systematic mass murder is highly correlated with modernity...,
2011-12-01 17:14:42
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the individual initiative of large scale state backed collective enterprises...,
2011-12-05 00:48:00
further evidence that Andrew Sullivan's mother spent too much time at Surrey solariums during his gestation:
He's spent much of the last week bemoaning the lack of research into correlations between race and IQ, for reasons that have quite escaped me.
It's a great mystery why Andrew Sullivan hasn't, sometime in the past 17 years, taken a few minutes to find out which genes are responsible for human pigmentation (it's not like the IQ surveys this shit is premised on are getting detailed, accurate ancestral histories of the subjects, let alone mapping subject genomes, so arguments that "race" is genetically more complex than what some proctor surmises from the color of your skin or a no less problematic self-report are preponderantly a lost cause for the "empirical data acquired from the measurement of intelligence in the 20th Century") and start by asking what, if any, role those same genes have in, say, the function of the nervous system, such that they could influence sophisticated but nevertheless arbitrary measures of some statistical artifact.
An hour or so on the internets would reveal that there is no clear coincidence between genes influencing skin color and genes that might be linked to performance on standardized tests of one's tolerance for bureaucratic bullshit, love of Mozart, and time dedicated to the mastery of Tetris.
Instead, he would have discovered the rather more complex interaction between genetics and environment in the photodegradation of folate in lighter skinned mothers in sunny regions that create selective pressures against lighter skinned sons and daughters, as they're born lacking brains, which happily explains everything.
update: Of course sunbeds weren't introduced in England until 1977, so we're left with the possibility that Surrey, England just had a particularly sunny Winter in 1963.