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>The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual in a g

>The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends. Yet it is equally bad reasoning to ignore the prior as it is to refrain from updating it. One form of foolishness will find you unpersoned, the other such mental handicap allows one to signal great virtue. As it takes great moral restraint to distrust your lying eyes. We are in interesting ideological waters. The great taboo of our age is quantifying human capability, precisely when our tools have never been sharper. Cognitive genomics is joining this strange fray. Extremely politically incorrect truths are beginning to stumble reluctantly out of the field. The confirmation of a dysgenic trend in Iceland is one of the milder examples:http://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727 http://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727. Much more controversial truths are yet to come. One wonders how much truth our mental Lysenkoism will survive. It has resisted all reason so far, so one must bet it will continue.

escape_goat 7y ago
If you measure a minuscule rate across a generational timescale and then seek to promote it as "substantial on an evolutionary timescale" then you're no longer doing science. It's another version of the typical science journalism and market hucksterism of the "if these trends continue" argument. Will this trend continue on an evolutionary time scale? Our biological history suggests that it will not, and nothing but our ill-examined fears suggests that it will. What this paper does successfully do is find faint evidence that gives comfort to the old trope of "poor/stupid/brown/religious people have more babies than rich/smart/white/enlightened people, therefore the world is doomed because they shall inherent the earth." However, the problem with this is not the correct observation that people who produce more offspring increase their genetic contribution to future generations, the problem is the inability to imagine a 'we' that includes the 'poor/stupid/brown/religious' people that the speaker is 99.9999% identical to and the projection of an imagined social & cultural defeat of the individual (who is going to experience a very thorough personal defeat at the hands of senescence, in short order, no matter what) by people who 'look different' onto the reality of what is actually going on to the human genome over the far vaster timescales of actual genetic change.

escape_goat 7y ago

If you measure a minuscule rate across a generational timescale and then seek to promote it as "substantial on an evolutionary timescale" then you're no longer doing science. It's another version of the typical science journalism and market hucksterism of the "if these trends continue" argument. Will this trend continue on an evolutionary time scale? Our biological history suggests that it will not, and nothing but our ill-examined fears suggests that it will. What this paper does successfully do is find faint evidence that gives comfort to the old trope of "poor/stupid/brown/religious people have more babies than rich/smart/white/enlightened people, therefore the world is doomed because they shall inherent the earth." However, the problem with this is not the correct observation that people who produce more offspring increase their genetic contribution to future generations, the problem is the inability to imagine a 'we' that includes the 'poor/stupid/brown/religious' people that the speaker is 99.9999% identical to and the projection of an imagined social & cultural defeat of the individual (who is going to experience a very thorough personal defeat at the hands of senescence, in short order, no matter what) by people who 'look different' onto the reality of what is actually going on to the human genome over the far vaster timescales of actual genetic change.