Toot link; transcript:
Greta Thunberg could have, by now, carved out a very comfortable life for herself as a liberal grifter-celebrity offering platitudes about personal responsibility at Davos. Instead she connected the dots between ecocide, capital, and empire, aiming squarely at the heart of the beast. And now fresh out of captivity she downplays her own suffering to recenter the urgency of aid to the Palestinian people. No wonder she's hated by the fascist+lib coalition that rules this world.
Author: JP (@jpbreton@mastodon.social)
A rash of artificial selection experiments has provided serious support for the existence of the type of ‘balancing selection’ at the population level you describe.
One experimental setup I know really well involved frightening aquaria full of zebra fish (an important model species for many things in biology research.
The researchers would hide behind a curtain until everything was quiet and calm, then emerge and make note of which fish swam away to hide and which came to the glass to investigate the investigators.
Breed shy with shy and bold with bold and very soon you have two populations that behave either over-cautiously or in an overly risky way. Artificial selection is a cool way to identify the genetic basis of these sorts of traits.
One conclusion to come from doing this in various model species (even fruit flies have this population level variation in response to new stimulus) is that ‘balancing selection’ seems to maintain populations naturally with about 25% ‘bold’ phenotypes with the remainder taking the careful ‘shy’ approach.
They have been able to identify some of the genetic basis of these differences in behavior, too.
So yea it’s very socially determined which neurotypes will prosper.
As they say,
If you are poor, you are considered crazy.
If you are middle class you are neurotic.
If you are rich, you are just eccentric.