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Notes -
White power
/s
Happy Diwali to my man J.D. Vance. In which, a Colored pagan gives white people more reasons to feel superior. Now with conclusive genetic data to back it.
In Scott's 'links for November' he shares:
Curious pattern matchers will find another identical graph in the paper. The intelligence graph coincides perfectly with....drum roll please...... yes, it's white skin and hair color.
Conclusive proof tying whiteness to intelligence! Nazis --> elated, Data --> supported, immigrants --> deported. Don't @ me bro
I thought I was cherry picking. But nope. No other graph superimposes this nicely with intelligence. (other graphs)
I'm surprised white supremacists didn't pounce on this immediately. I don't expect them to read. But still.....
Now what, 2000 more words about a stupid graph ? Yes ! But I'm more interested in trends within the intelligence graph over time, rather than what it means for white faces and blonde hair. The intelligence graph has inflection points which leads me to divide European history into distinct eras based around these points. Let's talk about these eras instead.
Reverse engineering history from kinks in intelligence genomic graphs :
The intelligence graph has a few distinct trend reversals. Those key reversals / phases eye balled with 250 yr tolerance on either side are:
What (spurious?) co-relations can we draw ?
7000 - 4500 BC:
The sharp rise corresponds to the Neolithic expansion. Agriculture spread and Near-East farmers started replacing native hunter gatherers.
3500- 3000 BC:
Sharp drop coincides with the Yamnaya expansion. It is in full swing, going deep into Europe. Big L for Skin heads. Aryans made them stupider.
1500BC - 500 BC:
Steady rise coincides with Bronze age collapse. But, not major genetic changes. This makes sense in context of the white-skin preference graph. It doesn't reflect any major change during that time. Might have been a purely cultural change or noisy data.
500BC - 1200AD steady decline:
I like this one. The Greek and Romans did not perform much population replacement, so the steadiness in genetics is to be expected. Germanic, Viking, Slavic & Celtic people performed some 'population replacement', but there isn’t one inciting genetic factor. On the other hand, This steady decline coincides with the continent’s biggest cultural phenomenon : Christianity. Another L for the skin heads.
1200AD++ steady increase:
Turns out, there's minimal lasting genetic impact owing to mongols or black death. So, I'll discard them. This increase appears cultural. Renaissance happens in 12th century, the technology hockey-stick begins and with it what I expect was positive selection for IQ.
If my (potentially spurious) correlations are to be believed, ancestral pillars of white identity (Yamnaya Aryans and early Christians) suppressed intelligence than promoting it. I'd love to see a global intelligence graph over the same period,. That way I can view relative impact instead of absolutes.
"There are 3 kind of lies : Lies, Damn lies and Statistics"
In closing, was whiteness good for European intelligence ? Idk, I remain confused.
P.S: Yes, I am extrapolating from one paper and drawing correlations over correlations. Don't take this as gospel. Please.
You would have expected "white supremacists" to pounce on this immediately, but they didn't... So why are you talking about them?
Aside from that, what can you expect to find? Some hidden genetic evidence that shows that, actually, white people are stupid, ugly and short? It seems rather obvious the only evidence you can find will support the fact we can all observe every day of our lives: Compared to any other race on the planet, White people are the opposite of that.
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What a terrible post.
Why would they? What does it prove, in the most white-supremacist-friendly interpretation? That intelligent Europeans (alone, as far as we know) preferred fairer-skinned partners? Or do you mean that they should have pounced because, in their stupidity, they would have congenially misinterpreted the findings as showing a causal relationship between fair skin and intelligence if they had bothered to read them?
Is there a single group of people outside of academia that would be more likely to read this paper? I don't know how many read it in full, but it did generate a lot of discussion on RW twitter, much of it reasonably well-informed. The IQ results were flattering enough on their own that there was no need to resort to whatever nonsensical argument you expected to see referencing skin color.
I suggest you draw some vertical lines on the graph. The sharp drop definitely starts before 3500. It looks more like 4000-3500, with recovery starting around 3300. So,
is false. The Yamnaya expansion began sometime between 3300 and 3000, coinciding with the beginning of the slow increase. Note that it took a thousand years or more for Aryan genes to spread to most of the rest of Europe. I too would have expected the Aryan invasion to be associated with a drastic change in one direction or the other, but that's just not what the graph shows.
I don't think I've heard skinheads referenced anywhere in the last 20 years except as hypothetical boogeymen. Less of this.
Please google the word "Germanic".
I'm sure you do.
How does Christianity explain the 1/3 of the decline that took place before the birth of Christ, or the 1/2 of the decline before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, or that during the interval before Christianity established itself in the more remote regions of Europe, let alone becoming a major force in the lives of the scattered, illiterate farmers that constituted the majority of these regions? The decline would have had to start around ~800 AD for your point to stand, but that is much closer to the beginning of the increase we see in the High Middle Ages than it is to your Christian pre-Socratics.
I'm not old enough to remember what the skinheads were really about, but nowadays, the image of a right-wing extremist who passionately believes in the salvific power of both Christ and the Aryan-derived heritable component of IQ is chimerical. (A believer in the latter is more likely to be an antireligious pagan (sympathizer). Actually even he might not exist; I've never heard it claimed that the Aryans' special sauce was their superior IQ.)*
Wait. I thought that the "whiteness" of a historical current, as perceived from the 21st century, as a latent variable modulating its contribution to intelligence, was your strawman, but maybe that was an accidental steelman of you. Is your working theory that whites were dumbed down by the Aryans and Christianity, but we compensated for it through the gradual lightening of our skin? I would think that was unfair, but then I don't understand why you say you're confused. Why would you expect all these unrelated things to have a consistent effect on intelligence?
*The closest I've heard is that their milk-drinking gave them an enlarged frontal cortex (unmediated by gene-culture coevolution) and so maybe a superior memory. I'm not familiar with the physical evidence, but one indirect point in favor is that international memorization competitions are apparently dominated by Mongolians, the one (large) ethnicity that both is Asian and drinks lots of milk. Also, the Aryans seem to have had a knack for epic poetry -- or just very long poetry, in the case of the Vedas -- which is not shared by many other cultures.
Whites and blacks getting together in racial unity and roughing up newly arrived pakistanis in UK in the 70s?
This Is England (2006) is a fun movie about that. Green Street is also a fun but different movie. The Brits need to keep their white working class around just so that we get more of these movies, IQ be damned.
If you like Green Street, I would suggest The Football Factory as a very realistic/funny look at the same stuff.
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Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.
We can go to West Africa or Haiti today and see 'ok these people aren't that smart', test genes and compare with other populations today. We can draw upon all kinds of data and observations from real countries, real peoples that exist today.
But 3000 years ago? 8000 years ago? Why was the Bronze Age collapse so good for IQ, such that it took us ages to recover to that peak level of intellect? Were the Sea People the true bringers of enrichment and diversity? We just don't know. Who can say what we're really graphing here, there could be a million confounders we don't know about.
Secondly, call me high-time preference but I'm interested in the here and now. So what if Meds, Hittites and ancient Egyptians had masterful civilizations while the Germanics were carving ugly wooden faces? Ancient Egypt is gone now. The Greece of Plato and Aristotle is gone now. Rome is gone. Byzantium is gone. We see ruins and read stories about peoples who don't exist anymore, places that lost their relevance. We can construct stories about how the dirty Asiatics brought Christianity with them to displace proper European religion but it's all just conjecture, we weren't there at the time. Our knowledge of this period is vanishingly small.
Let's focus on not becoming ancient history for someone else to ponder over.
once you analyzed lots of phenotype-genotypes for moderns you can apply these models for ancient, and analyzing population averages is simpler in some aspects than getting a good score for individual: for individual, a trait would depend on non-linear combinations and rare alleles; for comparing between populations, these aren't significant, because a population cannot reliably continue lucky non-linear combinations (we however do in in agriculture with f1 seeds and cloning).
How verifiable is it, though? Where are we getting DNA from, are they outliers trapped in peat bog pits or something? The article says they just found basically anonymous DNA samples from across Eurasia, over thousands and thousands of years. We can't know that this is a balanced sample.
What if they have X genetics and we accurately capture that but some epigenetics are activated/deactivated at the time? As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost (and they didn't cover it anyway).
I like my science as concrete and provable as possible. This is dangerously abstract. Abstraction is fine if we had some real Indo-European farmers or Neolithics to talk to but since we don't, standards for validity should be kept high.
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Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse? Smart people with a higher time preference survived because they were the ones prepared to survive the collapse and to rebuild afterwards. The ones who die are the ones who are dumb and therefore do stupid things to kill themselves, are unable to plan ahead, and lack a solid work ethic.
Now the reverse is true of High Civilization like Greece and Rome. We say it ourselves — good times make weak men. The Greeks and Romans used slaves for everything and had a pretty decent welfare state in Rome itself. The chief problem for Rome was a large class of unemployed in Rome who had to be entertained. In such a city, one could live a comfortable life and never have to break a sweat doing anything productive. And so if you were lazy, stupid, and uninterested in working or getting educated, not a problem. And so while those people die quickly in a collapse, they didn’t really suffer all that much in Rome. So those types would definitely lower the IQ of classic civilization.
Have you lived or witnessed close by a collapse? From my experience with the fall of the communism it is not the type of person that you described that thrived.
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You mean, smart people with a lower time preference.
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Doesn't this risk being a just-so story? It's not clear to me why a civilisational collapse or dark age would necessarily favour smart people with a higher time preference - you can probably argue just as easily that it would favour impulsive and violent people, because short-term aggression is more valuable in a time of instability. Long-term planning and building is more valuable in a time stable enough for generational or intergenerational investment to bear fruit.
Crises tend to favour fast strategies - and surely you could argue that fast strategies will value IQ less than slow strategies, and so you might expect average IQ to go down through a crisis.
To be clear, I'm not asserting that this is definitely the case. It just seems at least as plausible to me as the theory that crises favour people with higher IQs. I have no strong opinion on how crises influence the genetics of IQ.
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1200 AD is when the church started to more aggressively expand its control over marriages- if the Hajnal line selects for intelligence, we’d expect it to pick up around then.
The Church didn't ban cousin marriage in Western Europe, though. Aversion to cousin marriage is an ancient Indo-European tradition and something smuggled into Christian law by the influence of the Indo-European peoples who became Christians. It was something introduced into Christianity by peoples long disgusted by cousin marriage.
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