Saturday, 12 February 2011

Does hereditary psychology explain broad cultural types and trends?




























These are the marks of the 'civilized' personality. 






























(Note: Humility is quite different from submission.)
















Jim Kalb said...


I just heard a talk by a friend in which he was puzzling over John Paul's comment that we should philosophize "in Mary." Why her? What did she ever do or say that has anything to do with philosophy? And why is she "Mary, Seat of Wisdom"? The answer, of course, is that she is supremely receptive, and that's how we get beyond concept and assertion to reality.

Jason Malloy said...


Vital creativity is a sexually selected trait. Almost all recognized creative accomplishment is male, occurs during the prime reproductive years, and declines gradually with age. Violent crime, athleticism, and creative output follow the same age curve for men due to their shared purpose and origin in the male sex hormones. Violence, athleticism, and creative display are all competitive male drives which work to attract female sexual partners. Then as men age or enter committed relationships the male sex hormones abate, so paternal traits increase and these mating traits decrease.

State antiquity is similar for East Asians and Europeans, and shouldn't explain the difference in sexual traits. Asian males have a weaker mating drive than European males and the best paradigm for explaining population differences in mating effort right now is differential pathogen exposure.

bgc said...

@Jason - the papers I have seen on differential pathogen exposure seemed very poor, so I have ignored them.

Jason Malloy said...

The pathogen paradigm suffuses the sociobiology literature in explaining individual differences in sexual strategies (e.g. the female choice between good gene CADS and good commitment DADS). Both Hamilton and Trivers favored it specifically for the Rushtonian pattern, But it's also the standard for explaining population level differences in polygyny more generally. For example Low 1990, Gangestad & Buss 1993, Quinlan 2007, and Barber 2008.

Europeans are more oriented towards mating effort because they have a stronger legacy of polygynous behavior. And pathogens are the standard sociobiological paradigm for explaining polygyny. While climate history also seems relevant, it invites skepticism over assumptions of evolutionary stasis. As Razib commented, with all the cold adaptation theories for Asians you'd think that Guangdong was a tundra.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

All right then. Photon Courier linked over here, and I see you are touching on many of my favorite topics here. Glad to have found you, and I think I may spend the evening here.

By way of explanation why this enchants: I am a psychiatric social worker, past president of a high-IQ society, father of five, both natural and adopted from Romania: evangelical with strong Catholic leanings, interested in prehistory, social history, and the largely tribal ways we still organise our politics and society. I don't see where you are touching on my other passions of historical linguistics ("Tyne" is, BTW, likely one of the few Brythonnic survivals, from the PIE word for river that gives us Danube, Dniepr, Dniester, Don, Donets), maps, and Lewis/Chesterton/Tolkien, but perhaps something will show up.

For openers, I have taken to saying that while IQ has been one of the dominant needs for development to date, adaptability - which was always useful anyway - may surpass it in the coming years.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Largely concur. I would venture that I was of moderate psychoticism in my younger days, but have moved lower because of duty - to children and church originally, then later to job, friends, and ultimately to many societal traditional values.

Note: Isaac Asimov suggested that schools identify who was reading science fiction for pleasure and mark them for fast-track science training, regardless of whether they had shown any other aptitude. That net may indeed catch a disproportionate number with both intelligence and creativity.

Geniuses in any field are often autodidacts or have nontraditional education. Mandelbrot comes to mind. It may be notable that Einstein was the only one of his graduating Doctoral class not to be offered a professorship, because he had proved hard to get along with. Edison invented a lot of fairly stupid things, such as concrete houses, in addition to his world-changers.