"Track and Battlefield" by Steve Sailer and Stephen Seiler, 1997

Track and Battlefield

Everybody knows that the "gender gap" between men and women runners in the Olympics is narrowing. Everybody is wrong.

by Steve Sailer and Dr. Stephen Seiler

Published in National Review, December 31, 1997

Everybody knows that the "gender gap" in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.

This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women, or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure, is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature, as well as to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.

When everybody is so sure of something, it's time to update the numbers. So, I began an in-depth study with my research partner, Dr. Stephen Seiler, an American sports physiologist teaching at Agder College in Norway. (Yes, we do have almost identical names, but don't blame him for all the opinions in this article: of the two of us, I am the evil twin).

The conclusion: Although the 1998 outdoor running season isn't even here yet, we can already discard Ward and Whipp's forecast: women will not catch up to men in the marathon this year. The gender gap between the best marathon times remains the equivalent of the woman record holder losing by over 2.6 miles. In fact, we can now be certain that in fair competition the fastest women will never equal the fastest men at any standard length race. Why? Contrary to all expectations, the overall gender gap has been widening throughout the Nineties. While men's times have continued to get faster, world class women are now running noticeably slower than in the Eighties. How come? It's a fascinating tale of sex discrimination, ethnic superiority, hormones, and the fall of the Berlin Wall that reconfirms the unpopular fact that biological differences between the sexes and the races will continue to play a large, perhaps even a growing, role in human affairs.

Secret intelligence conference in Europe

Last month, psychologist James Thompson hosted a scientific conference for researchers interested in IQ and human biodiversity topics at an undisclosed location in Europe. I advised him last year to keep arrangements non-public because a somewhat similar conference a decade-and-a-half ago was broken up by a mob of anti-science fanatics.

I would have liked to have attended, but I can't afford trips to Europe.

James has now posted a few of the abstracts of presented papers on his Psychological Comments blog.
     

David Epstein's "The Sports Gene" reviewed

From my book review in Taki's Magazine:

Structured around the dismantling of the profitable notion pushed by self-help seers such as Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of monomaniacal practice is the secret of success, David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is one of the best books on human biodiversity in recent years.  

Beyond undermining Gladwellian blank-slatism, Epstein extols the sheer pleasure of noticing humanity’s variety for its own sake. On his book’s penultimate page, he writes:  

…sports will continue to provide a splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that’s human biological diversity. Amid the pageantry of the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, make sure to look for the extremes of the human physique.…It is breathtaking to think that, in the truest genetic sense, we are all a large family, and that the paths of our ancestors have left us wonderfully distinct. 

Epstein, a Sports Illustrated reporter, builds upon the work of journalists such as Jon Entine (Taboo) and me in taking an evenhanded look at the roles of both nature and nurture.

Read the whole thing there.

A tribute to J.P. Rushton: "Jensen's bulldog"

James Thompson of University College London recently wrote of J.P. Rushton, who died last week:

Phil Rushton is tough minded, and has needed to be. Scholarly enquiry often leads to surprising answers, and expounding unpopular views is no project for the faint hearted. His key achievement has been to gather together what would otherwise have been a rag tag of disparate findings and bind them into a coherent pattern of r-K evolutionary strategies. His approach is one more example of an Eysenkian gesamtkunstwerk, to which those of hereditarian persuasion seem drawn, in which an over-arching theory provides a sweet symphony that brings order to chaos. This has given the debate about behavioural differences between genetic groups a new rationale, and for that alone Rushton deserves praise. 

In terms of his approach to the data he has shown doggedness in tracking down evidence and arguing his case. His 2005 review with Jensen sets out the hereditarian case as thoroughly and forcefully as has ever been achieved, and must be considered his shared magnum opus. In the best sense of the term he has been Jensen’s bulldog, taking on all comers with dogged persistence. 

(T.H. Huxley was known as "Darwin's bulldog.")

Jensen and Rushton were able to draw together the main points of a complex argument and also retain the sense of challenge and flexibility as they invited their critics to grasp the gauntlet they had thrown down. By proposing to identify the 10 major fields of contention, and by rating their own progress in each of them they challenged others to reply. 

What is most notable about Rushton is his intellectual resilience. He can grasp the big picture, and can assemble evidence in its favour. He has the capacity to understand the implications of individual findings, and to track down confirmatory or dis-confirmatory consequences. He can also link together entirely disparate publication networks, such as looking at cousin marriage in Japan to illuminate group differences in America. At every stage of discovery he believes he has done enough to convince his critics, but finds that the goal posts have been moved yet again. He has had to pick his way through a maze of imprecise hypotheses, as his critics reply to his specific proposals with a general portmanteau complaint that “these effects could be due to any number of things”.  As he himself has observed, the hard-line environmentalist position is not progressive. It does not deign to specify environmental effects in any rigorous way, but tends to multiply ad hoc objections and demand standards never yet achieved in social science. It would be enough to discourage the strongest of constitutions, but despite reverses Rushton pushes on, tracking down weak arguments, studying the implications of research results so as to take them to further levels of examination,  gathering new evidence, and as a consequence leaving well-constructed cairns of evidence along the trail-ways of exploration for other researchers to follow.

A reader has dug up some 1970s pictures of Rushton with a bass guitarist's head of hair.

Visitation will be Tuesday, funeral Wednesday in London, Ontario, Canada (not London, England, which had me momentarily confused since Rushton was a leading light of the London School descending intellectually from Darwin and Galton), Details here.

[Spoiler Alert] Men's 100m dash semifinals

For Americans planning on watching on tape delay, I won't give away who won the finals of the men's 100m dash on the London track, but I will note who didn't make it to the finals for the eighth consecutive Olympics, beginning with 1984: a non-black. That's 64 men in a row of primarily black African descent.

Three non-blacks were among the 24 semifinalists striving for the eight spots in the finals:

- A Chinese fellow who then ran an unimpressive 10.28.

- A young Japanese runner, Ryota Yamagata, who failed to advance with a decent 10.10. The Japanese typically have one or two semifinalists in the Olympic 100m, although I don't think they've made the finals since the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932.

- Most interestingly, an 18-year-old U.K. runner Adam Gemili, who appears to be largely a swarthy Caucasian of Middle Eastern descent, who finished third in his semifinal at 10.06, just shy of the 10.02 needed to move on.

The fastest white 100m man of all time, France's Christophe Lemaitre, who has a personal best of 9.92, decided to pass up on the 100m in favor of concentrating on the 200m where he felt he has a better chance of medaling. 

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

Things Fall Apart: Greg Cochran's new theory of the cause of racial differences in IQ

Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran has been introducing a a fairly new and potentially important theory of the genetic origins of race differences in IQ.  It's less a theory of evolution than of devolution. The mechanism causing effective differences, he argues, is less selection for higher IQ due to differences in the environment (e.g., winter versus tropics selecting for forethought); instead, a large driver is differential rates in random mutation leading to differences in average level of deleterious genetic load, which tend to correlate with climate warmth.

Sanctuary 

What would happen if people moved somewhere where the mutation rate was far lower? 

Their genetic load would decrease with time, assuming that they were still subject to much selection. Today, everybody has hundreds of nicked or broken genes:  selection keeps eliminating them, while mutation keeps creating them.  The suspicion is that their effect is quite large.  This hypothetical population would have fewer and fewer.  In a few thousand years, they would lose most of the variants that decrease fitness by 1% or more.

Cochran's next post looks at some data on the rates at which random mutations creep into the reproduction process.

Too Darn Hot? 

Posted on July 14, 2012 by gcochran9 

Several recent papers  give me the impression that there is regional variation in mutational load.   One can slice this a number of ways. Dan MacArthur and company looked for mutations that knocked out genes – loss-of-function or LOF mutations.  Mutational load is the sum of all deleterious mutations – LOF mutations are a clear-cut subset of total mutational load. 

Some of the LOF mutations they are found are common, and are presumably neutral, maybe even beneficial, but most are rare and likely deleterious.  The kicker is that they found significantly more LOF mutations in their African population sample than in their European and East Asian samples – 25% higher.  That was unexpected. 

Population history (and mutation rate) determine the variation you expect to find in neutral genes, but significantly deleterious mutations should be in mutation-selection balance.  A neutral variant might easily be a million years old, but a deleterious variant will  last, on average, 1/s generations, when s is the decrease in fitness caused by that variant.  A mutation that decreases fitness by 1% should disappear in  100 generations or so, about 2500 years.  Ancient bottlenecks should not influence the frequency of such noticeably deleterious mutations. 

Another related paper, by Jacob Tenessen et al,  looked at a large set of coding genes, sequencing many times (average depth of 111x)  for high accuracy. As in in MacArthur’s paper they found that the average person carries many probably-deleterious mutations, mutations which are individually rare.  Each person carried, on average, mutations expected to change function (almost always for the worse, although usually only a little for the worse)  in 313 genes (out of the 15,585 they studied. 

They looked at African-Americans and Americans of European descent, about a thousand of each.  They saw what MacArthur’s group did: there were significantly more probably-deleterious mutations in the 80%-African population.  When they used a loose definition of functional variation, about 20% more : with a more conservative definition,  which should have a higher fraction of truly deleterious genes, about 29% more. 

...    The only simple explanation (that I can think of)  is a higher mutation rate.

One possibility is that heat tends to cause a higher mutation rate.

Henry Harpending then summed up:

Pre-term Births 

Posted on July 16, 2012 by harpend= 

The model that Greg is dancing around suggests (1) that there is variation in mutation rate dependent on temperature or something correlated with temperature, (2) higher mutation rates cause a higher genetic burden in human populations, (3) leading to IQ reduction and other minor dings

Here's my model of this theory (which is probably pretty woozy):

Imagine, say, a factory that builds a complex product, such as a car, according to a complicated set of instructions. But, the instructions on how to build the next car are passed on via the Game of Telephone, with mistakes inevitably creeping in. Sometimes, big mistakes are made, and the resulting car is such a disaster that it can't function at all and has to be scrapped. But, most of the individual mistakes are minor and just mean, say, that instead of delivering 268 horsepower, the engine generates 267. Over time, the Telephone Game build up mistakes until a car is completely unusable and has to be scrapped. At that point the workers go find a better car and get the instructions for that car relayed to them. So, on average, most cars don't come off the assembly line performing at spec, but they perform well enough to make it through a test drive. 

Now imagine two factories making the same car from roughly the same overall design. One is in Nagoya and the other in Lagos. It's so hot and humid alla the time in Nigeria, unfortunately, that the workers get distracted during their Game of Telephone and have a higher rate of errors when transmitting plans from one generation to the next. 

In the comments, commenter extraordinaire Jason Malloy writes:

See these posts from February and April for the conceptual background. 

While not fully or explicitly articulated, this is the first New Big Theory of race differences in quite a while, and an interesting alternative to the reigning sociobiological models available since the 1980s. In the latter models intelligence and reproductive differences are seen as consequences of natural selection in divergent latitudes, but this new model replaces natural selection with accumulated mutational burdens. The differences at lower latitudes are not selectively advantageous, but dysfunctional. 

Dr. Cochran notes that complex adaptive systems, involving the functioning of many genes, should be the most vulnerable to genetic load, so this would obviously be the brain and probably reproductive physiology. So in addition to higher general mortality, dysfunctions associated with mutational burdens might include: 

Mental
- Lower intelligence
- Higher retardation
- Higher mental illness 

Reproductive
- Lower birthweight
- Higher premature births
- Higher infertility
- Higher reproductive deformities
- Higher miscarriage (and general obstetric complications)
- Lower sperm quality 

Of course there is a difference between establishing population differences in genetic load, and proving that this is related to population differences in socially valued traits. I’m not sold on this as a replacement for sociobiological models, although there are aspects that make it useful and attractive in different ways. For example, I recently found that ethnic differences in rate of homosexuality are inversely correlated with latitude. Since theories of selectively advantageous homosexuality fall flat, this theory seemed like a better fit.

In the comments to Henry's post, I offer a couple of tentative criticisms, which you can read there.

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

Cochran's new theory of IQ genetics

At West Hunter, Gregory Cochran writes about the distinction between extremely deleterious genetic mutations that frequently kill people before they pass on their bad gene (e.g., Huntington's Disease) and mildly detrimental mutations that reduce Darwinian fitness in the range of 1 percent. Not surprisingly, the latter are more common because they can build up over the generations before they keep an individual from reproduciing.

... So… most  genetic load in humans is made up of many, many  mutations that each have fairly small effects.  A smaller fraction of the genetic load consists of mutations with big effects on fitness. 

... One important point is that a single highly deleterious mutation has a good chance of pushing the whole organism in some odd direction in phenotype space.  In other words, the same mutation that drops your IQ, or damages your heart, may also make you look funny.  At lower IQs, more and more kids are considered to suffer from ‘organic’ retardation.  On the other hand, a higher-than-average number of small-effect mutations should also interfere with really complex systems such as the brain (and reduce IQ), but because of the law of large numbers, wouldn’t tend to have any particular direction in phenotype space.  As far as I can tell, an extra-large dose of small-effect mutations, which we will henceforth call genetic noise, would not make you funny-looking.

Would the converse be true? Would good-looking but not very bright people also tend to have more genetic noise, as well, just in different places

Individuals can vary in the amount of genetic noise they carry, and populations can as well, depending on the relative intensity of selection and on the mutation rate, which might also differ.  For example, although having an unusually old father does not much affect the amount of genetic  noise an individual carries, a culture in which fathers were typically 55 would undoubtedly accumulate an unusually high amount of genetic noise, over a couple of millennia. 

If a kid’s parents have a higher-than-average amount of genetic noise, on average the kid will as well. This sure looks like what we usually call non-organic or familial retardation. 

Most of the within-population variation in IQ looks to be familial rather than organic.  If I’m right, this means that most IQ variation – what we might call the normal range – is caused by differences in the number of slightly deleterious mutations.  None of them would show up in a QTL search, because all are rare. And that is where we stand thus far:  no  intelligence QTLs have been found – although you never know what you’ll see in the next population.  On the other hand, shared chromosomal segments would mostly contain the same slightly deleterious mutations,  and so IQ should correlate with genetic similarity, which is what Visscher has found.

So, think of models for the genetics of IQ like horsepower in cars. In one model, a lot of people get the engine designed for 200 horsepower, some get the engine designed for 400 horsepower,  and some get the engine designed for 100 horsepower. Occasionally, something very bad happens in the manufacturing process or the maintenance process (e.g., Down's Syndrome) and people get an engine that only delivers 50 horsepower. 

Cochran's new model is at the other end of the spectrum: Most people get engines designed for 300 horsepower, but there are a whole lot of minor glitches in the manufacturing process (some because the blueprints have had accumulating errors creep into them in copying until they get thrown out, some de novo). So, most people get a mental engine somewhere in the 100 to 300 horsepower range, typically falling out in a bell curve. 

But what about the 400 horsepower people known to history?

Many great scientists and mathematicians have likely had relatively low levels of genetic noise combined with some fairly deleterious de novo mutations; with the net effect of a powerful mental engine strangely focused on some particular topic not directly related to fitness.  Low noise, high weirdness.   Math, not sheilas. One might look for advanced paternal age in such cases.

Read the whole thing there. There's one phrase in it that hints at the next stage of his theory, but I'll leave it at that.

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

The Dingo as the Default Dog?

I frequently post excerpts from serious articles that sound as if I wrote them as parodies. But here's a terrific section from a New York Times article Australia's Changing View of the Dingo by James Gorman and Christine Kenneally that hits on about a half dozen or more iSteve golden oldie themes in a row. This stuff is just plain interesting. You have to work hard to convince yourself you aren't interested in the human equivalents of these topics. And that just makes you boring and dull-witted.

Dingoes are generally classified as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus dingo, although in the past they have been classified as a subspecies of dog and as a separate species. 

As a long-time critic of both thinking of human racial groups as "subspecies" and of proclaiming that Race Does Not Exist because of the problems with the subspecies concept  I'm always on the lookout for news of scientists being befuddled about how to classify other animals, especially ones as well-known to us as canines.

Linnaeus did a tremendous job of classifying plants and animals into useful, reasonable categories, but the categories are for our convenience. I've argued that what people are most interested in about other people are not their Linnaean classification, but who their relatives are. Thus, a racial group is an extended family that has more coherence and continuity than run of the mill extended families because it is inbred to some degree.

By way of analogy, think about a very expensive type of animal for whom we know the entire genealogy going back scores of generations: the thoroughbred racehorse. The color of the coat is of little interest to buyers and bettors. They don't need to classify bays and grays separately because they know the actual genealogy of every horse: e.g., Seabiscuit was the grandson of Man o' War while his archrival War Admiral was the son of Man o' War and therefore Seabiscuit's uncle.

Now, we don't know the genealogy of individual dingos, so we study how they look, how they behave, any archaeological record, and their DNA to figure out how to classify them for important purposes of our own, such as Australia's equivalent of the Endangered Species Act. But, scientists still wind up arguing over how to classify them because classifications are something we impose for our own purposes. The only thing that inevitably exists is genealogy: father, mother, child.

Physically, they resemble a generic, medium-size dog, about 40 pounds, usually tan-colored, with pricked ears and a bushy tail. 

If you let dogs mate randomly, as in much of the Third World, that's typically about what you wind up with. The dingo is distinctive looking in some ways, but in general looks like the Indian pariah dog of the streets. A 2004 DNA study said dingos were more closely related to Chinese dogs, but both seem pretty close to the Default Dog.

The rest of this excerpt is equally interesting.

They do not have some of the physical signs of domestication found in many dog breeds, like barking as adults. They breed once a year, like wolves, and when undisturbed they have a stable pack structure topped by one male-female pair, the only ones in the pack that reproduce. 

Bradley Smith, a research associate in public health at Flinders University in Adelaide who has studied dingoes, said by e-mail that experimental tests put dingoes closer to wolves in the kind of intelligence they display. “Both dingoes and wolves, being highly effective predators, are great at problem solving, working well in groups, and independent problem solving,” he said. 

But they also understand humans in a way that wolves do not. They get it when a person points at something, while wolves are clueless or supremely uninterested. Dingoes are not as good as dogs, however, at following a human’s gaze. 

Dingoes, Dr. Smith wrote, “seem to be a prime example of one of the first types of ‘dogs’. Not domestic dogs as we know them now, but some form of early dog that made it easier for the human-canid relationship to develop. You could almost say dingoes are frozen in time — as they have made a very good home in Australia and have been isolated for many thousands of years.” 

Dingoes came to Australia 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, probably with Asian seafarers, and already at least partly domesticated. At the time, people had been on Australia for almost 50,000 years, without dogs. The dingo quickly became an essential part of Aboriginal life and stories. 

Deborah Rose, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney who has done research with Aboriginal peoples and is the author of “Dingo Makes Us Human,” said the dingoes were a deep part of Aboriginal life. “The dingoes had names, they had kinship classifications, which makes them so unlike all other animals in Australia,” she said. “They had a place at the campfire.” Or even closer. The phrase “three-dog night” has been attributed to indigenous Australians as a way of describing how cold it was. However, it does not seem that Aborigines bred dingoes selectively.

Wikipedia has a less well-written but even more extensive article on dingoes and all the controversies involving their racial purity that are a big deal in Australia for legal and other reasons.

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

The History of a Myth

Today's conventional wisdom that Science has proved that race does not exist (and all the more or less comic variants on that) seems to my recollection to have reached a crescendo in the single year, 2000, when there was a vast amount of hype over the Human Genome Project. For leaders of the vastly well-funded undertaking, as well as their political overseers such as Bill Clinton, it was seen as essential to put the right racial spin on DNA research.

For example, below are excerpts from a big New York Times article by Natalie Angier from 2000, "Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows."

That was hardly the worst Race Does Not Exist article from 2000, but, still, this is pretty embarrassing to read a dozen years later in an era when Henry Louis Gates is ready to roll with his 3rd reality series on PBS later this month, in which he has celebrities get their DNA tested and then springs on them the results of what their racial admixture is.

The irony, of course, is the that the rapid development of the gene sequencing technology celebrated in 2000's orgy of Race Does Not Exist pronouncements, immediately began undermining the dogma in its moment of greatest triumph.

Still, very few people notice the contradiction between this dogma about what Science Says that they absorbed in 2000 and have held ever since versus all the scientific discoveries of the last 12 year. For example, reporter Nicholas Wade of the New York Times published dozens of the articles over the next decade systematically dismantling Angier's article, but almost nobody noticed. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on, especially when the lie ties into the status system. 

August 22, 2000 

Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows 

By NATALIE ANGIER 

Scientists say that while it may be easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Asian, African or Caucasian, the differences dissolve when one looks beyond surface features and scans the human genome for DNA hallmarks of "race." 

ADD YOUR THOUGHTS
The Science of Differences
If racial labels have "little or no biological meaning," what is the best way to address racial differences, politically or scientifically? 

In these glossy, lightweight days of an election year, it seems, they can't build metaphorical tents big or fast enough for every politician who wants to pitch one up and invite the multicultural folds to "Come on under!" The feel-good message that both parties seek to convey is: regardless of race or creed, we really ARE all kin beneath the skin. 

Yet whatever the calculated quality of this new politics of inclusion, its sentiment accords firmly with scientists' growing knowledge of the profound genetic fraternity that binds together human beings of the most seemingly disparate origins. 

Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level. 

But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome -- the complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body -- the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by "race" have little or no biological meaning. 

They say that while it may seem easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Caucasian, African or Asian, the ease dissolves when one probes beneath surface characteristics and scans the genome for DNA hallmarks of "race." 

As it turns out, scientists say, the human species is so evolutionarily young, and its migratory patterns so wide, restless and rococo, that it has simply not had a chance to divide itself into separate biological groups or "races" in any but the most superficial ways. 

"Race is a social concept, not a scientific one," said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Md. "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world." 

Dr. Venter and scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race -- the human race. 

Dr. Venter and other researchers say that those traits most commonly used to distinguish one race from another, like skin and eye color, or the width of the nose, are traits controlled by a relatively few number of genes, and thus have been able to change rapidly in response to extreme environmental pressures during the short course of Homo sapiens history. 

And so equatorial populations evolved dark skin, presumably to protect against ultraviolet radiation, while people in northern latitudes evolved pale skin, the better to produce vitamin D from pale sunlight. 

"If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of .01 percent," said Dr.
Harold P. Freeman, the chief executive, president and director of surgery at North General Hospital in Manhattan, who has studied the issue of biology and race. "This is a very, very minimal reflection of your genetic makeup." ... 

By contrast with the tiny number of genes that make some people dark-skinned and doe-eyed, and others as pale as napkins, scientists say that traits like intelligence, artistic talent and social skills are likely to be shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome, all working in complex combinatorial fashion.
The possibility of such gene networks shifting their interrelationships wholesale in the course of humanity's brief foray across the globe, and being skewed in significant ways according to "race" is "a bogus idea," said Dr. Aravinda Chakravarti, a geneticist at Case Western University in Cleveland. 

... Dr. Eric S. Lander, a genome expert at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., admits that, because research on the human genome has just begun, he cannot deliver a definitive, knockout punch to those who would argue that significant racial differences must be reflected somewhere in human DNA and will be found once researchers get serious about looking for them. But as Dr. Lander sees it, the proponents of such racial divides are the ones with the tough case to defend. 

"There's no scientific evidence to support substantial differences between groups," he said, "and the tremendous burden of proof goes to anyone who wants to assert those differences."
Although research into the structure and sequence of the human genome is in its infancy, geneticists have pieced together a rough outline of human genomic history, variously called the "Out of Africa" or "Evolutionary Eve" hypothesis. 

By this theory, modern Homo sapiens originated in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, at which point a relatively small number of them, maybe 10,000 or so, began migrating into the Middle East, Europe, Asia and across the Bering land mass into the Americas. As they traveled, they seem to have completely or largely displaced archaic humans already living in the various continents, either through calculated acts of genocide, or simply outreproducing them into extinction. 

Since the African emigrations began, a mere 7,000 generations have passed.

A mere 7,000 generations?

And because the founding population of émigrés was small, it could only take so much genetic variation with it. 

As a result of that combination -- a limited founder population and a short time since dispersal -- humans are strikingly homogeneous, differing from one another only once in a thousand subunits of the genome. 

"We are a small population grown large in the blink of an eye," Dr. Lander said.

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

Is the white-black cognitive / achievement gap smaller in the U.K.?

Probably. 

Chuck at Occidentalist assembles a bunch of test reports, here and here. It's not as well-studied of a subject as it is in the U.S., so it's hard to make sense of all the data, but most point toward the white-black gap in the U.K. being well under a standard deviation.

I haven't seen a good meta-analyses by a British researcher who knows the ins and outs of all these acronyms like GCSE. (For example, a few years ago a British researcher slipped up on writing about regional differences in performance on the SAT in the U.S. because he didn't know that only the most ambitious students in the Midwest take the SAT instead of the ACT -- so what pitfalls await American kibbitzers among British test scores?) But most of the data seems to suggest a smaller cognitive and/or achievement gap in the U.K. than in the U.S.

It has been apparent for some time now (see this post at Racial Reality) that in Britain, the lads are not all right. In the U.S., we've become familiar with gender gaps on school achievement tests favoring black and Hispanic girls over their brothers, but we see less of this among whites and Asians. This is among the better evidence that culture -- fear of being put down by your co-ethnics for Acting White, etc. -- is depressing NAM performance. 

On a lot of tests, in Britain, there's even a bigger gender gap favoring the distaff side, but it seems to go across all ethnicities, even Chinese. We see weird things like girls whose parents are from Africa outscoring white boys and maybe even East Asian boys on some tests. 

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. "Class" is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like "gentlemen." By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism. 

In contrast, there isn't all that much of an oppositional culture among blacks in Britain, since assimilating into the white working class isn't terribly hard: You like 'aving a pint while watching footie on the telly, too? The proportion of mixed race children appears much larger than in the U.S. As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting -- something you don't see in the U.S much at all.

Moreover, blacks in Britain are of immigrant origin: West Indian and African, with the Africans doing better on tests, typically. Some not insignificant fraction of Africans in Britain were brain-drained from Anglophone ex-colonies to work in National Health as nurses and doctors. In the U.S., West Indians and African immigrants tend to outperform native blacks. The Bell Curve found that in the NLSY79 longitudinal study, blacks who were immigrants or the children of immigrants outscored native African-Americans by an average of 5 IQ points. 

But, those are just a few speculations. It's an interesting question that, as far as I know, hasn't been studied terribly systematically.

Update: lots of good stuff in the comments from people who know more about what they are talking about when it comes to Britain than I know.

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

Lazy HBDers

Chuck at Occidentalist has been blogging up a storm lately of statistical analyses on various interesting questions. He vents:

What really frustrates me is Lazy HBD. There are dozens of public use data sets waiting to be explored from a HBD perspective. Statistical packages can be downloaded for free. All sorts of HBDish questions can be addressed: Do 2nd generation Blacks do worse on cognitive tests than 3rd+ generation Blacks? Do mixed White and Asians outperform Whites? What is the standardized difference between first, second, and third generation Hispanics controlling for SES? Does color correlate with IQ in the Hispanic population? Does color correlate with crime in the Black population? But it seems that few are interested. I don’t get it.

I'd get right on it, but I have to take a nap first. 

Seriously, there truly is a huge amount of data out there. Various longitudinal studies have been going on for decades that follow thousands of individuals throughout their lives. The 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth is the most famous because Herrnstein and Murray made it the centerpiece of The Bell Curve. But there are many other ones. 

Of course, it's a lot of work to do it right, as Chuck's wrestle through multiple blog posts with the old question of whether light-skinned blacks score higher on IQ tests than do dark-skinned blacks. Richard E. Nisbett argued that the lack of a correlation falsifies the theory that racial gaps in IQ are partly genetic. But the answer Chuck came up with appears to be ultimately yes there is a correlation, although it's not enormous. But as Chuck's work showed, there are a fair number of wrinkles that must be dealt with. 

Meanwhile, Inductivist looks at the Add Health questionnaire data to see if respondents overrate their own intelligence versus their scores on the survey's vocabulary tests:

First, people do have a tendency to rate their intelligence correctly--self-described intelligence is positively correlated with measured IQ--but the tendency is only moderate. Next, males are not more likely than females to inflate their smarts. By contrast, blacks are significantly more likely to--compared to whites. The other racial/ethnics groups do not differ from whites. 

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

Consider the implications

Gregory Cochran writes in 2012 Edge question series on "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?"

Germs Cause Disease 

The germ theory of disease has been very successful, particularly if you care about practical payoffs, like staying alive. It explains how disease can rapidly spread to large numbers of people (exponential growth), why there are so many different diseases (distinct pathogen species), and why some kind of contact (sometimes indirect) is required for disease transmission. 

In modern language, most disease syndromes turn out to be caused by tiny self-replicating machines whose genetic interests are not closely aligned with ours. 

In fact, germ theory has been so successful that it almost seems uninteresting. ...

A huge amount of money has been devoted to searching for the genetic causes of slow-acting diseases because with the development of genome sequencing we have a very handy lamppost to search for our keys under. Looking for germs that might cause slow diseases has not been a priority because nobody has much of a plan for how to do it.

This isn't a terribly bad strategy. It's like when I'm playing golf and I slice my teeshot toward a tangle of head-high thornbushes. I might go look for my ball on the next fairway to the right: maybe the ball happened to bounce through all the thorns an on to the short grass of the wrong fairway. That probably didn't happen, but if it did, well, I can find my ball a lot more easily than if it's in the thorn bushes. But, when my ball doesn't turn up sitting pretty on the next fairway over, I try not to be disappointed.

Similarly, with big diseases, the balls aren't sitting up on the short grass where it would be easy to find them. The 21st Century hasn't seen a lot of cases of common diseases being caused by common gene variants, just as Cochran predicted back in the 20th Century. But few are thinking about how to wade into the thorn bushes to look for them.

It is still worth studying—not just to fight the next plague, but also because it has been a major factor in human history and human evolution. You can't really understand Cortez without smallpox or Keats without tuberculosis. The past is another country—don't drink the water. 

It may well explain patterns that we aren't even supposed to see, let alone understand. For example, human intelligence was, until very recently, ineffective at addressing problems causing by microparasites, as William McNeill pointed out in Plagues and Peoples. Those invisible enemies played a major role in determining human biological fitness—more so in some places than others. Consider the implications.

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

Facts on Left-Handers

Lefthanded people are interesting, in part because they don't make up a strong identity politics group and thus don't benefit from legal protection. There is no Lefthanders History Month of PBS documentaries on Lefthander Pride. This is despite a stringent period of anti-lefthanded bias in the early 20th Century. Ronald Reagan, for instance, was a natural lefthander converted to writing righthanded accordign to the advanced thinking of his time. At some point, before WWII, I believe, there was something of a Lefthander's Liberation movement that reversed this pattern of oppressing natural lefties to switch, but unlike other such movements, this one has almost completely disappeared from media memory. 

Here are some facts from the WSJ on lefties:

About 10% of people are left-handed, according to expert estimates. Another 1% of the population is mixed-handed. What causes people not to favor their right hand is only partly due to genetics—even identical twins, who have 100% of the same genes, don't always share handedness.

... More important, researchers say, are environmental factors—especially stress—in the womb. Babies born to older mothers or at a lower birth weight are more likely to be lefties, for example. And mothers who were exposed to unusually high levels of stress during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to a left-handed child. A review of research, published in 2009 in the journal Neuropsychologia, estimated that about 25% of the variability in handedness is due to genetics.

Handedness is a form of human biodiversity that is only moderately heritable, which explains much about about their lack of political power as a group. Identity groups are largely constructed from relations of blood and marriage, language (e.g., signing deaf people are a strong identity group despite their problems because they have Deaf Culture, while deaf people who don't sign aren't really politically deaf), sexual relations (homosexuals), and sex.

On average there is no difference in intelligence between right-and left-handed people. But lefties do better on an element of creativity known as divergent thinking.

Six of the last 12 U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, have been lefties. 

Left-handed people earn on average 10% lower salaries than righties, according to a recent study. Findings of some earlier studies on income have been mixed. 

Despite popular misperceptions, lefties aren't more accident prone than right-handed people and don't tend to die at a younger age. 

Left-handedness has been linked to increased risk of certain neurodevelopmental disorders like schizophrenia and ADHD. Mixed-handedness is even more strongly associated with ADHD. 

Most people's brains have a dominant side. More symmetrical brains of mixed-handed people may explain the link to some neural disorders.

While lefties make up about 10% of the overall population, about 20% of people with schizophrenia are lefties, for example. Links between left-handedness and dyslexia, ADHD and some mood disorders have also been reported in research studies.

Recall, the standard thing nice white people always say about race -- "He just happens to be black." As George Carlin pointed out, if somebody has two black parents, "Where does the surprise part come in? I would think it would be more unusual if he just "happened to be" Scandinavian!"

But, it's much truer to say "He just happens to be lefthanded." But, because it's true, hardly anybody ever says it.

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

Height! What is it good for?

Over at GNXP Discover, Razib Khan asks about selection for height genes.

I’m a little over 6’4″, and I find being tall pretty useless other than for seeing over other spectators at golf tournaments.  Personally, I think genes for height exist in part to fool other people into thinking you are from a wealthy family. We’re used to people using nurture to try to fool other people about their nature, but I think this is the mirror image: this is genes trying to fool others into assuming you have rich relations. The main advantage to being tall was that other people figured you must come from a well-to-do family, which has many Darwinian benefits. 

Height used to be a good clue to how well fed you were as a child. For example, the Tory cabinet that Prime Minister Salisbury formed in 1895 averaged six feet in height, maybe five inches higher than the British national male average at the time. This difference of a couple of standard deviations reflected in part how much better fed and how much healthier aristocrats were than the masses, but fortunately that indicator is becoming less meaningful.

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

Denisovans

For the last couple of decades, there has been a popular theological concept that every living human being was 100% descended from modern humans who came Out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, so therefore there hasn't been enough time for evolution to cause any changes among people, so, therefore, Science Proves the complete genetic equality of all human racial groups.

So, what happened to the not-so-modern humans who were around back then, like the Neanderthals? Well, to Prove Racism Wrong, they had to have been utterly exterminated, the victims of a 100% genocide with no living descendants whatsoever. You see, old theories that some of the old non-African humans weren't completely obliterated were racist, because that would imply that living humans aren't all identical by descent, so they had to be utterly wrong. So, the old humans had to die. You can't make anti-racist omelet without exterminating a few lineages.

In reality, it's not actually a good idea to get too worked up over some theory you hold about the distant past. It's especially not a good idea to create political/moral/religious dogmas dependent upon some assumption you make about the far past. You never know what somebody might dig up. 

It's a better idea to keep an open mind about the present. If, say, men of West African descent keep making the Olympic 100m finals, well, that's pretty interesting. There are a variety of ways that that could have come about, and there's a variety of evidence for assessing those theories. In contrast, the conventional wisdom that anybody who notices these patterns must be evil because Science Proves that these patterns shouldn't exist is just setting yourself up for a fall.  

Not long ago, it turned out that, sure enough, non-Africans tended to be a few percent Neanderthal by descent. Then, it turned out that some people (but not others) were related to an archaic group christened Denisovans. 

A new paper that came out today finds evidence of Denisovan ancestry in various islands off the southeast coast of Asia, such as the Mamanwa negritos of the Philippines and Australian Aborigines. Dienekes has some follow-up on it.

Meanwhile, a second big paper that came out today (see below) says that Australian Aborigines didn't intermarry with anybody after they got to Australia 44,000 years ago. 

You'll notice that there seem to be at least superficially contradictory lessons here about human nature: the ancestors of Australian Aborigines mated with a different quasi-species somewhere in the past, then maintained splendid isolation genetically for many tens of thousands of years in Australia, with no subsequent intruders mating with them until the 18th Century. So, maybe the general rule to draw from this is that You Can't Tell about human history. You've got to go look it up.

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

Denisovans

From New Scientist:

Stone Age toe could redraw human family tree 

10 August 2011 by Colin Barras 

ON THE western fringes of Siberia, the Stone Age Denisova cave has surrendered precious treasure: a toe bone that could shed light on early humans' promiscuous relations with their hominin cousins. 

New Scientist has learned that the bone is now in the care of Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who revealed the first genetic evidence of interbreeding between ancient humans and other hominins (New Scientist, 30 July, p 34).

There are tantalising hints that the find strengthens the case for a third major group of hominins circulating in Eurasia at the same time as early humans and the Neanderthals. It might possibly even prove all three groups were interbreeding (see diagram). 

The Denisova cave had already yielded a fossil tooth and finger bone, in 2000 and 2008. Last year, Pääbo's DNA analysis suggested both belonged to a previously unknown group of hominins, the Denisovans. The new bone, an extremely rare find, looks likely to belong to the same group. 

It is a very exciting discovery, says Isabelle De Groote at London's Natural History Museum. "Hominin material from southern Siberia is rare and usually extremely fragmentary." 

The primitive morphology of the 30,000 to 50,000-year-old Denisovan finger bone and tooth indicates that Denisovans separated from the Neanderthals roughly 300,000 years ago. At the time of the analysis, Pääbo speculated that they came to occupy large parts of east Asia at a time when Europe and western Asia were dominated by Neanderthals. By 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was also moving around much of the region. But the Denisovans remain known only from the finger and tooth fossils - not enough information to formally assign them to their own species. 

That may change with analysis of the newly discovered toe bone. 

I hear a rumor that the pygmy negritos of the Philippines might be in the news by the end of the year or so.

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

Race and Medicine, Part LXXV

This Washington Post article illustrates that the widespread conceptual confusion over what race is can be bad for health care:

Race reemerges in debate over ‘personalized medicine’ 

By Rob Stein 

Federal examiners have rejected patents for genetic screening tests because the applicants did not explore their effectiveness for different races, adding to the debate about whether race has scientific validity in modern DNA-based medicine. 

Presumably, Patent Office staffers got a memo encouraging them to make sure that genetic tests work on minorities and aren't just being optimized for whites. But this upsets the Race Does Not Exist crowd.

Some geneticists, sociologists and bioethicists argue that “black,” “white,” “Asian” and “Hispanic” are antiquated categories that threaten to revive prejudices. Others, however, say that meaningful DNA variations can track racial lines and that ignoring them could deny many benefits of “personalized medicine,” which aims to develop tests and treatments tailored to a person’s genetic makeup. ...

Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., discovered the patent rejections when he began sifting through applications, prompted by a 2008 patent office presentation that raised the race issue. 

“Constructions of race as genetic are not only scientifically flawed, they are socially dangerous, opening the door to new forms of discrimination or the misallocation of scarce resources needed to address real health disparities,” Kahn wrote in a report in the journal Nature Biotechnology in May. ...

Similarly, in 2009, an examiner rejected a patent for a test for a propensity for prostate cancer because it did not specify the risk the variation posed among different races, Kahn found.
And in 2010, an examiner denied a patent for a test for a genetic marker for asthma and eczema because it was vetted only in whites and Asians. 

The prostate cancer and asthma rulings were reversed on appeal. But the colorectal cancer applicant narrowed the application to win approval. 

“There’s no telling how many people will just give in and use race in a way that the scientists clearly do not think is an appropriate way to use race,” Kahn said. 

Just the fact that patent applications are including such information is disturbing, he and other critics say. 

“This gives almost scientific legitimacy to the false categories of race — that somehow being white or being European is a strong category you can use in research,” said Troy Duster, who studies the racial implications of scientific research at New York University. 

For decades, demagogues — and even some scientists — argued that racial groups were genetically distinct and, in some ways, biologically inferior or superior, justifying laws barring interracial marriage and other discriminatory practices. 

Genetic predispositions — such as for sickle cell anemia, which occurs more frequently among African Americans, and Tay-Sachs disease, which is found more often in descendants of Ashkenazi Jews — clearly can pass down through generations. But as scientists developed modern tools of molecular biology, they produced ever more convincing evidence that genes vary as much among people who identify themselves as the same race as among groups segregated along traditional racial lines.

Except that they don't. Statistically, genes vary a lot within races, just as they vary a fair amount among siblings within a nuclear family, but they vary even more among individuals across races.

“What we are learning is that ancestry is really the key here,” said Charles N. Rotimi, director of the center for research on genomics and global health at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Because ancestry and race don't have much to do with each other, I guess.

“The labels for race, at least as we currently use them, distort some of the things we want to understand in terms of ancestry.” 

Then perhaps we need for doctors to use more accurate terms. For example, Professor Kahn is up in arms about a Patent staffer who supposedly treated "Hispanic" as a racial group. This suggests that the medical profession ought to revive more genetically useful terms such as "mestizo" and "mulatto." Doctors use technical terms for lots of things that are considered inappropriate to mention in polite society, so why shouldn't they use "mestizo" and "mulatto?" It's their job, after all.

For example, although sickle cell anemia is more common among African Americans, the blood disorder is also rare in some parts of Africa and common in some predominantly Caucasian populations.

This is the kind of race-does-not-exist talking point that's more likely to confuse nonspecialist doctors than to help them make more accurate diagnoses. For the purposes of figuring out which tests to run on sick African American children, it doesn't particularly matter that sickle cell anemia "is rare in some parts of Africa" because traditional African-Americans (i.e., the descendants of American slaves) are a blended population with no ability to accurately tell a doctor something like, "My baby can't have sickle cell anemia because all 512 of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were from parts of Africa where sickle cell anemia is rare." The point is that if your baby is African-American, sickle cell anemia should be a concern for your pediatrician. Now, if you and your spouse just got off the plane from, say, the highlands of Ethiopia, well, maybe not, but you are the exception.

Likewise, it would be good for doctors to know that if your baby is, say, 100% Sicilian, then there's a small chance of sickle cell anemia because there was some falciparum malaria in Sicily.

The ultimate goal of genetic-based personalized medicine is to match care to each patient’s genetic makeup, Rotimi and others say. 

“You are truly going to be looking at that individual, whether black, white or Asian. It’s the individual’s genome that becomes important to their disease risk as opposed to their socially identified race or ethnicity,” said Vence L. Bonham Jr., an associate investigator at the institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

But in the mean time ... Look, this individualized medical genomics thing hasn't working out as fast as people thought it would. What is progressing fast is racial genomics. Scientists are getting very good at figuring out people's racial backgrounds from their DNA.

Injecting race back into the mix carries myriad dangers, critics say. On a practical level, it may result in doctors using tests or treatments on one ethnic group and not another, denying people care based on the color of their skin.

Because less information is better when making diagnoses.

... On a more disturbing level, it could fuel racism. 

“It has the social consequence of making it seem that differences among groups are fundamentally biological,” said Barbara A. Koenig, a medical ethicist and anthropologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. “Inevitably, in our history, that leads back to the idea that one race is better than another.” 

But others say that although race is far from perfect, some genetic variations with meaningful implications for health can be much more common among certain groups. 

For example, the anti-seizure drug Tegretol produces a life-threatening skin rash more frequently among certain Asians than others; the best dose of the common blood thinner Warfarin varies by race and African Americans appear to be at an increased risk for kidney failure because they more often carry certain mutations. 

“I don’t think race/ethnicity and personalized medicine are mutually exclusive,” said Neil Risch, a professor of human genetics and epidemiology at the University of California at San Francisco. “You can call it sociological, cultural — whatever. It’s all of the above. That doesn’t mean it’s devoid of genetic meaning.”

In other words, racial medicine doesn't work in theory, but it does work with human beings. That suggests that we need a better theory.

In fact, recent analyses have indicated that many common diseases probably are caused by genetic variations in different populations, making it crucial to assemble diverse databases, researchers said in an article published online July 13 by the journal Nature. 

Two large genetic analyses published July 20 by the journals Nature and Nature Genetics found hundreds of genetic discrepancies between people of African American and European descent. And two papers published online Sunday by Nature Genetics found four unique genetic variations associated with asthma in people in Japan and people of African ancestry. Until scientists learn more about individual genetic predisposition, race provides a useful proxy, some say. 

“I think there’s a healthy debate right now about the role of race in medicine,” said Noah A. Rosenberg, a professor of biology at Stanford University.

One of the reasons that this debate has dragged on in a confused fashion for so many years, probably killing a few patients along the way, is that doctors aren't given a solid concept of race. Doctors are busy, practical people. They need the conceptual heavy lifting to be done by intellectuals, but the intellectual class has overwhelmingly failed when it comes to understanding what race is.

The problem is that because it's easy to poke holes in the crudest forms of old-fashioned American racial concepts, such as the one-drop rule, that means you can jump all the way to Race Does Not Exist, which is even cruder and stupider. What we need instead is a more sophisticated way for doctors to think about race. Fortunately, I invented* that way back in the 1990s: a racial group can most profitably be thought of as an extended family that is partly inbred. This is very close to being tautological, and, not surprisingly, lots of recent genetic data supports this insight.

The good news is that doctors shouldn't have too much trouble grasping my concept because it fits nicely as an extension of a concept they use all the time: the family medical history. The Surgeon General, AMA and the Mayo Clinic advocate that patients draw up a family medical history for themselves.

Race fits into the notion of a family medical history by allowing your family medical history to be extended beyond relatives whose medical histories you happen to know. Thinking of race as a partly inbred extended family means implies that statistical tendencies should also be garnered from large numbers of members of your more extended families.

The bad news is that almost nobody is explaining this concept to doctors. Thus, we see confused and confusing articles like this one.

----------------------

* I'm sure lots of other people invented it before me.

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

hbd chick v. Francis Fukuyama

hbd chick has made an interesting response to my review in The American Conservative of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order. First, another excerpt from my review:

William D. Hamilton’s math was popularized by Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 bombshell Sociobiology and by Richard Dawkins’s 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. (A more accurate title would have been The Dynastic Gene.) According to Fukuyama, however, political science has scandalously ignored the implications of these famous books. That’s true in general, although I have on my bookshelves academic works pointing out the fascinating political implications of kin selection by Pierre L. van den Berghe, Frank Salter, Tatu Vanhanen, and J.P. Rushton, none of whom Fukuyama cites. 

... Fukuyama is worried enough by this unpublicized but powerful line of logic that he tries to brush off the entire concept of ethnic nepotism: 

"Since virtually all human societies organized themselves tribally at one point, many people are tempted to believe that this is somehow a natural state of affairs or biologically driven. It is not obvious, however, why you should want to cooperate with a cousin four times removed rather than a familiar nonrelative just because you share one sixty-fourth of your genes with your cousin."

Indeed, it is “not obvious,” but Fukuyama’s challenge is hardly unanswerable. In arranged-marriage cultures, clans, tribes, and castes can perpetuate themselves indefinitely, making states typically either ineffective or tyrannical. For example, as I’m writing, Colonel Gaddafi has so far survived NATO aerial bombardment by rallying many Bedouin tribes to his banner. Even though most Libyan nomads have settled down, they’ve maintained tribalism as what anthropologist Stanley Kurtz calls their “social structure in reserve” precisely for violent times like these when you can only trust blood relations. 

In the West, in contrast, over the generations familiar nonrelatives—i.e., neighbors—tend to turn into relatives, or at least potential in-laws, because European cultures frequently permitted love marriages with the girl next door. Moreover, as Fukuyama notes, the Catholic Church discouraged even fourth-cousin marriages. The resulting broad but shallow regional blood ties help explain why Western cultures were able to organize politically on a territorial basis without always being looted by self-interested clans.

hbd chick expands my rebuttal to Fukuyama into a General Theory of the West:

No, being tribal is not necessarily the natural state of affairs, but it IS biologically driven. as is being non-tribal. 

Europeans used to be tribal, but that's because they used to marry their cousins, too, just like the afghanis or iraqis or saudis or libyans of today. the church put an end to all that and then some -- it also put an end to all sorts of endogamous practices like polygamy and marrying your dead brother's wife. first- and second-cousin marriage was banned in 506 a.d., and by the 11th century the church had banned marriage up to SIXTH cousins. 

This forced exogamy resulted in, as steve describes it, "broad but shallow regional blood ties." almost all of european (and western) history hinges on these loose genetic ties. the whole evolution of european societies from tribes to city-states (think of the venices and the hamburgs of europe) to the nationalistic movements -- this was made possible because extended family ties were continually loosened over centuries of european history (from the fall of rome onwards). the broadening of political structures (tribe, city-state, national-state) mirrors the underlying broadening of the genetic ties.

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

Heat

Here's an article about HP's plan for next generation computing built around memristors (dreamed up by Amy Chua's dad 40 years ago). The problem with the current architecture:

Today, computers constantly shuttle data back and forth among faster and slower memories. The systems keep frequently used data close to the processor and then move it to slower and more permanent storage when it is no longer needed for the ongoing calculations.

In this approach, the microprocessor is in the center of the computing universe, but in terms of energy costs, moving the information, first to be computed upon and then stored, dwarfs the energy used in the actual computing operation. ...

One reason is computing’s enormous energy appetite. A 10-petaflop supercomputer — scheduled to be built by I.B.M. next year — will consume 15 megawatts of power, roughly the electricity consumed by a city of 15,000 homes.

There are perhaps analogies here to the evolution of human intelligence. For millions of years, our predecessors' brains got larger, peaking with the Neanderthals. That suggests that bigger brains made us fitter.

But that's a brute force solution.The usual argument is that big brains require too much food. (They also make us fall over more.) Now, it could be that as human population increased after the invention of agriculture, there were enough mutations to create more intelligence per cubic centimeter, just as there have been with computer chips.

That's certainly true, but I suspect the concomitant problem of not just getting enough energy in, but of getting enough energy out of the skull, of heat dispersal, also became a problem with this trend toward bigger brains. With a roughly spherical shape, as volume goes up, so does the volume to surface ratio.

Unfortunately, I've never seen anybody who actually knows what they are talking about consider this question of brains shedding heat. 

It could be that there is an ideal latitude at which the cost of keeping the brain warm is balanced by the cost of keeping the brain cool at lowest overall cost. In 1911, Yale Professor of Geography Ellsworth Huntington conducted a study of climate's effect on human achievement. He concluded that the ideal climate was roughly that of New Haven, Connecticut. In a recent article, Malcolm Gladwell had great fun with that: here we are, 100 years later, and we can see what a biased moron Huntington was! Proving how much things have changed in 100 years, Malcolm's article appeared in that glossy, ad-packed magazine, The Lagoser.

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

"The Perils of Diversity" by Byron M. Roth

I review the massive book on immigration discussed from the perspective of the human sciences in VDARE.com.

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