Economist on Evolution

My New VDARE.com column:

The Economist On Evolution: Survival Of The Unfit To Print

By Steve Sailer

The centerpiece of The Economist magazine’s year-end double issue (Dec. 24, 2005 to Jan. 6, 2006) is a 12 page survey entitled "The story of man." The cover cartoon depicts human evolution from the knuckle-dragging ape to the apparent ultimate in human perfection—which the magazine's artist seems to conceive of as starlet Scarlett Johanson in a little black New Year's Eve party dress holding a champagne flute. (I can't say I disagree…)

But when he turns to race in his otherwise well-done essay, The Economist's science editor Geoffrey Carr can't keep his story straight even on the same page.

Thus at the bottom of p. 11 of the survey, Carr commends the theory of how the high average intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews might have evolved over just the last millennium, which was published in 2005 by Gregory Cochran (Carr compares him to Darwin!) and Henry Harpending.

Carr explains:

"Until a century or two ago, the Ashkenazim—the Jews of Europe—were often restricted by local laws to professions such as banking, which happened to require high intelligence. This is the sort of culturally created pressure that might drive one of Dr. [Terrence] Deacon's feedback loops for mental abilities … If Ashkenazi Jews need to be more intelligent than others, such genes will spread, even if they sometimes cause disease."

(Bear in mind that this theory hasn't been proven—Cochran and Harpending have proposed an empirical test for it, but it hasn't been carried out yet. Scientifically, though, it's at least possible for important traits like intelligence to evolve that fast, as the celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has recently acknowledged.)

Yet, earlier on the same page, Carr enunciates one of the sillier versions of the “Race Is Only Skin Deep” smokescreen that I've seen recently:

"… geneticists have failed to find anything in humans that would pass muster as geographical races in any other species….The only ‘racial’ difference that has a well-established function is skin color. … As to other physical differences, they may be the result of founder effects [i.e., caused by random variation among the handful of progenitors of a group] or possibly of sexual selection, which can sometimes pick up and amplify arbitrary features.”

It’s obviously contradictory for Carr to write both that

• During just 1,200 years, natural selection may well have brought about higher mean IQs among Jews than among their gentile neighbors in Central Europe.

• But during more than 50,000 years, natural selection probably didn't lead to any differences, other than in skin color, among races of different continents!

And it’s also simply not true, as John Goodrum's "Race FAQ" has exhaustively shown.

You would think that some editor would notice this glaring conflict and ask his writer to resolve it. But the topic of race routinely induces Brain Shutdown Mode even among smart journalists.
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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer