Wow. I’d forgotten that passage. I suppose “social constructionism” really isn’t that new.

There is a long tradition in environmentalism of favoring zero (or even negative) population growth. The more people there are, the more humanity’s “ecological footprint.” So people shouldn’t have more than two children, especially if they can’t provide for them. If you have 4 or 6 or 8 children, you don’t have the moral authority to say, “I can’t make it here; you have to take me in to your rich country.”

This tradition has been pretty much covered up by the now reigning idea that one never “punches down.” One never says bad things about those you are less well-off. Rather than being less deserving because they are irresponsible, they are more deserving because they need it more–and, of course, no kid asked to be born.

The old tradition never fully died, and has a lot of harsh logic behind it. Perhaps we will hear more of it in the next few years.

Never rest on your laurels. Rest on your ischial callosities.

The whole DNC email leak and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resignation strikes me as strange. Obviously I don’t follow politics, because everyone knew they were engaging in these shenanigans. Is it different because we know for a fact?

Perhaps. Sanders ran saying, “The system is corrupt and stacked against you, and Hillary is part of that system.” But he’s a pragmatist, and very much wants to change his message to, “Donald Trump is absolutely awful, so vote for and work for and give money to Hillary.”

This makes it harder to get his supporters on to the new message. Part of the story of the next three and a half months will how successful he and Hillary (and parts of the media) are in burying the old message and spreading the new one. In fact, the Hillary people will be trying to spread an even newer message, “With the changes in the platform and the welcome to Sanders, Hillary is now the anti-establishment, pro-reform candidate–but with experience and knowledge of “how to play the game.” Kind of a tight-rope walk. But a lot of people certainly want to believe that.

Razib, have you seen this Wall Street Journal article? It basically says that pungent tastes stop cramps. Since you’re a fan of pungent tastes, I thought you might find it interesting.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-way-to-prevent-muscle-cramps-1468256588

So that’s why from ~1400 on, pagan Europeans conquered Christian Americans and Africans and Asians. Oh, wait …

Graduate education courses are at the level of a second or third year undergraduate course at a mid-rank state college. No one flunks out of the program is they attend most of the classes and actually do the assignments. Your friend may be brilliant and learned but possessing an “MS in Education from DePaul” doesn’t indicate that at all.

2) A number of economists on the right, e.g. Scott Sumner, also think raising interest rates is a bad idea at this time.

As I recall, Nicolas Wade said something similar in 2010’s The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.

i am confident that people can deny whatever empirical facts disconfirm their priors for a long time. creationism and communism illustrate that.

Sad, but true (and very well put).

Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) criticizes a P. Z. Myers post about the impossibility of increasing human intelligence much by genetic engineering. It seemed sensible (as did the cited Stephen Hsu response) but I really don’t know enough to be sure. Any thoughts?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/04/myers-race-car-versus-the-general-fitness-factor/

Short for aggressive pastoralism?

Cool blog. It reminds me how amazing the internet is. The Monkey’s Voyage is a fun book.

The Keweenaw Peninsula juts out into Lake Superior from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, pointing vaguely toward Isle Royale. The town at the tip is named Copper Harbor. Copper was mined on the Peninsula from 1844 to about 1870.

Yup, Razib was there first.

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-paternity-myth-the-rarity-of-cuckoldry/

Actually, alcohol prohibition is making a comeback. Many Islamic states have it. Just five days ago, the Indian state of Bihar prohibited the sale AND consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Wow. Great post.

Lots of immigrants want their children to become Americans. They just don’t make a lot of noise or get on the news.

Anyone who has talked with a “social justice warrior” knows that, for better or worse, liberals have a very emotional morality.

Steve, For those who don’t read the comments, how about elevating the meat of education realist’s comment (15) to the main text?

I am now reading Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (2009), on Razib’s recommendation. In it, languages seem to move because their speakers do (I haven’t been reading with that question in mind). And there is certainly a lot of people movement.

You contradict yourself. You say that, ” The whole notion of interference by ‘advanced’ nations for ‘huminatiarian’ reasons is a very very recent trend, no older than 1945.” But in the next paragraph, you mention that the British banned suttee (“an archaic Indian funeral custom where a widow immolated herself on her husband’s pyre, or committed suicide in another fashion shortly after her husband’s death”-wikipedia) when they ruled India. They did this in 1829.

And there is, of course, the famous story of General Sir Charles James Napier, the Commander-in-Chief in India from 1849 to 1851. When a group of Hindu priests complained of the ban, he supposedly said,

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Having now read the comments to Steve’s post, I see that Peter Frost (75.) has suggested that much of the genetic difference is from Homo erectus admixture ~35,000 years ago, which makes the date of divergence look much older than it is. Cochrane and he then argue (90., 97., maybe more by the time you read this).

What marwan (85.) said.

Also, many of the same people and groups that are not making a big deal out of gay oppression abroad because it’s out of the country, we don’t have any direct power there, etc. had no problem making a big deal of apartheid in South Africa. There was a MORAL OBLIGATION to do whatever was necessary to end it.

Steve Sailer had a post recently quoting Greg Cochrane,

… using the slow rate, the split time between Pygmies and Bantu is ~300k years ago – long before any archaeological sign of behavioral modernity (however you define it) and well before the first known fossils of AMH [anatomically modern humans] (although that shouldn’t bother anyone, considering the raggedness of the fossil record).

Logically, this means that Pygmies aren’t really modern humans. Or, perhaps, they’re the most divergent of all modern humans.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-if-pygmies-are-a-different-species/

He doesn’t give a cite for the quote. Any thoughts?

Libya isn’t ruled by anyone right now. Different parts are ruled by different groups. Some have links to ISIS. No one knows how it will finally turn out.

Muamar Gadaffi was a despot and a bad man but 1) as I understand it, much of the really bad stuff (chemical weapons, barrel bombs) was in the past; 2) he was not trying to destabilize any other country or cause suffering outside Libya (which is certainly not the situation today); 3) he had voluntarily given up his nuclear weapons program (with a kind of wink, wink, nod, nod from the US that we would now not try to overthrow him). A major reason to have nukes is to be able to say, “You don’t dare overthrow me; I have nukes.” By overthrowing him, we are sending a message to other dictators that developing a nuke might be a good idea.

I don’t know if the US could have done anything better in Syria, but the situation there is certainly worse than it was when Obama became president. And when I say “worse,” I mean really bad. Obama took a chance that getting involved a little would be the best of both worlds. It would overthrow a bad regime without getting America very involved. Instead, we have become involved and it looks more and more like Assad will remain in power, ruling over a much poorer country, full of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, with millions of refugees. With hindsight, it probably would have been better to have just stayed out.

To put this in the most negative way:

Obama has helped fuck up two countries, caused starvation and suffering, created millions of refugees who are now fucking up Europe, but almost no Americans have been hurt–so, cool.

TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and more agreement) has to be approved by the United States Congress (within 90 days of submission by the president) in order to be binding on the USA. Right now, it is looking like that approval will not happen.

Razib,

Horses died out in the Americas some time between 12,000 and 7,600 years ago. So I assume they didn’t have anything like “[~4,000 years ago] Because of the inevitability of the drafting of the horse as a beast of burden and transport it was inevitable that the early adopters would undergo a cultural revolution, and trigger a high stakes series of inter-group competition.” Neither would sub-saharan Africans.

What differences would you expect based on that?

I think the slippery slope argument is perfectly fair to make in this case because it’s how the issue plays out historically.

I do not think that is true. The Nazis early on tried to kill the “defective”–those who in the United States wound up in an institutions or in a chair in the corner. They had to stop because there was too much resistance from ordinary Germans. Such defectives were still seen as part of the German family.

The result with Jews was different, partly because most of the Final Solution took place during wartime and partly because the Nazis were able to get people to feel that Jews were not “part of the German family.”

That’s fundamentally different from how religion is lived by people of the book. … Asian cultures in general are not religious in the same way “West Eurasians” are …”

I’m not sure that you and Razib are actually disagreeing. You both seem to be saying that supernaturalism is religious and that there is supernaturalism in both east and west. It just takes different forms.

Razib, Is “pleiotropic cascade” an existing term or something you made up? Nothing returns when I google it. I assume it means in this case, “one gene changes and then interacts with other genes causing a lot of other things to change.”

Prothero is very good on fossils. But for a (relatively) beginning reader, there’s too much on fossils and not nearly enough on other things.

I had a problem with the book’s morality play. In the one corner are creationists: liars who will never be convinced by facts. In the other corner are scientists: careful sifters of the facts who only care about truth and would love to be proved wrong if it would advance human knowledge.

He is certainly correct about many creationist writers and the people who run creationist organizations but I was put off by his eagerness to metaphorically “consign to hell” anyone who disagreed with him. Unlike one of my favorite books: Jason Rosenhouse’s Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line (Oxford, 2012). Rosenhouse is a clear-eyed atheist who actually tries to understand the 50% or so of Americans who say they “don’t believe in evolution”. He shows how difficult it is to make a belief in a beneficent God compatible with knowledge of how evolution actually works–and how bad some of the attempts are. Many people who say they “believe in evolution” actually believe in some vague bloodless semi-magical improvement over time.

Prothero’s portrayal of scientists is ridiculously unrealistic. Nowadays, anyone who’s been paying attention knows about the problems with replicability, the extent of p-hacking and selective publication (and unwillingness to share data and methods), the groupthink in many areas–and realizes that there is some truth to the saying, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

The situation in education research is similar to the one in nutrition research. Long-term randomized controlled trials are difficult and expensive and almost never done. Experts know a lot less than they say they do.

But two important differences. Education has a lot more ideology; thus foolishness like, “Full inclusion works” (because it’s democratic and inclusive and nice, unlike–yuck!–tracking). Since people buy their own food, they can decide what (if any) nutritional advice to accept. But most schools are provided “free” by governments, and they are run under the educational equivalent of the dietary guidelines. So it’s hard to get away from the experts’ notions, mistaken or otherwise.

There is no “essence of Caucasian” like there actually is an “essence of red.” Races are simply descendant groups where most reproduction has been within the group.

I think, at least on the surface, Elysium, Interstellar, and the Mad Max movies are “environmental” rather than “population” movies. It’s not that there are too many of us; it’s that we’ve screwed up the environment–and now it can’t support us.

Of course, the more people there are, the more pressure on the environment–but if that message is there, it is hidden.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was not just socially acceptable, it was cool to worry about “the population problem.” Thus the movies. It is now poor manners to talk about population; most all the people with a fertility rate above replacement are “people of color.” So there can be no cool overpopulation movies. There can be cool “screw up the environment” movies.

There were a hell of a lot more than 2 million Indians before Columbus. Many were agriculturalists, and there were “roads, bridges, towns”–cities if you count the Aztec and Indian capitals. But European diseases literally decimated (reduced to one tenth) most of the native population. Diseases usually preceded the Europeans so they saw empty land and bedraggled survivors. Check out Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005).

It seems to me that it’s more like drawing conclusions about the composition of the atmosphere based on ten samples of one molecule each. “According to a study in Nature, the atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, 10% oxygen, and 10% argon.”

NO, no “technology we haven’t thought of yet.” No technology is going to be able to get around Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. You will always need a sh*tload of energy to get above the atmosphere and stay there. And no new technology is going to repeal the Law of Conservation of Energy. You can’t just pull usable energy out of your ass.

B. isn’t just “meaningless for discussion purposes.” It’s as impossible as a perpetual motion machine or a technology that would allow humans to subsist on a slice of bread a day.

Sorry to sound so harsh. It’s great to be technologically optimistic. But it’s dangerous to think we can do the impossible.

Piri Thomas, in Down These Mean Streets, tells of how he got out of a difficult situation in the segregated South by convincing the white people that he was Spanish. He is usually described as “a dark-skinned Puerto Rican” (born 1928).

Rashida Jones (now starring in Angie Tribeca and a lot of Verizon commercials) is described in the Internet Movie Data Base as, “the younger daughter of media mogul, producer, and musician Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton. … Her father is African-American, and also has Welsh ancestry. Her mother is Ashkenazi Jewish (a descendant of immigrants from Russia and Latvia).”

The imdb page also quotes from a 2005 interview with Glamour magazine (she graduated from Harvard in 1997),

Finally I was leaving for college, for Harvard. Daddy would have died if I turned Harvard down. Harvard was supposed to be the most enlightened place in America, but that’s where I encountered something I’d never found in L.A.: segregation. The way the clubs and the social life were set up, I had to choose one thing to be: black or white. I chose black. I went to black frat parties and joined the Black Student Association, a political and social group. I protested the heinous book The Bell Curve [which claims that a key determinant of intelligence is inherited], holding a sign and chanting. But at other protests-on issues I didn’t agree with- wondered: Am I doing this because I’m afraid the black students are going to hate me if I don’t? As a black person at Harvard, the lighter you were, the blacker you had to act. I tried hard to be accepted by the girls who were the gatekeepers to Harvard’s black community. One day I joined them as usual at their cafeteria table. I said, “Hey!”-real friendly. Silence. I remember chewing my food in that dead, ominous silence. Finally, one girl spoke. She accused me of hitting on one of their boyfriends over the weekend. It was untrue, but I think what was really eating her was that she thought I was trying to take away a smart, good-looking black man-and being light-skinned, I wasn’t “allowed” to do that. I was hurt, angry. I called Kidada in New York crying. She said, “Tell her what you feel!” So I called the girl and…I really ripped her a new one. But after that, I felt insidious intimidation from that group. The next year there was a black guy I really liked, but I didn’t have the courage to pursue him. Sometimes I think of him and how different my life might be if I hadn’t been so chicken. The experience was shattering. Confused and identity-less, I spent sophomore year crying at night and sleeping all day. Mom said, “Do you want to come home?” I said, “No.” Toughing it out when you don’t fit in: That was the strength my sister gave me.

2. Very, very, very few people are ever going to go into space. It takes a tremendous amount of energy even to get into low earth orbit. Dealing with that energy is technologically difficult. In any case, it is very, very, very expensive.

Getting into space simply cannot be done with less energy. Any more than a person could sustain themselves on 50 calories a day. It’s a matter of simple physics.

Yes, Star Wars, Star Trek and all the rest are fantasies.

It seems that improved & ever more widely available techniques of birth control, combined with near certain establishment of paternity, should lead many (all?) of the purely biological reasons for stronger sexual restrictions on females than on males relax.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it makes a sound. But it doesn’t make a difference. This would only be true if people routinely give paternity tests to their newborns (or yet-to-be-borns!).

Last year, the NYT announced that Razib would be writing some things for them but then took back the job (before he started) because he had published in vdare years ago. He might not be here if respectable sites were more open-minded. Unz pays him and doesn’t censor him (as far as I know).

Well, Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) is a pen name.

I was gone for a week and when I got back I found two references to you at Marginal Revolution (one was for this; the other I forget). Nice to see you getting more exposure

The Old Testament is part of the Christian Bible. It is the Old Covenant, which is superseded by Jesus’ New Covenant–but depending on your theology, large parts of the OT remain relevant. E.g., no Christian says God stopped caring about the Ten Commandments after Jesus came along. The verses against homosexuality are in the OT and many Christians think they still are binding precedent (as the lawyers would say). Others disagree, saying Jesus’ talk about love renders them null and void; Jesus is like Justice Kennedy in Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas.

Razib, speaking of abortion and genetic testing, any thoughts on this? Clinical Genetics Has a Big Problem That’s Affecting People’s Lives: Unreliable research can lead families to make health decisions they might regret.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/why-human-genetics-research-is-full-of-costly-mistakes/420693/

What Razib (13) and iffen (17) said. If you believe that abortion is murder, then it is a BIG DEAL, and it is easy to get, um, over-earnest. After all, pro-life activists are just another kind of Social Justice Warrior (for all of them it could be said that many well-meaning people are “not well served by their most vocal proponents”).

On the other hand, if unborn children are sinless, and at death sinless souls instantly go to heaven, this kind of murder may actually be a good thing. It could even be argued that “the greatest good for the greatest number” would require constantly becoming pregnant and constantly aborting, sending the maximum number of souls to heaven, there to live with God in unimaginable bliss for all eternity. That argument makes as much sense to me as Pascal’s Wager.

“Pro-life” people don’t really care that much about abortions per se, what they care about is policing women’s sexuality; pregnancy is an appropriate punishment for being a slut, hence abortions should be banned

You must know different “pro-life” people than I do.

Or perhaps you have absorbed some powerful reasons for why they are an Other that so deserves to be hated.

NCLB did not require ANY test prep. It did result in many state tests that students had to pass. Though most commenters here would find the tests fairly easy, there are many, many students who cannot pass them without lots and lots of test prep.

The problem is that, without a lot of prep, the tests tell us something we don’t want to know: a very substantial percentage of young people are not “proficient.” It suggests something even more terrifying: many of them never will be and there’s nothing we can do about it.

For what it’s worth, the FTC just announced it was opposing the Staples/Office Depot merger.

Hirschman actually came to appreciate exit more in later life. I’m pretty sure that particular essay is in A Propensity to Self-Subversion (Harvard UP, 1995). It really should be included in future editions of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which is presently a rather short book–and doesn’t quite reflect his mature views.

Since most baby boomers are white and have white kids …

I think your theory needs work.

Do you mean Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984), which was one of the causes of the welfare reform of the early Clinton years or Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012)? It is the latter that uses the metaphor of successful Belmont, with “middle-class morality” and unsuccessful Fishtown, without.

But it’s totally crazy talk to think that parents who are rejected by a doctor or institution when it comes to a whole genome sequence wouldn’t just go elsewhere.

Not if it is illegal to get genes sequenced without a doctor’s permission, just like it is illegal to get many drugs without a doctor’s prescription. That seems to be what people like Sharp want.

As I recall, early on the FDA prohibited people from testing their blood for HIV. They had to go through a medical professional, who (it was devoutly hoped) would explain to them what it all meant and what they should do.

Should we read those books because you have read them and know they are good, or because they are–as Tyler Cowen would say–“self-recommending”?

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a big deal of the idea that only a few animals are “domesticable.” The New World didn’t have any comparable to, for example, the horse and the cow and so never developed the way the Old World had.

He gives reasons for why he thinks so few species are domesticable–but I don’t think anyone has tried to run anything similar to your bear thought experiment.

Fourth, the CPM made a significant contribution to national politics by urging India to not fall totally within the American orbit. This is important because independence from great powers is vital to developing countries.

If that were true, Taiwan and South Korea would be sh*tholes. They are not. This is an astoundingly untrue thing to say.

Yes, the communist countries weren’t really communist, and no really existing Christian church actually follows the true teachings of Jesus.

But that has little to do with whether a communist revolution would be a good thing or whether there should be an established Christian church.

a best case scenario is that a dynamic China would have prodded India’s Permit Raj to liberalize earlier than the 1990s

A worse case scenario is that a KMT China would have been strikingly similar to India’s Permit Raj and neither would have liberalized until …? Japan would have provided a nearby success story but it had always been the richest country in the neighborhood. Of course, there would be no Taiwan, and the history of Korea would probably be different without PR China supporting the various Kims.

Which often has the same results as the “inverted expertise” effect:

First of all, there is a substantial body of evidence that overconfidence grows worse as people become more expert in a given field. This is called the “inverted expertise” effect. In short, the more you know, the more you think you more know than you really do.

from a fascinating speech by Jason Zweig, “Behavioral Finance: What Good Is It, Anyway?” Transcript at
http://www.jasonzweig.com/behavioral-finance-what-good-is-it-anyway/?utm_content=buffer509be&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I wasn’t sure whether you were being serious or sarcastic. So I just played dumb. For some reason, that comes very easily to me.

The 24 July 2015 issue of Science has a number of feature news articles promoted on the cover as “Unlocking the past: Ancient DNA comes of age.” Any comments?

Given that the moon revolves around the earth, how do I explain the celebrity of Kim Kardashian?

However, the idea that prior to agriculture humans lived in peace and harmony with their neighbors has, I think, been rather thoroughly debunked. Little battles were common and death from fighting a fact of life. Kind of like chimps.

The basic idea, which I still stand by, is that agriculture tied men down to a place, which made it possible for one group to capture another and reduce them to servitude, leading thereby to the birth of the political state.

I think that is mainstream anthropology. Along with the idea that agriculture created a “surplus beyond the farmers’ basic needs” allowing the creation of specialized classes: craftspeople, merchants, priests, warriors, rulers.

A good book. I actually liked it predecessor, Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005), better.

“Take the heat?” He welcomes this heat. People remember the cost overruns and the endless inconveniences of the Big Dig. They like him for not signing off on a repeat.

More broadly, Pinker has offered that one reason that why the ancients are relevant in philosophy is that the discipline is characterized by the problems which are intractable. They are those domains which remain to philosophy as a discipline after science has carved out huge swaths of its traditional territory.

So philosophy has a God of the Gaps problem.

The Monkey’s Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life, by Alan de Queiroz (Basic, 2014) argues that long, accidental trips are not so uncommon. E.g., monkeys are divided into two groups, the Old World Monkeys and New World Monkeys. Africa and South America split more than 100 million years ago. But there is no evidence of monkeys in the New World before ~50 million years ago, and genetics indicate that’s about when the monkey lineage split. At the time, there was 1,000 miles of open ocean between the two continents.

Of course, bro-country IS mostly hip-hop. Guns, alcohol, babes, and male bragging.

E.g., in the 1960s and ’70s, Garrett Hardin was a star. But though he kept churning out articles and books, he seemed to be forgotten and ignored long before his death in 2003.

It may be just my narrow experience, but I get the impression that “overpopulation” was a public concern of “educated” and “progressive” opinion in the 1960s and 70s. However, some time in the 1980s, those people (and their children) came to see such a concern as not really nice. You were basically telling a lot of people that they shouldn’t have so many children, and since (implicitly) most of them were non-white, you were probably being racist and “blaming the victim.” So “overpopulation” dropped out of polite discussion.

He seems to be saying there is no margin, or at least that the gains from switching will be very, very small: “at the end of the day smart people are going to learn stuff, and low IQ people just don’t read that much anyway.”

That is, of course, an empirical question, which I have no idea how to answer.

Species are genres.

For me, the puzzle remains that fertility would drop as wealth grew hugely.

Talk to young couples. You will find most of them want children but most of them also feel that the children will be kind of a burden. They will need day-care or one of the parents will have to quit work or they’ll do some frazzled parenting-in-shifts. The kids will be expensive and the parents will have to move somewhere “the schools are good.” Romantic vacations for two will disappear.

Because wealth has grown hugely, there are lots of fun things to do without children. Having children means giving those things up.

Evolution makes people want to do things that in the past led to more surviving offspring. Many of those wants can now be satisfied without children, e.g. non-reproductive sex. In fact, children can actually frustrate those wants. So people respond by having fewer.

The literarily fecund environmentalist Bill McKibben has one child and wrote a book urging everyone else to have one or fewer, Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (1999).

A post defending Paul Ehrlich that is full of wisdom. Razib, you have done what I would have thought was impossible.

For many “mind workers,” opposition to GMOs is driven by anti-corporatism but I think ordinary people have a more visceral opposition. It’s unnatural, and because it’s unnatural, it’s dangerous. For all the millions of Americans who don’t believe in evolution, there are “human genes” and “carrot genes” and “fish genes” and they can’t legitimately be moved from one species to another. (And, yeah, lots of Americans who think they believe in evolution feel the same way.)

A fine irony is that corporations are happy to push fear of GMOs if they think it will help their bottom line. E.g. Chipotle’s bragging about how it is removing all GMOs from their restaurants. Because, among other things, GMOs don’t have “integrity.”

http://chipotle.com/gmo

Yeah, The Dialectical Biologist. At one point, I planned to read it but after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was fine with consigning Marxism to “the dustbin of history.” He also used to run a seminar called something like Marxian Methods in the Biological Sciences.

Yeah, I thought of Lewontin. My impression is that the productive parts of his Marxism were kind of general, like Newton’s and other early scientists’ feeling that God had made a world which worked according to understandable laws, which He would be happy for them to understand. Perhaps I was too influenced by Trivers’ “vignette” published in unz April 27.

I first heard him talk when he visited Harvard in 1969 to lecture on the new work. He gave a masterful talk, both in content and in style … But within five years he turned his back on natural selection and decided to emphasize the importance of random factors, which of course produced no patterns of particular interest, nor any insight into the function of genes and traits. This I believe he did for political grounds, emasculating his own discipline in order to render it sterile regarding human behavior and genetics.

In later years, doing less and less science, he spent more of his time on politics and philosophical writing whose meaning was difficult to locate, in part because there was often no meaning there. …

As for his political writing, nothing could beat a piece he wrote with Richard Levins stating that there was nothing in Marxist/Leninism that could be contradicted by objective reality. Wow, I thought, it is rare for people to fess up so quickly that there is no content to their enterprise, since if in principle it can’t be contradicted, it says nothing.

Lewontin’s story is that of a man with great talents who often wasted them on foolishness, on preening and showing off, on shallow political thinking and on useless philosophical rumination while limiting his genetic work by assumptions congenial to his politics. He ran a successful lab for many years, and easily raised large sums of research funds, so many U.S. geneticists remember him fondly for their time with him at Harvard, as a grad student or post-doc, but as an evolutionary thinker, never mind geneticist (beyond his early work on linkage disequilibrium), he has turned up mostly empty and the best of his ex-students concede he had done little of note for more than 20 years.

Second: of course you can be a very good scientist and also very religious, if your religion says nothing about your science.

I think this is also true of more secular religions. Like Marxism.

True–these songs weren’t written by southerners. Many popular Christmas songs were written by Jews. Life is complicated.

I’m not sure there’s much real life useful content to the statement, “[American] Indians … had an ideal of harmony with nature that is lacking in the West.” I very strongly suggest that if you polled a representative sample of Americans, at least 80% would agree with the statement, “We should live in harmony with nature.”

What exactly does that mean? What effect does that have?

Also, there were something on the order of 500 native cultures before Columbus. I do not think it is possible to say that they all “thought” something.

I read Mithen. I was disappointed. I have an amazon review at

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3NR8HMK7ZEVZE/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0674019997

Whereas a previous generation of white supremacists perceived in the non-Western the inferior and primitive, a modern generation of Westerners sees the authentic and pristine.

Sounds a lot like what has happened with American Indians. European colonists said that the Indians had “wasted” America. They had just left it alone and hadn’t “improved” it. Thus, it was morally proper for people who would improve it to take it over. Ironically, the landscape looked empty because European diseases had denuded it of the people who had previously used it. “Look at this meadow. It would be great for growing crops but it’s just being wasted.” Yes, and twenty years ago, crops were being grown there.

Nowadays, so many Americans who care about nature have the warm and fuzzies for Native Americans because they, unlike Europeans, don’t try to change the landscape but instead “live in harmony with nature.” It is a great untruth, something that those who are paying attention have known since William Cronon’s classic Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983). On a broader scale, there is Charles C Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005), found in the books on the right. Daniel Botkin’s Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark (1995) considers the United States northwest of St. Louis.

Gould once wrote that he “learned Marxism at my father’s knee.” When he was asked about that later, he said something like, “but that doesn’t mean I believe it.”

Of course, there is Theodore Sturgeon, often quoted as “90% of everything is crap.” The more expansive quote:

“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

“Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.” Venture March, 1958

Before Europeans arrived, the American Indians didn’t have horses or rifles. Without them, it is very difficult to put a big dent in the population of bison that existed in 1750.

It’s not as if climate change was new. There were at least 8 ice ages and “interglacials” in the previous 2 million years. Yet the megafauna were still around–until the beginning of the most recent interglacial. Perhaps it is coincidence, but that is also the only one during which Homo sapiens sapiens were around.

That should be 1750-1920.

A (short) book length study is Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1950-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2000). It basically agrees with the wikipedia excerpt.

One could argue that though there has been persistence in the sense of institutional continuity (there are churches in upstate NY that are 200 years old and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has unbroken continuity of bureaucracy in Salt Lake City), what people take from those churches is very different than it was. What the churches treat as important, and what goes without saying, is very different. Even some of the official doctrine is different.

I feel like there has to be some intermediate position between “You can’t scientifically get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ so anything that says, ‘This is right; that is wrong’ is a religion” and “A religion is something that calls itself a religion.” But I can’t figure out what that position is.

I wonder what you think of, if you have read, Joseph Bottum’s “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas.” http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/spiritual-shape-political-ideas_819707.html

He agrees with your post that “the culture of the United States and its elite was fundamentally derived from that of Anglo-Protestantism” and that “what’s happened in the past generation is that a massive wave of secularization swept through the culture.” He sees Social Justice Warriors as descendents of Protestantism with a kind of “old wine in new bottles” fighting faith: those who believe must search their conscience because they are sinners; those who disagree must bow because they are heretics.

An agreement with the first half but a disagreement with the second half of the famous, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” (often mistakenly attributed to G.K. Chesterton)

Bottum also has a book which I gather elaborates on some of the ideas in the article, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (2014). Bottum identifies as a Christian.

I for one am glad you’re alive.

So Mr. Khan may have a cause of action against the Times for breach of contract. The legal stuff you had put up was about a third party causing “tortious interference” with that contractual relationship. I said that there was no way a case of tortious interference could be won against Gawker. I stand by that.

Bro Country: bad hip-hop becomes bad country.

No matter what their intention is, it doesn’t matter. The fact that he wrote for vdare is public information, and a simple objective fact. Gawker brought it to the attention of their readers, and the Times either found it out from those readers or from one of its employee’s reading Gawker (or both).

A newspaper has the right to choose its writers, and to be as ideologically pure and closed-minded as it wants.

“Lack of any privilege on the part of the third party to induce such a breach.

That is why a claim of tortious interference will fail. Third parties are free to tell the NYT any bit of public information they want.

I was surprised, and really pleased, to see you on the last. Then I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see you dropped. I’m sorry. You would have added expertise and intellectual diversity to the NYT. But I suppose you were too diverse; it’s kind of like asking an atheist to speak in church.