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thats all well and good but evolution is a sterile calvinist whig myth, (fits with the anglo theme of today's post) and the actual observable reality is that the process that anglo empiricists were trying to describe but failed (not high IQ enough, clearly) is known as "degredation", not evolution.

belarussians have an average IQ of 106 btw.

maybe they "evolved" out of romanians.

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Mar 27·edited Mar 27Author

It is sterile and disenchanting (i.e. Anglo) and not as high-IQ as what Dalmatian Croats or Castillians would have come up with but you can't deny its sheer dominance.

Anyway plz don't be mean Rurik I am a devoted free subscriber and I try to convince everybody (including my parents, and they are starting to come around) that you are correct and ZAnon is wrong.

By the way the Belorussian sample was N = 5, SD = 0 and was taken from scientists at the country's top institute of nuclear physics.

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a country that has 106 IQ nuclear physicists is a country that will be a nuclear crater by the end of the month. the average IQ for nuclear physicists has to be at least 120.

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It was a joke brah

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how was i supposed to know that??

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yeah maybe a bit obscure

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A few points:

It should be emphasized that cognitive ability, time preference, empathy, and individualism are not genetically interlinked. They can be brought together as part of an "adaptive package" but that package is not inevitable. East Asians, for instance, have followed a different trajectory of evolutionary change that has produced a different package of adaptations, i.e., high cognitive ability and low time preference, but also relatively low individualism and empathy that tends to be more cognitive than affective.

Format du jour, not formatte du jour.

hbd chick is still active on X (formerly Twitter) - @hbdchick

I became interested in this subject through a debate back in 1991 with Kevin MacDonald in the pages of Ethology and Sociobiology (now Evolution and Human Behavior). He was arguing that the mating system of Western Europe was created by Western Christianity (i.e., Catholicism). I was arguing that certain pre-existing tendencies created this system and later became embedded in Western Christianity. I now think more in terms of an evolutionary trajectory where an initial tendency toward individualism and weak kinship ties helped set Western Europeans on a trajectory of decreasing reliance on kinship and increasing reliance on other principles of social organization, notably the State and the market economy.

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Mar 27·edited Mar 28Author

Thank you for reading Peter; I appreciate your response.

"It should be emphasized that cognitive ability, time preference, empathy, and individualism are not genetically interlinked. They can be brought together as part of an "adaptive package" but that package is not inevitable. East Asians, for instance, have followed a different trajectory of evolutionary change that has produced a different package of adaptations, i.e., high cognitive ability and low time preference, but also relatively low individualism and empathy that tends to be more cognitive than affective."

Yes I was sloppy at best, ill-informed at worst; thanks for the correction. Would it be fair to say that in the Western European (and especially Anglo) case the four attributes *did* form an adaptive package? This is a genuine question to you as a formally educated authority (which I am not).

"Format du jour, not formatte du jour."

How dare you sir! As a fluent French speaker I naturalement know le forme correct. It was just a little joke I put in there (probably not funny I don't know).

"hbd chick is still active on X (formerly Twitter) - @hbdchick"

This is good to know and I am glad even though I don't use or look at twitter.

"I became interested in this subject through a debate back in 1991 with Kevin MacDonald in the pages of Ethology and Sociobiology (now Evolution and Human Behavior). He was arguing that the mating system of Western Europe was created by Western Christianity (i.e., Catholicism). I was arguing that certain pre-existing tendencies created this system and later became embedded in Western Christianity. I now think more in terms of an evolutionary trajectory where an initial tendency toward individualism and weak kinship ties helped set Western Europeans on a trajectory of decreasing reliance on kinship and increasing reliance on other principles of social organization, notably the State and the market economy."

Do you think there is anything in the revised KMac-Duchesne theory that Western individualism dates back to the Ice Age, later reinforced by the militaristic, non-kin based client-patron relationships of Bronze Age IE elites? Too speculative?

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My "formal education" was in neo-Marxism and structuralism. University gave me the tools for analyzing and writing, for which I'm grateful, but most of what I know comes from reading on my own or interacting with various scholars. I don't consider myself an "authority" and I'm not really sure what that word means.

Yes, I've argued that those adaptations have helped Western Europeans succeed in a post-kinship environment.

Speculation isn't bad. We need it to create testable hypotheses. In the case of KMac-Duchesne, I largely agree that Western individualism goes back to the hunter-gatherer period — not the Ice age but rather the late Mesolithic, when large communities of fisher-hunters formed around the North Sea and the Baltic. These people had to resolve the "Large Society Problem" at an early date, i.e., the problem of interacting peacefully and creatively with lots of non-kin.

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Mar 28·edited Mar 28Author

Thanks for follow-up Peter; valuable points and corrections here.

I take 'authority' to mean a person well informed about a particular field who writes knowledgeably, sensibly and in accordance with the facts, and who is known for doing so. I deliberately avoided the tainted word 'expert'.

Indeed informed speculation is essential in building knowledge (and developing experti...sorry, authority).

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I just checked HBD Chick's twitter. She's still funny, not in a standard womanly cutesy-funny way but in an absolute sense.

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Mar 27Liked by Shade of Achilles

I wonder what the evolutionary advantages of dry humor are? The Anglos seem to have that in spades as well.

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This is the sort of question that Ed Dutton would have a stab at.

He would probably say something like, 'Dry humour of the Anglo brand correlates at 0.7 with conscientiousness'.

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Hilarious!

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Thank you sir

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Mar 28Liked by Shade of Achilles

The shopping cart picture is a great TLDR 😂

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I am glad you noticed. It is indeed highly indicative.

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Best “about” page I’ve read yet lmao we will watch your career with great interest

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Thank you sir you are very kind.

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Mar 26Liked by Shade of Achilles

You have an engaging style of writing.

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My thanks to you sir

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Looks like you independently discovered a bunch of stuff I wrote a book about twelve years ago. Get yourself a dirt cheap used or remaindered copy of American 3.0 by Bennett and Lotus. Todd, Macfarlane and the Hajnal Line all figure prominently. I knew about HBD Chick, but we could not really work her stuff into the book explicitly. You are onto a treasure trove of good stuff here.

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Aha yes I see it on Amazon--81 ratings, 4.6 average! You have my respect of course, but did you get rich? Please say yes; I want to believe there is a reasonably large audience for this material. I will try to procure a copy but it's hard to get books in English in Romania.

HBD Chick is interesting to me because it's not the usual HBD stuff about differences between intercontinental populations (not that there's anything wrong with such material). Instead it centres on the more subtle matter of intraEuro differences, which were, e.g., in not-inconsiderable measure the motivation for the vote in favour of Brexit.

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Mar 27·edited Mar 27Liked by Shade of Achilles

We sold a combined 4,600 copies physical and electronic. Did not get rich. Barely made any money at all. If you count the time spent on it, the entire effort was irrational. I am still glad we did it.

You cannot get Amazon deliveries in Romania? I would think their tentacles reached that far! If you can't get it send me a direct message and I will send you one of my extras.

You are one of literally five people in the world (not counting Todd and Macfarlane themselves) who know know about Todd and Macfarlane and have put the two together -- and one of them, the late great Brian Micklethwaite is dead now.

HBD Chick was great. Very small, she read everything, and she was funny. Too bad she never pulled it all together into a book.

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Mar 27·edited Mar 27Author

Your offer is very generous.

Yes there are Amazon deliveries but shipping costs are prohibitive unless order is quite large, probably due huge insurance costs required to guard against theft by low-trust Romanian postal services...joking.

I am much favoured to be one among a select few humble guardians of the flame of this arcane knowledge!

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Mar 27·edited Mar 27Liked by Shade of Achilles

https://pe.usps.com/IMM_Archive/HTML/IMM_Archive_20060108/imm/immicl/immiclnr_024.html

Book postage rate for Romania is not terrible. Looks like it would be $5.95 economy book rate.

And I am not trying to sell a new copy, so I don't make any money on this! I just want you to see our references to Macfarlane and Todd!

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Mar 27·edited Mar 28Author

EDIT: I found it on l*bg*n.rs

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