Here is the list, once again, of countries ranked by murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants.
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.
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.
> “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:
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.
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.
Wait. Maybe I’m missing your point. Is this supposed to be evidence that blacks and Hispanics are genetically inferior to whites? Do cultural factors play no part in this in your view? Could being brought to this country in chains and being treated like animals for hundreds of years have any effect on the nature of certain populations here?
Just a note that this thread is over a year old. Also, if you were hoping for a direct answer, NDD was banned a while back.
But yes, NDD did think that exactly. He, among other posters on the board, minimize or deny the effect societal factors play across a number of outcomes.
yeah -I didn’t realize how old or how lengthy this thread was, nor did I notice that** NDD **had been banned when I jumped at that statement of his. Oh, well - it was an interesting read.
While Cochrane et.al. may be talking about genetic evolution, that’s not the only kind of evolution.
It’s trivially obvious that over time, the principle mechanisms of evolution have changed. Early on, sexual reproduction was a big boost, both in terms of speciation and morphological changes. The development of sophisticated brains allowed mammals to adapt more quickly to changing environments, especially primates (yes, this is controversial). Language allowed more and more sophisticated lessons to be passed, both to future generations and laterally. Writing and telecommunications extended these, adding a more durable medium for recording as well.
The result of these innovations has been a much faster rate of change in the way humanity works. Now that we dominate the world, it also has the ability to change the way the world works, even the climate (OMG!)
In the future, in addition to our improved language and communication technologies, we’ll add artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and the rate of change will continue to accelerate. Would we even recognize our descendents as human, 1000 years from now?
Of course technology has affected our genetic evolution. However, I doubt most specific claims in that regard. For example, the impact of jails on the gene pool must be miniscule, thanks to the small portion of the population (even in the US), the strength of genetic drift to stabilize the gene pool, and the fact that our justice systems probably aren’t very successful at incarcerating the majority of the worst offenders.
My guess is that the biggest impact of technology has been to allow a much higher portion of the population to survive, reducing what would ordinarily be considered “fitness” as a factor. In Darwinian terms, the most fit today are the poor uneducated classes that are reproducing most rapidly. (I saw an interesting TED talk that made a convincing argument that this unbalance should diminish in the coming century, thanks to technology and emerging markets.)
Of course it does. It even has a unit of measure, the