The 10,000 Year Explosion

[Alexander III]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion

Above I posted a wikipedia link for the Book, The 10,000 Year Explosion. Today I suddenly became obsessed with human evolution and I have spent the day on wikipedia and other sites informing myself. This book particularly caught my attention, because it's premise is so radical (or rather radical to us, for a 1920's white male scientist a lot less radical)- it counters the modern theory that the human race ceased evolving 40,000 years ago. It say's the opposite that the human race in individual pockets all over the world began hyper-evolution due to the introduction of agriculture and society which changed the dynamic.

One of the main points of the book is that, those physical differences between all the races, they are not merely superfluous and ornamental - they indicate that we are equally different on the outside as on the inside. What the book says is a Chinese man, a european, and a sub-saharan african - are genetically different, they are diversely hardwired.

Furthermore, it states that ancient cultures like the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, were different to us, not merely due to culture but their mind's as well , they thought differently and perceived the world differently because they were genetically different.

The implications, social and political of this book, are obvious - as soon as we acknowledge that the genetic difference between a French man and a Malaysian are not merely on the surface but are in fact bone-deep - well...

Now many of the arguments seemed suspect, but then again my entire knowledge of the subject rests on an 8 hour wikipedia binge. So I was hoping that more genetically versed members*cough**cough* Orphanpip, Juniper*cough* might help me out here.


Also on a more general implication I want to take this hypothetical situation for a spin, if what the authors of the book are saying is true, and it becomes scientifically accepted, what do you think the social ramifications would be.

This bellow is an online interview with one of the authors, it sheds more light on his theory and manner of thought.

http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.html

[OrphanPip]

Ah Cochran is a crummy anthropologist, he's a physicist by education and he's a pseudoscience mouth piece for the Mormon Church. I tried to find some more information on this book, but all I could find was mainstream marketing stuff, the scientific reviewers seem to have just ignored the book. It didn't get reviewed by Nature or Science, I'll go check if Scientific American reviewed it.

I'd have to actually read the book to address specific claims. But he seems to be building off of the same out of date research by Rushkin (sadly a Canadian scientist) from the 1970s that has been largely funded and supported by white supremacists.

The first red flag for me is the claim that it is the common wisdom that humans haven't changed, or that there are no genetic differences between populations. Race as a concept is problematic because it is not coherent with the standards of biology we would use in any other species. Finding incidental differences in frequency of genes across populations is for the most part an arbitrary endeavour, as it can be done with any cross section of any population.

The genetic difference between groups of humans is slight, and apart from a few identified traits there have been few cases of selection causing major differences between populations that we would consider as races. Genetic isolation has contributed more to the visibility of certain recessive traits though.

If you're interested in how civilization has influenced evolution, I think Stephen Pinker is probably a more reputable source. E.O. Wilson, who is an ant specialist that I mostly disagree with, it also pretty influential in terms of evolutionary psychology of humans.

Edit: Some major research has actually found that IQ tests results correlate better with motivation than they do with cognitive ability. No one has really effectively designed a way for IQ tests to be a relevant measure of intelligence across cultural and socio-economic groups.

[Jack of Hearts]

Great post, Pip.

It's easy to understand the curiosity here Alex. We want to know more about ourselves and the world around us; that's an immensely human trait. But this line of thinking has to be evaluated for what it is- divisive and dehumanizing. If you look at another human being and see more difference than sameness then something has gone awry intellectually (in this reader's opinion). It is this line of divisive thinking that takes us places we don't want to go: eugenics, human rights issues, heinous crimes, etc.







J

[gcochran]

"he's a pseudoscience mouth piece for the Mormon Church."

Now THAT'S funny.


Gregory Cochran

[prendrelemick]

Furthermore, it states that ancient cultures like the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, were different to us, not merely due to culture but their mind's as well , they thought differently and perceived the world differently because they were genetically different.

[url]http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.html

I am currently reading Plutarch, and can tell you the human mind has not altered since then. As to implications, I would say historically all genocides stem rom an indoctrination that "they" are not like "us".

[gcochran]

You can't say any such thing. We're talking about populations. Assuming that there are people today who are just like Plutarch, that hardly proves that his kind of mind has the same frequency today as it did then. The distribution matters. The mean, the first and second moments, the shape of the tails - all those things matter.

So you're telling me - for example - that the Mongols slaughtered most of the inhabitants of the Kin Empire because of some racial ideology? Hardly - they were just in the way. The Jenghiz-Khanites had no real siege train in those days, but they found that walled cities fell if there were no peasants left to feed them.

While the idea that something must be untrue because it upsets you is juvenile. But I expect no better argument.

[JuniperWoolf]

It is this line of divisive thinking that takes us places we don't want to go: eugenics, human rights issues, heinous crimes, etc.

Should morality really influence data, or the data which is shared? Ethics has a place when we consider methods, of course, but should the results themselves be supressed or manipulated because everyone's still afraid of Hitler? What if a pychological genetic trait that has a strong correlation to a phsysical genetic trait were to be discovered? We've had populations isolated for 200,000 years due to oceans, mountain ranges, ect., so it's not exactly a ridiculous notion. What's more, we haven't discovered nearly all there is to know about human biology especially regarding the brain and genetics. So, this is a murky topic which is often answered very, very firmly. That doesn't seem right, isn't the beautiful thing about science is that questions are freely examined?

Being only a third-year eco student I'm way too ameteur to have a serious, strong opinion on human genetics, but I have dealt with this exact question before. Actually, it's one of the topics that you stumble across often in the sciences. I've had three profs who have discussed the famous Rushkin and the notion of racial genetic inheritance regarding intelligence. All three lectures contained exactly the following sentence (and I swear I'm not making this up): "race does not exist." Their lectures made it clear that if you doubt or question that, then you're racist. It was bizarre how similar their lectures sounded, even though they were from different fields (bio, psych, sociology). I resented their adamancy and implications, it felt like we were being manipulated, and judging from the other students' reactions I wasn't the only one. If there's one thing I'm certain of in the whole mess that is this topic, it's that there is going to be a reaction against the whole "shove tolerance down your throat" teaching method, and not because the students are intolerant, but because they feel like their thoughts are being prodded.

[Jack of Hearts]

You can't say any such thing. We're talking about populations. Assuming that there are people today who are just like Plutarch, that hardly proves that his kind of mind has the same frequency today as it did then. The distribution matters. The mean, the first and second moments, the shape of the tails - all those things matter.

So you're telling me - for example - that the Mongols slaughtered most of the inhabitants of the Kin Empire because of some racial ideology? Hardly - they were just in the way. The Jenghiz-Khanites had no real siege train in those days, but they found that walled cities fell if there were no peasants left to feed them.

While the idea that something must be untrue because it upsets you is juvenile. But I expect no better argument.

If the Mongols didn't have an 'us versus them' mentality on some level when they slaughtered other nations, this reader would be highly surprised by that. It's not necessarily a question of race- and mick mentioned nothing about 'racial' ideology.


Should morality really influence data, or the data which is shared? Ethics has a place when we consider methods, of course, but should the results themselves be supressed or manipulated because everyone's still afraid of Hitler? What if a pychological genetic trait that has a strong correlation to a phsysical genetic trait were to be discovered? We've had populations isolated for 200,000 years due to oceans, mountain ranges, ect., so it's not exactly a ridiculous notion. What's more, we haven't discovered nearly all there is to know about human biology especially regarding the brain and genetics. So, this is a murky topic which is often answered very, very firmly. That doesn't seem right, isn't the beautiful thing about science is that questions are freely examined?

Being only a third-year eco student I'm way too ameteur to have a serious, strong opinion on human genetics, but I have dealt with this exact question before. Actually, it's one of the topics that you stumble across often in the sciences. I've had three profs who have discussed the famous Rushkin and the notion of racial genetic inheritance regarding intelligence. All three lectures contained exactly the following sentence (and I swear I'm not making this up): "race does not exist." Their lectures made it clear that if you doubt or question that, then you're racist. It was bizarre how similar their lectures sounded, even though they were from different fields (bio, psych, sociology). I resented their adamancy and implications, it felt like we were being manipulated, and judging from the other students' reactions I wasn't the only one. If there's one thing I'm certain of in the whole mess that is this topic, it's that there is going to be a reaction against the whole "shove tolerance down your throat" teaching method, and not because the students are intolerant, but because they feel like their thoughts are being prodded.

You seemed to have drawn a moral claim out of this reader's post. It might look like this, if we unpack it: Thinking divisively about characteristics that differ from ourselves seems to often correlate in some way with the occurence of human rights issues, ethnic purging and genocide, and these things are bad. There is also a a declaration that seems to reflect how the world is (though it is not necessarily so if this reader is mistaken). But there is no moral condemnation in this reader's original reply for 'thinking thoughts.' Just a strong suggestion for putting a certain line of thinking in a given context, a context that this reader easily could (but did not in his original reply) support with reasons.

Eventually you're going to have to interpret your data. You can keep reasoning to any abstract order but sooner or later you're going to have to make the call (and if you're a good scientist, you will probably do this in the context of other evidence [or what your sources of funding insist upon]). If you're asking whether or not 'morality' or any human factor has any weight in making this interpretation, this reader says absolutely. We can imitate objectivity but never reach it. We are human and we are stuck seeing the world as humans.






J

[prendrelemick]

You can't say any such thing. We're talking about populations. Assuming that there are people today who are just like Plutarch, that hardly proves that his kind of mind has the same frequency today as it did then. The distribution matters. The mean, the first and second moments, the shape of the tails - all those things matter.

So you're telling me - for example - that the Mongols slaughtered most of the inhabitants of the Kin Empire because of some racial ideology? Hardly - they were just in the way. The Jenghiz-Khanites had no real siege train in those days, but they found that walled cities fell if there were no peasants left to feed them.

While the idea that something must be untrue because it upsets you is juvenile. But I expect no better argument.

I should explain that I'm reading Plutarch's Li>es, a collection o biographies on the ancients. I'm not using Plutarch as the example, but the history he records. (about 700 years worth.) It seemed pertinant to a point the OP made. It's the same thing wheneer I read histories, rom whateer era, I am always struck by how little human nature has changed. These are my own conclusions and my own obserations, as Jack says, we are stuck seeing the world as humans.

I also think there was a great deal o racial ideology in play with the Mongols and the Kin (Jin). Though it was the Kin who regarded the Mongols as the Untermensch.

The Mongols and the Kin are a good example, like the Tutsi and the Hutu and the Bosnians and the Bosnian Serbs and the Jews and the Nazis and the Beruit Moslems and the Beruit Christians and the Turks and the Armenians and so down through the ages, unchangeing human nature and the doctrine o us and them.

Why do you expect no better argument?

[RupertVanster]

You can't say any such thing. We're talking about populations. Assuming that there are people today who are just like Plutarch, that hardly proves that his kind of mind has the same frequency today as it did then. The distribution matters. The mean, the first and second moments, the shape of the tails - all those things matter.

So you're telling me - for example - that the Mongols slaughtered most of the inhabitants of the Kin Empire because of some racial ideology? Hardly - they were just in the way. The Jenghiz-Khanites had no real siege train in those days, but they found that walled cities fell if there were no peasants left to feed them.

While the idea that something must be untrue because it upsets you is juvenile. But I expect no better argument.

I am once again left in awe by your unflappable patience. Please, please keep doing what you're doing.

You should take a look at reddit. They're a bit like lesswrong. They'd like you.

[JuniperWoolf]

You seemed to have drawn a moral claim out of this reader's post.

Oh, no, that wasn't really aimed at you, I just sort of snatched out a little snippet from your post which strongly represents an idea that I come across often in lectures dealing with this topic and elaborated on why it bothers me, since in real-life lectures you almost never get to speak up about why it bothers you so much how you and other students are being treated like you're one second away from becoming a violent mob and lynching each other unless you're pandered to by some liberal douchebag professor (bitter).


If you're asking whether or not 'morality' or any human factor has any weight in making this interpretation, this reader says absolutely. We can imitate objectivity but never reach it. We are human and we are stuck seeing the world as humans.

Well that's true, but science is sort of this self-regulating system, right? If you say something that might be construed as lacking in objectivity, the self-regulating mechanism here is that someone else is going to retort to you, there are going to be other people who disagree with you, some of which are driven to put your study to the test by creating their own experiment to find holes in yours. You, yourself, as a human, can't be objective - but the system can, and as long as the system is free, then you can come close to objective truth.

[RupertVanster]

"he's a pseudoscience mouth piece for the Mormon Church."

Now THAT'S funny.


Gregory Cochran

I think he's got you confused with Gregory C. Cochran: https://doccochran.wordpress.com/

[AuntShecky]

I'm not a fan of so-called "soft science" shows on cable tv for nothing, not to mention the incomparably astute "Nova" on PBS. I've seen and read copious amounts of research in which scientists have found that the truth is the diametrical opposite of what is proposed in the opening post of this thread.

Rather than having evolved separately, there really, truly is only ONE human
race. Every human being on earth, every one born of a human female mother,
has a single common ancestor, "Eve," if you will. The evidence is in mitrochondrial DNA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve