* Steve Pinker has done a great job of slowly and cautiously getting HBD thinking into the mainstream. He needs to watch his every step or he will be Watsoned by the censorship mob. So far he has shown a very deft touch in gently and subtly pushing the science. We need more major public figures like him in academia and the media.
* James Thompson has an excellent write up on a study that just came out.
It is a mind blowing scientific breakthrough. The actual paper is behind a paywall and the abstract is well named, so to understand the findings go to James Thompson’s blog.
There is a huge variation in genetic in human intelligence and HBDers as well as psychometric studies have been saying it for years. Now, finally now the scientific proof is coming out. Just read what James Thompson has to say, he quotes at length from the article which is going to open up the doors to a brave new world, where folks like Steve Sailer will have scientific proof to back up his HBD claims.
We live in interesting times. No doubt Razib Khan and Greg Cochran will have their take on what this all means coming out shortly. Honestly Pinker brilliant as he is, influential as he is, he isn’t on the hunt for IQ genes, he isn’t a geneticist. In a nutshell there are no individual genes with large impact on IQ. What this study has found is that there is a large group of genes that together create an optimum combination that cause a better functioning human brain.
* Since when is the test of a theory whether it is too depressing or not? You could consider it depressing to think that the sun will one day run out of fuel and all life on earth will perish but that’s no reason not to accept the scientific evidence that is so. It is fatalistic to think that the human lifespan appears to be limited to perhaps 120 years or so, but you can’t deny it. But somehow, in this area it’s OK to cover your ears and shout “nah, nah, nah, I can’t hear you” because it might cause you to draw uncomfortable conclusions.
By the way, the conclusions you draw from this have nothing to do with the findings themselves. Just because intelligence is partly heritable it doesn’t follow that we must therefore build extermination camps or sterilize the less intelligent. Human dignity does not have an IQ cutoff.
In some ways, acceptance of this would be liberating. Say you are a black person with an 85 IQ, just like your parents and siblings. You are constantly being told that you are actually a genius just like the great African geniuses who built the pyramids and yet you find academic work to be incredibly difficult. You are told that white people have cheated you by not teaching you in a culturally appropriate way, which fills you with anger (but nothing anyone tries seems to work). You keep trying and keep running up against intellectual brick walls – calculus, even algebra just don’t seem to register – it’s as if the teacher is speaking some foreign language that you don’t understand and you can never seem to break the code no matter how hard you study. Wouldn’t it be better to just accept that you just don’t have it in you because you were born that way?
I was always horribly uncoordinated – the last person to be picked for teams in gym class (and no one in my family has ever shown any glimmer of athletic talent). Nor am I particularly musical or artistic (again like the rest of my family) I grew to accept this situation. Although I wish that I had been gifted with more talent in these areas, I had to accept reality and play to my strengths instead.
* People who are terrible in math generally aren’t interested in math. Most adults of all ethnic groups don’t have basic calculus or even basic algebra proficiency. And they generally don’t care. If you meet people who are really interested in math, and do math for fun, they may not be math superstars or as good as they wish, but they generally have basic math aptitude. I’ve never heard of an adult who always wishes they could learn calculus but simply lacked the aptitude. Math skill is heritable, but I suspect that it is the personality that is interested in math that is inherited through genes, and the aptitude is developed in response.
* The book Architects of Annihilation is enlightening about the extent to which the Nazi program was mainstream technocratic thinking in racial guise. For example guidance about which East European ought to be selected for Germanisation specified they were to be from high achieving families irrespective of their sub racial type.
