Does Bad Karma Have an Expiration Date?

One single example of a family of foxes who breed domesticable offspring is enough to give the lie to the previously "established fact" that foxes cannot be bred to be tame.

After the initial demonstration, further experiment is needed, but without it, no experiment would be tried. The same as every other advancement in science.

How then is this "not science"?

Clifford Heath.

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Duh! I'm talking about the "studies" you cite. Rather than actual paper s that properly describe what was done, how it was done and the detailed re sults, these reports have no value. Your analysis is exactly why the repor ts are considered "junk" science. You attribute the changes to the behavio rs of the foxes to "selection" when there is no evidence this is actually c orrect. That's the "junk" part of your post.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say. Initially it was claimed to be pr oof that tameness can be "selected" for by human selection. I never said t he study was not scientific. My only point is that the reports you are usi ng to show the "science" of the study are a magazine article and a TV show.

I maintain that this does not provide enough information to determine if th e study does what you claim or not. I've already pointed out two potential issues what were not addressed in the reports.

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  Rick C. 

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Sadly, what IQ measures isn't useful intelligence, but rather the capacity to soak up instruction, and churn it out on exam papers.

China has a got a particularly dire writing system, which makes it hard to get literate, and hard to stay literate.

Europeans have alphabetic writing systems, which align better with what the human brain can do.

In Africa reading and writing has been confined to the upper classes until quite recently - as it was in Europe and china n ot all that long ago.

Or rather literacy.

Selecting for the people who can be persuaded to work hard on mastering a bad system. If there was any intelligence involved, they would have adopted an alphabetic writing system as soon as they ran into one.

The Koreans actually did that in 1446, having imported linguists from south India to create the alphabet. They seem to have adopted it officially in 1894.

Taking IQ as measure of general intelligence, as opposed to a quick and dirty way of finding out who is likely to make a competent clerk, should make anybody uncomfortable.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Sounds like an experiment that can't be conducted without impacting the

Just so. But too many people nowadays equate "science" with "my prediliction".

Sigh.

The experiment has been running since the 50s, and is well documented. I merely provided a link to a result of 30s googling. No, I am not going to spend more of my life trying to get you to change your mind.

Having said that, it is good to see you backtracking a little.

It's not science unless the study was conducted correctly. Is that really so hard to understand?

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No back tracking at all, just your mistaken impression of what I said, just like you apparent misunderstanding of the fox study. Not only have you no t provided any evidence this study was remotely rigorous, you haven't even claimed to have seen any other material than the article and a TV show, bot h of which will be the opposite of rigorous since their purpose is entertai nment.

Claim busted!

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  Rick C. 

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Huh? OK I'm talking about 'smarts' as measured by IQ, SAT, ACT and other 'intelligence tests' I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but there is some clear correlation between whatever IQ tests measure and academic success, and to a smaller degree monetary success. I guess the simplest answer is whatever colleges and universities use to select students.

(This isn't meant as any sort of criticism of you, but there seems to be this tendency within the left, to ignore science when it comes to 'identity politics'. That we all have to be equal, there are no genetic differences, and it's all nurture... what a pile of horse hockey.)

Hmm, let's leave T out of it.

Civilizations, don't just need manual labors. They need people for all types of jobs that need 'smarts'. (It's seems a little pedantic to start listing them all...) So these people are attracted to the cities where they can use their skill and get paid more. Now I've got (on average) some smarter, more successful people living together in cities. What happens next is they have kids. And smart parents have smart kids.. (IQ or whatever you want to call it is ~50% heritable.)

Rinse and repeat for ~100's of generations and maybe the overall IQ goes up a few points. (Maybe this is not true, it's just an idea.)

Clifford, I don't think you live in the US is that right? Regardless, I've got a book recommendation. "Coming Apart", but Charles Murray.. It's an interesting idea... and to bring it back to the current day does help to understand our current political situation.

Yeah I don't know. I'm not sure I have to 'think rationally' with all parts of my brain. I don't believe in God, but I try to live my life as if there is one. Does that mean I'm deceiving myself? (maybe)

George H.

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You have talked about "smart" people migrating to the cities and making mor e money, but you have not tied it to reproductive rates. That is how natur al selection works, but making one part of the population more likely to pr ocreate successfully. What you have left out is that there is a significan t factor that as populations improve in economic status they have fewer chi ldren by choice. That rather skews the impact of your armchair analysis.

--

  Rick C. 

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Yeah, I don't trust them. There are too many cultural aspects to intelligence, nurture/nature factors, and monetary success is an even worse indicator. Just very hard to unravel.

Ability to pay fees and not damage reputations.

That doesn't create a gradient. Smart people might have smart kids, but not (on average) smarter kids.

100 years ago, 99% of Americans lived in farming areas, and 1% in cities. Now, it's the exact opposite. Pretty tricky to gauge any effect on genetics on data hidden inside such a massive shift.

I also have a very strong sense of living truthfully; doing only those things I would feel able to justify publicly without shame, as if all will actually be revealed. Perhaps that was my church-school upbringing, perhaps it's just integrity. Perhaps it was being excluded from every clique at school, so I had to find my self-worth internally, not from tribal impulses. It also made me hate the abuse of power, so I'm anti-tribal.

Most people are intensely, deeply tribal, and blissfully unaware of that. Whether they're religious or not, that's also self-deception. We like to think we're rational, but we're not. Religion just introduces the need for an even more difficult-to-construct set of stories.

Clifford Heath.

Chimpanzees tend to get annoyed when they get fed a slice of cucumber while their neighbor gets a bunch of grapes for doing the same task, human voters seem to often go for "trickle down grapes" in economics routinely without getting miffed at all but it's doubtful an "advanced concept" like that would fly with other primate societies. Not having the benefit of language makes lying harder, too.

I told the stupid monkey you get cucumbers for now but the grapes will trickle down! he threw poop at me, anyway! How uncivilized

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nts.

The operative word here is "some".

The academic process tests for smarts by having the students study material for a few years, then gets the students to write essays and sit exams wher e they can exhibit what they have learned.

IQ tests have no preparation, and don't take long to do or to mark. They ar e a lot cheaper than the full academic process, but a lot less reliable.

Steven Pinker wrote a book about it

I thought it was a bit silly - the political proposition is that everybody should be seen as having the same potential, but everybody knows that peopl e aren't created equal, and you start taking different capabilities into ac count as soon as you know enough about individual to know what their capabi lities are.

Some political rhetoric has been known to oversimplify this proposition, bu t it didn't strike me as worth writing a book about. Pinker and his publish er thought differently. It isn't his best-selling book.

"Like Eriksen, Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker, also claimed that Pinker's arguments constituted a strawman fallacy, stating "[m]any pages of 'The Blank Slate' are devoted to bashing away at the Lockean-Rousseauian-C artesian scarecrow that Pinker has created."

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De-electing him would seem to be a necessary part of that.

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Charles Murray writes a lot of right-wing political propaganda. He can be r elied on to be selective in his use of evidence, to put it kindly.

makes the point that thinking rationally is an expensive and time-consuming luxury. We do have to do it from time to time to audit what our quick and dirty algorithms are doing, but it's too slow to handle all the decisions t hat we have to make.

Clearly you are. But it leads to rationally defensible behaviour (most of t he time). You do have to think again when you find yourself advocating the incineration of heretics.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Actually, they do, but there is a regression to the mean, and a lot of vari ability between kids even when they have both parents in common.

There seem to be thousands - probably tens of thousands - heritable genetic differences involved, each one with with a very small effect.

If there was a lot of effect on reproductive success, the system would conv erge on a particular recipe quite fast. Some areas of the modern human geno me do seem to be evolving fast - there's a recent Finnish study - but they saw social virtues, rather than cleverness, as the trait being selected.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

snipped-for-privacy@decadence.org wrote in news:qh6qsc$1p1t$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

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I cannot believe that you all did not include this in your discussions.

No, I mean population average. Two smart people might have a smarter kid, but if each bred with an average person, you're likely to get more IQ points overall, if you see what I mean. So it doesn't move the population average. What could do that is if the smarter kid is more successful in breeding, but that doesn't seem likely. Rather the opposite in fact.

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variability between kids even when they have both parents in common.

I don't think that you have thought this through. If there isn't any select ion going on, shuffling the genes isn't going to make any difference to the population.

Smarter people are better placed to take care of their kids, so there's lik ely to be some positive selection there.

Smarter people may get un-intentionally pregnant less often, which would de crease their representation in the next generation, but dumber people are l ess attractive marriage partners, and don't look after their kids as well w hich probably leads them to be under-represented to a greater extent.

There are ways of working out which bits of the genome are subject to selec tive pressure - there's less variability around favoured genes - and while the most vigorous selection that is visible is for genes that favour resist ance to selective diseases, the Finnish study I referred to - a reference w hich you have snipped without marking the snip - did talk about genes assoc iated with social virtues.

Making non-evidence-based assertions isn't a social virtue. Backing them up by text-chopping, even less so.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Thinking that living in a way that maintains self respect is deluded is clearly weird.

It was George's suggestion that smarter people interbreeding make the population smarter. I was the one who pointed out the need for selection pressure, wherever that comes from.

My observation is that many smarter people are often making the decision not to breed at all.

NT's strategies for maintaining his self-respect are even weirder.

He does come across as depressingly gullible, and the stuff he chooses to believe can't be good for his health.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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lection going on, shuffling the genes isn't going to make any difference to the population.

likely to be some positive selection there.

And many dumb people don't manage it either. Without statistics this doesn' t mean anything at all.

As usual, you have snipped the text where I pointed out that whole genome s tudies let you see which bits of the genome have recently be subjected to signifcant selection. You do need lots of whole genome studies to do this a nd sophisticated statistical analysis, which does seem to be above your pay grade, but if you snip stuff like that you ought to mark the snip.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney