The following is a brief but interesting commentary from JW on a David Sloan Wilson paper (pdf) that, not surprisingly, was criticized by Razib on Gene Expression.

A few excerpts from the paper:-

Group selection provides the fitness differences that were lacking within groups. In the case of a no-cost public good, any variation among groups is sufficient for the A-type to evolve to fixation in the total population, because positive among-group selection is unopposed by within-group selection.  If providing a public good requires a private cost, then positive selection at the group level is opposed by negative selection at the individual level and the outcome depends upon the relative strength of the two processes.  More generally, groups can evolve into adaptive units that are designed to maximize their contribution to the total gene pool to the extent that selection among groups prevails against selection within groups.  This is also part of the consensus that emerged in the middle of the 20th century; it remains theoretically valid today …

That sound thinking can be compared to Richard Dawkins’ absurd strawman argument against group selection, as quoted in OGI by Salter, in which he asks why lions don’t refrain from eating antelope, “for the good of the mammals” (or something to that idiotic effect).  I mean, hello, where is the selective pressure to result in such behavior?  Is “the good of the mammals” a selective pressure to out-compete the strong selective pressure on lions to be efficient predators on antelope (never mind that lions, as a group, can cooperate in hunting, but that’s another story)?

Robert Boyd, who has championed cultural group selection for as long as I have championed group selection in general, has stated that the received wisdom about genetic group selection is correct and that culture is required to make group selection a significant evolutionary force…

Here is where the biopolitical Salterians can find some common ground with the culturalist Yockeyians because Western High Culture may assist in forming the cultural input needed for making white group selection a “significant evolutionary force”.

Human cognition is usually assumed to be an individual-level process, even if the outcome of the cognition is adaptive at the group level (eg, an individual deciding to provide a public good at private expense).  Another possibility is that the group becomes the cognitive unit, with social interactions comparable to neuronal interactions.  The concept of a group-mind might sound like science fiction but its likelihood follows directly from multilevel selection theory, has been well documented in social insects, and is fully plausible for human groups…

Does MacDonald’s work describe such a human group-mind?

In closing, let’s note that there is some irony in Razib’s complaint that Wilson uses an unrealistic “pipe-dream” model to explain group selection (actually, on a small part of the overall paper).  Tame white GNXP blogger David B based his “Salter Intermarriage Fallacy” upon the wildly unrealistic scenario of exactly equal migration and intermarriage between all peoples and all nations – something that has never happened and will never happen.  Not that that bothered Razib.  Then again, David B’s “work” supports South Asian Diaspora interests.  Wilson’s work, if it catches the attention of the “wrong” people, may be understood to oppose those interests.  By the way, group selection is not necessary for the pursuit of EGI, it is a “why”, not a “what”.  But nevertheless, a study of group selection can inform as to methods to be used to rationally pursue genetic interest objectives.

Actually, the reverse may be true; incorporating concepts of EGI may bolster the significance of Wilson’s ideas, and may better explain the actions of those who provide public goods for their group even at some degree of private cost.

There are a variety of ways in which interpersonal relations map onto interethnic relations.  Indeed, the ethnic becomes personal most often through interpersonal relations even if they are abstracted to the level of some television producer making a series of degrading images to project into your home, hence into your eyes.  So, with that in mind, I’d like you to read over Wikipedia’s “checklist” of indicators of when you are being subjected to “emotional abuse” and see if they match your experience, as a white, of your relationship to one or more other ethnicities:

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The proportion of human genetic variation due to differences between populations is modest, and individuals from different populations can be genetically more similar than individuals from the same population. Yet sufficient genetic data can permit accurate classification of individuals into populations. To resolve this apparent conflict, we analyzed the question “How often is a pair of random individuals from two different populations genetically more similar than a pair of individuals randomly selected from any single population”; We compared this frequency (w) with error rates for classification methods, using data sets that vary in number of loci, diversity of populations, and polymorphism ascertainment strategies. Classification methods achieve higher discriminatory power than the individual-based measure, w, because of their use of aggregate properties of populations. The number of loci analyzed is the most critical variable: with one hundred polymorphisms, accurate classification is possible, but w remains sizable, even when using populations as distinct as sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. Phenotypes controlled by a dozen or fewer loci can be expected to show substantial overlap between human populations. This provides empirical justification for caution when using population labels in biomedical settings, with broad implications for personalized medicine, pharmacogenetics, and the meaning of race.

This is the cautiously-worded Abstract to a Universtity of Utah paper downloadable in full here.

And this is what JW takes from it:-

This is crucially important, especially since it validates, essentially, EGI, while it is possible that a cursory examination of the paper by the “usual suspects” would lead them to an opposite, totally erroneous conclusion.

Reading the paper to its conclusion, the major finding is this: the idea that individuals from different (highly) distinct races could be more genetically similar than they would be to members of their own group is an illusion due to insufficient numbers of markers.

When 1000+ markers are used, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups; the overlap in genetic similarity between these groups is ~ 0%.

It is true that the authors found, when “admixed” and “intermediate” groups are included, that the overlap does not quite reach zero, even with up to 10,000 markers, although the overlap does become very small.

However, three points (in increasing order of importance):-

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To get an idea of the dangerous turf Google has weighed into, watch this video by Swedish professor Hans Rosling at TED 2006 (or here)

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Summary of Majority Report for recent days.

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The following Post-Autistic Economics Review article, from March 2005, is an investigation of Japan’s enduring economic success by Robert Locke.  It was sent to me by Wintermute who urged me to read the whole thing.  It’s long ... some 8,000 words.  So I will not reproduce it in its entirety here.  But if you want to understand how the Japanese function economically, and whether they have a better way of doing things than our market-driven approach, I do urge you to read the article in full at source.

GW

Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism

No-one wants to talk about Japan these days.  The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s.  Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention.

But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why neoliberalism is false.  Simply put, Japan has done almost everything wrong by neoliberal standards and yet is indisputably the second-richest nation in the world.

This doesn’t mean that neoliberalism is wholly meritless as an economic theory or as a development strategy, but it does mean that its claim to be the only path to prosperity has been empirically falsified.  Japan’s economy is highly regulated, centrally-planned by the state, and often contemptuous of free markets.  But it has thrived.

What follows is for space reasons necessarily a sketch and exceptions, subtleties, and refinements have been left out.  Facts have been homogenized and caricatured to make structural fundamentals clear.  But a reader who bears this in mind will not be misled, as detail analyses are available elsewhere.

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by GT

One of the little blessings of civil rights and the fight against evil white racism has been an explosion in serial killings.

Note why Marxists and feminists include in their databases serial murderers from as long ago, in some cases as far back as 1800.  They are interested in inflating the number of white males relative, of course, to Africans.  Real life, however, is not that easy to ignore.

An Anatomy of Serial Murder

Fox 2004

Notwithstanding these cautions, Figure 3.1 displays counts of serial killers, partnerships, and teams each year since the beginning of the 20th century, using the midpoint of a killer’s career as a reference point.  That is, for example, Theodore Bundy, whose murders spanned the years 1974 to 1978, having a career midpoint of 1976, is counted in the 1970s. Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, who was at large from 1978 to 1996, had a career midpoint of 1987 and thus is included among killers of the 1980s, even though he operated both before and after this decade.

The trend is relatively flat for the first half of the century, hovering around 10 serial killers per decade. The pattern emerging in the second half of the century is radically different. In the 1960s, the number of killers or killing teams reached nearly 40.  Remarkably, over the course of the next two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, the number of killers or partnerships quadrupled, surpassing the 150 mark in the 1980s.

Although rapid growth into the 1980s clearly suggests significant shifts in the prevalence of serial murder, these results are vulnerable, at least in part, to alternative explanations related to changes in data accessibility and quality of record keeping.  As interest in serial murder increased, so did the likelihood that case histories would be published in some fashion.  Additionally, as law enforcement became better equipped to identify linkages between victims slain by the same killer or killers, the detection of serial crimes and criminals became more likely.  Notwithstanding these concerns, the trend in serial killings into the 1980s is quite consistent with a more general rise in violent crime, including homicide, as well as in resident population, strongly suggesting that the rise in serial murder is more than just an artifact of increased reporting and improved detection.

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Agronomist-inventor Jethro Tull increased carrying capacity by as much as a factor of 8 with, among others, his invention of the seed drill (seen here with his surname distribution during the cultivation of the US frontier):

The seed drill is a simple device, simple enough that it can be built by a competent yeoman farmer, which Jethro Tull was.

If I were King, I would replace Saint Patrick’s Day with Jethro Tull Day, in honor of this man to whom so many owe their very biological existence—born to his own biological existence as he was during March 1674 in Basildon, Berkshire, UK.  The Friday nearest Mid-March seems a good time for such a celebration since we don’t know his exact date of birth (he was christened March 30 according to Parish records), and Friday night is better for raising a glass of ale, (brewed from the fruit of the harvest made more bountiful by the seed drill) than some random day of the week.

Jethro Tull, rather than being properly honored, lost his land and was hounded by creditors.

If any of my cousins near Lower Basildon in Berkshire would be so kind as to drop some flowers on his grave at St Bartholomew’s church I would appreciate it. 

PS: Not to denigrate Chinese agricultural accomplishments—which are undoubtedly quite profound in their own right—to those who claim that Jethro Tull “adopted” the much earlier Chinese device which they call a “seed drill”, let them compare the drawing above with this drawing of the Chinese “seed drill” and keep in mind that Tull had to go through multiple generations of design before he arrived at a device which achieved the required multiple of crop yield with the above pictured device: