January 12, 2005

Deafness and male homosexuality

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#deaf.gays

A clue to a cause of male homosexuality? A reader writes:

I've been reading your articles on homosexuality with interest as of late. I'm 25 years old, gay, and have been out of the closet and therefore in the gay community to some degree since the age of 16. One thing that I have noticed that I have always thought people ought to do a study on is the shockingly high number of people in the gay community who were born deaf. I'm not the only gay person to make note of this; at least three of my friends have had the same independent realization. One would never imagine that, in a relatively small city such as Baltimore, a social club for "gay deaf bears" could fill up a moderately-sized bar with its monthly outings, but I saw this myself regularly when I worked as a barback. Perhaps deafness and homosexuality are two possible long-term consequences of an infection by the same "gay germ".

On the other hand, one could argue that deafness, like effeminacy, might lead to early alienation from same-sex peers among boys, which develops into homosexual attraction during the hormonal onrush of puberty.

I had never heard of this before, but an article in The Advocate says:

Many deaf gay people actually find it easier than hearing people to recognize and accept their sexuality, a fact that may explain the impression that a disproportionate number of deaf people are gay. Everybody has a theory on this one: Gallaudet French and Spanish instructor Buck Rogers believes deaf gay children are sheltered from much of the mainstream culture's verbal homophobia by not hearing it. Others say homoerotic feelings are more easily manifested and acted on because many deaf children are educated in group homes and seek comfort because they feel abandoned by their parents. Still others suspect the process of coping with being deaf makes acceptance of yet another difference more natural.

Gregory Cochran replies:

If this higher incidence of homosexuality among the deaf is real, and we can pin it on the approximately half of deaf people who used to have rubella-caused deafness, game over. The vaccine was licensed in 1969: I would guess that rubella deafness was rare after 1975. So this connection should, if it exists at all, exist in gay men 35 and over. (By the way, kids with rubella infections who got them in utero are ~50 times more likely to have type-I diabetes.)

So, that would raise the question of the average age of deaf gays -- is it higher than average among gays? Is there a sharp fall off under 35 or so? Gay deaf organizations could be contacted.

Generally speaking, I don't see much evidence for a higher than normal number of medical syndromes among male homosexuals, so I was surprised to hear about this possible connection to deafness. The only thing instantly noticeable in a sizable fraction of gay men is the famous "lissssp" (it's not a "lithp," or a Daffy Duck-style "lishp," but a sibilant "lissssp"), which bedevils gay men's choruses across America, but a lisp is hardly a major problem like deafness is.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Gay Gene Theory Could Lead to Eugenic Abortion

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#eugenic.abortion

The same reader asks:

Incidentally, what do you think the odds are that, once a germ or a gene for homosexuality is found, heterosexuals will abort us out of existence?

It's hard to say what the effects of discovering a gay germ would be, but it's certainly less likely to lead to large-scale eugenic abortions than would the discovery of a gay gene. A gay gene would probably elicit responses similar to the modern responses to the chromosomal abnormality that causes Down Syndrome -- and you'll notice that there are a lot fewer Down Syndrome people around than a few decades ago, due to pregnant women having eugenic abortions.

In the prestige press, everybody talks about eugenics as something that existed only in the bad old days, but it's going on right now all around us.

None dare call it eugenics, but private eugenics is highly popular with liberals. Dave Shiflett wrote on NRO:

Jocelyn Elders, just prior to being named Bill Clinton's surgeon general, famously proclaimed that abortion "has had an important and positive public-health effect" because it reduced "the number of children afflicted with severe defects." She pointed out that "the number of Down Syndrome infants in Washington state in 1976 was 64 percent lower than it would have been without legal abortion."

I'm sure lots of fashionable people would say that they would never abort a fetus with a gay gene, but then you don't hear a lot of people boasting that they would abort a Downs syndrome fetus either, but it sure happens a lot these days. In both cases, parents would have to decide whether they want to go through all the hard work of raising a child without much chance of getting grandchildren in return. This calculus would especially be likely to be true among blue state liberals who are only planning to have one or two children, and therefore don't feel they can afford to invest in kids who won't pay off fully ... and grandchildren are about the biggest payoff you can get out of childrearing.

A seldom-discussed paradox is that if male homosexuality is proven to originate in a particular "gay gene," then it's likely that the continued existence of gay men in future generations in America will primarily be due to Christians who oppose abortion on religious grounds. Kind of ironic, no? Gays might want to think about that before denouncing Christians.

On the other hand, if the gay germ theory is proven true, then this would likely only lead to numerous eugenic abortions if both the infection was ascertainable during the first few months of pregnancy and if it wasn't readily preventable or curable. At this point we have no clue when the infection (if there is such a thing) might occur: the likely timespan would be about the first 30 months or so after conception, with only the first 20% being in the window when a first or second trimester abortion would be feasible.

It's a fascinating example of the raw stupidity of the politically correct, such as Garance Franke-Ruta, that they generally consider the gay gene theory progressive and pro-gay and the gay germ theory absolutely beyond the pale, when the discovery of a gay gene would probably lead to far more eugenic abortions of gay fetuses than would the finding of a gay germ.

On the other hand, the discovery of a gay germ would probably lead to searches for vaccines or antibiotic/antiviral agents, which eventually might lead to fewer male homosexuals, but that hardly compares on the morality scale to the tide of eugenic abortions that the identification of a gay gene would set off.

If a clear path of transmission was discovered, such as being sneezed on by a gay man while pregnant, that might cause some change in behavior during the susceptible periods, such as pregnant women or women with babies staying away temporarily from gay friends or gay service workers like hairdressers. (One of my readers recently checked, at my suggestion, for seasonality in the births of gay males, which could be the sign of transmission via cold/flu mechanisms, but found no seasonality, lowering the possibility of sneeze route). I'm sure many people would consider that a horrific possibility, but it strikes me as one that people could adjust to.

In the long run, a decline in the number of male homosexuals, from whatever cause, would have various consequences. For example, a decrease in the number of young gays would mean that more old homosexuals would have to be satisfied with each other for company. Certain professions, especially in the arts, might be set back, but I suspect society would compensate, just as it has adjusted to the far more horrible impact of the AIDS epidemic that gays inflicted upon themselves through massive promiscuity. For example, a large number of Broadway choreographers were killed by AIDS in the 1980s.

If the number of gay men coming of age each year dropped significantly, I suspect that more women would step up to fill the gap in professions like choreographer where gay men currently tend to have an advantage in professional competition over women due to their greater male aggressiveness. Straight men might even return to the profession, as in the days of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, and Gower Champion, before the "straight flight" that has rendered Broadway so much less popular than in the past.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Is Humor Conservative?

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#conservative.humor

Paging through the massive new book of New Yorker cartoons from 1925 to 2004, it strikes me that most humor is conservative, even in a liberal magazine. Not "conservative" in the ideological sense of whatever kind of wacky risk-taking "conservatism" stands for in 2005, but in the general sense of "being skeptical of innovations."

For example, my wife and I find hilarious the recent cartoon of the man walking down the street talking on his cellphone who says, "Can you hang on a sec? I just took another picture of my ear." My wife and I know that it's obvious that God only meant for us to talk on our cellphones, or maybe text-message a little, or, in a pinch, surf the Web, but to take pictures with our cellphones is inherently ridiculous and anybody who tries it deserves whatever come-uppance they're sure to get.

My kids, however, can't understand what's so derisible about combining a camera with a telephone. Isn't it totally obvious that they go together? Was there ever a time so primitive that nobody had a camera in his cellphone? Why would he have to hold on a sec just because he took a picture of his ear? Is he that lacking in bandwidth?

On the other hand, both generations of Sailers are baffled by the cartoons from the 1920s that apparently are trying to make fun of the tall buildings that were then under construction in New York. What in the world is funny about skyscrapers? What would New York be without skyscrapers? What kind of cavemen were so unfamiliar with skyscrapers that they found the very idea of them amusing?

Paradoxically, it's this conservatism of humor that means that old humor doesn't endure well. Judging from the New Yorker collection of their best cartoons, the funny stuff (from my perspective) goes back to, oh say, my birth in 1958 and the amusing stuff to about 1935, but the cartoons from the decade before that are about as laugh-inducing as League of Nations white papers. The problem is that I'm so inured to everything from 1925-1934 that I can't even begin to put myself back into the shoes of people to whom skyscrapers, subways, and talkies were such outrageously new-fangled novelties that they were automatically funny.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Orthodontics questions

What's the deal with orthodontists? CBS Marketwatch's List of Top 10 Most Overpaid Jobs includes:

4. Orthodontists

Working 35 hours a week, orthodontists on average earn $350,000 a year. At the same time, regular dentists make 50% less, having to work 39 hours a week and performing more "dirty" work. Orthodontics, unlike neurosurgery, does not require additional schooling. The entire educational process lasts two years.

Why hasn't this price come down the way the cost of laser eye surgery has plummeted? Personally, I would find the argument more persuasive that you really ought to pay for the best when looking for a doctor to slice your eyeballs up with a laser beam than the argument that you ought to willingly pay extra when looking for a doctor to very slowly nudge your kid's teeth around with braces, but that doesn't appear to be the general opinion of mankind. And how are you supposed to decide between two orthodontists, one asking $5,200 and one asking $3,200? How do you find out if one is worth the extra money?


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Armstrong Williams' Payoff

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#armstrong.williams

The Bush Administration takes the direct approach in persuading the punditariat:

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

It's actually reassuring to learn that not everybody who shills for the Bush Administration's wackier projects is a True Believer.

I guess the definition of an honest pundit these days is one who stays bought.

From what I know of conservative pixel-stained wretches, you could buy the undying loyalty of 60 pundits for $4,000 each just by inviting them to a fancy conference at a tropical resort hotel and letting them give speeches to high government officials who nod appreciatively at their insights.

So, why did somebody in the Education Department pay Armstrong such a vastly inflated sum? Maybe there was a little personal favoritism? The NY Press reported in 1998:

Armstrong Williams, the conservative talk-show host who instigated a firestorm last week by asking the senator from Mississippi [Trent Lott] whether homosexuality is a sin, is being sued for sexual harassment by a former employee who happens to be male. Last year, Stephen Gregory -- the former YMCA personal trainer whom Williams promoted to executive producer of his show -- alleged in his suit that the boss grabbed his buttocks and penis, tried to kiss him, and climbed into his hotel-room bed asking for "affection" while they were traveling together. Williams immediately held a press conference to denounce Gregory's allegations as "false, baseless, and completely without merit." Gregory's attorney, Mickey Wheatley, who says the case will probably proceed to trial this fall, has spoken with Gregory since Williams's news-making interview with Lott. "He's not that political," says Wheatley, "but his reaction was, 'That sounds like Armstrong shooting his mouth off.' " Neither Williams nor his attorney could be reached on deadline.

Here's the outcome of the case.

Beats me what the real story is behind this story.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

A Sentinelese tribesman firing arrows at a relief helicopter in the Andamans

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#sentinelese.photo

: A poster child for xenophobes everywhere!

Can you imagine how terrifying a helicopter must look and sound to a stone age tribesman and how brave you'd have to be to fight one with a bow and arrow? Personally, I find helicopters rather horrifying and I've seen them all my life.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Photo of Sentinelese Andamanese attacking helicopter

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#sentinelese.photo

A Sentinelese tribesman firing arrows at a relief helicopter in the Andamans: A poster child for xenophobes everywhere!

Can you imagine how terrifying a helicopter must look and sound to a stone age tribesman and how brave you'd have to be to fight one with a bow and arrow? Personally, I find helicopters rather horrifying and I've seen them all my life.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Setback for Gay Germ theory

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#gay.germ

As I've mentioned several times before, the existence of male homosexuality (of the exclusive variety) is perhaps the greatest anomaly troubling Darwin's theory of natural selection, which is otherwise so enormously useful in understanding the living world. Therefore, solving the mystery of the cause(s) of male homosexuality is -- besides all the personal, moral, and political controversy it generates -- of the highest abstract scientific interest. It's as if a few percent of objects in the universe didn't appear to follow Einstein's theory of relativity.

We can be reasonably confident that in contemporary society, homosexual orientation is typically not a choice or a fashion or a product of socialization because it's not terribly hard to predict with more than random accuracy which little boys will grow up to be gay men. Richard Green of UCLA's long tracking study found that effeminate little boys are radically more likely to grow up to be homosexuals than masculine little boys. Similarly, the average difference in thirty retrospective studies asking adult men to discuss their proclivities as little boys found that adult gays were 1.2 standard deviation studies more effeminate than adult straights.

Fundamentalist liberals of the Garance Franke-Ruta ilk are shocked to hear me point out these scientific studies linking boyhood effeminacy to adult homosexuality (a correlation which most people over the age of 35 or so have probably observed among their own circle of acquaintances), but, obviously, these facts about early childhood are the most persuasive response to religious people who consider homosexuality to be a sinful choice of adults. Further, a wider understanding of the correlation between childhood effeminacy and adult gayness can help parents prepare themselves so they won't be so shocked when their sons come out of the closet, thus preventing painful family rifts.

Dean Hamer's gay gene declaration of the cause of male homosexuality proved wildly popular when broached over a decade ago, but little has emerged since to validate it. It's not impossible for male homosexuality to be a genetic trait that is selected for if it had other side effects that increase "Darwinian fitness" (i.e., number of descendents), just as sickle cell anemia is selected for in West Africa because it reduces the deaths from malaria.

It has been theorized by advocates of the gay gene theory for over three decades that homosexuals might have more nephews and nieces and the like, but there seemed to be no empirical evidence for this. I know one researcher who looked for this and found nothing. Then, last year some Italian researchers announced they had found that gay men in Italy could recount more relatives on their mothers' side than their fathers' side, suggesting a connection to the X chromosome. But everyone ignored the obvious methodological concern: gay men famously tend to talk to their mothers more than they talk to their fathers, having more in common with their mothers, so they would be more familiar with the maternal sides of their families.

I first heard of the alternative gay germ theory in the cover story in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1999 about evolutionary theorists Paul Ewald and Greg Cochran. So, Ms. Franke-Ruta should denounce the Atlantic Monthly, not me.

The gay germ theory has a lot of theoretical advantages. For example, germs can evolve at least as fast as our defenses against them, so an ever-increasing number of medical conditions are found each decade to be caused by infections. In contrast, despite all the enormous interest in discovering genetic diseases, progress has been slow for the predictable reason that natural selection fairly quickly and surely eliminates genes that reduce the number of descendents.

However, theories, no matter how elegant, need to be tested. So, I've proposed a couple of times in the past that somebody check to see if there is a seasonality to the births of homosexuals, as there is with the birthdates of schizophrenics. A seasonal pattern isn't essential to a gay germ theory, but if one existed, it would be evidence for it. If seasonality doesn't exist, it suggest that this theoretical gay germ would not be spread by the same mechanisms as cold and flu germs, which spread more easily in winter with more running noses from the cold and people indoors more.

A reader writes:

I took a look at the General Social Survey which asks people what was the sex of the people they slept with last year (SEXSEX) and their sign (ZODIAC). Looking at the 201 men (SEX=1) who had exclusively male-male sex compared to the almost 6,500 men who had exclusively hetero sex, I couldn't find any differences in the seasons of the two groups' births. Specifically, I looked at various ranges of time within the period between Oct. 23rd and Mar. 20 (Scorpio through Pisces) but found no differences between the two groups in the percentage born during the given period of time. If you're interested, you could fiddle with the numbers at: http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/

UPDATE: Greg Cochran replies:

Come on, Steve, think it through: the only way you'd see a seasonal effect is if there was a key vulnerable period in in early development, probably before birth. A pre-birth infection is possible but not particularly likely: for every infection that hits before birth there must be a hundred that hit later in life.

So, imagine that the mystery bug is something that everybody gets fairly early in life, like RSV. Depending on what month you're born, maybe you get it at 2 or 2.5 or 3. No seasonal effect.

If this involves nuking a hypothalamic nucleus, there probably is no key developmental period.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Andamanese update

Andamanese Jarawas are OK: The AP reports:

JIRKATANG, India — Members of the ancient Jarawa tribe (search) emerged from their forest habitat Thursday for the first time since the Dec. 26 tsunami and earthquakes that rocked the isolated Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and in a rare interaction with outsiders announced that all 250 of their fellow tribespeople had survived.

"We are all safe after the earthquake. We are in the forest in Balughat," Ashu, an arrow-wielding Jarawa, said in broken Hindi through an interpreter in a restricted forest area in the northern reaches of South Andaman island (search).

According to varying estimates, there are only 400 to 1,000 members alive today from the Jarawas, Great Andamanese (search), Onges (search), Sentinelese (search) and Shompens (search).

Some anthropological DNA studies indicate the generations may have spanned back 70,000 years. They originated in Africa and migrated to India through Indonesia, anthropologists say.

Government officials and anthropologists believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the indigenous tribes from the tsunami.

Seven men — wearing only underwear and amulets — emerged from the forest to meet with government and police officials to say they had all fled to the forest and survived by eating coconuts. The men were all carrying bows and five arrows each and wore colored headbands with leaves.

The Jarawa were (along with the Sentinelese, who have their own island) essentially uncontacted until the late 1990s when a young tribesman walked into Port Blair, the urban center of the large Indian colony in the Andamans, and was discovered scavenging through garbage. When attempting to run away, he broke his leg and was hospitalized. In the hospital he discovered the pleasures of television, and when he was released, he started bringing his friends into town to cadge food and watch TV. Unfortunately, their immune systems were overwhelmed by the outside world's germs, and the Jarawa have been victims of several epidemics in recent years.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

How to test gay gene theory

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#clone.gay.sheep

Let's clone a gay sheep! Greg Cochran's come up with a way to test the popular but almost untested Gay Gene theory: clone a homosexual ram. Although you hear a lot about homosexuality in animals, most of that is actually bisexuality. There is very little in the way of exclusive homosexual orientation among male animals -- but sheep are a clear exception, much to the frustration of sheep ranchers who find that a noticeable percentage of their rams won't pay attention to a ewe in heat even if you tie her to a fence for his convenience.

Since we've known how to clone sheep since the 1990s, it would be straightforward to clone a number of exclusively gay rams and see how many of their clones turn out to be gay as well. The gay gene theory would predict that all of them would be gay since their genes would be the same.

By the way, among human identical twins, a substantial portion of the time when one identical twin is homosexual, the other is not. The first time this was studied, just under half of the pairs were "nonconcordant" for homosexuality. However, it was pointed out that by placing an ad in a gay newspaper, this would be more likely to attract concordant twins (since readership of gay newspapers among nonconcordant twins is about half compared to concordant twins; and other readers of the gay newspaper would be more likely to know that, say, Ike had a twin if his twin Mike was also active on the local gay scene than if Mike lived in Schaumburg with his wife and three kids, so they'd be more likely to call the ad to one of the twin's attention if both were gay.)

So, the study was redone using the Australian government's twin registry and they came up with a nonconcordance figure of, I recall, something like 75%-80%. However, there are methodological issues involving that study, too, so we can't be too sure. Nonetheless, it's clear that concordance for male homosexuality among identical twins is much lower than for, say, sex, where it's virtually 100%, or for, say, height where the concordance is quite high.

Let me also throw out a quick way to test a different theory of the origins of homosexuality. It turns out that schizophrenics tend to have birthdates falling more in some seasons of the year than in other seasons, suggesting that prenatal or postnatal infections, which are spread more in winter than in summer, might play a role in schizophrenia. So, are male (or female) homosexuals more likely to be born at some point of the year than at other points of the year? One way to test this is by looking at a gay dating service that displays the participants' astrological signs (i.e., birth months). There ought to be an equal number for each sign, but if there is a statistically significant skew toward one or two seasons, that might suggest some role for infections.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Cousin marriage in Afghanistan

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#cousin.marriage.a

Good news from Afghanistan: Agency France-Presse reports:

"Cousins, forced marriages and blind children — a very Afghan drama"

HABIB Zada is a photographer but his two children, one year-old Zaki and six-year-old Harez, will never see his pictures. Born from an arranged marriage between blood relatives, they are both blind - the victims of an ingrained tradition, like many handicapped youngsters in Afghanistan...

“I told my father, ‘if you want, I’ll follow your directions but it is not good to marry a cousin,’” Zada, who spoke to AFP using a pseudonym, said with a doleful look. “At the time, I had another girl in mind. I didn’t want to marry for another five years, but he said I was his oldest son and he wanted to see my wedding”.

Faced with his father’s intransigence and being aged just 20 at the time, Zada gave in - despite the fact that two of his brothers are blind and that in marrying his cousin he increased the risk of passing on the problem. The United Nations estimates between 800,000 and two million Afghans suffer from a disability. A quarter were caused by Afghanistan’s 25 years of war but specialists are slowly coming to the conclusion that many of the rest result from arranged intrafamilial marriages.

“In Afghanistan, disability is caused by war, accidents, poverty, diseases for mother and children, and forced marriages between cousins,” said Parween Azimi, an official at the Ministry for Martyrs and the Disabled, recently. “Hundreds of families have disabled children for that reason,” she told AFP, adding that it remained a highly sensitive subject.

Masooda Jalal, Afghanistan’s new Minister for Women, who is also a paediatrician, said: “More than 13 years ago, I remember a survey that said that hundreds of thousands of Afghans were mentally disabled.” According to the survey “intermarriages were the first cause of this disability,” she said. Jalal had been combating the practice and planned radio programmes to get information to the public, but had to stop when Afghanistan’s civil wars began in the early 1990s. In the meantime, Zada married his cousin.

“Our two families knew each other and mine thought that meant I could stay close to them,” said his 28-year-old wife, sitting on cushions on the floor. “After we were told that our son Harez was blind I cried all the time. I was watching him hoping that he would get better. “My friends came to me and said ‘it is not only your problem, it is everybody’s problem.’”

“Afghan culture is like this. The daughter should not go away,” said her mother Rahila as she cuddles little Zaki. Masooda Jalal has a more searching explanation. “Why they are happy to do that? Because of the security and safety of the girl. There is so much harshness (against women) that every parent has that fear.” Poverty is another factor, with families marrying amongst themselves to avoid paying a large dowry, both Jalal and Azimi maintain. “I hope that the Ministry of Women can design a programme so that the next generation of Afghans is stronger,” Jalal said.

Zada, meanwhile, has decided to marry a second wife in the hope of having children who are not handicapped. “So that they can take care of us when we are old,” he said. “In Afghanistan you need to have children to help you when you get old”. afp

Why is this good news? Well, because, typically, people don't much notice the genetic problems caused by first cousin marriages while wars and plagues are going on. It's only when the death rate comes down a little that disabilities caused by inbreeding become readily noticeable. So, this could be a sign of progress in Afghanistan.

A reader points out:

Also, remember in these tribal/clan cultures that *many generations* of intermarriage within the clan is shooting up the inbreeding coefficient as "cousins" share an incredibly high number of recent coancestors.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

I review Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

January 7, 2005

Sentinel Islanders' Shoot Arrows at Relief Helicoper

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#sentinel.islanders

Sentinel Islanders Shoot Arrows at Relief Helicopter: A reader comments, "God! Don't you just love those little buggers! They've got pretty big brass ones to attack a helicopter!" Imagine what a helicopter looks and sounds like to a stone age tribe...

Tribe shoots arrows at aid flight
By Jonathan Charles BBC News, Andaman Islands

An Indian helicopter dropping food and water over the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been attacked by tribesmen using bows and arrows. There were fears that the endangered tribal groups had been wiped out when massive waves struck their islands.

But the authorities say the attack is a sign that they have survived.

More than 6,000 people there are confirmed as either dead or missing, but thousands of others are still unaccounted for.

The Indian coastguard helicopter was flying low over Sentinel Island to drop aid when it came under attack.

A senior police officer said the crew were not hurt and the authorities are taking it as a sign that the tribes have not been wiped out by the earthquake and sea surges as many had feared.

The Andaman and Nicobar archipelago is home to several tribes, some extremely isolated.


Officials believe they survived the devastation by using age-old early warning systems.
They might have run to high ground for safety after noticing changes in the behaviour of birds and marine wildlife. Scientists are examining the possibility to see whether it can be used to predict earth tremors in future.

Mr Andaman, George Weber, is updating a page of breaking Andaman and Nicobar news.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

January 6, 2005

Years Married among blacks

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#years.married.blacks

I invented the statistic "Average Years Married between 18 and 44" to give an easy-to-grasp understanding of marriage proclivities by state. It looks at the expected numbers of years a woman will be married in the 27 years from 18 and 44. For white women, it correlates at 0.91 with Bush's share of the vote in 2004.

Here's Years Married for black and white women (non-Hispanics):

State Blacks Whites Diff
District of Columbia 3.9 7.4 3.6
Pennsylvania 5.4 13.9 8.5
Wisconsin 5.4 14.6 9.2
West Virginia 5.8 15.3 9.4
New York 5.8 12.7 6.9
Illinois 5.9 14.2 8.3
Michigan 6.0 14.5 8.5
Ohio 6.2 14.5 8.4
Missouri 6.2 15.0 8.8
Connecticut 6.5 13.4 7.0
New Jersey 6.7 13.5 6.8
California 6.7 12.5 5.8
Iowa 6.8 15.1 8.4
Indiana 6.8 15.1 8.3
Massachusetts 6.8 12.2 5.4
Delaware 6.9 13.9 7.0
Kentucky 6.9 15.7 8.7
Nebraska 6.9 15.3 8.3
Minnesota 7.0 14.4 7.5
Tennessee 7.2 15.7 8.5
Rhode Island 7.2 12.6 5.4
Maine 7.4 13.8 6.4
Maryland 7.4 14.0 6.6
Louisiana 7.4 15.4 8.0
Oklahoma 7.6 15.8 8.2
Mississippi 7.6 16.5 8.9
Nevada 7.7 13.4 5.8
South Carolina 7.7 15.4 7.7
Oregon 7.7 13.9 6.1
Florida 7.8 13.6 5.8
Alabama 7.9 16.6 8.7
Arizona 7.9 13.7 5.8
Kansas 8.0 15.7 7.8
Georgia 8.0 15.6 7.6
Arkansas 8.0 16.5 8.5
North Carolina 8.2 15.5 7.4
Virginia 8.2 14.7 6.4
Texas 8.2 15.2 6.9
Washington 8.3 13.9 5.6
Wyoming 8.5 15.5 7.0
Vermont 8.5 13.4 4.9
Utah 9.0 17.0 8.0
Colorado 9.2 14.1 4.9
New Mexico 9.4 14.1 4.7
New Hampshire 9.7 14.0 4.2
South Dakota 11.2 15.7 4.5
Alaska 12.4 15.3 2.9
Montana 13.8 15.0 1.2
Idaho 14.0 16.3 2.3
North Dakota 15.8 15.5 (0.4)
Hawaii 16.0 14.1 (1.9)

It looks like there's a negative correlation between the size of the black urban ghetto in a state and the years married for black women.

The states with very high average years married tend to have very small numbers of blacks and high interracial marriage rates for blacks. Also, a lot of the blacks in states like Hawaii, North Dakota, and Alaska got there with the U.S. military, and black enlistees in the military tend to come from more middle class backgrounds than blacks in general.

There's a moderate correlation between blacks being married and the state as a whole voting more conservatively in 2004: r = 0.40.

The correlation between years married for blacks and whites in a state is only r = 0.34. This high degree of random variation suggests that blacks are not closely tied into the culture of the whites in the state.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

January 5, 2005

USC -- would have been greatest team ever

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#usc.1

USC beats OU 55-19 to win national championship -- Think how good the Trojans would have been if they hadn't lost their great receiver Mike Williams in a legal fiasco. (When a court ruled that Maurice Clarett could go to the NFL after one year instead of the usual three years, Williams hired an agent and stopped going to classes. Then, the ruling was overturned and Williams, as a self-declared pro, had to sit out the season.) They would have had three of the top five in the Heisman voting: winner QB Matt Leinart, RB Reggie Bush, and WR Williams.

Many years ago, I shared an office with a former All-American DB from UCLA. We got around once to the sensitive topic of why USC beat his UCLA teams like a drum. He said, "Because it is made very clear to the USC players that if they beat UCLA, they ... will ... be ... rewarded." Ah, the the amateur spirit!


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

January 4, 2005

Another kind of Darwinian selection?

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#parental.selection

From the NYT:

Judith Rich Harris
Writer and developmental psychologist; author, "The Nurture Assumption"


I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three - not two - selection processes were involved in human evolution.

The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.

The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty - not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

January 3, 2005

Jared Diamond didn't used to be so boring

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#jared.diamond.collapse

Jared Diamond has a new book out called Collapse about societies that have collapsed due to environmental disasters such as deforestation. It's a useful topic, but in the large scheme of things, a minor one, which is why Diamond spends so much time on famously trivial edge-of-the-world cultures like the Vikings in Greenland and the Polynesians on Easter Island. But Diamond is so good at getting publicity that the fact that ecology has little to do with the reason most societies collapse will likely be overlooked. The main reason you don't see many Carthaginians or Aztecs or members of other collapsed civilizations around these days is they got beat in war, as Edmund Creasy's famous 1851 book "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World" makes clear.

Diamond wasn't always so pompously dull. Over a decade ago, Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book called The Third Chimpanzee that collected his Discover columns and other articles. It didn't make too much of a splash, perhaps because it was politically incorrect in a lot of places, so then he wrote a much duller book entitled Guns, Germs, and Steel, which purported to once and for all Disprove Racism, and he has been a fixture as a speaker at the higher priced sort of conferences ever since.

Although, as far as I can tell, he only lectures, never debates. I've never heard of him ever allowing himself to be dragged into a debate. I met him after he gave a speech at Mike Milken's big annual confab. We were chatting nicely until I asked him a tough question about what he didn't mention in his Guns, Germs, and Steel -- Wouldn't different agricultural environments select for different hereditary traits in locals? -- I went on to mention how James Q. Wilson's The Marriage Problem has a couple of chapters on how tropical agriculture in West Africa affects family structures. And, thus, wouldn't the kind of man that would have the most surviving children be different in an agricultural environment where he doesn't need to work too much to support them than in an agricultural environment where he does?

Now, Diamond has spent a lot of time birdwatching in New Guinea, so he knows all about what tropical agriculture selects for. And he has no intention of touching that tar-baby with a ten-foot pole. So, he grabbed his stuff and literally dog-trotted at about 5 mph out of the auditorium!

Jared Diamond wasn't always such a tedious phony. GC over at GNXP.com has uncovered an early Jared Diamond article in prestigious Nature about a hilariously politically incorrect topic. Personally, I don't have any first-hand experience with the topic, so I couldn't give you my opinion on the validity of Diamond's findings on racial differences in testicle sizes, but Diamond seems pretty fascinated by the question.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has more on Collapse.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

January 2, 2005

How Bush's Social Security Plan could work

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#social.security.1

Bush's Social Security Plan: A reader writes:

  • If economic growth slows by half (in the midst of a global tech boom fuelled by Asian nerds unleashed from socialism)

  • If the stock market continues to grow faster than earnings

  • If the Bush upper income tax cuts are made permanent

  • If means test benefits cannot be introduced

  • If FICA taxes cannot be raised

  • If the the pension eligibility age is not moved out to take into account extended longevity (as life expectancy edges towards 80+)

  • If congress can be constrained from introducing loopholes for lobbyists and liquidators

  • And if Wall Street can be prevented from looting the greater fools overcharging fees or churning accounts

Then maybe, privatization of social security would look like a reasonable idea.

But why would one bet on so many ifs?

Considering what a superb job Bush did of thinking through every possible eventuality of the Iraq Attaq, he's obviously the man to upend Social Security. I know a lot of "conservative" pundits like Michael Barone are exulting that "conservatism" now means blindly backing radical gambles based on on one indifferently-informed man's hunches, but why is that conservative?


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com