Show me an example. Why did evolution move slower in Australia than Asia?
Why do you say it did?
If that were true, it still would be a long way from proving any genetic component; there are any number of social, economic, political and cultural factors that could raise or lower a society’s crime rate from one generation to the next. Considering the time-scales involved, those factors necessarily include changing definitions of “crime” – and even of “murder” – over time.
And, of course, we cannot know whether it is true, because police forces of pre-industrial centuries are in no way comparable to police forces today, not in detection of crime or compilation of statistics or anything else.
Have you read what the ancient Greeks wrote and left us 2,500 years ago? Their contributions to the arts and science are works of genius that have only been surpassed because we stand on the shoulders of giants. There are philosophers who have added to the enormous foundations laid by Plato and Aristotle, but none have surpassed the originality and importance of their works. Their contemporary historian Thucydides wrote a history as important and influential and frankly well written as anything done since. If we are always evolving faster, I’d expect that after 2,500 years that we would have mo and better stunning stuff, rather than just additive. Although we have added a damn lot. But what the ancient Athenians in a city of 50,000 citizens did in 200 years is enough to calm the hubris of most New Yorkers and the past 300 years of their history.
Aristotle made mistakes that were not discovered until the Italian Renaissance when his assertions were tested experimentally. One of the more famous examples of this was Galileo dropping a ten pound weight and a one pound weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and discovering that they fell at the same rate of speed. Aristotle said the ten pound weight would fall ten times faster. For nearly two thousand years no one had thought to test that.
The achievements of ancient Greeks were significant, but they were not followed by greater achievements until the Italian Renaissance. The authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion do mention the achievements of ancient Greeks, and suggest that they were ahead of their time, not only culturally but biologically. The average intelligence of Europeans needed to advance to the point that enough people could understand what those ancient Greeks had achieved.
From the Golden Age of Greece to the Italian Renaissance was nearly two thousand years. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue that during this time the average intelligence in Europe was advancing because civilization rewards intelligent men with a higher standard of living, and consequently the ability to have more children who survive and reproduce. A higher average intelligence pushes the bell curve to the right, and means that a higher percentage of people are brilliant.
The criminal justice system of China has always been draconian. The periodic threats of floods and famines, as well as the ability of the government to mitigate these through relief efforts, has given the government the ability to reward deference and punish insubordination. Chinese people have a low crime rate everywhere in the world they live. With a much lower standard of living, the people of India also have a lower crime rate than the United States.
That is only one example, but it is characteristic. I have difficulty understanding the high murder rate in Russia. I suspect that it is due to the dislocations that have followed the fall of Communism. What I have read from accounts of people who traveled in the Soviet Union suggests to me that the crime rate back then was lower than in the United States.
Whites and Orientals in the United States have low murder rates. It is the blacks and Hispanics that give the United States a higher murder rate than one finds in Western Europe. The murder rate is a better way to evaluate the crime rate than the rate of reported crimes because murders are more likely to come to the attention of the police.
Well they’re mongoloids so they’re practically black. They must be genetically predisposed to be inferior.:rolleyes:
I have to say that this is one of the dumbest OPs I have seen in a long time. It starts with a bunch of incorrect assumptions and then goes on to derive a set of lame conclusions based on those premises.
Pretty much. When the USSR collapsed, Russians were thrust suddenly into a market economy, when no living Russian had any knowledge of or experience in such a thing beyond the black-market level, and there was no legal or sociocultural or traditional infrastructure governing business practices. The economy was privatized because, Communism being discredited, there was nothing else to do with it, but there was no obvious way to decide how the industries and assets should be parceled out. (To the workers? Watchoo talkin’ 'bout?) In the event, the best-connected/strongest/most-aggressive shouldered their way to the front of the line and grabbed what they could and became the new capitalists; and those who were nearly so but didn’t quite make the cut became Mafiya; and which group is more dangerous is debatable.
As I understand it. Perhaps any Russians here can correct or flesh out the details.
No nation that produced the literature and symphonic music that Russia has can possibly be considered to be genetically inferior.
I dislike abrupt political, economic, and social changes. I think the people of Russia, and possibly the world, would be better off if Michail Gorbachev had been successful in reforming the Soviet Union, and if it still existed, but was evolving in the direction of Scandinavian Social Democracy. I would even like for a Romanov to be invited to serve as a figurehead monarch.
Many people are angered by biological explanations of human nature and ability. Nevertheless, you have not substantiated your assertions.
To give an example that does not extend by too much the restraints of political correctness, when dingos entered Australia over five thousand years ago marsupial wolfs became extinct. Marsupial wolves occupied the same ecological niche as dingos, and looked surprisingly similar to wolves, but they were less evolved, and could not compete with the dingos.
Wrong.
Absolutely, undeniably, unarguably and utterly wrong.
Very probably wrong.
Would you like to try again? Perhaps on a topic that you have a basic understanding of?
I guess you must reserve that judgment for colored folk.
There are a lot of misconceptions floating around here, and I’m not sure that I could correct them all given chalk, a blackboard, unlimited time, and a baseball bat.
In the book, we 're talking about adaptive evolution. Sewall Wright thought that was more likely to happen in small, isolated populations - his 'shifting balance' theory - while Fisher thought that adaptive evolution would move faster in large populations, since a large population will have more beneficial mutations. I'd say that the evidence favors Fisher. This faster evolution in large populations has been repeatedly demonstrated in selection experiments: adaptation to an environmental change goes a lot faster in large populations: you don't have to wait so long for a favorable mutation.
The idea that a favorable mutation can somehow be ‘diluted out’ is just wrong.
Here’s how it works. Imagine a situation in which the environment has changed, so that a population is no longer well-matched to that environment. Changes that would improve fitness are now possible. For example, suppose that some human population starts raising cattle. They start out lactose intolerant - they stop making lactose around age five - and so cannot easily and completely digest milk as adults.
This is the default human pattern.
This population probably does use cow’s milk, but in a somewhat limited and inefficient way. Kids can drink it, and some probably do, for example if they lose their mother. Adults probably make cheese or yogurt out of it, but in so doing lose about a third of the food value.
Imagine someone with a mutation that leaves lactase production turned on indefinitely. Presto, he can drink milk as an adult. He can use a common food far more efficiently than other people. His fitness is higher: maybe as much as 10% higher, when we consider how fast lactose-tolerance mutations have spread.
Most likely this beneficial mutation does not spread. Imagine that he has two children: there's a 25% chance that neither has a copy, which would end the story. Even if it survives the first generation, there are many ways in which it can be lost in later generations - at least up to a point. But its frequency does not just drift randomly (usually hitting zero and disappearing) as would be the case with a new allele with no advantage. If it survives at all, its frequency tends to increase, because of that 10% advantage. If it survives drift, it will become more and more common, eventually becoming immune to drift. After that it spreads. In a well-mixed population, the frequency grows exponentially. In a spatially spread-out population, its spreads as a nonlinear wave (Fisher-Kolmogorov wave) with a propagation speed proportional to the square root of the selective advantage.
Such an allele is either lost early or will spread widely. The probability of that spread is calculable. If the selective advantage is s (10% in this case), the chance of success is 2s. So you'd have to have about 5 lactose-tolerance mutations, on average, before one would take off.
This has happened, several times. The European lactose tolerance mutation is the oldest: it probably originated something like 8-10 thousands years ago, and is now found in Europe (especially northern Europe), in north India, and at lower frequencies in North Africa and even in the Fulani, just south of the the Sahara.
And of course in populations that originated from those places.
The Bedouin have their own mutation that roughly dates back to the domestication of the camel, and several pastoral groups in Africa (Nilotic and Cushitic groups) have their own versions. The Tutsi have a Nilotic mutation and about 90% of them are lactose tolerant.
This is not the only way in which adaptive evolution can happen. Probably more common, especially in small populations, is selection on standing variation - changes in the frequencies of alleles that are already fairly common. This can happen very rapidly - vastly more rapidly than the typical rates of change seen in the fossil record. When you select for aggression in mice, you get noticeably more aggressive mice in just a few (8) generations. When you put guppies from Central American streams in a predator-free environment above a waterfall, you get heritable changes in behavior in as little as 7-10 generations. That involves changes in the frequencies of many alleles. Not long enough for new mutations to reach high frequency.
The selective response due to standing variation usually plateaus after a while.
We know a fair amount about the actual mechanisms of adaptive evolution - but 'we' doesn't mean everybody, nor does it mean most biologists. Most biologists don't know population genetics or quantitative genetics. They probably would say that they believe in evolution, but that hardly means that they understand neodarwinism. They don't know the mechanisms, or the math.
Moreover, we have a strange situation in which someone can be acclaimed by the general public as an expert on evolution without knowing jack about population genetics or quantitative genetics. Gould, for example, didn't. Ernst Mayr didn't. This is a whole lot like having a supposed expert on the future of the Solar System who doesn't know F = MA or Kepler's laws (let alone relativity) - but that's the way it goes.
The fraction of people outside the field who know enough to recognize the empty suits is fairly small: they have to have some mathematical chops, and how many people in public life can say that? Paul Krugman does: he got interested, which went pretty easily because evolutionary genetics has fair overlap with microeconomics. He concluded that Gould was the John Kenneth Galbraith of evolutionary biology - a blowhard who couldn’t do the math and had no real respect in the profession.
Another problem is all the people who come in from medical genetics. Again their knowledge of evolutionary mechanisms could easily be packed into a thimble. One of the most famous guys in medical genetics asked a friend of mine, not long ago, if he really believed that bit about lactose tolerance being selected. It's only probably the strongest example of selection known in humans ! Turned out that this medical geneticist only believe in selection for sickle cell (among existing humans) l - not in other malaria-defense genes like Hemoglobin C, Hemoglobin E, G6PD deficiency, alpha- and beta thalassemia, etc etc. Not on skin color, not on altitude adaptation, not temperature. It's not just general ignorance: they don't _like_ the idea of natural selection operating on humans.
Partly due to this, laymen have a million confused ideas. Significant adaptation really only happens in tiny, isolated populations. Wrong. Natural selection takes a million years for anything to happen - wrong. You might at least notice what has happened in dogs and other domesticates over a few thousand years. Beneficial alleles somehow can’t spread in large populations: wrong. And so on.
P. Z Myers think I’m a flake. Well, Bill Hamilton didn’t: George Williams didn’t: James Watson doesn’t: James Crow doesn’t: Paul Ewald doesn’t.
I must endeavour to bear it.
You are making assertions without substantiating them. Marsupial wolves once inhabited all of Australia. If dingoes, which thrive in Australia, did not cause them to be extinct, what did?
The thylacine is likely to have become near-extinct in mainland Australia about 2,000 years ago, and possibly earlier in New Guinea.[50][51] The absolute extinction is attributed to competition from indigenous humans and invasive dingoes. However, doubts exist over the impact of the dingo since the two species would not have been in direct competition with one another as the dingo hunts primarily during the day, whereas it is thought that the thylacine hunted mostly at night. In addition, the thylacine had a more powerful build, which would have given it an advantage in one-on-one encounters.[52] Recent morphological examinations of dingo and thylacine skulls show that although the dingo had a weaker bite, its skull could resist greater stresses, allowing it to pull down larger prey than the thylacine could. The thylacine was also much less versatile in diet than the omnivorous dingo.[53] Their environments clearly overlapped: thylacine subfossil remains have been discovered in proximity to those of dingoes. The adoption of the dingo as a hunting companion by the indigenous peoples would have put the thylacine under increased pressure.[12]
The same thing that extinctified wolves in Britain, I imagine.
Wolves were once present in Great Britain. Early writing from Roman and later Saxon chronicles indicate that wolves appear to have been extraordinarily numerous on the island.[1] Unlike other British animals, wolves were unaffected by island dwarfism,[2] with certain skeletal remains indicating that they may have grown as large as Arctic wolves.[3] The species, which was a threat to livestock, human life and frequently desecrated burial sites, was exterminated from Britain through a combination of deforestation and active hunting through bounty systems.
Marsupial wolves became extinct on Australia long before the coming of the whites. The Australian Aborigines did not deforest Australia. They did not practice farming. They did not have metal axes to cut down the trees. It is highly unlikely that they would have made a concerted effort to exterminate the marsupial wolves. No effort was made to exterminate the dingoes. Also, before the coming of the whites the human population density of Australia was much smaller than in Britain when the wolves were exterminated.