I'll continue editing this blog post tomorrow. Because my online stalker has disabled the highlighting and coloring function on my blogs I can't highlight and color the whited out writing in the above link all at once. I have to highlight and color each letter at a time and this is time consuming. (I've started, however. Have a gander at the below writing. This is what I'd like the above blog post to look like when I'm done editing it (I should be done by Sunday, I'm sorry, this Sunday).
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/east-asias-farewell-to-alms/
What's The Sole Purpose Of Life? Passing On Your Genes. You're Unconsciously Driven To Pass Your Genotype On At The Expense Of People With Dissimilar Genotypes (You're Unconsciously Trying To Get More Of Your Genes Into Subsequent Generations Than Your Fellow Man Who You're Competing With). (Social And Cultural Changes In Society Are A Product Of Certain Genotypes Spreading At The Expense Of Others And Ultimately Predominating Within A Society. For Instance, Why Did The Industrial Revolution* Take Place In England At The Time It Did And Not Some Other Country? because A Certain Genotype (A Genotype Conducive To Intelligence, Industriousness, Inventiveness, Inhibition, Institutionalism, Etc.) Began To Proliferate After Several Generations (About 24 Generations) In England And Predominated (Or At Least Its Culture Predominated) By The Time Of The Onset Of The Industrial Revolution.
*I Read Your Books Gregory Clark!
In sum, State societies create a new environment of natural selection. The Big Man goes from hero to zero (unless he is part of the tiny ruling elite). For most people, the road to success is the market economy, and such success requires a special behavioral package:
1. abandonment of violence as a means to resolve disputes and increase personal wealth;
2. ability to plan ahead and save for tomorrow
3. general trade-related skills, notably numerical and text processing
Over time, economic success would have translated into demographic success. This nascent middle class would have grown in number, with downwardly mobile descendents spreading into the lower classes and gradually replacing them. Eventually, they and their heritable characteristics would have come to dominate the entire gene pool.
During the long Malthusian era in which both genotypes struggle to earn enough to subsist (i.e. during the thousands of years leading up the Industrial Revolution), the quality-preferring genotypes have a fitness advantage. As the quality-preferring genotypes are of higher quality, they earn higher wages. These higher wages are more than enough to cover education expenses, so they are also able to have more children than the quantity-preferring genotypes.
This fitness advantage leads the quality-preferring genotypes to increase in prevalence. As this occurs, technological progress increases, as the average level of education in the population drives technological progress. This in turn increases the incentive to invest in education, creating a feedback loop between technology and education.
...
Eventually, the rate of technological progress gets high enough to induce the quantity-preferring genotypes to invest in education. When this happens, the average level of education jumps, boosting technological progress and causing the Industrial Revolution.
During this process, the population growth rate changes. Up to the time of the Industrial Revolution, population growth increases with technological progress. However, when the level of technology leaps with the Industrial Revolution, the level of education becomes so high that population growth drops dramatically. Everyone is investing more into education than raw numbers of children.
From an evolutionary perspective, the Industrial Revolution also changes the selection pressure in the model. After the Industrial Revolution, the quality-preferring genotypes invest so much into education that they have lower fertility than the quantity-preferring genotypes. They then reduce in prevalence, their fitness advantage erased.
http://jasoncollins.org/2014/09/30/the-genetic-basis-of-social-mobility/
Steven Pinker’s “human progress” has really been progress by a relatively small population, essentially Western Europeans over the past millennium. Their trajectory of gene-culture coevolution is now being reconstructed from ancient DNA.
Europeans became a high-IQ population through a trajectory that began with the adoption of farming and continued because of the cognitive demands of social complexity. Much of the upward trend in cognitive ability has occurred since medieval times.
The increase in intelligence over the past 10k years (shown in Europeans) explains a lot.
Why was cultural change so slow in the deep past? Why was invention so rare?
Because people weren't smart enough yet. I've seen anthropology professors claim that all homo sapiens populations, even hundreds of thousands of years ago, just had to have the same capabilities as high-performing groups today.
Not the case.
https://x.com/frost61h/status/1904596662330565005In East Asia, mean cognitive ability began to rise with the emergence of farming. It then continued to rise until the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). The ensuing stagnation and gradual decline may have been due to declining fertility among the upper classes.
Charles Darwin was born on this day Feb 12th in 1809.
Here he sums up why progress happens: (translated into modern language) a large population; high human capital (intellectual faculties); low corruption, crime, etc. (moral faculties); and meritocracy (excellence).
Because my online stalker has disabled the highlighting and coloring function on my blogs I can't highlight and color the lighter colored writing in the above link all at once. I have to highlight and color each letter at a time and this is time consuming. I hope to finish highlighting and coloring this blog post by Wednesday.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202310/the-israelpalestine-crisis-in-evolutionary-perspective
The Israel/Palestine Crisis and Ingroup/Outgroup Psychology
One of the most powerful (and most disturbing) features of our evolved psychology is found in what we call the ingroup/outgroup bias (see Billig & Tajfel, 1973). This bias is, quite simply, a tendency (in fact, an incredibly strong tendency) to see others who are (psychologically) seen as in one's own group as more deserving of benefits relative to those who are seen as one some "other" group.
Further, the flip side seems to be true. People tend to think that those who are in some group other than their own (variously defined) are more deserving of adverse outcomes relative to those who are seen as being in their own group.
The early research on this topic found that eliciting ingroup/outgroup bias is as easy as the flip of a coin. Literally, if you're in a room where everyone flips a coin and you got a head, you're (on average) more likely to hold positive attitudes about others who also got a head—and are less benevolent toward those who, by chance alone, flipped a tail. Think about that.
Ingroup/outgroup reasoning seems to be so entrenched in our psychology that it pertains to groups of pretty much any and all kinds. Yankee fans think that Red Sox fans are somehow nefarious—and vice versa. People from one academic field tend to be overly skeptical of people in other fields. People who live in the U.S. often see people from their own region (e.g., the Northeast) in more benevolent terms than people who live in other regions (e.g., the South). And so forth.
From an evolutionary perspective (see Wilson, 2019), we can understand why the ingroup/outgroup bias is so deeply entrenched in our psychology. Under the ancestral conditions that surrounded human evolution, people did not live in large cities or nations. Prior to the advent of agriculture, about a mere 10,000 years ago (which is a sliver of time when thinking from an evolutionary perspective), all humans lived in small clans comprised primarily of kin as well as individuals whom people knew well.
People in other clans were often seen as competitors for various resources (space, food, etc.). Under such conditions, when small groups were competing with one another, showing a bias toward benefiting members of one's own group at a cost to members of other groups would have led to a kind of team mentality that would have helped individuals cooperate within groups at a cost to other groups—thus leading to benefits for both their own groups and, as a result, benefits to themselves and to their family and friends.
The ingroup/outgroup bias is a deeply entrenched feature of our evolved psychology. And this bias has the capacity to lead to all kinds of ugly and adverse outcomes.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202405/a-humanist-take-on-the-crisis-in-the-middle-east
Joseph Bronski on X: "Are Jews or Palestinians white? Principal component analysis suggests Jews are half southern-European, half middle-eastern. They are far closer genetically to Palestinians than they are to Northern European populations. https://t.co/FxKqvhHsvh" / X
