Evolutionary thinking is neither comfortable nor comforting
No, capacities are not going to be evenly distributed across human populations.
Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense—an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators. That means that their strongest selection pressures—both genetic and cultural—have almost always been about dealing with other humans.
We are the cultural species par excellence. Cultures can be reasonably thought of as collections of life-strategies. Culture tends to be persistent—aspects of culture can be highly persistent.
It is worth keeping in mind that genetic selection can occur surprisingly quickly—i.e., in a relatively short number of generations, depending on the intensity of the selection pressures. A very clear example of this is the evolution of lactase persistence in pastoralist, or agro-pastoralist, populations. (The decades-long experiment in domesticating silver foxes is an extreme example.)
The great advantage of cultural selection is that it is faster than genetic selection but culture still has to show some “stickiness”, some persistence, to be useful. Especially in the evolution of signals, norms and social strategies.
The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest—or most thoroughly—are Europe, particularly North-West Europe, East Asia and Indian (especially by high-jati Indians). So, those are the areas where natural and cultural selection has been most focused on selection for dealing usefully with other humans. Those populations have also been the most successful in dealing with the modern world, wherever they go. This hardly seems a coincidence.
The regions where dealing with the local physical environment has been most salient are Sub-Saharan Africa—all those co-evolved parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores—and Australia—which is full of deserts and spiky things likely to poison you. Much of Africa is also semi-desert forager lands, while the tsetse fly stopped the central African plains generating the equivalent of the connecting—for good or ill—pastoralist cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Both continental-scale regions therefore historically had low human population densities.
The consequence in Africa was that Sub-Saharan Africa has, for millennia, been a region of endemic slavery. Labour was more valuable than land, which led—as it usually did historically—to labour bondage: the violent/coercive extraction of labour’s scarcity value. In this case, the low population density meant that folk were regularly seized and transported, thus requiring the level of domination for folk to be moved at will—i.e., slavery rather than some form of serfdom.
Increased selection to deal with the physical environment meant comparatively less selection to deal with other humans. Sub-Saharan African and Australian Aboriginal populations have been rather less successful at dealing with the modern world than have other populations. (Claims about the success of recent African immigrants seem to be overstated.) The key element of the modern world is domination of social outcomes by human interactions to the greatest extent yet achieved in history. Again, that relative lack of success hardly seems like a coincidence.
Yes, it is true that selection for transportation across the Atlantic as slaves was negative in all sorts of senses. The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions (which are highly heritable). Nevertheless, with the partial exception of recent African immigrants—who are selected for initiative and education—both populations have been markedly less successful than other groups.
There are certainly factors which affect that either way. Not inflicting on Australian Aborigines the dual metabolic disasters of the farming and processed-food revolutions at the same time would be good. Not under-policing the localities in which folk live is also good.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that capacities—which are a genetic, epigenetic and cultural matter—will be evenly distributed across all populations. Indeed, we have very good reasons to think that that will not be the case, due to the variations in selection pressures—whether genetic, environmental or cultural, including interactions between the three. It is not a good idea, for instance, to spend 1400 years marrying your cousins.
Even when means and medians are the same in the distribution of some trait across groups, differences in the size of tails—i.e. the number of extreme outliers—can lead to differences in the distribution of outcomes. Any population with a persistently larger tail of high physical robustness and lower executive functions—which can be an ethno-racial pattern but also a class pattern—will tend to have higher rates of violent crime. Conversely, any population with a smaller tail of lower executive functions—for example, East Asians with a long history of underclass males not breeding but selection for reproductive success through passing examinations and cooperative farming—will tend to have lower rates of violent crime.
Sufficient variance in traits—so having a larger “right tail” of positive-for-human-flourishing characteristics—can be enough on its own to increase a group’s success. Tail effects matter.1
The persistence of gene flows across human populations does undermine any strong notion of human subspecies among Homo sapiens. It does not imply equal distributions of capacities across human populations.
Hence, evolutionary thinking is neither comfortable nor comforting.
Human agency and the falsity of Equalitarianism
So, Nathan Cofnas did a post, to which I wrote three responses — here, here, and here — to which he responded. Then I did another post. This is me wrestling some more with heritability. It is, in part, a response to Richard Hanania’s post.
If, however, you take it to be a morally required claim that capacities must be evenly distributed across all human populations, then one is committed to various knock-on implications. One is to anathematise all evolutionary biology, anthropology and psychology that undermines the claim of equal distribution of capacities across human populations. One is therefore committed to a war against science, especially the consilience of social science with biology.
Social analysis consilient with biology
A living organism uses information and resources to keep itself functioning. Information is:
Another is that—given that social outcomes are not evenly distributed across groups—human agency must be unevenly distributed across human groups for equal distribution of capacities to lead to unequal distribution of social outcomes. That is, some groups have so much agency, they can realise their potential (and more than their potential). Conversely, other groups have so little agency, that they are blocked from realising their potential, regardless of their choices.
The oppressed-oppressor dialectic fits naturally with this. Such analytical templates claim that successful groups have demiurgic power to turn society into a social prison for less successful groups. Something that the enlightened can see, but those who disagree are too flawed to realise. It therefore marries an updated secularised gnosticism (society as social prison) with an updated secularised Hermeticism (those with the correct knowledge have transformative capacity).
Questions about, for example, better or worse life-strategies do not fit naturally with such an outlook. Nor are such questions conducive to grand strategies of social leverage to “fix” the problem—i.e., achieve equal social outcomes between groups.
Once there were no longer specific laws holding people back—and even more once overt discrimination became illegal—there had to be more and more assertion of invisible sociological gremlins—disparate impact, structural racism and the like—for the systematic uneven distribution of agency required for the presumed equal distribution of capacities to be compatible with the observable uneven distribution of outcomes.
Electing an Africa-American US President (twice) made pressures for inferring such invisible sociological gremlins worse, precisely because a member of the classically marginalised group had been elected—by majority vote: 52.9% in 2008, 51.1% in 2012—to the highest office in the land.2 What Matt Yglesias labelled The Great Awokening (and includes what Steve Sailer calls “the Late Obama Age collapse”3) makes more sense as increased demand for invisible mechanisms of oppression in face of spectacular disconfirming of the US polity being inherently racist.
The demand for moral and emotional validation by fighting “oppression” generated the relevant literature and media of pervasive racism, oppression, etc., as what was emotionally attractive was far more powerful than inconvenient reality. Just as the demand for racism way exceeds the supply—hence all the hate crime hoaxes—so the demand for oppression way exceeds the supply.4 Hence contemporary universities doing what they do so well: create mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth.
All this also requires a fairly profound level of innumeracy, given that the most salient fact of outcomes between human groups—particularly within developed democracies—is that overlaps in social outcomes across groups are much larger than differences between groups. That the differences within groups are much larger than the differences between them puts human agency back into the story in a very uncongenial-to-the-equal-outcomes-program way.
The demiurgic hypothesis of massively unevenly distributed human agency just fails on its face. But it can be both powerfully motivating and emotionally comforting.
Hence contemporary outbreaks of Lysenkoism—trumping science with ideology—including the denial of the biological reality of sex being driven by deeming Trans folks to be victims of an oppressive society, while—as is normal to Lysenkoism—seeking to shame, shun, and otherwise punish, those who dissent. This leads to the nonsense of claiming sex is “assigned” at birth, rather than being observed—a capacity developed over a billion years of sexual reproduction.
All this falls well within “College Professor in Exile” Bret Weinstein’s comments that:
… if you go to college without a good plan for avoiding nonsense you can very well come out stupider than you went in, and … isn't that mind-blowing: in 2024 college is a place that might make you stupider.
Alas, that has been true for quite some time.
And we are back to evolutionary thinking being neither comfortable nor comforting.
References
M. Ajaz, N. Ali, G. Randhawa, ‘UK Pakistani views on the adverse health risks associated with consanguineous marriages,’ Journal of Community Genetics, 2015;6(4):331-342. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4567984/
Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.
Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, State University of New York Press, 1997.
Catherine M. Cameron, Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World, University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Tanaya Devi, Roland G. Fryer Jr, ‘Policing The Police: The Impact Of “Pattern-Or-Practice” Investigations On Crime,’ NBER Working Paper 27324, June 2020. http://www.nber.org/papers/w27324
Laura E. Engelhardt, Daniel A. Briley, Frank D. Mann, K. Paige Harden Tucker-Drob, ‘Genes Unite Executive Functions in Childhood,’ Psychological Science, 2015 August, 26(8), 1151–1163. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4530525/
O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/
Joseph Henrich The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Making Us Smarter, Princeton University Press, 2016.
Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.
Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, W.W.Norton, 2024.
Katherine J. Latham, ‘Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body,’ Nebraska Anthropologist, 2013, 187, 95-102. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/nebanthro/article/1186/&path_info=28_Latham.pdf
K. McCaffree & A. Saide, A. ‘How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing? Skeptic Research Center, CUPES-007, (2021). https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
M. O'Hearn, B.N. Lauren, J.B. Wong, D.D. Kim, & D. Mozaffarian, ‘Trends and Disparities in Cardiometabolic Health Among U.S. Adults, 1999-2018,’ Journal of the American College of Cardiology, (2022), 80(2), 138–151. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10475326/
A.R. Templeton, ‘The importance of gene flow in human evolution,’ Human Population Genetics and Genomics, 2023;3(3):0005. https://www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/3/3/0005/html
Given that human males—like males across species—have a flatter distribution of traits—so more positive and negative outliers—having equal numbers of males and females at the top ends of hierarchies suggests some level of discrimination against males. Conversely, having female prison populations begin to approach male populations in size suggests some level of discrimination against, even persecution of, females.
Barack Obama was the son of an East African migrant, so not a descendant of American slaves. He represented immigrant success. But the ridiculous US racial classifications mark him as “black”, even though he is mixed race, a second-generation migrant and not a descendant of slaves.
Seeing police as inherently racist oppressors—rather than a necessary buttress of order against a violent criminal “tail”—is a combination of not taking the problems of order seriously with the demand for racism and oppression exceeding the supply. This led to the 2014 “Ferguson” and 2020 “George Floyd” surges of thousands of extra homicides within African-American communities as police withdrew under the pressure of anti-police activism. This stupidity literally kills.
The settler-colonialism nonsense on which hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written—where the injustice of indigenous dispossession is baked in to a polity, so every citizen of the polity not of indigenous descent is a “settler” perpetuating “structures of oppression”—is very much an example of the demand for oppression—so one can be validated by “fighting” against it—exceeding the supply. As Adam Kirsch points out, it is a notion of original settler sin to be purged by “decolonising” everything. It is yet another version of societies as social prisons (gnosticism) to be transformed by folk with appropriate knowledge (Hermeticism).
There is a very disturbing corollary to the last segment. I am a regular reader of fellow Substacker HolyMathNerd and she recently reviewed Rob Henderson's book. What truly blew my mind is her assertion that the practices of wokeism/performative denial of reality are not actually errors, but indeed a skill being deliberatively put to use to attain social advancement in an increasingly competitive milieu:
"signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing"
From: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/agency-is-a-life-defining-skill
Place yourself inside the nomenklatura during Lysenkoism and the above capacities would be useful indeed. Also recall very similar themes in 1984 about willfully pursuing cognitive dissonance and using ambiguous language which carries whichever meaning that is desirable at-the-time. Modern terms like "inclusion" and "diversity" closely align to duckspeak.
I have some experience of Nigeria and the interaction, shall we say, between farmers and pastoralists. Part of the basis for the terrible trouble between them in the last fifteen years or so is the sharp reduction in the ability of cattle to produce milk. This is for a series of factors relating to the sparsity of vegetation meaning that the cattle aren't healthy enough to produce much. The pastoral people of Nigeria are the Fulani (along with a few much smaller group), who have even abandoned the use of butter for traditional rituals at things like weddings and initiation ceremonies.
Anyway, one of the Fulani responses to the strangulation pastoralism has suffered in the north has been the shift of pastoralism towards the centre and south, necessitated by the better vegetation and pasture but enabled by a mix of veterinary advances and mass deforestation meaning the tsetse fly is no longer to be feared. But a downside of this movement* is that there is very little market at all for dairy in the south. Upon investigating this I discovered that lactose intolerance amongst the Igbo and Yoruba people, two major groups of the south, are at astonishing rates of something like 80-90%. I suspect this means that southern Nigerian kids get something like zero dairy once they are off the breast. The northern Hausa, Kanuri and of course Fulani have much greater tolerance, as you describe.
*An expert on pastoralism told me that the rupture of the last couple of decades experienced by the Fulani of Nigeria is the biggest change ever experienced by any pastoralist group anywhere in the world, ever.