Re: Data better than theory?

On 5 Sep, 05:20, Peter Brooks <Peter.H.M.Bro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 4, 11:48 pm, Dave Smith <da...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On 4 Sep, 12:59, Peter Brooks <Peter.H.M.Bro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sep 4, 4:05 am, Peter Brooks <Peter.H.M.Bro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The exception is that men are more violent than their partners,
committing murders at around 10 times the rate that women do all over
the world. Even so, the overall incidence of homicide varies from
around 1 in 100,000 in Japan to 60 times that figure in Venezuela,
something that has nothing to do with biology."

That is a different point - again, the claim that it has 'nothing to
do with biology' seems an extreme one to me - 'nothing' is a very,
very strong claim!

Considering the Russian silver foxes experiment it seems unlikely to
be true. The experiment (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2374754
) was over 40 generations and selecting only for behaviour, it
produced the extreme changes in behaviour (tameness and agressiveness)
and looks seen.

Now, if human generations are 30 years long, the same effect should be
possible in 30 * 40 = 1200 years. Just reading a little history
suggests the the selection pressures in Venezuela have been very
different from those in Japan since around 800 AD - and so we'd expect
these pressures to have had effects on both morpholoogy and behaviour..

So I'd have to see some extremely convincing evidence that the
difference in murder rates between Japan and Venuzuela are 'nothing to
do with biology'.

'Nothing much to do with biology' would certainly be safer. Difficult
to know how much is due to genetics and how much to current economic,
cultural and political factors.

'Quite probably not much to do with biology' would be closer to the
mark. It is difficult to tease out these factors, as you say, but, as
you can see in the study of the foxes, under pressure over this number
of generations, you do have clear behavioural differences that can be
mapped to genetic differences. I'd expect that the 'genographic'
project that you posted about recently might be just the sort of place
to get this sort of information. The fox project could help direct
likely places to look.

I'd be interested to see how the selection pressure of war actually,
rather then theoretically, works. Korea has had, as far as I can tell,
far more wars than Japan. This stands to reason since it Japan has had
a large proportion of its wars with Korea and Korea has had a sizeable
proportion of its wars with China. So a comparison between Japan and
Korea might shed some light on this - as might a comparison between
the Swiss, French and Germans.

Theoretically, I'd suppose that the invaded and occupied country would
gain more 'aggressive genes' whilst the invader would be more likely
to lose them. It would be nice to learn more about this. Anecdotally
this seems consistent with my family history - both the uncles of mine
that died in WWII (one on each side) appear, from what I've heard of
them, to have been keener on novelty and risk-seeking than their
siblings to a fairly large degree.

There's an interesting, of somewhat tangential, article on the Romans
and AIDS:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2674993/Britons-may-be-more-
vulnerable-to-Aids-due-to-Roman-invasion.html - with a photograph that
must have been cleverly brought back to us by time-travelers, unless
I've missed the Roman invention of colour photography. This certainly
seems pretty clear evidence (if more was needed) that conquest and
occupation is an effective way of spreading genes - something that was
pointed out in 'A Natural History of Rape'; but I noticed that there
were some objections to points made in that book, mainly, it seemed to
me, on grounds of political correctness or non-compliance with
feminist mythology.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


I know little about these issues and don't dispute your points.
Various questions occur to me, however. How different is natural
selection from selection by humans (breeding) -- is it usually much
slower and less specific? Maybe aggression takes distinct forms and
is to some extent 'situation specific' ? Maybe aggression in humans
is more complicated than aggression in other animals, due to cultural
and cognitive factors? Are warlike nations necessarily composed of
relatively aggressive people? Maybe aggressive soldiers often don't
live to pass on their genes? And so on..............

Dave
.

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