Kicking. Squealing.
Crunchy con Rod Dreher provides contemptible commentary on the Sullivan-TNC IQ-Race discussion. I’ll start at the end and work backwards:
Then again, I believe there is a such thing as forbidden knowledge — that is, knowledge that ought to be suppressed, for the greater good of all. Read Roger Shattuck’s brilliant study of this topic for more.
And this is why I can’t call myself a conservative insofar as conservatism requires a dogmatic collectivism that puts a social and cultural vision axiomatically ahead of truth. The adherence to noble lies prevents me from addressing issues that I consider my self mature enough to handle. This type of ideology plants its own truth and forces Truth to grow around it; I prefer the opposite.
But as far as acceptable suppression goes: First, who decides which knowledge is suppressed? What are their merits? To what extent is the knowledge suppressed – are guns used to assassinate characters or to just plain assassinate? And what factors determine suppression – can we get a Venn diagram or something? Dreher, a Christian, would have been among the many opposing those dissenting voices who dared speak against the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, or those that spoke against geocentrism. Going back further, a person holding Dreher’s view would have opposed unlocking the door of monotheism altogether.
Regardless of how Dreher feels about confronting hard truths, he ignores that knowledge, like winter, is coming. There is no point ducking and hiding; the drunkenness from a keg stand at the Spigot of Truth will hit harder than merely slow slipping it. If there is an uncomfortable truth to be learned might as well learn it now and figure out how to deal with it or transcend the limitations it presents. For the long-term, this will create a more robust society.
Sullivan understands that just because the Nazis made bad use of this stuff doesn’t make it untrue, or unimportant. I get that. But I keep coming back to a point that seems to be the one TNC is making: of what use is this field of study, anyway? Where do we propose to go with it? Andrew’s view is that it’s worth knowing for the reason all truth is worth knowing, and pursuing. In an abstract world, that makes sense. But we don’t live in a world of pure disinterestedness.
I find it more useful to observe the debate surrounding the debate rather than the actual study of race and IQ itself. The responses to the mere mention of between-group differences in IQ are canaries in the coal mine; they let us know exactly to what extent the suppressors of knowledge (contrary to Sullivan’s initial posts, I think suppression in the social sciences and in the mainstream are more of a problem than suppression in intelligence research) will go in stifling debate. And similar reactions help us mark and measure the reactions on other controversial scientific discussions – climate change comes to mind. And for those who do believe that IQ differences are not genetic, engaging in the science and the debate will do much more towards reaching that conclusion than engaging in near-Lysenkoism.
Also, to continue with the “why should we?” question, as Dr. Stephen Ceci offers in an anti-suppression rebuttal to a debate at scientific journal Nature over whether the research into Race and IQ should be conducted in the first place, Dr. James Flynn, the leading proponent of the environment explanation for group IQ differences, attributes his discoveries in the field to the existence of the debate in the first place. Without Arthur Jensen, James Flynn wouldn’t have contributed anything to the field of psychology.
If I were a geneticist, I doubt I would want to work in this field, only because the experience of the 20th century, especially the Holocaust, makes me deeply mistrustful of what human beings will do with the scientific knowledge that this race is intellectually inferior to that race, and we can prove it genetically.
Which is why, if these truths are to be explored, they are best dealt with by “responsible” people who don’t adhere to collectivist ideals. By the way, Nazis were collectivists, no? Libertarian Charles Murray is a good example of the strain of scholars – quite different in goal-orientation that eugenicists – who think that there’s merit to arguments about group IQ differences. Most of these people place the sanctity of humanity above the scope of science. Nazis – and collectivists to a less egregious extent – took accumulated knowledge about certain groups of people and used that to shape society and public policy. The people who are interested in the topic of race and IQ today are most likely to oppose any collectivist lurch against human rights, which is the only fundamental suppression with which we should concern ourselves.
And yet, I am more sympathetic to TNC’s viewpoint because I can’t get around the uses to which the study of racial differences and intelligence was put in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the eugenics movement. The eugenicists weren’t all racists in the way we understand the term. Eugenics was thoroughly mainstream science, embraced by progressives (Teddy Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, et alia) who thought this science would help us improve humanity.
And religion, nationalism, and tribalism were all once widely and barbarically used as rallying-points for war, rape, and murder, yet we don’t automatically eschew those institutions. And as mentioned before, labor unions were once used as tools to push black, minority, and immigrant labor out of the workforce. But I assume that Dreher has been able to “get around” some of those despite their (sometimes) nefarious use.
I can appreciate, in concept if not in application, the utility of the Noble Lie.
But sometimes a noble lie is a blood libel. This is the case with denying the unequal distribution of IQ by race. Barring the HBD explanation, a white-perfidy explanation becomes the consensus, with logical political responses applied to remedy this phantom evil and people like us paying the white-tax in blood and treasure for an eternity.
lol, this dumbass confused Margaret Sanger with Margaret Mead
Good catch mike. I don’t want to keep rubbing it in black people’s faces that they aren’t as smart as we are, but I also don’t want to keep hearing about all the injustice they’ve suffered at our hands. Like most white people I don’t really feel bad about slavery, segregation or colonialism.
I don’t think people should be stopped from studying IQ differences by race. They may also be the ones who find ways to raise black IQ.
Does my first comment above satisfactorily answer Dreher’s question “why study this?”
Lara,
Raising relative black IQ will only occur when blacks begin mating assortively for intelligence rather than other characteristics. Or perhaps government-coordinated breeding or interracial breeding.
PA,
I think so. We need to study this because if we don’t definitively attribute the gap to something – whether it be nature, nurture, or some mix – white perfidy will be the go-to bogeyman. That’s a good point. Today, white oppression is, as you say, the default setting for the explanations of most everything wrong with the world.
I understand that between people or groups that it is useful to avoid bringing up the shortcomings of other people or groups. The idea that there are topics that shouldn’t be brought up out of discretion and social harmony comes with it an unspoken agreement. This silent agreement is a reciprocal understanding that neither side will attempt to craft arguments that assumes false the unpleasant reality is being politely ignored. To put it another way, I can humor you and pretend that their isn’t an elephant as long you don’t make plans that assume that is no elephant in the room. This may be how PC has shifted us from mere socially useful politeness to unreality that will be harmful over the long run. By explaining failures in minorities as driven mostly by white racism and privilege, by promoting affirmative action, ideas and policies too numerous to document, they have broken an unspoken agreement of civility and made it necessary to bring reality back into the argument.
(Thought: Is is possible that politeness/civility is only useful between individuals and small local groups, at a mass level, absolute honesty is best?)
PA–
Here, here.
We pay enormous costs in inefficiency and direct costs for all the affirmative action, disparate impact, and related regulations and ideology. They’re the principal business of human resources departments in all big organizations in this country. Our governments are vastly more expensive due to all the lousy black workers they “have” to hire and can’t fire regardless of how little effective work they do.
Dreher says, ‘I keep coming back to a point that seems to be the one TNC is making: of what use is this field of study, anyway?’
Maybe it’d shed some useful light on differences in outcomes between jews and gentile-whites in academic matters, and once and for all we could put aside the notion that disparate outcomes hasnt been the norm for millenia because those damned kike bastards have been holding us down.
Maybe, just maybe we’d hate the Hebes a little less, and just accept the fact that some people are a little smarter than us, on average.
Think of how much money we spend to close uncloseable gaps in education performance. Think of how much our bright are held back by the great resistance to tracking or to many tracks in our public schools. Thing how much money it costs whites to take flight from cities and inner suburbs (from crime and black dumbed down and violenced up public schools) in both real estate and commuting costs, due to all the government forced housing integration.
Mass level diversity is our weakness, and all the efforts to integrate and fully blend it makes it worse.
Right Chuck. When black men become successful and often choose a white woman to have children with they are trying to have smarter children.
It’s no different than anyone else looking for good genes in a mate.
I’d like to see eugenics make a comeback. No I’m not talking about a holocaust for blacks. Duhhh.
I’m talking about conditioning welfare and parole on voluntary but incentivized/coerced sterilization for females and males alike. Get the stupid and violently stupid to reproduce a lot less.
Yowza!!
Lara–
Which I’m completely opposed to. It quite disgusts me. It dilutes smart white genes. As well the individually smartish black guy is gonna have a kids with a white woman that tends to regress towards the black mean IQ.
IQ is well over half genetic in America environmental conditions, the evidence fairly reviewed strongly suggests.
Dreher is the worst sort of panty-waist, so-con loser. Don’t forget that he was a runner-up for Roissy’s Beta of the Month back in ’09:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/june-2009-beta-of-the-month/
Dreher is actually worst than lefties, since he kinda knows the truth but is just too … scared! scared, I tell you! to look at it and accept it.
I stopped reading American Conservative when Dreher showed up there (after he lost his previous job for “anonymously” posting nasty-grams on a church site).
Rod’s a weakling and a bad human being.
Yeah, I forgot about the Dreher “beta of the month” post @Chateau.
I once half-seriously bantered with David Alexander about black IQ eugenics, and in response to his suggestion that all non-genius white women mate with blacks, I counter-offered with this as the most effective, win-win method:
Factor most black men out of the equation via humane distractions, and impregnate most black women with high iq sperm, from Nordic men for aesthetic value-added.
@PA
That’s a much better suggestion. Given that black women are much less in demand than white women in the mating market, taking black women off the market instead of white women due to pregnancy incurs less opportunity cost.
I appreciate black men because they are masculine and I always feel feminine around them. Their constant racial agitating is annoying however.
Liberals have a lot to lose if it is indeed true that blacks have a lower average IQ. Right now, so much of the virulent idology on the left is wrapped up in the false meme that the only reason blacks are unsuccesful is due to white racism. Therefore there must be mechanism that compensates blacks for this injustice. This is what justifies most of the welfare entitlements in our society. It is also the foundation of black on white resentment and hatred. If blacks are unsuccessful, it surely must be the fault of whites because we are all supposedly equal. Therefore we should not surprised that blacks and liberals will be hypersensitive to anything that demolishes this cherished myth.
Regarding having children with a black man, I would be bothered by the fact that they identify as black rather than white even though they have a white mother. It would especially be a problem with a daughter who didn’t identify with me because I’m white.
As far as asking whether knowledge is useful, you need to know the truth before you can oppose a lie, and you know the truth by tackling a subject fairly. Without that knowledge, BS goes unchecked. I’m looking at you, oppression studies.
Agreeing as a society to not talk about something that is known to be true is one thing. That thing becomes an elephant in the room that nobody mentions. It’s annoying, but not in itself truly devastating to the discourse.
It’s when jackasses decide to hide behind the elephant in the room and insist that they’re invisible, or attempt to use the elephant as if it were cover in a firefight that you’ve got real problems. To refute their sophistry, you’ve got no good option but to light up the damned elephant.
TNB, PA–
I was rereading some of that comment thread. That was a seriously good one.
I miss the old days at the chateau 2008-2009. Was a good gang of regulars then, and Roissy was fresher. Was still saying things for the first time. More pickup and fratire anecdotes too.
I’m kinda surprised he doesn’t have a book out yet.
[GLP: I kind of cringe at my naivete in some of those threads. Not that I was wrong - just that the stuff I wrote, at least in that thread, was sort of Alt Right 101. But in other news, it's nice to know that Whiskey was and will always be 87% crazy and 13% amazingly lucid.]
Lara-
.
Yes, excellent point. I might well disown a daughter who regularly dated black guys. No uni money from me.
Dreher is a weak-willed hypocrite. He wrote extensively about Catholic child abuse scandals while a Catholic, and eventually abandoned the Church over it. That is, he determined that the truth mattered too much to not illuminate the public, for the sake of the children no doubt.
His desire to obfuscate here is just an extension of that same self-flagellating, degenerate paternalism on display in his BotM entry. When it came down to it his hysterical, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” internal dialogue won out over his commitment to the ingroup; which is an incredibly common maladaption to Christians, especially of the denomination-shopping variety like Dreher. I’m not saying he is wrong here (in opposing the Church in their handling of incidences of abuse), but that his moral compass is defective. The reason he opposes it, and his visceral reaction to the scandal comes from an unhealthy place.
When it comes down to it here, his reasoning isn’t the same as TNC’s. TNC is looking out for fellow blacks. Dreher’s internal dialogue again is “Won’t somebody think of the black?”; displaying a similar paternalism.
He associates the capacity to suffer on behalf of others as strength. Which is to say he believes weakness is strength; and he also conflates capacity with desire, when in this instance they are basically opposites. Roissy touches on it tangentially when discussing Dreher. The Bible teaches mercy and forgiveness as a restraint on one’s natural impulse for ruthlessness and vengeance in the face of being wronged. It’s about controlling non-constructive primal instincts, such as caving in the skull of your disobedient wife with the jawbone of an ass when experiencing emotional stress.
The message in the Bible isn’t for mentally defective emotional masochists like Dreher that actually get off on being wronged, and then abasing themselves before their wrongdoers. There’s a difference between being a simple beta, as in not so great with women, and a cuckold fetishist that has an attraction to feeling emotional anguish, and an attraction towards submissiveness; however one wants to paint that behavior as flattering, Papa Bear.
Ultimately Dreher is psychologically incapable of not advocating anti-white policies, because he is white. White people must suffer so that others may benefit and lord over them to meet Dreher’s approval. The Catholic Church wasn’t wrong in protecting its’ image (in Dreher’s eyes), but because they refused to accept their due social opprobrium and abase themselves before the court of public opinion. The Church, in displaying strength and solidarity (albeit in a corrupt pursuit) appears ‘weak’ and wrong to Dreher. The problem isn’t their corruption; it’s their not sharing in his masochism.
Chuck:Raising relative black IQ will only occur when blacks begin mating assortively for intelligence rather than other characteristics. Or perhaps government-coordinated breeding or interracial breeding.
Huge ramble but I’ve had a helluva lot of soju and it’s just clearing up.
Life is misunderstood. Life is an energy process; it currently happens to use carbon chains and genes and bit protein machines called lifeforms, some of them bogglingly complex but based on straightforward if involved development on multiple levels. These are all feedback mechanisms. Chemistry, cellular metabolism, structures, organisms – all of it directed ultimately by the need for genes to reproduce. The total is more than the sum of its parts. But the root director and absolute limiter is the genetic code. The process has become so complex (self-directed intelligence) that it often defies itself – but fool yourself not. Religion and liberal mysticism aside, we are biochemical machines of fantastic complexity on many levels. Add in social feedback and it makes us physical miracles. That said, we are as much part of the natural order as it is part of us. And our distinctness is a complete illusion. We are biological machines in every sense.
On race and IQ:
Evolution can happen shockingly quickly. The tricky range is 3-5 generations. A consistently applied selective factor – maintained over 3-4 generations without lowering its selective pressure – has these effects on average gene distribution. Note that this requires pretty impressive pressure. The right level would be 0-1 children (below replacement rate) for the lowest 15% of the population *if* the upper range of those carrying a trait were having 2-3 children; note that if the upper range have more than 4 (double replacement rate or more) then this will more than double the effect over 3 generations.
1 generation: 1-5% shift
2 generations: 5-15% shift
3 generations: 15-35% shift
4 generations: 35-65% shift
Say there’s a simple trait that promotes an inability to focus or a wildly distractable temperament. Maybe something that exaggerates the effect of testosterone. can make males and some female more aggressive and more stereotypically masculine, perhaps with major downstream effects: inattention in school, ability to perform strength – related sports, tendency to overreact emotionally, tendency to respond with fight rather than flight, to attack unprovoked, etc. The body may have the same amount of testosterone, but it uses it differently. This can be a simple trait.
You could reduce a 60% incidence in a population to a 2-3% incidence by 5 generations.
Select *for* and not just against traits and you radically alter this formula. It accelerates.
I presume that proactive social proscriptions would be impossible, so really aggressive selection criteria would be undoable. But if we focus just on eliminating dysgenic policies, again, the effects over, say, 6 generations would be so profound as to render a population essentially unrecognizable for a given trait.
In the case above, that gene would no longer contribute to social delinquency.
To completely eliminate a trait without massive selective pressure is likely impossible; but to reduce it to a self-propagating threshold is possible. This is the level where its marginal advantage outweighs any possible negatives: traits like this often are marginally useful and hence are hard to extirpate in a gene pool, but below a certain threshold are disadvantageous in general; if they hit a higher threshold, say 60% penetration, they become exaggerated and highly advantageous again: The sweet spot is to get the lower dynamic and not the higher one.
It’s like this: Crap genes like that would be of incidental advantage at 2-3% are hard to get rid of, but can’t spread much more than that. BUT if they get to about 50% then the balance tips and those who don’t mate into this lose out; a new social pattern is set and what was previously a mating disadvantage is not required for success. The prior advantage (say more sociability) is now a weakness (social weakness and lack of aggression if all other members of society are more aggressive). This can reverse again as easily, when the balance tips: A heavy-handed state brutally punishes malefactors, reducing their breeding attractiveness, and creates a new “breeding attractiveness” standard; what was previously an advantage (aggressiveness) is now almost always negative, except on a marginal level. Note that this equilibrium can exaggerate the tail of a peacock or produce a fantastically generalized body form instead of a specialized one (primates, a generalized group of “mammal” with no great specializations, unlike carnivora or say, ungulates, which are highly specialized in many ways primates are not). Why not specialize? Why specialize? Evolution takes traits and runs away with them. Sometimes, it seems to not run away at all: But NOT running away with a trait is a way of running away with some sort of “Balance”. Primates have some weirdly generalized “mammal” body plan that is unlike other mammals, and while they went on to specialize, they’re unusual among mammals.
Evolution is a statistical game, based on “attraction” for mates much more than raw survival. The invention of sex changed the whole game radically: Avoiding predators and getting food had to share space with *finding mates*.
So sexual selection makes members of your own species almost more important as an environment as your food or predators. And sexual selection become quite literally everything. Sexual reproduction changed the game for life entirely. Evolution went nuts. Bacteria that don’t engage in sexual selection face different forces of evolution.
Creating dimorphic sexes (males and females as opposed to hermaphroditic sex) then upped the equation again. It’s no accident that the vast variety of life took off after the invention of sex. Mate selection makes it all insanely competitive.
It’s this mechanism that could go a long way to explaining why more than just IQ may be needed to account for profoundly higher levels of aggression and overall sociopathy in sub-Saharan populations: Once state societies hit in hard, it would have taken what was a great advantage in, say, germany 5000 years ago and turned it into hard-core liability under the rule of a prince, especially if there’s nowhere else close by to run to not ruled by said prince or related princes.
The equilibrium is dominance (65-85% penetration) or insignificance (3-10%). You need “sexy sons”: Even if something is not useful or detrimental, you MUST have kids with this trait simply because all your kids’ potential mates have it. Don’t have it and your sons aren’t “sexy” and therefore are less successful (this mechanism is less relevant to female offspring; females are always desirable for breeding stock, males obviously less relevant, therefore females just compete for the best males while males much compete for getting access to females at all, or risk never reproducing; females rarely have to worry about not reproducing at all, they just need to worry about mate quality. Males have to worry about both quality and existence of mating opportunities).
The “sexy son” effect breeds the Red Queen runaway selective mechanism.
This may explain why a population with violent tendencies on a genetic level could, in the span of say 10-20 generations, literally breed the violence right out of themselves – or into themselves. Maybe both over 40 generations. It’s almost assuredly true that the Scandinavians had this happen: Mass die-offs and emigrations, and severe limitations placed on errant males and their female admirers, by newly established states that no longer tolerated these males and their females – meant a huge shift in *which* offspring survived and bred more successfully: Today, a bunch of peacenik, sheep-like farmers. Prior to that, a huge class of extremely violent and aggressive males had far more breeding success. Prior to that, perhaps it as balanced.
Once a population adopts a strategy, stepping outside that strategy hugely disavantages those who don’t follow it. This is how a “red queen” effect takes off: A trait can become stupidly exaggerated. Why? It fosters attraction or breeding success. Why does it do this? It encourages mate selection. Why? Because –
Potential mates must have offspring that are themselves attractive. if you choose against this, your offspring will suffer in the current selective regime. When the balance tips, for whatever reason, the opposite then holds true.
But what I’m trying to say is that these dynamic balances are incredibly subtle and incredibly unstable when faced with changes in environment. Introducing state societies and agriculture is a huge change in social pressure. Coming from a cold climate minus modern technology is another.
The tipping point for *consistent* selective pressure is about 3-5 generations. If you don’t backslide on pressure, I suspect you could raise the average black IQ significantly by about 5 generations, probably on par with any other group. With a black “Ashkenazim” in an elite black population perhaps by 10 generations. They wouldn’t be representative, but like white Ashkenazi Jews, they would be self-selecting and reinforcing members of their racial groups.
All social policies are powerfully eugenic. Nothing is random. I have no idea why liberals are so set against eugenics as a discipline. What they promote is powerfully selective, as well: Single moms and thug boyfriends will produce a radically different genetic behavior distribution (culture aside, even) than females obliged to mate for resources.
Denying this is insane. It requires some sort of willful blindness about basic biology. Or a belief in the “magic essence” of human beings. If you believe that there’s a magic pudding in human heads that is amorphous and limitlessly alterable and interchangeble, this makes sense. But it’s counter-intuitive and utterly at odds with everything we know about biology.
Sociobiology is going to be a huge science unless it’s shut down for crassly political reasons (like the church denying heliocentricity)
Why? Because we’re animals, like all other animals.
What liberals need to get ready for is shifting their reliance on the blank slatist ideology they ascribe to to something more stable.
At some point, probably soon, we’re going to find out what genes do on a micro level. I suspect that we’re going to make a lot of people cry. Before a baby is even born, we’ll be able to determine its maximal height range, how strong it will be, how much they’ll have to study to get good math marks, how likely they are to be a petty criminal in a given social situation, how likely they are to cheat on a spouse, etc.
When we do this, liberals will scream, but then predictions will turn out true, and then–
We’ll learn how to manipulate these traits. Want an entire nation of hyper-intelligent people? Easy. Want people who are specialized (like ants) on a basic genetic level? IE – bred like dog breeds? Easy.
This technology isn’t far away. It will obliterate liberal ideology if they cling to blank slatism – like those who clung to Lysenkoism despite reality.
But this revolution will pale in comparison to the next one. It’ll look like small potatoes.
At some point, we’ll learn not just to manipulate current variation, but to take evolution a further step: we’ll figure out how to create variation, and then program completely novel traits that never existed. When that happens, it will be an even bigger revolution than societal genetic selection. It will become genetic programming. It will make genetic selection (eugenics) look positively uninteresting by comparison.
More:
We’ll have computers with 1,000,000 x the computing power of all of our current computers put together; this is likely an underestimation. Perhaps they’ll be molecular, or based on non-binary models of parallel processing on variable state nodes: perhaps instead of binary bits, individual switches will have changing combinations with from 2-8 states. Perhaps molecular “neurons” will have 55 potential states. These will cluster together, to make switches that have 10,000 different potential states – a computer the size of a pixel would have more computing power than all computers ever made. A computer the size of a speck of a USB drive will be able to perform as many tasks as all computers ever made x 10,000,000 and do it more efficiently than any information processor ever conceived.
Such machines will be able to minutely model every possible genetic change in an organism. Imagine them hooked up to molecular generators and recombiners: they’ll be able to fabricate life, along with symbiotic organisms (gut bacteria, skin arachnids, etc.) and incubate it and raise it to any age. It could make a new Chuck from scratch. Add in other technologies and perhaps it could implant memories and personality and life experiences, too.
They’ll be able to make kinds of organisms we can’t even imagine. They’ll be able to make animals or things that don’t even have the same life-characteristics we have now.
On larger scales, they may be able to make, say, metal-based lifeforms that can be used as vessels by other organisms. The moment we have machines that can literally generate lifeforms, we can create things we wouldn’t now recognize as living at all. Remember: Life is an information process. It *happens* to rely on chemistry and carbon and genes. It needn’t do so.
If we don’t kill ourselves, this will happen. It’s only a matter of time and focus. Initial levels: Customized bacteria to eliminate toxins in water. Viruses to reverse-engineer traits in existing species (a plant virus to insert pathogen-resistance genes into all, say, banana plants – thus exterminating a parasitic fungus in a day everywhere in the world; a cure for cancer spread by virus to all humans, inevitably getting to everyone; more disconcerting things can be imagined, but all are possible).
They’ll be able to create lifeforms from scratch. They’ll be able to literally create people (archaic ones, Chuck, my aunt, new ones, ones with blue hair, ones that don’t age after reaching adulthood, huge humans, interesting new experimental lifeforms vaguely resembling humans, etc.).
A single sentient machine (likely one of billions) would be able to model a lifeform and literally know everything likely to make up its life long before it even got to the gene creation machine. It could then model a society of such beings, have 10,000 years of evolution play out, and then not bother creating it at all. Or create a much later stage in its existence because the first stage was too boring.
The upside:
Imagine the education program you could make for such engineered lifeforms. You would know in the tiniest detail what it would take to turn X into a nobel-prize winning physicist. Or exactly, down to the minutest detail, what it would take to make Y person be the fastest human ever to have lived. As in, what to eat on its 12th birthday and down to the second how long it should train when it’s 22 years, 3 months and 2 days old. You could estimate to within crazy levels of accuracy what age it would die at if no accidents happened. Etc.
That’s absolutely possible.
We think this shit is unbelievable. But it’s not. All life is mechanical: The right level of computing power would make a machine able to model lifeforms on the most inconceivably intimate level. The right technology would also allow the molecular construction of such organisms from basic ingredients. Nanotechnology fabricators are already able to do this in theory. We’re building the purest possible crystals in tiny quantities. It’s the stone age for nanotechnology, but I’ll bet we get to the equivalent of the information age in nanotechnology a lot faster than it took us to go from neolithic to Apple computers.
The neo-luddites who aspire to blank slatism are so utterly doomed, it’s more pathetic to watch them dance and shriek than anything else. Doomed. Their worldviews on its most basic level, down to what it means to be alive, let alone sentient, is so irrelevant as to be laughable. We’re on the border to remaking life. We’re on the border to taking a self-replicating information molecule and extracting the process from the chemistry entirely. Taking life out of carbon life and genes and making this process (and sentience) independent.
We are biological machines. Much of our so-called free will is an illusion. We are both liberated and constrained by our biosocial programming.
Science will not just unlock and decipher the magic of life. It will completely remove the “magic” thought from our understanding of it.
“Sentience” has never had this opportunity before, as far as we know. What we become capable of is not just creating new life – this will be a big change, surely, but smaller than what comes after.
Whatever sentience descends from us will become capable of creating whole categories of material things that have sentience or characteristics of life we now think are uniquely created by “God” or just arrived by the contingency of evolution.
Each step will be a huge revolution, each revolution more profound than the last.
The first step is unlocking the human genome and deciphering it. Expect blank-slatists to cry deep tears as we demystify group differences. Expect some societies to engage in active breeding. Others will resist but will be out-competed easily within 2-3 generations by those who do.
The second is the radical selection of traits. Social policy may not allow it, but I think specialization and breeding will take on a regular role in society. If it goes badly, expect wars and social chaos. Likely top-down governments and if it goes sour, horrible hierarchies. They will become more palatable as resistance disappears because people don’t want to resist (ie, are bred for roles).
Liberals can prevent this by abandoning the blank slate and actively engaging positive reforms and controlling them. Once we understand the human genome and how many traits, including social and personality characteristics, are genetically influenced, we won’t be able to unlearn this knowledge. Blank slatism will die and be forgotten, like phrenology. It will just disappear or be relegated to the fringes of magical thought, like creationism. Liberals will twist and turn in the wind, having tied themselves to a delusion and now unable to continue as before; if they adapt, they can prevent the worst abuses, but ostrich head in sand will cause the worst to happen if they do nothing. If they don’t embrace the new world, their worst nightmares will be the result.
The third revolution is the creation of new traits. Humans with wings. Humans able to take pressures at 3 miles under water and also go into space. Humans engineered to live on Mars at the extreme end. Humans integrated into machines and human intelligences starting to be unlike anything we can imagine.
The fourth will be the ability to remotely manufacture new life forms. This could be concurrent with the third, but need not be. Basically, a computer or its very distant descendant AI lifeform would be able to model anything it could imagine, program it and then create it from scratch. It could recreate 9th century BC Babylonia through inference and genetic records, plant it in an environment and include every plant and animal on record such that the locals might think it *was* 9th century BC babylonia. It might do this just for fun.
It might just make some bacteria to extract arsenic from rocks while leaving the rocks intact. Who knows? Only the scale is different; the process will be the same.
Imagine such intelligence at school. Okay, class, make lifeforms that can live at 1000 degrees centigrade. Now design a bacteria to make quartz. Now create something that flies, anything that flies – a bifacial algae mat with gas balloons, a predatory insect, a monkey with wings, a plant that flies somehow.
Who knows? At that level, you could do amazing shit.
At some point, the descendants of our sentience (not necessarily direct human descendants, but possibly) might make lifeforms that live in the vast emptiness of space and themselves generate further lifeforms. They could eventually experiment with alternate chemistries and know precisely how it’ll all turn out long before they create a lifeform: silicon in place of carbon. For that mater, *light waves* instead of carbon.
There are few limits. Life is an organizing information principle. It’s subject to evolution, but as soon as you start reorganizing matter for sentience, not just reorganizing carbon life, all bets are off. Carbon-based life and genes become ancient history.
After that, I’m sure new laws of evolution and physics we can barely imagine will come into play.
We might be the embryonic stage of a sentient universe. Sentient on micro and macro levels.
Perhaps, eventually, bubbles of space time might form an environment for sentience. Maybe sentience itself will prove to be too limiting and absurdly basic a concept.
Point being: The beginning is the ability to direct our own evolution. We’ve always had this. We’re the product of selective breeding, whether we admit it or not. Taking the step to direct our own selection instead of letting it happen blindly (though it’s never been directionless and completely random) is “consciously selective”. That’s eugenics. But this is much better than being unconsciously selective. The potential for harm and betterment are so much greater. Take that and go with it: SOMEBODY is going to try to direct it. It behooves liberals to take this one by the horns and direct it.
But we can’t stop there. This is the point.
Nanotechnology and biotechnology (in the greatest sense, not just the limited way we conceive of it now) will not just change the way we see the world, they will radically alter what we are. What life is. What existence is.
When suns and stars and the intervening space are populated by things we don’t even imagine now, and things, with genetic codes represented by atoms and chains of metal ions and bodies made up of crystal lattices only vaguely modeled on carbon-protein bodies, swim through the spaces between galaxies on gusts of gravity waves, their distant ancestors (carbon-based life) not even the dimmest racial memories a thousand life revolutions before, and descendants of humans resembling amorphous biological machines capable of rearranging their own molecular structures to suit any purpose, able to survive as individuals for a billion years, then change their material makeup, then combine together to form hyper-intelligent lifeforms and then decide to break apart again into sentient sub-components just because, then assume the form of their most distant ancestors because it’s interesting, then leave the universe altogether and go elsewhen/where, –
when this happens, it will be because life became sentient and the process started to redefine itself.
We don’t know this. But in the very truest sense of the word, we are undergoing the most profound revolution in the history of the human race. Right now. Not just redefining what it is to be human. But what it is to even be alive. We’re going beyond mere life itself with computers and information technology and biotechnology and nanotechnology. We’re on the very edge of redefining existence.
This all starts with tiny steps, realizing we are biosocial information machines: molecular protein shells meant to propagate an information meme as a chemical process, made up of an alliance of self-interested genes which are, at root, just an information transfer process that happens to rely on carbon chemistry. A hopelessly complex chemical process built up in fine layers of organization from the simplest of chemical roots.
Understanding life as it really is – a layered chemical process, an information regime transmitting itself through the processing of an energy transaction with resultant natural selection refining it for billions of years – utterly devastates most people. Our palaeolithic brains are simply unable to compute in this world. It’s why we lapse into magical thought, as creationists and liberal ideologues do.
It’s wildly mechanistic in a non-determinant way. It’s not mechanistic in a way we can readily conceive, but it *is* a physical / chemical process.
At some point, the fact that life is genetic/carbon-based will become incidental. A process that started somewhere and that became carbon chains reduplicating and then information that sought survival and then ever more complex chemical forms and ever more elaborate structures and then integrated environments and hosts of competing organisms, none of them wholly separate and none of them wholly integrated, a blurry miasma of biological things interacting and then becoming social – generating higher orders of information behavior–
sentience of individuals, if not groups (perhaps not ants today, but weirdly social insects in 500 million years? Brain fungus plasmoids living on things oddly resembling trees but really a kind of very distant descendants of lichens blended with some kind of animal) –
human intelligence, non-human intelligence–
and at some point, this unbelievably elaborated system of communication and information exchange will cease requiring carbon based life itself. These spasmodic dreams above that seem like absurd science fiction will themselves seem hopelessly archaic.
Humans with wings or vast races of human-like things engineered to live in bizarre environments by machines traveling through space or brain-like things with the ability to manipulate planet-sized machines based originally on human genomes, though the most bizarre fantasies today and seemingly terrifying in their other-worldliness, …
will themselves be nothing but the most silly archaisms when compared to lifeforms composed of light or living things inscribed in the crystalline structure of entire planets or hyper-intelligent lattices composed of esoteric matter coasting along and generating electromagnetic-gravity waves through the universe as they graze on energy derived through tapping into variations in zero point energy.
Genetics itself will seem like some sort of bizarre hopelessly ancient process lost in the dim ancient memories of the universe. Once day, beings composed of light with no genetic structure at all but capable of existing as raw information in fifty physical states simultaneously and sentient on levels we can barley comprehend might look back on carbon-based life the way we look at the first bacteria, let alone the basic human lives we live as higher animals essentially indistinguishable at that level from the first bacterium that split in two –
Life is a process. It’s a kind of energy idea. It happens to involve organic chemistry. It doesn’t need to. I can be engineered. At a higher level, it need not even require chemistry as we understand it.
It sounds like bafflegab, but it’s not.
The carbon genetic code is a mechanism for the transmission of an energy process that exists because it replicates. Genes are in alliances of convenience with each other. This got bigger than itself and then we had self-replicating colonies of clones (multicellular organisms) through several intervening stages which are lost to history.
Add evolution and more and more complex organisms, all *programmed* on every level to breed by evolution, and you get humans.
We’re layers and layers and layers of instinct and biochemical machine and adaptive intelligence but still biochemical social machines.
On a fundamental level, life is a tiny information process.
We’re taking baby steps. But just as we’re just discovering the basic principles of life, we’re set to radically alter them.
Whine. Bitch. Complain. Piss into the wind, if you want.
But liberals have to know: Infantile debates about race and IQ and gender and genes are about to be rendered so unutterably irrelevant that it makes one weep for the stupidity of it all.
Accept it. We’re machines. Complex machines, but machines. Proof?
We’re going to start to make more like us. Eventually, we’ll make things utterly unlike us, in the way humans are distinct from bacteria. In some way, they will be our descendants.
You can cry or weep, but reality is and will be. You are a biosocial machine. You are the descendant of breeders and survivors. Your genes emerged from a soup of chemicals and even these genes themselves are just physical manifestations of an information process. At some point, it’s likely we’ll divorce life from reliance even on this physical process.
Okay, so this might be a million years off. But I suspect that gene machines and life generators and vastly sentient computers are a helluva lot closer. 1000 years is probably not far off. Maybe even less. Maybe much less. Maybe 10 generations to space probes capable of completely recreating all life on Earth on a distant world and even replicating themselves like von Neumann machines such that in 1 million years dozens of planets with Earth-life exist in our local area. 20 generations from human lifeforms only vaguely resembling us, perhaps hundreds of species if species as a term has any meaning at all. 30 generations from us maybe not existing at all, or us creating life not using organic chemistry. 80 generations from some kind of descendant intelligence of some order traveling into space on waves of light and happening upon earlier versions of life’s migrations outward, in a universe filled with Earth-originating life that we might mistake for laws of physics or esoteric phenomena. 100 generations from intelligence not even resembling sentience as we could ever hope to understand it.
Maybe we can’t understand physics on a deep level because of the way our minds evolved. So… perhaps we’ll create intelligence not limited in the same way. What will they be? A different order of life?
A different kind of thing?
It’s like living at the time when the first printer was banging out pages and selling them for a pfennig or a schilling. We have no idea how we’re blasting away at everything we understand about not just human life, but life itself.
This tide will sweep it all away.
A bunch of lefty blank-slatists will have no home in a world where the very notion of life and living thing have been completely redefined.
Don’t think this is going to happen? Too late. It’s happening right now.
It appears the blood diamond industry has been hurting. They’ve created a new trend: engagement rings for men, called “management rings”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2068182/If-like-ring-Introducing-mangagement-rings–engagement-bands-MEN.html
Diamonds are a guy’s best friend.
Gorbachev,
that is the longest fucking blog comment i’ve ever seen. i’ll need to download that on my Kindle and read it through my next several shittings.
Kyle,
what i see in Dreher is the same quality i see in the social conservatives i was arguing against in my So Con threads last week. and it is my main criticism of church doctrine. at their heart, they are blank slaters; they assume an equal starting point – based upon the notion of original sin which, i think, informs their egalitarianism in realms outside of regular morality. they save no room for hormonal or genetic differences in tendencies or behavior.
Prof. Woland–
They do. La Griffe du Lion calls the 1.1=/- 0.2 standard deviation difference in IQ between America whites and blacks (at young adulthood) the fundamental law of sociology.
IQ tests for 100 years have shown this. The US first did widespread IQ tests among those called up for the draft in WWI.
Nor is the gap narrowing. Narrowing results are always cherry picked by lying lefties like Nisbett and usually involve older young adult IQ tests with newer younger children ones. The IQ gap grows during childhood as young brains grow bigger with more complex interconnection.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about the ~ 1 SD IQ gap between American whites and blacks and virtually everyone in the field of pschometrics (the dudes the devise IQ, personality and other mental tests) agrees with this.
The only controversy is how much of IQ variance is due to variance in genetics and how much is do to all other factors, usually summed up as “environment” or “nurture”. The evidence strongly suggests though that over half is due to genetic variation, both for individuals and as between populations/races. (And genders – females have only slightly lower IQ means than males 2-3 points on the standard 15 points = 1SD scale, but they have considerably narrower SD’s the males do, and hence far fewer of the really really bright (and really dumb) than males. Fact.).
There is simply a great deal of lying and misleading and covering up of all this by the left.
GLP–
Full on not shitting you belly laugh over that one. So true!
And yeah holly shiite, I just scrolled through Gorbs comment. Eee gods. Not doing that one at work.
chuck,
The can is entirely the appropriate place for it. Enjoy.
I’m just coming off the soju and the world is taking on shades of electrifying grey. Lady friend bailed on me for the evening, leaving frustrated balls and directionless energy that needed to be spent somewhere. Your page is convenient.
Besides, I think this is a relevant topic. What we’re really talking about is not just race and IQ or any of these related issues. We’re talking about the basic concepts that make up our understanding of what it is to be both human and living beings.
Differences in these conceptions lie at the root of the divide. I’m not talking about racists here: race realists with no axe to grind and liberals with an ideology to defend.
My ultimate point here was that the hard reality of science is, like it or not, utterly destroying earlier, essentialist, “magical” notions of what it is to be human. We all naturally resist this, and through all of the coming revolution will like do so in novel and interesting ways. But the reality is what it is. And science has stripped the spirits and mythical creatures and ethereal powers from the world, done away with the magical thought in so many other areas, no matter how hard we cling. The moon is a big rock and people have walked on it.
In many ways, I see this desperate clinging to amorphous blank-slate ascientific understandings of the human condition as another symptom of the inability of the human mind (conservative or liberal or whatever) to deal with the hard reality of existence. We need to dream our existence into reality; simply painting what it is is insufficient.
In a sense, these liberal blank-slate reality deniers are elders telling their children not to investigate the next valley too much, lest they run into a bear or they dislike what they’re going to find.
If you dig, you’ll find the ideology to be secondary. It’s why these completely unscience liberals sound so much like creationists. It’s more than just their commitment to social justice and marxist redistribution of everything from guilt to wealth. It’s because they’re not comfortable seeing humans as animals.
They just don’t want to do this. It’s an ancient instinct. We ascribe powers and human initiative to objects and things. It’s instinctive essentialism, an artifact of a mind evolved to comprehend others like itself and then projecting onto the world around it. It’s a palaeolithic mind.
Breaking this is hard. It’s going to be very hard for many people. Just just Amanda Marcotte and her ilk.
But it will happen, nonetheless.
Gorbachev – I just want to point out that as soon as the blank slate dies leftists will switch from social engineering to genetic engineering in the blink of an eye.
The left doesn’t actually give a damn about the blank slate. They just use it as an excuse to control people.
The Blank Slate is a tenet of Churchianity, not Christianity. Any Christian who knows how to read his holy book will find all sorts of things that make it VERY clear that God gives not a rat’s ass about our modern notions of fairness—e.g.
Hath not the potter power over the clay, so as to make one vessel to honor and another to dishonor?
The parable of the talents ,
the different blessings and curses meted out to the fathers of nations (Noah’s sons and grandchildren)
God is NOT in the business of creating people equally in any material or intellectual sense. He’s not some Celestial Champions Gamemaster. There’s precisely one way at most in which people are equal, and that is in the fact that they are all of value to Him. That’s it, the only way to get to equality under the law—fiat, Divine or otherwise. Pretending material or intellectual equality is absurd and not Biblical.
@RVT,
You’re right, of course. They have a Vision, and they will Make It Happen.
However, because genetics is so central, as soon as they adopt some sort of positive eugenic policy, which they will, along with genetic engineering, barring horrible accidents (zombie armies munching their way through terrified victims, etc.), this will have a positive effect.
It will have a positive effect in spite of their social engineering. They will be working to eliminate negative social outcomes, and by focusing on the source, will effectively eliminate them. They’ll incidentally lose their pet populations as a result.
Reactionaries will oppose them, it will go back and forth, but population genetics will win out in the end. They always do. It’s relentless.
Positive eugenics is unlikely to be a bad thing, if fairly implemented. Liberals can, whatever their flaws, be trusted if they make the shift to do it fairly. it might mitigate the inevitable nightmare conservatives would create – worker-bee classes, slave-classes, etc. The result will be a lot of philosophers and not many telephone cleaners and ad executives, to say nothing of bricklayers, but what can you do.
When it comes down to it, this marriage of social engineers will start to use eugenics. One will temper the other. By just giving up on the lies, some of this equalist pap will start to become reality – which is, in and of itself, not a bad thing.
it would be a positive good if you could de-criminalize the black population and make them successful. Clearly, current methods won’t achieve this. We need more. it serves both our black population and the rest of us to fix this. Liberals are a barrier only in as much as they’re ideologically crippled in that they can’t see reality. Once they embrace reality, I predict they’ll actually start to succeed.
And this is not a bad thing.
I’m not so optimistic. Leftism isn’t utopianism, it’s utopian tyranny. They’ll get rid of crime and stupidity, no doubt, but what really pisses them off is free will.
I don’t see any reason to “implement” genetic engineering at all. Simply let the designer baby shops springs up on their own, and maybe subsidize them a little for the sake of our underclasses.
Putting too much mileage on my scroll wheel. Can’t afford a new mouse right now. Not in this economy.
I don’t see how Original Sin leads to Tabula Rasa. At all. I get the whole Universalist versus Particularist moral systems, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that all people are equal in ability. The Bible says the exact opposite. Christianity as far as egalitarianism goes doesn’t have a great track record.
Egalitarianism and Tabula Rasa didn’t really gain any traction in Europe until the Enlightenment, which is a huge rejection and reaction to the Christian moral order that had reigned for as long as anyone could remember. The classically educated Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers probably got their ideas from Plutarch, Plato et al; who obviously weren’t Christian. Egalitarianism and Tabula Rasa was a huge philosophical pillar in classical antiquity.
Egalitarianism comes from our Greco-Roman roots, not our Christian ones for the most part. Of course the early Church was Platonic to some extent, but by the time of the Enlightenment the Church (including most Protestant ones) had done an Aristotelian 180.
That’s not even taking Marxism and Whig History into account. Although, again I’m sure both are at least partly inspired by the Neo-Platonism of the Enlightenment.
There is a lot to be said on your post, on Dreher’s point regarding Pandora’s Box, and I’ll continue this when I get a chance.
GL, good post. And good comments. As a physician/scientist I care about the genetics of IQ. As Gorbachev was trying to argue somewhere in his long comment, it opens the possibility for treatment. Look up the discovery of phenylketonuria (PKU), a devastating genetic disease that can be treated with a simple diet, as I have argued before. We may or may not be missing similar treatments that are holding back IQ, even if genetic, because it is not a legitimate subject of research.
I carefully guard my pseudonym because I would be excommunicated for even considering such research.
GLP,
If you want to see the results of “interracial breeding” take a look at Portugal. 80% of the population no longer finishes high school thanks to their idea of breeding their black slaves into their own population.
No thanks.
Here’s an easy breeding program:
1st criminal offense: flogging.
2st criminal offense: deportation to Liberia. It’s the least we can do after taking them from their homeland.
The non criminal with produce the majority of the kids and while they won’t be rocket scientists they will be smarter, better behaved, and everyone will be better off.
Kyle–
I realize you were kidding, but New Egg has three button (well including the down click on the scroll wheel) pretty damn cheep at about $17. Cheap delivery too.
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