[ExI] note from a foaf in japan

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:
> Il 03/04/2011 1.23, Kelly Anderson ha scritto:
>> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Mirco Romanato
>> <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:
>>> Il 01/04/2011 6.17, Kelly Anderson ha scritto:
>> Recall that most of the people at the time were very poor. The rich
>> ruling class was very small at this time, and there was virtually no
>> middle class in feudal Europe.
>
> I think "poor" in this discussion is whoever is not able to feed
> themselves and his family members and allow them to be healthy enough to
> pass the genes to the next generation. Many paesants would be able to do
> so. Many others not.

Starvation of a portion of the populace at each generation was fairly
common until the past couple hundred years. Occasionally, you would
have mass famines (China, Irish Potato famine), but more common was
families that fell on hard times as individual units. This is classic
individual Darwinistic pressure.

>> Name a specific trait that allows people to thrive in cities. Then
>> tell me what the selection mechanism is to keep people without that
>> trait from reproducing.
>
> Attention disorders and hyperactivity disorders are not good for city
> dwellers. It interfere with the constant toiling of the jobs usually
> available in cities like blacksmithing.

There is more attention disorder and hyperactivity today than in the
past. At least it is easier to notice when you have the problem
because there are so many things to distract us today.

> The predisposition to learn how read and write and do maths. For
> example, in Florence during the XII century half of the children in the
> city went to "Schools of Abacus" (not public funded) to learn to do
> maths and be able to land a good job in some banks or keep a shop.

Did this effect reproduction? Usually higher education leads to lower
reproductive levels. Farmers reproduced at the highest rates
historically, due to the free labor of children.

> Impulsiveness is a bad trait, as you are near too much people to get
> away with aggression, murder, thief, etc. easily.
>
> There is a reason the word "urbane" and "villain" are used to denote a
> behavior and not only the dweller in city and in the country.

But none of these are Darwinistic pressures. That is, being bad at
math does not lead to lower reproductive levels.

>> The bottom line with people is that memes have been more important
>> than genes for hundreds of years, so I would not expect see a lot of
>> genetic changes over the past few hundred years because a wide cross
>> section of society reproduces. Another way to ask the question is
>> what sort of people don't reproduce in our modern societies?
>
> The productive middle class that it taxed out of existence and have not
> the resources to raise more than two children (often not enough to raise
> one). The lower classes, the unproductive on the dole, many of them
> reproduce far more than the the middle class because they can offload
> their reproduction to the taxpayers.

We are now selecting for people willing to live off of welfare. This
is a heavy pressure. Some males in the inner city have as many kids as
they possibly can to get bigger government checks. If this keeps up
for a few more generations, this may indeed lead to some genetic
results, but for now I would say it is mostly cultural.

> This is a problem much debated in the manosphere.
>
>
>> The children of rich people can become poor very easily. Today the
>> poor reproduce at higher rates than the rich. I'm not sure what the
>> historical case is, but farmers have historically had lots of kids.
>
> Some farmers rarely were poor for the standards of the time.
> They had many children and bough land. They divided the land with their
> children. Some succeed and some not. Repeat.

The problem with farming is how the land is inherited. If all the land
goes to the eldest son, then he still has enough land for the next
generation. The other nine kids have to fend for themselves, perhaps
by going to the city, if there is one. If the land is divided amongst
the ten kids, then you have a problem.

>> You are probably right. Still, with a 5% or even 20% survival rate,
>> that is an EXTREME selection pressure that human beings have almost
>> never seen. And certainly we haven't seen those extreme selection
>> pressures based on the kinds of cultural issues that we started
>> talking about.
>
> In fact, I think it required much more time for the humans to select the
> right traits in the right conditions.
> In England it was something like 5-600 years or 20-30 generations.

And now that we are mixing our genes across country boundaries at a
fast rate, any such selection is quickly being diluted, or at least
distributed. I of course contend that there haven't been any terribly
important genetic changes in the last 60K years of human evolution. Of
course, there have been some, particularly related to livestock
domestication and agriculture.

>> But can you point to one case where genetic change has happened. The
>> only one that comes to mind is that our genes for lactose
>> intolerance have been bred out after the creation of dairy as a main
>> human food source. That is a very different kind of genetic drift
>> than you are talking about. What you are saying is theoretically
>> possible, but as far as I know undocumented as having actually
>> happened.
>
> I think deMause "History of childhood" and "The Emotional Life of
> Nations" could be interesting.
>
> For something available on the net:
> http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/07/return-of-quetzalcoatl-preface.html

That was sad, frightening and pretty disgusting. However, I did not
see anything there that pointed towards Darwinian selection. Killing
female babies does not lead to fewer females in the next generation.
Duh.

>> African tribes have definitely had enough time for some genetic
>> drift. Is this research or a guess? In western cultures where people
>> move to the city, then to the country and back, there isn't enough
>> pressure or time to create meaningful genetic drift.
>
> Recent research about a tribe, I read it a few years ago.
> Probably from Futurepundit.
>
>> I am engaged in just such an experiment. I am Caucasian, I have six
>> African American children, four Hispanic and one half Asian child.
>> Culturally, they are all mostly culturally white. They are
>> intellectually indistinguishable from me (other than some physical
>> issues stemming from in utero abuse). Your position on this point
>> seems racist, and completely unsupported by research. Of course,
>> there is a cultural limit on how much real research has been done in
>> this area because nobody wants to be called a racist.
>
> Exactly.
> The data about the IQ gap of blacks relative to whites in the US is well
> know.

Yes, but is it genetic or cultural? That is the question.

> It also didn't change much with time. IIRC the data about
> mulattos/mestizos is something in between.
> Also, the distribution of personality traits and psychic disorders is
> different for Africans and Europeans and, IMHO, appear to follow the
> adaptations to the local conditions of Africa and Europe.
>
> I think the next decade will be very interesting in this field,
> dispelling many wrong ideas.

I hope so.

>> We talk a lot about the higher rates of incarceration of minorities.
>
> The problem is when some explanations can not be uttered because they
> are not acceptable to the polite discourse.
>
>>>> Blacks are more carefully watched by the police,
>>>
>>> Why? Why they don't check more for Hispanics or Vietnamese or
>>> Italians? Are the policemen racists? Even the blacks one?
>
>> Yes, even some black policemen are racist against blacks.
>
> This beg the question:
> "Are they racist without reasons or with reasons?"

I would assume with reason. If blacks are incarcerated at a higher
rate, and you as a police man want to optimize your time, it is better
to arrest people more likely to be incarcerated. So you might focus on
the poor, or drug addicted, or minorities to up your effectiveness
measured in numbers. This is not because they are more apt to crime
(although generations of being prayed upon can lead to moral decay due
to the loss of parents to the next generation) but because of the
circumstances created.

>> It took the Irish at least three generations to escape from being
>> the lowest in American society. At one point, the coal mines in West
>> Virginia would hire Irish over black slaves because they were less
>> valuable than the slaves to the mine owners. Similarly, the Chinese
>> who build the transcontinental railroad were valued less than
>> slaves.
>
> This because slaves were property and the freemen not.

Exactly.

>> I blame politicians more than anyone else for the problems facing
>> the blacks in America today. The black leadership (Jessie Jackson and
>> the like) are particularly guilty IMHO.
>
> :-)
> I agree that many politicians (blacks and whites) give as much help as
> they are able to keep the blacks in the plantation.

The sick thing to me is that Democrats seem more guilty of this than
Republicans, and yet more blacks sign up as Democrats. That seems
suicidal to me.

>> Blacks who recently came from Africa or the Caribbean are usually
>> more immediately successful than African Americans with the cultural
>> history. Yesterday, I interacted with an African pharmacist. I was
>> not surprised, but I would have been more surprised by an African
>> American pharmacist. In other words, the problem is not such much the
>> color of their skin, but the color of their mind. After hearing that
>> the "man is going to keep you down" for generations, many African
>> Americans give up. My own African American children don't hear this
>> negative talk, and I fully expect them to succeed in America. It's
>> not genetic, it's cultural.
>
> How much old are they.
> Theory say the older they will be the greater the difference.
> For the sake of the experiment you could sequence their genome when the
> costs will be down in the next few years and look for their real share
> of European, African, whatever genes.
>
> I agree that skin color is a poor proxy for something so complex like
> the genetics of the mind.

Clearly skin color and mental ability are not strongly correlated.

>> Where I live, the most disproportionate homicide is done by
>> undocumented Mexicans. Again, even if the homicide rate nation wide
>> is higher for black on whoever, that doesn't mean it is genetic. It
>> is societal and cultural if that is the case.
>
> As I wrote before, this decade will give up so much genetic data that we
> will be able to know much more about this. Maybe more than many of us
> would know are are able to accept. Reality have many surprises.

I just hope it doesn't lead to a second round of eugenics.

>> They have succeeded. This doesn't make sense. Large changes in the
>> zeitgeist are accomplished all the time. Look at the change in
>> Southern attitudes towards blacks, or the nation's view of
>> homosexuality. They have changed a lot just in my life time.
>
> These are cultural changes of others, not the blacks.

I wasn't talking about blacks. Just how quickly society changes,
compared to the glacial progress of genetics. Tens of years rather
than millions.

>> I have also spent a lot of time in Mexico. It DID work exactly this
>> way. Mexico is 90%+ Catholic to this day. Where are you getting
>> these ideas?
>
> The issue is a bit more complex than formal adhesion to the Catholic
> Church. Local customs and way of thinking resisted the Conquistadors,
> mainly in the rural areas.

For a few generations, I'm sure you are sure.

>> Ok. Here you are talking about real selected genetic difference.
>> Racism in humans is not based on significant genetic differences
>> because humans don't have very significant genetic differences. This
>> is primarily because of the population bottleneck around 600K years
>> ago.
>
> Significant genetic differences must be defined.
> It would be interesting, but not very ethics, to take a group of
> Africans and land them in rural Finland (with enough resources for
> living for a few years and have the chance to adapt) and land a group of
> Finns in rural Africa (with the same resources). Then look  at how they
> succeed or not. I remember something like this in an old sci-fi book
> (Genoa-Texcoco:0.0) but it was more a testing of economics systems.

Still, whatever success or failure was achieved would be more a
function of how adaptable their culture was than their genetic makeup.

>> Actually, in the US armed forces, minorities and poor are
>> represented in higher proportion than middle class and white. This is
>> because of the financial benefits of joining the  armed forces are
>> more effective in recruiting people who need those benefits.
>
> I would reconsider this info. Mine is that whites, middle class are the
> majority and overrepresented in the armed forces.
> Minorities are more represented in not combat positions than in combat
> positions.

I do not think you are right, but I'll try to dig up some real numbers later.

-Kelly