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Comment by green_wheel | Hacker News Reader

It seemed unlikely that ancestral populations had so many physiological differences, but not cognition. This seems like the last piece to compliment observed IQ differences between groups and levels of civilizational attainment.

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I don't understand how that argument could even work. Since the dawn of recorded history there has been (1) wildly varying levels of civilizational achievement depending on the era and (2) not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations.

We could get into the reasons why physiological differences ("height") behave differently in genetics than behavioral differences ("cognition"), but we don't even reach that --- first you have to explain to me how genetic advantages are the reason European-extracted people are so successful now, but weren't in play when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbasids and Tang Dynasty Chinese.

There are multiple factors at play:

- Among those who believe in intellectual differences among human groups, very few believe Europeans are the most intelligent group. The prevailing opinion you would find is that both Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (your second example) are more intelligent on average.

- Northwest Europeans encountered intense selection over a Millennia starting around 300AD through a couple of mechanisms: The Church banning cousin marriage, and Biparte Manorialism. This resulted in the destruction of kinship networks, established the nuclear family, and selected for the high-trust peoples that enabled a kind of society you can still only find among those peoples.

The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!

And yet when you look at corruption perception indexes, they largely track the Hajnal line. As do so many other graphs.

Ireland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.

Which other developed countries do you mean? The only ones I can think of, have westernised on purpose. E.g. Singapore and Japan.

What you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.

That is sort of my point, I can't think of a developed country that hasn't westernised to some extent.

You're not even responding to the question. You're describing (what you believe to be) features of global civilization today, projected out from "300AD". But at various points over that interval, European civilization wasn't on the leaderboard, and was being outcompeted by the Khmer, Mali, China, you name it.

You see this all the time in these kinds of discussions, the assumption that because "western" civilization possesses X, Y, and Z traits, history must consist of a linear progression towards realizing those traits. Obviously, no. For many centuries the west was brutal, illiterate, tribal, and chaotic, primitive in ways other cultures were not.

It's just a tedious history lesson except that it abruptly falsifies the idea that you can look at "civilizational achievement" and reason back to genetic superiority. Obviously you cannot. You could come up with some other evidence for genetic superiority! But this particular argument is patently wrong.

> not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations

It isn’t enough time to produce many novel feature changes, but it is enough time to act as a filter, no?

The issue isn't that it's impossible for their to be a causal genetic mechanism behind highly polygenic behavioral traits; whether you call that "filtering" or not doesn't change anything.

The issue is that there's no time interval long enough and directionally stable enough for that to have happened. What you're seeing instead are people who have built a sort of civilizational leaderboard in their head based on current events and projected it back to (apparently) 300AD. That's obviously not what happened in real history.

Whether it’s filtering or not is highly relevant.

It takes much longer to develop new features via random mutation and selection than it does to alter the distribution of existing features via selection. This is trivially true, no? I’m not sure what the argument against this is, please elaborate.

Like I said, it doesn't matter what you call it, what matters is that you won't find stable associations of civilizational progress and ethnic groups over the course of history. You can compose other coherent arguments for causal genetic superiority, but it can't be "civilizational achievement".

Okay, I am focusing on the one assertion you made which I quoted, and I think you are arguing the top level point back at me.

Features can change at a population level in the amount of time that different human groups have been separated from one another. That is all I’m saying here. It seemed like you didn’t agree with that point, and I’m interested if you can refute it in a well reasoned way since the implications are pretty counter-zeitgeist and being outside the zeitgeist is annoying.

By the way, “genetic superiority” is a category error and I find it annoying when people talk like that. An animal can only be better or worse in a particular environment, and even then different animals can exist in a similar niche without being better or worse. This sort of rhetoric has made this area very hard to discuss.

I saw in the article that male pattern baldness became way less common over the studied period. Their definition of "way less" was 1-2%. Even if it wasn't the case that, lacking natural weapons, generalizable cognitive faculties are highly advantageous for our species regardless of factors like climate, there's not any real reason to figure cognitive changes would occur way faster than the 1-2% reduction in MPB. So is the argument that some large scale population has a mean IQ that differs by 1-2%? That's vastly less than the impact of poverty or childhood nutrition.

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