In Postcivil Society: Empty the Cities I outlined a vision of the kind of world that might result from the destruction of Western Civilization—a postcivil society in which the panmictic vectorism of so-called “globalization” is replaced by much more localized economies and social experiments.  The driver for that coming postcivil society wasn’t exactly specified, but one potential was a pandemic with virulence driven higher by vectorism.  An alternative source of pandemics is bioengineering.

A recent article by Robert Carleson, titled “The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies” essentially predicts that personal bioweapons labs capable of producing deadly pandemics will be widespread in about a decade.  This means that the kinds of people who now develop computer viruses may turn their talents to real viruses—and not all of these people will be “playful” about it.  As I see it the primary potentials here are:

1. A team of reproductively disenfranchized East Asian and/or Israeli men building a pathogen that kills men in high population areas except those with a selected group of Y-Chromosomes.  This selectivity requires some careful engineering.
2. A reproductively disenfranchized “loner”—most probably northern European/Russian heritage—concocting a much less selective pathogen that kills anyone unfortunate enough to be in a high population density area.  Its easier to kill indiscriminately.

Not an overly “majoritarian” issue this week.  But Martin Hutchinson’s mini-tour of the global investment hotspots makes a good read, even if you’re poor like me.

Breaking the BRICs

Over the last few years, emerging market investment has been overwhelmingly centered around the concept of the “BRIC” group of emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China. These countries were supposed to be the giants of 2050 and the only emerging markets that a truly Important institutional investor should consider, because of their liquidity. Like most ideas spawned by investment banks (truly original minds are weeded out by the banks’ Darwinian appraisal systems pretty rapidly) this idea was vapid and silly at the time. More interestingly, it is now a recipe for gigantic investment losses. There are economies in the world with excellent medium term prospects, but none of the BRICs qualify.

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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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