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The question of Northern vs Southern Italy is back with this new graphic. I'm going to dox myself slightly and say I have some perspective on this because both of my parents are Sicilian from Sicily, although I grew up in America. Though I will add it just to interject my general bemusement and provide some Med charm. My background isn't needed to reach this conclusion (though I'm surprised to see so few people arguing it... so maybe!)
Anyway, I presume HBD enjoyers love this North vs South divide because it comes across like that satellite photo of North vs South Korea where the dependent variable is "Communism", except in the case of Italy it's "African ancestry". That's fun to think about, and it certainly has a lot of pop culture roots (that hard scene in True Romance where the Sicilian mob boss is infuriated by being accused of being descended from the Moors), but this link is weak and it mostly ignores the elephant in the room: colonialism.
Yeah yeah we're all sick of hearing about colonialism, but hear me out. I don't mean the kind of colonialism where the natives resist being dragged kicking and screaming into an empire with reading, roads, global trade and capital. I mean the kind of colonialism where your island is considered a useful military outpost and changes hands constantly in wars of dominance.
Quick incomplete list of who ran Sicily over the last thousand years: Byzantines, then Arabs (reasonably good rulers, all things considered), then the Normans rolled in around 1060, then the Hohenstaufens, then the French Angevins, who got kicked out in 1282 in the Sicilian Vespers. A real popular uprising, my people murdering 3000+ Frenchmen over Easter weekend. Much proud. But short-lived! Then the Sicilians, having won, immediately had to invite the Aragonese in to rule them, because a chunk of land in the middle of the Mediterranean does not get to just be independent. The (definitely not gay) hypermasculine types who love the Vesper story seem to not really read to the next chapter where you have to bend the knee to a different imperial lord. Curious!
Anyway then there's the Spanish Habsburgs, who figured out how to maximally extract Naples and Sicily to fund their wars in Flanders. Then the Bourbons. Then briefly Napoleon. Then the Bourbons again. Then finally Garibaldi shows up in 1860 and the place gets annexed into the new Italian state. Run from afar, by people who didn't speak the language and considered the south basically Africa. BTW you knew these regions spoke different languages, right?
Sure, history is sad everywhere. But my point is you can't build anything durable on top of that. Every time a new overlord shows up, the previous administrative class either gets purged or has to switch sides. Whatever institutional knowledge existed gets fragmented. The legal system is whatever the new guy says it is. Tax collection is whatever can be extracted before the next regime change. Land tenure is locked in whatever extractive configuration was useful to the latest set of foreigners, which in Sicily's case meant gigantic estates owned by absentee landlords who lived in Naples or Madrid and never set foot on the property. Nobody is investing in the long term because there is no long term. The mafia isn't a quirk of North African ancestry but rather a survival instinct when you have a long, long standing tradition and belief that the state is illegitimate.
Again, whatever, story of the world. But now we're trying to compare this outpost (these outposts, not just Sicily here) to the seat of the fucking Renaissance up north! Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan. City-states running their own banks, their own foreign policies, colonial empires of their own. Bit players in bootstrapping the enlightenment! Nobody could conquer the whole north cheaply because the Po Valley was fragmented and the cities played the Holy Roman Empire and France against each other for centuries.
The South had very little of this. It's not so much Guns, Germs and Steel as it is one is a series of defensible mini-Switzerlands and the other are islands easily starved.
The "one peoples, different outcomes, let's Notice" framing seems so off to me because it's clearly more more like smooshing two different countries together and asking why they're still so different. Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions doesn't really change in decades.
You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that nobody could grab easily. One of these explanations predicts the data and the other is constructing vibes based on a satellite photo.
I find it really frustrating how often HBD gets dismissed, and then an alternative explanation is given that is perfectly compatible with HBD. Usually connected to the assumption that HBD is about either differences between people being either 100% genetics and/or that it's just about black vs white.
No, HBD is simply about the finding that genes/biology in humans matter for everything, even for those attributes where the implications are a bit unpleasant. Yes, some people are just more violent. Some people are just less conscientious. And yes, some people are just less intelligent. It's not even their fault so I have a lot of sympathy with them, in a way. But it's not claiming that environment has no influence at all; That's just silly.
Once you accept this, group differences follow directly. Let's take brain drain. If we accept that intelligence is, say 60% genetic, and that a place suffers from a large percentage of intelligent people leaving, what does this imply about the group that has left vs the group that stayed behind? It's nearly mathematically impossible for both groups to have the same genetic mean afterwards! It would require some convoluted simultaneous anti-selection. And this applies in one way or another to every large migration wave. There is always some reason why people leave, and that reason will have implications for group differences between the stayers vs the leavers. Also, this applies of course to the average, not to literally every single person in each group.
Of course, this is hardly the only dynamic; The recent Reich paper shows clear evidence for ongoing selection even just inside west eurasia and in particular shows that the idea of cultural evolution supplanting biological evolution is simply wrong; They work in tandem with each other. Which makes perfect sense: If a society requires substantial long-term planning for winter months, then you will have both cultural adaption to do so and biological selective pressure towards more conscientiousness, intelligence, etc. Likewise, living in literal centuries of civilization with a highly developed tax code such as China will plainly have different selective pressures than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Also, an aside: It's perfectly sensible to say that HBD is more important for differences inside developed states than for the differences between the developed vs the undeveloped world, since the latter has larger environmental differences. The black-white gap inside the US is probably substantially more genetic than the Europe-Africa gap. And this fits very well with the data, since the latter is significantly larger, even accounting for admixture.
Coming back to this post, assuming HBD is true, it makes sense that people with
will also have substantially biologically adapted to that environment. Or the other way around, if we assume the differences currently holding them back were pre-existing, than we would of course expect them to fare badly in international warfare and regularly get conquered and colonized. I agree with @SecureSignals that at least part of the difference here is likely pre-existing.
Now you may ask, if HBD is so compatible with everything, when does it really fail? That's simple: I lean towards cultural/environmental explanations where the split is historically recent, and/or where there is little evidence for plausible, sufficiently large genetic differences. NK vs SK is the gold-standard here. Korea has historically always been relatively developed and well-managed. Koreans are of course not perfectly homogenous, every group has subgroups, but it's relatively isolated and as homogenous as it gets. The split is an inheritance of WW2, which is quite recent. And it's at this point well-known that neither communism nor most other autocratic governments are very conducive to economic development, so the cultural explanation makes very plain sense.
I can't remember if we had a top-level thread on the Reich paper, but it's an important one validating the notion that Culture War is directly tied to biological evolution of society. The intersection of Culture War and HBD has been why I attribute so much importance to it and it seems like that association is becoming mainstream. But given the persistent taboo on serious HBD analysis, that also means we will continue to have academics who seriously study Culture War, some academics like Reich that seriously study HBD (while steering clear of societal implications), but an enormous gap in the study of the interaction between the two: how cultural memes, religion, and symbols influence the biological evolution of the nation.
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