GrumpyCatFace wrote:Speaker to Animals wrote:GrumpyCatFace wrote:
So then, in your opinion, a few hundred years of genetic evolution changed us from Germanic hordes and Vikings, to the Great Civilized People that we are now? What stimulates that change in our coding?
Don’t go Cathy Newman. That’s honestly what your position sounds like.
Yes.
Culture and civilization are environmental variables in evolution too. They determine sexual selection just as much as any other environmental factor.
So then, somewhere around the 15th century, women decided to select for more gentle and less aggressive males. But they aren’t doing that now.
Why?
I think it was more like the 11th century that it began.
The best description of the event I have read was by Nicholas Wade in which he posited (really expounded on the theory postulated by others) that the civilization of the northern European race happened as a result of the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of societies due to the Malthusian trap, and the internecine violence that, during such periods of decline, resulted in many of the aristocracy losing status and inter-marrying with the merchant classes in the cities.
Think of it like this: for going on a thousand years, our society was feudal. Feudal dynasties would thrive or perish based upon their ability to plan for the future (delayed gratification for future reward) and their predisposition to sacrifice happiness in their own life for the sake of their children. Sound familiar? Those are also what we call middle class values, which arose from the middling class of the late medieval period.
As times prospered, the population grew. But we would always hit that Malthusian limit. When that happens, famines occur, populations decline, and the early medieval civilization we had budding would also decline, resulting in increased conflict between aristocracies over dwindling resources and power. Eventually many of them would lose their patents and end up demoted to merchants and whatnot in the cities. They would marry the daughters of wealthy merchants, businessmen, etc., and start new family lines in the merchant classes (and sometimes even farmers). The genetics that were selected through constant aristocratic violence in all those previous generations were carried on, but rather than in the context of aristocracies, it went to business, farming, etc. The middling class emerged. They put more resources towards the advancement of their children than they would towards their own personal happiness. They were future planners as opposed to present-moment types (i.e. our working classes, or what we in America call democrats). Because they were able to plan ahead, they were able to mitigate the effects of the Malthusian trap. This means as the families without those genetic adaptations perished and dwindled, the fledgling middlings were able to live off their savings and larders and continue having more children. This propagated the genes over many centuries across most of Northern Europe.
That doesn't explain how we lost the warrior gene, or how our IQ increased over time, but I suspect that usually happens as society becomes more complex, and those with stronger intellects are rewarded with more resources. The average IQ of a sub-Saharan African is in the mid-60s. Haiti has the same IQ as their African counterparts, and no complex society to elevate over many generations. American blacks, however, have a very high IQ compared to other Africans. Their average IQ is somewhere in the upper 80s, but even then there are lots of African Americans that are geniuses, and almost no geniuses in Africa. China for many thousands of years most rewarded those with political power and resources who have the highest IQ and conformity. Their average IQ is significantly higher than our own. Environmental pressures in the form of state policy, laws, customs, etc., have very large effects on the nature of a race over the course of many generations if those pressures remain relatively stable.
Further, it's a kind of feedback loop where you have social pressures becoming environmental pressures on sexual selection, which in turn results in genetic predispositions towards various social behaviors that reinforce social change in the general trajectory of that initial social pressure. This is why China is not likely on course to become "liberty nation". They have thousands of years of conformity bred into them that's not going to just disappear. Liberty is not just an idea. It's a genetic predisposition as well.
