I dedicate this post to DaShi with his adorable HBD=racialist=racist meme.
Nicholas Wade has been fighting the good fight against disinformation regarding human biological diversity for some time now. I feel sympathy for him, no matter how much he tries to educate people the readers of the NYT have ideological blinding glasses that will prevent them from connecting the dots.
Adventures in Very Recent Evolution
I've skipped the other parts he mentiones like Tibetan adaptations, spread of genes that help counteract alcoholism, the different genetic mechanism for light colored skin in Europeans vs. Asians,... since I've already talked about them extensively in the past few months here.
For the past few years the trend in science is very much pro HBD. Its turning into a veritable tsunami. I can't help but feel that by 2020 we'll have gone a quiet revolution in thinking with current and past Blank Slatists by then claiming they said this all along.
Some of you are thinking or planning to say "so what? I don't see anything about intelligence that you seem obsessed with." I say wait a little longer for the Chinese study.
And even if they don't exist. LOL. Do you really fail to see how for example something like variation among populations in their susceptibility to alcoholism could affect outcomes and crime rates? Intelligence may well [unlikely in my opinion] prove to be perfectly distributed equally but there are already dozens of proven trait variations among ethnicites/populations/races that affect economic success and behavior. Perfect egalitarianism is dead, long live diversity!
BTW The NYT has come a long way since publishing people like Gould
Nicholas Wade has been fighting the good fight against disinformation regarding human biological diversity for some time now. I feel sympathy for him, no matter how much he tries to educate people the readers of the NYT have ideological blinding glasses that will prevent them from connecting the dots.
Adventures in Very Recent Evolution
From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.
But the new evidence that humans have adapted rapidly and extensively suggests that natural selection must have other options for changing a trait besides waiting for the right mutation to show up. In an article in Current Biology in February, Dr. Pritchard suggested that a lot of natural selection may take place through what he called soft sweeps.
Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.
One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.
One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.
Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.
Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.
Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.
For the past few years the trend in science is very much pro HBD. Its turning into a veritable tsunami. I can't help but feel that by 2020 we'll have gone a quiet revolution in thinking with current and past Blank Slatists by then claiming they said this all along.
Some of you are thinking or planning to say "so what? I don't see anything about intelligence that you seem obsessed with." I say wait a little longer for the Chinese study.
And even if they don't exist. LOL. Do you really fail to see how for example something like variation among populations in their susceptibility to alcoholism could affect outcomes and crime rates? Intelligence may well [unlikely in my opinion] prove to be perfectly distributed equally but there are already dozens of proven trait variations among ethnicites/populations/races that affect economic success and behavior. Perfect egalitarianism is dead, long live diversity!
BTW The NYT has come a long way since publishing people like Gould
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