[extropy-chat] Economic consensus on immigration

[Martin Striz]

On 5/18/06, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> Good point. At individuum level and (related) social group
> there's territory protection. I wasn't thinking about such
> small-scale clustering. You wouldn't see Canuck deer
> erect a fence to separate themselves from Yankee deer.

For good reason.  The theoretically observable universe presents a
physical limit on human understanding, but the actually observable
universe presents a cognitive limit on most nonhuman animal
understanding.  I suspect that to most nonhuman animals, nothing
exists beyond the horizon, at least to the extent that they never
think about it (migratory species notwithstanding).

So the lack of large-scale artificial borders in biology is not due to
theoretical impediments but the practical fact that most biological
systems aren't complex/intelligent enough.

> Absolutely -- and with small tribes it made even sense,
> from a genome's view. But the bulk of our interactions in
> urban areas is now among unrelated individuals, so clustering by
> other markers (language, culture, mobile phone brand)
> is an atavism.

Interestingly, even in the highly mobile modern world, humans tend to
cluster along racial, ethnic and cultural lines (culture being a
marker of tribal affiliation and solidarity).  How many ethnic
subregions does New York City have?

I don't think that all historical trends in human behavior are
inviolable biological phenomena,   but this one does seem to persist.

Martin