[BretLudwig]

Are Human Beings Alike Or Different? The Evidence Is In, But Its Hard To
Talk About

By Steve Sailer

"The human sciences are in a paradoxical situation. Vast quantities of
new data are pouring in, particularly from the exponential improvements in
genome sequencing. Yet theorizing about what the new data imply has seldom
been more career-threatening€”as the fates of James Watson and Larry
Summers show.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the May 10, scientific conference on "Evolution,
Culture, and Human Behavior" at UC Irvine, which brought together leading
theorists for a day of presentations centered around the debate over human
uniformity vs. human biodiversity, flew under the radar. It needed only a
single normal-sized classroom.

Still, the few dozen spectators included an honor roll of prominent
figures in the human sciences.

For example, Leda Cosmides, the co-developer of the field of evolutionary
psychology. Also: John Hawks, the young anthropologist from the University
of Wisconsin, whose remarkably broad range of expertise, from the oldest
bones to the latest statistical techniques for genetic analysis, has
quickly made him a star science blogger.

Hawks is already a strong prose stylist. If he continues to improve, he
could someday fill the job of the human sciences' Public Sage€”a role for
which such luminaries as Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Richard
Dawkins, and Steven Pinker have competed.

And in attendance: Gregory Cochran. In evolutionary theory over the last
decade, Cochran has been the straw that stirs the drink€”as slugger
Reggie Jackson described his function on the tumultuous 1970s Yankees
baseball team. (Here's the unofficial Cochran Fan Site.)

There were four main speakers:
bullet Shinobu Kitayama, director of the Culture and Cognition Program at
the University of Michigan.

Kitayama discussed the sizable differences in personality between
Americans and Japanese. Just as the stereotype would suggest, Americans
are more independent; the Japanese more interdependent. Americans like to
feel individually in control of the situation; the Japanese are happiest
when their group is cohesive.

Interestingly, the Japanese on the northernmost island of Hokkaido
generally fall midway between the Japanese and American norms. Kitayama
speculates that this is related to Hokkaido having been a wilderness
frontier, not settled until the late 19th Century, rather like the United
States.
bullet Thomas J. Bouchard, the principle organizer of the famous
"Minnesota Twins" study that reunited separated twins.

Bouchard explained that the state of the art in twin and adoption studies
shows that IQ is highly heritable. Remarkably, the heritability of IQ goes
up as we age. Identical twins who grew up together tend to become more
alike in IQ when they are adults living apart than when they were children
in the same home.

The conference was organized and emceed by UCI professors
bullet Chuansheng Chen and

bullet Robert Moyzis, one of the co-authors of the late 2005 paper "Global
landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for Homo sapiens" [PDF],
which listed 1,800 genes that have been under varying selection pressure
in Africa, Europe, or East Asia over the last 50,000 or so years. This
shattered the conventional wisdom that Darwinian selection had somehow
ceased to operate on the human species when our ancestors first left
Africa. The data now suggests what common sense always implied€”that when
humans dispersed out of the tropics, the new environments they encountered,
such as cold weather, led to important degrees of racial diversification.

The central argument of the conference turned out to be between the other
two speakers, the prominent anthropologists, Henry Harpending of the
University of Utah and John Tooby of UC Santa Barbara over, in effect,
whether diversity or uniformity best characterizes humanity.

Harpending spoke first on the accumulating evidence that human evolution
has actually accelerated since we came out of Africa, especially after the
invention of agriculture. This was proposed by Harpending, with Cochran,
Moyzis, Hawks, and Eric T. Wang, in their important December 2007 paper
"Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution", [PDF] which appeared in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

For example, Harpending suggested that the prehistoric spread of
Indo-European languages across a huge swath of Eurasia from India to
Ireland might have been made possible by a beneficial genetic mutation for
"lactose tolerance." This allows many adults in this region to drink milk
without gastro-intestinal discomfort. In the right terrain for dairying, a
tribe whose adults can get much of their nourishment from the milk of
cattle or goats has a big competitive advantage over tribes that
can't€”perhaps allowing the Proto-Indo-European-speaking milk drinkers to
impose their language and spread their useful gene.

By the way, a "lactose tolerance-centric" theory of world history was put
forward by the Irish dairy farmer-turned-economist Raymond D. Crotty in
his ambitious but little known 2001 book When Histories Collide: The
Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism. (It hasn't been
published in the U.S., but you can read part of it on Google Books. And
here is a brief summary.) Crotty attributed the medieval rise of property
rights and the rule of law in Northwestern Europe to deep roots going back
to the type of European agricultural society made possible by the evolution
of lactose tolerance.

In contrast, John Tooby, co-founder of evolutionary psychology with Leda
Cosmides, who is his wife, countered Harpending's emphasis on human
biodiversity with their Gray's Anatomy Test. Open that 1918 book of
medical charts at random, close your eyes, and poke a drawing. In all
likelihood, whatever tiny anatomical detail you're touching can be found
in virtually everybody on Earth. (Or at least everybody of one sex).

Although the parts differ in size from person to person, the basic human
blueprint is extremely uniform in terms of which parts are used.

This uniformity is what allows sexual reproduction. Imagine that you want
to assemble a working Toyota Camry from the parts of two other cars, Tooby
suggests. You'll see that you'd better start with two other Toyota Camrys.

As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker wrote in his 1994 bestseller The
Language Instinct, produced after a sabbatical year spent in Santa Barbara
with Tooby and Cosmides, "To a scientist interested in how complex
biological systems work, differences between individuals are so boring!"

Well, that's one way of looking at it €¦

Tooby also suggested that human nature is reasonably uniform in many
behavioral areas as well. For instance, in virtually every society
currently in existence, incest within the nuclear family is unusual and
socially disapproved.

Sigmund Freud famously theorized that humans desperately want to commit
incest with their nearest and dearest relatives, and that makes necessary
the convoluted apparatus of Freudianism. But Finnish anthropologist Edvard
Westermarck offered a simpler idea way back in 1891: that humans have
evolved an instinct to find incest repugnant because it leads to birth
defects. (In a 2007 paper in Nature, "The Architecture of Human Kin
Detection," [PDF] Tooby, Cosmides, and Debra Lieberman offer what they
believe are the two rules for recognizing siblings€”seeing your sibling
being nursed by your mother, or being raised together--that make
Westermarck's instinct feasible.)

So who is right? Is the human race uniform or diverse?

Well, they're both right. It all depends upon what you're interested in at
the moment.

That's usually how it goes€”the things that interest us the most, that
get us most worked up, are those that are on the knife edge, that look
different when viewed from different angles.

Let's consider a similar question that's remote enough that we can think
about without political biases getting in the way: Is the universe empty
or full?

Outer space is famously empty. You can't get much emptier than space. By
one account, the universe is about 0.00000000000000000000000000001 as
dense as water.

And yet, outer space is also famously full of "billions and billions" of
stars, as Johnny Carson used to say when parodying astronomer Carl Sagan.
In 2003, a team of Australian astronomers estimated that there are 70
sextillion stars in the known universe. That's
70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.

Now, it's perfectly reasonable to conceive of the universe both ways,
depending upon what you need to think about at the time. The incredible
emptiness of space is terribly important to understand if you are, say,
contemplating an interstellar voyage. Nevertheless, to be frank, once you
grasp that fact, it gets kind of boring to think about. So, astronomers
spend more time thinking about the tiny fraction of space that isn't
empty, those 70 sextillion stars.

Similarly, the Wikipedia article on Human Genetic Variation reports DATE,
"Two random humans are expected to differ at approximately 1 in 1000
nucleotides €¦"

Well, that's not a very big number.

But Wikipedia goes on to say, "However, with a genome of approximate 3
billion nucleotides, on average two humans differ at approximately 3
million nucleotides."

Well, three million is a pretty big number. (It's not as big as 70
sextillion, but still €¦)

So, now we can see why, no matter what Pinker says, the African-American
7'-1" basketball player Shaquille O'Neal and the Lebanese-Colombian 5'-1"
singer Shakira seem interestingly different.

Of course, probably they would not at all be very different at all
compared to space aliens possibly living on a planet going around one of
those 70 sextillion stars.

And if those aliens showed up in hostile flying saucers to conquer the
human race, no doubt Shaq and Shakira and everybody else would team up to
fight them off. Ronald Reagan said exactly this to the United Nations back
in 1987:

"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish
if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."[Address to the
42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York]

But, we're not facing space aliens. So the differences between humans are
interesting€”and important.

When it comes to thinking about race,€”which is all about who your
relatives are€”its all, well, relative."


http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080512_human.htm

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