Gene Expression: More pathogens means more collectivism?
by tdaxp ~ February 28th, 2008
Gene Expression: More pathogens means more collectivism?
Razib’s post is an important read for anyone thinking what what SysAdmin/post-disaster nationbuilding activities will be like in 20 years or so. It seems that pathogenic load (how many diseases are about) does a good job of predicting political collectivism. This could be from environmental, epigenetic, or genetic factors — probably all three.
Imagine an armed force entering a region or province, sampling the water, taking some blood (with needles, not bullets), and being able to predict how to distribute walking-around money.
Really exciting stuff.
The New York Times uses top 1% of income, not wealth. From the legend:...
March 1st, 2008 at 11:55 am
So more diseases equals more collectivism? Japan is one of the most ethnocentric, collective nations in the world, is Japan prone to more disease?
March 1st, 2008 at 11:58 am
Seerov,
Thanks for the comment!
A better way to think about the finding is that variation in collectivism is explained by variation in pathogens. So there are excepts this way and that, but knowing the pathogenic loads gets you a good way (about half, in fact) of knowing the collectivism of a country, on average.
March 1st, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I’m a little suspicious of this study. The most individualistic countries happen to be some of the most rich countries. Lack of poverty usually means less disease. Western countries, especially protestant Northern European countries are the most individualistic of all. I often wonder why Northern European countries are so individualistic while Japan and Korea are collective.
March 2nd, 2008 at 2:23 pm
seerov, remember that changes to a society or a genome can last for generations after the cause of the change subsides. For an extreme example, look at the ME– decades after the invention of air conditioning, at a time when the funds to keep pig pens cool and pork well prepared are abundant, the religious strictures against eating pig meat are still followed. Another example is african-americans, who still carry- and suffer from- a recessive gene that gave their ancestors some protection against malaria.
Dan, my ME example brings up something I tried asking about a few days ago (my comments got swallowed). How much of the collectivist tendencies in these areas are genetic or epigenetic, and how many are social adaptions to a hostile environment.
March 2nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Yay, I’m not getting swallowed whole anymore! Now if I can only remember to use question marks. . .
BTW, like the design. The bunching of recent comments by thread is an improvement.
March 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Michael,
Hopefully others will like the not-swallowing-comments-feature, too!
The current comments sidebar is FreePress’s “WordPress Recent Comments” Plugin [1], with a little modification to make the posts more distinct from each other.
To your q (eaten by blogspirit, I presume):
The data’s not in on this yet, but once it’s in, it should be a straightforward task of building a structural equation model…
Seerov,
“The most individualistic countries happen to be some of the most rich countries. Lack of poverty usually means less disease.”
Great point.
I think we’ll see many vicious circles where one ill creates another, and many virtuous circle where one good thing begets another.
[1] http://freepressblog.org/wordpress-plugins-2/wordpress-recent-comments-plugin-widget/
[2]
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:08 pm
There’s a Howard Hughes-/Alternate History-/Conspiracy Theory-a-la-”X-Files” type of story waiting to be inspired by this.