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Nature Vs. Nurture: Waging War Over the Soul of Science
derekmead writes "Wherever determinism appears, controversy attends, raising specters of days when colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials, and political idealists believed they could cure the human condition through manipulation and force. Understanding those fears helps shed light on the controversy surrounding a recent paper (PDF) published in the American Economic Review, entitled, 'The "Out of Africa" Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.' In it, economists Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor argue that the economic development of broad human populations correlate with their levels of genetic diversity—which is, in turn, pinned to the distance its inhabitants migrated from Africa thousands of years ago. Reaction has been swift and vehement.
An article signed by 18 academics in Current Anthropology accuses the researchers of 'bad science' — 'something false and undesirable' based on 'weak data and methods' that 'can become a justification for reactionary policy.' The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity, but the economists are standing by their methods. The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable."
Economists tend to be interested in how human behaviour relates to the study of money. Which is not exactly a neutral research direction.
It was also an economist (Herbert Spencer) that studied Darwin and to give us the famous "Survival of the Fittest" instead of the more accurate "Survival of the Fit".
All things are inevitable if they happened. You just don't know that before they happen.
Not to be picky, but the url to "An artile signed by 18 academics" is http://www.jstor.org/action/cookieAbsent "cookieAbsent" doesn't exactly look like it was ever supposed to work. Does someone have a link to the actual signed article?
It's funny how left wing jack wads support Science and the Scientific Method until it conflicts with Political Correctness.
Clearly, the African continent is home only to the most primitive peoples. It's not a place that would birth historically powerful, flourishing civilizations whose large-scale engineering feats would be regarded among the "wonders of the world" millennia later. Oh, wait...
This is one of the reasons that the whole idea of "scientific consensus" or "the science is settled" bugs me. People try to act like science is a completely rational activity. It's simply not: it's a human activity, fraught with all the prejudices, biases and shortcomings — as well as the wonder and majesty and achievement — that implies. Here is an excellent example of exactly that.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
And anyone who suggests otherwise is a racist, sexist, homophone!
Economists are not scientists. Nice trollbait, bro.
It seems to me that genetic diversity and cultural diversity would be related. In other words, cultural isolation and genetic isolation tend to go hand-in-hand.
Therefore, if the argument is that economic development is correlated to genetic diversity, then it is also necessarily correlated to cultural diversity. This now frames the issue in a more intuitive way; The more ideas and ways of looking at the world you bring to the table, the more diverse your solutions and creativity, and the more developed your economy becomes. This seems to be broadly supported by history as well, since the most prosperous trade often occurred when and where cultures mingled freely.
And now that the genetic element has been effectively abated, the controversy evaporates. You're welcome.
=Smidge=
An article signed by 18 academics in Current Anthropology accuses the researchers of 'bad science'—'something false and undesirable' based on 'weak data and methods' that 'can become a justification for reactionary policy.' The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity,
If you missed that part of the summary, you might try leaving the fertile crescent and seeing if it makes sense afterward.
The summary's typical inflammatory crap. THe paper takes an existing economic hypothesis ("Genetic diversity plays a role in economic development, and there is an optimal amount of diversity which has a net positive effect. There are also suboptimal amounts which have negative effects.") and then tries to justify it by pointing out that certain _genetic regions_ of the globe (not geographical, though they tend to fall along those lines) are better off than others.
Most importantly, this study does not correct for external factors, and as is typical for most of the junk that economists push, it assumes that if there's a correlation, that correlation will hold true no matter how many factors are not analyzed in the data. Further, it's a bunch of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" arguments with some handwaving to hide the stark (and, at least from the references in the paper, unsupported) assumptions they make.
Is it bad science? Sure. But economics isn't a science, and if you disagree, you probably don't have a degree in a hard science.
"The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable.""
Let me fix that for you:
"Data be damned. If two people with degrees say it, they must be pioneers of truth hunted by the system, and if you say their argument is weak and laughable, you can't even see how deep your own bias runs!" Thank you, Slashdot. Sometimes I forget that you got bought out by sensationlists.
It seems their main argument has less to do with genetic diversity and more to do with distance from each other. They claim superior technological advances are a driving factor and I do not see how that relates to genetic diversity.
From Page 3 in here:
"The beneficial effect of diversity, on the other hand, concerns the positive role of heterogeneity in the expansion of society's production possibility frontier. A wider spectrum of traits is more likely to contain those that are complementary to the advancement and successful implementation of superior technological paradigms. Higher diversity therefore enhances society's capability to integrate advanced and more efficient production methods, expanding the economy's production possibility frontier and conferring the benefits of improved productivity."
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
This is the same argument that IQ is tied to race. The IQ to race connection has been debunked as it is largely the availability of resources that effect learning and systemic racial biases in the tests that have been producing the effect. Also the IQ tests have been regularly readjusted as intelligence of the global population has risen to bring the middle of the bell curve back down to 100.
When China overtakes the USA as the world's largest economic power, does that mean that the White man is now the inferior group and Asians are the superior? What would happen if nuclear war breaks out and Africa escapes unscathed? Then they would have a chance of becoming the dominate world power. Economic success is more about about which countries happens to hold most of the world's wealth and resources.
Hmm, what field of "science" most deserves those quotation marks? Macroeconomics, or cultural anthropology?
This is seriously a tough one.
A caption from the linked article sums it up: "Opponents of genetic determinism argue that it ignores the effects of colonialism."
Within the US, at least, I believe that the on-going effects of 250 years of slavery, and an added 100 years of systematic segregation, still leave Americans as a group unable to divorce ourselves from their effects when trying to ascertain what - if any - biological basis there may be to the economic performance of southern Africans, and their diaspora in the US. There is such an ingrained belief that it's "their" fault, I don't think researchers are yet to the point to where their research can be trusted.
Luke, help me take this mask off
He talks of certain events happening repeated in different groups and at different times. For instance, the development of crops and the different rates of adoption of those crops, even by neighbors who can be assumed to genetically similar.
This really has nothing to do with fear, anymore than saying that a light bulb is turned on by a human flipping a switch and not a human praying to a god who then allows the flip to be switched. It has to do with a long line of research that shows simplifying variation amount humans is problematic, and mostly a result of forcing generalities. For instance, asian people are short and thin is a genetic disposition. But when fed an western diet, many become tall and fatter.
We all know that economist are basically are free to say whatever they want, because really, they make no testable conclusions. Cutting income does increase the amount of stuff we can buy, because, really,, how can we say that it is the conclusion that is incorrect and not just that we are too stupid to apply it. OTOH, if a geneticist says something, and it later proved false, the gentisist is not free to go around and say that her failure is caused by the lame media, and not bad science.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
a)If this is the case, then, the most economically successful (based on the premise described in the Slashdot article, I haven't read the paper) would be the Native Americans on the East coast, as they came from Africa, through Asia, across the Bering Strait, and then across what is now the United States, putting them about as far from Africa as you can get. While the American natives had a far more advanced culture than classic stereotypes portray, I'm not sure you could call it more economically advanced than the Europeans had when they landed here, as the Europeans had already invented such advanced economic developments as usury, debtor's prison, embezzling, and insurance fraud. I have not heard of any Native American cultures having developed those vital economic tools prior to contact with Europe, but I will accept I could be wrong.
b)I'm absolutely certain the xenophobic far-right will seize with gleeful delight on a study that says "exogamy, multiculturalism, and mixing of ethnic groups/continual intermarriage is the key to success". (That was sarcasm.)
c)Given that, I'm not sure why the left, which presumably favors multiculturalism, mixing ethnic groups, etc, would OPPOSE a study that says, "Yes, the more genetically diverse your population is, the better off you're going to be."
d)"Argument from consequences" is a severe logical fallacy. If the paper is factually wrong, then, prove it wrong -- but don't say, "This can't be true because it would be BAD if it was true." That's the equivalent of saying, "I know my spouse isn't cheating on me, because I'd be utterly heartbroken if they were. That proves they're not."
The wrong link in the summary should be http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669034
Wherever determinism appears, controversy attends, raising specters of days when colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials, and political idealists believed they could cure the human condition through manipulation and force.
Well that sounds pretty epic ... also, very confusing. "Cure the human condition"? "Manipulation and force"? What does any of that have to do with this paper? Also, I find it counter-intellectual to take a paper that has been submitted for peer review and renounce it along with colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials and political idealists just because it contains correlated determinism. You're free to attack it based purely on what it says but to say that just because it suggests determinism in humanity's history doesn't mean that they are Nazi scientists and Ku Klux Klan members.
Curiously the article accompanying this paper leaves out a key detail. From the paper:
This study therefore employs cross-country historical data on population density as the dependent variable of interest in the historical analysis and examines the hypothesized eect of human genetic diversity within societies on their population densities in the year 1500 CE.
(emphasis mine) Okay, after reading the article I would have said this study is obviously overlooking the British Empire that came back and started to systematically colonize the world despite it being further from the cradle of civilization than the very people it was colonizing. So 1500 CE was prior to a lot of the counter examples I could think of but I also feel like China and Japan had to be fully operational at these points in time and I wish I could pull up GDP numbers for 1500 but, gosh darn it, they weren't very good at record keeping at this point in time.
I think that if these authors had placed their time frame in pre-Holy Roman Empire or pre-Zoroastrian times they would have met with less kick back from their academic community. Personally, I feel like we as humans by 1500 CE had already transcended the epoch period where our intelligence removed us from the uncaring hand of nature. Granted, that was a long struggle, but I think it's foolish to say that "At not time in humanity's history has our genetic diversity played a role in our survival." We are of the animal kingdom, the mistake this paper made was trying to bring that too close to the present. We had already had inventor-geniuses. History had already shown that technology like the Romans roads could be critical in enforcing dominance on other cultures.
The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity, but the economists are standing by their methods.
Welcome to academia. I mean, when it comes to publishing papers on historic events you can't exactly take their experiment and run it 50 times in your own lab to independently verify your results, can you? So I would imagine that economists, social sciences, historical studies and the like are filled with disagreeing camps that can't rectify their differences.
The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable.
Or perhaps if you publish something about the past and you make flimsy assumptions, you can almost guarantee your "colleagues" will roast you alive.
Geographer and author Jared Diamond, for example, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, has been branded an environmental determinist who cuts culture and colonialism too much slack with regard to the rise and fall of civilizations—criticism that has been renewed recently with the publication of his new book, The World Until Yesterday.
So you're saying an author is being attacked for his theories not being 10
My work here is dung.
I managed to misread the original summary, which implied generic diversity, in the study, correlated with economic success, rather than the LACK of genetic diversity correlating with economic success.
Which, in turn, implies that the Alabama and other states in the "mah family tree doesn't fork" regions of the US should be the more economically successful. Still doesn't seem right.
Even 5 minutes of research shows times when massive populations of NON-diverse genetic make-up were the big economic winners on the Earth. Other times, isolated peoples would stagnate, until 'fresh' blood from outsiders reinvigorated their society, creating a new economic power house.
Simplistic conclusions are always drawn by simpletons who select the evidence carefully to support their assertions.
There is only ONE Human race. 'Genetic diversity' is usually a code-word for racist depravities who want to claim that 'whites' for instance, are superior to 'blacks'. Cultural diversity, on the other hand, is clearly a real and significant phenomenon. Your 'culture' has nothing to do with your 'genes' except by accident of birth.
Racist scumbags say that your genetic makeup says the most important things about you as a person. The 'race'-based slavery promoted by the sickos that created the USA followed this pseudo-scientific philosophy. American slavery was based on the principle that it was scientifically inconceivable that a black person could ever be president of the USA. The authors of this article are cut from the same cloth.
The depravities currently patenting the hell out of the Human genome NEED you to believe that your genes matter. They are the current day eugenicists so beloved by Adolf Hitler. Never forget that the eugenic movement that gave birth to forced sterilization, death camps, medical experimentation on Human victims, forced adoption for the children of 'single' mothers, modern forced female circumcision, lobotomies and electro-shock treatment was centred in the USA, and supported by the most powerful American politicians, intellectuals and industrial barons. When Americans could no longer own slaves, they got behind a movement that 'proved' black people were inferior to whites. The scientific community in the USA is sick to the core.
The owners of Slashdot push this story, because powerful eugenicists, like Bill Gates, are funding race-based pseudo-science with more money than ever before. While the scientific mainstream of Europe will continue to deplore such racist garbage as always, US money will seek out powerful racists within Europe in an effort to make their voices louder.
Eugenics was a dead-duck in Europe in the early 20th century, but very powerful and rich American eugenicists backed every racist politician they could find. The result of this was terrifying. While the mainstream European scientific community described race based science as junk, smaller European nations, receiving large sums of money from America, implemented widespread social policies based on eugenics, including forced sterilizations policies that continued into the 1980s. The owners of Slashdot are proudly doing their part to ensure these policies continue.
I do have an account here; how do you post without preview?
Thanks,
******* ********
Clearly, the African continent is home only to the most primitive peoples. It's not a place that would birth historically powerful, flourishing civilizations whose large-scale engineering feats would be regarded among the "wonders of the world" millennia later. Oh, wait...
Um, the article was confusing, it showed like a White Pride info graphic ... yet if you read the paper, the genetic diversity is noted as being increasing over time the closer you are to the birthplace of humanity (as pictured here the heterozygosity is reduced the further away from Africa). The second part that the article woefully left out was that this article examined the year 1500 CE.
My work here is dung.
There is no escaping that we, as humans vary widely in terms of potential of all sorts whether it be for learning, violence or what have you. We know we can breed dogs and other animals to have specific behavioral characteristics and abilities. Is it so far fetched that humans, also being animals, would demonstrate the same variances and potentials based on breeding? But breeding is just the basis. Since we as humans have an amazing ability to teach and learn, additional variabces exist based on how much a community of humans values certain behaviors whether it is physical strength and violence (sports?) or more passive advancements (academics, getting good jobs?) or even merely physical appearance (models, entertainment?).
It is both. It has always been both and until humans evolve into more purely intellectual creatures, it will always be both. And we *ARE* the living planet of the apes. The gorillas are more suited to certain roles while the chimps are more suited to others. And the damned orangutans are ruling everything.
"They" is the AC, which is who I replied to.
Just a guess that he's a left winger based on his knee jerk attack against Republicans.
But, to address your point and based on the dynamics of the AGW arguments here, attacking methods and data and conclusions is tantamount to attacking the Scientific Method.
But, who cares...I have pr0n to download. Busy busy..so much pr0n, so little bandwidth.
"the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable."
Asserting inevitability about the course of human development should, in fact, be tricky. It's plainly a tricky thing to do. There's no reason it shouldn't receive higher levels of scrutiny and skepticism.
A few, among many, reasons why this is so: Reading actual history makes it difficult to believe that history's outcomes were inevitable. Speculations about history invite all manner of foolish prejudices - not just big, racial or gendered ones, but a million tiny ones about what individual bits of information mean. Relatedly, history isn't 'measurable' in the easy ways that most things geneticists study are. The methodologies for studying it aren't there, or close to there - neither in disciplines like history and economics, nor in disciplines like genetics, where our measurements of things like 'diversity' are still pretty basic! These are all ways in which saying "Western Europe did awesome at economics because it had the right amount of genetic diversity" is radically different and much more tricky, as a scientific claim, from saying "Western Europeans don't seem to get sickle-cell anemia much because of a genetic thing."
Further, claims about history, race, gender, genetic determinism and the like attract enormously more kooks and bad science than do claims about the inheritability of sickle cell anemia, for obvious reasons. There's no reason you shouldn't turn your kook-meter on when you're objectively far more likely to encounter nonsense. This study sounds, near as I can tell from looking at it, like taking an existing curve (some places are richer than others) and fitting some terribly mushy data to it, then deciding they match. It's awfully easy to think of reasons it could be wrong. I can't even figure how it's supposed to make any sense, since we're working from an 'expected genetic diversity' that doesn't match the actual genetic diversity in question in the places studied in the relevant time periods. Europe is richer now because they had the right amount of genetic diversity in 8,000 BC or so? really?
To put it another way, the article seems to think scientist think determinism is bad, or something, because really really lousy science that has deterministic implications gets criticized loudly. But that's very much what should happen. Thinking that's evidence for what scientists think about determinism generally is... bad science.
To put it a third way, as someone's said elsewhere on the web: http://xkcd.com/882/.
Economics is not a science.
... attacking methods and data and conclusions is tantamount to attacking the Scientific Method.
I take it you're drunk, possibly stoned, and besotted on pr0n. Have fun, but please don't inflict any more of this sort of drivel on us.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The original paper reads as a bad example of mistaking correlation with causation.
If "While the low degree of diversity among Native American populations and the high degree of diversity among African populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions", then why did Tenochtitlan have a population of around 200,000 in 1519 (http://www.tenochtitlanfacts.com/), between twice to four times the size of London at the time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London#Population)?
And now that the genetic element has been effectively abated, the controversy evaporates. You're welcome.
Thanks, but you offered absolutely zero proof or research nor did you even talk about how you verified that "genetic diversity and cultural diversity would be related." Armchair genetics is not progress.
I mean, I can pull explanations out of my ass too: the paper focuses on the distance from the cradle of humanity so while they may be correct in genetic diversity they are actually witnessing the exploitation of resources in new lands as humans traveled further and further. Their "just so" sweet spot of heterozygosity has nothing to do with economic productivity. The economic productivity comes from the untapped resources that the free new land provided the encroaching humans.
And that explanation is about as helpful as yours (hint: not at all).
My work here is dung.
When scientists in the "hard sciences" use terms like "settled science" it should be taken with the understood "... unless of course we get new evidence."
"Settled science" means that just about all scientists agree that the existing evidence leads to a given conclusion, and that the evidence and logical arguments have already been picked to death and barring actual new evidence or some currently-inconceivable way of interpreting existing evidence, the "scientifically settled conclusion" will be treated as scientific fact.
Newtonian physics was "settled science" for centuries ... until new data rolled in that made scientists think "um, that's odd, this data doesn't match the known laws of the universe, and we've looked at this new data over and over again and it's not a case of a bad measurement. Perhaps what we thought was fact isn't," at which point previously-settled science became ... unsettled.
As for the "soft" sciences, well, it's probably unfair to use the term "settled science" at all. A less-definitive phrase like "most psychologist agree that..." or "the social anthropology community generally accepts ..." are sufficiently strong to allow the layperson to treat the "generally accepted scientific idea" as fact, while giving scientists the wiggle room to quickly admit they were wrong if it turns out they are.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have a similar theory -- that those further away from the equator progressed technologically at a faster rate out of the necessities of dealing with their cold environments. Progress isn't necessarily born out of necessity, but necessity surely accelerates it. A similar phenomena can be observed regarding war -- wars tend to accelerate technological progress. When one's life is at stake, new motivations arise.
I recently had a discussion with someone from Florida about this. He mentioned how here in the midwest our destitute were much better off than the Floridian destitute, how we seemed to have far less homeless. My response was a version of the aforementioned theory: People around here have no choice but to have some essentials taken care of by the time winter hits or they'll freeze. That's not to say there are no homeless and no one's poverty stricken, it's just that there are extra motivating factors that drive people to avoid being bums. Most of our homeless suffer from schizophrenia -- anyone with a half ounce of sense will find some way to be sheltered during the winter, whether it be staying with friends/relatives, gaming the government entitlement systems, or just removing themselves from society by committing a crime (a lot of people go to jail on purpose in the winter time). Or they just find some way to get to Venice Beach where they love the homeless.
The difference between my theory and the one postulated by this article is that I don't claim to have any scientific veracity behind mine. Also, mine is a more plausible explanation for the same observed phenomenon.
In conclusion one could say that the Inuit and other northern indigineous people of the Americas had the greatest and most diverse economies, being about as far away from Africa as you can get.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Does adding the qualifier dismal before the word science increase or decrease the "deservedness" of quotation marks?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
this is a war between scientists and a bunch of postmodernists parading around in lab coats shouting down results they don't like (cultural anthropologists.)
Umm, no. I take it you didn't even read the summary of either paper.
The economists claim that “the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions.” In other words, that only populations with the "right" amount of genetic diversity (i.e. matching Europe) are likely to be successful. The rest of the scientific community points out that they have defined their terms in a way that gives the results that they want, and ignore existing standard means of measuring genetic diversity.
Open source advocate Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming has entered the Nature-Nurture debate, stating here:
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The answer is right there, it' just a bunch of scientist fighting with muddled words about who did what when. It's both, how can it not be? You are the sum of your creation and experiences, nothing more, nothing less. Sure people are born a certain way, with certain perks and downsides, at a certain time, and to certain people, but what that person does past that is their choice and their responsibility. There's going to be a million choices and factors to take into account, but ultimately it's that individual making the choices. You can argue something like being born into slavery, but that's us creating our own pot of shit, that person had choices and now they're limited due to one of those million factors, and still at some point some time somebody chose to rise above it, that's nurture, the enslaved got fed up with slavery and did something about it.
You too can use the rigorous methods of this paper to prove your own theories explaining why European culture is the best!
Ingredients:
(A) a measure of economic/social/cultural development that puts Europe on top, 1500-2013CE (plenty to choose from; Europe was really good at conquering/enslaving/looting over this period)
(B) a second characteristic correlated with "Europeanism" (in the paper's case, genetic diversity based on migratory distance from Africa --- pick another to support your own pet theory).
Method:
Plot (A) vs. (B). Note the graph peaks around the maximally-European value of (B).
Conclude that having just the right value for (B) was a cause for Europe's maximal (A).
Yay! Now you too can "prove" why nice-sounding attributes (like "optimal genetic diversity for cultural cooperation") put Europe (deservingly!) on top, instead of bothering with the distasteful details of actual history (genocide, colonialism, neo-colonism, ...).
Well, cultural anthropology is at least in part an empirical study, whereas economics is pure abstract idealism.
Alright, I'll bite. They aren't attacking science or the scientific method here, they're attacking the specific methods used here and the conclusions.
It's always bad science when runs counter to their preferred political narrative. Suggest that there are biological differences in intelligence, skill, or behavior between the sexes or races, and the villagers race out with their pitchforks. "Your science is impotent. You can't *prove* your claims." Suggest that we're all racist, sexist, homophobes based on some half assed psychology experiment, and it's "that's the way, uh huh uh huh, we like it, uh hu uh huh".
whereas economics is pure abstract idealism.
Did you realize when you wrote this that it's false? Do you understand that economics actually does empirical studies? The level of ignorance in your post is somewhat alarming.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is an example of social scientists challenging a 'law' of the social sciences, namely that there is no genetic reason why almost any reasonably large population of people should perform significantly better or worse than any other and any discrepency should be attributed to other socio-environmental factors.
Compare, for a moment, to the 'laws' of the physical sciences. These aren't necessarily completely accurate descriptions of the universe, but they are persistently true despite numerous challenges and the scientific community has essentially decided that they will disregard all but the most compelling challenges and that people who try to advance uncompelling challenges regarding these topics had better be prepared to be publicly shamed for it. If you look at the example of the CERN faster-than-light neutrino results where the team responsible essentially said that they got a strange result, please help them figure out how their instruments are malfunctioning, we still ended up with denunciations from all corners of the physics community.
Even though social scientists work in a field where it is difficult to be anywhere near as certain as physicists and thus they tend to shy away from the term 'law', but this is a law which is quite defensible. The history of challenges to this assertion is long and storied with very little utility arising from it; every claim of the genetic superiority of some populations over others in social matters has been handily discredited as not able to isolate genetic and social factors. When researchers try to isolate social factors, they are unable to identify genetic signals on the population level greater than the (admittedly strong) statistical noise. Compare that to the history of social engineering which uses bad research in this area to claim legitimacy and the atrocities they cause, and we have an example of a very poor risk/reward ratio. It is only fitting that social scientists should demand that people making these sorts of claims show due reverance to the political implications of their statements and back their assertions with highly compelling evidence. As many of the other comments to this article note, not only is this evidence not 'highly compelling', it is downright poor work and by this measure deserves the shaming it is receiving.
Except that, without any empirical basis whatsoever, studies of real things don't have much value. Sure, dollars and people are real, but when your studies of them are based on wishful thinking and imaginary models without any basis in fact, your conclusions are worthless. Economics isn't science. It's fortune telling.
...based on the dynamics of the AGW arguments here, attacking methods and data and conclusions is tantamount to attacking the Scientific Method.
I disagree, I started following climate science in the early 80's, became convinced it was a serious problem in the mid 90's, and started posting on AGW somewhere around 2000, The (often raucous) AGW debate on this site has overall been a good example of how science works over time to defeat self-interested propaganda (eg: I can't remember the last time I heard the "volcanoes" canard on slashdot). I think at the very least most people who have followed the slashdot debate are better informed because of it, I know I am.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
the devolution of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.
I have degrees in both "hard" and "soft" sciences.
I disagree that economics isn't a science - it is. Whether or not this paper is bad science is beside the point from your rather broad generalisation to the whole of economics. You seem to be mistaking the inherent difficulty of the subject with the quality of the practitioners.
The distinction between "hard" and "soft" is usually the ability to conduct experiments to verify your hypothesis. In "soft" sciences people get really annoyed when you arbitrarily experiment on them. Something about "ethics". But, for some reason, hydrogen atoms never get annoyed when you experiment on them. And that makes for a world of difference in what you can achieve. But that doesn't change the underlying fact that people are forming hypotheses and testing them and applying the scientific method to the whole shebang.
So now, let is talk about your familiarity with economics. You seem to claim to have read and understood a bunch of it with your statement "is typical for most of the junk that economists push". So, how much have you actually read? Or do you just read the Slashdot summary and claim expertise based on that?
I skimmed over the original paper. It presents an interesting hypothesis, but the evidence is correlational, the analysis is complicated and indirect, and the relationship they found is not simple (not that bell-shaped curves can't occur, but they offer a lot more freedom in fitting data than monotonic relationships). If anybody actually is basing policy recommendations on it, I'd question their motives. But the attack on it seems a bit over the top, and I get the impression that the authors of the attack don't even want these sorts of ideas discussed, so I'm suspicious of their motives as well.
In any case, it seems like a very minor tempest in a teapot over a very tentative hypothesis based on weak evidence. I don't see what it has to do with the "soul of science."
Except that, without any empirical basis whatsoever, studies of real things don't have much value.
When you say this kind of thing, all it shows is that you haven't read many economics studies. They very much DO have an empirical basis. I would give you some examples, but clearly it won't do any good because you've never read any economics in your life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, macro has worked pretty well until the last three or so decades when they forgot everything they learned about the large-scale dynamics of an economy and tried to model it instead on a completely false premise, i.e. that humans are fundamentally rational (and also that thus the market is always right). I understand the desire to be reductionist in science, I am a physicist after all, but you have to make sure that your small-scale behavior mirrors your large-scale behavior in the "macro" or "classical" limit. If anything, the anti-Keynesian economics has completely failed to do that, living in a parallel world where austerity in a recession is somehow expansionary when reality is saying completely the opposite.
But back on the "Out of Africa" thing, I really think geography makes a huge difference... South Africa has a climate very similar to Europe, and thus similar lifestyles and foodstuffs are possible there. In the heart of Africa, without any navigable (from the sea) rivers and not even a good highway system (let alone rail) and multiple borders to cross to get to the world market, your imports are expensive and so are your exports, so having a modern economy is almost impossible. This explains pretty well much of the lack of development of Africa.
And by the way, Africa has some of the greatest genetic diversity of any continent.
Sure, without reading the article and its conclusions, it would be reasonable to say that the more homogeneous gene pool is, the more economic activity with the increased level of mutual trust.
Move further away from Africa and you'll be richer. So obviously that moon-based civilization will be unbelievably rich!
Indeed. I don't have the slightest clue how they dealt with Japan, Korea or even south China in their paper, but prima facie these examples seem to refute their thesis. I could probably come up with a few more examples of economic powerhouses that feature relatively homogeneous populations (genetically speaking), but these are the ones that leap out. And now that I think about it, the US and Canada are wildly diverse. So it appears that the hypothesis is logically flawed at both extremes.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Have gnu, will travel.
So Keynesianism worked great, with the exception of the most recent 30 or 40 years, and anti-Keynesian (Austrian) economics is clearly a failure and you know that's so even though it has never been applied (unlike Keynesian economics was for at least 50 years).
Yea, okay, that makes perfect sense. I suggest you stick to physics.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The problem with the soft sciences is that they can only yield statistical correlations, and make best guesses at the mechanisms yielding the correlations. The hard sciences can identify the actual physical mechanism of action.
This fact is why Big Tobacco could get away for so long with saying that cigarettes didn't cause cancer. The epidemiological studies couldn't prove the link ("Epidemiological studies can never prove causation ... The higher the correlation the more certain the association, but it cannot prove the causation"), only provide (very compelling) correlations. Big Tobacco would only relent when finally the actual physical cancer-causing mechanism was discovered.
So the soft sciences are stuck with identifying correlations, and coming up with plausible explanations for those correlations. There are some brilliant social scientists, but there are a lot of clowns too, coming up with textbook "Junk Science."
Just like us... Yea, right. They have the mind of apes.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ea8_1361148894
Dog breeds are certainly more tightly genetically controlled than humans. But they're still all dogs. They can all interbreed. And they share certain typical characteristics within breeds.
A German Shepherd has a certain set of typical attributes. A Siberian Husky has another set of typical attributes. A Shepherd-Husky cross has yet another set of attributes. Dogs are grouped into logical classes on the basis of those attributes.
Humans are pretty diverse even within races and ethnicities, in terms of their physical appearances, intellectual attributes and emotional makeups. Eventually, with increases in medical and gene science, it may be possible to group people in a much more informative way, taking into account intellectual attributes and emotional makeups, than the simple physical classifications that now exist.
I agree, the "deniers" have been a good, healthy thing for that field.
Suggest that there are biological differences in intelligence, skill, or behavior between the sexes or races, and the villagers race out with their pitchforks.
There is one notable exception: homosexuality. Find a gene that proves homosexulaity can be determined before birth, and you will be celebrated!
Everything else must be free will and environment, except sexuality, according to many. Why is that?
You realize that if there is a gene that promotes same sex attraction, then there must be a gene that promotes attraction to children?
That makes Homosexuals and Pedophiles roughly equal in terms of morality.
Don't forget, there are all manner of sexual practice that you would be repelled by. But those are likely the result of similar genes expressing same sex attraction.
IIRC, genetic diversity is GREATEST in Africa and diminishes with distance, as would be expected from a historical picture of small groups migrating out. So the hypothesis is upside down to begin with.
What does Gladiator have in common with The Lone Ranger?
And he talks about drivel.
One characteristic I often see ignored in the discussion of successful versus unsuccessful groups is this: High intra-group empathy. Empathy and esteem the group members have for each other.
Intra-group empathy means less internal violence, more cooperation, less corruption and criminality, less preying of one group member on another. Leaders see this and make use of it. "Our group is the best! Each of you is fabulous because you're a member of this group!"
And then another important, somewhat coincident characteristic is low empathy for those outside of the group. This allows the group to remain cohesive. And allows group members to be directed to more willingly take advantage of those outside of the group. Leaders take advantage of this as well. "Those other groups are not as good as us."
I've heard this stated as "Amity within, enmity without." I would think also that there would need to be a certain level of intelligence for the group then to be highly successful. But if they're looking for important characteristics for success, I'd think high intra-group empathy and low extra-group empathy are important ones as well, in addition to intelligence.
Kudos to you for getting it completely, right down to the point about ethics. Of course, most of the people you respect to fancy themselves some sort of intellectual elite that think that since they are good at some parts of (say, physics) that they can disregard something like psychology in favor of their own intuitions.
What does Gladiator have in common with The Lone Ranger?
And he talks about drivel.
Fail. Think equine.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
So Keynesianism worked great, with the exception of the most recent 30 or 40 years, and anti-Keynesian (Austrian) economics is clearly a failure and you know that's so even though it has never been applied (unlike Keynesian economics was for at least 50 years).
Yea, okay, that makes perfect sense. I suggest you stick to physics.
Willful misreading of posts. Internet is so fun.
And I wasnt talking about Austrian economics.
Except that, without any empirical basis whatsoever, studies of real things don't have much value.
Real things inherently have an empirical basis. Otherwise they wouldn't be real.
Yea, I forgot the ? after the "Austrian" - I didn't know what you were talking about with "anti-Keynesian", and Austrian school theory is all I could think of. In fact, I didn't know what you were talking about throughout your entire post. I've read it three times now and I still don't.
You can call that "willful" if you want, but seeing as you didn't even make an effort to explain yourself in your reply, I prefer to chalk it up to a physicist being inarticulate. Don't feel bad - I can't do tensor math. Not everyone has a talent for expositionary English.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If memory serves, "Guns , germs and steel" discusses at length the reasons for the large differences in technological advancement between countries/races. Surely Diamond is not perfect but what I read there made quite a bit of sense. Had nothing to do with genetics and much more with geography and a few key technologies. The part dedicated to the extermination of the Maya and Aztec civilizations was very insightful...
Having f*cked up the global economy doesn't mean you are obligated to wade into a field you have no expertise in and sprout your idiot opinion there because now you're bored.
Just because half the human race is infuriated, and the other half feeling now justified in enslaving or worse the first half, does not make the research mistaken, wrong, or unfortunate. If I wanted to exterminate a few billion people, or all of them, I would not even think to look for an excuse or a reason - what might such be, after all? Policy (speaking as one who has been there) has nothing at all to do with facts. It has to do with advantage, in terms of mostly relative values, then coalition maintenance, then vested interests be they material or immaterial.
Facts come along when ordinary people discover that none of the policies work, unless they are bent to accommodate the facts.
There are lots of 500-year or longer historical trends - not enough for genetics but nearly enough for cultural stuff - that show that diverse populations that SURVIVE as diverse populations have to develop ways and means of turning same to advantage, which usually improves economic prospects as well. There APPEAR to be some differences in the means and medians for various characteristics, linked to gender or maybe predominant continent of origin. Perhaps this sort of diversity too is helpful.
Then there is the billiard ball theory, that everybody had to start somewhere, and kept going until the water got too darn deep. That would be to places like the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean coasts of the big Europe-Africa-Asia-Australia landmass, which might of course also be benefiting from (a) ocean harbors and (b) rivers draining hinterlands. Who knows but its fascinating.
DON'T LET THE PC POLICE waste any more of any one's time! Merge them with USA Homeland Security, and then abolish them totally!
And it makes even more sense than I thought it would. The only likely flaw I see if confirmation bias...it just seems SO obvious that most folks distrust utter strangers, and that entirely unanimous agreement tends not to foster creativity...
Psychology, sociology, and several other ###ologies will never be sciences. They may use statistical methods (well or badly) but one of the fundamentals of science is that experimental results should be repeatable, and I suppose refutable. They key here is experimental - this is not an experiment, it is data crunching. Sorry, data crunching is not science and never will be (yes it may be a tool of science). This is as bad as the correlation = causality moronic statements that we see frequently.
Yes. It's an exaggeration, of course.
A genetic component does not make it moral. Brain damage that leads to you becoming an ax murderer doesn't give you the moral high ground. You're defective. Any concept of morality must depend on the values of others. Even among homosexuals, there is such a thing as intolerable behavior.
"The system has never been truly applied," its adherents shout. "And all the historical examples you're about to pull up, where they tried it and it ended in disaster, don't really count because, while it looks like they were applying it, they didn't do it correctly or go far enough!"
Quick question, am I describing Austrian Economics, or Marxism?
I can't remember the last time I heard the "volcanoes" canard on slashdot
Is that something to do with ducks floating in volcanoes, so they're witches and therefore liberal pro-AGW fanatics?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You realize that if there is a gene that promotes same sex attraction, then there must be a gene that promotes attraction to children?
Why must there? Must there be a gene which makes you prefer programming Linux to watching Glee? Must there be a gene which lets you write poetry or be a good engineer?
Don't forget, there are all manner of sexual practice that you would be repelled by
So what? People can do repellent things with other consenting adults as much as they like, that doesn't mean they can be paedophiles/child rapists.
Some people have a genetic disposition to violence, that doesn't mean we let them off murder.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Early 20th century just called, and they want their discounted justifications for eugenics back... So a double Y chromosome can make males more violent, but yet we can find perfectly ordinary citizens with an extra Y who are not only peaceful but notable contributors to their communities. One of those most fundamental traits of human beings is that we can overcome our own nature and choose who we want to be through our own choices. i.e. we have a predisposition to be gluttonous, humping, pleasure seeking, greedy bastards but we *can* rise above all of that if we choose to - I'm not denying many people don't.
So back to politics. All those people I know, that "switched" teams must have undergone a primordial morph in brain structure. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Since when have we gotten back into this notion that people are born the way they are and can't change? And why would the options be limited to a 2 party system of left and right? Apparently the "middle" has not only been vaporized from politics and media, but from research too. Are we really such simpletons that we have to paint everyone either blue or red? Really? Disgusting.
Can't I be a tree hugger and be pro capitalism at the same time? Can't I be pro gun ownership and pro gun control at the same time? Can't I be anti-abortion and pro women's rights at the same time? Why are we so stuck on these stupid stereotypes...
Anyway, malarkey.
[I have mod points; posting as AC]
Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor with his own blog, has shredded Ashraf and Galor's paper on his blog. This is not science, it's sensationalism.
Money quote: "Everybody wants to be Jared Diamond, that is the problem." He gives some simple counterexamples that illustrate the silliness at play here.
I'm not talking about radical economic theories like libertarianism or communism, simply the middle ground of economists. You'd have thought by now that there would be agreement on whether austerity measures work or not.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Practitioners of a scientific discipline know that the first mistake outsiders often make is a failure to familiarize ones self with the often quite large body of peer reviewed published research in that field. The economists who authored the original article have fallen into that common blunder here.
When two disciplines come into conflict it is often a good idea to pay heed to the discipline whose field of expertise and history of research best covers the bone of contention. The central conflict here is over two variables - genetic diversity, and population density at various times in history and prehistory. Anthropologists have a long established, peer reviewed record of research into genetic diversity and human migration; economists do not. Anthropologists (specifically, archaeologists) have a long established, peer reviewed record of research on population estimation throughout history and prehistory across the globe; economists do not.
As a result, the economists who wrote the original paper got both their genetic diversity AND population density estimates wrong, so their work is essentially worthless. The rebuttal by the anthropologists goes ino great detail on these errors often resulting from long outdated sources or complete lack of awareness of published literature in the relevant areas of research.
Practitioners of a scientific discipline know that the first mistake outsiders often make is a failure to familiarize ones self with the often quite large body of peer reviewed published research in that field. The economists who authored the original article have fallen into that common blunder here.
When two disciplines come into conflict it is often a good idea to pay heed to the discipline whose field of expertise and history of research best covers the bone of contention. The central conflict here is over two variables - genetic diversity, and population density at various times in history and prehistory. Anthropologists have a long established, peer reviewed record of research into genetic diversity and human migration; economists do not. Anthropologists (specifically, archaeologists) have a long established, peer reviewed record of research on population estimation throughout history and prehistory across the globe; economists do not.
As a result, the economists who wrote the original paper got both their genetic diversity AND population density estimates wrong, so their work is essentially worthless. The rebuttal by the anthropologists goes ino great detail on these errors often resulting from long outdated sources or complete lack of awareness of published literature in the relevant areas of research.
N.B. dupe since I unintentionally wasn't logged in originally
It seems like that, because the focus is mainly on the places where people disagree. There is overall agreement on a lot of issues. To get out of this recession, we didn't try price controls, we didn't try massive tariffs, we made sure the money supply didn't contract. The overall disagreement is what to do with fiscal policy (as opposed to monetary policy). The disagreements come because there isn't a lot of data on the topic.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Um... You just described slashdotters in general thus contributing to redundancy........
You have won the Obscure Trivia sweepstakes
Collect $15 from each Slashdot user
Must there be a gene which makes you prefer programming Linux to watching Glee?
Too easy. It's called the Y chromosome.
You have won the Obscure Trivia sweepstakes
I was in a liquor store the other day and I noticed some nitwit has named a wine "Argento." Argent's what the Romans call that shiny, whitish coloured, semi-precious metal. "Hiyo Silver, away!" I've always been a veritable bottomless pit of useless information; just one of my many finer qualities.
Have you seen some of the goofy names being applied to wines lately? "Conundrum", "Menage a trois", ...
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Hey! There are still people out ther who believe Barak Obama was born in Kenya!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
In a world of cause and effect everything we see has a cause, a physical cause. What sort of sense does the concept of cause have outside of the physical? Let's just say that, for argument, we have non-physical effects today. What is the cause of those non-physical effects? Did any non-physical effects exist one million years BP? If not, how did we get from purely physical causality to non-physical causality? We know what "nature" means, and in the context of biological life it means genetics and the theory of evolution. What does "nurture" mean? I can't get anyone on the nurturist side of this debate to tell me what it actually means or, more importantly, from whence it comes. Before you can tell me that nurture is important you have to explain of what it consists.