A while back there was a guest article about r vs K.  Wikipedia defines r vs K:

In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring.

This theory has a certain common sense appeal, because there clearly is an evolutionary trade off between quantity and quality, and that fascinates me because quality is a value judgement and scientists aren’t supposed to think in terms of some life forms being genetically superior to others.  An r strategist is like fast-food cook (she makes tons of food fast and cheap) while a K strategist is like a fine dining chef (makes a few expensive masterpieces with exquisite care and craft)

I think where the theory went wrong is claiming that selection pressures that depended on population density led to K selection because when this hypothesis was actually tested, it wasn’t always true causing many to reject the whole concept prematurely.

In the 1980s J. Phillipe Rushton became perhaps the first person to ever apply the r vs K to humans, arguing more recently evolved and colder adapted races like Northeast Asians were more K than older tropical peoples.  He viewed large genitalia and other developed sexual traits (including less obvious ones like breasts, buttocks, voice deepness, muscle salience) as a sign of r selection since they presumably lead to more and better sex, and thus reproduction.  By contrast large brains were viewed as a sign of K selection because they are slow to develop and thus require more parental care.

Genetically superior?  Trump brilliantly defeated every politician in America, yet still got played by Kim Jong Un

Critics claimed Rushton was wrong and that arctic environments are actually more r selecting because they are less stable, and that tropical diseases are actually K selecting because they are infectious and less density dependent.

The critics were not completely wrong.  In his book Lone Survivor, Christopher Stringer argued that one reason modern humans evolved in Africa instead of Northern Eurasia is that in the latter, sudden burst of extreme cold would kill entire populations before any progress could gain traction.

But to me, critics were making the whole debate more complicated than it needs to be.  To me it’s very simple:  if individual survival is luck-dependent, it’s better to have high quantity offspring (r selection) than high quality offspring (K selection) because luck favors large numbers.  The more lottery tickets you buy, the more likely one will win.

How do you know if individual survival is luck dependent?  It’s not as simple as asking whether you live in the tropics or the arctic, because an environment that is luck dependent at a primitive stage of technology, might be skill dependent at a more advanced stage.

Instead I suggest you look at how heritable life span is in a particular environment.  The lower the heritability, the more luck-dependent your environment is, because luck is really just unexplained variance, and if there’s nothing about the genetic variance (which is the variance that matters in evolution) that can explain who lives or dies, then survival depends on luck.

Of course even if life span had a high heritability at first, natural selection would likely drive it down by removing unfit genetic variance, so it’s not as simple as just comparing heritabilities in the tropics to the arctic.  Instead what we need to do is take a group of people who have not had time to genetically adapt to either the tropics or the arctic (middle easterners perhaps) and get one group of them to live as hunter-gatherers in the arctic, and another to live as hunter-gatherers in the tropics.  Whichever group showed a higher life span heritability would be in the more K selecting environment.

[Note from Pumpkin Person, July 5, 2018: A previous version of this article greatly underestimated the number of 55 to 69-year-old Nigerians]

According to Forbes 2018 listing of the World’s billionaires, there are only three black billionaires in America (Oprah, Michael Jordan, Robert Smith) and only three black billionaires in Nigeria (Aliko Dangote, Mike Adengua, and Folorunsho Alakija).

Now at first glance, you might think it’s easier to become a black billionaire in America because the U.S. has a much smaller black population than Nigeria has, yet still produced the same number of black billionaires.  But this ignores the different age structure of the two countries.  If we limit ourselves just to people in the age group of the above mentioned six individuals (55 to 69), then we find America has about 5 million blacks in this age group, and Nigeria has about 10.2 million.

So the odds of a black person in the billionaire age group actually being a billionaire are about one in 1.7 million in America vs one in 3.4 million in Nigeria.  So the same black person should find it harder to become a billionaire if they were born in Nigeria as they would if born in America.

Of course the problem with this analysis is that if you were born in Nigeria, you would not be the same person.  Third World malnutrition and disease stunt the development of the brain and body.  A Nigerian born Michael Jordan would have been 6’4″ instead of 6’6″,  making his basketball empire that much less likely, especially since his brain would have been smaller too, shrinking his physical coordination and business sense.

So part of what makes it so hard to get rich in the Third World is that you don’t reach your physiological potential, physically or mentally, however if you do, I’d say it’s probably much harder to get rich in the United States because you’re competing against other people who have also reached their physiological potential (and cultural potential too).  So a young black adult raised with no cultural links to either  the U.S. or Nigeria would be much better off moving to Nigeria if his only goal was to become a billionaire.

By 1989, she was the richest woman on TV.

By 1995, a net-worth of $340 million made her the only black to rank among the 400 richest Americans.

From 2004 to 2007, she towered as the World’s only truly black billionaire (Blarabs and Blasians don’t count if they’re less than 50% sub-Saharan).

And then last month Oprah went where few billionaires of any race get to go.  Bloomberg’s list of the 500 richest people on the planet, thanks to soaring Weight Watchers stock.

Like Warren Buffett, Oprah has the self-awareness to only invest in what she understands and no one understands the psychology of American dieters better than Oprah.

When Donald Trump was on Oprah’s syndicated show years ago, he praised her for all the money she made in real-estate.  Other people in Trump’s social circle were gossiping about all the money Oprah was blowing on houses, saying what the hell is she doing, but Oprah’s return on investment shut them all up, Trump noted.

“God’s not making anymore land,” said Oprah, explaining her common sense investment strategy.

Perhaps one of the secrets to Oprah’s success is she’s about as smart as a person can be without being a nerd. Americans with IQs more than 3 standard deviations below the white mean tend to have organic conditions like Down Syndrome.  Americans with IQs more than 3 standard deviations above the white mean tend to be nerds.  Of course many organics will have IQs much higher than 55, and most nerds have IQs way lower than 145, but roughly speaking, biological normality ranges from 55 to 145.  There’s no evidence that any U.S. president in the last 200 years has been above 150 (white norms) and that makes sense because presidents should look and sound like the people they govern, and nerds look and sound very different.

So should Oprah run for President?  That was the question the World was asking after she gave one of the best speeches of the 21st century at the 2018 Golden Globes.  Returning to the cover of Vogue magazine 20 years after she appeared in 1998, she was asked that very question.

“In that political structure –- all the non-truths, the bulls–t, the crap, the nastiness, the backhanded backroom stuff that goes on –- I feel like I could not exist,” Oprah stated. “I would not be able to do it. It’s not a clean business.”

Is Oprah too low on psychopathy to run for president?  Indeed one reason Oprah made a better talk show host than a news woman is talk show hosts are allowed to show emotion while journalists should be objective.  We want our journalists to be psychopathic enough that they can remain detached, though not so psychopathic that they fabricate the news.

Because Oprah’s smarter than most billionaires and power elites, she didn’t need to be a borderline psychopath to achieve such wealth and influence.  On the other hand, Oprah’s one of the best actors in Hollywood, so her low psychopathy could be shtick.

Source:  The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty images

Recently Lion of the Blogosphere blogged that the game Dungeons and Dragons is not “autistic” because it’s a social activity that requires imagination.

Autism is such a vaguely defined concept that it’s hard to say anything definitive.

A team of scientists gave members of the general population a bunch of questionnaires measuring how many autistic and schizotypal traits  they had, and then performed a Principal Component Analysis.

PC Analysis takes a bunch of correlated variables and reduces them to a smaller number of hypothetical variables that can explain the data more parsimoniously.  For example, if we had measurements of the human body (leg length, arm length, chest circumference, bicep circumference, neck length, cranial circumference, etc) a PC analysis might find that most of the variation in all these dozens of measurements could be explained by just three latent traits: 1) general body size, 2) general body length, and 3) general body width.

PC analysis of the the psychiatric questionaires found the following:

So even through the questionnaires had 12 subscales, The PC analysis found that 29% of the psychiatric variation in this general population non-clinical sample could be explained by the first principal component, while 15% can be explained by the second principal component.  If you think of PC1 as a vertical dimension, and PC2 as a horizontal dimension, then you can see in 2-dimensional space how several important traits seem to cluster:

We don’t have to give these clusters names,  but the higher and further to the left a trait is, the more “autistic” it’s considered to be.  The higher and further to the right a trait is, the more “schizophrenic” it’s considered to be.   Of course it’s important not to take this too seriously because none of these correlations are anywhere close to strong, so it’s unclear how meaningful these clusters are.

It’s also unclear how the bottom two quadrants should be labelled, but if I had to label all four, I would guess something like this:

As I’ve discussed before, because Social Genius is more closely related to Schizophrenia than it is to Autism, a lot of our most charismatic leaders encourage magical thinking in the masses.   Muhammad gave us Islam, Jesus gave us Christianity, and Oprah helped give us The Secret.

Many would consider Donald Trump a social genius and he too is prone to magical thinking when he endorses fringe conspiracies or promotes the discredited claim that autism is caused by vaccines.  This is diametrically opposed to the hyper-rational tech genius Bill Gates who not only supports vaccines but is on a mission to vaccinate the Third World.

I’ve also noticed striking differences between Social Geniuses and Math/Tech Geniuses in how they explain their success.  Hyper-rational Gates and Buffett have a mathematical appreciation for randomness and credit their success to luck, while Oprah does not believe in luck, and credits her success to finding what she was put on this Earth to do.  The more developed social brain has a tendency to anthropomorphize the universe (it has a plan) and has a greater sense of self (I have a purpose).