November 27, 2007

Did you know that Jews were the star basketball players in 1932?

One of the most common chestnuts pulled out in any argument over human biodiversity is: "Well, sure, blacks may dominate basketball today, but Jews used to dominate basketball back during the Hoover Administration, so that proves that genes don't have anything to do with it."

Indeed, in I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe poked fun the Jewish liberal sportswriters' obsession with Jewish success back in the Stone Age of basketball as proof that genes don't matter in sports, as the frat boys watch an ESPN talk show:

"… four poorly postured middle-aged white sportswriters sat slouched in little, low-backed, smack-red fiberglass swivel chairs panel-discussing the 'sensitive' matter of the way black players dominated basketball. 'Look,' the well-known columnist Maury Feldtree was saying, his chin resting on a pasha's cushion of jowls, ‘just think about it for a second. Race, ethnicity, all that—that's just a symptom of something else. There's been whole cycles of different minorities using sports as a way out of the ghetto. … In the 1930s and 1940s, you know who dominated professional basketball long before the African Americans? Jewish players. Yeah! Jewish players from the Jewish ghettos of New York."

Let's look at the obvious: basketball, which was only invented in 1895, was not a very popular sport in America back when Jews did well in it. It wasn't close to being one of the top three spectator sports in the country. It was only played intensely here and there around the country, such as in New York City and in Indiana.

Think about the famous stars of the "Golden Age of Sports" in the 1920s: Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden. Man O' War, etc. Where are the famous basketball players? Basketball was way behind boxing, horse racing, and maybe track and field. I can't even name any basketball stars before Hank Luisetti of Stanford introduced the one-handed shot to the East at a celebrated game at in 1936. (It was barely a national game at the time, so developments in different parts of the country took years to register on NYC sportswriters.) The first professional basketball player to make much of a dent on the national consciousness was George Mikan immediately after WWII.

There wasn't even a national professional league until after WWII, and blacks didn't play in the NBA until 1950. Basketball was barely played in the South where most blacks lived before WWII. The black sports between the wars were primarily baseball, boxing, and, among middle class / college-going blacks, track and field.

Basketball was a different game back then. You're deluded if you imagine it was then the showcase of athleticism that it became after 1950.

All these facts would be obvious to anybody who knows anything about the history of American sports if people didn't let political correctness and Jewish ethnocentric nostalgia make them stupid.

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

"Youths" in France now rioting with shotguns

The endemic disorder in France's North African and sub-Saharan African suburbs (unlike Americans in the 1960s, the French refused to flee their beloved cities) is peaking once again, with rioters now using shotguns to blast away at the police.

It's hard to get a straight story out of France about the riots. It was widely assumed in 2005 during the car-burnings that the rioters were motivated by Islamic fundamentalism, but little evidence of that emerged. It seemed more like an American black riot (but without the looting), with a Gallic twist. Fighting in the streets for ostensible political causes is an honored French tradition, and it's common for immigrants to assimilate toward the more destructive of host country traditions.

It's hard to even find out who is doing the rioting. In 2005, the pictures I saw tended to make it look like black Africans were taking the lead rather than olive North Africans, but there wasn't much direct reporting on the demographics. One exception: Martin Walker wrote for UPI:

AUBERVILLIERS, France (UPI) -- It still smells of smoke along the Rue Henri-Barbusse in the French suburb of Aubervilliers, but the skeletons of burned-out cars are cold now and look oddly like randomly parked pieces of modern sculpture in the shadow of the giant Quatre-Chemins housing estate that saw some of the worst riots in the two-week spasm of riots that swept France.

The sullen faces that gaze on the handiwork of the local rioters and sneer at the vans of the riot police are black rather than brown: Africans from Mali and Martinique rather than Arabs from Algeria and Morocco. ...

One of the striking features of the two weeks of rage that swept France is that so many of the rioters are black rather than Arab, though North Africans from Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia make up more than two-thirds of the estimated 6 million immigrants, their families included, in France.

Another important element is that in places where the rioters were 'beurs,' as the French Arabs call themselves, Islam and religion seemed to play only a minor role. A tear gas bomb fired into the mosque of Clichy-sous-Bois on the first day of the riots infuriated local Muslims, but there have been no Islamic slogans and no taunts against the French as Christians. They are identified instead, by young blacks and beurs alike, as the Gaulois, the Gauls, a taunting reference to the way French primary schools traditionally begin their history lessons with the phrase 'Our ancestors, the Gauls...'

Local Islamic leaders who tried to calm the young mobs have been routinely ignored, as have the fatwas issued by the leading Imams saying rioting and attacks on innocent people are against Islam...

Experts who work with France`s black community point to a different kind of family breakdown. Sonia Imloul of Respect 93, a non-governmental organization, says one of the biggest problems is polygamy, and cites the example of one family she knows with one father, four wives and thirty children, all living in the same standard 4-room apartment of French public housing.

In 2005, I wrote about American pundits' misconceptions about rioting for The American Conservative in "French Lessons."

On the other hand, I'm still confused by the apparent lack of looting in the 2005 riots. Were the rioters in France sober? The 1992 LA riots were essentially one long drunken brawl. It started with looting Korean-owned liquor stores and most of the rioters were drunk the whole time. If the French rioters are sober, perhaps that means they really are faithful Islamic tea-totalers and not the hip-hop inner city American wanna-bes, as I picture them.

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

Shelby Steele's book on Barack Obama

Former English professor Shelby Steele has a book coming out on another fellow with a white mother and a black father, Barack Obama. John Rosenberg's Discriminations blog reports on Steele's recent visit to Toronto:

"... he believes Barack Obama will not win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, in large part because he is caught between pleasing blacks and whites and can never please all Americans at once....

“He needs a self. There’s no self there. I think it comes from a lifetime of being bound up and playing one side, and another side, and never feeling that he had the right to be his own man,” Mr. Steele said in a hotel bar this week. “This is the tragedy, certainly, of the black intellectual class in America. They don’t think they have the right to be individuals, so they’re all just predictable, victim-focused, old line. It’s a generation that’s failed to really take us further. Obama is a part of that. There’s nobody there.”
....
He argues blacks in America typically wear one of two “masks”: They are either challengers or bargainers. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are challengers: Such blacks assume whites are racist until they prove otherwise. Bargainers, on the other hand, make a deal with whites by not rubbing their faces in a history of racism — think of Louis Armstrong or Oprah, he says.
Mr. Obama is an archetypal bargainer, says Mr. Steele, whose forthcoming book on the Democratic contender, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, will be released in time for the primaries.

“The question that hovers over Obama to this day: Is he really black enough? If white people like you, it’s very likely you’re not black enough. Black people are very suspicious of that. To prove himself to black people, he has to be a challenger,” Mr. Steele says.

“White America loves him because they think he’s a bargainer. And so if he goes with whites, blacks don’t like him and say he’s not black enough. If he goes with blacks, whites say, ‘He’s not the guy we thought he was.’ So he’s a bound man.

David Broder says:

Steele writes that "the Sixties stigmatized white Americans with the racial sins of the past -- with the bigotry and hypocrisy that countenanced slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Now, to win back moral authority, whites -- and especially American institutions -- must prove the negative: that they are not racist. In other words, white America has become a keen market for racial innocence."

Steele likens Obama's success to the fame and fortune won by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But the earliest of the crossover heroes he calls "iconic Negroes" was Sidney Poitier.

And it reminded me that in his political biography of Obama, author David Mendell reported the reaction of a focus group of liberal, North Shore (Chicago area) female voters, middle-aged and elderly, when shown a videotape of Obama speaking in his 2004 Senate campaign. Asked whom Obama reminded them of, the answer was "Sidney Poitier." No wonder Hillary Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, is worried by The Post's report that Obama has tied Clinton among female voters in Iowa.

But while all of the others mentioned by Steele were entertainers of one kind or another, Obama is the first to carry the "masking" technique of the "iconic Negro" into the realm of politics.

Steele contrasts Obama with "challenger" types such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, whose appeal was strictly within the black community and who were seen as threats to the Democratic establishment.

Steele, who shares with Obama the lineage of having a white mother and a black father, writes sympathetically of the pressures that drove both sons to choose to live their lives as blacks while operating in largely white institutions.

"The problem here for Barack, of course, is that his racial identity commits him to a manipulation of the society he seeks to lead," Steele writes. "To 'be black,' he has to exaggerate black victimization in America. . . . Worse, his identity will pressure him to see black difficulties -- achievement gaps, high illegitimacy rates, high crime rates, family collapse, and so on -- in the old framework of racial oppression."

Theoretically, being black ought to free him to take the opposite stands without being denounced with the R-word, just as it has for Shelby Steele.

But, as Obama explained at tireless length in his 1995 autobiography, the preppie from paradise had obsessed his whole life over being black enough, so I doubt if he will do more than make pro forma gestures and do something serious, like dump the Afrocentrist radical Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual adviser.

I've read countless articles mulling over whether he is black enough, but I've never seen one that asked why in the world the 7/8ths of the electorate who isn't black would want Obama to be black enough.

I mean, Mitt Romney, who is the second generation quintessence of mainstream corporate Republicanism (his father George Romney was CEO of a car company, a governor, and cabinet secretary), has to jump through hoops to prove that being Mormon doesn't mean he'll do something weird if he somehow gets elected, while Obama's racial religion gets a free pass. Most of the coverage of Obama assumes that everybody hopes he proves he's black enough, which strikes me as about 179 degrees the opposite of the truth.

Perhaps Obama's humiliating loss at the hands of black voters in the 2000 Congressional primary helped him grow up and get over his obsession with his missing Kenyan father, but, as far as I know, nobody has ever directly and asked him about whether he's stopped obsessing over being black enough.

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

Brad DeLong versus Charles Murray

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong claims:

"If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings--say $200,000 a year--to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000."

To justify this claim, he cites a Rube Goldberg formula from a multiple regression study that I'll leave to you to ponder.

This is a good example of how complex model-building can wind up in the ditch without the authors or readers noticing where things went wrong. It's reminiscent of the baseball statistical analysis battles of the early 1980s between proponents of all-encompassing models like Pete Palmer and advocates of simpler studies like Bill James.

As a Bill James-style study of the impact of IQ on income, Charles Murray's 1997 follow-up to The Bell Curve remains stunning in its simplicity and power. Murray utilized an insight dreamed up by Sanders Korenman of the City University of New York and Christopher Winship of Harvard: "Compare siblings who have grown up in the same home, and with the same parents, but who have different IQs."

This means that we are comparing pairs with less genetic diversity than typical pairs of strangers, and with very similar "shared environments." (They may well differ in the mysterious "unshared environments" of random bumps on the head or whatever.)

Murray once again used the federal government's National Longitudinal Study of Youth that has been following 12,000 people (and their children!) since 1979. In 1980, the Department of Defense paid to have all of them take the military's AFQT IQ test.

The results look much different than Dr. DeLong would wish you to believe. Murray reported in the London Times in 1997 on his study of sibling pairs in the NLSY:

"To make the analysis as unambiguous as possible, I have limited my sample to brothers and sisters whose parents are in the top 75 per cent of American earners, with a family income in 1978 averaging 40,000 (in today's money) [all figures in the London Times article were in British pounds, but the exchange rate was different then, so just think of the incomes as comparative figures.]

"Families living in poverty, or even close to it, have been excluded. The parents in my sample also stayed together for at least the first seven years of the younger sibling's life."

In other words, this sample represents a utopian America where no child is poor, no child is illegitimate, and even divorce is limited. So, how much income inequality does this model America generate in the next generation?

"Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of 90-110, a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs."

So, the Brights had a median IQ of 117, the Normals 100, and the Dulls 83. The differences are a little over one standard deviation (15 points).

"How much difference did IQ make? Earned income is a good place to begin. In 1993, when we took our most recent look at them, members of the sample were aged 28-36. That year, the bright siblings earned almost double the average of the dull: 22,400 compared to 11,800. The normals were in the middle, averaging 16,800."

So, the Brights had incomes 33% higher than the Normals, and the Normals had incomes 42% higher than the Dulls. (It would be interesting to know if Normals with Bright siblings differed from Normals with Dull siblings.)

"These differences are sizable in themselves. They translate into even more drastic differences at the extremes. Suppose we take a salary of 50,000 or more as a sign that someone is an economic success. A bright sibling was six-and-a-half times more likely to have reached that level than one of the dull. Or we may turn to the other extreme, poverty: the dull sibling was five times more likely to fall below the American poverty line than one of the bright.

"Equality of opportunity did not result in anything like equality of outcome. Another poverty statistic should also give egalitarians food for thought: despite being blessed by an abundance of opportunity, 16.3% of the dull siblings were below the poverty line in 1993. This was slightly higher than America's national poverty rate of 15.1%.

"...The young people in our selected sample came from families that were overwhelmingly likely to support college enthusiastically and have the financial means to help. Yet while 56% of the bright obtained university degrees, this was achieved by only 21% of the normals and a minuscule 2% of the dulls. Parents will have been uniformly supportive, but children are not uniformly able.

"The differences among the siblings go far beyond income. Marriage and children offer the most vivid example. Similar proportions of siblings married, whether normal, bright or dull - but the divorce rate was markedly higher among the dull than among the normal or bright, even after taking length of marriage into account. Demographers will find it gloomily interesting that the average age at which women had their first birth was almost four years younger for the dull siblings than for the bright ones, while the number of children born to dull women averaged 1.9, half a child more than for either the normal or the bright.

"Most striking of all were the different illegitimacy rates. Of all the first-born children of the normals, 21% were born out of wedlock , about a third lower than the figure for the United States as a whole, presumably reflecting the advantaged backgrounds from which the sibling sample was drawn. Their bright siblings were much lower still, with less than 10% of their babies born illegitimate. Meanwhile, 45% of the first-born of the dull siblings were born outside of marriage."

This data can be found in tabular form at the bottom of Wikipedia's "Bell Curve" article.

Murray ends his "IQ and Economic Success" paper like this:

"People of different political viewpoints may legitimately respond to this presentation with policy prescriptions that are in polar opposition. In many ways, the Left has the easier task. These data are tailor-made for the conclusion that a Rawlsian redistributive state is the only answer. For its part, the Right must state forthrightly why it thinks that a free society that tolerates large differences in outcomes is preferable to an authoritarian society that reduces them. But though the answers may be different for those of competing political persuasions, the challenge is common to all. It is time for policy analysts to stop avoiding the reality of natural inequality, a reality that neither equalization of opportunity nor a freer society will circumvent."

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

November 26, 2007

Sen. Trent Lott quitting -- Gotta be more to the story, right?

The guy just got re-elected, he's GOP Whip in the Senate, and now he's resigning.

Well, when something weird is going on with a Republican politician, the automatic Google search is:

[politician's name] gay

How big a role do you think blackmail plays in politics these days? If you had a list of all the gay Republicans, plus incriminating photos of them, how much power could you wield in Washington?

In the comments, Tommy points to a story saying:

"So, aides said, the senator decided to leave by year’s end to circumvent new lobbying rules — instituted by Congress this year and effective in 2008 — that that would bar members from lobbying their colleagues after two years. The so-called “revolving door” policy in effect now keeps former members from lobbying their colleagues for one year. The changes were made in the wake of the scandal surrounding former lobbyist Jack Abramoff."

So, perhaps Lott isn't resigning over being with a male whore. Instead, he wants to be a male whore (lobbyist division).

My new VDARE.com column on immigration and fertility

My new VDARE.com column appears in two sections today. Start reading here.

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

November 25, 2007

The NYT's Idiocratic Interviewer: Deborah Solomon

Deborah Solomon has established a popular weekly feature in the New York Times in which she snarkily interviews somebody much smarter than herself. The secret to her success: being ignorant and surly. Here's part of her interview with Umberto Eco (with Solomon in boldface):

Q: Although you’re known best as the author of the highbrow murder mystery “The Name of the Rose,” you’re also a prolific political commentator whose essays have now been collected in a book, “Turning Back the Clock,” in which you warn against the dangers of “media populism.” How would you define that term? Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.

Much of your book is an assault on Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy who used his media empire to assist his political ends. From ’94 to ’95, and from 2001 to 2006, Berlusconi was the richest man in Italy, the prime minister, the owner of three TV channels and controller of the three state channels. He is a phenomenon that could happen and is maybe happening in other countries. And the mechanism will be the same. ...

So why would any country besides Italy be at risk of having the media takeover you describe?

Putin has been imitating Berlusconi's path in Russia, and Chavez has been trying, less effectively, to do something similar in Venezuela.

But that's not what caught my eye. Instead, the great bit is how Eco's answer sets Solomon off on an exchange that Fred Willard would be proud to have improvised in a Christopher Guest comedy in one of his roles as a smugly clueless media personality. Eco answers:

One of the reasons why foreigners are so interested in the Italian case is that Italy was in the last century a laboratory. It started with the Futurists. Their manifesto was in 1909. Then fascism — it was tested in the Italian laboratory and then it migrated to Spain, to the Balkans, to Germany.

Are you saying that Germany got the idea of fascism from Italy? Oh, certainly. According to what the historians say, it is so.

Maybe just the Italian historians. If you don’t like it, don’t tell it. I am indifferent.

You’re saying that Italy was a trendsetter in both fashion — or art — and fascism? Yes, O.K., why not?

Earth to Deborah Solomon: trust Umberto Eco, the Italian polymath born in 1932, on this, not your own store of knowledge. See, there was this guy named Mussolini. Hard as it may be to believe, he came (as the narrator of the Time Masheen ride in "Idiocracy" says) before "the year 1939 when Charlie Chaplin and his nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world... But then an even greater force emerged, the U.N. [pronounced "un"] and the U.N. un-nazied the world - forever."

Eco goes on to correct Solomon's somewhat less Idiocratic misapprehension of which of his bestsellers was the inspiration for The Da Vinci Code:

I am wondering if you read Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code,” which some critics see as the pop version of your “Name of the Rose.” I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” which is about people who start believing in occult stuff.

But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel. No, in “Foucault’s Pendulum” I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.

Here's my 2006 posting on "The Da Vinci Code versus Foucault's Pendulum."

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

African DNA testing services

In the NYT, a story on the frustrations that African-Americans are experiencing with DNA ancestry testing services:

DNA Tests Find Branches but Few Roots

By RON NIXON

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., whose PBS special “African American Lives” explores the ancestry of famous African-Americans using DNA testing, has done more than anyone to help popularize such tests and companies that offer them. But recently this Harvard professor has become one of the industry’s critics.

Mr. Gates says his concerns date back to 2000, when a company told him his maternal ancestry could most likely be traced back to Egypt, probably to the Nubian ethnic group. Five years later, however, a test by a second company startled him. It concluded that his maternal ancestors were not Nubian or even African, but most likely European.

Why the completely different results? Mr. Gates said the first company never told him he had multiple genetic matches, most of them in Europe. “They told me what they thought I wanted to hear,” Mr. Gates said.

Telling Gates his ancestors haled from Nubia, on the upper Nile, was a particularly clever scam for the first company since Gates is about the color of a Nubian (thus obviating the need for Gates to have European ancestors), and Gates made a PBS documentary series called "Wonders of the African World," in which he took a camera crew around Africa looking for ancient ruins, and not finding all that many. In general, ancient Africans didn't seem to see much point in slaving in the hot sun to put up some big structure that tourists would someday be impressed with.

But Nubia has lots of cool looking pyramids, temples, and sculptures, complete with an undeciphered written language, at Jebel Barkal, Kush, and Meroe, and conquered Egypt and ruled as the 25th Egyptian Dynasty.

How exactly Gates' ancestors were supposed to get from Nubia (mostly in northern Sudan) to America wasn't explained, but that's all part of the romance of genealogy.

The article goes on to point out that customers' frustrations come not just from finding out that they had white ancestors, (especially in the direct male line, which Y-chromosome tests study), which reputable services warn about upfront, but also in pinning down just where in Africa their direct line male or female line (mitochondrial DNA test) ancestors came from.

From a genetic point of view, studying your direct male or female line ancestors (left or right edges of your family tree) is fairly pointless, since you only get from them, rather than from all your other ancestors, your small Y-chromosome or your mitochondrial DNA (which is separate from the rest of your genome). The main body of your DNA gets reshuffled with each new generation, so even if you are directly descended from Charlemagne or Mansa Musa, king of the gold-rich medieval Mali empire (who was such a big tipper that his famous 14th Century pilgrimage to Mecca lowered the world price of gold), you probably didn't get any useful but distinctive gene variants from the great man himself.

Still, traditional genealogy hobbyists tend to focus upon the direct male line down which surnames are descended (my father's family tree begins with "X Seiler, patriot from Lucern, c. 1290-c.1340") as a way to give focus to the teeming multitudes of ancestors, so there's nothing more or less silly about using DNA to focus on male or female direct line ancestors.

The second, more subtle problem customers find with African DNA analysis is that minor mutations among Africans aren't all that indicative, at least yet, of where any individuals direct male or female line ancestors came from.

Bert Ely, a geneticist at the University of South Carolina, was a co-founder of the African-American DNA Roots Project in 2000, hoping to use DNA tests as a way to find connections between African-Americans and ethnic groups in Africa.

“I originally thought that the mitochondrial DNA test might be a good way for African-Americans to trace their country of origin,” Mr. Ely said. “Now I’m coming to the opposite conclusion.”

Last October, he matched the DNA sequences of 170 African-Americans against those of 3,725 people living in Africa. He found that most African-Americans had genetic similarities to numerous ethnic groups in Africa, making it impossible to match African-Americans with a single ethnic group, as some companies assert they can do.

Mr. Ely also published a paper in which he tried to determine whether the country of origin of native Africans could be found by using mitochondrial DNA tests. Several of the Africans in the study matched multiple ethnic groups. For example, DNA results for a person from Ghana provided genetic matches with people in 20 African countries.

You are always hearing about how Africans are supposedly the most genetically diverse people on earth, but that's true mostly of the more-or-less nonfunctional genes that population geneticists focus upon because they don't want their genealogies messed up by convergent evolution.

What this statement is actually saying is that current sub-Saharan Africans' ancestors didn't go through an Out-of-Africa bottleneck because they've always been in Africa.

On the other hand, a huge fraction of the ancestry of current Africans stems from the "Bantu expansion" of agriculturalists out of the Cameroon-Nigeria region starting several thousand years ago, displacing hunter-gatherers such as Bushmen. When the Dutch arrived at Cape Town in 1652, the Bantu, whose crops weren't acclimated for Mediterranean climate and higher latitudes, hadn't yet reached the bottom of the continent. There are still lots of exotic groups within sub-Saharan Africa, such as Bushmen, tall Dinkas and small Pygmies, but most of the regions from which African-Americans came from are fairly homogeneously populated by farming descendants of the Bantu expansion. So, there hasn't been much time for many local mutations to emerge.

Moreover, there are relatively few physical barriers to movement within Africa, which ranks with Australia as the flattest continent, so Africans have continued to wander about. While some regions are dependent upon rivers for agriculture, such as the inland Niger delta, Africans were less tied down by specific water sources than Middle Easterners, who tended to settle around rivers such as the Nile, Euphrates, and Jordan, or around springs, as is common in the Holy Land. So, there has been a certain amount of movement over time -- the rains fail in one place, so a group moves somewhere else. Perhaps because of the high disease burden, Africa was traditionally less densely populated than Europe or Asia, so land availability was less of a factor in creating a Malthusian trap than in Europe or Asia. Thus, it was easier to move about in Africa because other groups were less jealous in guarding their land than, say, the Romans or Chinese were.

Finally, sub-Saharan Africans tended not to exert such tight control over their womenfolk's fertility as Middle Easterners did.

The upshot is that it will take a lot more work to make African DNA analysis satisfyingly accurate for customers.

Paging Drs. Lynn and Vanhanen!

A report from the World Bank entitled "Education Quality and Economic Growth" begins:

"Schooling has not delivered fully on its promise as the driver of economic success. Expanding school attainment, at the center of most development strategies, has not guaranteed better economic conditions. What’s been missing is attention to the quality of education—ensuring that students actually learn. There is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population, rather than mere school enrollment, are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. And the magnitude of the challenge is clear—international comparisons reveal even larger deficits in cognitive skills than in school enrollment and attainment in developing countries."

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

November 24, 2007

The summit of the nerd pyramid

A reader writes:

Take a look at the group photo here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/248891/

These people, the core Linux kernel hackers, are among the very best programmers in the world. It is an absolutely ruthless international meritocracy. These people have no common employer (there are nearly as many different employers as the group has members).

IBM and Microsoft have comparable talent on the payroll, of course. But I doubt that you could trust an IBM or Microsoft group photo to so ruthlessly expose the demographic shape of that talent.

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

November 21, 2007

More on the Race-IQ brouhaha

Here's Will Saletan's third and last article at Slate. He advocates genetic engineering to equalize the races. I've always been skeptical about whether we have the wisdom to handle such power, and have been pleased that it appears to be farther off than I had assumed back in the 1990s. As I wrote in VDARE.com in 2005:

Through genetic selection and modification, we will soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Noah Millman responds to Saletan in detail at American Scene in The Sound of a Dam Breaking, with comments from John Derbyshire and Will Wilkinson.

At Cato Unbound, social scientist Eric Turkheimer writes:

“When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.”

Which raises the question, if Eric Turkheimer were ever to discover anything that would support race science realism, he would do what with it, burn it? Couch it in such high-flown philosophical language that you wouldn’t be able to figure out what he meant? Publish it while vigorously disapprobating himself?

Hasn’t he just wrecked his credibility as an objective scientist? Shouldn’t he be ashamed of that, rather than proud of it?

Turkheimer goes on:

“Why Race Science is Objectionable

“If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups?”

My observation over the last couple of decades has been, going back to Gould's Mismeasure of Man and Kamin, Lewontin, and Rose's Not In our Genes, that while most of the talk is about the white-black IQ gap, among those who take the lead in demonizing realists, most of their angst, anger, and underlying agendas are actually driven by concerns that the masses will learn about the Jewish-gentile IQ gap, which would cause them to pick up their torches and pitchforks and stage pogroms across America.

It's the kind of triple bankshot reasoning that intellectuals take seriously -- If James Watson is not allowed to mention race and IQ, then the process of discovering that Jews tend to be smarter than gentiles can't get underway! -- not realizing that 90% of the people who have never heard of James Watson roughly understand the reality already (e.g., listen to what arrested mafioso and rap stars say about which kind of lawyer they want).

Of course, quite a few of those demonized, such as Richard J. Herrnstein of The Bell Curve, are Jewish, too.

I'm reminded on one of the dozen general lessons Jacques Barzun has learned from a lifetime of study:

"An age ... is unified by one or to pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide."

As Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine pointed out in The Jewish Century in 2004, much of Western intellectual life since, say, The Communist Manifesto in 1848 has been driven by the pressing needs felt by a successful but vulnerable high IQ minority, and by the often-clashing remedies their many thinkers have proposed: e.g., Marxism, Freudianism, Randism, Boasism, Frankfurtism, Neoconism, Friedmanism, etc.

And progress was made -- Milton Friedman's theories were good for the Jews and the human race as a whole, at least compared to Karl Marx's. The early neocons did a lot of good work in the domestic social science arena and in foreign policy.

But you can't understand the world around you without paying attention to group differences in IQ, since they drive so much of what we see.

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

November 20, 2007

"The Thing"

In Hollywood, when all is said and done, more is said than done, but, apparently, John Carpenter's classic 1982 horror film "The Thing" is being remade by Battlestar Galactica screenwriter Ronald D. Moore.

All the movie versions, including the 1951 rendition, are based on the great 1938 sci-fi story "Who Goes There?" Written by John W. Campbell at age 28, it was his last major piece of fiction. After that, he concentrated solely upon editing Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the key vehicle in launching the Golden Age of Hard Science Fiction. In the summer of 1939 alone, Campbell published the first stories of (among others) Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

"Who Goes There?" is the story of American scientists holed up for the winter in a research station in Antarctica. They find an ancient spaceship buried under the ice and dig up a frozen body, which (foolishly) they allow to thaw. The alien wakes up and begins to eat people.

Ho-hum, right? But the thing has a peculiar talent: after he eats somebody, he can split into two and change himself into that person, physically and even mentally. Paranoia, carnage, and more paranoia ensue. If the alien(s) eat everybody at the station, they'll then eat the first supply plane pilot in the spring and take over the human race. How can you tell who is man and who is monster?

This helped inspire Heinlein's Puppet Masters and the film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Campbell had written the same idea at least once before, in a light-hearted story called "The Brain Eaters of Mars," but "Who Goes There?" was clearly a climactic effort for Campbell.

The Wikipedia page on Campbell offers a wild biographical theory about the origin of this concept in Campbell's youth:

"His mother, Dorothy (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an identical twin who visited them often and who disliked young John. John was unable to tell them apart and was frequently coldly rebuffed by the person he took to be his mother. ... As Sam Moskowitz has written about Campbell in his early critical study of science-fiction writers, "From the memories of his childhood he drew the most fearsome agony of the past: the doubts, the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering that the woman who looked so much like his mother was not who she seemed. Who goes there? Friend or foe?"[9]"

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

An insanely good data source

In our discussion of how to measure school effectiveness, many people had commented that it would be nice to have IQ scores for students as well as their achievement test scores.

I had forgotten that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running the National Longitudinal Study of Youth since 1979, and it's still going on, now into a second generation of children of women in the first study, so there is a nationally representative sample of thousands of people for whom we know both their IQs and their mom's IQs, along with a huge amount of detail about their lives and the lives of their mothers. As I wrote in VDARE.com last year:

In 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics established a nationally representative sample of about 13,000 young people born from 1957 to 1964. In 1980, the military paid to have the entire sample take its enlistment IQ test, the Armed Forces Qualification Test. In 1990, the NLSY methodically checked up on how they were doing in life. The military provided the data to Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein and it wound up as the centerpiece in the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve.

The NLSY is still going on. It has now even measured the IQs of 6209 children of women in the original panel—2557 of whom were born to black female panelists.

The social scientists keep interviewing the children born to the first generation participants, children who now range in age from new-borns into thirty-somethings, every two years. They typically had their IQs measured twice, first as pre-schoolers, then as 4th or 5th graders. Up through age 14, they were given a school achievement test called the Peabody Individual Achievement Test, and a lot of characteristics were collected about the schools they attended, such as (I believe) phonics versus whole word reading instruction. Here's the official write-up on what info has been collected on the children.

The sample sizes could be large enough to explore the major issue of how good a job California has been doing fostering achievement among public school students compared to the rest of the country.

The data is free and available to the public from here (except for the children's zip codes, which are only available to non-creepy types).

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

The Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World


Esquire has a nifty feature on the Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World, including my favorite, the Giant Libyan Fist Crushing the U.S. Fighter Plane.

And then there's the statue of the late dictator of the Congo, Laurent Kabila, one Big Man who wasn't ashamed to look big.

But, how did they overlook North Korea's Hotel of Doom?

This Pyongyang beauty is 1083-feet-tall, 105 stories, 3000 rooms, and unfinished because it's structurally unsafe.

The North Koreans have removed it from all maps because its failure has brought shame upon the nation, but it still casts its vast, malevolent shadow over much of the low-lying capital.

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

November 19, 2007

More from Audacious Epigone on how well schools are doing

Is this the best ranking yet available of how the states differ in how good a job their public schools are doing?

RankStateWhites' relative NAEP
improvement from 4th
grade to 8th (St.Dev.)
1.Montana.93
2.North Dakota.84
3.Maryland.71
4.Oregon.67
5.Idaho.57
6.Dept. of Defense
.55
7.Texas.54
8.Massachusetts.53
9.South Dakota.50
10.Kentucky.50
11.Tennessee.49
12.Maine.49
13.Vermont.45
14.Nebraska.38
15.Kansas.35
16.Arizona.34
17.Alaska.34
18.Ohio.33
19.Pennsylvania.26
20.Oklahoma.24
21.Colorado.21
22.Nevada.19
23.New Mexico.13
24.Wisconsin.09
25.Alabama.08
26.Georgia.08
27.Washington

.07

28.Minnesota.04
29.Utah.04
30.Indiana.03
31.Missouri.02
32.Iowa(.02)
33.New Jersey(.06)
34.Wyoming(.07)
35.Arkansas(.11)
36.Rhode Island(.17)
37.Virginia(.21)
38.Delaware(.29)
39.Illinois(.33)
40.Mississippi(.36)
41.South Carolina(.40)
42.California(.45)
43.New Hampshire(.56)
44.Florida(.73)
45.Hawaii(.75)
46.Louisiana(.81)
47.New York(.89)
48.West Virginia(1.10)
49.North Carolina(1.18)
50.Michigan(1.18)
51.Connecticut(1.33)

Over the years, I've been frustrated by how everybody uses the absolute test scores of students to evaluate how good a job a school is doing: "You'll get a great education at Harvard because the average SAT score there is 1500!" Yes, but that's what they got in high school before Harvard got its mitts on them. In truth, nobody has much of an idea whether Harvard is doing a better or worse job than, say, Cal State Dominguez Hills at helping its students live up to their individual potential.

Similarly, I often hear people assume that the principal at, say, Beverly Hills H.S. is doing a good job because test scores are high there, while the principal at say, Compton Dominguez must be doing badly because scores are low. That's quite unfair.

Absolute test scores for public schools are so dominated by demographics that the results are notoriously boring and depressing.

The state of California attempts to deal with this problem by giving two Academic Performance Index scores to each public school, one absolute and one relative to "similar schools."

But I've always wanted to look at how much "value added" schools provide.

Earlier, Audacious Epigone tried to figure out from the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math test results how much value different state educational systems are adding. He compared, across states, performance by 4th graders in 2003 vs. performance by 8th graders in 2007 on the NAEP.

That's a pretty clean comparison (for example, if one state has had a policy of discouraging Special Ed kids from taking the NAEP and another doesn't it, the differences shouldn't affect the relative change over time, unlike the usual absolute comparisons).

But what if there is a big demographic shift going on, such as in states with a dramatic Hispanic influx? That would distort the numbers.

So now, in the table above, he's looking at just the change in performance from 4th to 8th grade among non-Hispanic white students in order to reduce the impact of demographic change and make for even more of an apples to apples comparison.

(This analysis could also be done for blacks and for Hispanics, but not for all 50 states because of inadequate sample sizes of minorities in, say, Montana or Vermont.)

The results are quite striking. In the best state, Montana's white students did almost a standard deviation better as 8th graders in 2007 than they (using the term "they" roughly) did as 4th graders in 2003 relative to the rest of the country. In contrast, in the worst state, Connecticut's white students' change from 4th to 8th grade was one and a third standard deviations worse than the national average, relatively speaking.

That's more than a two standard deviation difference between #1 and #50. These are such large differences that I'm hesitant to present the numbers, but maybe somebody out there can help us check them out.

Clearly, there is some demographic change from 4th grade in 2003 to 8th grade in 2007 still showing up in the data. Perhaps the top white students in Connecticut (last on the list) are more likely than in typical states to leave the public schools for elite prep schools starting in 7th grade? (Maybe not -- most of the boarding schools in that state famous for boarding schools are 9-12).

In general, the states at the top of the list tend to be less demographically diverse than those at the bottom, although there are obvious exceptions, such as West Virginia doing quite badly.

Still, the sample sizes are impressively large: 196,000 for public school 4th graders (across all races) and 164,000 for 8th graders or around 5-6% of all students in those two grades. So the typical state is represented by roughly 2,000 white 4th graders and 2,000 white 8th graders. So, there are probably close to 1,000 whites in each grade at minimum for just about every state. (D.C., though, is excluded because there are so few whites in its public school system.) The two superstates, California and Texas, have extra-large samples of at least 10,000 students of all races in each 4th grade sample, so the number of whites there are adequate, yet they differ by about a standard deviation.

Part of the results are no doubt methodological noise. Some states might have switched to more upscale schools where the test is administered rom 2003 to 2007 to make themselves look better. Or, for example,the NAEPs are administered during a window from January to March, so if a state gave its 4th graders the test in March in 2003 and its 8th graders the test in January in 2007, it would be cheating itself of two months of maturation vs. the national norm.

On the other hand, there would be one obvious way to cheat: give a bad education from K-3 to depress 4th grade scores, then start to do your best to teach kids a lot once they take the NAEP in 4th grade so you can score high on the 8th grade test.

Still, it's unlikely that anybody has tried to game this particular analysis simply because I don't think anybody has ever thought of this analysis before.

Just looking at the table, I don't see any obvious demographic pattern explaining why, for example, Vermont would be in 13th place a standard deviation ahead of New Hampshire in 43rd place. Or why are Maryland's whites (3rd place) two standard deviations ahead of Connecticut's whites (50th place)? Both have affluent, moderately liberal, well-educated white populations. Perhaps we really are approaching the Holy Grail of a measure of educational effectiveness?

Normally, when I look at a table of data, I can figure out what's driving the rankings. Here, though, I can't. That could be good news - I really don't know much of anything about pubic school quality across the country apart from demographics (other than a vague impression from the media that Texas is better than California), so the fact that the results look pretty random could mean that we are looking at actual differences in public school effectiveness. The bad news is that the results could also look random because they are pretty random due to lots of different kinds of noise.

Any suggestions you might have for torture testing the data would be appreciated.

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

Bravo for William Saletan in Slate

William Saletan's defense of James Watson in MSM Slate (owned by the Washington Post) is turning out to be a three parter and he's not holding back. Today, he looks at the environmentalist attacks on hereditarian ideas and concludes:

"When I look at all the data, studies, and arguments, I see a prima facie case for partial genetic influence. I don't see conclusive evidence either way in the adoption studies. I don't see closure of the racial IQ gap to single digits. And I see too much data that can't be reconciled with the surge or explained by current environmental theories. I hope the surge surprises me. But in case it doesn't, I want to start thinking about how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic difference, even between races. More on that tomorrow." [More]

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

November 18, 2007

Asimov's Revenge on O'Connell

Here's my new VDARE.com column.

It follows up on California school superintendent Jack O'Connell's attack on Mean White Lady schoolteacher that Nanette Asimov broke in the San Francisco Chronicle a week ago. By the way, although I titled my blog's extract from her article "Beyond Parody," that shouldn't be taken as criticism of her story, which is a model of giving a bloviating politician enough rope to hang himself.

Here's an excerpt from my new column:

Earlier, Nanette Asimov reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell's initiative to close the racial achievement gap:

"He offered the example of black children who learn at church that it's good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous. But doing the same thing at school, where 72 percent of teachers are white and may be unfamiliar with such customs, will get them in trouble, he said.

"The achievement gap is 'absolutely, positively not genetic,' O'Connell said.’All kids can learn. I'm saying it's racial.'"

In other words, he is blaming the gap in part on white racist schoolteachers enforcing too much discipline in California's public schools.

O'Connell's statement caused a controversy, leading him to apologize … not to white schoolteachers, of course (there wasn't any media tumult over that), but to black churches.

After the conference, O'Connell kept up his attack on white teachers, telling the Los Angeles Times:

"O'Connell concurred, talking of 'a cultural bias that impedes instruction. Well-meaning, well-educated people can unintentionally be part of perpetuating institutional racism.' The nation's schooling system, he said, 'developed to educate white children and remains most advantageous to white children.'"

… Finally, O'Connell's implication that too much classroom discipline is holding NAM students down is just barking mad.

For example, Asimov (yes, she's the niece of science fiction great Isaac Asimov) pointedly reported in the SF Chronicle on the only session out of the 125 at O'Connell's conference where real high school students were asked what would help them:

"'If the room is quiet, I can work better—but it's not gonna happen,' said Nyrysha Belion, a 16-year-old junior at Mather Youth Academy in Sacramento County, a school for students referred for problems ranging from truancy to probation.

"She was answering a question posed by a moderator: 'What works best for you at school to help you succeed?'

"Simple, elusive quiet.

"Nyrysha said if she wants to hear her teacher, she has to move away from the other students.’Half our teachers don't like to talk because no one listens.'"

After five years of Jack O'Connell as head educrat, California nearly hit rock bottom on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. California students' reading scores are horrible, with the state ranking 48th out of 50 states in 4th grade reading and 49th in 8th grade reading.

But the performance of California, home to Silicon Valley, in that universal language, mathematics, may be even more disturbing: 47th in 4th grade math, 46th in 8th grade math.

California's dim future is mostly not O'Connell's fault. The primary culprit is "demographic change"—i.e., immigration.

I suspect that the Superintendent is babbling insane nonsense because he's terrified of blurting out what he suspects is the real reason for the gap…and finding himself Watsoned out of his precious political career.

But, unfortunately, as Richard Weaver pointed out long ago, ideas have consequences …no matter how stupid the ideas are. O'Connell's ridiculous rationalizations have taken on bureaucratic momentum. He hired Glenn Singleton, a black professional diversicrat, as his racial sensitivity consultant and wants to subject white public school teachers to Singleton's system of Maoist-style self-criticism sessions (Singleton calls them "Courageous Conversations") about "white privilege."

The last thing California public schools need is for O'Connell and Singleton to wage a Cultural Revolution from above against school discipline. That would tell NAM students, in effect, to play the race card even more than they do now when they get in trouble. [MORE]

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

A Watson Defender

More than a little too late, but, still, good for William Saletan, the "Human Nature" columnist for Slate, for gearing up his courage to become one of the few James Watson defenders:

Created Equal

Race, genes, and intelligence.

From: William Saletan
Subject: Liberal creationism


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

-- Declaration of Independence

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced nto retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."

I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating "supposedly superior intellects," "eliminating the weak," "paralyzing the hope of reform," jeopardizing "the doctrine of brotherhood," and undermining "the sympathetic activities of a civilized society."

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals. [More]

As G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1922 in Eugenics and Other Evils:

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal.

Also, good for Saletan for showing some sympathy for William Jennings Bryan.

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