"... what is going on here may be simpler than we are ready to believe. ... The degree to which seemingly complex behaviors are rigidly and genetically programmed is quite frightening at times -- frightening for what it suggests about motivation and free will, at least."I don't agree with Budiansky's interpretation and reaction on this, though.
"...we are descended from an unbroken line of envious ancestors, and it would be unwise to assume that we are any different. Those few of us who are are less likely to be the ancestors of posterity. As Leo Durocher said: "Nice guys finish last." Our ancestors did not finish last."Pop evolutionary formulations often emphasize the basest aspects of competititon, "Nature red in tooth and claw"
"...we are concerned about our reputations and want to be seen as virtuous. But where did these notions of virtue and reputation come from?
Humans, Ridley argues, are not really all that strange. We were crafted by natural selection. We evolved in small groups where reciprocal trading was important, and trust between trading parties a crucial concern. Selection would clearly favour those capable of distinguishing every member, remembering people's reputations and earning the trust of others. Hence we have an amazing ability to distinguish faces, an uncanny aptitude to detect deceit and an almost irrational inclination to be cooperative."
"Too many people make decisions about everyday questions without considering the underlying moral and ethical framework of the problems. They are simply swept along by the need to get through the day, said Dr. Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. "They are so busy, and they have so many things to do that the tyranny of the immediate keeps them from asking the question 'What is important?' "And it's always been this way; there's never been enough time to consciously work out all the moral decisions of life. Which, I'd argue, is why our genetic heritage makes most of our decisions for us.
"Clarke: One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all. It's this: "Don't do unto anybody else what you wouldn't like to be done to you." It seems to me that that's all there is to it.
The other issue is, why can't humans live up to this principle? Why is it that people can't act as human beings should?"
"Were it not for ideological prejudice, any rational person looking at the evidence would agree that human aptitudes, personality traits, many interests and personal idiosyncrasies, even some social attitudes, owe from 30 to 70 percent of their variation across people to the genetic differences between people. The ideological barrier seems to involve the conviction that accepting these facts means accepting biological determinism, Social Darwinism, racism, and other evils."
Re "the potentially epochal (sic) scientific paper by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Jason Hardy entitled The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence [PDF file].So in the old days, when people used the expression " yiddishe kopf", they were on to something.
... Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, (notes) that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, 'it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright.'
The high average intelligence of the Ashkenazi Jews (essentially, Jews from Northern Europe whose ancestors spoke Yiddish, ancestors of the great majority of Jewish Americans) has had an enormous impact on the modern world.
(Jews from the Muslim world score somewhat lower than Ashkenazis, which leads to a sizable social gap within Israel.)
The Economist reported:'Ashkenazim generally do well in IQ tests, scoring 12-15 points above the mean value of 100...”
Which is not an enormous gap. (Personally, my immediate response on reading this was, "Wow, that's a pretty significant gap.") Assuming a 12 point difference between Ashkenazis and white gentiles, it suggests that the median Ashkenazi scores somewhere around the 80th percentile among all whites. Many gentiles have higher IQs than many Jews.
But this difference in median intelligence does lead to large differences at the far right edge of the bell curve.
For example, some back-of-an-envelope math suggests that Ashkenazi Jews are roughly an order of magnitude more likely than white gentiles to have IQs above 145. Roughly one in 70 Ashkenazi Jews score above 145 compared to one in 700 white gentiles. There are about 30 times as many white gentile adults as Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S. So that implies one-fourth of white Americans with IQs above 145 are Ashkenazi Jews.
Ashkenazi levels of real world accomplishment are impressive and thus support the IQ studies. Jewish Americans make up no more than three percent of the U.S. adult population. But in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out'During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.' [pp 26-27]
Interestingly, the Ashkenazi cognitive advantage seems to be mostly in verbal and numeric, rather than visual, skills. For example, in Hollywood, fewer top cinematographers are Jewish compared to screenwriters or agents.
Ashkenazi intelligence is one of those facts that are obvious, important, and interesting, yet, is largely unmentionable in polite society… at least until this week.
The Cochran-Harpending theory may turn out to justify the audacity of The Economist and the NYT in breaking this taboo. If validated, it would prove a landmark in the fields of medicine, population genetics, IQ research, and even history. ...
In their brilliant cross-disciplinary essay, which will appear soon in the Journal of Biosocial Science, the three University of Utah researchers show that from about 800 to 1700 A.D., Yiddish-speaking Jews were almost completely confined to cognitively-demanding occupations such as finance, fields in which intelligence pays off more than in peasant farming. ...
Contrary to the layman's assumption that Darwinian selection can only putter along at geological speeds, the authors mathematically demonstrate that the 35 generations during these nine centuries offered enough time for mutations conferring greater business acumen to spread widely among the Ashkenazi."
"The Utah researchers Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending (henceforth CH&H) proposed that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E.
... attention to the talents needed in the middleman niche (whether they are biological or cultural) could benefit other middleman minorities, such as Armenians, Lebanese, Ibos, and overseas Chinese and Indians, who have also been targets of vicious persecution because of their economic success. "
"Terrible things do happen... The world is filled with evil, with grotesque horror and universal suffering. Fiendish humans, often possessing great power, torment and slay others daily. The history of the twentieth century offers much proof of rampant wickedness in the world. Believers in the monotheistic God and/or in karma often tell us that this does not matter all that much, because in the final analysis evil really promotes good. They seem to be saying that evil is not really evil at all, but good masquerading in an unpleasant disguise. Yet this kind of topsy-turvy argument is an affront to all those who have looked evil in the face. To present this argument to survivors of the Holocaust or the Gulag or the killing fields would be insulting as well as ridiculous. For these victims, evil is evil, and all else is but an evasion.
Moreover many terrible things happen that are in no way due to human volition. While the perversities of the human condition are responsible for some of the suffering in this world, much of it is not our fault. Frequently, however, we believe that it is. Yet, whether occasioned by the myth of Adam and Eve or by the propaganda of some trendy folk today who make out humans to be the sole villains in the environment, the cultivation of guilt in the human mind is no remedy for evil. On the contrary, guilt usually begets more sorrow in the long run. Let us be done with this self-flagellation and try to mitigate the evils over which we have some control while remembering that it is beyond our powers to eradicate misfortune altogether.
Like the world, humans are a mixture of good and evil. Just as it is impossible to exorcise evil from the fabric of creation, so we cannot entirely get rid of it in ourselves. If human schemes and techniques were able to eliminate evil from human nature, they would have succeeded in doing so long ago."
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"Primatologists at the Yerkes Primate Center of Emory University have found new evidence that capuchin monkeys (a small but large-brained South American primate) cooperate to obtain food and share the rewards of their efforts. The study, conducted by Frans de Waal, Ph.D., director of Yerkes' Living Links Center, and Michelle Berger, senior laboratory assistant, has implications for understanding the evolutionary basis of reciprocity, a fundamental feature of human society. Dr. de Waal's research appears in the April 6 issue of Nature. "
"A new study has found the strongest evidence yet that what sets humans apart from other primates may be found in the brain's frontal lobes, particularly in an area the size of a "billiard ball" called the right prefrontal cortex. ...
Understanding the mental processes of others -- mentalizing -- is the basis of our socialization and what makes us human. It gives rise to our capacity to feel empathy, sympathy, understand humor and when others are being ironic, sarcastic or even deceptive."
"... researchers in the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine tried to find out if genetic taste markers might prevent some women from enjoying bitter chocolate or bitter espresso coffee. Dr. Adam Drewnowski, director of the school’s Nutritional Sciences Program, says the study by graduate student Agnes Ly and himself showed that any aversion to bitter taste, genetic or not, was easily overcome by the addition of a little sugar or a lot of fat. ...
As for why people like chocolate, Drewnowski, who also holds an appointment at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said it is not necessary to look for chemical or nutritional explanations for enjoying its complex flavor. ...
'We all eat it because we like it, and we don’t need any scientific explanation to do that'. "
"While the Darwinian right has emphasized competition, a Darwinian left would focus instead on the importance of cooperation and altruism, matters that were not widely understood as being part of evolution when Social Darwinism first gained favor. Furthermore, he wants the left to use a current understanding of human nature, based on Darwinism, rather than on idealistic notions about perfect societies and utopias."
"For the past few years I have been writing pop-math books for a living, and let me tell you, it’s damn hard work. Mathematical and scientific thinking is deeply unnatural. Statistical thinking about our fellow human beings is doubly or trebly so. It goes against all the grain of human nature, against all the social habits programmed into our brains. ... We are all interested in other people, but very few of us are interested in multivariate distributions or correlation coefficients. People magazine has a far, far larger circulation figure than the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, and I am willing to hazard a speculation that this will always be so."
" You can appreciate the problems faced by these little animals by imagining yourself living in the following "econiche":
You are blindfolded such that you can discern light and dark, but no more. You live in a vast junkyard piled three and four meters deep with old automobiles, interspersed here and there with vast pits and the ruins of tall buildings. Not only is this Hell inhabited by packs of man-eating wild dogs, but in the air helicopters circle, filled with armed men who hope to shoot you. Your appetite is tremendous; to survive, you must eat your own weight in food each day. The only food is live rabbits, which you must catch with your own hands. Not only must you escape predators and snare food in this nightmarish landscape; you must also find a mate, raise a family, and leave descendents.
Our Mesozoic ancestors were heroes, every one. "
Synapsida
by John C. McLoughlin
page 101