A lot of these debates ignore that evolutionary success is simply defined as persistence. If population A has 90% infant mortality and lives on $1 day but has genetic descendants 1000 years from now, then they are evolutionarily "better" than population B that has <1% infant mortality, lives on $100 day, and has no genetic descendants 1000 years from now. Declaring one group a "have" and another group a "have not" is myopic. Literally every group on the face of the earth at some level believes they are "chosen" and superior to other groups. The only way to actually tell though is to see which genes are still geneing 1000 years, 10,000 years, etc into the future. To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.
> To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.
Doesn't it hurt to realize your multi-cellular brain came up with this?
Of course you want multi-cellular life. It's the only known answer of nature capable of particle physics, space exploration and postulating one's bad ideas on HN.
You shouldn't become that agnostic to your place in the universe, and unless a couple of much better reasons aren't more obvious to you, at least because people will think you like insulting yourself, together with your entire branch of life, that also includes the reader.
If the point of a gene is to reproduce itself, the GP's conjecture is likely correct.
Evolution itself is non-judgemental and has no inherent bias to the development of spaceflight over, say, a massively distributed system willing to tolerate huge die offs. They are simply two different approaches (not even strategies) for dealing with local conditions.
I kind of see the utility in prevailing in the universe can much more be an active and guided persuasion through us humans (maybe by proxy, through whatever robotic arks we can come up with), because it can be so much more effective than a passive and kind of brittle and to me unconvincing process of post-solar system panspermia.
You may have a bias towards humans but nature doesn't care: all the bets are played in parallel.
In fact by your own preference, the unicellular organisms are more likely to successfully spread their DNA (as it's "packetized" into a complete organism) via the surfaces of the robot ships you describe than the multicellular ones are.
Gumby is right here. While it's obviously important to US whether or not we survive, Mother Nature doesn't care whether we live or die.
As long as the genes keep propagating, she's good.
I think it's healthy for humans to look to their own survival, but I realize that Mother Nature only cares for the propagation of genes. We should never confuse the one with the other. We should never start to believe that Mother Nature has an interest in our survival more than the survival of some other fish, or alien lifeform far away, or some bacteria, or virus. That could be a fatal mistake for us.
That’s up to you — I also think spaceships are great (and also don’t really see the point of putting humans in them). We’re all just telling you that nature doesn’t prefer you or me to the amoeba, nor vice versa.
I would take it further and say that nature doesn't care about genes either. Caring is a property of whole organisms with complex information processing abilities. Genes kinda tend to propagate, just because the ones that were slightly less good at that didn't make it very far.
You seem to be suggesting that all values that don't contribute to long-term evolutionary success are not worth pursuing.
Perhaps in the thousand-year timeframe it's irrelevant what it means to be a "have" or "have not" in today's society. But does that really mean that we shouldn't care about the lives of the people around us who are living right now? In fact, why should any of us care all that much about who's still got descendants long after we're dead?
I wouldn't create a dichotomy between these two choices. In many ways our descendants will determine the state of the future far more than any particular change we might engage in today. Imagine that people who are well educated, secular, and generally well off start to stop having children. At the same time people who are poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor continue to have children at a high rate. Think about what this would mean for the lives of people born into the next generation. They're going to disproportionately come from households that are poorly educated, highly religions, and mostly poor.
And of course this isn't a hypothetical. This is exactly what's happening today on a global and crucially, even on a national level. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year annually have a fertility rate that is just about exactly 50% higher than those earning > $200,000 per year. [1] And there's a disconcertingly smooth gradient in the incomes in between. This is a very new problem. It was speculated about in the past, but generally well to do families continued to pump out the kids at a decent rate and there were macabre systems in place that prevented reckless procreation from those who could not afford it. Today fertility rates have plummeted and such macabre deterrents have become completely unthinkable which is a very good thing, yet it's simultaneously a very bad thing in that it effectively enables reckless and socially destructive behavior.
It becomes clear that one of the easiest ways to have a society where more people are better off is simply by encouraging those that can afford to have children to do just that! This also goes a step further as well. You might argue that 'well, if we create better social systems then we can start to transform those poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor families into the [perhaps subjectively] better off households today.' Maybe, maybe not -- it'd be a herculean task in any case. But there's an even more fundamental problem. The future of those systems will be upheld, or tossed aside, by the generation of tomorrow. And we once again end up back at square one as this generation will be comprised heavily of these poorly educated, highly religious individuals who are going to generally have different social motivations.
I think HN User reader500's material point is that while you and I may believe that poor people procreating is "reckless and socially destructive behavior", Mother Nature does not. She's going to go to great lengths to ensure that poor people have a desire to procreate that is, at once, urgent and overpowering. She really doesn't care about anything other than getting the genes propagated. (Basically, in human terms, she just wants more kids. Nothing else matters to Mother Nature.)
She's also going to go to great lengths to instill the same urge in the wealthy, and everyone in between for that matter. She really does just want the genes propagated. The rest she doesn't care about. Ideology, money, whether or not one human has any power over another, social morés, and any other human construct... none of it matters to her.
Environment vs genetics is a minefield for anyone who tries to be objective. Just say that differences are in 99% shaped by environment and you are fine and safe for today. However a lie is good for a short time, but really bad for a long term. Especially if it becomes a base for, let's say, a national policy.
Also, saying it is mostly environment makes individuals blame others for their own failures - "I am perfect, the environment is wrong and has to change".
A sad thing is that scientists that study this question get publicly destroyed.
>Just say that differences are in 99% shaped by environment and you are fine
You can find flaws and inconsistencies in their logic easily though. People have no issue with saying that height is genetic for example. Even racially, it's ok to say Asians are on average shorter than Africans
But imply intelligence is genetic, and now there are issues. For some reason we are told that evolution and genetics stop at a human's neck
My question is that if intelligence isn't genetic, why doesn't somebody teach a dog, or cat, or bacteria how to do quantum mechanics? Surely it's just environment right?
One of the more interesting theories in that book is that Europe and Asia were technologically so far ahead of Africa and the North Americas was because Europe and Asia are lined up "horizontally" which allowed for easier migration by nomadic tribes in prehistoric times, thus allowing for faster spread of ideas like writing, farming, domestication of animals, etc.
I'm not sold on the hypothesis that Europe and Asia were way ahead technologically, because honestly (mostly Europeans) did all they could to eliminate any culture indigenous cultures in the Americans and Africa, ignored them and devalued them completely. And definitely didn't make any attempts to understand or document what was going on before they got there. So likely lots of informaiton got lost along the way.
Yes, proximity helps with cross pollination - but there are hundreds of distinct ethnic groups in the Americans and Africa that also traveling, cross-pollinated and shared. History decided to group them together and call these all one big group.
Similar story here in Australia. I'm currently reading "Dark Emu" [0], which shows how Indigenous Australians, always claimed to be hunter-gatherers with only primitive societies, actually were agriculturists... using the early explorer's own journals.
AFAICT that video on youtube is infringing. But you can watch it on Amazon Prime Video (and they also have it available on DVD -- you have to pay a premium for the convenience of DVD, though: 144 USD).
It might be a good read but at best its pop science at worst complete bunk (close to the latter). There was a book about this topic written by an actual historian much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_Imperialism_(book) and where Diamond tried to answer very broad questions and his broad answers break down in detail, Crosby makes similar points but approaches as a historian, limits his arguments and actually practices proper scholarship.
There are also a ton of good critiques on /r/history, /r/askhistorians, and /r/anthropology. I can't remember which I've read. Ones like this are typical:
That first link entirely ignores that IQ tests have been shown to be culturally dependent. Likewise for the aptitude tests he conflates them with.
Pretty sure if you wrote an IQ test where your standard population was a group of people living in a harsh jungle environment, urbanite Westerners would come off thick as pigshit.
Or an aptitude test for "How good are you at tracking cassowaries without being disembowelled by them".
I've read good dissections of what's wrong with Diamond's work, that link is not one of them.
If you know a little bit about history involving dates and such, Diamond makes some hilarious boners. Like, getting the actual dates when plague hit the Indians wrong in a way that makes his theory kind of fall to shreds.
Anthropologists don't think much of him either.
Of course any historical theory of everything based on one factor is going to look silly if you read another. Most modern people haven't read Spengler or Brooks Adams or whatever the popular socialist books were in the 30s which attempt to explain everything.
History, of course, is path dependent, and the correct perception is probably something like "stuff is like this by accident."
Guns, Germs, and Steel is essentially pop science by a guy with next to no expertise in many of the areas he bases his theories on like geography.
Germs - Ignores the fact that Europeans were devastated by things like Malaria that many Africans have moderate immunity to thanks to the sickle cell trait
Domesticated animals - Ignores that Europeans have actually used Zebras as work animals and had to domesticate cows from Aurrochs and dogs from wolves
The whole thing is basically Diamond starting off with a conclusion and finding a theory to fit in
I tried to read Guns, Germs and Steel several years ago, as it was popular, and required by a collage class I was taking. I finished maybe a third of the book before it became clear the author had lost the plot entirely, and all my independent reading on the subject seemed to indicate the author was at best ambitious with his conclusions; At worst, actively spreading misinformation.
The emergence of human sociability defies modern genetic models. Nonetheless, out of all the irreparably flawed assumptions in anthropology, one of the least flawed is the premise that intelligence and sociability probably had a complex, interconnected evolution.
Given that not only can we not explain our sociability, but that it's emergence seems nearly impossible according to our understanding of genetic natural selection, then opining on the dominant factors that drive modern intelligence, let alone drove our intelligence hundreds of thousands of years ago, is a hopeless endeavor.
Anyone providing answers to such higher-order questions could only be correct by accident. We have no way of assessing the validity!
A lot of these debates ignore that evolutionary success is simply defined as persistence. If population A has 90% infant mortality and lives on $1 day but has genetic descendants 1000 years from now, then they are evolutionarily "better" than population B that has <1% infant mortality, lives on $100 day, and has no genetic descendants 1000 years from now. Declaring one group a "have" and another group a "have not" is myopic. Literally every group on the face of the earth at some level believes they are "chosen" and superior to other groups. The only way to actually tell though is to see which genes are still geneing 1000 years, 10,000 years, etc into the future. To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.
> To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.
Doesn't it hurt to realize your multi-cellular brain came up with this?
Of course you want multi-cellular life. It's the only known answer of nature capable of particle physics, space exploration and postulating one's bad ideas on HN.
You shouldn't become that agnostic to your place in the universe, and unless a couple of much better reasons aren't more obvious to you, at least because people will think you like insulting yourself, together with your entire branch of life, that also includes the reader.
If the point of a gene is to reproduce itself, the GP's conjecture is likely correct.
Evolution itself is non-judgemental and has no inherent bias to the development of spaceflight over, say, a massively distributed system willing to tolerate huge die offs. They are simply two different approaches (not even strategies) for dealing with local conditions.
I kind of see the utility in prevailing in the universe can much more be an active and guided persuasion through us humans (maybe by proxy, through whatever robotic arks we can come up with), because it can be so much more effective than a passive and kind of brittle and to me unconvincing process of post-solar system panspermia.
You may have a bias towards humans but nature doesn't care: all the bets are played in parallel.
In fact by your own preference, the unicellular organisms are more likely to successfully spread their DNA (as it's "packetized" into a complete organism) via the surfaces of the robot ships you describe than the multicellular ones are.
Gumby is right here. While it's obviously important to US whether or not we survive, Mother Nature doesn't care whether we live or die.
As long as the genes keep propagating, she's good.
I think it's healthy for humans to look to their own survival, but I realize that Mother Nature only cares for the propagation of genes. We should never confuse the one with the other. We should never start to believe that Mother Nature has an interest in our survival more than the survival of some other fish, or alien lifeform far away, or some bacteria, or virus. That could be a fatal mistake for us.
I see my argument solely as one driven by my own survival instinct.
And as it's nature that biases me towards my species, is it wrong to try live up to that and build those spaceships?
That’s up to you — I also think spaceships are great (and also don’t really see the point of putting humans in them). We’re all just telling you that nature doesn’t prefer you or me to the amoeba, nor vice versa.
I would take it further and say that nature doesn't care about genes either. Caring is a property of whole organisms with complex information processing abilities. Genes kinda tend to propagate, just because the ones that were slightly less good at that didn't make it very far.
You seem to be suggesting that all values that don't contribute to long-term evolutionary success are not worth pursuing.
Perhaps in the thousand-year timeframe it's irrelevant what it means to be a "have" or "have not" in today's society. But does that really mean that we shouldn't care about the lives of the people around us who are living right now? In fact, why should any of us care all that much about who's still got descendants long after we're dead?
I wouldn't create a dichotomy between these two choices. In many ways our descendants will determine the state of the future far more than any particular change we might engage in today. Imagine that people who are well educated, secular, and generally well off start to stop having children. At the same time people who are poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor continue to have children at a high rate. Think about what this would mean for the lives of people born into the next generation. They're going to disproportionately come from households that are poorly educated, highly religions, and mostly poor.
And of course this isn't a hypothetical. This is exactly what's happening today on a global and crucially, even on a national level. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year annually have a fertility rate that is just about exactly 50% higher than those earning > $200,000 per year. [1] And there's a disconcertingly smooth gradient in the incomes in between. This is a very new problem. It was speculated about in the past, but generally well to do families continued to pump out the kids at a decent rate and there were macabre systems in place that prevented reckless procreation from those who could not afford it. Today fertility rates have plummeted and such macabre deterrents have become completely unthinkable which is a very good thing, yet it's simultaneously a very bad thing in that it effectively enables reckless and socially destructive behavior.
It becomes clear that one of the easiest ways to have a society where more people are better off is simply by encouraging those that can afford to have children to do just that! This also goes a step further as well. You might argue that 'well, if we create better social systems then we can start to transform those poorly educated, highly religious, and generally poor families into the [perhaps subjectively] better off households today.' Maybe, maybe not -- it'd be a herculean task in any case. But there's an even more fundamental problem. The future of those systems will be upheld, or tossed aside, by the generation of tomorrow. And we once again end up back at square one as this generation will be comprised heavily of these poorly educated, highly religious individuals who are going to generally have different social motivations.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
I think HN User reader500's material point is that while you and I may believe that poor people procreating is "reckless and socially destructive behavior", Mother Nature does not. She's going to go to great lengths to ensure that poor people have a desire to procreate that is, at once, urgent and overpowering. She really doesn't care about anything other than getting the genes propagated. (Basically, in human terms, she just wants more kids. Nothing else matters to Mother Nature.)
She's also going to go to great lengths to instill the same urge in the wealthy, and everyone in between for that matter. She really does just want the genes propagated. The rest she doesn't care about. Ideology, money, whether or not one human has any power over another, social morés, and any other human construct... none of it matters to her.
Environment vs genetics is a minefield for anyone who tries to be objective. Just say that differences are in 99% shaped by environment and you are fine and safe for today. However a lie is good for a short time, but really bad for a long term. Especially if it becomes a base for, let's say, a national policy.
Also, saying it is mostly environment makes individuals blame others for their own failures - "I am perfect, the environment is wrong and has to change".
A sad thing is that scientists that study this question get publicly destroyed.
>Just say that differences are in 99% shaped by environment and you are fine
You can find flaws and inconsistencies in their logic easily though. People have no issue with saying that height is genetic for example. Even racially, it's ok to say Asians are on average shorter than Africans
But imply intelligence is genetic, and now there are issues. For some reason we are told that evolution and genetics stop at a human's neck
My question is that if intelligence isn't genetic, why doesn't somebody teach a dog, or cat, or bacteria how to do quantum mechanics? Surely it's just environment right?
Another good read that says something similar.
Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393973867
And the documentary based on the book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgGw8kZnJxE
One of the more interesting theories in that book is that Europe and Asia were technologically so far ahead of Africa and the North Americas was because Europe and Asia are lined up "horizontally" which allowed for easier migration by nomadic tribes in prehistoric times, thus allowing for faster spread of ideas like writing, farming, domestication of animals, etc.
I'm not sold on the hypothesis that Europe and Asia were way ahead technologically, because honestly (mostly Europeans) did all they could to eliminate any culture indigenous cultures in the Americans and Africa, ignored them and devalued them completely. And definitely didn't make any attempts to understand or document what was going on before they got there. So likely lots of informaiton got lost along the way.
Yes, proximity helps with cross pollination - but there are hundreds of distinct ethnic groups in the Americans and Africa that also traveling, cross-pollinated and shared. History decided to group them together and call these all one big group.
Similar story here in Australia. I'm currently reading "Dark Emu" [0], which shows how Indigenous Australians, always claimed to be hunter-gatherers with only primitive societies, actually were agriculturists... using the early explorer's own journals.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21401526-dark-emu
AFAICT that video on youtube is infringing. But you can watch it on Amazon Prime Video (and they also have it available on DVD -- you have to pay a premium for the convenience of DVD, though: 144 USD).
And just when I read your reply and I was about to edit it to remove the link, I passed the two hour edit window.....
That book is central to this article, which even includes a photo of its cover.
It might be a good read but at best its pop science at worst complete bunk (close to the latter). There was a book about this topic written by an actual historian much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_Imperialism_(book) and where Diamond tried to answer very broad questions and his broad answers break down in detail, Crosby makes similar points but approaches as a historian, limits his arguments and actually practices proper scholarship.
Out of curiosity, can you explain, or point to some writing about why you think the theories in the book are close to "complete bunk"?
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/guns-germs-and-ste...
There are also a ton of good critiques on /r/history, /r/askhistorians, and /r/anthropology. I can't remember which I've read. Ones like this are typical:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/thoug...
That first link entirely ignores that IQ tests have been shown to be culturally dependent. Likewise for the aptitude tests he conflates them with.
Pretty sure if you wrote an IQ test where your standard population was a group of people living in a harsh jungle environment, urbanite Westerners would come off thick as pigshit.
Or an aptitude test for "How good are you at tracking cassowaries without being disembowelled by them".
I've read good dissections of what's wrong with Diamond's work, that link is not one of them.
I remember being struck by his anecdotes of Papua New Guineans seeming just as smart as anyone else as supposed evidence of... What exactly?
I don't think Neil Diamond is wrong but it's kind of baby's first reading on the differences between groups in the world.
I think CGP Grey does a great job at communicating the actual meat of Guns, Germs, and Steel here https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
If you know a little bit about history involving dates and such, Diamond makes some hilarious boners. Like, getting the actual dates when plague hit the Indians wrong in a way that makes his theory kind of fall to shreds.
Anthropologists don't think much of him either.
Of course any historical theory of everything based on one factor is going to look silly if you read another. Most modern people haven't read Spengler or Brooks Adams or whatever the popular socialist books were in the 30s which attempt to explain everything.
History, of course, is path dependent, and the correct perception is probably something like "stuff is like this by accident."
Guns, Germs, and Steel is essentially pop science by a guy with next to no expertise in many of the areas he bases his theories on like geography.
Germs - Ignores the fact that Europeans were devastated by things like Malaria that many Africans have moderate immunity to thanks to the sickle cell trait
Domesticated animals - Ignores that Europeans have actually used Zebras as work animals and had to domesticate cows from Aurrochs and dogs from wolves
The whole thing is basically Diamond starting off with a conclusion and finding a theory to fit in
I tried to read Guns, Germs and Steel several years ago, as it was popular, and required by a collage class I was taking. I finished maybe a third of the book before it became clear the author had lost the plot entirely, and all my independent reading on the subject seemed to indicate the author was at best ambitious with his conclusions; At worst, actively spreading misinformation.
The best theory out there is the 'Cold Winters' theory. But it leads to politically incorrect conclusions, so is not widespread.
The emergence of human sociability defies modern genetic models. Nonetheless, out of all the irreparably flawed assumptions in anthropology, one of the least flawed is the premise that intelligence and sociability probably had a complex, interconnected evolution.
Given that not only can we not explain our sociability, but that it's emergence seems nearly impossible according to our understanding of genetic natural selection, then opining on the dominant factors that drive modern intelligence, let alone drove our intelligence hundreds of thousands of years ago, is a hopeless endeavor.
Anyone providing answers to such higher-order questions could only be correct by accident. We have no way of assessing the validity!