Evo and Proud has a sober "Editorial" where laments the death of Rushton and Jensen in 2012 and predicts the end of an era. His analogy with Eastern Europe under Stalin is appropiate and therefore the era we are entering now will end in the same way. Just as the nineteen century economic concepts of Marx became irrelevant with the development of new data and instruments of analysis, also the old HBD is becoming irrelevant and replaced by molecular genetics and population statistics. Now we talk of specific genes and their distribution overf time and over geography, without recurring to the hateful term "race". I am optimistic except that the capable fraction is decreasing all over. Yet civilization (as in "Gremlins") has such a momentum that it will take centuries to disappear. Then it will start again. The new Brahmins are already around, as observed by another giant who left us in 2012, Gore Vidal.
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Molecular genetics and population genetics haven't disproven the concepts of HBD or race. At least for the latter, they've confirmed it. One allele present in many populations at different frequencies doesn't tell you very much, but a the frequencies of a panel of 1000 alleles in different populations may be able to separate the populations nicely. 23andMe couldn't have an Ashkenazi ancestry detector if that were not the case.
The alleles being analyzed by historical population geneticists are pretty much all "junk DNA," not even protein-coding genes. Junk DNA may actually be very important, but we are only just now beginning to understand it. Even the study of protein-coding genes and their variants is in its early phase. We don't know every function or interaction that any gene or its protein can participate in, but as you can imagine, with 30,000-60,000 genes and a host of other interactive molecules, the number of potential interactions is immense. That may be another reason why there won't be many quick-fix scenarios for genetic engineering. It's one thing to correct a single point mutation in a gene causing a Mendelian disorder with a clear phenotypic association (e.g. sickle cell anemia). It's another thing to manipulate 5000 genes at multiple points with a far murkier understanding of the effects of any single tweak or the full suite of tweaks. The complex traits may not be easily manipulated at all, or it could take centuries to get it right rather than just screw around blind.
Something else you ignored from Frost's piece is that public academic discussion of genetic contribution to human behavioral traits is suppressed by the powers that be. That is the result of Leftist campaigns againt sociobiology starting in the 1970's and continuing into the 1980's. Science hasn't exactly moved where you think, J. It's still recovering from the beating it took from the cultural Marxists in their quest to eliminate "racism" from the academy. Read Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate for an account of the culture wars in biology during that period. Those lunatics treated harmless researchers like E.O. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein as if they were fire-breathing racists. It was incredibly malicious and destructive.
Look, we have no idea how to directly manipulate the genes that are responsible for various traits in dogs, yet just thru conventional breeding techniques, we have been able to emphasize or de-emphasize all sorts of physical traits and behaviors over the course of a number of generations. But this has never seriously been tried in humans except for "accidental" experiments such as the Ashkenazi Jews.
K
Controlled breeding experiments in humans are unlikely to be tried anytime soon. That's what you need to achieve big effects in selected traits over a relatively short period of time. Of course, dogs don't live as long as humans and have larger litters than humans, so the human breeding experiment would take a lot longer even if it did occur. Purebred dogs also have quite a number of health problems. That can be viewed as a trade-off for the desired traits, but that could be the case in humans also. If heterozygosity for the mutations that cause Tay-Sachs and idiopathic torsion dystonia really does promote intelligence among the relevant Ashkenazim, then you can already see evidence of that trade-off. Perhaps the fact that we Ashkenazim tend to be physically smaller and uglier than Northern Europeans is further evidence. All populations were subject to evolution over the same period that we were. Their mating strategies and environments just selected for different traits.
Frost's note is excellent and short, and did not touch the subject of dramatic reduction of the capable fraction in all human populations. It started among North Europeans but it has extgended all over the world, except Africa. I think Greg Cochran made an estimate how many years it will take to return to Middle Age levels (vide Clark). Anyway, we are about one hundred years into the reversal process. I think, the "data|" shows the opposite - but I dont believe in those strange F. effects. I wrote a note on how ridiculously wrong it is in La Plata, Argentina.
Ashkenazim tend to be physically smaller and uglier than Northern Europeans...
Speak for yourself. You can argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Many confuse beauty with neoteny and perhaps N. Europeans show more neoteny.
As for height, I don't know of any systematic studies. I suspect a lot of old country Ashkenazi shortness was due to malnutrition. My father's family ran short but my mother's (not coincidentally wealthier) family were quite tall, even by American standards.
K
My family has been in the U.S. for two to four generations, started lower working class and has ended up middle class to upper middle class. Most of us are still aignificantly shorter than the white American average, although we tend to be taller than the generation that immigrated here. So, there probably was a component of malnutrition, but heredity can't be ignored. Interestingly, the one taller branch of my family was quite poor in Eastern Europe compared to the wealthiest branch of my family, which was short.
Here's an article on height genetics (not at all in relation to Jews) if you're interested:
Common SNPs explain a large proportion of heritability for human height
Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't care for swarthiness, and my fellow Ashkenazim are definitely darker complected and darker-haired on average than are Northern Europeans on average.
"..the capable fraction is decreasing all over..."
I fear this might be true.
Modern society is replete with all sorts of gadgets which compensate for all sorts of incapacity; food stamps are an example which springs to mind, so are pocket calculators, spell-check devices, mechanised factories, automatic this and that, etc. Many of these are making their way into third-world societies.
One inevitable implication, it seems to me, is that it then becomes easier for low-IQ people to survive and breed, until the ratio of incompetent to competent people again reaches the limits of sustainability.
What, if any, are the eugenic forces countering this? Most highly intelligent people cannot bring themselves to believe in any external sources of morality or purpose, and become prey to selfishness and hedonism which discourage fecundity.
It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the only way to avoid a death spiral for civilised society is the application of highly eugenic human breeding programs, distasteful as this might seem.
Anon.
"..the capable fraction is decreasing all over..."
I fear this might be true.
Modern society is replete with all sorts of gadgets which compensate for all sorts of incapacity; food stamps are an example which springs to mind, so are pocket calculators, spell-check devices, mechanised factories, automatic this and that, etc. Many of these are making their way into third-world societies.
One inevitable implication, it seems to me, is that it then becomes easier for low-IQ people to survive and breed, until the ratio of incompetent to competent people again reaches the limits of sustainability.
What, if any, are the eugenic forces countering this? Most highly intelligent people cannot bring themselves to believe in any external sources of morality or purpose, and become prey to selfishness and hedonism which discourage fecundity.
It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the only way to avoid a death spiral for civilised society is the application of highly eugenic human breeding programs, distasteful as this might seem.
Anon.
Why not try to reduce dysgenic breeding by the low-IQ/highly impulsive population instead? For example, this could be achieved by requiring reversible sterilization for those receiving welfare benefits. The biggest problem with that specific policy would be that automation technology is going to replace jobs in the future, so even higher IQ and less impulsive people may be reduced to welfare. But that highlights that we don't need more people in the future. We need fewer dangerous, derelict people.
From where do you get the wrong idea that automation will decrease the need for people? There are more people working today that twenty years ago. Maybe in the industrial sector there will be need for less workers, like happened in agriculture, but overall there are new needs and new sectors.
Production today of many goods and services is most economically and least problematically achieved by machines, or, as an alternative, by human beings who resemble machines.
This is one of the reasons that jobs are being off-shored; workers in places like China, and especially Vietnam or Cambodia are least likely to be unionized, least likely to strike and are more likely to work in harsh conditions for a pittance.
Eventually, as mechanization technology proceeds apace, it will be preferable not to employ even these most compliant of people.
In the end, although the business of sheer survival will become easier and easier, it will be harder and harder to gainfully employ those with IQ's below, say, 95, ie most of humanity. In the West, it will be increasingly hard for those with IQ's below 105 to find good, secure jobs. Therefore, the survival of the lower IQ masses will depend on redistribution, and as long as there are leftwing governments, and food and energy are cheap and plentiful, and democracy continues, these people will be OK, and will proliferate.
But the rest of us, who have to pay for them, and manage their inadequacies and various pathologies, will not be OK.
This is what the election of Obama was all about, and the really frightening thing is not that it's not sustainable, it's that it might in fact be sustainable for quite a long time.
Anon.
There is not enough granularity to these analyses.
The intellectual upper, lower and middle classes are not monolithic.
Within the upper class, there is a large inert mass which believes in nossing, Lebovski! and is not reproducing, because it's bought into the dead Western progressive consumerist system. There is a small fraction which has combined intellectual ability and reasoning with life-sustaining faith, and IS reproducing. Their curves will intersect sooner rather than later. From this point, the power elite will be composed of intelligent people who believe in G-d in a very real way, and I doubt they will continue to subsidize the breeding and havoc of feral retards.
The middle stratum is in no danger of being overrun by robots any time soon. Show me the robot that can do the job of a welder, plumber, household mover, construction worker, electrician...intellectuals consistently underestimate the amount of brainwork it takes to do menial labor, and the amount of power possessed even by the average human brain. When you start thinking about what it would take to make a robot capable of playing a game of baseball on a normal baseball field, it is incredible. And we're talking about people whose ancestors trekked thousands of miles across the most varied terrain, fought off bands of savages and terraformed the land they found. This is no joke.
In a caravan, there is always a demand for mules. For all what bloggers like Steve Sailer write, the Mexican illegals pay their way and are no burden on the American economy. Moreover, the fifty million American Africans are mostly employed and working and as a class, they are not an unsufferable economic burden on the 12 xillion dollar US economy.
Illegal Mestizos aren't net taxpayers ; they consume roads schools hospitals. Not so amazing for the low-end wages around here either. Blacks' jobs are largely fake, certainly far from entirely.
Why should one particularly oppose dysgenic meltdown on account of a clear connection with the divine, or just the question of the divine, as opposed to my rather wan connection. As has been noted, the 'atheocracy' memeplex which leads people to favor or ignore dysgenesis is itself considerably religion-like. I don't necessarily expect thinking to get either better or worse as religion rises.
Mostly as a general note, while I have read Kaufmann or at least leafed around a great deal, and looked at some other sources, I haven't learned much about the psychology of the positive selection for religion. Which subcomponents are we getting, in which proportions -- Faith? Fervor/exaltation? Obedience? Very different valances, man.
But yes, the problem isn't so much econ, rather
-they vote
-they impact our gene and meme pools. The Black world is pretty cool in its way, just no replacement for the Berlioz requiem. Even at the middlebrow level, Black culture can be kind of dominating, having stronger 'superstimulus' aspects.
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