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Thursday, January 18, 2018

Darwin, Evolution, and Human Gender Differences (or Darwin the Evil Sexist!)

To see the abominably ignorant and crazed science-denying state of our civilisation, you need only look at this interview of Jordan Peterson:



This stems from the insanity caused by the Liberal/Leftist cult of blank slateism, social constructivism, and the denial of biological reality and even basic principles of Darwinian evolution.

Let us run an experiment, and go back to what Darwin said about biological differences between men and women caused by evolution.

Charles Darwin – the discover of evolution by natural selection – wrote a book called The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and a second edition of the book was published in 1874. I quote from the second edition.

Chapter 19 is called the “Secondary Sexual Characters of Man.” In this chapter, Darwin noted some truly sexist, bigoted biological differences between men and women:
There can be little doubt that the greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and pugnacity, are all due in chief part to inheritance from his half-human male ancestors. These characters would, however, have been preserved or even augmented during the long ages of man’s savagery, by the success of the strongest and boldest men, both in the general struggle for life and in their contests for wives; a success which would have ensured their leaving a more numerous progeny than their less favored brethren. It is not probable that the greater strength of man was primarily acquired through the inherited effects of his having worked harder than woman for his own subsistence and that of his family; for the women in all barbarous nations are compelled to work at least as hard as the men. With civilized people the arbitrament of battle for the possession of the women has long ceased; on the other hand, the men, as a general rule, have to work harder than the women for their joint subsistence, and thus their greater strength will have been kept up.

Difference in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes. —With respect to differences of this nature between man and woman, it is probable that sexual selection has played a highly important part. I am aware that some writers doubt whether there is any such inherent difference; but this is at least probable from the analogy of the lower animals which present other secondary sexual characters. No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild-boar from the sow, the stallion from the mare, and, as is well known to the keepers of menageries, the males of the larger apes from the females. Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness; and this holds good even with savages, as shown by a well-known passage in Mungo Park’s Travels, and by statements made by many other travelers. Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow-creatures. Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright. It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on ‘Hereditary genius,’ that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.

Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently, in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.

Now, when two men are put into competition, or a man with a woman, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, perseverance, and courage, the latter will generally become more eminent in every pursuit, and will gain the ascendancy. He may be said to possess genius—for genius has been declared by a great authority to be patience; and patience, in this sense, means unflinching, undaunted perseverance. But this view of genius is perhaps deficient; for without the higher powers of the imagination and reason, no eminent success can be gained in many subjects. These latter faculties, as well as the former, will have been developed in man, partly through sexual selection,—that is, through the contest of rival males, and partly through natural selection,—that is, from success in the general struggle for life; and as in both cases the struggle will have been during maturity, the characters gained will have been transmitted more fully to the male than to the female offspring. It accords in a striking manner with this view of the modification and re-inforcement of many of our mental faculties by sexual selection, that, firstly, they notoriously undergo a considerable change at puberty, and, secondly, that eunuchs remain throughout life inferior in these same qualities. Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.

It must be borne in mind that the tendency in characters acquired by either sex late in life, to be transmitted to the same sex at the same age, and of early acquired characters to be transmitted to both sexes, are rules which, though general, do not always hold. If they always held good, we might conclude (but I here exceed my proper bounds) that the inherited effects of the early education of boys and girls would be transmitted equally to both sexes; so that the present inequality in mental power between the sexes would not be effaced by a similar course of early training; nor can it have been caused by their dissimilar early training. In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance, and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point; and then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult daughters. All women, however, could not be thus raised, unless during many generations those who excelled in the above robust virtues were married, and produced offspring in larger
numbers than other women. As before remarked of bodily strength, although men do not now fight for their wives, and this form of selection has passed away, yet during manhood, they generally undergo a severe struggle in order to maintain themselves and their families; and this will tend to keep up or even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present inequality between the sexes.” (Darwin 1874: 557–560).
If Darwin were alive today, he would probably be jailed for “hate crimes.”

But was Darwin right? He was not correct in everything he argued here, but nevertheless right in many other ways.

But let us run through some of his most important assertions:

(1) Darwin said: “There can be little doubt that the greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and pugnacity, are all due in chief part to inheritance from his half-human male ancestors.”

Modern science absolutely has found sex differences between men and women, as follows:
(1) on average, men are taller than women;

(2) on average, men have greater upper and lower body strength (with greater muscle mass, thicker tendons, and greater bone density) than women;

(3) on average, oxygen is better circulated around the male body because of higher haemoglobin levels so that, physiologically, men are better at physical activity than women;

(4) on average, men have greater stamina (with higher levels of anabolic steroids);

(5) on average, men have greater maximal oxygen uptake capacity than women

(6) on average, men have higher levels of testosterone, and this causes behavioural differences between men and women, including greater male aggression, violence and competition (essentially what Darwin calls “pugnacity”).
So Darwin was right.

(2) Darwin said: “Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness;” and “We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on ‘Hereditary genius,’ that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.”

Modern science and psychometrics have found the following:
(1) there really is some evidence of a small difference between the average IQ of men as compared with that of women. Men appear to have a slightly higher average IQ, with about a 3–5 point advantage over women.

(2) more importantly, when the IQs of a representative sample of men and women are plotted on a graph, it has been discovered that the distribution of IQs is not the same. See the graph of male and female IQ distribution here. As we can see, the manner in which the IQs of men and women fall on the graph differs: the IQ scores of women tend to cluster around the average (with less distribution in upper and lower ranges), while male IQs tend to be distributed less around the average and more in the upper and lower ranges as compared with the IQ distribution of women.

The average IQ for European people is about 100. So, for example, more European women have IQs that tend to cluster around 100 than the IQs of men do. This means that, numerically, there are far more high IQ men than there are women (also, it means there are far more low IQ men than there are women). Furthermore, it means that, numerically, there are fewer men of about average IQ than there are women.

(3) by examining the sub-tests of IQ tests, we have discovered that – in terms of sub-tests and specific cognitive abilities – men and women also differ. Women tend, on average, to be much better at verbal abilities and language, but men tend on average to outperform women on numerical/mathematical and visual-spatial cognitive abilities.

(4) There are also general psychological and behaviour differences between men and women that affect each gender’s educational choices and career choices. Women are better at verbal/language abilities, and have a general propensity to choose professions where they can use those abilities, and professions that involve greater social interaction, caring and nurturing (e.g., nursing).

(5) on average, men are more competitive (because of higher levels of testosterone) and more aggressive than women.
So here Darwin was essentially right too (full references to scientific literature can be found here), and the only problem being he should have focussed more on differences in the distribution of male versus female IQ, and on average differences in specific cognitive abilities such as verbal IQ, numerical/mathematical IQ, and visual-spatial IQ.

Curiously, Darwin was a Liberal and a type of progressive Liberal in his day, and many of his defenders and followers were too, so there was clearly a time when Liberalism was compatible with accepting biological differences between men and women.

For some reason, modern Liberalism and Leftism have been poisoned by science-denial and blank slateist social constructivism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Darwin, Charles. 1874. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edn.). Merrill and Baker, New York and London.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Steve Keen on the Reformation of Economics

Steve Keen, with other speakers, talks here on the “Reformation of Economics”:


Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Steve Keen on Cryptocurrencies

Steve Keen gives a talk here on the nature of money and cryptocurrencies:



My own post on Bitcoin can be read here.

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Noam Chomsky on the Blank Slate

From his Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (1988):
The evidence seems compelling, indeed overwhelming, that fundamental aspects of our mental and social life, including language, are determined as part of our biological endowment, not acquired by learning, still less by training, in the course of our experience. Many find this conclusion offensive. They would prefer to believe that humans are shaped by their environment, not that they develop in a manner that is predetermined in essential respects. I mentioned earlier the remarkable dominance of the behaviorist conception that language and other aspects of our beliefs and knowledge, and of our culture in general, are determined by experience. The Marxist tradition too has characteristically held that humans are products of history and society, not determined by their biological nature; of course this is not true of physical properties, such as the possession of arms rather than wings or the property of undergoing puberty at roughly a certain age, but it is held to be true of intellectual, social, and general cultural life. This standard view makes nonsense of the essentials of Marx’s own thought, I believe, for reasons already briefly indicated, but let us put that aside; there is no doubt that it is proclaimed as a point of doctrine by many who call themselves Marxists. For several centuries now the dominant intellectual tradition in Anglo-American thought adopted similar conceptions. In this empiricist tradition it was held that the constructions of the mind result from a few simple operations of association on the basis of contiguity, phenomenal similarity, and so on, perhaps extended by a capacity for induction from a limited class of cases to a larger class of the same type. These resources must then suffice for all intellectual achievements, including language learning and much else. ….

When some doctrine has such a powerful grip on the intellectual imagination over such a broad range and when it has little in the way of empirical support but is rather in conflict with the evidence at every point, it is fair to ask why the beliefs are so firmly maintained. Why should intellectuals be so wedded to the belief that humans are shaped by the environment, not determined by their nature?

In earlier years environmentalism was held to be a ‘progressive’ doctrine. It undermined the belief that each person has a natural place fixed by nature: lord, servant, slave, and so on. It is true that if people have no endowments, then they are equal in endowments: equally miserable and unfortunate. Whatever appeal such a view may once have had, it is hard to take it seriously today. In fact, it was dubious even then; as noted, the traditional dualism to which it was opposed had deeper and far more persuasive reasons for assuming the essential unity of the human species and the lack of significant variation within it in any of these respects.” (Chomsky 1988: 250–252).
Noam Chomsky is basically the Grand Old Man of the radical Left at this point, but it is frequently forgotten that the whole basis of his academic and scholarly work was a vehement rejection of the blank slate and a defence of biological essentialism.

Chomsky has defended (1) the view that human beings are not blank slates as in radical (and mistaken) empiricism, and (2) the observation that human language and other cognitive traits are innately biological to a significant extent.

The latter view was brought out in Chomsky’s now famous 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, where Chomsky attacked Skinner’s behaviourism and effectively discredited that theory.

This is confirmed in Chomsky’s statement above when he says the following:
“The evidence seems compelling, indeed overwhelming, that fundamental aspects of our mental and social life, including language, are determined as part of our biological endowment, not acquired by learning, still less by training, in the course of our experience. Many find this conclusion offensive. …. The Marxist tradition too has characteristically held that humans are products of history and society, not determined by their biological nature; of course this is not true of physical properties, such as the possession of arms rather than wings or the property of undergoing puberty at roughly a certain age, but it is held to be true of intellectual, social, and general cultural life. This standard view makes nonsense of the essentials of Marx’s own thought, I believe, for reasons already briefly indicated, but let us put that aside;” … . (Chomsky 1988: 250–251).
As Chomsky points out, the blank slate is a popular but flawed assumption of much of the Left, certainly the Marxist left, and is not supported by the evidence.

Chomsky talks about human nature here:



But his claim that the genetic basis of human nature is difficult to study is collapsing now, owing to the genetic and genomic revolution. Chomsky is also wrong to be skeptical about modern evolutionary psychology.

Chomsky is entirely correct, however, that biological essentialism is true, and the fact is that there was a strand of the Left that did not deny biological nature: the early-20th-century progressive Left, including the progressive Liberals, who defended the truth of Darwinian evolution, the truth that evolution applies to human beings, the understanding that even many of our human cognitive traits like intelligence are highly heritable, and, most controversial of all, that evolution has produced human beings in different regions with different phenotypic traits under different selective pressures.

Of course, that kind of progressivism that defended biological essentialism has been shunned and ejected from any influence on the modern Left, which tends to embrace radical blank slateism and social constructivism.

But all the scientific evidence today shows that blank slateism and social constructivism are utterly discredited: yet the Left continues to fanatically defend these discredited pseudo-scientific religious dogmas. Obviously, to make any progress on reforming the errors and flawed assumptions of the Left, blank slateism and social constructivism have to be abandoned.

Of course, Chomsky himself can be criticised for not taking his commitment to the biological basis to human nature far enough, or making strange denials about the role of evolution.

Take Chomsky’s view of the human language faculty. In standard neo-Darwinian theory not everything biological and innate is a direct adaptation, but evolution can be caused by multiple processes:
(1) direct adaptation;

(2) exaptation (some prior adaptation then “re-designed” to solve a different adaptive problem);

(3) as a by-product (or spandrel);

(4) sexual selection, or

(5) genetic drift.
Chomsky has suggested that the human language faculty is (3), while most other biologists or evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker argue it is (1) (see Pinker and Bloom 1990). At other times, Chomsky has also suggested that the language faculty is caused by some unknown even more fundamental principles of physics (Dennett 1996: 395), but this seems absurd.

Chomsky himself has not shrunk from commenting on the most controversial issue of all: race and average IQ differences. Chomsky has said:
“Such arguments for environmentalism are often heard today in connection with debates over race and IQ and the like. Again, it is true that if humans have no biologically determined intellectual endowments, then there will be no correlation between IQ (a socially determined property) and anything else: race, sex, or whatever. Again, though the motivation can be appreciated, it is difficult to take the argument seriously. Let us pretend for the moment that race and IQ are well-defined properties, and let us suppose that some correlation is found between them. Perhaps a person of a particular race, on the average, is likely to have a slightly higher IQ than a person of another race. Notice first that such a conclusion would have essentially null scientific interest. It is of no interest to discover a correlation between two traits selected at random, and if someone happens to be interested in this odd and pointless question, it would make far more sense to study properties that are much more clearly defined, say, length of fingernails and eye color. So the interest of the discovery must lie in the social domain. But here, it is clear that the discovery is of interest only to people who believe that each individual must be treated not as what he or she is but rather as an example of a certain category (racial, sexual, or whatever). To anyone not afflicted with these disorders, it is of zero interest whether the average value of IQ for some category of persons is such-and-such. Suppose we were to discover the height has a slight correlation with ability to do higher mathematics. Would that imply that no one under a certain height should be encouraged to study higher mathematics, or would it mean that each person should be considered as an individual, encouraged to study higher mathematics if their talents and interests so indicate? Obviously the latter, even though it would then turn out that a slightly higher percentage of taller people would end up pursuing this path. Since we do not suffer from the social disease of ‘height-ism,’ the issue interests no one.

Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists, and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexist, and the like.” Chomsky (1988: 252).
Chomsky here is saying that blank-slate environmentalism is not needed to dismiss concerns about racial differences in average IQ, because Chomsky thinks that, if there were such differences, it is of “essentially null scientific interest” or “of no scientific interest.”

But here Chomsky himself is absurdly wrong. If there are significant differences in average IQs between the races and other cognitive traits, then this has profound social, economic, and political implications, implications which Chomsky refuses to discuss or honestly consider.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass and London.

Dennett, D. C. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Penguin Books, London.

Pinker, Steven and Paul Bloom, 1990. “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4: 707–784.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Sargon of Akkad goes Full SJW Retard

And also mixed in with a good portion of libertarian/Classical Liberal retard too.

At this point, it is difficult not to lose all respect for Sargon. For years, he did sterling work refuting and countering all the nonsense of the SJW Left, but now seems to have fallen into – or at least been forced to throw up – Cultural Leftist nonsense. All this has happened because of his picking a fight with the Alt Right. Unfortunately, Sargon isn’t intellectually up to debating such people, and it is not just his lame Classical Liberal individualist rubbish that is the cause of this. Sargon is also ignorant of science.

In a recent debate with Millennial Woes below, Sargon is forced to invoke social constructivist idiocy and, yes, literally goes full SJW, and asserts that white people are just a “social construct”:



When Sargon says that white people are just a “social construct,” he is denying evolution, biology and modern science, and falling back on social constructivism – a cult of nonsense on the Cultural Left.

One can easily find the facts about race in Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (New York, 2014). Wade was a New York Times science writer and, typically, he and his book were subject to all sort of vicious slanderous attacks, even though his basic facts are the findings of modern science and have not been refuted.

It is easy to prove Sargon wrong by referring to the scientific facts. By “white people,” what Sargon really means is “white European Caucasians,” a sub-branch of the Caucasian/Caucasoid population group or race.

The broad Caucasian/Caucasoid race includes more than just Europeans, of course, since it includes North African Caucasians, Middle Eastern Caucasians, the indigenous people of the Caucasus, and Central Asian Caucasians. But Europeans are an objective and real subgroup of this broad population group, which has a distinctive set of phenotypes and genetic markers.

We can easily prove this.

As Wade points out, humans have the same types of genes, but human races differ in terms of gene allele frequencies (Wade 2014: 96), which cause distinctive phenotypes because of a common ancestry and evolutionary history.

Genome sequencing shows us that human populations have been subject to genetic and evolutionary changes in the various regions of settlement and in recent history, because of different selective pressures and other evolutionary processes, and that these changes differ from population to population (Wade 2014: 103).

Genes under selection actually do differ from region to region in the genome: of genetic regions under selection, there were 206 distinct regions in the genome of Africans, 185 in East Asians, and 188 in Europeans (Wade 2014: 103).

Evolution is driven to a great extent by the prevalence of gene variants called alleles. These alleles spread through a population by natural selection. Many important phenotypic traits are caused by a number of different genes (Wade 2014: 111). But an allele need only become more common in a population with respect to another population to cause significant evolutionary change.

Human beings can be objectively divided into 5 major continental races, with minor races as well as additional “clines” (people of mixed ancestry). It is also a total myth that a race has to be “pure” in order to exist. This is utterly false. Modern Mestizos are a real objective race, but by origin they were a “cline,” an admixture between mostly male European Caucasians and female Amerindians.

We can genetically classify human beings into different population groups by two objective criteria as follows:
(1) differences in “tandem repeats” or DNA repeats, and

(2) single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs).
Genetic studies by either of these methods confirm that there are 5 main races:
(1) Caucasians/Caucasoid,
(2) East Asians,
(3) sub-Saharan Africans,
(4) Australian Aborigines, and
(5) Amerindians (Wade 2014: 97–98).
There are also minor races like New Guineans and Melanesians (Wade 2014: 97), as well as “clines” (admixtures of two originally separate groups) like the people of sub-continental India (Wade 2014: 96). Within broad races, one can also find sub-groups with finer genetic testing, which often line up with traditional ethnicities (Wade 2014: 98), which have themselves shared common descent and further minor evolution.

The hard scientific evidence for this can be found in these ground-breaking genetic studies:
(1) For classifications based on differences in “tandem repeats” or DNA repeats, see:

Rosenberg, N. A., J. K. Pritchard, J. L. Weber, H. M. Cann, K. K. Kidd, L. A. Zhivotovsky, and M. W. Feldman. 2002. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” Science 298: 2381–2385.

(2) For classification based on Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs), see:

Li, J. Z., Absher, D. M., Tang, H., Southwick, A. M., Casto, A. M., Ramachandran, S., Cann, H. M., Barsh, G. S., Feldman, M., Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., and Myers, R. M. 2008. “Worldwide Human Relationships inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation,” Science 319.5866: 1100–1104.
So science says that Caucasians are a real objective group defined by objective gene allele frequencies derived from common descent and evolution.

What of Europeans? Europeans are a subgroup of the broad Caucasian/Caucasoid race. When people speak of white people, what they normally mean is “white European Caucasian.”

The science of genetics also says Europeans are an objectively real group with a three-fold common descent. The evidence can be seen in Gibbons (2014), Allentoft et al. (2015), Günther et al. (2015), Mathieson et al. (2015) and Hofmanová et al. (2016). These studies are based on gene sequencing of ancient DNA in the remains of people who died thousands of years ago.

In terms of descent, the facts appear to be that indigenous modern Europeans are a three-fold mix of three ancient populations as follows:
(1) Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe from c. 45,000 years ago;

(2) Neolithic Anatolian and Aegean farmers who migrated into Europe from c. 6,500 BC–4,000 BC, and

(3) Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya-culture people who swept into Europe from the Russian steppe from 3,000 to 2,000 BC.
We can examine the history of these groups in greater detail as follows:
(1) Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from c. 45,000 years ago
These were the earliest members of Homo sapiens in Europe; they were a hunter-gatherer people who lived in Europe from about 45,000 years ago during the end of the last Ice Age (which lasted from about 108,000 to 10,000 BC). They came from the Middle East along a Mediterranean route. But Europe must have been sparsely populated by these people: in essence, the earliest European hunter-gatherers must have been a relatively small population. These Mesolithic hunter-gatherers have contributed to modern European genetics, though to a different extent in different regions.

It appears that some of them interbred with the Neanderthals (who had in turn evolved from Homo erectus populations) (see here). But, even if true, the Neanderthal genetic contribution to modern Europeans is low, maybe as low as 1.5–2.1% (Prüfer et al. 2014). (For a useful family tree, see here).

There also seems to be some evidence that the mysterious Homo sapiens denisova lived in Europe in the Stone age.

At any rate, the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers appear to have had dark skin, which lightened by Darwinian evolution over the centuries, but perhaps accelerated by the adoption of farming which involved a reduced intake of vitamin D. Blue eyes may have evolved amongst these early European hunter-gatherers as well (see here and here).

(2) Neolithic Anatolian farmers from c. 6,500 BC–4,000 BC
From c. 6,500 BC–4,000 BC, Neolithic Anatolian farmers from northern Greece and north-western Turkey started migrating into central Europe through the Balkan route and then by the Mediterranean route to the Iberian Peninsula. They brought sedentary agricultural communities and new domestic animals and plants. Modern southern Europeans still seem to have inherited much more of their genes from these people. The original Anatolian farmer phenotype was probably similar to that of the modern people of Sardinia (Hofmanová et al. 2016: 3), and, generally speaking, the swarthy phenotype of southern Europeans is the legacy of their greater descent from the Neolithic Anatolian farmers as opposed to northern Europeans. Genetic analysis of ancient farmers seems to show that after their arrival in Europe the Neolithic Anatolian farmers only mixed infrequently and at low levels with the hunter-gatherers, but increasingly from the later Neolithic period (Hofmanová et al. 2016: 4).

(3) Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya-culture people from 3,000 to 2,000 BC
From 3,000 to 2,000 BC, there was massive migration of people from the South Russian steppe into central Europe, and then into northern and western Europe, and these people were of the Yamnaya culture north of the Black Sea. These people were almost certainly proto-Indo-European speakers (Balter and Gibbons 2015), cattle herders, and probably had a phenotype with brown eyes, pale skin, and taller height. It is also interesting – and not surprising – that the Caucasian Yamnaya-culture people have bequeathed to modern Europeans the trait of persistent adult lactose tolerance (Allentoft et al. 2015: 171). The migration of the Yamnaya-culture people west and east spread the Indo-European languages (Allentoft et al. 2015: 171).
All modern indigenous Europeans (e.g., even those partly descended from the later invaders from the Eurasian steppe like the Magyars or Turkic-speaking Bulgars or Cumans) have a mix of genes from these three types of ancient people (see here).

The distinctive European traits of blue eyes (from hunter gatherers), lactose tolerance (from the Yamnaya people) and fairer skin spread by interbreeding and natural selection (see here and here).

The genetic contribution of the Neolithic Anatolian farmers is important, but admittedly less so as you move northwards in Europe. However, even the Scandinavians have significant descent from the Neolithic Anatolian farmers, and even a marginal population like the Irish do as well (see here).

The further north you go in Europe, it appears the more is the genetic contribution of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

And virtually everyone has some descent from the Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya-culture people. Linguistically, this third group is fundamentally important because virtually everyone in Europe now speaks an Indo-European language, apart from the Hungarians, Finns, and Estonians (who speak Finno-Ugric languages), and the Basques (who probably speak a modern descendant of the ancient Anatolian farmer language).

The Indo-European Yamnaya-culture people of the steppe had themselves mixed with a population of hunter-gatherers isolated in the Caucasus region, so that the early Yamnaya pastoralists were a mix of Eastern European hunter gatherers and another group of hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus. These people then migrated back into Europe in a mass movement from c. 3,000 to 2,000 BC (Balter and Gibbons 2015: 815). For example, they flooded into eastern and central Europe and created the Corded Ware culture (c. 3100–1900 BC) (see the map here). Their descendants appear to have arrived in Greece from 2400–2000 BC bringing with them the Proto-Greek language that would evolve into Mycenaean Greek and then the later Greek dialects of Classical Greece.

Conclusion
So we have objective criteria for defining a white European Caucasian: a person whose ancestors lived in Europe for thousands of years and who shares a three-fold descent from (1) the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe, (2) Neolithic Anatolian and Aegean farmers who migrated into Europe, and (3) the Indo-Europeans. All these groups were also ancient Caucasians/Caucasoids, and Europeans are also a sub-group of a broader Caucasian/Caucasoid race.

So Sargon can be refuted easily. I challenge him to read and respond to the evidence above, or just read the evidence in Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (New York, 2014), and the other genetic studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allentoft, Morten E. et al. 2015. “Population Genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia,” Nature 522 (11 June): 167–172.

Balter, Michael and Ann Gibbons. 2015. “Indo-European Languages tied to Herders,” Science 347.6224: 814–815.

Gibbons, Ann. 2014. “Three-Part Ancestry for Europeans,” Science 345.6201 (5 September): 1106–1107.

Günther, Torsten et al. 2015. “Ancient Genomes link Early Farmers from Atapuerca in Spain to Modern-Day Basques,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.38: 11917–11922.

Haak, Wolfgang. 2015. “Massive Migration from the Steppe was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe,” Nature 522: 207–211.

Hofmanová, Zuzana et al. 2016. “Early Farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, June 6
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/01/1523951113.full

Jones, Eppie R. et al. 2015. “Upper Palaeolithic Genomes reveal Deep Roots of Modern Eurasians,” Nature Communications 6
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151116/ncomms9912/full/ncomms9912.html

Mathieson, Iain et al. 2015. “Genome-Wide Patterns of Selection in 230 Ancient Eurasians,” Nature 528.7583: 499–503.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v528/n7583/full/nature16152.html

Wade, Nicholas. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The Penguin Press, New York.

Friday, January 5, 2018

Steven Pinker on the Alt Right

See Steven Pinker’s remarks here:



Pinker is right. Our society has become so insanely politically correct that asserting basic empirical truths is now hate crime, and many people do not even know these facts at all, and when confronted with them are shocked.

Take the issue of biological differences between men and women, especially differences in the distribution of female versus male IQ, as I have discussed here. These facts about IQ and the biologically-determined physical, cognitive and personality differences between men and women explain why women do not have much interest in the hard sciences, or any great presence in that field. Instead, the field is dominated by men, just as men dominate sectors of the economy where hard physical labour is required, and this is almost entirely explained by biological differences.

As Pinker says, the explosion of the popularity of the Alt Right is in part explained by the outrageous suppression of such basic empirical truths like these. But Pinker doesn’t go far enough. The rise of the identitarian right is also explained by the obvious catastrophe of mass Third World immigration and in particular mass Muslim immigration.

Pinker, however, seems to get the Alt Right wrong on economics. Perhaps the anarcho-capitalists had much greater influence in the past, but the Alt Right these days seems dominated by people who are comfortable with aspects of left-wing economics, or even supportive of a Bernie Sanders-style socialism, but for white people in a white ethno-state.