anarchonomicon.com
10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.
What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
While I can buy this as a means of propagating the memes of a society, your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers. Moreover, how likely was a man to actually participate in a battle so large that routing was possible? I have a hard time believing the selection effects here would be anything but incredibly weak.
Why?
I'm having a hard time imagining why you think so. I'll try two angles but lmk if neither is what you meant.
You mention "your individual genes" not making much of a difference, but humans fight as ethnic groups. The other men in your army are probably much more closely related to you than the enemies are, and share a lot of the traits which distinguish you from the enemy. So no, one soldier being a bit more courageous isn't likely to affect much, but in aggregate it's likely that one side is going to be substantially more courageous than the other, for several reasons including culture, nutrition, and, yes, genetic distinctiveness. Over enough iterations this should propagate.
Maybe you think that the relatively tiny (in absolute numerical terms) genetic differences between ancestral groups can't amount to much? In fact there are plenty of single-allele mutations which have outsized effects on all sorts of things from body shape to behavior. A lot of the ones we think about most often are deleterious because those stand out more: when someone gets a nasty FOXP2 mutation and can't really engage in human-level speech, that's obvious and we go looking for the cause, which happens to be easy to spot. But suppose there were a mutation which made someone (and by extent his descendants) 20% more courageous? How would that even play out? We'd probably only know about it if it had unfortunate side-effects like also making carriers prone to violent crime or something, which seems plausible. Here's an interesting candidate, though due to the prohibitions on research into such topics set in place by today's dominant religion, we seem to know less about it today than we did fifteen years ago.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link