A while ago I put out a post outlining my disagreements with Bronski’s thesis that the rise of Liberalism can be attributed to a build up in mutational load due to relaxed purifying selection following the industrial revolution [1]. I’ve come across some new evidence since then that strengthens the case against it, and I no longer really have any doubts about how strong of a contributing factor mutational load represents.
I think the disagreement comes down to this. Bronski wants to show that leftism is associated with mutational load. He does this by showing a correlation between paternal age as a proxy for mutational load and leftism. This does not mean that the primary reason (or even a particularly significant reason) that mutational load is increasing in modern populations is due to increased paternal age, but because of lower infant mortality. So i think Bronski is right that this article is largely irrelevant as a counter to his thesis.
Purifying selection can't be reduced to infant mortality, infant mortality has never been the primary selection outcome that the children of high paternal age parents differ on. Surviving children marry less and have less children when they do marry. The mechanism by which infant mortality matters is that infants who die don't have kids. m3/m1 counts the fertility of kids who die as "zero" in how it calculates its effect. Infant mortality is already factored in.
You're also making the same misinterpretation of the graph bronski made. The graph is the *sibling-control* results which attempt to evidence a decade of paternal age being less deleterious than it once was. Before the sibling control, the children of older fathers in pre-industrial sweden had more children than the children of older fathers. The significance of the sibling control is as an argument that a decade of paternal age resulted in a larger mutation increase in pre-industrial sweden than it does today. If you aren't convinced that this means fewer mutations per decade of paternal age, that's whatever; purifying selection would still be stronger today even if we disregarded this. Children of older fathers still had more kids in pre-industrial sweden (the dead infants who had zero children of their own contributing to the total), and average paternal age was higher in pre-industrial sweden (people in sweden today start having kids later, but also stop having kids sooner).
I claim that the opposite of purifying selection was happening in pre-industrial sweden. From the paper:
“In historical Sweden, paternal age had a slight positive effect in m1 before using sibling comparisons, in the other populations the effect was negative in all models”
(i only pasted this once in the article as well as clarifying the sibling control before and after the graph rather than spamming it in caps lock with the caption "THIS IS REALLY REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT". Shame on me for not making it clear.)
Btw:
(b) Statistical approach:
"We analysed reproductive success for all offspring, including those who died in childhood or never married"
This is why number of children appears twice in the graph. Infant mortality is already factored in except where explicitly stated otherwise. For the millionth time as well, the graph is THE SIBLING CONTROL results. The sibling control results are an argument for a decade of ML being less deleterious today than it once was. For the non-control results without sibling control and which count the non-fertility of dead infants (m1), older fathers in pre-industrial sweden produced children which themselves had more children of their own while the opposite is true of sweden today.
1. the first chart is not informative on mutational load theory wrt leftism, which is about the average effect a new mutation has on leftism. Measure new genes wrt some other species or distant ancestor are completely irrelevant to this. You are confused about what the theory is if you made this mistake. The terms are similar but these are not the same thing.
2. your second chart shows increased infant mortality with increased paternal age at all ages. The rest of the things are conditions on not dying in infancy, and none of them measure the average effect of a new mutation on leftism, so they are not informative in this
3. You third chart doesn't show paternal age or a good measure of leftism. Instead you're using birth order. I have replicated those effect sizes of birth order on leftism and shown that the paternal age correlation is robust to birth order controls.
"We analysed reproductive success for all offspring, including
those who died in childhood or never married"
This is why number of children appears twice in the graph. Infant mortality is already factored in except where explicitly stated otherwise. For the millionth time as well, the graph is THE SIBLING CONTROL results. (I only specified immediately before and after the graph that this was the case as well as repeatedly specifying so to you and to others, shame on me for not making this clear. What the fuck dude.) The sibling control results are an argument for a decade of ML being less deleterious today than it once was. For the non-control results without sibling control and which count the non-fertility of dead infants, older fathers in pre-industrial sweden produced children which themselves had more children of their own while the opposite is true of sweden today.
1. Pre-industrial sweden had no purifying selection while modern sweden does
2. Paternal age was arguably less deleterious in pre-industrial sweden, (1) is still true even if you don't find the sibling-control results to be a convincing argument for (2).
3. Paternal age was higher in pre-industrial sweden. Swedes today start having kids later but stop having kids earlier.
No. Frankly, he's just burying his head in the sand regarding the obvious relevance of the first two papers since he's let his pride get tied too deeply to the ML thesis. If you're going to interpret it this way though, then I'm no longer ignoring it. The entire point of ML is to explain the historically abnormal amounts of leftism in the modern west. If ML levels aren't abnormal among the modern French compared to other contemporary non-western populations and aren't abnormal WRT ancient hominids, then ML obviously offers no explanatory power for why leftism is so much higher in France right now than it is among Asians and Africans.
Yes, he doesn't understand the hypothesis and won't listen when I explain why the first two papers are non-informative on the hypothesis space. He's basically just Kevin Bird on this but because he's a JQer instead of a commie
1. You flatly misinterpreted the table from the second paper, which shows the sibling-control results, and is my justification (and the paper's justification) for saying that a decade of paternal has become less deleterious. It was elsewhere in the paper that they report higher paternal age to be associated with superior fertility outcomes in historical sweden:
1a: “In historical Sweden, paternal age had a slight positive effect in m1 before using sibling comparisons, in the other populations the effect was negative in all models”
1b: "(b) Statistical approach: ...We analysed reproductive success for all offspring, including those who died in childhood or never married"
1c: 1b is why number of children appears twice in the chart you've been tunnelvisioning on.
2. "The average effect a new mutation has on leftism" is only half the battle. Societal differences in mutation have to actually vary with societal differences in leftism in order to plausibly explain the changes in leftism. Claiming otherwise is retarded on its face, and saying "you don't understand my hypothesis, just read my work bro" to justify claiming otherwise would ordinarily give somebody every reason to think that you're just trying to Euler them.
Your theory of mind of me is also clearly dogshit if you think I'm a JQ reductionist who's trying to attack ML as a defense of the JQ. I've always been completely candid as to what my thoughts on the topic are: I've repeatedly said that I think jews are only a minor contributing factor, I went through a fair amount of effort verifying the veracity of evidence of war crimes against Israel upon the initial outbreak of the current gaza conflict at a time when it was all being dismissed as "Israeli propaganda", I don't interact with JQ circles much, etc.
You're also throwing stones from a glass house here with that JQ accusation as well. Your reductionist ML position does not give you solid footing to be coming at me from this angle. I've been open about my doubts on the matter (case in point your response on the GSS paper), but I've never once seen you at all self-conscious about things like the complete lack of molecular genetic evidence in this area. If I were paying for original studies, I'd be doing things buying DNA testing kits to verify that it's actually the case that liberals + left-handed people + mentally ill people + etc are further than average from the human reference genome (controlled for ancestry PCAs); UK biobank survey data would at least enable this WRT mental health without you having to gather any original data at all. Hell, the ancient genomes we have access to are disproportionately European; you could probably check if there were any differences between the french and the english during the french revolution. You could've been doing far more detailed historical analyses this entire time without ever spending a dime. I've been looking for molecular evidence of leftism-ML correlation since before we even knew each other back during the days when dutton and woodley were the only ones posting about this, and I've never been able to find anything on any of the supposed markers: not left handedness, nothing. I could just be an asshole if I wanted and just say that paternal age isn't the same as ML and that papers like yours or the GSS one aren't informative as to ML effects, and I could dismiss the cancer+schizophrenia+etc stuff in turn, but I've been immensely charitable to you in just assuming a common basis of general knowledge rather than demanding you cross every t and dot every i. By contrast, you have not shown me the same kindness anywhere that I've pointed out blindingly obvious things like how the liberal-conservative wealth gap would cause liberals to live in whiter neighborhoods if there were no gap in racism.
If I were just a JQ guy trying to defend the JQ, I would've stopped giving you any exposure the second you stopped doing quantitative power research in any capacity, or hell, even before then back when you dug up the thing about how CEOs mostly aren't jewish, and I never would've posted my results on how jewish opinion doesn't correlate with policy outcomes. Me giving consideration to what I thought ML had going for it was an act of open-mindedness. Your uncharitability, your inclination to try to psychoanalyze whatever I say rather than just sticking to the topic itself, and your lack of engagement with molecular genetic evidence are all acts of the opposite.
If you still don't see the relevance of the first two papers after I've explained your misinterpretation multiple times, then you're the one who "won't listen" to reason here. I genuinely no longer attribute ML plausibility; if instead of making a better case for ML, you still want to do some psychoanalysis of me asserting that I'm lying about my views to rationalize some irrational hatred of jews, that's a paradox of tolerance problem and there's no point discussing it further.
I've resisted discussing the matter on the level of character thus far except for cases where you repeatedly make the same character-based dismissals of what I say, but the case against ML is strong enough at this point and your responses have become unreasonable enough at this point such that my honest assessment is that the grandiose way you describe yourself and your work has made this too much a matter of ego for you to admit any doubts you have. Assuming the irrelevance of ML to changes in leftism, the more productive path would be to go back to something like quantitative power research; you don't even do this anymore and my assessment of you is that your ego has become too tied to the ML thesis to ever go back to it regardless of how weak the ML case becomes. As such, I no longer see what utility there is in supporting you.
You have no case against ML, you admitted you haven't even read my work, which shows because your "case" is just random stuff that says "mutational load" and is "molecular". Molecular stuff is trash rn, it says the heritability of IQ is 20%. would you like to bite that bullet and go join K. Bird? But that aside, your studies are not even relevant to my hypothesis, because you don't understand it; reading someone's work is not optional if you want to critique their theories
Interesting analysis. So when you say "I no longer really have any doubts about how strong of a contributing factor mutational load represents." , you think that it's ~0%?
This analysis has nothing to do with my hypothesis, which is built on 3 simple facts:
1. paternal age correlates with leftism with the relevant confounders controlled for
2. de novo mutation count correlates with paternal age
3. mutational load is accumulating between generations
Only his last chart attempts to comment on one of these (1), using birth order as a paternal age proxy. I have replicated those effect sizes of birth order on leftism and shown that the paternal age correlation is robust to birth order controls, so this critique fails.
He admitted he hadn't read any of the 3 papers or any of my substack articles or educational videos on the topic, did not understand the mathematical model used (calling it overly-complicated when it's just regression), and has also stated that he is motivated by fighting leftism and he finds my hypothesis black pilling and therefore wants to fight it.
I think the disagreement comes down to this. Bronski wants to show that leftism is associated with mutational load. He does this by showing a correlation between paternal age as a proxy for mutational load and leftism. This does not mean that the primary reason (or even a particularly significant reason) that mutational load is increasing in modern populations is due to increased paternal age, but because of lower infant mortality. So i think Bronski is right that this article is largely irrelevant as a counter to his thesis.
Purifying selection can't be reduced to infant mortality, infant mortality has never been the primary selection outcome that the children of high paternal age parents differ on. Surviving children marry less and have less children when they do marry. The mechanism by which infant mortality matters is that infants who die don't have kids. m3/m1 counts the fertility of kids who die as "zero" in how it calculates its effect. Infant mortality is already factored in.
You're also making the same misinterpretation of the graph bronski made. The graph is the *sibling-control* results which attempt to evidence a decade of paternal age being less deleterious than it once was. Before the sibling control, the children of older fathers in pre-industrial sweden had more children than the children of older fathers. The significance of the sibling control is as an argument that a decade of paternal age resulted in a larger mutation increase in pre-industrial sweden than it does today. If you aren't convinced that this means fewer mutations per decade of paternal age, that's whatever; purifying selection would still be stronger today even if we disregarded this. Children of older fathers still had more kids in pre-industrial sweden (the dead infants who had zero children of their own contributing to the total), and average paternal age was higher in pre-industrial sweden (people in sweden today start having kids later, but also stop having kids sooner).
Just to be clear do you actually claim that purifying selection was strong in the past in Sweden than today?
I claim that the opposite of purifying selection was happening in pre-industrial sweden. From the paper:
“In historical Sweden, paternal age had a slight positive effect in m1 before using sibling comparisons, in the other populations the effect was negative in all models”
(i only pasted this once in the article as well as clarifying the sibling control before and after the graph rather than spamming it in caps lock with the caption "THIS IS REALLY REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT". Shame on me for not making it clear.)
Btw:
(b) Statistical approach:
"We analysed reproductive success for all offspring, including those who died in childhood or never married"
This is why number of children appears twice in the graph. Infant mortality is already factored in except where explicitly stated otherwise. For the millionth time as well, the graph is THE SIBLING CONTROL results. The sibling control results are an argument for a decade of ML being less deleterious today than it once was. For the non-control results without sibling control and which count the non-fertility of dead infants (m1), older fathers in pre-industrial sweden produced children which themselves had more children of their own while the opposite is true of sweden today.
It's infant mortality + lack of selection pressures
1. the first chart is not informative on mutational load theory wrt leftism, which is about the average effect a new mutation has on leftism. Measure new genes wrt some other species or distant ancestor are completely irrelevant to this. You are confused about what the theory is if you made this mistake. The terms are similar but these are not the same thing.
2. your second chart shows increased infant mortality with increased paternal age at all ages. The rest of the things are conditions on not dying in infancy, and none of them measure the average effect of a new mutation on leftism, so they are not informative in this
3. You third chart doesn't show paternal age or a good measure of leftism. Instead you're using birth order. I have replicated those effect sizes of birth order on leftism and shown that the paternal age correlation is robust to birth order controls.
(b) Statistical approach:
"We analysed reproductive success for all offspring, including
those who died in childhood or never married"
This is why number of children appears twice in the graph. Infant mortality is already factored in except where explicitly stated otherwise. For the millionth time as well, the graph is THE SIBLING CONTROL results. (I only specified immediately before and after the graph that this was the case as well as repeatedly specifying so to you and to others, shame on me for not making this clear. What the fuck dude.) The sibling control results are an argument for a decade of ML being less deleterious today than it once was. For the non-control results without sibling control and which count the non-fertility of dead infants, older fathers in pre-industrial sweden produced children which themselves had more children of their own while the opposite is true of sweden today.
1. Pre-industrial sweden had no purifying selection while modern sweden does
2. Paternal age was arguably less deleterious in pre-industrial sweden, (1) is still true even if you don't find the sibling-control results to be a convincing argument for (2).
3. Paternal age was higher in pre-industrial sweden. Swedes today start having kids later but stop having kids earlier.
So he's strawmaning you?
No. Frankly, he's just burying his head in the sand regarding the obvious relevance of the first two papers since he's let his pride get tied too deeply to the ML thesis. If you're going to interpret it this way though, then I'm no longer ignoring it. The entire point of ML is to explain the historically abnormal amounts of leftism in the modern west. If ML levels aren't abnormal among the modern French compared to other contemporary non-western populations and aren't abnormal WRT ancient hominids, then ML obviously offers no explanatory power for why leftism is so much higher in France right now than it is among Asians and Africans.
Yes, he doesn't understand the hypothesis and won't listen when I explain why the first two papers are non-informative on the hypothesis space. He's basically just Kevin Bird on this but because he's a JQer instead of a commie
I listened and your explanation sucked.
1. You flatly misinterpreted the table from the second paper, which shows the sibling-control results, and is my justification (and the paper's justification) for saying that a decade of paternal has become less deleterious. It was elsewhere in the paper that they report higher paternal age to be associated with superior fertility outcomes in historical sweden:
1a: “In historical Sweden, paternal age had a slight positive effect in m1 before using sibling comparisons, in the other populations the effect was negative in all models”
1b: "(b) Statistical approach: ...We analysed reproductive success for all offspring, including those who died in childhood or never married"
1c: 1b is why number of children appears twice in the chart you've been tunnelvisioning on.
2. "The average effect a new mutation has on leftism" is only half the battle. Societal differences in mutation have to actually vary with societal differences in leftism in order to plausibly explain the changes in leftism. Claiming otherwise is retarded on its face, and saying "you don't understand my hypothesis, just read my work bro" to justify claiming otherwise would ordinarily give somebody every reason to think that you're just trying to Euler them.
Your theory of mind of me is also clearly dogshit if you think I'm a JQ reductionist who's trying to attack ML as a defense of the JQ. I've always been completely candid as to what my thoughts on the topic are: I've repeatedly said that I think jews are only a minor contributing factor, I went through a fair amount of effort verifying the veracity of evidence of war crimes against Israel upon the initial outbreak of the current gaza conflict at a time when it was all being dismissed as "Israeli propaganda", I don't interact with JQ circles much, etc.
You're also throwing stones from a glass house here with that JQ accusation as well. Your reductionist ML position does not give you solid footing to be coming at me from this angle. I've been open about my doubts on the matter (case in point your response on the GSS paper), but I've never once seen you at all self-conscious about things like the complete lack of molecular genetic evidence in this area. If I were paying for original studies, I'd be doing things buying DNA testing kits to verify that it's actually the case that liberals + left-handed people + mentally ill people + etc are further than average from the human reference genome (controlled for ancestry PCAs); UK biobank survey data would at least enable this WRT mental health without you having to gather any original data at all. Hell, the ancient genomes we have access to are disproportionately European; you could probably check if there were any differences between the french and the english during the french revolution. You could've been doing far more detailed historical analyses this entire time without ever spending a dime. I've been looking for molecular evidence of leftism-ML correlation since before we even knew each other back during the days when dutton and woodley were the only ones posting about this, and I've never been able to find anything on any of the supposed markers: not left handedness, nothing. I could just be an asshole if I wanted and just say that paternal age isn't the same as ML and that papers like yours or the GSS one aren't informative as to ML effects, and I could dismiss the cancer+schizophrenia+etc stuff in turn, but I've been immensely charitable to you in just assuming a common basis of general knowledge rather than demanding you cross every t and dot every i. By contrast, you have not shown me the same kindness anywhere that I've pointed out blindingly obvious things like how the liberal-conservative wealth gap would cause liberals to live in whiter neighborhoods if there were no gap in racism.
If I were just a JQ guy trying to defend the JQ, I would've stopped giving you any exposure the second you stopped doing quantitative power research in any capacity, or hell, even before then back when you dug up the thing about how CEOs mostly aren't jewish, and I never would've posted my results on how jewish opinion doesn't correlate with policy outcomes. Me giving consideration to what I thought ML had going for it was an act of open-mindedness. Your uncharitability, your inclination to try to psychoanalyze whatever I say rather than just sticking to the topic itself, and your lack of engagement with molecular genetic evidence are all acts of the opposite.
If you still don't see the relevance of the first two papers after I've explained your misinterpretation multiple times, then you're the one who "won't listen" to reason here. I genuinely no longer attribute ML plausibility; if instead of making a better case for ML, you still want to do some psychoanalysis of me asserting that I'm lying about my views to rationalize some irrational hatred of jews, that's a paradox of tolerance problem and there's no point discussing it further.
I've resisted discussing the matter on the level of character thus far except for cases where you repeatedly make the same character-based dismissals of what I say, but the case against ML is strong enough at this point and your responses have become unreasonable enough at this point such that my honest assessment is that the grandiose way you describe yourself and your work has made this too much a matter of ego for you to admit any doubts you have. Assuming the irrelevance of ML to changes in leftism, the more productive path would be to go back to something like quantitative power research; you don't even do this anymore and my assessment of you is that your ego has become too tied to the ML thesis to ever go back to it regardless of how weak the ML case becomes. As such, I no longer see what utility there is in supporting you.
You have no case against ML, you admitted you haven't even read my work, which shows because your "case" is just random stuff that says "mutational load" and is "molecular". Molecular stuff is trash rn, it says the heritability of IQ is 20%. would you like to bite that bullet and go join K. Bird? But that aside, your studies are not even relevant to my hypothesis, because you don't understand it; reading someone's work is not optional if you want to critique their theories
3. Where can I find this?
https://x.com/BronskiJoseph/status/1744569953661992993?s=20
Interesting analysis. So when you say "I no longer really have any doubts about how strong of a contributing factor mutational load represents." , you think that it's ~0%?
He's convinced me of paternal age being causal for leftism again (see the edit), but still ~0% given the other two pieces of evidence, yes.
This analysis has nothing to do with my hypothesis, which is built on 3 simple facts:
1. paternal age correlates with leftism with the relevant confounders controlled for
2. de novo mutation count correlates with paternal age
3. mutational load is accumulating between generations
Only his last chart attempts to comment on one of these (1), using birth order as a paternal age proxy. I have replicated those effect sizes of birth order on leftism and shown that the paternal age correlation is robust to birth order controls, so this critique fails.
He admitted he hadn't read any of the 3 papers or any of my substack articles or educational videos on the topic, did not understand the mathematical model used (calling it overly-complicated when it's just regression), and has also stated that he is motivated by fighting leftism and he finds my hypothesis black pilling and therefore wants to fight it.
Thanks for the clarification