I argue that culture is downriver of biology, not the other way around

Without the physical brain, there can be no culture etc.

hang on, how did I find this discord >.>

Could of sworn I got here from a channel link

@Seven Proxies

> If you've got tangible arguments against the study, then I'll hear them. But I won't accept any shooting of messengers based simply on who they are.

My point is, ILFS is a poor source, exactly for this reason. The worms don't appear to be inheriting memories by eating each other. It'll just be a chemical difference. If you ate another person who had high levels of oestrogen in their blood, it would probably flip whether you had a boy or girl in the early stages of pregnancy.

@B[] The cannibalism argument was not mine though. I was refering to the inherited memories of hot and cold enviroments and the behviours exhibited in the worms when exposed to them.

@Seven Proxies

> The elephant in the room here is where you believe that culture comes from. You seem to (I stress SEEM) to treat culture as something entirely separate from biology. As if it is something that just springs from the ether, rather than being a phenomenon produced by the thought process of living human brains.

When it comes to modern homo sapiens, I believe culture is entirely separate. Culture comes from your community, culture is inherited socially. Culture literally means "social behaviour" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

@Seven Proxies

> The cannibalism argument was not mine though. I was refering to the inherited memories of hot and cold enviroments and the behviours exhibited in the worms when exposed to them.

It really doesn't matter, behaviours aren't stored in DNA. They're just an emergent property and even then they just seed your behavioural tendencies.

@B[] And you don't admit that biology influence social behaviour?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

@B[] Yes it does matter, because this research suggest that behaviours might just be stored in DNA. We don't know exactly what DNA governs. The genome is not fully mapped out.

@Seven Proxies Lobotomy doesn't come from your DNA...

@B[] No but it proves that altering your biology will also alter your social behaviour.

@B[] And DNA most definitely play a part in governing the formation of neural connections in the brain, like controlling the number of neural connections made in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain anatomy.

WHich is why some people are born as geniuses, while others are born hopelessly dumb, even when brought up in virtually identical cultural and nurtritional enviroments.

@Seven Proxies > Yes it does matter, because this research suggest that behaviours might just be stored in DNA. We don't know exactly what DNA governs. The genome is not fully mapped out.

No, you're extrapolating. Worms mostly are governed by a reactive behaviour, meaning that very little intelligence is involved. You're trying to compare this to human behaviours - it just doesn't match up. At least find the same thing done with mice.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/18/8225321/memory-research-flatworm-cannibalism-james-mcconnell-michael-levin

@B[] The "amount" of intelligence cannot be quantified. You can't say that "very little intelligence is involved" in the worms. Enough intelligence is involved to prove that their actions are behavioural.

@Seven Proxies

> No but it proves that altering your biology will also alter your social behaviour.

If you kill somebody, that severely affects their social behaviour.

> And DNA most definitely play a part in governing the formation of neural connections in the brain, like controlling the number of neural connections made in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain anatomy.

Yes, which is why brain defects/diseases exist. But I'm yet to see any evidence of difference between the races.

> WHich is why some people are born as geniuses, while others are born hopelessly dumb, even when brought up in virtually identical cultural and nurtritional enviroments.

Nope. It has a lot more to do with luck and happenstance. There is no correlation for example between brain size and success.

@OneTrueGod Please link to papers rather than "news" article by TheVerge

studies are links in blue

Which one in particular makes your point?

I haven't got infinite time to read through their shit piece

I am going to go an eat a bagel

Culture cannot be determined by genes it changes too quickly. OK evolutionarily you are talking about hundreds of generations for an adaptive trait with a *very high drive* to become dominant in a local population. Culture can change drastically over the course of a generation or two.

@Seven Proxies > The "amount" of intelligence cannot be quantified. You can't say that "very little intelligence is involved" in the worms. Enough intelligence is involved to prove that their actions are behavioural.

No, I can't put an exact number on it. But what I do know is that my brain's ability to solve any problem compared to that of a worm is significantly better, for others I cannot say.

Exactly @Jym

@B[] Yes but that isn't relevant to the issue. The fact that you can solve more complex logical problems than the worm, doesn't make your BEHAVIOUR inherently different or uncomparable to the behaviour of the worm.

They're both behaviours, influenced by your respective brains, memories etc.

@Seven Proxies Of course it does, part of your behaviour as a human is your predictive capability of the world around you, and that's related to IQ. The better your ability to understand the world around you, the better at making decisions you are, hence a different behaviour. For example, those who are unable to express themselves with clarity often use violence (Antifa).

Behaviors like what? Language? That's a very complex human behavior. And we have genes related directly to it like FOXP2. Would language then be determined genetically? If you raise a Chinese child in Brooklyn do they start speaking Mandarin?

@Jym Exactly. Cultural changes are, based on the available evidence, nothing but symptoms of an intelligent species trying out different strategies in order to survive and dominate their enviroment.

The fact that cultures change rapidly only shows that the species in question is intelligent (meaning: it doesn't bang it's head with a hammer a million times before realizing that it's going to hurt, but settle for doing it two or three times before concluding that enough is enough), it doesn't prove that culture is completely separate from it's biologically determined behaviour.

Bringing things back to the point....

Prove that there is differences in the brains between races

@B[] IQ tests are not based on predictiv capabilities of the world around you. They are purposefully designed to use abstract patterns of symbols and drawings in order to move the test subjects mind away from expectations and experiences regarding the surrounding world.

I.e the test subject is focused entirely on abstract symbols and drawings which they have never and will never encounter in the world outside

@B[] I have already done so, by highlighting racial IQ differences

OH IQ. Well that we can say quite easily has a high cultural influence. The IQ test is only about a century old. Over that period the mean IQ in populations that were tested the most has changed by more than a standard deviation. So in about 3 generations.

@Seven Proxies > I have already done so, by highlighting racial IQ differences

Which part of the brain stops them from understanding and enacting your cultural/ideological beliefs?

@Jym gets it

Any IQ test you can create is based on a pre-conceived idea of what human IQ is

@B[] But you could use other examples, like general physiology and racial performance in things like sports. The NBA is not exactly dominated by white people. And the runners in the olympics are almost always africans.

If there can be such significant physiological differences in terms of stature, aerobic and anaerobic ability, it makes little logical sense to argue "but our brains are all exactly the same"

Jym actually studies evolution rather than searching studies for the word 'race' and trying to build a theory using that limited data set...

We're not talking about sports, there are clearly physical differences.