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> these disparities are due to being in the right place at the right time rather than racial superiority The problem is that many of the supposed adaptive phen

by wahern 7y ago

> these disparities are due to being in the right place at the right time rather than racial superiority The problem is that many of the supposed adaptive phenotypes were conjecture or based on poor science. Such sloppy characterizations, when combined with the seeming authoritative weight of genetics, is fodder for racism. It's like the stereotype in the U.S. that blacks are genetically better at singing and sports. It's a "compliment" that actually serves to justify racism--the implied corollary is that to be good at those things is to be maladaptive at intellectual endeavors. There's no real scientific evidence to back it up. What "evidence" exists is far better explained by environmental factors (i.e. racism), but superficially it all seems intuitive because the entire society is constructed upon that narrative. (Actually, traits like athleticism positively correlate with intelligence, but that's irrelevant because the stereotype was flawed from inception.) The only way to suppress such racist tendencies in humanity (to characterize and group people en masse and to rationalize post hoc our behaviors) is to be highly skeptical about proposed substantive genetic differences, particularly those which seemingly justify existing cultural or social differences. When they do exist they almost never (if at all) operate in the way we originally believed. Even recent scientific history (as in past couple of decades) is littered with hypotheses and evidence of this sort that turned out to be faulty.

xondono 7y ago
> The problem is that many of the supposed adaptive phenotypes were conjecture or based on poor science. What phenotypes? It’s been a while since I read GGS but as far as I remember the argument of the book lies directly on the environment, not on human adaptation on that environment. Since reading the book I’ve seen a lot of comments claiming racism on Diamonds part that to this day I can’t understand. I’ve seriously considered the possibility that there’s two different editions of the book, because I find it hard to justify any racist view using the book.
- wahern 7y ago
  > That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. > .... > That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners.... It's hard to pinpoint anything as boldly suspect as what he wrote early in the book, but in searching what stood out to me was his casual use of words like "evolved" and "evolution". In various parts it's ambiguous whether he perceives a genetic component to the evolution of various political societies. I thought I remembered a part where he says some seafaring peoples score higher on spatial reasoning tests, from which he infers an evolutionary genetic adaption. But I couldn't find it. FWIW, here's the full text: https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel/Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_S...
  - manfredo 7y ago
    The full quote is: > Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euro- pean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. > That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali's question. This is part of the prologue where Diamond rejects this genetic explanation, as well as Classical environmental determinism: > A GENETIC EXPLANATION isn't the only possible answer to Yali's question. Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent. > Although formerly popular, this type of explanation, too, fails to survive scrutiny. As we shall see, the peoples of northern Europe contributed nothing of fundamental importance to Eurasian civilization until the last thousand years; they simply had the good luck to live at a geographic location where they were likely to receive advances (such as agriculture, wheels, writing, and metallurgy) developed in warmer parts of Eurasia. In the New World the cold regions at high latitude were even more of a human backwater. The sole Native American societies to develop writing arose in Mexico south of the Tropic of Cancer; the oldest New World pottery comes from near the equator in tropical South America; and the New World society generally considered the most advanced in art, astronomy, and other respects was the Classic Maya society of the tropical Yucatan and Guatemala in the first millennium A.D. (some paragraphs later) > Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book. And the answer he offer to refute the racist biological explanation is a geographic one.
Symmetry 7y ago
Would you find it racist to say that people living closer to the equator have darker skins? While there's no evidence for any complex adaptive differences between groups of people there are certainly adaptive responses to specific environmental hazards that we can see. People's levels of melonin in their skin balance skin cancer against vitamin D deficiency against folate deficiency, at least for their ancestral environment. Some groups of hunters living in the far north are harmed less by a nearly all meat diet than most people would be. Many groups living at high altitudes have higher quantities of red blood cells or similar adaptations. And since Guns, Germs, and Steel came out we've located genes influencing the immune system that trade off resistance to parasites versus resistance to contagious disease and found that Native Americans tend to have genomes that make the former trade while settled peoples in Eurasia tend to have genes pushing more in the later direction. So Jared Diamond's assertions about disease resistance have been entirely born out.
manfredo 7y ago
I'm not sure I follow. Are you talking about Diamond's book? Diamond not only did not attribute the course of human history to genetics or phenotypes, he has argued against such an explanation on multiple occasions. He attributes the higher development of Eurasia to geographic features: an environment more conducive to agriculture, and has a large amount of land in the latitudes conducive to building dense urban centers, among other things. This is why the allegations of racism hold little to no water: by explaining these disparities with geography, the book is a decisive counterargument to the narrative of genetic superiority.

by wahern 7y ago

xondono 7y ago

> The problem is that many of the supposed adaptive phenotypes were conjecture or based on poor science. What phenotypes? It’s been a while since I read GGS but as far as I remember the argument of the book lies directly on the environment, not on human adaptation on that environment. Since reading the book I’ve seen a lot of comments claiming racism on Diamonds part that to this day I can’t understand. I’ve seriously considered the possibility that there’s two different editions of the book, because I find it hard to justify any racist view using the book.

wahern 7y ago
> That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. > .... > That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners.... It's hard to pinpoint anything as boldly suspect as what he wrote early in the book, but in searching what stood out to me was his casual use of words like "evolved" and "evolution". In various parts it's ambiguous whether he perceives a genetic component to the evolution of various political societies. I thought I remembered a part where he says some seafaring peoples score higher on spatial reasoning tests, from which he infers an evolutionary genetic adaption. But I couldn't find it. FWIW, here's the full text: https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel/Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_S...
- manfredo 7y ago
  The full quote is: > Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euro- pean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. > That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali's question. This is part of the prologue where Diamond rejects this genetic explanation, as well as Classical environmental determinism: > A GENETIC EXPLANATION isn't the only possible answer to Yali's question. Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent. > Although formerly popular, this type of explanation, too, fails to survive scrutiny. As we shall see, the peoples of northern Europe contributed nothing of fundamental importance to Eurasian civilization until the last thousand years; they simply had the good luck to live at a geographic location where they were likely to receive advances (such as agriculture, wheels, writing, and metallurgy) developed in warmer parts of Eurasia. In the New World the cold regions at high latitude were even more of a human backwater. The sole Native American societies to develop writing arose in Mexico south of the Tropic of Cancer; the oldest New World pottery comes from near the equator in tropical South America; and the New World society generally considered the most advanced in art, astronomy, and other respects was the Classic Maya society of the tropical Yucatan and Guatemala in the first millennium A.D. (some paragraphs later) > Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book. And the answer he offer to refute the racist biological explanation is a geographic one.

Symmetry 7y ago

Would you find it racist to say that people living closer to the equator have darker skins? While there's no evidence for any complex adaptive differences between groups of people there are certainly adaptive responses to specific environmental hazards that we can see. People's levels of melonin in their skin balance skin cancer against vitamin D deficiency against folate deficiency, at least for their ancestral environment. Some groups of hunters living in the far north are harmed less by a nearly all meat diet than most people would be. Many groups living at high altitudes have higher quantities of red blood cells or similar adaptations. And since Guns, Germs, and Steel came out we've located genes influencing the immune system that trade off resistance to parasites versus resistance to contagious disease and found that Native Americans tend to have genomes that make the former trade while settled peoples in Eurasia tend to have genes pushing more in the later direction. So Jared Diamond's assertions about disease resistance have been entirely born out.

manfredo 7y ago

I'm not sure I follow. Are you talking about Diamond's book? Diamond not only did not attribute the course of human history to genetics or phenotypes, he has argued against such an explanation on multiple occasions. He attributes the higher development of Eurasia to geographic features: an environment more conducive to agriculture, and has a large amount of land in the latitudes conducive to building dense urban centers, among other things. This is why the allegations of racism hold little to no water: by explaining these disparities with geography, the book is a decisive counterargument to the narrative of genetic superiority.