(Open thread, links)

Burning in the brains of the reactosphere this week: Complexities of caste, media hysteria, where reaction begins, ambiguities of narrativization, Google on the slide, the American era comes apart. The language of recovery. The meaning of property (previously linked). Rituals of disintegration. The masters of meta. The Mitrailleuse secession round-up is always worth catching.

Some comet thing happened, but far more importantly: Did you see that guy‘s shirt?

The Internet’s SJW cannibal holocaust continues. Meanwhile, in the UK (Brendan O’Neill has been doing Miltonic work). Some additional notable commentary. Oh, and Obama wants to reclassify the Internet as a ‘utility’ (always comforting rhetoric from a communist). It’s a global trend.

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A familiar point, stated exceptionally well:

… while the evolution of northwest Europeans to extreme altruism worked great for the last 500 years or so (it allowed for the type of cooperation that more or less created a far better world), it left us very vulnerable to exploitation. We simply have no genetic defense against being called bad names.

That there is a genetic contribution to IQ ‘cognitive performance’ has been theoretically obvious for as long as these concepts have existed. Now it has been empirically confirmed. The basic argument should be over now (but I’m not holding my breath).

As this type of information becomes a flood, the dike of ideologically-motivated obscurantism has — eventually — to break. Watch for the smart rats to start jumping off first.

Another outrageous study completely overlooks the problem of stereotype threat.

Hopkins et al conclude (un-shockingly):

Finally, from an evolutionary standpoint, the results reported here suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in determining individual variation in cognitive abilities, particularly for spatial cognition and communication skills. Presumably, these attributes would have conferred advantages to some individuals, perhaps in terms of enhanced foraging skills or increased social skills, leading to increased opportunities for access to food or mating … These individuals would have then potentially had increased survival and fitness, traits that would have become increasingly selected upon during primate evolution, as has been postulated by a number of theorists, going all the way back to Darwin …

(Thanks to Greg for the link.)

F. Roger Devlin reviews Gregory Clark’s latest book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility at American Renaissance:

China, which saw enormous social upheaval in the 20th century, provides yet another perspective. Under Mao, much of the country’s elite was killed or exiled. The rest were subject to discrimination and excluded from the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao tried to turn the social scale upside down by shipping prominent people to the countryside to work in rice paddies. If political intervention can create higher social mobility, it would have done so in China.

Yet once discrimination against “class enemies” was abolished shortly after Mao’s death, those with surnames characteristic of the pre-communist elite quickly began to rise again. Today, they are greatly over-represented even in the Communist Party. Those descended from the “workers and peasants” favored under Mao have quickly seen their status erode. Recent social mobility in China has been no greater than it was under the Emperors.

Anyone who doesn’t find their presuppositions shaken by Clark’s work is probably not paying attention. If those out here in the NRx think it conforms neatly to their expectations that heredity is strongly determining of social outcomes — are they comfortable proceeding to evidence-based acknowledgement that socio-economic regime-type seems entirely irrelevant to the (uniformly low) level of social mobility? Clark himself draws the curve-ball conclusion: so why not be a social democrat? It’s not as if rational incentives make any difference anyway.

(I’ll be looking for the opportunity to dig into this stuff at least a little, as soon as I catch a moment.)

John Bohannon on a civilization doomed by dishonesty:

“People [in the West] don’t like to talk about IQ, because it undermines their notion of equality,” [Douglas] Detterman says. “We think every person is equal to every other, and we like to take credit for our own accomplishments. You are where you are because you worked hard.” …  Even if we accept that intelligence is heritable, any effort to improve or even understand the inheritance process strikes us as distasteful, even ghoulish, suggesting the rise of designer superbabies. And given the fallout that sometimes results when academics talk about intelligence as a quantifiable concept … IQ research is not a popular subject these days at Western universities.

But in his lab at BGI, 21-year-old Zhao [Bowen] has no such squeamishness. He waves it away as “irrational,” making a comparison with height: “Some people are tall and some are short,” he says. Three years into the project, a team of four geneticists is crunching an initial batch of 2,000 DNA samples from high-IQ subjects, searching for where their genomes differ from the norm. Soon Zhao plans to get thousands more through Renmin—his former high school—as well as from other sources around the world. He believes that intelligence has a genetic recipe and that given enough samples—and enough time—his team will find it.

There’s nothing really new for those who’ve been following the story, but it’s well done (and the Satanism angle adds color). World War as a global crusade against hate facts is just about the only Cathedral play left at this point.