razib 
 
This will be my final posting since I've been invited to go away. 
 
razib you are obviously too close to this issue to maintain perspective. I suggest that you confine himself to genetic issues henceforth. You are out of your depth with political issues. I quite enjoy you technical msuings. 
 
The comment about how I view all Muslims monolithically is not worthy of you. I was speaking of how terrorist provocations are likely to engender the kind of Western responses that were common in WWII. In that context distinctions about types of Muslims is no more relevant than it would have been to distinguish Prussian Nazis from Swabian Nazis - or Russian Communists from Ukrainian Communists. In war such distinctions get lost. Your Islamic scholarship deludes you. People under attack just don't care about such distinctions.  
 
You might try reading some military history. 
 
To date Muslims of all persuasions seem to cohere against the West and the US. If the Pakistanis are striking out against that suicidal tendency, I'm glad - but I'll reserve judgement. If Bin Laden were offered up by the Pakistanis I might be persuaded more. However the fact that the would-be bombers were all Pakistani is not likely to weigh in their favor with public opinion. 
 
You state accurately that Islam is not a nation like Germany or Japan. If I were you I wouldn't take much comfort in that fact. One great advantage a nation has is it's ability to surrender. If Japan for example had not had an emperor who commanded his people to stop resisting, what would have happened? Japan would not have won, Japan would not have avoided occupation, and most importantly Japan would not have recovered.  
 
This looks like the great conundrum facing the West. Islam can't win of course, but can it lose without being totally anilhilated? 
 
pat 
 
p.s. 
I don't recognize that posting about Asian women in martial arts. My guess is that, if I indeed wrote it, that it is was one of my attempts at levity. I used to do that. You might, after you get over your current rage, to try to lighten up. 
 
p.s. 
If you want to apologize please do so through email.

razib 
 
At the risk of offending you again - I forgive you. If indeed you do have a long memory and/or you keep old posts you will find I have always spoken of my admiration for you. Check it out. 
 
I think you are overcome with emotion because of yesterday's events. I think you see where this is leading and you know its not good. You lash out at me because I have pointed out some likely unpleasent consequences of Muslim provocations. 
 
It would be nice is Islam would come to its senses and back off. Were that to happen and a new generation of modernizers like Reza Pahlavi, or Attaturk came to the fore then all men of good would rejoice. I don't see that happening any time soon. I believe it will happen but probably not until after this wave of extremism is past. 
 
Modernism (or Western Civilization) has swept around the world usually with a lot of short term violence. For example in China the intoduction of Christianity (Taiping) killed perhaps twenty million people. Later when western economic ideas (Marxism) came, rather more died. In Japan the reaction to the West begat the reactionary suicidal terrorist group the Shinsengumi. Further reaction led to an extremely agressive anti-colonial and anti-westerm form of militarism. This also killed a lot of Chinese.  
 
As I'm sure you know the 1905 constitution of Iran was modeled after that of the Netherlands. The Middle East then sought Western models. Iran under Reza I tried to be Western in the manner of Japan. Meijii Japan was also a model for the late Ottomans and the Young Turks. The Ottomans had tried with limited success to incorporate Western notions since the nineteeth century. 
 
The history lesson seems clear. Western ideas are attractive to older societies but they are deeply resisted. To become modern takes at least decades and often a great deal of bloodshed. 
 
The important Islamic countries of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq are attracted and simultaneuosly repelled by the Western ideas that they see sweeping around the world. The current Islamic fundamentalism we see today in these countries is a step backwards. That would have been the view of almost any of the political leaders in the Middle East shortly after the settlements of 1923. Pahlavi, Attaturk, even Mosadegh would have been apalled to learn of the re-rise of Islam. 
 
I don't think these countries are doomed forever to be held under the sway of Muslim superstition. But to get back to where they had been not so long ago will only be accomplished through war and devastation. That is not my wish but that is my prediction. 
 
The reason I am so pessimistic is that militant Islam continues to make the same mistake that the fascists of the thirties made. They mistake compunction with intrinsic inability.  
 
We today have compunction about "racial profiling". That compunct
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If I have used a strawman argument I would be happy to be set straight but I will need a more specific reference than to the whole Steve Sailer site. Please be more specific.  
 
In fact I'm not sure I understand which of my statements you deem to be a strawman argument? Possibly that's because I'm - as you say - a D & D boy-warrior, an imbecile, and an animal.  
 
Your personal attacks grieve me because I have always held you in the highest regard (Steve Sailer too).

I have been cited by name and accused of "childish fantasies". Please note that what I have predicted for a long time was that if the provocations of Muslims continued to escalate the response of the US and the West in general would likewise escalate. Not so unreasonable a postion I think. The events of yesterday do not persuade me that Muslims have abandonned terrorist provocations. The escalation continues. 
 
Newt Gingrich says we are in WWIII. I agree. I believe we are in a nuclear war in the sense that it is hard to see how the present conflict can be resolved without resorting to nuclear weapons. The simple truth is that the Muslims have not been dissuaded by law, reason, diplomacy, police response, imprisonment, or small scale military actions. 
 
Muslims who wish to impose their will on others at the cost of their own are unlikely to be affected by by anything less than the strongest military response. We were sucessful in transforming the fantical Japanese and Germans into modern peaceful democracies but not through discussion or dilplomacy. We fire bombed Dresden and Toyko and we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why should we think we can pacify the Middle East with milder measures? Do we think that the Muslims are less resolved than the Nazis? 
 
Does anyone really think that the kind of Muslims who attacked us on 9/11 or yesterday would hesitate to use nuclear weapons if they had them and the means for delivery?  
 
We are in a nuclear war in which the enemy as yet lacks the means to fully utilize those weapons. I would like to believe otherwise but to do so would be a "childish fantasy".

I thought it was well established that the Flynn Effect worked on the left side of the distribution only. Is this being ignored or did I miss it? 
 
There is a well known correllation between height and IQ but it is also well known that this phenomenon is a product of confounding two populations: the "normal" and the defective. Those who have no genetic diseases or have not had a severe envioronment that stunted them, have no correllation between height and IQ. Those with bad genes/aneuploidy or a midieval peasant upbringing will likely be short and stupid. 
 
I have long assumed that the elimination of these factors was what was powering the Flynn Effect. Obviously this sort of reform can't go on endlessly. The irony is that the as these problems are cleared up the phenotype comes to ever more closely express the genotype. This is sometimes called the Hernstein Effect I believe.

As I remember Carl Sagan posited a fear of snakes and even a basis for midieval dragon legends in his theory of the "triune brain". He called our most primitive sub-cortical structures the "snake brain". Somehow having that residual snake structure in our heads predisposed us to hate them. 
 
Sounds like something only Tom Cruise could believe.

Stress will always be an easy explanaton and a difficult independent variable. 
 
Hans Selye invented the term stress when he discovered that he he could cause the same syndrome of symptoms from a wide variety of treatments. His rats died from stomach lesions if they had been put in the cold or worked too hard or put in a pyschologically frustrating learning situation. Same result - multiple causes. He invoked the mechanical engineering term "stress". Got him a Nobel prize and gave everyone else a facile explanation for almost anything. 
 
I am currently working on this problem by building a time machine. I'll go back and kill Selye and thereby improve the language. Of course first I need to get rid of Einstein and thereby clear up this "it's all relative" talk.

It is possible for Coffee Mug do be correct in all particulars regarding the superstitious opposition to ESC research and for George Bush to be correct to veto it. 
 
I disagree almost totally with Bush's personal understanding of the science and the ethics of ESC research. Yet I recognize that it is his job to find a workable political compromise.  
 
Tom Cruise believes that Xenu created mankind by injecting eggs into a volcano (or some such). He also believes that sex was invented by psychiatrists about 100 million years ago as a ploy to control humanity. 
 
It terms of irrationality these ideas make the notions of Christain creationists seem like very weak tea indeed. Yet George Bush is bound by the Constitution to protect Cruise's right to believe and act on those beliefs.  
 
Bush doesn't have the power to stop ESC research he only has some power to slow it down in the US. We shouldn't overreact. Perhaps half of all Americans hold a pre-scientific world view. He's their President too. 
 
If it seems likely that ESC research is important to medicine, the present Bush policies will evaporate like snow in the desert. Religion based public policy is not immutable.  
 
Remember the Angel Moroni came back to announce that polygamy was wrong after all.

Remember the movie "The Vikings". It starred Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Ernest Borgnine as the three main vikings. All three are Jews. No one seemed to mind or even notice.  
 
Who would Hollywood cast as a typical Finn? Just about anyone I imagine, except perhaps Samuel T. Jackson. Every Caucasian population has some members who look like Arabs, Swedes, Finns or Irish. 
 
But when they cast Woodie Strode as a Mongol in "Ghengis Knan", that was too much. That was even worse than Robert Morley as the Chinese emperor or Stephen Boyd and Francoise Dorleac as Tartars.

My girl friend's Golden Retriever loves to go swimming whereas my cat hates to. I'm pretty sure this is a genetic difference not socio-economic.  
 
Since blacks are ancestral to whites it suggests that whites have been bred for aquaphilia (oops I thought I had made up this term but I looked it up and found out that its a sexual fetish). Make that bred for water-loving (oops thats might be worse). You know what I mean.

Is there a general treatment somewhere that discusses the theory and math of dating bottlenecks?

Currently Iranian Muslims are threatening to nuke the Jews in Israel and the Christians in the US. Its hard to see how if this sort of thing continues Mecca can escape retaliation. 
 
So perhaps the the theological question should be, will Muslims continue to pray toward the shiny spot of fused sand in the desert where Mecca once stood?

When I was in the Army in Kentucky I met real hillbillies. They in fact did talk about shooting at "revenuers" and running moonshine. But you didn't have to listen to them to identifying them you just looked at their teeth. If the guy had a mouthfull of rotten stumps you knew he was descended from a long line of first cousin marriages.

I think it's clear that Bertramm uses the term "ethnic group" in a way that can only cause confusion. The term is normally an anthrological and statistical term. Bertram expropriates it to promote a political agenda. 
 
When an observer experiences the buzzing confusion that is reality he or she will impose an abstraction or grouping on the phenomena. In statistics one tool that helps with this is factor analysis. The methodological mill produces constructs that glom together.  
 
Antropologists in the field do the same thing - they look for patterns that clump together and they give a name to this construct - ethnic group.  
 
A simple model of an ethnic group would be three orthogonal dimensions - race, language, culture.  
 
In times past the clustering was certainly better than it is today. The cloud of data points was more compact. That meant that knowledge of an individual's position on one or more of the axies gave you a good idea of their position on the other axis. 
 
These multidimentional correlations do not persevere automatically. The cloud of data points cohere or dissipate as a function of circumstance and social evolution. 
 
For example the connection between race and religion has been a function of the religion's means of expansion. Jews don't proselytize and until recently have not intermarried much. Therefore to be a Jew means something genetically as well as in terms of doctrine. For Christians this connection is much less strong because Christianity spread and continues to spread by missionary action. Islam is an extreme case. This is the only major religion that has spread principally by conquest and coerion. A consequence is that the link between belief and the race of the believer hardly exists.  
 
Hence to use the uni-dimensional category of religion as a proxy for the mullti-dimensional concept of ethnicity is least appropriate for Islam. It maybe makes a little sense for Jews but none whatever for Muslims. 
 
Of course Bertram means something else again. His sophistry expropriates the antropoligical notion of ethnic group to advance a political point of view. Sailer hit on this point above. Bertram means ethnic group in the leftist sense of of oppressed group.  
 
A few years ago in England there was a movement to widen the term "BlacK" to include all oppressed people. This silly idea meant that in England Jews would be classified as Blacks.

It's nice to see innovation but I wonder if you have considered performance sufficiently. 
 
In retrospect it appears that the Altair led to the future. My first computer was in fact an Altair. Chuck Peddle "the father of the PC" (in his own words) did not base either the Commodore PET or the Radio Shack TRS-80 or the CPU of the Apple II (6502) on the Altair. As Stephen Jay Gould was so fond of pointing out, evolution is bushy. It only looks like a ladder in retrospect. This means that at this time there are likely to be many approaches to the next paradigm. The winner is likely to be the fastes not the most sophisticated. The Altair went nowhere because it had terrible performance and was very unreliable. The evidence of history suggests that the race will go to the swiftest. 
 
No central point of failure is a 1980's concept. When I first taught networking peer-to-peer networking was the vision of the future. Everybody was going to have everything always and hardware weaknesses didn't matter. Of course that never worked. Ray Noorda got into networking from a background in fault tolerance. LANs abandonned the dream of no central point of failure to achieve higher performance with client server architecture. That architectural principal carried forward to the thin client on the Web. 
 
Virtuality is also an old concept. When PC spreadsheets were young IBM struck back with virtual spreadsheets running on 360/370 hardware under the VM (Virtual Machine) OS. I ran speed tests at the time. Even a stinky 6502 based second generation PC running Visi-Calc was faster than a mainframe running ADRS on VM. A bit later the second generation of spreadsheets included two new offering Lotus 1-2-3 and MBA. MBA ran under the UC-p system OS. It had far more features than 1-2-3 but it was much slower. The race went to the swiftest. 
 
Google is popular because Google is so fast. If you want investors to back a change in architecture show them how how fast your solution is not how many features it has. 
 
Also the idea that users are interested in a decentralized architecture is contrary to the historical record. The IBM PC was not the best computer in 1981. I much preferred the Sirius 9000 but the public was attracted to the big name. Similarly today Microsoft enjoys continued success at least in part because it is big and has an overwhelming market presence. 
 
Political conservatives hate big government. Liberals hate big business. There is something to be said for both attitudes. But voters are attracted big government and consumers like big central private enterprises. 
 
What is your business model? How and when do you recoup your investment? Or is this another quasi-political statement technology like Linux? Linux users endure an inferior product so as to be able to make a political statement. So do Prius drivers. Is that your purpose? 
 
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There are lots of goofy ideas that have hold on the human mind. For example - government price controls. Everyone knows their bad effects since at least Diocletian, but Congress and Bill O'Reilly contine to rant about price abuses. 
 
Are we to conclude that there is a universal theme of economic stupidity buried in our genes?

John Ioannidis recently published an article which claimed that most new published peer reviewed articles with new or breakthrough findings are wrong. A corollary finding is that almost all confirmatory replication papers end up being true. 
 
I took this argument to heart. I no longer pay any attention to popular press science stories. The popular media virtually never report on replication studies. They enthusiastically jump on new findings. These findings of course are the ones that are so often wrong. 
 
IQ genetics is just the kind of topic that will gather attention. Were I directly involved in brain chemistry or population genetics I would try to replicate these "findings". Since I'm not, I simply ignore them as noise. It is much much to early to discuss Rushton's theory for example in light of these new facts. There are no facts - at least yet.  
 
These findings have not even been published. After they have been replicated a few times. I will think about them. I advise others to likewise wait.

The Triumph of the West began in the 15th Century in Western Europe. It traveled west to America. It traveled east and is just now reaching China. If genetics and IQ and such were important then we would expect that the Chinese would be refractory to Westernization. Who can beleive that? 
 
The Triumph of the West started in Europe not because the native population was more inventive but because inventions suddenly were better preserved. 
 
The Ankythera machine like the Su Sung clock did not lead much of anywhere. Before the 15th Century China and Europe (mostly Greece) routinely produced inventions. And after a few years these inventions were forgotten. In the fifteenth century there were two major changes. 
 
The first was of course Guttenberg. The second was the patent given to Brunelleschi. Soon individuals were recognized for their accomplishments and those accomplishments were published. Accomplishments began to be preserved and began to accumulate. 
 
China couldn't make this leap because its written language was logomorphic not alphabetic and therefore movable type was much more difficult. Secondly China had a tradition of a strong bureaucratic central government which suppressed the identification of individual inventors and intellectual property rights.

BTW the whole thrust of Max Weber's concept of Protestantism as an explanatory variable seems to have been rendered obsolete by recent history. 
 
Weber noticed that Spain and Ireland were Catholic and trailled Protestant Germany and England. However quite recently Catholic Ireland which was the poorest country in Western Europe abruptly changed. It has been the fastest growing nation in Western Europe for the last twenty years or so. 
 
When Poland and the other Eastern European nations joined the EU they looked to Ireland as a model not Germany or France.  
 
Ireland became the Celtic Tiger not because they changed religions or made major cultural patterns. Nor did the genetic makeup of the population change. They simply changed tax policy. 
 
The Triumph of the West was likewise triggered by a few simple policys and inventions.

BTW the idea that Europeans have masculine brains and East Asians have a more feminine mentality conflicts with the IQ evidence. 
 
Most IQ tests are divided into two regions - quantitative and verbal. By convention male and female scores on sub tests were set to be equal but it has been long recognized that men did better on quantitative and spatial items while women did better on verbal items. 
 
There is some evidence that testosterone levels correlate with scores on synonym creation (feminine) and spatial rotation (masculine). 
 
European whites and East Asians have roughly equal IQs but the composition of the scores is very different. East Asians score at least four or five points above Europeans on quantitative and spatial sub tests - the masculine pattern. While Europeans score about the same level higher on the verbal sub tests - the feminine pattern.  
 
I think this accounts very well for the common observation that UC Berkeley's Computer Science is largely a Chinese enclave. Whereas there are few Chines at Boalt Hall the Law School. However I don't think the masculine Asian mind explains the Triumph of the West and the Stagnation of the East.

IQ of course is an individual characteristic not a group characteristic. If we are to generalize from individuals to groups or populations we should at least consider the limitations of prediction from IQ in individuals. 
 
IQ correlates with post education achievement at about .40. It is the best single predictor but it is hardly a measure of destiny. Most American CEOs (and the current President) have an MBA. The average MBA IQ is something like 130 to 135. Nobel Prize winners have an average IQ of about 140. I suspect that at least half of the responders on this thread have IQs that high or higher. Yet none of them I suspect has a Nobel Prize or is a major corporation CEO much less the President of the US. 
 
IQ is the strongest tool ever forged by psychology but it cannot make the kind of predictions tacitly assumed here. National or regional IQ is important in understanding national achievement but not in the strong way suggested by Richard Lynn. It is clear that the group IQ of the natives of sub-Saharan Africa and Australia is lower than the global norm. These two regions of course trail the world in cultural achievement. 
 
IQ operates as a threshold variable not a monotonically increasing function over the full range of values. In individuals significant acheivement in most fields requires an IQ of 120 or greater, but above 120 IQ does not predict achievement at all. That is to say above the threshold the correlation of acheivement and IQ is essentially zero. 
 
I think that's how it works for nations also. Europe, India, and China have populations that are over the requisite IQ threshold while Australians and sub-Saharan African are not. However beyond that gross observation, IQ differences explain little in regional or national contributions to civilization.