why human biodiversity is true…and why jason richwine is right

human biodiversity — the set of biological and genetic differences between (and within) groups — is true because The Theory of Evolution is true, and since The Theory of Evolution is true, human biodiversity must be the case. (of course, The Theory of Evolution might be wrong. if so, everyone will have to head back to the drawing boards. but all the scientific indications are that The Theory is correct, so now it’s simply a matter of working out all the details.)

most of the hysteria surrounding jason richwine’s crimethink (i.e. that hispanics have a lower average iq than whites) is coming from the politically correct chattering classes — most of them on the left of course, but there are plenty of examples to be found on the right as well. these are people who probably claim to be smart (and most of them are probably pretty smart, actually), modern, and well-read. many of them are likely skeptics and atheists, too. most all of them no doubt “believe” in evolution. the problem is that they don’t understand evolution.

if they did understand evolution, they would know that, thanks to natural selection, genetic differences between populations having had long histories of developing in different types of environments are inevitable. and if they understood anything at all about biology (perhaps i’m asking too much), they would know that dna contributes to (not determines) variance in all sorts of traits in humans and other animals like personality, physique, and yes … intelligence. frankly, we’d be one really WEIRD species if there were NO differences between us all! (the pc-crowd would all probably be horrified to learn that this evolution in humans has sped up in the past 10,000 or so years thanks to the hugely increasing sizes of our populations — i.e. the more individuals you have, the more mutations there’s gonna be, and the more on which natural selection can work.)

so, the fact that the average iq of hispanics has been found, by many psychometricians btw, to be lower than the average iq of whites — and, i’ll note, that the average iq of whites has been found to be lower than the average iq of east asians — should not be surprising. that is, that there are differences between the average iqs of these different groups should not be surprising. those are the sorts of differences you’re gonna get with EVOLUTION.

do these differences mean that some peoples should be considered superior or inferior to others? no. do these differences mean that some peoples should be treated differently before the law (or in our daily lives for that matter)? of course not. do these differences mean that we should give pause for thought when considering which groups — and, perhaps more importantly, how many of any one group — to allow to immigrate to our country? absolutely!

jason richwine was right in his ph.d. thesis to suggest that we ought to consider the natures of the peoples we allow to immigrate to the u.s. if we want america to remain american in nature, since different peoples are different by nature. the addition of large numbers of foreigners to any country changes the culture and the workings of that country. jason has apparently said that immigrants to the u.s. in the past — the irish and the italians, for instance — successfully assimilated, while hispanics will not. i would suggest that what, in fact, happened was that the irish and the italians, et al., while assimilating to a certain degree also changed the nature of the country. perhaps less so than tens of millions of hispanics will do, but they altered it from a mostly anglo-saxon nation into a more generic western european nation.

all mass immigration serves to alter recipient nations to some degree or another. even the slightest bit of rational thinking based upon an understanding of evolution would lead anyone to realize that is an inevitable consequence of human biodiversity.

sadly, we live in irrational times.
_____

see also:
- White v. Hispanic cognitive gap across 39 studies with 5,696,529 sample size from steve sailer.
- Generations of Exclusion from greg cochran via steve sailer.
- NYT: Dr. Richwine guilty of not being oblivious to the obvious from steve sailer.
- “Burn The Witch!” Heritage Foundation Scuttles Away From Jason Richwine — And The Cold Hard Facts – from john derbyshire.
- Christopher Jencks – “Who Should Get In?” – New York Review of Books from steve sailer.
- The Crucifixion of Jason Richwine – from michelle malkin.
- Jason Richwine and a bottle of Rich Wine from james thompson.
- Jason Richwine’s Racial Theories Are Nothing New @the atlantic.
- The IQ Test @slate.

further reading on human biodiversity:
- jayman’s hbd fundamentals
- hbd bibliography

update: see also “to disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies”

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linkfest – 02/25/13

Natural selection acts to maintain diversity between Out of Africa and sub-Saharan African populations in genes related to neurological processes and brain development – aapa abstract @race/history/evolution notes.

Hispanic Genomic Diversity, Part I: European, African, and Amerindian Admixtures and the Taíno ‘Extinction’ Controversy – “This post deals with the variance in European, African, and Amerindian/Taíno admixture in five of the twenty Hispanic subgroups….” – from nelson!

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past – “Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending even suggest that human evolution as a whole has, on the contrary, accelerated over the last several thousand years, and they also believe that relatively isolated groups of people, such as Africans and North Americans, are subject to differing selection. That leads to the somewhat uncomfortable suggestion that such groups might be evolving in different directions—a controversial notion to say the least.” – i dunno why that suggestion should be uncomfortable, but i guess it is. -?- see also steve sailer.

Predictable evolution trumps randomness of mutations – “Separate bacteria populations may respond to environmental changes in identical ways.”

Mediterranean Diet Cuts Heart Disease Risk – IN MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLE! – “Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet was powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.” – *facepalm*

Where Men See White, Women See Ecru – “Neuroscientists prove what we always suspected: the two sexes see the world differently” – i love ecru!

Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered – FOXP2 gene. and an objection: The “Language” Gene and Women’s Wagging Tongues.

Bone Marrow Transplants: When Race Is an Issue – via hbd biblography.

“Know Thyself” Is A Lot To Ask

Low mobility associated with inherited ability is no social tragedy – from gregory clark, via jayman.

The sociology of dysgenia – “Eugenics is a great idea, and perhaps it’s not as complex as I make it to be here. But the fact remains that for all we speculate, we know very, very little about it.” – from spandrell. via foseti.

Modern sub-fertility may be a pathologically slow life history, triggered by a supernormal stimulus of modernity – from bruce charlton. see also mangan and malcolm pollack.

The Riddle of the Human Species – multilevel selection argumentation from e.o. wilson. i like the opening paragraphs very much. (^_^)

Can India’s Democracy Defeat Corruption? – “Of course, big corruption scandals are commonplace in the developing world (and the developed world, for that matter). Yet the scale and relative peacefulness of the corruption debate in India may be unprecedented…. And although the Indian political system is imperfect in ways too numerous to list here, the central authorities most of the time do respect free speech and free press. Civil society works. Freedom of association works….”

Study finds maize in diets of people in coastal Peru dates to 5,000 years ago – “Up until now, the prevailing theory was that marine resources, not agriculture and corn, provided the economic engine behind the development of civilization in the Andean region of Peru.”

Fun With HBD: Racial Differences in Women’s Asses – (~_^)

How Christianity stopped Anglo-Saxon England eating horsemeat: Church officials claimed it was ‘pagan’ food

bonus: The Big Question – “Q: What day most changed the course of history?” – i like freeman dyson’s response. (^_^)

bonus bonus: Dolphins Call Each Other By Name – “Bottlenose dolphins call out the specific names of loved ones when they become separated, a study finds. Other than humans, the dolphins are the only animals known to do this….”

bonus bonus bonus: The Meanest Girls at the Watering Hole – behavioral evidence suggests that hierarchy is heriditary in elephants.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Grey langurs spotted treating a wild dog to a grooming session in India

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: How male alligators have PERMANENTLY erect penises which they keep hidden inside their bodies

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Most zombie ant photographs are upside down

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The 15th-Century Equivalent of Your Cat Walking on Your Keyboard – meow!

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linkfest – 12/02/12

Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase – “In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, researchers estimated the age of more than one million variants, or changes to our DNA code, found across human populations. The vast majority proved to be quite young…. ‘Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so….’ said geneticist Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, co-author of the Nov. 28 Nature study. ‘We have a repository of all this new variation for humanity to use as a substrate. In a way, we’re more evolvable now than at any time in our history.’“ – i think greg cochran and henry harpending are now permitted to say — “we told you so!” — as much as they like and as often as they like. even to the point when it becomes annoying. (~_^) — see also: Too Much Diversity.

The Dark Enlightenment – “‘The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs….’” – @mangan’s. see also malcolm pollack. (come to the dark side … we have cookies!)

Origins of English Individualism – from peter frost. (h/t jayman and bob!) – see also “mating patterns in europe series” in left-hand column below ↓, particularly the section on the english (you might start with this one), and … oh … pretty much every post on this blog for the last year and a half. (~_^)

Native Americans and Northern Europeans more closely related than previously thought – “According to Nick Patterson, first author of the report, ‘There is a genetic link between the paleolithic population of Europe and modern Native Americans. The evidence is that the population that crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into the Americas more than 15,000 years ago was likely related to the ancient population of Europe.’” – see also peter frost.

Expectations and reality: a window into the liberal-conservative baby gap – “Genotypically, White Americans are getting more conservative, and the future will come to be dominated them (and the non-White groups in the country).” – from jayman.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves – from malcolm pollack.

Ancient poo gives clues to human impact on environment – “Researchers were able to use prehistoric poo to establish the presence and size of a population dating back over 7,000 years.”

No, 10,000 Hours of Practice Won’t Make You An Expert — gladwell debunked in fifty words or less. — see also “you, too, can have…” series.

Odd Reason Some Guys Have Fewer Sex Partners – “Men who were born without a sense of smell report having far fewer sexual partners than other men do….”

Prenatal exposure to testosterone leads to verbal aggressive behavior – “Relative length of adults’ fingers an indicator of verbal aggression.” – r2d2 2d:4d stuff.

The geography of selfishness: Regional interest in Black Friday – from agnostic.

The Autism Advantage

Body language, not facial expressions, broadcasts what’s happening to us – “‘[W]hen emotions become extremely intense, the difference between positive and negative facial expression blurs.’”

Why do humans have so little body hair? – from the straight dope.

bonus: Quiz: Can you pick out the “white Hispanic” amidst all the Hispanic Hispanics? – from steve sailer. heh.

bonus bonus: Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

bonus bonus bonus: Grand Canyon ’64 million years older than previously thought’

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what pinker missed

human biodiversity.

i’ve pretty much finished reading pinker’s The Better Angels — i’ll admit to you right now that i skimmed chapter 8, “Inner Demons,” so i’ll have to go back and give that a proper read — and i’ll also say right now that it’s an amazing book! definitely worth a (full and attentive!) read. and i agree with steve sailer that pinker is really, really thorough and covers everything you could imagine that might be related to violence.

except human biodiversity.

pinker is obviously no blank slater, so he knows that evolution has shaped human behavior. but, at least as far as i could see, he doesn’t give much cred — not in this book anyway — to the fact that different populations might differ in average behavioral patterns including violence — differ because of their different evolutionary histories. recent evolutionary histories. pinker seems to be hooked on the idea of human nature rather than human natures, and that’s too bad.

he does mention cochran and harpending’s ideas about human evolution accelerating since the start of the agricultural revolution (’cause there’s more people!) — and he brings up the “warrior gene” (MAO-A) and gregory clark’s work — but then he sets them aside saying [kindle locations 13807-13817]:

“So while recent biological evolution may, in theory, have tweaked our inclinations toward violence and nonviolence, we have no good evidence that it actually has. At the same time, we do have good evidence for changes that could not possibly be genetic, because they unfolded on time scales that are too rapid to be explained by natural selection, even with the new understanding of how recently it has acted. The abolition of slavery and cruel punishments during the Humanitarian Revolution; the reduction of violence against minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals during the Rights Revolutions; and the plummeting of war and genocide during the Long Peace and the New Peace, all unfolded over a span of decades or even years, sometimes within a single generation. A particularly dramatic decline is the near-halving of the homicide rate during the Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s. The decay rate of that decline, around 7 percent a year, is powerful enough to drag a measure of violence down to 1 percent of its original level over just two generations, all without the slightest change in gene frequencies. Since it is indisputable that cultural and social inputs can adjust the settings of our better angels (such as self-control and empathy) and thereby control our violent inclinations, we have the means to explain all the declines of violence without invoking recent biological evolution. At least for the time being, we have no need for that hypothesis.”

poppycock!

we aren’t talking about “time scales that are too rapid to be explained by natural selection.” pinker pointed out himself (referencing eisner) that the pacification of england (and a couple of other nw european countries) started as early as the 1300s — maybe even earlier — hard to know for sure ’cause the records don’t go back farther. (but, as jayman once said, the fact that we actually have records for england and these other european countries that go back as far as they do says something about those populations right there!)

the 1300s to pinker’s humanitarian revolution (basically the enlightenment) of the 1700s? that’s four hundred years right there — plenty of time for evolution to have happened (see also here for example [pdf]) — especially if the selection pressures for these more soft and squishy, as opposed to nasty and brutish, behaviors had been there. which i think were, thanks to the roman catholic church’s bizarre requirement that catholics outbreed — a practice that medieval nw europeans seem to have jumped upon with (comparatively) great enthusiasm (see “mating patterns in europe” series in left-hand column below ↓) — eventually anyway.

furthermore, while the anglo-saxons in england were still marrying their cousins in the 500-600s, to the dismay of st. augustine (the one who went to england), my guess is that their outbreeding project was probably well underway by the 800s thanks to pressure from the church and secular authorities (e.g. see first note here). definitely by 1000 to be really conservative. so the evolutionary time period we’re talking about is probably actually seven hundred, or even nine hundred, years long. p-l-e-n-t-y of time for natural selection to have worked its magic.

what were these selection pressures that resulted in nw europeans going all soft and squishy? well, because of the church’s various bans on close marriages (which were also backed by many nw european secular authorities), the degree of genetic similarity between close and extended family members in nw european populations was reduced, so inclusive fitness payoffs were similarly reduced for these populations. since there was no longer sooo much to be gained genetically by helping your second-cousin-once-removed, clans — and clannish behaviors — disappeared in england and other parts of nw europe. being successful in life — and, most importantly, reproduction — thus depended more on your alliances with neighbors and friends rather than your extended family. and it was these behavioral patterns — along with gregory clark’s bourgeois, middle class traits — that were increasingly selected for in nw medieval european populations. more and more over the period, it paid off less and less to be brutal and cruel to your unrelated neighbors — why would anybody cooperate with you if you were brutal and cruel to them? — so eventually nw medieval europeans chilled out. they became more individualistic — and universalistic in their thinking/sentiments. until — voilà! — we got the enlightenment. which DIDN’T happen anywhere else but in nw europe — where people had been outbreeding (relatively speaking) for several hundreds of years.

even if i’m wrong, which is impossible pretty likely, it remains a fact that this pacification process started in nw europe, really with the english, and not anywhere else in the world (except maybe in some pockets here and there). and THAT requires explaining — which i don’t think that any of pinker’s social, cultural or rational explanations do. why england? why nw europe? what was so different there?

previously: “violence around the world”

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linkfest – 08/12/12

Is corn the new milk? Evolutionarily speaking, that is. – “Corn, or maize, may have exerted natural selection on the human populations that first cultivated it.” – original research article: Evolutionary Responses to a Constructed Niche: Ancient Mesoamericans as a Model of Gene-Culture Coevolution.

New Fossils Indicate Early Branching of Human Family Tree – “The discovery of three new fossil specimens, announced Wednesday, is the most compelling evidence yet for multiple lines of evolution in our own genus, Homo, scientists said. The fossils showed that there were at least two contemporary Homo species, in addition to Homo erectus, living in East Africa as early as two million years ago.” – see also Fossils point to a big family for human ancestors.

Tree’s leaves genetically different from its roots – “Black cottonwood trees (Populus trichocarpa) can clone themselves to produce offspring that are connected to their parents by the same root system. Now, after the first genome-wide analysis of a tree, it turns out that the connected clones have many genetic differences, even between tissues from the top and bottom of a single tree…. ‘This could change the classic paradigm that evolution only happens in a population rather than at an individual level….’“

IQ Is A Social Construct Except When It Isn’t – “Stupid people are simply far, far more likely to be criminals than normal people.” – from anatoly.

We Thought Female Athletes Were Catching Up to Men, but They’re Not – “Across dozens of sports, women’s world speed records consistently fall 10 percent short of men’s records.” – the horror, the horror.

Study Reveals Anti-Conservative Discrimination Among Psychologists – “A significant number of social and personality psychologists have told researchers they would discriminate against conservatives in decisions about publishing, grant applications and hiring, according to a study published in the September issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.”

Wrongdoers Feel a ‘Cheater’s High’

Religiosity and crime – “[R]eligiosity reduces criminal involvement.” – from the inductivist.

Women and Bell Curves – “We have to understand that not only men and women are different as groups, there is also variance among them. People are different, and even though human societies assign different roles to each group, that often ignores biological variance.” – from spandrell via foseti.

Gender inequality in awarded research grants – oh, noes! – “[I]n our opinion, the most likely explanation for the difference in amounts awarded to women and men is that women are systematically less ambitious in the amounts of funding requested in their grant applications.” – oops!

bonus: African Grey Parrots Have the Reasoning Skills of 3-year-olds

bonus bonus: The Largest Ever 3D Map of the Universe – awwwwwwsome!

bonus bonus bonus: Science Proves Luke Skywalker Should Have Died In The Tauntaun’s Belly – hmpf. they’re obviously just missing some key parameter/s.

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