Tucked within this post by Steve Sailer on the last surviving WWII physicist Freeman Dyson, might be the most subversive argument against globalism and mass scale urbanization I’ve read yet.
Steve quotes Dyson in a review Dyson wrote of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute.
(By the way, you ever notice how so many suprageniuses are ectomorphs?)
On the average, people in villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of geniuses in a short time.
The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.
A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).
These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit.
“Starburst of geniuses”. Evocative term.
But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.
West’s neglect of villages as agents of change raises an important question. How likely is it that significant numbers of humans will choose to remain in genetically isolated communities in centuries to come? We cannot confidently answer this question. The answer depends on unpredictable patterns of economic development, on international politics, and on even more unpredictable human desires.
But we can foresee two possible technological developments that would result in permanent genetic isolation of human communities. One possibility is that groups of parents will be able to give birth to genetically modified children, hoping to give them advantages in the game of life. The children might be healthier or longer-lived or more intellectually gifted than other children, and they might no longer interbreed with natural-born children.
I have predicted that sexbots will gravely disrupt the functioning of the Western sexual market.
The other possibility is that groups of people will emigrate from planet Earth and build societies far away in the depths of space. West considers neither of these possibilities. His view of the future sees humans remaining forever a single species confined to a single planet. If the future resembles the past, humans will be diversifying into many species and spreading out over the universe, as our hominin ancestors diversified and spread over this planet.
Aspie sci fi masturbation. Let’s make Earth the best it can be before we engage on quixotic quests to seed the universe with our species. As AnotherDad commented,
Respect Freeman Dyson for being a freethinker, skeptic and willing to call b.s. on establishment fads.
However, his scifi-ish flights of fancy (nerdbait) are the kinds of things that i had a so-so interest in as an adolescent. But one of things even a nerdy scfi reader should grasp as he matures is that the earth–however prosaically present–is what matters.
Space–even if some things making terrific dramatic pics–is actually mostly cold and boring. The earth in contrast is full of contrast, full of life, full of interest–incredible interest. And unsurprisingly we are terrifically well suited for life on earth–after a couple billion years of evolution coughed us up.
Space may be of some modest–or even great–interest way, way down the road, but what’s absolutely critical is to not screw up planet earth. Not destroying the planet, and preserving and building on the best humanity has achieved. The critically important stuff is … well cue Steve’s “world’s most important graph��?.
Getting back to Dyson’s lucid argument for the value of village life (and concomitantly for the de-scaling of America’s managerialist administrative state and a de-urbanization of its big blue coastal shitlibopolises), what he’s suggesting — that small isolated towns and villages produce the geniuses who create and expand civilization — is profound beyond words, because it contradicts in every fathomable way the neoliberal globohomo orthodoxy.
Dyson is saying that the opposite of globalist miscegenation agitprop — inbreeding in small, local, racially distinct communities — is the ENGINE OF PROGRESS.
The restrained and range restricted sexual market of the village dating life is the source pool for the starbursts of genius and the Truth & Beauty which shoot out like a supernova from those starbursts.
Think on that and laugh, because a more total refutation of leftoid equalism you won’t find anywhere (except at places like this blog).
Dyson then warns us on the likelihood of humans choosing to “remain in genetically isolated communities”. Our neoshitliberal effetes want to herd us all into ever-larger and dysfunctional megacities. They WANT to depopulate the countryside and crush the small town and village because they know, even if they’ll never come right out and say it, that those goy outposts are where rebels, revolutionaries, and great new thinkers will come from to challenge their despotic orwellian surveillance state gynarcho-tyrannical rule.
Dyson’s warning is unfolding. The trend away from small town America and into Citizen of the World Coastal MegaBabels has only accelerated in the time since the West birthed those starbursts of genius and changed the world forever. Americans, and Westerners in general, and young fertile women in particular, are choosing to leave those genetically isolated communities for the genetic slop bucket of the anonymous urban sexual jungle.
The future is grim for the West and hence for humanity, if Dyson is right.
In effect, the small town and village are an organic constraint on female sexuality. Women of genius-bearing age are limited by small town life in how aggressively they can satisfy their hypergamous urge; instead of the density of alpha males in the cities where anonymity protects against the consequences of impulsive romantic choices, the small town offers no such cockucopia possibilities or protections for women. They must choose from among a smaller pool of men, and they will often settle happily for their small town men because male SMV is relative, and without the glut of cads that the city presents to women their small town men look better for the lack of comparison. This gives those starbursts of genius genes a chance at a foothold (or poonhold) in young willing women, and the opportunity to multiply in large families where cost of living is low and lebensraum is expansive.
Restricting female sexuality is the formula for unleashing civilizational genius! Who woulda thunk it?
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