Explaining the science left-right belief gap by intelligence or temperament seems true but seems less robust over history (50 years ago left-right science belief was the same). Jonathan Haidt’s spin on this is that certain groups hold certain belief’s sacred, and denialism happens when sacred beliefs and reality conflict. This frame seems widely useful. Is there a way to use the GSS to test out that hypothesis? Maybe pick some sacred liberal beliefs that conflict with science. Here’s a short video where Haidt talks to David Sloan Wilson on this topic.

Eric Michael Johnson makes a great comment that “multilevel selection is little more than a rebranding of Hamilton’s inclusive fitness (albeit the “enhanced” 1975 version).” The albeit is the key here. Dawkins and some of the others so up in arms are using inclusive fitness in the narrow and original version of rB>C from 1964. Not the Price equation co-variance model from 1975 which allows non-relation selection. In fact it’s not quite clear if you using the 1964 version as well when you say “inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism are not sufficient to explain human cultural complexity”. The “enhanced” 1975 version of inclusive fitness would include the possibility that humans evolved from group on group conflict without necessarily having a narrow kin selection relatedness dynamic.

Are you planning to read/review Nick Lane’s new book The Vital Question on the origins of complex life? Already out in the UK and out in the US in July. Reviews were good so I’m reading his previous book Life Ascending right now, which is in a similar vein. I found it quite good. He has a strong point of view but tries to show the biochemistry technical detail behind his views and let those make the case. So greatly enjoyed his writing style.

Link to his amazon page

I’m largely sympathetic to the idea science is more foundational than culture to our civilization. But I’m wondering if you’ve read Robert Lucas on the industrial revolution. The chapter from his “Lectures on Economic Growth” about the industrial revolution is particularly provocative. Though as a collection of lectures some of the chapters are far better than others.

But a quick search shows Lucas is making a similar point in the middle of this article:
“What occurred around 1800 that is new, that differentiates the modern age from all previous periods, is not technological change by itself but the fact that sometime after that date fertility increases ceased to translate improvements in technology into increases in population. That is, the industrial revolution is invariably associated with the reduction in fertility known as the demographic transition.”
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/the-industrial-revolution-past-and-future

That is to say, while arguably science or the scientific attitude is foundational, the particulars of the industrial revolution were (in Lucas’ view) about a demographic transition where fertility did not track at the expected Malthusian rate to increased wealth and productivity. And as history now clearly shows, we see this phenomena around education of woman (among many other complicated factors). In a narrow Darwinian sense this is a non-optimal response to a rapidly shifting environment. One where perhaps the status signal system pushed fertility down more rapidly than adaptation could keep up. In some sense we are in a non-malthusian window of opportunity right now. Eventually demographics/selection should respond and we’ll go back to Malthusian as fertility picks up through selection in our far wealthier era. But of course that won’t have time to happen in reality. Long before then we’ll seize control of our genetic destiny through direct decision making.

Anyway, the point here is you may want to read Lucas on demographic transition as a key aspect of the modern era. Arguably complimentary to your science foundational position, but certainly interesting if you haven’t read it before.

This twitter conversation with Billare, Razib Khan and Alan Rogers is relevant:

Billare: “Um, where’s the evidence that the Yamnaya expansion was peaceful? AFAIK chariots & the horse fit well into machinery of warfare”

Rogers notes: “Also the fact that the Neolithic Y chromosomes disappeared when the Corded Ware/Yamnaya arrived.”

http://twitter.com/alanrrogers/status/608783012205989888

Not sure which study he’s referring to though. But very telling if Y chromosomes are all gone.

I am a sucker for Toynbee and big picture history in general. Even though he’s got some serious flaws.

Toynbee would not be surprised to see the internal proletariat celebrating their lifestyle, nor that a decadent civilization would find it attractive. Though I don’t think we’re close to collapse. Plenty of ruin left.

But a Toynbee angle on that video is my reaction on how to understand it. (Obviously also applies to rap as well, though as you note rap glamorizes money. But both deliberately flaunt their lifestyle to shock the middle/rich classes and have a coarse, but seductive attraction to upper class, which is very Toynbee).

Regarding abortion rhetoric “I think part of it is that some people feel better about their own viewpoint when they can couch it in anti-sexism”, my favorite framework for this is from Arnold Kling’s 3-axis framework:

1. Progressives default to analyzing by Oppressors – Oppressed
2. Conservatives default to Civilization – Barbarism
3. Libertarians default to Freedom – Coercion

So progressives try to shoehorn arguments into oppressor-oppressed, in this case of course women are oppressed around abortion. Hence their (false) intuition that women don’t oppose it. Why I like this framework is it reveals the logic behind apparently illogical positions. For example, it makes no genetic sense that Caitlyn Jenner can choose her gender but Rachel Dolezal can’t choose her race (Y chromosome should trump a social construct). But from an oppressors/oppressed axis, you can squint and see that Jenner is a victim and Dolezal is not, at least in the progressives default framework. Hence defending the oppressed results in supporting Jenner but not Dolezal.

Basically saying I agree with your intuition about anti-sexism, but think it fits into this larger framework. Anyway, you might find Kling’s “The Three Languages of Politics” interesting if you haven’t read it. Short and clear. Easy read (that’s a compliment as obviously he worked hard at making it clear and short).

Enjoyed your guest post. But again left me confused with your “post-genomics” terminology (which you’ve consistently for many years on your blog).

I would stylize some key data points framing genomic data availability as:
* earlier than 1970s – genetics theoretical framework without actual molecular data
* 1972 Lewontin – Apportionment of human diversity paper – by protein blood types (could date this to 1966 Drosophila paper)
* 1994 Cavalli-Sforza – his famous book, again using protein blood types
* 2000 – human genome sequencing ($1B cost) – as good as any point for demarcating using true genome data instead of protein stand-ins
* 2015 – $1000 genome

Now, I get your point in your article that once genomic data becomes cheap and commonplace enough, it disappears. We don’t talk about living in the electricity era, though that was a common term roughly a century ago. But we also don’t ever talk about being in the “post-electricity” era either.

If I were to break this up, maybe something like (I would defer to you on actual dates, though think eras are likely ok):
A) <1970 – pre-molecular genetics, pre-genomics era
B) 1970-2000 – protein molecular genetics era, transition to genomics era
C) 2000-future – genomics era. Not "post-genomics era"! With the understanding that "genomics era" terminology will gradually fall out of use as genomic data becomes so cheap as to be ubiquitous (like electricity era is no longer useful).

This is obviously not a point with much substance, just a terminology issue.But your usage always leaves me thinking I'm missing something. Maybe something interesting! So an "eras of genomics" post might be a good, if you find that topic worth your time. Anyway, never could quite figure out why you use "post".

Hmmmm…. just re-read what I wrote, maybe you're saying we have an era D) "post-genomics" that starts in say, 2015, where we have genomics so cheap it's invisible. In that case, I guess I would argue (by analogy with electricity era) that we are not there yet. GWAS with a million genomes is going to shake things up quite a bit: human groups and ancestry, intelligence, personality. That all has to happen and be socially absorbed before we are "post-genomics." Maybe another decade would be my guess. Saying that's now is like saying we are post-electricity era once 10% of the houses had electricity. But would least explain your usage if that's what you mean.

Thanks for posting this, even if from 2010(!). The part about LD masking heritability was the most interesting.

Now a bit unsure what consensous is around missing heretibility problem. Sounds like you’re saying that’s on the way out as full sequencing replaces SNP, and as newer techniques parse data better. Went to missing heritability wikipedia article, but that short article had “epigenetics” in second graf, so…., hmmm. And wikipeida refs at bottom dated to 2010, as do most web search results. Not sure if there’s a recent solid pop science article on this topic. Can’t recall seeing one. Maybe overdue.

The book I found completely loopy yet really opened up my thinking is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Published 1976. It does not assume anything we take for granted about human nature and conciousness. Bonkers at times but wonderful. A great book.

The more I read the more I find myself seeking originality from autodidact thinkers. Though seems like autodidact originality (which is great) also tends to be paired with conspiracy world views. For example, Nassim Taleb is worth reading, but his views on GMO are plain embarrassing. Black Swan remains though a great book for pushing against conventional views.

One common mistake I’ve seen in attempting to understand the other side in politics is attacking the influential/popular thinkers, instead of the deeper ones. So for example attacking Ayn Rand’s zaniness, but not doing the work to read Hayek or Nozick (who you mentioned). This is an easy mistake to make, and I’ve unfortunately made it myself. Hard to know what the good stuff is for views you find uncongenial. Thanks for publishing this list.

Thanks for providing more detail on the Cultural Evolution Society, plus the related book recommendations.

One obvious question here is how David Sloan Wilson’s Social Evolution Forum fits into this. I know Peter Turchin is on the board of directors for that, and that David Sloan Wilson for the past decade or so been pushing an evolutionary approach to solving social problems. Though of course he has a tendency to interpret evolutionary theory from the perspective of his version of group selection. Plus of course economics, aka “evonomics”. I’ve been reading that site off and on, as some articles are quite good, though the overall quality varies quite a bit.

Link to Evolution Institute site
https://evolution-institute.org/about/who-we-are/

So my question: are Turchin’s Cultural Evolution Society and Sloan Wilson’s Social Evolution Forum parallel efforts, intertwined, separate?

Maybe that’s not clear or somewhat still under discussion before they can share. So you left it out on purpose. But if there’s public information on how these two groups will work together that would be interesting to know.

Rather than size, relative size, or normalized relative size (EQ), is there any literature on cross species mammal energy consumption of the brain? From this paper, energy consumption as a % peaks in childhood at brain at 43%.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/36/13010.abstract

If I recall it stabilizes at about 20%. Maybe the data has not been collected, but if it has, would be interested to learn what you think about this topic. Would energy be a better measure to look at than EQ? Or is brain size itself a "good enough" measure of energy expenditure. If not, what does the data say about comparative energy expenditure of brains in mammals (if you know of any data)?

Regarding twitter, I think Will Oremus is correct about embedding content as a move towards a walled garden. But I don’t think this will change twitter’s basic nature. Once a platform/network is set up it’s rare for it to change all that much. Windows 95 is pretty much the same as Windows 10. Where Windows got eclipsed was by smartphones, with a new touch interface, a pocketable nature, and a new apps ecosystem. A new model. Not by Windows changing.

So unless Jack Dorsey finds a way to engage a more casual and broader user base, changing the business economics of the platform, the most likely outcome is for twitter to ride a flat and rather long slow fade. If it gets displaced it’s more likely to be something like say Slack, based on an IRC messaging framework with a distinct interaction model, rather than twitter itself changing all that much.

That is to say, to address your point, I suspect continuing to build a twitter presence is still a safe bet. If something else takes off we’ll have a few years warning. And it will likely be rather different than twitter per se.

For some reason this comment asking for directions on how to curate twitter feeds reminds me of Gregory Chochran in his unmistakable style last year saying “I am not Razib, and I disagree with him on some things of importance: but I look forward to the day, a few years hence, when Razib is still cursing the ignorant commenters, while the New York Times is one with the dust of Nineveh and Tyre.”

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/the-once-and-future-khan/

OK. Tme to put my kids to bed. 🙂

I am sympathetic to those who argue Sanders-Trump enthusiasm is partly driven by decades of Democratic and Republican leadership disdain for poorer whites. As you know, both of them skew white in their supporters. And the one group generally considered acceptable to mock by *elite* leadership of both Red and Blue tribes is the culture of poor whites (though Blue tribe leadership professes more rural support). I grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. So when I talked to my Mom this weekend, I also randomly asked a few questions about politics. With an N=1 level of confidence, I came away feeling more convinced. The depth of enthusiasm for both is partly driven by decades of disdain for white poverty in “flyover” states. Not whole story, but surely part of it. Murray’s Coming Apart thesis.

The argument on reparations has both an economic and moral angle. Not sure if Robinson is more economic or not. But it seems to me that the TN Coates flavor recently coming into prominences comes primarily from a Catholic inspired sin-redemption moral angle. But is often misunderstood as an economic argument. Yes, Coates goes on about exploited black bodies. But he is very tentative about any financial success with reparations. On this point I think he is correct. It’s not the money so much as confessing sins, forgiveness, and (hopefully) moving on. So the amount of money to transfer has to be large enough to not be a joke, but the calculation itself and whether the money is squandered doesn’t make much difference (in this view). I don’t agree with Coates analysis of race as being the be-all end-all for understanding America, but I do see the moral logic of reparations as being more fundamental than the economic. It’s ostentiably about giving blacks what they are owed and having prejudicied whites acknowledging the truth about America’s history, but in some ways nearly as important is allowing progressives to also move on. So together we can focus on poverty in all races.

Minor note: to migration question #29 wanted to answer moderate/controlled migration is good for world and for me, but not a choice. Free migration tougher to answer depending on what that is supposed to mean, but totally free migration agree not good or even workable as long term policy. Bryan Caplan provocative and interesting and worth taking seriously, but wrong. On other hand, #37/#38 clearly very important to civilization, hopefully everyone responds with correct answer Butt/Abs or i will be very disappoint in quality of readers for gnxp.

The historical parallel that jumps out for your “non-coercision on gene editing position” stance is pro-choice on abortion. By this I mean that 1) high confidence this will eventually win out, 2) it’s the right stance, but 3) this (presently) is for some people a hotly hotly contested moral position to take. Pro-choicers are sometimes dismissive of moral stance of those they argue against, and in the long term I think this has hurt their side. So I think non-coercsion is correct frame to get off the merry go round of theory theory history history eugenics, and on to tangible real world CRISPR (limited) choices available with today’s tech. Time of course will make these things normal, even boring, similar to how test tube baby panic of 1978 turned into today’s completely mundane IVF. But it took a few decades for IVF to become mundane, and the duration of fear phase might have been shorted if people on pro-IVF side avoided the temptation to merely assert non-coercion is correct rather than explicitly argue it as a reasonable moral position. Anyway, I read your blog for genetics/science/history stuff, so not sure that’s your baliwik. But think it’s a point that the non-coercision side should be highly cognizant of to nudge things faster in right direction.

footnoote: assume your “rest is commentary” phrase is an allusion to David Sloan Wilson/E.O. Wilson “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” Whether or not people agree with Sloan/Wilson, always felt that was a great and pithy phrase to frame to their argument.

TIL via google that fart porn is not a made up phrase.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brazilian+fart+porn

My education is now complete.

Obligatory star wars quote: “I’ve been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.” Google can do that to you, if you but ask.

That is to say, as an old with middle school kids, not happy about our current age of ubiquitous porn. I very much recall the stigma of the previous age of sneaking magazines with pictures printed on paper. But on balance agree there’s no compelling data showing internet porn is causal to any severe social ills.

Excellent post. Seomwhat technical, but to serve putting genomics into (pre)historical perspective. Enjoyed this one!

Re robotic probes and who is Richard Dawkins. This is not the golden age of robotic probes. Far from it. Rather it’s the early dawn of the (yes, will take a long long long while) post human, autonomous robotic space exploration era. By this I mean, biologic humans are so ill suited for hard radiation and weightless space it’s only the Cold War mythos of 1960s Apollo heroics thats confusing people that it ever made sense to send humans into space instead of autonomous probes. Time is correcting this myth. Hence any “Richard Dawkins” of probes suffers from tension of truthfulness versus writing about robotic AI post human future. You sometimes see this slip out in Elin Musk occasionally getting off message. But mostly he sticks to pro human to keep getting investors. So there are people writing about this. But mostly they are ignored. Maybe another decade before Overton window shifts enough to make this an acceptable topic in polite company. Meanwhile government space funding talks and talks and talks of sending people to places like Mars, while incredible science gets ever cheaper with (ever more autonomous) robotic probes.

Agree CEO pay rising is an unfortunate trend, become worse than before.

But re your last paragraph: “What’s the take-home less? Social mobility is a thing in the United States. But the reality is that what you really need to do is somehow make it into a particular segment of the class structure. Once you are there, the reality is that your own competence probably matters less than chance and necessity. Even if you don’t become a superstar, the nature of the American class structure will probably make it so you’ll be shielded from the bracing consequences of creative destruction.”

For casual reader, this might imply US somehow being worse than before, or worse than other parts of the world. Though (more likely) you’re just pointing out that’s how the world has always been. In which case point well taken.

But just to be clear about social mobility getting worse, or US being worse than other countries. 2014 paper which made the rounds is discussed here.
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2014/02/income-mobility.html

And of course as you’ve often cited, Greg Clark has deeper historical data and thesis.

You probably saw this. Wondering if you be seen any responses. Like say, James Thompson. n=15000.

Sex differences in intelligence: A multi-measure approach using nationally representative samples from Romania
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616301003

When I check Stuart Richie’s book, here’s the key graf which says what I thought, men higher variance.

Quote from Ritchie:

But it’s not quite so simple. Just looking at the average hides two consistent sex differ-ences. The first is that there are differences in more specific abilities: women tend to do better than men on verbal measures, and men tend to outperform women on tests of spatial ability (Miller and Halpern, 2014); these small differences balance out so that the average general score is the same. The second is that there is a difference in variabil-ity: males tend to be over-represented at the very high and the very low levels of intelli-gence. This was found most clearly in the Scottish data. 

thanks for linking to this paper. Super interesting topic. Noticed the Heinrich cite in the paper, which was also something I wasn’t aware of, as I only read his book (no doubt he mentions his paper in his book, but don’t recall it)

The paper doesn’t take this to the point of developing stats to detect this (obviously enough to do in just putting together basic framework). But you seem to imply that this is possible in your “data is out there” comment. If some type of statistical test is possible for this class of model, it will settle a huge amount of theoretic noise about group selection/altruism.

Am somewhat sympathetic to group selection altruism form posited by David Sloan Wilson, as at least he’s strongly saying it’s not a new framework, but rather an alternative way to partition fitness. And so completely compatible with existing frameworks. And knows enough about his math limits to stay within them. In contrast to, for example, the “we have overtuned the entire past” mode in Nowak, Tarnita, EO Wilson.

Slicing the endless debates on this topic with a model that is testable real data would be something I’d like to live to see.

I had same reaction reading that piece. Was difficult to read through as I kept expecting at least some throw away line acknowledging the arguments on other side. Oh well.

To larger point, I never got my head around idea of social group cohesion being so central to human cognition until I could give it some sort of evolutionary psychological underpinning. Even if he’s wrong, David Sloan Wilson’s ideas were the first to help me (personally) get there. Though by now I find the Joseph Heinrich gene-culture framework seems far more plausible and useful in explaining what’s going on.

The writing advice of the first restating your opponents arguments clearly and conceding a few of points now makes more sense. You have to establish some group solidarity first before even attempting any kind of argument. You see it done best in how Scott Alexander writes at Slatestarcodex I think. Not a style of writing everyone finds worth attempting. But certainly his writing style makes more sense to me than it did a few years back. Of course people rarely ever change their mind about politicized ideas. But if that is your goal, it’s how to do it. It’s really the subtext of his post on how to write like him
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/

Thanks for this post. Was wondering about this exact topic today.

Seems like you had twitter account @gnxp back in 2009 to push your blog posts.
https://twitter.com/gnxp

No reason not to revive that account as a blog feed twitter account once you move to new site.

Overall probably not worth the trouble. Very marginal in terms of page views. But suspect people who follow that kind of account tend to be high value readers (maybe they just want the posts for high SNR). I read a lot of ben thompson on tech, and also follow his blog posts via his twitter feed
https://twitter.com/stratechery

So it’s common enough.

But I think RSS far more important for power readers.

One downside is confusion on who to follow on twitter. You or gnxp. Maybe makes more sense to name the twitter account something like @gnxp_blogfeed to make it more explicit.

Anyway. Enjoy your writing. Keep it up.

Good post. I’ve been thinking about how Albion’s Seed relates to new paper by Han et al, and this is a good overview. That’s a great paper!

But….what’s less clear to me is if we’ve learned anything new beyond what we already knew. If it’s just confirmation, well, that’s fine.

The only thing that seems to jump out is south part of Tidewater. That’s the poorest alignment between Han et al and other existing ancestry/cultural/trump voter maps. Is that perhaps an area where something new is to be dug into where genetic ancestry aligns less closely to culture than other areas?

Beautiful essay. If you want a cheat code on what it’s about, given the hints and using said internet mentioned above, I looked it up. 🙂

The house, maybe estate(?), is Dar Sebastian in Tunisia. Some pictures
http://www.tunisia.com/dar-sebastian-hammamet

Video

Video Link

Nathan

The best way I’ve found to explain the argument against calories in/calories out is to use the analogy of heating a house.

If your house has no thermostat, then using more fuel or less fuel is the control you need to think about for heating.

But suppose your house happens to have a thermostat. This means how hot it gets now depends more on the regulatory control. Yes, obviously thermodynamics holds of course. But focusing on heat in/heat out won’t attack the central problem, which is to figure out whether the built-in thermostat control is failing.

Let us suppose that evolution is not completely stupid. And we observe that in their natural setting animals aren’t fat. Why? Because all animals have a regulatory thermostat which stops them from getting fat. Not too much. Not too little.

Now. How might this thermostat fail? By putting in a new type of fuel. Let’s say sugar. Suppose sugar makes the regulatory framework fail, so it causes you to eat too much. Running the body hot. In this case, what is the solution? You can’t modify your thermostat (evolutionary biofeedback control). So unless you want to fight your own instinct, the best option is to restrict your consumption to fuel your house is designed for. If you do this, then you can eat all you want and let your thermostat do it’s work as designed. Which foods? This is an empirical question. And in fact is likely to differ by human lineage. There’s genetic evidence that populations that are long time farmers digest starch differently. Which is data in support, or at least not at odds, with this idea. I would say cutting back on sugar is probably an obvious start given what we know today.

Anyway. That’s the argument I’ve found to be most successful in convincing people that straight calories in/calories out is an oversimplification. Pointing out that cals in/cals outt presupposes we (and by analogy all animals) don’t have a very powerful and unconscious built in regulatory weight control mechanism. Which is supposing a bit too much in my opinion.