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OK, single gene effects are the easy ones to find, so we find them first. We know height is massively polygenetic though. The point of the Tibetan story is tha
by iguy 9y ago
OK, single gene effects are the easy ones to find, so we find them first. We know height is massively polygenetic though.
The point of the Tibetan story is that they (may) benefit from > 200k years of adaptation to that geography, via these ancestral humans. Whereas the Andean people had < 10k years.
Re transfer of IQ, why is it always beneficial? There are always trade-offs -- more blood to the brain is going to make it harder to survive famines, for instance. Some monkey species are dumber than others because it was not profitable in their niche. Domesticated herbivores are dumb too. It could be that this doesn't apply to us, e.g. if we are the result of some recent breakthrough.
- Symmetry 9y agoThere are certainly tradeoffs with IQ. There one allele that raises your IQ a bunch but has a good chance of causing you to die early. And if you had a domesticated species of human I'd expect that that might hurt intelligence. But given that humans' primary competition has been other humans and given that this is true the world over I expect that IQ would be roughly equally valuable everywhere and so we shouldn't see big differences, genetically, between populations like you do with adaptations to other sorts of particular environments.
- iguy 9y agoIn the western word, today's environment seems to select against IQ -- number of children anti-correlates. This wasn't true 200, 300 years ago. So that's one example of two environments which value this trait very differently. Sure, one of them is highly unusual... The flores island hobbits are another example, where it seems that humaniods evolved quite dramatically smaller brains. But islands are also unusual, obviously.