Tag: science

A troublesome defect

Fred Reed has read Nicholas Wade’s book too, and while he identifies a similar flaw to one that I observered myself, he has a different take on it.

A minor defect of the book, understandable since Wade works for a very PC newspaper and may want to keep his job, is that he dances away from the conclusions to be drawn from what he says. Differences among people are actually small, he asserts, and only in cumulative effects on societies do they really count. Yet he puts the mean IQ of Sub-Saharan Africans at 67, of Europeans at 100, and of Jews at 115. He also says that four of every thousand Europeans have IQs in excess of 140, but 23 Jews. These are huge differences and, if real, have equally huge implications.

As is the case with high-IQ atheists versus high-IQ theists, the implications of the various sizes between the populations that possess different average intelligence is seldom considered. Take the numbers Fred cites: 0.4 percent of Europeans have 140+ IQs but 2.3 percent of Jews do. But first, I suspect this is erroneous and that 2.3 percent of Ashkenazi Jews are actually indicated. Further research indicates that I was correct, as Wade actually wrote:

Average northern European IQ is 100, by definition, and 4 people per 1,000 in such a population would be expected to have IQs above 140 points. But among Ashkenazim, if the average IQ is taken as 110, then 23 Ashkenazim per 1,000 should exceed 140, the Utah team calculates, a proportion almost six times greater than that in northern Europe. This helps explain why the Jewish population, despite its small size, has produced so many Nobel Prize winners and others of intellectual distinction.

This reasoning doesn’t hold up. The global Jewish population is 13,854,800. This would seem to indicate 318,660 Jews with 140+ IQs.  However, since Ashkenazim account for 74 percent of the global Jewish population and “enhanced cognitive capacity is confined to the Ashkenazic branch of the Jewish population”, the likely number of high-IQ Jews around the world is 235,809 Askenazim plus 14,409 non-Ashkenazim for total of  250,218. A very conservative estimate of the global European population is 680 million. This indicates 2,720,000 Europeans with 140+ IQs around the world.

Therefore, crediting Jewish success to their high level of intelligence when there are at least 11 high-IQ Europeans for every high-IQ Jew isn’t logically credible. Especially because there are at least 48 high-IQ Han and 5 high-IQ Japanese to factor in as well.

An interview with Nicholas Wade

Social Matter interviews the author of A Troublesome Inheritance: 

In writing A Troublesome Inheritance, what response did you expect to receive? What has been your impression of reviews so far?

I feared the book would be condemned out of hand and have been delighted that the preponderance of reviews so far have been favorable.  The two main themes of the book – that race is biological, evolution continuous – are not so hard to accept, and I hope that I’m pushing on an open door. 

In your book you write “The rise of the West is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.” How much do we miss in our understanding of the rise and fall of civilizations by not incorporating the role evolution plays in human populations?

A thesis of the book is that social institutions rest on human social behavior, which is shaped by evolution.  Institutions have a large cultural component, so it’s hard to know at present how important evolution has been.  But I think we should look out for it in all major social transitions, such as the foraging-settler transition, the escape from tribalism, and the Industrial Revolution, and if one accepts that the natural selection has been active here then all major societies probably have been shaped by evolution to some extent.

I think Wade’s reference to “evolution” is considerably broader than that customarily utilized by biologists when referring to evolution by natural selection, (for example, Wade occasionally uses “natural selection” to encompass selection that does not appear to be based solely on environmental pressures), but among other things, his book points to one obvious point of logical tension in the progressive dogma. If TENS is true, then a lot of progressive dogma is not merely false, but completely impossible. And if TENS is not true, then a lesser, but still considerable amount of progressive dogma has, contra to progressive assumptions, no greater basis in science than many competing non-progressive dogmas.

Which is precisely why most progressives attempt to avoid thinking about such matters. The relative silence with which Wade’s book has met from its anticipated critics is a strong indication that they at least suspect they are not merely outgunned, but scientifically outdated.

Anti-race is anti-science

It should be interesting to see the likes of Jared Diamond attempt to explain away the undeniable genetic differences between the various human subspecies; his reference to the Flat Earth Society is as clear a case of emotional projection as one could hope to find. In a chapter entitled “The Human Experiment”, Nicholas Wade observes that criticism-averse biologists are playing a shell game that provides sociologists who don’t understand the relevant science with sufficient cover to deny the scientifically undeniable:

Many scholars like to make safe nods to multicultural orthodoxy by implying that human races do not exist. Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is the title of a recent book by a physical anthropologist and a geneticist, though their text is not nearly so specific. “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” writes Craig Venter, who was the leading decoder of the human genome but has no known expertise in the relevant discipline of population genetics.

Only people capable of thinking the Earth is flat believe in the existence of human races, according to the geographer Jared Diamond. “The reality of human races is another commonsense ‘truth’ destined to follow the flat Earth into oblivion,” he asserts. For a subtler position, consider the following statement, which seems to say the same thing. “It is increasingly clear that there is no scientific basis for defining precise ethnic or racial boundaries,” writes Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in a review of the project’s implications. This form of words, commonly used by biologists to imply that they accept the orthodox political take on the nonexistence of race, means rather less than meets the eye. When a distinct boundary develops between races, they are no longer races but separate species. So to say there are no precise boundaries between races is like saying there are no square circles.

A few biologists have begun to agree that there are human races, but they hasten to add that the fact means very little. Races exist, but the implications are “not much,” says the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Too bad—nature has performed this grand 50,000 year experiment, generating scores of fascinating variations on the human theme, only to have evolutionary biologists express disappointment at her efforts.

From biologists’ obfuscations on the subject of race, sociologists have incorrectly inferred that there is no biological basis for race, confirming their preference for regarding race as just a social construct. How did the academic world contrive to reach a position on race so far removed from reality and commonsense observation?

The politically driven distortion of scientific views about race can be traced to a sustained campaign from the 1950s onward by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who sought to make the word race taboo, at least when referring to people. Montagu, who was Jewish, grew up in the East End district of London, where he experienced considerable anti-Semitism. He was trained as a social anthropologist in London and New York, where he studied under Franz Boas, a champion of racial equality and the belief that culture alone shapes human behavior. He began to promote Boas’s ideas with more zeal than their author. Montagu developed passionate views on the evils of race. “Race is the witchcraft, the demonology of our time, the means by which we exorcise the imagined demoniacal powers among us,” he wrote. “It is the contemporary myth, humankind’s most dangerous myth, America’s Original Sin.”

In the postwar years, with the horror of the Holocaust weighing on people’s minds, Montagu found ready acceptance of his views. These were prominent in the influential UNESCO statement on race, first issued in 1950, which he helped draft. He believed that imperialism, racism and anti-Semitism were driven by notions of race and could be undermined by showing that races did not exist. However much one may sympathize with Montagu’s motives, it is perhaps simplistic to believe that an evil can be eliminated by banning the words that conceptualize it. But suppression of the word was Montagu’s goal, and to a remarkable extent he succeeded.

“The very word race is itself racist,” he wrote in his book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Many scholars who understood human races very well began to drop the use of the term rather than risk being ostracized as racists. In a survey taken in 1987, only 50% of physical anthropologists (researchers who deal with human bones) agreed that human races exist, and among social anthropologists (who deal with people) just 29% did so.

How unfortunate for the self-styled anti-racists that scientody is bound, in the end, punch right through the most firmly lodged dogmas of scientistry. It’s a bit ironic that a member of the most tribal people in human history, (and one of the most scientifically accomplished, for that matter), the Jews, should be responsible for this profoundly anti-scientific triumph of propaganda; imagine if Montagu had instead waged a similarly successful campaign against the fundamental evils of a belief in gravity.

Instead of marveling at the amazing coincidence of people being beaten to death in the wrong part of town, we would be wondering how it was possible that so many people were being mysteriously found dead on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

But the scientific fact is that race exists, it is a concept based on observable genetic differences that are the result of human microevolution, and those differences have a significant impact on human behavior. The Collins position, which is that while race exists, it does not matter, is weaselly, incorrect, and scientifically outdated.

Lewontin’s thesis immediately became the central genetic plank of
those who believe that denying the existence of race is an effective way
to combat racism. It is prominently cited in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,
an influential book written by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu with
the aim of eliminating race from the political and scientific
vocabulary. Lewontin’s statement is quoted at the beginning of the
American Anthropological Association’s statement on race and is a
founding principle of the assertion by sociologists that race is a
social construct, not a biological one.

But despite all the
weight that continues to be placed on it, Lewontin’s statement is
incorrect. It’s not the basic finding that is wrong. Many other studies
have confirmed that roughly 85% of human variation is among individuals
and 15% between populations. This is just what would be expected, given
that each race has inherited its genetic patrimony from the same
ancestral population that existed in the comparatively recent past.

What
is in error is Lewontin’s assertion that the amount of variation
between populations is so small as to be negligible. In fact it’s quite
significant. Sewall Wright, an eminent population geneticist, said that a
fixation index of 5% to 15% indicates “moderate genetic
differentiation” and that even with an index of 5% or less,
“differentiation is by no means negligible.” If differences of 10 to 15%
were seen in any other than the human species they would be called
subspecies, in Wright’s view.

It is more than a little ironic that it is those who so loudly proclaim that they “fucking love science” are among the most terrified of the genetic science that touches most closely upon who and what they are. Perhaps it is because I am tri-racial that I don’t give a damn about the racial pieties; what do various pretensions to White supremacy or Asian supremacy or the intrinsic superiority of La Raza  mean to one who is all-of-the-above?

In matters of race, as in all things, the facts are what they are, not what anyone might wish them to be. And the sooner that we face those facts and begin to deal in terms of objective and scientific reality rather than wishful thinking, the sooner that our social and personal policies are likely to meet with success rather than inevitable and cataclysmic failure.

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS

Today we are officially announcing the publication of ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, a curriculum created by Dr. Sarah Salviander, a research scientist whose areas of particular interest are quasars and supermassive black holes. She is a research scientist at the University of Texas, is one of the authors of “Evolution of the Black Hole Mass – Galaxy Bulge Relationship for Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7” and “Narrow Emission Lines as Surrogates for σ * in Low- to Moderate-z QSOs” in addition to many other scientific papers, and teaches classes as a visiting professor of physics at Southwestern University. Dr. Salviander describes the new curriculum at Castalia House:

“Look around the web for a high-quality, modern-science astronomy homeschool course and you won’t find much. There are a handful of scripture-based astronomy courses that seem to cover little more than the seasons and motions of the night sky, and one very expensive software-based curriculum. I realized there was a need for a comprehensive, modern, and affordable astronomy homeschool curriculum, and set out to develop one based on my years of teaching astronomy at the university level. A couple of years ago, I mentioned this in an offhand way to Vox Day; it turns out Vox had been contemplating offering a series of affordable, electronically-available homeschool curricula, and so we began to discuss the possibility of making astrophysics the first of many such courses.”

 So we are pleased to announce ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, the first offering in the Castalia Homeschool line. The curriculum is available only through the Castalia House store and costs less than $60.00. No further expenditures are necessary for the course as the textbook is available online, although we recently received permission to publish the primary textbook and will soon offer it accordingly at an affordable price. Our objective is to keep the price of all curricula under $100.

The curriculum is designed for students aged 13+. It has been described as “a top-notch astronomy curriculum” by Laurie Bluedorn, author of Trivium Pursuit. As per suggestions from the readers of this blog, sample PDFs from all four books of the curriculum have been made available for free download on the relevant product listing of the Castalia House store. If you are, or if you know, a homeschool mother of teenagers now preparing the fall course schedule, I encourage you to take a close look at ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS and consider using it for the next school year.

Genetic segregation

“The regional nature of selection was first made evident in a genomewide scan undertaken by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, in 2006. He looked for genes under selection in the three major races—Africans, East Asians and Europeans (or more exactly Caucasians, but European genetics are at present much better understood, so European populations are the usual subjects of study). Copious genetic data had been collected on each race as part of the HapMap, a project undertaken by the National Institutes of Health to explore the genetic roots of common disease. In each race Pritchard found about 200 genetic regions that showed a characteristic signature of having been under selection (206 in Africans, 185 in East Asians and 188 in Europeans). But in each race, a largely different set of genes was under selection, with only quite minor overlaps.”

The primary theme of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance is repeated over and over by Wade in the early chapters like a drumbeat, as if he knows the critical reader is not going to read very far into the book and will misrepresent what Wade is asserting: human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. It is also apparent that Wade knows why his words are likely to be twisted and attacked: “The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.”

Genetic science has already exploded most of the equalitarian mantras. We are not all the same under the skin. Race is not a social construct. Race is not only skin-deep. The content of your character can, on average, be estimated by, if not necessarily the color of your skin, the sum total of your superficial features. Human evolution did not stop at some point in the distant past. Civilization is not magically bestowed by geographic location. Education is not the answer.

The reason even professional biologists are afraid to discuss the current scientific evidence coming out of the genetic laboratories is because it leads to one inescapable conclusion: all of the social policies based upon the idea of basic human equality are doomed to failure. And worse, when combined with other evidence from other disciplines, it leads to a second conclusion: most of the social policies designed to improve the lot of the so-called disadvantaged are not merely doomed to failure, but are intrinsically dyscivic in nature and are more likely to drag the genetically advantaged populations down into semi-barbarism than to help the genetically disadvantaged populations become fully civilized on average.

Not all of the specifics of these known genetic differences are known, much less the full extent of their effects on human behavior. Some of them are, of course, trivial. But they are not all insignificant. Consider, for example, the example of the MAO-A gene, which is connected to the control of aggression.

“As it happens, the promoter for MAO-A is quite variable in the human population. People may have two, three, four or five copies of it, and the more copies they have, the more of the MAO-A enzyme their cells produce. What difference does this make to a person’s behavior? Quite a lot, it turns out. People with three, four or five copies of the MAO-A promoter are normal but those with only two copies have a much higher level of delinquency…. He and his colleagues looked at the MAO-A promoters in African Americans. The subjects were the same 2,524 American youths in the study by Shih mentioned above. Of the African American men in the sample, 5% carried two MAO-A promoters, the condition that Shih had found to be associated with higher levels of delinquency. Members of the two-promoter group were significantly more likely to have been arrested and imprisoned than African Americans who carried three or four promoters. The same comparison could not be made in white, or Caucasian, males, the researchers report, because only 0.1% carry the two-promoter allele.”

Does this mean that all African-Americans are prone to violence? No, it proves the exact opposite. The vast majority are not. But it does mean that with regards to this single factor related to an individual’s ability to control his own aggression, an African-American male is 50 times more likely to have a genetic handicap in comparison with a white male. Therefore, social policies that blithely assume that African-American males have the same intrinsic ability to control their aggression as white males are not only unscientific, but can be reliably predicted to fail. That is just one significant genetic distinction that has been discovered. There will be more. There will be many more.

Equality is not merely unscientific, at this point it is now objectively antiscientific. The undeniable fact of human genetic segregation does not intrinsically justify the eugenic excesses and ethnic cleansings of the past. But sooner or later, as the science advances, it will force the eventual discussion of whether the costs of playing equalitarian make-believe are too high for Western civilization, if that civilization wishes to survive.

Slouching towards barbarism

In his book A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade points out what he believes to be two of the most important steps in building an advanced Western civilization. The first is the more fundamental one:

How then was the profound transition made from the chimplike society of the joint ancestor to the hunter-gatherer societies in which all humans lived until 15,000 years ago and in which kinship was a central institution? The likely steps in this process have been persuasively worked out by the primatologist Bernard Chapais. The critical behavioral step, in his view, was formation of the pair bond, or at least a stable breeding relationship between male and female….

Having a dad around makes all the difference to social networks. In highly promiscuous societies like those of chimps, an individual knows only its mother and the siblings it grows up with. With pair bonding, people know not only their father as well as their mother, but all their father’s relatives too. The males in a community now recognized both their daughters and, when their daughters dispersed to a neighboring group, a daughter’s husband and his parents.

The development of the heterosexual pair bond, which eventually developed into monogamous marriage, appears to have been crucial in the development of tribalism. It therefore follows that the modern sexual free-for-all and the weakening of the vital pair bond involved is not only dyscivic, but downright dehumanizing.

The second significant step Wade identifies comes much later, and enables the escape from tribalism. This was accomplished most successfully, and fully, in England, but also took place in East Asia:

The entry to the modern industrial world has two principal requirements. The first is to develop institutions that enable a society to break away, at least to some substantial extent, from the default human institution of tribalism. Tribalism, being built around kinship ties, is incompatible with the institutions of a modern state.

The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviors as higher levels of trust toward those outside the family or tribe. A second required evolutionary change is the transformation of a population’s social traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies and documented by Clark for English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

But this break from tribalism required a eugenic and eucivic mechanism, one that Wade rather generously labels “natural selection”: the English rich consistently having a little more than twice as many children as the poor.

As it happens, Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work….

“The surname evidence confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of the poor and the criminal,” Clark concludes. “Their extra reproductive success had a permanent impact on the genetic composition of the later population.”

Clark’s data provide substantial evidence that the English population responded genetically to the harsh stresses of a Malthusian regime and that the shifts in its social behavior from 1200 to 1800 were shaped by natural selection. The burden of proof is surely shifted to those who might wish to assert that the English population was miraculously exempt from the very forces of natural selection whose existence it had suggested to Darwin.

If Wade and Clark are correct, this has terrible implications for the profoundly dyscivic mechanisms we are witnessing across the West today, where the dependent classes and the imported barbarians have considerably more children than the productive classes. While this part of the book is more logic based on statistical and historical observations than science, its scientific aspects are fairly firm. Blank slatists attempting to dismiss it unread, (the ever-inept PZ Myers being but one example), will soon find themselves forced to take scientifically indefensible positions.

That was fast

Nicholas Wade, the author of the excellent A Troublesome Inheritance and science editor of the New York Times, is now still the FORMER science editor of the New York Times:

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians.

Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment.

Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in bookstores on Tuesday, May 6. In excerpts from his book posted by Time.com on Friday, he is identified as a “former science editor” of the Times. Until then, coverage of his book called him a current Times journalist.

Obviously he deserved it, as he undeniably implied black people are “differently evolved” when he wrote that only 45 of the 394 genes currently deemed to be under selection are the same genes in blacks and whites. In light of such an atrocity, he may as well have called someone a “half-savage”; clearly he must be lambasted and ritualistically assailed by every goodthinking individual. I wonder if it is still acceptable to the Left to describe the fine, upstanding gentlemen who belong to Boko Haram and are so eager to host teenage schoolgirls as “less than entirely civilized although otherwise totally equal to all individuals of both sexes of European descent in every way” or if that too is a purgeable offense?

The Left is more than uncomfortable with both science and the conclusions that logically follow from it. It is now openly and avowedly anti-science. What is fascinating is that most clueless Leftists still feverishly insist that they, and not the Right, are pro-science even as they reject it in favor of various nonexistent ideals. As I have repeatedly pointed out since last August, the time for tolerating the Left has passed. Your only choice now is to submit to them or to shatter them.

UPDATE: I’m not sure this proves that Wade was not “fired”, even if he had already stepped down as science editor. “Anyway, just heard from reliable source that Wade took a retirement
package a couple of years ago.  The deal was that he could continue to
make occasional contributions on a fee basis.”

If he continues to make occasional contributions, then we’ll know he wasn’t canned for his book. If his last contribution on a fee basis turns out to have been April 24th, well, that would not prove that he was fired, but it would tend to indicate that was the case.

UPDATE 2: Not so fast. Apparently the Daily Caller author let his imagination run away with him.

“I retired from the Times about two years ago. There’s a stupid story you may have seen in the blogosphere. It is completely untrue. The writer just made that up. The fact that he saw the words ‘former Science editor’ in the piece I did in Time. He assumed that I had been fired by the Times. There is nothing to the story at all. I myself wrote the word ‘former’ in because I saw that the Time editor in putting the tag line on had said that I was Science editor of the Times. Since that was some time in the past, and is no longer true, I inserted the word ‘former’ and the writer in the Daily Caller just made the story up out of thin air. He made absolutely no attempt to contact me and not a word of it is true.” 

Geno-cultural eucivicism

The “culture is not genetic” crowd is finished, they simply don’t realize it yet because they a) have never thought logically through their position, and, b) are not up on the relevant science. This study of differing Han cognitive styles is but one of the many examples that is putting the coup de grace into the blank slate myth:

It has long been suggested that China’s reliance on rice fostered collectivist attitudes, and the Confucian emphasis on group allegiance and conformity. Such attitudes are even cited as explaining why Europe, rather than China, was the home of the industrial revolution: the revolution was based on scientific thinking, which is held to rely on individualism and openness to innovation. But the idea that growing rice promotes a group mentality remained speculation.

Talhelm and his colleagues in China decided to test it. They gave standard tests for cognitive style, individualism, and in-group loyalty to 1162 students in six cities across China, in wheat or rice-growing areas. All were Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, so other differences were hopefully minimal.

Nevertheless, they found many differences in cognitive style. For instance, students from all-wheat areas were 56 per cent more likely to think analytically than students from all-rice areas. For example, when asked to match the two closest of sheep, dog and grass, they grouped sheep and dog, which appear most similar. Students from rice-growing areas grouped sheep and grass, as these have the closest relationship to each other in real life, and to them this relationship mattered more than physical resemblance.

I read Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance yesterday, and while it was not without flaws, it does make for a useful roundup of the current state of genetic science as it presently relates to race, culture, and civilization. It is very nearly a restatement of my time-to-civilization hypothesis, and even provides some evidence in support of this.

Due to the intertwining of genetic microevolution, culture, and individual behavior, it is very likely that the differences in cognitive style observed are the result of genetic microevolution in the divergent Han populations brought about by the different growing cultures. It might be useful to think of these “cultural selections” as inadvertent genetic programming which tends to have either eucivic or dyscivic consequences over time.

I will get into this in considerably more detail over the next week, but after reading Wade’s book, it is apparent to me that geno-cultural eucivicism is likely to become one of the more important concepts of the 21st century.

Exploding orthodoxy

Charles Murray anticipates that “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” by Nicholas Wade, is going to explode more equalitarian minds than his own landmark work did:

The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific
tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The
Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close
to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be
of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second,
popularized by the late paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould,
is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences
stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a
contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in
1984.

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, has written a book that pulls back the curtain….

At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with
command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known
with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the
orthodoxy are wrong.

Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken
on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right,
then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people
into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that’s exactly
what happens. A computer given a random sampling of bits of DNA that are
known to vary among humans—from among the millions of them—will cluster
them into groups that correspond to the self-identified race or
ethnicity of the subjects. This is not because the software assigns the
computer that objective but because those are the clusters that provide
the best statistical fit. If the subjects’ ancestors came from all over
the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the
five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native
Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New
Guinea. If the subjects all come from European ancestry, the clusters
will instead correspond to Italians, Germans, French and the rest of
Europe’s many ethnicities. Mr. Lewontin was not only wrong but
spectacularly wrong. It appears that the most natural of all ways to
classify humans genetically is by the racial and ethnic groups that
humans have identified from time out of mind.

Stephen Jay Gould’s
assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left
Africa has also proved to be wrong—not surprisingly, since it was so
counterintuitive to begin with.

Those who still stubbornly cling to their antiscientific belief in human equality are the Flat Earth Society of our day. There is truly nothing surprising here except the name of the author; for a New York Times columnist to abjure liberal race orthodoxy is like a sitting cardinal of the Catholic Church publishing a book declaring that God does not exist.

All the dogma goodthink with which we were raised, all the statements about “race is only skin deep” and “it’s not genetics, its the culture” and “deep inside we’re all the same” are nothing more than children’s tale meant to obscure the frightening truth. Science is gradually peeling away the orthodox falsehoods; soon it will be impossible to conceal the important and necessary discussions about reality under nonsensical accusations of racism.

It will be interesting to see how science-loving equalitarians react to the discovery that they will have to choose between science and their faith. I expect that most of them will react as they did when economics made incontrovertibly clear the intrinsic contradictions of socialism and stubbornly cling to their antiscientific beliefs without admitting that they have openly rejected science.

The intrinsic unreliability of science

This 19x rise in retractions should suffice to put the lie to the ridiculous idea that published scientific papers are the best means of determining truth, let alone the only one:

In the first decade of the 21st century, retractions of papers published by medical journals went up 19 fold, although the number of manuscripts being published only increased 44 percent. The reasons behind this surge in evidence of scientific falsification were examined in a recent editorial in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (the Red Journal), published in October 2013.

“One of the greatest, and sadly all too common, challenges facing a contemporary medical journal editor is the adjudication of ethical integrity issues,” Editor-in-Chief Anthony L. Zietman wrote. “I had originally presumed that this would be just an occasional role, but it transpires that these problems are quite widespread, ranging from unconscious and unwitting naivete to the conscious and willful betrayal of scientific trust.”

Studies suggest that a majority of papers are retracted due to deliberate falsification by researchers, rather than simple mistakes.

Science fetishists have long ignored the fundamental flaw in the system of modern science; it is only as reliable as the moral character of the scientists involved permits. Of course, this could be seen as a positive; more science fiction is being published than ever before!