I have also always held the opinion that this is through no fault of our own, but through a very faulty system established by our ancestors. The monetary system, which was envisioned to simply keep a tally of resources among members of a society, has now become the sole cause for an overly aggressive and violent world. We have reached a point where several of the alleles, described in the article, are now in an environment so unfriendly to them, that let alone their successful development, it is threatening their very survival.

The time for orchids to blossom is almost over. It seems like only the dandelions will continue to persist.

“absent-minded, physically weak, socially misfitted dorks who can barely get a girlfriend”

Yay, that sounds like a plurality, if not majority, of software developers. The guys that developed the browser we are using now…

Really, visit a campus where mathematics and programming are studied, and you will see very strange people. Especially if you visit the rooms, because some of them never go outside. I remember a guy who constantly forgot to eat, and was only kept alive (sitting at the computer, of course) by mercy of his roommate, who would occassionaly bring him some groceries.

With regard to “unfounded”: you have nothing but your own imagination on which to make conclusions about the readership of blogs like this. The fact that, given these few clues, your imagination leads you to such a negative and judgemental vision, indicates that you yourself have bones to chew.

With regard to “unnecessarily offensive”: even if someone _is_ absent-minded, physically weak, and does not fit in well with a society that treats him like a dork, this doesn’t mean that he’s not actually a genius. He very well might be. The reason such a person can be a social misfit is because such people are rare; they thus tend to be deprived of the company of similarly minded peers when growing up; and thus tend to develop a social personality belatedly.

All in all, your comment is a fairly ugly ad hominem, with no bearing on the truth of what you were responding to.

And yes, in my opinion, something like the satirical thought by Anonymous is likely true.

Wrong. Certainly over the time period we’re talking about, and heterogeneity has shot up even more since industrialization. There are more niches, and more narrowly defined niches, that have been carved out over time. Going from hunting and gathering to agriculture produced a jump in specialization, and from there to industry even more so.

“And then along comes a catastrophic plague killing off a large precentage of the population wiping out most of the dandelions (common traits) leaving all the orchids (uncommon traits) unscathed.”

Doesn’t make sense. Percentages don’t matter for whether a trait will persist — whether the wipe-out is due to a plague, a genetic bottleneck, loss from migration or abduction by aliens. It’s the sheer size that matters. So when the Black Plague or the Thirty Years War wipes out 30-50% of some population, that doesn’t show up as a loss of genetic diversity because millions of people were still left.

The effects of reduction in population size only show up in cheetahs or something where the sheer population size falls below 100 (or other small number).

I don’t see what the big point of the plague comment was in the first place, though. A plague will kill off those susceptible to it and leave those who weren’t, or who avoided contact, or who were lucky.

“When societies become more complex” i can understand social complexity as part of this but is not diversity the issue?

society is becoming more homogeneous not less. behavior and culture are tending towards a norm. the evidence of this problem is manifest in political and economic life.

DWC’s comment “And then along comes a catastrophic plague killing off a large precentage of the population wiping out most of the dandelions (common traits) leaving all the orchids (uncommon traits) unscathed.”….. is to be taken seriously.

There’s too much, er, flowery language in that article because it’s in the Atlantic. The basic concept is simple: for some phenotypes (observable traits), there is an interaction between the variant of some gene that you have and the environment. Fragility has nothing to do with it.

Simple case: imagine you had a genetic variant “predisposing” you to having a hair trigger, always spoiling for a fight, etc. That variant would spread where it paid off, in terms of # of offspring, to be bloodthirsty. In a new environment with large powerful states that restrict violence either to the state itself or to a small ruling coalition of elites, they will round up the hellraisers and kill them off, like they did to the Vikings. So the variant goes extinct.

The tone of group selectionism can easily be re-cast in individual terms. When societies become more complex, they offer a wider variety of roles for people to fulfill. Before, people with genetic variants that pushed them into unnecessary roles would’ve had fewer kids. With a wider variety of roles, some of those previous deviants may have a niche carved out for them.

But it’s not true that “every society needs X” — or else every society would have X. Why don’t you find neurotic helicopter mothers in hunter-gatherer groups, while you do among German or Jewish mothers? Must be different selective pressures. Or the German and Jewish ecosystems are more complex and have a wider variety of roles.

If you’ve got genes controlling something as complex as proclivity for depression, ADHD, etc., it seems very unlikely that they managed to propagate fairly extensively without an upside. Of course, that upside need not be anything we’d call admirable; maximizing descendants isn’t really something society sees as a good terminal value. I suppose it’s possible that depression and ADHD and so on may increase descendants somehow, so the “downside” may be the upside.

Thus, some skepticism towards PC conclusions is merited, but if there’s a downside, and it has significant prevalence in the population, then it seems there should be an upside, whether society would call it an upside or not.