Population genetics is all the rage these days. Not the science as much as the abuse of the science. You have that nitwit in England claiming interest in this stuff is tantamount to embracing Hitler. But, you also have guys like this who just claim science proves people they don’t like are inferior. But, you also have semi-respectable liberals getting a little frisky with the whole nurture/nature thing. I say semi-respectable because they will surely be expelled from the cult. Jews and Asians are on shaky grounds with the CML as it is. But, there are some entertaining bits of reaction that are worth noticing. Ashok Rao does some interesting things on economics, but he goes into a complete panic over Chua’s latest.

No tiger mom would have let her daughter publish this piece for a fifth grade project, let alone in the New York Times. Amy Chua, in a little under 3000 words, explains her theory of power and prosperity in modern America. Absent from this essay, however, is a single reference to any scientific study. Not only does the article exclude any hyperlinks – appalling for any serious journalism in the 21st Century – it refers to several anonymous “studies” without providing any information about the authors, making it well-nigh impossible for a reader to track it down.

Yes, the lack of hyperlkinks is what makes Shakespeare unreadable today. It is a strangely modern thing to fill up an essay with links to supporting documentation. Instead of persuading with well reasoned arguments, the writer is now expected to build a legal case, using prior arguments as precedent. If the area is related to science in any way, then you have to link to studies that you claim support your argument. It really is a tedious way of doing things and complete bullshit. The form is not intended to improve the work, it is intended to blunt it. It socializes reason in a way that is unreasonable. Amy Chua’s arguments are hardly original, but they stand on their own.

Anyway, I’m not a Chua fan, but I am enjoying the reaction to her from different corners. She’s probably right about why certain ethnic minorities have prospered while others have sunk to the bottom. Those traits, however, don’t spring from nothingness. I suspect she knows that, but she also likes showing up in the NYTimes and the swank book parties in Manhattan. That means she can describe what the elephant in the room would like if there was a room and an elephant, which there’s not and only racists would think so. Who knows, maybe she can play the victim card if some critic gets carried away or is from the wrong sub-group, not that anyone sees race, if race existed, which it doesn’t.

I’m continually amazed at how much Huxley got right in Brave New World. People who fret about the future and those unhappy with the people in charge, tend to rely on Orwell for their ammunition. The truth is, Orwell got everything wrong. The future is not going to be a boot stamping on a human face forever. The future is going to be something closer to what Huxley had in mind. Automation will do most of the work required to sustain life and people will spend their free time on drugs or their technological equivalents. The “feelies” were a type of movie experience Huxley described where the viewers experienced raw emotions, rather than watching a story with characters and plot.  According to this story, books will soon deliver emotion to the reader.

Using a combination of sensors, the book senses which page the reader is on and triggers vibration patterns through a special vest.

“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations” the researchers said.

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I’m surprised by how quickly the traffic on this blog has grown in the short time doing it. I see a regular group of a few hundred popping in daily. A larger group of a few thousand drops in at least every few days. of course, an army of robots and penis pill salesmen swing by daily, but I filter those out of the list. It’s funny how it is easy to spot web traffic from robots, but a major pain in the neck to block them entirely. The penis pill salesmen and fake ugg boots people from Eastern Europe are persistent. I  assume it works for them otherwise they would stop, but you never know. It may be that the real scam is further down stream and has nothing to do with stealing credit cards and selling fake medicine.

What got me thinking about it is a couple of things I recently saw. When I was regular on NRO, I would torment liberal by comparing them to the Seekers, the cult written about in the great book When Prophesy Fails. I know exactly one person familiar with that book and that one person is me. I never see anyone reference it and certainly no one connect it with modern liberals. That’s why I used it. That was the gag. The best way to insult someone is by doing so subtlety. Calling someone, who fashions themselves your intellectual superior, a booger-head just reinforces their sense of superiority. Referencing something they have to look up because it is unknown to them makes them feel inadequate. Childish on my part, but every man has his vices.

The other day, I saw that former National Review contributor Robert Weisberg had picked up on the idea and used it in his latest column. I don’t want to claim he got the idea from me, but I’d say it is highly probable. He may not even recall where he heard it, but he looked it up and decided it was a good bit of gear to stash away for future use. That’s often how ideas get into circulation. Someone with a small audience gets read by someone with a big audience, who then popularizes the idea, often taking credit for it. Rush Limbaugh has become a very rich man popularizing the ideas of others. Ann Coulter is another example of someone from Conservative Inc who got rich repeating the ideas of others while flashing some skin on TV.

There’s nothing wrong with it, but it is a reminder that ideas have a habit of escaping the enclosure. Steve Sailer gets ripped off all the time. I see his stuff recycled by less agile minded people on a regular basis. That’s not a terrible thing as he has many good ideas. It is why HBD’ers should not worry so much about the assault coming from dead enders like Jamie Bartlett and Tim Stanley. These are people with no useful or interesting ideas of their own. Instead they make a living attacking others, but by doing so five those ideas a wider audience. The concern is that people like these two trolls are good at character assassination, while guys like JayMan are not. Reading his post on the subject, I can see how guys like this could be silenced by thugs like Bartlett and Stanley.

Still, I suspect the ideas peculating in the so-called Dark Enlightenment – what a great phrase – will be surfacing in the columns of mainstream chattering skulls soon enough. There may be no Alfred Wegener out there in the Dark Enlightenment, but you never know. Science is the history of error and the best ideas were often met with skepticism and scorn from the running dogs of the status quo.

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I’m reading an 80 year old copy of J.B.S. Haldane’s The Inequality of Man. He got some run when Richard Dawkins resuscitated his ideas in the 1970′s. HBD’ers will reference him from time to time, but otherwise he has been forgotten. My copy is a worn old paperback that is a few years from falling to pieces. I don’t know where I got it, but I figured I should read it before it falls to dust. As I’m reading bits of the page’s edge falls away, creating a natural bookmark. Even though it is 80 years old and written by an upper class Brit, the book reads easier than most modern stuff. The old British academics really knew how to use the language to reach a broad audience. Or, I’m just temperamentally suited for that sort of writing. You never know about these things.

There’s a great value, I think, to reading old books in science and social commentary. One of the things that jumps off the page right from the start is just how fresh much of his discussion of population differences seems today. I recently re-read The Money Game by Adam Smith. You would think a book about Wall Street written in the 190′s would seem ridiculous today. Instead, it was as fresh as anything written today. His treatment of computers and markets (keep in mind that computers were rarities in the 1960′s) was strikingly prescient. The lesson you take away is the money game, the world of finance, has not changed much at all in fifty years. The point of the book, is it had not changed much in the previous fifty years. Reading stories about scams run by big banks on the 1920′s that are just like those run today is a bit jarring in a good way.

That’s one reason why I think it is wise to read old books from time to time. It is a good way to remind yourself that the world has not changed very much, at least the big parts of it. By old books, I don’t just mean classics. A well read man should have read the Western Canon. Anyway, I suspect it is why the Left locks up history into a trunck and buries it in the backyard. Constant reminders that human relations have not changed very much makes the idea of Marxist Man  ridiculous even to the fanatic. If the nature of man is transcendent and rooted in his biology, Marxist Man is an impossibility. Then you have the fact that the ideas  current with modern lunatics are just recycled from past lunatics. Reading about people 100 years ago making the same claims you are making today is satisfying until you learn they failed disastrously. That is going to take the wind out of the sails of even the most dedicated. “This time things will be different” can only take you so far.

That said, there’s a service to the stable minded too. Haldane was one of the first population geneticists. He was also a Marxist. On the one hand, he offers up respectable and rational ideas about population genetics. On the other he claims Soviet communism is a roaring success and will certainly work in the long run. Incredibly, he claims the Soviets had, at the time of his writing, made no attempt to socialize agriculture. At the time, the Soviets were brutally collectivizing the peasants. killing millions in the process. It is also during the Holodomer, which a British intellectual of his stature surely heard some rumors. He may not have known the details, but the rumors were everywhere. The point here is that brilliant people are capable of believing outrageously insane things. Reading old books on social commentary is a great reminder of that. It is another reason, I suspect, the Left ignores their own intellectual history.

What I’m enjoying about Haldane is something HBD chick touches on in this blog post. Population genetics and eugenics are separate things. The modern critics, all from the Left, of HBD immediately throw out the eugenics card. Haldane goes to great lengths explaining why the eugenicists are wildly mistaken on the science of genetics. What we know now and what he could not know then, is what the Left would do with these ideas. The modern Left’s assault on HBD has little to do with science and everything to do with history. When you start sniffing around in the past about eugenics, you find the heroes of the American Left as the chief promoters. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a proto-Nazi eugenicist who wanted to sterilize the unfit.

That’s an obvious example, but the Progressive Era is full of them. Sterilization campaigns were a regular feature of the American Left from the beginning and persisted even after the horrors of the Nazis were fully aired. The lingo changed, but the underlying justification remained. Programs launched by liberals in the 60′s and 70′s aimed at reducing birth rates in black ghettos were just thinly veiled eugenics programs. Of course, it is hard to claim your cult is the friend of the black man if you have been systematically trying to snuff them out. Similarly, it is hard to run the war on women stuff, when you are also ripping out their reproductive organs.

In contrast, the HBD folks, for the most part, don’t try to tease morality or public policy from the science of population genetics. There are exceptions and abuse, but the folks dedicated to the science don’t care about the politics. The reason is an example Haldane uses. Atoms do not act in predictable ways. Instead, they act in a number of ways with differing degrees of probability. Rolled up into a bar of steel, however, the mathematics presents an object to us that acts predictably and seemingly consistently. That’s population genetics. One Chinese guy is random and unpredictable. a billion are predictable and fixed.

One last thing on reading old books. There’s a valuable lesson in the wrongness of their certainty. One of my few criticism of John Derbyshire is his blind spot to the error rates of science. The history of science is the history of error. Reading Haldane’s ideas on cancer and what comes next for the treatment of the disease is cringe inducing. His description of blacks in America and their likely future is hilariously anachronistic. The point is Haldane was brilliant and empirically minded, but he and his contemporaries were wrong about a great many things. Those who came after them made their careers proving them wrong. Those who come after us will do us the same favor. Therefore, it is wise to not keep open the possibility that what we think we know now is all wrong.

The only thing more mysterious than Byzantine politics is maybe Oriental business practices. It is a strange combination of complexity and opacity, sprinkled with a heavy dose of dishonesty, that is forever off-limits to the Western mind. A good example is right here. In the West, a firm struggling to pay its bills and threatening to default will do so in a very public fashion. If the regulators take over, they perform a public audit, liquidate the assets and pay creditors based on an agreed upon framework. If the firm goes into bankruptcy, that is also a public process. If a white knight comes in and puts up a bunch of cash, then we learn who it is and why they are coming to the rescue. It is not perfectly transparent, but the public and interested parties will know enough to judge the results.

In China, the banking system is a mystery to even the people in the Chinese banking system. China Credit Trust Co has no money of its own. It sold a product to investors promising a ten percent return on loans to a firm that has no money to repay the loans. They can dress it up in the popular lingo, but that’s the bottom line. Zhenfu Energy, desperate for cash, went to private firms to borrow money at rates well above market. China Credit Trust Co appears to have created a product to be sold to retail banking customers to funnel money into the struggling energy company. It was a fraud, but most of modern banking is a fraud. Now that the energy company is defaulting on the loan, China Credit Trust Co cannot pay the retail investors their promised return.

This was all supposed to happen at the end of the month. Today a mysterious and undisclosed white knight has arrived to supply the cash. Everyone knows the white knight is the Chinese Communist Party, but no one will dare say it. It is simply a “restructuring” that papers over the problem for now. A month from now some mid-level functionary will kill himself and everyone will know why, but no one will dare say. It is no way to run a modern economy, but that’s another thing everyone knows, but no one dares say. Instead, the West looks the other way and hopes those inscrutable Chinese keep buying up the useless paper the credit machines keep emitting every month.

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I saw this linked on the America Spectator blog. I must confess that I find Sean Hannity to be a boring loud mouth. Michael Savage is a nut, but nuts often lock in on a truth that the rest of us pretend not to notice. Conservative talk radio is often just Republican talk radio. In the Bush years, guys like Hannity and Limbaugh were so far in the tank for Bush they should have been getting a W2 from the GOP. I listen to some talk radio, but the level of discourse is pretty low. Most of it is just cheering for the red team over the blue team, even when the red team is fucking up. Still, I give Hannity credit for using his head in this case. It is too bad his party does not do the same.

The recent uproar over Huckabee’s comments at some Republican meeting is a good example of the stupid party in action. Huckabee pointed out that Democrats think women are unable to control themselves in matters of sex. Dana Bash is either too stupid to understand English or is a liar. The later is the most likely answer. The woman works for NBC which is nothing more than a megaphone for the cult of modern liberalism. MSNBC, their cable arm, is a collection of people who should be institutionalized. Why the Republicans would invite these nuts in and give the media credentials is the great mystery of our time.  The Stupid Party seems incapable of learning what mediocrities like Sean Hannity have apparently mastered.

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My in interested in homosexual marriage lies only in the irrationality of the subject. Marriage is all about reproduction. Without it, you’re left with the equivalent of an intimate handshake agreement on how to divide up the property when one or both parties gets bored. But, as modern insanity goes, it is one of the lesser evils. It does tell us a lot, however, about the people debating it. Arguments for changing public policy, the good ones least ways, contain knowledge of the current policy, its origins, its trade-offs and then the reasons why the new policy is superior. That allows everyone to agree to the facts in advance. Gay marriage advocates dispense with that and instead throw a tantrum, demanding you justify your opposition to their tantrum.

Libertarians suffer from many of the same defects as the Left. My suspicion with them is they are just conservatives with less backbone than the typical conservative. By seeking shelter in the libertarian hut, the lunatics will pass by them on their way to burn some village of normalcy. Libertarians, being useless in the culture war, are not a target of the Left. Say what you will about the Left’s scorched earth polices, they are adept at the  conservation of energy by narrowing their enemies list. They eventually get around to you, but for libertarians, it seems like a safe bet. If libertarianism is on the rise, as some people claim, then this theory will be put to the test. One hundred years of warfare will not be undone by a bunch of pot smoking greed-heads.

Like the Left, libertarians suffer from a peculiar brand of myopia. The Left is at war with the past, even their own past. By that I mean they jam history into their narrative, excluding great swaths of it, even their own words and deeds. Libertarians, in contrast, are so narrow minded, they blunder into a retarded utopianism that borders on the comical. They will yammer on about open borders, for example, and then throw in the fact it worked great when we lacked a giant welfare state transferring a trillion dollars from tax payers every year.They like to design machines that work great if we suspend the laws of physics.

I thought about that when I saw this from Karl Denninger. This is one of the newer hobby horses libertarians enjoy riding in public. Their “solution” to the war over marriage is to do away with marriage.

Marriage is none of the government’s damn business.  It’s sad that it took the gay screamers to wake people up to this, but if it results in Oklahoma actually doing the right thing it will be about damn time.

Tell me this — why is it that you want the State in your bedroom? I don’t give a **** if you’re straight or gay, just give me one good reason why you’d invite the ****ing government behind your bedroom door.  Ever.  For any purpose.

But you do, and what’s worse is that if you actually honor a religious, that is, a sacramental marriage irrespective of what faith you follow you have sworn falsely before your God by having the pastor sign a state marriage license.

As is typical of fanatics everywhere, libertarians have no idea why the rules and institutions were created. They seem to think they were either forced on us by some supernatural entity or sprung from random nothingness. The hallmark of the fanatic is a dedicated lack of curiosity about the origins of contrary opinion. Libertarians seem to think marriage was created in the murky past by the religious or by despotic rulers or maybe the leprechauns. He just assumes that society, through the state, has no interest in marriage and that marriage licenses are something new.

That’s complete nonsense. This excellent post on matting patterns of medieval Franks illustrates that policing marriage predates Christianity and the nation state. Human populations have been keeping an eye on mating habits for a very long time, perhaps from the earliest times of human settlement. Other species have ways of dealing with inbreeding like the Westermarck Effect. The best way mother nature has to handle inbreeding is the defective progeny dies off quickly. Humans having the ability to reason through these results, we soon figured out that mothers and sons should not be mating. Whether a natural repulsion developed, followed by the taboo or the other way around, human societies have been policing the mating choices of its members since the beginning. Again, marriage is about reproduction, not sex.

In the Christian world, the church was enlisted in the war on cousin marriage long after authorities took an interest in it. It is not hard to see what human populations would worry about this problem. Every pinhead is a burden. If you get too many pinheads, you end up like Detroit. If you want to argue that this is no longer necessary in modern times, keep in mind that we are taking in tens of million of people from places where inbreeding is still common. Then there is the urban and rural underclass where inbreeding is always a concern. If you don’t have someone policing the hillbillies in Appalachia, you will get get a Scotts-Irish Pakistan in a few generations. Unfettered liberty works great for smart rich people, but becomes increasingly problematic as you move down the social pyramid.

Contra the libertarians, mating habits are a central concern of all human populations. Try this thought experiment. The world is wiped out by some plague and the remained 100 people are all of child bearing ages, equally divided between boys and girls. What are the first priorities of the group? Obviously, the group has survival needs. Food, fresh water, fire, shelter and defense against nature are the first concerns. Establishing a decision making process and a division of duties amongst the members of the tribe would come naturally, if the group is to make it through the first winter. The next thing they will do is figure out how to handle the inevitable paring off, mating a child birth. Again, if they are to survive, figuring this out is at the top of the list.

That’s why libertarians properly belong on the fringe. They deliberately seek to eliminate themselves from serious debate over public policy. The right thing, it seems, is to leave them alone with the copies of Atlas Shrugged.

[subscribe2]In the 17th century, European settlers in North America saw the native populations as an obstacle to progress. That was not an unreasonable proposition since the natives had no made it far past the stone age. They were using stone arrows and spears, wore animals skins and lived in nomadic tribes. From the perspective of Europeans, these people were barbarians. The locals may not have been very advanced and they were certainly not very bright, but they soon figured out that it was a bad idea to let the white man settle in their lands. A long war of attrition won by the technologically superior (and eventually numerically superior) whites turned North America into Ice People territory. The point being that even primitive nomads could quickly figure out that the tribe that controls the land wins and the tribe that loses, dies out. Love of tribe is a natural part of man.

Everywhere else on plant earth, human populations have been killing one another over land since the dawn of time. So much so we have developed elaborate methods to keep tribes apart from one another. People knew that mixing a bunch of Tribe X into Tribe Y’s turf was going to lead to violence. Either Tribe X would seek to take over or Tribe Y, worried that Tribe X may try to take over, would kill the people of Tribe X first. It may seem totally irrational to the modern alpha male reading this while in his footie pajamas and drinking hot cocoa, but to mother nature it is perfectly rational. I’m fond of saying, just because you don’t understand it does not mean it is irrational. The problem is most likely with you.

Now, against that backdrop consider what the open borders fanatics in the GOP are considering for the end of this summer. It will consist of at least four bills, to be voted on by the end of the summer: 1) an amnesty for illegal aliens that doesn’t lead to citizenship, 2) a Dream Act–like amnesty granting green cards (and eventual citizenship) to illegals who came as teenagers and younger, 3) a bill requiring tracking of foreign nationals (like the eight previous ones passed since 1996), and 4) increased importation of low-skilled workers to compete with unemployed Americans. They’re trying to get the approval of Representative Luis Gutierrez, the firebrand amnesty-pusher from Chicago, who would never — can never — accept any arrangement that would require the full implementation of enforcement systems prior to any legalization.

This little bit of lunacy from the author is the best:

And though none of the bills is likely to offer a path to full citizenship, the fact Republicans are preparing to take on immigration at all is a sign the party is coming to grips with a political reality: if they want to win elections in the long run, they’ll have to face the issue.

After the last amnesty, the GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote declined from 37% to 30%. In fact, it has never again risen about 31% and that was with George Bush, who spoke Spanish and was an amnesty fanatic. Bush arguably did more for Mexican peasants than any Mexican leader in the history of the country. Bush expanded resettlement and dropped the English requirement. Further, the lunatic writing the piece just assumes it is the GOP’s problem to fix what his cult has destroyed. Liberal democrats were the champions of the last two amnesty deals and are behind the current amnesty deal. In fairness, the global elites are buying off buffoons like Boehner and Ryan so both parties have their snouts in the trough this time.

Immigration is neither a good thing or a bad thing. The degree and timing is what determines the right course. In boom times, it may make sense to bring in guest workers and ramp up the naturalization of immigrants. The numbers should reflect the needs of the native population. In lean times, like the last five years, foreign workers should be thrown out with exceptions being made in high skill fields. We can safely assume, for example, that we will never have too many mathematicians or brain surgeons. otherwise, the point of government is the protection of the citizens. If the people of Mexico are unhappy with our immigration rules, too bad. They are not our problem. They should make Mexico better so they don’t have to flee their native lands.

Nothing like economic necessity is involved here. The ruling elites of America have concluded that America is too white. They want to remedy that by importing fifty million Mexicans, who they consider non-white. If it were practical, they would bring in fifty million Congolese, but the running of slave ships over the Atlantic is bad form, for now. Paul Ryan, who will be dead soon, most likely is acting out of pure greed, but malice should not be discounted. There’s a reason why companies take away privileges from those about to quit or retire. Short-timers do not take the long view or care much for those who will be left behind. Ryan could very well be nursing bitterness at his fate and it is manifesting itself as a hatred for those he sees as less deserving – his fellow Americans.

That’s what I suspect is driving the mass suicide we see going on throughout the West. When the majority of British school children are not British, it is not hard to see what the future holds for the Brits. Religions are fueled by self-loathing. Christianity, for all it s faults, offered a celebration of life as an antidote to the self-loathing of the faithful. You may be a sinner and hate yourself for the sin, but God loves you nonetheless, as long as you live a Christian life. Liberalism offers no such antidote. Instead, it offers a never ending liturgy on why it would have been better if none of us had ever been born. it is not hard to see why eventually the adherents would want to speed up the process. Surrendering over your tribe’s land to another tribe is one sure way to erase your people and their history.

One of my favorite targets is the pseudo-intellectual poser. This creature of the Left has been with us since the darkness descended on the West. They are are always folks who have ambition, but not much talent. That results in memorizing the liberal nostrums and then repeating them with an air of wearied resignation. They cultivate a certain look and a range of little outfits to identify themselves. Dandyism, it seems, will always be with us. One such example is Jamie Bartlett, who is a blogger at the Telegraph. The precious little baby has himself worked up over those of us on the Dissident Right.

Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called “The Dark Enlightenment”. Its modus operandi is well suited to a digital society. Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism.

It started, suitably enough, with two blogs. Mencius Moldbug, a prolific blogger and computer whizz from San Francisco, and Nick Land, an eccentric British philosopher (previously co-founder of Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) who in 2012 wrote the eponymous “The Dark Enlightenment”, as a series of posts on his site. You can find them all here. 

HBDChick does an excellent job taking the guy apart. The mere fact that the guy works for a Marxist front group disqualifies him from serious company. But, it explains the liberal use of the word “fascist” in his rants. Marxism, like all groups on the Left needs bogeymen. The Marxists call their bogeymen fascists, which is a catch-all phrase for the undifferentiated other they fear is on the other side of the door, ready to burst in and snatch them away. It says something about the world when it is OK to be a Marxist, despite the fact that cult has murdered about 100 million people worldwide.

From his blog, it appears he is writing a book about witch hunting, I mean the dark forces he and his pansy army are fighting against on-line. It seems the modern dandy is always bravely writing hotly worded letters to the evil doers of the world. of course, those letter never get delivered. Instead they end up on blogs at the Telegraph or the Times. The evil doers are never actually evil or capable of doing anything other than holding an opinion different from those in the cult of modern liberalism. The real bad asses never have to worry about a discouraging word from the Dandy. That why the Left has been such a potent killing machine.

Many people on the Right think evolutionary psychology is a nonsense field, probably because it has the word psychology in it. On the Left, the opposition comes from feminists who want to believe sex is imaginary. They use the word gender, when they mean sex, as it allows them break free of biological reality. They get to pollute the idea with cultural items like gender roles and homosexual advocacy.

The question though, is whether selection works on the cognitive traits in the same way it works on the physical traits. I’m thinking about that as I type this post, watching snow flurries and temperatures in the single digits. Climate is probably the most brutal of selection mechanism, and humans adapted to climate mentally, not physically. Skin tone and eye color can take many generations. One hard winter and those who failed to plan are wiped out.

For example, if this were five thousand years ago, I would be dead now if I was not prepared for this brutal cold snap. That means I would have collected enough wood for the winter, back in the fall when the weather was nice. I would have prepared my shelter for the cold and wind, back in the summer when the days were long and I had the time. Most important, I would have prepared a supply of fresh water and food that would remain edible through the winter.

In the late summer I could not possibly know what winter would bring or how long it will last so planning for the worst is the key to survival. For that to be learned behavior means the people who failed to learn were wiped out. It also means the folks who somehow survived or thrived had the capacity to pass on these lessons in a way that allows the progeny to survive. It also means every winter the best at this cognitive skill survived while those less skilled perished.

When you start with a simple example like this, it is not hard to see why the personality and culture of Iceland is different from sub-Saharan Africa. When you add in how this would change reproductive strategies, it’s easy to understand how the people in the harsh north evolved a different set of cognitive traits from those in the warm south. In the former, good planning attracts the ladies, while in the south it does not.

How much of difference this makes and how persistent it is in the genes of the human population is another debatable, but the way to be is on biology. Europeans in Africa, for example, don’t acquire African ways after a generation or two. Similarly, African populations in the north remain African in behavior and temperament. Maybe it really is the legacy of colonialism or whatever the Left is into these days, but that is very unlikely.