nhaliday

I like the following anecdote of Darwin's (though it's from quite a bit later in time):

Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spiritous liquors: they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure. (6. The same tastes are common to some animals much lower in the scale. Mr. A. Nichols informs me that he kept in Queensland, in Australia, three individuals of the Phaseolarctus cinereus [koalas]; and that, without having been taught in any way, they acquired a strong taste for rum, and for smoking tobacco.) Brehm asserts that the natives of north-eastern Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk. He has seen some of these animals, which he kept in confinement, in this state; and he gives a laughable account of their behaviour and strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons. An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected.

- "The Descent of Man"

The sentiment is lifted directly from the linked post.

It's hard to argue with given the subcontinent had agricultural, seafaring populations while Australian populations never made it past Paleolithic hunter-gathering.

If you're a remotely rational government, why would you not subsidize it? The dividends you could reap from a population with greater health, intelligence, self-control, low time-preference, etc., would be ridiculous.

Of course maybe people will want to use it for more zero-sum things like height or looks, so maybe you ban or don't subsidize that, but inequality in more positive-sum traits is unlikely.

> 90% of genetic variance in human races exists in the African continent

Counting neutral variation (the vast majority of genetic variation). You can get plenty of variation in non-coding DNA from drift without any effect on the variance in a trait. In fact, you rarely actually get effects on highly polygenic traits from drift without selection (imagine random directions chosen independently for each of the relevant alleles, and think in terms of the law of large numbers).

If you're getting this from Oded Galor or Deidre McCloskey, they're generally smart people but don't understand population genetics well.

relsted to the secular decline in testosterone (whatever's causing that)?

People complain about US govt surveillance all the time. It doesn't always lead to change but there's a healthy degree of dissent.