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fubarobfusco comments on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December - Less Wrong Discussion
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Given that various mental disorders are heritable, it's not clearly impossible for psychological properties to be selected for.
However, unlike dark or light skin (which matters for dealing with sunlight or the lack of it), mental ability is generally useful for survival and success in all climates and regions of the world. Every physical and social setting has problems to figure out; friendships and relationships to negotiate; language to acquire; mates to charm; rivals to overcome or pacify; resources that can be acquired through negotiation, deception, or wit; and so on. This means that all human populations will be subject to some selection pressure for mental ability; whereas with skin color there are pressures in opposite directions in different climates.
So why is this such a troublesome subject?
The problem with the subject is that there's an ugly history behind it — of people trying to explain away historical conditions (like "who conquered whom" or "who is richer than whom") in terms of psychological variation. And this, in turn, has been used as a way of justifying treating people badly ... historically, sometimes very badly indeed.
Classifications don't exist for themselves; they exist in order for people to do things with them. People don't go around classifying things (or people) and then not doing anything with the classification. But sometimes people make particular classifications in order to do horrible things, or to convince other people to do horrible things.
"Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors, and never invite them round to dinner." —Douglas Adams
There is a tradeoff between energy consumption and intelligence (where the optimum has moved toward a focus on intelligence with our species). Your second paragraph doesn't eliminate the possibility that this optimum might have landed at different points in different ancient locations.
The fact that selection pressure for mental ability is everywhere present is an excellent point; thanks. As to why it's a troublesome subject, I always maintain "If there is a quantitative difference, I sure as hell hope we never find it."
I think that'd lead to some pretty unfortunate stuff.
Even though intelligence helps everywhere,* both the benefit and cost from increased intelligence can vary. For example, brains consume quite a bit of calories--and turn them into heat. Everyone is going to have to pay the caloric cost of powering the brain, but the cooling cost of keeping the brain at a healthy temperature is going to vary with climate. Foresight is going to be more useful the more variable local food availability is.
* Well, actually, this should be poked at. The relationship between intelligence and reproductive success could easily be nonlinear, even among early hunter-gatherers and farmers. It's not genetically favored to be smart enough to outwit one's genes! (The effects of widespread female education and careers are too recent to be relevant for this conversation.)
? We can already measure intelligence, and have good estimates of heritability from cross-generational intelligence testing. We've found the quantitative difference. All that's left to find out is how it works under the hood, which is knowledge we could use to re-engineer things to make them better. Why stop at discovering that piece?
You may want to practice reciting the litany of Gendlin.
So have false beliefs about equality.
It's far from clear that it's "false beliefs about equality" that were responsible for the massacres committed by the communist states you refer to.
And given the context, it's maybe also worth pointing out that the communists' distinctive "beliefs about equality" were not beliefs about racial equality[1], or beliefs about equality of intelligence[2], so bringing them up here is something of a red herring.
[1] E.g., under the Khmer Rouge, you really didn't want to be ethnic Chinese.
[2] Opinions on that point in, e.g., the USSR seem to have been highly variable.
Did Khmer Rouge really care about ethnicity, or that was just a convenient marker for a particular social class?
Taboo 'care'. They did kill people just for looking Chinese.
That doesn't change much, I can taboo "care" easily enough. Did they kill all Chinese-looking people because looking Chinese was an imprecise but a good-enough marker for a particular socio-economic group?
It looks to me as if they really cared about ethnicity, but I'm far from being an expert and could be wrong. The case seems to be clearer for the Vietnamese than for the Chinese.
Evidence that that was why they did what they did?
[EDITED to add: Also: if this is meant to be an example of an atrocity arising from a "false belief about equality": evidence that in fact the Chinese were better off than the Khmer on account of racial inequality?]
That's ... rather broad. Can you point to some specific thing indicating that the Khmer Rouge did what they did for reasons that resemble the ones you described?
Thank you for alerting me to an interesting phenomenon of which I was not previously aware. On the face of it there are other explanations besides racial superiority; for instance, different social traditions can make one group succeed "against" another without anyone being better than anyone else (example: consider a toy model in which people have prisoner's-dilemma-type interactions; one group, the "natives", plays always cooperate and does very nicely until another group, the "immigrants", comes along and plays cooperate with other immigrants, defect against natives and thereby outcompetes the natives by being slightly meaner and slightly more prejudiced). Is there an obvious reason why the racial-superiority explanation should be preferred?
We do know the average IQs of the populations involved.
Mine was a little ill-thought out comment.