We live in a world where physical and behavioral differences between human population groups are observable. The question then arises, what are the causes of these differences? To me, the most important information you would want to know is - what is the nature of the these groups and why do they exist? You would need to know this to set a baseline of assumptions about equality. If genomic evidence shows that these groups were caused by a intermixing of homo sapiens of various subspecies (Neanderthal, Denisovans, etc.), genetic bottlenecks and selection pressure, is it reasonable to assume that these groups would all have the exact same brain structure? It seems like the default hypotheses should be that there are genetic differences in the brains between groups, but culture/social factors also play a major role in the overserved behavioral differences.
The idea that all humans are part of the same homogenous group, and that the differences between us are superficial seems to come from the idea of human exceptionalism - that we are an entirely separate form of life than other animals on this planet and not subject to the same evolutionary rules.
Yep. That there are physical markers of continental/sub continental origin establishes that there are some genetic differences between groups that are simply observable, even if they are, as is often the case in biology, fuzzy-boundary sets.
I tend to agree, but very tricky proposition to sell to the Christian cultures of the west from which this ideology sprung, and not, I would argue accidently. As you have said before, it is the socialization of the spiritual belief in equality before God.
Given the inbreeding issue in some cultural systems, are there bursts of much higher productivity / creativity after invasions or conquests that might disrupt cultural marriage patterns for a few generations? The combination of outlander gene patterns and disrupted marriage patterns should interrupt the inbreeding for at least a portion of the population for a few generations.
The question is how much conquerors interbreed with the population and for how long. Also, inbreeding effects are both slow and cumulative. That being said, the original Arab conquests did lead to a period of cultural flowering. Much of that was the interaction of cultures and the creation of a common scholarly language (Arabic) across a huge area. So, teasing out effects is, as ever, difficult.
I assumed it would be difficult, for example, what was the effect of the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great? Ptolmey ended up running it after Alexander's death, but I assume the Greek soldiers would have taken Egyptian wives. More importanly, did the conquest upset the cousin marriage pattern for a part of the population for a generation or two? That could have a much larger impact. Ditto, Roman rule and the later Islamic conquest.
Romans really found cousin marriage icky and strongly discouraged it. Christianity, picked that up, sanctified and extended it. Particularly the Latin Church.
For what it's worth, I think that we are not sufficiently specific when we refer to "genetics." Recent research suggests that the genome we inherit is just part, and maybe not the most important part of the story. At least equally important are "epigenetic" forces that switch our genes on and off when we are in utero and young infants. (see Nessa Carey, Denis Noble, Eva Jablonka among others.) It is our environment that determines how "epigenetics" influences the genome, and a big part of our environment is "culture." Much of who we are is determined by things like prenatal care and nutrition, the mental state of the mother, exposure to toxins, early childhood exposure to language and reading, trauma and more subtle family instability. A recent book by Thomas Sowell pointed out that black kids hear significantly fewer spoken words than other races. Being raised by a single unprepared mother doesn’t help. I'm not alone in thinking that family structure and values are the main problem. I do not think it is a coincidence that 60% of black children grow up in single parent households, whereas only 15% of Asian kids do.
Having said this, there must be significant genetic differences between races. Otherwise, more than 25% of professional basketball players - the nation's highest paying job - would be white.
Interesting post, but see Franz de Waal on other primates exhibiting reciprocity and a taste for fairness, not conventional homo economicus traits. Many books and papers, this one is great:
The angry underpaid monkey is a great image. Though it could be a status matter that is proto-normative, since it about fairness to themselves rather than others. Human children regularly exhibit concern about unfairness towards others.
Reciprocity could be rational bargaining, so still Homo economicus in a repeated game scenario, though it is clearly much more robust if its shades into being normative.
But I specifically cited competitive games in the behavioural lab and noted we were more normative, rather than trying to argue only we were normative. When it gets to the stage that Australian raptors will pick up a burning stick and drop it in underbrush to flush out prey, trying to create bright lines with only Homo sapiens on one side becomes fraught.
In fact, one of the strongest such distinctions is Homo sapiens is the only species where it can be true that neither member of the mating pair has chosen the other. Courtship marriage being a distinctly minority pattern across human societies. Something evolutionary psychologists regularly fail to grapple with, as they do not read enough evolutionary anthropology.
Rob Boyd once began a talk by asking the audience which species occupies the broadest range of habitats on Earth. I was thinking of some insect or bacterium but of course it is humans. By far. And none of us could survive for long in any habitat if abandoned and left alone at birth. His point was similar to what you are making, the primacy and power of culture.
One of the great joys of being affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute over the past couple of decades has been interaction with the likes of de Waal, Boehm, Boyd, Bowles, Gintis, Fehr, Silk, Borgerhoff Mulder and so on. Lots of evolutionary anthropology. But increasingly marginalized within anthropology.
What great people to be able to interact with. I have learnt so much from reading evolutionary anthropology papers.
As for evolutionary anthropology being marginalised, that is Hegelian vernunft (“Reason”) triumphing over mere verstand (understanding), reworked through Marx’s “the point is to change society” and “ruthless criticism of all that exists”, further reworked through Critical Theory and its spinoffs. All the Marxists and quasi-Marxists should have been pensioned off out of the academy in 1991. “We have run the natural experiments again and again, your ideas always fail.”
The Dialectical Faith is a religion (or religion substitute) and is selected for on the basis that religions are selected for: in the short run, for their ability to motivate and coordinate. In the longer run, through their ability to sustain a resilient community. (They are not selected for truth: except in the “metaphysically true” sense — it works to believe in them.)
We know the Dialectical Faith doesn’t work in the longer run. But we also know it motivates and coordinates extremely well.
Diversity officers are commissars: commissars are modern inquisitors. Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance is a manual for the modern inquisitor — error has no rights and we can determine error.
The whole “hate speech” in its various manifestations is “error has no rights”. As is the disinformation push. It is the updated version of Gleichshaltung (coordination/synchronisation): how totalitarian politics advances entirely internally in parliamentary states. (I.e. without the Red Army or equivalent looming over your society.)
Folk who grew up in the Soviet bloc or Cultural Revolution China are extremely worried as they can see all the same patterns replicating in new forms: via networks rather than a centrally directed Party. But the schools and universities are churning out plenty of motivated and coordinated-via-networks-and-signalling zealots plus useful idiots. The latter have the stupidity of arrogance: they are being played for useful idiots but are too arrogant (and often too wilfully historically ignorant) to notice.
Hence what I call ‘the Brad DeLong effect’: admitting that there is a problem would require some level of agreeing with conservatives, some tarnishing of the conceit of being Moral Masters of the Universe, so is foreclosed.
Meanwhile, we have remarkably insular elites engaged in increasingly dysfunctional signalling having no idea how much frustration, even anger, they are storing up. (Folk vote for Trump for a reason.) Really, how many alienated, frustrated, even humiliated, young men can a society afford to generate? DEI “struggle sessions” are so often also humiliation sessions, for example.
Feminisation of institutions — replacing institutions as formalised teams with emotionalising cliques that shame and shun to enforce an imperial propriety — also doesn’t help. But we apparently cannot discuss the downsides of female behaviour or the upsides of male behaviour. To criticise men is feminism. To criticise women is misogyny,
Depressing. Wrestling with applying the evolutionary lens is much more edifying. (Except of course, my comments on current trends also applies the evolutionary lens — social selection in highly bureaucratised societies with mass universities and social media.)
Lorenzo, maybe I'm part of a vanishingly small group but I find the way Marx is referenced these days to be really unhelpful. Many of the people I mentioned, Bowles and Gintis in particular, were deeply influenced by Marx. Some of the most powerful critiques of identity politics today come from others so influenced, such as Freddie DeBoer, Adolph Reed, Norman Finkelstein, and Tyler Austin Harper. I have read a fair amount of Marx and there are some very deep insights there, which I can appreciate even if they don't have a direct bearing on my own work.
Let me also say something about Glenn Loury, whom I consider to be a very deep thinker and often poorly understood. We have written together, taught together, traveled together, and I have a blurb on the jacket of his memoir. He has spent his entire career thinking about group inequality, going back to his dissertation. He introduced the concept of social capital into economics (and influenced Putnam, who also has a blurb on the book). It is true that he puts great emphasis on culture, as captured by his relations before transactions motto. But he also adheres to what he calls the axiom of anti-essentialism, believing that there are explanations for group disparities that do not require us to essentialize race. And furthermore, he sees culture itself as endogenous and responsive to incentives, see for example his work with Hanming Fang. Glenn is an exhilarating conversation partner, I've been on his podcast maybe seven or eight times, mostly in the early days.
Anyway, I enjoy reading your thoughts, my comments above are made out of respect and a hope for understanding.
We live in a world where physical and behavioral differences between human population groups are observable. The question then arises, what are the causes of these differences? To me, the most important information you would want to know is - what is the nature of the these groups and why do they exist? You would need to know this to set a baseline of assumptions about equality. If genomic evidence shows that these groups were caused by a intermixing of homo sapiens of various subspecies (Neanderthal, Denisovans, etc.), genetic bottlenecks and selection pressure, is it reasonable to assume that these groups would all have the exact same brain structure? It seems like the default hypotheses should be that there are genetic differences in the brains between groups, but culture/social factors also play a major role in the overserved behavioral differences.
The idea that all humans are part of the same homogenous group, and that the differences between us are superficial seems to come from the idea of human exceptionalism - that we are an entirely separate form of life than other animals on this planet and not subject to the same evolutionary rules.
Yep. That there are physical markers of continental/sub continental origin establishes that there are some genetic differences between groups that are simply observable, even if they are, as is often the case in biology, fuzzy-boundary sets.
"Equalitarianism is false."
I tend to agree, but very tricky proposition to sell to the Christian cultures of the west from which this ideology sprung, and not, I would argue accidently. As you have said before, it is the socialization of the spiritual belief in equality before God.
Given the inbreeding issue in some cultural systems, are there bursts of much higher productivity / creativity after invasions or conquests that might disrupt cultural marriage patterns for a few generations? The combination of outlander gene patterns and disrupted marriage patterns should interrupt the inbreeding for at least a portion of the population for a few generations.
The question is how much conquerors interbreed with the population and for how long. Also, inbreeding effects are both slow and cumulative. That being said, the original Arab conquests did lead to a period of cultural flowering. Much of that was the interaction of cultures and the creation of a common scholarly language (Arabic) across a huge area. So, teasing out effects is, as ever, difficult.
I assumed it would be difficult, for example, what was the effect of the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great? Ptolmey ended up running it after Alexander's death, but I assume the Greek soldiers would have taken Egyptian wives. More importanly, did the conquest upset the cousin marriage pattern for a part of the population for a generation or two? That could have a much larger impact. Ditto, Roman rule and the later Islamic conquest.
Romans really found cousin marriage icky and strongly discouraged it. Christianity, picked that up, sanctified and extended it. Particularly the Latin Church.
For what it's worth, I think that we are not sufficiently specific when we refer to "genetics." Recent research suggests that the genome we inherit is just part, and maybe not the most important part of the story. At least equally important are "epigenetic" forces that switch our genes on and off when we are in utero and young infants. (see Nessa Carey, Denis Noble, Eva Jablonka among others.) It is our environment that determines how "epigenetics" influences the genome, and a big part of our environment is "culture." Much of who we are is determined by things like prenatal care and nutrition, the mental state of the mother, exposure to toxins, early childhood exposure to language and reading, trauma and more subtle family instability. A recent book by Thomas Sowell pointed out that black kids hear significantly fewer spoken words than other races. Being raised by a single unprepared mother doesn’t help. I'm not alone in thinking that family structure and values are the main problem. I do not think it is a coincidence that 60% of black children grow up in single parent households, whereas only 15% of Asian kids do.
Having said this, there must be significant genetic differences between races. Otherwise, more than 25% of professional basketball players - the nation's highest paying job - would be white.
You might be interested in this blogpost.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-tribe-has-spoken
Interesting post, but see Franz de Waal on other primates exhibiting reciprocity and a taste for fairness, not conventional homo economicus traits. Many books and papers, this one is great:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01963
The angry underpaid monkey is a great image. Though it could be a status matter that is proto-normative, since it about fairness to themselves rather than others. Human children regularly exhibit concern about unfairness towards others.
Reciprocity could be rational bargaining, so still Homo economicus in a repeated game scenario, though it is clearly much more robust if its shades into being normative.
But I specifically cited competitive games in the behavioural lab and noted we were more normative, rather than trying to argue only we were normative. When it gets to the stage that Australian raptors will pick up a burning stick and drop it in underbrush to flush out prey, trying to create bright lines with only Homo sapiens on one side becomes fraught.
In fact, one of the strongest such distinctions is Homo sapiens is the only species where it can be true that neither member of the mating pair has chosen the other. Courtship marriage being a distinctly minority pattern across human societies. Something evolutionary psychologists regularly fail to grapple with, as they do not read enough evolutionary anthropology.
Rob Boyd once began a talk by asking the audience which species occupies the broadest range of habitats on Earth. I was thinking of some insect or bacterium but of course it is humans. By far. And none of us could survive for long in any habitat if abandoned and left alone at birth. His point was similar to what you are making, the primacy and power of culture.
One of the great joys of being affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute over the past couple of decades has been interaction with the likes of de Waal, Boehm, Boyd, Bowles, Gintis, Fehr, Silk, Borgerhoff Mulder and so on. Lots of evolutionary anthropology. But increasingly marginalized within anthropology.
What great people to be able to interact with. I have learnt so much from reading evolutionary anthropology papers.
As for evolutionary anthropology being marginalised, that is Hegelian vernunft (“Reason”) triumphing over mere verstand (understanding), reworked through Marx’s “the point is to change society” and “ruthless criticism of all that exists”, further reworked through Critical Theory and its spinoffs. All the Marxists and quasi-Marxists should have been pensioned off out of the academy in 1991. “We have run the natural experiments again and again, your ideas always fail.”
The Dialectical Faith is a religion (or religion substitute) and is selected for on the basis that religions are selected for: in the short run, for their ability to motivate and coordinate. In the longer run, through their ability to sustain a resilient community. (They are not selected for truth: except in the “metaphysically true” sense — it works to believe in them.)
We know the Dialectical Faith doesn’t work in the longer run. But we also know it motivates and coordinates extremely well.
Diversity officers are commissars: commissars are modern inquisitors. Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance is a manual for the modern inquisitor — error has no rights and we can determine error.
The whole “hate speech” in its various manifestations is “error has no rights”. As is the disinformation push. It is the updated version of Gleichshaltung (coordination/synchronisation): how totalitarian politics advances entirely internally in parliamentary states. (I.e. without the Red Army or equivalent looming over your society.)
Folk who grew up in the Soviet bloc or Cultural Revolution China are extremely worried as they can see all the same patterns replicating in new forms: via networks rather than a centrally directed Party. But the schools and universities are churning out plenty of motivated and coordinated-via-networks-and-signalling zealots plus useful idiots. The latter have the stupidity of arrogance: they are being played for useful idiots but are too arrogant (and often too wilfully historically ignorant) to notice.
Hence what I call ‘the Brad DeLong effect’: admitting that there is a problem would require some level of agreeing with conservatives, some tarnishing of the conceit of being Moral Masters of the Universe, so is foreclosed.
Meanwhile, we have remarkably insular elites engaged in increasingly dysfunctional signalling having no idea how much frustration, even anger, they are storing up. (Folk vote for Trump for a reason.) Really, how many alienated, frustrated, even humiliated, young men can a society afford to generate? DEI “struggle sessions” are so often also humiliation sessions, for example.
Feminisation of institutions — replacing institutions as formalised teams with emotionalising cliques that shame and shun to enforce an imperial propriety — also doesn’t help. But we apparently cannot discuss the downsides of female behaviour or the upsides of male behaviour. To criticise men is feminism. To criticise women is misogyny,
Depressing. Wrestling with applying the evolutionary lens is much more edifying. (Except of course, my comments on current trends also applies the evolutionary lens — social selection in highly bureaucratised societies with mass universities and social media.)
Lorenzo, maybe I'm part of a vanishingly small group but I find the way Marx is referenced these days to be really unhelpful. Many of the people I mentioned, Bowles and Gintis in particular, were deeply influenced by Marx. Some of the most powerful critiques of identity politics today come from others so influenced, such as Freddie DeBoer, Adolph Reed, Norman Finkelstein, and Tyler Austin Harper. I have read a fair amount of Marx and there are some very deep insights there, which I can appreciate even if they don't have a direct bearing on my own work.
Let me also say something about Glenn Loury, whom I consider to be a very deep thinker and often poorly understood. We have written together, taught together, traveled together, and I have a blurb on the jacket of his memoir. He has spent his entire career thinking about group inequality, going back to his dissertation. He introduced the concept of social capital into economics (and influenced Putnam, who also has a blurb on the book). It is true that he puts great emphasis on culture, as captured by his relations before transactions motto. But he also adheres to what he calls the axiom of anti-essentialism, believing that there are explanations for group disparities that do not require us to essentialize race. And furthermore, he sees culture itself as endogenous and responsive to incentives, see for example his work with Hanming Fang. Glenn is an exhilarating conversation partner, I've been on his podcast maybe seven or eight times, mostly in the early days.
Anyway, I enjoy reading your thoughts, my comments above are made out of respect and a hope for understanding.