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Old 02-04-2013, 07:39 PM   #444
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
Quote:
reverse natural selection
You cause me to go deep here, I have considered the question very carefully, and I believe that what we are seeing is culture in operation, over many generations.

As in "Trading Places", I now believe that upbringing is 99%, genetics 1% in determining our intelligence.

(It may go further than that: what we believe intelligence is, and what importance we place on it, is mostly cultural.)

What WE are is informed by what our culture taught us. We have no idea how big the impact of our culture is. But consider that all first-world drama is informed by Shakespeare, who worked from late 1500s - early 1600s.

Culture is so critical to who we are. We don't want to believe it. We try to deny it. But if there is a unifying "force" a la Star Wars, it's culture, which goes so far as to inform us what musical scale sounds "right" to our ears.

Culture tells us how often to wash our hands, whether we value hard work, whether we value education, what importance we place on charity, what importance we place on raising children.

All humans are identical, genetically. Race is an expression of as little as 25,000 years spent developing separately. But in the 100,000 years we have been wandering the earth, no group of us spent enough time apart to develop into a different species. We all have roughly the same capacity for intelligence. When an African is raised in western culture s/he seems western, identical to the rest of us, save for the racial characteristics.

What confuses us is that we don't see how valuable our cultural background is. We don't realize that our cultural differences develop in the same way as genetics... slowly, over many generations. What if, instead of Shakespeare, we had three centuries of slavery?

Our cultural differences APPEAR to be genetic, because they happen over so many generations of time that we can't see where the changes happened.
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