The Bombshell on Cultural Determinism May Have Been a Nuke

First to get a bugaboo out of the way: Cultural determinism is the view that significant variation between human cultures is not significantly influenced by genetic differences. It is a dogma of the present theocracy. Second, the scientific bombshell that got dropped on that dogma just may turn out to be a nuke. It discovered huge numbers of genes that have been under recent evolutionary pressure. However, the method used cannot detect genes that have been under selective pressure for long enough that the selected genes have become fixed and this means many genes such as lactose tolerance that are as young as agriculture.

From a colleague:-

“It’s a quirk in Moyzis’s current methodology that he can’t find in the main HapMap database differing gene alleles that are fixed or close to fixed in different populations. For example, the lactose tolerance gene only shows up as being under selection pressure in one extra database they’ve got that has a more global population. In the main HapMap database of Mormons, Yorubans, and Chinese/Japanese, the lactose tolerance gene is so close to fixed at one point or the other in the three populations that they can’t see evidence of recent selection, even though we already know that selection occurred over the last 10,000 years. Most of the real obvious genes that distinguish the races also can’t show up in their main databases because they don’t have a way to see past selection in genes that are now close to fixed.

So, this 1,800 genes under selection figure is merely a conservative minimum. The actual number will go up as more databases of people are brought under examination and more close to fixed variable genes are examined.”

The cultural determinists depend on there being so little bias in the cultural predispositions of various populations that if there are as few as 40 genes shown to have been:

Useful in categorizing people by self-identified race.
Involved in behavioral predisposition/temperament.

Then it is all but falsified.

The 40 genes figure is from a breeding experiment attempting to estimate the number of genes required to breed “tameness” into foxes. The tame foxes, in addition to having different markings (white spots) differed from their captive control group (subjected to no selection for tameness) by 40 genes.

Posted by James Bowery on Sunday, January 8, 2006 at 01:59 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Comments:

Posted by John S Bolton on January 08, 2006, 04:25 PM | #

Not to mention that hundreds of thalassemia alleles have been discovered, each from a single founder. The genetic homogeneity of the species in recent millennia, as if diversity and natural selection had crystallized in present form, is now known to be false. The leftist egalitarian argument depends on the supposition that any alleles of great advantage would just spread into every population. Now, however it is becoming all the more clear and certain, if it was ever doubted, that the prior establishment of a local allele of advantage, can, and quite commonly does, pre-empt the opportunity for another allele of globally greater advantage to just spread and spread.

Posted by Guessedworker on January 08, 2006, 07:45 PM | #

The achilles heel of CD, or environmentalism, was always its absolutist dogma. Unless you absolutely believe that blacks raised in the same environment as whites will exhibit 100% the same capacities as them, you are already an hereditarian. The threshhold for CD is too high for all but the most fanatical.

The RDNE issue is dead. The emergence of genetic evidence confirming what we know of racial differences in all the key areas will accelerate. The big political question is what the left will do now. Yes, obviously it will ignore everything in ideological terms. These people switched so effortlessly from economic Marxism to cultural Marxism when the Wall came down in 1989, they won’t give up now just because the Blank Slate is kaput. But they will have to make some accomodation with science, and that will hugely damage their white-racism guilt trip. Racial equality programmes will have to be founded on a moral preference which, of course, will be open to political refutation from the right.

Posted by ben tillman on January 08, 2006, 09:58 PM | #

The leftist egalitarian argument depends on the supposition that any alleles of great advantage would just spread into every population.

One makes it about 5 or 10 pages into Race & IQ by Israel Ehrenberg (or “Ashley Montagu”) before encountering such a notion: Sub-Saharan Africans cannot be genetically deficient as regards IQ because the benefits of intelligence are so great; the genes supporting it would necessarily flow to and become fixed in all populations. The fallacy is the “free lunch” fallacy. Everything has a cost, and the cost of a large brain includes caloric demands and pelvic morphological demands.

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