RationalWiki Hagiography

kompromat-rational-wiki

Is here at last: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anatoly_Karlin

It is almost certainly courtesy of Internet lolcow Oliver D. Smith (Twitter), with whom I had this short exchange a few hours before its publication:

twitter-oliver-d-smith

Although I appreciate their help in actualizing my potential, there are a number of errors that I wish to clear up.

Anatoly Karlin is a Russian alt-rightwhite nationalist anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist blogger who promotes racialist pseudoscience. …

Despite having political views typical of neo-Nazis and white nationalists and even speaking alongside Richard Spencer on a podium — Karlin is a crypto-Nazi, who describes himself as a non-racist “liberal race realist“.[2]Do You Believe That?

I am no mere Neo-Nazi, crypto or otherwise. I identify as the reincarnation of Mecha-Hitler from Wolfenstein 3D, my extremism is so off the charts that even Ben “Race War Now” Garrison quails before me.

However, this doesn’t preclude me from having excellent relations with the Jews. I will even be voting for one of the very best Jews on March 18.

He writes for Russia InsiderWikipedia's W.svg and UNZ Review.

I do not write for Russia Insider, they just reprint me, with my permission.

Karlin says he became a “race realist” and proponent of “HBD” (human-biodiversity) in 2012 after reading Richard Lynn; he now promotes race and IQ pseudoscience on his blog.[6]

I did not so much “become” a race realist in 2012 as that I started to openly write about racial IQ differences, specifically on how it is implausible to attribute them all to the environment.

Although I respect Lynn’s work, he had very little influence on me, because I read him after I was already familiar with the work of Charles Murray, Philippe J. Rushton, etc.

In January 2018, Karlin wrote a blog post on UNZ Review defending paedophile apologist Emil Kirkegaard, who said “a compromise is having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it“. Karlin maintains Kirkegaard was somehow misquoted or taken out of context by so-called SJWs, when this isn’t the case.[10]

You can judge for yourself here: Inaccuracies in Rationalwiki’s (Oliver D. Smith’s) page about me.

PS. RationalWiki needs help padding out my bio:

He’s published over a thousand blog posts on UNZ Review. Lots more of his crazy views can be added to article. SkepticDave (talk) 03:31, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Feel free to pitch in.

Comments

  1. As this famous quote says it:
    There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

    I just want to know that if one day you wanted to enter politics in Russia, would this be possible, or would your associations (as mentioned in RationalWiki) disqualify you?

  2. The AK Rises.

  3. Daniel Chieh says

    Congratulations. This fulfills one of your predictions for 2018, yes?

  4. Anyone else notice that Mr Karlin looks completely different in every picture he publishes?

  5. And think…nobody even mentioned that you’re a political admirer of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. 🙂

  6. I was just ready to mention that very fact myself! He really does…he must be the Russian version of the ‘human chameleon*!

    *Set in the 1920s and 1930s, the film focuses on Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a nondescript man who has the ability to transform his appearance to that of the people who surround him. He is first observed at a party by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who notes that Zelig related to the affluent guests in a refined Boston accent and shared their Republican sympathies, but while in the kitchen with the servants, he adopted a coarser tone and seemed to be more of a Democrat. He soon gains international fame as a “human chameleon”.

    If you haven’t seen ‘Zelig’ you’re missing one of Allen’s best and funniest films!

  7. Oliver D. Smith says

    Emil Kirkegaard was never “smeared” by s0-called SJW’s since newspapers and other news sources, covering the entire political-spectrum exposed him as a child-rape/paedophilia apologist and neo-Nazi; the Socialist Worker is far-left wing, The Guardian is left wing , The Independent is centrist, The Telegraph is centre-right, while the Daily Mail, right-wing. As for far-right, there is a thread on Stormfront criticizing Kirkegaard’s obscene child rape comments. It’s not a right or left issue, but right or wrong: anyone with a moral conscience can see Kirkegaard is a vile human and paedophile.

    And no surprise, it turns out the sick freak Kirkegaard is a fan of animated baby porn and wants it made legal:
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard#Animated_baby_porn

  8. Leftists called me a Nazi in college about 30 year ago. And I was a garden variety center-right conservative then (granted, I was older than most students having come from military service in Asia).

    Calling political opponents or anyone with whom left disagrees (or just anyone with a clean haircut who calls people “sir” or “ma’am”) a Nazi is just tiresome, old, and unoriginal.

  9. Rationalwiki is garbage. Worse than wikipedia.

  10. Was he apologising for paedophiles when he said they should be castrated?

  11. Smith portrays you as way more based than you actually are.

  12. Greasy William says

    how come you aren’t tall and blonde like most Russians?

  13. Also, nowhere in the article linked on your site does he say that he is a fan, or in anyway likes, animated child pornography. Nor does he ‘want it made legal’ (it was already legal in Denmark when the article was written), he presents arguments against making it illegal. You’re a liar.

  14. German_reader says

    Pretty thin stuff, they’ve got nothing about your Russian nationalism, Ukraine etc. Very US-centric.

  15. German_reader says

    anyone with a moral conscience can see Kirkegaard is a vile human and paedophile.

    I think Kirkegaard’s “thought experiment” was rather misguided (and there was a lengthy discussion about that in the thread about SJWs attacking the London conference), but there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that he himself has any pedophile tendencies, let alone has ever acted on them. Nor he can be called a dedicated pedophilia apologist based on just one or two strange blog posts. That’s just a smear, and shows how rotten mainstream media has become.

  16. So, guilt by association, with the association being not to an actual person but to a dishonest portrayal of that person. Nice work.

  17. Reading Karlin’s blog for a couple weeks – I would say he is a talented blogger. He tries to stick to facts. He reports on various interesting things and doesn’t seem interested in propaganda.

    That doesn’t endorse his views which are obviously not all sensible. But Karlin seems like the most reasonable and open-minded writer on the Unz website. Also kind of rebellious views so he would be the first one sent to the gulag – he would hardly fit in well with the totalitarian ideology the article is claiming he endorses.

    Article is relying on a ‘guilt by association’ based on the fact that many other authors on the Unz website are nutjobs who write propaganda (although entertaining propaganda at least), and that he was reprinted by the Russia Insider website.

    (A plausible case could be made that Russia Insider is somekind of CIA project, perfectly timed to self-destruct the pro-Russia public relations).

  18. how come you aren’t tall and blonde like most Russians?

    In Russia, there are around 190 different nationalities or different origins that people can have – quite a few people have interesting backgrounds.

  19. I don’t think it would even come up. Russians (mostly) don’t speak english. Writing in a small alternative magazine wouldn’t have any effects.

  20. I respectfully don’t give too much credence to the last point. More appropriate for Navalny.

    Like it or not, the pro-Russian perspective has some suspect views, as is true among other advocacies. Such perspectives are far from monolithic.

    My not being a sovok doesn’t by default put me in bed with everyone sharing a pro-Russian/non-sovok slant.

    The recently contentious RI piece in question covered all angles, in terms of accentuating the matter of the Jews, while simultaneously cautioning against a collective negativity towards them. The article ended seeking a wider audience – something its author restated in his own words.

    At the same time, the matter of “Jewish influence” has been covered over the decades. With that in mind, the RI piece doesn’t offer anything especially new, along with some errors to boot. Covering the very same general subject, Alfred Lilienthal’s late 1970s book “The Zionist Connection”, is an interesting read.

  21. For sure.

    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/12/countering-anti-russian-propaganda.html

    Overall, Russia’s strength is its multiethnic dynamic.

  22. Daniel Chieh says

    The Speaker really only wants the best for all transhumans.

    http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/speaker.png

  23. Are you being sarcastic or not? German_reader seems to think not?

  24. Very US-centric.

    We might have known that you or RT would whine about this.

  25. FWIW, I don’t believe that AK is an anti-Semite.

    I do note that he hasn’t explained exactly how Russian Jews would fit into his Russian Nationalism project.

  26. Karlin also seems hesitant to point out how relations with Ukraine might change/improve within his vision of a more nationalistic Russia. Searching for things that he may have said several years back is not wholly satisfying. He definitely needs to bring things up to date.

  27. I think my summary was accurate.

  28. Karlin also seems hesitant to point out how relations with Ukraine might change/improve

    I don’t see any hesitancy or imprecision there.

    He seems fairly straightforward in his opinion that there is no such thing as a “Ukrainian” separate from being a Russian.

  29. Swedish Family says

    If you haven’t seen ‘Zelig’ you’re missing one of Allen’s best and funniest films!

    I very much agree, but you left out that it’s obviously a brilliant parody of Jewish people’s yearning to “fit in.”

  30. Swedish Family says

    It’s not a right or left issue, but right or wrong: anyone with a moral conscience can see Kirkegaard is a vile human and paedophile.

    Anyone with a brain can see that he is a through-the-roof high IQ, slightly aspie freethinker who went overboard with the outside-the-box thinking. It happens. Live and let live.

  31. Swedish Family says

    (A plausible case could be made that Russia Insider is somekind of CIA project, perfectly timed to self-destruct the pro-Russia public relations).

    Yes, but it would very likely be baseless. Like it or not, they give voice to the reductionist worldview of most Western russophiles (Washington = all bad, so therefore Moscow = all good).

  32. He seems fairly straightforward in his opinion that there is no such thing as a “Ukrainian” separate from being a Russian.

    I haven’t exactly read an explicit statement made by him about this rather obtuse and historically revisionist point of view. If it’ true, his opinion seems to be flying directly into the face of historic reality.

  33. guilt by association

    ?

    Funny, I don’t see anything nearly as reprehensible that you’ve written to compare directly with what one can find directly attributable to Kirkegaard:

    <

    blockquote>Perhaps a compromise is having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it (so, using sleeping medicine). If they dont[sic] notice it is difficult to see how they cud[sic] be harmed, even if it is rape.[27]

    <

    blockquote>

    Your seeming greenlight here to Kirkegard seems rather out of character here? What gives?

  34. Oliver D. Smith says

    He penned an essay defending animated baby-porn and argues for it to be made legal in Norway and Sweden and any other country that has banned it. So he does support legalising it since the vast majority of countries have banned it (Denmark being the only notable exception).

    When questioned if he supports possession/legalising of real child porn, what did he say?

    https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard&diff=prev&oldid=1862554

    “As for possession, I’m unsure. My blogpost is from 2012, 5 years ago, and I haven’t thought much of the topic since.”

    What kind of an answer is that? Only something a paedophile would write. A non-paedophile of course is against child porn, but Kirkegaard is ambiguous/undecided and refuses to be against it.

    Furthermore, Kirkegaard uses the paedophilia-apologist definition of paedophilia as pre-pubescent:
    https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard&diff=prev&oldid=1863285

    In his essay where he proposes a compromise for paedophiles is to rape children while they sleep, Kirkegaard wrote:

    “One can have sex with some rather young ones (say, any consenting child in puberty) without any moral problems.”

    Children in puberty are as young as 11-12; in other words Kirkegaard literally supports adults having sex with children, who while not pre-pubescent are still under the age of consent.
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard#Child_rape

    Why are you defending a blatant paedophile?

  35. Daniel Chieh says

    You can actually write any of the MSM distributors as “right” while not breaking out in laughter. Well done.

  36. I think that this was obvious, to anyone familiar with Jewish history and humor. You know, Karlin has admitted to having some Jewish roots in his lineage, maybe he’s a gene recipient of this phenomena?
    You have to admit that he does look strangely different in most of his photographs? 🙂

    BTW, has anybody noticed that Anatoly’s pupils seem to have dissapeared from his eyeballs in his latest reincarnation in the related photo?….

  37. So you admit that he didn’t say anything indicating he was ‘a fan of animated baby porn’ (your words) and you were lying? And you still haven’t answered my question if he was apologising for paedophiles when he said they should be castrated

  38. Oliver D. Smith says

    Kirkegaard showed up on RationalWiki in 2017 to defend child rape, since he claims there is no mental harm if adults rape children:

    “My remark was simply that if you have sex with someone [children] while they are asleep and somehow don’t wake up from it and they never discover it later somehow, it is not likely for there to be any causal effects on mental health. How would there be?
    https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard&diff=prev&oldid=1862554

    What sort of person types something like this? Kirkegaard is seriously sick in the mind and anyone defending him here should be ashamed.

  39. It’s all a continuum, and it’s somewhat arbitrary where you want to draw the line between Russia and Poland (that’s why the borders have changed so often). The further into the past you go, the more true that is, back when there was no mass media or mass schooling to spread the Moscow dialect. If you look at old folk dialects and songs in different parts of Russia (study some ethnographic folklore…), they are ALSO very different from “modern literary Russian”. Same thing with Ukraine — the countryside spoke an “older” dialect, the cities spoke a more “modern”, uniform literary/business Russian. The difference with Ukraine is that an elite came into power who for their own legitimacy needed to separate themselves from Moscow, so they decided to create a different standardized language by accentuating and everything that was unique about their local folk dialects, as well as replacing some other Russian words with Polish ones (even the words of the national anthem were taken from Poland). And still, many or most Ukrainians in their cities speak in Russian or in some surzhyk mixture.

    If Ukraine was really a stable nationality, how could a German general boast in 1919 that he had “made it”? https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/123305344/12515549

    We spoke about Russia, which is Hoff-
    mann’s speciality. “Russia,” he said, “can-
    not possibly remain split up into several
    States. It must sooner or later come toge-
    ther again as a political unity. The Uk-
    raine and its secessionists are a mere pass-
    ing phase. In fact, the Ukraine was my
    suggestion, and my creation”—here he
    showed his teeth—”and not a spontaneous
    wish of its inhabitants at all, although the
    Ukrainians may choose to think so.
    DUTCH COURAGE FOR AUSTRIA.
    “I created the Ukraine, to put it bluntly,
    merely in order to have a part of Russia
    to make peace with. For at that special
    moment I had to make peace with somebody
    in order that Czernin, the Austrian Minis-
    ter, might return home with something in
    hand to show to his down-hearted people
    and check them in the dry rot that had set
    in among them. Austria was in a state of
    absolute desperation, especially about food.
    So, the Ukraine and the Treaty of Ukraine
    had willy-nilly to be manufactured in order
    to put some Dutch courage into the quaking
    Austrians.
    “It goes without saying,” Hoffmann
    continued, “that the creation of a separate
    Southern Russia with political independ-
    ence is a rank absurdity—an absolutely
    artificial and temporary thing; and this
    for the simple reason that you cannot have
    a country with its industries in one place
    and its coal districts a thousand miles away
    in another. The centre of whatever in-
    dustries Russia possesses is Moscow, and
    these industries are dependent upon the
    coal of the River Don basin. It is a truly
    Russian piece of unpracticality not to
    bring the industries to the coal, instead of
    trying to take the coal to the industries, as
    we Germans shall no doubt do if we ever
    got the economic management of Russian
    affairs.
    “That is the main point for Europe to
    think of at present. Russia is down. Her
    leaders and her intellectual classes have
    been murdered and annihilated. Now is
    the chance for non-Russian Europe to step
    in and seize control of the whole of the Rus-
    sian resources. Germany would willingly
    do the work and share the profits with the
    Entente if it would help in the plan.
    “Now is the chance which may never
    occur again. Germany is full of young
    men, excellently trained in technical know-
    ledge and skill in engineering, chem-
    istry, and all the rest of the arts and
    crafts of a modern nation”—he did not
    mention poison gas—”and Russia would be
    a wonderful field for their activities, and
    a safety valve to prevent their explosion
    elsewhere in Europe. In the meantime
    Germany is threatened with the overwhelm-
    ing dangers of Bolshevism.”

  40. So… is he wrong? Isn’t he making the same argument as the one about invisible pink unicorns? I’m sure you’re familiar with it. If he IS wrong, within his premises, how?

    I’ll answer for my part: the problem is that his premise is far too likely to be wrong, because there is a relatively high likelihood that the child WILL discover what happened at some point, which would cause horrible mental health effects. IF however we assume that his premise is correct and the child NEVER finds out what happened (which is unlikely, and a bad, immoral risk to take, but assuming that’s the case), then there is no possible way for there to be any mental health effects. If you disagree with this, please explain how. And explain how it’s any different than the invisible pink unicorns argument.

  41. German_reader says

    I think Kirkegaard’s views on this issue are rather misguided (his reasoning seems rather flawed), but they’re a long way from the defense of pedophilia you’re claiming them to be. And there’s zero evidence that Kierkegaard himself has any sexual attraction to children, let alone acted on it. Unless you produce evidence to the contrary, you should stop calling him a pedophile (aren’t you in the UK where there are strict libel laws? Seems like this could be legally relevant).
    Anyway, what’s this got to do with Karlin? Btw, did you actually write that rationalwiki page about him?

  42. It’s a schizo NEET, I wouldn’t be optimistic about reasoning with him

  43. Daniil Adamov says

    The first paragraph I’d more or less agree with, but: “how could a German general boast in 1919 that he had “made it”?” I could boast of having caused Americans to elect Trump with my psychic powers, but that wouldn’t mean it happened. German generals in the 20th century have a terrible track record of claiming to be much smarter and more important than they really were, except, of course, around the Holocaust. More broadly, of course there was some proto-Ukrainean feeling in some parts of what is now Ukraine for far longer than that, and Ukrainean nationalism as such definitely predated WWI, though not all people who would now pass as Ukraineans would have found it relatable.

  44. I have never seen child porn so I am not sure what it is. Or maybe I did and did not even know it. I have been to museums where I saw paintings or photographs of naked children. I have seen many naked children on beaches in Europe. It used to be normal. I did not think there was anything wrong with it.

    So what is child porn and why are we supposed to be so upset about it that we send people to prison for it? For very stiff sentences here in the US of A. You seem to be very upset about child porn so I presume you know a lot about child pornography. Could you explain to ignoramuses like me why should we be upset like yourself?

  45. All of the photos within this collection were taken in Kyiv during 1919. 100,000’s of Ukrainians turned up to support the Act of Unification between Western and Central Ukraine. In contrast to this one German General that you cite, I’d urge you to take a long hard look at these photos if you’re really intereted in Ukrainian history (my favorite for gauging the vastness of the crowds is the tenth photo).
    Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words!

    http://www.istpravda.com.ua/artefacts/2011/01/22/17352/#10

  46. Jaakko Raipala says

    In fact, the Ukraine was my
    suggestion, and my creation”—here he
    showed his teeth—”and not a spontaneous
    wish of its inhabitants at all, although the
    Ukrainians may choose to think so.

    Actually this quote seems to not support your view on Ukraine. He is quite clearly implying that a popular Ukrainian identity existed and he is boasting that he has duped the locals into thinking that Germany is actually in favor of the popular sentiment. The long term plan of canceling Ukrainian independence that he explains has economic, not ethnic, motivations.

  47. Same thing with Ukraine — the countryside spoke an “older” dialect, the cities spoke a more “modern”, uniform literary/business Russian.

    When? In 1897 Kiev guberniya was something like 6% Russian speaking. The Russian-speakers were mostly ethnic Russian colonists from Russia.

    The difference with Ukraine is that an elite came into power who for their own legitimacy needed to separate themselves from Moscow, so they decided to create a different standardized language

    Little Russian (identical to Ukrainian) was in writing in the 18th century. It was standardized as Little Russian in the 1850s-1860s, and this standardized Little Russian was renamed as Ukrainian a decade or so later. No Ukrainian government came to power until decades after that.

  48. Yes, but it would very likely be baseless. Like it or not, they give voice to the reductionist worldview of most Western russophiles (Washington = all bad, so therefore Moscow = all good).

    And how does this alt-right project using the country’s name help the country? Just attracting all old misfits and bitter crackpots to project their fantasies, while giving a totally wrong impression to normal people, not to mention the local elites of foreign countries, and especially the more middle class, professional and educated young European and American people who a country should be trying get to visit (even just for their tourism spending power).

    Above all, this alt-right stuff gives a completely false impression to the West, of a country which is now quite moderate place, with a significant educated middle class – a country where the attitude of most people is not to notice what you do in your own home.

    A few years ago, the worst PR disaster was related to the sexual minorities. There was some kind of misimpression that sexual minorities were being persecuted – even as the reality is the average member of these groups would be far happier in Moscow, than in Alabama.

  49. Lemurmaniac says

    its pretty funny when the left goes on spurious pedo apologist hunts against the right when their own side is openly working to normalize it (see Salon dot com).

  50. Oliver D. Smith says

    Kirkegaard supports possession of animated child porn and wants to legalise it for the countries he said it was banned in, which is virtually all countries – so it’s the same thing to describe him as a “fan of animated baby porn”. The point is: only paedophiles support possession of CP or cartoon baby porn. If Kirkegaard isn’t a paedophile, why is he pro-CP? Why would a non-paedophile want to legalise obscene cartoons of babies being raped in diapers? Please do care to explain…. Like I said, it’s obvious to anyone, Kirkegaard is a paedophile. This is why all mainstream newspapers described him as either a paedophile-apologist or paedophile. And these journalists independently read Kirkegaard’s comments and came to the same conclusion as myself. The only people denying this are some neo-Nazi nutjobs on this weird website because you share Kirkegaard’s cranky/pseudo-scientific views on race.

    He never posted paedophiles should be castrated, what he said was this:

    “the best solution to one who is exclusively aroused by very young children: castration, either medical or fysical. This will help reduce libido.”

    He’s added “very” there when this was not mentioned earlier, so is talking here of infants or pre-pubescent. In the same post he says there are no moral issues for adults to have sex with ” rather young ones” in puberty, so he’s distinguishing children in puberty to pre-pubescent’s; he’s fine for adults to have sex with children in puberty under age of consent, but not pre-pubescent. Both though are paedophilia. Kirkegaard though restricts the term paedophilia to only pre-pubescent’s. This is what paedophilia-apologists do to try to normalise having sex with children in puberty but below age of consent.

    This is all explained on the RW article.

    And if you’re claiming I “smeared” Kirkegaard, are you saying every mainstream journalist/newspaper has as well?

  51. Oliver D. Smith says

    I’ve already refuted this claim, if you look at the newspapers that call Kirkegaard a child-rape or paedophile-apologist etc., they cover the left-right wing spectrum. centre, centre-right and right-wing newspapers call him a child-rape apologist. Now what? This is not a witch hunt by the left.

  52. German_reader says

    Kirkegaard supports possession of animated child porn and wants to legalise it for the countries he said it was banned in

    Chief argument against child porn is that real children are raped, tortured etc. for its production. This obviously doesn’t apply to animated media. Most people would still regard such media as repellent (I certainly do), but imo it’s not a clear-cut issue whether they should be legal or not. Arguing such media should be legal certainly doesn’t equal support for real-life child rape.

    Like I said, it’s obvious to anyone, Kirkegaard is a paedophile

    That’s not obvious at all, you’ve provided zero evidence for that accusation; if I were you, I’d be careful, you might get sued for such slander.

    The only people denying this are some neo-Nazi nutjobs on this weird website because you share Kirkegaard’s cranky/pseudo-scientific views on race.

    Most people here aren’t Nazis. And if they are, they’re moderate Nazis.

    he’s fine for adults to have sex with children in puberty under age of consent, but not pre-pubescent. Both though are paedophilia

    That’s not correct, see here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia

  53. Lemurmaniac says

    Based on your online footprint, we know you have a weird anti-sex fetish in general. Thus, you have neither temperament nor objectivity to handle the admittedly ill-advised thought experiment Kirkegaard developed.

    Also, the ‘spread’ (or range in mathematical terms) on the mainstream spectrum is pretty narrow. That’s why outlets like National Review and Fox would publish articles like ‘The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage’ when that debate was going on. Major newspapers, no matter where they ostensibly fall politically, share the same underlying consensus, and merely provide niche interpretations of it depending on what cohorts they choose to target. If Fox wants Western intervention in Syria to uphold the ‘American led liberal order’, the Guardian wants it for the cause of ‘human rights’ and ‘international accountability.’ Same sausage, different slicing. These entities perceive the alternative academic and media sphere as a threat to their hegemony and business model. Thus, they are happy to smear anybody associated with it. This was why it was foolish of K to to given them such easy canon fodder to misconstrue.

    So your “refutation” is really an appeal to authority of the most egregious kind, because the ‘authority’ is the establishment borg mind. The same people who promoted the idea Trump went to Moscow and enjoyed an interlude of watersports….

  54. Lemurmaniac says

    Also, what a sad little man you are. I can only imagine what its like to live a life defined by feuds on the internet.

  55. Swedish Family says

    Like I said, it’s obvious to anyone, Kirkegaard is a paedophile.

    As German Reader points out, this is not at all obvious. You have no evidence whatever that he ever touched a child or watched child pornography. All you have are some, yes, very disturbing comments of his, but those are not evidence in themselves.

  56. reiner Tor says

    It’s also interesting that he uses Kirkegaard’s defense of animated child porn as a sign of his pedophilia, while animated child porn itself is legal in many countries, and was actually made legal in the US by the Supreme Court in 2002 – in other words, either he is willing to say the Supreme Court consists of pedophiles, or he has to drop the charges against Kirkegaard.

    The reasoning SCOTUS (and I think Kirkegaard, too) used is that no one was harmed while making animated child porn, however vile, and so no crime could have been committed. The only thing illegal would be to depict a real person in child porn, like a real child’s face animated to make it look like the real child is engaged in it, because such a video would harm the child who was depicted that way. But video of a generic child (not resembling any particular person) was permitted.

  57. Swedish Family says

    And how does this alt-right project using the country’s name help the country? Just attracting all old misfits and bitter crackpots to project their fantasies, while giving a totally wrong impression to normal people, not to mention the local elites of foreign countries, and especially the more middle class, professional and educated young European and American people who a country should be trying get to visit (even just for their tourism spending power).

    Agree on all counts. I just don’t think the Kremlin had a hand in setting the project up. Having said that, Bausman has appeared on Russian state TV (Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show, if memory serves, and also RT, of course), so they do give him some exposure.

  58. reiner Tor says

    it’s not a clear-cut issue whether they should be legal or not

    Animated child pornography is legal in the United States, among others. (Kirkegaard himself I think used the example of Denmark, where it’s also legal. But I only skimmed through his piece, so cannot comment much on it.

  59. Conspiracy corner: AK wrote the RW article to improve this 2018 prediction stats. Oliver D. Smith is actually a long term art project.

    Hey Anatoly… Whatcha doing?

  60. reiner Tor says

    It’s enough for one guy to notice and translate, though.

  61. Greasy William says

    Remember when Anatoly, out of nowhere, went on that bizarre “We Wuz Kangz!” post storm last year before abruptly backtracking when he realized his readers were going to desert him if he continued? At the time, people here speculated that he had started dating an African girl studying in Russia, but maybe instead he was just trying to get away from the career killing perception that he was an Alt Righter.

    Euros: Is your media reacting at all to the FBI memo stuff? This is huge news in The States but it seems like Europe/Canada/Australia aren’t interested for some reason.

    Also, I know that BLM is pretty much dead now, but when it was going strong would it be correct to say that the Euro media attitude towards it was fairly negative?

  62. German_reader says

    but when it was going strong would it be correct to say that the Euro media attitude towards it was fairly negative?

    No, German mainstream media (as far as I can tell, don’t really read or watch them anymore) went pretty much with the “racist white cops are hunting down innocent blacks and killing them for fun, so anger among the black population is completely justified” line. Their coverage of race issues in the US pretty much pretends it’s always Alabama in 1965 (or maybe even 1915). Probably similar in much of Western Europe.
    Haven’t noticed much about those FBI memos, doubt it will get that much attention, it doesn’t fit approved narratives, and the intricacies of the whole issue are hard to understand, all the more so for non-Americans.

  63. Spisarevski says

    I will even be voting for one of the very best Jews on March 18.

    He would not be too happy to hear you calling him that :]

  64. Remember when Anatoly, out of nowhere, went on that bizarre “We Wuz Kangz!” post storm last year before abruptly backtracking when he realized his readers were going to desert him if he continued? At the time, people here speculated that he had started dating an African girl studying in Russia, but maybe instead he was just trying to get away from the career killing perception that he was an Alt Righter.

    http://www.unz.com/akarlin/dating-east-asian-girls-as-a-wn-rite-of-passage/

    The right-wing agitator Mike Cernovich, the writer John Derbyshire and an alt-right figure named Kyle Chapman (so notorious for swinging a lead-filled stick at Trump opponents at a protest in Berkeley, Calif., that he is now a meme) are all married to women of Asian descent. As a commenter wrote on an alt-right forum, “exclusively” dating Asian women is practically a “white-nationalist rite of passage.”

    My blog has been recognized as an alt-right forum by the NYT, cool.

    First comment

    RationalWiki entry when?!!!

    http://www.unz.com/akarlin/dating-east-asian-girls-as-a-wn-rite-of-passage/#comment-2150394

    Eighth comment

    BTW it’s lolworthy that she linked to some random comment under an unrelated post (about Ethiopia).

    Does that suggest she’s a regular reader or did google “alt-right yellow fever” take her there?

    http://www.unz.com/akarlin/dating-east-asian-girls-as-a-wn-rite-of-passage/#comment-2150542

  65. He looks exactly as you would expect him to. And people call phrenology a pseudoscience!

    https://images.encyclopediadramatica.rs/8/83/OliverSmith03.jpg

  66. for-the-record says

    Euros: Is your media reacting at all to the FBI memo stuff? This is huge news in The States but it seems like Europe/Canada/Australia aren’t interested for some reason.

    The news I have seen (France, Portugal, UK) has uniformly portrayed it as Trump trying to derail the investigation. The idea that it might on the contrary illustrate the machinations of the “deep state” at work is completely foreign in these parts, so to speak.

  67. Most people here aren’t Nazis. And if they are, they’re moderate Nazis.

    Moderate Nazis; I like it.

  68. reiner Tor says

    The real victims of Hitler were the moderate Nazis, who had to spend their whole lives ever since experiencing the backlash.

    #notallNazis
    #IstandwithNazis

  69. He would not be too happy to hear you calling him that :]

    I kind of think he is more Jewish than average non-neurotic Israelis. Even Schindler’s list music is perfect for him 🙂

  70. I don’t know how it will play out, but it appears that the Germans will, in the long run, be the ultimate victims. Maybe ethnic groups are like individuals in that there is no recovery from certain traumas.

  71. Oliver D. Smith says

    I don’t have “internet feuds”. For the past 6 years I’ve documented and refuted pseudo-scientists on RationalWiki: this includes flat-eathers, geocentrists, “race realists”, white supremacists, black supremacists, religious fundamentalists, dowsers, occultists, conspiracy theorists, the list is endless.

    When I document and refute cranks: of course most of them get mad and then attack me on the internet to make themselves feel better, usually by writing ‘hit pieces’ on their own blogs. This is what Kirkegaard did and he links to a load of other crazies on his smear article about me, such as Liard Shaw – a nutcase who believes in demonic possession, reincarnation and pretty much any crazy belief. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laird_Shaw#Views Since I criticize these people for their irrationality, they go around the internet attacking me on websites which explains the Encylopedia Dramatica article in my name. That article was partly written by this neo-Nazi lunatic: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Coombs [funnily enough even this guy’s anti-Semitism is too extreme for Kirkegaard, and he banned Michael Coombs aka Mikemikev from his forum].

    Kirkegaard’s OpenPsych pseudo-science journals uses to self-publish, hence he is the author of over 50% of paper submissions. These journals are not even formal peer-reviewed. He also abuses Google Scholar by citing his own papers. No other scientist cites Kirkegaard; one paper he self-cites himself 30 times in other self-published papers! This is abusing Google Scholar’s citation index – I’ll probably send in a report and get him banned from there.

    Originally I had no interest in digging up Kirkegaard’s paedophilia-apologism: I simply created an article that criticises his pseudo-journals and racialist beliefs. I only found his child-rape apologism after someone named Oliver Keyes mentioned it (just a coincidence we have the same first name).

  72. Damn Anatoly, now this is something, this is recognition.
    Congratulations!

    …and even the psycho itself is here in comments, triggered; I count this as double win for you.

  73. I’ve documented and refuted pseudo-scientists on RationalWiki: this includes …. “race realists”

    How many of these hundreds of intelligence experts who agree that racial differences in IQ are caused by genetics have you so far refuted?

    http://i0.wp.com/i.imgur.com/5ThVCxW.png?w=678

    http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.695.3163&rep=rep1&type=pdf (page 16)

  74. How many of these hundreds of intelligence experts who agree that racial differences in IQ are caused by genetics have you so far refuted?

    I’m going to go way off-topic, but it is something I wished to comment on the topic.

    Sure it’s possible that racial differences in IQ test score results are caused by genetics – and this might be measured within a same country perhaps producing valid evidence, where you can at least make a semblance of isolated genetic component, with all other various being equal.

    But claims where people are trying to compare between countries are a bit of a speculative joke.

    At the beginning of the 20th century, 76% of all people in the Russian Empire could not read or write (imagine their IQ score results). By 1950s, literacy rates in the Soviet Union were among the highest in the world (imagine how different their IQ score results were to their grandparents’ scores – without genetics having relevance to the change).

    People like Richard Lynn who compare between countries (even with their various ‘corrections’ for other variables, which they draw out of hat), and then speculate that genetics is the main variable between countries, are not necessarily much more refined than someone who would look at the population of Russia in 1900, and find the majority borderline retarded, and argue that genetics is the explanation. The confounding variables are way too many to even make a semblance of isolating the genetic component, when comparing different countries (which are often at different stages of historical development).

    (Many African countries are still in the position in terms of educational standards as the Russian Empire in the turn of the century).


    And then even comparing between countries at the same stage of historical development, there will be different cultural approaches to taking these tests, which will influence the scores.

    A post a paper arguing for this in relation to comparisons between American and Russian language test subjects on certain tests:

    In these tests, the American group outscored the Russian group. However, because we selected volunteers with no brain damage and performance on other tests was in normal limits in both groups, it appears unreasonable to attribute low performance of the Russian sample to problems with in attention, concentration, or planning strategies, which are being assessed by these tasks. Rather, the differences might reflect culture-specific effect of relevance of the assessed function to real-life experience. That is, lack of exposure to timed tests and rare occurrence of experiences where timed performance is required or measured in everyday routine of Russian people could provide a salient explanation for the observed group differences. Furthermore, these findings may provide additional support to the notion of cultural specificity of cognitive abilities put forward by Ardila (1995) and Greenfield (1997). That is, because Russian culture does not emphasize importance of timing one’s performance, adhering to deadlines, and being prompt as much as does American culture, measuring cognitive performance with timed tests might be not as ecologically valid. That is, understanding the ecological validity of the neuropsychological tests is critical for valid interpretation of the results (Ardila, 2001; Shordone & Long, 1997).

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887617707000091

  75. Agree on all counts. I just don’t think the Kremlin had a hand in setting the project up. Having said that, Bausman has appeared on Russian state TV (Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show, if memory serves, and also RT, of course), so they do give him some exposure.

    Yes I agree with that. It’s an American project. They usually post various clips from official channels and give them misleading titles and (when they don’t copy off official subtitles now provided by the first channel) mistranslating various words (they seem to be using mainly machine translation of the transcripts) . A lot of it seems harmless although of a somewhat low cultural level, but then last month they suspiciously self-destructed any possible PR or ‘Hasbara for Russia’ benefits by turning into an alt-right website.

  76. These topic are certainly not pleasant and they have certainly disturbed many, but that is no reason to loose your jimmies. You are taking great liberties in interpreting his motives or personality. There is literally nothing controversial about what he said, except the issue itself.
    There is actually good evidence that availability of (animated) child porn acts as a substitute to the deviant, lowering the number of attacks, rapes, molestation.
    (check :https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y)

  77. But claims where people are trying to compare between countries are a bit of a speculative joke.

    Not if said countries are at a similar level of development.

    At the beginning of the 20th century, 76% of all people in the Russian Empire could not read or write (imagine their IQ score results). By 1950s, literacy rates in the Soviet Union were among the highest in the world (imagine how different their IQ score results were to their grandparents’ scores – without genetics having relevance to the change).

    We don’t particularly have to speculate – the first IQ studies in the Russian Empire and 1920s USSR showed Russians to be 2/3-1 S.D. below West European norms. Then the entire subject was banned. But after it became politically correct again, Russians are now scoring around 97.

    That said, regional differences within Russia remanied remarkably constant, e.g.: Zverev estimated the Russian IQ in the region of 81 points on a sample of 114 children in the Kursk region (test Binet-Bert) in 1928. A couple of years later, EV Guryanov et al. estimated Russian IQ in the region of 90 points on a sample of 414 Moscow children (Stanford-Binet test) compared to US standards. This, by the way, is exactly equal to today’s difference between the Kursk region and Moscow based on PISA tests. (Google Translation of my Russia IQ article)

    … and then speculate that genetics is the main variable between countries…

    Sub-Saharan Africa and China in the 1980s were both pretty much Third World. Even so, the Chinese performed vastly better – better, in fact, than Blacks in the US.

    Two explanations: Culture – culture, moreover, that seems to be endemic to Blacks throughout the entire world; or genetics.

  78. I take it you stole this guy’s girlfriend.

  79. The question in the graph I previously posted was referring to the black-white gap in the US, not between countries.
    As far as I know, Lynn has never claimed that there aren’t environmental effects on IQ, or that average African IQ wouldn’t be higher in better conditions. But there’s still good reason to believe that the majority of the gap between US/European whites and Africans is genetic, since the difference between them and US blacks (100 vs. 85) is bigger than the gap between US blacks and African blacks (85 vs. about 75). This isn’t even taking into account the significant white admixture in US blacks.

    The paper is odd since Russians actually don’t score notably worse than (white) Americans or Western Europeans on the data I am aware of or the figures collected by Lynn.

  80. Oliver D. Smith says

    It’s a stupid question since “black” and “white” are very large (socially constructed) groups, that are not homogeneous and so are useless to analyse data with. So for example, you can find certain “black” populations in Sub-Saharan Africa with higher average IQ scores than certain “white” populations in Europe, and vice-versa. Wicherts et al. (2010) report a significant “indication of heterogeneity in mean IQs” for SSA countries, i.e. 73.8 to 91.4.

    As to what that 2013 survey shows, I fail to see how it supports the hereditarianism position:

    • 0% of differences due to genes: 17% of experts
    • 0-40% of differences due to genes: 42% of experts
      *50% of differences due to genes: 18% of experts
      *60-100% of differences due to genes: 39% of experts
    • 100% of differences due to genes: 5% of experts

    The ‘hereditarianism’ position would be anything over 50%, and most experts are not arguing for this. And I’ve seen a straw-man on this website that restricts the anti-hereditarianism position to not under 50%, but only 0%. That’s laughable because the biological anthropologist C. Loring Brace who denies the existence of race and put out several studies debunking Arthur Jensen back in the 1970s/80s/1990s (e.g. “On Creeping Jensenism”) doesn’t argue for 0% of differences due to genes, but something like 10-20%.

  81. The question in the graph I previously posted was referring to the black-white gap in the US, not between countries.
    As far as I know, Lynn has never claimed that there aren’t environmental effects on IQ, or that average African IQ wouldn’t be higher in better conditions. But there’s still good reason to believe that the majority of the gap between US/European whites and Africans is genetic, since the difference between them and US blacks (100 vs. 85) is bigger than the gap between US blacks and African blacks (85 vs. about 75). This isn’t even taking into account the significant white admixture in US blacks.

    The paper is odd since Russians actually don’t score notably worse than (white) Americans or Western Europeans on the data I am aware of or the figures collected by Lynn.

    I understand your first sentence, which is why I said I was going offtopic.

    The other part of your argument – again it will depend very specifically on how well they can isolate variables. It’s currently a plausible hypothesis that there is genetic component to intelligence (however you define it – perhaps ‘academic intelligence’ is clearer), and that there would be racial differences in this, but incompetent cross-country comparisons like Flynn are not exactly convincing works.

    As for the paper I posted. This paper is not about IQ specific tests, but a more wide neuropsychological tests. That’s why they seem to make broad speculations about the generalizability of testing across countries – because in one of these tests there should not be a gap in the scores for healthy individuals. So the plausible explanation for them is a different level of accustomedness to this kind of testing.

  82. The ‘hereditarianism’ position would be anything over 50%, and most experts are not arguing for this. And I’ve seen a straw-man on this website that restricts the anti-hereditarianism position to not under 50%, but only 0%. That’s laughable because the biological anthropologist C. Loring Brace who denies the existence of race and put out several studies debunking Arthur Jensen back in the 1970s/80s/1990s (e.g. “On Creeping Jensenism”) doesn’t argue for 0% of differences due to genes, but something like 10-20%.

    So which of the 44% of intelligence experts who are, even by your own definition, hereditarians have you so far refuted?

  83. If you are a contributor to rationalwiki that pretty much means you are flat-earther. It’s just you consider your version of flat-earth theory true.

    Rationalwiki follows the same naming pattern as with many other names: “socialist democracy” “communist justice” and so on. There is nothing rational about rationalwiki.

  84. It’s not stupid at all, no more stupid that comparing wealth between whites and blacks in USA, education and so on.
    Unless, of course, it’s only pseudoscience when you compare things you think should not be compared, while comparing educational outcomes is perfectly acceptable.

  85. Sub-Saharan Africa and China in the 1980s were both pretty much Third World. Even so, the Chinese performed vastly better – better, in fact, than Blacks in the US.

    Two explanations: Culture – culture, moreover, that seems to be endemic to Blacks throughout the entire world; or genetics.

    China is historically one of the world’s most developed and literate civilizations, which had gone through centuries of decline. While a lot of sub-Saharan African countries have only recently started to leave the hunter-gatherer stage.

    Is the difference in their test scores only cultural or is there a genetic component, or a interacting combination of both, and in what proportions? If you want to isolate the variables, country-to-country comparison is going to be the hardest way to do it.

    The idea that there is a genetic component is very intuitively plausible in explaining differences in test score. But intuitively plausible is not acceptable criteria. We have to control variables and isolate variables before we have evidence for our hypothesis, and preferably show we can manipulate an independent variables, and reproduce this experimentally.

    We are not at the experimental stage yet, so we rely on correlation type study. The usefulness of correlations is very dependent on controlling variables – while with country-country comparison you are just introducing numerous additional confounding variables not found in intra-country comparison. (Although without personal interest in the subject – I am sure there is plenty of work starting in this area, where the most basic first step is to take people from the same culture, but with different genetic profiles – and which you guys will have more knowledge of than me.)

    Richard Lynn approach is not proving anything beyond that the ‘phenomena to be explained (different test scores) exists’ in different countries, and then adding on what seems to him to be the intuitively plausible explanation. This is fine for entertainment and speculative works – but if an engineer would behave like this, I would not trust walking on their bridge.

  86. Also, if someone is deyning existence of race is a flat-earther (unless he creates a strawman of race and then denies that this strawman “race” exists, which is what most such pseudoscientists do).

    (race is a human population when large number of genes have different frequencies than other populations. Race in taht sense might be two separate village populations – and yes, this is a paraphrasis from old scientific book, from some twenty or so years ago IIRC).

  87. It’s a stupid question since “black” and “white” are very large (socially constructed) groups, that are not homogeneous and so are useless to analyse data with.

    No, they are human phenotypes, not socially constructed at all.

  88. It’s a stupid question since “black” and “white” are very large (socially constructed) groups, that are not homogeneous and so are useless to analyse

    Such obviously absurd statements, completely discrediting your argument.

  89. Jaakko Raipala says

    At the beginning of the 20th century, 76% of all people in the Russian Empire could not read or write (imagine their IQ score results). By 1950s, literacy rates in the Soviet Union were among the highest in the world (imagine how different their IQ score results were to their grandparents’ scores – without genetics having relevance to the change).

    The early IQ tests tended to ask general knowledge questions on the assumption that a more intelligent person picks up more random facts and a literate person had a huge advantage over an illiterate person even if their biological mental ability was the same. Psychometrics arose as its own field in the 1930s to develop tests that are more dependent on pure mental ability but Russia missed these tests as the communists had taken over.

    If non-verbal tests had been in use earlier we might have seen less of a gap in scores of Russians of 1900 and Russians of 2000. There may be an illusion at work here where you’re thinking of today’s illiterate people and imagining Russians in 1900 as alike but today an illiterate is going to be someone with a developmental disorder like Down’s syndrome. That wasn’t true in 1900 when there were plenty of normal children who were just never taught to read.

    There were also ethnic groups with high literacy rates in the Russian empire and people generally did not note an intelligence gap between ethnic Russians and Finns, Latvians etc. But many most certainly did make comments about the clever Jews…

    It is perfectly possible that there are genetic differences in time preference and impulsivity between European ethnic groups. Persistent behavioral differences and a West/East gap show up in crime rates and such.

  90. Anatolu, have you been following the Chanda Chisala discussion? I think he has shown that there have to be quite a lot of black groups even in Africa which have quite hight IQ even by white standards. That of course does not refute hereditarian hypothesis, but it does show that the sarcastic quip about endemic culture is a gross simplification.

  91. China is historically one of the world’s most developed and literate civilizations, which had gone through centuries of decline. While a lot of sub-Saharan African countries have only recently started to leave the hunter-gatherer stage.

    Research (in America) IQ white children (adopted white parents) and IQ of black children (adopted white parents), showed a difference (IQ of white children is higher than the IQ of black children in the same environment). I am a person to this topic neutral, but I think that it is very likely that the differences in IQ of blacks and whites are (partly) hereditary. An alternative explanation seem unlikely

  92. German_reader says

    No, they are human phenotypes, not socially constructed at all.

    Well yes, but people like Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice don’t look exactly like people from the Congo (nor does Barack Obama), yet in the present-day West they would still be called “black”.
    And in regards to Africa, phenotypical differences between East Africans and people from somewhere like Nigeria are clearly discernible even to outsiders. I suppose such differences must be even more obvious to Africans themselves.
    Race, ethnicity etc. do have a significant biological basis and aren’t infinitely malleable, but there is an element of social construction; it’s just that it’s greatly exaggerated by people like Oliver D. Smith.

  93. They correspond to the best fit clusters drawn by a computer given genetic data with 99% accuracy.

    http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070&type=printable

    They’re no more socially constructed than any other subspecies category.

  94. Where? Who? (I want tests of cognitive ability apart from scrabble)

  95. It is perfectly possible that there are genetic differences in time preference and impulsivity between European ethnic groups. Persistent behavioral differences and a West/East gap show up in crime rates and such.

    The Russian Karelians are genetically indistinguishable from Finns but “socially” almost indistinguishable from the Russian. That is, cultural factors (the adoption of different versions of Christianity and different models of civilization), was in this case more important than genetics.

    Also Russian are divided into two different genetic clusters, but genetic division is not correlated with crime rates, income levels, intellectual achievements per capita, etc.. There are many examples; for this distinction of European Nations is likely to be determined mainly by cultural factors..

  96. The ‘hereditarianism’ position would be anything over 50%

    Not necessarily. Anything over 0% would ascribe some differences to genetic causes. The question is merely – how much. Context is also important. A “hereditarian” could claim that under ideal equal conditions with no environmental impact, differences could be 100% attributable to genetics. But because such conditions do not exist, he might assume that 40% of the observed differences have a genetic cause. This would not mean that he is not a hereditarian.

    The bottom line is that 83% of experts consider that at least some of the differences in intelligence between races is due to a genetic cause.

    And an anthropologist arguing something about intelligence against a psychologist such as Jensen is like a geologist arguing about climate change against a climatologist. Take these forays out of his area of expertise with a big grain of salt.

  97. Just to give an example. The difference in average IQ between whites and African Americans is about 15 points. Someone who things that 50% of the difference is due to genes thinks that due to genes African Americans have IQs on average 7.5 points lower than those of whites, with the environment accounting for another 7.5 points on average. Someone who thinks genes account for 30% of the difference thinks that for genetic reason African Americans have average IQs about 5 points lower than those of whites, and environment explains the other 10 points.

    Why do you think that an expert who thinks that genes account for 30% of the difference, or 20% of the difference, is not a hereditarian?

  98. Well yes, but people like Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice don’t look exactly like people from the Congo (nor does Barack Obama), yet in the present-day West they would still be called “black”

    No, they’d be called that in the United States, which has a dichotomous conception of race. In the Caribbean, Powell might be called mulatto. In Brazil, where racial classification is a function of both phenotype and class, he’d be called white. American blacks generally draw about 15% of their pedigree from Europe. I’ll wager Michelle Obama is about average in this respect, Condoleeza Rice a notch above average &c. Obama is unusual in that he had no connection to the domestic black population until he moved to New York at age 20, just his grandpa’s checker-playing hookah-smoking chum, Frank Marshall Davis. Culturally, he nothing like ordinary blacks of any description.

  99. Culturally, he nothing like ordinary blacks of any description.

    Yet, he was the 2nd black American President.

  100. Oliver D. Smith says

    Hereditarianians were refuted on this stuff like 40 years back. Read any of Brace’s papers, including “On Creeping Jensenism” when he debated Arthur Jensen. Also read the papers in the following compendium: Race and IQ (ed.) Ashley Montagu, 1975 Oxford University Press, the second (expanded) edition was published in 1999 and is on Google Books.

    “However, he [Jensen] does not mention the fact that adopted children consistently display a substantially higher IQ than their biological parents. Skodak and Skeels (1949) found that the average IQ of the real mothers was 86, while that of their children adopted into other families was 106 – well over a whole standard deviation higher. Surely this indicates that, with an improved socioeconomic background, one can accomplish in one generation change that is greater than any difference between ‘racial’ or religious groups in the United States. The overwhelming component of this difference is certainly environmental.” – C. Loring Brace, “On Creeping Jensenism”

    But, for sake of argument, if hereditarianism is true: what use is it to politics? No one will vote for this type of thing, it’s totally nuts to the ordinary public, like Holocaust denial. So what exactly are you achieving? Nothing. Indeed, this is why I’ve said you HBD”/”race realist” weirdos have almost put the SPLC out of a job – the stuff you promote is so unpalatable to voters, your “alt right” (or whatever euphemism you use) political movement is going absolutely nowhere.

  101. Daniel Chieh says

    I only have some personal ancedotes but Igbo-descented Africans do seem to do well although from what they told me, in their native countries, overwhelming corruption still keeps any real progress from being accomplished. You might have individuals with the human capital to setup a reasonably complex IT system to support a business, but the exceeding interest of the government upon discovering anything functional will be to find a way to rob them.

    FWIW, I think that HBDchick has some articles on this as well.

  102. … but genetic division is not correlated with crime rates, income levels, intellectual achievements per capita, etc..

    I disagree. There’s a pretty clear South–>North transition in Russia (slightly higher IQ, considerably more civic/less corrupt, more saunas over banyas, but more alcoholism, higher murder rates)

  103. Daniel Chieh says

    But, for sake of argument, if hereditarianism is true: what use is it to politics? No one will vote for this type of thing, it’s totally nuts to the ordinary public, like Holocaust denial.

    This may seem like an amazingly wild idea, but sometimes analysis for truth and understanding is worthwhile for its own sake. You could even call it an intellectual virtue to be open-minded enough to acknowledge various potential genetic factors, rather than embrace an idea just because it’ll maximize the number of mooks you can acquire in the glories of demotism.

    Pretty sure if Mr. Karlin’s sole goal in life was to maximize readership and hits, his articles might have more clickbait titles, for one. For example, “One weird trick to get ‘rationalists’ to lose their mind…”

  104. But, for sake of argument, if hereditarianism is true: what use is it to politics? No one will vote for this type of thing, it’s totally nuts to the ordinary public, like Holocaust denial

    Thanks for showing so plainly that your ‘refutation’ is just witch-hunting for socially unacceptable views.
    ”””””””””””Rational”””””””””””wiki – KEK

  105. I don’t doubt that some African groups are more intelligent than others or that there are some intelligent individual Africans, but I have never seen any evidence (as the previous commenter suggested) that any groups are as intelligent as Europeans.

  106. Daniel Chieh says

    I found this blog post by Peter Frost – who is arguably one of the major “entryways” I had into HBD. Note that he doesn’t vastly dispute Chisala’s position, but the fact that the Igbo do so well versus the rest of Africa only makes the heredity position stronger.

    https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-jews-of-west-africa.html

  107. German_reader says

    No, they’d be called that in the United States, which has a dichotomous conception of race. In the Caribbean, Powell might be called mulatto. In Brazil, where racial classification is a function of both phenotype and class, he’d be called white.

    Yes, but that’s the “social construction” part. So in that sense people like Oliver D. Smith are correct that categories like “black” and “white” depend to some extent on the context of a specific society, and aren’t necessarily accurate descriptions of genetic reality.

  108. Thanks for the article. It would be interesting to see IQ-proxy data about the Igbo relative to the rest of Africa.

    A criticism of Chisla he could have mentioned is that GSCEs are not very G-loaded and all other measures show much bigger white-black gaps in the UK.

  109. Lars Porsena says

    I identify as the reincarnation of Mecha-Hitler from Wolfenstein 3D

    LOFL not bad, Anatoly, not bad. I still get to be Emperor of China though. My pronouns are His Imperial Majesty/The Lord of 10,000 Years/Son of Heaven’s.

  110. About 50% of variance of SAT(Race, Income) as function of race and income can be explained by race. Family income does not eliminate SAT differences between Black and White even in the highest income brackets. The difference is virtually income bracket independent.

    The SAT(Race, Income) function approximately has the following form:

    SAT(Race,Income)=a+b*income + delta

    where delta=0 if Race=Black and delta=delta>0 if Race =White

  111. But, for sake of argument, if hereditarianism is true: what use is it to politics?

    Not a whole lot.

    The problem we face in this country is professional-managerial types who insist on distorting and disfiguring institutions in order to build patron-client relations. The excuse is that otherwise, people are treating their clients unfairly, the evidence for which being that there are differences in performance scores between their clients and the ordinary run of (American) humanity. The foundational excuse was to ‘make up for past discrimination’, one which later morphed into promoting ‘diversity’ – i.e. contriving to reduce the presence of social sectors the patronage mill-builders despise a priori.

    People with emotional attachments to non-hereditarian perspectives cannot leave well enough alone and accept a system of natural liberty where it’s equal liberty conjoined to careers-open-to-talents. That’s the only system perceived as just by the bulk of the population. It’s disliked by certain social strata and that dislike is a class delimiter defining in-groups and out-groups, so the chances of public policy being based on what most people want approaches nil.

    It’s gotten to the point where that same class of people is making use of various sorts of legal and institutional harassment in order to wreck the livlihood of anyone who opposes them. We putatively have the right to speak in this country. That’s eroding, because recognizing that would be recognition by the legal profession and those in their circle of friends that we’re not under their tutelage. And that they won’t do.

  112. It’s ‘socially constructed’ with people who have mixed ancestry. My ancestry is 99.9% European. That I’m ‘white’ is not socially constructed.

  113. German_reader says

    True enough, and the way this “socially construced” line is used nowadays is, it’s mostly obscurantist sophistry.

  114. Congrats buddy!

  115. The “social construction” argument about race like all arguments socially is constructed. Its objective is to shut you up and and make you stop thinking in racial categories.

    Not so long ago I listened on NPR to an interview with a woman activist who said that race is socially constructed, i.e., races do not exist, but then she admitted that race is still a convenient concept for them when fighting the racism, so it is not being abolished yet. What she really meant is that they need a method to create at least two categories of white people and everybody else. By abolishing race they would lose the ability to find identify their enemy.

    Obviously the concept of race can’t be abolished entirely as it is fairly easy to define races genetically with the method of clusters. Then the races can be even more nuanced and depend on genetic differences that do not have manifestation in external phenotype, though usually they do.

    If however Bullworth’s racial reconstruction is implemented then indeed the concept of race will be less useful.

  116. Well yes, but people like Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice don’t look exactly like people from the Congo (nor does Barack Obama), yet in the present-day West they would still be called “black”.

    And what exactly do we mean by white people? Are we talking about Caucasians? Europeans? Are we including Jews? Armenians? Arabs? Persians? “White people” is pretty much meaningless as a term. Does anybody actually agree on what “white people” is supposed to mean?

    There may or may not be genetic IQ differences between races and/or ethnicities but “black” and “white” are terms that are surely too vague to be useful.

  117. But, for sake of argument, if hereditarianism is true: what use is it to politics?

    It’s already in use in politics, affirmative action is nothing more than the acknowledgement that blacks are an inferior race. It does not matter where you are, anywhere affirmative action is practiced (USA, Canada, Britain, France) the only criteria to qualify is racial, they never factor in “culture” or “environment” because they know that blacks are inferior and the only way to cover up your pseudoscience is throwing enormous amounts of money at blacks and hoping it will cover up the truth.

    There are no black states, cities, societies that can be measured as a success, absolutely none, not a single exception to this rule, even the contrived example of Barbados simply proves that mulattos are superior to pure blacks. This being the case, the use of politics of this very fundamental truth are the following.
    1) stop mass immigration by inferior races, nobody seriously believes that replacing Germans with low IQ Syrians is going keep Germany the same as before
    2) halt all wasted transfer of resources to black people in the name of affirmative action, if anything this harms black people more than it helps them
    3) create public policy that is based on facts (imagine that) instead of crazed ideologies that have zero grounding in reality

    As for your belief that it is “unpalatable” argument, this is nothing more than being based on fear, fear of going to jail in some states, fear of losing ones job by refusing to accept the faith of equality and fear of black people as their low average IQ makes them prone to sincerely believe they are equal and thus will lash out at anyone that says otherwise. It is safe to say that the vast majority of the non black world sees blacks as inferior, to not see this basic truth is like trying to argue that the sun is not hot, many don’t want to be rude in public, but at a certain point your dogmas are going to create such societal damage that people will increasingly not care about respecting your beliefs.

  118. It seems useful to BLM, and I doubt you are going to confront them about this.

    As for who is white, jews, Armenians, Persians are middle easterners and thus are not considered white, the only reason you think they are white is that the USA added them to the census as white, this was done to cater for the jews as in the past when being white was considered an advantage. Since white is now the worst thing to be, the flight from white is accelerating, jews, and all the other MENA types all now say they are not white.

    When we talk about whites we are talking about Europeans, people that can trace their genetic ancestry to the lands of Europe before the year 1000 at least.

  119. I disagree. There’s a pretty clear South–>North transition in Russia (slightly higher IQ, considerably more civic/less corrupt, more saunas over banyas, but more alcoholism, higher murder rates)

    Existing social differences do not coincide with genetic differences that can easily be seen in maps

    http://mapinmap.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Russiamurder2014.png

    https://78.media.tumblr.com/9c33f898654e614cf4b79d9203b73e09/tumblr_oo2wcdYREI1rasnq9o1_1280.png

    http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Russia_alcoholism_2010.png

    Genetic differences exist in the direction North-South, but social differences in the direction East-West.
    IQ gradient North-South IMHO is easy to explain by higher percentage of the rural population in the South.

  120. If you have followed the whole debate, it wasn’t just about scrabble. I would say he conclusively have shown that the IQ levels reported by Lynn for at least some countries are waaay to low.

  121. , the only reason you think they are white is that the USA added them to the census as white,

    No. They were considered part of Caucasian race by early physical anthropologists. Also, in the clustering analysis they are clustered with whites when number of clusters is given as “3”.

    I’d say, looking at Syrian refugees, that there are people there who could pass for an Italian or even Polish. It’s just in their mass they look unmistakenly alien.

  122. As for who is white, jews, Armenians, Persians are middle easterners and thus are not considered white, the only reason you think they are white

    I didn’t say I thought they were white. They are usually considered to be caucasian.

    So is “middle easterner” a race?

    My point is that there is no agreed scientific definition of a “white race” so making comparisons between “black” and “white” races is not really scientifically possible. I’m not saying that race doesn’t exist or that it’s a social construct, it just does not seem to be a very useful concept if you’re trying to make comparisons between populations. “Asian” is equally useless. Much too broad and too fuzzy around the edges.

    Ethnicity is more useful but you’d have to accept that there are various white and black ethnicities.

  123. My point is that there is no agreed scientific definition of a “white race” so making comparisons between “black” and “white” races is not really scientifically possible.

    Scientists in non-western countries use race perfectly well, just like any other subspecies distinction.

    Much too broad and too fuzzy around the edges.

    No more broad on fuzzy than any other distinction made with animal subspecies, which scientists still use.

  124. Jaakko Raipala says

    The north/south genetic clustering exists in the medieval Russian territory that was already russified before the eastern conquests that began with Ivan IV. It doesn’t exist East of the Urals where the ethnic Russian population is newer and drawn from all over the old heartland; the north/side gene difference of the European side was not replicated in Siberia because there was no policy of populating north and south Siberia with different populations.

    What we see in this map in the European regions are two bands of elevated crime rates: an east-west band roughly from Pskov to Arkhangelsk that seems to correspond to the north Russian genetic clustering and a north-south band roughly from Komi to Bashkortostan that corresponds with the presence of Turkic and Finno-Ugric ethnic groups. (I don’t think the north/south divide exists in ethnic Russians of these regions, either, since they too are migrants who moved there in the past few centuries.)

    These are very rough patterns though but it would be interesting to see more detailed study of this.

  125. But, for sake of argument, if hereditarianism is true: what use is it to politics?

    Here’s a summary: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ea-and-intelligence-theory/

  126. Jaakko Raipala says

    Actually, no. There are huge gaps between Finnish populations and there is more genetic diversity in Finland than in any other European country (except Russia). Finns are not exactly one ethnic group and some parts of Eastern Finland are Karelians; Karelians in Finland are very close to Karelians in Russia but most Finns are not close to Karelians.

    Here’s a dialect map:

    https://sampuliblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/murrekartta.png

    The Eastern dialects of the purple areas are close relatives of Karelian and other nearly dead languages in nearby areas of Russia. In all other aspects of ethnicity (pagan religion etc) except type of Christianity the purple Eastern areas of Finland are closer to Karelians and Vepsians than to Western Finland and they even were to some extent Orthodox first.

    Here’s an example of a genetic map:

    http://puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/sites/default/files/imagecache/biggest/domain-8142/kuvat/Salmela11.png

    FIW = West Finns (green on dialect map), FIE = East Finns (purple). Their Russian samples seem to be from Vologda and they are actually closer to West Finns than to East Finns.

    There are regional differences in Finland in crime rates, IQ, alcoholism and the like and they may well have genetic components, in fact we already have clear examples of culture-generated genetic differences eg. lactose tolerance is much higher in West Finns than in East Finns.

    We spoke about Finno-Ugric admixture in north Russians in other threads and for that, one thing to realize is that in the old theory identified by Finnish linguists there were two Finno-Ugric expansions that populated Finland and north Russia, an early one from the Volga that spoke the language that later diverged into Finnish, Saami, Mordvin etc and a secondary one when a set of speakers of this language merged with some Indo-Europeans (Balts or proto-Balto-Slavs) near what’s now Baltic states and formed a farming hybrid culture that expanded into Finland and north Russia, leaving behind Finns, Estonians, Vepsians etc who are hybrids of the original Finno-Ugrians from the Volga and the I-E+Finno-Ugric hybrid that expanded as far East as Arkhangelsk.

    In the old theory of Finnish linguists Finland was taken over by Finno-Ugrians twice with a second invasion of the hybrid culture from Estonia hitting mainly the southwest. The genetics seems to be a perfect fit so far and the chase for Finno-Ugric admixture in north Russia should be looking for two waves of Finno-Ugrians, one heavily hybridized with early Indo-Europeans. And the theory of “higher IQ from Finno-Ugric admixture” has a big problem in Finland since it seems like the less Finno-Ugric (?) West does much better in standardized tests. If we had a country of just West-Finns without Swedes, Easterners, and Laplanders we’d score much higher in PISA studies…

  127. Greasy William says

    Actually, no. There are huge gaps between Finnish populations and there is more genetic diversity in Finland than in any other European country (except Russia). Finns are not exactly one ethnic group and some parts of Eastern Finland are Karelians; Karelians in Finland are very close to Karelians in Russia but most Finns are not close to Karelians.

    Is there any separatism in Finland? If no, do you think that there would have been had there not been a need to unite in defense against Russia and Sweden?

    Pakistan is a super diverse country that has a very strong national identity based on 2 things: 1. Desi Islam (this is why they were so adamant that Bangladesh not be allowed to leave) 2. The need to unite to defend against India. If India had never existed, I suspect that Pakistan would have ended up being like 6 or 7 different countries.

  128. YetAnotherAnon says

    “Rationalwiki is garbage”

    Yes, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of rationality about it.

    Where did the “rational” name come from? Did it start as some kind of atheist group? I know some atheists like to think of themselves (and speak of themselves, and write of themselves) as enlightened.

  129. YetAnotherAnon says

    “What kind of an answer is that? Only something a paedophile would write.”

    Sounds like you’re writing from experience.

  130. German_reader says

    If India had never existed, I suspect that Pakistan would have ended up being like 6 or 7 different countries.

    Reminds me of this article:
    https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/pakistan-the-problem-the-solution/
    Interesting proposal, though obviously its implementation would be quite risky and probably not advisable.

  131. Daniel Chieh says

    No, he is faithful to his waifu: the luscious bouncing boobs of digitized Laura Croft.

  132. Greasy William says

    I never thought that Lara Croft was hot.

    You know who was really hot for an animated figure? Stacy Cornbread from Celebrity Death Match.

    For the most part I prefer human females though. Still, nothing wrong with a little variety.

  133. Daniel Chieh says

    My favorite girl from a video game was Lt. Eva McKenna from Red Alert 3 though the percentage of plastic to human might be a bit high there.

  134. Oliver D. Smith says

    I’m done here, but you and other posters, misunderstood my point completely. I suggest watching any of Joe Owen’s YouTube videos if you can find them (unfortunately most were recently taken down), although one was copied, see below.

    “Alt-Right is a group of people who talk about the same old outdated (and failed) approach, and that holds endless conferences talking about the same topics discussed decades ago. And they don’t engage in local politics, but push identity, culture and heritage, which the public doesn’t care about.”
    – Joe Owens

    Richard Spencer, Daily Stormer and crackpot politics

    Watch especially from 7:30 – 9:30 minutes.

  135. Daniel Chieh says

    Your most recent mistake was to come in here expecting that this is some sort of Spencer fanclub, though it is not nearly as bad at your mother’s mistake not to swallow.

  136. YetAnotherAnon says

    “affirmative action is nothing more than the acknowledgement that blacks are an inferior race”

    That certainly isn’t the rationale as I understand it.

    They’re not inferior when it comes to running, or jazz improvisation if it comes to that. And if you have to use those labels, white Brits are intellectually inferior to Ashkenazis and Far Easterners. But as a Brit, I prefer my own, even if we’re not as fast over 100m or win fewer Fields Medals per capita – as Mr Sailer has pointed out, that’s what separate countries are for.

    “many don’t want to be rude in public, but at a certain point your dogmas are going to create such societal damage”

    As has been pointed out many times, those who are loudest in praise of diversity also seem pretty good at minimising its impact on their (and their children’s) daily lives.

  137. It seems useful to BLM, and I doubt you are going to confront them about this.

    As for who is white, jews, Armenians, Persians are middle easterners and thus are not considered white, the only reason you think they are white is that the USA added them to the census as white, this was done to cater for the jews as in the past when being white was considered an advantage. Since white is now the worst thing to be, the flight from white is accelerating, jews, and all the other MENA types all now say they are not white.

    When we talk about whites we are talking about Europeans, people that can trace their genetic ancestry to the lands of Europe before the year 1000 at least.

    I agree mainly with the comment – but there is a difference between white and European. That’s why ‘White Nationalism’ should be called something like ‘Pan-European nationalism’ instead.

    Perception of white is usually based on how a person looks – whereas being European is a genetic one. That’s why the Nazis used their own concept of ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’, rather than relying on coloration.

    When you talk about European people – then you’re referring to people of genetic origin from the Ancient European peoples.

    If you talk about ‘white’, ‘brown’, ‘yellow’, ‘black’ – you are usually referring to external coloration or appearance.

    External appearance can be deceptive in many cases, as with Middle Eastern people – as a proportion people of Middle Eastern nationalities look externally white, while many people who are European origin (e.g. a majority of Italians, Spanish, Greeks, etc), look brown.

    As nobody is going around giving people forced DNA tests, and we don’t have any National Socialist countries (which used the concept of ‘Aryan’) – the thing which usually effects people in terms of racial treatment, on day-to-day life is external colouration (whether they look white, brown, yellow or black).

    Jews are Middle Eastern origin nationality, so they are clearly non-European ethnic group, and this is proved by modern research. But a proportion of Jewish people have white-colouration (i.e. blonde hair and pale skin) despite Middle Eastern origin. And the proportion with lighter colouration is how the country has the second highest skin cancer rates in the world https://www.haaretz.com/1.4718949

    For example, Jewish model Esti Ginzburg would be described as white (external colouration and potential to get sunburn), but not as European (as genetic origin is the Middle Eastern region). In Israel, about 15-20% of the local population you see on street have a white coloration (at the same time that genetic tests showing they are Middle Eastern origin nationality) –

    By the way ‘white’ is also found in smaller numbers amongst the Arabs – as with the famous Palestinian protest girl Ahed Tamimi. She is ‘white’ but she is differently not European (either genetics or culturally).

  138. I suggest watching any of Joe Owen’s YouTube

    You, random dude, suggest we random dudes listen to some other random dude on the subject of random dude Richard Spencer. I had a beagle-lab puppy once who would entertain the family chasing her tail.

  139. You are complete idiot if you came here thinking anyone here cares about Spencer or Daily Stormer.

  140. “Alt-Right is a group of people who talk about the same old outdated (and failed) approach, and that holds endless conferences talking about the same topics discussed decades ago. And they don’t engage in local politics, but push identity, culture and heritage, which the public doesn’t care about.”
    – Joe Owens

    There isn’t a large alt-right following here. Most people in this forum seem just normal right-wing. On the Steve Sailor forum there is more ‘alt-right people’ (which is a movement which only really exists in America by the way).

  141. I didn’t say I thought they were white. They are usually considered to be caucasian.

    So is “middle easterner” a race?

    My point is that there is no agreed scientific definition of a “white race” so making comparisons between “black” and “white” races is not really scientifically possible. I’m not saying that race doesn’t exist or that it’s a social construct, it just does not seem to be a very useful concept if you’re trying to make comparisons between populations. “Asian” is equally useless. Much too broad and too fuzzy around the edges.

    Ethnicity is more useful but you’d have to accept that there are various white and black ethnicities.

    Middle East is a geographical region – and there are various different native ethnic groups which originate in the region, which have degree of genetic relations between each other.

    Similarly Europe is geographical region, with its own native ethnic groups. European ethnic groups cluster together genetically as much as most geographically close regions, but the main unifying theme is the fact there have been centuries of emerging common European self-consciousness, religion (even if adopted from the Ancient Middle East), and cultural history usually subsumed under the concept – ‘Western civilization’

  142. Funnily enough, I agree with Joe Owens that the correct path is to organise a white nationalist policital party at a local level. I’m a bit surprised that you appear to agree with that as well though, Oliver.

  143. Oliver D. Smith says

    You never watched the video. The important point made is race & IQ, “race realism”, Holocaust denial, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories etc – are all unpalatable/toxic to voters and are therefore useless. If you stood in an election and quoted Richard Lynn’s race & IQ crackpottery – you wouldn’t get 5 votes. None of this stuff posted on this website has any relevance to the real world (off-the internet), hence the people promoting “race and IQ” nonsense here confined to fringe/weird websites like this…. Please try getting some fresh air or something.

    And if I’m wrong, tell me where “race realism” or race & IQ works – none of this stuff is taken seriously by the public, or they simply don’t care, nor does anyone vote on these issues. So why do you weirdos spend your time promoting it? What are you achieving? Nothing. Even if everything you say is true (it isn’t, but let’s say it it), what can you do with “race and IQ”? Nothing because it’s toxic to voters. Arguably “race realism”/race & IQ – demonises actual opposition to immigration. Last time I checked, parties like the FN and Freedom Party of Austria were not goofing around talking about these stupid toxic-to-voters subjects. There are a lot of people who oppose immigration for sensible reasons, then you clowns come along and start talking about racial IQ pseudo-science and 19th century eugenics.

  144. racial IQ pseudo-science

    Pseudo science that at least 44% of intelligence experts agree with?

  145. German_reader says

    So why do you weirdos spend your time promoting it?

    It might potentially be a good argument for immigration restriction; current mass immigration policies are based on the idea that people are the same everywhere (and therefore mass immigration and huge demographic changes are no big deal), so it should be possible to turn Somalis and Afghans into tomorrow’s engineers if you just send them to a civics course and make them respect women…and if they don’t reach their supposed potential, well, it must be due to racism.
    But if even a fraction of the claims of IQ hereditarians about group differences in IQ are true, this is obviously a futile enterprise and immigration policies would have to be much more selective.
    It’s probably correct though that one also needs other arguments for immigration restriction since the IQ/race stuff is unpalatable to many people…so other arguments (culture/identity, Islam’s illiberalism, the erosion of societal cohesion and trust through mass immigration, economic arguments like the effects on the labor market, housing etc.) are also necessary. But it’s not either/or, imo all these approaches have their role in shifting the terms of discussion.
    And regarding Holocaust denial and “antisemitic conspiracy theories”, that’s not really something AK’s blog is promoting, that’s an unfair accusation.

  146. Daniel Chieh says

    So, are you saying that truth is best found through demotic consensus? How many fingers is O’Brien holding up? Is two plus two five, and are women just as strong as men?

    The benefit of Mr. Karlin’s writings is that they focus on finding truth. The “racial IQ pseudo-science” has real-world relevance and explanatory power – it is likely that knowledge increases, we will find errors in its details much as even understanding of germ theory of disease has changed over time. Nonetheless, the hereditary explanation is closer to the truth than the purely environmental one.

    But you will not be able to advance and find truth by rejecting analysis and learning, and especially not for its popular political relevancy. The fact that you keep advancing that as an argument here is is a mildly hilarious example of your projection and ignorance. Indeed, the notion of blogging for votes is so preposterous that I’m not really sure any mockery can do it justice.

    Your presence here, in being a crusader with amazingly close-minded views who participates in witch-hunts to defame and harm individuals for violation of liberal norms, promotes this chimerical “alt-right” of yours better than an army of Spencers.

  147. Oliver D. Smith says

    He’s not arguing for that. He’s telling WN’s or ethno nats to abandon white/ethno nationalism for populism because populism can still be anti-immigration. Look at public surveys on immigration for UK: the people who want a large decrease in immigration levels do so because of overcrowding (60%) and all the problems it causes (e.g. lack of housing, strain on public services see here: https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/key-topics/public-services-infrastructure), as well as economic competition since natives have to compete with immigrant labour (30%). The other 10% is cultural concerns such as female genital mutilation, but “race” isn’t a factor at all.

    So why on earth are there people talking about race and immigration in 2018? Race isn’t a factor in the public/voters who oppose immigration. And arguably looney-tunes who want to bring “race” into opposing immigration are actually demonising anti-immigration populist parties.

  148. You have quasi governmental organizations such as the ADL and SPLC undertaking mass online censorship operations. Then you have government with the increasing censorship, mass propaganda campaigns and ever more anti white laws. The mass media is now nothing more than promoting extreme left wing views that even 10 years ago would have been seen as ridiculous.

    Strange how such a supposedly irrelevant movement that nobody wants attracts such attention, the fact of the matter is that they want to shut down any talk about racial realities because they know that their own ideology is becoming the toxic one.

  149. reiner Tor says

    Are you yourself an immigration restrictionist or is it just concern trolling? Because if you don’t actually want immigration to be restricted, then why do you worry about us being ineffectual?

  150. German_reader says

    Race isn’t a factor in the public/voters who oppose immigration.

    You must be somewhat autistic if you think what people say in public about those issues and what they really think is identical, given all the politically correct speech taboos (backed by the threat of legal prosecution for “incitement to hatred” or such nonsense) that have been created over the last 50 years or so. “Race” is most definitely a crucial reason for people opposing mass immigration, maybe not in the sense that they care about group differences in average IQ, but in an (increasingly correct) perception that the native population of much of Western Europe is being replaced and dispossessed by culturally and ethnically alien immigrants.
    Economic arguments are important, but they’ll never have the same emotional resonance as appeals to identity, and will be dismissed as merely a smokescreen for hidden “racism” anyway.

  151. hence the people promoting “race and IQ” nonsense

    By your own chart, 83% of intelligence experts believe that at least some of the discrepancy between the races in terms of IQ can be attributed to genes.

    None of this stuff posted on this website has any relevance to the real world

    It has high relevance if one wants to solve certain problems or prevent others, because understanding an issue and its causes accurately promotes better solutions.

  152. Oliver D. Smith says

    Truth and politics are two different things. When it comes to the latter, I’m only interested in what people will vote for and that is palatable in terms of the public minds and winnable in terms of ballot box. This certainly isn’t nonsense like “race realism” or race & IQ. People didn’t tick Leave EU on their ballots because of race. Btw, my understanding is that Spencer and most in the alt-right actually campaigned against Brexit because they support mass-migration into UK from Poland. Their opposition to immigration is based only skin colour (how stupid), so since Poles are “white” they have no problem with large numbers of Poles moving to UK. Spencer is a pro-EU twat.

  153. Oliver D. Smith says

    I’m arguing the opposite, as does Joe Owens: SPLC loves the fact the alt-right promotes crank theories like Emil Kirkegaard’s ‘race realism’ and ‘race & IQ’ to demonise anti-immigration sentiment. The fact is, the SPLC doesn’t have to do anything to combat the alt-right since they make themselves a laughing stock by promoting stuff like ‘race realism’ – voters run a mile away from. The difference between me and Joe is Joe is a bit of a daft conspiracy theorist and thinks these people who promote these things are working for the SPLC and are spies (he thinks Spencer is SPLC); I don’t – they’re just idiots and weirdos. That’s a far more simple and probable explanation.

  154. Arguably “race realism”/race & IQ – demonises actual opposition to immigration.

    In practical terms there’s no doubt that you’re correct on this point. Politically it’s a guaranteed losing strategy.

    There are a lot of people who oppose immigration for sensible reasons,

    Agreed. There are powerful arguments against immigration that have nothing to do race or IQ. There are economic, social, environmental and cultural arguments against immigration and those arguments have at least a chance of gaining actual political traction.

    then you clowns come along and start talking about racial IQ pseudo-science and 19th century eugenics.

    Whether it’s pseudo-science or not doesn’t matter (and I have no particular opinion on the subject). It’s almost universally perceived as pseudo-science and it’s a fast track to political failure and irrelevance.

  155. d, it ain’t that complicated.

    In the US, everyone (except for a few mental cases) knows whether they are white or black.

    Most people with black ancestry will identify as black. Mixed race people are dealt a difficult hand. The stubborn and strong willed individuals can refuse to “pick.”

  156. Pseudo science that at least 44% of intelligence experts agree with?

    An enormous number of “experts” agree with man-made climate change, but it’s still politically motivated pseudo-scientific poppycock.

    Scientists are just people. They are as prone as anyone else to stubbornness, intellectual prejudice, moral cowardice, self-interest and political agendas. There’s one thing that 99% of scientists agree on – that they personally should get more funding.

    When any field of science becomes involved in issues with political consequences then the publicly-expressed opinions of scientists on those issues need to be viewed with extreme scepticism.

  157. Economic arguments are important, but they’ll never have the same emotional resonance as appeals to identity

    But you can base your appeals to identity on culture. I suspect that culture has more emotional resonance than race.

    And I think you’re underestimating the emotional impact of perceived threats to people’s economic interests. Being told that you’re losing your job to an immigrant who will work for lower wages tends to reach people emotionally in a pretty big way.

    and will be dismissed as merely a smokescreen for hidden “racism” anyway.

    Perfectly true, but there’s no need to make things easier for your political opponents.

  158. d, it ain’t that complicated.

    In the US, everyone (except for a few mental cases) knows whether they are white or black.

    That’s true, and for everyday purposes that works fine, but if you’re trying to make a rigidly scientific argument you need rigidly scientific categories. Relying on self-identification will make your results very questionable if you’re classifying someone who is 75% European as black because he “knows” he’s black. Or if you’re classifying someone who is 90+% European as non-white because he “knows” he’s a Cherokee.

  159. German_reader says

    But you can base your appeals to identity on culture. I suspect that culture has more emotional resonance than race.

    If you mean some abstract concept of the “white race” probably yes, but I’m not sure at all about that regarding ethnicity which is a complex mixture of culture, identity and at least some element of biological descent. And what’s meant by “culture”? If it means you want to have civilizational continuity in Western countries, you can’t have that anyway without keeping a majority of “white” people, anything else is really an illusion, meaningful assimilation is impossible given the magnitude of current immigration levels of cuturally and ethnically very alien peoples. When people today say “It’s about culture, not race” it usually means something along the lines of immigrants should adopt a minimum of liberal Western values (“don’t subjugate women, don’t throw homos off high buildings…”)…but such appeals are meaningless, merely diversionary tactics to keep the immigration flowing while pretending to do something. And in the end the multiculti/antiracist left will stigmatize even this as hidden “racism” and “culturalism”, and come up with arguments how Islam is really quite progressive, the hijab a sign of female empowerment etc.
    Personally I too have my doubts whether the race/IQ stuff will appeal to voters…but saying one should make it an issue of “culture” isn’t really a solution.

    And I think you’re underestimating the emotional impact of perceived threats to people’s economic interests.

    Sure, those are powerful arguments…given the situation in Germany with its ongoing importation of a parasitical “refugee” class which has a huge amout of resources lavished upon it, with predictably negative consequences for housing and the health care and welfare systems, I can easily see the powerful appeal of economic arguments.

  160. Relying on self-identification will make your results very questionable

    No, extensive genetic testing shows that people actually know whether they are black or white. It is an almost perfect alignment between self-identification and genetic identification.

  161. He’s not arguing for that. He’s telling WN’s or ethno nats to abandon white/ethno nationalism for populism because populism can still be anti-immigration. Look at public surveys on immigration for UK:

    I doubt anyone on this forum is interested in getting involved in politics, or in becoming politicians, or appealing to voters. It’s just a place or virtual teahouse, like most internet forums – for discussing various subjects, and writing down opinions.

    And most people here are arguing different points of view anyway.

    The reason this blog is quite a good one, is that the author doesn’t seem to be doing political activism or propaganda – usually tells us some data, and there doesn’t seem to be censorship of different views.

  162. Agreed. There are powerful arguments against immigration that have nothing to do race or IQ. There are economic, social, environmental and cultural arguments against immigration and those arguments have at least a chance of gaining actual political traction.

    The main issue problem have with current immigration situation is the threat of terrorism, threat of increased crime – and perhaps change of a political future (as in Houellebecq’s novel submission).

    IQ test score debates are not really something most people care about in relation to immigration debates (really if the immigrants are stupid, that means less future job competition for me than if all other immigrants were engineers).

    IQ test score debates are more often something people are discussing because it is an interesting topic.

  163. Oliver D. Smith says

    I oppose population-growth and support economic degrowth. UK’s population growth is explained by 53% -net-immigration and 47% by natural means (i.e. more births than deaths each year, largely because people are now living longer, although in my opinion despite the decline in birth/fertility rates – they’re still too high and I support a voluntary 1 child policy by payment of government subsidies only to the first child). The problem is this: left-wing populist parties only want to stop population-growth by abortion, voluntary euthanasia, women’s rights (access to contraception) and pro-LGBTQIA. They’re aren’t anti-immigration and tend to ignore capital punishment. While right-wing populist parties are anti-immigration, are generally supportive of capital punishment – the problem is they are usually against women’s rights, are often anti-abortion and always anti-LGBTQIA; probably neutral on voluntary euthanasia. This is why I’ve never been a member of a political party because I support all these things that cross the right-left spectrum to halt and reverse population growth. The closest party that mixes some of these things would be Italy’s Five Star Movement. In my youth though (pre-2012) I supported right-wing populist, even nationalist, parties, but I saw their limitations and flaws. When I got older I changed my mind to stop supporting these (at the time I wrote a whole essay why). There’s now though a vacuum for a populist degrowth party like the Five Star Movement in UK; the populist UKIP has been obliterated and is over since they achieved their raison d’être to leave the EU and there were no good candidates in their 2017 leadership election, just anti-Islamic fruitcakes, walter mitty’s and other weird characters such as a guy who said a “gay donkey raped his horse”..

    As for RationalWiki, nothing wrong with folks changing their minds and seeing sense. A current sysop on RationalWiki was an alt-righter less than 2 years ago. He genuinely changed his mind and now criticises the alt-right. As for RationalWiki’s political content – I don’t agree with all of it, in fact few editors there will agree 100%. There are a few RW sysops who are pro-Brexit like myself, but note how the article is biased against-Brexit. I’m less interested in that site for politics, but to document and refute pseudo-science. The alt-right promotes racialism & race & IQ pseudo-science. Most the people I have criticised is for this e.g. Emil Kirkegaard, John Fuerst etc. Karlin promotes the same junk.

  164. German_reader says

    They’re aren’t anti-immigration and tend to ignore capital punishment.

    Eh, what has capital punishment got to do with population growth? Do you want to use the death penalty for decreasing population?

  165. German_reader says

    really if the immigrants are stupid, that means less future job competition for me than if all other immigrants were engineers

    You’re again looking at this only from your own narrow perspective…for people lower down the socioeconomic scale it does mean increased pressure and competition.
    In the context of Western/Northern European welfare states it also means importing a permanent burden on the welfare system which all taxpayers have to pay for (or eventually drastic scaling back of welfare provisions because people don’t want to pay for a parasitical underclass of foreign origins that contributes little, but takes a lot…in any case such immigration is detrimental to the native population).

  166. but I’m not sure at all about that regarding ethnicity which is a complex mixture of culture, identity and at least some element of biological descent. And what’s meant by “culture”? If it means you want to have civilizational continuity in Western countries, you can’t have that anyway without keeping a majority of “white” people

    I agree. But the advantage of focusing on culture is that it makes the argument sound slightly more respectable. Ordinary people (normies if you like) are not quite so threatened by it. They’re likely to think that yes, they are concerned by the destruction of their culture (which to me in this context really means the established familiar way of life).

    If you take England as an example then people notice there aren’t many fish-and-chip shops any more but there are lots of kebab shops. The tradition English pub is declining. People notice that the village church is empty but there’s now a mosque, a Hindu temple and a Nigerian cultural centre. They notice that the freedoms they used to take for granted are disappearing. Their kids are learning about post-colonialism but they’re not being taught English history.

    And people feel at least marginally freer to express concerns about their disappearing way of life, whereas mention of race will frighten them.

    When people today say “It’s about culture, not race” it usually means something along the lines of immigrants should adopt a minimum of liberal Western values

    That’s a definite problem, that automatic assumption that western culture must mean liberal culture, given that liberal Western values are what has all but destroyed the West. The real problem is that our own native populations have embraced these self-destructive values. There isn’t really any chance of saving the West unless we can persuade white Europeans to jettison liberal values such as feminism and LGBT worship.

  167. German_reader says

    And people feel at least marginally freer to express concerns about their disappearing way of life, whereas mention of race will frighten them.

    That’s certainly true, a lot of people would be repelled by openly racial talk, since it will sound like some nutty purity obsession about physical types to them and evoke memories of Nazism. I just don’t think one should have any illusions that one can avoid accusations of racism by talking about “culture”. Those in favour of mass immigration will just claim that’s merely a cover for “racism”, and that culture is a meaningless concept, because cultures are perpetually changing and mixing and we’ve always been multicultural anyway (“We’re using Arabic numerals…so why do you dislike Islam?”). They’ll accuse you of having a static, “essentialist” conception of culture…which is in the end supposedly just as racist as if you were talking about genes, racial types etc.
    And to some extent one probably can’t escape the fact that those issues really are to a significant extent about ethnicity and descent. Assimilation may happen on an individual level. But why should the large immigrant communities in England care about traditional English culture, history etc.? It really isn’t their culture and history after all.

  168. Daniel Chieh says

    What you are, in reality, is a living meme to Bioleninism. A low-t, mentally ill and ignorant nutcase who can’t see past the most surface of concepts?

    Flying colors on all.

    Perfect.

    The sheer obsession with voter popularity misses so many second-level effects from a movement that it seems incredible that you’ll miss it. Consider even Spencer, which I highly doubt most commentators here are fans of – even so, by insisting on explicit white nationalism and by gathering a meaningful number of followers, he nonetheless makes all other far right positions appear more moderate in comparison. In the same way how extreme leftists have been moving the Overton window left, his movement serves to shift a portion of the Overton window right.

    Voter patterns and trends ultimately are only a surface reflection of much deeper movements beneath, and underlying and affecting the underlying causes is far more important(and meaningful). Besides, according to reliable sources in the media, Russian influence is all-powerful, so all that is needed to get the voters is to be nice to Grand Wizard Putin.

  169. Pres. Obamas contacts with black Americans while he was growing up in Hawaii included fellow black high school students who tended to come from military families.

  170. The one drop rule is socially constructed, and the left wants to perpetuate it. Latin American classifications of mestizo, mulatto, and whatever the word is for a 3 way mixture of Black, White and Indian, are more grounded in reality.

  171. Oliver D. Smith says

    Yes.

    And on the subject of being anti-immigration and wanting to stop and reverse population growth: I’m one of the few people with a consistent position. What annoys me a lot is far-right/alt-right/white nationalist types who claim to oppose immigration, or “non-white” immigration, but are pro-natalism and want to increase ‘white’ birth rates. You see plenty of that on Kirkegaard’s twitter who is complaining about western fertility rates being low and pushing for more reproduction, yet the hypocrite claims to oppose immigration.

    Makes zero sense to oppose immigration, but then support large families or increase in fertility rates.

    If I wasn’t Grey-Asexual I would have been vasectomised. Simply put, it only makes sense to oppose immigration if you don’t reproduce (voluntary childlessness), or if you do, support small, rather than large families -limit to having only one child.

    These alt-right freaks like Kirkegaard and Spencer are pushing for large families. IMO they’re as bad as the open-borders lunatics. Alt right and open-borders: opposite side of same coin.

  172. German_reader says

    Yes.

    How do you suppose that would work? If the death penalty should have any appreciable effect on population numbers, you’d have to execute large numbers of people, and there aren’t that many murderers…do you want it to be like in 18th century Britain where people were executed for theft and other minor property crimes?

    You see plenty of that on Kirkegaard’s twitter who is complaining about western fertility rates being low and pushing for more reproduction, yet the hypocrite claims to oppose immigration.

    I don’t see the hypocrisy. Mass immigration is often justified with the low birth rates of the native population, so if you’re against mass immigration, it makes sense to think native birth rates should be higher.
    That being said, there are probably already far too many people on earth than would be good for the environment, so it’s true that further population growth is a problem. But surely you must be aware that most population growth today is in Subsaharan Africa and some Islamic countries…this is where the focus for family planning etc. should lie. Birth rates in Europe, the Americas and East Asia are already low enough (probably too low in fact).

    If I wasn’t Grey-Asexual

    I don’t even know what’s that supposed to be, but it sure doesn’t sound healthy.

  173. But who cares? I am not a politician. I am interested in truth for the truth sake. I do not care if discovering truth will bring benefits or not. The most irritating thing is when we try to discover truth and then you clowns come in calling valid studies “pseudoscience” only because you don’t like the conclusions.

    BTW: are you holocaust denier? Because I have no patience for Holocaust deniers and … it would be really strange combination – rational wiki contributor and holocaust denier.

  174. An enormous number of “experts” agree with man-made climate change, but it’s still politically motivated pseudo-scientific poppycock.

    It’s not. A climate is changing, CO2 levels do influence the climate, and current CO2 level are influenced by man. THose three things are simply facts. What you can reasonably discuss is how much CO2 levels influence climate and how much of current CO2 levels are influenced by man.

    Also, it’s useful to differentiate the question into several smaller once
    (1) Are theories of warming gases scientifically valid? (yes)
    (2) Are they true or, what certainty we have that they might be true? (highly probable)
    (3) What would be the consequences? (shifting of climate zones, changing rain patterns, changing ocean streams)
    (4) Will that consequences be advantageous or not? (hard to say, especially per country basis. More plants, but also more bugs eating those plants. Less rain in some regions and more in others. There is also doomsday scenario, which is extremely unlikely and that’s why scientists tend not to talk about it)
    (5) What we can do about it? (geoengineering, babe!)

    It seems to me that opposition to the “AGW” is mainly driven by tribal signaling, which was probably triggered by the fact that most of proposals for (5) have distinct leftist taint. However, in (5) we can do a lot in old, good capitalistic way, for example, by geoengineering.

  175. Sorry, but that’s not true (in social science). You have a lot of research which does not deal with rigid categories (e.g. stereotype threat BS). Nothing in social “science” related to real life can be neatly divided into categories; it’s just some categories are more rigid and some are less rigid.

    Also, I will repeat myself, but what the heck: the question whether the measured IQ difference between “whites” and “blacks” are driven by genes or not is not really dependent on whether race is a rigid category. Heck, even if it would be totally socially constructed, the differences still could be driven 100% by genes! I really do not understand this fixation on whether “race” exists or not. It does not matter.

    For the sake of argument, assume we completely randomly assign people into “blue shirt” and “greenshirt” categories. This would be completely constructed category. Yet, if we measure the IQ averages between those two groups, the averages might, in general, differ. Since IQ seems to be 50-80% hereditary (but see very interesting arguments on RaceRealist blog against heritabilities estimations and against IQ in general), then those average differences would be driven at least in part by genetical component.

    What does that would mean? That depends on a question.

    First, it would be absurd to claim someone is “stupid” or “clever” based on her/his shirt color.
    Second, yet if you have no other information, the shirt color would be valid indicator in the absence of other information, and you could guess that “he has green shirt, meaning there is some probability is not as intelligent as the girl in blue shirt”
    Third, it would mean that differences in outcome between “blue” and “green” shirts would not be effect of discrimination and there is no need for affirmative actions.

    Those are pretty much obvious things, yet the irrational guys obsess over things whether race is rigid category.

  176. But if you think IQ is pseudoscience, then pretty much you have to say that all of social science is pseudoscience (because there is not much out there which is of as godo quality as research on IQ). Same relates to race.

  177. for-the-record says

    But why should the large immigrant communities in England care about traditional English culture, history etc.? It really isn’t their culture and history after all.

    That is in fact one of the strongest anti-immigration arguments (not that it will do any good of course, the die is already cast) that one can use with “normal” people. When I point out that in another fifty years or so Shakespeare won’t be taught, they really can’t put up much argument. I am thus able to present myself as a disinterested (i.e, impartial) protector of “native” cultures.

  178. “Genetically” in European Russia have to be two pole, and Siberia (where mixed Northern and southern Russian) must have an intermediate position.
    However, the reality is quite different .

    Also with Karelians – Finnish Karelians are very similar to the rest of the Finns, Russian Karelians are very similar to Russian. In this case, the cultural factor is more important than genetic

  179. Whether it’s pseudo-science or not doesn’t matter (and I have no particular opinion on the subject). It’s almost universally perceived as pseudo-science and it’s a fast track to political failure and irrelevance.

    Really? The Blank Slate and Our Troublesome Inheritance were bestsellers (actually Nicholas Wade came close but dodged out of directly confronting the issue).

    So was The Sports Gene (even Obama snagged a copy).

    Literally all that “pseudo-scientists” such as ourselves do is extend those arguments to IQ, the most solid construct in psychology.

    The blank slatist position might remain predominant amongst ordinary people who don’t follow these debates, but it is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy in educated circles.

  180. crank theories like Emil Kirkegaard’s ‘race realism’ and ‘race & IQ’

    These are the ‘crank theories’ that 44% of experts in the field agree with?

  181. I oppose population-growth and support economic degrowth.

    And you criticize us for adopting unpopular positions, LOL.

    Your agenda is supported by perhaps 1% of the British population.

    As for RationalWiki, nothing wrong with folks changing their minds and seeing sense. A current sysop on RationalWiki was an alt-righter less than 2 years ago.

    And in a couple more years he might convert to radical Islam and demand to stone you for your anti-natalist perversions.

    As is quite a typical pattern amongst extremists who base their ideology on feelz, who flit from one demented ideology to the next depending on their current mood.

    In contrast, being based on science – or at least, the closest approximation to it that we can get in the social sphere – the only way my or many of the commenters’ here view of the world could be undermined so radically is if IQ research is indeed proven to be fraudulent (but the trend is firmly in the opposite direction). Otherwise, you would actually have to stone us, or at least credibly threaten to do so, to make us see the (your) light.

  182. It seems to me that opposition to the “AGW” is mainly driven by tribal signaling…

    Moreover, tribal signaling that is largely limited to the Anglosphere (and Poland, I think). I don’t think anybody cares to flog that dead horse anywhere else.

  183. I am interested in truth for the truth sake. I do not care if discovering truth will bring benefits or not.

    Discovering the truth allows us to make better decisions and that’s a big deal. The truth as sacralized virtue is okay as a guide and as re-enforcement.

  184. Greasy William says

    Esti Ginzburg: 5/10. Would not bang.

  185. Oliver D. Smith says

    No. I’ve criticised and refuted Holocaust denial like ‘race realism’/race & IQ on RationalWiki for past 6 years. They’re in the same boat as flat earthism and geocentrism. But I don’t really understand your position if you’re against one pseudo-science, but support another. The traditional race concept became obsolete decades ago – as refuted by population geneticists like Cavalli Sforza (1994) and mean differences between populations in IQ is largely explained by non-genetic factors.

    My point about politics not caring about if Holocaust denial and ”race realism’ is true or not, is that voters do not care or vote on these issues, or if they do care – they find these topics totally unpalatable – so there’s no point in supporting these things in politics. You wouldn’t get 5 votes if you stood in an election spouting your “race realism” nonsense.

    The litmus test would be to go into your work office and talk to your colleagues. If you mentioned race & IQ to them, they would either walk away or stare at you thinking you’re an oddball. I worked in a busy office for a year, not once did I hear anyone mention these fringe-topics you discuss on this website; “race realism” never mentioned. It’s simply not what ordinary people and voters talk or care about – its confined to the lunatic-fringe. And I’ve already explained why if you are anti-immigration you should not focus or mention these things at all: potentially you just demonise anti-immigration sentiment if you talk about “race”.

  186. Daniel Chieh says

    The litmus test would be to go into your work office and talk to your colleagues. If you mentioned race & IQ to them, they would either walk away or stare at you thinking you’re an oddball.

    Let’s not even consider the sample size of one, the idea that the entire world is in a Western office, or the hilarious addition of “I worked for one year.”

    Simply this: If I walked into an average Western office and talked about bowel cancer, it would not likely be welcomed by laypeople. But it wouldn’t stop it from being the second most common cancer in the world, it wouldn’t keep it from being deadly, and it would make a heck of a lot of sense to continue to discuss and research it among interested individuals.

  187. The traditional race concept became obsolete decades ago

    If this is defined as Africans vs. Europeans vs. Asians, the idea that the race concept is obsolete is a pseudo-scientific claim.

    as refuted by population geneticists like Cavalli Sforza (1994)

    Obsolete.

    mean differences between populations in IQ is largely explained by non-genetic factors

    Indeed they are largely explained by non-genetic factors.

    But they are not exclusively explained by non-genetic factors (at least, according to an overwhelmingly majority of experts).

    Thus, the idea there are no genetic differences is pseudoscience.

    It’s simply not what ordinary people and voters talk or care about – its confined to the lunatic-fringe.

    Ordinary people don’t talk about particle physics, or nephroblastomas. Doesn’t mean these things don’t exist, or are “pseudoscience.”

  188. Oliver D. Smith says

    The Green Party is an open-borders party that wants to increase immigration despite 7/10 voters in UK want to see a reduction in immigration, most of them – a large reduction. So no, I don’t support them – the Green immigration policy is ridiculous hence they are only polling 1%. They also make little sense since mass-immigration is destroying the environment (e.g. more homes being built on green-belt areas). Furthermore, there’s the fact despite a long-term decline in fertility rates for the native “White British” (ethnic census category) – immigrants and second-generation immigrants are increasing UK’s fertility rate as a whole: the fertility rate of “White British” (ethnic census category) is 1.5, yet the UK fertility rate as a whole (including all other ethnic groups) is 1.8.

    As I mentioned in my other comment: the dilemma is that while left-wing populist parties are pro assisted suicide/voluntary euthanasia, abortion, feminist and LGBTQIA (like Green Party), they aren’t anti-immigration. Right-wing populist parties in contrast are anti-immigration, but aren’t pro-abortion and are neutral on voluntary euthanasia; they also are generally against LGBTQIA and women rights (like UKIP). So if someone is anti-population growth, who do they vote for?

  189. The traditional race concept became obsolete decades ago – as refuted by population geneticists like

    Which traditional race concept? As far as I know, geneticists provided the strongest evidence for the existence of races, even though they sometimes pay lip service to modern trends (as Cavalli-Sforza, who first denied race exist, while then freely continuing to use the r-word in their works).
    Give me the definition of race which was refuted by geneticists. Usually I read taht the “race” concept should not be used because it is laden with toxic past or because it might be misuderstood by layman.

    I already gave you the old definition of “race” (which I got straight from book on genetics)

    Boyd: “A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant ‘constellation” (1950)

    Such races exist and denying such race is the same as arguing that earth is flat. The criticism is that using that definition one might categorize people in arbitrarily large number of races, which is true; however, this is not argument against existence of race, as the same can be told about – for example – social class.
    There are people using “Social class” in the science and somehow no one is calling them pseudoscientists.

    Another criticism is that race boundaries are fluid, which is true. But – here I will borrow from Sesardic’ paper, who quited Dobzhansky: “such criteria do not exist because if they did,
    we would not have races, we would have distinct species.”

    Moreover, as I wrote already above, the question of whether race is based on biology has no relevance to the question of whether IQ differences between populations are based on genetics. In fact, you would have to be flat-earther to deny outright the there is at least a possibility that such differences exist (as even perfunctory familiarity with evolution theory would show that such differences might exist) and especially given the genetical evidence.

    For me, people arguing races do not exist are the same category as flat-earthers.

    BTW, I apologize for calling you idiot. I was angry, because I am fed up with people labeling “pseudoscience” things which they don’t like.

    If you mentioned race & IQ to them, they would either walk away or stare at you thinking you’re an oddball.

    Well, here in Poland – no problem at all. People are quite comfortable talking those things. I am actually pretty progressive by Polish standards 😀 I remember drinking with my friend, who invited all sort o his friends. Gee, I felt there like a SJW or something 😀

  190. Greasy William says

    I interrupt this debate to bring you more Russophobic gems from “ResetEra”, the land of the liberal retards:

    I worry that the success of China will encourage more governments to aggressively crack down on dissent. That’s probably my greatest fear with a world led by China. However, for all of their human rights abuses the Chinese leadership are at least rational actors. That’s more than can be said for the US at the moment.

    I’ll take what I can get. Once the world is on a more sustainable path maybe then we can come together to pressure counties like China to allow more freedom of expression.

    As for the EU, it is the institution that offers the greatest hope for the future of mankind in my opinion. I have faith that it will continue to morph and evolve into a more cohesive and influential force in the world.

    The greatest obstacle to that happening is obviously populism. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there, but hopefully in a few years Europe will once again have an ally in the US to combat rogue states like Russia that seek to undermine democracy. If Russia can be brought to heel I believe populism will subside enough for the EU to do a better job handling incendiary issues that fuel it such as Muslim migration.

    Do you guys see what I’m talking about now about how organic liberal Russophobia is, and how it really isn’t even about Russia at all?

    Where to even start with the above? First of all, from a left wing point of view the biggest problem about rising Chinese power should not be the Chinese government stifling free speech, as that does not effect people outside of China, but rather that a Chinese dominated world would mean much lower status for blacks, women, gays and trannies.

    But none of that stuff matters to liberals because they never cared about any of those groups anyway. They just hate white people.

    But it is the Russia stuff that make the comment noteworthy. The populist backlash in the West is not because of economic stagnation, PC gone amok, mass migration and treasonous/incompetent elites, but rather because of “Russia”. Russia, a country with a smaller economy than Italy, is causing the populist revolt that is happening all across the Western world.

    Of course when the EU unifies into a superstate and Trump is removed from office (which will be happening any day now), then the West will be able to destroy the Russian menace once and for all.

    And the amazing thing is: none of this is trolling. These people are totally sincere.

  191. German_reader says

    I don’t think anybody cares to flog that dead horse anywhere else.

    I don’t have solid numbers like polls etc., but unfortunately one does see quite a bit of that in comments by AfD supporters in Germany as well (and the logic is tribal indeed, something along the lines of “if the establishment and the Greens who are wrong about so much else believe in global warming, it’s probably just a hoax”).
    Regarding bestselling books dealing with issues like heredity of IQ, group differences etc., Thilo Sarrazin’s books were great successes in Germany. So I’d agree, there definitely is interest in those issues, even if many supposedly educated people hold to bizarre blank slatist positions.

  192. German_reader says

    As for the EU, it is the institution that offers the greatest hope for the future of mankind in my opinion.

    lol, they’re 15 years or so behind the times…who still believes such nonsense today?

  193. Greasy William says

    who still believes such nonsense today?

    US liberals. They love the EU even more than your won left wingers do.

  194. German_reader says

    It’s pretty dumb even for liberals…given the Euro/debt crisis (unresolved, will blow up at some point), the migration crisis, Brexit and the likely results of the upcoming elections in Italy it should be obvious that the future of the EU is unlikely to be a model for anything (except in the sense of what not to do).
    But I guess it’s all just due to Russia’s sinister machinations.

  195. Makes zero sense to oppose immigration, but then support large families or increase in fertility rates.

    It make a perfect sense because of economic argument of pro-imiggration lobby. However, I would emphasize the benefit of smaller society, longevity, longer working careers and obviously automation and robotics.

  196. I am interested in truth for the truth sake. I do not care if discovering truth will bring benefits or not.

    It might be so. But if so then usually in a narrow sense. Truth itself does not have s strong motivational power. People are driven by tangible benefits and intangible as well like the satisfaction of proving somebody else is wrong. Truth is an ultimate rhetorical device. Who possess it wins debates. It is about power.

  197. I have no patience for Holocaust deniers

    But there is plenty of room left for revisionism of the official historical narrative about WWII including the Holocaust. But framing the issue as whether Holocaust happened or not w/o defining what Holocaust is any discussion or inquiry becomes impossible. Earlier you have stated

    I am interested in truth for the truth sake. I do not care if discovering truth will bring benefits or not.

    You do not follow your own dictum in the case of Holocaust. You do not seem interested in truth in this case at least. The question about Holocaust is historical and it is of different nature than the question about, say the flat Earth. The latter can be answered by making experiments w/o reference to what was done in the past. The latter is much harder because it will depend on work of people who not necessarily believed “in truth for the truth sake” but where driven to create politically beneficial narratives. W/o revisionists who were conveniently placed as deniers we would still believe (an lots of people still do) in soap stories, shrank heads stories or gas chambers in camps on German territory (not in Poland) or 4 millions in Auschwitz.

  198. reiner Tor says

    You really don’t want to understand the world? Have you never argued for a position which was inconvenient for you, and which you thought would have been better untrue, but which you thought to be true and so nevertheless stuck to it? Have you never convinced yourself that views which you had thought to be true, and very much wished to be true, were, in the end, untrue?

  199. The question about Holocaust is historical and it is of different nature than the question about, say the flat Earth.

    Sure, that’s true. But the problem is that Holocaust revisionism is not usually about investigating the truth. It’s ok to argue the numbers are wrong, but to deny that millions of Jews perished is so far removed from the evidence and so often correlated with many other erroneus beliefs, that’s I find out it’s useless to discuss with such people. It’s not that I do not think it’s wrong to pursue the truth. It’s that I, personally, have no interest to invest my time once again into discussion with people who are not interested in a discussion. I’ve discussed Holocaust since 90s up to, I don’t know year or two ago and at my point I decided that enough is enough.

  200. It seems to me that opposition to the “AGW” is mainly driven by tribal signaling

    Perhaps you should rather ask why AGW attracts so many flaky liberals and sloppy scientists and why it is so well funded? The opposition to AGW is to large extent driven by the political character of AGW movement and not about whether CO2 or H2O or CH4 are green house gases or not. The GHG effect is beyond the question. How big it is in a complex system with so many feedbacks is still open to question.

    Your point (5)

    (5) What we can do about it? (geoengineering, babe!)

    bothers me. You are taking it too lightly. I would not touch geo engineering. I know people who did modeling of it in 1990’s. Sure it is possible. But the unanticipated consequences?

  201. Have you never argued for a position which was inconvenient for you, and which you thought would have been better untrue, but which you thought to be true and so nevertheless stuck to it?

    I do it all the time. But truth is not necessarily my only motive. As I wrote it is also about winning and about power. Truth is the the ultimate rhetorical device. And when szopen stated

    I am interested in truth for the truth sake.

    it sounded very trite that may come from somebody who is posturing or who is lacking self-knowledge how his mind really works. Btw, it was inconvenient for me to question it because I too would prefer to see myself as the one who seeks truth for the truth sake regardless of consequences.

  202. reiner Tor says

    But truth is not necessarily my only motive.

    Oh of course not.

    Truth is the the ultimate rhetorical device.

    Though often others will assert that it’s different from what you understand to be the truth. But yeah, it is so.

  203. You are taking it too lightly.

    I am not. Simply, given the current political climate, large opposition to any coherent global action, it is inevitable that when it will be obvious that cliamte has warmed, it will be too late to do anything else (in the worst case).

    OTOH, given the worst possible outcome (i.e. earth would be habitable for mammals only around the poles), I’d say that opposition to any steps taken to prevent warming IS “taking things too lightly”. Sure, the worst possible outcome is extremely unlikely (which is why it is not reported as an official scenario) but still, it is possible.

  204. Oliver D. Smith says

    A geographical race (subspecies) in taxonomic literature is an allopatric or parapatric group of breeding populations and therefore is either (1) an evolutionary lineage or (2) is largely genetically differentiated to other races by pre-zygotic isolation (e.g. barriers prevent mating)

    By this definition there are no human races since human populations are sympatric, and there is gene flow between virtually all local populations, especially those that live adjacent to each other, hence minor genetic differentiation if you look at FST. I suggest reading Alan Templeton’s papers.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/

    Typical “race realist” straw man is to try to re-define race to a deme/breeding population, say like the Lancaster Old Order Amish which is laughable. Templeton debunks this:

    “Most demes or local populations within a species show some degree of genetic differentiation from other local populations, by having either some unique alleles or at least different frequencies of alleles. If every genetically distinguishable population were elevated to the status of race, then most species would have hundreds to tens of thousands of races, thereby making race nothing more than a synonym for a deme or local population. A race or subspecies requires a degree of genetic differentiation that is well above the level of genetic differences that exist among local populations” (Templeton, 2013)

    If we use the “race realist” re-definition of race like Boyd you posted, we end up with 10,000+ human races. Is that really what you have in mind? These local breeding populations are not ‘races’, but small ethnic, tribes or ethno-religious groups, and there’s simply no reason to call them races. No one calls the Lancaster Amish a race.

    As discussed on the RationalWiki article, while there are local breeding populations like the Old Order Amish, or other small ethnic groups, there are not aggregates or clusters of populations:

    Relethford throughout his work stresses that population genetics should focus on small-size populations because these reflect actual mating behaviours; a larger number of individuals across more space is likely to contain different breeding populations (such as the Han Chinese). As explained by Jonathan Marks in a 2010 article: “larger units than the deme lack cohesion… to adopt a unit of analysis of human biology larger than that of the local population or deme, then, is what requires some justification today”.[17] Like Relethford and Cavalli-Sforza et al., Marks goes on to deny the validity of aggregating demes into too broad divisions (large countries and continents); firstly since their boundaries are too arbitrary, and secondly because they have too many individuals (with different tendencies of assortative mating or endogamy) and so they are not useful. Relethford (2017) concludes by saying: “Application of much of population genetics works best when considering variation between local populations and not between aggregates.”
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism#Populations

    There are no genetic clusters, especially not at the continental level. So genetics does not support socially constructed races like “white race”, “black race” etc. There are scientists who study populations, but like Relethford they confine their analysis to small local populations.

    Arguably in 50 years or something, there will be no longer much need to even study local populations – genetics will then focus on individual genomes. We aren’t quite yet there though.

  205. Oliver D. Smith says

    There’s no such thing as race, its been refuted by science, and even if there was, no one cares (apart from you autistic Nazi basement dwellers). It’s not an issue people vote on.

    The National Front in UK in the 1970s-1980s promoted ‘race realism’ (they even distributed John R. Baker’s book Race, 1974 and put out leaflets with bizarre photos of “races” and their brain sizes), it got them absolutely nowhere. They never polled more than 1% in General Elections, and never had a single local councillor elected.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(UK)#General_and_by-elections

    You crackpots are clinging to 40 year old failed election strategies…

  206. German_reader says

    It’s not an issue people vote on.

    But they’ll vote for voluntary economic and demographic decline, and for the reintroduction of the death penalty as a means of population control?
    Maybe you shouldn’t be the one accusing others of autism.

  207. There’s no such thing as race, its been refuted by science, and even if there was, no one cares (apart from you autistic Nazi basement dwellers).

    One may argue that he wants to construct a society where race does not matter but one can’t argue that there is no such thing as race.

    You do not seem to be a person who uses his rational mind to learn the truth but you sound more like a mindless agitator. If you want society that is color blind go ahead and keep arguing for it but the argument that race does not exist is invalid.

  208. Oliver D. Smith says

    Yes dumbass, because all those issues I listed and I support are ‘populist’: they have large % of public support, but the establishment parties and elites do not support them. In contrast the nonsense and insane garbage you support like “race realism”, has virtually 0% of public support.

    45% of British public support death penalty (compared to 39% who oppose)
    https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/08/13/capital-punishment-50-years-favoured/

    Voluntary euthanasia/assisted suicide:

    “82% of respondents wanted to see assisted dying made legal, while only 12% would oppose such a change. Nearly half of all voters (47%) “strongly support” this proposal for legalising assisted dying, with just 6% saying they are “strongly opposed”.
    https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/news/poll-assisted-dying/

    Despite over 80% of British public supporting voluntary euthanasia, in 2015 330 MPs voted against a Assisted Dying Bill (only 118 in favour) of plans to allow seriously/terminally ill adults to end their lives with medical assistance.

    There are not even public opinion surveys on ‘race realism’ or ‘race and IQ’ because those topics are so cultish, obscure and weird. Like I said – Nazi autistic basement dwellers.

  209. There’s no such thing as race, its been refuted by science,

    No clue where you come by these fictions.

  210. German_reader says

    I didn’t even mention assisted dying/euthanasia. It’s probably true a lot of people support that (though maybe they would get second thoughts if they looked at some cases in Belgium and the Netherlands), but I doubt it’s a decisive issue for most people.
    As for the death penalty, your own numbers show it’s a divisive issue. And even most people who are in favor of it (I am to some degree), would find linking it to the issue of population growth bizarre. That sounds just like misanthropy of the voluntary human self-extinction kind.
    But anyway, do you have any polls that show mass support for voluntary economic “degrowth” and demographic decline? I very much doubt those are popular positions. Such postmaterialist concerns are only widespread among a narrow wealthy and “educated” segment in Western societies.

    There are not even public opinion surveys on ‘race realism’ or ‘race and IQ’ because those topics are so cultish, obscure and weird

    That’s just concern trolling on your part. Sure, most people probably don’t care about the IQ issue. But if you’d ask “Are you as a White British/English person in favour of continued mass immigration and of English people becoming a minority in England?” you’d get lots of people answering in favour of the ethnonationalist position.

  211. Nazi autistic basement dwellers

    All your arguments come to this insult about Nazi basement dwellers. Three days ago you wrote your first comment. Apparently being triggered by Kierkegaard. So far you wrote 21 comments (200 words on average). Anyway, you are not making any progress. You start with an insult and end with an insult. There are no rational arguments in between.

  212. Oliver D. Smith says

    Ok dude, so who should I trust on this issue?

    The Human Genome Project, or some random idiot on an weird anti-Semitic website?

    hummm….

    “DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans.” – Human Genome Project

  213. Oliver D. Smith says

    “DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans.” – Human Genome Project

    “The geographic pattern of genetic variation within this array is complex, and presents no major discontinuity. Humanity cannot be classified into discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries” – American Association of Physical Anthropologists

    A 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members found very strong agreement that the conventional concept of race is not scientifically useful:

    “The human population may be subdivided into biological races.”

    86% disagree
    14% agree

    Scientific consensus: races aren’t useful:
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism#Scientific_consensus:_Races_aren.27t_useful

  214. Daniel Chieh says

    Thanks, you should let American Heart Association know this.

    https://news.heart.org/cracking-genetic-code-on-heart-problems-in-african-americans/

  215. “DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans.” – Human Genome Project

    You do realize that this requires identifying conceptions of race with taxonomic conventions used in systematic biology, no? You’re denying an assertion that no one has made.

    (And, while we’re at it, DNA studies can identify people’s familial points of origin quite readily).

  216. If you’re familiar with the dynamics of public opinion on the issue of assisted suicide, you’ll understand it generally polls well as an abstract option and indifferently as an actual black-letter law. It’s not only legislatures which reject it. Popular referenda do as well.

  217. we end up with 10,000+ human races. Is that really what you have in mind?

    Yes. I’ve already have written that and also I have written why there is nothing wrong in that. If you want to discuss, please start by reading what we have already written.

    I would also say that it’s really dishonest to claim that your definition is somehow the correct one, while Boyd’s or Dobzhanski aren’t (despite Boyd’s definition being I think older than deifnition of race as “evolutionary lineage), when your definition is of geographical race, ignoring that it is not the only definition functioning in literature and is not definition used by your opponents (nor was ever the only accepted definition in science) – I think I’ve read few dozens definitions of race, including definitions by Cavalli-Sforza. For example this is a definition from 1936: “A population distinguished by morphological and physiological characters, most frequently of a quantitative nature; interfertile with other ecotypes of the ecospecies, but prevented from freely exchanging genes by ecological barriers” which neatly feats with, for example, blacks being for most of our specie’s history separated from the rest by Sahara (note “not freely exchanging genes” does not mean “not exchanging genes at all”).

    That is you use rhetorical trick: you redefine the word used by your opponents, and then use your own definition that the concept used by your opponents does not exist. Don’t do it. This won’t convince anyone and only will irritate people.

    For another example of such wrong rhetorical tric, you can’t claim that race is not useful because “no one calls Old Church Amish race” (i.e. using appeal to the common use of the term) and then using definition which is definitely not in accordance to the common use of the term.

    And if you think that “race” is not useful, because there are many definitions, well, there are also few definitions of species in the literature.
    Not to mention that your argument is wrong and was addressed already by Dobzhanski. Also Fst argument was already addressed, by both showing that there are “races” or even “subspecies” in species with lower Fst than in humans, and second, Fst is wrong measure to use when defining races.

    Also I would want to stress taht if Marks and other would be right, then there would be no clustering found on country-level, yet it exists, and no clustering on continental level, yet it exists.

    Do not link to irrational wiki, I do not read flat-earthers sites.

    There are no genetic clusters, especially not at the continental level.

    Of course there are. Start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering

    But, once again, that question is totally irrevelant to whether there are biological differences between “blacks” and “whites”. If you want, I might instead use “ancestries” instead and it would change nothing.

    Heck, even decade ago it was possible to use genetic data to guess “race” by set of random genes of an individual (i.e. matching “ancestry” to self-declared race). If you would be right and the race would be totally social construct without basis in biology, that would be impossible.

    In fact, your whole answer only shows why I consider irrational wiki a flat-earthers site. You ignore two last decades of research and you claim they show something totally different what one can read. It’s almost amazing how can you claim with straight faces that there are no “genetical clusters” were there are clusters even on regional levels. Yes, they are not separate, but the nice clean separation is not required at all.

    BTW, I think you are Nazi. You are just dog whistling. Stop, do not be ashamed of yourself, admit you are Nazi.

  218. You forgot to mention that in Kaszycka et al2003 50% of European anthropologists agreed that races exist.

  219. “DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans.” – Human Genome Project

    You realize this is just an official government’s agency statement that has its own PC agenda. If you were a bit curiouser you should look into the cluster method. In genome you look at many SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) which then you reduce by the principal component analysis (PCA) to several principal axes. More axes you use more nuanced separation into races you can achieve. Each axis is a linear combination of many SNPs. Even with three axes only you can get excellent definition of races:

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/08/3DPCA.png

    Basically there are three numbers that can place anybody in the 3D space which can be partitioned into race clusters. Three numbers can define your race. But these are not three genes. Each of this numbers is a linear combination of many genes (rather SNPs).

    The method is objective. A purely mathematical or more precisely topological problem once you define the PCA axes. There are no ad hoc subjective assumption. An automaton trained in image recognition will come up with races when looking at the picture generated by PCA. There is no social construction element in it. However the cluster generated with PCA axes correlated very well with the so-called socially constructed races or with geographic latitude/longitude.

  220. Oliver D. Smith says

    Yet British surveys on immigration show virtually no one cares about ethnicity. Opposition to immigration is based on (60%) overcrowding concerns, economic competition because of immigrant labour (30%) and culture (10%). The latter has nothing to do though with genetics or descent. Also, racial/ethnic nationalist parties are a complete failure at the ballot box. The BNP only started polling well when it was modernised and repudiated white/ethnic nationalism (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8146585.stm), with Griffin scrapping the compulsory repatriation immigration policy and eventually opening up party membership to ethnic minorities, including Hindus and Sikhs. Griffin’s party was ‘replaced’ by UKIP after 2012, because their brand of cultural nationalism is a lot more palatable and moderate than the BNP’s; UKIP also benefited since it did not have a fascist past that always scared people voting BNP despite Griffin’s “modernisation” (like Marine Le Pen’s dédiabolisation for the FN). One though can see the limitations of UKIP’s cultural nationalism. Arguably culture isn’t even a good thing to focus on when looking for anti-immigration voters. Ethnicity, even culture – has to be completely avoided.

  221. or some random idiot on an weird anti-Semitic website?

    This site is not weird and we are not random.

  222. Oliver D. Smith says

    Of course I don’t define “race” as my opponents (‘race realist’ pseudo-scientists) do; the reason is I am using the actual traditional definition or taxonomic definition of race, while ‘race realists’ are dishonest losers who re-define race because they were already refuted i.e. the traditional race concept was falsified decades back. The definitions you are posting are trivialised or “weak” re-definitions of race, that have little in common with how race was originally defined by scientists.

    No two breeding populations are genetically identical. So since there are 10,000+ human breeding populations like the Lancaster Amish, are you calling these races?

    A biological anthropologist wrote the following against Dobzhansky/Boyd who were trying to re-define race as local populations (such as the Old Order Amish), over 50 years ago:

    “There are undoubtedly no two genetically identical populations in the world; this has nothing to do directly with the validity of race as a taxonomic device. Unless we have defined exactly what we mean by this… differences between populations are population differences, nothing more.” (Hiernaux, 1963)

    If you aren’t using the definition I posted, you aren’t talking about race, but a trivialised re-definition that’s is invalid.

    As for human genetic clustering- there is no genetic clusters that are objective or scientific because human biological variation is explained by isolation-by-distance (smooth genetic gradients across geographical space) not clustering and genetic discontinuities. But of course someone could arbitrarily make any clusterings by arbitrarily slicing the genetic-continua. This is though completely pointless and these clusters have no utility.

  223. German_reader says

    Yet British surveys on immigration show virtually no one cares about ethnicity.

    That’s the official line, but I don’t believe it. Non-European immigration to Britain is the huge issue one isn’t supposed to talk about it, but there are indications that it’s a very important issue for a lot of people, and that they do make distinctions:
    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/non-eu-migration-is-what-uk-voters-care-most-about/

    Also, racial/ethnic nationalist parties are a complete failure at the ballot box.

    Under a first past the post system it’s extremely difficult for new parties of any kind to make gains.

    Ethnicity, even culture – has to be completely avoided.

    Might be true, but that just shows how rotten the UK has become with all its ridiculous pc speech taboos and the threat of legal prosecution for dissent.

  224. Oliver D. Smith says

    This website is clearly weird; one source labels it “anti-Semitic crackpottery”. And the people here are just alt-right or Nazis who are obsessed with discredited racial theories and other pseudo-science.

    Notice how I just posted a scientific sources that points out the reality races don’t exist. The Nazi idiots here reply by responding it’s a “politically correct” conspiracy theory. Probably Davide Icke lizard men next…

  225. Ethnicity, even culture – has to be completely avoided.

    Only because if it was brought in the result would catastrophically unpredictable. People care about ethnicity very much.

  226. Oliver D. Smith says

    No, it’s the fact UK is a multicultural/multi-ethnic society and sizable immigrant populations have been settled here for 2-3 generations. A reality people have to accept, and nothing will change this fact. And people who oppose immigration do not do so because of culture or ethnicity, but the strains of overpopulation on infrastructure, e.g. public-services being overcrowded. People will vote on things that affects their daily lives – ethnicity or culture is irrelevant, but not getting to sit down on a train to work because of too many people overcrowding it – that’s a reason someone will vote for a party that wants to significantly reduce immigration. This was something UKIP was tapping-into quite well a few years back, for example their 2015 manifesto said their opposition to immigration was because of “space, not race” and mentioned the problems with overcrowding on public transport. That got them nearly 4 million votes. In contrast, autistic Nazi basement dwellers who try to link opposing immigration to ‘race realism’ = 5 votes.

  227. one source labels it “anti-Semitic crackpottery”.

    Wouldn’t the validity and value of this rest upon an evaluation of the source?

    And the people here are just alt-right or Nazis

    Many are. There is an abundant supply of “moderate Nazis” as well. Clearly, some writers and commenters are anti-Semitic.

    who are obsessed with discredited racial theories and other pseudo-science.

    There is some obsession here, but there are many knowledgeable and competent commenters. There is very little pseudo-science. We have conspiracy theorists by the gross. What has been discredited and what has not is a debate.

    The Nazi idiots here reply by responding it’s a “politically correct” conspiracy theory.

    Well, it is a main tenet of political correctness, but it is not a conspiracy. They are not trying to hide anything.

  228. German_reader says

    No, it’s the fact UK is a multicultural/multi-ethnic society and sizable immigrant populations have been settled here for 2-3 generations. A reality people have to accept, and nothing will change this fact

    Indeed, large areas have been successfully taken over by distinctive immigrant communities, and their ethnic lobbyism plus the state-enforced “antiracism” make an honest discussion of the issue almost impossible.

    People will vote on things that affects their daily lives

    Most people don’t want to see their own society changed beyond recognition in their lifetime or have their own ethnic group become a minority in its own homeland. What could be worse for one’s daily life than having to live with the fact that other groups, whose values one can’t relate to, are increasingly setting the cultural tone and changing the country to their own preferences, so you become a stranger where once you felt at home, or with the increasingly likely risk that people who hate you for your white skin or who think their religion gives them an Allah-given right to dominate others will have power over you?
    These are matters of basic caution and self-preservation and shouldn’t be hard to understand.

  229. Allah-given…

    In theory at least Muslims can be civilized and in many cases they were. They can abandon their nonsensical religion or at least adopt its milder versions. The real problem are SS Africans. They can’t abandon their genes. Look at American Blacks. No progress. No hope.

    (TTBC)

  230. It seems to me that opposition to the “AGW” is mainly driven by tribal signaling, which was probably triggered by the fact that most of proposals for (5) have distinct leftist taint.

    And support for the “AGW” position was driven right from the start by tribal signaling, which was unquestionably because those who came up with it had a distinct leftist taint. Right from the beginning it was a political ideology.

    Radical environmentalists needed an issue since the overpopulation issue which had served them so well was running out of steam. And expressing concern about population was increasingly seen as racist. If they couldn’t find a new scare story they were facing political irrelevance. And, lo and behold, they suddenly discovered AGW. It was like a miracle.

    Socialists were also desperately in need of something that would restore socialism’s credibility. And, lo and behold, AGW came along. It was like a miracle.

    For scientists it was a wonderful opportunity to get their hands on lots and lots of money. “Climate scientists” were able to build lucrative careers on it. It was like a miracle.

    The whole AGW thing was pure politics from its inception. By an extraordinary, almost unbelievable coincidence, those who got the AGW hysteria bandwagon rolling just happened to be people who stood to gain from it.

  231. There’s no such thing as race, its been refuted by science, and even if there was,

    What a bizarre claim.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24983758

    Racial differences in hypertension: implications for high blood pressure management.

    Lackland DT1.
    Author information
    1
    Department of Neurosciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina.

    It’s very telling that you ignored the rest of my post, demonstrating that the overwhelming majority of intelligence experts believe that genetics plays a role in racial differences in intelligence.

    no one cares (apart from you autistic Nazi basement dwellers)

    Not autistic, not a Nazi, and not a basement dweller.

    But what do you have against people with autism?

  232. I really do not understand this fixation on whether “race” exists or not.

    Nor do I. But whenever the subject of IQ differences comes up it always seems to lead to the race issue. And for those who oppose immigration that’s invariably disastrous. It’s handing a loaded gun to the pro-immigration lobby. And when you do that you shouldn’t be surprised when they pull the trigger.

    That seemed to be the point Oliver D. Smith was making, and on that point I was agreeing with him (although I disagree with him on lots of the other points he was making).

    Just for the record, I’m against immigration. I’m against all immigration, whether it’s legal or illegal, whether it’s based on race or merit or IQ or any other consideration. And I’m against affirmative action.

    If you want to oppose immigration and you mention race or IQ you’ll lose.

  233. But if you think IQ is pseudoscience, then pretty much you have to say that all of social science is pseudoscience

    But is is pseudoscience isn’t it?

  234. German_reader says

    In theory at least Muslims can be civilized and in many cases they were.

    Yes, but theirs is a different civilization that’s incompatible with ours, and I don’t want it to gain any more influence in Europe. It’s true some of the stuff written about Muslims is dumb/false, and one shouldn’t demonize them and their religion, but on the whole Islam in Western countries is bad news and leads to severe conflicts.

  235. I am not disagreeing with you. I just stated that at least theoretically cultural differences can be abolished while racial differences cannot. Currently Muslims are a bigger threat to Europe than SS Africans but it may change for worse very quickly.

  236. German_reader says

    Currently Muslims are a bigger threat to Europe than SS Africans but it may change for worse very quickly.

    Given what Sailer calls “the most important graph in the world” that seems quite likely.
    There is some interconnection though, Islam is on the rise in Africa after all (as are some especially nutty forms of Christianity like Pentecostalism, but then I don’t have much sympathy for those either).

  237. I’m against immigration. I’m against all immigration, whether it’s legal or illegal, whether it’s based on race or merit or IQ or any other consideration.

    Why are you against immigration? You must have a reason.

    If you were forced to decide which people can immigrate to your country who would you select?

    You must have some criteria. Or are you trying to avoid the hard questions by saying “I’m against all immigration”?

  238. Why are you against immigration? You must have a reason.

    I have several.

    1) Economic. Immigration drives down wage levels. With automation/robotics combined with immigration we’ll end up with very high unemployment and very low wages. This is of course why the corporate sector loves immigration so much.

    2) Overcrowding. It might seem bizarre when you look at the size of Australia but our cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne, are already overcrowded and that’s where most immigrants end up. Sydney has become a very unpleasant place.

    3) Housing. Immigration pushes already ludicrously high real estate prices ever higher.

    4) Cultural. I’d like to be allowed to keep my own culture. I don’t want to live in a melting pot. Mass immigration does not lead to cultural diversity. It’s one of the factors pushing us towards a nightmare mono-cultural future in which every country will be indistinguishable from every other country. I like cultural diversity and the best way to maintain cultural diversity is by having separate countries. I have nothing against other cultures. I have nothing against Islam. I despise the idea of assimilation. I don’t want to join the Borg.

    5) Political. Immigration leads to social disorder which gives the elites the excuse to tighten the totalitarian screws.

  239. I like cultural diversity and the best way to maintain cultural diversity is by having separate countries.

    Very good!

  240. But [it] is pseudoscience isn’t it?

    It is much less of a science than its adherents want us to believe. There is only one sensible argument in it which is that there is a genetic component to intelligence. Anything can be defined as a trait but not every trait will have a genetic component. So, if a score from an arbitrary test shows to have heritable component then it requires some attention even if the test like the IQ test is pretty arbitrary and have many recognized flaws. It can’t be denied that the heritability of IQ test score is larger than zero. IQ test scores can be useful in some studies even though one must held his nose while using them. A proper distance is required. Unfortunately the adherents of this enterprise lost the distance and overextended themselves into the regions of ludicrousness. They crossed several levels of reification ending up in the la la land cult. Any discussions with them are usually futile.

  241. I really do not understand this fixation on whether “race” exists or not.

    Nor do I.

    People did classifications, create categories and make taxonomies from the very beginning of human existence. Many ancient pre-scientific categories were validated by science. People could tell cats from dogs and they still can by the same method.

    The reason the left decided to abolish the concept of human race by announcing that races do not exist was to accelerate realization of two postulates of French revolution égalité and fraternité. This postulate while noble in principle degenerated into anti-scientif form: race does not exist.

    Whether race as a concept is useful or harmful is an unscientific question. The bottom line is that race can be elegantly and precisely defined using genome data. This definition is congruent with the so-called social construction definition.

    As far as immigration issue the distinct external phenotype associated with different races is critical. It is empirical and historical fact that people from different races do not get along well when forced into the same society. The society always undergoes fragmentation along racial lines which lead to development of separate racial identity and separate political aspirations and goals which results in low trust, low cohesion, low solidarity and low altruism society that will lead to social strife that can be easily manipulated by its rulers using the well tested divide et impera method. It is possible that achieving this state (see Sweden) is the true motive behind the abolition of races and immigration agenda promoted by the left which actually serves the interest of the ruling elite.

  242. Oliver D. Smith says

    Correct. Glad to find one other person has some sense on this website.

    I would just go further than you and point out culture is also an irrelevance to opposing immigration. We’ve seen this with the FN and Marine le Pen’s 2017 Presidential election campaign. Her anti-immigration rhetoric was based on being against Islam and “protecting French identity” and that’s why she lost because she still came across as scary to many voters. This is also why Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has not done too well in your own country. These sorts of cultural nationalist parties, while more successful than the toxic and unpalatable white/ethnic nationalist parties of the past – are still never going to gain power. No point in wasting time with them.

    How old are people here? I realised all this stuff many years back when I was practically still a teenager or 20, yet some idiots are in their 30, 40s or even older and clinging to the same outdated and failed anti-immigration strategies. You can still find morons on Stormfront who think people are going to vote for David Duke’s tin-foil hat conspiracy theories about Jews or ‘race realism’. Well let’s see where that got him:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Louisiana,_2016
    David Duke 3.0%

    lol.

  243. There’s no such thing as race, its been refuted by science…

    I happened to notice that this blog post by Anatoly was attracting a remarkable number of comments for something not run as a main feature, already passing 25,000 words of heated argumentation and still running strong.

    Although I certainly haven’t read the entire thing, the debate really seems pretty amusing at a glance.

    As everyone knows, my webzine tends to attract all sorts of nutjobs and lunatics, whose remarkable varieties of madness must surely match that of any other location on the Internet.

    Until recently, I probably would have put the “Moon Hoax” people at the summit of insanity, but I’d have to say that our current “Race Hoax” visitor must surely give them a run for their money.

    Since I’m still bogged down in my software work, I might as well provide a link to a column on that issue I wrote a couple of years back:

    http://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/

    I remember I was joking with Steve Pinker a couple of months back that given current trends, I fully expect a widespread movement to soon arise claiming that men and women are exactly equal in average height, with its activists mounting vicious public campaigns against anyone they suspect of being a “Height Equality Denier”…

  244. German_reader says

    Her anti-immigration rhetoric was based on being against Islam and “protecting French identity” and that’s why she lost because she still came across as scary to many voters.

    That’s just your interpretation, iirc she had actually toned down her anti-immigration rhetoric during the election campaign and instead tried to focus more on economic populism, being anti-Euro and anti-EU (which actually may have scared people rather more since a lot of her economic proposals seem to have been kind of dumb; there’s also a class element, with FN being seen as too prole by many). She also tried to move somewhat more towards the direction of civic nationalism, defending the republic, laicite and all that.
    And given the events of the last few years, with several acts of mass murder perpetrated by “French” jihadis, it would be somewhat difficult to ignore the Islam issue anyway.

  245. “The geographic pattern of genetic variation within this array is complex, and presents no major discontinuity. Humanity cannot be classified into discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries” – American Association of Physical Anthropologists

    The visible spectrum contains no major discontinuity. It cannot be classified into discrete categories of “color” with absolute boundaries.

    A 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members…

    73% of whom also happened to Disagree or Strongly Disagree that “Race — as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (i.e., census categories) — is a useful proxy for ancestry.”

    I suppose in their – and presumably, your – world most Americans are transracial like Rachel Dolezal. Or maybe they believe white people randomly popped up in Africa and vice versa. Or they’re crazed ideologues.

  246. The first climate model was constructed by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s. His estimates of climate sensitivity tallied extremely well with modern estimates. Incidentally, he was also into eugenics, and welcomed the prospect of his native Sweden turning into a tropical paradise.

    So that’s where, when, and with who the “pro-AGW” position started.

  247. So that’s where, when, and with who the “pro-AGW” position started.

    And it was sitting there for 100 years until somebody realized that it can be used. Global warming, yes, that’s a ticket. The atmospheric science was just warming up and recognizing its abilities in 1980s as a political player on a global scale. First they “discovered” and “defeated” the acid rain and then they “discovered” the ozone hole and “defeated” it in 1989 with Montreal protocol. They realized they were a global player in business of saving planet. No scientists since after the Manhattan project had that much public presence and power as atmospheric scientists in late 1980s. The cold war was being won. New enemies were being sought. It used to be the physics envy and now it became the atmospheric science envy. Nobody could scare people as much as they and nobody could offer salvation as they. If you had as much power as them are you sure you would not end up abusing it? This is what dfordoom was writing about. It was not whether the sensitivity is 2° to CO2 doubling or 4°. These are relatively trivial matters. Everybody agrees that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The so called deniers are straw men. The plot of CO2 at Mauna Loa was constructed since 1960. Anybody could extrapolate it after few years and start screaming that the end is nigh because of global warming. Nevertheless nobody did. Actually some experts were talking about global cooling in 1970s. What was happening? Were thousands of atmospheric scientists hypnotized to not see the problem and somehow in 19980/90 they were woken up? Is it possible that they are under some hypnosis now? Some group think mania possibly?

    Nowadays you can’t look at scientific work just as a scientific work. These are huge enterprises with 10’s or 1000’s people involved and huge budgets and there are ulterior social and political motives involved.

    I would recommend Judith Curry who I have great respect for. She is not a denier. Nobody really is. She is reasonable and she asks right questions. Also this Nobel physicist from Rensselaer Polytechnic puts some things in good perspective (there some minor problems in some of his arguments but most of it is correct): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdTlXuTwvEQ

  248. As everyone knows, my webzine tends to attract all sorts of nutjobs and lunatics

    W/o lunatics this AK’s post would not get 25,000 words. AK did not mind and did not complain.

  249. You know what, you are dishonest loser nazi, who continues to use ad hominem arguments (which is way I decided to use them too). Or you are idiot. The definition you gave is not “the traditional definition” because there were no one agreed upon traditional definitions and people were arguing over proper definition since like ever. Why not use other definition: “constant varieties which perpetuate themselves by generation”? Why your re-definition is more valid than Boyd’s? Why not use Hooton’s definition as traditional (from 1926) – after all, your wroding is a re-definition dating past Hooton and was defined by whome, Montagu first or even later?

    You also called Boyd, Dobzhansky and Cavalli-Sforza pseudo-scientists, meaning you have no idea about biology. For example, for you Dawkins is also crackpot who loves pseudoscience. You are claiming they were refuted, where they weren’t actually refuted, they were just argued against.

    Once again, you are building a strawman and trying to pretend since this strawman is not valid.

    If you aren’t using the definition I posted, you aren’t talking about race, but a trivialised re-definition that’s is invalid.

    That’s why one does not debate flat-earthers like you. No, I do not talk trivialised re-definition. It’s you who are trying to pretend that “race” as understood by “race realists” does not exist by using definition of race which is not used by “race realist”. This is dishonest, and at this point I know you are dishonest.

    Once again, there are things like social class: which has no clear definition and where you can actually divide classes more and more. Where social classes as traditionaly defined in Poland (e.g. intelligentsia) does not exist in USA. Does that mean, you idiot, that every paper using “social class” is a pseudoscience?

    Then there is thing like family. Two completely unrelated people may form a family. A guy may marry a girl and they may adopt a child and they are family. State might sanction it, but sometimes families might exist without legal sanctioning. There are families of size 2 or 10. A man might belong in the same time to many families (e.g. he is family with his parents, family with his wife, with his wife parents, he might remarry and so on). Does that mean every paper using “family” is a pseudoscience?

    Then there is population. There might be thousands of populations and we may divide population into subpopulation. Yet you quote a pseudoscientist who used such unscientific term!

    As for clustering and no “objective” clusters that once again means you completely have no idea what you are talking about. This does not matter. There is no objective number of races. You simply decide whether you want compare blacks/whites, or european/mena, or Poles/Germans.

    For example you state this untrue statement: ” But of course someone could arbitrarily make any clusterings by arbitrarily slicing the genetic-continua”. This is emphatically not true. This means you have no idea what you are talking about, because there is no perfect continuum, exactly because in the past there existed geographical barriers preventing substantial gene flow between human populations. How you can’t know this? Only if you are not interested in scientific evidence, only if you are a flat-earther you can claim such thing (or political comissar). Heck, there is even a small genetic discontinuity between Poles and Germans.

    Moreover, if you really know the evidence (which you don’t) then you will know that actually there can be objectively defined “optimal” number of clusters.

    BUt, you nazi flat-earther euthanasia fanboy, you know?Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that race do not exist. Instead, i define “grumple” the same as Boyd’s definition above. Happy now? See, no race, just grumple. Grumples have fuzzy borders (just like social class) and we might have problems to decide whether people belong to a given grumple or another.

    Now, you cannot deny that grumples, defined as such, do exist.

    Heck, let’s even say tehre is a perfect genetic continuum, that barriers such as Sahara did not exist, and that borders between “grumples” are completely arbitrary.

    Also, without making complete fool of yourself, you have to admit that we can divide humans in, for example, three grumples: blacks, white, asians. Or four grumples. This does not matter. Also, it does not matter if we can divide humans into three grumples “pinks” “blue-eyed” “pizza-eaters”. Simply, I have divided humans into THAT three grumples, beucase division into THAT three grumples allows me to ask questions about matters relevant to modern society (since society divided poeple into three “social races” which, by coincidence, almost perfectly fit my “grumples”, and society keeps asking questions about differences between those “social races”)

    And, just for the sake of argument, let’s say IQ is a BS.

    And here is a question: are educational outcomes between white “grumple” and black “grumple” result of culture solely, or are also in some part influenced by genes?

    You see? What has changed if you have removed the “race” word from the debate? Nothing. Would you still insist that trying to answer this question is pseudoscience? If so, then you are not interested actually in science and your definition of pseudoscience is “something which tries to find answers to questions I don’t like”. Meaning you are irrational flat-earther. Probably also geocentrist and creationist. Not to mention Nazi. Which means there is no point in further discussion with you. EOT. Go back to your basement and worship Stalin or Hitler, or whoever is your idol.

  250. I oppose population-growth and support economic degrowth.

    So why exactly do you oppose population growth? I’m not saying that I disagree, I’m not in favour of population growth either, but I’d be interested to know your reasons.

    Without immigration the population in western countries is going to decline. Fertility rates are below replacement level throughout the developed world. I don’t think a fall in population levels would necessarily be a bad thing.

    The corporate sector (and the politician who are owned by the corporate sector) will of course react with hysteria to the idea.

    As for economic degrowth, good luck with selling that idea. If GDP stops growing the sky will fall.

  251. But they’ll vote for voluntary economic and demographic decline, and for the reintroduction of the death penalty as a means of population control?

    We need to stop calling it capital punishment. It’s assisted non-voluntary suicide.

  252. Climatologists were discussing this theory for quite a long time before 1980, utu. They pretty much reached a consensus that increase of CO2 would lead to climate warming in what, 1970s? Googling gives me wiki page with this statement from 1979:

    When it is assumed that the CO2 content of the atmosphere is doubled and statistical thermal equilibrium is achieved, the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2°C and 3.5°C, with greater increases at high latitudes.

    and another from the same year:

    it appears plausible that an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can contribute to a gradual warming of the lower atmosphere, especially at higher latitudes….It is possible that some effects on a regional and global scale may be detectable before the end of this century and become significant before the middle of the next century.

    Well, and what do you say? The temperatures really seem to be higher now than in 1979. What a coincidence.

    You really should separate science from politics here.

  253. I fully expect a widespread movement to soon arise claiming that men and women are exactly equal in average height,

    We can close the gender height gap! We just have to try harder.

    The first step is to attack male height privilege. The government must act to remove the unearned height advantage from men. We can solve poverty by redistributing wealth. We can solve the height problem by redistributing height. We need affirmative action to ensure that women get more height.

  254. You really should separate science from politics here.

    In our Brave New World the scientific is the political. Everything is now politics. Art is politics. Entertainment is politics. Sport is politics. Sex is politics. Food is politics. Health is politics. Education is politics.

    Science no longer exists outside of politics.

  255. Scopen is a strange case. On one side you have his belief in IQ mambo jumbo which in some sense is counter the prevailing cultural paradigm and on the other side you have him cucking to the global warming band wagon and on top of it instructing everybody to separate science from politics. This guy actually believes what he reads in newspapers. I thought that people in Poland were more savvy about it. Apparently they lost some edge once they ceased to be vigilant against the communism or perhaps szopen has the old communist nomenclature provenance that was always looking on which side the bread was buttered. Opportunism is inbred.

  256. utu,

    This guy actually believes what he reads in newspapers.

    No. Few years ago I thought AGW was a hoax. Then I came on a polish climatologist blog (“doskonale szare”). After a week or so I read many his posts, analysed released fortran codes and emails, I discussed with him and saw him discussing with others. That prompted me into reading scientific papers, which I savoured by dozens. Which caused me to switch my position from “AGW is a leftist hoax!” into my current one. I gain nothing from changing my position except from my belief that I am closer to truth than few years ago.

    I am scientist, after all.

    This guy actually believes what he reads in newspapers. […]szopen has the old communist nomenclature provenance

    Why do you name calling me? You know nothing about me and yet you are applying SJW tactics against me.

  257. Science no longer exists outside of politics.

    I don’t care. I care about whether theory is sound, whether it can be falsified, whether it can be used to predict outcomes or at least whether it explains world better than the competing theories. Whether it affects me or my politics is of no importance to me. Of course, I am a human being, with my own biases, and there are some theories which I would prefer to be wrong – but I always have strived to challenge my biases. I just like to know things and just like to think I am right. And if I find out that I am wrong, why then I just change my position and I am right once again 😀

  258. I thought AGW was a hoax

    On the basic level it is not a hoax. The problem with it is that it is a hype. If a teenage boy hears that obsessive masturbation is bad for him and that if he continues his teeth will fall out which one of the two messages is a hoax or which one is a hype? The problem with the global warming is excessive hyping on the alarmist side. And this is all political. The numbers are always exaggerated in one direction and effects are dire and always negative. There is a big problem of error bars. Judith Curry deals with it. The fact that CO2 is a green house gas is trivial and obvious once you know the spectroscopy of CO2. And thus increased concentration of CO2 will lead to temperature increase of atmosphere. The question is how much? The fact that water vapor is many times stronger than CO2 is less known and less understood because its concentration constantly varies locally and oscillates and its effect is less understood and to what extend it can compensate (a negative feedback) the CO2 increase. Global circulation models (GCM) all suck. And empirical data like global temperature data are constantly tweaked and no reasonable person should trust them. I knew some of the people who work on those data sets. Personally I kind of trust only one set that goes back to only 1979 (beginning of satellite age). Despite of the tweaking we had at least 15 years pause in temperature increase.

    You just underestimate the group think and many other sociological effects in science. And keep in mind that there are dishonest people who have no scruples. The majority are stupid sheep who drunk too much Kool-Aid but there are also real crooks. I do not believe that you are that naive so I attribute your attitude to a willful ignorance and that is disappointing and irritating. Anyway, I take back what I said before. Sorry for making a personal innuendo.

  259. Oliver D. Smith says

    You’re a Nazi crank and poorly educated about these science topics. Everything you posted is refuted on the RationalWiki racialism article, that you said you wouldn’t read:

    1. There are no geographical barriers today. If there were in the distant past – man has since crossed all of them because of transport that has improved mobility. Furthermore, the Sahara millennia ago was never a barrier; it was not always a desert and when a desert it has been inhabited by nomadic Saharan desert tribes like the Taureg, while the Nile-valley has obviously been constantly inhabited. Are you denying the ancient Egyptians and Nubian civilizations existed?

    2.There is no genetic discontinuity between populations, certainly not across continents, but a smooth continua:

    http://genome.cshlp.org/content/14/9/1679.full
    “Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or “races”.”

    So if you want to slice this genetic continua, you end up with completely arbitrary clusters. Someone if they wanted to could create an “Afro-European race”, arbitrarily clustering all populations in Europe, with Africa. Now what? These arbitrary clusters have no utility.

    1. You aren’t using the traditional definition of race, but using re-definitions. A traditional definition is found in Templeton (1999): “Race is generally used as a synonym for subspecies, which traditionally is a geographically circumscribed, genetically differentiated population.” And as noted by Templeton, a race requires a threshold of genetic differentiation, otherwise any (local) population is a race because no two breeding populations are genetically identical. You’re weakening the race concept and changing the definition because the traditional race concept was refuted. Like I said, ‘race realists’ are dishonest losers.
  260. The problem with it is that it is a hype.

    Well, I agree. The problem is that media and politicians have in general problem in udnerstanding science, and selling something along the lines of “well, there is 30% probability that your grandchildren life will really suck” does not sell well to the electorate.

    My favourite example is when on one conference scientists for an entertainment purposes considered whether atomic war would stop global warming. Can you guess how it was reported by Polish press? “Scientists are considered using nukes to stop global warming” (not an exact quote, but the gist of it).

    As for the “Despite of the tweaking we had at least 15 years pause in temperature increase. ” that’s not really true. First, there were already such “pauses” before, after which temperatures again started to rise. Second (ignore anything past the graph, there is a lot of political signaling past that):

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/02/2017-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-without-an-el-nino-thanks-to-global-warming

    And before:
    https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally

    the warmest year was 2016, second place goes either to 2017 or 2015.

    Quickly googled:
    “2017 was a top 3 warmest year, and that 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000”

    “The six warmest years have each occurred since 2010. ”

    I take back what I said before. Sorry for making a personal innuendo.

    No problemo.

  261. YetAnotherAnon says

    “And regarding Holocaust denial and “antisemitic conspiracy theories”, that’s not really something AK’s blog is promoting, that’s an unfair accusation.”

    I don’t think ‘fair’ is in the “Oliver D. Smith” lexicon.

  262. YetAnotherAnon says

    Islam plus SSA = Somalia.

  263. YetAnotherAnon says

    In 2012 we went to Solheimajokull Glacier in Iceland, one of the few glacier tongues you can drive to. Six years on it’s retreated more than 200 yards. That’s a fair old pace.

  264. Listen, you Nazi eugenics-apologist, go back to stormfront or some other place where nazis like you are welcome. After all, you support euthanasia. Nazis supported euthanasia. Means you are Nazi, right?

    (1) You quote an outdated study from 2004. That’s like 12 years ago. In genetics, it’s like if you were quoting some 19th century paper. Go and find something more recent. The debate whether races exist still continues, and I’ve read plenty of papers arguing that discontinuities are large enough to ensure division into races, and arguing that they are not. You are quoting one old paper, as if was final say in the matter and as if there are no more scientists arguing that races do exist. For example, read this Jerry Coyne’s blog piece (Jerry Coyne is a known biologist):
    https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/are-there-human-races/

    Even better, read this piece, where he deals with your so called “arguments”
    https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/a-sensible-article-on-human-race/

    (2) Once again, you seem to not understand that “barrier” does not need to be complete. All it’s required is to prevent some gene flow. I have also impression that you do not understand taht discontinuity does not mean “sharp border”. There are no sharp borders. Races are not discrete entities. Discontinuity exists even between Poles and Germans – NO SHARP BORDER, but small discontinuity, which enables to differentiate Poles and Germans, two neighbouring population, which were separated only by social factors!

    (3) How’s Templeton’s definition is “traditional”, if I can quote you about twenty or even more race definitions, starting with 18th century, through 19th, to the 20th century, which would be different?
    1786: ” should mean nothing more than a mass of men whose common formation is distinctive and sufficiently at variance with their neighbors could not be immediately derived from them.”
    1926: “great division of mankind, the members of which, though individually varying, are characterized as a group by a certain combination of morphological and metrical features, principally non-adaptive, which have been derived from their common descent”
    1963: “A race that is not formally designated as a subspecies is not recognized in the taxonomic hierarchy. However, the terms subspecies and geographic race are frequently used interchangeably by taxonomists working with mammals, birds, and insects. Other taxonomists apply the word race to local populations within subspecies.””
    Cavalli-Sforza (1976): ““[R]aces could be called sub-species if we adopted for man a criterion from systematic zoology. The criterion is that two or more groups become sub-species when 75 percent or more of all individuals constituting the groups can be unequivocally classified as belonging to a particular group.”
    1936 “A population distinguished by morphological and physiological characters, most frequently of a quantitative nature; interfertile with other ecotypes of the ecospecies, but prevented from freely exchanging genes by ecological barriers”

    Yet somehow you claim that Templeton’s definition, which is evolved from but not the same as earlier definition, is the “traditional definition”. It’s not.

    (4) “if you want to slice this genetic continua, you end up with completely arbitrary clusters” HOW IS THAT RELEVANT? How many times have I explain the same effing thing? I already told you, that even if there is a perfect genetic continuity and cutting it at some point is arbitrarily, it does not influence the question whether, for example, there are biologicaly based difference between “blacks” and “whites”. Somehow, as usually with nutjobs, you ignore this question.

    ” a race requires a threshold of genetic differentiation, otherwise any (local) population is a race because no two breeding populations are genetically identical. “

    For God’s sake, after all you really are an idiot who can’t read. I already admitted that any local population is a race, per definition. You get the book about genetics and you will find the sentence stating something like (from memory) “in that sense two separate Yanomami villages are two races”. I’ve written that already! Can’t you read?!?

    It’s liked third time now. But hey, once again: if you don’t like the race word, let’s use “grumple”. Or ancestry. Or cline. Cline class. Clade. What does it change? Nothing. I don’t care about the word. Do you get it, or do I have to explain it to you once again?

    Gee, those flat-earthers.

    But hey, I will try to be nice. What’s your definition of science and pseudoscience? I mean, what do you think about using “social class” or “family” in science? Does research which uses “social class” is pseudoscience, or not, and why?

  265. Oliver D. Smith says

    Yes, many categorizations are to some extent subjective or arbitrary, based on continua or a spectrum and are therefore what has been described as ‘fuzzy’, with vague rather than clear-cut boundaries.

    Subspecies/race though requires discontinuity because they are intraspecific lineages and do not mate with each other because they are geographically isolated (allopatric). In the rare case they do mate, it is restricted to a narrow zone of contact (parapatry). Potentially therefore subspecies are incipient species.

    http://www.biology-pages.info/S/Speciation.html
    “It is no accident that the various races (or “subspecies”) of animals almost never occupy the same territory. Their distribution is allopatric (“other country”). The seven distinct subspecies or races of the yellowthroat Geothlypis trichas (a warbler) in the continental U.S. would soon merge into a single homogeneous population if they occupied the same territory and bred with one another.”

    If you simply compare humans to most other animals, you see why there are no races. Furthermore, there are a few other species with no subspecies. Humans are not the sole example.

    As for most scientists disagreeing with:”Race — as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (i.e., census categories) — is a useful proxy for ancestry.” – why wouldn’t they? The census categories are not at all useful to determine ancestry. For example, you can find individuals who identity as “African-American”, but most their ancestry derives from outside Africa. For example, for self-reported “African-Americans”, there have been studies showing some have less than 2% ancestry from any population inside Africa; socially constructed census categories do not mirror ancestry.

  266. Oliver D. Smith says

    And read Hooton’s definition you posted, Nazi-moron.

    “1926: “great division of mankind…”

    Precisely. At that point in time (early 20th century), ‘race’ was only applied to large i.e. continental divisions. Read your own sources that contradict you.

    The definition of race was then changed by Dozhansky et al. who shifted the term race to local breeding populations as small as tribes, ethnic groups etc., away from the old tripartite “Caucasoid”/”Mongoloid”/”Negroid” as “great divisions” that covered continents. This though runs into a clear semantic problem, since these small populations exist in their tens of thousands, so are there 10,000+ races? There’s simply no need to call them that, but tribes or ethnic groups.

    Excluding though the semantic issue of these small populations – the existence or utility of continental populations was debunked and rejected decades ago. Population geneticists only work with small populations for the reasons I already outlined but you ignored.

    “The majority of human population geneticists and biological anthropologists, though they reject the race concept because of the arbitrariness of racial divisions, are prepared to divide the entire human species into more-or-less discrete panmictic units or demes despite the extensive continuities in breeding patterns and allelic distributions that exist. Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, for example, rejects the “typological” division of humans into a small number of discrete races because, circling the globe, one finds that traits are distributing continuously. He argues instead that it is the “small biopackages” called populations, not races, that are the “real units of human diversity” (1995: 274, 116). Similarly, human population geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza treats panmictic populations as real but characterizes attempts to classify “clusters” of populations into races as a “futile exercise” (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994, 19).” (Gannett, 2003)

  267. Gee, you really are idiot. I posted several definition to show that there was not one single traditional definition, but many competing ones, and you picked one of them and decided surely I support that one.

    And that’s despite I clearly written what definition of race I support.

    Moron. Go back to stormfront, Nazi scum. You can’t even answer simple questions I posted to you. It’s clear to me now that (a) you can’t read (b) when you read, you can’t reason (c) you continue to quibble on minor point (despite I already said that I do not care about whether you called that thing race or ethnicity, because that does not change a thing).

    I already have written in comment 176:

    ” I really do not understand this fixation on whether “race” exists or not. It does not matter.”

    In comment 186:

    “The criticism is that using that definition one might categorize people in arbitrarily large number of races, which is true; however, this is not argument against existence of race, as the same can be told about – for example – social class.” and then I explained that the existence of race is moot point anyway.

    Then in comment 217 once again I admitted that there might be ten thousands of races and then I added “.” question is totally irrevelant to whether there are biological differences between “blacks” and “whites”. If you want, I might instead use “ancestries” instead and it would change nothing”

    Then I wrote once again “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that race do not exist. Instead, i define “grumple” the same as Boyd’s definition above. Happy now? See, no race, just grumple. ”

    And yet despite me admitting TWO TIMES at least that there might be 10000 races, and after saying THREE TIMES that this does not matter anyway and if you want, we may use any other word, you keep on saying that “races as defined by Templeton do not exist!”. So you are not here really for a debate, you have no arguments on your own, you just repeat slogans learned by rote.

    And that’s why I won’t discuss with you. You avoided my questions, ignored things which I said THREE TIMES and instead you kept on beating the same dead horse. Why should I discuss with you? Clearly you have shown you are not interested in a discussion. That’s why I’ve written you are flat-earther. In other words, you blindly believe in something, repeat things learned from scripture and you do not hear arguments, instead you just repeat over and over the same thing, sometimes selectively quoting some scientific papers while ignoring the others, and calling names any scientist who does not share your opinion.

  268. Subspecies/race though requires discontinuity because they are intraspecific lineages and do not mate with each other because they are geographically isolated

    Yeah. So imagine a species A with two races B and C. They are separated (geographically or in other ways, because he obviously should now that geographical separation is not the only one! For example one race lives on the ground and second in leaves or something). And hey, they are races!

    But then humans come, take members of race C and bring them to habitat of race B. ANd voila! There instantly are no more races in species A, because suddenly B and C are not geographically separated and start to mate more.

    In other words, whether race exist would depend on whether humans decided to transport individuals from one habitat into other.

    What a moron.

  269. Exactly. And this is what has happened – some % of wild wolves in North America now have dog ancestry. I suppose this means that dogs and wolves are one species.

    For that matter, non-Africans have 3% or so Neanderthal DNA. So when Homo Sapiens left Africa, Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens stopped being different species. (obviously, differences between races are much less than differences between modern humans and neanderthals, but similar principles apply here.)

  270. Now, to be honest: over a prolonged period of time races would cease, indeed, exist. But this would take a lot of time unless someone would force the mating. THere are substantial bariers except geographical ones.
    Imagine someone would separete mice into two different islands and they are left there for thousands of years. Now, over a time, clearly two races in the sense above would be created.

    Then someone would move those mice into one island. They would in time join into one race, but the whole point is that even in that case taht wouldn’t be instantenous – it would last few generations, and despite increased inter-mating we could still initially differentiate the two original mice races. And if we would put those mice into two parts of the island, the process would last even longer.

    So yes, if we would liquidate all of the existing bariers, eventually human races (if defined as separately geographic population with reduced gene flow between them) would stop to exist. But this had not happened yet.

    Well, that’s my humble opinion, of course.

  271. This process has occurred among Mestizos in Mexico (40-50 % European, 60-40% Native) and among many Puerto Ricans (60% European, 25% African, 15% Native American).

  272. Oliver D. Smith says

    You’re scientifically illiterate. The points you made I refuted, e.g. there are no human genetic clusters. You also re-define race and your trivialised definition does not closely match how subspecies/races are actually defined by contemporary biologists and understood traditionally.

    Here’s 4 definitions of subspecies/race in use right now:

    “A subspecies is a population, or collection of populations, that appears to be a separately evolving lineage with discontinuities resulting from geography, ecological specialization, or other forces that restrict gene flow to the point that the population or collection of populations is diagnosably distinct.” Taylor et al. 2017 Authors argue subspecies are independent lineages with genetic discontinuity.

    “The subspecies concept we advocate: diagnosable clusters of populations of biological species occupying distinct geographic ranges.” Pattern & Unitt, 2002 Authors argue subspecies must be allopatric.

    “Subspecies are generally considered to be a population or populations within a species that are found in different breeding locations (allopatry) and have been equated to ‘geographic varieties’.” Wang et al. 2015 Authors argue subspecies must be allopatric.

    “The subspecies concept should be understood to embrace groups of organisms that appear to have been on independent evolutionary trajectories (with minor continuing gene flow), as demonstrated by morphological evidence or at least one line of appropriate genetic evidence.” Reeves et al. 2004 Authors argue subspecies have independent evolutionary lineages, although allows for “minor” gene flow via parapatry.

    If we go back over 3 decades, we find common statements like the following:

    ” Subspecies (a trinomial scientific name) should be used in two situations: (1) allopatric populations where definition of the populations is clear, distinct, and total (or very nearly so); and (2) situations where secondary contact between distinct populations has occurred and the zone of intergradation is relatively narrow.

    – Monroe, Burt L. “A modern concept of the subspecies.” The Auk 99.3 (1982): 608-609

    Now what Nazi clown? Are these scientists wrong? If so why – when they’re using the actual standard definition of subspecies/race.

  273. Oliver D. Smith says

    Science corrects its mistakes; some recent papers now challenge the existence of Chimpanzee subspecies based on genetic studies showing the putative 3 subspecies (in the old taxonomic literature) are not genetically differentiated to a high level. Despite these putative subspecies being allopatric, they have not yet accumulated enough genetic differences, probably because they have no been isolated long enough. As Templeton 2013) points out-

    “The fst definition in addition requires that the genetic differentiation across the geographical boundary exceeds a quantitative threshold, and the evolutionary lineage definition requires that the genetic differentiation fits a tree-like evolutionary structure.”
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/

    This is pointed out in the other sources I also posted, if you read their studies.

    Chimpanzees pass the alloptric criteria, but not genetic quantitative threshold/lineage, while humans fail both. Race is obsolete and not useful to analyse human biological variation.

  274. Your battle against common sense is relentless. Bottom line: Humans left Africa about 100,000 years ago. Those that left, mixed with Neanderthals such that they are about 3% Neanderthal. Those that stayed behind, did not – but some mixed with other human species. So you have 100,000 years of divergent existence, plus measurable admixture with different species separating Africans from non-Africans. So whatever you want to call it – the differences are real and discrete.

    https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/woodley-2009-is-homo-sapiens-polytypic-human-taxonomic-diversity-and-its-implications.pdf

    There exists to the mind of this author, two salient reasons why the recognition of new extant human taxa is desirable. Firstly, it would appear that those who insist on ‘lumping’ human taxonomic diversity into a single monotypic species are making a specific claim about the evolutionary relationships and distinguishability of members of that group – namely that only the overarching similarities between human groups matter from the perspective of classification. This holism is however detrimental to a consistent understanding of recent human evolution as only through full consideration of the timing and causes of the points of divergence between the major taxa of humanity can an entirely accurate model of human evolution be devised.

    Secondly, within medicine, knowledge of a patient’s racial and ethnic background is often a significant factor in the appropriate selection of treatment modalities. It is well known for example that the survival rates of transplant patients are influenced by race, as the lack of close ethnic matching between donor and patient is a significant factor influencing tissue rejection [64,65]. Many diseases are known to differentially affect racial and ethnic groups. Melanoma has a higher incidence in Caucasians than in any other racial group, Tay Sachs disease predominately affects people of the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity, sickle cell anaemia is extraordinarily rare in people of non African ancestry, even factors such as tolerance to alcohol, the likelihood of developing heart disease, hypotension and their responsiveness to medication can be partly predicted based on racial data [66]. The list is long and is illustrative of the fact that the assumption that racial differences are meaningful biologically is important to medicine, both to the research and practice aspects of it.

  275. You also re-define race and your trivialised definition

    Yeah, in previous life I was Boyd. Or Dobzhansky. Or maybe Hartl or Clark. Or both of them.

    “In population genetics, a race is a group of organisms in a species that are genetically more similar to each other than they are to the members of other such groups.
    Populations that have undergone some degree of genetic divergence as measured
    by, for example, Fst, therefore qualify as a races. Using this definition,
    the human population contains many races. Each Yanomama village represents,
    in certain sense, a separate „race”, and the Yanomama as a whole also
    form a distinct „race”. Such fine disticntions are rarely useful, however.
    It is usually more convenient to group populations into larger units that
    still qualify as a races in the definition given.”

    https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Population-Genetics-Daniel-Hartl/dp/0878933085

    And you have not refuted anything. You have posted an old paper from 2004, while ignoring there up to this day there is ongoing debate and that there ARE discontinuities which are discovered continously by new papers on genetics. Without such discontinuitiesit wouldn’t be possible to cluster Poles and Germans, for example.

    Im ignoring you right now (i.e. I won’t see your further posts). But, the fact that i stated the FOURTH time that debate of race is irrevelant and if you want, i can instead use word of “grumple”, speaks volumes about your intellectual integrity and about your dishonesty.

  276. About racial differences in terms of admixture with non homo sapiens:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947341/

    Author makes interesting speculation that Neanderthals were less violent than Homo Sapiens and that Neanderthal % correlates with lower levels of violence among human populations.

    Africans mixed with unknown human species, who were far older or more differnet from homo sapiens than were Neanderthals:

    http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2017/07/028.html

    As part of this investigation, the team examined the MUC7 gene in more than 2,500 modern human genomes. The analysis yielded a surprise: A group of genomes from Sub-Saharan Africa had a version of the gene that was wildly different from versions found in other modern humans.

    The Sub-Saharan variant was so distinctive that Neanderthal and Denisovan MUC7 genes matched more closely with those of other modern humans than the Sub-Saharan outlier did.

    “Based on our analysis, the most plausible explanation for this extreme variation is archaic introgression — the introduction of genetic material from a ‘ghost’ species of ancient hominins,” Gokcumen says. “This unknown human relative could be a species that has been discovered, such as a subspecies of Homo erectus, or an undiscovered hominin. We call it a ‘ghost’ species because we don’t have the fossils.”

    Given the rate that genes mutate during the course of evolution, the team calculated that the ancestors of people who carry the Sub-Saharan MUC7 variant interbred with another ancient human species as recently as 150,000 years ago, after the two species’ evolutionary path diverged from each other some 1.5 to 2 million years ago.

    A tree of human descent:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Homo_sapiens_lineage.svg/685px-Homo_sapiens_lineage.svg.png

  277. So what do you make of the 100,000 years of divergent development and the different mixtures with other species that differentiate Africans from non-Africans (and some Africans from others – there are at least 2 races, or whatever you are comfortable calling them, within Africa)?

    I came across this, which is interesting:

    http://www.pnas.org/content/108/37/15123

    Our results are consistent with earlier inferences supporting the role of archaic admixture in sub-Saharan Africa based on analyses of coding regions (19) and the Xp21.1 noncoding region (16). Although our estimates of isolation and admixture dates are tentative, the results point to relatively recent genetic exchange with an unknown archaic hominin that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans in the Lower-Middle Pleistocene and remained isolated for several hundred thousand years. Despite a fragmentary African fossil record, there are plenty of candidates for the source(s) of this introgression. Beginning ≈700 kya, fossil evidence from many parts of Africa indicate that Homo erectus was giving way to populations with larger brains, a change that was accompanied by several structural adjustments to the skull and postcranial skeleton (14). By ≈200 kya, individuals with more modern skeletal morphology begin to appear in the African record (8, 14). Despite these signs of anatomical and behavioral innovation, hominins with a combination of archaic and modern features persist in the fossil record across sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East until after ≈35 kya (12, 14). Although there is currently a major debate about the meaning of this piecemeal or mosaic-like appearance of modern traits for taxonomic classification (12, 29), the evidence presented here and elsewhere suggests that long-separated hominin groups exchanged genes with forms that either were in the process of evolving fully modern features, or were already fully modern in appearance. The emerging geographic pattern of unusual variants discovered here suggests that one such introgression event may have taken place in central Africa (where there is a very poor fossil record). Interestingly, recent studies attest to the existence of Late Stone Age human remains with archaic features in Nigeria (Iwo Eleru) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ishango) (30⇓–32).

    :::::::::::::::

    I recall reading about an African American guy whose DNA test revealed a paternal haplogroup that was older than homo sapiens:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929713000736

  278. Jaakko Raipala says

    By all these definitions humans make up several subspecies. There are several distinct populations separated by very strong geographical boundaries like oceans, the Sahara and Siberian emptiness. The population densities in these boundary regions are so small that the variation in them is indeed a never ending hybridization between the major subspecies and not a straightforward cline.

    A clinal variation would imply a stable intermediate phenotype and that’s indeed generally found within the major races but in the in-between regions such as Central Asia the emerging picture is NOT of a cline with stable intermediate phenotypes between the Westernmost European and the Easternmost East Asian but instead Central Asian population history is mainly a story of a series of hybridization events of European and East Asian populations.

    There’s a large phenotypically stable population of Europeans with mostly clinal internal variation within it and there’s a large phenotypically stable population of East Asians with mostly clines of variation within it but in between them there’s a zone of such lower population density that it receives huge disruptive influxes of genes from the major populations and cannot maintain a stable intermediate phenotype.

    The transition from Europeans to East Asians would make a fine textbook example of a subspecies boundary to illustrate all the definitions that you quote.

  279. He will just repeat the same thing, AP 😀 After all, he quoted a paper from 2004, ignoring the Tang’s paper from 2005 and Xing et al paper from 2009, or even Rosenberg et all paper from 2005 with this well-known (i think) fragment:

    For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic dis-
    tance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner,
    consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs
    from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than
    that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographi c
    distance . . . Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous
    jumps in genetic distance
    —across oceans, the Himalayas, and
    the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE
    to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions.

    STRUCTURE is not BTW a perfect tool. I’ve read one paper (forgot the author) which has claimed that STRUCTURE can be fooled.

    Of course, Rosenberg declares himself agnostic on the case of race. Btu the fact is that someone can claim that there are no discontinuities where there clearly are…speechless.

  280. Oliver D. Smith says

    Like I said, you’re poorly educated on these topics.

    Boyd and Dobzhansky post-1950 invented a trivialised new concept of race, hence a re-definition of race that does not resemble the traditional race theory. This stemmed from the so-called “new race biology” delivered at a symposium in June 1950 at the Cold Spring Harbor Institute for Quantitative Biology on Long Island, New York.

    The 1950 symposium was organised by Dobzhansky. It ended up with some population geneticists and biologists re-defining race to mean a local breeding population – as small as a tribe, ethnoreligious sect or rural village. Ashley Montagu, who attended this symposium though disagreed about the semantics; instead he pointed out local breeding populations should be called ‘ethnic groups’ and in the scientific literature they are known as demes or ‘panmictic groups’.

    As Frank Livingstone wrote in his influential paper: “On the Nonexistence of Human Races” (1962), which was the first notable paper to deny the existence of race:

    “Thus it [race] is a taxonomic term for subspecific grouping greater than the local population.”

    Livingstone and Montagu at the time (1950s-60s) were against re-defining race to mean a local breeding population like the Lancaster Amish, Cherokee tribe, or Faroe Islanders. And this remains true today, this is not how most, if any, population geneticists define race. Good luck finding me a scientific study calling the Old Order Lancaster Amish people a “race”. You’re the idiot, not me.

  281. Oliver D. Smith says

    There are no genetic discontinuities. What you’re posting is a PRATT – point refuted a thousand times… I’ve dealt with Rosenberg et al 2005 countless times, for past 6 years on RationalWiki and the fallacy you’re posting is discussed there in detail, for example read Glasgow 2009:

    Rosenberg and colleagues (2005) followed up on the research from Serre and Pääbo [2004], finding it based on an insufficient amount of data. Considering considerably more data, Rosenberg and colleagues not only did not find that a less geographically random sample resulted in more genetic clustering, but in fact found that such a sample resulted in less clustering. This result is noteworthy, but care is in order here. First, this study tested the fact of continuity by seeing if there were more discontinuities among non-random samples than among random samples, but the
    samples themselves were not consistently taken from globally continuous regions
    . Thus their admittedly probative evidence doesn’t tell us how many dis/continuities we would find if we examined a continuous swath of samples from around the globe. At present, we apparently
    don’t have a truly representative, continuous set of samples, and until we do, [racial] populationism cannot be vindicated (Handley et al. 2007). The importance of this point is testified to by the fact that Rosenberg and colleagues confirmed yet again that ‘intermediate’ populations for which there were samples—such as in Pakistan and western China—
    did not reveal discontinuities between the populations they ostensibly
    separate
    (Eurasians and East Asians), a result that likely holds globally” (Joshua Glasgow, 2009 The Theory of Race p. 106)

    Rosenberg et al never took a continuous swath of samples from across the globe, they used few population samples that left large geographical gaps. Any discontinuities that Rosenberg found are not real, but computational artifacts and are an error.

  282. Oliver D. Smith says

    lol @ these Nazi ‘race realist’ morons getting obliterated in debate. Like creationists all you can do is post the same points refuted a thousand times.

  283. Oliver D. Smith says

    All of that is false. Have you ever looked at a PCA that includes lots of population samples (say over 150) from all continents?

    Here’s what you will find:

    http://www.molecularecologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tishkoff2009_fig02.png
    – Tishkoff et al. 2009 (nearly 200 population samples)

    It’s a genetic continuum spanning all continents. “Europeans” or “East Asians” are not a discontinuous genetic cluster.

  284. Just for the interested, here is an old link from humanvarieties.org

    The first is actually a summary of quite an old book, but it is I think still quite interesting since it is much more approachable than Fuerst’s almost unreadable long discussion of history of race concepts, problems with those concepts, their evolution and so on. Also, provides some arguments which are often ignored by flat-earthers (as for example discussing the issues with a “climate” or “bioms”)

    http://humanvarieties.org/2015/07/17/alice-brues-on-race/#more-4455

  285. Jaakko Raipala says

    What are you talking about? There are separated clusters even in your image which has such a low resolution with outsides blobs for data points that we can’t even infer a conclude of a genetic gap from it from the overlap.

    A lack of gaps in a PCA analysis wouldn’t even mean anything since you can have a continuum or sameness in a PCA plot while having discontinuities in others. For example, in your plot everybody is the same (literally the same) except the Hadza among axis PC3 which separates all of mankind into Hadzas and non-Hadzas. If they hadn’t plotted this component, the Hadzas would just cluster identically with Sub-Saharan Africans. There is no proof at all that they couldn’t separate the populations further, they’ve just made an illustration that they found interesting for their work.

    Furthermore, these are not representative samplings of all mankind and in fact they’re filling the gaps between the major races by adding in groups like Cape Coloureds, a grouping of mixed race people that didn’t even exist until a few centuries ago. You can create a “continuum” in your plot between Nigerians and Englishmen by going to South Africa and sampling the mixed race population there but that’s certainly not proof of a geographic continuum. A PCA analysis like this does not separate mixed race individuals and just plots them in between the populations where their ancestry came from.

    However it’s perfectly possible to separate mixed race individuals from intermediate individuals and if we did an individual by individual analysis of these Cape Coloureds we’d find that they have blocks of ancestry from the Sub-Saharan cluster, blocks from the European cluster and so on. For example, let’s say we had

    a) Some Spaniards
    b) Some Frenchmen
    c) Some Germans
    d) Some group of Germans and Spaniards that mixed and intermarried

    On a PCA plot you’d most likely see groups (b) and (d) group completely together. Yet we now have the tools that can analyze the individuals and identify the ones that are recent mixes of Germans and Spaniards because they’ll have blocks of Spanish and German ancestry that can be identified – genese are discrete, you don’t inherit an intermediate version of your parents genes, you inherit a selection of genes from both parents. Frenchmen with long roots in France will still be genetically intermediate between Spaniards and Germans but they won’t have blocks of recent ancestry from Spaniards and Germans and that creates a different genetic pattern.

    A continuum on a PCA plot does not mean a lack of sharply identified borders. To return to my previous post, out of personal interest I know a lot about northern Eurasian genetics, and it’s increasingly clear there that there hasn’t been any stable intermediate continuum of stable genotypes between the European and East Asian races; all the populations look like mixes with a lot of admixture events. A subspecies boundary looks exactly like that – there are two separated populations with negligible genetic exchange between them and a much less populated region of hybridization between them where, due to the lesser size of the population, we always see admixed populations with blocks of ancestry coming from the bigger populations, instead of continuum intermediates.

  286. Oliver D. Smith says

    They’ve arbitrarily divided the continuum on that PCA by labels, yes. They could have though split “Western Eurasians” from “Saharan [North] Africans” (blue) into two different colours, or they could have lumped “Central/Southern Eurasians” (red) with “East Asian” (pink) into one colour. My whole point is it is totally arbitrary how we divide the genetic continua, hence there are no real genetic discontinuities and no races. Someone could create 10, 20, 100, 5000, 25000 races if they wanted, and all different groupings. This explains why there’s never been agreement about racial classification and genetic clustering studies often produce different clusters – they’re arbitrary.

    Of course a weak-version of ‘race realism’ can just respond- so what if they’re arbitrary, if they’re useful – they can be of use. The problem is though none of these arbitrary genetic clusters are useful to any area of science. If you want to argue medical genetics, then think again-

    Dr. Jurgen K. Naggert, a geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, has noted:

    “These big groups that we characterize as races are too heterogeneous to lump together in a scientific way. If you’re doing a DNA study to look for markers for a particular disease, you can’t use ‘Caucasians’ as a group. They’re too diverse.”

    While its true though that some medical genetics relies today on local populations like the Amish (not races), this will no longer be needed in the near-future:

    “The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality.” – S.D.J. Pena. “The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics”. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

  287. If you add the next largest principal component the definition of clusters and their separations in the 4-dimensional space will be even more pronounced. And you can get even better results when you use 5 dimensions.

    Pointing to the fact that sometimes there is some overlap between clusters is not a significant argument. You appeal to continuum fallacy/Sorites paradox. There is an overlap between ocean and land on the beach and nobody argues that ocean and land can’t be delineated.

    Read Ron Unz’s comment above, he already addressed the issue.

    Stop monkeying around You remind me of Okechukwu who was obsessing about the same things and was using similar flawed arguments and whose ambition was also not commensurate with his knowledge or intelligence.

    Which part of Nigeria are you? Or perhaps you are from India?

  288. Science no longer exists outside of politics.

    I don’t care.

    I can understand and sympathise with your position but it’s not realistic. Science is now so thoroughly politicised that it is naïve to think that scientists can still engage in a disinterested pursuit of the truth. Scientists are like fish. The fish might not want to live in his watery environment but he doesn’t have a choice. He’s going to absorb whatever happens to be in that environment and he’s going to absorb it unconsciously.

    The sea in which scientists swim is a sea of politics. Scientists who think they can avoid politics are like fish who think they can live in the sea without coming into contact with the water.

  289. Oliver D. Smith says

    I don’t believe in the ‘Out of Africa” theory. That theory is mainly supported by white supremacists and ‘HBD’/racialist types who use it to argue for what you posted, or the opposite extreme – black supremacists/Afrocentrists who argue ‘we r all African’. The people who support this theory do so for their own ideological biases. There’s no archaeological evidence whatsoever for OOA and while it is often claimed it is supported by genetics, its a matter of interpretation.

  290. Oliver D. Smith says

    Basically summarised well here:
    https://www.populationmatters.org/documents/population_wellbeing.pdf

    The problem right now with anti-immigration parties is they tend to be pro-natalist (supporting large families and are against abortion), while anti-natalist parties (that support small families and are for abortion) tend to be pro-immigration.

    Ideally what I want for UK is something like Japan that has a low fertility and birth rate, (more annual deaths than births) and zero net-immigration. Looking at demographic projections their population-size will reduce by more than half within in a century from 125 million to 60 million.

  291. Oliver D. Smith says

    Read the RationalWiki article on racialism:

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism

    Also:

    “Specifically, between human populations, including smaller groupings, genetic differences may be detected. These differences tend to increase with geographic distance, but the basic genetic variation between populations is much less prominent. This means that human genetic diversity is only gradual and presents no major discontinuity between populations.”
    Statement on «Race» proposed by the participants of the Scientific Workshop of the International
    UNESCO-Conference «Against Racism, Violence, and Discrimination», June 8 and
    9, 1995, Schlaining Castle, Austria. Chairman and organizer: Horst Seidler,
    University of Vienna.

  292. I don’t believe in the ‘Out of Africa” theory. That theory is mainly supported by white supremacists and ‘HBD’/racialist types who use it to argue for what you posted

    ?????

    https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/

  293. We are reaching levels of wokeness that shouldn’t even be possible.

  294. Oliver D. Smith says

    Yes, and read any prominent non-racialist on this issue. They all deny OOA. Here’s C. Loring Brace who I earlier quoted:

    “The continued enthusiasm for finding an identifiable sub-Saharan African cradle for the origin of all ‘modern’ human form, then owes more to the Judaeo-Christian faith in the traditions of a Garden of Eden than it does to anything that can be called science.”

    He maintains OOA-dogma is comparable to religious fundamentalism.

  295. Brace’s quote is from 1979.

    Let’s argue against the idea of plate tectonics while we’re at it.

    The genetic evidence confirms the dominant out of Africa theory. The only arguments are whether this happened in one or several ways and how soon the first modern humans left Africa:

    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/almost-all-living-people-outside-africa-trace-back-single-migration-more-50000-years

    A team led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen zeroed in on Australia and New Guinea in what Akey calls a “landmark” paper detailing the colonization of Australia. By comparing Aboriginal genomes to other groups, they conclude that Aborigines diverged from Eurasians between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, after the whole group had already split from Africans. That means Aborigines and all other non-African people descend from the same out-of-Africa sweep, and that Australia was initially settled only once, rather than twice as some earlier evidence had suggested. Patterns in the Aboriginal DNA also point to a genetic bottleneck about 50,000 years ago: the lasting legacy of the small group that first colonized the ancient continent.

    In another paper, a team led by population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University comes to a similar conclusion after examining 300 genomes from 142 populations. “The take-home message is that modern human people today outside of Africa are descended from a single founding population almost completely,” Reich says. “You can exclude and rule out an earlier migration; the southern route.”

    But the third paper, by a team led by Mait Metspalu of the Estonian Biocentre in Tartu, makes a different claim. Analyzing 379 new genomes from 125 populations worldwide, the group concludes that at least 2% of the genomes of people from Papua New Guinea comes from an early dispersal of modern humans, who left Africa perhaps 120,000 years ago. Their paper proposes that Homo sapiens left Africa in at least two waves.

    Reich questions that result, but says that his and Willerslev’s studies can’t rule out a contribution of only 1% or 2% from an earlier H. sapiens migration. Akey says: “As population geneticists, we could spend the next decade arguing about that 2%, but in practical terms it doesn’t matter.” The most recent migration “explains more than 90% of the ancestry of living people.”

    Still, changes in climate and sea level would have favored earlier migrations, according to a fourth Nature paper. Axel Timmermann and Tobias Friedrich of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in Honolulu reconstructed conditions in northeastern Africa and the Middle East, based on the astronomical cycles that drove the ice ages. They find that a wetter climate and lower sea levels could have enticed humans to cross from Africa into the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East during four periods, roughly around 100,000, 80,000, 55,000, and 37,000 years ago. “I’m very happy,” Petraglia says. His and others’ discoveries of early stone tools in India and Arabia suggest that moderns did expand out of Africa during the early migration windows. But those lineages mostly died out. The major migration, with more people and reaching all the way to Australia, came later. “Demographically, after 60,000 years ago something happens, with larger waves of moderns across Eurasia,” Petraglia says. “All three papers agree with that

  296. Oliver D. Smith says

    The quote is from 1991, not 1979. But I could easily provide more recent quotes from Brace saying the same thing.

    Read the following paper from 2013 by Robert G. Bednarik:
    http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=39900

    The OOA theory even originated as a hoax:

    “In 1973 Professor Reiner Protsch “von Zieten” proposed that modern humans arose in sub-Saharan Africa, presenting a series of false datings (Terberger & Street, 2003; Schulz, 2004) of presumed “modern” fossil specimens from Europe over the following years (Protsch, 1973, 1975; Protsch & Glowatzki, 1974; Protsch & Semmel, 1978; Henke & Pro-tsch, 1978). In 2003 it was shown that all of his datings had been concocted and he was dismissed by the University of Frankfurt.”

    And there’s no such thing as a “modern human” since in palaeo-anthropology, any definition of “anatomical modernity” is arbitrary. It’s an arbitrary grade, like “archaic human”. Many scientists argue to avoid these classifications (see below)

    Humans split from chimpanzee species 5-10 million years ago (Miocene), and since then there has been a single human lineage:

    “It can be concluded that at no point in time since the late Miocene in the distributions
    of basic metric characteristics of hominins are there to be found any significant
    discontinuities, deviations from normality or ranges expanded beyond what is observed
    in the only living hominin species. Although arguments can be made that upon a study of descriptive characteristics some categorical discontinuities can be detected, the subjective nature of the descriptions makes it difficult to objectively test such arguments. Thus the null hypothesis that hominins are a single lineage cannot be falsified and must be accepted at the present
    time
    .” – Maciej Henneberg Two interpretations of human evolution: Essentialism and Darwinism Anthropological Review, 2009; 72(1):66-80

  297. Oliver D. Smith says

    The Nazi, paedophile/child rape apologist and stalker Emil Kirkegaard seems to be reading all these comments and making up more garbage about me:

    https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/961683710998401024

    https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/770/1*Urd-9Fo7Y7QmZKhuDtdybw.jpeg

    Piratpartiet and “Nazi sympathiser”

    In 2012-2013 there was a campaign by Danish Antifascist Action to expel Kirkegaard from the PiratpartietWikipedia’s W.svg (Pirate Party) after they discovered he had tried to forge political ties to the far-right Danish People’s Party, had made racist and anti-immigration posts on the Piratpartiet forum and took a photo of himself next to his friend doing a Nazi-salute, while writing an insensitive comment about being the Führer. An article appeared on the Project Antifa website describing Kirkegaard as a “Nazi Sympathiser“.
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard

    Kirkegaard is mad and dislikes me so much because I simply dug up his Nazi past. In recent years he’s tried to reinvent himself as a non-racist “race realist” (laughable) but hates the fact there is that 2012 photo where he is next to someone doing a Nazi salute and writing a pro-hitler comment.

  298. One can still find a few recent papers doubting the human impact on climate change, also. That denialism is rather marginal. Just as are current ideas contradicting the out of Africa theory.

    Maciej Henneberg argues that Neanderthals aren’t a different species from Homo Sapiens. Whether they are, or are not, does not contradict the out of Africa theory. Non-Africans get about 3% of their DNA from Neanderthals and most of the rest from people who left Africa.

    It’s odd that you choose to believe marginal ideas yourself, yet criticize other ideas by referring to them as fringe or marginal (in the case of the relationship between IQ differences and races, and genetics – incorrectly).

  299. The problem right now with anti-immigration parties is they tend to be pro-natalist (supporting large families and are against abortion)

    The reason they’re pro-natalist is immigration. They’re pro-natalist because they believe (quite correctly) that their culture is being swamped by immigrants. They’re mostly concerned about the balance of the population rather than the overall numbers. If immigration were to be halted most of these people will become less obsessed with pro-natalist policies. In other words pro-natalism is essentially a perfectly understandable defensive response.

    Ideally what I want for UK is something like Japan that has a low fertility and birth rate, (more annual deaths than births) and zero net-immigration.

    I actually don’t have a major problem with that. If immigration can be halted there’s actually no need whatsoever for anti-natalist policies – the population will decline anyway.

    I do differ from you on a couple of points. Firstly, I believe abortion is a moral evil that contributes to the demoralisation and degeneracy of our society. Secondly, my concern about declining fertility rates is that they may be a symptom of a deep sickness in our society – alienation, pessimism, the worship of materialism, mindless hedonism. In other words they may be a symptom of the evils that have been created by capitalism, liberalism and democracy.

  300. Oliver D. Smith says

    Because we have surveys about the scientific support for racialism & race & IQ.

    9/10 scientists deny the existence of race. Furthermore, most of the remaining 1/10 are not racialists, but include those that are “not sure” or refuse to take a position for or against. So there’s virtually no scientific support for race – belief in race has about as much support as creationism.

    In contrast, no survey has ever been published on the level of support for the Out-of-Africa theory of (“modern”) human origins. There’s numerous renowned palaeo-anthropologists and geneticists who still criticise or are sceptical about it.

    When ‘race realists’ quote scientists who believe in race, they never can find an actual contemporary geneticist or biologist. Richard Lynn for example is a racist psychologist who has no understanding of biology.

  301. Because we have surveys about the scientific support for racialism & race & IQ

    Indeed we do. You posted:

    https://i.imgur.com/5ThVCxW.png

    The chart shows that 83% of experts in intelligence believe that genetics plays a role in racial differences in intelligence. They vary in terms of how much of a role genetics plays in the racial differences, with some believing that genetics accounts for 20% of the racial differences, others that it accounts for 100% of the difference. But a strong majority of experts believe that genetics accounts for at least some of the difference in intelligence.

    Yet, you choose to believe the minority view, held by only 17% of experts. Which is fine, but it makes your criticism of other ideas based on their alleged status as marginal rather odd.

  302. Well, I’m just a lowly galactic pea-brain, but I say we try to get this fucker on our side and let him rip.

  303. Oliver D. Smith says

    That intelligence survey was psychologists, not biologists, anthropologists or geneticists.

    Can you explain, why the 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members found 9/10 don’t believe in race?

    Also, read:
    AAA Statement on Race
    http://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583

    And the intelligence survey doesn’t ask if these psychologists actually believe in “race” as a biological category; for example “black”/”white” are social constructs.

    Even using the intelligence survey, my position is the most popular one. Can you show where I denied genetic factors play a role in IQ differences between populations? I never said this. C. Loring Brace who denies the existence of race, does not deny there is some very minor genetic role in group differences in IQ scores, but he realises environmental factors overwhelmingly explains most of the group differences.

    Anti-hereditarians are not restricted to 0%. That’s a straw man since Brace is an anti-hereditarian (who debunked Jensen), but is arguing for something like 10-20% genes as mentioned in my early posts. The anti-hereditaran position would be anything under 50%. And if you add up the survey total, you will find most experts are arguing for under 50% genes. Now what?

    Some other ‘race realist’ straw man arguments are covered on the RationalWiki article e.g.

    “Misrepresenting anti-racialism as the position that “all human populations are identical” or there are “no differences between populations” is a common tactic among racialists.”

  304. Can you explain, why the 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members found 9/10 don’t believe in race?

    Could it be because they want to keep their jobs? And they know that if they dare to express a dissenting opinion they’ll never work as anthropologists again?

    The whole “scientific consensus” argument, on any issue, is nonsense. Scientists these days are very much aware that their livelihoods depend on conformity. If you don’t want to end up driving a cab or waiting tables you make sure you don’t dissent on any subject that has political overtones (and these days almost everything has political overtones).

    I’m not expressing a view on whether race exists or not, I’m simply saying that appeals to a “consensus” among “experts” are meaningless BS.

  305. Oliver D. Smith says

    The Nazi paedo Emil Kirkegaard is writing yet more lies.

    https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/960406685696262145

    Unlike Kirkegaard who self-publishes his pseudo-science in his own journals that are not formal peer-reviewed, I submitted 2 papers to peer-reviewed journals, one was published in 2016, the other forthcoming.

    http://shimajournal.org/issues/v10n2/d.-Smith-Shima-v10n2.pdf

    The other major difference between me an Kirkegaard, excluding the fact he is a massive arrogant pseudo-intellectual while I am humble – is I write about topics I specialise and am qualified in (doing it as a mere hobby while Kirkegaard is an academic fraud). Kirkegaard instead writes about genetics/IQ when his degree is linguistics. He’s basically a crank.

  306. The other major difference between me an Kirkegaard, excluding the fact he is a massive arrogant pseudo-intellectual while I am humble – is I write about topics I specialise and am qualified in (doing it as a mere hobby while Kirkegaard is an academic fraud).

    “life lived as an internet lolcow”

    In terms of popularity, you’ve managed to unite people here normally snark and dislike each other to all agree in common that they hate you. That’s some skill.

  307. That intelligence survey was psychologists, not biologists, anthropologists or geneticists.

    Intelligence is something some psychologist specialize in. Overwhelming majority of those who specialize in intelligence conclude that at least some of the black/white differences in intelligence are due to genetics.

    Can you explain, why the 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members found 9/10 don’t believe in race?

    1. They do believe in whatever it is they define as “race.” I’ve seen at least one person who denied that there is such a thing as race, refer instead to the clumsier expression “ancestry linked to geographical origin.” Such as in this ridiculous article:

    http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/

    “In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute. Today, scientists prefer to use the term “ancestry” to describe human diversity (Figure 3). “Ancestry” reflects the fact that human variations do have a connection to the geographical origins of our ancestors—with enough information about a person’s DNA, scientists can make a reasonable guess about their ancestry. However, unlike the term “race,” it focuses on understanding how a person’s history unfolded, not how they fit into one category and not another. In a clinical setting, for instance, scientists would say that diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are common in those of “sub-Saharan African” or “Northern European” descent, respectively, rather than in those who are “black” or “white”.”

    1. Many of not most of the 9/10 who do not believe in “race” do believe that people can show specific characteristics or vary in specific areas (such as susceptibility to sickle cell, or skin color) depending on region of origin. So not believing in race does not exclude the idea that black-white differences (let’s label them sub-Saharan origin/European origin differences) in intelligence are genetic in origin, as is stuff like skin color.

    So, 87% of experts agree that genes play a role in the difference in IQ between those of primarily European origins and those of primarily African origins. You take the position of the small minority of dissenters.

  308. Yall a bunch of morons discussing race over the internet in your moms basements, get a life. This kind of discussion don’t exist in the real world, ppl are too BUSY living.

  309. reiner Tor says
  310. reiner Tor says

    Join us, Oliver.

    https://youtu.be/esEcwAWi6dk

  311. Oliver D. Smith says

    Two points:

    1. I’m not a “lolcow” considering the fact Lolcow.wiki/Kiwi Farms deleted their content (made up nonsense) about me; the owner of that website takes almost nothing down, but made an exception for me – and even users from there realised in the end – I’m a pretty normal guy.

    2. The only people I’ve united against me are crazies and pseudo-scientists whose RationalWiki entries I created or edited for past 6 years. Predictably, these sorts of people are disgruntled losers, who now stalk me across the web – mad or upset about their RationalWiki articles because they are too childish to accept someone can criticise them (freedom of speech). Go cry some more?

  312. reiner Tor says

    You are an autistic and crazy. You’d fit in well here… we’re autistic crazies ourselves!

    Join us, Oliver!

  313. reiner Tor says

    I think Anatoly would also happily issue a document proving that you are not a lolcow. He’d henceforth prohibit people from calling you a lolcow. From then on you’d be referred to as Oliver, who is not a lolcow.

    I think it’s obvious that you are not much more normal than us Nazis and moderate Nazis. You should join us, and together we’ll troll others.

  314. Oliver D. Smith says

    There is no difference in average IQ-scores between certain countries in Africa and Europe. That’s another reason ‘race’ is invalid: because of the heterogeneity in these large groupings. For them to be valid/useful they would need to be homogenous. I already posted that the range in mean IQ’s for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is large: 73-91. And if you look at Europe, the range is also large: 82-100. IMO, the fact you can find such large mean differences between some neighbouring countries easily refutes the hereditarianism model. As mentioned in one of my first posts, there are some SSA countries with higher IQ’s than European countries, and vice-versa.

  315. Oliver D. Smith says

    I don’t have any intention of using this website as a regular i.e. posting elsewhere. I’ve only stuck to this single post section as I was mentioned and we were discussing RationalWiki/Emil Kirkegaard, but the section is almost dead now. When posting here, I’ve actually broken a rule already – as mentioned I have stalkers who follow and try to ‘find’ me anywhere I post off-RationalWiki. That’s why with very few exceptions, I’ve not commented on other forums, message-boards or blogs for years now.

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abd_ul-Rahman_Lomax
    ^ This creep has 15 articles attacking me on his website, digitally-stalking my every move. He’s now tried to forge an alliance with Kirkegaard; he could be the “anon” commenting above.

  316. The problem right now with anti-immigration parties is they tend to be pro-natalist (supporting large families and are against abortion), while anti-natalist parties (that support small families and are for abortion) tend to be pro-immigration.

    This was something UKIP was tapping-into quite well a few years back, for example their 2015 manifesto said their opposition to immigration was because of “space, not race” and mentioned the problems with overcrowding on public transport. That got them nearly 4 million votes. In contrast, autistic Nazi basement dwellers who try to link opposing immigration to ‘race realism’ = 5 votes.

    Yet British surveys on immigration show virtually no one cares about ethnicity. Opposition to immigration is based on (60%) overcrowding concerns, economic competition because of immigrant labour (30%) and culture (10%). The latter has nothing to do though with genetics or descent. Also, racial/ethnic nationalist parties are a complete failure at the ballot box. The BNP only started polling well when it was modernised and repudiated white/ethnic nationalism (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8146585.stm), with Griffin scrapping the compulsory repatriation immigration policy and eventually opening up party membership to ethnic minorities, including Hindus and Sikhs. Griffin’s party was ‘replaced’ by UKIP after 2012, because their brand of cultural nationalism is a lot more palatable and moderate than the BNP’s; UKIP also benefited since it did not have a fascist past that always scared people voting BNP despite Griffin’s “modernisation” (like Marine Le Pen’s dédiabolisation for the FN). One though can see the limitations of UKIP’s cultural nationalism. Arguably culture isn’t even a good thing to focus on when looking for anti-immigration voters. Ethnicity, even culture – has to be completely avoided.

    I don’t have any intention of using this website as a regular

    I consider the above excerpts from your comments to be very informative and insightful.

    If you do stick around, you should concentrate on the politics and avoid making comments on race realism, Kirkegaard, genetics or IQ.

  317. There is no difference in average IQ-scores between certain countries in Africa and Europe.

    Lynn’s list has a single outlier, Sierra Leon (91):

    https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country

    The next SSA country, Eritrea, is at 85 (though it is East African).

    I suspect something went wrong with the Sierra Leone sample.

    I already posted that the range in mean IQ’s for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is large: 73-91. And if you look at Europe, the range is also large: 82-100.

    Link?

    The link I found showed European range of 102-89, and sub-Saharan African range of 91-64. Remove the Sierra Leone outlier and you have a Sub-Saharan African range of 85-64. Clearly a strong difference.

    IMO, the fact you can find such large mean differences between some neighbouring countries easily refutes the hereditarianism model.

    1. This may indeed be your reasoning, but it’s not shared by the vast majority of experts in intelligence, who conclude that at least some of the difference in average IQ between people of European origin and those of African origin is due to genetics.
    2. This was posted on a psychologist’s twitter: “There is overwhelming evidence boys are not taller than girls. There is more variance within groups of girls and within groups of boys than between boys and girls. Gender differences in height are learned, not innate.” Similar reasoning to the one you provide about validity of IQ being suspect due to within-group variance in sub-Saharan Africa vs. Europe.

    Within the USA average black-white IQ gap is about 15. Overwhelming majority of experts claim that at least some of this has a genetic cause, although the experts disagree with respect to how much of this difference is genetic (the most common answer is 50% – that is, people of European origin naturally have IQs on average 7 points higher than those of primarily African origin but environmental factors such as poverty and less educational opportunities add another 7 or so points to this difference).

  318. The whole “scientific consensus” argument, on any issue, is nonsense. Scientists these days are very much aware that their livelihoods depend on conformity.

    This is true if the idea that experts agree upon is a popular and politically expedient one. OTOH, if it is not, then consensus among experts is a powerful argument.

    In today’s political climate it is not wise to claim that there are genetic differences between people of different ancestral geographical origins and IQ. The fact that 87% of intelligence researchers think that this is the case is quite meaningful.

  319. Unlike Kirkegaard who self-publishes his pseudo-science in his own journals that are not formal peer-reviewed, I submitted 2 papers to peer-reviewed journals, one was published in 2016, the other forthcoming.

    http://shimajournal.org/issues/v10n2/d.-Smith-Shima-v10n2.pdf

    The other major difference between me an Kirkegaard, excluding the fact he is a massive arrogant pseudo-intellectual while I am humble – is I write about topics I specialise and am qualified in (doing it as a mere hobby while Kirkegaard is an academic fraud). Kirkegaard instead writes about genetics/IQ when his degree is linguistics. He’s basically a crank.

    Sure I’d agree most of these ecelebs could be described as ‘cranks’. But there is still usually interesting conversations, free-speech, and entertainment on these blogs – I don’t really understand your hostility. No-one is saying that these bloggers are real scientists or intellectuals who publish in peer-reviewed journals. (You can see in the diagrams they make that the bloggers like Steve Sailer have zero understanding of statistics; but they are bloggers, not scientists, and you take it with a pinch of salt – the bloggers’ talent is in starting interesting conversations and encouraging exchange of opinions from readers)

  320. Oliver D. Smith says

    Just a final update from me [a detailed article on the white supremacist UCL conferences]:

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/London_Conference_on_Intelligence

    Kirkegaard and Lomax are now going around posting a crazy paranoid allegation I first wrote about the conferences on RationalWiki, and then sent the RW material to newspapers. I did neither.

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/London_Conference_on_Intelligence#Abd_ul-Rahman_Lomax

    Funnily enough, the VDARE article contradicts them both.

  321. Oliver D. Smith says

    Final Final update:

    Please prevent this guy speaking in Edinburgh in July (ISIR Conference)

    Kirkegaard is likely to attend and speak at the 19th Annual ISIR Conference: Edinburgh, 2018: July 13-15

    Contact and leave a complaint on the ISIR website here.

    Comment I left:
    Hi,
    Having checked the last conference speakers, I noticed Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst attended.

    Both Kirkegaard and Fuerst are white supremacists/neo-Nazis.

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Fuerst

    Will you take the appropriate action to block Kirkegaard or Fuerst attending the 2018 conference?

    Recently, the London Conference on Intelligence was suspended since Kirkegaard and other white supremacists had attended and this was reported by the media and newspapers:

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/London_Conference_on_Intelligence

    Can you confirm, you will not let Fuerst or Kirkegaard attend? If you allow them to attend, I’m sure there will be a public backlash like the London Conference on Intelligence.
    Regards.

    NOTE THAT IF NEO-NAZI KIRKEGAARD OR FUERST ATTEND – THERE WILL BE A DEMONSTRATION OUTSIDE THE CONFERENCE BUILDING