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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here.

Disproof by example: I'm most favourably disposed to genetic explanations of group differences in a few specific cases.

  1. Sub-Saharan Africans, because of longer timescales of the main, H. s. s. component (100,000+ years of relative isolation in some cases), and because of very low hybridisation with Neanderthals (whereas everyone else has ~3%).

  2. Austronesians, because they're essentially the only group with substantial Denisovan ancestry.

  3. Shitty immune systems from those that didn't settle down until recently, because of the massive and sustained selection for plague resistance since we started building cities. I'm normally sceptical of recent-significant-change explanations, but this one has actually met the high burden of proof given the Columbian Exchange and the similar effects on Australian Aborigines, and it's a relatively-simple tweak compared to stuff "upstairs".

What's not there? I'm highly sceptical of any attempt to explain differences within Eurasia by HBD; the timescales of divergence are quite short, with in most cases significant gene-flow for the entire period, and we've all been civilised for long enough. That includes people going on about Near Easterners (except to the - relatively minor AIUI - degree that there's sub-Saharan African introgression) and, yes, Jews.

So I'm not really with @DradisPing about Iraqis being genetically unsuited to democracy, though I will note that he did also mention "deep culture" and I don't see anything wrong with that claim.