[ExI] It's the genes was it's the yoga!

[Keith Henson]

Sigh.

Understand that what I am talking about here is a temporary problem.
There may be time for gene editing to hit before the AIs kick humans
out of the control loop but probably not.

It's taken years for the landmark work of Gregory Clark to sink in,
but there really is a difference between peoples due to non-random
selection in a (relatively) stable agrarian environment.  I don't know
how much of Europe this selection affected, but it was a large swath
beyond the UK, where Clark did the research.

As a result of that selection, Western European people (on average)
*are* different.  Our personalities were shaped by intense selection
between the middle ages and about 1800.  The ones with strong economic
drive are our ancestors, the ones who lacked the complex of traits
involved did not successfully reproduce.  (Their kids starved or
disease got them in the periodic famines.)

We are also resistant to alcohol due to 5000+ years of selection.  Not
all of us, the selection has not run to completion, but the native
state of humans without that selection is around 95% alcoholics (if
they can get it).  Our ancestors, or rather the ones in the former
population who are *not* our ancestors paid the price of our alcohol
resistance by dying or failing to reproduce.  This is not politically
correct of course, but the difference between us and chimpanzees is
due to genes.

Past selection has strong effects today.  If the current situation was
to last 20 generations, I expect a strong resistance to opioids to
evolve.