My Comment on the Review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, by Jared Taylor
EDIT, 5/1/14: Looks like my comment did finally appear, buried among over 500 others.
Comment moderation is an understandable practice, but at times it is rather annoying, especially when it’s used for less than above-board purposes. I left a comment to Jared Taylor’s review of Nicholas Wade’s forthcoming book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. My comment has yet to emerge from moderation, and other, newer comments have, suggesting that it may never do so. This is much too an important issue to wait, but fortunately I have a blog, so here is my comment:
Interesting, it’s good to finally see a review of this book.
I’m glad Wade is trying popularize this topic, giving it its much-needed due. In so doing, however, he has, as I expected, gotten quite a few things wrong. Unfortunately, those things that are wrong will be remembered more than the corrections to them.
DNA studies show that Tibetans split off from Han Chinese only 3,000
years ago, so it must be only since then that Sherpas evolved their
ability to function so well at high altitudes.Though this latest evidence is probably too new for Wade to have included it in his book, that’s not exactly true. The Sherpa adaptation goes back much longer than that. The Tibetans are a fusion of a Han-like population and a Sherpa-like population, who picked up their high-altitude adaptation from the latter group. See Greg Cochran on it:
A novel mechanism for getting high | West Hunter
One of Mr. Wade’s lesser breaches of good manners is to note that Europe made crucial breakthroughs in civilization that many groups have yet to adopt: “Europeans, probably for reasons of both evolution and history, have been able to create open and innovative societies, starkly different from the default human arrangements of tribalism or autocracy.”
Academics have long chased their tails trying to explain why some countries are rich and others poor. Mr. Wade points out that their fatal blunder is to assume that all populations are interchangeable. He uses findings by the economic historian Gregory Clark to suggest that in Britain, where records go back far enough to make such studies possible, there was steady evolution towards the qualities crucial to the Industrial Revolution.
I hope Wade also realizes that just as not all human populations are interchangeable, not all Europeans are interchangeable. Nor, for that, matter, are all White Americans interchangeable.
Mr. Wade’s discussion of the MAO-A gene is even more contortionist. He concedes that American blacks are no less than 50 times more likely than whites to carry the variant most closely tied to violence, but says we must draw no conclusions: Whites might have different, as yet undiscovered, alleles that would make them just as violent.
Many Blacks apparently do indeed possess versions of MAO-A that have been linked to higher aggression:
How Much Hard Evidence Do You Need? | JayMan’s Blog
That’s not possible. If human differences have “far reaching implications” there is no way to “dispel the fear” of what goes by the name of “racism.” What, to begin with, are these far reaching implications?
…
The liberal façade is all of a piece. It cannot be punctured only in a few safe and convenient spots. That is why its guardians plug every chink with such bloodthirsty zeal. To accept what dissidents call human biodiversity would open the door to everything the regime most piously hates: immigration control, inequality, self-segregation, nationalism, mono-culturalism. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter how hard he denies it, Mr. Wade has taken a match to the entire liberal/modern world view. The next thing you know, someone might say the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be repealed or that women have no business on submarines.
Perhaps those things are indeed an inevitable conclusion of society openly embracing HBD, as I have discussed before. These might represent not unwarranted reasons to be concerned about public acceptance of this knowledge. I am of the mind that these things not be inevitable conclusions, but some of that will indeed come up. The extent that it does will be itself dictated by the mindsets of the people who discuss it, which itself explained by HBD (see above about White Americans). This is a serious issue that, if true, might represent some real justification for liberal reticence about HBD.
JayMan's Blog 
I’d be interested in knowing if you expect a decent number or academics to include Wade’s book on their required reading lists come next fall. If so, which departments will. Which assuredly won’t (cultural/social anthro, eh?)
correction: “of academics”
Quite a few professors require students to read Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which I review here for Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RHO8YJ618OUMX
I am afraid that most of these professors require their students to agree with The Mismeasure of Man in order to get a good grade.
Any teacher can tell that some students can learn faster with less effort than others, that those in the first group can learn what those in the second group cannot, that these differences correlate with race, and that while they also correlate with parental income some students from poor backgrounds are extremely intelligent.
Teachers who deny the biological and racial implications of these observations are probably being dishonest.
I was about to leave a comment on the Tibetan issue but saw that the commenter BonV.Vant had raised the point, albeit with much less detail than you went into above. I’m not sure what the reason for the moderation tie-up was, but yours might have flagged for having too many links. Whatever the reason, I hope that it ultimately shows up.
I agree, links/possible spam seems like the most likely reason it’s not showing up.
It will be interesting to see how – and if – it is received by MSM and Academia. But I don’t think this represents an imminent danger. The Blank Slate was killed in the mid 1980s but remains something people believe in today, some 30 years later, in varying degrees. Like Pinker predicted, it takes decades for this sort of knowledge to sink in. Rigth now, I think probably less than one percent of people in the West have even heard of HBD. Although the wheels are perhaps spinning a bit faster with the advent of the internet.
the empirical truth = Unfortunate implications…because it disagrees with falsely held beliefs? So much for honesty. Science has gone from becoming a way to determine the truth and discover knowledge, and become another religion, with academics as priests.
By the way, jayman, this 116 year old japanese lady credits her age to “sushi and 8 hours of sleep a night”….I bet you would beg to differ, but wonder what you think?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/10670467/Worlds-oldest-person-celebrates-her-116th-birthday-Eat-and-sleep-and-you-will-live-a-long-time.html
Ah, so you admit this could be dangerous…this is exactly what liberals have been saying for years…
I’m actually convinced the discovery of Jewish IQ will not be as detrimental to American Jews as my relatives fear…reactions will probably go from ‘oh, that’s nice!’ to ‘like we didn’t have that figured out after Nobel #185…’ The Nazis are still gonna hate, but they did before.
But the African-American thing could go very, very bad. Anywhere from nothing to Jim Crow coming back.
off-topic but i think very likely related to your heart attack posts
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10674915/Angry-outbursts-cause-fivefold-increase-in-heart-attack-risk.html
Off-topic, another majorly flawed product of correlation based medical research. High-protein diet as bad as smoking. How many people elderly people are going to be bed-ridden or demented in a few decades, because medical researchers don’t understand the concept of confounding variables?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10676877/High-protein-diet-as-bad-for-health-as-smoking.html
@Doug.
Yup, saw it.
Wait…
“The researchers define a “high-protein” diet as deriving at least 20 per cent of daily calories from protein. They recommend consuming about 0.8g (0.03oz) of protein per kilogram of body weight every day in middle age. It means a person weighing nine stone should eat about 45-50g (1.6-1.7oz) of protein a day. A 300g (10.5oz) steak contains 77g (2.7oz) of protein.”
That is hilarious.
I notice for the RDAs for the average person on the nutrition facts label it’s around 50 grams of protein. That’s ridiculously low. You need more protein than that. Fat is good for satiation as well, but people regualrly eat 3 to 400 grams of carbs a day which is horrible (increases insulin production and makes you hungry sooner).
I regularly eat 300 grams of protein on my workout days for satiation (and I love protein).
But red meat isn’t linked to a higher rate of cancer. They say that grilling red meat well done causes it. When the char gets on the meat, compounds from the smoke mix with other compounds in the charred meat and leads to an increase in cancer rate.
But what these garbage articles don’t say is that the 18 percent increase in cancer was laughably low.
Red meat is fine.
But the African-American thing could go very, very bad. Anywhere from nothing to Jim Crow coming back.
I presume you’re indulging a bit of humor and hyperbole, but if not? I highly doubt anything that drastic will go down; there’s too much variation and too many counter-examples prevalent as symbols and memes; I think hbd verification could actually have reifying effect on black pop imagery, as it conceivably could bolster black physical iconry and priority.