This scenario makes a lot more sense than Rasmus Nielsen's notion that Tibetans adapted to high altitude in less than 3,000 years, which I never believed. Reminds me of the line in Dirty Harry where Callahan says that anybody could tell that he hadn’t beaten up Scorpio: “Because he looks too damn good, that’s how!”

The Tibetans deal with high altitude much more effectively than the Amerindians of the Altiplano. You have to think that they’ve lived there longer, been exposed to those selective pressures longer – and that’s quite feasible. Anatomically modern humans have been in Asia much longer than in the Americas, and it’s even possible that they picked up some adaptive altitude-adaptation genes from archaic humans that had been there for hundreds of thousands of years.

There’s another interesting point: the hunter-gatherers of Tibet appear to account for a lot of Tibetan ancestry, probably most of it, rather than than being almost entirely replaced by a wave of neolithic agriculturalists, which is the more common pattern. They had a trump card – altitude adaptation. A story like that which has left Bolivia mostly Amerindian.

It is easy to see, in retrospect, how the social and institutional environment selected for the changes that Clark describes. Higher reproductive fitness of the wealthier led to pervasive downward social mobility so that today the English are descended from the Medieval gentry. How did one enter the gentry? Save some money. With interest rates pushing 10% any savings at all would quickly accumulate. This paid because there were enforceable contracts, courts, and such mitigating risk. A ruthless constabulary and judicial system selected against the violence prone, of course, as well as those with high time preference. Debtors’ prisons for goodness sake.

Clark’s thesis is no less than that this environment bred a new version of humans by selection. This is absolutely revolutionary in the current climate yet it has slipped right past the self-righteous chatterers that have crucified Jason Richwine.

In an important article Peter Frost describes essentially the same process in the Roman Empire with its Pax Romana. Here again a central government with courts and constabulary shaped a new version of human who was peaceful and law abiding and worked hard. Frost also describes the reaction of this new version of human to the Barbarian invasions:

Nonetheless, when Rome faltered in the fifth century it did so as never before. Earlier, the third century had seen a similar crisis: civil war, foreign invasion, return of brigandage, and steep economic decline. Yet Rome fought its way back and reasserted its authority. There was no such response in the fifth century. Instead, the crisis was met with a strange mixture of complacency and willful naiveté.

We cannot understand this change without considering the ideology that now shaped the Roman worldview, i.e., all humans share the same potential for peaceful and submissive behavior. This was largely true among the pacified populations inside the empire’s borders. Outside, it was largely false. Tragically so.

Thinking about the response of the pacified and submission Roman population to barbarian invaders immediately brings to mind the response of contemporary North Americans and Atlantic Europeans to barbarian invaders. It reads just the same: “welcome new neighbor!”

What about the Eastern empire? They kept the barbarians out for a few centuries longer in the European half, but accounts of the loss of the Asian provinces show the Clark/Frost pattern, a pacified submissive population hardly contesting the invasion of Islam (Jenkins 2008, 2010). The new neighbors simply walked in and took over. The downfall of the Western Roman empire reads much like the downfall of the Asian and North African parts of the empire. It is certainly no accident that the Asian provinces were the heartland of Christianity.

This all brings up an interesting question: what happened in East Asia over the same period? No one to my knowledge has traced parallels with the European and Roman experience in Japan or China. Is the different East Asian trajectory related to the East Asian reluctance to roll over, wag their tails, and welcome new barbarian neighbors?

REFERENCES

Phillip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, And Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe For The Next 1,500 Years, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010. 328 pages.

Phillip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008.

In the second stage, the infected cicadas produce a mass of diploid resting spores, that fall to the ground and wait 17 years for the next set of victims.

The arboreal marriage issue, like many other contemporary issues, is not burdened with data. Writers are free to let their imaginations go free. But other issues are blessed with data, and one would assume that the first obligation of a pundit would be to learn the data, perhaps even learn the science. The recent kerfluffle over Jason Richwine’s dissertation, where there are data and where the pundits have not a clue about it, is a shame and disgrace for both journalists and those who publish them.

IQ test scores as well as achievement indicators of all kinds are well known, easy to check out for oneself. There is almost no controversy about any of it because there is arguing with test scores nor incarceration statistics. Ron Unz valiantly tried several years ago, and his arguments were pretty well demolished.

What we see from the paper talkers instead is a lot of name calling and snark. Those people are, almost all of them, so ignorant that they have no clue about data, they are also so ignorant that they do not understand how useless they themselves are. Shame? Never heard of it. To them, blather about arboreal marriage is not different from blather about Hispanic IQ.

IQ differences among groups are well known, well established, and not very interesting IMHO. OTOH there are interesting things out there that deserve focus for thoughtful people. Here is one:

Given the density of twaddle that is published about poverty and health, why do US Hispanics live on average two and a half years longer than US Anglos? The chatterers have no interest in this, and amazingly neither do sociologists and the ilk at my university. It just isn’t in their domain. Perhaps this health difference is a hate fact?

Henry is willing to give the occasional talk for free, as part of his public education mission. I am willing to give talks for money or some close approximation thereof.

if you have a puzzle that no one’s been able to solve, I might take a stab at it – for $$. Particularly if it falls into one my areas of expertise – algorithm development, signal processing, image recovery, adaptive optics, simulations, strategic analysis, and genetics (creating super-Neanderthals, for example). Among other things.

Some T-shirts are still available.

If you’d like to see something different on this blog, this is the time to suggest it. The odds are that I won’t do it, but you never know.

P.S. Bitcoin address is 1JayHvhHCRG4RTAV87EiETy4Vnwp66Q74q

P.P.S. You can transfer frequent flier miles to my Delta SkyMiles Account: 2645857695.

P.P.P.S. there must be other ways of transmitting pseudo-valuta that haven’t occurred to me. Game gold in WOW? Gift cards? Barter?

Modern industrialized societies are failing on all three counts. Every population that can make a decent cuckoo clock has below-replacement fertility. The demographic pattern also selects against intelligence, something like one IQ point a generation. And, even if people at every level of intelligence had the same number of children, so that there was no selection against IQ, we would still be getting more and messed up, because there’s not enough selection going on to counter ongoing mutations.

It is possible that some country, or countries, will change in a way that avoids civilizational collapse. I doubt if this will happen by voluntary action. Some sort of technological solution might also arise – but it has to be soon.

The question is why anyone – let alone society as a whole – takes the whole idea seriously – acts as if they are in some sense really women. There are lots of differences in how the female brain develops and is wired – castration isn’t going to fix that. You’d need nanosurgery, and that probably wouldn’t be enough. More like rolling the clock back and starting over from conception.

Deirdre McCloskey isn’t a woman: wishing can’t make it so, not even wishing and flashing scalpels. Neither is Joan Roughgarden.

What they are is crazy. Darwinian madness: a behavior pattern that never works, or more exactly, never worked in past environments. You can make some sense of psychiatry if you think in terms of Darwinian illness, but of course psychiatrists haven’t done that and don’t show much interest in doing so, which is why the DSM is completely incoherent. I mean, they think homosexuality isn’t a disorder: talk about silly!

Recently, Y.-H. Percival Zhang and colleagues demonstrated a method of converting cellulose into starch and glucose. Zhang thinks that it can be scaled up into an effective industrial process, one that could produce a thousand calories of starch for less than a dollar from cellulosic waste. This would be a good thing. It’s not just that are 7 billion people – the problem is that we have hardly any food reserves (about 74 days at last report). The usual assumption is that any drought or blight would be local, but that isn’t necessarily so. We might have another Tambora-style eruption, or an asteroid big enough to generate tidal waves and kick up a lot of dust – or wheat rust might get out of control.

If this works, we might have a reserve in hand. At least until the population runs up to the new Malthusian limit.

European honeybees are half-tame, probably because beekeepers selected for lower levels of aggressiveness. People collect honey from African honey bees, but have never domesticated them, so the optimal strategy for African honey bees is to go down fighting. Which they do: they’ll chase you for a mile once they get their dander up.

This has probably been going on for a long, long, time. It may well go back before anatomically modern humans. I say that because of the greater honeyguide, which guides people to beehives in Africa. After we take the honey, the honeyguide eats the grubs and wax. A guiding bird attracts your attention with wavering, chattering ‘tya’ notes compounded with peeps and pipes. It flies towards an occupied hive and then stops and calls again. It has only been seen to guide humans.

I would not be surprised to find that this symbiotic relationship is far older than the the domestication of dogs. But it is not domestication: we certainly don’t control their reproduction. I wouldn’t count on it, but if you could determine the genetic basis of this signaling behavior, you might be able to get an idea of how old it is.

Honeyguides may be mankind’s oldest buds, but they’re nasty little creatures: brood parasites, like cuckoos.