Hawk repellent?

This evening, shortly after dark, I was stepping into the enclosed backyard where Fred, my older son's large white rabbit, lives, when a gray shape suddenly swooped down out of the night sky and a white shape shot across the lawn inches ahead of it and took refuge in the dense star jasmine bush.

The hawk (or perhaps an owl, but it looked more like a hawk) landed on the roof of the house behind us. I threw lemons at the predator, but when it took flight again, it landed on the telephone pole in the backyard and peered down hungrily. Eventually, it tired of the lemons flying past and took off for parts unknown, but I fear it will be back for Fred.

I can't imagine anything smaller than an eagle could carry off Fred, who weighs several pounds. A few years ago, I saw a hawk struggling to lift a squirrel it had killed off a San Fernando Valley sidewalk, and certainly a big bunny weighs multiple times more than a squirrel. (That hawk finally gave up carrying off the squirrel after about 100 crows came from all around to squawk menacingly at the hawk's encroachment on their suburban turf.)

In a fair fight, face to face, the bunny would stand a good chance against the hawk, using the claws of its powerful hind legs to slash downward at the bird. Still, the hawk could do a lot of damage to Fred with its talons in one of its dive-bombing runs. The rabbit, who has pink eyes not suitable for bright conditions, spends sunny days deep in the bushes, but at night he likes to come out and frolic on the lawn. I had never heard of local hawks attacking at night, but this one clearly does.

So, tonight Fred is in the house, but he chews through all the lamp cords and aggressively poops in front of the door of his mortal enemy, Whopper, the little bunny who lives in my younger son's room. I want him back outside soon.

So, does anybody have any advice for preventing bloodshed in the backyard?

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

The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Dennis Mangan points us to a website where "Deogolwulf" delivers aphorisms in the style of G.C. Lichtenberg:

A Little More Lichtenberg
“That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”

Here are some of Deogolwulf's own:

Fewtril #140 It should not pass our notice that almost all of our so-called iconoclasts are not so bold as to smash the idols of this age, in whose presence they are wont to grovel, but rather are only so bold as to make great play of pulverising the already smashed idols of another.

Fewtril #126 It is hardly to be hoped that one can speak with knowledge and insight without being accused of ignorance and bigotry.

Fewtril #122 In the great scramble to be offended, it is essential that one might find any innocuous thing utterly vile and offensive, lest one be outdone by more inventive souls.

Fewtril #117 The principle that controversial or objectionable views ought not to be suppressed, but rather shown to be wrong through reasoned debate, is usually defended only when a man is under the impression that those views have little reason in their favour. So much for magnanimity!

Fewtril #107 The scepticism of intellectuals means that they are wont to look suspiciously upon any idea that does not first flatter them into believing that they are central to its realisation.

Fewtril #105 It is good to spend an hour or two wondering how many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.

Fewtril #79 I often get the feeling that many of those laymen who profess to be Darwinists have hardly the foggiest understanding of the theory of evolution through natural selection. It is as if the belief in it comes to them not through its scientific role in helping them to understand the natural world, but rather through its social role in helping them to appear no-nonsense and hard-headed at dinner parties.

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

So, why isn't Van Nuys "vibrant"?

Van Nuys es very nice,
But it´s not paradise

En Van Nuys court celebrities can plead no contest or guilty,
A student steals his teacher´s car for prom but didn´t get too far,
A strip mall fire rages on Valerio, while Letty bumps la raza on the stereo,
"20 pegaditas, no corridos!"

Los Abandoned

The screening for Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" that Disney invited me to wasn't until four days after the film goes into the theatres on Friday, so I tracked down the Latino marketing firm that Gibson hired to promote his film to Hispanics. They kindly sent me an invitation to a screening last Thursday at a small multiplex in a Hispanic section of South Central LA.

Driving around South Central, I started mulling over again why Mexican-American neighborhoods in Southern California are so dreary. Why aren't they fun? Sure, there's lots of private drama, like the song lyrics above depict. One reason journalists call Mexican-American neighborhoods vibrant is because they often have warm memories of Spring Breaks in Mexico, and assume that Mexican-American parts of town must be like that. Granted, Cancun isn't exactly representative of Mexico, but Mexico isn't an unfun place. So, what's wrong with the vast Mexican-American swatches of SoCal?

Suddenly, traffic slowed, pedestrians were everywhere, cops were directing traffic, people were waving signs trying to entice me to park in their yards for only $10, there were beautiful girls on every corner, and a brass band was playing an exciting fanfare. "Hey, now this is pretty doggone vibrant!" I thought.

Then I figured out what was going on: I was at the University of Spoiled Children and it was the night of USC's annual "Beat UCLA" pep rally in preparation for the #2 ranked Trojans polishing off the Bruins on their way to the national championship game.

Well, that didn't work out for the Trojans any better than the "Apocalypto" screening did for me, which was postponed a week due to a defective print.

But I did figure out one reason why Mexican-American neighborhoods are so dull: Mexican culture and Anglo town planning just don't jibe at all. Social life in Mexico traditionally revolves around the plaza, the town square, the zocalo, or whatever you want to call it, with a bandstand, places to walk around, and cafes under the arcades of the encompassing buildings.

In contrast, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, the problem with Los Angeles from a Mexican point of view is that there's no there there. There's no focal point. Downtown LA has a pleasant little plaza next to the Olde California touristy Olvera Street. But, the scale is miniscule -- it's the same plaza that has been there since the mid-19th Century. There's nothing like Times Square in the rest of LA, and the San Fernando Valley is worse, with zero focus.

In many Mexican villages, the big weekly social event is where the boys line up around the edge of the plaza and walk around clockwise, while the girls walk around counter-clockwise (or vice-versa), and everybody gives everybody the eye. Back in the 1970s, this was reproduced in cars on Cruise Night every Wednesday on Van Nuys Blvd. and was popular among both Hispanic and white teenagers, just like in George Lucas's Modesto, as depicted in "American Graffiti." (This is another bit of evidence that whites and Hispanics were less culturally separate in the past in LA than at present.) But the Van Nuys merchants complained and the cops shut it down.

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

The War Nerd in The American Conservative

Gary Brecher reviews Showdown with Nuclear Iran by Michael D. Evans and Jerome R. Corsi in the new Dec. 18th issue of The American Conservative (not on line).

On the claim that Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon is a "proxy army" for Iran, Brecher unloads:

If there's anything that recent military history shows clearly, it's that nobody, not even a superpower, can create a proxy army that will really fight -- and Hezbollah proved pretty clearly that they can fight.

America and the USSR tried creating proxy armies all through the Cold War years. The only time it worked was when the locals had their own reasons to want to fight. In those cases, it's just a matter of sliding the cartons off the C-130's and cracking 'em open. Local warlust will do the rest.

But when the locals are only fighting because some foreign power pays them, they're worthless. I hate to bring up painful memories, but anybody remember our old pal ARVN -- the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, aka South Vietnam? We poured so much blood and money into the South Vietnamese Army that it still hurts to think about it. …

The Soviets tried the same technique in Africa and Afghanistan, with the same results. It's hard to believe now, but back in the 1970s people thought the USSR was going to take over Africa because those Soviets were funding so many proxy wars. All those African safaris got the Russians were tropical diseases and a huge cash drain. …

That's exactly what happened to our worst-ever proxies, the Contras. They were supposed to be our Latin American version of the Colorado kids in "Red Dawn" -- freedom-loving rebels who would overthrow the Sandinista commies. Instead they spent your tax dollars on fast boats and clothes -- they were the only insurgents in history who dressed like extras on "Miami Vice." And as for how they behaved, it was more like Tony Montana, who would happily talk about how "I keel a Commyunis' fo' fun!" but then lose interest after the coke money started flowing.

So let's drop the nonsense that Hezbollah is just a stand-in for Iran. You can tell stand-ins by the way they fight, or rather don't fight. …

It wasn't Iran that made the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon so tough. It was Israel. Before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon were the quietest, most peaceable tribe in the whole crazy country. There's no faster way to turn submissive peasant-types into kamikazes than by grabbing their land, and that's what Israel did, declaring a "security zone" in southern Lebanon. It was Israeli occupation that turned those Shi'ite peasants into the best soldiers in the Middle East, not Iranian cash. Cash just makes Contras; occupations make fighters.

If you want an ultra-painful example of that, just compare the Iraqi army before we occupied Iraq -- a bunch of cowards who were surrendering to news crews -- to the hardened insurgents we have to deal with now.

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

The "R" Word

Malcolm Gladwell asserts a viewpoint that I think is pretty common among the media elite today:

Defining A Racist

… I propose three criteria:

1. Content. What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is. To call someone a [n*****] is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites. To make a targetted [sic] claim is worse than calling a name.

Let me propose two criteria. You are more likely to get smeared as a "racist," the more your statement is:

1. True.
2. Important.

As you know, the white-black intelligence gap has been studied to death over the last several generations. Legitimate questions remain about whether it's changing in size, and how big a role, if any, genetics plays in it. But there is no scientific question whatsoever about its existence.

The most comprehensive investigation of the size of the white-black IQ gap was carried out by Philip L. Roth of Clemson and colleagues in a 2001 article, "Ethnic Group Differences in Cognitive Ability in Employment and Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis," in the academic journal Personnel Psychology. They looked at 105 different studies covering 6,246,729 individuals and found an overall average difference between whites and blacks of 16.5 IQ points, or 1.1 standard deviations. The 95 percent confidence interval runs merely from 1.06 to 1.15 standard deviations (in other words, there is strong agreement among the 105 studies).

As for its importance, the white-black IQ gap is highly relevant to a broad range of social issues, such as education, voting, and much else that you aren't supposed to think about.

There is a lot of hate in this world, and, increasingly, much of that hate is getting directed at people who tell the truth.

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

David Lynch's "Inland Empire"

The popular surrealist director David Lynch ("Elephant Man," "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks," "Mulholland Drive") is back with "Inland Empire," a film noir nightmare in which Laura Dern is "a woman in trouble."

The basic structure of the film is promising, resembling the setup for a complicated Tom Stoppard play. Dern plays a classy Hollywood actress married to a jealous Polish millionaire. She lands a big role in a Southern Gothic film about adulterous lovers and the husband who will kill them if he finds out. Her leading man is a Colin Farrell-type star notorious for sleeping with all his leading ladies, especially the married ones. Not surprisingly, you soon can't tell whether the love scenes depict the characters in the film-within-a-film, or whether the stars are rehearsing a little too realistically in their spare time.

Considerately, Lynch has characters clue the audience in on what will happen, such as a sinister Polish hag who visits Dern in her LA mansion and tells her that her upcoming romance film is actually about murder, or maybe she just forgot, but who can remember, she asks, what comes before what, whether it's today, yesterday, or tomorrow?

The director (Jeremy Irons) reveals that the new movie is actually a remake of a Polish movie, based on a Polish Gypsy folktale, about adulterous lovers that was begun in the 1930s but never finished because the two stars were murdered, presumably by a jealous husband. And there's suppose to be a Gypsy curse on the whole proceedings.

Then, Dern somehow becomes, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, unstuck in time (or maybe she's just crazy) and is soon encountering scenes both from the unfinished Polish movie and from the private lives of the doomed Polish actors.

So far, so good. A half hour into the film, my hopes were high. But then … the story never develops any momentum. And it just goes on and on and on forever and a day. You know the last ten minutes of "2001," where the astronaut keeps walking into strange rooms, staring in puzzlement at different versions of himself? Well, multiply that by 18 and you'll grasp what this three-hour disaster is like: Laura Dern walking into scores of rooms and staring in horror at what she sees. But there isn't much that's all that horrible to look at, so the film doesn't even offer the amusements of a horror film. The soundtrack consists of endless minor key chords and thump-thump heartbeat-like percussion, which is pretty creepy for awhile, but gets old eventually.

Lynch himself seems to get bored with this, and keeps introducing characters that don't fit into his already overstuffed four-level structure. Dern re-emerges as a foul-mouthed skank who apparently lives in Pomona, in the "Inland Empire" east of LA, and is married to a man from Poland (which was an inland country, except for the controversial Danzig corridor, when the original movie was made between the wars -- see how the Pomona-Poland Inland Empire theme all fits together!), who runs off to join a Baltic circus because he's good with animals. And then there are scenes from a Polish sitcom starring a stiffly dressed bourgeois family with the heads of rabbits, which I guess is tied into the recurrent theme of being good with animals, which also pops up in the ten minute monologue by a Chinese homeless lady sitting on the star-engraved sidewalk of Hollywood Blvd., who talks at vast length about her friend in Pomona who is retiring from turning tricks to stay home with her pet monkey.

This isn't as random as it sounds because every damn thing in the movie is foretold earlier. For example, in Dern's second incarnation, as the whore, she delivers a long monologue to a Hollywood private eye (who looks kind of like, rather improbably for a shamus, Matthew Yglesias) in which, in the course of talking about some guy she once knew, she mentions that he had a one-legged sister. About an hour later, as I was walking out early, about 170 minutes into this ordeal, up on the screen -- well, what do you know! -- there's suddenly a one-legged woman.

To be honest, I'm often a big admirer of films constructed in this manner. I imagine that if I sat through "Inland Empire" again, I could explain why, say, "Repo Man" is art while "Inland Empire" is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare / snoozeathon, but no way in hell am I going to subject myself to it another time.

Like Peter Jackson's interminable "King Kong," what's being debuted in the theatres is the three-hour Director's Cut. Hopefully, someday there will be a two-hour Editor's Cut of "Inland Empire."

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

How the printing press made nationalism feasible

From Nick Szabo's Unenumerated blog:

Before book consciousness there had been no national languages, but only a range of often mutually incomprehensible dialects and in Western Europe the language of the tiny literate elite, Latin. With newly unified national vernaculars, organizations were able to coordinate and grow in an unprecedented manner. A much larger group of people, raised on the same written language, increasingly also came to look and speak similarly and become far more mutually trusted. It was the birth of national loyalty and nationwide webs of trust. The "tribe" to which we are instinctively loyal vastly increased in size.

The pool of already somewhat trusted "same tribe" people from which a bureaucracy could recruit new members vastly increased. National polities and militaries were able to coordinate political, economic, and battlefield strategies in an unprecedented manner. The 16th century saw the first major growth of the joint-stock corporation, enabling far more capital to be invested in the enlarging organizations that engaged in mining and manufacture as well as government and conquest. This development is probably a response to the new ability to form larger organizations, since the basic ideas (corporate law, shares of stock, etc.) had already been in use in Europe for quite some time.

Going along with this was the emergence of "national bards," beginning with Dante, who made the Florentine dialect the national version of Italian.

Europe ended up with a bunch of mid-sized nation states united by language, which proved about the right size for many tasks. Unfortunately, Europe's nation-states proved most effective of all at self-sacrificial war, and mutually exhausted themselves in WWI, discrediting nationalism, which had otherwise proved the most effective framework for human progress. (Similarly, the Chinese progressed the fastest during the Warring States era, which ended with the formation of the Empire 2200 years ago.)

In contrast, the Arab world shunned printing presses for hundreds of years. And, due to the sacred nature of the Arab language, the rise of national languages was largely prevented. So, the Arabs didn't really develop the nation-state. The pan-Arab or pan-Islamic caliphate remained attractive in theory, while, in reality, tribal and family struggles occupied their energies.

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

Dog Bites Man

From the New York Times:

Lawyers Debate Why Blacks Lag at Major Firms
By ADAM LIPTAK

Thanks to vigorous recruiting and pressure from corporate clients, black lawyers are well represented now among new associates at the nation’s most prestigious law firms. But they remain far less likely to stay at the firms or to make partner than their white counterparts.

A recent study says grades help explain the gap. To ensure diversity among new associates, the study found, elite law firms hire minority lawyers with, on average, much lower grades than white ones. That may, the study says, set them up to fail.

The study, which was prepared by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was published in The North Carolina Law Review in July, has given rise to fierce and growing criticism in law review articles and in the legal press. In an opinion article in The National Law Journal this month, for instance, R. Bruce McClean, the chairman of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a major law firm, took issue with the study’s “sweeping conclusions” but not its “detailed data analysis.”

This is all utterly predictable from even a cursory knowledge of how the IQ bell curve works.

In the tournament to become a partner in a lucrative law firm, there are five hurdles, two of which have been corrupted by affirmative action and three of which are more meritocratic. Admission to law school and hiring by big firms is driven by quotas (just don't use the word "quotas," as the Supreme Court, in its majestic wisdom ruled in the Bakke law school admission case of 1977). In contrast, graduating from law school and making partner are less influenced by racial preferences, and passing the state bar exam remains, so far as I know, wholly objective.

In other words, there are some goodies the white elite is comfortable handing out using quotas, and others they feel are just too important to mess with.

Not surprisingly, affirmative action at the admissions and hiring levels lure in blacks who are less likely to make it over the meritocratic hurdles. Sander has shown that 53% of the black students who enter law school fail to become lawyers, versus 24% of white students. This is a really stupid way for society to misdirect and abuse its scarce resource of intelligent young black people.

The outcome for black lawyers hired by hotshot law firms who are in over the heads competing to become partner might be less dire, however, because affirmative action is also in operation in corporate law departments. So, if you start off working 70 hours a week at a Manhattan law firm, but soon realize that you aren't smart enough to make it to partner, well, that job offer to go work at Coca-Cola's legal department in Atlanta can start looking pretty good.

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

Polonium Poisoning Update: The Mysterious Professor Scaramella of Naples

This is getting pretty funny. Apparently, the man Alexander Litvinenko was having lunch with at the sushi bar where he was poisoned was Professor Mario Scaramella, a Neapolitan formerly of Bogota, is an expert on radioactive poisons, KGB agents, the Mafia, and who know what else…

Professor Scaramella of Naples -- is that the greatest name for a shady character in a tale of international intrigue and poison? It sounds like Arthur Conan-Doyle and Ian Fleming teamed up to create the good professor.

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

Dog and Man at Yale

A reader writes:

Nice story on NOVA last night about the evolution of Dogs and Man at Yale. Most interesting points for me were

1) how selection for tameness ended up yielding, as a surprise by-product, extraordinary variety of weird appearance characteristics in dogs, and

2) how man developed superb sniffers, hunters, runners, pointers, herders, etc., not by deliberately breeding in the modern sense, but simply by inevitably shaping the social environment, mostly food supply and mating chances, of the nearby hounds.

All implications for human evolution were passed over until a final bit on how dogs may help us identify genes for human narcolepsy and other genetic diseases.

And the Victorian invention of deliberate inbreeding for pure appearance, not performance, was characterized as "racist eugenics," of course.

Greg Cochran's theory is that just as selecting for new personality traits in wild animals that you are trying to domesticate often introduces new physical looks, the famous diversity of looks among Europeans (red and blond hair, blue, gray, and green eyes) are by-products of natural selection for new personality traits favorable to survival in Europe. Blue eyes, for example, might possibly be a by-product of selection for something like shyness.

Most theories of European hair and eye color focus on sexual selection (like the peacock's tale) rather than natural selection, but Cochran says he is averse to thinking about sexual selection on the grounds that it too often turns out to be a conceptual dead end. It's too random. Clearly, examples of sexual selection exist now and then, but Cochran believes that relying on sexual selection for explanations encourages lazy thinking, a little like in the Stanley Harris cartoon where a scientist has filled the left and right sides of the blackboard with equations but in the middle he has only written "A miracle happens here."

I'm not sure I agree, but, generally speaking, disagreeing with Cochran is not typically a winning strategy.

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

Blind kid uses echolocation to navigate

This TV news clip of a blind 14 year old African-American who listens to echoes from his tongue clicks to avoid running into things is fun to watch, especially the part where in a pillow fight he hurls a throw pillow across the room at the TV announcer man and -- bullseye -- nails him right in the crotch.

According to the movie "Ray," Ray Charles didn't need a cane because he always wore hard-soled shoes and the echoes were enough for him to avoid obstacles. Of course, it helps if your brain is wired for sound like Ray Charles's was.

Wikipedia has a short article on "Human Echolocation." The tongue-clicking makes me wonder if the famous click languages of the Bushmen, Hottentot, and two black African tribes had something to do at one time with echolocation, although I've never heard that. Perhaps it could be useful to echolocate to avoid stumbling into things while walking on moonless nights, especially in forests where there is no starlight and lots of tree trunks to run into. The Bushmen generally don't lived in heavily forested country today, but they've been around an awfully long time, so we shouldn't assume they never did. But it can be very dangerous to walk around at night in leopard country, so maybe people just stayed put.

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

More on natural selection of New World blacks

A reader writes:

According to Galenson, the mortality rate on slave ships (a little more than 10% for both Slaves and Europeans) was constant per time unit regardless of the length of the journey. That is about 2 per 1000 per day died. More would die in longer journeys, but only proportionally. The incremental difference between other stops and Jamaica should therefore be all but negligible.

The fact that the European crew died at such a high rate (ships with only whites tended to have 4-5% mortality rate) indicates it was the mixing of disease that was the main cause, not “harshness” of the journey per say. The slaves for example had enough food, so testosterone would not help the strong ones get more than the weak.

Many more slaves tended to die when the ships contained slaves from different regions. Again disease is the likely cause. I guess testosterone increases immune defence somewhat. But the direct selection for disease immunity most be vastly more important than testosterone in the selection.

Another writes:

But in the larger picture, what Aiken is pointing to is being a slave was a new evolutionary environment. He's focusing only on the flashy middle passage environment, to be sure. But it seems to me that even once they got off the boat, the slaves were facing a distinctly harsher environment (in many ways) than they had in West Africa. If it is true that being a slave in the West Indies was different in terms of what was "fit" from being a random peon in West Africa, then we should expect natural selection to differentiate the populations. A selection bottleneck which selected along the same lines would, in this case, speed the process along.

Rather than the middle passage, what I think may be more important was the astounding death rates the slaves had even once here. Consider this:

"By the middle of the 17th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest and most brutal slave societies of the region, rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans. The death rates for black slaves in these islands were higher than birth rates. The decrease averaged about 3 percent per year in Jamaica and 4 percent a year in the smaller islands. The main causes for this were overwork and malnutrition. Slaves worked from sun up until sun down in harsh conditions and supervised under demanding masters, with little medical care. Slaves also had poor living conditions and consequently they contracted many diseases."

A 4% per year decrease in population is an impressively powerful selection environment!

Right. The sugar plantation regions of Brazil and the West Indies were much more deadly than the tobacco plantation region of Virginia. The sugar growers worked slaves to death and replaced them with cheap imports from across the Atlantic.

It was more expensive to import slaves all the way to Virginia. Plus, the climate was quite healthful for Africans -- cooler than the tropics, so tropical diseases were less virulent, but not frigid, so Africans didn't suffer as much from respiratory diseases in Virginia as they did in New England. So, Virginia slaveowners had economic incentives to make sure that the birth rate was higher than the death rate among their slaves. (By the time the deep Southern cotton belt opened up fully, the slave trade had been outlawed, so American owners still had an incentive to care for the health of their slaves.)

Off the top of my head, though, I can't see any particular traits that the sugar plantations selected for. Take sprinting ability: West Indians (sugar) and African-Americans (mostly not sugar) are both outstanding, while black Brazilians are not. Not bad, just not great.

On the other hand, a black Brazilian named Ronaldo da Costa set the marathon world record in 1998, which is almost unimaginable for an African-American or West Indian.

Why? A. There is less connection between looks and racial background in Brazil than in America due to the lack of a color line and preference for fair women. Consider two sisters in Brazil, one fair and one dark. The fairer one is more likely to marry a richer, whiter man, while the darker one is more likely to marry a poorer, black man. Repeat for 12 generations and you've substantially disconnected the genes for looks from all the other genes. (In the U.S., the color line largely prevented this process.) So, perhaps, even somebody as black-looking as da Costa could have the athletic genes of a Portuguese distance runner.

B. The alternative theory is that da Costa is largely descended from South or East Africans. Brazil got a lot of its slaves out of those regions that today produce so many fine distance runners. In contrast, the U.S. got most of its slaves from West Africa, which has the same imbalance today as African-American between outstanding sprinters and virtually non-existent distance r

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

Black athletes and testosterone

From the Jamaica Gleaner:

The athletic prowess of Jamaicans
by William Aiken
Dr. William Aiken is the head of Urology at the University Hospital of the West Indies and president of the Jamaica Urological Society

The sprinting prowess of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people in general and Jamaicans in particular is legendary and is demanding of serious scientific enquiry and research. It cannot be coincidence that over the years the fastest men and women in the world were born in Jamaica. Herb McKinley, Arthur Wint, Donald Quarrie, Linford Christie, Donovan Bailey, Ben Johnson, Bert Cameron, Michael Frater, Asafa Powell, Merlene Ottey, Sherone Simpson, Veronica Campbell, Deon Hemmings, Bridgette Foster-Hylton and Sanya Richards come readily to mind...

While it is clear that good sport administration, excellent coaching, proper nutrition and adequate funding and facilities are vital to achieving athletic greatness, in the absence of raw athletic sprinting ability this will not occur.

I wish to propose a hypothesis that addresses not only the aspect of Jamaica's raw athletic talent, but also encompasses an explanation of seemingly diverse phenomena as our high incidence of prostate cancer (one study found it to be by far the highest in the world at 304 / 100,000 men / year), our high crime rate (murder capital of the world status earlier this year), our high road traffic accident and fatality rate, and our alleged high levels of promiscuity.

What do these seemingly disparate phenomena, characteristic of Jamaican life, have in common? On close examination these phenomena are manifestations of high levels of aggressiveness and drive, high libidos, highly efficient muscles from persons of lean body mass and black ethnicity.

On closer scrutiny all of these phenomena are either related to high circulating levels of testosterone or alternatively to high levels of responsiveness of testosterone receptors to circulating testosterone. It has already been shown that the testosterone receptors of blacks are different genetically to those of whites and this difference confers increased responsiveness to testosterone.

I've long felt that Occam's Razor points in the same direction. Differences in average levels of male and female sex hormones and in function of sex hormone receptors can parsimoniously account for many of the racial patterns that can't be accounted for by differences in IQ.

I'm not as persuaded, however, that Dr. Aiken's specific theory attributing differences to the Middle Passage is as plausible.

I propose that Jamaicans of primarily African descent have even greater testosterone responsiveness than blacks anywhere else.

But why should this be? I believe the answer to this lies in the slave ship routes within the Caribbean and the New World. First, let us assume that all Africans who survived the trek from the African interior to the West African coast and subsequently the middle passage would have been more or less subject to the same inhumane conditions which would have produced a severe selection pressure that enabled only the fittest slaves to survive the journey.

My hypothesis is that for each incremental increase in the journey travelled, once the slave ships entered the Caribbean, there was a corresponding selection pressure which ensured that only the fittest of the fit slaves survived and furthermore the traits which enabled survival were somehow dependent on high levels of responsiveness to testosterone. Characteristics such as aggression, determination, drive, strong bones, lean body mass, high surface area to body mass ratio, highly efficient and responsive muscles were probably all important for survival and are testosterone-dependent.

The math doesn't really work. Steven Levitt's partner Roland Fryer has revived a similar theory about African-American blood pressure problems being caused by selection for salt retention on slave ships. Greg Cochran explained to Fryer:

"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."

Nonetheless, Aiken makes an interesting observation about clinal difference within the West Indies:

Since Jamaica was one of the last stops to be made by the slave ships it ensured that only the most resilient and fittest of slaves were alive to disembark in Jamaica. This hypothesis is supported by a number of observations. African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people are represented far more frequently in sprinting events than persons from Africa. Even more interesting is that as one goes westward within the Caribbean, sprinting prowess becomes more prevalent and reaches its peak by the time Jamaica and Bahamas are reached.

West Indian countries are definitely better at sprinting than West African countries, although the weakness of West Africa at sprinting is often exaggerated. West Africa would be the strongest sprinting region in the world if not for the competition from the West African Diaspora in places like Jamaica and the U.S. I would tend to assume that the West Indian superiority over West Africa is due to advantages in health, nutrition, and social organization, rather than in genetic differences.

What about the clinal difference within the Caribbean? The most striking example is Barbados, whose citizens are renown for being the best educated and most civil of all the West Indians. Barbados was the richest and most easterly of the West Indies.

An alternative theory is that the clinal pattern is due to artificial rather than natural selection. According to the PBS series The Story of English, as the first stop for the slave ships coming from Africa, the wealthy slaveowners of Barbados had their pick, and they preferred to buy slaves from tribes they had found to be the most cooperative. Then they'd send the leftovers from the Bad Dude tribes on to be sold in Jamaica and the U.S.

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

Michael Irvin on Tony Romo:

Back in the 1990s, in between getting arrested in the company of hookers and cocaine, Michael Irvin caught a lot of passes for the Dallas Cowboy Super Bowl teams. This year, a journeyman white quarterback named Tony Romo (who is half Mexican-American) has suddenly gotten red hot, throwing five touchdown passes in the Cowboy's Thanksgiving Day victory. On Dan Patrick's ESPN radio show, Irvin, who is employed as a broadcaster by ESPN, laughingly suggested that:

"He doesn't look like he's that type of an athlete," Irvin said of Romo. "But he is. He is, man. I don't know if some brother down in that line somewhere, I don't know who saw what or where, his great-great-great-great-grandma ran over in the 'hood or something went down."

Patrick tried to suggest to Irvin that he shouldn't go there, but Irvin was having none of it, continuing:

"If great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma pulled one of them studs up out of the barn, 'Come on in here for a second,' you know, and they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day."

It's common for white announcers to lose their jobs after referring to the genetic differences between black and white players, such as Paul Hornung who lost his radio job on Notre Dame games after suggesting that ND needed to lower its academic standards so it could recruit black players fast enough to compete with the Florida powerhouses.

So far there hasn't been much of a controversy over Irvin's comments. It's worth noting that it reflect the view widespread among famous black athlete that blacks tend to be genetically superior athletes. It's politically incorrect, but, hey, they're black so the usual rituals of censorship and public humiliation seldom apply to them.

Ironically, this racial self-assurance comes at a time when blacks aren't doing as well athletically as in the 1990s. Three of the four claimants to the heavyweight boxing title are Ivan Drago types from the former Soviet Union. The US. Olympic Basketball tem got beat pretty bad in the 2004 Olympics, losing to Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Lithuania. A white Canadian has won the NBA MVP award two years running. A Chinese player is the best center now that Shaq is in decline. The two best 400m sprinters are white Americans. A Chinese runner won the 110m hurdles at the last Olympics. An all white team won the World Cup.

On the other hand, blacks continue to dominate the 100m sprint (in the last six Olympics going back through 1984, all eight men who made the finals have been of West African descent, an amazing 48 of 48). African-Americans also continue to dominate at tailback and cornerback in the NFL, holding all the starting positions, last I checked. Blacks continue to dominate most of the statistical categories in the NBA.

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

Dept. of "Huh?"

An LA Times op-ed columnist weights in on two recent brouhahas:

The O.J.-Kramer divide: Recent flaps show that we're more tolerant of a white man's blunder.
Erin Aubry Kaplan:

But the reality is that there is far more tolerance for a white person's unseemly behavior than for similar behavior of somebody who isn't white, especially if the unseemliness involves race. [Michael] Richards' "racist rant" has been described as a terrible but isolated incident. O.J., meanwhile, is condemned for his character.

No, OJ's condemned for damn near sawing two people's heads off, plus whatever else he did to Ron Goldman.

Speaking of Michael Richard, whose Kramer character on "Seinfeld" might have been the consistently funniest supporting character in the history of American television, comparable to Andrew Sach's Manuel on "Fawlty Towers," I'm reminded that Tom Wolfe anticipated Kramer in a courtroom scene in 1987's Bonfire of the Vanities:

"Your Honor! Your Honor! Hey, Judge!"

It was Albert Krnkka. He was waving his right hand, trying to get [Judge] Kovitsky's attention. His arms hung open in a half smile that was supposed to convince the judge that he was a reasonable man. In fact, he looked, every inch of him like one of those wild tall raw-boned men whose metabolisms operate at triple speed and who, more than any other people on earth, are prone to explosions.

"Hey, Judge! Look."

Kovitsky stared, amazed by this performance. 'Hey, Judge! Look. Two weeks ago she told us two to six, right?'

When Albert Krnkka said "two to six," he raised both hands up in the air and stuck out two fingers on each hand, like a v for victory or a peace sign, and flailed them in the air, as if he were beating a pair of invisible aerial drums in time to the the phrase "two to six." ...

Larry Kramer moved over to where Patti Stulleri was standing and said, "What did they do?"

Patti Stulleri said, "The wife held a knife to a girl's throat while the husband raped her."

"Jesus," said Kramer in spite of himself.

Wolfe presumably based Albert Krnkka on fellow New Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whom Wolfe affectionately described in the WSJ after Thompson's recent death:

He proved to be one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions. Hunter didn't so much have a conversation with you as speak in explosive salvos of words on a related subject.

I don't know anything about Michael Richard off-camera, but I expect nobody could play Kramer for that long and that well without being rather like Kramer. Even if you are just acting when you start out, after 9 years, you are a little bit Kramer. The classic depiction of this tendency is Martin Landau's tremendous performance in "Ed Wood" as the elderly, washed-up Bela Lugosi, who after 25 years of playing Dracula, can't separate his main character from himself anymore.

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

Not-Borat Speaks!:

A UK newspaper quotes extensively from Sacha Baron-Cohen's out-of-character interview with Rolling Stone, which reveals that the comic believes all those reviews explaining that his Polish Jokes are actually good for you.

Now, after staying resolutely in boorish persona during previous interviews, Sacha Baron Cohen has spoken in depth about his motives in creating his comical anti-hero Borat. The journalist from Kazakhstan who sings anti-Semitic songs and refers to women as prostitutes was created "as a tool" to expose people's prejudices, he said.

The 35-year-old Jewish comedian from London has maintained a long silence over the controversy raised by Borat, whose extreme anti-Semitic remarks have earned censure both from the Kazakh government and from the Jewish community.

In one sketch from Baron Cohen's film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which premiered this month in London, Borat performs a song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" in a country and western bar in Arizona.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the comedian revealed he was a devout Jew, observing Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and he referred to the singing scene to defend his inflammatory comedy.

"Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.

"But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism," he said.

Baron Cohen said the concept of "indifference towards anti-Semitism" had been informed by his study of the Holocaust while at Cambridge University, where he read history. "I remember, when I was in university, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.'

"I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic," he said.

It's generally depressing to listen to extremely funny comedians get serious.

Udolpho says:

Who cares? But I didn't realize that apathy is best revealed through careful staging, audience prep, video recording, and editing of the results. Is Cohen really such a pedantic git that he thinks getting a bunch of drunken revelers to sing "Throw the Jew down the well" is proof of Western indifference about anti-Semitism? It's not even an indictment of country-western bars. (Cohen knows very well that it would be easier, not harder, to get an audience of Jesse Jackson supporters to sing that refrain. But this would make the urban sophisticates who howl with glee at this "transgressive" comedy very sad, so that's right out.)

To my mind, Baron Cohen and the critics have it exactly backwards. I try to be polite in private and candid in public, but that's not terribly fashionable. The critics are claiming to be outraged that the Americans in the film who were exposed to Borat's anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism in private didn't denounce him to his face. Instead, they tended to be polite and tried to change the subject. In contrast, almost none of critics have mentioned Baron Cohen's extremely public anti-Slavism. Complete apathy reigns over Baron Cohen's revival of traditional goyishe kop attitudes toward Slavs. As Lenin said, the ultimate question remains "Who? Whom?." And everybody wants to be on the side of the Who, not the Whom.

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

Not-Borat Speaks!

A UK newspaper quotes extensively from Sacha Baron-Cohen's out-of-character interview with Rolling Stone, which reveals that the comic believes all those reviews explaining that his Polish Jokes are actually good for you.

Now, after staying resolutely in boorish persona during previous interviews, Sacha Baron Cohen has spoken in depth about his motives in creating his comical anti-hero Borat. The journalist from Kazakhstan who sings anti-Semitic songs and refers to women as prostitutes was created "as a tool" to expose people's prejudices, he said.

The 35-year-old Jewish comedian from London has maintained a long silence over the controversy raised by Borat, whose extreme anti-Semitic remarks have earned censure both from the Kazakh government and from the Jewish community.

In one sketch from Baron Cohen's film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which premiered this month in London, Borat performs a song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" in a country and western bar in Arizona.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the comedian revealed he was a devout Jew, observing Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and he referred to the singing scene to defend his inflammatory comedy.

"Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.

"But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism," he said.

Baron Cohen said the concept of "indifference towards anti-Semitism" had been informed by his study of the Holocaust while at Cambridge University, where he read history. "I remember, when I was in university, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.'

"I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic," he said.

It's generally depressing to listen to extremely funny comedians get serious.

Udolpho says:

Who cares? But I didn't realize that apathy is best revealed through careful staging, audience prep, video recording, and editing of the results. Is Cohen really such a pedantic git that he thinks getting a bunch of drunken revelers to sing "Throw the Jew down the well" is proof of Western indifference about anti-Semitism? It's not even an indictment of country-western bars. (Cohen knows very well that it would be easier, not harder, to get an audience of Jesse Jackson supporters to sing that refrain. But this would make the urban sophisticates who howl with glee at this "transgressive" comedy very sad, so that's right out.)

To my mind, Baron Cohen and the critics have it exactly backwards. I try to be polite in private and candid in public, but that's not terribly fashionable. The critics are claiming to be outraged that the Americans in the film who were exposed to Borat's anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism in private didn't denounce him to his face. Instead, they tended to be polite and tried to change the subject. In contrast, almost none of critics have mentioned Baron Cohen's extremely public anti-Slavism. Complete apathy reigns over Baron Cohen's revival of traditional goyishe kop attitudes toward Slavs. As Lenin said, the ultimate question remains "Who? Whom?." And everybody wants to be on the side of the Who, not the Whom.

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

1491

Charles Mann's book summarizing recent research into life in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere is quite interesting, although a little slippery. His main theme is how enormous the population of the Americas was before the epidemics introduced by the Conquest, but he tends to slide back and forth between whether he's talking about America north or south of the Rio Grande. For example, he talks a lot about Cahokia, or Monks' Mound, near St. Louis, which had a population of about 15,000 around 1000 AD, before falling apart a couple of centuries before Columbus. But this appears to have been just about the only sizable urban center north of the Rio Grande, which raises questions in my mind about just how densely populated the future U.S. was. If it was densely populated, why was it so little urbanized, especially compared to the enormous number of cities in what's now Latin America? There are a lot of dirt mounds in Midwest, but as tourist attractions, they are lacking compared to what you can see in Latin America.

Perhaps the problem was that corn was a rather late arrival in the future US from its origin spot in Mexico, and urbanization would have followed. Or perhaps, North American Indians just didn't see much point to building big cities and future tourist attractions.

The urbanization of Mesoamerica and the northern half of South America was quite high. We're all familiar with a handful of well-visited monumental ruins like Chichen Itza, the huge pyramids outside of Mexico City, or Machu Pichu, but there are countless others. Something that Mann doesn't quite realize is that urban life was more feasible in the New World than in the Old World precisely because of the lack of contagious diseases that was the downfall of the New World when the Spaniards arrived bearing Old World germs into a region with no immunity. In the Old World until late in the 19th Century, cities were typically "demographic sinks" where the death rate was higher than the birth rate due to infectious diseases. Cities had to be constantly replenished with newcomers from the healthier countryside or they would disappear.

The disease burden was particularly severe in Africa, which is a major reason why Africa is so lacking in monumental ruins. I would bet that Guatemala alone has an order of magnitude more ruins of impressive scale than all of sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, when the population density got too high, diseases would wipe out the populace, which is a big reason why Africa was thinly populated until recently. This doesn't appear to have been anywhere near as severe a problem in tropical America, presumably because Indians didn't bring many disease with them from Siberia, and because they had so few domesticated animals to pick up germs from.

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