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by naasking 369 days ago
> If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement.

The fact that humans are intelligent at all and Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world suggests otherwise.
1 comments
lisper 369 days ago
> Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world

Huh??? How do you figure? AFAICT the world is dominated by Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin (if you reckon by power) or Christians and Muslims (if you reckon by population). None of these individuals or groups can be properly categorized as "Enlightenment peoples", certainly not with a capital E.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

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naasking 369 days ago
Western nations have dominated the world for centuries, in science, technology and cultural dominance. Russia is a bit player and has been for some time. Even if China were to ascend to equal prominence as the US, it would be an outlier in an otherwise clear trend.
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lisper 369 days ago
> Western nations have dominated the world for centuries

I guess that depends on what you consider "the world". It makes no sense to even talk about the West dominating "the world" before 1492. The first truly global Western empire was Britain, but it was also the last. It was replaced by the U.S. but it was never really global. Even at the height of its power after WW2 the USSR was a credible rival. After the fall of the USSR in 1991 the U.S. was the sole undisputed superpower for a little while, but that came to an abrupt end on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think you are over-extrapolating the past into the future. The mindset and culture that produced U.S. hegemony in the 20th century seems to me to be mostly extinct. The U.S. was indeed ruled by rationalism (more or less) from the time of its founding through the mid-to-late 20th century, but there is precious little of that left today. Certainly the power structure in the U.S. today is actively hostile to rationalism, and I don't see a whole lot of rationalism in play in the opposition either.

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