If there is some general effect of latitude on IQ, then I would not expect America to look, long-term, like Britain or France. Indeed, I’d expect about half of the US to eventually look like North Africa, and the upper half of the US to look more like Spain, Italy, and Turkey.
The US has historically been a land of great abundance–a land where a small founding population like the Amish might grow from 5,000 people in 1920 to over 290,000 people today.
One of the side effects of abundance has been lower infant mortality; indeed, one of the side effects of modernity has been low infant mortality.
In the Middle Ages, a foundling’s chances of surviving their first year were down around 10%. What did orphanages do without formula? (Goat’s milk, I suspect.) Disease was rampant. Land was dear. Even for the well-off, child mortality was high.
My great-great grandparents lost 6 or 7 children within their first week of life.
Things were pretty harsh. An infant mortality rate of 50% was not uncommon.
American abundance, warm climate, industrialization, and modern medicine/hygiene have all worked together to ensure that far more children survive–even those abandoned by one or more parents. (As someone who would have died 3 or 4 times over in infancy without modern medicine, I am not without some personal appreciation for this fact.)
I recently read an interesting post that I can’t find now that basically posited the theory that all of these extra surviving people running around are depressing the average IQ because they have little sub-optimal bits of genetic code that previously would have gotten them weeded out. There’s a decently strong correlation between intelligence and athleticism–not necessarily at the high end of intelligence, but it does appear at the high end of athleticism. Good athletes are smarter than bad athletes. Smart people, Hawking aside, are generally pretty healthy. For that matter, there are strikingly few fat people at the nation’s top universities. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that a few deleterious mutations that result in some wonky side effects in your kidneys or intestines might also cause some wonky side effects in your brain, which could make you dumber or just really fond of stuffed animals or something.
Okay, but this post is not actually about the theory that low infant mortality is turning us all into furries.
My theory is that America + Modernity => more children of single mothers surviving => long therm changes in marriage/divorce rates => significant long term changes in the structure of society.
Historically, if we go a little further south to Sub-Saharan Africa, monogamy has not been a big thing. Why? Because the climate is generous enough that people don’t have to store up a ton of food for the winter, and women can do most of the food production to feed their children by themselves, or with the help of their extended kin networks. In these places, polygyny is far more common, since men do not need to bear the burden of providing for their own children.
As we head north, the winters get colder and the agricultural labor more intensive, and so the theory goes that women in the north could not provide for their children by themselves. And so Fantine, unwed, dies attempting to provide for her little Cosette, who would have died as well were it not for the ways of novels. The survivors were the men and women who managed to eek out a living together–married, basically monogamous.
But take away the dead Cosettes and Olivers–let them survive in more than just books–and what do we have? Children who, sooner or later, take after their parents. And even if one parent was faithful ’till death, the other certainly wasn’t.
Without any selective pressure on monogamy, monogamy evaporates. So now you can get a guy who has 34 children by 17 different women, and all of the children survive.
Meanwhile, neurotic types who want to make sure they have all of their career and personal ducks all lined up in a row “just can’t afford” a kid until they’re 38, have one if they’re lucky, and then call it quits.
Guess who inherits the future?
Those who show up, that’s who.
I suspect that the effects of low infant mortality have been accumulating for quite a while. Evolution can happen quite quickly if you radically change your selective parameters. For example, if you suddenly start killing white moths instead of grey ones, the moth population will get noticeably darker right after you kill the moths. Future generations of moths will have far fewer white moths. If you then top killing the white moths, white moths will again begin to proliferate. If white moth start having even more babies than grey moths, soon you will have an awful lot of white moths.
Long term, I expect one of the effects of abandoned children surviving is that the gene pool ends up with a lot more people who lack a genetic inclination toward monogamy. At first, these people will just be publicly shamed and life will continue looking relatively normal. But eventually, we should get to a tipping point where we have enough non-monogamous people that they begin advocating as a block and demanding divorce, public acceptance of non-marital sex, etc.
Another effect I would expect is a general “masculinization” of the women. Women who have to fend for themselves and raise their own children without help from their husband have no practical use for femininity, and the more masculine among them will be more likely to thrive. Wilting, feminine flowers will fade away, replaced by tough dames who “need a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Only time will tell if the future will belong to the Amish and the Duggers, or to Jay Williams’ progeny.
From an evolutionary perspective, childlessness is as bad as death: either way, your genes die with you. (Unless you’re a bee or ant, which you’re not.) Quite obviously, you are descended from people who successfully reproduced, not from the millions of creatures throughout Earth’s history who didn’t. Adaptations that led to your ancestors reproducing got passed down to you, while adaptations that failed to make your ancestors reproduce didn’t. As a result, the vast majority of us have a rather strong inclination to do whatever it takes to reproduce.
I know this is incredibly basic stuff, but you wouldn’t believe the number of people I have encountered who swear that humans do not possess instincts related to reproduction.
What happens when people don’t have children? On a biological level, something needs to kick in and get them out there, where they can meet people and fuck. Or overthrow society, kill all of the other males, and then fuck. After all, the continuing existence of society means nothing when you don’t have kids.
When men have children, their testosterone drops. The more time men spend around their children, the more their testosterone drops. This is very sensible: it prevents men from murdering their children.
Since American society has, since its founding, afforded enough resources for most men to marry and have children, the normal state for American males by their thirties has been relatively low testosterone. Today, however, millions of people are choosing not to have children, do not live with their children, or are delaying childbearing for decades.
Men who do not have children/live with them do not have this drop in testosterone. They have the testosterone of evolutionary failure, of increasing aggression until, well, they reproduce or die. (Or just get old.)
If I really wanted to embarrass people, I could tell of some of the absolutely nutty things men I know have done to try to get laid. Rational thought and risk assessment go completely out the window. People act like they have gone mad.
The evolutionary pressures on women have been different, but I can’t imagine that they were non-existent. Like men, they probably find pregnancy and babies calming–meeting people requires aggressive, social behavior that (often) leads to violence, but raising babies requires being a quiet, responsible homebody. It’s probably not a coincidence that childbirth triggers, in some women, actual depression.
Women with no children seem, at least anecdotally, highly aggressive. Their willingness to overthrow society is well-known.
On the plus side, childlessness probably drives a certain amount of creativity. The childless can take more risks, and are driven to succeed. But this is not to say that high levels of aggressive hormones are, long term, great for your brain or overall health.
You may have noticed that I like science. I also like scientists–heck, let’s expand this to most of STEM. Good folks.
Scientists tend to be quiet, unassuming folks who get on with the business of making the world a better place by curing cancer, inventing airplanes, and developing the germ theory of disease.
I don’t like it when political ideas try to dictate science. It was bad enough when the Soviet Union tried it (and Maoist China, remember that exciting time when Mao declared that the concept of diminishing returns was bourgeois capitalist lies and that just planting more seeds in your fields would result in more crops, and then millions of people died? Fun times!)
Sometimes scientists say or think unpopular things, like that humans evolved from apes or that some human populations have lower IQs than others. Or that women cry easily or that Global Warming is real.
The mature reaction to someone saying something you find offensive is to make a logical counter-argument. (Or, you know, ignore them.) Indeed, as I’ve said before, one of the beauties of science is that the whole point of it is to disprove incorrect ideas. If there’s an idea floating around in science that you don’t like, well, disprove it with science!
If you can’t, then maybe you’re the one who’s wrong.
Republicans have traditionally been the anti-science side. 49% don’t believe in evolution, versus 37% do. Throwing Democrats and independents into the equation doesn’t help much–overall, 42% of Americans don’t believe in evolution, versus 50% who believe in some form of evolution, (including god-directed evolution):
Unfortunately, a lot of those people who claim to believe in evolution don’t.
For example, according to Gallop, 2005, the majority of Americans–68%–believe that men and women are equally good at math and science. Only 10% believe that men have an innate advantage in math and science, and 8% believe that women are superior.
Do you know how depressing this is? I mean, for starters, the question itself is badly worded. Men and women are about equal on average, but men are disproportionately represented at the high end of mathematical ability and at the low end. As I noted yesterday, this is a natural side effect of Y chromosome variation. But for the purposes of doing math and science as a career, which takes rather more than average talent, men do have an innate advantage.
But instead of getting intelligent discussions about these sorts of things, we get people shouting insults and trying to ruin each other’s careers.
This popped up on FB today:
Does this count as a microaggression?
“Sexist,” of course, is an insult, akin to saying that you hate women or believe that they are inherently inferior. So according to these people, anyone who thinks that, IDK, men are more aggressive on average because their brains produce more testosterone is a bad person. Never mind that science supports this notion pretty soundly.
(BTW, it’s pretty hard to argue that society’s anti-woman views are nefariously keeping women out of STEM when the majority of people think men and women are equally talented. For that matter, if there’s any group of people that I’ve found to be extremely accepting of and decent toward women, it’s the folks in STEM. Seriously, these guys are super awesome.)
So you may remember that whole kerfluffle in which Tim Hunt–some nobody who’s contributed nothing of worth to humanity except maybe Nobel Prize-winning work in Medicine/Physiology, small stuff on the scale of human achievement–made some comments about women in science and the entire world spent about 5 minutes losing their collective shit and then a lot of pictures of female scientists got posted on the internet. (Actually, the pictures are kind of nice.)
“The days that followed saw him unceremoniously hounded out of honorary positions at University College London (UCL), the Royal Society and the European Research Council (ERC).
“Under siege at his Hertfordshire home, he sank into despair.
“‘Tim sat on the sofa and started crying. Then I started crying,’ his wife, Professor Mary Collins (herself a prominent scientist) later recalled. ‘We just held on to each other.’”
When it came to light that Tim Hunt may have just been trying to make a joke–a bad one–the provost at his erstwhile University indicated that, (in The Guardian’s words) “Professor Hunt would not be reinstated, it was impossible for an institution to tolerate someone to whom they had awarded an honorary post, even a 71-year-old Nobel prize winner, expressing views even in jest that so comprehensively undermined its own reputation as a leading supporter of female scientists.”
I am just thrilled, oh so thrilled, that university science departments now see their primary purpose as public works programs for women, rather than, IDK, the pursuit of actual fucking science.
Do you know what happens to your science department when you stop focusing on science and turn it into a pity-festival for women? You end up with a bunch of women who can’t hack it in science. Accept men and women on their merits, and you end up with quality scientists. Accept people based on their qualities other than merit, and you end up with hacks.
BTW, I’m female.
You might think Hunt’s comments were totally silly (in which case, go ahead and ignore them,) but I’ve known couples that started in labs. I don’t think it’s any big secret that people sometimes fall in love with co-workers. Is this a problem? I don’t know. Do women cry more than men? Anecdotal experience says yes.
The intelligent response to Hunt’s comments (if you want to do anything at all,) would have been to document whether or not women cry at a higher rate than men when you criticize their lab work and whether lab romances are a problem–and if gender segregated labs would actually work any better, or end up with their own issues. The unintelligent response is to make a big deal out of how offended you are and try to get someone fired.
“The likes of Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox should focus on taking up the real issue of sexism in science. It is absurd to say that scientists can do and say what they like in the name of academic freedom.”
Let’s read that again. “It is absurd to say that scientists can do and say what they like in the name of academic freedom.”
What else does St Louis have to say?
“…eight Nobel laureates, plus the ubiquitous Richard Dawkins, have come out in support of Hunt. There are over 2,000 signatures on an online petition to reinstate him to his honorary post at UCL. Contrast this with 200+ signatures on a petition that I started calling on the Royal Society to elect its first female president. The Nobel eight made an idiotic attempt to equate the upset caused by Hunt’s ill advised and sexist comments with some kind of “chilling effect” on academics.”
Of course it has a chilling effect. No one wants to get fired. How does a journalist even presume to claim to know what does and doesn’t have a chilling effect on someone else’s profession, when rather respected people in that profession are claiming that chilling effects exist?
Hell, there’s a reason this blog is anonymous, and it’s people like Connie St Louis. But she continues:
“This is an absurd idea and deserves to be outed for what it is, a deeply cynical attempt to say that scientists can do and say what they like. In the name of academic freedom? Is science so special that any old sexist (or for that matter racist) words that they utter are allowed? The answer is and must be a resounding no.”
Free inquiry is dead.
Remember whom to thank when we all die of cancer plague.
Okay, yes, obviously when you take the gut parasites out of people, they tend to gain weight immediately after. That’s not exactly what I’m talking about.
First, let’s assume you come from a place where humans and hookworms have co-existed for a long, long time. The hookworms that just about everybody in the American South used to have appear to have come from Africa, so I think it safe to assume that hookworms have probably been infecting a lot of people in Africa for a long time. I don’t know how long–could be anywhere from a few hundred years, if they’d come from somewhere else or recently mutated or something, or could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, if they’ve just always been hanging around. Let’s just go with tens of thousands, because if it wasn’t them, it was probably something else.
Over a few thousand years of constant infection, you’d expect to develop some sort of biological response to minimize the chances of death–that is, your ancestors would have evolved over time to be less susceptible to the parasite. Obviously not getting the parasite is one great way to avoid getting killed by it, but let’s assume that’s not an option.
Another solution would be to just absorb food differently–faster, say, or in a manner that circumvents the parts of the gut that are normally infected. Over time, humans and parasites might tend toward an equilibrium–humans stepping up their digestion to make up for what’s lost to the parasite.
Remove the parasite, and equilibrium is lost: suddenly the human starts gaining a lot of weight, especially compared to people from populations that did not adapt to the parasite.
That functional a gut isn’t needed anymore, but it might persist for a while if there are no counter-evolutionary pressures.
I know it shouldn’t surprise me when people post outright, bold-faced lies about, say, the nature of humanity, but somehow I still stare in shock for a split second or two before struggling with whether or not to respond.
It’s generally a bad idea to respond, another thing you would think I’d have learned by now. No one likes the guy who starts every comment with, “Actually…”
Today’s lie was, to paraphrase slightly due to memory being imperfect, “Animals are so loving and compassionate, even to members not of their own species! Humans totally fail at compassion. We should learn from our ape cousins and ancestors!” The sentiments were accompanied by an adorable picture of an orangutan holding a baby tiger.
Okay, the exclamation points are my own additions.
First, the obvious: This shit is a baldfaced lie. If animals were regularly compassionate and loving to members of other species, lions would be vegans and running adoption agencies for baby gazelles whose parents had fallen victim to unfortunate accidents. If animals were regularly loving and compassionate, we wouldn’t make a big deal out of it every time a hippo and turtle hang out together. Does someone write a picture book documenting every set of human kids who become friends? Or every human who feeds a pet? Of course not. We only document these animal stories because they’re unusual.
Reality is boring. Lies entertain.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “My dog totally loves me.”
Your dog is the result of thousands of years of selective breeding specifically for friendliness to humans. Also, you give it food. Does your dog give you food?
No.
Anyway, how nice are animals?
“Altruism” is defined (by the Wikipedia, anyway,) as, “behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor.” Wikipedia defines “compassion” as a, “response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help.”
I’m not going to even try to define “love.”
Now, the definition of altruism itself hints that inter-species altruism probably isn’t a thing you’re going to see very often, because if the altruist increases the genes of another species at the expense of their own genes, then whatever genes originally drove the altruist to be altruistic become less common. Over time, the inter-species altruist gets replaced by everyone else, and altruism disappears.
This doesn’t mean that no one can ever be altruistic–altruism works just fine if it’s directed at your near kin. Animals that have a strong instinct to care for their family members and a certain level of intelligence can even apply that caring instinct to non-family. But I wouldn’t expect much friendliness from a crocodile.
It does means that claims about widespread altruism among animals toward other animals that aren’t family are probably nonsense.
The vast majority of observed instances of animal altruism involve close kin, pack members, or behavior that would normally be directed toward one’s kin but happened, by accident, to involve a non-related individual. The Wikipedia list on the subject, while incomplete and imperfect, gives a good impression.
In reality, the vast, vast majority of animals in this world do not give a shit about members not of their own species. Most of them don’t even care about members of their own species who aren’t family, and some will even eat their own children.
What about claim two, that humans suck at compassion?
Certainly some of us do. Humans aren’t as nice as I wish we were. Compassion, trust, kindness, etc., are all traits I would like to see more of in humans. But compared to animals, we look like Mother Theresa. How many animals set out little houses, baths, and seed-filled feeders for other animals? How many animals buy cancer treatments for their pets? For that matter, how many animals feed and care for a pet, period?
These behaviors are almost exclusively human.
Humans adopt orphans, run into burning buildings to rescue each other, fund social welfare nets, and spend a lot of time trying to prove to each other just how much they care about each other. Movies and novels basically wouldn’t exist without our capacity to empathize with strangers.
Humans support this level of altruism because our societies have bred us, like dogs, for it. (And since different societies are different, that means that different societies have bred different types/levels of altruism and compassion.) It is only in modern, first-world societies that we see anything resembling wide-spread altruism. Slavery–generally outlawed throughout the West in the late 17 or 1800s–is still common throughout many parts of Africa and the rest of the third world. If you really want to break your heart, just go read about Cambodian children sold as sex slaves at the age of 5. (Clearly the solution is more orangutans.)
(Seriously, what is the point of having a military if we don’t occasionally swoop into those brothels, behead everyone running the place, and then leave their heads on pikes about the city as warnings to everyone else?)
How about the final claim: Should we learn from the other apes?
Which do you think is friendlier, your dog or a wolf? The dog, obviously.
Human society has been getting steadily less violent for about as long as we’ve managed to account. Everyday life in non-state and pre-state societies is/was about as violent as Russia during WWII, only a bit more spread out. Chimpanzees, like wolves, are well-known for their violence. They wage war, form alliances to overthrow their leaders, and murder chimpanzee babies in order to breed faster with their mothers.
But what about bonobos?
I’ll grant that they have a lot of sex. They’re also known to be less aggressive than chimpanzees. This is not the same as being less aggressive than H sapiens. Until I see some data on bonobo homicide, I’m going to continue suspecting that bonobos are more violent than humans. Remember, some human societies–25 of them, though several of those are teeny–have gotten their murder rates down below 1 in 100,000 people. Since 50,000 is the high end estimate of number of bonobos on earth, if even one bonobo kills another bonobo once every two years, they’d still have 6x the homicide rate of Japan.
Not to mention that, unsurprisingly, empathy and “emotional intelligence” appear to correlaterather well withregular intelligence–and since humans are noticeably smarter (on average) than chimps, gorillas, bonobos, or tigers, this implies that we are probably better at empathizing with others, feeling compassion, and being generally altruistic.
This is pretty obvious to just about anyone who has ever had to deal with a bully, or looked at the average IQs of criminals.
All of which leads us back to our initial quandary: Why do people tell (and believe) such obvious lies?
I posit two reasons:
1. The other is but a foil for the self, and most people don’t really process words into their exact meanings, but into internal feeling-states. So when they say, “Animals are so caring and compassionate; we should be more like them,” they actually mean, “I like being caring and compassionate; you should be more like me.”
2. People who are caring and compassionate tend also to be caring and compassionate about animals, so thinking nice things about animals because it makes them happy.
Most of the time, people seem to remember that crime rates are actually lower among humans than among wild animals, and so don’t get too close to bears. (Sometimes they forget, but Gnon has his way with them.) But I do occasionally encounter people who really, truly seem to believe this. They really think that humans are irredeemably evil, and the world would be better off without us. But a world without humans would be a world with even less empathy and compassion than our current world, not more.
Corporations should not have the same rights as people because corporations are meta-organisms and I don’t want to get out-competed by them.
The meta-organism is still an organism. The same laws of evolution apply to meta-organisms as to since-celled organisms. You are a meta-organism; you are composed of billions of cells, some of them h Sapiens cells, the majority of them not h Sapiens. Yes, numerically speaking, most of your cells are gut bacteria.
Your individual interests are not the same as your cells’. Your cells are just as well-off taking the CTV route and transforming into sexually-transmitted-cancers and infecting everyone they can as they are hanging out in your big toe, worried about getting sloughed off the next time you walk around barefoot. In a pinch, you’ll sacrifice your whole leg to save the rest of you–sucks for your leg, but good for you.
A beehive is a more obvious meta-organism. You probably already know all about bees, so I will attempt not to bore you by over-explaining. The queen bee lays the only eggs; worker bees, all female, spend their days flying miles back and forth to fetch nectar for the hive until their wings literally fall apart and they die.
The colony survives even if the majority of the workers die, say, in destroying an intruder.
The bee does what it has evolved to do, but I do not find such a fate personally attractive (despite my obvious affection for bees.) I do not want to be a bee; I want to be a person.
Corporations, like bee colonies, are meta-organisms. They are created, they live, they die. They attempt to get legislation passed in their favor. They will, if not controlled by some outside source, literally work their employees to death. Corporations do what is best for the corporation, or else what is best for the Queen Bee (management, CEOs.)
A world where corporations are given the same rights as people is a world where corporations change the political, social, and economic landscape to favor the continued existence of corporations, rather than the human beings who are supposed to benefit from them.
I think there’s a book by the title of “The Art Instinct.” I haven’t read it.If anyone knows of any good sources re human genetics, art, and history, I’d be grateful.
As far as I know, some kind of art exists in all human populations–even Neanderthals and other non-AM primates like homo Erectus, I think, appear to have had occasional instances of some form of art. (I am skeptical of claims that dolphins, elephants, and chimps have any real ability to do art, as they do not to my knowledge produce art on their own in their natural habitats; you can also teach a gorilla to speak in sign language, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that this is something that gorillas naturally do.)
However, artistic production is clearly not evenly distributed throughout the planet. Even when we only consider societies that had good access to other societies’ inventions and climates that didn’t destroy the majority of art within a few years of creation, there’s still a big difference in output. Europe and China are an obvious comparison; both regions have created a ton of beautiful art over the years, and we are lucky enough that much of it has been preserved. But near as I can tell, Europeans have produced more. (People in the Americas, Australia, etc., did not have historical access to Eurasian trade routes and so had no access to the pigments and paints Europeans were using, but people in the Middle East and China did.)
Europeans did not start out with a lot of talent; Medieval art is pretty shitty. European art was dominated by pictures of Jesus and Mary to an extent that whole centuries of it are boring as fuck. Even so, they produced a lot of it–far more than the arguably more advanced cultures of the Middle East, where drawing people was frowned upon, and so painting and sculpture had a difficult time getting a foothold.
I speculate that during this thousand years or so of shitty art, the Catholic Church and other buyers of religious paintings effectively created a market that otherwise wouldn’t have existed otherwise (especially via their extensive taxation scheme that meant all of Europe was paying for the Pope to have more paintings. The (apparently insatiable) demand for religious paintings meant employment for a lot of artists, which in turn meant the propagation of whatever genes make people good at art (as well as whatever cultural traits.) After 700 or a thousand years or so, we finally see the development of art that is actually good–art that suggests some extraordinary talent on the part of the artist.
I further speculate that Chinese art has been through a similar but slightly less extensive process, due to less historical demand, due to the historical absence of an enormous organization with lots of money interested in buying lots of art. Modern life may provide very different incentives, of course.
Thus the long period of tons of boring art may have been a necessary precursor to the development of actually good art.
Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that all of that other stuff (parts 1, 2, and 3) is probably small potatoes and the biggest, most important thing driving the surge in atheism is information technology/mass media bringing people into contact with millions of other people.
Since religious belief is probably driven by some kind of neural feedback loop that basically results in people doing whatever the majority of people around them are doing, if you live in a world where everyone you talk to is Catholic, you’ll probably be Catholic, but if you suddenly switch to a world where you are watching TV and movies and talking to people on FB and Twitter and whatnot and some of them are Catholic and some are Protestant and you can even follow the Dalai Lama’s FB feed, suddenly you aren’t surrounded by Catholics anymore. Now your feedback loops cannot pick out any dominant religion for you to follow, and without the belief-experience feedback loops going on, you start to feel nothing at all.
In other words, all of those crazy Christians who homeschool their kids and refuse to let them watch TV because they don’t want them exposed to the sinful, fallen world are actually correct. Being around godless atheists all day will turn their kids into godless atheists. Except their kids grow up and join the world anyway, so it’s not really a great strategy.
Anyway, back on track: Once upon a time (about 70 years ago,) most people (at home and abroad!) got the vast majority of their functional information about the world from their parents and other members of their immediate community. We call this vertical transmission. With most of the people in a community adhering to a single religion, people were religious.
So Ireland, once an overwhelmingly Catholic country that rejected divorce back in 1987, just legalized gay marriage. Why? Because atheism has suddenly completely triumphed in the past 30 years–probably because the Irish started interacting with a bunch of people who weren’t Catholic via the internet.
(Hilariously, though, “Closer to Dublin, British-ruled Northern Ireland has refused to join the rest of the United Kingdom in recognizing same-sex marriage. …the majority right-wing Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, to which he still belongs, voted down same-sex marriage in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the fourth time in three years.
Much of the opposition there is rooted in religious convictions, based in evangelical Protestantism. The Catholic nationalist Sinn Fein party supports gay marriage in Northern Ireland, but has not been able to overcome the opposition.”–from the NY Times.)
Note that this does not mean that the modern meme-plexes (ie, Progressivism,) that are succeeding at horizontal transmission are “better”, more moral, or in humanity’s or your personal self-interest. It means that this particular environment (mass media/information) favors meme-plexes that are optimized for horizontal transmission over meme-plexes that are optimized for vertical transmission, and religion happens to be (in most cases) optimized for vertical transmission.
It seems like people are always trying to use hunter gatherers to further some wacky theory or other. The Paleo Diet isn’t too bad; it is at least a reasonably accurate representation of what hunter-gatherers actually eat, though your chances of replicating hunter-gather food at home are slim–which is why we end up with things like “Paleo Bread.” But then you have the far less accurate theories, often pushed by people who really ought to know better. Like the theory that hunter gatherers had no wars, or that they were all gender egalitarians. Or that there was once a global civilization of feminist goddess-worshipers who were wiped out by evil agriculturalists.
But let’s backtrack a minute. Where do these wacky theories come from?
The short answer is that they come from Marxists. You may laugh or roll your eyes, but I was actually assigned Das Kapital twice in college–once in my major, political science, and once in my minor, anthropology. I was also assigned explicitly Marxist papers in my Feminism class. This was a reputable university where many of my professors were identifiably conservative, not an obvious liberal bastion like Berkley or Reed.
Marx is deep in academia.
You do not have to be explicitly citing Marx or realize that you are using theories of the world derived from Marx to be using one of Marx’s theories, anymore than you have to have studied the Chicago School of Economics or the Austrian School to pick up one of their theories and start using it. But most academics of the past 100 years or so have known the intellectual provenance of their ideas, because like me, they were assigned it in class and no one in academia is shy about explicitly citing Marx.
To be honest, I don’t hate Marx’s theories. I enjoy Bakunin better than Marx, but I understand Marx’s attempt at making a science out of economic history. Not a terribly rigorous science, unfortunately.
This isn’t the time or place for a full explanation of where exactly Marx went wrong–there are far better authors than me who have spilled plenty of ink on the subject if you want to take a look. But suffice to say, real-life experience has not been terribly kind to Marx’s theories. Nonetheless, they still undergird a great deal of academic thinking and were formative in the educations of many, many anthropologists.
And the basic thought process went like this:
Jesus Effin’ Christ, WWII was the most awful, worst thing ever. Nazis are horrifying, racist scum. We need different theories.
Marxism explains human behavior through entirely environmental means, namely the means of production (ie, whether you live in a hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial, etc., kind of society.)
Marxism says that humans have wars because capitalists make them–that is, war is a side effect of capitalist society.
Therefore, in the pre-capitalist society, people didn’t have wars.
And then academics went and wrote a lot of things about how they now realized that pre-state people didn’t have wars or violence or were ever mean to each other.
Alas, many a beautiful theory has been destroyed by an ugly fact, and the ugly fact in this case is that pre-state people killed each other all the damn time. Take the Dorset, completely wiped out by the Thule (Inuit) about 700 years ago:
Science 29 August 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6200 DOI: 10.1126/science.125583, Maanasa Raghavan et al.
Those blue bars represent Dorset DNA found in ancient gravesites around the arctic. The red guys represent Thule (Inuit) DNA. The Dorset are gone; their DNA did not make it into the Thule.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have spent the last 70 years or so arguing that if you find one kind of pots in one layer of your excavation, and radically different pots in the next layer, all it means is that people traded for some different pots. In the case of the Dorset, it means the Thule killed them all, a good 200 years before Columbus even set foot anywhere near Cuba.
Speaking of Columbus, he wrote of the Indians he met in the Bahamas, “Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves.”
“[The Bushman’s] courage is remarkable, and Fritsch was told by residents who were well qualified to speak that supported by a dozen Bushmen they would not be afraid of a hundred Kaffirs. The terror inspired by the Bushmen has indeed had an effect in the deforestation of parts of Cape Colony, for the colonists, to guard against stealthy attacks, cut down all the bush far round their holdings.
…
Marriage is a matter merely of offer and acceptance ratified by a feast. Among some tribes the youth must prove himself an expert hunter. Nothing is known of the laws of inheritance. … As among other African tribes the social position of the women is low. They are beasts of burden, carrying the children and the family property on the journeys, and doing all the work at the halting-place. It is their duty also to keep the encampment supplied with water, no matter how far it has to be carried.”
Yes, clearly they are bastions of peaceful gender egalitarianism!
“A recent study… gave some astonishing cross-cultural figures. The homicide rate in modern Britain is roughly 0.5/100,000; in the USA it is about 20 times as high, at about 10.5. The highest death rate recorded in a nation, as opposed to a tribe, is 34 / 100,000, in Colombia. Though it is difficult to calculate exact correspondences for much smaller populations, about whom much less is known, it is still clear that Stone Age tribes make up in enthusiasm what they lack in the technology of murder. Even the !Kung bushmen, popularised as “The Harmless People”, had a had a homicide rate of 41.9 on this scale; the Yanomamo come in at 165. The record appears to be held by the Hewa people of New Guinea, with a score of 778. … the Murngin hunter-gatherer aborigines of Northern Australia come in with a score of 330.” –from The Darwin Wars, by Andrew Brown, (you can find excerpts on Brown’s promotional website for the book.)
Of the Yanomamo, Brown notes, ” There are fashions in noble savages as in other things, and the Yanomamo, a warlike and intermittently cannibal tribe living on the borders of Brazil and Venezuela, are one of the most heavily studied and nastiest in their habits of all the unspoiled people in the Seventies and Eighties. …
The tribes are quite exceptionally violent and sexist. The Yanomamo term for marriage translates literally as “dragging something away”; their term for divorce is “throwing something away.” [My emphasis, not Brown’s.] Villages war with villages; villagers with each other. They use poisoned arrows, spears and wooden clubs. When nothing much seems to be happening in the world outside, villagers will fight with long poles: two men will stand facing each other, and exchange insults. Then they will take turns to punch each other in the chest as hard as possible. Finally they take up long flexible poles, and — once more taking turns — smash each other around the head with them until the loser is felled, unconscious and bleeding all over his head. To quote one lurid description: “A man with a special grudge against another challenges his adversary to hit him on the head with an eight foot long pole shaped like a pool cue. The challenger sticks his own pole in the ground, leans on it, and bows his head. His adversary holds his pole by the thin end, whipping the heavy end down on the proffered pate with bone-crushing force. Having sustained one blow, the recipient is entitled to an immediate opportunity to wallop his opponent in the same manner.”
And if we go back to the data cited at the top of the post, Steven Pinker estimates, in The Better Angels of our Nature, that about 15% of people died of violence–murder or warfare–in pre-state societies.
This is about the same % as the Russians lost in WWII, if we go with the high estimate of Soviet casualties–about half that if we take the low estimate. Of course, hunter gatherers live to be about 45, while WWII was compressed into 6 years, so the death rate was rather faster during WWII, but if you did manage to survive, you lived the rest of your 60 or 70 years in relative peace.
In short, Marx obviously missed some major factors that lead people to kill each other, and anthropologists, not necessarily trained in things like analyzing crime statistics, ran with the idea, producing books with titles like “The Harmless People” about the Bushmen.
Unfortunately, wanting something to be true is not the same as it being true.
So what’s the real story?
Put yourself in the bare feet of a hunter-gatherer, unfettered by the rules and oppressions of the modern state. You meet a random stranger. Kill him, and you can take his pile of nuts, his gourd of water, and his wife. Don’t kill him, and he can kill you and take your nuts, water, and wife. There are no police in your society, so who’s going to stop you?
Throughout pre-history, the men who killed their neighbors and took their wives became your ancestors, and the men who didn’t got killed.
“Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.”–Is There Anything Good About Men?
This is, literally, evolution in action. This is survival of the fittest, the struggle to reproduce and pass your genes on to the next generation.
Interestingly, Genghis Khan’s empire, after the massacres, was supposedly very safe–it was said that a woman carrying a bag of gold could walk unmolested, alone, from one end of the empire to the other. Probably an exaggeration, but in general, you did not mess with Genghis Khan’s money-making trade routes unless you wanted to be dead.
As has been said many times, the State demands a monopoly on the use of violence, punishing–often killing–those who would take the ancestral route to paternity. This is a novel evolutionary pressure–the collective pressure of the state against the violent.
Thus violent crime rates have plummeted in state-societies over the past 5,000 years or so:
Peter Frost lays out this argument excellently in his post, “The Genetic Pacification of Europe“–basically the idea that European governments have been executing their violent criminals (or otherwise letting them die in jail) for centuries, resulting in a drastic reduction in the prevalence of genes coding for violence in areas with long histories of strong, organized state rule.
According to Wikipedia, monoamine oxidase A, also known as the “warrior gene”, is associated with several types of antisocial behavior. “…individuals with the low activity MAO-A gene, when faced with social exclusion or ostracism showed higher levels of aggression than individuals with the high activity MAO-A gene. Low activity MAO-A could significantly predict aggressive behaviour in a high provocation situation, but was less associated with aggression in a low provocation situation. Individuals with the low activity variant of the MAO-A gene were just as likely as participants with the high activity variant to retaliate when the loss was small. However, they were more likely to retaliate and with greater force when the loss was large.”
Also, “The frequency distribution of variants of the MAO-A gene differs between ethnic groups. 59% of Black men, 54% of Chinese men, 56% of Maori men, and 34% of Caucasian men carry the 3R allele. 5.5% of Black men, 0.1% of Caucasian men, and 0.00067% of Asian men carry the 2R allele.”
Now, as HBD Chick has pointed out, we aren’t just looking at states at agents of pacification, we’re looking especially at a specific sub-set of states. Like those inside the Hajnal Line, where the Catholic church forbade cousin marriage (one of the preferred forms of marriage throughout the rest of the world, actually,) a thousand and a half or so years ago, leading to the breakup of the barbarian tribal/clan systems and the genetic prerequisites for living in modern states (I assume something functionally kinda similar has happened in China and Japan, since they also have low crime rates, but that requires more research.)
“According to a survey of 93 nonindustrial cultures, men were expected to dominate their wives in 67% of them, the sexes were expected to be about equal in 30%, and women were expected to dominate their husbands in 3% (Whyte, 1978). Sex roles differ to varying degrees even among hunter-gatherers, who correspond to the earliest stage of cultural evolution. In the tropics, women provide more food through gathering than men do through hunting. The reverse is true beyond the tropics, where women have few opportunities to gather food in winter (Kelly, 1995, pp. 128-132; Martin, 1974, pp. 16-18).”
Also:
“English psychologist John T. Manning has pioneered the use of this digit ratio as a way to measure how prenatal male and female hormones influence various behavioral traits. In a recent study, he looked at how prenatal hormones might influence gender equality in different populations. After measuring the digit ratios of participants from 29 countries, his research team averaged the score for each country and compared it with indices of gender equality: women’s share of parliamentary seats; women’s participation in the labor force, women’s education attainment level; maternal mortality rates; and juvenile pregnancy rates. To ensure comparability, all of the participants were of European descent.
… the more similar the two sexes were in 2D:4D, the more equal were the two sexes in parliamentary and labor force participation. The other variables were not as strongly correlated. (Manning et al., 2014)
In general, women from Northwest Europe have more masculine digit ratios, whereas women from farther east and south have more feminine digit ratios. This geographical trend is more pronounced for the right hand than for the left hand. Since the right-hand digit ratio is associated with social dominance, Northwest Europeans may be less sexually differentiated for that particular trait, as opposed to being less sexually differentiated in general.
Presumably, this isn’t a new tendency. Women must have been more socially dominant among Northwest Europeans even before the late 19th century and the earliest movements for women’s suffrage. So how far back does the tendency go? To medieval times? To pre-Christian times? It seems to go back at least to medieval times and, as such, forms part of the Western European Marriage Pattern:
‘The status of women differed immensely by region. In western Europe, later marriage and higher rates of definitive celibacy (the so-called “European marriage pattern”) helped to constrain patriarchy at its most extreme level.
[…] In eastern Europe however, the tradition of early and universal marriage (usually of a bride aged 12-15 years, with menarche occurring on average at 14) as well as traditional Slavic patrilocal customs led to a greatly inferior status of women at all levels of society. (Women in the Middle Ages, 2014)’ ”
If you’re looking for a peaceful, gender-egalitarian society, don’t look to prehistory, hunter gatherers, or non-state societies. Look at your own country. It’s probably pretty good.
Look, I like the Paleo Diet as much as you do–maybe even more than you do. After all, I didn’t name this blog Evolutionist X because I haven’t been reading about paleolithic peoples.
The basic idea of the Paleo Diet–in case you’ve been living under a rock–is that you will be healthier if you eat only veggies, fruit, and meat (no grains or milk products,)–the diet your Paleolithic ancestors evolved to eat.
The problem with the Paleo Diet is that evolution did not stop 10,000 years ago. Evolution is constant. It doesn’t stop. You are not a caveman in a suit. You are a modern person. Unless your grandparents were hunter-gatherers, chances are good that your ancestors have been under significant evolutionary pressure to adapt to agriculture for thousands of years.
For example, Lactase Persistence evolved in dairying populations entirely within the last 10,000 years. Today, 80% of Europeans and European-descended people have the gene for lactase persistence. Outside of traditionally dairying areas, this trait is rare. It has spread entirely in response to the development of dairying–which means that if your ancestors have been raising animals for their milk for the past few thousand years, there is a very good chance that you are adapted to drinking milk well after infancy.
Of course, you’re probably not going to hurt yourself drinking water instead.
Likewise for wheat; if your ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years, you can probably digest it okay. If your ancestors haven’t been eating wheat for thousands of years, then you might want to avoid it–a Vietnamese friend of mine gets stomach aches from eating wheat (especially whole wheat, which contains more of the irritating chemicals from the external part of of the grain, designed to inspire your stomach to pass out the seed within without digesting it). Their ancestors ate rice, not wheat, so this is hardly surprising. (They also are lactose intolerant, since their ancestors did not keep dairy cows.) However, they have no difficulties digesting rice–a food they are adapted to eat.
If you aren’t adapted to wheat, wheat will give you a stomach ache. If wheat gives you a stomach ache, avoid it! But if your ancestors ate wheat and it doesn’t give you a stomach ache, you’ll probably be safe eating it.
It is reasonable to ask whether there are long-term bad effects from eating wheat or drinking milk–some disease that doesn’t kick in until you’re in your 70s, for example, would be difficult to develop adaptations to combat because it kills you after you’ve already had all of your kids. On this count, I would love to see more research.
Also, there may be some people who, like the 20% or so of Europeans who lack lactase persistence, are particularly sensitive to various foods. People with the ApoE4 gene (the “Alzheimer’s Gene”) may benefit from specific dietary modifications.
However, there’s no particular reason to believe that you are all that well-adapted to eating a diet your ancestors haven’t eaten in thousands of years.
