Today’s Telegraph alerted me to a survey of leading scientific thinkers conducted by The Edge website.

John Brockman, the New York-based literary agent and publisher of The Edge website posed the question: what is your dangerous idea? in reference to a controversial book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett that argued that Darwinism was a universal acid that ate through virtually all traditional beliefs.

Brockman received 116 responses to his challenge from Nobel laureates, futurists and creative thinkers. These were among them

This one from Craig Venter, Genomics Researcher and Founder & President, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, is a real breath of fresh air:-

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Heterosity (novel diversity in a local area) is usually portrayed by its proponents as yielding a high rate of symbiosis in human ecologies.  This is not what is observed in other ecosystems however.

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To those of us who value real diversity a maddening abuse of language (there are so many these days) is the use of the word “diversity” to describe the colocation of many different types.  This fallacy is so familiar to us that we are accustomed to living with it.  We bite our tongues and stay silent or we try to construct sentences to describe the horror of taking the great diversity of nature and destroying it with technologically amplified mixing of ecologies. 

No more.

A word is needed—something more specific than “multiculturalism”—to replace the use of “diversity” to describe colocation of different types. 

I propose “heterosity”.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely negative creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity.  Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’.  Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence.  If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’.  If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous.  It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue.  The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel.  A modern nation cannot afford either of them.  Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.  It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

George Orwell, sounding very modern as he commends love of country in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, published in 1941.

Given our dissident purpose it is fitting that this, MR’s first full calendar year of operation, brought a sharp spate of nasty surprises to our liberal elites.  I mean, of course, 7/7 and 21/7, the Katrina lawlessness, the black v brown riots in Lozells, the 18 days in Paris and beyond and, latterly, the white backlash in North Cronulla.

Naturally, some of these events were greater than others.  But all, in their way, were unprecedented.

Blacks have looted often enough, but always in times when a moral bonfire was to be expected.  No such pass could be extended in post-Katrina NO, where the white norm would have been to rise to the challenge.  Instead, white Americans glimpsed hopeless, irredeemable Africa in their midst and for a moment the narrative of white racist causality, so precious to liberals, was falsified.

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View this QuickTime movie of world crop cover since 1700 for evidence that Northern European “immigrants” to North America pulled their weight by increasing the carrying capacity.  This increase in carrying capacity is something necessary (but insufficient) to justify foreign immigration and it is something no other immigrant group has approached since.  With the exception of trade in African slaves by the southern plantations—plantations best seen as a part of the Central and South American tradition of centralized land ownership where slave trade was part of the practice—the US and Canada were built by Protestants deriving their yeoman farmer tradition from pre-theocratic northern European agricultural practices.

Charles Murray uses citation analysis to account for “human accomplishment” in his book by that name. However he failed to take into account the fundamentally important accomplishment: negative numbers.  He therefore assigns a positive value for citations which might be best viewed as a negation of human accomplishment.  Examples of such negative accomplishments might be such works as “Das Kapital” (which set political economy back a century), “Civilization and its Disconents” (which set psychology back a century), “Anthropology and Modern Life” (which set sociology back a century) and “The Genetic Basis for Evolution Change” (which set human ecology back at least a generation).  He could have avoided this fatal error of epistemology by using a truly important human accomplishment that’s over a century old: Factor analysis.

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I am not sure how to interpret the tale of two not particularly current documents circulated by the Church in Italy, and both disapproving of mixed marriages between Italian women and Muslim immigrants to Italy.  Yes, it’s extremely heartening that this message is being spoken.  But I am puzzled why the BBC’s Rome correspondent should file this article at all.

This is what he says:-

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People get emotional about the public display of the Nativity Scene.  Maybe the real reason it is so emotionally charged is not that it is sectarian but racist.

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