Tag Archives: Culture Wars

Jerusalem sites sprayed with anti-Christian graffiti

open quoteVandals sprayed anti-Christian graffiti on a monastery and a Christian cemetery in Jerusalem overnight, in two apparent “price-tag” attacks, police told AFP on Wednesday.

“Overnight, graffiti was sprayed on the gates of the entrance of the Armenian cemetery reading ‘Jesus is a son of a bitch’ in Hebrew, and on a monastery belonging to the Greek Orthodox saying the same thing,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Samri said the attackers also wrote “Happy Hannukah” and “price tag” at the second site, the Valley of the Cross monastery, and slashed the tyres of nearby cars.

“Price tag” is a euphemism for revenge hate crimes by Israeli extremists, which normally target Palestinians and Arabs.

Initially carried out in retaliation for state moves to dismantle unauthorised settler outposts, they have become increasingly unrelated to any specific government measures.

The attacks tend to involve the vandalism or destruction of Palestinian property and have included multiple arson attacks on cars, mosques and olive trees.close quote (Read more)

Religion and Genetics

open quoteReligious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain ‘religiosity’ gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of ‘cultural hitchhiking’, whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.

Keywords: religion; fertility; evolution; genetic predisposition; cultural hitch-hiking; evolutionclose quote


rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/01/07/rspb.2010.2504.full.pdf

How research changed my mind to overcome the “all races are equal” dogma

open quoteI grew up indoctrinated by political correctness. Like a large part of citizens in Western countries I was brainwashed: Races do not exist, all are equal. Saying anything different, saying that there are racial differences, is racism, a crime.

In school I heard disparaging remarks about Artur Jensen and other “unscientific” “dishonest” “cheating” scientists doing faulty research about race differences.

The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray actually looked fairly convincing to me, but if even President Bill Clinton denounced it, there must be something wrong about it.

There always was some complex theory to explain away the IQ differences:

– different culture
– parental expectation
– mother’s malnourishment
– IQ measurements are racially and culturally biased

My opinion changed when I read about trans-racial adoption studies. That was the last drop that really disproved all these desperate attempts to explain away racial differences in intelligence.

“The best evidence for the genetic basis of race-IQ differences comes from trans-racial adoption studies of Oriental children, Black children, and Mixed-Race children. All these children have been adopted by White parents at an early age and have grown up in middle-class White homes.”

Chart 9 summarizes the results for Oriental children adopted into White middle-class homes.
Korean and Vietnamese babies from poor backgrounds, many of whom were malnourished, were adopted by White American and Belgian families. When they grew up, they excelled in school. The IQs of the adopted Oriental children were 10 or more points higher than the national average for the country they grew up in. Trans-racial adoption does not increase or decrease IQ. The three-way pattern of race differences in IQ remains.”

In plain English: adopted Asian babies grew up to be very bright, adopted black babies grew up to have low intelligence.

One more desperate argument that was posed to save the “racial equality” dogma:

They claimed “expectancy effects,” not genes, explained the pattern. They argued that the Black and White children were not treated the same. Even if parents took good care of their children, the schools, classmates, and society as a whole discriminated against Black children and this hurt their IQs. Because we expected Black children to do poorly in school, they lived up to our low expectations.”

Even that argument got promptly destroyed. Rushton:

A special analysis of the Scarr study compared parents who believed that they had adopted a Black baby but, really, had adopted a Mixed-Race (Black-White) child. The average IQ for these Mixed-Race children was just about the same as for other Mixed-Race children and above that for adopted Black children. This was true even though the parents who adopted these Mixed-Race children thought their babies really had two Black parents.

That did it for me. It destroyed my ingrained indoctrinated beliefs that all races must be equal. It opened up my mind to the possibility that there could be racial differences.

Before we go on, may I stress a few more points

– I have no axe to grind against blacks. I am not interested in proving that blacks are stupid or inferior. I am not a white supremacist
– I have an axe to grind against dogmatism, blindness, stupidity. I have an axe to grind against the catholic church for repressing Galileo’s truth about the moving and revolving earth. And I have an axe to grind about political correctness repressing the truth, repressing research.
– This site is about human stupidity versus truth and consciousness
– Rushton, though much maligned, is not some crazy cook but one of the most prestigious research scientists to date: Rushton holds two doctorates from the University of London (Ph.D. and D.Sc) and is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He is also a member of the Behavior Genetics Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the Society for Neuroscience. Rushton has published six books and nearly 200 articles. In 1992 the Institute for Scientific Information ranked him the 22nd most published psychologist and the 11th most cited. Professor Rushton is listed in Who. Some of Rushtons scientific publications can be found on his University.close quote (Read more)

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For anyone who’s curious: IQs by country

Race is not everything, but it’s not nothing either.

The Size Of Nations By Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore

I’m skeptical of social “modeling” but I love their politically incorrect conclusion:

open quote

The authors of this timely and provocative book use the tools of economic analysis to examine the formation and change of political borders. They argue that while these issues have always been at the core of historical analysis, international economists have tended to regard the size of a country as “exogenous,” or no more subject to explanation than the location of a mountain range or the course of a river. Alesina and Spolaore consider a country’s borders to be subject to the same analysis as any other man-made institution. In The Size of Nations, they argue that the optimal size of a country is determined by a cost-benefit trade-off between the benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity. In a large country, per capita costs may be low, but the heterogeneous preferences of a large population make it hard to deliver services and formulate policy. Smaller countries may find it easier to respond to citizen preferences in a democratic way.

Alesina and Spolaore substantiate their analysis with simple analytical models that show how the patterns of globalization, international conflict, and democratization of the last two hundred years can explain patterns of state formation. Their aim is not only “normative” but also “positive” — that is, not only to compute the optimal size of a state in theory but also to explain the phenomenon of country size in reality. They argue that the complexity of real world conditions does not preclude a systematic analysis, and that such an analysis, synthesizing economics, political science, and history, can help us understand real world events. [Emphasis added]close quote

(Side note: I’ve begun using the word “nation” to refer to a race of people, and distinguish it from “country” and certainly from “government.”)

Pakistani couple kill daughter who talked to a boy (by pouring acid on her face!!!)

open quoteISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A Pakistani couple killed their teenage daughter by pouring acid on her face and body after they caught her talking to a boy, police and a doctor said on Thursday.

The parents of the 16-year-old confessed to police in Kotli, a town in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, that they attacked their daughter after she had spoke to the boy outside their house, said Mohammad Jahangir, a local doctor at the hospital where she was brought.

“There were third-degree burns on her scalp, face, eyes, nostrils, both arms, chest foot and lower part of legs. Even her scalp bone was exposed,” he said, adding that the mother initially told the hospital their daughter tried to commit suicide. Police have arrested the parents.close quote (Read more)