I would like to thank everyone for the incredible reaction to my first dendrogram and a special thanks to the great James Thompson who tweeted it out to his thousands and thousands of twitter followers.

Although the vast majority of people enjoyed the dendrogram, there were a few people who were mocking it. Luckily I was tipped off by a quick thinking blogger. Not to namedrop but it was HBD Chick).

One of the critics asked why I had not calculated the cophentic correlation, because if I had, I would have known that human “races” don’t fit a tree like structure.

Alan R. Templeton writes:

The cophenetic correlation measures how well the observed genetic distances fit the predicted genetic distances from an evolutionary tree model and provides a heuristic goodness of fit to treeness…  The cophenetic correlations for various data sets that have been used to portray human population trees vary from 0.45 to 0.79 (Templeton, 1998a). A tree-like structure of genetic differentiation requires a cophentic correlation greater than 0.9, and any value less than 0.8 is regarded as a poor fit (Rohlf, 1993)

Source: Biological races in Humans

So what’s the cophenetic correlation of my dendrogram?

0.99333828

Why did my dendrogram achieve such a cophenetic correlation when others failed to do so? There are several possible reasons.

1. incompetence? perhaps I didn’t follow the correct procedures?
2. luck. With only a 5 modern human populations, a high correlation may have occurred by chance.
3. pure samples: perhaps the genomes in the data-set were less hybridized than previous data-sets which contained mixed groups like Southeast Asians
4. genome thoroughness: perhaps my data being newer, sampled more of the genome than previous research and thus gave more accurate results.

Anatomically Modern Humans first appear in the fossil record around 300 kya, yet we do not leave Africa until 50 kya. So for 250,000 years, we were confined to a single continent.

Perhaps this is an example of what paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould called Punctuated equilibrium, the theory that evolution is not gradual, but rather is a characterized by rapid explosive changes, followed by long periods of stability, followed by rapid explosive change etc.

So from 300 kya to 50 kya may have been a period of stability, since we had acquired the ability to conquer Africa, but apparently couldn’t leave (perhaps because Neanderthals were still superior to us at that point and thus would kill us the second we entered the Middle East, or perhaps we were still too dumb to survive the cold Middle Eastern winters)

Then, as paleontologist Richard Klein has noted, this long equilibrium was punctuated by a great leap forward in adaptive behavior. After spending 250,000 years confined to one continent, our species suddenly colonized five new continents in just 40,000 years.

So our ability to colonize jumped from one continent per 250,000 years to one continent per 8000 years (a 31-fold increase!). What caused this explosive change? Probably some mutation(s) in Africa that gave us the intelligence to leave, (as Klein claimed) quickly followed by natural selection for even more intelligence as we encounter cold climates our tropical bodies weren’t built for (as psychologist Richard Lynn claimed).

In the book The 10,000 year explosion, the authors imply another genetic revolution when agriculture occurred. Indeed
anthropologist John Hawks claims positive selection in the past 5,000 years has been roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution and is quoted as saying ” We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”

On the one hand, such rapid evolutionary change makes sense. There’s been more technological progress and population size increase in the last 5000 years than in all of previous human evolution combined, suggesting that maybe we’ve become smarter since the neolithic transition.

On the other hand, if people living 5000 years ago were more similar to Neanderthals than they are to us, why are they considered members of our species and not the Neanderthal species? Obviously they’re much more similar to us, at least when it comes to the skeletal traits used to distinguish members of the Homo genus.

Also, brain size has not increased since the end of the Paleolithic and may have even decreased, and our ability to draw (a crude proxy for IQ) , also may have even decreased. CBS news reports:

A new analysis of 1,000 pieces of prehistoric and modern artwork finds that “cavemen,” or people living during the upper Paleolithic period between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago, were more accurate in their depictions of four-legged animals walking than artists are today. While modern artists portray these animals walking incorrectly 57.9 percent of the time, prehistoric cave painters only made mistakes 46.2 percent of the time.

Also, if there’s been such rapid evolutionary change in the last 10,000 years, why hasn’t our ability to colonize new locations increased? We saw a huge increase in colonization ability 50,000 years ago as we jumped from colonizing one continent per 250,000 years to one per 40,000 years, but we haven’t colonized anything in the last 10,000 years, not even Antarctica. This suggests no increase in intelligence since the upper Paleolithic.

On the other hand, we went to the moon which is arguably the equivalent of colonizing a hundred new continents. Or did we? A lot of people think that was a hoax designed to elevate the U.S. above her Soviet cold-war competitors, and while I wouldn’t go that far, if I were a conspiracy nut I would find it suspicious that a) we did this with crude 1960s technology yet can’t seem to do it again today, b) we can go to the moon but we can’t colonize Antarctica, and c) East Asians never went to the moon, despite having the highest IQs.

The strongest evidence that we’ve become smarter in the last 10,000 years is that East Asians score about 14 IQ points higher than Arctic people according to Richard Lynn, even though both are big brained cold adapted Mongoloids that split from a common ancestor before the neolithic transition. Similarly, Lynn found the same pattern in Africa: Bantus score 12 IQ points above Bushmen. This may suggest that the 10,000 year explosion added nearly 1 SD to our IQs. Or it could suggest that Lynn’s data is flawed or that extreme differences in environment (not DNA) explains the IQ advantage East Asians and Bantu have over their hunter-gatherer cousins.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, this blog has been setting social media on fire after I discovered shocking video of Michael Jackson’s photographer claiming Jackson built the train station at the Neverland ranch before he had a permit. This was significant because Jackson fans claim he could not have molested a kid at the train station in 1992 if the building permit wasn’t even issued until Sept 93. However with the footage I unleashed, that alibi has crumbled.

Within hours of that blog post, thousands of people were tweeting Dan Reed, director of HBO’s critically acclaimed blockbuster Leaving Neverland, and then when Reed himself tweeted my discovery, all hell broke loose.

I have been bombarded with abuse survivors thanking me for brilliant journalism and excellent research. Adults who claim they were molested as children have very high IQs so it’s a great honor to be an icon in the #Metoo movement.

Of course now that the permit alibi has been ripped to shreds, Jackson fans are using photographs of Neverland, allegedly taken after 1992 to prove that there was no train station then. However even if the train station was not up until as late as 1994, Safechuck is on record saying the abuse ended “around 14” and someone born Feb 28, 1978 is still around 14 until at least Feb 28 94. Childhood memories are obviously approximate.

Because thousands of obsessed fans have spent their whole lives worshiping Jackson as a Christ-like figure, they can’t possibly accept that he could have been a pedophile, as alleged by HBO’s terrifying new documentary Leaving Neverland:

Fans have therefore devoted countless hours trying to debunk the documentary any way they can.

Most of these debunkings are too ridiculous to respond to, but one gained a small degree of traction.

In Leaving Neverland, James Safechuck describes many places where he claims to have been molested by Michael Jackson as a kid, including different rooms at Neverland (Jackson’s home). One of those rooms was the upstairs of the train station.

Mike Smallcombe (a British Jackson biographer) told Mirror Online:

The deficiency in Safechuck’s story is this – construction on Neverland’s train station didn’t start until the latter part of 1993, and it didn’t open until the first part of 1994, when Safechuck was 16. So abuse in the train station wasn’t possible if the abuse stopped in 1992, as he claims in his testimony, as it didn’t even exist then. There’s a two year difference.”

To prove that Jackson’s trains station wasn’t built until 1993, Smallcombe tweeted the construction permit.

However Smallcombe is assuming the train station was only built after Jackson got the construction permit. But in an interview taped in 2018 (well before this controversy emerged) for episode 094 of a Jackson fan podcast called The MJ Cast, Jackson’s photographer Harrison Funk claims he was told not to photograph the train station because it was built without a permit.

This means that the September 1993 permit Smallcombe cites must have been issued after the train station was built, suggesting it was likely built in 1992 or earlier.

Even if it was built in early 1993, this still does not debunk Safechuck’s claims of being molested there. According to imdb, Safechuck was born February 28, 1978, so he would have been 14 before February 28, 1993 and 15 by March 1993. Consistent with this timeline is Diane Diamond’s Daily Beast article published in 2014 which stated:

According to the source, Safechuck alleges that he “was molested from the age of 10 to about 14 or 15″.

Even if one overlooks the absurdity of expecting alleged victims of abuse to precisely remember the exact date and location of every sexual act that occurred over many years a quarter century ago, there appears to be no holes in Safechuck’s narrative.

UPDATE April 21, 2019: I’ve just been informed that further confirmation that the train station was built long before the permit Smallcombe cites can be found on pages 23-24 of Frank Cascio’s book My Friend Michael.

Then in 1993, my relationship with Michael reached a new level when, for the first time, he invited my family to visit him at his home, Neverland Ranch…I was twelve when my family took its first trip to Neverland over spring break…Now, though, we were at last at Neverland, and it was truly another world…The driveway curved past a train station on the right, a lake on the left.

In response to this article, many Jackson fans are linking to an AP photo of Jackson’s train station showing it under construction as recently as December 1993. However the photo only lists the creation date as December 1993; the taken date was likely much earlier. Many people assume the created date is when the photo was taken but it actually refers to when it’s created on the computer. AP has no way of knowing when their photos were taken since they buy photos from freelance photographers and if one of these worked for Jackson, they may have even deliberately delayed the creation date if, as Funk claimed, Jackson did not have a building permit at the time of construction

We’ve been told since the 1980s that IQ scores are incredibly sensitive to the environment, as proven by the fact that scores have been increasing at a rate of 3 points per decade since the earliest days of testing, and the tests must constantly be renormed to keep the average at 100.

However I’ve always suspected that the Flynn effect was an exaggeration and have been quietly collecting evidence to prove it. Most recently, I found a 1961 paper by Betsy Worth Estes et al., in which 82 kids (grades one through eight) who had taken the 1937 Stanford Binet were tested on the 1960 version. Given the Flynn effect is supposedly 3 points a decade, you’d expect them to score 6.9 points higher on the older test, than on the newer one, but instead the gap was only 2 points (IQ 125 on the 1937 S-B, IQ 123 on the 1960 S-B),