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Well, take racism out of it. Do a thought experiment. Take a genetically identical starting population with identical culture, customs, etc. Split them onto tw

Well, take racism out of it. Do a thought experiment. Take a genetically identical starting population with identical culture, customs, etc. Split them onto two islands, island A and island B. Island A has temperate weather, plentiful food, resources, and no natural predators. Island B has natural disasters, brutal seasons, intermittent food shortages, etc. Check back in on both populations (assuming they lived exclusively on islands A & B) in 1000 years from the identical starting point. Do you think there would be any differences between them?

wizzwizz4 1y ago
Of course there would be differences between the populations. There would probably be genetically-linked psychological differences, too! But would B-islanders be more cooperative, because they needed to band together to survive? Would they be more competitive, because those who hoarded resources for themselves reproduced better? Would A-islanders be better at analytical philosophy, because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals was sexually selected for? Would that have no impact, because analytical philosophy skill has no significant genetic correlate, or would they actually be worse at analytical philosophy because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals is a poor proxy metric? Or would A-islanders decide that analytical philosophy nerds are undesirable mates, and select against such an ability? Would cultural factors on island B result in a better, safer society where a decade's worth of preserved food is kept at all times, and nobody has to venture out into storms, while the A-islanders become their own predators and destroy each others' food supplies until they suffer entirely-avoidable famines? Would all these various effects cancel each other out, leaving no phenotypical variation except skin colour (due to the selective effects of melanoma and vitamin D deficiency), and no significant psychological differences except those caused by unselected genetic drift, which are utterly erased by the first generation of interbreeding? There is no way to tell, from the information you have provided. Your thought experiment reveals your (and my) own biases, nothing more. Thought experiments only work in mathematics and physics, not (except in extremely simple situations) evolutionary biology.
- medvezhenok 1y ago
  Agreed, there is no way to know the exact degree of differences between the two populations (although any geneticist would reject the notion of primarily unselected genetic drift in the example I described. I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments). But at least we agree that they would not continue to be identical, and that the environmental pressure, over time, would also show up in genetic drift between the populations (there are surprisingly many blank-slaters who would disagree even with this premise). We have tools in modern science to attempt to differentiate between different underlying components of genetic variation vs environmental variation (identical twin studies, adoption-at-birth studies, general population studies, longitudinal analyses, etc). In lieu of a 1000-year experiment (which we cannot recreate), we can make predictions. If factor X was primarily genetic, we would expect to observe A, B, C. If factor X was primarily environmental, we would expect to observe D, E, F. Then, we can basically incorporate various studies and results and do gradient descent, and observing which (means squared error) is smaller. None of this is groundbreaking stuff, I know. But I have read arguments from both the primarily environmental camp and the primarily genetics camp, and one of them has to do a lot more mental gymnastics explain the differences between obvious predictions (under this paradigm) and the observed data in the real world.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    > I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments No, you didn't, because humans behave quite differently to your average animal. The only strong selective pressure you described was climactic: everything else can be mitigated with straightforward tool use. (And heck, going "oh, our skin is getting sunburned, let's be nocturnal instead" might cause your A-islanders to develop paler skin.) You seem to be confusing "observed data in the real world" and "things that seem obviously true". If you pit your "obviously true" against other people's "obviously true" in your own head, of course your own "obviously true" is going to be the victor.
tptacek 1y ago
I hear this argument a lot and I don't know what you think it demonstrates. Put two groups of people on separate islands for 1000 years. Check back up on them. They will be overwhelmingly phenotypically similar. It's not like one of the groups is going to become the X-Men. Really, these analogies mostly seem like a device for smuggling in the premise that innate intellectual ability is less like color vision and more like eye color. Maybe it is, but you have to make and ground that argument.
- medvezhenok 1y ago
  What is the color vision equivalent of a savant? Surely you don't believe that any person could (given infinite time & training from birth), match the intellectual performance of a savant on, say, multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head? (I think a clear savant that has a untouchable ability in one small dimension of mathematics is a clearer example than, say, von Neumann - who was equally brilliant but across many domains and in a less obvious way)
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    > multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head? This kind of thing is quite easy. Which mental delay-line caches you exploit depends on how your mind works, but multiplying 6-digit numbers in your head isn't a hard trick to learn, if you care. There was a time when I cared about such parlour tricks, and I could pick them up quite quickly. I once spent a few days memorising the first 10 digits of pi. Once I'd figured that out, it was the effort of a few hours over the subsequent weeks to memorise to 36 digits. If I had cared, I could have learned twenty new digits a day, using the following scheme: 3.14159 265358979 32384626 43383 2795028841 9716 93993 75105820 97494459 23078164 06286208 99862803 4825342 117067 982 14808 65132 823066 4... See how it's lyrical? Just learn the poem. Except… I quickly found I didn't care, and at that point my motivation vanished, and I lost the "savant" ability. (Sure, if I wanted to, I could easily bootstrap the requisite intrinsic motivation – and I suspect I could learn a hundred digits a day thereby – but I don't want to.) Despite my generally-absent enthusiasm, I'm still capable of aceing IQ tests, scoring highly in measures of cognitive ability that I do not possess, etc, because I have a certain stubbornness towards the idea that these tests truly measure anything important, which means I approach them sideways with the objective of breaking the tests, which means I break the tests. If anything of value hinged on my ability to quickly multiply 6-digit numbers in my head, I expect I could pick it up in… six months? I do not say these things to brag: rather, the opposite. I don't think I am particularly exceptional: I never learned a thousand digits of pi, would probably take an hour to multiply 6-digit numbers in my head… I am able to solve problems I've never encountered with computer systems I've never used, after half a second of thought, while concentrating on other things – but from the inside that doesn't feel exceptional at all: it's just a few tricks, well-practised. People who have memorised millions of digits of pi likewise claim to use a few tricks – and while those particular tricks don't always work for everyone, I don't think these people are innately exceptional.

wizzwizz4 1y ago

Of course there would be differences between the populations. There would probably be genetically-linked psychological differences, too! But would B-islanders be more cooperative, because they needed to band together to survive? Would they be more competitive, because those who hoarded resources for themselves reproduced better? Would A-islanders be better at analytical philosophy, because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals was sexually selected for? Would that have no impact, because analytical philosophy skill has no significant genetic correlate, or would they actually be worse at analytical philosophy because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals is a poor proxy metric? Or would A-islanders decide that analytical philosophy nerds are undesirable mates, and select against such an ability? Would cultural factors on island B result in a better, safer society where a decade's worth of preserved food is kept at all times, and nobody has to venture out into storms, while the A-islanders become their own predators and destroy each others' food supplies until they suffer entirely-avoidable famines? Would all these various effects cancel each other out, leaving no phenotypical variation except skin colour (due to the selective effects of melanoma and vitamin D deficiency), and no significant psychological differences except those caused by unselected genetic drift, which are utterly erased by the first generation of interbreeding? There is no way to tell, from the information you have provided. Your thought experiment reveals your (and my) own biases, nothing more. Thought experiments only work in mathematics and physics, not (except in extremely simple situations) evolutionary biology.

medvezhenok 1y ago
Agreed, there is no way to know the exact degree of differences between the two populations (although any geneticist would reject the notion of primarily unselected genetic drift in the example I described. I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments). But at least we agree that they would not continue to be identical, and that the environmental pressure, over time, would also show up in genetic drift between the populations (there are surprisingly many blank-slaters who would disagree even with this premise). We have tools in modern science to attempt to differentiate between different underlying components of genetic variation vs environmental variation (identical twin studies, adoption-at-birth studies, general population studies, longitudinal analyses, etc). In lieu of a 1000-year experiment (which we cannot recreate), we can make predictions. If factor X was primarily genetic, we would expect to observe A, B, C. If factor X was primarily environmental, we would expect to observe D, E, F. Then, we can basically incorporate various studies and results and do gradient descent, and observing which (means squared error) is smaller. None of this is groundbreaking stuff, I know. But I have read arguments from both the primarily environmental camp and the primarily genetics camp, and one of them has to do a lot more mental gymnastics explain the differences between obvious predictions (under this paradigm) and the observed data in the real world.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  > I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments No, you didn't, because humans behave quite differently to your average animal. The only strong selective pressure you described was climactic: everything else can be mitigated with straightforward tool use. (And heck, going "oh, our skin is getting sunburned, let's be nocturnal instead" might cause your A-islanders to develop paler skin.) You seem to be confusing "observed data in the real world" and "things that seem obviously true". If you pit your "obviously true" against other people's "obviously true" in your own head, of course your own "obviously true" is going to be the victor.

tptacek 1y ago

I hear this argument a lot and I don't know what you think it demonstrates. Put two groups of people on separate islands for 1000 years. Check back up on them. They will be overwhelmingly phenotypically similar. It's not like one of the groups is going to become the X-Men. Really, these analogies mostly seem like a device for smuggling in the premise that innate intellectual ability is less like color vision and more like eye color. Maybe it is, but you have to make and ground that argument.

medvezhenok 1y ago
What is the color vision equivalent of a savant? Surely you don't believe that any person could (given infinite time & training from birth), match the intellectual performance of a savant on, say, multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head? (I think a clear savant that has a untouchable ability in one small dimension of mathematics is a clearer example than, say, von Neumann - who was equally brilliant but across many domains and in a less obvious way)
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  > multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head? This kind of thing is quite easy. Which mental delay-line caches you exploit depends on how your mind works, but multiplying 6-digit numbers in your head isn't a hard trick to learn, if you care. There was a time when I cared about such parlour tricks, and I could pick them up quite quickly. I once spent a few days memorising the first 10 digits of pi. Once I'd figured that out, it was the effort of a few hours over the subsequent weeks to memorise to 36 digits. If I had cared, I could have learned twenty new digits a day, using the following scheme: 3.14159 265358979 32384626 43383 2795028841 9716 93993 75105820 97494459 23078164 06286208 99862803 4825342 117067 982 14808 65132 823066 4... See how it's lyrical? Just learn the poem. Except… I quickly found I didn't care, and at that point my motivation vanished, and I lost the "savant" ability. (Sure, if I wanted to, I could easily bootstrap the requisite intrinsic motivation – and I suspect I could learn a hundred digits a day thereby – but I don't want to.) Despite my generally-absent enthusiasm, I'm still capable of aceing IQ tests, scoring highly in measures of cognitive ability that I do not possess, etc, because I have a certain stubbornness towards the idea that these tests truly measure anything important, which means I approach them sideways with the objective of breaking the tests, which means I break the tests. If anything of value hinged on my ability to quickly multiply 6-digit numbers in my head, I expect I could pick it up in… six months? I do not say these things to brag: rather, the opposite. I don't think I am particularly exceptional: I never learned a thousand digits of pi, would probably take an hour to multiply 6-digit numbers in my head… I am able to solve problems I've never encountered with computer systems I've never used, after half a second of thought, while concentrating on other things – but from the inside that doesn't feel exceptional at all: it's just a few tricks, well-practised. People who have memorised millions of digits of pi likewise claim to use a few tricks – and while those particular tricks don't always work for everyone, I don't think these people are innately exceptional.