Tales of the City is a provocative series about a group of gays in San Francisco, one of whom is a genetic superior.
The genetic superior is lesbian but her girlfriend transitioned into a man, causing great confusion in the relationship.
The genetic superior (right) has a far larger cranial capacity than the boyfriend (left) who used to be her girlfriend.
Although the genetic superior wants to be open-minded, woke and supportive of her girlfriend becoming a man, deep down she wishes he was still a she, and so the two break up.
Sensing an opportunity, an older very wealthy bisexual woman gets naked in the Jacuzzi, hoping the genetic superior will take an interest.
She does:
Later that day, the older woman gets a knock on the door of her mansion. When she opens, it’s the genetic superior who grabs her and passionately kisses her.
The older woman is older not just as an individual, but also as a race, since Caucasoid morphology appears in the fossil record earlier than the new and improved skulls known as Mongoloid do.
Aside from the genetic superior, the show has little racial diversity, aside from a somewhat black gay guy who looks like a young Obama.
The black guy is dating an older white man who takes him to dinner with his older white friends. This turns out to be a huge mistake when the black guy tries to lecture his elders that the term “tranny” is politically incorrect.
An older gay is furious that the young black would dare lecture them about political correctness, because they were the generation that fought for the very gay rights he now enjoys, the generation that saw half their friends die of AIDs, so how dare this young kid sit on his politically correct high-horse and try to police their vocabulary.
Humiliated by the backlash, the black storms out of the house and feels betrayed than his older boyfriend did not defend him.
Oprah was in classy Montreal last week and she surprised a school teacher who is such a huge fan, she incorporates Oprah’s teachings into her lesson plan.
Most celebrities kind of take it for granted when fans gush about how much the celeb means to them, but Oprah actually listens earnestly, perhaps because Oprah attracts high quality fans: white suburban women-the crown jewel of the white race.
Meanwhile on Friday Bill Maher argued that if Oprah were to run for president in 2020, she’s the ONLY Democrat who could definitely beat Trump.
[the rules of this game were updated on June 22, 2019, to prevent zero scores]
Below is a list of people who have commented on this blog. Each person will represent a life form that started 3.5 billion years ago. All started with a complexity score of 1 which is the lowest level of complexity.
Now once a day the computer will randomly pick a number from -1 to +1 for each of you, that will be added to your scores. Since evolution would never select for zero complexity, any score that falls below 1 just remains at 1 by default. If your score hits 100, you’ve evolved into a complex multi-cellular oganism.
Every day the average score of all survivors will be recorded to see how the mean increases over time. The purpose of this exercise is to test Stephen Jay Gould’s claim that random variation leads to increasing complexity when you start near zero and have nowhere to go but up.
Obviously mean complexity will increase at first, but for how long can it continue? We shall see.
These numbers will be updated daily:
mikey blaze 2
Loaded 2
G-man 1
caffeine withdrawals 3
billy 2
illuminaticatblog 1
pumpkinperson 3
pumpkinhead 4
Rahul 2
social justice warrior 1
mug of pee 3
melo 1
marsha 1
race realist 2
james thompson 2
name 1
thinking mouse 1
Hippopotamusdrome 4
richard harper 1
akarlin 3
Munchkin Person 1
bruno 1
deal with it 2
June 21, 2019: mean 1, median 1, mode 1, lowest 1, highest 1, SD 0
June 22, 2019: mean 1.35, median 1, mode 1, lowest 1, highest 2 , SD 0.49
June 23, 2019: mean 1.52, median 1, mode 1, lowest 1, highest 3 , SD 0.73
June 24, 2019: mean 1.70, median 2, mode 1 & 2, lowest 1, highest 3 , SD 0.70
June 25, 2019: mean 1.91, median 2, mode 1, lowest 1, highest 4, SD 0.97
Paleontologist Dale Russell believed that had dinosaurs not gone extinct, they would have evolved into big brained bipeds very similar to us
In a trivial sense, almost everyone agrees that evolution is progressive in some ways. The average life form on Earth today is far bigger, more complex, more intelligent and more beautiful than the average life form 3.5 billion years ago, when life began.
However this does not prove that evolution favors more complex organisms because they’re superior, which is what is truly meant by evolutionary progress. It could just be that it takes time for complex life to evolve, and since life started with minimal complexity, it had nowhere to go but up.
Stephen Jay Gould uses the analogy of a drunkard’s walk. Gould’s anology is explained by Robert Wright:
A drunk is heading down a sidewalk that runs east-west. Skirting the sidewalk’s south side is a brick wall, and on the north side is a curb and a street. Will the drunk eventually veer off the curb, into the street? Probably. Does this mean he has a “northerly directional tendency”? No. He’s just as likely to veer south as north. But when he veers south the wall bounces him back to the north. He is taking “a random walk” that just seems to have a directional tendency.
If you get enough drunks and give them enough time, one of them may eventually get all the way to the other side of the street. That’s us: the lucky species that, through millions of years of random motion, happened to get to the far north, the land of great complexity. But we didn’t get there because north is an inherently valuable place to be. If it weren’t for the brick wall—that is, the fact that no species can have less than zero complexity—there would be just as many drunks south of the sidewalk as north of it, and the randomness of all their paths would be obvious. Gould writes, “The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity.”
The problem with this metaphor is how far North does the drunk need to get before the wall no longer explains his progression? If you found 100 drunks that were all 100 miles North of the wall and came back a month later and found those same drunks were now on average 200 miles North, then obviously something other than the wall is moving them North because once you get 100 miles North, the odds of randomly stumbling 100 miles South are like the odds of flipping a coin and getting 100 consecutive heads.
So Gould’s argument can plausibly explain why single cellular organisms evolved into multi-cellular organisms, but it can’t seem to explain why organisms that are already 100 miles North of the wall also show increasing complexity.
Paleontologist Dale Russell (1989) found that the encephalization quotient (ratio of brain weight to expected brain weight for body size) of mammals more than tripped in 65 million years of evolution. It seems extremely unlikely that this tripling can be explained by Gould’s “no where to go but North” metaphor because brain size can certainly decrease in size, and even vanish all together.
On the other hand, there might be a survivor bias in Russell’s dataset in that the descendants of those mammals that decreased their brain size are no longer considered mammals, leaving only bigger brained mammals in the sample.
What is needed is a study that compares the brain size of extinct animals with the brain size of their living descendants. If most of the latter are bigger brained than most of the former, then Gould’s metaphor is debunked, and evolution really is progressive.
Fascinating characters, dark narrative, outstanding acting. This show is a haunting emotional tour de force.
Number two: The Oprah Winfrey show (1986 – 2011)
The show that led millions of sexual abuse victims to recovery, broke America’s taboos, made us laugh cry, and cheer & allowed people of all races, ages, classes & sexual orientations to relate to each other as fellow human beings.
Number three: Dallas (1978-1991)
J.R. Ewing was the greatest villain in the history of television, and personified the elite of his era with wit, charm and style. No other show epitomized American culture in quite the same way.
Number four: The Sopranos (1999-2007)
Despite being a fat bald murderous pig, Tony Soprano was the ultimate alpha male in this riveting and psychologically fascinating narrative.
Number five: Roseanne (1988 – 1997)
I know we’re not supposed to like this banned show because the star has been outed as a racist, but it humanized working class white America with humor and intelligence.
The following is the abstract from J.P. Rushton’s original 1989 paper that launched him to international controversy:
Genetic distance estimates calculated from DNA sequencing indicate that in years since emergence from the ancestral hominid line, Mongoloids = 41,000, Caucasoids = 110,000, and Negroids = 200,000. Data also show that this succession is matched by numerous other differences such that Mongoloids > Caucasoids > Negroids in brain size and intelligence (cranial capacity = 1448, 1408, 1334 cm3; brain weight = 1351, 1336, 1286 gm.; millions of excess neurons = 8900, 8650, 8550; IQ = 107, 100, 85); maturational delay (age to walk alone, age of first intercourse, age of death); sexual restraint (ovulation rate, intercourse frequencies, sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS); quiescent temperament (aggressiveness, anxiety, sociability); and social organization (law abidingness, marital stability, mental health). This pattern is ordered by a theory of r/K reproductive strategies in which Mongoloids are posited to be more K-selected than Caucasoids and especially more than Negroids. (K-selected reproductive strategies emphasize parental care and are to be contrasted with r-selected strategies which emphasize fecundity, the bioenergetic trade-off between which is postulated to underlie cross-species differences in brain size, speed of maturation, reproductive effort, and longevity.) It is suggested that this pattern came about because the ice ages exerted greater selection pressures on the later emerging populations to produce larger brains, longer lives, and more K-like behavior. One theoretical possibility is that evolution is progressive and that some populations are more “advanced” than others. Predictions are made concerning economic projections and the spread of AIDS.
One especially interesting part of Rushton’s theory was the idea that later emerging populations are more advanced than early emerging populations, but Rushton never fully elaborated, beyond saying that Negroids emerged 200 kya, Caucasoids 110 kya and Mongoloids 41 kya.
Rushton’s source for these dates has always come from one 1988 paper from CB Stringer and P Andrews. Nowhere in the paper do they explicitly state that Negroids emerged 200 kya, so Rushton must have infered it from this paragraph:
If mtDNA changes are assumed to accumulate at a steady rate, genealogical trees constructed by minimizing genetic changes (through maximum parsimony analysis) distinguish two main branches. One leads exclusively to a number of African (or African origin) individuals, whereas the other leads to all other individuals of African or non-African origin. Dates for the branching points of the tree can be estimated from rates of mtDNA evolution in other organisms. This gives a date for the origin of the mtDNA of Homo sapiens at between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago, assuming constant rates of change at 2 to 4% per nucleotide site per million years…
Nowhere in the paper do they state that Caucasoids and Mongoloids emerged 110 kya and 41 kya respectively, but Rushton must have infered it from this paragraph:
Protein analyses, however, show a consistent split between “negroids” and the other groups, in accordance with most results from mtDNA and nuclear DNA. There mav be stronger selection on blood group types, and there is a less clear relationship between blood group phenotype and nucleotide sequence. Since the body of data from protein systems is also larger, the results from protein analyses are probably the most relevant here, and support the recent African origin model. These have been used to calibrate divergence times (again assuming selective neutrality and absence of gene flow) of about 110,000 years ago for the African-non-African split and about 41,000 years for the EuropeanAsian split (38).
In short, the paper seems to be saying the following:
From left to right: Archaic Homo, Negroids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids
So it seems that Rushton would have interpreted the above tree as showings Negroids emerged 200 kya, Caucasoids emerged 110 kya, and Mongoloids emerged 41 kya.
My reading of the tree would be Negroids emerged 110 kya and Caucasoids and Mongoloids both emerged 41 kya, if emerged is defined as branching off the main trunk of the human evolutionary tree.
Rushton once told me that he believed “Mongoloids branched off from Caucasoids in a superior form”, but his citation only claims a Mongoloids and Caucasoids split from each other, not that one split off the other.
Nonetheless Rushton was probably right. The last common ancestor of Mongoloids and Caucasoids probably looked and behaved more like a Caucasoid than a Mongoloid. If so, it seems reasonable to say Mongoloids branched off from Caucasoids.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a mathematical technique by which many data points get reduced to a smaller number of more manageable data points.
Cavali-Sforza lumped humans into nine major populations. The following shows his phylogenetic tree of these nine populations followed by a matrix showing the genetic distance between them:
Because I wanted to see if these nine populations could be objectively reduced to a smaller number, I made all the distances negative and then entered the genetic distance matrix into a minitab spread sheet.
The reason I made the distances negative is because PC analysis is usually done on correlation matrices where the higher the value, the more similar. In a genetic distance matrix, it’s the opposite, hence the negative signs I added.
The principal component analysis gave the following result.
To determine how many principal components to retain, mathematicians use what’s called the eigenvalue > 1 rule, which in this case means only three components.
The first component explains 54% of genetic variation and since Northeast Asians have the highest loading on this component (0.432), it can be thought of as a measure of Northeast Asianness. Africans are the only group to load negatively on Northeast Asianness (-0.376).
The second component explains 26% of the variation and since Europeans have the highest loading on this (0.526), it can be considered a measure of whiteness.
The third component explains 12% of the variation and since Native Americans have the highest score on this (0.527) it can perhaps be considered a measure of “New Worldliness”.
Now when I plot each of the nine populations in three-dimensional space (x axis = Northeast Asianness, y axis = whiteness, z axis = New Worldliness) with their loadings multiplied by 10 to make differences visible, we find all of the nine populations fit into three major clusters.
made using Graphing Calculator 3D
These three clusters are extremely similar to the three major races of physical anthropology: Mongoloids on the back wall, Negroids on the side wall, and Caucasoids on the floor.
No disrespect to Caucasoids (I’m 100% pure Caucasoid myself). The graph can be reoriented so any group is on the floor.
One anomaly is that New Guineans & Australian aboriginals cluster with Mongoloids, even though they are morphologically closest to Negroid. Of course such anomolies are not uncommon in taxonomy. Birds for example genetically cluster with reptiles, even though they’re not reptiles. Humans cluster with apes, even though we’re not apes.
Such anomalies occur because most of our DNA is junk, so it groups us based on how recently we share common ancestors, not by how much of that common ancestor we shared.
Wikipedia has a fabulous tree showing how human populations are all related on the Y chromosome. Trees based on just the Y chromosome might give better results than trees based on the entire genome because the latter is confounded by interbreeding between lineages. By contrast the Y chromosome is only passed on the male line and since men did not interbreed with each other, we get a clean separation of branches.
In addition, mutations on the Y chromosome tend to be neutral, so it serves as a more reliable molecular clock.
source: wikipedia
Moving from left to right, you get an interesting transition from Negroid to Caucasoid to Mongoloid phenotypes.
I suspect the Caucasoid race evolved in India. The first modern humans to leave Africa were almost certainly morphologically Negroid and were drawn to India because it resembled the African climate they were adapted to.
Then among the indigenous Indians, there was likely a split between the proto-Island Indians (ancestors of Andaman Islanders) who remained Negroid, and mainland Indians (who started evolving Caucasoid hair and beards),
The race known as Australoids may simply be Negroids evolving into Caucasoids
Some of the proto-Caucaoids stayed India where they remain as relic isolated tribes, others headed to Australia where they are known as Australian aboriginals, while others headed Northwest where they evolved into proto-Arabs and eventually whites,
smarter, more beautiful & less autistic? East Asians have some wondering whether evolution is progressive
I used to think East Asians were more autistic than other races, but new research begs to differ:
Mongoloids occupy a higher branch on the evolutionary tree than the other two races (Caucasoids & Blacks) and sadly, might be more evolved than the rest of us.
from left to right: capoid blacks, congoid blacks, caucaoids, non-african blacks, mongoloids
You might say, if East Asians are more evolved, why did most of the great inventions come from whites?
Perhaps the answer is because Caucasoids branched off the evolutionary tree first, they’ve had much more time to advance technologically. Caucasoid skulls appear in the fossil record 35 kya while Mongoloid skulls don’t appear until 11 kya, so Caucasoids have had a 24,000 year head start.
[update, June 2, 6:01 pm EST) a previous version of this article cited data that mixed cognitive empathy with emotional empathy. This error has since been corrected]
A study proves what women have known and exploited for centuries: men are autistic.
A sample of over 670,000 individuals took a battery of tests and questionnaires measuring autism quotient, empathy quotient, systemizing quotient, and sensory perception quotient.
The most interesting find was that on the eye test, a measure of cognitive empathy (ability to read what others are thinking), neurotypical men scored 25.54 (SD 4.57) and neurotypical women scored 27.42 (SD 3.43). From this I estimated the sex-combined neurotypical mean and SD are 26.48 and 3.92, respectively. Converting the sex-combined mean and SD to the familiar IQ scale (mean 100, SD 15), we get the following hierarchy of social intelligence:
Neurotypical women: social IQ 104 (SD 13.13)
Neurotypical men: social IQ 96 (SD 17.5)
Autistic men: social IQ 89 (SD 25.4)
Autistic women: social IQ 88 (SD 27)
Autism can be defined as the hyper-masculinization of certain parts of the brain, and people exposed to more testosterone during a critical period of brain development are more likely to be autistic, according to Simon Barron Cohen.
Also interesting is the incredible variability in each of the groupings. Nearly the full range of social intelligence is found in both sexes and in both autistics and neurotypicals. Even some autistics will be social geniuses and even some female neurotypicals will be socially retarded.
But on average, neurotypical females are about 8 IQ points more socially intelligent than men, which makes sense because men evolved to be useful idiots who work 48 hours a week to provide for their wives who stay at home watching Oprah, and then taking half the man’s money in divorce, and live five years longer.
Because females (on average) lacked the spatial and logical IQ to hunt food and build shelter, they evolved the social IQ to find a man who could these things for them.
However it should be noted that because of their greater variance (at least in this study), we’d expect social geniuses to be more likely to be male than female.
