African DNA testing services

In the NYT, a story on the frustrations that African-Americans are experiencing with DNA ancestry testing services:

DNA Tests Find Branches but Few Roots

By RON NIXON

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., whose PBS special “African American Lives” explores the ancestry of famous African-Americans using DNA testing, has done more than anyone to help popularize such tests and companies that offer them. But recently this Harvard professor has become one of the industry’s critics.

Mr. Gates says his concerns date back to 2000, when a company told him his maternal ancestry could most likely be traced back to Egypt, probably to the Nubian ethnic group. Five years later, however, a test by a second company startled him. It concluded that his maternal ancestors were not Nubian or even African, but most likely European.

Why the completely different results? Mr. Gates said the first company never told him he had multiple genetic matches, most of them in Europe. “They told me what they thought I wanted to hear,” Mr. Gates said.

Telling Gates his ancestors haled from Nubia, on the upper Nile, was a particularly clever scam for the first company since Gates is about the color of a Nubian (thus obviating the need for Gates to have European ancestors), and Gates made a PBS documentary series called "Wonders of the African World," in which he took a camera crew around Africa looking for ancient ruins, and not finding all that many. In general, ancient Africans didn't seem to see much point in slaving in the hot sun to put up some big structure that tourists would someday be impressed with.

But Nubia has lots of cool looking pyramids, temples, and sculptures, complete with an undeciphered written language, at Jebel Barkal, Kush, and Meroe, and conquered Egypt and ruled as the 25th Egyptian Dynasty.

How exactly Gates' ancestors were supposed to get from Nubia (mostly in northern Sudan) to America wasn't explained, but that's all part of the romance of genealogy.

The article goes on to point out that customers' frustrations come not just from finding out that they had white ancestors, (especially in the direct male line, which Y-chromosome tests study), which reputable services warn about upfront, but also in pinning down just where in Africa their direct line male or female line (mitochondrial DNA test) ancestors came from.

From a genetic point of view, studying your direct male or female line ancestors (left or right edges of your family tree) is fairly pointless, since you only get from them, rather than from all your other ancestors, your small Y-chromosome or your mitochondrial DNA (which is separate from the rest of your genome). The main body of your DNA gets reshuffled with each new generation, so even if you are directly descended from Charlemagne or Mansa Musa, king of the gold-rich medieval Mali empire (who was such a big tipper that his famous 14th Century pilgrimage to Mecca lowered the world price of gold), you probably didn't get any useful but distinctive gene variants from the great man himself.

Still, traditional genealogy hobbyists tend to focus upon the direct male line down which surnames are descended (my father's family tree begins with "X Seiler, patriot from Lucern, c. 1290-c.1340") as a way to give focus to the teeming multitudes of ancestors, so there's nothing more or less silly about using DNA to focus on male or female direct line ancestors.

The second, more subtle problem customers find with African DNA analysis is that minor mutations among Africans aren't all that indicative, at least yet, of where any individuals direct male or female line ancestors came from.

Bert Ely, a geneticist at the University of South Carolina, was a co-founder of the African-American DNA Roots Project in 2000, hoping to use DNA tests as a way to find connections between African-Americans and ethnic groups in Africa.

“I originally thought that the mitochondrial DNA test might be a good way for African-Americans to trace their country of origin,” Mr. Ely said. “Now I’m coming to the opposite conclusion.”

Last October, he matched the DNA sequences of 170 African-Americans against those of 3,725 people living in Africa. He found that most African-Americans had genetic similarities to numerous ethnic groups in Africa, making it impossible to match African-Americans with a single ethnic group, as some companies assert they can do.

Mr. Ely also published a paper in which he tried to determine whether the country of origin of native Africans could be found by using mitochondrial DNA tests. Several of the Africans in the study matched multiple ethnic groups. For example, DNA results for a person from Ghana provided genetic matches with people in 20 African countries.

You are always hearing about how Africans are supposedly the most genetically diverse people on earth, but that's true mostly of the more-or-less nonfunctional genes that population geneticists focus upon because they don't want their genealogies messed up by convergent evolution.

What this statement is actually saying is that current sub-Saharan Africans' ancestors didn't go through an Out-of-Africa bottleneck because they've always been in Africa.

On the other hand, a huge fraction of the ancestry of current Africans stems from the "Bantu expansion" of agriculturalists out of the Cameroon-Nigeria region starting several thousand years ago, displacing hunter-gatherers such as Bushmen. When the Dutch arrived at Cape Town in 1652, the Bantu, whose crops weren't acclimated for Mediterranean climate and higher latitudes, hadn't yet reached the bottom of the continent. There are still lots of exotic groups within sub-Saharan Africa, such as Bushmen, tall Dinkas and small Pygmies, but most of the regions from which African-Americans came from are fairly homogeneously populated by farming descendants of the Bantu expansion. So, there hasn't been much time for many local mutations to emerge.

Moreover, there are relatively few physical barriers to movement within Africa, which ranks with Australia as the flattest continent, so Africans have continued to wander about. While some regions are dependent upon rivers for agriculture, such as the inland Niger delta, Africans were less tied down by specific water sources than Middle Easterners, who tended to settle around rivers such as the Nile, Euphrates, and Jordan, or around springs, as is common in the Holy Land. So, there has been a certain amount of movement over time -- the rains fail in one place, so a group moves somewhere else. Perhaps because of the high disease burden, Africa was traditionally less densely populated than Europe or Asia, so land availability was less of a factor in creating a Malthusian trap than in Europe or Asia. Thus, it was easier to move about in Africa because other groups were less jealous in guarding their land than, say, the Romans or Chinese were.

Finally, sub-Saharan Africans tended not to exert such tight control over their womenfolk's fertility as Middle Easterners did.

The upshot is that it will take a lot more work to make African DNA analysis satisfyingly accurate for customers.

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

Paging Drs. Lynn and Vanhanen!

A report from the World Bank entitled "Education Quality and Economic Growth" begins:

"Schooling has not delivered fully on its promise as the driver of economic success. Expanding school attainment, at the center of most development strategies, has not guaranteed better economic conditions. What’s been missing is attention to the quality of education—ensuring that students actually learn. There is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population, rather than mere school enrollment, are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. And the magnitude of the challenge is clear—international comparisons reveal even larger deficits in cognitive skills than in school enrollment and attainment in developing countries."

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

The summit of the nerd pyramid

A reader writes:

Take a look at the group photo here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/248891/

These people, the core Linux kernel hackers, are among the very best programmers in the world. It is an absolutely ruthless international meritocracy. These people have no common employer (there are nearly as many different employers as the group has members).

IBM and Microsoft have comparable talent on the payroll, of course. But I doubt that you could trust an IBM or Microsoft group photo to so ruthlessly expose the demographic shape of that talent.

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

More on the Race-IQ brouhaha

Here's Will Saletan's third and last article at Slate. He advocates genetic engineering to equalize the races. I've always been skeptical about whether we have the wisdom to handle such power, and have been pleased that it appears to be farther off than I had assumed back in the 1990s. As I wrote in VDARE.com in 2005:

Through genetic selection and modification, we will soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Noah Millman responds to Saletan in detail at American Scene in The Sound of a Dam Breaking, with comments from John Derbyshire and Will Wilkinson.

At Cato Unbound, social scientist Eric Turkheimer writes:

“When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.”

Which raises the question, if Eric Turkheimer were ever to discover anything that would support race science realism, he would do what with it, burn it? Couch it in such high-flown philosophical language that you wouldn’t be able to figure out what he meant? Publish it while vigorously disapprobating himself?

Hasn’t he just wrecked his credibility as an objective scientist? Shouldn’t he be ashamed of that, rather than proud of it?

Turkheimer goes on:

“Why Race Science is Objectionable

“If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups?”

My observation over the last couple of decades has been, going back to Gould's Mismeasure of Man and Kamin, Lewontin, and Rose's Not In our Genes, that while most of the talk is about the white-black IQ gap, among those who take the lead in demonizing realists, most of their angst, anger, and underlying agendas are actually driven by concerns that the masses will learn about the Jewish-gentile IQ gap, which would cause them to pick up their torches and pitchforks and stage pogroms across America.

It's the kind of triple bankshot reasoning that intellectuals take seriously -- If James Watson is not allowed to mention race and IQ, then the process of discovering that Jews tend to be smarter than gentiles can't get underway! -- not realizing that 90% of the people who have never heard of James Watson roughly understand the reality already (e.g., listen to what arrested mafioso and rap stars say about which kind of lawyer they want).

Of course, quite a few of those demonized, such as Richard J. Herrnstein of The Bell Curve, are Jewish, too.

I'm reminded on one of the dozen general lessons Jacques Barzun has learned from a lifetime of study:

"An age ... is unified by one or to pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide."

As Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine pointed out in The Jewish Century in 2004, much of Western intellectual life since, say, The Communist Manifesto in 1848 has been driven by the pressing needs felt by a successful but vulnerable high IQ minority, and by the often-clashing remedies their many thinkers have proposed: e.g., Marxism, Freudianism, Randism, Boasism, Frankfurtism, Neoconism, Friedmanism, etc.

And progress was made -- Milton Friedman's theories were good for the Jews and the human race as a whole, at least compared to Karl Marx's. The early neocons did a lot of good work in the domestic social science arena and in foreign policy.

But you can't understand the world around you without paying attention to group differences in IQ, since they drive so much of what we see.

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

"The Thing"

In Hollywood, when all is said and done, more is said than done, but, apparently, John Carpenter's classic 1982 horror film "The Thing" is being remade by Battlestar Galactica screenwriter Ronald D. Moore.

All the movie versions, including the 1951 rendition, are based on the great 1938 sci-fi story "Who Goes There?" Written by John W. Campbell at age 28, it was his last major piece of fiction. After that, he concentrated solely upon editing Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the key vehicle in launching the Golden Age of Hard Science Fiction. In the summer of 1939 alone, Campbell published the first stories of (among others) Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

"Who Goes There?" is the story of American scientists holed up for the winter in a research station in Antarctica. They find an ancient spaceship buried under the ice and dig up a frozen body, which (foolishly) they allow to thaw. The alien wakes up and begins to eat people.

Ho-hum, right? But the thing has a peculiar talent: after he eats somebody, he can split into two and change himself into that person, physically and even mentally. Paranoia, carnage, and more paranoia ensue. If the alien(s) eat everybody at the station, they'll then eat the first supply plane pilot in the spring and take over the human race. How can you tell who is man and who is monster?

This helped inspire Heinlein's Puppet Masters and the film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Campbell had written the same idea at least once before, in a light-hearted story called "The Brain Eaters of Mars," but "Who Goes There?" was clearly a climactic effort for Campbell.

The Wikipedia page on Campbell offers a wild biographical theory about the origin of this concept in Campbell's youth:

"His mother, Dorothy (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an identical twin who visited them often and who disliked young John. John was unable to tell them apart and was frequently coldly rebuffed by the person he took to be his mother. ^... As Sam Moskowitz has written about Campbell in his early critical study of science-fiction writers, "From the memories of his childhood he drew the most fearsome agony of the past: the doubts, the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering that the woman who looked so much like his mother was not who she seemed. Who goes there? Friend or foe?"^[9]"

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

An insanely good data source

In our discussion of how to measure school effectiveness, many people had commented that it would be nice to have IQ scores for students as well as their achievement test scores.

I had forgotten that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running the National Longitudinal Study of Youth since 1979, and it's still going on, now into a second generation of children of women in the first study, so there is a nationally representative sample of thousands of people for whom we know both their IQs and their mom's IQs, along with a huge amount of detail about their lives and the lives of their mothers. As I wrote in VDARE.com last year:

In 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics established a nationally representative sample of about 13,000 young people born from 1957 to 1964. In 1980, the military paid to have the entire sample take its enlistment IQ test, the Armed Forces Qualification Test. In 1990, the NLSY methodically checked up on how they were doing in life. The military provided the data to Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein and it wound up as the centerpiece in the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve.

The NLSY is still going on. It has now even measured the IQs of 6209 children of women in the original panel—2557 of whom were born to black female panelists.

The social scientists keep interviewing the children born to the first generation participants, children who now range in age from new-borns into thirty-somethings, every two years. They typically had their IQs measured twice, first as pre-schoolers, then as 4th or 5th graders. Up through age 14, they were given a school achievement test called the Peabody Individual Achievement Test, and a lot of characteristics were collected about the schools they attended, such as (I believe) phonics versus whole word reading instruction. Here's the official write-up on what info has been collected on the children.

The sample sizes could be large enough to explore the major issue of how good a job California has been doing fostering achievement among public school students compared to the rest of the country.

The data is free and available to the public from here (except for the children's zip codes, which are only available to non-creepy types).

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

The Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World

Esquire has a nifty feature on the Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World, including my favorite, the Giant Libyan Fist Crushing the U.S. Fighter Plane.

And then there's the statue of the late dictator of the Congo, Laurent Kabila, one Big Man who wasn't ashamed to look big.

But, how did they overlook North Korea's Hotel of Doom?

This Pyongyang beauty is 1083-feet-tall, 105 stories, 3000 rooms, and unfinished because it's structurally unsafe.

The North Koreans have removed it from all maps because its failure has brought shame upon the nation, but it still casts its vast, malevolent shadow over much of the low-lying capital.

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

More from Audacious Epigone on how well schools are doing

Is this the best ranking yet available of how the states differ in how good a job their public schools are doing?

Rank	State	Whites' relative NAEP improvement from 4th grade to 8th (St.Dev.)
1.	Montana	.93
2.	North Dakota	.84
3.	Maryland	.71
4.	Oregon	.67
5.	Idaho	.57
6.	Dept. of Defense	.55
7.	Texas	.54
8.	Massachusetts	.53
9.	South Dakota	.50
10.	Kentucky	.50
11.	Tennessee	.49
12.	Maine	.49
13.	Vermont	.45
14.	Nebraska	.38
15.	Kansas	.35
16.	Arizona	.34
17.	Alaska	.34
18.	Ohio	.33
19.	Pennsylvania	.26
20.	Oklahoma	.24
21.	Colorado	.21
22.	Nevada	.19
23.	New Mexico	.13
24.	Wisconsin	.09
25.	Alabama	.08
26.	Georgia	.08
27.	Washington	.07
28.	Minnesota	.04
29.	Utah	.04
30.	Indiana	.03
31.	Missouri	.02
32.	Iowa	(.02)
33.	New Jersey	(.06)
34.	Wyoming	(.07)
35.	Arkansas	(.11)
36.	Rhode Island	(.17)
37.	Virginia	(.21)
38.	Delaware	(.29)
39.	Illinois	(.33)
40.	Mississippi	(.36)
41.	South Carolina	(.40)
42.	California	(.45)
43.	New Hampshire	(.56)
44.	Florida	(.73)
45.	Hawaii	(.75)
46.	Louisiana	(.81)
47.	New York	(.89)
48.	West Virginia	(1.10)
49.	North Carolina	(1.18)
50.	Michigan	(1.18)
51.	Connecticut	(1.33)

Over the years, I've been frustrated by how everybody uses the absolute test scores of students to evaluate how good a job a school is doing: "You'll get a great education at Harvard because the average SAT score there is 1500!" Yes, but that's what they got in high school before Harvard got its mitts on them. In truth, nobody has much of an idea whether Harvard is doing a better or worse job than, say, Cal State Dominguez Hills at helping its students live up to their individual potential.

Similarly, I often hear people assume that the principal at, say, Beverly Hills H.S. is doing a good job because test scores are high there, while the principal at say, Compton Dominguez must be doing badly because scores are low. That's quite unfair.

Absolute test scores for public schools are so dominated by demographics that the results are notoriously boring and depressing.

The state of California attempts to deal with this problem by giving two Academic Performance Index scores to each public school, one absolute and one relative to "similar schools."

But I've always wanted to look at how much "value added" schools provide.

Earlier, Audacious Epigone tried to figure out from the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math test results how much value different state educational systems are adding. He compared, across states, performance by 4th graders in 2003 vs. performance by 8th graders in 2007 on the NAEP.

That's a pretty clean comparison (for example, if one state has had a policy of discouraging Special Ed kids from taking the NAEP and another doesn't it, the differences shouldn't affect the relative change over time, unlike the usual absolute comparisons).

But what if there is a big demographic shift going on, such as in states with a dramatic Hispanic influx? That would distort the numbers.

So now, in the table above, he's looking at just the change in performance from 4th to 8th grade among non-Hispanic white students in order to reduce the impact of demographic change and make for even more of an apples to apples comparison.

(This analysis could also be done for blacks and for Hispanics, but not for all 50 states because of inadequate sample sizes of minorities in, say, Montana or Vermont.)

The results are quite striking. In the best state, Montana's white students did almost a standard deviation better as 8th graders in 2007 than they (using the term "they" roughly) did as 4th graders in 2003 relative to the rest of the country. In contrast, in the worst state, Connecticut's white students' change from 4th to 8th grade was one and a third standard deviations worse than the national average, relatively speaking.

That's more than a two standard deviation difference between #1 and #50. These are such large differences that I'm hesitant to present the numbers, but maybe somebody out there can help us check them out.

Clearly, there is some demographic change from 4th grade in 2003 to 8th grade in 2007 still showing up in the data. Perhaps the top white students in Connecticut (last on the list) are more likely than in typical states to leave the public schools for elite prep schools starting in 7th grade? (Maybe not -- most of the boarding schools in that state famous for boarding schools are 9-12).

In general, the states at the top of the list tend to be less demographically diverse than those at the bottom, although there are obvious exceptions, such as West Virginia doing quite badly.

Still, the sample sizes are impressively large: 196,000 for public school 4th graders (across all races) and 164,000 for 8th graders or around 5-6% of all students in those two grades. So the typical state is represented by roughly 2,000 white 4th graders and 2,000 white 8th graders. So, there are probably close to 1,000 whites in each grade at minimum for just about every state. (D.C., though, is excluded because there are so few whites in its public school system.) The two superstates, California and Texas, have extra-large samples of at least 10,000 students of all races in each 4th grade sample, so the number of whites there are adequate, yet they differ by about a standard deviation.

Part of the results are no doubt methodological noise. Some states might have switched to more upscale schools where the test is administered rom 2003 to 2007 to make themselves look better. Or, for example,the NAEPs are administered during a window from January to March, so if a state gave its 4th graders the test in March in 2003 and its 8th graders the test in January in 2007, it would be cheating itself of two months of maturation vs. the national norm.

On the other hand, there would be one obvious way to cheat: give a bad education from K-3 to depress 4th grade scores, then start to do your best to teach kids a lot once they take the NAEP in 4th grade so you can score high on the 8th grade test.

Still, it's unlikely that anybody has tried to game this particular analysis simply because I don't think anybody has ever thought of this analysis before.

Just looking at the table, I don't see any obvious demographic pattern explaining why, for example, Vermont would be in 13th place a standard deviation ahead of New Hampshire in 43rd place. Or why are Maryland's whites (3rd place) two standard deviations ahead of Connecticut's whites (50th place)? Both have affluent, moderately liberal, well-educated white populations. Perhaps we really are approaching the Holy Grail of a measure of educational effectiveness?

Normally, when I look at a table of data, I can figure out what's driving the rankings. Here, though, I can't. That could be good news - I really don't know much of anything about pubic school quality across the country apart from demographics (other than a vague impression from the media that Texas is better than California), so the fact that the results look pretty random could mean that we are looking at actual differences in public school effectiveness. The bad news is that the results could also look random because they are pretty random due to lots of different kinds of noise.

Any suggestions you might have for torture testing the data would be appreciated.

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

Bravo for William Saletan in Slate

William Saletan's defense of James Watson in MSM Slate (owned by the Washington Post) is turning out to be a three parter and he's not holding back. Today, he looks at the environmentalist attacks on hereditarian ideas and concludes:

"When I look at all the data, studies, and arguments, I see a prima facie case for partial genetic influence. I don't see conclusive evidence either way in the adoption studies. I don't see closure of the racial IQ gap to single digits. And I see too much data that can't be reconciled with the surge or explained by current environmental theories. I hope the surge surprises me. But in case it doesn't, I want to start thinking about how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic difference, even between races. More on that tomorrow." [More]

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

Asimov's Revenge on O'Connell

Here's my new VDARE.com column.

It follows up on California school superintendent Jack O'Connell's attack on Mean White Lady schoolteacher that Nanette Asimov broke in the San Francisco Chronicle a week ago. By the way, although I titled my blog's extract from her article "Beyond Parody," that shouldn't be taken as criticism of her story, which is a model of giving a bloviating politician enough rope to hang himself.

Here's an excerpt from my new column:

Earlier, Nanette Asimov reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell's initiative to close the racial achievement gap:

"He offered the example of black children who learn at church that it's good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous. But doing the same thing at school, where 72 percent of teachers are white and may be unfamiliar with such customs, will get them in trouble, he said.

"The achievement gap is 'absolutely, positively not genetic,' O'Connell said.’All kids can learn. I'm saying it's racial.'"

In other words, he is blaming the gap in part on white racist schoolteachers enforcing too much discipline in California's public schools.

O'Connell's statement caused a controversy, leading him to apologize … not to white schoolteachers, of course (there wasn't any media tumult over that), but to black churches.

After the conference, O'Connell kept up his attack on white teachers, telling the Los Angeles Times:

"O'Connell concurred, talking of 'a cultural bias that impedes instruction. Well-meaning, well-educated people can unintentionally be part of perpetuating institutional racism.' The nation's schooling system, he said, 'developed to educate white children and remains most advantageous to white children.'"

… Finally, O'Connell's implication that too much classroom discipline is holding NAM students down is just barking mad.

For example, Asimov (yes, she's the niece of science fiction great Isaac Asimov) pointedly reported in the SF Chronicle on the only session out of the 125 at O'Connell's conference where real high school students were asked what would help them:

"'If the room is quiet, I can work better—but it's not gonna happen,' said Nyrysha Belion, a 16-year-old junior at Mather Youth Academy in Sacramento County, a school for students referred for problems ranging from truancy to probation.

"She was answering a question posed by a moderator: 'What works best for you at school to help you succeed?'

"Simple, elusive quiet.

"Nyrysha said if she wants to hear her teacher, she has to move away from the other students.’Half our teachers don't like to talk because no one listens.'"

After five years of Jack O'Connell as head educrat, California nearly hit rock bottom on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. California students' reading scores are horrible, with the state ranking 48th out of 50 states in 4th grade reading and 49th in 8th grade reading.

But the performance of California, home to Silicon Valley, in that universal language, mathematics, may be even more disturbing: 47th in 4th grade math, 46th in 8th grade math.

California's dim future is mostly not O'Connell's fault. The primary culprit is "demographic change"—i.e., immigration.

I suspect that the Superintendent is babbling insane nonsense because he's terrified of blurting out what he suspects is the real reason for the gap…and finding himself Watsoned out of his precious political career.

But, unfortunately, as Richard Weaver pointed out long ago, ideas have consequences …no matter how stupid the ideas are. O'Connell's ridiculous rationalizations have taken on bureaucratic momentum. He hired Glenn Singleton, a black professional diversicrat, as his racial sensitivity consultant and wants to subject white public school teachers to Singleton's system of Maoist-style self-criticism sessions (Singleton calls them "Courageous Conversations") about "white privilege."

The last thing California public schools need is for O'Connell and Singleton to wage a Cultural Revolution from above against school discipline. That would tell NAM students, in effect, to play the race card even more than they do now when they get in trouble. [MORE]

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

A Watson Defender

More than a little too late, but, still, good for William Saletan, the "Human Nature" columnist for Slate, for gearing up his courage to become one of the few James Watson defenders:

Created Equal

Race, genes, and intelligence.

From: William Saletan
Subject: Liberal creationism
Posted Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007, at 7:57 AM ET

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

-- Declaration of Independence

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced nto retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."

I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating "supposedly superior intellects," "eliminating the weak," "paralyzing the hope of reform," jeopardizing "the doctrine of brotherhood," and undermining "the sympathetic activities of a civilized society."

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals. [More]

As G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1922 in Eugenics and Other Evils:

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal.

Also, good for Saletan for showing some sympathy for William Jennings Bryan.

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

Who your relatives are matters

Henry Louis Gates writes in the NYT:

"I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

"Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah’s great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi. (He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)"

Of course, he needs a control group of unsuccessful African-Americans to see if they are significantly less likely to be descended from black property owners (not to mention white property owners, who often tended to be the original source of wealth for their mulatto offspring who disproportionately made up the African-American middle class), but I would hardly be surprised that black people who make something of themselves today tend to be descended from black people who made something of themselves in the past. Similarly, economic historian Gregory Clark found that today's English tend to be descended from successful landowning farmers of the past, rather than from the propertyless poor who worked for them.

In summary, a lesson I've often pointed out is that we aren't self-made Ayn Rand heroes. Who your relatives are matters.

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

"In the government yard in Trenchtown"

It's odd how certain lines from songs stick in the heads of lots of people. One of the stranger famous lines is from Bob Marley's 1975 hit "No Woman, No Cry," especially in its amblingly monumental live version:

I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown

Trenchtown is a slum neighborhood in Kingston, Jamaica whose most distinctive feature was an open sewer trench. The government yard was a public housing project where Marley lived.

This doesn't sound like promising raw materials for a tourist attraction, but the second line is so ineffably memorable that, sure enough, Jamaicans are trying to make the government yard in Trenchtown into a museum. Apparently, tourists have been getting off planes for years and telling cab drivers they want to sit in the government yard in Trenchtown. The BBC reports:

"The public housing project where reggae legend Bob Marley lived is being re-envisioned as a historic site and tourist area. But high crime in the depressed neighborhood poses a challenge to dreams of a tourist-friendly shrine to Marley."

I can see how this could be a problem because the crime rate in Kingston scared the hell out of The Clash when they visited 30 years ago. As Joe Strummer recalled of their trip to Jamaica in "Safe European Home:"

I went to the place
Where every white face
Is an invitation to robbery
An’ sitting here in my safe European home
I don’t wanna go back there again

Didn't Bob have, like, a favorite beach or waterfall he liked to visit, maybe bring his guitar along and work on his songs? Tourists like beaches and waterfalls a lot more than they like housing projects. I'm just trying to be helpful here ...

The funny thing about the line's fame is that there's not a lot of catchy melody going on when Bob sings, "In the government yard in Trenchtown." I suspect the use of common English words to make up slightly puzzling phrases helped make it popular. But, clearly, the wistful, elegiac organ part behind the verses plays a huge role.

Now, where have I had heard the organ line in "No Woman, No Cry" more or less before? I certainly have negligible musical skills, but it's surely reminiscent of (without being exactly the same as) Procol Harum's famous bluesy organ part from their 1967 hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Procol Harum's organ line was inspired by J.S. Bach's "Air on a G String" and another Bach piece. (Here's a technical discussion of the Bach-Procol relationship, and here's the scene in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing about how Bach, "that cheeky beggar," stole "A Whiter Shade of Pale.")

Marley's organ part is quite similar to Procol's, and adds a catchy descending resolution at the end, set to the words "No woman, no cry," that wraps it up nicely. (By the way, here's a quantitative description of why the live version of "No Woman, No Cry" is so much more popular than the trite studio version on Natty Dread -- it's slowed down from 99 beats per minute on the studio album to 78 beats per minute on the live album. This MeanSpeed site has calculated the beats-per-minute of 15,000 pop songs, and has developed some elaborate theories about how different speeds fit different emotions.)

So, I was pleased to find out that Procol Harum has noticed this too and uses this when they tour on the Baby Boom nostalgia circuit:

"When they did Whiter Shade ... Gary feinted with a couple of false starts, going once into No Woman, No Cry and once into When a Man Loves a Woman before doing the full three-verse version ('Said I'm home on shore leave...')."

Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman" came out the year before and has a similar chord structure to AWSoP.

Although there was a long court fight among members of Procol Harum over whether the Bach-inspired organ part was original enough to merit a share of the songwriting credit (and thus the royalties), it would be tacky to sue the Marley estate for a share of "No Woman, No Cry" because Marley registered the song he wrote as being written by a friend named V. Ford who runs a soup kitchen -- so "No Woman, No Cry" is the charitable donation that keeps on giving.

I've always liked to see bands mashup songs by different artists that share elements in common, such as a backbeat or chord structure.

Even more fun is when musician and singer aren't in cahoots but can still follow each other. The best DJ in LA is Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist, a shambling, amiable old bloke who knows everybody in the music business. Despite all the made-up nonsense about how the (pre-Sid) Sex Pistols couldn't play their instruments (kind of like how "Seinfeld," the most intricately plotted sitcom in American TV history, is always described as a "a show about nothing"), Jones was a well-paid session guitarist for many years after the Sex Pistols broke up in 1978. So, Jonesy, who has been on the wagon for twelve years, does his two hour show each day on 103.1 FM with his acoustic guitar in his lap. It's fascinating listening to somebody who talks like an old duffer, yet whose music intelligence remains so sharp.

Last spring, his guest was Mika, a Beirut-born English pop singer with operatic training. So, Jonesy started by playing on his guitar Mika's latest hit for his guest to sing, then segueing into songs by Mika's influences, such as Freddie Mercury (an English Parsi gay) and George Michael (an English Greek/Jewish gay), then into songs that influenced Mika's influences, such as going from George Michael and Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" to Martha and the Vandella's Motown "Heat Wave." Mika valiantly followed Jonesy' lead, scat-singing when he couldn't remember the lyrics, turning ten minutes of live music into a seminar on a half century of one thread of pop history.

The Jonesy's Jukebox show is such a success that it seems very strange that I can't recall ever hearing before a rock DJ who plays guitar live on the air.

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

My high school football article is finally out

Here's the beginning of my essay on high school football. The whole thing appears in the 12/03/2007 issue of The American Conservative:

Each year roughly 1,200,000 boys play and 100,000 men coach high school football. It's one of those social phenomena that are so big that nobody thinks much about it. Yet, prep football -- by uneasily combining the norms of the middle of the last century, which seemed in the 1940s to be the Century of the Common Man, and of our own Century of the Superstar, in which many watch but only a chosen few perform -- offers a window into America's past and future.

The new age of elitist high school football was epitomized by the nationally televised game played September 15 between USA Today's #2-ranked squad, the well-drilled Dragons from exurban Southlake Carroll, winner of three straight Texas championships, and the star-packed #1-ranked Bulls of inner city Miami Northwestern, the 2006 Florida titleholders.

And yet, this type of made-for-television exhibition remains more the state-of-the-art exception to the conservative rule that, at least compared to basketball, high school football hasn't changed culturally all that much since Paul Brown was coaching the Massillon, Ohio Tigers to glory in the 1930s. For instance, close to 20,000 fans showed up November 2 for the 73rd meeting of Garfield and Roosevelt, two all-Latino high schools in East Los Angeles that seldom send players to college programs. This "East L.A. Classic" remains one of the countless local football rivalries that thrive despite the homogenizing dominance of the national media.

High school football continues to be a repository of many of the authority-respecting and communal virtues of the WWII-winning Greatest Generation. On the high school football field, America's old struggle between nurture and nature -- between the faith that winners can be molded out of the common folk versus the ever-spreading sneaking suspicion that success is mostly in the genes and in private tutoring -- can still battle it out on relatively equal terms.

Foreigners have long been astounded by the extravagant number of players on American football teams and by the expensive armor in which they are encased. And yet, because only the most carefully rehearsed teamwork can prevent chaos on the gridiron, their numbers and anonymity have helped retard the growth of superstaritis in football.

In contrast, basketball, with its fewer and more recognizable players, can be dominated by one or two stars freelancing. Successful coaches increasingly emphasize recruiting genetic anomalies over training normal kids. For instance, USC basketball coach Tim Floyd recently promised full scholarships to two eighth graders!

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

"No Country for Old Men"

Here's an excerpt from my review of the new action movie, which appears in the 12/3/07 American Conservative:

Developing video games is consuming more and more of today's creative talent, with little benefit to show for it in the broader culture. Traditional art forms such as poetry, music, and painting tended to inspire each other forward in a virtuous cycle, but video gaming, a mostly solitary vice, has been a cultural black hole. Game-inspired films, for instance, have largely failed, because watching a movie star frenetically shoot bad guys is missing the point of playing, which is to shoot them yourself.

Finally, Joel and Ethan Coen ("Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski"), the most gifted of the many brother-act frauteurs making films today, have figured out how to bring the pleasures of a problem-solving first person shooter game to the movie theatre. Strangely enough, they've done it in their first literary adaptation, a faithful rendition of "No Country for Old Men," the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, an acclaimed master of American prose.

Despite the 74-year-old McCarthy's august reputation, his book is a surprisingly high-energy art-pulp Western. It's essentially a chase featuring two highly competent antagonists: a West Texas good old boy (who, while antelope hunting, finds $2 million among the bullet-riddled bodies of Mexican drug-runners) tracked by a relentless killer hired to retrieve the money. ...

The Coen Brothers have discovered that the paradoxical key to making a video game movie is to slow down the action, allowing the viewer to think along with the hero and villain. Not since the sniper scene that makes up the second half of Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam film "Full Metal Jacket" has a movie played fairer with the audience in detailing the physical puzzles confronting the characters. How, for example, could you best hide two cubic feet of $100 bills in your motel room? And how could your enemy find such well-concealed money?

I know I've seen a well-crafted film when I walk out of the theatre yet still feel like I'm living in the movie. Leaving the amnesia thriller "Memento," for example, I was convinced I'd never remember where I'd parked my car. With "No Country," this post-movie spell lasted longer than I can ever recall. Even the next night, every car that passed me on a quiet street seemed an eerie, sinister harbinger of sudden violence.

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

New paper on the speeding up of human evolution coming

There will be a milestone scientific paper out soon on PNAS summarizing evidence that human evolution has been -- in contrast to the conventional wisdom -- speeding up over the last 50,000 years. It also offers a simple "Why-didn't-I-think-of-that?" theoretical reason why that would be likely. It's co-authored by a Murderers' Row of big names: Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, John Hawks, Robert Moyzis, and Eric Wang.

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

Craptocracy: C. Van Carter covers the election

I often feel amiss because, unlike all the other bloggers, I'm having trouble getting interested in any of the countless Presidential candidates, other than Obama (who at least has a felicitous prose style). Fortunately, C. Van Carter, author of the unique Across Difficult Country blog, is meeting all your electioneering news needs with his blog Craptocracy. A sample:

Amusingly named journalist Foon Rhee reports Mitt Romney has received the endorsement of fellow cultists The Osmond family. What took them so long?

At a campaign stop at Google headquarters in Silicon Valley Sen. Barack Hussein Obama compared his “metoric rise” to that of Google’s. What could Barry possibly mean by that? Does he really think Google got to where it is today by being black? Maybe he does.

Signs of John McCain’s mental decline were evident at a campaign event in South Carolina after an American patriot asked John McCain “How do we beat the bitch?". Instead of correctly answering 'with a stick,' the doddering Senator incoherently replied:

"That's an excellent question," he added. "I respect Senator Clinton. I respect anyone who gets the nomination of the Democratic Party."

Later McCain further reminded voters he’s a tired old man by recycling a tired old joke from the 1990’s about CNN standing for the “Clinton news network”.

In Charleston, South Carolina Fred Thompson awoke from a nap mumbling something about wanting “a "million-member" ground force that includes 775,000 in the Army and 225,000 Marines,” but fell back asleep before explaining why. In unrelated news, Canada's oil reserves are now second only to Saudi Arabia.

Hillary Clinton arrived in Las Vegas for a Democratic debate. Despite the proximity of the Vegas Strip, the boring former first lady said she was too busy to do any gambling, drinking, or dancing, and would instead spend most of her time in her hotel room prepping for the debate and having lesbian sex.

Rudi Guliani is also in Las Vegas. At a brief appearance he criticized the Democratic candidates for having “impractical ideas” then headed out for dinner with some friends.

Exactly as experts warned, Senator Hillary Clinton is using her outward resemblance to a woman to deflect legitmate criticism (or "playing the gender card", as all the original thinkers in the mainstream media describe it).

DC is buzzing like a great big buzzy bee with high murder rate and a Washington monument about a major sex-scandal involving one of the Presidential candidates. There is some speculation the scandal involves a lesbian affair between Hillary Clinton and her aide, the suspected Saudi Arabian intelligence asset Huma Abedin. (Some theories are even stranger.)

People love little Denny Kucinich and his wife, at least until they find out he's running for president.

More from Craptocracy here.

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

This is just pathetic

The LA Times reports on the latest Bush Administration's waste of time: building a "nice" fence on the Border that won't actually do the job:

A fence without offense
Strong but not lethal, effective but not ugly: The U.S. is looking for a barrier along the border with Mexico that will say 'keep out' -- nicely.

By Richard Marosi

... "They want to make it seem like you could shake hands through the fence," said Peter Andreas, a political science professor at Brown University who studies border security issues.

If you can shake hands through it, you can pass drugs through it.

Whether the new fencing meets aesthetic standards remains an open question. Except for a five-mile stretch of steel-plate barriers outside San Luis, most of the new fencing is made of mesh or steel tubing.

The new structures are taller and more imposing than the landing-mat fencing. But then much of the new fencing has gone up in rural areas.

"There are very few people that can see the new fence, which may be why we're not getting reports of people not liking it," said Jeremy Schappell, a Border Patrol agent who works in the San Luis area.

One of the Fence Lab barriers that agents seem to like best so far is a double-mesh barrier made of thick welded wires in a tight honeycomb-like design. The tiny holes between the wires make climbing difficult. Axes and crow bars are useless because the layers give under pressure. Blow torches get through, but it takes more than 15 noisy minutes to cut both layers.

Still, this summer a similarly constructed double-mesh fence went up along seven miles of border in Naco, Ariz., and within days Mexican smugglers had found a way to defeat it. By inserting screwdrivers into the holes to use as handholds, they are able to scale the fence as if it's a pegboard.

"They get over in about 15 seconds," said John Ladd, 52, whose 14,000-acre ranch abutting the border is trampled daily by migrants.

Look, keeping criminals out really isn't that complicated. There's this 19th Century invention that was put up in 1914 in Europe and kept the German, French, and British armies out of each other's lines until 1918. You might have heard of it: it's called barb wire. You intertwine coils of razor wire with stronger steel elements and concrete structures, backed up with quick response, and ... it works. The Israeli fence has been keeping out suicide bombers for years, and they are a lot more motivated than coyotes.

Jeez, if the Bushies would come visit the Mexican neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley, they'd see that the Mexican homeowners are themselves putting up deadly fences topped with lethal finials designed to impale any other Mexican who tries to climb into their yard. C'mon, folks, Mexicans understand that the purpose of a fence is to keep people out, and they don't need it sugarcoated. If you've ever been to Latin America, you'll bring back memories of all the walls around yards with broken bottles embedded in the cement along the top. Latinos aren't into friendly-looking security partitions. They're into fences that say: This will inflict life-threatening pain upon anybody stupid enough to try to climb over into our property.

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