@Andy

I wouldn’t be surprised is the next target of the identitarian left is evolution itself. The blank slate view they espouse is incompatible with evolution and genetics
 

Actually, it is the IQists who espouse a blank slate ideology. IQism and geneticism and HBDism all proceed from philosophical antecedents which are quite Lockean in nature, and would be seen to be so if their adherents would ever bring them clearly into consciousness, but they don't.

This is rather easy to demonstrate in the case of IQ. Suppose we take the claims of the HBDers at face value and stipulate that Blacks have an average IQ of 85. Even with that being the case, the much larger absolute size of the White population means that the left tail of its own IQ distribution contains more 85 IQ people than the entire Black population can boast of, yet you never hear the IQists complaining about them. This means, by their own lights, that the bad Black behavior which they abhor (assuming, again, that such is real and demonstrable and characteristic of Blacks and not of low IQ Whites, which were it not the case would imply that the IQists are either not observing correctly or are employing a double standard) must be due to something other than IQ---either "nurture" (which they scoff at) or some other essential factor of race that lies beneath its physical manifestation.

Yet the so-called "race realists," who are quick to bewail a deracinated culture all the livelong day, are perfectly ready to accept a deracinated intelligence as the sole arbiter of civilizational worth. Having already rejected nurture out of hand, and essentialism being too metaphysical for their limited grasp, they are constrained to fall back upon the hobgoblin of IQ itself, the flickering movement of a content-free intellect, the pure Lockean abstracta---the blank slate. They may try to get around this difficulty by introducing whimsical notions like "time preference" and r/K theory, but that is just recapitulating the problem and bringing in essentialism by the backdoor.

For if their really exists such a thing as race (and I believe that there does) then it has as little to do with IQ as it does with skin color. Let there be no talk here of genes, and especially not of that abominably false distinction between genotype and phenotype. The DNA in a person is still "phenotype"; it is every bit as physical as the rest of him is, i.e. it is part of the phenomenon. There is only soul and body, matter and form; there is no third possibility. Everything not in the one must be in the other.

Let the Left attack evolution and they would only be conferring a boon upon us. Getting rid of that system of superficial causality is something that the Alt-Right should have done for itself a long time ago. Yet it appears, by the tenacious manner in which they cling to it, that the race realists are more keen to defend Darwinism (which actually undermines their own position) than to defend the truth about race, which requires essentialism in order to be articulated coherently. The cause of this confusion is something about which I'm not going to speculate here, but I will say that the whole project will go nowhere as long as it is planted firmly in the fairyland of HBD.

Replies: @obwandiyag, @Jack D, @peterike, @Autochthon, @banopus

Cleopatra was of Greek descent, from Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals.

Replies: @njguy73, @banopus