If Origenes knew fathers pass their traits to the sons, why did he (allegedly) castrate himself? I am not joking: historically speaking, Early Christianity and Catholicism waste its best men in celibacy (e.g. Lemaître) while Jew and early protestant smartest men sire truckloads of son. Why, according to you, it depends on Christianity and not on worst environment conditions (e.g. roaming barbarians that kill all the stupid romans around)?
The argument is that a man of faith cannot fully devote himself to the Church unless he forgoes the distractions of marriage and family. I disagree, but that's the argument.
Harsh environmental conditions do not select for intelligence if they are unpredictable. They have to follow a predictable pattern if there is to be selection for higher cognitive ability, as well as lower time preference, higher impulse control, etc.
The barbarians tended to target Romans with wealth and property. In any case, the collapse of the 5th to 7th centuries was due not only to the barbarians but also to the collapse of trade (notably grain shipments) and the Plague of Justinian (541-549 AD), which killed perhaps a quarter of the population in the eastern Mediterranean.
If i can follow your argument, only really smart wealthy Romans survive the barbarian.
That said, Third Century Crisis was severe as Fifth (Western collaps) and Eight (Muslim invasion) ones: if i got the gene plot right, the rise in cognitive ability match the Diocletian's/Constantinians' restauration, so the Third Century Crisis sounds like a better explanation than Third Century, self-castrating Christianity: Fifth Century Emperors had to forbid celibate monasticism because it was destroying noble families (e.g. Majorian did it).
No, the wealthy Romans were the ones targeted by the barbarians. They suffered more. They were also more likely to be pagan, and there is evidence that the Church encouraged the barbarians to go after pagan households.
The increase in mean cognitive ability was not episodic. It was a progressive increase from about 300 AD to medieval times and beyond. I discuss this point at greater length in another post: https://www.anthro1.net/p/was-the-roman-empire-eugenic
I read that post too (back when it was published) and i still don't get your answer: how a religion that push the smartest fraction of his devotees to celibacy promote a rise in cognitive ability? Again, early Christianity was strongly anti-natalist, as the stress on celibacy and episodic self-castration clearly demonstrate.
Tombs clearly show the dead's religion: are there studies that look at it?
Priests were a small fraction of the total Christian population, so the zero fertility among them was compensated by the increased fertility due to the increased stability of procreative relationships in the rest of the population. This increased stability tended to benefit households with more income and resources, i.e., who were better able to translate economic success into reproductive success.
Look, I'm not defending priest celibacy, but I understand the arguments for it. It can be argued that priests function as a "collective good" that benefits the Christian population through better internalization of Christian morality and through better resolution of individual/family problems.
Your last point would be an interesting avenue of research, although Christians often looted and destroyed pagan tombs. When the Old Saint Peter's basilica was built, many pagan tombs were opened, and their contents (jewels, gold, marble, etc.) seized by the Church authorities.
About priest celibacy, a common explanation of Ashkenazim intelligence is rabbis' fertility: i doubt rabbis were a bigger fraction of that population than priests of the Catholic one.
Moreover, my focus is in Early Christianity: back in the days celibacy was actively promoted to the whole christian community, as edict like Majorian's one testify. I obviously concurr that post-roman Church enhanced Repubblican Roman celibacy and created the WEIRD society, but Early Church was a very different beast.
This makes me wonder how cognitive evolution occurred in China (and Japan). I'm by no means fluent in Chinese history, but it never seems to have experienced a truly dark age in which cultural output vanished. I don't know how legitimate this paper is, but a graph in The Technological Activity and Competition in the Middle Ages and Modern History: A Quantitative Analysis shows a very stable rate of innovation in China from 900 to 1600 AD. The Chinese seem quite similar to the Republican-era Romans: relatively irreligious, industrious, pragmatic, intelligent, yet overwhelmingly influenced by another culture (the West’s science, mass media, and way of life for the Chinese; the Greeks’ literature and philosophical traditions for the Romans). The Chinese were not overwhelmed to the same extent as the Romans, since they have had their own highly developed culture for over two millennia, but still.
Perhaps the Republican-era Romans failed by not creating a strong secular religion, unlike the Chinese, who, curiously enough, developed Confucianism during a period of political fragmentation (the Warring States Period, 475–221 BCE). Confucianism in China was strong enough to largely repel foreign religions, despite the fact that (to my knowledge) Confucianism doesn't offer the same metaphysical and eschatological assurances as other religions.
There is also the case of cognitive evolution in different jatis in India. I'd imagine a founder effect (from the Aryans) and a religious tradition played a role in the high intelligence of certain jatis to the extent that they maintained a high level of cultural and scientific development in India before around 1200 CE: the development of a sophisticated aesthetic and metaphysical tradition, Hindu numerals, the study of linguistics, etc. Even the early Hindu texts display a level of sophistication comparable to the Bible: they explicitly define metaphysical terms and directly engage with metaphysical questions.
The Sogdians also appear to have been an intelligent merchant class. It would be interesting to compare their cognitive evolution to that of the Ashkenazi Jews and Parsis.
Both China and Japan would be ideal for this sort of research. Since both countries have been collecting DNA from human remains, it should be possible to determine the rapidity and duration of their cognitive evolution. I suspect that Japan has had a high rate of cognitive evolution over the past five centuries. In the case of China, I suspect that the Mongol invasions of the 13th century were a period of stagnation or decline.
In China, Confucianism has played the same role that Christianity has played in the West in terms of promoting fertility and the family as the main instrument of societal reproduction. The main difference is that Confucius saw the family, and having children, as a duty to one's ancestors. If a man fulfilled this duty, he could freely engage in recreational sex with prostitutes.
It would be interesting if you could study, or at least speculate on, the significant differences in IQ results between majority-Han Chinese provinces (e.g., Shandong vs. Henan). Are these differences a result of the massive urbanization in recent history, despite the hukou system, or do they date back even further in time?
As you point out, within-China migration is a complicating factor, since Chinese with more education (and presumably higher IQ) tend to migrate to the large urban areas.
I'd rather speculate after the results of Davide Piffer and Emil Kirkegaard's new study get published.
Yes, but Confucianism was more effective in getting the message across and enforcing the message. The same was true for Christianity. Christian morality overlapped with Pagan morality, but it was more effective than the latter in communicating and enforcing morality.
Whatever the reality of the reboot, it also subsumed local polities and cults in the Empire, into the imperial cult by way of foisting obedience to the imperial creed onto everyone (called beliefs later on by Olde English translators), i.e. replacing the devotee-ist (individual) relationship with Jesus. I.E. the individualistic expression of Christianity was co-opted and collectivized in the name of the Emperor ( a bit like how 'don't treat on me' maga peeps and 'libertarians' will be subsumed into the Narcissism of Trump one-ego-government and his reliance on 'loyalty'). (probably no cognitive reboot there but).
I would argue the reverse. Christianity has acted as a brake on the megalomania of leaders. This was the argument of Francis Fukuyama in his recent book: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Christianity created the notion that no one is above the law, not even the King.
I agree that Trump is a narcissist. That being said, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that some narcissism is necessary in any great leader, particularly in the US as it currently exists. A nice guy like me wouldn't survive for 5 minutes on the American political scene.
don't confuse Protestantism (a part return to more devoteeist forms) (where you may be partly right) with Imperial Cult Christianity AKA as Orthodox AKA Roman Catholicism (the rogue version).
Sister Wendy is a Catholic saying obedience is the primary virtue.
( Perhaps saying it is a protestant myth is imperialist narcissistic deflection, or, the work of Russian troll farm mis-dis-info nothing-is-true so keep you head down as we stumble along in the meat wave (agency-less obedience).
I write extensively on bias, and on this matter, today I am preparing a post on bias and social institutions by Mary Douglas, a Catholic anthropologist. Her work is excellent.
I see you avoid out-of-context quotes by not supplying anything at all, and merely repeat in a troll-like way with a sea-lioning inclination.
" sexual division of labor" this old traditional term needs some readjusting, more like "negotiated niche construction with very strong/reinforced gender preferences" I say this as someone who has tried herding guinea pigs with small children as an analog for hunting. Gathering grass for the herd with small children was much easier.
“Earlier farmers looked distinctly more African than later ones (Angel, 1972; Brace et al., 2006; Frost, 2015). As farmers spread into Europe, they must have mixed more and more with indigenous Europeans.”
Stopped reading here you are bad at research. Anatolians migrated into Europe replaced the population then steppe Yamnaya who were European hunter gatherers (who split from anatolians and natufian 20k years ago) then conquered the anatolians. Greeks and French are 70% Anatolian hunter gatherer (proto Greek) they only gave 30% European ancestry.
Please don't worship estimates. All of those numbers have wide margins of error. It's difficult to measure Anatolian ancestry because the genetic difference between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers is not simply Anatolian ancestry. It's also founder effects and convergent natural selection. "Anatolian ancestry" is also a moving target. The farmers became progressively more and more admixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers as they pushed farther into Europe.
I agree that Anatolian ancestry is higher in southern Europe than in northern Europe. As for the figure of 70%, it's simply a guesstimate.
I was combining non European ancestry (mistakenly).
Yamanya
European Hunter-Gatherer :59.0%
Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer :32.6%
Anatolian Neolithic Farmer :7.2%
Zagros Neolithic Farmer :1.2%
The mythifying of European ancestry baffles me. I find it as insane when Turks masturbate to themselves when they have like 7% Turkic ancestry despite being like 90% Byzantine. It just ludicrous focus on the meritorious history and now these pre-civilization nonsense.
Playing devil’s advocate: Why should we care about the cognitive abilities of Europe’s pre-Yamnaya ancestral population? You also cite hunter gatherer technology in the very beginning as a proxy for advantage in farming, but the farmers who came to Europe pre-Yamnaya were Neolithic Anatolian populations who wouldn’t have benefited from colder weather, unlike the WHG who just didn’t farm at all and were largely segregated for hundreds if not thousands of years according to the genealogical record.
While I don’t disagree with the actual purpose of this article, which is the positive impact of Christianity, I do think that cold weather has a negligible impact on cognition, and that you haven’t sufficiently made your case. I think that excellent cognition is maintained in populations via many somewhat or severely harmful recessive mutations that are selected out for in larger more diverse populations, but can be maintained in endogamous populations that occupy intellectual niches or have otherwise restrictive cultural marital practices. Perhaps colder weather makes it impossible for the very incapable to survive, but it also doesn’t provide unique incentive for extremely smart women to find mates or for things like Tay-Sachs to not get bred-out like any other harmful mutation.
Your argument would make sense only if most of the present-day European gene pool comes from the Anatolian farmers. There is much debate on this question, largely because it's difficult to tease out the contribution of founder effects and convergent natural selection. My own position is that the Anatolian farmers contributed about 25% to the European gene pool, with this proportion being higher in the south (50% or higher) and lower in the north (10% or lower). You also mention the Yamnaya, who were largely of indigenous hunter-gatherer origin. Yes, they were pastoralists, but they adopted pastoralism long after the ice age.
Mean cognitive ability is a product of many selection pressures. Cold environments are only one of them, and they were an important only during the hunter-gatherer period. With the transition to farming, and the progressive increase in social complexity, selection for cognitive ability became stronger in temperate and even subtropical environments.
"Perhaps colder weather makes it impossible for the very incapable to survive" - No, that isn't the argument. Harsh conditions select for cognitive ability only if they are predictable and avoidable. It wasn't cold weather per se that selected for cognitive ability, it was its predictable nature, particularly the yearly cycle. Humans survived by storing food and fuel for the lean months of the year. Also, the tendency of game animals to concentrate in herds selected for the ability to create mental simulations of their movements over time and space. Finally, humans survived in cold environments by using untended devices, like traps and snares.
This is a very interesting article. I am fascinated by the topic of changes in human cognition before the modern era.
One issue: I am skeptical of the claim that the cooler temperature created higher cognition among Hunter-Gatherer societies.
A quick visual inspection of the first graphic shows that many of the groups with higher cognition were actually Fishing societies.
This is a very common mistake among anthropologists. There are actually substantial differences between Hunter-Gatherer societies and Fishing societies. Fishing societies were far more complex and inegalitarian. It is reasonable to suppose that the greater complexity within the society is the real cause of higher cognition, not the cooler temperatures.
My guess is once the groups are sorted into two distinct society types, the correlation disappears or at least gets much less strong. This is theoretically acceptable because there are so many other differences between Hunter-Gatherer societies and Fishing societies.
I think the complexity of society also neatly explains why cognition increased in agricultural societies. It was because people lived in more complex societies so needed higher cognition to compete against other humans.
I'm familiar with the societies at the far left of this chart (high technological complexity and low temperature). Most of them had low levels of social complexity. This is notably the case with the Inuit groups: Iglulik, Tareumiut, Angmaksalik, and Ingalik (not Inuit but heavily Eskimo-ized). These were small bands of families who procured food through fishing, sealing, and whaling, except for the Tareumiut (who were caribou hunters). Social complexity was higher for the Tanaina, Twana, and Klamath, but their high level of technological complexity was related primarily to food procurement, and not to higher order tasks created by social complexification.
One other thing: Robert Kelly gives solid evidence that Hunter-Gatherers in temperate regions rely far more on hunting than Hunter-Gatherers in tropical regions. Tropical regions have far greater availability of edible plants year-round.
Given the complexity of hunting over gathering, this could also put biological pressure on human cognition. It is also possible that the fatty acids from animals nourishes the brain far more than plants, so this enables increased cognition.
There is also a lot of evidence that less complex societies always prefer to eat meat when it is available. This is likely due to need for fatty acids.
So it is not really cold temperatures, so much as the hunting.
Yes, those societies are clearly low complexity in comparison to agricultural societies.
Yes, one can make a credible claim that Fishing societies in the Arctic that rely on whaling and seal hunting are only slightly more complex than Hunter-Gatherer societies. I still think that they deserve a separate group, perhaps a sub-group within Fishing societies. In particular, they are far more sedentary than Hunter-Gatherers.
The latter groups are clearly different from Hunter-Gatherers. And, yes, I agree that this is due to food procurement. That is exactly how Society Types are defined.
My theory goes something like this:
Geographical limitations of food > Innovations in subsistence technologies > Increased food surplus > New society type > Greater societal complexity > Greater biological pressure towards increased cognition.
Or it was the Germans who last to convert. Even then it didn't Christianize Germans the Germans Germanize the Christianity. Very little of that is to be found in the Bible; much of it is in the traditions, the rituals, the theology, virtually all of which grows out of European paganism and the thought of pagan philosophers. My parents likely disagree. Listening to “Christianity is SLAVE MORALITY, Dad!” every Sunday morning as we drove to church got old fast, I’m sure.
Germans were stabilizing force compare Latin German version to the byzantine Greek. East was degenerate. It was full of Syrian-Semites speaking Greek caling them selves Roman practicing the Hammurabi code and sporadically iconoclast mob violence. It only took a thousands years to get back to pitch of Greco-Roman world.
Then there are the cathedrals. Nothing that can inspire people to spend centuries building such intricate, powerful, inspiring monuments to the transcendent grace and glory of God can be a bad thing at root
Usually, since intact civilizations rarely forget how to do useful things, technology advances most civilizations fall at the height of their technical skill. This is a statistical illusion, but it should still make us think. Historically, civilizations of last men tend to fall when they are overrun by barbarians Archimedes, after all, was slain at his whiteboard by a Roman soldier. In those days it was the Romans who were the barbarians—later the Germans, and so on. Part of the problem, for a pessimist, is our lack of any really impressive barbarians. Tacitus did not like the Germans—he did not want to surrender to them—but he respected them. But today, what is even out there to respect? ISIS? You gotta hand it to ISIS, but…
The role of thymos is to maintain order. Pride in maintaining order is a crucial element of a functional elite. When the elite loses this pride, or even develops its opposite—Luciferian pride in destroying order— trouble is on the horizon
Yes, Christianity drew considerably from pagan traditions, especially Germanic traditions in the case of the Western Church. When the Arabs conquered the Middle East and North Africa, the geopolitical center of Christendom shifted north and west, thus facilitating the influence of Germanic paganism on Latin Christianity. This trend culminated in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne.
Yes, you come across as "rude and belligerent." This is a shortcoming you need to work on.
I agree with the rest of your comment. Mean cognitive ability is a product of many different selection pressures. Cold environments were only one, and they were a significant selection pressure only during the period of hunting and gathering.
"Ancestral components" tell us nothing about selection pressures during the time of those ancestors. Remember, thousands of years separate the Paleolithic from the Neolithic (which is the time period of that ancient DNA). It is likely that selection for cognitive ability declined during the Mesolithic because hunters were no longer following large herds of game over long distances. Consequently, they didn't have the same need to memorize and manipulate huge quantities of spatiotemporal data. This is suggested by the decrease in brain size in Europeans and Asians after the last ice age: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-did-brain-size-decrease-after-ice.html
My main argument is that selection for cognitive ability in cold environments gave northern Eurasians a cognitive edge that enabled them to spread south in post-glacial times and exploit the cognitive challenges made possible by farming and the overall rise in social complexity in the temperate and tropical zones.
Frost, P. (2019). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 1(1): 166-181. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012
I would say that Palestinian Christians are smarter than most non-Christians in the same geographic region. Ashkenazim are not a fair comparison because they are a product of selection pressures in a much more dynamic social and economic environment.
Again, we come back to the strange idea (definitely not mine!) that mean cognitive ability is a product of only one selection pressure. I've discussed elsewhere the importance of other selection pressures, particularly the growing importance of trade (and the requisite cognitive skills) from the late medieval period onward:
Roman law already forbade polygyny. See: Bierkan, A. T., Sherman, C. P., & Jur, E. S. (1907). Marriage in Roman law. The Yale Law Journal, 16(5), 303-327. https://www.jstor.org/stable/785389
This prohibition was increasingly ignored and flouted during the Imperial Era. As with other aspects of morality, Christianity revived it and enforced it more effectively.
There are many condemnations of polygyny by the early Church fathers:
"We do not indeed forbid the union of man and woman, blest by God as the seminary of the human race, and devised for the replenishment of the earth and the furnishing of the world and therefore permitted, yet singly. For Adam was the one husband of Eve, and Eve his one wife, one woman, one rib." Tertullian 155-220 AD
"That the good purpose of marriage, however, is better promoted by one husband with one wife, than by a husband with several wives, is shown plainly enough by the very first union of a married pair, which was made by the Divine Being Himself." Augustine 354-430 AD
If Origenes knew fathers pass their traits to the sons, why did he (allegedly) castrate himself? I am not joking: historically speaking, Early Christianity and Catholicism waste its best men in celibacy (e.g. Lemaître) while Jew and early protestant smartest men sire truckloads of son. Why, according to you, it depends on Christianity and not on worst environment conditions (e.g. roaming barbarians that kill all the stupid romans around)?
The argument is that a man of faith cannot fully devote himself to the Church unless he forgoes the distractions of marriage and family. I disagree, but that's the argument.
Harsh environmental conditions do not select for intelligence if they are unpredictable. They have to follow a predictable pattern if there is to be selection for higher cognitive ability, as well as lower time preference, higher impulse control, etc.
The barbarians tended to target Romans with wealth and property. In any case, the collapse of the 5th to 7th centuries was due not only to the barbarians but also to the collapse of trade (notably grain shipments) and the Plague of Justinian (541-549 AD), which killed perhaps a quarter of the population in the eastern Mediterranean.
If i can follow your argument, only really smart wealthy Romans survive the barbarian.
That said, Third Century Crisis was severe as Fifth (Western collaps) and Eight (Muslim invasion) ones: if i got the gene plot right, the rise in cognitive ability match the Diocletian's/Constantinians' restauration, so the Third Century Crisis sounds like a better explanation than Third Century, self-castrating Christianity: Fifth Century Emperors had to forbid celibate monasticism because it was destroying noble families (e.g. Majorian did it).
No, the wealthy Romans were the ones targeted by the barbarians. They suffered more. They were also more likely to be pagan, and there is evidence that the Church encouraged the barbarians to go after pagan households.
The increase in mean cognitive ability was not episodic. It was a progressive increase from about 300 AD to medieval times and beyond. I discuss this point at greater length in another post: https://www.anthro1.net/p/was-the-roman-empire-eugenic
I read that post too (back when it was published) and i still don't get your answer: how a religion that push the smartest fraction of his devotees to celibacy promote a rise in cognitive ability? Again, early Christianity was strongly anti-natalist, as the stress on celibacy and episodic self-castration clearly demonstrate.
Tombs clearly show the dead's religion: are there studies that look at it?
Priests were a small fraction of the total Christian population, so the zero fertility among them was compensated by the increased fertility due to the increased stability of procreative relationships in the rest of the population. This increased stability tended to benefit households with more income and resources, i.e., who were better able to translate economic success into reproductive success.
Look, I'm not defending priest celibacy, but I understand the arguments for it. It can be argued that priests function as a "collective good" that benefits the Christian population through better internalization of Christian morality and through better resolution of individual/family problems.
Your last point would be an interesting avenue of research, although Christians often looted and destroyed pagan tombs. When the Old Saint Peter's basilica was built, many pagan tombs were opened, and their contents (jewels, gold, marble, etc.) seized by the Church authorities.
What about the tombs Piffer et al, 2023 used?
About priest celibacy, a common explanation of Ashkenazim intelligence is rabbis' fertility: i doubt rabbis were a bigger fraction of that population than priests of the Catholic one.
Moreover, my focus is in Early Christianity: back in the days celibacy was actively promoted to the whole christian community, as edict like Majorian's one testify. I obviously concurr that post-roman Church enhanced Repubblican Roman celibacy and created the WEIRD society, but Early Church was a very different beast.
This makes me wonder how cognitive evolution occurred in China (and Japan). I'm by no means fluent in Chinese history, but it never seems to have experienced a truly dark age in which cultural output vanished. I don't know how legitimate this paper is, but a graph in The Technological Activity and Competition in the Middle Ages and Modern History: A Quantitative Analysis shows a very stable rate of innovation in China from 900 to 1600 AD. The Chinese seem quite similar to the Republican-era Romans: relatively irreligious, industrious, pragmatic, intelligent, yet overwhelmingly influenced by another culture (the West’s science, mass media, and way of life for the Chinese; the Greeks’ literature and philosophical traditions for the Romans). The Chinese were not overwhelmed to the same extent as the Romans, since they have had their own highly developed culture for over two millennia, but still.
Perhaps the Republican-era Romans failed by not creating a strong secular religion, unlike the Chinese, who, curiously enough, developed Confucianism during a period of political fragmentation (the Warring States Period, 475–221 BCE). Confucianism in China was strong enough to largely repel foreign religions, despite the fact that (to my knowledge) Confucianism doesn't offer the same metaphysical and eschatological assurances as other religions.
There is also the case of cognitive evolution in different jatis in India. I'd imagine a founder effect (from the Aryans) and a religious tradition played a role in the high intelligence of certain jatis to the extent that they maintained a high level of cultural and scientific development in India before around 1200 CE: the development of a sophisticated aesthetic and metaphysical tradition, Hindu numerals, the study of linguistics, etc. Even the early Hindu texts display a level of sophistication comparable to the Bible: they explicitly define metaphysical terms and directly engage with metaphysical questions.
The Sogdians also appear to have been an intelligent merchant class. It would be interesting to compare their cognitive evolution to that of the Ashkenazi Jews and Parsis.
Both China and Japan would be ideal for this sort of research. Since both countries have been collecting DNA from human remains, it should be possible to determine the rapidity and duration of their cognitive evolution. I suspect that Japan has had a high rate of cognitive evolution over the past five centuries. In the case of China, I suspect that the Mongol invasions of the 13th century were a period of stagnation or decline.
Ron Unz is the go-to person for understanding how cognitive evolution occurred in China: https://www.unz.com/runz/how-social-darwinism-made-modern-china-248/
In China, Confucianism has played the same role that Christianity has played in the West in terms of promoting fertility and the family as the main instrument of societal reproduction. The main difference is that Confucius saw the family, and having children, as a duty to one's ancestors. If a man fulfilled this duty, he could freely engage in recreational sex with prostitutes.
We are working on the ancient East Asians. As far as I recall, they also show a large increase at the time of the farming transition.
I'm looking forward to seeing the results!
It would be interesting if you could study, or at least speculate on, the significant differences in IQ results between majority-Han Chinese provinces (e.g., Shandong vs. Henan). Are these differences a result of the massive urbanization in recent history, despite the hukou system, or do they date back even further in time?
As you point out, within-China migration is a complicating factor, since Chinese with more education (and presumably higher IQ) tend to migrate to the large urban areas.
I'd rather speculate after the results of Davide Piffer and Emil Kirkegaard's new study get published.
What other culture are you referring to that influenced China?
Yes, but Confucianism was more effective in getting the message across and enforcing the message. The same was true for Christianity. Christian morality overlapped with Pagan morality, but it was more effective than the latter in communicating and enforcing morality.
Whatever the reality of the reboot, it also subsumed local polities and cults in the Empire, into the imperial cult by way of foisting obedience to the imperial creed onto everyone (called beliefs later on by Olde English translators), i.e. replacing the devotee-ist (individual) relationship with Jesus. I.E. the individualistic expression of Christianity was co-opted and collectivized in the name of the Emperor ( a bit like how 'don't treat on me' maga peeps and 'libertarians' will be subsumed into the Narcissism of Trump one-ego-government and his reliance on 'loyalty'). (probably no cognitive reboot there but).
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/fideism-the-heresy-and-obedience
I would argue the reverse. Christianity has acted as a brake on the megalomania of leaders. This was the argument of Francis Fukuyama in his recent book: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Christianity created the notion that no one is above the law, not even the King.
I agree that Trump is a narcissist. That being said, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that some narcissism is necessary in any great leader, particularly in the US as it currently exists. A nice guy like me wouldn't survive for 5 minutes on the American political scene.
see also Russian Orthodox as the purest form of Imperial Cult Christianity around to day.
don't confuse Protestantism (a part return to more devoteeist forms) (where you may be partly right) with Imperial Cult Christianity AKA as Orthodox AKA Roman Catholicism (the rogue version).
Roman Catholicism's primary virtue is obedience to the church as a government department of empire. Examples are still to be found in modern catholicism, in the cutest places, https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/sister-wendy-on-love-as-an-obedient
Sister Wendy is a Catholic saying obedience is the primary virtue.
( Perhaps saying it is a protestant myth is imperialist narcissistic deflection, or, the work of Russian troll farm mis-dis-info nothing-is-true so keep you head down as we stumble along in the meat wave (agency-less obedience).
I am a raised Catholic. Here is the intellectual journey I have made.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/to-build-a-better-world-we-should
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/fideism-the-heresy-and-obedience
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/sister-wendy-on-love-as-an-obedient
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/fideism-reason-and-the-gap-that-is
I write extensively on bias, and on this matter, today I am preparing a post on bias and social institutions by Mary Douglas, a Catholic anthropologist. Her work is excellent.
I see you avoid out-of-context quotes by not supplying anything at all, and merely repeat in a troll-like way with a sea-lioning inclination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
" sexual division of labor" this old traditional term needs some readjusting, more like "negotiated niche construction with very strong/reinforced gender preferences" I say this as someone who has tried herding guinea pigs with small children as an analog for hunting. Gathering grass for the herd with small children was much easier.
I prefer to use words that people readily understand.
So would I. Until they fail.
“Earlier farmers looked distinctly more African than later ones (Angel, 1972; Brace et al., 2006; Frost, 2015). As farmers spread into Europe, they must have mixed more and more with indigenous Europeans.”
Stopped reading here you are bad at research. Anatolians migrated into Europe replaced the population then steppe Yamnaya who were European hunter gatherers (who split from anatolians and natufian 20k years ago) then conquered the anatolians. Greeks and French are 70% Anatolian hunter gatherer (proto Greek) they only gave 30% European ancestry.
Please don't worship estimates. All of those numbers have wide margins of error. It's difficult to measure Anatolian ancestry because the genetic difference between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers is not simply Anatolian ancestry. It's also founder effects and convergent natural selection. "Anatolian ancestry" is also a moving target. The farmers became progressively more and more admixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers as they pushed farther into Europe.
I agree that Anatolian ancestry is higher in southern Europe than in northern Europe. As for the figure of 70%, it's simply a guesstimate.
Spain Aragon:
Anatolian Neolithic Farmer :61.2%
European Hunter-Gatherer :30.4%
Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer :6.6%
North African Neolithic Farmer :1.8%
I was combining non European ancestry (mistakenly).
Yamanya
European Hunter-Gatherer :59.0%
Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer :32.6%
Anatolian Neolithic Farmer :7.2%
Zagros Neolithic Farmer :1.2%
The mythifying of European ancestry baffles me. I find it as insane when Turks masturbate to themselves when they have like 7% Turkic ancestry despite being like 90% Byzantine. It just ludicrous focus on the meritorious history and now these pre-civilization nonsense.
Did you read my previous answer?
Playing devil’s advocate: Why should we care about the cognitive abilities of Europe’s pre-Yamnaya ancestral population? You also cite hunter gatherer technology in the very beginning as a proxy for advantage in farming, but the farmers who came to Europe pre-Yamnaya were Neolithic Anatolian populations who wouldn’t have benefited from colder weather, unlike the WHG who just didn’t farm at all and were largely segregated for hundreds if not thousands of years according to the genealogical record.
While I don’t disagree with the actual purpose of this article, which is the positive impact of Christianity, I do think that cold weather has a negligible impact on cognition, and that you haven’t sufficiently made your case. I think that excellent cognition is maintained in populations via many somewhat or severely harmful recessive mutations that are selected out for in larger more diverse populations, but can be maintained in endogamous populations that occupy intellectual niches or have otherwise restrictive cultural marital practices. Perhaps colder weather makes it impossible for the very incapable to survive, but it also doesn’t provide unique incentive for extremely smart women to find mates or for things like Tay-Sachs to not get bred-out like any other harmful mutation.
Your argument would make sense only if most of the present-day European gene pool comes from the Anatolian farmers. There is much debate on this question, largely because it's difficult to tease out the contribution of founder effects and convergent natural selection. My own position is that the Anatolian farmers contributed about 25% to the European gene pool, with this proportion being higher in the south (50% or higher) and lower in the north (10% or lower). You also mention the Yamnaya, who were largely of indigenous hunter-gatherer origin. Yes, they were pastoralists, but they adopted pastoralism long after the ice age.
Mean cognitive ability is a product of many selection pressures. Cold environments are only one of them, and they were an important only during the hunter-gatherer period. With the transition to farming, and the progressive increase in social complexity, selection for cognitive ability became stronger in temperate and even subtropical environments.
"Perhaps colder weather makes it impossible for the very incapable to survive" - No, that isn't the argument. Harsh conditions select for cognitive ability only if they are predictable and avoidable. It wasn't cold weather per se that selected for cognitive ability, it was its predictable nature, particularly the yearly cycle. Humans survived by storing food and fuel for the lean months of the year. Also, the tendency of game animals to concentrate in herds selected for the ability to create mental simulations of their movements over time and space. Finally, humans survived in cold environments by using untended devices, like traps and snares.
This is a very interesting article. I am fascinated by the topic of changes in human cognition before the modern era.
One issue: I am skeptical of the claim that the cooler temperature created higher cognition among Hunter-Gatherer societies.
A quick visual inspection of the first graphic shows that many of the groups with higher cognition were actually Fishing societies.
This is a very common mistake among anthropologists. There are actually substantial differences between Hunter-Gatherer societies and Fishing societies. Fishing societies were far more complex and inegalitarian. It is reasonable to suppose that the greater complexity within the society is the real cause of higher cognition, not the cooler temperatures.
My guess is once the groups are sorted into two distinct society types, the correlation disappears or at least gets much less strong. This is theoretically acceptable because there are so many other differences between Hunter-Gatherer societies and Fishing societies.
I have written a few articles on related topics:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/praise-the-fisherman-for-he-worked
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-our-deep-history-explains-global
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/in-the-beginning-we-were-all-the
I think the complexity of society also neatly explains why cognition increased in agricultural societies. It was because people lived in more complex societies so needed higher cognition to compete against other humans.
I'm familiar with the societies at the far left of this chart (high technological complexity and low temperature). Most of them had low levels of social complexity. This is notably the case with the Inuit groups: Iglulik, Tareumiut, Angmaksalik, and Ingalik (not Inuit but heavily Eskimo-ized). These were small bands of families who procured food through fishing, sealing, and whaling, except for the Tareumiut (who were caribou hunters). Social complexity was higher for the Tanaina, Twana, and Klamath, but their high level of technological complexity was related primarily to food procurement, and not to higher order tasks created by social complexification.
One other thing: Robert Kelly gives solid evidence that Hunter-Gatherers in temperate regions rely far more on hunting than Hunter-Gatherers in tropical regions. Tropical regions have far greater availability of edible plants year-round.
Given the complexity of hunting over gathering, this could also put biological pressure on human cognition. It is also possible that the fatty acids from animals nourishes the brain far more than plants, so this enables increased cognition.
There is also a lot of evidence that less complex societies always prefer to eat meat when it is available. This is likely due to need for fatty acids.
So it is not really cold temperatures, so much as the hunting.
https://techratchet.com/2021/04/06/book-summary-lifeways-of-hunter-gatherers-by-robert-kelly/
Yes, those societies are clearly low complexity in comparison to agricultural societies.
Yes, one can make a credible claim that Fishing societies in the Arctic that rely on whaling and seal hunting are only slightly more complex than Hunter-Gatherer societies. I still think that they deserve a separate group, perhaps a sub-group within Fishing societies. In particular, they are far more sedentary than Hunter-Gatherers.
The latter groups are clearly different from Hunter-Gatherers. And, yes, I agree that this is due to food procurement. That is exactly how Society Types are defined.
My theory goes something like this:
Geographical limitations of food > Innovations in subsistence technologies > Increased food surplus > New society type > Greater societal complexity > Greater biological pressure towards increased cognition.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-you-need-to-know-about-society
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/all-of-human-history-in-one-graphic
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-our-deep-history-explains-global
Or it was the Germans who last to convert. Even then it didn't Christianize Germans the Germans Germanize the Christianity. Very little of that is to be found in the Bible; much of it is in the traditions, the rituals, the theology, virtually all of which grows out of European paganism and the thought of pagan philosophers. My parents likely disagree. Listening to “Christianity is SLAVE MORALITY, Dad!” every Sunday morning as we drove to church got old fast, I’m sure.
Germans were stabilizing force compare Latin German version to the byzantine Greek. East was degenerate. It was full of Syrian-Semites speaking Greek caling them selves Roman practicing the Hammurabi code and sporadically iconoclast mob violence. It only took a thousands years to get back to pitch of Greco-Roman world.
Then there are the cathedrals. Nothing that can inspire people to spend centuries building such intricate, powerful, inspiring monuments to the transcendent grace and glory of God can be a bad thing at root
Usually, since intact civilizations rarely forget how to do useful things, technology advances most civilizations fall at the height of their technical skill. This is a statistical illusion, but it should still make us think. Historically, civilizations of last men tend to fall when they are overrun by barbarians Archimedes, after all, was slain at his whiteboard by a Roman soldier. In those days it was the Romans who were the barbarians—later the Germans, and so on. Part of the problem, for a pessimist, is our lack of any really impressive barbarians. Tacitus did not like the Germans—he did not want to surrender to them—but he respected them. But today, what is even out there to respect? ISIS? You gotta hand it to ISIS, but…
The role of thymos is to maintain order. Pride in maintaining order is a crucial element of a functional elite. When the elite loses this pride, or even develops its opposite—Luciferian pride in destroying order— trouble is on the horizon
Yes, Christianity drew considerably from pagan traditions, especially Germanic traditions in the case of the Western Church. When the Arabs conquered the Middle East and North Africa, the geopolitical center of Christendom shifted north and west, thus facilitating the influence of Germanic paganism on Latin Christianity. This trend culminated in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne.
I discuss this point in another post: https://www.anthro1.net/p/when-did-europe-pull-ahead-and-why
Yes, you come across as "rude and belligerent." This is a shortcoming you need to work on.
I agree with the rest of your comment. Mean cognitive ability is a product of many different selection pressures. Cold environments were only one, and they were a significant selection pressure only during the period of hunting and gathering.
"Ancestral components" tell us nothing about selection pressures during the time of those ancestors. Remember, thousands of years separate the Paleolithic from the Neolithic (which is the time period of that ancient DNA). It is likely that selection for cognitive ability declined during the Mesolithic because hunters were no longer following large herds of game over long distances. Consequently, they didn't have the same need to memorize and manipulate huge quantities of spatiotemporal data. This is suggested by the decrease in brain size in Europeans and Asians after the last ice age: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-did-brain-size-decrease-after-ice.html
My main argument is that selection for cognitive ability in cold environments gave northern Eurasians a cognitive edge that enabled them to spread south in post-glacial times and exploit the cognitive challenges made possible by farming and the overall rise in social complexity in the temperate and tropical zones.
Frost, P. (2019). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 1(1): 166-181. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012
I would say that Palestinian Christians are smarter than most non-Christians in the same geographic region. Ashkenazim are not a fair comparison because they are a product of selection pressures in a much more dynamic social and economic environment.
Again, we come back to the strange idea (definitely not mine!) that mean cognitive ability is a product of only one selection pressure. I've discussed elsewhere the importance of other selection pressures, particularly the growing importance of trade (and the requisite cognitive skills) from the late medieval period onward:
https://www.anthro1.net/p/europeans-and-recent-cognitive-evolution
https://www.anthro1.net/p/ashkenazi-jews-and-recent-cognitive
https://www.anthro1.net/p/when-did-europe-pull-ahead-and-why
Roman law already forbade polygyny. See: Bierkan, A. T., Sherman, C. P., & Jur, E. S. (1907). Marriage in Roman law. The Yale Law Journal, 16(5), 303-327. https://www.jstor.org/stable/785389
This prohibition was increasingly ignored and flouted during the Imperial Era. As with other aspects of morality, Christianity revived it and enforced it more effectively.
There are many condemnations of polygyny by the early Church fathers:
"We do not indeed forbid the union of man and woman, blest by God as the seminary of the human race, and devised for the replenishment of the earth and the furnishing of the world and therefore permitted, yet singly. For Adam was the one husband of Eve, and Eve his one wife, one woman, one rib." Tertullian 155-220 AD
"That the good purpose of marriage, however, is better promoted by one husband with one wife, than by a husband with several wives, is shown plainly enough by the very first union of a married pair, which was made by the Divine Being Himself." Augustine 354-430 AD
I could cite many other examples.