Germs and ancient migrations help explain our world of 'haves' and 'have nots'
geneticliteracyproject.org
geneticliteracyproject.org
Doesn't it hurt to realize your multi-cellular brain came up with this?
Of course you want multi-cellular life. It's the only known answer of nature capable of particle physics, space exploration and postulating one's bad ideas on HN.
You shouldn't become that agnostic to your place in the universe, and unless a couple of much better reasons aren't more obvious to you, at least because people will think you like insulting yourself, together with your entire branch of life, that also includes the reader.
Evolution itself is non-judgemental and has no inherent bias to the development of spaceflight over, say, a massively distributed system willing to tolerate huge die offs. They are simply two different approaches (not even strategies) for dealing with local conditions.
In fact by your own preference, the unicellular organisms are more likely to successfully spread their DNA (as it's "packetized" into a complete organism) via the surfaces of the robot ships you describe than the multicellular ones are.
As long as the genes keep propagating, she's good.
I think it's healthy for humans to look to their own survival, but I realize that Mother Nature only cares for the propagation of genes. We should never confuse the one with the other. We should never start to believe that Mother Nature has an interest in our survival more than the survival of some other fish, or alien lifeform far away, or some bacteria, or virus. That could be a fatal mistake for us.
And as it's nature that biases me towards my species, is it wrong to try live up to that and build those spaceships?
Perhaps in the thousand-year timeframe it's irrelevant what it means to be a "have" or "have not" in today's society. But does that really mean that we shouldn't care about the lives of the people around us who are living right now? In fact, why should any of us care all that much about who's still got descendants long after we're dead?
And of course this isn't a hypothetical. This is exactly what's happening today on a global and crucially, even on a national level. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year annually have a fertility rate that is just about exactly 50% higher than those earning > $200,000 per year. [1] And there's a disconcertingly smooth gradient in the incomes in between. This is a very new problem. It was speculated about in the past, but generally well to do families continued to pump out the kids at a decent rate and there were macabre systems in place that prevented reckless procreation from those who could not afford it. Today fertility rates have plummeted and such macabre deterrents have become completely unthinkable which is a very good thing, yet it's simultaneously a very bad thing in that it effectively enables reckless and socially destructive behavior.
It becomes clear that one of the easiest ways to have a society where more people are better off is simply by encouraging those that can afford to have children to do just that! This also goes a step further as well. You might argue that 'well, if we create better social systems then we can start to transform those poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor families into the [perhaps subjectively] better off households today.' Maybe, maybe not -- it'd be a herculean task in any case. But there's an even more fundamental problem. The future of those systems will be upheld, or tossed aside, by the generation of tomorrow. And we once again end up back at square one as this generation will be comprised heavily of these poorly educated, highly religious individuals who are going to generally have different social motivations.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
She's also going to go to great lengths to instill the same urge in the wealthy, and everyone in between for that matter. She really does just want the genes propagated. The rest she doesn't care about. Ideology, money, whether or not one human has any power over another, social morés, and any other human construct... none of it matters to her.
Also, saying it is mostly environment makes individuals blame others for their own failures - "I am perfect, the environment is wrong and has to change".
A sad thing is that scientists that study this question get publicly destroyed.
You can find flaws and inconsistencies in their logic easily though. People have no issue with saying that height is genetic for example. Even racially, it's ok to say Asians are on average shorter than Africans
But imply intelligence is genetic, and now there are issues. For some reason we are told that evolution and genetics stop at a human's neck
My question is that if intelligence isn't genetic, why doesn't somebody teach a dog, or cat, or bacteria how to do quantum mechanics? Surely it's just environment right?
Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393973867
And the documentary based on the book:
Yes, proximity helps with cross pollination - but there are hundreds of distinct ethnic groups in the Americans and Africa that also traveling, cross-pollinated and shared. History decided to group them together and call these all one big group.
There are also a ton of good critiques on /r/history, /r/askhistorians, and /r/anthropology. I can't remember which I've read. Ones like this are typical:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/thoug...
Pretty sure if you wrote an IQ test where your standard population was a group of people living in a harsh jungle environment, urbanite Westerners would come off thick as pigshit.
Or an aptitude test for "How good are you at tracking cassowaries without being disembowelled by them".
I've read good dissections of what's wrong with Diamond's work, that link is not one of them.
I don't think Neil Diamond is wrong but it's kind of baby's first reading on the differences between groups in the world.
I think CGP Grey does a great job at communicating the actual meat of Guns, Germs, and Steel here https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
Anthropologists don't think much of him either.
Of course any historical theory of everything based on one factor is going to look silly if you read another. Most modern people haven't read Spengler or Brooks Adams or whatever the popular socialist books were in the 30s which attempt to explain everything.
History, of course, is path dependent, and the correct perception is probably something like "stuff is like this by accident."
Germs - Ignores the fact that Europeans were devastated by things like Malaria that many Africans have moderate immunity to thanks to the sickle cell trait
Domesticated animals - Ignores that Europeans have actually used Zebras as work animals and had to domesticate cows from Aurrochs and dogs from wolves
The whole thing is basically Diamond starting off with a conclusion and finding a theory to fit in
Given that not only can we not explain our sociability, but that it's emergence seems nearly impossible according to our understanding of genetic natural selection, then opining on the dominant factors that drive modern intelligence, let alone drove our intelligence hundreds of thousands of years ago, is a hopeless endeavor.
Anyone providing answers to such higher-order questions could only be correct by accident. We have no way of assessing the validity!