Pinkerite has of course never been a fan of Steven Pinker's former pal, Steve Sailer, and has always freely expressed contempt for him both on this blog and right to his virtual face on Twitter.So imagine my surprise to find Pinkerite has been blocked by Steve Sailer on Twitter.
I can't say what, for sure, finally triggered Sailer, although I can't help but suspect that it might have something to do with the Northern Superiority Hypothesis.
The "Northern Superiority Hypothesis" (I came up with that name) is the foundational belief of race science and was apparently devised in the 18th century. Originally it simply held that humans who live in colder climates are more intelligent than those who live in warmer climates. Then after Darwin and the Out of Africa theory race science proponents began suggesting that humans coming out of African adapted through increased brain power to cold harsh weather.
Richard Lynn has been the most prominent contemporary champion of Northern Superiority, publishing his thoughts on the topic in the white supremacist Mankind Quarterly.
There are many problems with the hypothesis, but I'll focus on two, because they relate to Steve Sailer.
First - why did anybody leave the virtual paradise as described by Richard Lynn?
The life style of present day !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari desert provides a useful insight into the relative ease of securing food supplies for hunter gatherer peoples in tropical latitudes. As described by Lee (1968), women go gathering plant foods about one day in three, and men go on hunting expeditions for about one week in three. This is sufficient to provide food for the whole group, including infants, children and the old. The rest of the time can be spent relaxing about the camp. For these peoples the problems of obtaining food supplies are neither time consuming nor cognitively demanding.Sounds pretty sweet, doesn't it? Why would anybody ever want to move away from such a place? I have never found any proponent of the Northern Superiority Hypothesis discussing why anybody would want to move into a cold harsh climate on purpose.
One reason, from a cultural materialist perspective, and which is at least as plausible as anything dreamed up by race science theories, is that if there was such an easy-living environment for humans, the result, before reliable artificial birth-control, would be a population boom.
The population boom would result in populations expanding into each others' territory and then conflicts over the best territory. The winners got to stay in the best territories. The losers had to move to the lesser territories.
So it's plausible that the people who ended up moving into the harsh climates were losers of territorial competition. So in spite of "biosocial criminologists" like John Paul Wright claiming:
Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially.In fact it's very possible whites and "Orientals" are the descendants of those who were less able to "organize socially" which is why they lost the war and had to move north into harsher climates. And the people who stayed in Africa were the better organized.
So that's the first problem with Northern Superiority Hypothesis.
The second problem is Neanderthals.
Neanderthals lived in cold weather before humans did. The Northern Superiority Hypothesis holds that intelligence was selected for in cold climates - in other words, in the battle of survival of the fittest, those who were most intelligent lived better and had more offspring than the less intelligent. In survival of the fittest, intelligence, according to Northern Superiority Hypothesis, made you fit in cold weather.
The problem is Neanderthals are extinct. If they were more intelligent than homo sapiens they should still be around if intelligence made you "the fittest." So either intelligence isn't the ultimate determination of fitness, or cold weather isn't such a bane to the stupid after all.
And then there is the problem of purity.
Racialists are obsessed with purity of the blood. Which is likely why Steve Sailer's book (Sailer was offering a PDF version for free on VDare for awhile) is called AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE - BARACK OBAMA’S STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE.
You can still get it for free via the Wayback Machine. It's a bargain at twice the price.
DNA testing has shown that virtually all humans living now, except those from sub-Saharan Africa, are likely to have traces of Neanderthal DNA. It seems that the losers of the territorial disputes of the African paradise headed north and had sex and offspring with Neanderthals.
Which means that people with direct sub-Saharan African ancestors are more "pure" homo sapiens than everybody else. Not only more purely human but unmixed with a species that clearly failed the long-term allegedly intelligence-based survival-of-the-fittest test.
And that is why I think I may have triggered Steve Sailer when I tweeted at him:
If this did trigger him it would be really funny. As it happens, according to DNA test results I have more Neanderthal DNA than 74% of 23andMe customers. And it doesn't bother me at all.
It also doesn't bother me that sub-Saharan Africans are more pure homo sapiens than everybody else.
But that's exactly the kind of thing that would bother purity-mongering race obsessives.
