October 31, 2007

Samuelson on "Farewell to Alms"

Robert J. Samuelson writes about Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms" in the Washington Post. (My 2 part review of the book is here and here.)

Personally, I'm fairly optimistic about Third World poverty, in the absolute sense if not the relative sense. For example, telephones are hugely useful for getting things done, and the good news is that cell phone systems are much less dependent on having a functional culture than the old land line systems. The old systems required big bureaucracies that were reasonably honest and efficient, which many countries, including some Western European ones, couldn't reliably manage. But you can have working cell phone networks in places as anarchic as 1990s Somalia.

My guess would be that technology will continue to evolve toward plug and play solutions that will work even in dysfunctional cultures like Nigeria. The U.S. burned up a lot of brainpower in the 1980s and 1990s figuring out how to use, first, PCs and then the Internet. (For example, I worked mostly on introducing PCs to my marketing research company from the fall of 1984 to the summer of 1988, and on introducing the Internet to the company from late 1994 to the end of 1996.) The whole world has benefited and will continue to benefit from these investments. Granted, the Nigerians have latched on to the Internet most famously for the purposes of fraud, so maybe that's not the best example ...

And then there's the Secret Solution to African Poverty, the one that nobody talks about: get the men to work as hard as the women. By one estimate I've seen, from an African feminist organization, women do 80% of the work in sub-Saharan Africa. That's probably biased, so let's say it's only 70%. So, if the men started working as hard as the women, and were on average as productive, that would boost output by 40%.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Big Game

This Sunday's NFL game between the 7-0 Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts and the awesome 8-0 New England Patriots is the first November battle of undefeateds in the NFL in many years, with temporary possession of the title of the top American athlete up for grabs between quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. For years, Manning had the better statistics but Brady had the Super Bowl rings, but now it's reversed, with Brady putting together an unbelievable half season. If he could somehow keep up this pace, Brady would break Manning's record of 49 touchdown passes and finish with 60 touchdown passes versus only 4 interceptions. By way of comparison, Manning is on pace to finish with the second best TD to interception numbers at 28 to 7.

A couple of weeks ago, sportswriter Jason Whitlock pointed out:
African-American football players caught up in the rebellion and buffoonery of hip hop culture have given NFL owners and coaches a justifiable reason to whiten their rosters. That will be the legacy left by Chad, Larry and Tank Johnson, Pacman Jones, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick and all the other football bojanglers.

In terms of opportunity for American-born black athletes, they're going to leave the game in far worse shape than they found it.

It's already starting to happen. A little-publicized fact is that the Colts and the Patriots — the league's model franchises — are two of the whitest teams in the NFL. If you count rookie receiver Anthony Gonzalez, the Colts opened the season with an NFL-high 24 white players on their 53-man roster. Toss in linebacker Naivote Taulawakeiaho "Freddie" Keiaho and 47 percent of Tony Dungy's defending Super Bowl-champion roster is non-African-American. Bill Belichick's Patriots are nearly as white, boasting a 23-man non-African-American roster, counting linebacker Tiaina "Junior" Seau and backup quarterback Matt Gutierrez.

For some reason, these facts are being ignored by the mainstream media. Could you imagine what would be written and discussed by the media if the Yankees and the Red Sox were chasing World Series titles with 11 African-Americans on their 25-man rosters (45 percent)?

We would be inundated with information and analysis on the social significance. Well, trust me, what is happening with the roster of the Patriots and the Colts and with Roger Goodell's disciplinary crackdown are all socially significant.

Hip hop athletes are being rejected because they're not good for business and, most important, because they don't contribute to a consistent winning environment. Herm Edwards said it best: You play to win the game.

I'm sure when we look up 10 years from now and 50 percent — rather than 70 percent — of NFL rosters are African-American, some Al Sharpton wannabe is going to blame the decline on a white-racist plot.

Back in October 2005, Inductivist did a statistical analysis for my VDARE.com article showing that in the 2.3 seasons he looked at -- 2003, 2004, and early 2005 -- that NFL teams with more white second stringers won more games. The correlation between the racial makeup of the starters and percentage of games won was close to zero, suggesting that teams rationally evaluated their starting line-ups. But, it appeared that, at least in 2003-early2005, teams with whiter benches did better, suggesting there had been an under-exploited opportunity to win more games:

Why would having more white nonstarters help a team? Caste Football’s J.D. Cash has suggested that perhaps white utility players are more likely to master the playbooks for multiple positions (as suggested by their higher average IQ scores on the Wonderlic test mandated by the NFL).

Or, possibly, the reason that teams with a higher number of white reserves have been winning more games is because whites are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining about not starting. Perhaps white back-ups are less likely than black back-ups to poison the atmosphere and ruin the team spirit.

After all, our society for the last 40 years has lavishly encouraged blacks to claim to be victims of injustice, so it would hardly be surprising if, among pampered egotistical athletes, whites might tend to be more likely than blacks to keep quiet for the good of the team when they feel they are being treated unfairly.

Whatever the reason for this pattern, this quick study, while not definitive, is important news—both to team officials in charge of player personnel choices and also to anyone who likes to bet on football games.

It would pay to extend the study over more years to see if it represents a long-term pattern, and to go into more depth to find the reasons for this apparent market failure.

Anyway, there's now a couple of years more data, so somebody might want to check and see if this pattern persisted.

The definitive James Watson posting

Over at GNXP, Jason Malloy unloads on the Watson brouhaha.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A brilliant parody in Slate.com

For Halloween, Slate publishes the most hilarious parody of egomaniacal lesbian-feminist self-righteousness and general tiresomeness I've seen in awhile: "The Invisible Lesbian: Challenging the Myth of Merit-Based Publishing." It's attributed to "Sarah Schulman," who I assume is probably actually some guy who writes for The Simpsons or Letterman's Top Ten lists.

Update: Wow, this is a really elaborate hoax. There's a whole Wikipedia page (almost as funny) devoted to this obvious nom de plume.

Hats off to Slate for going to all this trouble to amuse us!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What's gone wrong with music?

A recurrent topic of mine is "Kids These Days: What's the Deal with Their Music?" Unlike the previous generation, my complaint is that popular music has barely changed in 25 years. Rap music is still the same old same old; the LA "New Rock" radio station KROQ sounds almost exactly the same as when I left LA in 1982, except styles have gotten narrower (fewer synthesizers and fewer girl singers); and country sounds like the lamer sort of 1970s rock.

The great age of rock music was driven in part by the electric guitar, which first emerged with Charlie Christian's participation in Benny Goodman's band in the late 1930s. Just as the development of the pianoforte (soft-loud) was essential to the Romantic music of the 19th Century (imagine if Romantic composers had had to compose on harpsichords!), the electric guitar was central to turning rock 'n' roll (which could be performed just fine on the piano, as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard had shown) into rock. Around 1964-1965, the world discovered how protean the electric guitar could sound, and that set off one of the great eras in popular music history.

But there was an important ethnic angle, the slow synthesis during the 19th and 20th Centuries, mostly in the Mississippi watershed, of an Afro-Anglo-Celtic style. And that started to come apart with the punk-New Wave era at the end of the 1970s, which was a rebellion, in large part, against the dominance of the blues, as institutionalized by the Brits from the Beatles onward in the sainted Sixties. Devo, with their robotic rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," was a representative New Wave act -- not particularly talented, but that made them more representative than some idiosyncratic genius. Their message was: Let's stop pretending we're Mississippi Delta bluesmen; we're nerdy suburban white kids with three digit IQs.

The problem has become that the punk-New Wave rebellion against the blues got institutionalized, and the same musical styles that were refreshing in 1977-1982 are still hanging around. The more linear, abstracted styles that emerged after 1977 were interesting, but you can't keep mining that vein -- abstracting an abstraction hits diminishing marginal emotional returns pretty quickly.

An article in The New Yorker --"A Paler Shade of White: How indie rock lost its soul" by Sasha Frere-Jones -- starts off as a review of an Arcade Fire concert and then touches on some of these issues.

By the time I saw the Clash, in 1981, it was finished with punk music. It had just released “Sandinista!,” a three-LP set consisting of dub, funk, rap, and Motown interpretations, along with other songs that were indebted—at least in their form—to Jamaican and African-American sources. As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century.

Unfortunately, the author appears to be too young to know his history correctly:
"MTV had been on the air for nearly two years before it got up the courage to play the video for Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” in 1983. (Jackson was the first black artist to appear on the channel, though it had played videos by the equally gifted white soul act Hall & Oates.) Jackson’s 1982 album “Thriller” is the second-biggest-selling record of all time (after “Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975”), but he alone could not alter pop music’s racial power balance. Black and white musicians continued to trade, borrow, and steal from one another, but white artists typically made more money and received more acclaim."

No, he's confused here. Blacks were huge stars long before then -- Ever hear of the Supremes? Stevie Wonder? Aretha Franklin? Jimi Hendrix? Marvin Gaye? Ray Charles? Johnny Mathis? Nat King Cole? Ella Fitzgerald? The biggest stars of the post-1964 classic rock era were British (Beatles, Stones, Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd), but among American acts, blacks did fine.

The first two years of MTV, 1981-1982, were an anomalous period in which white rock fans were overtly anti-black. (I recall Prince, opening for the Rolling Stones at the LA Coliseum in 1981, being showered with boos no matter how much heavy Hendrix-style electric guitar he laid on.) This was specifically because white rockers blamed blacks (wrongly) for disco. (They should have blamed gays -- as Tom Wolfe pointed out at the time after visiting Studio 54, the music industry was covering up just how gay disco was.) It was a passing phase growing out of the anti-disco backlash, and wasn't true before or after.
"If young white musicians had been imitating black ones, it was partly because they had been able to do so in the dark, so to speak. In 1969, most of Led Zeppelin’s audience would have had no idea that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had taken some of the lyrics of “Whole Lotta Love” from the blues artist Willie Dixon, whom the band had already covered twice (with credit) on its début album."

Oh, come on ... Everybody knew British rockers were copying black bluesmen. The Brits talked about it constantly -- in their limey speaking accents that contrasted so hilariously with their Memphis singing accents.

Nor were whites only "stealing" from blacks. Consider Aretha's 1967 classic "(You Make Me Feel Like a) A Natural Woman," which was written by the Brill Building husband-wife team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Indeed, a strong respect for Jewish showbiz professionalism contributed mightily to black musical success. Most famously, Motown founder Berry Gordy explicitly organized his recording company to mimic the methods of Hollywood movie studios of the 1930s.

The author goes on to make a better point:
"In the mid- and late eighties, as MTV began granting equal airtime to videos by black musicians, academia was developing a doctrine of racial sensitivity that also had a sobering effect on white musicians: political correctness. Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation. A political reading of art took root, ending an age of innocent—or, at least, guilt-free—pilfering. This wasn’t a case of chickens coming home to roost. Rather, it was as though your parents had come home and turned on the lights."

For example, after the first rap Top 40 hit in late 1979, white bands released various raps in 1980-81, such as Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" (with super-nerd David Byrne rapping "Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late"), The Clash's "Magnificent Seven," and Blondie's #1 hit "Rapture." It was a fun novelty fad, and the cool New Wave bands were hopping on the bandwagon. And why shouldn't they?

Now, though a white performer has to be as good at rapping as Eminem or he'll be tarred as the new Vanilla Ice.

So, white musicians retreated from anything to do with black music, not wanting to be accused of being the new Pat Boone and stealing Little Richard's act.

Meanwhile, it turned out that blacks weren't such almighty natural creative geniuses either, at least when freed of the anxiety of living up to white demands. Black songwriting collapsed. Writing melodic hooks came to be seen as incompatible with keepin' it real. By the 1990s, black songs that weren't raps didn't have much more melody than the raps did. Hip-hop just droned on forever, although it may now, hopefully, be finally dying.

The terrible irony is that blacks turned themselves into new minstrels, acting out ridiculous gangsta rap fantasies for white fans, sometimes with lethal results.

At the Super Bowl halftime show this year, oldtimer Prince gave a tremendous performance in the pouring rain. For his two cover versions, he pointedly chose songs written by whites and covered by blacks -- Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (most famously peformed by Jimi Hendrix) and Creedence Clearwater's "Proud Mary" as done by Ike and Tina Turner. His message was clear: Let's get over this obsession with who stole what from whom. Together, we Americans conquered the musical world. We can do it again if we just grow up.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Larry Auster on Michael Hart's "Understanding Human History"

Larry Auster has a long review of a book I reviewed over the summer, Michael A. Hart's Understanding Human History. Here's an interesting section:

The reason for Hart's low opinion of India become evident from his similarly (and unfashionably) low opinion of ancient Egypt. Egypt, he tells us, was not nearly as important a civilization as everyone thinks. This is because Egypt was relatively poor in the sorts of inventions and innovations that are influential and useful for other civilizations. In other words, Hart's criterion of the worth of a civilization is its material contributions to general human progress. Which means that the internal structure and inner life of a society, what it is subjectively for its own members, is of no interest to him. Because the Egyptians did not add a great deal to civilizational advance, ... they are of no importance to him, even though, as many other observers and students of Egypt have seen it, the Egyptian society achieved a kind of perfection. The Egyptians experienced their earthly life as so beautiful, pleasant, harmonious, and stable (as one can glean from their paintings), that their idea of the afterlife was to continue in that experience forever. Once we understand this, the Egyptian cult of the afterworld, with its mummies and monumental tombs and pyramids, starts to make sense in terms of the Egyptians' own experience of life and of eternity. Seen from this perspective, the pyramids are not just very large and very impressive structures, they are representations of the cosmos. Of course this Egyptian culture with its focus on eternity was not as innovative as, say, fifth century Athens; indeed, it led to a static conception of society with little room for human freedom and creativity. But at the same time it represents an awe-inspiring human achievement, which explains Egypt's continuing hold over men's imagination.

In other words, Hart misses the Egyptians' experience of order. Every society and civilization is an attempt to create order, an orientation of men's lives toward nature, society, and the divine, which will be different in each society. But to grasp a civilization's order, we must attempt to see the civilization whole, and this is impossible if we reduce its meaning to a comparative list of its material and even its intellectual achievements. What was most remarkable about the Egyptians--and what still draws us to them today, even if we can't explain the nature of the pull--was not this or that achievement, but the underlying vision of order that each of those achievements expressed. A materialist will have little interest in all this. It doesn't come within his ken. He wants solid, useful accomplishment and that's that.

With the obvious caveat that this assessment of Egyptian civilization applies more to the Egyptian on top of the social pyramid than to the poor bastard down at the bottom, this is a good point. But I also admire Hart's reductionism. With history, you can profitably move in both directions.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 30, 2007

A dog that isn't barking

A reader writes:

Have you noticed that no one on the right is willing to say anything about race and gender preferences during this election cycle? All the candidates had positions on preferences in 2000. Today, the pundits don't even chide them for keeping mum.

That's particularly strange because in November 2006, on a night that Republicans were getting drubbed across the country, Ward Connerly won a smashing victory in Michigan on his initiative outlawing racial and ethnic preferences.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

An interview with Dr. Effect

The LA Times runs an interview with James Flynn, of the Flynn Effect.

And here's my VDARE.com review of his new new book.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

African vs. African-American family structures

An anthropologist responds to my posting on the loss of interest among the public in the bread-and-butter topic of cultural anthropology -- kinship structures:

Steve Sailer noted that the study of family structure has fallen on hard times in anthropology. This is perfectly true. It is now very widely believed by anthropologists that 'kinship' is a Eurocentric construction, and that other folks actually have their own folk theories about 'relatedness' which have to be understood in their own terms, and don't map closely on to Western folk theories of 'blood' and biology (which in turn don't map closely on to actual genetic relatedness).

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, even serious treatments of kinship often veer between microscopic and telescopic: either details of particular societies or general principles underlying all human kinship systems. But there's also a middle range to kinship: different geographic areas have (on average) characteristic differences in their kinship systems.

In Sub-Saharan Africa (henceforth just 'Africa'), for example, family establishments commonly take the form of separate households for each of a man's co-wives (and her children), with husbands moving between wives' households, and women having considerable autonomy, and not much day-to-day economic support. Polygyny is certainly found outside of Africa, but this particular household arrangement is vastly more common in Africa than anywhere else. African societies also generally have strong unilineal descent groups, and great religious power vested in elders and ancestors. (This actually converges somewhat with China, but economics and male-female relations are very different there). Marriage is stronger in some parts of Africa than others, but is generally seen as a device for expanding the lineage, rather than as an economic and emotional union. Within Africa. the major exceptions to these generalizations are often genetic outliers as well: Bushmen, Pygmies, and Ethiopians.

Africans on the other side of the Atlantic are an interesting comparison. In some ways they look very African: marriage is not very strong among blacks in the New World. But in other respects, New World blacks look Western: African lineage systems and ancestor worship didn't survive the Middle Passage and slavery (except among scattered maroon (i.e. runaway slave) groups in places like Surinam). One result is that, although blacks in the US, the Caribbean, and Brazil have all sorts of social problems related in part to family structure, tribalism is really not the issue that it is in Africa.

More speculatively, another result may be much higher levels of creativity in popular culture, especially music, among blacks on the western side of the Atlantic than in Africa. I suspect that Jamaica alone has had as much impact on popular culture around the world as all of sub-Saharan African. There are all sorts of factors contributing here: more money, more miscegenation, a greater proportion of English speakers. But it may also be that in the African Diaspora as in the Jewish Diaspora, the assimilation of Western individualism has unleashed a degree of cultural creativity not seen in more tradition-bound kin-group-oriented sectors of the population.

I had a summer job once sharing an office with a Ph.D. student from Cameroon. All day long we played his tapes of African pop music. Wonderful stuff, but it lacked the "star power" of African-American pop music. It was more communal, less show-offy than James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or Jimi Hendrix.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Neo-Cons vs. Nepo-Cons

A friend points out:

A note on neo-nepotism: One difference between Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol and their sons is that the fathers were shaped in part by serving in the armed forces, alongside guys they otherwise wouldn't have spent much time with. They've both written about this. In Podhoretz's case, he discovered that his fears of anti-intellectualism and anti-semitism among the masses were overblown. The GIs he rubbed shoulders with were actually fairly respectful of the brighter guys, and they were more curious than hostile about his religious/ethnic background. Kristol learned another lesson: there was so much corruption and racketeering going on among his fellow soldiers that he lost his socialist faith that putting lots of government property in the hands of The People was a wonderful idea. My impression (I could be wrong) is that John Podhoretz and William Kristol haven't had this range of social experience. The great theme of The Bell Curve is that a cognitive elite is increasingly cut off from the rest of the population. The end of conscription may be part of this trend.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Wolfgang Zernik v. Steve Sailer on The Big Question

In the Letters column on VDARE.com, Wolfgang Zernik raises a common question:

The real problem Sailer should tackle is this: society has no way to treat the recognition that one racial group is intellectually inferior to others.

I mean simply no way to deal with it, legally, constitutionally or morally. We are not Nazis, after all, and are not likely to become like them. Why not discuss important issues?

If we ever get to the point where we are forced to acknowledge that people of African descent are on average far less intelligent than whites or Asians, what do we do then?

Click here for my answer.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Great Flood or The Epic of Gilgabush

On the Tigris River lies the world's most dangerous dam, built on top of water-soluble gypsum (hey, at least the Iraqis didn't build it out of sugar), which threatens to unleash a 66-foot tall wall of water on Mosul, with an expected death toll of up to half a million.

From the Washington Post, this is almost too perfect of a metaphor for our whole experience in Iraq.
Seepage from the dam funnels into a gushing stream of water that engineers monitor to determine the severity of the leakage. Twenty-four clanging machines churn 24 hours a day to pump grout deep into the dam's base. And sinkholes form periodically as the gypsum dissolves beneath the structure.

Read the whole thing. It's hilariously horrifying.

Greg Cochran emails:
There is only one right answer - drain the reservoir as rapidly as is safe. But we don't get around to it. We have more important things to think about.

Once upon a time this country was a fountain of competency: we got things done and we were _famous_ for getting things done. Not any more.

Bush is the Apostle of incompetence. Everything he does is stupid, and he does it in a stupid way. If he'd run the space program back in the 60s, the iconic movie would be Journey To The Center Of The Earth rather than Apollo 13.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 29, 2007

Obama's life v. Obama's autobiography, continued

As I've been pointing out all year, when people actually get around to reading Senator Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from my Father, all sorts of questions open up. Now, the New York Times runs a rather dull article pointing out that the brief section in it about his life in New York in the early 1980s is somewhat misleading: he wasn't a glamorous international business consultant, he was a copyeditor of a newsletter, etc.

There's's a pretty good blog called Analyze This written by a former colleague at the newsletter company named Dan Armstrong. He posted in "Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume:"

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s.I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack - he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers - but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book....

All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.

Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats - not to mention America - need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.

And yet I’m disappointed. Barack’s story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the facts to his purpose.

As I've mentioned before, the autobiography Obama wrote at age 33 gives the impression of somebody who is interesting but not quite right in the head: verbally talented, depressive, humorless, and overly sensitive, like Joan Didion or an unfunny Evelyn Waugh. That's not the impression most people have of him now (everybody says "He seems so comfortable in his own skin," which raises the question of how did he get his head turned around -- it's too bad he can't tell us how he did it, at least so long as he's running for President).

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Warning! May Contain Spoilers! (If you've been in a coma for seven years)

"Recount" is an upcoming TV movie, whose IMDB listing takes the contemporary fetish for protecting the reader from unknowingly discovering the exciting conclusion of the movie to the point of absurdity:
Plot Outline:
A chronicle of the weeks after the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent recounts in Florida.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 28, 2007

James Watson, Steven Rose, and the Lives of Others

Here's another excerpt from my new VDARE.com essay on James Watson:

Perhaps the most widely quoted smear-artist attacking James Watson has been Steven Rose. Rose is a professor emeritus of neurobiology at the Open University, a sort of British 1960s lefty version of the University of Phoenix. Rose is a Marxist and the co-founder of the boycott Israel movement among British academics.

He was also the co-author, with Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin, of the 1984 manifesto with the amusingly unprophetic title Not In Our Genes. (Here's Richard Dawkins's scathing review—which led to Rose threatening to sue Dawkins for libel!)

During the attack on Watson, Rose wrote in The Guardian:

"As for freedom of speech, these freedoms are and must be constrained. We don't have the right to casually cry fire in a crowded theatre, or to use hate speech—at least in Europe, as opposed to the US. Watson's now retracted [sic] remarks came into these unacceptable categories. So the repercussions are to be welcomed." [Watson's bad science, October 21, 2007]

Not surprisingly, Steven Rose has been accused of practicing what he preaches: having the government silence scientists whose ideas he dislikes.

According to social scientist Volkmar Weiss, a dissident under the East German Communist dictatorship, Rose ratted him out to the East Berlin regime, setting in motion the crushing in East Germany of IQ research and human behavioral genetics.

Weiss explains this in a 1983 essay entitled The Suppression of Human Behavioral Genetics by the Radical Left—unpublished, for obvious reasons, until 1991. He wrote:

"In 1980, the manuscript of the monograph Psychogenetik (Weiss 1982a) was complete. Now some fierce dogmatists were discovering that a cuckoo’s egg had been laid in the nest of socialism. One example: S. Rose asked his East German colleague, the professor of neurochemistry D. Biesold at the Karl-Marx-University of Leipzig (personal communication by Biesold), whether there was no means of stopping further publications by Weiss, because such publications printed in a socialist country were particularly disadvantageous to the propaganda of the Radical Left in the Western world. …”

Rose’s wish appears to have been the East German Communists’ command:

"[A]t the end of the year 1982 [Walter] Friedrich [ director of the Central Institute of Youth Research in Leipzig] sought and obtained the backing of high-ranking officials of the Communist Party and all further research in psychogenetics in East Germany came to an end."

Weiss goes on to describe the aftermath he endured, which would be familiar to anyone who saw the tremendous 2006 film about life in East Germany under the thumb of the secret police, The Lives of Others:

“… the cited author was under the threat of arrest and had already lost all possibility of doing further empirical work of defending his field of research. After 1984, Weiss was forced to work in a quite different field … What follows is the usual story of life and resistance under totalitarian conditions. In order to be published abroad, any new theoretical contributions had to be smuggled out of the GDR." [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Working for The Clampdown

From my new VDARE.com article:

Why did so many so enthusiastically sign up as auxiliaries of the Thought Police to hound James Watson, who is perhaps America's most distinguished man of science?

Because it's fun.

The psychology of those who rushed to attack Watson was memorably outlined in Orwell's 1984, when the interrogator O'Brien explains to his prisoner Winston Smith the exciting future envisaged by the Party:

"Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. …The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. … The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. … Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Blackwater

Leaving aside all the usual moral issues for the moment, as a taxpayer, I want to complain about this 21st Century innovation of using ex-U.S. military servicemen as highly paid mercenaries alongside much lower paid servicemen.

The government has forfeited its monopsonistic (i.e. sole employer) buying power over government-funded jobs killing people and breaking things, so the taxpayers are having to shell out much higher pay, either to Blackwater mercenaries or in six figure re-enlistment bonuses to U.S. military servicemen to keep them from going over to Blackwater. From the taxpayers' point of view, it's a ridiculous situation.

This is not a unique case restricted to the military. Much of the demand for privatization of traditionally governmental jobs comes from government employees themselves who want a competitive job market for their skills. For example, the folks who run state lotteries have been working for years to get the state lottery business privatized so they can transfer from a civil service job to a "private"-sector job ... running a state-licensed monopoly. It's the best of both worlds!

As a taxpayer, I'm tired of paying to train somebody in a government job, then, when they are finally productive, having them jump to an privatized for-profit job that costs me two or three times as much.

I want our monopsony back!

(I've also been wondering, how did the Blackwater company decide to name themselves after a particularly lethal complication of malaria? Were "Black Plague" and "Black Death" already trademarked by somebody else?)

By the way, mercenaries are not some brilliant 21st Century innovation that nobody ever thought of before. Renaissance Italy, for example, used lots of mercenaries and how'd that work out for them? There are good reasons why advanced societies got rid of their reliance upon mercenaries. Same with Max Boot's brainstorm of using lots of illegal aliens in our armies. These are old, old ideas. Machiavelli discussed the downsides of mercenaries and foreign fighters in Chapters 12 and 13 of The Prince.

The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.

And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to, either by a prince or a republic, then the prince ought to go in person and perform the duty of captain; the republic has to send its citizens, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by the laws so that he does not leave the command. And experience has shown princes and republics, single-handed, making the greatest progress, and mercenaries doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Switzers are completely armed and quite free.

I conclude, therefore, that no principality is secure without having its own forces; on the contrary, it is entirely dependent on good fortune, not having the valour which in adversity would defend it. And it has always been the opinion and judgment of wise men that nothing can be so uncertain or unstable as fame or power not founded on its own strength.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 27, 2007

The downfall of science in Italy

I was wondering what impact Galileo's conviction had on science in Italy, so I took a look at the database Charles Murray sent me of the 4002 eminent artists and scientists he compiled from leading reference books for his 2003 book Human Accomplishment.

From 1000 AD to Galileo's conviction in 1632, Italy furnished 34.7% of the world's scientific eminence. From then up through 1950, it only accounted for 3.46%. Now that's what I call an order of magnitude!

Italian contributions to science (measured at the scientist's 40th birthday) continued on fairly strong for the rest of the 17th Century, so the Galileo trial impact wasn't immediate. Of course, the 17th Century was like Andy Warhol's factory -- everybody was a genius! (Except, in the 17th Century there really were geniuses throughout Europe). But, in Italy slowly things sloooowed down, as they sped up elsewhere.

We're not used to things getting more boring and unproductive, but it has been a common tendency throughout history, and one we may get familiar with again.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 26, 2007

Who has defended America's most distinguished living scientist?

We're now into the second week of the latest ritual race humiliation, this time of the man who is probably America's most distinguished living scientist, James Watson. And who has spoken up for him? Besides this guy in Nigeria?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Oops! Cold Spring starts to realize they just kicked to the curb their top fundraiser

From Newsday:
Fundraising questions after Watson's exit

Five days before an international uproar erupted over comments he had made to a British newspaper, James Watson smiled as camera shutters snapped at the groundbreaking for a multimillion-dollar renovation to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory library.

"Watson raised that money; it was his effort," said Elof Carlson, a former Stony Brook University professor of biochemistry who attended the Oct. 12 ceremony. "He has been a major fundraiser for the institution, and he certainly had enormous skills in doing that."

Now, with Watson forced into early retirement for questioning Africans' intelligence, officials said it remains unclear whether he will continue his lesser known but immensely important role as the laboratory's fundraiser-in-chief.

"I don't think that's been discussed," said Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "This is a great institution. I hope that these events don't affect our fund-raising."

Science observers said Watson's ability to tap rich donors has been compromised.

"People who tend to support these kinds of charities are not going to embrace somebody who now has been branded as a racist," said Wesley J. Smith, a bioethicist at the [Creationist] Discovery Institute in Seattle.

Watson was named director of the laboratory's research projects in 1968. He is celebrated for transforming it from a respectable but sleepy research campus into a prestigious international center for genetic science. His knack for finding the money to pay top talent was key, said Watson biographer Victor McElheny.

When Watson was named president in 1994, the laboratory was raising less than $1 million a year from private donors, financial statements show. By 2006, donors gave more than $43 million.

Those private donations have helped the lab build new buildings and expand its endowment from nothing when Watson took over as director in 1968 to $129 million last year.

"A lot of it is attributable to [Watson]," said Stillman, who added that Watson will keep his home and office at the lab.

Watson appealed to donors with disarming honesty, visible passion and a rumpled unpretentiousness, McElheny said. In the late 1970s, he persuaded Charles Robertson, widower of A&P grocery chain heiress Marie Hartford, to give $8 million to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to bankroll unproven young scientists.

"It was the most precious gift in the history of the laboratory, and Watson swung it," McElheny said.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 25, 2007

Watson dumped permanently from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Expect a new round of gloating and putting the boot in:

Controversial DNA scientist retires

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer1 hour, 52 minutes ago

James Watson, famous for DNA research but widely condemned for recent comments about intelligence levels among blacks, retired Thursday from his post at a prestigious research institution.

Watson, 79, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York announced his departure a week after the lab suspended him. He was chancellor of the institution, and his retirement took effect immediately.

Watson shared a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. He is one of America's most prominent scientists.

In his statement Thursday, Watson said that because of his age, his retirement was "more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired."

Watson, who has a long history of making provocative statements, ran into trouble last week for remarks he made in the Sunday Times Magazine of London. A profile quoted him as saying that he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really."

He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." He also said people should not be discriminated against because of their color, adding that "there are many people of color who are very talented."

Watson later apologized. But by then, London's Science Museum had canceled a sold-out lecture Watson was to give there, and London's mayor had branded the comments "racist propaganda."

In the United States, the Federation of American Scientists said Watson was promoting "personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science." And the Cold Spring Harbor lab said its board and administration "vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments."

The lab suspended Watson's administrative duties last Thursday.

Watson had served at the lab for nearly 40 years, having been named director in 1968. He was its president from 1994 to 2003.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gotcha!

Yet another famous figure, Presidential candidate Joe Biden, is caught being momentarily not oblivious to the obvious:

Biden Stumbles in Interview

In an interview with The Washington Post's editorial board, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) ... stumbled through a discourse on race and education, leaving the impression that he believes one reason that so many District of Columbia schools fail is the city's high minority population. His campaign quickly issued a statement saying he meant to indicate that the disadvantages were based on economic status, not race.

After a lengthy critique of Bush administration education policies, Biden attempted to explain why some schools perform better than others -- in Iowa, for instance, compared with the District. "There's less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with," Biden said. He went on to discuss the importance of parental involvement in reading to children and how "half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom."

The Biden campaign moved quickly to clarify the senator's remarks in a statement: "This was not a race-based distinction, but a discussion of the problems kids face who don't have the same socio-economic support system (and all that implies -- nutrition, pre K, etc.) entering grade school and the impact of those disadvantages on outcomes."

Obviously, nutrition is crucially important in the difference. Since all the Washington D.C. schoolkids grow up to be short and scrawny from lack of nutrition, that's why Georgetown U. has always been so bad at basketball, compared to the mighty U. of Iowa basketball team with its starting line up of corn-fed farmboys.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 24, 2007

Deja vu all over again

As I wrote in VDARE.com right after the Southern California fires exactly four years ago:

Brushfires and mudslides used to seem more amusing because they afflicted Hollywood celebrities significantly more often than average citizens. This was not just a matter of God's good taste. Hoi polloi lived in the cheaper and safer flatlands. The rich poised precariously in the hills, where construction and maintenance costs are higher—especially if you want your home to survive what Mother Nature keeps up her sleeve.

But the plains of Southern California filled up long ago. So the ever-growing population has been spilling into the more treacherous wild areas.

This is regularly denounced as "sprawl," which implies that individuals are wastefully consuming more and more land per capita. But in California the driver has been population growth. According to a 2003 Center for Immigration Studies report by Roy Beck, Leon Kolankiewicz, and Steven A. Camarota, from 1982 to 1997 the total number of developed acres in California grew by 32 percent, but the per capita usage was up only two percent. Essentially all of California's population growth in the 1990s was due to new immigrants or births to foreign-born women. (Indeed, close to 1.5 million more American-born citizens moved out of California during the 1990s than moved in from other states.)

As low-income immigrants pour into Southern California's lowlands, crowding the freeways and overstressing the older cities' public schools, the middle class (at least the ones who don't leave the state) have responded by taking to the hills.

The hill country's environment is benign most of the year. But the local ecosystem evolved to require periodic blazes. Up through American Indian times, these brushfires were frequent and thus relatively mild.

Unfortunately, we modern people haven't really figured out how to manage the chaparral and pine forests yet—especially when the canyons and mountains are home to housing. The best-known remedy, controlled burns, is disliked by people who live in the backcountry because they pollute the air, and they can jump out of control. The 2000 Los Alamos fire set by the Forest Service ended up destroying hundreds of structures.

Thus the policy has been to try to suppress all fires. This, however, causes fuel in the form of dry brush and dead trees to build up each decade, inevitably leading to infernos like those of 1993 and 2003. …

It’s just California's problem? ‘fraid not! Taxpayers across the country always end up chipping in, through government disaster loans, new federal firefighting and forestry management programs, lower stock market prices for insurance companies, and other forms of burden-sharing.

And, in some ways, that's fair, because so much of California's current crisis traces back to the federal refusal to adequately enforce immigration laws.

California desperately needs a slower population growth rate until it learns how its current vast population can live with its lovely but sometime lethal landscape. And the state's burgeoning numbers are solely driven by immigration.

The logical solution: cut back on immigration.

Reality is literally lighting a fire under us.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The League of Extremely Rich Donors for Free Speech"

One of the depressing things about the James Watson Witch Hunt is the enthusiasm with which so many people signed up to be voluntary auxiliaries for the Thought Police, how many people who imagine themselves to be freethinking nonconformists positively reveled in their chance to put the boot in when they found a great man down.

As far as I can tell at this point, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees are going to get away with their shameful suspension of the man who rebuilt their institution over the last 39 years.

What can be done for the future?

Money talks. What the world needs is an organization of major donors to academic and scientific institutions who have publicly pledged themselves to defend free speech and scientific inquiry by punishing institutions who punish heretics like Watson.

In 2006, billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle withdrew his pledged gift of $115 million to Harvard after it forced out Larry Summers. But that was just 1/300th of Harvard's endowment, so even Ellison had little impact by himself. Some rich guys need to get together and throw their weight around.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What went wrong with anthropology of family structures?

Boasian cultural anthropology was a glamor field in academia in the 1950s, yet it is now among the least publicized. What went wrong?

For example, sci-fi great Robert Heinlein wrote Boas's student Margaret Mead into his 1957 sci-fi "juvenile" novel Citizen of the Galaxy. Young Thorby flees Sargon and is adopted into the extended family of Free Traders, a people who buy and sell anywhere in the galaxy. The rules of the spaceship crew / family are baffling to Thorby.

Fortunately, anthropologist Margaret Mader (i.e., Margaret Mead) is on board to explain why Thorby can't fall in love with any girls in his Starboard Moiety, but must find his bride on the Portside Moiety, along with the other complications of Free Trader family structure.

Family structure is interesting stuff, and obviously has real world applications for, say, all those countries where America has soldiers wandering around, such as Afghanistan and the borders of Somalia. But nobody is interested these days.

So, what went wrong? First, anthropologists became obsessed with what Robin Fox, the author of the 1967 textbook Kinship and Marriage calls "ethnographic dazzle." The exception became the rule. A few decades ago, you'd always hear arguments beginning, "Well, there's this one tribe where ..." which I parodied in The American Spectator in 1992 in "Report Cites Bias Against Women in Drug Rackets: 'Aspiring Female Traffickers Lack Role Models,' Notes Expert."

"All the experts indignantly dismiss biological conjectures purporting to explain why males seem more violent than females. "Then why are the Nuzwangdees of Guyana -- or is it the Wangduzees of New Guinea? Well, anyway, I heard there's some tribe somewhere where more women than men are into GrecoRoman wrestling, or is it Australian football?" retorts Dr. Charles Womyndaughter."

The point of all this is to deny that there is a basic human nature, in order to facilitate intellectuals being funded to carry out improbably social engineering projects.

Fox wrote in 1991:
"But find me a society without a kinship system, and one without one that operates on the six basic parameters I outlined ... Such societies do not exist. ... This being so the question becomes not whether or not we "socially construct" the kinship systems we have, but why we construct the limited number of types we do out of all the possible types."

The flip side of this is that there tend to be general patterns in family structure that follow regional and racial structures, suggesting that within the basic human nature, some variation has evolved.

Cultural anthropologists didn't want to hear that at all, so they intellectually emasculated their subject rather than follow the facts to their conclusions.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 23, 2007

Cuba, Armenia, and Israel Lobbies

The crucial difference between the Cuban and Armenian lobbies vs. the Israel lobby is that the former allow you to engage in nonOrwellian singlethink. The Cuban Lobby boasts of how powerful it is and how, if you cross it, you'll never win the Electoral Votes of Florida. Well, you can either believe that or not believe it, but there's nothing whatsoever contradictory about its stance. The Armenian Lobby laments that, so far, it hasn't quite been powerful enough, but asserts that its day is coming very soon. Once again, singlethink. That's how most lobbies behave.

The Israel Lobby, on the other hand, demands Orwellian doublethink -- "the act of simultaneously and fervently holding two mutually contradictory beliefs." It boasts endlessly of its power in Washington, but smears anybody else who agrees with it that, yes, it is powerful as being a fellow traveler of David Duke. This relentless doublethink is bad for the mind and soul.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT on neo-nepotism and JPod

The New York Times has an interesting article on Jpod taking over as editor of Commentary, cleverly tying it to the 2003 book by Adam Bellow, In Praise of Nepotism:

New Commentary Editor Denies Neo-Nepotism

By Patricia Cohen

The new appointment puts three generations of Podhoretzes at the magazine, with Norman holding the title of editor at large and his grandson Sam Munson as online editor. Of course, the ancestral streak is not exactly surprising. The Podhoretz, Kagan (Fred, Donald, Robert and Kimberly) and Kristol clans have dominated the movement for 40 years.

“There’s a family business aspect to the neoconservative enterprise,” said Mr. Bellow, whose book “In Praise of Nepotism” was published in 2003. Such kinship ties are part of “a very broad phenomenon across American society; it’s not really right to single out neoconservatives."

(Here's my review-essay on Bellow's "In Praise of Nepotism" in The National Interest.)

The NYT reporter had asked me:
"How is he [JPod] thought of in conservative circles?"
I replied:
Among conservative intellectuals, John Podhoretz is widely considered proof of the statistical tendency toward regression beneath the mean. The only reason he has a career is because he is, as they say in Little Italy, connected.

As blogger Larry Auster has been pointing out, only one of his many colleagues at National Review Online's group blog, The Corner, has congratulated him on his ascension. On Tuesday morning, Kathryn Jean Lopez ("K-Lo") offered this minimalist salute:
Congrats Are in Order [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who is the most famous living scientist working outside the English-speaking world?

One of the features of the 21st Century is the growing parochialism of us native English-speakers. No educated man in 1907 making up a list of the most famous scientists or most famous writers would have included only people working in America and Britain, but it seems perfectly natural today. So, I'd like to hear from my more worldly readers about important scientists who are less well-known in our Fortress of Anglophonic Solitude than they deserve to be.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who is the most famous living scientist?

I come up with Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall at the top, with James D. Watson in the next tier down, maybe with Norman Borlaug (who has become famous for not being famous). Noam Chomsky is famous, and was a great scientist in his day, but his day was 1958. Lots of folks who had credible claim to being the world's most famous scientist -- e.g., Gould, Sagan, Feynman -- tended to drop dead at an early age. I think the last of the atomic bomb physicists are now dead (Hans Bethe died recently).

Who are your suggestions?

Of course, to be famous, it helps to be a public personality. Shy personalities like William D. Hamilton tend to be obscure, even though Hamilton's work was essential to better known figures like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson. So, a second question: Who is the greatest living scientist?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who will defend James Watson?

I'm wondering which heavyweights will step up up to defend James Watson? Below is a list of big names who might have the courage to do it. I don't have time to Google them, but any commenters can feel free to paste in any statements about Watson by the following luminaries, and give them a grade. The rubric is:

+2 points for noting that what Watson said is not scientifically improbable

+2 for saying that, as Watson says, we'll soon know pretty much for sure, so we should get ready for whatever the results are

+1 points for defending free speech and open scientific inquiry

+ 1 for defending IQ testing

+ 1 for defending the existence of race

- 1 for saying race doesn't exist

- 1 for attacking the validity of IQ testing

- 1 for general weaseliness

- 2 for distorting or denying the testing results

- 3 for commending Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for punishing Watson

So, here are some big names from which positive scores are at least possible:

Edward O. Wilson
Steven Pinker
Thomas Sowell
Richard Posner
Richard Dawkins
Larry Summers
Charles Murray
James Q. Wilson
Jared Diamond (a loooong shot, but this would be his last chance to redeem his reputation in the eyes of history)

Anybody else you can think of?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 22, 2007

The LA Apocalypse All Over Again

The weather conditions out here in LA are identical to those of exactly four years ago: a drought year and hot winds off the desert. So, the whole place is on fire once more. The end is nigh, which tends to make a lot of people, many of them Southern Californians, rather pleased. Here's a quote from my UPI article from October 30, 2003 on "Los Angeles and the Apocalyptic Imagination:"

According to journalist Mike Davis, who became L.A.'s favorite prophet of calamity with his foreboding local bestseller "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," Southern California is widely seen as "the doom capital of the universe."

He wrote in 1998, "The destruction of Los Angeles has been the central theme or dominating image in more than a hundred and fifty novels, short stories, and films." Davis counts 49 fictional local nuclear attacks, 28 earthquakes, six floods, and 10 hordes of invading creatures that have helped brand "the City of Angels as a theme park for Armageddon."

Davis himself can't resist trumpeting such alarming but trivial threats to residents as tornados, man-eating coyotes, and killer bees. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James Watson as a leader

One of the points I tried to make in my VDARE.com article on James D. Watson is that he's not just some old coot who discovered something back in 1953. When he felt his powers of new discovery decline as middle age approached, he switched to scientific management, taking over the failing Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968 and drove it to huge success. He remains a central cog in the great enterprise of modern genetic research.

Here's a Sunday Times essay by the biologist/journalist Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe who got James Watson in so much trouble with her previous article:

Science has always been open to debate. Why shackle it? What are we so afraid of? Why gag and shame on the basis of fear?

Maybe this will be a watershed moment, one that examines our inability to openly debate sensitive issues. Whether is it or not, I believe that fear of what might be uncovered – or not – as a result of further analysis is no reason to deprive ourselves of the most experienced geneticist of our age. My hope is, once the smoke clears, that the laboratory will realise that he is too precious to dismiss over fears of what he has said and might say next. He can say it, he can take it back, others can challenge it. We pride ourselves in living within a democratic society. If he said - which he hasn't – that I might be less intelligent because I had blonde hair, I wouldn't care. All that matters to me is that if someone I loved was ill, or dying from an incurable disease, then the man who has the brains, capability and resources to help them, be allowed to do so.

As Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Watson's is not only a maverick in securing funding but a crucial sounding board for lab scientists. Daily, he consults with his scientific investigators – all working on disparate areas of the disease field. At nearly 80, Watson seamlessly manoeuvres his thoughts around scores of ultra-specific genetic problems. All hours of his working day his researchers look to him for advice – secure in the knowledge that he has the experience to make the decisions which, without him, they could misjudge and risk being a step behind.

I have been reported as working with him - when, as stated, I was under the guidance of the then assistant director of the lab, Winship Herr. But, any geneticist who has had their hand grasped by him in a congratulatory handshake following a hard-won discovery in the lab, will tell you that Watson has a unique ability to instil pride in achievement. Biologists rarely see the limelight, and if occasional words of praise and encouragement are enough to keep scientists working a few extra few hours a day, and if this makes our fight against disease faster, then we need him.

After a long day of conversation – the topic of racial inequality was broached. It seemed an important extension to words he had written in his book. I would never have written something that I thought he would not be prepared to defend. I am not trying to destroy a brilliant scientist and I am genuinely horrified by the response. We need to squeeze every last drop of brilliance from this man if we are to continue hoping to unravel the genetic causes of disease. He strives to help young people in their careers. My biggest concern is that, by helping me, he has damaged himself. I could not hope more, that I am wrong.

In a war – the people we want around us are the ones with the experience and proven track record. Disease is a war. We need tactics, brilliance and, above all, experience. He may push the boundaries of what is acceptable in our PC world – and stray into areas that are not his expertise - but when he sits in his role as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his scientists – though not the publicists – feel safe and expertly guided. And they are.

Watson's personality is complex. We're used to shy or Aspergery scientists who accidentally offend people around them because they aren't very social, but Watson doesn't fit that mold, which is why he's been such a success as a leader of scientists.

He's extremely gossipy, for one thing. Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice, the social queen of Washington for decades, used to say, "If you don't have anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me."

But gossip provides unexpected benefits. Back in the 1970s, the LA Dodgers and the NY Yankees had opposite approaches to gossip. The Dodgers were trained by their management to always put a bland, happy spin on things. Occasionally, you'd get hints that everything wasn't always peachy with them, such as when Don Sutton and Steve Garvey got into a locker room fight in 1978 over Garvey's wife, but that was an exception. In contrast, the Yankees, led by their owner George Steinbrenner, were constantly denouncing each other in the newspapers. It seemed obvious to me that the Dodger system was superior, but the Yankees took two out of three World Series from the Dodgers, and went on in the 1990s (under a little more mellow Steinbrenner) to form an even better dynasty.

Sociobiology founder Edward O. Wilson, the other grand old man of American biology, famously clashed with Watson at Harvard departmental meetings in the 1950s and 1960s in a turf war between the old organismic biologists like Wilson and the new molecular biologists like Watson over faculty hiring. The normally gentlemanly Wilson wrote in his autobiography Naturalist that at faculty meetings Watson, "the Caligula of biology," "radiated contempt in all directions," The nicest thing he said about traditional biology was to call it "stamp collecting." Wilson wrote:

"When Watson became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, ... I commented sourly to friends that I wouldn't put him in charge of a lemonade stand. He proved me wrong. In ten years he raised that noted institution to even greater heights by inspiration, fund-raising skills, and the ability to choose and attract the most gifted researchers."

Eventually, Watson did Wilson a great service by forcing him to rethink higher level biology, make it less stamp collecting and more of a theory driven science based on natural selection, so he could compete with Watson's triumphant brand of molecular biology. "Without a trace of irony I can sat I have been blessed with brilliant enemies ... because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions." Watson's challenge also inspired Wilson to think deeply about reductionism and the proper levels of scientific research, as shown in his book Consilience.

(Wilson's other brilliant enemy was Stephen Jay Gould, whose denunciations of Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology persuaded Wilson to learn, at age 45, how to write like a literary intellectual, so he could compete with Gould in the non-scientific intellectual marketplace. Thus, Wilson's small 1978 book On Human Nature , in which Wilson unveiled his new prose style and hard-earned set of artistic references, won the Pulitzer.)

It's nice to know that Watson and Wilson have reconciled in recent years, appearing in a joint interview on Charlie Rose. Perhaps Wilson and Gould would have reconciled too if Gould had not died at age 60?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 21, 2007

The Countdown Speeds Up

As I mention in my new VDARE.com article, the climactic last two pages of James Watson's new memoir are devoted to how fast the price of genome sequencing is falling, which, as Watson emphasizes, will make inevitable major breakthroughs in understanding the genetic underpinnings of political hot potatoes like IQ. At FuturePundit, Randall Parker provides some numbers.

An article in The Scientist provides a sense of how much DNA sequencing costs have fallen. At the bottom of that page they show 3 costs from 3 different sequencing instruments for doing a sequencing of the Drosophila fly genome. The established ABI 3730 has a sequencing cost for this job of $650,000. The 454 Life Sciences instrument costs $132,000 for the same job. Big cut in cost, right? But if you paid $132,000 you paid too much. Using the Solexa instrument costs $12,500 for the same job. Wow.

Apparently, Moore's Law of semiconductors (a doubling every 18 months) is slow compared to the speed of advances in DNA sequencing.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James Watson -- my new VDARE.com column

Here's my new essay on James D. Watson.

I want to apologize to Dr. Watson for earlier accepting the media spin that he had completely capitulated. As my VDARE.com column says:

When Watson's own feet were held to the fire last week, however, he offered a semi-apology/semi-defense. This has been almost universally assumed to be a "complete retraction"—to quote a representatively obtuse article, The Mortification of James Watson. [Time Magazine, By Laura Blue, October 19, 2007]

But it’s not. As the headline of Watson’s response on Friday, October 19 in the UK Independent shows—"To question genetic intelligence is not racism"—his actual stance is closer to Galileo's, who is said to have muttered E pur si muove ("and yet it does move") after the Inquisition forced him to recant in public his heretical belief that the earth went around the sun.

Watson wrote on Friday:

"This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

Watson didn't specify who the great musicians tend to be—as opposed to the great engineers. But you can fill in the blanks. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer