And what about human-caused mass death selecting for specific characteristics? For example, the Cambodian purges of intellectuals or the Communist purges of successful businesspeople. Are these too tenuous a proxy for genes to cause long-term change in alleles, or did the Cambodians and Communists do long-term harm to their genetic legacy?
Purges in Cambodia might have changed average genotypes because they hit such a high fraction of the population. Generally it’s hard to change things much in one generation, though—particularly because of loose correlations between genotypes and dreadful political fates. In the future dictators should be better at this. Now if Stalin had taken all the smartest people in the Soviet Union and forcibly paired them up, artificially inflating assortative mating for intelligence, you would have seen an effect. If you were a billionaire, you could maybe bribe people into something similar.
And what about human-caused mass death selecting for specific characteristics? For example, the Cambodian purges of intellectuals or the Communist purges of successful businesspeople. Are these too tenuous a proxy for genes to cause long-term change in alleles, or did the Cambodians and Communists do long-term harm to their genetic legacy?
Purges in Cambodia might have changed average genotypes because they hit such a high fraction of the population. Generally it’s hard to change things much in one generation, though—particularly because of loose correlations between genotypes and dreadful political fates. In the future dictators should be better at this. Now if Stalin had taken all the smartest people in the Soviet Union and forcibly paired them up, artificially inflating assortative mating for intelligence, you would have seen an effect. If you were a billionaire, you could maybe bribe people into something similar.