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When Was Writing Invented?
Was writing first invented by the Sumerians? Before then? A lot of people seem to have misconceptions about what actually constitutes ‘writing’ and it’s predecessor ‘proto-writing’. Today I will touch on writing’s beginnings, as well as confusion of what writing is and is not.
Writing was first invented in Sumeria around 3200 B.C. What people confuse with writing is proto-writing, which is a precursor to writing. The word writing is defined as the activity of skill of marking coherent words on text. Therefor, proto-writing is not writing.
Above is a picture of the Karanovo Seal. People like to say that that denotes writing having it’s beginnings in Southeastern Europe in Romania around 7000 years ago. But that is proto-writing and not what we would call “writing” today. The Seal was made by the Vinca culture of Southeastern Europe. It is devoid of logograms, which is a written symbol representing an entire spoken word without expressing its pronunciation. The Seal is also of the Zodiac, and not any actual writing. It roughly matches up to the constellations when divided up in to four quadrants.
The Tartaria Tablets (which the Karanovo Seal is included with) were excavated in 1961 in Romania. People say that the above is writing. To quote Professor Colin Renfrew:
“To me, the comparison made between the signs on the Tărtăria tablets and those of proto-literate Sumeria carry very little weight. They are all simple pictographs, and a sign for a goat in one culture is bound to look much like the sign for a goat in another. To call these Balkan signs ‘writing’ is perhaps to imply that they had an independent significance of their own communicable to another person without oral contact. This I doubt.”
Steven Fischer writes in his book History of Writing:
The current opinion is that these earliest Balkan symbols appear to comprise a decorative or emblematic inventory with no immediate relation to articulate speech.
Proto-writing=/=writing. It doesn’t convey text and syllables and logographs. A logograph is 1 word represented by a single sign. For something to be classified as writing, it needs to have logograms and phonographs, which are signs holding purely phonetic or sound value.
The New World Encyclopedia says that those ‘writings’ cannot be called proper writing due to the fact that they are ancient traditions of symbol systems.
Now that we have a good understanding of proto-writing and what is and is not writing, lets touch on where writing was developed.
The five original writing systems were developed by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, the Maya of Central America, the Ancient Egyptians of Egypt, the Dravidians of India and the Chinese of China. Though, the only remaining language in use is Chinese.
All five of the writing systems mentioned above use logograms, phonograms and syllables. All five of those writing systems can be spoken, which denote writing and language. The Tartaria Tablets, including the Koronovo Seal, cannot be spoken from, as the Seal is for the Zodiac and the Tablets are a form of proto-writing that cannot be spoken due to no logograms or phonograms.
Solutrean Hypothesis: Were the first peoples of the Americas from Spain?
Just like Afrocentrists have cockamamie theories, so do Eurocentrists. Some people believe that the first peoples of the Americas were the Solutreans, a stone age people from France and Spain who existed around 25 kya, and ended 16,500 ya. They would have had to cross 3000 miles of ice and water, does that seem possible 20 kya? Not at all.
The Solutrean Hypothesis first came about in the 30s by archaeologist Frank Hibben. He noted that the style of the spear tips the Solutreans used was like that of the Clovis culture in the Americas, who are the oldest culture on the continent. He said the tips bore an extremely strong resemblance to those from the Solutreans in Europe.
The points of the tips are different (diamond shaped, non-fluted vs concave bottoms, fluting). They also didn’t have boats to cross the ocean to reach the Americas.
From this Nature article, we can see that the genome of the Clovis people had direct ancestry to Native Americans:
An alternative, Solutrean, hypothesis posits that the Clovis predecessors emigrated from southwestern Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum4. Here we report the genome sequence of a male infant (Anzick-1) recovered from the Anzick burial site in western Montana. The human bones date to 10,705 ± 3514C years BP (approximately 12,707–12,556 calendar years BP) and were directly associated with Clovis tools. We sequenced the genome to an average depth of 14.4× and show that the gene flow from the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic Mal’ta population5 into Native American ancestors is also shared by the Anzick-1 individual and thus happened before 12,600 years BP.
Consistent with the population migration from Siberia into the Americas, as noted in this study. This study I will quote below also shows why some of the same alleles are found in both Europeans and Native Americans:
Y chromosomal DNA polymorphisms were used to investigate Pleistocene male migrations to the American continent. In a worldwide sample of 306 men, we obtained 32 haplotypes constructed with the variation found in 30 distinct polymorphic sites. The major Y haplotype present in most Native Americans was traced back to recent ancestors common with Siberians, namely, the Kets and Altaians from the Yenissey River Basin and Altai Mountains, respectively. Going further back, the next common ancestor gave rise also to Caucasoid Y chromosomes, probably from the central Eurasian region. This study, therefore, suggests a predominantly central Siberian origin for Native American paternal lineages for those who could have migrated to the Americas during the Upper Pleistocene.
And what do you know? There was this study proves the bolded text from the above study. That the Caucasoid Y chromosome comes from the central Eurasian region, which is where the Yamnaya came from, who populated Europe around 4500 years ago.
A study of the genetics of Kennewick man from Nature says:
We therefore conclude based on genetic comparisons that Kennewick Man shows continuity with Native North Americans over at least the last eight millennia.
That proves that Kennewick man was of Siberian origins, not European.
To round this up, some people like to say how some of the Natives have myths that a bearded white man came from across the Atlantic and gave them knowledge, who then left, promising to return. Then on the same day he promised he would return, was the day that Hernan Cortez landed at the Yucatan Penninsula. From their myths, they knew that the man was a god, because of his description.
People like to say that this myth proves Europeans crossing the ocean thousands of years ago to give knowledge to Native peoples of the Americas. Ridiculous, and here is why.
When the Aztec Empire fell, they needed a way to explain how their once great empire fell. So they then thought of the myth I described above. That the only way their civilization could have possibly fallen is only because of a god.
In conclusion, the Solutrean Hypothesis has no basis in genetics, paleoanthropology, and even basic common sense. Those who say that the Hypothesis is true are uneducated, and just like Afrocentrists, trying to push an untrue agenda.
Refuting Richard Nisbett
3100 words
The environmental model on IQ in the debate on not only IQ as a whole, but in racial differences in intelligence has led to horrible policies throughout the world. Thinking that we are all equal and everyone is the same and has the same potential as the next person has really hurt us as a society.
Richard Nisbett is of the egalitarian (nurture) side of the debate on the black-white IQ gap. His main research has focused primarily on how laypeople reason and make presumptions about the world. His more recent work has focused on comparing East Asians and Westerners, and how and if they think differently. He says that the arguments have been made that Westerners learn analytically, focusing on the object and its attributes, use its attributes to categorize it and apply rules based on the category to explain and predict behavior. He says that East Asians reason holistically, focusing on the object in its surrounding field. There is little concern with categories or universal rules and behavior is explained on the basis of the forces presumed to be operative for the individual case at that particular time. This goes with white’s higher verbal IQ, as well as going with East Asian’s higher visio-spatial IQ. He says that his lab has found evidence for both.
Now that there is some background on Nisbett and his research interests, let’s turn to the B-W IQ gap.
Rushton and Jensen have refuted him multiple times. In their paper Race and IQ: A Theory-Based Review of the Research in Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It, they provide more than sufficient evidence that the B-W IQ gap, as well as other racial differences in intelligence, are genetic in origin. They propose that the hereditarian model (50/50 genetics/culture) better explains group differences than the culture-only model (0/100 genetics environment). They review 14 topics of contention which are: (1) data to be explained; (2) malleability of IQ test scores; (3) culture-loaded versus g-loaded tests; (4) stereotype threat, caste, and “X” factors; (5) reaction-time measures; (6) within-race heritability; (7) between-race heritability; (8) subSaharan African IQ scores; (9) race differences in brain size; (10) sex differences in brain size; (11) trans-racial adoption studies; (12) racial admixture studies; (13) regression to the mean effects; and (14) human origins research and life-history traits. They conclude that the preponderance of evidence concludes that differences in intelligence, as well as other life-history traits between the races, are genetic (50 to 80 percent) in origin.
I will be quoting from this article Nisbett wrote for the New York Times, All Brains Are the Same Color.
JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”
Ah yes. What a great day that was when Watson said that. It needed to be said. The conversation on exactly why Africans are starving needs to be had. No, the answer is not colonialism. It’s intelligence. I’ve touched on how Kanazawa got attacked for stating that Africa’s woes are due to low intelligence, where the average is 70. Just as how Watson got attacked. Except since Watson is more well-known than Kanazawa, the PC crowd attempted to run him out of town. Watson is 100 percent correct with that statement.
Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?
Blacks are genetically inferior to whites in intelligence, on average, just as West African blacks and their descendants are genetically superior in sprinting competitions and East Africans and their descendants are superior in distance running (the same as whites as both have the same muscle fiber type that allows for endurance running). Are we really to think that East Asians are superior nowhere? Clearly ridiculous. We know of Rushton’s Rule of Three, which holds through most all of the variables between races. Yes, there is a genetic difference in intelligence that will condemn blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent.
The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument — Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate — have made the same mistake.
One of my favorite papers, the one that reignited the B-W IQ debate. Titled How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement, he argues that scholastic achievement and IQ can’t be boosted to any meaningful level. He says prenatal effects such as nutrition, the length of pregnancy, maternal stress and environment within the uterus has an effect on IQ, whereas any postnatal (environmental) explanations have not been found to show a lowered IQ, except those kept in isolation. Let’s see what the ‘misleading account of the evidence’ he is talking about.
In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
See the Rushton and Jensen paper, as well as the Jensen paper I linked above. Any environmental explanation for racial differences in IQ can easily be explained away due to bad study design, or simply not testing the children again at adulthood, as any instances where blacks showed they had higher IQs than whites, they were never tested again at adulthood. Just so happens, that around age 10-12, where most of these tests get administered, is when the racial gap starts to become extremely noticeable. To think that race differences in IQ are environmental and not genetic is laughable.
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
Rushton and Jensen state in the refutation of Nisbett I linked that non-white samples show the same heritabilities as white samples.There is little evidence of any cultural, or hardship differences, such as being raised as a visible minority, in one group and not the other. If blacks had heritabilities that were consistently lower than white heritabilities, then we could conclude that racism and poverty were responsible for a lower IQ in blacks. Though when a researcher compared black and white IQs on 3 tests, he found that heritabilities were 50 percent in each group. “The heritabilities in the Basic, Primary, and Cattell tests were, respectively: Whites—.61, .37, and .71; Blacks—.75, .42, and .19.”
On Turkheimer, they say that he was right that he did find gene x environment interactions that made genetic influences weaker and shared environment stronger for those from poorer homes in comparison to those from more affluent homes. Though most studies show no interaction effects, or interactions vary significantly.
Other studies have shown that heritabilities are the same both within as well as between white and black samples. That led Jensen to label this the ‘default hypothesis’. Researchers analyzed full and half siblings from the NLSY on three Peabody Achievement Tests. 161 black full siblings, 106 pairs of black half siblings, 314 pairs of full white siblings and 53 pairs of white half-siblings. with measures in math and reading. The best fitting model for all of the data was by which the sources of the sources of the differences between those within race and the differences between races were the same, at 50 percent genetic and environmental. The combined model (50/50) best explains it, whereas the culture-only and genetics-only models are inadequate.
In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).
Skewed perception on only working with young children. Heritabilities range from 20 percent to 90 percent from the time someone is a toddler to adulthood. He wouldn’t see the same in adult populations.
There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.
Men and women don’t score the same on average. Rushton and Jackson found that on average, men had an edge on IQ tests, scoring 3.63 points higher than women. The people from Ecuador are dwarfs, encephalization quotient explains that, as well as brain size to non-fat mass being most important. Back to Rushton’s Rule of Three, East Asians have bigger brains and more neurons, whites intermediate and blacks last.
About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).
Funny. Rushton and Jensen refuted this 2 years before Nisbett wrote this article. Rushton and Jensen say that in certain areas of the Deep South, black IQ is around 70, consistent with the hereditarian explanation of effects of hybridization. An average IQ of 71 was found for all black children in one district, whereas it was 101 for whites (Jensen, 1977). Also, Lynn (2002) and Rowe (2002) analyzed IQ scores for those that are mixed black and white and found scores in between 100 and 85, around 93. Though they do say that evidence isn’t conclusive on the matter. They say Cape Coloreds and African Americans may have better nutrition, or are treated better in society. The Minnesota Study held many variables constant, and still the mixed race children had higher IQs. That supports the genetic hypothesis.
During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
Nope. Doesn’t work that way, Nisbett.
If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.
Strawman. No one says there aren’t any smart blacks.
Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups.
Correct. Though, the studies failed to choose genetic markers with large allele frequencies between Europeans and Africans (Jensen, 1998b pg 480).
A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.
“Superior”. I touched on Moore here in my ‘Blank Slate’ article:
Another is the Moore study, which tested 23 black adopted children and 23 black children adopted by middle class black families. Their findings indicated that blacks adopted to black families scored at 104 compared to the blacks adopted by white families who scored at 117. People may point to this and say “Well, they didn’t differ in their environment and not their genes, so therefor the B-W IQ gap is 100 percent environmental.” Ridiculous. As with the other 2 studies, they were not tested again at adulthood. To say that any of these 3 studies mentioned above prove a 100 percent environmental cause is intellectually dishonest.
Not worth talking about either.
Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what factors shape differences in I.Q. scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just as well as the whites.
Nothing strange here. Blacks have a high verbal IQ in comparison to their visio-spatial. Rushton thought that black rappers and entertainers had high verbal IQs.Also, people from the same Community College would have, on average, around the same intelligence.
Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to recognize similarities and better facility with analogies — when solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.
That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.
In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.
Nope. The data that Murray uses only shows those of the same age, which is the accurate model. Others use those from all age groups, skewing the findings due to different heritabilities at different ages.
Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.
Yes, interventions from infancy all the way to the end of grade school help, as genes explained only 22 percent of the variance in those at age 5, 40 percent at age 7 and 82 percent at age 18. IQ differences can be changed in younger children, as they are more malleable at younger ages as I have just noted. But as they age, to quote Jensen, their genes “turn on” and fall to the average for that racial grouping.
People like us need to refute these lies that attempt to say that we are all the same and that any and all intelligence and scholastic achievements are environmental in origin and not largely genetic, as Rushton and Jensen have argued vehemently over the years. I will close with the final paragraph of the paper that Rushton and Jensen refuted Nisbett on sums up this situation perfectly:
There is no value in denying reality. While improving opportunities and removing arbitrary barriers is a worthy ethical goal, we must realize that equal opportunity will result in equitable, though unequal outcomes. Expanding on the application of his “default hypothesis” that group differences are based on aggregated individual differences, themselves based on both genetic and environmental contributions, Jensen [59] proposed “two laws of individual differences”—(1) individual differences in learning and performance increase as task complexity increases, and (2) individual differences in performance increase with practice and experience (unless there is a low ceiling on proficiency). We must recognize that the more environmental barriers are ameliorated and everybody’s intellectual performance is improved, the greater will be the relative influence of genetic factors (because the environmental variance is being removed). This means that equal opportunity will result in unequal outcomes, within-families, between-families, and between population groups. The fact that we have learned to live with the first, and to a lesser degree the second, offers some hope we can learn to do so for the third.
People like us need to defend men who are no longer here to defend their work, in Rushton and Jensen. The environmental explanation for IQ, as well as racial differences in IQ, is preposterous. To think that a full environmental causality actually means anything to intelligence is clearly a pipe dream.
HBD and Sports: Baseball
1350 words
Racial differences in sports also prove HBD. The differences are extremely clear to the naked eye, but there are many physiological differences between races that lead to disparities of one being over-represented over another race. I will touch on the three main races (Europeans, Asians and Africans), what they excel in and what they are below average in. Sports, as does academic achievement, prove HBD right. Sports prove innate athletic differences, whereas academic achievement proves innate differences in the brain, as well as intelligence. This is on average of course.
The word ‘sport’ is defined as an athletic activity requiring skill or physical ability, often of competitive nature. The sports I will touch on are baseball, basketball, soccer, football, weightlifting, bodybuilding, chess, gaming and hockey.
Baseball is predominantly white (MLB’s 2015 Racial/Gender Report Card), at 58.8 percent white (down from 60.9 in 2014), 8.3 percent black (up from 8.2 percent in 2014), 29.3 percent ‘Latino’ (up from 28.4 percent in 2014), and 1.2 percent Asian (down from 2 percent in 2014). Baseball is actually one of the only sports in America to be close enough to the ethnic mix of the country. According to the SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), the highest rate for black players in the MLB was in 1981 at 18.7 percent.
Before getting in to why the disparity is that large, I need to touch on ‘Latinos’ in baseball.
According to MLB.com, in 2014, 224 out of 853 players (750 active 25-man roster players and 103 disabled or restricted Major League players) were foreign-born, accounting for 26.3 percent of the players that year. Highest is the Dominican Republic with 83 players, followed by Venezuela with 59 players, Cuba with 19, Puerto Rico with 11, Mexico with 9, Colombia with 4, Panama with 4 and Nicaragua with 3. That makes 192 ‘Latino’ baseball players.
This article talks about how ‘black Latinos’ don’t get treated as black, but as ‘Latino’, when they are racially black (I will show some notable examples below). People like to think that it’s its own separate racial category when that’s not true at all.
Using 2014’s numbers, 520 players were white, 72 were black, 243 were ‘Latinos’, and 18 were Asians. We know that all ‘Latinos’ aren’t black, so using 2014’s numbers by country I will try to estimate the number of black ‘Latino’ players to try to get a real look at the racial breakdown in the MLB.
For brevity, I will just add each country up as what the majority mix of that particular country is. So, adding to the 72 black players I will add 83 from D.R., Cuba with 19, I’ll split P.R. with 5. Venezuela has a mix of blacks, whites and mulattoes, so I will just say 25 percent are black. That’s 15. Adding those up you get 194 black players. Keep in mind, a conservative estimate. So that makes the MLB about 23 percent black (this is only for those from foreign-born countries, I may make a comprehensive list one day if I feel up to it about this).
(I will just group mestizos as white for brevity to only have 3 categories.) So with that being said, 641 white players, 194 black players, and 18 Asian players. So with my guesstimate, baseball is 75 percent white, 23 percent black and 2 percent Asian in 2014.
Why the huge disparity? Simple. Baseball, at its core, is about reaction time. To quote Rushton and Jensen from their magnum opus Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability (pg 244):
Reaction time is one of the simplest culture-free cognitive measures. Most reaction time tasks are so easy that 9- to 12-year-old children can perform them in less than 1 s. But even on these very simple tests, children with higher IQ scores perform faster than do children with lower scores, perhaps because reaction time measures the neurophysiological efficiency of the brain’s capacity to process information accurately—the same ability measured by intelligence tests (Deary, 2000; Jensen, 1998b). Children are not trained to perform well on reaction time tasks (as they are on certain paper-and-pencil tests), so the advantage of those with higher IQ scores on these tasks cannot arise from practice, familiarity, education, or training.
And from pg 245:
The same pattern of average scores on these and other reaction time tasks (i.e., East Asians faster than Whites faster than Blacks) is found within the United States. Jensen (1993) and Jensen and Whang (1994) examined the time taken by over 400 schoolchildren ages 9 to 12 years old in California to retrieve overlearned addition, subtraction, or multiplication of single digit numbers (from 1 to 9) from long-term memory. All of the children had perfect scores on paper-andpencil tests of this knowledge, which was then reassessed using the Math Verification Test. The response times significantly correlated (negatively) with Raven Matrices scores, whereas movement times have a near-zero correlation. The average reaction times for the three racial groups differ significantly (see Figure 2). They cannot be explained by the groups’ differences in motivation because the East Asian children averaged a shorter response time but a longer movement time than did the Black children.
Those with higher IQs average faster times on the simple RT, choice RT and odd-man-out RT. They follow Rushton’s Rule of Three, in which blacks will be at the bottom, whites in the middle and Asians at the top.
In this article, Mind Games: What Makes a Great Baseball Player Great, they say that studies done by Columbia University on Babe Ruth while he was playing showed that he could react to visual and sound cues better than the normal population, as well as having better hand-eye coordination than 98.8 percent of the population. A great proportion of MLB players have 20/20 vision or better. Within higher-skilled players, even then there are huge differences in reaction time (IQ differences). Hitters also have to predict where the ball will be, all within a 4/10ths of a second. This infographic explains it well. So you need an extremely high reaction time to hit a fastball coming at you at 95 miles per hour. All of this proves that, on average, baseball players have high IQs because of a lot of the things associated with baseball, also correlate highly with IQ.
Personality also is a factor. According to the previously linked article, with the example of Darryl Strawberry and Billy Beane, Strawberry handled the pressure well, while Beane folded under pressure. Seems this has to do with extroversion and introversion. Strawberry says that self-confidence and mental toughness come in to play because they fail 66 percent of the time they come up to hit.
Athletic ability is also important. The top two record holders for stolen bases in the MLB are blacks. Has to do with fast twitch muscle fibers (muscle fibers that exert force faster, but tire out more quickly than slow twitch). So you can see how natural fast twitch muscle fibers help blacks on the field, as well as the base pads, in baseball.
To touch on a previous point, even in the upper end of hitters (the elite ones), there are still marked differences in reaction time (IQ). That makes sense, seeing as I alluded to before that it takes 4/10ths of a second for a 95 MPH fastball to reach home plate.
Why the low rate for Asians? Well, natural athletic ability for one. The second reason is myopia. Those with myopia do have a higher IQ on average (as the correlation is .25), but those that are nearsighted are often late in their reactions to higher speed pitches. For something anecdotal, I’ve noticed that most Asians are pitchers, either starters of relievers. This article talks about the critical vision skills that pitchers need, and all though Asians are only 2 percent of the MLB, their high visio-spatial ability, along with high reaction times, they are able to succeed as good pitchers in the MLB.
Outfielders are generally fast and quick. Blacks round out a good amount of outfielders, whereas whites round out catcher, as well as a majority of the infield, due to a lot of line-drive hits coming at them, which the player needs high reaction times to be able to catch/field the ball.
Sports prove HBD, just like academic/monetary achievement. Intelligence, as well as physical differences, are pretty much innate. They show in all facets of life. Even though they are obvious to most, no one ever speaks out on it.
“Race is a Social Construct”: Part 1
3200 words
“Race is a social construct”. You may hear that a lot from uneducated people. They may say that since the definition of race is ‘ever-changing’, that race doesn’t exist and that it only exists in our minds. They obviously have no understanding of genetics and how we came to be today. If you want to get technical, everything is a social construct. The Universe is a social construct. We’re only giving definitions to what we perceive something to be, so with the logic of ‘race being a social construct’, then everything is a social construct. With that logic, the Universe doesn’t exist because it’s a social construct.
I will look at 3 articles in the first of many articles on this subject. One from Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Bill Nye and Ta-Nehisi Coates. All 3 have extremely wrong views on the biological reality of race, and I will prove that here. I will quote from each article and show how they are wrong with scientific studies as well as point out their bad logic.
I will begin with Angela Onwuachi-Willig. In her article for The New York Times, ‘Race and Racial Identities Are Social Constructs‘, she says that because of the ever-changing definition of the term race, that it is a social construct and not a biological one.
Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. Were race “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries. Yet, a person who could be categorized as black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil or colored in South Africa.
Race is not biological, it is a construct. There are no clusters of genes or one gene that is common in blacks or whites. That is correct, but her statement about race being social and not a biological construct is clearly ignorant as I will show below.
You can see in the picture above that races clearly do cluster in different clusters from other races. She is right about the changing definitions, especially Brazil, but Brazil is a special case. So much mixing has gone on in Brazil that there is evidence of skin color becoming independent of ancestry. One outlier example doesn’t make race a ‘social construct’. South Africa is also another one. They classify race in South Africa with four categories: black, colored, Indian/Asian or white. Obama would have been called ‘colored’ in South Africa today. But, again, just because there are changing definitions of race throughout the globe, doesn’t mean that race doesn’t exist.
Like race, racial identity can be fluid. How one perceives her racial identity can shift with experience and time, and not simply for those who are multiracial. These shifts in racial identity can end in categories that our society, which insists on the rigidity of race, has not even yet defined.
Is she making an argument for being ‘trans-racial’? I bet Rachel Dolezal would be happy.
In a society where being white (regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages) means living a life with white skin privileges — such as being presumed safe, competent and noncriminal — whites who begin to experience discrimination because of their intimate connection with someone of another race, or who regularly see their loved ones fall prey to racial discrimination, may begin to no longer feel white. After all, their lived reality does not align with the social meaning of their whiteness.
I always hear about ‘white privilege’ but never get an actual definition of what it means. People complain about ‘white privilege’ because they, of course, don’t understand the biological reality of race. Anything that may prove innate differences between individuals or races they just can’t imagine exists because of what they’ve been taught their whole lives. She is talking about those whites who are in the BLM movement. The false ideals of egalitarianism are the cause of this.
More than 50 years ago, Congress enacted the most comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation in history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Half a century later in 2015, the same gaps in racial inequality remain or have grown deeper. Today, the unemployment rate for African-Americans remains more than double that for whites, public schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1950s and young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white male peers. Even a white fourth-grade teacher in Texas, Karen Fitzgibbons, openly advocated for the racial segregation of the 1950s and 1960s on her Facebook page.
Right. IQ is the cause of the unemployment rate of African Americans. Not any imaginary forces such as ‘white privilege’. Public schools are more segregated today due to people wanting to be with others genetically similar to themselves. Blacks cause themselves to get shot and killed by police due to their actions during altercations with police officers. Oh no, someone has not politically correct opinions!! She should lose her job and never work a good job again!
That’s what the Left does. They attempt to shout you down with buzzwords so you can’t calmly and intellectually prove your case.
She is clearly wrong. Good thing this is called an ‘opinion piece’, there were few actual facts in it.
Now to touch on Bill Nye’s views on race. It’s funny. I loved his show when I was a kid. Now, knowing the truth about racial differences, hearing him say that made me lose all respect for him. He’s a mechanical engineer with a Bs from Cornell University. People only take what he says because he is ‘The Science Guy’ when he has no training in what he is talking about.
“We obsess about whether our dog is a pug-Jack Russell terrier mix with corgi overtones and an oaky finish. ‘An approachable little dog,’ whatever. They’re all dogs, okay? And so the idea of a purebred is just a human construct. There’s no such thing – in a sense there’s no such thing as a purebred dog.”
That right there is a fallacy. As with the woman’s article above, they both use the ‘continuum fallacy‘. The continuum fallacy is when someone rejects a vague claim because it’s not as precise as they want it to be. ‘There are no pure races’ or ‘there are no pure breeds of dog’, that doesn’t mean that genes don’t cluster differently, showing genetic differentiation.
“If a Papua New Guinean hooks up with a Swedish person all you get is a human. There’s no new thing you’re going to get. You just get a human. Japanese woman jumping the African guy, all you get is a human. They’re all humans. So this is a lesson to be learned. There really is, for humankind there’s really no such thing as race. There’s different tribes but not different races. We’re all one species.”
Right. That doesn’t mean there is no such thing as race. Grizzly bears and polar bears can mate to create a prizzly bear. Does that mean species doesn’t exist? (I will touch on speciation at the end of this article.) Once again, that statement doesn’t deny the biological reality of race, as you can see from the picture above.
Researchers have proven, scientifically, that humans are all one people. The color of our ancestors’ skin is a consequence of ultra-violet light, of latitude and climate.
We all belong to the same genus, Homo, but again, that doesn’t disprove race. He’s correct in saying that our ancestors’ skin is a consequence of UV light of latitude and climate, and right there he proves us correct in stating that sunlight differences depending on where your ancestors evolved in the world are the cause of racial differences.
Despite our recent sad conflicts here in the U.S., there really is no such thing, scientifically, as race. We are all one species. Each one of us more alike than different.
In this statement, he is saying the first sentence because of recent racial relations in the U.S. A clear politically-motivated statement.
“Each one of us more alike than different.’ That is correct, but, yet again, doesn’t disprove the reality of race. Geneticists estimate that humans will differ, on average, at 3 million base pairs in their DNA. That’s more than enough for distinct racial classification, as well as enough to differentiate us.
Is that supposed to mean anything? Cats have 90 percent homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice.
90% of the mouse genome could be lined up with a region on the human genome.
99% of mouse genes turn out to have analogues in humans.
As you can see from the links above, we are all extremely genetically related to animals that are clearly extremely physically different from us humans. This shows, that the differences in humans are down to not how genetically distant we are from other animals in the animal kingdom, but how the differing genes we have are expressed.
We all came from Africa. We’re all made from the same star dust. We’re all going to live and die on the same planet – a pale blue dot in the vastness of space. We have to work together!
And finally, you can see his way of saying that racial differences mean nothing because ‘we all come from Africa’ and ‘ we’re all made from star dust’. That may be true, but that doesn’t do anything to acknowledge, or even show that racial differences are meaningless.
Bill Nye has absolutely no authority to speak on this matter. Liberals then eat this up and cite Bill Nye as proof that race doesn’t exist, which is clearly untrue as I have shown.
Finally, I will get to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ‘The Social Construction of Race‘. He cites my favorite blogger/geneticist Razib Khan, so this should be good.
Ancestry — where my great-great-great-great grandparents are from — is a fact. What you call people with that particular ancestry is not. It changes depending on where you are in the world, when you are there, and who has power.
Right with the first sentence, and with the second. It seems he’s attempting to use what the first article I cited says: that due to ever-changing racial definitions that race doesn’t exist as we believe it to be. He says that ancestry is a fact, well wouldn’t that same ancestry be your racial classification? I am not following his logic. Just because there are differing views on the definition of race throughout the globe, doesn’t mean that there is no biological reality of race.
He cites someone else who states:
“Race” as a term is very nebulous. But human subgroups with similar ancestries can have group differences in DNA — and intelligence is highly unlikely to have no genetic basis at all (although most now believe its impact is greatly qualified by cultural and developmental differences).
Cultural and developmental differences. The cultural differences are thrown out. According to the editorial ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’, which came out shortly after The Bell Curve was published, one of their points is that IQ tests are not culturally biased if the individual speaks English. If they are not English speakers, they will either get a test in their native language or get Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which is a ‘culture free’ IQ test as it’s based on pattern recognition and has no writing involved. Developmental differences, yes. White mothers have a better prenatal environment then do black mothers, which is biological. Developmental differences are innate within the two populations.
I do not know. Andrew is more inclined to believe that there is some group-wide genetic explanation for the IQ difference. I am more inclined to believe that the difference lies in how those groups have been treated. One thing that I am not convinced by is controlling for income and education.
Oh, the old ‘Stereotype Threat‘ canard. The paper, which was cited more than 5000 times, states that African-Americans do worse on tests in which they are told that they are being judged on their race. Well, a meta-analysis of 55 published and unpublished studies came out and what was found that the it shows clear publication bias. Either due to people not knowing how to read scientific papers or more insidious tactics. The effect varies across studies and is small. Though elite university undergrads may underperform on tests of cognitive tests due to Stereotype Threat, this effect doesn’t generalize to non-adapted standardized tests, high-stakes settings and less academically gifted test takers. Stereotype Threat cannot explain the difference in mean cognitive test performance between African Americans and European Americans. (pg 68)
In the mid-20th century, as we have been documenting, it was the policy of this country to deny African-Americans access to the same methods of wealth-building, that it was making available to whites.
This is not merely a problem for your local diversity and sensitivity workshop. It is a problem of wealth and power. When you create a situation in which a community has a disproportionate number of poor people, and then you hyper-segregate that community, you multiply the problems of poverty for the entire community–poor or not. That is to say that black individuals are not simply poorer and less wealthier than white individuals. Because of segregation, black individuals and white individuals of the same income and same wealth, do not live in communities of equal wealth.
What bearing does segregation have on IQ differential? I don’t know. My skepticism of genetics is rooted in the fact that arguments for genetic inferiority among people of African ancestry are old, and generally have not fared well. My skepticism is also rooted in the belief that power generally seeks to justify itself. The prospect of actual equality among the races is frightening. If black and white people truly are equal on a bone-deep level, then the game might really be rigged, and we might actually have to do something about it. I think there’s much more evidence of that rigging, then there is evidence of cognitive deficiency .
I must add that I can not pretend to be a dispassionate, nor impartial observer. I come from a particular place. I’ve now been out in the world, and seen how other people in other places live. They don’t strike me as more intelligent. They strike me as better armed. There’s nothing scientific about that. But I think we all have core faiths. These are mine. You’ve been warned.
Regardless of the method used in the analyses, all researchers reached estimated very close to that obtained by Lewontin: The differences observed by the subdivisions (populations, groups of populations, races) represented 10 to 15 percent of the total genetic variation found within the human species. Formally, these findings demonstrate, first, that the species is indeed subdivided into genetically definable groups of individuals and, second, that atleast some of these groups correspond to those defined by anthropologists as races on the basis of physical characters. They do not however, settle the arguments regarding the methods of racial classification. Unfortunately, Lewontin did not specify before initiating his analysis how large the difference has to be in order to call the groups “races”.
Consequently, the results of the studies have led population geneticists to two diametrically opposite conclusions. Lewontin called the observed differences trivial, and proclaimed that “racial classification is now seen to be of no genetic or taxonomic significance” so that “no justification can be offered for its continuance.” This view is echoed by authors of similar studies, who seem to be surprised that genetic variation within populations is greater than that between them. By contrast, Sewell Wright who can hardly be taken for a dilettante in questions of population genetics, has stated emphatically that if differences of this magnitude were observed in any other species, the groups they distinguish would be called subspecies.
One can extend Wright’s argument even further. The more than 200 species of haplochromine fishes in Lake Victoria differ from each other much less than the human races in their neural genes, although they are presumably distinguished by genes that control differences in their external appearances. The same can be said about atleast some of the currently recognized species of Darwin’s finches and other examples of recent adaptive radiations. In all these cases, reproductively isolated groups are impossible to tell apart by the methods used to measure differences in human races. Obviously, human races are not reproductively isolated (interracial marriages are common and the progenies of such marriages are fully fertile) but the external differences between them are comparable to cichlid fishes and Darwin’s finches. Under these circumstances, to claim that the genetic differences between the human races are trivial is a more political statement than a scientific argument. Trivial by what criterion? How much difference would Lewontin and those who side with him consider non-trivial?
By mixing science with politics, geneticists and anthropologists are committing the same infraction of which they are accusing other scientists, who they themselves label as racist. Even worse, by labelling the genetic differences as insignificant, they play into the hand of genuine racists who can demolish this claim and so further their own agenda. It is intellectually more honest to acknowledge and then point out that by no means imply supremacy of one race over others. This can be done by demonstrating that the differences are in genes that cannot be linked to any features that would be required for the preeminence of a particular race.
It’s clear that racial classification does exist. The creator of Fst, Sewall Wright, says that a Fst distance of .15 is more than enough for speciation (differing racial classifications). It directly refutes Lewontin, who put his political ideology of Marxism over science. Those cichlids in Lake Victoria are a perfect example that though the definition of ‘species’ does change depending on which researcher you speak to, it doesn’t discount that there are real and physical genetic differences between races and ethnicities.
In conclusion, the term “race is a social construct” is a deliberately intellectually dishonest statement, or a statement used to hide the truth for more insidious things to happen due to the non-acknowledgement of race.
IQ, Nutrition, Disease and Parasitic Load
1600 words
There are some environmental factors that have negative effects on IQ. Three I will touch on today are nutrition, disease and parasitic load. All three mean decreased cognitive ability as well as a slew of other negative effects on their lifestyle.
To start, nutrition of the mother is one of the most important and telling things for the health as well as IQ of the child. Prenatal nutrition is very important to a developing fetus. What the mother eats has a big effect on the fetus. For instance, vitamins and minerals are extremely important. A pregnant mother needs two times the amount of folic acid than a non-pregnant mother. A pregnant woman needs 400 mcg per day to prevent defects to the babies brain and spine called neural tube defects. A pregnant woman also needs double the amount of iron than a non-pregnant woman.
We can see here that if a pregnant woman is protein deficient, it passes on to the baby. Protein is more important in the second and third trimester due to the fetus developing more rapidly. It can also lead to growth retardation, due to reduced nutrient supply to the fetus. The authors end up concluding that the women who ingested 50-70 grams of protein per day and 156 to 465 ml of milk had children with significant and better tendency in femur length, bi-parietal diameter, abdomen circumference and head circumference. It’s important for a mother to get the right amount of protein for optimal fetal growth.
It’s also known how malnutrition in early years can lead to antisocial and aggressive behavior as well as lower cognition. It’s due to what I touched on above. They state that malnutrition in early childhood years such as lack of iron, zinc, B vitamins as well as being protein deficient leads to the 3 aforementioned things. As I have shown in the previous paragraph, the lack of the same nutrients during fetal development causes the same problems.
Now that I have touched on how prenatal nutrition is important for the fetus, I will talk about parasitic load.
According to a paper by Eppig et al, the prevalence of parasites is the cause of worldwide differences in cognitive ability. They state that from an energetics standpoint, that a developing human would have a hard time developing a brain while fighting infectious disease, as both are very metabolically demanding. They go through all of the theories of differences in cognitive ability, such as the cold winter hypothesis of Lynn, Rushton and Kanazawa, to studies of inbreeding depression by Saadat and Woodley. They state that Lynn has argued that nutrition is important to high degrees of mental development, that nutrition is the cause of the ‘Flynn Effect’ and that he showed that undernourished children have smaller heads, smaller brains and lower cognitive function than adequately nourished children. They end up concluding that as nations develop, they should be monitored for a decrease in parasitic infection to see if it correlates with a rise in IQ and whether any gain would be able to account for the ‘Flynn Effect’ (which the rate is 3 points per decade, no matter what population you look at).
To touch quickly on what Lynn said about undernourished children having smaller heads, smaller brains, and, therefore, lower cognitive function, all 3 of those variables are related. Brain size is correlated with cognitive ability at .44. So, we can see there is a pretty good relationship with brain size and IQ. So, those who don’t get adequate nutrition will, in turn, have a smaller head size and a smaller brain, which both lead to depressed intelligence.
There is evidence that Sickle Cell Anemia leads to a decrease in IQ. The authors conclude with MRI scans, that those with SCA have a decrease in total brain volume, which of course has a negative effect on cognitive ability. Though, that happened due to an increase in age. It’s known that brain size and the amount of neurons in the brain decrease with age. I won’t discount that SCA lowers cognitive ability, it’s a good hypothesis, along with the paper by Eppig et al, but I still think that Rushton, Lynn and Kanazawa’s Cold Winter Theory is the best evolutionary model for differences in intelligence found across the globe.
In the map above you can see the rate of malaria in the world. It’s concentrated around the equator as mosquitoes are the main transmitters of the parasites. Though, is it the parasitic load that causes low IQ or evolution in hot climates, which lead to low IQ and, in turn, makes them able to not be able to figure out how to cure the diseases due to low intellect? I believe it’s both, leaning more to the side of evolution in hot climate obviously, but I won’t discount that malaria, and therefore, SCA, has something to do with lower cognitive ability in those populations with higher rates of malaria.
So with all of the above factors, let’s talk about Africa.
We know they have the lowest IQs in the world (IQ 67 to 70), and we know they have the highest rates of malaria in the world, and also some of the worst nutritional standards of any geographic region in the world.
What is the cause? IQ? Disease? Parasitic load? Nutrient deficiencies?
All of the above. The last 3 are environmental effects that retard IQ. IQ drives most all development for a country, so with the last 3 points being there, obviously since they retard IQ, the QoL in the country will suffer.
Lynn states that with better nutrition that Africans will be able to reach their phenotypic IQ of 80. There is some good evidence for his claim as he also states that blacks with low to no white admixture have an IQ of 80. Rushton and Jensen also say that since psychologists don’t venture into the lowest income neighborhoods in the South, that the black IQ may be 78 in America, and not 85. Right there by the African phenotypic IQ of 80. So, that would mean that those with the highest amount of African ancestry have an IQ of around 80, plus or minus a few points. So if those African-Americans with low amount of white admixture have an IQ of 80, then it’s a good bet to take that if Africans themselves had proper nutrition that they would hit 80 as well, just as Lynn has stated.
Satoshi Kanazawa also said this back in 2006. Of course the media made him out to be someone who just said that without any backing of his claims. He compared IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries. He found that those countries with the lowest IQs have higher rates ill health. They accuse him of attempting to ‘revive the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high’. We know that poverty goes out the window because of the relationship between IQ and poverty. But as seen above, disease does have an effect on IQ. They only threw buzzwords at him and, of course, didn’t attempt to say anything meaningful to him.
The link between life expectancy and IQ is well studied. Those with lower IQs live shorter lives and those with higher IQs live longer lives. The studies and information I cite in that article corroborate what Kanazawa says about IQ and ability to fight disease.
IQ is affected by environmental factors such as disease, nutrition and parasitic load. I have given good evidence that with better nutrition, Africans can reach their phenotypic IQ of 80. But, they can’t learn how to farm because of their low IQ. They can’t get a higher IQ because they can’t learn how to farm.
The cause of this is evolution. When they say, as seen in Kanazawa’s article, that poverty (malnutrition) and disease are the causes of low IQ, low IQ causes those 2 things because those with lower IQ don’t have the abstract ability to think into the future that what they’re doing to their bodies can and will have negative effects in the future, which leads to decreased life span as I have noted in the article I have linked. It also leads to them not being able to farm, due to not having a high enough intellect due to evolving in the hot climates of the sub-Saharan desert. The only thing that holds wight, in my opinion, for the case for an environmental effect for lowered IQ is the case for parasitic load. So, I posit that if Africans were to some how to get it in to shape on their own and take care of those things on their own, they will be able to reach their phenotypic IQ of 80. We also know that immigrants from European countries with lower IQs, their descendants in America have IQs closer to average to the white average (100). 33 million people in Europe are at risk for malnutrition, so those who do come to America who are at risk for malnutrition, get the IQ boost due to living in America with better nutrition. This is also supported by African immigrants to America having a higher rate of collegiate attainment than white Americans, though that may be due to super-selection, only the smartest African populations coming here.
In conclusion, those African-Americans with low to no white admixture have an IQ of around 80, so it’s well supported that, with better nutrition, lower parasitic load and lower disease rate, Africans, and all other low IQ countries for that matter, can get a boost of around 10 to 15 points with all 3 things I have noted in this article taken care of.
BEHAVIOR=GENES+ENVIRONMENT NEEDS TO DIE: Vindication!
1800 words
So I was at Barnes N Noble a few weeks ago and picked up this book called ‘This Idea Must Die‘. It has a ton of researchers who wrote for it. Each person writes a short, 3 to 4 page writing on what idea must die and why. it’s a great read so far. Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins wrote for it.
Now, I just came to this section in the book where Steven Pinker talks about behavior=genes+environment. To quote Pinker from the book:
Would you say that the behavior of your computer or smartphone is determined by an interaction between its inherent design and the way it is influenced by the environment? It’s unlikely; such a statement would not be false, but it would be obtuse. Complex adaptive systems have a nonrandom organization , and they have inputs. But speaking of inputs as “shaping” the system’s behavior, or pitting its design against its input, would lead to no insight as to how the system works. The human brain is far more complex, and processes its input in more complex ways, than human-made devices, yet many people analyze it in ways that are too simplistic for our far simpler toys. Every term in the equation is suspect.
Behavior: More than half a century after the cognitive revolution, people still ask whether a behavior is genetically or environmentally determined. Yet neither the genes nor the environment can control the muscles indirectly. The cause of the behavior is the brain. While it’s sensible to ask how emotions, motives, or learning mechanisms have been influenced by genes, it makes no sense to ask this of behavior itself. (Emphasis mine.)
Genes: Molecular biologists have appropriated the term “gene” to refer to the stretches of DNA that code for a protein. Unfortunately, this sense differs from the one used in population genetics, behavioral genetics and evolutionary theory – namely, any information carried that’s transmittable across generations and has sustained effects on the phenotype. This includes any aspect of DNA that can affect gene expression, and is closer to what is meant by “innate” than genes in the molecular biologists’ narrow sense. The confusion between the two leads to innumerable red herrings in discussions of out makeup, such as the banality that the expression of genes (in the sense of protein-coding stretches of DNA) is regulated by signals from the environment. How else could it be? The alternative is that every cell synthesizes every protein all the time! The epigenetics bubble inflated by the science media is based on a similar confusion. (Emphasis mine.)
Environment: This term for the inputs to an organism is also misleading. Of all the energy impinging on an organism, only a subset, processed and transformed in complex ways, has an effect on its subsequent information processing. Which information is taken in, how it’s transformed, and how it affects the organism (that is, the way the organism learns) all depend on the organisms innate organization. To speak of the environment “determining” or “shaping” behavior is unperspicuous.(Emphasis mine.)
Even the technical sense of “environment”used in quantitative behavioral genetics is perversely confusing. Now, there’s nothing wrong with partitioning phenotypic variance into components that correlate with genetic variation (heritability) and with variation among families (“shared environment”). The problem comes from so-called “nonshared” or “unique” environmental influences. This consists of all the variance attributable to neither genetic nor familiar variation. In most studies, it’s calculated as 1 – (heritability + shared environment). Practically, you can think of it as the differences between identical twins who grow up in the same home. They share their genes, parents, older and younger siblings, school, peers, and neighborhood. So what could make them different? Under the assumption that behavior is a product of genes plus environment, it must be something in the environment of one that is not in the environment of the other.
But this category really should be called “miscellaneous/unknown,” because is has nothing necessarily to do with any measurable aspect of the environment, such as one sibling getting the top bunk and the other the bottom, or a parent unpredictably favoring one child, or one sibling getting chased by a dog, coming down with a virus, or being favored by a teacher. These influences are purely conjectural, and studies looking for them have failed to find them.The alternative is that this component actually consists of the effects of chance – new mutations, quirky prenatal effects, noise in brain development, and events in life with unpredictable effects. (Emphasis mine.)
Stochastic effects in development are increasingly being recognized by epidemiologists, frustrated by such recalcitrant phenomena such as nonagenarian pack-a-day smokers and identical twins discordant for schizophrenia, homosexuality, and disease outcomes. They’re increasingly forced to acknowledge that God plays die with our traits.(Emphasis mine.) Developmental biologists have come to similar conclusions. The bad habit of assuming that anything not classically genetic must be “environmental” has blinkered behavioral geneticists (and those who interpret their findings) into the fool’s errand of looking for environmental effects foe what may be randomness in the developmental processes. (Emphasis mine.)
A final confusion in the equation is the seemingly sophisticated add-on of “gene-environment interactions.” This is also designed to confuse. Gene-environment interactions do not refer to the fact that the environment is necessary for genes to do their thing (which is true of all genes). It refers to a flipflop effect inn which the genes affect a person one way in one environment but another way in another environment, whereas an alternative gene has a different patter. For example, if you inherit allele 1, you are vulnerable: a stressor makes you neurotic. If you inherit allele 2, you are resilient: a stressor leaves you normal. With either gene, if you are never stressed, you are normal.
Gene-environment interactions in this technical sense, confusingly, go into the “unique environmental” component, because they’re not the same (on average) in siblings growing up in the same family. Just as confusingly, “interactions” in the commonsense – namely, that a person with a given genotype is predictably affected by the environment – goes into the “heritability” component, because the quantitative genetics measures only correlations. This confound is behind the finding that the heritability of intelligence increases, and the effects of shared environment decrease, over a person’s lifetime. One explanation is that genes have effects late in life, but another is that people with a given genotype place themselves in environments that indulge their inborn tastes and talents. The “environment” increasingly depends on their genes, rather than being the cause of exogenous behavior. (Emphasis mine.) (pg 188-191 This Idea Must Die)
I’m pretty excited about this. I have said for a while, to quote Douglas Whitman:
Race is not a social construct. Society is a racial construct. Society and culture derive from race/biology
You can see the effects from race/biology anywhere in the world you look and see the majority racial/ethnic mix of a country and/or area. A place is ONLY as good as its majority population.
We can see the kinds of effects this will have on our society as a whole. The way all of these 3rd worlders are flooding in to our countries. They leave their countries, to come to ours (in the West), and they don’t realize that once they become the majority and displace the native populations of the countries, that the place they will be living in will be just as bad, or even worse than where they came from.
Now, what Pinker said about the nonshared environment was really interesting. Especially at the end where he says ‘The “environment” increasingly depends on their genes, rather than being the cause of exogenous behavior.’
What does that mean? You can see this, for the most part, whenever there are new immigrants to an area. They still act how they did back in their home countries. The native peoples of the country have a certain way they act, and so do the immigrants to that country. The native peoples environment is an expression of their genetics. The new environment that the new immigrants bring to the country is also an expression of genetics. So, we can see just with what Pinker explained above, that environment itself doesn’t dictate behavior, but GENES DICTATE BEHAVIOR AND ALSO THE ENVIRONMENT THAT GETS CREATED.
So, it seems that those with certain genes place themselves in environments that indulge their inborn tastes and talents. “Environment” INCREASINGLY DEPENDS ON THEIR GENES RATHER THAN BEING THE CAUSE OF EXOGENOUS BEHAVIOR.
We know that genes are the driving force in life, and with this new ‘epigenetic’ field of genetics, they will attempt to say that environment is the main cause of molding genetics because one may have different things happen to them in one environment and not the other. But, since we have just seen here that those with certain genes put themselves into their environments, what does this say about certain people you may know? Does this mean that their genes put them in their situation? Well, for the most part, yes.
If one chooses their environment based on their genetic makeup, wouldn’t that throw out any and all environmental interactions?
For instance, how leftists say that negros can’t help it and are ‘born in to poverty’. Negros, as well as other low IQ peoples, choose their environment based on their genetics.
THE ENVIRONMENT YOU CHOOSE IS BASED ON YOUR GENETICS. THE PEOPLE DICTATE THE ENVIRONMENT OF A PLACE.
Growing up in a bad environment does not make you a bad person, sorry to say, but your genes make you a bad person. People seem to have the wrong idea about how environment interactions work with genes. I’m glad this came out.
This is inferred from what Pinker said. This is also explicitly said in the Whitman quote.
This new “epigenetic revolution” needs to die. It is saying that gene x environment interactions matter, when it really is the opposite. What is really happening is that individuals group up, due to genetic similarity theory, the theory proposed by Rushton after noticing that each ethnic group basically stayed with each other, along with their genetics that dictates their environment to live in. By putting so many genetically similar people in the same environment, in this case, immigrants, you will, therefore, get the same situation of how the conditions in their countries were, due to genetic similarity theory having them be with peoples of similar genetics, as well as their genes dictating their environments.
BEHAVIOR=GENES+ENVIRONMENT NEEDS TO DIE!!
Refuting Afrocentrism Part 2: Are Italians Black?
1400 words
Afrocentrists like to say things like ‘Italians were black’ and ‘the Romans were black’ and ‘The Moors were black’. All of this is based on shoddy evidence and uneducated people not knowing what they’re talking about.
In this article by an Afrocentrist, he claims that ‘Italians were black’ and talks about ‘dark-skinned Sicilians’.
Southern Italians were considered “black” in the South and were subjected to the Jim Crow laws of segregation. They weren’t allowed to marry “whites.” It was difficult, damn near impossible.
They were designated as “black” on census forms if they lived in the South and that is because the majority of them were dark-skinned Sicilians.
No idea what he’s talking about. In America at the time, Northern Italians said that Southern Italians were of a different race due to a slightly different look. Well, genetic testing shows similarities between the Northern and Southern Italians which I will get to later.
First off, it’s not only Sicilians who are ‘dark-skinned’. It’s all of Southern Europe.
The map seen above is a map of UV rays that Europe and parts of North Africa get. Notice how North Africa and Southern Europe get the same amount of UV rays. That’s the cause of the difference in appearance between the North and South of Italy.
Mass lynchings happened to them often.
Mass lynchings happened to everyone often, not just blacks and Italians. Lynchings happened to anyone who raped, murdered, or did any other heinous crime. 27 percent of those lynched between the years of 1882-1968 were white. It wasn’t only a ‘black problem’.
One of the biggest mass lynchings happened to Italians in New Orleans when they thought that a Italian immigrant had killed a “white” police officer.
Right. It was the biggest mass lynching ever in the history of the US, 11 Italians got lynched. But, what he says about the cause being ‘killing a “white” police officer’ is unfounded. They got lynched for killing the police officer, not because they were of ‘another race’.
The very few Northern Italians that immigrated here perpetuated the myth that Southern Italians and Greeks were of a different race than them in order to save their own asses. This wasn’t true, and there are actually dark-skinned Italians all over Italy, not just in the South, as well as light-skinned Italians all over Italy.
But it is true. The differences between Northern and Southern Italians are embellished due to political reasons. There are dark-skinned Italians who live in Italy but are not genetically Italian/Greek. Yes, light-skinned ‘all over Italy’, those in the North are more Germanic, while the South has slight admixture from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Though, some from the South migrated to the North and vice versa. The amount of non-white admixture in Italians is less than that of the average for Europe:
Combined data from two large mtDNA studies provides an estimate of non-Caucasoid maternal ancestry in Italians. The first study sampled 411 Italians from all over the country and found five South Asian M and East Asian D sequences (1.2%) and eight sub-Saharan African L sequences (1.9%). The second study sampled 465 Sicilians and detected ten M sequences (2.2%) and three L sequences (0.65%). This makes a total of 3% non-white maternal admixture (1.3% Asian and 1.7% African), which is very low and typical for European populations, since Pliss et al. 2005, e.g., observed 1.8% Asian admixture in Poles and 1.2% African admixture in Germans. (Plaza et al. 2003; Romano et al. 2003)
Similar data from the Y-chromosome reveals Italians’ even lower non-Caucasoid paternal admixture. Both studies obtained samples from all over the mainland and islands. No Asian DNA was detected anywhere, but a single sub-Saharan African E(xE3b) sequence was found in the first study’s sample of 416 (0.2%), and six were observed in the second study’s sample of 746 (0.8%). The total is therefore a minuscule 0.6%, which decreases to 0.4% if only Southern Italians are considered and 0% if only Sicilians are considered. Again, these are normal levels of admixture for European populations (e.g. Austrians were found to have 0.8% E(xE3b) by Brion et al. 2004). (Semino et al. 2004; Cruciani et al. 2004)
An analysis of 10 autosomal allele frequencies in Southern Europeans (including Italians, Sicilians and Sardinians) and various Middle Eastern/North African populations revealed a “line of sharp genetic change [that] runs from Gibraltar to Lebanon,” which has divided the Mediterranean into distinct northern and southern clusters since at least the Neolithic period. The authors conclude that “gene flow [across the sea] was more the exception than the rule,” attributing this result to “a joint product of initial geographic isolation and successive cultural divergence, leading to the origin of cultural barriers to population admixture.” (Simoni et al. 1999)
These studies show the opposite of what Afrocentrists, and even Nordicists say.
The reason I say very few is because over 80% of Italian immigrants were from Southern Italy (Sicily, Abruzzo, Calabria, Campania, Sardinia, Naples, etc.)
Correct, and as seen above with those 3 studies, neither of them are ‘African’. My grandmother was born in Calabria. She looked like any other normal Italian woman you see on the street. These people take their ideas from movies, take genetics information from a movie like True Romance and attempt to say that all Italians are ‘black’ or ‘African’ or ‘Moorish’.
It was highly unlikely (damn near impossible) for a Southern Italian to own a slave because they were seen as the same as blacks, and at the time, they were the second (right behind blacks) most discriminated against group.
Too bad Italians started coming to America in the 1870s. What he states doesn’t even make sense because blacks owned slaves way disproportionately than whites. 4.8 percent of Southern whites, along with the North, being 1.3 percent of all whites in America in 1860 owned slaves. There are reports from New Orleans from their 1860 census that showed 3000 freed blacks owned slaves, accounting for 28 percent of the city’s population.
In 1860 Louisiana, at least 6 blacks owned more than 65 slaves, with the biggest number of slaves being 165 slaves who worked on a sugar plantation. So even if Italians were looked at as ‘black’, as you can see, blacks themselves had no problem owning slaves, and actually did it more than whites did right before slavery ended.
A lot of this confusion comes from the race of the Moors. The Moors are a Caucasoid Muslim group from North Africa. People hear ‘Africa’ and automatically think sub-Saharan Africa. Well, the Moors were Cacausoid for one. 2, as I have shown above, the amount of Moorish/Berber admixture is minute in Italians. 3rd, I will show now that the Berbers are not sub-Saharan African.
You have other Afrocentrist websites who talk about so-called ‘black Moors’. Well, the Moors were Berbers and Arabs, who are Caucasian.
Berbers live in groups scattered across NorthAfrica whose origins and genetic relationships with their neighbours are not well established. The first hypervariablesegment of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region was sequenced in a total of 155 individuals from three Tunisian Berber groups and compared to other North Africans. The mtDNA lineages found belong to a common set of mtDNA haplogroups already described in NorthAfrica. Besides the autochthonous North African U6 haplogroup, a group of L3 lineages characterized by the transition at position 16041 seems to be restricted to North Africans, suggesting that an expansion of this group of lineages took place around 10500 years ago in NorthAfrica, and spread to neighbouring populations. Principal components and the coordinate analyses show that some Berber groups (the Tuareg, the Mozabite, and the Chenini-Douiret) are outliers within the NorthAfrican genetic landscape. This outlier position is consistent with an isolation process followed by genetic drift in haplotypefrequencies, and with the high heterogeneity displayed by Berbers compared to Arab samples as shown in the AMOVA. Despite this Berber heterogeneity, no significant differences were found between Berber and Arab samples, suggesting that the Arabization was mainly a cultural process rather than a demographic replacement.
Race Realism: Modern Day Galileos
3000 words
This will be the first in a long series of posts on who I think are Modern Day Galileos and their contribution to the study of racial differences/intelligence and all that good stuff. People who get shunned because their views aren’t ‘PC’.
Why do people deny race realism? Why do people deny that there are mental and behavioral differences between races, but acknowledge physical differences among races when science acknowledges it, but not when they mention IQ or other behavioral differences?
People deny it because people HATE hearing that they are wrong. Actually, telling someone facts on something when they are ignorant on the matter INCREASES misperceptions.
They’re scared. I find it funny that hundreds of years ago, even as recent as the early 1900s, that we knew that there are differences. What changed? Marxism. Communism. Some wacky belief that we are all the same even though races spend tens of thousands of years isolated from each other. These same people point to science when it goes against their beliefs, not when it goes against them. My brother told me that his CCD teacher said to him one day that there are Christians called “cafeteria Christians.” Meaning, that they read the Bible and cherry pick what they like and fits their views but omit the stuff that doesn’t or say it’s irrelevant. I’m pretty sure a lot of these people have differing levels of cognitive dissonance, because it’s so illogical to believe that we are all the same.
Where did this idea originate from? As far as my research indicates, the earliest was from Marxism. Anyone know if this is right or not? They need everyone to “be the same.” Racial differences don’t allow that to happen as we are all different and different groups of people, on average, some will be better than others, others not as good. People can say superiority and inferiority, but it’s just their buzz words they say so people cry racist and no further research gets done.
Let’s get to some of the leading people in this field. Let’s start with Rushton.
Rushton spent his life studying differences in races, intelligence and other factors. He got heckled as a racist and people gave character attacks in place of rebuttals to his claims. See some of this video. Start at 31 minutes to hear the end of Rushton’s part, then at 34, Suzuki gets up.
Skip to 31 minutes to get the part.
Suzuki didn’t refute not one of his points at until 3 minutes into his turn. Just ad hominems and character attacks. Sound familiar? Even well learned people still give illogical arguments to facts. Suzuki says IQ can be changed. It can be changed in children, because heritability is low but as you age, heritability increases. The way he puts his statement, makes it seem like you can make your IQ higher at any point in life. Wrong. Most people here know the reality of heritability of IQ. He says IQ doesn’t test intelligence. Why? What makes people give ad hominems in place of facts? They have been conditioned to accept these false truths from people who are scared to learn exactly how different we are.
When people do give rebuttals on why we differ in intelligence and other mental and behavioral traits, they are usually poor arguments that are easily refutable. Systemic racism, environment, which is influenced by IQ, as is culture, poverty and other easily refutable arguments. Silly arguments that quickly crumble when presented with facts.
Now Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein, co-authors of The Bell Curve.
They also received much criticism on their book which the main topic is that human intelligence is influenced heavily by inherited and environmental factors and are indicators of success in life, income, job performance, crime involvement, out of wedlock births, parental socioeconomic status and education level.
Criticisms of the book are as follows.
Similarly, anthropologist C. Loring Brace in a review wrote that The Bell Curve made six basic assumptions at the beginning of the book. He argued that there are faults in every one of these assumptions
Human Cognitive ability is a single general entity, depictable as a single number.
It is called the g factor.
Cognitive ability has a heritability of between 40 and 80 percent and is therefore primarily genetically based.
Twin studies put heritability at .85.
IQ is essentially immutable, fixed over the course of a life span.
Yes. Only possible to raise in children as heritability is lower, as you age, heritability increases.
IQ tests measure how “smart” or “intelligent” people are and are capable of rank ordering people in a linear order.
Yes, they do measure this accurately.
IQ tests are not biased with regard to race, ethnic group or socioeconomic status.
They aren’t biased. Whites and blacks get taught the same things. When they culturally load IQ tests with stuff blacks know, they score highly. For the people who say they are biased, we have Raven’s Progressive Matrices, tests based on picking the next matrice in the order. “Culture free IQ tests.”
Arthur Jensen is another great man in this field. Both him and Jensen have written great papers together. They refuted the Flynn Effect, which has stopped since the early 90s. His and Rushton’s twin studies prove IQ to be heritable at .85.
Jensen’s most controversial work, published in February 1969 in the Harvard Educational Review, was titled “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” It concluded, among other things, that Head Start programs designed to boost African-American IQ scores had failed, and that this was likely never to be remedied, largely because, in Jensen’s estimation, 80% of the variance in IQ in the population studied was the result of genetic factors and the remainder was due to environmental influences.
This is true. Headstart does really nothing for children.
Seems like Jensen has flipped from an environmentalist to the hereditarian position over the course of his career. Of course. Because as you attain new knowledge on a subject, you begin to reevaluate your views.
See some criticisms about Jensen.
What of the latest currents of thought? Are they likely to lead to, or at least encourage, further distortions of social policy? The indications are not all encouraging. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a book in 1994 clearly directed at policy, just as Jensen and others had in the 1960s and 1970s. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press 1994) teamed a psychologist with a conservative policy advocate to try to prove that both the class structure and the racial divide in the United States result from genetically determined differences in intelligence and ability.
We know there are genetically determines differences in intelligence and ability. As I have said earlier, tens of thousands of years separated have resulted in mental as well as behavioral differences.
Their general assertions about genes and IQ were not very controversial, but their speculations on race were something else again.
How is that? Because they come to find that the truth, obviously, is not what people want to hear, because in the back of their minds, it makes them question what they’ve been taught their whole lives.
Jensen actually started off his career as an environmentalist, meaning he thought IQ was dictated fully by environment. He only looked in to the genetics of intelligence so he can say he looked at it and that there was no relationship between intelligence and genetics.
He wasn’t even mad at the people who attacked him for his research, he just wanted to them to look at the data. Someone who goes from an all environment outlook on IQ, to a mostly hereditary outlook on IQ, who actually follows where the data leads him, switched his position on the subject because the evidence was overwhelming. The point to bringing up Jensen’s past views on this subject are to show that even someone with a full on egalitarian mindset when it comes to this can and will switch their views when the data piles up enough, and look what came out of that. The most important psychologist of this generation, with the most cites and most papers.
This is the paper that reignited the firestorm on race/IQ and just IQ as a whole. A paper that never would have gotten written had he not looked where any and all data sent him. This is why all of our detractors should look at all of the evidence, then weigh it out themselves and not just listen to other non-experts on the subject, but actually, read it for themselves and attempt to digest all of the information and data so that they fully understand it. Even the most diehard egalitarian, if they are completely science-minded and not driven by emotions and politics will change their position.
You have people like Tim Wise putting all of this Marxist dribble into people’s heads. A class struggle, a race struggle. Those hierarchies are wrong and that everyone should be the same. Well, we know that in nature, hierarchies naturally exist. Why should humans be any different?
We all know that when people like us give facts like we give, they immediately cry racist as an attempt to stifle discourse. They think that ad hominem attacks end the conversation. We know that reality still exists whether these people want to admit it or not. They just look really ignorant denying facts.
People’s favorite ad hominem to use when we use our facts is to cry Stormfront. Like that changes the reality of facts. Because they know they can’t refute them so they do that and all of the other SJW jump in and berate the person’s accused character, all the while ignoring the facts. We all know who looks the most intelligent.
Let’s get to Guns, Germs, and Steel. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s the link.
Such a ridiculous argument.
So different levels of civilizations can be traced to environmental differences and not innate differences in races? Because physical environment can explain civilization differences does that mean all human brains are the same on average? Horrible strawman. Noone says environment doesn’t matter.
We can look at 2 countries within Sub-Saharan Africa. Look at South Africa. Still one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. Economic freedom isn’t the only source of wealth, human capital and natural resources are important. The lack of proper resources for civilizations in the past isn’t why Africa is poor today since we can see actual African countries that are better of by simply having more economic freedom.
The poverty today in Congo isn’t dated back to the dawn of time. Diamond says New Guineans are probably smarter then white Europeans. So does he accept that all races are the same in the brain except New Guineans? So does he then accept that human brains can differ in environments? Jared Diamond’s work is irrelevant and does nothing to explain why the various race performs differently in Europe. You can say racism or lingering effects of oppression, but the reasons for Africa’s poverty is not relevant to the racial gaps in Europe and America.
If you think it’s caused by environmental poverty in the past, you still have to argue the facts on racial differences today, the evidence still exists.
Jared Diamond is a man who spent a lot of time in Papua New Guinea. I guess he grew to like the natives there and befriended some of them so he makes ridiculous leaps in logic to actually say they may be more intelligent than Europeans. Hilarious. Any intelligent person can see the ridiculousness of what he claims. I can’t even begin to think how, when faced with all of this evidence of differences, that you can possibly believe in some warped view of equality or egalitarianism.
The same people who cry racist want to use racist policies to shoehorn minorities into places they don’t deserve to be in all in the favor of “equality and justice.” More intelligent whites and Asians lose out on a chance to get a good education all because they have to shoehorn minorities into places they don’t belong, because their, IQ simply doesn’t allow for it.
Rushton gives a great review of Diamond’s book here.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond joins the debate over racial differences in IQ. In a few ex cathedra pronouncements, Diamond brands the genetic argument “racist” (pp. 19-22), declares Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) The Bell Curve “notorious” (p. 431), and states: “The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome but also that they are wrong” (p. 19). He summarises his solution to one of philosophy and social science’s most enduring questions in one credal sentence: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves” (p. 25).
The book grew out of an attempt to answer “Yali’s question.” Yali, a New Guinea native, allegedly asked Diamond, an evolutionary biologist, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” “Cargo” refers to all that technology — airplanes, guns, steel axes — European whites brought to New Guinea, whose dark-skinned inhabitants were still using stone tools. Diamond’s answer, is that the peoples of the Eurasian continent were environmentally rather than biologically advantaged. They had the good fortune to have lived in centrally located homelands that were oriented along an east-west axis, thereby allowing ready diffusion of their abundant supply of domesticable animals, plants, and of cultural innovations.
As a card-carrying “race-realist” (Rushton, 1995), I should register my objection to Diamond’s claim that Guns, Germs, and Steel is a good faith effort to solve one of the most controversial and enduring controversies in the history of philosophy and social science. However well written, however encyclopedic in scope, and however much truth there may be in this book about 10,000 years of human history, Diamond does not give his readers the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In fact, he gives them much less. Inexcusably for an evolutionary biologist, Diamond fails to inform his readers that it is different environments that cause, via natural selection, biological differences among populations. All of the Eurasian developments he described created positive feedback loops selecting for increased intelligence and various personality traits (e.g., altruism, rule-following, etc.).
In recent years, the equalitarian dogma has been hit hard by some bad karma. In the wake of the success of The Bell Curve and other recent books about race (including my own) to provide race-realist answers to the question of differential group achievement, there has been an intense effort to get the ‘race genie’ back in the bottle, to get the previously tabooed toothpaste back in the tube. It is in such times that Diamond provides an answer that, just coincidentally, shores up the walls of the politically correct fortress, when they are being threateningly undermined by scientific research.
Rushton, as usual, gives a great review and discredits most, if not all of Diamond’s thesis in the book.
If these trends continue, we can expect to see a huge shift in the climate of America. Because the people who have the intellect and grades to get into good colleges get passed up for minorities. I don’t even need to explain how this will degrade society by putting people in a place where they don’t belong.
We all know of the SAT scores and how they correlate at .81 with intelligence. We all know how blacks consistently score lower than whites, even blacks from high socioeconomic status homes and whites from a poor socioeconomic situation. The leap in logic to say that forces are actively holding down blacks is ridiculous. The IQ gap has held consistent and there are 100 years of studies to back this up. We know it is mostly heritable.
America will go through a paradigm shift soon. A country doesn’t stay the same for too long. It was only 100 years ago that people understood the realities of race. We are due for a paradigm shift in consciousness soon. I can feel it. To actively deny things, especially when presented with well-sourced facts, is very ignorant. These same people who claim to be so intellectual show how unintellectual they are when they don’t look at evidence that differs from their own beliefs or even attempt to refute facts.
These 4 men, among many others, will be recognized as modern-day Galileos. No country can scoff at facts and reality for so long before it finally becomes accepted. It’s simply illogical to ignore facts for so long. As we all know, just because you ignore something, doesn’t make it not real.
In conclusion, the denial of race realism is simply illogical and a stupid belief based on ignorance to facts and inability to be able to refute the facts because their mind won’t let them because of their set beliefs. I used to be like that. I used to think everyone was the same, that we are all equal. Then reality hit me. Like it will hit everyone in the country soon. As black Americans continue to riot for people, when they get killed by police when police have a right to protect their lives when they feel threatened, more Americans will wake up to the fact that we are all different and that multiculturalism doesn’t work. Black people have basically been babied for the past 50 years with trillions of dollars spent to try to make them equals, yet they all failed. All waste money. Just think, if we were to recognize these differences how much greater of a society America would be. A paradigm shift is coming, and it’s coming soon.
These and many more reasons are why these men, along with others, will be known as modern day Galileos.
I close with this video, Modern-Day Galileo: J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012) – A True Man of Science
Refuting Afrocentrism Part 1: Olmecs Were Africans?
1600 words
All over the Internet, you may have seen ‘Beethoven is black’, with an accompanying picture. Or that Mozart was black, or Hannibal from Carthage or other historic figures from antiquity were African Negroids. We all know it’s not true. Afrocentrists just take things that agree with their viewpoint, and warp anything they can in an attempt to say that “they were African”. There are tons of these lies going around the internet, with enough people who believe in Afrocentrism religiously, convinced that the white man hid knowledge of past African greatness. This will be a series of posts on Refuting Afrocentrism, with each successive piece focusing on a different part of the Afrocentric narrative.
I’ve had an interest in Mesoamerican history since I was a kid. I was reading adult level books when I was 10 years old. I got this book, The Mayan Prophecies: Unlocking the Secrets of a Lost Civilization, which talked a lot about Maya history, as well as where they came from. It’s an extremely interesting book, which goes through the history of the Maya, their astrology, mathematics, agriculture, building methods and so on. It said nothing about the Maya being African. That’s because it’s just Afrocentric rubbish.
Recent new evidence has said that the Olmecs and the Maya were easy to differentiate in the Classic Period (250 to 900 AD, which was their Golden Age) because they had language and culture distinct from the Olmecs. It’s said that while the Olmecs were building La Venta in Mexico, the Maya were living in loosely associated nomadic groups to the east and southeast. That holds that the Maya developed from the Olmec, but Ceibal is 2 centuries older than La Venta. Though, the researcher says that there was a flow of ideas and culture between the two locations and that through those interactions, a new society developed. He says from 1000 to 700 BC that that La Venta and Ceibal were freely trading ideas, technology, culture, and maybe even people.
From this study on Maya genetics, you can see that it says the closest group to the Maya were the Arhuacs, the first recorded Caribbean inhabitants. They are not genetically close to the Mesoamerican Zapotec, Mixe and Mixtec, who generally cluster together. The Mixe are only related to the Maya on a linguistic basis. DRB1*0407 and DRB1*0802 alleles are found in 50% of Mayans, they’re also found in other Amerindians, but the Maya’s high frequencies may be because of a founder effect from the Mesoamerican-Caribbean population. They described Maya-specific HLA haplotypes (which are involved in inflammation as well as other immune system activities). Some HLA genes have many possible variations, allowing each person’s immune system different protections against certain diseases. Language and genes do not completely correlate in microgeographical studies.
“Significant genetic input from outside is not noticed in Meso and South American Amerindians according to the genetic analyses; while all world populations (including Africans, Europeans, Asians, Australians, Polynesians, North American Na-Dene Indians and Eskimos) are genetically related. Meso and South American Amerindians tend to remain isolated in the neighbour joining analyses.”
This further proves another point that I read. That Mesoamericans are the furthest genetically from Africans, because of no genetic mixing between any populations with Mesoamericans, allowing their DNA to go from distinct East Asian (because Native Americans are descended from Siberians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge 12,000 years ago, since they evolved completely separated from Africa, no gene flow from anywhere else in the world got to the Mesoamericans, and over thousands of years they developed to be a genetically distinct group), to their own distinct genetic clade.
This is attributed to isolation from the rest of the world, as well as faster evolution. That is another reason why I believe the once great Mesoamericans are how they are today, because 1) because the Spanish killed off all of the high-status people, who were more intelligent, as well as disease killing them off. The slave population they had would have been more immune to the diseases. 2) Faster evolution. With evolution in a hot climate for tens of thousands of years, in comparison to where they first evolved when they were still genetically similar to East Asians, it obviously changed their genetics to make them distinct from East Asians, but not enough to get rid of the intellect they had already due to the Ice Age evolution. Anyway, I’m digressing, that will be for a future post.
Now to see Olmec genetics (Mexican Mazatecan Indians), who are pretty similar to the Maya, as noted above.
Findings were indirect evidence of Olmec/Maya relatedness, further supporting the theory that the Olmecs were the precursor to the Maya. Again, language and genetics do not correlate in the microgeographic area, a significant genetic output is not noticed at all in Mesoamerican populations while all other world populations (Africans, Europeans, Asians, Australians, Polynesians, North American Na-Dene Indians and Eskimos) are genetically related. As I said above, Mesoamericans are so genetically distinct due to faster evolution as well as no gene mixing between regions, which, over time, caused their DNA to mutate to the clade they have today. Both Central and South American Indians are genetically distinct from the rest of the world.
So we can see that all Mesoamerican populations are mostly similar to each other, except the Maya who are pretty unique, most likely due to the founder effect from the Caribbean.
The name ‘Olmec’ is a Nahuatl word meaning ‘the Rubber People’ Nahuatl is an Aztec language. They extracted latex from rubber trees. The Olmecs were thought to have died out around 400 BC.
Now that we have a good background on the Olmec and Maya connection, as well as Maya and Olmec genetics, let’s see what this Afrocentric Olmec theory is about.
The theory of Olmecs being Africans was first developed by Ivan van Sertima in the 70s. He wrote a book called They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (Journal of African Civilizations). He first developed the theory from seeing the giant stone heads the Olmecs made, which look distinctly Negroid in appearance, as seen in the picture below.
Sure, from direct outward appearance, I can see how people would believe how the head looks like that of a negroid, but genetics tells us a different story.
Van Sertima claims that Mali seafarers reached Mesoamerica, and had consistent contact with the Olmecs, trading ideas and culture with them.
As I said above, most Mesoamerican populations are related to each other, with having no admixture from other parts of the world that all other populations have. So, if the Malinese people did have contact with them, we would find some of their DNA in Mesoamerican peoples today. We obviously know how ‘Hispanics’ came to be today, Spaniards mixing with the ‘Natives’. So, if we have Spaniards mating with ‘Natives’, and Mali supposedly had contact with Mesoamerica, then logic would dictate that genetic testing would find African blood in Mesoamerican populations.
But, as I noted earlier in this article, Mesoamericans are genetically distinct from all populations. We can see here that neighbor-joining analyses were done by putting together many worldwide and American populations. Both analyses show that Meso and South Amerindians are not related to the Na-Dene, because they came in one of the 3 migrations out of Siberia into the Americas. They are also not related to the Eskimos. Mesoamericans also do not show any relatedness with Polynesians, Australoids (discarding a massive Pacific colonization), Caucasians or African blacks. Genetic evidence also suggests that people moved from South America to North America into Siberia.
So why are there clear negroid features on the Olmec heads? Because they were obviously modeled after the Olmecs themselves. We know that the shapes of people’s noses comes from the climate that their ancestors evolved in. It has to do with temperature and moisture in the air. In areas where it’s extremely dry and has a lot of heat, a larger mucous area is required to moisten inspired (breathe in; inhale) air, which is why a more flat and narrow nose is needed. Olmecs and West African-descended peoples have short, flat noses because they lived in wet and tropical areas, whereas Nubians and Egyptians have longer and thinner noses due to living in the desert.
Here are some peoples who are said to be descended from Olmecs. There are pictures of statues as well as modern day people who look like them.
The Olmec statue heads are clearly of the indigenous peoples in the area, and not of West African Negroids.
Because of that one man’s theory, you have all of these Afrocentrists, with absolutely no understanding of genetics or human migration, who write these articles saying that any and all peoples and old/ancient cultures were negroid based on shoddy evidence and only physical appearance as well as cockamamie theories.
I’m pretty sure I have given way more evidence than is needed that the Olemcs were NOT negroids, but alas, you still have people who parrot this clearly refuted and untrue things, because they have absolutely no grasp on humanity in antiquity and will take any type of ‘theory’ that fits their warped worldview.
My brother told me a few years ago “If you’re looking for something, you’re going to find it”. Well, this is a perfect example of that.
In conclusion, because of genetic testing, as well as evolutionary factors which explain the ‘negroid-looking statues’, as well as most Mesoamerican populations being similar with each other completely debunk any and all notions of the Olmecs, and all Mesoamericans for that matter, to be African negroids.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 