David Reich

It can move the mean value of traits within hundreds or thousands of years in one direction or the other if that's adaptive in a particular environment.

You might wonder, isn't intelligence good

You know, in all contexts and places of time.

And I think that there's a number of ways to think about that.

First of all, I think we are speaking from the point of view of a society which intensely values this particular trait, you know, ability to score well on IQ tests or things like them or to go to school for a long time or whatever it is.

And I think this is unprecedented in human history that we live in a time like this.

Like if you look at the Hebrew and Christian Bible and you look at how much intelligence is valued, it's basically not at all.

Yeah, exactly.

But it's about strength or courage or religiosity.

Those are the values, right?

Or if you read Homer or the other texts of other religions, it's not intelligence.

It's beauty.

It's other things.

And so this value system, which has a hyper-focus on...

you know, smarts is not obviously a trait, trait value that's been common in the past.

You might think that in certain communities, like, you know, some communities are not, there might be valuation of things that are more proximate to, you know, years of schooling, but really broadly, it's not been a high value in the population.

And let me give you two examples about how, about what this is, about in my head, how I'm thinking about this.

And not that I'm a particularly good authority on these things.

But as I mentioned, a lot of these traits, which are quite disparate, are highly correlated to each other.

Obesity, years of school