Another strange piece from Steve Sailer containing all the
usual fallacies: evolution=progress, human nature=genes,
head size is a measure of human advancement, stereotypes
and folklore are the source of all true knowledge, all human
variability=genetic variability or "cultural inventions designed
to mimic the effects of the gene variants", equality=biological
equality, neo-Darwinism=conservatism. The study of an
"homogenous human nature", rather than being a feature of
evolutionary psychology, is of course a feature of Sailer's "race
realism": universal species-typical phenomena such as
altruism, intelligence, and morality are viewed as
variable, but genetically determined, traits unequally distributed
amongst a familiar hierarchy of classes, races and sexes.
The study of individual differences against a backdrop of
pre-Darwinian typological essentialism has no real bearing on the
question as to whether human psychological mechanisms are
polymorphic. Evolutionary psychology is perfectly clear that
frequency-dependent selection and developmental system variables
can result in multiple human natures and novel phenotypes, and yet
"race realism" struggles to embrace even such elementary biological
ideas as polyphenism. The extent to which Sailer will grasp at
genetic explanations of any inclination or behaviour, however idiotic,
is revealed in his earlier piece "The future of intermarriage".
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3314 of 3328
9:13 AM Mon 31Jan
Steve Sailer here:
I'm just tootling my own horn here, sending along praise for my attack on
evolutionary psychology entitled "The Future of Human Nature."
"Congratulations on a very good piece. It will take a lot of thinking in
order to give some right answers, but I agree that those which are
currently popular are not at all appealing."
Luca Cavalli-Sforza
[lead author of "History and Geography of Human Genes]
--------------------
"Very sensible! As you know, despite being an 'environmentalist' in the
race and IQ debate, I am one of those egualitarians who recognises that we
would have nothing to do if there were not inequalities to take into
account."
Yours - Jim Flynn
["Flynn Effect"]
----------------------
"Brilliant! Thanks for sending it to me."
Sincerely,
Robert Plomin
[Top IQ gene researcher]
-------------------
Steve here again: Regarding Dr. Plomin's verdict of "Brilliant!" -- It's
important to remember that he lives in England where "Brilliant!" is used to
praise any action that doesn't result in accidental dismemberment. The last
time I was there, I had lots of conversations like this:
Englishperson: "So, did you have any trouble driving here from Heathrow?"
Steve: "Well, after I barely avoided three head-on collisions, it occurred to
me that you people seem to drive on the wrong side of the road, so after that
I didn't have any problems."
Englishperson: "Brilliant!"
So if you want another chance to bask in my Brilliant! essay, here it is
again:
The Future of Human Nature
by Steve Sailer
National Post
1/29/2000
As we all know from watching old science fiction movies, humans will evolve
into hyper-intelligent, 97 pound weaklings. Our descendents will mutate into
androgynous pencil-necked geeks barely able to hold up their basketball-sized
brains. And as Steven Spielberg demonstrated in Close Encounters of the Third
Kind and E.T., highly evolved species are also altruistic pacifists. Of
course, the same sort of movies forecasted that in the year 2000 we'd all
helicopter to work in our one-man autogyros. So, we know the future ain't
what it used to be, but what will it be?
One thing that's certain is that we will evolve, and at a much faster clip
than the not-insignificant rate of genetic change we are currently
experiencing. "You can't change human nature" has been one of the wisest of
adages, but its days are numbered. The genetic, pharmaceutical, and computer
revolutions are about to radically accelerate the changing of human nature.
Indeed, by Y3K, humanity may have begun to break apart into separate species
as interstellar colonists use genetic engineering to adapt to
extraterrestrial climates.
But before we can think about the future of human nature, we have to
understand what "human nature" is. Logically, it's the opposite of "human
nurture." At one extreme of the nurture-nature continuum is culture, at the
other extreme are genes. But there's also a large gray area in the middle.
For example, the steroids that transformed Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson from
skinny, shy, and slow to burly, surly, and fast were cultural inventions to
mimic the effects of the gene variants Ben wished he'd been born with.
Plastic surgery, Prozac, and alcohol are other ways we manipulate our bodies,
brains, and behavior. We will invent many more. For instance, computer-brain
interfaces, like the one that recently enabled the blind patient known as
"Jerry" to see large letters, will ultimately be perfected, someday giving
our brains remarkable memory and computational powers. In this essay,
however, I'll focus on just that most natural example of human nature: our
genes.
Unfortunately, most thinking about human nature has been confused and
politicized by the widespread assumption that -- despite ample evidence to
the contrary -- "natural" always equals "good." Thus, opinion-mongers love to
proclaim that whatever they're peddling is natural, and whatever they deplore
is artificial.
The value most approved of by 20th Century intellectuals was "equality," so
most recent thinking about human nature has been deformed by attempts to
prove that the manifold diversity that is such a blatant aspect of human
nature is somehow not natural. Thus, "progressives" denied the very existence
of human nature, attributing all inequality to baneful social conditioning.
Margaret Mead, the celebrity anthropologist, summed up the fashionable dogma:
"Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable." If nurture overwhelms
nature, then everybody could be prodded into equality. Indeed, Lenin, Stalin,
Mao, and Pol Pot tried to do exactly that. Although they murdered scores of
millions, their egalitarian police states ultimately failed because ornery
old human nature endured.
Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, Harvard evolutionist Edward
O. Wilson brought the on-going "rediscovery of human nature" to general
attention with his 1975 book Soiobiology. Of course, much of the wisdom that
neo-Darwinians laboriously rediscover had never been lost by
non-intellectuals, such as your grandmother, who made these truths about
humanity the basis of her nagging. So far in 2000, for example, evolutionists
have won worldwide headlines with the following stop-the-presses findings: 1.
Women like taller men. ("So stop slouching like a slob, young man!") 2.
Rapists are often motivated by sexual desire. ("So stop dressing like a slut,
young lady!").
However, the inevitable conservatism of neo-Darwinism made it so many enemies
on leftist-dominated campuses that anthropologists John Tooby and Leda
Cosmides found it expedient to relaunch sociobiology under the new, improved
brand name of "evolutionary psychology." In a brilliant marketing ploy, they
spin-doctored neo-Darwinism into academic acceptability by pronouncing
themselves the truest True Believers in equality. They portrayed human nature
as almost monolithically uniform, and proclaimed that science should only
study human similarities.
Yet, except for identical twins, no two humans' genetic codes are the same.
So, exactly whose genes were they going to study? Stumped, the evolutionary
psychologists responded with name-calling: Interest in human differences was
deemed evil, or tedious, or insensitive, or just not done. This conservative
egalitarian party line soon had many smart people parroting silly ideas. For
example, one evolutionary psychology bestseller concluded "… differences
between individuals are so boring!" Since most highly-educated people are
infected with the Platonic virus that makes them prefer to think in terms of
nonexistent abstract certainties rather than reality's fuzzy probabilities,
few challenged the new orthodoxy of a homogenous human nature. The
evolutionary psychologists themselves, however, soon found that while
egalitarianism was a useful cover story, it was a largely useless methodology
for learning about humanity. Ironically, but not surprisingly, evolutionary
psychology has become primarily the study of sex differences. Why? Because
knowledge consists of contrasts. For example, yesterday the National Post
reported the controversial finding of a so-called "suicide gene." Its
existence was inferred by contrasting the genetic codes of the suicidal to
the non-suicidal.
Information can be boiled down to that most basic of contrasts, the ones and
zeroes of digital data, but it can't be boiled down further to all ones. So,
if we want to learn much about human nature, we're going to need to compare
different kinds of humans: male and female, sick and healthy, young and old,
smart and stupid, gay and straight, tall and short, black and white, and so
forth. They all deserve respect as manifestations of human nature's rich
diversity.
Grasping this realistic perspective on the varieties of human nature, we can
now think about our onrushing ability to manipulate our natures without
succumbing to the vapours. For we already have been diversifying our own
genetic code. For instance, adults were uniformly "lactose intolerant" until
cattle were domesticated within just the last 10,000 years. Fortunately,
Darwinian selection can work so fast that in ethnic groups with a milking
tradition (e.g., Danes or Dinkas from the Upper Nile), most adults now
possess a gene allowing them to digest milk comfortably. In other words, just
as our genes influence culture, culture rearranges our genes.
So, how will humanity choose to re-engineer its genes? Will we follow the
sci-fi movies and equip our children with huge heads, spindly bodies, and
politically correct personalities?
The crucial question is: "Who is this "we" who gets to choose -- the parents
or the state?" Individual parents could only finesse their offspring within
the genetic limits imposed by what Charles Darwin called "sexual selection."
For what parents want most from their children is grandchildren. Parents will
thus design their children to outcompete same-sex peers in attracting the
most desirable spouses, in order to produce the most desirable grandkids. So,
most parents will be satisfied with only moderately higher IQ's. Why?
Although much larger brains would probably be required for gigantic increases
in intelligence (as shown by our brains being three times the size of our ape
ancestors' brains), having a head the size of E.T.'s just isn't sexy. Nor
will a gentle personality, like that of children's TV host Mr. Rogers, make
your boy a babe magnet. Thus parents will balance the lip service they pay to
having wiser and kinder spawn against their need for more sexually desirable
descendants, just as feminists denounce sexual harassment and rape but can't
get enough of that sexual harasser and accused rapist Bill Clinton.
In contrast, a government can attempt to impose its favorite ideology. It
could try to ban genetic enhancements. But that is unlikely to work, since
the payoff to individuals from having the kind of body and personality that
the opposite sex lusts after is so great. Recall the 1992 health panic that
lead to the U.S. government banning silicon breast implants. Yet, from 1990
to 1999, the annual number of breast augmentations still sextupled from
41,000 to 255,000.
No, to prevent parents from buying black market gene enhancements to make
their progeny more alluring, a government would have to excise the incentives
by mutating the masses via mandatory eugenics. A hardnosed regime that wanted
to conquer the world by quadrupling its subjects' average IQ would have to
genetically reengineer its young people to find themselves strangely
attracted to paramours with bloated brains as massive as the Elephant Man's.
Similarly, a feminist government out to free women from the "beauty myth"
would need to delete the male genes that make men appreciate shapely breasts.
A pacifist state would have to redesign women so they stopped getting aroused
by dangerous men. An egalitarian regime would have to tweak women so that
they viewed unemployable losers as Mr. Right. In short, something close to
totalitarianism would be necessary.
Otherwise, free-market eugenics will brings us a human race that's the utter
opposite of the sexless, altruistic eggheads of the sci-fi movies. Note how
many affluent California families are holding their little boys back for a
second year of kindergarten. This is so their sons will be bigger, stronger,
smarter, more athletic, and more socially dominant than the other kids in
their classes. How much do you think these couples would pay for the genetic
enhancements that would allow their scions to continue to rule as alpha males
as adults? In Beyond This Horizon, the great Robert A. Heinlein's prescient
1942 novel about a genetically engineered future, the world is populated by
highly intelligent but extremely sexy people straight out of a Hollywood
casting call. The men are manly and the ladies lovely. The men are so macho
in fact, that no gentleman would be seen without his gun, and duels are
fought daily.
Obsessed by equality, bioethicists and other intellectuals today fret most
that the new genetic technologies will let rich parents buy their kids higher
IQs. Yet, considering the coming tidal wave of testosterone that the same
techniques are likely to unleash, I suspect we're going to need all the
smarts we can get to keep the bellicose boys of the future from blowing up
the world just to hear the bang.
Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is the president of the Human Biodiversity
Institute.
______
Sailer on the Future of Intermarriage
12:02 PM Fri 4 Jun 99
Steve Sailer here:
It's interesting to speculate on the future of intermarriage in America.
Marriages are increasingly likely to be between people of different ethnic
groups but of similar IQ's, and there's no reason to assume this trend will
stop. America's obsession with sending everybody to college means that young
people get sorted by SAT score (i.e., IQ) when they're at their most
romantic. Therefore, it's quite possible that the top dogs in America will in
future generations look different than they do now, but they probably won't
look much like the future underdogs, either. If we were to halt immigration
now, continuing intermarriage along IQ lines might in many generations lead
to the country being run by an IQ overclass of mostly "Jeurasians" (i.e., a
genetic blend of the smarter European gentiles, Jews, East Asians, South
Asians, Armenians, and possibly other Middle Easterners). In contrast, the
lower ranks might consist largely of "Redblex": a rather lumpy partial blend
of redneck whites, blacks, and Mexicans.
Of course, continued immigration slows genetic and cultural assimilation. For
example, right now Japanese-Americans are fading into Eurasians because of
the decline in immigration from Japan (since there are no terribly poor
people left in Japan) and their very high rate of intermarriage with whites
(especially for Japanese-American women). Chinese-Americans, in contrast, can
be expected to remain a distinct ethnic group for several generations more
(despite a high rate of intermarriage), since there is no imminent shortage
of poor Chinese desperate to come to America.
The Jews are another interesting case to speculate about. The next generation
of the "IQ elite" (e.g., Ivy Leaguers or lawyers or media figures or frequent
flyers or whatever category you think representative) may well have a lower
percentage of pure Jews ... but a higher percentage of part-Jews, as
intermarriage between Jews and smart gentiles continues.
Would this mean the non-violent extinction of Jews (except for the Orthodox)?
Possibly, but it might also imply that America's overclass would become even
more dominated by Jewish attitudes, e.g., Hitler-obsession (which has played
such a major role in influencing the views on the Balkans of our Secretary of
State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser, and their
colleagues). In the future most highly articulate white Americans will be
related to Jews by genes or marriage, which no doubt will impact what views
are popular in society (even more than today, when a Marlon Brando is
automatically excoriated for saying that Jews have lots of power in
Hollywood!)
For an extreme example of how pro-Semitism can come about within an
individual merely through genes alone, consider me. Although I'm Catholic, I
became very pro-Semitic at the age of 13 when my powers of logic kicked in
(and my hair turned curly). I quickly noticed that a high percentage of the
thinkers I either agreed with (e.g., Milton Friedman) or whom I considered it
a worthy challenge to argue against were Jewish. Since I was adopted, a few
years later I concluded that it was likely that I was half-Jewish
biologically, (which indeed appears to be the case based on evidence my wife
dug up when I was 30). It's important to understand the chain of causation:
having a very Jewish-style brain (e.g., enjoying logical argument), I sought
out the best logical arguers to read, very many of whom were Jewish. (You may
object that my political views today don't sound much like those of the
majority of American Jews, but I was enormously influenced by Jewish
neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s. Having gone to some lengths to
expose myself to Jewish thinkers (not because they were Jewish per se, but
because those who most stimulated my kind of mind more than writers from
other ethnic groups), I absorbed from them a lot of typically Jewish
political stances: e.g., pro-Israel and pro-immigration.
Now, my pro-Semitism came about even though I was being raised in my
(adoptive) family, which has no Jewish relatives, and, in fact, has a slight
anti-Semitic mindset. (I realize my case is only a single data point, so I
recommend somebody conduct a formal adoption study of Jews and part-Jews
adopted by gentile families.) In the future, however, most children of the IQ
elite will have Jews in their extended relatives, which will make my kind of
pro-Semitism even more widespread in the future.
Steve Sailer
http://members.aol.com/steveslr
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