I wonder if it is purely cultural or is there a genetic component? If there is low fertility because of a genetic component, that is likely going to targeted hard by evolution now.
(Will evolution select against women getting higher education like Masters or PhD? Because that is one of the biggest predictors of reduced fertility.)
What does this mean for liberal views? Are they destined to become more conservative over time if there is a genetic component which is being selected against?
So interesting. I wish we could track genetic changes along with political changes over time. I bet there is more happening there than we think.
>(Will evolution select against women getting higher education like Masters or PhD? Because that is one of the biggest predictors of reduced fertility.)
Generally speaking evolution does not work on these time scales. Importantly, there is nothing that would make someone "genetically liberal" or "genetically conservative." You might be able to point to higher order traits which may indicate someone being conservative vs. liberal. ie, openness to experience, religiosity, etc. But, it's not clear that these traits are static throughout a lifetime. (eg, "openness to experience" is generally much higher in the young than the old.) Furthermore, the idea of what it means to be "liberal" or "conservative" changes over time as well. Someone describing themselves as "liberal" in 1950 wouldn't bear much resemblance to someone describing themselves as liberal in 2021. According to historians, the conservative movement as we understand it really only began in the 1950s, and prior to that people would not have described themselves as either "liberal or conservative." (and in fact, "liberal" was not previously synonymous with "left," and therefore many people on the "right" would have previously described themselves as liberal.
The point is that political movements have short life spans. Perhaps in the tens or hundreds of years, which is not nearly enough for evolution to make any meaningful impact.
Likely the genes don't make you a liberal or conservative directly. Rather they do it in an indirect way. For instance if someone has a genetic disease that requires costly medical care then they will likely vote for socialized medical care. And of course having a dark skin color will also cause politcal leaning in an indirect way.
Religions have a longer time span and correlate with conservatives. Many religions actually shed their members who have liberal views. Thus religions tend to conserve conservatives leaning individuals.
So if religion was not part of the conservative-liberal divide I would buy your argument but it is part of it and it is long running.
200 years ago nearly the entire country was Christian, but the entire country did not hold the same political beliefs. Protestant vs. Catholic may have been a more pressing divide back then. And how would your argument fare in say ... 2,000-4,000 BC middle east? Each city has its own deity, perhaps part of a pantheon, perhaps not? Are the followers of Chemosh more or less conservative than the followers of Anat? Who are the irreligious liberals in this time period?
I would argue that time and again liberals have not reproduced at the level of conservatives/religious. This is why we still have the conservative/religious as the backbone of society.
It may also explain why so many people are illogical about things like Covid in religious/conservative circles. They have genetics that incline them towards illogical religious beliefs in part because it allows them to ensure they reproduce the next generation, and some of the downsides of this illogical religious inclination is that they believe crap about things and are impervious to evidence to the contrary -- e.g. faith.
I'd absolutely agree that there is likely a genetic component underlying propensity for religious belief. But "atheist" is not synonymous with "liberal," I suppose that's the crux of what I'm saying.
>The point is that political movements have short life spans. Perhaps in the tens or hundreds of years, which is not nearly enough for evolution to make any meaningful impact.
Evolution can work on any time scale, including instantly. Look no further than a large asteroid turning into a meteorite, it is evolution done in hours, where everything larger than a cat dies.
For politics: the Nazi party for example had a definite impact on human evolution in Europe as it murdered rather a lot of people who were not blond enough or too blond. The same way the British Empire had a rather profound impact on evolution in the US, Canada and Australia.
>Evolution can work on any time scale, including instantly. Look no further than a large asteroid turning into a meteorite, it is evolution done in hours, where everything larger than a cat dies.
A large asteroid will not make me grow a new sensory organ, it will simply kill me. Not all genetic changes take an equivalent amount of time, or are equally feasible.
- Growing taller or shorter can happen rapidly because genes for these traits already exist and must simply be selected from the environment.
- Moving away from a bifurcated body plan is probably impossible, as it is too fundamental to many other systems in the body.
Obviously there's a wide area in between those two examples, but we're discussing whether or not certain traits that people have are 1) genetic in origin, and 2) liable to drift much over time.
Given that religion has been a constant for all known human history (and pre-history, depending on how you interpret artifacts) I would suggest that it's likely to be strongly wrapped up in the same things which build human psychology and human social structure. I want to admit here this is just my view on the topic, and I'm not suggesting that this established scientific fact. In any case, I'm a firm believer in the argument that many who identify as "liberal" and definitely-not-Christian nonetheless have many beliefs which could otherwise be categorized as religious. I want to make it clear I'm not attacking or praising these beliefs, but simply suggesting that parts of the mind which lead people toward religion are a bit more fundamental to humanity, and are not something such as hair color which can be easily or capriciously changed.
Education is correlated with both low birth rates and liberal political views, and culture surrounding politics and reproduction changes a lot faster than population genetics.
Conservatives live in less expensive areas and often have less wealth, two things that often drive reproduction rates up higher. I feel comfortable Occam’s Razoring that up as the explanation
But more seriously: the furthest left people I know are the ones who grew up around conservatives, particularly in privation (usually one of the strongest signals for high birth rates). These things have a tendency to balance each other by nurture; assuming that people are genetically predestined to be conservative (or liberal) is both silly and incompatible with our observed history as communal animals.
> But there is evidence of that. I linked to some of these papers in my previous comments.
The IFS is not a credible source. Their previous claim to fame was publishing bogus research on same-sex parenting, presumably because it doesn't align with their values[1].
The other link is a meta-analysis that shows a correlation between family political alignments (quelle surprise!). It doesn't support the more ridiculous claim that the arc of human reproduction bends towards conservativism.
Because most of my calls are telemarketers and scams, I did this years ago. My message has been for the longest time, "I do not check these messages, please email me at **@gmail.com"
I would have probably checked my messages more if I had search to text translation of my messages and it wasn't an extra fee.
And for the same reasons (spam, "newsletters", etc), I know some people who are abandoning email as well, and instruct people to contact them via a particular chat app or Twitter.
The best ways to contact me are basically ordered by how many of the messages I receive are automated, whether spam or not. WhatsApp is the best way (0% automated messages), then text (maybe 75-80% automated?), then phone (something like 95-99% automated), then email (~99.99% automated, and that's just the stuff that gets through gmail's spam filters)
More machines talking to me = I'm less likely to check messages unless I'm expecting something. If you email me without giving me a heads-up first, there is nearly a 0% chance I'll see it. The only medium where the chance of my actually receiving your message the first try is over 90% is Whatsapp. I used to work to keep the % of garbage down in my email, but realized at some point that I was receiving so few emails I wanted that weren't just transactional messages from a machine, that it was pointless (I can just search for transactional emails if I need them, because I'm expecting them and know where they should be from, so inbox clutter barely affects that use at all).
Gap, Inc. also has a collection of dying brands and is a little desperate. Gap and Banana Republic are stale. I guess Old Navy is doing OK. Google trends says Athleta seems to do OK, but it's a second-rate Lululemon.
I worked at a big retail company a few years that was desperate to make investments in tech. Probably didn't help that HQ was in Silicon Valley. They ended acquiring a 3D company for a similar purpose to Gap only the company was actually a total mismatch for what they intended. They produced 3D models, but not actual usable software. The tech leadership internally advised against the acquisition but the CEO did it anyway. Then we had to pivot them to basically build what we wanted from scratch with no clear market need. AFAIK, it's been languishing for a few years.
Microsoft is trapped by its own success. It is used all over the place and these old uses are hamstringing its ability to innovate because the new OS may not meet the needs of all of its previous use cases.
This has been Microsoft's predicament since probably 2000.
I'm not sure there's any need to "innovate" on the UI in this case. It's a stable, mature product refined for >30 years to suit the desktop use case and billions of people are familiar with it and its metaphors. There's plenty of room for innovation on new features, but why mess with what works UI wise? Seems like change for change's sake.
I agree, especially if you compare it to Apple's approach of small, steady, iterative tweaks to the UI.
You can still keep the OS looking fresh and up-to-date without completely reengineering the UI with every OS generation.
Especially as this "complete reengineering" was so so so much worse each time, with additional "new" layers of (incomplete) UI being added on top of legacy UI that would inexplicably still be there. Simply the worst of all worlds.
I'm a big fan of the old Windows 2000 era UI (which partly, amazingly, still exists today), but I have no desire for it to stay around if they can just come up with something fully cohesive and all-encompassing to *fully* replace it with.
China is pretty scary in this way. The Han ethnic group is the majority in population and leadership and it is enacting policies to suppress the population numbers of non Han-ethnic groups in the country.
They do it via birth control and family separation so it happening slowly but it is still decreasing the population of non-Han ethnic groups in comparison to the Han ethnic group.
When this was done elsewhere it was declared as the worst form of racism/ethnocide/genocide, but in China it is accepted standard practice.
Imagine in Donald Trump wanted non-whites to be forced on birth control in the US or if Israel wanted its Arab population on birth control -- there would be uproars and rightly so. But somehow China is getting away with this behaviour towards its ethnic minorities.
ok sure, replace arab with black then. This whole thread is about poor treatment of ethnic minorities, and the point of the comment I replied to is that we wouldn't tolerate forced sterilization of an ethnic minority group from a country like Israel. My response was that Israel has already done this, and we all seemed to tolerate it just fine.
My point is that you respond to one claim with something else while cutting the context and pretending it is the same.
And as I already pointed out the article is pretty clear that there isn't actually convincing evidence, especially not against Israel (it seems to be about a possible rogue NGO or something?)
> there isn't actually convincing evidence, especially not against Israel
There seems to be a very obvious bias in your comments. This is a fact accepted by the Israeli government that I have already pointed out to you, but you keep ignoring it.
>My point is that you respond to one claim with something else while cutting the context and pretending it is the same.
Here's the bit I responded to.
>Imagine in Donald Trump wanted non-whites to be forced on birth control in the US or if Israel wanted its Arab population on birth control -- there would be uproars and rightly so.
I don't think that questions changes much if you replace "Arab" with any other ethnic minority group in Israel. Black Ethiopians are an ethnic minority group in Israel, and they were given birth control against their will by the state of Israel.
>And as I already pointed out the article is pretty clear that there isn't actually convincing evidence, especially not against Israel (it seems to be about a possible rogue NGO or something?)
Israeli officials admitting they did indeed give them birth control isn't strong evidence against Israel? What about the source below?
The reason companies and celebrities on Twitter don’t denounce (as they would if this were happening in Israel or Italy), is that one, it would impact earnings and two, they hold China as different enough that they’re different and they can do different things and we won’t be too bothered by it.
If you're referring to the now-obsolete one-child policy, IIRC, they do this to all ethnicity. The ethnic minority usually got more slack when the government enforced this policy.
> The ethnic minority usually got more slack when the government enforced this policy.
More importantly, the policy officially allowed minorities to have two children, which is very much the opposite of driving down minority numbers relative to Han numbers.
There is a popular poem reflecting the Han's view of what their government thinks of them:
>> China is pretty scary in this way. The Han ethnic group is the majority in population and leadership and it is enacting policies to suppress the population numbers of non Han-ethnic groups in the country.
Factually incorrect. It is the opposite. Quite many ethnic groups had more right than the Han majority.
One example:
"The policy also allowed exceptions for some other groups, including ethnic minorities."
It’s worse than birth control. There are concentration camps in xinjiang. Called “re-education” or “vocational training.” There are many places to begin educating yourself on this (not directed at the person I’m replying to, but to the downvoters). You can start here if you like. Hrw is human rights watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/19/break-their-lineage-br...
> enacting policies to suppress the population numbers of non Han-ethnic groups in the country
It is terrible.
It is also common, although thankfully not so much in the 21st century as in previous.
Of the top of my head... Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, Spanish South America, Germany, Russia, Various Balkan countries. My African history isn't very good, but I'd imagine there too.
And these are just examples of state-sponsored and facilitated, non-genocidal (so leaving out direct murder) attempts to shift the majority ethnicity within an area.
This is nonresponsive nonsense. First, you can't just link half of wikipedia and assume the correct supporting argument must be in there somewhere. There's a huge difference between different types of population control measures.
But more to your direct point: the CCP is engaging in forced sterilizations right now in 2021. See sibling comments with links.
I linked "half of wikipedia", because that's in how many countries changing majority ethnicities has been state policy.
I'm not one to often bring whataboutism into arguments involving China, but I think it's an important point of context that many of the world's now-stable countries either perpetrated same or were victims of it.
It doesn't begin to excuse or justify it, but it does provide some perspective on the darker parts of our own history.
These arguments are not unknown in the discourse in western media, but it's always good to fact-check. Do you have any report or data on these at hand? I'd expect amnesty international for example to have complied info on such cases.
"an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. "
There are increasing number of reports in Canada that Indigenous Women were forcefully sterilized in the last few decades. Women who gave birth in hospitals had their tubes tied after giving birth. I agree this is a one of "the worst forms of racisim/ethonicide/genocide". And yes, I dont understand why more (white) Canadians are not aware of this, and why there has not been a larger out cry over this.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/report-indigenous-w...
[Edit] I am against forced sterilization by anyone on to any one. I want to highlight that sterilization has happened in recent years in Canada. As the message above me points out, there is very little outcry in North America. Here is a data point where sterilization has happened in Canada and there is very little public outcry or knowledge of the situation.
yea exactly thing is most people don't want that to happen today.. in Canada.. and the government also.. nor do we want it to happen in west Taiwan... i don't get these peoples arguments that because other people did evil crap west Taiwan should be allowed to do it as well? is that what your trying to say?
but you agree it should not happen or are you saying because it happens in Canada, we should be fine with it in happening in West Taiwan? whats your opinion on forced organ harvesting? and slave labour ? i mean slavery did happen in the past and now most places ban it but since it did happen its fine for West Taiwan to do it? or Libya?
i just don't get the argument that because X happened in X place, people from X place can't be against it in another country? when they are against it happening anywhere, including their country.
I don't agree with forced medical procedures at all. I think the world should be upset with Canada, with CPP, and all the other cultures who are doing it. I agree, regardless of your cultural background, you have every right to be upset with genocide/racisim/terrible thing in another country and in your home country.
I don't want to tamper anyone's disgust. I would like to add that it happens in my home country and it breaks my heart.
Maybe, maybe not. What is the proof of the connection? Just the time of disappearance and the username? That is pretty circumstantial, but maybe. Not conclusive though.
I put very little trust in self-reported information online. Someone like Ghislaine would probably recognize the value and zero cost of sowing nuggets of false information in public posts. (However, this expectation also makes me doubt that Ghislaine Maxwell would choose a username with "maxwell" in it...)
Maxwellhill is an old account. I think online user anonymity is a biggest deal and people realize the value of that. Sort of like op security. So I could see her registering that 14 years ago. But over time she should have realized she need better security. Why she would continue to use it 14 years later is more of a question?
Maybe. The account stopped posting 2 days before she was arrested. And hasn't posted since.
Mixers will be considered illegal by the EU. It sort of makes sense. Mixers are primarily used to hide one's identity when doing shady/illegal things with cryptocurrency.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advant...
I wonder if it is purely cultural or is there a genetic component? If there is low fertility because of a genetic component, that is likely going to targeted hard by evolution now.
(Will evolution select against women getting higher education like Masters or PhD? Because that is one of the biggest predictors of reduced fertility.)
What does this mean for liberal views? Are they destined to become more conservative over time if there is a genetic component which is being selected against?
So interesting. I wish we could track genetic changes along with political changes over time. I bet there is more happening there than we think.
EDIT: Here is a large meta analysis paper that seems to indicate that genetics influences political ideology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/pdf/nih...