Feminist Corruption

Early in 2005, I wrote in The American Conservative about the financial conflicts of interest and web of backscratching among Harvard President Larry Summers's most enraged feminist critics. After reviewing MIT professor Nancy Hopkins's conflict of interest, I turned to a second case, that wasn't mentioned anywhere else in the voluminous commentary on Summers's remarks on why science and engineering departments at Harvard are heavily male:

Similarly, Denice D. Denton was celebrated for standing up to Summers to, in her words, "speak truth to power." This heroic tableau of the humble, no-doubt-discriminated-against woman engineering professor daring to defy the mighty male university president lost some luster when it emerged that Denton was UC Santa Cruz's chancellor-designate at $275,000 annually. One college supremo attempting to intimidate another one into not mentioning inconvenient facts is not what most people visualize as speaking truth to power.

A few days later, Tanya Schevitz reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on how Denton plays the game. The headline read, "UC hires partner of chancellor: creates $192,000 post for Santa Cruz chief's lesbian lover." ...

But Denton had a powerful defender in the woman scientist who had formerly headed UC Santa Cruz. M.R.C. Greenwood praised UCSC's two-for-the-price-of-three deal for the lesbian academics as the cost of gender diversity: UCSC "should be commended for attracting and hiring two very qualified female engineers."

Greenwood herself had just moved up to provost of the UC system, at $380,000 per year, almost $100,000 more than the man she replaced. Moreover, she had quietly brought with her a female scientist friend from Santa Cruz to fill the novel post of "Executive Faculty Associate to the Provost."

Are you noticing a pattern here?

Schevitz now reports on the latest on Greenwood:

The University of California's former No. 2 official, who resigned under a cloud last month, violated conflict-of-interest rules by helping to create a management job for a friend with whom she owned rental property, a UC investigation concluded Wednesday.

In addition, UC investigators found that a subordinate for the former official, ex-Provost M.R.C. Greenwood, had improperly helped create an internship for Greenwood's son, though they couldn't find evidence he had done so at Greenwood's direction...

UC said it started the investigation after The Chronicle asked about Greenwood's role in the hiring of two people: her friend and business partner, Lynda Goff, for a job at UC's headquarters, and Greenwood's son, James Greenwood, for a midcareer internship at UC Merced.

But UC won't take any action against Greenwood, 62, as a result of the investigation. In fact, a separation agreement that Greenwood and UC agreed to in November, a month before the investigation was completed, grants the former No. 2 official a 15-month leave at $301,840 a year. The money is a combination of the salary she earned as provost and in her previous job as UC Santa Cruz chancellor.

UC also promised Greenwood the right to return after her leave to UC Davis, where she worked years earlier, as a tenured professor of nutrition and internal medicine earning $163,800. In addition, UC agreed to give her $100,000 in research funding.

Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel with the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., said it was "highly unusual" for the university not to have waited until the investigation was complete before deciding the terms of Greenwood's departure.

"This would seem indeed peculiar when you have mounting evidence of potential violations of university regulations to conclude a settlement prior to a determination of a full investigation," Steinbach said. "It seems at variance with common practice." ...

The latest revelations come on the heels of reports in The Chronicle that UC gave employees hundreds of millions of dollars in hidden pay and perks in addition to salaries and overtime. The state Legislature, which oversees a significant portion of UC's funding, is planning to hold hearings early next year into the university's compensation practices.

In the report released Wednesday, UC's general counsel said Greenwood should have recused herself from helping to promote Goff, 56, a UC Santa Cruz administrator who owned rental property with Greenwood in Davis.

Two months after Greenwood started as provost in April 2004, she hired Goff as an executive faculty associate. Then in August 2004, she hired Goff for a yearlong position in academic affairs with a $192,100 salary, a $44,300 raise from her pay at Santa Cruz.

In addition, the offer included a faculty relocation allowance of $50,000 and a low-interest housing loan if Goff were to take a permanent appointment in UC's academic affairs office. She eventually did so.

This past August, Greenwood offered Goff a permanent position as director of UC's new Science and Math Initiative, reporting to her. Goff took the job.

"Given their business relationship, Dr. Greenwood should not have participated in any way in decisions respecting Dr. Goff's employment," the UC report said.

In the Santa Cruz Sentinel, one Conn Hallinan, lecturer in journalism at UC Santa Cruz, was not pleased:

'Integrity in hiring? UC? An oxymoron. What happened with Goff and Greenwood is part of a pattern I call "academic corruption." The rationale is that these people could make so much more money working for some private university or private industry. I don't see either beating a path to their doors.

They have well-paid jobs in the nicest state in the union, and we have to give them $70,000 to move 72 miles? We have to invent jobs for their kids or friends? We give them low-interest loans while students burden themselves with crushing debt at high interest in overcrowded classes that make it almost impossible to graduate in four years? We cut programs and services so some kid of a vice provost can get a made-up internship that cost $5,000 less than our entire journalism program? ...

The corruption is not only at the level of the President's Office, it is part of the structure of the university, and the Regents are no better. The only reason they are annoyed is they got sidelined on all of this. But letting the Regents investigate this all is like recruiting the foxes to find out who has been pinching chickens. This was stealing taxpayers' money, plain and simple. You restore integrity by ending the skull-and-bones style of running a great public university and give it back to the people who send their children there.'

Of course, Larry Summers quickly backed down under pressure from these women, and promised $50 million to fund additional feminist corruption.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pathogen selection and evolutionary psychology

A new blog called "Dusk in Autumn" writes about the Wang and Moyzis paper on 1,800 genes that have been under different selection pressures in West Africa, East Asia, and Europe:

I'll emphasize a point Steve Sailer raised, which is that this is contra the assumption in Evolutionary Psychology (TM) that selection worked its stuff while our species was located in Africa, and more or less froze us in that state before various groups left, since natural selection hasn't had "enough time" to work on our brain within the ~50,000 years since. Most cultural differences are assumed to reflect differences in the local ecology -- that is, we're all born with mostly the same cognitive architecture, but depending on how this interacts during our lifetime with salient features of the environment, some groups could show a psychological or behavioral difference from others...

However, as is the problem with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, the more one emphasizes long-lasting differences in the local ecology, the more they are implicitly arguing that the populations occupying these areas over time face different selection pressures, which would tend to introduce a greater genetic component into explaining why different populations differ, as they became adapted to their region...

When it comes to the brain, however, the psychological / behavioral equivalent of the Standard Social Model is assumed to account for population differences. However, way back in 1993 Steven Gangestad and David Buss published an article, "Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences" (Ethology and Sociobiology, 14, 89-96), wherein they described how the degree to which nasty pathogens were present in the local ecology strongly correlated with the degree to which the people of that region placed an emphasis on physical attractiveness when selecting a mate, as documented by Buss' seminal 1989 cross-cultural survey of human mate preferences (Ctrl+F BBS)... Buss had already examined how much emphasis people in various cultures place on good looks when choosing a mate; each subject rated this from 0 to 4, with 4 being most important, and he took the mean of all subjects in a given culture. G&B then examined the correlation of this average with the prevalence of 6 or so nasty pathogens in the geographical areas studied in mate preferences study -- by nasty I mean something like malaria, whose post-Out-of-Africa pressure has resulted in vast group differences in sickle-cell anemia. The hypothesis was that those in more pathogen-ridden areas would place more emphasis on good looks since they are a reliable cue for good health & immune system, which are more crucial for survival in an area teeming with microscopic bugs ready to eat you up. Here's Buss' summary from another paper which is available online (under 2001, "Human Nature and Culture..."). G&B:

"found that cultural variation in the prevalence of pathogens was correlated +.71 with the average cultural importance placed on physical attractiveness in a potential mate, accounting for a virtually unprecedented 50% of the cultural variation (Gangestad & Buss, 1993). Assuming further tests confirm this hypothesis, cultural variation in a psychological variable, in this example, can be traced, in part, to variation in an important hazard of the local ecology" (p. 969; my emphasis).

Aha! So despite the wording here about local hazards and the abstract's claim that "the [universal] human mind contains many complex psychological mechanisms that are selectively activated, depending on cultural contexts" (my emphasis) -- this is actually an instance of the Baldwin Effect, whereby learned behaviors become progressively more "hard-wired," even if not completely so, in order to increase fitness. But as anticipated by Darwin the Second (aka William Hamilton), and as confirmed now by the Wang et al paper, nasty pathogens play a central role in the directions natural selection takes in human beings. Combine this with the great variation in pathogen prevalence between geographical regions plus the Baldwin Effect, and you get psychological group differences with substantial genetic components. As I recall from the G&B paper, the Finns and Zulus face a milder pathogen army and on average don't care much about how their partner looks, whereas the Bulgarians and Nigerians, respectively, are the reverse.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pathogen selection and evolutionary psychology

A new blog called "Dusk in Autumn" writes about the Wang and Moyzis paper on 1,800 genes that have been under different selection pressures in West Africa, East Asia, and Europe:

I'll emphasize a point Steve Sailer raised, which is that this is contra the assumption in Evolutionary Psychology (TM) that selection worked its stuff while our species was located in Africa, and more or less froze us in that state before various groups left, since natural selection hasn't had "enough time" to work on our brain within the ~50,000 years since. Most cultural differences are assumed to reflect differences in the local ecology -- that is, we're all born with mostly the same cognitive architecture, but depending on how this interacts during our lifetime with salient features of the environment, some groups could show a psychological or behavioral difference from others...

However, as is the problem with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, the more one emphasizes long-lasting differences in the local ecology, the more they are implicitly arguing that the populations occupying these areas over time face different selection pressures, which would tend to introduce a greater genetic component into explaining why different populations differ, as they became adapted to their region...

When it comes to the brain, however, the psychological / behavioral equivalent of the Standard Social Model is assumed to account for population differences. However, way back in 1993 Steven Gangestad and David Buss published an article, "Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences" (Ethology and Sociobiology, 14, 89-96), wherein they described how the degree to which nasty pathogens were present in the local ecology strongly correlated with the degree to which the people of that region placed an emphasis on physical attractiveness when selecting a mate, as documented by Buss' seminal 1989 cross-cultural survey of human mate preferences (Ctrl+F BBS)... Buss had already examined how much emphasis people in various cultures place on good looks when choosing a mate; each subject rated this from 0 to 4, with 4 being most important, and he took the mean of all subjects in a given culture. G&B then examined the correlation of this average with the prevalence of 6 or so nasty pathogens in the geographical areas studied in mate preferences study -- by nasty I mean something like malaria, whose post-Out-of-Africa pressure has resulted in vast group differences in sickle-cell anemia. The hypothesis was that those in more pathogen-ridden areas would place more emphasis on good looks since they are a reliable cue for good health & immune system, which are more crucial for survival in an area teeming with microscopic bugs ready to eat you up. Here's Buss' summary from another paper which is available online (under 2001, "Human Nature and Culture..."). G&B:

"found that cultural variation in the prevalence of pathogens was correlated +.71 with the average cultural importance placed on physical attractiveness in a potential mate, accounting for a virtually unprecedented 50% of the cultural variation (Gangestad & Buss, 1993). Assuming further tests confirm this hypothesis, cultural variation in a psychological variable, in this example, can be traced, in part, to variation in an important hazard of the local ecology" (p. 969; my emphasis).

Aha! So despite the wording here about local hazards and the abstract's claim that "the [universal] human mind contains many complex psychological mechanisms that are selectively activated, depending on cultural contexts" (my emphasis) -- this is actually an instance of the Baldwin Effect, whereby learned behaviors become progressively more "hard-wired," even if not completely so, in order to increase fitness. But as anticipated by Darwin the Second (aka William Hamilton), and as confirmed now by the Wang et al paper, nasty pathogens play a central role in the directions natural selection takes in human beings. Combine this with the great variation in pathogen prevalence between geographical regions plus the Baldwin Effect, and you get psychological group differences with substantial genetic components. As I recall from the G&B paper, the Finns and Zulus face a milder pathogen army and on average don't care much about how their partner looks, whereas the Bulgarians and Nigerians, respectively, are the reverse.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pathogen selection and evolutionary psychology

A new blog called "Dusk in Autumn" writes about the Wang and Moyzis paper on 1,800 genes that have been under different selection pressures in West Africa, East Asia, and Europe:

I'll emphasize a point Steve Sailer raised, which is that this is contra the assumption in Evolutionary Psychology (TM) that selection worked its stuff while our species was located in Africa, and more or less froze us in that state before various groups left, since natural selection hasn't had "enough time" to work on our brain within the ~50,000 years since. Most cultural differences are assumed to reflect differences in the local ecology -- that is, we're all born with mostly the same cognitive architecture, but depending on how this interacts during our lifetime with salient features of the environment, some groups could show a psychological or behavioral difference from others...

However, as is the problem with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, the more one emphasizes long-lasting differences in the local ecology, the more they are implicitly arguing that the populations occupying these areas over time face different selection pressures, which would tend to introduce a greater genetic component into explaining why different populations differ, as they became adapted to their region...

When it comes to the brain, however, the psychological / behavioral equivalent of the Standard Social Model is assumed to account for population differences. However, way back in 1993 Steven Gangestad and David Buss published an article, "Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences" (Ethology and Sociobiology, 14, 89-96), wherein they described how the degree to which nasty pathogens were present in the local ecology strongly correlated with the degree to which the people of that region placed an emphasis on physical attractiveness when selecting a mate, as documented by Buss' seminal 1989 cross-cultural survey of human mate preferences (Ctrl+F BBS)... Buss had already examined how much emphasis people in various cultures place on good looks when choosing a mate; each subject rated this from 0 to 4, with 4 being most important, and he took the mean of all subjects in a given culture. G&B then examined the correlation of this average with the prevalence of 6 or so nasty pathogens in the geographical areas studied in mate preferences study -- by nasty I mean something like malaria, whose post-Out-of-Africa pressure has resulted in vast group differences in sickle-cell anemia. The hypothesis was that those in more pathogen-ridden areas would place more emphasis on good looks since they are a reliable cue for good health & immune system, which are more crucial for survival in an area teeming with microscopic bugs ready to eat you up. Here's Buss' summary from another paper which is available online (under 2001, "Human Nature and Culture..."). G&B:

"found that cultural variation in the prevalence of pathogens was correlated +.71 with the average cultural importance placed on physical attractiveness in a potential mate, accounting for a virtually unprecedented 50% of the cultural variation (Gangestad & Buss, 1993). Assuming further tests confirm this hypothesis, cultural variation in a psychological variable, in this example, can be traced, in part, to variation in an important hazard of the local ecology" (p. 969; my emphasis).

Aha! So despite the wording here about local hazards and the abstract's claim that "the [universal] human mind contains many complex psychological mechanisms that are selectively activated, depending on cultural contexts" (my emphasis) -- this is actually an instance of the Baldwin Effect, whereby learned behaviors become progressively more "hard-wired," even if not completely so, in order to increase fitness. But as anticipated by Darwin the Second (aka William Hamilton), and as confirmed now by the Wang et al paper, nasty pathogens play a central role in the directions natural selection takes in human beings. Combine this with the great variation in pathogen prevalence between geographical regions plus the Baldwin Effect, and you get psychological group differences with substantial genetic components. As I recall from the G&B paper, the Finns and Zulus face a milder pathogen army and on average don't care much about how their partner looks, whereas the Bulgarians and Nigerians, respectively, are the reverse.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Wind from the South

As I I've been writing for awhile, there is a major trend toward anti-white leftist populism in Latin America, which will likely have important implications for our immigration policy. In the wake of Evo Morales, and his Movement Toward Socialism party's smashing victory in Bolivia, others are starting to notice the Wind from the South, if not the immigration implications. In Slate, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan writes:

For Morales' most devoted partisans in the poor communities that dot the high Andes and ring Bolivia's cities, the explanation for his sweeping victory is simple: An Aymara Indian who grew up herding llamas before becoming a coca farmer and union leader, Morales will be the first indigenous president in a country that is two-thirds indigenous. "Evo is a campesino. He knows hunger and misery," a potato farmer named Remedios Quispe explained. "The other candidates are the descendants of the Spanish, who have always ruled over us." Morales, playing on this theme, calls himself "just an instrument of the pueblo" and the MAS a "second independence movement."

Indeed, Morales would rather think of himself as a Bolivian Nelson Mandela than as the second coming of Che. (One of his first trips abroad will be to meet with Mandela in South Africa.) He realizes that his victory is less about specific policies than it is about making a symbolic break—from 500 years of indigenous dispossession and 20 years of disappointment with neoliberal economic reforms and a democratic system controlled by elite interests. "This is not just about a change of government," Morales has said. "It is about starting a new history for the Bolivian people, a history free from corruption and discrimination."

I was talking to a guy in a bar in West LA once who told me a couple of his ancestors had been Presidentes of Bolivia. I acted impressed, but he said that considering how many Presidentes Bolivia has had, what with the annual coups and all, if you come from a family that's rich enough to let you drink in bars in West LA, you're almost sure to have ancestors who were Presidentes. So, it's striking that Morales is the first Indian Presidente.

More generally, this shows the fundamental problem with Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" theory that after the discrediting of Communism, everybody will agree on the ideological fundamentals. The problem is that even if everybody agrees that there should be property rights, they don't agree on who should have the rights to the property. If you go far enough back in time, virtually all "property is theft" from somebody's point of view. And the near universal human custom of property inheritance from ancestors means that property disputes are likely to break down along racial (i.e., extended family) lines. For example, from the point of view of Morales and his relatives, the current distribution of property in Bolivia is based on theft by the Conquistadors, and Bolivia's resources should be returned to their rightful owners, them.

Noah Millman has more on Bolivia at Gideon's Blog.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More revelations about the genetics of race

Everybody in the blogosphere is having their say about the Dover judicial decision against teaching Intelligent Design, yet 95% of those crowing over Dover would want to punish any public school educators who tried to teach the latest scientific findings about about the evolution of human biodiversity.

Last night, we saw the release of Moyzis and Wang's epochal paper with a list of 1,800 different genes that have been under different selective pressures in different regions of the world within the last 50,000 years, since modern humans emerged Out of Africa.

Today, I want to focus on another important paper called "Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure" by Noah A. Rosenberg et al. It's a refutation of one of bit of sophistry by the more sophisticated members of the Race Does Not Exist crowd: the cline theory. Yeah, sure, it goes, people differ, but the variations change evenly across the face of the earth, so you can never define the boundaries of separate racial groups.

For example, Science Daily reported on a population genetics study that says:

"… geographic distance from East Africa along ancient colonization routes is an excellent predictor for the genetic diversity of present human populations, with those farther from Ethiopia being characterized by lower genetic variability... The loss of genetic diversity along colonization routes is smooth, with no obvious genetic discontinuity, thus suggesting that humans cannot be accurately classified in discrete ethnic groups or races on a genetic basis."

Rosenberg's new paper essentially quantifies my refutation last March of the pure clinal theory in VDARE.com. The cline theory isn't a bad one as long as it's not pushed too far. I wrote:

Two fallacies are readily apparent in this statement. First, the whole argument is a little silly. You could walk from, say, Calais on the English Channel to Pusan in South Korea without dying of thirst. At either end of your vast journey, however, the people look quite different. In between you might run into, say, Boris Yeltsin, a blond man with features slightly reminiscent of East Asia, and other people of varying degrees of European and East Asian admixture. But, in the big picture, so what? Frenchmen and Koreans are still different and nobody would mistake one for the other.

Second, the geneticists' statement applies only "along colonization routes," and most possible directions were not major colonization routes. If you walk in the majority of directions, you will eventually fall into the ocean and drown. [Or die of thirst in the Sahara or of exposure in the Himalayas.] This reinforces the "obvious genetic discontinuity" that we see with our lying eyes. [More]

Rosenberg's paper is quite technical, but it shows definitively that both clines and clusters are important. If you assume, say, five continental-scale races "corresponding to Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas," then, unsurprisingly, you find the clinal theory works well within a continental region or "cluster," but doesn't work well across the continental ("cluster") boundaries:

For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic distance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner, consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia. Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions.

Out of their 52 human populations, 49 fell distinctly into one continental-scale cluster or another. Only two followed the clinal model by being evenly mixed, and one, the pagan Kalash of the Hindu Kush, was unique:

Two exceptions to the pattern include the Hazara and Uygur populations, from Pakistan [actually, Afghanistan] and western China, respectively, whose genetic distances scale continuously with geographic distance both for populations in Eurasia and for those in East Asia. These populations were evenly split across the clusters corresponding to Eurasia and East Asia, and thus, unlike most other populations, they do not reflect a discontinuous jump in genetic distance with geographic distance. Finally, a third population of interest in the plot is the Kalash population (of Pakistan), whose genetic distances to other populations are large at all geographic distances, illustrating the distinctiveness of the group as the only member of its own genetic cluster in some STRUCTURE analyses ...

The Kalash, like the Kafiristanis in "The Man Who Would Be King," claim to be descended from Alexander the Great's troops, and the Hazara say they are descendents of Genghis Khan's troops.

Excluding these three groups, Rosenberg found a strong correlation between geographic distance and genetic distance, as the clinal theory would predict, but also found that the three main kinds of barriers -- oceans, the Sahara, and the Himalayas -- "adds an equivalent amount of genetic distance as traveling approximately 3,100 km on the same side of the barrier." That's not a huge amount, but it needs to be added to the existing size of the barrier. For example, this barrier factor roughly doubles in effect the already large size of the Sahara.

It's enough to make clusters at least as important a conceptual tool for thinking about human genetic diversity as clines.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More revelations about the genetics of race

Everybody in the blogosphere is having their say about the Dover judicial decision against teaching Intelligent Design, but 95% of those crowing over Dover would be horrified if any public school tried to teach the latest findings about about the evolution of human biodiversity. Last night, we saw the release of Moyzis and Wang's epochal paper with a list of 1,800 different genes that have been under different selective pressures in different regions of the world within the last 50,000 years, since modern humans emerged Out of Africa.

Today, I want to focus on another important paper called "Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure" by Noah A. Rosenberg et al. It's a refutation of one of a bit of sophistry by the more sophisticated members of the Race Does Not Exist crowd: the cline theory. Yeah, sure, people differ, but the variations change evenly across the face of the earth, so you can never define the boundaries of separate racial groups.

For example, Science Daily reported on a population genetics study that says:

"… geographic distance from East Africa along ancient colonization routes is an excellent predictor for the genetic diversity of present human populations, with those farther from Ethiopia being characterized by lower genetic variability... The loss of genetic diversity along colonization routes is smooth, with no obvious genetic discontinuity, thus suggesting that humans cannot be accurately classified in discrete ethnic groups or races on a genetic basis."

Rosenberg's new paper essentially quantifies my refutation last March of the pure clinal theory in VDARE.com. The cline theory isn't a bad one as long as it's not pushed too far. I wrote:

Two fallacies are readily apparent in this statement. First, the whole argument is a little silly. You could walk from, say, Calais on the English Channel to Pusan in South Korea without dying of thirst. At either end of your vast journey, however, the people look quite different. In between you might run into, say, Boris Yeltsin, a blond man with features slightly reminiscent of East Asia, and other people of varying degrees of European and East Asian admixture. But, in the big picture, so what? Frenchmen and Koreans are still different and nobody would mistake one for the other.

Second, the geneticists' statement applies only "along colonization routes," and most possible directions were not major colonization routes. If you walk in the majority of directions, you will eventually fall into the ocean and drown. [Or die of thirst in the Sahara or of exposure in the Himalayas.] This reinforces the "obvious genetic discontinuity" that we see with our lying eyes. [More]

Rosenberg's paper is quite technical, but it shows definitively that both clines and clusters are important. If you assume five continental-scale races "corresponding to Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas," then, unsurprisingly, you find the clinal theory works well within a continental region or "cluster," but doesn't work well across the continental ("cluster") boundaries:

For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic distance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner, consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia. Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions.

Out of their 52 human populations, 49 fell distinctly into one continental-scale cluster or another. Only two followed the clinal model by being evenly mixed, and one, the pagan Kalash of the Hindu Kush, was unique:

Two exceptions to the pattern include the Hazara and Uygur populations, from Pakistan and western China, respectively, whose genetic distances scale continuously with geographic distance both for populations in Eurasia and for those in East Asia. These populations were evenly split across the clusters corresponding to Eurasia and East Asia, and thus, unlike most other populations, they do not reflect a discontinuous jump in genetic distance with geographic distance. Finally, a third population of interest in the plot is the Kalash population (of Pakistan), whose genetic distances to other populations are large at all geographic distances, illustrating the distinctiveness of the group as the only member of its own genetic cluster in some STRUCTURE analyses ...

The Kalash, like the Kafiristanis in "The Man Who Would Be King," claim to be descended from Alexander the Great's troops, and the Hazara say they are descendents of Genghis Khan's troops.

Excluding these three groups, Rosenberg found a strong correlation between geographic distance and genetic distance, as the clinal theory would predict, but also found that the three main kinds of barriers -- oceans, the Sahara, and the Himalayas -- "adds an equivalent amount of genetic distance as traveling approximately 3,100 km on the same side of the barrier." That's not a huge amount, but it's enough to make clusters as important a conceptual tool for thinking about human genetic diversity as clines.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Uh-oh

"Robot Demonstrates Self Awareness"

Maybe getting that Roomba robot vacuum cleaner as a present for your sweetie wasn't such a hot idea. Pretty soon she'll be vacuuming for Lord Roomba while he admires himself in the mirror.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Human evolution and genetic diversification has been speeding up since we came Out of Africa

One of the dogmas of Evolutionary Psychology™ is that human beings stopped evolving after the "Era of Evolutionary Adaptation," which presumably was before modern humans left Africa, which was probably 50,000 or more years ago. Bob Moyzis, Eric Wang et al now have a paper finally out entitled "Global landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for Homo sapiens" [pdf] that Greg Cochran has been telling me about for months. It punches a big hole in the Evolutionary Psychologists' assumption about the genetic identicality of human racial groups.

Anthropologist John Hawks writes:

It would be hard for me to overstate how important this paper is. Even if it weren't central to my own current research (about which you will just have to wait for more), it brings home the vast importance of adaptive change during the most recent parts of human evolution.

When you stop and think about it, there are lots of reasons why evolutionary diversification would speed up after some humans left Africa, but I'll avoid mentioning a new one that Cochran is working on.

It's always controversial to argue that genetic differences cause cultural differences, but something that has largely been ignored is that cultural differences will also cause genetic differences. The canonical example is how the cultural trait of milking domesticated animals increased lactose tolerance over the last ten thousand or so years from close to zero to something like 95% in Northern Europe, which, in turn, had big impacts on that region's cultural traits such as population density, economy, lifestyle, and cuisine.

Now, it turns out that lactose tolerance has lots of company in the ranks of recent genetic diversification of humanity.

Bob Holmes writes in the New Scientist:

Darwin’s fingerprints can be found all over the human genome. A detailed look at human DNA has shown that a significant percentage of our genes have been shaped by natural selection in the past 50,000 years, probably in response to aspects of modern human culture such as the emergence of agriculture and the shift towards living in densely populated settlements.

... Robert Moyzis and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, US, searched for instances of linkage disequilibrium in a collection of 1.6 million SNPs scattered across all the human chromosomes. They then looked carefully at the instances they found to distinguish the consequences of natural selection from other phenomena, such as random inversions of chunks of DNA, which can disrupt normal genetic reshuffling.

This analysis suggested that around 1800 genes, or roughly 7% of the total in the human genome, have changed under the influence of natural selection within the past 50,000 years. A second analysis using a second SNP database gave similar results. That is roughly the same proportion of genes that were altered in maize when humans domesticated it from its wild ancestors.

Moyzis speculates that we may have similarly “domesticated” ourselves with the emergence of modern civilisation.

“One of the major things that has happened in the last 50,000 years is the development of culture,” he says. “By so radically and rapidly changing our environment through our culture, we’ve put new kinds of selection [pressures] on ourselves.”

Genes that aid protein metabolism – perhaps related to a change in diet with the dawn of agriculture – turn up unusually often in Moyzis’s list of recently selected genes. So do genes involved in resisting infections, which would be important in a species settling into more densely populated villages where diseases would spread more easily. Other selected genes include those involved in brain function, which could be important in the development of culture.

According to Michael Balter in ScienceNow Daily News:

Harnessing data from two existing databases of human diversity, the team found some 1800 genes that appeared to have been under selection during the last 10,000 to 50,000 years. According to team leader and genome researcher Robert Moyzis, this is between 10 and 100 times greater than the number found in previous studies (Science, 8 July, p. 234).

The genes belong to several biologically important categories, including genes important in defense against disease, controlling the cell cycle, protein metabolism, and nervous system functioning, the researchers report online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One of the newly spotted genes, ASPM, was recently linked to brain evolution by a team from the University of Chicago (Science, 9 September, p. 1662).

The paper ends:

In conclusion, we have introduced a simple probabilistic method to detect unusual genetic architectures associated with recent selection that does not require haplotype information. It is, therefore, suitable for large chromosomal scans with large population samples. Homo sapiens have undoubtedly undergone strong recent selection for many different phenotypes, including but certainly not limited to the general categories we have defined in this work (Fig. 5). Such inferred selective events are not rare (Fig. 3). The numbers obtained, however, are similar to estimated numbers obtained for artificial selection (by humans) on the maize genome (45). Given that most of these selective events likely occurred in the last 10,000 - 40,000 years, a time of major population expansion out of Africa followed by regional shifts from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, it is tempting to speculate that gene - culture interactions directly or indirectly shaped our genomic architecture (46, 47). As such, we suggest that such recently selected alleles may provide useful "markers" for investigating the evolutionary migrations of our species, as an adjunct to studies using neutral markers. We also propose that many of these alleles, because of their high prevalence and recent selection, should be considered likely "functional candidates" for association with human variability and the common disorders afflicting humankind.

[Thanks to Dienekes and GNXP]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NPR: New Orleans actually pretty bad after all

While the New Orleans Nightmare was winding up in September, I predicted both that initial reports of violence were exaggerated and that there would soon be an attempt to cover up how bad conditions were in New Orleans. This duly arrived. Soon, the conventional wisdom had shifted 180 degrees.

It's too late for another shift in the conventional wisdom, but for those interested in what actually happened, here's today's National Public Radio report:

More Stories Emerge of Rapes in Post-Katrina Chaos
by John Burnett

Morning Edition, December 21, 2005 · Law-enforcement authorities dismissed early reports of widespread rapes in New Orleans during the lawless days following Hurricane Katrina. But a growing body of evidence suggests there were more storm-related sexual assaults than previously known.

Female victims, now displaced from New Orleans, are slowly coming forward with a different story than the official one. Two national crime-victims' groups have reported a spike in the number of reported rapes that happened to storm evacuees. The numbers are not dramatic, but they are significant when seen in light of the official number of post-Katrina rapes and attempted rapes: four...

Benitez and others interviewed for this report believe that police authorities -- who were anxious to discount initially exaggerated reports of mayhem -- are downplaying violent crimes that happened in the anarchy after the storm. Lt. Dave Benelli, commander of the sex crimes unit with the New Orleans Police Department, denies that.

"We're not downsizing anything," Benelli says. "I'm telling you the number of reported rapes we had."

Benelli says his team investigated two attempted rapes inside the Superdome, and two additional reports of rapes that happened in the city, one of which was the 25-year-old hairdresser.

When presented with the additional cases collected by victims' advocates groups, Benelli acknowledges that the police simply doesn't know the extent of sex crimes after the storm.

"I admit that rapes are underreported," Benelli says. "I know more sexual assaults took place. I've expressed many times that we're willing to investigate any sexual assaults that happened in this city at any time. We can only deal with what we know."

The California Disaster Medical Assistance Team spent 24 hellish hours inside the Superdome. Team members said they delivered babies, treated gunshot and stab victims, and ultimately fled for their own safety. Commander Dave Lipin says they saw two women who said they'd been raped -- different women than those the police attended to. He says his team only saw a fraction of the desperate people who sought assistance.

Lipin says when he arrived in Baton Rouge and turned on the TV, he was surprised by reports of rampant violence in New Orleans. "I think that that was probably over-reported," he says. "And so now I think it's swung the other direction and it's underreported. I don't know why. My sense now is there are victims out there whose stories haven't been heard." [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My latest VDARE.com effort:

A reader takes offense at my mentioning in my celebration of the Jewish contribution to the American Christmas the obvious trend among some American Jews, but by no means all, toward greater resentment of the culture of the Christian majority. I respond:

Mr Zernik claims this is a:

"… monstrous conclusion which, if it were true, would bring about a major social explosion in this country with disastrous consequences such as we have not seen for half a century."

No, it wouldn't.

There isn't the slightest chance of large-scale Christian pogroms against American Jews. To suggest otherwise is, frankly, a libel on the American people. (The odds of major anti-Semitic attacks in this country unfortunately rise rapidly farther out into the future, as immigration brings in more anti-Semites—which is one reason I work to cut back on immigration.)

The reality is the opposite of what Mr. Zernik suggests. American Jews feel so secure (rightly) that, for example, last year leading Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League orchestrated an enormous campaign in the news media and Hollywood to demonize Mel Gibson for making The Passion of the Christ....

No, the plain fact is that the Holocaust Card is simply played to silence any criticism, no matter how constructive, or even any objective outside analysis, of the important roles that Jews play in American life.

Mr. Zernik needs to ask himself whether living in this George W. Bush-like media bubble where critical perspectives are silenced will be, in the long run, good for the Jews...

For all their intelligence, their tragic track record suggests that Jews have not always been the wisest decision-makers (especially when compared to the much happier history of the single most similar high IQ group, the Parsis of India).

For instance, the House of Representatives voted 423-0 last week for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's (D-FL) proposal to ask President Bush to declare January to be "Jewish History Month."

As you know, February has long been "Black History Month." But is it truly prudent for American Jews to engage in such blatant one-upmanship over blacks in their long-running battle over who has been the most oppressed?

Allow me to speculate on what African-American reactions will include when they hear about January becoming Jewish History Month:

• "How come the Jews get a month with 31 days while Black History Month only has 28 days?"

• "How come Jewish History Month comes before Black History Month? Are they trying to say Jews come first and blacks should ride in the back of the bus?"

• "The Jews are just trying to diss Martin Luther King's Birthday."

Of course, unlike in the 1960s, when many Jews were shopkeepers in black neighborhoods, most Jews are now physically insulated from black resentment. But this move is still unwise—and it reflects a distressing recent tendency among American Jews to let self-pitying nostalgia get in the way of clear thinking about upcoming threats.

Or, similarly but more substantially, (and much to the distress of Steven Steinlight), American Jews tend to be enthusiasts for the current mass immigration system—even though it is both admitting anti-Jewish terrorists like the Egyptian who got in on his wife's Diversity Lottery Visa and then shot up the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002, and also gradually reducing Jewish political power.

Unfortunately, Jewish attitudes toward immigration today appear more driven by nostalgic emotion about their Ellis Island forebears than by rational calculations about the future. (Exhibit A: the current designated enforcer for immigration enthusiasts, Tamar Jacoby.)

It is obvious that the War Against Christmas waged by heavily Jewish organizations like the ACLU appears to be rooted in resentments of perceived past slights more than on any intelligent assessment of what is good for the Jews now.

And attacking the Christian majority at their single strongest point—their wonderful holiday of joy to the world and peace on earth to men of good will—will likely turn out to be ill-advised.

In the long run, if Jews would allow gentiles to offer constructive analyses like this, they could avoid a lot of grief. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"King Kong"

Peter Jackson's 3-hour theatrical release is definitely the Director's Cut. Someday, if we're lucky, there'll be a 2-hour Editor's Cut. Anyway, it's good, but no need to rush out and see it during this busy week before Christmas. When you have more time after Christmas, it will still be there.

And Peter Jackson's big innovation is to have not just the monkey in love with the blonde, but the blonde in love with the monkey, which would be creepy ... if there was any point in thinking about it, which there is not.

By the way, you can see all my movie reviews for UPI and The American Conservative magazine going back to 2001 here.

"Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors:"

Speaking of big apes, the Scotsman newspaper reports:

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

A desire for super-soldiers also figured in Stalin's later and much more disastrous embrace of Lysenkoism, the anti-Darwinian Lamarckist pseudo-science that wrecked the advance of Soviet agricultural genetics for decades and sent Darwinian scientists to the Gulag.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hold the Presses!

In late breaking news, we discover that ... Christopher Hitchens hates Christmas!

By the way, perhaps Christopher would be happier if he changed his first name? It must gall him every day that he's named after Someone he hates.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More of that Christmas spirit!

The War Nerd salutes the Japanese Red Army, pound for pound the craziest terrorists ever. But first, Gary Brecher pauses to recount the last day of Yukio Mishima:

The man who tried to rouse Japan's military spirit was a writer named Yukio Mishima. A freak, no denying that, but at least he was anti-peace, pro-war -- he had "moral clarity," as they say. Not your typical militarist, though -- Mishima was an "avant-garde" novelist. Haven't read his books, but I'd imagine "avant-garde" means his books make no sense even in translation. He was also a flaming mariposa, gay as a Spartan bath attendant. Worked out non-stop, got very buffed (for a Japanese) and was always posing with his shirt off, trying to look Imperial, with that rising-sun flag wrapped around him, or wearing a samurai sword and headband -- only he's always got that "Hi there, Sailor" expression which pretty much ruins the effect.

Still, his heart was in the right place, and I'm not going to do [more?] gay jokes because I realized after high school that in those four lousy years, no gay guy ever called me fatso...

So here's the scene in the commanding officer's office [after Mishima commits seppuku]: we've got two heads on the floor, a really messy carpet they probably had to throw away, and a desk jockey General who was probably wondering if these wackos were going to add him to the pile of skulls or leave him alive to explain to his superiors how his base got seized by a gay novelist and his four boyfriends. That's a rock and a pretty durn hard place for a career officer. [More]

Actually, homosexuality was quite common among the samurai, rather like in Sparta. These were quite different worlds than ours.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

I don't get movie critics

While the big names are slobbering over "King Kong," they are also all denouncing the hour-shorter "Producers" as "overblown," supposedly because it was filmed like you're sitting in a $100 seat in the third row center, which means you can actually see the choreography. Where are all the MTV quick cuts and close-ups on some dancer's elbow? You call that a musical?

One of the things that killed the musical in movies is trying too hard to film them like busy modern movies with lots of camera set ups, cuts, and close-ups. Bob Fosse could get a way with it in "All That Jazz" because he was Bob Fosse, but the folks that have come up afterwards aren't Bob Fosse. It's the same thing that has made Jackie Chan's big budget American movies lousier than his low budget Hong Kong movies -- the refusal to mount the camera in one place and let the man do his stuff. Fred Astaire, at least, was powerful enough to keep his directors from thinking they were the creative talent on the set.

(I suspect the bigger problem with "The Producers" for film critics are all the gay jokes. Considering how many times I've been denounced for pointing out that gays have a higher propensity to "lissssssp" with a hissy S, I particularly liked the scene where the gay director's "common-law assistant" says "Yesssssssssssssss" and the S's go on for at least 30 seconds. No, movie reviewers like realism, like manly gay cowboys.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pundit Payola

Long time libertarian pundit Doug Bandow quit his job at the Cato Institute after it was revealed that he'd written something like two dozen columns over the years at the behest of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who paid him up to $2,000 per op-ed about Abramoff clients like Northern Marianas sweatshop owners and immigration scamsters and American Indian casino tribes. Bandow failed to disclose the payments to his readers or the Cato Institute.

(Personally, I find the Marianas Trench to be a disgrace and Indian gaming a bad joke, but a libertarian might think differently.)

Observers suggested this case is far from unique, that op-ed subsidization is common. I wouldn't know. Nobody has ever offered me money. For some reason, no PR guys want a notorious crimethinker to endorse their clients.

Hey, I know! I'll take money for not writing in favor of lobbyists' clients. You wouldn't want to have your sweatshop's good name tarnished by my public approval. Okay, K Street, I'm waiting. Just E-mail me and I'll tell you where to send the cash in return for my hitting the snooze button.

Seriously, the even bigger problem with this country's media than what pundits will say for money is what they won't say to protect their careers.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Answers to all your holiday questions

Q. I'm a Multiculturalist Pagan. I want to celebrate the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, at the exact same moment as all the indigenous peoples on Mother Earth. When will that moment occur?

A. Never. Unlike Christianity, pagan religions are local. This causes practical problems for politically correct American pagans who want to use the seasons of the sun to commemorate the unity of humanity under nature. Their problem is that nature treats humans very differently depending upon where they live. For example, while Dec. 21 is the shortest day for the Inuit (i.e. Eskimos), it's the longest day for Australian Aborigines. And for Mbuti pygmies living on the equator, it's just another day. In truth, Winter Solstice celebrations are (gasp) Eurocentric! Or, to be precise, "Nordocentric."

Q. My ethnic group's holiday isn't as popular as some other ethnic groups' days and that really gets my goat. Is there a way for it to be more popular?

A. Figure out how Americans could observe it by spending money doing something fun. For example, all the Irish bars in America will never let you forget that St. Patrick Day is when every American, no matter what your race, religion, or creed, is expected to get as drunk as an Irishman. Similarly, the Mexican restaurants and tequila companies have made Cinco de Mayo popular. Chinese New Year wanders around too much to catch on really big, but Chinese restaurants keep it going. In contrast, the Italians blew it by not establishing the custom of going to an Italian restaurant on Columbus Day (everybody likes Italian food!), thus leaving it vulnerable to attacks by the politically correct. Not being a fun holiday, Columbus Day has too few defenders to withstand the attacks of the humorless.

Now, the House of Representatives has voted 423-0 to ask President Bush to declare January to be "Jewish History Month." I think this would go over big if it becomes customary to observe Jewish History Month by going to Blockbuster and renting old Mel Brooks movies. Yet, I suspect Jewish History Month will turn out to be just as big a drag as all those dead-of-winter African-American "celebrations" -- Kwanzaa, Martin Luther King's Birthday, and Black History Month. We have three dozen days devoted to black people between Dec. 26 and February 28, and on not one of them is it considered appropriate to put on the Isley Brothers' version of "Shout."

Q. What were Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday like before they got compressed into President's Day?

A. I don't recall, but the always reliable Across Difficult Country blog has some vivid memories:

Merging the separate holidays made it impossible to celebrate either one, since the distinctive celebrations of each are incompatible. And what celebrations they were! I can still recall as a boy how on Washington’s Birthday everyone in town would wear powdered wigs, cherry pie was served, and we would all drink applejack. For Lincoln’s birthday, in contrast, the children would dress as slaves. We would all gather in the town square and there, the tallest of the boys, dressed as Lincoln in top hat and overcoat would read a proclamation ‘freeing us’. The adults would applaud and the children would dance. Suddenly, a boy dressed as a 19th century stage actor would appear and pretend to shoot the boy dressed as Lincoln in the back of the head. The crowd would fall into silence for precisely four-score and seven seconds. Then the adults would applaud and the children would dance, and we would all drink applejack.

I predict that in the future there will be only one holiday, a combination of all existing and all possible holidays. This day will be called “Holiday”, and on this day everyone will stay home from work and watch television.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Why Gender Matters"

My Claremont Review of Books essay on Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax is now online:

As founder of the national association for Single-Sex Public Education, Sax's favorite and perhaps most valuable theory is that co-educational schooling is frequently a mistake. He makes a strong case, especially concerning the years immediately following puberty. He cites the experience of two psychologists studying self-esteem in girls. They went to Belfast, where children can be assigned fairly randomly to coed or single-sex schools:

They found that at coed schools, you don't need to ask a dozen questions to predict the girl's self-esteem. You have to ask only one question: "Do you think you're pretty?"

Similarly, the Coleman Report found, four decades ago, that boys put more emphasis on sports and social success in coed schools, and less on intellectual development. Sax argues:

Here's the paradox: coed schools tend to reinforce gender stereotypes.… There is now very strong evidence that girls are more likely to take courses such as computer science and physics in girls-only schools…. Boys in single-sex schools are more than twice as likely to study art, music, foreign languages, and literature as boys of equal ability attending comparable coed schools.

Noting that the Department of Education projects that by 2011 there will be 140 women college graduates for every 100 men, he asks, "I'm all in favor of women's colleges, but…why are nominally coed schools looking more and more like all-women's colleges?" So far, the decline of male academic achievement in the U.S. is mostly among blacks and Hispanics, but the catastrophic downturn into "laddism" of young white males in England in recent years, and their consequent decline in test scores, shows that no race is permanently immune to the prejudice that school is for girls.

Of course, American schools have long been taught largely by women, and boys and schoolmarms have not always seen eye-to-eye. But the rise of feminism has encouraged female teachers to view their male students as overprivileged potential oppressors. Further, feminism justifies teachers' self-absorption with female feelings. Thus, a remarkable fraction of the novels my older son has been assigned to read in high school are about girls getting raped. I hope it hasn't permanently soured him on fiction. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My new VDARE.com column: Human Directionals

"Human Directionals: The Cheap Wage / Expensive Land Economy Personified:"

America's proud history as a middle class country rests fundamentally on two advantages of settling a mostly empty continent: a small supply of labor and a large supply of land. This meant relatively high wages and low land prices, so Americans could afford to buy their own farms and homes.

In turn, this virtuous cycle encouraged Americans to invent labor-saving technologies like the reaper, the washing machine, the assembly line, and the semiconductor.

Which made Americans even richer and more independent.

Sadly, mass immigration has created a wasteful abundance of cheap labor and contributed to a shortfall of cheap land.

In that harbinger of the American future, Southern California, once the Promised Land of the middle class, unskilled labor has become so plentiful that now a common weekend sight is people who are paid to stand on corners and try to catch your eye by randomly wiggling brightly colored directional arrows, typically pointing to real estate open houses.

It's the 21st Century equivalent of the Depression-era advertising practice of hiring unemployed men to walk around wearing sandwich board signs saying "Eat at Joe's."

And it's just as depressing.... [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Stem Cell Fraud: Do us Californians get our $3 billion back?

In 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed a successful initiative allotting $3 billion in California taxpayer's money to promote stem cell research. Your Lying Eyes has the latest:

Based solely on the fact that their boosters were seeking taxpayer funding rather than private investment, I had assumed that embryonic stem cells (ESC) were unlikely to provide any concrete benefits for years to come. But then this South Korean ends up accomplishing something that sounds like a real breakthrough and boy, was I wrong, I thought - they're at least 10 years ahead of schedule! Alas, it looks like I wasn't wrong after all, as it appears the "breakthrough" was a total fraud. I don't know what the funding arrangement was for the South Korean research, but the money to be made from research grants must be terribly tempting for a scientist to be willing to throw away his career by faking results. And with lots of people in the USA willing to "invest" billions of dollars of other people's money in ESC's, we should be glad there's an active coterie of pro-life extremists shouting "Stop!"

Arnold got $30 million for "Terminator 3," so all he has to do is make "Terminator 4" through "Terminator 103" and he can pay us taxpayers our $3 billion back.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Economics question

When you read American business history of the 19th and early 20th Century, one thing that immediately jumps out at you is that businessmen didn't behave in the constructive fashion you'd imagine from reading modern libertarian websites. Back in the good old days before the Supreme Court decided to enforce the anti-trust laws in 1911, businessmen hated competing. Their first priority was often to form a cartel to keep prices up and wages down.

My son and I were discussing why early 20th Century miners' strikes, especially in the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest, were so often ding-dong battles with extraordinary levels of violence on both sides.

Here are my guesses: First, in contrast to today, when mining is mostly a low excitement business concentrating on squeezing left over bits of valuable ore out of the vast amounts of worthless rock, in the early days of industrial-scale mining in the newly settled West, the big strikes offered enormous amounts of money to their owners, if they could avoid sharing much of the wealth with their workers. This meant the upside for winning a strike was huge, since the owners of a motherlode could afford to pay much more than the typical owner.

Second, a union's worst fear is competition from elsewhere. Either the owners will react to union demands for higher wages by moving the business somewhere else or other companies, perhaps in other countries, with lower wage structures will outcompete the unionized business. But a motherlode is more site specific than just about any other kind of business. Unlike a factory, you can't build another motherlode somewhere else.

Third, there's no other work in town besides the mines and supporting service businesses like saloons. So, wages aren't bid up by competition among factory owners. Mines were often in company towns where the mineowner monopolized all the retail outlets as well. Similarly, this makes mineowners more likely to form monopsonistic cartels to drive down wages.

Fourth, safety and working conditions are bigger issues in mines than just about anywhere else, giving miners a non-wage issue to organize around.

Fifth, miners are tough and brave. They have to be to go down in the ground. Plus, they had a lot of experience with high explosives, which made them formidable when push came to shove.

Sixth, going down in the ground together bonds miners like soldiers going into battle together, providing them with more solidarity and making them less likely to to sell each other out by scabbing.

Do these reasons make sense?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rep. Murtha was right about low IQ recruits

The 37-year Marine veteran said recently that the Army was taking 20% of its new recruits from below the 30th percentile on the military's IQ test, compared to only 1% from 1992 to 2003. The Baltimore Sun reports:

The Army exceeded by 256 its goal of 5,600 recruits for November, while the Army Reserve brought in 1,454 recruits, exceeding its target by 112. To do so, the Army accepted a "double-digit" percentage of recruits who scored between 16 and 30 out of a possible 99 on the military's aptitude test, said officials who requested anonymity.

I believe the "16 and 30 out of a possible 99" refers to percentile. We know that the October proportion of low scorers among recruits was 12%, so, presumably, "double-digit" means worse than that.

More amusingly, over at the popular liberal site Pandagon, the crowd's reaction to this news consists of the two things liberals love doing more than anything else (here and here)

1. Bragging about their high IQs and scorning low IQ people as "mouth-breathers."

2. Denouncing the entire concept of IQ.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Four Vikings Charged in Boat Incident"

"Four Vikings Charged in Boat Incident" -- No, it's not a headline from the Northumbrian Times of 860 A.D., but another incident in a big story from the NFL in 2005 that you won't hear elsewhere: the decline of the black quarterback. After years of sportswriters demanding more black quarterbacks, the mediocre performance of black quarterbacks this year, with only Byron Leftwich and Michael Vick having effective seasons, is not exactly Topic A to sportswriters.

Black quarterbacks, with their (on average) superior running ability, have added some valuable excitement to the league, but the current NFL game is dominated by passing. Here are the seven black quarterbacks' passer rating ranks so far this season (the passer rating synthesizes yards per attempt, completion percentage, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage):

12	Byron Leftwich	JAC
14	Donovan McNabb	PHI
16	Steve McNair	TEN
22	Michael Vick	ATL
25	Daunte Culpepper	MIN
26	Anthony Wright	BAL
28	Aaron Brooks	NO

Leftwich of Jacksonville has the highest passer rating among the seven main black quarterbacks, ranking #12 in the league. Vick is only the #22 passer, but he remains a dangerous runner, although not as spectacular as last season when he gained 902 yards with a 7.5 yards per carry average. Other than Vick, none of the black quarterbacks are running well enough to make up for their mediocre passing. The veteran McNair has done another admirable job coming back from injuries big and small. Brooks of New Orleans had his city wash away. Wright is just a stopgap. Seven quarterbacks for one season is too small a sample size to draw conclusions, but this year's performance does raise questions that aren't being addressed elsewhere.

Minnesota Viking Daunte Culpepper, who finished in the top 3 in passer efficiency the last two seasons, was indicted yesterday, along with three teammates, on disorderly conduct, indecent conduct and lewd or lascivious conduct for a cruise by 30 Vikings on Lake Minnetonka on which they invited along dozens of prostitutes. It didn't help their popularity that the Vikings were off to a 1-3 start and Culpepper was throwing bushels of interceptions. Culpepper is now out for the season with an injury. He currently ranks 25th in the league in overall passer rating. Culpepper's replacement, Brad Johnson, the epitome of the boring white journeyman quarterback, now ranks 9th in the league and the Vikings have won six in a row under him.

Meanwhile, Donovan McNabb of Philadelphia, who was the beneficiary of much praise from sportswriters two years ago when Rush Limbaugh quit his football commentary job after saying that McNabb was overrated because sportswriters had been calling for more black quarterbacks for so long, who is out for the season with an injury, after an adequate season as the #14 passer, has come under increasing criticism, in part for his poor play in last year's Super Bowl. Philadelphia's management suspended their superstar receiver Terrell Owens for criticizing McNabb. The much derided Owens, notorious for his showboating after touchdowns, performed heroically in Philadelphia's Super Bowl loss, garnering over 100 yards receiving despite playing on half-healed broken foot. McNabb, who apparently had been out partying the night before, ran one of the worst two minute drills in history, and was visibly woozy at one point when his teammates had to point him in the right direction.

Now, McNabb has been criticized by the owner of the local black newspaper, who also heads the local NAACP office, for not running the ball anymore. To which McNabb replied, "Obviously if it's someone else who is not African-American, it's racism. But when someone of the same race talks about you because you're selling out because you're not running the ball, it goes back to: What are we really talking about here?... I always thought the NAACP supported African Americans and didn't talk bad about them,"

Indeed, what are we talking about? The black columnist's criticism of McNabb was fairly off-base: It's rational for McNabb to stop running now that he is older and slower and more beat up. By not running last season, he had his best passing season, ranking #4 in the league after many years of mediocrity as a passer. Similarly, Steve McNair led the league in passing in 2003 by not running anymore. He's had only 138 yards rushing, whereas in 1997 he'd had 674. But, he was voted co-MVP in 2003 along with Peyton Manning.

It's not healthy for McNabb to play the race card, but it's a natural excuse for him after the Limbaugh brouhaha.

Overall, what we may be seeing is a natural evolution of the black quarterback fad that began about a half dozen years ago. Nothing in the NFL lasts forever. The defenses eventually always figure out how to adjust to a new offensive style, including running quarterbacks. There's probably no effective defense against an unbelievable runner like Vick, but for mortals, defensive coordinators can take steps.

One advantage of black quarterbacks has been that they can be fairly effective early in their careers before they've learned how to be an NFL quality passer because of their running ability is at its peak early. In contrast, consider a classic immobile white quarterback like Cincinnati's Carson Palmer, who won the Heisman at USC in 2002. He didn't play at all as a rookie in 2003, then started but was a detriment in 2004, but now, in his third season, is second in passing only to the great Peyton Manning. And that's fast development. San Diego's Drew Brees wasn't an asset until his fourth year, Brad Johnson not until his fifth season, Trent Green his sixth season. Leftwich, an immobile black quarterback, has had a similar progression, becoming an above average quarterback in his 3rd season.

In contrast, McNabb started six games as a rookie, and in his second season, even though he was a mediocre passer, was an effective quarterback because he ran for 629 yards.

But, what's not clear yet is how long they keep it up. NFL running backs take an extraordinary pounding, and their careers seldom make it to age 30. In contrast, QB Brad Johnson is 37.

For example, perhaps nobody in NFL history outright hurt the defense like Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers in his first three seasons, 1978-1980. Coach Bum Phillips's "offensive strategy," such as it was, consisted mostly of sending Earl slamming into the line, figuring that by the fourth quarter, the defensive linemen would be more bruised than Earl was. For three years, it worked, but after that, Campbell was never the same.

Turning quarterbacks into part time running backs may work out somewhat similar. Culpepper, for example, has had a lot of back problems.

On the bright side, little Doug Flutie is still getting a few snaps as Tom Brady's backup in New England at 43, and he ran for 476 yards at age 37, but most of his prime was spent in the Canadian Football League (where he was probably the greatest ever in CFL history), where tacklers aren't quite as fast and heavy. But Flutie is something special.

If you want running quarterbacks, and want them to have long careers, and, personally, I think they are more fun to watch, then you ought to think seriously about team weight limits, because that's the only way to cut down on the pounding players take. Restrict each team to an average of, say, 215 pounds per player on the field at any time.

Technically, it would be easy to enforce. Weigh all the players as they come out on the field, and then divide them into, say, 9 weight classes. The first digit of their jersey numbers would reflect their weight class: e.g, 10 to 19 would weigh below 170, etc. Then, the sum of the first digits of the players on the field could never exceed some number like 50.

Gregory Cochran suggests:

I'd just set a maximum total weight and let them choose the number and mix of players. That'd make for a hell of a game. I like the idea of 11 guys who weigh 300 pounds versus 33 guys who weigh 100 pounds.

One interesting side effect of the emergence of the black running quarterback is that white quarterbacks aren't allowed to run anymore. This season, only David Carr of Houston has more than 200 yards (290), and he mostly runs to save his life. In the past, white quarterbacks like the great Steve Young rushed for 454 yards and six touchdowns at age 37. (Of course, he had to retire from concussions the next year.) This appears to be another example of how integration leads to greater stereotyping by race.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer