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This.

Note that there is an eight point difference between East Germany and West Germany, a seven and a half point difference between China and Chinese Singaporeans, and a four point difference between China and Taiwan.

I can't believe something this idiotic is on slashdot. Hey, why stop at 5 trillion? Why not make a $5000 trillion coin, and then we'll all be rich, right?

Mike Judge was right.

Great in theory, doesn't work in practice. Unfortunately this one has been debunked.

You want a source on the fact that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women? Where are you from, Alpha Centauri? (BTW, at birth, worldwide, the human sex ratio is about 105 boys to 100 girls. It's slightly lower, about 101:100, during the sexually active years. All this does is increase the number of single men, making polygamy even less attractive.)

Your point about sexual orientation is immaterial. If polygamy is widespread enough to leave large numbers of men single, the fact that some small percentage of them will be gay is not going to change this fact.

Your point about no interest in marriage is irrelevant. What matters is whether men can find a mate, not whether they can actually marry. Even without marriage, if 25% of the men have no available mate, they have no choice in the matter.

Interesting blog article about this issue.

Uh, the death of 'amateurism' was, IMO, a good thing. Read this article for more clarification; it discusses the NCAA, but it applies here as well.

"Now, it turns out, according to two economists at the Boston Fed who have checked Levitt's calculations in detail, that the abortion-cut-crime theory rested upon two mistakes Levitt made. So far, Levitt admits to making one error, saying it "is personally quite embarrassing."

http://www.isteve.com/Freakonomics_Fiasco.htm

I'd have to say the Lead-Crime theory is more sound. As opposed to the eugenics rooted theory that aborting children will prevent crime. Because if that theory is true, would upper middle class and extremely wealthy parents abort their children as well to prevent white collar crime, which loots the country of untold billions annually, from increasing?

Or would they just prefer to rail against the poor and argue that they need to get abortions because they erroneously believe that they're the only class which is the source of crime?

I believe it to be the latter.

As for the abortion/crime flawed theory, it's been fatally undermined by a number of studies, one of which shows that violent non-white collar crime among teenagers peaked decades after Roe v Wade, according to the FBI's own statistics.

Furthermore another study demonstrates that after factoring in other variables that influenced violent crime during the period under question, such as the crack epidemic, and also when looking at arrests on a per capita basis, the much vaunted abortion effect, advanced by eugenicists, disappears.

Sourced here:

http://www.isteve.com/Freakonomics_Fiasco.htm

HDI shows the corellation between a quality of life, freedom and capitalism. Very true! The original post, however, conjectured that science corellates with freedom and capitalism. Not true at all. Science depends on having high IQ people and having an incentive for working in scientific fields. An incentive can arouse from desire for profit(Industrial revolution), civic tradition (ancient Greece), quasi-religious tradition (ancient China), utility as viewed by opressive government(Soviet Union), perhaps some other sources. Islamic world clearly has no such incentive. Worse yet, they IQ probably suffered from centuries of incest. Wile IQ is probably hard to fix, incentive is not. The problem of Islamic world is that it's ruled by people like OeLeWaPpErKe. He's been taught that freedom is good, and tries to solve all problems by it, wherever it works or not. Islamic scholars has been taught that Islamic values are good, and they try to solve all the problems by adhering to them, wherever it works or not.

I watch a lot of golf. I have no problem with women in the PGA as long as they are hitting from the same tee position. From reading stuff like this article, it seems like women still don't have the necessary strength to keep up with the men's tour. And with the men's tour constantly getting longer to keep up with the longer shots men are capable of making (witness the 300 yard par 3 on last weekend's US Open, which the men still birdied), I don't think women are going to catch up very soon.

http://www.isteve.com/2003_NBA_Height_Spreading_Gl obally.htm

From the above article: "Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line... Coon pointed out that this pattern follows Bergmann's Law, a rule of thumb in biology that states that within a species, animal populations living in the colder parts of the range tend to be larger and heavier than those living in the warmer parts."

While diet and the wealth of a country are certainly correlated with average height, the Balkans in particular is the poorest region of europe, while producing some of its tallest people. Moreover, the current slavic inhabitants of the Balkans have lived there for at most 1500-2000 years, while their slavic cousins that migrated to other parts of eastern europe have not grown so tall. This points to a recent evolutionary adaptation to the environment.

(less aborted babies = more kids in school = more teaching jobs)

nah, it's more like "more aborted babies == less unwanted children in school == less discipline problems"

Or, as it applies to crime, see this

Other factors are mentioned by the article; I'm sure they're very valid. However, I suspect these problems are amplified by some other factors that, on their own, are relatively harmless or positive.

Basically, people in south asian countries have, on average, very high IQs. The best data I have on South Korea is that the average IQ there is 106 (normalized on UK=100, where the US has an average of 98- http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm ). That may sound wonderful, but with a high average IQ you get high IQ personality problems, such as a tendency toward addiction to video games (whether high IQ folks have a general tendency toward addictive behavior is another argument).

I'm not too surprised. I expect similar problems in China (average IQ = 100 *before* many rural citizens live in a 'modern' IQ-enhancing society, and before they've had access to iodized salt and enriched bread and such). China's decision to curb the MMO culture by limiting playing time may end up a wise move.

That sharp decline in 1993 can be attributed to the federal legalization of abortion twenty years prior.
This trend has been checked against violent teen crime statistics in states that legalized abortion sooner.

I will go ahead and supply the link to the counter-rant http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm .
It is oozing with legitamacy.

It makes me think, though. Are female gamers like female golfers, highly lesbian? Normal women just don't act like this too often.(Compare Sailer's chart in Why Lesbians aren't Gay [Men].)

To add more worthless anecdotally supported stereotypes, I have to mention that maybe 1/3rd of the time that I come across a female CS wonk on the web or on Slashdot, that person is actually transgender. (Read through the journal here for my latest find.) I read an interesting book by Bailey a while back, in which he postulates two main categories of transgendered male-to-female individuals. The first tend to be very effeminate gay males who get the surgery done early and are much more successful with it than the second group. The second group tend to get the surgery done later, are often heterosexual and married beforehand, often have stereotypically male careers (like CS), are very bad at "walking like a woman," etc., and are lesbians or asexual afterward. There is also one unifying factor present in 100% of this second group: they like to wear female clothing and masturbate. Bailey calls them autogynephiles.

I wouldn't mention it, but they pop up again and again in news stories covering female CS advocacy (Lynn Conway is a notorious offender), or in lists of famous CS women. Maybe there is no connection to gaming, but then again...

Interestingly enough, this may be the reason why outsourcing projects fail often http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm

According to this study India has a mean IQ of 81. Although to be fair, this may be explained by poverty or nutrition.

This is an interesting paper on slow moving viruses in other diseases.

Just being male and type A blood type in the US means you are 63 times as likely to get autism as the general population. If you just look at the specific zip codes where this is prevalent-it probably gets a lot higher.

The genetic tests aren't going to get much better than these simple rules of thumb-because only 90% of autitics with an identical twin have one that is also autistic.

I'm the parent of an autistic child-which is why I have exposure to this stuff.

First thing, only 90% of the identical twins of an autistic child are also autistic. Now, this becomes less impressive when you consider almost all of these twins were raised together-and they _all_ shared the same environment before birth--and factors like stress during pregnancy, weight at birth, difficulty of pregnancy, age of mother are all predictive factors for autism(though none are especially good). The most you'll _EVER_ get from a genetic test is saying that a kid has a 95% chance of developing autism--and probably a lot less than that.

About 90% of all autistics are Type all blood type-and something like 95% are male. That means males with type A blood type are something like 45 times more likely to develop autism than the general population(one theory is autism is related to an immunological condition-and blood type has some relevance to antibodies produced). I've actually seen identical twins where only one was autistic.

Personally, I think genetic testing is premature here. There isn't yet a 100% accurate biological test for autism. The closest I've seen are the immunological tests developed by V.K. Singh at Utah State University.

I think we are probably looking here at some kind of environmental stress-that some genotypes are particularly susceptable too. Something that doesn't hurt adults and most kids at all-but really hammers some kids.

Cochran has some interesting stuff about very slow moving viruses and various diseases.

Also purely genetic theories don't explain the rise in autism rates well.

If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"?

By Steve Sailer

Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books.

Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement , never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability.

In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.

(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)

What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here Real Soon Now.

I'm not so certain. Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not.

The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was far from true.

For example, in the overall

Now, it would be tremendously useful if Gladwell had figured out some general rules of thumb for when to rely on your instantaneous hunches and when not to.

But as far as I can tell, his book reduces to two messages:

1. Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right
2. And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

Gladwell does make a genuinely useful point about how when people try to put their ideas into words, they often distort them into meaninglessness or falsehood.

Ironically, this happens to Gladwell every time he writes about race.

Because there were already plenty of books on the market advising corporate workers in tiresome detail how to look before they leap, the sales potential of a book telling them, "Wotthehell, just go ahead and leap," was clear.

Unfortunately for Gladwell, the best-known examples of thinking without thinking are racial and gender prejudices. But, then, you've forgotten Rule #2--Readers despise logic and consistency. So Gladwell just assumes that his otherwise beloved "rapid cognition" is 100% wrong whenever it's based on race or gender stereotypes.

(And that's why he makes a $1 million annually and I don't.)

The most intriguing aspect of Gladwell's book is that its hopeless confusion and mind-melting political correctness stem from the author's own racial background. Although mostly white, Gladwell is partly of African descent (his mother was black, Scottish, and Jewish). But he doesn't look noticeably black in most of his pictures.

The origin of Blink, he writes on his website, came when, "on a whim," he let his hair grow long into a loose but large Afro.

As you can see in this picture of Gladwell with his Afro, he wound up with more of a Napoleon Dynamite Mormon 'fro than the genuine kinky kind that ABA basketball players espoused back in the 1970s. Still, it does finally make him look marginally black.

As soon as Gladwell grew his Afro, he claims, he started getting hassled by The Man: highway patrolmen wrote him speeding tickets, airport security gave him the evil eye, and the NYPD questioned him for 20 minutes because they were looking for a rapist with an Afro.

"That episode on the street got me th

A mathematical treatment of population genetics in groups was given by W. D. Hamilton in "Innate Social Aptitudes of Man". In the last sentence of that paper, Hamilton, the originator of modern kin selection theory, states:

One hears that game theorists, trying to persuade people to play even two-person games like 'Prisoner's Dilemma', often encounter exasperated remarks like: 'There ought to be a law against such games!' Some of the main points of this paper can be summarized as an answer to this comment: that often, in real life, there is a law, and we can see why, and that sadly we also see the protean nature of this Dilemma, which, when suppressed at one level, gathers its strength at another.

It is indeed a dilemma but it isn't without a rigorous treatement within genetic theory.

Steve Sailer has written an an excellent review of the politically touchy issue of ethnic nepotism given from Hamilton's group selective perspective.