Dwarkesh Patel

There's no effect of natural selection.

And so we see episodes like this where we don't see natural selection, but then there's

The Bronze Age apparently must have had an even stronger effect where the change in environment is even stronger than what we see from Africans in Africa then being migrated to the new world and then living under slavery.

And the standard deviation here is how much the

polygenic score for the trait itself moves or?

Okay, so the effect here is huge then.

Because if you're saying one standard deviation, a standard deviation above the median would be somebody in the 85th percentile.

So you're saying that the effect of selection has been so strong that compared to 10,000 years ago versus now, the median has gone to the 85th percentile.

And that's just like a huge effect over the last 10,000 years on something like intelligence or...

the thing that predicts household income or whatever.

So these seem like, especially given that this is only 2% of the change in halo frequencies and then like the 98% is coming from migration.

So then it's sort of stupendous to think about like, well, what is the impact of migration then?

If this alone can explain or is driving a standard deviation change in these kinds of qualities, at least among the kind of variation we see in the world today.

Yeah.

So there's this person who has a collective intelligence hypothesis, which is this idea that the selection for intelligence has actually been in the opposite direction.

That as society has developed, there's been more specialization.

If there's more specialization, each person only needs to understand a smaller and smaller thing.

part of the world and therefore actually the ancients were much smarter than us and we've sort of evolved out in intelligence.

And your results seem to point in the opposite direction that although there's not been a selection in the last 2000 years as society has gotten more complicated, at least when society began,

there was more need for the kind of thing that predicts intelligence today.