I had my annual physical yesterday. Even though I am an old man, I remain in good health. Other than high blood pressure, for which I take a pill every day, and the occasional bouts of insanity, I have no health concerns. The pill is $12 for three months and has no discernible side effects, other than the aforementioned psychotic breaks. Those are a lot of fun for me so it is not much of a burden. I exercise frequently and watch my diet, but I am not like the guys in this story from the Weekly Standard. I take few supplements and I refuse to starve myself into a skeleton. I’m not interested in living forever if it means looking like this guy.

Anyway, sitting there waiting for Robin to ask her questions and then jam her finger up my arse, I started thinking about health care. There was a poster on one wall describing the horrors of smoking. It featured pictures of brown lungs and mangled faces. The poster was sponsored by one of the nicotine patch makers. There was a calendar sponsored by a local disability lawyer. There was a poster for some drug that must be aimed at fat people. Next to that was a poster for botox. I started thinking about John Kerry. What in the world would possess someone to have that done? I’m as vain as any other man, but immobilizing your face sounds crazy to me.

Looking around, it occurred to me that one reason America has such a dysfunctional health care system is we have convinced ourselves it is not a business. We think health care is this weird fusion of mystical religion, government service and natural resource. It is none of those things. It certainly should never be any of those things. Europeans made it a government service for the proletariat. It’s cheap and does the basics, but there’s a reason their elites don’t use the system. Africans and many Asians still treat medicine as a religion. The natural resource angle is an American invention. Our lunatics truly think health care is a magical well held hostage by insurance companies.

Health care is just another service. It is a business. If we looked at it that way, like we do veterinary services, we would do ourselves a world of good. When I take the cat to the vet, I pay for the service. I once had a cat with a heart problem. I was able to get first world, cutting edge cardiac care for the animal at a price that was trivial. A one hour visit with a world class doctor and his cutting edge machines cost $300. For large animals, heart surgery is now available to fix things like heart valves, again, at reasonable prices.

At no time is there any doubt that the transaction is exactly that, a transaction. My vet charges a fee and hopes to make a profit from my business with him. I decide whether the services are worth the money. Normal market forces drive prices down and innovation up. In my little slice of heaven, there are more veterinarians than physicians. The wait time for the vet is the next day while I had to wait over a month to see the nurse practitioner for my physical. That last bit is important. I see a real doctor for the cat. I’ve never met my doctor, just his nurses.

The response whenever I bring this up is “But you can put your cat down. People need loads of health care when they are old and you cannot choose to put them down.” That’s not entirely true. We withdraw life saving measures all the time. Living wills are for exactly that. Doctors have been telling families “there’s nothing we can do” for generations. The realities of death have been dealt with since the dawn of time. It is only of late that we struggle with the concept. In Europe, poor people are given pain killers and sent home to die. We used to do the same thing until the reformers came along.

Health care is a math problem. In any society the care and feeding of the helpless members is a top priority. Altruism is one of the oldest human traits and it is what allows us to live in large communities of strangers. We are not going to leave the poor and sick to die in the streets untended. The question is how best to supply that charity to these people. Everyone else should be paying their own way for health services just as we pay our own way for clothes and food. But, when you live in a society run by lunatics with magical thinking about observable reality, you get what we have now.

This was an easy one to spot.

In 2011, Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and director of the GI Unit at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, published a study that found gluten, a protein found in grains like wheat, rye, and barley, to cause gastrointestinal distress in patients without celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder unequivocally triggered by gluten. Double-blinded, randomized, and placebo-controlled, the experiment was one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date that non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), more commonly known as gluten intolerance, is a genuine condition.

By extension, the study also lent credibility to the meteoric rise of the gluten-free diet. Surveys now show that 30% of Americans would like to eat less gluten, and sales of gluten-free products are estimated to hit $15 billion by 2016 — that’s a 50% jump over 2013’s numbers!

One of the weirder parts of the post reality victim culture is people are always looking for a reason to fear their food. Ten years ago, I knew no one with a serious food allergy. Today, I may be the only person not reporting a food allergy. Of course, there’s big dough to be made in getting off bread.

But like any meticulous scientist, Gibson wasn’t satisfied with his first study. His research turned up no clues to what actually might be causing subjects’ adverse reactions to gluten. Moreover, there were many more variables to control! What if some hidden confounder was mucking up the results? He resolved to repeat the trial with a level of rigor lacking in most nutritional research. Subjects would be provided with every single meal for the duration of the trial. Any and all potential dietary triggers for gastrointestinal symptoms would be removed, including lactose (from milk products), certain preservatives like benzoates, propionate, sulfites, and nitrites, and fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates, also known as FODMAPs. And last, but not least, nine days worth of urine and fecal matter would be collected. With this new study, Gibson wasn’t messing around.

37 subjects took part, all with self-reported gluten sensitivity who were confirmed to not have celiac’s disease. They were first fed a diet low in FODMAPs for two weeks, then were given one of three diets for a week with either 16 grams per day of added gluten (high-gluten), 2 grams of gluten and 14 grams of whey protein isolate (low-gluten), or 16 grams of whey protein isolate (placebo). Each subject shuffled through every single diet so that they could serve as their own controls, and none ever knew what specific diet he or she was eating. After the main experiment, a second was conducted to ensure that the whey protein placebo was suitable. In this one, 22 of the original subjects shuffled through three different diets — 16 grams of added gluten, 16 grams of added whey protein isolate, or the baseline diet — for three days each.

Analyzing the data, Gibson found that each treatment diet, whether it included gluten or not, prompted subjects to report a worsening of gastrointestinal symptoms to similar degrees. Reported pain, bloating, nausea, and gas all increased over the baseline low-FODMAP diet. Even in the second experiment, when the placebo diet was identical to the baseline diet, subjects reported a worsening of symptoms! The data clearly indicated that a nocebo effect, the same reaction that prompts some people to get sick from wind turbines and wireless internet, was at work here. Patients reported gastrointestinal distress without any apparent physical cause. Gluten wasn’t the culprit; the cause was likely psychological. Participants expected the diets to make them sick, and so they did. The finding led Gibson to the opposite conclusion of his 2011 research:

“In contrast to our first study… we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten.”

This is why it is wise to be skeptical of studies. The world is complex and full of innumerable variables. Models are used to study one narrow part of the world. They are in no way similar to real life. Even with this refinement, no one should walk away thinking they have found a true cause here. It could very well be nothing more than the power of suggestion. Most people on gluten free diets just wanted to be with the cool kids.

Instead, as RCS reported last week, FODMAPS are a far more likely cause of the gastrointestinal problems attributed to gluten intolerance. Jessica Biesiekierski, a gastroenterologist formerly at Monash University and now based out of the Translational Research Center for Gastrointestinal Disorders at the University of Leuven in Belgium,* and lead author of the study alongside Gibson, noted that when participants consumed the baseline low-FODMAP diet, almost all reported that their symptoms improved!

“Reduction of FODMAPs in their diets uniformly reduced gastrointestinal symptoms and fatigue in the run-in period, after which they were minimally symptomatic.”

Coincidentally, some of the largest dietary sources of FODMAPs — specifically bread products — are removed when adopting a gluten-free diet, which could explain why the millions of people worldwide who swear by gluten-free diets feel better after going gluten-free.

Indeed, the rise in non-celiac gluten sensitivity seems predominantly driven by consumers and commercial interests, not quality scientific research.

Of all the dumb fads, this one seems harmless to me. Americans eat way too many carbohydrates. The Paleo guys take it too far, but they are right about basic human biology. We are built to consume meat, fish, eggs, dairy and green vegetables. That’s the best food for us. Carbs make us fat because our bodies struggle to process them. If you want to have a healthy diet, limit your carb intake and you will lose weight and you will feel healthy. Life is for living, so having ice cream or pasta or chips once in a while for a treat is great, but carbs should never be staples, unless you are living in a 15th century village.

A school in North Dakota has canceled their planned talent show. The teachers were going to dress the first graders up as homosexuals and have them perform in stereotypically homosexual fashion for the entertainment of others. A parent objected saying the show was racist because one of the little homos was dressed as an Indian.  That’s right. the issue was the Indian costume, not the gay bashing.

A Fargo first-grade class won’t be participating in the school’s talent show after a concerned parent called a planned act “racist.”

The students were supposed to be performing the song “Y.M.C.A.” during Bennett Elementary School’s May talent show.

For the show, a first-grade teacher asked parents to have their kids wear clothes like the Village People, the group that recorded the hit song in the 1970s. Some would come dressed as a policeman, a cowboy, a biker dude, a construction worker or a Native American.

But one mom, Elaine Bolman, said asking her daughter and her classmates to dress up like an Indian is offensive.

Clearly, Elaine Bolman hates homosexuals and is therefore a homophobic bigot.

This is the inevitable insanity of cultural Marxism. The contradictory and self-defeating logic does nothing but immiserate the people and culture. Elaine Bolman should drink a frothy glass of Drano tonight and put the rest of us out of her misery.

According to a new study, George Wallace was right when he said “Segregation now, segregation forever!” This time it is not just the South, it is all over.

Segregation is making a comeback in U.S. schools.

Progress toward integrated classrooms has largely been rolled back since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision 60 years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.

In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority.

Normal people tend to notice things. For instance, if they push a button and nothing happens, they quickly figure out the button does not work. Crazy people stand there all day pushing the button, each time expecting a different result. That’s what we keep seeing with the Left and social policy. Even if we assume their motives were good, six decades of failure should cause some rethinking of their goals. In this case, maybe people like living amongst people like them. That’s the history of the world so maybe it is not just an accident of history or white racism.

Project co-director Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60” report, said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer educations than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a “fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling.”

This is the next great cause of the Cult. White people keep moving away from blacks and Latinos. The result is the schools remain segregated. Busing was a disaster so the only solution is to force blacks and whites to live together. They tried this in Berkeley in the 70’s and 80’s. Berkeley Citizens Action gained control of the housing authority and zoning board. The first thing they did was go after the lace curtain liberals on the hill. It was a disaster, but the Cult never learns from the past.

Way back in the olden thymes, they tried building housing projects out in the suburbs. That was a hilarious disaster as people just moved away and you ended up with these weird pocket ghettos in the middle of nowhere. I remember one when I was a kid. HUD built the thing and within a few years all of the retail shops within two miles had been robbed. Eventually that part of the county became a mini-suburban ghetto. The private homes became rentals and then drug dens. Eventually those houses were abandoned. A few years ago I took a drive through the area and the complex had been bulldozed.

Although segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos,” Orfield said.

Housing discrimination – stopping or discouraging minorities from moving to majority-white areas – also plays a role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court.

School performance can be entwined with poverty, too.

The reason it is a “harder nut to crack” is people are not insane. In the Baltimore – Washington area parents play all sorts of games to keep their kids out of ghetto schools. Parents will claim to live in a better area, using the address of a friend or relative, so they can send their kid to the better school. Of course, the massive suburbs and exurbs around places like Detroit  are the result of sane people fleeing the metastasizing ghetto.

“These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty, and it also denies the opportunities, the contacts and the networking that occur when you’re with people from different socio-economic backgrounds,” said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.

For students like Diamond McCullough, 17, a senior at Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side, the disparities are real. Her school is made up almost entirely of African-American students. She said her school doesn’t offer physical education classes or art, and Advanced Placement classes are only available online.

I’d suggest the first problem is naming your kid “Diamond.”

John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, said the work at UCLA has revealed how many of the advances in desegregating schools made after the Brown ruling have stopped – or been reversed.

While racial discrimination has been a factor, other forces are in play, Rury said. Educated parents with the means to move have flocked to districts and schools with the best reputations for decades, said Rury, who has studied the phenomenon in the Kansas City region.

In the South, many school districts encompass both a city and the surrounding area, he said. That has led to better-integrated schools.

Still, around the country, only 23 percent of black students attended white-majority schools in 2011. That’s the lowest number since 1968.

Kansas City is billion dollar experiment that should have put an end to this madness. Here’s a long report from Cato on the colossal failure of the reformers to fix the schools. Again, failure never seems to teach these people any lessons. It only encourages them.

This post over at Marginal Revolution is getting a lot of attention. Steve Sailer is filling the comments thread, which always brings out a lot of responses. The discussion about Obama is following the usual path. Even his supporters struggle to accept that he is a bright guy. That’s always been a strange thing about Obama-mania. The concept of the “first black president” overwhelmed any discussion of the man. His biggest fans know little about him.

There’s something else which I think will make Obama a curiosity for generations to come. The man lacks the usual traits we associate with leadership. There’s no evidence of physical courage. He is an awkward dufus who seems timid and aloof. All of our post-war presidents have been manly, for lack of a better word. He also lacks the risk taking trait. Again, even his biggest fans describe him as excessively cautious. He is also indecisive. This is something his fans loath about him. The man never makes a decision until the initiative is long lost.

I can see how critics would point to these defects and conclude it is a lack of IQ. He’s smart enough to know he is not smart enough so he waits until the smart people decide and then he jumps on-board. That’s a possibility, but being a genius has never been a desirable quality in leaders. Obama is at least as smart as Bush or Clinton, which is to say smart enough. The decisiveness of Bush and Clinton was more than enough to overcome whatever intellectual challenges they faced.

I’m fond of saying that Obama is our first alien president. I do that to piss of lefty, for the most part. But, the guy is a singular weirdo in our political history. Everyone in the ruling class is alien to normal Americans, but Obama is alien to the aliens. By the time a candidate is nominated, we know everything there is to know about him from birth to that moment. With Obama, we’re still not sure about large swaths of his life, including where he was born. He never tells stories about his youth or about when he was starting out in life. No one shows up on TV talking about their friendship with Obama. It’s as if he exists conceptually, but not tangibly.

Anyway, I think scholars will be puzzling over this guy long after I’m dust.

This story about world drunkenness is interesting. Immigrant countries don’t tell us a whole lot with a survey like this, but the old world offers some useful insights. Those screaming about scientific racism love talking about this sort of stuff, never understanding that it undermines their charges, making them look foolish. You can’t explain a map like this with culture alone.

From the article:

People in the UK are among the most prolific drinkers in the world, according to a report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Britons over the age of 15 on average drink 11.6 litres of pure alcohol a year, according to the “Global status report on alcohol and health 2014”.

The report provides country profiles for alcohol consumption in the 194 WHO member states, looking at the resulting impact on public health and policy responses.

And it reveals that the harmful use of alcohol causes 3.3 million deaths a year worldwide.

Europe is the region with the highest consumption of alcohol per person, making up the entire top 10.

Belarus takes the top spot, with people on average drinking 17.5 litres of pure alcohol a year, followed by the Republic of Moldova where the figure is 16.8 litres.

Australia and Canada also have high levels of alcohol consumption, with people on average drinking 12.2 and 10.2 litres a year respectively.

In the United States the figure is marginally lower at 9.2 litres.

But in northern Africa and the Middle East, the average figure is less than 2.5 litres of alcohol per person, with many countries having figures below one litre.

When analyzing the stand-off with Russia over Ukraine, it may be useful to remember this map.

Steve Sailer has a post on the rise of UKIP.

From Slate:

Right-Wing Anti-Immigration Party Leads Labor, Tories in UK Poll

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

A controversial right-wing group known as the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP or Ukip) leads the traditionally dominant Labor and Conservative parties in polling ahead of next week’s election of British representatives to the E.U.’s European Parliament.

Why aren’t conservative politicians in the U.S. studying what Nigel Farage is doing right?

Notice for the umpteenth time that “controversial” no longer means “new, daring, cool, sexy” in the liberal media, it means “bad.”

Maybe Bush was right and everyone can be above average. Most of us think we’re above average, according to this story in the National Journal.

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country.

Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American.

A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people.

Men (24 percent) are more likely than women (15 percent) to say they are “much more intelligent” than the average American. White people are more likely to say the same than Hispanic and black people.

So, this many smart people must mean that, on the whole, the United States ranks pretty high in intelligence, right?

Not quite. According to the survey, just 44 percent of Americans say that Americans are “averagely intelligent.” People who make less than $40,000 a year are much more likely to say that their fellow Americans are intelligent, while those who make more than $100,000 are far more likely to say that Americans are unintelligent.

The results are not surprising. Western cultures have a habit of inflating their self-worth, past research has shown. The most competent individuals also tend to underestimate their ability, while incompetent people overestimate it. Not out of arrogance, but of ignorance—the worst performers often don’t get negative feedback. In this survey, 28 percent of high school graduates say they are “slightly more intelligent” than average, while just 1 percent of people with doctoral degrees say they are “much less intelligent.”

Bertrand Russell said “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

The second sentence in the last paragraph is interesting. “Western cultures have a habit of inflating their self-worth, past research has shown.” I’d love to see an actual study on that. It strikes me as something a member of the suicide cult would assume is true, just out of self-loathing. That and how people respond to self-assessment surveys is an area of some debate. The responder could very well be reacting to the questioner in a culturally biased way. In Japan understatement is a valued social good while in America, boasting is valued. What the respondent actually thinks is unknowable.

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I’m re-reading Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn. I had forgotten how good a book it is for someone not well-versed in the biological sciences. If I recall, Wade was criticized for being a bit direct and dry in his presentation. These things are a matter of taste, of course. I find it to be a great way to present the material, but I tend to prefer the plain over the fancy. If he larded his narrative up with colorful imaginings about early man, I don’t think I would enjoy it very much. There’s a place for everything and population genetics is not the place for imaginative narrative.

Anyway, the point of re-reading the book is in preparation for his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The race realist crowd has been talking about it for a while now and many of the usual suspects got early copies to review.HBD Chick has a useful collection of links to reviews from the sort of people who can be trusted to understand the material.

One review has been rolling around in my head for a while. Charles Murray did a very long write-up in the Wall Street Journal, touching on something that has been lurking at the edges of genetics for a while. That’s the challenge it poses to social science, specifically the Standard Social Science Model.

The problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don’t yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that “race is a social construct” in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality.

After laying out the technical aspects of race and genetics, Mr. Wade devotes the second half of his book to a larger set of topics: “The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations.”

It is the central debate in human science. Are we what we are because of a vastly complex number of environmental variables that shape out characters? Is it just an accident of birth that makes a Nigerian a Nigerian and a Brit a Brit? Or, is there something else? Have these populations evolved long enough in isolation to be different in ways that run much deeper than skin color and hair type? Real science is pointing at the latter answer, while the soft sciences and the progressive holy men insist it is the former.

All of which will make the academic reception of “A Troublesome Inheritance” a matter of historic interest. Discoveries have overturned scientific orthodoxies before—the Ptolemaic solar system, Aristotelian physics and the steady-state universe, among many others—and the new received wisdom has usually triumphed quickly among scientists for the simplest of reasons: They hate to look stupid to their peers. When the data become undeniable, continuing to deny them makes the deniers look stupid. The high priests of the orthodoxy such as Richard Lewontin are unlikely to recant, but I imagine that the publication of “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be welcomed by geneticists with their careers ahead of them—it gives them cover to write more openly about the emerging new knowledge. It will be unequivocally welcome to medical researchers, who often find it difficult to get grants if they openly say they will explore the genetic sources of racial health differences.

The reaction of social scientists is less predictable. The genetic findings that Mr. Wade reports should, in a reasonable world, affect the way social scientists approach the most important topics about human societies. Social scientists can still treat culture and institutions as important independent causal forces, but they also need to start considering the ways in which variations among population groups are causal forces shaping those cultures and institutions.

I’m a long fan of population genetics and that means I have read more about the topic than most people. I’m also an empirically minded person for whom mathematics is a naturally inclination. I mention it only to point out my bias. I place fields like economics and psychology in the same bucket as philosophy and religion. They may use the tools of mathematics to build their arguments, but ultimately they rely on faith. Therefore, in the great battle between science and the blank slate crowd, I’m on the side of science.

That said, I would not bet on science. People are not moist robots. At least we don’t see it that way. We very well may be moist robots, but our complexity is beyond out ability to comprehend. That gives social science the edge. Peddling hope in the form of self-help and the quackery of Malcolm Gladwell is always going to trump the appeal of sterile materialism.

Then there are the vested interests. Most of our institutions are built on the blank slate orthodoxy. The keepers of the flame are not giving it up just because science contradicts their faith.

How long will it take them? In 1998, the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a book, “Consilience,” predicting that the 21st century would see the integration of the social and biological sciences. He is surely right about the long run, but the signs for early progress are not good. “The Bell Curve,” which the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I published 20 years ago, should have made it easy for social scientists to acknowledge the role of cognitive ability in shaping class structure. It hasn’t. David Geary’s “Male/Female,” published 16 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the different psychological and cognitive profiles of males and females. It hasn’t. Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate,” published 12 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the role of human nature in explaining behavior. It hasn’t. Social scientists who associate themselves with any of those viewpoints must still expect professional isolation and stigma.

That’s the lesson of Galileo. The real lesson, least ways. The contemporaries of Galileo knew he was right. His inquisitors knew he was right. That was not the point of contention. The fear of the Church and the defenders of the established order was simple. Pulling the legs out from under current understanding of the world was a threat to that order. The vested interests had, therefore, a natural advantage. Without something readily at hand to replace the current order, the bias was against any knowledge that threatened the order.

If you’re looking for a bright side it is that Galileo foreshadowed the collapse of the Catholic Church as the organizing entity of western civilization. Soon after Galileo, Europe was devastated in the Thirty Years War. That was the end of Christianity as the organizing philosophy of western elites. In many ways the Progressive Church appears to be similarly exhausted and headed for a breakup. The axioms of Western Liberalism no longer square with known reality and they no longer address the problems faced by modern man. Something has to give and history says wishful thinking eventually yields to objective reality.

I’m not good at predicting the future so I don’t know what happens. I do know we have reached a point where you cannot be counted as an empirically minded, educated man and not embrace the growing body of evidence from population genetics.

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I’m a big fan of archeology, but there’s a certain about of bullshit that comes with it. For example, we know with a fair degree of certainty about the people living in New England in the 18th century. They left lots of written records, physical evidence and their bones. We don’t know everything.

The people in 8th century New England are a different story. They left little evidence, far fewer bones and not much of a record, written or otherwise. The further you go back, they less evidence we have to go on and that means lots of speculation. There’s nothing wrong with speculation as it can lead to discovery. A good narrative that incorporates the available evidence can lead researchers to troves of new evidence. Or, it can be complete nonsense.

This story is what I mean.

Concentric stone circles near rocks weighing more than a ton — apparently aligned to mark solar events — are believed to be part of a Paleo-Indian site in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Clarke County that an expert has dated to about 10,000 B.C.

The complex along Spout Run has 15 above-ground stone features. Though still under study, it could be one of the oldest man-made structures in North America still in existence and twice as old as England’s Stonehenge.

Christ and Rene White, who own the property near Bluemont and made the initial discovery, credit their Native American heritage for the finding.

When Chris White, who is of Cherokee descent, was building a home for himself and his wife — who is a Lumbee Indian — on the wooded land, he said he often took a break to walk by Spout Run, which tumbles downhill in its rocky bed across his land.

Something told him that the area was important, and he decided to create a stone medicine wheel on the 20-acre property below Bears Den Trail Center — a lodge owned by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.

To his surprise, he realized the area across the stream already had a stone circle. In fact, it had several concentric stone circles.

The first red flag is the Indian heritage stuff. I guess we’re supposed to believe that Indians just know how to recognize Indian stuff. And of course, he is Cherokee. They always pick the cool tribes. The Fake Indian from Massachusetts, who is really a WASP, claims to be Cherokee. I bet if we learn that the Cherokee were cannibals the number of people claiming to be Cherokee would suddenly plummet. Anyway, the medicine wheel nonsense is a nice touch.

For a professional opinion, the Whites contacted retired archaeologist Jack Hranicky of Alexandria, who had investigated five other Paleo-Indian sites in Virginia.

It was Hranicky who realized that the rocks in and outside the circles aligned with special features on the Blue Ridge.

A line from a center rock, over a specific boundary rock, intersects the feature called Bears Den Rocks on the mountain. Standing on that center rock, looking northeast, a viewer can see the sun rise over Bears Den on the day of the summer solstice in June.

Moving around the circle, another set of rocks points to Eagle Rock on the Blue Ridge, and also to sunrise on the day of the spring and fall equinox in March and September.

Yet a third points to a saddle in the mountain, where the sun rises at the winter solstice in December.

This could be true or it could be nonsense. Almost everything we “know” about Amerind people is speculative. We take what we know about Native Americans and work backward, trying to explain the fossil record and archeological evidence. Genetic evidence confirms the very broad outlines of how and when people entered North America from Eurasia. The mass of knowledge that is confirmed is a drop in the ocean of what is speculative. Again, nothing wrong with it, but this news story makes it sound like we know that these people had a high level of sophistication.

To date the age of the site, Hranicky excavated an area of five square feet, carefully numbering every rock and setting it aside, to be replaced later. He wanted to create as little disturbance as possible in hopes that future technology will have better methods of studying the site. His digging exposed three artifacts — a thin blade of quartzite, a small piece of jasper and another piece of the rock that had been shaped to be used as a small scraper.

Hranicky believes the jasper ties the Spout Run site to the Thunderbird Archaeological District, an intensely excavated Paleo-Indian site on the Shenandoah River in Warren County.

There, 9,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians — who Hranicky calls Virginia’s first engineers — quarried jasper from the river’s west bank to make tools.

Hranicky suggests that after quarrying jasper for tools at Thunderbird, Native Americans walked down the Shenandoah River and held some sort of cultural ceremonies at the Spout Run site. Rock engravings in the shape of footprints could be intended to mark where to stand to observe an equinox.

To get some idea of the site’s age, a section of jasper from the Spout Run site was sent to James Feathers, who runs the Luminescence Dating Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This, said Feathers, is a dating method based on solid-state physics. Materials absorb energy from natural processes and can store that energy for indefinite periods of time. Exposure to heat can release energy.

According to Feathers, the piece of jasper found along Spout Run was heated, perhaps in a campfire, and it’s possible to determine by the proportion of luminescence when that occurred.

“The method has been in use for more than 30 years,” Feathers explained, “and has been shown to be accurate against independent dating evidence. Precision is usually 10 percent or better.”

The date when that piece of jasper was burned on the Blue Ridge, Chris White said, is about 10,470 B.C.

This is consistent with other evidence. Humans entered North America roughly 10,000 years ago. The dating method is reliable and the types of tools would be consistent with hunter-gatherer populations.

I think this stuff is interesting, but I hate the way it is reported in the press. The desire to deify the Native Americans gets the better of them. The truth is the Amerind people were not very advanced, even by the standards of the world 10,000 years ago. These stones could very well just be cool looking stones. Anyone who has spent time in the wild has run across some amazing looking stuff created by Mother Nature.