chickens … home … roost

today on both sides of the atlantic we’ve had a couple of positively shining examples of why it’s NOT a good idea to have all this mass immigration** to the west — especially from particularly violent places (see: chechnya, africa) — and doubly especially from particularly violent places where large parts of the population view us as the enemy, an assessment which frankly isn’t entirely wrong.

first, we’ve got a beheading and disemboweling of a soldier in london by a couple of black muslims — at least one of whom has a local london accent, btw:

“Terror at Woolwich barracks: Attacker tried to behead and disembowel British soldier”

“Terrorism returned to the streets of Britain today as a soldier was murdered by two suspected Islamists who attempted to behead and disembowel him as he left his barracks, in the first deadly attack since the 2005 London bombings.

“One of the suspected killers, who addressed an onlooker with a camera, said the pair had carried out the attack ‘because David Cameron, (the) British government sent troops in Arabic country’.

“As pedestrians stood close by the armed men, he went on: ‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,’ according to footage obtained by ITV News.

“The soldier was ambushed by the two men as he left the base in Woolwich, south-east London, who attacked him and then dragged his body into the middle of the road to pose for photographs while standing over him waving a machete and a gun, according to witnesses….”

you don’t get much more barbaric than hacking someone to death with a machete. and these guys were armed with handguns, so they specifically CHOSE to kill this unarmed soldier in the way that they did. to make a statement, presumably, but this is also often how they deal with their enemies “back in the old country” (or sweden).

no doubt they viewed a soldier as a legitimate target — a soldier who had actually served in iraq and afghanistan, btw — and it is a slightly less crazy choice than a random civilian — but NOT an unarmed soldier who is just walking down the street. that is just cowardly. and, again, the way they killed him was barbaric — and they had a cleaner option (i.e. they had guns). they preferred barbarism.

in the u.s., the plot thickens (as if it wasn’t already thick enough!) in the boston marathon bombings case:

Friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev shot dead by FBI after ‘pulling a knife as he prepared to sign a confession to 2011 triple homicide’

- Ibragim Todashev, 27, reportedly turned violent during an interview with an FBI agent
- He was being interviewed over his ties to Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev
- Todashev, from Chechnya, was shot dead by the agent just after midnight Wednesday
- He had reportedly confessed to the FBI that he played a role in a brutal triple slaying in the Boston area in 2011
- Todashev had met Tsarnaev while he was living in Boston and last spoke him about a week before the bombing
- He was arrested on May 4 in an unrelated incident after he knocked a man unconscious in a fight over a parking space

involvement in a triple homicide AND you beat a guy senseless in a fight over a parking space?! AND you pull a knife on some fbi agents?? wtf is wrong with you?

i’ll tell you what’s wrong with these people: human biodiversity. they all come from populations which are, on average, more violent than western populations. some of these people probably like the violence — they relish it. note that the elder tsarnaev brother as well as this ibragim todashev were both boxers. these people are quick to anger — and quick to act violently when they are angry.

we know that europeans have, for whatever reasons, become less violent on average since the medieval period. why that is remains open for debate, but it is a fact that cannot be denied. this pacification seems to have happened in other populations as well — japan, china, india. but, comparatively speaking, it has NOT really happened in places like sub-saharan africa, the arab world/middle east/north africa/pakistan/afghanistan, amongst certain tribal peoples of south america, etc.

westerners better wake the f*ck up soon to hbd and that different peoples are different and quit importing people from violent societies, otherwise these events are going to become much more common right here on our doorsteps.

this is not to say that some of these peoples don’t have legitimate grievances with us. sam francis was right about Why They Attack Us many years ago (he was right about a lot of things):

“[T]he blunt truth is that the United States has been at war for years — at least a decade, since we launched a war against Iraq in 1991, even though Iraq had done absolutely nothing to harm the United States or any American. Our bombing attacks on Iraq certainly caused civilian casualties, and if they were not deliberate, nobody beating the war drums at the time felt much regret for them. For ten years, we have maintained economic sanctions on Iraq that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and we have repeatedly bombed it whenever it failed to abide by standards we imposed on it.

“Under Bill Clinton, we again launched bombing raids against civilians — once against so-called ‘terrorist training camps’ supposedly under bin Laden’s control in Afghanistan and at the same time against a purported ‘chemical weapons factory’ in Sudan that almost certainly was no such thing….

“In all the buckets of media gabble about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, not once have I heard any journalist ask any expert the simple question, ‘Why did the terrorists attack us?’

“There is, of course, an implicit answer to the unasked question: It’s because the terrorists are ‘evil’; they ‘hate democracy’; they are ‘fanatics,’ ‘barbarians’ and ‘cowards.’ Those, of course, are answers that can satisfy only children. Some day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we started.

“Let us hear no more about how the ‘terrorists’ have ‘declared war on America….’

“The blunt and quite ugly truth is that the United States has been at war for years — that it started the war in the name of ‘spreading democracy,’ ‘building nations,’ ‘waging peace,’ ‘stopping aggression,’ ‘enforcing human rights,’ and all the other pious lies that warmongers always invoke to mask the truth, and that it continued the war simply to save a crook from political ruin. What is new is merely that this week, for the first time, the war we started came home — and all of a sudden, Americans don’t seem to care for it so much.”
_____

**although as steve sailer keeps pointing out, there are only one or two hundred chechens totally in the u.s., so apparently ANY amount of immigration from chechnya is a bad idea.

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we’re dumber than the victorians

or so woodley, te nijenhuisc, and murphy have concluded:

Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time

- Simple reaction time has slowed since 1889.
- Simple reaction time genetically correlates with g.
- Psychometric meta-analysis reveals a decline in g of − 1.23 points per decade.
- The decline between 1889 and 2004 is − 14.1 points.
- This is the first direct measurement of a probable dysgenic trend in IQ.

The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1884 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.23 IQ points per decade or fourteen IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.

interesting!

my first question, of course, would be: are they comparing like with like? the authors write:

“We take our general inclusion rules from the meta-analysis by Silverman (2010)…. Third, given that Galton’s sample was British the studies had to have been conducted in a Western country.”

ehhhh. but the demographics of western nations — especially the u.s. and the u.k. — have changed a lot from victorian days!

i especially started asking myself if they’ve compared like with like when i noticed in their table that the iqs of the finnish in the 1980s-90s — demographically still very much a white northern european in those decades — were pretty much the same as the victorians’ scores:

the two reaction time studies on the victorians were done by galton in the u.k. in 1884-1893 and someone named h.b. thompson in the u.s. in 1898-1900. galton’s study presumably included mostly white britons and perhaps some amount of ashkenazi jews. thompson’s study, which was conducted on university of chicago students, was almost certainly comprised of mostly white americans.

what about all the later studies? well, i don’t have access to most of them, but here’s what i found out about a couple of them (again see the table above):

- the 2002 study from the u.k. (rt=324): Effects of caffeine on mood and performance: a study of realistic consumption [pdf] – the subjects were 24 university of bristol students. now, in 2002 at least 10.5% of the university of bristol student population were non-whites, possibly more since the ethnicities of 17.8% of the student population were unknown. this is not really comparing like with like when at least 1 in 10 of the subjects was not white, unlike in galton’s or thompson’s studies. and, do we even know what the ethnic/racial backgrounds of the subjects in this study were? nope.

- the 1984–85 from the u.k. (rt=300): Age and Sex Differences in Reaction Time in Adulthood: Results From the United Kingdom Health and Lifestyle Survey [pdf] – the subjects in this study were drawn from the 1984-85 health and lifestyles survey. i don’t know for sure, but presumably this was meant to be a representative survey — representative of the population of the u.k. in the early 1980s, minorities were 4.2% of the u.k. population [pdf], so 4 out of every 100. and what about the presence of, say, southern europeans in the u.k. at the time? i have no idea, but clearly these things should be taken into account.

i dunno. this is a really neat study, and maybe woodley, et al., are on to something, but i’d like some reassurance that they’re looking at the same sorts of populations.
_____

see also:

- Simple reaction time: it is not what it used to be.

- Objective and direct evidence of ‘dysgenic’ decline in genetic ‘g’ (IQ) and Taking on-board that the Victorians were more intelligent than us and Intelligence declined one SD since Victorian times – why NOT? from bruce charlton!

- The Victorians were cleverer than us! and ORIGINAL PAPER: “A response to Prof Rabbitt – The Victorians were still cleverer than us” by Woodley, te Nijenhuis and Murphy and Can I have a reaction? @dr. james thompson’s blog!

- The Victorians were smarter than us, study suggests
- Were the Victorians cleverer than us?
- Victorian Era Brits Were Smarter Than Us

_{(note: comments do not require an email. sir francis galton.)}

practice makes you…

…better (except if you’re practicing all wrong!), not perfect — unless you’ve got talent:

Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?

Twenty years ago, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed that expert performance reflects a long period of deliberate practice rather than innate ability, or “talent”. Ericsson et al. found that elite musicians had accumulated thousands of hours more deliberate practice than less accomplished musicians, and concluded that their theoretical framework could provide “a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance” (p. 392). The deliberate practice view has since gained popularity as a theoretical account of expert performance, but here we show that deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research—chess and music. For researchers interested in advancing the science of expert performance, the task now is to develop and rigorously test theories that take into account as many potentially relevant explanatory constructs as possible.

don’t have access, but here are a couple of charts from the supplemental data:

Fig. 1. Average percentage of variance in chess performance explained by deliberate practice, correcting for measurement error variance. The light gray region represents reliable variance explained by deliberate practice; the dark gray region represents reliable variance not explained by deliberate practice.

Fig. 3. Average percentage of variance in music performance accounted for by deliberate practice, correcting for measurement error variance. The light gray region represents reliable variance explained by deliberate practice; the dark gray region represents reliable variance not explained by deliberate practice.

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a loaded question

when i gave a shot at analyzing the witch-hunt against jason richwine, i said that nearly all of the elements of a classic witch-hunt were present afaict, but i didn’t have an example of “use of the loaded question technique.”

now i’ve got one, provided by jason himself in his excellent article in (above all places!) the national review – “About That Dissertation”:

“I don’t apologize for any of my writing, but I deeply regret that it was used to hurt my friends and colleagues at Heritage. Seeing them struggle on account of me was the most painful aspect of the whole ordeal. I remember a particularly difficult moment when a Heritage spokesman went on Univision to defend the Heritage report. He explained, accurately, that I was just the number cruncher for the study. Here’s the question he was given by the host:

“‘So you’re telling me that you used the numbers from a man who has written that Hispanics have a low IQ and will have a low IQ for generations. So what makes you think, unless you agree with that premise, what makes you think that his numbers are sufficiently good in order for, for them to be included in your study?’

“How can anyone respond to a question as absurd as that one?”

exactly. and, of course, no one is meant to respond to such an absurd question. that’s the whole point.

anybody who puts a question like that to someone is doing so for the exact same reason that other witch-hunters pose loaded questions, for example these papua new guinean witch-hunters:

“Janet, you drank the blood from your husband, when are you going to give it back, so that our uncle can have his life again?”

the aim is simply to illustrate the “guilt” of the witch or crimethinker involved and to shut down rational discussion entirely (if rational discussion was ever an option in the first place).

witch-hunts — whether looking for “actual” witches or religious heretics or even political witch-hunts (and, yes, that includes the mccarthy hearings, too) — while they may vary in the particulars, are all fundamentally the same thing: a method of delineating the boundaries between the in-group and the out-group — between what is acceptable behavior and what is not. they are freakish events, and terrorizing, because they generally occur at moments of crises, so you never know when they’re going to rain down on your head (that’s what the historians/anthropologists have concluded anyway – see previous post and/or Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis, pgs. 114-121).

witch-hunts serve the same function as other normative rituals like weddings and funerals, superbowls and fraternity hazings: to demonstrate for everyone who’s IN and who’s OUT — and what you need to do to be IN. jason describes this perfectly in his article:

“The furor will soon pass. Mercifully, the media are starting to forget about me. But a certain amount of long-term damage to political discourse has been done. Every researcher who writes on public policy over the next few years will have a fresh and vivid memory of how easy it is to get in trouble with the media’s thought police, and how easy it is to become an instant pariah. Researchers will feel even more compelled to suppress unpopular evidence and arguments that should be part of an open discussion.“

yup.

the witch-hunt is just an emergency version of society’s bonding rituals. (note that they can obviously also be used and manipulated for political ends.) my question still is: what is this emergency that the politically correct crowd is feeling these days?

read jason’s entire piece here: “About That Dissertation.”

previously: “to disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies”

_{(note: comments do not require an email. d*mn witches!)}

twitter dodgeball

because we’ve all got to choose sides, apparently. (what’s being discussed in this tweet session.)

previously: “to disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies”

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ed west’s last post at the telegraph

ed west is no longer going to be blogging at the telegraph (nooooooooooooooo!). *sniff* =(

his final post is wonderful, though! go read it for yourselves! and don’t forget to read his book, too!

“Conservatives – depressing everyone since 500BC”

“One of the most telling comments David Cameron has ever made came last week when he accused some of his critics of being ‘pessimists’ for believing that he won’t get a deal in Europe.

“Of course we’re pessimists, we’re conservatives – that’s the whole point. Some see a glass half-full, some see a glass half-empty, we see the downfall of Western civilisation and the country going to the dogs. If you want cheery, happy people who think everything’s going to turn out like one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses drawings of heaven where the kids are lying in a field next to a moose, join the Liberal Democrats….

“Since the time of the Greeks, people have been coming up with schemes to create better societies that are hopelessly unrealistic, and from 1789 the human race has become hugely inventive at thinking of terrible ways to leave us all impoverished or dead, most of them based on the idea that humans are instinctively good. The European project is one such highly optimistic idea: just because every single attempt to overcome national identity in history has ended in miserable failure and bloodshed, that’s not to stop us trying again, eh, folks…?

“Conservatism may sound miserable, even misanthropic, but it only recognises that within the communities we live in, which are from an evolutionary point of view unnaturally large, there need to be firm rules to minimalise free-riding, violent conflict and economic disaster. The idea of evolutionary conservatism is to build a society that is as just, progressive, wealthy and happy as is possible within the boundaries of human nature.

“Evolution explains why people are unwilling to pool their resources with people unlike them, why men who are not expected to be providers will become hyper-masculine, why poor people are more hostile to welfare claimants than the rich are, why we’re more scared of terrorists and paedophiles than car drivers, and why things like the gender gap will never be eliminated (though social forces can reduce it)….”

previously: “the diversity illusion”

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human leukocyte antigen (hla) haplotypes and human biodiversity

over the past few months, commenter chris davies has left several interesting comments here on the blog about hla haplotypes (see here and here and here and here for example) — something about which, like so very many things, i know absolutely NOTHING.

i asked chris if he’d help alleviate my ignorance by writing a post on the topic, and he has graciously obliged (thanks, chris!). so, without further ado, here’s chris’ introduction to hla!:

An Introduction to HLA (Human Leukocyte Antigens)

I would like to thank HBD Chick, who recently asked me if I wanted to write a guest post here about Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA). I have been a reader of this blog for several months now, and I really enjoy it. This blog is among the most innovative of the HBD-related blogs out there and takes a completely different approach to the subject. So it is a pleasure to write a post here, as I don’t write a blog myself.

In the comments section on some posts here recently I have talked about ‘HLA haplotypes’. I have had an interest in HLA haplotypes for a few years, following discussions with a molecular biologist who writes (or rather wrote) in newsgroups including Usenet. But what are ‘HLA haplotypes’, and more importantly what is their usefulness or relevance to those of us with an interest in ‘HBD’?

‘HLA’ means Human Leukocyte Antigen. The HLA system is simply the name given to the human version of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC). MHC genes are found in most vertebrates, and this group of genes can be found on chromosome 6.

HLA genes are important in immune function and disease defence. There are three classes: Class I (A,B,C); Class II (DP, DM, DOA, DOB, DQ, DR); and Class III. All play different roles.

In addition to conferring resistance or susceptibility to various diseases and conditions (eg autoimmune diseases, such as type I diabetes), they are also vitally important in organ and bone marrow transplants. For example, if a donor is not a close enough match in terms of HLA, an organ could be rejected. Because diversity of HLAs in human populations is a part of disease resistance, it is very uncommon to find two unrelated individuals with identical HLA molecules at all loci.

In addition, it has been claimed that HLA may play a role in human mate selection through people’s perception of the odor of other people.

HLA haplotypes are like strings of HLA genes by chromosome, with one being inherited maternally and the other paternally. A multigene haplotype is a set of inherited alleles covering several genes, or gene-alleles. Common multigene haplotypes are generally the result of identity by descent from a common ancestor. As distance from the ancestor increases, chromosomal recombination causes multigene haplotypes to fragment.

An example of an HLA haplotype is shown below:

A*01:01 ; C*07:01 ; B*08:01 ; DRB1*03:01 ; DQA1*05:01 ; DQB1*02:01
[Which by serotyping, is more simply: A1-Cw7-B8-DR3-DQ2].

This particular haplotype btw is found at high frequency among people of North-West European descent, including Irish, British, Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians, and of course a high percentage of Americans and Australians. It is associated with autoimmune disorders like coeliac disease, and allergic diseases like hayfever and asthma.

In addition to medical use, HLA haplotypes can also be used as a means of tracing migrations in the human population as they are like a fingerprint of an event that has occurred in evolution.

So alongside Y Chromosome DNA and Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) markers, HLA haplotypes are useful tools for molecular anthropologists in determining evolutionary links between ancient and modern human populations. They also help to determine closeness of relationships between or within populations, and commonality of geographical origin between groups. Therefore patterns of migration and settlement can be traced, giving insight into how contemporary populations have formed and progressed over time.

Because the HLA system is under selection, diversity in HLA should be looked at in conjunction with other markers like Y-DNA and mtDNA in building a bigger picture when tracing migrations of modern humans.

However, HLA has several advantages over Y-DNA and mtDNA. mtDNA is often biased towards the founders in a core population and can show a punctuated distribution, while Y-DNA is biased more towards relatively recent migrations, and with both of these markers the effects of genetic drift are more rapid. With HLA there is intense heterozygous selection which works to preserve diversity.

Also with HLA, one tends not to see a punctuated distribution of haplotypes across geographical regions between groups, but rather one sees a fluidity of migrations tracing back to their original source population. Examples of this occur when one looks at diversity of HLA in northern Africa, which appears to be the source for a number of haplotypes that migrated into Europe in the Holocene. This picture is less clear from looking at mtDNA or Y-DNA data only.

Finally, the other advantage of HLA is the sheer volume of data available. [See: www.allelefrequencies.net]. The numbers of people worldwide who have been typed for HLA are huge. There are nearly 22 million donors and blood cord units in the BMDW (Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide) database, encompassing many different ethnicities and nationalities with hundreds of thousands of HLA alleles and extended haplotypes identified. Y-DNA and mtDNA cannot offer this volume of data. Whether used for tracing ancient human migrations, or researching diseases in different populations, this data can be extremely helpful.

The association of HLA haplotypes in populations with certain diseases in Western countries is interesting to consider from an HBD perspective. For example, if resistance or susceptibility to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, etc. are all affected by HLA type, then there could be wildly varying outcomes between different population groups, in addition to the effects of environmental or lifestyle factors.

This in turn could have serious implications. For example, certain disease-related charities’ fund-raising campaigns are aimed at convincing the general public to donate cash on the basis that everyone is almost equally at risk from that particular disease, when different ethnic groups living in the same country with the same lifestyle may often vary in risk considerably from very high risk down to very low risk, with HLA type being an important determining factor. But the charity may not publicise this information in order not to jeopardise their fund-raising. This, I should stress, is speculation on my part however.

If want to find out more about Human Leukocyte Antigens, please refer to some of the sources listed below:

References
- The Allele Frequency Net Database (AFND). A database and online repository for immune gene frequencies in worldwide populations: [www.allelefrequencies.net]
- “Tracking Human Migrations by the Analysis of the Distribution of HLA Alleles, Lineages and Haplotypes in Closed and Open Populations.” [Fernandez Vina, M. et al, 2012].
- “HLA 1991: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Histocompatibility Workshop and Conference” (Volumes I & II) [Kimoshi Tsuji; Miki Aizawa; Takehiko Sasazuki] Oxford Science Publications, 1991.
- “HLA-Net: A European Network of the HLA Diversity for Histocompatibility, Clinical Transplantation, Epidemiological and Population Genetics.” [www.hla-net.eu].
- “AHPD: Analysis of HLA Population Data to Reconstruct the History of Modern Humans and Infer the Role of Natural Selection.” [geneva.unige.ch/ahpd].
- “Challenging Views on the Peopling of East Asia: the Story According to HLA Markers.” [Di D, Sanchez-Mazas A.]. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2011 May; 145(1):81-96.doi:10.1002/ajpa.21470.Epub2011Jan4. PMID:21484761 [Pubmed – indexed for MEDLINE].
- Wikipedia: “Human Leukocyte Antigen.”
- Wikipedia: “Major Histocompatibility Complex.”

_{(note: comments do not require an email. gene map of the human leukocyte antigen (hla) region!)}

andrew sullivan talks sense on iq

re. the richwine affair:

“Race And IQ. Again.”

“We [humans] remain the same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species. But poodles, in general, are smarter than beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell. We bred those traits into them, of course, fast-forwarding evolution. But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.”

gee. i wish i’d thought of saying something like that (in the context of the richwine affair)!

oh, wait. (~_^)

previously: why human biodiversity is true…and why jason richwine is right and “to disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies”

_{(note: comments do not require an email. multi-racial poodle-beagle! (^_^) )}