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 role in the whole body, making the body one. In …
Category: science
Moore’s law ends. Technological singularity postponed indefinitely
The fabs will soon be delivering “16nm” chips. But they are not in fact 16nm chips. That is just marketer spin. The wire to wire spacing, the pitch, is still 64nm, as it has been for some considerable time. There have been substantial improvements in power consumption, and this and that, but chips have just stopped getting denser. There are no more transistors per unit area than in previous technology …
Progress
In 1900, there were no planes, no space travel. Motorcars were toys that enthusiasts played with, not useful means of transport. There were no computers, no radios, no antibiotics, no rockets, no nuclear power, no knowledge or understanding of the interior the atom, no very useful plastics. In 1961 we had all of this stuff Since 1961, what have we got? The last man on the moon is getting pretty …
Dysgenics and mutational load
It seems probable that most variation in health, beauty, and IQ is due to genetic load, large numbers of rare genetic variants. About fifteen percent of the human genome is under negative selection, meaning that in about fifteen percent of the human genome, any random change is likely to be harmful, most variants get eliminated by natural selection in a reasonable time. The mutation rate in humans is one or …
On Funding Science
Funding science is not a job that government can do, due to diseconomies of scale, and because government is inherently a religious organization. It winds up funding pseudo science, thus damaging real science. The patron has to know and appreciate that field that he is patronizing, and has to personally gain status from the success of his clients. Otherwise he has the wrong incentives and the wrong knowledge, so patronizes …
The decline of sperm production
Today’s average male has sperm production and sperm motility considerably lower than when these were first recorded, the data least subject to systematic error being sperm counts from couples tested for infertility where the infertility was subsequently determined to be due to the female. It has been in decline over the last seventy years. Testosterone levels have also fallen substantially. Changes in obesity and other factors do not explain the …
Debate with Vox Day: Evolution by natural selection
We have been discussing on what the various kinds of reactionary agree. We agree on reality and agree that reality is important. I also agree with Vox Day about Scalzi, who exemplifies the progressive tendency to cut the balls off male progressives.  John Scalzi is exhibit A for Heartiste’s position that any man who is a man should reject the entire progressive political movement, including and especially the early nineteenth …
Dark Enlightenment and the Endarkenment
The Dark Enlightenment: The movement that concludes that the Enlightenment took a bad turn, or that the Enlightenment itself was a bad turn. I take both positions: That the Enlightenment was wildly and dangerously wrong to proclaim all men created equal, and that restoration England was a pretty good political system, which gave us the scientific and industrial revolutions, and the British conquest of most of the world, and it …
How sweet it is
Marcott et al recant the blade of their Hockey stick This is a huge change, in that previously, when warmists lied, and got caught doing so, every scientific institution, every science journal, every prestigious academy, and every organized group of scientists would piously swear holy fealty to the lie. Now, instead, they quietly twist the liar’s arms behind closed doors.Â
The latest PC
It used to be mandatory to believe that evolution was a mere creation myth, something that happened long, long ago, and far far away, but had not happened in the last hundred thousand years or so, so that it was impossible for there to be differences between races, or indeed between men and woman. But, in that case, we would still be shaped for eating meat and fat, and not …