4 ms·

Blank Slate hypothesis is now officially refuted, correct? Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive perfo

Blank Slate hypothesis is now officially refuted, correct? Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive performance.

Tor3 6mo ago
Just where did you get that from? Certainly not from the paper.
- AlgorithmicTime 6mo ago
  [dead]
- tokai 6mo ago
  Racists are hilarious. They will twist and bend anything remotely applicable to fit and underpin their prejudices.
- kloop 6mo ago
  I think they're talking about this bit: > We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing γ = 0.74 ± 0.12), household income (increasing γ = 1.12 ± 0.12) and years of schooling (increasing γ = 0.63 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant (Extended Data Fig. 10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years )*, after which γ tends towards zero Presumably pressure in different regions lead to different combinations of those alleles, which I think they are shorthanding a bit, but the fact that those alleles exist makes blank slate theory a kind of rough assumption
  - svnt 6mo ago
    I haven’t had time to really dig in to the paper but these data (from only one region) are limited in their ability to compare regions, right? If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya. The methodology, if it holds up, seems to hold a lot of promise for answering questions like this in the future.
    - ano-ther 6mo ago
      Yes, they only had data for West Eurasia. > Just because an allele, SNP, or trait swept into or out of West Eurasia during this time doesn’t mean this happened only in West Eurasia. Researchers can use the new computational methods to look for directional selection in other populations worldwide that have enough ancient DNA sequences and construct a clearer picture of what’s unique to different groups and what generalizes across populations. > Reich expects that future studies will show that shared selective pressures acted on some of the same core traits across diverse human groups, even as those groups split off and migrated to different parts of the world over tens of thousands of years. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-reveals-natural-selection-has-accelerated-recent-human-evolution https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-revea...
    - kloop 6mo ago
      No, this paper doesn't seem to talk about regional differences. The implication seems to be that it wouldn't be surprising to find differences between groups that separated more than 2kya, as there was active changes going on before that time. Not that it predicts any specific differences > If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya. I would be interested in how you came to that conclusion, unless I'm misleading your post and you specifically mean West Eurasia
      - svnt 6mo ago
        I meant West Eurasia, I agree it doesn’t seem to support any broader conclusion.
  - asdff 6mo ago
    It is important to consider that these alleles are merely correlated to behavior and are not proved to be causal of any behavior. For example, maybe you sample bankers in NYC. You can probably assume you'd get a lot of perhaps semitic genetic background in this dataset. Now, would you conclude that Jewish people have some inherent gene that makes them want to be bankers like a moth to a lamp? Maybe you would. But more likely situation is that people tend to follow the profession of people in their lives who work that profession and can inform them about it, and for centuries there were real legal restrictions in a lot of places preventing anyone but jews from being allowed to charge interest. So, pretty good odds today as a jew you know someone who works in finance and can help at least to some degree point you towards that field. So really when you say select for household income among western populations, it might be hard to actually find any real signal that is actually causal that isn't due to simple demographic and historical reasons, due to the lack of power you have in sampling rare demographics within a given category such as high income.
- Nesco 6mo ago
  There is a graph arguing “intelligence” has been positively selected in west Eurasian population in this paper according to a polygenic score (page 8 fig. 4) Now I would be quite curious to know how they constructed this polygenic score
  - tptacek 6mo ago
    ... because it's a study of West Eurasian DNA. The claim that humanity has over millennia selected for intelligence isn't all that spicy.
    - Nesco 6mo ago
      First yes it is. The claims that this time period was too short to meaningfully change phenotypes in human populations was not entirely far fetched. Then to address the elephant in the room - which is the race discourse subtext let’s be honest - it’s highly unlikely that any recent selective pressure on a separated population, which resulted in meaningful phenotype adaptations, happened similarly everywhere at the same time
svnt 6mo ago
No one in adjacent fields has been seriously engaging tabula rasa speculation from the 17th century for quite some time prior to this paper. What you think the implications are of that for your present day lived experience, that might be a different conversation.
lukev 6mo ago
To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly. But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-population effects, and personal history (nutrition, education, etc) strongly dominates that. And that's setting aside the moral implications of judging someone or changing your behavior towards them even if you have somehow measured them to be "less intelligent," as if that was a single axis of worth. Because, apparently, this needs to be said.
- card_zero 6mo ago
  This interest in IQ has a negative effect on the concept of intelligence, never mind human unity. It attaches exaggerated importance to test scores, jobs, and school. It tends toward snobbery.
  - gnerd00 6mo ago
    reading about Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences stuck with me.. seven is a common list
- georgeburdell 6mo ago
  And yet you are also likely to argue “weather is not climate”. Differences in population characteristics of all kinds have massive societal implications and we should lean into addressing them.
  - lukev 6mo ago
    Well if you are talking about environmental stuff (like leaded gasoline), sure. If you’re talking about trying to improve the genetics of populations at scale… yikes.
  - convolvatron 6mo ago
    people trying to force everyone else to accept their poorly defended notions of race superiority have a much larger social impact than any quantifiable differences in the genetics of populations.

Blank Slate hypothesis is now officially refuted, correct? Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive performance.

Tor3 6mo ago

Just where did you get that from? Certainly not from the paper.

AlgorithmicTime 6mo ago
[dead]
tokai 6mo ago
Racists are hilarious. They will twist and bend anything remotely applicable to fit and underpin their prejudices.
kloop 6mo ago
I think they're talking about this bit: > We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing γ = 0.74 ± 0.12), household income (increasing γ = 1.12 ± 0.12) and years of schooling (increasing γ = 0.63 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant (Extended Data Fig. 10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years )*, after which γ tends towards zero Presumably pressure in different regions lead to different combinations of those alleles, which I think they are shorthanding a bit, but the fact that those alleles exist makes blank slate theory a kind of rough assumption
- svnt 6mo ago
  I haven’t had time to really dig in to the paper but these data (from only one region) are limited in their ability to compare regions, right? If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya. The methodology, if it holds up, seems to hold a lot of promise for answering questions like this in the future.
  - ano-ther 6mo ago
    Yes, they only had data for West Eurasia. > Just because an allele, SNP, or trait swept into or out of West Eurasia during this time doesn’t mean this happened only in West Eurasia. Researchers can use the new computational methods to look for directional selection in other populations worldwide that have enough ancient DNA sequences and construct a clearer picture of what’s unique to different groups and what generalizes across populations. > Reich expects that future studies will show that shared selective pressures acted on some of the same core traits across diverse human groups, even as those groups split off and migrated to different parts of the world over tens of thousands of years. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-reveals-natural-selection-has-accelerated-recent-human-evolution https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-revea...
  - kloop 6mo ago
    No, this paper doesn't seem to talk about regional differences. The implication seems to be that it wouldn't be surprising to find differences between groups that separated more than 2kya, as there was active changes going on before that time. Not that it predicts any specific differences > If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya. I would be interested in how you came to that conclusion, unless I'm misleading your post and you specifically mean West Eurasia
    - svnt 6mo ago
      I meant West Eurasia, I agree it doesn’t seem to support any broader conclusion.
- asdff 6mo ago
  It is important to consider that these alleles are merely correlated to behavior and are not proved to be causal of any behavior. For example, maybe you sample bankers in NYC. You can probably assume you'd get a lot of perhaps semitic genetic background in this dataset. Now, would you conclude that Jewish people have some inherent gene that makes them want to be bankers like a moth to a lamp? Maybe you would. But more likely situation is that people tend to follow the profession of people in their lives who work that profession and can inform them about it, and for centuries there were real legal restrictions in a lot of places preventing anyone but jews from being allowed to charge interest. So, pretty good odds today as a jew you know someone who works in finance and can help at least to some degree point you towards that field. So really when you say select for household income among western populations, it might be hard to actually find any real signal that is actually causal that isn't due to simple demographic and historical reasons, due to the lack of power you have in sampling rare demographics within a given category such as high income.
Nesco 6mo ago
There is a graph arguing “intelligence” has been positively selected in west Eurasian population in this paper according to a polygenic score (page 8 fig. 4) Now I would be quite curious to know how they constructed this polygenic score
- tptacek 6mo ago
  ... because it's a study of West Eurasian DNA. The claim that humanity has over millennia selected for intelligence isn't all that spicy.
  - Nesco 6mo ago
    First yes it is. The claims that this time period was too short to meaningfully change phenotypes in human populations was not entirely far fetched. Then to address the elephant in the room - which is the race discourse subtext let’s be honest - it’s highly unlikely that any recent selective pressure on a separated population, which resulted in meaningful phenotype adaptations, happened similarly everywhere at the same time

svnt 6mo ago

No one in adjacent fields has been seriously engaging tabula rasa speculation from the 17th century for quite some time prior to this paper. What you think the implications are of that for your present day lived experience, that might be a different conversation.

lukev 6mo ago

To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly. But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-population effects, and personal history (nutrition, education, etc) strongly dominates that. And that's setting aside the moral implications of judging someone or changing your behavior towards them even if you have somehow measured them to be "less intelligent," as if that was a single axis of worth. Because, apparently, this needs to be said.

card_zero 6mo ago
This interest in IQ has a negative effect on the concept of intelligence, never mind human unity. It attaches exaggerated importance to test scores, jobs, and school. It tends toward snobbery.
- gnerd00 6mo ago
  reading about Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences stuck with me.. seven is a common list
georgeburdell 6mo ago
And yet you are also likely to argue “weather is not climate”. Differences in population characteristics of all kinds have massive societal implications and we should lean into addressing them.
- lukev 6mo ago
  Well if you are talking about environmental stuff (like leaded gasoline), sure. If you’re talking about trying to improve the genetics of populations at scale… yikes.
- convolvatron 6mo ago
  people trying to force everyone else to accept their poorly defended notions of race superiority have a much larger social impact than any quantifiable differences in the genetics of populations.