= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RomeoStevens comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - 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 (214)
I don't think 'epigenetic' means what you think it means. But anyway: yes, there is anthropological evidence of that sort (covered in Pinker's Better Angels and in something of Diamond's, IIRC), and height and mortality are generally believed to correlate with health and presumably then to IQ.
The problem with that is that that is a problem for all theories of civilization formation: if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
So, suppose it takes less IQ to maintain a basic civilization than to start one from scratch (as I already suggested in my Africa example), and suppose civilization has some sort of self-reinforcing property where it will force itself to remain in existence even when superior alternatives exist (as it seems it must, factually, given the poorer health of early farmers/civilizationers compared to hunter-gatherers sans civilization).
Then what happened was: over a very long period of time hunter-gatherers slowly accumulated knowledge or tools and IQs rose from better food or perhaps sexual selection or whatever, until finally relatively simultaneously multiple civilizations arose in multiple regions, whereupon the farmer effect reduced their IQ but not enough to overcome the self-sustaining-civilization effect. And then history began.
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often 'go native'?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
Uh, going native is exactly what the vein of thought is predicting. The question is not why did some go native, but why didn't all the rest?
An old suggestion, but just as old is the point that civilizations routinely fail at military matters: it's a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
That does happen a lot, but the barbarians in question tend to be nomadic pastoralists, very rarely foragers. About the only exceptions I can think of happened in immediately post-contact North America, and that was a fantastically turbulent time culturally -- between the introduction of horses and 90+% of the initial population getting wiped out by disease, pretty much everything would likely have been up for grabs.
I don't know offhand how healthy or long-lived pastoralist cultures tended to be by comparison with sedentary agriculturalists. I do know that they generally fell somewhere between foragers and agriculturalists in terms of sustainable population density.
Insufficient opportunity and brainwashing.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake. They are self limiting.
What civilization-wide infrastructure did the Mongols destroy in the process of creating the greatest land empire in history which then doomed them and limited their spread?
The mongols were emphatically not barbarians, they introduced systems that were in most cases improvements over what they destroyed.
I suspect the connotations of "barbarian" are getting in the way here. The Mongols were highly mobile pastoralists and raiders; this did not get in the way of setting up sophisticated and creative institutions. (Nor did the latter undo the considerable net loss in poulation and extent of cultivation that accompanied the Mongol conquests.)
I think this is basically correct, but I'd express it in terms of cultural inertia rather than brainwashing. It's not (usually) part of a planned campaign of retention, it's just that learning a completely different culture and language and set of survival skills is a huge risk and would take a huge amount of effort: it might be attractive in marginal cases, but most people would likely feel they had too much to lose. Particularly if the relationship between the cultures is already adversarial.