Justin’s Notes

The Culturist's Empirical Load-Bearing Wall Has Fallen

2026-07-20 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy is usually read as a philosophical or political dispute, but he smuggles an empirical claim into the Culturist position that the ancient DNA paper turns out to test directly. Notice the exact wording: the Culturist holds that evolutionary "processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time." That is not a value judgment about equality; it is a falsifiable statement about allele frequencies over time.

And it is precisely what the West Eurasian study measures. Against the prior expectation that classic hard sweeps were rare across human evolution, the authors find that "in the past ten millennia... many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection." Ten millennia is squarely inside the window the Culturist declares evolutionarily quiet. The load-bearing wall of the position — that selection switched off and culture took over — simply isn't there.

What's striking is that the data don't vindicate Derbyshire's confident "Biology rules!" either. The paper is scrupulous where Derbyshire is triumphant: it notes that trait effects were "measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past." So the finding dissolves the Culturist's factual premise while refusing the Biologian's rhetorical certainty.

The honest synthesis is narrower than any of Derbyshire's three camps: evolution continued, recently and strongly, but we do not yet know what for. The tabula rasa fails on the facts; the genome-as-destiny story outruns them.

Woven from these notes

Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness—directional selection—from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution8,9. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.
Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia
There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed