kind of work. All nature and no nurture. It's kinda silly.

 

[Blackstarhat]

Yeah, that's how it sounds to me, too. It kind of gives me the creeps.

Eugenics is evil i cant believe theres so many people in academia that believe in eugenics.

 

[Fusebox]

The Slate review of the book is worth reading:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._nicholas_wade_s_dated_assumptions_about.html

Curious to see Wade taking a shot at Guns, Germs and Steel instead of trying to run parallel to it. GG and S has some very robust theories.

 

[Trent Strong]

Eugenics is evil i cant believe theres so many people in academia that believe in eugenics.

What? Pretty much no one in academia believes in eugenics.

Edit: said "pretty much no one", but meant "literally no one."

 

[-Plasma Reus-]

Had my interest until: 'Three major races'.

 

[benjipwns]

Eugenics is evil i cant believe theres so many people in academia that believe in eugenics.

Yeah, but there's a consensus among the elites, we need scientific planning:

In July 1931, the New Statesman asserted: "The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics."
...

Beatrice Webb declared eugenics to be "the most important question of all" while her husband remarked that "no eugenicist can be a laissez-faire individualist".

Similarly, George Bernard Shaw wrote: "The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man." Bertrand Russell proposed that the state should issue colour-coded "procreation tickets" to prevent the gene pool of the elite being diluted by inferior human beings. Those who decided to have children with holders of a different-coloured ticket would be punished with a heavy fine. HG Wells praised eugenics as the first step towards the elimination of "detrimental types and characteristics" and the "fostering of desirable types" instead.

...

A year later, Sir James Crichton-Brown, giving evidence before the 1908 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, recommended the compulsory sterilisation of those with learning disabilities and mental illness, describing them as "our social rubbish" which should be "swept up and garnered and utilised as far as possible". He went on to complain, "We pay much attention to the breeding of our horses, our cattle, our dogs and poultry, even our flowers and vegetables; surely it's not too much to ask that a little care be bestowed upon the breeding and rearing of our race". Crichton-Brown was in distinguished company. In a memo to the prime minister in 1910, Winston Churchill cautioned, "The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race".

...

Even in 1946, Keynes was calling eugenics "the most important and significant branch of sociology".

In 1896, Francis Walker noted in the Atlantic Monthly that the necessity of 'straining out' immigrants who were 'deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, pauper or criminal' was 'now conceded by men of all shades of opinion' and indeed there was a widespread 'resentment at the attempts of such persons to impose themselves upon us.' William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, argued that immigration restrictions were "necessary to the preservation of our national characteristics and to our physical and mental health". A New York Supreme Court judge feared that the new immigrants were "adding to that appalling number of our inhabitants who handicap us by reason of their mental and physical disabilities."

...

Alexis Carrel, who worked at the prestigious Rockefeller Institute in the early years of the 20th century, advocated correcting what he called "an error" in the US Constitution that granted equality to all people. In his best-selling book Man, the Unknown, he wrote: "The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education." Arguing that the human race was being undermined by disabled people, he wanted to use medical advances to extend the lives of those he deemed worthy and condemn the rest to death or forced sterilisation.

...

His book sold more than two million copies and thousands of people in America would turn up to hear Carrel's talks, sometimes filling venues to capacity. He was even awarded the Nobel Prize.

Soon the White House itself was intent on restricting the right of disabled people to reproduce. President Theodore Roosevelt could not have been more blunt: "I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them". Theodore Roosevelt created an Heredity Commission to investigate America's genetic heritage and to encourage "the increase of families of good blood and (discourage) the vicious elements in the cross-bred American civilisation". Funding for the eugenics cause came from such distinguished sources as the Carnegie Institution and the WK Kellogg Foundation, and support also came from the influential leaders of the oil, steel and railroad industries.

...

A landmark Supreme Court case in 1927 upheld America's sterilisation legislation on the grounds it was necessary "to prevent our being swamped with incompetence". Judge Holmes, reflecting in his judgement that our "best" citizens may be called on to give up their lives in war, said of sterilising the feeble-minded or insane: "It would be strange if we could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices ...It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind".

...

In 1937, a Gallup poll in the USA found that 45 per cent of supported euthanasia for "defective infants". A year later, in a speech at Harvard, WG Lennox argued that preserving disabled lives placed a strain on society and urged doctors to recognize "the privilege of death for the congenitally mindless and for the incurable sick". An article published in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association in 1942 called for the killing of all "retarded" children over five years old.

 

[happypup]

Interesting theory. If it were true, wouldn't it mean that there has to be genetic information for the traits he mentions such as thrift, docility and nonviolence? If he can show the genetic markers and prove that those traits increase your likelihood of survival in a particular environment it makes sense that those traits would start dominating in that environment given enough time.

This is where most of the theorizing breaks down. Not every behavioral trait necessarily needs relate to a gene or group of genes. Cultural variations can occur sans genetic input. As he pointed out the difference is not in novel genes, nor even in novel alleles, but in variations of common allele's frequencies within the populations. Now it is very likely that a social construct, a culture can alter selective pressures for certain alleles, and in so doing cause these variations, but it would take a direct linkage of a specific behavioral trait to a gene or genes for the reverse to hold. Culture, as it happens changes in a similar manner as biological evolution, except that the population demarcation is not species level, but at the successful transmission of complex thought from one host to another (language). Miner variations of culture occur through mutations of behavior, if you will, those are then tested against one another, and the behavior that provides the greatest fitness survives. Truly novel behaviors form rarely, and are simple by nature, those then form the building blocks for new variations, which then form a suite of purely cultural based behavioral characters. It should surprise no one that geographically isolated peoples look different from each other, nor that some of those differences are more than skin deep, but behavior is a complex emergent system whose simple agents are not restricted to genetics. they include some unknown degree of genetic agents, and of cultural conditioning, still more of environmental, nutritional, and individual experiences.

In other words, I would find it far more likely that any genetic component to variations in behavior would play only a marginal role in the expression for those variations, and would thus be only very weakly selected, most likely only once those behaviors are firmly rooted in a culture.

 

[kame-sennin]

But if that’s so, why is it apparently so hard for tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan to change their culture and operate like modern states?

wat

Caucasians were the first to establish settled communities, some 15,000 years ago, followed by East Asians and Africans.

wat

China, which developed the first modern state, shed tribalism two millennia ago, Europe did so only a thousand years ago, and populations in the Middle East and Africa are in the throes of the process.

waaaaat

I'm not sure I can believe this guy's scientific hypothesis if he can't even get basic historical facts right.

 

[benjipwns]

I'm not sure I can believe this guy's scientific hypothesis if he can't even get basic historical facts right.

He's just got a really specific definition of "settled communities", "tribalism", "years", "modern state", "Africans" and "operate."

 

[kame-sennin]

^ I love your posts.

The Slate review of the book is worth reading:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._nicholas_wade_s_dated_assumptions_about.html

For example, he writes that declining interest rates in England from the years 1400 to 1850 “indicate that people were becoming less impulsive, more patient, and more willing to save” and attributes this to “the far-reaching genetic consequences” of rich people having more children, on average, than poor people, so that “the values of the upper middle class” were “infused into lower economic classes and throughout society.”

Wade’s attitudes toward economics also seem a bit simplistic, for example when he writes, “Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark?”

Wow, this guy's a fucking joke.

 

[benjipwns]

In fairness, looking at the free excerpt that question appears to be setting up a "well, here's why not" set of paragraphs. But I didn't read any of them.

 

[bomma_man]

Err from that description this sounds like rubbish.

"No one can agree on the exact cause of the industrial revolution therefore genetics" is not a compelling argument.

 

[Tim the Wiz]

If the sympathetic reviews are at all accurate, the book's big arguments are "geographic region shows up in factor analysis" and "most genes under selection are under selection in a particular region" and both of these claims are completely trivial. Nothing the book has to say is daring, nor is it useful for the repugnant "race realist" crowd so desperate to attach IQ or cultural traits to race.

Humans are generally quite similar. Regional selection exists but has mostly been for disease resistance and so on, which should be no surprise.

Exactly. I'm sure there are elements of genetic variance between different strands of human beings, but people who argue for it as the overriding driver of human culture are usually lazy thinkers who tend to ignore or underestimate the context of history, economics and environment.

Just reading through those excerpts, he fails to address or seems unaware of Max Weber, Middle Eastern societal history, economic fundamentals and basic fact:

The English population was fairly stable in size from 1200 to 1760, meaning that if the rich were having more children than the poor, most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class.

Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class — nonviolence, literacy, thrift, and patience — were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and increase in literacy that Clark has documented for the English population. Moreover, the behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.

?

But if that’s so, why is it apparently so hard for tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan to change their culture and operate like modern states?

??

Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark?

???

Caucasians were the first to establish settled communities, some 15,000 years ago, followed by East Asians and Africans.

China, which developed the first modern state, shed tribalism two millennia ago, Europe did so only a thousand years ago, and populations in the Middle East and Africa are in the throes of the process.

????

 

[benjipwns]

Add "stable" to that list of specific definitions if the wikipedia numbers on England's population are anything to go by:

Population 1100 - 1751
Year	Pop.  	±%  
1100	3,250,000	—    
1350	3,000,000	−7.7%
1541	2,774,000	−7.5%
1601	4,110,000	+48.2%
1651	5,228,000	+27.2%
1700	5,058,000	−3.3%
1751	5,772,000	+14.1%

Population almost doubling over a century! Stable!

 

[nomis]

 

[SRG01]

If the sympathetic reviews are at all accurate, the book's big arguments are "geographic region shows up in factor analysis" and "most genes under selection are under selection in a particular region" and both of these claims are completely trivial. Nothing the book has to say is daring, nor is it useful for the repugnant "race realist" crowd so desperate to attach IQ or cultural traits to race.

Humans are generally quite similar. Regional selection exists but has mostly been for disease resistance and so on, which should be no surprise.

Regional and cultural selection of favorable genetic traits is definitely non-trivial. However, the problem is whether or not intelligence and other factors can be strongly correlated to genetic markers.

The brain is a giant neuroplastic machine. It can learn and do anything within reasonable limits given proper stimulus and repetition.

 

[happypup]

Regional and cultural selection of favorable genetic traits is definitely non-trivial. However, the problem is whether or not intelligence and other factors can be strongly correlated to genetic markers.

The brain is a giant neuroplastic machine. It can learn and do anything within reasonable limits given proper stimulus and repetition.

I believe he meant the claims are trivial not necessarily that the effect is trivial. In other words that this is true is to say that evolution happens, or if evolution occurs it is trivial to show that regional and cultural selection of favorable traits also occurs.

 

[Seth C]

I don't understand the hate for this sort of discourse. Is it fear? Is a horse better than a tiger? No. It is just better suited to a particular niche. If there are differences among groups of people the same holds true. None is better than the other, just better suited to the environment in which they evolved.

Isn't that common sense based on our understanding of evolution?

 

[-Plasma Reus-]

I don't understand the hate for this sort of discourse. Is it fear? Is a horse better than a tiger? No. It is just better suited to a particular niche. If there are differences among groups of people the same holds true. None is better than the other, just better suited to the environment in which they evolved.

Isn't that common sense based on our understanding of evolution?

That's an assumption that populations, and their habitat are static. In truth, majority of populations migrate and intermix back and forth. Ethnicity, culture, language, all of these things are gradients.Except for a very few number of homogeneous tribal societies in the world, this holds true for the vast majority of humanity.

 

[happypup]

I don't understand the hate for this sort of discourse. Is it fear? Is a horse better than a tiger? No. It is just better suited to a particular niche. If there are differences among groups of people the same holds true. None is better than the other, just better suited to the environment in which they evolved.

Isn't that common sense based on our understanding of evolution?

People who are rightly dismantling this man's arguments are doing it because they hold no veracity. His grasp on the data is tenuous at best, and is used to promote an idea that has been found lacking within the scientific community. He uses rather than follows data and his results are found wanting.

 

[OminoMichelin]

Conventionally, these social differences are attributed solely to culture. But if that’s so, why is it apparently so hard for tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan to change their culture and operate like modern states?

Aaaand I stopped reading here. He should stick to studying genes, because the conclusions he's drawing are just plain wrong. He ignores the effect environment has on the mind, before it affects the genes.

 

[Black-Wind]

Yeeeeaaaah, I kinda don't get any of that. Seems like a ton of what he says contradicts my understanding of history and he seems to use "GENES!" the way people point to "GOD!" or "MAGIC!" to explain shit.

 

[Devolution]

Why does a region that keeps getting destabilized by greater world powers and their agendas have tribalism.

How does I history.

 

[benjipwns]

Maybe this is an autocorrect error, he really means jeans as in blue jeans.

 

[zero shift]

wat



wat



waaaaat

I'm not sure I can believe this guy's scientific hypothesis if he can't even get basic historical facts right.

Wow, this guy's a fucking joke.

And this is the problem with the "right wing" of the social science establishment. They may have some good points (I.E. there may be SOME people with regional areas with above or below average intelligence to at least some extent) but they take it so far to the point of looneyville. They're the MRA's of the science world.

Also here is a gem that you missed:

Similarly, he claims a genetic basis for the declining levels of everyday violence in Europe over the past 500 years and even for “a society-wide shift ... toward greater sensibility and more delicate manners.”

 

[Necromanti]

I'd say that his work reeks of ad hoc fallacies more than anything else, making the assumption that specific, discrete historical events or movements may be directly tied to evolutionary changes.

It's also making the assumption that the characteristics we tend to associate with a "race" are divergent adaptations rather than convergent ones. Body morphologies and skin pigments could be tied to the climates of certain biogeographies, so people sharing a skin tone would not imply any other similarities beyond that. Darker skin could be favorable in regions that are far apart. The same could be said of any other traits that arose independently in many regional groups, being one of the reasons that people within the artificial classification groups known as "races" tend to have more genetic diversity between the members within the group itself than between groups.

 

[badcrumble]

I don't understand the hate for this sort of discourse. Is it fear? Is a horse better than a tiger? No. It is just better suited to a particular niche. If there are differences among groups of people the same holds true. None is better than the other, just better suited to the environment in which they evolved.

Isn't that common sense based on our understanding of evolution?

This sort of "facts/values" divide is generally a bunch of crap. White supremacists psuedoscientists hold it up and say "Look, I'm not saying whether creativity and intelligence are better than the capacity for manual labor - no value judgments! - but I *really* have opinions on which ones white people are better at and which ones black people are better at."

And really, this is less about people being afraid to enquire into this stuff so much as that there are smart people who look into it and correctly see nothing and white supremacist obsessives who look into it and gather together any data they possibly can to support both white superiority and genetic determinism, both of which are entirely bunk ideas.