= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
blogospheroid comments on This Failing Earth - 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 (158)
And you shouldn't, too. Ancient India tried both intelligence and warriors, infact it tried a 4-fold caste system.
It might have worked for a while, and probably did. Indian monuments and works of art, literature and philosophy from that period are good. Faith differences were resolved by dialogue and not by the sword. Trade happened with Egypt and China. Damascus steel originated actually in India. Surgeries took place and the traditional texts prescribed rituals for 120 yrs of life.
And some where in the past, entropy took over. Too many different tribes with different ideas came and the system could not handle them. Education became the ability to articulate properly the texts that were already in place and little new knowledge was added. The prosperity that was previously present was lost, slowly, but surely.
<Edited for formatting list>
They were doing deliberate breeding with a notion of heredity? Or just segregation by job into union-castes? There's a big difference.
Nearly everyone was doing that.
Eugenics always plays at sophistication, but it's rooted in very old (false) folk intuitions.
I hope I understood your question correctly..
Defenders of the caste system say that the system began just as job segregation, but that doesn't explain the endogamy that is prevalent in the system.
A majority of the people in India still have issues in marrying outside their caste.
The breeding may not have been deliberate as in blood type matching, but the duties of every caste and how a person matched the ideals of his caste were factors in deciding marriage.
Brahmins give their daughters away in marriage to learned pundits. Kshatriyas gave their daughters away in marriage to soldiers who achieved victories and kings who had territory. Vaishyas gave their daughters away in marriage to rich merchants and so on..
Deliberate notion of heridity, yes I think that is true. We match for the patrilineal and matrilineal lineage and avoid marriage with someone who is of the same patrilineal lineage for more than 3 generations and matrilineal for 1 generation.
But this isn't enough to say that India was "doing eugenics". Eugenics involves a conscious effort to ensure that people with "the desired traits" produce more children than other people. Did that occur?
Interesting question - Probably only in the kshatriya caste where polygyny was practiced. Not so in the other castes.
OK, so India shows us one way which doesn't work so well. What should we make of other examples?
I'm sure everyone here has read at least a little about the Ashkenazi researches. What did the Jewish ghettos get right? Was the selection pressure too weak in Indian society in general? Or was shooting for multiple targets a bad thing - maybe the Sudras mixed too much with Brahmins and the net effect was nil.
Respectfully, you're making a very big assumption there - that anything at all was "got right".
Before concluding that the eugenic forces the molded the Ashkenazi were beneficial, you should ask yourself: What did they lose?
It's very rare indeed that a population-level genetic change can take place without some tradeoffs being made.
(Well, maybe I overestimated how much people know about the Ashkenazi.)
What they got was a ridiculously high average IQ (I've seen between 120 and 130). What the population paid for this was a ridiculously high rate of diseases related to the central nervous system.
List formatting help