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Humbert Rivière's avatar

This should be an exciting series to read.

Joseph, as an aside, are you at all familiar with r/K selection theory? I recall around 2016 that was one of the more popular theories explaining the liberal/conservative divide.

As it pertains to this work I had a few questions, which I'm sure you'll already be answering in the next parts, but I wanted to get them out of the way:

Are there confounding factors like socioeconomic status, religion, or education level that could influence both fertility and political views independently?

How might modern environmental and social factors interact with any underlying genetic influences on political views today?

What is the mechanism by which subtle selection pressures could skew the population at a genetic level over hundreds of generations?

What other evolutionary pressures like genetic drift or migration might influence changes in political ideology over long time periods?

How testable is this overall theory? What kind of complex modeling or new data would be needed to fully evaluate it for future generations?

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Reasonable Man's avatar

This has been great for keeping me fresh on mathematic concepts and practical implementation.

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exore1's avatar
16hEdited

Summation and conversion to absolutely continuous random variable form would be cleaner and more natural if it were: change_G_i = h^2*(1/n)*[Sum(G_i*dF_i)]

with G_i = g or iq; and dF_i (fertility diff) = (ith number of kids - kids/person).

e.g. if kids per couple is 2 (i.e. 1 kid/1 parent), and number of kids is positively correlated with iq, then it would be something like (h^2)*(1/n)*[(80)(.8-1) + (90)(.9-1) + (100)(1-1) + (110)(1.1-1) + (120)(1.2-1) + ... + (G_n*dF_n)]

This gives the absolute change in g or iq for one generation.

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