I didn't know there were two Tom Friedmans working for the New York Times.
>>The test was probably skewed by the inability of the pollsters to present the
pro-globalization position as clearly as Friedman would have.<<
Oh, I see, he's taking the piss. *Nobody* can present *anything* with Friedman's degree of unclarity and lunacy. As Matt Taibbi noticed, he doesn't even ever get a metaphor right by accident.
best, dd
PS: Question for Justin, given that this post is somewhat content-free otherwise. Last week while I was on holiday (lovely, thanks), you wrote:
>>Bottom line: we are animals, descended from
Pleistocene hunter gatherers, whose central nervous
systems are basically designed for life that sort of
life in small groups in the African veldt. The ten or
fifteen thousand years we've been civilized is
evolutionarily irrelevant, no significant natural
selection can take place in such a period (apart from
out not-too-improbable self-extinction). <<
Is there any real evidence for this often-made claim? I mean anything from hard physiology or quantitative genetics or something more substantial than the general feeling that 10-15 kiloyears is "not enough"? I only ask because it seems to me that:
1) We're *not* descended from Pleistocene hunter gatherers, apart Jim Craven, the Aborigine bloke who used to post on here, and any lurkers who happen to be Khoi San. We are descended from the farmers of various sorts who drove the hunter gatherers into extinction. I may even actually be wrong about Jim Craven as I have no real idea about whether Blackfoot civilisation was nomadic.
Anyone who can digest grains and animal milk is someone who has passed through at least one very substantial genetic bottleneck.
2) There have been numerous mass extinctions of humans over the last ten to fifteen thousand years that are known about by people like Jared Diamond; more genetic bottlenecks.
3) As I understand my Eldredge and Gould, the basis for the estimates that natural selection takes hundreds of thousands of years is a statistical one based on hazard rates rather than one based on a determinate rate of drift. If there's an epidemic of malaria going about on the veldt and you don't carry the sickle-cell gene, then "evolutionary time" is *right now*. I don't think it can be ruled out at all that one or more "evolutionary events" might have taken place in the 10-15 kY that humanity has been civilised; ex ante, it would be an improbable event for one to have happened in any given 10kY time slice, but this is not relevant to the question of whether it happened or not.
I'm not sure this has any particular implications one way or the other for the wider sociobiology debate but I was wondering if there was something I was missing.
best once more dd
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