[ExI] it's the yoga! was: RE: The Doomsday Clock

[Keith Henson]

Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote

snip

> I'm sure they didn't recognize the "far superior nature of the European
> culture". *I* don't think European culture is superior. They were savages,
> too. They just had better weapons and communicable diseases.

I would not underestimate culture, which included the technology to
build weapons and the farming technology that let the Europeans live
at much higher density than the natives. The Europeans had something
even more important in overrunning the natives, twenty generations (or
more) of ruthless genetic selection in a (relatively) stable
agricultural environment.  You can see how that level of selection
changes the personalities of red foxes here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox  A fair fraction of
the population is wired up to be overachievers since that's what their
ancestors who had surviving children did.

Some of the Native Americans were evolving in the same direction of
being adapted to agriculture, particularly the mound builders of the
Mississipi valley.  But disease got most of them.  BTW, when farming
moved out of the middle east and into Europe, the same thing happened
to the local hunter-gatherers, some of whom are our ancestors.