Geography is really important though. Just not as important as Diamond asserts. Faulk, again, is an idiot. But geography is always a significant factor. I mean read McKinder or Mahon.

He starts from the position of assuming that the Papua people are more or less equivalent to western whites, and then comes up with a bunch of conjecture to explain why they had different outcomes.

Hell, he even seems to entertain the possibility that Papua are *superior* to western whites.

Geography is important. But it also influences the selection for phenotypes. This is undeniable.

They are basically the same. Please tell me he did not rely on Rushton's data. You know he got it by measuring skulls in a Portuguese home for the disabled right?

Geography will both impact what behaviors a population will adopt to survive and thrive in a given environment, but it will also impact what gets passed on genetically.

I don't recall if he cited that.

Not nearly as much. The ability to build a canoe is a lot more important than some adaptation that might improve swimming.

There are heritable trait considerations for who will be the best canoe builders, though.

More specifically, it would select *against* traits which would be an obvious impairment.

From what i can tell from scanning through his sources, it looks like Faulk is mostly referencing the domestication arguments.

Not nearly as important as being in a culture that has a tradition of building canoes. Think about this for half a second. 200 years ago 90% of our ancestors were agricultural labor. We did not genetically inherit the ability to function in this environment.

Crops and beasts of burden.

Most of us *don't* function well in this environment.

Hell, there are phenotypes we're perpetuating now who couldn't even do the whole agriculture thing consistently.

And it's largely due to scientific strides and mandatory charity that these people still breed at competitive rates and have sufficiently low mortality for population growth.

You are imagining evolution where it does not exist. 200 years is too short a time for any adaptive trait to occur. Again like many Faulkisms it stems from a basic ignorance of how evolution works.

It's not too short. Especially when we're talking about very fine, small differences. It can be as simple as changing from being just smart/disciplined enough to grow your own food, to just a little too dumb/impulsive.

And much of the change isn't due to individual populations themselves having a dramatically different ratio of traits, but from them being out-reproduced by *other* populations with different traits.

Again basic ignorance. We know about gene-culture co-evolution. We have examples of this like lactase persistence. It took *thousands* of years to become a dominant trait.

A single year is enough time for an entire phenotype to go extinct, depending on how aggressive the pressures.

In fruitflies maybe.

No, even in humans.

If entire species can go extinct in short intervals of time, certainly entire phenotypes can.

Again that assertion displays a basic ignorance of evolution.

How?

You have to have a mutation (which is random) that mutation has to be an adaptation (which is rare) that adaptation has to become dominant in the population (which takes several generations in humans a generation is 30-35 years depending on how you measure it).

The idea of a successful adaptation occurring in a couple hundred years is like saying "I will flip this coin and it will land heads 1000000000 times in a row."

First off, who is arguing that for ramifications to be felt, a trait must be dominant? Second, you can easily make it the dominant trait by aggressively eliminating every organism which doesn't carry it. Third, we're talking global populations, as well as national populations. Not just in terms of differences in raw reproductive rates, but also dramatic changes in *where* those populations are *located.*

The same math would hold true for fruitflies. The only difference is they have a generation every 48 hours.

But, let's say for the sake of argument, we're talking about 1/3 of the population of a geographic region replacing the other 2/3 of the population two and a half times over the course of 600 or so years.

Which is what Faulk is arguing occurred in northern europe.

While, simultaneously, about 2% of the population is culled for criminality, every generation.

His idea is then intelligent design. That 600 years ago genes in Europe *knew* what world they had to evolve into? Even then it does not work. Like the example of lactase persistence (which has a lot of drive twice the caloric intake for a pastoral culture) still takes thousands of years.

wtf?

that's not intelligent design

It is it presupposes the genes have foreknowledge of the environment they will adapt to.

assuming all human populations, regardless of pressures, will be identical after at least tens of thousands of years of general isolation in different environments, now *that's* intelligent design

No it doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P78Zd8265_k

He's basically just arguing what he thinks happened. That the rich effectively outbred the poor in certain regions, very aggressively, and that the most criminal elements were aggressively removed from the gene pool over an extended period of time.