Evolution explains regional differences in China best
According to a new paper in Nature
New paper says:
We used natural language processing to analyze a billion words to study cultural differences on Weibo, one of China’s largest social media platforms. We compared predictions from two common explanations about cultural differences in China (economic development and urban-rural differences) against the less-obvious legacy of rice versus wheat farming. Rice farmers had to coordinate shared irrigation networks and exchange labor to cope with higher labor requirements. In contrast, wheat relied on rainfall and required half as much labor. We test whether this legacy made southern China more interdependent, as measured by modern day language. Across all word categories, rice explained twice as much variance as economic development and urbanization. Rice areas used more words reflecting tight social ties, holistic thought, and a cautious, prevention orientation. We then used Twitter data comparing prefectures in Japan, which largely replicated the results from China. This provides crucial evidence of the rice theory in a different nation, language, and platform.
Previously I reviewed a similar, older paper showing that rice farms cause, probably through natural selection, people to be more collectivist. Combining this with the new paper, we can infer that regional differences in collectivism in China are the product of divergent evolution due to rice farms.
Reading the article, the writers don’t seem excessively blank slatist, similar to those from the last one. But they do use the word “culture” a lot. This is despite giving off the vibe that they understand what is really going on when they contrast the immediate effect of urbanization (environment) with the effect of the “legacy of rice farming” (genes) on “culture” (of the 3 major definitions of this horrible newspeak word, they pretty cleanly use the mass phenotype one). I suspect if they went more Darwinistic they would not get published in Nature. So what force is it that keeps the conceptualization in this field so retarded?
If it’s not the researchers themselves, who? Is it peer review? Journal owners? It’s probably a mixture of these. I have seen personally how if you include biological theory regarding behavior in papers like this, you get trolled by reviewers and you have to change it. Not on my own papers, because I don’t bother with such journals for this reason. But I’ve seen it on others. And if it gets published, journal owners and administrators might collaborate with angry readers and stage a retraction. They cite all of the refuted 1970s blank slatism stuff as cover while doing this.
It’s damaging to science because it keeps science dumb. It’s essentially a prohibition on thinking. For example, in this paper, I’m not sure how one relates these results to historical selection pressures, like I did with the last article. Maybe these results actually aren’t very informative. The researchers would include this as a part of the paper if this could be approached biologically. But it must be approached “culturally”, which is really stupidly — since the theory is a political toy theory, there’s no math, and you’re not allowed to connect it to population genetics. So you’re stuck with not only a wrong theory but a dumb verbal theory.