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There was a theory floating about on Twitter about apparent European noble practices regarding child birth. Basically, nobles that failed out of society for wh
by bingohbangoh 5y ago
There was a theory floating about on Twitter about apparent European noble practices regarding child birth.
Basically, nobles that failed out of society for whatever reason (drunkards, second borns, etc.) would intermix with the lower classes. This would propagate out "superior" genes that may have aided increases in intelligence over time.
This is quite controversial but it is thought provoking.
- cblconfederate 5y agoHighly doubtful considering their recessive traits. Evidently intelligence doesnt correlate with social dominance , its the same today or in roman times
- zuminator 5y agoWhy in the world would nobles have superior genes in the first place? Since being noble is merely hereditary by "blood," there's no genetic pressure that would select for intelligence. If anything due to intermarriage they'd be more likely to have birth defects leading to low intelligence, I would imagine.
- jcadam 5y ago> If anything due to intermarriage they'd be more likely to have birth defects leading to low intelligence, I would imagine. It's widely speculated that the demise of the Hapsburg empire was due to centuries of inbreeding eventually producing rather... simple monarchs.
- gumby 5y agoYes, if they selected for anything at all it would be for a willingness to carry around a long sharp knife and push it into people who don't do what the knife-wielder says.
- roywiggins 5y agoOr, to be fair, the ability to get other people with pointy sticks to do it for you. That's also an important skill for nobles.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mc32 5y agoThe implication I think is a missing a point. Before the advent of mechanization people were subject to the whims of nature. When nature ravaged them, they were forced to seek developed resources elsewhere and this’d who had those resources normally would not want to share them with others as all resources were meager and most people lived on the edge of existence where one bad summer meant winter was bare and people starved or died by disease taking advantage of weakened systems. Thus people had to fight of they’d die themselves. So it wasnt always, let’s make war so we can subjugate more; though that did happen too Vikings. Huns and Ottomans among others. Of course there were petty rivalries that also just produced unproductive wars.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
- rory 5y agoIf you cast out the "inferior," you don't have to start out superior to end up so.
- bencollier49 5y agoLet's assume the opposite - that success is not correlated with fitness (intelligence amongst other things). Is that a rational position to take?
- stonogo 5y agoYes. Being second-born is not a heritable trait.
- api 5y agoEither claim would be wrong if it assumed perfect correlation or lack thereof. Correlations are floats not booleans. There is going to be some correlation, but there are lots and lots of factors like luck, network effects, heritable wealth, etc.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoRight, and it would seem to be silly to argue that all else being equal, someone more intelligent isn't more likely to be successful than someone less intelligent. It's more that in the real world, all else rarely is equal.
- femiagbabiaka 5y agoWe're talking royals here, not some entrepreneur. Unless of course what you're suggesting is that royal families gain and maintain power due to intelligence.
- woodruffw 5y agoThat's not the opposite; success can be correlated with fitness (i.e., success) in disparate social strata without necessitating the correctness of the strata themselves. The strata themselves can be the product of pressures unrelated to individual fitness, like our individual propensity for selfishness.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoPerhaps not, but the most successful individuals are generally not the most talented. Rather, they tend to be the luckiest. See, e.g. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
- rowanG077 5y agoTo become a noble you would generally have to have done something of great note. I'd think someone of higher intelligence would have a higher likelihood to do that.
- lumost 5y agoIs there any backing to this? As I recall feudal societies in both Europe and Japan had the origin of "nobility" in land ownership/control. If you could successfully hold a piece of land as your own you were a noble. You can imagine this as a form of de facto rule.
- pbalau 5y agoHolding into a piece of land is not a given. The fact that one could hold into that could mean that individual was smarter than the individuals that did not.
- KittenInABox 5y agoIt's pretty easy to hold onto a piece of land if you're the only one who is well-fed, literate, and capable of hiring and feeding personal guards.
- rowanG077 5y agoIsn't that the point? A person with superior genes is more likely to have those qualities.
- api 5y agoYour ancestors were probably above average in either intelligence or physical ability. That doesn't mean you are after a century or two of noble inbreeding.
- rowanG077 5y agoThe point is that inbreeding while having some bad outcomes can also have the good outcome of the nobility having higher intelligence. You can't just argue when someone says: "this is A", with: "No this is B". At least put some substance behind it.
- flenserboy 5y agoQuick speculation: It could simply come down to being better fed over time. There is evidence of negative multi-generational effects on descendants from malnourishment suffered by progenitors. If nobles had better access to food (which makes sense, given power differences), that could propagate down the generations (and promote increased reproduction) not due to a stronger gene pool, but rather through improved gene expression and general health.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jimbob45 5y agoNobles were far more likely to be healthy with better diets and less disease which would certainly be correlated with better offspring outcomes. We can discard better genetics (have fun proving that lol) entirely and still be somewhat on board with this theory.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
- api 5y agoWhy would you assume nobles have superior genes, especially the ones who "flunked out." If anything the inbreeding practices of the nobility were dysgenic. Unprecedented levels of outbreeding has been suggested as a possible source of IQ increase over the past 100-200 years. You can argue that today's somewhat-meritocracy is going to sort people by social class in a way that roughly overlaps with IQ if you zoom out very far. I don't see why this would be true at all in an autocratic caste system society. This sounds like a made up just-so theory that belongs on a neoreactionary Reddit group.
- sitkack 5y agoThat is plot of Starwars.
- cmyr 5y agoIgnoring the other blatant problems with this interpretation (e.g. that social class was highly correlated with fitness) I suspect that the nobility were intermixing their genes quit successfully via coercion & violence. I am not a geneticist or a historian or even more than barely literate
- JasonFruit 5y agoIANAGOAHOEMTBL
- defen 5y agoYou might be conflating nobility with Gregory Clark's thesis in "A Farewell to Alms". There never would have been enough nobles for their failsons to have any kind of measurable genetic impact on the wider society; plus nobles were never really selected for intelligence in the first place - they were the descendants of successful warlords.
- scarmig 5y agoAre successful warlords likely comparable in intelligence to landless peasants?
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoAre VCs likely comparable in intelligence to competent engineers?
- slibhb 5y agoIf you believe in general intelligence, successful warlords are more likely to be intelligent.
- PeterisP 5y ago> There never would have been enough nobles for their failsons to have any kind of measurable genetic impact on the wider society; I'm not sure if this is true - I seem to recall studies that can clearly see a genetic impact of just a single particular noble (Gengis Khan), so it seems plausible that the genetic impact of nobles would be oversized as high-status males can have many children from the society in which they have violent power, and their children (even if bastards) have less issues with childhood malnutrition and early death.
- defen 5y agoThe proposed hypothesis though is that unsuccessful nobles spread their "favorable genes" by descending into the lower classes. To fall that far you'd have to be deeply in debt and not particularly high status.
- thatfrenchguy 5y agoI don't know if you're read a little bit about European aristocracy, but one can easily say they were pretty dumb.
- wayoutthere 5y agoBe wary of any talk of “superior” genes. We have no way to judge one set of genes relative to another even if we did understand genetics a lot better than we do. A genetic trait’s advantage can change depending on environmental factors, so any attempt to do so is effectively retreading debunked eugenic theory (a favorite pastime among some reactionary groups, particularly on social media).
- giantg2 5y agoThis can be true of things like personality traits and beliefs too - useful in one situation but not another. Society still punishes people who don't conform or rewards those who do. I think society will accept, or even push for, some level of genetic discrimination. I believe there was a recent article on HN about fetal genetic defect testing being used to make abortion decisions. The question is where should the line be, as it seems to already exist.
- natded 5y ago[flagged]
- wayoutthere 5y agoSuggest you read Guns, Germs and Steel if you want a more plausible explanation for that.
- dang 5y agoYou can't do this here. Since it's already a pattern, we've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fristechill 5y agoIt's not so much 'superior genes' as an absence of deleterious mutations. The brain requires the cooperation of the greatest number of genes (compared with other organs) in order in the develop in embryo. Since the industrial revolution infant death has thankfully dropped but it seems likely this improvement has had the side-effect of increasing the number of deleterious mutations and therefore also of decreasing the average IQ in Western populations.
- jcranmer 5y agoThere are a number of literally insane monarchs who didn't "fail out of society." In general, nobility tended to select not for intelligence or strength but political connections.
- throwaway5590 5y agoI think many people are confused about this post. There is no need to believe that nobles were initially "superior", and that their initial superiority was the reason they became nobles in the first place. The increase in "gene quality" at the top, and its diffusion to the bottom, can be understood as the simple result of Malthusian constraints, and high survival rates for nobles (as compared to the harsh conditions of the lower classes). Imagine you start a society where nobles have the same "gene quality" as everyone else. Some nobles are pretty smart, others not so much. As nobles would have more children surviving into adulthood (due to better nutrition and living standards) compared to the amount of land/titles they could distribute, some of the children of the nobility would be cast aside. The assumption, and I agree it's an assumption (although a rational one in my opinion), is that the smarter children would tend to inherit, and the less capable children would be dispossessed. Over time, this constant churn would lead to a concentration of "good genes" among the aristocracy, which would trickle down into the lower classes when every generation some of the nobility lost their position. I believe that this "trickling down" phenomenon has been proven to have occurred in England during the second millennia by Gregory Clark using census data, although I'll admit I've only heard of his work, not read it.