"One of the major problems with that is that both blacks and hispanics in the USA decent from the less succesfull individuals in their 'home' societies."
For Hispanics, this is of course a major factor (as a pure gene clustering label, the designation "hispanic" is far from optimal. I.e. most hispanic societies have a white upper class, a mestizo middle and an indian/black underclass, on a "color scale"). In the case of african-americans, they in general do considerably better than africans. Of course, environmental conditions in Africa are very sub-optimal, while there has been a small but significant amount of gene exchange between whites and africans in the US, making a straight comparison harder.
"Also, early education and training are fundamental for developing certain skills well, and those 2 groups are less likely to get those due to social circumstances."
True to some degree, although huge interventions to rectify the situation has so far been unsuccessful. Also, note that "skills" are not measured in the tests described here.
"Any pointers to such studies that are factual and undisputed?
I have yet to see one."
Having "undisputed" as a threshold in a new field is a bit harsh. Still, I linked to a summary of two such papers in my previous post, published in Science last September. For even more coverage of those papers, see the NYTimes article. (registration required)
"Those adaptations do not seem to have much if any influence on the mental abilities of people however."
This is, once all the claptrap is cleared away, the major sticking point.
In virtually all forms of intelligence testing, significant differences between various ethnic groups are detected, that are steady over time. (This is the reason we get a steady flow of these kinds of stories.
Also, we are starting to find stuff like geographically determined differences in brain development genes. Hence, I wouldn't be so sure about your assertion.
Of course, lots of other people have sort of sensed this would be the case, and hence many have felt comfortable with propping up the assertion that evolution made an exception for humans starting 50 000 years ago or so, without much supporting evidence. Now that bulwark is slowly starting to give way...
Seen from an evolutionary perspective, many third-world peoples are already ahead of westerners in a wide range of environments, as they produce much higher levels of surviving offspring than do westerners both at home and as immigrants to the west. (Meanwhile, westerners are even not even maintaining their present numbers)
I would not recommend Gould as reading on human evolution, as he is one of the two primary sources of misinformation on the subject of modern human evolution (the other being Lewontin).
Natural selection works through differing rates of reproductive success - thus, "being removed from the gene pool" prior to reproduction is merely one extreme case of natural selection. Varying rates of surviving and reproducing offspring is probably far more relevant.
"Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
Because if it didn't suddenly stop after the major supergroups of humans started moving out of Africa in various directions, it would mean that it is likely that these groups would have evolved on somewhat separate paths (as dictated by the highly variant environments they were living in).
This would in turn go against the dominant western ideology of empirical egalitarianism, that dictates that the average innate skills and predispositions of all human populations (I.e. 'races') are (on average and in distributions) entirely equal. Therefore, clearly, evolution must have stopped with the modern era. After all, how could something ideologically uncomfortable be true?
Ok, as Europe is an heterogenous place, my comment is bound to be inaccurate in lots of places. But here in Sweden at least, cost-cutting was a major factor behind quickly moving to broadband:)
One important factor here: Free local calls in the US. That hasn't been around here in Europe, and so, moving to broadband is a fiscal necessity unless you want to go bankrupt. (You should have seen some of my phone bills, before I got BB - yowza!);P
"The New York Times simply cannot be stupid enough to believe that this knowledge will help terrorists. They are a bunch of sniveling, subservient, fart-catchers. They care less about informing the public, then in protecting their pathetic "access" to the powerful."
There is no "duty to publish". Since they (accurately) knew the information being pursued was related to an ongoing terrorism investigation, they held off publication (alternatively, they wanted time to write up the book being pushed here). The right call, certainly, as at least one AQ operative was nabbed in the operation. (Plotting against NYC bridges and tunnels, IIRC)
It should also be noted that Congress was informed about this course of action, and I am willing to bet that's where the leak came from. Lucky that the new policy is finding and prosecuting press leaks vigorously.
The "percentage wise" argument doensn't cut it - it's the same one used to create spurious megadisasters for political benefit. Read: "12 dead in Israel is like XXXX dead in the United States", etc. Face it, the main objective of the Holocaust was eliminating the Jews, who were seen as powerful, decadent, , and seditious. Add in good old Christian / Lutheran jew hatred, and you have the makings of a genocide. The Gypsies were merely parasitic annoyances to be cleansed from society. Being successful is often much more dangerous than staying near the bottom of the social pyramid.
It is also true that Jews have a very strong position in the US media (as they did in pre-Nazi Germany - a reason for them being hated by the Nazis), and thus have been able to put their spin on the Holocaust to a far greater degree than ethnies who don't do academics. Still, to say that mainstream history has somehow erased, or even seriously diminished the fact that the Nazis went after Gypsies, Homosexuals and political opponents, and so on, is hardly backed by any hard facts.
Heh - all it takes is for one of the Islamics to let a wayward comment slip, and the "Liberals" (I.e. Socialists in normal parlance) on Slashdot are falling over themselves to offer upp excuses and defenses. Brothers in arms indeed. (Is this perhaps why Liberals reach their peak levels of indignation when fretting over "abuse" of poor innocent Islamic terrorists? Dunno.)
It really does surprise me though that the pro-Islamic fervor among the Liberals has reached such a peak that even the bastion of Liberalism in the United States, the Jewish community, isn't safe. Suddenly, Slashdot is alive with "But hey, everyone is doing Holocaust denial these days", and "Well, but the United States did destroy the social cohesion of the native americans".
Finally, Bush did not "back spying on Americans", he backed spying on Arab traitors. Luckily it seems to be trendy these days to prosecute national security leaks (even to the point of prosecuting the legal ones!), so hopefully whatever Liberal of dubious loyalty leaked this one will be found out and arrested swiftly.
You have to understand that he is a Liberal - he thinks helping "terrorists" is the highest form of "Patriotism". And you must accept his way of looking on the world, or you are to be deemed "insensitive" and cast into the void (I.e. sensitivity training).
"Some gamers have gone to even greater extremes - like the man who robbed an Electronics Boutique store in Stafford, Virginia in the early hours of this morning. According to US website GameSpot, he held the store manager up at gunpoint and ordered him to hand over two Xbox 360s. Presumably ones with hard drives."
Gee, Microsoft are really taking viral marketing to new heights here. Move over iLoveBees...;)
Well, I had the same feelings as you about PG3D, but I am really enjoying civ 4 so far. 3D isn't a problem if it's done right - and the graphics really become quite a bit better. (At least with 4X AA enabled);P
The Evilest, biggest corporation known to Slashdotdom, Microsoft, was barely a blip on the radar 20 years ago. It proceeded to screw over the main corporate giant in the field, IBM, and establish dominance. The second evilest company in Slashdotdom, Dell, well, see above. Capitalism is a whole lot less inflexible than you think - as is stifling innovation. I agree copyright laws need an overhaul, but then again, copyright is a creature of politics and law, not of the market. (Most people who whine about the corporations buying those crooked politicans usually advocate turning power over to... yea, those very crooked politicians instead... sweet...)
Well, this is just one of the iron laws of American sociology: White rich cultural liberals / economic conservatives will always insulate themselves as much as they can from the failed ethnic minorities they import/support.
Do you really think the oil companies are such nice, touchy-feely people that they feel they need "excuses" in order to ramp up the price? They simply charge what they can get away with at the moment, like most other businesses.
As oil production is slumping right now due to Katarina, with high levels of demand, prices will go up. But "excuses" probably play only a very limited part.
...but I certainly find they had a point. I really don't archive much physically anymore. Virtually all my documents are archived only in electronic form.
Still, of course I often still print 'em when I am going to read them through / pass them on. Reading on paper is still better, but processing and archival has been taken over by electronic documents. So, were the paperless people right to two thirds?:P
This has been a recurring phenomenon from the dawn of geekdom. As (if) a technology gains mainstream acceptance, the ur-core of geeks in the field get crowded out, and sometimes marginalized.
An example: At the dawn of computer gaming, the ultra-geeky wargaming hobby was "big thing" to do on computers. As the Madden-ization of the gaming progressed, wargaming was pushed to the fringes, catered to by mailorder-only outfits such as Matrixgames (www.matrixgames.com) or Battlefront (www.battlefront.com).
Slashdot Mirror
"One of the major problems with that is that both blacks and hispanics in the USA decent from the less succesfull individuals in their 'home' societies."
For Hispanics, this is of course a major factor (as a pure gene clustering label, the designation "hispanic" is far from optimal. I.e. most hispanic societies have a white upper class, a mestizo middle and an indian/black underclass, on a "color scale"). In the case of african-americans, they in general do considerably better than africans. Of course, environmental conditions in Africa are very sub-optimal, while there has been a small but significant amount of gene exchange between whites and africans in the US, making a straight comparison harder.
"Also, early education and training are fundamental for developing certain skills well, and those 2 groups are less likely to get those due to social circumstances."
True to some degree, although huge interventions to rectify the situation has so far been unsuccessful. Also, note that "skills" are not measured in the tests described here.
"Any pointers to such studies that are factual and undisputed?
I have yet to see one."
Having "undisputed" as a threshold in a new field is a bit harsh. Still, I linked to a summary of two such papers in my previous post, published in Science last September. For even more coverage of those papers, see the NYTimes article. (registration required)
"Those adaptations do not seem to have much if any influence on the mental abilities of people however."
This is, once all the claptrap is cleared away, the major sticking point.
In virtually all forms of intelligence testing, significant differences between various ethnic groups are detected, that are steady over time. (This is the reason we get a steady flow of these kinds of stories.
Also, we are starting to find stuff like geographically determined differences in brain development genes. Hence, I wouldn't be so sure about your assertion.
Of course, lots of other people have sort of sensed this would be the case, and hence many have felt comfortable with propping up the assertion that evolution made an exception for humans starting 50 000 years ago or so, without much supporting evidence. Now that bulwark is slowly starting to give way...
If you want to read up on kin selection, I would point to Hamilton instead of Gould.
Seen from an evolutionary perspective, many third-world peoples are already ahead of westerners in a wide range of environments, as they produce much higher levels of surviving offspring than do westerners both at home and as immigrants to the west. (Meanwhile, westerners are even not even maintaining their present numbers)
I would not recommend Gould as reading on human evolution, as he is one of the two primary sources of misinformation on the subject of modern human evolution (the other being Lewontin).
"Modern" in this context does not mean "19:th century and onwards", but is defined more as "50 000 years ago and onwards".
Natural selection works through differing rates of reproductive success - thus, "being removed from the gene pool" prior to reproduction is merely one extreme case of natural selection. Varying rates of surviving and reproducing offspring is probably far more relevant.
"Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
Because if it didn't suddenly stop after the major supergroups of humans started moving out of Africa in various directions, it would mean that it is likely that these groups would have evolved on somewhat separate paths (as dictated by the highly variant environments they were living in).
This would in turn go against the dominant western ideology of empirical egalitarianism, that dictates that the average innate skills and predispositions of all human populations (I.e. 'races') are (on average and in distributions) entirely equal. Therefore, clearly, evolution must have stopped with the modern era. After all, how could something ideologically uncomfortable be true?
MS have fab rights to their processor (they learned from the XBox Intel screwup...), so that shouldn't be much of an issue.
Ok, as Europe is an heterogenous place, my comment is bound to be inaccurate in lots of places. But here in Sweden at least, cost-cutting was a major factor behind quickly moving to broadband :)
One important factor here: Free local calls in the US. That hasn't been around here in Europe, and so, moving to broadband is a fiscal necessity unless you want to go bankrupt. (You should have seen some of my phone bills, before I got BB - yowza!) ;P
"The New York Times simply cannot be stupid enough to believe that this knowledge will help terrorists. They are a bunch of sniveling, subservient, fart-catchers. They care less about informing the public, then in protecting their pathetic "access" to the powerful."
There is no "duty to publish". Since they (accurately) knew the information being pursued was related to an ongoing terrorism investigation, they held off publication (alternatively, they wanted time to write up the book being pushed here). The right call, certainly, as at least one AQ operative was nabbed in the operation. (Plotting against NYC bridges and tunnels, IIRC)
It should also be noted that Congress was informed about this course of action, and I am willing to bet that's where the leak came from. Lucky that the new policy is finding and prosecuting press leaks vigorously.
The "percentage wise" argument doensn't cut it - it's the same one used to create spurious megadisasters for political benefit. Read: "12 dead in Israel is like XXXX dead in the United States", etc. Face it, the main objective of the Holocaust was eliminating the Jews, who were seen as powerful, decadent, , and seditious. Add in good old Christian / Lutheran jew hatred, and you have the makings of a genocide. The Gypsies were merely parasitic annoyances to be cleansed from society. Being successful is often much more dangerous than staying near the bottom of the social pyramid.
It is also true that Jews have a very strong position in the US media (as they did in pre-Nazi Germany - a reason for them being hated by the Nazis), and thus have been able to put their spin on the Holocaust to a far greater degree than ethnies who don't do academics. Still, to say that mainstream history has somehow erased, or even seriously diminished the fact that the Nazis went after Gypsies, Homosexuals and political opponents, and so on, is hardly backed by any hard facts.
Heh - all it takes is for one of the Islamics to let a wayward comment slip, and the "Liberals" (I.e. Socialists in normal parlance) on Slashdot are falling over themselves to offer upp excuses and defenses. Brothers in arms indeed. (Is this perhaps why Liberals reach their peak levels of indignation when fretting over "abuse" of poor innocent Islamic terrorists? Dunno.)
It really does surprise me though that the pro-Islamic fervor among the Liberals has reached such a peak that even the bastion of Liberalism in the United States, the Jewish community, isn't safe. Suddenly, Slashdot is alive with "But hey, everyone is doing Holocaust denial these days", and "Well, but the United States did destroy the social cohesion of the native americans".
Finally, Bush did not "back spying on Americans", he backed spying on Arab traitors. Luckily it seems to be trendy these days to prosecute national security leaks (even to the point of prosecuting the legal ones!), so hopefully whatever Liberal of dubious loyalty leaked this one will be found out and arrested swiftly.
You have to understand that he is a Liberal - he thinks helping "terrorists" is the highest form of "Patriotism". And you must accept his way of looking on the world, or you are to be deemed "insensitive" and cast into the void (I.e. sensitivity training).
World of Warcraft are coming out with that kind of system ("parental control") - the person with the PC password can set playing hours, etc. at will.
"Some gamers have gone to even greater extremes - like the man who robbed an Electronics Boutique store in Stafford, Virginia in the early hours of this morning. According to US website GameSpot, he held the store manager up at gunpoint and ordered him to hand over two Xbox 360s. Presumably ones with hard drives."
;)
Gee, Microsoft are really taking viral marketing to new heights here. Move over iLoveBees...
" I believe it is hard (perhaps impossible) to make a billion dollars by being totally honest."
I'd like to broaden that statement a bit:
" I believe it is hard (perhaps impossible) for most to get through a normal working day while being totally honest."
Well, I had the same feelings as you about PG3D, but I am really enjoying civ 4 so far. 3D isn't a problem if it's done right - and the graphics really become quite a bit better. (At least with 4X AA enabled) ;P
Yea, I'd like to dispute this:
The Evilest, biggest corporation known to Slashdotdom, Microsoft, was barely a blip on the radar 20 years ago. It proceeded to screw over the main corporate giant in the field, IBM, and establish dominance. The second evilest company in Slashdotdom, Dell, well, see above. Capitalism is a whole lot less inflexible than you think - as is stifling innovation. I agree copyright laws need an overhaul, but then again, copyright is a creature of politics and law, not of the market. (Most people who whine about the corporations buying those crooked politicans usually advocate turning power over to... yea, those very crooked politicians instead... sweet...)
Well, this is just one of the iron laws of American sociology: White rich cultural liberals / economic conservatives will always insulate themselves as much as they can from the failed ethnic minorities they import/support.
Still, it runs pretty nicely on my Mac Mini, which I found to be very surprising. :)
Do you really think the oil companies are such nice, touchy-feely people that they feel they need "excuses" in order to ramp up the price? They simply charge what they can get away with at the moment, like most other businesses.
As oil production is slumping right now due to Katarina, with high levels of demand, prices will go up. But "excuses" probably play only a very limited part.
...but I certainly find they had a point. I really don't archive much physically anymore. Virtually all my documents are archived only in electronic form.
:P
Still, of course I often still print 'em when I am going to read them through / pass them on. Reading on paper is still better, but processing and archival has been taken over by electronic documents. So, were the paperless people right to two thirds?
This has been a recurring phenomenon from the dawn of geekdom. As (if) a technology gains mainstream acceptance, the ur-core of geeks in the field get crowded out, and sometimes marginalized.
An example: At the dawn of computer gaming, the ultra-geeky wargaming hobby was "big thing" to do on computers. As the Madden-ization of the gaming progressed, wargaming was pushed to the fringes, catered to by mailorder-only outfits such as Matrixgames (www.matrixgames.com) or Battlefront (www.battlefront.com).