Woodley of Menie on the Cognitive Archaeogenetics of Ancient Greeks
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Here’s Michael Woodley of Menie’s presentation this month on the old question of how smart were the Ancient Greeks. You can try turning on the subtitles (6th button from the right at the bottom of the screen) if you can’t hear. Woodley is a very interesting and very aggressive scientist. Whether there is enough ancient DNA data and accurate enough modern polygenetic scores yet to answer this question is beyond me.
But, at least eventually, we should know.
(When did Woodley add “of Menie” to his name?)
Apparently Menie is an estate near the North-East coast of Scotland, part of which was recently bought by Donald Trump. However, the surrounding area isn’t “Menie” but “Medie.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmedie
He is the son of the Baron of Menie and the ‘of Menie’ sounds so weird it gets people’s attention. He was on Molyneux for over an hour and he was an interesting guy.
The Menie house is right near Trump’s golf course. Perhaps Trump and the Baron are buddies?
Only four modern Greek genomes to support his tentative second analysis (from Neolithic Greece through the Mycenaaeans and Minoans to said contemporary samples)–and he notes that he can’t test the “Galton Hypothesis” of UK vs. Athenian intelligence due to a lack of samples from that era. Intriguing; one wonders if the “replacement” hypothesis he pushes is necessary given his beliefs about the accumulation of spiteful mutations in modern developed populations. Question: could psychological findings on “WEIRD” populations differ partly b/c of those mutations?
He’s always been “of Menie” and is currently “Ygr.” He’s just getting more baronial with time. Are there enough samples of ancient DNA from the prior Baronsn of Menie for him to determine if he too is dysgenic?
There’s a Donald Trump connection.
The answer to the question is probably, “When his father died.”
That would be when Michael Woodley of Menie, Yr (the younger) took over the Scottish barony of his father, the elder.
According to Wikipedia:
The caput is the land or castle/manor house.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.
Think how much new information would have been added to human knowledge if Gates had started this twenty years ago. Now we'd really be gathering the fruits of it.
Sadly, our elites are not only sadistic and vengeful, they are also dull and never have an original thought.
Looks like it is his father’s title circa 1996. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the workings of British peerage can elaborate?
http://www.thepeerage.com/p64899.htm#i648987
Wut?
eccentric brit scientist is best scientist
What happened to the dapper young scion of the British Empire, lounging in the feudal manor house? He’s wearing a camo T-shirt, a Unibomber beard, and a dork-knob hairstyle. Does he have any tattoos?
(Dork knob: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dork%20knob)
http://gregoirecanlorbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/1454590368-7168-0-768x636.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0sa5u6ZIE
Behold!
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?
unwinding of inbreeding depression when... forgotten his name... changed the clan structure of Athens
(although it might have come back again once the population settled into their new clans)
Over time the upper classes got smarter, the middle classes got much smarter, and the lower classes also got smarter. Rinse, repeat. All boats rise.
Eventually, of course, the upper classes stop having children and then bad stuff happens, which is what were witnessing now.
Clarke applied his theories later to other countries, including China. I don't think there is surname data from ancient Greece, but you can imagine something similar having happened.
The Menie house is right near Trump's golf course. Perhaps Trump and the Baron are buddies?
Judging from how much trouble Trump had building his Trump Aberdeen course with local political opposition to it, probably the local baron and the president are arch-enemies by this point.
There is a Trump connection, naturally:
http://oldmanpar.blogspot.com/2009/09/donald-versus-scotsmen.html
“Trump has had problems with the local residents since he purchased the estate in 2006. He changed the name of Menie House, which he plans to turn into the clubhouse of his development, to the Macleod House, a tribute to his mother Mary. Mary MacLeod was born in the Scottish western isles, far away from Balmedie Village, while the Menie family’s association with the property dates back some 700 years according to Scottish historians. Michael Woodley, the Baron of Menie and a supporter of the project told the London Times that “The Menie name has been around for hundreds of years, it’s part of Scotland’s heritage. I am disappointed he’s changing it but overall I do support Trump’s golf proposal because I think it will create a lot of jobs.”
Scientist? Or speculator? Woodley and his collaborator Edward Dutton are interesting but a lot of their work is highly speculative, with lots of hand waving and just so stories.
It’s “of Menie, Younger”. His father is Michael Woodley, Baron of Menie. Interestingly enough, Trump actually bought the Menie estate several years ago and renamed it after his mom and turned it into one of his golf clubs:
https://oldmanpar.blogspot.com/2009/09/donald-versus-scotsmen.html
At any rate, Woodley has a weird family. His sister is a “catgirl” who lives in “Cat Girl Manor”, which is some weird BDSM type thing. She’s featured in a Vice Documentary about it on YouTube. Woodley likes to make very definitive and sweeping judgments and proclamations from little or flimsy pieces of data, so I wonder what he’d make of this data point.
https://postimg.cc/7CX36Rbb
https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/branch-rickeys-scouting-reports-digitized-now-online/
Not as OT as you might think, and as iStevey as it’s possible to be.
figure we measure the skulls of skeletons from that era, do the usual internal skull volume thing.
also, weren’t the greeks and romans employing youthanasia? that was probably actively eugenic.
Compared to Fat Tony and the modern Greeks?
my guess
unwinding of inbreeding depression when… forgotten his name… changed the clan structure of Athens
(although it might have come back again once the population settled into their new clans)
Have we forgotten Mankind Quarterly‘s Robert Gayre of Gayre?
(Actually of Gayre and Nigg, the latter left off MQ‘s masthead. Yes, there really is a Nigg, near Aberdeen. My 3rd great-grandaunt was born there.)
Gayre’s claim was quite a bit shakier than Woodley’s, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermot_Turing
http://oldmanpar.blogspot.com/2009/09/donald-versus-scotsmen.html
"Trump has had problems with the local residents since he purchased the estate in 2006. He changed the name of Menie House, which he plans to turn into the clubhouse of his development, to the Macleod House, a tribute to his mother Mary. Mary MacLeod was born in the Scottish western isles, far away from Balmedie Village, while the Menie family's association with the property dates back some 700 years according to Scottish historians. Michael Woodley, the Baron of Menie and a supporter of the project told the London Times that "The Menie name has been around for hundreds of years, it’s part of Scotland’s heritage. I am disappointed he’s changing it but overall I do support Trump’s golf proposal because I think it will create a lot of jobs."
Will it create a lot of jobs in the USA for the US citizens that DJT represents?
OT
Re the suggestions of various mental health “minorities”: Genetic research, especially GWAS, is making this field much more interesting. Plomin talks a lot about it in Blueprint.
One thing we have learned in recent years about the genetic architecture of psychological disorders is that it is not OGOD (Oh, god!, one gene, one disorder).
And you’ve heard of the current trend in shrinksville of creating “spectra”? Well, it’s much more spectral than they thought. As Plomin says, “abnormal is normal.” We are all on the spetrum for everything. Mental health and disease are just differnet areas of a normal distribution:
Another interesting finding is that there are only three major psychological disorders, which express in various ways. They have been arranged in a complex taxonomy by psychology, because they have not been able to see inside the black box:
This explains the earlier empirical finding that mental illness runs in families, but manifests in different diagnosed or named mental illnesses.
The upshot is that there is no sharp cutoff between normal and abnormal. So everyone is “on the spectrum” for everything. So you might see, for mental illness, what is happening for blackness: If one drop makes you black, simply being alive and having a genome makes you crazy, since everyone has some of the genes that characterized every mental illness.
In fact, isn’t this already sort of happening with ADHD. Does anyone not claim to have this? That’s how people get the extended time on the SAT. It’s more common among rich kids since their parents can afford the official diagnosis. Autism spectrum, née Aspergers, is another one that seems to be a trendy thing to have, for males at least. “Sorry honey if I’m not paying rapt attention to all of your constant bitching. I have Aspergers.”
And the current rules are that nobody can complain that a fringer is “not xxxxx enough.” You can’t tell someone who identifies as black that he isn’t black enough, that he doesn’t even look black. You can’t tell a Native American, “Hey, be real, you hardly have any Indiana ancestry.” So if those rules extend to mental disorders, everyone can qualify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEUW_sWlYI
She's not actually schizoid: I've dealt with people who really are, she doesn't give off that vibe.
She's trying to be fashionably shocking, or perhaps just a trifle gross, but she wants attention. She doesn't seem genuinely trangressive nor any plausible danger to herself or anyone else.
(Dork knob: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dork%20knob)
The British aristocracy has always been given great leeway to indulge in personal idiosyncracies of style and appearance. They don’t necessarily feel the need to dress like some P.G. Wodehouse character.
Here’s Lord Bath, who has said he has 75 “wifelets.”
https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/06/Duke-of-Wellington.jpg
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-99g6pN36WxA/V_h2uf5lfAI/AAAAAAAALYk/8zcxTu6WHZ8WGSoyrhdiRoVqobJplpR0gCLcB/s1600/young_winston_churchill.jpg
https://www.gratefulweb.com/sites/default/files/images/articles/sm-Sheckter-4923.JPG
Probably has a few more shillings.
I’ll take a shot. Mediterranean commerce. In the patient process of arranging deals around the big sea, lots of stories are exchanged and considered. Then in the port city of Miletus (Μίλητος), Thales asked a new question. Instead of, Who is causing all these storied (and observed) changes, he chanced: Is there an underlying substance? And that is why people who name their cars are less able to pop the hood and fix them at the side of the road.
Either that, or something else.
And, that seems pretty obviously true to me.
But, how does that interact with changes in the genetic potential for intelligence?
The talk’s Acknowledgment cites the Unz Foundation. Hopefully, Woodley of Menie is more house-trained than Greg Cochran!
He thinks modern Greeks are dumber than the Mycenaeans.
From his graph there does not appear to be much difference between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, though the dataset is limited.
I think eventually we’ll find that the shore of the Black Sea was the cradle of civilization before Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. The evidence lies at the bottom of the sea. This is because of the tremendous rise in sea level resulting from an inundation caused by the relatively sudden connection of the freshwater Black Sea (formed from earlier glacier melt) with the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosporus.
Higher-IQ groups like the Mycenaeans and the Trojans and the Luwians and the Hittites had their origin in the populations surrounding the Black Sea and moved into the Aegean and Anatolia and conquered the dumber locals.
One theory is that the conflict between the ancestors of the Greeks and the Centaurs memorialized in the metopes on the Parthenon had its origin in a war between the ancestors of the Greek elites back in their Black Sea homeland and other population groups north of the Black Sea that had pioneered the domestication of the horse and the riding of the horse for herding and warfare. Something similar in scope to the later Trojan War, and that was remembered in bardic retellings down through the millennia, in which the enemy became a combined horse-man.
Legends about smart Trojan refugees relocating to the Italian peninsula among dumber locals and founding what became Rome should not be dismissed.
Something similar happened in Egypt, in which higher-IQ groups originally of Mesopotamian stock conquered the dumber Nilotics and created the first dynasties.
Dunno what to say, though. We should be finding a lot of ruins in the Black Sea if this were true because of the chemical composition below 200 m depth, which leads to absolutely no life being present, but also great preservation for things like shipwrecks.
I recall reading that Lothrop Stoddard argued that the ancient Greeks were the most intelligent race in recorded history. Maybe that theory can now be verified (hopefully along with all of his other theories).
I suspect the NHS in England loves to throw the DSM at rich kids who are simply the product of odd childrearing o circumstances. I don’t for exmple think Little LMM is quite as crazy as she (allegedly) thinks: she’s more of a bored rich kid who doesn’t feel she can live up to her parents’ notoriety and skill sets. And, well, she can’t. Could you?
She’s not actually schizoid: I’ve dealt with people who really are, she doesn’t give off that vibe.
She’s trying to be fashionably shocking, or perhaps just a trifle gross, but she wants attention. She doesn’t seem genuinely trangressive nor any plausible danger to herself or anyone else.
Yes, except that Woodley of Menie *did* used to dress — and cut his hair — like a P.G. Warehouse character.
So I’m wondering why the change? He can’t get laid unless he does the bad boy thing? The cat woman gene finally kicked in? That’s his casual look? The baronisl bank account hit rock bottom?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xUJsRMaTiLU
On the “of Menie” there’s a whiff of RLS about it as in the American novel “The Master of Ballantrae” featuring a “bad-boy” heir (Master).
I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter.
(The same thing is occurring across Europe and its diaspora this moment, just as Mr. Sailer recently wrote about. Pour enough piss into a vat if wine....)
If you’re rich enough, you’re no longer weird, you’re just eccentric.
--Jermaine Jackson
(Really. He said that.)
This actually strikes me as a meaningful insight.
I think one standard answer is that the emergence of literature influenced people’s thought processes. Instead of everyone just getting confused or angry when that smart guy said something clever, they could go home and puzzle out his thinking.
Lol! The English make the best nerds. Tune in at exactly 26:00 for a superbly characteristic shutdown.
(Dork knob: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dork%20knob)
Until recently, he had the turtleneck Bond villain look, which goes with the mad scientist persona. I don’t know what motivated the change in appearance. Maybe he can do a video on why people get dork knobs and grow beards? His colleague Ed Dutton did a video recently about why people get tattoos.
https://www.amazon.com/At-Our-Wits-End-Intelligent/dp/184540985X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=PXHBTKG55BEZ&keywords=michael+woodley+of+menie&qid=1559121099&s=gateway&sprefix=michael+woo%2Caps%2C442&sr=8-1
How’s the old theory that Italian Tuscans/Etruscans are descended from Anatolians coming lately?
But we would need some good Y-DNA ancient samples to test to really get to the bottom of it. It could have been a case in which a band of Lydian men landed in the area, prevailed over the local men and mated with the local women.
“My brother is not ‘eccentric’!”
–Jermaine Jackson
(Really. He said that.)
mtDNA (which is passed matrilineally) research on ancient specimens in 2013 doesn’t support Herodotus’ claim that the Etruscans came from Lydia in Anatolia.
But we would need some good Y-DNA ancient samples to test to really get to the bottom of it. It could have been a case in which a band of Lydian men landed in the area, prevailed over the local men and mated with the local women.
http://oldmanpar.blogspot.com/2009/09/donald-versus-scotsmen.html
"Trump has had problems with the local residents since he purchased the estate in 2006. He changed the name of Menie House, which he plans to turn into the clubhouse of his development, to the Macleod House, a tribute to his mother Mary. Mary MacLeod was born in the Scottish western isles, far away from Balmedie Village, while the Menie family's association with the property dates back some 700 years according to Scottish historians. Michael Woodley, the Baron of Menie and a supporter of the project told the London Times that "The Menie name has been around for hundreds of years, it’s part of Scotland’s heritage. I am disappointed he’s changing it but overall I do support Trump’s golf proposal because I think it will create a lot of jobs."
Aren’t the MacLeod’s traditional allies of Clan Campbell? Is the Baron of Menie possibly an ally of Clan Macdonald? Please call the Mueller investigation.
https://oldmanpar.blogspot.com/2009/09/donald-versus-scotsmen.htmlAt any rate, Woodley has a weird family. His sister is a "catgirl" who lives in "Cat Girl Manor", which is some weird BDSM type thing. She's featured in a Vice Documentary about it on YouTube. Woodley likes to make very definitive and sweeping judgments and proclamations from little or flimsy pieces of data, so I wonder what he'd make of this data point.
165, being of the lower orders, you are insane. Being noble, the future baroness is eccentric.
Even if she marries a Baron, usually she’d be called Lady X, not Baroness X, though both are permitted.
The easy answer (and where I’d put my money) is similar mechanisms as in A Farewell to Alms– the more able (richer/smarter) have more surviving children. And perhaps some cultural attributes– like not using smart guys as expendable front line grunts or stashing them away in monasteries.
Underappreciated effects might be that involving women. I say this not in the vein of some SJW wanting to rewrite history, but because it’s low hanging fruit. They’re half the equation. Some sort of system (probably class based) whereby smart women get paired up with the smart/rich men (rather than wives being chosen near-exclusively on physical sexual appeal)– that gives the selection more bang for the buck generation to generation. Were Mycenaean and/or Hellenic cultures monogamous?
Midsomer Murders is a documentary, pass it on.
I mean, they spoke Ancient Greek, so they had to be smart.
They were smarter than most of their contemporaries, of course.
There’s never been any evidence of Trojans settling in Italy. The Po Valley had a high bronze age civilization that rapidly collapsed around 1150BC, also around the time of the fall of Troy. After that Northern Italy was largely depopulated and was settled again 900-1000BC by Iron Age migration from Central Europe, from whom the Etruscans and Romans evolved. Greek influence in Northern Italy began around 700BC.
(When did Woodley add “of Menie” to his name?)
In 2015.
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?
Superior reproductive success of individuals with higher cognitive ability, i.e., natural selection. In most cases, the actual alleles are already present in the population. It’s simply a matter of increasing their frequency.
There has been much debate in the literature about the social conditions that permit this kind of evolution. Ernst Mayr thought the secret was polygamy: high-status men can have large numbers of children by many wives. Yet, if anything, mean IQ correlates negatively with the incidence of polygnyny. The societal model that seems most conducive to increase in mean IQ is the one that Gregory Clark described for late medieval and early modern England and that Ron Unz described for China, i.e., higher-income individuals, usually a nascent middle class, have more children than average, whereas the lower class fails to replace itself reproductively. The lower class is thus continually replaced by downwardly mobile middle-class individuals.
“I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter.”
Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.
References
Clark, G. A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007; ISBN 978-0691141282.
Unz, R. How Social Darwinism made modern China. The American Conservative, 16–27 March/April 2013.
“I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it [high cognitive ability] vanished thereafter.”
"Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks."
Chrissake, I've had a sort of unarticulated sentiment that the Euro-American peoples of 1900 were on the verge of a golden age of material prosperity and an expanding sphere of "decency" or "civic goodness", for want of any better terms. Well, we've got sub-replacement fertility. I guess, among today's cognitive elites. Not sure if any nation, or perhaps internal policies, can be assigned the role of oppressor Ottomans.
They had a city-state to defend.
Similarly, many English novels depict promising orphans being effectively adopted and able to get their feet under a table. Presumably, many of the less promising orphans died in a gutter.
So kind of like how border collies got so smart. On purpose.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w12796.pdf
Page 27/29 show a terrifying trend. Nearly 150 years of selection for lower income and lower IQ since ~1850. Others have pinned this at ~5 points of IQ lost, with consequent effects on per capita innovation rates and the general decline of society.
It has slowed down recently (among whites anyway), but with enough luck we'll take America's IQ down into the low 90s with immigration and dysgenic black fertility instead.
Ancient Greek’s spoken and written forms must have been very different, just like with modern German, whose syntax resembles that of Ancient Greek’s in many ways, so not a criterion of smarts.
They were smarter than most of their contemporaries, of course.
The Hellenes were monogamous, with the exception of the Macedonians, that seems to be mixed Hellenes with barbarians.
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?Superior reproductive success of individuals with higher cognitive ability, i.e., natural selection. In most cases, the actual alleles are already present in the population. It's simply a matter of increasing their frequency.There has been much debate in the literature about the social conditions that permit this kind of evolution. Ernst Mayr thought the secret was polygamy: high-status men can have large numbers of children by many wives. Yet, if anything, mean IQ correlates negatively with the incidence of polygnyny. The societal model that seems most conducive to increase in mean IQ is the one that Gregory Clark described for late medieval and early modern England and that Ron Unz described for China, i.e., higher-income individuals, usually a nascent middle class, have more children than average, whereas the lower class fails to replace itself reproductively. The lower class is thus continually replaced by downwardly mobile middle-class individuals."I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter."Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.ReferencesClark, G. A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007; ISBN 978-0691141282.Unz, R. How Social Darwinism made modern China. The American Conservative, 16–27 March/April 2013.
Perhaps this occurs in modern Sub-Saharan Africa.
We all assume the ancient Greeks were quite smart, but it is interesting to consider what evidence we have for that belief.
Take math: The work of Andrew Wiles (who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem) or of Michael Atiyah (who was co-author of the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem) is light years beyond that of Euclid or Archimedes. Two or three years of study really is enough to master Euclid; enormously more work is needed to master the work I just referenced by Atiyah or Wiles.
Now, of course, Wiles and Atiyah needed Euclid to come first and lay the very basic foundations, and the invention of the axiomatic method by the Greeks really was important. But how much credit does Euclid get for being the pioneer vs. the much more difficult work done later by Atiyah or Wiles?
Personally, I think Atiyah and Wiles are much smarter than Euclid, but it’s hard to make a definitive case either way.
A complicating issue is population size: if the mean and SD of IQ today were the same as ancient Greece, we should have lots more smart people simply because we have so many more people altogether.
I will admit on a personal note that I have visited Mycenae, Akrotiri, Knossos, and, of course, the Athenian Acropolis, and I was impressed, very impressed. Pericles had a point when he said in the Funeral Oration, “Men will marvel at us in future ages as men marvel at us now.”
But the fact that I am awed by the founders of our civilization is not really evidence.
2. But Euclid.
What are invasions and rape by savage Turks for $1,000.00, Alex?
(The same thing is occurring across Europe and its diaspora this moment, just as Mr. Sailer recently wrote about. Pour enough piss into a vat if wine….)
They were smarter than most of their contemporaries, of course.
Nn wrote:
There ought to be some evidence, one way or the other, in the different registers used by various characters in ancient plays.
Dube wrote:
I think that is pretty much the standard explanation among historians going back a long ways: commerce makes people smart, inquisitive, and free.
And, that seems pretty obviously true to me.
But, how does that interact with changes in the genetic potential for intelligence?
For changes in genetics arising from Mediterranean commerce, I'll punt to standard Darwin. But let me add a singular contributing circumstance for Athens: the improbable adoption of democracy.
Teachers arrived to train the boys to think and speak. (In contrast, the Spartans were pretty laconic.) In Athens, even Luke, traveling with Paul, noted in his famous Acts 17:21, All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
Now wouldn't that get the genes hopping, somewhat like reading comment threads at UR? But that's only a metaphor augmented by a simile, and likely fails to satisfy the clinical query.
Behold!
is that yeoman Janice in the go-go boots?…
http://gregoirecanlorbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/1454590368-7168-0-768x636.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0sa5u6ZIE
well very daper but his books are good nonetheless… (middle of the catalog).. also here, before it is memory holed:
No. Not only here, but nowhere. It is impossible.
Thanks!
In addition to the difficult accent, the speaker just doesn’t give a well composed talk. For instance, timepoint when video launched for me (in the 20s), he’s giving a minute long dissertation on why his freaking axes are reversed before or in the middle of making an actual point. And the graph is as simple as a linear fit of a scatter plot. Add onto that the poor videography (can’t see the slides What a mess.
I find myself less and less willing to listen/read poorly constructed arguments. It’s just not worth the time. It shows laziness and disrespect by the creator. And it’s correlated to cranks.
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?Superior reproductive success of individuals with higher cognitive ability, i.e., natural selection. In most cases, the actual alleles are already present in the population. It's simply a matter of increasing their frequency.There has been much debate in the literature about the social conditions that permit this kind of evolution. Ernst Mayr thought the secret was polygamy: high-status men can have large numbers of children by many wives. Yet, if anything, mean IQ correlates negatively with the incidence of polygnyny. The societal model that seems most conducive to increase in mean IQ is the one that Gregory Clark described for late medieval and early modern England and that Ron Unz described for China, i.e., higher-income individuals, usually a nascent middle class, have more children than average, whereas the lower class fails to replace itself reproductively. The lower class is thus continually replaced by downwardly mobile middle-class individuals."I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter."Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.ReferencesClark, G. A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007; ISBN 978-0691141282.Unz, R. How Social Darwinism made modern China. The American Conservative, 16–27 March/April 2013.
Peter, thanks.
“I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it [high cognitive ability] vanished thereafter.”
“Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.”
Chrissake, I’ve had a sort of unarticulated sentiment that the Euro-American peoples of 1900 were on the verge of a golden age of material prosperity and an expanding sphere of “decency” or “civic goodness”, for want of any better terms. Well, we’ve got sub-replacement fertility. I guess, among today’s cognitive elites. Not sure if any nation, or perhaps internal policies, can be assigned the role of oppressor Ottomans.
Greg Cochran has mentioned that the Anatolian Farmers who entered Europe were preceded by Iranian Farmers who only got as far as Greece. Perhaps this double inheritance gave them a civilisational leg-up.
1. It’s difficult to deconfound smarts versus training and use of prior work. Wiles had a lot that he could build on and learn from by other algebraists.
2. But Euclid.
They just don’t make British aristocrats like they used to.
https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/10/101435/2118425-george_washington_1795.jpg
To this
https://grazia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Kehinde-Wiley-Barack-Obama-portrait.jpg
Talk about a decline.....
The first Woodley to hold the title of Baron of Menie is Dr Woodley's father, who I suspect bought it.
His title is recognised by the Lyon Court, and is therefore unimpeachable as such, but it is no sign in itself of noble origins, and has nothing whatever to do with the title of "baron" within the peerage system of the United Kingdom.
Woodley senior seems to have made his money as an "aviation consultant" for the film industry, including one or two of the Bond films, which is amusing, given the supposedly Bond-like qualities of his son.
Aside dubious genetic remains, much of the writings of Aristotle survive and all the literary works of Plato. In his treatises, Aristotle demonstrates in almost every paragraph the highest analytic ability. He addressess issues in a comprehensive manner. Hard to imagine a higher intelligence. Plato provides an extra data set. He wrote so-called philosophical dramas, essentially plays, in which all the characters. except for Socrates (aside the later dialogues featuring other speakers than Socrates). are represented as having no more than an intelligence similar to that of the average Joe in the modern world. Unless Plato dumbed down their intelligence, that fact seems to me to indicate that the ancient Greeks were no more intelligent than folks are nowadays.
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?Superior reproductive success of individuals with higher cognitive ability, i.e., natural selection. In most cases, the actual alleles are already present in the population. It's simply a matter of increasing their frequency.There has been much debate in the literature about the social conditions that permit this kind of evolution. Ernst Mayr thought the secret was polygamy: high-status men can have large numbers of children by many wives. Yet, if anything, mean IQ correlates negatively with the incidence of polygnyny. The societal model that seems most conducive to increase in mean IQ is the one that Gregory Clark described for late medieval and early modern England and that Ron Unz described for China, i.e., higher-income individuals, usually a nascent middle class, have more children than average, whereas the lower class fails to replace itself reproductively. The lower class is thus continually replaced by downwardly mobile middle-class individuals."I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter."Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.ReferencesClark, G. A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007; ISBN 978-0691141282.Unz, R. How Social Darwinism made modern China. The American Conservative, 16–27 March/April 2013.
No citations on my part but I think Greeks made choices about which kids, having been born, were going to be nurtured and allowed to grow up. No way precious resources would be wasted on an obvious misfit.
They had a city-state to defend.
Similarly, many English novels depict promising orphans being effectively adopted and able to get their feet under a table. Presumably, many of the less promising orphans died in a gutter.
So kind of like how border collies got so smart. On purpose.
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?Superior reproductive success of individuals with higher cognitive ability, i.e., natural selection. In most cases, the actual alleles are already present in the population. It's simply a matter of increasing their frequency.There has been much debate in the literature about the social conditions that permit this kind of evolution. Ernst Mayr thought the secret was polygamy: high-status men can have large numbers of children by many wives. Yet, if anything, mean IQ correlates negatively with the incidence of polygnyny. The societal model that seems most conducive to increase in mean IQ is the one that Gregory Clark described for late medieval and early modern England and that Ron Unz described for China, i.e., higher-income individuals, usually a nascent middle class, have more children than average, whereas the lower class fails to replace itself reproductively. The lower class is thus continually replaced by downwardly mobile middle-class individuals."I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter."Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.ReferencesClark, G. A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007; ISBN 978-0691141282.Unz, R. How Social Darwinism made modern China. The American Conservative, 16–27 March/April 2013.
Rather depends who is doing the polygamizing. If your elites are conquering deep-thinkers, you get one result … if they are local warriors, you get another.
Read depth and coverage of aDNA is so far pretty garbage, at least in large numbers. (Even the ones done to a higher level are pretty low by normal standards) Couple that with the issues of IQ polygenic scores, I’d be disinclined to take anything much from this just yet.
The Gregory Clarke idea for England, where there is an unbroken 1,000 year recorded history to study, is that before the Industrial Revolution life was tough, and getting food was tough and people died from that, including starvation. The rich were able to have and support large families. The smarter kids replaced their parents in the upper class. The lesser kids had to move into the middle class, displacing the middle class, who moved into the lower class, while the lower class died off from starvation and disease (their surnames literally disappeared from written records). There was also a “move south to London angle” where the rich congregated in that city.
Over time the upper classes got smarter, the middle classes got much smarter, and the lower classes also got smarter. Rinse, repeat. All boats rise.
Eventually, of course, the upper classes stop having children and then bad stuff happens, which is what were witnessing now.
Clarke applied his theories later to other countries, including China. I don’t think there is surname data from ancient Greece, but you can imagine something similar having happened.
Received wisdom is that the “young fogey” look is most likely to be successful:
On the “of Menie” there’s a whiff of RLS about it as in the American novel “The Master of Ballantrae” featuring a “bad-boy” heir (Master).
Every generation has the advantage of standing on the shoulders of prior generations and starting from a an advantageous position.
Euclid, Archimedes, and Pythagoras did not have air-conditioned offices or laptops. What are the chances of third world thinkers of today independently rediscovering the fundamentals of algebra or geometry?
The state of carpentry in Yorkshire, England was evidently highly developed in the eighteenth century and helped three local village boys make good.
Thomas Chippendale from the small town Otley–a few miles down the River Wharfe from where I grew up– got into furniture making and published a book of designs that are still used to make furniture today.
Another carpenter , John Harrison from the village of Foulby, built his first grandfather clock at the age of 20, all with wooden works, and went on, after decades of work, to create a reliable marine chronometer that would compensate for heat, humidity, and barometric pressure that could be used to determine accurate longtitude.
One of his watches was very useful navigational aid to another local Yorkshire boy, James Cook from the village of Marton, the second of eight children of a Scottish farm laborer, who went to sea and discovered the missing half of the world, Easter Island, Christmas Island, Hawaii, plus a slew of other scientific discoveries.
So Jesus was not the only carpenter’s son who hit the big time.
Clock made by Harrison, however the case more in the London pagoda top style than with the typical break arch top popularized by Chippendale, though it does have oriental-style decorative motifs as per Chippendale design book.
https://www.antiqueclockspriceguide.com/priceguideimages/robertoschmitt4/apr2002xlot399a.jpg
Someone should use archaeogenetics to test W. D. Hamilton’s “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man” conjecture that:
IMHO this conjecture is what triggered Trivers to call this paper of Hamilton’s “fascist”.
Lord Bath looks like Wavy Gravy.
Probably has a few more shillings.
https://oldmanpar.blogspot.com/2009/09/donald-versus-scotsmen.htmlAt any rate, Woodley has a weird family. His sister is a "catgirl" who lives in "Cat Girl Manor", which is some weird BDSM type thing. She's featured in a Vice Documentary about it on YouTube. Woodley likes to make very definitive and sweeping judgments and proclamations from little or flimsy pieces of data, so I wonder what he'd make of this data point.
Catgirls are not necessarily BDSM and are related (albeit aspirationally and speculatively) to genetic engineering.
https://postimg.cc/7CX36Rbb
The ancient Greeks were a mercantile race of traders. The first philosopher and scientist or proto-scientist, Thales, famously made his fortune by buying up all the olive presses and then renting them out later when demand was high. The mechanism was mercantile success, similar to the Ashkenazim later.
As far as renovating/repairing the Parthenon… if Bill Gates had a shred of imagination — he doesn’t — he would give 100% of his philanthropy to where it would really do humanity some good. Namely, funding archaeological digs and restoration projects. In fact, he should open the Bill Gates School of Archaeology, find interesting and smart students, and give them a free ride to a PhD as long as they promise to actually work in the field for x years. And that “work in the field” would be guaranteed by the same Bill Gates School of Archaeology. How much archaeological work could you fund with, say, $10 billion dollars in seed money throwing off income every year?
Think how much new information would have been added to human knowledge if Gates had started this twenty years ago. Now we’d really be gathering the fruits of it.
Sadly, our elites are not only sadistic and vengeful, they are also dull and never have an original thought.
http://gregoirecanlorbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/1454590368-7168-0-768x636.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0sa5u6ZIE
I guess he was losing his hair, both surface and thickness, and was losing also his blondness. The hipster look was the only available alternative for a dandy.
He was really a cuty with his sloanie style.
Even with ancient DNA we could not make a meaningful assignment of IQ test scores to ancient populations because so far no polygenic score can predict IQ scores of population in a meaningful way. 10% of variance explained seems to be the best what has been achieved so far even when using many 1000’s of SNPs and very large samples. The missing heritability gap is not being closed.
But we would need some good Y-DNA ancient samples to test to really get to the bottom of it. It could have been a case in which a band of Lydian men landed in the area, prevailed over the local men and mated with the local women.
I wasn’t aware of Herodotus’s claim. If he said it happened after 700BC, maybe. But the proto-Etruscans came from the North and carried their culture, not Greek. More likely though the Greek influences on them came directly from Greece and their colonies further south.
But we would need some good Y-DNA ancient samples to test to really get to the bottom of it. It could have been a case in which a band of Lydian men landed in the area, prevailed over the local men and mated with the local women.
Well, that just sounds preposterous.
She’s not a future Baroness unless she secures a new title or marries into one.
Even if she marries a Baron, usually she’d be called Lady X, not Baroness X, though both are permitted.
And, that seems pretty obviously true to me.
But, how does that interact with changes in the genetic potential for intelligence?
I think that is pretty much the standard explanation among historians going back a long ways: commerce makes people smart, inquisitive, and free. … But, how does that interact with changes in the genetic potential for intelligence?
For changes in genetics arising from Mediterranean commerce, I’ll punt to standard Darwin. But let me add a singular contributing circumstance for Athens: the improbable adoption of democracy.
Teachers arrived to train the boys to think and speak. (In contrast, the Spartans were pretty laconic.) In Athens, even Luke, traveling with Paul, noted in his famous Acts 17:21, All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
Now wouldn’t that get the genes hopping, somewhat like reading comment threads at UR? But that’s only a metaphor augmented by a simile, and likely fails to satisfy the clinical query.
Glory Hallelujah! :)) Preach, brother Achilles!
Dunno what to say, though. We should be finding a lot of ruins in the Black Sea if this were true because of the chemical composition below 200 m depth, which leads to absolutely no life being present, but also great preservation for things like shipwrecks.
Dunno what to say, though. We should be finding a lot of ruins in the Black Sea if this were true because of the chemical composition below 200 m depth, which leads to absolutely no life being present, but also great preservation for things like shipwrecks.
How long before we find out the ancient Black Sea Romanians were kangz?
Also, other Balkans countries have protochronist leanings, as I found similar rhetoric in Bulgaria, among others.
We don't really do kangz though, as a nation. National identities are based not just on glorious pasts, but also on shared defeats and hardships, and we veer more towards that area. We self-define explicitly as non-expansionists minding their own business in ancestral lands, absorbing migratory waves and foreign influences, with fragile internal politics and going up against empires and losing more often than not until the modern age.
But we would need some good Y-DNA ancient samples to test to really get to the bottom of it. It could have been a case in which a band of Lydian men landed in the area, prevailed over the local men and mated with the local women.
Razib discusses the evidence:
https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-etruscan-origins-mystery-and-genetics/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119242
But were they smarter than Archimedes…..
But of course, one of the problems here is judging the intelligence of people smarter than oneself -- an intrinsically hard task.
I can actually understand most of Einstein's work: I have even, I am proud to say, repeated some of Einstein's own errors when I have tried to understand General Relativity (yes, yes, he did it first, and I made the errors even though I had his final work as an example of how to do it right).
But, for the life of me, despite the fact that I have access to the final results, I cannot understand how Wiles or Atiyah worked out their discoveries.
In any case, while it is obvious that Atiyah and Wiles are smarter than me (or any mathematician I have knowm personally) at math, doing an anachronistic comparison of Euclid and Archimedes vs. Atiyah and Wiles is very hard indeed.
A related problem is comparing Euclid and Archimedes to their contemporaries in other civilizations. Obviously, they were way far out in advance of others at the time.
But, is that because they were intrinsically brighter than anyone else at the time or simply because they lived in a culture that encouraged their innate talents?
Of course, I am not trying to denigrate Archimedes or Euclid -- obviously, they were giants among the pioneers of mathematics. The question is how do you compare genius across the centuries or across different civilizations -- a very difficult problem.
Greeks valued intellectual achievement.
Intelligence would make a young man more valuable as a son-in-law to a young woman’s father due to the prestige the marriage would bring. Also, having intelligent in-laws means having intelligent allies, which would be particularly important in the factious political environment of Ancient Greek city-states.
The ancient Greeks did not let their women marry down. A women from a good family was expected to marry a man from a good family, and it was arranged for her. None of this mudsharking business we have in modern society. The minute a smart woman marries a dumb guy, it’s a waste of her genetic potential.
Modern white men are reluctant to commit to marriage. Arranged marriages in traditional societies gets over this problem. In a modern society, it’s the most aggressive man who gets married and has kids, whatever his color. Smart guys are often too hypersensitive and neurotic to get married without an outside push. Look at Bill Gates. His mother practically had to order him to get married.
https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/06/Duke-of-Wellington.jpg
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-99g6pN36WxA/V_h2uf5lfAI/AAAAAAAALYk/8zcxTu6WHZ8WGSoyrhdiRoVqobJplpR0gCLcB/s1600/young_winston_churchill.jpg
Not to mention presidents. We’ve gone from this
To this
Talk about a decline…..
Another interesting clock-maker was Connecticut’s Eli Terry, one of the pioneers in the development of interchangeable parts:
Yes, indeed, Terry did a lot to make expensive looking clocks cheap with mass production methods to produce wooden movements in mantel clocks that had easily replaceable parts and ran for thirty whole hours without winding but note that the case of this clock still has the vestigial Chippendale-style broken arch horns like a goat’s on the top and rudimentary feet and udders underneath, although by this point in time the clock is not really a piece of furniture at all.
With clocks becoming so affordable, there was now no excuse for factory workers to show up late.
However, Terry’s cheap0 clocks have now become rather expensive and online some dealers are pricing similar clocks to the one in the picture above at close to 5 figures. No doubt Eli Terry’s pendulum is swinging in his grave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milling_(machining)#HistoryVestigial ornamentation.Like fluting on a stone column.Back when Connecticut clocks set time for much of the globe....Affordable commodities for the common man.....There's a certain nobility in that....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-szjN_MdA
Perhaps this is more your speed.....
http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/benjaminfranklin300/images/09pop/large/pop_c09_010.jpg
https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/06/Duke-of-Wellington.jpg
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-99g6pN36WxA/V_h2uf5lfAI/AAAAAAAALYk/8zcxTu6WHZ8WGSoyrhdiRoVqobJplpR0gCLcB/s1600/young_winston_churchill.jpg
Winston Churchill used to take pleasure in pointing out that he was a commoner.
Technically speaking, of course.
https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/06/Duke-of-Wellington.jpg
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-99g6pN36WxA/V_h2uf5lfAI/AAAAAAAALYk/8zcxTu6WHZ8WGSoyrhdiRoVqobJplpR0gCLcB/s1600/young_winston_churchill.jpg
As a matter of fact the present Duke of Wellington is every bit as much an aristocrat as was his illustrious ancestor, and the present Duke of Marlborough (to which title Churchill was heir for the first 23 or so years of his life), although a reasonably reformed drug-addict, is a good copy of a dissolute nobleman of the 18th century. Both dukes still live in their ancestral seats. In other words, they do still make aristocrats the way they used to.
But nothing of this has anything to do with the Woodleys, who are neither peers (“lords”) nor gentry.
The first Woodley to hold the title of Baron of Menie is Dr Woodley’s father, who I suspect bought it.
His title is recognised by the Lyon Court, and is therefore unimpeachable as such, but it is no sign in itself of noble origins, and has nothing whatever to do with the title of “baron” within the peerage system of the United Kingdom.
Woodley senior seems to have made his money as an “aviation consultant” for the film industry, including one or two of the Bond films, which is amusing, given the supposedly Bond-like qualities of his son.
Traditionally, the film industry and anything entertainment related is considered extremely declasse by the aristocracy, isn't it?
Personally, I'd be embarrassed to go by a fancy name if it derived from my father buying it or something.
It would take academic integrity and backbone to finally acknowledge our cradle of mankind status and that we taught Aristotle and all them Greek homos everything they knew. It’s the salt in the Carpathians that proves it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protochronism
Also, other Balkans countries have protochronist leanings, as I found similar rhetoric in Bulgaria, among others.
We don’t really do kangz though, as a nation. National identities are based not just on glorious pasts, but also on shared defeats and hardships, and we veer more towards that area. We self-define explicitly as non-expansionists minding their own business in ancestral lands, absorbing migratory waves and foreign influences, with fragile internal politics and going up against empires and losing more often than not until the modern age.
https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/10/101435/2118425-george_washington_1795.jpg
To this
https://grazia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Kehinde-Wiley-Barack-Obama-portrait.jpg
Talk about a decline.....
Haha! The black people soul is colorful, tropical.
With clocks becoming so affordable, there was now no excuse for factory workers to show up late.
However, Terry's cheap0 clocks have now become rather expensive and online some dealers are pricing similar clocks to the one in the picture above at close to 5 figures. No doubt Eli Terry's pendulum is swinging in his grave.
Interchangeable parts. It’s kind of a bit deal. Of course, milling machines were the big breakthrough. Such a humble piece of tech…..but so vital to the modern world…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milling_(machining)#History
Vestigial ornamentation.Like fluting on a stone column.
Back when Connecticut clocks set time for much of the globe….
Affordable commodities for the common man…..There’s a certain nobility in that….
Perhaps this is more your speed…..
syonredux wrote to me:
Well… my gut feeling is “yes.”
But of course, one of the problems here is judging the intelligence of people smarter than oneself — an intrinsically hard task.
I can actually understand most of Einstein’s work: I have even, I am proud to say, repeated some of Einstein’s own errors when I have tried to understand General Relativity (yes, yes, he did it first, and I made the errors even though I had his final work as an example of how to do it right).
But, for the life of me, despite the fact that I have access to the final results, I cannot understand how Wiles or Atiyah worked out their discoveries.
In any case, while it is obvious that Atiyah and Wiles are smarter than me (or any mathematician I have knowm personally) at math, doing an anachronistic comparison of Euclid and Archimedes vs. Atiyah and Wiles is very hard indeed.
A related problem is comparing Euclid and Archimedes to their contemporaries in other civilizations. Obviously, they were way far out in advance of others at the time.
But, is that because they were intrinsically brighter than anyone else at the time or simply because they lived in a culture that encouraged their innate talents?
Of course, I am not trying to denigrate Archimedes or Euclid — obviously, they were giants among the pioneers of mathematics. The question is how do you compare genius across the centuries or across different civilizations — a very difficult problem.
For changes in genetics arising from Mediterranean commerce, I'll punt to standard Darwin. But let me add a singular contributing circumstance for Athens: the improbable adoption of democracy.
Teachers arrived to train the boys to think and speak. (In contrast, the Spartans were pretty laconic.) In Athens, even Luke, traveling with Paul, noted in his famous Acts 17:21, All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
Now wouldn't that get the genes hopping, somewhat like reading comment threads at UR? But that's only a metaphor augmented by a simile, and likely fails to satisfy the clinical query.
sounds WEIRD
The first Woodley to hold the title of Baron of Menie is Dr Woodley's father, who I suspect bought it.
His title is recognised by the Lyon Court, and is therefore unimpeachable as such, but it is no sign in itself of noble origins, and has nothing whatever to do with the title of "baron" within the peerage system of the United Kingdom.
Woodley senior seems to have made his money as an "aviation consultant" for the film industry, including one or two of the Bond films, which is amusing, given the supposedly Bond-like qualities of his son.
I thought baron is one of the titles that can’t be bought and sold. So is Woodley’s father’s “baron” not the real baron but one of those you can use if you buy some old piece of real estate?
Traditionally, the film industry and anything entertainment related is considered extremely declasse by the aristocracy, isn’t it?
Personally, I’d be embarrassed to go by a fancy name if it derived from my father buying it or something.
Acts 17:21. All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
sounds WEIRD
Hyperboly, perhaps? Expressive of attitude on the part of the author? – nothing except telling or hearing something new. Still, it suggests verisimilitude in the report of hyperactivity.
Does that link to genetic effects? Punt to Darwin.
They took [Paul] and brought him to the Areopagus, a first-rate venue. Paul was pretty hyper himself. If it was a night class, they might not have needed lights.
But of course, one of the problems here is judging the intelligence of people smarter than oneself -- an intrinsically hard task.
I can actually understand most of Einstein's work: I have even, I am proud to say, repeated some of Einstein's own errors when I have tried to understand General Relativity (yes, yes, he did it first, and I made the errors even though I had his final work as an example of how to do it right).
But, for the life of me, despite the fact that I have access to the final results, I cannot understand how Wiles or Atiyah worked out their discoveries.
In any case, while it is obvious that Atiyah and Wiles are smarter than me (or any mathematician I have knowm personally) at math, doing an anachronistic comparison of Euclid and Archimedes vs. Atiyah and Wiles is very hard indeed.
A related problem is comparing Euclid and Archimedes to their contemporaries in other civilizations. Obviously, they were way far out in advance of others at the time.
But, is that because they were intrinsically brighter than anyone else at the time or simply because they lived in a culture that encouraged their innate talents?
Of course, I am not trying to denigrate Archimedes or Euclid -- obviously, they were giants among the pioneers of mathematics. The question is how do you compare genius across the centuries or across different civilizations -- a very difficult problem.
My gut feeling is…no. I mean, when you consider how far Archimedes got back in the 3rd century BC…..
Um, uhh… OK … sounds good … here’s your research funding
Random Academic Essay Title Generator
Galton wrote that Greek were at least two Grades (21 IQ points) above victorian English so it’s 121 IQ not 130 IQ.
I feel Galton method based upon geniuses number was quite exaggerated because he chose a population of 100k people instead of 10M without equating the selection for Victorians.
10 people out of 100k gives au Gaussian threshold + 55.
10 people out of 10M gives a + 72 threshold.
If you ponder by correlation between IQ and achievement of 0.7, you get around +40 and +50.
If we take a Nobel prize level at around 150 (Ann Roe), with Galton « error », would give Greek an 115 average IQ and correcting for entire general Greek civilization population would give an average IQ of 100. But then, maybe it was 20 IQ points above other great civilizations of the past …
Galton also estimated the subsaharian African IQ to 73 or 2,5 grades under Victorian IQ.
Perhaps this occurs in modern Sub-Saharan Africa.
No it doesn’t. First, the high polygyny rate (most marriages were polygynous until recently) creates a high level of mate competition among males. This selects for a different package of mental, physical, and behavioral traits: physical strength, verbal bombast, ostentatous behavior, etc., i.e., the “Big Man” persona. Second, a high polygyny rate ensures that all women marry early and have children. There is very little reproductive wastage on the female side, so the selection pressure on women is very light. In general, selection is strong only for the basics.
I think Greeks made choices about which kids, having been born, were going to be nurtured and allowed to grow up.
Exposure of newborn children was common in ancient Greece, but it was also common in many other peoples. Again, the correlation between this practice and population IQ seems close to zero.
so far no polygenic score can predict IQ scores of population in a meaningful way. 10% of variance explained seems to be the best what has been achieved so far even when using many 1000’s of SNPs and very large samples. The missing heritability gap is not being closed.
At present, polygenic scores explain 11-13% of the variance in educational attainment. That works out to r= 0.33-0.36. Even if we could locate every single gene that influences educational attainment, we probably could not get a value of r greater than 0.5.
The problem here is not simply that the polygenic score imperfectly measures the genetic component of intelligence. The problem is also that educational attainment imperfectly measures this genetic component. Keep in mind that the heritability of IQ has a value of r=0.5 to 0.8.
If you’re looking for general patterns, it’s not necessary to locate and identify every single gene that influences intelligence. If you have a bowl of differently colored jellybeans, you don’t have to identify the color of every single jellybean to estimate the proportion of each color. A sample is sufficient.
(Actually of Gayre and Nigg, the latter left off MQ's masthead. Yes, there really is a Nigg, near Aberdeen. My 3rd great-grandaunt was born there.)
Gayre's claim was quite a bit shakier than Woodley's, though.
There’s something up with that stretch of coast. Menie is 18½ miles north of Nigg, but only 2½ miles south of Foveran, at the Ythan estuary. Ancestral seat of the Turing baronets. The current laird is no thicko, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermot_Turing
i was thinking of the WEIRD acronym (Western Educated Industrial Rich Developed) used to describe the psychology of modern western college students who iirc are very high in “openness.”
Can anyone here offer the mechanism by which high cognitive ability emerged in the Greek population?Superior reproductive success of individuals with higher cognitive ability, i.e., natural selection. In most cases, the actual alleles are already present in the population. It's simply a matter of increasing their frequency.There has been much debate in the literature about the social conditions that permit this kind of evolution. Ernst Mayr thought the secret was polygamy: high-status men can have large numbers of children by many wives. Yet, if anything, mean IQ correlates negatively with the incidence of polygnyny. The societal model that seems most conducive to increase in mean IQ is the one that Gregory Clark described for late medieval and early modern England and that Ron Unz described for China, i.e., higher-income individuals, usually a nascent middle class, have more children than average, whereas the lower class fails to replace itself reproductively. The lower class is thus continually replaced by downwardly mobile middle-class individuals."I’d also be interested in the mechanism by which it vanished thereafter."Sub-replacement fertility during the Roman period, then oppression by the Ottoman Turks.ReferencesClark, G. A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007; ISBN 978-0691141282.Unz, R. How Social Darwinism made modern China. The American Conservative, 16–27 March/April 2013.
And to see how it vanished:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w12796.pdf
Page 27/29 show a terrifying trend. Nearly 150 years of selection for lower income and lower IQ since ~1850. Others have pinned this at ~5 points of IQ lost, with consequent effects on per capita innovation rates and the general decline of society.
It has slowed down recently (among whites anyway), but with enough luck we’ll take America’s IQ down into the low 90s with immigration and dysgenic black fertility instead.