Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014)
theappendix.net
theappendix.net
> … Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.
I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
> Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.
I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g. egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example, analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the same people capable of constructing it also made a basic mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be equally explained by classic big org fuckups.
It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.
We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.
We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
This is the nub of it - we're better at one very particular thing. I think I'm gonna get crucified if I really go into arguing against abstract reasoning as the baseline for understanding the world on this site, but without trying to defend that particular assertion I'd just make a note to say that what IQ tests are testing is a very specific type of thinking and not actually generalized intelligence, which is a very broad topic.
I am, and I say this without ego, a very smart person, and there are situations I absolutely excel - I can synthesize new information very quickly, I can draw correlations and relationships and principles from sparse data, I recognize patterns and build and dissect systems easily. Abstract reasoning is my wheelhouse, but I cannot do the things my friends can do with the ease they do them - I can get there eventually, in the same way that they can get to where I am eventually, but the things they do very clearly require a different type of intelligence than my variety.
A large part of the Flynn effect may be due to reductions in environmental pollutants, which would mean it would be a reversal of the effect of the industrial revolution. Or it may have been due to people being much more used to taking tests. Or it may be due to nutrition. It is unlikely to be due to modern education forcing people to "learn to reason abstractly from an early age" because schools don't require students to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
Yes, perhaps both Homer (the author of the world-famous literary classic the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a hypothetical modern Homer (d'oh!) believed in a flat Earth. The modern Homer failed to understand or rejected the education he was offered, while a hypothetical modern observer, who feels more intelligent than the flat-earther, understood and accepted it. But that does not mean that the ancient Homer was of similar intelligence!
Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring projects in jobs created, for example).
1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and
2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.
Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example.
The reason for waiting is to give the hivemind cache time to clear. Normally we'd re-up the existing post, but we don't want two overly similar threads on the frontpage within a short time period.
Lactose tolerance in populations is linked with pastoralism, and if I am remembering correctly colder climates as well.
Most humans today are not lactose tolerant as adults - it’s actually the exception.
Perhaps that's a way in which we're less educated than those who came before us
It wasn't until much later, in the 15th and 16th century onwards, that people began to think that they were more advanced and accomplished than the ancient Greeks and Romans.
How do you know this?
And does the average person today really think someone living in the year 1200 to be all that different from them living in 2025? If so, in what way does this person think people 800 years ago are different from us? (I'm asking because I don't share your assumptions if this hypothetical person were to think on this matter for more than 5 seconds)
Maybe even 100,000.
Yep, and it's good to remember that "us" is still a pretty diverse bunch.
> One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim pictured himself as the knight.
I guess we'll never truly be able to know what Onfim was thinking when he drew a knight named "Onfim" stabbing an enemy with a lance from horseback. The past is a foreign country, and the mind of a child can't be understood anyway.
"Debate continues as to whether anatomically modern humans were behaviorally modern as well."
Anatomically modern humans emerged 300,000 years ago but behaviourally modern humans only date back to 60,000-150,000 years ago.
In many ways no different to us, in other ways, knowledge, cultural norms, gender roles, morality, etc they are very different to us.
We're very tribal and very hostile to people outside of our tribe, and what we consider our tribe has slowly expanded over time.
Thankfully today we mostly don't form up into raiding parties to go kill, rape, and enslave people in the neighboring suburb - but that would have been historically a very normal and acceptable thing to do.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-a...
It always blows my mind how many people, historically, married their cousins. I guess smaller towns had shallower gene pools.
I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities. Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.
Right, clearly I meant close (1st and 2nd) cousins. At the end of the day, we are all related, but that's kind of a technicality.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do.You might have kids, and then they work the farm, then you manage the farm and slowly the children take over the manual labor and hard work of it. In old age the investment in the children pays off and a reciprocal relationship is formed where you take care of the grandchildren and your own children take care of you.
Now that is flipped on its head. The parent makes the lions share of the investment in the child, but the benefits of the child is largely socialized. Want daycare, food, recreational, extra-cirricular activities -- basically anything other than public schooling you pay taxes for already? Go fuck yourself.
But once the children is grown up, well well well we are a society here! Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children. And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard -- it is only morally right when all of society does the exact same thing to the kid.
There is every possible incentive in today's society to encourage others to have kids, ensuring your own retirement, but to reneg on doing it yourself because some other poor bastard can front most the costs and then you can tax the shit out of the kid for your retirement / social benefits. I think children were a rational decision in Darwin's day, now they are definitely not, because you are on the sucker end of a tragedy of the commons deal.
I don't know which country you are talking about, but at least in France and Belgium they do.
Parents do not have an obligation to pay for their children's post-secondary education though (but they have to provide for them if they are not financially independent).
Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.
On face this is true in the US. If you dig down into it in the slightest though, at least for a middle class family, it is extremely misinformed.
Society puts all kinds of burden on the parent that they would not otherwise have to spend
1) Car seats, safety equipment,
2) Employment and corporate taxes, regulatory overhead (including any government-imposed insurance and bond requirements), and licensing costs on daycare. And daycare is required because in US leaving children alone is illegal and providing unlicensed childcare for money is also in many cases illegal. (this one likely completely eats up the child tax credit)
3) Taxes charged on items of utility for the child, often even food.
If you are a single person you are not paying sales taxes for all the shit a kid consumes, you are not paying all the overhead taxes of childcare and child healthcare workers, you are not paying for all the costs associated with licensing requirements of child services providers, you are not paying sales taxes for car seats and all those goodies. You are also paying increased property taxes for the real estate the child needs, although this one is less questionable since you are more likely to consume public schooling which is usually a major component of that.
When you sum it all up I have zero doubt whatsoever a middle class parent pays way more in extra taxes and government imposed overhead than they get in tax breaks. And this is ignoring the fact that the single people in the end still ultimately benefit from the pyramid scheme we have going where social security is paid upward, and the investment to make that possible is mostly born on parents who in the end get the same stake on the returns as someone who did not raise a kid much beyond the scraps taken out of their property taxes.
consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.
To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work, that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term dividends.
Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary requirement.
There are also other effects at work, especially psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders have increased demands, because they are used to see them in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to truly understand it on a personal level is far more difficult. In the same way people growing older often try to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they for many years defined themselves through it.
There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes gradually.
If you killed off social benefits, desirable or not, there would be lot more left over for intra-familial support and the incentive would come back for people to invest in their own children. Or alternatively under a more society-driven system, make a proportional societal investment in children to what you ultimately take from them so that the incentives are not skewed. Ultimately the issue here is not individualistic or social systems for raising children but rather shoving almost all the costs on the individuals and then totally changing the system to being societal as soon as society can extract benefit.
The argument for taxes is usually something along the lines of forming a society, but society is almost totally gone when you make the investment in a child to become productive but then magically appears as soon as the kid is productive. As we are finding out this bastardized model is not working out for kids or parents.
In my experience friends and family have helped take care of elderly parents without that. I help my parents without giving them money.
Even if the elderly are destitute they generally have social security and medicare. If you need to you temporarily move in with them or they move in with you.
Also latchkey kids are very much so legal in most states: ~37 states have no statutory age limit. Your real issue there is probably liability if something does go wrong.
And unlicensed (license-exempt) daycare is perfectly legal in many (most?) states, usually with limits on the number of children and the location. In my state you can legally pay (or not) the stay-at-home mom neighbor with kids to watch your kid after school and she doesn't need a license.
I agree with the idea that smaller family sizes and cultural changes (outside of some communities like immigrants) have led to child raising changing in negative ways compared to communal approaches.
And I agree the financial calculus of having kids does not lean in favor of having kids (mainly because of high cost of living compared to wages, especially in certain regions).
But the rest of it doesn't seem to have strong supporting evidence. While personal income tax rates in the US can be high compared to some countries, overall tax burden as a % of GDP (25.2%) is below average (33.9%) [oecd].
I don't think there is any evidence that shows family size changes or multi-generational living are correlated with tax rate. That's usually correlated with other factors like women's wage employment/rights/education/ethnicity.
And the return value of a society where life expectancy at birth is not in our 40s seems pretty good.[1] There's no left over money from taxes you didn't have to pay if you or the family members you would spend it on are already dead.
>>>> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
>>> consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.
>>I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them b
>Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?
For one, the law says the kids have to support the parents, writ large, in a pooled scheme via SS. If you don't pay it, IRS agents seize your bank account and possibly even bust down the door and put you in a tiny cell. So we're not starting with the premise as a question. It is the current reality.
Now, I don't have a personal belief that kids should have to support their parents, but to philosphically hold that means they shouldn't have to pay SS to them either. The difference between children paying parents individually and writ large is just different mechanisms (collective vs familial), so if you agree with the collective system you already agree children should be forced to pay the parents.
Now, to be clear -- I didn't believ in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man, but I totally object to it. But I replied based on their fiction so I could address the underlying point about support without a further argument.
Ultimately elderly do need support. Children are ofter going to want to support the elderly. My point is that it would make more sense to tie that elderly support to investment in children so the incentives are in place to put a good investment in children and also to ensure people don't just free ride by rejecting children or helping children but then gladly gobbling up the dividends of the investment. This incentive system can be fixed by either an individual or collective approach but the bastardized system where we privatize the investment and socialize the dividends presents the worst moral hazards and anti-natal outcomes.
Children who emotionally care about their parents but are financially unable to assist are rarely going to say
> go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
i did not build that strawman, you did, i just set it on fire
Proven by modern science now. At least longer life.
My two favorite journal entries:
"But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything."
"I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything."
Me too Charles, me too.
"""but terrible loss of time. —""" !!!!
So ruthless in his calculus. One wonders if he was on the spectrum?
It is calculus, it is performed like calculus - it has to.
> When those difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes some set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us. // To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one pro, and over the other con. Then during three or four days consideration, I put down under the different heads short hits of the different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. // When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con, equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies, and if, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly
My friends thought it was the coolest thing ever.
We painted it over when we got older.
They were playing tic tac toe the other day, and asked my dad whether he played tic tac toe when he was a kid. My dad—who grew up in a village in Bangladesh—explained that he did, except they drew the game in the dirt with sticks.
Sometimes history provides too much information to future generations.
That really is wonderful! Reading how Pepys arranged for his diary to be preserved makes me think that he would have enjoyed this more modern presentation.
> Found out my uncle Wight and Mr. Rawlinson, and with them went to the latter’s house to dinner, and there had a good dinner of cold meat and good wine, but was troubled in my head after the little wine I drank.
"Troubled in the head" is a euphemism due a revival!
Like him or hate, the fact that the Vice President takes his kids everywhere is a good reminder of how un-child-friendly our societies have become. It's almost transgressive to exist with children these days.