= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
taryneast comments on Of Gender and Rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (342)
Being able to learn and absorb written material allows a person to create more wealth. This is presumably why people go to school at all. Being able to accumulate more wealth as a result of learning allows a person to have increased reproductive fitness. So when you say "Access to better food, more sanitary living, less stress all indicate higher survival rates", these things could be the result of learning information. Like if you learned how to build something from a book that could improve your surrounding living conditions. Of course this could be highly variable depending on an individual person's evolutionary past.
Genes have been correlated with reading ability. http://www.physorg.com/news142091390.html I would imagine their could have been selection pressure on these genes in the recent past.
See here for more info. http://jmg.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/44/5/289
I think you may have your cause and effect backward here.
in the 1600's wealth is the cause of people going to school - not the other way around.
The vast majority of people had no access to schooling at all (unless they joined the clergy and thereby their line ended).
Accessible schooling is a very modern phenomenon.
You may thereby be confusing correlation with causation. Reading and wealth are correlated because the latter causes the former, rather than vice versa.
Genes are correlated with reading simply because wealth is correlated with the ability to multiply and support many descendants. Therefore we should not be surprised that reading correlates with genes, any more than that there is likely a correlation between genes and wearing expensive, fashionable clothing.