Slashdot Mirror
The Twists of History and DNA
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has a piece today talking about the possible connection between genetic evolution and history." From the article: "Trying to explain cultural traits is, of course, a sensitive issue. The descriptions of national character common in the works of 19th-century historians were based on little more than prejudice. Together with unfounded notions of racial superiority they lent support to disastrous policies. But like phrenology, a wrong idea that held a basic truth (the brain's functions are indeed localized), the concept of national character could turn out to be not entirely baseless, at least when applied to societies shaped by specific evolutionary pressures."
You'd be surprised at how true that is. Hormones being what they are, spherically shaped regions in your brain... nevermind, I'm making this all up.
I hate how, when an article comes up about a sensitive issue, 3/4 of the summary text is dedicated to doubletalk.
"[..]unfounded notions of racial superiority[..]" --- yet the linked article states that they may in fact not be so unfounded. If a group can be as a whole different, there's no reason that a group can't be as a whole superior.
Shove this PC bullshit up your ass, you anonymous coward.
-- A.T.
More generally, I think people are going to have to face someday that brain genetics are not somehow special. Just like certain races are shorter, taller, darker, lighter, faster, stronger, etc, certain races (and sexes...) are going to have bell curves that are different shapes. Of course, this doesn't preclude any individual from falling anywhere on the bell curve.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
For those of us who didn't already know much about the concept of national character, Google defines it as "studies based on the assumption that collectively members of a society have a distinctive set of psychological qualities." Interesting article.
An example: the british live on a poor island, which was soon depleted of it's natural ressources. In order to avoid starving, they simply went overseas to get the essential ressources they lacked at home. Hence they developped a commercial empire, and the ability to do trading on a global scale was elevated to a "desirable national characteristic", which explains that the anglo-saxons are the most imperialistic people on Earth.
Nearby France is a rich country, overflowing with bountiful ressources. It followed Britain by constituting an empire, yes, but this was just for copycat purposes; it never vitally needed an empire just to survive, and the best illustration of this is, after World War II, when both Britain and France lost their empires, Britain sunk into decadence and decrepitude, whilst France had the highest economic growth during the 30 years following the War.
And this is also why in France, excelling in the Arts and Science is viewed as a "desirable national characteristic", whilst commerce is viewed as a vile, unwholesome, fithy activity.
This amazing book sums up what happens to humans when placed in different geographies. Just like animals, certain traits are more advantageous and lead to increased specialization.
One can only wonder what evolutionary pressures caused well endowed Asian males do die out.
There has been some recent trending toward the thinking that recent human history (the past few millenia, that is) involves our genetic history. Most of it is cited in the article, though--it's a pretty scant number studies willing to even look in that direction. As the article notes, Western societies tend to be pretty sensitive to suggestions that genes predispose behavior or personality traits, because it has so recently been the justification for war, mass murder, and horrific social policies (eugenics).
BUT... the problem, from a scientific perspective, is that the more we learn about genetics the more evidence exists that there ARE behavioral and personality traits linked to our genes. Nobody's talking about master races or anything like that, but there's still a morally offensive (to some, at least) supposition there: Not all men are created equal.
This is a big moral problem for liberal Western democracies. Most European and North American states, and a good portion of nations in the rest of the world, are founded on the basis that every person is entitled to the same basic rights as the rest. The philosophical rhetoric that underlies these claims needs the postulate that all human beings are somewhat equal--nobody is so much better equipped, morally or intellectually or otherwise, that he can take away the political rights of self determination from other men.
Although I'm behind scientific inquiry 100%, and I don't think that these researchers should ever compromise their work for political purposes (well-intentioned or not!), I am a little worried about how this kind of work will affect the new few centuries of government and political thought.
A great book on this subject is Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate : The Modern Denial of Human Nature. He spends a good while explaining the biological evidence for certain traits such as increased intelligence being just as much genetically determined as someone's eye color. He also takes the time to explain why so many people instinctively demonize this stance and why facing the truth about our genetic heritage will actually allow people to live in greater harmony with each other. The explanations are surprisingly clear and he mostly stays away from rhetorical and psychological bubble that so many philosophers often resort to.
Surely if you were able to take a baby from ancient times and transplant him to the present, he'd grow up to really be no different than the rest of us.
The most recent example of a society's possible genetic response to its circumstances is one advanced by Dr. Cochran and Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In an article last year they argued that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases found among Ashkenazi Jews (those of Central and Eastern Europe) was a response to the demands for increased intelligence imposed when Jews were largely confined to the intellectually demanding professions of money lending and tax farming. Though this period lasted only from 900 A.D. to about 1700, it was long enough, the two scientists argue, for natural selection to favor any variant gene that enhanced cognitive ability.
This part I really don't buy. More like they weren't having children outside of their group, and so are more prone to genetic diseases.
Even on slashdot, ignorant fools run rampant. Damn shame...
Here we go again. This reminds me of the not-incorrect observation by a certain Harvard dean that women, in general, tend to be better in areas not related to math and science. Regardless of the merit of such a claim, the current political climate is such that any observation other than the obvious is regarded as demeaning. Even obvious differences are often taboo. It would be fine to observe, for example, that asians tend to excell at math and science, but mentioning that they're generally shorter than their european counterparts would be considered insulting by some, regardless of the fact that being smaller has many advantages for survival.
I suppose though, in light of our inability to view differences objectively, that it's probably for the best. Invariably, when someone points out differences, one group will use those differences to assert some sort of supreriority over the other. While it would be nice if we could discuss differences with scientific detachment and actually learn something, it seems that the most common trait among humanity -- our desire to be the best; to feel superior -- prevents such objectivity.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Never trust work that moves from the digestion of milk (dependent on a single enzyme in adulthood) to broad cultural generalizations. Why would anyone think that East Asians have been selected for intelligence, unless they buy into a particular cultural stereotype that has been common only in the past few decades, as the East has sent its best and brightest to the West for education? A generation ago East Asians were considered much less mentally capable than Europeans. Both stereotypes are fact-free.
Here's a real howler from the article:
"It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population."
Easy to imagine, yes, at least if you are completely ignorant of how societies have actually behaved in history. It's easy to imagine the Earth is flat, if you are sufficiently ignorant.
Trust pays off most in societies that trade under the rule of law, like Rome. And we all know that generation after generation Roman families grew and grew, especially amongst the most properous classes, who benefited the most from trust...
Except they didn't.
Certain types of benefit to individuals result in decreased procreation, as we see in modern developed societies. Rome struggled with declining population amongst the middle and upper classes throughout most of its history, to the extent that laws and other social pressure requiring marriage and progeny were common features even during the late Republic.
Local genetic adaptation to a rice-based diet I can believe. Adaptation to cow's milk is plausbile. But until you show me quantitative, unbiased performance measures of "cultural types" I'll say you're telling the kind of just-so story that faux-evolutionists have been foisting off on the public for generations, starting with Spencer and coming down to the present day in the form of statistically illiterate dunderheads like Charles Murray.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
What the poster fails to mention is that the pendulum has swung to an opposite extreme that isn't good either. We're not all biochemically equal, and that should be at the foundation for our belief that all people are deserving of equal rights. Each life has its own individual existance, even twins.
The tendency I have notice is that those who preach the idea that we're all equal, instead of all equally worth human dignity, is that they tend to favor control of others. In the name of "equality," people have been turned into cogs to fit into some sociologist's "scientific" organization of a corporation or society.
That's why libertarianism is so hard for liberals to swallow. We don't believe that all people are equal. In fact we do believe that some are born with clear advantages over others, and the opposite is equally true. Instead, what should be emphasized is that no one is born with the inherent right to control others, and all arguments for controlling others ought to be based in the highest standards of morality and reason.
Besides, I have been around enough foreigners to know that the majority around the world doesn't really believe this bullshit Western idea that we are all born equal, save for an equal right to be free from all arbitrary controls. Instead of focusing on equality, perhaps we should be focusing on the more pressing need to make the government work more efficiently and in a fairer way, that does not (as it has always happened in the past) end up making it simply a powerful means for the strong to control the weak.
Fitness is purely a function of how well you pass on your DNA. This is mostly, but not purely, about making children. Protecting close blood relatives, including siblings and grandchildren, counts toward your fitness because your close blood relatives share lots of DNA with you.
Our current environment doesn't typically feature starvation, so it's no problem to have more babies than most people consider sane. Welfare can help. You just need to make the babies. Major medical defects like diabetes are no problem. So, fitness today...
Lovely world, huh? Evolution doesn't stop, and it sure doesn't obey our desires.
> Not all men are created equal.
> This is a big moral problem for liberal Western democracies. Most
> European and North American states, and a good portion of nations in
> the rest of the world, are founded on the basis that every person is
> entitled to the same basic rights as the rest. The philosophical
> rhetoric that underlies these claims needs the postulate that all
> human beings are somewhat equal--nobody is so much better
> equipped, morally or intellectually or otherwise, that he can
> take away the political rights of self determination from other men.
Well, actually it's not such a problem. To be "created" equal requires a creator. The idea is that, since none of us is the creator, we have no rights over the lives of one another, except insomuch as we mutually agree. Jefferson was not talking about intellectual, muscular, or moral equality--certainly he knew that some of us are smarter, more powerful, or more virtuous than others.
..with examples like
men who had killed in battle had three times as many children as those who had not.
and
East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years
I have to say it is pretty badly written. Asians are indeed more community/ society-oriented than westerners who are more individualistic (look at our emphasis on personal freedom and privacy), but that may not all be based on genetics. The level of priority for an asian is Country-> Community -> Family -> ME whereas westerners are traditionally more of ME->Family -> Community -> Country. The asian argument is that without a strong country there cannot be a safe family. However the western priority list above is not something inherent in all westerners, it is just more obvious these days and mostly only in America which the researcher assumes applies to the rest of the western civilisation. A Glance through history would reflect that the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Vikings and even the more modern Britains and Americans have accepted that the country's welfare is in fact more important than their own personal ones, or else nobody (almost) would want to voluntarily enter the Armed forces.
A community-based individual is the by-product or perhaps even the pre-requisite of ancient civilisations. The asians were amongst the first to realise this and never found any reason to change their believe. Thats why they are what they are.
To attribute everything asian to rice is rather immature. This article tells us what we already know - adaptation and evolution happens. But nothing else is new or even believable.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Moron.
Folks, its a hard pill for most to swallow today because of the egalitarian indoctrination most people have received in public education and in the media, but the whole issue of thinking that humans are somehow all equal is the most ridiculous statement ever made.
I hate bigotry towards people, but I hate denial of science even more. This is like the whole ID issue - we are faced with mountains of evidence to show that the human race has, over time, branched out, settled in different parts of the world, and because of new challenges faced in new environments, different micro-evolutionary pressures have created the races (and subgroups) that we see today. Some of us are much more athletic, some of us are stronger, and some of us are more intelligent. It is even possible that there might be different "intelligence traits" that have been selected as a result of environmental pressure to adapt amongst various groups.
Why is it so hard to accept this? Why is it so hard to see the obvious outside differences - darker skin for peoples who originated in sunny areas, whiter skin for people who came from colder and less sunlit areas, different facial features, and every thing else - to make the connection to say that evolution has affected the very way we think and our cognitive abilities?
This is why I have supported the rights of ethnic groups to maintain their identity and promote their self-reliance. People get along better with people who are very similar to themselves (that is how we evolved!). This does not mean we should allow or promote blatant discrimination, but we should be right-minded enough to accept science with open arms and embrace our diversity by PROMOTING it, not trying to eliminate it by denying our own nature and history.
I don't want employers or schools to start guessing at the best candiates solely based on racial statistics. We should still look at an individual's merit and not go down the road of generalizing people into groups. However, at the same time, I want to scream every time I hear the denial of human evolution that comes out of the mouths of the social scientists. This is no worse than the whole Intelligent Design issue that people try to shoehorn into society as legitimate.
I love these "controversal" articles. ' I have to agree that we are not created equal. I also have to agree that we all have equal right to human dignity. However, the question is whether being inequal means one being better as a whole than another. What standard are we using to define what makes a human better than another? Survival? Intelligence? Physical Strength? TFA seems to be saying that there is inequality between races, but each race is best suited for their own region. So we do have a sort of equality since we have yet to define an international standard for a "best human being" ' Host: And now for the winner of the 2006 "Best Human" Award goes to the Japanese for sweet DDR footwork, cheap cars, and 1337 anime. Runners-up include the Germans for good beer and the Volkswagon, and the Irish for, uh even better beer and red-haired lasses...
I find that although many people are liberal in beliefs, they are conservative in actions.
This article is built on a foundation of sand. To begin with what's a "nation"? In what sense are distinct populations like the Basques part of the modern nation state that rules over them? Are my Alsatian ancestors "French" or "German"? Or, how do you explain the genetics of places like Poland, which went extinct and then came back?
The category of the nation is relatively recent, and itself a product of history. You can't simply take it as a given.
If you were able to take a baby from ancient times and transplant him to the present, he'd grow up to about the same as the rest of us, because "the rest of us" have enough variation that you'd not notice any difference.
Take 10000 ancient babies and 10000 modern babies though, place them in equal situations, and you'll see a pattern of differences between the groups.
It's easy to prove this for physical attributes like height. The Mayan and Inca people of Central America were very short. If you brought one to the modern world, part of that difference would go away (better food) and part would remain. Maybe the guy is 5'4" instead of the average 5'10", but you couldn't say for sure if it was something particular to an ancient person. If you got 10000 of these people though, and the average was 5'4", then you'd know there was a difference.
We will develop a reduced desire for calories, salt, and protien.
We will handle trans fats better, or we will become able to taste them and find them yucky.
What I got from this article is that someone who basically lived at any time period before my birth is genetically and biologically different than me. I'm pretty sure that ANYONE with one of these "brains" or whatever you call them, would have been able to rationalize that. It's not like the knowledge and insight people before us have gained would have been lost, right? Or has it? Oh, shi--
Science has shown us over the years that the minority of our population that has left handed DNA are just as good as the rest of us. Despite this the scientific establishment has continued to discriminate against them.
:P
We have to stop discriminating based on the twists of our DNA.
>Surely if you were able to take a baby from ancient times and transplant him to the present, he'd grow up to really be no different than the rest of us.
If you read things like Seneca's letter of consolation to his mother from his exile, you find that ancient people had the same feelings and quirks that we do. You can even spot comparable personality subtypes. What was Archimedes if not a superlative nerd? Ancient politics malfunctioned in all the same ways that contemporary politics does, and the US Founding Fathers successfully applied lessons from governance structures in ancient Greece. Stories in the Bible about procrastination (Jonah) and temptation (many) resonate with us all today. Cochran really overreached there.
I agree with your point, but just for the record, that phrase by the Founding Fathers did not mean "equal in ability" or even "equal in value". It meant that no one is born divine, in the sense of more than human. This was a direct attack on the idea that kings are ordained by God.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
21st century Jewish (ashiknazi) exceptionalism is just as much psudoscience as Nazi eugenics programs and racial BS of the 20th and 19th century.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The actual ideology was created for the purpose of grabbing power for the commercial classes from the Old Regime, not for creating an egalitarian society.
Read that fragment again: "...unfounded notions of racial superiority..."
That's not political correctness. The author is taking a clear stance on the supposed superiority of races. You seem to have ignored the distinction between a well-adapted race and a morally superior race; 'superiority' in this context implies a moral judgment that obviously can't be summarized in genetic terms.
...every person is entitled to the same basic rights as the rest. The philosophical rhetoric that underlies these claims needs the postulate that all human beings are somewhat equal--nobody is so much better equipped, morally or intellectually or otherwise, that he can take away the political rights of self determination from other men.
This is a fallacy, of course. It should be pretty obvious that not all humans are equal (whether 'created' or 'born' or whatever). Some people are smarter, some people are stronger... some are taller than average, some are shorter than average, and so on. This is obvious. That some of these traits are also correlated to our genetic stock is also obvious.
The fundamental ethical argument should not be "all humans deserve equal rights because they are fundamentally identical..." but rather "all humans deserve equal rights because they are all human and all deserve rights." Being strong doesn't give you extra rights... being taller doesn't give you fewer rights. The ethical axiom is simply that "humans deserve equal opportunities/rights/etc." Somehow linking this to "all people are identical" is a fallacy.
Until people get rid of this fallacy, we are doomed to deny the facts of genetic studies. That some cultures may be genetically predisposed in some way (on average taller than average, or on average stronger than average, whatever...) should be obvious... and it shouldn't challenge our notions of humans being entitled to equal rights.
Yet somehow "all men are created equal" didn't stop France from imperial/colonial expansion in Africa, nor did it prevent France from trying to conquer Mexico, or the US the Phillipines.
Bypassing that cognitive dissonance is dead simple...you just define the natives/undesirables as "sub-human" and continue on your merry way. Every successful* culture in history did and still does this.
*I think most metrics of cultural dominance can be used here
It is a problem. The second we find the causes of certain things in genes, there will be high pressure to eliminate them. Sure Hitler went out of control when he started killing off all the Jews and homosexuals and non-Aryan people, but there are other more humane ways. Such as sterilization. If it's found gene X when configured in manner A increases the likelihood of someone becoming a serial killer to 90%, there aren't many arguments you can come up with to say "we should keep that gene in that configuration in our gene pool."
That's the scary thing. If gene's do affect our behaviour to a large degree, it is difficult to argue for people with those genes being allowed to continue to breed.
Some weirdo actually weighed testicles removed from cadavers. The asians were smallest. The others didn't differ all that much. The same is true of penis measurements, but note that africans look better equipped because the "flacid" state isn't as flacid as that of other populations.
A few basics:
1. genes govern everything we are and are not, and everybody has a different set of genes (with the exception of twins). Thus, no one is actually created equal, in the sense you are suggesting.
2. although genes on the individual level can vary significantly from another (think John Holmes, think Albert Einstein), there is virtually no difference at all on the group level. This means that if you compare a distinct ethnic group (or "race" as they still call it in the US) with another, you will find a much larger variation within each group than between the groups. This is what scientists mean when they say we are all Homo sapiens sapiens (except for three tiny African tribes, who DO qualify as another sub-species (or "race" as they still call it in the US). What this basically means is that we are all the same on the group level; this is not just politically correct, but also scientifically correct. A few discrepancies such as resistance to malaria, skin color, hair color and other minute genome changes donät change this.
3. we tend to categorize people by their looks. Japanese and Chinese are all small, and this must be because of their genes, right? Did you know that the average height for a European was 150 cm in the 1500s? That it is now 180 cm is of course because of altered diet, and we now utlizie our genetic potential to the maxium. The same goes for modern Japanese and Chinese to a certain extent (do you know who Yao Ming is?), but many Asians have low protein diets and thus don't maximize their genetic potential.
4. TFA mentions that some warriors tend to have three times as many babies as non-warriors, and that this would have a social effect, making the tribe more aggressive on the whole. That is such rubbish that I can't even start to think about its national socialist roots; it doesn't work that way, since others still have babies at a significant rate. If you compare artificial selection measures like milking cows, you would see that one weeds out all the "bad" examples; that doesn't happen in real life, and that is why you don't see natural selection happen before your eyes.
If all men are not created equal, that does not imply that they aren't entitled to the same basic rights.
of course
in australia, a bunch of colonists from the murky british isles dropped on a brightly sunlit desert has meant soaring skin cancer cases. am i saying pale people shouldn't wear sunscreen because that would be racist? of course not. that would result in thousands of needless deaths in australia alone ever year
less melanin means you should protect yourself from the sun in other ways. duh. and... what is this supposed to mean to me? what great lessons is supposed to be drawn from this? geographic variations in biochemistry exist
so what? what does it mean? it doesn't have ANY SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER. because race simply doesn't matter
there are many medical conditions which can be shown to be confined historically by geography. sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, lactose intolerance, HIV immunity, rhabdomyelosis vulnerability when on statin drugs, tay-sachs disease, chilblains, vulnerability to gout, etc., ad nauseum. just like nose size (arid or humid conditions), finger length (hot or cold), and skin color (melanin protection from sun), etc., ad nauseum
did you know that on the average, worldwide, men are about 10% darker than females because for females protection from the sun is less important than the critical need for folic acid during early pregnancy, and that can come from the sun? what does this all mean?
nothing!
not a fucking thing! JUST LIKE THIS FUCKING RACIST BULLSHIT
it's little scientific tidbits that don't add up to a whole. all of these little different surface features and biochemical quirks all overlap with each other. you can't draw any lines in the sand that signifies anything meaningful, because all these little quirks you add up have different geographical ranges. it's simply genetic white noise, and it's a quiet signal
meanwhile there is a strong solid tone that is a lot louder: the similarities. so how come the static of surface differences matter so much to some, when if you mapped them they would barely pierce the thick volume of similarities? to focus on these surface statistical perturbations is like someone looking at ripples on the surface of the lake, and completely missing the volume of water in the lake underneath
this is the logical fallacy of racism: ripples on the surface have lessons for us about the volume of water underneath. race is a concept that is silly shallow antiquated nonsense, for if you really truly understood what you were talking about when you bring up medical quirks and statistical anomalies, if you truly had some wisdom behind your words, then the vast volume of medical knowledge and statistics would speak to you of the similarities more than differences, by orders of magnitude
so what the fuck is this article supposed to mean? tell us how ripples on the surface of a lake means something. tell us racists, tell us the deep significance. tell me about sickle cell anemia... what is the lesson for us? what great significance are we supposed to attach to this?
this article is nothing more than a window into the filthy soul of racism, and the fallacies in the reasoning of racists that they overlook to make the evidence fit their presupposed ideas about how much we differ
when the real lesson of all medicine and biochemistry is how similar we are. focusing on the ripples on the surface, versus the volume of water underneath: the fallacy of the "logic" of racism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why is it scientifically hard to apply the same ideas to humans? You can see various traits and charcteristics based on breed with any number of animals, anyone who raises dogs, horses, cattle-whatever, can see this is just true facts. Seems more or less a gimme it would apply to human sub species "breeds", even if it is politically incorrect. Legally there should be no difference, biologically and genetically, of course there are various differences. Some are overt, obvious physical characteristics that are easy to see. So, we should be surprised if there are psychological make up differences, or ways to socialize or interact in other ways? I would be surprised if they COULDN'T find traits. People who would deny science and say any differences are purely local and immediate environmental and cultural are failing to acknowledge that "genes" do in fact exist, and we are still just scratching the surface on the subtle nuances of slight variations. It could well be that various genes drive culture and basic behavior.
One problem with that axiom, however, is that humans throughout history tend to disagree on the definition of the word "human". If a person doesn't want to think of another person as an equal, then they will generally call them something else (e.g. an animal, savage, monkey, etc.)
If we accept a genetic definition of what it means to be human, then at what point does a genetic relative no longer deserve equal rights and why?
"For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." -From the Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, by Lewis Carroll
in mirror image. libertarianism has as much a tenuous hold on reality as communism, and doomed to just as much miserable failure
communism holds that altruism, working for the benefit of the group, as something that trumps human selfishness. bullshit. likewise, libertariams holds selfishness, working only for your benefit, as something that trumps human altruism
the truth? human nature is a duality of altruism and selfishness, none superceding the other, and one ignored in favor of the other at the peril of creating a philosophy out of touch with real human nature, and therefore bound to fail as a valuable guiding philosophy in leading your life and building a society
the wisest guiding philosphies for capturing the essence of human nature and harnessing it to maximize human wealth and happiness is to be both altruistic and seflish. capitalism, with social safety nets, as in the usa, or socialism, with a capitalist engine, as in europe.
so beware dear impressionable souls: libertarianism is bunk of the same order and magnitude, in mirror image reverse, as communism. libertarianism is nothing but selfishness with a philosophical bumper sticker stuck on its ass that somehow purports to elevate it to respectability. libertarianism will succeed as soon as human nature is purged of empathy, sympathy, love for one's family, love for one's community, love for humanity itself
in other words, never
the only people who take this shit seriously are earnest but naive college students with too much philosophy classes under their belt and no real life experience, 40-something selfish assholes behind on their alimony payments, and nutjobs who horde guns in the woods and consider themselves to be part of the minutement militia, 2 centuries hence
i wish libertarians and the residual communist idiots would get together on some south pacific island, and leave the rest of us more in touch with the altruistic AND selfish parts of our human nature in peace
libertarianism = loud, useless nonsense, utterly out of touch with human nature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because tendency to attend university and value that culturally is written io our genes
right before the gene for spinning the dradle and right after the gene for wearing yarmukles
pfffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. genes govern everything we are and are not, and everybody has a different set of genes (with the exception of twins). Thus, no one is actually created equal, in the sense you are suggesting.
Let's you and I, and ten other people, all take a (12 oz) bottle of drinking water, get together, and run some scientific tests. All twelve bottles will have different mineral content, salinity, and various other factors, but despite these minor variations they are all "equal" bottles of water.
To put the rebuttal another way: there has never been a solid proof that genetics really do determine human behavior. It's an influence, but not a greater influence that paternity, upbrining, or self-determination. It's certainly not a factor in the success rate of persons attemting equal goals with equal resources resolve.
What this basically means is that we are all the same on the group level; this is not just politically correct, but also scientifically correct. A few discrepancies such as resistance to malaria, skin color, hair color and other minute genome changes donät change this.
Saying that there are no such thing as human races is an untenable abuse of language. The right term, perhaps, would be "there are only minor changes between the races" or rather "there is almost universal interbreeding between the races." No ammount of genetics will ever change the fact that children look like their parents, and genetically different groups have identifiable physical differences.
we tend to categorize people by their looks. Japanese and Chinese are all small, and this must be because of their genes, right?
No, it's because of their diet. The distinguishing oriental characteristics are slanted eye shape and color, and "yellow" skin tone. Just like the distinguishing african characteristics are "brown" skin and a particular facial characteritics, and the distinguishing "Caucaisan" characterisics are (again) skin tone and face shape.
(do you know who Yao Ming is?)
He's an oriental basketball player. And, apparantly, a bad strawman on your part.
TFA mentions that some warriors tend to have three times as many babies as non-warriors, and that this would have a social effect, making the tribe more aggressive on the whole. That is such rubbish that I can't even start to think about its national socialist roots; it doesn't work that way, since others still have babies at a significant rate.
Sheesh. If sub-group A (let's call them Republicans) has more children than sub-group B (let's call them Democrats), then the tribe that contains both sub-groups will, generation after generation, tend to be more like sub-group A.
In order to dismiss the claim, you'd have to show that either warriors/republicans tend not to raise children that grow up to be warriors/repulicans, or that a significant ammount of warriors/republicans die before having children, or that the tribe as a whole is distinct enough that its sub-groups don't influence each other at all.
How can you make such broad statements? Are you a troll or does this go against your religion (christianity, marxism, etc)?
(Now, which way did evolutional pressures go? We won't know much for quite a few years.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
All humans are physico-chemically unique; therefore all humans are morally and philosophically equal.
When everyone is unique there is no logical justification for any particular moral system. Therefore the logical conclusion is to allow and protect every moral system to the maximum possible extent that does not hold one moral system (and therefore its adherent(s)) above another, viz a viz "natural rights".
BUT... the problem, from a scientific perspective, is that the more we learn about genetics the more evidence exists that there ARE behavioral and personality traits linked to our genes.
... We think it increases chemical agent X, ... Which is statistically correlated with behavior Y..,") that are not scientific (because they have not stood up well to alternative, equally plausible explanations,) that appeal to people with pre-determined beliefs aka "pre-judgements" aka "prejudices." ...who then go on to say, "Because this is a materialist explanation, it is therefor scientific truth."
Not at all;
Genetics is still in infancy, and all we're finding is statistical correlations.
There is not a single good scientific explanation (I said scientific, not just materialistic -- that is, it has to be backed by experience and have stood to scientific criticism) alive that tells, mechanically, how you get from specific genes, to specific behaviors.
Instead, what you have is a bunch of materialistic explanations ("This gene here,
That, my friend, is the state of things.
Evolutionary Psychology is rife with fraud, and you can't throw a stone in a scientific establishment without (A) hitting someone who is passionately sure that it's real, and then (B) the stone riccocheting off to hit some other scientist, who'll say, "This is just wishful thinking on their part, and their literature leaks like a sieve."
It's important to note that the concepts "All men are created equal" and "All men shall be treated equally" are *not* synonymous. Just because some individuals may or may not have better inherent abilities at some tasks is *not* justification for denying equal opportunities.
Similarly, it would not be justification for excusing certain behaviour (eg: a predisposition towards violence used as an "excuse" for assault). It works both ways.
What the hell are you even talking about? The phrase indicates that all men are equal UNDER THE LAW. In no way does it mean that I'm somehow equal to Linus Torvalds when it comes to kernel programming or any other such nonsense.
The more you know, the less you understand.
The author goes to extreme ends to try and distance himself from the last people(s) who advocated this philosophy. Namely the Nazis as he himself notes.
Yet for all that, I don't think that he learned the lesson of the Nazi's and their supposed "scientific evidence". Do not ask Religon for "How". Do not ask science for the answer to "Why". To the degree that he explains certain genetic traits, that is fine. But the dangerous application was when the Nazi's used science to justify their hatred of the Jews. This could easily go the same way.
More to the point, I don't believe that genetics are destiny any more then I believe that Demographics are Destiny. Science may point out new characteristics and new theories, but that only answers the how, never the why. It may be interesting, but never a reason for segmenting people.
but there's still a morally offensive (to some, at least) supposition there: Not all men are created equal.
I would argue that not all men are created the same, but that has little or nothing to do with equality, however you choose to define it.
No, it's because of their diet. The distinguishing oriental characteristics are slanted eye shape and color, and "yellow" skin tone. Just like the distinguishing african characteristics are "brown" skin and a particular facial characteritics, and the distinguishing "Caucaisan" characterisics are (again) skin tone and face shape.
Sorry that's just not true. Genes do play an important factor in determining height. Take the people of NE Netherlands. The average hieght of males in the region is over 6 feet. Native peoples of South America tended to be quite short. Diet does play a factor, but genes are more important.
It turns out they were wrong to do this but really the posturing about 19th century beliefs being based on little more than base prejudice isn't much better than Lewontin and Gould. The Boasian anthropologists were just as politically motivated as their counterparts of the late 19th and early 20th century. The Boasians were more successful in putting forward their agenda not because their arguments were more sound but because they, like Lewontin and Gould, had better public relations.
Men of Darwin's era weren't as stupid as we wish they were and we wish they were stupid because if they weren't then we would have to face how much damage has been done to scientific progress in the fields of human culture in the name of fighting racism and prejudice.
The real question is how can we get beyond this nonsense and come to consilience between various fields of human knowledge of humanity so we can make human societies more sustainable and humane?
Seastead this.
Are we nothing more than gene machines, controled by our genes determined from the distant past? It seems like the implications of several of the genetic articles I have recently read. It seems to be the mechanistic assumption of many of the scientists studying our genes. Are they correct to assume this?
I think we are more than gene machines.
A couple of notes, Hitler did do sterilization, primarily for political opponents and homosexuals. They (the catholics, the protestants, the homosexuals, etc) died in the camps, but they were not systematically wiped out.
Saying that there are no such thing as human races is an untenable abuse of language. The right term, perhaps, would be "there are only minor changes between the races" or rather "there is almost universal interbreeding between the races." No ammount of genetics will ever change the fact that children look like their parents, and genetically different groups have identifiable physical differences.
No. In fact the term "race" is not a valid term. It is called sub-species, and as I laid out in the previous post there are in fact three sup-species among humans that are not Homo sapiens sapiens but Homo sapiens somethingelsius. But these are isolated cases. Thus, science doesn't recognize the term "race", and even if it did, it wouldn't be what you and Mrs. Robinson mean with "race".
I can give you a gene to study, and you cannot tell me what "race" this gene's carrier is (I'll give you 1000 samples in order to weed out guesses and make a statistically accurate falsification of your lies). That is the ultimate test of "race".
Sheesh. If sub-group A (let's call them Republicans) has more children than sub-group B (let's call them Democrats), then the tribe that contains both sub-groups will, generation after generation, tend to be more like sub-group A.
No. This is simply not so, because warriors (in the original example) don't mate with warriors; they mate with females, who are carriers of the whole population's gene pool.
In the case of democrats and republicans... alright. Republicans get more kids, and these kids must then make their offspring with another republican, otherwise your thesis falls. Considering that humans tend to be just a teeny weeny little more complex than you suggest, it will easily be demonstrated that these kids will look for other traits in their dates than their parent's political preference, and many of them will also revolt against their parents and do the opposite. Not to mention that societal conditions constantly change; it might have been cool to be a republican in the Reagan era, but look what retarded inbred bastard runs the country now... (likewise, there are no Samurai in Japan today, and no feudal vassals in Europe, no plantation owners doing slave trade in Virginia).
shut the fuck up incoherent flip boy
Just as asian eyes and noses are an adaption to low temperatures, this other body part had to be protected from freezing off.
That all men are created equal is an untruth- depending upon what you use to rate measure of worth if that's what you're measuring. Jesse Owens has a lot more value -- and is provably better -- than Albert Einstein if you think running fast is of greater value than theoretical physics- and vice versa. The declaration as we've all come to know and love it has nothing to do with valuation, but is one that all men are created equal in the eyes of the law.
While a number of other posters blather on -- pro and con -- about how wussy and PC or not the theory is, the argument put forth by this therory that's truly of interest is more all men are created different. It deals with the possibility that different genetically influenced behavirorial inclinations amongst populations, as well as physical traits, can come about due to cultural as well as environmental pressures rather than genes as destiny. Keep in mind that an individual is not the populace and an inclination is not the sole proven determinant of behavior.
What is worrisome is that some idiot, half understanding this, will grasp this as proof that various populations are inherently inferior or superior, coloring it with his perceptions as to what behavior and traits are valuable or not.
Britain on the other hand got squat from the Marshal Plan, and struggles to this day with pre-war infrastructure that in nearby countries was destroyed and subsequently replaced.
The British got about $14 - $20 billion of war material from the US via the Lend-Lease program during 1941-1945. This was in 1940s dollars, so it really was a substantial fraction of GDP. None of this was repaid in cash; rather, in return, the US got leases on various British naval bases.
Now, the name "Lend-Lease" is a bit misleading. It was only named that to make the deal palatable to stingy American voters.
The "Lend" part refers to the idea was that the materials (tanks, trucks, ships, aircraft, food, fuel, clothing, etc.) would be lent to the allies, and that when the emergency was over, the allies would give back whatever was still in usable condition. Of course, at the end of the war, almost all these materials had been destroyed or otherwise used up, so basically nothing was returned.
The "Lease" part of course refers to leases on British naval bases. This is not a small matter. These bases have helped the US to project military power on the world ever since then. It is hard to put a dollar value on them.
When the US ended the program suddenly in 1945, there was a remainder of material still on its way to Britain. This was sold for about 10% of its market value. The British government paid for it with a loan at a 2% annual rate, which the UK still has not paid off. (At 2% interest, who can blame them?) Again, this is separate from the Lend-Lease deal, which was repaid in bases, not money.
This was meant to be a good deal for the British, and it probably was. But it had a terrible effect on British industry. Part of the terms of Lend-Lease required that the UK not export the sort of materials that it was being given by the US. People were put to work at other wartime tasks, and so by the end of the war, industrial capacity in the UK was much reduced. Of course, in the US it was the opposite story.
The UK also got more than $3 billion from the Marshall Plan -- which is more than any other country got, but still small compared to the Lend-Lease aid. IIRC, roughly half of this was in the form of a loan that had to be repaid, whilst the rest was basically an outright grant.
Most of this was justified in the US more by naked self-interest than pure charity. Otherwise there would have been comparable aid to the Axis powers during WWII and to Eastern Europe during the Cold War. But there is nevertheless a pretty clear case of American generosity and idealism in the great aid effort during the First World War which saved tens of millions of Europeans from starvation, but nowadays is almost entirely forgotten.
Explain why so many countries with thousands of years of history are such shit holes.
Ethiopia been developing for thoudands of years, yet they can't grow enough food to feed themselves. The was a country that was known and around during the Roman Empire! WTF do we have to give them food? They should be teaching us the irrigation techniques they developed because their land is so poor. Oh wait, that never seemed to catch on there untill really recently.
>> Not all men are created equal. > just for the record, that phrase by the Founding Fathers did not mean "equal in ability" or even "equal in value". It meant that no one is born divine Considering the Founding Fathers' beliefs, I would argue it meant the exact opposite. They believed everyone was born divine.
"All men are created equal" does indeed imply the meaning you suggested, but also says that all people have the same natural rights, and those natural rights are the right to life, liberity, and properity (the declaration of independance changed this to "the persuit of happiness")
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
The defect rate for siblings is only 2x the norm. (1.5% norm, 3% siblings)
That's... maybe one out of 33 kids with a noticable problem. Lots of those will manage to breed despite the problem, perhaps with a similar person and thus reducing the in-breeding.
So the numbers look good. Even supposing that all defects resulted in failure to reproduce, the in-bred baby is still over 97% as geneticly useful as a regular baby.
You get all sorts of horrid diseases from eating humans. Eating primates is almost as bad. Eating non-mammals is better. Eating cold-blooded stuff is even better than that.
See also: Kuru, Mad Cow disease, HIV/SIV, leprosy, SARS, bird flu...
Every mutation need not be random or equally common. We've discovered that some genes produce multiple proteins while others consistently mutate between generations via a set of strange rules (this is a major factor in understanding telomeres). It is a fact that some genes cannot be mutated without causing fatalities - evidenced in part by the presence of said genes in nearly all organisms - so why wouldn't life (single-cell or larger) evolve safeguards for these, such as locating them on the part of a chromosome less prone to mutation?
There was an article some time ago on slashdot science noting that extreme temperatures can influence the rate of mutations in certain single-celled lifeforms. The ability to change the rate and target of mutations in response to changes in environment is an extremely useful adaptation, particularly for asexual creatures that might often be exposed to circumstances too difficult for their progeny to survive without some genomic change.
The adaptation of being able to trade genes - sexual reproduction - seems far less trivial than the adaptation of keeping some genes off limits while letting others mutate with a high degree of frequency. Life doesn't "choose to evolve" per se, but having a non-uniform degree of mutation across the entire genome is by itself an extremely functional adaptation .
My point? Each gene might have a different propensity for mutation and different mechanisms for propagating within a population.
And that could make it much harder to determine noise and margins of error (among other statistical issues).
The article - and possibly many of the referenced scientists as well - fail to address that we inherit far more than genetics.
Palpable examples include parent's commitment and knowledge passed between generations.
A less "noble" but extremely well documented example is money ($$$). Your offspring's viability will be influenced not only by their genes but also by the economic circumstances they inherit. This is something that is particularly well documented; many women admit that wealth is a factor in judging a male's attractiveness and there is evidence that even those who deny such motivation are rarely truly immune to it.
(I realize the asymmetry in my use of male/female. I in no way am asserting that the converse is false so it would be best to simply consider my choice of labels to be arbitrary rather than arguing political correctness over this point.)
And let's face it, I know of very few people who don't intuitively want to pass on wealth to their descendants. It is easy to note the hypocrisy behind somebody who wants their child to inherit billions but complains incessantly about "government hand-outs to people too lazy to get a job." But it certainly wouldn't surprise me if a desire to pass on wealth is as strong a force as the desire to have sex or procreate. (Is it realistic to believe that a steep estate tax would ever be accepted by the public while simultaneously declaring abstinence-only programs to be ineffective in practice? - I hope not!)
Ashkenazi Jews being limited to money lending and tax farming would create a situation where higher intelligence is an asset and therefore a potential adaptation. Of course an adaptation like that might be insignificant compared to other potential adaptations, say the creation of monopolies and attempts to keeping wealth within families (De Beers, anybody?).
My point? Don't for a minute assume that "adaptation" need only occur via genetic changes. I have no idea if their modeling takes this into account - if such a feat is even possible - but it seems to me that there are many non-genetic inheritable variables that are difficult to measure.
You come from the shallow end of the gene pool.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Just because we are all of equal value doesn't mean that we all have to be similar. If you disregard everything else you can still not say that men and women are genetically identical, because we are not. So we are not the same in all things, but we are of equal value (human value, not money value); which is the important thing.
All men (and women) are equal; we are just not identical.
Studies have found that we're wired to eat more food the more choices of food we see. Given unlimited refills we on average will eat just one or two servings if there's just one choice of lunch. But at a lunch buffet we can easily eat 3x or 4x the calories.
Because all of us are just a few hundred generations (at most) away from our hunter gatherer ancestors, we all want to bulk up during the feast season. Its only been the past 10 generations that a very, very few of us have lived in a non-malthusian world, and 10 generations isn't enough time for any genetic selection.
"Science" -- we'll just ignore the lack of a monlotlithic scientific body here -- doesn't decide what words mean. Yes, (almost) all humans are the same species and sub-species, able to comfortably interbreed without reproductive difficulty. But there is a clear difference between the people who lived in Europe in 0 C.E. and those that lived in Japan or Africa in the same year. Just as there was a clear, physical difference between the people of one tribe and their hated enemies across the sea.
There are few serious studies of the difference between this that use the term "race" becase it is, as the Times points out, "a sensitive issue." Much better to use a different term entirely than to have to risk political backlash when the politician who helped fund you gets called a racist.
I can give you a gene to study, and you cannot tell me what "race" this gene's carrier is (I'll give you 1000 samples in order to weed out guesses and make a statistically accurate falsification of your lies). That is the ultimate test of "race".
I'll give you 22 entire chromosones to study, and you cannot tell me what "gender" the chromosone's carrier is. Obviously, this statistically disproves your naive notion that there is any difference at all between "men" and "women."
Race is a set of physical characteristics that is borne out by physical examination. The slender genetic differences needed to carry these characteristics does not, in any way, invalidate the idea itself. In fact, if you give me 1000 RELEVENT genes, I can tell you with close to 100% accuracy what race the subjects are.
No. This is simply not so, because warriors (in the original example) don't mate with warriors; they mate with females, who are carriers of the whole population's gene pool.
*sigh* Please go back and read the article. Here, I'll quote it for you and markup the relevant word you missed:
I think that's all the rebuttal I need for that point.
Republicans get more kids, and these kids must then make their offspring with another republican, otherwise your thesis falls
Nope. The premise just has to be that Republicans tend to raise Republicans and have more children than non-Republicans. If we had the kind of discrepency that the Yanomamo had, with say two kids for Democrats and six for Republicans, we'd have a Republican slant unless every Democrat married a republican(1) and managed at least an 88% poliitcal conversion rate (2).
Oh, and I already told you how my shaky premise could be shot full of holes when you apply it to America.
(1): Presuming equal starting populations of Republicans and Democrats and unstaggered generations for ease of illustration, this makes for 1/3 pure republican, 1/3 male republican, and 1/3 female republican households in the second generation. With reproductive frequency linked to the male as it is in the Yanomamo, that'd give us 43% of the children in pure-Republican homes and 57% of the children in mixed homes.
(2): That is, rate of raising their children to be like them instead of the other parent. Even if we presumed that all Republicans had more kids, this would still need to be at least a 75% conversion or we'd have a slant.
makes no adjustments for those who fail. as a perfect meritocracy, if you fall and break your arm one day, you will starve
a society that cares for its citizens is antithetical to libertarianism. but a society that doesn't care for its citizens is impossible because of basic human nature
libertarianism only works in a world where humans are so venal and selfish and lizard-like that they can, indeed, see someone fall down, break their arm, and starve to death and completely ignore them
how do you equate, for example, socialized medicine, which would help that person with a broken arm, and the notion of libertarianism?
the government has to take that money and apportion it to for that social safety net to exist
what will replace that function on your libertarian utopia/ dystopia?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a big moral problem for liberal Western democracies. Most European and North American states, and a good portion of nations in the rest of the world, are founded on the basis that every person is entitled to the same basic rights as the rest. The philosophical rhetoric that underlies these claims needs the postulate that all human beings are somewhat equal--nobody is so much better equipped, morally or intellectually or otherwise, that he can take away the political rights of self determination from other men.
I'm sorry, but that is pure BS. There is no nation in the world that is founded on the belief that there is no difference between Einstein and someone with a mental disability. What makes liberal democracies liberal is that they believe that even those of low (relative) intelligence should have the right to self-determination. This is ensured through a combination of restrictions on governmental authority and an open electoral system. There is an intelligence threshold at which you are self-conscious and therefore need self-determination. It doesn't matter how far other people go beyond that threshold.
It is pretty simple to prove that these new findings would have no impact on our core Liberal beliefs. It has been easy to test "IQ" for decades now. If we wanted to disallow low-IQ people from voting or controlling their own lives, we could have done so decades ago. If we find the genes for intelligence that makes it no easier to determine who is actually going to end up intelligent (as measured by IQ) after education. It would actually be less precise to use genes. And even LESS precise to use racial categories.
so you dislike government imposing upon freewill and taking money from people to support others who are in dire straights
but you have no problem with an overarching power with the ability to impose upon your private finances and mandate the requirement for insurance according to certain protocols and standards
you do realize that such an overarching power is necessary, right?
and that such an "insurance" is commonly known as... drumroll please... TAXES
lol!
or in your mind everyone is spontaneously going to take out the full spectrum of insurance required for this pseudo-libertarian scheme to work?
you really believe that will voluntarily, willfully, and knowledgably happen?
(smacks forehead)
just follow through on your own thoughts dude. take a libertarian utopian scheme in your mind, and see how it devolves into nonfunctional nonsense. wishfully suspending disbelief about basic human nature and just wishing that a libertarian uptopia will ever, could ever work is just nonsense on the same order of idiocy as creationism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Americans: supersize everything... McDonalds fries, Hummers, malls...
Iraqis: hate old shoes
British: somewhat asexual, so lots of compensatory effort
(People, it's a joke.)
Sure, there undoubtedly many factors, but mention genetics as one of them and you will be shunned.
He's an ex-fireman who became a bouncer. He's also a dwarf bowling pro. (it doesn't pay the bills) During the day, he helps disadvantaged kids lose weight and learn to read. He lives in the bad part of Sydney. He's a 46-year-old divorced father of two. He's really cool. He drives a Harley.
Any other questions?
(Well, having said that, I'm not sure that anything short of experiments by sadistic aliens from the planet XYZZY can explain the English, but that's another story...)
Likewise, many European nations are very young, in evolutionary terms, and spent most of the time invading each other, mixing the gene pools substantially. It's actually quite impressive that there is any "national trait" in appearance, all things considered. By all rights, that should have been totally eliminated through wars, raids, invasions and the occasional mass population migration.
I'm inclined to reverse the direction of the theory - that nations did not evolve people to fit the circumstance, but rather people evolved nations to fit their whims.
Under this theory, genetics is quite irrelevant. Rather, you start off with small bands of people espousing a specific philosophy or attitude, and that attracts like-minded people. The bands that become large enough become nations, the smaller bands become yokels to be scorned by the masses.
I do not believe that there is a "work-till-you-die" gene, for example. It's counter-productive. You end up doing less effective work, die younger and are unable to take full advantage of the skills and abilities of those who cannot physically work under such rigors. We can see that although American medicine is the best in the world, and American mental and physical healthcare is highly advanced, more people die in America from stress-related disorders (including stress-related addictions) than do so in any other technological civilization on the planet. From a purely evolutionary perspective, a more efficient, less militant work-ethic should be better adapted for survival.
Clearly, evolution isn't the determining factor in what civilization survives, or indeed becomes dominant. However, no civilization can become dominant without some advantage, and no civilization will maintain a philosophy that doesn't provide it with some payback.
America has a lot of resources, a lot of usable land, a lot of just about anything imaginable. Combine that with a rapid population growth, and you've the makings of a very respectable superpower. The payback then becomes obvious - with that much in hand, it is very easy to accrue both wealth and influence. Those factors alone are enough to describe American philosophies.
But American philosophies didn't evolve out of thin air. They came from the Puritans - known to the English as the Roundheads. The Puritans ruled England after seizing power in a military coup under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, and beheading the King for no better reason than he liked to party too much. (The Royalists were known as the Cavaliers, from which we have inherited the term to be "cavalier".) After Cromwell himself was forced from power, the Puritans fled England for America, becoming the controlling force there.
The Puritans were a strange English sect and really didn't feature much in English history prior to the English Civil War. If genetics plays any role in culture or history, the Puritans evolved in exactly the wrong place and the wrong time. England, by that time, was becoming seriously sick with endless internal religious wars. Strangely, the Puritans managed to move to about the one country in the world that could handle them. This is simply not something genetics can do for you.
I am much more inclined to believe that there is nothing here that needs explaining genetically, that the genetic makeup o
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
with socialized medicine, caring for those in dire straights becomes mandatory for all citizens
with libertarian charity, caring for those in dire straights becomes voluntary
i am very much a pragmatist and a realist in my arguments, no over-arching moral grandstanding needed to make my point: the society that mandates a standard of care for its citizens is a richer society that one that suggests people try to look after the less fortunate
and i make this statement along rote economic arguments, not along more nebulous arguments about happiness
you have to be kidding me if you are honestly telling me voluntary charities will serve the needs of a society's bereft better than one where a government mandate does
sure, you can argue about the waste and inefficiencies and bureaucratic idiocies of said government all you want, but all of these negatives do not add up to something which makes the mandatory care-driven society poorer than the voluntary care-driven one
it's simply a matter of qunatity of aid that can be provided and a real recognition of the quantity of help that is needed
sure, there are created parasitical citizens who exploit inadequacies in the system to live off of other people's hard work, but these are vanishingly small absurdities, not the defining character of a society
and in fact, in a libertarian society where charities make up the social safety nets, these parasites will still exist, they just change their tune
don't let the existence of these losers come to define the nature of such a society to you, or you are simply a victim of some sort of propaganda, if you can't look at the real numbers of such losers and come to realize how inconsequential they are
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Otherwise you'll find yourself sorting out people soon, also called fascism.
if i waved a magic wand, and removed all of the religions in the world: christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism, etc., what would happen?
new religions would immediately spring into existence to fill the void
why?
this is because religion is a phenomenon of humans in social groups that is unremovable from how human nature plays out. that is, religion is not good, religion is not bad, it just IS
now, along the same lines, if i waved a magic wand, and removed all of the governments in the world, new governments would immediately spring into existence to fill the void, because government is a phenomenon of humans in social groups that unremovable from how human nature plays out. that is, government is not good, government is not bad
government just IS
people will try to regulate their behavior and the behavior of others. there you go: government. POOF. you can call this evil, ugly, impoverishing, anti-freedom, whatever you want to call it. but it is real, and it is not going away, unless you have some magic machine which alters human nature
so to argue against the existence of government as something separate from society is simply an absurdity
for the same intellectual and rhetorical value, i could argue against gravity or magnetism: its the same sort of laughable absurdity that has no probative or useful value if you are trying to remain relevant to your subject matter
government just happens, just like shit just happens, if that allegory suits your negative impression of government
hey, go ahead, hate government all you want, i don't care
but at least remain lucid and admit its not going away
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Prove it.
I am not an anarchist; I am a libertarian. I recognize that some government is needed to protect the rights of other people, and I do allow the federal government to have a interstate highway system and a military. Local and state governments can fill in some more services as long as they aren't socialistic or totalitarian. However, any more government control than this is evil, ugly, impoverishing, and illiberal (in the classical sense of the word).
Prove it.
I personally don't like government at all. I've seen nothing but corruption, bad leadership, needless regulation and legislation, nanny laws, and other bad things throughout my life, to the point that I lost faith in government to solve anything. However, I recognize that government is a necessary evil needed to defend people when coercion occurs. However, government shouldn't abuse that power to perform coercion (which, unfortunately, it does). That is what libertarianism is about.
You, however, seem to be a government worshiper. Everything in society has to be fixed by the government. The government is the savior, the government is the good Samaritan, the government this, the government that. Society this, society that. You don't understand the true role of government. You think that people like having their rights being ran over. You think that people like their governments fighting wars, controlling the economy, inflating its money supply, overtaxing them, and all of this other stuff.
Newsflash; for the umteenth time; the government doesn't not exist to be Superman. Its purpose isn't to come around and solve societal problems. Governments can't be compassionate, they can't be helpful, they can't really be anything. A government holds a monopoly of force and uses it to achieve certain goals; that's all a government does. I've already told you the libertarian goals of using government power. However, you seem to want to use the gun for everything. What does the gun know about health care, for example, that the market has been proven to do better?
Removing huge amounts of government isn't absurd. You shouldn't be calling me absurd because you don't understand libertarianian; that's the real absurdity. Government is NOT (and in some cases, never) the best solution for fixing all of societal problems. You don't care about freedom; it's all about "society" and "compassion" to you. You sound like the communists that you denigrated a few posts ago.
Go ahead, love the government all that you want, I don't care.
Just keep in mind that your freedom is a very important value that shouldn't be taken away by government force. Freedom being defined both in civil liberties and in economic liberties.
The most compassionate government is one that just gets out of my darn way. As long as I am not harming anybody else, I am free.
because you missed a crucial difference or three.
You're a anti semitic troll right? Post some pro-jewish racism and enjoy the 'anti-semitic' rebuttals rolling in. No matter if you are a jew or not, you are a big disgrace to humanity.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is it some sort of genetic trait for americans to talk about their system of government all the time?
"Since the agricultural revolution, humans have to a large extent created their own environment. But that does not mean the genome has ceased to evolve. The genome can respond to cultural practices as well as to any other kind of change. Northern Europeans, for instance, are known to have responded genetically to the drinking of cow's milk, a practice that began in the Funnel Beaker Culture which thrived 6,000 to 5,000 years ago. They developed lactose tolerance, the unusual ability to digest lactose in adulthood. The gene, which shows up in Dr. Pritchard's test, is almost universal among people of Holland and Sweden who live in the region of the former Funnel Beaker culture."
I need an extra pair of arms. I think I will develop them through a spontaneous change in my genome... They have got to be kidding me. The concept that you spontaneously evolve through a need for evolution is an outdated concept in science and most people would be laughed out of a room of scientists if they were to even talk about it. Only the NY Times can get away with this.
Please define "more important". I'm from a nation with high average heights, but we know that 100 years ago, we were 10 cm shorter on average. Our genes haven't changed significantly, obviously.
1885 average recruit height: 169 cm (5'6")
2003 average recruit height: 179.9 cm (5'11")
Go further back, even more extreme results - people were hardly malnourished in 1885.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
No, you muppet TFA is not saying that we can choose to evolve in a specific way it's saying that since humans have gained the ability to choose to live in certain conditions, e.g. as farmers rather than hunter-gatherers the same processes which led to the evolution of humans in the first place are carrying on and causing subsequent generations of humnans to be better adapted to the environment in which they are living than previous generations may have been.
The problem is the phrasing of the term.
When we are born, as a matter of fact, we ARE all equal. We have only a few skills - breathing, crying, suckling, peeing and pooping. In fact it usually takes months for even mental retardation to become noticable.
What you mean to say is that people are born with different potential. Our genes can only give us a range of possibilities; how high we go is entirely up to our upbringing and education.
When you say that "not all men are created equal", it implies that people are smarter or dumber based solely on their birth, which is untrue. The choices we make, and the events forced on us, shape us much more than what most of our genes contain.
Has anyone pointed that out to your President?
Britain was inhabited 15,000 years ago, but the current mixture of genes we call the English, for example, are a mere 940 years old. There would be precious little differentiation in a paltry thousand years. Certainly not enough to explain the peculiarities of the English.
;-)
Unless you factor in all of the inbreeding!
Is the answer to your sig 7 or 3?
This is news to me. Source?
In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago. Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion, suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods. No one has yet tested the Cochran-Harpending thesis, which remains just an interesting though well worked out conjecture. But one of its predictions is that the same genes should be targets of selection in any other population where there is a demand for greater cognitive skills. That demand might have well have arisen among the first settled societies where people had to deal with the quite novel concepts of surpluses, property, value and quantification. And indeed Dr. Pritchard's team detected strong selection among East Asians in the region of the gene that causes Gaucher's disease, one of the variant genes common among Ashkenazim.
Translation: "Asians are smarter than europeans because they eat rice."
We live in a technological civilization. That means we are engineering our environment. When we take animals out of their wild and throw them into cages without regard for their natures we are not being humane. We are no more humane when we do the same to humans.
Seastead this.
well said ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
PS -- "doesn't" should be "don't"
PPS -- Annoying, ain't it?
Actually, I find it helpful. While personality unquestionably has a large genetic component, skills are (IMHO) mostly learned. And my personality is such that I mostly learn from my mistakes (though it would seem much preferable to learn from the mistakes of others, it isn't as effective for me). In order to learn from my mistakes, I first have to notice them.
So, thanks. In some small way, you have contributed to making me a better person in the long run (and perhaps a tad more humble in the short).
--MarkusQ
i don't hate the government
i merely accept its existence
you are the only one here with a malformed emotional reaction to the existence of government, for or against
its the story of any naive young kid who does not know how real life works. they have not made peace with reality, so they lash out at it. and also just like a teenaged boy, they have real life all figured out, precisely because they have no idea how real life really works
you need to grow up and accept government. not because i say so, but because its an unstoppable end result of humans in social groups
you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with reality
but i of course expect more shoot the messenger type posts from you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
government is a monopoly
duh
your point?
(snicker)
we need competing governments in the same geopraphic area?
my head asplode
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i verbally abuse racists
;-)
i consider that is a virtue of mine
(snicker)
As an aside, I find it interesting to notice the degree of acceptance amongst Slashdotters to the concepts of human biodiversity. A stealth consensus in the making?
ummm, there's a lot of human biodiversity. didja ya happen to miss all of my purty examples of such in my post dorothy?
or did you miss my analogy, even though i said it about 4 different times?: mistaking the ripples on the surface of a lake as something more meaningful than the volume of water underneath
similiarities from man to man: 10^33 magnitude greater meaning than all of the biodiversity
is it sinking in that thick skull there yet?
or are you a shining example of human biodiversity by being on the low end of the IQ curve?
(snicker)
come play with me anytime racist, i enjoy verbally abusing you losers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So how do we explain the "red state" and "blue state" pheonmenon? If there is such a thing as a national character, then the United States apparently has a massive case of dissociative identity disorder, or in other words, multiple personalities.
see, here you have projected your cartoonish fears onto who i am. you have a bogeyman in your head: the rabid government lover. of course, this stereotype has nothing to do with who i am or what i am saying, but you're so wrapped up in your irrational fears you lash out at your imagined enemies and project them onto me
the next step in your growth is to deal with your demons in private, and realize that in real life, people's motivations are more complex than the cartoonish one dimensional characteratures that populate your personal fears and hatreds. try dealing with what someone actually says, rather than labelling them with your own internal difficulties and lashing out at that
now if you excuse me, i have to get back to my "hillary + big government in '08" button making
(that was a joke on your behalf, in case you missed it)
now, if you are ready to actually listen to what i say, for the 3rd time now: government i don't love, government i don't hate, government i merely accept. it has plenty of waste and negatives. these need to be cleaned up. they disgust me. but cleaning up the mess is not to be confused with throwing out government's rightful roles. according to you, if your car has imperfections, you want to get rid of your car, and walk. i have a wacky idea: how about keeping your car and just fixing the imperfections?
i know: difficult, gradual change. not as sexy as revolutionary zeal. one would hope that those in love with revolutionary change would realize how much pain and suffering and wealth destruction and social backsliding is involved with revolution, but of course, that always gets dealt with by clear headed people after messes are made by the hotheads
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
how do you have civilty with racism? it's repugnant, like any low iq nonsense is. civility implies the other person has a point of view which has some merit that needs to be considered. that's not the case with racism
racism is the provenance of the stupid. they don't have any skills, so they resort to bigotry as a sense of priveledge: "i am better than you because of my skin color" or in your case "i am better than you because i have more alcohol dehydrogenase expression in my genetic makeup" or whatever bullshit you think has meaning here
I used to be a self-righteous asshole in these areas too, so I can understand where the emotion is coming from, no prob. I grew out of it, perhaps you will too.
i'm sorry, but once again, i assert that being a self-righteous asshole when dealing with RACISM is a virtue. we are talking about RACISM if you hadn't noticed. hello? anyone home? racism? you know what that is, right? you know why it's fucking stupid, right?
racism is old and dead. the realm of people who lived two centuries ago. we've grown out of it, just like we've grown out of creationism and grown out of a flat earth view: we got more data on the subject, and got better theories. we realize that what makes one nation rich and one nation poor is not genetics
here, try some education on the subject, then open your ignorant mouth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Though the Irish did not invent redheads, they sure perfected them!
I vote with this guy.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
i don't see a problem with what you are saying
but that means you are not a libertarian
certainly, there are many different meanings for many different complex philosophies, but i would wager that if you examine some classic libertarian texts (like ayn rand) you'd find that you have less in common with what libertarianism is than you suggest
not that meanings don't shift over time, and perhaps if a lot of people are like what you are, and what you believe, and call yourselves libertarians, then that will come to dominate what libertarianism is, and therefore change it to a meaning that indeed, as you say, has nothing to do with what i was attacking
sort of hard old school libertarianism versus softer new school libertarianism
we live in a world where a country that embraced radical communism a few decades ago now is a bastion of radical capitalism (china)
so stranger ideological shifts have happened in this world
peace dude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My point: Discussing both similarity and difference matters - as is the case in most areas of study, in most diciplines. (Especially when discussing aggregates) The Diamond article was just to show that even the high n' mighty Mr. Diamond has found human difference a worthy subject of study and discussion.
On another, somewhat ironic note, you go on about how my IQ is supposedly shoe-size level. Yet as soon as race and IQ are discussed in conjunction, IQ is suddenly transformed into racist pseudoscience. Heh.
Outraged politically correct self-righteousness is a great way to give oneself some worm fuzzies. It is usually a sign of an intellectually lazy person trying to compensate for some self-perceived inadequacies (much as classical racism is used by the uneducated). As rewarding as yelling "RACISM" or "NAZIS" might feel to you right now, I hope you will someday learn the value of a true discourse and intelligent analysis.
i respect
except that subject matters like racism and creationism are incompatible with the notion of true discourse or intelligent analysis: you have to have a low iq to take theses subject matters seriously
if you have a high iq, you have enough brain cells to realize why these subject matters are redundant and remedial
do i have to have a serious and respectful argument with someone who is trying to tell me the earth is flat? no, of course not, i dismiss him out of hand as deluded
same with creationism, same with racism
only low iq wackjobs take this stuff seriously
it's not the year 1750 anymore
these ignorant inbred idiots need to play catch up with modern times
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we can effectively shortcircuit this entire topic along that line of thought
only someone with a low iq would consider racial differences in intelligence to be a serious and fruitful mode of inquiry
therefore, the real irony is that anyone who takes race seriously in a discussion of intelligence has proved themselves to be on the low end of the gene pool
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Take depression for example. It's a true medical condition that involves a serotonin imbalance. Depression DOES affect ones mental abilities. Thankfully however, the right medication can put your mental status and abilities in the "normal" range if treated."
why would depressed people want to dumb themselves down to "normal"? you did mean that depressed people are generally more intelligent right?
The book goes into the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA histories that track the three major migrations in and out of Africa. How most major migrations result in intermingling with the new neighbors (not extermination). How you typically trace your lineage back to a set of a common set of ancestors, but not all ancestors contribute equally (indeed their DNA contributions can genetically get pushed out even if they are your ancestors). How long chains of DNA in humans are an exact copy of the early form of life on Earth, and so on.
Good way to learn about DNA/genetics/evolution too.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
Does ANYONE here know about the idea of gene-culture coevolution? (once called dual inheritance theory)
As new as it might sound, this idea has been passed around certain academic circles for year.
Of course without getting any exposure at all due to the political environment.
E.O. Wilson was called a racist and had a bucket of ice-water dumped on his head when trying to give a speech on the possibility of gene-culture coevolution.
E.O. Wilson, Cavalli-Sforza, Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson...etc..etc....
And now it is a new idea?
I think your points highlight a possible key weakness of libertarianism. Unfortunately, engineering goverment strategies to maximize societal benefit seem dangerous. Where exactly do you draw the line between the benefit for individuals vs the benefit for society?
I am a Libertarian, but the reason I believe in Libertarianism is because I suppose it to be a good way to maximize societal benefits. And because seeing society benefit is my personal end-goal in government, I am superficially attracted to the idea of taking money from those for whom its relative value is low. Or taking from those who will not even invest money back into the economy.
However, I am not sure what sort of scientifically-justified system could draw the line between the rights of the individual and the benefits to society. Certainly there is a line that is drawn by each government, but I'm afraid that line is arbitrary, especially where democracies are concerned.
-------
Incite and flee.
Even at that age, the risk is only 10%. So an arbitrary baby at that age is like 0.9 babies for a young woman.
The English are truly a mixed-up people. Well, you all know that already, just reading my posts is proof of how mixed-up we are. Anyways, let's start with pre-history. Britain was occupied by two distinct Neanderthal tribes, but there is no genetic evidence they survived meaningfully into the times of modern humans. Then there was a stone-age people. Not sure who they were, but mDNA samples indicate that some modern English can trace their roots to them.
After the early stone-age, we had the later Beaker People. They, too, show up in genetic studies. No great surprise. In the Iron Age, we had the Celts, but the Celts were not strictly a unified people. Britain seems to have been occupied by Celts from France and Belgium, at least, and probably from other parts of Europe.
Then came the Romans, who brought with them Greeks and probably representatives of every other invaded nation in their empire. The Romans departed about the time of raids from the Picts and other groups living in the Caledonias, Irish, Saxons, Angles and Jutes. There were likely lesser raiders from elsewhere. Not long after that wave, we have the Vikings, the regular Danes and eventually the Norman French.
You are correct that England is a mish-mash of these. My argument is that it is impossible for any notion of "pure" bloodlines to exist in such an environment, that each person is a wholly random mix of all of the above. My conclusion, then, is that because everyone is a random mix, very little in the way of traits can be expressed solely because of the average state. The average state has an extremely low probability of even existing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
that's not what I meant. I meant that ideology at home didn't turn into moral action abroad, by their own standards. France and Britain hosted many lectures on the rights of man but policy towards slavery and st domingue/Haiti were decided by monetary concerns.
If roads were 50% of the total land area, maybe after hundreds of generations they'd have different reflexes- but they already have to be quick but careful in open spaces due to bird predation. The percentage of squirrels affected by roads is very small compared to the total squirrel population, and there's always movement between populations.
Japanese tend to be small. Chinese are average size, on average.
nevermind, I didn't read your post when I replied the first time. yeah, you're correct, that's why my favorite book is conflict sociology by randall collins. http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/courses/COLLINR 1.HTML