Do be aware that Lorenzo is in Australia and asleep at the moment. He'll be around in about six hours.
[Addendum Monday 22nd at 5 pm GMT: Rather than getting into the weeds with people, I'll just note that some of the comments here are getting a bit spicy. Please don't tell people to read books or that their claims are incoherent. With very few exceptions, most of the people on this Substack leave sensible comments, and this is still true even when I disagree with them.]
You should really post these when America is up and had 2-3 cups of cofee :-) We could all do without the six hours of rebuttal-free butt-hurt "Wah! Muh feels" from your average Septic "intellect". Great minds, the Founding Fathers; but the USA rapidly.... regressed to the mean. ;-)
Ugh. The amount of variation by DNA is minimal compared to variation by acculturation. Sowell's Wealth, Poverty and Politics is directly on point. There are cultural subgroups all but genetically identical to neighbors that do not display the same socio-economic success.
The heredity argument clearly falls apart as soon as you examine any aristocracy.
The amount of variation by DNA between you and a chimpanzee is minimal but here we are. Clearly there are biological differences between humans based on geographic origins.
Not sure what point you’re making about aristocracy.
That the genetics have jack to do with who got ennobled, or that the refined breeding thereof actually accomplished the objective of further refinement.
Whoosh! The immigrant parent does better then the native child. Edward 1, great king; Edward 2, wanker. The hereditary argument isn't about race; it is about heredity, be that cutural or genetic. JRR Tolkein>Christopher Tolkein>Tolkeins now. Henry Ford>Edsall Ford. You suffer from confusion; conflation; and substituting whatever narrative is in your head for that on your screen. Prat.
“Race” is a shitty term with bad history,but people intuitively understand it as shorthand for complex population genetics.
Recent black African immigrants to the USA are more affluent and from well educated, professional families, which presumably have better genes AND cultural tendencies than ADOS (many of which have something like 25% DNA from slave masters, who are not the best part of the “white” gene pool, see Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations).
DNA differences between modern-western gene pools are drastically different the parts of the world where honor systems, clans and dynasties rule and practice cousin marriage and polygamy.
Inbred gene pools are pre-modern in their thinking and values. Thus they struggle with high-social-trust, democracy, market economics, Constitutional order, scientific and technological innovation, etc.
The same differences show up comparing the Frankish Manorial gene pool vs Celts, Slavs and Romans. It isn’t about skin pigment, it is about degree of historical cousin marriage, clans, and inbreeding.
Contemporary America is struggling with high social trust - it isn't because of genetic deterioration. It is because some of our deep social instincts are re-appearing and doing harm.
Loss of high social trust results from techno-economic disruption. Suburban consumer culture, globalism, the decline of manufacturing and the rise of digital capitalism. See Martin Van Creveld’s article, 1990s, on the Fate of the State, US Army web site.
Evolutionary psychologist and futurist John Vervaeke sees loss of social trust resulting from a “crisis of meaning” (sense making), similar to this AI scientist’s analysis:
As the late Bernie Neville(Jungian, latrobe. edu . au) pointed out, disruption by digital capitalism corresponded to the emergence of postmodern relativism, what he called the Hermes myth. Hermes was a boundary violator and trickster. The rise of Hermes displaced modern rationalism and the nation state system, the Apollo and Prometheus myths.
Postmodern digital capitalism and globalism generate digital Gnosticism,the”belief” that “reality is a social construct”, a cult of global elites.
postmodern values do have potentially positive aspects such as pluralism, displacing the “absolutisms” of scientific materialism and mythic religion, destigmatizing embodied “pagan” awareness and spirituality (Grof at Esalen).
Both. The ruling elites observe cultural evolution and social change (far in advance of most of the masses of commoners) and then they come up with ways of manipulating it.
"Woke" postmodernism was an emergent phenomena at least as far back as Sri Aurobindo and maybe Max Weber. The ruling elites hung out with systems theorists and futurists and got a sense of how to manipulate it.
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School neomarxists worked for the CIA during and after WW2 as german language translators.
Fred Dutton, advisor to the Kennedys and Democrats in the 1960s, specifically appropriated postmodernism/counterculture for political purposes.
... “wokeness” is rooted in the wider infrastructure of statecraft which can be traced, at the irreducible minimum, to the collusion between the Frankfurt School and the OSS during WW2, followed by the CIA’s creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. While elements of the ideological framework of totalitarian humanism may have their roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s/1970s, in its present form “wokeness” represents a co-optation of those cultural patterns by the liberal wing of the capitalist class ( a specific strategy that was devised by Fred Dutton as far back as 1970).
We aren't even three full generations removed from Moynihan's observations. You aren't going to get a huge genetic shift out of that. Not compared to what has happened to family structure and the absence of fathers. That is a cultural failure largely abetted by a bad policy choice.
Selection is selection. The selection in humanity is now very largely at the cultural level. This is the why and how of Dawkin's invention/popularisation of the meme as culture's gene.
The dominant paradigm in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is gene-culture [CO]evolution , which follows Darwin’s observations on the evolution of culture and morals.
The “race deniers” the postmodern “left” explicitly set out to muddle the science because they are corrupt ideological tribalists. Ironically
Memetic evolution is a damn sight faster than genetic. Genes might set bounds; but it'll be damn good while, if ever, that we see a genetic input beyond what was already there at the Neolithic Revolution.
(not sure if this got posted earlier, there might have been a substack glitch.)
that is mostly, but not completely true.
a recent scientific study found genetic changes in an east african population of hunter/gathers that were heavily impacted by drought.
it took just a few generations to develop greater biological tolerance of an extreme shortage of water.
banning cousin marriage and imposing the nuclear family had dramatic results, and after a few black plaques wiped out more low IQ clannish peasants than higher IQ "liberal" urban commoners the change was probably pretty rapid in historical terms.
They deny biology and genetics, in preference to ideological nonsense. But their position is incoherent and full of bizarre, irrational contradictions ("race" doesn't exist, but "white" people are evil), cherry picked data, etc.
They are driven by narratives, usually emotive-subjective narratives, including hate ideology, so they ignore scientific data that contradicts their narrative.
Innocence on your part perhaps. 'The Bell Curve' was thirty years ago: given the kerfuffle that set off has come around several times since already, the ironic cynicism is to be totally expected. I can almost guarantee negiligible chance of comment I haven't seen in previous go-a-rounds with this topic.
We need terminology that differentiates between group and individual context. Race is a poor term because it is used for describing groups as well as individuals.
This is not a simple problem - we assign a group name not to a specific group of individuals but to an abstract concept meaning "all that have X characteristic".
So while the qualities discovered in the group (via research and statistics) are "true" they are not necessarily applicable to an individual that one happens to think belongs to that group. And often those qualities are further differentiate within the group by other social factors.
No surprise that our enlightened rulers have decided to double down on identity politics, where the individual is encouraged to have a strong connection to their group. Of course this connection is natural for an individual. But often what is natural is not productive or is even destructive.
Ironic that those that celebrate diversity (therefore difference) are such advocates for equality.
the "need" is for people to actually understand population genetics and the process of evolution leading to intense social cooperation in the human species. when that happens, people, maybe especially moderns, are shocked by the irrelevance of individuals to ancient evolution.
to oversimplify, individuals don't "evolve", but kinship groups (gene pools) do.
Thanks again for an excellent link. Frost is correct. He makes an excellent summary.
I've read so much stuff over 50 years I probably forgot more than I can remember.
Peter Richerson's web page showing his publications is now a mess, presumably because he is retired and UC Davis no longer helps him maintain it, but it used to be good.
Other people in the "Dual Inheritance" theory camp have written about it, maybe Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute) or one of his collaborators?
web search: "population genetics" - the wikipedia result is pretty good
Great article, Lorenzo, that argues against use of the term race realist. So what do you suggest as a better term to distinguish people who are trying to be realistic about these matters from those pursuing ideological motivated falsehoods?
That probably needs to be more specific; something like "memetic heredity", or you have folk misleading themselves back to genes again and rehearsing the same guff Charles Murray has to put up with.
The trouble is, the argument that differences in IQ, personality etc. between individuals within a population are partly genetic, is to some extent a different argument from the one that average differences in those traits between populations are also partly genetic. 'Hereditarian' kind of awkwardly straddles both, but 'race realist' only applies to the latter.
However, the more neutral term "Human Biodiversity" or HBD is also available, so one can just say "HBD proponents".
Very interesting...particularly the African-American rural/urban crime-rate persective which I wasn't aware of. I posted my own quibble on another aspect of the Cofnas essay (completely tangential to yours) in response to Cofnas saying: "wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously".
I re-post my quibble here: "Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game.....one in which you the woke person get a nice FEELING about yourself as one of a caring (and sophisticated) elect. At the same time you get to indulge some delicious hate towards your notional peers."
"Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game."
The problem of wokeism like many things, is not found in its motivations. The problem is in it's reception. What is it in our culture that has so readily accepted its doctrines?
Speak for yourself. Walk it back through history and you find at its' heart it is Xtian heresy and most certainly has a doctrine. It is Plato on rinse-and-repeat.
My heathenish husband takes it as a given that Christianity, the NT, is Platonist (neo-Platonist?). During my earliest years spent in a Baptist school, I was not exposed to that idea ;-). But it is not a subject we have delved into in 32 years of marriage. I think because - one doesn't particularly enjoy having one's childhood creed, one's little establishing notions challenged or made light of, or undermined.*
I have not heard that it is Christian heresy that is owing to Plato. Interested in any book or essay on that subject.
*The only thing that seemed problematic in the doctrine even to me, while still in childhood, was a touch of antisemitism, not from my family, but rather church or church-school-derived, that caused me (an event prior to my feeling there was troubled water, in my religion, but contributory to it) at six to tell my neighbor pal that her people had killed Jesus; in MY DEFENSE (always paramount to me), she initiated the conversation, by telling me that He was not the messiah, and that was the difference between us, that I believed in something false; neither of us particularly struck in our ruinous attempt to reconcile our faiths, without adult help, by the more signal fact that He was a Jew; I was crying after, both absurdly because I so wanted to be friends with this person I had accused of *deicide*, because she was pretty and a little older and had a cool game room and I'd been offered green chocolate in her kitchen and she was allowed to watch many things on TV unsupervised in that game room, and because she was next door; and also crying because so much did I love Jesus because I had been told He loved me, which was very comforting since I knew myself to be unlovable; but just as soon very ashamed of myself - wanting to query my mother on this paradox but unwilling to admit to and expose my solecism; was neurotic about it for quite some time; I didn't apologize though, never have been able to apologize, nor accept the idea of forgiveness ;-).
Neoplatonism was basically an attempt to combine ("pagan") naturalism (Greco-Roman "rationalism") with "spirituality" (supernaturalism, superstition, religion, metaphysics, etc.).
It was important to medieval philosophers including Ibn al Arabi, the great Andalusian Moor and thus part of the foundation of Sufism and other schools of mysticism (many of which cross-fertilized ideas).
The modern idea that "science" and "religion" are separate is a recent historical thing. See Max Weber on the various "spheres of authority" in human consciousness and how they became distinct in modernity (industrial revolution).
Pure Greco-Roman rationalism was not an ideology that had a material-economic base or a class base in ancient times, so it had to be adapted to religious cultures.
With the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, that changed as growing literacy, numeracy and scientific-rational thinking expanded along with the growing industrial economy. That was when rational thinking re-emerged and gained importance.
Even though some consider Newton to be the father of modern science, he was a secret alchemist.
The idea of The One, some kind of Transcendent/Divine Unity, was frequently attributed to Zoroastrianism, a proto-monotheism from Persia before Christ.
Note that there were 100s/1000s of years of wars between nomadic cultures and agrarian cultures that probably drove complex agrarian city-states to adopt monotheism (transcendent unity) as a belief system that was in almost complete contrast to the "pagan" ("tribal") worship of various gods/goddesses.
A doctrine of transcendence was presumably a powerful incentive for unifying tribes within a city-state against outside enemies.
Somewhat related to your comment about city-states and monotheism, but providing a more nuanced history, is the book by N D Festul de Coulanges, The Ancient City [1864 in French, 2020 in English]. He discusses an Indo European practice of family god(s) evolving into clan/tribe/ city-state god(s), worshipping the father/patriarchal ancestors and then the king/ priest/ ancestorial leaders; and that this was also the situation for the earlier Greek and Roman cities. Then separate from this "religion" was the development of the set of "physical gods" growing into the conventional pagan collection of semi-human/ super human gods.
But I also understand that the prime/ proto example of agrarian society, pharaonic Egypt, also had a pantheon of around 700 gods.
But it is reasonable to suppose than the Levant Canaanites were not the only people to develop a monotheistic belief system.
The "pagan" world didn't have the religious concept of the renunciation of evil and sin or of spiritual salvation.
The "pagan" world did not think humans could be saved from evil/sin, or that it was necessary to do so.
Platonism asserts that there is a realm of abstraction that is EXTERIOR to the INTERIOR realm of spirituality and aesthetics. I think that maps into objective vs subjective awareness.
The distinction between objective and subjective awareness does seem to lead, weirdly, to both renunciate salvation religion (which defines materialist exteriors as containing evil/sin, spiritual impurity) AND scientific rationalism, which focuses on the "reality" of sense perception of material objects (even when they contradict mythic religion).
Recent advances in evolutionary psychology have reduced the perceived conflict between objective and subjective awareness.
Do you (also) have a reference for those recent evo psych studies? :-)
They sound like they might help me understand the distinction between "faith" and rationality, as I am struggling to comprehend why even very smart people can and do have strong faith, even when faced with, and fully able to comprehend, more "logical" arguments.
I never received the kind of childhood religious exposure that you did, but when I learned about the "give us Barabbas" story (maybe age 8 or so? via social osmosis), I recognized it was a flawed idea to attribute the nominal "deicide" of the 30 or 40 "Jews" in that crowd to the whole Jewish population.
"... nor accept the idea of forgiveness ;-)." I think the Golden Rule version that says "Do unto others as you would have them do onto you" is a lot easier to follow than the one that says "you should love your neighbor as yourself". :-)
At least the first version has a "tit for tat" corollary "Do unto others as they have done unto you ... until they stop".
"Wokeism" is usually pathological (sociopathic), both a mind game and mental dysfunction, narcissism and nihilism.
It is the result of the disruption of traditional sense-making (like it or not) by technology, a crisis of meaning that has been explained variously, such as by analysis of Jungian archetypes and geopolitical analysis (Martin Van Creveld).
But it is also a postmodernist critique of the "absolutisms" in both mythic and modern-rationalist culture, and thus a "doctrine". The doctrine might be a mess, mostly wrong, but it is a doctrine reflecting some nasty realities of cultural evolution.*
If mythic and modern-rationalist values and ideas were NOT CRUMBLING, dis-integrating (under disruption), and causing a "crisis of meaning", "woke" postmodernist ideology would not matter much.
-----
The Pattern-Nebulosity Conundrum
(also see punctuated, dynamic equilibrium in systems theory.)
Modern rationalism, science, mostly reflects "patterning" in human consciousness and tries to ignore nebulosity. At worst, it absolutizes "pattern" and becomes stasist.
Reference for heritability of executive function vs intelligence?
In Britain I note that there is criticism from some quarters over unrealistic expectations of black kids at school. This is called 'adulting'.
On the other hand, schools like Michaela, with mostly black pupils and higher expectations, score very highly in objective tests - ie public examinations - and also highly, anecdotally, in behaviour outside school. Learning executive function - management of emotions - is mentioned as a feature of the school.
Nigerians to the USA are the most successful ethnic group in the country (more than asians or white-europeans in general).
Nigerian immigrants to the USA are almost all from well educated, successful professional families in Nigeria.
There are presumably several levels of selection for IQ/EQ going on (and culturally "inherited" thinking and values such as hard work and morals), so making any generalizations about Nigerians and/or black africans is not going to be meaningful.
That article says NOTHING about Nigerian immigrants to the USA specifically.
You do know that Nigeria is a specific, large, high population black majority country in Afica, with a history of British colonialism, education, business culture, etc.?
When people from the most successful, educated, wealthy, cosmopolitan families in Nigeria send their children to the USA, those children do very well in the USA, just as they would have done in Nigeria. Seems simple. The hereditary element seems obvious.
The success of that part (top 1%?) of the Nigerian gene pool doesn't explain how an average Nigerian from the entire gene pool would do. (there are three major religious categories, Muslim, Christian and "animists", in Nigeria and a number of tribes, making any such analysis even more complicated.)
The article, which is excellent, does lay out evidence that supports my statement.
Web search: "nigerian immigrants most successful ethnic group usa"
If you define "success" narrowly as having degrees (many of them attained prior to coming to the U.S.), then sure. If you do it, as any normal person would, by measuring earnings, then, no, then the children of these immigrants seem to do a bit below the average (look closely at the graph in the article).
By definition, children of immigrants [usually] aren't immigrants.
My point was that the standard rhetoric about success of ethnic "racial" groups as being oppressed because of their membership in a given "racial" category is contradicted by objective facts.
Nigerian immigrants are "black" (african origin), but are very successful in comparison to (all) whites.
It is interesting that equalitarians do agree that certain groups have poor executive function - hence the need to train everyone else in the existence of microaggressions.
Another thought provoking essay. Thanks. When I hear the word 'hereditarianism' I immediately think of both culture and biology. After all we inherit both. Why can't the word incorporate both aspects of our inheritance?
The American culture has been generally speaking open, and when assimilation reigned, it worked pretty well. The Americanization of immigrants and the generations born of them very strongly argued against any kind of biological determinism (not that I'm accusing Lorenzo of going there). What has broken is our belief in that, and instead that group identity (be it biological or not) is superior to the common culture.
The "common culture" (Enlightenment ideals, modern rationalism, classical liberalism, Constitutional order, high social trust) originated in a specific gene pool (NW Europe) as a result of biological evolution: 1. variation, 2. selection, 3. retention.
That gene pool had to have started with the early church banning cousin marriage and imposing the nuclear family. That increased the diversity of the gene pool, making uptake of cultural innovation of classical-liberalism (etc.) by larger numbers of commoners possible.
Classical liberalism can't originate in inbred gene pools that are polygamous, clannish and highly illiterate (never did so historically).
There were a small number of proto-democracies that emerged in non-european cultures, usually because they were geographically isolated from wars with larger, more aggressive empires and military hierarchies were not needed. And, food was relatively plentiful.
American and English culture had already diverged by the revolution; e.g. the English would find slavery outside the common law before Americans had settled on the 3/5ths compromise (which in the end was neither rational nor Enlightened). Our liberal, constitutional order would need another 76 years and a very bloody war to bring itself up to date.
Cultural evolution proceeds much faster than population genetics. If I've read Lorenzo correctly in his series, our underlying social behaviors - things like need for status and belonging - are the layer between our pure genetic/physical inheritance and our higher cultural level. The conflict we are currently experiencing is the disconnect between those layers, as applied by groups angling for social dominance by demolishing the culture.
What scientific discipline is it that studies culture - anthropology I suppose. That of course makes it a social science, and there is very little scientific about that. I believe we aren't in a scientific dispute at all, but that we are arguing history.
The English also outlawed the international slave trade and slavery in their colonies prior to our Civil War and 13th Amendment.
Was King George a liberal that resisted Absolutism?
Read Kevin Philips or similar. Both England and the American colonies had the same “tribal” and class factions. Lots of English people supported American independence.
Weirdly, the merchant class dictatorship that founded the USA broke away from the King because they were highly motivated to invade the Ohio River valley to log its forests and farm the rich soil. The King didn’t have the money to fund another war on native americans,I think he was already bogged down with wars against the russians or french.
Leonard Liggio explained that both the British alter-and-crown and the american colonialist elites were the last remnant of medieval liberalism, the last major western european holdout against Spanish Absolutism.
Because "biological/genetic" heredity is what is (or was!) overwhelmingly taught; so that is what is overwhelmingly thought. We'd be better taking that as stipulated and referring to "cultural/memetic" heredity in this context. If we don't, we'll get the bollocks response to 'The Bell Curve' forever and ever as folk substitute what lives rent-free in their heads for what is written on page or screen.
In practice, that is what sociobiologists have been doing for something like 40 years, starting with E.O. Wilson.
Note that E.O. Wilson was viciously (and wrongly) attacked by the "blank slaters" on the cultural-left in the late 1970s. See Razib Khan's article about Wilson on substack.
The problem, or part of it, is that science is harder than giving into to tribalistic hate ideology.
Both actual old school "right wing" racists AND anti-racists on the cultural-left are so emotionally indoctrinated that they struggle, frequently failing, with real science. In many (most?) cases they are simply, grossly, scientifically illiterate, OR they are brainwashed by "bad science" generated by ideology.
Their capacity for objectively and rationally processing facts, data and evidence that contradicts their ideology is limited at best.
I'm not going to quibble over conflating races and subspecies or any other definitional disputes, since I don't think it's worth anyone's time. I've never seen any serious challenges to Fuerst's The Nature of Race, so I'll just link it here for those interested in the evidence on the concept: https://philarchive.org/rec/FUETNO.
I don't know if my piece on Nigerians (which is about to receive a follow-up piece on ethnic attrition in many other groups) shows the importance of culture. From the available data, it cannot differentiate culture from, say, genes. There's no clearly-articulated theory of cultural regression to the mean, but there is a genetic one, and it is consistent with the results. A cultural theory doesn't seem consistent with the observation of ethnic attrition without making a number of other assumptions that there's not currently evidence for.
There isn't actually good support for the claim that executive function is more heritable, or even distinct from, intelligence. There's a niche misconception that they are distinguishable (not justified by latent variable modeling in sufficiently broad batteries) and that EF is more heritable than g (this is based on seeing EF modeled alone in an underpowered AE model of its common pathway), but the idea is just based on a confusion and it doesn't hold up.
Selection via slavery doesn't seem like a reasonable hypothesis. When observed, slaves virtually always have low fertility relative to their captors and their conditions align more with luck-based fertility. There are also no records of multi-generational slave breeding programs to make them, e.g., stronger, more environment-resistant, etc. I also don't know of good reasons to believe that Sub-Saharan Africans in general have been selected for physical robustness.
The point about African American and White American homicide rates being statistically attributable to urbanicity is wrong. With the latest CDC WONDER data, I am unable to replicate this result for the period 1999-2020 or using the Compress Mortality 1979-1998 data. I've charted the 1999-2020 results, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1749158245229326586. The data suggest practically no effect of urbanicity for Blacks aside from the most urban category, and this could just be due to geographic sorting. The point about female-headed households doesn't seem meaningful either, since female-headed households are not populated randomly. Sibling control results are at least not consistent with a strong or moderate causal effect of father absence: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/118965416/poverty-and-violent-crime.
Otherwise, nice! I look forward to the other pieces.
People want to, but have no grounds to ignore this issue.
> IQ also can be measured on different components.
All tests measure the same g.
> You have an essay about Jewish intelligence, for example, where you show more than a standard deviation discrepancy between spatial and verbal IQ compared to most other groups.
No, I do not. Re-read what I wrote, because that isn't something I found. It's something I explicitly didn't find support for. It also wouldn't matter anyway. Try to think about the factor analytic implications and you'll see why. In fact, the data is public, so you can go see for yourself that differences in specific abilities don't mean non-invariant g loadings between groups.
> Many articles researching executive function find it more heritable than IQ.
This is obviously not true. When properly-measured, EF and g cannot even be distinguished. They obviously don't appear to have different heritabilities. Getting confused about sumscores might lead you to believe there's some difference or that one is more heritable than the other, but it's just confusion.
In a recent TV documentary on US PBS I noted a surprising fact: the number of slave children per family in Virginia, the main source of slaves to be traded to the expanding western frontier, was 10 children on average.
Slave owners in that context presumably had an interest in providing adequate food, medicine and shelter to slave families because at a minimum they wanted to maximize the number of young slaves to be sold to the west.
Given that slaves were frequently treated like livestock, and that slave owners were usually farmers familiar with livestock breeding practices, it would not surprise me that there were "selective" pressures for "good" slaves.
It could be argued that the status hierarchies in "white" culture functioned as a breeding program ,selecting for traits associated with high status.
Well it is unusual for an author, even a self-published/open-source one, not to cite his academic credentials and affiliations. His only apparent affiliation was with Cleveland State U. and that was tenuous. I made mention in a comment in another subthread here of the garbled writing. I can certainly think of non-academic intellectuals worthy of respect, so I'm not arguing simple credentialism.
However, let's cut to the bone. He argues in his summary that the critics will hit him on science (and he's not particularly strong in that) and on moral grounds. If he were purely a scientist, he could withstand almost any moral charge as science is judged on following good methodology (as Charles Murray did). If on the other hand, he wishes to make moral arguments, then he cedes all authority to be derived from science. To do otherwise is to be in categorical error as Marx was and falsely using a cheap veneer of scientism as a fig leaf for bad analysis.
Your arguments are idealistic at best and altogether nonsensical. All you've done here is revealed that you're willing to seriously insult someone without good reason.
His good work speaks for itself. I cited a relevant example of his good work. If you can't appreciate it because you dislike the man for what seems to be no actual reasons at all, you'll never be worth talking to.
Excellent essay, thank you. My first encounter with a version of Lorenzo's well titled and defined "hereditarian thesis" was from Matt Ridley's book 'Nature via Nurture' which I recommend to interested readers... "Heritability is a measure of what is varying, not what is determining... Social policy must adapt to a world in which everybody is different... 'environment' is not some inflexible and real thing: it is a unique set of influences actively chosen by the actor himself. Having a certain set of genes predisposes a person to experience a certain environment... The genes are likely to be affecting appetite more than aptitude. They do not make you intelligent; they make you more likely to enjoy learning. Because you enjoy it, you spend more time doing it and you grow more clever. Nature can only act via nurture. The environment acts as a multiplier of small genetic differences, pushing sporty children towards the sports that reward them, and pushing bright children towards the books that reward them." https://www.amazon.com/Nature-via-Nurture-Genes-experience-ebook/dp/B0054J9CLK
Neanderthals had larger, more energy intensive brains that were less efficient.
More sophisticated, cognitive-linguistic (homo sapiens) brains that "modularlized" complex linguistic thinking and that outsourced the use of those "modules" to culture and shared learning required less energy and thus less food, which would have been a significant thing during the worst parts of the ice ages (arid since water was locked up in ice) when food was scarce.
The more modern, efficient, smaller brain was probably also more innovative, thus the improvements in stone and other technologies. (?)
there is an endless need to re-litigate the sins of the "woke" (blank-slate) cultural-left, which is unfortunate if the goal is to have better discussions of actual science on social media.
since the "woke" cultural-left doesn't seem to be interested in getting past its scientific illiteracy, that problem will presumably linger. they still get power by having tantrums and calling their critics "racists" and "nazis" to whip up the mob.
Cofnas is saying that there are too many stupid people on the right (hilarious and mostly correct), and that some kind of opening should be made to win over intelligent people on the "left" that are disaffected by "woke" anti-science nonsense.
I would have to re-read both articles to see if Warby directly addresses that statement.
Or maybe you could ask him?
What might be more important is to ask about the level of evil and depravity on the left vs the right, at the level of elites and the middle/working classes.
Haidt's work on moral politics seems to give clear answers?
The Hatemi research scandal (which is about genes, personality types and the left and right) supports Haidt, there is genetic evidence that the "left" is genetically pre-disposed to "psychoticism" (neuroticism and authoritarianism).
To be fair, there are sane people on the "left" that have proposed moral reforms. Unfortunately they usually get stabbed in the back by the neurotic-authoritarian leftists that tend to rise into leadership.
Do be aware that Lorenzo is in Australia and asleep at the moment. He'll be around in about six hours.
[Addendum Monday 22nd at 5 pm GMT: Rather than getting into the weeds with people, I'll just note that some of the comments here are getting a bit spicy. Please don't tell people to read books or that their claims are incoherent. With very few exceptions, most of the people on this Substack leave sensible comments, and this is still true even when I disagree with them.]
You should really post these when America is up and had 2-3 cups of cofee :-) We could all do without the six hours of rebuttal-free butt-hurt "Wah! Muh feels" from your average Septic "intellect". Great minds, the Founding Fathers; but the USA rapidly.... regressed to the mean. ;-)
The "exceptions" are the problem.
Ugh. The amount of variation by DNA is minimal compared to variation by acculturation. Sowell's Wealth, Poverty and Politics is directly on point. There are cultural subgroups all but genetically identical to neighbors that do not display the same socio-economic success.
The heredity argument clearly falls apart as soon as you examine any aristocracy.
The amount of variation by DNA between you and a chimpanzee is minimal but here we are. Clearly there are biological differences between humans based on geographic origins.
Not sure what point you’re making about aristocracy.
That the genetics have jack to do with who got ennobled, or that the refined breeding thereof actually accomplished the objective of further refinement.
Whoosh! The immigrant parent does better then the native child. Edward 1, great king; Edward 2, wanker. The hereditary argument isn't about race; it is about heredity, be that cutural or genetic. JRR Tolkein>Christopher Tolkein>Tolkeins now. Henry Ford>Edsall Ford. You suffer from confusion; conflation; and substituting whatever narrative is in your head for that on your screen. Prat.
What you inherit from your parents is genetic, cultural and property. You can make dumb political arguments about any of them.
You didn't refute anything he said.
Genetic part that you inherit plays a big role. That's why blacks in the 60's who inherited wealth from the parents just spent it on degenerate living
That could easily be cultural. Indeed, surely was, as it was not nearly as much a feature in previous generations.
“Race” is a shitty term with bad history,but people intuitively understand it as shorthand for complex population genetics.
Recent black African immigrants to the USA are more affluent and from well educated, professional families, which presumably have better genes AND cultural tendencies than ADOS (many of which have something like 25% DNA from slave masters, who are not the best part of the “white” gene pool, see Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations).
DNA differences between modern-western gene pools are drastically different the parts of the world where honor systems, clans and dynasties rule and practice cousin marriage and polygamy.
Inbred gene pools are pre-modern in their thinking and values. Thus they struggle with high-social-trust, democracy, market economics, Constitutional order, scientific and technological innovation, etc.
The same differences show up comparing the Frankish Manorial gene pool vs Celts, Slavs and Romans. It isn’t about skin pigment, it is about degree of historical cousin marriage, clans, and inbreeding.
Contemporary America is struggling with high social trust - it isn't because of genetic deterioration. It is because some of our deep social instincts are re-appearing and doing harm.
Loss of high social trust results from techno-economic disruption. Suburban consumer culture, globalism, the decline of manufacturing and the rise of digital capitalism. See Martin Van Creveld’s article, 1990s, on the Fate of the State, US Army web site.
Evolutionary psychologist and futurist John Vervaeke sees loss of social trust resulting from a “crisis of meaning” (sense making), similar to this AI scientist’s analysis:
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
Nietzsche saw the loss of meaning. That part's hardly original - just the application of it to social trust.
Digital capitalism, Gnosticism.
https://substack.com/@charleschevalier/note/c-47759085?r=85pi0&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
https://substack.com/@charleschevalier/note/c-47759085
As the late Bernie Neville(Jungian, latrobe. edu . au) pointed out, disruption by digital capitalism corresponded to the emergence of postmodern relativism, what he called the Hermes myth. Hermes was a boundary violator and trickster. The rise of Hermes displaced modern rationalism and the nation state system, the Apollo and Prometheus myths.
Postmodern digital capitalism and globalism generate digital Gnosticism,the”belief” that “reality is a social construct”, a cult of global elites.
postmodern values do have potentially positive aspects such as pluralism, displacing the “absolutisms” of scientific materialism and mythic religion, destigmatizing embodied “pagan” awareness and spirituality (Grof at Esalen).
The discussion was about historical origins.
This is not an organic process that’s randomly occurring, it’s something that’s been inflicted on us from the top down.
Both. The ruling elites observe cultural evolution and social change (far in advance of most of the masses of commoners) and then they come up with ways of manipulating it.
"Woke" postmodernism was an emergent phenomena at least as far back as Sri Aurobindo and maybe Max Weber. The ruling elites hung out with systems theorists and futurists and got a sense of how to manipulate it.
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School neomarxists worked for the CIA during and after WW2 as german language translators.
Fred Dutton, advisor to the Kennedys and Democrats in the 1960s, specifically appropriated postmodernism/counterculture for political purposes.
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
excerpt:
... “wokeness” is rooted in the wider infrastructure of statecraft which can be traced, at the irreducible minimum, to the collusion between the Frankfurt School and the OSS during WW2, followed by the CIA’s creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. While elements of the ideological framework of totalitarian humanism may have their roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s/1970s, in its present form “wokeness” represents a co-optation of those cultural patterns by the liberal wing of the capitalist class ( a specific strategy that was devised by Fred Dutton as far back as 1970).
...
Basic statistics: the USA is less “white” and more postmodern/diverse. Gene-culture regression to tribalism.
Your nonsensical babble is absurd.
Modern black American crime rates are not a genetic selection effect. They are a policy outcome.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/
Yes, but there’s also a genetic component. It’s the same all over the world.
We aren't even three full generations removed from Moynihan's observations. You aren't going to get a huge genetic shift out of that. Not compared to what has happened to family structure and the absence of fathers. That is a cultural failure largely abetted by a bad policy choice.
Selection is selection. The selection in humanity is now very largely at the cultural level. This is the why and how of Dawkin's invention/popularisation of the meme as culture's gene.
The dominant paradigm in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is gene-culture [CO]evolution , which follows Darwin’s observations on the evolution of culture and morals.
The “race deniers” the postmodern “left” explicitly set out to muddle the science because they are corrupt ideological tribalists. Ironically
Argh, can’t edit on my iPad mini.
Gene-culture CO-EVOLUTION, aka Dual Inheritance theory. See Peter Richerson, UC Davis.
Memetic evolution is a damn sight faster than genetic. Genes might set bounds; but it'll be damn good while, if ever, that we see a genetic input beyond what was already there at the Neolithic Revolution.
(not sure if this got posted earlier, there might have been a substack glitch.)
that is mostly, but not completely true.
a recent scientific study found genetic changes in an east african population of hunter/gathers that were heavily impacted by drought.
it took just a few generations to develop greater biological tolerance of an extreme shortage of water.
banning cousin marriage and imposing the nuclear family had dramatic results, and after a few black plaques wiped out more low IQ clannish peasants than higher IQ "liberal" urban commoners the change was probably pretty rapid in historical terms.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/#race
They aren’t really race deniers at this point, they are race essentialists. Being “colorblind” is considered right wing extremism now.
They deny biology and genetics, in preference to ideological nonsense. But their position is incoherent and full of bizarre, irrational contradictions ("race" doesn't exist, but "white" people are evil), cherry picked data, etc.
They are driven by narratives, usually emotive-subjective narratives, including hate ideology, so they ignore scientific data that contradicts their narrative.
This reads like you've reached the bargaining stage with reality WRT race-realism.
I see you are a Nick Land connoisseur?
That's a flex I didn't expect.
I just assumed he was referring to https://web.archive.org/web/20211118113418/https://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/
Innocence on your part perhaps. 'The Bell Curve' was thirty years ago: given the kerfuffle that set off has come around several times since already, the ironic cynicism is to be totally expected. I can almost guarantee negiligible chance of comment I haven't seen in previous go-a-rounds with this topic.
I've barely read anything by him, actually.
We need terminology that differentiates between group and individual context. Race is a poor term because it is used for describing groups as well as individuals.
This is not a simple problem - we assign a group name not to a specific group of individuals but to an abstract concept meaning "all that have X characteristic".
So while the qualities discovered in the group (via research and statistics) are "true" they are not necessarily applicable to an individual that one happens to think belongs to that group. And often those qualities are further differentiate within the group by other social factors.
No surprise that our enlightened rulers have decided to double down on identity politics, where the individual is encouraged to have a strong connection to their group. Of course this connection is natural for an individual. But often what is natural is not productive or is even destructive.
Ironic that those that celebrate diversity (therefore difference) are such advocates for equality.
the "need" is for people to actually understand population genetics and the process of evolution leading to intense social cooperation in the human species. when that happens, people, maybe especially moderns, are shocked by the irrelevance of individuals to ancient evolution.
to oversimplify, individuals don't "evolve", but kinship groups (gene pools) do.
Do you have a suggested reference for an educated layman to better understand population genetics? Something not TOO deep? :-)
I just now added 4 books by Michael Tomasello to my "buy in the future" list.
And following 6jgu1ioxph's link above led me to Peter Frost's definition of HBD: https://web.archive.org/web/20211203072346/https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/01/sometimes-consensus-is-phony.html
Does that sound like the right track to you?
Thanks again for an excellent link. Frost is correct. He makes an excellent summary.
I've read so much stuff over 50 years I probably forgot more than I can remember.
Peter Richerson's web page showing his publications is now a mess, presumably because he is retired and UC Davis no longer helps him maintain it, but it used to be good.
Other people in the "Dual Inheritance" theory camp have written about it, maybe Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute) or one of his collaborators?
web search: "population genetics" - the wikipedia result is pretty good
I'll post a substack note with a quote from darwin that you might find interesting.
Great article, Lorenzo, that argues against use of the term race realist. So what do you suggest as a better term to distinguish people who are trying to be realistic about these matters from those pursuing ideological motivated falsehoods?
He tells you in the piece - hereditarian as opposed to "blank-slate".
That probably needs to be more specific; something like "memetic heredity", or you have folk misleading themselves back to genes again and rehearsing the same guff Charles Murray has to put up with.
The trouble is, the argument that differences in IQ, personality etc. between individuals within a population are partly genetic, is to some extent a different argument from the one that average differences in those traits between populations are also partly genetic. 'Hereditarian' kind of awkwardly straddles both, but 'race realist' only applies to the latter.
However, the more neutral term "Human Biodiversity" or HBD is also available, so one can just say "HBD proponents".
anti-race-denier?
Very interesting...particularly the African-American rural/urban crime-rate persective which I wasn't aware of. I posted my own quibble on another aspect of the Cofnas essay (completely tangential to yours) in response to Cofnas saying: "wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously".
I re-post my quibble here: "Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game.....one in which you the woke person get a nice FEELING about yourself as one of a caring (and sophisticated) elect. At the same time you get to indulge some delicious hate towards your notional peers."
Lorenzo covers this issue in his third essay (yes, he's written them all in advance again).
"Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game."
The problem of wokeism like many things, is not found in its motivations. The problem is in it's reception. What is it in our culture that has so readily accepted its doctrines?
In the point I was making:
* its motivations and its reception are part of the same thing....the bogus but seductive appeal of feeling oneself part of a virtuous elect
* it's not a 'doctrine' it's a psychology....a mind-game.
Speak for yourself. Walk it back through history and you find at its' heart it is Xtian heresy and most certainly has a doctrine. It is Plato on rinse-and-repeat.
It is a doctrine that appeals to people with dysfunctional personality traits.
Some of those people are sociopaths and natural emotional-rhetorical manipulators.
I'm in your choir on that one. :-)
My heathenish husband takes it as a given that Christianity, the NT, is Platonist (neo-Platonist?). During my earliest years spent in a Baptist school, I was not exposed to that idea ;-). But it is not a subject we have delved into in 32 years of marriage. I think because - one doesn't particularly enjoy having one's childhood creed, one's little establishing notions challenged or made light of, or undermined.*
I have not heard that it is Christian heresy that is owing to Plato. Interested in any book or essay on that subject.
*The only thing that seemed problematic in the doctrine even to me, while still in childhood, was a touch of antisemitism, not from my family, but rather church or church-school-derived, that caused me (an event prior to my feeling there was troubled water, in my religion, but contributory to it) at six to tell my neighbor pal that her people had killed Jesus; in MY DEFENSE (always paramount to me), she initiated the conversation, by telling me that He was not the messiah, and that was the difference between us, that I believed in something false; neither of us particularly struck in our ruinous attempt to reconcile our faiths, without adult help, by the more signal fact that He was a Jew; I was crying after, both absurdly because I so wanted to be friends with this person I had accused of *deicide*, because she was pretty and a little older and had a cool game room and I'd been offered green chocolate in her kitchen and she was allowed to watch many things on TV unsupervised in that game room, and because she was next door; and also crying because so much did I love Jesus because I had been told He loved me, which was very comforting since I knew myself to be unlovable; but just as soon very ashamed of myself - wanting to query my mother on this paradox but unwilling to admit to and expose my solecism; was neurotic about it for quite some time; I didn't apologize though, never have been able to apologize, nor accept the idea of forgiveness ;-).
Neoplatonism was basically an attempt to combine ("pagan") naturalism (Greco-Roman "rationalism") with "spirituality" (supernaturalism, superstition, religion, metaphysics, etc.).
It was important to medieval philosophers including Ibn al Arabi, the great Andalusian Moor and thus part of the foundation of Sufism and other schools of mysticism (many of which cross-fertilized ideas).
The modern idea that "science" and "religion" are separate is a recent historical thing. See Max Weber on the various "spheres of authority" in human consciousness and how they became distinct in modernity (industrial revolution).
Pure Greco-Roman rationalism was not an ideology that had a material-economic base or a class base in ancient times, so it had to be adapted to religious cultures.
With the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, that changed as growing literacy, numeracy and scientific-rational thinking expanded along with the growing industrial economy. That was when rational thinking re-emerged and gained importance.
Even though some consider Newton to be the father of modern science, he was a secret alchemist.
https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/isaac-newton-and-the-american-alchemist/
I shouldn't have said Neo-platonism. Apologies. I didn't mean that at all!
The idea of The One, some kind of Transcendent/Divine Unity, was frequently attributed to Zoroastrianism, a proto-monotheism from Persia before Christ.
Note that there were 100s/1000s of years of wars between nomadic cultures and agrarian cultures that probably drove complex agrarian city-states to adopt monotheism (transcendent unity) as a belief system that was in almost complete contrast to the "pagan" ("tribal") worship of various gods/goddesses.
A doctrine of transcendence was presumably a powerful incentive for unifying tribes within a city-state against outside enemies.
Somewhat related to your comment about city-states and monotheism, but providing a more nuanced history, is the book by N D Festul de Coulanges, The Ancient City [1864 in French, 2020 in English]. He discusses an Indo European practice of family god(s) evolving into clan/tribe/ city-state god(s), worshipping the father/patriarchal ancestors and then the king/ priest/ ancestorial leaders; and that this was also the situation for the earlier Greek and Roman cities. Then separate from this "religion" was the development of the set of "physical gods" growing into the conventional pagan collection of semi-human/ super human gods.
But I also understand that the prime/ proto example of agrarian society, pharaonic Egypt, also had a pantheon of around 700 gods.
But it is reasonable to suppose than the Levant Canaanites were not the only people to develop a monotheistic belief system.
Exteriors vs interiors of human consciousness
Forgot to mention previously:
The "pagan" world didn't have the religious concept of the renunciation of evil and sin or of spiritual salvation.
The "pagan" world did not think humans could be saved from evil/sin, or that it was necessary to do so.
Platonism asserts that there is a realm of abstraction that is EXTERIOR to the INTERIOR realm of spirituality and aesthetics. I think that maps into objective vs subjective awareness.
The distinction between objective and subjective awareness does seem to lead, weirdly, to both renunciate salvation religion (which defines materialist exteriors as containing evil/sin, spiritual impurity) AND scientific rationalism, which focuses on the "reality" of sense perception of material objects (even when they contradict mythic religion).
Recent advances in evolutionary psychology have reduced the perceived conflict between objective and subjective awareness.
Do you (also) have a reference for those recent evo psych studies? :-)
They sound like they might help me understand the distinction between "faith" and rationality, as I am struggling to comprehend why even very smart people can and do have strong faith, even when faced with, and fully able to comprehend, more "logical" arguments.
Solecism -- learned a new word. Thanks.
I never received the kind of childhood religious exposure that you did, but when I learned about the "give us Barabbas" story (maybe age 8 or so? via social osmosis), I recognized it was a flawed idea to attribute the nominal "deicide" of the 30 or 40 "Jews" in that crowd to the whole Jewish population.
"... nor accept the idea of forgiveness ;-)." I think the Golden Rule version that says "Do unto others as you would have them do onto you" is a lot easier to follow than the one that says "you should love your neighbor as yourself". :-)
At least the first version has a "tit for tat" corollary "Do unto others as they have done unto you ... until they stop".
The Doctrine of No Doctrine
"Wokeism" is usually pathological (sociopathic), both a mind game and mental dysfunction, narcissism and nihilism.
It is the result of the disruption of traditional sense-making (like it or not) by technology, a crisis of meaning that has been explained variously, such as by analysis of Jungian archetypes and geopolitical analysis (Martin Van Creveld).
But it is also a postmodernist critique of the "absolutisms" in both mythic and modern-rationalist culture, and thus a "doctrine". The doctrine might be a mess, mostly wrong, but it is a doctrine reflecting some nasty realities of cultural evolution.*
If mythic and modern-rationalist values and ideas were NOT CRUMBLING, dis-integrating (under disruption), and causing a "crisis of meaning", "woke" postmodernist ideology would not matter much.
-----
The Pattern-Nebulosity Conundrum
(also see punctuated, dynamic equilibrium in systems theory.)
Modern rationalism, science, mostly reflects "patterning" in human consciousness and tries to ignore nebulosity. At worst, it absolutizes "pattern" and becomes stasist.
Postmodern relativism-pluralism reflects nebulosity, chaos.
https://meaningness.com/pattern
fyi, the third essay:
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/class-and-the-state
the index of essays:
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/worshipping-the-future
I think she meant "This is the first of three pieces addressing Nathan Cofnas’s arguments..." :-)
at this point my head is spinning in the imaginal land of Oz.....
Reference for heritability of executive function vs intelligence?
In Britain I note that there is criticism from some quarters over unrealistic expectations of black kids at school. This is called 'adulting'.
On the other hand, schools like Michaela, with mostly black pupils and higher expectations, score very highly in objective tests - ie public examinations - and also highly, anecdotally, in behaviour outside school. Learning executive function - management of emotions - is mentioned as a feature of the school.
Surprise, surprise: you have to be taught and you have to put the work in. Whodda thunk.
Nigerians to the USA are the most successful ethnic group in the country (more than asians or white-europeans in general).
Nigerian immigrants to the USA are almost all from well educated, successful professional families in Nigeria.
There are presumably several levels of selection for IQ/EQ going on (and culturally "inherited" thinking and values such as hard work and morals), so making any generalizations about Nigerians and/or black africans is not going to be meaningful.
>Nigerians to the USA are the most successful ethnic group in the country (more than asians or white-europeans in general).
This just isn't true. https://zachgoldberg.substack.com/p/exposing-the-group-disparities-discrimination
That article says NOTHING about Nigerian immigrants to the USA specifically.
You do know that Nigeria is a specific, large, high population black majority country in Afica, with a history of British colonialism, education, business culture, etc.?
When people from the most successful, educated, wealthy, cosmopolitan families in Nigeria send their children to the USA, those children do very well in the USA, just as they would have done in Nigeria. Seems simple. The hereditary element seems obvious.
The success of that part (top 1%?) of the Nigerian gene pool doesn't explain how an average Nigerian from the entire gene pool would do. (there are three major religious categories, Muslim, Christian and "animists", in Nigeria and a number of tribes, making any such analysis even more complicated.)
The article, which is excellent, does lay out evidence that supports my statement.
Web search: "nigerian immigrants most successful ethnic group usa"
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-most-educated-in-the-U-S-1600808.php
If you define "success" narrowly as having degrees (many of them attained prior to coming to the U.S.), then sure. If you do it, as any normal person would, by measuring earnings, then, no, then the children of these immigrants seem to do a bit below the average (look closely at the graph in the article).
By definition, children of immigrants [usually] aren't immigrants.
My point was that the standard rhetoric about success of ethnic "racial" groups as being oppressed because of their membership in a given "racial" category is contradicted by objective facts.
Nigerian immigrants are "black" (african origin), but are very successful in comparison to (all) whites.
It is interesting that equalitarians do agree that certain groups have poor executive function - hence the need to train everyone else in the existence of microaggressions.
Another thought provoking essay. Thanks. When I hear the word 'hereditarianism' I immediately think of both culture and biology. After all we inherit both. Why can't the word incorporate both aspects of our inheritance?
The American culture has been generally speaking open, and when assimilation reigned, it worked pretty well. The Americanization of immigrants and the generations born of them very strongly argued against any kind of biological determinism (not that I'm accusing Lorenzo of going there). What has broken is our belief in that, and instead that group identity (be it biological or not) is superior to the common culture.
The "common culture" (Enlightenment ideals, modern rationalism, classical liberalism, Constitutional order, high social trust) originated in a specific gene pool (NW Europe) as a result of biological evolution: 1. variation, 2. selection, 3. retention.
That gene pool had to have started with the early church banning cousin marriage and imposing the nuclear family. That increased the diversity of the gene pool, making uptake of cultural innovation of classical-liberalism (etc.) by larger numbers of commoners possible.
Classical liberalism can't originate in inbred gene pools that are polygamous, clannish and highly illiterate (never did so historically).
There were a small number of proto-democracies that emerged in non-european cultures, usually because they were geographically isolated from wars with larger, more aggressive empires and military hierarchies were not needed. And, food was relatively plentiful.
https://www.history.com/news/caral-peru-norte-chico-oldest-civilization-western-hemisphere
American and English culture had already diverged by the revolution; e.g. the English would find slavery outside the common law before Americans had settled on the 3/5ths compromise (which in the end was neither rational nor Enlightened). Our liberal, constitutional order would need another 76 years and a very bloody war to bring itself up to date.
Cultural evolution proceeds much faster than population genetics. If I've read Lorenzo correctly in his series, our underlying social behaviors - things like need for status and belonging - are the layer between our pure genetic/physical inheritance and our higher cultural level. The conflict we are currently experiencing is the disconnect between those layers, as applied by groups angling for social dominance by demolishing the culture.
The English didn’t need slavery they were exploiting other colonies. Your grasp of cultural evolution is scientifically illiterate.
What scientific discipline is it that studies culture - anthropology I suppose. That of course makes it a social science, and there is very little scientific about that. I believe we aren't in a scientific dispute at all, but that we are arguing history.
The English also outlawed the international slave trade and slavery in their colonies prior to our Civil War and 13th Amendment.
Evolutionary psychology. Your ignorance is appalling and a waste of time
Was King George a liberal that resisted Absolutism?
Read Kevin Philips or similar. Both England and the American colonies had the same “tribal” and class factions. Lots of English people supported American independence.
Weirdly, the merchant class dictatorship that founded the USA broke away from the King because they were highly motivated to invade the Ohio River valley to log its forests and farm the rich soil. The King didn’t have the money to fund another war on native americans,I think he was already bogged down with wars against the russians or french.
Leonard Liggio explained that both the British alter-and-crown and the american colonialist elites were the last remnant of medieval liberalism, the last major western european holdout against Spanish Absolutism.
Because "biological/genetic" heredity is what is (or was!) overwhelmingly taught; so that is what is overwhelmingly thought. We'd be better taking that as stipulated and referring to "cultural/memetic" heredity in this context. If we don't, we'll get the bollocks response to 'The Bell Curve' forever and ever as folk substitute what lives rent-free in their heads for what is written on page or screen.
Incoherent. again, read e.o wilson
In practice, that is what sociobiologists have been doing for something like 40 years, starting with E.O. Wilson.
Note that E.O. Wilson was viciously (and wrongly) attacked by the "blank slaters" on the cultural-left in the late 1970s. See Razib Khan's article about Wilson on substack.
The problem, or part of it, is that science is harder than giving into to tribalistic hate ideology.
Both actual old school "right wing" racists AND anti-racists on the cultural-left are so emotionally indoctrinated that they struggle, frequently failing, with real science. In many (most?) cases they are simply, grossly, scientifically illiterate, OR they are brainwashed by "bad science" generated by ideology.
Their capacity for objectively and rationally processing facts, data and evidence that contradicts their ideology is limited at best.
I'm not going to quibble over conflating races and subspecies or any other definitional disputes, since I don't think it's worth anyone's time. I've never seen any serious challenges to Fuerst's The Nature of Race, so I'll just link it here for those interested in the evidence on the concept: https://philarchive.org/rec/FUETNO.
I don't know if my piece on Nigerians (which is about to receive a follow-up piece on ethnic attrition in many other groups) shows the importance of culture. From the available data, it cannot differentiate culture from, say, genes. There's no clearly-articulated theory of cultural regression to the mean, but there is a genetic one, and it is consistent with the results. A cultural theory doesn't seem consistent with the observation of ethnic attrition without making a number of other assumptions that there's not currently evidence for.
There isn't actually good support for the claim that executive function is more heritable, or even distinct from, intelligence. There's a niche misconception that they are distinguishable (not justified by latent variable modeling in sufficiently broad batteries) and that EF is more heritable than g (this is based on seeing EF modeled alone in an underpowered AE model of its common pathway), but the idea is just based on a confusion and it doesn't hold up.
Selection via slavery doesn't seem like a reasonable hypothesis. When observed, slaves virtually always have low fertility relative to their captors and their conditions align more with luck-based fertility. There are also no records of multi-generational slave breeding programs to make them, e.g., stronger, more environment-resistant, etc. I also don't know of good reasons to believe that Sub-Saharan Africans in general have been selected for physical robustness.
The point about African American and White American homicide rates being statistically attributable to urbanicity is wrong. With the latest CDC WONDER data, I am unable to replicate this result for the period 1999-2020 or using the Compress Mortality 1979-1998 data. I've charted the 1999-2020 results, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1749158245229326586. The data suggest practically no effect of urbanicity for Blacks aside from the most urban category, and this could just be due to geographic sorting. The point about female-headed households doesn't seem meaningful either, since female-headed households are not populated randomly. Sibling control results are at least not consistent with a strong or moderate causal effect of father absence: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/118965416/poverty-and-violent-crime.
Otherwise, nice! I look forward to the other pieces.
You don't know what you're talking about.
> While executive function correlates with G
At the latent level, EF and g cannot be distinguished. There is publicly available data for you to check this yourself: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/f572b0aa-f5e5-44af-8302-ca9f81a6e45a, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13803395.2019.1705250. You can even see it reported explicitly, such as in Floyd et al. (2006; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pits.20500): "It is also notable that Model 2 and Model 3 yielded correlations between the CHC general factor and the general Executive function factor that were .99 and 1.0, respectively. These correlations suggest that the two second-order factors are indistinguishable."
People want to, but have no grounds to ignore this issue.
> IQ also can be measured on different components.
All tests measure the same g.
> You have an essay about Jewish intelligence, for example, where you show more than a standard deviation discrepancy between spatial and verbal IQ compared to most other groups.
No, I do not. Re-read what I wrote, because that isn't something I found. It's something I explicitly didn't find support for. It also wouldn't matter anyway. Try to think about the factor analytic implications and you'll see why. In fact, the data is public, so you can go see for yourself that differences in specific abilities don't mean non-invariant g loadings between groups.
> Many articles researching executive function find it more heritable than IQ.
This is obviously not true. When properly-measured, EF and g cannot even be distinguished. They obviously don't appear to have different heritabilities. Getting confused about sumscores might lead you to believe there's some difference or that one is more heritable than the other, but it's just confusion.
You don't know what you're talking about.
It looks like you're trying to substitute your desires for empirical findings and the tool you're using to do that is repeating irrelevant maxims.
Arcane waffle-gabble. If you can't write so us proles can understand you, go away.
I think he was primarily replying to scholars.
In a recent TV documentary on US PBS I noted a surprising fact: the number of slave children per family in Virginia, the main source of slaves to be traded to the expanding western frontier, was 10 children on average.
Slave owners in that context presumably had an interest in providing adequate food, medicine and shelter to slave families because at a minimum they wanted to maximize the number of young slaves to be sold to the west.
Given that slaves were frequently treated like livestock, and that slave owners were usually farmers familiar with livestock breeding practices, it would not surprise me that there were "selective" pressures for "good" slaves.
It could be argued that the status hierarchies in "white" culture functioned as a breeding program ,selecting for traits associated with high status.
Fuerst appears to be something of a mystery, to be generous - fraud to be less so.
I know you don't have any grounds whatsoever to call him a fraud. So why not say what you meant?
Well it is unusual for an author, even a self-published/open-source one, not to cite his academic credentials and affiliations. His only apparent affiliation was with Cleveland State U. and that was tenuous. I made mention in a comment in another subthread here of the garbled writing. I can certainly think of non-academic intellectuals worthy of respect, so I'm not arguing simple credentialism.
However, let's cut to the bone. He argues in his summary that the critics will hit him on science (and he's not particularly strong in that) and on moral grounds. If he were purely a scientist, he could withstand almost any moral charge as science is judged on following good methodology (as Charles Murray did). If on the other hand, he wishes to make moral arguments, then he cedes all authority to be derived from science. To do otherwise is to be in categorical error as Marx was and falsely using a cheap veneer of scientism as a fig leaf for bad analysis.
Your arguments are idealistic at best and altogether nonsensical. All you've done here is revealed that you're willing to seriously insult someone without good reason.
Fuerst isn't to be taken seriously, and yet you cite him as authoritative.
No one refutes him because he isn't engaged in a legitimate dialogue.
His good work speaks for itself. I cited a relevant example of his good work. If you can't appreciate it because you dislike the man for what seems to be no actual reasons at all, you'll never be worth talking to.
Excellent essay, thank you. My first encounter with a version of Lorenzo's well titled and defined "hereditarian thesis" was from Matt Ridley's book 'Nature via Nurture' which I recommend to interested readers... "Heritability is a measure of what is varying, not what is determining... Social policy must adapt to a world in which everybody is different... 'environment' is not some inflexible and real thing: it is a unique set of influences actively chosen by the actor himself. Having a certain set of genes predisposes a person to experience a certain environment... The genes are likely to be affecting appetite more than aptitude. They do not make you intelligent; they make you more likely to enjoy learning. Because you enjoy it, you spend more time doing it and you grow more clever. Nature can only act via nurture. The environment acts as a multiplier of small genetic differences, pushing sporty children towards the sports that reward them, and pushing bright children towards the books that reward them." https://www.amazon.com/Nature-via-Nurture-Genes-experience-ebook/dp/B0054J9CLK
Neanderthals had larger, more energy intensive brains that were less efficient.
More sophisticated, cognitive-linguistic (homo sapiens) brains that "modularlized" complex linguistic thinking and that outsourced the use of those "modules" to culture and shared learning required less energy and thus less food, which would have been a significant thing during the worst parts of the ice ages (arid since water was locked up in ice) when food was scarce.
The more modern, efficient, smaller brain was probably also more innovative, thus the improvements in stone and other technologies. (?)
"But the notion of heritability is not only about genes"
well *technically* the term heritability is about the genes. the other stuff is non-heritable
colloquially of course heritable means everything
a lot of the issues here seem to be semantic. not sure where the huge disagreements are
there is an endless need to re-litigate the sins of the "woke" (blank-slate) cultural-left, which is unfortunate if the goal is to have better discussions of actual science on social media.
since the "woke" cultural-left doesn't seem to be interested in getting past its scientific illiteracy, that problem will presumably linger. they still get power by having tantrums and calling their critics "racists" and "nazis" to whip up the mob.
Cofnas is saying that there are too many stupid people on the right (hilarious and mostly correct), and that some kind of opening should be made to win over intelligent people on the "left" that are disaffected by "woke" anti-science nonsense.
I would have to re-read both articles to see if Warby directly addresses that statement.
Or maybe you could ask him?
What might be more important is to ask about the level of evil and depravity on the left vs the right, at the level of elites and the middle/working classes.
Haidt's work on moral politics seems to give clear answers?
The Hatemi research scandal (which is about genes, personality types and the left and right) supports Haidt, there is genetic evidence that the "left" is genetically pre-disposed to "psychoticism" (neuroticism and authoritarianism).
To be fair, there are sane people on the "left" that have proposed moral reforms. Unfortunately they usually get stabbed in the back by the neurotic-authoritarian leftists that tend to rise into leadership.
Damn, this comments section is so good that you've all added at least 3 new books to my reading list (and introduced me to some new perspectives).
A salute to everyone here for taking a fraught and potentially ugly topic and analyzing it with so much calm intelligence.
Thanks also to Helen and Lorenzo...