Andrew Sullivan’s latest column (click first headline to read, but I couldn’t find an archived version) is a strange one. His main point—that “progressives’ think that some scientific research should be ignored because it flouts their ideological conventions—is a good one, and one that Luana Maroja and I made before.
In this piece, Sullivan attacks three of these issues: assumption that there are no evolved differences among races, especially in intelligence; that gender reassignment may not always be a good thing; and, an issue I’ve mentioned before, the falsity of recent claims that black newborns have a higher mortality when taken care of by white rather than black physicians (this fact, falsely imputed to racism, actually reflects that underweight black newborns are preferentially given to the care of white doctors). Sullivan’s conclusion is that science should proceed untrammeled by ideology:
Let science go forward; may it test controversial ideas; may it keep an open mind; may it be allowed to flourish and tell us the empirical truth, which we can then use as a common basis for legitimate disagreements. I think that’s what most Americans want. It’s time we stood up to the bullies and ideologues and politicians who don’t.
He’s right, but he also commits what I see as a serious error. He describes recent studies by a crack geneticist (David Reich at Harvard) and his colleagues, studies showing that there has been natural selection on several traits within Eurasian “populations” in the last 8000 years. But then Sullivan extrapolates from those results to conclude there must then have been natural selection causing differences among populations. Now we know that the latter conclusion is true for some traits like skin pigmentation and lactose intolerance, but we can’t willy-nilly conclude from seeing natural selection within a population to averring that known differences among populations in the same trait have diverged genetically via natural selection rather by culture culture (or a combination of culture and selection).
The hot potato here, of course, is IQ or “cognitive performance.” This does differ among races in the U.S., but the cause of those differences isn’t known (research in this area is pretty much taboo).So even if there’s been natural selection on cognitive performance within Eurasians, as Reich et al. found, one isn’t entitled to conclude that differences among populations (or “races”, a word I avoid because of its historical misuse) must therefore also reflect genetic results of natural selection.
Here’s what Sully says, and basis it on the bioRχiv paper by Akbari et al. (Reich is the senior author) which you can access by clicking below.
Sullivan (bolding is mine):
But how have human sub-populations changed in the last, say, 10,000 years? A new paper, using new techniques, co-authored by David Reich, among many others, shows major genetic evolution in a single human population — West Eurasians — in the last 14,000 years alone. The changes include: “increases in celiac disease, blood type B, and a decline in body fat percentage, as farming made it less necessary for people to store fat for periods without any food.” Among other traits affected: “lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance.” Guess which trait is the controversial one.
The study was able, for the first time, to show
a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8,433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14,000 years and 6,510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection.
Not just evolutionary change in the last 14,000 years — but “an order of magnitude” more than any previous studies had been able to show. Gould was not only wrong that human natural selection ended 50,000 years ago — but grotesquely so. Humans have never stopped evolving since we left Africa and clustered in several discrete, continental, genetic sub-populations. That means that some of the differences in these sub-populations can be attributed to genetics. And among the traits affected is intelligence.
The new study is just of “West Eurasians” — just one of those sub-populations, which means it has no relevance to the debate about differences between groups. But it is dramatic proof of principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called “races” — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time. And that West Eurasians got suddenly smarter between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago and then more gradually smarter since.
If the results have no relevance to differences between groups, then why in the next sentence does he extrapolate the results to differences between sub-populations or “races”?
Well, yes, Sullivan does indeed admit that the West Eurasian study (below), showing selection within tjat group, can’t be extrapolated to differences between groups. But he does so anyway, saying that “it is the dramatic proof of a principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called “races” — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time.
Well, no, it doesn’t really “prove” that. It’s surely true that 1) if two or more populations show genetic variation in a trait and 2) natural selection ACTS DIFFERENTIALLY in those different populations (or “races” or “subpopulations”), then yes, selection can in principle cause genetic differences among populations. But this is not an empirical observation, but a hypothetical scenario. It’s almost as if Sullivan wants to use within-population data to show that differences among populations (especially in “cognitive performance”) must, by some kind of logic rather than empirical analysis, also be genetically based, and instilled by natural selection. But he is talking about what is possible, not what is known.
The relevant article below, which is somewhat above my pay grade, shows that Reich’s group used a combination of ancient and modern DNA to look for coordinated changes in the sequences of genes involved in the same trait. Using GWAS analysis (genome-wide association studies), investigators can find out which segments of the genome are associated with variation in various traits within a population. This way, for example, you can find out which areas of the genome (I believe there are about 1200) vary in a coordinated fashion with variation in an individual’s smarts (they use “educational attainment” as a surrogate for intelligence.
Click title to read:
Knowing this association, you can then compare the bits of the genome in ancient DNA associated with various traits like those listed above, and then estimate a) whether the bits of the genome that are jointly associated with variation in a trait measured today have changed in a coordinated way (i.e., have the genes affecting body fat in a population today changed over the last 8000 years in a coordinated way, with a decrease in those gene variants associated with higher body fat?); and b) the likelihood that natural selection has changed those bits over time.
Although we don’t, for example, know the “educational attainment” of ancient people, we can see that gene variants associated with higher attainment have increased by positive selection in the past few thousand years, implying that the Eurasian population has gotten smarter. It’s thus fair to conclude that, within the study population, there was selection for higher cognitive ability, known to be associated with educational attainment. Here, for example, are two findings of selection from the paper:
CCR5-Δ32: Positive selection at an allele conferring immunity to HIV-1 infection (panel 7)
The CCR5-Δ32 allele confers complete resistance to HIV-1 infection in people who carry two copies43–45. An initial study dated the rise of this allele to medieval times and hypothesized it may have been selected for resistance to Black Death46, but improved genetic maps revised its date to >5000 years ago and the signal became non-significant47,48. We find that the allele was probably positively selected ∼6000 to ∼2000 years ago, increasing from ∼2% to ∼8% (s =1.1%, π=93%). This is too early to be explained by the medieval pandemic, but ancient pathogen studies show Yersinia was endemic in West Eurasia for the last ∼5000 years49–51, resurrecting the possibility that it was the cause, although other pathogens are possible.
Selection for light skin at 10 loci (panels 8-17).
We find nine loci with genome-wide signals of selection for light skin, one probable signal, and no loci showing selection for dark skin.
Depending on which level of stringency you want to use to identify natural selection on bits of the DNA, Reich’s group found between 300-5,000 “genes” (DNA bits) that have undergone positive or negative natural selection in our ancestors. But remember this: when you are talking about selection on traits, we didn’t KNOW the traits of our ancestors (like “intelligence” or “propensity to smoke” in our ancestors. Instead, what we see is that gene variants affecting those traits in modern populations have changed over time from ancient populations, with gene variants affecting a given trait changing in a coordinated way (i.e., different bits of DNA associated today with “higher intelligence” have generally increased over time).
Below is a figure from the paper showing 12 traits that have coordinated changes in the genes affecting them. Click to enlarge, and note that the traits vary from darker skin color (DNA bits associated with darker skin color declined in frequency, implying selection for lighter skin), waist to hip ratio (genes affecting this ratio declined in frequency), and both “intelligence” and “years of schooling” (both showing strong increases in “smart” DNA over the last 8,000 years). It’s a clever analysis.
This is a lovely study (it needs vetting, of course, as this is a preprint), but doesn’t buttress Sullivan’s conclusion that changes within a group wrought by natural selection, such as the changes above, mean that differences between populations must also have been caused by natural selection. That’s simply a mistake, or a fallacy resting on confirmation bias. Sullivan insists, though, that he’s just interested in what the facts are, and those facts must play into any societal changes we want to make. (He’s sort of right here, but not completely, but I’ve discussed this issue in a WaPo book review.)
Sullivan:
Why do I care about this? It’s not because I’m some white supremacist, or Ashkenazi supremacist, or East Asian supremacist. It’s because I deeply believe that recognizing empirical reality as revealed by rigorous scientific methods is essential to liberal democracy. We need common facts to have different opinions about. Deliberately stigmatizing and demonizing scientific research because its results may not conform to your priors is profoundly illiberal. And, in this case, it runs the risk of empowering racists. As Reich wrote in his 2018 op-ed:
I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.
Scientific illiberalism is on both sides. The denial of natural selection by creationists and the denial of carbon-created climate change by some libertarians is damaging to any sane public discourse, but so too is the denial of any human evolution for 50,000 years by critical race theorists and their Neo-Marxist and liberal champions.
Okay, but I wish he’d been a bit more explicit about the limitations of Reich’s study for concluding things about selection among populations or “races”. Note, though, that he chastises both Left and Right for committing scientific “illiberalism.”
One area in which his conclusions seem more sound, however, involves gender and trans issues:
You see this [scientific illiberalism] also in the left’s defense of “no questions asked” gender reassignment for autistic, trans, and mainly gay children on the verge of puberty. The best scientific systematic studies find no measurable health or psychological benefit for the children — and a huge cost for the thousands of gay or autistic or depressed kids who later regret destroying their natural, functioning, sexed bodies. And a new German-American study has just “found that the majority of gender dysphoria-related diagnoses, including so-called gender incongruence, recorded in a minor or young adult’s medical chart were gone within within five or six years.” Yet the entire US medical establishment refuses to budge.
I should say that my own priors might also need checking. Maybe some, well-screened kids would be better off with pre-pubertal transition. Right now, we just don’t know. That’s why I favor broad clinical trials to test these experiments, before they are applied universally, and why I believe kids should have comprehensive mental health evaluations before being assigned as trans. And yet, as I write, such evaluations are being made illegal in some states, and gay kids are being mutilated for life before puberty, based on debunked science — and Tim Walz and the entire transqueer movement is adamant that no more rigorous research is needed.
Agreed! I think that Sullivan should have added that studies do show that adults accrue overall benefits from changing gender (at least that’s what I remember). If that’s the case, then he’s made another omission that. if admitted would strengthen his credibility (always admit the caveats with your conclusions!) But I think he’s dead-on right about affirmative therapy for minors.
(h/t: Christopher)
Thanks.
Jerry, I think you’re being harsh on Sullivan. On my reading of him he does recognise this distinction, indeed the bolded sentence that you quote (beginning “The new study is …”) says so.
You then say:
He doesn’t. The next sentence is about that one sub-population, saying that that one sub-population got significantly smarter in a short period of time.
This is relevant since, if one sub-population did that while others didn’t, then significant differences between sub-populations could in-principle emerge.
Of course it is also possible that all sub-populations changed in the same way, in lock-step, and so no between-group differences resulted.
But all Sullivan is concluding is that it is in principle possible that between-population differences did result. And if it were the case that, say, some group means were half-a-standard-deviation different from some other group means, then that would help to make sense of quite a lot of observations and data from across the world.
Sorry, but I disagree. Earlier on he says this,
“To the obvious objection that race is a social construct — it obviously is — Reich rightly agreed. Crude racial classification is as dumb as it is usually malign. But the fact remains, in Reich’s words, that “while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.”
“Racial constructs” (i.e., what we think of as races). Of course, as I say, it’s POSSIBLE that differences BETWEEN subpopulations (or “races”) are evolved; you’d be stupid to deny that possibility. But you can’t use a study of one subpopulation to say, “Well, it’s theoretically possible that. . .” OF COURSE IT IS, and we’ve always known that. It follow simply from how natural selection works. The hard part is not theorizing, which is dead easy, but getting data. And Sullivan adduces no data to support that biological data support a genetic difference in, say, intelligence, for “racial constructs”. He should have left out race completely.
Of course the work will be done some day, despite opposition, and then we’ll know. But we’ll know from data, not speculation based on a single “sub-population.”
I agree with Coel. I think Sullivan was merely arguing that it’s possible there are evolved differences between populations. You say “we’ve always known that”. Indeed anyone with a brain can see that it’s possible. But the dominant discourse in the mainstream media is that it’s beyond the pale to even raise the possibility. That’s what he’s arguing against.
> He describes recent studies by a crack geneticist (David Reich at Harvard)
What does “crack geneticist” mean?
> when you are talking about selection on traits, we didn’t KNOW the traits of our ancestors (like “intelligence” or “propensity to smoke” in our ancestors). Instead, what we see is that gene variants affecting those traits in modern populations have changed over time from ancient populations, with gene variants affecting a given trait changing in a coordinated way (i.e., different bits of DNA associated today with “higher intelligence” have generally increased over time).
Does this mean that alleles that are associated with high IQ today could have been selected for for different reasons in the past (disease resistance, surviving through harsh weather etc.)?
Also, there was a study by Kees-jan kan (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24104504/) claiming to find that the more culturally-loaded cognitive abilities are, the greater the heritability coefficient for that ability on average. If this is true, it might be very hard to compare heritability of cognitive abilities between groups of people (although I do not think the study has been replicated).
What I find distressing about these science posts is not just the lack of comments, but, in this case, the fact that a really cool study was done showing natural selection on a number of traits in one group, and the way they did it they didn’t have to look at the traits in ancient people. They just used GWAS analysis in modern humans and sequencing of DNA in ancient people. That in itself was cool. This is one reason that I’m contemplating deep-sixing science posts. I could go after a famous atheist, for example, and get ten times more readers on that post than this one. It’s sad.
I just got here this AM and am only now reading it.
Please don’t do that. Perhaps write fewer, but that Reich paper looked very important to me, a complete non-specialist.
+1.
A work day for me. Eating lunch at my desk and reading this post.
Focusing on the among-subpopulation differences that so many Americans seem to want to know about (between Africans and Europeans), it will be very hard to do something like the Akbari analysis of Africans. There are few ancient human DNA samples from sub-Saharan Africa because the preservation is poor in most places; <20,000 years is the best folks have been able to do afaik
https://www.the-scientist.com/ancient-dna-sheds-new-light-on-africa-s-stone-age-69729
But modern human populations in Africa are more than 10 times older than that. Applying a GWAS from present-day Africans to get polygenic scores for ancient African DNA would capture only the last moments of that history.
It seems worth doing even from the woke perspective that Sullivan decries. Given that much older history in Africa, it's possible that selection and adaptive evolution of intelligence was much greater in some African lineages than it was in Eurasians. Because there was so much African diversity before and after the out-of-Africa dispersal event, one would probably have to do a bunch of Akbari-like analyses of lots of them to compare to Eurasians.
I guess I agree with Jerry that we shouldn't get out over our skis on this before there are data to show that subpopulations diverged in those polygenic scores due to differences in the selection they experienced and evolved under. I admire his determination not to speculate about "between" given only one analysis of "within". If I was standing in front of a classroom of students and someone asked me what I think the answer will eventually be, I would have a hard time answering "We just don't know yet."
I am commenting just so you know that there are at least some readers out there who enjoy these science posts but don’t comment — in my case, because I don’t know enough to add to what you’ve posted. But I learn a lot from you (and sometimes from the comments, too)!
Ditto
Ditto here as well. I find posts like this fascinating but I’m not knowledgable enough about the topic to have anything intelligent or helpful to say. Please don’t stop posting them, though!
Me too.
ISTM even if the science posts were read as avidly as (e.g.) the cat posts, far fewer readers would have the necessary background knowledge and interests to comment on them.
Maybe WordPress can can give you stats on how many unique IPs click on each post (or even more detailed analysis). “Follow the data.”
+1
Yeap! I struggle my way through these articles snd try to learn as much as I can. I am a non-scientist and can’t add a thing besides saying that when Jerry dissects these articles that is where I learn the most. Maybe the scientists are busy doing science during the day and hit the website at night? Typically, I feel like these articles get tons of comments
+1.
One important statistical point about this study is that the sample was very large. This means that even tiny amounts of directional selection can be detected with high statistical significance. The importance of this study will not lie in its finding that many genes show statistically significant directional selection. The important thing to look at is the absolute magnitude of the effect. Thankfully they do mention the magnitudes of the effects in some cases, though not for all. For example selection in favor of HIV immunity caused the frequency of that gene to rise from 2% initially to 8%.
In contrast there is no mention of effect size in the discussion of the skin color loci, only discussion of the direction of change. That’s unfortunate.
Well, I agree that the magnitude of the selection is important, but simply knowing which traits have been under selection, and in which direction, is of interest to me. I always am asked in lectures to the public on evolution, “Are we still evolving?” Now I can give them a much more comprehensive answer about what seems to have changed, and in which direction–at least for one population.
>…. studies do show that adults accrue overall benefits from changing gender…
Maybe some studies do, but many don’t. For example, see this:
https://www.cureus.com/articles/201512-risk-of-suicide-and-self-harm-following-gender-affirmation-surgery#!/
Or this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/
Thanks. I don’t know the data on adults, but I remember seeing reports that most adults who had transitioned were happy with it.
I have not yet finished my first cup of coffee, so perhaps it is unwise to jump in, but . . .
Jerry says, “If the results have no relevance to differences between groups, then why in the next sentence does he extrapolate the results to differences between sub-populations or ‘races’”? Below are Sullivan’s two relevant sentences:
“The new study is just of ‘West Eurasians’ — just one of those sub-populations, which means it has no relevance to the debate about differences between groups. But it is dramatic proof of principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called ‘races’ — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time.”
Andrew could have removed any ambiguity had he written “it is dramatic proof of principle that a human sub-population can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short period of time.” And this is, indeed, what I read him to mean. (Incorrectly?) He clearly assumes—reasonably so—that genetic shifts are also happening in human sub-populations other than those in West Eurasia, but I am struggling to see how the language he uses here necessarily extrapolates the results to explain the differences “between” groups.
His tossing the term “race” into the sentence, along with using the plural “sub-populations,” and then immediately highlighting “smarter” as one of those genetic changes invites Jerry’s conclusion. I do wonder, however, whether this “between group” reading would be the natural one if we did not store in our memory cells the controversy Andrew stirred when he published excerpts from “The Bell Curve.” Given that Andrew is generally a very careful writer, it is possible that he is literally saying one thing (not relevant to differences between groups) while simultaneously suggesting another. I wish he would clarify.
I need another cup of coffee.
I am more skeptical than Sullivan that having a shared set of facts will move us to a better plane of discourse.
Instead, my experience with social media commentary like what we see on Twitter is that even people who are apparently intelligent, scientifically literate, genuinely able to understand subtle statistical arguments about human differences seem unable to use that understanding to reason differently about individuals and groups. People find it really hard to let go of essentialism and the idea that modern human populations belong to separate teams engaged in zero sum competition. Given this seems the norm even among individuals who appear highly intelligent, I am skeptical we will ever move past it.
I hadn’t written to Sullivan, regarding his last Friday column, the following….anyone who wishes to comment, please do so:
Andrew,
Thank you again and again for the continued attention to the “gender affirming care” issue which I almost immediately realized, several years ago, was at heart the gay/lesbian conversion therapy from hell.
Benjamin Ryan covers this issue masterfully and here is a 1 minute clip of a doctor at Lurie Children’s Hospital, affiliated with Northwestern University, who reveals that “that not only is there no means of assessing whether a child’s transgender identity will persist, they don’t even try.” It’s from 2021, but to my knowledge, not a thing has changed.
https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1837132244277743965
In terms of race and social constructions, this is an interesting article. In essence, there is a field called forensic anthropology. And forensic anthropologists have a success rate of around 90% in telling racial ancestry from examining a skull. If that can be done, How can race be merely a social construction? I understan there are other biological markers about race. A key paragraph:
“Winburn and a colleague did a study to try to find out. Among about 250 resolved cases in which forensic anthropologists offered an ancestry estimate, they correctly identified a person’s social race about 90% of the time, the team reported in April in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
. But when anthropologists identified someone’s ancestry as “mixed” or “other,” they were wrong 80% of the time. Thirteen percent of unidentified people in the United States are listed as likely belonging to “multiple races”; another 21% are classified as “uncertain.” Based on her research, most of them are likely to be people of color, Winburn says. “Who are we serving and who are we failing with these continental ancestry estimates?” she asks.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/forensic-anthropologists-can-try-identify-person-s-race-skull-should-they
“If that can be done, How can race be merely a social construction?
The problem might be that you have a popular – and inaccurate – understanding of “social construction” rather than a technical understanding of the concept.
“Social construction” does not mean or imply that a phenomenon is illusory, unreal, or imaginary. It refers to the fact that what is known or assumed about a phenomenon is discovered – a social process – debated (another social process), published, taught, and learned (social processes). “Social construction” refers to the rather undeniable fact that we are not born with full, complete, and accurate knowledge of the empirical world already present in our brains, but must learn it – and our society selects parts of that vast range of potential knowledge to elevate, to valorize, etc. The importance of “social construction” for social sciences is the possibility – really, the certainty – that these processes of discovery, dissemination, etc, allow error to be introduced, so that our “socially constructed” knowledge and understanding is often incomplete or simply wrong in ways that reflect social values and biases. Check out Barker-Benfield’s classic book “The Horrors of the Half-Known Life” for a fascinating history of beliefs about masculinity, female biology, etc. especially in the 19th century. What else would you call these 19th century biological “facts” except “socially constructed”?
With regard to “race,” anthropologists like to point out that biological differences within races are greater that biological differences across races, implying that the concept “race” is not useful. I am not persuaded by this, since I think it comes close to committing the same error as the ‘naive’ understanding of social construction. What is “socially constructed” is, rather, the cultural assumptions we make about members of races based solely on being of this or that race. Joe Biden was surprised that Barack Obama was so “well spoken,” as though all Black folks spoke in Black dialect – ‘Ebonics’ – as a matter merely of their race. Stereotypes of Asians are common, and neglect to consider that there are numerous “Asian” populations: one “race,” but numerous differences that we don’t seem aware of until you realize that we have few Laotian-American doctors in the U.S. but lots of Vietnamese-American doctors. Are people in India “Black”? They are in the U.K, but not so much in the U.S. There is a very funny and very politically incorrect satire on this issue in an episode of “Fawlty Towers” from a number of years ago – I can no longer repeat it to my classes since it uses racial epithets that are forbidden, even to make fun of them.)
I’ve rambled too long, but I hope that a different perspective in “social construction” is helpful in understanding how race is also a socially constructed phenomenon.
Note sure which episode you were referring to, but I think this is good too.
That is the episode I referred to. Very funny, but we’re not allowed to show it in classes!
> With regard to “race,” anthropologists like to point out that biological differences within races are greater that biological differences across races, implying that the concept “race” is not useful.
This is known as Lewontin’s Fallacy\*, and is not simply a result of social constructionism. Accepting it is a result of confusion and ignorance, surely helped by the fact that few anthropologists have the quantitative background that would enable them to describe problems of classification mathematically. The confusion may be illustrated by a controversial German public figure (Sarrazin) who claimed that “all Jews share a specific gene” in 2010. This man had worked in finance, so was probably not too awful at math.
\* By all accounts, Lewontin was a highly intelligent man who had the unfortunate tendency to let his activism get in the way of science. Not unlike Gould, one gets the impression there was some motivated reasoning at work here.
I have only contempt for scientists who try to arrest truth-seeking when it endangers their worldview. It has of course happened to the Reich lab before. In a notable scientific reversal, it turned out that many archaeological findings were better explained by population replacement instead of cultural change (which means that at the beginning of the 21th century, the profession had been clearly wrong about something that they had better understood more than a century earlier). There were calls to selectively interpret the new evidence, to forestall unwelcome conclusions, instead of discussing why so recently so many had been so wrong. You can’t serve two masters!
I do wonder whether it was ever plausible for a Darwinian to believe that humans stopped evolving tens of thousands of years ago, at least for any traits where debating this would cause anguish among certain people. (The obsession with African Americans is very unfortunate, I for one would be more interested in knowing about the evolution of adaptations in groups like Aborigines, Khoisan or Inuit.)
Genetic engineering should in any case massively rearrange the distribution of talents found among hominids, in exciting ways that could drastically reduce suffering and increase quality of life. (Lineage will also become much less relevant as a result). That it, unless governments decide to stymie any such advances for fear that not everyone will end up equally miserable.
To the best of my knowledge, the Substack paywall can’t be circumvented with archive services. The reason they work for most newspapers and magazines is that these sites allow bots to access their articles in order to index them for search engines, allowing them to be found through web searches. Substack eliminates this vulnerability with a hard paywall that doesn’t give access to bots; the trade-off is that the articles are harder to find by searching.
I used to have a subscription to Andrew Sullivan, but cut it off to save cash. However, I still get an abbreviated version each week, and that’s where I read about this study. By the way, I used the Unpaywall extension (available for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers) to legally find the full text of the paper.
As for comments on the article, I rather hope S J Gould is rolling in his grave for being daft enough to suggest that human evolution had halted for the last 50,000 years (but has continued in all other species). The important message, to me, is that once again we are surprised by the speed of evolution. Consider the genes that confer some resistance to tuberculosis. In the 14,000 years studied, it has gone from low frequency (2%), to higher (9%, in response to domesticating cattle that gave us their TB), and to low again (3%) as TB has become much rarer for non-genetic reasons—better nutrition also confers relative resistance. It shouldn’t be surprising in that TB is much more likely to kill you—and maybe before having children— if you don’t have at least one copy of the allele that helps you survive it, thus making for rapid selection pressure.
And as for Sullivan’s comments on race, I think I’m right in remembering he did so in anticipation of certain quarters balking at a study that mentions Western Europeans and intelligence in the same breath. For all we know, the same changes occurred in other populations, providing they experienced the same selection pressures. How could they not? I rather wish we could stop making the obligatory references to race being a social construct, as populations have plainly developed with differences according to their environments. There are gradual transitions between the genetics of populations rather than hard borders, and more and more individuals are to be found in the transitional areas as populations mix with easy travel. Saying differences only exist as a social construct is to ignore reality. Me, I like variety!
It’s weird that Sullivan, who strongly believes in a benevolent god that created mankind in his own image, would allow evolution to produce entire races of stupider people.
It’s weird that Sullivan, who strongly believes in a benevolent god that created mankind in his own image, can believe that god would allow evolution to produce entire races of stupider people.
Not intending to be provocative, but the intellectual dominance of Ashkenazy Jews is so overwhelming that a curious observer who fails to consider the possibility is hard to credit…
I admit that I sometimes have a problem distinguishing between “intra-population” and “inter-population”, esp. in humans where culture can lead to partial reproductive isolation even among groups inhabiting the same region.
Thank you. As a nonscientist reading about this, one of the challenges is that so many authors (scientists or nonscientists) seem motivated more by moral fervor than by a concern for objective truth.
The moral fervor of the anti-hereditarian side makes them more suspect in my eyes, because I don’t trust them to weigh the evidence honestly. Isn’t it a little bit incoherent to place so much moral weight on the uncertain outcome of a scientific question about genetics?
The determination of the anti-hereditarian side to suppress and sanction the work of their opponents is another strike against their credibility, for me. What are they so afraid of? Don’t they see that they would be more credible if they permitted open discourse and argument?
Sasha Gusev, “No, heritability will not tell you anything about education policy”
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-heritability-will-not-tell-you
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, “European polygenic scores predict Chinese provincial differences too”
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/european-polygenic-scores-predict
https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
https://www.chronicle.com/article/racial-pseudoscience-on-the-faculty