The correlation between divorce rate of adopted children and their biological parents was nearly identical to the parent-child divorce rate correlation of children raised by their biological parents. Any number of studies show similar findings. The likelihood of crime is a reflection of the biological parents tendency towards committing crime, not the adoptive parents.

The studies that show a correlation between fatherlessness and general degeneracy are probably measuring an inherited tendency towards poor future time orientation, irresponsibility and the effects of poverty to a lesser degree. A child usually becomes fatherless because either the mother is too socially maladjusted to keep the father in her life or because the father is a poor parent. In most cases, fatherless children are probably the result of two irresponsible parents.
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If r/K selection has any validity in human evolution, it will create a problem for studies that attempt to show a connection between paternal investment and child quality.
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What happens when children who are born with traits favoring parental investment are for some reason raised in unstable environments? ... there are a few studies of the lives of child holocaust survivors. Not only did they function in society, they were more successful than their Jewish peers. This is interesting because those children were taken away from both their mothers and fathers and given the most negative possible substitute for a parent.

I am guessing that involvement of a father in a child's life has a very marginal effect on a child's success in life.

corwyn_ap

krustad

First, it is important to mention that nobody sees homosexual men among hunter-gatherers, the groups whose way of life is thought to most closely resemble the general evolutionary past of the human race. (Patri: this is compatible with the virus theory, as viruses are population-size-dependent and different viruses exist in cities than small tribes, but not compatible with the helpful uncle theory).

Second, this idea that homosexual men somehow paid their evolutionary way by helping others in the tribe raise children is bullshit, because they don't do any such thing in any society. If they were something like worker bees, if helping others raise their kids were their particular evolutionary strategy, they would have a strong impulse in that direction, and they'd do it a lot. They would always have done it, they'd practically always _be_ doing it. . It'd be as obvious as mother love - but it doesn't exist.

Third, how on Earth would homosexuality help? Being neuter might - it works for bees, but how is strong same-sex interest going to help anyone provide for kids in the tribe? It's a distraction, a time consuming distraction. Obviously, a guy who spent most of his time investing in his sister's kids and screwed the occasional interested chick would have a far superior reproductive strategy. Homosexuality neither makes babies nor brings in the bacon.

Fourth, it wouldn't work if they _did_ do it: the relationship coefficients are wrong. In order for a gene causing altruistic behavior ( behavior that costs the doer and benefits others) to be favored by natural selection, it has to satisfy Hamilton's inequality: sum of rb > c, r is the relatedness coefficient, b is the benefit to the other individual, and c is the cost to the doer, all measured in terms of fitness. Someone who has and raises two kids to maturity breaks even, in a genetic sense. r is 0.5 for your own kid, 0.25 for a nephew or niece. In order for a homosexual man to break even, he'd have to cause four more nephews/nieces to survive to maturity than would have without his efforts; he has to be better at making kids grow up than a mother - and, in order to fit our observations, must do so in a way that has never been noticed by anyone.

Probabably the most important lesson learned in biology over the past 40 years is that natural selection is strongest at the individual level and that behavior should be analyzed keeping that in mind. This had not oozed much into the popular mind. Homosexual men have a lot fewer children than average: that is a fact, and it is not exactly surprising. I think that this nonsensical crap about the evolutionary 'function' of human homosexuality originated with Jim Weinrich and was then uncritically mentioned by the notoriously numerically challanged E. O. Wilson in a book. Jim can't count, but I can.

Clark has also shown that hunter gatherers probably _cannot_ integrate with modern societies because they have not been through the natural selection of agricultural societies which seems to produce changes in cognition and personality necessary to working in modern conditions. Richard Lynn's work on international IQ suggest that IQ may be one important factor; and probably prosocial personality traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness/ negative-psychoticism are others.

So I would now (post having read Clark and Lynn) be inclined to say that at least two factors are at work. Hunter gatherers probably don't want to join modernity, because they will be less happy; but also they probably cannot join modernity, because they have not been psychologically pre-adapted for modernity by many generations of natural selection in agrarian societies.

Clark does not know of any examples where an h-g group has sucessfully integrated with modernity; but there are many (horrific) examples where it seems they cannot - perhaps the most extreme being Australian Aborigines. It might be worth Googling Northern Territories and Aborigine to get a feel for the appalling - and apparently intractable, unsolvable - problems of this group of ex-hunter gatherers in relation to the modern world.

If anyone knows of any exceptions, where h-gs have successfully integrated with modernity, I'd like to hear them.

Of the three kinds of society as described by Gellner: hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and mercantile, it is probable that hunter-gatherers had the best life, overall. Hunter gatherer societies are the happiest and peasant societies are the most miserable - while industrial-mercantile societies such as our own lie somewhere in between.

That, at any rate, is the conclusion of anthropologist Jerome Barkow - and his opinion is widely confirmed by the reports of many independent anthropologists who have experienced the alternatives of foraging, agrarian and industrial society...

Another line of evidence is patterns of voluntary migration. When industrial mercantile societies develop, they are popular with the miserable peasantry of agrarian societies who flee the land and crowd the cities, if given the chance. Not so the happier hunter gatherers who typically must be coerced into joining industrial life. My great grandparents left their lives as rural peasants and converged from hundreds of miles and several countries to work the coal mines of Northumberland. They swapped the open sky, fields and trees for a life underground and inhabiting dingy rows of colliery houses. Being a miner in the early twentieth century must have been grim, but apparently it was not so bad as being an agricultural laborer.

Psychiatry and the Human Condition provides an optimistic vision of a superior alternative approach to psychiatric illness and its treatment, drawing upon modern neuroscience and evolutionary theory. Psychiatric signs and symptoms - such as anxiety, insomnia, malaise, fatigue - are part of life for most people, for much of the time. This is the human condition. But psychiatry has the potential to help. In particular, psychotropic drugs could enable more people to lead lives that are more creative and fulfilled. Current classifications and treatments derive from a century-old framework which now requires replacement. Available psychotropic drugs are typically being used crudely, and without sufficient attention to their psychological effects.

We can do better. This book argues that obsolete categories of diseases and drugs should be scrapped. The new framework of understanding implies that clinical management should focus on the treatment of biologically-valid symptoms and signs, and include a much larger role for self-treatment.

Imagine a world in which many of the people suffer from psychiatric symptoms for most of the time and very few live out their lifespan without suffering periods of significant psychiatric illness. I am describing the world we live in.

If this seems far fetched, start adding up the numbers. In the first place there are the obvious people who suffer from the formally diagnosed psychiatric diseases such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s dementia.

There is the vast army of the anxious; people who go through life in a state of gnawing angst, perhaps seeking temporary relief from alcohol, perhaps stoically enduring.

Then there are those suffering from sleep deprivation for a multitude of reason - shift work, overwork, jet lag, young children, obstructed airways - or just chronically poor sleepers no known reason. Then there are the more or less miserable people who are ill and in pain - with colds, flu, hay fever, gastroenteritis, irritable bowels, headaches, back aches, inflammations. And the patients with life-threatening diseases like cancers, heart disease, stroke, AIDS - who often have significant ‘psychiatric’ symptoms that may amount to a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

Of course, huge numbers of people at any one time will be either intoxicated and brain impaired from alcohol, opiates, uppers, downers, solvents and the like - or else are ‘hung over’ and brain impaired as an after effect of such intoxication. It must not be forgotten that prescribed drugs often have undesirable and sometimes unavoidable side effects of a psychiatric nature - sedation, headaches, mental clouding… Then there are people without a psychiatric diagnosis but taking prescribed psychoactive medication: tranquilizers, antidepressants etc. These represent only a proportion of those whose state of mental health or well-being depends upon taking drugs.

When considered in this way, it is clear that few people are free of psychiatric symptoms for sustained periods of time. And if psychiatric symptoms are a matter of everyday life, then so - potentially - is their treatment. Such is the scale that professional management is inconceivable, as well as undesirable. Logistically, this means an expansion in psychiatric self-help - which entails expertise in self-diagnosis, self-treatment and the self-evaluation evaluation of this process.

The human condition, as we experience it in contemporary life, is one where psychiatric symptoms are endemic, being constantly present in the population - and present at a remarkably high prevalence.

A culturist explanation would be that blacks and Hispanics are held back by “racism”—basically, by malice on the part of white and Asian people.

A non-culturist explanation would be that a population whose ancestors went through some key transiton—say, from hunting-gathering to pastoralism—ten thousand years ago, if compared with a population whose ancestors passed through that transition only one thousand years ago, will have, on average of course, different gene sets conferring different abilities, personalities, and social skills. Natural selection can just get more done in ten thousand years than in one thousand. This is not scientifically controversial.

Now consider the effect on a black or Hispanic person of the two explanations. If he accepts the first, the culturist explanation, he will be mad as hell, and rightly so. He looks out at the world and sees people like himself stuck at the bottom of society. Why? Because of malice on the part of other groups. That’s what the culturist model tells him. He’s just the same as those other groups—the differences are only superficial. Why isn’t his group doing as well as their groups? Malice, the culturists tell him, wicked malice! Why wouldn’t he be mad as hell?

If, on the other hand, he accepts the biological explanation, there is no-one to blame. That’s just how human biology has shaken out across the deep history of our species. It isn’t anybody’s fault.

Thus, a culturist explanation of human group inequality—or of human individual inequality, for that matter—breeds rage and rancor. The true, biological explanation, by contrast, offers at least the hope of acceptance. We do, after all, accept our individual differences without pain. Everybody in this room is better than I am at something or other: playing tennis, appreciating music, writing, attracting the opposite sex. Many of you are undoubtedly smarter than I am. I don’t lose any sleep over this. Millions of American men and women go out and play golf every weekend, by no means sunk in listless despair at the knowledge that they will never be as good as Tiger Woods. If we can so placidly accept individual inequality, why can’t we accept group inequality—especially since it is supported by an ever-growing mountain of evidence? Perhaps we like rage and rancor, I don’t know.

Much of humanity’s past is a mystery. Until recently, we had only bones and artifacts to help us understand prehistoric human life. But today we have a new window into the past: the historical record that survives in our genes. We can now examine material from our own genomes and analyze it in light of evolutionary theory—a combination Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending call evolutionary genomics. The overwhelming surprise emerging from this new field of research is that human evolution did not stop with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Instead, it sped up—and has continued accelerating into historical times.

The 10,000 Year Explosion is the first book to introduce the new ideas coming from evolutionary genomics that will revolutionize humanity’s understanding of its past. Harpending and Cochran reveal the genetic changes that led to behaviorally modern humans and that allowed our ancestors to adapt to new environments. The majority of these changes, including adaptations to physical and social inventions such as agriculture and urban environments, seem to have started in a huge burst only 10,000 years ago. Cochran and Harpending make clear that many of the important transitions in human history involved biological changes that were the products of natural selection.

Full of revelatory and wondrous findings, The 10,000 Year Explosion proves that humanity’s genetic inheritance can change remarkably fast—and that our own civilization can cause the change.

There is a good theoretical argument for why evolution may speed up due to population growth. Given a particular probability distribution for producing beneficial mutations, a large population implies a faster rate of incidence of such mutations. Because reproductive dynamics leads to exponential solutions (i.e., a slight increase in expected number of offspring compounds rapidly), the time required for an advantageous allele to sweep through a population only grows logarithmically with the population, while the rate of incidence grows linearly.
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Thus civilization, with its consequently larger populations supported by agriculture, enhanced rather than suppressed the rate of human evolution.

At a somewhat lower level, there is a great hunger for books about human nature that reinforce the state dogma—the dogma I call “culturism.” Jared Diamond has made a nice bundle for himself with books explaining human differences without breathing a word about human biology. Plenty of lesser lights have done the same. I picked up Harvard psychologist Richard Nisbett’s book The Geography of Thought with great expectations, but I found that the book was weakened by its punctilious culturism.

If, on the other hand, you publish a book that contradicts the “culturist” dogma, you had better get the wife and kids filling sandbags, beause you are going to take a lot of fire from the intellectual establishment. You could ask Charles Murray about this. Geography is in fact a great friend to the culturists.

Question: Why is this human group over here different from that one over there?

Answer: Ah, because they’re different places, you see. Different fauna, different climate, so the inhabitants react differently.

Question: I see. But then, over a few hundred generations, wouldn’t the selection pressures from these different environments cause these two populations to diverge in average characteristics, as Darwin observed with lesser animals?

Answer: Guards! Guards!

kirinn

I think a lot of the resistance to these posts comes from people who see many EvBio/EvPsych arguments going in the direction of "well, evolution made us this way, so it must be alright then" and having that applied to aspect of human behavior that they find abhorrent.

For example, while I believe in evolution, and believe it has plenty of profound effects on human behavior in the aggregate, I also believe (near religiously, which is saying something for me) in the power of individuals to use their higher brain functions to overcome many, if not all, of the pressures of evolution. I think to believe otherwise would be unbearably depressing. Given some of your other comments and the time I've spent with you, I'm pretty sure we largely agree on this stance, but it's often far from clear in the top level of your favorite button-pushing posts.

reinaness

zuleikhajami

why are you trying to dissuade those of us who want to stay here and fight for our country? What do you get out of it? As long as we still live here, isn't it worth it? You can have your opinion, but really who does it serve to tell people it doesn't matter? If it matters to us that is enough. Sure there is alot of bullshit, sure there is corruption. Your solution of leaving and creating new utopias is great, but anywhere there are people there is lying and corruption. All we can do is hold them accountable the best we can. Leaving this country to the "extremely concerned" minority on either fringe is not the way to benefit anyone. You can tell me I am wasting my time, but I am sure people have told you that, too. I support you right to try and create your utopia, please just let me try to create mine here now in America or at least inch my way towards it.

altamira16

Evolution is not a political theory. It is a scientific theory. It mostly applies to biology, but shortly after it was discovered it captured people's imagination, and they applied it to all sorts of things. Some of it panned out, and some of it did not. I found the scientific racism of the late 19th century to be a bad thing.

I recently finished reading a book called The Nurture Assumption, which my dad gave me. Its a fascinating work on developmental psychology which explains how most previous dev psych was wrong. Specifically, the nurture component of your personality (the non-hereditary part) is not mainly due to fashionable things like lots of parental attention, or a nurturing home environment, or indeed anything about your parents or home at all. Rather, the influences of your peer group are the dominant force.

Besides discussion of Evolutionary Psychology (a fascination of mine), TNA contained lots of really interesting studies. One idea which really meshed with my view of the world was that stereotypes and group differences tend to start with real differences, but then amplify and reinforce them. For example, there are real biological differences between male and female psychology that one can detect in children who are only 2 or 3 years old. However, the gender roles we take on go well beyond those genetic differences.

TNA offered support to a theory I'd made about my own development. I spent middle school and high school as a geek, a nerd, and a social outcast. Things improved a little the last couple years due to the automatic prestige that comes with age, but in general I was unpopular and didn't have a lot of friends. College was a dramatic change. I went to a science-oriented school, and suddenly I was surrounded by other geeks and nerds, as well as better-socialized folks who happened to be smart. I flourished in this environment, made tons of friends, smooched lots of girls (and a few boys), and became reasonably popular (or at least notorious, which is a decent substitute :) ). Most importantly I became self-confident and comfortable with meeting new people and interacting with them. I still experience occasional bouts of shyness, generally triggered by insecurity, but not too often.

The differences between the two stages can perhaps best be seen through pictorial contrast:

On the left is me in high school, on the right is me after college.

Now, TNA suggests that ones personality is strongly affected by ones peer group, and that it is set in childhood and can be hard to change. Why doesn't my case offer a counterexample? The theory I'd had in college was that the key was my participation in the Society For Creative Anachronism (SCA) . Besides being a place for midieval recreation, the SCA was very much a social group. Not just a random social group, but one that drew heavily from SF fandom, gamers, theatre, and other subcultures which tend to be geek-heavy and generally tolerant of nerdiness. In the SCA I was treated not only as a person instead of a geek, but as an adult much more often than in conventional society. I got to do the flirting and socializing which I missed out on in the rest of my life, and develop self-confidence within that social context.

TNA believes strongly in people's personalities being context-dependent. This explains the apparent contradiction between claims that things like birth order are very important (with studies to back them up) with the thorough studies showing that birth order doesn't mean squat. If you ask someone's family, or watch them with their family, birth order matters a lot. If you study them in the real world, it has no detectable effects. So I developed at least two facets to my personality in two different contexts. College, being friendly and full of geeks, was much more like the SCA, and so the social Patri emerged as dominant. I remember thinking in college that I was "getting to be my SCA self the whole time". If I'd gone to a less nerdy school (not that I applied to any), I might have continued to be shy most of the time, coming out of my shell only around people I was comfortable with.

Now its true that many people manage to find a group they are comfortable with in college, and become more social. I suspect that its much harder for those starting from scratch to have dominant extroverted personalities, but it could just be a matter of degree. I should also note that the basic personality in my family is quite social and extroverted, so I was at least swimming with the current. Another interesting note is that the actual time I spent in the SCA was very low. I went to the Pennsic War every summer for a week or two, and a few other events (such as the Buttery New Years party), for a total of perhaps 2 or 3 weeks a year. Yet this brief period was (if my theory is correct) enough to have substantial effects on my development. I wonder if people involved in summer programs such as CTY or theatre programs have had similar experiences?