Most of the genome is additive

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There seems to be a belief among some in the comment section that genetic effects are not (primarily) additive. By additive, we mean that by adding the gene, we will add to your phenotype; for example Steve Hsu estimates that replacing 100 negative height variants in your genome with 100 positive ones will add a few inches of height. That’s not to say that everyone with a given genotype will have the same phenotype regardless of environment, but rather it’s to say that good environments combine with good genes in an additive way; like a rising tide that lifts all boats without changing their relative heights.

However some are obsessed with Gene X environment interactions. That is gene A might add 1 inch if you’re in China but it will subtract 1 inch if you’re in Brazil. I don’t deny that such interactions exist. For example the Tarahumara of the Mexican highlands had very little exposure to agriculture and thus never evolved an ability to process refined carbs. So in their native lands, their genetics adds very little fat compared to whites reared in the same environment, but when they live in the United States, it adds hundreds of pounds of fat compared to American whites. So it’s not a case of a rising tide lifting all boats without changing their relative heights. In this case the rising tide (U.S. diet) lifts Tarahumara weight several times more than it lifts white weight. Tarahumara go from equal or maybe even leaner than whites when both races are raised in the wild, to several times fatter when both races are raised in a modern industrial society.

There are also gene X gene interactions (epistasis) where the effect of a given gene depends on other genes it its nexus. An obvious example is eye colour where having an allele for blue eyes only causes blue eyes when combined with another allele for blue eyes, but results in brown eyes when combined with a brown eyed allele.

These examples notwithstanding, many human traits, especially complex polygenic traits, are overwhelmingly additive. An obvious example is black people have darker skin and kinkier hair than white people, regardless of whether the two races are raised in America, Europe, Africa, China, or even Mars! There is no genes X environment interactions that alters that ranking.

People with Y chromosomes (on average) grow up to be much taller, stronger, faster, and hairier than women, regardless of whether they’re raised in India or Britain, so no gene X environment interaction. And regardless of whether they’re South Asian, white, Bantu, Pygmy, Dutch or Downs syndrome, so no gene X gene interaction either.

During the 20th century, the heights of both men and women increased dramatically all over the developed World, but that man > woman height gap remained similar. Again, the Y chromosome is an additive constant independent of what the environment adds. Similarly, ethnic differences in IQ have held constant in the United States over the 20th century, even though the average IQ of all races has increased quite a bit (see the Flynn effect).

People with a third chromosome on the 21st pair tend to be 50 IQ points lower and many inches shorter than their normal peers, regardless of race or continent, so again no interactions. Only additive independent effects.

In fact so independent are the effects of certain genes that they have similar effects on genomes and environments as disparate as humans living in the city and mice running through the grass. The FOXP2 gene is associated with language in humans. Humans with impaired FOXP2 genes struggle with words, syllables and sounds.

So what happens when you put the human version of FOXP2 in mice?

“There seems to be a change in vocalization — they squeak in a different way,” observed Nobel Prize winning geneticist Svante Paabo.

If the same gene can add vocalization skills to creatures separated by 65 million years of evolution, don’t tell me genes don’t have additive effects.

In similar experiments, scientists took the glowing gene from a species of jellyfish living in the ocean.

They found it had the same independent effect on everything from sheeps and rabbits living in fields to monkeys swinging from trees. Can’t wait for the first glowing person!

If genes can add the same effects across wildly different genomes in completely different environments, then surely they can be additive across different kinds of people living in our increasingly homogeneous global village.

Interviews with Steve Hsu

So I’ve been watching youtubers interview Steve Hsu. The first interview I saw was done by some Israeli, the second one I watched was by a guy of South Asian descent, and the third was some white guy who seemed to think he was Buddha.

Steve made a lot of important points, some of which I’ve discussed before.

When Steve first entered this field he feared that traits like height and IQ would be too non-additive to decode and too pleiotropic to edit. Pleiotropy is when a genomic variant affects more than one seemingly unrelated phenotype, for example one theory is that high IQ kids wear glasses because the genes for IQ also cause myopia.

Luckily, genetic architecture is overwhelmingly additive and with over 3 billion base-pairs in the genome, pleiotropy is not that bad.

The additive nature of the genome has been long understood by animal breeders and was formally explained in the famous Fisher Theorem in the 1930s. Put simply, phenotypes that are caused by additive genes are favored by natural selection because they’re easier to pass on. That’s because we get a random sample of mom and dad’s genes, so if a particular trait requires an interaction of several genes, it’s unlikely we’ll get all of them so what good are any of them? It’s thus much better to have every gene (genomic variant) having at least a small effect, independent of other genes in its nexus.

At least for white people living in the West, Steve can predict your height from your DNA with a correlation of r = 0.64. That’s actually quite incredible considering he’s limited to only common genetic variants (who knows how much additional variance there is in rare variants and non-additive ones). How high will the correlation get when the whole genome becomes cheap enough to sequence in huge numbers?

Unfortunately the correlation drops when he tries to predict height in South Asia. Let’s say you have a gene that causes you to like milk and milk makes you grow tall. This gene will help predict your height in the West but perhaps not in India where milk is scarce so maybe stuff like that is why the correlation declines.

Of course it could also be that races differ in genetic architecture but Steve assumes they are the same (not sure why this should be the default assumption since we know, for example, whites and East Asians have different genes for white skin)

If they are the same, then Steve needs some international samples to force the machine learning to find truly causal equations that transcend culture and I would like to try these equations on ancient DNA to find out whether the decline in height (and brain size) during the Holocene was genetic or environmental.

Right now Steve can only predict IQ (within countries) with an accuracy of around 0.4 (he says) but that’s only because in the age of wokeism, it’s virtually impossible to sequence large samples of people who have taken quality IQ tests. He can see the accuracy trend-line is still rising as sample size increases, unlike his height predictor which already has such large samples that it has plateaued.

Once IQ predictors become as good as height, we’ll see a massive increase in average IQ and height as rich couples will use surrogate mothers to produced 100 fertilized eggs and only the top 1% from each couples’ eggs will be chosen.

I feel bad for my nieces and nephews (and RR’s baby) because they’re about to become part of a genetic underclass. Already 10% of Denmark babies are born through in vitro insemination. Within the next 30 years, those who are not will find themselves six inches shorter and 30 IQ points dumber than the youngest adults. And on top of that they might also be more ugly and less healthy. It’s even conceivable that life span will increase to 300 years.

Already the pace of technological progress has been rapid over the last hundred years, despite the fact that genetic IQ has been static or declining. Now just imagine how fast technology will progress when cultural evolution is combined with artificial high speed biological evolution.

Jimmy Dore interviews Whitney Webb

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Just when I had given up on Jimmy Dore, he redeems himself by interviewing the BRILLIANT and BRAVE Whitney Webb.

I’ve been singing this girl’s praises since before it was cool and it’s great to see the rest of the internet finally catching on.

In an age where legacy media only tells half the story, and social media is is teaming with QAnon crap, Webb is one of the most important journalists on the planet. She asks the questions legacy media wont dare ask, but has the intelligence, critical thinking, and research skills to find actual answers.

Interestingly, this is now the second interview where she name checks Bob Rubin (who one of our commenters has claimed is a major power player).

See 31 minute mark.

One thing I like about Webb is she doesn’t just focus on Epstein’s sex crimes, but also looks into financial and foreign policy impact. Apparently he was a financial bounty hunter, helping the super rich hide stolen money and also helping their victims recover it.

My guess is Epstein’s IQ was around 145. Smart enough to entertain Bill Gates (IQ 170), yet still dumb enough to relate to Trump (IQ 120?).

The politics of autistic people

In the below video HBD vlogger Edward Dutton explains the politics of autistic people.

He agrees with the stereotype that they are more likely to be libertarian. He says this is because they like systems (markets?) and lack empathy. I hope he means cognitive empathy, because unlike psychopaths, they don’t lack emotional empathy.

I would propose a third reason which is they fail to predict the degree to which corrupt people will exploit the lack of government regulation.

On the other hand Daniel Seligman was likely a libertarian (based on his criticism of David Wechsler’s grasp of economics) and he was anything but autistic. He was the most lucid written word communicator I’ve ever seen in the HBD-o-sphere and I highly recommend his book to newbies who want a crash course on the whole IQ debate.. On the other hand he was Jewish so may have had ethnic reasons for being libertarian.

Dutton also claims that autistics tend to be alt-right. If by alt-right he means the QAnon nutjobs, I would tend to agree, but the Steve Sailer alt-right is politically savvy.

The legacy of the ice age lives on in our IQ genes

The largest study ever of American ethnic IQ differences in a representative sample is the Coleman study. Here we saw 5 different ethno-racial groups compared at multiple ages on 5 different mental tests. The study involved 645,000 students from 4000 public schools. All test scores were expressed using a scale where the Americans on the whole average 50 with a standard deviation of 10.

Because American Indians and Oriental Americans come from non-English homes I decided to use the non-verbal test as the most valid measure of general intelligence. And because the environmental inequality between these races compounds every year like compound interest, I decided to compare them in the first grade before environment has had much time to cause differences.

The other reason for using the non-verbal test is it consists of conceptual problems like figure series which are neither verbal nor spatial but purely abstract and thus a pure measure of general intelligence that is not significantly biased towards verbal or spatial thinkers.

I wanted the scores to be expressed as IQs using white norms so the white mean of 54.1 was equated to IQ 100 and the white SD was equated to 15.

I don’t in fact know the white SD on these tests but historically the white SD is about 97% as large as the American SD so I assume it was 9.7.

Using these parameters, we get the following IQs:

Oriental Americans: 104

White Americans: 100 (by definition)

American Indians: 98

Mexican Americans: 94

Puerto Ricans: 87

The American Negro: 83

Estimated score of the American pure Negro: 78*

What these numbers suggest is that when anatomically modern humans evolved in Sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago, we had an average IQ of about 78, however leaving the tropics to survive the cold ice age caused massive natural selection for IQ. Indeed by the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, commenter Melo discovered that brain size in Europe had reached 1512 cc (60 cc higher than it was before humans left Africa).

Assuming a within-sex, within ethnic brain size standard deviation of 91 cc, and assuming a brain size IQ correlation of 0.4, this 0.65 SD increase in brain size implies a 0.65/0.4 = 1.63 SD increase in IQ (24 points). Not all that different from the 22 point IQ gap between white Americans and the estimated IQ of full-blooded African Americans.

The fact that there’s virtually no IQ gap between white Americans and American Indians suggests human intelligence (like human brain size) peaked at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.

Then as Native Americans headed South, the warm hospitable climate required less intelligence and we see a rare example of backwards evolution, thus explaining why despite white admixture, the Mexican Americans score lower than their indigenous cousins in the U.S..

Puerto-Ricans, like Africans Americans, are hybridized blacks but with slightly more white admixture, thus explaining why they score a bit higher too.

Meanwhile the incredible scores of Oriental Americans is not at all explained by selective immigration. Indeed in the 1960s, most Orientals were descended from railroad indentured laborers and thus, if anything, were below the average of their home countries. Rather, the high East Asian IQ can be explained by Northern Siberia being the coldest (and thus most cognitively demanding) place modern humans ever lived in large numbers

*estimated by assuming American blacks are 75% whites and thus dividing their deviation from whites by 0.75.

The three grades of Homo Sapiens

I really love this Y chromosome tree found here.

Technically there’s just one race because all humans are part of the African clad which is why you often hear the cliche “we’re all Africans under the skin”. Nonetheless, there are three main morphologies corresponding to major evolutionary grades: Negroids (the first four populations pictured), Caucasoids (the next two, splitting off Negroids) and Mongoloids (the last two, splitting off Caucasoids)

One can seen how Rushton would have looked at trees like this and became convinced evolution is progressive. As the tree goes from left to right, the haplogroups become younger (although we could orient it so goes from right to left) and descended from more splits. At the bottom of the tree we have the bushmen who are believed to have absolutely colossal sexual characteristics (consistent with Rushton’s theory that less advanced populations are more r selected).

A better view of the haplogroups is seen here:

Guest post: Cognitive cognitive Disonance; or, The Apparent Antinomy of Atheism and Anti-Hereditarianism by Teffec P

[The following is guest post and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person]

It has always puzzled me that many atheistic “rationalists” are hostile towards so-called hereditarianism; it seems that an ounce of consistency and statistical intuition suffice to appreciate that purportedly amoral, purposeless physical forces alone could not beget a secular “human equality.” While one can reasonably object to over-indexing on hereditarianism, mere inquiry into its being a partial explanation for intergroup differences in such a thing as cognitive ability often arouses the hysterical outcry of supposedly dispassionate Darwinists.

To any anti-hereditarian physicalists ordained to the Church of ad hoc Sentimentality, I am curious: If not “divine intervention,” what gave rise to equal distribution of cognitive strengths between, say, men and women – or, moreover, between ethnic groups evolving for tens of thousands of years in reproductive isolation? Was it a lucky break? Are quanta omnibenevolent? Their egalitarian developments with regard to Mankind sacrosanct, questioned only by blasphemers just asking to be flogged?

RIP Barbara Walters 1929 to 2022

So 2023 began with the death of legendary broadcaster Barbara Walters who passed away quietly in her posh New York apartment at the freakishly old age of 93, on Dec 30, 2022

As the first woman to co-anchor the network news, she is praised as a trailblazer for women in broadcasting as she clawed her way to the absolute top of the New York elite. Like George Soros and Allan Greenspan, she’s part of the generation of American Jews who replaced the WASPs as the ruling class.

Fellow Jew David Wechsler would have been a kid in a candy store testing Walters. Despite a speech impediment perhaps genetic (her greatest secret was a retarded sister), she would have scored high as a kite on Verbal IQ especially Comprehension subtest (she had insight & wisdom) but she would have scored perhaps low on Performance IQ thanks to her sister’s genes.

Jackie’s genes

Before retiring from TV, the ladies of The View, the show she created, honoured her historic career. Even though she was surprised by luminaries as great as Hillary Clinton, it wasn’t Oprah.

For wouldn’t it have been great to have been honoured by the most iconic worshipped, charismatic & most powerful woman on the planet.

wouldn’t it be nice to claim her as part of your legacy.

one can dream.

and then it happened. Out of the corner of the stage, the Queen of the World walked out to surprise Barbara

The crowd went wild & Barbara went into shock

Packing a 150 IQ, Oprah took over the show, shifting seamlessly from prepared speech to improvised dialogue without missing a beat. After generously plugging a network special on Barbara’s career, Oprah introduced a long line of women in media who each thanked Barbara for paving the way.

It was the most amazing tribute I have ever seen and virtually the last time Barbara would be seen. Like so many who live so long, she would be diagnosed with dementia but had enough intelligence to isolate herself in her gorgeous apartment, so that this special day would be the last thing we’d remember of her incredible life.

slowly her incredibly high verbal IQ would slip away as she found herself turning into her retarded sister Jackie,

oh sweet innocent Jackie

her only sibling….

Jackie

her greatest secret…

jackie

Her greatest love and deepest shame

Jackie

If only there were a God so the two sisters could reunite in Heaven

Barbara died peacefully in her sleep surrounded by loved ones..probably other women from New York’s Jewish community

In the end it’s your own people who have your back

Guest post by Illumanaticat: The psychology of abstract models of reality

There is a distinction between what is naturally selected and what is mind selected. That which survives survives. It is a tautology and therefore true. That which exists exists.

rr redefines what fitness is. Fitness is fitting. The environment has vacumes where organisms can survive in. The best fit survives. If it does not fit it does not survive. Fitness does not mean superior. Cavefish are blind yet they fit into their environment. If it fits it fits otherwise it does not fit and dies before reproduction.

The problem with deductionists like rr is they redefine words so that their arguments are always correct. (like fitness and selection)

balls are square.
a basketballs is round, not square.
therefore a basketball is not a ball.

see what I mean?

Deductionists play word games using logic because that is their psychology. F*** evidence and common sense. In their minds validity is above soundness.

Minds do not select organisms. Organisms either fit or don’t fit. Reproduce or don’t reproduce. That is natural selection as defined by Darwin. Variation either helps hinders or is neutral to fitness. It is why you find cacti in the desert but not in the artic. It is why whales but not sharks live in the arctic surface waters. Warm-blooded animals can fit in more places than cold-blooded animals and that is why you find them there.

Redefining words is helpful for winning arguments but it is not science.

Minds as defined by rr is immaterial. (cannot solve material problems/abstract problems because it cannot touch them physically)

Minds, as defined by science, is a problem-solving mechanism innate in the brain. Both abstract and concrete. You can touch problems physically. (interact with them physically)

Phycology is the same. Take cocaine or weed and tell me that is not a physical reaction you are experiencing. The ADHD meds they gave me along with the antipsychotic and seizure meds physically changed my brain so I no longer have anxiety.

Deductionists will tell you that the physical and mental are separate by redefining words but in all reality, their psychology is very much the result of the orientation of their psychic energy (libido). Energy is physical so in reality their energy flows in the direction which causes them to be deductionists in the first place. Well, the opposite flow causes others to be inductionists.

When you realize that the psychology of mind is simply the direction energy flows in the brain system then you understand why people are different. It is these differences that characterize a person’s psychology because they can be observed and are not the results of unobservable immaterial substances.

If I poke your Amygdala in the right spot you will become angry, in another spot happy. Rats that have been genetically engineered to have human glucose metabolites outperform non-engineered rats in rat intelligence tests.

A human brain is a causal model of reality that simulates a hypothesis of what is possible and then selects the option that is most beneficial to it. This requires nothing immaterial. What it does require are the frontal lobes to inhibit wrong actions and to have a backup plan. And to monitor if both plans (the current plan and backup) meet the criteria for achieving the goal. If something does not work try something else in accordance with how you know reality works.

Mate selection in humans works by humans seeing desirable traits in their mates. Again these are observable, not immaterial. So what is desirable? What helps you survive. A conscious selection is still based on a judgment so by the design of the brain (its pattern) selection will occur based on how well a brain is able to judge survival qualities. For example, a k-selected person will select a k-selected person to mate with and reject an r-selected individual. Their brain is designed to favor this difference. Not designed by “God” but by their genes that shape the structure of their brain.

Looking at what this all means is that different brains direct energy in different ways. This is an attention mechanism. The attention mechanism shapes how we build our causal model of reality. Because attention can be structured differently so to patterns, in reality, can be understood better or worse by the structures that accommodate them. Such is when mental manipulation occurs. The ability to abstract is a structure that coordinates with itself to simplify what a pattern means in relation to other patterns. The symbol is the ultimate abstractor. In language, we use signs to signify the meaning of something else. Together the human brain’s mechanisms of attention abstract patterns in such a way as to find new meaning.

Meaning as such is the attention we place on patterns based on brain structure. Intelligence in humans and creatures beyond the human is more than shallow quantities but is in the abstract nature of meaning lower concrete systems cannot understand and are blind to because they lack the attention mechanism that would generate a causal model of those abstractions.

In conclusion, it is brain structure that directs attention. And Intelligence is based on modeling reality with its brain structure.

How many races are there?

How many races are there? Depending on who you ask there are anywhere from only two to over 100. Since many humans are too dumb and too biased to give an objective answer, let’s turn to math.

Perhaps a more objective approach was deployed by Cavalli-Sforza who transformed a genetic distance matrix of 42 ethnic groups into a scatter plot.

Once he had them in a scatter plot, he could do principal component analysis

The first principal component can be thought of as the g factor of race. It is the line that best fits all the races and the primary dimension upon which they can all be ranked. It reflects the great Out of Africa migration and how far from Africa the races were able to travel. Those who stayed in or close to Africa score at one extreme (Europeans and Africans themselves). Those who were able to travel all the way to Australia, Siberia and the Americas score at the opposite extreme (East Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians).

To find the second principal component, you need a variable that is 100% independent of the first variable. Thus you need to draw a line through the scatter plot that in 90 degrees from the first, but not just any 90 degree line, but one that minimizes the distance between the new line and ethnic groups.

The second dimension seems to correlate with skin color. Those who score high on the second Principal Component are white skinned peoples like Northeast Asians & Northwest Europeans. Those who score low have dark skins, like sub-Saharan Africans and Oceanians.

With two components you can crudely organize humanity into 4 major races: sub-Saharan Africans (lower right), Caucasoids (upper right), Northeast Asians & Amerindians (upper left) and Oceanians (bottom left).

However white supremacists might not be happy to be lumped in with commenter “Loaded” in a single Caucasoid race. Perhaps if Cavalli-Sforza had added a third principal component, that separation may have occurred. A third principal component would have to be at 90 degrees of both the first two and thus requires three dimensional space where it would stand like an erect pole.

Cavalli-Sforza never bothered, but using a smaller data-set of 26 populsations, Jensen extracted SIX principal components. He then spun the six components like a spin on Wheel of Fortune. “Varimax rotation maximizes the variance of the
squared loadings of each component, thereby revealing the variables that cluster together most distinctly,” said the brilliant Jensen.

Jensen wrote:

“The population clusters are defined by their largest loadings (shown in boldface type) on one of the components. A population’s
proximity to the central tendency of a cluster is related to the size of its loading in that cluster. Note that some groups have major and minor loadings on different components, which represent not discrete categories, but central tendencies. “

The six rotated components are: (1) Northeast Asians (2) Caucasoids, (3) Southeast Asians & Pacific Islanders, (4) sub-Saharan Africans, (5) North and South Amerindians and Eskimos, (6) aboriginal Australians and Papuan New Guineans.

However Jensen neglected to do a principal component analysis on the rotated principal components themselves or maybe he did but didn’t publish it because the results were unpalatable. You might think that’s not possible because principal components by definition are uncorrelated, however one purpose of rotating them is they become no longer 90 degrees apart and thus are no longer orthogonal.

Had he done such a second order principal component analysis, he may have found second-order factors. Perhaps (1),(3) and (5) would form a second order factor. Perhaps (2) would form another. Perhaps (4) and (6) would form a third. Then we’d have the three main races of the Bible: Mongoloids, Caucasoids and Negroids (not that I believe in the Bible or the Koran or any other holy book).