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My earlier entry (Clannishness – the Series: Zigzag Lightning in the Brain) established that there are deep distinctions between Northwestern European peoples and most of the rest of the world, and that these differences have a huge impact on the world, including on levels of human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust. If you’re unfamiliar with this division, the previous entry and materials linked within cover it all in extensive detail.
But the question is, how did it happen? How did these divisions come to be? Well, of course, my answer is evolution through natural selection – specifically, gene-culture co-evolution.
Before we can ascribe these differences to evolution, it must be understood that these differences have a genetic basis. That is, they are heritable. This means that genetic differences between different peoples lead to differences in their behavioral traits, which, collectively, manifests as cultural differences. We should be clear that all human behavioral traits are heritable, with “nurture” (as it’s commonly thought of) playing a minimal to nonexistent role in each. As John Derbyshire put it, “if dimensions of the individual human personality are heritable, then society is just a vector sum of a lot of individual personalities.”. See my Behavioral Genetics Page for more. The rest of this entry proceeds assuming an understanding of this reality.
Now, it’s also very important to understand that evolution proceeds quicker than you’ve been led to believe. Certainly a lot faster than mainstream ideology posits (i.e., claiming that human evolution somehow came to a halt 50,000 years ago) which is demonstrably nonsense:
As seen in both the age of genetic variants and the distribution of lactose tolerance, much human evolution took place within the last 5,000-10,000 years.
But evolution can proceed within the space of a few centuries, as governed by the breeder’s equation. A few centuries of sustained selective pressure can make a considerable impact on the characteristics of a human group. We see that with Ashkenazi Jews, whose high IQ (and many other traits) evolved only within the last 2,000 years.
With all of this out of the way, what selective pressures explain the differences between Northwestern Europeans and the rest of the world? Here, we can, for now, only hypothesize. As opposed to the reality of the differences, which is easy to establish, how these differences came to be is a harder puzzle to untangle. That said, we do have some good ideas.
One aspect is that cousin marriage rates were historically very low in Northwestern Europe as opposed to the rest of the world. This would have an effect on the relationship coefficient between related individuals, having an impact on the returns for kin altruism and hence kin selection (see a table and short discussion in my earlier entry “Ethnic Genetic Interests” Do Not Exist (Neither Does Group Selection). Now while kin selection was involved, it couldn’t have been a dominant force, because kin selection is relatively weak in humans. But maybe factors that came into play along with this were involved.
In Northwestern Europe, that was likely predominantly bipartite manorialism:
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The areas of Northwestern Europe that exhibit their peculiar suite of traits also went under the peculiar institution of bipartite manorialism. As HBD Chick describes here (from medieval manorialism’s selection pressures | hbd chick):
“every society selects for something.” — greg cochran
every society selects for something. it does take some time for selection pressures to make a difference when it comes to the frequencies of “genes for” various behavioral traits, of course (unless the culling is extreme): twenty generations, maybe. forty is probably better. a few hundred?
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working theory is that manorialism set up selection pressures for a whole suite of traits including perhaps: slow life histories; future time orientation; delayed gratification; the good ol’ protestant work ethic; a general compliant nature and even rather strong tendencies toward conformity; perhaps even a high degree of gullibility; perhaps a few extra iq points; and even more cooperation and trust between unrelated individuals.
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manorialism — “classic,” bipartite manorialism (more on that below) — started with the franks in austrasia by at least the 600s or perhaps earlier and spread gradually southwards with the frankish conquest of, well, france and eastwards during the ostsiedlung. we find it just across the channel in southern england very early as well — there are references to what sounds like features of a manor system in the laws of king ine of wessex (688-726) [see mitterauer, pg. 43]. the medieval european manor system originated, then, roughly in the area outlined in green below (yes — this is the very same area where the Outbreeding Project began.
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classic manorialism was introduced to southern france (but bypassed some more remote areas like the massif central) as those regions were conquered by the merovingians and carolingians between the fifth and eighth centuries and to northern spain around the eighth and ninth centuries. the bipartite manor system never reached the southern regions of spain that were controlled by the moors. there was a rudimentary form of manorialism in northern italy even before the area was made a part of the carolingian empire, but the region was heavily manorialized (especially by ecclesiastical monasteries) after charlemagne conquered the lombard kingdom in the 770s. classic, bipartite manorialism was never adopted in central or southern italy or sicily — nowhere in the byzantine world, in fact.
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the franks also pushed eastwards, introducing the manor system to central europe, beginning in the eighth century. the border of this eastward movement was, for a couple hundred years or so, the eastern boundary of the carolingian empire (look familiar?)
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the “classic” form of manorialism never reached the farthest parts of eastern europe.
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in scandinavia, denmark was heavily manorialized relatively early i believe (probably around the time of the first wave of the ostsiedlung, although i must check the dates), and manorialism was also very much present southern sweden (scania). the more northerly parts of scandinavia — norway, northern sweden (or sweden north of scania), the swedish-settled areas of finland — didn’t have manors per se, but were covered by a unique version of “manorialism” in which much of the population was under the thumb of the church (and sometimes petty aristocratic landowners).
This details the spread of bipartite manorialism. Here HBD Chick talks about the selective pressures it imposed:
– the bipartite estate. the bipartite estate was a key aspect of classical (north)western european manorialism. basically, the manor was divided into two parts: the lord’s part — his farm or demesne — and the peasants’ or serfs’ parts — all their individual farms. the serfs or villeins or whatever you want to call them (there were multiple categories of these peasant farmers and a range of names for them) each had farms to work which were granted to them by the lords (keep in mind that sometimes those “lords” were bishops or monks who ran the monasteries). in the earlier part of the medieval period, the serfs owed labor to the lord of the manor as payment — they were obliged to help work the lord’s demesne — but they also independently worked the farms which they were granted, both to sustain themselves and perhaps make a little profit by selling any extra produce to the neighbors or in a market. there were other obligations, too, but the above was the fundamental gist of the whole system. later in the medieval period, the duty to provide labor switched over to a more simple and direct rent system.
also early on in the period, serfs were given (or assigned) farms to work by the lord of the manor. as a young man, you might not be given the same farm that you grew up on — that your parents had worked — especially not if your father/parents were still productive workers. the lord of the manor, or his steward, would just grant you another farm on the manor to work…if there was one available…and if he chose to do so (presumably based on your merit or your familiy’s record). this system eventually changed as well into one in which a son (typically the eldest son) would “inherit” the farm that his father/parents had worked. not sure when this happened. must find out.
not everyone who was a member of a manor operation would be granted a farm to run. some individuals were just laborers on the manor (“cottagers” in england, for example), and there were plenty of domestic servants serving in the manor house, too.
not everyone who was a member of a manor operation would be granted a farm to run. some individuals were just laborers on the manor (“cottagers” in england, for example), and there were plenty of domestic servants serving in the manor house, too.
i think that there are potentially selection pressures here for several different traits or qualities. if we ask ourselves, what sort of individual would’ve done best living in this bipartite estate system, i.e. which individuals with which sorts of traits would’ve managed to reproduce the most, i think it might’ve been people with qualities including: being hard-working or industrious — those that made the most of the farm grant and produced the most food to support the most number of kids and even to sell extra produce for a profit; perhaps smarter than some of the neighbors (like the cottagers) — for the same reasons as hard-working; future time oriented — you had to be patient and wait for a farm to become available, or later in the period wait for your father to hand over the farm or die, and not start philandering about the manor before you could afford to raise kids (you also might not be granted a farm, or acquire yourself a husband, if your reputation was ruined beforehand); slow life histories — those individuals who could hold off on reproducing too early would’ve been rewarded with farms, those that did not would’ve been shunned and would lose the opportunity to reproduce further; and compliancy — you didn’t rail (too much) against the man in the manor, and anyone that did wouldn’t have gotten a farm and may have, if they caused too much trouble, been shipped off to a monastery for life.
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a classic (north)western european manor, then, almost sounds like a 1960s hippie kibbutz, at least when it came to the relatedness of the individuals on the estate. (unlike a hippie kibbutz, though, The Man was clearly in charge.) the people living and working on a medieval manor in (north)western europe were not all members of one extended family or clan (which you do see elsewhere, like in eastern europe, especially russia, or southern china). this system, along with the Outbreeding Project, might’ve encouraged the selection for individuals who were willing to cooperate with other (comparatively speaking) unrelated persons. it might even have helped, along with the Outbreeding Project which got rid of much nepotistic altruism imho, to select for highly trusting — and quite highly trustworthy — individuals.
open-field system. another key feature of (north)western european manorialism was the open-field system in which shares of large “fields” were apportioned out to each family on the manor — each household would get a long strip or strips within one of these huge fields in which to grow their crops. open-field systems were used by the pre-christian germans and slavic populations (iirc), but in those contexts, extended family/kindred/clan members typically shared the fields. again, in the classic manor system, we have more unrelated individuals/families sharing these fields. residents of the manor regularly policed one another, bringing each other to the manorial court if they thought someone was cheating in the open-field system (and also in the usage of the commons), so, again, here we might have the selection for cooperative and trustworthy individuals.
– ecclesiastical manors. i think the presence (or absence) of ecclesiastical manors in any given area might be very important. apparently, ecclesiastical manors exercised more control on their residents, and until later in the period, than those headed by lay lords (more on this in a later post). so, i’d expect all of the behavioral traits associated with manorialism to be even more pronounced in areas/populations that had more than their fair share of ecclesiastical manors: south-central england, france, germany, and northern italy (and northern scandinavia?).
By the time the age of the manor in Northwestern Europe came to an end, the selective pressures it established would have allowed for the development of corporate societies. As we seen in the corporate nature of european societies and liberal democracy | hbd chick:
economist avner greif explains in “Family Structure, Institutions, and Growth: The Origins and Implications of Western Corporations” how the new, individualistic europeans developed a corporate society, one which eventually lead to democratic nations in europe [pgs. 309-10]:
“The decline of large kinship groups in Europe transpired during a period in which the state was also disintegrating and the church’s secular authority was diminishing…. A new solution was needed to solve problems of conflict and cooperation, and people got together to form corporations.
“These corporations were voluntary, interest-based based, self-governed, and intentionally created permanent associations. In many cases, they were self-organized and not established by the state. Participation was voluntary in the sense that one had to be attracted to be a member and, therefore, corporations had to cater to their members’ interests….
“By the late medieval period, economic and political corporations dominated Europe….
“Monasteries, fraternities, and mutual-insurance guilds provided social safety nets against famine, unemployment, and disability. The majority of the population belonged to such fraternities and guilds, at least in England. Because corporations provided social safety nets that were alternatives to those provided by kinship groups, they enabled individuals to take risks and make other economic decisions without interference by members of such groups. Relative to a society dominated by kinship groups, the nuclear family structure increased capital per worker by encouraging later marriages and fewer children, and it led to a more efficient distribution of labor and knowledge by facilitating migration.
“Craft guilds regulated production, training, and the protection of brand names. Universities, monastic orders, and guilds developed and distributed scientific and technological knowledge. Merchant guilds and communes protected property rights at home and abroad, secured brand names, and provided contract enforcement in exchange. Corporations, such as the Italian citystates and military orders, mustered armies to expand the European resource base.
“Many late medieval corporations were political; they had their own legal systems, administrations, and military forces. The Italian city-republics were literally independent, but most European cities west of the Baltic Sea in the north and the Adriatic Sea in the south were also political corporations (communes). Political corporations also prevailed among Western European peasants. Because such corporations preceded the pre-modern European states, they often provided these states with indispensable services, such as tax collection, law and order, and an army. Self-interested rulers were constrained in adopting policies that hindered these corporations’ economic interests or abusing their property rights (Greif, 2005). Indeed, by the thirteenth century, most European principalities had representative bodies to approve taxation and communes were represented in all of them. Economic corporations, therefore, had the ability to impact policies and, in the long run, they were influential in transforming the European state into a corporation in the form of a democracy.”
Northwestern European society was now one where the most successful types of individuals were ones not bound to kin, but rather cooperated in voluntary exchanges with non-relatives. This continued the selective pressures similar to those of the bipartite manorial system and furthered NW Europeans down the path of their individualistic, “wikified” society. This eventually led to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions as well as the rise of democracy and all the things that followed for from that.
How about the rest of the world? Why didn’t Southern or Eastern Europe or East Asia follow down this path? Well, their societies were structured differently. As HBD Chick put it in viscous populations and the selection for altruistic behaviors | hbd chick:
part of william hamilton‘s theory of inclusive fitness/kin selection, which explains how altruism ever could’ve arisen at all (altruism here having a very specific definition), is that it should be possible for genes for altruism to be selected for if close kin interact regularly. kin don’t need to recognize one another for altruism to be selected for. as long as closely related individuals don’t move far from one another — that is, if a population is viscous — selection for altruism might happen.
i can’t see why this couldn’t also apply to lesser forms of altruism, not just the kind where you sacrifice your life for two brothers or eight cousins. you know what i mean. like: reciprocal altruism or nepotistic altruism. or just pro-social behaviors. whatever you want to call them. seems to me that nepotistic behaviors ought to be selected for more easily in viscous populations (if they increase fitness, of course).
and some populations are more viscous than others:
1) inbreeding populations where close relatives marry frequently over the long-term. mating with relatives must be highly viscous [insert sweaty/sticky incest joke here]. not only do the individual members of the population likely interact fairly regularly (can depend on your mating pattern), they pass many of the genes they share in common on to the next generations — who then also interact and mate. that’s what i call viscous! and, as you all know by now, some human populations inbreed more than others, and some have been doing so for longer than others. and vice versa. (see: entire blog.)
2) populations where extended families are the norm. societies where two or three generations of families all stay together, work together, play together. viscous. plenty of opportunity for nepotistic behaviors to be selected for. on the other hand, societies of nuclear families where more distant relatives are seen only once a year on thanksgiving, and then only to argue, and where your your heir is your pet cat…not very viscous. (see:family types and the selection for nepotistic altruism.)
3) socio-economic systems which push for close relatives to remain together rather than dispersing. if that sounds vague, that’s ’cause it is. sorry. i haven’t thought through it all yet. i do have an example of the opposite for you — a socio-economic system which pushed for close relatives to disperse — and that is the post-manorialism one of northwest europe. already by the 1500s, it was typical for individuals in northwest europe to leave home at a young age (as teenagers) and live and work elsewhere — often quite long distances away (several towns over) — before marrying. then it was not unusual for them to marry someone from their new locale. not viscous. conversely, many societies outside of the hajnal line (northwest europe) have had systems which encouraged the opposite.
In most of the rest of world, regular interaction with non-relatives was a much rarer occurrence. Families were more tightly bound and were the basic medium through which most social interaction took place. This would make the successful individual in such a society a much different kind than would get ahead in Northwestern Europe. Certainly not one that would freely give trust to strangers, would expect favors from others without the other party getting something out of the deal, or would be very universalistic in their view of the world. A fundamentally different kind of person would thrive in these settings, leading to the differences we see.
This lack of voluntary cooperation may even hold back science and discovery (in addition to other large-scale ventures) in clannish parts of the world:
…*and* high trustworthiness. (going way out on a limb, enabled the scientific revolution and enlightenment.) @JayMan471
— hbd chick (@hbdchick) December 14, 2016
Even though manors of sort existed in Russia and China, as HBD Chick describes, they didn’t operate like the bipartite manorialism of NW Europe:
the “classic” form of manorialism never reached the farthest parts of eastern europe. eventually, a form of manorialism was adopted in russia and areas of eastern europe bordering russia, but it was quite different than the version western europe had had. this serfdom-heavy manor system in eastern europe also arrived very late compared to manorialism in western europe — in the fifteenth century (iirc) or in some areas even much later. classic manorialism had practically disappeared in western europe by this point
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a classic (north)western european manor, then, almost sounds like a 1960s hippie kibbutz, at least when it came to the relatedness of the individuals on the estate. (unlike a hippie kibbutz, though, The Man was clearly in charge.) the people living and working on a medieval manor in (north)western europe were not all members of one extended family or clan (which you do see elsewhere, like in eastern europe, especially russia, or southern china)
Selection there operated in far more “viscous” milieus.
One way we see this expressed today is that “familial” organized crime is a general feature of clannish societies, as Staffan had noted in his post The Clannish World of Organized Crime | Staffan’s Personality Blog.
Classic organized crime outfits like those out of Southern Italy are based (or at least rooted) in clan loyalties. By contrast, in Russia, organized crime, while functionally similar, is nonetheless distinctly non-familial in nature. As Anatoly Karlin pointed out:
The Cosa Nostra is extremely hierarchic, whereas the Bratva is far more “horizontal.” … The Cosa Nostra clans are strongly familial, territorial, and substantially hereditary (though more so in the US than in Italy itself). This directly extends to the name of their basic organizational unit: The family. Membership in most Sicilian families is limited to men of Sicilian ancestry or even specific regional ties or bloodline associations.
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The Russian mafia is completely different, even in etymology. It is not a “family” but a “brotherhood.” And a brotherhood not in any literal blood sense, but in a way that evokes associations with a “fraternity,” or a “band of brothers.” Organization is strongly hierarchic, as is the case in every strongly masculine institution from the army to the priesthood, but the direct control the pakhan exercises over matters such as personnel policy is far more limited relative to the godfather
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By far the most striking difference is that the “Russian” mafia is strongly multiethnic. It has its origins in the heavily Jewish port city of Odessa in Tsarist times
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Fast forwarding to the 21st century, some of the most prominent Russian mafia bosses of recent years were the Kurdish Aslan Usoyan
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Though it is necessarily incomplete, what statistical evidence exists indicates that ethnic minorities, especially the Caucasians, are so massively overrepresented in the ranks of the Russian mafia that ethnic Slavs are a minority within it. As such, the Bratva is a highly multiethnic and universalistic organized criminal group.
Selective forces produced a form of distinctly un-WEIRD type of behavior in Eastern Europeans even if not literally clan based. Clannishness, as HBD Chick and I use the term, doesn’t mean literally based on clans. Viscous societies selected for viscous behaviors – low-trust in strangers, particularism, corruption.
In short, the Northwestern European manor system (and the subsequent selective pressures of the society it created) produced the guilt culture, where one’s behavior is regulated by one’s own internal feelings of guilt. By contrast, the rest of the world has some variant of the shame (or honor) culture, where behavior is regulated by societal disapproval. (See Honor, Dignity, and Face: Culture as Personality Writ Large | Staffan’s Personality Blog). These are fundamental human differences and are largely intractable in our world.
I wanted to address one final point, as I suspect critics will bring this up. Often we hear that the clannish/honor-based behavior of those from beyond the Northwestern European world can be corrected through “assimilation.” Unfortunately, assimilation is largely an illusion:
The things above water are the things that can "change" with immigrants, leading to the illusion of assimilation pic.twitter.com/j0YWJWneOd
— JayMan (@JayMan471) May 9, 2016
What we see as “assimilation” is largely when the “assimilated” group adopts superficial aspects of the host group. Other behaviors remain (Those Who Can See: Were you Assimilable?). As well, intermarriage with host group and selective migration can both give the appearance of assimilation, as can long-run secular changes (the kind that affect everyone, such as the move towards secularism, for example).
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”We should be clear that all human behavioral traits are heritable, with “nurture” (as it’s commonly thought of) playing a minimal to nonexistent role in each”
Human behavioral traits can be minimally maleable via cultural memes + human disposition to the social conformity.
Most of human behavioral traits are not exclusively instinctive, directly spontaneous and they tend to be mediated by culture… culture–co-evolution. Even their basis are obviously genetic/intrinsic, the association between instinctive response and cultural memes make them more a elaborated response than just a simple/pure reflection of the mind. Noise in this process seems quite common.
Between the birth of the mind response and the final product (internalized and/or personalized cultural meme) there is a mechanism, first the filtering, second the regurgitation and constant recycling of this ideas/facts/beliefs.
Mainstream northwestern culture was typically conservative, leaning-”clannishness”: religious, ”racist”, ”homophobic’, ‘anti-semitic’ until 60’s cultural/jewish revolution OR ”Weimarization of the western culture”.
How explain this big change*
Degree of exogamy*
Re-structuralization of the social/cultural hierarchy* [good bye Christ, welcome Marx*)
what swedish and academic government say about swedish people is exactly the same what swedish people say or think about themselves, for example, about mass immigration*
Swedes already live in the 1984-crimethink society.
exogamy degree explain all this ”tolerance”*
It’s heritable*
Yes, human little-but-existent adaptability-potential is ”heritable”, transferable.
We have the differential ”nurture” systems increasing the cultural differences between for example, North Korea and South Korea.
Maybe there is regional intrinsic differences between north and south koreans, but it don’t appear to be so great that make ”north koreans intrinsically choice the communist regime”. In the end of day, chineses tend not to be so diffferent than koreans regards personality types if compared with any ”western” people.
Taiwaneses and Xangai-people ”are different” from mainland China too*
Maybe people don’t change completely their intrinsic behavior, but no doubt different environments press them to change their superficial responses.
Most people seems minimally volatile. Just people like ”us” who tend to be more idealistic, rigid and self-confident that we are in the right path. Many people simply don’t care about ”this path”, they care about their immediate desires.
In Rome, be like roman.
Maybe some human groups are less maleable than others.
“This would have an effect on the relationship coefficient between related individuals, having an impact on the returns for kin altruism and hence kin selection (see a table and short discussion in my earlier entry “Ethnic Genetic Interests” Do Not Exist (Neither Does Group Selection). Now while kin selection was involved, it couldn’t have been a dominant force, because kin selection is relatively weak in humans. But maybe factors that came into play along with this were involved.”
EGIs do exist.
Michael Woodley argues that it was intense group selection among NW Europeans that led to these divisions:
Video Link
That EGI stuff again…
Meh. Assuming any of this is true, what are you going to do with it?
Answer: Nothing. Hell, you don’t even get halfway-decent predictability out of this shaky edifice.
Seriously, stick with economic determinism. It’s close enough, and has predictability and a certain degree of applicable action that can be taken to modify outputs.
In 30 years, the Earth will reach critical levels of human population. And you intend to fix that problem with what? “Applied epigenetics”?
Come on … do something useful.
Heritable my ass; maybe you are a robot controlled by your genes, but then you’re a rare freak of nature. Hard to believe it’s possible, but this species of racialism is even stupider than the liberal version.
I thought you died (I assumed fatherhood killed you, as it does most men).
While I don’t agree with some of the things you say its good to see you back.
Nope.
Have you seen the previous entry in the series, and everything linked there? You get a lot of predictability.
[sarcasm]What a fantastic contribution[/sarcasm]
Highly doubtful, to say the least.
I was born and raised in a vast mental asylum. I was a young man before I had any inkling I had somehow become partly sane. We had all learned in the asylum that to speak or even think in any mode other than the collective insane voice of the other asylum residents would mark one as different and dangerous. The onset more
https://robertmagill.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/asylum-earth/
I respectfully disagree, JayMan. “Nope” doesn’t say anything.
But my lengthy discussion on the matter, including the comments I left at your piece do.
So the question remains:
Can people genetically predisposed to higher trust societies (and lower fertility) survive in the geographic presence of those who are predisposed to lower-trust societies (and higher fertility)?
I find it fascinating to discuss all this with intelligent people who still appear unable to see where all this leads. Is it that they don’t have children, and so just don’t really care if the unique attributes of Westerners disappear over coming generations? Or is it that they are so high-spectrum for those trusting attributes that they simply cannot imagine others are different? Are these people easy marks for common con artists, too?
I well recall the topics-of-the-day back in the early 1970’s. Back then people were truly terrified of running out of room, out of food, out of water, etc., and the notion of inviting tens of millions of (fast-reproducing) people into their midst would have caused mass fainting or riots. All we heard about was that Spaceship Earth was going to be rechristened the “Thomas Malthus.”
Now, the children of those 1970’s worriers are all sailing the good ship Pollyanna, apparently happy to invite the world to raid (their neighbors’) local refrigerators while producing the next round of grandchildren.
Such is what happens when we’ve endured 35 straight years of debt-based “prosperity,” leading to a perception of unlimited resources.
One point on that: fertility is highly context dependent. The frosty NW Euro Puritan colonists in New England had a fertility of over 9 children/woman at one point. It quickly crashed once the Irish and other immigrants arrived.
Except for the fact that it makes sense and has been scientifically validated in many ways? If you take something as simple the prevalent depression gene in Southern Chinese, it highly leads to implications of why the rice-growing regions in China are more collectivistic. Any consistent strain of behavior/motivation frequently exhibited in a population will lead to policies that rise to meet the need. Doesn’t mean it has to be the same policies.
Excellent point.
It’s easy to become emotionally invested about results of conditions that seem permanent, but are not.
Today’s bitter debates over fads and fashions in politics & science will change as soon as the underlying environment does. As I’ve noted in a few comments today, few people seem to remember what that fad/fashion environment entailed just 40 years ago. It was a near inversion of now.
I know I’m a one-note wonder, but anyone can look to a long-term arithmetic chart of the DJIA or S&P500 and see that the last 35 years are every bit as much an anomaly as were the Popular Delusions of John Law’s Mississippi Scheme and England’s South Sea Bubble, excepting duration.
Beliefs are fashions. Today’s dominant beliefs are perfect exhibits of those that rise up during major upturns in social mood. Today it falls to pseudonymous bloggers to aggregate the otherwise blasphemous data on human phenotypes at the group level. In a few years it seems likely to me that these ideas will move from the fringe to the mainstream as a bear market in social mood leads to rejection of “unlimited resources/no limits” in favor of “dwindling resources/hard limits.”
Today’s “problems” will turn into something else entirely, while things now considered non-problems will come to occupy the social environment. It’s thus meaningless to become emotional over any of it.
I think that may be one of the issues with this theory. If group selection was not involved, then individual selection would have given a high payoff to defection. One possible way of resolving this and maintaining the theory is that the individual selection favored deception, whereby the appearance of trust is maintained coupled with defection. This would conform to the sort of phenomena we see among Westerners such as virtue signaling and pathological altruism whereby the costs are avoided or deferred onto others and/or others are actively harmed.
No, I have not. So, for that aspect, judgement withheld until I get around to it. So far, the potential for epigenetics to be preempted by culture and environment is so … strong … that I have been inclined to dismiss epigenetics out of hand.
Suppose that “genetic” factor is a situational product of long-term dependence on high glycemic index food sources, and not “genetic” at all?
You clearly haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Change that before commenting here again. Last warning.
WEIRD NW Europeans have never faced the situation they face now. That whole matter is irrelevant.
Furthermore, universalism may not actually be under negative selection in Europe. I haven’t seen data on fertility by political views there. Only the United States.
Am I correct in assuming that leftist political views in the USA correlate with lower fertility? Anecdotally I find that to be the case.
Right, but presumably the behaviors and traits evolved earlier. Under individual selection, the payoffs to defection without detection would have been great. The sort of things we see today like virtue signaling correspond to defection without detection and incurring of costs.
This sounds like word salad. To begin with, there’s no such thing as a “depression gene”. In addition, “it highly leads to implications” and “more collectivistic” are completely meaningless combinations of words.
True, but we also had a lot of cultural machinery devoted to prevention and punishment of defection.
But thank G-d we’ve progressed out of that hell hole! It was repressive, illiberal, anti-individualistic, patriarchal, authoritarian, xenophobic, and far too often, antisemitic.
😉
”But thank G-d we’ve progressed out of that hell hole! It was repressive, illiberal, anti-individualistic, patriarchal, authoritarian, xenophobic,
and far too often, antisemitic.”
Oops,
hbd-o-sphere have more jews, creeptojews and jewlover than a synagogue, period.
Here are the sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23319313/
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-10-27-Depression_culture_N.htm
Upon analysis, the authors theorized that while the gene was indeed correlated with depression, it also was potentially correlated with even lower depression than usual when individuals had frequent social contact.
So, if individuals are more likely to need more social contact, they tolerate or even be encouraged by societies where social contact is more frequent. This isn’t either condemnation or praise, just an observation.
Its not impossible, but we’ll need a mechanism by which the serotonin transporter gene turns exhibits its short allele form due to long-term rice consumption since that was what was observed. Its something which can be clearly be experimented for, I think at any rate.
Ah, that saved me some pointless reading, thanks. No warning needed. Preach as you see fit.
Just think about all this changes in clothing and attitudes, since begining of XX and today*
Or too fast genetic changes has happened during the XX century (in all places, included not-so-”universalistic” places) OR no doubt culture/social pressure have important but not absolutely determinative role in human behavior ( i always inclined to believe both).
We have, individually speaking, SOME limited but existent ”mask of sanity/normalcy” to wear and as many people are not constant/habitual thinkers and/or more self-aware so they tend to internalize that their social milieux IS the reality itself/whole reality, while it’s not correct to conclude.
We are basically talking about ”subconscious social smart” people, those who have the chameleon strategy (emulating ”the environment”) because social conformity usually have many individual advantages and the most important of all, fertility potential, and they are, invariably, the majority.
Leftism is the demonstration that human beings tend to be skilled to adapt to their cultural environment BUT at the same they tend to become dependent of their environment.
When everything in your life appear to be right why you would question*
Well, ”we” know this don’t happen with more self-aware people, but we must need to put ourselves in the clothes and in the mind of the common/ordinary people to understand this collective changes or patterns and many times we just put in the place them (partial empathy) but analysing their existential/evolutive perspective based on our perspectives, more self-aware, a wrong thing to do, the first mistake of the empathy.
In the end, i believe most of this cultural changes were superficial, at the best, over-exagerated by hbd’ers, to fit with their genetic direct role on human behavior-theory.
The fundamental cause on this cultural differences in western behavior is the re-organization/re=programming of this social-hierarchical structures privileging ”extremistic and ignorant/vague ‘humanistic’ point of views”, divorced from ”cold” facts and completely embodied by emotion, and emotion without reason is just histeria. Means and their progressively known ends…
Means = gigantic emotional blackmail
Ends = ”pacific’ capitulation of the european and their race.
Maybe the fundamental psychological trait that tend to correlates with higher degree of exogamy is openess.
But centuries of ”clannish–conservative-leaning” behavior of NW europeans show for us that lack of cousin marriages don’t make people instantaneously post-modernists. Europeans and descendents are disproportionately more open to experience, to intellect and culture/arts than other people*
since XVII*
A million things are correlated with each other. You pick some and you fantasize, which is fine, a decent way to kill time, if you got nothing better to do. But that’s all it is – fantasies, and extremely unconvincing at that.
It’d be much more logical (even perfectly obvious, imo) to surmise that the cause for collectivist activities is the environment: rice-growing, in this case. Or, for that matter, any low-tech labor-intensive high-density agricultural society. Villages. And the same goes for any other cultural quirk: all of them have good (and often quite obvious) environmental and socioeconomic explanations. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel, or something. People (and animals) adapt to their environment; adults teach their young how to behave. And so it goes…
All of it have genetic/intrinsic basis.
Social conformity have genetic basis, human capacity to self-deception have genetic basis…
Genetics is omniscient. Even the most cultural or environmental thing is genetic-dependent in some way.
We all agree that people adapt to the environment. Part of that adaptation, as you indicated is cultural, however, part of that adaptation can be physical as well as we see with the larger lung capacity in the populations of the Nepal, or the development of sickle cells in African regions. Carrying logically from that is the realization that certain mental traits are also hereditary at least in part, and therefore can impact perception, society, and culture as well.
Otherwise, the argument is effectively a form of black state – that we are born as blank states, wholly impacted only by society. While gender theorists love this idea, I must unwaveringly hold that testosterone has clear physical effects on the shape of certain brain structures, leading to behaviorial differences.
It would seem similarly logical that other genetic traits also can impact the brain, and thus personality. In aggregate, then, it would impact developed culture and society.
Guns, Germs and Steel is interesting and I’ve studied it before, however, it is far from a complete theory. For example, the New World did potentially lack draft animals, but nothing stopped them from creating the wheel. And yet, no one thought of it. Sometimes, the limiting factors aren’t the environment; sometimes, its just an idea, and that idea isn’t present for some reason.
The science behind heredity of mental traits is not really as fragile as you think it is, I am afraid.
Without group selection, the payoffs to defection are still there, and there’s intense selection for deception, that is defecting while appearing not to, which fits a lot of the behaviors we see today such as virtue signaling and pathological altruism.
What about it?
Through natural selection, yes.
You should really check out the section where I mention my Behavioral Genetics Page.
The Maya used the wheel for children’s toys, so they knew of it. The wheel wasn’t conducive with their city state layout and there were no beasts of burden to carry the load.
You don’t need a beast of burden to make a simple wagon useful, as anyone who has used a dolly can relate. And they did have a pack animal, though a weaker one than in the Old World: the llama. The Incans made quite a bit of use out of them.
I believe what was actually missing wasn’t the idea of a wheel, which might be present in the New World as you suggested, but the idea of an axle. The axle is what makes wheels actually useful for moving burdens.
Golly, they sure do, don’t they? And those factors combine to provide some rather much more complete explanation, don’t they? Sonofagun.
Not that parsimony matters when genetic hijinks are just begging to be theorized, eh?
Not “layout” necessarily. One good look at what the Maya called a “road”, and you would immediately conclude that sitting on a wheeled device of any kind would have been an invitation to suicide. Walking and llamas are infinitely safer, and consistently effective for the terrain. And yes, llamas can be used as beasts of burden.
Lungs and brains are not similar. The whole point of a brain is adaptation, being able to learn and adapt dynamically – and I don’t see how this could be contested in good faith.
True, some physical characteristics of a brain could be inheritable – but to jump from that to traits, that’s just craziness. This is exactly the stuff you’d hear for an old village woman: ‘his father was always late (or lazy, or drunk), and so is he’. That’s a superstition.
Neuroplasticity, man. Brain is a plastic organ (unlike the lungs); it gets formed during your lifetime. Check twin studies, of the twins grown up in different environments. If I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I checked), even homosexuality – a major, super-major trait – turns out it’s not significantly gene-based. And that a super-major personal trait. Collectivism? That’s not even a trait, it’s a socioeconomic development; product of societal evolution…
Regarding the “ethnic genetic interests” issue, from what I understand, it emphasizes relatedness and having copies of one’s genes in other organisms. But isn’t lineal descent what genes care about? For example, if there were trillions of exact clones of you on other planets replicating themselves in perpetuity, your genes in your own body here on Earth wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care. They’d only care about their own lineal descent. Am I wrong about this?
I don’t see the point in bringing genetics into this at all.
Let’s do a thought experiment:
– take a sperm from the most individualistic arrogant Anglo-Saxon asshole we can find.
– take an egg from a similar Anglo-Saxon lady.
– fertilize the egg.
– implant it into the most collectivist rice-growing lady we can find, on the other side of the world. We’ll hypnotize her and her family to believe that she is pregnant from her rice-growing husband.
– once the baby is born, we (secretly) perform a plastic surgery on it, to make it look like a typical person in that rice-growing community.
– done.
I predict that the person will most likely grow up to be a perfectly normal rice-grower, like any other rice-grower. What does your intuition tell you?
Look, I’ve told you repeatedly to read my Behavioral Genetics Page. Please do so before commenting again. Final warning.
Indeed, male homosexuality has a low heritability. But that is because it is primarily pathogenic in origin. See:
Greg Cochran’s “Gay Germ” Hypothesis – An Exercise in the Power of Germs
Ethnic genetic interests is based on inclusive fitness. You care about your relatives in addition to yourself and your own offspring. That’s because relatives also carry copies of your genes. However, your concern falls off as the degree of relatedness decreases. If people had large bands of clones of themselves, you might see behavior more akin to worker ants.
EGI doesn’t work because they overestimate the effect of inclusive fitness for distant relatives.
You should look at adoption studies, as discussed in the aforementioned page.
If they didn’t sacrifice the opponents there would have been beats of burdens to pull those wheeled carts around.
I study neuroplasticity extensively. However, neuroplasticity has its limits – for example, women put in male careers still use inter-hemispherical neural expression while men put in careers utilize intra-hemispherical neural expression typical of their sex.
Only hormones, for example, ultimately affect your amygdala size and the sexually dimorphic nucleus is pretty much set at birth as far as we can tell. You can’t think yourself into having a larger hippocampus and more primitive and basic structures such as the brainstem can’t have any alterations at all without causing serious, potentially fatal health effects(they influence things such as heartbeat).
Neuroplasticity can emphasize knowledge and skills but only partly explains traits and feelings. There’s a lot of the hindbrain activity when it comes to “gut feeling” and the neocortex where most of neuroplasticity occurs doesn’t account for all of it.
I humbly submit that you’re making the fallacy of composition – what is true of a part isn’t always true of the whole. Its like arguing that just because we can increase our muscle size, that our bodies are not hereditary at all. We can indeed hypertrophy, but we can’t extend bones through effort, for example.
I also want to object to this, its confusing the purpose of the brain with a feature of the brain. The “point of a brain” is simply to get the individual to be able to reproduce successfully; the human brain’s ability to adapt was a reaction to highly changeable circumstances during our origin conditions.
When society and environment is stable, selection then favors brains that thrive within such an environment, and certain traits are hereditable. The science is pretty strong on that, to be honest.
Incidentally, alcoholism is indeed partly hereditary.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-use-disorders/genetics-alcohol-use-disorders
Alcoholism as well many other behavioral traits are enviroment-dependent because if you no have any alcoholic drink to become alcoholic how you will express phenotypically this behavior**
So alcoholism is not heritable, what is ”heritable” is the vulnerability to the alcoholism, because alcoholism is already a unbalanced product/combination of intrinsic/genetic and environmental/availability of alcohol and permissive culture, what i call ”secondary reaction”.
None born drunk, 😉
Interaction of genetic and environmental factors, yes. Obviously one couldn’t be an alcoholic in a world where no one has invented any form of alcoholic drinks, agreed.
Allow me to introduce you to the specimen of humanity known as the Irish 😉
Hehehehe
I’m alien in this department. Maybe I have the southern European/and MENA gene that prevent me to become alcoholic. Well I need like alcoholic drink first to have some vulnerability but not, I have none. I’m very feminine-like in this taste.
Contrary to all previous scientific enquiry concerning the genetics of mental disorder you have succeeded in discovering a single gene that is responsible for depression? Publish your research immediately for a Nobel Prize surely awaits you.
Lack of CHARACTER is heritable too Jay??
I will take these explanations more seriously when the expounders show they’ve done their reading in economic history at a more scholarly level. Otherwise there is more than a whiff of mono-causal mania about HBD claims. Take HBD chick’s comments quoted in the text – she seems to revel in her ignorance of comparative history.
For example there’s a well known explanation for the great divergence between East and West Europe in terms of the Black Death and its demographic consequences; how, in the West a shrunken population was able to demand higher wages and engender a path to commerce-intensive growth, whereas in the East the loss of population led to even harsher forms of serfdom (the ‘second serfdom’). Now how does HBD account for this kind of rather rapid, socio-political shift that then had long term path dependent consequences? OK, maybe Easterners were slightly differently endowed genetically before this divergence, but that slight difference doesn’t ‘explain’ the divergence itself which was contingent and political in nature but then had enormous long term effects. The same, more obviously was true in the split Germany and Korea.
Many sophisticated socio-economic explanations exist for divergences and splits between regions. HBD might contribute something to understanding why fault-lines lie where they do and how institutions then ‘select’ for certain traits (thus cementing divergences that were primarily caused by politics), but until any HBDer shows any serious interest in institutional history, comparative anthropology, etc, no one is going to take them seriously.
You’re acting like growth comes out of the air. Growth and progress take talented people to create them. I suppose it’s just a coincidence that the overwhelming bulk of scientific and intellectual progress past and present comes from Northwestern Europe (and its derivatives).
Yup.
Where do political systems come from?
I see you’re new here:
Stop Saying North and South Koreans Are Necessarily Completely Identical Populations
Yes, there are millions of “explanations”. Which is correct? Indeed, what says Occam?
Until you learn some facts, no one will take you seriously. I’ve been making an effort to facilitate that.
Unrelated: Are you back because Razib is gone?
Like you said, unrelated.
Reading a slight too much into what I meant, good sir. I did link the relevant source in a later comment incidentally.
The article is a repackage of Orientalism, the mother of Racism/White supremacy/Nazism, presenting bigotry observations as the scientific evidence to legitimize racism/White supremacy/Nazism by ignoring the cause of creating the differences of the levels of human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust around the world. The falling behind social developments in the rest of world is caused by the West’s destructive intervention with organized violence and barbaric inhumane imperialist colonialism in the last few hundreds of years.
Before the advent of the destructive intervention of the bagger-thy-neighbor West, the large part of the rest of the world was way ahead of the author’s shinny example, the West, in the levels of human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust in thousands of years. In human history majority of the time the author’s shinny example, the West, was an ignorant, superstitious, barbaric, backwards and oppressive federal serfdom.
The author’s narrative in the article is equivalent to pointing the lack of “human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust” in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, etc. as the poor outcome of “evolution through natural selection – specifically, gene-culture co-evolution.” instead of they are the disasters created by the West’s bombing, killing and torturing on the their fabricated phantom WMD allegations as humanitarian intervention.
Where does “asking for money” fall in the clannishness aspect of society?
I guess dumbass commenters (the ones that can’t be bothered to read anything that was posted or linked to) come with the territory. None the less, that gives license for merciless mocking.
That’s just not the case
These places were all doing horribly before Europeans showed up. Try again.
Maybe Steve Sailer or Heartiste can help us answer that one.
racism/white supremacy/nazism = you need choice only one, what do you think*
Yes, i agree in the near past white supremacism was mainstream, or better, nordic supremacism.
Nazi ideology wasn’t a mere coincidence but the explosive rupture of the honestly-racist culture being nurtured many decades/centuries before.
I agree to the ”nazi ‘insight’ ” about always-permissive jewish role whatever the place where they are. BUT i disagree a lot with the ”methods” nazis used as well their essential racial ideology.
Only partially i agree with you. Well westerner”s” become so powerfull… why**
Just think about if super-evolved aliens invaded the earth and start to colonize or to kill us…
Now compare europeans with ”the rest of the world”.
People just luv creativity but without wisdom it can be deadly.
I’m not a blind european-phile, but i’m against injustice and ordinary living white/european caucasian people today no have nothing to do with the ”mistakes” (euphemisms) of their ELITES and the connivance or indiference (or also, stupidity/lack of factual knowledge) of most of their people, or better, ”sheeple-ness” in the past… and even today if they are being opressed by their (and ”their”) elites too, in very different and sophisticated ways.
Elites jumped to the anti-(ordinary) white people because it’s quite convenient for them. (Even, current living rich western people today no have, literally speaking, nothing to do with the ”mistakes” on the ”PAST””’… but they, many them, are direct heirs of it).
In this part i absolutely agree with you, but bear always in mind that the brains of all this ”intervertions” ALSO have ”david star identification”.
Exactly, even cousin marriage + hyper-masculine culture + lower IQ can create a progressive nightmare for itself, we know very well that for example civil war in Lebanon was not a DIRECT product of this complex scenario.
Cousin marriage theory seems want blame ”muslims”/MENA and europeans by their own current fate, BUT we know, or at least, ”we” know WHO are manufacturing all this shit.
I strongly believe reduction of cousin marriage make people more ”open-minded” or open to new experiences but this theory can’t explain alone why ”westerners” (how the % of them, exactly*) begin to be ”more progressive” only three four decades ago if they started to stop cousin marriage since a long time.
Socio-economic, psychological (psychology of cohersion apllied) and politic factors are also very important to explain this cultural changes.
There are a lot of such specimen in Vietnam, they are called Vietnam War time babies, you do not need to take the trouble of doing plastic surgery on them, they were all grew up a perfectly normal Vietnamese (mentally and behavior wise).
This comment of mine as a reply back to a comment by another Unz Review commenter might be of interest to this discussion:
– https://www.unz.com/runz/when-viacom-ceo-philippe-dauman-still-had-an-iq-of-260/#comment-1522227
– https://www.unz.com/runz/when-viacom-ceo-philippe-dauman-still-had-an-iq-of-260/#comment-1522396
What about pedigree collapse?
In THE TETHERS OF THE SAPIANTS, culture is defined as “the consensual paradigms of belief, habits, customs and traditions derived from a group genome’s interaction with its circumstances over time.”
And a sizeable dollop of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Genetic relatedness for two co-ethnics is on the magnitude of second cousins. People match on phenotype, you’re going to tell me that there is no matching by genotype? Culture is a product of genetics, so culture, by proxy, is an example of genotypic matching. We’re also genetically similar to our spouses and friends (on the magnitude of fourth cousins). This clearly shows that we want to be other that are genetically similar to ourselves.
Vietnam is fairly recent, and the cohort suffers somewhat from societal rejection. Another example might be the Germans in South America — classically adapted to their host culture.
A property of the DNA sequence itself is the ability to switch epigenetic state, and is therefore subject to natural selection on conventional mutations. Natural selection will eliminate switches with maladaptive effects but perpetuate, and refine, those with adaptive effects. The additional ‘information’ represented by a DNA sequence’s particular epigenetic state is repeatedly being reset.
Thus, epigenetic switches do not involve cumulative, open-ended evolutionary change. Switches are tools that increase the options available to DNA sequences but, in themselves, should not challenge the beliefs of a Darwinist. The high rate of epigenetic change is also important because the level of achievable adaptive precision is limited by the fidelity of replication. Adaptation is constantly being degraded by copying errors and the higher the rate of errors, the larger the selective advantage that is required to maintain previous adaptation. Thus, small selective advantages are unable to be maintained in the presence of low-fidelity replication.
Har! Zing!
after the reading the article, the comments section didn’t disappoint either 🙂
thanks for the article.
LOL. You can’t hack it, can ya, J-Bob? You cannot abide any questioning of your cant. You’re tracking the Razib Khan path outahere, and nobody is going to miss you a bit. Nobody wants to read solipsistic shinola that some nabob regards as incontestable religious articles of faith.
Hey, your worship, go get published in a legitimate scientific publication. That’ll stroke your needy ego. Awwww…do you have to put up with unwashed, uneducated Doubting Thomases? Welcome to the world of publishing, Jack! Go be a jerk among among those you fancy to be your peers — if only!
How many Christmas cards do you send to your unrelated co-ethnics?
The result of that study was due to population stratification.
They speak the language…
DNA methylyzation is directed by the DNA.
Now you’re just making shit up.
You’re welcome.
Yeah my commenters are something else…
> The article is a repackage of Orientalism, the mother of Racism/White supremacy/Nazism, presenting bigotry observations as the scientific evidence to legitimize racism/White supremacy/Nazism by ignoring the cause of creating the differences of the levels of human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust around the world. The falling behind social developments in the rest of world is caused by the West’s destructive intervention with organized violence and barbaric inhumane imperialist colonialism in the last few hundreds of years.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/02/paul-bairoch-on-industrial-revolution_20.html?m=1
Tell us more on how only Whitey invaded other lands.
>Before the advent of the destructive intervention of the bagger-thy-neighbor West, the large part of the rest of the world was way ahead of the author’s shinny example, the West, in the levels of human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust in thousands of years.
WE WUZ KANGZ
Go list all the accomplishments that weren’t Chinese or Indian from the fall of Rome onward that weren’t derived from European work .
>In human history majority of the time the author’s shinny example, the West, was an ignorant, superstitious, barbaric, backwards and oppressive federal serfdom.
Unlike the paradises that were Muslim lands and India. Or Sub-Saharan Africa.
Here’s a tip for you, whiny boy: Stop attending SJW classes, stop reading Commie books, and stop getting your history from films like Braveheart or Monty Python.
>The author’s narrative in the article is equivalent to pointing the lack of “human development, the strength of democracy and democratic institutions, scientific output, and levels of social trust” in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, etc. as the poor outcome of “evolution through natural selection – specifically, gene-culture co-evolution.” instead of they are the disasters created by the West’s bombing, killing and torturing on the their fabricated phantom WMD allegations as humanitarian intervention.
Meanwhile China trolled around in Tibet.
Why not replace ethnic by GENETIC interests firstly??
Well there are that ethnically-genetically aficionados too, aka, ethnic genetic interests. But generally human beings tend to be primarily and generally concerned by their own genetic interests independent of ethnicity. Ethnicity is not the first option, may be one of the options.
If ethnic personality types really exist so I think people who are more “exotic” in this way will be more ethnically aficionado than ex centric ones or outsiders. Everything tend to conspire to the ethnic aficionados: Greater facility and fastness to find a partner as well a kind of intrinsic attraction/motivation to the people who look like him/her. Conservatives those who tend to be more ethnically interested tend to marry earlier and build a family.
Both exist, ethnic genetic interests and lack of it in the same way there are cons and libs.
How independent is this organisation!
In April 2015 TI defended the decision by its American chapter, TI-USA, to give Hillary Clinton its Integrity Award in 2012. TI’s statement followed a report by National Public Radio that Bill and Chelsea Clinton were not factual regarding the transparency of the Clinton Foundation.
It has the smell of the corporate sector all over it!
These data are based on the reported perception of corruption in each country. I.e., this is what you get when you simply ask people how corrupt their country is. It is corroborated by other measures of corruption…
A Better Corruption Index
…not to mention it correlates with a boatload of other data, as mentioned at the beginning of the piece.
Without group selection, the payoffs to defection are still there, and there’s intense selection for deception, that is defecting while appearing not to, which fits a lot of the behaviors we see today such as virtue signaling and pathological altruism.
Please, please, please elaborate.
Jay,
about IDENTICAL twins — homossexuality heritability
How they analysed it*
they measured their levels of same-sex[ual] excitability*
Self-report:
Whitehead, 2011
Jayman is back!!!!!
OT–does anybody know of a concise write-up on gay pathologies, medical and social, and how society should deal with it? Ideally some concise arguments and needed authoritative sources, not too many, not too few, plus workable ideas on what to do, politically, morally, rhetorically.
Also, JayMan: Merry Christmas!
First, homossexual community need emancipate yourself and start to behave like a parallel political state just like Jews, just like a satellite of the heteronormative society. But still need build a real community because by no there such thing homossexual community I mean a group of people who help one each other.
Homosexuality is in the state of feral culture without behavioral laws. Just like if heterossexuals were through in the natural state without a culture.
There are important points that explain great part of homossexual problems for example the popularity or sacrament of the anal penetrative sex. This practice must avoided. Too much promiscuity that is not caused exactly by homossexual nature but also by lack of efficient social network that can find correct partners to the most of the homosexuals.
If most of this points were corrected I believe homosexuality will stop to be a social cursed, collectively speaking.
Many homosexual pathologies can be in the true co occurrence of mental disorders like schizophrenia in disproportionate rates if compared with “control” groups.
No jayman nor you can decide for us what we must to do for yourselves.
“by now”
“curse”
Do we know this for certain? I’ll virtue signal a little bit here that I have nothing really against homosexuals, but my experience with gay men is that they always seem to have a very large number of short-term partners. When a gay friend of mine told me that he just found out that he had HIV, he told me something like “Eh, that was going to happen anyway sooner or later, no big deal.”
I mean, there have been gay bars for a long time. At least with gay men, wouldn’t sexuality being tied to testosterone imply more frequent and casual partners?
I believe lack of protective factors increase certain intrinsic trends among homosexuals. Yes promiscuity is common among us and it’s not entirely explained by cultural factors but what I said, a sub ideal scenario increase vulnerabilities. For example the increase of social pathologies among white working classes this days. Many or most of promiscuous people are those who are always searching for “perfect” mate but they are unsuccessful while monogamous people because their personality traits, higher percent of available people and strong social network tend to find their long life partners easily. I believe most people want a long term if not long-life partners, this factors increase or reduce the chance you find him/her/sher, 😉
There are extreme types who lack of self control among homosexuals it’s evident. They are firstly victims of themselves and this laws I’m proposing will be very good for them or at least will creates a correct divisions between those who want really build something sustainable at long term and those who are too immature or childish to build anything.
In many aspects homosexuals has been persecuted by pure disgusting or hate by other people. There are a hierarchy of legitimacy of “PC” social causes. Speciecism and homophobia are in the top of legitimacy. Racism and specially anti Semitism is in the bottom. The two first are really biggest sin humans has committed and with very little rational reflection for very long time still this days. Anti Semitism are the least legitimate of this sin partially credible but predominantly caused by own Jewish attitudes against their host and we know what collectives do individuals many them who are innocent pay for it.
My issue is just that overt normalization of homosexuality has brought a host of other ridiculous concepts as norms, and served ultimately to signal traditional masculinity as something negative. I really don’t care if homosexuals had a satellite state or whatever, I just don’t feel a particular need to force bakeries to make cakes for same-sex marriages, be certain that the women I’m with are actually biologically born women, and be allowed to make snide remarks about people within my state.
I like Peter Thiel and all, but I don’t feel a need to praise people for who they choose to boff. Nor do I think they need special protections against people who might say bad things.
I wouldn’t care if people wanted to exclude me for my ethnicity from certain regions, I mean, and I don’t demand women who don’t like Asians to like me or be considered a bigot.
I wouldn’t say acceptance of homosexuality is a cause of such things than a facet of a larger phenomenon. See:
The Rise of Universalism
By the way, let me put the brakes on this talk of homosexuality on this post. It’s straying too off-topic.
Wow. Rude you isn’t??
I agree about force people to do what they don’t want to do is at priori waste of time BUT I also disagree because MOST of people are intellectually hopeless AND like it or not there are universally morally correct things MOST don’t want understand by pure immaturity/stupidity. Yes priests being forced to celebrate marriage of two people of same sex is a separated and negotiable thing.
But we have some attitudes that are essentially/universally wrong
Do you want that African teens have their clitoris removed BECAUSE you don’t care what other people do??
As ALWAYS….
There are cases and cases
Thanks to traditional masculinity wars has happened..
Returning vaguely to the original point and conflating with the link, I believe that there may be another aspect of clannish attitude that isn’t quite addressed – for example, I’ve always been conservative, even reactionary for as long as I can remember on certain aspects. One would argue that in some ways, I should be similar to you in that I would acknowledge how universalist values benefit me; while I can see that, I also extend logically that I’ve lost much from it and gained in ways that are ultimately meaningless to me.
When I was younger, for example, I remember affiliating myself with a group composed, as I found out, of almost entirely Deep Southerners(and East Europeans) that has naturally structured themselves into an elite which were mostly descendants of plantation owners and a “redneck” population of former sharecroppers, etc. I worked with them in a role that proved essential for their cause, but made me utterly invisible, such that my successes would be seen and acknowledged by almost no one. And yes, even at the time, I had wondered why something as neutral as a gaming group seemed to had segregated itself along geographic lines. Our rivals used a faux democratic structure and clearly North American/West European, incidentally.
Its probably the happiest that I’ve ever been in my life. Ironic, given that it might seem to be working to marginalize myself.
But nothing else later that I can think of has quite matched up to the feeling of togetherness in a tight-knit, ordered group with a sense of history and defiance. I’ve since become much more “successful” as an individual, but none of it feels really all that meaningful.
I wonder if lack of clannishness is affiliated with a greater sense of “self-interest” in a way that individual gains are more meaningful. I’ve never particularly cared, for example, for my own personal survival – my culture has often taught suicide as a way to redeem from familial shame, for example, and so as long as the larger form of my family endures, focusing on the brief life of an individual seems almost silly.
In atomized, more WEIRD societies, being more individualistic means that credit or shame is more associated with the self than with the family.
WEIRD societies are extremely recent phenomenon…
Before crazy sixties, europeans, out and in Hainal circles were homogeneously conservative: ”homophobic”, ‘racist’, ‘anti-semitic, ”xenophobic”, … what do you think about it Jay*
My ability to care about what Africans or Martians do to each other borders between none to little. I’m not sure why I should, either, until I want the day for someone to impose their universalist attitudes upon me and declare that all pronouns must be zher.
As far as I can hold as an universal moral philosophy, by allowing multiple forms of society to exist, it creates a diversity of societies which is worth preserved in the same way that animal biodiversity is worth preserving, as opposed to, for example, unleashing the European rabbit everywhere. For all I know, Africans doing horrible things to other Africans might result in a better society for them thirty generations from now.
I’ll let you have the last word here but perhaps because of how I am, I really don’t care much for what other people do to each other, so as long as it doesn’t affect me or my family. I rather like the idea of being able to just exit from any society I find too annoying, and find one where I belong to better.
Unfortunately globalization have this ability to increase this moral concernments, at least among some people, unfortunately because instead less things to think/to care we have a multiplication of it. If i had in very bad place and some out-people decide save me and my people i would be eternally grateful and i will try to retribute this enormous help in all ways my possibilities can touch.
Different from you i little care about my own family, maybe more about my mother, my father is extremely stubborn ( extremely stubborn people, you need leave them live their own ignorance in peace) and my older brothers follow him and they tend to be very stupid in their own ways, the middle brother is a incurable and very silly leftist, my older brother is the classical ”red-pilled”/libertarian-tard, nonexistent emotional intelligence and too much polymath syndrome. Because i’m very different than my other relatives i find very little similarities, strong enough to connect myself with them but i believe even i was very similar i would not change my universalistic point of views if this is just the truth of moral facts.
You tore this Daniel cheenk a new one, lol!
JayMan, so good to see you back! The thought that you, HBD Chick, and Peter Frost had all stopped blogging was so disheartening. Fatherhood must be exhausting. Hope you’ll be doing lots of blogging in the New Year!
There’s intelligent questioning and then there is stupid questioning. Unfortunately, most of the questioning is the latter.