I did not realize that there was evidence of increased cognition after the invention of agriculture. I am glad to hear of it.
This bolsters my working theory on how average levels of intelligence between groups have diverged over time. Essentially, those people living in certain geographies with greater potential food production were able to evolve into more complex societies. The increased benefits of living within more complex societies then enabled men with heritable traits, particularly intelligence, that better enabled socio-economic success to have more children than those without those traits via sexual selection. Women wanted to mate with men who are more successful, and success varies by the type of society.
Or more simply:
Geography > Increased food production > more complex society > greater divergence of heritable traits.
So different levels of intelligence between groups is not the cause of different levels of development, it is the result of it (though the causality probably goes both ways).
Yes, this is gene-culture coevolution. Humans adapt not only to their natural environment but also to their cultural environment. There is thus a positive feedback loop between social complexity and the ability to cope with social complexity.
You are correct. It is gene-culture coevolution, but it is a specific type of gene-culture coevolution that I don't think anyone else has presented as an explanation for the inequality between nations in the past and the present.
Genetic evolution and cultural evolution are two very different things in that one physically manifests in the gene pool and the other is just a reaction to an immediate environment by individuals.
Yes, they are different things. But they interact with each other. Over the last 10,000 years, humans have adapted primarily to their cultural environment. If you can better fit into your culture, follow its rules, and exploit its possibilities, you will have a better chance of surviving and reproducing. Culture has thus acted as a template for genetic evolution.
Under natural circumstances, culture is a product of genes so much that it is even like an extended phenotype trait. However since the semitic Christianity got its foot into our culture, the culture has become increasingly dysfunctional and alien.
Christianity succeeded because Paganism had failed. Rome had become a sick, dying culture; this was why Constantine embraced Christianity — he understood that Rome needed an institution to inculcate and enforce morality on an empire-wide scale.
Could some other religion have fit the bill? It's telling that all of the closest contenders were quasi-Christian (Arianism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, etc.). So we would have got something like Christianity in almost any scenario, and that something would have further coevolved with Europeans to become what it is today.
I don't wish to deny the failings of Christianity, both ancient and modern. But I don't see what other belief system could have done a better job. Again, Paganism had failed. It wasn't just that Paganism had become moribund. It was incapable of regulating morality in a mass society with a debauched elite.
At this point no White person should believe literally in gods, spooks etc. It is an enormous handicap and I am not sure we will be able to get enough time to overcome it. Jesus’ morality is highly dysgenic. No wonder that Jews refused to take that road to extinction and prefer to have a religion of fertility, wealth and power in the here and now.
Yes. This is already well established. Agriculture drives intelligence because it is systematic and occurs over long periods. So it selects for people who can think abstractly enough to understand the system and plan for future seasons.
Moreover, some crops are more cognitively complex to produce than others, and this disparity drives intellectual differences between agricultural groups. For example, rice is more difficult tog row than most other staple crops. So the rice-growers, Sinnoic peoples, are slightly more intelligent than other farmers.
For natural selection to work at this level there would have to be significant death of those that were useless at growing rice and very few non-rice growers who were fed by the rice growers but had less effective rice-growing genes. I do not believe this happened. Farming allows the genetically inferior to survive and reduces population IQ and physically causes the “farmer body type” which contrasts with the hunter gatherer physique.
I believe it did happen. In order for it not to have happened, productive ancient peoples would have needed to generate a surplus of food with which to feed the incompetent. The growers would also need to be altruistic enough to give it to them -- unless they were providing a non-agricultural service, in which case lower intelligence may not have been a barrier to survival.
Moreover, the farmers would need to be persuaded to do so at the expense of themselves, their families, and friends. This might occur in a few cases but is hardly the norm.
And farming raises IQ because it selects for people who can think ahead and plan for seasonal effects. At first, at least.
It can suppress intelligence later if the food surplus created by farmers is used to feed the dullards and enable their reproduction. However, this suppression does not occur until after the population's IQ has been pumped by the seasonal selection pressure.
Were it not for agriculture, our people wouldn’t have so many examples of the domesticated farmer type physique. Basically the difference between the traditional Nordic and the modern Greek types to give an idea. Agriculture also allowed trading and wheeler dealing to take off.
Have you read Elmer Pendell’s “Why Civilisations Self Destruct”? He explains how we evolved our intelligence in the Ice Ages, long before agriculture. What was key indeed was planning ahead and storing food. The other major trait that was honed then was reciprocal altruism through cooperation.
Another major factor is the “invention” of hay, which was the essential resource for agriculturalists in climates with winters. A far larger population was sustained once we had agriculture and sexual preferences by females towards material wealth vs hunting abilities became advantageous for reproducing optimally.
My mother's ancestors were merchants on Fleet Street, in London. They were apparently successful. One of them married three times and had over twenty children. And most of those children apparently survived. Unfortunately, not all of them could gain employment as merchants — the "niche" wasn't big enough — so they went into other lines of work, like shipbuilding. Eventually, some of their children decided to emigrate to Canada. One of them, my great-great-grandfather worked in Canada as a dockyard laborer. His son worked as a laborer and peddler until he scraped up enough money to open a general store.
My point is that life can be tough even if you're smart. This was England in the mid-19th century. There was no welfare, and you had to live by your wits to survive.
This "big question" became a preoccupation of Alfred Wallace. His thinking moved towards supernaturalistic hypotheses, which might be why he isn't well remembered, along with Charles Darwin, as the co-originator of natural selection.
My own hypothesis is that humans have evolved so much more intelligence than they seem to need to survive due to intra-species competition. It was, in part, the pressure to outwit each other that sparked an intelligence explosion in our species.
It might if humans were constantly compelled to cognitively one up each other, generation after generation. If ever incrementally more intelligent humans had a competitive advantage over their slightly less intelligent kin, who's to say how smart they might have become over the course of deep time?
An accumulation of knowledge by a species can continue despite massive LOSS of cognitive ability and it has. Cooperation, not competition, helped people in the Ice Age to advance. Competition is highest in Africa and results in not enough trust to build civilisation and the most genetic diversity on Earth.
Mutations are pretty random. Genes today associated with intelligence just happened to pop up. Once that occurs, it's not difficult to see why those who can better plan for the future and solve problems would prosper and expand at the expense of those who don't. It's simply just another competitive advantage, like speed or great eyesight.
"Genes today associated with intelligence just happened to pop up. Once that occurs, it's not difficult to see why those who can better plan for the future and solve problems would prosper and expand at the expense of those who don't."
Again, that is inadequate to explain cognitive abilities that go far beyond survival. If your supposition were true, all animals would develop cognitive abilities beyond those necessary for survival, and that is not observed.
The chances that the same mutation occurs across all species are very slim. Intelligence as we know it just happened to occur among homo sapiens, across tens of thousands of years.
Cheetahs can run as fast as the highway speed limit, which is way beyond what's necessary for them to survive. But since it can't hurt them, there's no reason for that ability and the genes associated with it to disappear. Same for human intelligence.
"The chances that the same mutation occurs across all species are very slim. Intelligence as we know it just happened to occur among homo sapiens, across tens of thousands of years."
The mutations would not have to occur across all species, nor would it be necessary for all cognitive mutations to happen, just enough to make a species much more intelligent than is needed to survive.
Advanced cognitive ability results from high polygenic 'mutations'. If that were not the case, people would be either stupid or intelligent.
"Cheetahs can run as fast as the highway speed limit, which is way beyond what's necessary for them to survive."
Wrong. Cheetahs run at high speed to catch prey but have limited stamina. Why can't they run 70 miles per hour?
"This admixture is difficult to quantify. One could assume that the Middle Eastern ancestry of farmers would correspond to the genetic difference between them and indigenous hunter-gatherers, but that assumption would be wrong. Some of the difference would also be due to founder effects, and some would be due to natural selection."
this doesn't make any sense. admixture is easy to quantify. the genetic distance between the two groups though could be amplified due to founder effects. in fact, they are, because the WHG were strong bottlenecked. the farmers were not.
"The initial surge in cognitive ability may have thus been due to admixture from Arctic-adapted hunter-gatherers who now enjoyed the advantages of farming, including a larger population and sedentary living – both of which would have made them more visible in the archaeological record, including ancient DNA. Hence the steep rise in cognitive ability. The subsequently slower rate of increase might reflect continuing adaptation to the possibilities created by farming."
akbari et al. show a steep rise, but most of europe showed a 2,000 year period of very little admixture of WHG into EEF; then in the middle neolithic there was large admixture ("the WHG resurgence"). so if it was arctic adapted farmers, the rise should have been later.
in any case, there's no reason to be speculative. in figure 4 panel 10 you see that the farmers have much higher predictive cognitive ability than the foragers, and also more than the steppe populations (which is about 50% EHG; "arctic forager").
There is no strong evidence because we don't have much DNA from pre-Neolithic sites in northern and eastern Europe, i.e., the regions that were Arctic tundra until ten to twelve thousand years ago.
In general, we don't have much DNA from the hunting and gathering period. Populations were a lot smaller and more mobile. It was only with the introduction of farming that we start to see large sedentary concentrations of people who left a much larger footprint in the archaeological record.
"There is no strong evidence because we don't have much DNA from pre-Neolithic sites in northern and eastern Europe, i.e., the regions that were Arctic tundra until ten to twelve thousand years ago."
yes, we have plenty of it. the yamnaya are 50% EHG. eastern hunter-gatherer. we have thousands and thousands.
The Yamnaya were pastoralists from a later period. Sure, we can make assumptions, i.e., the other 50% may be similar and the selection pressures under pastoralism may be similar. But we don't really know.
If we look at the latest study from the Reich lab, we see a lot less data from the last ice age. This is why the study's authors focus on the last 10,000 years.
"The Yamnaya were pastoralists from a later period. Sure, we can make assumptions, i.e., the other 50% may be similar and the selection pressures under pastoralism may be similar. But we don't really know."
they have data from before they were obligate pastoralists (earlier cultures). and, they can detect which segments were inherited from EHG and CHG.
to get to your specific issue: <b>they can detect which alleles were inherited from EHG and CHG.</b> you say things like "arctic ice age hunters might have made them smart," well, they can see <b>if those alleles were from EHG or CHG</b>. if you are correct, then the EHG alleles will be enriched in the + alleles (more EDU attainment). if not, then not.
as it is, the highest EDU etc. is in the neolithic farmers WITHOUT ice age forager ancestry. you said in the piece that it might be that ancestry that made later europeans smarter but i just explained that 1) they had very little WHG 2) here you seem to be saying yo udon't count the WHG as ice age foragers. so your initial assumption in this post is just wrong.
you seem to be going back to the position now that the steppe people were dumber because of CHG ancestry, because you think the EHG were super smart or something. that is irrelevant for most of the period of selection, as that occurred before the steppe intrusion.
I'm detecting a rise in room temperature. First, I'd like to point out that our positions are not that far apart. Neither of us is denying the following points:
- As the Middle Eastern farmers pushed into Europe, they intermixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers.
- Indigenous admixture progressively increased as the farmers pushed farther into Europe.
- Indigenous admixture was substantial, being greater in northern Europe than in southern Europe.
- Estimates of this admixture are problematic because of founder effects and natural selection. A significant portion of genetic changes in either category will create false resemblances between the two groups. I gave the example of Haplogroup U. It disappeared from Europe through natural selection, not through population replacement.
- It is difficult to estimate the mean cognitive ability of Europe's hunter-gatherers because we have much less DNA from them. It is even more difficult to break the data down regionally.
Razib, for your own sake, please take a walk and spend some time chatting with a friend or a stranger. You're getting angry for no good reason, and that isn't a good sign.
Founder effects and natural selection can create false positives that look like admixture. In the case of founder effects, the false positives occur at random. In the case of natural selection, the false positives are also due to convergent selection.
"Founder effects and natural selection can create false positives that look like admixture. In the case of founder effects, the false positives occur at random. In the case of natural selection, the false positives are also due to convergent selection."
this is not correct. i know how this works. your assertion is not even wrong.
I doubt the Sinnoic peoples have, or could, become more intelligent in response to Christian social forces. They have undergone selection for the same factors Christianity selects for by their own cultural influences. Their horse has already been led to water and drunk its fill.
In Asia, Christianization has been limited to the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia), Assam, Korea, and the Philippines. Of these areas, the first one has been Christianized the longest. Armenia became Christian in the 4th century. I would like to see PGS data from both ancient and present-day Armenians, but such data seems to be absent.
As for the other areas, with the possible exception of the Philippines, Christianization may not have had enough time to alter the population. As for Latin America, it would be difficult to disentangle selection effects from admixture effects (i.e., from Europeans and Africans).
a call just got canceled, so i have some extra time.
peter keeps talking about how admixture might be distorted because of selection or bottleneck. this assertion is
1) wrong in part
2) not even wrong in part
here is why.
1) the paper from akbari estimates that 2.5% of the allelic change was due to selection. this is probably a high estimate. but if it is right, it makes it clear why admixture estimates will not be distorted much by selection: <b>most genomic variation is due to drift/neutral forces.</b> so the point about selection is irrelevant
2) the "not even wrong" part is that what admixture is detecting is drift and bottlenecks. peter keeps talking like bottlenecks are a massive problem, but bottlenecks are just an extreme form of drift. so he keeps acting like bottlenecks are a problem for admixture analysis when without any bottleneck there would be no admixture to detect.
populations in a genetic sense diverge from each other through changes in allele frequency that are due to genetic drift/bottlenecks. because this is a neutral process this change can be thought of as a clock that drives variation that separates lineages, and allow us to infer population history. what bottlenecks due is increase drift, and change alleles much faster. so the main effect is not the shape of the tree, but the length of the branches. but, admixture is looking at the alleles, so it is detecting the correct thing. it makes no sense to act like bottlenecks are abberations when they are the very thing that admixture is tracking. the main issue with bottlencks is that they may mislead about generation time back to the past. you will see this is a situation where
pop A has been bottlenecked and pop B has not. back to common ancestor pop C, pop A will have a very long branch in the phylogenetic tree because it "evolved faster."
what does this mean for admixture? pop A will snap out very cleanly in the analysis, and in pairwise Fst there will be some inflation due to the bottleneck. there are ways you can correct for this (f3 stats are one way you can, but there are forms of Fst that avoid rare alleles, and that can do it too).
It's difficult to quantify the effects of natural selection because we still know little about what most of the genome actually does.
Researchers have tried to resolve this problem by examining differences in noncoding genes between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers, on the assumption that such genes are generally non-functional and do not affect one’s chances of survival and reproduction. But that assumption is unfounded. About 80% of our genome has some kind of function, even noncoding genes.
Indeed, such genes may have contributed disproportionately to human evolution. If we compare our genome with other primate genomes, we see that almost all human-specific deletions are in noncoding regions. Furthermore, DNA is mostly noncoding in human accelerated regions (HARs), i.e., genomic regions that have been well conserved throughout vertebrate evolution but are strikingly different in humans, perhaps in ways that alter how coding genes regulate each other.
1) readers should know that we have the computing power to run simulations now and test our statistics against simulated data where researchers controled the breeding parameters and selection exquisitively so much of this is not speculative
2) the way you describe how selection is detected is highly incomplete. there are many different ways, and the way you describe is a way that was dominant and common about a generation ago, partly due to lack of genomic-scale datasets
(the akbari paper itself uses a new method based on allele frequency changes over time and their relationship to the median change over time)
I'm not sure what you were trying to say in the first paragraph.
As for the second paragraph, I agree that several methods exist, but they all run into the same obstacle: the problem of disentangling selection effects from admixture effects when we still don't fully know the adaptive value of the genes in question.
It's significant that Akbari et al. (2024) did not present any graphs of cognitive evolution before 10,000 BP. They seem to have considered the earlier data insufficient.
for readers who want an empirical illustration: the kalash in the HGDP tend to pop out in K analysis because of a bottleneck. this isn't wrong, it's correct, but it is kind of annoying because we already know that the kalash are an endogamous bottlenecked population.
but instead of relying on unsupervised admixture analysis we can use qpadmin to detect admixture with explicit models of the kalash where their bottleneck effect is not a problem.
A very interesting article. Much of the best new research and research discussion in social science is now done outside mainstream academia; this is an example of this trend, since the article is published by Aporia Magazine rather than a mainstream journal. I hope it gets deserved attention. Frost is quite speculative in the last section of the paper. Interesting quotes from this early Christian philosopher Origen, but quite speculative discussion in that later section of the article about the late Roman and early Christian impacts on evolutionary trends in the European population. The earlier sections of the article are a superb description of the new research frontier in human genetic evolution. Perhaps Frost should have concluded with a discussion of Gregory Clark's work (which is only very briefly cited earlier in the article).
The reversal of cognitive decline coincides closely in time with the advent of Christianity. So something about Christianity was responsible. Yes, I'm speculating about the specific causes, but even today practicing Christians have less dysgenic fertility than nominal Christians (I'll see if I can dig up that reference).
"Nitzan Peri-Rotem (2020) shows that among religiously observant women in Britain and France, higher education goes hand in hand with a relatively large family size."
Agriculture reduced genetic intelligence, height and athleticism. It nurtured the weak. It countered natural selection, which you Christians regard as the work of the Devil. Cro Magnons had the highest cognitive ability and our brain shrank thereafter. Under Christianity, scientific advancements of Greece and Rome were lost, only to be revived when rediscovered in Persia where ironically the Islamic Golden Age began.
If Origenes knew fathers pass their traits to the sons, why did he (allegedly) castrate himself? I am not joking: historically speaking, Early Christianity and Catholicism waste its best men in celibacy (e.g. Lemaître) while Jew and early protestant smartest men sire truckloads of son. Why, according to you, it depends on Christianity and not on worst environment conditions (e.g. roaming barbarians that kill all the stupid romans around)?
I like the thrust of this article but isn’t all sex procreative. I don’t see whether men used slaves for fun vs their wives would have any impact upon intelligence. The main issue is whether more intelligent people survived-and if there are strict rules about being monogamous in culture-those who don’t will not survive (hence increasing morality across the population over time).
A man’s chances of siring children do not reduce with the number of partners!
What might be a better descriptor of selection pressures encouraging intelligence, was the choice of who to marry-rarely did women get a say. They were chattel. But successful men would marry off daughters to other (more) successful men. Hence adding selection pressure to intelligence criteria (of successful men to other successful men).
Also, clever women would make better clothes/fishing nets/pots and prepare better for times of survival in general which also probably improved intelligence at a more basic level, earlier in history when we were hunter gatherers.
The graphs i think shown the selection pressures after lots of civilisations were wiped out by the ice age. I think we’ve been pretty advanced for far longer than the current school of thought.
This isn’t really to do with Christianity. It is to do with general selective pressures.
Since we now have monogamy (and not a tribal hareem with one alpha male) I would say the graph pretty much shows we are actually far far lea intelligent than we could be and have actually REDUCED out selective pressures on intelligence.
Interesting.
I did not realize that there was evidence of increased cognition after the invention of agriculture. I am glad to hear of it.
This bolsters my working theory on how average levels of intelligence between groups have diverged over time. Essentially, those people living in certain geographies with greater potential food production were able to evolve into more complex societies. The increased benefits of living within more complex societies then enabled men with heritable traits, particularly intelligence, that better enabled socio-economic success to have more children than those without those traits via sexual selection. Women wanted to mate with men who are more successful, and success varies by the type of society.
Or more simply:
Geography > Increased food production > more complex society > greater divergence of heritable traits.
So different levels of intelligence between groups is not the cause of different levels of development, it is the result of it (though the causality probably goes both ways).
I go into more detail here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-our-deep-history-explains-global
Yes, this is gene-culture coevolution. Humans adapt not only to their natural environment but also to their cultural environment. There is thus a positive feedback loop between social complexity and the ability to cope with social complexity.
You are correct. It is gene-culture coevolution, but it is a specific type of gene-culture coevolution that I don't think anyone else has presented as an explanation for the inequality between nations in the past and the present.
Genetic evolution and cultural evolution are two very different things in that one physically manifests in the gene pool and the other is just a reaction to an immediate environment by individuals.
Yes, they are different things. But they interact with each other. Over the last 10,000 years, humans have adapted primarily to their cultural environment. If you can better fit into your culture, follow its rules, and exploit its possibilities, you will have a better chance of surviving and reproducing. Culture has thus acted as a template for genetic evolution.
Under natural circumstances, culture is a product of genes so much that it is even like an extended phenotype trait. However since the semitic Christianity got its foot into our culture, the culture has become increasingly dysfunctional and alien.
Christianity succeeded because Paganism had failed. Rome had become a sick, dying culture; this was why Constantine embraced Christianity — he understood that Rome needed an institution to inculcate and enforce morality on an empire-wide scale.
Could some other religion have fit the bill? It's telling that all of the closest contenders were quasi-Christian (Arianism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, etc.). So we would have got something like Christianity in almost any scenario, and that something would have further coevolved with Europeans to become what it is today.
I don't wish to deny the failings of Christianity, both ancient and modern. But I don't see what other belief system could have done a better job. Again, Paganism had failed. It wasn't just that Paganism had become moribund. It was incapable of regulating morality in a mass society with a debauched elite.
At this point no White person should believe literally in gods, spooks etc. It is an enormous handicap and I am not sure we will be able to get enough time to overcome it. Jesus’ morality is highly dysgenic. No wonder that Jews refused to take that road to extinction and prefer to have a religion of fertility, wealth and power in the here and now.
Yes. This is already well established. Agriculture drives intelligence because it is systematic and occurs over long periods. So it selects for people who can think abstractly enough to understand the system and plan for future seasons.
Moreover, some crops are more cognitively complex to produce than others, and this disparity drives intellectual differences between agricultural groups. For example, rice is more difficult tog row than most other staple crops. So the rice-growers, Sinnoic peoples, are slightly more intelligent than other farmers.
For natural selection to work at this level there would have to be significant death of those that were useless at growing rice and very few non-rice growers who were fed by the rice growers but had less effective rice-growing genes. I do not believe this happened. Farming allows the genetically inferior to survive and reduces population IQ and physically causes the “farmer body type” which contrasts with the hunter gatherer physique.
I believe it did happen. In order for it not to have happened, productive ancient peoples would have needed to generate a surplus of food with which to feed the incompetent. The growers would also need to be altruistic enough to give it to them -- unless they were providing a non-agricultural service, in which case lower intelligence may not have been a barrier to survival.
Moreover, the farmers would need to be persuaded to do so at the expense of themselves, their families, and friends. This might occur in a few cases but is hardly the norm.
And farming raises IQ because it selects for people who can think ahead and plan for seasonal effects. At first, at least.
It can suppress intelligence later if the food surplus created by farmers is used to feed the dullards and enable their reproduction. However, this suppression does not occur until after the population's IQ has been pumped by the seasonal selection pressure.
Were it not for agriculture, our people wouldn’t have so many examples of the domesticated farmer type physique. Basically the difference between the traditional Nordic and the modern Greek types to give an idea. Agriculture also allowed trading and wheeler dealing to take off.
Written in response to my post, but not an actual response.
Have you read Elmer Pendell’s “Why Civilisations Self Destruct”? He explains how we evolved our intelligence in the Ice Ages, long before agriculture. What was key indeed was planning ahead and storing food. The other major trait that was honed then was reciprocal altruism through cooperation.
Another major factor is the “invention” of hay, which was the essential resource for agriculturalists in climates with winters. A far larger population was sustained once we had agriculture and sexual preferences by females towards material wealth vs hunting abilities became advantageous for reproducing optimally.
Thanks for the interesting suppositions on the rise of cognitive ability.
The big question is why human cognitive ability has progressed so much beyond what is necessary for survival.
My mother's ancestors were merchants on Fleet Street, in London. They were apparently successful. One of them married three times and had over twenty children. And most of those children apparently survived. Unfortunately, not all of them could gain employment as merchants — the "niche" wasn't big enough — so they went into other lines of work, like shipbuilding. Eventually, some of their children decided to emigrate to Canada. One of them, my great-great-grandfather worked in Canada as a dockyard laborer. His son worked as a laborer and peddler until he scraped up enough money to open a general store.
My point is that life can be tough even if you're smart. This was England in the mid-19th century. There was no welfare, and you had to live by your wits to survive.
You did not need to make this point. It is already known.
This "big question" became a preoccupation of Alfred Wallace. His thinking moved towards supernaturalistic hypotheses, which might be why he isn't well remembered, along with Charles Darwin, as the co-originator of natural selection.
My own hypothesis is that humans have evolved so much more intelligence than they seem to need to survive due to intra-species competition. It was, in part, the pressure to outwit each other that sparked an intelligence explosion in our species.
"It was, in part, the pressure to outwit each other that sparked an intelligence explosion in our species."
That may be one possibility, but that would not explain the tremendous overkill in cognitive advancement.
It might if humans were constantly compelled to cognitively one up each other, generation after generation. If ever incrementally more intelligent humans had a competitive advantage over their slightly less intelligent kin, who's to say how smart they might have become over the course of deep time?
"It might if humans were constantly compelled to cognitively one up each other, generation after generation."
The question remains...what 'compelled' them?
The need to outwit each other to maximize their chances of survival and reproduction.
"The need to outwit each other to maximize their chances of survival and reproduction."
Thanks that probably contributed, but I feel it is inadequate to describe the degree.
An accumulation of knowledge by a species can continue despite massive LOSS of cognitive ability and it has. Cooperation, not competition, helped people in the Ice Age to advance. Competition is highest in Africa and results in not enough trust to build civilisation and the most genetic diversity on Earth.
Mutations are pretty random. Genes today associated with intelligence just happened to pop up. Once that occurs, it's not difficult to see why those who can better plan for the future and solve problems would prosper and expand at the expense of those who don't. It's simply just another competitive advantage, like speed or great eyesight.
"Genes today associated with intelligence just happened to pop up. Once that occurs, it's not difficult to see why those who can better plan for the future and solve problems would prosper and expand at the expense of those who don't."
Again, that is inadequate to explain cognitive abilities that go far beyond survival. If your supposition were true, all animals would develop cognitive abilities beyond those necessary for survival, and that is not observed.
The chances that the same mutation occurs across all species are very slim. Intelligence as we know it just happened to occur among homo sapiens, across tens of thousands of years.
Cheetahs can run as fast as the highway speed limit, which is way beyond what's necessary for them to survive. But since it can't hurt them, there's no reason for that ability and the genes associated with it to disappear. Same for human intelligence.
"The chances that the same mutation occurs across all species are very slim. Intelligence as we know it just happened to occur among homo sapiens, across tens of thousands of years."
The mutations would not have to occur across all species, nor would it be necessary for all cognitive mutations to happen, just enough to make a species much more intelligent than is needed to survive.
Advanced cognitive ability results from high polygenic 'mutations'. If that were not the case, people would be either stupid or intelligent.
"Cheetahs can run as fast as the highway speed limit, which is way beyond what's necessary for them to survive."
Wrong. Cheetahs run at high speed to catch prey but have limited stamina. Why can't they run 70 miles per hour?
"This admixture is difficult to quantify. One could assume that the Middle Eastern ancestry of farmers would correspond to the genetic difference between them and indigenous hunter-gatherers, but that assumption would be wrong. Some of the difference would also be due to founder effects, and some would be due to natural selection."
this doesn't make any sense. admixture is easy to quantify. the genetic distance between the two groups though could be amplified due to founder effects. in fact, they are, because the WHG were strong bottlenecked. the farmers were not.
"The initial surge in cognitive ability may have thus been due to admixture from Arctic-adapted hunter-gatherers who now enjoyed the advantages of farming, including a larger population and sedentary living – both of which would have made them more visible in the archaeological record, including ancient DNA. Hence the steep rise in cognitive ability. The subsequently slower rate of increase might reflect continuing adaptation to the possibilities created by farming."
akbari et al. show a steep rise, but most of europe showed a 2,000 year period of very little admixture of WHG into EEF; then in the middle neolithic there was large admixture ("the WHG resurgence"). so if it was arctic adapted farmers, the rise should have been later.
in any case, there's no reason to be speculative. in figure 4 panel 10 you see that the farmers have much higher predictive cognitive ability than the foragers, and also more than the steppe populations (which is about 50% EHG; "arctic forager").
basically, there is no strong evidence that arctic foragers are particular smart in these data, tho you could always argue it is underpowered
There is no strong evidence because we don't have much DNA from pre-Neolithic sites in northern and eastern Europe, i.e., the regions that were Arctic tundra until ten to twelve thousand years ago.
In general, we don't have much DNA from the hunting and gathering period. Populations were a lot smaller and more mobile. It was only with the introduction of farming that we start to see large sedentary concentrations of people who left a much larger footprint in the archaeological record.
"There is no strong evidence because we don't have much DNA from pre-Neolithic sites in northern and eastern Europe, i.e., the regions that were Arctic tundra until ten to twelve thousand years ago."
yes, we have plenty of it. the yamnaya are 50% EHG. eastern hunter-gatherer. we have thousands and thousands.
The Yamnaya were pastoralists from a later period. Sure, we can make assumptions, i.e., the other 50% may be similar and the selection pressures under pastoralism may be similar. But we don't really know.
If we look at the latest study from the Reich lab, we see a lot less data from the last ice age. This is why the study's authors focus on the last 10,000 years.
"The Yamnaya were pastoralists from a later period. Sure, we can make assumptions, i.e., the other 50% may be similar and the selection pressures under pastoralism may be similar. But we don't really know."
they have data from before they were obligate pastoralists (earlier cultures). and, they can detect which segments were inherited from EHG and CHG.
to get to your specific issue: <b>they can detect which alleles were inherited from EHG and CHG.</b> you say things like "arctic ice age hunters might have made them smart," well, they can see <b>if those alleles were from EHG or CHG</b>. if you are correct, then the EHG alleles will be enriched in the + alleles (more EDU attainment). if not, then not.
as it is, the highest EDU etc. is in the neolithic farmers WITHOUT ice age forager ancestry. you said in the piece that it might be that ancestry that made later europeans smarter but i just explained that 1) they had very little WHG 2) here you seem to be saying yo udon't count the WHG as ice age foragers. so your initial assumption in this post is just wrong.
you seem to be going back to the position now that the steppe people were dumber because of CHG ancestry, because you think the EHG were super smart or something. that is irrelevant for most of the period of selection, as that occurred before the steppe intrusion.
I'm detecting a rise in room temperature. First, I'd like to point out that our positions are not that far apart. Neither of us is denying the following points:
- As the Middle Eastern farmers pushed into Europe, they intermixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers.
- Indigenous admixture progressively increased as the farmers pushed farther into Europe.
- Indigenous admixture was substantial, being greater in northern Europe than in southern Europe.
- Estimates of this admixture are problematic because of founder effects and natural selection. A significant portion of genetic changes in either category will create false resemblances between the two groups. I gave the example of Haplogroup U. It disappeared from Europe through natural selection, not through population replacement.
- It is difficult to estimate the mean cognitive ability of Europe's hunter-gatherers because we have much less DNA from them. It is even more difficult to break the data down regionally.
Razib, for your own sake, please take a walk and spend some time chatting with a friend or a stranger. You're getting angry for no good reason, and that isn't a good sign.
Founder effects and natural selection can create false positives that look like admixture. In the case of founder effects, the false positives occur at random. In the case of natural selection, the false positives are also due to convergent selection.
"Founder effects and natural selection can create false positives that look like admixture. In the case of founder effects, the false positives occur at random. In the case of natural selection, the false positives are also due to convergent selection."
this is not correct. i know how this works. your assertion is not even wrong.
I'm sure you feel that way. Unfortunately, that doesn't constitute an argument.
i just wanted to state it, the readers here who are not retarded know very well i know how admixture works.
Khan always goes to ad hominems. He is a petulant little asshole.
You’re retarded
"You’re retarded"
Brilliant riposte
Have you shown a similar effect in Asian or Latin American countries that were introduced to Christianity.
I doubt the Sinnoic peoples have, or could, become more intelligent in response to Christian social forces. They have undergone selection for the same factors Christianity selects for by their own cultural influences. Their horse has already been led to water and drunk its fill.
In Asia, Christianization has been limited to the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia), Assam, Korea, and the Philippines. Of these areas, the first one has been Christianized the longest. Armenia became Christian in the 4th century. I would like to see PGS data from both ancient and present-day Armenians, but such data seems to be absent.
As for the other areas, with the possible exception of the Philippines, Christianization may not have had enough time to alter the population. As for Latin America, it would be difficult to disentangle selection effects from admixture effects (i.e., from Europeans and Africans).
a call just got canceled, so i have some extra time.
peter keeps talking about how admixture might be distorted because of selection or bottleneck. this assertion is
1) wrong in part
2) not even wrong in part
here is why.
1) the paper from akbari estimates that 2.5% of the allelic change was due to selection. this is probably a high estimate. but if it is right, it makes it clear why admixture estimates will not be distorted much by selection: <b>most genomic variation is due to drift/neutral forces.</b> so the point about selection is irrelevant
2) the "not even wrong" part is that what admixture is detecting is drift and bottlenecks. peter keeps talking like bottlenecks are a massive problem, but bottlenecks are just an extreme form of drift. so he keeps acting like bottlenecks are a problem for admixture analysis when without any bottleneck there would be no admixture to detect.
populations in a genetic sense diverge from each other through changes in allele frequency that are due to genetic drift/bottlenecks. because this is a neutral process this change can be thought of as a clock that drives variation that separates lineages, and allow us to infer population history. what bottlenecks due is increase drift, and change alleles much faster. so the main effect is not the shape of the tree, but the length of the branches. but, admixture is looking at the alleles, so it is detecting the correct thing. it makes no sense to act like bottlenecks are abberations when they are the very thing that admixture is tracking. the main issue with bottlencks is that they may mislead about generation time back to the past. you will see this is a situation where
pop A has been bottlenecked and pop B has not. back to common ancestor pop C, pop A will have a very long branch in the phylogenetic tree because it "evolved faster."
what does this mean for admixture? pop A will snap out very cleanly in the analysis, and in pairwise Fst there will be some inflation due to the bottleneck. there are ways you can correct for this (f3 stats are one way you can, but there are forms of Fst that avoid rare alleles, and that can do it too).
i hope that is clearer
It's difficult to quantify the effects of natural selection because we still know little about what most of the genome actually does.
Researchers have tried to resolve this problem by examining differences in noncoding genes between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers, on the assumption that such genes are generally non-functional and do not affect one’s chances of survival and reproduction. But that assumption is unfounded. About 80% of our genome has some kind of function, even noncoding genes.
Indeed, such genes may have contributed disproportionately to human evolution. If we compare our genome with other primate genomes, we see that almost all human-specific deletions are in noncoding regions. Furthermore, DNA is mostly noncoding in human accelerated regions (HARs), i.e., genomic regions that have been well conserved throughout vertebrate evolution but are strikingly different in humans, perhaps in ways that alter how coding genes regulate each other.
1) readers should know that we have the computing power to run simulations now and test our statistics against simulated data where researchers controled the breeding parameters and selection exquisitively so much of this is not speculative
2) the way you describe how selection is detected is highly incomplete. there are many different ways, and the way you describe is a way that was dominant and common about a generation ago, partly due to lack of genomic-scale datasets
(the akbari paper itself uses a new method based on allele frequency changes over time and their relationship to the median change over time)
I'm not sure what you were trying to say in the first paragraph.
As for the second paragraph, I agree that several methods exist, but they all run into the same obstacle: the problem of disentangling selection effects from admixture effects when we still don't fully know the adaptive value of the genes in question.
It's significant that Akbari et al. (2024) did not present any graphs of cognitive evolution before 10,000 BP. They seem to have considered the earlier data insufficient.
for readers who want an empirical illustration: the kalash in the HGDP tend to pop out in K analysis because of a bottleneck. this isn't wrong, it's correct, but it is kind of annoying because we already know that the kalash are an endogamous bottlenecked population.
but instead of relying on unsupervised admixture analysis we can use qpadmin to detect admixture with explicit models of the kalash where their bottleneck effect is not a problem.
A very interesting article. Much of the best new research and research discussion in social science is now done outside mainstream academia; this is an example of this trend, since the article is published by Aporia Magazine rather than a mainstream journal. I hope it gets deserved attention. Frost is quite speculative in the last section of the paper. Interesting quotes from this early Christian philosopher Origen, but quite speculative discussion in that later section of the article about the late Roman and early Christian impacts on evolutionary trends in the European population. The earlier sections of the article are a superb description of the new research frontier in human genetic evolution. Perhaps Frost should have concluded with a discussion of Gregory Clark's work (which is only very briefly cited earlier in the article).
The reversal of cognitive decline coincides closely in time with the advent of Christianity. So something about Christianity was responsible. Yes, I'm speculating about the specific causes, but even today practicing Christians have less dysgenic fertility than nominal Christians (I'll see if I can dig up that reference).
"Nitzan Peri-Rotem (2020) shows that among religiously observant women in Britain and France, higher education goes hand in hand with a relatively large family size."
https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/religion-as-a-moderating-factor-in-the-education-fertility-relationship-la-religion-comme-moderateur-de-la-relation-entre-niveau-dinstruction-et-fecondite/
Agriculture reduced genetic intelligence, height and athleticism. It nurtured the weak. It countered natural selection, which you Christians regard as the work of the Devil. Cro Magnons had the highest cognitive ability and our brain shrank thereafter. Under Christianity, scientific advancements of Greece and Rome were lost, only to be revived when rediscovered in Persia where ironically the Islamic Golden Age began.
Your audio is tiny. Please improve as it makes a difference to listenability during commutes.
you nazi fucks are deluded. you should kill yourselves.
If Origenes knew fathers pass their traits to the sons, why did he (allegedly) castrate himself? I am not joking: historically speaking, Early Christianity and Catholicism waste its best men in celibacy (e.g. Lemaître) while Jew and early protestant smartest men sire truckloads of son. Why, according to you, it depends on Christianity and not on worst environment conditions (e.g. roaming barbarians that kill all the stupid romans around)?
I like the thrust of this article but isn’t all sex procreative. I don’t see whether men used slaves for fun vs their wives would have any impact upon intelligence. The main issue is whether more intelligent people survived-and if there are strict rules about being monogamous in culture-those who don’t will not survive (hence increasing morality across the population over time).
A man’s chances of siring children do not reduce with the number of partners!
What might be a better descriptor of selection pressures encouraging intelligence, was the choice of who to marry-rarely did women get a say. They were chattel. But successful men would marry off daughters to other (more) successful men. Hence adding selection pressure to intelligence criteria (of successful men to other successful men).
Also, clever women would make better clothes/fishing nets/pots and prepare better for times of survival in general which also probably improved intelligence at a more basic level, earlier in history when we were hunter gatherers.
The graphs i think shown the selection pressures after lots of civilisations were wiped out by the ice age. I think we’ve been pretty advanced for far longer than the current school of thought.
This isn’t really to do with Christianity. It is to do with general selective pressures.
Since we now have monogamy (and not a tribal hareem with one alpha male) I would say the graph pretty much shows we are actually far far lea intelligent than we could be and have actually REDUCED out selective pressures on intelligence.
How much of this was due to the importing of northern genetics?