George Clooney vs. Steve Sailer in NBC's "Roguish Charm Smackdown"

I was on the NBC Nightly News for 15 seconds tonight, right after George Clooney. With the benefit of that kind of one-on-one comparison, I'll be waiting for leading man offers to pour in from Hollywood producers. Clooney's getting raves for growing a beard and adding 30 pounds to play his role in "Syriana," but, hey, I did both of those things years before he did...

Update: The reviews are in!

"Dad, that was horrible!"

My younger son

Theoretically, you can watch the Clooney v. Sailer Charisma Contest by going to this link here (then click on "Hollywood Takes a Serious Turn") -- but not on Firefox, and I haven't been able to get it to work on Internet Explorer yet either. Presumably, too many millions of websurfers are flooding the NBC servers with requests to see it.

I am told, "You need Internet Explorer 6.0, Flash, and Windows Media Player 10. It takes about 2 minutes to load, then you see a commercial, then the segment with you in it comes on."

Nothing seems more sensible than endlessly fiddling with your computer in order to watch TV on it.

A reader writes:

If it makes you feel any better, your website picture makes you appear older than the TV does. (As a matter of fact...is that website picture you???)

Yes, the picture above shows how I looked six years ago. I guess those monkey gland injections I've been taking are working as advertised!

The thesis of the segment was, according to NBC's website:

"An influx of highly acclaimed movies with serious themes [i.e., leftist politics] is translating into a new brand of big box office hit."

But that's the first I heard that was what they were claiming. On Friday, they wouldn't tell me that was what they were going to say. They just referred to the theme as "topical movies" or "issue movies" or "political movies." If they'd come out and told me what their argument was, I would have said: "'A new brand of big box office hit'? Are you nuts? Movies with 'serious themes' always come out in the 4th quarter each year so they can be remembered at awards time, when movie industry insiders love to congratulate each other on their social consciences. Some of them even sell a lot of tickets. But 2005 was a lousy year for Hollywood at the box office and 'issue movies' sure didn't make it any better."

Indeed, an amusing confirmation of this was that during our 20 minute discussion on tape, the interviewer requested a couple of times that I not mention any of these movies he'd brought up as examples of this "trend," such as "North Country" or "Syriana," by name because, according to him, only a tiny fraction of the TV audience had actually seen them. That of course made my point that Hollywood is missing out on big profits by being out of touch with half the country, because each of these films were seen by only a small fraction of the number of people who paid $370 million domestically to see "The Passion of the Christ," which the Hollywood studios refused to touch.

So, I kept talking about why Hollywood is not having hits, but that wasn't why they wanted me on. Instead, they wanted "balance" by having a benighted conservative say that it was wrong for Hollywood to have hits making smart serious movies about the burning issues of the day.

Let's look at the numbers. So far, the top 17 box office movies of 2005 consisted of 12 children's movies, 4 sex comedies, and 1 Adam Sandler remake of a Burt Reynold's movie. The first serious film for grown-ups on that list at #18 is the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line" with $99 million. The highest ranking "issue movie" was "The Interpreter" at #32 with $73 million.

Okay, but what about now? Aren't a lot of these late 2005 issue movies cleaning up during awards season, so the ultimate list for the year's movies will look a lot different.

Nope. Every "serious film" except "Brokeback Mountain" is already just about dead in the water at the box office. Here are the estimated Top 10 for Friday, January 20th, a few days after the Golden Globes were telecast:

1	UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION	$10,500,000
2	GLORY ROAD	$2,550,000
3	LAST HOLIDAY	$2,350,000
4	BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN	$2,160,000
5	HOODWINKED	$2,100,000
6	FUN WITH DICK AND JANE	$1,720,000
7	END OF THE SPEAR	$1,450,000
8	THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA	$1,400,000
9	HOSTEL	$1,350,000
10	THE NEW WORLD	$1,200,000

Friday figures are generally about 30% of the weekend total, so the only hit of this weekend in mid-January is a horror sequel so awful it wasn't screened for critics. Nothing else is likely to make even $10 million this weekend. On this top ten list, only "Brokeback" and "The New World" were positioned as Oscar contending serious movies.

By the way, Sunday night on VDARE, I'm writing about "The New World" versus the real Captain John Smith (hint: he was lot more interesting than Colin Farrell!)

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

British surname profiler

Here's a new website that's an informative timekiller: Just type in a British surname and it will show you on a map of Britain where that name is most often found, both in 1998 and in 1881.

The 1881 maps are probably of more interest, since names are less geographically dispersed by the vagaries of modern life. For instance, most Shakespeares in 1881 were found quite close to Stratford upon Avon.

Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes was surprised to find that all the men named Sykes in Britain appeared to be his relatives (excepting adoptees and cuckoo's eggs). In other words, back in the late medieval times when surnames were adopted, only one man (or one set of brothers or cousins) in England chose "Sykes." The 1881 map showed that almost all the Sykes in Britain lived with a fairly narrow radius of one sport in north-central England, thus supporting this genetic inference that all the Sykes go back to one man.

And here's the Hamrick surname map for American states. The state with the highest proportion of Sailers is North Dakota.

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

New York Times catches up with iSteve.com

Nicholas Wade finally runs with the genetic story I covered last year in my blog posting "Every Man a King!"

Listen more kindly to the New York Irishmen who assure you that the blood of early Irish kings flows in their veins. At least 2 percent of the time, they are telling the truth, according to a new genetic survey.

The survey not only bolsters the bragging rights of some Irishmen claiming a proud heritage but also provides evidence of the existence of Niall of the Nine Hostages, an Irish high king of the fifth century A.D. regarded by some historians as more legend than real.

The survey shows that 20 percent of men in northwestern Ireland carry a distinctive genetic signature on their Y chromosomes, possibly inherited from Niall, who was said to have had numerous sons, or some other leader in a position to have had many descendants.

About one in 50 New Yorkers of European origin - including men with names like O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn - carry the genetic signature linked with Niall and northwestern Ireland, writes Daniel Bradley, the geneticist who conducted the survey with colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin.

Of course, the vast profusion of kings within ancient Ireland necessarily meant that their kingdoms tended to be not much bigger than Yertle the Turtle's:

"All mine!" Yertle cried. "Oh, the things I now rule!
I'm the king of a cow! And I'm the king of a mule!
I'm the king of a house! And, what's more, beyond that
I'm the king of a blueberry bush and a cat!
I'm Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me!
For I am the ruler of all that I see!"

Paul Johnson wrote in his Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day:

The English presence in Ireland arose from the failure of Irish society to develop the institution of monarchy. The Irish, of course, had kingship; too much of it indeed. The chief kings were those who held the Meath and Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Ulster; but between the fifth and twelfth centuries, with a population that never exceeded 500,000, Ireland had about 150 kings at any given date, each ruling over a tuath or tribal kingdom. A chanson de geste describing the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century says: "In Ireland there were as many kings as counts elsewhere."

So, that's about 3,000 followers per king.

My recollection of visiting England, then Ireland was that it seemed pretty obvious why the English kicked the Irish around for so long: England looked like a very nice place to farm, while the Irish countryside was full of rocks. So it's hardly surprising that there were more Englishmen than Irishmen and they had more energy left over to go overseas looking for trouble.

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

Iran Question

Back during the eight years from 1997-2005 when Iran had a relatively moderate, non-frothing-at-the-mouth President, the neocons constantly assured us that he was just a figurehead and had no real power. Now that the Iranians have elected a mouth-frother as President. the neocons are telling us that the new President has absolute life-or-death power and will no doubt plunge the world into nuclear war on his whim.

For example, here's Niall Ferguson's "future history" article in the Telegraph: " The origins of the Great War of 2007:"

A seminal moment was the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intemperate attack on Israel in December 2005, when he called the Holocaust a 'myth'. The state of Israel was a 'disgraceful blot', he had previously declared, to be wiped 'off the map'. Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives...

The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.

Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.

So, which is it with the Iranian presidency: powerless figurehead or absolute autocrat?

By the way, you'll note that Ferguson can't bring himself to explain who starts this "devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007" even though it's his own scenario! Presumably, the only conceivable storyline he could come up with that sounded at all believable is is that Israel nukes Iran, then Iran takes its one or two working bombs and somehow slips them through Israel's defenses to nuke Tel Aviv, after which Israel takes its 100 or more remaining nukes and flattens most of Iran. Although this has a certain grim plausibility -- after all, Israel fired first in four of its five wars (although it had various kinds of justification) -- he won't admit in print that that's what he's talking about.

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

Andrew Sullivan's new slogan

Andrew's blog has been taken in-house by Time Magazine. It now features a much more readable black on white look, and he has added a new slogan to his site:

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell

I wonder where he got the idea for that?

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

A Martin Luther King Day thought

The AP reports:

New Orleans Mayor: God Wants City To Be Mostly Black

NEW ORLEANS -- The mayor of New Orleans is predicting that his city will once again be "a majority African-American city."

In a Martin Luther King Day speech to a crowd at City Hall, Mayor Ray Nagin said, "It's the way God wants it to be." He said you can't have New Orleans any other way.

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

The Chinese and Gambling

From the LA Times:

Gambling Seen as No-Win Situation for Some Asians
Community leaders and social workers are putting pressure on casinos and legislators to help those who may be addicted face their problem.

By John M. Glionna, Times Staff Writer

A 1999 poll in San Francisco's Chinatown, commissioned by a social services agency, found that 70% of 1,808 respondents ranked gambling as their community's No. 1 problem. In a follow-up poll, 21% of respondents considered themselves pathological gamblers and 16% more called themselves problem gamblers — rates significantly higher than in the overall population.

Current data suggest that 1.6% of Americans can be classified as pathological gamblers, a condition recognized as a psychiatric disorder. About 3% more are considered problem gamblers...

"Asians are a huge market," said Wendy Waldorf, a spokeswoman for the Cache Creek Casino north of San Francisco. "We cater to them."

Each day in San Gabriel, Monterey Park and San Francisco's Chinatown, scores of buses collect Asian customers for free junkets to Indian casinos and to Reno and Las Vegas.

Many Nevada casinos also maintain business offices in Monterey Park, where hosts keep in regular touch with Asian high rollers. To reach more run-of-the-mill gamblers, casinos run ads in Asian-language print and broadcast media and conduct direct-mailing campaigns to ZIP Codes with high numbers of Asian residents.

Most gambling venues celebrate Asian holidays, hire bilingual staffers and feature the latest nightclub acts from Shanghai, Seoul and Manila.

Cache Creek Casino has a tank featuring a popular 2-foot-long dragon fish named Mr. Lucky. Dragon fish are considered good fortune by many Chinese gamblers, who often rub the tank for luck...

Many Chinese are fascinated by the mystical qualities of luck, fate and chance. The Chinese New Year — this year Jan. 29 — is a time of heightened wagering, when bad luck of the old year is ushered out by the good luck of the new.

Numerology also plays a crucial role in many Asian cultures. The number 8, for example, is considered extremely lucky by many Chinese, while 4, when spoken in Mandarin and Cantonese, sounds like the word for death and is avoided.

Though Chinese believe most strongly in such concepts, other Asian cultures, including Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino, hold similar beliefs — depending on China's political influence in their history or the extent of Chinese immigration there.

A friend of mine hosted a poorly-rated horse racing TV talk show from Santa Anita, near Pasadena. Nobody in LA ever said to him, "Hey, you're that horse-racing guy on TV." But when he'd go to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Hong Kong millionaires would stop him and tell him they watched his show on satellite TV every week.

I vaguely suspect that not having much of an advanced religion inclines the Chinese toward often channeling their religious impulses toward the manipulation of luck. Every religion has some of that tendency toward magic, but ones with a more advanced theology are more likely to rise above a conception of religion as primarily a technology for the control of luck.

It's also interesting to consider the possible connections between Chinese numerology and strong Chinese math skills.

By the way, I've been wondering why I find casino gambling so boring and depressing. I think it has to do with the fact that gambling machines are invented precisely to produce random results, so there's almost no hope for me to use my pattern recognition skills to figure out overlooked secrets of it works. It works to produce random results, not patterns. Judging from the Google Ads for lucky amulets and the like that this posting elicited, I suspect many gamblers imagine that they are on the verge of uncovering underlying patterns, which helps make gambling so interesting to them. Well, the money helps too.

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

Dogs can sniff cancer

The NYT reports:

In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs - three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs - to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy. Skip to next paragraph Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80's that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue.

Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency.

The near-perfection in the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, "is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing."

As a result, he and other cancer experts say they are skeptical, but intrigued.

I don't have an opinion on the validity of this particular claim, but a more general point is why the emphasis merely on training dogs? Why not also breed the most trainable dogs to create a cancer-sniffing breed? These dogs could be useful in third world settings where conventional tests are too expensive, or they could be used for quick and dirty screenings of large numbers of people. The dog world is transfixed by the assumption that a breed has to be homogenous in appearance, but that should be secondary to selectively breeding a higher degree of accuracy.

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

"Isonomy"

I'd never heard this word before, but it means "equality of legal rights." A reader replies to my new VDARE article "It's the End of the World As We Know It" by raising this important issue:

What I want to know is, why are so many defenders of the prevailing dogma so invested in condemning dissenters, even going so far as to imply or actually accuse dissenters of hoping to use the facts as they interpret them to reverse the just social doctrine of isonomy, equality of every one unto the law? Do they honestly believe isonomy is impossible or a mockery if any innate differences among people are proved? Is their own putative devotion to isonomy that weak, shallow & dependent?

Good questions. I take a crack at explaining what liberals and neoconservatives are really thinking in the upcoming February 13 issue of The American Conservative [subscribe here].

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

"Glory Road"

My review of the basketball movie will be in the Feb. 13, 2006 issue of The American Conservative [subscribe here]. Here's a brief excerpt:

At least since 1967's Best Picture-winning "In the Heat of the Night," in which Rod Steiger's bigoted Southern sheriff and Sidney Poitier's angry Northern detective reluctantly team up to solve a murder, movies aimed at guy audiences have often astutely promoted racial harmony not as an end in itself, but as the most efficient way for real men to work together for important manly goals. A canonical illustration is the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced 2000 hit "Remember the Titans," in which the black and white football players at a tense newly integrated Virginia high school in 1971 learn to play as a team to win the big game.

Bruckheimer's new basketball movie "Glory Road" purports to be similar. Yet, this quasi-true story of the 1966 Texas Western (now UT at El Paso) Miners, the first squad to win the NCAA championship game with an all-black starting line-up, actually exemplifies more unsettling historical trends: the beginning of the de facto re-segregation of basketball and of the triumph of recruiting over coaching, of nature over nurture.

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

Did Sir Francis Galton invent pachinko?

In the Galton biography I'm reading, I've reached the famous lecture in 1877 where Galton introduced the concepts of regression and correlation. To illustrate to the crowd the normal probability distribution, which had been discovered much earlier by Gauss, Galton, who was as much an inventor as anything else, introduced the quincunx or Galton Board, which was pretty much what we'd think of as a pachinko game -- you pour steel balls into the top of rows of pegs and watch them wind up in buckets at the bottom in roughly a bell-shaped curve. Here's a simulation of Galton's quincunx.

The modern Japanese pachinko game, which has been a huge pastime in Japan for a half century was apparently introduced in Nagoya after WWII, but it's easy to imagine the original idea came from Galton. Of course, the man who turned it into a gambling game was the real business genius.

Also, I've always wondered if there is a connection between the Japanese bell curve game obsession and their more general interest in statistics, as exemplified by their fervent adoption of Edward Deming's statistical quality control philosophy.

Finally, it's encouraging to note that Galton introduced regression analysis, one of the great leaps forward in the history of human analytical capability, at the relatively advanced aged of 55. We've become so used to hearing about how only young men have big new ideas that Galton's productivity as a middle-aged man is striking.

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

Starbucks & IQ

A reader writes:

On the other end of the employment spectrum, I think Starbucks winds up with, for a fast-food-type job, a relatively intelligent bunch. I suspect this is based on the ability to parse drink orders quickly and accurately. Being able to hold "iced decaf caramel latte with soy milk and two raw sugars" in your head long enough to write it on the cup looks like a moderately g-loaded task, and it's central to working there. And my personal observation (as a coffee addict) is that most Starbuck employees come off as reasonably bright and competent. Much more so than, say, the employees at the local grocery stores or fast food restaurants.

I don't know if this is good or bad, long term. I and people I know go to Starbucks or Borders a lot more often than we go to bars or fast food restaurants. I can imagine this being just one more area where smarter people just stop rubbing elbows with anyone with an IQ lower than 100, and thus forget about their existence.

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

"What questions have disappeared?"

Geoffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist who wrote The Mating Mind responded to Edge.org's 2001 question of the year this way:

Geoffrey Miller "Three Victorian questions about potential sexual partners: 'Are they from a good family?'; 'What are their accomplishments?'; 'Was their money and status acquired ethically?' "

To our "Sex and the City" generation, these three questions sound shamefully Victorian and bourgeois. Yet they were not unique to 19th century England: they obsessed the families of eligible young men and women in every agricultural and industrial civilization. Only with our socially-atomized, late-capitalist society have these questions become tasteless, if not taboo. Worried parents ask them only in the privacy of their own consciences, in the sleepless nights before a son or daughter's ill-considered marriage.

The "good family" question always concerned genetic inheritance as much as financial inheritance. Since humans evolved in bands of closely-related kin, we probably evolved an intuitive appreciation of the genetics relevant to mate choice--taking into account the heritable strengths and weakness that we could observe in each potential mate's relatives, as well as their own qualities. Recent findings in medical genetics and behavior genetics demonstrate the wisdom of taking a keen interest in such relatives: one can tell a lot about a young person's likely future personality, achievements, beliefs, parenting style, and mental and physical health by observing their parents, siblings, uncles, and aunts. Yet the current American anti-genetic ideology demands that we ignore such cues of genetic quality--God forbid anyone should accuse us of eugenics.

Consider the possible reactions a woman might have to hearing that a potential husband was beaten as a child by parents who were alcoholic, aggressive religious fundamentalists. Twin and adoption studies show that alcoholism, aggressiveness, and religiosity are moderately heritable, so such a man is likely to become a rather unpleasant father.

By the way, have you ever noticed how the use of the word "religiosity" is a dead give away of anti-religious bias? It's as much of a tell-tale sign of bias as "piety" is in the opposite direction.

Yet our therapy cures-all culture says the woman should offer only non-judgmental sympathy to the man, ignoring the inner warning bells that may be going off about his family and thus his genes. Arguably, our culture alienates women and men from their own genetic intuitions, and thereby puts their children at risk.

The question "What are their accomplishments?" refers not to career success, but to the constellation of hobbies, interests, and skills that would have adorned most educated young people in previous centuries. Things like playing pianos, painting portraits, singing hymns, riding horses, and planning dinner parties. Such accomplishments have been lost through time pressures, squeezed out between the hyper-competitive domain of school and work, and the narcissistic domain of leisure and entertainment. It is rare to find a young person who does anything in the evening that requires practice (as opposed to study or work)--anything that builds skills and self-esteem, anything that creates a satisfying, productive "flow" state, anything that can be displayed with pride in public. Parental hot-housing of young children is not the same: after the child's resentment builds throughout the French and ballet lessons, the budding skills are abandoned with the rebelliousness of puberty--or continued perfunctorily only because they will look good on college applications.

The result is a cohort of young people whose only possible source of self-esteem is the school/work domain--an increasingly winner-take-all contest where only the brightest and most motivated feel good about themselves. (And we wonder why suicidal depression among adolescents has doubled in one generation.) This situation is convenient for corporate recruiting--it channels human instincts for self-display and status into an extremely narrow range of economically productive activities.

Yet it denies young people the breadth of skills that would make their own lives more fulfilling, and their potential lovers more impressed. Their identities grow one-dimensionally, shooting straight up towards career success without branching out into the variegated skill sets which could soak up the sunlight of respect from flirtations and friendships, and which could offer shelter, and alternative directions for growth, should the central shoot snap.

The question "Was their money and status acquired ethically?" sounds even quainter, but its loss is even more insidious. As the maximization of share-holder value guides every decision in contemporary business, individual moral principles are exiled to the leisure realm. They can be manifest only in the Greenpeace membership that reduces one's guilt about working for Starbucks or Nike. Just as hip young consumers justify the purchase of immorally manufactured products as "ironic" consumption, they justify working for immoral businesses as "ironic" careerism. They aren't "really" working in an ad agency that handles the Phillip Morris account for China; they're just interning for the experience, or they're really an aspiring screen-writer or dot-com entrepreneur. The explosion in part-time, underpaid, high-turnover service industry jobs encourages this sort of amoral, ironic detachment on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. At the upper end, most executives assume that shareholder value trumps their own personal values. And in the middle, managers dare not raise issues of corporate ethics for fear of being down-sized.

The dating scene is complicit in this corporate amorality. The idea that Carrie Bradshaw or Ally McBeal would stop seeing a guy just because he works for an unethical company doesn't even compute. The only relevant morality is personal--whether he is kind, honest, and faithful to them. Who cares about the effect his company is having on the Phillipino girls working for his sub-contractors? "Sisterhood" is so Seventies. Conversely, men who question the ethics of a woman's career choice risk sounding sexist: how dare he ask her to handicap herself with a conscience, when her gender is already enough of a handicap in getting past the glass ceiling?

In place of these biologically, psychologically, ethically grounded questions, marketers encourage young people to ask questions only about each other's branded identities. Armani or J. Crew clothes? Stanford or U.C.L.A. degree? Democrat or Republican? Prefer "The Matrix" or "You've Got Mail'? Eminem or Sophie B. Hawkins? Been to Ibiza or Cool Britannia? Taking Prozac or Wellbutrin for the depression? Any taste that doesn't lead to a purchase, any skill that doesn't require equipment, any belief that doesn't lead to supporting a non-profit group with an aggressive P.R. department, doesn't make any sense in current mating market. We are supposed to consume our way into an identity, and into our most intimate relationships.

But after all the shopping is done, we have to face, for the rest of our lives, the answers that the Victorians sought: what genetic propensities, fulfilling skills, and moral values do our sexual partners have? We might not have bothered to ask, but our children will find out sooner or later.

GEOFFREY MILLER is an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and at U.C.L.A [Now at the u. of New Mexico.] His first book was The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.

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