From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 09:40:03 MDT
At 10:57 AM 9/23/02 -0400, gts wrote:
>At 08:14 PM 9/22/2002 -0700, spike:
>began pondering mechanisms which would explain
>why humans may evolve more quickly than similar
>apes.>>
>Antioxidants help to protect DNA
>from mutation. This leads to a novel theory of why humans evolve faster
>than apes
What's all this about humans evolving faster than other apes? Where's the
molecular biological evidence for this? You mean apes must evolve slower
because they don't drive cars? I'm not saying humans *don't* evolve faster
than apes (and incredibly slower than bacteria and other higher forms of
life than us), I'd just like to see the lab evidence, is all.
I also note that Spike's original observations of dumb & dumber down-home
flagrantly conflates a possible genetic leaching with a quite palpable
cultural denudation. If you stranded any bunch of kids in a waste land,
they'd fall behind the ones in the kool skools.
Oh no, everyone yawns, another PC rant. Not so. Consider two paragraphs
from MAPPING HUMAN HISTORY by Steve Olson (Bloomsbury, 2002):
< When researchers tracked down the children born to German mothers and US
soldiers during the Allied occupation of German in WWII they found no
difference in the IQ scores of children with African-American versus
European-American fathers.
< Minorities in many countries score lower on IQ tests than do the
majorities, regardless of their ancestry. An example is the Buraku of
Japan, a minority that is severely discriminated against in housing,
education, and employment. Their children typically score 10 to 15 points
below other Japanese children on IQ tests. Yet when the Buraku immigrate to
other countries, the IQ gap between them and other Japanese gradually
vanishes. >
Yes, there are possible escape clauses. Only the smart Buraku, say, have
the fire & grit to get up and go. It takes time, so they are getting extra
IQ points by infusion from outsiders. Both the black and white soldiers in
Germany who fathered children were the ones (let's imagine) too stupid or
too lacking in impulse control to use condoms, so all their kids are
equally dumb. (In fact I don't know what the figures are; I rather doubt
that interpretation, someone would have mentioned it by now.) I think the
explanation is rather more obvious.
The converse is even more plausible: isolate people in a dispirited waste
land and the smartest (and maybe the baddest) kids will escape, while the
stay-at-homes live lives of quiet desperation. That doesn't mean the magic
IQ genes have escaped. Polygenic traits like intelligence exhibit
regression to the mean. Stupid people have smarter kids, smart people have
stupider kids. Despite the jokes, it is *not* the case that Jews have
average IQs three or 30 times higher than Catholic Irish, even though for
many, many generations the smart kids become rabbis or priests, the former
highly fertile, the latter (at least in principle) celibate.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:14 MST