Race Differences in Behavior

Rushton Vindicated: Intelligent People Learn to Walk Later, Just as He Predicted

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For those who are fascinated by what is sometimes called “Based Science” — science which fearlessly examines the empirical evidence no matter how “controversial” the findings might be — a breakthrough took place recently: “Rushton’s Paradox” was solved at last, using genomic data. To those who are not initiated, this may sound rather abstruse and academic, but it is massively important: It is a breakthrough.

The theory of one of the most “controversial” scientists ever to live has finally been proven correct: At the individual level, intelligence — the ability to solve cognitive problems — is associated with a slow Life History Strategy, i.e., developing more slowly because you are evolved to a more difficult and highly specific environment, in which you need a long “learning period” — a long childhood — to be taught how to navigate. The implications of this are enormous, but, before we explore them, let’s have a look at the broader theory.

Even though he’s been dead for 12 years, there are few social scientists more loathed by the Woke than J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012). As I have discussed in my biography of him, J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective, the Canadian government tried to prosecute this British-born Canadian when, back in 1989, he presented his Differential-K model of racial differences at a conference. This model placed Blacks at one end of a spectrum and East Asians at the other, with Whites intermediate in terms of intelligence, psychopathic personality, age at puberty, interest in promiscuous sex over investment and nurture, and much else, but closer to East Asians.

In the resulting furore, students invaded Rushton’s department at the University of Western Ontario and scrawled “Racist Pig Lives Here” on his office door, the premier of Ontario declared that Rushton’s views were “morally offensive” to how people of his state think, newspaper cartoons portrayed Rushton in Ku Klux Klan robes, his lectures were invaded by protestors, his faculty dean tried to wreck his career with a politically-motivated “unsatisfactory” rating and he required a security escort while on campus. Even so, there was no legal case against him and, in 1995, he doubled-down, publishing Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective which set out his theory in depth.

According to Rushton, an r-strategy develops in an unstable yet easy environment. In such a situation, you could be wiped out at any moment, so you evolve to “live fast and die young.” You invest all your energy in mating—in order to have as many offspring as possible with as many partners as possible in the hope that some will survive. You invest very little energy in nurture, because such energy could easily go to waste. Any individual child could be killed at any moment.

This r-strategy is reflected in every aspect of your “life history”—you’re born younger (less developed), you reach developmental milestones younger, you go through puberty younger, lose your virginity younger, you age more quickly, you go through the menopause younger and you die younger. You also advertise your genetic quality as conspicuously as you can—as the end is always nigh—leading to large sexual characteristics, strong body odor, and so on. Rushton presented some of these data in Race, Evolution and Behavior and I added to them in my biography of him.

As the environment becomes more stable and also harsher, the carrying capacity for the species is reached. So, its members start competing more against each other to survive, moving towards a K-strategy. In such a harsh but predictable context, if you invest all your energy in mating then you may find that all of your offspring die. Hence, you have fewer offspring and fewer sexual partners but you invest more in them; you “nurture” them. There develops an arms-race where the species becomes increasingly adapted to the (predictable) ecology.

It does this by learning about the ecology and learning how to cooperate (bonding) and thus becoming higher in altruism, empathy and impulse control — and, perhaps most importantly, by becoming more intelligent. The result is that the offspring can learn about the environment and how to cooperate—and “life history speed” begins to slow down. Parents invest more energy in nurture of a (smaller number of) offspring and less energy in mating. They go for “quality over quantity.” With limited bio-energetic resources, secondary sexual characteristics also become smaller.

As they become more K-strategy, in a stable environment where they can trust that tomorrow will come, litters become smaller, offspring are born later, they develop more slowly, they go through puberty later (learning a great deal in their long childhood), they lose their virginity later, they age more slowly and, for genetic reasons, they die older, giving them more time to pass on their genes. Rushton showed that what he called the “three Big Races” occupy different positions on the r-K spectrum. Northeast Asians are the most K-evolved, Caucasians (a combination of Europeans, South Asians, Arabs and North Africans) are intermediate and Blacks are the most r-evolved.

Rushton’s Paradox was always that evidence could not be found that intelligence correlated with Life History Speed at the individual level, even though it did at the group level. This was so puzzling — and such a problem for the cleanness of Rushton’s model, that he may even have falsified data or otherwise manipulated his results to prove that such a relationship did exist, as I explored in J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective.

I also note there that, as appears to be the case with many genius or semi-genius (highly original) scientists, Rushton’s life evidenced a combination of a very high intelligence and fast Life History traits such as sub-clinical psychopathology [see F. Post, Creativity and Psychopathology: A Study of 291 World Famous Men, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1994]. This meant he didn’t care about offending people (which new ideas always do, as they challenge vested interests), and he was low in rule-following (so could think the unthinkable). Consistent with this, he was divorced three times, had extra-marital affairs, knocked his third wife about, had an illegitimate child by a relationship with a Black woman, dropped out of school and got a girl of about 15, and possibly younger, pregnant.

But if Rushton did falsify data, he needn’t have done so. A new study has proved him correct. The preprint “Genome-wide association meta-analysis of age at onset of walking” by Anna Gui and colleagues has presented a meta-analysis of age at onset of walking, using data on 70,560 European infants. It looked at the relationship between age of onset of walking and alleles that are associated, via very high educational attainment, with intelligence. It found that the age at which you start walking is positively correlated with polygenic scores for intelligence: Kids who are eventually more intelligent learn to walk later; their childhood is longer.

And as if Rushton — with his penchant for “controversy” — laughing from beyond the grave, even this has stirred things up. Researcher Emil Kirkegaard has noted that this new study was originally tweeted out by a mainstream academic. He then deleted the tweet stating: “Unfortunately, it has attracted many racist responses that abused the study to make ugly, racist claims.” There were no racist claims, but it did vindicate Rushton’s theory.

It also adds credence to an idea I have been toying with for quite a while. Why is it that, in advanced societies, intelligent people desire fewer children and why are they less religious than the less intelligent?

One possibility is that these are in-built instincts that are induced in our “evolutionary match” of high mortality salience and the desire to have children. As I explored in my book Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, we’ve been surrounded by high child mortality for most of our history. This is our “evolutionary match”: We desired many children because it was quite probably that many would die before adulthood. You would expect the more intelligent to be lower in “instinct” because solving problems involves rising above instinctive reactions and calmly and logically reasoning. It would follow that intelligent people would be more environmentally sensitive; they would be K-strategists, needing to be put on the correct road-map of life to adapt to a specific niche. If this didn’t happen — if they were in a mismatch — they’d become maladaptive, such as by not desiring children. So, the new finding is in line with this theory.

There may have been much to dislike about Rushton personally, but this is part of why he was a highly original thinker. With this new research, his grand theory has been vindicated.

 

Recent Research on Race Realism

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Race and Evolution: The Causes and Consequences of Race Differences
Stephen K. Sanderson
Self-published, 2022

Stephen Sanderson is the author, coauthor, or editor of sixteen books in twenty-two editions and some seventy-five articles in journals, edited collections, and handbooks. He is a retired professor of sociology and is quite unusual within his discipline for applying evolutionary principles to the study of society. His latest offering, dedicated to J. Phillippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, combines a useful summary of the best in recent research and theory regarding human racial differences (seven chapters) with applications to such topics as the history of slavery, liberal stereotype theory, social stratification by color, the history of human accomplishment, the rise of Northeast Asia, and the decline of Africa (six chapters); a final chapter discusses policy options. Being an American, the author devotes special attention to Whites and Blacks, but includes information on other races wherever helpful.

Sanderson begins his book with several epigraphs that indicate his awareness that he is stepping into a very politically incorrect minefield. These two are well worth pondering in the present context where woke ideology—an ideology based on moral judgments and equitable outcomes rather than science and facts—reigns supreme in universities, the media, and corporate culture:

A good society is one that permits a maximum amount of objective pursuit of truth and beauty, and this pursuit should be undertaken “irrespective of the consequences.” Such inquiry may lead to the discovery of “inconvenient facts,” but it must be undertaken nonetheless. We cannot know in advance whether the knowledge we create or discover will support or contradict certain moral positions already held. And “philosophies incongruent with the pursuit of a reduction in misery should be permitted since the basis of rationality is strengthened through argument,” and “all opinions, however obnoxious or however passionately held, [should] be heard and subjected to the test of rational criticism.” Barrington Moore, Jr.

Political thinking, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters. George Orwell

The first section of the book, entitled “Foundations of Race Realism,” will be well-trodden ground for regular readers of The Occidental Observer, so I shall be brief. The first chapter defends the biological reality of races by providing a point-by-point refutation of two high-profile formal statements of social constructivism, one issued by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1998 and the other by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in 1999. The author explains what is wrong with “Lewontin’s fallacy,” i.e., the inference of the unreality of race from the fact of greater genetic variation within than between racial groups. He quotes some older texts to show that the concept of race was not invented by eighteenth century European colonialists, as the AAA and many antiracists maintain. A good example of the lengths to which some people will go to deny reality is the AAPA’s declaration that “human traits known to be biologically adaptive do not occur with greater frequency in one population than in others.” Sanderson marvels that this is “obviously false and a rather astonishing statement for a biological anthropologist to make,” giving a few simple examples. The chapter closes with an account of how cluster analysis of population genetic data can reliably identify “four to six major racial groups.”

Chapter Two explains the inadequacy of non-biological explanations for differences in racial outcomes, including discrimination, the lingering effects of slavery, and systemic racism. The best of these theories focuses on the higher rates of fatherless households among Blacks than Whites, but the explanation for this difference lies ultimately in racial biology after all.

Chapter Three summarizes evidence for genetically based racial differences in average intelligences. American psychometric data showing an average White IQ of about 100 and an average Black IQ of 85 has now accumulated for over a hundred years. In the course of childhood, the degree to which environment can explain such differences steadily declines, disappearing entirely by around age fourteen. Most damning for the social constructivist position, however, is that Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) now make it possible to identify specific genes that contribute to intelligence, meaning that intelligence can be reliably (albeit not perfectly) predicted from biological data alone. One particularly telling statistic Sanderson cites is the correlation between the average IQ of the nations of the world and the percentage of their population that is Black: –.808.

Many Black-White socioeconomic gaps disappear once IQ is controlled for, but one difference that does not is out-of-wedlock births. In his fourth chapter, Sanderson explains race differences in sex, reproduction and family patterns, summarizing Rushton’s evidence for high mating effort/low nurturance among Blacks and low mating effort/high nurturance among Northeast Asians, with Whites intermediate. He demonstrates that fatherless homes are common in Africa and among Blacks worldwide, not something unique to post-World War II America.

Chapter Five discusses race differences in personality and temperament. In the American context, the most important are that Blacks have significantly higher levels of antisocial personality as well as higher time preference than Whites (i.e., Blacks are more likely to place less value on returns receivable or costs payable in the future and hence more likely to accept immediate rewards rather than wait for larger returns at a later date and more likely to take out disadvantageous long-term loans with immediate up-front payouts). Confusingly, the author systematically switches the terms “high” and “low” time preference; one hopes this mistake can soon be corrected through the print-on-demand system.

Chapter Six explains racial differences in law-abidingness, including violent crime, civil disorder (mob violence), and political corruption. Such differences are in large part a consequence of differences in intelligence and time-preference.

Chapter Seven outlines the historical development of racial differences following the migration of early humans out of Africa and into colder climates where getting through the winter required planning ahead. There is also a discussion of Life History Theory and the r-K continuum (basically the continuum from high mating effort/low nurturance to low mating effort/high nurturance).

The six chapters which make up Part 2 of Race and Evolution apply the race realist perspective to particular issues. Chapter Eight provides a brief history of New World slavery, including regional comparisons, arguing it was fundamentally an economic rather than a racial institution: “Europeans did not choose Africans as slaves because they considered them biologically inferior, but because Africa provided a huge supply of labor that could be transported to the New World more cheaply than slaves drawn from, say, India or China.”

Chapter Nine discusses racial stratification around the world, showing that Blacks have the lowest average socio-economic status in multiracial societies everywhere. The author explains that the phenomenon of “pigmentocracy”—where increasingly light skin is found the higher one goes up the socio-economic scale—results from a hierarchy of ability: “Lighter skinned people are regarded more highly because they are more talented.”

Ever since psychologist Gordon Alport published The Nature of Prejudice in 1954, “stereotypes” have been a staple of social constructivist discourse, the assumption being that they are unreliable. But this has never been demonstrated. In Chapter Ten, Sanderson summarizes the findings of a series of studies published since 2012 by social psychologist Lee Jussim and colleagues. They found a high positive correlation between racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes and empirical reality. For instance, in one study comparing stereotypes with US Census data, correlations ranged from .27 (already moderately significant) to .96, with a mean as high as .83. Jussim et al. write that “stereotype accuracy correlations are among the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology.” This is no doubt because, over human evolutionary history, accurate knowledge of behavior patterns of social groups within one’s environment must have had considerable survival value, and thus been favored by natural selection.

Chapter Eleven demonstrates that the bulk of scientific discovery and other advances in human knowledge have been the work of European and European-descended men. Northeast Asians may have somewhat higher average intelligence, but they tend to produce highly conformist cultures where copying from accepted “masters” is inculcated and originality is frowned upon. Africa, of course, has produced nothing notable in scientific discovery.

Chapter Twelve discusses the recent rapid economic development of Northeast Asia and the dominance of Southeast Asian economies by the overseas Chinese.

Chapter thirteen contrasts this with the catastrophic fate of sub-Saharan Africa since decolonization and demonstrates the inadequacy of anti-colonial theories to explain it. The late Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey has described the typical African post-colonial regime as a “vampire state.” Sanderson summarizes:

A vampire state is one run by crooks and gangsters who come to power either through rigged elections or coups d’état. Their leaders are functional illiterates who debauch all major government institutions: civil service, military, judiciary and banking system. They transform their countries into personal fiefdoms for the benefit of themselves, their cronies and tribesmen.

The author offers a brief tour of the continent filled with collapsing public services, universal corruption and bribery, civil wars, cannibalism, torture, a five hextillion percent rate of inflation (in Zimbabwe a few years ago) and outright genocide (in Rwanda). As he explains:

Before colonialism Africans had indigenous political institutions that were much simpler and more easily used to maintain order than those established by the colonists. The new colonial institutions were not natural to Africans and proved beyond their ability to manage effectively. Indeed, it took Europeans thousands of years to develop such institutions, . . . so it is no wonder that Africans did not understand them.

To this must be added that many who succeed in the ruthless world of African power politics have extremely antisocial personalities and are not really interested in economic development or the general welfare. They concentrate their efforts on enriching themselves at the expense of the countries they govern, displaying “a massive failure to adhere to social norms, no regard for truth, a lack of remorse or feelings of guilt, extreme aggressiveness, impulsiveness and recklessness, and an unusually weak moral sense.”

The final chapter of Race and Evolution is devoted to policy, explaining the failure of racial preferences, the lack of any evidence for the alleged benefits of “diversity,” and the many powerful objections to slavery reparations. Sanderson agrees with law professor Amy Wax’s position that “outsiders’ power to change existing [dysfunctional Black family] patterns is severely limited; the future of Black America is now in its own hands.” Yet he notes that the choices Blacks have to make are constrained by their own biological nature. Some Blacks do make good choices and prosper as a result, but these are generally those with above-average intelligence and an absence of antisocial character traits. Many others are unlikely ever to make better choices than they are making now.

Sanderson agrees that America needs a “national conversation on race,” as advocated, e.g., by Bill Clinton and Howard Schultz (the CEO of Starbucks), but unlike them he understands that it will do no good as long as knowledgeable race realists are banned from participation. As Arthur Jensen and J. Phillippe Rushton have written:

There is a need to educate the public about the true nature of individual and group differences, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Ultimately, the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be overrepresented and others groups underrepresented in various socially valued outcomes. The view that one segment of the population is largely to blame for the problems of another segment can be harmful to racial harmony. Equating group disparities in success with racism on the part of the more successful group guarantees mutual resentment.

Racial equality of outcome is not achievable, but race relations could be greatly improved if the biological reality of racial differences were understood by more people.

There is not a lot of original material in Sanderson’s Race and Evolution, but I am not aware of any other single volume which summarizes so much useful information about race between two covers. It could do a great deal of good if made widely available. Is there any chance it will be? The author is currently trying to get an e-book version published on Amazon. For the time being, you can order the book directly from him for $12 US plus $4 US shipping (domestic) or 10 EUR plus 7 EUR shipping (outside the United States). Write to:

Stephen Sanderson
460 Washington Road, Apt. G-3
Pittsburgh, PA 15228

E-mail: sksander999@gmail.com

The author also maintains a website at www.stephenksanderson.com.

Dr. Ralph Scott’s Forty-year Battle for Science in Research on Forced Busing: Angela Saini, Barry Mehler, and the Academic Left

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Angela Saini, who describes herself as a “freelance science journalist,” has written a propaganda piece on race for the Guardian (“Why race science is on the rise again”), a precis of a now-released book of the same title. You know what you are up against right from the beginning, with the phrase “so-called ‘races,’” with ‘races’ in scare quotes. She describes herself as growing up in an “Indian-Punjabi household” and appears to be yet another non-White who is campaigning against the idea that Whites are a real group—a group with interests and a long, proud history.[1] In other words, she is promoting her own ethnic interests in dismantling the West as an ethnic entity and sees herself as a lifelong victim of White racism (“racism was the backdrop to my teenage years”) because there was a White nationalist bookstore in her neighborhood and because of the murder of one Black person — Stephen Lawrence who has since been elevated to sainthood by the same activists and media that have systematically ignored or downplayed victimization of native Brits by non-White immigrants; see Tobias Langdon, “Black Saints, White Demons: The Martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence”).

The Guardian piece centers around one Barry Mehler, who has been a longtime anti-race realism activist as head of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, a non-profit housed on the campus of a state-supported university, Ferris State in Michigan.

I’ve long been aware of Mehler, being a target of some his writing. Mehler was the protégé of Jerry Hirsch, a behavior geneticist who devoted much of his professional life to campaigning against sociobiology and against quantitative behavior genetics, especially as applied to humans. Hirsch has a cameo role in Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique, so you know what I think of ethnic activists like Hirsch and Mehler.

Indeed, Mehler is Faculty Advisor to Jewish Students at Ferris State University, a good indication that he has a strong Jewish identity. Saini’s article also shows his Jewish identification as informing his crusading against race science: Mehler “immediately saw parallels between the far-right network of intellectuals and the rapid, devastating way in which eugenics research had been used in Nazi Germany, terrifying him with the possibility that the brutal atrocities of the past could happen once more.”

Also indicative of his ethnic activism, Mehler has long been associated with the ADL. A 1995 article on the ADL website describes Mehler as the ADL National Commissioner. Another describes him as the chairman of the ADL’s Latin American Committee working to combat the confiscation of Jewish property and forced exile of Jews by the Sandinista government because of Jewish support for the previous government and because of Jewish support for Israel.

Not much doubt that Mehler is a Jewish academic ethnic activist, an activist ensconced at a state-supported university—the height of establishment respectability.

Once again, we see the confluence of Jewish identity and academic activism aimed at furthering Jewish interests, in this case by someone with no training in evolutionary biology or genetics. Despite the clear ethnic and political motivations characteristic of both Mehler and Saini, Saini has the gall to claim that race science is “innately political,” thereby absolving the activism of people like Mehler and Saini from any taint of extra-scientific interests. Read more

National Intelligence and its Consequences

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The Intelligence of Nations
Richard Lynn and David Becker
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2019

British psychologist Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their first study of national IQ differences, Intelligence and the Wealth of Nations, in 2002. The book found that a nation’s average IQ correlated at .62 with its per capita income, meaning that IQ explained 38% of variation in wealth (0.38 = 0.62 squared). In addition to the expected opposition from egalitarians, some critics’ skepticism was aroused by shortcomings in the book’s empirical data: the authors had direct IQ measurements for only 81 countries; values for the other 104 were mere estimates based on neighboring countries.

Plenty of international IQ data has accumulated since then, and the authors updated their results first in 2006 (IQ and Global Inequality), and again in 2012 (Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, hereafter Lynn & Vanhanen 2012; reviewed in TOQ 12:2, Summer 2012). In this last work, they provided direct data for 161 countries; the correlation between IQ and income rose to .71. Some of the earlier skeptics were won over.

Tatu Vanhanen died in 2015, but progress in the measurement of national IQ has continued. Heiner Rindermann of Chemnitz Technical University in Germany made an important contribution with his book Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations (2018). Prof. Rindermann found a correlation of .82 between national IQ and per capita income, meaning that intelligence explains no less than two thirds of the variation between nations. He found positive correlations between IQ and many desirable social variables, boldly concluding that “national well-being mainly depends on the cognitive ability level of a society.” Rindermann also demonstrated that the cognitive ability of the most intelligent five percent of a population generally has a greater positive effect on national achievements and other desirable outcomes that the average intelligence of the overall population.

In this new book, Richard Lynn’s first since the loss of his Finnish coauthor, he teams up with David Becker, a younger colleague of Prof. Rindermann in Chemnitz. The authors explain:

The main difference between this study and the previously published studies is with regard to the level of detail provided. Previous studies have been criticised for drawing upon unrepresentative, small or incomparable samples with regard to particular nations. In updating these studies, we endeavour to obviate this problem, so that; this information is as clear as possible to other researchers. The central aim of this revision is to standardize each individual step of the process through which we have reached our estimations and made our calculations. This has the advantage of complete transparency, such that other researchers can refollow our steps should they wish to do.

This aim necessitates a highly technical presentation less adapted to the needs of the general reader than Lynn’s and Vanhanen’s books.

Also new to this study is use of the “National IQ Dataset,” a working file first uploaded to the internet in August, 2018 and continually updated to provide the best current data on IQ around the world. The most recent version can be viewed at http://viewoniq.org/.

Read more

Assault on Psychology: Research on Race Differences Anathematized

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Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) has been called the Father of Modern Science. So it is fitting that he was, perhaps, the first scientist to be censured and silenced by political forces represented in his day by the Catholic Church. The issue then was evidence Galileo presented supporting the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system that contradicted the Aristotelian geocentric theory espoused by the establishment.

Elites have often used science to support the dominate ideology while suppressing evidence incompatible with their beliefs. One notable case was the rise of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), a Ukrainian biologist, rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the inheritance of environmentally acquired characteristics. This theory won favor because it fit well with the creation of the New Soviet Man: human nature was not innate, but as malleable and adaptable as were the characteristics of spring wheat.

The ideological orthodoxy of today is egalitarian multiculturalism, sometimes described as social or cultural Marxism. According to this doctrine the perceived differences between racial groups are superficial physical traits or cultural characteristics determined externally by history and the social environment.  All ethnic groups have equal potential for social development. A multicultural society is the most desirable and progressive social arrangement. There are no legitimate group interests that would preclude social harmony in a diverse and inclusive society.

Over the past half century, as social Marxism has tightened its ideological grip on the main stream media (MSM), education, corporations and the government, very few public persons have challenged its canon. But a handful of social scientists, mainly psychologists, have, along with Galileo, gone where the evidence led them. Because psychology deals with intelligence and behavior, the field is especially important for egalitarians to control. This essay will take a brief look at five psychologists who have contested established dogmas, and paid a price for doing so. Read more

White Men Can’t Jump, Black Men Can’t Shot-Put

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raceandsport_frontcoverRace and Sport: Evolution and Racial Differences in Sporting Ability
Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2015

 

The Ulster Institute’s latest study in human differences will come as a pleasant surprise to those who have complained about their previous somewhat narrow focus on IQ. Race and Sport is not the first book to venture into the taboo area of innate racial differences in athletic aptitude, but it is the most thorough and systematic so far.

The ice was first broken by Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It (2000). Numerous publishing houses rejected this work before it could see the light of day; some publishers were explicit about their fear that discussion of innate Black superiority in sport would lead inevitably to genetic explanations for low Black intelligence. A more serious objection to Mr. Entine’s thesis is that there are many sports Blacks do not dominate, and not all of these are winter sports (where an environmental explanation might be convincing).

Dutton and Lynn see reason for cautious optimism in the relative lack of furor surrounding the more recent publication of David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (2013). Epstein accepts that athletic ability is partly genetic in origin, although he does not focus on this matter. Read more

Science and Politics in Academe: Good Research is Not Enough

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At first glance, few people are as disagreeable as individuals with a touch of Asperger’s. Basically, they are high-IQ guys who tend to intuitively grasp things like logic, mathematics, and mechanics, yet are remarkably inept at socializing with other people. Because of their inborn characteristics, people on the Asperger’s end of the spectrum are often “nerds” who spend far more time facing a computer or slaving away in a lab than with other people. We have all seen The Social Network (2010) and its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged personality: a strange mix of raw genius, social clumsiness and lack of scruples, the latter allowing Zuckerberg to rip off the Winklevosses and betray his best friend Eduardo Saverin according to the wish of the gleeful manipulator Sean Parker. (Notice that the shared Jewishness of Zuckerberg and Saverin didn’t prevent the former from betraying the latter. That community has its breakdowns in ethnic networking too.)

Dark Enlightenment figure Nick Land claims that the biodiversity people — those scorned as “racists” by the mainstream media and parasitic class — are endowed with low agreeableness. They tend to have “low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. …  Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement.”

There is a grain of truth here. Trying to understand one’s fellows from the objective, disinterested point of view of science is not a behavior everyone will be attracted to or able to attain. Calm reflection about abstract principles is different from both blind habit and the passionate defense of some dogma — or one’s people. The pure scientist, after all, can never “take his own side.” He must forever be purely objective.

Honest — sometimes excessively; balanced in his epistemology to the point of favoring the groundbreaking — or plain truth in general — to popular dogmas; naively believing that his grand abstractions are an excellent recipe for society, like the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet who believed in an unlimited and exponential progress in future history. Read more