NYT’s “news” section

always get a chuckle out of that

Of course the people WHO GOT IN weren’t discriminated against.

Jesus, so stupid

Does Mishra’s employment of a character in The Great Gatsby and the real life racist he is modeled on to begin his review of Ferguson’s book deserve a beating? Well, if we can trust The Guardian’s photographer, Mishra is a slight-framed colored man, but the review itself concerns Ferguson’s pro-colonial, West is Best, views, and the first few paragraphs of it are an artful sketch of earlier practitioners of that trade (and a reminder that The Great Gatsby should be read again.) It would be difficult to say much about pre-WWII theorists of colonialism without noticing their racism. Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about these things at all. With respect to other, not explicitly racist, concepts and attitudes the similarities between Ferguson and his forbears seem clear enough.

Ferguson’s response to the review (found at the same link as the review itself) identifies him as a boor, if not a bore (it’s all rather exciting, really) somewhat like Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan. At least he hasn’t for himself played the I’m-married-to-a-colored-lady card. Has he?

I’m advised by the review above not to read Civilization if I’m not well versed in history. Fortunately I don’t have to agonize over whether I qualify: Mishra says,
” [Ferguson’s] book is immune to the broadly tragic view – that every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism – just as it is to humour and irony.”
Ferguson’s response confirms this. Reason enough to leave the book alone.

Esther Dyson? Brian Eno? Those people are morons.

Since the males available for adultery in a matriarchal society will also be from outside the group I do not see how the likely coefficient of relatedness necessarily increases.

I wont mate with… cold fish Nicole Kidman 
 
Yeah, yeah, that’s what they said about Grace Kelly and say about Catherine Deneuve and Peta Wilson too. I say come on and freeze me baby!

Teri Horton is not active in *any* market 
 
Well turning down offers of 2 & 9 million counts as active AFAIAC. 
 
After doing a little research I found that there are studies showing a mild increase in the acceptance rate of low offers by receivers as the stakes rise. 
 
My personal experience mimics the game insofar as a good rule of thumb is that one shouldn’t ever go for more than 75% of the pie even when totally in the driver’s seat. Of course that assumes that the customer is aware of your cost structure.

she believes it’s worth a lot more and won’t be ripped off. 
 
She is an active player in the Pollock market. That is hardly the Ultimatum Game. Also, any relaxation of the stranger rule in regards to the players in Ultimatum will result in extraneous “reputation” considerations to cloud the results.

The results of this test are more indicative of aggression directed at the testers rather than an irrational response to the proposer. Harvard undergraduates are relatively affluent. $5 is approaching the $0 edge condition and it makes sense that the effects of a zero offer will start showing up at such a niggardly amount. 
 
Bumping the cash up three orders of magnitude would surely result in more meaningful results (and a much higher acceptance rate among the responders.) The test as it stands is influenced too highly by the marginal utility of pocket change.

over the past 10,000 years there certainly has been quite a bit of evolution. search for ‘recent human evolution’ in our archives. we know that cranial morphology has changed in britain in the past 1,000 years. 
 
Considering the all the different waves of invasion that occurred during the millenium previous to that one, it’s not surprising that something as complicated as skull shape continued to boil around for a while especially when you consider that there was a more or less continuous admixture of Celts from beyond the Pale (or even Wales) as they became more integrated into British society. Cultural standards of beauty were changing fashion during that time too. I guess that is “evolution” if you want to call it that but it seems to me a lot of it is merely a lot of sideways movement vis a vis the “advancement” of the species. 
 
It seems a lot of stuff on this site is pure speculation along the lines of Bruce Lahn’s hypothesis about microcephalin and ASPM. His critics charge that the gene changes he notes may not even relate to any phenotype changes let alone any change in general intelligence. I guess I’ll just have to study your archives more so I get a better handle on the current expert opinion on recent genetic evolution. 
 
It doesn’t make any sense to me that there can possibly have been any natural selection since the start of the Industrial Revolution however; given the population explosion that is occurring as a result of the huge increase in human productivity that the revolution unleashed. I guess you could call it “success” when the biomass of homo sapiens exceeds that of the ants but it is hard to call it better.  
 
I don’t see that humans are any more intelligent now than they were in the past. Plumbing didn’t get back to Roman standards until well into the 18th Century. Newton and Bach lived to ripe old ages without the benefit of MRI machines or penicillin. 
 
I’d also say that the mass success of the human race has been at least as much attributable to the efforts of engineers and businessmen as it has been to the the scientists. Smart people go into science for the intellectual stimulation and creative freedom it provides as they would probaly be too bored in other work. And not withstanding the scandalously low wages by yuppie standards, in the global scope of things doing science is a high status occupation that pays pretty well, is largely indoor work, and doesn’t require heavy lifting.

While i am familiar with the allure of evolution as a beer commercial, nowadays the only thing such men drive up are the welfare roles. 
 
Among the contemporaries of Newton and Darwin it was more along the lines of riding to hounds and imbibing port rather than pickup trucks and Budweiser although you seem to be implying that the current hunters in your neck of the woods are continuing to win the evolutionary race.

there is no objective sense in which we can say evolution “advances” toward any goal. 
 
Survival and reproduction fill the bill for me. 
 
I think we could say there is evidence that the average IQ of humanity has risen 
 
What evidence? Are you saying that there has been genetic evolution in the human faculty of intelligence in the short span of time that IQ tests have existed? 
 
Charles Murray said “Who wants to be an elephant”: IQ isn’t everything or even much of anything to some.  
 
Especially if it cuts into ones hunting and drinking! 🙂

Leibniz also didn’t have any children and God knows studying calculus never did anything to enhance my sex life. 
 
There is no evidence that the human race has advanced in anything other than numbers since the end of the last ice age. Give a healthy paleolithic man a shave and a haircut and he could pass for anyones cousin Fred. I daresay the distribution of the traits of strength, speed, or cleverness over the population of ancestral hunter-gatherers is any different than it is over the current population. 
 
Some argue that we have adapted to live with crowds and germs but becoming docile mass consumption units is hardly an “advance” in my book.

The advance of our species was driven by the hunting and drinking men that fathered the most children.