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Comment by zuminator | Hacker News Reader

Why in the world would nobles have superior genes in the first place? Since being noble is merely hereditary by "blood," there's no genetic pressure that would select for intelligence. If anything due to intermarriage they'd be more likely to have birth defects leading to low intelligence, I would imagine.

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Quick speculation: It could simply come down to being better fed over time. There is evidence of negative multi-generational effects on descendants from malnourishment suffered by progenitors. If nobles had better access to food (which makes sense, given power differences), that could propagate down the generations (and promote increased reproduction) not due to a stronger gene pool, but rather through improved gene expression and general health.

Yes, if they selected for anything at all it would be for a willingness to carry around a long sharp knife and push it into people who don't do what the knife-wielder says.

Or, to be fair, the ability to get other people with pointy sticks to do it for you. That's also an important skill for nobles.

The implication I think is a missing a point. Before the advent of mechanization people were subject to the whims of nature.

When nature ravaged them, they were forced to seek developed resources elsewhere and this’d who had those resources normally would not want to share them with others as all resources were meager and most people lived on the edge of existence where one bad summer meant winter was bare and people starved or died by disease taking advantage of weakened systems.

Thus people had to fight of they’d die themselves. So it wasnt always, let’s make war so we can subjugate more; though that did happen too Vikings. Huns and Ottomans among others.

Of course there were petty rivalries that also just produced unproductive wars.

Let's assume the opposite - that success is not correlated with fitness (intelligence amongst other things). Is that a rational position to take?

Either claim would be wrong if it assumed perfect correlation or lack thereof. Correlations are floats not booleans. There is going to be some correlation, but there are lots and lots of factors like luck, network effects, heritable wealth, etc.

Right, and it would seem to be silly to argue that all else being equal, someone more intelligent isn't more likely to be successful than someone less intelligent. It's more that in the real world, all else rarely is equal.

We're talking royals here, not some entrepreneur. Unless of course what you're suggesting is that royal families gain and maintain power due to intelligence.

That's not the opposite; success can be correlated with fitness (i.e., success) in disparate social strata without necessitating the correctness of the strata themselves. The strata themselves can be the product of pressures unrelated to individual fitness, like our individual propensity for selfishness.

Yes. Being second-born is not a heritable trait.

Perhaps not, but the most successful individuals are generally not the most talented. Rather, they tend to be the luckiest. See, e.g. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...

Depending how you define success, absolutely.

The worst thing about pseudo-Darwinism is the fact that so few people really understand that "success" just means reproductive success. It has absolutely no moral or ethical dimension, and is partly circular.

Averagely intelligent sociopaths who are charming and pathologically unfaithful can generate a large number of kids. So - in historical times - could travelling bandits who were also rapists. That's what Darwinian success looks like.

Meanwhile someone with a PhD who dies childless is a Darwinian failure.

The problem is the usual one - evolution is stupid and selects for shallow local minima.

So the "Darwinian success" continues - until the species as a whole fails.

That was certainly the position of the eugenicist monsters of the 20th century, who saw themselves as supremely rational, yet they believed that only by sterilization could they prevent the "marching morons" of the lower classes from overwhelming the elite with their sheer fecundity.

On a less controversial note, I'm thinking of lions, believed by some to be the smartest of all cats [0], yet in terms of population and habitat spread much less successful than the lowly housecat.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/super-cats-a-nature-miniseri...

Nobles were far more likely to be healthy with better diets and less disease which would certainly be correlated with better offspring outcomes. We can discard better genetics (have fun proving that lol) entirely and still be somewhat on board with this theory.

To become a noble you would generally have to have done something of great note. I'd think someone of higher intelligence would have a higher likelihood to do that.

Is there any backing to this? As I recall feudal societies in both Europe and Japan had the origin of "nobility" in land ownership/control. If you could successfully hold a piece of land as your own you were a noble.

You can imagine this as a form of de facto rule.

Holding into a piece of land is not a given. The fact that one could hold into that could mean that individual was smarter than the individuals that did not.

It's pretty easy to hold onto a piece of land if you're the only one who is well-fed, literate, and capable of hiring and feeding personal guards.

Isn't that the point? A person with superior genes is more likely to have those qualities.

Your ancestors were probably above average in either intelligence or physical ability. That doesn't mean you are after a century or two of noble inbreeding.

The point is that inbreeding while having some bad outcomes can also have the good outcome of the nobility having higher intelligence. You can't just argue when someone says: "this is A", with: "No this is B". At least put some substance behind it.

> To become a noble you would generally have to have done something of great note

This might be arguably true for the 1st generation, the one who becomes a noble. Maybe this noble marries another 1st or 2nd generation noble and they have children who are also pretty great. But regression to the mean indicates that, at best, future generations will inevitably be average, and half will be below average. Especially, and this cannot be over emphasized, when they interbreed.

Add into the mix that nobility is conferred via political maneuvering, and it's not guaranteed that even the 1st generation was all that notable

Just to note that regression to the mean doesn't apply here. Nobles back in the day most of the time married only other nobles. A kid of 2 extremes is not a new sample of the same random variable the 1st gen noble was taken from. If that were the case evolution would never work, your more fit specimens would regress to the mean. Which is obviously not the case.

Plus I would also argue that successful political maneuvering is a sign of superior fitness.

> "Just to note that regression to the mean doesn't apply here"

Ok? You didn't really explain why. Surely by extreme you don't mean "being noble". You're asserting that 2 nobles will have a child who is "extremely noble"?

Do you also believe that 2 rich people will have a child who is, genetically, "extremely rich"? That over generations, these descendents will just be inherently richer and richer?

The only thing of great note most nobles did to become noble is to emerge from the right vagina.

> If anything due to intermarriage they'd be more likely to have birth defects leading to low intelligence, I would imagine.

It's widely speculated that the demise of the Hapsburg empire was due to centuries of inbreeding eventually producing rather... simple monarchs.

If you cast out the "inferior," you don't have to start out superior to end up so.

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