This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Not sure what the point of this post is
That "race determines culture" is just wrong, compare the culture of any race X000 years ago to that of any race today. Vikings to middle managers, aztec blood sacrifices to gardeners, japanese empire to efficient japanese manufacturing systems. Both the american upper-class, intellectuals and scientists and managers, contains a lot of indians, middle easterners, asians, jews, and whites - as do the lower classes - and the culture of the upper-class indians sure is closer to that of the upper-class whites or jews than the lower class indians.
I won't defend OP's thesis directly, but I will contest your argument against it. Genetics can change substantially over thousands of years (and even in less than a decade if the selection is intense enough), so insofar as race is determined by genes, the races themselves will also change over those timescales.
I'm genuinely not sure what OP's thesis is, exactly.
I don't think 200 years is enough for the recent cultural changes in japan, india, europe, or anywhere else that 'developed'. There probably were evolved genetic changes in 'behavior' in some senses, but I genuinely don't know what those might be, and they're probably rather contingent and complicated. Similarly - racial differences in 'attitudes', organization, or something are ... plausible, but I'm really not sure what they might be, and strongly suspect they mix in complex ways with the existing culture than anything like 'being more aggressive', 'being less emotional', etc. (And also significant variation within races, etc)
(like with intelligence, this isn't a reason to reject sorting, hierarchy, genetics being critical for any sort of virtue, etc - just that it doesn't follow racial lines very closely)
Why not? That's like ten generations. Is it so hard to believe that the advance of technology alone wouldn't impose selective pressures sufficient to manifest over just three or four generations?
Ubiquitous access to contraceptives, totally new types of career paths and educational trajectories, vastly different criminal justice responses to violent behavior, vastly different observed fertility rates with respect to all sorts of socially relevant variables (income, religiosity, class, education level)... all of these impose dramatic changes on family formation, which we see in everyday life in America today and which we talk about all the time on this forum. I'd expect those differences to have really big effects on society in the space of three generations -- let alone ten.
It could've selected for something. But something that determined culture? I.e. played a large role in it, such that people without it are culturally incompatible? Over four generations?
Generally - india, japan, northern europe, central europe are different places, with different native cultures - what selective pressures would be present in all of them over the last ten generations (and some less than ten) that would that rapidly raise the genes for a tolerant and liberal culture from a brutish and reactionary one, or some other significant cause? At the same time? Even if there was one driving allele for every cultural change at the same time, present in 1 in 100 people ten generations ago and very common (say, 50%) today, it'd need to 1.5x every generation. And there'd be many genes necessarily involved, and selecting for one 'competes' with selecting for any other, as does it with any other existing selection (for intelligence, physical compatibility with novel environment, diseases, etc). Even if - purely hypothetically - that did happen for anglos - how are there serbians, russians, middle easterners, indians, chinese, koreans - all firmly culturally assimilated into the american elite? How was the queer iranian category theorist's culture determined by their race?
"Ubiquitous access to contraceptives" has existed for three generations, and tends selects against modern tendencies, right? "Totally new career paths and educational trajectories" many of these career paths & educational trajectories existed for a small subset of the population for the past ten generations. ,Those that weren't were fairly universal - industry, universal schooling, etc - but how exactly do these present such a strong selective pressure for some complex cultural thing, when they're mostly designed allow anyone to work or get an education?
Industrialization, of course. In an agrarian society, close cooperation with strangers isn't as important. In an industrial society, it is. Those who are predisposed against spending time professionally in close quarters with strangers are fine in an agrarian society but will be unable to earn a living in an industrial society. Their genes will be largely eliminated from each generation after the advent of industrialization. Three generations should be more than sufficient to change the character of a society.
We aren't talking about evolving a new organ or something. We're talking about weeding out or magnifying certain existing traits that are known to have significant heritable components. As a thought experiment, if only one in three blond people reproduced in each generation, I hope it's obvious that we'd dramatically reduce the proportion of blond people within three generations. It wouldn't take long at all.
Is "tendency to spend time professionally in close quarters with strangers" even a distinct "trait" that is solely or mostly genetic, like fur color? I'm fairly sure that if you took a bantu or hunter gatherer fetus and implanted them into a mother in Kowloon Walled City, when they grew up they'd be entirely used to, and find natural, being around so many other people. They might have other problems, but people are intelligent and work in the culture and environment they're born into.
Sure, and I agree a change like some behavior-related alleles becoming 30% more common can't be excluded. But there are a ton of possible changes those could cause, and the way they interact with 'culture' is probably complicated and contingent, such that claiming this "determines" culture in any sense is probably wrong.
We have genetic material for populations in the last 200 years though, and I don't think any alleles were that strongly selected. And most of ones that were mostly selected were - iirc, i'd have to look again - diet or disease related, as opposed to brain, and none nearly so much as 'blondes have children at 1/3 the rate of brown haired'.
I don't know what a "distinct trait" means. It's certainly going to be polygenic. And of course it's going to be substantially heritable. The big five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Of those, the latter three are heavily implicated in one's ability to be good at professional collaboration. Extraversion is going to be heavily implicated in one's ability to succeed generally in a society of specialized labor, rather than one of subsistence farming. And all are known to be quite heritable. And those are probably just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't come close to cataloguing every variation in human personality or behavior, and everything tends to be at least somewhat heritable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link