Very interesting talk. I’m still waiting for the conclusive physical evidence from those who can’t prove their points:HBD, EP, and ENCODE. I’m not holding my breath.
Great American Satansays
Weirdly I had not heard of the Haldane you mentioned, but had heard of his father John Scott Haldane due to researching the history of medical use of oxygen for a bit of fiction.
The Tomoko Ohta nearly neutral theory was a surprise for me. I guessed as a lay person that the different appearance of human “racial” groups was influenced by an interaction between cultural drift and sexual selection (beauty standards changing over time affecting appearances selected), but NN would suggest it’s all drift.
The peeps around my campfire were feeling clever for picking out a way in which sexual selection has almost surely affected human appearance – the similarity between humans from the front view is strong, but the profile view is all over the place. Eyes, nose, etc., tend to fit in a recognizable proportion without a huge amount of difference (while not as tight as drawing books like to pretend, the variation we use to recognize each other can be very minute). But ear placement – where your ears sit on the side of your head – can vary more radically. Likewise how far you chin, brow, cheekbones, and forehead stick out or recede specifically when viewed from the side.
We found that out by overlaying images of models with their heads held in close to the same perspective. The front views could be lined up well, but the side views had ears all over the place. Also the overall shape of the brain-havin’ part of the skull and the look of the back of the head were much more varied than the front of the face.
So, IANABiologist, but it seems like sexual selection keeps us looking human from the front because we’re looking at each other with binocular vision, but otherwise, doesn’t give a fuck with regards to body shape color, skin color, etc. EPers using intuition and WEIRD subjects haven’t done biometrics on diverse people (nor would I trust them to given their transparent ideological slant), but I love in a fairly diverse place, and you can easily tell the supposedly universally appealing traits in bodies vary a lot in populations from different parts of the world.
Like the boob science mentioned, the huge variety in the physical appearance of breasts even within racially homogenous groups, and the extreme rarity of the supposedly universally sought hourglass shape, should be enough to prove that shit ain’t right – no matter how right it feels to a white dude’s boner raised in a culture with angloamerican media culture more than a hundred years deep.
I’d love to hear evopsych twerps reply to your 29:30ish list of undisputed information.
I think you were being too generous to evopsychers by distancing them from HBDers – we all know there is a ton of overlap – but I know why you did it, and I know it’s at least sometimes true.
On the possible kernel of traits adapted for in human cognition that are important you mentioned, I’d argue even things that may have been adaptive a thousand years ago in human cognition – assuming you could even identify and prove them – should not be assumed to be good or useful now. Some EPers might agree. We see people saying “pinkberries, therefore ladies should be in the pink ghetto 5eva” and some that are “I just wanna understand the pinkberries, not derive value statements from them.”
I suspect the best use for identifying universal human cognitive adaptations is in order to subvert the ones that make our society all fucked up, with social engineering. I love using bogeyman phrases like social engineering without shame. :-D
Anyhow… Rambling wall of text over! Anyone who finds my shit disagreeable, have at it. I could be wrong about anything and everything.
F.O.says
Very interesting.
I have very angry feelings to whoever recorded it though. 1h 20′ of moving noises.
Sabregirlsays
Not sure why but the cameraman/woman? moved the image away from your slide when you first talked about race, and then moved it right back afterwards . . . so youtube viewers missed anything you had on that slide. Also this individual insisted on playing with the camera the whole time – especially towards the end . . . very annoying.
Of somewhat greater importance, you misspelled Allium. And . . . Allium altynocolicum is chives and Allium ursinum is a species of wild garlic. Neither of which are the species you pictured which is Allium cepa – which oddly enough has about the same genome size as Allium altynocolicum (so you could just change the species name). On top of that it’s genome is more like 5 times the human genome size – at least according to the paper linked below (and assuming I did my calculations correctly): http://isyeb.mnhn.fr/IMG/pdf/Genome2005.pdf
(Sorry . . . nitpicky botanist) :)
Great talk overall.
Sabregirlsays
And I nitpick and make an “it’s” typo myself, alas, such is life.
Lady Mondegreensays
Please don’t be too hard on the cameraman–our (semi) regular videographer was ill, so a friend taped the talk–on his phone. (We were able to provide a tripod, at least.)
I was personally disappointed that none of our local Brave Heroes was brave enough to show up.
azhaelsays
So, IANABiologist, but it seems like sexual selection keeps us looking human from the front because we’re looking at each other with binocular vision, but otherwise, doesn’t give a fuck with regards to body shape color, skin color, etc.
That type of selection doesn’t have to be sexual at all. Facial recognition is important to us as a social species (so much so that pareidolia exists). This is independent from whether people are attracted to symmetric features and stuff like that, or not.
taco_emojisays
Is this a heavily visual presentation? Thinking about converting to audio to listen on my commute, but obviously that won’t work if it relies on lots of diagrams…
Daniel Dunérsays
#8. taco_emoji
It should be fine, I mostly listened to it. I think there were a few quotes and numbers that weren’t read out loud, but they weren’t integral to the talk.
Very interesting talk. I’m still waiting for the conclusive physical evidence from those who can’t prove their points:HBD, EP, and ENCODE. I’m not holding my breath.
Weirdly I had not heard of the Haldane you mentioned, but had heard of his father John Scott Haldane due to researching the history of medical use of oxygen for a bit of fiction.
The Tomoko Ohta nearly neutral theory was a surprise for me. I guessed as a lay person that the different appearance of human “racial” groups was influenced by an interaction between cultural drift and sexual selection (beauty standards changing over time affecting appearances selected), but NN would suggest it’s all drift.
The peeps around my campfire were feeling clever for picking out a way in which sexual selection has almost surely affected human appearance – the similarity between humans from the front view is strong, but the profile view is all over the place. Eyes, nose, etc., tend to fit in a recognizable proportion without a huge amount of difference (while not as tight as drawing books like to pretend, the variation we use to recognize each other can be very minute). But ear placement – where your ears sit on the side of your head – can vary more radically. Likewise how far you chin, brow, cheekbones, and forehead stick out or recede specifically when viewed from the side.
We found that out by overlaying images of models with their heads held in close to the same perspective. The front views could be lined up well, but the side views had ears all over the place. Also the overall shape of the brain-havin’ part of the skull and the look of the back of the head were much more varied than the front of the face.
So, IANABiologist, but it seems like sexual selection keeps us looking human from the front because we’re looking at each other with binocular vision, but otherwise, doesn’t give a fuck with regards to body shape color, skin color, etc. EPers using intuition and WEIRD subjects haven’t done biometrics on diverse people (nor would I trust them to given their transparent ideological slant), but I love in a fairly diverse place, and you can easily tell the supposedly universally appealing traits in bodies vary a lot in populations from different parts of the world.
Like the boob science mentioned, the huge variety in the physical appearance of breasts even within racially homogenous groups, and the extreme rarity of the supposedly universally sought hourglass shape, should be enough to prove that shit ain’t right – no matter how right it feels to a white dude’s boner raised in a culture with angloamerican media culture more than a hundred years deep.
I’d love to hear evopsych twerps reply to your 29:30ish list of undisputed information.
I think you were being too generous to evopsychers by distancing them from HBDers – we all know there is a ton of overlap – but I know why you did it, and I know it’s at least sometimes true.
On the possible kernel of traits adapted for in human cognition that are important you mentioned, I’d argue even things that may have been adaptive a thousand years ago in human cognition – assuming you could even identify and prove them – should not be assumed to be good or useful now. Some EPers might agree. We see people saying “pinkberries, therefore ladies should be in the pink ghetto 5eva” and some that are “I just wanna understand the pinkberries, not derive value statements from them.”
I suspect the best use for identifying universal human cognitive adaptations is in order to subvert the ones that make our society all fucked up, with social engineering. I love using bogeyman phrases like social engineering without shame. :-D
Anyhow… Rambling wall of text over! Anyone who finds my shit disagreeable, have at it. I could be wrong about anything and everything.
Very interesting.
I have very angry feelings to whoever recorded it though. 1h 20′ of moving noises.
Not sure why but the cameraman/woman? moved the image away from your slide when you first talked about race, and then moved it right back afterwards . . . so youtube viewers missed anything you had on that slide. Also this individual insisted on playing with the camera the whole time – especially towards the end . . . very annoying.
Of somewhat greater importance, you misspelled Allium. And . . . Allium altynocolicum is chives and Allium ursinum is a species of wild garlic. Neither of which are the species you pictured which is Allium cepa – which oddly enough has about the same genome size as Allium altynocolicum (so you could just change the species name). On top of that it’s genome is more like 5 times the human genome size – at least according to the paper linked below (and assuming I did my calculations correctly): http://isyeb.mnhn.fr/IMG/pdf/Genome2005.pdf
(Sorry . . . nitpicky botanist) :)
Great talk overall.
And I nitpick and make an “it’s” typo myself, alas, such is life.
Please don’t be too hard on the cameraman–our (semi) regular videographer was ill, so a friend taped the talk–on his phone. (We were able to provide a tripod, at least.)
I was personally disappointed that none of our local Brave Heroes was brave enough to show up.
That type of selection doesn’t have to be sexual at all. Facial recognition is important to us as a social species (so much so that pareidolia exists). This is independent from whether people are attracted to symmetric features and stuff like that, or not.
Is this a heavily visual presentation? Thinking about converting to audio to listen on my commute, but obviously that won’t work if it relies on lots of diagrams…
#8. taco_emoji
It should be fine, I mostly listened to it. I think there were a few quotes and numbers that weren’t read out loud, but they weren’t integral to the talk.
Well, here’s a paper on evolutionary psychology that appeared at CPAC – http://www.anonymousconservative.com/modern.pdf
It’s sooooooo erudite, even sciencey.