It is often said that the ancient Greeks were the first Europeans. Indeed, their culture feels remarkably modern. Usually this is put down to the Greek spirit of inquiry, its dedication to reason, or perhaps cosmopolitanism. But there is another characteristic of ancient Greece which unites it with the present, and distinguishes it from the past. It is a characteristic that is almost universally overlooked, despite its importance, because its presence is so much a part of contemporary consciousness that its nature is exceedingly hard to convey: ancient Greece, like modern times, was a non-traditional culture.

Though I, myself, am often haphazard in my use of the word ‘traditional’ (for example, I often use the terms: ‘traditional values’ or ‘traditional religion’), at least for the purpose of this post I will endeavor to use the word more precisely: A traditional culture is one that has explicit cultural institutions for transmitting tradition. The emphasis is on the word explicit – clearly, people in all cultures learn from their elders, and thus tend to propagate traditions. But in tribal cultures there is strong, if not universal, tendency to maintain cultural institutions whose purpose is to preserve and transmit the wisdom of the tribe. In other words: maintaining tradition is an explicit value – not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. The identity of the tribe is symbiotically bound to its memetic wisdom, and each strives to preserve the other.

Traditional culture is often thought of as a kind of super-stodginess: elders frowning and saying, "this is the way it’s always been done". However, I have found (and I don’t know how generally applicable this is) that in a certain way quite the opposite occurs. The maintenance of explicit institutions for transmitting tradition provides a forum, and a language, for examining it. We see it operate in the one area of life that, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, still operates on traditional principles: Law. The legal profession, in common-law countries, maintains institutions for transmitting not just the law itself, but also how the law is understood. And when the law is applied, it is necessary to consider not just the law itself, but the whole weight of legal tradition – this tradition being considered, in fact, inseparable from it.

It is perhaps inevitable that tribal cultures would tend to be traditional. Clearly, those tribes which best succeed in transmitting their accumulated wisdom to the next generation are most likely to succeed, so maintaining explicit institutions for this purpose would tend to further this goal. But there is a better reason: traditional cultures create the infrastructure for memetic evolution.

Many systems, not just genetic systems, are evolutionary. To be evolutionary, a system need only:

1. Consist of units which propagate traits over time

2. Propagate units with advantageous traits better than units with disadvantageous traits

3. Have some kind of mechanism for mutation of traits

Thus, many systems, for example economic systems, can be thought of as evolutionary. But notice that (1) and (3) are contradictory: it is essential that the tendency to mutate be extremely low in comparison to the tendency to conserve and propagate traits. If the mutation rate is too high, it will overwhelm the ability to propagate advantageous traits, and the system will be defined not by evolution, but by the quirks of the mutation mechanism.

The ancient Greeks, in adopting reason as the standard for judging truth, implicitly rejected tradition. It is this, to my mind, that is most responsible for the modern feel of Greek culture. But in doing so, they rejected an evolutionary system in favor of a viral one. Reason is a mechanism for the rapid mutation of memes: Come up with a good reason, and you will change your mind, and others’. The fitness of a meme is determined not so much by the constraints of the environment, as by its attractiveness to the fallible mind.

Clearly, reason has brought us far. But with populations on the precipice of decline in every modern society, it might be relevant to ask: Will it win out in the end? Perhaps tradition will make a comeback? Or perhaps there is some synthesis of reason and tradition that is better than either of the two?

(Cross-posted at Rishon Rishon)

PS: I think this whole issue should be thought of as meta-memetic evolution: Memes which determine the evolutionary environment of memes. It is parallel to genes which determine the mechanism of reproduction.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at 12:27 AM

It is often said that the ancient Greeks were the first Europeans. Indeed, their culture feels remarkably modern. Usually this is put down to the Greek spirit of inquiry, its dedication to reason, or perhaps cosmopolitanism. But there is another characteristic of ancient Greece which unites it with the present, and distinguishes it from the past. It is a characteristic that is almost universally overlooked, despite its importance, because its presence is so much a part of contemporary consciousness that its nature is exceedingly hard to convey: ancient Greece, like modern times, was a non-traditional culture.

Though I, myself, am often haphazard in my use of the word ‘traditional’ (for example, I often use the terms: ‘traditional values’ or ‘traditional religion’), at least for the purpose of this post I will endeavor to use the word more precisely: A traditional culture is one that has explicit cultural institutions for transmitting tradition. The emphasis is on the word explicit – clearly, people in all cultures learn from their elders, and thus tend to propagate traditions. But in tribal cultures there is strong, if not universal, tendency to maintain cultural institutions whose purpose is to preserve and transmit the wisdom of the tribe. In other words: maintaining tradition is an explicit value – not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. The identity of the tribe is symbiotically bound to its memetic wisdom, and each strives to preserve the other.

Traditional culture is often thought of as a kind of super-stodginess: elders frowning and saying, "this is the way it’s always been done". However, I have found (and I don’t know how generally applicable this is) that in a certain way quite the opposite occurs. The maintenance of explicit institutions for transmitting tradition provides a forum, and a language, for examining it. We see it operate in the one area of life that, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, still operates on traditional principles: Law. The legal profession, in common-law countries, maintains institutions for transmitting not just the law itself, but also how the law is understood. And when the law is applied, it is necessary to consider not just the law itself, but the whole weight of legal tradition – this tradition being considered, in fact, inseparable from it.

It is perhaps inevitable that tribal cultures would tend to be traditional. Clearly, those tribes which best succeed in transmitting their accumulated wisdom to the next generation are most likely to succeed, so maintaining explicit institutions for this purpose would tend to further this goal. But there is a better reason: traditional cultures create the infrastructure for memetic evolution.

Many systems, not just genetic systems, are evolutionary. To be evolutionary, a system need only:

1. Consist of units which propagate traits over time

2. Propagate units with advantageous traits better than units with disadvantageous traits

3. Have some kind of mechanism for mutation of traits

Thus, many systems, for example economic systems, can be thought of as evolutionary. But notice that (1) and (3) are contradictory: it is essential that the tendency to mutate be extremely low in comparison to the tendency to conserve and propagate traits. If the mutation rate is too high, it will overwhelm the ability to propagate advantageous traits, and the system will be defined not by evolution, but by the quirks of the mutation mechanism.

The ancient Greeks, in adopting reason as the standard for judging truth, implicitly rejected tradition. It is this, to my mind, that is most responsible for the modern feel of Greek culture. But in doing so, they rejected an evolutionary system in favor of a viral one. Reason is a mechanism for the rapid mutation of memes: Come up with a good reason, and you will change your mind, and others’. The fitness of a meme is determined not so much by the constraints of the environment, as by its attractiveness to the fallible mind.

Clearly, reason has brought us far. But with populations on the precipice of decline in every modern society, it might be relevant to ask: Will it win out in the end? Perhaps tradition will make a comeback? Or perhaps there is some synthesis of reason and tradition that is better than either of the two?

(Cross-posted at Rishon Rishon)

PS: I think this whole issue should be thought of as meta-memetic evolution: Memes which determine the evolutionary environment of memes. It is parallel to genes which determine the mechanism of reproduction.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at 11:26 PM

As my Christmas present to my friend Aziz Poonwalla, I point readers to The First Annual Brass Crescent Awards for the Islamic Blogsphere. Who says atheists can’t practice religious ecumenicalism?

Update: And Merry Christmas to everyone!

Posted by razib at 01:09 PM

I thought this was pretty cute. After explaining some recent behavior genetic research into female infidelity and telling their readers that “it certainly would not be a threat to a biblical worldview,” the creationists at Answers in Genesis go on to give their own explanation of heritability:

In a fallen world, in which genes are corrupted by random copying mistakes, there may well be adverse effects of such mutated genes on behavior. Pastors know that certain parishioners are more predisposed to a certain class of sin than others. When person ‘X’ falls, it is generally in the same direction—whether that be stealing, pride, gluttony, substance abuse, spousal abuse, infidelity, etc. Person ‘Y’ in the same congregation tends to fall in a consistent direction, too, only it’s not the same direction as for ‘X’. They both have recurring weaknesses, but each is for a different class of sin. Posted by God Fearing Atheist at 01:54 AM

I hope that everyone enjoys their Christmas and because our readership so heavily skews to a science literate audience I thought most would enjoy a little sci-fi story written by James P. Hogan, celebrating the birth of Sir Isaac Newton, born on Christmas Day of 1642.

Merry Gravmas

“Is that you, Li?” Cheng Xiang called, looking up from the notescreen propped against his knee. He had been amusing himself with a few tensor integrals to clear his mind before taking his morning coffee.

The sounds of movement came again from upstairs. Moments later, his ten-year-old son appeared, floating down the staircase on an anti-g disk. “Good morning, father.”

“Merry Gravmas.”

“And to you.” Li hopped off the disk and stood admiring the decorations that the family robot had put up overnight. There were paper chains hanging in hyperbolic catenary curves and sinusoids, Gaussian distribution bells, and pendulums wreathed in logarithmic spirals. In the corner opposite the total-sensory cassette player, there stood a miniature apple tree with binary stars on top, a heap of gaily wrapped gifts around its base, and its branches adorned with colored masses of various shapes, a string of pulsing plasma glows, and striped candles shaped like integral signs. “It looks nice,” Li said, eyeing the presents. “I wonder what Santa Roid has brought this year.”

“You’ll have to wait until your brother and sister get here before you can open anything,” Xian told him. “What are they doing?”

“Yu is sending off a last-minute Gravmas present to a schoolfriend over the matter transmitter to Jupiter. Yixuan is helping Mother program the autochef to cook the turkey.”

“Why does everyone in this family always have to leave everything until the last minute?” Xiang grumbled, setting down the screen and getting up. “Anyone would think it wasn’t obvious that the ease of getting things done varies inversely as the square of procrastination.”

Li walked over to the window and gazed out at Peking’s soaring panorama of towers, bridges, terraces, and arches, extending away all around, above, and for hundreds of meters below. “How did Gravmas start?” he asked his father.

“Hmph!” Xian snorted as he moved to stand alongside the boy. “Now isn’t that typical of young people today. Too wrapped up in relativistic quantum chromodynamics and multidimensional function spaces to know anything about where it came from or what it means. It’s this newfangled liberal education that’s to blame. They don’t teach natural philosophy anymore, the way we had to learn it.”

“Well, that kind of thing does seem a bit quaint these days,” Li said. “I suppose it’s okay for little old ladies and people who –“

“They don’t even recite the laws of motion in school every morning. Standards aren’t what they used to be. It’ll mean the end of civilization, you mark my words.”

“You were going to tell me about Gravmas . . . “

“Oh, yes. Well, I presume you’ve heard of Newton?”

“Of course. A newton is the force which, acting on a mass of one kilogram, produces an acceleration of one meter per second per second.”

“Not a newton. The Newton. You didn’t know that Newton was somebody’s name?”

“You mean it was a person?”

Continue reading Merry Gravmas.

Posted by TangoMan at 11:59 PM

Many of the American readers may have participated in CTY. This article on the gifted students in the program will be of interest to most GNXP readers:

The same egalitarian ardor has swept over schools across the country in recent years, slashing gifted classes and dismantling tracking systems. Programs for the gifted now receive less than two cents of every hundred dollars spent on education by the federal government…

By 1980, he had begun to track the fortunes of the most gifted among the gifted-known as “the 1-in-10,000,” because their test scores were in the top one-hundredth of one per cent nationwide. The talent search had begun…

Camerer’s career is not unusual for a High Math. We know this because he and some six thousand other alumni have now been followed for nearly thirty years, first by Stanley and then by one of his proteges, Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at
Vanderbilt University. Benbow and her husband, David Lubinski, a psychologist at Vanderbilt, send out periodic questionnaires and track their subjects’ achievements year by year. Recently, they compared Camerer’s cohort-the 1-in-10,000-to a group that merely scored in the
top one per cent. “There were huge differences,” Benbow says. “Huge.” By the age of thirty, the 1-in-10,000 were twice as likely to earn Ph.D.s as the other cohort, and fifty times more likely to earn Ph.D.s than the average American. “And they go to much more prestigious schools,” she added. “The top one per cent achieve enormous amounts, but the 1-in-10,000 do even better.”

It’s too early to tell how many of the 1-in-10,000 will become Nobel Prize winners. But a few, like Camerer, are already leaders in their field, and the rest have proved surprisingly predictable. Lubinski showed me a series of graphs based on gifted students’ S.A.T. scores. In college, those with high verbal and low math scores mostly majored in the social sciences and humanities; those with high math and low verbal scores gravitated toward math and engineering. Students with high scores in both areas often studied physics; those with equally low scores drifted into business. By the age of thirty-three, when the students had become professionals, physicians occupied the center of the graph-good but not great in both math and language. And lawyers had joined businesspeople in the bottom quarter.

Remember here that “low” is relative, because we are talking about people in the top .0001 of the IQ distribution. Make sure to check out Camilla Benbow’s webpage, particularly this publication:

Adolescents identified before the age of 13 (N = 320) as having exceptional mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked over 10 years. They pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-rate expectations, with several participants having created noteworthy literary, scientific, or technical products by their early 20s. Early observed distinctions in intellectual strength (viz., quantitative reasoning ability over verbal reasoning ability, and vice versa) predicted sharp differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational pursuits. This special population strongly preferred educational opportunities tailored to their precocious rate of learning (i.e., appropriate developmental placement), with 95% using some form of acceleration to individualize their education.

Note also that Benbow and Lubinski have collaborated with Robert Plomin in his hunt for QTLs that contribute to high IQ, which we blogged about here.

Ok, let’s just enumerate the take home points:

A one hour test given at age 12 is sufficient to predict outcome statistics more than a decade later. In particular, it can identify a group of individuals more than 50-times more likely than the general population to obtain doctoral degrees. As the paper shows, the top 1 in 10000 population is overwhelmingly European and Asian. (78% European, 20% Asian). The threshold effect postulated by some investigators like Gardiner – which supposes that a 180 IQ does not afford much advantage over a 130 IQ – does not stand up to statistical investigation.

When I see studies like this, I have to admit that I’m a bit perplexed as to how biophobes fit them into their worldview. Whatever IQ measures, it’s clearly related to physiological variables and is a very strong predictor of life outcomes. Its utility becomes more starkly apparent when you contrast it to other metrics – you wouldn’t see these kinds of numbers if you had measured height or weight at age 12, for example.

If I was a biophobe – literally, someone afraid of biological explanations – just about the only explanation for the ethnic differences observed would be some omnipresent environmental factor X (stereotype threat, post traumatic slavery disorder, etc.) that does indeed depress *real* performance. But for a biophobe to take this tack he must first cede that IQ tests are a good predictor for the vast bulk of the population which is not affected by his factor X.

Usually, of course, the conversation doesn’t get to this point. Hysterical name calling is the name of the day – it’s far easier to denounce everyone interested in intelligence as a “racist” than to engage with ideas that threaten the blank slate.

Posted by gc_emeritus at 11:07 AM

Many of the American readers may have participated in CTY. This article on the gifted students in the program will be of interest to most GNXP readers:

The same egalitarian ardor has swept over schools across the country in recent years, slashing gifted classes and dismantling tracking systems. Programs for the gifted now receive less than two cents of every hundred dollars spent on education by the federal government…

By 1980, he had begun to track the fortunes of the most gifted among the gifted-known as “the 1-in-10,000,” because their test scores were in the top one-hundredth of one per cent nationwide. The talent search had begun…

Camerer’s career is not unusual for a High Math. We know this because he and some six thousand other alumni have now been followed for nearly thirty years, first by Stanley and then by one of his proteges, Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University. Benbow and her husband, David Lubinski, a psychologist at Vanderbilt, send out periodic questionnaires and track their subjects’ achievements year by year. Recently, they compared Camerer’s cohort-the 1-in-10,000-to a group that merely scored in the top one per cent. “There were huge differences,” Benbow says. “Huge.” By the age of thirty, the 1-in-10,000 were twice as likely to earn Ph.D.s as the other cohort, and fifty times more likely to earn Ph.D.s than the average American. “And they go to much more prestigious schools,” she added. “The top one per cent achieve enormous amounts, but the 1-in-10,000 do even better.”

It’s too early to tell how many of the 1-in-10,000 will become Nobel Prize winners. But a few, like Camerer, are already leaders in their field, and the rest have proved surprisingly predictable. Lubinski showed me a series of graphs based on gifted students’ S.A.T. scores. In college, those with high verbal and low math scores mostly majored in the social sciences and humanities; those with high math and low verbal scores gravitated toward math and engineering. Students with high scores in both areas often studied physics; those with equally low scores drifted into business. By the age of thirty-three, when the students had become professionals, physicians occupied the center of the graph-good but not great in both math and language. And lawyers had joined businesspeople in the bottom quarter.

Remember here that “low” is relative, because we are talking about people in the top .0001 of the IQ distribution. Make sure to check out Camilla Benbow’s webpage, particularly this publication on the ultra high IQ:

Adolescents identified before the age of 13 (N = 320) as having exceptional mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked over 10 years. They pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-rate expectations, with several participants having created noteworthy literary, scientific, or technical products by their early 20s. Early observed distinctions inintellectual strength (viz., quantitative reasoning ability over verbal reasoning ability, and vice versa) predicted sharp differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational pursuits. This special population strongly preferred educational opportunities tailored to their precocious rate of learning (i.e., appropriate developmental placement), with 95% using some form of acceleration to individualize their education.

Note also that Benbow and Lubinski have collaborated with Robert Plomin in his hunt for QTLs that contribute to high IQ, which we’ve blogged about several times.

Ok, let’s just enumerate the take home points:

A one hour test given at age 12 is sufficient to predict outcome statistics more than a decade later. In particular, it can identify a group of individuals more than 50-times more likely than the general population to obtain doctoral degrees. As the paper shows, the top 1 in 10000 population is overwhelmingly European and Asian. (78% European, 20% Asian) – see the Methods section. The threshold effect postulated by some investigators like Gardiner – which supposes that a 180 IQ does not afford much advantage over a 130 IQ – does not stand up to statistical investigation.

When I see studies like this, I have to admit that I’m a bit perplexed as to how biophobes fit them into their worldview. Whatever IQ measures, it’s clearly related to physiological variables and is a very strong predictor of life outcomes on both the individual and the macroeconomic scale. Its utility becomes more starkly apparent when you contrast it to other metrics – you wouldn’t see these kinds of numbers if you had measured height or weight at age 12, for example. For that matter, I seriously doubt that you’d have gotten such results by measuring wealth at age 12, not least because one’s wealth is better predicted by one’s own IQ than by one’s parents’ IQ.

So if I was a biophobe – literally, someone afraid of biological explanations – just about the only explanation for the ethnic differences observed would be some omnipresent environmental factor X (stereotype threat, post traumatic slavery disorder, etc.) that does indeed depress *real* performance. While standard as a conversational gambit, one must recognize that this plays the same role as “God’s will” does for the religious – it’s not intended to be a testable hypothesis. However, for a biophobe to take this tack he must first cede that IQ tests are a good predictor for the vast bulk of the population which is not affected by his factor X.

Usually, of course, the conversation doesn’t get to this point. Hysterical name calling is the name of the day – it’s far easier to denounce everyone interested in intelligence as a “racist” than to engage with ideas that threaten the blank slate…

Posted by gc_emeritus at 11:42 PM

Sailer and Salter’s advocacy of kin selected ethnic nepotism using similarity data faces a major theoretical hurdle.

Evolution by natural selection concerns the change of the frequency of a specific allele at a given locus. In this sense, an allele competes with other alleles at this locus. It does not matter whether the effects of an allele increase the frequency of some alleles at other loci, a gene simply has to augment its own frequency to be evolutionary successful. For this reason,an allele that influences an organism in a manner that this individual behaves altruistically towards other individuals which are genetically similar to it with respect to other loci is neither selected for nor against. But genetic similarity theory focuses on overall genetic similarity, which basically includes all these irrelevant genes or loci. Instead, the question should be whether a gene is able to detect (based on phenotypic effects) whether another organism also has this allele at the same locus, then preferential behavior towards this organism is actually a better strategy than towards other organisms. But this scenario is simply the green beard effect, which as above said is usually excluded as a real possibility. This criticism has already been put forward by other authors (e.g., Mealey, 1985)…Standard kin selection theory, however, is able to give a possibility of the evolution of altruism. When a gene causes altruism towards a relative, this relative has—with a determined probability—the same gene identical by descent, and a fortiori identical in state. This is a clear way in which an allele can benefit the same allele in another organism (at least with a certain probability). (Brigandt in-press, pg. 10)

Dr. Harpending agrees with this criticism, but unlike Brigandt, apparently sees green beard effects as a possiblity. I want to take a look at this.

In some ways, green beard effects can better account for the peculiarities of ethnic conflict. Brigandt writes, with respect to van den Berghe’s more traditionally Hamiltonian approach [1], that we would expect to see gradients of nepotism and ethnic conflict depending on how large the kinship coefficient is in any particular case. For example, we would expect Frenchmen to behave more altruistically toward each other than toward Englishmen, but more altruistically toward Englishmen than toward Poles. Wilson & Daly (via Jason) take this to its logical conclusion by suggesting “selection would have also favored altruism towards monkeys over dogs and mosquitoes over marigolds.” However, “ethnic phenomena as ethnocentrism often have not only rather clear, but also distinctive boundaries. Either you are accepted as a fellow ethnic, or you are not. This does not conform to homeopathic altruism.”

But this wouldn’t be so strange if they are green beard effects. Ingroups and outgroups, according to the green beard hypothesis, are clearly delineated; either you are a member of the group (have the green beard gene or genes) or you are not (lack the green beard gene). Still, I see more problems and inconsistencies than solutions. For example:

1) If ethnic nepotism is a green beard effect, similarity data is still irrelevant. What matters is the presence or absence of the green beard gene (or tightly linked genes) but not similarity of other alleles across all loci.

2) Though possible, green beard effects are very rare. Dr. Harpending mentioned the fire ant gp9 locus, but an additional search of the literature yeilded only two more examples, within the slime mold Dictyostelium and possibly the poison-antidote system of bacteriocin producing bacteria.

3) The hypothesis would require the parallel acquisition of different versions of these genes in all ethnic groups that exhibit nepotism. Coupled with the second point, it seems highly unlikely that an ultra-rare phenomenon would repeatedly evolve in such a short amount of time, within such a phylogenetically exclusive group.

Minimally, this needs to be subjected to experiments before we jump on the bandwagon.

Related:
Ethnic Genetic Interests: Part 2
Ethnic Genetic Interests
Interracial Marriage: Salter’s fallacy
Limits to Hamiltons Rule
On Genetic Interests
Dissin’ Dawkins

[1] I say Hamiltonian approach because van den Berghe, unlike Rushton and (apparently) Salter, relies on the relatedness of individuals by descent and not their allelic similarity across all loci.

Posted by God Fearing Atheist at 03:57 PM

As GC notes, I am not going to be posting much (though 1-2 times a week seems likely) until the winter starts to thaw out a bit…but I do want GNXP readers to be aware of the excellent site Butterflies and Wheels. The name of the site is drawn from an acrimonious (and intellectually dishonest) attack on Richard Dawkins by philosopher Mary Midgley. Required reading for The Remnant.

Posted by razib at 12:12 PM

Dusting off my bookmark shelf and I found a link to a memorable 1999 Lingua Franca article about the Sociobiology Wars. The link was, of course, as dead as Lingua Franca, so I ran it through the always useful Wayback Machine: Oh My Darwin!: Who’s the Fittest Evolutionary Thinker of Them All?. There’s a nostalgia factor here because this article was probably my first encounter with the topic, so anyone curious or new to the “Gould vs. Dawkins” rift might want to check it out. Those that have already read book-length treatments of the topic like Defenders of the Truth or The Triumph of Sociobiology probably won’t get much more out of it than they already know outside of a few Hamilton and Pinker quotes they haven’t heard before. 😉

Posted by Jason Malloy at 07:53 PM