#gregory cochran

[isaacsapphire]

Not sure if you knew this, but West Hunter is Gregory Cochran, an HBD 'intellectual'. That Killer Bees blog probably isn't about animal behaviour per say, its just written like that to get past censorship...

Okay, so idk if you've noticed, but I post about bees fairly often. If gcochran posted about hybrid African bees having different learning capabilities than European bees, with a link to the study that is literally about the learning abilities of bees beecause he really wants to have a discussion about learning abilities in people or to quietly imply that... mixed African and European people are genetically stupid or something... That fact doesn't have an impact on my decision to reblog. He linked to a real study about literal bees, and I post about literal bees.

If you want to argue that studying bee intelligence is immoral, please argue that honestly.

[arcticdementor]

Cognitve ability has both benefits and costs.  If it had no costs, everybody would be a lot smarter than they actually are.  There is no reason to think that those costs or those benefits are the same everywhere and everywhen.

Gregory Cochran

[arcticdementor]

There is a new article in the New York Times Magazine (Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?) , in which some pinhead repeats complaints about David Reich crus…

There is a new article in the New York Times Magazine (Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?) , in which some  pinhead repeats  complaints about David Reich crushing his enemies [archaeologists] , driving them before him, and hearing the lamentations of their women.  He doesn’t give them much respect.

They don’t deserve respect. Sure, he has a far more powerful method.  Sequencing DNA gives you billions of bits, orders of magnitude more than staring at potsherds. But it is fair to look at how archaeologists did with the tools they had:  terrible, horrible, no good, very bad.  They really, really wanted to  create detailed stories of local social change, stories that didn’t sound like something by Robert E, Howard, full of thud and blunder. Not stories about barbarian conquest, population replacement, and mating with nonhuman races.

But that’s what happened.

…

Archaeologists had unreasonable priors, about everything in sight. Given a chance, they assumed that the Maya were a nation of peaceful astronomers [ Just another snake cult !] . Indo-European languages spread because they were so cool, rather than by conquest  [even David Anthony fell for this!].  One group couldn’t be biologically superior to another. { Why not?  Do the Galactic Overlords forbid that?}

And so on, and so on.  They had one job…

[arcticdementor]

Some ( including insurance companies) have claimed that young men are more likely to take risks than young women. Cordelia Fine says that ” The reported gender gap in risk-taking would almost…

Some ( including insurance companies) have claimed that young men are more likely to take risks than young women. Cordelia Fine says that ” The reported gender gap in risk-taking would almost certainly narrow if researchers’ questionnaires started to include more items like: ‘How likely is it that you would bake an impressive but difficult soufflé for an important dinner party? ”

This strongly suggests – strongly ! – that she is and always has been my sock-puppet, because how could anyone real deliberately make such a stupid comparison? Making a soufflé, vs basejumpers, guys that drive 125 miles an hour when drunk,  climb the Eiger, or flew a Spitfire against the  Luftwaffe?

[arcticdementor]

Gregory Clark finds that social status is strongly heritable. Combined with a very high degree of assortative mating for the genetic factors behind this heritability, social mobility is surprisingl…

Gregory Clark finds that social status is strongly heritable. Combined with a very high degree of assortative mating for the genetic factors behind this heritability, social mobility is surprisingly low. This happens without anyone particularly trying to make it this way – although it can happen less if people do try to stop it. An interesting example out of Plomin’s group:  genetics explains  “twice as much variance in educational attainment and occupational status in the post-Soviet era compared with the Soviet era.”

…

We’re talking about genetic factors that tend to increase social status: intelligence helps, sure, but the people at the top, the people running the show are rarely the smartest – or the most decent, or the most effective.  If we define ‘merit’ as a tendency to effective action that favors the best interest of society as a whole – surely what  high-status people have more of is only loosely associated with ‘merit’.  They have more of what works for themselves. Call it moxie.

So the ideal social policy would attempt  – and succeed – at picking people for high-status job that were good at getting the job done – not just good at getting the job. Talent and hard work are influenced by genetic factors, but then so is being a back-stabbing, credit-stealing asshole.

…

What should the Classical Greeks have done with Alcibiades, who surely had enough genetic moxie for a platoon? Answer: shoot the bastard. Him better off dead.

In principle this is a question that liberals should be thinking about, but apparently thinking clearly – about anything – is a job that American liberals just won’t do.

[arcticdementor]

Time to respond to Eric Turkheimer’s post. In my review of Carl Zimmer’s book, I said that the existing fixation index values between continental races are compatible with very signifi…

Time to respond to Eric Turkheimer’s  post.

In my review of Carl Zimmer’s book, I said that the existing fixation index values between continental races are compatible with very significant physical and behavioral differences between those races, because wolves and coyotes have exactly the same value of Fst as Yorubas and Mormons. Lewontin said that two groups with that Fst couldn’t be very different, yet coyotes and wolves are very different – so Lewontin was wrong.  Turkheimer seems to agree with me on this, although he probably doesn’t think Lewontin is full of shit. He should.

…

Lots of important traits in domesticated animals are highly polygenic. Milk yield in dairy cows is highly polygenic: no single allele explains a lot of the variance in milk production.  Does this mean that milk production is not predictable, or that it varies in odd ways  compared to traits that are monogenic or oligogenic?   No, that doesn’t happen: the consequences of polygenicity that Turkheimer expects don’t actually occur. If they did, much of agriculture would come to a screeching halt.  Speed in horses is highly polygenic: does that mean that development of running ability is a nondeterministic process?  Is it logically impossible to know that certain breeds or horses ( say  Thoroughbreds) are faster than other breeds (say  Shetland ponies)?  It may be logically impossible for Turkheimer, but it’s easy for everyone else.  Along the same line, Kevin Mitchell, for equally mysterious reasons, has said that it’s really hard to select on highly polygenic trauts – even though we have a mathematical theory of selection that says otherwise, even though we do it every day in agricultural genetics.

Both are making use of nonexistent general principles to further a particular conclusion.

…

Turkheimer also says that we don’t really know anything about polygenic differences unless we  understand the mechanisms.  And usually we don’t know the mechanisms: even when we know that a given allele boosts a horse’s speed, or a Guernsey’s milk production, or makes dachshunds have short legs, we usually don’t know exactly how  it works.  Often we haven’t the faintest. Which is why we couldn’t select for fast horses or cows  that produce lots of milk- except that we could and did, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago. You don’t need to know how a plus allele or minus allele for trait X works to be able to [reasonably] accurately predict the consequences. Investigating mechanisms is going to be difficult in highly polygenic traits: those alleles favoring high trait value could work through a number of different mechanisms.  We don’t  know the mechanisms involved in the behavior of Turkheimer’s dogs – but in that case it doesn’t bother him.  In humans, not knowing mechanisms bothers him: He wants humans to be special.  And hey, they are, but not in the way he would like.

Actually I don’t quite believe this of either Mitchell or Turkheimer. I think they’re trying to arguing away stuff they don’t like.

[arcticdementor]

Let us suppose that Elon Musk makes substantial progress in Mars colonization. There’s a problem* – it’s not clear that current Earth humans could thrive there. The gravity is …

Let us suppose  that Elon Musk makes substantial progress in Mars colonization.  There’s a problem* – it’s not clear  that current Earth humans could thrive there. The gravity is a lot lower: we know that zero G is bad for you, and 0.376 of Earth standard  might not be survivable, over a lifetime.

But that’s no reason to give up. Evolution has solved a lot harder problems than that, and likely our genetic engineers could as well.  The solution is changing the DNA, redesigning  human physiology for low gravity.  while we’re at it, I’m sure we’d want to make a number of other improvements, most of which already exist in the spectrum of human variation.

…

But, although instantly recognizable, significantly different in genome and phenotype, and many ways quite formidable, those Martians would not be a different race. Why?

Because Carl Zimmer and David Reich have recently discovered,  a population isn’t really a race – not matter how different – unless it’s been around a long, long time.  Five thousand years isn’t nearly enough.   Previous definitions of races or subspecies never mentioned this, so it must be a new discovery.

And by the same inexorable argument, German Shepherds, developed in 1899, do not exist.  There is no such breed. I wish this had been generally known back when I had a paper route,  because if  I had just known that the beast on my Sunday route didn’t really exist, either he wouldn’t have bitten me or at minimum it would have hurt less.

[arcticdementor]

Nathan Cofnas wrote a paper [ Science is not always “Self-Correcting” ] on how various scientists and philosophers choose or reject scientific theories about human intelligence. Not jus…

Nathan Cofnas wrote a paper [ Science is not always “Self-Correcting” ] on how various scientists and philosophers choose or reject scientific theories about human intelligence. Not just quietly avoiding truths they don’t like, but explicitly saying that everyone should do so.