[ExI] Evolutionary psychology and recent selection was trump

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 8:00 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> Nobody knows why but every once in a while highly civilized countries go
> crazy,

I do.

If you don't, it not for a lack of trying on my part.  However, after
many years of talking about it, I find that there is a cultural or
perhaps even genetic bias against understanding this topic.

Anders <anders at aleph.se> wrote
>
> Blaming political ideology does not work as an explanation, since they
> were not exactly in a great state before shifting to socialism (Russia a
> collapsing monarchy, Cuba an authoritarian dictatorship, North Korea
> occupied by the Japanese and Soviet Union). Plus, other basket cases
> like Haiti has never been socialist.
>
> Now, I know political science has a fair bit of knowledge and theory
> about why dysfunction tends to run deep. One clear issue is that
> institutions tend to be weak and untrustworthy, the incentives for
> rulers and ruled are such that corruption and distrust (or even outright
> theft) becomes rational. Some failure modes involve tribalist politics,
> making joint government hard.

It may be more effective to consider the places where decent
government emerged and look at what led up to it.  Gregory Clark has a
lot to say that I think is directly related.  He argues that human
psychology underwent as strong a selection over 20 generations in some
societies as the Russian tame foxes over the same number of
generations.

There was a related study that I can find if anyone wants to see it
because I corresponded with the author and put him in touch with Dr.
Clark.  It was about rice and wheat farming area in China.  Rice takes
intense social cooperation to grow, wheat does not.  In city people a
couple of generations out from being wheat or rice farmers you can
strongly sort out who came from these areas using psychological
testing.

Such studies tend to be rejected because, for some deep rooted reason
I don't understand, people tend to intellectionly reject that genetics
has anything to do with human personalities (blank slate plus).

Anyway, if it is genetics, then places like Haiti can't be fixed until
we figure out how to do search and replace on genomes.

Keith