<<I believe that as advanced education spreads world wide, that different nationalities and mixes will appear in somewhat disproportionate numbers among the most successful practitioners.>>
||Successful how?||
I guess I mean the reverse, that certain cultural groups will be over-represented in various specialties (but the inverse is necessarily true as well)-- particularly those who (1) live near the most outstanding centers of advanced deducation and research; and (2) place extraordinary emphasis on education and upward mobility of their children. An
<<Generations of selection for abstraction, scholarship, memorization, philosophy will
concentrate whatever alleles there are associated with the particular trait, and it could
work rather quickly.>>
||Who, and when, was decided the selection should be for these mental characteristics?||
Primarily physical environment, especially weather must have selected Polynesians for survival. The really stupid, slow-to-decide, weakly, skinny one must have disproportionately perished in long ocean voyages. Predators (such as crusaders, inquisitors, Romans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, etc.) may have started selecting Hebrews for survival. As Nietszche pointed out "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger."
|Generations..quickly? Is this not contradicting?|
With respect to speed of adaptation, with only a few children per unit, really dysfunctional dominant alleles can get bred out of a stock in a few generations.
<< I think it is clear that the human population is becoming more varied, with links being
built between different subpopulations, rather than more divided.>>
|Varied, yes. Divided, yes: making the selections above, making some arbitrarily successful as above, these divide us.
The problems of earth seem to me to be less the use of our tools over the environment,
than our lack of willingness to cooperate with each other.|
I certainly agree with that. But I am astounded at the contrast of the relationships between people in a highly varied population like Hawaii's. Commonalities of experience and especially education permit personal affinities between people of different races, cultures, and religion. Diverse people who grow up together in school or go to the same college are much more likely to mate than to discriminate against each other. I know an Liberian-born publisher married to an Iranian psychiatrist who bore a near genius kid who had the economic opportunity to obtain a truly great education and is doing something with it. I could give you many examples of "successful kids" if I had the patience. I don't contend that the mixing of stocks is the principal cause of the kids' success, but combined with a supportive environment and many examples of success of hard studying kids of all origins, I think the results are great --- many of them have extraordinary intercultural charm and widely appealing beauty too.
|Sorry about seeming short and arguementative; I do appreciate your posts.| No problem. Thanks for the interest.
During the great dispersion from Africa, some tribes seem to move very rapidly to extreme places -- such as Southern South America, South Africa, Australia, Polynesia, the Arctic (they arrived (or ran out of places to migrate) at different times). Selection probably adapted them physically and mentally both to migration and to their particular destination environments. Australian aboriginals have some of the heat control blood circulation adaptations to cold that Inuit have, and most others don't. The cultural (learned) adaptations no doubt were even greater, and many formerly known technologies must have been lost. |
