Dreams of equality (how not to make the world a better place)

[shkrobius]

What is the foundation for the notion of human equality

Comments

[iisus]

Только вот это вызывает сомнения: "Cultural isolation can occur more quickly than geographic isolation, especially when innovation rates are high".

Кажется более вероятным, что как раз таки господствование в обществе консервативных настроений и замедленная скорость прогресса укрепляет существующие границы между культурными прослойками, снижая вероятность спаривания между ними. А быстрый прогресс, напротив, подтачивает старые стены и по-новому перекраивает общество, так что бывшие "разные" оказываются в одном слое. Потому что эволюция культуры и появление запретов на скрещивание на основе культурных различий - синхронные, но противофазные процессы.

И биение это объяснимо, так как существует цикл обратной связи, его порождающий:
большое разнообразие -> почва для глубоких различий -> запреты на скрещивание -> снизившееся разнообразие -> причины для нарушения запретов -> рост разнообразия

[shkrobius]

They talk less about mating taboos than formidable cultural divides, like speaking a different language. No one is forcing an American to marry a fellow English speaker, but it is unlikely that he will marry someone who does not speak English. Who does not know how to use a toothbrush. Who'd never heard of George Washington. And so on. In most places on earth you travel 100 miles and customs, languages, widely shared beliefs - everything - changes considerably. Innovation further splits already structured population by erecting new cultural barriers. Not every innovation, I grant you that, but almost any. You say that if it refashions reproductively isolated groups and such refashioning is sufficiently frequent, you have effectively panmictic population. Had that been the case the effective population size would not stay around 10^5 throughout history. You need a mechanism to explain inbreeding; geographical isolation (serial founder effects) accounts only for a fraction of it. Perhaps divisive innovations subdivide the existing

[hannahsarah]

I'm feeling a bit confused here. It sounds like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation is a bad thing, while marrying your first cousin is much better. Seems counter intuitive to me.

As a former dog breeder, I learned that a certain (controlled) amount of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis was much preferred to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression.

Granted, my grasp of the complexities of genetics is freshman level at best, so if you could boil this post down into smaller words I'd be most grateful.

[shkrobius]

If you want uniformity in your breed there is only one way to achieve it: through inbreeding. If you want diversity, there is only one way to achieve it: let these breeds to mix. You cannot have it both ways. There is hardly any equality between the Great Dane and chiwawa: the continuum of variation in dogs is much broader than it is in humans. Our genetic endowment is simply too restrictive to produce very wide variation. We may have exceptional individuals, but they are exceptionally rare: most abilities are distributed around the middle with a very small number of outliers. It is this property of traits variation that makes us equal (Hobbes' argument). The question is what makes us different from dogs, and the suggested answer is that it is culture. Culture divides us in so many kennels where we inbreed and makes breeding between kennels infrequent. It is this mechanism that sustains low genetic diversity, which is the basis of equality. If you remove such barries, there will be cross mating and diversity will explode. We know how

[piterburg]

I understand how inbreeding keeps genetic variety low within human kennels, but what I fail to understand is how it works out to keep the diversity low throughout the humanity - wouldn't different kennels start drifting away from each other creating different human breeds similar to dog breeds? Low variety among a given kennel, but not BETWEEN different kennels..

[shkrobius]

There are much fewer kennels than dogs. Because each kennel is inbred (very low variation) you can think of it as an individual; there are only so many representative "individuals" mating in the general population, so the effective population size becomes low eventhoug the total population is large. So not only genetic diversity inside the kennel is low, it becomes low in general. Perhaps an analogy with ants would be more apt than the analogy with dogs. There are trillions of individual ants, but because mating groups within each ant hill are small, their genetc diversity does not scale with their total size