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Not sure what the point of this post is
That "race determines culture" is just wrong, compare the culture of any race X000 years ago to that of any race today. Vikings to middle managers, aztec blood sacrifices to gardeners, japanese empire to efficient japanese manufacturing systems. Both the american upper-class, intellectuals and scientists and managers, contains a lot of indians, middle easterners, asians, jews, and whites - as do the lower classes - and the culture of the upper-class indians sure is closer to that of the upper-class whites or jews than the lower class indians.
Just a thought, re:Your conversation with Velveteen ambush below.
When you talk about cultures you are both focused on the prominent products of that culture. The flowers of a culture, not its stems. It was a common metaphor that the knights of a country were the "Flower of France's Chivalry." That's what you're pointing to in your examples. But for every Viking warrior there were a dozen of thralls or karls who stayed home to mind the farm. For every Aztec blood-priest, there were a dozen ordinary Aztec dudes who just drank maize beer and nodded along at the ceremony (and the Aztecs and Vikings were themselves ethnic minorities within their own territories!). Samurai in Feudal Japan constituted about 5% of the population, Seven Samurai for the whole village pretty much gets the percentage right.
And when you talk about your modern examples, you picked representative examples of things you associate with those cultures. Leaving aside the joke stereotypes, manufacturing is 20% of Japan's GDP. The vast majority of Japanese aren't any more involved in manufacturing than that Mexican gardener, and there's little reason to think they're all that much better suited to it than he is. Which is what I'm thinking.
So let's assume that people's personal genetic proclivities determine how they'll express themselves culturally. Cultural change you're seeing doesn't require a change in genetics, merely a change in which genetic groups within a country constitute the flower of the culture. It's not that the Japanese have changed, it's that which Japanese become prominent has changed. In feudal Japan, the flower of the culture, the flower of its chivalry, was a charging army of Samurai; today the flower of Japan's culture is a container ship filled with Toyota Land Cruisers and high tech electronics, or a streaming service of the latest anime. If you held Japan's genetic mix exactly constant, the dorks who design the shocks on Land Cruisers probably aren't the best sword fighters, and the animators probably weren't great archers; they were probably invisible farmers or merchants, with skills that the world simply didn't value at the time. Meanwhile, a talented fighter, filled with piss and vinegar and aggression, who wants to test himself in combat with other men, makes a great samurai. Today, if he's one of the best 100 or so in the country he might make it as a professional athlete, if not he's some anonymous nobody, a cop or a criminal. He has no impact on your impression of Japanese culture, where once he did.
Elon Musk, had he been born a thousand years earlier in Holland, probably dies with his name written only in the baptismal registry of the local church. Temujin, born today, probably runs a street gang somewhere. In medieval times, Ashkenazi Jews were not very prominent examples of European culture, producing few great knights or lords; in the industrial world that valued and rewarded IQ, they gave Europe the Rothschilds and Einstein and Freud. The vast majority of people who don't have the genetic profile that the culture selects for, they get forced into a mold they don't fit and they never amount to anything; the handful that stand out are those that happen to have what society selects for. Change what society selects for, and you get a different "race" because the iceberg flips and the 10% you used to ignore is the only 10% you see anymore.
Idk, just a thought. I'm not sure I buy into genetic determinism that heavily, just pointing to an alternate mechanism.
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The mythology of culture as an external force that perpetuates itself on its own motion is just that.
The only coherent definition of cultural expression is that of genetic material expressing itself in an environment. If you drastically change the environment you change the culture. On top of that, genetic expression can change environment in a feedback loop. But as soon as you change the genes, such as can be seen with, for example, Pakistanis in Britain, you get a massive shift where it becomes obvious where the non-Pakistani genes were doing the work and where the environment was modulating behavior.
There is also a hidden assumption here I find wrong. That, because someone in the past was using primitive tools or technology they must be 'primitive' in comparison to a modern human, that their modes of behavior and emotion were somehow primitive or different in a way that would distinguish them from the emotional expressions of a modern human. There is no reason to assume that the people of the past differ from the people of the present. I am in fact quite sure that a lot of people from the past would become quite docile if they lived in the same luxury modern people live in. And they would modulate their behavior accordingly if their luxurious lifestyle was threatened by them stepping out of line. In fact, it would be absurd to suggest otherwise given this is where the modern man came from. Even if the transformation wasn't without some culling of volatile genetic material, there is no reason to assume that the all the volatility of the past was culled, and that it did not instead modulate to a more prosperous future.
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I won't defend OP's thesis directly, but I will contest your argument against it. Genetics can change substantially over thousands of years (and even in less than a decade if the selection is intense enough), so insofar as race is determined by genes, the races themselves will also change over those timescales.
I'm genuinely not sure what OP's thesis is, exactly.
I don't think 200 years is enough for the recent cultural changes in japan, india, europe, or anywhere else that 'developed'. There probably were evolved genetic changes in 'behavior' in some senses, but I genuinely don't know what those might be, and they're probably rather contingent and complicated. Similarly - racial differences in 'attitudes', organization, or something are ... plausible, but I'm really not sure what they might be, and strongly suspect they mix in complex ways with the existing culture than anything like 'being more aggressive', 'being less emotional', etc. (And also significant variation within races, etc)
(like with intelligence, this isn't a reason to reject sorting, hierarchy, genetics being critical for any sort of virtue, etc - just that it doesn't follow racial lines very closely)
Why not? That's like ten generations. Is it so hard to believe that the advance of technology alone wouldn't impose selective pressures sufficient to manifest over just three or four generations?
Ubiquitous access to contraceptives, totally new types of career paths and educational trajectories, vastly different criminal justice responses to violent behavior, vastly different observed fertility rates with respect to all sorts of socially relevant variables (income, religiosity, class, education level)... all of these impose dramatic changes on family formation, which we see in everyday life in America today and which we talk about all the time on this forum. I'd expect those differences to have really big effects on society in the space of three generations -- let alone ten.
It could've selected for something. But something that determined culture? I.e. played a large role in it, such that people without it are culturally incompatible? Over four generations?
Generally - india, japan, northern europe, central europe are different places, with different native cultures - what selective pressures would be present in all of them over the last ten generations (and some less than ten) that would that rapidly raise the genes for a tolerant and liberal culture from a brutish and reactionary one, or some other significant cause? At the same time? Even if there was one driving allele for every cultural change at the same time, present in 1 in 100 people ten generations ago and very common (say, 50%) today, it'd need to 1.5x every generation. And there'd be many genes necessarily involved, and selecting for one 'competes' with selecting for any other, as does it with any other existing selection (for intelligence, physical compatibility with novel environment, diseases, etc). Even if - purely hypothetically - that did happen for anglos - how are there serbians, russians, middle easterners, indians, chinese, koreans - all firmly culturally assimilated into the american elite? How was the queer iranian category theorist's culture determined by their race?
"Ubiquitous access to contraceptives" has existed for three generations, and tends selects against modern tendencies, right? "Totally new career paths and educational trajectories" many of these career paths & educational trajectories existed for a small subset of the population for the past ten generations. ,Those that weren't were fairly universal - industry, universal schooling, etc - but how exactly do these present such a strong selective pressure for some complex cultural thing, when they're mostly designed allow anyone to work or get an education?
Industrialization, of course. In an agrarian society, close cooperation with strangers isn't as important. In an industrial society, it is. Those who are predisposed against spending time professionally in close quarters with strangers are fine in an agrarian society but will be unable to earn a living in an industrial society. Their genes will be largely eliminated from each generation after the advent of industrialization. Three generations should be more than sufficient to change the character of a society.
We aren't talking about evolving a new organ or something. We're talking about weeding out or magnifying certain existing traits that are known to have significant heritable components. As a thought experiment, if only one in three blond people reproduced in each generation, I hope it's obvious that we'd dramatically reduce the proportion of blond people within three generations. It wouldn't take long at all.
Is "tendency to spend time professionally in close quarters with strangers" even a distinct "trait" that is solely or mostly genetic, like fur color? I'm fairly sure that if you took a bantu or hunter gatherer fetus and implanted them into a mother in Kowloon Walled City, when they grew up they'd be entirely used to, and find natural, being around so many other people. They might have other problems, but people are intelligent and work in the culture and environment they're born into.
Sure, and I agree a change like some behavior-related alleles becoming 30% more common can't be excluded. But there are a ton of possible changes those could cause, and the way they interact with 'culture' is probably complicated and contingent, such that claiming this "determines" culture in any sense is probably wrong.
We have genetic material for populations in the last 200 years though, and I don't think any alleles were that strongly selected. And most of ones that were mostly selected were - iirc, i'd have to look again - diet or disease related, as opposed to brain, and none nearly so much as 'blondes have children at 1/3 the rate of brown haired'.
I don't know what a "distinct trait" means. It's certainly going to be polygenic. And of course it's going to be substantially heritable. The big five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Of those, the latter three are heavily implicated in one's ability to be good at professional collaboration. Extraversion is going to be heavily implicated in one's ability to succeed generally in a society of specialized labor, rather than one of subsistence farming. And all are known to be quite heritable. And those are probably just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't come close to cataloguing every variation in human personality or behavior, and everything tends to be at least somewhat heritable.
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