If they don’t want to have kids, they have a serious defect in their genetic makeup, and they can only harm the human race’s survival in the long term.

Actually, that isn’t quite fair – it is either a defect, in which case it is self-regulating, or it is an extremely “deep” genetic population-pressure release valve (i.e. hormonal stress in the mother caused by large numbers of people result in kidophobia or homosexual preferences in the offspring, which prevents further propogation).

I suspect that a good percentage of the black populace will respond to competitive pressure, and, of course, the job market will continue to grow. At least I hope so. The social stratification inherent in your proposal is staggering.

There has been much said on this thread about feminism, feminists, femininity and masculinity that I think may be confused by different definitions. The word feminism can be used to describe a formal theoretical system, (one I am aware of, though not versed in), yet it can also be used to simply describe the belief that women are as capable and as valuable as men and that they should not be treated unfairly based on the fact that they have ovaries. One can completely agree with the latter (perhaps essential?) belief, while having strong arguments with the theoretical system, or other ideas that are often all bundled under the rubric of feminism.

That said, I am most intrigued by what has been written here about courtship and marriage. A few centuries ago, there was an image often used concerning marriage that I’ve always found very beautiful: the description of a wife as a “helpmeet,” or a helpmate. It meant more than simply the function of a housewife, though the woman’s role was often the more than full time and back-breaking job of keeping a house functioning at a time when you not only baked your own bread, but also brewed your own beer. But there was also the sense that a wife was a life partner, and that each half of the couple was very important to the functioning of the family and household.

The biggest change is that now we can think of the husband as just as much a partner and helpmeet to his wife, and that the specific functions they have in a family should be not directed entirely by their biological sex but also by their personal inclinations. Does biological sex matter? Of course it does. No matter how much a man loves his children, it is still the mother whose breasts leak. But should it stop a woman from having a career? No. I think the main purpose of the women’s rights movement (the current mainstream, if not the fringes) is not to try to turn women into men (unless they want to be, in which case power to them), but to allow women to be mothers, and also do what they like with their lives. The biggest problem now is that women have won the rights to have careers, but parents, both and female, need to win the rights to be parents. We all need more time off, more freedom from work to be with our families.

On the subject of dating habits, I can only speak from my experience as a young (and somewhat “career-oriented”) woman. But I think that there is a lot of worrying about relationships, and relations between men and women that is unnecessary. I pay for my half of dates, because otherwise I feel guilty (my mother raised me to be financially independent, nothing to do with ideas of patriarchy), but I am clear, upfront and friendly about it. I gladly walk through when a man opens a door for me, and open the next (they always seem to come in pairs) for him. I would never get offended, and my dating habits just reflect my feelings that relationships should be reciprocal. But if there is tension, one should talk about it, be open, and most of all, never get offended, but have a sense of perspective that it really is not that important. Make a joke, laugh a little, and learn more about each other.

I do wonder, though, about what other women look for in men. I have heard that the idea that women “marry up,” both financially and in age, is not a stereotype but a documented trend. How strong a trend, I am not sure; I once read that North American women marry men who are on average two years older than they are, which is really not much at all. But I don’t understand it. When looking at a possible courting pool, I look for men like myself: men of a similar age (a few years up or down), in a similar field (in my case academics), and likely headed for very similar careers (and incomes). It is not that I would not consider dating someone very different (I certainly would, though probably in unusual circumstances), but these are the men with whom I have the most in common, and thus the most rapport. I would even be wary to marry someone much more successful than I, for fear that he would be possibly moving around, and that I would simply have to follow him, disrupting my own career. Of course, I am clearly looking for a helpmeet and life partner. But are other women looking for something very different?

Just a brief note for any who are interested:

The nature of marriage from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is currently under debate among historians. A few decades ago, some historians made the argument that the family over this period became much more affectionate than they had been before. But subsequent research has since argued that if you study it closely, you can see that affection and love in families was just as strong. They may not have created a whole Valentine’s Day-esque culture around romantic love, but there is evidence that it was a primary part of marriage choices (of course restricted, as they are today, by financial concerns, etc).

In terms of the Montaigne diary evidence, one must ask what the purpose of the diary was. Ralph Josselin was a clergyman who kept a diary in the seventeenth century, primarily for the pupose of recording God’s “providences” to him rather than recording everyday life. Thus his wife apppears mainly when she is giving birth to their children, and he is giving thanks that she and the child are safe. But this does not mean that they didn’t have affectionate breakfast together every morning, just that he chose not to write about it. I have not read Montaigne, but it may be that the fact that his wife does not appear in his soul searching reflects a happy, uneventful marriage, rather than any lack of love.

I do not really understand claims that “white” ideals are taking over the world. Very few beauties are pictured with such very European features as ill-defined, even bulbous noses (much more common than straight) or heavily lidded, downturned eyes. Instead, all around I see beauties with high cheekbones, and eyes that are tilted up, whether almond shaped or not, features much more common among those of African or Asian descent. (I have to say that West Africans have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen, almond-shaped, upturned, large and luminous).

In fact, those I have seen who most match the suposedly white Western standards of beauty are those who are of a mixed heritage – perhaps a wisdom in that? In mixing we come out with the best. 🙂

PS – The historian in me must caution one little detail of duende’s otherwise very interesting essay: When looking at a work of art, such as the Meiji print, conventions of art may not reflect the actual standards of (living) beauty. It helps to corroborate with other evidence (if you are lucky, someone writes “What people find beautiful is…”)

One must also remember that the article mentioned that “poor ethnic-minority youngsters tend to be better-educated than whites in the same social group,” and thus was only concerned with the GCSE scores of poor white students, whereas the ranking above included all white students, including those from the upper and middle classes.

I find the above statement very believable: most non-white people in Britain are recent immigrants, and thus automatically selected for people with ambition, for themselves and their children. In my own country, I know that not only does the act of immigration self-selecting, but the government of Canada also has such high requirements for immigration that most immigrants are more highly educated than the average Canadian.

I would be interested in knowing more about ethnicity, class and academic achievement in Britain, Canada or the US, if anyone has links to share.

“It just means the woman was either unaware of or choosing to avoid the implication, which in my reading is that people with vaginas are weak not just in the physical sense, but also in terms of having convictions.”
Wow. I always called people “pussy” because CATS are such wimpy little animals, unlike DOGS who are tough and stand up and bark and bite… But I guess you can take it any way you like.
Just out of curiousity, if you were under attack and had a choice between 100 random men or 100 random women who would all be willing to physically defend you, which group would you choose?
Don’t pussy-out in your answer!

hence – “birdbrain”…

I consider myself a born-again nerd. I was a smart-jock in high school so of course I chose to emphasize the jock aspect to impress the fairer sex. After college ended I found out I really really missed learning. I started reading like crazy. I’m almost entirely self-taught in science, math, and computers. The last two books I read were statistics books (one textbook, one a history of). I even founded a “science club” with some friends which basically involves building stuff, launching stuff, or blowing stuff up. Right now I’m wearing a shirt that says “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipate” (from ThinkGeek). BTW, if you have anything fun to do with SF6 for my next science club, let me know.

“But actual American citizen workers didn’t even much get in on the benefits of having those jobs building unneeded McMansions in the desert because we let in millions of immigrants who would do those jobs for $5 or $10 less per hour.”

Not exactly true, I met two realtors during the bubble days one who had a family dairy the other who was also a cattle rancher. You’d think they’d have made a million off the backs of illegals but those houses are still sitting empty because they were built too far from sources of employment for the potential owners. Now if they could’ve just sold those same houses to the illegals who milked the cows and built the houses but that would’ve entailed an endless cycle of building suburbs that would then be populated by illegals who were supporting themselves building exurbs just a stones throw from the new suburb. Oh, wait…

I’ve gotta hand it to you, Sailer, you’ve had a tremendous influence on my thought processes.

I was intrigued by Caplan’s comment about believing in Free Will, so I took a look at his essay on the subject:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/freewill
WTF? Right up front he denies the Law of Causality, effectively assuming his conclusion. Very unimpressive!

“The study actually found that girls and non-whites fail the exam more than those white boys who are their equals in other assessments.”

In the interest of scientific inquiry, wouldn’t it make sense to look at whether the “other assessments” could be at fault?

Some observations:
1) boys consistently show less enthusiasm for busy work/homework/neatness than girls [often attributed to the female desire to please]. One would assume that “other assessments” may reflect this giving a skewed picture of ability.

2] Teachers may penalize boys for acting like boys

3] In the Ricci case commentary, I have seen no data about the amount of time spent studying [other than Ricci’s efforts]of those who were successful versus those who were not.

4] I am always skeptical when I hear that straight A students do not perform well on a test due to anxiety, particularly after consistently getting As on tests for their entire academic career. I have long suspected that the As they have gotten in the past are more a reflection of their willingness to study lots more hours than their peers. Further, teachers often give tests that do not test the ability to think as much as to memorize the material in a text book. Ergo, when it comes time to take a test that cannot be studied for, these students crater.

5] Lastly, studies increasingly show that black students have the highest self-esteem of all groups [contrary to media mythology] with Asian students having the lowest. Perhaps the need to actually work hard stems from the students’ view of themselves.

6] If one has been raised in an evironment in which failures have been attributed to others [racism], perhaps one does not realize what it actually takes to suceed. The notion that white success is merely due to privilege has consequences.

just some thoughts……

Derbyshire had an interesting piece on NRO about Ricci. Apparently, the search for the perfect test – that would be one that makes all groups look good while still exhibiting a reasonable performance spread – has been a dismal failure.

http://tinyurl.com/cf4wwk

Also, discriminations.us had some great commentary on Ricci.

http://tinyurl.com/c73juc

Random thoughts…

1] After spending decades overseas, my exposure to a diverse environment – yes, the “m” word – consisted of superb ethnic food, enhanced cultural exposure, highly competitive schools for my kids,international travel, stimulating conversations with well-educated folks from around the world, and yadayadayada.

Never once did I kid myself that multiculturalism would be experienced the same way by those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale.

Are our elitists so obtuse that they cannot begin to understand why a family making $50,000 might not find it wonderful to have an influx of “other”?

2] There is a level of arrogance among liberals that leaves me breathless. For some reason, they assume that all dialogues are about who loves the poor down-trodden the most, rather than who has the most effective problem-solving approach. For a group that prides itself on being high-context, they are often clueless about the context of their own conversations.

3] Commentary on race is virtually always responsive in nature. Generally, the dynamic involves a liberal insisting that racism is at the root of a disparity. When someone responds to the often hyperbolic statement, they are condemned for being obsessed with race.

At the end of the day, it is the liberal fixation on race and disparities – along with their expensive boondoggle solutions – that keep the issue boiling in the public consciousness.

4] When commenting on “black” blogs, I frequently see the comment; “Why don’t you ever mention “trailer-trash crackers”? Setting aside the perjorative nature of the term, the reality is that dysfunctional whites are seldom brought up because NO ONE – I repeat NO ONE – is defending this group unilaterally.

This makes me wonder whether liberal bloggers understand that the dialogue is with THEM, in response to THEIR comments.

Minor point, but I have never understood this thing about credit card payments being less painful than cash. I use my credit cards as little as possible (I like to be able to read my statements and remember every purchase on them), but when I do use them, whatever the amount, it feels exactly like paying cash.
This may be the reason I don’t have any debit cards. I just don’t understand their advantage over credit cards! I lose the option (although I never use it) of deferring payment, and I can’t see that I’ve gained anything in return.

Steve is dead-on, as always. In reality, the average white kid gets a mediocre education. Even at the top echelons – my five kids all attended top boarding schools -the high flying performances are largely a reflection of the types of kids they accept in the first place.

I’ve yet to hear of a program for white kids in which they get the hands-on rah rah mentoring and rigorous academics at the hands of outstanding dedicated teachers that the students in the Harlem programs receive. My guess is that ANY student plucked from the typical public school would thrive – even sky-rocket – academically in such an environment.

I imagine that the average parent can only dream about the type of education their tax dollars provide for these urban programs.

Pouring disproportionate funding into urban areas may indeed raise the scores of these children, but GEE, wouldn’t it be lovely if someone cared as much about the largely ignored potential of the children of those who actually pay taxes!

People are described as middle class to make their situations palatable to those who have to pay to remediate them.

Frankly, using the term “hard-working middle class” was a stroke of rhetorical brilliance by the left.

Having discerned that the average American found it annoying to subsidize high school drop-outs and welfare moms, they simply repackaged them in glossy wrap.

I like the slack jawed expression on the dark haired newscaster’s face immediately after the drunk guy gets slapped!

I didn’t follow your remark about “an overestimate of the concordance for homosexuality among twins”. Could you expand on that?
What I’ve heard is that if one twin is gay there is a 50 percent chance the other will be too. This figure is quoted to argue for a genetic component to homosexuality, which seems fair enough. But then the existence of a genetic component is used to argue in turn that gender preferences are fixed, that you are born that way, and therefore there is no need to worry about children being “turned gay” by greater visibility and social acceptance of homosexuality. Nobody every seems to point out that the 50 percent figure in fact implies that the environment has just as strong an influence as genetics, which would seem to suggest that worries are indeed warranted!
So anyway, I would be interested if you think the 50 percent figure is inaccurate, and if so how.

probably 25. the original studies were probably selection biased toward twins who were both gay.
This would be very interesting! Anything you can link to?
My own suspicion is that homosexuality — like other forms of deviant sexuality that nobody claims are genetic (S&M, for example) — is to some degree triggered by random influences in childhood.
I base this in part on memories of my own childhood: My interest in the opposite sex was mostly intellectual (I figured out how the plumbing worked quite early) up until puberty, when all of the sudden I actually started to feel it. It just isn’t all that hard to imagine some random encounter — even some random image in a movie or on TV — sending me down the other path!
The question of when the random environmental influence occurs still remains, and of course if it’s pre-natal then you can still say that people are “born that way”. But if the true number is really 25 rather than 50 percent, the exclusive “born that way” scenario become that much harder to argue.

My mother’s side of the family comes from Eastern Europe, and is very Catholic. Two of my older relatives are priests. My mother, in her 80’s, still goes to church every Sunday. But she is quite bitter about pedophile priest scandal, and openly talks about how it has lowered the standing of the Church in her eyes. During the same period she also became more liberal politically, and to me it seemed related. So yes, I can easily imagine that the scandal has had a major impact on the attitudes of marginal Catholics in America!

What I find startling, and quite offensive actually, is the article’s assumption that there is something wrong with a city being mostly white.
It would be wrong of course if blacks were being deliberately excluded. But the author doesn’t seem to be implying that; he actually seems to be going all to way to saying that a city can just be too white, even if no discrimination is involved anywhere. That strikes me as every bit as racist as saying that a city is too black, or too mongrelized for that matter.

My favorite cephalopod story involves scientists trying to figure out why their crabs kept disappearing from a fish tank. They finally set up a video camera, and found that an octopus was hauling itself out of another tank at night, crawling across the floor, climbing into the crab tank, eating a crab, then returning home. (It’s been a while since I read this, and in retrospect maybe it was something else rather than crabs, unless an octopus would also consume the shell?).
I also remember a long article about personality in animals, including octopuses. Apparently individual octopuses can have very distinct personalities, e.g. bold/shy, aggressive/friendly, inquisitive/incurious etc.

People who can do good work in math or physics are often capable of doing of many things well (such as reading a medical chart, or running a factory). I’ve worked on Wall Street, and yes, there are a lot of very smart people there. If the work they are doing is in fact socially non-productive (and I suspect it may be), then the loss isn’t just to math and physics (fields which may already have too many workers), but to society as a whole.

How does the size of the hobbit’s brain compare to that of, say, a 4 year old human child? I can remember being a (very verbal) 4 year old and intensely focusing on figuring out how a toy worked, or untying a complicated knot, and other stuff like that. It hardly seems implausible to me that, given some additional body strength and manual dexterity, someone with a brain no larger than a 4 year old human could make fairly sophisticated tools. Maybe the brain would have to be tweaked a little, but I don’t see that it would have to be anything radical.

I know this is blazingly obvious, but it’s difficult for a political movement to succeed when a direct consequence of success is a reduction in the number of people in the movement. I’ve never been able to figure out how to get around this.
This may be a false memory, but I can swear I can remember being in grade school, being told that there were too many people in the world, and that because of this Americans ought to have smaller families, and thinking that if we did that then eventually the world would be taken over by people from other countries who believed in having large families. Maybe it was junior high school. In any case, for most ideologies (this includes religions), anything that increases the number of believers is good, and this includes big families (since children in general accept their parents beliefs). But if the cause you are trying to advance is population reduction, then by practicing what you preach you are continually undercutting yourself. The Shakers may be the best example of this (compared, lets say, to the Mormons), but the Western World as a whole seems to be doing the same thing in slow motion. So how do we avoid selecting for high birth rate cultures? How do we avoid handing the world over in the end to whatever group is least willing (or able) to reduce its own birthrate?

I not only use pseudonyms when I comment on blogs, I use different pseudonyms (or anonymous comments) on different blogs, because I don’t want some automated software someday tying together everything I’ve ever written on the Internet for the benefit of some casual inquirer. I have non-controversial opinions on non-controversial subjects, and opinions that would really offend some people, and at the very least, even if nobody is going to be showing up on my doorstep, I don’t particularly want those opinions mixed together on-line.
Having multiple pseudonyms doesn’t completely eliminate the risk though. People tend to reuse expressions and arguments that they think are particularly telling or clever, and these can be tracked through Google. Even if you manage to avoid using the exact same wording in different venues, people have distinctive writing styles, and I can imagine that someday there may be software that can search on that.
Back in the day, I published a couple of moderately controversial thoughts under my real name on this newfangled thing called Usenet, secure in the knowledge that whatever I wrote there would disappear forever in a few weeks. Then along comes this other thing called DejaNews, and suddenly my words are preserved for all eternity. (You do realize, don’t you, that people could very well be reading these archives a thousand years from now). Thank goodness I had the foresight (um, was sufficiently paranoid) even then to go to the considerable trouble of getting a second email address (which wasn’t free back then) for my most transgressive opinions. But if I should ever reuse some some particularly clever argument from that old alias (and I’ve probably already done so, more than once), in principle I could still get nailed. Yes, truly, we are all headed into a new age of transparency.

So are we going to find out the “various reasons” at some point?

Obviously if one astute biologist can select silver foxes for non-aggression and eventually succeed in creating a tame, family friendly fox, another can select non-aggressive African zebras, breed them for a dozen generations, and create a fine riding and hauling zebra.
As part of the thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond asserted that one reason for the success of Eurasia compared to Africa is that Eurasia had the great good luck of having many large animal species that turned out to be suitable for domestication, while Africa had few or none. (Remember his famous comment about how history might have been different if Zulus had been able to ride rhinoceroses?) One example of this that he gave was the Zebra, which he claimed was fundamentally just too mean to be domesticated.
I thought of this when, a couple of years ago, I attended a performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Some of the acts had zebras performing along with horses in the ring. Since I had internalized Diamond’s argument at this point, I found this kind of startling! I paid close attention to the performance, and noticed that the more complicated maneuvers seemed to be reserved for the horses, while the zebras went through somewhat simpler paces. Nevertheless, the zebras were clearly well trained and controlled. It makes me wonder just how difficult the domestication of zebras in Africa really would have been, and if anyone there had ever even thought to make a serious effort.

Off topic, but that set of papers in Current Biology (open access!) looks extremely interesting! For example, the paper on Europe seems to argue against the idea — which has been coming up a lot recently — that the original hunter/gatherer population of Europe was mostly replaced by Neolithic farmers from the Middle East. I don’t really have the time or the background to read all the papers carefully, so I’m looking forward to hearing from those who do.

Isn’t the liberal/conservative issue confounded by the belief/non-belief issue?
It seems to me that the weakness of the arguments for religion are rather obvious, and that a person with an IQ of 106 is considerably more likely to come to understand this than a someone with an IQ of 95, even though the gap between them isn’t huge. However the question of which social arrangements work best seems far more difficult to me, and even highly intelligent people can easily find themselves in over their heads. So if the two issues were independent we might expect a clear sorting on belief/non-belief, but not on the liberal/conservative spectrum.
However if religious belief tends to push people towards conservative social positions, then the two issues are not independent at all. So if conservatives in fact do tend to be less intelligent than liberals, couldn’t that be entirely a consequence of believers being less intelligent than non-believers?

Hey, no problem! Low birthrates are a sign that a country is starting to develop: in particular that it’s managing to educate its women and find jobs for them them that make it difficult to have children. But there are still plenty of countries — mostly in Africa for some reason — that don’t look like they are ever going to be able to get their acts together, and will most likely keep on producing boatloads of children into the indefinite future. So as the people in the more successful countries die out, we’ll just replace them with people from the least successful countries. What could possible go wrong?

Non-shared experiences can make me differ from my twin but shared ones cannot make us more similar?

I don’t see the problem here. If you have a monozygotic twin then your genes would be identical. If you also had all the same experiences (including pre-natal) then you would be completely identical people. No problem so far?

Now suppose your genes are still identical, but some of your experiences are not identical. The result is that you are no longer identical people. And it is your non-shared experiences that have made you different! Your remaining shared experiences are still there in the mix, but the answer to the question “why are we different?” is the non-shared experiences. To me this looks like a perfectly good answer to the question.

I don’t know. Common ancestry certainly seems the most reasonable possibility. But the idea that we can calculate any real world probabilities and come up with 1 in 10^2860 seems dubious to me!

What no one seems to want to point out is that, while these studies do suggest a strong genetic component to homosexuality, they also argue for an equally strong environmental component — about 50/50 actually. If you are trying to think of homosexuality as entirely genetic, how do you explain that in so many cases where one twin was gay the other was straight?

I don’t believe many people consciously choose to be gay (although I think a few actually do), but I do believe that many gay people might have ended up straight if it had not been for some influence early in life — perhaps an improper encounter, or perhaps they just saw something that intrigued them and turned them in a certain direction. (Children are allowed to see so little, but they are very interested, so what little they do see can have a big impact). Whatever the actual mechanics, a 50 percent environmental influence is certainly big enough to worry about!!!

Even if there was only one migration out of Africa, the Andaman islanders could still be plausibly viewed as a “remnant” population, in a way that the rest of us aren’t.

If the ancestors of the current Andaman islanders arrived on the islands shortly after the out-of-Africa migration, and if since then there has been relatively little mixing with people from the rest of the world, and if — as seems very likely — their population has always been small, then they could easily be much more similar to the people of the migration than are the rest of us. This seems to me the natural interpretation of any talk about “remnant populations,” and while it isn’t necessarily true of the Andaman islands, it strikes me as being more likely to be true there than of any other place I can think of.

The situation with languages is of course different. Languages can change very fast even in small populations, so the Andaman languages aren’t likely to have any special similarity to the language(s) of the out-of-Africa migrants. But if the languages of the islands have never been replaced by outside languages in all that time, then their study could still conceivably shed some extra light on the original language or languages of the migrants, and for that reason I think those languages are particularly valuable, and I regret the loss of any of them (in the same way that I really regret the loss of the original language of the African pygmies).

All else being equal I would rather have 90 percent of the population well fed; the absolute numbers seem fairly irrelevant to me in that regard.

However absolute numbers do matter. The thing is, I have serious doubts about whether the Earth can support 10 billion people long term without the world’s resources being totally exhausted. It isn’t just energy — that actually seems like it may be a solvable problem. It’s everything else. It’s silver and gold, and platinum, and tantalum, and all those rare earth elements that China is playing games with, and so on. I’ve seen projections where we start running out of some materials that are critical for our high technology society within a few decades. Even if those projections are way off, what about a five hundred years from now? Or ten thousand? Even with recycling something is always lost, scattered to the wind as dust, unrecoverable. We see the earliest stirrings of civilization maybe ten thousand years ago, and for most of the time since then civilization has weighed fairly lightly on the Earth. I’m just finding it more and more difficult to imagine how the Earth can support a high technology high population society for similar periods of time into the future.

I’ll tell you one thing: I’m half convinced that if we have a hard civilizational collapse in the 21th century, that’s it, game over. All the easily accessible resources are long gone. There is no more copper, or tin, or zinc that can be mined with Neolithic technology. Unless we can climb back up by scavenging ruined cities, it’s going to be a million years of wood, stone, and iron.

asteroids?

Yeah, that’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far. (Hopefully it won’t involve delicately nudging enormous rocks into near Earth orbits!) I’m not ruling out the possibility of some sort of “singularity” either, although I don’t expect it any time soon. But I do think it is interesting how little people today — even the catastrophists — seem to be concerned with time horizons beyond the next century. The ancient Greeks and Romans don’t seem all that far back to us, but the 22nd century appears to count as the far distant future. I think maybe we’ve all been so impressed by the rate of recent technological change that we are all assuming that if we can just last out the next century then technology will surely save us. And it might — it’s just that I don’t think there is anything sure about it.

I really do with people were more aware of the possibility that, if we have a crash now, it might not be possible to recover, ever. If I were king of the world, my long term plan for dealing with the issue would, among other things, involve eugenically breeding the population down to about 100 million (which, as Katharine noted, would be a much easier number to work with). Or course, if I were really king of the world, and I actually tried to do that, I probably wouldn’t be king for very long. So I think we’re pretty much going to have to take what comes, with no real long term planning, and hope it works out for the best.

I find it interesting that nobody seems to want to make a connection between Neandertal admixture and the fact that Europeans and Asians are in fact more advanced than Africans. It’s interesting because I have seen so many examples of people making the opposite argument — i.e., taking the fact of overall greater African genetic diversity and trying use it to imply some kind of genetic superiority for Africans, or at least to argue that it means it’s impossible for Africans to be intellectually inferior to non-Africans. Stephen J. Gould made the latter argument, and that’s the point the people who keep saying “we are all Africans” really care about. Arguing that “white people are superior because of our ancient Neandertal bloodlines” would make every bit as much sense (i.e., a little bit of sense, but not a whole lot), but so far I haven’t heard anyone making that argument. Maybe the bad Neandertal PR is just too much to get by?

I’m rarely a SJG defender, but I think what he said is that it makes no sense to consider Africans as a whole a stable group for comparisons to other groups, since the diversity within Africa is so much greater than that outside. I would be interested if he said what you claim he did, as well as a reference.

I’m quite sure that SJG did in fact claim that the greater genetic diversity made it impossible that Africans could be less intelligent than non-Africans. He originally made the claim in an article in Natural History magazine, and he also included it in an appendix to a later edition of The Mismeasure of Man. On page 399 (from Google Books):

For starters, though, I suggest that we finally abandon such senseless statements as “African blacks have more rhythm, less intelligence, greater athleticism”. Such claims, beside their social perniciousness, have no meaning if Africans cannot be construed as a coherent group because they represent more diversity than all the rest of the world put together.

The thing is, this is just wrong. Those statements may be true or false, but the greater diversity of Africans does not render any of them senseless, any more than it renders senseless the statement that “African blacks have darker skin and curlier hair.” Gould’s claim is total obvious nonsense, and I think the only reason he wasn’t called on it instantly is that nobody felt comfortable making an argument that could be interpreted as anti-anti-racist.

OK, I concede Gould was blurry–I know he is a rhetorical weasel and I don’t like to defend him, but I don’t think that statement says what you claimed it did (”it is impossible for Africans to be intellectually inferior to non-Africans”).

I’m sorry, but I’m having a very hard time finding any other way to read Gould’s statement. Yes, along the way he talks about factor analysis and statistical methods and within/between group measurements and all that. But in the end what he actually says is that statements like “African blacks have less intelligence” are “senseless” and should be “abandoned,” and that the reason for this is that African blacks “represent more diversity than all the rest of the world put together.” How is that any different than the way I originally put it? Further, he didn’t just say it once, he wrote it up in a magazine article, and then thought so highly of the argument that he added it to an expanded edition of his book, and edition I might add that was promoted as “The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve” (again, from Google books, and this time from the cover of the book). So he must have been comfortable with the wording.

And I’ll say it again — whether or not he worded it as well as he might have, his statement is just unfixably wrong. No matter how you reinterpret it, you are going to run into the counterexamples of skin color and hair texture, where non-Africans, taken as a group, lie outside of the normal range of variation of African blacks, also taken as a group. You have to be careful, but there is nothing intrinsically senseless about comparing a single branch with the rest of the tree. The tree may have more variation overall, but with respect to the particular traits you care about, the single branch may lie well outside of the cluster formed by the other branches.

The various explanations for the existence of sex, such as the Red Queen hypothesis, all seem reasonable enough to me. The thing I absolutely do not understand is the rarity of hermaphroditism among higher animals. From a naive point of view, hermaphroditism would seem to combine the best of both worlds. All individuals reproduce, as with asexual species, and yet you have the same amount of genetic recombination as with sexual species. So where is the downside? I don’t get it!

Given that we are all looking at your sample spectrum on an RGB screen, is it really possible for anyone to see anything beyond the usual set of trichromat colors? Don’t you need an actual physical fourth color for that — something like an RGBU screen?

Also, I remember reading in some science magazine that the vertebrates we evolved from did originally have 4 opsins, that mammals lost two of them (probably because they were nocternal), and that primates gained back one. However fish, birds, and reptiles never lost the original 4, so tetrachromatic color vision is common in those groups. (This is just from memory — I couldn’t find the article).

kjmtchl: when I was very young I learned that there were three primary colors, and I wondered “why three? Why not some other number?”. Much later I learned it was because we have three types of color receptors in our eyes, so that three different frequencies of light is all it takes to stimulate all possible responses. In contrast our ears can distinguish thousands of frequencies, which is why a speaker that could only produce three frequencies would be totally useless.

An RGB screen may be able to generate what appears to our eyes to be thousands of distinct shades, but each of those shades is actually just some combination of the same three color frequencies (R, G, & B). You can make chords on a piano with four tones that you simply cannot reproduce using three, and in the same fashion you can make tetrachromatic colors with four distinct frequencies of light that cannot be reproduced with three frequencies. For this reason I’m pretty sure that a true representation of tetrachromatic colors on a computer screen would require four distinct colors (RGBU being only one possibility).

If you go back far enough — and not all that far, 2,000 years perhaps, or maybe 3,000 — almost everybody alive today is a direct descendant of almost everybody alive back then (who has any current descendants at all). All it takes is one or two traveling merchants in Roman or medieval times to connect me to all of China or Indonesia (and even Australia maybe?). All I’m left with is the fact that the people living in Europe 2,000 years ago show up far more often in the slots in my family tree than people from other parts of the world. Yet realizing this didn’t change my sense of identity much. I still feel like a white European-American.

What did change, at least a little, was my sense of what a white European-American is. But people from different parts of the world are still different, and those differences still matter, to some greater or lesser degree, even though we are also all connected. I can see where some people might have trouble with this though.

@jb, I’ve seen that 2000-to-3000-year figure mentioned before–do you (or anyone else) know of a primary source for it?

I just came up with it as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but if others have come up with the same numbers I’m not surprised. The argument is basically this:

1) If one generation is 25 years, then 250 years back you have a thousand ancestors, 500 years back you have a million, 1000 years back you have a trillion, 2000 years back a septillion, and so on. Of course there weren’t anywhere near that many people back then, so we are really talking about slots on your family tree, which are filled with the same people again and again and again, millions and millions of times.

2) Going forward it works pretty much the same way: population increase has been pretty slow until recently, so the average person had only slightly more than two surviving children, four grandchildren, etc.

3) So there is plenty of room on your family tree for everybody who ever lived. The only thing that could possibly stop you from being descended from everybody alive 2,000 years ago would be if people didn’t mate at random. And of course they didn’t. But it seems pretty obvious to me that they mated in a “small world” network, where most people paired off close to home, but a non-trivial minority made large moves, and that’s really almost as good as random.

4) So basically when I say 2,000, or maybe 3,000 years, I’m just trying to be absolutely sure that I’m allowing time for the small world effect to work. An Indonesian trader in 500 AD settles in India. One of his million descendants in 1,000 AD settles in Arabia. One of his million descendants in 1,500 AD settles in Italy. I think that’s being really pessimistic, but if you think that’s overoptimistic then push it back another thousand years. People have been moving around for a long time, and there have always been long distance travelers. It only takes a few.

So why do the Europeans of today still look European, if they are all directly descended from everyone in the world 2,000 years ago. Because the Europeans of 2,000 years ago show up in the family trees of present day Europeans trillions of times, while the Africans and Asians of 2,000 years ago only show up millions or billions. (Give or take). In fact, if you go back that far, you can easily have direct ancestors from whom you did not inherit a single gene. So that’s how we can all be connected, and yet all still be different.

I got all 12 questions right, although I was a little uncertain about one or two.

I see however that four percent of the respondents got every question wrong, and I’m at a loss to understand how that could happen! The thing is, if everyone taking the test had guessed randomly on every question, the percentage who got everything wrong should have been about 1.5. Since most of the people taking the test were not guessing randomly, and since anyone with even a minimal knowledge of current affairs is almost certain to get at least a few questions right, the percentage who got everything wrong should have been much lower than that. So how could four percent have gotten all the questions wrong? Maybe people who dropped out of the test in the middle were still counted? If so, that would depress the scores for the later questions.

There has for a long time been a suspicion that Australoids had erectus admixture.

How long? I remember reading many years ago — maybe even 30 or 40 — that if paleontologists weren’t careful about the criteria they used to define Homo Erectus, their definitions would sometimes end up including the Australian Aborigines. (Well, the Abos certainly do have a different look to them, don’t they?)

Many (most?) Americans have a sense that there are three major races in the world (roughly corresponding to Dienekes’ ADMIXTURE run with K=3), but we don’t really have good words for them. White, Black, & Yellow? Caucasian, Negro, & Oriental? What? If you press us we’ll acknowledge that the people of some parts of the world don’t fit neatly into that framework, but I think there is a general sense that most people fall into one of the Big Three, and I do think it would be useful to have clear words corresponding to those perceived races.

The thing is though, some people really hate the idea of race, and deny that the term has any meaning at all. After all, except for some unimportant superficial differences, hasn’t science proved that we are all exactly the same under the skin? Those people don’t want us to have clear words for different races. “Negro” was a perfectly clear racial term for the people of Sub-Saharan Africa, but the word got taken away and replaced by “African-American”, which can’t be used as a racial term, unless you you don’t mind finding yourself talking about the African-American’s of Nigeria. ” Caucasian” is a perfectly clear racial term for the people of West Eurasia, provided you never have any reason talk about the people of the actual Caucasian mountains. And “Mongoloid” is a perfectly clear racial term for the people of East Eurasia, now that someone’s invented Down’s syndrome.

Of the three, “Caucasian” is probably the least problematic, so I’m not that anxious to see it go away. But if you have better suggestions I’m listening! 🙂

People who go to college tend to be smarter than average. If college actually influences people’s thinking, and pushes them in a more liberal direction, then wouldn’t we expect that, as a result, liberals would end up smarter on average than conservatives? (Imagine if all the smartest people went to college, and college converted 100% of them to liberalism!)

I’m thinking in particular of my own college experience. I’m somewhat conservative now, but I was considerably more liberal in college. I never felt any obvious pressure, it’s just that liberalism was in the air, something that was assumed. I gave up my religion in college. It didn’t take much of a push really, but I can think of a particular professor who gave me support. I might have had a far more difficult time of it at a conservative Catholic institution! Do we have any good information about the political leanings of college freshmen verses seniors?

In America there are 90 guns to every 100 people. I like those odds.

According to “The Old Way”, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the Kalahari Bushmen did not kill both twins. Rather they would abandon one of them, and would feel very sad that they had to do this.

My mother, who is Catholic, taught high school biology in Michigan for years. Whenever a student asked about evolution and religion she always pointed out (in front of the class!) that there was no reason why God couldn’t have used evolution to achieve His ends. Our school district didn’t have many hard core Bible thumpers who insisted on a 6000 year timeline, so the students were usually satisfied. My mother always felt it was a little risky even addressing the issue, but she never got into trouble over it. And frankly, as long as you are already religious, divinely guided evolution makes just as much sense, and is just as consistent with the evidence, as pure unguided natural selection. Evolution may indirectly undermine religion, by eliminating some of the necessity for God, but I don’t think it conflicts with most religions directly. We don’t want to play into the hands of the Fundies by forcing people to choose between one or the other.

The paywall is so flimsy that it might as well not exist. There are numerous ways to get around it, and unless there are some teeth hidden in there somewhere that I haven’t come across so far, nobody who has any technical expertise, or who knows anybody with any technical expertise, or who is capable of finding and following the instructions on a how-to-bypass-the-paywall blog post, is going to bother paying.

No, actually some of them will. Because even if you can get around it, the paywall does function as a sort of nag screen, and that does work with some people. Maybe that’s all the Times is hoping for.

As long as the paywall is based on cookies it will be trivial to get around it. Any real enforcing will have to be based on registration, and that’s incompatible with casual access through links. (Basing enforcement on IP address won’t work, because so many people browse the web from work. Plus, I can change my IP address simply by turning off my modem for a few minutes).

I do spend a lot of time clicking around the NYT site, and I understand their need to get paid. I do pay for cable TV, but most cable companies provide pretty much the same product, so I really don’t lose anything by not being able to simultaneously access Time Warner Road Runner and Verizon FiOS (my local duopoly). With news it’s different. Not everything is reported everywhere, or reported the same way, but right now I have free access to (almost) everything reported anywhere. That’s what the pay model threatens! I can afford a subscription to the NYT, but not also to the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the dozens of other news sources that I occasionally read. If everybody demands payment, we could go back to the world where everybody gets their news from one source. I think that’s what everyone is really afraid of. I can live in that world, but the one I’m in now is better.

Of course, somebody has to pay. With cable, I pay one provider, and I get vast amounts of content. The cable company takes care of passing some of my dollars on to the content providers, and everybody is happy. Likewise, with Internet, I pay one provider, and I get even vaster amounts of content. Same model for me, but my ISP doesn’t pass anything on.

In my ideal world, a fixed amount from my monthly ISP bill would get distributed somehow among all the content providers I access each month, and everybody would be happy again. There would still be pay sites of course, just like there is pay-per-view on cable, but sites like the NYT (or GNXP!) could make more money by attracting large numbers of “basic Internet” users. Most important, the fixed-cost-wide-access payment model would be preserved.

I think such a system is in fact technically possible. And of course in my ideal world, you wouldn’t have large numbers of sites doing their best to game the system and collect more than their fair share of the money, thereby wrecking everything. My ideal world is a really nice place to live! 🙂

I don’t read the Huffington Post that often, but I did notice this article, and it irritated me.

Aside from the obvious political agenda (minimizing the connection between heredity and IQ is always popular!), it seems very misleading to make a blanket assertion that heritability can vary between 0.00 and 1.00. My blue eyes were 100% determined by my genes, and short of gouging my eyes out at birth nothing in the environment was going to change that. I’m sure there are plenty of other traits like this, as well as traits where heritability can be pushed down from 1.00, but never anywhere close to 0.00.

I’ve always felt that reconstructions of Neanderthals generally looked far too much like modern Europeans. We don’t need to go all the way to slit-eyed killer apes (!), but the fact that the genetic distance between Neanderthals and modern Europeans is greater than the distance between modern Europeans and Africans suggests that the difference in appearance was probably also greater. I wonder what they really looked like! (I do think it’s at least possible they had fur!!!)

Razib, I’ve been reading this blog regularly, and I’m still not clear on how well the most recent genetic studies align with what I think is the simple story you get just by eyeballing the people of Europe. The simple story says that, while farming may have allowed the first farmers to demographically overwhelm their neighbors, the replacement was more complete in southern Europe, because the climate was a better match to Anatolia, and because there was easy access from the sea. This explains in a general way why southern Europeans are darker than northern/eastern Europeans — they look more like the people of the Middle East because a greater portion of their ancestry comes from the Middle East.

I’ve been telling people this story since I read Colin Renfrew’s “Language & Archaeology” years ago. It’s a very satisfying story, because it explains something that people can actually see with their own eyes. But now I keep reading about “near total replacement”. How can this be reconciled with the fact that people from different parts of Europe look so noticeably different? I can think of several possibilities, but I’m curious what you think about this.

Did they get any of those “ultrafiltered bone collagen radiocarbon dates” for modern humans in Europe? If those dates get pushed back as well, doesn’t the problem come back?

It is either true that, given the proper environment and upbringing, any child is a potential Einstein or Mozart, or else it isn’t true.

In its most extreme form, this is what the whole nature/nurture debate is about. Public confusion over the precise nature of the interaction between genes and environment takes nothing away from the fact that this is a perfectly clear, meaningful, and important question.

Wow. I don’t live in a food desert, but the map has accurate representations of all the houses and even garages in my neighborhood. I mean, as far as I can tell it gets the shapes right when houses are non-rectangular! This isn’t something I see on Google Maps for my neighborhood, although places like Manhattan have something similar. Where does this information come from?

Hey, if the only reason you can’t have a dog is because you have cats, don’t worry about it. For most of my childhood we had a cat and a dog in the same house, and it was one big happy family. The closest we ever came to a problem was when one cat died, and for a while the new kitten was terrified of the (big, friendly, extremely interested) dog. But they worked it out. And introducing a new puppy to the current cat never caused any problems at all. It’s certainly possible you could have trouble with particular animals, but in general, Bill Murray notwithstanding, dogs and cats can live together and get along just fine.

Kersey, really great article. I knew who Gorgeous George was, but you added a lot of good detail.

You run a good site. I've been reading it for some time now, and have jumped into other related sites. The information blitz is indeed enlightening, and provides a much more faithful map of what "is" than anything the MSM will touch.

Nice to make your acquaintance. Perhaps I'll post again.

JB

In just about all situations I can imagine, someone who knows you personally will know you better than someone who knows your genome. He’ll know your actual strengths and weaknesses, not just your potential. The one exception I can think of is that you have a gene that says you will get a certain genetic disease within the next 10 years. And how often is that going to happen? And besides, presumably you already know that yourself, and have already taken steps, and may not even be keeping it a secret.

One of the things I’ve always wondered about is to what degree Gould was popular not despite, but because of his biases. Telling people what they want to hear is always popular. I’m sure, for example, that the people in charge of Natural History magazine were appreciative of the way Gould consistently reinforced the conventional wisdom in regard to evolution, biology, and human nature.

But Gould was certainly a talented writer, so maybe he would have gotten the NH gig even if he had been solidly in E. O. Wilson’s camp on the issue. Maybe, but I have my doubts….

To anyone who has actually interacted in real life with attractive girls, it should be no surprise that any putative hot chick on the internet who appears to have decent writing/thinking abilities is a hoax.

Sample size of one: My high school girlfriend was as hot as anyone could ask for, and extremely smart. She went on to get a Ph.D. in history, and when she realized she couldn’t make a living from that she become a lawyer. I still regret that I wasn’t able to land her!

Hmmm, so collective cultural memory can sometimes be maladaptive. In other words:

If I have seen less far, it is by standing in the footprints of giants!

(Someone had this as their Usenet signature, back in the day, and I found it enormously amusing. I miss Usenet!)

Kersey,

I must say, your posts make my jaw clench and my stomach roil.
I've monitor Chicago radio stations, and have been following the ongoing flash mobs/robs by honors students since Black Memorial Day. WLS has had to (been forced to) address this situation morning noon and night since then, including the racial component, but they still have to tap dance around the glaring truth. It's sickening…the Tribune and Sun Times are even worse, but still better than Chicago's odious new Mayor Emmanuel and Top Cop McCarthy.
I've been reading a site called Second City Cop, and it's been highly educational. You get a feel for the real deal from actual Chicago street cops who eat, sleep and breathe the real BRA every day.
And speaking of riots, ever heard of the Zoot Suit Riots? I've known about it since I was a little kid (my mom told me about it), but it seems to be a rarely-visited corner of American history. I bring it up because I watched DePalma's "Black Dahlia" (a critical bomb, believe me) the other night, and the film opens in the middle of one of the riots. Just a few minutes ago, I took a look at what Wikipedia had to say about it, then I read your most recent posting. Needless to say, they do seem to synch up. Compare and contrast WWII-era America with today's BRA. It's interesting how angry white men handled their version of violent, surly, disrespectful, gangster-thug-punks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_suit_riots

What's that line from that old song? Ah, it's "We did it before, and we can do it again, and we can do it again!"

Seriously, my stomach knots when I read your site. I get exhausted just reading it (and your commentators), so I can imagine that the drain on you must be tremendous, as you have alluded. You're doing a lot of heavy lifting on this subject, but don't feel like you can't step away from time to time, as you may need. Take care of YOU first and foremost.

Kersey,

Many, many interesting comments on this post.

A few posts back, I mentioned the Zoot Suit Riots, an apparently little-known chapter in American history.

It would do everyone good to at least hit the Wikipedia article on this subject; it's a five minute read, and provides a very interesting parallel to what we're now experiencing.

Compare and contrast how our (still among us) forefathers, circa WWII, in L.A., dealt with the same kinds of things we face today…alien, surly, aggressive, violent, dumb, easily identifiable (by the CLOTHES they wore) thugs-punks-gangsters, with this brave new world of 2011.

Zoot. Suit. Riot.

If they could do it, we can.

If THEY can do it, we can.

Kersey,

I just…
Wow. I just can't take much more of this…

The story made national radio news briefly, and when I heard it, I suspected, no kidding, that this was part and parcel BRA…

I'm an old man, Kersey, and within my lifetime, I have seen the eclipse of this country, nay, this WORLD. I was born right at the twilight, and retain ancestral memories of how things once were, but as dying embers, as the waning light of a once glorious beacon.

My sweet Lord, we are in a Dark Age.

These are the Dark Ages.

PS: Usually one to appreciate (actually relish) morbid humor, your juxtaposition of this story with the Caddyshack pool scene actually made me sadder, and revolted and sickened me…

Good show, Old Chap!

Keep up the good work.

Kersey,

The Crazies play Peoria:

http://blackpeoria.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/update-black-mob-lures-peoria-police-and-firefighters-to-dumpster-fire-then-starts-shooting-them-with-fireworks/

The number of people who take a given position is influenced by more than just fertility; there is also conversion. What the flat trend lines say to me (as a partisan for the secular side) is that unbelievers have been winning the conversion battle (through superior argument and evidence), but believers have been winning the fertility battle, so the overall result has been stasis. If so, this means the effect of differential fertility, while less obviously visible, has still been powerful. If the fertility rates had been reversed, I think the BIBLE=1 side would probably have been totally marginalized by now, and the US would be a rather different place.

Kersey,

These movie comments make me chuckle. Since I recently saw it, I've been saying that "The King's Speach" is the whitest movie I've ever seen.

The entire production is superb, from the script to the acting to the soundtrack. I know a bit about movies, and I think this one is destined to be a cinema classic alongside such films as "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Bridge On the River Kwai."

A movie about the King of England, ruler of his people. I only watched it twice (though I'm sure I'll be seeing it again. This film can bear multiple viewings. The script is canny, and the movie is witty and cheeky), and I don't remember seeing a black person in it. No retrofitted black valet for Churchill, for instance.

Like I said, maybe the whitest movie I've seen.

Kersey,

It is WE who appreciate what YOU are doing. Thanks ever so much, pal. Your bravery is inspiring. Your mordant wit is invigorating. You are the future. Thank you.

Hey, "This is a hate site,"

You're spot-on in that pronouncement, for this site highlights the venomous hatred that a segment of our society has for anything good, decent, civilized, pure and uplifting.

So, in that sense, this is indeed a hate site.

Jackass.

"GI Joe" certainly doesn't express himself like a man with an IQ of 135.

Surgeon, please.

As I've suggested before, an inquiry into the events of the Zoot Suit Riots would be very enlightening for anyone concerned with the problems of criminal minorities in our midsts.

Research this topic and see how the men of the "Greatest Generation" handled their version of our present day strife.

Zoot. Suit. Riot.

Hey, Anon,

What do you mean these people "don't do shit?"

Kersey started this site. He's taken a personal hit, so it seems, because of it. Seems he's laid a lot on the line. Where did that march across the Pettus bridge vid go?

There are a lot of people sharing information here. They're all doing something about "it."

They DO a lot, and they WRITE a lot.

What do you do, mister "faggot" hurler?

Here, son, is what I do when I have to bump up against the detritus of BRA: I never let my guard down, never relax for an instant, and my hand is gripping something cold, hard and sharp in my pocket. I am a man of peace, but I will be merciless with someone who tries to take that peace away.

Me, I never turn my back around 'em.

Faggot, please.

It

I'm sorry, but again, I do not think "GIJOE" expresses himself like a person who has a 135 IQ.

"GIJOE," please.

Evoluton doesn’t produce less-fit individuals, pretty much by definition. The environment they are adapted to can change, of course.

Fitness != desirability. Evolution (i.e., natural selection) may, by definition, always increase fitness. But the traits that are more “fit” in a certain environment can also be traits that people may reasonably consider undesirable. For example, if, in some parallel universe, a society were to make it difficult for smart people to have children (let’s say, by expecting both partners to take demanding jobs that leave little time or energy for children), and easy for stupid people to have children (let’s say, by flat out subsidizing them), then in that society (environment), people of low intelligence could easily be more fit, in an evolutionary sense, than people of high intelligence. And yet it would be quite reasonable for people in that society to consider this a bad thing! And quite reasonable for them to make efforts to change the situation.

(Oh wait. That would be Eugenics! Sorry! Off limits! Taboo! Thoughtcrime! Forget I ever said it….)

the practice of Eugenics … been has been a big factor in leading to genocide.

People keep saying this, but is it actually true?

It’s not clear to me that belief in eugenics has ever actually led to genocide. It seems to me the Nazis were motivated primarily by nationalism, antisemitism, and paranoia, and when they talked about eugenics they were simply using currently fashionable language to further insult people they already hated for other reasons. And aside from the Nazis, what other cases of “genocide” has eugenics ever been implicated in? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Stalin and Mao each arguably killed more people than Hitler, but I don’t see a eugenics connection with either of them. What have I missed?

Kersey,

A highly enlightening post. I see now why you're writing about college football. It is indeed VERY important in understanding BRA.

Your skew on this is really quite fascinating, and your passion shows.

I think you may be on the bleeding edge of the zeitgeist that is the awakening of Those Who Can See. Do you ever consider that one day, you'll be considered a part of history? One of the pioneers who bucked up on their hind legs and pointed to the truth? And with such a mordant, truculent wit?

Ah, well, time will tell that tale. Just as it's telling the tale of the demise of BRA at this very moment.

Keep up the good work.

Kersey,

I had avoided video of this incident, but had seen a few stills and read the story, so I Saw what it was all about.

But I just watched it. My heart was in my stomach. My pulse raced. I was appalled and horrified beyond words.

And as I sat here and assimilated what I had just seen, a visceral anger and hatefulness rose up in me, as I watched yet another senseless assault on simple human decency.

Then a question to myself (and most of us here): What do I do when the black tsunami surges up MY street. An above poster mentioned being swallowed by the mob. Absolutely terrifying.

So, do we run? Run and hide?

Kersey, you have utterly established that the black undertow always follows the white flighters, who move farther into the interior and erect new cities they carve from the bare earth. So there is no place to "hide."

The Crazies are real, and they're here. Crazy people for crazy times. How does one deal with The Crazies?

The Boy Scout motto has never been more applicable.

Hey, Anonymous Weasel @ 6:15,

Good. Hit the road.

Bet you were always picked last.

Because you throw like a girl.

Kersey,

Another stellar post. I'm heartened by the number of commentators who understand your angle on these collegiate football articles as a microcosm of our national problem.

Of course, it's subjective, but it seems to me that the caliber of discourse here has been trending upward since you started this series.

Your reportage has stuck a nerve.

Kersey,

Holy cow. If this is being characterized as a "mini-riot," and it was a thousand strong, just what is MSM's definition of a "riot-riot?"

Kersey,

Wow. Real horrorshow, my droogie. I've poked into the DIA murals before. Tells quite the bedtime story.

And another thing: Where'd you come up with all these crazy, new, hilarious commentators? I told you, this site's discourse level is on an upswing.

Oh, and a personal aside…BRA whapped me in the face today not five minutes into my sojourn into the world.

I said, "NO."

Kersey,

One of your finest posts, in my opinion, and I've read them all.

As bad as things seem, it's so relieving and refreshing to know that free expression, free thought, and free inquiry still exist, and are being carried forward by someone like you (oh, and your august commentators, myself included, of course).

I'm very interested in what next you've got up your sleeve.

Interesting. Up until the mid 90’s I knew almost all of the songs, even just from their names. But after that I was unfamiliar with more than half of them, and didn’t recognize them even on listening.

Few on the list were real favorites of mine. I wonder though — are those songs the top favorites of anybody? How many people are there whose individual musical preferences actually track the averaged preference of an entire nation?

(BTW, is it just me, or does anyone else thing The Sign sounds like repurposed Christian rock?)

Kersey,

Incredible post. I must echo Baldowl on that champagne comment. I really did have to stop for a moment, look away from the screen, smile and chuckle to myself, shaking my head, at the audacity of that comment. Really, you're most mordant comment yet. And then BAM, you follow up with the very next line. Sharp stuff.

On a more serious note, the direction you're heading into is dizzying, to say the least. Some might even say revolutionary. The implications…well, I have an inkling. It makes my heart pump and my blood race.

I'm as ready as I can be. There's a big black cloud on the horizon. The storm could break as early as sometime in October. This is Apocalypse Now. We're living history here.

Ten years might be a tad too soon, but I see nothing implausible about everybody in the world — or at least everybody in the developed world — eventually having their genome done. The big question is whether there turns out to be any significant medical benefit. If there is, it will create an industry, and sequencers could become as common as X-ray machines.

“And yet today, very few people today would deny that Italians or Poles or Ashkenazim are white. The definition expanded from the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Protestant identities to include pretty much every European background.”

I’m not entirely certain about Jews, but I don’t believe for a minute that Italians (the people of Cicero and Leonardo!) or Poles were ever considered non-white by anybody.

I asked my mother about this once. She is in her 80’s, of pure Eastern European extraction, and she would often tell us stories about how her people were mistreated, and ridiculed as “hunkies,” by more established white Americans. Yet when I told her of the claim that Eastern Europeans were once considered non-white, she was flabbergasted! The idea anyone might ever have thought of her, or her people, as non-white, had never once occurred to her, not in her entire life.

Rather than a timed slide show, I think this would work better with Forward and Back buttons. I found I was sitting on the Start and Stop buttons, and didn’t ever want to go to the next slide automatically.

Wait a minute!!! If the minimum wage is $10/hr in Canada, $13/hr in France, and $16/hr in Australia, why do those countries still have illegal immigrants?

It looks like this experiment is already being tried in other countries, so we should pay attention to how well it is working there. For example, Australia gets boatloads of would-be refugees, but do they get visa-overstayers who slip into an underground economy, like we do? If a high minimum wage really is an automatic deterrent to illegal immigration, to what extent is it being undercut by “compassionate” social policies in France and Canada? And so on.

The idea of using a high minimum wage as a weapon against illegal immigration is new (or at least it hasn’t been brought up much by the pro-restriction side) and interesting (in part because, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t conflict with any of the other policy changes advocated by the restrictionist side, so it could simply be added to them, even by those who don’t accept the rest of Unz’s analysis). So we need to look at the experience of other countries carefully to see to what extent it might actually help.

Kersey,

Another hilarious post. This stuff almost writes itself, but you always manage to give the story a little je ne sais quois and take it to next absurd level.

Quick side note re: Klan uniforms depicted as white sheets and pillowcases:

Twenty or so years ago, I was at the home of a colleague who was twenty or so years older than I. This was his family home, and he had inherited it from his grandfather. The home was a massive three-story farm house, all hardwood floors and high ceilings, a wrap-around porch on two sides, etc., circa 1910. It had the original lightning rod on the roof.

So I'm over there, admiring the place, and he says, "Hey, I gotta show you something."

He takes me up to the attic (so now, we're actually FOUR stories up), opens up this ancient steamer trunk, and pulls out a full Klan uniform…the hood, and the gown.

"This was my grandfathers," he tells me. He spent time in the Klan in the '30s, and this was his uniform.

As I held the hood and gown, I knew this was FAR from a sheet and pillow case. This was a bona fide uniform. It was made of hemp, very thick, professionally sewn, hemmed…the hood, my gosh, this thing was terrifying…the cone jutted three feet back, stiff as a board, the eye holes were stitched and seemed, the flaps on front and back that fit over the shoulders firmly anchored the whole array…utterly professional. As was the gown…substantial, sewn, hemmed. Wearing this, I thought, you could be hit with a rock and not feel it.

Far from a sheet and pillowcase, it was a professional uniform. And I should know, because I've worn one.

I was surprised when my colleague told me about Klan activity in this particular town, and in the other small towns throughout the region, in the '20s and '30s, because, I had believed at the time, that this region of the country had no Klan activity.

But they were here. Masked vigilantes in identical professional uniforms (designed to strike utter terror into the hearts of evildoers within their community…a very SUPERSTITIOUS segment, then, as now) riding the night, lighting the signal, and sending a message.

Reminds me of another hooded vigilante, come to think of it…

Kersey,

I can't bear to read all the comments. Awhile back, I gave accolades to the commentary here for an upswing in the discourse.

Apparently, I was a bit premature in that.

Where did these people come from, with their "Cain this" and their "Cain that?" Do they not understand a single thing you've been exposing, lo, these many months?

For the love of pizza, Kersey, do they not understand that, no matter what, Cain is an African-American [sic]?

I thought we were making inroads here.

Now, maybe not so much.

Hopefully, it's only a temporary departure from reality, brought on by the bizarre mania political discourse engenders.

Ugh. I need to take a shower.

Just…yuck.

Kersey,

Good show, old sport.

What I find interesting is how quickly the change occurred, which really does suggest selection. Since we don’t yet know the genes involved, is this a viable candidate for introgression from archaics?

Also, while “wooly” hair occurs in the tropics outside of Africa, it never seems to be the really tightly curled variety you find within Africa, while within Africa it never seems to be loosely curled (except in areas where it could possibly be explained by back migration from Eurasia) . Maybe the primitive state for modern humans was really something like the hair of Australian Aborigines, while the tightly curled hair of modern Africans also introgressed from archaics?

Kersey,

"Drag addiction" and "black distract" are HILARIOUS. You've coined some neologisms. I'm going to use them, and give you, oh, say a NICKEL every time.

Dig: Even your TYPOS are funny!