Socialdem. 21st Century

Chapter 6 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Expansions,” and examines the genetic effects of large-scale migrations of human beings.History is filled with examples of certain population groups that conquer, migrate into, or spread over large areas and replace other groups, or replace other groups with some mixing.Cochran and Harpending (2009: 156) accept that cultural and technological...

Chapter 5 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Gene flow,” and looks briefly at the evolutionary changes induced by mixing of genetically distinct populations.The chapter begins with the concept of a gene allele “sweep,” or the manner in which a favourable gene variant can spread throughout a population of people where interbreeding is general, but not highly isolated and localised. While most gene...

Chapter 4 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called the “Consequences of Agriculture.”The effects of agriculture accelerated human evolution and selective pressures in the following ways:(1) Infectious disease Farming caused the creation of sedentary settlements, cities and overcrowding, as well as greater contact with animals, and the bacteria, viruses and parasites that animals bear. Therefore disease...

Chapter 3 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called the “Agriculture: The Big Change,” and examines the evolutionary impact of the agricultural revolution and urban life.When human populations were low during the Stone Age, the smaller number of people entailed that new favourable traits from random sexual reproduction and mutations occurred at a low rate: that is to say, low-population Stone Age people...

Chapter 2 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “The Neanderthal Within,” and examines the possibility that early humans outside of Africa interbred with Neanderthals, and how this affected human evolution.Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens outside of Africa encountered one another and competed for resources – and early humans won out in about 10,000 years, perhaps because:(1) our ancestors had...

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is a truly extraordinary book that every person on the Left should read. Critical reviews of the book can be found in Wills (2009), Arden (2009) and Gorelik and Shackelford (2010).In essence, Cochran and Harpending challenge the notion that human evolution stopped around 50,000 years ago. In Chapter 1 of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending (2009: 1) argue...

Although this is an old interview with the Post Keynesian economist Geoff Harcourt from May 2007, it is a fantastic interview, retelling much of the history of Post Keynesian economics:[embedded content][embedded content]Realist LeftRealist Left on Twitter @realistleftRealist Left on RedditRealist Left BlogRealist Left on YouTubeLord Keynes on FacebookSocial Democracy for the 21st Century: A Realist Alternative to the Modern LeftAlt Left on the Internet:Alternative...

Behold the continuing saga of insanity from the Cultural Left:Kristine Phillips, “Why these Professors are warning against Promoting the Work of Straight, White Men,” Washingtonpost.com, July 16, 2017. What’s next from these utter psychopaths?For example, it is well known that Jewish people – and above all Jewish men – are greatly overrepresented amongst Nobel laureates: Jewish people are just 0.2% of the world population but (mostly) Jewish men are about 22% of Nobel laureates (you can...

In 2016, Germany was horrified by this sickening crime in a subway:[embedded content]Now Svetoslav Stoykov, the perpetrator of the crime, has been sentenced to 2 years and 11 months in jail after being convicted of causing grievous bodily in a German court (see here and here).The perpetrator was reportedly a Roma Gypsy from Bulgaria, who was in Germany only because of the EU open borders policy, but this an issue for another post and time.In his defence, it was claimed that Stoykov was under...

Check out the full details here: Philip Pilkington, “Book Launch in Parliament Earlier this Year,” Fixing the Economists, July 13, 2017.Philip Pilkington has a new book called The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory (2016).You can buy it here and here.There was a book launch on 16 March 2017 in the Clement Attlee room in the UK House of Lords. See more details here.Robert Skidelsky gave some introductory remarks here:[embedded content]And Philip...