Q&A with Harpending and Cochran

MBlume

Edit: Q&A is now closed. Thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks very much to Harpending and Cochran for their responses.

In response to Kaj's review, Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran, the authors of the The 10,000 Year Explosion, have agreed to a Q&A session with the Less Wrong community.

If you have any questions for either Harpending or Cochran, please reply to this post with a question addressed to one or both of them. Material for questions might be derived from their blog for the book which includes stories about hunting animals in Africa with an eye towards evolutionary implications (which rose to Jennifer's attention based on Steve Sailer's prior attention).

Please do not kibitz in this Q&A... instead go to the kibitzing area to talk about the Q&A session itself. Eventually, this post will be edited to note that the process has been closed, at which time there should be no new questions.

Edit: Q&A is now closed. Thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks very much to Harpending and Cochran for their responses.

In response to Kaj's review, Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran, the authors of the The 10,000 Year Explosion, have agreed to a Q&A session with the Less Wrong community.

I thought RichardKennaway's previous comment was interesting, and would appreciate hearing your comments on it. Commenting on the hypothesis that life under the rule of others may have selected for submissiveness, he wrote:

On the other hand, submissiveness is surely selected against in rulers, who as noted in the posting leave more descendants than proles. So perhaps in a society in which the strong rule and the weak submit there is some evolutionarily stable distribution along a submissive/aggressive spectrum, rather than favouring one or the other?

I don't think it's correct to assume a pure strategy (ie each male is either dominant OR submissive). It might make more sense for males to be able to switch when the opportunity arises from submissive to dominant (a mixed strategy in game theory terms). I think outsider orang-utans can become alphas (adding the distinctive cheek-flaps etc) when they find a group that will let them join, for example.

We do see humans making the same transition (and in the other direction too) when they move between groups, and when opportunities arise.

13harpend16y

My feeling is that the dichotomy between societies where males are threatening and violent and societies where males are submissive and not threats to each other is the most interesting social dichotomy we have. In some societies where males are threats there is a clear alternative niche like the Berdache on the Great Plains. In urban ghettos with drug dealers and street corner males there is a significant set of males who hold down jobs and, often, bring the proceeds to support their matrifocal families. How much such males reproduce is not clear. A wonderful description of this, with a zany analysis, is (Sharff, J. W. (1981). Free enterprise and the ghetto family. Psychology Today, 15, 41-8.) There may well be stable distributions lurking in the social system but they are likely different everywhere: that for Bushmen would be quite different from that for Mundurucu. Rulers do not always leave more descendants than proles. I highly recommend Gregory Clark's "Farewell to Alms", in which he shows that the medieval ruling class in Britain essentially all killed each other and have no descendants today. On the other end peasants and laborers did not reproduce themselves, so almost everyone in the UK today is descended from the medieval gentry, prosperous merchants, and so on.

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