I made this comment originally on another book review of the Everett Pirahã book (lightly edited):
Gwern has a great book review on this one: https://gwern.net/review/book#dont-sleep-there-are-snakes-everett-2008. The ending of Gwern's review brings up probably the best theory I have read to explain the Pirahã, although I would put it more bluntly: maybe they are just extremely inbred and very dumb. They can't plan for the future the way some children cannot plan for the future. They cannot learn how to count to ten, because that is too complicated for them.
The *New Yorker* article (cited by Gwern and found here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2) also implies that the Pirahã are really dumb. An evolutionary biologist, William Tecumseh Fitch (yes, he is a direct descendant of the American Civil War general), traveled down there to test the Pirahã, and he had a lot of problems getting them to pass basic grammar test which apparently even all monkeys tested could pass. According to the article, Fitch eventually found one sixteen-year-old who could pass the test. I cannot figure out from Fitch's Google Scholar page where he wrote up these results--maybe they're buried somewhere.
Getting genetic samples of the Pirahã would clarify how inbred they are, and it would at least partly let us guess their genetic IQ, insofar as we can use one of those fancy polygenic scores for educational attainment/cognitive ability to estimate it. I also would like to see someone replicate Everett's work (Margaret Mead's fieldwork did not replicate). Even the *New Yorker* journalist had to rely on Everett's translations.
Per Wikipedia, "[Everett] says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985." And wouldn't you know it, he completed his masters thesis in 1980 and PhD in 1983 in linguistics under a Brazilian-French advisor. His thesis provided "a detailed detailed Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã." Anyways, it sounds like he begins to reject his faith as a Brazilian graduate student in a (presumably) atheistic/secular atmosphere.
Incredibly, Everett is an avowed defender of the blank state.
You have to be incredibly blank-slate-pilled in the first place to avoid immediately seeing Pirahã stories as "Wow, so this is what homo erectus society and culture looked like before the last batch of brain developments". Guess Christianity that posits fundamental difference between humans (however dumb) and non-human entities, could have kinda similar effects.
That makes sense, except Christianity does not posit quite that--theology accounts for adults without the use of reason (consider, as an analogy, that infants do not possess a knowledge of good and evil, yet they still often get baptized, although not in Everett's denomination). Thomas Aquinas addressed it similarly: "Some are so from birth, have no lucid intervals, and show no sign of reason; with these we should decide as with children."
As far as I can tell, Everett's particular theological bent (he went to Moody) also accommodates this situation, because everyone has an answer to what happens if a baby dies. (They [Evangelicals] basically say that culpability presupposes knowledge, so babies and adults without the use of reason go to heaven.)
I'm not certain we disagree. What I mean is that Christian dogma on human state is that we all possess souls and so are inherently good or at least redeemable. Blank-slate style of ideas also implies something similar - that all humans are fundamentally equal in capacity, both intellectual and moral.
The idea that these are basically a tribe of morons, and that they are morons inherently (as opposed to made such by circumstances) isn't easy to express in either paradigm. Everett would need to lose more than faith in the actual fact of His existence to consider it as a hypothesis rather than just a random piece of slander.
I know there was homo habilis at some point, and that there is no particular reason something similar shouldn't exist in a similar niche today. A creature somewhat different from you and me, but still for most intents and purposes human. There is no difficulty in supposing that Pirana just so happen to be that creature. Whereas for either Christian or leftist (and afaik Everett was at some point both) it's a strict delineation - either they have to be apes, or they have to be basically the same as himself.
Also just wanted to note they don't seem to be particularly amoral when you consider decreased capacity for long-term planning. Compare eg to a random guy who inhibited his preference of long-term over the current moment by having a few beers too many.
"It doesn’t even need to be in person — histories of the Aztecs or the Carthaginians demonstrate exactly the same kind of 'sweeping positive statement / truly horrific details' phenomenon."
And at some point people will say exactly the same kinds of things about us. "Everyone had food and emergency medical care. They could vote and go to school, where they might be shot in their classrooms by a stranger, and people accepted this. 'Nothing can be done'."
I always have to remind myself at the doctor that this is a real question. “Fine thanks how — wait no, I have a 103° fever and my veins are all red and squiggly.”
Matthew Desmond's Evicted is a great example of the “sweeping positive statement / truly horrific details” phenomenon. He's very certain that people get evicted and end up homeless due to slumlords, cruel laws, capitalism, etc. And then he describes the evicted people as making truly horrific choices that very obviously lead to homelessness—e.g., starting a stupid fight with the person who is letting you live with her for free and beating her up.
These can both be true. It's an uncontroversial fact that America has a problem. In cities there are more jobs than houses while outside cities, there are more houses then jobs. But at the same time, if you don't have enough rooms in your house, who are you going to kick out first. Your sweet Grandma or the guy who keeps trying to punch Grandma?
Just because a problem is concentrated on the most vulnerable and troublesome part of our population doesn't mean we don't need to fix it. If we don't fix it, it will get worse and hit more and more people.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
I'm guessing the divorce and children cutting him off have to do with him being an unreliable self-promoting a hole.
It's super convenient that the ONE language that has NONE of the features of other languages has a super small number of speakers, is difficult to learn, and a linguistic isolate (there are not other languages in the same family against which his claims can be compared). So he is the lone expert in this language (his wife is the only other) and he says it has all these weird features no one can check.
How could it be otherwise? If there was a well known, accessible language that was missing these features Chomsky never would have claimed that they are universal.
How do we evaluate the quality of life of people like the Pirahã? On the one hand, their lives are objectively pretty awful. On the other hand, they actually seem... pretty damn happy about the state of their society? Would their experience of reality be better if they were raised in modern, wealthy Western societies? What are we optimizing for here?
«a reproductive landscape of widespread birth control, unusually impulsive people will have more babies»
This I think attributes to impulsiveness *in general* too much weight. My impression is that having children is positively influenced by two factors:
1) An "innate" reproductive instinct, similar to the "hunger" instinct, which is rather more specialized and different from generic poor impulse control; it is not a negative lack of control but a positive motivator.
2) A rational self-interest to invest in sons as pension assets.
My impression is that for a rather long time the pension asset motivation ("tiger moms") has dominated reproduction in many societies which has weakened the reproductive instinct (as women with low reproductive instinct still would still invest in bearing and raising sons as pensions assets).
Currently women can work and invest in financial pension assets instead of investing in sons and prefer to do so in part because of weakened reproductive instinct in part because bearing and raising sons is both risky and time consuming.
IIRC an article in "The Economist" pithily summarized this as "children used to be a necessary investment and now are an expensive hobby in competition with nicer holidays, house renovations, car upgrades, ...".
...are you from a rich area, perchance? I'm not, and 'lack of impulse control' explained a substantial proportion of total births in my hometown. Those that were disciplines enough to get an education often still don't have children, or at most two.
«'lack of impulse control' explained a substantial proportion of total births in my hometown. Those that were disciplines enough to get an education often still don't have children, or at most two.»
That is the usual smugly sneering "centrist" propaganda that only promiscuous dummies (especially those perceived as being of lower class or inferior race) do not mind the annoyance of having children and properly educated clever women with self-control try to live as if they were men avoiding the burden of motherhood.
As I wrote instead most women are instead rather smart and think ahead even if from poor background and choose between sons or career depending on which option looks more profitable and secure for their old age.
This is fairly obvious when considering that highly educated and securely wealthy women who do not need to work for a pension or need to have sons as pension assets still often have several children as they can easily afford them and it gives them satisfaction. Conversely many women in very poor places have many children as pension assets but abort their female ones as they are less profitable than male ones who can work harder and longer. Those are not signs of impulsiveness but of careful deliberation for the long term.
The funniest thing to me was that Jared Diamond wrote the book against the Bell Curve from the left, and now is considered discredited because people further to *his* left criticized it for not being sufficiently anticolonialist; he doesn't blame colonialism enough for the failures of non-Western cultures when the West was keeping them down all the time.
(I haven't really seen the critiques address the question of *how the West got ahead in the first place*, Diamond's central point, I suspect because that would mean they'd have to argue with HBD arguments they find even more offensive.)
The next iconoclastic book that needs to get written and discussed is a skeptical inquiry into the intellectual fad of uncritically swallowing swallowing numerical plots that purport to accurately measure criteria that are defined entirely by verbal means. Relying entirely on consensus du jour "definitions" that- to put it in computerspeak- partake of a massive amount of data compression, due to reliance on low resolution (i.e., vague) terms and summary phrases like "life outcomes", "neuroticism", and "cognitive performance."
The main flaw of the Metrics Are Proof paradigm is that it has a pronounced tendency to blur the difference between the numbers of the data sets, which are entirely denotative and objective--and the aspects of human functioning being measured, which are defined using verbal criteria, which are connotative, and ultimately the result of a subjective consensus established by the academic authorities and researchers that's always arbitrary and imprecise.
Numerical results have a way of conferring authority on a research study, because they're entirely denotative. The number 4 is quantity 1 + 1 +1 +1, and that's all there is to it.* There's no interpretive argument to be made on matters of arithmetic. The rules are long settled, precise, and objective.
The verbal component of the studies is more elusive, because it's connotative. Definitions of words rely on other words; dictionaries bear no resemblance to bookkeeping accounts. Verbal definitions are inherently interpretive, and always to some extent arbitrary. The intent should always be to aim for semantic accuracy- maximizing the signal to noise ratio, so to speak- but the precision of math is simply out of the question. Verbal language always contains some noise in the mix. That accounts for the shifts in term definitions, jargon terms, and neologisms in fields like the social (hopefully) disciplines, and researches into the mysteries of human psychology.
That's where the studies often run into trouble. Consider the definition of "cognitive performance"- by whose lights? I notice highly educated, high income, high occupational status individuals falling for the most elementary sorts of foolishness and logical inconsistency all the time. I've heard many attempts to explain that disparity away--most often, self-exculpatory exercises claiming that "everyone" is vulnerable to cognitive problems like preconceived bias, epistemic closure, and premature conclusions derived from facile speculation--but I've never heard anyone actually explain the situation. There's no section of an IQ test that provides a reliable measure of perspicacity.
Speaking of IQ tests, I also notice a lot of table-pounding about that cornerstone of developmental psychology, Intelligence Quotient, as a vitally important measure of "g" or "Spearman's g", i.e., the "common substrate of mental abilities" in a given individual that can be expressed as a numerical quantity, ranked and charted as a percentile in group estimates. I mean, talk about connotative interpretations drawn from verbal term definitions.
The more I reflect on the accepted definition of quantifiable human intelligence, the more I notice how closely it aligns with the sort of abstract reasoning used to construct the precision architecture of computer programs--nested loops, sets and subsets, elaborations built from computer "languages". Except that computer languages are crucially different from human verbal languages. In human language, imprecision doesn't automatically break the program. The noise quotient of human language--provided that it's within the limits required for a reliably useful amount of communication--allows for parallel processing shifts that comprise a fruitful source of creativity. Wordplay. Whereas the creativity found in the realm of computers is of a different order, operating within much more precisely delimited rules. It's more like mechanical engineering than, say, humor, or musical invention. The creative expression that often innovates by occasionally coloring outside the lines, confounding or surpassing expectations by breaking conventional rules.
You cannot get away with doing that within the rules laid down by an IQ test. You can't do that when writing computer code, either; leave out a bracket or forget to close a loop, and all sorts of unwanted nonsense crops up. And that's the particular aspect of intelligence that modern civilization c.2025 has ordained as leading to a better chance of achieving optimal or high-status "life outcome", compared to other aspects of intelligence. But it just isn't the entire picture of what human intelligence constitutes.
A preliminary hypothesis: the sort of "pattern recognition" "abstract reasoning" that enables someone to excel at computer coding constitutes a subset of intelligence in the same way that prowess at running fast is a subset of athletic ability. But abstract reasoning is not the entire picture of intelligence, just like running speed is not the sole measure of athletic. Intelligence researchers are found of pointing out that measured abstract reasoning ability serves as a rough predictor of a general level of the wider set of intelligence ability in an individual. It can also be said that the ability to run fast is associated with a more general prowess of athletic ability. But in both cases, it's only a very general correlation. Valid, mostly. But only up to a point.
However, there is a limit to the analogies that can be made between mental ability and athletic ability. Athletic ability is visible, and there are means to determine the limits of individual performance. Mental ability is invisible, and exists as a potential that is expressed through indirect actions on the outside world. It's difficult to figure exactly how to push the mental capacity of an individual to the limit, the way an athletic competition or an Olympic trial does. The components of athletic ability are mostly quantifiable--couldn't be simpler, in an event like the 100 yard dash. Whereas only some of the components of mental ability are reliably quantifiable. I can accept that Raven's Progressive Matrices measures some sort of mental ability, if the test subjects are provided with a clear idea of how to achieve correct answers. But it doesn't measure all of it.
There are other problems I find with statistical measures of some of the more amorphous mental-emotional features on the chart in the post. For example, human abilities are dynamic. We aren't doing metallurgic analysis of alloys here. The notion that the "neuroticism" found in an individual is a static component of their emotional makeup is a pretty hopeless conclusion, for instance.
I have other criticisms. Once statistical researches are applied to demographic cohorts- groups- rather than individuals, precise measurement is replaced with probability ranges. I would argue that all such researches should be considered as not entirely scientific. Which is not to say that they're unscientific, or worthless. There's certainly some amount of useful information to be gleaned. But rigorously disciplined research and sound methodology is no guarantee of confident conclusions, and in my experience researchers are often very careful about speculating beyond the data. However, Pop Science Journalism rarely adheres to that ethical standard in their reporting. And that has a way of leading to popular misconceptions.
Because such researches are foundational to modern medicine, pharmacology, and psychology, if my opinion about probability estimate statistical research is valid, the logical inference is that those fields are not 100% Science. I don't think they are. There's a heavy component of empiricism in the practice of those occupations, along with increased competence derived from the crystallized knowledge that can only be accumulated and strengthened by extensive firsthand experience in field conditions.
(*Unless someone applies the sort of connotative "meanings" found in the various schools of esoteric numerology, which we'll set aside as irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion at hand.)
This has to be the most conceptually dense comment I've ever read anywhere on the internet, and my not having eaten today is definitely not helping me decipher it. I had to pass the whole thing to ChatGPT to try to get a sense of what you were talking about, and even from that I'm still struggling to keep up.
I think you're onto something. If someone can write this out in a "popular sociology" type of language it might actually become a quite worthwhile book.
I hate to think that an entire book would be required in order to productively clarify what I was trying to outline there. But that may well be the case.
Thanks for thinking that I'm onto something. I'm content to have other readers run with that project, if they've managed to figure out what I'm referring to. I think it helps if someone has reviewed a lot of research papers, and the papers made out of those research papers, and sometimes detect methodology shortcomings and an absence of consideration given to confounding factors that might better have been screened or investigated.
You remind me somewhat of Taleb's attacks on "mathiness", or the overreliance on financial and economic modeling without taking the time to question if the models actually make sense in the first place.
Whether or not an "entire book is required" or not, an entire book would be useful.
The challenge would really be developing a sort of alternate way of interpreting the world — i.e. so that a person can say, "oh, I guess I haven't been perceiving the world in thus and such a way, but perhaps I can learn to do so, this makes sense" — that is simple enough for people to grasp (enough of them anyway), backed up enough by the right kinds of data to be compelling, and stimulating enough / predictive enough to be rewarding or useful for people to adapt towards.
Taleb is definitely someone I've learned from. I've found that a lot of his insights resonated with me on the common ground of ordinary good sense, and my firsthand experience of the world. We both know that numbers don't lie, but it's possible--all too easy--to manipulate words to get the numbers to lie. So to speak. To support a lie.
Well, and this is another concept he touches on, numbers may not lie but they don't tell the whole truth. Economics can tell you many things about trade and business, but very little about social hierarchies or how technology flows from one place to another, or, anyway, what we should value. Sowell makes this last point very clearly many times, yet many seem to miss it, maybe even of his cohort and fans.
So part of the challenge is simply the fact that numbers may answer the question we asked instead of the question we should have asked, and so on it goes.
Actually, it's a bit of a tangent, but there's a book I read recently called The Ever Changing Past, which essentially argues that history can never be a complete telling because historiography is always trying to respond to itself in the light of new information. That's a roundabout way of pointing out just how flawed any position is, if one just focuses on the "data" in front of them. The same pattern emerges in virtually any other area of life.
I've particularly made my study that of humanity, specifically of Western Eurasia, of broadly the last 10,000 years, sometimes going deep and sometimes pulling back to the grand overviews, and one conclusion I've come to is that modern libertarian economics, let's say that of Milton Friedman, the Austrians, Chicago School, etc., while it's basically correct in the questions it asks and answers, doesn't really tell you much about how to make a civilization last more than a few centuries. It can give warnings, but does nothing to explain or counteract the mechanisms that lead over time to various forms of feudalism.
To some extent "fully understanding reality" is a fantom we will never capture, the best we can do is have slightly more accurate approximate guesses, but you get deep enough into this — perhaps you've found this for yourself also — and you begin to respect tradition and folk-ways more over time, even if you don't choose to embrace them yourself.
I guess I don't see 1 and 3 as anti Diamond at all, and in fact reinforcing his core points.
2 is more balanced, and I think he would push back on the genetic determinism point, but the argument that portions of civilisation drove human evolution isn't at all incompatible with Diamond's view that certain geographical and natural features are much more conducive to settled civilisation than others (such as the number and quality of plants and animals you can harvest within your biome and have land based access to).
I would agree that 2 supports the written message of Diamond's book, but not the unwritten message.
The unwritten message is that he wrote the book to pwn the racists who think that Eurasians invented agriculture and then civilisation because they're smarter, and he wouldn't necessarily be that thrilled if they simply admitted he was right and actually Eurasians are smarter because they invented agriculture and then civilisation.
I did not know Everett before this, but it is always astounding to see how the behavior of religious, radical protestants and evangelist Americans is so similar to the behavior of woke and atheistic Americans. Same ideology with a different skin.
There's a pretty specific reason for that: secular humanism is a product of protestant christianity to a large degree, and to the extent it's not a "product" they are siblings. In the US, it should not be lost on a person that Boston was founded as a hyper-religious colony, the Harvard was founded TO BE a seminary, and that New England specifically was very disproportionate centuries later in bringing education to the postbellum Southern Black populations, even as they had long since stopped being intensely religious. It's a fairly direct link. The early hyper-religious Protestant focus gave way to transcendentalism, but was still carrying much of the underwriting logic.
On top of that, American evangelicalism has infused American society (much more so than European society for example) with a lot of dramatic imperatives about changing and reshaping the world, which has spilled out significantly into the rest of society. A lot of this is heightened by the rather intense "marketplace of ideologies" we have in the US, specifically over religion, in which saying dramatic things to get attention, and arguing that the destruction of the world is at hand if one did not do a specific thing has been going back for centuries. See Millerism for one specific example.
In short what you're seeing is a sort of secular / atheistic worldview and approach to life which is essentially protestant evangelical American culture, but taking away God and the Bible, and replacing it with other things instead, in particular academia and the state (at it's best). You see a very similar sort of frantic "THE WORLD WILL END SOON! THIS IS OUR LAST CHANCE!" logic.
But it's still fundamentally evangelical, and fundamentalist, and apocalyptic.
Part of my vision on this comes from the fact that I grew up in a somewhat intensely apocalyptically focused branch of fundamentalist Christianity within the US, and have now lived abroad for a few years especially in Europe, where I'm able to contrast what I feel or don't feel abroad with what I find back home. I'm no longer religious but it does dictate intensely how I approach life in ways that I really have no control over (nor am I convinced it necessary to try to rewrite my whole identity), but does make me rather different from others. Basically I translated my "we must share the last message to the world before it's too late!" imperative of my upbringing to "I must find answers to the complex questions of society". But the drive is no less intense, because I was taught that it was important to be driven on a mission, and now it's just part of my core essence.
Just want to note that Everett is a major character in Tom Wolfe's *The Kingdom of Speech* as part of Wolfe's rebuttal of Chomsky. I liked KOS mostly because it felt entirely like a book created after Wolfe and Chomsky met each other at a party and them both hating each other.
«The rest of the book is spent demolishing his claim and arguing (quite convincingly) that the flywheel of genetic and cultural coevolution has been one of the key driving forces of human history»
Well pretty much everything is a selective pressure, the question is *how fast* they work. The fastest seem sexual/reproductive pressures: cesarean births seem to have led to a significant decrease in hip size of women over several decades, less than a century, for example. The speed is related to how strong the pressure is: a herd of horses trapped on a peninsula when it became an island turned from normal size into pony size over just 3,000 years because of food scarcity. Otherwise they seem to work pretty slowly because humans and their environments seem to evolve slowly, as they are complex, live relatively long, have long infancy periods, unlike fruit flies :-).
As to the "flywheel" that is also called "path dependency" and it arises from there being many local maxima in fitness, and they shift too. Path dependency (both as to time and space) is a big deal and indeed it is often vastly under-rate by those who seek "universal truths".
Do you have a citation on hip size? IIRC there’s not a great correlation between pelvic anatomy and birth outcomes, and anecdotally most of the c-sections I know about were for malpresentation or fetal distress, not literal “baby too big” problems. A lot of these women go on to have multiple successful VBACs, too.
"The researchers estimated that the global rate of cases where the baby could not fit through the maternal birth canal was 3%, or 30 in 1,000 births. Over the past 50 or 60 years, this rate has increased to about 3.3-3.6%, so up to 36 in 1,000 births. That is about a 10-20% increase of the original rate, due to the evolutionary effect."
Another couple unrelated effects, nothing to do with sexuality/reproduction:
"Over time, human faces have got shorter, which has seen our mouths get smaller, with less room for as many teeth. As part of natural selection and our increased ability to chew food, this has resulted in fewer people being born with wisdom teeth, Dr Teghan Lucas from Flinders University, Adelaide, said. "A lot of people thought humans have stopped evolving. But our study shows we are still evolving - faster than at any point in the past 250 years," she added. An artery in the forearm that supplies blood to the hand has become more prevalent in newborns since the 19th century, the study also found.”"
Or perhaps shorter faces or smaller mouths are more attractive.
Interesting, thanks! The paper in PNAS is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1712203114 I wonder how much of this is pelvic narrowing and how much is decoupling the genes for pelvic width and fetal size. You have to imagine that the limitations on repeat c/s would impose a similar cliff to the one this model suggests, but I guess not even broad-hipped mothers are routinely having enough children to run up against the numbers where that would make a difference.
I guess good dental hygiene makes wisdom teeth less important? The neoteny more generally might be a consequence of selection for docility, I think the same changes to neural crest development influence both (cf. domestication syndrome in animals and possibly also anatomically modern humans vs. Neanderthals?).
Right, I wouldn't be surprised if this says more about babies being fatter due to better material health and diet than it does about any skeletal changes. Babies are heavier now than they used to be, this isn't hard to verify. Same as every other stage of life.
Thousands of years intuitively feels like a short time for evolution to make significant changes, because we're accustomed to looking at the huge body shape changes which happens over millions of years.
But thousands of years is a long time to massively change the distribution of traits already present in a population. If one percent of the population has a particular trait, and that trait suddenly starts giving you a three percent boost to reproductive fitness, then... well, I can't be bothered figuring out the maths actually, but over a few hundred generations then that trait will come to dominate.
So we shouldn't be the least bit surprised if a population that has spent hundreds of generations with one particular lifestyle in one particular environment winds up with a very different distribution of traits to a different population in a different environment with a different lifestyle.
«But thousands of years is a long time to massively change the distribution of traits already present in a population. If one percent of the population has a particular trait, and that trait suddenly starts giving you a three percent boost to reproductive fitness, then»
Two problem with that:
* A three percent *net* boost is enormous and I guess very rare.
* For most of human history most people never went further than a few dozen miles from their birth village, so the 1% usually remained 1% for a long time.
«over a few hundred generations then that trait will come to dominate.»
The environment can change quite a bit over a few hundred generations (a few thousand years), because of climate evolution, invasions, etc.
IIRC however one example of relatively fast such change is that lapps in northern Scandinavia evolved from yellow and dark-yellow mongolics to very pale white mongolics as they moved west and north, in around 30,000 years, that is around 1,000 generations.
«we shouldn't be the least bit surprised if a population that has spent hundreds of generations with one particular lifestyle in one particular environment winds up with a very different distribution of traits to a different population in a different environment»
My guess is that could happen given quite favorable conditions, but it is rare.
I made this comment originally on another book review of the Everett Pirahã book (lightly edited):
Gwern has a great book review on this one: https://gwern.net/review/book#dont-sleep-there-are-snakes-everett-2008. The ending of Gwern's review brings up probably the best theory I have read to explain the Pirahã, although I would put it more bluntly: maybe they are just extremely inbred and very dumb. They can't plan for the future the way some children cannot plan for the future. They cannot learn how to count to ten, because that is too complicated for them.
The *New Yorker* article (cited by Gwern and found here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2) also implies that the Pirahã are really dumb. An evolutionary biologist, William Tecumseh Fitch (yes, he is a direct descendant of the American Civil War general), traveled down there to test the Pirahã, and he had a lot of problems getting them to pass basic grammar test which apparently even all monkeys tested could pass. According to the article, Fitch eventually found one sixteen-year-old who could pass the test. I cannot figure out from Fitch's Google Scholar page where he wrote up these results--maybe they're buried somewhere.
Getting genetic samples of the Pirahã would clarify how inbred they are, and it would at least partly let us guess their genetic IQ, insofar as we can use one of those fancy polygenic scores for educational attainment/cognitive ability to estimate it. I also would like to see someone replicate Everett's work (Margaret Mead's fieldwork did not replicate). Even the *New Yorker* journalist had to rely on Everett's translations.
Per Wikipedia, "[Everett] says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985." And wouldn't you know it, he completed his masters thesis in 1980 and PhD in 1983 in linguistics under a Brazilian-French advisor. His thesis provided "a detailed detailed Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã." Anyways, it sounds like he begins to reject his faith as a Brazilian graduate student in a (presumably) atheistic/secular atmosphere.
Incredibly, Everett is an avowed defender of the blank state.
You have to be incredibly blank-slate-pilled in the first place to avoid immediately seeing Pirahã stories as "Wow, so this is what homo erectus society and culture looked like before the last batch of brain developments". Guess Christianity that posits fundamental difference between humans (however dumb) and non-human entities, could have kinda similar effects.
That makes sense, except Christianity does not posit quite that--theology accounts for adults without the use of reason (consider, as an analogy, that infants do not possess a knowledge of good and evil, yet they still often get baptized, although not in Everett's denomination). Thomas Aquinas addressed it similarly: "Some are so from birth, have no lucid intervals, and show no sign of reason; with these we should decide as with children."
As far as I can tell, Everett's particular theological bent (he went to Moody) also accommodates this situation, because everyone has an answer to what happens if a baby dies. (They [Evangelicals] basically say that culpability presupposes knowledge, so babies and adults without the use of reason go to heaven.)
I'm not certain we disagree. What I mean is that Christian dogma on human state is that we all possess souls and so are inherently good or at least redeemable. Blank-slate style of ideas also implies something similar - that all humans are fundamentally equal in capacity, both intellectual and moral.
The idea that these are basically a tribe of morons, and that they are morons inherently (as opposed to made such by circumstances) isn't easy to express in either paradigm. Everett would need to lose more than faith in the actual fact of His existence to consider it as a hypothesis rather than just a random piece of slander.
I know there was homo habilis at some point, and that there is no particular reason something similar shouldn't exist in a similar niche today. A creature somewhat different from you and me, but still for most intents and purposes human. There is no difficulty in supposing that Pirana just so happen to be that creature. Whereas for either Christian or leftist (and afaik Everett was at some point both) it's a strict delineation - either they have to be apes, or they have to be basically the same as himself.
Also just wanted to note they don't seem to be particularly amoral when you consider decreased capacity for long-term planning. Compare eg to a random guy who inhibited his preference of long-term over the current moment by having a few beers too many.
as a fellow snorter of Hajnal lines, I thank you.
"It doesn’t even need to be in person — histories of the Aztecs or the Carthaginians demonstrate exactly the same kind of 'sweeping positive statement / truly horrific details' phenomenon."
And at some point people will say exactly the same kinds of things about us. "Everyone had food and emergency medical care. They could vote and go to school, where they might be shot in their classrooms by a stranger, and people accepted this. 'Nothing can be done'."
This cuts both ways, fascinating.
I guess as long as you sidestep the horrific details personally, it's a positive experience.
> “how’s it going?” is usually not an actual question
Yesterday I heard someone answer that with 'you don't want to know, but thanks for asking.'
I always have to remind myself at the doctor that this is a real question. “Fine thanks how — wait no, I have a 103° fever and my veins are all red and squiggly.”
Same.
As a youngster I was in the camp of taking the question seriously. I had to train myself to understand that nobody actually cared about me.
Matthew Desmond's Evicted is a great example of the “sweeping positive statement / truly horrific details” phenomenon. He's very certain that people get evicted and end up homeless due to slumlords, cruel laws, capitalism, etc. And then he describes the evicted people as making truly horrific choices that very obviously lead to homelessness—e.g., starting a stupid fight with the person who is letting you live with her for free and beating her up.
These can both be true. It's an uncontroversial fact that America has a problem. In cities there are more jobs than houses while outside cities, there are more houses then jobs. But at the same time, if you don't have enough rooms in your house, who are you going to kick out first. Your sweet Grandma or the guy who keeps trying to punch Grandma?
Just because a problem is concentrated on the most vulnerable and troublesome part of our population doesn't mean we don't need to fix it. If we don't fix it, it will get worse and hit more and more people.
Yeah, totally agreed. And I think Desmond would agree too—except his solution for housing scarcity is more restrictions on landlords
The Everett story really haunts me. He saw a seriously stunted society and purposely stunted himself. It’s disturbing to me.
I don't know.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
― Douglas Adams
I'm guessing the divorce and children cutting him off have to do with him being an unreliable self-promoting a hole.
It's super convenient that the ONE language that has NONE of the features of other languages has a super small number of speakers, is difficult to learn, and a linguistic isolate (there are not other languages in the same family against which his claims can be compared). So he is the lone expert in this language (his wife is the only other) and he says it has all these weird features no one can check.
huh how bout that.
Research opportunity, Kath!
How could it be otherwise? If there was a well known, accessible language that was missing these features Chomsky never would have claimed that they are universal.
How do we evaluate the quality of life of people like the Pirahã? On the one hand, their lives are objectively pretty awful. On the other hand, they actually seem... pretty damn happy about the state of their society? Would their experience of reality be better if they were raised in modern, wealthy Western societies? What are we optimizing for here?
Maybe I'm missing something here - why would ADHD be selected for in American society?
Also, the Pirahã are a perfect of example of why subjective happiness is not the highest good.
I assume it's because, in a reproductive landscape of widespread birth control, unusually impulsive people will have more babies.
«a reproductive landscape of widespread birth control, unusually impulsive people will have more babies»
This I think attributes to impulsiveness *in general* too much weight. My impression is that having children is positively influenced by two factors:
1) An "innate" reproductive instinct, similar to the "hunger" instinct, which is rather more specialized and different from generic poor impulse control; it is not a negative lack of control but a positive motivator.
2) A rational self-interest to invest in sons as pension assets.
My impression is that for a rather long time the pension asset motivation ("tiger moms") has dominated reproduction in many societies which has weakened the reproductive instinct (as women with low reproductive instinct still would still invest in bearing and raising sons as pensions assets).
Currently women can work and invest in financial pension assets instead of investing in sons and prefer to do so in part because of weakened reproductive instinct in part because bearing and raising sons is both risky and time consuming.
IIRC an article in "The Economist" pithily summarized this as "children used to be a necessary investment and now are an expensive hobby in competition with nicer holidays, house renovations, car upgrades, ...".
...are you from a rich area, perchance? I'm not, and 'lack of impulse control' explained a substantial proportion of total births in my hometown. Those that were disciplines enough to get an education often still don't have children, or at most two.
«'lack of impulse control' explained a substantial proportion of total births in my hometown. Those that were disciplines enough to get an education often still don't have children, or at most two.»
That is the usual smugly sneering "centrist" propaganda that only promiscuous dummies (especially those perceived as being of lower class or inferior race) do not mind the annoyance of having children and properly educated clever women with self-control try to live as if they were men avoiding the burden of motherhood.
As I wrote instead most women are instead rather smart and think ahead even if from poor background and choose between sons or career depending on which option looks more profitable and secure for their old age.
This is fairly obvious when considering that highly educated and securely wealthy women who do not need to work for a pension or need to have sons as pension assets still often have several children as they can easily afford them and it gives them satisfaction. Conversely many women in very poor places have many children as pension assets but abort their female ones as they are less profitable than male ones who can work harder and longer. Those are not signs of impulsiveness but of careful deliberation for the long term.
The funniest thing to me was that Jared Diamond wrote the book against the Bell Curve from the left, and now is considered discredited because people further to *his* left criticized it for not being sufficiently anticolonialist; he doesn't blame colonialism enough for the failures of non-Western cultures when the West was keeping them down all the time.
(I haven't really seen the critiques address the question of *how the West got ahead in the first place*, Diamond's central point, I suspect because that would mean they'd have to argue with HBD arguments they find even more offensive.)
The next iconoclastic book that needs to get written and discussed is a skeptical inquiry into the intellectual fad of uncritically swallowing swallowing numerical plots that purport to accurately measure criteria that are defined entirely by verbal means. Relying entirely on consensus du jour "definitions" that- to put it in computerspeak- partake of a massive amount of data compression, due to reliance on low resolution (i.e., vague) terms and summary phrases like "life outcomes", "neuroticism", and "cognitive performance."
The main flaw of the Metrics Are Proof paradigm is that it has a pronounced tendency to blur the difference between the numbers of the data sets, which are entirely denotative and objective--and the aspects of human functioning being measured, which are defined using verbal criteria, which are connotative, and ultimately the result of a subjective consensus established by the academic authorities and researchers that's always arbitrary and imprecise.
Numerical results have a way of conferring authority on a research study, because they're entirely denotative. The number 4 is quantity 1 + 1 +1 +1, and that's all there is to it.* There's no interpretive argument to be made on matters of arithmetic. The rules are long settled, precise, and objective.
The verbal component of the studies is more elusive, because it's connotative. Definitions of words rely on other words; dictionaries bear no resemblance to bookkeeping accounts. Verbal definitions are inherently interpretive, and always to some extent arbitrary. The intent should always be to aim for semantic accuracy- maximizing the signal to noise ratio, so to speak- but the precision of math is simply out of the question. Verbal language always contains some noise in the mix. That accounts for the shifts in term definitions, jargon terms, and neologisms in fields like the social (hopefully) disciplines, and researches into the mysteries of human psychology.
That's where the studies often run into trouble. Consider the definition of "cognitive performance"- by whose lights? I notice highly educated, high income, high occupational status individuals falling for the most elementary sorts of foolishness and logical inconsistency all the time. I've heard many attempts to explain that disparity away--most often, self-exculpatory exercises claiming that "everyone" is vulnerable to cognitive problems like preconceived bias, epistemic closure, and premature conclusions derived from facile speculation--but I've never heard anyone actually explain the situation. There's no section of an IQ test that provides a reliable measure of perspicacity.
Speaking of IQ tests, I also notice a lot of table-pounding about that cornerstone of developmental psychology, Intelligence Quotient, as a vitally important measure of "g" or "Spearman's g", i.e., the "common substrate of mental abilities" in a given individual that can be expressed as a numerical quantity, ranked and charted as a percentile in group estimates. I mean, talk about connotative interpretations drawn from verbal term definitions.
The more I reflect on the accepted definition of quantifiable human intelligence, the more I notice how closely it aligns with the sort of abstract reasoning used to construct the precision architecture of computer programs--nested loops, sets and subsets, elaborations built from computer "languages". Except that computer languages are crucially different from human verbal languages. In human language, imprecision doesn't automatically break the program. The noise quotient of human language--provided that it's within the limits required for a reliably useful amount of communication--allows for parallel processing shifts that comprise a fruitful source of creativity. Wordplay. Whereas the creativity found in the realm of computers is of a different order, operating within much more precisely delimited rules. It's more like mechanical engineering than, say, humor, or musical invention. The creative expression that often innovates by occasionally coloring outside the lines, confounding or surpassing expectations by breaking conventional rules.
You cannot get away with doing that within the rules laid down by an IQ test. You can't do that when writing computer code, either; leave out a bracket or forget to close a loop, and all sorts of unwanted nonsense crops up. And that's the particular aspect of intelligence that modern civilization c.2025 has ordained as leading to a better chance of achieving optimal or high-status "life outcome", compared to other aspects of intelligence. But it just isn't the entire picture of what human intelligence constitutes.
A preliminary hypothesis: the sort of "pattern recognition" "abstract reasoning" that enables someone to excel at computer coding constitutes a subset of intelligence in the same way that prowess at running fast is a subset of athletic ability. But abstract reasoning is not the entire picture of intelligence, just like running speed is not the sole measure of athletic. Intelligence researchers are found of pointing out that measured abstract reasoning ability serves as a rough predictor of a general level of the wider set of intelligence ability in an individual. It can also be said that the ability to run fast is associated with a more general prowess of athletic ability. But in both cases, it's only a very general correlation. Valid, mostly. But only up to a point.
However, there is a limit to the analogies that can be made between mental ability and athletic ability. Athletic ability is visible, and there are means to determine the limits of individual performance. Mental ability is invisible, and exists as a potential that is expressed through indirect actions on the outside world. It's difficult to figure exactly how to push the mental capacity of an individual to the limit, the way an athletic competition or an Olympic trial does. The components of athletic ability are mostly quantifiable--couldn't be simpler, in an event like the 100 yard dash. Whereas only some of the components of mental ability are reliably quantifiable. I can accept that Raven's Progressive Matrices measures some sort of mental ability, if the test subjects are provided with a clear idea of how to achieve correct answers. But it doesn't measure all of it.
There are other problems I find with statistical measures of some of the more amorphous mental-emotional features on the chart in the post. For example, human abilities are dynamic. We aren't doing metallurgic analysis of alloys here. The notion that the "neuroticism" found in an individual is a static component of their emotional makeup is a pretty hopeless conclusion, for instance.
I have other criticisms. Once statistical researches are applied to demographic cohorts- groups- rather than individuals, precise measurement is replaced with probability ranges. I would argue that all such researches should be considered as not entirely scientific. Which is not to say that they're unscientific, or worthless. There's certainly some amount of useful information to be gleaned. But rigorously disciplined research and sound methodology is no guarantee of confident conclusions, and in my experience researchers are often very careful about speculating beyond the data. However, Pop Science Journalism rarely adheres to that ethical standard in their reporting. And that has a way of leading to popular misconceptions.
Because such researches are foundational to modern medicine, pharmacology, and psychology, if my opinion about probability estimate statistical research is valid, the logical inference is that those fields are not 100% Science. I don't think they are. There's a heavy component of empiricism in the practice of those occupations, along with increased competence derived from the crystallized knowledge that can only be accumulated and strengthened by extensive firsthand experience in field conditions.
(*Unless someone applies the sort of connotative "meanings" found in the various schools of esoteric numerology, which we'll set aside as irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion at hand.)
This has to be the most conceptually dense comment I've ever read anywhere on the internet, and my not having eaten today is definitely not helping me decipher it. I had to pass the whole thing to ChatGPT to try to get a sense of what you were talking about, and even from that I'm still struggling to keep up.
I think you're onto something. If someone can write this out in a "popular sociology" type of language it might actually become a quite worthwhile book.
I hate to think that an entire book would be required in order to productively clarify what I was trying to outline there. But that may well be the case.
Thanks for thinking that I'm onto something. I'm content to have other readers run with that project, if they've managed to figure out what I'm referring to. I think it helps if someone has reviewed a lot of research papers, and the papers made out of those research papers, and sometimes detect methodology shortcomings and an absence of consideration given to confounding factors that might better have been screened or investigated.
You remind me somewhat of Taleb's attacks on "mathiness", or the overreliance on financial and economic modeling without taking the time to question if the models actually make sense in the first place.
Whether or not an "entire book is required" or not, an entire book would be useful.
The challenge would really be developing a sort of alternate way of interpreting the world — i.e. so that a person can say, "oh, I guess I haven't been perceiving the world in thus and such a way, but perhaps I can learn to do so, this makes sense" — that is simple enough for people to grasp (enough of them anyway), backed up enough by the right kinds of data to be compelling, and stimulating enough / predictive enough to be rewarding or useful for people to adapt towards.
Taleb is definitely someone I've learned from. I've found that a lot of his insights resonated with me on the common ground of ordinary good sense, and my firsthand experience of the world. We both know that numbers don't lie, but it's possible--all too easy--to manipulate words to get the numbers to lie. So to speak. To support a lie.
Well, and this is another concept he touches on, numbers may not lie but they don't tell the whole truth. Economics can tell you many things about trade and business, but very little about social hierarchies or how technology flows from one place to another, or, anyway, what we should value. Sowell makes this last point very clearly many times, yet many seem to miss it, maybe even of his cohort and fans.
So part of the challenge is simply the fact that numbers may answer the question we asked instead of the question we should have asked, and so on it goes.
Actually, it's a bit of a tangent, but there's a book I read recently called The Ever Changing Past, which essentially argues that history can never be a complete telling because historiography is always trying to respond to itself in the light of new information. That's a roundabout way of pointing out just how flawed any position is, if one just focuses on the "data" in front of them. The same pattern emerges in virtually any other area of life.
I've particularly made my study that of humanity, specifically of Western Eurasia, of broadly the last 10,000 years, sometimes going deep and sometimes pulling back to the grand overviews, and one conclusion I've come to is that modern libertarian economics, let's say that of Milton Friedman, the Austrians, Chicago School, etc., while it's basically correct in the questions it asks and answers, doesn't really tell you much about how to make a civilization last more than a few centuries. It can give warnings, but does nothing to explain or counteract the mechanisms that lead over time to various forms of feudalism.
To some extent "fully understanding reality" is a fantom we will never capture, the best we can do is have slightly more accurate approximate guesses, but you get deep enough into this — perhaps you've found this for yourself also — and you begin to respect tradition and folk-ways more over time, even if you don't choose to embrace them yourself.
I guess I don't see 1 and 3 as anti Diamond at all, and in fact reinforcing his core points.
2 is more balanced, and I think he would push back on the genetic determinism point, but the argument that portions of civilisation drove human evolution isn't at all incompatible with Diamond's view that certain geographical and natural features are much more conducive to settled civilisation than others (such as the number and quality of plants and animals you can harvest within your biome and have land based access to).
I would agree that 2 supports the written message of Diamond's book, but not the unwritten message.
The unwritten message is that he wrote the book to pwn the racists who think that Eurasians invented agriculture and then civilisation because they're smarter, and he wouldn't necessarily be that thrilled if they simply admitted he was right and actually Eurasians are smarter because they invented agriculture and then civilisation.
Ha! Without commenting on the substance of the argument, you may be right re: Diamond's reaction.
I did not know Everett before this, but it is always astounding to see how the behavior of religious, radical protestants and evangelist Americans is so similar to the behavior of woke and atheistic Americans. Same ideology with a different skin.
There's a pretty specific reason for that: secular humanism is a product of protestant christianity to a large degree, and to the extent it's not a "product" they are siblings. In the US, it should not be lost on a person that Boston was founded as a hyper-religious colony, the Harvard was founded TO BE a seminary, and that New England specifically was very disproportionate centuries later in bringing education to the postbellum Southern Black populations, even as they had long since stopped being intensely religious. It's a fairly direct link. The early hyper-religious Protestant focus gave way to transcendentalism, but was still carrying much of the underwriting logic.
On top of that, American evangelicalism has infused American society (much more so than European society for example) with a lot of dramatic imperatives about changing and reshaping the world, which has spilled out significantly into the rest of society. A lot of this is heightened by the rather intense "marketplace of ideologies" we have in the US, specifically over religion, in which saying dramatic things to get attention, and arguing that the destruction of the world is at hand if one did not do a specific thing has been going back for centuries. See Millerism for one specific example.
In short what you're seeing is a sort of secular / atheistic worldview and approach to life which is essentially protestant evangelical American culture, but taking away God and the Bible, and replacing it with other things instead, in particular academia and the state (at it's best). You see a very similar sort of frantic "THE WORLD WILL END SOON! THIS IS OUR LAST CHANCE!" logic.
But it's still fundamentally evangelical, and fundamentalist, and apocalyptic.
Part of my vision on this comes from the fact that I grew up in a somewhat intensely apocalyptically focused branch of fundamentalist Christianity within the US, and have now lived abroad for a few years especially in Europe, where I'm able to contrast what I feel or don't feel abroad with what I find back home. I'm no longer religious but it does dictate intensely how I approach life in ways that I really have no control over (nor am I convinced it necessary to try to rewrite my whole identity), but does make me rather different from others. Basically I translated my "we must share the last message to the world before it's too late!" imperative of my upbringing to "I must find answers to the complex questions of society". But the drive is no less intense, because I was taught that it was important to be driven on a mission, and now it's just part of my core essence.
+1 on the Kyle Harper books — they are fantastically illuminating, if often grim reading.
Just want to note that Everett is a major character in Tom Wolfe's *The Kingdom of Speech* as part of Wolfe's rebuttal of Chomsky. I liked KOS mostly because it felt entirely like a book created after Wolfe and Chomsky met each other at a party and them both hating each other.
Few better reasons to write a book tbh.
«The rest of the book is spent demolishing his claim and arguing (quite convincingly) that the flywheel of genetic and cultural coevolution has been one of the key driving forces of human history»
Well pretty much everything is a selective pressure, the question is *how fast* they work. The fastest seem sexual/reproductive pressures: cesarean births seem to have led to a significant decrease in hip size of women over several decades, less than a century, for example. The speed is related to how strong the pressure is: a herd of horses trapped on a peninsula when it became an island turned from normal size into pony size over just 3,000 years because of food scarcity. Otherwise they seem to work pretty slowly because humans and their environments seem to evolve slowly, as they are complex, live relatively long, have long infancy periods, unlike fruit flies :-).
As to the "flywheel" that is also called "path dependency" and it arises from there being many local maxima in fitness, and they shift too. Path dependency (both as to time and space) is a big deal and indeed it is often vastly under-rate by those who seek "universal truths".
Do you have a citation on hip size? IIRC there’s not a great correlation between pelvic anatomy and birth outcomes, and anecdotally most of the c-sections I know about were for malpresentation or fetal distress, not literal “baby too big” problems. A lot of these women go on to have multiple successful VBACs, too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38210837
"The researchers estimated that the global rate of cases where the baby could not fit through the maternal birth canal was 3%, or 30 in 1,000 births. Over the past 50 or 60 years, this rate has increased to about 3.3-3.6%, so up to 36 in 1,000 births. That is about a 10-20% increase of the original rate, due to the evolutionary effect."
Another couple unrelated effects, nothing to do with sexuality/reproduction:
https://news.sky.com/story/human-microevolution-sees-more-people-born-without-wisdom-teeth-and-an-extra-artery-12099689
"Over time, human faces have got shorter, which has seen our mouths get smaller, with less room for as many teeth. As part of natural selection and our increased ability to chew food, this has resulted in fewer people being born with wisdom teeth, Dr Teghan Lucas from Flinders University, Adelaide, said. "A lot of people thought humans have stopped evolving. But our study shows we are still evolving - faster than at any point in the past 250 years," she added. An artery in the forearm that supplies blood to the hand has become more prevalent in newborns since the 19th century, the study also found.”"
Or perhaps shorter faces or smaller mouths are more attractive.
Interesting, thanks! The paper in PNAS is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1712203114 I wonder how much of this is pelvic narrowing and how much is decoupling the genes for pelvic width and fetal size. You have to imagine that the limitations on repeat c/s would impose a similar cliff to the one this model suggests, but I guess not even broad-hipped mothers are routinely having enough children to run up against the numbers where that would make a difference.
I guess good dental hygiene makes wisdom teeth less important? The neoteny more generally might be a consequence of selection for docility, I think the same changes to neural crest development influence both (cf. domestication syndrome in animals and possibly also anatomically modern humans vs. Neanderthals?).
Right, I wouldn't be surprised if this says more about babies being fatter due to better material health and diet than it does about any skeletal changes. Babies are heavier now than they used to be, this isn't hard to verify. Same as every other stage of life.
Thousands of years intuitively feels like a short time for evolution to make significant changes, because we're accustomed to looking at the huge body shape changes which happens over millions of years.
But thousands of years is a long time to massively change the distribution of traits already present in a population. If one percent of the population has a particular trait, and that trait suddenly starts giving you a three percent boost to reproductive fitness, then... well, I can't be bothered figuring out the maths actually, but over a few hundred generations then that trait will come to dominate.
So we shouldn't be the least bit surprised if a population that has spent hundreds of generations with one particular lifestyle in one particular environment winds up with a very different distribution of traits to a different population in a different environment with a different lifestyle.
«But thousands of years is a long time to massively change the distribution of traits already present in a population. If one percent of the population has a particular trait, and that trait suddenly starts giving you a three percent boost to reproductive fitness, then»
Two problem with that:
* A three percent *net* boost is enormous and I guess very rare.
* For most of human history most people never went further than a few dozen miles from their birth village, so the 1% usually remained 1% for a long time.
«over a few hundred generations then that trait will come to dominate.»
The environment can change quite a bit over a few hundred generations (a few thousand years), because of climate evolution, invasions, etc.
IIRC however one example of relatively fast such change is that lapps in northern Scandinavia evolved from yellow and dark-yellow mongolics to very pale white mongolics as they moved west and north, in around 30,000 years, that is around 1,000 generations.
«we shouldn't be the least bit surprised if a population that has spent hundreds of generations with one particular lifestyle in one particular environment winds up with a very different distribution of traits to a different population in a different environment»
My guess is that could happen given quite favorable conditions, but it is rare.
«the distribution of traits already present in a population»
I keep collecting stories about different traits already present in some populations, some example:
* Some percent of human babies are born with a small tail, and obstetricians are taught to trim it.
* Humans in 1 in 10,000 has the distribution of thoracic organs swapped left-right, so their heart is on the right etc.
* Lobsters come in various colors with 1 in 1,000,000 to 1 in 100,000,000 chances.