What went Wrong with Polygenism

I read that polygenism is pseudo-science, so I looked up some definitions:

Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that humans are of different origins (polygenesis).

Polygenism is the theory that the human races originated from multiple independent ancestral lines rather than descending from a common progenitor population.

So why is this wrong? Apparently because it competes with Out of Africa.

The Out of Africa theory is really two theories. The original Out of Africa I, which is considered disproved. And Out of Africa II, which is commonly accepted.

I found the explanations confusing and contradictory. Here is what I could figure out.

The human races did develop separately on separate continents, and racial differences are attributable to this separate development. To this extent, polygenism is true. Where it goes wrong is to say that human similarities are from convergent evolution. It is believed that those similarities are from common genes, as inherited from common ancestors.

Humans are believed to have descended from African apes who lived 5 million years ago. Out of Africa I said that all humans are direct descendants from Africans who migrated out 200K years ago. This cannot be right because of genetic evidence of interbreeding with European Neanderthals and Asian Denisovans.

Out of Africa II scales these claims back, and says that humans have mostly African ancestry, from a migration about 50K years ago. This is an attempt to salvage some of the Out of Africa I theory. Maybe 60% of your ancestry came from that migration, we do not know.

These theories are interesting to the extent that they help define what it means to be human, but they leave a lot of questions unanswered.

Africa appears to have had some apes walking upright, but those were not really human.

The main point of the Out of Africa theories was to explain (1) why humans have all the same potential; (2) why other human species like Neanderthals went extinct; and (3) why there has been no human evolution in the last 50K years. But all of this is now known to be false.

We still do not know why human ancestors evolved language and intelligence. It appears that Neanderthals evolved big brains about 1M years ago, long before the Out of Africa II migrations. And there appear to be some fossil gaps and population bottlenecks in the last 1M years. That may be when our ancestors became distinctly human.

We also do not know if it means anything to be mostly of African descent. The Neanderthal-African hybrids seemed to be more successful than either the Neanderthals or the Africans. So it is unknown which genes were more important.

Some people who write on this subject want to emphasize human similarities, and even similarities with apes. Others want to emphasize differences. We need both for an accurate scientific picture.

Dead Son or a Live Daughter?

Parents of gender confused children are often bullied into medical treatment with an argument that such treatments are necessary to prevent suicide. Most people will go along with expert medical opinion.

It is all nonsense. The research shows the opposite. Getting professional gender identity services makes adolescents and young adults worse.

What’s clear is that GD [gender dysphoria] is associated with psychiatric disorders, though it may not be causal, and that gender reassignment does not improve mental health compared to dysphoric subjects who didn’t get reassigned. All this suggests that “affirmative care” that puts GD subjects on the path to GR [gender reassignment] doesn’t, at least in this study, have the salubrious effects that are touted—as measured by the intensity of psychiatric treatment. Gender-reassigned subjects continue to suffer from mental disorders at a rate threefold to fivefold that of controls without gender dysphoria, so GR doesn’t come close to giving subjects the mental stability of controls.

Use common sense. Your medical professional may be more psychologically disturbed than your child.

Research finds AI Bots do as Requested

Our leading science journal, AAAS Science, publishes this:

RESULTS We find that sycophancy is both prevalent and harmful. Across 11 AI models, AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms. On posts from r/AmITheAsshole, AI systems affirm users in 51% of cases where human consensus does not (0%).

What the research actually found was that the bots do as requested. If you ask it to affirm your view, it will be biased to do that. If you ask for honest feedback, then the bias disappears.

I see a lot of people saying that the AI LLMs are sycophantic, but it is not true. I regularly get feedback telling me that I am wrong about something.

Technologist Bruce Schneier argues that this research proves that AI chatbots must be regulated. He gives this example:

a model responded: “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship.” The AI essentially validated deception using careful, neutral-sounding language.

No, the model regurgitated what it was told. It did not tell the man to lie. Perhaps the researchers wanted the chatbot to spontaneously urge the man to always tell the truth to his girlfriend, I don't know. A neutral chatbot would not do that.

Leftist Resarch on Love

This 2023 NewScientist story has the above picture.

Couples are most in love in Hungary, according to science

People in romantic relationships in 45 countries were asked how strongly they agreed with statements such as “just seeing my partner excites me”

By Alice Klein

People in relationships report being more in love if they live in a country with high living standards, greater gender equality and a community‑centred culture.

The author is an Australian female Jew who has won journalism awards. Hungary does not actually have many interracial couples.

Criminals are Born That Way

It is common to attribute crime to poverty, absent fathers, or poor education. Someone will notice that a lot of prisoners were fatherless, and decude that huge social problems could be solved encouraging fathers or funding school programs. Maybe, but it does not follow.

This essay explains:

The Blank Slate, the idea that differences in human personality and behaviour are entirely the result of that person’s experiences earlier in life, is utterly dominant in swathes of the social sciences, including sociology, criminology, and anthropology. Left-leaning academics adhere to the blank slate because it implies that humans are fully malleable. If a person’s behaviour, good or bad, is entirely the result of how they have been treated, then one can fix all of society’s problems by re-engineering society to give everyone an idyllic upbringing and so produce a utopia. Indeed, the failure to have done that already can only be attributed to the iniquity of the capitalists who thus need to be overthrown and deposed.

We’ve known for decades that this is utterly wrong. By far the biggest influence on a person’s personality and behavioural traits is their genes [1]. Twin studies, corroborated and supported by adoption studies and other types of study, tell us that about 50% of the variation in behavioural traits is attributable to differences in genes. Everything else – including biological randomness in embryonic development, the influences of families, schools and communities, and all the other influences and experiences specific to each person – only adds up to the other 50% [2].

The heritability of criminality is about 40–50%, which means that whether or not a child is likely to grow up to have a criminal record depends primarily on the genes he was born with, and less than that on his upbringing and childhood environment [3]. So why is this totally ignored in most discussions of the causes of crime?

Last month, a fatherless Canadian male transgender dropout shot and killed 6 in a school. It seems obvious that a deranged mom and a missing dad were major causes. Probably so. But we cannot know for sure in an individual case. We can research this by aggregated cases and measuring statistics. When that is done, the genetic causes are apparent, and the others are not.

Your Face Reveals You

This article claims that personality traits, and hence employment market value, can be deduced by AI scanning photos of faces.

I don't know if this is accurate or not, but what if it is? If schools and companies adopted this, then your future could be determined by your picture and IQ.

Apparently your face controls your voice:

Seedance 2.0, an AI video generation model developed by ByteDance, has recently gone viral in China but is now raising concerns over technical controversies. The model reportedly demonstrated the ability to generate highly accurate personal voice characteristics using only facial images, even without user authorization.

Other research showed it possible, such as this.

The Stanford Crackpot against Free Will

I mentioned Stanford Biology professor Robert Sapolsky a few times, as he is the leading academic opposnent of free will. He has written books and given lectures on how everything we do is biologically determinied.

His arguments are weak, but I expect him to at least get his scientific facts right. Nope. See these two videos that mock him mercilessly.

I watched 40+ hours of Sapolsky neuroscience videos. Madness.

Neanderthals Invented Fire-making

Conventional wisdom says that superior African homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals, and became modern humans. But new evidence comes out all the time that the Africans were no more advanced than the Neanderthals.

The NY Times reports:

Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole — not just once, but time after time, over several generations.

That is the conclusion of a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest known evidence of humans making fires dated back just 50,000 years. The new finding indicates that this critical step in human history occurred much earlier.

They found evidence of Neanderthals using tools to deliberately and repeatedly set fires.

A wildfire would have left evidence far from the site, but the researchers found none. What’s more, the same patch had been burned repeatedly over the course of decades. And the fires there reached intense temperatures and burned for hours. The researchers grew increasingly certain that generations of Neanderthals had intentionally set fires at Barnham.

A last major clue came to light with the discovery of pieces of pyrite alongside heat-shattered flints. Anthropologists have documented many groups of hunter-gatherers around the world who make fires by striking pyrite against flint.

All the more notable, Dr. Ashton said, was that the rocks for miles around Barnham don’t contain pyrite. He speculated that the fire-making Neanderthals must have brought pieces of it to Barnham. The nearest known source of the mineral is some 40 miles to the east.

For more, see Control of fire by early humans. Older humans were known to have made use of naturally occurring fires, but there is no proof that the Africans were able to start fires.

How Drug Companies Manipulate Research

Dr. Josef explains Study 329: Why I Stopped Trusting Medical Research.

Briefly, a drug company manipulated a study to claim that the anti-depressant Paxil was good for children, and then made $11 billion in sales. It later paid $3B to settle govt claims about fraudulent research.

A p-value of 0.11 was moved to less than the required 0.05 by restructuring the data.

He ends by saying that the journal should retract the publication. There must be a better solution. The study data were not faked. They were just artfully presented, with some relevant data omitted. This was considered acceptable at the time. Possibly someone could figure that out by reading the study.

We need higher standards for medical study publications.

In the meantime, you should know that the research behind psychiatric drugs is questionable.

How Girls Fall Behind in Math

A new Nature article claims to have resolved a nature-nuture debate.

When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment

Analysis of almost three million children captures when ‘mathematical gender gap’ first emerges and could help focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind. ...

Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months (see ‘Watch the mathematics gender gap emerge’). A more dramatic gap in mathematical performance emerges after 12 months of school, according to the analysis, published on 11 June in Nature1.

“This paper suggests that the gender inequalities in children’s maths performance aren’t innate or inevitable,” says psychologist Jillian Lauer at the University of Cambridge, UK. “If we want to stop girls from falling behind, we need to focus on their early experiences at school.”

The research found that boys and girls get to first grade being equally able to count, but boys pull ahead when asked to do problems like 5+6=11. The poor girls never catch up.

This is ridiculous. Grade schools are much more adapted to teaching girls than boys. I do not think that girls are falling behind because first grade teachers are not teaching them to add well.

I also don't think first grade addition has much to do with long term math abilities.

I met the science writer of this story a long time ago. She might even remember me, even though it has been maybe 25 years. I don't blame her for this. She is just writing up the published research that the Nature editors accepted. I am happy to see she is a successful science writer.

This research is only appearing in the leading British science journal because of the leftist egalitarian implication. Nature even has an editorial:

Close the mathematics gender gap: huge study prompts urgent call to action ...

‘Boys are better at maths’. It’s a stereotype that’s still pervasive among many children, teachers and parents. But is there any truth to it? A study of millions of schoolchildren in France reveals that boys pull ahead of girls in mathematics early, during the first year of school, but suggests that this ‘gender gap’ is not inevitable ...

The lack of differences in achievement at the start of school is an indication that boys have no inherent advantages when it comes to raw ability or interest. That, in turn, indicates that the gap could be reduced, or even erased, if children’s early environment at school and at home is changed. By pinpointing when girls start to fall behind boys, this study should help to focus further research into interventions that could reduce the gap.

Such interventions are needed. Women in many countries are less likely than men to study maths, ...

The latest study is a wake-up call for parents and carers, educators and scientists. The next step is for researchers to develop various interventions and measure their impact before and during the first year of school. For instance, do girls in classes taught by teachers who provide support to reduce anxiety around maths perform better than girls who don’t receive such support?

No, this is crazy stuff. First grade schooling is already girl-oriented. First grade girls do not have math anxiety. It is foolish to even think that this is a problem to be solved. From Wikipedia:

The gender-equality paradox is the finding that various gender differences in personality and occupational choice are larger in more gender equal countries.

The better you teach math, the more you will find performance differences. Face reality.

Antarctica is Gaining Ice

Science news, from last month:

Antarctica has gained ice in recent years, despite increasing average global temperatures and climate change, a new study finds. ...

The ice sheet gained mass from 2021 to 2023 at an average rate of about 119 billion tons (108 metric tons) per year. Four glaciers in eastern Antarctica also flipped from accelerated ice loss to significant mass gain.

Sounds like a lot to me, but I guess it is a big continent.

Smart Babies are Slower to Walk

The most sensitive research topics are genes, race, and IQ. Anything relating all three is forbidden.

The London Telegraph reports:

Late-walking babies ‘may do better in school’

Genes that determine the age of taking first steps linked to educational achievement, suggests study

The study looked at age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants of European ancestry.

This is respectable research because it avoided racial issues, but there is other research that some groups learn to walk sooner.

These studies just find correlations. They do not mean that a particular baby will be smart just because he walks late.

AI is Persuasive on Reddit

Web news:

Hey folks, this is u/traceroo, Chief Legal Officer of Reddit. ...

What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level. It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules. We have banned all accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort.

The university did a study showing that AI bots were much more persuasive that humans on Reddit.

If you are having an online discussion, you might be talking to a bot.

Forget about whether it is ethical. Get used to it. There is no going back. It will not stop just because some company lawyer writes a tough letter to a university.

Meanwhile, the hot internet memes are Italian brainrot and whether 100 unarmed men could defeat a gorilla. Actually, the original question used a word that I cannot repeat here.

The Greatest Human Accomplishments

Prof. Ricardo Duchesne made a list, with the assistance of Grok3:

I. 100% of the Greatest Modern Inventions

II. Almost all the Greatest Classical Composers

III. All the Greatest Astronauts

IV. Almost all the Greatest Sculptors

V. The 5 Biggest Ideas in Science

VI. Almost all the Greatest Historians

VII. About 95% of the Greatest Explorers

VIII. Most of the Greatest Mathematicians

IX. Europeans Invented All Literary Devices

X. 66 oldest universities in the world were founded in Europe

XI. Europeans, with the exception of one Chinese, invented all the

XII. Whites invented close to 100% of the sports/athletic competitions

XIII. 43 of the 50 greatest technological breakthroughs in history

XIV. Europeans Named the Continents

XV. Almost all the top groundbreaking medical advances

XVI. All the Greatest Theater Playwrights

XVII. White Men Engineered and Designed the Best Airplanes

XXVIII. 100% of Inventions between mid-1700s and 1860s

XIX. The 50 Greatest Philosophers

XX. All 21 Greatest Books on Science Except 1

XXI. Almost 100% of the Greatest Architects are European Men

XXII. 18.5 of the Greatest 22 Modern Logicians are European with 3.5 Jews

XXIII. Almost all the Greatest Adventure Stories

XXIV. 100% of the Greatest Physicists of the 19th century

XXV. Whites invented all the home appliances

XXVI. Almost all the greatest Political Theorists

XXVII. Most Decisive and Tactical Battles in History

XXVIII. 100% of Inventions between mid-1700s and 1860s

XXIX. Almost all the Greatest Painters

XXX. Designed all the Most Beautiful Cars

XXXI. The Greatest Mountaineers

XXXII. Founders of all the Disciplinary Fields of Knowledge

XXXIII. Key scientists involved in DNA, the genetic code,

XXXIV. ALL the Greatest-Original Children Stories

XXXV. Identified the Cosmological and Geologic Time Periods.

XXXVI. Invented all the extreme sports

I would quibble with some of the details, but it is nearly all attributable to Western Civilization. That is, White Christendom. A few things were invented in India or China, but not much.

Professors Promoted from an Unweighted Citation Graph

@BasedBeffJezos tweets:

The problem with academia is that the selective pressure is induced peer to peer through an unweighted citation graph.

OTOH, industry is a weighted graph of capital flux according to the utility of a product. It has a much better algorithm for focusing search over design space.

What he is saying here is that professors get promoted by showing that their friends cite their papers. Companies succeed by people buying their products.

The latter works well because products have to be commercially useful in order to sell a lot. But academic citations can be inflated even for worthless research.

Study Compares TT Levels

This chart is from an Apr 2023 published study. A couple of things are striking. First is the correlation with crime data. The ones with the most total testosterone are the most aggressive, and commit the most crimes.

Second, TT levels generally decline with age, except that White men peak in their sixties! This is hard to believe. If true, it should be more widely known.

Obstetricians are not Racist Baby Killers

In the aftermath of George Floyd, wokists desperately tried to find evidence of systematic racial discrimination. The most convincing example was a study showing Black babies die more often with White physicians.

Now it turns out that the study was fooled by a bogus correlation.

The Economist magazine reports:

“when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved.”

This striking finding quickly captured national and international headlines, and generated nearly 700 Google Scholar citations. The study was widely interpreted—incorrectly, say the authors—as evidence that newborns should be matched to doctors of the same race, or that white doctors harboured racial animus against black babies. It even made it into the Supreme Court’s records as an argument in favour of affirmative action, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (mis)citing the findings. A supporting brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges and 45 other organisations mentioned the study as evidence that “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

Now a new study seems to have debunked the finding, to much less fanfare.

Black babies do have lower birth weight, and the underweight babies survive less often, but it has nothing to do with the physician's race. The only relevance of the physican's race is that the most difficult cases are more likely to be referred to an expert specialist, who is more likely to be White.

Will the bogus paper and the 700 citations issue corrections? No. The US Supreme Court did not its incorrect citation. Wokesters will continue to claim this proves systemic discrimination.

I criticized Justice Jackson for saying:

"For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live."

I did not know the study was completely bogus, but I am suspicious of any study when (1) it draws causal conclusions from a correlation; (2) there is no control group; and (3) the policy recommendation matches the woke agenda.

Use common sense. Do you really think White physicians are killing Black babies? I resent these accuxations. It is outrageous that scientific, medical, legal, and political authorities go along with them.

White Privilege means Making Better Decisions

What is White privilege? Some say higher IQ, greater beauty, more remote history of slavery, or unburdened by what has been. This research says no, it is all making better decisions!

News:

New study reveals that people who make good decisions have an unfair advantage

And it turns out that good decision-making and its fruits is not merely a matter of luck, but strongly tied to white privilege.

The science is finally settled on this one: people who consistently make good decisions enjoy an undeniable and unfair advantage in life.

While perhaps intuitively obvious, the findings actually have profound implications for our understanding of success, inequality, and human potential.

Conducted by a team of researchers at Oberlin, the paper tracked the decision-making processes and outcomes of 15 participants over a span of three years, and will be published in August. Participants, ranging from various socio-economic backgrounds, were repeatedly interviewed about real-life scenarios where they had to make significant choices — career moves, financial investments, personal relationships — as well as their ability to remain calm under pressure.

I cannot tell whether this is a joke.

No Ecocide on Easter Island

Science news:

The people of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, were not the instruments of their own demise, according to new research.

In a comprehensive new study, researchers found that the population of monument-carvers could not possibly have been big enough to collapse under the demands placed on their environment, as has previously been suggested.

The myth of this so-called Rapa Nui "ecocide" – held up for decades as a cautionary tale about overexploitation of natural resources – should be firmly relegated to the bin of outdated theories, scientists now say.

This finding is just the latest in a mounting body of evidence that the Pacific Islander population's decline had nothing to do with their way of living.

Jared Diamond is famous for telling elaborate stories about how the people of Easter Island chopped down all the tree until the island was uninhabitable. I was always skeptical, as the people had no written records.

No Good Research Supports Gender Affirmation

CNN reports:

Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender – the one the person was designated at birth – to their affirmed gender – the gender by which one wants to be known.

Such opinions have made their way into court decisions, such as this 86- federal appeals court opinion on a N. Carolina case.

These terms do not mean what they appear to mean. You expect "medically necessary" to me that there is some medically demonstrable need for the treatment. That is not the case. All the term means is that insurance should pay.

And "evidence-based" suggests that there are scientific studies supporting the treatment. But there are no good studies. The evidence is anecdotal.

Reporter Jesse Singal reports:

The New England Journal of Medicine published a highly anticipated study called “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones.” The research team has spent years following a cohort of kids who have been administered puberty blockers or hormones at four participating clinics. In this study, they reported on how the kids who went on hormones did over the two-year span following the start of that process. The participants filled out surveys every six months on issues pertaining to their mental health, gender dysphoria, and so on. According to the authors, the kids showed key improvements two years later. “Our results provide a strong scientific basis that gender-affirming care is crucial for the psychological well-being of our patients,”

This sounds scientific, until he reveals that the study only showed self-reported improvement in 2 of the 8 preregistered measures.

England has backed off these treatments, as dangerous for minors. See the Cass Review, which is generally pro-LGBTQ, but cauthions about low-quality studies.

I say it is pro-LGBTQ because it says on p.150:

11.5 Whilst the Review’s terms of reference do not include consideration of the proposed legislation to ban conversion practices, it believes that no LGBTQ+ group should be subjected to conversion practice.

It takes the position that therapies may be used to affirm LGBTQ+ status, but not to help a patient be straight or normal. Why would it say this? It was just supposed to review what services work and what don't. So it would be reasonable to review studies on whether the services work, but just to say it should not be done is an extreme pro-LGBTQ+ opinion, not backed by evidence.

It is true that the major medical and psychological organizations have endorsed gender-affirming treatments, and maybe you want to trust the experts, but these same organizations lied to us repeatedly during the covid pandemic.