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The Psychological Diversity of Mankind — LessWrong

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The dominant belief on this site seems to be in the "psychological unity of mankind". In other words, all of humanity shares the same underlying psychological machinery. Furthermore, that machinery has not had the time to significantly change in the 50,000 or so years that have passed after we started moving out of our ancestral environment. In The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending dispute part of this claim. While they freely admit that we have probably not had enough time to develop new complex adaptations, they emphasize the speed at which minor adaptations can spread throughout populations and have powerful effects. Their basic thesis is that the notion of a psychological unity is most likely false. Different human populations are likely for biological reasons to have slightly different minds, shaped by selection pressures in the specific regions the populations happened to live in. They build support for their claim by: In what follows, I will present the

x The Psychological Diversity of Mankind — LessWrong Evolutionary Psychology Human Universal Book Reviews / Media Reviews Evolution Human Genetics IQ and g-factor Rationality Frontpage 149 The Psychological Diversity of Mankind by Kaj_Sotala 9th May 2010 9 min read 162 149 The dominant belief on this site seems to be in the " psychological unity of mankind ". In other words, all of humanity shares the same underlying psychological machinery. Furthermore, that machinery has not had the time to significantly change in the 50,000 or so years that have passed after we started moving out of our anc

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