Tag: science

Despite being a mild Edgar Allen Poe aficionado, I wasn’t familiar with his Eureka, which is a sort of brilliant stream-of-consciousness intellectual exploration that is almost exactly what Jordan Peterson, in his fevered, cousin-devouring dreams, must have imagined his Maps of Meaning would be. I’ve been reading Eureka and finding it to be an absolute delight, particularly in Poe’s prophetic anticipation of the instrinsic limitations of the methodology of modern science, which he described in the summary of a letter said to have been written in 2848.

“Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme, until the advent of one Hog, surnamed ‘the Ettrick shepherd,’ who preached an entirely different system, which he called the à posteriori or inductive. His plan referred altogether to sensation. He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts—instantiæ Naturæ, as they were somewhat affectedly called—and arranging them into general laws. In a word, while the mode of Aries rested on noumena, that of Hog depended on phenomena; and so great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first introduction, Aries fell into general disrepute. Finally, however, he recovered ground, and was permitted to divide the empire of Philosophy with his more modern rival:—the savans contenting themselves with proscribing all other competitors, past, present, and to come; putting an end to all controversy on the topic by the promulgation of a Median law, to the effect that the Aristotelian and Baconian roads are, and of right ought to be, the solo possible avenues to knowledge:—‘Baconian,’ you must know, my dear friend,” adds the letter-writer at this point, “was an adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian, and at the same time more dignified and euphonious.

“Now I do assure you most positively”—proceeds the epistle—“that I represent these matters fairly; and you can easily understand how restrictions so absurd on their very face must have operated, in those days, to retard the progress of true Science, which makes its most important advances—as all History will show—by seemingly intuitive leaps. These ancient ideas confined investigation to crawling; and I need not suggest to you that crawling, among varieties of locomotion, is a very capital thing of its kind;—but because the tortoise is sure of foot, for this reason must we clip the wings of the eagles? For many centuries, so great was the infatuation, about Hog especially, that a virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called. No man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone. It mattered not whether the truth was even demonstrably such; for the dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only the road by which it professed to have been attained. The end, with them, was a point of no moment, whatever:—‘the means!’ they vociferated—‘let us look at the means!’—and if, on scrutiny of the means, it was found to come neither under the category Hog, nor under the category Aries (which means ram), why then the savans went no farther, but, calling the thinker a fool and branding him a ‘theorist,’ would never, thenceforward, have any thing to do either with him or with his truths.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s also fascinating to see how the Mozart-Salieri relationship seems to play out again and again over time, the inevitable public rivalries between the original thinkers with integrity and talent and the popular pretenders with neither. Sometimes the Mozarts win out, sometimes the Griswolds do. But time always eventually exposes the latter, as your complete failure to recognize the name of Poe’s bitter would-be rival should suffice to demonstrate.

On a possibly-but-not-necessarily-unrelated note, I found this email from a reader to be more than a little amusing.

I was over at my sister’s place today and saw a copy of The Irrational Atheist in their library. When I asked about it, her husband, who is a recent MDiv graduate, told me that it was assigned reading in seminary. Amen. 

Anyhow, “Hogian” is an apt description of the science-loving dogmatists who demand “proof” and “evidence” for event the simplest and most straightforward claims. They inevitably confuse the means with the end, and not infrequently go so far to claim, without any apparent sense of irony intended, that any factual statement made without evidential support and reliable sourcing being subsequently provided is inherently untrue.

Be very careful before casually throwing out that “seeking a better life”  rhetoric to justify immigration. Because you’re granting entry to the vast majority of the global population with that rationale:

The victory of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) in the recent Mexican presidential election likely means an increase in immigration to the United States. AMLO has called immigration a “human right that we will defend” and will probably continue the Mexican government’s meddling in American affairs. AMLO has also reportedly promised to demand “respect” from President Trump and the United States, which probably means less cooperation in stopping Central American migrants from moving through the country.  If Mexico continues its decline into lawlessness or goes into recession, immigration from Mexico itself will sharply increase.

The ironic result of all this: the worse Mexico performs, the more powerful that nation becomes. Many nominal American citizens believe their first loyalty is with Mexico. Though they don’t want to live there, they don’t want to surrender their identity. Exporting its underclass to the U.S. spares Mexico and other Latin American countries the need for internal reform. As Tucker Carlson recently put it: “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class”.

Furthermore, Mexico and other Latin American countries continue to benefit from the endless flow of remittances from the U.S. America is literally paying welfare benefits to illegal aliens (if only for their anchor babies), some portion of which they then proceed to send home.

This phenomenon should be termed “Failure Migration.” The lower a people’s level of civilizational accomplishment, the more that people is able to expand its influence. This paradox is another example of how the modern social and political system has a destructive and even dysgenic effect.

As I’ve been pointing out recently, it’s going to be interesting to see how the non-Posterity US citizens attempt to thread this particular needle. Why should their German, Dutch, Italian, Irish, and Jewish ancestors have had the right to seek a better life that they are denying to Mexicans, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians today?

Average IQs are plunging across the West, most significantly in the USA and Sweden. This is more than societal self-destruction, it is civilizational suicide.

Remember, this is the standard by which Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris believe truth should be measured:

“The majority of papers that get published, even in serious journals, are pretty sloppy,” said John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who specializes in the study of scientific studies.

This sworn enemy of bad research published a widely cited article in 2005 entitled: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Since then, he says, only limited progress has been made….

“Diet is one of the most horrible areas of biomedical investigation,” professor Ioannidis added — and not just due to conflicts of interest with various food industries. “Measuring diet is extremely difficult,” he stressed. How can we precisely quantify what people eat?

In this field, researchers often go in wild search of correlations within huge databases, without so much as a starting hypothesis. Even when the methodology is good, with the gold standard being a study where participants are chosen at random, the execution can fall short.

A famous 2013 study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet against heart disease had to be retracted in June by the most prestigious of medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, because not all participants were randomly recruited; the results have been revised downwards.

So what should we take away from the flood of studies published every day?

Ioannidis recommends asking the following questions: is this something that has been seen just once, or in multiple studies? Is it a small or a large study? Is this a randomized experiment? Who funded it? Are the researchers transparent?

These precautions are fundamental in medicine, where bad studies have contributed to the adoption of treatments that are at best ineffective, and at worst harmful.

In their book “Ending Medical Reversal,” Vinayak Prasad and Adam Cifu offer terrifying examples of practices adopted on the basis of studies that went on to be invalidated, such as opening a brain artery with stents to reduce the risk of a new stroke.

It was only after 10 years that a robust, randomized study showed that the practice actually increased the risk of stroke.

Never forget that science cannot be considered reliable until it is called “engineering”. Until then, the most that one can accurately assume is that it has about a fifty percent chance of actually being correct. The fact that some physicists got some very accurate results in the 1950s says precisely nothing about that study published by a biologist or a medical researcher or an economist 70 years later.

More empirical evidence of the existence of the communications gap, as if any were needed:

I have gained nothing from watching this video. My IQ is around 120 and I don’t understand what is being said here. I have watched this stream 2x and I don’t get it. I know that government forcing people to use speech is bad; cleaning your room is good. 

Population experts are belatedly beginning to worry about the effects of abortion on various countries:

Scientists have sparked controversy after creating a pin-prick test that can determine the gender of a baby after just eight weeks.

Concerns have been raised the test could trigger a rise in sex-selective abortions, especially in countries such as India and China where families desire boys over girls for cultural reasons.

A recently published government report in India found that the country has 63 million fewer woman then it should because families are choosing to abort their female babies.

The situation is much the same in China, where men outnumber women by 34 million – significantly more than the entire population of Australia.

Experts claim the controversial one-child policy, which lasted from the 1970s until 2015, helped to create the imbalance as families sought to have a son.

It is feared the new pin-prick test could fuel a ‘genocide’ of female babies in India and China as parents are given more time than previously to make a decision on whether to abort their babies.

India’s Government revealed in January that there will be 105 boys for every 100 girls without any human intervention. But previous estimates from 2011 suggest the problem is already worse than that, with 914 girls under the age of six to every 1,000 boys the same age. In China, the UN states there are nearly 116 boys for every 100 girls, however reports claim the ratio is much higher in poor rural areas.

I fail to see how this is a problem. Isn’t worrying about the male-female ratio transphobic, considering that an individual can now be whatever sex it identifies as being? And it’s very identity politicist, to say nothing of culturally appropriative, to interfere with the individual choices of women in other countries to make choices about their own bodies.

The Alt-Right is inevitable because we do not advocate suicide, on either an individual or a group basis.

Allow me to demonstrate why it is a bad idea to try to bullshit those who are considerably smarter than you are. We are often told that Jews are the smartest ethnic group in the world and that this explains their current position of cultural and socio-economic dominance in the United States. However, the core claim is observably false, and readily and conclusively disproved.

First, what is the basis for the claim that Jews are highly intelligent?

Researchers who study the Ashkenazim agree that the children of Abraham are on top of the IQ chart. Steven Pinker – who lectured on “Jews, Genes, and Intelligence” in 2007 – says “their average IQ has been measured at 108-115.” Richard Lynn, author of “The Intelligence of American Jews” in 2004, says it is “only” a half-standard higher: 107.5.  Henry Harpending, Jason Hardy, and Gregory Cochran, University of Utah authors of the 2005 research report, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” state that their subjects, “score .75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ of 112-115.” Charles Murray, in his 2007 essay “Jewish Genius,” says “their mean is somewhere in the range of 107-115, with 110 being a plausible compromise.” A Jewish average IQ of 115 is 8 points higher than the generally accepted IQ of their closest rivals—Northeast Asians—and approximately 40{9777635cfa82a0aab621d7111c7b7154d6356e0eedfaecd5a3ca30be59699a9a} higher than the global average IQ of 79.1 calculated by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and Global Inequity.

First, you will note the usual definitional switch we’ve learned to anticipate. A subset – Ashkenazim – is substituted for the full set of Jews. Second, if one takes the trouble to look up and read these studies that are often referenced but never cited, one is immediately struck by the fact that the studies are a) misrepresented, b) old and outdated, c) invariably authored by those with an observable bias, and d) the samples reported are always limited to a very small subset of the subset of the set. For example, the primary source of the “115 IQ” claim appears to be a 1957 study by Boris Levinson entitled “The Intelligence of Applicants for Admission to Jewish Day Schools” published in Jewish Social Studies,Vol. 19, No. 3/4 (Jul. – Oct., 1957), pp. 129-140.

Right in the study, which reported a 114.88 mean IQ for the 2083 students sampled, the author notes its intrinsic limitations.

This study is limited to applicants for Day Schools adhering to the principles of the National Commission for Yeshiva Education. This sampling does not claim to represent the entire Jewish school population or even those children attending yeshiva Day Schools with a different educational emphasis. 

Levinson further admits that the students sampled only represented 38 percent of the 5494 students attending the 16 Day Schools, raising the possibility that the sampled scores were cherry-picked. Now, are we seriously expected to believe that the mean of a partial subset of a wealthy private school subset of a half-European subset is even remotely representational of the average of the complete population set? This is so utterly absurd on its face that for the logically inclined, it alone should suffice to conclusively refute the claim.

In the study, Levinson refers to a 1956 study by Robert D. North concerning American fourth-graders from 16 independent private school, and noted the following:

Many of these schools select their pupils on the basis of mental ability and achievement. Because these schools charge tuition fees, most of their pupils come from higher socio-economic levels. These children had a mean IQ of 119.3.

Shall we therefore conclude that the average white American is more intelligent than the average Jew because one very small group of elite private-schooled white Americans outperformed another very small group of elite private-schooled Jews? Of course not, that would be nonsensical, right? The samples are not representative, right? There are numerous other statistical idiosyncracies that demonstrate the irrelevance of these post-WWII IQ studies to average population IQs; for example, one study reported that the average IQ of the boys was 112.8 and of the girls was 113.6. If we are to take these particular IQ studies as definitive, then we must conclude that girls are more intelligent than boys, all other subsequent studies and observations to the contrary.

Third, given the average reported Israeli IQ of 95, and the average reported Jordanian IQ of 84, the claim of an average 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews would necessarily require all other Jews to have an average IQ of 84.2. This means that even if Ashkenazi Jews did have a mean IQ of 115, then the average global Jewish IQ would be 107.0. However, on the basis of the original studies pointing out that the reported IQ scores are not indicative of mean or average Ashkenazi IQ, we can be 100 percent certain that this estimated 107 IQ is higher than the real Jewish average.

For example, if Lynn is correct and the Ashkenazi mean is 107.5, then the average global Jewish IQ is 103.2. Not bad, certainly, but considerably lower than 115 and an insufficient foundation on which to construct a believable narrative of intellectual superiority and inevitable success.

There are many other reasons to be dubious of the myth of Jewish intelligence. Consider Israel, for example. It is a successful quasi-European society, superior in most respects to the lower-IQ Arab societies surrounding it, but it is no more technologically advanced or socio-economically successful than most Western or East Asian societies, and it remains economically dependent upon regular handouts from Germany and the USA. Even after 70 years, it is not the advanced society that one would expect a uniquely high average IQ society to be. The reason, of course, is that it is not.

Moreover, where was this disproportional high-IQ success in Roman times, in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance? Where was it in the Napoleonic era? Why did it only appear when and where a sufficient degree of societal influence in certain societies had been obtained? And most of all, how did various European countries observably benefit so greatly from reducing their average IQs through the various expulsions?

The good news for those who are interested in the truth is that despite the reproducibility crisis in science, the relentless advancement of scientage means it is no longer possible to utilize dishonest citations of biased studies of limited relevance from 62 years ago to deceive the general public. The advancement of genetic science and the confirmed links between genetics and intelligence will soon scientifically explode this outdated and self-serving myth that has been relentlessly pushed upon the unsuspecting American public along with similar myths such as the Zeroth Amendment, “a nation of immigrants”, “the melting pot”, and Judeo-Christianity.

Now, it is remotely possible that I am wrong and there is a factual basis to the myth. More likely, however, we will learn that Flynn is too generous and the correct average is below 103. Regardless, the facts of the subject will soon be known and they will be beyond the possibility of reasonable dispute. If I am right, however, you can expect to see the previous link between average IQ and societal success to be played down, just as Ivy League admissions officers are now attempting to play down the importance of test scores and merits in the university admissions process.

John Derbyshire is frustrated with geneticist David Reich’s one-step-forward, two-steps-back routine in Who We Are and How We Got Here.

It is plain from the evidence, amply presented in this book, that many—perhaps most—of the “mixture” events Prof. Reich urges us to “embrace” in fact involved one group of human males killing off another group’s males and mating with their females.

Does Prof. Reich really expect males from that second group to “embrace” their annihilation?

The last three chapters of Who We Are are marbled with incoherent gibberish like this, punctuated with shamefully gratuitous insults to more honest and brave human-science writers like Wade, Cochran, the late Henry Harpending, and even the great James Watson.

What makes it all very odd is that these preposterosities and insults are interleaved with commendably frank statements about the reality of biological race differences, e.g.

If selection on height and infant head circumference can occur within a couple of thousand years, it seems a bad bet to argue that there cannot be similar average differences in cognitive or behavioral traits.

Reich’s lurching between PC pablum and honest race realism left this reader feeling positively dizzy. Why is the book like this? The most charitable explanation: Prof. Reich believes he needs to do the signaling in order to preserve his funding.

It is more than a bit bizarre, as are Reich’s regular digressions into Jewish history, the myth of Jewish intelligence, and various other Jewish minutiae that have literally nothing to do with the science of ancient human DNA that is the nominal topic of the book. Reich is a serious and accomplished scientist, but as Derb points out, he lacks the basic literary competence of science popularizers like Dawkins and Wade, and he is almost astonishingly nasty and unfair to Wade as well as James Watson. That being said, Reich does step firmly, if not fully, away from the blank slate theory and leaves the anti-racist anthropologists without a single scientific leg to stand on. From Chapter 11, The Genomics of Race and Identity:

Beginning in 1972, genetic arguments began to be incorporated into the assertions that anthropologists were making about the lack of substantial biological differences among human populations. In that year, Richard Lewontin published a study of variation in protein types in blood.7 He grouped the populations he analyzed into seven “races”—West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians, and indigenous Australians—and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. He concluded: “Races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.”

In this way, through the collaboration of anthropologists and geneticists, a consensus was established that there are no differences among human populations that are large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Lewontin’s results made it clear that for the great majority of traits, human populations overlap to such a degree that it is impossible to identify a single biological trait that distinguishes people in any two groups, which is intuitively what some people think of when they conceive of “biological race.”

But this consensus view of many anthropologists and geneticists has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy that the biological differences among human populations are so modest that they should in practice be ignored—and moreover, because the issues are so fraught, that study of biological differences among populations should be avoided if at all possible. It should come as no surprise, then, that some anthropologists and sociologists see genetic research into differences across populations, even if done in a well-intentioned way, as problematic. They are concerned that work on such differences will be used to validate concepts of race that should be considered discredited. They see this work as located on a slippery slope to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement to sterilize the disabled as biologically defective, and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

The concern is so acute that the political scientist Jacqueline Stevens has even suggested that research and even emails discussing biological differences across populations should be banned, and that the United States “should issue a regulation prohibiting its staff or grantees…from publishing in any form—including internal documents and citations to other studies—claims about genetics associated with variables of race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other category of population that is observed or imagined as heritable unless statistically significant disparities between groups exist and description of these will yield clear benefits for public health, as deemed by a standing committee to which these claims must be submitted and authorized.”

But whether we like it or not, there is no stopping the genome revolution. The results that it is producing are making it impossible to maintain the orthodoxy established over the last half century, as they are revealing hard evidence of substantial differences across populations.

It’s not a good book. But it is a useful one that may well point the way towards better-written, more intellectually coherent books in the future.

As I observed in my most recent Voxiversity, Why the West Needs Christianity, the most serious challenge now facing science is the historical decline in the percentage of scientists who are Christians, and the concomitant decline in the personal and professional ethics of scientists that has inevitably resulted from this demographic change. And this lack of ethics is having a profoundly negative effect on science, including some unanticipated consequences.  In his book Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich laments the decreasing willingness of American Indian tribes to permit their DNA to be studied by genetic scientists as a result of bad behavior and broken promises by previous scientists.

Modern genomics offers an unexpected way to recover the past. African Americans—another population that has had its history stolen as its ancestors descend from people kidnapped into slavery from Africa—are at the forefront of trying to use genetics to trace roots. But if individual Native Americans often express a great interest in their genetic history, tribal councils have sometimes been hostile. A common concern is that genetic studies of Native American history are yet another example of Europeans trying to “enlighten” them. Past attempts to do so—for example, by conversion to Christianity or education in Western culture—have led to the dissolution of Native American culture. There is also an awareness that some scientists have studied Native Americans to learn about questions of interest primarily to non–Native Americans, without paying attention to the interests of Native Americans themselves.

One of the first strong responses to genetic studies of Native Americans came from the Karitiana of Amazonia. In 1996, physicians collected blood from the Karitiana, promising participants improved access to health care, which never came. Distressed by this experience, the Karitiana were at the forefront of objections to the inclusion of their samples in an international study of human genetic diversity—the Human Genome Diversity Project—and were instrumental in preventing that entire project from being funded. Ironically, DNA samples from the Karitiana have been used more than those of any other single Native American population in subsequent studies that have analyzed how Native Americans are related to other groups. The Karitiana DNA samples that have been widely studied are not from the disputed set from 1996. Instead, they are from a collection carried out in 1987 in which participants were informed about the goals of the study and told that their involvement was voluntary. However, the Karitiana people’s later experience of exploitation has put a cloud over DNA studies in this population.

Another strong response to genetic research on Native Americans came from the Havasupai, who live in the canyonlands of the U.S. Southwest. Blood from the Havasupai was sampled in 1989 by researchers at Arizona State University who were trying to understand the tribe’s high risk for type 2 diabetes. The participants gave written consent to participate in a “study [of] the causes of behavioral/medical disorders,” and the language of the consent forms gave the researchers latitude to take a very broad view of what the consent meant. The researchers then shared the samples with many other scientists who used them to study topics ranging from schizophrenia to the Havasupai’s prehistory. Representatives of the Havasupai argued that the samples were being used for a purpose different from the one to which its members understood they had agreed—that is, even if the fine print of the forms said one thing, it was clear to them when the samples were collected that the study was supposed to focus on diabetes. This dispute led to a lawsuit, the return of the samples, and an agreement by the university to pay $700,000 in compensation.

The hostility to genetic research has even entered into tribal law. In 2002, the Navajo—who along with many other Native American tribes are by treaty partly politically independent of the United States—passed a Moratorium on Genetic Research, forbidding participation of Navajo tribal members in genetic studies, whether of disease risk factors or population history. A summary of this moratorium can be found in a document prepared by the Navajo Nation, outlining points for university researchers to take into account when considering a research project. The document reads: “Human genome testing is strictly prohibited by the Tribe. Navajos were created by Changing Woman; therefore they know where they came from.”

However, David Reich manages to completely miss the point and fails to learn the obvious lesson of not lying to people and failing to deliver on one’s promises.

Scientists interested in studying genetic variation in Native American populations feel frustrated with this situation. I understand something of the devastation that the coming of Europeans and Africans to the Americas wrought on Native American populations, and its effects are also evident everywhere in the data I and my colleagues analyze. But I am not aware of any cases in which research in molecular biology including genetics—a field that has arisen almost entirely since the end of the Second World War—has caused major harm to historically persecuted groups. Of course, there have been well-documented cases of the use of biological material in ways that may not have been appreciated by the people from whom it was taken, not just in Native Americans. For example, the cervical cancer tumor cells of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman from Baltimore, were distributed after her death, without her consent and without the knowledge of her family, to thousands of laboratories around the world, where they have become a mainstay of cancer research.

But overall there is an argument to be made that modern studies of DNA variation—not just in Native Americans, but also in many other groups including the San of southern Africa, Jews, the Roma of Europe, and tribal or caste groups from South Asia—are a force for good, contributing to the understanding and treatment of disease in these populations, and breaking down fixed ideas of race that have been used to justify discrimination. I wonder if the distrust that has emerged among some Native Americans might be, in the balance, doing Native Americans substantial harm. I wonder whether as a geneticist I have a responsibility to do more than just respect the wishes of those who do not wish to participate in genetic research, but instead should make a respectful but strong case for the value of such research.

Yeah, attempting to justify ethical lapses and avoid the responsibility to obtain consent on the grounds that you’re ultimately doing more good than harm isn’t exactly convincing when the argument is being presented by a group of godless, amoral individuals who are already known to be corrupt, untrustworthy, and ethically challenged.

It is science. And Martin Luther King’s dream remains just that, a dream that is not based on reality:

Unless it involves mocking President Trump’s supposedly “small hands,” there is nothing that horrifies our multiculturalist masters more than judging by appearances.

It is impossible, they claim, to infer anything about how someone is likely to behave by their gender or because they are from a particular ethnic group. Everyone is unique (but also, somehow, equal). Judging by appearances is not just superficial but plain evil.

It will be fascinating to see what they’ll make of the recently-published book by British academic Dr. Edward Dutton titled How To Judge People By What They Look Like, which argues that even within races and sexes you can, with a fair degree of accuracy, infer people’s personalities from appearances. You may even get an inside track on how smart they are by taking a good look at their physical characteristics, according to Dutton.

“You can’t judge people by what they look like! It’s drummed into us as children,” writes Dutton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Oulu University in northern Finland. “It is utterly false.”

But Dutton makes a provocative case for resurrecting the ancient art of physiognomy—judging character from the face. He argues it should never have been dismissed as pseudo-science. Indeed, his research goes way beyond making inferences from the face. He writes:

We are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like; we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive. Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . these and much else are windows into personality, intelligence or both.

So many people fail to understand that when I say the Alt-Right is inevitable, I am not merely engaging in rhetoric. I mean that quite literally and I am speaking in unvarnished dialectic. Just as communism is unviable because it denies economics and feminism is unviable because it denies biology, conservatism is unviable because it denies inequality. All of these unviable political identities have set themselves against science, history, and observable reality.

Remember, the red pill is reality.

As Dutton says in his book, the relevant research has been published in top psychology journals, such as Intelligence, Personality and Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychological Science, as has his own research. This includes a study asserting that atheists tend to be less physically attractive and more likely to be left-handed than religious people and that they have objectively worse skin. Dutton, ever the evolutionist, opines that this is because we have been selected to be religious over thousands of years of evolution. Hence, those who are atheists reflect mutant genes in the brain and people with mental mutations are more likely to have physical ones. This explains their asymmetrical features and asymmetrical brains, leading to left-handedness.

You may recall that I was among the first to observe that atheists are neurologically atypical and that atheism is essentially a particular characteristic of being on the autism spectrum. It’s not a coincidence that you can often pick out an atheist by his appearance.

However, the link between psychology, personality, and intelligence on the one hand and appearance on the other involves considerably more than our genes, it also involves our choices and behavior. When we see a man who is slender and clear-eyed at 60, we can safely conclude that he is both intelligent and self-disciplined, just as we can reliably reach the opposite conclusion of a child who is obese at the age of 12.