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Sturgeon's House

Human genetics


Toxn

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7 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

Wasn't SSC a pro-neurouniformity guy?

Neuroconformity? I don't know what the term is.

 

Anyway; the dude is a psychiatrist by training. He's also ashkenazi jewish by descent, is a carrier for one of the genetic diseases mentioned and has some sort of non-specific issue with being over stimulated by loud sounds.

 

His views seem to be firmly in the 'IQ = intelligence = genetic legacy' camp, but he takes the left-ish approach that the genetically un-gifted should be given compassion and careful training to overcome their disability.

 

The standard approach*, for reference, is more along the lines of 'toss the dummies into the sea and/or force the hotties to bear my genius offspring'.

 

 

*edit: I've found that a pretty easy way to tell whether people fall into this camp is whether they use the term 'dysgenic' or not. It's not a term used much in evolutionary theory or population genetics.

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28 minutes ago, Toxn said:

Neuroconformity? I don't know what the term is.

 

Anyway; the dude is a psychiatrist by training. He's also ashkenazi jewish by descent, is a carrier for one of the genetic diseases mentioned and has some sort of non-specific issue with being over stimulated by loud sounds.

 

His views seem to be firmly in the 'IQ = intelligence = genetic legacy' camp, but he takes the left-ish approach that the genetically un-gifted should be given compassion and careful training to overcome their disability.

 

The standard approach*, for reference, is more along the lines of 'toss the dummies into the sea and/or force the hotties to bear my genius offspring'.

 

 

*edit: I've found that a pretty easy way to tell whether people fall into this camp is whether they use the term 'dysgenic' or not. It's not a term used much in evolutionary theory or population genetics.

 

Coming soon to Pornhub. Cuck porn featuring 122-pound ashkenzazi jews wearing glasses and possessing some weird genetic disease nailing wives and girlfriends of dumb jocks who look like they played college football for the SEC and who are made to sit and watch.

 

Money shot lines include "You're a carrier of Tay-SEX Disease!"

 

...

 

...

 

OK. Maybe that isn't the best money shot line.

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38 minutes ago, Donward said:

 

Coming soon to Pornhub. Cuck porn featuring 122-pound ashkenzazi jews wearing glasses and possessing some weird genetic disease nailing wives and girlfriends of dumb jocks who look like they played college football for the SEC and who are made to sit and watch.

 

Money shot lines include "You're a carrier of Tay-SEX Disease!"

 

...

 

...

 

OK. Maybe that isn't the best money shot line.

Heh, not much money in limiting your audience though.

 

The type I'm familiar with are basically just angry white kids who did well in high school, blame affirmative action for not being able to get into the university of their choice, work in the tech sector and are deeply confused about why they're still single at 25.

 

Which is, coincidentally, a much larger audience for jock-hating cuck porn.

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So, here's a depressing thought regarding the above-mentioned hypothesis: If you accept it, you also have to conclude that it provided no fitness value whatsoever.

 

I don't just mean in a 'these guys all had fewer kids than the mean' way, or a 'there are no families consistently producing nobel prize-winners' way.

 

I mean; you have what might be an actual population of genetically smart people, and this did nothing for their survival. It didn't help them to attain positions of political power strong enough to ensure their supremecy, and it didn't allow them to forsee and avert the catastrophe which consumed them. Being smart just meant that those few who survived the unholy fire which consumed 8 million people in their ethnic group made better physicists and mathematicians than one would expect.

 

It sort of bums me out, to be honest.

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I see it as contributing to their demise at the hands of the weirdo with the mustache. Spend a thousand years pushing a group of people into mercantile commerce, banking and medicine such that you massively increase the fitness of greater intelligence, and you'll end up with some very wealthy people. A shunned underclass who is also able to generate enough wealth to live comfortably, in fields that the typical worker doesn't understand very well, is a very easy target for a mob when times are hard - I'm not trying to suggest that the jews deserved their persecution, of course, merely that the conditions they were put under make that kind of sentiment easier to drum up. Intelligence adds the most fitness when other people aren't dicks, it's like trying to beat a shit-throwing monkey at chess - you might be the chess grandmaster, but achieving victory in that situation doesn't look anything like a normal game of chess.

 

This means that if we can get the international community to stop anyone changing the rules of the game like that, then we should be able to sustain the conditions that make intelligence useful

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9 hours ago, Toxn said:

So, here's a depressing thought regarding the above-mentioned hypothesis: If you accept it, you also have to conclude that it provided no fitness value whatsoever.

 

I don't just mean in a 'these guys all had fewer kids than the mean' way, or a 'there are no families consistently producing nobel prize-winners' way.

 

I mean; you have what might be an actual population of genetically smart people, and this did nothing for their survival. It didn't help them to attain positions of political power strong enough to ensure their supremecy, and it didn't allow them to forsee and avert the catastrophe which consumed them. Being smart just meant that those few who survived the unholy fire which consumed 8 million people in their ethnic group made better physicists and mathematicians than one would expect.

 

It sort of bums me out, to be honest.

 

I think you're also taking one factor and considering it in isolation, and concluding therefore that it did "nothing to help them".

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7 hours ago, Xlucine said:

Intelligence adds the most fitness when other people aren't dicks, it's like trying to beat a shit-throwing monkey at chess - you might be the chess grandmaster, but achieving victory in that situation doesn't look anything like a normal game of chess.

 

This means that if we can get the international community to stop anyone changing the rules of the game like that, then we should be able to sustain the conditions that make intelligence useful

I'd qualifty this by saying that 'certain types of intelligence' add the most fitness when other people aren't dicks.

 

A master social manipulator (which I assume requires a high degree of some type of intelligence) may thrive in these sorts of situations.

 

2 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

I think you're also taking one factor and considering it in isolation, and concluding therefore that it did "nothing to help them".

A couple of points:

 

1.

The hypothesis isn't mine, and I'm not really on the whole 'generalised intelligence highly correlated to IQ' bandwagon. So I'm probably dropping a certain amount of nuance in favour of the idea that being smart at maths/chess/whatever should also make you smart enough to guess other people's motives and decipher their intention. In this sense; being smarter certainly didn't help too many of the folk involved to avoid what looks in retrospect like a building trend. Which is unfair, of course, because the idea that having a high IQ gives you mental superpowers is unfair.

 

But that's also not too far off from what people seem to believe when it comes to IQ. For instance; some of the commenters on the website I linked have seiously argued that beng good at chess should also make one able to learn mandarin chinese in adulthood with no issues. Because chess rank is correlated with IQ (to something like 0.25) and IQ is generalised intelligence. So there are plenty of other-wise smart folk who look at a high IQ as a sort of mental superpower - endowing the bearer with the ability to become a polymath in any field.

 

2.

You are right that being high-IQ was fitness-increasing in the ordinary course of events under the hypothesis. It's actually a big chunk of the hypothesis overall (along with the idea that being exceptional at maths and physics is a sign of generalised intelligence and that this intelligence is linked to large-effect genes which are advantageous in heteroxygotes but deletarious in homozygotes). So of course, if you buy into the hypothesis, it helped to be high-IQ.

 

It just didn't help in the most obvious 'genetic survival of your ethnic group' sort of way. I've seen it said that close to 70% of the jewish population in Europe was wiped out in the holocaust. If you're taking that as a sign of the usefulness of generalised intelligence when the chips are down, then you'd have to conclude that it doesn't help much. 

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8 minutes ago, Toxn said:

A couple of points:

 

1.

The hypothesis isn't mine, and I'm not really on the whole 'generalised intelligence highly correlated to IQ' bandwagon. So I'm probably dropping a certain amount of nuance in favour of the idea that being smart at maths/chess/whatever should also make you smart enough to guess other people's motives and decipher their intention. In this sense; being smarter certainly didn't help too many of the folk involved to avoid what looks in retrospect like a building trend. Which is unfair, of course, because the idea that having a high IQ gives you mental superpowers is unfair.

 

But that's also not too far off from what people seem to believe when it comes to IQ. For instance; some of the commenters on the website I linked have seiously argued that beng good at chess should also make one able to learn mandarin chinese in adulthood with no issues. Because chess rank is correlated with IQ (to something like 0.25) and IQ is generalised intelligence. So there are plenty of other-wise smart folk who look at a high IQ as a sort of mental superpower - endowing the bearer with the ability to become a polymath in any field.

 

2.

You are right that being high-IQ was fitness-increasing in the ordinary course of events under the hypothesis. It's actually a big chunk of the hypothesis overall (along with the idea that being exceptional at maths and physics is a sign of generalised intelligence and that this intelligence is linked to large-effect genes which are advantageous in heteroxygotes but deletarious in homozygotes). So of course, if you buy into the hypothesis, it helped to be high-IQ.

 

It just didn't help in the most obvious 'genetic survival of your ethnic group' sort of way. I've seen it said that close to 70% of the jewish population in Europe was wiped out in the holocaust. If you're taking that as a sign of the usefulness of generalised intelligence when the chips are down, then you'd have to conclude that it doesn't help much. 

 

No, I don't. Example: What's 1,000,000,000 minus 33 minus 1,456 minus 2,523,218 minus 997,475,293? Zero, right? Yet, what's the largest quantity in that sequence?

My point is that you are falling for the hammer and nail fallacy. You are assuming that since the problem only accounts for IQ, that IQ is the only factor, or the dominant factor. Yet in doing so, you forget the entire culture of the Jewish people, their character, and the perspectives of the individuals at the time. You are also assuming that intelligence is a proxy for good decision making, but it certainly is not.

So there are some other very significant factors in play, but does that mean intelligence is not a major factor? Of course not. Forrest Gump does not exist. There are no power players with Down's Syndrome.

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So, since I'm potentially mangling someone else's views on the subject; here are mine:

 

- I'm pretty down with the emerging consensus that the genetic factors which increase human intelligence are of the highly polygenic, small-effect sort. My take is that dumb cavemen didn't have kids, and that one should accordingly expect that the genetics of intelligence are pretty well fixed in the population.

 

This does not necessarily exclude the idea of a sort of sickle-cell trait (or many) for certain types of intelligence.

 

- I'm not a big believer in a wholly generalised intelligence, although I'll admit that there are certainly folks who are just overall smarter than the average. My take is that there are different domains of intelligence which are fairly loosely linked, and my guess is that most existing measures of intelligence only test one domain very well (IQ tests don't do much of anything to predict generalised creativity, sporting ability or artistic talent, for instance).

 

The analogy here is like giving people a fixed budget and telling them to go build PCs. Some might splurge for more RAM, some might focus on a better GPU, some might decide that a big HDD is the way forwards. Now you have another party which comes along to estimate the price of each PC. Except that the tests they use are really RAM and CPU intensive and don't affect much else. The result would be that the estimated price could vary wildly even where the actual price is the same. 

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7 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

No, I don't. Example: What's 1,000,000,000 minus 33 minus 1,456 minus 2,523,218 minus 997,475,293? Zero, right? Yet, what's the largest quantity in that sequence?

My point is that you are falling for the hammer and nail fallacy. You are assuming that since the problem only accounts for IQ, that IQ is the only factor, or the dominant factor. Yet in doing so, you forget the entire culture of the Jewish people, their character, and the perspectives of the individuals at the time. You are also assuming that intelligence is a proxy for good decision making, but it certainly is not.

So there are some other very significant factors in play, but does that mean intelligence is not a major factor? Of course not. Forrest Gump does not exist. There are no power players with Down's Syndrome.

I'm assuming that the strong version of the hypothesis assumes that intelligence is a proxy for good decision making. Hence the disclaimer about mangling someone else's idea. And also the supporting evidence that a lot of people really do believe in genetic IQ as this overwhelmingly dominant factor.

 

I've already laid out my current ideas on intelligence, which might be closer to the nuanced view of the hypothesis (which I admitted I'm probably not illustrating).

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6 minutes ago, Toxn said:

I'm assuming that the strong version of the hypothesis assumes that intelligence is a proxy for good decision making. Hence the disclaimer about mangling someone else's idea. And also the supporting evidence that a lot of people really do believe in genetic IQ as this overwhelmingly dominant factor.

 

I've already laid out my current ideas on intelligence, which might be closer to the nuanced view of the hypothesis (which I admitted I'm probably not illustrating).

 

It is loosely correlated to good decision making. A 150-IQ man will almost always make better decisions than an 80-IQ man. However, a 110-IQ man may make worse decisions than a 95-IQ man, depending on his culture, attitude, personality, and other factors.

 

IQ is clearly a large factor, but the problem is that there are a great many other large factors. One of the reasons large brains developed is to manage the multiple competing streams of data that are needed to function in a human society. Good decision-making is enabled by a high IQ, it is not determined by it. Using high IQ as a proxy for it is therefore like assuming that a Ferrari will always be traveling at a higher speed than a Honda Civic.

 

The other thing to remember is that while humans did develop high intelligence and brain power as a result of their social networks, they also developed sophisticated emotional patterns to go along with them. These emotional patterns can be viewed as a sort of autopilot for human behavior. By analogy, there is no point in trying to determine a plane's flight path by studying the IQ of its pilot - if the plane is on autopilot!

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19 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

It is loosely correlated to good decision making. A 150-IQ man will almost always make better decisions than an 80-IQ man. However, a 110-IQ man may make worse decisions than a 95-IQ man, depending on his culture, attitude, personality, and other factors.

 

IQ is clearly a large factor, but the problem is that there are a great many other large factors. One of the reasons large brains developed is to manage the multiple competing streams of data that are needed to function in a human society. Good decision-making is enabled by a high IQ, it is not determined by it. Using high IQ as a proxy for it is therefore like assuming that a Ferrari will always be traveling at a higher speed than a Honda Civic.

 

The other thing to remember is that while humans did develop high intelligence and brain power as a result of their social networks, they also developed sophisticated emotional patterns to go along with them. These emotional patterns can be viewed as a sort of autopilot for human behavior. By analogy, there is no point in trying to determine a plane's flight path by studying the IQ of its pilot - if the plane is on autopilot!

I like the idea of generalised emotional patterns, as it would neatly explain why my two-year-old can be so emotionally manipulative without being able to so much as put on a shirt by himself.

 

I do occasionally wonder how much of our behaviour is hard-wired, and how much we are even able to admit about this being so. The male chest shove (which you will see at a high school or a bar), for instance, would look a lot like a hard-wired dominance ritual to an alien. 

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1 hour ago, Sturgeon said:

Shit, doesn't one ol' pharoah have red hair?

No idea, but we've known for a long time now that they weren't very sub-Saharan African or European (see, for instance, the fayum portraits). 

 

It's just that that's the only two ways which the broader culture seems to have of engaging with the topic. And it sucks.

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https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/06/11/the-search-for-eden-opens-up-new-vistas/

 

An interesting tidbit from that piece:

Quote

…it may be that there was no rapid antique population expansion in Africa which was analogous to [the] out of Africa migration. IOW, non-Africans are just a branch of Northeast Africans, and the Bushmen and other groups were already differentiated by that point

 

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  • 7 months later...

Since I've been out for a while, more stuff from Razib:

 

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/02/03/why-the-chinese-dont-buy-deodorant/ - single-gene variants can be fun/make your company go under.

 

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/02/03/perhaps-the-genghis-khan-modal-haplotype-is-not-genghis-khans/ - Ghengis might not actually be responsible for 2% of the world's population

 

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/01/28/none-dare-call-it-multiregionalism/ - out of Africa is looking a lot like 'sorta out of Africa, but then back in. And then back out. And then repeated. And then covered up by later migration/invasion'

 

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/01/30/the-finns-are-probably-an-iron-age-intrusion-into-the-east-baltic/ - for all you greater Finns out there

 

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/01/24/it-isnt-what-you-say-its-who-you-are/ - not genetics related, but fun to see both sides being damned.

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This is a very good video that not only explains the latest understanding of Neanderthal contributions to the modern human genome and the discovery of Denisovans and their contribution to the modern human genome, but it also gives a good overview of the advances in gene-reading technology that have occurred over the last 20 years that have allowed these discoveries.  Ancient DNA is all sorts of screwed up and contaminated, so teasing useful information out of it has only become possible recently thanks to some heavy duty refinements in technology:
 

 

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More on genetic research into intelligence:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6

 

This one is behind a paywall, so I can't say much about the methodology used (specifically; how diverse the sample population was and what metrics were used to determine intelligence). But a ~270 000 individual sample size is certainly a good start. Expect screening kits for the ~1000 genes identified in the study during your lifetime.

 

In very similar news, a GWAS looking at educational attainment was done for a fairly diverse population (~20 000 individuals, all of european descent), and found some useful information:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/03/1801238115

 

The first thing is that there do seem to be genes for success (the paper does not specify which genes, however), and they do measurably affect your overall success in life. The second is that your mom has a massive effect on your success - her polygenic score does more to determine your fate than yours does (probably due to environmental factors rather than epigenetic ones). So choose your mates wisely.

 

All in all, its looking like we're rapidly entering an era where questions of nature/nurture shift again to more nature-based explanations. Which is where the local idiots (many of whom will, in fact, be well-educated and powerful) will start believing that genes are destiny again. Expect your local trust fund baby to bore you with talk about his superior genetics a decade from now.

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