Tigzy wrote:gurugeorge wrote:In response to some of the comments above: since the other factors are (I agree) so numerous and indeterminate, surely that indeterminacy cancels out for all the various ethnic groups, so the factor that is fairly determinate - genetics - is the one that's left over to make the biggest noticeable difference?
No, I wouldn't say it was the only one. Far from it (and this is even when we assume the nature/nurture debate might have been settled in favour of nature). Take geography: sure, it changes, but only over huge timescales. In terms of human civilisation, it has hardly changed at all. So throughout much of human history, we have had steppe peoples, desert nomads, plains folk, seafaring folk. Surely this would be
at least as big a cultural determinant as human biology. And then you couple that with the local climates, the propensity for an area to suffer earthquakes, floods and the like - and then couple it with how isolated an area may or may not be, how easily it may or may not be conquered by another people. And so on and so forth.
Eh, those epochal constants in geography ARE what results in the the biological differences. For example, geography is why you have relatively busy, clever people coming from climes where it was hard to scrabble a living in the ancestral environment (Whites and Asians coming from Ice Age climes).
It's harsh to think about, but it's obviously true. So the full chain is: long term environment shapes genetics, which shape family forms and kinship groups, which shape culture.
And
then you have the "messy", difficult-to-parse-out elements of quicker geographical changes, local advantages and disadvantages, etc. And then you have historical artifacts, like the manorial system reinforcing an ongoing tendency to nuclear family form west of the "Hajnal Line."
Our understanding of ourselves is skewed by our having a written history and a fairly detailed knowledge of what has happened to us over the last 5,000 years or so, but the bodies and brains we have are shaped by the larger swathes of time before that - the 10,000, 100,000 year periods of our ancestral environment before history, those are what give us the DNA blueprints we have now.
But, at the same time, that's what makes it hard to be definite about any of this, as Kirb says. Nevertheless, we can think about it, and while it's not definite, it's suggestive and worth thinking about if we're trying to actually understand who we are.