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Religion As It Relates to Genetics
Malcolm explains his concept of "evolutionary vortexes" - how cultures create bottlenecks selecting for certain sociological profiles over generations. He analyzes examples like Calvinists' happiness, Jewish mysticism, and Catholic anti-nepotism norms. Simone questions why this isn't more obvious. They discuss how technology will let intentional cultural selection rapidly shape future minds.
Malcolm: [00:00:00] So a great example of this that I'd always say, is when I talk to people and I'm like, yeah, you know, what do you think of Cubans? You talk to a Florida, you're like, what do you think of Cuban? They go, yeah, Cubans. There's the typical Cuban sociological profile.
Malcolm: They're very conservative. They're really good at business. They're really educated. And it's that's not the profile of Cubans more broadly. That's the profile of the Cubans that were differentially sorted into trying to escape a communist dictatorship and move to the United States You know, to an extent within any immigrant population depending on how the, the sorting worked, you're often going to get a very specific sociological profile that may not be the dominant sociological profile of the mainland population.
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Simone: So Malcolm, you know, how. Someone in our family once called me a vortex of failure.
Malcolm: Yes, somebody did! They're like, Simone is a vortex of failure, Malcolm, and she is pulling you down. [00:01:00] Well,
Simone: there are other types of vortexes that I think you find very interesting, and I have failed to understand why they're so interesting.
Simone: So can you please explain your concept of evolutionary vortexes with this old vortex of failure?
Malcolm: Yes, well, so this is a very interesting thing for us. So a lot of people know that we don't believe that there are persistent, meaningful genetic differences between things that we, in our society, view as things like ethnic groups and stuff like that.
Malcolm: And a lot of people view
Simone: that The concept of racism or race supremacy as being, like, pretty frickin dumb, because, like I don't know given
Malcolm: the evolutionary... Why is it dumb? It's dumb because small groups, family groups, religious groups local environmental groups, it's not because we don't believe that genetic differences don't exist between populations.
Malcolm: We just believe that they change way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way faster than this, like... You know, 100, 000 year difference that defines ethnic groups. Exactly. [00:02:00] So a great example of this is like San Francisco, right? When you look at San Francisco, you had this environment where during the gold rush, you basically had a siren call to people from a diversity of , ethnic and cultural backgrounds that said, anybody who uniquely is drawn to high risk High reward, economic opportunities move to this area.
Malcolm: Okay. That's what the gold rush was. And people would die for these opportunities. I mean, the Donner party, et cetera. Right. And then is it a surprise that, you know, a century later, Silicon Valley starts there, which, which was really driven because the venture capital industry started there where you had.
Malcolm: High risk, high reward opportunities explode as like a way to generate wealth and ruin people all over again. And this is what a vortex does. Because there was the first event that caused a genetic [00:03:00] predilection within that environment, that then made it more likely that the second event would happen, which then further...
Malcolm: condensed that genetic predilection by again, sending out this, this signal
Published on 2 years, 3 months ago