{"id":92984,"date":"2024-12-15T03:00:45","date_gmt":"2024-12-15T08:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=92984"},"modified":"2024-12-14T21:19:51","modified_gmt":"2024-12-15T02:19:51","slug":"outside-sub-saharan-africa-homo-sapiens-are-vermin-in-the-australian-sense-an-introduced-species-with-no-co-evolved-local-predators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/12\/15\/outside-sub-saharan-africa-homo-sapiens-are-vermin-in-the-australian-sense-an-introduced-species-with-no-co-evolved-local-predators\/","title":{"rendered":"“Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens<\/em> are vermin, in the Australian sense \u2014 an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators”"},"content":{"rendered":"

You have to admit that Lorenzo Warby<\/a> has a way with words to introduce a new essay, yes?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens<\/em> are vermin, in the Australian sense \u2014 an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators. That means that their strongest selection pressures \u2014 both genetic and cultural \u2014 have almost always been about dealing with other humans.<\/p>\n

We are the cultural species par excellence<\/em>. Cultures can be reasonably thought of as collections of life-strategies. Culture tends to be persistent \u2014 aspects of culture can be highly persistent. <\/p>\n

It is worth keeping in mind that genetic selection can occur surprisingly quickly \u2014 i.e., in a relatively short number of generations, depending on the intensity of the selection pressures. A very clear example of this is the evolution of lactase persistence<\/a> in pastoralist, or agro-pastoralist, populations. (The decades-long experiment in domesticating silver foxes<\/a> is an extreme example.)<\/p>\n

The great advantage of cultural selection is that it is faster than genetic selection but culture still has to show some “stickiness”, some persistence, to be useful. Especially in the evolution of signals, norms and social strategies.<\/p>\n

The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest \u2014 or most thoroughly \u2014 are Europe, particularly North-West Europe, East Asia and India (especially by high-jati<\/em><\/a> Indians). So, those are the areas where natural and cultural selection has been most focused on selection for dealing usefully with other humans. Those populations have also been the most successful in dealing with the modern world, wherever they go. This hardly seems a coincidence.<\/p>\n

The regions where dealing with the local physical environment has been most salient are Sub-Saharan Africa \u2014 all those co-evolved parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores \u2014 and Australia \u2014 which is full of deserts and spiky things likely to poison you<\/a>. Much of Africa is also semi-desert forager lands, while the tsetse fly<\/a> stopped the central African plains generating the equivalent of the connecting \u2014 for good or ill \u2014 pastoralist cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Both continental-scale regions therefore historically had low human population densities.<\/p>\n

The consequence in Africa was that Sub-Saharan Africa has, for millennia, been a region of endemic slavery. Labour was more valuable than land, which led \u2014 as it usually did historically \u2014 to labour bondage: the violent\/coercive extraction of labour’s scarcity value<\/a>. In this case, the low population density meant that folk were regularly seized and transported, thus requiring the level of domination for folk to be moved at will \u2014 i.e., slavery rather than some form of serfdom.<\/p>\n

Increased selection to deal with the physical environment meant comparatively less selection to deal with other humans. Sub-Saharan African and Australian Aboriginal populations have been rather less successful at dealing with the modern world than have other populations. (Claims about the success of recent African immigrants seem to be overstated<\/a>.) The key element of the modern world is domination of social outcomes by human interactions to the greatest extent yet achieved in history. Again, that relative lack of success hardly seems like a coincidence.<\/p>\n

Yes, it is true that selection for transportation across the Atlantic as slaves was negative in all sorts of senses. The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions<\/a> (which are highly heritable). Nevertheless, with the partial exception<\/a> of recent African immigrants \u2014 who are selected for initiative and education \u2014 both populations have been markedly less successful than other groups.<\/p>\n

There are certainly factors which affect that either way. Not inflicting on Australian Aborigines the dual metabolic disasters of the farming<\/a> and processed-food<\/a> revolutions at the same time would be good. Not under-policing the localities<\/a> in which folk live is also good.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that capacities \u2014 which are a genetic, epigenetic and cultural matter \u2014 will be evenly distributed across all populations. Indeed, we have very good reasons to think that that will not be the case, due to the variations in selection pressures \u2014 whether genetic, environmental or cultural, including interactions between the three. It is not a good idea, for instance, to spend 1400 years marrying your cousins<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even when means and medians are the same in the distribution of some trait across groups, differences in the size of tails \u2014 i.e. the number of extreme outliers \u2014 can lead to differences in the distribution of outcomes. Any population with a persistently larger tail of high physical robustness and lower executive functions \u2014 which can be an ethno-racial pattern but also a class pattern<\/a> \u2014 will tend to have higher rates of violent crime. Conversely, any population with a smaller tail of lower executive functions \u2014 for example, East Asians with a long history of underclass males not breeding but selection for reproductive success through passing examinations and cooperative farming \u2014 will tend to have lower rates of violent crime.<\/p>\n

Sufficient variance in traits \u2014 so having a larger “right tail” of positive-for-human-flourishing characteristics \u2014 can be enough on its own to increase a group’s success. Tail effects matter.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

The persistence of gene flows across human populations<\/a> does undermine any strong notion of human subspecies among Homo sapiens<\/em>. It does not imply equal distributions of capacities across human populations.<\/p>\n

Hence, evolutionary thinking is neither comfortable nor comforting.<\/p>\n

\n
    \n

    1. Given that human males \u2014 like males across species \u2014 have a flatter distribution of traits \u2014 so more positive and negative outliers \u2014 having equal numbers of males and females at the top ends of hierarchies suggests some level of discrimination against males. Conversely, having female prison populations begin to approach male populations in size suggests some level of discrimination against, even persecution of, females. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    You have to admit that Lorenzo Warby has a way with words to introduce a new essay, yes? Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense \u2014 an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators. That means that their strongest selection pressures \u2014 both genetic and cultural \u2014 have almost always been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,21,331,25,62,7,16],"tags":[484,262,130,827,605],"class_list":["post-92984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-asia","category-australia","category-economics","category-europe","category-history","category-science","tag-competition","tag-culture","tag-evolution","tag-genetics","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-obK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92984"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92987,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92984\/revisions\/92987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}