Leftists against considering evolution seriously
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2008/…
Who is Against Evolution?
“And the religious right has been the chief force against teaching evolution.” (Quoted from Barbara Forrest, a Southeastern Lousiana University philosophy professor and prominent critic of creationist science.)
It’s a widespread view, but true in only a narrow sense… But people who are against taking seriously the implications of evolution … are quite likely to be on the left.
Consider the most striking case, the question of whether there are differences between men and women with regard to the distribution of intellectual abilities or behavioral patterns. That no such differences exist … is a matter of faith for many on the left…
Yet the claim that such differences must be insignificant is one that nobody who took the implications of evolution seriously could maintain. We are, after all, the product of selection for reproductive success. Males and females play quite different roles in reproduction. It would be a striking coincidence if the distribution of abilities and behavioral patterns that was optimal for one sex turned out to also be optimal for the other, rather like two entirely different math problems just happening to have the same answer.
The denial of male/female differences is the most striking example of left wing hostility to the implications of Darwinian evolution, but not the only one. The reasons to expect differences among racial groups as conventionally defined are weaker, since males of all races play the same role in reproduction, as do females of all races. But we know that members of such groups differ in the distribution of observable physical characteristics–that, after all, is the main way we recognize them. That is pretty strong evidence that their ancestors adapted to at least somewhat different environments.
… when differing outcomes by racial groups are observed, it is assumed without discussion that they must be entirely due to differential treatment by race. That might turn out to be true, but there is no good reason to expect it. Here again, anyone who argues the opposite is likely to find himself the target of ferocious attacks, mainly from people on the left.
Nothing new here, but David Friedman is a genius and a wonderfully clear thinker, so I always enjoy having him come out on a position I’ve already spoken on.
Next consider the whole nature/nurture debate, in which the left has, for half a century or more, mostly taken a strong pro-nurture position. It is hard to see how humans could have evolved intelligence if intelligence is not heritable.
If Nurture is not more important than Nature, then how can you possibly create The New Soviet Man ?
If the goal is create a better society, and a better society can only be made out of better people, and to date, people have proven woefully intractable, then clearly (a) force and massive government indoctrination from K-12 is called for; (b) it is unthinkable that this might not be effective (because that would throw into question the whole teleological goal), therefore it becomes a Thought Crime to suggest that Nature is more important than Nurture.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:53 am
I can see temperaments being different but aptitudes I’m not so sure about.
Every difference between the genders has an evolutionary cost in increased complexity (ie, why risk weird deformities trying to get rid of male nipples, even if they do chafe while running). Math has long been considered to be a male dominated subject but in a lot of countries now girls are outperforming boys.
I basically figure we have two variables, X=temperament and Y=aptitude, I don’t see a good reason to assume we’re getting variations in Y when we know we have massive fluctuations in X that can account for the discrepancy.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:01 am
Right on. Except now I feel stupid for not having come up with this on my own. Not my fault though, it’s just evolution.
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:23 am
what do you mean by “teleological”?
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 am
Primates have been very successful being generalists. Big brain lets us adapt with rapid behavioral changes. Yes, differences in male and female reproductive strategies but also a lot of variation within each sex as well– keeping things nice and flexible. Since there are multiple ways to “win” depending on circumstances and individual abilities, I don’t think you’re going to get a huge polarization –in fact, I can’t think of even a mammal that does.
That being said, the older I get the more I notice differences between men and women that I swore were only caused by socialization when I was younger. I think it’s like anything else– there are very few absolute certainties, and there are exceptions to every rule. In most cases, you would be better off betting on the tall black runner instead of the short white one to win in the 100m dash– but you would have been wrong with me, my brother, and my dad. The nerdiest person I knew about math in high school was a girl. So I wouldn’t strive for 50/50 males and females in math, or CS, or engineering, or infantry, or nursing (etc etc), but I wouldn’t rule it out.
(in fact, for those of you that are still reading, there’s an interesting post about groups out on the edge of the bell curve not reflecting the proportions of the larger group– I didn’t follow the math, but I chalk it up to the “when things get weird, they get really weird” phenomenon.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/usain-bolt-its-just-not-normal/
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:01 am
That post is good, as is:
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/09/social-creation.html#comments
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
But people who are against taking seriously the implications of evolution … are quite likely to be on the left.
Thinking this over, I suspect there is an interesting political correlation going on here. Skepticism about the overwhelming evidence for Darwinian evolution, and a tendency to find this racialist handwave plausible, are both tied to weak quantitative thinking, which in turn correlates against the mythical g and therefore leans measurably right on the political axis. Friedman himself is, like our gentle host of course, an outlier; he could work through the following objection without difficulty, if it suited him.
The basic problem is one of timescales. People who think without numbers are constantly expecting to “catch Darwin in the act,” and when half-wings and half-eyes don’t turn up in the fossil record, they get tetchy about the whole evolutionary paradigm. A selective advantage of a half a percent is enormous; it comes and saturates in the geological blink of an eye. A selective advantage of a hundredth of a percent is unlikely; anything that fine-tuned is not going to keep pushing in the same direction long enough to get evolutionary traction, because some other selective pressure an order of magnitude larger will come along and swamp it. Thus, the natural timescale for selective pressures within the human genetic pool is on the order of a few hundred generations — roughly since the dawn of agriculture.
Anything much faster than that (like the Flynn effect) has got to be environmental or cultural; not even the totalitarian regimes of the 20c put enough evolutionary pressure on filling out forms to drive a worldwide IQ test increase of ten points or more per generation, and we also see the Flynn effect in countries where eugenics is a dirty word. Contrariwise, anything much older than that, such as the development of the human brain’s deep linguistic structures or spatial and quantitative reasoning skills, is no longer under evolutionary pressure. If it mattered to our reproductive fitness at the hunter-gatherer stage, we’ve all got it now, because even a tenth of a percent over 50k years will run the loser strains off the evolutionary tail.
If you want to see evolution within the human gene pool, you have to pick a trait like skin color that has built-in malleability over millennia — whenever we move somewhere cloudy, we lose it all over again — or else a trait like sickle-cell anemia (malaria is apparently a new disease), lactose tolerance or alcoholism resistance (cow-&-plow is less than 8k years old; beer is about the same, and wine is newer). Lactose tolerance has evolved four separate times since the ice melted, and we can still trace each variant of the gene from its geographical source. Greeks and Jews drink moderately and hold their liquor better than Swedes and Irishmen, who in turn do much better than Inuit and Maori, because fermented and then distilled spirits swept out of Araby so recently the genetic variation hasn’t been selected away.
The last common human ancestor was about 4k years ago; twice that far back, and we’re all descended from everyone. Races are stable over that timescale only and precisely because the racial traits are the ones that confer no broad selective advantage; if they did, interracial leakage would propagate and saturate them. We are one species.
Sexual selection is more interesting: if neurological structures are sex-linked (as they surely are to some extent; consider color-blindness), systematic differences between male and female habits in the hunter-gatherer environment where human intelligence evolved could have led to stable sex differences in human cognition. Indeed, the Red Queen effect plausibly explains how we got these big brains in the first place: intraspecies competition drives much faster change than any external threat, because the bar keeps rising — consider the Irish elk, or bower birds. If we got smart and verbal primarily to chat each other up, and if the relevant genes happen to be sex-linked, there might be some genetic component to hokhma and binah (male cleverness and female intuition) after all.
However, any such effects are second-order. First, you would have to convincingly show that “intelligence,” Spearman’s g, exists as more than a statistical artifact, has some observable biostructural correlate, and is controlled by human genetic variation. (And you would have to do all this in a single lifetime, because going on to speculate out loud about sex-linked intelligence genes will tend to negatively impact your breeding fitness.)
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Correction: I meant to say that malaria is regional, not that it is recent. The recent worldwide diseases, like syphilis, are also good “evolution in action” candidates.
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
[quote comment="162331"] weak quantitative thinking, which in turn correlates against the mythical g and therefore leans measurably right on the political axis. [/quote]
Evidence?
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 am
Evidence?
Oh, please.
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
[quote comment="162343"]Evidence?
Oh, please.[/quote]
I suspect that you’re deliberately making gross mistakes in reasoning as a meta-commentary on what you perceive as my mistakes, but just for the record: accredation != intelligence, and you’re doing a fun trick with aggregates, comparing all fourth graders, on the one hand, to registered voters, on the other. One can as well spin the shaded regions as “states with high black population that don’t vote and white populations that do vote”.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
as a meta-commentary
Yeah, exploratory factor analysis sucks when it gets reified into an explanatory tool, doesn’t it? You can take it as read that anything I say about correlating measured IQ averages to anything is basically a dig.
And I salute “accredation” — it’s not just metatextual, it’s metatextual for you!
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
states with high black population that don’t vote
Erm. Utah and Idaho? West Virginia and Indiana?
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:10 pm
“If [Nature] were not vastly more important than [Nurture], then you could teach calculus to a horse.”
R. A. Heinlein, I think.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:46 pm
“. . . then you could teach calculus to a horse.”
And if we offer those stupid horses amnesty, pretty soon every street vendor in Manhattan will be selling timothy, instead of khlav kalash and crab juice.
Oh, wait — were you making a point?
September 4th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
In constructing his quantitative argument about the rates of genetic change based on the 4000 years since our MRCA as defined by that paper, Mr. Burton misses one of the important points in the very paper he links to:
“As a result of recombination, a given gene may not pass from parent to child. In fact, an individual’s DNA may retain none of the genes specific to a particular ancestor who lived many generations in the past.”
The fact that a member of one relatively isolated population mated with a member of another relatively isolated population some 4000 years ago does not mean that those two isolated populations did not have meaningful genetic differences that started diverging much longer ago.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
The fact that a member of one relatively isolated population mated with a member of another relatively isolated population some 4000 years ago does not mean that those two isolated populations did not have meaningful genetic differences that started diverging much longer ago.
Obviously not; racial traits exist. However, as I said above, “Races are stable over that timescale only and precisely because the racial traits are the ones that confer no broad selective advantage; if they did, interracial leakage would propagate and saturate them.” Any gene that reaches a population a few dozen times and confers selective advantage will saturate that population at an exponential rate, with the selective factor determining the time constant.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
“In constructing his quantitative argument about the rates of genetic change based on the 4000 years since our MRCA as defined by that paper. . . .”
To be clear, the MRCA comes into it only to answer the technical objection that the yeast-growth argument may fail for isolated populations that never get a seed copy. The core argument (evolution can be caught in action only on a timescale of a few hundred generations, because exponents work fast and very small exponents tend to drift) doesn’t depend on geography, though it would fail for a subpopulation relocated to Mars with no return ticket. Dr. Rohde’s paper merely closes this last loophole.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
“Oh, wait — were you making a point?”
Well, yes, but not only about genetics but rather about lengthy, largely meaningless strings of big or unusual words assembled by amateurs and shot at each other in blog comments.
I thought a bit of Heinlein’s concision might catch everyone’s eyes.
September 4th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Here is a hypothetical situation:
There are populations of a species on continent A and continent B. The race on continent A has a genetic behavioral trait that confers an advantage on continent A, but a disadvantage on continent B. One member of the race on continent A, named “Sam”, goes to continent B and mates and has a few kids. Within a few generations, the genetic behavioral trait that Sam brought to continent B has been selected out of continent B. Nevertheless, within some thousands of years, Sam is still a common ancestor of everyone who lives on continent B. Of what relevance is Sam?
When you say “broad selective advantage”, presumably you mean one that applies in all the environments where a species lives. So what? All that matters is that it provides a local selective advantage.
September 4th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
[quote comment="162612"]The fact that a member of one relatively isolated population mated with a member of another relatively isolated population some 4000 years ago does not mean that those two isolated populations did not have meaningful genetic differences that started diverging much longer ago.
Obviously not; racial traits exist. However, as I said above, “Races are stable over that timescale only and precisely because the racial traits are the ones that confer no broad selective advantage; if they did, interracial leakage would propagate and saturate them.” Any gene that reaches a population a few dozen times and confers selective advantage will saturate that population at an exponential rate, with the selective factor determining the time constant.[/quote]
So it sounds like your arguments are entirely compatible with “Population X is smarter than population Y by, on average, 10 IQ points. Before the 20th century, the two populations were in different geographic, environmental, and cultural bins, and did not have much commerce. In the same way that IQs above 130 or so seem to be maladaptive, population Y may have been in an environment that found IQs above 120 maladaptive. In the 20th century the environments have been shaken together, and commerce is orders of magnitude more widespread. Thus, because evolution operates in short sprints over hundreds of generations, are smack dab in the middle of population Y disappearing / merging with population X / having it’s average IQ go up”.
Yes?
September 4th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Of what relevance is Sam?
A few Sams (roughly the square root of the trait’s selective weight, to allow for random drift) guarantee that the trait has at least been tested on continent B. As you say, if its selective weight is situationally negative on B — examples I gave were sickle-cell anemia in malaria-free areas, or fair skin in tropical climes — the test will be a dud. Actual racial traits are a combination of evolutionarily neutral drift and local selective advantage; traits that confer universal advantage show variance only when they are very new.
Thus, because evolution operates in short sprints over hundreds of generations, we are smack dab in the middle of population Y disappearing / merging with population X / having its average IQ go up”.
Yes?
If you treat “IQ” as a symbolic variable like “X” and “Y,” this is entirely compatible, and for resistance to alcoholism and adult tolerance for milk, for example, I believe we see exactly this happening. In order to make it work for Spearman’s g as your example trait, you first need to (1) accept or challenge the partial correlation results that numerically refute the hypothesis of a general intelligence factor, (2) data-mine for a first principal component of multifactor intelligence (“new g,” which like New Coke isn’t the real thing), then (3) eliminate from new g any component which shows up in the Flynn effect, since that’s too fast to be genetically determined, and any component which confers universal selective advantage, since that would already be post-selective if it were genetically determined, and (4) stare hard at your residuals, to decide whether the largest remaining eigenvector passes the giggle test, or equivalently calculate chi-squared and stare at the p-value while mentally summing over all your counterfactual selves. A person could go blind.
Exploratory factor analysis is a sky-castle game; when there are more factors than you can count on one foot, it’s a lot easier to start from a hypothesis (which in this case would be a neurostructural model linked to one or more gene sites) and work upwards. Even when you think you’ve found a principal factor, it’s (5) not a causal hypothesis yet, because correlations are bidirectional, and multifactor correlations are factorially so. Quoting a curmudgeon whose rants I often admire, “Is there a genetic condition which black people are susceptible to which predisposes them to poor educational outcomes, a high rate of incarceration, shorter male life expectancy, alcohol and drug addiction and so forth? Yep. It’s the same genetic condition which causes them to get more speeding tickets.”
You could streamline (1) through (4) a lot by just dispensing with the statistics and “believing in IQ” a priori, perhaps on the basis of life experience and common sense . . . and this is in fact what many people do. But, as I’ve observed before, the end result of this whole exercise is to become, or remain more confidently, a racist, and “life experience and common sense” have always gotten many people to that result without all the tedious scientific fretwork.
September 5th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Whoa!
Long words…
Nature AND nurture. Always blame the parents, I say.