(Don’t bother posting)

I updated my outline of the hereditarian hypothesis in case you’re still interested. Generally, I find that the evidence supports it more than the environmental hypothesis. I’ve been emailing around to try to get the hypothesis dispositively tested with the help of modern genotyping — but there seems to be some reluctance to doing so. Anyways, if your interested:

“Race, genes, and disparity”
http://abc102.wordpress.com/

What if I said: “It is said that the Boston Red Sox have a curse on them.”?

Does that imply that I believe in curses?

That’s not what I said. I have read over Jenson and his papers (within the last 10 years) on group differences in intelligence. And he is not the only one that comments on this. But I have read though his views on life- history. The former fits into his Life History model, but is independent of it. I can posit that the performance advantage of Ashk Jews, relative to Hispanics has a partial genetic etiology without implying that, on average the former group has, on average, smaller tools. I would note that Saleton in his Slate article made a similiar mistake.

Regarless, Touché.

I do find it odd, that you seem to agree with the idea that:

“Intelligence is said to be the hallmark of the human species .. and that [if there are differences, it implies] it is likely that evolution is a progressive process with change happening in the direction, long term, of a particular ideal of “advancement”

Or maybe you could clarify your position or link to a post in which you have — as the same logic would apply to individuals, with some fitting the hallmark and representing more “advanced” members of the species — if it could be shown that their intellectual advantage had a partial genetic etiology.

The way this works is that I pwn you in a blog post when I get the time to do so. I don’t think you’ll have to wait long.

Your opinion about the comments here is interesting, given that you write about racial issues and have never heard of Rushton. You’re like some guy who has a new TOE but has never heard of … no, wait, I don’t want to make an equivalence between Rushton and anyone smart. Forget it.

Anyway, there will be a post.

How did you want to set up this interblog? I was reading through the comments and they are pretty ill informed. Even at Huff Post, where I post on this issue, people are more informed.

You might like a site called “Liberal Biorealism.” There are a lot of ways you could see this. Just as you define types of ‘racism’ as bad, you can define interpretations as such. I checked over Rhuston and I may have made a rash accusation. I will email him when I get a chance to get a clarification.

Regardless, we will know for sure within a couple of years. So, if so, people will adjust around it. If not, no point in arguing otherwise.

If, when you say “inheritable” you mean “genetic” the simple fact that children tend to resemble their parents does not demonstrate that link.

The way people often end up thinking about these things is this: The less we know about the mechanism of children resembling the parents, the more we attribute that to genes, regardless of the actual material evidence for a genetic connection.

Then you look for the genes, and if you don’t find them, rather than simply saying “well, maybe it’s not genetic” you start to come up with some rather interesting models for how it can still be genetic even though a search for actual genes that cause the observed variation has failed again and again.

Along the way, people who really want the thing they are studying (like, for instance, intelligence) to be genetic say things in the papers they write like “It is presumed to be genetic” and after a decade of that people site those earlier papers and say “several papers have indicated that it is genetic” and after a decade of that people start to write in their papers that fail to find clear eveidence of a genetic connection things like “a vast literautre supports the idea tht this is genetic so our inability to see this must be because … [fill in the latest model for why the genes are invisible].

And if you say things like I just said, people say to you things like “your ruining science” or “you just need to come to terms with the truth” or “you have a political bias” or “show me the definitive prove of the abcence of this thing I can’t show you because we don’t know what it is” and so on and so forth.

And then, if someone like me suggests that maybe those who seem to really really need a gene that makes, typically, peole of dark skin seem inferior to them racist, which I do occasionally do, they say things like “erase where you said that or I’m going to sue you!!!11!! You’ll be hearing from my lawers!!!11!!

To which I say, “have your lawyer contact me at his or her earliest opportunity”

And then after that, nothing. Just a void where there used to be a raging angry white male.

Done.

I question your implicaiton that Rushton either has a handle on how evolution works, how human evolution has worked out historically, and especially, that he is not explicitly stating that there are different levels of “progress” in his “races.” To suggest what you are suggesting is to be very much in denial.

And I should let you know right away that I’m not interested in playing the game where we pretend we are having some kind of conversion and during that period of time you load your racist bullshit into a series of comments on my blog. You have your own blog. Don’t use mine. Not that I’m sure you were going to, but that is the usual pattern.

If, however, you post something on your own blog regarding what I’m saying over here, you are more than welcome to ping us and let us know! Maybe we can get an interbloggal conversation going.

I am familiar with the book. Again, Rhuston discusses differntial adaptation. That means different not better. The former is a scientific claim, the later a value-laden one. Teleological evolution — the sense in which you can speak of ‘progress’ and ‘being better’ and ‘moving towards something’ is a 19th century idea based on the something akin to Herbert Spencer’s progressive philosophy. Perhaps I missed where Rhuston argues a progressive evolutionary philosophy. So I was asking for a citation. The book you refer to does not discuss this. But maybe he did in the 80’s or some other time.