Open Discussion Thread
I’ve started this page as a place for open discussion. If you have a question, a request, or something that you want to bring to my attention, and it doesn’t fit anywhere else (or you want somewhere current), put it here.
I can’t guarantee you’ll get fast service from me. I’m having a hard time keeping up with my other stuff as it is. 🙂
A couple of updates worth mentioning here. I’ve disabled the comments at my JayMan’s Race, Inheritance, and IQ F.A.Q. (F.R.B.). Invariably, my pages and posts, with my declarative assertions they feature, attract (wittingly and unwittingly) bullshit-peddling commenters, and I don’t want a 100-comment long back and forth there. As such, I’m removing some of the comments from there, and they may appear here, eventually. As well, if you have something to say about my F.R.B., put it here.
JayMan's Blog 
To cross a privacy line, what does Jayman do in real life?
Random guess: teacher?
@MawBTS:
I’ve hoped my reaction (or lack thereof) to those types of questions so far would have served to send a message. Maybe not…
@MawBTS:
I am also interesting in his job :). However, generally, it doesn’t matter what Jayman does in the real life, but what Jayman is informing and serving people on internet for non-profits from his knowledge. I hope he is a teacher as you mentioned.
I’ve often read that when trying to find factors with DNA, the factors are arbitrary because you can rotate them to be anything. But, if you are doing Principal components you aren’t allowed to rotate, so that doesn’t work; in factor analysis where the factors can be correlated (not orthorgonal as in PCA), there are standard methods to maximize the amount of variance explained. Further, while it’s true you can arbitrarily load explanation onto the factor loadings or the factors (eg, Beta*factor=7=1*7 or7*1), it doesn’t mean the factors are arbitrarily important, because it’s the product that counts. Anyway, I think the ‘rotational indeterminacy’ assertion is factually wrong: you can’t make the first factor whatever you want.
I’m a finance guy (we have factor models of stock returns, thus my experience).
I’ve always thought Gould’s initial exposition in Mismeasure of Man was pretty logical on this point, and at first I didn’t get it. Either way, it’s either right or wrong, yet no one seems to have refuted it, though I notice it merely pops up a lot within a broader argument, as opposed to being prominent.
@Eric Falkenstein:
There’s a good chance that if we’re talking about race, and Gould was saying it, it’s unadulterated horseshit. Gould wasn’t just guilty of misdirection, he was outright fraudulent. That should be a clue.
There’s some good papers on PCA on my Fundamentals page. Take a look.
Well if they are using PCAs in DNA research, not factor analysis, then the factors are unique, so I guess Gould was referring to the whole factor*factor loading issue, which is quite silly because even though you can arbitrarily adjust the factor and factor loading by a constant and its reciprocal (eg, make the factor 10x bigger, the factor loading 0.1x ‘bigger’), the significance of the result doesn’t change. Factor extraction techniques for correlated factors can get tricky, and are often domain specific, so I thought it was something in that space I was unaware of.
What are the principal components of a football? Do you have any choice? But with a circle or a sphere, or things spherically symmetrical you have complete choice. With a snowflake you have six choices. If there are no relations between variables whatsoever, complete scatter shot, then that is close to spherically symmetrical. But in most scatter plots, not all, you can pick out the first two or three directions in rank order that contain most of the variance.
@Luke Lea:
Well said Luke!
Rotation of factors has nothing to do with PCA vs. factor analysis. One can rotate them with both methods. You can easily verify this using R by using the functions in the psych package.
Hi Jayman,
I’m so glad you have this thread because I’m confused about something.
You (among others) contend that male obligate homosexuality cannot be genetic and that because other causes have been ruled out, it might well be a disease exposure. You also contend (and here I agree with you 100%) that female obligate homosexuality doesn’t exist.
Thinking this over, I have to ask: Where is the evidence that male obligate homosexuality exits?
Let me give you my reasoning. Men have been known to indulge with sheep, vacuum cleaners, fence posts, whatever is handy. Some men may find certain types of sex more enjoyable for any number of non biological and non psychiatric reasons. I can imagine that men who want a lot of sex, both in occurrences and in number of partners would find more of it in the homosexual world.
There are many men historically that the Gay community says are homosexual who had children: Alexander the Great for one. But if he was Gay, it certainly wasn’t obligate, since he fathered a child or children. Oscar Wilde had children, where’s the obligate in that?
Do you, or does anyone, actually have a definition of homosexuality?
Thanks in advance for an answer.
I’m sure Jaybaby is keeping you busy!!!
@Anonymous:
First, to be clear, that truly lesbian women don’t exist is a suspicion of mine. I don’t know if they don’t for sure.
The evidence for the existence of obligate male homosexuality comes from arousal studies. Men are fairly easy to study this way (i.e., it’s easy to tell when a man is aroused). For the longest time, they’ve had a hard time finding men with a bisexual arousal pattern. Most men were either straight or gay (i.e., were aroused only by women or men, respectively). Truly 100% gay men (at least in terms of arousal, not necessarily behavior) do exist, and are much more common than they “should” be, genetically speaking.
This, by the way, is one point that was brought to my attention about lesbians. Women show a different arousal pattern than men (i.e., seemingly bisexual), but I was told that lesbians show a different one. So real lesbians may exist. We’ll see.
In response to Anonymous: I’m 53 and have never had sex with a woman, nor do I have any desire to do so, nor have I ever had any such desire. I suppose I could force myself to do it, but I can’t say it would likely be very enjoyable for me. It would be like you (assuming you are a heterosexual male) performing oral sex on another guy. You “could” do it (suppose I offered you $10,000?) , but I wouldn’t say you were bisexual if you did it just to pay off your mortgage. So, how would you classify me? if I’m not a homosexual, I don’t know who would be.
Hi Mark,
Maybe I’m not making myself clear. I’m trying to get at the “obligate” part. I know Gay women who suddenly, and to me shockingly, get themselves involved with and even married to a man. That means they weren’t “obligate” Gay.
I know people who may have had meat once or twice in their lives (I live in California!!!) because their parents were vegetarian and they “adopted” that lifestyle. They can no more imagine eating meat than you can imagine having sex with a woman, but they are not obligate vegetarians.
I am not trying to foist my ideas on anyone, I am trying to understand the argument about homosexuality being caused by an infection and to understand that I need a firmer definition of homosexuality then I have.
Thanks for your response. I wasn’t aware of any such studies. Now I have a follow up question. The argument for an infection causing homosexuality is that the condition would have faded away long ago because Gay folk would have had less children to pass the trait along. Therefore, because other causes don’t work, the last explanation is the infection, and that works out pretty well as a theory.
But aren’t we assuming that Alexander was homosexual (if he was) for the same reason that my pal Brian is? Could there have been a mutation in the thousands of years between Alexander and Brian? Or is this one of those Occam’s razor things and there’s no need to add yet another layer of theory
I’m keen to discuss theories about the rise in obesity. Assuming it’s not simply explained only by ‘excess calorie consumption’, ‘insufficient exercise’, or even some of the fashionable theories like ‘adverse gut flora’ which I have advocated. This would potentially leave, as you indicated, infection as another possible explanation – which might be viable: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/766526
However, obesity is highly heritable yet has been increasing over the past few decades in the west. So, assuming the rate of being genetically predisposed to becoming obese as a result of the alleged mystery infection didn’t increase in the general population over this time frame, that would potentially imply either: an increased susceptibility to succumb to the infection in the first place (due to weakened immunity, for whatever reason); &/or greater levels of exposure to the pathogen in the population. I would like to hear more of your thoughts on this Jay (plus some other readers of this blog).
@chrisdavies09:
Misdreavus had a few things to say on that today.
As for the article, I can’t access it. Yes, I would suspect that if there’s pathogenic (or microbial in general) involvement, heritability much represent a degree of genetic susceptibility.
Is there a succinct and complete review of the effects (or lack thereof) of environmental interventions on IQ? The 75-0-25 rule only works in the case of “ordinary” variation, and I’m wondering how much you can increase the 25 bit with deliberate effort.
All I know is that Dual N-Back has some decent evidence in favor of small gains.
@ckp:
I don’t know. But that sounds like a good thing to have. Maybe I’ll go searching for one. Remind me again some time.
I found a good one – in this talk at about 27:00, mentions they couldn’t find any interventions that had a lasting effect on IQ. Haven’t read the full paper though.
I saw a movie where the “lesbian” couple got off on watching gay porn. I can’t say I understood that, unless they were really bisexual.
@Mark F.
Cochran’s gay germ theory works great for obligate gay men. For bisexual men, not so much. And we’re quite clueless about bisexual and lesbian women.
Sorry, didn’t realise the link didn’t work.
Is Obesity Caused by an Adenovirus?
Introduction
“Is obesity, a condition traditionally linked with nutrition and physical activity, a relevant or important topic for an infectious diseases journal? A few decades ago, infection was not considered relevant to cancer, but now the roles of human papilloma-virus, hepatitis viruses and Helicobacter pylori infections in various cancers are under aggressive investigation. Similar to the early stages of infection–cancer research, emerging evidence now indicates a role for certain infections at least in a subtype of obesity. This offers an excellent opportunity for the field of infectious diseases to extend expertise to an unacquainted discipline. Over the last 30 years, nearly a dozen microbes have been causatively or correlatively linked with animal or human obesity (reviewed in).[1] These adipogenic microbes include viruses, bacteria, parasites, gut microflora and scrapie agents. This offers a potential opportunity to impact obesity by designing effective prevention or treatment strategies against adipogenic pathogens, or by modulating the gut microflora, which are not considered pathogens under normal conditions. Such an approach could be particularly significant considering the sharp increase in obesity prevalence in recent years and the intractable nature of the condition. WHO has declared obesity as a ‘global epidemic’.[2] Obesity is not merely a cosmetic issue, but a serious medical condition, with serious health consequences, including a shortened life span.[3,4] Effective action is urgently needed to counter the health and economic consequences of obesity at the individual and societal level. However, effective strategies for obesity prevention or treatment at the community level are unavailable despite considerable research. Dietary restraint and increased physical activity are the cornerstones of weight-loss treatment or long-term maintenance. This approach is successful in very few individuals in clinical studies, and disappointingly ineffective for a large majority, and is particularly ineffective in free-living populations. Although pharmacotherapy or surgery for weight loss show some promise, the accompanying undesirable effects have restricted their widespread application.
Despite its multifactorial etiology,[5] conventional obesity treatment or pre-vention strategies offer a blanket approach, mostly irrespective of the cause. Effective cause-specific treatment or prevention strategies could be developed if the precise contribution of various factors to obesity is identified. If certain infections contribute to obesity, prevention or treatment approaches for such a subgroup of obesity could differ from extensive and long-term lifestyle changes. Nonetheless, identifying adipogenic microbes and determining their causative role in human adiposity is challenging.
Among the known adipogenic pathogens, some induce obesity in animal models, whereas others are associated with human obesity.[1] Adenoviruses are the only infective agents reported to be linked with adiposity in both experimental animal models and naturally infected humans, which make them promising candidates for investigating their role in human obesity. SMAM-1, an avian virus, is the first adenovirus reported to increase adiposity and the first virus reported to be associated with human obesity.[6,7] Adenovirus Ad-36 is the first human virus reported to cause obesity in animals.[8–11] Ad-36 is also associated with human obesity.[1] Reports about the adipogenic role of additional human adenoviruses, Ad-5 and Ad-37, followed.[12,13] Thankfully, commonly prevalent human adenoviruses Ad-2 and Ad-31, and avian adenovirus chick embryo lethal orphan are not adipogenic.[9,12] Since the first report about the adipogenic properties of adenovirus SMAM-1 in 1990, approximately 60 publications in PubMed address the role of adenoviruses in obesity. Of these, approximately 45 were published in the last 5 years, indicating a growing interest in this area. Overall, researchers are more aware of infections as potential contributors to obesity.[14] In 2009, the NIH/National Institute of Diabetes, and Digestive and Kidney Diseases organized a symposium titled ‘Non-traditional Risk Factors for Obesity’, which covered the topic of obesity of infectious origin. Despite the attention, the crucial question – whether viruses in general and adenoviruses in particular cause obesity – is only partially answered.
For conceptual and practical reasons, unequivocally determining the causative role of a viral infection in human obesity would be a significant milestone. The relative preponderance of information about the adipogenic role of adenoviruses in general, and Ad-36 in particular, allows the assessment of progress, challenges and limitations in conclusively determining the contribution of virus infections to human obesity. Human adenoviruses are DNA viruses and have over 50 subtypes, linked to upper respiratory tract infections, conjunctivitis or GI tract symptoms. Ad-36 was first isolated in the late 1970s in Germany, from the fecal sample of a girl suffering from enteritis.[15] This is the only information available to postulate a GI-related role for Ad-36 and a possible feco–oral route of transfection. Substantial evidence exists to conclude that Ad-36 induces obesity in animals. Experimental infection of chickens, mice, rats and marmosets with Ad-36 increases adiposity,[8–11,16] which is not explained by food intake. In agreement with Koch’s postulate, blood obtained from an Ad-36-infected animal shows viremia and induces obesity in another animal receiving that blood intravenously.[8] Up to threefold greater weight gain and 60% increase in adipose tissue is observed in Ad-36-infected animals as compared with uninfected controls, but the response seems to vary with the host species. Animals excrete Ad-36 in feces for up to 2 months postinfection[11] and the virus seems to quickly reach multiple organs, including the liver, spleen, kidney, brain and, surprisingly, the adipose tissue.[17] The amount of Ad-36 DNA present in the adipose tissue significantly correlates with adipose tissue mass of that animal,[8] which led the way to discovering the role of adipocyte differentiation as a potential mechanism for Ad-36-induced obesity.[18–22] MCP-1 and E4orf1, appear to be the required host and viral factors, respectively, for Ad-36-induced adiposity.[23,24] Ad-36 infection produces a distinctive phenotype, albeit with some host species-specific variation.
Excessive adiposity is linked with deterioration in glycemic control, and increased amount of circulating and hepatic stores of lipids. Ad-36 improves high-fat diet-induced hyperglycemia and hepatic steatosis, and reduces serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels, despite the adiposity it induces.[8–11,16] Findings from several studies indicate that via its E4orf1 gene, Ad-36 induces adipogenic commitment, proliferation and lipid accumulation in adipocyte progenitors, and also increases cellular glucose and lipid uptake.[16,18–20,22–27] Collectively, these effects appear to explain adipose tissue expansion and a paradoxical clearance of lipids and glucose levels from the circulation induced by Ad-36. Although further information is welcome, evidence to date certainly argues in favor of a definite adipogenic role for Ad-36 in animals. Determining the adipogenic role of Ad-36 in humans, on the other hand, is as complex as it is important.
Experimentally infecting humans with Ad-36 and determining the effect on their adiposity can conclusively determine the role of Ad-36 in human obesity. However, ethical reasons preclude experimental infection of humans with Ad-36, and the evidence will have to remain indirect. Natural Ad-36 infection in humans is associated with obesity. With the exception of two studies, multiple studies from the USA, Italy and South Korea have reported a significant association of natural Ad-36 infection with obesity in children and adults (reviewed in[1]). Human twins who were discordant for Ad-36 seropositivity showed that Ad-36-positive co-twins were significantly heavier and fatter as compared with their antibody-negative counterparts.[28] Furthermore, natural Ad-36 infection in humans is associated with a phenotype similar to that induced by experimental Ad-36 infection in animal models, which suggests causality. Ad-36 DNA is present in human adipose tissue and those carrying Ad-36 DNA in adipose tissue have greater adipogenesis potential.[19] Also, natural Ad-36 infection is associated with lower serum lipids, better glycemic profile and lower liver fat in humans.[16,28–31] Although these reports are highly suggestive of the causative role of Ad-36, they are associations. Given the cardinal rule in epidemiology that ‘an association does not prove causation’, additional convincing evidence is required. The insidious onset of obesity further complicates the matter. It is hard to retrospectively track an infectious episode that initiated the development of obesity a while ago. Moreover, multiple factors ranging from genetics to biology and behavior may contribute to obesity in an individual and they may vary between individuals, making it difficult to isolate the relative contribution of any single factor. Therefore, the question of whether Ad-36 contributes to human obesity has remained incompletely answered, although we seem to be progressing in the right direction.
Longitudinal studies may help settle this question to a large extent. A longitudinal study in rhesus monkeys showed that natural Ad-36 infection was associated with a 15% increase in body weight and a 29% drop in serum cholesterol levels.[11] Such studies with a long-term follow-up of changes in adiposity and other phenotypes associated with natural Ad-36 infection are required in humans.
If indeed Ad-36 contributes to human obesity, it may influence obesity treatment or prevention approaches and encourage the search for additional adipogenic pathogens. If Ad-36 infection persists long term and continues to promote obesity in an individual, an effective obesity treatment will have to include anti-Ad-36 therapeutics. On the other hand, if it is a ‘hit-and-run’ type of event, which perpetuates obesity long after the virus has ceased to be active in a host, a preventive approach, such as vaccination, may be suitable. Obviously, such a vaccine would only eliminate or attenuate the risk of the obesity due to that specific pathogen, and not due to other contributory factors. Nevertheless, at least for a subgroup of population, this obesity prevention approach could be far simpler and more effective than the current conventional approach. After all, smallpox eradication was achieved with a vaccine, not by lifestyle modification.”
Click to access 15539346.pdf
This paper purports to show greater fecundity in maternal relatives of male homosexuals. However, it gives much smaller effect sizes than an adaptive genetic hypothesis would require, and the “only maternal relatives” part looks suspiciously like p-hacking. Am I right or is there more to it?
@ckp:
GWAS studies rule it out:
Click to access Drabant-Poster-v7.pdf
Even if they didn’t, we run up against the low heritability again.
Hi, when we talk about something causing obesity, what do we really want to know? Because, unless physics has changed recently, you can’t get obese without eating a lot.
But maybe we are talking about something (genes, germs, microbes) that makes people really hungry? and if that is so, isn’t the answer that for the first time in the history of mankind, someone who is really, really hungry all the time can satisfy that hunger?
I think that people are getting confused about the question. The fact is that heavy people either eat more or move less. Why they eat more and if we should do more about it is a legit question, and one I’m curious about. But it seems to me a lot of folks asking the question either never took physics or have forgotten all about it. You can’t get fat unless you are taking in more fuel than you are using.
@Anonymous:
It’s not that simple.
1. While ultimately, calories in vs. calories out is at play, several complications arise. For one, calorie expenditure is not a simple matter of exercise (indeed, exercise is completely useless for weight loss). Then of course there’s the matter of hunger. It’s entirely possible for weight gain to occur without an increase in calorie consumption.
2. Why is there (highly heritable) variation in obesity?
In short, the balance between in vs. out is in play, but what influences that is not known, and is a perplexing matter.
“Exercise is useless for weight loss”
Got a cite for that, because it seems implausible.
@ckp
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jonny-bowden/exercise-benefits_b_1777630.html
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-ed-why-doesnt-exercise-lead-to-weight-loss/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
@Ed the Department Head:
Well, those articles are right that exercise is completely useless for weight loss (as we’ll see in more detail soon). However, I’ll go a step further and say it’s completely useless for all those other things it lists. Exercise can’t help with depression, it doesn’t lower your risk for heart disease or cancer, and reducing the risk for complications from diabetes is a maybe, I’d say, at the moment. And growing new brain cells is laughable.
What exercise does is simple: lets an energetic person burn off that energy. That, and let athletes get into shape. That seems to be about it.
@ckp:
Did you ever see my Obesity Facts page?
JayMan:
Can you elaborate?
Decrease in expenditure.
Jayman, as much as I admire you, and that is quite a lot!!!, you have to accept that you cannot gain weight without eating more “energy” then you spend. Now, calories may not be the only energy in food and if that’s your point, ok. But, if you can gain weight without eating too much, then you’ve got yourself a perpetual motion machine!!!!
Just to mention two real world experiments that prove my point, in neither the Irish famine nor the Holocaust, did any of the individuals deprived of food put on any weight at all. They didn’t eat, they lost weight, they died.
@Anonymous:
Clearly you’re not understanding what I’m saying.
That is not in dispute. The question is why does that balance get upset that way? No one knows, and answering this has thus far proved elusive.
Look in to Peter Atilla’s research.
You are right, I did not understand. I constantly have to listen to people tell me that they haven’t eaten “a thing” in a month and gained 10 pounds. I thought you had the same friends and had bought into their fibs.
I don’t think we need to look any further than the Irish Famine or the Holocaust. The history of mankind is filled with famine. Those who were hungry all the time and thus ate whatever they could get their hands on when times were good, survived the next famine and passed on hunger genes. More people are fat because for the first time in history, famine has been almost abolished but the hunger genes are still with us.
If now the hunger gene causes premature death or fertility loss due to diabetes, then people will become skinny again. At which point, the corn crop will fail, and the skinny folks will die!!
@Anonymous:
If modern obesity is the result of previously adaptive genes “misfiring” in a modern environment (the “thrifty genes” hypothesis), then why are we not all fat? Why haven’t such genes been selected to fixation?
I think that some of the issue is what doctors call obese versus what you and I call obese.
What we see around us, chunky folk, are what everyone should be. Doctors call them obese based on BMI. Those people I call obese, the 600 pounders, are one end of the curve and people like me, scrawny, are the other end of the curve.
So if the question is why are there more doctor defined obese, I say the world had finally gotten to the point where most people can satisfy their hunger and maintain the weight nature intended for them: enough reserves to get over a short term food shortage but not so much weight that it handicaps them in their hunting and gathering, or herding and farming.
If the question is why there are more 600 pounders, then I think you have to look at social policy. I only know one such person in real life (the rest I’ve only seen on TV) My acquaintance who weighs at least 600 lbs (and who is just the nicest person in the world so I hate to bad mouth her) gets disability, food stamps, a handicap sticker for her car, state financed home help and medicare. If she had to get up every day earn enough money to buy food then actually walk around a grocery story to buy it, she wouldn’t be so fat. If she had to vacuum she’d burn up some calories. If she had to park at the other end of the parking lot and walk she’d use some calories. But the state has set it up that she doesn’t ever have to do anything but eat. And boy does she eat!!!
Scrawny people, like me, are the other side of the coin. I find food a real pain and often would rather just read a book then eat. But in time of famine, I will be among the pictures of the bodies stacked like cord wood. I think the happy mean and what our genes demand is the sort of chunky, chubby, husky, robust, person who can still move freely.
Hunter-gatherers are below the Malthusian limit of population density because they cull their own numbers through warfare (and sometimes infanticide). The ones that live tend to get enough food.
They aren’t “chunky”.
I suspect the parasites that infect hunter-gatherers play a role in why they are not on average chunky.
Being a criminal may be evolutionarily adaptive, at least in Sweden: http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(14)00077-4/abstract
@Anthony:
Maybe not, says Audacious Epigone.
So, with this, can we expect to learn a lot more about molecular mimicry? Until now, hasn’t it been theoretical? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140707092707.htm
Is there a generic email address you have set up somewhere for anyone interested in further discussion about topics etc
@FoolishReporter:
Top to the right.
I still do not understand.
Where can I find out whether if the extent that all things are hereditary is true means that it is pointless to attempt to change anything that I or anyone else is doing?
Everything you create and that I have read so far points to active parenting being a waste of energy other than for happy feelings as to get your genes carried forward you just need spawn and a non-abusive environment that stimulates them enough. It seems that no content at all carries forward. No values, no principles, no advice or examples. The same goes for attempts at leading others. Changing their behaviour in a meaningful, long lasting way seems to be denied and the soul burning and life denying impression this gives is incredibly difficult to deal with.
What does one do when the nihilistic smbc comic you posted is the most cheerful thing I have seen you create or refer to, and that strikes me as encouragement to curl up and die or become a sadist.
@Steven:
If so, this would be because of heredity, yes?
It all seems to point to fatalism. Infinite meaninglessness everywhere one looks with the only salves being to seek happiness in whatever way suits you, or to look for delusion to dull the pain. What do people do when not only is god dead, but everything that ever gave life meaning and value is little more than pablum? Hedonism or nihilism, seems insane.
@Steven:
Well, that’s how you see it. But that’s because that’s how you’re wired to see it. Those who don’t care can absorb the information and not lose any sleep.
@ JayMan
Well, that’s how you see it. But that’s because that’s how you’re wired to see it. Those who don’t care can absorb the information and not lose any sleep.
Yeah. I have an intense level of expressing sexual and physical affection/attraction and I attract the same in women. I can explain, in detail, all the biochemical processes that produce such intense experiences, yet, this detailed knowledge doesn’t diminish the experiences even a bit.
Re: your tweet
“Not to be mean, but trans (& to a lesser extent, gay) rights mythos are nothing more than a sophisticated ‘I’m OK, the world is all wrong.'”
1/2 right, Jayman. Gays are no different than trans insofar as being screwed up somewhere in their brains. Further, they have perpetrated many, many more frauds (or “myths,” as you call them) than trans have.
Gays, in fact, have led the way in showing how to conduct a pr campaign full of a lies and misrepresentations in order to attain what they want.
They have been doing a full court press this year to pressure the media into pressuring the CDC to take their blood. Congressional hearings and all. The last decision again didn’t go their way so they’re using idiots like Takei, a beloved icon, to add pressure. He’ll convince who knows how many straights and gays alike who follow him Fb that there’s no danger to anyone if the CDC changes their protocols.
Their argument? (I have seen it put forth at least ten times in the last month or so on the net). “All blood is checked anyway so there’s no reason other than discrimination for the CDC not to take our blood.”
Ah, but they fail to mention that HIV doesn’t even show up in most people’s blood, no matter the test, for quite awhile after it’s first contracted.
They are self-centered bastards.
Hypothetical scenario:
Suppose you have a kid who is not overtly abused but whose parents spend most of their energies restricting that child’s access to all non-home environment. Would such a person’s outcomes be purely genetic? Logically speaking, that’s the only possibility, right?
Okay, not so hypothetical, as the first sustained social interactions I ever had involved attending college.
Do you consider it worthwhile to have my IQ tested? If so, which test is most accurate and/or valuable?
@Valmont:
James Thompson is your man for that.
I’d be interested to see you justify this claim:
“I think science has been making great strides towards explaining consciousness.” No, You Don’t Have Free Will, and This is Why
As far as I can see, science understands the material substrate of consciousness (the brain) in greater and greater detail, but is utterly unable to explain how objective matter becomes subjective consciousness. We have not moved an inch towards understanding how quanta become qualia since this was written in 1871:
Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, “How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?” The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.
Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we love, that the motion is in one direction, and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other; but the “Why?” would remain as unanswerable as before.” — John Tyndall (1871), Fragments of Science
@Krilling for Company:
Try some LSD and then tell me that we have no idea how matter gives rise to consciousness whatsoever… 😉
@jayman
“Try some LSD and then tell me that we have no idea how matter gives rise to consciousness whatsoever…”
An excellent point — on Tyndall’s side. Because LSD is a highly dramatic example of matter affecting consciousness via the brain, it emphasizes his point: that we have no idea whatsoever how it does so. None whatsoever. As he said: all we know is that different forms of consciousness are associated with different arrangements of matter. Beyond that, consciousness a complete mystery. Whether our ignorance is good or bad, it’s undeniable. LSD, caffeine or distilled water: matter plainly influences consciousness. And we don’t have a clue how.
@Krilling for Company:
Why is that people that make metaphysical arguments engage in such twisted silliness?
Isn’t that enough? The same is true of gravity, or electromagnetism, etc. Yet you don’t see people calling for some supernatural explanation.
And as with those forces, it’s not like we are completely clueless in how consciousness might work. Computer science and artificial intelligence, among other things, have been shedding insight into how physical computations can give rise to perception, deliberation, and intent.
A key part of the problem is that there are so many fine actions involved in thinking and acting – processes which occur automatically to us – that they fool us into not noticing the highly mechanized process that it is.
@jayman:
Because LSD is a highly dramatic example of matter affecting consciousness via the brain, it emphasizes his point: that we have no idea whatsoever how it does so. None whatsoever.
Why is that people that make metaphysical arguments engage in such twisted silliness?
Why do intelligent people often think they understand a subject better than in fact they do? Tyndall was not making a metaphysical argument. He was making an observation about our inability to explain consciousness. The observation and the inability aren’t metaphysical, except in a general sense.
As he said: all we know is that different forms of consciousness are associated with different arrangements of matter.
Isn’t that enough?
Of course not, because an observed association is not an objective explanation. Arthur C. Clarke has a story about a conscious creature that lives in the sun (and is thrown out by a solar eruption, etc). Its neurology is obviously very different from ours, in a chemical sense. Is such a neurology possible? Unless we understand how matter produces consciousness, we can’t say. Can a conscious brain be made of gas or electronics or clockwork or hydraulics? Clarke also has a story about the telephone-and-computer system becoming conscious once it reaches a certain level of complexity and interconnection. That seems plausible, but is it possible? No-one knows. Are societies or eco-systems conscious? They’re analogous to brains, after all. No-one knows, because no-one knows how consciousness arises from matter and its interactions.
The same is true of gravity, or electromagnetism, etc.
It isn’t. Any entity is ultimately mysterious, but what-we-associate-with-gravity IS gravity: an objective material phenomenon out there. What-we-associate-with-consciousness is not consciousness. Matter is not mind and we do not know how one becomes the other.
Yet you don’t see people calling for some supernatural explanation.
Tyndall wasn’t calling for a supernatural explanation of consciousness. He was pointing out there was then no scientific explanation, i.e. no complete objective explanation based on mathematics. There still isn’t. Supernature explains nothing and is as incoherent and self-contradictory a concept as free will. I don’t believe in the supernatural. Whether Tyndall did or not, he wasn’t invoking it.
And as with those forces, it’s not like we are completely clueless in how consciousness might work. Computer science and artificial intelligence, among other things, have been shedding insight into how physical computations can give rise to perception, deliberation, and intent.
All of those can take place in the human subconscious and all can be exhibited by an insect or robot. There is no objective test for consciousness and no proof that it is necessary to normal brain function. We merely assume it is. We can’t prove that. If consciousness arises from brain activity, why is the brain activity not sufficient on its own? The brain does a lot of very complex things that aren’t conscious, like controlling the heart and other organs. The better we are at a task, the less conscious we are of how we do it. Consciousness is very strange and almost incidental. But it’s also the most important thing in the universe.
A key part of the problem is that there are so many fine actions involved in thinking and acting – processes which occur automatically to us – that they fool us into not noticing the highly mechanized process that it is.
You’re talking about objective brain activity and I agree that the brain is a mechanism. I also assume that consciousness is generated by that mechanism. But we cannot explain how. We cannot get from quanta to qualia, from objective matter to subjective consciousness. A famous example: if a blind person knows the precise neurological mechanism whereby a sighted person sees the colour red, that blind person does not know what “red” is. Humans don’t know what it’s like to perceive with sound like a bat or dolphin. Unlike bats and dolphins, we have a very sophisticated understanding of how sonar works, but we don’t know how sonar feels as an independent sense. One day, using brain modification, we will know, but that won’t entail that we will know how the objective mechanism produces the subjective qualia.
Summary: consciousness is a complete mystery and science seems to have no way of beginning to explain it. This does not mean it is supernatural. Or that science will never explain it.
@Krilling for Company:
Except that it appears to be a causal association. Manipulating these physical states (with drugs or with electrical or magnetic stimulation) leads to changes in conscious perception – even volition. That’s a key distinction from the merely observed correlations trumpeted by conventional social and medical science that I lament.
Again, do we fully understand? No. Do we have any ideas? Yes. That’s a biggie.
You know, what’s the need for this a priori dualism? On what basis can you make that declaration?
See above.
Again, there’s no need for assumed dualism. There is in fact plenty of objective evidence for consciousness. Firstly is your objective evidence in the form of your own subjective experience. And unless you’re a solipsist, we can clearly see it in other people. It’s just as objective as gravity.
Sure there is, see above. If you are claiming we can produce no absolute proof, well we can’t absolutely prove we’re not in the Matrix either. But then, science uses Hume’s Dictum and Occam’s Razor to proceed despite this. If you’re going to invoke the problem of induction to make your case (which you are doing), then we might as well pack it in right now and quit: it would be impossible to know anything.
Who said it was not? Again, the above dualism.
Yes, and, so? Those things are part and parcel to making the conscious self, as are many things that go on that you’re not normally aware of.
Well, we can’t quite say that, because we don’t actually know what having that knowledge would be like, because we don’t yet have it.
And even still, you don’t see that these two:
A. knowledge of the brain states involved in someone else’s experience (or even your own)
B. the brain states of those experiences
…aren’t equivalent pieces of information? A ≠ B.
A key problem, of course, is that we don’t actually know what it means to be conscious. Many of us have some conception in mind, but we don’t know what it is, even from a mechanistic standpoint. Try make a definition of “to be conscious.” Without even knowing this, it’s not surprising that we don’t know precisely how it works. Again, that’s a far cry from saying we know nothing, which is clearly not the case.
@Jayman
A key problem, of course, is that we don’t actually know what it means to be conscious.
I think you’ve conceded Tyndall’s argument there. How can science have advanced in understanding of consciousness when we don’t “know what it means to be conscious”? We do know what “brain function” means, which is why our understanding of brain function HAS advanced hugely.
But “know” is ambiguous in English: 1) understand, be able to define; 2) be familiar with, experience. In sense 2 we do know what it means to be conscious: by introspection and subjective experience. E.g., what is “red”? You know because you’ve experienced the quale at which the linguistic symbol is pointing. But the definition of “red” conveys nothing qualial to someone blind, though they could understand all the concepts associated with it: lightwaves, photons, nerve-signals, neural processing, etc.
Many of us have some conception in mind, but we don’t know what it is, even from a mechanistic standpoint. Try make a definition of “to be conscious.” Without even knowing this, it’s not surprising that we don’t know precisely how it works. Again, that’s a far cry from saying we know nothing, which is clearly not the case.
If you accept that we can’t define consciousness, you’re accepting Tyndall’s point: that it is a scientific mystery. We can easily define, investigate and analyze “brain function”: organized electro-chemical activity susceptible to mathematical modelling, etc. We can’t define consciousness: we can only point at it using symbols. But note that any definition ultimately ends in undefinable qualia, so you might call consciousness the fundamental axiom in epistemology. That’s why science is having problems with it.
The question of dualism:
Imagine a universe running parallel with and identical to our own except that there is no consciousness in it. On present scientific understanding, there is no reason to believe that this is impossible. Science is not animistic: it does not believe that matter has to be vitalized by spirit, i.e. consciousness, in order to act in complex ways. So matter is autonomous and brain function does not have to be accompanied by consciousness (on our current understanding). An android with an electronic brain might be able to mimic human behavior perfectly and not be conscious. That is scientifically plausible. Monism is sufficient for an android and for a universe without consciousness: they contain nothing but matter, energy and their interactions. Our universe contains something ontologically distinct: consciousness. So (ontological) dualism applies to our universe.
But brain function, in any kind of material brain, may necessarily generate consciousness. Does it? We don’t know, because we have no understanding of consciousness. That is why an electronic brain without consciousness is plausible. Like a computer, the human brain is a physical mechanism that processes information. But the brain is more than an information-processing mechanism: it’s also conscious. The most sophisticated modern computer is not conscious (we assume).
A question:
Can a computer be made of substance X? We answer that by examining whether substance X can be organized for the requirements of computation: a way to represent and manipulate information, a program, a memory store, etc. So a computer can indeed be made of clockwork or hydraulics. And, in theory, a society or eco-system could be deliberately designed or co-opted as a computer: see Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the planet Earth and its life were designed to function as a giant computer.
Another question:
Can a conscious brain be made of substance X? We can’t answer that general question because we don’t know what meets the “requirements” of consciousness, as opposed to the requirements of computation. We don’t know whether “wetness” is essential in a conscious brain. We don’t know whether information has to be processed at a certain speed. Could brain-function take place in blocks of activity separated by indefinite periods of stasis and still produce consciousness? We don’t know. A society or eco-system is obviously more complex and “processes” much more information than an individual human brain. But is a society or eco-system actually or potentially conscious? We don’t know now any more than scientists did in Tyndall’s day.
So there’s a clear distinction between the computational aspect of a brain, which we understand in ever greater depth and detail, and the consciousness-generating aspect of a brain, which we don’t understand at all. If we understood the latter, we would be able to answer general questions like: Can a conscious brain be made of substance X? Does entity Y possess consciousness?
Science fiction has been exploring these ideas for a long time. I’ve not read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for years, but I think the point about androids is (or could be) that they mimic human behavior without being conscious. That is perfectly plausible, because human behavior is clearly a computational phenomenon susceptible to modelling by non-conscious mechanisms. Barring civilizational collapse (which I don’t rule out), it won’t be long before a non-conscious computer will become a “native speaker” of a human language and be able to pass the Turing test with ease. There won’t be anything you can ask a sufficiently sophisticated but non-conscious computer that will distinguish it from a conscious interlocutor. So consciousness in others is not objectively “there” like gravity: it is an inference from behavior. It isn’t solipsistic to say this. There is no proof that anyone who appears conscious is actually conscious, just as there is no proof to the contrary. Honest solipsism would require proof that no-one else is conscious.
Here is another map that can be seen as reflective of the American Nations: NFL fandom.
@smb:
Thanks. The previous year’s map in featured in my post More Maps of the American Nations. Good to see no big changes since then (as we’d expect).
I’m leaving my response to the recent Diana Fleischman interview
here:
Not all men seek sexual variety. Such varies greatly between different men (and varies greatly between groups). This difference is heritable. Some men are high-investment one-women men (dads). Others tend to be lower investment and like to play the field (cads). These likely represent a trade-off between relatively slower vs faster life-history strategies, respectively.
Sounds about right.
Interesting…
As with all things, I wonder how this applies cross-culturally? I’d suspect it’s similar everywhere, but many cross-cultural findings are known to suprise.
Indeed. Religion, politics, verbal IQ, education. Those are the biggest psychological qualities people seem to assortatively mate for.
Probably good advice. Why try to sail against the current?
Oh yes….
I will add on this point, that people’s conceptions and beliefs about the world often tie to the very heart of who they are. Is this is not even just moral beliefs (I believe X is good or bad), but claims to *fact* about the world. This is why someone like me can find it difficult to talk about about certain topics with certain people. Free will, diet and health, and (for the PC crowd) racial and gender differences are reliable hot button issues.
Very interesting and informative talk.
@Insider:
I would suggest reading my sections on IQ, specifically here and here. The g-factor does indeed emerge from the correlation between mental abilities, but is real for reasons beyond that. For one, it is highly heritable, and is considerably predictive of a host of things. As well, there are morphological correlates in brain itself.
Call this “Heartiste comment shaming.”
Either it be technical problems or deliberate action, my comments just don’t show up there. Either way, it should get fixed. So from now on, whenever I write a key comment to something written at Chateau Heartiste that doesn’t get posted after a reasonable amount of time, I’m going to leave it here.
This latest one was in response to his post “Cognitive Stratification And Female Obesity“:
1. Marriage rates haven’t changed much (-10%) among the upper classes, ala Charles Murray’s own data:
2. Meritocracy is your problem, not assortative mating. Even without assortative mating, high-IQ progeny of the high-IQ M/low-IQ F matings will rise to the top, while their low-IQ siblings will sink.
But then, it’s not so much meritocracy as it is reality: Gregory Clark found this same pattern everywhere in world, from India to Sweden, China to Britain.
Except that assortative mating is strongest for (verbal) IQ, not education or social class per se. People of similar IQs but different social/educational backgrounds find each other.
There is considerable assortative mating for BMI, as well, for the record.
Also for what it’s worth, for White Americans born in the 1960s anyway, there appears to be slightly eugenic fertility overall. This appears to have been driven by considerably eugenic fertility among men, despite dysgenic fertility among women.
You may, to some extent, have gotten your wish:
Idiocracy Can Wait? | JayMan’s Blog
I’m not sure why cognitive stratification (and for other traits) is a bad thing. Non-assortative mating merely hastens the rate certain clans revert to the mean (in both directions). Certain clans persist on the top while others sit on the bottom regardless. Seeing meaningful change takes many, many generations here even with low assortative mating.
Jayman-
I’m not sure if you’ve ever presented any analysis like this before, but I found a fairly strong correlation between life expectancy at birth (by state and race/ethnicity) and (state averaged) math scores in 8th grade.
You can see the graph here.
life expectancy data
test score data
This seems a much better fit than GDP per capita or “inequality”….
LE by state gini
per capita income
I suspect the fit would be quite better still if I actually had the data handy by each major group in each state (instead of just the state averages) and/or broader adult scores and the like, but this still strikes me as decent proxy for population IQ and other genetically influenced variables of interest between states, regions, and the like. I think it helps capture some of the regional differences in somewhat more objective, quantitive, and probably better weighted terms than your map of the americas or what have you….
Err, on second thought, I just found the NAEP data explorer tool and found detailed scores by ethnic group…..
Here is the same thing against NAEP 8th grade math scores by race/ethnic group
Jayman-
You may be interested in some additional analysis on life expectancy and various causes of mortality using a variety of sources. The focus is on over-attribution of health outcomes to healthcare differences, but you may be particularly interested in some data into the causes of mortality and/or estimated years of life lost by race/ethnicity. It’s kind of long and crude at the moment….. (will probably refine this later)
You may also be interested in a in-depth analysis of differences in the “white non-hispanic” populations across different states, i.e., observed correlations between NAEP test scores, smoking rates, obesity rates, life expectancy, and various types of mortality. I also created a few heatmaps for that same data amongst non-hispanic whites in standard deviations from the mean (with the same sign/direction) and same color schemes/weights to observe apparent patterns more easily. 🙂
I’ve just begun reading and digesting your thorough discourses, some of which I don’t feel educated sufficiently to fully understand. From reading and living (78 years), I’m inclined to believe that genetic heredity is by far the strongest influence in the development and conduct of an individual, with culture as a less than 50% factor. On the issue of “I.Q.”, I hold all commenters on this subject suspect (that is, those who correlate IQ with various other aspects, including especially ‘race’), because they apparently have high IQs (I do, as well). We all come to our opinions and findings with our biases. Has there been any check on how the IQ of any person affects his/her opinions and findings through this “IQ-effect” in any realm of study?
Another observation: I have not seen any studies in the realm(s) you address which use the Myers-Briggs typology in looking at humans (I see that you, or one of your references, looked at The Big Five, which is somewhat related). It seems that each of us is destined to fall into one of 16 classifications, and that these are arrayed in predictable proportion in a given large population (at least in the USA). That nature has decreed, let us say, that there will be so many of each Type, with their different “preferences” (the official terminology) seems an important marker.
@Ron Pavellas:
Thanks for the compliments.
I suspect that IQ isn’t the primary factor in believing in IQ or its genetic basis, but something else (e.g. clannishness).
The Myers-Briggs doesn’t seem to have any predictive validity, so I don’t use it. Even the Big Five has its issues, which is why I favor the HEXACO (which still isn’t perfect).
@Jayman I’m wondering what you mean by this statement. What the heck does clannishness have to do with belief in IQ? Do you think higher or lower clannish people are more likely to believe in IQ? Because low-clannish people like NW Europeans don’t seem believe in IQ at all despite evidence for it all around us; on the flip side, I don’t see more highly-clannish people like Sub-Saharan Africans accepting it either, especially because of the mild negative correlation between clannishness and IQ.
@Lion of the Judah-sphere:
Blacks outside the U.S. believe in human differences.
Low clannishness correlates with believe in P.C.
@Jayman So how do you think you arrived at your acceptance of the stark realities of human nature? As you mentioned, high IQ and exposure to genetics/psychometrics literature alone doesn’t seem to lead people there, so do you think high clannishness somehow did the trick?
I thought you might appreciate this video from CollegeHumor; it sums up rather well what you’ve gathered together in your “Obesity Facts” page.
@Anonymous:
Absolutely brilliant! Thank you, going to add that to the page.
Another resource of interest, that seems to have slipped by the HBD community, as far as I can tell… these two neat little papers by Del Giudice, on how biological sex differences have been underestimated in the literature due to the use of univariate effect sizes and low-sensitivity scales like the Big 5:
Click to access DelGiudice_etal_2012_global-sex-differences_personality_pone.pdf
Click to access delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf
Multivariate effect sizes come with a lot of caveats, but seem like the natural choice for measuring magnitudes along multidimensional scales. Del Giudice gives a nice demonstration of their power with regard to facial structure (this is from the second paper):
“A good example is provided by sexual dimorphism in facial morphology (see Figure 1). If one
compares men and women on individual anatomical traits such as mouth width, forehead
height, eyebrow thickness, and eye size, univariate differences tend to be relatively
unimpressive. For example, a study by Ferrario, Sforza, Poggio, and Serrao (1996) found
that men had higher foreheads (d = .40), longer jaws (d = .96), and wider faces than women
(d = 1.08), whereas women had wider mouths (d = −.96). These are typical effect sizes in
this domain. Their unsigned average is .85, corresponding to an overlap of 50% between
the male and female distributions of facial traits. Given that male and female faces are
discriminated with more than 95% accuracy by human observers (Bruce et al., 1993), this
has to be a gross underestimate of the actual magnitude of sexual dimorphism. Indeed,
when individual traits are integrated in a multivariate analysis, much larger differences are
found. For example, Hennessy, McLearie, Kinsella, and Waddington (2005) applied D to
sex differences in facial morphology and found an effect size of about D = 3.2,
corresponding to an overlap of only 7% between the male and female distributions (Fig. 3
in Hennessy et al., 2005; note that D2 was plotted instead of D).”
Hey, JayMan, if you’ve got a few minutes to kill, read this article and tell us everything that’s wrong with it: http://naturalsociety.com/4-ways-actually-make-new-years-resolution-work/
Cheers.
Hello Jayman,
I am interested in your thoughts on the studies presented in the following two articles:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/27/sleeping-drugs-increased-risk-alzheimers
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/erectile-dysfunction-drugs-skin-cancer-worry-201406057197
My impression is that these studies are misleading and confuse correlation with causation (old people take pills and get dementia and old men take ED drugs and get skin cancer) but I was curious about your thoughts.
Hi Jayman. I realise that population genetics is possibly not so much your thing. However I know that you are a fan of Greg Cochran and Razib Khan, who both write about pop gen on their blogs. Given your criticism of poor methodology in science, I would like to know your thoughts on academics publishing papers with grand theories about human population movements in prehistory, and the spread of languages and cultures, which are based on little more than N=1 or N=2 sample sizes of ancient DNA taken from skeletons.
@chrisdavies09:
Sometimes that’s informative. And other times, obviously not. I’d have to look at the matter a lot closer to make any pronouncements on it.
From Prof. M Thomas P Gilbert, Associate Professor, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen:-
“Ancient DNA studies often draw fantastic levels of press coverage. Rarely a month passes these days, without highly accessed web sites such as BBC news having at least one ancient DNA related study on the front page[…]
Researchers are doing amazing work exploiting ancient DNA to understand the past. And I really do mean this – the amounts of information we can glean from typical sources of material, including degraded archaeological bone, soils, ice and even coprolites – coupled with some of the state of the art analyses that can be applied to the data, is revealing findings that were beyond our wildest dreams only 10 years ago[…]
[…]There is one catch however, and it is the central point of my post. The samples sizes of almost all of these high profile studies are n = small. Actually, n= very small. Like 1. Now don’t get me wrong; there are a number of very good reasons for this.
The first problem is cost. At the core of most leading ancient DNA studies these days is palaeogenomics – that is the recovery of not just snapshots of DNA, but the majority of the genome within any specimen. Genomes, from modern specimens, are not cheap, falling in the range of thousands of dollars. Genomes from ancient specimens are even more expensive since the DNA is highly degraded, mixed with microbial DNA, and so on. Study costs can easily get into the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars per genome.
Secondly, there is simply a lack of material to work on. Either samples simply don’t exist (the Denisovan fingerbone was the only bone at that time discovered), or if they do, they don’t contain DNA due to age or poor preservation (e.g. the Flores hominids). Those samples that do exist are often (rightly or wrongly) buried under too much red tape to enable the destructive sampling required to exploit them. And thus, we come to my central point. Small sample sizes, when covered with wide press coverage looking for a sensationalist angle are dangerous. Yes, single samples can provide incredible, news-worthy insights. But a key question is, how much can we actually extrapolate from these findings? This is not just a problem in palaeogenomics – many other disciplines face the challenge of reconstructing scenarios based on limited data. But not all disciplines routinely get quite as much press, and as thus find their implications spreading rapidly into secondary educational resources such as blogs, text books and popular science articles, without the primary literature being consulted. Simple example – I still come across articles today discussing some incredible results (Woodward et al. 1994) derived from the early 1990s that reported the recovery of DNA from dinosaur remains (http://www.unmuseum.org/dnadino.htm). The problem is, that shortly following the initial success publication, it was rapidly demonstrated that the results derived from human contamination (Hedges and Schweitzer 1995), and for sound biochemical reasons, the chance of dino DNA really being there is essentially zero (Lindahl 1993). Ancient DNA results, in particular the first ones on whatever the latest sensational story is, spread far and wide, and later voices arguing alternate viewpoints have a much harder time being heard.
And so back to my point. How many of the recent palaeogenomic-based findings will hold up with time, as larger datasets are analysed? Were there really 3 founder sources to the modern European population as recently claimed using palaeogenomic data from three differentiated ancient populations (BBC Story; Lazaridis et al., 2014)? Or is this observation simply an artifact of the fact that only material from 3 ancient populations was analysed? If we add a fourth or fifth distinct group, will the number of founders increase? Given that one thing we definitely have learnt from ancient DNA in general, is that the past was way more complex than we can imagine. And so given that, my answer to this question is, I expect so!”
Hi “JayMan”,
while I don’t share your specific racialist notions and despite the fact that I’m not sure about your honesty in relation to your self-described ethnic background, I still would like to pose a question:
If members of specific ethnic groups / “races” were in fact predestined to succeed or fail in life based on the intelligence they inherited (due to belonging to a specific ethnic group that is more likely to be of high or low intelligence compared to another ethnic group) – what solution would you suggest?
One approach I can see is the promotion of “interracial” sexual relationships – something that is certainly not very popular in your white-supremacist circles.
If some people don’t have the intelligence to be rocket-scientists, there are many other occupations and ways how they can contribute. But these opportunities must be provided and not taken away!
I for example don’t understand why people in the Global South are pressured to leave their traditional lifestyles – traditional agriculture for example could easily be utilized for the production of organic and fair trade food – there is an increasing demand for this in the world. But the free-market system doesn’t tolerate co-existence of traditional agriculture and industrialized farming. So, people are forced to abandon their traditional way of living and are faced with precarious living-conditions in urban slums – where most of these people don’t have the specific kind of education that is required for careers in an urban environment. What are these people supposed to do, when there are no opportunities and occupations that are adequate to their educational and cultural background?
The concept of HBD that you promote, essentially tells society that black people tend to be dumb while whites tend to be clever. That can lead to clever black persons being prejudged and not taken seriously.
Enough for now.
@BulkBogan:
Hook me up with a 23andMe kit and I’ll post the results.
Hello, I recently discovered the HBD blogosphere and it’s both a relief and quite depressing.
I would really like to know how influential your blog is. So can you please disclose how many views your blogs has received so far? Or how many views you get per month? And which country do most of your visitors come from? I’d guess most of the traffic is from USA followed by NW UK, Aus, France, etc.
May I also suggest that you add a “no. of views/hits” counter on the sidebar so everyone can see how many views your blog has received so far. It’d be very encouraging for other people who wish to start their own website writing about HBD but worry that it would make negligible impact. Just a suggestion – I do not want you to feel obliged in any way.
Also, I am glad you exist! Intelligent beings are increasingly rare in this cold, dark universe. So thanks for existing and using your intellect to write the truth about humanity.
@Pulkit K:
See here for a national breakdown:
The HBD of HBD realists – where I get my readers | JayMan’s Blog
My most recent stats look pretty similar.
My number of all time views is closing in on 3/4 of a million. Average monthly views around 30,000.
Thank you! I try, because you’re quite correct, smart folks are very rare.
HI.
I’m grateful that I discovered HBD. It’s a real eye opener, but swallowing the red pill was an exceedingly gut-wrenching experience that, nonetheless, gradually began to radically redefine my perception of race, biological sex, and human psychology. I’ll further refine my enlightenment as I chew through your blog’s “HBD Fundamentals” section and the reading material that it holds.
Unfortunately, trying to get other people into HBD is incredibly difficult, but it’s an absolute nightmare prospect when your principle target audience are your fellow blacks (of which the lion’s share seem to be thoroughly hooked on the drug-like mantra espoused by Democratic white liberals and their black puppets).
I’m all for forwarding the group, but it’s become quite apparent that such a noble objective is fraught with certain failure when one factors in the median IQ of American blacks. Some blacks, most likely those with a greater echelon if innate intelligence, will come to terms with the discomforting facts of reality, but the majority of my kin and kith are firmly set in their ways. Eugenics are a theoretical possibility for black advancement, but a (somewhat) more socially and politically acceptable option would be intra-racial segregation. To my current knowledge, no African American leader to date has ever campaigned for such a thing (with a possible exception being made for the honorable W.E.B. Du Bois).
Or maybe we can all wait until test tube babies become affordable.
At any rate, nice blog.
Two convenience stores in China briefly experimented with automated checkout systems. The results were predictable: http://en.rocketnews24.com/2015/06/13/honesty-experiment-in-china-ends-with-losses-of-20-percent-for-participating-convenience-stores/
Jayman-
You may be interested in latest blog post, a brief and rather casual analysis of NLSY97 height data. I find that controlling for sex, race/ethnicity, and height of both biological parents allows me to predict height quite accurately (unsurprisingly). Perhaps more surprising to some (environmentalists), I find that parent income has zero effect on their offspring’s adult height (likewise for other measures of SES). I also find increasing heritability of height as people age, i.e., the children of tall parents, especially boys, tend to gain in ordinal terms…. (which has some relevance to IQ and other topics of interest)
FDM
did you adopt your children?
how can two women have a child together?
What is the best study to cite to show that:
1) IQ has a greater impact on achievement than socio-economic status
2) IQ is mostly hereditary (i.e. a specific twin study meta-analysis)
The two effects are mostly equal. But Charles Murray’s sibling comparisons are telling.
I found this with blogsearch for “hispanic paradox”, but I couldn’t comment on that
2014-page here. Is it smoking as I found here:
“phd student explains puzzling hispanic paradox”
did they eat less trans fats ?
(or both together)
seems to me that hispanics just had a delay and coronary deaths are rising now
while US-born coronary deaths are declining since decades
I’m posting this here because it got held up in spam (WordPress sucks at times) over at Chick’s (this post) and people need to see this:
“Strikingly, the major axis of genetic differention in Spain runs west to east, while conversely there is remarkable genetic similarity in the north-south direction.”
This is a very key finding, and let me explain why:
I’ve been getting a lot of confused commenters over at my latest piece at Unz (Clannishness – the Series: Zigzag Lightning in the Brain). Basically, many are bewildered by the success of NW Euros over other groups because NW Euros weren’t always so successful. They don’t understand that evolution can proceed fairly quickly (or at least a lot quicker than they’re imagining).
But we here we see that the major gradient of genetic/ancestral differences in Spain is perpendicular to the gradient in IQ, clannishness, and other key traits! This is strong evidence for recent evolution (within the last few centuries), because this indicates that, despite being different genetically, people in adject corners of Spain (along the east-west direction) nontheless developed similarities in key traits. In other words, convergent evolution.
This, by the way, applies for all of Europe.
The reason people in the past seem different is because they were different.
Hi Jayman – love your site. Just wondered if you were aware of John Gray, whose thinking (especially on religion and the New Atheists) chimes well with yours, although from a slightly different angle. This is as good a place to start as any: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists
Like you (and me), he falls very much into the “self-aware, reflective atheist” camp, that eschews knee-jerk hostility to religion; and there are striking parallels between your insight that many modern mores are simply misplaced religious impulses finding new expressions, and his view that the history of the modern, secular West is largely a disastrous series of attempts to recreate religious-style Utopias in a secular context, where they’ve been vastly more destructive than religion ever was.
His 2003 book Straw Dogs is one of the great assaults on the sort of lazy thinking you like to challenge too. If you like the article I’ve linked to, I’d highly recommend it.
Cheers, Tom
I have some questions on sex differences:
1. Currently, what does the data show on IQ differnces between men and women? Is it a situation where men fill the extremes (retards and geniuses) while women at large fall in as average? Or something else?
2. In terms of both physical attraction (like how muscular a man is) and not-so physical attraction (as in, personality), what are women at large drawn to? I ask because I’ve seen and heard conflicting claims from both feminists and Manosphere types.
3. Which sex is more moral? I know more homicides are committed by men (and against other men more than women) but what about stuff like sincere charity work (as in, not doing a charity just to signal to others)?
The answer to this is not obvious because of a simply but pervasive problem: certain people refuse to participate in tests, and more often these people are men. This makes it hard to get the perfectly representative adult samples you need to answer this question.
Also difficult to study. Why? Because which women are we talking about? There is a great deal of individual variation, and depending on how you choose you sample, you can get quite different results.
Define “moral”.
Jayman — I’m interested in the phenomenon of Black SciFi/Fantasy/ComicBook nerds, these being people I instantly connect with even though I generally fear Blacks or am at least irritated by what I take to be their tendency toward a sort of childish loudness and space-dominating physical assertiveness. Also, I’ve noticed that Black students in the philosophy-classes that I teach are frequently able to philosophize — they have a feel for what it is to speculate in a useless, imaginative way — while Chinese students almost never are (only one exception in the last decade). I brought this up in a jokey kind of way at Westhunter, asking about Jimi Hendrix’s “SciFi Nerd gene” — whether it was inherited through his Northern European ancestors (he looks to me as though he has a couple of European great-grandparents) or whether the ancestral pre-Neanderthal African population had it. (But Chinese people don’t seem to have it — although Japanese people do, don’t they, along with a weirdly Western-structured language ….) Okay, I’m an idiot, but … any thoughts about this …?
No thoughts on this, I guess. I won’t be back.
Jayman,
I had read your article regarding your criticism of the alt-right. In many ways I am firmly in your camp in terms of being against them. Most of them really are no better than regressive leftists, and in many ways there are not many differences in their behavior.
However, unfortunately, it seems that accepting HBD does inevitably lead to the beliefs of the alt- right, that whites and Asians are superior races, while blacks, Hispanics and Arabs are inferior. If high IQ is necessary to have a functioning society, HBD clearly shows that blacks and other non-oriental/non-white groups are simply not capable of this, in particular blacks. If this is indeed the case, it is not surprising why some on the alt-right are calling for simply wiping Africans off the face of the earth, for if they are simply not capable of creating functional societies in an increasingly globalized world, there is no reason for them to exist. Sadly, the alt-right is very much in ascendance, and it is quite possible that not terribly far in the future, a large number of western whites will come to adopt this ideology.
Is there any way to avoid this? To reiterate, I am most assuredly NOT an adherent of the alt-right, and I very much want you to prove me wrong.
Inevitably? Hardly. I don’t have such belief, and neither so many others.
“Alt-right” folks don’t realize that HBD applies to them just as it does anyone else. The reason some call for aggression towards other races is because of their own nature (the Nazis didn’t come out of a vacuum). Should the truth of HBD gain wider acceptance, these sort of people still need to be marginalized and decried and kept away from the levers of power.
I have read some of your work saying that white populations are not interchangeable, and that Eastern Europeans will never produce the same civilizations as Western Europeans. Of course, if you were to tell this to alt-righters, they would say that it’s because the Jews have been holding their white brethren from achieving their true potential. However, it doesn’t seem like HBD shows any downsides to white genes, while it seems that African genes are severely flawed. Like it or not, white nationalism is on the rise, and this is something we as non-whites must acknowledge. Whether they are full of shit or not, they are dangerous.
You mean nothing like the very universalism that now threatens NW Euros?
Quite right. That’s why they need to be kept out of positions of power.
But what happens once they throw away that universalism? I’m predicting a potential mass genocide of non-whites in the coming years unless the tide is stemmed soon. I support Donald Trump, but I do fear that his presidency could be a gateway for future alt-right politicians who will push segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, among other things.
Oh yes, those genocidal maniacs in the alt-right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aG-VQYGhA
How terrifying.
In all seriousness, though, outbred Northwest Europeans in America (and anywhere else) will not dispense with universalism. If you like ethnic diversity and civic abstraction within an individualist superstructure, it’s the clannish American Nations, as represented by the alt-right, that you need to worry about.
I find ethnic diversity and civic abstraction within an individualist superstructure hideous, due to my heritable temperament. So, I will continue to support the alt-right as I have for years while remaining cognizant of the possible long-term danger to myself or my family on account of us being nonwhites.
Jayman,
Do you have any information on the physical/mental health and wellness of mixed indivduals? Is it true that mulattoes, for example, are the least physically healthy of all interracial offspring and that hapas are more inclined to be mentally unstable?
The key problem with such studies is two fold: for one, they depend on self-identification. Second, being in an interracial relationship isn’t random, so they don’t tell you anything about merely being mixed race.
Forgive me, but I’m not sure I follow. Self-identification is irrelevant in light of genetic testing, is it not? I can say I identify as a pure-blooded Cherokee, for example, but my genes would clearly show that my ancestry is European, Indian and African. I don’t see what your second point has to do with anything. I’m not asking about the people who engage in interracial relationships, I’m asking about the children of their unions.
There are indeed ways of getting around the self-identification issue. I don’t think anyone has done that, yet.
The people that go in give you the children that come out.
Jayman,
I know you’ve been following the situation in Dallas. I know you stand against white nationalists, and I applaud you for doing so, but the increasing frequency of these situations, coupled with the emerging truths of HBD, simply seem to give their positions greater credence. If the wealthiest blacks are more than twice as likely to commit violent crime than the poorest whites, it doesn’t look good. I’d like to know your thoughts on the subject.
Jayman, I am also interested in HBD ,but I recent watched a video on Youtube about race where someone argued that the way we look at aborigines peoples today is how Ancient Egyptians would have looked at Europeans several thousand years ago, ie lower intelligence, less contributions, etc.
I’m not looking for an argument, but I believe his point gives a great deal of support to the cultural relativist side of things. Do you have any thoughts or comments?
Because Egyptians and Europeans were then identical to how each group is now (considering White Europeans as we known them today didn’t even exist back then).