http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre_1.html#005818 is part 2 of a 5-part interview with Gregory Cochran, co-author (with Henry Harpending of the University of Utah) of "The 10,000[-]Year Explosion", whose main thesis is that civilization has accelerated the pace of evolution among human populations.
http://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/ has links to all five sessions of the interview, which looks like it would make a good substitute for actually reading the book. A few excerpts... 2B: What should the interested Eng-Lit amateur make of the evolution-culture question? What picture could he carry around that would be useful and accurate-enough? GC: He should remember that people can and sometimes have changed biologically over historical time, and that the changes have not taken the same course in every population. He should not expect events over a single generation to have much genetic effect. And he should, if all possible, try to remember that cicumstances over the past 70 years are different than those experienced over most of history: also that 70 years is not enough time for much change. 2B: One implication would seem to be that there are striking differences between populations that developed agriculture long ago and ones that encountered it only recently. Fair? GC: Yes. Peoples with short histories of agriculture have trouble with alcoholism, diabetes, and generally have a lot of trouble fitting into complex hierarchical societies. 2B: One of my favorite moments in your book comes on the first page, where you write "Sargon and Imhotep were different from you genetically, as well as culturally." That certainly blows the idea that cultural differences are nothing but meaningless accidents of time and space out of the water. In other words, perhaps tastes differ from culture to culture not just because standard-issue Blank Slate people are responding to different environments but also because the people doing the encountering have preferences and penchants that are biochemically based. How would you expect the kind of knowledge and thinking that is now emerging to affect discussions of culture? And how would you like to see it do so? GC: There's probably such a thing as "national character," at least when we're contrasting distant peoples, say Japanese and Irish -- even if they both have Oharas. The idea has fallen deeply out of fashion. I once tried to see if anyone on the net was thinking along those lines, and the closest I came was some idiot who wrote in French. After fighting my way through the language, I then found that he was insane, to the point of having been involved with both Lyndon LaRouche and the American Enterprise Institute. However, an idea being out of favor (and mainly held by lunatics) doesn't mean that it is necessarily impossible or wrong. [So being involved with the AEI is a mark of insanity. That's my kinda author!] Also mentioned are the "Paleo" diet and lactose tolerance, with an unexplained reference to the Illuminati and "the Hidden Way and the Rule that is to Come". -- Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages prior to posting, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
