Website review: Cultural differences: A DNA link? -...
laodan discovered this in Culture/Ethnicity
•2 reviews since Mar 12, 2006
culture
•iht.com/articles/2006/03/12/news/genes.php
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laodan discovered 28 months ago
Cultural differences: A DNA link?
Discovering that genes and memes work sometimes in concert. Or how bio-chemistry and culture interact...
via the IHT in the NYT by Nicholas Wade :
""" ..."it should be no surprise to anyone that human nature is not a constant" and that selective pressures have probably been stronger in the last 10,000 years than at any other epoch in human evolution.
... Genetic information could therefore have a lot to contribute, although only a minority of historians might make use of it, he said.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has distinguished between high-trust and low-trust societies, arguing that trust is a basis for prosperity. Since his 1995 book on the subject, researchers have found that oxytocin, a chemical active in the brain, increases the level of trust, at least in psychological experiments.
... Since the agricultural revolution, humans have to a large extent created their own environment. But that does not mean the genome has ceased to evolve. The genome can respond to cultural practices as well as to any other kind of change. """
URL: Cultural differences: A DNA link?
- tranquil43 rated 28 months ago
- From the page: ""Since it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical time, we're going to have to rewrite every history book ever written," said Gregory Cochran, a population geneticist at the University of Utah."
