Replies: @gcochran

So show me – but you can’t.

 

Replies: @gcochran

The study he referred to does not exist. It is an urban legend.

 

Replies: @Emilia, @gcochran

About 20 years ago the French national health service did the same study with new borns and their parents but with DNA. Results were kept completely confidential. Parents weren’t told the real purpose of the study was to verify paternity Parents were told the purpose was to test for genetic diseases. 10% of the babies were not the children of the man who thought he was their father.

Replies: @Anon, @Emilia, @gcochran

What did he do?

Replies: @gcochran

back six or seven generations
 

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @Lot, @gcochran, @Anonymous, @Alden, @Bardon Kaldian

I’ve never been genuinely fat, but it’s a very ‘American’ thing to reach for the idiot’s simple “they must be lazy and gluttonous” explanation.
 

Replies: @gcochran, @Neil Templeton, @obwandiyag, @Stealth

thus it's probably fair to extrapolate this process to any other mammal, including humans. such that you could say, if you deliberately control who has sex with who, you could probably max out humans for whatever traits you wanted, within a known number of generations.

horse generations are shorter, so it would take longer with people, but you could probably get there in 200 years at most, 10 generations, as long as you were more efficient than the horse breeder guys.

this seems to happen faster than with plants. you can read all the work that agriculture guys have been doing for over 100 years in their farm labs, and the grains they produce are still slowly getting better, after many more generations than with animals. with farm animals, there's lots of incentive and pressure to make cows and hogs and chickens better, but i'm less clear on how much effect drugs are having on them versus breeding better animals in the first place. although it's true agriculture yields are also improved by chemicals. crop yield per acre depends a lot on chemicals.

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Dr. Raff’s Vita

CURRICULUM VITAE

Jennifer A. (Kedzie) Raff

Department of Anthropology

University of Kansas



Education

2008 Ph.D., Anthropology and Genetics (dual degree), Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN.

Dissertation: An Ancient DNA Perspective on the Prehistory of the Lower Illinois Valley

2008 M.A., Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

2001 B.A., Biology and Anthropology (double major): Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

Professional Positions

2015-present Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas.

2013-2015 Research Fellow: Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

2011-2013 Postdoctoral Fellow: Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Molecular Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University at Chicago

2008-2011 Postdoctoral Associate: Department of Anthropology, University of Utah at Salt Lake City

2002-2008 Graduate Researcher: Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Indiana University at Bloomington

2001-2002 Research Assistant: Department of Biology, Indiana University at Bloomington

1997-2001 Undergraduate Research Assistant: Department of Biology, Indiana University at Bloomington
 

Replies: @gcochran

You could ask the same thing about Jews.

Queer was very much in among 19th century Prussian (and then united German) military officers. The Nazi Party was founded in a gay bar. Ernst Rohm, Brownshirt leader, was a pederast.

Satan needs brutal queers and rewards them in this world.

Replies: @Eric Novak, @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

No, you said that “at best”. As if to imply there were good odds that a Jefferson male waan’t the father.
 

And this was AFTER you had previously eliminated Thomas Jefferson as a potential father, based on no evidence of any kind, but an Ann Coulter-tier book.
 

What? Yes they can, Y-STR can distinguish between even father and son.
 

In the paternity dispute of former US President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Y-STR and Y-SNP analysis demonstrated that several currently living male relatives of Thomas Jefferson share the same Y haplotype as a living descendent of Eston Hemings Jefferson, son of Sally Hemings—the President’s African American female slave (except for one repeat difference at one Y-STR, which could be easily explained by a mutation) (Foster et al. 1998). This indicates that President Jefferson had sired Eston Hemings Jefferson, or alternatively, his brother Randolph did; two scenarios such Y-chromosome analysis cannot differentiate. However, living male descendent of Thomas Corbin Woodson, the previously assumed full brother of Eston Hemings Jefferson, showed a very different Y haplotype, indicating that his biological father was a different man (Foster et al. 1998).
 

It then went on to dispell the notion that they visited regularly and that anyone but Jefferson is the father.
 

Incorrect; the same standard of proof is used daily in the United States to establish paternity. Thomas Jefferson is the father of Eston, it’s 100% proven.
 

This indicates that President Jefferson had sired Eston Hemings Jefferson, or alternatively, his brother Randolph did; two scenarios such Y-chromosome analysis cannot differentiate.
 

Your entire post relies on long quotes of no relevance and whimpy cries of “ad hominem”, as if to camouflage a mere two points of your own: that Thomas Jefferson was 65 when Eston was born and that another Hemmijgs descendant’s family refuses DNA testing: hardly evidence of any kind against his paternity.
 

The second (and most recent) report was released as a book in 2011: https://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Hemings-Controversy-Report-Scholars-Commission/dp/0890890854
Here are the first 15 pages: https://cap-press.com/pdf/1179.pdf
An overview from Amazon:

In 2000, the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society asked a group of more than a dozen senior scholars from across the country to carefully examine all of the evidence for and against the allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, and to issue a public report. In April 2001, after a year of study, the Scholars Commission issued the most detailed report to date on the issue. With but a single mild dissent, the views of the distinguished panel ranged from ”serious skepticism” to a conviction that the allegation was ”almost certainly false.” This volume, edited by Scholars Commission Chairman Robert F. Turner, includes the ”Final Report”–essentially a summary of arguments and conclusions–as it was released to the press on April 12, 2001. However, several of the statements of individual views–which collectively total several hundred carefully footnoted pages and constitute the bulk of the book–have been updated and expanded to reflect new insights or evidence since the report was initially released.
 

I looked harder and found this page which links to a 40 page summary from the book: https://www.tjheritage.org/the-scholars-commission
It’s not possible to cut and paste from that, but I suggest at minimum looking at the final paragraph on page 18.
 

Replies: @Sam Coulton, @gcochran

I really don't think that you, as a Founding Stock type person, fully appreciate how grave an insult "go back to where you came from" is to a non-Founding Stock person. It's not the same as saying "go to Hell". It is an attempt to negate the person's entire life in this country, in effect to label them an n-word or a 2nd class citizen.

This is what the Left is getting at when they talk about "white privilege" - it is exactly that lack of ability to understand the full implications of your words or deeds because your birth puts you in a situation where it can never apply to you - "Hey, what's the big deal?" that enrages non-whites so much. In the past, people used to have the same attitude toward calling people the n-word or a fag, etc. - why it's no different than calling someone an idiot - no harm is intended.

While it is sometimes useful to be able to push people's hot buttons like when I joke about certain white ethnic groups perhaps loving the bottle a little too much, you have to know when you are going too far. Our beloved Buffalo Joe apparently reached his tipping point over just such an issue.

Replies: @William Badwhite, @peterike, @black sea, @LoutishAngloQuebecker, @gcochran, @Art Deco, @anon

The hacks use a 0.8°C change over 150 years to determine the planet will be doomed if we don't do something.

Never mind that 0.8°C is not statistically significant in a fair sample. In @Peter Johnson world, you just get a lot of data points so you can have a very low but "statistically significant" correlation coefficient.

Yeah, I'm old... I can still use a slide rule to calculate an orbit. I didn't have the luxury of false precision.

Replies: @gcochran

The correlation within the self-identified blacks between IQ and European ancestry is positive but quite small (r = 0.09)
 

Replies: @gcochran, @Counterinsurgency, @Peter Johnson

In Dan Brown's novel, Inferno, someone creates a virus that randomly sterilizes one-third of humanity to reign in population growth.

It must have been the zeitgeist, because I had the same idea months before the book was published -- but the virus was designed to be choosy in what kinds of humans it would sterilize. Many other people must have thought of the same thing. It's probably appeared in lots of science fiction stories over the years.

One wonders if this is possible, and shudders to think of the consequences if anyone were to have such power.

Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Hunsdon, @gcochran, @dux.ie, @Kronos

Blacks should be repatriated back to Africa.
 

For better or for worse, we are stuck with black people. It was America's original sin to drag them over here, but we're stuck with them now.

Any solution to any problem has to start with an accurate diagnosis before you can apply the cure. Unfortunately, we live in an age where the opposite is true. Society and government start from the premise that all racial gaps are due to racism (and in fact race doesn't even exist and has no genetic basis at all). This is like believing that disease is caused by an excess of bad humors in the blood - the "cure" that then follows (bleeding the patient) is of course wrong too. As is the case with many failing causes, lack of empirical proof or success only causes the proponents to double down even more. E. German academic journals were expounding on the validity of Marxist-Leninist economic theory right up until the day that the Berlin Wall fell. As the doubts grew, any dissenting voices were repressed all the more. But if you attempt to posit a different or genetic cause then you are a "racist" and beyond the pale of polite society. As long as this situation prevails, there's really no hope for a solution.

What would a realistic solution look like? It would start with a realistic appraisal of black strengths (and weaknesses) and propensity toward violence. There is a small % of black people who are intelligent and calm enough (Obama, although not actually African American is their poster boy) to thrive in white society on equal terms. The rest need a much more structured environment than what is currently being offered (until they end up in prison, where things are REALLY structured). Ideally this structure would come from within the black community itself, since people hate taking orders from outsiders. Black education (for those who do not show mainstream intellectual talent at an early age) would be aimed more at blacks strengths in the kinetic, improvisational, musical, athletic and visio-spatial realm because they are never going to learn material with a high level of abstraction anyway. How you could get jobs for 13% of the population out of this, I can't say, but what we are doing now is just throwing $ down the drain for the 1/2 or more of blacks who just don't have the intellectual HP to benefit from an education in abstract concepts.

Replies: @gcochran, @frankie p, @AnotherDad

Back in the 1970s, when I spent a summer in Newfoundland, I met plenty of people who had hoped that the former colony would join the US, rather than Canada.

Replies: @gcochran

Davis did nothing for Jackson except get him killed by indulging his kid brothers comic book ideas. His lawyer Fay Stender (who edited Jackson's gibberish into Soledad Brother book) then quit as Jackson's lawyer after getting into a shouting match with him when he demanded she bring him in
guns and explosives had realised that he was a lot less well endowed in the mental department. Davis could not see past his physical appeal but according to Stender his plans after a break ohe was violent anti white terrorism

Jackson ordered Rubico to open all the cells and along with several other inmates he overpowered the remaining correction officers and took them, along with two inmates, hostage. Five other hostages, officers Jere Graham, Frank DeLeon and Paul Krasnes, along with two white prisoners, were killed and found in Jackson's cell. Three other officers, Rubico, Kenneth McCray, and Charles Breckenridge, were also shot and stabbed, but survived.[17] After finding the keys for the Adjustment Center's exit, Jackson along with fellow inmate and close friend Johnny Spain escaped to the yard where Jackson was shot dead from a tower and Spain surrendered.[18][19] Jackson was killed just three days prior to the start of his murder trial for the 1970 killing of officer John Mills.[19]
 

Replies: @Steve Sailer, @njguy73, @gcochran

No different from other Lebanese Shia or Sunni Muslims. Or Druze. Their genetic makeup is pretty uniform, and not dependent on religion. Muslims in Lebanon have the same amount of Phoneician in them. Similar can be said about many Palestinians, Jordanians and Syrians

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-phoenicians-dna/in-lebanon-dna-may-yet-heal-rifts-idUSL0559096520070910

https://stepfeed.com/dna-tests-prove-lebanese-are-direct-descendants-of-ancient-phoenicians-8777

Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @gcochran

Replies: @MarkinLA, @gcochran

hilarious how enraging this obvious fact is to the eternal child boomer.

moronic child boomers like gregory cochran will jump in and say some irrelevant bullshit like ancient greek math/science was beyond that of 5th century dutchmen or whatever. complete non-sequitur unless greg would like to say a 1969 chevy is more technically advanced than a 2019 tesla.

we haven't lost shit; all of the tech is better and we aren't close *to knowing how to do it*. stop the lies about "not wanting to spend the money."

Replies: @Mr. Anon, @gcochran, @Anonymous

Replies: @Sean, @gcochran, @anon, @backup

Might makes right Jack? Really? If you are right, what do we need civilization for?

Replies: @gcochran

Wikipedia:

An Arabic compendium of Meteorology, called al-'Athar al-`Ulwiyyah (Arabic: الآثار العلوية‎) and produced c. 800 CE by the Antiochene scholar Yahya ibn al-Bitriq, was widely circulated among Muslim scholars over the following centuries.[1] This was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century – and by this means, during the Twelfth-century Renaissance, entered the Western European world of medieval scholasticism.[2] Gerard's "old translation" (vetus translatio) was superseded by an improved text by William of Moerbeke, the nova translatio, which was widely read, as it survives in numerous manuscripts; it received commentary by Thomas Aquinas and was often printed during the Renaissance.[3]
 

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

I will interpret that remark as you cannot refute any of his arguments.

Replies: @Bubba, @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Dr. Peter Duesberg, a modern day Galileo, is a professor of molecular biology at UC Berkeley and an expert on retroviruses.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-05-21-vw-2451-story,amp.html

He authored an excellent book in 1996 called Inventing the AIDS Virus. Prior to that he wrote a paper in ‘91 or ‘92 that was published in The Heritage Foundation magazine (which I can no longer find the link to) that argued the AIDS retrovirus was just a marker and could not be responsible for the the death of anyone who had it. Here is a link to a similar article in ‘95.

https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/duesberg-on-aids-causation-the-culprit-is-noncontagious-risk-factors-58592/amp

If I recall Dr. Duesberg correctly, one thing he stated was that the AIDS virus violates Koch’s Postulates on infectious diseases. Here is his old website that is still (miraculously) online. https://www.duesberg.com/

Anyway, Dr. Duesberg’s lab was defunded and he no longer studies retroviruses for his sins against the High Church of Globohomoism.

Replies: @Gordo, @gcochran, @Coag

Men-who-have-sex-with-men are vastly over represented in HIV infections. Given that they are <3% of the population, it would be surprising if they were the majority.

Replies: @gcochran, @ben tillman, @Anonymous

http://drugdiscoveryopinion.com/2009/06/toxoplasmosis-linked-to-traffic-accidents/

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

I think this is part of it, but another large part is multicausal/rare random mutation as with schizophrenia.
 

Replies: @gcochran

I think this is part of it, but another large part is multicausal/rare random mutation as with schizophrenia.

I don’t find Cochran’s germ theory convincing. We have exactly one example of a germ having complex behavioral effects in human beings, and its effects are subtle (e.g. slightly worse driving) and nothing as dramatic, complicated or consistent as completely inverting sexual desire.

Homosexuality has two distinct parts: removing desire for one sex and creating it for another. Otherwise you’d have a asexual or bisexual.

Replies: @Valentino, @Anon, @gcochran

I've run across these statistics across a number of Western countries from a number of sources. Years ago the studies started with blood tests and, naturally, have moved to DNA testing.

On average, 10% of fathers on birth certificates are not the biological fathers. The breakdown by social class:

30% for lower class births
12.6 % for middle-class births
1% for upper-class births

I speculate that the upper-class versus lower-class disparity is due to the relative risks and costs of exposure to the female perpetrators. Women with husbands who have high place and status on the male Dominance Matrix have much more to lose with respect to wealth and social status than lower class women. There is also the expectation that upper-class women live more disciplined lives, which put and/or keep them in the upper-class in the place.

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Wency, @gcochran, @Old Prude, @AnotherDad

'The article in The Guardian is problematic due to its leftist ideological biases and for taking Professor Shlomo Sand seriously. According to his April 14, 2019 interview with Mediapart.fr, Sand is currently writing a French novel that argues against the notion of genetic Jewishness. He is still in denial of the significant indigenous roots of Western Jews in Israel.'

I notice that you don't rebut Sand's actual arguments.

1. The probable Jewish population of Roman Palestine simply couldn't have expanded enough quickly enough to account for the Jewish population of the Roman Empire. 100,000 cannot equal 2,000,000 -- not in six generations or so. More generous figures assume that all the inhabitants of Palestine were Jews, and they all fled Palestine to settle elsewhere -- and both parts of that are demonstrable nonsense.

2. In the Jewish cemeteries of the Roman Empire, half the names of each successive generation indicate that the deceased was a convert. Do the math on what percentage of a population will remain genetically 'Jewish' if half of each generation are converts.

Replies: @Kevin Brook, @Kevin Brook, @Not Raul, @gcochran

Two problems with that.

1. Many military minds at the time felt that whichever side attacked first would have a large advantage. The Nazis believed the Soviets were planning to attack. The Soviets believed the Nazis were planning to attack. As long as both sides firmly believed they had an advantage by attacking first, someone was going to stage a preemptive strike.

Especially since the Nazis uses the blitzkrieg style of attack, which depends on the first strike.

2. The Nazis believed time was of the essence. If they struck quickly, they could strike before the Soviet troops were all in position. More important, they could strike before the weather got too bad.

Where that failed: The Nazis, like Napoleon before them, got bogged down and were stuck in Russia during the winter.
Add to that the fact that it was the most severe winter in 30 years.


To be fair, we have no idea what would’ve happened had the Nazis avoided attacking the USSR. Suppose the Soviet Army had plenty of time to get into position. Consider the level of paranoia of Stalin. At some point the Red Army would be ready to fight an offensive battle. At that point they would attack the Nazis.

Replies: @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @Thea, @gcochran, @Anonymous

The Indo-European Hittites of Anatolia and the Canaanite Hittites were not the same people. The similar names are a coincidence.

The Indo-Europeans in the Hebrew Bible are the Persians! And probably the Philistines too; they're believed to have arrived by sea around 900BC, and "by sea" suggests Greece or its islands.

Replies: @Wilkey, @gcochran, @Dr Van Nostrand

Coincidentally, I saw the movie for the first time just last night, and agree with your characterization. The movie is cartoonish and absurd.

I learned a bit about Turing when I was an undergrad math major in the 1970s and read an article about the breaking of the Enigma code, decades later.

It looks like the Royal Navy commander, Dennison, depicted in the movie as a buffoon, was a highly skilled cryptanalyst himself, and had an accurate understanding of the broad strategy needed to break the code. He also had a keen sense of the kinds of people he needed, and Turing was only one of them.

A group of Polish cryptographers had already broken the Enigma code in 1932, and had been hired by Dennison. Turing took on the sub-task of analyzing the German naval (Kreigsmarine) Enigma, which had enhancements built into it, and his innovation, along with Tommy Flowers, was to build a computer to automate the task. US Navy cryptographic bombes (computers) proved to be much faster at the task, and the German naval code was broken.

Replies: @gcochran

What causes the Asian % to be so much higher than everyone else’s, especially their demographic twins the Hispanics? According to the article, it’s access to test prep. There are a lot of test prep academies where the Asians live and not very many in el Bronx. Apparently this explains everything.
 

Replies: @gcochran

"Gays network. They have gay mafias in white collar organizations through which they promote each other. Also, gays sleep their way to the top, which straight men generally cannot do because women at the top of organizations are either lesbians or straight women who look down on lower ranking males."

This. Gays network like crazy all the while sleeping with each other. In contrast, straight males are losers because they tend to promote women they sleep with but these will promote women when they reach seniority. So gays and women help each other out, and straight men are going the way of the dodo because they tend to be individualistic.

Replies: @gcochran, @SFG

There were white sharecroppers, especially north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Replies: @gcochran

Ed Wilson is an entomologist and popularizer, not a serious theorist.
 

Replies: @gcochran

I assume this is the paper (in case anyone else wants to read it)?
Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

Popular article about it: https://www.shh.mpg.de/423779/mummy-genomes

Greg, do you think it is reasonable to speculate that the average Egyptian had more sub-Saharan African ancestry than the mummified elite? If so, any thoughts about magnitude?

Do present day Egyptians vary in sub-Saharan African ancestry by social class?

This excerpt from the paper is a counterargument to my point.

Although we only analysed mummified remains, there is little reason to believe that the burials Rubensohn excavated belonged exclusively to a group of prosperous inhabitants on the basis of the far published references to excavation diaries and Rubensohn’s preliminary reports that permit a basic reconstruction. Rather it seems arguable that the complete spectrum of society is represented, ranging from Late Period priests’ burials that stand out by virtue of their size and contents to simple inhumations that are buried with little to no grave goods2. The widespread mummification treatments in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods in particular, leading to a decline in standards and costs48 and the generally modest appearance of many burials further supports this assessment.
 

Replies: @gcochran

it seems their term "people of color" includes Egyptians and Syrians, North Africans and middle eastern people were always considered caucasian , even by the racist anthropologists who defined the races into 3 categories, Negroid , Mongoloid and Caucasoid. "people of color" is more of a social construct than race and is an almost meaningless term when the NY times considers Ted Cruz to be a person of color. Last year Ted Cruz was listed as one of the few non-white senators.

They conflate being from Africa as being a person of Color despite Northern Africans being considered caucasian, even the United States government still classifies them as white today, even as Egyptians have become less caucasian due to the slave trade. It seems the leftists are trying to confuse the issue of race by implying non-europeans are now "people of color".

They cannot even find Negroid remains in Egypt 1,200 years ago. Scientists took 166 bone samples from 151 mummies, dating from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 425, extracting DNA from 90 individuals. They found that ancient Egyptians share almost no DNA with sub-Saharan Africans. Instead, their closest relatives were people living the Levant. Strikingly, the mummies were more closely related to Europeans and Anatolians than to modern Egyptians. "The genetics of Egyptians did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300-year timespan we studied," said Wolfgang Haak, group leader at the Max Planck Institute. So as late as 425 AD the Egyptians were still genetically not very different from Southern Europeans. If the presence of Blacks cannot be found in Egypt , it is doubtful they will find any Negroid presence in medieval Europe.

Replies: @gcochran, @The Wild Geese Howard

The Sierra Leoneans are stupid, but healthy. Down Syndrome kids are similar. They have a cognitive condition, but are pretty well-rounded otherwise.

Compare them with Prader-Willi people, who are at a similar mental level, and a horrendous appetite and weight problem.

Replies: @gcochran

No, it suggests a predictable outcome in cultures of deliberate isolation with abundant cousin-fucking... the inevitable genetic shitstorm that incest entails.

Once the Ashkenazim moved out of the hovels of the Pale and into a gene pool with larger numbers of more-distantly-related potential partners, Tay-Sachs would be expected to wash out of the system over the course of a few generations. Screening simply made the process more rapid.

Replies: @gcochran

Our systems are set up to do the exact opposite – bright women are encouraged to value career/qualifications over motherhood, less bright are subsidised via welfare to have babies.
 

Replies: @gcochran, @AnotherDad

Some research indicates, for example, that Louisiana Cajuns, French Canadians and individuals with Irish lineage may also have an elevated incidence of Tay-Sachs.
 

Replies: @Lot, @gcochran, @Federalist, @Sean, @Ed, @Kratoklastes

It’s true that gestation and nursing time and the extreme physical immaturity of small children also limit a woman’s ability to hunt big game. If women hunt giraffe, who will mind the toddlers?

But even with slower speed and wider pelvises, full grown women can probably hunt big game since humans were historically persistence hunters who hunted by running down their prey to the point of exhaustion, sometimes running for 10 hours at a time after the same animal.

Women are physically capable of ultra long distance running and could probably hunt this way if they had to. They don’t because they dont have to in order to live and because they need to carry their children around or mind their troublesome toddlers.

Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson, @gcochran, @Forbes

I doubt on Protestant in a thousand knows what the Edict of Fontainebleau was but Jews can talk about 1260 without looking it up.

Replies: @Desiderius, @gcochran, @Known Fact

Replies: @gcochran

They argued that the fossil record showed the extinction took place over 100's of thousands or millions of years. There were substantive arguments back and forth between Alvarez and the nay-sayers.

Replies: @gcochran

Excellent. Thank you. I've been exposed to ideas like his on this subject, and I may have read him but can't remember. He gets it that there are basic, physical rules that any living organism must follow, and, um, "size matters."

I'm just simple-minded enough to look at the sheer size of some of the dinosaurs, and to listen to men like Haldane and some engineers and biologists of today, and to agree that there is no way the big ones could have lived in 1 G.

There are plenty of other example of gigantism from that era too. Some of the large, winged creatures could not fly in present day gravity and atmosphere, so you need either an air of syrup, or a smaller planet, or both.

I think noticing things and thinking about their implications should be allowed for laymen.

Replies: @gcochran, @Jack D

the intensity of the opposition by the paleontologist and geologists who showed up made quite an impression on me. They *really* didn’t like the idea of a sudden catastrophic event.
 

Replies: @gcochran, @Another physicist

> On what basis do you say “K-Pg extinction was fast but not simultaneous.”?
As I wrote above, I'm following the Russian paleontological/evolutionary-biologist school centering on Dr. Markov. I trust them on paleontology, and as an (ex-)physicist I make a judgment on the general systems principles involved.
> How long do you think the last dinosaur survived after the meteor impact? An event dragging out years (or decades/centuries even) is nothing on a millions of years timescale. How do you think the dinosaur population at the moment of impact compared to the maximum?
I don't know. See Intelligent Dasein's comment #5 above, he quotes somebody that dinosaur fossils have been found 0,7 million years past K-Pg.
> One can make either of two extreme arguments:
The modern definition of "extinction" matches your (2), but I don't see the value of making such extreme arguments. Yes'kov (apparently he uses the spelling 'Eskov', my bad) quite reasonably (in my opinion) says that fixating on the last few species of a group that had been in bad shape and steadily losing ground for many millions of years prior to K-Pg is a red herring. It does appeal to journalists and the general sensationally-minded public, and it may well be the case that the asteroid impact helped to finish it off quickly rather than lingering on in diminishing numbers for several millions of years more, or even survive in some African river caves like the coelacanth did in the Indian ocean. The important thing is that the group would have become ecologically marginal and nugatory, and this means that the important changes were those that had undermined the group's position in the first place. I'm sure Steve's readers can come up with any number of topical political analogies.

Replies: @res, @RickinJax, @gcochran

My contention was with this statement: "There is no remnants of their DNA in the genome of modern people."

That implies no remnants whatsoever, male or female. Total annihilation. It's the kind of blanket statement I find hard to believe, and which already seems to contradict earlier studies showing that a sizeable % of British DNA traces back to several thousand years before the Yamnaya.

I'll follow the evidence wherever it leads, but this strikes me as either bad science, or bad reporting about science, or both.

Where the hell is Greg Cochran when we need him?

Replies: @Carol, @gcochran

Forty per cent of all males had a Y chromosome linked to Yumnaya, indicating after the cultures met, only Yumnaya men were procreating.
 

Replies: @gcochran

Buried the lede as usual. Read closely: “Decimated by disease.”
 

So sure these big strong blonde men who you so strangely seem to admire to excess
 

Replies: @wren, @guest, @Desiderius, @gcochran, @Pericles, @obwandiyag

Reagan saw through the contradiction in traditional anti-Communism: they can't run a fruit stand, but they'll take over the world. How someone who couldn't run a fruit stand could do so was a question no one asked.

It's similar to discovering hypocrisy-- don't expose it, leverage it.

Replies: @Paleo Liberal, @Almost Missouri, @gcochran

Germans and other distinct white ethnic groups in the United States gradually assimilated and intermarried. There is no evidence that a large fraction of Eastern European Jews did this between 1940 and 1945.

You and your holohoax crew are simply deranged.

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran, @Hans, @Jack D, @J.Ross

That is consistent with my speculative contribution to discussion many years ago on how the Ashkenazi IQ rose. While all the emphasis of Greg Cochran at al. was on the rabbit's many children marrying the successful businessman's many children I suggested that dim Jews, especially males, failed to reproduce as Jews. I think my calculation was that 500 years of no reproduction by those whose IQ was 2 or more SDs below average would raise average IQ from 100 to 115. Now the 115 is not accepted as the Ashkenazi average as it was 20 years ago.

Replies: @gcochran

Most of his blog follows a simple but ass backwards template: he suggests he knows something while flagrantly avoiding actually demonstrating what he insistently implies he knows.
 

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran

Sometimes, it produces results that are definitely improbable. For example, one study of Chinese DNA 'revealed' that there were only something like a thousand Han Chinese in 500 BC. It also determined that modern Tibetans had only diverged from the rest of Chinese around two thousand years ago or something -- i.e., that's when they emigrated to Tibet. Conventional archeologists objected that all the evidence indicated that the movement occurred more like about ten thousand years ago.

All figures are from memory, and subject to correction. The point is that genetics research sometimes comes up with results that are at odds with the rest of the evidence or even simply improbable even taken in isolation. So should we be so unhesitating in draping the mantle of absolute certainty about its shoulders?

Another aspect of it all is that the 'research' may be subject to abuse. Here I'm thinking of the reality of Jewish racial identity. Obviously, 'Jews' are not all the same people. Netanyahu looks a lot like many gentile Poles; he doesn't bear the least resemblance to Yemeni Jews. And so on. Historical evidence supports this as well; Jewish populations exploded at a rate and in a manner that could only have occurred if the main engine of expansion was conversion rather than natural increase. And so on.

And indeed, the first genetic studies of Jewry supported this. While the DNA of the descendants of the various Jewish communities were related to the DNA of the descendants of other nearby Jewish communities, it was still more closely related to the DNA of their immediate gentile neighbors. I.e., a German Jew might be a distant cousin to an Italian Jew, but his really close relatives tended to be German gentiles.

...but now all that appears to have been mysteriously reversed. Somehow -- the visual evidence, the historical evidence, and the earlier genetic evidence all notwithstanding -- Jews are a race after all, most closely related to each other, be they from Tunisia or the Ukraine.

Moreover, the studies 'establishing' this all seem to be done by Jews themselves.

Theoretically, it's possible -- but isn't it also possible that one can make the genetic data say whatever one pleases? Again, if so, can we really place so much unqualified credence in the results?

Personally, I'm kind of a blood and thunder guy myself, and I'm perfectly happy to accept that the ancient Indo-Europeans carried out mass slaughter on a scale that dwarfs Genghis Khan and everyone since -- but should we really take that as proven?

Replies: @Flip, @Lot, @gcochran, @Kevin Brook, @Hippopotamusdrome

Replies: @gcochran, @utu

Replies: @gcochran

Replies: @gcochran, @sensitive

To be sure, but how many people really understood at the time (or understand even now) what the theory of relativity is, or how it relates to the phenomena manifested in thermonuclear weapons?

How many knew or know that David Hilbert is owed at least as much acknowledgment for the theory of relativity as is Einstein? Newton and Leibniz today are both credited for the development of the calculus, but more than a hundred years on, Hilbert gets little or none for relativity.

Replies: @gcochran, @Jack D

What? He didn’t continuously make Nobel Prize winning discoveries? No wonder he is so bitter. He only won a single Nobel Prize!
 

Replies: @gcochran

Well....horses for courses, surely.

Shockley made his eugenic proposal in 1974, long before political correctness, intersectionality, post-modernism et al was an established THING. There simply wasn't the tidal wave of progressivism in science then that there was in 2007, when Watson made his (much more modest) comments.

Sure Shockley got shit, but I doubt he was buried to under tons of it from all sides like Watson has been.

Methinks you need to cut Watson a break.

Replies: @gcochran

Whoah. No wonder he was Watsoned.

Replies: @gcochran

Check back tomorrow for “Yogi Berra and N.N. Taleb Debate IQ.”
 

The likelihood of exceptional achievement is markedly enhanced as a function of general ability. There does not appear to be an ‘‘ability threshold’’ (i.e., a point at which, say, beyond an IQ of 115 or 120, more ability does not matter). Although other things like ambition and opportunity clearly matter, more ability is better. The data also suggest the importance of going beyond general ability level when characterizing exceptional phenotypes, because specific abilities add nuance to predictions across different domains of talent development.
 

Replies: @jbwilson24, @gcochran

Herbert Hoover's book, Freedom Betrayed, has, inter alia, a fairly detailed exposition of the steps that FDR took to provoke the Japanese into an attack.

Replies: @anon, @gcochran