03/22/2014
For those who like this kind of thing and have a couple of hours to fritter away, I recommend going to JayMan’s March 13th blog post Why HBD? and diving down into the links and associated comment threads.
HBD is of course Human Biodiversity, which I defined well enough on this site fifteen months ago. It is the area of inquiry concerned with:
those (individual) differences between human beings and (statistical) differences between human populations that have biological causes in whole or part. [Is HBD Over?, VDARE.com, January 10th 2013]
I’ve noticed in a different piece [Arriving Late to the HBD Party, Taki’s Magazine, February 7th 2013] that commentators who approach human-nature issues from an orthodox Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) point of view — see no genes, hear no genes, speak no genes — have recently been betraying awareness of HBD.
One such is social anthropologist A.J. West, who on March 11th put up a post pooh-poohing HBD. That drew a long comment thread of (mostly) rebuttals to which West replied in-thread in a (mostly) thoughtful and courteous style. Among the names on the thread are both authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, along with JayMan himself.
Cochran and Harpending had previously engaged with A.J. West on their own blog. [“I regret studying social anthropology,” West Hunter, February 21st 2014.] That post has a good comment thread too, with A.J. West himself pitching in.
And so on. As I said, you need to (a) find this stuff interesting, and (b) have some time on your hands.
I just bring this to readers’ attention because it’s a good high-IQ discussion with a level of civility unusual in this area. A.J. West gets the worst of the arguments, but he fights his corner with very little support and a good spirit, keeping his cool and only very occasionally falling back on Cultural Marxist cuss-words like “racism.”
It’s now fifteen years since Steve Sailer started his HBD listserv. SSSM Puritans are beginning to pay attention. Some, like A.J. West, are now willing to engage in open debate above the level of point’n’sputter abuse.
Perhaps in another fifteen years Steve or Jayman or Greg Cochran will have a TV show.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.