Mga app ng Google
Pangunahing menu

Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"The Economist on the Cochran, Harpending, Moyzis, Hawks, Wang paper"

16 Comments -

1 – 16 of 16
Blogger the Narrator... said...

"So far, no one—daring or foolish—has tried. Eventually, however, such questions will have to be faced. The paper Dr Moyzis and his colleagues have just published is a ranging shot, but the amount of recent human evolution it has exposed is surprising. Others will no doubt follow, and the genetic meaning of the term “race”, if it has one, will be exposed for all to see."


The tone there is comical. Its a,"soon they'll know that we know that they know that we know" kind of thing.

With each passing story like this though, you get the sense that there is a shuffle amongst the media and academia in regards to how to "present" the information once it is undeniable.

And that is the thing to look out for; not the information, but the spin...

12/17/07, 6:43 AM

Anonymous SKT said...

Don't confuse mutations with evolution. Most mutations are bad. We might be seeing more people in the population with a broader degree of mutations because modern technology (esp. medicine) is allowing them to survive and leave offspring. That is to be expected.

I think evolution is becoming convergent for people across the world. Evolution is driven by the environment, and people are now adapting the environment to suit their needs. People live in comfortable, climate controlled homes, and eat three square meals a day purchased from a store. That's a big change from a thousand years ago, when a Scandinavian viking might have been hunting wild boars vs. someone in the African bush gathering berries vs. Japanese villagers fishing, etc. to survive. Very different lifestyles back then, very similar lifestyles today.

12/17/07, 7:55 AM

Blogger Born Again Democrat said...

The best popular summary so far I would say.

12/17/07, 8:27 AM

Blogger RobertHume said...

Speaking of Asians' IQ. In Gladwell's recent New Yorker interview of Flynn he seems to say that Flynn thinks that the reported high IQ for Asians is an artifact of comparing IQ scores on tests with different calibration.

This seems like a very difficult question requiring expert analysis. Does anyone have an expert opinion? Has anyone read Flynn in detail on this subject?

12/17/07, 11:05 AM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

This phenomenon is nothing new in history. The Finns and Hungarians ceased being and looking like Central Asians and became European in appearance in a matter of hundreds of years. Likewise the wolf became the dog once placed in a human environment. This cannot be accounted for by mutation alone. What we need is a new Lamarckism that recognizes the interplay of environment on genetic selection via epigenetic phenomena.

12/17/07, 11:46 AM

Anonymous tommy said...

This phenomenon is nothing new in history. The Finns and Hungarians ceased being and looking like Central Asians and became European in appearance in a matter of hundreds of years.

Only a small percentage of the ancestors of modern Finns and Hungarians were Central Asian.

12/17/07, 12:35 PM

Blogger Tim said...

This fits nicely with Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell to Alms. Clark is an economic historian, and he argues that European society created significant selection pressure. Rich parents had many more surviving children than poor parents, so the culteral and genetic advantages of the rich survived and prospered.

12/17/07, 12:50 PM

Anonymous slocombe said...

"Likewise the wolf became the dog once placed in a human environment."

A commonly believed fallacy. Dogs evolved from wild dogs, not wolves.

12/17/07, 1:25 PM

Blogger gcochran said...

skt, dutchboy, slocombe:

Wrong.

12/17/07, 2:17 PM

Anonymous tommy said...

You have to love how they spin things:

Human evolution has speeded up over the past 80,000 years. That raises awkward questions about the concept of “race”

Actually, it raises awkward questions for race denialists.

This demonstrates that pygmyism is not a result of early malnutrition, as another hypothesis has it.

I've always presumed pygmyism was a rather severe adaptation to dense jungle environments. African elephants dwelling in the deep jungles also tend to be quite a bit smaller than their cousins roaming the grasslands. The incredibly agile pygmies would have been fierce competitors for non-pygmy hunter-gatherers in the same environment.

12/17/07, 4:28 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder what effect modern medicine such as anti-biotics, insulin, and other wonderdrugs will have on future evolution. It should seem clear that many more people who would never have made it to the next gene pool are now kept alive and breeding, sometimes with others that have the same afliction. I guess we will find out.

12/17/07, 5:25 PM

Anonymous Martin said...

I would be willing to bet money that every single person who works for The Economist in a reportorial or editorial capacity believes in evolution - good little Darwinists all. So why is it that people who believe that people have evolved by means of natural selection are so surprised when told that evolution through natural selection continues to this day? Who did they think would have interrupted it? God?

Rest assured though that as soon as the conventional wisdom about human racial differences changes, the Economist will leap right on board, and will sneeringly deride all those who say it does not matter, just as they today would deride those who say it does.

Fatuous and false erudition, delivered with a wink and a mocking sneer, is the Economist's chief product.

12/17/07, 7:50 PM

Anonymous egoldstein said...

Could you elaborate on your reply to skt, Greg? Why won't gene flow and our increasingly similar lifestyles and environments halt the genetic divergence of the races? When Harpending said the races "are" becoming less alike, I thought he was just speaking carelessly, but it sounds like you have another idea.

12/18/07, 5:38 AM

Anonymous sabanaoeste said...

A commonly believed fallacy. Dogs evolved from wild dogs, not wolves.

There are still some bones of contention involved in the question of domestic dog origins.

12/18/07, 8:50 AM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

Since the Finns speak a Finno-Ugric dialect (as do the Hungarians) it is likely that most of their ancestors did also (i.e., they were of Central Asian descent). The other dialects of this family are found thousands of miles from Europe.

12/19/07, 1:57 PM

Anonymous tommy said...

Since the Finns speak a Finno-Ugric dialect (as do the Hungarians) it is likely that most of their ancestors did also (i.e., they were of Central Asian descent).

Nonsense. By the same logic, it could be argued that since the majority of Irish people speak the Germanic language of English, this must mean the majority of Irish ancestry is Germanic (or even that most Irishmen are actually English).

12/19/07, 5:47 PM

Comments are moderated, at whim.
You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>

Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.

You will be asked to sign in after submitting your comment.
OpenID LiveJournal WordPress TypePad AOL