I don't understand why Mr. S is straining to avoid the term 'sexual selection'. In the case of the Ashkenazi, physical or behavioral traits that promoted success within the cultural environment in which they lived would have been rewarded by greater access to resource, including reproductive resources: these traits would have had a greater chance of being passed on. According to this formula, all groups, over time, become optimally adapted to their physical and cultural environment. Groups aren't superior or inferior to one another, they are just more or less adapted to their environmnet.

Good point. Theoretically, the basis of SS evolves along the same nature-culture continuum, from power to resources to status, etc.

For example: deer antlers and peacock feathers supply no fitness advantage in nature, but have been selected for as 'display attributes' that attract females; they in some way denote fitness to females.

>>Groups aren't superior or inferior to one another, they are just more or less adapted to their environment.<<

I don't think this will make Mr. Saletan's conclusions any less repellent to the people who are supposed to have lower I.Q.s thanks to either natural or sexual selection. The idea that culture caused my "population" to be dumber on average than others (I'm black) doesn't appeal to me any more than the idea that nature is the culprit. Saying "You folks aren't inferior to Ashkenazi Jews, just differently adapted," where that different adaptation involves typically lower intelligence, sounds like the addition of condescension to racialism.

Of course, "repellent" doesn't entail "false," and I don't see any intrinsic harm in entertaining this sort of stuff as a hypothesis. What annoys the hell out of me is the way people like Saletan often present their hypotheses as if they were the only possible scientific ways of looking at the very spotty evidence. In fact, they aren't. (See Metcalf's response to Saletan's last foray into evolutionary theory.) And it's funny how often genetic confirmations of stereotypes turn out to come from people with ulterior motives like J. P. Rushton and his buddies at the Pioneer Fund.

You don't have to be obsessed with "political correctness" to wish that people would display a little healthy skepticism about views that are so convenient for some people to believe. And it is indeed very convenient for the people who are succeeding in our society to believe that the people who aren't doing so well have only, or mainly, their genes to blame.

Our dentist reported to me that people now have fewer or simpler (easier to extract) wisdom teeth. As one who had four wisdom teeth that were very hard to extract 60 years ago I found this very interesting. when I asked her why she responded, "evolution". But she could not point to any environmental factors that might account for this change.

I'm a psychologist, and I've done a fair amount of IQ testing. Here is the thing one must keep in mind when comparing one person's (or one group's) IQ to another's; A person's IQ is their score on a test: That test in turn is designed to measure their IQ. This is a unmistakably a tautology. Native Americans typically score stronger for tasks associated with the right hemisphere, while white urban males score more strongly, as a group, on left hemisphere tasks. Whether one pattern of responding is superior to the other depends on 1) the context in which the pattern is expressed, or else, 2) a value judgment.

I think nearly everyone reading this agrees that certain (self-identified) racial groups score lower or higher on IQ tests. The paper that Saletan cites tries (and fails) to establish that the *reason* for the high IQ test scores of a certain group of people is genetic. The paper does have the virtue of citing a *possible* mechanism for the genetic transference of an IQ testing advantage, but it's a long way from settling that question to my satisfaction. It also makes plenty of assertions (e.g., that the "experts" agree that IQ test scores are largely determined by genetics) that are just false.

Softer food will do it: if one feeds monkeys wet monkey chow then there are fewer stresses on the developing jaws, they don't grow as large, they don't hold all the teeth they are designed to hold, and the monkeys are candidates for orthodontia.

Once we started eating soft foods, cereal mush, there must have followed pretty strong selection for third molar agenesis, so the dentist could be right I suppose.

If there is anything to this hypothesis it is more of the gene-culture coevolution that Herb Gintis mentioned.

This is an interesting message because you say that you don't like the idea that your "population" may be dumber than others. Why? I can't imagine being very concerned with "my population", which is redneck white. For example there has been chortling on the net about Watson's black ancestry. He might find it interesting, as I would if it were me, but what on earth is the chortling about? I would think about my own personality and temperament and wonder about ways it is similar to that of Africans I know.

I certainly am choosy and discriminatory about my friends, neighbors, etc. But I am not very interested in what color they are: in other words I don't seem to find myself attracted to or interested in "my population."

Here is the puzzle. If it is natural for you to be interested in your population, is it not then natural for people like Phil Rushton or Jared Taylor to be interested in whites (however defined). You have no conflict apparently about your interest in your racial identity yet you sneer at Rushton or Taylor for the same thing!

I can't understand nor empathize with racial identity since it seems to me that class trumps race every time. I respect Phil Rushton and Jared Taylor for their honesty and courage but I have no empathy at all with their social/political viewpoint.

I am critical of your viewpoint that you identify with your race, yet you latch onto the _same_ viewpoint in Rushton and others to sneer at them. You write approvingly of the Metcalf essay, but that is nothing but sleazy low-class name-calling and mudslinging. I think that Metcalf is a blot of shame on the world of journalism.

I can't resist pointing out that if one insists on attributing evil racist motives to Rushton's science then one discovers that he is a yellow supremacist not a white supremacist. Should you and I console each other about how "dumb" our own groups are or should we realize that our "racial groups" are pretty irrelevant to our own understandings of ourselves?

oh dear, you're simply a racist. the arguement has been repeated so many times. what about the koreans living in japan who score poorly?

RE Koreans in Japan. They don't like each other and have no problem discriminating against them. Highly unlikely that a Korean would choose to live in Japan, I was stationed in Korea for 2 years and know their feelings toward the Japanese, therefore they are probably leftovers from WW2. Probably not given the same educational choices as native Japanese. Just a guess, but sounds like standard treatment of minority populations throughout human history.

>>This is an interesting message because you say that you don't like the idea that your "population" may be dumber than others. Why? I can't imagine being very concerned with "my population", which is redneck white.<<

Maybe you ought to be. Maybe everybody ought to be a little careful about disparaging "white trash" and "redneck whites." I wouldn't think of doing it. Some people argue that the wealthier people of the South used divide-and-conquer strategy on poor blacks and poor whites, despising both groups but getting the poor whites on their side by telling them that those stupid, undeserving blacks were going to take their jobs if the whites did things like unionize. A little less contempt all around might have benefited all the people at the bottom of things in this country, and it might still.

Anyway, there is a painfully obvious reason to care about the fate of blacks as a group in America and other places. The people known as blacks have a history of being owned as chattel, lynched and terrorized, denied voting and other civil rights, denied equal protection of the laws, . . . you know the drill. They--that is, we--got this treatment as a group. We had to fight a very noble fight to improve things here as a group. And we are still subject to less flagrant kinds of discrimination as a group, not to mention the lingering effects of the flagrant kinds. The treatment of blacks as a group is the great stain on the history of this country, and so of course we blacks should care about our history and about how we are doing in the present. Everybody should care, in fact, not just blacks. Race shouldn't be the center of anybody's world, and it seems clear to me that some blacks today make too big a deal of racial identity, just as some whites do. But nobody, black or white, should ignore signs of present-day racism.

>>For example there has been chortling on the net about Watson's black ancestry. He might find it interesting, as I would if it were me, but what on earth is the chortling about? . . . <<

Watson, according to his quoted remarks, disparaged the abilities of "Africans." Not any particular Africans, not even the majority of Africans. He made a blanket statement about "them." He later recanted, but you can't blame people for pointing out with interest and amusement that his own ancestors may have included a surprisingly large number of the people whose intelligence he said was lower than "ours." And, seriously, this shows the foolishness of the whole business of ranking "populations" by intelligence. Nature has not divided humanity up into geographical groups whose characteristics can be meaningfully compared. There's too much of "us" in "them," whoever "we" and "they" are.

>>. . . Here is the puzzle. If it is natural for you to be interested in your population, is it not then natural for people like Phil Rushton or Jared Taylor to be interested in whites (however defined).<<

I don't think I said anything about how "natural" it was for people like me to take an interest in my "population." In fact I just think it's rational, given current and historical circumstances, for me to take an interest in what people who believe that races are real (people unlike me, that is) have to say about the race they categorize me into.

>>You have no conflict apparently about your interest in your racial identity yet you sneer at Rushton or Taylor for the same thing!<<

Give me a break. I'm not giving talks and writing books praising my own "race" and depreciating the others. And yes, I get it, they're saying whites are number two, not number one, by a small number of IQ points. (Oops: Except for the Ashkenazi Jews, who are white and are, it seems, number one after all.) But "We're number two! You're number five!" still sounds like cheerleading to me, and it doesn't make me happy. Instead, when I consider the history of this kind of "scientific" thinking and the uses people put it to, it makes me suspicious. What's hard to understand about that?

>>I can't understand nor empathize with racial identity since it seems to me that class trumps race every time.<<

Not every time. I do think that at the moment class is a thing people should think about lots more. But blacks who couldn't vote, defend their property, travel freely, or get or hold onto jobs had more of a problem with race than with class. And there would be more blacks in the middle and upper classes if it weren't for parts of that history.

>>I respect Phil Rushton and Jared Taylor for their honesty and courage but I have no empathy at all with their social/political viewpoint.<<

Somehow I just don't see a whole lot of courage involved when a tenured academic takes a position that gets him lots of attention and followers, not to mention control of a fund with which he can bankroll the junk social science he favors, including books like The Color of Crime and lectures on "the War of Southern Independence" rather than the "Civil War."

>>. . . You write approvingly of the Metcalf essay, but that is nothing but sleazy low-class name-calling and mudslinging. I think that Metcalf is a blot of shame on the world of journalism. . . . <<

That is nothing but name-calling and mudslinging. Metcalf makes arguments.

"
&gt;&gt;. . . You write approvingly of the Metcalf essay, but that is nothing but sleazy low-class name-calling and mudslinging. I think that Metcalf is a blot of shame on the world of journalism. . . . &lt;&lt;
That is nothing but name-calling and mudslinging. Metcalf makes arguments.
"

You are right, sorry. I just see red when someone like Metcalf, apparently innocent of the literature, chants catechism and denounces the devil.