Blank Slate hypothesis is now officially refuted, correct?

Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive performance.

No one in adjacent fields has been seriously engaging tabula rasa speculation from the 17th century for quite some time prior to this paper.

What you think the implications are of that for your present day lived experience, that might be a different conversation.

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Tor3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just where did you get that from? Certainly not from the paper.

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kloop 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think they're talking about this bit:

> We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing γ = 0.74 ± 0.12), household income (increasing γ = 1.12 ± 0.12) and years of schooling (increasing γ = 0.63 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant (Extended Data Fig. 10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years )*, after which γ tends towards zero

Presumably pressure in different regions lead to different combinations of those alleles, which I think they are shorthanding a bit, but the fact that those alleles exist makes blank slate theory a kind of rough assumption

	▲	svnt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I haven’t had time to really dig in to the paper but these data (from only one region) are limited in their ability to compare regions, right? If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya. The methodology, if it holds up, seems to hold a lot of promise for answering questions like this in the future.

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Nesco 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a graph arguing “intelligence” has been positively selected in west Eurasian population in this paper according to a polygenic score (page 8 fig. 4)

Now I would be quite curious to know how they constructed this polygenic score

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AlgorithmicTime 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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tokai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Racists are hilarious. They will twist and bend anything remotely applicable to fit and underpin their prejudices.

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lukev 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly.

But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-population effects, and personal history (nutrition, education, etc) strongly dominates that.

And that's setting aside the moral implications of judging someone or changing your behavior towards them even if you have somehow measured them to be "less intelligent," as if that was a single axis of worth.

Because, apparently, this needs to be said.

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card_zero an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This interest in IQ has a negative effect on the concept of intelligence, never mind human unity. It attaches exaggerated importance to test scores, jobs, and school. It tends toward snobbery.

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georgeburdell an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet you are also likely to argue “weather is not climate”. Differences in population characteristics of all kinds have massive societal implications and we should lean into addressing them.

	▲	lukev an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well if you are talking about environmental stuff (like leaded gasoline), sure. If you’re talking about trying to improve the genetics of populations at scale… yikes.