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    Re: Can We Address That British Eugenics Scandal? by Justin Podur Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on September 15, 2020, 8:24 am, in reply to "Re: Can We Address That British Eugenics Scandal? by Justin Podur"

    Dug up an old Jason Godesky article where he talked about this (from the now unavailable anthropik website I used to read in the early 2000s - some of his more recent distillations of anarcho-primitivist philosophy are up on the http://rewild.com/ homepage):

    'In the process of domesticating other species, humans from some cultures began to exhibit some of the same signs of domestication shown in other species, including reduced body size.

    One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. (Diamond, 1987)

    Perhaps even more alarmingly, humans have also followed the trend for brain size. In the last 10,000 years, human cranial capacity has decreased by at least 8% (Ruff, et al., 1997). Researchers have been very quick to point out that brain size does not necessarily indicate intelligence (though they are strongly correlated), so this reduction does not necessarily mean that human intelligence has suffered the same blow from primitive to civilized as we can observe from dogs to wolves. Others have connected the loss of brain size to the aforementioned co-evolution with wolves (Simonds, 1998), but this theory seems contradicted by the timeline: most of the loss of brain size has occured only in the most recent fraction of the time of human-canid co-evolution. Specifically, it has occured over precisely the same fraction during which that co-evolution turned into domestication. The biological evidence is clearly consistent with a scenario of domestication, but do we dare follow the implications that holds for what has happened to human intelligence, much less human dignity?

    Humans from domesticated cultures also show the same neotenous behaviors so often found in other domesticated animals. Mammals are defined by their mothers’ mammary glands, which produce milk for offspring. A thin layer in the small intestine produces lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the lactose in milk. Normally, this thin layer breaks down as a mammal matures, and the body stops producing lactase. “Lactose intolerance” is the normal condition for all adult mammals, including humans; it is lactose tolerance that is abnormal. The mutation that made a thicker layer that did not break down and allowed for the consumption of milk into adulthood appeared in the Middle East and Scandinavia, apparently independently, and spread from there. It is a juvenile characteristic now evident in many humans, the very definition of neoteny.

    Humans have been domesticated. It has changed our biology (Leach, 2003) and our behavior. Domestication up-ended the normal pattern of life: the web of relationship in which each species contributed a unique element. Instead, domestication replaced that with a pattern of dominance, wherein other plants and animals could be twisted to fit human desires and used as property at will. But in so doing, humans created a system of relationship that could just as easily extend to them; humans became domesticated, human bodies became twisted, and human behavior became pathological (Russell, 2002).'     - https://forums.skadi.net/threads/111237-Rewilding-Humans-Reversing-Human-Domestication

    Looked up the Ruff paper quoted for the 8% decline in brain capacity stat, which is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/387173a0 (unlocked with woman waving at you on the left of the screen: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1038/387173a0 ) and it doesn't seem to support the argument after all, saying that brain mass correlates to body mass, both of which have been in decline for around 35,000 years, ie: well before the ag revolution 10-12,000 years ago:

    'Our results also indicate that a decrease in average absolute brain size over the past 35,000 years within H. sapiens was paralleled by a corresponding decrease in average body size, supporting earlier suggestions of a general correlated size reduction in the human skeleton since the early Upper Paleolithic. This decrease continued through the Neolithic, at least in Europe.' (p.175)

    Nowhere is an 8% figure quoted, though it may have been calculated from the table on p. 174. Doesn't invalidate the other aspects of the argument vis lactose tolerance and declining height though, so there might still be something to it...

    I

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