Thread by @SumElseThing1

1/14
[Transcribed thread justifying the proposition that real physical class/caste distinctions exist among humans]

2/14
Functional human equality is improbable. I think it's relatively safe to assume that human classes and the lineages they are comprised of are at least as adapted to their social, technological, and historical settings as landrace dog breeds.

3/14
A population of animals lives a few generations in a certain place, thrives by performing a certain role, in a social context which rewards that role, and before long they will become a breed far better suited to that role in that place than the general population.

4/14
This isn't "evolution" as it's commonly thought of, just an informal sort of selected breeding - existing traits shuffled, sorted, and concentrated in successful lineages. This takes a few centuries rather than the millions of years it takes to evolve a novel trait.

5/14
And because we are talking about humans rather than dogs, there is a whole social/cultural dimension which accelerates this.

If you want to breed the ideal shepherd dog for rural Iceland say, you are limited to a single up/down breeding selection on each individual dog.

6/14
But when society breeds ideal retail merchants, semi-skilled industrial workers, bureaucrats, etc, the subjects actively contribute:

People self-sort in or out of roles seeking comparative advantage, they develop memes and techniques which enhance their relative success.

7/14
If you have experience with agriculture, horticulture, or animal husbandry, you will know that even a handful of generations' selective breeding yields and organism which OVERWHELMINGLY outperforms some random cross.

Good seedstock is pretty much *always* worth paying for.

8/14 (Conclusion 1):
So I think it is worthwhile to explore the concept-space which opens up if you stipulate that "class" or "caste" or however you like to style it is a real, physical thing.

9/14
Now, if you take this searingly right-wing postulate, the physical reality of class, and interact it with the social justice notion of "intersectionality", some interesting things happen.

10/14
People don't, after all, compete along a single dimension of "class". They seek a personal optimum based on a combined biological/cultural/technological inheritance in a space which extends to occupations, reproductive strategies, subcultures, hobbies, and habits.

11/14
(And sex cuts across the lines of lineal diversity with it's own clustering of individual attributes and disjoint sets of opportunities.)

12/14
But no matter how multidimensional your model of human difference, there are bound to be clusters, and with the aforementioned self-selection and adaptation processes in effect, these clusters would be expected to become more differentiated with time.

13/14
If a life strategy works well for e.g. +openness, -decoupling, moderate conscientiousness, hetero white females, then you would expect there to develop a culture, norms, and network around this strategy which would gradually draw some peripheral people into itself.

14/14 (Conclusion 2)
It remains reasonable and probably useful to talk about "types" and the internal and external dynamics of "types", as long as we don't mistake our characterizations of such for descriptions of individuals.