While most biologists would agree that humans are genetically inclined to behave altruistically towards immediate family, it’s more controversial to claim that humans are genetically inclined to behave altruistically towards their ethnic group, or race. Although part of the skepticism about the existence of ethnic loyalty stems from political correctness, much of it is scientifically legitimate. For if you sacrifice your life for your two children, the gene for family altruism will live on through them, since they each share 50% of your genes, but if you sacrifice your life for random members of your race, the gene for racial altruism will end with you assuming you are the first to have it. So how could ethnic/racial altruism evolve in the first place?
I think the answer to the paradox is that many ethnic groups originally started out as small families. All it would take is for a mother of a small family to have a gene that makes her sacrifice her life (if necessary) if she sees large numbers of people who look and act like her (relatively speaking) being seriously threatened by people who don’t look and act like her (relatively speaking). The degree of sacrifice she would make would be proportionate to the degree of threat and the number of people like her being threatened. Since most of her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren would have this gene, they would collectively form a tribe that would stick together in the face of threats from rival tribes which would give them a huge competitive advantage. Pretty soon their population would grow in size from a tribe, to an ethnic group. to an entire continental race.
Of course there would also be free loaders in the race that didn’t inherit the gene and thus benefited from the racial altruism without ever sacrificing for their group. What’s to stop such racial treason from being selected for? Well the people who had the gene for racial altruism would be especially hostile to any member of the race who wasn’t loyal, and they may even kill them and their children, so racial treason would not be adaptive. Even today we see that people who refuse to sacrifice in some way for their race are ridiculed as “Uncle Toms” and lose status within their ethnic group. In prehistoric times, a loss of status probably impaired genetic fitness.
Very interesting post. This sounds quite plausible.
I’ve learned more in one day of reading this blog than I learned in all 4 years of university.
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you
this is all anhistoric jibberish.
for most of human history and for all of prehuman history races simply didn’t exist in the world people
and their subhuman ancestors knew.
and this because no one traveled very far, like no farther than 20 miles from where they were born ever. even much later marco polo was reckoned a fantastic liar.
the closest thing to another race was the neighboring tribe which spoke jibberish and wore a slightly different penis cone.
the human band was never more than 70 individuals men, women, and children combined.
thus racial affinity is at best a spandrel. it cannot possibly be an adaptation. affinity for your band bleeds into affinity for everyone who looks like you, dresses, speaks, thinks, eats, etc. like you.
i can imagine many a white american racist might be cured if he were stranded in a vietnamese prisoner of war camp with a black guy. there their similarities would be far greater than those they had with their captors.
the closest thing to another race was the neighboring tribe which spoke jibberish and wore a slightly different penis cone.
Actually, ancestral humans dealt with far more diversity than we do today, because they coexisted with entirely different species of “people” like Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus.
the human band was never more than 70 individuals men, women, and children combined.
thus racial affinity is at best a spandrel. it cannot possibly be an adaptation.
But those 70 individuals, if they were loyal to the group, might grow from a band of 70, to a race of millions, replacing less internally loyal tribes along the way. The point is, if you think loyalty to the band is an adaptation, then loyalty to race is too, since a race is more or less just a band that got really really big.
btw here’s an online calculator for the bivariate normal distribution.
so in most us cities the probability someone born in the bottom 20% will end up in the top 20% is about 10%. this may not sound so bad, but this corresponds to an “intergenerational income elasticity” using the calculator of .4.
this shows that contrary to the contention of a randroid commenter on steve shoe’s blog correcting for geography has no effect on the figure for the rigidity of america’s class structure which uncorrected for geography is about .4.
this randroid is a friend of shoe’s, a cal-tech alumnus and a harvard phd in applied physics and partner and goldman sachs. likely he makes 8 figures.
but he’s an idiot, both in a purely intellectual sense and a moral sense.
http://socr.ucla.edu/htmls/HTML5/BivariateNormal/
you’re so dumb bob.
you’re looking at the figure for the exact 20th percentile. but with rho = .4 the transition probability from
bottom 20% to top 20% is only 5.9% not 10%. the correct rho is < .3.
so the gs partner is right that "correcting" for geography lowers the rigidity of the class structure, rho, but europe would also have to be corrected. of course denmark and the netherlands are small countries so there's not much correcting. but germany and norway and sweden and france and italy have a lot of geographic diversity.
intergenerational income elasticity in canada at country level is already < .2. and canada is huge. the maritime provinces are the poorest iirc. so the us goes from .4 to less than .3. would canada go to less than .1? is canada a classless society? if it were this would be a good thing, but bad news for hbders.
i remember an article in forbes where a canadian meets a harvard grad who says, "don't judge me by my college." he thinks to himself, "wtf are you talking about?"
and one of your almost all former commenters a dane ever comes back…
in the mid 70s income inequality in the uk before taxes and transfers was less than it was in sweden.
so this idea that british underclass whites are some how inferior to even the worst scandinavians is…
balls!
There is such a thing as an in-group or “ethnic” bias, and it appears to be universal. Partly hereditary? Almost certainly so, as are virtually all behaviors.
But that’s hardly the same thing as “altruism”, which represents a net loss of fitness for the altruist on behalf of another individual. Altruism on behalf of non-related strangers within your race doesn’t really pay off under any scenario. At this point you are left with special pleading and implausible scenarios to support your mechanism.
If you define altruism as a net loss of fitness, and define “pay off” as a net increase in fitness, then by definition altruism can’t pay off, but it seems you’ve just made a circular argument.
From the standpoint of the altruism genes, altruism can pay off.
That’s the working definition of “altruism” in evolutionary biology. I didn’t invent it. You can’t just change its definition willy-nilly.
sorry,
bob is black so he’s stupid. he meant to say that he’d electrocute your balls, then throw you alive into the Paraná River.
the Piranhas River is in NE Brazil.
miss dreavus is confused again. less E! more ESPN.
1. human behavior is not rational at the level of consciousness.
2. almost all human behavioral traits have not evolved or been selected for, but are spandrels of the redonkulously huge human brain.
3. these behavioral traits vary with time and place and culture. the most distinguishing feature of the human animal is how un-fixed its behavior is. the human being is a programmable computer. but not everyone is running the same operating system if you know what i mean.
1. human behavior is not rational at the level of consciousness.
Not sure what you mean by that, but my theory is that a lot of so-called irrational behavior on the part of some high IQ people is actually extremely rational once you understand their motives and goals (which are often mutually exclusive)
3. these behavioral traits vary with time and place and culture. the most distinguishing feature of the human animal is how un-fixed its behavior is. the human being is a programmable computer. but not everyone is running the same operating system if you know what i mean.
Human behavior is extremely flexible in how it achieves our goals, but it’s possible that the goals themselves are relatively fixed.
That’s an interesting theory, except for the fact that there exists an entire field called Evolutionary Psychology which has been rather successful.
an entire pseudo-field which has been 100% pure failure.
i agree.
Lol, mugabe. How obvious is it that you haven’t read the book ‘The Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker
but i have.
i own it as a matter of fact.
pinker is a moron.
Of course, everyone you don’t like and everything that proves you wrong is moronic.
Even the most basic papers about genes and psychology will demonstrate that you’re wrong about evo-psych, example: Bouchard, 2004 http://ram.mrtc.ri.cmu.edu/_media/papers/bouchard04_genetic_influence_psychological_traits.pdf
you’re very very very confused kev.
“genetic influence” and the “influence of genes” are two very very very different things in their respective contexts.
“1. human behavior is not rational at the level of consciousness”
Protozoans, amoebae, and tapeworms aren’t conscious, either, but who gives a damn? Does anybody have to teach chickens how to lay eggs? Does a chicken even understand the purpose of an ellipsoid or a chorionic membrane?
Selection causes allelic frequencies to fluctuate. All behaviors (including behaviors that do not exist yet in the human species) are heritable. THE END. If an organism does not have any built-in mechanism by which it can recognize its own kin, one will evolve inevitably if the potential rewards are high enough.
“2. almost all human behavioral traits have not evolved or been selected for, but are spandrels of the redonkulously huge human brain.”
I’m sure that’s why a Catholic education succeeds so marvelously in attenuating the sex drive of adolescent boys. If the threat of eternal torture in hell doesn’t stop them from jerking off…
“3. these behavioral traits vary with time and place and culture. the most distinguishing feature of the human animal is how un-fixed its behavior is. the human being is a programmable computer. but not everyone is running the same operating system if you know what i mean.”
Jorge Videla, you are an imbecile.
that’s not what the BGI folks say, but…
you can’t have an opinion, because you’re a top, bottom, power bottom, or some such perverted vanity.
Paul VI was right. sexual acts for purposes other than procreation are intrinsically evil.
maybe you should follow the supposedexample of Origen. no balls no problem. no balls no prostrate. it diappears.
if you hadn’t any balls i couldn’t hook them up to electrodes before i through you alive out of an airplane into the piranhas river.
don’t mess with the moustache.
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/althistory/images/a/a1/Jorge_rafael_videla.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100210021216&path-prefix=es
god damn it!
that’s not what the BGI folks say, but…
you can’t have an opinion, because you’re a top, bottom, power bottom, or some such perverted vanity.
Paul VI was right. sexual acts for purposes other than procreation are intrinsically evil.
maybe you should follow the supposed example of Origen. no balls no problem. no balls no prostrate. it diappears.
if you hadn’t any balls i couldn’t hook them up to electrodes before i threw you alive out of an airplane into the piranhas river.
don’t mess with the moustache.
sorry,
bob is a stupiud black guy. he meant that he’d electrocute your balls and then throw you alive into the Paraná River.
the Piranhas River is in NE Brazil.
you’re such an idiot WMC.
now miss dreavus will know who we are.
he’ll tell everyone at the dallas bath house.
Altruism – > loss of fitness for the giving individual, not ‘net loss of fitness.’ The receiving individual’s fitness increases.
misdreavus and his god Cochran have lost this debate, so now they are twisting the meaning of “altruism”.
Altruism has a specific meaning in biology.
In non-scientific, ordinary discourse, terms like altruism can be used very vaguely and imprecisely and have varying connotations, which is partly why debates can arise, as different interlocutors will often have different meanings of the terms in their heads.
Of course, Bob is correct. Adaptation, altruism, etc. all have very specific meanings in science. So either admit that when using scientific definitions of the terms, the theories fall down, or that these theories have no pretense to science. Either is fine.
I think the point is true altruism doesn’t seem to exist which is why it’s been such a paradox for evolutionary theory (since natural selection by definition favors self-preservation). The resolution of the paradox is that what seems altruistic at the level of the individual is actually selfish at the level of the genes.
If by ‘true’ altruism you mean philosophical altruism and not biological altruism —- okay? Trivially true. “Ethnic altruism,” by Hamilton’s rule, regardless of the relative genetic relationship between co-ethnic A and non-ethnic B, is unlikely to evolve via kin selection.
I have already said that cultural group evolution and reciprocity can explain this.
Bugabe “eating white cockcake is delicious”,
explain the differences between “genetic influences” and “influence of genes”, please!!
I think he means that some genetic effects are dependent (genetic influence) and other genetic effects are independent (influence of genes).
So if a gene makes you smart in Africa but dumb in America, that’s a dependent genetic effect (genetic influence)
But if a gene makes you smart everywhere, that’s an independent genetic effect (influence of genes); independent because it does not depend on the environment.
Mugabe thinks HBDers are stupid because most of us don’t appreciate this subtle distinction, but the reason HBDers don’t appreciate it is because there’s no evidence for it with respect to IQ, as far as I know. Genotypes that score relatively high on IQ tests in one environment tend to score relatively high in every environment they’ve been tested; that is to say the racial ranking in IQ tends to remain roughly the same across time and space (though admittedly, IQ tests have only been around for about a century and not every race has representative samples in every region of the world)
I can see that a human being which are technically intelligent, adapted to the modern world, can not be adapted to societies of different levels of ” civilization ” and organization. I think many liberals, if they are thrown into the middle of a city Third-World without Mom and Dad, or without the government’s financial benefits, will not know adapt to region because, in environments ” less civilized ” than modern societies, social intelligence is very important and I think most of them have the same deficit of autistics, mind blindness.
Although the ability to adapt is very important, it does not mean that intelligence is to summarize it, especially because it is a set of complex phenotypes, polygenic, so you can have different combinations that IQ tests are not good for capture.
What Bugabe said is not 100% wrong, but is not very well explained, if that is what he meant. The intelligence is adaptable because we have a limited behavioral plasticity, we can set ourselves in different environments, but this will vary from individual to individual. Even our ability to adapt will have a strong genetic component, if all that relates to biological beings in one way or another, primarily have a genetic character. But perhaps as environments are complex and some humans may be very creative to adapt in different ways, thus more based on the improvisation than predetermined. What we see however, is a tendency for most are not very creative. Still, improvisation has an origin, in our mind, and even the most unusual combinations of adaptability, have genetic factors as initial modulators. I think.
I can see that a human being which are technically intelligent, adapted to the modern world, can not be adapted to societies of different levels of ” civilization ” and organization. I think many liberals, if they are thrown into the middle of a city Third-World without Mom and Dad, or without the government’s financial benefits, will not know adapt to region
Certainly someone who is considered smart in environment A might be considered dumb in environment B, but that’s because different abilities are valued in different environments.
But I think Mugabe is saying is that even if you measure intelligence the same way in every environment (by the same standardized IQ test, not by real world adaptability) the rank order of people will change depending on where they are raised. I don’t see much evidence for this, but it’s possible.
Mugabe’s point would even apply to a concrete trait like height. Let’s say you’re taller than your brother in Brazil, but he might have been taller than you if you both had been born and raised in China. So the same genetic variants that cause tallness in one environment may cause shortness in another environment.
So Mugabe thinks HBDers are too simplistic in ranking people based on genes because he suspects that the rank order would change from one environment to another. The only way you could really do it is to clone people and raise their clones in many environments, and whoever had the higher IQ or higher height in the greatest number of environments could be considered genetically smarter or genetically taller.
One exception is organic retardation. Mugabe feels that people with Down Syndrome would have relatively low intelligence in every environment, so he admits that this is an example of genetics actually causing intelligence.
But when it comes to higher levels of intelligence, Mugabe thinks, the rank order would change depending on where people are raised.
what mugabe meant was that high h^2s should not lead one to expect that it will ever be possible to predict IQ from genes alone, not even approximately.
but that locutions like “genetic influence” and “influence of genes” ares used ineterchangeably with “high h^2s” and misleadlingly.
and the same goes for all psychological traits.
the exception is retardation.
Again mugabe, even a simple book like The Blank Slate can tell you that you’re full of shit
Another book you ought to take a look at is Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain by the venerable Ian J. Deary. But if you do, you won’t have the ignorance excuse for being wrong ; )
FYI we can predict many things from IQ, factors like politics have large influence by IQ
https://t.co/MTrNo8nSxO
again kev you’re too dumb to talk to.
and again pumpkin has no memory.
i have given at least three examples of a non-linear norms of reaction surface with regard to IQ in particular.
two studies by Turkheimer
and the fact that h^2s vary significantly for reasons other than sample size and means of assessment. if the surface were planar this wouldn’t be the case. this can only happen if the surface is curved.
in the case of all other psychological traits the h^2s vary much more than they do for IQ. so much that even the very restricted area which these studies sample of the total P(G,E) surface is “rugged”.
i have given at least three examples of a non-linear norms of reaction surface with regard to IQ in particular.
I was thinking specifically of examples where people A are smarter than people B in environment X, but dumber than people B in environment Y. I don’t know of any examples of that, unless “smarter” is measured by cultural achievements, not IQ scores, but I do know of many examples of people A being smarter than people B in environment X, Y and Z.
This suggests that whatever genetic variants are associated with IQ largely have an independent causal effect, at least in combination, if not in isolation.
No evidence….save the fact that so-called “norms of reaction” both varying from genotype to genotype and even crossing is nearly ubiquitous among species. Yet, for whatever reason, IQ would be the one trait to escape NoR? Unlikely.
Further, examples of differing IQ reaction norms have been found.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/47/18860.abstract
It is as I have said: HBDers do not care if HBD is true. Whether it’s r/k theory’s misapplication (and use despite the theory itself being essentially rejected), misreading Darwin, or changing the definitions of scientific terms to suit some speculative purpose…it’s all pseudo-science. The only actual data that HBDers have, which exists as data, are twin studies, and Falconer’s formula depends on EEA…which is also garbage.
Is so EASY criticize older works. Difficult is to do a work that prove your point. “hbd do not care if hbd is right”.
please, use this mantra, generalist and primitive, only to people with your mental age, 12 years old.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414997/teach-americas-impact-modest-best-jason-richwine
HBD is true enough to be able to predict things of value to social policy. See link.
HBD: Blacks are inherently less intelligent and disagreeable. Not only that, they are inherently less ambitious and enterprising. I put them significantly behind working class whites who refuse to seek out the world, except Whites have been doing quite the opposite throughout the centuries.
* less agreeble
biologic determinism/early environmental determinism/congenitalism/but not hereditistsm is true enough within a sufficiently restricted environment to predict things.
all of the former are different from the latter-most.
biologic determinism/early environmental determinism/congenitalism/but not hereditistsm is true enough within a sufficiently restricted environment to predict things.
the problem with that theory JS is that’s what Americans of NW Euro extraction use to say about S Euro and Jewish immigrants. it’s what Aristotle said about N Euros.
the TFR of Latin America and S Asia use to be out of control. now the only part of the world where TFR is out of control is SS Africa.
remember the three Bs. Barbados, Bermuda, the Bahamas.
SS Africa can develop within the next 50 years if:
1. they get their TFR under control.
2. they have foreign investment and management from chinese or white south africans.
3. they solve a problem unique to them…multi-ethnic phony countries with boundaries made by colonial powers…and the expectation of the rest of the world that that they’re just barely above chimps in “cognitive ability”…not to mention malaria and HIV.
used to be
is my Linux OS?
used to say
the problem with that theory JS is that’s what Americans of NW Euro extraction use to say about S Euro and Jewish immigrants. it’s what Aristotle said about N Euros.
This argument is either uninformed or disingenuous. While it’s true that many populations have been considered primitive at various times in history, full-blooded blacks are unique in that they have been considered primitive through almost all of history.
that argument is itself ill-informed. take your tampon out. age by 1000 years, then start a blog pumpkin moron.
little or nothing was known of SS Africa by the rest of the rest of the world until the age of discovery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
the closest the Eddas have in reference to blacks is “blue men”. what are “blue men”? the few natives of the saharah who wore blue turbans which died their fairly fair skin blue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edda
that argument is itself ill-informed.
take your tampon out.
age by 1000 years.
then start a blog pumpkin moron.
little or nothing was known about SS Africa by the rest of the world until the age of discovery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
the closest the Eddas have in reference to blacks is “blue men”. what are “blue men”? the few natives of the sahara who wore blue turbans which dyed their fairly fair skin blue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edda
again,
racial piety (parallel to filial piety) per se cannot have been selected for because race has been very rare in the human experience prior to 200 years ago.
I know you think you know a lot, but compared to me you do not. People have known about blacks for thousands of years; there are references to them going all the way back to Aelius Galenus and even the ancient Egyptians.
And for virtually the entire time they have been considered primitive. Indeed blacks have lagged behind the rest of the wold for over 20,000 years:
https://pumpkinperson.com/2014/12/05/has-the-black-white-iq-gap-existed-for-20000-years/
This is strong evidence that the genetic variants that cause blackness, much like Down’s Syndrome, have an independent causal effect on IQ, since blacks have lagged across such a huge range of time and space.
racial piety (parallel to filial piety) per se cannot have been selected for because race has been very rare in the human experience prior to 200 years ago.
Again, humans evolved tribalism in reaction to diversity even far more extreme than racial differences (i.e. competition from neanderthals and denisovans and homo erectus), so you bet it could have been selected.
Off topic.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2988410/Autism-linked-higher-intelligence-People-genes-related-condition-scored-better-mental-ability-tests.html
Tribalism’s relatively high h^2 would indicate that it isn’t an adaptation.
Dark-skinned peoples included many non-negroid peoples in antiquity.
All continuous traits that evolved are highly heritable otherwise they could not have evolved in the first place. Think about it!
Heritable and heritability aren’t the same thing, in other words.
When traits are selected for, they go to fixation within populations. Eventually, the allele spreads and the heritability drops because most of the variance associated with the trait becomes environmental. For example, #of fingers is probably mostly controlled by genetics but the h^2 is probably low because most everyone has the same genotype for the trait.
Swank, you should actually take a biology course so you can something coherent. Look up continuous variable for starters.
No thanks, you can learn basic adaptation criteria instead.
And apparently the difference between ‘heritable’ and ‘heritability.’
Reef, Swank couldn’t take a biology class even if he wanted to unless he got in under affirmation action, which I suspect he did..
And I guess the long neck of a giraffe is not an adaptation since it’s extremely heritable.
Swank is a good example of why prople with IQs of 90 should not attend university.
And I guess the long neck of a giraffe is not an adaptation since it’s extremely heritable.
Heritable and heritability are two different things.
Idiot,
A giraffe’s neck length is highly heritable (i.e. most of the variation is genetic )
I’m agnostic on whether giraffe neck length shows high h^2 — -apparently you have a study that has found high h^2 in giraffe populations?
And by heritable you are meaning heritability.
But you seem to be disagreeing with the notion that generally, fitness-related traits show low h^2. Is that correct?
Swank,
Reef and Kate and pumpkin inter alia are great examples of how not only do stupid people not know they’re stupid, but they think that people who are much smarter than they are are stupid.
don’t let it get to you.
just laugh at them.
Pingback: Congratulations JayMan! | Pumpkin Person