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PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs!

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Saturday, December 28, 2019

NYTimes promotes Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence paper. Again.

I'm proud to have interviewed anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, critic of the paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence."

Ferguson said:
...it was a pretty stark hypothesis because it was proposing that particular conditions would confer a five-point IQ increase. That's a lot. It's testable. It was proposed in the journal which was formerly called The Eugenics Review and it got a tremendous amount of attention. 
Nicholas Wade brought it to the readers of the New York Times twice. Now one
question is why is an untested hypothesis getting so much attention?
 
You would think that if they found evidence for it - but there was no evidence. This was an untested hypothesis. Steven Pinker helped legitimize this.  
Well what struck me was that him saying that it was good science and when you actually look at the science, it's not good science. I mean they get the wrong diseases in some cases, they, if you look at their proposition that these different diseases - just just the idea that these diseases boost IQ - if you look at their the actual science of it, that’s not what it says...
So now the NYTimes Bret Stephens is promoting it again:
The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper.
Stephens links to the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence paper.

There were some good responses on Twitter:


Bessner is referring to the infamous incident in which Stephens threw a fit because he was referred to as a "bedbug" as a joke, on Twitter.



I teach classes in strategic political communication. Every week, for the last seven years, I have begun each class session with a simple question: “What happened in the news this week?” The idea is to draw out lessons about how strategy and power work in the digital age. I often joke that it is my job to have a professional opinion about the latest Twitter storm. 
But then Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist, emailed me on Monday night, cc’ing my university provost, to scold me over a milquetoast joke I had made on Twitter about bedbugs at the Times. I’ve never been a fan of Stephens, so when I saw the news about bedbugs at the newspaper and everyone joking about it, I contributed a joke about Stephens. His email was a bizarre overreaction (he was offended that I called him a metaphorical bedbug) — my joke had gotten no traction on social media, and was pretty tame — so I posted about his response on Twitter. Something clicked, and the story went immediately viral. The original joke had zero retweets and nine likes. It now has 4,700 retweets and 31,200 likes. I have spent the past two days in the center of the viral media controversy, instead of observing with interest from the sidelines.
Stephens was so angry at the response he quit Twitter:
Stephens responded by quitting Twitter. Then he wrote a column last Friday that one could say was a massive subtweet of the entire situation. Accompanied by a picture of Nazi propagandist-in-chief Joseph Goebbels, Stephens argued that the politics of the current moment echoes that of 80 years ago, “plus three crucial factors: new forms of mass communication, the rhetoric of dehumanization and the politics of absolute good versus absolute evil.” And then he went there:
Radio then, like Twitter today, was the technology of the id; a channel that could concentrate political fury at a time when there was plenty to go around.... 
The political mind-set that turned human beings into categories, classes and races also turned them into rodents, insects and garbage. “Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing,” Heinrich Himmler would claim in 1943. “Getting rid of lice is not a matter of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness.” Watching Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto burn that year, a Polish anti-Semite was overheard saying: “The bedbugs are on fire. The Germans are doing a great job.” 
Today, the rhetoric of infestation is back.
As historian Daniel Bessner put it, “Well, he did it. Bret Stephens compared his being called a bedbug on Twitter to the genocide of 6 million Jews.”
==========


Now if he would only quit the NYTimes.


UPDATE: The NYTimes posted this on the article:

An earlier version of this Bret Stephens column quoted statistics from a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically. The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent. He went on instead to argue that culture and history are crucial factors in Jewish achievements and that, as he put it, “At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational.” We have removed reference to the study from the column.

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

The mind of a racist part 4: Steve Sailer, VDARE & the strategy to deny African American history

As we have seen in The mind of a racist part 3, although Steve Sailer asks for donations at the Unz Review web site, Unz doesn't have a system in place to accept donations.

Sailer instead suggests a variety of direct options, from PayPal to Bitcoin. And he provides a link to his old web site and to VDARE. Sailer advises:
Please don’t forget to click my name at the VDARE site so the money goes to me...
VDARE has been kiboshed from use of Paypal for being, I dunno, EVIL. But you can give via credit cards, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, check, money order, or stock.
It's odd considering that Unz Review is - or perhaps once was, more respectable and less obviously evil than VDARE. Many of the same writers work for both, like Sailer, John Derbyshire (fired from The National Review for being too racist), Pat Buchanan, but Unz Review includes those who are not white supremacists like Ted Rall and Ron Paul. I would have thought Unz would be the ones to handle the money.

But as we've discussed, Ron Unz is a big contributor to VDARE too, so there may be no significant distinction, financially, between Unz Review and VDARE. Except that VDARE is a nonprofit, which has been controversial.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center profile, VDARE:
(was) established in 1999 by the Center for American Unity, a Virginia-based nonprofit foundation started by English immigrant Peter Brimelow, VDARE.com is an anti-immigration hate website "dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century. 
Now run by the VDARE Foundation, the site is a place where relatively intellectually inclined leaders of the anti-immigrant movement share their opinions. VDARE.com also regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites.
Most recently Brimelow was in the news thanks to his connection to the Trump administration via Stephen Miller:
Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE, believes that diversity has weakened the United States, and that the increase in Spanish speakers is a “ferocious attack on the living standards of the American working class.” 
Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, is a self-described “white advocate” who has written that “newcomers are not the needy; they are the greedy.” 
Their websites were among the sources cited by Stephen Miller, the White House aide who is the driving force behind President Trump’s immigration policies, in emails and conversations with conservative allies at Breitbart News when he was a young Senate aide. A cache of those emails, obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, provides new insight into the ideas that have shaped Mr. Miller’s thinking and suggest he has maintained deeper intellectual ties to the world of white nationalism than previously known.
Is it any wonder why the IDW, Republicans and professional racists like Steve Sailer hate the SPLC?  I recommend you support them.

I have said many times that a strategy of race science proponents is to minimize or deny the history of African Americans, as IDW Sam Harris has done, explicitly, including not only the impact of the massacres and lynchings of the descendents of the Emancipated, but incidents of looting of black wealth, finally being discussed in the media, like the NYTimes 1619 Project.

I haven't yet seen the television series The Watchmen (I don't have HBO) but I've heard one or more of its episodes reference the Tulsa massacre, the mass murder and looting of "Black Wall Street." This is a very positive development. More people need to know about this kind of atrocity which happened far more than is recognized.

In his anti-1619 post in VDARE, Steve Sailer shows exactly what I mean by the race science attempt to erase African American history:
Basically, it’s The Bell Curve question once again: If we utterly rule out of consideration all the facts and logic in The Bell Curve, then how can we explain why only 7 blacks passed the Stuyvesant HS entrance exam in 2019, despite decades of massive spending to uplift black performance? 
As each year brings us further into the Post-1960s future, the answer for why blacks aren’t achieving more must lie far in the past, such as in 1619. 
But of course the answer can’t lie even further back than 1619, such as in 1618 or in the tens of thousands of years when, as geneticist David Reich has pointed out, humanity was split into two basic large populations: the Out-of-Africans and the Still-in-Africans. 
It just can’t, because looking further back than 1619 would diminish the guilt that could be imposed upon white Americans to give their money to black Americans.
It's amusing to see Sailer whining about giving money to black Americans. Where would Sailer be without the right-wing racist wingnut welfare infrastructure that supports him exactly because he attacks black Americans?

And his description is, naturally, a misrepresentation of the 1619 project. One of the best, and most relevant pieces is The Wealth Gap which details some of the ways that black wealth has been stolen since Empancipation and the insidiousness of redlining. A practice, it has been proven, is still going on in New York state.

Sailer has one recent anecdote about black students and Stuyvesant entrance exams, and so he declares the reason for African American failure to thrive is genetics, as claimed in The Bell Curve.

Sailer believes, apparently, perfect social, political and economic parity was achieved in the 1960s, contrary to all evidence.

And by the way, I think I triggered Steve Sailer into blocking me on Twitter by pointing out that the "out-of-Africans" were probably the losers of turf wars and also mated with Neanderthals and so are less pure homo sapiens than the "Still in Africans."

So why VDARE? The name comes from Virginia Dare, one of the "lost colony" residents of Roanoke Virginia, and a baby during the three years before the colony was lost.

As the New Yorker explains:
In the hands of its literary interpreters, the Roanoke colony became a reprieve from a conquered, mapped, and increasingly developed American landscape. It also became the literary property of post-Confederate nostalgia, the “lost colony” linked symbolically to the “lost cause.” In an 1866 novel called “Roanoke; or, ‘Where Is Utopia?’ ” Calvin H. Wiley, who had been superintendent of public schools in Confederate North Carolina, set the colony’s descendants in a place where “the wild and restless demon of Progress has not yet breathed … its scorching breath on the green foliage of nature,—filial reverence, parental tenderness, conjugal fidelity, neighbourly kindness, and patriotic integrity.” 
In 1875, an anonymous “M. M.” published a story in Our Living and Our Dead, a North Carolina magazine dedicated to Confederate nostalgia and anti-Northern fomentation, in which Indian magic had turned Virginia Dare into an enchanted white doe who haunted the coastal forests for a century and witnessed the Indians’ "extinction, and the wide occupation of their forfeited patrimony, by that superior race, the Anglo-Saxon, with their bondsmen, the sable African, the red man’s inferior.” M. M.’s Virginia Dare also prophesied the Civil War as a national disaster: “divided, brave brothers fall beneath the yoke of despotism.”
White supremacists like to turn their biggest failures into victory narratives.

Another contributor to both Unz Review and VDARE is Taki Theodoracopulos, who also has his own magazine. We'll look at that next.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

The mind of a racist, part 3: Steve Sailer and the Unz Review


Continuing from The mind of a racist, part 2

Steve Sailer has had a "journalism" career, for about twenty years more or less, thanks to right-wing sugar daddies, in addition to having his career promoted by Steven Pinker.

This is what Paul Krugman means when he talks about wingnut welfare:
Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.
Sailer thanked his sugar daddies in the intro to his 2008 book (free online) AMERICA’S HALF‐BLOOD PRINCE BARACK OBAMA’S “STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE"
I am especially indebted to my many patrons, most of whom wish to remain anonymous, who have donated sums of money, small and large, so I can continue to get by as a full‐time professional writer. Due to political correctness, we’re heading into an era when individualistic writers once again depend not upon the mass media for their pay, but upon enlightened patrons. Fortunately, the Internet allows heretical thinkers to help scratch out a living from the small donations of people around the world.
Sailer has had a column at the Unz Review since 2004 and is currently fundraising there:
First: You can use PayPal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. PayPal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.

Second: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to: Steve Sailer P.O Box 4142 Valley Village, CA 91617-0142

Third: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring “subscription” donations.) Please make sure to click the box for: Make contribution to author
Note: the VDARE site goes up and down on its own schedule, so if this link stops working, please let me know.
Other methods you can use to pay Steve Sailer include Bitcoin, transfer via Wells Fargo or Chase and Google wallet.

Sailer claims 2019 has been a good year, according to these metrics:
2019 has been another strong year for iSteve. So far in 2019 there have been 1,685 blog posts comprising 666,9555 with is a lot, perhaps a half dozen typical books. You all have contributed 226,393 comments comprising 15,744,145 words, which is an insane amount. So far, iSteve has seen 4,211,669 unique visits total 10,355,015 page views with a little under 2 weeks to go in 2019. 
It’s been a very good year and I thank all my readers for their contributions, which dwarf mine in volume. On the other hand, as Reggie Jackson once said about the 1977 New York Yankees, I’m the straw that stirs the drink.
So what do you get for your money?

Well judging by Sailer's Unz blog for the past couple of days you get Sailer's thoughts about Harry Potter, Sailer's thoughts on the J.K. Rowling transgender controversy, twice, Sailer apparently suggesting - ironically or not, it's unclear - that Amy Klobuchar said something racist. And last, something about Trump.


What's interesting about Sailer's blog posts is how little work must have gone into them. They most often consist of large block quotes from others with a few comments from Sailer, interspersed. For example his post "Is Trump the best thing that ever happened to journalism?"



But Steve Sailer doesn't need a lot of words to express his hatred and contempt for black people. And he counts on his hereditarian readers to understand their underlying inferiority so he doesn't usually have to spell it out.

Sailer is obsessed with the idea that the housing bubble of 2008 was the fault of Those People. Sailer writes:
...Our society so focused on the problem of not enough mortgage money being lent to nonwhites that, surprise, surprise, we ended up lending too much mortgage money to nonwhites during the Housing Bubble.
Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman addressed that issue in one of his blog posts. I don't include the charts here:
...the fact that those libruls in Congress caused the bubble is just part of what everyone knows, even though it’s not true. 
Just to repeat the basic facts here: 
1. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was irrelevant to the subprime boom, which was overwhelmingly driven by loan originators not subject to the Act.
2. The housing bubble reached its point of maximum inflation in the middle years of the naughties:
3. During those same years, Fannie and Freddie were sidelined by Congressional pressure, and saw a sharp drop in their share of securitization - while securitization by private players surged.
 
Of course, I imagine that this post, like everything else, will fail to penetrate the cone of silence. It’s convenient to believe that somehow, this is all Barney Frank’s fault; and so that belief will continue.
But the kind of people who read Steve Sailer are going to have much more confidence in the opinions of a sore-headed racist with a marketing background than in Krugman.

The bubble was caused by unregulated lending to low-income people of all ethnicities. Sailer harps on "nonwhites" because his focus is on blaming Those People for the problem.

Now it's true that a higher percentage of blacks have bad credit and lower income than whites. This is due to African American families starting out with nothing at all after emancipation, and then enduring 150 year of anti-black brutality and theft of black resources and wealth.

But when evidence that blacks are still being discriminated against shows up, this is how Sailer spins it in an article entitled Black Retirement Planning.
Discrimination lawsuits alleging racism by deep-pocketed corporations (a.k.a., Black Retirement Planning) are a popular topic for credulous news articles.
The lawsuit in question is about discrimination against a wealthy ex-football player who wants to be a private client - a banking term that indicates high-asset clients -  and was told he couldn't because he was black.

Then the article notes:
This year, researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that black mortgage borrowers were charged higher interest rates than white borrowers and were denied mortgages that would have been approved for white applicants.
The important point here is "denied mortgages that would have been approved for white applicants."

In other words, the black applicants in question were as well-qualified as the white applicants. The only variable was ethnicity. But of course Sailer has to say this in sarcastic response:
As we all know, the 2008 mortgage meltdown was due to not lending enough money to minorities.
So to recap, a lawsuit over a wealthy black man trying to take advantage of a bank "private client" designation like any other wealthy bank customer might is declared by Sailer to be an example of "black retirement planning."

And an example of well-qualified black applicants being denied mortgages on the basis of ethnicity is connected by Sailer to his claim that black people caused the 2008 mortgage meltdown.

To Steve Sailer, financially-qualified black people are the same as financially un-qualified black people thanks to the logic of racism : those people are all the same.

Sailer thinks no black people are qualified for the same type of mortgage as white people because it's not their income, but their blackness, that would cause them to default on a mortgage.

This is the same thought process behind Sailer personally retrying and reconvincting the Central Park Five on the basis that a black teenager stabbed a white woman in Manhattan, thirty years later.

And Steve Sailer makes a living spewing this toxic, hateful, sleazy racism.

Now I don't doubt Sailer gets small donations from his reader base, but where would Sailer be without plutocrats like Ron Unz?

Sailer, reposting his own American Conservative article from March 2009 in Unz Review:
...the man who did more to head off the dangers posed by bilingual education is a friend of mine. In fact, he’s my boss: The American Conservative’s publisher Ron Unz.

The Spectator suggests Ron Unz is a Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic Jew:
Contrarianism begins, by and large, with the valid conclusion that many of the ‘facts’ that we are told — by politicians, or the media, or academic and religious institutions — are less than wholly true. You begin to question other aspects of conventional wisdom. There is nothing wrong in this. Yet your questions, and methods of answering them, have to be rational. Otherwise your iconoclastic instincts are unmoored from reason; your passions and biases take over in the flattering guise of independent thought. You question established narratives but swallow alternative claims. You leap to alternative ideas but avoid questioning yourself. In the most extreme cases, you begin by questioning the grounds for preemptive wars and ends by claiming that religious Jews routinely worship Satan. 
That, sadly, appears to be what has happened to Ron Unz.
That would explain why Unz is publishing articles recently like Vulture Capitalism is Jewish Capitalism.

Unz isn't only a Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic Jew, he's a big fan of race science and Steven Pinker:
For example, in 2002 Harvard’s Steven Pinker, one of America’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, published The Blank Slate, an outstanding critique of this incorrect reigning dogma, which specifically included a lengthy debunking of Gould, Lewontin, and their circle. Not only was the book a huge seller and glowingly discussed throughout the MSM, but I was stunned to read an equally favorable review in The Nation, pole-star of America’s political Left. I naturally assumed that the full collapse of Gouldism was underway, an impression enhanced once the august New York Times later published an article describing an important instance of Gould’s scientific fraud.
According to SourceWatch:
Unz publishes The Unz Review. He formerly served as publisher of The American Conservative, a small opinion magazine. In the past, he served as founder and chairman of English for the Children, a nationwide movement to dismantle bilingual education. [1] Unz has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the far-right website VDARE, claiming that he supports them because they are "mostly broke and they write interesting things." In August 2018, Unz published a long essay in The Unz Review in which he supports Holocaust Denial.
Unz would have been the keynote speaker for VDARE's first conference had it not been cancelled by the venue owner. Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer had also been scheduled to speak.

As I have mentioned, Sailer also writes for VDARE, so Sailer is doubly-supported by Ron Unz. I'll talk about VDARE next.

Friday, December 20, 2019

The mind of a racist, part 2: Steve Sailer's fear of Pakistanis

Although the Steven Pinker tweet I shared in the previous post, The mind of a racist, part 1: Steve Sailer promoted by Steven Pinker was a year old, yesterday's tweet shows Pinker is still promoting hereditarianism.



In response to Pinker, Evolutionary Biology PhD student Kevin Bird pointed out how weak the paper is for the hereditarian point of view.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb had a stronger response.


The hereditarian belief that genetics explains virtually all aspects of human cultural behavior is well-demonstrated by Pinker's promotion of Sailer's crackpot theories about Iraqis and democracy.

David Buller demonstrated how reflexive the hereditarian explanation for human behavior is in his critique of evolutionary psychology, Adapting Minds, Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, published in 2006.

David Buss (another big name in hereditarianism) mistakes female sexual slavery for female choice.

Buller:
...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 
But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).
So here is how you do an hereditarian study:
  • Observe human social behavior 
  • Buss observes that high status Turkmen men have increased sexual access to a larger number of women.
  • Proclaim it's the result of genetics.
  • Based on his belief that adaptation controls all human behavior, Buss assumes the greater sexual access is due to women finding high status men more sexually desirable. 
  • Done.
  • Buss is done because, thanks to his belief in all-controlling adaptation, he can't be bothered to examine the lives of Turkmen women. It falls to others to point out that the Turkmen society - like many societies throughout history and even continuing into the present time (sometimes via Facebook) - force women into arranged marriages. This information will never be acknowledge by Buss, who instead publishes his work as "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind."
The stubborn hereditarian denial of the reality of non-genetic human social arrangements is a never-ending problem in part because they pretend they don't ignore it.

For example, in a VDARE article I linked to here Sailer writes:
Q. Are global differences in IQ caused solely by genetics? 
A. No. As I wrote in VDARE.COM back in 2002: 
"A clear example of how a bad environment can hurt IQ can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries...

But if you look at Sailer's actual output it is clear that he doesn't account for environment in human cultural behavior. In his Cousin Marriage Conundrum he writes about Pakistanis:
According to the leading authority on inbreeding, geneticist Alan H. Bittles of Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, “In the resident Pakistani community of some 0.5 million [in Britain] an estimated 50% to 60+% of marriages are consanguineous, with evidence that their prevalence is increasing.”
Sailer thinks the prevalence of Pakistani cousin-marriages is due to the genetic nature of Pakistanis,  which is why he believes that Pakistani cousin marriages will continue increasing in England, in spite of the fact that cultural and socio-economic conditions, especially for women are completely different in England than they are in Pakistan.

And of course he is wrong
But as I hear from some people in their teens and early twenties, that doesn't guarantee interest in cousin marriage. Attitudes are shifting. “I wouldn’t marry my cousin because I consider them like my siblings,” says Ilsa, a 17-year-old student from London. “In my opinion, it’s an option. If you want to, you can get married. It’s not like your family is going to force you. It just depends on what the person wants.”
The reason people marry their cousins in Pakistan is because their marriages are arranged. As Pakistani immigrant families, generation by generation, acclimate to the cultural practices - and most importantly, economic opportunities for women - of England, Pakistani families will have less and less power to arrange their children's marriages, and the custom will die out in England.

Arranged marriages are not the result of genetics. They are due to a complex historical, economic and infrastructural network of cause and effect. The Turkmen selling women into marriage is one form of arranged marriage. Pressuring your child to marry a cousin is another. 

The important thing about arranged marriages is that they are extremely common throughout human history. So common there's reason to believe they existed pre-history. 

This puts a serious crimp in the hereditarian claim that human social hierarchies are adaptations, a result of sexual selection. There's plenty of reason to believe that for much of human history many people, and especially women, didn't choose who they had sex - and reproduced - with, they were forced to have sex with whomever their parents chose for them, in cultures that didn't allow divorce and did not have a concept of spousal rape. 

In other words, human sexual preferences were often ignored, throughout human cultural history, in defiance of sexual-preference-adaptation theories of hereditarians.

And so hereditarians simply ignore that reality.

As Louis Menand wrote in his important review in The New Yorker of Pinker's The Blank Slate:
The insistence on deprecating the efficacy of socialization leads Pinker into absurdities that he handles with a blitheness that would be charming if his self-assurance were not so overdeveloped. He argues, for example, that democracy, the rule of law, and women's reproductive freedom are all products of evolution. The Founding Fathers understood that the ideas of power sharing and individual rights are grounded in human nature. And he quotes, with approval, the claim of two evolutionary psychologists that the "evolutionary calculus" explains why women evolved "to exert control over their own sexuality, over the terms of their relationships, and over the choice of which men are to be the fathers of their children." Now, democracy, individual rights, and women's sexual autonomy are concepts almost nowhere to be found, even in the West, before the eighteenth century. Either human beings spent ten thousand years denying their own nature by slavishly obeying the whims of the rich and powerful, cheerfully burning heretics at the stake, and arranging their daughters' marriages (which would imply a pretty effective system of socialization), or modern liberal society is largely a social construction. Which hypothesis seems more plausible?
So although Steve Sailer's overt racism is an embarrassment to the more respectable purveyors of hereditarianism like Steven Pinker and David Buss, his racism is based on the very same hereditarian logic of "deprecating the efficacy of socialization."

And Steve Sailer doesn't think that cousin-marriage is the only essential genetic trait of Pakistanis.

In a recent article for Unz, Sailer posted a tweet from ABC News that said:
Stunning scene in Pakistan as hundreds of lawyers storm a hospital, attacking doctors and staff to avenge what they said was an assault by doctors on a colleague.
Officials say three patients died when doctors had to flee the scene. https://abcn.ws/2LQfKEC 
To which Sailer responds:
You are probably thinking: “Thank God I wasn’t born in Pakistan.”
But that just proves you are racist and therefore deserve to have your country taken over by immigrants from Pakistan (population 219 million).
It's actually not racist to say "Thank God I wasn't born in Pakistan" because saying so acknowledges that the issue is socio-economic-political conditions in Pakistan.

It's Sailer's message that is racist, because the problem according to Steve Sailer is that immigrants from Pakistan could take over your country with their innate, natural-born, crazy violent ways.

This is the reality of hereditarian beliefs, no matter how much it is white-washed.

And in fact, it is the standard template for the output of Steve Sailer.

Kevin Bird recently wrote a piece called The Hereditarian Hypothesis and Scientific Racism in which he says:
Instead of Nobel Laureates and respected tenure track faculty, the new generation of race scientists on the Pioneer Fund dole are untrained post-graduates. While the campaign to promote scientific racism is losing ground in academic venues, it is still lively in online communities under monikers like “Human Biodiversity” and “Race Realism” (Saini, 2019).
But I think this is overly-optimistic. First because "biosocial criminology" has established an hereditarian beachhead in academia, as I discuss here.

And then there are people like Steve Sailer, who make a living spewing racist pseudo-science thanks to the largess of right-wing racist plutocrats, which I will talk about in The mind of a racist, part 3.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

The mind of a racist, part 1: Steve Sailer, promoted by Steven Pinker


As far as I can tell, Steven Pinker has decided to ignore the existence of Steve Sailer since 2011.

But Sailer can't let Pinker go.

Sailer can be seen just a year ago in Taki's mag (founded by right-wing extremist Taki Theodoracopulos, and once edited by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer) praising Pinker:
...Pinker, for example, is an outspoken advocate of the politically incorrect science of IQ and heredity. For instance, Pinker tweeted earlier this year: 


The Blank Slate is cracking: With polygenic scores corroborating twin & adoption studies in showing IQ is in good part heritable, even schools & left-leaning mags are walking back the tabula rasa.
How does Pinker avoid getting in trouble like DNA researcher James D. Watson or Pinker’s friend Larry Summers, former president of Harvard until he gave a Pinkerian talk on sex differences in IQ? I’m not sure, exactly. Perhaps it’s that the lithe, long-haired, soft-spoken Pinker seems like the archetype of the liberal college professor.
Or perhaps would-be SJW deplatformers intuit that they’d come out of a collision with the extraordinarily smart Pinker as badly as Malcolm Gladwell did in 2009 when the New Yorker writer tried to taint Pinker with guilt by association with me and my impolitic views on IQ and race. Gladwell’s career has never fully recovered from the drubbing the seemingly mild-mannered Pinker gave him.
If you want to see an actual drubbing you should read the exchange of letters between Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Review of Books in 1997.  This is what happens to Pinker when he comes up against someone who knows what they are talking about. (The same thing happened, although at a much lower key, in Pinker's meeting with Krugman.)

GOULD (my highlight):
Pinker quotes me correctly in noting that I accept natural selection as the only known cause of “eminently workable design”—and he then writes, again correctly (although I would add the restrictive adjective “complex” to the beginning of the phrase), that “adaptive design must be the product of natural selection.” But, two paragraphs later, and now in the sarcastic mode, he ridicules me with a very different claim that he regards as equivalent:
Those blinkered, narrow, rigid, miserly, uncompromising ultra-panselectionists whom Gould attacks are simply explaining complex design in terms of its only known cause.
I’m astonished that Pinker doesn’t see the key fallacy here (and he states the point several times, so he has not just made a careless slip): “complex design” does not equate with “complex adaptive design” (or what I preferred to call “eminently workable design”). Complex design forms a much broader category than adaptive design—and has many other potential evolutionary causes. Which brings us to the subject of “spandrels”—just one of the nonadaptive ways to build crucial parts of complex designs (but incomprehensible as a concept to Pinker because he conflates complexity with adaptation).
Gould is pointing out Pinker's over-reliance on adaptation to the exclusion of other evolutionary mechanisms, which Gould calls "Darwinian fundamentalism."


What interests me about the Taki passage is Sailer's accurate observation that Pinker's reputation is generally untainted in spite of the fact that he holds the same hereditarian beliefs as James Watson and Larry Summers.

And I have written about Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections.

Sailer speculates it's Pinker's appearance and demeanor that shields him from well-deserved criticism, which I find a far more plausible explanation than that "SJW deplatformers" are afraid of Pinker's mighty intellect.

But I think the two main reasons for why Pinker's hard-core hereditarianism is ignored are:
Pinker liked Sailer's crackpot theory about Iraq and democracy "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" so much he included it in the 2004 volume of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" which he co-edited with Tim Folger. (Folger wouldn't take any of the blame for Sailer when I wrote and asked him about it.)

"The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" was originally published in The American Conservative (founded by Taki Theodoracopolus) and can be found here.

The fact that the article was published in a rightwing political magazine should have been a clue that its focus is politics rather than "science and nature."

The article almost touches on "science and nature" a few time, but you can tell how "scientific" it is when Sailer first makes a reference to in-breeding hillbillies in the article:
Americans have long dismissed cousin marriage as something practiced only among hillbillies. That old stereotype of inbred mountaineers waging decades- long blood feuds had some truth to it. One study of 107 marriages in Beech Creek, Kentucky in 1942 found 19 percent were consanguineous, although the Kentuckians were more inclined toward second- cousin marriages, while first-cousin couples are more common than second-cousin pairings in the Islamic lands.
Then Sailer finishes the article like this:
In summary, although neoconservatives constantly point to America’s success at reforming Germany and Japan after World War II as evidence that it would be easy to do the same in the Middle East, the deep social structure of Iraq is the complete opposite of those two true nation-states, with their highly patriotic, co-operative, and (not surprisingly) outbred peoples. The Iraqis, in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys.  
As I wrote when I first reviewed the article:
He is claiming that the history of feuds between the Hatfields and McCoys had something to do with inbreeding. Apparently since the families lived in West Virginia and West Virginia has a reputation for inbreeding hillbillies (which is bogus) Sailer decided to go ahead and conflate inbreeding with the feud. That's the level of scholarship we're talking about here.
Now remember, Steven Pinker was the editor responsible for bringing this piece into "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." And yet he had no problem with Sailer mixing up claims of Kentucky inbreeding with the Hatfield/McCoy feud.

But as I've noted, Pinker is big on scolding others about careless fact-checking while being a bad fact-checker himself.

Other obvious problems with Sailer's article include his references to biblical characters as if they were historical, and his claim that consanguinity rates control forms of government. It took me minutes to debunk that:
A quick glance at a Five-Thirty-Eight data form on global consanguinity by country indicates that Iraq is not the most consanguineous country in the world. It's number 16. Meanwhile Kyrgyzstan is number 7 and has a Presidential Republican form of government, like Bangladesh, which is only number 33 on the list. Croatia, which has the same form of government has a cousin marriage rate of 0.1% - less than the US with 0.2%.
Sailer's article, although he makes references to genetics several times, does not demonstrate that Iraqis are genetically indisposed to democracy. And in fact in the last paragraph of the article he uses the phrase "the deep social structure of Iraq."

So what exactly does the deep social structure of Iraq have to do with science and nature? Clearly Steven Pinker believed there was something to do with science or nature there.

I think the solution to that puzzle is this: to the mind of an hereditarian like Pinker or Sailer, every single aspect of human culture, regardless of even the most obvious socio-political-environmental dynamic, is the direct result of genetics.

And this belief comes from the adaptationist essentialism at the heart of hereditarianism as noted by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and again 22 years later by developmental biologist P. Z. Myers.

In his "science" article Sailer writes:
Cousin marriage averages not much more than one percent in most European countries and under 10 percent in the rest of the world outside that Morocco to Southern India corridor. Muslim immigration, however, has been boosting Europe’s low level of consanguinity. According to the leading authority on inbreeding, geneticist Alan H. Bittles of Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, “In the resident Pakistani community of some 0.5 million [in Britain] an estimated 50% to 60+% of marriages are consanguineous, with evidence that their prevalence is increasing.”
In part 2 of "The mind of a racist" we'll look at Sailer's more recent thoughts on Pakistanis.

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Steve Sailer in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" 2004

NOTE this was originally published on my personal blog in February 2018. I am reposting it here because I will be discussing it soon in a new post.

Ugh, I'm probably the only human being to read "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" since 2005.
Ugh


Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer go back to at least 2002 when Sailer interviewed Pinker about The Blank Slate. although he mentioned Pinker even earlier on his iSteve blog and used the term "human biodiversity" too. I haven't found Pinker mentioning Sailer publicly after 2011 when he used Sailer for a positive blurb for "Better Angels."

Sailer still talks about Pinker though, posting Pinker's PC video in a recent Unz column.

Pinker must have been aware of Sailer's attitudes about race by 2004. Sailer was already saying this kind of stuff in 1997:
On average, black men tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more and black women as slightly less feminine than white women.
Obviously, these are gross generalizations about the races. Nobody believes Michael Jackson could beat up kung-fu star Jackie Chan or that comedienne Margaret Cho is lovelier than Sports Illustratedswimsuit covergirl Tyra Banks. But life is a game of probabilities, not of abstract Platonic essences. 
This is notable not only for what he says about race (and his identifying three races, black, white and Asian) but especially his use of "Platonic essences." I think the evo-psycho bros got the term "Platonic" in reference to race from Steve Sailer.

Turns out Sailer uses the term a lot, including the definition most people are familiar with, "non-sexual." But he uses other meanings more often. In addition to Platonic essences Sailer mentions Platonic archetype, idealism, idea, ideals, essentialism, universal, Temptation and form.

Sailer had also had a column at VDARE since 2000 and had published The Left Side of the Bell Curve in 2000 which says things like:
Thus, in the 1960s when American intellectuals imported Swedish sexual morals, along with Swedish-style welfare for unmarried mothers, it had few ill effects in Minnesota (traditionally the highest IQ state). But it proved an instant disaster for African-Americans.
I have yet to find Steven Pinker disavowing anything Sailer has ever said.

I can't guess what made Pinker think it was a good idea to include a known racist in a collection of science writing. Especially since "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" isn't really about science, unless you mean political science since Sailer doesn't get into the genetics of inbreeding except in passing.

The final paragraph:
In summary, although neoconservatives constantly point to America's success at reforming German and Japan after World War II as evidence that it would be easy to do the same in the Middle East, the deep social structure of Iraq is the complete opposite of those two true nation-states, with their highly patriotic, cooperative, and (not surprisingly) outbred peoples. The Iraqis, in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys.
It's interesting he didn't mention the third member of the Axis, Italy. We'll come back to that.

He is claiming that the history of feuds between the Hatfields and McCoys had something to do with inbreeding. Apparently since the families lived in West Virginia and West Virginia has a reputation for inbreeding hillbillies which is bogus Sailer decided to go ahead and conflate inbreeding with the feud. That's the level of scholarship we're talking about here.

By "reforming" Iraq what Sailer means is "rebuild Iraqi society in order to jumpstart the democratization of the middle east."

A quick glance at a Five-Thirty-Eight data form on global consanguinity by country indicates that Iraq is not the most consanguineous country in the world. It's number 16. Meanwhile Kyrgyzstan is number 7 and has a Presidential Republican form of government, like Bangladesh, which is only number 33 on the list. Croatia, which has the same form of government has a cousin marriage rate of 0.1% - less than the US with 0.2%.

So there doesn't seem to be any connection between a country's percentage of cousin marriages and form of government. But you couldn't expect Steve Sailer to do any research, he has his nice simple theory about cousin marriages and democratic reform and it's so much easier than doing any work.

And why should he work, when Steven Pinker will apparently include any old crap in "the best" American science and nature writing.

There's really no structured argument in this article, Sailer is all over the place. He uses the Bible as an example of "Middle Eastern norms" writing:
Jacob's dozen sons were the famous progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Due to inbreeding, Jacob's eight legitimate sons had only six unique great-great grandparents instead of the usual eight. That's because the inbred are related to their relatives through multiple paths.
And don't even get Sailer started on the incest problems with Adam and Eve's children! Sailer doesn't mention Adam and Eve but why not? They're in the Book of Genesis too.

Sailer cites Jacob's family as actual historical people. I can't wait until Sailer explains the genetics of how Jacob lived to be 147.

The only time Sailer talks about the genetics of cousin marriage is this:
Of course there are also other disadvantages to inbreeding. The best known is medical. Being inbred increases the chances of inheriting genetic syndromes caused by malign recessive genes.
He then gets into kin selection and declares that "nepotism is biologically inspired "- which is the standard evo-psycho literary atrocity since by definition nepotism is "inspired" by one's family connections. "Nepotism is biologically inspired" is a tautology.

And while Sailer admits that inbreeding is a medical risk, he should probably say that he believes it's also an indicator of high genetic intelligence. The evo-psychos as a group seem to be convinced that Azkenazi Jews are genetically the smartest "race" and yet Israel is number 29 on the cousin-marriage list and also the Ashkenazi Jews in particular are massively inbred. The Jewish magazine Forward reports:
A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today’s Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the medieval era, between 600 to 800 years ago.
The math also indicates that today’s sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews — there are more than 10 million around the world — derived from just 350 people or so. That previously postulated population bottleneck — a drastic reduction in population size — occurred between 25 to 32 generations ago, the scientists say.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications by a team headed by Columbia University’s Shai Carmon.
So apparently inbreeding makes Jews smarter but only makes Arabs incapable of democratic forms of government.

OK so now we get to the Italian issue. Sailer writes:
Are Muslims, especially Arabs, so much more loyal to their families than to their nations because, due to countless generations of cousin marriages, they are so much more genealogically related to their families than Westerners are related to theirs? Frank Salter, a political scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany whose new book Risky Translations: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity takes a sociobiological look at the reason why Mafia families are indeed families, told me: "That's my hunch. At least it's bound to be a factor."
This is such a perfect evo-psycho paragraph. It sounds learned - hey, Max Planck Institute! - but when you actually try to figure out what he's getting at, it falls apart.

The actual description of the Salter book on Amazon is:
Trust is a central feature of relationships within the Mafia, oppressed minorities, kin groups everywhere, among dissidents, nationalist freedom fighters, ethnic tourists, ethnic middlemen, exchange networks of Kalahari Bushmen, and families subjected to Stalinist social control. Each of these types of trust is examined by a leading scholar and compared with the expectations of neo-Darwinian theory, in particular the theories of kin selection and ethnic nepotism.
A search of the book on "consanguinity" shows that the Mafia use three other relationship types besides consanguinity. In contrast to the reason Arab families "are indeed families" which Sailer claims is because they are related by blood. So where is the connection? Just because Salter takes a "sociobiological look"? And the best Salter can do is "that's my hunch." Wow, so scientific.

And by the way, Italy is rated as 0.6% on the cousin-marriage data sheet, lower than France, Sweden or Canada.

There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker from the last month called The Woman Who Took On the Mafia by Alex Perry. And the sexual politics among these mafia families, people evo-psycho bros would characterize as "white" (or European or possibly Mediterranean  depending on their mood) are every bit as regressive as the most traditional patriarchal tribe in the Middle East. Which should tell you that it's not about race or religion - both things that evo-psycho bros have used to explain when some groups of people in the Middle East are violent.

But they can never admit that it's socio-environmental and economic conditions that drive the behaviors and not genes or sacred texts. Because they have this whole simple paradigm set up, and in order to make it work, you have to deny environmental factors.

Evo-psycho bros sometimes admit environment is important but they have no actual theories on how environment impacts human behavior so they almost completely ignore it. That was the problem at the root of Pinker's "Better Angels" which the New Yorker trashed. If your primary way to explain human behavior is evolution, which is of course the point of evolutionary psychology, well you aren't going to be much good at explaining any changes in human behavior that happen in less than hundreds of thousands of years.

So why did Pinker include a poorly-reasoned, non-scientific explanation for Iraqi non-democratic tendencies in this collection? Well apart from blackmail I think it's most likely because Pinker didn't realize how bad it was himself, because Pinker is not a very good writer and not a clear thinker.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Turning over the IDW rock

Ever since racist crackpot HBD Chick attacked one of the most congenial people ever to attempt to reason with race science proponents on Twitter, a few days ago, I've been paying more attention to her than usual.

When the hell is a representative of Bill Watterson going to tell HBD Chick to
stop abusing Watterson's copyright by associating Hobbes with her racism?















The first result was the post from the other day about the crackpottery of HBD Chick.

HBD Chick's claim that Twitter account Rasmansa is rude - seen in the tweet above - is completely bonkers - I've complained to him a few times that he is too nice to race science creeps, including Ben Winegard, seen agreeing with HBD Chick.

I keep telling people that there's no point in being nice to the IDW race science gang - they are paid to promote race science, not to debate in good faith the swill they are paid to promote.

The only way you can be "nice" enough that they won't complain is to agree with them and tell them how brilliant they are.

Otherwise they will find an excuse to piously moo, sooner or later, about "rudeness." Certainly they consider rudeness to be a much greater sin than grotesque festering hateful racism, which Steve Sailer represents and which HBD Chick completely supports.

This attack on Rasmansa vindicates my approach to race science mongers, which is to expressly not be nice to them. I consider them racist crackpots pushing pseudo-science because they're too stupid to realize it's bullshit or too evil to care.

I see no reason to pretend otherwise. Being nice doesn't get you anywhere with these creeps as Rasmansa found out.

Anyway, so while I was checking out HBD Chick's Twitter feed I saw this fascinating tweet.





So many questions.

I had no idea that the American Enterprise Institute had a cafeteria. What a scene that must be. I wonder if Charles Koch ever shows up to see what he's paying for.

Koch has supported several people associated with the IDW.

I find it curious that Steve Sailer and HBD Chick are linked together like that. I've heard rumors that they have a personal connection and are more than just comrades in evil, but I don't have definite proof. Certainly they are each others' biggest fans.

But why is the AEI cafeteria crowd having animated conversations about two of the most shameless racists around? Although Sailer had a connection to Steven Pinker for years, Sailer has not been included as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

But certainly IDW Charles Murray, an AEI scholar is fond of Sailer. And Sailer is naturally fond of another AEI scholar, professional misogynist Christina Hoff Sommers, (while harping on Roxane Gay's weight and expressing his seething hatred for the Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC wrote an accurate piece about Sailer in 2008 which undoubtedly fueled his hatred.)

And authors at AEI have occasionally linked or quoted Sailer, including Charles Murray.

So Steve Sailer has semi-official connections to AEI. Maybe AEI is considering putting him and HBD Chick on the payroll.

Meanwhile Steve Sailer frets about why he hasn't gone viral as he feels he should.


Monday, December 16, 2019

The racist logic of Steve Sailer

Many have called Steve Sailer a racist. For example:
  • Rightwing watch: "Steve Sailer, an unabashedly racist columnist for the white nationalist site VDARE"
And Malcolm Gladwell, while debating Steven Pinker, noted:
I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. 
But in 2014, HBD Chick would have you know the bar is very high to declare someone a racist, and she feels that Steve Sailer does not meet that (my highlight):
some people seem to be under the impression that being interested in human biodiversity is somehow racist. they couldn’t be more wrong. 
first of all, what is racism? merriam-webster* tells us that racism is:
“A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” 
so there are TWO criteria there that have to be fulfilled to meet the definition of racism: you have to think that 1) race is the primary determinant of human traits, and 2) racial differences inevitably mean that one race is superior to the others. 
with regard to the first one, i can’t think of any serious hbd blogger or commenter in the hbd-o-sphere that thinks that biological differences between the races are the primary determinant of “human traits and capacities.” far from it, in fact. i certainly don’t (see: the entirety of this blog). i’m sure, too, that steve sailer doesn’t think that. nor does john derbyshire. not greg cochran. not henry harpending. not razib either. i know that neither jayman nor super misdreavus think that. and on down the list, etc., etc. ..
Sailer wrote an article for the white supremacist VDARE (he's a very frequent contributor) explaining just how important he thinks intelligence is and how unevenly it is distributed among "races":
Q. Are there differences in average SAT scores among racial groups?
A. Yes. Ashkenazi (European) Jews appear to average the highest—maybe around 110-112—followed by Northeast Asians (105), and then by gentile white Europeans and North Americans (100). The world mean is around 90, Hispanic-Americans are at 89. African-Americans traditionally average around 85 and Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa around 70.
So Steve Sailer thinks that intelligence is very important and he thinks different "racial groups" have different innate levels of intelligence although, as is common to race science promoters, he gives a small nod to environment.

But to get a true understanding of what Steve Sailer considers the innate characteristics of black people, there is this, also in the VDARE article:
Q. But I see all these black people on TV being highly entertaining. They look pretty lively upstairs. Could IQ tests be missing something? 
A. Yes. IQ test questions, by their nature, must have fixed, objective answers. If African Americans are better at subjective, improvisatory responses than they are at objective problem-solving, then IQ will fail to predict fully their patterns of success in the real world. And, indeed, we see much evidence for that every time we turn on the TV (e.g., Oprah).  
Unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many jobs being entertainment or sports superstars as black youths seem to assume, so, overall, IQ remains a quite accurate predictor outside of the tiny sliver of celebrities.
We can infer from this that Steve Sailer believes that black people are not innately good at "objective problem-solving" and this is a serious problem because their innate "subjective improvisatory responses" are not as valuable on the job market. Which of course implies something about black employment and black financial well-being.

If you look at Steve Sailer's Unz Review column it's clear that Sailer is obsessed with race (which is likely the reason his career is supported by wingnut welfare from people like Ron Unz) and that he employs racist logic when it comes to people of color. This is obvious in his December 13 post:
How long until Ava DuVernay, director of “When They See Us” about the Central Park Five, is hired by Netflix to concoct a five part miniseries on how the Morningside Park Three’s beautiful black baby bodies were framed by whites?
This is the very quintessence of a racist mind. Sailer believes that because some black teenagers in 2019 are suspects in the murder of a white woman, it therefore proves that black teenagers - who were exonerated - were guilty of an attack on a white woman in 1989.

Even a thirty-year separation in time cannot convince Steve Sailer to look at them as two separate groups of individuals.

That is how the mind of a racist works: those people are all the same.

Only a total crackpot like "HBD Chick" would claim that Steve Sailer is not a racist.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Race science crackpottery from HBD Chick

HBD Chick, like many defenders of race science who fancy themselves champions of free and open debate, has blocked Pinkerite on Twitter. But I occasionally take a peek at what she's up to from one of my other Twitter accounts.

As usual, it's race science crackpottery.

I am perfectly fine with calling Coyne and Pinker scientific racists. (I've already called Khan a racist.)

Others have called HBD Chick a racist, and The Forward grouped her in with Razib Khan and Steve Sailer. (Many have called Steve Sailer a racist.)

And when the hell is a representative of Bill Watterson going to tell HBD Chick to
stop abusing Watterson's copyright by associating Hobbes with her racism?



HBD Chick's tweets here illustrate perfectly the attempt by race science proponents to have it both ways - to make claims about race and intelligence (AKA strong pinkerism) while maintaining an escape hatch with their mumblings about "fuzzy boundaries" (weak pinkerism.)

I've noted that Steve Sailer uses the defense that critics of race science are guilty of trying to make race into "platonic essences." I'm surprised HBD Chick didn't use that term (she's very fond of Steve Sailer and vice versa.) That's the trick they use when critics of race science ask, if race is the biological reality that they, Pinker, Coyne and Khan like to claim it is, why can't they give biologically valid definitions of race or give us a list of all the races.

But it could be argued that they learned from Steven Pinker that in order to maintain some credibility, unless you are guaranteed a sympathetic audience, you have to outsource the strong pinkerism to people like Linda Gottfredson.

The claim that race is "a useful heuristic" concerning human populations is wrong. As I demonstrated last week, race science considers "Native American" and "East Asian" to be separate races, like they consider "European" a separate race. However 23andMe, while grouping "European" as a "global population" due to genetic similarities, grouped Native American in with East Asian.

Race science considered Native American and East Asian to be so distinct they assigned them different group IQ scores and claim those scores are based on innate genetics-based intelligence.

Race science depends on pre-20th century concepts of "race" and they prefer to keep it that way. Which is why even though 23andMe has been grouping East Asians and Native Americans together since at least 2017 based on genetic testing, this information is completely ignored by proponents of race "science."

Friday, December 13, 2019

Miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for backup from racist Razib Khan

This is a repost from my personal blog originally posted November 2011

Since the earliest days of this blog I've had my eye on Razib Khan, the bigwig at Gene Expression the web site devoted to the "science" of evolutionary psychology. The very first time I mentioned Khan was to point out that he is a blatant racist and a big admirer of Steven Pinker - and it was obvious to me even then that Pinker returned the admiration. Here's Khan talking about aptitude:
I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy.
Now what Khan means by "aptitude" is intelligence and what he has in mind is that infamous work of racialist science "The Bell Curve." Predictably, Khan is a huge fan of the Bell Curve and featured this interview with author Charles Murray.

Another time Khan clarified further on the "aptitude" issue:
right now, we assume that ALL GROUPS HAVE EQUAL APTITUDES. the result is that liberals devise new social programs to “uplift” groups to express their potentional. conservatives excoriate underclass social structures and cultures and encourage their own rival social engineering programs (vouchers, enterprise zones, privating public housing). if some aptitudes were genetic on average between groups, then we have an even harder task: identify the points in the genome that effect “g”-general intelligence, and figure out ways to manipulate these segments of the genome (gene therapy).
There is no question, Razib Khan believes that non-whites, especially Africans, have evolved to be less intelligent than whites. He is a full-on racist.

Here Khan lays out his theories of intelligence of various national/ethnic groups and the desirability of blondes.

UPDATE DECEMBER 14:
In the link above Khan presents the race science belief that Native Americans are a separate race from East Asians. Pinkerite has recently discussed the why that is genetically incorrect.


The proudly racist American Renaissance likes to republish the work of Razib Khan.

But Khan is careful not to make his racism too blatant these days. Instead he lets you draw your own conclusions about Black Americans as in this Discover Magazine column he writes:
Here’s a case of inversion: in the early 20th century ideologues turned the roots of all civilizations into examples of Aryan/Nordic superiority. Today from what I can tell the mainstream sentiment is to not comment or inquire too deeply into the Afrocentrist fiction that St. Augustine, Hannibal or Cleopatra were black. A fiction which from what I can tell has spread widely within the African American community. How the pendulum has swung!
So how does he know that the fiction "has spread widely within the African American community"? He says it right there: "from what I can tell."

In other words, the Aryan/Nordic superiority myth, which was widely disseminated and believed and acted upon in the Holocaust, is equivalent to the myth-making of the African American community - from what Razib Khan can tell.

According to his online bio he is an "Unz Foundation Junior Fellow." The Unz Foundation was created by Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative.

Now it's not surprising that Pinker has a hissyfit over the New Yorker review of his most recent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." - Pinker is not accustomed to analysis by someone who is not baffled by his bullshit - and legions in the media are. Pinker is accustomed to being lionized and revered.

So who does Steven Pinker turn to for a reply to The New Yorker? Razib Khan:
But aren’t you just being defensive? Authors always think that negative reviews of their book are wrong. Has anyone else replied to Kolbert?

Razib Khan has a response in the Gene Expression blog on the Discover magazine Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20111012170040/http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/10/relative-angels-and-absolute-demons/
The funny thing is, both in the link above and here, Khan admits he hasn't even read the entire book, estimating he's read about 20% as late as November 28.

A racist who doesn't do his homework. That's who Steven Pinker cites in defense of his work against the New Yorker.

Steve Sailer, a buddy of Khan's and an even more blatant racist, is a huge fan of Pinker's book and gives the book a rave review in - where else - The American Conservative.

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