News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by thewarrior on Saturday November 09, 2013 @04:40AM (#6701202)
"Such competence is potentially heritable and is reinforced by the human tendency to mate with partners of similar traits and ability."

So does this mean that over tens of thousands of years rich people could evolve into a separate race ?

Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by lepukowsky on Saturday November 09, 2013 @04:49AM (#6701216)
According to Wikipedia, that question doesn't really matter: "race has no taxonomic significance and that all living humans belong to the same species" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29

I suppose if some group of people got themselves into their own species, where they could not in fact mate with what we know as "human", it would be a pretty big deal.

Edit-- I quoted the same line... please feel free to respond to my comment below.

Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by larksimian on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:18AM (#6701432)
'Race' is a dumb concept. We know that there are groups of people that are biologically distinct from others. Not to say that they can't interbreed, merely that there are genetic/phenotypic differences between groups.

Probably the most obvious example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#Epidemiolog... which is a condition that mostly appears in people with ancestry in regions that expose them to malaria.

Skin color is obviously a biological difference that distinguishes different human populations, it just doesn't correlate with all the stuff we actually care about, for instance intelligence. 'Race' is loosely correlated with some specific biological traits, for instance http://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/guide/...

As for hyper-successful people breeding themselves into a sub-group with specific traits, for better or for worse, this is obviously possible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognathism#History

Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by jmerton on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:46AM (#6701482)
Thanks for the links. My area of (amateur) research is "contra-science," and one sub-set I find most interesting is so-called "race." What is called "race' seems actually to be the result of environmental/geographic induced gene expression. My favorite examples is a South African sub-culture that possesses the Cohen gene (Tribe of Isaiah), but looks identical to their neighbors. They have been in South Africa for about 800 years.
Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by jmerton on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:31AM (#6701453)
No. Crudely put, the rich guys get the pretty girls. This re-averages the IQ. There's an article somewhere; sorry I don't have a link handy. Edit: This re-averages the overall genetic factors.
Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by guard-of-terra on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:38AM (#6701463)
And pretty girls are healthy ones. Which lets powerful ones avoid degeneration.