Came here from the genetic engineering post. Long comment incoming, but skip to the end for the TLDR if it gets boring.
My understanding of heritability, and what causes regression to the mean seems to be different than yours, and leads to different conclusions about the importance of family background, vs. the importance of individual genetics. Although I'm a layman so it could very well be my incorrect understanding (and I ideologically lean towards individual over group identity/relevance so that could make me biased).
Here's my understanding;
Regression to the mean, especially for traits influenced by a large number of genes, occurs regardless of ancestry. Even with two high-IQ parents, their child’s genetic makeup is likely to regress toward the population average.
Hypothetically, if there were 100 important IQ-related genes, with the average person having 50 positive genes, the top 1% of children (assuming random 50/50 inheritance) would have about 62 positive genes. If two individuals from this top 1% were paired, their child would have a 50% chance of inheriting each gene from each parent. The child’s expected number of positive genes would remain 62 if the parents had identical positive genes.
However, if the overlap between the parents’ 62 positive genes is only 50% (31 shared genes, 31 unique genes), the child is guaranteed only to inherit those 31 shared genes. For the remaining 31 unique genes from each parent, the child inherits each with a 50% probability. This increases the variance in the child’s gene count around the expected value of 62.
In reality, since there are way more than 100 IQ producing genes (and possibly the result of Epistasis, multiple genes which together create an effect, but alone are neutral. This would have worse than 50/50 inheritance odds), the regression to the mean would be stronger than assuming just a 50/50 inheritance. If parent A had a combination of 2 genes that together produced higher IQ, and parent B didn't overlap with those two genes (with their high IQ deriving from somewhere else), the child would have to win the genetic lottery twice in order to benefit. Making the actual heritability of that single-parent IQ gene pair at 25%. Since the pool of IQ-enhancing genes (and gene combinations) is small compared to the vast number of neutral or non-IQ-affecting genes and gene combinations there’s more room for downward variation than upward. This asymmetry makes larger losses in positive IQ genes more likely than small gains.
Now when it comes to how I understand this would apply to lineage;
On the same hypothetical shown above, when two parents have 62 random IQ producing genes or gene combinations that are independent of each other, the expected mean of offspring would depend on how much overlap there is. If parent A has an IQ gene pair that parent B does not have, the child will have to get lucky for each gene, so 1/2 times the number of different genes that contribute to that one IQ effect. If it was 2 genes, each with 50% heritability, then the chance of a child inheriting those IQ genes would be only 25%, while it would be 100% if the parents shared the same mutation.
Larger losses would be more likely than lesser gains, as the space of IQ increasing genes decreases the higher IQ you are, and the space of normal IQ genes increases, causing regression to the mean. However, if you assume that the 62 positive genes are not randomly selected, but are somewhat dependent on each other, or on some 3rd factor (like for example, shared ancestry with lots of intermarriage), then the overlaps (and hence guaranteed inheritance) of those 62 genes and gene pairs would be expected to be a lot higher! Therefore, there would be a higher chance of heritability of IQ (and other heritable factors) when you concentrate the blood a bit.
Of course the heritability of clusters of genes is not completely random, but where IQ is derived from combinations of genes that aren't clustered, there would be a meaningful advantage to having more overlap among IQ producing genes. Shared lineage would increase the likelihood of that overlap.
Essentially, (at least as I understand it) the lineage shouldn't matter for the likely IQ of your children with someone, unless there is significant shared lineage or shared concentration of IQ genes. Person A with high IQ Japanese familial lineage marrying Person B with high IQ New England WASP lineage will have the same mean expected mean IQ, and same downward variance, as either of them marrying an equivalent high-IQ prole. Unfortunately, this would mean there's literally no way to benefit from the advantages of lineage-IQ, unless you're already part of such a lineage, or otherwise have access to a closely genetically related person who's also benefited from at least a couple of generations of traditional non-lineage assortive mating.
Darwin married his cousin after all, and I’d imagine the high-IQ families Clark describes originated from a small, genetically distinct group—whether an invader stock or a semi-legendary aristocracy. These families likely intermarried mostly exclusively, concentrating their advantageous “blue blood,” so to speak. This would explain the persistence of high IQ among elite families without suggesting that someone should specifically target high-IQ lineage unless that lineage is closely related to their own.
This concentration of lineage may also increase the risk of genetic diseases and single genes that cause significant IQ deficits. While such outcomes were likely managed by ensuring those with severe issues did not reproduce—either through exclusion, disinheritance, or marriage outside the lineage—the negative effects of inbreeding were still present. Over time, these risks may have been outweighed by the positive effects of preserving and reinforcing high-IQ genes within the lineage.
Cultural practices may have helped mitigate some of the downsides of inbreeding. For example, in aristocratic families, it was common to send non-heirs into the clergy, where celibacy may have acted as a release valve for those with undesirable traits or unlucky genetic inheritance. This practice may have reduced the reproductive impact of deleterious genes.
Anecdotally, examples like that Kennedy sister (her name I don't remember)—who was lobotomized and institutionalized due to developmental issues—many indicate elite families may have overrepresented genetic diseases. I've read this was quite common among the elite, but I have no real data.
TLDR: My understanding is that familial IQ only matters if you’re already part of a high-IQ lineage or have close IQ relatives you can marry. Otherwise, building a long-term high-IQ lineage requires either genetic testing (to find someone who shares the most positive genes with you, though this is practically impossible without a centralized database) or setting up your descendants to intermarry within the family. This might only work if you come from a unique, relatively unmixed genetic stock (e.g., Iceland, the Sámi, Japan). For most people, especially those from settler states like America, targeting familial IQ wouldn't be feasible.
If I were trying to create a long-term genetic winner lineage (a goal I personally resonate with but am not focusing on right now), I’d prioritize finding a high-IQ, accomplished woman who shares that goal. The current best approach would likely involve IVF, embryo selection, and possibly surrogacy, though there are trade-offs (I've read suboptimal gestation conditions from surrogacy can offset genetic advantages). Passing down these values and philosophies to your children is probably the key so they continue the trend over multiple generations. Gwern’s excellent piece on this topic is worth reading for what the possible future developments would look like, but I am sure you've already seen it: https://gwern.net/embryo-selection
Alternatively, you could bypass the need for a partner who shares your goals. You could find a high-IQ egg donor and raising 5+ children with surrogates. You wouldn’t need your partner to be ideal—just supportive or ambivalent (allowing you also to select for other non-trivial traits, like attraction and emotional compatibility). Finding high-IQ egg donors isn’t impossible, as shown by the Hwang affair, where researchers donated eggs for his cloning experiments despite the dubious nature of his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U
I’d appreciate your thoughts here, as I agree with your goals but understand heritability differently (and an incorrect understand would have very material effects on my own approach to my descendants). As for why, I believe that intelligence, creativity, and ability thresholds for productivity are rising rapidly. 1,000 years ago, almost anyone could farm; 100 years ago, industrialization favored the systems-makers; 20 years ago, controlling information became key with the internet; each of these setting the minimum necessary intelligence to produce something valuable much higher, and in 10 years, AI may eliminate 95% of low-performing white-collar jobs. If descendants don’t rank among the top 1% performers of the top 1% most difficult jobs, they will probably end up at the mercy of AI, the oligarchs controlling it or government-controlled UBI.
Edit: Made changes for clarity of my thoughts. After writing that out it may warrant writing a more formatted and edited post instead of just a comment.
I think this would definitely be a fun one to take to the subreddit and / or ACX comments.
So where we agree:
1. Everything desirable is massively polygenic.
2. Genetically, there is more downward variation possible than upwards, and this is a part of what drives regression to the mean
Where we might potentially disagree (not sure bc you didn't bring this up except for the Polgars):
A) Environmental effects also matter - genes are stronger, in general, bet 80/20 genes. But the 20% is also a source of variation, including positive variation
B) In general, any given smart / hot / whatever person you see has had "lucky" positive environmental variation to attain that given phenotype
C) The best way to average this "luck" out is to match on lineage smarts / hots / whatever, because that is the "true" read on their genotype quality on whatever metrics.
Synthesis:
1a) You seem to be assuming something akin to Mendelian heritability with your supposition that you would need similar / inbred familial lines to benefit, but I don't think this is true. Selection for polygenic traits doesn't rely on rare, discrete alleles, but instead from large pools of small-effect alleles, and you're as likely to benefit from genetic diversity as to lose from it. Which is to say, your lineages don't need to be similar, because lineage X has clusters a,b,c, and lineage Y has clusters f,g,h, and both clusters contribute to the relevant endpoint. Hybrid vigor is a thing, and it's a thing because of massive polygenicity.
For an IQ endpoint, maybe there's a cluster of alleles that affect myelination positively, and maybe there's another cluster that affects the size of short term memory buffers - if you cross those populations, you're still going to get an additive IQ effect, even though from different domains.
2b) Polygenic traits are more sensitive to environmental variation and effects than Mendelian traits, and so the "lucky" variations are more prominent / important, and being able to offset them is correspondingly more important than with simpler Mendelian traits.
2c) You're right that genetically there's more downward variation possible than upwards, but this isn't really addressable (without gengineering or embryo selection). But the environmental variation IS addressable, and you address it by lineage optimization.
Now I could definitely be wrong here, and this is why I think we ought to open it up to the subreddit and commentariat. I did do microbiology research, including making genetic knockout constructs and isolating functional genes, but I'm by no means a geneticist, and it was many years ago (and so my state of knowledge is a decade or more out of date, too).
I'll make a subreddit post and tag you, and then if it's still a productive convo we can look for an open thread to post in a little later. But yeah, fun topic! Thanks for bringing it up.
I think I understand your thinking better. My background has absolutely nothing to do with biology, so my understanding is based of passive osmosis of related blogs, books and whatnot. It's more likely that my understanding is lacking than yours.
1) This makes sense. I was aware that IQ was a combination of many thousands of genes, so perhaps there isn't significant overlap between any two people like there is in my hypothetical, even if they are of the same lineage. I don't know how many of these genes are expressed in the average person though (Half, I assume?), and that would change what the expected overlap would look like. I suspect I don't rightly understand if there is any advantage to equivalent-IQ parents with high-overlap (Parent 1 & 2 both have A, B, C) vs. low-overlap (Parent 1 has A, B, C and Parent 2 has F, G, H). I suspect overlap does matter, but I am not so sure.
Here's where I am still lost:
I am not sure whether you're making the claim that there is any actual benefit to lineage when it comes to a partner's IQ, or if lineage is just a signal that a partners IQ is due to heritability, and not due to an environmental outlier?
My understanding from this post: If you're saying there's a real underlying benefit to lineage, I don't think there's much evidence of this specifically (although maybe reading the book would change my mind). I don't see what the difference between a 140 IQ person with terrible relatives, and a 140 IQ person with a millennia of family success. Shouldn't the children of both have the same mean IQ, and same regression to the mean (assuming 140 IQ is all due to genetics)?
I can think of a dozen different mitigating factors that would give elite lineage advantages but they sum to the normal benefits of having rich parents (plus assortive mating). Parental wealth is perhaps coequal with IQ in predicting outcomes, and often stronger, despite the modern world having high social mobility and a decent floor for access to opportunity, so I imagine it was even more important in the past.
My understanding from your comment: If you're saying lineage isn't inherently important to a person's IQ (at least after conception anyway), but is an excellent indicator for weeding out the random environmental outliers, this I can somewhat buy. Under this view, there would be nothing inherently more desirable between two people with an equal number of high-IQ genes. In reality, where you can't actually know someone's underlying genetic potential, you just have to guess from their outcomes. You don't want to mistake someone with very high heritable IQ, with someone that has good, but not great heritable IQ, but got lucky due to random environmental factors.
How do you weigh this against the benefits of positive environmental factors you *know* the children of wealthy successful people have? Would you expect the environmental factor to be more beneficial in the case of Lisa Simpson, or Princess Diana? If anything, I would expect people of comparable IQ who jumped from a lower class background to have a higher heritable IQ component, than someone who came from a high-class background. The environmental effects of poverty are probably negative (I assume), while the environmental effects of wealth are positive, so the genetic IQ of a Dianna would be an overestimate, and a Lisa an underestimate.
Also, what are your thoughts on IQ's usefulness as a metric when you get abnormally high or low IQs? This has come up recently in the IQ discussions with Nepal's average IQ being 43. This is so low it's not even funny, and obviously not communicating what we normally mean when we talk about IQ. Unless some particularly intelligent slime mold or a few million Chimpanzees were included in these IQ studies, IQ must fail to be a useful tool on the tails. Perhaps so long as you're in the 145 IQ+ percentile (1/1,000 odds, which isn't so bad), optimizing selection beyond that is a waste of effort.
I'll look out for your post. To me it seems like the quality over there has been going down lately, especially with anything tangentially political or IQ related, but that might be me exhausting many of the interesting thoughts and conversations from when SSC was fresher to me.
> I suspect I don't rightly understand if there is any advantage to equivalent-IQ parents with high-overlap (Parent 1 & 2 both have A, B, C) vs. low-overlap (Parent 1 has A, B, C and Parent 2 has F, G, H). I suspect overlap does matter, but I am not so sure.
Yes, I actually don't know this either, and it's something I'd be interested in learning more about.
My SWAG is something like "higher similarity can pay off between 1-5% of the time due to pleiotropy reinforcing certain traits in additive ways, and due to duplicative effects in separate chromosomal locations backing a gap up when it happens by chance" and stuff like that, but honestly, I think the same could happen with genetically distinct lines, just at a slightly lower cadence, so it's a fairly slight edge.
> I am not sure whether you're making the claim that there is any actual benefit to lineage when it comes to a partner's IQ, or if lineage is just a signal that a partners IQ is due to heritability, and not due to an environmental outlier?
Yeah, here I'm saying there's an actual benefit to lineage quality, it's not just a signal.
In fact, I go so far as to suggest that if your choice was somebody hot and smart from an average lineage, and somebody less-hot and less-smart but from a great lineage, I'd choose the great lineage.
The reason is because in your matched 140 IQ case, the children do not regress to the same mean, they each regress to their respective lineage means.
The lineage mean is more relevant, because it represents the true genotypical pool from which they are drawing. Broadly, the 140 IQ person who drew from an average genotypical pool got much luckier - they drew extra good genes, and benefited from environmental luck to the maximum degree. That "luck" is exactly the kind of thing that regresses to the mean harder.
What's the actual mechanism there? I'd suggest it's something like "you drew a couple of high-variance genes that just happened to get *just the right environment* to express themselves maximally," and things like that. But this means your children with those genes are unlikely to hit the optimally lucky environmental factors, and are more likely to regress to a lower mean.
Comparatively, the "good lineage" IQ 140 person drew an average hand, from a better deck. Less luck was involved, and they don't need exquisitely tuned environmental luck to shine. Their kids are also going to be drawing from that higher baseline, and will be more robust to the environmental differences and perturbations everyone faces.
> How do you weigh this against the benefits of positive environmental factors you *know* the children of wealthy successful people have? Would you expect the environmental factor to be more beneficial in the case of Lisa Simpson, or Princess Diana? If anything, I would expect people of comparable IQ who jumped from a lower class background to have a higher heritable IQ component, than someone who came from a high-class background.
Nope, I'm betting on "high class background" all the way here. The low class background person threw all 6's, but their kids are a lot less likely to do that. The high class background person just threw an average hand from better dice, so that's a lot more replicable in your own kids.
> Also, what are your thoughts on IQ's usefulness as a metric when you get abnormally high or low IQs?...IQ must fail to be a useful tool on the tails. Perhaps so long as you're in the 145 IQ+ percentile (1/1,000 odds, which isn't so bad), optimizing selection beyond that is a waste of effort.
Oh yeah, this is fun. Yeah, I think optimization at the tails falls apart. Also, optimization in general on any trait is such a massive filter on your pool that you just *cant'* go out into the tails and have any real chance of getting anybody. I think "settling" is an iron law, more or less.
Tangentially, back to "settling," I believe in mate selection you only get 3 things you can optimize on. Blatantly unfair! Monstrous! But *I* bring a lot more than 3 good things to the table! Yup. Life sucks that way, you only get 3 things, no matter how cool you are on whatever other metrics.
So because of that, it's actually a massive multiplier to be able to relax on IQ. Because let me tell you, optimizing on "lineage attainment" is f-ing ridiculously hard! WAY harder than IQ, WAY harder than looks! So being able to give up a "top 1%" IQ is actually a really big deal, because each independent factor cuts your pool by a lot.
So in real life I'm doubling down on attractiveness and conscientiousness/discipline (and lineage attainment), and relaxing on IQ because of the AI counterfeiting intelligence thing, because I think those things are going to matter more for my kids.
I am not (yet) onboard with your claim that people with great lineage *actually* have a higher mean IQ than the general population, or if they're keeping themselves above water with environmental factors and selective mating. I personally buy that different global population's have different mean IQs, but I find it less plausible that you'd see this over way shorter timespans (tens of thousands of years globally, hundreds of years for a lineage). Especially with significant intermarriage with the larger population.
If you're right, this is definitely a valid metric to pursue, and if you don't care so much about IQ, then it's even better.
> I am not (yet) onboard with your claim that people with great lineage *actually* have a higher mean IQ than the general population, or if they're keeping themselves above water with environmental factors and selective mating.
Isn't the Bouchard twin study decent evidence against the environmental factors thing? (twins separated at birth have IQ's much closer to their biological parents than their adopted parents of different SES / environment)
But yeah, assortative mating IS basically how a given lineage attains and keeps a higher mean, and the mechanisms are the same as the "population differences" ones, just writ smaller. to your point, it's basically NOT "intermarriage with the larger population," because people optimize on their mate quality impossibly hard.
It still "leaks" due to the mechanisms talked about in the post here, just like populations "leak" with exogamous breeding, but the different means are still maintained, because 75% transmission fidelity is good enough to differentiate the means between families / populations.
You find the time periods implausible, but consider the extreme degree of change you can drive in 8 generations (only 160-200 years in humans):
What can you do in 8 generations?
> Between 2000 and 2016, US dairy cattle breeders, by applying selection pressure to increase the productive life, achieved an increase of about 10 months
> After eight generations of selection, the percentage of dogs with an excellent hip quality score (as assessed by an extended view hip score) increased from 34 to 93% in German Shepherd Dogs and from 43 to 94% in Labrador retrievers.
> In dogs, it's generally thought that it takes ~7-8 generations to get a new measurably distinct *breed* entirely
> When Byalev deliberately set out to breed domesticated foxes, it only took 3 generations until they had no aggression response, within 4 generations some kits would approach humans wagging, like puppies. At the sixth generation, they essentially had the full dog behavioral package.
> More generally, traits with a heritability of at least 15% are considered good candidates for genetic selection. Essentially everything we care about in humans (intelligence, height, strength, conscientousness, neuroticism, mental illness, health, etc) is way above 15% heritability
Not a bio geek by any means, but: how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission? In psychology there's talk of things like class loyalty, where the social script expectations are learned from the close example of one's own family. I know a couple cases of people who got good enough genes to go to elite schools, but ended up settling for comfortable lives instead of working hard to meet high social expectations. With no example in their family culture to motivate them to try to leave a mark on the world, they quite rationally couldn't be bothered to.
> how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission?
Great question - they don't and can't. This is why Clark is careful to frame it as "social competence," rather than genetics specifically. I think he's also trying to avoid boo lights like "the rich are literally better than everyone else *genetically!!* which may send people into a tizzy.
But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,* such that each subsequent descendant optimizes and climbs a status and money making gradient in their local conditions.
In fact, this may BE *the key difference that separates lineages* by social competence! Imagine the top and bottom 10% of "drive to achieve families." Wouldn't that result in the exact same dynamics we see in Clark's data? Both high and low status persisting across generations and lineages?
Lineages without a strong "drive for achievement" naturally regress back to the mean quickly. Similarly for lineages who satisfice in mate selection - if somebody shrugs and says "eh, good enough," their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
That's part of why it was so amazing to me that these lineage statuses persists for hundreds to thousands of years - that's SO many generations without wastrels, and without lazy satisficers!
And as Polderman 2015 showed us, for any given trait, it's a good bet that it's highly heritable.
Cool, in that case let me throw a lance for culture being a big part of it. No political axe to grind here, but I'm a fan of Joseph Henrich so I won't let cultural transmission be casually dismissed :)
> But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,*
I don't see how that is an argument for genetics; the fact that "drive for achievement" is a bit abstract, and its expression can change in time, doesn't preclude it from being a strongly transmitted component of a family-cultural package, does it?
Here's my argument for culture in this case: genetics are (AFAIK) relentlessly linear, and despite keeping the same family name for centuries, genes within a family get mixed to oblivion with whatever parts of society they're interbreeding with. So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
Cultural transmission, OTOH, has the cool property that it doesn't have to be linear, because our mind's responses are anything but. Ex. if your paternal family is teaching you to be 80% industrious, and your maternal one to be 85%, you will learn the virtue, and given the little difference, you might end up doing 85% to satisfy them both.
The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family. And indoctrination is powerful! Take religions for example, whole communities have been known to convert in a generation or two (so it can't be genetic!), and then it sticks for a millennium or two by the power of indoctrination and cultural transmission.
I'll also add that indoctrination is powerful, because there's a huge gaping hole at the center of our motivation systems, as the existentialists figured out. Beyond our most basic survival and hedonic needs, we have no inborn clue what we want! Hope to have made my case :)
> their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
LOL, this is the childless generation. There are no descendants for my examples.
> So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
You know, I think you're right. I just did some simple math, and there's quite a bit of regression to the mean over even 3-4 generations even with 90% accurate, 90% percentile matching, so there has to be a strong cultural component to it, and it has to be something like "trait fortification" where genetics and culture reinforce each other, to last for many hundreds of years.
So not only do you have to aim and execute extremely high on assortative mating for generations, you ALSO have to have a strong familial culture of achievement!
This honestly makes the accomplishments of high social competence families even more impressive, IMO - because I think matching via strict assortative mating is actually easier than coming up with and promulgating a high achieving culture that lasts for tens of generations.
> The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family.
I genuinely wonder if there's a difference in this in our current generations, because all the rich folks I know with kids are "losing" kids to hedonism and aimlessness and anomie at higher and higher rates. Given the low birth rates generally (to your point, and even for the rich, who might have 3-4 kids instead of the ~2 "regular" UMC people have, 3-4 is not really enough to carry on a family line and culture. The Victorian rich routinely had 6-8 kids, for example).
Why have our "indoctrination" and "cultural transmission" capabilities attenuated so much, is a question I'm really interested in learning more about.
Cool overview, Clark also affected my worldview a lot and you covered some stuff I hadn’t thought about before. Maybe a slightly elitist take, Clark himself thinks his research lends support to more redistribution to promote equality, I don’t think he’d want to promote guys status signalling with multiple wives or whatever.
One thing I still find confusing about all this is what is actually happening psychologically on the ground when people are picking partners with such a strong influence from assortative mating. Basic evo-psych suggests our mating instincts come from our hunter-gatherer past before there were strong social hierarchies in wealth/power. So people’s tendency to pair up on status genes probably can’t be an evolved instinct.
I’m slightly sceptical that there really is such strong assortative mating since it runs counter to our more basic instincts to select for hotness etc. And if there is, it’s probably socially constructed, not in our genes.
Two thoughts here - in the EEA, 80% of women had descendants but only 40% of men, indicating that hypergamy is a strong force for hundreds of thousands of years.
So although HG’s seem pretty egalitarian, there is definitely very strong empirical selection effects in terms of who is having offspring.
Second, a lot of that selection is probably “g” driven, and as we all know, “g” is positively correlated with just about every good thing (health, attractiveness, life satisfaction, etc.).
Geoffrey Miller makes a pretty decent argument that our brain size was nearly ENTIRELY driven by sexual selection vs "fitness selection."
You can see this because H Erectus, H Heidelbergensis, and H Neanderthalis all had brain sizes the size of modern H Sap - but Erectus used lower paleolithic tool sets for ~2M years, and HH and Neanderthals similarly used much simpler lower Paleolithic toolsets for many hundreds of thousands of years, and all were globally distributed and successful the whole time.
And indeed, supportive of Miller, when ethnographies are surveyed, the high prestige / status leaders (and so the more reproductively successful) in HG societies are those who are “producing good arguments, creating good plans, being the best mediators, telling the best stories, or seeing the future most convincingly.”
Those all seem fairly g-loaded, and seem like they'd correspond pretty well to later civilizational "social competence."
Your thinking of a world that continues going for 100's of years into the future without genetic engineering being used.
This seems unlikely.
I also think your doing a weird thing where you look at distant descendants, but only your own.
Like imagine you snag a partner with really high social competence. But that person was going to exist and going to have high quality children either way. If your just changing who partners with who, not who has children, then your just changing the mixing constant, not the average.
Came here from the genetic engineering post. Long comment incoming, but skip to the end for the TLDR if it gets boring.
My understanding of heritability, and what causes regression to the mean seems to be different than yours, and leads to different conclusions about the importance of family background, vs. the importance of individual genetics. Although I'm a layman so it could very well be my incorrect understanding (and I ideologically lean towards individual over group identity/relevance so that could make me biased).
Here's my understanding;
Regression to the mean, especially for traits influenced by a large number of genes, occurs regardless of ancestry. Even with two high-IQ parents, their child’s genetic makeup is likely to regress toward the population average.
Hypothetically, if there were 100 important IQ-related genes, with the average person having 50 positive genes, the top 1% of children (assuming random 50/50 inheritance) would have about 62 positive genes. If two individuals from this top 1% were paired, their child would have a 50% chance of inheriting each gene from each parent. The child’s expected number of positive genes would remain 62 if the parents had identical positive genes.
However, if the overlap between the parents’ 62 positive genes is only 50% (31 shared genes, 31 unique genes), the child is guaranteed only to inherit those 31 shared genes. For the remaining 31 unique genes from each parent, the child inherits each with a 50% probability. This increases the variance in the child’s gene count around the expected value of 62.
In reality, since there are way more than 100 IQ producing genes (and possibly the result of Epistasis, multiple genes which together create an effect, but alone are neutral. This would have worse than 50/50 inheritance odds), the regression to the mean would be stronger than assuming just a 50/50 inheritance. If parent A had a combination of 2 genes that together produced higher IQ, and parent B didn't overlap with those two genes (with their high IQ deriving from somewhere else), the child would have to win the genetic lottery twice in order to benefit. Making the actual heritability of that single-parent IQ gene pair at 25%. Since the pool of IQ-enhancing genes (and gene combinations) is small compared to the vast number of neutral or non-IQ-affecting genes and gene combinations there’s more room for downward variation than upward. This asymmetry makes larger losses in positive IQ genes more likely than small gains.
Now when it comes to how I understand this would apply to lineage;
On the same hypothetical shown above, when two parents have 62 random IQ producing genes or gene combinations that are independent of each other, the expected mean of offspring would depend on how much overlap there is. If parent A has an IQ gene pair that parent B does not have, the child will have to get lucky for each gene, so 1/2 times the number of different genes that contribute to that one IQ effect. If it was 2 genes, each with 50% heritability, then the chance of a child inheriting those IQ genes would be only 25%, while it would be 100% if the parents shared the same mutation.
Larger losses would be more likely than lesser gains, as the space of IQ increasing genes decreases the higher IQ you are, and the space of normal IQ genes increases, causing regression to the mean. However, if you assume that the 62 positive genes are not randomly selected, but are somewhat dependent on each other, or on some 3rd factor (like for example, shared ancestry with lots of intermarriage), then the overlaps (and hence guaranteed inheritance) of those 62 genes and gene pairs would be expected to be a lot higher! Therefore, there would be a higher chance of heritability of IQ (and other heritable factors) when you concentrate the blood a bit.
Of course the heritability of clusters of genes is not completely random, but where IQ is derived from combinations of genes that aren't clustered, there would be a meaningful advantage to having more overlap among IQ producing genes. Shared lineage would increase the likelihood of that overlap.
Essentially, (at least as I understand it) the lineage shouldn't matter for the likely IQ of your children with someone, unless there is significant shared lineage or shared concentration of IQ genes. Person A with high IQ Japanese familial lineage marrying Person B with high IQ New England WASP lineage will have the same mean expected mean IQ, and same downward variance, as either of them marrying an equivalent high-IQ prole. Unfortunately, this would mean there's literally no way to benefit from the advantages of lineage-IQ, unless you're already part of such a lineage, or otherwise have access to a closely genetically related person who's also benefited from at least a couple of generations of traditional non-lineage assortive mating.
Darwin married his cousin after all, and I’d imagine the high-IQ families Clark describes originated from a small, genetically distinct group—whether an invader stock or a semi-legendary aristocracy. These families likely intermarried mostly exclusively, concentrating their advantageous “blue blood,” so to speak. This would explain the persistence of high IQ among elite families without suggesting that someone should specifically target high-IQ lineage unless that lineage is closely related to their own.
This concentration of lineage may also increase the risk of genetic diseases and single genes that cause significant IQ deficits. While such outcomes were likely managed by ensuring those with severe issues did not reproduce—either through exclusion, disinheritance, or marriage outside the lineage—the negative effects of inbreeding were still present. Over time, these risks may have been outweighed by the positive effects of preserving and reinforcing high-IQ genes within the lineage.
Cultural practices may have helped mitigate some of the downsides of inbreeding. For example, in aristocratic families, it was common to send non-heirs into the clergy, where celibacy may have acted as a release valve for those with undesirable traits or unlucky genetic inheritance. This practice may have reduced the reproductive impact of deleterious genes.
Anecdotally, examples like that Kennedy sister (her name I don't remember)—who was lobotomized and institutionalized due to developmental issues—many indicate elite families may have overrepresented genetic diseases. I've read this was quite common among the elite, but I have no real data.
TLDR: My understanding is that familial IQ only matters if you’re already part of a high-IQ lineage or have close IQ relatives you can marry. Otherwise, building a long-term high-IQ lineage requires either genetic testing (to find someone who shares the most positive genes with you, though this is practically impossible without a centralized database) or setting up your descendants to intermarry within the family. This might only work if you come from a unique, relatively unmixed genetic stock (e.g., Iceland, the Sámi, Japan). For most people, especially those from settler states like America, targeting familial IQ wouldn't be feasible.
If I were trying to create a long-term genetic winner lineage (a goal I personally resonate with but am not focusing on right now), I’d prioritize finding a high-IQ, accomplished woman who shares that goal. The current best approach would likely involve IVF, embryo selection, and possibly surrogacy, though there are trade-offs (I've read suboptimal gestation conditions from surrogacy can offset genetic advantages). Passing down these values and philosophies to your children is probably the key so they continue the trend over multiple generations. Gwern’s excellent piece on this topic is worth reading for what the possible future developments would look like, but I am sure you've already seen it: https://gwern.net/embryo-selection
Alternatively, you could bypass the need for a partner who shares your goals. You could find a high-IQ egg donor and raising 5+ children with surrogates. You wouldn’t need your partner to be ideal—just supportive or ambivalent (allowing you also to select for other non-trivial traits, like attraction and emotional compatibility). Finding high-IQ egg donors isn’t impossible, as shown by the Hwang affair, where researchers donated eggs for his cloning experiments despite the dubious nature of his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U
Success is largely heritable, but a targeted environment can amplify those advantages. The Polgar Sisters, raised by a father who believed genius could be nurtured through environment: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/ Coincidentally the English translation was sponsored by SSC readers: https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf
I’d appreciate your thoughts here, as I agree with your goals but understand heritability differently (and an incorrect understand would have very material effects on my own approach to my descendants). As for why, I believe that intelligence, creativity, and ability thresholds for productivity are rising rapidly. 1,000 years ago, almost anyone could farm; 100 years ago, industrialization favored the systems-makers; 20 years ago, controlling information became key with the internet; each of these setting the minimum necessary intelligence to produce something valuable much higher, and in 10 years, AI may eliminate 95% of low-performing white-collar jobs. If descendants don’t rank among the top 1% performers of the top 1% most difficult jobs, they will probably end up at the mercy of AI, the oligarchs controlling it or government-controlled UBI.
Edit: Made changes for clarity of my thoughts. After writing that out it may warrant writing a more formatted and edited post instead of just a comment.
I think this would definitely be a fun one to take to the subreddit and / or ACX comments.
So where we agree:
1. Everything desirable is massively polygenic.
2. Genetically, there is more downward variation possible than upwards, and this is a part of what drives regression to the mean
Where we might potentially disagree (not sure bc you didn't bring this up except for the Polgars):
A) Environmental effects also matter - genes are stronger, in general, bet 80/20 genes. But the 20% is also a source of variation, including positive variation
B) In general, any given smart / hot / whatever person you see has had "lucky" positive environmental variation to attain that given phenotype
C) The best way to average this "luck" out is to match on lineage smarts / hots / whatever, because that is the "true" read on their genotype quality on whatever metrics.
Synthesis:
1a) You seem to be assuming something akin to Mendelian heritability with your supposition that you would need similar / inbred familial lines to benefit, but I don't think this is true. Selection for polygenic traits doesn't rely on rare, discrete alleles, but instead from large pools of small-effect alleles, and you're as likely to benefit from genetic diversity as to lose from it. Which is to say, your lineages don't need to be similar, because lineage X has clusters a,b,c, and lineage Y has clusters f,g,h, and both clusters contribute to the relevant endpoint. Hybrid vigor is a thing, and it's a thing because of massive polygenicity.
For an IQ endpoint, maybe there's a cluster of alleles that affect myelination positively, and maybe there's another cluster that affects the size of short term memory buffers - if you cross those populations, you're still going to get an additive IQ effect, even though from different domains.
2b) Polygenic traits are more sensitive to environmental variation and effects than Mendelian traits, and so the "lucky" variations are more prominent / important, and being able to offset them is correspondingly more important than with simpler Mendelian traits.
2c) You're right that genetically there's more downward variation possible than upwards, but this isn't really addressable (without gengineering or embryo selection). But the environmental variation IS addressable, and you address it by lineage optimization.
Now I could definitely be wrong here, and this is why I think we ought to open it up to the subreddit and commentariat. I did do microbiology research, including making genetic knockout constructs and isolating functional genes, but I'm by no means a geneticist, and it was many years ago (and so my state of knowledge is a decade or more out of date, too).
I'll make a subreddit post and tag you, and then if it's still a productive convo we can look for an open thread to post in a little later. But yeah, fun topic! Thanks for bringing it up.
I think I understand your thinking better. My background has absolutely nothing to do with biology, so my understanding is based of passive osmosis of related blogs, books and whatnot. It's more likely that my understanding is lacking than yours.
1) This makes sense. I was aware that IQ was a combination of many thousands of genes, so perhaps there isn't significant overlap between any two people like there is in my hypothetical, even if they are of the same lineage. I don't know how many of these genes are expressed in the average person though (Half, I assume?), and that would change what the expected overlap would look like. I suspect I don't rightly understand if there is any advantage to equivalent-IQ parents with high-overlap (Parent 1 & 2 both have A, B, C) vs. low-overlap (Parent 1 has A, B, C and Parent 2 has F, G, H). I suspect overlap does matter, but I am not so sure.
Here's where I am still lost:
I am not sure whether you're making the claim that there is any actual benefit to lineage when it comes to a partner's IQ, or if lineage is just a signal that a partners IQ is due to heritability, and not due to an environmental outlier?
My understanding from this post: If you're saying there's a real underlying benefit to lineage, I don't think there's much evidence of this specifically (although maybe reading the book would change my mind). I don't see what the difference between a 140 IQ person with terrible relatives, and a 140 IQ person with a millennia of family success. Shouldn't the children of both have the same mean IQ, and same regression to the mean (assuming 140 IQ is all due to genetics)?
I can think of a dozen different mitigating factors that would give elite lineage advantages but they sum to the normal benefits of having rich parents (plus assortive mating). Parental wealth is perhaps coequal with IQ in predicting outcomes, and often stronger, despite the modern world having high social mobility and a decent floor for access to opportunity, so I imagine it was even more important in the past.
My understanding from your comment: If you're saying lineage isn't inherently important to a person's IQ (at least after conception anyway), but is an excellent indicator for weeding out the random environmental outliers, this I can somewhat buy. Under this view, there would be nothing inherently more desirable between two people with an equal number of high-IQ genes. In reality, where you can't actually know someone's underlying genetic potential, you just have to guess from their outcomes. You don't want to mistake someone with very high heritable IQ, with someone that has good, but not great heritable IQ, but got lucky due to random environmental factors.
How do you weigh this against the benefits of positive environmental factors you *know* the children of wealthy successful people have? Would you expect the environmental factor to be more beneficial in the case of Lisa Simpson, or Princess Diana? If anything, I would expect people of comparable IQ who jumped from a lower class background to have a higher heritable IQ component, than someone who came from a high-class background. The environmental effects of poverty are probably negative (I assume), while the environmental effects of wealth are positive, so the genetic IQ of a Dianna would be an overestimate, and a Lisa an underestimate.
Also, what are your thoughts on IQ's usefulness as a metric when you get abnormally high or low IQs? This has come up recently in the IQ discussions with Nepal's average IQ being 43. This is so low it's not even funny, and obviously not communicating what we normally mean when we talk about IQ. Unless some particularly intelligent slime mold or a few million Chimpanzees were included in these IQ studies, IQ must fail to be a useful tool on the tails. Perhaps so long as you're in the 145 IQ+ percentile (1/1,000 odds, which isn't so bad), optimizing selection beyond that is a waste of effort.
I'll look out for your post. To me it seems like the quality over there has been going down lately, especially with anything tangentially political or IQ related, but that might be me exhausting many of the interesting thoughts and conversations from when SSC was fresher to me.
> I suspect I don't rightly understand if there is any advantage to equivalent-IQ parents with high-overlap (Parent 1 & 2 both have A, B, C) vs. low-overlap (Parent 1 has A, B, C and Parent 2 has F, G, H). I suspect overlap does matter, but I am not so sure.
Yes, I actually don't know this either, and it's something I'd be interested in learning more about.
My SWAG is something like "higher similarity can pay off between 1-5% of the time due to pleiotropy reinforcing certain traits in additive ways, and due to duplicative effects in separate chromosomal locations backing a gap up when it happens by chance" and stuff like that, but honestly, I think the same could happen with genetically distinct lines, just at a slightly lower cadence, so it's a fairly slight edge.
> I am not sure whether you're making the claim that there is any actual benefit to lineage when it comes to a partner's IQ, or if lineage is just a signal that a partners IQ is due to heritability, and not due to an environmental outlier?
Yeah, here I'm saying there's an actual benefit to lineage quality, it's not just a signal.
In fact, I go so far as to suggest that if your choice was somebody hot and smart from an average lineage, and somebody less-hot and less-smart but from a great lineage, I'd choose the great lineage.
The reason is because in your matched 140 IQ case, the children do not regress to the same mean, they each regress to their respective lineage means.
The lineage mean is more relevant, because it represents the true genotypical pool from which they are drawing. Broadly, the 140 IQ person who drew from an average genotypical pool got much luckier - they drew extra good genes, and benefited from environmental luck to the maximum degree. That "luck" is exactly the kind of thing that regresses to the mean harder.
What's the actual mechanism there? I'd suggest it's something like "you drew a couple of high-variance genes that just happened to get *just the right environment* to express themselves maximally," and things like that. But this means your children with those genes are unlikely to hit the optimally lucky environmental factors, and are more likely to regress to a lower mean.
Comparatively, the "good lineage" IQ 140 person drew an average hand, from a better deck. Less luck was involved, and they don't need exquisitely tuned environmental luck to shine. Their kids are also going to be drawing from that higher baseline, and will be more robust to the environmental differences and perturbations everyone faces.
> How do you weigh this against the benefits of positive environmental factors you *know* the children of wealthy successful people have? Would you expect the environmental factor to be more beneficial in the case of Lisa Simpson, or Princess Diana? If anything, I would expect people of comparable IQ who jumped from a lower class background to have a higher heritable IQ component, than someone who came from a high-class background.
Nope, I'm betting on "high class background" all the way here. The low class background person threw all 6's, but their kids are a lot less likely to do that. The high class background person just threw an average hand from better dice, so that's a lot more replicable in your own kids.
> Also, what are your thoughts on IQ's usefulness as a metric when you get abnormally high or low IQs?...IQ must fail to be a useful tool on the tails. Perhaps so long as you're in the 145 IQ+ percentile (1/1,000 odds, which isn't so bad), optimizing selection beyond that is a waste of effort.
Oh yeah, this is fun. Yeah, I think optimization at the tails falls apart. Also, optimization in general on any trait is such a massive filter on your pool that you just *cant'* go out into the tails and have any real chance of getting anybody. I think "settling" is an iron law, more or less.
Actually, per my "optimal descendant strategy" post, I'm actually SHORT on IQ overall! I really believe that AI personal assistants are going to counterfeit it. (https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/optimal-descendant-strategy-in-a?r=17hw9h)
Tangentially, back to "settling," I believe in mate selection you only get 3 things you can optimize on. Blatantly unfair! Monstrous! But *I* bring a lot more than 3 good things to the table! Yup. Life sucks that way, you only get 3 things, no matter how cool you are on whatever other metrics.
So because of that, it's actually a massive multiplier to be able to relax on IQ. Because let me tell you, optimizing on "lineage attainment" is f-ing ridiculously hard! WAY harder than IQ, WAY harder than looks! So being able to give up a "top 1%" IQ is actually a really big deal, because each independent factor cuts your pool by a lot.
So in real life I'm doubling down on attractiveness and conscientiousness/discipline (and lineage attainment), and relaxing on IQ because of the AI counterfeiting intelligence thing, because I think those things are going to matter more for my kids.
This is a very unique perspective!
I am not (yet) onboard with your claim that people with great lineage *actually* have a higher mean IQ than the general population, or if they're keeping themselves above water with environmental factors and selective mating. I personally buy that different global population's have different mean IQs, but I find it less plausible that you'd see this over way shorter timespans (tens of thousands of years globally, hundreds of years for a lineage). Especially with significant intermarriage with the larger population.
If you're right, this is definitely a valid metric to pursue, and if you don't care so much about IQ, then it's even better.
> I am not (yet) onboard with your claim that people with great lineage *actually* have a higher mean IQ than the general population, or if they're keeping themselves above water with environmental factors and selective mating.
Isn't the Bouchard twin study decent evidence against the environmental factors thing? (twins separated at birth have IQ's much closer to their biological parents than their adopted parents of different SES / environment)
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1990-bouchard.pdf
But yeah, assortative mating IS basically how a given lineage attains and keeps a higher mean, and the mechanisms are the same as the "population differences" ones, just writ smaller. to your point, it's basically NOT "intermarriage with the larger population," because people optimize on their mate quality impossibly hard.
It still "leaks" due to the mechanisms talked about in the post here, just like populations "leak" with exogamous breeding, but the different means are still maintained, because 75% transmission fidelity is good enough to differentiate the means between families / populations.
You find the time periods implausible, but consider the extreme degree of change you can drive in 8 generations (only 160-200 years in humans):
What can you do in 8 generations?
> Between 2000 and 2016, US dairy cattle breeders, by applying selection pressure to increase the productive life, achieved an increase of about 10 months
> After eight generations of selection, the percentage of dogs with an excellent hip quality score (as assessed by an extended view hip score) increased from 34 to 93% in German Shepherd Dogs and from 43 to 94% in Labrador retrievers.
> In dogs, it's generally thought that it takes ~7-8 generations to get a new measurably distinct *breed* entirely
> When Byalev deliberately set out to breed domesticated foxes, it only took 3 generations until they had no aggression response, within 4 generations some kits would approach humans wagging, like puppies. At the sixth generation, they essentially had the full dog behavioral package.
> More generally, traits with a heritability of at least 15% are considered good candidates for genetic selection. Essentially everything we care about in humans (intelligence, height, strength, conscientousness, neuroticism, mental illness, health, etc) is way above 15% heritability
Not a bio geek by any means, but: how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission? In psychology there's talk of things like class loyalty, where the social script expectations are learned from the close example of one's own family. I know a couple cases of people who got good enough genes to go to elite schools, but ended up settling for comfortable lives instead of working hard to meet high social expectations. With no example in their family culture to motivate them to try to leave a mark on the world, they quite rationally couldn't be bothered to.
> how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission?
Great question - they don't and can't. This is why Clark is careful to frame it as "social competence," rather than genetics specifically. I think he's also trying to avoid boo lights like "the rich are literally better than everyone else *genetically!!* which may send people into a tizzy.
But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,* such that each subsequent descendant optimizes and climbs a status and money making gradient in their local conditions.
In fact, this may BE *the key difference that separates lineages* by social competence! Imagine the top and bottom 10% of "drive to achieve families." Wouldn't that result in the exact same dynamics we see in Clark's data? Both high and low status persisting across generations and lineages?
Lineages without a strong "drive for achievement" naturally regress back to the mean quickly. Similarly for lineages who satisfice in mate selection - if somebody shrugs and says "eh, good enough," their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
That's part of why it was so amazing to me that these lineage statuses persists for hundreds to thousands of years - that's SO many generations without wastrels, and without lazy satisficers!
And as Polderman 2015 showed us, for any given trait, it's a good bet that it's highly heritable.
> Great question - they don't and can't.
Cool, in that case let me throw a lance for culture being a big part of it. No political axe to grind here, but I'm a fan of Joseph Henrich so I won't let cultural transmission be casually dismissed :)
> But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,*
I don't see how that is an argument for genetics; the fact that "drive for achievement" is a bit abstract, and its expression can change in time, doesn't preclude it from being a strongly transmitted component of a family-cultural package, does it?
Here's my argument for culture in this case: genetics are (AFAIK) relentlessly linear, and despite keeping the same family name for centuries, genes within a family get mixed to oblivion with whatever parts of society they're interbreeding with. So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
Cultural transmission, OTOH, has the cool property that it doesn't have to be linear, because our mind's responses are anything but. Ex. if your paternal family is teaching you to be 80% industrious, and your maternal one to be 85%, you will learn the virtue, and given the little difference, you might end up doing 85% to satisfy them both.
The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family. And indoctrination is powerful! Take religions for example, whole communities have been known to convert in a generation or two (so it can't be genetic!), and then it sticks for a millennium or two by the power of indoctrination and cultural transmission.
I'll also add that indoctrination is powerful, because there's a huge gaping hole at the center of our motivation systems, as the existentialists figured out. Beyond our most basic survival and hedonic needs, we have no inborn clue what we want! Hope to have made my case :)
> their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
LOL, this is the childless generation. There are no descendants for my examples.
> So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
You know, I think you're right. I just did some simple math, and there's quite a bit of regression to the mean over even 3-4 generations even with 90% accurate, 90% percentile matching, so there has to be a strong cultural component to it, and it has to be something like "trait fortification" where genetics and culture reinforce each other, to last for many hundreds of years.
So not only do you have to aim and execute extremely high on assortative mating for generations, you ALSO have to have a strong familial culture of achievement!
This honestly makes the accomplishments of high social competence families even more impressive, IMO - because I think matching via strict assortative mating is actually easier than coming up with and promulgating a high achieving culture that lasts for tens of generations.
> The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family.
I genuinely wonder if there's a difference in this in our current generations, because all the rich folks I know with kids are "losing" kids to hedonism and aimlessness and anomie at higher and higher rates. Given the low birth rates generally (to your point, and even for the rich, who might have 3-4 kids instead of the ~2 "regular" UMC people have, 3-4 is not really enough to carry on a family line and culture. The Victorian rich routinely had 6-8 kids, for example).
Why have our "indoctrination" and "cultural transmission" capabilities attenuated so much, is a question I'm really interested in learning more about.
Cool overview, Clark also affected my worldview a lot and you covered some stuff I hadn’t thought about before. Maybe a slightly elitist take, Clark himself thinks his research lends support to more redistribution to promote equality, I don’t think he’d want to promote guys status signalling with multiple wives or whatever.
One thing I still find confusing about all this is what is actually happening psychologically on the ground when people are picking partners with such a strong influence from assortative mating. Basic evo-psych suggests our mating instincts come from our hunter-gatherer past before there were strong social hierarchies in wealth/power. So people’s tendency to pair up on status genes probably can’t be an evolved instinct.
I’m slightly sceptical that there really is such strong assortative mating since it runs counter to our more basic instincts to select for hotness etc. And if there is, it’s probably socially constructed, not in our genes.
Two thoughts here - in the EEA, 80% of women had descendants but only 40% of men, indicating that hypergamy is a strong force for hundreds of thousands of years.
So although HG’s seem pretty egalitarian, there is definitely very strong empirical selection effects in terms of who is having offspring.
Second, a lot of that selection is probably “g” driven, and as we all know, “g” is positively correlated with just about every good thing (health, attractiveness, life satisfaction, etc.).
Geoffrey Miller makes a pretty decent argument that our brain size was nearly ENTIRELY driven by sexual selection vs "fitness selection."
You can see this because H Erectus, H Heidelbergensis, and H Neanderthalis all had brain sizes the size of modern H Sap - but Erectus used lower paleolithic tool sets for ~2M years, and HH and Neanderthals similarly used much simpler lower Paleolithic toolsets for many hundreds of thousands of years, and all were globally distributed and successful the whole time.
I touch on this a little bit in my "world dominating superweapon" post here: https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-149332133
And indeed, supportive of Miller, when ethnographies are surveyed, the high prestige / status leaders (and so the more reproductively successful) in HG societies are those who are “producing good arguments, creating good plans, being the best mediators, telling the best stories, or seeing the future most convincingly.”
Those all seem fairly g-loaded, and seem like they'd correspond pretty well to later civilizational "social competence."
Your thinking of a world that continues going for 100's of years into the future without genetic engineering being used.
This seems unlikely.
I also think your doing a weird thing where you look at distant descendants, but only your own.
Like imagine you snag a partner with really high social competence. But that person was going to exist and going to have high quality children either way. If your just changing who partners with who, not who has children, then your just changing the mixing constant, not the average.