March 23, 2005

Spanish Baby Names

Something that jumps out of Baby Name Wizard is how popular Spanish names were in the first half of the 20th Century. For example, Juan is, not surprisingly, growing in popularity, but the interesting thing is how popular it was before there were many Hispanics in America. Today, about 0.5% of all boys are named Juan, but during the first half of the 20th Century, the number of Juans ran consistently at about 1/3 the current rate.

For example, in "The Aviator," Alec Baldwin plays Howard Hughes' archrival Juan Terry Trippe, founder of Pan Am, Yale grad and son of a Wall Street tycoon.

Similarly, Juanita and Juana were fairly popular girls names in the 1920s, but they have since dropped out of the top 1000. Similarly, the upscale girls name Consuelo has disappeared.

Apparently, Spanish first names used to be considered aristocratic and romantic, but now they are considered plebian and depressing.

A reader writes:


In the early 20th Century, there was indeed some Hispanophilia reflected in pop culture. See, for example:, Zorro (created in 1919 by an Anglo pulp writer).


In California, there was a huge Spanish Mission fad in the 1920s, which was responsible for the gorgeous rebuilding of Santa Barbara after the 1923 earthquake. To this day, the Spanish Mission style remains the best architectural style for Southern California landscapes.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

George F. Kennan, Realist

Kennan was a bit of a Gloomy Gus, but he was a true conservative. Here's from David Engerman's article "George Kennan, a conservative's conservative" in the Chicago Tribune:

My one conversation with Kennan, who once was ambassador to Moscow, began with Russia and quickly turned to the depth of his conservatism. Asked what shaped his ideas about Russia, he recalled his professors at the University of Berlin in 1927. They had taught him about Realien, the givens of geography, climate and race that shaped nations and international relations. (The English "realities" doesn't suggest the word's resonance in 18th Century German philosophy.) Realien outlasted ephemera like ideology and even political systems--and should, he believed, be the basis of any foreign policy.


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Baby Names from A to Z

More from BabyNameWizard.com.

Aaliyah -- This fashionable name must appeal to people who want their daughter to be first in alphabetical order (assuming they are alphabetized by first names, which they seldom are). It beats out Aaron, the old champ.

Currently, the last name in the top 1,000 is the unimpressive Zoie. In the early 20th Century, there were more formidable contenders such as Zola, Zona, Zora, Zula, and, the Grand Champion of the 20th Century, Zulma, all girl names.

You do have to wonder about a new entry to the top 1000 of boys names: Zaire. I guess since the country of Zaire doesn't exist anymore, the name has a better vibe.

When I lived in Houston in the 1970s, one of the highlights of the year was the arrival of the new white pages phonebook. We'd breathlessly flip to the back to see who was last this year. In 1976, Zukie Zzulch brought up the rear. But the next year, Zukie was bumped to second place by Choco Zzzych. Late one night, we tried to call Choco from the Rice U. pub to announce:

"This is Zyrcon Zzzzygurat. I just moved to town and your days are numbered!"

But we couldn't seem to operate the phone correctly, so I'm not sure our message ever got through.

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A suggestion for a girl's name. Personally, I would name a daughter something designed to scare boys away, like Abigail, but a lot of people, presumably mothers, seem to want to give their daughters names that make them sound alluring. They also like unusual names for girls.

So, how about one of the sexiest characters in the history of movies: Joan Greenwood'sSibella. It's an old aristocratic name, sported by one of Helena Bonham Carter's titled ancestors, but it's not in the top 1000 in any decade in the 20th Century. It's unusual, but it's easy to spell. It's probably not a good choice if you have a WASP last name, since people might guess your daughter is black. temptress in the classic 1949 black comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets,"

UPDATE: My wife says Sibella sounds like a cross between syphilis and rubella.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 22, 2005

No Schiavo, None of the Time

I appear to be the only blogger not weighing in on the Terri Schiavo controversy, and it seems to be driving down my hit count. The Derb wrote this morning, asking me to post something penetrating and unique.

So, here goes, ... uh ... Look, here's Noah Millman's take on the subject, which is a lot more profound than you'd get from me. I'm better at seeing the in-front-of-one's-nose stuff.

I'm reminded of when I was having dinner with General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Administration, after he'd given a speech on America's Grand Strategy in the coming century. Somebody asked him his opinion of the Elian Affair, which was just beginning. (Remember Elian, the Cuban boy whose mother died coming ashore in Florida and his father wanted to take him back to Cuba?) "It's a triviaaaaaal matter," he harrumphed.

Not exactly ... Still, a lot of these human interest stories like Elian and Terri Schiavo that capture the national attention do so precisely because they are unique man-bites-dogs stories, and thus not all that instructive about broader issues.

One widespread subject, however, that modern Americans dislike talking about in public but is a very big deal and one of increasing importance is inheritance. It's hard to get any hard data on how much money Mr. Schiavo would stand to collect from his unfortunate wife's life insurance or medical trust fund if she were to die, but that may be an issue here.

In my life, I've seen normal people driven to certifiably insane behavior due to strong emotions tied to inheritance questions. The amount of wealth that is available to survivors is going up with each decade, but so are the odds that it will all be dissipated in terminal medical care. But there is almost no public discussion of inheritance these days.

By the way, I notice that there's not that much support in the polls for keeping her alive. Generally speaking, people find the the deeply ill to be depressing and wish they would go away (which is the unspoken aspect of much commentary about the Pope these days). When I had lymphatic cancer when I was 38, I was treated well by my friends, but I've seen people who were much more popular than me die slowly with practically nobody coming to visit.

My wife said that when she told people that I had cancer, lots of nonsmokers asked if I was a smoker. They were depressed to hear I wasn't, since they couldn't cheer themselves up by saying to themselves that it would never happen to them, only to bad people who smoked. (Smokers, in contrast, were distinctly bucked up by the news that I had foregone the pleasures of tobacco and was on death's doorstep anyway.)

So, back to the really important matters: BabyNameBlogging!


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Everything you know is wrong

"Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene" writes Nicholas Wade in the NYT. Greg Cochran says that if true, only the Flores Hobbits compares to this for weird discoveries in recent years.

In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.

The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.

The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system...

The result, reported online yesterday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Weigel describes the Purdue work as "a spectacular discovery."

Which reminds me ... it's time to back up my hard disk.


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Baby Names Mania

More on Baby Names: After looking at BabyNameWizard.com, readers wrote:

Odd to note that names beginning with a vowel—A, E, I, O, U—all show a very similar “U” shaped pattern over time in the graph, with much higher percentages in the early part of the century, much lower by mid-century, much higher again today. The reverse is not as clear, though it does seems the case that names beginning with sharper stop consonants have an edge in mid-century.

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It's also interesting to chart the rise and fall of first letters. For example, A, K and N have been rising steadily while F, H, P and W have been declining; E, G, I and O are reviving from a mid-century trough while D, P and R are declining from a mid-century peak. It's not just one name in any of these cases; though sometimes there's an 800-pound gorilla (like "William") the trend appears to cross many names with the same initial letter. I know that Ashkenazi Jews tend to name kids after departed parents, and if the name in question isn't appealing they typically compromise by using the same initial letter. I wonder whether there's any similar pattern in gentile naming?

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You didn't mention one of the most dramatic pop-culture-driven name events of the last few decades: the Jennifer explosion of the 1970s, propelled entirely by the hit movie, Love Story. Jennifer vaulted from #19 to #1 among girls' names from the 1960s to the 1970s. I must have had 3 or 4 Jennifers in every class when I was in school - they were everywhere.

I wonder how often the process works somewhat in reverse. Do novelists and screenwriters look around for (or just absorb through osmosis) names that fashionable young parents are giving their daughters and then apply them to romantic heroines? For example, Jennifer was starting to take off before the 1970s, so perhaps writer Erich Segal gave a shove to a trend that was already in motion.

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Another observation is that parents seem to be less concerned about honoring their older relatives by naming their children after them. It's my perception that parents nowadays are more likely than in the past to name their kids something because they simply like the sound of the name or because a cerelebrity has it and therefore they associate good things when they hear it. I don't know why this is. Maybe people don't revere their parents are much anymore? I dunno. It seems the upper classes are more concerned about honoring their ancestors as we see George Herbert Walker Bush, named to honor several different ancestors. Names like Jr, III, IV, more common among upper classes to honor that one ancestor everyone's proud to have on the family tree.

True, although Juniors are also common in the ghetto among the sons of young men who didn't expect to live terribly long and want their names not to be forgotten.

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This reminds me of something I meant to write about Julia Roberts' unfortunately named progeny.... her daughter is named Hazel, as you know. Hazel Moder. Which sounds an awful lot like the hillbilly psycho protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's famous novel Wise Blood: Hazel Motes. This rang a bell and I checked: Julia Roberts' stepfather IS surnamed 'Motes.' Her mother is now Betty Motes. so her daughter is named Hazel Moder, whose stepgrandfather is named Motes...I hope little Ms. Moder never goes postal.

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One oddity is that perhaps the hippiest of all the 60s names, Donovan (the singer of "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow" didn't actually became popular until the 1990s, and is now booming. The best known Donovan today is quarterback Donovan McNabb, who is probably not a hippie..

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What Were The Parents Thinking Dept.? One of the top 1000 boys' names during the 40s, 50s, and 60s was Linda. That makes Sue sound like Rod.


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Hypomania Mania!

This psychiatric syndrome is hot, hot, hot according to the New York Times, with books like Exuberance and The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America by John D. Gartner. I've read the latter and it does the best job I've seen yet of explaining the bizarre ups and downs of David O. Selznick, producer of "Gone With the Wind" (and subject of the new comedy play "Moonlight and Magnolias").

In Jay McInerney's fine novel about the leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s, Brightness Falls, one of the characters is a billionaire investor who is considered a genius at timing the market, but in truth his manic phases have simply happened to coincide with the early months of bull markets and his depressive phases with the beginnings of bear markets. A lot of success in business is based on that kind of luck.

Gartner doesn't talk about him, but billionaire H. Ross Perot was obviously cycling through manic-depressive cycles during his extraordinary run for President in 1992. Early in the year he suddenly announced he intended to be elected President as an independent, and by the spring he was actually leading Bush and Clinton in the polls. Then, his mood collapsed and he went into seclusion for the entire summer, muttering paranoid nonsense about government operatives disrupting his daughter's wedding. In the fall, he re-emerged as energetic as before and won an impressive 19% of the vote, the most for a 3rd party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.

But what about hypomania, or being fired up but not to the point of self-destructive mania? The problem I have with this is that it's not so obvious that medical terminology is helpful in explaining every energetic, charismatic individual.

While Selznick was clearly a manic-depressive with major problems, other examples of Gartner's like Alexander Hamilton seem more like an energetic, charismatic individuals. Gartner only gives Teddy Roosevelt a long footnote, but TR is probably the most famous hypomanic, and he was never depressed until his son died in WWI when TR was 58. So, is hypomania, which began as a version of manic depression, a suitable description?

Or consider Bob Hope. He largely invented stand-up comedy (like his friend Bing Crosby in singing, Hope was the first to understand the potential of the microphone for comics). Unlike the many comics who are depressives, Hope was up all the time. It was said of him that when he was walking to the men's room, he was gleefully looking forward to cracking up the attendant. He was enormously successful in comedy, movies, real estate, and charity. He toured until he was 90 and lived to 100.

So, how do you draw the line between a medical syndrome and overwhelming health?


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Name Fads

BabyNameWizard: A reader writes about the website that visually displays the popularity of the top 1000 boy and girl baby names for the last 11 decades:

IMHO, this an excellent use of Java-driven graphics to convey information. You may find it fascinating, as I did. I have always observed how faddish the general run of names is, but this interesting, interactive graph lets you see a name's popularity over time.

For instance, check out Adolf. Around the turn of the last century it was a fairly popular name -- German immigrants, one reckons. However, it drops off the list for reasons that need no discussion.

For a less politically loaded German name, pick Wilhelm or Hermann. See how it dies out with German immigration to the USA. Or Urban or Ole (immigrant names). On the distaff side, Sabina -- a German name -- dies out by the 1930s. And Sabrina first appears after the war. What this means? Beats me with a stick. But it's interesting, even if it is a bit of a tale told by an idiot, etc.

Then check out Adolfo -- it looks almost like bimodal over time, as the Italian Adolfos die out and are replaced after long years with Hispanic Adolfos -- I guess that uniforms and moustaches still have their appeal in the Latin world.

[On the other hand, while Benito did well in the 1920s and 1930s, it never fell too far and even made a sizable comeback in the 1970s.]

Another quirk is people with opposite-gender names. There are apparently some poor women out there named Kevin and William; but I can find no trace of a boy named Sue, which will surely distress Johnny Cash fans.

Actually there are many insights in "Su" territory. At first I thought the name "Summer" had undergone a sex change over the 20th Century, but no, that was an artefact of my aging eyes; the male name Sumner disappeared and the female name Summer showed up.

And there are hippy names -- "Sunny" for one -- that burst into prominence in the sixties and die out steadily.

It would be interesting to graph names against popular songs and entertainments, to see what effect if any they have, but I am too ill-versed in pop culture to pull this off. A few preliminary whacks at it suggest that names namechecked in popular songs and names of popular entertainers are influential. Orville and WIlbur peaked in the teens, Aaliyah (to pick someone whose fortune with flying machines did not do as well as the Ohio brethren) was unheard of before the 1980s and has since exploded into popularity.

I'd add:


- Black girl names beginning with "La-", like Latoya, Latonya, Latonia, Latisha, and Latrice (but no mention of Latrine, which obstetricians claim they have to talk vocabulary-challenged mothers out of periodically), after peaking in the 1980s have practically died out in this decade.


I wonder what has replaced them? Perhaps Mal- names like Malik and Maliyah. These may be variations on Malcolm, which perhaps was popularized in the 1990s by by Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X.


Some famous people bring about a surge in the popularity of a name, such as Dwight in the 1940s through 1960s, while Franklin had a brief spell in the 1930s. Woodrow spiked in the teens, but then fell out of favor. Warren, Calvin, and Lyndon also surged when their namesakes were in office, but John, Richard, Gerald, Jimmy, George, and William/Bill did not.

Clint jumped up in popularity when Clint Eastwood was a big star in the 1970s and 1980s, but Clinton fell in popularity in the 1990s.


Generally speaking, stars don't make common names more popular. Frank fell steadily throughout Frank Sinatra's titanic career. Some very rare names are too associated with a star to get a boost, such as Bing, which never cracked the top 1000 in any decade.


Dylan, however, has moved up to #19 on the boys names list. Does anybody who is having kids these days even remember Bob Dylan? Watch out, parents, because Dylan is catching on as a girl's name.

Audrey fell during Audrey Hepburn's career, but now that she's dead, is in ascent. I suspect that some parents, wisely, like to wait until some time has passed after a star's peak. Dylan and Audrey are now in the permanent firmament, so the names don't sound faddish.


On the other hand, just in the last couple of years has Reese taken off as a girl's name, no doubt due to Ms. Witherspoon. In 2003, there were suddenly about as many girl Reeses as boy Reeses, so the name is probably doomed for boys.


The big worry is that your sons' names will get imperialized by girls, with traumatic consequences as famously described by Johnny Cash. So, I named my sons after Biblical figures. The girls haven't taken over their names in 2000 years so they probably won't anytime soon.


Old Testament names like Jacob, now the number one boy's name, seem to be popular these days. More likely due to fundamentalist Christians than to Jews, who aren't having too many kids.


Why are mountaineers' last names like Hillary and Mallory always given to girls?


The upcoming book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner has an interesting chapter on names, with some demographic data. By the way, in case you were wondering why guys named Steve get written about a lot on iSteve.com (Pinker, Gould, Rose, Jones, Johnson, Olson, just to name ones who write about evolution), Steven / Steve / Stephen peaked in popularity during the 1950s, and has been in steady decline ever since, presumably because as the world has come to realize what an unappealing set of brainiac know-it-alls we Steves seem to be. Here's a cartoon about the swarm of intellectual Steves sent to me by Steve Pinker.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 21, 2005

Four more old articles

More of My 2003 Articles never before on iSteve.com:

The Declining Diversity of Immigrants

Judge Posner on Hispanic "Rotten Boroughs"

Q&A with "Out-of-State Agitator" Ward Connerly

Spanish Retards Latino Pop Culture Influence


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

New VDARE column: Race Does Exist, says NYT

"Race Does Exist - New York Times" - My new VDARE column is up. An excerpt:

A common argument of the Race Does Not Exist crowd that Leroi didn't deal with is that, yeah, sure, people differ, but the variations change evenly across the face of the earth, so you can never define the boundaries of separate racial groups.

For example, Science Daily reports on a new population genetics study that says:

"… geographic distance from East Africa along ancient colonization routes is an excellent predictor for the genetic diversity of present human populations, with those farther from Ethiopia being characterized by lower genetic variability."

The Science Daily article ends with the Race-Does-Not-Exist-Pledge that is seemingly obligatory for geneticists who study race (and who don't want their funding cut off by the enforcers of political correctness):

"The loss of genetic diversity along colonization routes is smooth, with no obvious genetic discontinuity, thus suggesting that humans cannot be accurately classified in discrete ethnic groups or races on a genetic basis."

Two fallacies are readily apparent in this statement. First, the whole argument is a little silly. You could walk from, say, Calais on the English Channel to Pusan in South Korea without dying of thirst. At either end of your vast journey, however, the people look quite different. In between you might run into, say, Boris Yeltsin, a blond man with features slightly reminiscent of East Asia, and other people of varying degrees of European and East Asian admixture. But, in the big picture, so what? Frenchmen and Koreans are still different and nobody would mistake one for the other.

Second, the geneticists' statement applies only "along colonization routes," and most possible directions were not major colonization routes. If you walk in the majority of directions, you will eventually fall into the ocean and drown. This reinforces the "obvious genetic discontinuity" that we see with our lying eyes.

For example, one ancient path out of Africa probably crossed the narrow mouth of the Red Sea from Northeastern Africa to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and people have been going back and forth between those edges of Africa and Asia ever since. That's why some Ethiopians, such as the late emperor Haile Selassie, look quite Arabic, and some Arabs, such as the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, look quite African.

In contrast, up through 1492, there was a relatively massive genetic discontinuity between West Africa and South America, which are only 1,600 miles apart at their closest points. Why? Because the out-of-Africa colonization routes went the other way around the world. The Atlantic Ocean got in the way of walking directly from Africa to South America.

With water covering 7/10ths of the earth's surface, the out-of-Africa dispersal pathways were, in reality, few and far between.

Even on dry land, there are vast regions where paths were few and arduous. For instance, between the peoples of West Africa and of the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) there was only a small amount of mating until historic times, because the Sahara got in the way. If you tried to walk from Senegal to the Pillars of Hercules, you would likely die of thirst. The eastern end of the Sahara, though, is more porous because of the Nile and some wetter highlands.

Likewise, the Himalayas form a sharp border even today between Caucasians and East Asians...

I'll try to be methodical about this question of topographical barriers. Let's split the world up into seven effective continents: Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia, Europe, East Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. (Other breakdowns are possible; but the results will all be about the same).

Here is a table showing seven major continents and my guess as to how easy the potential direct colonization routes between each of them were during early human prehistory: A "2" means easy, "1" means difficult but used, and 0 means there was virtually no direct contact between the two continents before historic times. As you can see, it's a sparse matrix:


W Asia

Europe

E Asia

Australia

N Am

S Am

Sub-Saharan Africa

1

0

0

0

0

0

West Asia


2

1

0

0

0

Europe



1

0

0

0

East Asia




1

1

0

Australia





0

0

North America






2


Of the 21 possible connections between continents, there were 14 where there was virtually no contact until the last millennium. Here is an image you've never seen before: a map of the many intercontinental roads not taken by prehistoric man:


Consequently there are relatively big genetic distances between Australians and Sub-Saharan Africans because the Indian Ocean was in the way. Similarly, Australians aren't closely related to Europeans because Asia, coming between them, was full of tribes that objected to outsiders marching through their lands. [More...]


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Gentlemen, Your Kids Aren't Really the Postman's

For a decade or two, it's been one of the clichés of the human sciences that 10% of all children are cuckoos eggs, fathered by somebody other than the poor work-a-daddy sap who naively thinks they are his. Evidence for this popular assertion, however, was lacking. Now, a new metastudy by Kermyt G. Anderson suggests that the cuckoo's egg rate is more like only 1.9%, at least among men who are confident enough of their rightful paternity to volunteer for a genetics test along with their child as part of some other kind of study. Among men who demand a paternity test, however, the rate is around 30%, but, obviously, those are different kinds of cases. (Via The Julian Calendar).


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Roland G. Fryer Jr., Slave Ships and Salt

"Toward a Unified Theory of Black America" is an interesting NY Times Magazine article by Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics, about one of Levitt's research partners, an ambitious 27-year-old Harvard economist named Roland G. Fryer Jr.

When he presents a paper, Fryer is earnest and genial and excitable, sometimes carrying on like a Southern preacher. While he denies that his work is united by a grand thesis -- he is a scientist, he explains, devoted to squeezing truths from the data, wherever that may lead -- he does admit to having a mission: ''I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong. One could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well. You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst-performing ethnic group on SAT's. Blacks earn less than whites. They are still just not doing well, period.''

To Fryer, the language of economics, a field proud of its coldblooded rationalism, is ideally suited for otherwise volatile conversations. ''I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don't think we can,'' he says. ''Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say something like, 'Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?' everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn't that be on the table?''

Fryer said this several months ago, which was well before Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, wondered aloud if genetics might help explain why women are so underrepresented in the sciences. Summers -- who is also an economist and a fan of Fryer's work -- is still being punished for his musings. There is a key difference, of course: Summers is not a woman; Fryer is black.

Fryer grew up in a bad environment:

How many of his close family members, I asked him, had either died young or spent time in prison? He did a quick count: 8 of 10. ''Suppose you can separate people into two camps: geneticists and environmentalists,'' he said. ''Coming up where I came up, it's hard not to be an environmentalist.''

But then Dubner takes the young professor to reunite with his estranged father (a Xerox salesman who went to prison for rape) and estranged mother (a singer).

Fryer finds out that his father had been a high school math teacher, and that his mother's family had been big wheels in Tulsa's famously prosperous black community. His maternal grandmother had studied classical music at the Julliard Academy.

Later that night, over Scotch and soda at an airport hotel in Tulsa, Fryer sifted through the discoveries of his trip. He hadn't known that his father was a math teacher. He hadn't known that so much accomplishment ran in his mother's family. ''I used to consider myself a genetic aberration or maybe an impostor,'' he said. ''But I actually have some pretty good genes.''

Unfortunately, what passes for fresh new ideas in economics these days are rather stale. For example, Fryer is trying to revive Clarence E. Grim's 1987 salt sensitivity-slave ship theory:

Fryer well appreciates that he can raise questions that most white scholars wouldn't dare. His collaborators, most of whom are white, appreciate this, too. ''Absolutely, there's an insulation effect,'' says the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser. ''There's no question that working with Roland is somewhat liberating.''

Glaeser and Fryer, along with David M. Cutler, another Harvard economist, are the authors of a paper that traffics in one form of genetic theorizing. It addresses the six-year disparity in life expectancy for blacks versus whites, arguing that much of the gap is due to a single factor: a higher rate of salt sensitivity among African-Americans, which leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease.

Fryer's notion that there might be a genetic predisposition at work was heightened when he came across a period illustration that seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave. The ocean voyage from Africa to America was so gruesome that as many as 15 percent of the Africans died en route, mainly from illnesses that led to dehydration. A person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving. So it may have been that a slave trader would try to select, with a lick to the cheek, the ''saltier'' Africans. Whether selected by the slavers or by nature, the Africans who did manage to survive the voyage -- and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans -- may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension. Cutler, a pre-eminent health economist, admits that he thought Fryer's idea was ''absolutely crazy'' at first. (Although the link between the slave trade and hypertension had been raised in medical literature, even Cutler wasn't aware of it.) But once they started looking at the data, the theory began to seem plausible.

Economists know almost nothing about evolutionary genetics (Paul Krugman is an honorable exception), so it's not surprising that they'd trip over this molehill and ignore the mountain. It's not implausible that there would be a Darwinian effect in the theorized direction, but it seems unpromising to focus on a unique selection pressure experienced for just one generation and ignore the relentless selection pressure on the countless generations of Africans in Africa. Peoples who have been evolving for hundreds of generations in sweaty tropical climates handle salt differently than peoples who have been evolving in cool climates.

Greg Cochran told me:

The reason it wouldn't have an important effect is that you don't get a lot of genetic change in one generation unless you try _really_ hard. If they lost the bottom 15% of the people (in terms of salt retention) during the Middle Passage, a cutoff of about one std below average, the increase in salt retention would be about a tenth or so of a standard deviation, assuming a narrow-sense heritability of 50%. You'd never notice the difference. [And, of course, genetic differences in salt retention didn't cause all the deaths in the Middle Passage, so this estimate is optimistic.]

But there is a real difference in salt retention between Africans and non-Africans, and it may well have something to do with cardiovascular problems (although other differences like an increased tendency to inflammation may be as important). It's been around for a long, long time. See the following account, based on a recent article in The American Journal of Human Genetics:

Here's the press release rom the U. of Chicago about the article about Africans' tendency to retain salt:

Researchers at the University have found genetic evidence to support the sodium-retention hypothesis, a controversial 30-year-old theory that the high rate of hypertension in certain ethnic groups is caused, in part, by an inherited tendency to retain salt.

In the online edition of the December [2004] issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers show that the frequency of one version of a gene that is crucial to salt retention correlates with distance from the equator.

Populations that live in hot, humid climates near the equator tend to have the normal version of that gene, which produces a very effective protein. Populations that adapted to cooler climates tend to have a mutant gene that codes for a totally dysfunctional protein.

“The surprise,” said study author Anna Di Rienzo, Associate Professor in Human Genetics, “was finding that as populations moved away from the tropics, the original or normal version of the gene became less and less common and the ‘broken’ version more frequent, which suggests it is protective. There seems to be a strong selective advantage conferred by the non-functioning protein, and that advantage increases with latitude.

“This could change the way we look for disease genes,” she added. “Historically, we have searched for mutations, altered or damaged versions of genes that cause rare disorders, like cystic fibrosis or phenylketonuria. Now, we are starting to look for common genes that may have been beneficial in an environment of scarcity, but have become harmful in a world of plenty. In the modern setting, it may often be the genes that aren’t damaged that predispose to disease, such as the ‘thrifty genes’ associated with type 2 diabetes.”

Humans need salt, sodium chloride, to transport nutrients, transmit nerve impulses or contract muscles, such as the beating heart. The average adult contains about 250 grams of salt, enough to fill three small salt shakers. This salt is constantly lost through sweat and urine and replaced through the diet.

Salt is now “so common, so easy to obtain and so inexpensive,” according to Mark Kurlansky, author of a recent history of salt, “that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”

In the sub-Saharan African regions where humans first appeared, available salt must have been limited and quickly lost through sweat. People who were better at retaining salt may have had a significant survival advantage.

This advantage decreased as humans spread to cooler climates...

Too much salt has become the norm. Despite a recommended daily allowance of less than six grams of salt, the average American consumes about 10 grams daily.

Since 1972, a series of studies has attempted to connect excess salt intake to high blood pressure, but that connection remains uncertain. But Di Rienzo’s team of evolutionary biologists took a different approach, looking at the genetics of salt processing. They focused on a gene called CYP3A5, part of a family known as cytochrome P450 genes, which help the body break down and eliminate a wide range of compounds, including many drugs and salt.

In the kidney, CYP3A5 acts to retain salt. One version of this gene, however, a mutation known as CYP3A5 *3, produces a truncated, non-functional protein.

The researchers looked at variations of this gene in 1,064 individuals drawn from 52 populations scattered around the world. The mutation was least common in some natives of sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from a low of only 6 percent of Yorubans in Nigeria (Latitude 8ºN) to 31 percent among the Mandenka of Senegal (12ºN). Rates were higher among populations in East Asia, ranging from 55 percent among the Dai of China (21ºN) to 75 percent among Han Chinese (32ºN) to 77 percent among Japanese (38ºN) and 95 percent among the Uygur of China (44ºN).

Rates in Europe were uniformly high, ranging from 80 to 95 percent in Italy, France and Russia. The highest rate, 96 percent, was found among the Basque, an isolated ethnic group of uncertain origins now concentrated in the Pyrenees Mountains (43ºN)...

The researchers found one other gene, for a hormone called AGT (angiotensin) that followed a similar distribution pattern, with different versions that correlated with distance from the equator. AGT also is involved in salt retention and has been associated with hypertension and pre-eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy. One variation of this gene, known as AGT M235, was closely correlated with CYP3A5 *3.

This correlation of two unlinked gene variants with similar effects “is remarkable,” the authors note, “and suggests a shared selective pressure.”

More generally, if Dr. Fryer truly wants to "figure out where blacks went wrong," if he wants to develop new insights into African-Americans, he should look at Africans. People who study African-Americans almost always adopt a condescending "blank slate" assumption that says that Africans didn't bring anything with them from Africa. American intellectuals' disdain for learning anything at all about Africa could be called the Black Slate theory.

In particular, I would suggest Fryer look into the continuity between family structures in Africa and in African-American communities. This has largely disappeared from American consciousness, but James Q. Wilson's recent book "The Marriage Problem" has a couple of chapters on the vast literature about African family structures and their similarities to African-American ways of life that could introduce him to some of the facts and sources.

Of course, I'm the last person to listen to for career advice!


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Steven D. Levitt's Abortion Cuts Crime Theory Is Back

Freakonomics: You may recall Steven D. Levitt as the celebrated U. of Chicago economist who put forward the theory that legalizing abortion in the early 1970s lowered the crime rate in the late 1990s by pre-natally capital punishing a lot of bad apples.

I demolished Levitt's theory when we debated it in Slate back in 1999, but Levitt's still making it the centerpiece of his upcoming book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. He simply doesn't mention the objections I put forward six years ago -- most famously, that the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion, who, under his theory, should have been better behaved than the unculled previous cohort, instead went on the worst teen murder spree in American history during the early 1990s. That this group then committed fewer murders when they got older, as Levitt emphasizes, obviously can't be attributed to their having been culled by abortion -- instead, the real explanation is that a huge fraction of these fellows born in the late 1970s were by the time they became adults already in prison cells, wheelchairs, or coffins due to the crack wars of their teen years.

Amusingly, our debate is the first thing Google brings up if you enter: Levitt abortion crime. So, it's hard to imagine how Levitt thinks he can get away with it, but you can get away with a lot in today's flaccid intellectual environment.

Levitt's publicist contacted me about hyping his book, so I suggested to her that we could generate a lot of publicity for it if Levitt and I resumed our 1999 debate in print or online. She thought that was a great idea, so she immediately presented the proposal to Levitt. This time, however, he refused to debate me.


Why? Well, William F. Buckley was once asked why Robert F. Kennedy refused reputed invitations to appear on Buckley's Firing Line talk show. WFB replied, "Why does baloney reject the grinder?"


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 20, 2005

Readers Write

From the Mailbag: Readers write

One interesting aspect of the rise of women in American public life over the last 35 years is that, until very, very recently, the most prominent women kibitzers have basically mimicked the conventionally liberal or radical left males of their publications or TV news outlets. The women's perspective, whose practicality might actually be important on some issues, has been largely absent. I am thinking particularly about the transformation of the criminal justice system in the 1960s and its continued ineffectiveness today. Most women, I suspect, care more about getting violent males off the street than about how many women suit up in police or swat-team uniforms. Yet the visible and audible sisterhood has been much more obsessed with employment rights that they, the graduate-school elite, will never use.

Weird. Or maybe Austen said it best. "Sense and Sensibility."

*

Your linking to that Slate piece on the lack of women who bother to write opinion essays reminded me how annoyed I was was the NYT op-ed by Deborah Tannen, with her usual "Men and Women are different, and men must learn to be like women" fluff. In particular this gem:

" The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas is deeply rooted in Western civilization. It can be found in the militaristic roots of the Christian church and in our educational system, tracing back to all-male medieval universities where students learned by oral disputation. Ong contrasts this with Chinese science and philosophy, which eschewed disputation and aimed to "enlighten an inquirer," not to "overwhelm an opponent." As Chinese anthropologist Linda Young showed, Chinese philosophy sees the universe in a precarious balance that must be maintained, leading to methods of investigation that focus more on integrating ideas and exploring relations among them rather than on opposing ideas and fighting over them."

Yes, by all means, we should abandon our "militaristic" model of science and adopt the Chinese way, since obviously Chinese science has achieved such spectacular results in comparison!

As so often happens, Tannen serves to prove that which she is trying to refute. If women are really going to be more concerned with not hurting each other's feelings than in getting at the truth, maybe they don't belong in the lab in the first place...

*

I read your April 25th editorial on diversity in medicine. I live in [famously average Middle American city] and have witnessed over the last 25 years the evolution of medical care in our city. Bill Frist wishes to have more people of color being doctors which on first sight seems reasonable since this would bring better health care to minorities where there are few doctors.

Here is the rub. I have practiced in an inner city hospital and also in the white suburban hospital and have watched the cultural diversity of medical care take shape. Many of my friends are African-American and I have talked to them about their feelings and desires. The African American doctors used to practice in inner cities but as time passed they have migrated to the suburbs. The inner city care has been picked up by the white doctors.

Before you dismiss this as heresy walk through your own inner city hospital and count the white doctors. Initially my African American doctor Friends went to the inner city but as quickly as they got on their feet financially they moved to the white suburbs.

The cause of this transition is multifactorial but some of the main points are the African American doctors are accepted in the white suburban hospitals. The lure of the higher pay associated with patients who have Private insurance is overwhelming. Also, the black physicians find themselves welcomed by the white and semi white suburban population whereas inner city black patients look down on African American doctors as being the product of affirmative action.

Practicing in the suburbs you hear words such as "Thankyou" and "please", words that don't translate to the language of the inner city.

One of my African American friends specifically felt it was his moral obligation to give back to the community he was from. After ten years he finally moved to the all white semi rural town here in Ohio where he does an excellent job and is rewarded financially. His life is no longer subjected to angry patients seeking narcotics (a profession in inner city).

*

The idiocy and irresponsibilty of our entire political class in the way they misuse the word "democracy" is beyond description. When I expressed these concerns to a well-known conservative recently, and talked about how the misuse of "democracy" makes it impossible to talk sensibly about political things and leads us over and over into illusions and makes us into huge hypocrites, he replied dismissively that my concerns were "talmudic." One of the most basic features of American political wisdom and of conservatism in particular, a critical understanding of the word "democracy," has been thrown away. One of the costs of the war.



Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com