You have argued against culture's influence, by saying that, today, there are genetic differences which cause high level personality traits in adults, such as being feminine.

I know 15megs is enough to implement intelligence, but how much do you imagine is left over to throw in quirks and differences? Certainly many orders of magnitude less information than our culture has it it. Less than our personality has in it.

Also bear in mind that to write intelligence in 15 megs, you need a very good programming language. Concise, powerful, lots of libraries, very good abstraction, high level of generality. And it will be targeted towards writing powerful, general, reliable things. On the other hand, these features will be inconvenient when you want to code weird special cases and hacks, so that kind of code will take more lines to write.

That's the same kind of argumentation the creationists use "see how complex life is, surely it could not just have developed by chance". Well duh, but it has. What do you know about how many genes are required for a behavioral difference? I am really asking you! Don't just throw around numbers like "surely xyz genes can not be enough to make a difference". I think just one gene can be enough in some cases. Maybe some hormone has a higher concentration in the blood of person A than in person B, and zing, totally different personality. Or whatever - I am not a biologist, but I suspect that neither are you.

There exists no explanation, ever invented, by anyone, which details how a gene could code for complex parts of adult personalities, like femininity.

You can make things up like how a hormone might umm somehow affect stuff. But that isn't an actual mechanism that goes from start to finish.

You don't have to prove that a particular mechanism is in fact the one used by our bodies. You don't need any scientific evidence. Just make one up that actually could work and makes sense.

No one has ever done that. End of story.

Meanwhile, there do exist possible explanations of how culture could account for the same phenomena (like femininity). They have no rival theories. Thus, all reasonable people should tentatively believe that kind of explanation is correct.

Sorry, that is complete bullshit. There are tons of papers on why genders exists, in terms of evolution theory. There are tons of studies on the effects of various genes - it is a billion dollar industry! Besides, why should I provide the details, if you started with claims of the sort "the number of genes is too small"?

Apparently mechanisms exists, humans are being created from mere genes, with lots and lots of differences. I don't think I need to provide any evidence for that - just go out on the street and look at the people. Nobody looks alike, except for the twins.

May I ask you: are you a creationist? I really don't want to waste my time...

If the hormone level doesn't convince you, let's take body height: can you imagine that body height could make a difference in temper? Again, I don't know, but if there was a study showing it, I would have no trouble believing it.

There are actually studies showing that tall men earn more on average than smaller men.

The world is a complicated place...

I know there are many studies to do with genes, I've read a variety of them. If you believe you know of one which answers my challenge, then feel free to cite it.

Am I a creationist? Umm, lol. No. If I was, why would i talk about evolution of both memes and genes? Since you keep bringing up personal issues, maybe we can put them to rest: I am a very (classically) liberal person, a scientifically-oriented atheist, generally a small-l libertarian. Not a science-hating, lunatic, religious conservative.

body height might control temper? how?

a correlation between height and income doesn't imply height causes income, especially not directly.

Of course not, but your challenges are a bit off: we are discussing complex systems, that nobody really has a hold of yet. And that includes you and me.

I don't know if body height affects temper, I am just giving examples that could e plausible. For example, body height could affect the blood pressure, which would surely affect temper.

What is your challenge again, that genes can affect temper? I don't even feel the need to read any papers, really. Body height doesn't convince you, take something else, say some ugly deformation of the body. Might cause depression?

Maybe those examples sound ridiculous, but so does the notion that a butterfly on the other end of the world could affect the weather on the other side of the world. Actually I think the butterfly really is an exaggeration, but nevertheless, small changes can have big effects on the outcome in a complex system. So I don't think we even have to argue.

Oh yes, and being a woman or a man obviously has a different outcome in temper. You claim that is only cultural, but that doesn't matter: in our current environment (a ka culture), your temper is affected by being a woman or a man. Point proven.

Being ugly doesn't cause depression. Though in some cultures ugly people are treated badly, and in some cultures many people have personalities that get depressed when others (wrongly) treat them badly.

Now, if you take a culture like that as a given, you can say that ugliness causes depression, and call it a fact. And say you've proven your point. I don't dispute the possibility of making very misleading simplifications of this sort which are true in a sense.

But if we want to explain what's going on in our world, it isn't reasonable to take culture as a fixed point. It would be much more fruitful to take our genes as a fixed point, and look at what our culture causes in the context of our genes, and how a different culture would, in that context, cause something else. Doing that, we could come up with some ways our culture should be changed.

One way to see what is the true cause, A or B, is to consider what would happen if you changed only one (at the time of its creation). So if we change genes, thousands of years ago, our culture could very well have developed to have the same results, despite the genes being quite different.

But if you change imagine our culture developing differently, then having the same genes we have today won't stop it from creating different gender stereotypes.

I think you don't want to get my point. Yes, there are ugly people who are happy.

Are you saying that nothing causes depression? Some things apparently do cause depression. I was just giving an example - maybe it is not uglyness, then it is something else. I don't care, but it is something.

And no, uglyness does not cause depression - not getting a mate because of ugliness causes depression. But that again is at least in part biological. I know you will deny that, though, because you did so in another threat some time ago. Anyway, if we deny the biology, we could culturally train ourselves to only be attracted to apes, and humanity would die out.

I never took culture as a fixed point, in fact I pointed out several alternative cultures, both existent and hypothetical.

Now I am waiting for you to describe a hypothetical culture in which things are like you want them to be, so that we can verify that it could really work that way - or perhaps biology would get in the way.

Edit: and I don't get why you deny that being ugly causes depression - on average.

We have a culture that (sort of) causes ugly people to get depressed. There is nothing innately depressing about being ugly, the whole idea of being depressed about it, and indeed of what is ugly or pretty, is in our culture.

So, our culture has code to have people detect certain traits caused by genes, and act differently in their presence. Just like it detects mountains, and has people act differently in their presence. But no one goes on and on about how mountains control human personalities and determine gender differences (or mountain-raised-near differences).

For lack of statistics on the amount of people doing startups in mountain regions compared to seaside regions, no doubt...

I live nearby the mountains and I can tell you that people in the mountains have a very different culture from the people in the flatlands, or at least used to have. I am talking about the farmers - they have different problems to face in the mountains than in the flatlands. So I am sorry but yes, mountains control human personalities and culture.

Aha, now we are getting somewhere: genes are a red herring. All the arguments regarding intelligence, DNA, memes, apes, irrelevant. You would have taken the same position about mountains. Or, I take it, hurricanes, earthquake zones, forks, dolls, different types of houses, TV shows, anything (though some things are more or less influential).

I guess to start with, you have said living in mountain regions is correlated with different kinds of culture. But you have not said by what mechanism it causes it. Which actually is the same question I kept asking about genes. So please do answer it.

No, it is not just a correlation. The environment influences the development, that's all - genes are also clever enough to use the information in the environment for a more efficient encoding. Are you asking me to explain in a news comment how the human brain develops from genes, how the brain adapts to the environment, how psychology works, and so on and so on? Not all steps in the development process are fully understood yet, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.

Although I guess also yes, I would have claimed that other things than genes can affect human psychology.

So, you don't have a complete theory of how the mountain, or gene, causes the personality change. You even agree with me in saying that no one does (as I said earlier). In your words, it's not "fully understood yet".

However, you believe that when it is understood, then we will know that genes and mountains do this thing. But how do you know what the conclusion will be, now?

Can you make up a possible mechanism of genetic causation? You don't have to prove this actual mechanism is being used, just invent one that could work.

I understand the causation up to (for genes) causing more/less of a chemical in the body, larger/smaller muscles, causing defects in the eyes or exceptionally good vision, something like that.

But how do you get from there to causing some significant effect in adult personalities? Like causing people to enjoy mountains, be republicans, or consider women bad at business.