When we read that only one man in three reproduced, we tend to imagine two thirds of the men in an underclass detached from society, enslaved, killed, or driven out, and one third of the men forming society, with three wives each. Or you could have two thirds killed in war and the survivors get the booty. And similarly, if only one man in seventeen … But obviously it is likely to be a power law. The ratio of men …
Category: science
High reproductive variance among males
The sociobiology leading to the conclusion that women are ill suited to be part of the larger society, and should be subordinated to husbands and fathers, rests in large part on high reproductive variance among males in the ancestral environment, the environment of evolutionary adaption. Now it obviously seems likely that reproductive variance among males was extreme – just look! And pretty much everyone in the manosphere agrees that it was, but until recently, I have not been able to …
Heroic entrepeneurship after the Restoration
According to the Whig/Marxist version of history, the roots of the Industrial revolution were in the Glorious Revolution, which represented the rights of man and the rising political power of businessmen. There are several problems with this story. One is that the rise of China decisively proves that the rights of corporations matter a whole lot more for economic development than the rights of man, and if you are looking for the origin of the rights of corporations, you are …
tasmanian aboriginal skull
At least that is what the article says, though maybe they photographed a Neanderthal skull in error. On the other hand, Erectus walks among us gives an example of an almost equally primitive looking aboriginal skull, and suggests that our most recent common ancestor with the Australian aboriginals is not very recent. The difference seems to be at least as great, as the difference between a human skull and a Neanderthal skull, and the cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull …
Race and species
One of the many politically incorrect aspects of Darwinism is that races are the origin of species. There is no objective way of distinguishing a large race difference from a small species difference, any more than one can distinguish a large hill from a small mountain. To say that two closely related kinds are two races of the same species, or two distinct species is a fact about scientific terminology, not a fact about the external world. As Lamarck argued, …
The really smart people
That nurses became sick “shows there was a clear breach of safety protocol” – but they are able to draw this conclusion without knowing what the breach was. The underlying reasoning is clear: Quarantine is racist. Therefore ebola is not very infectious. Therefore business as usual. Oops. Two nurses are infected with ebola. Obviously the nurses’ fault. They must be racist. This is a tragedy because it makes people think forbidden thoughts about Africans.
leftism as cancer
“Leftism as Cancer” stopped being accessible through google in the course of a blog backup and restore, so reposting it. Leftism is to memes as cancer is genes. If the cells of the body mutate, cells that multiply at the expense of the body will be selected. And cells that mutate to a faster mutation rate will be selected, since they will have more fast multiplying variants. In a healthy body, each cell lives for the body, and performs its …
Moravec’s paradox, RNA, and uploads.
Moravec’s paradox is the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. A computer can beat the world’s greatest chess player at chess, but it cannot beat a spider at getting around. If humans have been working on a problem for a thousand years, you can program a computer to do it. If evolution has been working on a problem for a hundred million years, not so easy. It turns out that the vast majority of the functional …
The great silence
There seem to be no great obstacles to intelligent life devouring the galaxy. So why are we here. If life on earth arose on earth , and produced humans in a few billion years, why not on some other planet ten billion years ago? Simplest and most likely explanation is that life is unlikely – requiring a stupendously improbable assemblage of molecules to form. No one has constructed a plausible high probability origin of life. Indeed, it looks to me …
Dysgenic fertility
Chateau Heartiste, always a great source for the Dark Enlightenment, reports: Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners. We conclude that criminality appears …