\doc\web\99\07\sail.txt
From:           	SteveSlr@aol.com
Date sent:      	Tue, 8 Jun 1999 18:57:14 EDT
To:             	h-bd@egroups.com
Subject:        	[h-bd] The Proper Study of Mankind


Steve Sailer here:


Here's a very rough draft of an article I'm writing. Any comments would be
appreciated. If you don't want to be quoted in it, please let me know and
I'll take them out. --------------------------


"The proper study of mankind is man." -- Alexander Pope


In recent years, the average homo sapien has learned a great deal about
other species. For example, the most memorable comic strip of the last
decade, Gary Larson's "The Far Side," simply would not have been funny
before PBS ran countless documentaries on penguins, pandas, and polar
bears. All this is to be encouraged. As the motto of Faber College in
Animal House reminds us, Knowledge Is Good. The rub, though, is in
figuring out how to apply knowledge, especially in applying zoological
data to human beings.


Lately, a popular intellectual pastime has been to look for insight into
human nature by studying our closest relatives in the evolutionary tree,
our fellow primates. For guidance on how to live, we increasingly look
less to scriptures and more to our cousins with the low foreheads. Now,
there are limits to how valuable a role model our furry friends can
provide. While no ape would have been so stupid as to have gotten America
into our current Banana War with the European Union, none would be smart
enough to get us out either. Conversely, those things that all us primates
clearly agree upon (e.g., Food: Good!  Air: Good!  Falling out of Tree:
Bad!) tend to be boring.


No, what we want apes to tell us are the answers to those fundamental
questions about sex and violence that we humans can't agree upon. What
makes this mode of inquiry so popular -- yet so fruitless -- is that
anybody can turn to their favorite primate for support for their favorite
lifestyle. Consider sex and family structure. As any upper-middle class
American in 1999 can tell you, nature intended us to live in monogamous,
egalitarian, affectionate pairs, like Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser on Mad
About You. If you doubt it, just ask our fifth closest cousins, those
elegant tree-swinging gibbons. 


If you're an NBA star, however, who likes to drop in only every so often
on the various mothers of your babies, our fourth closest cousin, the
orangutan of Southeast Asia provides all the justification you need.


Each of our three closest relatives is just as useful (if just as 
inconclusive) an example to somebody. If ayatollahs took up Darwinism,
they would find the Koran vindicated by the noble silverback gorilla, who
broods in absolute mastery over his dignified harem. 


Similarly, anti-utopian philosophers find their pessimism about human
nature vindicated by the ornery common chimpanzee, whose basic social unit
resembles a motorcycle gang, complete with murderous raids on other troops
and frequent gang-bangs. 


However, feminists, aging hippies, and queer theorists have recently
discovered to their delight that there is a rare second species of chimp,
the bonobo or pygmy chimp. Respected primatologist Frans de Waal wrote in
Scientific American, "At a juncture in history during which women are
seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the
feminist movement. Male-biased evolutionary scenarios - Man the Hunter,
Man the Toolmaker and so on -- are being challenged by the discovery that
females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of
one of our nearest relatives." 


A bonobo troop resembles a summer camp for omnisexuals run by Madonna and
David Bowie: everybody has sex with everybody else all day long. Lesbian
crotch-to-crotch grinding is a particular favorite, while males practice
"penis-fencing." (Bonobos can couple dozens of times per day because each
session typically lasts only 13 seconds.) Another run-of-the-mill bit of
fun is what New York Times feminist-science reporter Natalie Angier
euphemizes as "transgenerational sex" (i.e., child molestation). Bonobos
are said to be "peace-loving." Males remain mama's boys their entire
lives, "being dependent on [their mothers] for protection" in the words of
Dr. de Waal. 


Now bonobo life probably strikes most people, men and women, as about as
appealing as a case of the clap, but intellectuals have gone slightly gaga
over bonobos. A Washington Post reviewer rhapsodized that bonobos "could
be the key to a more harmonious human future." Even Richard Wrangham and
Dale Peterson, the hard-nosed authors of "Demonic Males: Apes and the
Origins of Human Violence" ask, "Those loving bonobos -- did we pick the
wrong primate to evolve from?" Ms. Angier hopes it turns out we are more
closely related to bonobos than common chimps. Dr. De Waal asserts that
the news about the bonobo lifestyle "commands attention because the bonobo
shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile … making it as close to
a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of
ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have
occurred a mere eight million years ago." 


There are a large number of poorly thought-through assumptions in these
attitudes. As appealing as the bonobos' genetic programming may be to the
students and faculty of Smith College, their genes have not succeeded in
replicating themselves widely: there are fewer than 10,000 bonobos alive.
In short, bonobos are Darwinian duds.


Second, we really don't know much yet about bonobos, so concluding that
they are pacifists is tentative. It took the great Jane Goodall over a
decade to notice that the males in her beloved troop of common chimps were
genocidal brutes. And it took anthropologists even longer to notice that
our hunter-gatherer societies typically have murder rates that make South
Central L.A. during a crack epidemic look like International Falls, MN
during a blizzard.


Third, we didn't evolve from either chimps, bonobos, or gorillas, but from
some mysterious extinct common ancestor. 


Fourth, the oft-cited 98% figure for shared DNA is less impressive than it
looks. Most DNA is unused, so natural selection never changes it. Another
big chunk of DNA controls the basics of earthly carbon-based life, and is
extremely common across multitudinous organisms. Thus, one study found we
share 70% of our DNA with yeast! Perhaps if you don't have a great ape
around, you can scrape by letting a packet of Fleischman's Quick-Rise
pinch-hit as your role model. De Waal's statement that a chimp is as
genetically similar to a human as a fox is to a dog should remind us of
how small genetic differences can have big consequences. Look at dog
breeds. A collie is identical to a pit bull in all but a tiny fraction of
genes, yet the two breeds differ radically in size, shape, behavior,
intelligence, and personality. 


Fifth, the mindset that alludes to the split between humans and chimps as
happening a "mere" eight million years (or several hundred thousand
generations) ago reflects one of the most disastrous preconceptions
afflicting current thinking in the human sciences: that evolution can only
happen over endless eons. I don't usually argue that the ideas of Marxist
media hound Stephen Jay Gould (who recently guest-starred as himself on
The Simpsons) are underappreciated, but I must give credit where it's due.
He conclusively drew attention to the fact that natural selection can take
place in a hurry. 


The "rediscovery of human nature" by sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson
and their more fashionable offspring, the evolutionary psychologists like
John Tooby and Leah Cosmides, was a huge step forward in reinjecting
realism into the human sciences, which had been drained of much of their
predictive power by the dogma that nurture trumps nature absolutely.
However, Tooby and Cosmides' model of how the world works is itself crude.
They picture environmental and cultural influences interacting with human
nature, which they conceive of as monolithically identical for all humans.
In truth, they don't even belief their own absolutist dogmas about the
identicality of human nature, since the largest field within evolutionary
psychology today is the study of male human nature vs. female human
nature.


Yes, there is such a thing as human nature, but it tends to vary slightly
from person to person. That's what makes your fellow humans interesting --
they're not all cut from the same mold. And since genes are, by
definition, hereditary, genetic patterns tend to correlate with hereditary
groups: e.g., clans, tribes, ethnic groups, and races.


In particular, contemporary evolutionary psychology completely ignores how
environmental and cultural differences bring about genetic disparities.
Evo psych's leading lights have explicitly denounced the study of human
biological diversity ("human biodiversity" for short) as evil, or trivial,
or boring, or just not done, or something. Obviously, this is a ploy aimed
at deflecting charges of political incorrectness. In reality, the
differences between people are just as interesting as the similarities.
Indeed, contrast (e.g., the 0's and 1's of digital data) is the raw
material of knowledge.


Let's take a simple example. Adults were uniformly "lactose intolerant"
until cattle were domesticated within just the last 10,000 years.
Fortunately, natural selection can work so fast that in ethnic groups with
a tradition of dairying (e.g., Northern Europeans or the herding tribes of
the Sahara and East Africa), most adults now possess a gene allowing them
to digest milk comfortably. In other words, over generations culture
rearranges genes. In turn, this genetic adaptation encouraged
lactose-tolerant populations like the Swiss or the ultra-tall Dinkas of
Sudan (e.g., 7'7" NBA novelty Manute Bol) to further adapt their economy
and cuisine to the milk-based opportunities their genetic adaptions have
made available to them. So, genes can in turn rearrange cultures.


The extremely lean members of these cattle cultures of East Africa provide
striking examples of how nurture changes the tendencies of nature. The 3
million people of the Kalenjin tribe of the Kenyan highlands win an
astonishing 3/8ths of the Olympic medals in men's distance running despite
comprising only 1/2000th of the human race, according to The Running
Tribe, an upcoming book by Kenyan-born journalist John H. Manners. The
traditional job of the Kalenjin male was "horseless cowboy," running about
their high altitude countryside rounding up strays. Kalenjin culture also
encouraged cattle rustling raids: a band of youths would run 50 miles,
steal some cows, and drive them 50 miles back. The slowest runners would
get spears in their backs (thus dropping out of the gene pool), while the
fastest would get home, get rich, get lots of wives, and thus get lots of
kids to carry on their running genes. This cultural selection of genes for
endurance and speed is still going on among the Kalenjin, since many of
their world class runners use their winnings to afford additional wives. 


As we can see from the polygamous Kalenjin, cultural differences regarding
marriage are highly likely to create genetic differences. Those whose
genes helped them fulfill their society's norms for the ideal mate were
most likely to reproduce their genes in abundance. 


Cultures differ wildly in terms of marriage rules, but one interesting
geographical pattern is that in many (though not all) tropical tribes,
women can scrounge up enough plant food to keep their families fed, so
they don't need work-a-daddy husbands to bring home the bacon. University
of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending says, "In most of Africa there
were what the economist Esther Boserup called 'female farming systems.' 
This is a euphemism for societies where women do all the gardening work
and men live off the women."


In contrast, in hunter-gatherer tribes in cold regions, wives can't feed
themselves when snow blankets the ground. Instead they require hunter
husbands who regularly bring home game. "Another factor is that
hunting-related mortality increases in relation to gathering-related
mortality the further away one goes from the equator," writes
anthropologist Peter Frost of Université Laval's Groupe d'études inuit et
circumpolaire in Quebec. "Both of these factors -- food provisioning
constraints and higher male mortality -- tend to reduce male-male
competition for females."


Since wives are expensive in colder climes, monogamy and and paternal

investment in children are socially encouraged. Since few other men can
afford a second wife, shy guys can still get married, thus passing on
their nerdy genes.   In contrast, in tropical regions husbands tend to be
more expensive, making multiple wives an economically feasible option for
the man who can outcompete other men in appealing to women. This appears
to select for handsome, muscular, out-going men. Thus, in sports and
entertainment today the black man and the blonde woman epitomize
masculinity and femininity. 


One of the great unanswered (indeed, almost unasked) questions is whether
these tendencies that are so readily visible in tribes remain somewhat
visible in America. It's possible that these climate-related patterns can
help explain social patterns visible all around us. 


The advice offered to humanity by egalitarian intellectuals can largely be
summed up in three words: Be Like Me. Their lack of respect for human
differences has had some nasty consequences for non-intellectuals. One
thing intellectuals have done a terrible job of understanding about other
people is that while a racial group less predisposed toward, say, the high
degree of paternal investment which appears to be characteristic of
cold-weather peoples can certainly adjust (slowly and painfully, but
nevertheless successfully) to cold-weather ways, their adaptation tends to
be fragile, requiring society to nurture it.. 


Thus, in the 1960's white American intellectuals implemented two
interrelated Big Ideas imported from Sweden: generous welfare for
unmarried mothers and the end of social disapproval of sex without
marriage. The damage done to Swedes by these ideas has been almost
glacially slow, since it takes generations of welfare to undermine the
remarkable Swedish work ethic as it stood in 1900. Same with sex: if you
make marriage unfashionable, Swedes will still form long term
relationships and act like they're married.


And in fact, for those Americans as placid and rational as Scandinavians

(e.g., Minnesotans, Vermonters, grad students, etc.), welfare and sexual
liberation turned out not so bad. But Swedes and African-Americans,
however, are about as similar as ABBA and Jimi Hendrix, so do-it-yourself
moral wisdom, and the welfare to subsidize it, proved an instant
catastrophe for American blacks. For many of the worst-educated
African-Americans, a century's hard work in adjusting to Northern
institutions like monogamy, paternal investment, work ethic, law
abidingness, etc. was swept away by these two Swedish imports. When the
rich catch cold, the poor catch pneumonia. In contrast, these social
innovations had no detrimental impact whatsoever on American immigrants
from Northeast Asia.


The study of human biodiversity does not undermine the importance of the
study of cultural diversity. In fact, it emphasizes the importance of
thinking long and hard about culture. It especially underscores the need
for intellectual respect for how other people are different from you, and
thus how they may respond differently to your Big Ideas than you would.


Denouncing the study of human biodiversity proclaims one's faith in
empirical egalitarianism, which serves as the perfect excuse for ignoring
the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. By declaring that everyone
could Be Like Me (if only they were properly socialized), the clever can,
with clear conscience, continue to surreptitiously wage class war against
the clueless


# # #


Steve Sailer
http://members.aol.com/steveslr


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