I was trying to say that I wouldn’t deliberately submit to any “cure.” If you could slip it in the water, well who knows? As it may be, many individuals lose enthusiasm for sex as they get more established and don’t miss it. Along these lines, I assume on the off chance that I was all of a sudden hot for ladies, I wouldn’t miss men. In any case, it is odd to experience such a colossal change. Furthermore, as I stated, I can’t perceive any reason why it would make me more joyful.

The only such compensating fitness benefit that has been documented for major human genetic diseases is resistance to infection

What about Tay-Sach’s disease, a genetic found disproportionately in Ashkenazis – found recessively in about 1 in 30 in American Ashkenazis. It is a genetic condition that is correlated with cognitive enhancement rather than resistance to infection.

When carried recessively it is thought to confer cognitive benefits. However it manifests itself as a debilitating condition when both parents are carriers, and their child receives a marked copy of the gene from each parent, there is a 1/4 chance of this when both parents are carriers.

Although “Paul Kersey” of Stuff Black People Don’t Like sometimes sounds like a broken record, one observation he has made is devastating. Were a visitor from outer space to hover over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden or Hamburg and then zip on over to Detroit, St. Louis or Gary he would assume that the United States had lost WW2 and was under the rule of an occupying power hellbent on destroying what had been the manufacturing base of the U.S. economy.

So much has changed over the last 50 years. Between the ravages of developers whose destruction is so ably described by Dr. Roberts and the wanton wreckage that follows in the wake of black people moving into a neighborhood the so-called white middle class and lower-middle class has been caught in a squeeze play. Every good thing is strip mined and left a hollow shell.

The American people live and labor under an occupation government run by ruthless, arrogant, hostile aliens.

Amurderka the Barbarian.

I turn gold to rust,

food to poison, health to disease,

lies to truth, life to death.

I lived down the coast in Panama City Beach in the late 70′s and worked on the Radio as Panama Jack. On a recent trip I revisited the area and could not believe what has been allowed in terms of high-rise hotels and condos. Did I say I couldn’t believe it!
It’s a totally different place, and I share your disgust.

Roberts:

“So much for American ‘freedom and democracy,’ another great myth. In the Great Myth that is America, no one has any rights except the latest money on the scene.”

Money talks and bullshit walks. And remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules.

“… rights that under common law would be squatters’ rights to a long established view ….”

Actually, there has been no common law aquired right to a view per se; owners have been free to either purchase/sell easements that would protect a view or use durable restrictive covenants to that end. There is a common law principle to acquired easements to beach access, but that has generally been avoided by property owners asserting their rights by appropriate means and at appropriate times, so the right has rarely been acquired aside from where it has been imposed by statute.

On the other hand, nuisance, detriment to property value, and detriment to health and safety would be actionable causes of action, but for corrupt local courts and agencies that refuse to uphold or support attempts to pursue remedies for these torts.

Down the road, the Destin area is way overbuilt and disgusting. The only nice place in the area is the beach. The town, if you can call it that, lacks any charm and is only suitable for drunken college students on spring break.

Sorry that doesn’t address his question. Why did the culture shift dramatically in the period referred to as the “1960′s” – and btw, it was pretty much a WEIRDO event, not just a US event.

But you could have pointed out (supporting your argument) that Society is the average of all the behaviors of the group. In the period 20 years before (early 40′s) there was a mass culling of the gene pool, on the order of 60 million WEIRDO of the primarily male and child generating age. This culling probably favored the removal of one sort of male (patriotic gene?) over others. This could explain the 1960′s – ie the children of the 1940′s.

Personally, I don’t see that totally explaining the 1960′s, but I see it as foundational. Let me put it this way by analogy. Our height is largely genetic. Getting to that is largely nutritional – which is first order environmental (although the availability of food is tied to parents ability, which is tied to Gene’s – absent flood or drought). So to put the 1960′s another way, the mass culling of the 1940′s created a change in the gene pool of certain gene types which set up probably 70% of the behavior of the 1960s.

I’ve read (and agreed with) much of this material over the years. I don’t recall any of it to specifically analyze homosexuality in a son as an extended phenotype of the mother. Given your deep interest, I hoped you might recall such an analysis and that’s why I asked. Looks like you don’t do questions

If you compare with classic Gay Uncle, the mother benefits just as her son would, but the cost of sterility of a son (out of say, 4 or 5 children) is lower for the mother than it would be for the son himself. A lot lower. This is not to argue that this works out, but it’s why I’m interested.

: Huh? Of course it is, at least as far as I remember Cochran’s original formulation. I know there are some who posit homosexuality as an incidental effect of the pathogenic action, but IMHO that doesn’t really work nearly as well as the “extended phenotype” version.

As to my actual question: Do you know of anybody who has pursued the idea of male homosexuality as the mother’s strategy?

Gay Germ is basically an “extended phenotype” theory of male homosexuality, thus circumventing the need for any contribution of the phenotype to the homosexual’s own inclusive fitness. However, there’s a much closer source of potential extended-phenotypic influence: The mother. Do you know of any sources considering the possibility of a “gay son gene” in any depth?

“I find the infectious agent explanation for male homosexuality to be highly credible. If true (and I’m convinced it is), it is likely something that does not affect adults or even children. It would affect the fetuses in pregnant women and, perhaps, small children whose immune systems are still developing. This would explain why it is so hard to identify the responsible agent.”

There’s no need to explain why the pathogen hasn’t been observed. I really feel like many people are grossly underestimating how difficult it would be to observe a pathogen (assuming its even still present), when you know essentially nothing about it, and don’t even know where in the body to look for it, or what its signature might be. Really think about that; if there were some unknown micro-organism in your body, one which we knew virtually nothing about, how would we locate it? There isn’t just some blood test we can administer for unknown microbes, after all.

[…] the aforementioned preceding posts, and see my posts All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable, Environmental Hereditarianism, and The Son Becomes The Father; recapped in my 200th post, section Heredity and behavioral […]

If homosexuality is the result of an infection, how do we account for the following:
homosexuality being more prevalent in cultures and sub cultures that accept homosexuality ie ancient Greece
men who are homosexual in prison but revert to heterosexuality when released
bisexuality

[…] in the population.  Greg Cochran has proposed that homosexuality is the result of a pathogen (see here), this being the only explanation that fits these facts.  I have to position on the […]

[…] does. Though it will be interesting to see how attitudes towards homosexuality will be affected by knowledge of its pathogenic origin. I expect it will not be […]

[…] Environmental Hereditarianism The Son Becomes The Father More Behavioral Genetic Facts […]

Nice

I think this article from the daily mail lends credence to Greg Cochran’s theory. Though it was discussing the impacts of infections on the brain and IQ, it does mention this: “‘Infections have previously been associated with both depression and schizophrenia, and it has also been proven to affect the cognitive ability of patients suffering from dementia.

‘This is the first major study to suggest that infections can also affect the brain and the cognitive ability in healthy individuals.’

He added it may be the immune system that causes the mental impairment, not just the infection.

Normally, the brain is protected from the immune system, but with infections and inflammation, the brain may be affected.

Dr Eriksen Benrós added: ‘We can see that the brain is affected by all types of infections.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3092806/Catching-simple-infection-damage-IQ-years.html

[…] Gone with the Wind from dr. james thompson, Nature, nurture and noise from kevin mitchell, and About Developmental Noise and Environmental Hereditarianism from […]

[…] right?) + nonshared environment (which can include de novo mutations and development noise, which also may be heritable! iow, variation itself might be a genetic trait.). not much room for the effects of nurture […]

I just want to add that my above comment was not recommending conversion or any other so called reparative therapy. I just posted it as a possible explanation for homosexuality. I understand that this subject matter could make some uncomfortable. This was not my intent. Just wanted to clarify my position on all this.

This is my first post on your blog. On the Noli Irritare Leones comments section the commenter misdreavus wrote: “We also know that homosexuality is strangely absent among hunter gatherer groups such as Inuits and Aka pygmies.” So would this mean that if an adult Inuit man in northern Canada living a hunter gather lifestyle were to travel to say, Toronto, and become infected with the pathogen they could become homosexual even if he is an adult? Or is the risk only when the male child is at a particular stage of development? It does seem plausible that the infection is a side effect from having the germ (an autoimmune response). Though some people could be carriers? We know that approx. one in ten male sheep exhibit exclusive homosexuality, has anyone found a germ common to both sheep and humans? I found this interesting article; Quoting article: “Specifically, they cut open the offending sheeps’ skulls, attached electonic sensors to their grey matter and monitored them while “varying the hormone levels, mainly by injecting hormones into the brain”. They reported “considerable success” in getting previously gay rams to consider a bit of boy-on-girl.

The purpose behind these experiments is to “improve the productivity of herds” since “approximately one ram in 10 prefers to mount other rams rather than mate with ewes”. The implications are far more sinister, opponents claim, since the acquired knowledge could in the future be used to “cure” human homosexuality, or may offer the prospect that “pregnant women could one day be offered a [hormone] treatment to reduce or eliminate the chance that their offspring will be homosexual”.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/02/sheep_research/ It appears the gay sheep lobby is strong

The Angu were known to practce homosexual and pedophillia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angu

[…] to other women. Unlike male homosexuality, where a likely explanation has been put forth (see Greg Cochran’s “Gay Germ” Hypothesis – An Exercise in the Power of Germs), female same-sex attraction remains the realm of speculation. My previous foray into the matter, […]

[…] Instead, I want to comment on the responses to his post, in particular JayMan‘s comment and hyperlinked post about the topic of the causes of homosexuality. I wrote a reply there, but I want to make a post […]

[…] Jayman on the irony of genetic homophobia: “Irony comes in because (obligate homosexual men, who most are concerned with) were not “born that way” at all, since male homosexuality almost certainly is the result of a childhood infection. […]

Cheap shot. There are sensible reasons for opposing the gay agenda, and speaking of general stupidity no one has it over liberals, whose ideological brethren allowed Islam to colonize Europe. How do you suppose that will work out?

[…] When did the industrial revolution begin? Gay germ hypothesis. […]

[…] Cochran first proposed that homosexuality is the result of an unknown pathogen. Here’s JayMan’s write up on it from earlier this year. The idea that pathogens could be the root cause of things like heart […]

“The pathogen is likely not acquired in utero. If it were, we’d see higher concordance between twins.

It’s likely an early childhood infection.”

I am late to the discussion. Pardon, please, I just saw your comment at Steve Sailer’s.

Your idea of an early childhood infection makes some sense. Consider: celiac disease (which is a confluence of digestive and immune systems malfunction) is more common in children born by C-section. The thinking is, the neonate’s sterile digestive system needs to be colonized by beneficial microbes received by passing through the birth canal, and C-sections bypass that, so pathogenic organisms colonize the baby’s bowel instead, making the immune system freak out. Some researchers are suggesting that C-section babies should have their mouths swabbed with fluids from the vagina just post birth.

Celiac disease has many manifestations all over the body, including neurological (such as peripheral neuropathies as well as brain: cognition, moods and behavior.)

Which leads me to speculate: Imagine there is some pathogen in the mother’s feces which requires as its life cycle to be passed to her newborns. (TMI, but the birth pushing generally causes the mother to defecate on the table.) If the infant is a girl, the pathogen can assume its host will birth infants for it to infect, later on. But if the baby is a boy, the infectious cycle stops, unless the boy can be made to desire receiving rectal sex, so the pathogen does brain damage to facilitate that.

Is my idea nonsense? A test might be, C-section boys ought to be far less likely to homosexual. Has anyone ever looked at that?

Update: Ed Yong writes that the narcolepsy paper has been retracted.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/30/narcolepsy-paper-retracted/

[…] liberal or conservative. He is an atheist, but a nationalist; a social libertarian who favors the “gay germ” theory of […]

[…] liberal or conservative. He is an atheist, but a nationalist; a social libertarian who favors the “gay germ” theory of […]

[…] to get it past censors, but the raw results speak for themselves to anyone who’s heard of the Germ Hypothesis covered there and here. Good evidence going forward to get other studies along the same lines […]

[…] identical, there are other factors, such as developmental stochasticity (noise) in utero, pathogenic and other biological insults, and plain old randomness that contributes to the differences between […]

[…] um certo tempo também que eu me deparei com a ”teoria do germe gay”, que abriu a possibilidade para uma explicação patológica da homossexualidade. Segundo esta […]

[…] from normal, reversed (female as in-utero hormone exposure instead). HBD chick here and Jayman here. Wouldn’t it be ironic if after all this complaining they weren’t born that […]

Abelard, I daresay that gay parents themselves would ensure that their children were vaccinated.

Gottlieb, your comment was touching and compassionate. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into it. I’ve had many discussions of homosexuality over the years, along with the other conditions your relate. I realized immediately that your attitude has no resemblance to the mindset driving this topic, neither here nor in society at large. You might ask yourself why these threads generate so much interest in the first place.

Obviously, many people don’t like homosexuality – a point acknowledged many times throughout this thread. I credit some of bloggers here for going into clinical detail on the topic of homo-aversion. It’s rarely given fair time. In any case, men dislike who they dislike, whatever the reasons. It’s our intuitive self. Each of the wonderful discussions here on the various hypothesis for the cause homosexuality boils down to one question: what went wrong? Jayman’s distillation of Cochran’s theories, which touched on many other rival suppositions, serves to characterize some of the specific undesirability from both the first and third-person POVs. I submit he’s proven his point in that regard.

So while you rightfully question some of the assumptions running through many of these posts, you might have missed the point of the discussion itself. The folks here are seeking some level of understanding about homosexuality, how to characterize it, how to understand those affected by it, and how to judge the condition. I see no blanket rejection of natural diversity nor a desire to impose arbitrary norms. In fact, the posts remained remarkably focused on obligate male homosexuality as a individual trait. Where this was described as undesirable, the judgement was specific to the trait itself and for more or less practical concerns.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-008-9449-3 have you seen this? curious, that only male abusers seemed to increase % chance of gay, almost like a transmission

[…] deserves a longer post – perhaps something even longer. I refer people to my previous posts Environmental Hereditarianism and Why HBD for some of my earlier thoughts on the […]

Here’s a question:

Historically, has male same-sex attraction actually been something that causes a large drop in genetic fitness? I imagine that, in times past, many gay males were socially obligated to marry women and have children, and that they in fact did so in spite of their lack of sexual attraction to women.

[…] and possible evolutionary function – if any – of female bisexuality. Unlike its counterpart, male homosexuality, the reason female bisexuality exists largely mysterious and poorly […]

Hospital professionals, public spaces, the majority of preschool teachers and nurses…?
It could produce a partial effect. Bisexual populations are under-researched as too complicated, as is female sexual fluidity. It would be a neat explanation of another social group and its features in sex research too.

I was just saying that I wouldn’t voluntarily submit to any “cure.” If you could slip it in the water, well who knows? As it is, a lot of people lose interest in sex as they get older and don’t miss it. So, I suppose if I was suddenly hot for women, I wouldn’t miss men. But it would be odd to undergo such a huge change. And as I said, I can’t see why it would make me happier.

I wonder if bisexual women couldn’t be the carriers? Women have very high bisexuality rates and since they’d build up enough of a partial resistance to maintain an attraction to both, it suggests of any human vector demo it may still be present and effective, moderating the renowned fluidity of female sexuality over lifespan.

[…] can be taken to be a sign something is seriously amiss. We saw that with male homosexuality (see Greg Cochran’s “Gay Germ” Hypothesis – An Exercise in the Power of Germs). Now I will discuss two curious exceptions to this […]

[…] behavior depends on the circumstances of the day and the specifics of the situation (see my post Environmental Hereditarianism). This may be as good of an explanation as any, but I am looking for evidence of reliable […]

Many gay men, including myself, would not want to experience the radical change that would result if they could be “cured” of homosexuality. I’ve thought about it, and being attracted to women would not make me happier.

[…] can lead a horse to water….” The child’s innate abilities and proclivities, plus whatever developmental luck he or she possesses, will guide his or her path through the […]

[…] HBD – “As I have tired to explain in my earlier post, Environmental Hereditarianism, the behavioral and physical traits of people are environmentally context-dependent. The broad […]

I suggest that you read Jacob Felson’s review article very carefully — in it, he refutes most of Jay Joseph’s most common objections, while noting that the EEA has been demonstrated to be valid for all sorts of traits ranging from educational attainment, to IQ, to eating disorders and more. (He notes that it might be slightly untrue for neuroticism, but Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s true for all of the Big 5, not just four of them.) Forget what the abstract of the paper says. Read it in its entirety.

If you have a microsoft onedrive account (I highly recommend one for sharing and uploading files — you get 7 GB for free!), feel free to download it below:

[link removed]

In summary, there really is no way that you can inflate correlations between identical twins by treating them similarly. And even if the twin studies were worthless, we’ve got multiple strains of evidence demonstrating that virtually all behavioral traits are heritable. Anybody who cites Jay Joseph’s nonsense at this point is not worth a minute of your free time.

(P.S. Jayman, could you please take down the link above after a week or so? I don’t want the wrong people accessing my profile. Thanks.)

The crux of Jay Joseph’s argument is that twin studies, et al. do not adequately control for the so-called “equal environments assumption” (EEA). That is, Joseph believes that the physical similarity between identical twins might over-inflate their correlations for traits like IQ, et al., thereby yielding heritability estimates that are excessively high.

That’s a pile of bull crap — and even if we didn’t have the twin studies, we’ve got heritabilities from GWAS studies that are mostly concordant with estimates from the classical twin study design, as well as estimates from longitudinal adoption studies. There really is no reason to doubt them at this point. The game is up, and that ship has already sailed. Why waste countless man-hours dithering over rough approximations that are hardly different than they were in Cyril Burt’s day?

Leaving that aside, there are a number of studies confirming the EEA that he either flat-out ignores or dismisses in a cavalier fashion throughout the entire book. For instance: While it is true that the parents of identical twins do treat them more similarly than they treat fraternal twins (e.g. by dressing them in identical outfits, feeding them identical meals, etc.), there’s a considerable degree of variation between families in how similarly identical twins really are treated. For instance, Linda and Sue’s parents might encourage their twins to express their individuality by forcing them to play different sports, etc., while Bob and David’s parents have dressed them in identical outfits since infancy because they look so darned cute. Their peers, in turn, might amplify the any similarity in appearance between the twins (either real or perceived) by treating them accordingly. And to this date we have found no correlation between the similarity of treatment and concordance rates for things like IQ. None whatsoever. Consult citations below:

Psychol Med. 1994 Aug;24(3):579-90.
Twin Research and Hum Genet. 2006 Jun;9(3):403-411
Acta Psych. Scandinavica 2007 Apr;81(4):322-326

Here’s another test: Every once in a while, parents will produce dizygotic (fraternal) twins who are so similar in appearance that they are treated as identical twins, until medical testing proves otherwise. (To give you an example, the famous duo Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are fraternal, not identical twins — but you wouldn’t know this at all by looking at their childhood pictures.) In essence, they don’t turn out to have life outcomes that are any different than outcomes for fraternal twins who are dissimilar in appearance, or two ordinary siblings from the same family, for that matter. There is no relationship whatsoever between how similar dizogytic twins are in appearance and how concordant they are for psychometric traits — the correlations are exactly what you might expect from them sharing (on average) 50% of each others’ DNA, and nothing more.

See here:

Behav Genet. 1995 Jul;25(4):327-35.
Behav Genet. 1976, Volume 6, Issue 1, pp 43-52
Behav Genet. 1993 Jan;23(1):21-7.
Behav Genet. 2013 Sep;43(5):415-26

And here is a comprehensive review article that suggests that the EEA is valid in most, if not all cases, but that further testing may be needed to assess the magnitude of the discrepancy (if any exists).

Soc Sci Res. 2014 Jan;43C:184-99

In essence, Jay Joseph abhors all findings from behavior genetics because it refutes his belief that social inequities are largely responsible for everything from schizophrenia to drug abuse and more. He is a politically motivated charlatan, not a serious researcher with an abiding interest in the accuracy of scientific findings. You might as well chuck him into the same category with activist bozos like Lewontin and K. Richardson.

Jayman, I have a task for you I think you might like to take up. It’s been causing me a little trouble dealing with an unusually bright critic of hereditarianism and I’m not even entirely sure that they’re wrong. To keep the story short, they’re referencing Jay Joseph’s critiques of twin studies http://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjayjoseph.net%2Fyahoo_site_admin%2Fassets%2Fdocs%2F2013_Joseph_Fallacy_of_the_Twin_Method_in_the_Social_and_Behavioral_Sciences.262140341.pdf&h=vAQHWf_xc&s=1 , http://www.futurepsychiatry.com/blog/twin-separation-studies-pro-and-con-for-biological-basis-of-psychiatric-disorders and it looks to me like if that goes, so does a significant chunk of the basis for hereditarianism, even if it doesn’t necessarily ‘prove hereditarianism wrong,’ per se. If you should decide to take the issue up, I’d appreciate if you could send some kind of something to my Facebook page to ensure I get notice of it. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100006548798446&ref=tn_tnmn

[…] of much confusion within the HBD world and without. As I have tired to explain in my earlier post, Environmental Hereditarianism, the behavioral and physical traits of people are environmentally context-dependent. The broad […]

Why the explosion of dysfunction beginning in the late 1960s?

[…] irrationality of it all is proof we’re dealing with lunatics. Some very smart people think pathogens may lie at the heart of currently unexplained biological phenomenon like homosexuality. Maybe the […]

Saw this today, and found it rather interesting: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/07/the-science-taboo-there-may-be-genetic-realities-to-race-but-not-along-the-lines-we-expect/

Seems like the media is taking notice.

In general, I’m skeptical of the ability of anyone on the outside to really come in and fix things for people, just because outsiders tend not to really understand why things are as they are. I like to think that most people, so long as they have the necessities of life, aren’t being over-taxed or slaughtered by war, sick or in the middle of a natural disaster, have a family/community around them, and aren’t staring at a bunch of people who’re richer than themselves, will be relatively happy. When folks come into a place and destroy the things that made good lives possible for people (fencing off grazing land, for example,) then we get misery. When people then come and try to switch people to a new lifestyle (convert hunter gatherers to pastoralists, for example,) we probably get a mis-match between skills and necessity, and that probably also causes misery. And once these things have happened and the old lifestyles aren’t viable anymore, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t assume that folks are unhappy or need help just because they’re poor.

In my experience, a significant % of Americans actively hate smart people. A much smaller % likes them.

“it makes it all the more difficult to craft a better a world. ”

Hmmm? I guess the question I am wondering about is, better for whom? Clearly the rich and intelligent know how to craft a better world for themselves, at least in the short run. Upper-middle class bourgeois utopias (aka the suburbs back in the first half of the 20th century) are a good example of this. But what about the rest of the population? Their may be no way to craft a better world for all of them — though I question even that conclusion — but it doesn’t follow that there is no way that some of them — self-selected subgroups — cannot craft a better world for themselves. Isn’t this what you see in various “whitopias” (sp?) scattered around the country? Granted, they are all pretty g loaded communities, so let us ask: is it inconceivable that there might be strategies to craft better worlds for average groups of people — average in terms of their normal distributions of various desirable human traits (not including sociopathy for instance) ? I think there is, but then I may be a fool. In fact, a fool I will always be!

Yes. Makes it the only means by which some problems can be addressed.

I live in the Midlands of America, the ideals of the alt-right blogosphere aren’t foreign to me, I see them every day. I’d give you Health and beauty for sure, but not smarts. I’ve known too many people who regard brains beyond a certain level with suspicion and distrust. My experience tells me that regular people are far more interested in their children having the same values they do than they are that they ace the SAT. If they had to trade one for the other values would win out… but hey I could be wrong.

And bear in mind I’d not saying people are wrong to think this way either (if indeed they do). Group cohesion is important and if there’s one I’ve noticed about weirdo artists like myself it’s that we are contentious and contrarian. when you get too many of us, you don’t have a culture, you just have an atomized group of mixed nuts with no overarching direction or goals.

I’d be interested to find that out too. You’d think ‘Smart’ would be part of the default choices but that doesn’t seem to stop people from hating the Jews. In my (albeit limited) experience smart people seem to think smarts should be the main qualifier but smarts often come with other unsavory attitudes disliked by many such as universalism, modern left liberalism or worse… weirdness. As someone in the 99th percentile for openness to experience with relatively low conscientiousness, I’ve experienced first hand how off putting my thoughts and actions are to regular folks. I’d guess most people would agree that they’d like to see more ‘people like me’ and the people they’d like to see less of is ‘people who are different than me.’

~S

Of course it does. However trying to address problems – in Australia for instance a life expectancy and IQ gap to the aboriginal population – without addressing the genetic issues is going to be fruitless and frustrating.

[…] THIS (yes, there *will* be a pop quiz on the material later in the week (~_^) )!: Environmental Hereditarianism – “[T]here is little evidence linking most ‘measurable’ aspects of the […]

I’m not sure what the studies say about resistance training, but my parents’ doctors are advising certain amounts of resistance exercise for both of them. (Dad’s 83, Mom isn’t claiming to be 29 anymore.) So whether the research is actually any good, someone’s listening to it.

Evolution will continue whether we want it to or not. The social incentives in place now will effect generations down the line for a long time. The question is, do we consciously attempt to control the incentive mix, or simply let the chips fall where they may. The problem with eugenics is always the same: you have to define what ‘better’ would be or ‘best’ would be and every group (even every person) out there is going to have their own idea of the model citizen.

Agreed, especially when people say: “It’s nature AND nurture” but then go on to act and think as if whichever one they prefer (typically nature) is the real driver behind the wheel anyway.

~S

[…] Jayman writes constantly on his excellent blog, environmental influence during development, including […]

Looking forward to the bigger post on this. Right now we need some data on exactly how much the MZ twins differ genetically. That could change things dramatically and go a long way in fighting the “half slatism” out there. Although just informing about the design and terminology of the studies should do that too.

I’d also add from a health perspective, a shift in attitude towards genetic determinism (and hence away from correlation based medicine) would be quite positive. Studies that purport to to measure long-term health affects are riddled with biases, inconsistencies and confounding variables. But short-term studies are easily subjected to the gold standard of controlled randomized experiments. The problem is the former get more attention because they come along with headline grabbing titles about dying early. Whereas the latter are more frequently about quality of life issues.

For example mountains of controlled experiments show that resistance training mitigates the effect of age-related muscle and bone loss and cognitive decline. This presents a whole slew of quality of life benefits for the elderly like greater mobility, lower fall risks, less time spent in hospital beds, less social isolation, better life engagement, etc. The evidence for this is solid, concrete, experimentally tested and largely indisputable.

But for decades the medical establishment promoted low-and-slow aerobic exercise to the almost exclusion of resistance training. In fact many doctors even explicitly advised against it. Aerobic exercise is certainly fine, and has its own documented benefits, but it absolutely should not replace resistance training. Particularly for older individuals where even a moderate volume of aerobic exercise drastically increases injury risk.

Resistance training was out of favor because of vague concerns about the long-term impact on cardiac hypertrophy and other heart problems. Findings rooted in correlation based medicines, most ultimately proven false during this century. From a health perspective orienting your lifestyle around recommendations based on short-term quality of life studies is a better strategy than relying on noisy and unreliable long-term longevity studies.

” From, parenting, to lifestyle, to social engineering, unfortunately, it turns out, the reality is not so simple. There isn’t always something you can do. The true calls for a type of serenity – accepting what you cannot change.”

Simply accepting this on a widespread level would certainly improve the world to a certain degree. Channeling Bryan Caplan here, the belief that intelligence is environmentally modulated, leads to a way over-bias in how much schooling kids receive. Both in terms of hours a day and number of years. Much of this schooling is not of the variety of learning essential and useful skills, but a vain attempt at general intellectual stimulation or “learning how to learn.” As any parent stuck staying up all night to finish the seventh grade science project can attest, this makes being a parent a lot less enjoyable than it needs to be.

For the student the undue stress and needless sense of failure continue throughout the educational process. For example in a field like computer science dropout rates for even the basic intro courses regularly exceed 50%. Yet it’s been well known for a while now that a simple logic test administered before the course can quite accurately predict success. Yet these are widely shunned in most academic departments for association with various forms of “privilege”. Thousands of students are made to feel stupid and discouraged from higher education for no reason whatsoever.

Even under the assumption of no ‘environment’ effects, there is still stuff we can do. It just requires generations – quite literally – rather than years. We have a lot of information about the effect of selection pressures on people, and we need to use it.

But eugenics hasn’t been admissible into discussion since World War II. I suspect if you go back to the literature of the 1930′s, there is a fair bit of worthwhile postulation on how to achieve some of the changes we’d like to see over time.

[…] the impact of pathogens – particularly behavioral impacts such as the previously discussed gay germ hypothesis of Greg Cochran – is amongst the most solid known examples of true “environmental […]

Part of the problem with the hunter-gatherer example is incidence: If 1 out of 10 men are homosexual there may be only one in a random generation. Without a cultural backdrop that even acknowledges homosexuality, they may never realize what’s up.

Szopeno,
but ‘they’ get ‘to cure’ the obligate or exclusive man (macho) homossexuality in sheep. It was that i read here.

homosexuality could be caused by germsn AND still it could be incurable (it would be just preventable)

I change completely my view about it, yes, you convince me, at least i’m now 80% predisposed to accept that homossexuality could be a disease and would be cured or or create a vaccine, but how i say in my other comment, you will need to prove it.