David Reich: belief

Transcript context

…And at the same time making sure they’re not schizophrenic. I guess we kind of do worry about that. But if intelligence has not been the dominant trait under selection for humans over the last 10, 20, or 100,000 years, does that mean there’s more room at the top for this trait? I think there’s more room at the top for a lot of these traits. You can move height extremely in one direction, much more than it is today. You can move any of these traits much more extreme in the other direction. There are probably very strong negatives to doing that. You’re probably sacrificing other things, and there are trade-offs. But it’s highly likely that if natural selection pushed any of these traits more in one direction than it is, the mean would move. So all of this evolution since “Out of Africa” is acting on alleles that already existed in the pool of human variation from that first group we were talking about last time, on the order of 10,000 people, that exploded out of Africa. Is it surprising that across all these different traits, from cognitive profiles to disease resistance to height, that one pool of people contained so much latent variation that they could supply enough stretchiness to accommodate all of these different traits you’re studying now?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.