The 10,000 Year Explosion - a book review

[New Deal Democrat]

Originally Posted by Steve MB

It must be true -- after all, Iraq has the world's lowest murder rate, right? Or is it Egypt? Syria? Well, it's gotta be one of those Fertile Crescent countries....

Originally Posted by Steve MB

Wow, this is absurd even by the standards of your usual arguments, given the obvious huge variations between populations in Euro-American civilization that are indistinguishable by that metric.

Here is the list, once again, of countries ranked by murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._homicide_rate

Egypt has 0.8, which places it toward the bottom of the list. Iraq has 7.3, but I am confident that it was much lower before the U.S. invasion. Syria has 3.0, which is still lower than the U.S. with 5.0.

Countries at the top of the list are countries where a significant percentage of the ancestors of current inhabitants were still paleolithic hunters when the earliest centers of civilization in Egypt, Iraq, India, and China were developing. At the very least they were neolithic, which means that they still depended on hunting, and lacked city governments to cull the more aggressive.

By the way, in India the murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants is 2.8. In China it is 1.17. Many countries with much worse poverty than the United States have much lower murder rates.

Cochran's and Harpending's arguments do not require a one to one correspondence, only a correspondence.

[Steve MB]

Originally Posted by New Deal Democrat

Cochran's and Harpending's arguments do not require a one to one correspondence

Obviously, you would not admit error if MacTavish dumped a tanker truck of sugar into his porridge.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by New Deal Democrat

http://www.livescience.com/12937-10-...ution-807.html

What kind of science zine is this? Evolution never has a speed.

[New Deal Democrat]

Originally Posted by marshmallow

Evolution happens with every new generation. Humans have evolved lots over the last 10K years, mostly reacting to disease and new diets (e.g. dairy).

Humans with a long history of agriculture have also adjusted to alcohol consumption, and high carbohydrate diets. Human populations that have more recently been introduced to agriculture, like north American Indians, have higher rates of alcoholism and diabetes. This is explained in The 10,000 Year Explosion.

Agricultural and urban populations gained an advantage by being able to consume wine and beer without ruining their lives, because fresh water in their environments was often polluted. Before the widespread use of water purification people often mixed wine and water. The alcohol in the wine killed the bacteria in the water.

St. Paul recommended this in 1 Timothy 5:23 Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities.

When researching the cause of cholera in the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur noticed that those who did not drink wine and beer were more likely to become infected.

[jiolowinglo]

"Cultural diversification promotes rapid phenotypic evolution in Xavánte Indians" (January 2012)

Shifts in social structure and cultural practices can potentially promote unusual combinations of allele frequencies that drive the evolution of genetic and phenotypic novelties during human evolution. These cultural practices act in combination with geographical and linguistic barriers and can promote faster evolutionary changes shaped by gene–culture interactions. However, specific cases indicative of this interaction are scarce. Here we show that quantitative genetic parameters obtained from cephalometric data taken on 1,203 individuals analyzed in combination with genetic, climatic, social, and life-history data belonging to six South Amerindian populations are compatible with a scenario of rapid genetic and phenotypic evolution, probably mediated by cultural shifts. We found that the Xavánte experienced a remarkable pace of evolution: the rate of morphological change is far greater than expected for its time of split from their sister group, the Kayapó, which occurred around 1,500 y ago. We also suggest that this rapid differentiation was possible because of strong social-organization differences. Our results demonstrate how human groups deriving from a recent common ancestor can experience variable paces of phenotypic divergence, probably as a response to different cultural or social determinants. We suggest that assembling composite databases involving cultural and biological data will be of key importance to unravel cases of evolution modulated by the cultural environment.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/1/73

"Evidence for evolution in response to natural selection in a contemporary human population" (October 2011)

It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection. In contrast, recent studies show that selection can be strong in contemporary populations. However, detecting a response to selection is particularly challenging; previous evidence from wild animals has been criticized for both applying anticonservative statistical tests and failing to consider random genetic drift. Here we study life-history variation in an insular preindustrial French-Canadian population and apply a recently proposed conservative approach to testing microevolutionary responses to selection. As reported for other such societies, natural selection favored an earlier age at first reproduction (AFR) among women. AFR was also highly heritable and genetically correlated to fitness, predicting a microevolutionary change toward earlier reproduction. In agreement with this prediction, AFR declined from about 26–22 y over a 140-y period. Crucially, we uncovered a substantial change in the breeding values for this trait, indicating that the change in AFR largely occurred at the genetic level. Moreover, the genetic trend was higher than expected under the effect of random genetic drift alone. Our results show that microevolution can be detectable over relatively few generations in humans and underscore the need for studies of human demography and reproductive ecology to consider the role of evolutionary processes.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/20...04210108.short

[John Mace]

"It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection."

Only by people ignorant of how evolution works.

[LonesomePolecat]

Originally Posted by sh1bu1

And dingos only eat white babies.

Except for when they're in the mood for Chinese or Thai.

[elucidator]

“This is not a book to be set aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.”

- Dorothy Parker (paraphrase, you pedantic snot!)

[jiolowinglo]

Originally Posted by elucidator

“This is not a book to be set aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.”

- Dorothy Parker (paraphrase, you pedantic snot!)

I take it you didn't actually read the book...

[Wendell Wagner]

elucidator writes:

> “This is not a book to be set aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.”
>
> - Dorothy Parker (paraphrase, you pedantic snot!)

We have talked about this quotation in various threads. No one has been able to find it in any of her writings. No one has been able to find any first-hand evidence that she said it. There's no proof that she ever said or wrote anything like it, despite it being one of her frequently-claimed quotations:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=532756

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=599661

[New Deal Democrat]

Originally Posted by John Mace

"It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection."

Only by people ignorant of how evolution works.

Cultural and technological advances benefit those who are able to master them at the expense of those who are not. Computer technology enables geniuses to earn fortunes. It provides reasonably well paying careers for those of superior intelligence. It destroys or reduces the economic value of jobs that can be learned by those of average or below average intelligence.

This kind of thing has happened throughout history and prehistory. The reason bows and arrows are easy for us to learn how to use is because our ancestors were able to learn how to make and use them. They used them against those who were unable to learn, by achieving greater success in hunting and war.

[Chen019]

Originally Posted by John Mace

"It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection."

Only by people ignorant of how evolution works.

True. Unfortunately some of those ignorant people include academics who speak on the subject.

[Crane]

And Sputnik!

Crane

[Crane]

Sorry about #313 - old news and I got timed out on the edit.

Anyway:

I have not had a chance to read the book yet, but the discussion above does not offer much evidence of evolution. Technology is separate from evolution. Our brains have far more to mimic and are stimulated by greater variety than were the brains of our ancestors. So, we are not smarter than they were, just better trained.

Skilled archaeologists today cannot reliably recreate the technology of a Folsom projectile point. A Folsom brain might do wonders with modern technology.

Crane

[Steve MB]

Originally Posted by New Deal Democrat

The reason bows and arrows are easy for us to learn how to use is because our ancestors were able to learn how to make and use them.

Oh, great Ghu, somebody who still believes in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics is lecturing us on human evolution....

[Freddy the Pig]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

Evolution never has a speed.

Of course it does. It even has a unit of measure, the darwin.