His points are individually cogent, but something about the tone of the piece makes me suspect Dark Arts at work. I’m generally rather suspicious of arguments deriving a broad range of evolutionary consequences (particularly gloomy ones) from some social trend; it’s too easy to privilege the hypothesis in such cases, and hard to prove when it happens. And nature vs. nurture is a topic I’m particularly suspicious of, since it bears directly on a number of social policy issues.
The post tells a plausible story, but within the space of plausible stories I don’t see much that privileges it. If it was supported by data, that’d be another thing; perhaps you could look at the reproductive success of the relatives of people with schizophrenia or other externally obvious problems with heritable components, and compare between rural and urban settings. Or just take a survey on attitudes towards nature vs. nurture, although in that case you’d probably have to control for age and politics (rural areas skew older and more conservative).
(Anecdotally, I did grow up in a small town, and while I knew the parents and siblings of most of my friends growing up I don’t think I had enough data to put together a clear picture of family traits. Upstate California in the 1990s is a far cry from the Kalahari, though.)
Anecdotally, I did grow up in a small town, and while I knew the parents and siblings of most of my friends growing up I don’t think I had enough data to put together a clear picture of family traits.
Did your parents and grandparents grow up in the same town? Those of your friends?
His points are individually cogent, but something about the tone of the piece makes me suspect Dark Arts at work. I’m generally rather suspicious of arguments deriving a broad range of evolutionary consequences (particularly gloomy ones) from some social trend; it’s too easy to privilege the hypothesis in such cases, and hard to prove when it happens. And nature vs. nurture is a topic I’m particularly suspicious of, since it bears directly on a number of social policy issues.
The post tells a plausible story, but within the space of plausible stories I don’t see much that privileges it. If it was supported by data, that’d be another thing; perhaps you could look at the reproductive success of the relatives of people with schizophrenia or other externally obvious problems with heritable components, and compare between rural and urban settings. Or just take a survey on attitudes towards nature vs. nurture, although in that case you’d probably have to control for age and politics (rural areas skew older and more conservative).
(Anecdotally, I did grow up in a small town, and while I knew the parents and siblings of most of my friends growing up I don’t think I had enough data to put together a clear picture of family traits. Upstate California in the 1990s is a far cry from the Kalahari, though.)
Did your parents and grandparents grow up in the same town? Those of your friends?