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From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine:
Edward O. Wilson’s Inordinate Fondness for Ants
Steve SailerApril 06, 2022
In the 1970s, the Harvard biology department was for life scientists like what Los Alamos in the 1940s had been for physicists: an assemblage of the great names, but with even more clashes of personality and politics.
The distinguished science journalist Richard Rhodes, author of the famous 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has published a biography of a central figure in the Biology Wars of the 1970s, Scientist: E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature. Rhodes completed his manuscript shortly before Wilson’s death at 92 last December.
Old-fashioned natural historian Edward O. Wilson, who was happiest collecting bugs in the field and then burrowing into the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology’s collection of millions of specimens, found himself the leader of the zoologists, ornithologists, botanists, and entomologists besieged by an invasive species of molecular biologists offering theories broader than those the traditional species specialists could conjure up. Led by the arrogant James D. Watson, discoverer of the DNA double helix, the newcomers derided the naturalists as mere “stamp collectors.”
To counter Watson’s derision of his view of life’s apparent lack of theory, in 1975 Wilson published his monumental textbook Sociobiology on how Darwinian selection might explain the social behavior of any and all organisms. But Wilson’s extension in his last chapter of Darwin to human societies unleashed the ideological animus of two leftist Harvard biologists whom Wilson had voted to hire to help in his war with Watson: Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.
Read the whole thing there.
I 
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The International Committee Against Racism staged a small riot at the 1978 American Association for the Advancement of Science conference during a debate between Wilson, Hamilton, and Dawkins against Gould, with a leftist pouring a pitcher of ice water on Wilson’s head
What many are probably unaware of is that he had recently broken his leg in a jogging accident and was significantly hobbled with a leg cast. Napoleon Chagnon was there.
How do you break your leg jogging? Or were they calling black robbers "joggers" back then too?
Just like ants in a colony, iSteve contributors can bring him small bits of sustenance each quarter.
They our Mighty Queen will Prosper!
Er, uh, well…
I now withdraw my analogy. Sorry.
Makes one wonder if John Nash’s math fits into any of this.
Also, it seems likely that the altruism described only applies when all members are sufficiently related — at least of the same race when it comes to humans. The world is a lot easier to understand and navigate when it is an AnotherDad type, i.e. separate nations.
In other words, if we all don’t go for the blonde, we all get laid and we all perpetuate our similar, familial genes. That’s good for “the family” or “the nation,” as long as we are as sufficiently related to one another as ants are.
It seems the Chinese worked this out a long time ago, but they do the sacrificing as a culturally enforced, mass norm, not necessarily as individual altruists.
In China and the east in general, charity is clan based or within families. Or in some cases religious but even that seems rather sparse. No religious charities in mainland China.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Hangnail Hans, @PiltdownMan
I wonder sometimes how much variation is caused by common SNPs. I don’t think it’s a lot, at least on interesting and important ones. Studies with lots of subjects doing, say, IQ, with narrow sense heritability ~0.4 and broad sense ~0.8 in modern populations will find like 13% of the variance of IQ is “explained” by variance in common SNPs. I think they apply narrow dense h**2 as the “target” but I don’t think that’s the right choice. First, we know the SNP frequencies, so testing for dominance becomes reasonable. Second, we know some biochemical pathways and can sort genes involved in various things, say lipid recycling, and we can sort them automatically by gene ontology, so we do not have to do pairwise calculations for every SNP, much less testing for interactions between larger groups, to find potential interactions. Like, if the protein of gene A isba receptor for the protein of gene B, it’s pretty reasonable to see if there’s an epistatic relationship for SNPs of the two genes. You can skip checking for epistasis between alleles of neurotransmitter receptors and keratin. Third, narrow-sense heritability gives you the “breeding value,” the predictable results of offspring phenotypes, but in broad-sense heritability, the total trait variation caused by genetic differences seems like it would correspond with trait variation in the whole population.Like, let’s say none of the black/white IQ gap is caused by additive variants. It’s all a mix of dominant and recessive alleles. h**2 is going to be fairly non-descriptive, and wouldn’t predict the IQ of a population of hybrids from randomly chosen black-white pairings very well, but it seems obvious that non-narrow-sense heritability causes the gap. Basically, all the alleles in a population, rare, common, additive, dominant, epistatic, etc contribute to the differences between populations. Checkmate, Kevin Bird(Brain).§ Substitute your favorite number of genes that people have. A quick answer is protein-coding or everything transcribed? Everything protein-coding and “functional transcript-only “genes” How about isoforms? Does each isoform count as a gene? I mean, if you couldn’t do alternate splicing, each of those versions would have to be a separate protein-coding gene. Even if you restrict it to protein coding, databases have different numbers. Steve, have you seen Random Developmental Variation of Human Phenotypic Traits, as Estimated by Fluctuating Asymmetry and Twin Studies? The author tries to use fluctuating asymmetry (differences in things that “should be the same, each half of your face, your fingerprint ridges, earlobe size, etc) to get a handle on the input of developmental noise on other traits, like height or identical twins’ fluctuating asymmetry, like compare earlobe sizes of both twins’ (right?) earlobes to each other and compare that difference to intratwin fluctuating asymmetry. He finds a range of developmental noise’s contribution to trait variance, 0.03 to 0.25. Of course, he can’t do intelligence, which, along with personality, is the most interesting and important trait. Of course, he might try to compare left/right brain regions that show low — not sure what to call it, divergence, specialization — between left and right hemispheres. Maybe the visual cortex? Left and right eye input interpreting centers — might be interpreted similarly. Compare the two sides within each twin, and then each twin to the other’s same/other side. Maybe get a sense of how much brain variation, maybe size, maybe connection density, can be attributed to developmental noise. That would actually be really interesting. He could get published in a better journal!Replies: @Eugene Nicks
Cannot read there.
Too much mega spam that is not closable
I think most of the sacrificing the Chinese do is at gunpoint.
I am unaware of any eastern culture that sustains or promotes private charity, like seen in the US.
In China and the east in general, charity is clan based or within families. Or in some cases religious but even that seems rather sparse. No religious charities in mainland China.
http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/ant-hill-bjorn-svensson.jpgReplies: @Buzz Mohawk
I've lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, both majority Chinese cities, and private charity organizations are far from absent. Perhaps the best known of them in overseas Chinese settlements is the Buddhist-Chinese Red Swastika Society, which runs food kitchens, and support services for the indigent and, especially, the elderly poor.
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_6ZhAAN5xNBU/TPIwoqJmUFI/AAAAAAAAHEI/emVA2IGtODE/s800/The%20World%20Red%20Swastika%20Society%20Penang.JPGReplies: @Reg Cæsar
In China and the east in general, charity is clan based or within families. Or in some cases religious but even that seems rather sparse. No religious charities in mainland China.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Hangnail Hans, @PiltdownMan
I agree with you, of course, but you say:
Indeed it may be, but who is pointing the gun, and from where is the gun pointed? That is my, um, point.
You agree with me that there is a “gun” pointed at individual Chinese people that forces them, individually, to do what is evolutionarily (actually zoologically!) best for The Chinese People. To this Westerner, they do behave like ants, but I think ants do what they do because they are programmed to.
On second thought, maybe Chinese people are similarly programmed. (Sorry, I am revealing a little anti-East-Asian prejudice here.)
This is China (I mean an ant hill):
This is life. If you have some land and at least a minimal observational skill, you understand everything that is happening in our world.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
In China and the east in general, charity is clan based or within families. Or in some cases religious but even that seems rather sparse. No religious charities in mainland China.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Hangnail Hans, @PiltdownMan
Funny, because when you read about an “American” “philanthropist” having died, you can drill down and see that the “philanthropy” was usually clan-based. If that’s what you want to call it.
In the spirit of his work this paper on the sociobiology of sociopathy got condemned had a few counter papers (Without an argument beyond it can’t be true because of the implication) and has largely been memory-holed except that it was probably the last serious paper of it’s type in a serious journal that I’m aware of.
The link is to a whole journal edition, the paper in question is on page 121.
https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1017/s0140525x00039595
A paper like this goes a long way to explaining the dynamic of inner city honor cultures.
The implications of this are that fundamentally IQ is looked at too much in terms of societies, the aggregate temperament or personality that dictates what social or cultural mores are sustainable is quite crucial as is that of the places societies are getting their immigrants. (As well as how clannish and how many generations they’ll have an ‘immigrant’ chip on their shoulder or identity)
Do the two go together perfectly? No, there are big social and cultural changes that are really just due to certain wars or events going a certain way. But surely the mores of a society must have an impact on the reproductive fitness of different personality and temperament types and how well they adapt to the ruling macro situation.
What we’ve seen in parts of the US since 2020 are certain types of people feeling free of the ‘oppression’ of having to live up to nice North West European guilt culture standards.
Sorry, I can’t get through the WSJ paywall today.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apps-with-hidden-data-harvesting-software-are-banned-by-google-11649261181
http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/ant-hill-bjorn-svensson.jpgReplies: @Buzz Mohawk
I must add that I think that photo is not only China but The Chinese People, wherever they are around the world. There are other human groups who behave similarly and have much influence on what happens historically, but they are far, far fewer in numbers, and they resemble the surrounding humans in their “host” countries.
This is life. If you have some land and at least a minimal observational skill, you understand everything that is happening in our world.
If Africa's land isn't as fertile as her people (jungles are deceptive), that continent's projected growth may be stalled, and not prettily.
https://youtu.be/PUwmA3Q0_OE&t=0m57s
OT: A lawsuit is making its way through the courts in Alabama trying to block abortion for blacks because supposedly it’s racist. “About 80 members of Baby Q’s class, which is African American babies in the womb, lose their lives in abortion every week in Alabama.” This is certainly a novel angle, but black women are going to hate it.
Considering that the women choosing these abortions are black, racism is going to be tough to prove. However, since a few libtard laws are springing up allowing no questions asked baby deaths soon after birth, it may get to the point where black women can only arrange abortions (ahem) after birth. Now, I’d call that really racist.
Call the Midwife is going to morph into a Smother Mother business.
“Watson was attracted to the theory of kin altruism” should be Wilson?
I’m still only half way through and it’s a magnificent review. Truly a delight to read.
I told you guys.
Washington DC is a combination of “The Godfather 2” (specifically the brothel scene with the blackmailed Senator Pat Geary) and “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Jeffrey Epstein is like a combination of mafioso “Michael Corleone” and Occult pimp “Victor Ziegler.”
Then you have John&Tony Podesta, James Alefantis, and Marina Abramovich.
What’s more interesting about the elite? The rampant debauchery and sexual blackmail? Or their blatant embrace of Occultism?
I was happy to contribute the other week, Steve. Good luck with the eye stuff.
Off Topic: The guy who has Hunter’s laptop is working with a tech firm in Zurich to recover 450 gigs of deleted data on it, which they apparently can tell is composed of massive amounts of email and tons of images and videos. He says once it’s extracted he’ll immediately be posting all of it online. Even being publicly known, his risk of being suicided this month has got to be fairly high.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10689445/Whistleblower-handed-Hunter-Bidens-laptop-congressmen-fled-Switzerland.html
It turns out the FBI, Times, Post, Daily Mail and Chuck Grassley were all given the laptop as far back as December 2019. I didn’t know they’d had it for so long before the election, plenty of time to examine it and know it was genuine. It makes what they did worse – not only fail to the public about new evidence of possible Biden family corruption, but get a parade of past and present intelligence/security brass to affirmatively state that the laptop was almost certainly a Russian hoax.
Apparently even Fox News would go no farther than mentioning the affair briefly, quietly and occaisonaly. They’d only hedge their bets, as seen in their refusing to accept a physical copy of the laptop hard drive (unlike even the NYT!) but letting some small samplings of the data be emailed to them.
Was 2016-2020 the first time in American history when the prime agencies of the national security state – FBI, CIA, NSA – were unified in total opposition to the president and so energetic in relentlessly working with the media to destroy him by any means fair or foul? I mean the CIA may have hated Kennedy but the FBI was ambivalent. They may not have cared for Carter or Clinton they didn’t absolutely HATE them and all gang up the entire time to immolate the guy as they did with Trump.
I think this was the first time for such unified and vigorous cooperation among the national security state agencies to repeatedly use such thoroughly dishonest means to sabotage the political prospects of the sitting president. I wonder if that happening so much in public view just fully and finally reveals the current power structure, where the police/intelligence/security agencies of the Executive Branch are no longer servants to the President but rather contenders with him for power – i.e., are willing and able to battle with him for control over the direction of policy and dispersal of resources. He can ally with some of them or all, but he can’t oppose them all or he’ll be alone and exposed.
Some people in power at the FBI decided to sit on the Biden corruption data from the laptop during 2020. They tilted against Trump and toward Biden simultaneously, since it would have been the final nail in Biden’s coffin in the primaries. Trump’s treatment looks like proof that the president is no longer the sovereign over the Executive Branch that he was as recently as FDR in the 1940s. What happened over the decades since then? Are the police/intelligence/security agencies of the Executive Branch now independent power sources, subservient to the president only in name or only as long as it suits them?
One of my later blog entries before taking the site down was that it no longer matters who is President. And sure enough the Politburo installs an old meat puppet instead of a person with actual, executive agency. Here's video footage of Joe Biden being reminded he's not actually the head of the Executive Branch.
https://youtu.be/x_KvoHlU4pA?t=48
Wilson’s more of my dad’s generation, so perhaps understandable, but still not a lot of foresight there.
It’s like Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings: If a theory pertaining to human nature is heavy on theoretical assertion and light on empirical reality, the shooter is likely Jewish.
You know, when I was a kid I spent a lot of time playing piano in bars. I played everything: Mozart, Chopin, Lennon/McCartney, Jelly Roll Morton, Black Sabbath, Mingus.
But at the end of the day, there’s really nothing like the divine Franz Schubert:
Read ’em and weep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBlGtjccI48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tks7VJ945_8Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @duncsbaby
Two colons in the title? Yuck.
It's like Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings: If a theory pertaining to human nature is heavy on theoretical assertion and light on empirical reality, the shooter is likely Jewish.Replies: @J.Ross, @Ian Smith, @Ian M.
We need a “Savage” button which, when pressed, plays that recording of the deep-voiced guy saying “Savage” from the bumpers of the Michael Savage radio show.
Watson to colleague: ” This Wilson guy pisses me the F off! Hey,why don’t we black ball him? Boot his ass out?”
“Just because you don’t like his theories?”
“Yep!”
“Wouldn’t that set a bad precedent? Bootin’ guys out cuz you don’t like ’em?”
“What do I care? I got the goddamn Nobel! I’m Jimmy Fucking Watson for fuck sake!”
Why do Chase and Wells Fargo allow Steve to have an account? They ban everyone who has even the slightest dissent viewpoints, no matter how unknown they might be.
Odd thing, that.
Is E.O. Wilson the Anty Christ?
We survived Black History Month and Women’s History Month, but it keeps on comin’:
Celebrating National Arab American Heritage Month
I don’t keep up with genomics even to extent of reading pop-sci pieces about it. Has anyone ever worked out how related two randomly chosen American whites are? Or narrow it down a bit. How related two random English guys are, on average?
To clarify, I don’t necessarily mean identical by descent, though I’d like to know that, but on a common SNP-only basis, how much overlap is there?
Cuz if you take “identical by descent” to extremes… Take a pair of identical twins, Hans and Franz. Well, almost identical. Hanz has a de novo single-base mutation. Are Hans and Franz (1 – 1/6,000,000,000)*100% identical by descent, are they (1 – 1/20,000§)*100%, on a nucleotide and gene basis, respectively? What if that difference causes a premature stop codon in a myostatin gene copy? Then Hans has a huge advantage on getting pumped up, the only relevant phenotype, so are they 0% identical on the only trait of reproductive significance?
I wonder sometimes how much variation is caused by common SNPs. I don’t think it’s a lot, at least on interesting and important ones. Studies with lots of subjects doing, say, IQ, with narrow sense heritability ~0.4 and broad sense ~0.8 in modern populations will find like 13% of the variance of IQ is “explained” by variance in common SNPs. I think they apply narrow dense h**2 as the “target” but I don’t think that’s the right choice. First, we know the SNP frequencies, so testing for dominance becomes reasonable. Second, we know some biochemical pathways and can sort genes involved in various things, say lipid recycling, and we can sort them automatically by gene ontology, so we do not have to do pairwise calculations for every SNP, much less testing for interactions between larger groups, to find potential interactions. Like, if the protein of gene A isba receptor for the protein of gene B, it’s pretty reasonable to see if there’s an epistatic relationship for SNPs of the two genes. You can skip checking for epistasis between alleles of neurotransmitter receptors and keratin. Third, narrow-sense heritability gives you the “breeding value,” the predictable results of offspring phenotypes, but in broad-sense heritability, the total trait variation caused by genetic differences seems like it would correspond with trait variation in the whole population.
Like, let’s say none of the black/white IQ gap is caused by additive variants. It’s all a mix of dominant and recessive alleles. h**2 is going to be fairly non-descriptive, and wouldn’t predict the IQ of a population of hybrids from randomly chosen black-white pairings very well, but it seems obvious that non-narrow-sense heritability causes the gap. Basically, all the alleles in a population, rare, common, additive, dominant, epistatic, etc contribute to the differences between populations. Checkmate, Kevin Bird(Brain).
§ Substitute your favorite number of genes that people have. A quick answer is protein-coding or everything transcribed? Everything protein-coding and “functional transcript-only “genes” How about isoforms? Does each isoform count as a gene? I mean, if you couldn’t do alternate splicing, each of those versions would have to be a separate protein-coding gene. Even if you restrict it to protein coding, databases have different numbers.
Steve, have you seen Random Developmental Variation of Human Phenotypic Traits, as Estimated by Fluctuating Asymmetry and Twin Studies? The author tries to use fluctuating asymmetry (differences in things that “should be the same, each half of your face, your fingerprint ridges, earlobe size, etc) to get a handle on the input of developmental noise on other traits, like height or identical twins’ fluctuating asymmetry, like compare earlobe sizes of both twins’ (right?) earlobes to each other and compare that difference to intratwin fluctuating asymmetry. He finds a range of developmental noise’s contribution to trait variance, 0.03 to 0.25. Of course, he can’t do intelligence, which, along with personality, is the most interesting and important trait.
Of course, he might try to compare left/right brain regions that show low — not sure what to call it, divergence, specialization — between left and right hemispheres. Maybe the visual cortex? Left and right eye input interpreting centers — might be interpreted similarly. Compare the two sides within each twin, and then each twin to the other’s same/other side. Maybe get a sense of how much brain variation, maybe size, maybe connection density, can be attributed to developmental noise. That would actually be really interesting. He could get published in a better journal!
Two unrelated white people are about as related to each other as a uncle:nephew relationship (relative to the human genetic average - not sure of exact details of pop weightings etc).
For some groups it would be more, eg vs Bushmen.
Now that bodice-ripper chick lit has moved on to the triple-coloned title, I suppose it’s time for serious nonfiction to adopt double colons — Scientist: E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature.
However, traditionally with muliple coloned titles, the last phrase usually contains the word “unputdownable.”
As for “distinguished science journalist Richard Rhodes,” this year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of his bizarre sex memoir, Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey. How about a review of that one, Steve? From the New York Times review by Martin Amis:
Admittedly, the A-bomb book was pretty good.
What happened to the ants ? Their colonies were thriving under every big rock i picked up the 80’s.
I helped my parents clear out their back yard a couple of years ago. I was disturbed to find not a single ant colony or any other insects. Their backyard was insect free. This was in central Indiana in late June.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01/where-have-all-the-insects-gone-e-o-wilson-silent-earth
I wonder sometimes how much variation is caused by common SNPs. I don’t think it’s a lot, at least on interesting and important ones. Studies with lots of subjects doing, say, IQ, with narrow sense heritability ~0.4 and broad sense ~0.8 in modern populations will find like 13% of the variance of IQ is “explained” by variance in common SNPs. I think they apply narrow dense h**2 as the “target” but I don’t think that’s the right choice. First, we know the SNP frequencies, so testing for dominance becomes reasonable. Second, we know some biochemical pathways and can sort genes involved in various things, say lipid recycling, and we can sort them automatically by gene ontology, so we do not have to do pairwise calculations for every SNP, much less testing for interactions between larger groups, to find potential interactions. Like, if the protein of gene A isba receptor for the protein of gene B, it’s pretty reasonable to see if there’s an epistatic relationship for SNPs of the two genes. You can skip checking for epistasis between alleles of neurotransmitter receptors and keratin. Third, narrow-sense heritability gives you the “breeding value,” the predictable results of offspring phenotypes, but in broad-sense heritability, the total trait variation caused by genetic differences seems like it would correspond with trait variation in the whole population.Like, let’s say none of the black/white IQ gap is caused by additive variants. It’s all a mix of dominant and recessive alleles. h**2 is going to be fairly non-descriptive, and wouldn’t predict the IQ of a population of hybrids from randomly chosen black-white pairings very well, but it seems obvious that non-narrow-sense heritability causes the gap. Basically, all the alleles in a population, rare, common, additive, dominant, epistatic, etc contribute to the differences between populations. Checkmate, Kevin Bird(Brain).§ Substitute your favorite number of genes that people have. A quick answer is protein-coding or everything transcribed? Everything protein-coding and “functional transcript-only “genes” How about isoforms? Does each isoform count as a gene? I mean, if you couldn’t do alternate splicing, each of those versions would have to be a separate protein-coding gene. Even if you restrict it to protein coding, databases have different numbers. Steve, have you seen Random Developmental Variation of Human Phenotypic Traits, as Estimated by Fluctuating Asymmetry and Twin Studies? The author tries to use fluctuating asymmetry (differences in things that “should be the same, each half of your face, your fingerprint ridges, earlobe size, etc) to get a handle on the input of developmental noise on other traits, like height or identical twins’ fluctuating asymmetry, like compare earlobe sizes of both twins’ (right?) earlobes to each other and compare that difference to intratwin fluctuating asymmetry. He finds a range of developmental noise’s contribution to trait variance, 0.03 to 0.25. Of course, he can’t do intelligence, which, along with personality, is the most interesting and important trait. Of course, he might try to compare left/right brain regions that show low — not sure what to call it, divergence, specialization — between left and right hemispheres. Maybe the visual cortex? Left and right eye input interpreting centers — might be interpreted similarly. Compare the two sides within each twin, and then each twin to the other’s same/other side. Maybe get a sense of how much brain variation, maybe size, maybe connection density, can be attributed to developmental noise. That would actually be really interesting. He could get published in a better journal!Replies: @Eugene Nicks
There is a table of FST values between races in the book On Genetic interests, can probably Google for it too.
Two unrelated white people are about as related to each other as a uncle:nephew relationship (relative to the human genetic average – not sure of exact details of pop weightings etc).
For some groups it would be more, eg vs Bushmen.
This is extreme degeneracy and yet he has a successful career.
I helped my parents clear out their back yard a couple of years ago. I was disturbed to find not a single ant colony or any other insects. Their backyard was insect free. This was in central Indiana in late June.Replies: @PiltdownMan
Where Have All the Insects Gone?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01/where-have-all-the-insects-gone-e-o-wilson-silent-earth
Most of the reviews of Richard Rhode’s book I read over the Christmas season, as well as the obituaries of E.O. Wilson that followed almost immediately, were quite admiring of E.O. Wilson, and markedly affectionate in tone. That review by the POC nurse lady is an outlier, I think.
In China and the east in general, charity is clan based or within families. Or in some cases religious but even that seems rather sparse. No religious charities in mainland China.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Hangnail Hans, @PiltdownMan
As in the Soviet Union, charity organizations in China were stamped out during the first decades of communism, since, under Marxist-Leninist theory, the people, in the form of the state, are providers to all.
I’ve lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, both majority Chinese cities, and private charity organizations are far from absent. Perhaps the best known of them in overseas Chinese settlements is the Buddhist-Chinese Red Swastika Society, which runs food kitchens, and support services for the indigent and, especially, the elderly poor.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ak2AHQhrtwU/maxresdefault.jpg
What many are probably unaware of is that he had recently broken his leg in a jogging accident and was significantly hobbled with a leg cast. Napoleon Chagnon was there.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Mike Tre
If anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon had not been stuck in the middle of a row, he would probably have gotten up on stage with dire consequences for the antifa.
What many are probably unaware of is that he had recently broken his leg in a jogging accident and was significantly hobbled with a leg cast. Napoleon Chagnon was there.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Mike Tre
“What many are probably unaware of is that he had recently broken his leg in a jogging accident”
How do you break your leg jogging? Or were they calling black robbers “joggers” back then too?
It's like Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings: If a theory pertaining to human nature is heavy on theoretical assertion and light on empirical reality, the shooter is likely Jewish.Replies: @J.Ross, @Ian Smith, @Ian M.
…or French.
But at the end of the day, there's really nothing like the divine Franz Schubert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUp2u9wI1fY
Read 'em and weep.Replies: @Gary in Gramercy
From Black Sabbath to Mingus?
Try doing THAT with a beer in your left hand, when you're sixteen years old.
Another term for fundraising is energy exchange.
Trump’s treatment looks like proof that the president is no longer the sovereign over the Executive Branch that he was as recently as FDR in the 1940s.
One of my later blog entries before taking the site down was that it no longer matters who is President. And sure enough the Politburo installs an old meat puppet instead of a person with actual, executive agency. Here’s video footage of Joe Biden being reminded he’s not actually the head of the Executive Branch.
It's like Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings: If a theory pertaining to human nature is heavy on theoretical assertion and light on empirical reality, the shooter is likely Jewish.Replies: @J.Ross, @Ian Smith, @Ian M.
Seems to me that divide between empirical/theoretical is more Anglo/continental than it is goyim/Jewish.
I wonder if James Watson did not start his crimethinking career in his eighties, but much earlier. Scott Alexander may end up canceled for being HBD-adjacent. It would ve hard to be as smart as Watson or Scott Alexander and not think IQ measured something real.
Watson and Gould were contemporaries, but not in the same league. Gould probably went into evo bio for the same reason as Dick Lewontin: to render it safe for the Jews. Watson was something of an old guard in evo bio. Watson cared more about biology than about math. Gould cared little for math but was not all that big on biology or truth. Some people think making economists of failed mathematicians has hurt the field. Modern sciences are quantitative. Certainly, Reedie-style evolution and ecology students probably don’t greatly contribute to the field. The Earth Mother is not an intelligent goddess, and the Gaia hypothesis is silly.
It may have been memory-holed, but I read Rushton’s(?) review of Mismeasure of Man. The first edition had a section on brain size differences being bs. Rushton sent him (then) current MRI studies showing racial differences. Gould did not revise that section in the revised edition!
Here’s the review: Rushton on an idiot
In truth, though, idiot is too kind a term for Gould. A saboteur would be better. I’ve said before that of the supposed thousands of citations Gould’s Structure of Evolutionary theory received, four of the first five do not actually cite it! The first is Darwin! Sociobiology will certainly age better than that.
Gould’s one claim to fame, “punctuated equilibrium,” was meant as a “gotcha, racists!” but of course, he is hoisted on his own petard. We are living in a punctuation right now. The change was gradual until some people started farming. As tech advances, selection pressures change too. Overeating amid plenty might be being selected against in some classes, but not in others. The class structure is becoming ever more sclerotic in America. Different castes are emerging? As this year’s models of humanity become less and less adapted due to the environment (social/cultural/tech) changing, selection speeds up.
Are we halfway through? There’s more difference between how the Japanese live and how modern Papua New Guineans live than there was between the lifestyles of Africans and Europeans 1000 years ago. It’s really hard to see how the punctuation will continue. Dumb people have lots of kids. Smart people have fewer. Because the modern economy is not sustainable, either we will “level up” to something better or something worse.
Are we speciating? As Svigor (whatever happened to him?) said, if there were an intelligent alien species with a green race and a blue race, and the green race built space shuttles, but the blue race built mud huts, we’d think that was a much more important than the color difference. Even American whites appear to be bifurcating into blue and red tribes, but this difference may break down if the dollar breaks.
Highly accurate metal models of DNA constituents were important in Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure. Linus Pauling was sick with a cold one day. He stayed in his hotel room and made paper models of amino acids with the correct bonds rigid and rotatable. That day, while sick, he came up with the two repeating structural elements of proteins. They did not have computers, but the molecules were too difficult to visualize. Simple physical models filled the gaps.
Simple mental models that can be easily manipulated might function the same way. Steve has insights other pundits don’t partially because he has some simple but accurate mental models that can be summed up in a few words. “Chunking” numbers and abstracting constants to symbols makes mental math easier. IQ tests seem built on the assumption that you can solve hard problems if you can solve simple problems quickly, but that’s not always so. Darwin is not said to have solved problems quickly, but maybe he did? He thought more deeply about evolution by natural selection than other biologists did for decades. He realized sexual was very important when sexism (and poor observational abilities) prevented other people from giving the other selection mechanism its due.
Steve also has an advantage in that he’s looking to notice true things, but most pundits are cheerleaders. When the football team is far behind, the cheerleader who says, “you know, our team is very far behind, there’s not much time left, so let’s just sit out the rest of the game” will not be the cheerleader most popular with the fans. Is cheerleading still a thing? When I was in Southampton, the pretty, popular girls played sports. Pretty girls cheered at the private school I went to in Va, but NYC is the vanguard of fashion. I think cheerleading in places like Texas is more of an acrobatic sport in its own right than anything having to do with football.
This is life. If you have some land and at least a minimal observational skill, you understand everything that is happening in our world.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
The relative distribution of the world’s population hasn’t shifted much in the last 2,500 years. It was centered in northern India and the North China Plain then, as it is now, with southern, then northern, Europe a distant third. The secret is fertility– of the land.
If Africa’s land isn’t as fertile as her people (jungles are deceptive), that continent’s projected growth may be stalled, and not prettily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBlGtjccI48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tks7VJ945_8Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @duncsbaby
Try doing THAT with a beer in your left hand, when you’re sixteen years old.
It’s clever in that somehow the media has most people thinking that abortions are mainly a white middle and upper class life planning tool, while black women just have baby after baby. In fact the CDC abortion surveillance survey of 48 states and NYC shows back women as being greatly disproportionate in getting abortions. A lawsuit like this, if it gets traction, will force discussion of this fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBlGtjccI48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tks7VJ945_8Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @duncsbaby
I was gonna ask what Black Sabbath songs he played, but yeah, “Changes” would have to be the one. Hopefully he was able to fit in “War Pigs” just for laffs.
Everything off of "Paranoid." Looove me some Paranoid.
It sounds really weird when you do it on piano instead of guitar.
In the meantime....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKKwAcE6H24
just for the fun of it.Replies: @duncsbaby
“I was gonna ask what Black Sabbath songs he played,”
Everything off of “Paranoid.” Looove me some Paranoid.
It sounds really weird when you do it on piano instead of guitar.
In the meantime….
just for the fun of it.
Here's Kristen Hersh doing a cover of Led Zeppelin's cover of Memphis Minnie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxT2AvHLkcM
Let’s just say that if you’re a teenager trying to play “War Pigs” on solo piano in public, you are reminded that the piano is at bottom a percussion instrument. I had to slap and punch that thing til my knuckles bled, kinda like Townshend.
I still remember it clearly: The interviewer was talking to one of the patients, a small, wiry guy with a perpetual sly smile on his face, asking him why he was there.
"Because they tell me I'm crazy" came the answer.
--"But are you crazy?"
"I once tried to play Beethoven's Destiny Symphony on accordion. Would I do that if I was crazy?"
--"So, how did it go?" the interviewer asked
The small guy looked at him, the sly smile still on his face: "It was a total disaster!"Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
Many, many years ago I saw a documentary on TV from a mental asylum.
I still remember it clearly: The interviewer was talking to one of the patients, a small, wiry guy with a perpetual sly smile on his face, asking him why he was there.
“Because they tell me I’m crazy” came the answer.
–“But are you crazy?”
“I once tried to play Beethoven’s Destiny Symphony on accordion. Would I do that if I was crazy?”
–“So, how did it go?” the interviewer asked
The small guy looked at him, the sly smile still on his face: “It was a total disaster!”
MYSELF: [quiet amused grin]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9R3704O0hk
…by demanding favors of them?
Darwin had an equally inordinate fondness for earthworms. Clearly a parallel there. They were underground scientists.
Fun fact: When Lithuanians feel a need to swear but are within earshot of children, they say, “Go scratch the armpits of an earthworm!”
I've lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, both majority Chinese cities, and private charity organizations are far from absent. Perhaps the best known of them in overseas Chinese settlements is the Buddhist-Chinese Red Swastika Society, which runs food kitchens, and support services for the indigent and, especially, the elderly poor.
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_6ZhAAN5xNBU/TPIwoqJmUFI/AAAAAAAAHEI/emVA2IGtODE/s800/The%20World%20Red%20Swastika%20Society%20Penang.JPGReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Since so many of them have moved to British Columbia– roughly 10% of the province is Chinese– perhaps they could revive the Fernie Swastikas.
I still remember it clearly: The interviewer was talking to one of the patients, a small, wiry guy with a perpetual sly smile on his face, asking him why he was there.
"Because they tell me I'm crazy" came the answer.
--"But are you crazy?"
"I once tried to play Beethoven's Destiny Symphony on accordion. Would I do that if I was crazy?"
--"So, how did it go?" the interviewer asked
The small guy looked at him, the sly smile still on his face: "It was a total disaster!"Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
You forgot to ask the guy the most important question: did you get laid or not?
MYSELF: [quiet amused grin]
Everything off of "Paranoid." Looove me some Paranoid.
It sounds really weird when you do it on piano instead of guitar.
In the meantime....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKKwAcE6H24
just for the fun of it.Replies: @duncsbaby
Very cool. I would love to hear some Symptom of the Universe on piano. That would be eventful. I believe it can be done. Especially the second jazzy part of the song.
Here’s Kristen Hersh doing a cover of Led Zeppelin’s cover of Memphis Minnie: