Does Steve Sailer, mentor to Razib and me, have some special appeal to brillliant minds stuck in mediocre state schools? Is it his fascinating, yet deceptively plain-worded insights that settle in the mind like a lazy cat? Is it the cool composure of his modest, yet tireless intellectual courage? Is it his skepticism toward trendy neocon rhetoric that, unbeknownst to anyone else on the Right, has the substance of cotton candy?. Who knows? I suppose I should be grateful to Steve for routing me to Gene Expression and offering me the opportunity to enrich my mind with Razib’s writings as well as his. But at this point I sort of feel like Eliza Doolittle after Henry Higgins transforms her from a Cockney flower girl to a respectable lady. How can I go back? How can I tolerate the egotism, self-deception, and shameless self-interest and hypocrisy that is the basis of most people’s intellectual life when I have become so spoiled by Steve’s sober ethics and refreshing optimism?
Update from Razib: Speaking of Steve, he has an article up on the Mongol y-chromosome lineage. Please remember that much of what is written about the Mongols was by conquered or vanquished peoples, so the Great Khan probably wasn’t any more bloodthirsty than Caliph or King, though his military success left a higher body count.
Also, my first email to Steve in the winter of 2000 had the following phrase in it:
“I find the evidence for human biodiversity far more compelling that I would have thought, but I still hold that culturalist explainations for differences seem more likely….”
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