Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: alternative credentials

ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.

 Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been
fascinating.  I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science.  At
the time, our program had about ten women.  As it happens, two of them
happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes.  They were
both mediocre programmers at best.  From what I gathered they graduated
by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and
omega males working on their own projects.

I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a
software engineer.  By that time IBM had long been infected with the
diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in
the global economy.  There were hundreds of women in my division and
while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly
as project managers or testers.  The women that started out in actual
software development positions did not last long.  They were frequently
promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.

There were two notable exceptions.  In the mid to
late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers.  The
universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to
educate programmers in sufficient numbers.  IBM decided it would offer
it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house
programming school.  Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions
from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers.  Since
IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the
graduation rate.  The goal was to create functional programmers.  In
talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging.
 The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my
time at IBM graduated from that program.  Both of these women were
exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers.  Even though
the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory.  In fact
women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved
something meaningful.

You discuss alternative credentialing systems much
like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence.  How do you foresee these
systems withstanding the “need for diversity”.  Certainly no such
system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.

There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.

Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.

Mailvox: the falsifiability of moral parasitism

R meets with a preemptive objection to TIA:

A young friend of ours has, after my recommending he read “The Irrational Atheist”, said this:

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Day insist atheists are moral parasites? He says that atheists inherit their morality from a foundation already established by Christianity. The problem with this stance is that it is unfalsifyable. It suggests that a society lacking Christian influence would be incapable of developing a similar morality. Well we live in a world which has had religious influence (mostly Abrahamic faiths) permeated throughout it, so where can we test the notion? We cannot. The argument cannot be tested. It therefore holds little weight.

I will read this book, i promise you that as a friend, and we may or may not have a discussion about it. My concern with approaching the work is that it will be littered with similar logic. But like I said I will read it. We’ll see if my concerns are founded.”

It’s always so cute when young atheists attempt to construct logical arguments on the basis of foundations they don’t understand with reason they utilize improperly. There are numerous problems with this attempt to preemptively rebut my arguments without even reading them; I continue to find it astonishing how many atheists observably believe that it is possible to provide substantive criticism in complete and self-admitted ignorance.

First, my argument concerning moral parasitism is that atheists tend to inherit or absorb their moralities from the dominant society in which they dwell rather than reasoning them out from first principles or developing them from science as many of them claim to have done.  That is why it is meaningful to identify someone as a Catholic atheist, a Jewish atheist, or a Muslim atheist; their moral standards tend to be Catholic morality less whatever the atheist doesn’t like, Jewish morality less whatever the atheist doesn’t like, etc.

It is true that in the West, which was once known as Christendom, most atheists are Christian moral parasites. But this is considerably less true in other parts of the world, despite Christianity’s current global reach.

Second, the young atheist’s objection underlines my point about the remarkable atheist ignorance of history.  Where can we test the notion? My suggestion would be to look at pre-Christian societies and compare the differences between the moralities advocated by the atheists in those societies and those to which modern Christian atheists subscribe.  Is he truly unaware that we are privy to a considerable amount of ideas from philosophers untouched by the Abrahamic faiths? Alternatively, we could look at the moralities espoused by atheists raised in current religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, the Chinese pagan folk religion, Buddhism, and the myriad of less popular religions.

We know, from history, that societies lacking Christian influence do not develop Christian morality.  In fact, we can go much farther, as we know that societies lacking Christian influence did not develop modern science.  It would be going too far to definitely claim that Christianity is a prerequisite for the development of scientody, but it cannot be denied that none of the hundreds of non-Christian societiesever independently developed the scientific method.

It is theoretically possible to claim my observation is incorrect, but it is not even remotely credible to claim that it is unfalsifiable. The fact that it has not been tested does not mean that it cannot be tested. As it happens, the hypothesis can be tested on an experimental basis with proper control groups; one wonders if the young atheist is consistent and rejects both evolution by natural selection and string theory on the same basis he has ventured here.  Based on the level of logic-mastery he has demonstrated here, I would tend to doubt it.

Mailvox: the dead horse quivers

SV digs up, from the past, a certain blast:

I read your Sept 6, 2004 review of Michele Malkin’s book supporting internment and I was wondering if you remember or noted where you found the information for this paragraph:

“In January 1942, prior to both Executive Order 9066 and the battle of Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed 717 carrier-borne planes and 176 ships, of which 15 were troop transports. The IJN’s troop-bearing capacity was about 42,000 men. Reinforcement and resupply required a roundtrip transit of 11,000 miles to a coastline only 1,359 miles long.”

Less important are the facts here, but just in case you have it:

“The Overlord invasion required 4,600 ships to travel 100 miles under the air cover of 12,000 planes to land 156,000 troops on a French coastline 3,437 miles long. Over the next three weeks, the Allies brought in another 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies.”

If I recall correctly, I worked out the IJN numbers from Tony Tully’s excellent The Imperial Japanese Navy Page.  I don’t remember where I looked up the statistics related to the invasion of Normandy, but they’re readily available.

It is a little amusing to look back and recall that some people actually took Me So Michelle’s book seriously at the time. It’s largely forgotten now, but it didn’t escaped my attention how she quickly stopped talking about it in public after I exposed her complete lack of research in support of her attempt to manufacture a retroactive military justification for the historical internment of Japanese-Americans.

One thing I didn’t mention in that article was that the former Marine Commandant’s first reaction, when asked about the viability of a Japanese invasion of the U.S. West Coast, was an instinctive snort of disdain. I mean, the hypothetical invasion is the sort of thing you have to be a complete military ignoramus to even contemplate for a millesecond. Forget Anzio. An IJN invasion of California would have made the Bay of Pigs invasion look sane and conservative by comparison.

Mailvox: a secular religion

MP emails an account of a woman quitting Teach for America and notices its similarities to a religion… or a cult:

This is a fascinating account of the religion that is Teach for America and the women that inhabit it.  This passage was particularly interesting because it shows the religious nature of the TFA girls:

“I am shifting my weight uncomfortably in a plastic classroom chair on an Atlanta summer afternoon. Our adviser interrupts lunch by asking us to pause to spend a few minutes reflecting on what brought us to TFA in the first place. After the requisite reflection time, and after turning off the room’s lights, Alicia begins to share a story about growing up with a single mother, culminating in an emotional appeal to do whatever we can to help “our kids” in the future. Although I have always found Alicia to be rather stoic, she suddenly begins sobbing when relaying this story. After regaining composure, she makes it clear that we are meant to follow suit. One by one, until the 12th person has spoken, we deliver either tearful accounts of personal hardship or awkward, halting stories recounted by people uncomfortable with the level of intimacy. While talking to other TFA teachers from different schools over dinner, I learn that other groups had nearly identical sessions.”

This is the classic “testifying” step in poor fundamentalist Christian church services  in which the various converted sinners are invited to testify about their sinful past and how low they were before they “came to Jesus”.  They recount all the bad things in their past and how it all changed when they “came to Jesus”.  Each person who is testifying get kudos and respect for how deeply they had fallen and therefore how much farther Jesus raised them from sin and degradation before they were redeemed. Lots of weeping and wailing, and “Praise Jesus!”, particularly by the women in the congregations.

It reminded me of accounts I’ve read of both Womyn’s Studies classes and Maoist reedcuation sessions. You really have to read the whole thing. It is like music to the ears of those of us who anticipate the collapse of the public school system; one would feel bad for the young women being so perfectly set up to fail if they weren’t such a poisonously destructive collection of mindlessly self-perpetuating leftbots.

Mailvox: you are not excused

Mr. Rational complained about his disappearing comments:

“Censoring again?  Shame on you.”

To which I replied:

“I’m not
censoring anything, you moron. If you hadn’t tried to comment
anonymously here at some point, your comments wouldn’t get spam-trapped
from time to time. As was the case here. Learn to ask questions before making an ass of yourself with false assumptions.”

Prompting this response:

“Well, excuse me for thinking that when a comment

(a) is posted without any links or other spammish content,
(b) appears on the post page as I reload it, and then
(c) disappears some time later while subsequent comments appear down-thread,

“it is through the intervention of someone after the fact. Because that is exactly what I have observed on multiple occasions, and absent any other information it is the logical conclusion.”

The point isn’t whether Mr. Rational had some justification for suspecting I was censoring his comments or not, but rather, instead of asking, he immediately leaped to a false conclusion and made an accusation on that basis. As it happens, the comment behavior he observed is EXACTLY what happens when Blogger spam-traps a comment.

Which is in fact, happened to his comments, which I subsequently found in the spam-trap and despammed. I didn’t delete his comments the first time, when he repeatedly posted the same comment about Fukushima again and again and again.  And I didn’t delete his comments this time either.

One can be excused for harboring suspicions. But if you’ve got suspicions of your comments being deleted for one reason or another, just ask me. If I decide delete your comment for one reason or another, I’m entirely willing to tell you why I did so.

As a general rule, before one starts running around and wagging one’s finger at people and crying “shame on you”, it is wise to first confirm that they have, in fact, engaged in the behavior one finds shameful.

Mailvox: a run-in with McRapey

Agathis’s initial experience with John Scalzi’s self-vaunted debate skills was quite similar to my own back in 2005:

Way back when, I had a blog and posted about Scalzi. He had made some
ridiculous argument about those that were all “het up” about
homosexuality–that they were, probably, homosexuals themselves. I asked
a rhetorical question–“Is Scalzi a bigot?” I answered no, then,
because I didn’t know him well. Anyway, he came by the blog and argued
with me. Now, at the time, I had quite a bit of respect for him. I liked
Old Man’s War, as a fan of Heinlein, and though it didn’t reach that
level of quality, it was entertaining.

What resulted was a long
conversation where he insulted me over and over again, never read a
single post I’d made, argued against strawmen, and showed a disturbing
ignorance of what people actually believe. And yes, I do believe he
threw around his education credentials. I didn’t bother telling him
that I have an MA in a philosophical field as well, because it wouldn’t
have mattered to him.

He tried to argue that it wasn’t insulting
to call people gay because he didn’t think there was anything wrong
with being gay. So I say, what if I went around saying that all Jews
were greedy money-grubbers. He got really offended by that and started
insulting me again. I said, hey, I don’t think there’s anything wrong
with being a greedy money-grubber. I’m a capitalist. I think that’s when
he gave up and went away.

But after that exchange, I never bought another of his books. I’ve read a few, but I’m not giving this guy money. He’s an idiot.

He’s
got an ego that’s a few times too large for his actual talent. Like
those A students who get to college and realize they aren’t actually as
good as everyone says, or those singers who go on American Idol and make
fools of themselves all the while thinking they’re great. It’s a sad,
sad, thing. But after my exchange with him, nothing that’s happened in
SFWA since he became president as been any surprise to me.

Agathis picked up on something that a surprising number of people don’t realize about McRapey.  The man is less intelligent than most people assume.  He is considerably less intelligent than most of the people with whom I habitually engage.  He’s not as smart as PZ Myers, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, and you are all familiar with how easily I have dismantled their arguments.  The difficulty in dealing with McRapey is that he seldom presents any actual arguments, he usually just presents assertions sans any logical or evidential support.  Then, when pressed, he makes a credentialist appeal to his college degree.  Not even a PhD or a Masters, just a simple liberal arts BA, as if that’s supposed to impress people who have more advanced or more difficult degrees. And then he flees from public debate while openly banning dissent and criticism from his blog, all to the thunderous foot-thumping approval of his fellow rabbits.

For those who find it hard to believe that Scalzi isn’t highly intelligent, I suggest asking him for evidence of his National Merit scholarship or his qualification for Mensa.  It seems a little odd that someone who doesn’t hesitate to trumpet his credentials would fail to mention such achievements, and surely someone who asserts a “Scalzi family tradition of blowing the doors off standardized tests” would have qualified for both, right?

McRapey’s heavy reliance on his minor academic credential tells us another important thing about him: he is from an environment where going to university was not considered par for the course, so he places a ludicrous amount of importance on it. Once I finish On Sophistical Refutations, I will show that to the extent McRapey learned anything while majoring in philosophy, it was to resort to sophistry rather than genuinely refuting an argument.

His behavior is fairly typical of men who are raised by women. If such men don’t turn entirely feral, they are taught to believe that the winner of a dispute is the one who comes off as looking better to the crowd rather than the one whose arguments are more closely in line with facts, logic, and reality. 

Also, since he appears to have run out of ideas, I’ve created a template that should save Phoenician a little time in commenting on these regularly scheduled McRapey posts.


“______ mancrush ______ obsession _______ laughing at _______ Dipshit ______ your father_______ jealous ________ self-made ______ lawn ______”

Speaking of which, does anyone have a reference count?  Have we hit 200 yet?

Mailvox: the changing writer’s market

NA writes about his perception of the current hole in the fantasy market:

Part of the reason I bought your books, along with Stephen King’s Dark
Tower series, was that I got burned by the last two fantasy series I
bought.  By which I mean Raymond Feist and George R. R. Martin.  I’ve
been looking for a good fantasy series to read and so far yours does not
disappoint. Another reason is that I want to write my own.  I figured I should get acquainted with others’ work before I get started.

Since I’ve last been a part of this hobby, there was no such thing as
e-books.  I’m way out of touch with the market and where it’s headed, as
far as it would concern a writer.  I’m also not aiming to become the
Next Big Thing in fantasy, but I’d still like to get published. I know it’s kind of an open ended question, but is
there anything I can do to help myself before I start putting words on
the screen?  

A lot of people like Martin’s
work, though I can barely understand why, so I know there’s a market out
there for fantasy.  In fact, if A Game of Thrones is considered some of
the best right now, then that market still has a gaping hole in it.
 People are hungry for fantasy fiction, but as far as I can tell they’re
willing to settle for McDonald’s because there’s no Cheesecake Factory
in sight. 

If you have a minute, I appreciate your insight.

My primary feeling is that the SF/F market is at a fascinating technologically imposed crossroads.  On the one hand, we have a narrow spectrum professionally published market that is shrinking, where the average advances are considerably smaller than they were, where the stakes are increasingly winner-takes-all, and books such as Redshirts and A Dance with Dragons represent the very best it has to offer.

And on the other, we have the rise of a broad spectrum independent digital scene where books are of wildly varying quality, the prices are better and many of them are free, there are no gatekeepers, distribution is limited, and it is very difficult for the average author to even let the average reader know his book exists.

Let’s put some basic facts before the reader. John Scalzi reported that Redshirts, the eventual Hugo Award winner written by the industry’s foremost self-promoter and pushed heavily by the biggest publisher in SF/F, sold 35,667 ebooks in its first eight months of release.  That represented 45 percent of the 79,279 sales-to-that-date; the rest were hardcover (34 percent) and audiobook (21 percent).  That’s pretty much the high water mark these days for anyone whose name does not begin with JK, EL, or GRR.  McRapey’s post is uncharacteristically understated, as that is not the state of A genre title, but in terms of 2013, THE genre title.

A Throne of Bones and its satellites, on the other hand, sold 3,865 ebooks in their first eight months of release.  Not bad for a book that has never seen the inside of a bookstore, on the other hand, at barely more than 10 percent of Redshirts ebook sales, it is a comparatively minor blip that is of no possible concern to the mainstream publishers, right?  Well, here is the problem for the publishers.  On a grand total of 13 free Kindle Select days, another 20,274 copies were downloaded from Amazon.

Now, there isn’t a lot of overlap between the SF reader interested in Redshirts and the EF reader interested in A Throne of Bones.  They are two fairly different markets. But there are probably 10 independent books that are to Redshirts what ATOB is to A Dance with Dragons.  The problem isn’t that the independents are necessarily a threat to the established bestsellers, but that they are standing in the way of the midlist writers as well as the mainstream writers of tomorrow.  And, of course, they are absolutely devastating the average margins.

If you simply run the numbers, it becomes apparent that the only thing keeping the mainstream publishers alive these days is the fact that Amazon now voluntarily limits its Kindle Select program to five free days per quarter. Readers are readers, after all, their ability to consume books is not infinite, and due to the relative price-elasticity of books, ATOB and its satellites are now reaching one-third as many readers as Redshirts without any marketing, without any press, and without any bookstore distribution.  In fact, were it not for Amazon’s Kindle Select limits, Selenoth could quite reasonably have reached 378,154 readers in the first eight months, nearly five times MORE than Redshirts did.

This is a game-changer.

Now, you can certainly point out that I have made considerably less money on my 24,139 copies sold/downloaded than McRapey did on his 79,279 copies sold in the first eight months. But that’s irrelevant and those are just today’s profits anyhow; as Facebook and Twitter have shown, there is considerable value in free users.  The point is that if you’re just getting into the writing game, there is virtually no reason in trying to work within the mainstream publishing model.

Consider: I did literally nothing to market my book except for publishing the Selenoth satellites. No ads. No billboards. No push from Audible. You can’t buy them anywhere but Amazon. The audiobook doesn’t even exist yet and there will never be a paperback. And yet, all it would take is an easily changed policy on the part of Amazon to permit me to reach more readers than the most relentlessly marketed writer in SF/F today. To cite a concept from Nassim Taleb’s excellent Antifragile, the mainstream publishing industry is EXCEEDINGLY fragile and is totally dependent upon the willingness of Amazon to avoid inadvertently wiping them out. Unless one is already tied to the world of professional publishing for contractual reasons, I see no reason whatsoever to waste any time or effort attempting to enter it.  For all practical intents and purposes, it may not even be there in a few years, so don’t be caught up in thought processes that were last valid three years ago.

As for the hole in the fantasy market, don’t be misled.  That is an artificial one caused primarily by the ideological biases of the professional publishing gatekeepers and it is being rapidly filled by the independents. In my opinion, NA’s best strategy is to publish as an independent and become a part of that process.  Remember, this is the situation today and future changes look to favor the independents, not the mainstream publishers.

Mailvox: answering a simple question

Will Shetterly poses questions for me and for NK Jemisin. I don’t know if she will see fit to answer him, but I certainly don’t mind doing so:

What do you want, besides book sales? You both have strongly-held beliefs, Critical Race Theory and Human Biodiversity, but you’re both silent about the practical application of those beliefs.

Vox Day, you say:

“I have repeatedly pointed out that the existence of different human
sub-species and/or races does not make those different sub-species
and/or races any less validly human. A dog is a dog whether it is a
Bichon Frise or a Great Dane. A man is a man whether he is Yoruba or
Prussian. My basic argument on race and civilization can be most
accurately summarized as the observation that if you wish to pull a
sled, you would be well advised to select Siberian huskies rather than
chihuahuas or pit bulls.”

If people with your beliefs were in power, what changes would there be?
Legal segregation of the races as you understand them? A ban on
miscegenation? Breeding programs to increase the virtues you see in the
different human races, stronger blacks and smarter Asians to serve the
more “alpha” whites?

Let me first point out something that many people fail to keep in mind when they are occupied with being offended at something I have said. I am a libertarian, so it should always be kept in mind that I am intrinsically skeptical of the idea that government can be effectively utilized to solve most societal problems, or even avoid making them worse, regardless of how serious we all agree those problems happen to be.  The fact that I point to something as being a problem should NEVER be taken as an implicit suggestion that the solution can be found in government action.

With regards to race, I would be more than content to see the U.S. federal government and other governments across the West firmly respect the right to self-determination, the right to free speech, and the right to freedom of economic association on the part of individual, as well as the political sovereignty of the several States.

This would likely lead to legal segregation in some states, most likely beginning, ironically enough, with the States where Hispanics are expected to soon be the majority. In most of the rest, I expect a return to Constitutional federalism and the concept of democratic laboratories would merely lead to bans on enforced desegregation and government violations of the freedom of association; history indicates that people have a tendency to naturally segregate as that is how most of the various population groups were formed in the first place.

I do not support bans on miscegenation nor do I believe they would be required in any environment that permitted genuine freedom of speech and association. Despite being inundated with heavy doses of pro-miscegenation and pro-equalitarian propaganda in the media, relatively few women of any race have shown themselves to be open to sexual involvement with men of other races.

Being an anti-eugenicist, I do not support breeding programs of any kind, especially not government-sponsored programs.

As for the idea of stronger blacks and smarter Asians serving whites, that could not be further from my own position on ideal interracial relations. My belief is that every population group, every human sub-species, every nation, is better served by furthering a homogeneous group interest.  To put it crudely, whites would do well to pick their own cotton and count their own money, blacks would do well to build their own power stations and grow their own crops, and yellows would do well to develop their own technologies and establish their own university systems. Let Israel be Israel and let Myanmar be Myanmar.

Inter-societal communication and assistance is a good thing, so long as it is the sort that involves teaching men to fish and not fishing for them… and if the fishermen are left alone to deal with the consequences of their catch. Trade is generally good. Information exchange is generally good. Even immigration can beneficial in small and limited doses. But the benefits of moderation does not extend to the extremes. For example, trade can benefit both sides, but truly free trade will inevitably destroy the more prosperous side.

It should be noted that the consequences of mass migration are all but indistinguishable from the effects of invasion and occupation, and multi-ethnic societies have shown a strong historical tendency to collapse amidst vicious ethnic violence. No one who recalls the intra-black violence in Rwanda, the intra-white violence in Yugoslavia, or the intra-yellow violence in Vietnam should be misled into thinking that expanding the range of population heterogeneousity is going to alleviate, rather than exacerbate, the eventual inter-ethnic violence.  Ms Jemisin may be more right than she knows about how everyone will eventually be forced to take a side, whether they want to or not.

I understand that three generations of Americans who have been raised to venerate the Civil Rights movement will find it hard, if not impossible, to grasp that history may ultimately prove to be firmly on the side of those they have always believed to be monsters of bigotry. But if what logic suggests is the most probable outcome indeed comes to pass, I suspect that forced segregation and non-violent ethnic cleansing will be the best case scenario in consequence of the damnable social engineering of the grand multicultural experiment that began in 1965.

It may already be too late for a peaceful return to historical segregation patterns. But if history is an even remotely reliable guide, the West will return to them one way or another. And keep in mind that my expectations of the future have nothing whatsoever to do with my personal preferences, any more than I wanted to see the global financial system seize up when I predicted the 2008 economic crisis six years before it happened.

There is a flaw in someone’s assumptions. The error may be on my part. But based on the known historical patterns as well as the way in which increased integration throughout the West has observably increased racial tensions rather than eliminating them as the multiculturalists so confidently asserted, I very much doubt it.

So, to answer the original question, what do I want? I want to preserve the greatest, most advanced, and most humane civilization the human race has ever known. I want the West to avoid descending into violence and chaos on a scale that will threaten to end our advanced civilization as we know it. And I believe continued mass migration, forced desegregation, reconciliation, government intervention, and racial integration only serve to increase the likelihood of a nightmarish scenario taking place.

Mailvox: What color? Amused

Dominic detects scientific falsification:

Last year, you made a post entitled Evolution and a potential rabbit
where you showed some in the scientific community had established that
DNA could last no longer than between 1.5 to 6.8 million years, even
under ideal conditions, where the linked article stated: “This confirms
the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient
insects trapped in amber are incorrect”

Well, in 2009 Wired magazine posted a story of a man who extracted live bacteria and yeast samples from preserved Amber well
beyond the 1.5-6.8 million year threshold. The plot twist being that
his only successful attempt at capitalizing on the discovery was that a
particular strain of yeast made good beer. But that’s it, nothing else
he extracted was different enough from modern microorganisms to yield
anything new or of value, in spite of the supposed tens of millions of
years difference in time and environment.

I know its not cloning, per se, but
this does seem, at least superficially, to meet your criteria of either
debunking the evolutionary timeline as it currently stands, given a man
has made a career out of resurrecting live organisms that should have no
DNA left, or further discrediting the peer-review process which allowed
a paper claiming a 521 year DNA half-life to get published..

Color me amused.

That is two more strikes against Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I think it would be overly aggressive to conclude that the evolutionary timeline has been comprehensively debunked, but this is, at the very least, yet another crack in the crumbling wall of the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow.

Mailvox: superior atheist intelligence

A psychologist writes from Finland:

I enjoyed greatly your book Irrational Atheist and used it in my two books about atheism published here in Finland. Have you noticed the new study the summary of which is below? I have not read the full article, yet, but will do it. This must be great news for those “bright” atheists.

The Finnish PhD is referring to this metastudy, which noted: “A new review of 63 scientific studies stretching back over decades has concluded that religious people are less intelligent than non-believers.”

Setting aside my intrinsic skepticism concerning the reliability of metastudies, this finding is nothing new and I have readily conceded that religious individuals are less intelligent than non-believers in general and atheists in particular on average for years.  However, what the midwits who get very excited about this statistical fact never seem to keep in mind is that because there are so many more religious people, there are considerably more highly intelligent religious people than there are highly intelligent non-believers.

In fact, the ratio of theists to atheists with Mensa+ level IQs is more than 10 to one.

Logic dictates that because the vast majority of people are religious, the average religious IQ is right around 100.  This is, in fact, what most of the religion and IQ studies have determined.  The average atheist IQ advantage appears on the order of about 5 points. That is less than one-third the 16 point difference in average IQs observed between blacks and whites.

So, a substantial portion of the observed difference between average religious and irreligious IQs can be attributed to the fact that atheists tend to be a) male, and, b) European or Jewish.  Now isn’t that awkward….

More importantly, the fact that people who believe X happen to be modestly more intelligent than people who believe Y does not indicate that the first group is correct. I suspect that the average IQ of the economists who believed massive quantitative easing would produce economic growth in Japan is considerably higher than that of the average atheist, and yet the recent GDP report shows it would have been hard for them to have been more wrong.