Category Archives: HBD

Denmark is full of Danes

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Imagine a group of people that deeply believe in the Great Pumpkin. So much so, they have not only developed a religion and culture around it, everything that defines them is based in the existence of the Great Pumpkin. Their culture and social structures would collapse if they discovered the Great Pumpkin was myth. The news is full of people who would die for their religion so this should not be a terribly difficult thought experiment.

Now, flip around the other way. Imagine a group of people that have based everything about their existence on the belief that the Great Pumpkin does not exist. Unlike atheists, these people have actually managed to build a viable culture and institutions around the absolute faith in the Great Pumpkin being a myth. Everything they are is based on it. Tolerance for any Great Pumpkin-ism is impossible because it is essentially a denial of their essence.

Now, let’s assume these people know of one another and are within travel distance of one another. The former group, let’s call them the Positives, are going to be hell bent on converting the latter group, that we’ll call the Negatives. On the other hand, the Negatives are not interested in converting the Positives. The mere fact that these people are able to tolerate Great Pumpkin belief means they are capable of denying everything that makes up the very being of a Negative. Therefore, part of the Negative belief set is they want to destroy the Positives.

Now, replace the Great Pumpkin with race.

That’s where things stand in America when it comes to race. Most people accept that race is a real thing and different people come from different parts of the world. For most people, it is a casual awareness that does not animate their life. They think about it when they see a sign for Martin Luther King Boulevard or a bunch of a Spanish guys hanging out on the corner. Others take it more seriously as an academic or intellectual pursuit, while others take it too far and become bigots.

The other side of the fence we find the race deniers. Everything they believe, their sense of self and their world view, is based on race being a myth. The trouble is they are facing a mountain of scientific evidence that contradicts their belief. The mountain is not only growing, it is growing rapidly. Studies like this one seem benign to normal people, but they are a stake through the heart of a race denier.

Economists at the University’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) have looked at why certain countries top the world happiness rankings. In particular they have found the closer a nation is to the genetic makeup of Denmark, the happier that country is. The research could help to solve the puzzle of why a country like Denmark so regularly tops the world happiness rankings.

Dr Eugenio Proto and Professor Andrew Oswald, based in the Department of Economics, found three forms of evidence for a link between genetic makeup and a nation’s happiness.

Firstly they used data on 131 countries from a number of international surveys including the Gallup World Poll, World Value Survey and the European Quality of Life Surveys. The researchers linked cross-national data on genetic distance and well-being.

Dr Proto said: “The results were surprising, we found that the greater a nation’s genetic distance from Denmark, the lower the reported wellbeing of that nation. Our research adjusts for many other influences including Gross Domestic Product, culture, religion and the strength of the welfare state and geography.

The second form of evidence looked at existing research suggesting an association between mental wellbeing and a mutation of the gene that influences the reuptake of serotonin, which is believed to be linked to human mood.

Dr Proto added: “We looked at existing research which suggested that the long and short variants of this gene are correlated with different probabilities of clinical depression, although this link is still highly debated. The short version has been associated with higher scores on neuroticism and lower life satisfaction. Intriguingly, among the 30 nations included in the study, it is Denmark and the Netherlands that appear to have the lowest percentage of people with this short version.”

The final form of evidence looked at whether the link between genetics and happiness also held true across generations, continents and the Atlantic Ocean.

Professor Oswald said: “We used data on the reported wellbeing of Americans and then looked at which part of the world their ancestors had come from. The evidence revealed that there is an unexplained positive correlation between the happiness today of some nations and the observed happiness of Americans whose ancestors came from these nations, even after controlling for personal income and religion.”

For the race deniers, this is like seeing the Great Pumpkin walking down the strete in full view of everyone. This study is not abstract correlations. This is hard genetic science. More important, if a small localized population of humans in the heart of Europe can have some weird genetics that manifest in personality and culture, groups walled off from Europe by oceans and mountains are going to have even more unusual mutations that distinguish them from the rest.

The race deniers will be undone by the fact Denmark is full of Danes.

The Left’s Galileo Moment

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Imagine if tomorrow the Chinese announce they have discovered some protein that causes criminality. That’s very unlikely, but let’s just pretend. Further, a simple test can determine if an individual has this protein and therefore is criminally inclined. That would certainly change how we go about fighting crime. The sci-fi concept of pre-crime would become a reality. Everyone could be tested and those with the protein would be flagged in some way. Suspects could be tested to eliminate the innocent. It is an amazing breakthrough that radically changes policing.

Now, suppose in addition to finding this magic protein, they also find a remedy. A person with the crime protein could be given a drug that mitigates the action of the protein. Not only can criminals be found with a blood test, they can be “rehabilitated” with drug therapy. That way, once a criminal is found, they can be repaired. Recidivism rates would fall to zero and there would be no need for a lot of the infrastructure we have in place to monitor ex-cons.

Think about how much human society would change after such a discovery. No need for prisons is the most obvious benefit. That alone is $100 billion in savings to society. Certainly an equal amount would be saved, probably double, in policing. Most crime is committed by repeat offenders. Depending upon who is counting, the number is as high as 80%.  Police forces could be slashed to a fraction of their current size, along with the courts and the whole massive edifice of criminal justice in America.

It sounds pretty good. Now, imagine that conservatives start howling with protest over this new test and the new drug. They start with the invasion of privacy and then move onto the moral issue of not punishing offenders when they are caught. In Congress they try to block this new science and take to the airwaves proselytizing against it. Of course, they are joined by police unions, prison guard unions, lawyers, bureaucrats and everyone else living off the criminal industrial complex.

With that in mind, consider this post by a famous Progressive blog.

Let’s use the term “academic racism” to mean “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (the Merriam-Webster “full definition” of “racism”), in order to differentiate it from bigotry (the common-use definition).
Anyway, science writer Nicholas Wade has a new book out making the standard case for academic racism. Andrew Gelman, a statistician, has a review of that book in Slate. The review is good, and you should read it, but I thought I’d try to restate Gelman’s point in a slightly more compact way.
Basically, academic racism has a problem, and that problem is overfitting.
Here’s how academic racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Hungary has a higher per capita income than Romania. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians. To explain that second data point, you come up with a new piece of theory: The Romanian race must have some genes for gymnastics that the Hungarian race lacks.
You can keep doing this. Any time you see different average outcomes between two different groups, you can assume that there is a genetic basis for the difference. You can also tell “just-so stories” to back up each new assumption – for example, you might talk about how Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads who had to be industrious to survive, etc. etc. As new data arrive, you make more assumptions and more stories to explain them. Irish people used to be poor and are now rich? They must have been breeding for richness genes! Korea used to be poorer than Japan and is now just as rich? Their genes must be more suited to the modern economy! For every racial outcome, there is a just-so story about why it happened. Read an academic-racist blog, like Steve Sailer’s, and you will very quickly see that this kind of thinking is pervasive and rampant.
There’s just one little problem with this strategy. Each new assumption that you make adds a parameter to your model. You’re overfitting the data – building a theory that can explain everything but predict nothing. Another way to put this is that your model has a “K=N” problem – the number of parameters in your model is equal to the number of observations. If you use some sort of goodness-of-fit criterion that penalizes you for adding more parameters, you’ll find that your model is useless (no matter how true or false it happens to be!). This is one form of a more general scientific error known as “testing hypotheses suggested by the data”, or “post-hoc reasoning”. It’s a mistake that is by no means unique to academic racism, but instead is common in many scientific disciplines (cough cough, sociobiology, cough cough).

If you don’t know much about population genetics and the current state of the science, you might be inclined to accept this as a valid critique. The trouble is the science described by Wade makes no such claims. In fact, few in the HBD world make these sorts of claims. There certainly is speculation about behavioral traits across groups and their possible genetic sources, but nothing definitive.

The fact is, it is very hard to tease out causal relationships when discussing human behavior. Even the most basic of behavioral traits involve an enormous number of factors, including genes. At this stage of the game, the best anyone can do is catalog group differences and then consider the possibility of genetic sources. Just as we have lots of diversity in dogs, bears and birds, we have lots of diversity in people because people are subject to evolutionary pressures.

The Left now finds itself at odds with science. The 19th century Left, focused exclusively on economics, is long gone. The post-war Left has blended culture, socials science, public policy and the law into a secular religion. Just as the Church could not disentangle theology from science, the modern Left cannot separate science from its ideology. Religion, secular or otherwise, are totalitarian. Therefore anything that contradicts the faith is the enemy of the faith and must be destroyed.

The Left’s war on evolution and population genetics is the only possible response to the growing body of evidence contradicting the blank slate and egalitarianism. Otherwise, the foundation stones of their faith crumble. If man is not a lump of clay that can be molded by the enlightened, then the justification for most of what the Left has advocated for centuries falls apart. That’s something they understand much better than the people plowing forward in the human sciences.

There’s another angle, one that I think haunts the Left and one that the HBD crowd fails to appreciate. Going back to my example that started this long post, there’s another option. Instead of “rehabilitating” the criminal with drug therapy, the people known to carry this trait can be sterilized at birth. In a couple of generations, the trait could be eliminated from the population or at least greatly diminished. The remaining people with the gene would be ostracized and unable to find mates.

What the sterilizers missed, natural selection would address. This is not unfamiliar turf for the Left. Prior to World War II, eugenics was very popular with Progressives in America. The man who coined the term was a Socialist. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a motivated by the eugenics movement. Progressives in America thought they could engineer a better society by limited reproduction of the undesirable and promoting among the elite.

That’s probably part of the panic. They know that if they cannot talk people into behaving they way they wish, the choice is.abandon the Utopian dream or start culling the herd. In a way, the war on science that is emerging is an effort by the Left to keep them from going down a very dark road. The Left always warns about what it is plotting to do to society. If they fear the new science will be used for eugenics, it means they will one day use it for eugenics. They hate that.

The End of Social Science

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I’m re-reading Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn. 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, but I find the directness refreshing. 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.

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. The modern social sciences are based on the belief in the blank slate and egalitarianism. They may place some limits on both, but fundamentally the belief is that people can be made into anything. Genetics is overthrowing that belief and the fields based on it.

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 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 fan of population genetics and that means I have read more about the topic than most people. I have strong bias toward empiricism. 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 our 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. Magical thinking is the rule. Then there are the vested interests.

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. Maybe something similar is happening to the Progressive world order.

Or Maybe They’re Just Cool Looking Rocks

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Archaeology is a fun subject, but there’s a decent amount of unsubstantiated claims in the field. For example, we know a lot about the people living in New England in the 18th century, because they left lots of written records and physical evidence. A lot has been lost over time, but science has gotten better so we can look at old bones and old artifacts and learn things missing from the written.

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, but it can also be complete nonsense. Here’s an example.

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. We’re supposed to believe that Indians just know how to recognize Indian stuff. He is Cherokee, of course. 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 archaeological 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. There are still some big holes, as genetics is revealing some populations in South America who are closer related to pacific islanders than the rest of the native people. How that happened is a mystery.

This is interesting stuff, but the desire to deify the Native Americans gets the better of the people reporting on it. 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.

The War on the Past

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If you have an interest in population genetics or evolutionary biology the coming debates about the nature of man will be very interesting. Wade’s new book is causing a lot of difficulty for the Left, forcing them into denying science. Gregory Clark’s book, The Son Also Rises, started the ball rolling. The rapidly expanding base of knowledge coming from genetics is blowing big holes in the orthodoxy. It promises to be a good summer of reading blog posts like this was from Steve Sailer.

A massive problem in contemporary intellectual discourse is that people don’t remember the past well and don’t have a critical attitude toward whatever is the latest conventional wisdom about the backwardness of the past. In the Obama Era, we see race and sex disparities all around us, and the only socially acceptable explanation for them is that the past was so incredibly racist/sexist until … well, nobody can quite remember when, but it must have been practically the day before yesterday.
So, it’s hard for contemporary intellectuals to put themselves back into the shoes of their predecessors.
This is an excellent observation that applies to the debate over homosexuality. The public debate always assumes that way back in like last week, homosexuals were in bondage, forced to work on lavender farms in the South. There’s never any evidence presented, other than the obligatory reference to Stonewall. Famous homosexuals have been erased from history, because they could not have existed, according to the prevailing narrative promoted by the usual suspects.
Sailer is correct that this leads to endless errors and mistakes, as he goes onto point out in that post. He assumes this obtuseness is the result of wanting to justify the present fads.Maybe. It could also be part of a greater war on the past, which is a manifestation of self-loathing.The modern Progressive hates his ancestors because they created the present, which the moral man detests and wishes to change. All that “leaning forward” stuff looked like pulling at the leash for a reason.
The left imagines themselves at war with the past, trying to break free from that which ties them to the present. It is why they deny biology, for example. The thought that we are the result of mating choices over many generations is horrifying. How can we break free when we are just a point in the time line? When the Left is viewed as a religion, the war on the past makes more sense. Belief is powerful stuff, so powerful it allows to people to deny observable reality.

Panda Man

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A problem that vexes economists and (soon) politicians is what will be done with all of the extra humans. It appears that we are running out of ways to keep people busy. In America, the labor participation rate remains stuck at all-time lows. Technology promises to eliminate the need for many jobs. Farming and manufacturing are two obvious examples of how technology eliminates the need for labor. Automation is now coming for white collar jobs and professions like the law.

Even growth industries like health care are ripe for technological upheaval. Much of what a doctor or nurse practitioner does can be automated. Getting a physical at a local kiosk is not far off. Accounting and engineering can and will be done by robots at some point in the near future. That’s the claim of this book, anyway. Of course predictions about the future tend to be hilariously wrong. This is great.

The Luddite Fallacy is nothing new. The counter to that is we have arrived at a time of genuine plenty. In the West, no one is going without food. Medicine is universally available, even if the delivery mechanism is unnecessarily expensive. Violence is slowly ticking down and plague appears to be unlikely. In other words, the big things that have threatened humanity have been conquered.

So much so that most of the human population can avoid work entirely. With further technological improvement, a very small number of people will be able to provide for the rest of humanity. The great challenge facing humanity over the next century will be how to organize ourselves in  world without work or want. This story is what should get everyone’s attention.

A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy.

Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single “letter” of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism.

A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans – and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said.

Given the state of medicine, the big challenge to extending human life is almost entirely genetic. The ability to fix these defects in our genome means, barring accident or environmental issues, humans could live to the maximum of their natural life. Better understanding of aging, which is moving along quickly, means living an extended youth. Whether or not human lifespans can be extended much beyond 100 years is debatable, but living to 100 in peak physical condition is a good deal.

That sounds great, but here’s something else we know from genetics. Roughly 50,000 years ago modern man emerged on the scene. Humans were physically and behaviorally human. Up until last week, scarcity was the rule for humanity. In fact, evolution depends on it. Competition for food and mates is what drives the whole process. It is not just what makes us human, it was necessary for there to ever have been humans. Just as important, it is what we are designed for as a species. All of our physical and behavior wiring is geared for a world of competition for food and mates.

Just as economists puzzle over what to do with all the extra people, we should also puzzle over what happens when all of those extra people are suddenly in a world for which they are poorly designed. The obesity issue is an obvious problem that comes from having unlimited food supplies. What happens when people have unlimited safety and unlimited pleasure? Are we even human at that point?

Another possible result is the falling birth rate. Liberals like to claim this is due to low infant mortality rates and high wealth. This is ridiculous. Others, like David Goldman, point to cultural decay. Having children is about celebrating the present and past. It is a gift to the future from those thriving today. That comes from culture. The old saying about proud societies is they are ones where old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. A strong and confident people wish to be remembered and the way to do that is through children. Otherwise, why bother?

An alternative may simply be confusion. For 49,900 years, humans had to have children as soon as they could. Every signal from their environment was triggering that urge, but now all those signals are scrambled. It is no wonder the receiving end would misinterpret these new signals. Just as obesity results from plenty, plummeting fertility rates may result from the lack of status and competition for mates. It’s not just the lack of babies; it is the lack of sex. Like people who work in a candy factory not liking candy, humans in a world of cost and objective free sex on demand may simply turn away.

This may sound ridiculous, but studies of the Khoisan people in Africa show us that humans quickly adapt to their environment. The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari are the world’s oldest people according to geneticists. That means they are closest to the original people who are the foundation stock for humanity. Because they walk everywhere, women have one child at a time. If they have twins, the mother smothers one newborn. Carrying two children is too difficult so they can never have more than one small child at a time.

If you’re inclined to think a world without work or want is Eden, again consider the Khoisan. Until outside forces forced them onto farms, they were able to gather and hunt for enough food in about 20 hours per week. Attending other needs like food preparation, tool making and so forth took up another 20 or so hours. That means the Khoisan were working far less per week than most other peoples on the planet. They also had a murder rate of Detroit, including fratricide, and they were in constant conflict with other groups.

I have no idea where it is all heading. Predicting the future is a lousy business, but we are looking a lot like Panda Bears. While we have no natural enemies and plenty of food in our environment, we have stopped having sex and children. Archaeologists in the far away future will dig through the remains of our time and call us Panda Man, the human species that simply had no reason to carry on. Having arrived at the end goal of evolution, we looked around and decided it was not worth the effort.

Our future is going to be very strange.

Female Trouble

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The awfulness of feminism was not always obvious. The “first wave” of feminism, conveniently called first-wave feminism, was about women getting the vote and some legal protections. A lot of men knew giving women the vote was a bad idea, but not so bad that they were willing to fight to stop it. A century ago when women were demanding the vote, feminism did not look like an assault on nature. It was just unattractive women making a nuisance of themselves in public.

Second-wave feminism is where the nuttiness bobbed above the water line. That’s where we get words like “gender” worming their way into our vocabulary. That is, sex is an arbitrary construct created by men to oppress women. The remedy was to smash up family life, give women a handful of rubbers and money for cab fare as dating aids and demand that men stop thinking about sex. That sounds crude, but crudeness was the most obvious feature of second wave feminism in the 60’s and 70’s.

Third-wave feminism takes this to another level of crazy where reality is infinitely negotiable. Here we get a variety of new sexes, claims about women being witches from another planet and the sun revolves around the earth. That sounds like mockery, but it is hard to satire this stuff. When people are claiming the biology is not just a social construct, but part of a grand conspiracy, it’s hard to not mock it. Despite this, the lunacy has just started. Soon, men will be afraid to around women in the office or even in public.

Crazy rants against nature in the abstract are one thing. Sitting in your college office ranting about males has a different result than throwing yourself off the roof claiming you can fly. But, the crazy rants eventually lead to someone testing the theory. The insanity of feminism is now showing up in the emergency rooms of America as women and girls test the theory that there is no biological difference between men and women. At the Olympics, girls competing on courses built for men are getting hurt a lot.

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front.

She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women.

The rants against nature are not just showing up in silly snow activities. The US military is putting women in combat units. It is one thing for a gal to break her neck trying to ski like a boy. It is unfortunate and sad, but not the end of the world for anyone but her. Putting physically and mentally inferior soldiers into combat units is another matter. That’s where mother nature let’s you know reality is not negotiable. Men in combat have a way to handle the physically and mentally unfit within their ranks.

Women are not men. Men are bigger, faster and stronger than women. Studies have been conducted using the mountain of data collected by the military over the last 100 years. One of the ancillary benefits of having a massive standing army is a massive amount of data about the humans entering and serving in that standing army. It provides the best cross-section of the American population possible. Since America is a mixed society, it works as a handy proxy for the human race in general.

“Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test … the upper quintile of women at West Point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.”

West Point is a training center for the very best who are willing to join the Army. What the data shows is the best women are physically the same as the very worst men. That may not sound so bad, but according to the data, “the average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.” Anyone who has played sports, goes to the gym or lived on earth knows this is fairly obvious. There is a reason why girls don’t play football and boys are not allowed to play in women’s sports.

There’s another bit to this. Women and men think differently too. For instance, there are differences in IQ. Males are over represented in fields like math and science, but under represented in nurturing professions like education and medicine. The difference between men and women show up across the range of human attributes. Men and women are different and they are complimentary. For all of human history, people, both sexes, understood and excepted this.

Believing In False Things

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It is a common lament to say that people are dumber today than in the past or that society is more depraved to day than in another age. It’s a lament that old men have made in all times and places, even when it is obviously false. That said, it seems as if the West is getting institutionally stupid. Basic facts about the human condition that were commonly understood are becoming forbidden knowledge, discussed only in secret.

The crush of information that comes at us probably has something to do with it. Our brains simply can’t hold the volume. Still, it seems like someone would remember that everyone knew Bobby Riggs threw the match against the lesbian tennis player when it happened. I was just a kid at the time and I recall the adults laughing at the thing. I’ve gone my whole life assuming the whole thing was a setup. The mafia angle is probably new.

The funny thing to me is the strange persistence of the feminist lunacy about the differences between the sexes. Biology is not a social construct and we have thousands of people, tens of thousands, working in fields that assume biology is real, sex is real and even race is real. Especially when it comes to the issue of sex. Yet despite the mountains of evidence and daily existence, the social construct argument persists.

We have a mountain of evidence now from the military and it is clear that women can’t do the same things physically as men. It turns out that 10,000 years of observation was indeed correct. That’s why there is one standard for women and another for men. It is also why we should never see women in combat units. They simply cannot do what is required. Yet, saying it in polite company gets you sent out of the room if you’re lucky.

The magical thinking does not stop at physical skills. Since 1901, women have made up four percent of the Nobel laureates in Medicine, two percent in Chemistry, and only one percent in Physics. The number of men with an IQ of 145 is seven times that of women. At the highest levels,  the ratio is 30:1. On average, men are clearly better at mathematics and dominate the higher IQ groups. It turns out boys are better at math.

Men are also over represented in the low end of IQ, which makes a lot of sense from the perspective of evolution. Human society needed a smart fraction, but also a strong violent fraction. Someone needs to be in charge, but someone has to be willing to carry out the orders. Women, in contrast, have to be good at bearing and raising children, which requires neither high math skills nor great physical courage.

Despite the mountain of evidence and 10,000 years of observation, put “women not good at math” and you get back pages and pages of links to stories claiming the facts are to be ignored. Hilariously, the counter to decades of test scores will be a paper in Psychology Today claiming it is part of the conspiracy to maintain the patriarchy. Feminism is that thing everyone knows is false, but everyone pretends it is true anyway.

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