One need not psychological adaptation to change behavior. One only needs incentive. The same environment factor doesn’t capture unpredictable environments. Behaviors can change when exposed to new incentives even if the innate preference/personality doesn’t change. Significant droves to the Philippines can be explained by new incentives like overpopulation. The new incentive need only lead to irreversible consequences for it to be relevant. A required environmental effect of rumors of a Spice Island, for example, kickstarted Portuguese exploration westwards.

Spanish friars described early Filipino men initially as dressing up and doing the jobs of women. Filipinos also believed spirits came only to feminine mediums. Women had to be trained to be shamans but effeminate men automatically can be shamans although they don’t necessarily do.

I notice a current effort to create new definitions of intelligence, based on factors that make one successful in the 21st centuary western economy, rather than what were considered desirable in spearman’s day. Even in the space of artificial intelligence, generalized intelligence is not really a thing. A processing engine designed to solve one kind of problem suffers significant disadvantage when unleashed on another class of problems.

If shame (observed wrongdoing) is really more important in regulating crime rates in East Asian societies, I wonder if security cameras are more effective there than in the UK for example. Also, does the public accept them more there than they seem to do in many places in the USA and Canada?

I think their prevalence in the UK was originally justified on the basis of public safety from terrorism (initially the IRA) rather than as a general crime deterrent. I know that in South Korea there are cities that are under extensive video surveillance but I don’t know about in other East Asian countries. Are the justifications the same? Of course, comparing and contrasting crime statistics between South and North Korea would be especially interesting if such data were available.

Hence why I stated, one should look at the body of research about Korean adoptees, raised by white families in the US and Europe.

Peter Frost,
Here is a hypothesis on why emotion identification is poorly correlated with g.
Consider reading. Reading is a learned task but is somewhat correlated with g. Why? Because higher g individuals read more (aswell as improving more quickly for every hour of reading). Maybe emotion identification is likewise learned, or at least substantially so. Who, then, would learn to do it better than whom? My hypothesis is that it would be the shy. For shy people social interactions induce more stress and anxiety; the brains way of saying “pay attention! This is important.� Unlike whether one reads a lot, whether one is shy is probably not itself correlated with g.

Max Payne tries to prey on the white man‘s guilt by bringing up all those horrible things he knows the white man feels guilty about.

19.

The last sentence is quoteworthy, to say the least.

It is worth noting that attitudes toward lying and corruption really are primarily driven by environment. East Germans lie more than West Germans: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21607830-more-people-are-exposed-socialism-worse-they-behave-lying-commies . Or compare Singapore with mainland China. There may be some racially driven differences in flavor–e.g. I can’t yet rule out the hypothesis that East Asians may be more comfortable with draconian punishments than NW Europeans because, in a society of East Asians, they may be more necessary–but they are demonstrably of at most secondary importance here.

Construction and maintenance of high-trust environments is near, or arguably at, the top of the list of genuinely worthwhile social projects.

The American IQ, modular or otherwise, is nosediving. But not to worry — letting anybody into college and letting everybody pass every test so that they can graduate will solve the problem.

I lived in Northeast DC for over 20 years, 20 years ago, back when DC was Blacker and meaner. I was in the DC Guard which was a mostly Black outfit. I didn’t have a car and I walked the streets a lot. I am prefacing this to explain my experience. It is my suspicion that Black people are not as dumb as they test out to be. Patterns on paper and SAT testing is just not what they evolved for. Isn’t that part of the point of this article? If Middle easterners are better readers due to something that happened 6000 years ago, would not the same forces work on Blacks?Anyway I have always felt they put their mental powers into body language and tone of voice. They read your twitches like a book.Ha ha. Move your eyes twice and that means more to them than it does to you, a white guy lost in his abstractions. So if human intelligence is modular, have they done studies on reactions to body movements, stance, relaxation etc.? or how about reactions to modulations and tone of voice. If they did, I think Blacks would score the highest.

Wikipedia points us to a meta-review that calls into question the VWFA. Has this study been responded to? Or is it an old study that has been overturned by recent imaging advances?

Link to the skeptical study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811903000843

Terry says:
To me Blench leaves out a fourth factor, so important that it probably should be number 1. The ‘original’ Austronesians appear to have been the first group able to cross the Taiwan Strait. In other words they had developed a greatly improved boating technology. This allowed greater mobility, and would explain every other aspect of their expansion.

Not every other aspect- boating tech would be part of a mix among other factors. Frost’s idea of cultural orientations would be part of that mix.

EatCheese says:
I am guessing that agriculture started in places like the fertile crescent because of increasing population numbers.
Could be. Also agriculture was invented independently in several different locations.

Dave chamberlain says:
. So why you passed over the obvious primary reason for this expansion (higher intelligence) and emphasized the natural cultural results of it is beyond me.
There is no obvious reason that intelligence is the primary reason, when there are so many other key factors in the mix. Declining crop yields in an area can cause people to move locations- it does not require dramatic pictures of burgeoning ancient “g.” And how would intelligence in tropical Austronesians be measured circa lets say 5000-7,000 BC? And why would survival in the far north be an automatic indicator of high IQ, when it is tropical and sub-tropical populations that generated the primary innovations of more elaborate and advanced civilization? Frost is right to look at the broad cultural palette, avoiding simplistic, deterministic explanations.

WOW ! Did you even bother to carefully read my post ? I doubt it because I wasn’t making any statement at ALL or making ANY “assumptions” at all. I was merely asking Mr. Frost his ( not your ) opinion concerning some allegations ( which I believed to be false ) which I had read. I gather from the fractured syntax of your post that English is probably not your primary language. I would suggest that for YOUR benefit you might have someone better grounded in the English language read what you mistakenly believe to be an insulting comment before resorting to the flame thrower.

Yeah I laughed at the guilt part too. I have nothing against the white man and his culture but if the white man did feel guilt we wouldn’t have such great inventions such as nuclear weapons (in ludicrous apocalyptic amounts; as the rest of the planet struggles to feed itself), the Holocaust, colonialism, neocolonialism (because its not over just yet), commercial international slavery, and my personal favorite total war in the modern industrial era.

But its a good and very informative article irregardless of the examples used.

More and more anthropologists are taking a closer look at what happened just before the advent of farming, a period called the “Broad Spectrum Revolution�:

Fair enough.

But is that the whole story? Was farming the trigger for this chain of events?

Of course a farming “revolution” does not explain everything, and farming had to have its antecedents. It did not arise out of thin air obviously. Hence in the ancient Nile Valley a foraging, plant protection and herding culture preceded and worked parallel with agriculture before agriculture became dominant.

The Austronesian advantage seems to have been threefold: (1) a more flexible and innovative approach; (2) a less present-oriented time orientation that extended further into the past and the future; and (3) a less individualistic approach to life that made collective goods and goals more possible.

None of the above means farming was not a key component. Was farming the ONLy factor? Of course not- agreed. An entire cultural package is at work including economic and subsistence systems. As already noted there were MIXED farming foraging regimes as part of the package. The innovative approach is not at all incompatible with early farmers, and had to be used in successful farming. Less present time orientation applied in the modern sense is a bit dubious. A drive to found new settlements could just as well be driven by climate change, personal and group conflict and disease vectors, rather than any present time driven orientation. Collectivism likewise seems a stretch as a significant reason for the expansion.

We associate the dawn of civilization with a shift toward future time orientation and a resulting complexification of technology, yet this shift seems to have first begun among hunter-gatherers of the sub-Arctic, where the yearly cycle required development of technologies for storage, meat refrigeration, and heat conservation, as well as other means to collect unpredictable and widely dispersed resources. This ‘first industrial revolution’ pre-adapted early modern humans for later cultural developments in places farther south.

Things like “future time orientation” seem a stretch as far as a highly significant influence. Other factors like environmental change, or interpersonal/intergroup conflict can drive movement just as easily. In the tropical Nile Valley of southern Egypt and nearby regions the Badarians, who cluster with other tropical Africans in scholarly analyses of population affinity, ran a productive mixed economy and for their era, produced one of the highest population densities in the world (Pinhasi 2011). They did not need cold storage pre-planning and such.

And it is an open question whether non-tropical environments have unpredictable and widely dispersed resources. To the contrary the rich resource base of Europe from numerous aquatic resources in lakes and rivers, to equally rich plant and animal species made food resourcing quite stable and predictable. Lewin 1988 (In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 196-199) shows that far back in the European past, massive parts of Western Europe such as France enjoyed rich environmental conditions with numerous wild species to hunt- quote: “the Upper Paleolithic people of Western Europe probably enjoyed a greater degree of social-complexity than is projected by the simplistic hunter-gatherer model. They had a rich diversity of resources, and a high degree of stability and predictability of these resources year to year.” And not only animals but the wild ancestors of key food crops were in places such as chickpeas and wheat-like variants of spelt, etc. Even the far north, places like Sweden’s Iron Gates zone had rich lake and river fishing resources- amply supporting population. Nor were resources necessarily dispersed where peoples could not get to them. Indeed the many navigable waterways of Europe and other temperate regions FACILITATE communication, in contrast to many parts of Africa with sandbar, waterfall and cataract clogged rivers.

Overall I would agree that time orientation, etc played a part. Whether it is as dominant or significant as some people claim, remains an open question.

“Even if your Visual Word Form Area is completely destroyed, you can regain some reading ability, but you will never be able to read as well as before.”

Or else, those unused brain cells, when rewired towards other activities, might give one an edge in developing other kinds of talents to an extent that people with a fully functioning VWFA are unlikely to ever match.

I don’t know. Your counterexamples are not very convincing, but neither was the original assertion.

I think we need further studies to determine whether Asians feel more or less guilt independent of shaming.

According to you, Lance Armstrong must be an East Asian disguised as white man, who loves to cheat.

Joke aside. Opinion is opinion. Facts are based on data. Guilt is closed to related to empathy. Studies show prevalence of psycopathy for major ethnic groups as black > white > East Asian. psychopathy is defined by lack of empathy. Most animals in this world lack empathy. So most animals will not give a damn about others suffereing. The studies have been backed up by historical evidence like Hitler nazi germany, KKK, ect. The very fact slavery is form of lack of empathy. Let us fact it. When unfortunate people suffer, how guilty or how much empathy the most white people feel about them? Just ask youself and your common white friends.

Confucious teaching actually is most based on personal disciplines which only can be achieved by personal guilt and honor. When people like you make assumption about East Asian, it very much close to `whitchhunt’

Just be honest, how much of your assumption is based on your cherry picking? Have you compared it to how much white prevalence of cheating? If you did not do that, you know what is going in your own mind. Sour grape? Studipity? or just whitch hunt? or just believe the world as you wish?

Fantastic post! This is very educational.

“This is the case with private crimes that we refer to as “corruption”.’ Would this also refer to such activities as cheating on tests, false credentials and resumes ? I have read accusations of that type of activity and have tended to dismiss them as “sour grapes”.

One way to locate these genes is through genome-wide association studies. We look at the various alleles of genes whose locations are already known, typically SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), and see whether this source of variability correlates with variability in a mental trait. If we find a significant correlation, the genes for that trait must be nearby.

You have to be assuming no assortative mating (and no linkage disequilibrium) here. If guys with big feet always marry blondes, then blonde phenotype will correlate with big foot alleles, whether or not they are close to one another.

How do you explain Asian adoptees’ lower crime rates, despite being raised without that kind of family discipline?

If I understand correctly, the point is not that without the allele(s) you couldn’t read or write at all but that it would be much harder for you. And Africans are not known for their exceptional literary abilities.

If it evolved in the Middle East, how come Africans can read?

Interesting. I always assumed that reading ability was a kind of side effect of something else that was selected for. Now it seems actually possible that being a bookworm was a selection advantage in and of itself… (Or maybe no. Maybe just having better than average reading ability was a selection advantage, and bookworms are the homozygous ones, and it’s only a heterozygous advantage.)

I find it interesting that anthropologists make wild assumptions of evolutionary/cognitive advancement based out their prejudices about what human collective process is more ” civilised” than another.
There is no evidence to suggest that hunter gatherers were/are less developed in any way than agriculturally based collections if human beings
One can argue that both mechanisms for survival are equally damaging to their environment and to sustainability – not just for Homo sapiens but to other species
Equally annoying is the human-centric approach to changes in the planet we inhabit along with the dangerously and rapidly reducing number of other species.
When are we going to get truly non-homocentric analysis of this worlds precarious state?
Civilisational Advancement is a myth perpetuated by human centric subjective analysis.

Peter: I realize that many people in the HBD community see the g factor as the prime mover and shaker in human evolution. I humbly disagree. The g factor explains a lot but there is still a lot, mentally speaking, that remains unexplained. Certain mental traits, like face recognition, are not explained at all by ‘g’ and others overlap ‘g’ to varying degrees.

g is not necessarily the prime mover in population differences in our history.

what g is, is categorically better. More reliable, larger and faster memory, faster processing. There’s no downside (except perhaps a higher calorie consumption).

By contrast, take “time preference”. What is a “high time preference” when you take out the element of it being a consequence of a rational actor being able to conceive of and predict the future, which is surely the province of g?

It is an irrational instinct to wait, be patient, to defer, to not follow through immediately on your impulses, to think of far future schemes, to have babies tomorrow rather than today. That is not necessarily going to be something that is always an advantage, even in a slow moving agriculture society (let alone today).

(And if we remove time preference from both empathy and g, it could be seen even less favourably – if you’re deferring activity, and you’re not focusing on the here and now of your community, and it’s not because you care, and it’s not because you’re smart, is that likely to be a good thing? the world has enough dumb and self interested people who make far fetched schemes for the future).

“Again, you’re underestimating the psychological and behavioral barriers. Farming isn’t really that complicated. If the mechanics of farming were the only obstacle, it should have happened much earlier.”

That’s my point I think – the idea that some particularly valuable stationary food source may have acted as a kind of gravitational force strong enough to bend “normal” behavior over time.

There’s a good documentary about troops of Macaque monkeys fighting over a fig tree in Sri Lanka that illustrates the point.

I envisage foragers around a site with a food source like this and the site gaining religious significance over time and eventually priests and the priests developing agriculture through tending the trees.

(I’d guess the northern equivalent of figs, dates, apples, pears etc would be oak trees and acorns.)

(The sea is a variant of this fixed food source idea (ish) in this case tying people to the sea.)

Truly a fascinating point in time we know almost nothing about. I appreciate your efforts but have to disagree with your emphasis. You start with citing an incredibly important paper (Hawks et all., 2o07) which laid out that human evolution accelerated one hundred fold 10,000 years ago. Your map clearly shows an amazing expansion via boats. I have studied boat building, open water navigating, and food exploitation of the sea and let me tell you something they all require. Ingenuity resulting from higher intelligence. Surviving in the far north also required high intelligence as you have stated. We have an obvious driver of higher intelligence for people that successfully survive in these environments. You screw up in either location and you are dead. More and more we see a clear picture of expansion from environments that rewarded high intelligence. Even the original occupation of the Americas came from people that had long resided in Beringia, if that wasn’t a tough place to live that required higher intelligence I don’t know where would. But then they got to two unoccupied continents and what can go up because of increased pressure can also go down when it stops. This is insulting the Amerinds so I should include for their sake that idiocracy has never had a better time to survive and spread than the present. So why you passed over the obvious primary reason for this expansion (higher intelligence) and emphasized the natural cultural results of it is beyond me. Still, I like your thoughts and enjoyed your paper.

“I am guessing that agriculture started in places like the fertile crescent because of increasing population numbers.”

I think it started around pre-existing sources of very high value foraged food sources like a valley with a lot of fig trees, dates, pears or apples. The local hunter-gathers might still need to be nomadic but centered around the high value resource.

For example Jericho is one of the oldest inhabited sites and known as the “City of Palm Trees” (so dates?)

If people are already sedentary or partially so then the step to farming is lower.

The Melanesian/Papuan/Aboriginal populations from Southeast Asia and Australia always striked me as the most primitive population of humans on this planet.

What I want to know is who decided to grow this instead of that? I want to know who the poor slob was that had to taste all the plants and determine which one was was worth eating. “Yup, oh that one sucks, let’s call it ‘Brussel Sprouts’, but that one is good we’ll call it a ‘Lemon’!”
Current thought has it that wheat bread was invented by the Egyptians sometime at the beginning of the pharonic era, but the best part is that bread was invented as a by-product of making beer. Now that’s priorities! I love anthropology, it’s like studying the science of used car salesmanship.

I am guessing that agriculture started in places like the fertile crescent because of increasing population numbers. Since the land was already plentiful the growing populations could have led to more pressure to find new food sources as the traditional ones would start to dwindle, also the higher population densities could have made communicating innovations like agriculture easier to do.

To me Blench leaves out a fourth factor, so important that it probably should be number 1. The ‘original’ Austronesians appear to have been the first group able to cross the Taiwan Strait. In other words they had developed a greatly improved boating technology. This allowed greater mobility, and would explain every other aspect of their expansion. Other points:

“That makes sense to me if their main advantage was innovation and an ability to throw human lives away on ludicrously long shot voyages”.

I don’t think they were prepared ‘to throw human lives away on ludicrously long shot voyages ‘. Certainly in the wider Pacific uninhabited islands were probably discovered by accident but their colonising voyages were obviously well planned. That had almost certainly been the case during their earlier ‘training runs’ in island Southeast Asia.

“Interestingly, in Fiji and some other islands proximate to Papua New Guinean, the first Polynesians / Austronesians seem to have been replaced by Melanesian horticulturalists”‘

Yes, and yet it is surprising the number of people who refuse to see things that way. To me it is obvious that the Melanesian element in the Remote Pacific is a product of later movement, not an ‘original’ population there.

The ‘agricultural revolution’ gave us agro-monoply. GMO crops baby, it’s the non-nutritional wave of our bleak future.

Peter,
are you aware of Michael Witzel’s theory of ‘Laurasian’ mythology emerging from a ‘Pangaean’ substrate? I can think of one or two problems, for examplke Berezkin finds some Laurasian-type mythemes absent in parts of the supposedly ‘Gondwanan’ Americas. But Witzel is at least broadly supported by the data when he separates Laurasian from Gondwanan mythology, and this outline should be interesting for you to interpret yourself.

http://koenraadelst.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/globalization-of-mythology.html

The shift to farming was not overnight. Long after cultivation, people in subsistence societies such as the Olmecs continued to depend upon wild resources. Its been suggested that the builders of Gobekli Tepe were in a transitional phase in the Near East where incipient agriculture was coexistent with hunting.

That was a very interesting post.

M, much of sub Saharan Africa remained uncolonised and unexplored well into the 19th century of course. Madagascar was empty, it was a jackpot.

In S America there are two similar species of rainforest monkeys the Howler and Spider. Howler monkeys just browse on leaves in the canopy, while Spider monkeys eat fruit and nuts, which have to be foraged for. Spider monkey brains are proportionately twice as big as Howlers monkeys.

Hunting Reindeer and other mobile animals in the the northern wastes of Eurasia would require a lot of thought about likely places to find prey, their order of priority, how long to spend looking in one area before moving on, if a risky short cut was worth it and how far to push on away from the camp. I like Linda Gottfredson’s theory that intelligence developed to get people though tasks without unfavourable outcomes that could involve a danger of premature death.

A hunter who is unsuccessful might well alter strategy and take more risks . He might decide to cross a dangerous river or travel further than is wise. He could get caught in a blizzard or injured.

Interestingly, in Fiji and some other islands proximate to Papua New Guinean, the first Polynesians / Austronesians seem to have been replaced by Melanesian horticulturalists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Fiji

The Austronesians (who seem like roughly a sort of robust Taiwanese origin East Asian) apparently moved east quite quickly. Not much direct competition with Melanesian horticulturalists.

In a similar way, we see Austronesian partial replacement in Madagascar* where it seems likely that these were Bantus who brought pastoralism, amongst other new crops, to the island and probably cognitive and social adaptations to pastoralism, but did not move in large enough numbers or have a decisive enough advantage to either establish a separate community of institute language switch. See – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903192/

And a lot more total replacement in Western mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.

(http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/a-twist-in-austronesian-origins.html).

That makes sense to me if their main advantage was innovation and an ability to throw human lives away on ludicrously long shot voyages. Colonist optimised versions of humanity. Perhaps a very extreme version of the migrant personality type theorised to be linked to DRD4? Not really advantaged away from the edge of the frontier (perhaps there are analogies to some other subgroups of humanity who have recently expanded from migrations).

*Obvious question – Why did the Austronesians stop at Madagascar, if they had any advantages over mainland Bantus? Answer: they probably didn’t have any advantage.

Does it hurt to bite your tongue so hard?

Reading the Stormfront comments makes me doubt this guy's validity as a researcher. He seems like a real oddball with open personal motives. While the paper seems sound on certain variables like height, skin color and crime, it makes me question other aspects, like IQ.

He was able to translate REB into japanese, and possibly this paper as well, but his english is terrible in the SF thread, and the fact he'd even comment on a site as horrible as that says something about his social awareness. He also calls REB a great book and Lynn's work heroic, and seems to have a grudge against the Chinese and Koreans:

" I know the Chinese are more openly proud of their higher intelligence (with scarce creativity). I am very proud of Japanese subculture of Anime and Manga and other subcultures than Pan East Asian Confucious total ;****!!"

" Hope that you white gays understand the racial difference that Chinese and Koreans are smartest to learn anything but least creative and contributing almost nothing to human culture , probably because of the widely and longly -accepted Confuciusism . period. "

More proud of japanese cartoons and comics than the Confucian legacy, and while believes koreans and chinese are smarter than japanese, contribute almost nothing to human culture because of Confucianism. There's some truth in that of course, but to that extent?

I love controversial, if it's intelligent. But this is bad science, because a "Darwinian" paper should not invoke non-Darwinian standard of IQ. When using standard IQ, one should know that average IQ in a poopulation is the best Darwinian IQ to have, as the lowest and highest have the least reproductive success. In short, the IQ test should be restructured in evolutionary terms. This Dane reminds me of Geoffrey Miller (even looks like him), an evolutionary psychologist who mostly doesnt know what he's talking about.

What did the sneaky eskimo wizards think? That's the $64 question.

"This is contrary to the genetic evidence, which shows that human evolution actually accelerated after the Pleistocene, this being a time when humans were moving into new cultural environments and not new physical environments."

Everywhere?

I think the r/k idea is very useful if you look at it in terms of how long ago different populations shifted from r to k and look at it in terms of the *proportions* of r and k behavior within a population.

e.g. (possibly) Burakamin, Paekchong, Cagots etc

.

"It seems to me Britain is the country that is furthest along the Western irreligious path. So why does it not have a birthrate as low as Japan (even allowing for immigration I don't think it does)."

Some of it is immigration but a lot is the beautiful chavs.

The elite's immigration policy on its own has the effect of slowly wiping out the indigenous working class population but their welfare policies which subsidize large immigrant families have back-fired to a certain extent because the English working class were still half-savage before the immigration genocide began and so some of them have reverted back to r type behavior very rapidly under the incentive of the welfare policies.

.

"why would governments want to increase their non-immigrant community birth rates?"

They didn't. It was a mistake and there's a lot of gnashing of teeth in the media about it – entirely directed at chavs and not at all at the large immigrant families on welfare.

Asia is a big place and history is quite long.

"I write what I believe, and I believe what I write."

I never meant to imply otherwise! Still, I do find you very slightly cryptic. One has to read through a few of your posts on the same topic to realize where your points and values are. Under circumstances I'm more accustomed to, clarity, conciseness, and economy of words serve an author better – but I no longer believe that to be the case in the soft sciences.

The comment about the age of the internet is spot on and the rise of 'SWJs'(social justice warriors) – officially approved online bullies – is suspicious for that reason.

The internet undermined the familiar two-step seen in the mainstream media by allowing dissident opinions a wider audience, then along came SWJs harassing sanctioned targets in an attempt to silence people outside of the old two-step.

It looks like someone is playing dirty.

It's drawing to a close. They are forced to wield their authority more and more blatantly because their power is waning. Accusations of racism are gradually becoming passe, and more and more people are realizing that there *is* no way to actually answer the meat of Nyborg's predictions.

Nyborg's problem (and in a way, its a virtue that he has it) is that he is oblivious to the demands of the Zeitgeist. Right now, people are getting wise, but they're not ready to admit that they're wise. That's why, say, Satoshi Kanizawa got stepped on, while, say, Jonathan Haidt didn't. Consider this interview with Haidt…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=n9kJkuuedw0&t=248

…and you'll see that Nyborg could have said everything he liked, so long as he had been polite and very slightly cryptic. Our own Peter Frost, incidentally, has this attitude down rather well.

So I believe that we could all stand to practice a bit more subtlety – especially since they have already lost. The science is in, and now that we live in the age of the Internet, they can't stop the science getting out. After all, considering that we've all quietly saved our personal copy of Nyborg's article, how many more people do you think will read it once it has been officially disappeared? None? Oh, how they wish.

"be careful not to do your good deeds when no one is watching you"

Those environmental activists are saying 'look at me' I'm such a nice person which = good reputation. Altruistic behaviour gets you a good reputation, which gets you what you want. Once western societies moved from low trust to high trust there was an increased need to acquire a good reputation.

If it was parasitic castration people would be altruistic even if it got them a bad reputations. No chance. 99.99 % of people fake it, because someone is watching. It's only the odd person like Lovelock who is for real.

The driving force in western policy is an altuistic arms race. Symmetrical schismogenesis, or runaway sexual selection if you prefer.

This is nonsense of course, unless you're using "altruism" as a euphemism for parasitic castration.

I have no idea whether projections based on the current scientific concensus on climate change (as articulated by Lovelock) are correct. But if projections of global warming research were held to the standard Nyborg's paper has been we would not be hearing anything about the consequences of climate change.

Society does not work like Daisyworld, no socio-political homeostatic correction to population flows can be expected to halt the exodus from poor countries. The driving force in western policy is an altuistic arms race. Symmetrical schismogenesis, or runaway sexual selection if you prefer.

And that is why it is a terrible mistake from that Nyborg's own standpoint to talk about IQ in the way he did. Western intellectuals will veiw it as a naive claim to privileged access.

You can also hit him up on twitter @oestergaard

I've asked him whether he's going to respond to Dr Frost or Dr Thompson and linked their respective letters.

From what I understand, Lovelock still maintains dire predictions, despite saying that he was a bit alarmist.

James Lovelock admits he was 'alarmist' about the impact of climate change. He is an impressive man, but he and the scientists he was basing his predictions on got it wrong.

So what is the difference between academic climate scientists and Nyborg. Why has no-one has called for climate change science papers to be removed and the scientists who wrote them to be disciplined? They used some incorrect calculations in their projections too. Come to think of it has there ever been a scientific journal review article which did not in some sense have "a reference which did not support the data it indicated to support"?

Collier had in interesting little anecdote about going to Haiti after the earthquake to put his ideas into practice. He managed to get people interested in setting up a factory on a site away from the devastation. He was well pleased at being able to help Haitians build up their own country. Then some shy lizards were found and media savvy environmentalist uproar followed.

Environmentalism is a way to show what a nice person you are. Nicer that other whites. Championing non-whites is a way to do this like caring about lizards when white economists are trying to create economic development for Blacks. 'Be be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.' And make no mistake, the white elite are going to destroy their people in altruistic competition, because someone is always watching them.

Marshal McLuhan suggested that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme".

The overheating medium of white altruism is the the real global warming.

Sean,

What's your point regarding climate change and Lovelock?

Also, do you agree with Lovelock's dire predictions?

Anonymous, whoever they are (V perhaps?) has just brought up a good point.

Many kids beginning university have experienced overprotective family homes and an upbringing that prevented an earlier and supervised experimentation with relationships or alcohol, before they were effectively dumped into an environment of promiscuity and drunkenness with little to no intervention by authority figures to prevent things going too far.

If the dumbness of co-ed and especially of allowing mixed dorms doesn't prove the point I have just made, then I don't know what would.

Peter, even if it weren't for the political bias on campus please remember that for many young people going to a real life university is extremely stressful for the same reasons that many gifted people couldn't stand school.

I also think it obvious that anyone praising the social life at university as something beneficial for young adults has their rose tinted spectacles on.

The data from the UK suggests that bullying is as rife as bias in such places, something which comes along with any space where young people are pressured to socialise within artificial groups, and is associated with youth suicides. On top of that is the infamous student lifestyle which is so obnoxious it shouldn't really be tolerated among anyone. Given the well known problems that are caused by drink and promiscuous sex, university life is especially harmful as a social environment for young people whose brains are still growing – a process which continues into peoples twenties. On such grounds I certainly wouldn't want my own children to be surrounded by peer pressure to behave in such a way as soon as they leave home.

Besides the main reason for universities now being political, most students themselves would be better off elsewhere for their own sakes. I actually don't see why no one else is honest about this.

Young people don't go to university simply to get a degree. They also go there to build social networks (and meet members of the opposite sex).

This is a recent development though. Major universities only became co-ed within the past few generations. Women only started attending universities in large numbers recently.

Regarding the Europa Soberana site, I should stress that although certain phenotypes and traits are locally more common in certain regions and absent in others, such types are not strictly the same thing as races.

Nonetheless if we look at the high percentages of Mongoloid autosomes among the Ainu or the Mamanwa, in spite of them retaining their distinctively non-Mongoloid phenotypes, it helps us to understand how Alpinoid types can still exist in Europe and yet remain so superficially distinct from their Nordic and Mediterranean neighbours, even though the genetic evidence does not demonstrate a vast difference between the neighbouring populations of Europe.

Just as the appearance of the Ainu and Mamanwa peoples demonstrates their descent from non-Mongoloid ancestors, so the phenotype of the modern Alpines is modified from that of pre-Neolithic European populations similar to the Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnon and the well known Iberomaursian North Africans whose own ancestors had arrived from southern Europe.

There is an obvious reason why the Alpine and related types are so markedly concentrated in the mountains and other remote places such as Lapland.

Mr Frost,

You wrote,

"I resisted the temptation to write something like: “I disagree with what he says, but I defend his right to say it.� That goes without saying. Just as physicians must swear the Hippocratic Oath, academics are supposed to defend the marketplace of ideas."

I do not comprehend how it "goes without saying" that you "disagree with what he says." Have you written a technical analysis of Nyborg's work and published it elsewhere?

You have assessed the two technical complaints of the Danish committee, so you do not appear to have any remaining objections to Nyborg's work. Is this correct? Are the findings of his research accurate, or not? With what do you disagree?

-Keith Erick Fix

technical trifle: the picture above of Morten Østergaard has ~6MB, though ~60KB should be enough–it's quite a drag on a mobile phone. You might want to resize your online pictures before uploading.

Evoandproud, What do you think of this?

http://europasoberana.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/the-new-racial-classification-i.html

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science

"ACCORDING to Morten Østergaard, Danish Minister for Science, Innovation and Higher Education, social sciences and the humanities play a very important part in our search of solutions to current and future societal challenges.
– In order to develop solutions to large challenges of society, such as for instance climate changes or an older population, we need knowledge about our society and about human behaviour and interaction from different perspectives."

In April 2009 James Lovelock gave a lecture in Dublin. In it he said that most countries would be uninhabitable by 2100; that billions would head for Ireland and Britain The Irish and British would have to kill the climate change migrants to repel the invasion. Helmuth Nyborg predicted a change in his country's circumstances. James Lovelock did something similar, and then went much further inasmuch as he actually talked about the inevitability of mass killing of those attempting to immigrate into Britain.

Paul Collier "specialist in the political, economic and developmental predicaments of poor countries": Exodus– Migration from poor to rich countries accelerates. Equilibrium will not be reached for 100 years. The single most important reason for immigration is the existence of diasporas. The poorest counties are going to empty of those who can afford the investment to leave. The diaspora lowers all costs of immigration. Hence acceleration. 40% in poor countries say they want to leave.

Bias is rife and expected on campus but there is light at the end of the tunnel for human biodiversity researchers like Nyborg bcause thankfully the age of the old, expensive brick and mortar universities is coming to an end. Although society might find them useful for disseminating its approved worldviews but, for better or for worse, cost effectiveness is what counts the most to the people who actually matter.

Without brick and mortar universities the political bias would have to evaporate because interpersonal contact is necessary to maintain the bias in two ways.
The first way involves contact between the impressionable students and certain radicalised professors who are out to promote agendas to them. Besides this creepy, grooming-like behavior (some professors actually sleep with their students despite the power imbalance) the second method is the purposeful creation of a biased atmosphere so that student activism is tolerated only if it is directed towards pre-approved causes that some have called 'Cultural Marxist' – that is, anti-racism, homosexual and transgender rights, pro-choice feminism etc.

Not long ago I read a paper on the attitudes of college (ie. university) students in the USA and not surprisingly young people holding certain political or social views are more likely to drop out of college. This naturally leads to an atypical skewing of attitudes among university students and graduates – the people with the degrees required to be affect the direction of society, with the outcome that American graduates are so out of touch. Although universities are supposed to uphold diversity there is no measure taken to counter this for the exact same reason they would crack down on students holding a harmless 'White Pride day'.

Once the real life universities are converted to housing those people will no longer be able to abuse their position as a means to indoctrinate young students with politics, let alone purposefully manage and uphold on purpose such a hostile atmosphere.

I would suggest also emailing your letter to Danish newspapers and journalists. Let them know that from the outside it appears they appear to be becoming totalitarian.

Others might want to look at posting on Danish blogs.

I'd also recommend Dr James Thompson's posts on the matter.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/was-scientific-dishonesty-minister.html

A commenter notes Steven Pinker's defense of Nyborg a few years ago in relation to gender differences.

"letter Pinker wrote in his defense a couple of years ago:

I am writing to protest the shocking and disgraceful treatment of Dr. Helmuth Nyborg following publication of his report on possible gender differences in average IQ scores. Dr. Nyborg may be mistaken, but the issue he is addressing is a factual one, and can only be evaluated by an open examination of the evidence. To “investigate� him, shut down his research, or otherwise harass him because his findings are politically incorrect is unworthy of an institution dedicated to the understanding of reality. It is reminiscent of the persecution of Galileo, the crippling of Soviet science and agriculture under Lysenko, and the attempt of the American religious right wing to inhibit the teaching of evolution in the schools.

No one has the right to legislate the truth. It can only be discovered by free inquiry, and that includes investigations that may make people uncomfortable. This is the foundation of liberal society, and it is threatened by attempts to interfere with Dr. Nyborg and his research. If he is incorrect, that will be established by a community of scholars who examine his evidence and arguments and criticize them in open forums of debate, not by the exercise of force to prevent him from pursuing his research. These are the tactics of a police state, and bring shame on any institution that uses them."

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/helmuth-nyborg-gets-watsond.html

Regarding long term population projections, there is a difference between projecting large long-settled populations and small groups of recent immigrants to the Denmark. Like Turks in Germany, the second generation behaves reproductively like the natives.

BTW, UN projections come in several levels: high, low, etc. and the reasons and estimated probabilities are well explained.

Second, if the idea was to provoke debate, it was not presented as such but as scientific research. It should have concluded that immigration must be stopped or something like that, which is a legitimate political position, and not to camouflage itself as a scientific research paper. A scientist can be wrong, but must have, above all, integrity.

Kudos for writing this, Peter.

"Provocation is no science."

Science cannot move forward without free inquiry. The forced removal of already-published articles from scientific literature impedes free inquiry. It's retroactive censorship. It's very likely that the motivation for this was political. That makes it worse.

"I'd like to know how he extrapolated demographic data two or three generations ahead."

Would you like to address the same question to the UN? Here's a publication of theirs called "World Population to 2300". Here are the World Bank's population projections till 2050. Population projections are quite common. I'm under the impression that most countries' statistics ministries do them.

Normally statisticians either extrapolate from current trends or try to predict how these trends will change in the future.

Provocation is no science.

Clearly you have not heard of Lysenko. Consensus is not science.

I'd like to know how he extrapolated demographic data two or three generations ahead.

Need I suggest that you read the paper?

Scientific papers are published with a view to provoking debate.

I thought the idea was to advance knowledge.

Provocation is no science.

I'd like to know how he extrapolated demographic data two or three generations ahead.

I assume that the term 'church' includes any place of workship, e.g. Buddhist and Shinto temples.

I don't think there is a mandatory or encouraged weekly service in Buddhism or Shinto like there are in Abrahamic religions, so this data may not be very useful here.

Anon, assuming there was any available method for a modern democracy to do it–dubious; why would governments want to increase their non-immigrant community birth rates?

I never said they wanted to. I said that Japan and the West differ due to the West's heterogeneity.

BBC Radio interview with Eamonn Fingleton start at 6min 10 secs here Slow to load, but he makes some interesting points including US superiority in economic growth being an illusion created by services such as lawyers and population growth.
"JAPAN'S … adopted a policy of population reduction. This was kicked off with the Eugenic Protection Act of 1948." (Japan was the first country outside USSR to legalise abortion).

Anon, assuming there was any available method for a modern democracy to do it–dubious; why would governments want to increase their non-immigrant community birth rates? Like Japan Britain and the US have no Empire to populate. Unlike Japan, there is not much manufacturing, the costs of which are too high because of Western governments governments' policy. Their countries have 'green' high cost energy while they sell cheap energy at massive profit. See here and here.

Like Peter said, governments go for economic growth and the only way they know and like (one which acts retroactively on immigration and native birthrate) is: pump up the housing market. "THIRD, there would have been efforts to spur another round of high economic growth through easy credit and deregulation, like the Bush Boom of the past decade. Such a boom would have done little to raise the average worker’s wage, while doing a lot to spur another influx of low-wage labor for work in construction, agriculture, and services … to mow the lawns of the rich and to build them ever more monster homes."

The main difference between left and right is that the right tend to procede by hysterical boom and bust.

Is it true that Okinawans have a higher birthrate than the Yamato Japanese on the mainland?

And is it also true that they have a higher level of religiosity expressed by the Ryukyuan folk religion?

The first question is about a mainland Japanese stereotype about Okinawans (which are actually similar to English stereotypes about the neighbouring Welsh), and the second one is my impression from reading anthropology texts.

What we're seeing in Japan is happening in Western countries. Japan is farther down the road because most of the population has no religion or belief system that can stop this behavior from getting out of hand. In Japan, like in the West, a genuine sexual/procreative relationship is becoming too expensive for most people.

Right. It's a similar situation. Young men
can't afford to form a family. The difference is that Japan is racially and ethnically homogeneous, and the differences in reproductive rates are still largely confined within the same group. While the West is no longer homogeneous, and you have a situation where certain people, ethnicities, and races are making out like bandits while native Western reproduction falls. So in the West, this situation can't even be addressed completely honestly, as that would mean acknowledging what amounts to a breeding competition taking place, and because those who are making out like bandits have a genetic interest in this situation not being addressed.

"The climate is milder in southern Japan, and farmers have less need to store food for the lean times of winter and early spring. Consequently, they tend to live more in the present and don’t plan ahead as much."

The behavioural trait most relevant to acting with a view to future resources is anxiety. Lynn: "North East Asians obtain higher scores on anxiety than Europeans".

Commentary on this abstract, please? Although this paper isn't attributing mate selection directly to a specific infection, it still suggests that a history of childhood infections (such as diarrhoea) has a long term affect upon mate selection later in life.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381300069X

Also returning to the subject of the Japanese birthrate, and also those of the UK, a long life expectancy may determine abstainence from sex (or, at least, from reproduction). In the UK people from 'chav' backgrounds often and unfortunately have relatively high and early mortality due to their following unhealthy lifestyles. Where people are growing up seeing their relatives die of lung cancer and heart disease at a comparatively early age, a presumption of their own early mortality will have an effect upon their procreative rates.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513813000779

"It seems to me Britain is the country that is furthest along the Western irreligious path. So why does it not have a birthrate as low as Japan (even allowing for immigration I don't think it does)."

Chavs.

A certain segment of the white population is capable of moving further into the r-selected spectrum than Japanese people are willing to go. Chavs aren't having tons of kids, but they are having kids that they can't afford to provide the very best for.

This might be a coincidence or a product of non HBD related circumstances though.

It seems to me Britain is the country that is furthest along the Western irreligious path. So why does it not have a birthrate as low as Japan (even allowing for immigration I don't think it does).

I'm not saying it's the only or even main factor, but Japanese are mechanistic in their cognition and technologically adept. By my way of thinking that has something to do with Japan's materialism and its low birthrate. Wealthy materialistic countries have low birthrates, but is there a line of causation there, or are both just reflections of a certain personality type?

Not eating or having sex may be related to self control, needed to plan ahead

I would bet for a combination of asymmetric cultural transmition (mothers have more influence in their kinds than fathers) and an oversupply of males.

Suicide is commoner in the north, I bet anorexia is too. (Women in Japan are consuming fewer calories than they did in WW2.)

Not eating or having sex may be related to self control, needed to plan ahead. Anorexics avoid sex.

Letter of apology by Dr Satoshi Kanazawa. Like he enjoyed that.

I think he did enjoy the whole episode. Like I said, he deliberately poses as a renegade scientist who says provocative things. It's clearly affected.

Slightly OT, but nonetheless an interesting article about Japan in The Guardian today: young people under 40 "have stopped having sex" according to the article; the country is going through a bizarre period where young men and women loathe intimacy and sex and actively avoid romance.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

And especially this bit.

Letter of apology by Dr Satoshi Kanazawa. Like he enjoyed that.