Anyone here got worms? Pro'l'ly not, which is a Good Thing, a-course... Or is it? One of the delights of science is the way it can Overturn the Obvious and Contradict Common Sense. And a good recent book exploring that (accelerating) iconoclasm is Rob Dunn's The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. Worms can be good for you, the appendix isn't an anachronism, and leopards'n'snakes can say much more about fear'n'loathing in Lovecraft (and elsewhere) than Ziggy Fraud. Plus: taste-buds in the tummy. I liked it a lot, but one thing did worry me:

Quote:

Once upon a time, that is to say, 200 years ago, there were, by most estimates, around 20,000 cultures or language groups on Earth. Not all of those cultures were associated with specific genetic adaptations to particular mutualists (or, for that matter, worms, pathogens or climates), but many were... (chap. 8, "So Who Cares If Your Ancestors Sucked Milk from Aurochsen?", p. 138)

Dunn done did a good job there (and elsewhere) of talking-about-race-without-talking-about-race, but I don't think that strategy is a keeper: the obnoxious truth is leaking out too fast and in too many places. I fear the CAStrati may be soon asking the Kult for their cojones back, with interest. Can you say triorchidicity?

Meanwhile, for non-Kultists and non-CAStrati, I recommend the following:

Six Black Russians


Posted on November 14, 2011 by gcochran9

Every now and then, I notice someone, often an anthropologist, saying that human cognitive capability just has to be the same in all populations. According to Loring Brace, “Human cognitive capacity, founded on the ability to learn a language, is of equal survival value to all human groups, and consequently there is no valid reason to expect that there should be average differences in intellectual ability among living human populations. “

There are a lot of ideas and assumptions in that quote, and as far as I can tell, all of them are wrong. First, you really need to note that populations today sure look as if they differ in average intellectual ability. They vary a lot in measured IQ: almost three standard deviations from lowest to highest. Some pairs of populations show big differences in scholastic results, and interventions to the tune of tens of billions of dollars haven’t had much effect.

Populations vary tremendously in the fraction that contributes original work in science and technology – and that variation mostly agrees with the distribution of IQ. Which is what you would expect, really - the fraction that exceeds a high threshold drops rapidly as the population mean decreases.

Nobody knows exactly what drove the evolution of human intelligence. That includes Loring Brace. In particular, nobody knows that it was just one factor, and certainly nobody knows that it was just one factor that was effectively uniform worldwide. Mind you, even that wouldn’t be enough. Fitness counts both costs and and benefits. A big brain is costly – it uses up a lot of calories and greatly complicates birth. For the net selective effect – the sum of payoffs and costs – to be almost exactly the same everywhere, both payoff and costs would have to be constant. In principle they could both vary in a way that left their sum always the same, but that’s too silly to even talk about…

And even that might not be enough, since the course of evolution depends on the existing genetic background, not just the local selective pressures. People outside sub-Saharan Africa picked up noticeable amounts of archaic human ancestry: maybe that changed the adaptive landscape. People inside sub-Saharan Africa didn’t pick up Neanderthal genes, but they apparently picked up a few from other, unknown archaic hominids.

I mentioned earlier that intelligence is correlated with brain size – and that it pretty much has to be, if our ideas about natural selection are correct. In Brace’s world, average brain size would have to be almost exactly the same in every population. It’s not.

Human populations been living in significantly different environments for 70,000 years (maybe more), with very little gene flow until quite recently. On top of that, populations have experienced wild changes over the last 10,000 years – agriculture, civilization, and all that. Some populations changed more than others during the Neolithic, and some hardly at all.

Surely most anthropologists agree with Loring Brace, one way or another. Most don’t know much about psychometrics, or genetics, or natural selection. Mainly, they know what they want to hear.

I was wondering what it would take to get me to swallow this nonsense. First thought was four Black Russians over an hour or so, but then I remembered the time I re-derived stationary phase on a napkin while in that state.

More like six, if I really want to think like an anthropologist.

Six Black Russians


"Populations vary tremendously in the fraction that contributes original work in science and technology" -- and art'n'literature. As I've suggested, CAS was born, not made. Or had to be born, prior to issues around his being made...

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“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.

Black Russians? They're cigarettes, aren't they? Sobrani, if memory serves me well.

asshurbanipal Wrote:

> Black Russians? They're cigarettes, aren't they?
> Sobrani, if memory serves me well.

No tengo ni idea. But it's funny you mention cigars, coz I owe Vaihinger one for coming up with a good link on the ouija (not sure how I'll get it to him, mind):

JONATHAN HAIDT
Psychologist, University of Virginia; Author, The Happiness Hypothesis

FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES

The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we're going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism..

A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

But the writing is on the wall. Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others. It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide "races") adapted to local circumstances by a process known as "co-evolution" in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other. The best documented example of this process is the co-evolution of genetic mutations that maintain the ability to fully digest lactose in adulthood with the cultural innovation of keeping cattle and drinking their milk. This process has happened several times in the last 10,000 years, not to whole "races" but to tribes or larger groups that domesticated cattle.

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates.

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.)

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism. I expect that dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found, so that any group — like any person — can be said to have many strengths and a few weaknesses, all of which are context-dependent. Furthermore, these cross-group differences are likely to be small when compared to the enormous variation within ethnic groups and the enormous and obvious effects of cultural learning. But whatever consensus we ultimately reach, the ways in which we now think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project.

[www.edge.org]

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“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.

Since Trey has done me the honor of invading my thread on criticism, albeit with borderline stalker-ish behavior, I'll briefly return the favor. The poor little onanistic frimeur seems so desperate for attention here--especially mine, for some odd reason--that it seems needlessly cruel to deny him.

So...

Reading Trey's posts is a bit like watching a clever trained animal perform--an organ grinder's monkey, say. While one may find its antics initially amusing, one grows quickly bored at its predictable and extremely limited behavioral repertoire, and one moves on with equal celerity to matters better suited to adults.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 27 Nov 11 | 10:41AM by Absquatch.

treycelement wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> asshurbanipal Wrote:
>
> > Black Russians? They're cigarettes, aren't
> they?
> > Sobrani, if memory serves me well.
>
> No tengo ni idea. But it's funny you mention
> cigars, coz I owe Vaihinger one for coming up with
> a good link on the ouija (not sure how I'll get it
> to him, mind):

Mea curpa. It was cigarettes you mentioned, not cigars. I was feeling drowsy at the time, for some reason.

---

“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.

Absquatch wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------
> Since Trey has done me the honor of invading my
> thread on criticism, albeit with borderline
> stalker-ish behavior, I'll briefly return the
> favor. The poor little onanistic frimeur seems so
> desperate for attention here--especially mine, for
> some odd reason--that it seems needlessly cruel to
> deny him.
>
> So...
>
> Reading Trey's posts is a bit like watching a
> clever trained animal perform--an organ grinder's
> monkey, say. While one may find its antics
> initially amusing, one grows quickly bored at its
> predictable and extremely limited behavioral
> repertoire, and one moves on with equal celerity
> to matters better suited to adults.

I'd put salt on that celerity, Abs': as invective, it's ineffective. Also, you should be thankful that you antagonized the monkey rather'n the monkey's master Frederico (he closely resembles Friedrich N., but prefers wooing to whipping).

The Cask of Amontillado

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“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.