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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

I would assume that genetics are playing a much smaller role in human physiology in general. So if the differences in cognition were nonexistent or weren't due to pure genes/biology, then we would have to assume most other human traits were not due to them either.

So I would expect to see:

The winners of most events centered around running would be a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, rather than, say, Marathon winners being almost exclusively from Kenya

I'd expect that height would be evenly distributed amongst ethnicities, rather than being dominated by the Dutch. Along with this, I'd expect much greater Asian representation in the NBA and NFL. Pygmy peoples, likewise, would be an even greater anomaly than they are now.

We'd also want to figure out what was in the water in Hungary that it produced so many ridiculous geniuses born around the turn of the 19th century, if there isn't a large genetic component. Alternatively, we'd expect to see groundbreaking physicists and mathematicians produced at similar rates by all countries, and not so heavily representing Asheknazis.

Basically, we'd expect that differences in culture, diet, and SES might explain 100% of any observed differences in any particular trait, and that interventions in culture, diet, and SES would lead to rapid changes (not necessarily improvements) in those traits without seeing major changes in their genetic code.

Rather than taking hundreds of generations to produce helpful adaptations.

If there is no Human Biodiverisity, then there must only be Human Sociodiversity or Human Cultural Diversity, and in that sort of world it should be much easier to manipulate human traits/outcomes at the national population level.

Basically, we'd expect that differences in culture, diet, and SES might explain 100% of any observed differences in any particular trait

I don't think we would expect that. If there are other factors, including randomness, which contribute at all, the sum of the effect of the known sources of variance will be less than the observed variance.

From whence comes the randomness, though?

In genetics, we know how mutations can arise and accumulate over time. Radiation, toxins, and transcription errors during cellular replication are often random themselves, and thus the genes that survive won't be completely random, but at least we can see where the randomness arises from.

If genetics aren't determining outcomes, then we must be talking about inputs of randomness from the environment, instead, and that is comparatively simple to control and reduce.

Randomness in biological development? Even as things are, with HBD, there's a lot of effects that look like randomness in non-additive genetic variation.

Yes, environmental stuff would be the rest. Controlling for environmental stuff is actually very very hard - that's why for science where we actually try to be correct instead of trying to appear to try to be correct (e.g. medicine), the gold standard is randomized controlled trials rather than observational studies.

That's not to say it's always impossible to get useful information from observational data. For example, there's clever stuff like this. Still, if you take the social science approach of "lol just control for a couple things, if it's good enough to get published it's definitely correct" your results will not be very robust.

But what sources of randomness in local environment would trigger differences in long-term outcomes in the absence of genetic influence?

Getting in a car crash, winning the lottery, making friends with the right people... all the stuff we call "luck".

That sounds like it explains individual outcomes, and can be mitigated through social policy.

Group outcomes are made of individual outcomes. Particularly in cases like "making friends with the right people", those individual outcomes may be correlated.

Not that "early luck compounded into long-term differences" can't be mitigated through social policy, but doing so transparently and fairly and in a principled manner is hard for the same reason that "controlling for" stuff in studies is hard.

Not who you're arguing with but the first example that comes to mind is the influence of the uterine environment. There's a plausible argument that the uterine environment has an impact on a lot of different areas in life (birth order effects, FAS, etc) and there's a whole galaxy of potential interactions there.

There we go.

Would this cause us to see significant differences between population groups?

It would, but those differences would not be the ones we see in the world we live in and they would respond differently to testing.

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