Archive for March, 2009

The biological basis of race

Monday, March 30th, 2009






Let’s begin.




Washington Post







And lest you missed it:












But now we’re looking at it as biology as well:


























Here’s a great assault on these scientific fallacies:












The Race FAQ


Here’s a good definition as well:

That is, we think that what most people call “races” are actually independently evolved sub-populations, but that human races exist in the same sense as ecotypes exist among other animals and plants.

An ecotype is a locally adapted population (say, characterized by an “alpine” phenotype for a plant, or a “high light intensity” phenotype for a human), which is not genetically much different from other populations of the same species, except for genes specifically influencing whatever traits are adaptive in that environment (say, short and branched stalks in alpine plants, to protect against strong wind; or dark skin in humans living near the Equator, to protect from high light intensity).

Scientific Blogging







Others can provide more on the IQ-race differences:


Of course, these three-way racial differences are averages. Individuals are individuals. However, I’ve found that this three-way pattern is consistently true over time and across nations. That the same three-way racial pattern occurs repeatedly on some 60 different biological and behavioral variables is profoundly interesting and shows that race is more than “just skin deep.” The international data come from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and Interpol. Recently, I even traveled to South Africa to collect new IQ data.

Charles Darwin Research










Medical News











Humanists versus naturalists

Monday, March 30th, 2009











It’s that simple.

Why the courts ignore rape

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Check out the anatomy of a disaster in formation:



She immediately accused the university student – who was her friend’s housemate – of taking advantage of her, shouting that the law had been changed because of ‘f****** like you’.

In her interview, the woman said she would never have consented to sex with Mr Bacon because he was ‘not her type’, and she did not feel the need to ‘chase after a 20-something man’.

The Daily Mail

I am an unpopular realist; I say things that upset people because they know they’re true.

You drank six bottles of wine, woke up after sex had happened, and want us to assume the sex was not consensual because of your normal habits?

Lady, you didn’t exist at the time of intercourse. Your brain was obliterated by alcohol. You may or may not have made a choice, but no one can prove either way.

You’re the one who made yourself a victim here.

Why Libertarianism fails

Monday, March 30th, 2009

From an email response:







Using green as an excuse to create the NWO

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

There’s a pattern in human affairs:









Legalize it

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

A brief thought on legal drugs:











Chinese practicality

Sunday, March 29th, 2009








The Daily Mail



Go China!

Bad science on the march

Sunday, March 29th, 2009






Psychology Today

This giant pile of stupidity comes to us, we imagine, from someone who wishes he or she had more sex.

Let’s look at the bad logic, step by step:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous.

Western Civilization was created by a different subspecies with different genetics than other groups. You need to study them separately.


There are multiple factors that influence height. One could be the degree of testosterone present in the womb; it doesn’t make sense to assign a result to an arbitrary cause like this. You need more intervening steps and greater knowledge of how height is coded and developed before you can make this sweeping statement.

Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group.

What about the fitness of the women? How does a society develop so that there are more fit women than men? Answer: it doesn’t, so you have one man impregnating many clueless women, producing half-clueless offspring.


No, they’re not, because the real question is how the children will be raised. In the view of science, we’re all rodents who want to fire and forget with our breeding; in reality, women of IQs above 100 tend to plan for the future as best they can. Being one wife of a rich man makes sense only if he’s a really rich man, but at that point, the child does not have much of an active father figure; a nuclear family makes more sense for the development of the child’s psychology.

And finally, the piece de resistance of BS argumentation:


Western civilization was monogamous before Christianity and before industrialization.

He just shot his foot off.

Watch for more bad science like this. Being a scientist doesn’t mean someone is logical; it means they are rational, or can compare a single factor of many in “before” and “after” conditions. That’s how they confuse correlation with causation and make other, similar mistakes.

Scientists like to think that philosophy is memorizing logical fallacies. They generally are unaware of the complexity of argument or polycausal factors.

It makes them a bad choice as our experts and leaders.

Are we post-racial yet?

Sunday, March 29th, 2009


I read Leonard Pitts not because I agree with him, although I think I’m with him for up to 40% of each column, but because he has his finger on the question most of the time. Of course, he only writes about a single issue: race, or being black in America. But still, notice how he nails it here.





I have another supposition here for Mr. Pitts:

The white yardstick is the one white people apply to themselves. Caucasians are notoriously cold-blooded about failure; it happens, someone writes a poem, and then we move on. We know that people all around us fail. We’re used to see high intelligences become unstable and detonate. So we keep moving forward and trust in the reward for those who are smarter, stronger, healthier, and more disciplined than others.

We’ve applied the white yardstick to groups like Italians, the Irish, Greeks, etc. as they’ve come into our country. The reigning Caucasian hierarchy, which was like the founders of the USA English-German-Dutch, was not impressed with the places from which these people came, and figured that many would bring their failure with them, so discriminated against them. This discrimination worked like natural selection and winnowed out the failures, leaving the strongest from these populations.

Hint to black America: once white people feel the playing field is roughly level, they’re going to leave it up to nature. And now that we have a black president, a black billionaire, black people on TV and in the news, they feel it’s level. Sure, there are going to be some who pander to your vote, but the American middle class has moved on. In their view, slavery and the guilt-wound opened is over; they’re going to do what they do, and hope you do what you do well.

They’re also sick of this attitude:

If you hear racist sentiments being aired among white co-workers, question them on their statements.

Simply ask the person how they reached the conclusion they have about that ethnic or racial group. They will self-correct if they become uncomfortable often enough.

Obviously, the act of self-censoring isn’t a signal that they have been magically “cured” of their racism, but it will give them something to think about the next time they open their mouths. And self-censoring often enough may well cause them to reflect more deeply on their prejudices during quiet times at home. It’s a first step.

All of us (not just white folks) need to learn how to go beyond the concerns of the specific community to which we belong and recognize that when one group is discriminated against, it is an affront to us all.

Some profiteer

Not all of us agree it’s an affront to us all. We’re concerned with ourselves, our families, our local communities, and our communities of value (churches, programming guilds, National Guard, etc.). We view the right path as one that rewards the best and ignores or destroys the least healthy, intelligent, and disciplined/organized. That’s natural selection and we think it’s fair.

Race profiteering, or using implied white guilt to passive-aggressively extract money or power from them, is over. It died with the ascension of Barack Obama. It’s dying even harder as people are starting to look at our bankrupt government more critically, and realizing that our social welfare programs consume over a third of our budget and yet produce zero reward that’s lasting — in other words, that improves us as a society, instead of simply subsidizing our failures, whether they’re white or black or in-between.

Design versus control

Sunday, March 29th, 2009


Imagine a human being gaining ten IQ points; suddenly, many things they used to do seem really pointless, and there are new challenges to shoot for. Now imagine a society that instead of being at war with itself, is able to find a balance and move onward to objectives outside of internal bickering.

If you do not improve design, your only other option is to keep forcing square pegs into round holes, which requires the application of blind force — whether that’s money, muscle or fear of law enforcement. Humanity is now at a crossroads between improving itself, and continuing to force its failed designs to advance limpingly.

The following quotation is interesting because like many of the things quoted here, it is an instant of clarity in a philosophy with which I share much in common, without being a devotee. People often ask “Are you a ______?” and hope I’ll answer for whatever tribe they’ve picked as their own, but the answer is that I’m not a libertarian, transhumanist, socialist, eugenicist, nationalist, etc. but have cherry-picked from each according to what I’ve learned from history and philosophy. ‘

While I respect the integrity of beliefs, modern people use them as adornments as if trying to show me that they’ve found the one truth path to enlightenment, and I’m only interested in results. Was Plato a socialist? Yes and no. Was Marcus Aurelius a libertarian? Yes and no. Nietzsche a eugenicist? Yes and no. Trying to shop for beliefs by category is a dead-end trick.

That being said, where truth is found in any of these beliefs, one finds a stepping stone to modulate between beliefs — a place where they agree, and from this agreement, each can interpret the other as a version if itself with slightly altered priorities. That’s where philosophy gets interesting.

To do this, we must study the possibilities of creating a more favourable social environment, as we have already done in large measure with our physical environment. We shall start from new premises. For instance, that beauty (some­thing to enjoy and something to be proud of) is indispensable, and therefore that ugly or depressing towns are immoral; that quality of people, not mere quantity, is what we must aim at, and therefore that a concerted policy is required to prevent the present flood of population-increase from wrecking all our hopes for a better world; that true understanding and enjoyment are ends in themselves, as well as tools for or relaxations from a job, and that therefore we must explore and make fully available the techniques of education and self-education; that the most ultimate satisfaction comes from a depth and wholeness of the inner life, and therefore that we must explore and make fully available the techniques of spiritual development; above all, that there are two complementary parts of our cosmic duty —one to ourselves, to be fulfilled in the realization and enjoyment of our capacities, the other to others, to be fulfilled in service to the community and in promoting the welfare of the generations to come and the advancement of our species as a whole.


The point here is valid: if we sit around fighting over who gets what, we will not improve, and as time rushes on, we’ll decay.

We need a positive, abstract, design-based goal, like improving simultaneously the human individual and social design. This does not happen through Progressive ideals, which are essentially wealth redistribution; it happens by setting higher qualitative goals and shooting for those. More genius! More strength! More beauty! And more wisdom.

This will involve several components:

  • A more realistic social design.
  • Mental and moral discipline in the individual.
  • Biological improvement in the abilities, mainly g or general intelligence, of the individual.

Most people freak out at this point because they’re underconfident: but what if I don’t make the cut?

My answer is that there doesn’t need to be a cut. All we need to do is keep growing forward and rewarding the best examples of humanity, instead of sending them to dreary offices and then home to equally sterile and pointless gated communities to keep the hoi polloi out.

Here’s an example of an area for design improvement:




Technology Review

As you can see from the article, our DNA determines our intelligence for the greatest part, and it’s up to us to nurture the rest and develop it to its best level. However, without the DNA coding for the raw intelligence, there’s no point exerting that effort.

If we made ourselves smarter as a species, our problems would decrease and we would feel better about ourselves as a species. The dumb stuff that people do now would be seen as obviously corrupt and with potential to end badly, and people would bypass it for more intelligent courses. Even more importantly, they’d stop buying really stupid products and insisting on really stupid services, which would gear our economy forward instead of toward self-parasitism.

The alternative is more control — more strong leaders, more media manipulation, and more fake experts:



“When the expert’s advice made the least sense, that’s where we could see the behavioral effect,” said study co-author Greg Berns, an Emory University neuroscientist. “It’s as if people weren’t using their own internal value mechanisms.”


When the advice is at its worst, we don’t understand it, but accept it because the person is an expert and now we have someone else to blame.

Wow. That’s control in a nutshell. When we are in a relationship, we’ll often let the other person take charge, and then blame them when it doesn’t work out. We gladly delegate to our leaders but when things don’t turn out, we ask for their heads. And so on.

Most people would rather be controlled than think about altering their designs. Things as they now exist are tangible and comfortingly familiar; anything that requires we stretch ourselves, or reward someone for rising above, can be negative unless that person did it through “hard work” or other illusions that seem equally accessible to us. Control can be justified as necessary, with the unspoken caveat that it’s going to apply to the other guy — we, the wiser monkey, will game the system.

Here’s an American pragmatist, much in the line of Plato and Aristotle, writing about the literal reality of making a civilization that does not head toward failure:




Charles S. Peirce, The Fixation of Belief (1877)

It’s interesting how thinkers of the past saw our present calamities coming, and warned others, but people had the option to simply turn off their brains and so they did in order to avoid difficult truths that impeded socialization.

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey, This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself-in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see “forms.” Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things.



Friedrich W. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense (1873)

Notice how Nietzsche stresses beauty, as Huxley did, and much as Peirce suggested a society moving forward toward a goal not bound in servitude to past failure? They are saying: discard linear rationality, and instead, look toward a whole picture as you might find in art or sentience itself. Do not break your thought down into little logical steps; make use of your big brain to consider many factors at once, and aim not to reconcile the present but to grow toward the future!

I suggest that instead of doing that, we’ve embarked on the path of control since the industrial revolution, and that we’re seeing how it’s not working. It requires people to put their brains on hold, accept expert advice, and then blame the experts who oversimplified the process in the first place so everyone could understand it. It also is a negative goal; it doesn’t aim for something new, but for re-shuffling of what we already have.

Instead, we need to create the new and beautiful, in ourselves, our society and our world. That way, we escape control, but gain a sense of increased self-esteem and purpose, and are able to see ourselves in a new plan without the failings of the old because it aims at tomorrow and not yesterday.