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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (205402)	10/8/2006 3:26:09 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

CB, quite right that within a small community, there is mixing of personality genes, but even there, there is difference, just as there are tall families and short ones. It's in the nature of self-selection. But on a geographically large scale, such as those required for different linguistic development, I would be very, very surprised to find particular personality DNA to be the same average level in the two populations and absurdly ridiculously unlikely in all populations. Just as intelligence DNA, which is a very measurable trait, varies from population to population, I am sure that personality DNA does too. Heck, you only have to listen to the old joke about having Germans, Italians, French, English in charge of army, cooking, love and bureaucracy to know it's true. Regarding your previous point, which I had overlooked by misreading on a too-casual read first time around, that natural human variation 10,000 years ago and now is so great that you could get the same traits then as now, and which I tried to explain with my probabilistic comment. In case you missed what I meant, [which seems likely when I re-read my hurried probabilistic explanation], the whole point of my comments was that you could find 100 people with the DNA essential to make an Einstein if it was all added together in one person, but because the replication and combination and filtration processes had still to run 10,000 years to get sufficient of it filling a community to combine into one person, we didn't get the actual Einstein until now. Even if the whole 100 DNAs were miraculously combined into somebody way back then, there was so little of it in the surrounding subsistence hunter gatherer culturally bereft community that he wasn't going to do anything more than be just a bloke good at catching deer and killing the opposition by figuring out behaviour patterns a lot better and forming a good alliance. The individual aside though, the community does better or worse depending on how much of those good DNAs it has. Griffe du Lion's smart fraction theory. Communities with very little smart fraction do badly, those with lots do well. But as you say, you can still get from either community today equally capable people. Same for personality. Actually, I doubt that you can get an Einstein from an African population, or Inuit. The DNA might not even exist, having been killed off long ago, or perhaps it's still so fragmented it hasn't got together yet in one person. Ashkenazi Jews do seem to have a very disproportionate share of the right stuff. Maybe since Africans never moved, they lack the 'adventurer' gene necessary to set off into the wild blue yonder, such as over the Bering Straits or over to India then back to Israel and up to Germany, which might also be the gene which provides imagination to think of new things. DNA analysis is going to find a LOT of interesting history in humans. Some of it so recent that people will get surprises "I had no idea I had a grandfather from Siberia". Some seafarer happened by and ooops, a change in the family's DNA, which was never mentioned [the mother not finding it wise to explain that she had met a nice bloke briefly]. Mqurice