[tptacek]

The issue isn't that it's impossible for their to be a causal genetic mechanism behind highly polygenic behavioral traits; whether you call that "filtering" or not doesn't change anything.

The issue is that there's no time interval long enough and directionally stable enough for that to have happened. What you're seeing instead are people who have built a sort of civilizational leaderboard in their head based on current events and projected it back to (apparently) 300AD. That's obviously not what happened in real history.

[pfannkuchen]

Whether it’s filtering or not is highly relevant.

It takes much longer to develop new features via random mutation and selection than it does to alter the distribution of existing features via selection. This is trivially true, no? I’m not sure what the argument against this is, please elaborate.

[tptacek]

Like I said, it doesn't matter what you call it, what matters is that you won't find stable associations of civilizational progress and ethnic groups over the course of history. You can compose other coherent arguments for causal genetic superiority, but it can't be "civilizational achievement".

[pfannkuchen]

Okay, I am focusing on the one assertion you made which I quoted, and I think you are arguing the top level point back at me.

Features can change at a population level in the amount of time that different human groups have been separated from one another. That is all I’m saying here. It seemed like you didn’t agree with that point, and I’m interested if you can refute it in a well reasoned way since the implications are pretty counter-zeitgeist and being outside the zeitgeist is annoying.

By the way, “genetic superiority” is a category error and I find it annoying when people talk like that. An animal can only be better or worse in a particular environment, and even then different animals can exist in a similar niche without being better or worse. This sort of rhetoric has made this area very hard to discuss.