Finished The Enigma of Reason. The basic thesis that reasoning is a way to convince people after you’ve already come to a conclusion, that is, rationalization, was already one I shared. That makes sense since one of the coauthors, Dan Sperber, has been influential in the “naturalistic” school of anthropology. If you’ve read books like In Gods We Trust The Enigma of Reason goes fast. But it is important to note that the cognitive anthropology perspective is useful in things besides religion. I’m thinking in particular of politics.
I haven’t been blogging much since I was abroad on a business trip. Specifically to the Persian Gulf. I’ll say more later, though I am going to be vague on geography since I’d rather not mix these two streams of my life (also, to be clear, this is not related to my day job).
One Family, Many Revolutions: From Black Panthers, to Silicon Valley, to Trump. I had known of this connection before, between Ben Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC guy, and David Horowitz, the right-wing provocateur. The elder Horowitz’s contention that one needs to play dirty to get anywhere is a position that I believe has more support today than it did ten years ago. The culture has come to him.
Don’t Believe in God? Maybe You’ll Try U.F.O.s. No surprise.
43 Senators Want to Make It a Federal Crime to Boycott Israeli Settlements. Here are the sponsors. I’ve never felt so sympathetic toward BDS….
My piece in India Today on South Asian genetics is hitting the printing press this week.
“I haven’t been blogging much since I was abroad on a business trip. Specifically to the Persian Gulf.”
Curious to know what the airplane travel experience was like this time around, compared to previous trips you’ve taken, in light of current affairs. Of course, if this gets into uncomfortable territory, forget that I said anything.
I can’t get too worked up about certain fields of biology, e.g. microbiome research in general, but I want to give a shout out to marine biology. It’s pretty awesome. Besides charismatic megafauna like whales and dolphins, there are other very interesting species in the ocean, e.g. cephalopods are really amazing. Sea Urchins are a cool model organism, in which genetic regulatory networks were first described and elucidated. Hydra* appear to not age or die of old age. And some of longest living animals are marine animals.
Anyone else like marine biology?
*Yes, I realize that they’re mostly in freshwater, regardless, they’re cool.
“I’m thinking in particular of politics.”
I recently read a book with an evolutionary psychological perspective on politics, called The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind. Normally I hate political literature, but I enjoyed this one.
The thesis of the book is that perceived self interest in matters of sexual conduct, identity politics, and redistributive policies has a major effect on political attitudes. Most of the American population does not have political beliefs that correspond closely to those on offer from the main political parties. Only politically active educated whites (20% of the population), whom most political pundits associated with, do. The authors show, for example, that the concept of intersectionality does not hold water, because people who have both traditionally dominant and subordinate identities want to advance the cause of both (i.e. their own cause) instead of allying themselves with other subordinate groups. They use the GSS to probe these various opinions among the population.
A startling number of the insights in this book were similar to the writings of Steve Sailer. For example, when describing the effects of segregation on different groups (blacks and whites, people with high and low levels of ability), they use an analogy from segregated baseball leagues. Unlike nearly all political writers I have seen except Sailer, these authors are perfectly comfortable with the notion that lower-class whites dislike affirmative action or that church-going blacks are uninterested in allying with gays.
Their ev-psych ideas are most clearly shown in the chapter where they describe how conservative sexual lifestyles predict both churchgoing behavior and conservative political attitudes–such people wish to raise the moral and financial cost of open sexual behavior because they do not wish to be tempted by it or to pay for it. In general, the authors see politics as a zero-sum game whose players cannot change their positions in order to placate one group without alienating others.
Curious to know what the airplane travel experience was like this time around, compared to previous trips you’ve taken, in light of current affairs. Of course, if this gets into uncomfortable territory, forget that I said anything.
no problem. i flew biz class. listened to the koran (arabic+translation) while downing unlimited red wine.
the only ‘issue’ was when an older latina woman kept barking at me to get in the line for non-citizens as i walked toward the citizen’s border & customs queue. eventually i just told her i was a citizen and she seemed surprised.
1) i was wearing a dress shirt and slacks since i had just come back from business trip
2) i had let my facial hair grow out a little (to ‘blend in’)
so i think i probably looked more FOBy than usual.
Anyone else like marine biology?
i used to be into sharks and whales as a kid. so in theory, yes. but i don’t know any good books on the topic really. i read a giant squid book a few years ago that was disappointing. also there are some tuna related books, but those are often more about ag science and economics.
@Odoacer @Razib
My daughter is currently obsessed with cephalopods of all types, I’d be very interested if anyone could recommend a book or two at either adult level (for me) or grade-school level (for her). If anyone knows of any decent documentaries on them, I would also be grateful!
So, I haven’t yet read the ‘Reason’ book, but 408 pages to make a simple point ? Or is the book filled with a large amount of ‘reason’ ?
However, I was thinking of, for instance, Fermat’s Last Theorem and Andrew Wiles ‘proof’ thereof. Many, many pages or highly developed mathematics that took many years and many contributors to create for Wiles to finally bring it all together.
Is that what Mercier and Sperber would call ‘persuasion’ ?
Not that I would dispute the idea in general, but my anecdotal ‘evidence’ is that the primary function of reasoning is to persuade the reasoner and the audience comes later, if at all.
Is that what Mercier and Sperber would call ‘persuasion’ ?
read the fucking book and lay off the sarcasm. or don’t. but then don’t be sarcastic.
New book on bushmen https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/23/books/james-suzman-affluence-without-abundance.html
In the back of my mind or when semi-conscious, I have been trying to articulate the following as a coherent question or hypothesis. I am not confident that I am there yet, but am probably at the point of diminishing returns, so prompted by that thought, this open thread, a couple of recent posts of Cochran’s, and a speculation of McWhorter’s in his recent piece on the pointlessness of obsessing about race and IQ, here goes.
Cochran
“Average IQ scores have gone up a lot over the years, although they seem to be plateauing.” (Here)
“Generally, sub-Saharan Africans have low scores on IQ tests, educational assessment tests like PISA, etc.” (Here)
McWhorter
“My purpose here, however, is not to throw my hat in with those who argue that there is a genetic racial gap in IQ. I have always hoped the black–white IQ gap was due to environmental causes. My intuition — whatever it is worth given that I am not an expert on the subject — is that the lag in performance of African-descended persons on IQ tests is the result of culture. As I have argued for 20 years now, a people are determined not only by external conditions but by the norms passed on in their culture. Many, including most academics, insist that culture is itself determined by external conditions, but this is an oversimplification. Norms and culture, once settled as habit, can persist long after the external causes that originally created them.
Black American culture, for example, grew from implacably oppressive slavery followed by a Jim Crow hegemony that recapitulated slavery in essence. These were people living in what my linguist’s training reveals as a life bound in orality rather than literacy. To live restricted to casual speech rather than the artifice of writing creates a psychology ill equipped to score highly on the distinctly modern stunt known as the IQ test. Speech emphasizes immediate experience over the athletically hypothetical. In speech, one focuses on a sequence of events — one damned thing after another — rather than on layered particularities along the lines of “If it had . . . , then it would . . . ” The latter sort of mental work, which is what a psychometric test requires one to perform, can seem irrelevant to an oral culture unless it is absolutely necessary — which it rarely is, given the broad generalities that suffice for basic human thriving. (Here)
My $0.02
That human health declined following the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of peasant or subsistence agriculture is well established.* This transition was not achieved in 1 generation but over many, as first one and then another species of plant or animal was domesticated and cultivated. Presumably the poorer health was well established by the time that the first agricultural states were established in Egypt and West and South Asia.
Given that the lifespan and physical health of peasant agriculturalists was substantially worse than that of hunter-gatherers, is there any reason to suspect that this had implications for their mental capabilities (over and above those that McWhorter suggests)?
Is there any reason not to?
If I am correct that the original decline took generations, is it plausible (likely) that reversing this would also take more than one generation?
*I am not sure at what point in the history of agriculture it has been established that morbidity demonstrably increased, thus my vagueness on this point. This constraint may have been first clearly relaxed in North America among descendants of Europeans who had available a great variety of foodstuffs from not only agriculture but also H&G, similar to some Native Americans whose food came from both sets of activities. In what follows, I will assume that it was with the development of large-scale peasant societies dependent on 1 or 2 staple crops.
listened to the koran (arabic+translation) while downing unlimited red wine.
Sweet irony.
@C.M. Campbell
I’m familiar with the thesis of that book though haven’t read it. The authors host a blog related to it: http://www.pleeps.org/
From what I gather the author’s POV can be considered a rejoinder to Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, in that it makes a case for selfish voting, albeit informed by cultural rather than economic notions of “self interest.”
@phanmo
Kings of Camouflage is a NOVA special that was pretty good. You can find the full length episode on Youtube. I’ve been told, but haven’t read, that Kraken by Wendy Williams is good.
Just noticed that you have your archives back to 2002 (long before I was aware of you, much less read you) up on gnxp.nofe.me. Congratulations. Just when I thought I had too much spare time on my hands.
Also, “FOBy”? –
– FRIEND OF BILLy? I wouldn’t have taken you for one (either the AA or the Clinton variety).
– FREE ON BOARDy?
@marcel proust
Well… population density increased tremendously with the neolithic revolution. So doesn’t that imply that you should take those studies finding that average lifespan decreased with a grain of salt?
New Topic: Zombie Chickens!
General recipe: genetically modify a chicken so it is not conscious. The moral basis for not eating meat is removed. Would you buy and eat it?
Guy
re: zombies. also get rid of pain sensitivity. though that might causes issues in inadvertent self-harm. there are serious ppl thinking about it, and perhaps may fund projects in this area.
@Guy Tipton: For starters, check out Wikipedia. Then google
health consequences of neolithic revolution
For instance, the summary of an article from ScienceDaily:
When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: the height and health of the people declined. The pattern holds up across standardized studies of whole skeletons in populations, say researchers in the first comprehensive, global review of the literature regarding stature and health during the agriculture transition.
Or, perhaps this from almost 10 years ago, by a prominent blogger on evolution and genetics:
Reading some stuff on the Neolithic transition. [extended quotations of other authors here] The stuff about the dietary deficiencies are well known.
When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: the height and health of the people declined.
On the other hand, is it not possible – indeed likely – that such decline, even if true, was not uniform across the agricultural populations? In other words, since high density agricultural populations were not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers (or even pastoral semi-nomads), I think it’s very possible and even likely the elites – those with excess productive capacity/property or otherwise lived off such excesses – in the agricultural societies (eventually) fared better than hunter-gatherers.
re: zombies. also get rid of pain sensitivity. though that might causes issues in inadvertent self-harm.
Removing pain sensitivity might also increase violence toward other chickens, not just self-harm, no? Can you imagine, say, 20,000 chickens at a farm all pecking each other to death?
@marcel proust
I am aware of articles and studies about the negative consequences of the neolithic revolution (however pastoralism may have a different trajectory than agriculture). However, how do you square that with the population increase? Assuming the same number of attempted pregnancies (a reach I’m sure) doesn’t the average lifespan have to go up? At least until the Malthusian limits are reached.
Cheers,
Guy
@marcel proust
I think the environmental effects on IQ are apparent in the IQ of Native Americans and Polynesians – two of the closest populations to East Asians genetically, but both score less than Africans in IQ tests (as do Australian Aboriginals). To me it’s obvious that current observable cultural/social/economic effects on IQ are greater than the current observed black-white gap – we can’t reliably put any black-white IQ different down to genetics until our society has evolved to a point where Native Americans outperform Europeans.
if cognitive performance diff btwn groups are due to in part (or all) to genetic differences, i wouldn’t put too much emphasis on phylogenetic distance. it is almost certainly due to soft selection on standing variation.
(also, we know most modern populations are admixes btwn very different groups in the holocene; the amerindian+east asian connection dates to ~15 thousand years before the present)
the amerindian+east asian connection dates to ~15 thousand years before the present
Long before intensive agriculture and urbanization set in East Asia, which greatly increased IQ gains in all likelihood, no?
we can’t reliably put any black-white IQ different down to genetics until our society has evolved to a point where Native Americans outperform Europeans.
This is incomprehensible to me. Would you please elaborate?
WRT pain sensitivity in zombie chickens. Replace it with the three laws.
Assuming the same number of attempted pregnancies (a reach I’m sure)
No, not a reach. Definitely wrong. Hunter-gatherer mothers have to carry children along and want at least a three year gap between kids. Which can be accomplished by long-term breast-feeding which suppresses ovulation.
Farmer women are sedentary. Also, they can wean young children onto gruel at a pretty young age.
Long before intensive agriculture and urbanization set in East Asia, which greatly increased IQ gains in all likelihood, no?
i think a lot of quantitative traits have been selected for much of human history. yes, i think we need to look to the holocene for a lot of it (as you may know there is plenty of evidence of this in regards to height/body form).
Tobus, Razib, and Twinkie might be interested in this post: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/06/complex-trait-adaptation-and-branching.html
Particularly, “We find evidence for polygenic adaptation in East Asian populations at variants that have been associated with educational attainment in European GWAS.”
Something tells me we won’t have to wait “until Native Americans in our society outperform Europeans” before we know the genetics of cognitive ability.
the last author on that preprint is a good friend, so yeah, i knew about that.
but that’s not really the most important stuff. there is a reason c murray keeps acting super confident that the shit is going to hit the fan in ~5 years. there are things many people already know but are not saying. perhaps it will be buried, who knows?
truth is a small thing against the shiny objects in this world 🙂
@Guy Tipton
However, how do you square that with the population increase?
1) I don’t even try. This topic is clearly not my wheelhouse. I try to read widely & intelligently, think about what I’ve read, and come away with some understanding and questions (some of which, like my original comment on IQ, I post here hoping for some answers). What I can do is to repeat what others whom I believe to be more knowledgeable have said on this score: e.g., Jared Diamond
2) From the Wikipedia link in my original comment (my emphasis below),
My understanding of this passage is that
* with the greater number of calories available, mothers could wean their children at an earlier age, but/and this returned them to fertility more quickly. Whether or not there were a similar number of attempted pregnancies, there were more conceptions carried to term with agriculture.
* the greater population size (&/or density that resulted led to many of the other developments associated with agriculture, including the ability of agricultural societies to push H&G societies aside
That agriculture results in a less healthy population than H&G is due to several factors.
a) Domesticated animals and the greater population density due to agriculture led to an increase in both disease and parasite incidence.
b) Although agriculture increased available calories, it reduced the variety of food stuffs, leading to nutritional deficiencies: e.g., scurvy, rickets and anemia.
c) Agriculture required much harder physical labor than H&G and many more hours of work/week (at least during planting and harvest for most crops and during the rest of cultivation for many others).
In a piece that is probably somewhat dated, Diamond discusses several of these phenomena. The tone of this piece strikes me as overblown and I am not endorsing them, but see the point 1 above: the list is why I am linking to it.
@Twinkie
Me: we can’t reliably put any black-white IQ different down to genetics until our society has evolved to a point where Native Americans outperform Europeans
You: This is incomprehensible to me. Would you please elaborate?
I’m suggesting that we can use the indigenous/white IQ gap as a yardstick for how much social inequity (for want of a better term) is still affecting IQ scores.
My assumption is that Native Americans/Polynesians have an inherent genetic IQ similar to East Asians (close genetically, developed agriculture and urbanisation (NAm)/ocean navigation (Poly) etc.). I’m also assuming that race-based differences are becoming smaller over time (“society evolving”), and that one day Native Americans (and so presumably African Americans) will not be at any genuine disadvantage in society. While Native Americans are scoring worse than Europeans on IQ tests then we know that there are still non-genetic confounders at play and we shouldn’t really be looking at “race” for an explanation… it’s a clear indicator that it’s not a level playing field.
I accept both your and Razib’s points about Holocene selection, but point out that Native Americans and Polynesians also developed/practiced agriculture, that Mayans, Incas and Aztecs had urban cities rivaling the biggest in Europe, and that Polynesians dominated ocean travel/navigation for thousands of years before any other culture. I find it very hard to accept a priori that these populations had significantly lower IQ than Eurasians at the time of contact.
My assumption is that Native Americans/Polynesians have an inherent genetic IQ similar to East Asians (close genetically, developed agriculture and urbanisation (NAm)/ocean navigation (Poly) etc.).
i don’t grant that we should say this is ‘close genetically.’ there are several points
1) btwn NA/EA the last common ancestors by and large diverged 15-20,000 years ago
2) 30-40% of amerindian ancestry (ANE) diverged from northeast asians closer to 40,000 years ago (ANE is in a clade with WHG, not eastern non-africans, albeit their divergence is old)
3) around 25% of polynesian ancestry is melanesian. diverged from that of other eastern non-africans on the order of 45 thousand years ago. a substantial minority of the ancestry of island austronesians in SE Asia seem to have ancestry derivable to pre-agricultural pops (more like the semang of interior malaysia).
the argument for polynesians is stronger than amerindians re: closeness, as austronesians do seem to have emerged out of the same agricultural tumult as the other east asian groups over the last 10,000 years.
i’ll let you debate the particulars of the IQ issue because there’s a lot less clarity there. but we do have clarity on the genetic ancestry aspect now. i generally dismiss arguments that are pre-holocene because few populations in their current form date to before the holocene….
@Razib: i don’t grant that we should say this is ‘close genetically’.
Fair enough, but they are definitely closer than Europeans, and so will at least have the standing variation common to other Eurasians, and possibly some specific to East Asians.
If we ignore the modern day situation and just look at the genetics and the historical accomplishments of Mesoamerican civilisations, I think it’s defensible to expect that, everything else being equal, Native American IQ should plot similar to other Eurasians, and probably somewhere between Europeans and East Asians… if we accept that genetics + agriculture is a major player, they should definitely be scoring well above Africans. Is that a fair call?
(FWIW I think the same expectation would probably apply to South Asia as well)
Correction: After double-checking, turns out Native American average IQ is *NOT* lower than Africans as I stated earlier, and neither is Polynesian IQ. Both are in the high 80s/low 90s, above the African American average of 85… the indigenous/white gap is smaller than the black/white gap, not larger as I state above. (Last looked into this 4-5 years ago and must have hard-coded some bad data into my brain! My apologies.)
Fair enough, but they are definitely closer than Europeans, and so will at least have the standing variation common to other Eurasians, and possibly some specific to East Asians.
this seems defensible. though they did go through a bottleneck.
Native American IQ should plot similar to other Eurasians, and probably somewhere between Europeans and East Asians… if we accept that genetics + agriculture is a major player, they should definitely be scoring well above Africans. Is that a fair call?
this sort of stuff is treacherous obviously. if we use the ag-schools-us-logic the brightest populations in the world should be living between the mediterranean and zagros mountains. thank god that that doesn’t seem to be true! (seeing as how this was lately isis’ domain). we really don’t have a good model that makes predictions well with what we know about human evolutionary history (we know a lot more than we used to).
what we do know is that psychometric tests vary by group in consistent ways and have for the past century or so when we’ve had OK psychometric tests. i will take an interest in the topic when genetic data, as opposed to model building/hypothesis generation, becomes available (should be soon).
Correction: After double-checking, turns out Native American average IQ is *NOT* lower than Africans as I stated earlier, and neither is Polynesian IQ. Both are in the high 80s/low 90s, above the African American average of 85… the indigenous/white gap is smaller than the black/white gap, not larger as I state above. (Last looked into this 4-5 years ago and must have hard-coded some bad data into my brain! My apologies.)
i actually misunderstood what you wrote and did not read the error (the converse). 🙂
in any case, updating facts based on new information is good.
I read the article you posted to your twitter feed a few days ago on conscientiousness. Not that it really said anything new that I wasn’t aware of before, but it’s a subject I’ve often been interested in, as someone who has rather low conscientiousness (diagnosed ADHD in childhood actually). I’ve been able to get in life because my intelligence can generally make up for my natural laziness, but I’m self aware enough to know how much more I could accomplish if I wasn’t disorganized and a procrastinator. I’ve tried explaining why low conscientiousness is so hard to break to my wife (who is on the extreme high end). It’s basically the feeling that, after putting in the minimal amount of effort, things are pretty much “good enough” and you can move on to something more enjoyable. I’ve learned to fight against it in my professional life, but it’s very hard to combat outside of this realm.
Regardless, the article made me wonder something I hadn’t considered before. If it really predicts success in virtually every life field why is there significant variation in this trait which appears to be controlled by biology? Obviously personal success does not equate to reproductive success, which could explain part of the reason. Beyond this, could it be as simple as in Malthusian times, someone who works more than is required to survive is as likely to waste precious calories on useless activities as they are to find a way to better their lives?
KZ, frequency dependence i assume. also, i assume that in some env low conscientiousness “pays off.” like conformity or lack of.
I’m suggesting that we can use the indigenous/white IQ gap as a yardstick for how much social inequity (for want of a better term) is still affecting IQ scores.
And based on what do you make that assumption? Have you looked at adoption studies, for example?
My assumption is that Native Americans/Polynesians have an inherent genetic IQ similar to East Asians (close genetically, developed agriculture and urbanisation (NAm)/ocean navigation (Poly) etc.).
Your assumption is unsubstantiated. And you ignore the very likely possibility that East Asian (or European) high IQ evolved relatively recently, i.e. in the past 10,000 years or so, through large scale agriculture, urbanization (with attendant bureaucracy and commerce), and complex warfare.
Native Americans and Polynesians also developed/practiced agriculture, that Mayans, Incas and Aztecs had urban cities rivaling the biggest in Europe, and that Polynesians dominated ocean travel/navigation for thousands of years before any other culture.
When I wrote of intensive agriculture and urbanization in East Asia, I am talking about INTENSIVE, i.e. highly organized and complex, agriculture and urbanization that probably started about 7-8,000 years ago. Polynesians and northern Native Americans never practiced intensive agriculture or built cities. Mesoamericans achieved somewhat similar feats, but were limited by environment (soil, climate, and lack of high strength beasts of burden), and they only got there about 500 years ago. Perhaps Mesoamericans might have achieved a similar level of civilizational progression if unimpeded for another 6,500-7,500 years (though I have my doubts given their isolation), but as it were they were not left alone, so never quite got there. And since their elites were eliminated (or at least demographically rendered meaningless), whatever cognitive their elites accrued likely vanished with the European conquests in the general Mesoamerican populations.
Polynesians were brave and adventurous maritime navigators, but their technology was extremely primitive. And while they might descend from Taiwanese aborigines, even that population is of a very different cognitive (and I think also genetic) profile than, say, Han Chinese or Koreans/Japanese.
I find it very hard to accept a priori that these populations had significantly lower IQ than Eurasians at the time of contact.
Why not? Eurasians have been building cities, developing new technologies, and constantly competing with each other in massive and complex ways for 10,000 years. The selection pressures of such, ever more complex and deadly competitions must have been tremendous on cognitive capacities. That “a priori” is far more likely than your assumption “that Native Americans/Polynesians have an inherent genetic IQ similar to East Asians.”
c) Agriculture required much harder physical labor than H&G and many more hours of work/week (at least during planting and harvest for most crops and during the rest of cultivation for many others).
Some thoughts about this:
1. Sebastian Junger in his “Tribe” discusses the phenomenon of Europeans settlers abandoning their people and joining Native American tribes (and ones who were captured refusing to be repatriated or those who were repatriated running away again to join the Indians) while the opposite almost never happened. One major reason was, of course, the intense communal bonding of a hunter-gatherer (or quasi-nomadic/semi-agricultural) band. But another major factor he cites is that life was pretty EASY in a hunter-gatherer society (so long as, of course, low population density was maintained) compared to the back-breaking life of a farmer or worker in colonial European society.
2. Agriculture may increase population density tremendously, but it tends to lower mobilization rate of a society. Farmers – at best – make part-time soldiers who can only campaign seasonally. Usually, only a small percentage that can subsist on excess production (king and his retinue) can be professional warriors. An exception, for example, was Sparta, whose full-citizen peers were renowned as excellent warriors, because they did not farm, but trained full-time (but, of course, they had to be constantly on guard for helot revolts and, ultimately, their lower fertility did them in).
3. In hunter-gatherer bands, every man/older boy is a warrior. They have exceptionally high mobilization rates. However, their population density is quite low, so they could rarely pose a significant or existential military problem for agricultural societies.
4. So, who were the best “baddies”? People in between the two – pastoral semi-nomads. They had the high mobilization rates of hunter-gatherers, but also population density substantially higher than pure nomads or hunter-gatherers. Both their own production (livestock) and their ability to trade with (or occasionally raid/seek subsidies from) agricultural civilizations increased their numbers as well as access to advanced technology. Contrary to Jared Diamond’s notion of “farmer power,” much of pre-modern human history is a story of the struggle between semi-nomadic pastoralists and agricultural civilizations, with the FORMER usually getting their way. Hunter-gatherers were usually relegated to the fringes and often died out or ignored (because they were too few in number) unless they happened to sit on something valuable.
c) Agriculture required much harder physical labor than H&G and many more hours of work/week (at least during planting and harvest for most crops and during the rest of cultivation for many others).
so H&G pops are and were more robust than their farmer neighbors. just read some stuff that they had 25% more dense bones. why? better diet one reason. but another given was that they were mobile. i don’t deny farmers do back-breaking labor. peasants look fit. but it is repetitive in a way H&G lifestyle is not. perhaps it produced a different physique?
but another given was that they were mobile. i don’t deny farmers do back-breaking labor. peasants look fit. but it is repetitive in a way H&G lifestyle is not. perhaps it produced a different physique?
Often times, “back-breaking” repetitive labor breaks down bodies (esp. on a poor diet). And being relegated to that kind of work while still young can’t be good for growth, especially bone growth. Hunter-gatherer or semi-nomadic pastoralism probably produced much fitter, “athletic” bodies, ones more suited to the needs of warfare.
Plus, the latter probably suffered A LOT less from disease than farmer populations (though that probably had its own problems in terms of wide-scale immunity).
if HG groups were easy to mobilize toward violence, and had enuf density, one might also suggest that they were often below the malthusian limit due to the fact they ‘checked’ each other’s population sizes.
Karl – I’m trying to explain this partly to try to understand it myself, because I only recently started to take much interest in it.
Humans are very ‘fuzzy’; we’re the most complex, unpredictable creatures on earth. Correlations that are regarded as very high in Psychology and Social Science, we would regard as too low to be useful in Science or Engineering.
The hierarchy of traits that predict favourable life outcomes is 1. Intelligence, 2. Conscientiousness – it’s actually more like Industriousness, but that doesn’t seem to correlate with anything and no one knows where it comes from, so Conscientiousness is the best available proxy, and it seems to work as a predictor. So, if you get someone who is Intelligent + Conscientious, that should be a good predictor (as good as predictions get in Psychology) of favourable life outcomes.
But there are also personality traits that correlate negatively for favourable life outcomes. A notable one is Neuroticism. So you could have someone who is Intelligent + Conscientious + Neurotic, and that combination might not lead to good outcomes.
Highly conscientious people can literally work themselves to death, and premature death is clearly not a good outcome. A lot of highly successful people are actually workaholics, and they need to watch it.
Plus there are arbitrary things that can get in the way; various random insults that life throws at people that prevent them achieving their potential.
In a genuine meritocracy, the most Intelligent + Conscientious individual who is also low on negative traits like Neuroticism should come out on top of the dominance hierarchy, and that should be the best outcome for everyone, but we can see in Western democracies that doesn’t always happen, so there are factors that get in the way of that happening. Everyone knows of cheaters and people who game the system, or trade on personal influence through being well connected.
When it comes to choosing marriage partners, women tend to choose partners who are equal or higher SES than themselves, and men choose marriage partners who are equal or lower SES than themselves. It necessarily has to be that way, because if both men and women were only willing to marry someone who is higher SES than themselves, it wouldn’t work; no one would ever get married. So you can’t have a system where the most intelligent and conscientious people are always marrying each other; it doesn’t work.
My Dad was a secondary school teacher of STEM subjects, and the example he gave me I think is relevant: a highly successful doctor might often choose a ‘trophy’ wife – someone who is physically very attractive, but as dumb as shit (which might suit him because she might also be very agreeable and compliant, in exchange for money and social status). Predictably, their kid would come out a lot less intelligent than the father. Then on Parents’ Day, the father would turn up at the school and demand to know from the teacher why Junior was not doing better in school, and my Dad’s job would be to try to explain to the father that Junior was doing the best that he could, and he as a teacher was doing his level best to teach him, but that the kid was just dumb, and getting straight A’s in Mathematics and Science was just beyond him, and he would have a happier life if he just became a plumber or carpenter. He told me that, in his teaching experience, he saw this pattern endlessly repeating itself. I find it kind of ironic that my Dad, who was no great genius himself, knew that damn well by the 1960s, but that education ‘experts’ today seem to not get it. Or they do get it, but just can’t admit it, otherwise they would be torn to shreds by SJWs. My Dad had a hard enough time in the 1960s telling highly successful men that their kids were too stupid to follow in their footsteps, and it has all become infinitely more difficult since then.
And as Razib noted, there could be environments in which people who are low on Conscientiousness can be highly successful. Jordan Peterson (from whom I have filched most of this stuff, at the expense of watching a lot of very long lectures from him) said that Creative people (who are actually pretty rare) are typically low on Conscientiousness, but they could be highly successful. The message I get from that is to appreciate the Michaelangelos and Musks, but watch out for the Zuckerbergs. Elon Musk clearly feels social responsibility; I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg does.
Razib –
Thanks for the kind words earlier regarding my son.
Recently we had a developmental assessment of him to ensure the treatments had not hurt his cognitive development. Although the doctor believed he has ADHD (likely inherited from me), the developmental test showed his cognitive skills were a year or two ahead of average for his age. This gives us an awkward choice to make. Due to his treatment, he is very small for his age (probably right around the 5th percentile). Given he had a September birthday, we have the option of enrolling him in kindergarten when he was four/almost five. We were formerly thinking about waiting another year, because at least it would mean up until his teenage years it wouldn’t be so obvious he was so much shorter than his peers. The doctor thought it was a really bad idea in terms of his cognitive aptitude and likelihood of attention issues. We’re not sure which decision to make now.
John Massey –
Thanks for the detailed response. As I noted, my wife is basically a polar opposite on the conscientiousness spectrum from myself. Unfortunately, she’s also a bit neurotic and a perfectionist, so the amount of effort she puts into projects doesn’t translate into a greatly higher payoff than myself. She’s basically always working – even in her “down” time she mostly reads practical things like researching solutions for a home improvement project. But she spends weeks to months researching small projects trying to make decisions, and sets up work processes to make everything harder on herself and more time-consuming. It’s really frustrating sometimes to deal with, because my own operative norm is to try and do things as simply and quickly as possible in order to get back to things I enjoy, like reading on subjects with no practical value whatsoever. I am hopeful that our two children will end up somewhere between us on this.
Karl – Meant to say, I’m happy to learn that things are looking better for your son. Long may it be so.
@Twinkie: Agriculture may increase population density tremendously, but it tends to lower mobilization rate of a society. Farmers – at best – make part-time soldiers who can only campaign seasonally.
One point (not necessarily in contradiction to what you say, exactly); farmers as we know them, only in about the last 3,000 years at most (recorded history) of a much longer Eurasian agricultural history, may be kind of the end point of a historical process of trying to squeeze more productivity out of land. Lots of hard work on often small areas of marginal land, without much opportunity for extra nutrition from hunting, or free range foraging pigs, goats, sheep. A very Malthusian point with lots of labour and technical knowledge for relatively low nutrition. Established “stationary bandits” perpetuate the situation by providing a basic check on violence – balance more towards clever men working bad land than brave men fighting for good.
It seems kind of tough for nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists to go to the same kind of place, for the obvious reasons.
Earlier agriculturalists may not have laboured under the same kind of restrictions on their time, or the same restrictions in diet. For people who enter the Western historical records at something like an earlier stage of agricultural intensity, we might think of Maori, or the early agricultural tribal groups of pre-Columbian North America… (Polynesians and northern Native Americans as you mention in a post above).
Earlier agriculturalists may not have laboured under the same kind of restrictions on their time, or the same restrictions in diet.
Earlier agriculturalists were probably “semi-” agriculturalists, and probably even semi-mobile. In other words, for some groups, modes of production may have been multiple and not as discrete/specialized as they became later. Also, as tribal confederations grew, some polities probably contained populations of different modes of production.
if HG groups were easy to mobilize toward violence, and had enuf density, one might also suggest that they were often below the malthusian limit due to the fact they ‘checked’ each other’s population sizes.
As you know, that was certainly the case with semi-nomadic pastoralists. For example, the Mongols were not a serious military power for a long time, because they were busy warring with each other.
Twinkie: Earlier agriculturalists were probably “semi-” agriculturalists, and probably even semi-mobile.
Well, I would simply say they were agriculturalists (primarily cultivators to very high degrees), and just not under Malthusian conditions or pacification from a states / elites.
But if we define agriculturalists as only being those groups who are primarily crop cultivators under fairly Malthusian conditions that force them to resort to intensive working and have relatively low violence because it’s checked by third parties, then I suppose we could call them semi-agriculturalist.
I guess the point (a technicality perhaps) to me is that it seems likely to be Malthusianism and states that make a difference between mobilisation / violence between pastoralist (stockbreeding, pasturing) societies and agriculturalists (crop cultivators) and rather than anything relating to the different modes of production working outside these variables.