I.Q. – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

I see dead people. – The Sixth Sense

It really will be different this time, right?

The biggest famine in human history was caused by communism, based on a bad idea and a stubborn decision to hold with ideology over reality. It was known as, ironically, The Great Leap Forward. Mao decided in 1957 that within 15 years, China could surpass the United Kingdom (The Guys Who Supply Evil Accents to Movies) in economic production. Mao was egged on to make this pronouncement based on Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 pronouncement that in fifteen years that the U.S.S.R. would surpass the United States in economic production.

Spoiler alert – none of these things happened, and Bruce Willis was the ghost the whole time.

That’s the entire world death rate. Who says communism isn’t powerful!

The Great Leap Forward killed about 45 million people in China. Mao decided that he wanted to collectivize farming to consolidate power (more on this later). In addition to this, Mao also decided that to increase economic output, he’d have the peasants make steel. In their backyards. This worked about as well with an I.Q. above room temperature could have predicted, especially once the farmers started melting down the tools they farmed with to meet production targets, thus decreasing food amounts even more than replacing experienced farmers with office workers did.

Oops.

Another victory for environmentalism under communism!

Farmers had to melt down steel farming tools to meet Mao’s steel production targets. Even though Mao was informed relatively early on that the policy wasn’t working, he stuck with it because he didn’t want to look weak because his wife told him he never would get that raise unless he stood up to his boss at work. In the end? 45 million people starved to death so Mao could keep his day job.

But this was just stupid, not vengeful. This is known in China today (as related by the Internet) as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” Even in death Mao cannot be challenged publically, so you can bet he finally got that raise. The rumor is that even his ghost can kill. But Mao’s ghost kills via bad breath, but George Washington’s ghost kills with laser eyes, so we’ve got that going for us.

Stalingrad? No, Stalinsad™. I may have to really trademark that for a series of teddy bears I sell to leftists so they can hug them after rallies.

Although Josef Stalin only gets the Silver Medal in the “Killed My Own People” sweepstakes, it’s not due to lack of trying – he managed to kill, by many estimates, 20 million of his own people in activities completely unrelated by war. How did we get there?

Soon after Lenin died, Stalin and the Soviet Union benefitted from a strong and robust economy. The local farmers, called Kulaks, were producing record grain yields. And if there’s one thing that people like, it’s grain, especially James at The Bison Prepper (LINK).

That’s a good thing, right? The grain production gave the U.S.S.R. a source of currency, and the Kulaks imported farm machinery to increase farm production even more. The Kulaks were the engine of the economy. As a leader, Stalin must have loved these guys, right?

No. Stalin hated them. They were a threat to his power, and he didn’t like any power structure existing outside of him. So, he went after the Kulaks.

But what was a Kulak? Well, a Kulak was a peasant. But this was a peasant that was slightly less poor than the other peasants. That meant, for reals, that this peasant had a slightly nicer hovel, and had some regular gruel. It wasn’t even as good a job as the assistant manager at McDonalds, but it was still really good in the Soviet Union where a bowl of warm mud was considered a major prize. As such, these Kulaks were often looked up to locally because they were successful. Their position in society was earned through merit.

But Stalin didn’t like Kulaks, and decided he was going to break them. One of the first things he did was to create an army because Stalin had declared a Revolution© against . . . his own people. This army was called the Twenty-Five-Thousanders. They were steel and factory workers that were armed, given a quickie six-month training program on farming, and told to go make collective farming work. Essentially they were dim-witted college interns with guns.

One of the interesting (to me, at least) measures of communism is how the system selects, on purpose, those of no real merit to be placed in positions of authority. The factory worker given a gun and told to enforce Stalin’s will was being given the best job they had ever had, and power beyond anything a typical factory worker ever had. This policy of promoting the unworthy and stupid into positions of power made the unworthy and stupid really zealous communists. Where else could they go to get that kind of power? They owed everything they were to the state. Where else could a former prostitute or pimp decide on the summary execution of a former doctor or engineer?

So, faced with the army of 25,000 idiots, the Kulaks decided to do what a reasonable person does: they decided to get together to go to Moscow to work out a solution. Stalin was glad to meet them, and worked with them on a solution to all of their problems: those Kulaks that weren’t summarily executed were shipped off to “leisure” camps in Siberia. You might have heard of the camps – they called them Gulags.

Ahh, just like Disneyland®!

But that wasn’t enough. Stalin sent his 25,000 strong army to confiscate every bit of grain from problem areas. Every bit. He encouraged the poorer peasants to raid the houses of the Kulaks and take . . . everything. Envy is powerful, and here was a license to steal.

So they stole. But that wasn’t enough.

Stalin essentially shut the border down of the Ukraine after pulling all food out of the area. In a stunningly familiar Communist plan, armed troops kept the people in. Mao was an inadvertent murderer, but Stalin starved millions of people to death, on purpose.

Why? James Mace explains:

I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem.

Even today, the Western Press has a love affair with Stalin. I won’t go into reasons why, and I’m not sure I care, but it’s obvious that the New York Times has never met a communist it didn’t love. Walter Duranty privately noted on a telegram to London that over 10 million had died of starvation in 1934 during the Holodomor, but wrote publicly rosy pictures about the Soviet Union. But what did Duranty say in public?

Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

Showing that they are perfectly unbiased, the Pulitzer™ committee has refused to rescind the Pulitzer Prize® given to Duranty for his participation in the cover up of Stalin’s mass murder of millions. I wonder if complicity is in any dictionary they own?

At least someone got it right, but he didn’t win a Pulitzer©.

Rumor is that he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD. Because truth is the biggest enemy a dictator has.

It might occur to a discerning reader that, while Democracy Dies in Darkness™, tens of millions can be killed by communism and lying about it, even when proven, gets prestigious awards! And who says the press is biased.

But just like in the Olympics®, communists can be proud. The got the gold and the silver!

GBD 2017 Mortality Collaborators [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] – Mortality graph.

Stop Making Yourself Unhappy, Unless It Involves Green Alien Women Doing Sexy Dances

“Bob, it won’t kill you. But it will make you very sore.” – Real Men

I promise, I try to have a point on alternate weeks.

The difference between what reality actually is and the way that you think reality should be can make you crazy. It’s not unusual – I think it’s the way we’re wired as humans. We have a big brain, and we can imagine things. I, for instance, can imagine a world in peace where people just leave me alone, taxes don’t exist, and Joseph Stalin and communism are as hated as Britney Spears and the IRS.

Yeah. I can imagine it. But I won’t hold my breath. Some of the stuff the world throws at me makes me pretty mad, if I allow myself to sit and think about it. You’ll notice I used the word “allow” – because that’s what it is – allowing myself to dwell on something that makes me mad. Honestly, I’ll admit it: sometimes I go online just to find a story that makes me angry, probably because it’s a substitute for a pacemaker that doesn’t require electricity. So, yes, anger keeps my heart beating on alternate Wednesdays when I run low on coffee.

The sad part is that most anger is a wasted emotion. Most of life just is. Nothing you can do can change it. On many things trying to change it is even worse than the original problem. We started out with a Depression in 1930, but ended up with a World War. See? Not a real good trade. Oh, wait, we got the space program out of it.

However, I’ll also tell you that you just can’t ignore everything in life and just say mañana, as attractive as that may sound at 5AM on a Monday morning. So, you can’t care about everything, but you also can’t ignore everything. It sounds like a paradox, like how the Kardashians became famous for being famous, but give me a second to explain. I’m a trained professional.

For me, it comes down to having a list of criteria.

Does it matter? In reality, most things really don’t matter one way or another. If they’re out of strawberry topping for your hamburger, it doesn’t matter. You might remember tomorrow, but you certainly won’t remember next week. You won’t remember when you’re 80. Rule of thumb? If you won’t remember it next year, it isn’t important.

Does your action make a difference? You may be a Flat-Earther© and believe that everyone on Earth should move away from the horribly illogical heliocentric model that has no evidence behind it. No matter what actions they take, they won’t make a difference. I mean, because they’re nuts.

Is it a matter of principle? Not everything is. Giordano Bruno (Jordan Brown in English) is a dead Italian who got burned at the stake due to heresy on February 17, 1600, at the age of 52-ish, so you know he pissed somebody with a cool hat off. The funny thing is that if you go to the Wikipedia page on Bruno, it makes him look like Carl Sagan crossed with Barack Obama. He questioned all Christian dogma (which makes him the darling of the Left) while arguing for an infinite Universe and used the Copernican model of our Solar System to predict that there would be planets around other stars. Genius!

But Wikipedia skips gently around the fact that he didn’t like Christ – he liked Hermes, and was a fan of reintroducing Egyptian gods. Today, he’s revered as a Gnostic saint. And, really, if anyone starts the name of their sect with a silent “G”, do we really want give them any gcredence? I thought gnot.

Even though Bruno picked a really stupid thing to die about, at least he had some pretty fierce words to say to people who thought they could tell him what to do:

It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the number of fools.

Jordan Brown, er, Giordano Bruno seems to think pretty highly of his own opinion. But the sentiment is a good one. One I’ll buy, unless it’s about running out of strawberry topping for my hamburger. That’s probably not a hill I’m willing to die on. Unless they were out of ketchup, too.

I bought Giordano’s book, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and started to read it. After I realized that it would take me two years of study of ancient Egyptian mythology, ancient Greek mythology, astrology, and 16^th Century European politics to decipher it, I decided to read a book where aliens wanted to drop a meteorite on Earth instead. At least I understood that the aliens wanted to come to earth because they liked our women as much as we do.

No, not hot alien girls. But, in a pinch that’ll do.

But Giordano has a point – there is a place where principle wins above all. It may not be this hill we’re willing to die on, but we have to be willing to die on some hill, even if we can’t win. If you’re not willing to die on that stupid hill where it’s a beautiful, pointless, stupid gesture? You’re not fully human, and would probably sell me out for a pack of Juicy Fruit® gum. For your sake, I hope you know where your hill is, or can find it. Even (shudder) if it involves astrology. Jesus, Bruno was an idiot.

The alternate view is that the future belongs to those that show up, so, pick that hill carefully. Giordano picked his. And he really did die on it. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have kids, but he did show up for the future, in the most potent way possible: with his ideas. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t kill Stalin or Lenin. Nope. I’d kill Marx – he was a fat guy who never had a job and was probably smelly because he couldn’t properly clean out his bodily crevices in Victorian England, but his ideas . . . his ideas have killed millions. But more about those tools on Monday.

By the way, finding a stupid name like Jordan Brown (sorry, dude) could sound so much like someone who commanded a tank division, I looked up John Wilder in Italian, and it would be Giovanni Feroce. Which is really badass. But it’s not Latin, which would probably sound something like Giovannius Maximus Feroci. Yeah. Like commander of a tank, designed by Ferrari® to fight grizzly bears. I can deal with that. Except Italians can’t seem to keep the oil on the inside of the engine.

The Boy put this together. He does indicate that he works for Ramen®. His favorite is beef, but he will do chicken. Shrimp? You’re not making any friends there. Stick with land animals.

Here are the zones:

Zone 1: This is the most important zone: you can change it. It matters. It’s a matter of principle. This, with no humor added, is the definition of the hill you can die on.

Yes, it’s a Microsoft® Office™ meme. No, I’m not proud about it.

Zone 2: You can change it. The best definition of this is “It’s the principle of the thing.” It’s not important. This is the Zone inhabited by Karens.

And my real readers would never complain.

Zone 3: It matters. It’s a matter of principle. But you can’t change it. I think this is what Twitter® accounts are for? Also? Maybe sometimes this is a good hill to die on, too.
Zone 4: It’s a matter of principle. And it doesn’t matter. And you can’t change it. I think this is the MySpace© of issues.
Zone 5: It matters, you can change it, but it’s not a matter of principle. So, you know, get up and mow your lawn. Or at least stay off mine.
Zone 6: It matters, you can’t change it. Ignore it. Triggered people live here, and I know you don’t want to live like Trigglypuff.

I remember when the word “triggered” had nothing to do with people unable to contain emotions just because someone said something naughty. But I also remember when dudes didn’t win girl’s high school track meets.

Zone 7: You can change it. It’s not principle. It doesn’t matter. This sounds a lot like FaceBook®. If you use it, keep in mind you’re keeping Zuckerberg in sippy cups while he sits on his high chair.

Thankfully Congress got him a sippy cup.

Inadvertently, I seem to have come up with actual advice that might help you if you’re sane enough to follow it. Who knew? Nah, who am I kidding? Go nuts. Literally. It seems to work for AntiFa®.

I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part Two

“Joe and Rita had three children, the three smartest kids in the world. Vice President Frito took 8 wives and had a total of 32 kids. 32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the Earth. So maybe Joe didn’t save mankind, but he got the ball rolling, and that’s pretty good for an average guy.” – Idiocracy

It’s better than the “Girls Gone Wilder” picture featuring Kardashians. They don’t shave nearly often enough.

Again, a single meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First: Increasing Intelligence and Civilization and here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy). Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part of the interview can be found at I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One. The final part of the interview can be found below, and I’ll admit that cutting the interview down from 9,000+ initial words to the two published pieces was difficult, as you can imagine some great comments from Dr. Dutton had to hit the cutting room floor. That makes me sad, but I hope you enjoy the gems below.

I heartily recommend the book, and get no compensation if you buy it.

As before, any errors in the interview below are solely mine.

JW: Is there an optimum I.Q. level?

ED: Well that’s an interesting question. We touch on that in the book. The problem is that high I.Q. isn’t inherently good. What’s good from an evolutionary perspective is to survive. If you are putting energy into having a large brain and having a large I.Q. that’s energy you’re not putting into being aggressive and having big muscles. In certain ecologies that’s better for you to do that, to have the big muscles and the aggressiveness. You’re actually less likely to survive – intelligence doesn’t help you. You’ll die. Intelligence is not selected for. Intelligent genes will pop up by random mutation and they just won’t get selected for. What’s happening now clearly is that there’s a negative correlation of about 0.1 among women between I.Q. and how many children you have and so what that inherently means is that there must be an optimum I.Q., because above the optimum you’re not having children. There’s something to do with the environment-gene interaction. That means you don’t breed.

JW: So essentially you’re less fit for the environment . . .

ED: They’re less fit for this zoo that we live in. Even if we were living in a zoo there’s some evidence that very high I.Q. is a bad thing. It correlates with things that are inherently bad in some ways like autism, being easily overstimulated, allergies, and not being very instinctive and therefore not really wanting to breed. And if you’re an outlier in I.Q. you have difficulty talking to most people and dealing with them because you find them so stupid and facile.

JW: One of the things I’ve noted from the data is that “higher I.Q.” [that’s in quotes] professions you end up seeing occupations like judge and engineer. There seems to be a cap of around 130 I.Q. or a little bit above 130 I.Q. You didn’t see so many of that greater than 130 fraction showing up as judges, attorneys, or engineers. In fact they ended up working in much less “high I.Q.” jobs . . .

ED: As the I.Q. gets higher, the positive manifold between the different components of the I.Q. battery becomes weaker and as a consequence of that at the very high level they have very, very high g, very high intelligence, you can be absolutely crap at things which only weakly correlate with intelligence like social skill. And this then will of course preclude you from climbing up the social hierarchy. This is, I suspect, why the correlation between income and I.Q. is only about 0.3, 0.4. With education it’s about 0.5.

JW: Looking at the fate of civilization is as we head into winter, what are your thoughts on timescale? Is there a minimum societal I.Q. beyond which the center cannot hold?

ED: That’s hard to say because it’s never happened before in a way that we can measure it. If you look in the book, we’ve got those graphs where we compare the collapse of our society, and the difference with us is that we’ve got so much further because of industrialization and we’ve got past the contraception. What we know is that in terms of our linguistic I.Q., we’re back at the level that we were in about 1600. That’s where we come back to from a peak [vocabulary] in 1850. Now we’re back to 1600. The factors that make that an overly simplistic comparison is that first, the standard of living was much worse in 1600. That’s going to make people more violent and more impulsive. Secondly, we’ve gotten high in extraversion – we’ve been selecting for extroversion for a long time, which makes people adventurous and risk taking. So, we’re not like 1600 in that way, but that was when we were last at this level of vocabulary. There has to be some clever person you could get to do mathematical modeling of how this works, we could calculate what the boost is to our behavior patterns by the level of, say, low child mortality. We can probably calculate that. Then perhaps we could make an estimate, ideally better than guesswork, but I’m sure you could find somebody, maybe my colleague Emil Kierkegaard. I imagine he might be able do something like that. Once I.Q. starts to decline at the genetic level, which is definitely happening, then this sets off an environmental decline as well. It’s a cascade effect, a snowball effect, because once I.Q. is declining then you can’t teach kids as well, the teachers are of low quality, the conditions are of low quality. Then you have this environmental effect so you will push things down quite quickly.

JW: When you talk about the Flynn Effect being having the potential to have arisen from environmental factors that means it could go away within a generation.

ED: Well yes, if you think about what the Flynn Effect is underpinned by, this capital that we’ve built up is almost like a catapult. I was in an interview once, and the interviewer used this metaphor: it’s like a catapult that’s given us momentum and once we run out of that that momentum means that we can just do these little micro interventions but there’ll come a point where that momentum will run out. And when that runs out then it will undo everything quite quickly because we simply won’t be able to do things that we used to be able to do in the past. We can’t do Concord anymore or go to the Moon, but there’ll be other things we won’t be able to do, and so it’ll collapse quite fast. That’s why I suspect it’ll collapse into war quite fast.

JW: Nothing can stop it because even if you have some sort of smart fraction left the vast majority of people have dropped so much.

ED: Exactly. So it reminds me that this concept they talk about in global warming research of a global dimming. They say that it’s pushing the temperature down. It’s causing this effect which is which is actually keeping it less warm than it would be and that once that goes then the temperature will spike up very, very, quickly. That’s the theory anyway. There’s this idea that there’s this effect: all these micro innovations are creating this better environment where we can control more things which is masking the evidence that should be there of us getting stupider and stupider. When that goes then the sudden stupidity will hit. If we were suddenly put in Darwinian conditions overnight, our inability to cope would be quite extraordinary in comparison to that of previous generations, even my grandparents’ generation, because we’re so totally protected from having to think.

JW: When you look at altruism as a whole do you think that it might be the big enemy of intelligence?

ED: It depends. That’s quite a complex question because if we think about group selection then it was as a consequence of us having relatively high altruism and cooperativeness that we were able to develop farming. And farming selected for intelligence, because it pushed out those that were too stupid to be able to farm, that had such short time horizons they couldn’t farm. In a direct sense altruism was the friend of intelligence. But then on another level you would argue well it’s altruism that’s stopping people from introducing eugenic policies, stopping people from getting rid of the welfare state which definitely promotes low I.Q. as my colleague Adam Perkins showed that there’s no question about that – it does cause people who are lower I.Q. to have more children, and stopping people from stopping low I.Q. immigration. You could argue, perhaps, under Darwinian conditions maybe altruism is the friend of intelligence to some extent, because under Darwinian conditions we’re under group selection and the group that is internally altruistic although externally hostile will survive. But once you get to non-Darwinian conditions then what tends to happen is that the levels of stress are so low that religiousness, which people become more religious when they’re stressed, the religiousness collapses and religiousness tends to promote ethnocentric attitudes that tends to promote focused altruism. Your altruism is only focused on your own group and not to outsiders because they are the devil. Once that collapses, then you have a generalized altruism and that would seem to be perhaps in an indirect sense the enemy of intelligence. Actually, altruism does correlate with intelligence weakly. People who are intelligent and who are altruistic because they are better able to reason through, not where you instinctively know how someone will feel that – that’s empathy, but they can reason through how someone else might think and they can solve social situations better. Thus there’s a weak relationship between the between altruistic behavior and intelligence.

JW: So for intelligence, perhaps an optimal level of altruism might resemble the Spartans then? [chuckles] Entirely an in-group focus extraordinarily trusting of in-group, but even your own offspring are outgroup if they don’t meet your specifications.

ED: Yes possibly. But the problem was with the Spartans was that it was taken to such an extreme and that they were almost like Nazi Germany. I mean they were they were so unfree that perhaps there wasn’t sufficient space for people to sit down and be creative. Because part of being a genius and coming up with an original idea is that you have a moderately antisocial personality combined with very high I.Q. in an environment where it’s awfully conformist like that and those people perhaps didn’t cope well. So that there’s an optimum there as well. I’ve got a book that’s just come out called Churchill’s Headmaster: The Sadist Who Nearly Saved the British Empire and it does what it says on the tin. It’s about Churchill’s prep school headmaster. Anyone that knows anything about Churchill knows that his prep school headmaster was this evil sadist and I show that he’s not. He’s actually a jolly nice chap and it’s Churchill that’s the evil sadist. If Churchill had had more time with this headmaster then maybe he would have been molded into more of a gentleman. Now that system of public schools like Eton was deliberately and consciously modelled on Sparta. Everybody knew that Sparta was the way forward. Plato said that the upper class should never know their parents. It wasn’t as bad as that. But for nine months of the year that you wouldn’t see your parents. There was a degree to which the Victorians got the balance right because look at the growth of the British Empire. It got the balance right. It made basically militarized the upper class but it was sufficiently open to nonconformists that geniuses could develop. I wonder if Sparta was just too far, too conformist.

JW: Versus some of the ideas that came out of Athens.

ED: Perhaps those ideas were ideas that came along once Greece was in decline. That’s what happens. The best idea, the original idea, all that critical thinking . . . that comes along in the autumn [of a civilization-JW]. Same with Victorian England. Science and whatever. It’s in the autumn of civilization that these things tend to flourish.

JW: You mentioned that as well with Islam and Rome, that the best ideas came in their autumn.

ED: That’s when you’re engaged in critical thinking, but by the end of autumn you’re critiquing everything and you take it too far and you destroy everything, including the things that hold society together like militarism and religion and . . . just everything. Nothing is sacred. When that happens then there will be people for whom things still are sacred. We see this now with the Muslims who are more ethnocentric, more motivated. So the desert tribesmen creates the city and it becomes decadent and the new desert tribesmen invades. This is the problem we have. I look at this in my new books Race Differences in Ethnocentrism and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers.

The only problem is I’m afraid I can’t think of a solution, neither myself nor my colleague Michael Woodley of Menie can think of an adequate solution to the problem of declining intelligence and so we are kind of resigned to this idea that it’s that there is an inevitable cycle. It’s in the nature of things. I was thinking that it could be something to do with human survival itself. If we get too intelligent then we get too low in kind of basic instincts and violence and these kinds of things.

Therefore we can’t survive. It’s like humanity somehow regulates itself, with the invention of contraception for example, such that intelligence never gets too high that humanity dies out. You probably get this with other animals as well. All of them are probably going to go in cycles. There are probably periods of time where frogs were more intelligent than frogs are now. There was probably a period of time when frogs were less intelligent. Not within a large range, for frogs. I think it’s probably the same with humans. Humans will go through these periods of high and low and ultimately the species survives. That’s evolutionary perspective. That’s the important thing.

I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One

“Number one, we’ve got this guy, Not Sure. Number two, he’s got a higher I.Q. than any man alive. And number three, he’s going to fix everything.” – Idiocracy

This will be the only meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First: Increasing Intelligence and Civilizationand here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy). Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part (of two, I believe) of the interview is below. I heartily recommend the book, and don’t pretend to be unbiased about my opinions – I sent Dr. Dutton a copy of the transcript prior to publishing and he made very few edits, mainly corrections of typographical errors as a result of the transcription. How embarrassing is that, right? I’ll note that any errors in the interview below are mine.

John Wilder (JW): What led you to the study of genetics, civilization and intelligence?

Dr. Edward Dutton(ED): Serendipity, really. I was interested in religion. I did a Theology degree and Religious Studies doctorate. And then I got to know various people that were studying intelligence such as Richard Lynn. And it was through them, reading their research that the importance of intelligence dawned on me, and the importance of genetic factors.

When I did my degree, every Humanities department in the U.K. 20 years ago, a bit less, said everything is about environmental causes. You don’t even look at genetic causes at all. When I did my doctorate I mentioned something about this to my thesis advisor and he said something along the lines of, “Oh well no that’s good. You don’t need to think about that. That’s what scientists think about: you’re anthropology and religion.” It’s as if he was saying, “You know . . . you just have to produce something within the bounds of the dogmas of the Church. You know it’s not up to you to think outside those.” It was a bizarre thing to say and I didn’t really realize the full significance of what he was saying at the time, until much later. He was exactly saying: “You don’t think outside the tent you know, dangerous thinking.”

A lot of the theories that I was espousing and that I was writing didn’t make sense and I could never quite put my finger on why they didn’t make sense. Why was it that some people were more religious than others when the environment seemed to be the same? Was it just coincidence? Was it just some minor alteration in the environment?

And of course, I realized that when I discovered that there was a strong genetic component to religiousness, about 40 percent of the variance: then suddenly everything started to make sense, everything I experienced when I was an undergraduate at the Christian Union. You have Campus Crusade for Christ in America. You’ve heard of them?

JW: Yes.

ED: A little bit like that, evangelical group on campus and the university I was at, Durham, which is a kind of mini-Oxford really. There were loads and loads of them – a third of my corridor – 15 people, in my first year were fundamentalist Christians. Fundamentalist by English standards, not by American standards. What was so interesting was that there was this certain social demographic. Understanding the genetics of it made it make sense and this made me question more things that I’ve been told. And suddenly I came across intelligence research and that’s how it happened. And then I started meeting other people that were researching the same thing and getting to know other people. And then you realize you’re actually researching something genuinely interesting. It’s controversial and it’s a bit taboo but that’s in a sense, that’s what makes it interesting.

JW: That’s what really shocks me about the [subject of intelligence], is the controversy. Because as you lay out very well in your book, going back into the 18th century. [Even then] it was clearly thought that this would be the case, that within humanity, intelligence would be selected for. In the 1950s [C.M.] Kornbluth wrote about it in the short story The Marching Morons (LINK – you can read the story here) almost exactly word for word. The movie Idiocracy laid it out as well. So number one it makes sense. Number two it’s been thought of before. So what’s driving this controversy?

ED: Well I guess it’s the fact that since the War [World War II – JW] anything that relates to genetics has become taboo. Once that’s happened then people can virtue signal and thus attain status by making it even more taboo and more taboo and more taboo. And so they can find whole new areas that they can make taboo in order to virtue signal and you end up with a situation where these Humanities departments are basically just teaching dogma – teaching quasi-religious dogma rather than anything that’s scientific. And you’ve had this split between the Humanities departments and social science departments and the science departments, although even the science departments are infected by this. But it’s less easy to become infected because they are more quantitative. They have objective standards.

JW: The War. I think that is a good point because I certainly think had an impact. But in the 1950s, for instance, going back to the C.M. Kornbluth story The Marching Morons – no one even batted an eye when that was published up in the 1950s.

ED: I think it’s a slow process. It probably sped up in the 60s. In the 60s, late 60s there was a linguistics expert. He did this study of linguistics and variation between classes and he showed that working class people, he didn’t dare look at intelligence, because by then that was taboo.

But he talked about the way they talk, and he said the working class people talk to their children in a qualitatively different way from middle class people and their way of talking, the working class people, doesn’t encourage the kids to think. Whereas middle class people they talk to them more and they ask them questions and they use higher order vocabulary and it encourages them to think. And so you end up with this growing gap in achievement between the classes. The researcher was just pilloried for that, just for that, and that wasn’t even touching on intelligence overtly.

When my mother was at university in the 70s, Marxism was de rigueur so on that you just couldn’t discuss intelligence differences between classes. That was out. And so I think it started with the War. As these crazies, these leftist equality cult kind of ideologies, become more and more powerful then intelligence research has become more and more difficult to pursue in a reasonable environment and particularly then with regard to issues such as race and sex and less so perhaps, class now. But even so there was a British psychologist, Adam Perkins, who wrote something he didn’t even look at intelligence – he daren’t look at it – he looked at personality. He showed that there’s a different modal personality between classes and that it’s highly genetic and he was absolutely pilloried for that. People at the academic journals refused to review his book, The Welfare Trait, I cited it in At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means For the Future. And just for that. As you may have read in At Our Wits’ End, we went further and we said, “look it’s intelligence that underpins this.” It’s become awfully taboo and you get brave people occasionally like Herrnstein and Murray in 1994 who came out with The Bell Curve and you get this strong reaction because it’s cognitive dissonance.

People have taken on a religion, really a kind of quasi-religion, which they know on a certain level is not empirically accurate or at least they can’t prove it. And when you confront them that triggers them and they go a bit mad.

JW: I think part of it is the framework that we’ve been set up with. One of the things I noticed where I was doing some early research, for me, on intelligence is when I went to Wikipedia. I looked at intelligence of nations versus national wealth. Wikipedia had a table of national I.Q.s and I was shocked. I was just utterly shocked because I had had this assumption that, you know, plus or minus let’s call it 10 points, that everybody would lay out the same given that IQ isn’t a function of schooling, it’s a function of raw intellectual capacity. But yet here this table that laid out something that was very different and it led to Dr. Lynn (I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations) but now I go back to Wikipedia and that table is completely gone.

ED: Wikipedia is increasingly corrupted by the left. That’s the terrible thing about it, it’s increasingly the go-to source for students. There are lazy academics, they think, “I’ve got to do an article (for a journal – JW)” and they’re told in their peer review, put something in on, let’s say, intelligence. What they’ll do is go to Wikipedia and the things that are cited in Wikipedia will then be cited by them without citing Wikipedia. But then that means that the leftists that are controlling Wikipedia are literally influencing proper academic knowledge.

JW: The [National I.Q.] table is gone and there’s a map there, and the map that shows various gradations of color indicating the average I.Q. in various nations. And I thought to myself, I thought, well you know if there is a problem with Dr. Lynn’s data then why wouldn’t you go and get better data? But no one seems to have done that.

ED: They have. There’s a colleague of mine, David Becker, he’s a spunky German fellow. And his website is View on I.Q. (LINK) and he has redone all of Lynn’s calculations. Lynn was an elderly man (he’s eighty-nine now) and he was elderly man even when he did [his original work] and there’s various mistakes. [Becker] redid it and he put all the information online so if anyone wants to have a go at it and say it’s inaccurate they can see exactly what’s been done, exactly what the maths is. He [Becker] found that the correlation between Lynn’s calculations and his was something like point nine eight.

It’s constantly updated so whenever our research group discovers a new I.Q. study we put it on. I’ve just got new I.Q data today from South Sudan, for example. I’m going to write up a study probably sometime this week on this I.Q. data, and it’s looking like the IQ is like 60. [JW note: View on I.Q. indicates the global average I.Q. is 82. Scary.]

This map is from View on I.Q. (linked above). You can see one that is quite similar on Wikipedia.

JW: When you look at society as a whole the first example in your book was the Concord, and the irony is a couple of weeks previous to that I had written in my blog about the SR71 jet, which was 18 months between funding and flying, and I don’t think we could do it within six or seven years today.

I just I just found that stunning that we’d lost that capacity. Then I thought about something I’ve thought about for actually more than a decade. If you look at the American Founding Fathers, you had a George Washington, a John Adams, a Ben Franklin, and a Thomas Jefferson all born about 1750. That same year as your 1750 A.D. maximum societal I.Q. [as discussed in the book]. And these people came from a population less than that of San Antonio. I hate to say it but if you compare them to the politicians available today, I mean . . .

ED: No I don’t think Trump is a Thomas Jefferson. He has many qualities about him but he’s not exactly Thomas Jefferson. No that’s true. The I.Q. was obviously higher. And I suspect, I don’t know if this can be provable, but I would suspect that perhaps at that time the I.Q. of America was perhaps even higher than the I.Q. of England because you were under more intense selection pressure so you have these people that went to Jamestown, you had entire populations that just died out. You were under selection pressure. I would say you were under group selection with the Native Americans and so on which we weren’t to the same extent in Europe.

JW: There was an additional selection, not selection pressure but self-selection for people who are adventurous enough to strike out across an ocean.

ED: Yes, that’s true and openness correlates with I.Q. at 0.3. So you have that element as well. Voluntary migration is correlated with I.Q. You’ve got that probably the religiousness of the Americans in comparison to the British . . . you are more religious than us even now. Your attendance rate at church on Sundays is about 40 percent. In England it’s about 7 percent. And I think that that’s no coincidence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s a genetic legacy. That’s one of the things that harsh selection selects for . . . is ethnocentrism and thus religiousness because religiousness often goes in parallel with ethnocentrism.

I think the founding Americans were a select British population. You don’t want to be British. But you are. And therefore you can’t help having certain British characteristics but they’re select characteristics of the population from which you came. But I think you’re quite right. I think it’s because what you’ve got is the difference in the average I.Q. and the smart fraction. That’s quite a separate issue.

And you get some societies such as Japan where the average I.Q. is high but the standard deviation is narrow. And so even though they have an average IQ that’s higher than us they have a smaller smart fraction than us. They don’t have many outliers. That’s why we’re ahead of them in terms of innovating the Industrial Revolution, because they just don’t produce geniuses. We Europeans do. So there’s two elements to it.

There’s the smart fraction and then there’s having sufficient organization of the population to be able to do something massive like the moon landing or the Concorde which is undermined by having a low average I.Q. lots of little things going wrong. So in India . . . they’re very clever they’ are some very clever people in India. India is so genetically diverse. India has a smart fraction it has some people who are very inventive and can do brilliant things. But the problem is that the I.Q. of the country is so low that it is very difficult for them to achieve something that’s complicated where you can rely on everything going exactly right. Whereas Japan could definitely do something like that, but the problem is it probably wouldn’t have people that would innovate the inventions.

More next Monday . . .

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

“Never give up, never surrender.” – Galaxy Quest

Originally I’d intended or the interview with Dr. Dutton, co-author of At Our Wits’ End which I reviewed in two parts (Review Part One At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First: Increasing Intelligence and Civilization, Review Part Two At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)) to be here – I’m still working on the transcription. It’s not done because the raw transcript is over 10,000 words, and family came in from out of town unexpectedly via parachute assault, and we were poorly defended. I should have the interview complete by next Monday’s post.

One of the themes and concerns I see on a continual basis in my wandering around the web is that we are living in the endgame of a society. Dutton and Woodley quoted Charles Murray discussing the eerie way that we get the sense “. . . that the story has run out.” There is a sense of national exhaustion. It’s hard to do things. It’s like we have become a nation of teenage boys on summer vacation with no summer job.

As a nation, the United States built a continent-spanning railroad in about six years, mainly by hand, with the only explosive available being black powder. I don’t know about you, but that just seems like so much work when I could be in my basement eating Cheetos® and playing Fallout™ instead. California, at least, has the right idea. They have been spending billions of dollars on a high speed railroad to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. This project was started in the 1990’s, so it must be nearly complete now. Oops. They’re pretty sure this high speed rail line will never be built, likely due to the high concentration of Cheetos© and video games in the state.

From a societal standpoint we seem to be at or near the point of no return, headed in the wrong direction on multiple fronts. It’s not just the inability to tackle or construct big things. Heck, the Empire State Building was designed in weeks and built in a little over a year. Freedom Tower in New York City? Over seven years of construction, and that doesn’t include the years of design that had to take place before anyone was even bribed.

It’s not just railroads and buildings that seem to be headed the wrong direction:

Political Violence. Wearing the wrong hat will get you fired – the Left has Hataphobia©.
We all know that the bad math is eventually replaced by firing squads, but like winning the lottery, we get to dream first.
Pink? Purple? Are you an anime character?
Bad tattoos. You’re gonna have to live with that tattoo sleeve when you’re in the rest home and have to explain to the kids changing your bedpan how cool Justin Bieber® was.
Constant remakes of television shows and movies that weren’t that good in the first place. Why won’t they remake some quality television, like Hogan’s Heroes®?

It’s easy to give up. In fact, every bit of the media challenges us to give up our values. We’re told we should celebrate children being pumped full of hormones after they make the brave and courageous decision at the age of seven that biology was a mistake and they’re really DeeAnn instead of Dean. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust a seven year old to find the remote control around my house. Trust them with decisions about pumping chemicals into their body that will utterly change the future? Sure. Makes sense.

The politics of the media have reversed: it used to be that free speech was celebrated. Now? Free speech is celebrated, but only if the free speech in question follows the values of the elite. For a brief moment in time, platforms like Twitter® really were able to amplify voices that cared about values. Now? Those voices will be silenced from those platforms. From financial systems. From jobs and eventually housing, if the Left can manage it.

I’ve seen this world-inversion where every value that was known to be good and true is vilified and every value that was known to be evil is celebrated. It’s at this time I really need to pause and remind our viewing audience that the central tenant of Christianity isn’t “Do what thou wilt.” That’s an utterly different religion with a boss who smells like sulfur with shiny horns and a pitchfork. Except in Clown World™, “do what thou wilt” is the single highest value.

Alright John Wilder, you’ve convinced me and depressed me. Why should we bother to continue?

It’s simple. We should continue because it’s what we’re born to do. Going gently onto that goodnight? If you’re reading this blog, that’s not your style. And despite what media is trying to convince you – what is good and right is not finished. That’s why they’re so desperately attempting to use the media at this point – to create despair. Despair is the main tool of evil – it causes us to curl up like we’ve been eating too much soy and give up without a fight.

Don’t give in.

How should we continue?

We continue by living our daily lives and living them unashamedly. Living them devoted to what is good and true. By having wonderful children. By teaching those children the values that we know are true. By teaching them to discriminate between good and evil, and how to choose good. By being good role models. By being fit. By being prepared for the tougher times ahead.

We continue because that’s what we do. I do think that times in the next decade will be tougher than the times a decade or two decades before.

That just means we’re lucky. Calm seas don’t make good sailors. Easy lives don’t make moral men.

But I will get that transcript done before next week, paratroopers or not.

At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

The pictures from this post are mainly from Idiocracy©, which you should watch before it’s an actual documentary.

This is the second part of the review of the book At Our Wits’ End. The first part can be found here at At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First: Increasing Intelligence and Civilization. Again, I recommend the book, and the link is below. As of this writing I don’t get any compensation if you buy it here. Buy it anyway. It’s an important book.

When last we left Western Civilization, we’d reached the smartest point ever in history. Isaac Newton was an example of the genius produced at this time in history. Dutton and Woodley have data to suggest that 1750 was the peak of intelligence for Western Civilization.

Is there any evidence for this?

Certainly.

Life in 1770 was fairly comparable to life in 1470. Given three hundred years, things hadn’t changed much at all. But by 1804, life was dramatically different. The Industrial Revolution® was a product of the accumulated intellectual capital of the preceding five hundred years and it changed everything.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution©, natural selection occurred in society through the culling of the poor via disease and poverty along with the execution/prison death for about 2% of the stupider males. This led to the population getting smarter. But the Industrial Revolution© created an economic abundance in the West like never seen before. Surplus food and goods were now available in society. Medicine improved and kept the weak children of rich people alive.

Ahh, selection in progress.

Medicine also kept more of the children of poor people and poor single mothers alive. As established previously,

Poor impulse control is correlated with lower I.Q.,
Single motherhood is correlated with lower I.Q.,
Less overall wealth is correlated with lower I.Q., and
Having more children is correlated with lower I.Q.

Again, none of these predict the behavior in individuals. The friend I have with the greatest number of children has a very high I.Q. There are several very smart people I know that don’t have a lot of money. And anyone under the influence of testosterone and being 18 has really crappy impulse control. I will also remind everyone being rich doesn’t mean you’re virtuous. Neither does being smart. But in group behavior, the correlations above are well documented.

Dutton and Woodley note that they’re not the first ones to see the inherent problems with the removal of natural selection in a wealthy society. Benedict Morel, named after a mushroom, observed this problem in 1857 between surrenders in France. Francis Galton wrote in 1865 that “Civilization preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.” Ouch.

But it’s true. As of this week, every member of our family wears glasses as Pugsley was the last to leave the “good eyes” club. And The Mrs. developed type I diabetes when she was 12. Prior to the 1920’s this was a near immediate death sentence. However, since insulin was isolated and entered the market in the 1930’s, she’s alive and had kids, namely Pugsley and The Boy. Her genes would never have reproduced without the Industrial Revolution™.

Spoiler alert: they’re never going to be ready.

Charles Darwin wrote an entire book on the problem: The Descent of Man. It really wasn’t a light “summer at the beach” read as it described humanity getting progressively . . . worse. Smarter people use contraception more (remember, the prohibition against birth control went away as religious beliefs changed). And lower I.Q. people not only have more children, they actively desire more children.

Further factors that have developed as society absorbed the wealth of the great capitalist expansion include the development of a welfare state. That’s a problem if you want smart people around. Welfare states support and encourage single mothers (lower I.Q.) to have more children and ensures that those children survive. Dutton and Woodley also note that data suggests that welfare may encourage those who are also low in “personality factors” (agreeableness and conscientiousness) to have more children. What does that lead to? A population that is more impulsive, paranoid, apathetic and aggressive. By coincidence these traits are also associated with lower I.Q.

So, numbers increase on the lower end of the I.Q. scale. What about on the upper end? Are smart people are having lots of babies? No. Opening high value careers up to intelligent women causes them to have fewer babies. Higher I.Q. people also use birth control more frequently, and actually desire to have smaller families. So not only are lower I.Q. people having more lower I.Q. babies, smarter people are having fewer high I.Q. children.

But at least they have what plants crave!

Having a wealthy society also increases the desire for people from less wealthy countries to immigrate to the rich countries. As we shown in the previous post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.), less wealth generally correlates to lower societal I.Q. Does this translate to real-world outcomes? Yes. Dutton and Woodley cite Danish studies that show the average Dane I.Q. to be around 100. However, the I.Q. of non-Western immigrants is roughly 86 in Denmark. Immigrants certainly aren’t making Denmark smarter.

To think, you could live in a paradise like this . . . .

Since intelligence is 0.80 correlated with genetics, they and their children actually can’t make Denmark smarter. This result would indicate that wealth, quality of life, and ability to self-govern would decrease in countries facing high immigration, while crime would increase. As a completely unrelated note, the United States has more immigrants than any country on Earth, with 40% of the population (How the Constitution Dies) now being either first generation or born of a foreign mother.

But What About The Flynn Effect?

The Flynn Effect refers to a general rise in IQ scores between 1930 and 1980, noted by a guy named (drum roll) Flynn, James Flynn – he’ll take his data shaken, not stirred. For whatever reason I.Q. scores seemed to be increasing. However, Dutton and Woodley explain that the Flynn effect is most likely environmental in nature (i.e., better nutrition) and not genetic.

Apparently the I.Q. test sub-scores that show improvement tend to favor very specific areas of intelligence, namely those areas that are environmentally influenced. There is a parallel with height, they point out: in 1900, average height in Great Britain was 5’6”. In 1970 it was 5’10”. But growth has been in leg length (which is more correlated with environmental factors) versus torso length (which is more genetic). People are taller due to nutrition.

Additionally, schools train more for abstract thought than they would have in a mostly agrarian society, which would have been the norm throughout the West in 1930. Country schoolhouses didn’t need to teach logic puzzles, since they were focused on traditional subjects. Now children are drilled in the kinds of questions that are used on I.Q. tests – and if you practice, you do get better even if you’re not smarter. On some I.Q. tests administered to youth, they’re not considered to be valid if the child had the test in the past year, so practicing the kinds of questions on the test will likely improve scores.

The bad news is that evidence suggests that the Flynn effect has stopped around somewhere around the year 2000 and is now headed downward. Reaction times (a proxy for intelligence) have dropped. Reaction times aren’t as closely correlated with I.Q. as many of the other things we’ve talked about, but they are directly measurable. It may be a bad ruler, but it’s a ruler that we can use to compare across time.

Also confirming the I.Q. drop is work done by Augustine Kong, a Chinese researcher at the University of Iceland studied genetic components known to increase I.Q. They’re declining. The average Icelander born in 1990 wasn’t as smart as one born in 1910, and the genetics aren’t there to support an increasing I.Q. The opposite appears to be happening.

Dutton and Woodley conclude that based on the metrics they reviewed, the “average” Englishman of 1850 would be in the top 15% of intelligence today in England. Oops. And apparently all tests surveyed indicate declining I.Q. That’s a problem: if average intelligence is declining, and intelligence is a bell curve, there will be fewer geniuses and a smaller “smart fraction” that is able to put run and hold together a technologically advanced society. Or build a SR-71 Blackbird. Or a Saturn V rocket.

Just like a bad horror movie, it keeps getting worse. The very temperament of genius is changing – from stereotypical genius – a very driven, self and work-preoccupied Einstein to Todd from corporate: intelligent, socially skilled, agreeable, and conscientious. Thankfully the genius “Todd” will provide us really detailed policy manuals and snappy PowerPoints® instead of that useless groundbreaking physics.

Creativity is correlated with I.Q. but only up to an I.Q. of 120. As a further confirmation, creativity scores have declined, therefore . . . expect less Monty Python® on TV and more “Ow, My Balls©.”

And people say that there’s nothing good on TV.

On the bright side, the murder rate is down. Why would that be so? Murder, violence and impulsive behavior is correlated with lower I.Q. Dutton and Woodley theorize that the environment that creates violence is down – given a robust welfare system it’s less likely that financial pressures or social pressures are as high. You kid won’t be starving to death as they stuff their face full of Cheetos® while they sit on the couch playing X-Box™, and since obesity is up, killing people is such hard work, anyway.

Why do Civilizations Rise and Fall?

Like your mother-in-law, early civilizations have a low I.Q. – they’re dangerous places to be. But over time group selection pressures intensify, the people become highly religious and ethnocentric – the hill people want to kill and eat the valley people, and vice-versa, and everybody wants to kill the group whose god makes them wear purple. The nice thing about strong religion and ethnocentric behavior is it allows your group to compete well.

If your religion is good enough, and if you get enough selection for I.Q., you just might end up with a baby civilization on your hands. Once I.Q. increases, conditions get better. An elite is formed, and, since they have nothing better to do, they begin to question all of the social traditions that made civilization smart and wealthy.

The elite begins to compete on who can be more altruistic and ethnocentrism (favoring your own people) becomes badthink. All of the values and norms that created the civilization are despised and thrown out. Society begins to decline. “. . . extreme views . . . eventually become the norm.”

Resources are then taken from those that are more capable and given to those that are less capable, which is called fairness since all people are equal, right? I.Q. drops. Innovation drops.

Then? The elite is purged, and the civilization collapses. The authors anticipate the following response, that: “. . . it doesn’t work precisely with some obscure civilization or other; or demand that we respond to an infinite regress of every unlikely possible alternative explanation . . . .” Yeah, even academics get denial.

Okay, maybe it won’t take that long.

Does This Explain Past History with Other Civilizations?

Sure.

Ancient Greece.
Islamic Civilization. 64% of important Islamic scientists lived before 1250. 100% of them lived before 1750.
China. It came very close to its own industrial revolution.
The Roman Empire. Why didn’t Rome (as awesome as it was) have an industrial revolution? Contraception and abortion were approved of. Higher IQ women generally had fewer children, and this collapsed Rome prior to that great leap that would have led to Maximus™ brand Ocelot Bitez® and Roman tanks. Man, I wish we would have had Roman tanks.

What About Western Civilization?

Western Civilization has followed the same cycle, but with this important difference: Christianity had a taboo against contraception and abortion which kept higher I.Q. women having children. The Spring of Western Civilization was from 1000 to 1500. During this time, it was highly religious and highly ethnocentric, just like the model.

The Summer lasted from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution©. This period was more rational, questioning, and the Renaissance brought culture and art to the forefront.

Autumn – Industrial Revolution™ to last Tuesday. We find ourselves with the elite questioning society. The ideas and thoughts that the civilization is capable of are reaching their highest level as we harvest the fruit of hundreds of years of human advancement.

We may be in Winter or close to it. The hallmark of winter is a declining I.Q. as the less intelligent spew out children like a society-destroying genetic AR-15. Culturally, Winter is characterized by the reproduction of good ideas from the past rather than coming up with new ones. Multiculturalism and Marxism are “anti-rational” and “their adoption should show how far g (I.Q.) has fallen.” Dutton and Woodley quote Charles Murray with the phrase that describes the era – “The feeling that the story has run out.”

The authors are not certain we are there, but feel that it’s worth noting that things don’t look very good.

Thanks, guys.

Are There Solutions?

I’ll leave you to read the book for those alternatives. I’ll summarize it by noting that the solutions provided are not easy choices, and unlikely to be implemented in any democracy. I.Q. drop is caused by our society and values, and won’t be undone by a society with our values. The authors further suggest that maybe we should spend some time saving our knowledge so it’s easier for the next group through.

Dark.

I still recommend the book. I also recommend Dr. Dutton’s YouTube® work. I’ve linked to a good one down below. Next week I should have the transcription done of my interview of him, and it’ll shine a bit more light on these conclusions.

At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First: Increasing Intelligence and Civilization

“Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner.” – Blackadder

I love accurate historical dramas.

What happens when you find a set of ideas that might explain the world as we see it, that ties together dozens of topics you’ve written extensively about over the course of years?

You smile, even if it means civilization might be ending. Heck, if civilization ends, no more mortgage!

Let me go back to the start.

I was listening to YouTube® on my way to work. YouTube™ has some interesting algorithms that select your next video. From time to time the videos presented have been horrific, but on this particular occasion, a gentleman was interviewing Dr. Edward Dutton about his new book At Our Wits’ End. I enjoyed the interview so much I ordered the book that night, and have watched many of Dr. Dutton’s YouTube© videos as well since then – he’s named himself quite appropriately the “Jolly Heretic.”

I was not disappointed when At Our Wits’ End arrived and, in my first spoiler alert for the review, I heartily recommend the book without reservation. Dr. Dutton wrote the book along with his colleague, Dr. Michael Woodley, and together they have put together an interesting and compelling scientific narrative. I research many of my posts, and some research takes hours and has dozens of notecards of notes. In this case, I typed my notes about the book – the notes alone are sitting right now at 1725 words. We’ll see how many posts that ends up being: I’m betting it will be two, and I’m certain that not all of my notes will be used. I may end up posting the combined review when it’s complete as a separate page on the blog, along with the interview of Dr. Dutton that he was gracious enough to agree to. I’ll be posting that interview after the review is complete – I think it will form an excellent post script.

Last week’s Monday post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.) was a warm up – it dealt with how I.Q. shapes the present. In it, the relationship between I.Q. and national wealth is fairly obvious. This week’s post deals with (to me) the more crucial and compelling question – what will the future of Western Civilization and humanity be? This is the core of At Our Wits’ End.

But first, from page 108 of At Our Wits’ End:

One problem with science which many people find difficult to get their heads around, is that the aim of science is to understand the nature of the world and to present the simplest explanation, based on the evidence, for what is going on. Science is not there to be reassuring, to make people feel good, or to help bond society together . . . . Those who call for suppression are, in effect, arguing that scientific pursuit is fine until it forces them to question the worldview that they hold for emotional reasons. Once it does this it is ‘bad science’ or ‘a higher standard of proof should be demanded’ or ‘it is immoral’.

This is perhaps the quote that impacted me the most strongly from the book. We live in a world filled with truths – and the most uncomfortable questions are perhaps the most important to ask. We may not like the answers, but when dealing with reality we cannot make rational decisions without that knowledge. In my personal life, the questions that I hate to ask myself are nearly always the most important ones. Strangely, I also seem to know immediately the answers to those questions, at least when I have the courage to ask them.

The first question posed by the book is a simple one:

What is intelligence?

As discussed previously in this blog, intelligence is the ability to solve complicated problems, generally with some speed. For this review, I’ll use I.Q. and intelligence as well as ‘g’ – the general intelligence factor – interchangeably. Although these are all very different terms for a scientist studying the subject, for the purposes of this review I’ll mangle the language and call them all the same thing and use them more or less similarly. It’s like calling a zebra a horse, but hopefully it excludes centaurs and giraffes and makes for clear reading for the lay reader. Also, keep in mind that these are group numbers – we all know and can cite examples of individuals who don’t follow the group correlations we’ll discuss – the genius level smart dude who has bad body odor and lives in his parent’s basement. The sort-of dim kid who developed a business and makes $350,000 a year. They exist. But they’re the exceptions, not the rule.

Intelligence has a most interesting property: it’s inheritable – with a correlation of about 0.8, which is pretty high. 1.0 is perfect correlation, -1.0 is perfect negative correlation. Educational attainment and economic status correlate with intelligence, as does salary – at about 0.3. Other things that are correlated with intelligence include impulse control. People with higher IQ are also more trusting. On an individual level to predict a person’s performance you also have to have information about their personality, but on a group level I.Q. has significant predictive power.

It’s generally the dream of every first grade teacher that all of her students are equal. But she knows that’s a lie. Every student isn’t equal – some are much better at some tasks than others. Some are much better at every task, and people who do well on one task generally do well on other tasks – intelligent brains just seem to have more bandwidth in general – it’s like they have an overclocked nervous system. Again, this doesn’t mean that they’re more virtuous, simply that they have greater capabilities.

The average IQ also determines interests to some extent – the average IQ of someone who studies anthropology is lower than someone who studies physics.

What are the properties of IQ?

IQ test scores fall out on a bell curve.
~70% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115.
95% between of the population is between 70 and 130.
Intelligence is “polygenic” – lots of genes are involved in making a smart kid.

But certainly, John Wilder, intelligence means different things to different cultures? In the very succinct commentary of Dutton and Woodley, “No it doesn’t.” I realize that’s not an argument, it’s a refutation – I’ll let you read the book for details. Scientifically it appears that IQ is a valid concept across cultures. It’s valid if the culture is literate. It’s valid if the culture is non-Western. IQ (or intelligence, or “g”) is potentially one of the most predictive and studied properties in social sciences, which tend to be a bit squishier and less science-y than, say, physics or chemistry, so give the social science folks a break that they found this gem.

So can a civilization get smarter?

Yes. If a trait can be passed on via sexual selection (like my butt), then it will be selected for. But in, say, the year 1400 a great butt wasn’t as important as regular food. If you look at the data as generated in the study Survival of the Richest (Gregory Clark) – as quoted by Dutton and Woodley, between 1400 A.D. and the mid-19^th century, the top 50% had more surviving children than the poor 50% – nearly twice as many. Since economic status is strongly correlated with I.Q., society became smarter each generation.

Brutal? Yes.

Concerned with sexy butts? Not at all.

Why would smarter people have more surviving children? Less intelligent means less money. That means less food, less heat. That means the poor children are all weaker when the ice weasels (extinct since 1745) came. There’s plenty of evidence for this, as Dutton and Woodley note: the average height on the ship Mary Rose was 5’7” around the time Henry VIII lived. Henry VIII was 6’3”. Henry got better food. He got better genes.

No, it was the genes, silly.

Henry wasn’t especially good at having children, but most of the nobles around that time were good at it – with or without their wives. There is evidence that as many illegitimate children of nobles survived as legitimate children. Most people have to work their whole lives to become a bastard, but like me, those lucky kids were born that way. And some of them did okay – William the Conqueror was illegitimate and managed to invent the paperclip (I made that up) and invade England at the head of the Norman Conquest (I didn’t make that up).

According to the genealogical records I’ve seen, I’m related to William the Conqueror. This would be an amazing story. Except . . . I won’t polish my claim to the crown just yet and become known as John Wilder the Usurper©, Eater of PEZ® and Defender of the Remote Control™ anytime soon: European society became one of constant trickle down – sons of nobility would have sons that were merchants who would have sons that were farmers who would have sons that worked on farms. The poor fraction was replaced by the rich fraction over time. The children of the wealthy replaced the poor in a silent way.

I don’t know the percentage, but I’ll bet a sizable chunk of England is, like me, related to William.

Genes for being wealthy, which is correlated with intelligence, spread throughout society. This still doesn’t explain my sexy, sexy butt. But there were further selection pressures in place: 2% of males were either executed or died in prison. Presumably these were the worst 2%, so society was pruning itself. But mobility worked both ways – people could move up the social strata as well based on their (generally I.Q. related) merits.

Also pruned were the children of unmarried women who didn’t have the position of mistress to someone higher up the social strata. Unmarried mothers have an average I.Q. of 92 in the United States. Childless or married women have an average I.Q. of 105. Today children live via welfare, but back in 1741 (when one study in particular was done) moms would have abandoned them. 71% of these abandoned children in 1741 were dead by the age of 15 versus 40% in the population as a whole. Presumably there would be even less child mortality in the upper incomes.

These selection pressures led to the gradual increase in intellect, culminating in what Dr. Dutton mentioned in one of his YouTube® videos as his estimated date for the smartest generation in recorded history – those born in and around 1750.

So, all is well, and humanity keeps going on an ever-smarter upward march of intelligence?

Spoiler alert!

No. And Soylent Green® is people.

We’ll discuss that (the intelligence piece) in Part II of this here: At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).

Meanwhile, go out and buy the book. It’s good.