What’s the quote, I think i have a take on this. What did he say exactly

You assume that Trivers’ expression of his assessments of famous colleagues is motivated only by self interest, which in itself could be considered an ad hominem attack. Another alternative is that Trivers is acting to improve the discourse in evolutionary biology. I suggest that public exposure of less than honest, less than civil, less than constructive behavior among scientists is the only measure that will lessen the frequency of such behavior, which all insiders know is appallingly common. Reports of unprofessional conduct made “over beers” have no real utility; they are just gossip.

This is the fairest comment I have read So far. It is absolutely amazing that an established evolutionary biologist like Trivers knows So little of the contribution by other evolutionary biologist.

I’ve heard all the same sorts stories about Lewontin and Gould. I’ve also heard an equal number of nasty stories about Hamilton. I’ve heard less nastiness about Williams, but yes, I’ve heard nasty stories about him too. I should mention as a practising academic in this field I’ve heard all of this nastiness from people who were there when the bad behavior happened. I’ve seen some of it myself firsthand. Finally, the worst stories I’ve heard about any of these people are about Trivers himself.

Now the real question is why does Trivers only mention the bad traits of Lewontin and Gould? Further, why does he belittle their accomplishments while giving full credit to the people he likes? Sean Carroll for example cites Ontogeny and Phylogeny as seminal for the field of Evo-Devo. Its not even mentioned in Trivers’ hit piece. Lots of stuff in Ontogeny and Phylogeny is wrong, of course, but lots of stuff Hamilton said about kin selection has been proven wrong. Doesn’t change who gets credit for getting the ball rolling.

This article by Trivers is disgraceful. This sort of thing should be said over beers with friends or about long dead people in biographies. Ad hominem attacks like this say everything there is to say about the people doing the attacking.

Thanks Dr. Trivers for the reminiscences and the stimulus to learn something about you and recall those turbulent times. The motivations of Gould and Lewontin and their numerous aggressive followers and patrons have been analyzed extensively by Prof. MacDonald as I am sure you are aware. Hahvud is such a stifling and clannish place, socially, academically, scientifically, and politically. In the future please let us know your impressions and assessment of the
man himself, Ed Wilson, as I am sure your paths crossed. The Lewontin/Gould/New Left forces made a tremendous stink about his speaking to us at Berkeley Life Sciences building about 1973. The usual Cal spectacle.

“If he was so dedicated to Marxism, why did he so embrace the publishing industry, which is all about capitalism?”

Once he came to power why did Lenin take possession of (and arrange for it to be chauffeur-driven) a confiscated Rolls Royce?

Why is does the personal wealth of Fidel Castro, per Forbes, total $900 million?

[…] Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small – The Unz Review. […]

Of all the “leftist” arguments I ever hear, the one that whites “destroy” more than other races, is the weirdest and one of the least credible. Even considering the vastly better record keeping of European societies, even when the records are unflatering, non-white peoples have done just as much or worse, and given less in return. There is a famous site in Canada called “Massacre Mountain.” In the 1700s, a well known British explorer was being conducted through the west by a friendly tribe of Indians. They came on another tribe peacefully settled for the night. For some reason the tribe conducting the British explorer decided to massacre them. It haunted the British explorer for the rest of his life. Such things happened among Indian tribes. They were not all noble. Corruption always eats from within the most.

In return, whites have created a world where non-white peoples are increasing in numbers exponentially, and enjoying more opportunities than most ever did in their traditional cultures. And I say this despite recognizing that, of course, there were some aspects of traditional cultures (everywhere, including Europe) that are preferable to modern society. Yet, almost nobody would really trade places. FCOL, just try to take the cell phones away from Kenyan farmers today. I know a Kenyan and she tell some funny stories about how the parents keep tabs on their kids with cell phones.

Crows are hilarious. That commercial with the crows closing the glass patio door, then making a noise to get the guy sitting outside on the patio, get up and run into the glass — and the crows laughing cruelly. Brilliant. You just know that’s what those jerks (crows) do.

I used to work in a bookstore in Harvard Square and had to deal with S. J. Gould several times. He was one of the rudest, most arrogant people it has been my misfortune to encounter. A truly obnoxious assh*le.

We’ve been through that “different kinds of intelligence” stuff before. What it basically boils down to, is, yes, talents and motivations and environments do differ among individuals of similar iq, but in order to achieve something significant in any given field, IQ matters. For instance, except for drumming, exeptionally musically talent people also score higher in IQ according to the level of their talent. Same for artists. OTOH, a person can have a superior IQ and not be able to computer program, or at least not have the motivation to learn. Of course it happens. Yet, overall, if you examine how their lives play out, IQ is the most significant single factor in their behavior. Kind of like height is the most important single factor in the success of most basketball players, but not the only.
It’s really not rocket science.

Oh dear. It is only natural that those who hold Robert Trivers and Bill Hamilton up as gods would be the most prolific of commenters on this article. We who favor Gould and Lewontin are in the minority appearing in this post, thus we get a biased reading of the issues. One of the best non-technical books I’ve read on this controversy is Andrew Brown’s “The Darwin Wars” of some 15 or 20 years ago. Not much has happened in the field since those days. But recently (2015), we now have the founding father of Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson’s “The Meaning of Human Existence”, in which he reverses his thesis on Inclusive Fitness and refutes both Trivers and Hamilton. It looks like the Darwin wars have not yet ended. It is no wonder Wilson’s name doesn’t come up in this article

Years ago, I attended a conference in Geneva, where I live, with Gould on the same day a negative article on him by Robert Wright (The Moral Animal) in Time magazine ripped Gould apart. Gould merely replied, that guy’s not a scientist but a journalist, a know nothing, and it’s his job to make waves of scandal.

[…] they possessed, as a genetic group, high inheritable intelligence. As an example, there is the outright fraud Steven Jay Gould committed in The Mismeasure of Man when he attacked the idea of heritable […]

Way to change the subject. Pointless non-discussion, dialogue with this man. Good night.

“And indeed his idea humbled me because ever since I had been coming to Jamaica I had heard rural people tell me “trees draw rain” as in, don’t cut them down, and I had thought to myself you poor benighted souls, you have the correlation right but causality wrong—naturally, where it rains more, trees are more apt to grow. Now Bill suggested they Jamaicans may well have had it right all along—lower temperatures over wooded areas could itself be a useful signal.”

Then why does the frequency of rain decrease after you cut down the trees? It’s not to much of a mind stretch to assume that the correlation was noticed between the cutting of trees and falling in precipitation, not between mere presence of trees and precipitation in the same locus, since it’s pretty obvious that the Jamaicans would of abandoned their conclusion after noticing instances of deforestation without the accompanying drop in precipitation.
During the late 60’s and early 70’s the communist government of Romania was actually planting forests to exploit this connection.

Really, to see such a patent lack of intuition from a supposedly smart academic is off putting.

Nonsense. I challenged your continually bogus comparisons of Pygmies as somehow “representative” of all Africans of Africa migrants, and a few Bantu ner’do wells as equally “representative.” You made this claim in the “Boas” thread, were roundly debunked, and you do it here again, with still pitiful results. And you need to add your own “addendum” as to why you continually duck and run away from substantive replies when your claims are exposed as BS. You are pretty good at throwing out all these sweeping claims but when debunked you run away from defending them with any substance, usually changing the subject to yet another dubious claim, or pretending to make reply with non-reply. Up above your own “supporting” reference actually contradicts what you say. No wonder you continue to duck and run.

Enrique has been mentioning the Nazis a lot lately, it will take him a while but he will eventually have placed an addendum to every comment section, explaining that the Nazis represented the essence of white people.

Oh there are plenty of “hostile neighboring savage hordes”next to the Dutch too. Why, they killed around 100,000 Dutch people not so many years ago. In fact the Dutch had the highest per capita death rate of all Nazi-occupied countries in Western Europe (2.36%). Over half (107,000) were Holocaust victims, deported and murdered Jews.

To be sure the Pygmies would have no problem, and it would be much easier for the Pygmies to pitch camp and survive in Amsterdam, than for the Dutch to spend multi-millions hauling concrete to start erecting condos in the middle of the Ituri forest.

This is only true to the extent that Pygmies in the Netherlands would be heavily subsidized by their host population and would not be threatened by hostile neighboring savage hordes. The Dutch in the Ituri forest? On their own.

Ronald West says
put the average Dutchman in the average Pygmy’s habitat and see how far the Dutchman’s bigger brain (and by implication, his higher intelligence) will see him live attempting to find his way to Nairobi.
To be sure. If suddenly placed there Dutchman would not last long, either in the rainforest or say in the Artic. By contrast the Pygmy or Inuit could forage quite successfully if dumped in the middle of Amsterdam.

.
Pincemartin says:
If the Dutch were so inclined, they could start building condos on pygmy territory tomorrow – and enjoy a comfortable life there. Can the pygmies say the same about Holland?
To be sure the Pygmies would have no problem, and it would be much easier for the Pygmies to pitch camp and survive in Amsterdam, than for the Dutch to spend multi-millions hauling concrete to start erecting condos in the middle of the Ituri forest.

.
Sean says:
Pygmies live as slaves of the Bantu and have no rights.
Exaggerated pablum, that your own reference contradicts. Read the Forest people by scholar Colin Turnbull. Far from being “slaves” they Pygmies once in or near their forest can and do run rings around the so-called “Bantu” and can easily move away from them. The “slavery” the article cites is not at all a uniform phenomenon but one based on Pygmy sufferance, when the Pygmies leave the forest to go into villages and settlements. The Pygmies join themselves to the Bantu and perform labor services to get various material goods but this is their call and their choice. Even your article notes:

“The ties between the two groups are complex and vary from family to family, village to village. Some Pygmies live exclusively in the forest, rarely visiting Bantu villages.”

And when they attach themselves it is on Bantu territory in villages, not the Pygmy forest strongholds- as the article points out -quote from article: ” are responsible for much of the hunting, fishing and manual labor in jungle villages like Enyellé.”

Furthermore the article shows the Pygmies are engaging Bantu society on their own terms. All are not rushing wholesale to serve the Bantu. They are miking their own choices, as they see fit.

Quote: “But many activists acknowledge that their task is formidable. For one, no one is quite sure what the Pygmies themselves want. Pygmies are an egalitarian people, who organize in small groups without anointing a clear leader. Although interviews with Pygmies show that nearly all want their situation to improve, some voiced reluctance at giving up their old ways – of trading a semi-nomadic jungle lifestyle, for example, for organized work or schooling.

And your own cited story shows Pygmies attacking Bantu: “Recent report Pygmy attacks on Bantu rivals in DR Congo leave 27 dead: UN”

So the picture you paint of long lines of dreary, hapless, helpless Pygmy “slaves” does not reflect actual reality of the situation, and that is proved by your own “supporting” references, which contradict what you are claiming.

.
But it follows that if whites are helpless to keep a slow but sure occupation of their land by non whites , it’s for some reason other than lack of destructive technology (London, which has far more people than Scotland is now half non-European).

^^All quite dubious. White people are not “helpless” against so-called “occupation of their lands.” Just as an example, West African refugee numbers to Europe in recent years matter of fact have been GOING DOWN overall, as UN data shows. Mos of the recent refugee migrants going to Europe are “Caucasoids” from the Middle East.

The main reason white numbers are shrinking is the fault of whites themselves: from their high rates of abortion (white Russia for example kills 2 white babies for each live white birth), to white women deferring marriage and childbearing into later years of less fertility, to high white divorce rates that lessen stability (almost 50 percent of recent white marriages in the US end in divorce), to the embrace of pattens and policies such as “gay” marriage that undermine the traditional family. All these are self-inflicted problems brought upon themselves by white people. Trying to shift the blame to “the culluds” can’t hide the blunt reality of white failures, and simply won’t work. People can easily see through that BS.

I never got “inclusive fitness.” It leads inevitably to too many obvious absurdities. Who in the world really believes, for instance, that siblings sacrifice as much and as often for eachother as parents do for children? The world is full of bad parents and every so often you get a Party of Five situation, but is there anything commoner in human experience than brothers and sisters competing for parents’ love or parents giving things up for their children? Anyone who’s ever been in a family with more than one child knows this. The fact that we share as many genes with our siblings as with our parents/children is irrelevant.

Likewise, I’ve never understood sociobiology’s explanation of homosexuality. The argument that it helps their familymembers’ fitness is especially weak, but let’s take that for granted. What about all the other ways not to have offspring? Why doesn’t natural selection promote suicide and self-castration? (Or does it?) (No.)

How can someone as brilliant as a W.D. Hamilton waste time calculating degrees of consanguinity and miss the inclusive insanity slapping him in the face?

Professor Trivers’ demolition of Stephen Jay Gould is impressive and appreciated. But he himself makes a grave error on a separate topic.

“Linguistic analysis in 2010 suggested that the architects of the U.S. 2003 war on Iraq were speaking deceptively when they warned that Saddam Hussein caused 9/11 and Iraq possessed WMDs.”

Professer Trivers seems to be very confused here. None of the “architects of the U.S. 2003 war on Iraq war… warned that Saddam Hussein caused 9/11 …”

They stated that Saddam supported terrorism (he did), was hostile to the U.S. (he was), had possessed chemical and biological weapons (he had), and had sought to produce nuclear weapons (he had). They also stated Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons, something in which most of the world’s intelligence agencies concurred, and which most Iraqi army generals believed (Saddam apparently lied to them).

But no one in the Bush administration ever asserted that “Saddam Hussein caused 9/11”.

There were reports which suggested (but did not prove) contacts between Iraqi intelligence and the 9/11 terrorists. Some pro-war partisans cited these reports, but not anyone in the Bush administration.

For Trivers to throw out such a claim in passing is drive-by libel.

The main point I was making here was correcting a misconception about what Lewis et al actually showed, a misconception that was repeated by Trivers as part of his story about Gould. So, naturally, I was focused on that misconception. What Trivers’ claims Lewis et al’s remeasurements show, those remeasurements do not, and cannot, show.

I remind you that if everyone agreed that after Morton switched to shot, his measurements of the skulls were accurate, then an entire third of Lewis et al’s paper was completely pointless and the thing they are mostly famous for — remeasuring a bunch of skulls — was an utter waste of time.

Further, I would argue (and, in the above cited co-authored paper, did argue), that Lewis et al’s interpretation of how Morton is understood in the literature is badly misguided; Gould did not accuse Morton of conscious manipulation, and in fact stressed that Morton was a careful, honest researcher trying to get the right answer, and *not* trying to manipulate his data (but see Jake Michael’s post, above, on whether Gould ought to argued that!). (An aside of sorts: Another “grievance” I have against Lewis et al and their paper is that, for example, they make claims about how Morton is understood in the literature, and provide several references, none of which, when one goes and reads them, actually support the claims they are making. So Lewis et al are either terrible readers (unlikely), or didn’t care that the claims they were making were unsupported by the references they were using to support those claims. As a reader, I find that intellectually dishonest, or unforgivably sloppy. Again, see our argument in http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615000035 )

As for Gould’s mistakes — yup, he made a number of them (not surprising, I think — you’ll get no robust defense of Gould from me!). But Jonathan Weisberg, in a paper also cited above, argues (compelling, I think), that Lewis et al’s defense of Morton’s analysis of his data fails in a number of key areas (again, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ede.12077/abstract), and that Gould’s criticisms land rather more often than Lewis et al’s analysis would suggest. I would stress that this doesn’t make Gould “right” — my co-authors and I argued that Gould was at best foolish to attempt to reanalyze Morton’s data, and suggest that it was because he was able to get an answer that he liked that he was unable or unwilling to see that there could be no “correct” summary of the data, and that many of the assumptions he was making and methodologies he was deploying were no better justified than Morton’s.

But had Lewis et al written an honest paper, one that fairly criticized the mistakes Gould actually made, and distorted neither Gould’s claims, nor the place of Gould’s analysis in the literature, their paper wouldn’t have gotten written up in the NYT. We shouldn’t reward people for being dishonest or sloppy. That goes for Gould, and it goes for Gould’s critics, too.

What other types of intelligence do you refer? Magik? Sourcery?… Bow and Arrow skills?

What does death or retirement have to do with it? Aside from the “don’t speak ill of the dead” taboo, which apart from when the news first breaks and at their funeral I consider irrelevant. If you want your copy to be visible you write about the famous, not necessarily the dead.

In what way do non-Western races possess a superior ‘social intelligence’ or whatever alternative measure you claim they excel in? And what good is it for them? What tangible benefits does it offer to their civilizations that are unseen in Western countries?

>no meaning there… Obscurantist thought…
“…A sufficient explanation of why two things are different may leave out everything needed to explain their nature.”

This is perfectly meaningful, understandable, and true.

The presence of a single gene on the Y chromosome can make the difference whether an embryo becomes anatomically male instead of female. But that gene is just a switch, setting the embryo along one incredibly complex developmental pathway instead of another one, and barely tells you anything about how those pathways work and why maleness and femaleness are the end results.

[…] Robert Trivers writes, […]

[…] The Unz Review: Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small […]

Feel free to stop driving cars, flying in planes, and using computers, the internet, or refrigeration if the “worldwide contagion” of The Evil White Man® is such a problem for you.

I hear the real estate is super cheap in the Congo, but I don’t suppose you’ll be moving there anytime soon, lol.

[…] Vignettes from Trivers. Genius-autism linkage. Neanderthal legacy. […]

I am John Michael who measured the Morton skulls back in 1986. If you care to see my take on Morton and Gould, its at my web site. Over the last 4 years I have read much of Morton’s work and those of his associates. I have two comments on the article:

1) Prof. Travers notes that, “Morton was a scientist in the early 19 th Century who devoted himself to measuring the human cranium, especially the volume of the inside, a rough estimate of the size of the enclosed brain. He did so meticulously by pouring first seeds and then ball bearings into skulls until they were full and then pouring them out and measuring their volume in a graduated cylinder. He was a pure empiricist.”

Actually, much of the above quote is simply Gould’s interpretation. Morton’s work was quite sloppy, and not meticulous. His samples were arbitrary defined and his math errors were rampant (even worse than my spelling!). And Morton was far from being a “pure empiricist.” Gould claimed Morton was celebrated as an objectivist, but the word “objectivity” had a different meaning back then and nobody in Morton’s era ever called him that. And in the 1830s and 1840s, the word “empiricist” was an insult akin to “quack.” If you don’t believe me, just check Gould’s papers and look for citations supporting his “objectivity” and “empiricism” claims. There are none.

Gould exaggerated Morton’s significance. In fact, Darwin wrote Lyell a letter warning that Morton’s work was not to be trusted. Morton was a great museum administrator with a huge ego and a great PR team. But, he was no better or more objective (by today’s definition) than any of his peers. Morton was just another run of the mill scholar, and an overtly racist jackass who believed in arrested development.

2) I agree that it was Gould’s drive for celebrity that was his undoing. But, I think people read too much into his politics. If he was so dedicated to Marxism, why did he so embrace the publishing industry, which is all about capitalism?

Gould had a disabled son, which is a stress, and then he got cancer, but he refused to slow down. I think the guy just pushed himself too hard, spread himself to thin, and especially later in life, did quick, poorly researched papers. As he got older and more famous, no one would question him. I doubt he got any meaningful peer review of his Morton work. Like Elvis Presley, fame ripped Gould apart. I now see Gould as a kind of tragic figure. And remember, all those star-struck people at Harvard and Science Magazine, deserve some of the blame as well. It wasn’t JUST Gould’s fault. The people who benefited from (and still benefit from) the “Gould Brand” need to do a little soul searching.

[…] http://www.unz.com/article/vignettes-of-famous-evolutionary-biologists-large-and-small/ Not one of these biologists was able to see the problem with darwninism… […]

I don’t think your classroom analogy holds up.

If you as a teacher are bothered by the inconsistency of the results you get from your “impressions” about your students’ ability, and you’re bothered by these inconsistencies enough to subsequently fire your Teaching Assistants (as Morton did his lab assistants) and use a multiple-choice test to see whether that method is more consistent – and indeed it’s not only more consistent, but shows you previously slighted your female students’ abilities – then I would say you’re not an example to be used in a book about the “mismeasure of man.” Your desire for good pedagogy was stronger than any bias you held against your women students.

And if I were more than a century later to highlight you in a book about how gender bias affected teaching to women, how honest a presentation is that? Shouldn’t you be an example of how good teachers can correct their own biases, as long as their commitment to teaching is stronger than any other view they hold? So why isn’t Morton an example of how even a racist man living in what was a racist society can still correct his own perceptions of the scale of racial differences simply because his commitment to good science was stronger than any other view he held?

Your particular grievance against Lewis et al also seems overwrought. They make a case against Gould’s view of Morton. One can miss some very important details and still have a thesis that makes a solid contribution to a topic. You say, for example, that Gould got a lot wrong. Well, had you highlighted those errors before Lewis et al came along to prompt you to look at them?

[…] Trivers’ personal recollections of famous evolutionary biologists. (ht Marginal Revolution) Very personal and frank–Robert Trivers always tells you exactly […]

However, occasionally small populations bud off and become reproductively isolated. This is speciation. Change is very rapid during this process of budding-off-and-isolation, slow otherwise. A new species that buds off sometimes replaces the old over all or part its range.

I don’t know that the small population can properly be called a species while the original population is still extant. Tooby says in Gould’s world there is nothing to say these are not races of the same species that compete (though no one is particularly keen on that terminology nowadays). Once the successful subpopulation has won the competition it will have become a species by definition, because the loser is no longer around. This is not clearly incompatible with “A widespread species evolves over the course of time until it is radically different from what it was”. You have to wonder if Gould was so political because he understood the implications.

The main complaint against Gould among his academic peers seemed to be that he recast established theory in mystifying terms, and thereby presenting himself as having innovative ideas.

The second scenario is the one that Eldredge and Gould claim is supported by the fossil record.

That second scenario is standard modern Darwinism according to Mayr. But as I understand it Trivers didn’t focus on species at all, he looked at the single gene in isolation. Biologists look at species or one gene but never the individual members of a species. And then they wonder why they are called reductionist

[…] Robert Trivers on his friends and enemies. HT: Razib […]

In effect, he was arguing that many human or animal traits were produced by essentially random processes (random relative to any phenotypic advantage).

Sounds like the opposite of the constant improvement of orthogenesis. I don’t know about the random process, but Gould was deliberately opaque, and his big ideas were often just cover for disguised points he was making. That is my reading of him anyway.

I sort of agree with you Ronald. Bear with me, in addition to having young females suffering ruptured internal organs from rapist Bantu overlords who run about waving the victim’s underwear and laughing. The Pygmies are being eaten; did Christians introduce cannibalism to Africa too?

Recent report Pygmy attacks on Bantu rivals in DR Congo leave 27 dead: UN. Don’t the Pygmies realise that everything will be OK if they just accept an influx of black Africans ? Christian missionaries must be behind this, they have obviously have been supplying the Pygmies with the video game ‘Ethnic Cleansing’, leading the little folk to erroneously believe “Your skin is your uniform in this battle for the survival of your kind”.

Ronald, you are correct that white inventions and no other peoples’ have the potential to destroy the global environment. But it follows that if whites are helpless to keep a slow but sure occupation of their land by non whites , it’s for some reason other than lack of destructive technology (London, which has far more people than Scotland is now half non-European). Rather obviously the genetic adaptations of Europeans make them more or less unable to protect themselves from genetic ellipse unless it comes as an actual rape and murder invasion (even the Pygmies have worked out what to do in that scenario).

Two scenarios (not the only two possible):

1) A widespread species evolves over the course of time until it is radically different from what it was. It never splits into multiple species, or if it does, the rate of change during splitting is not significantly more rapid than change within a single lineage when it’s not splitting. The rate of change may be fast or slow, but it’s not closely tied to new species budding off from old.

2) A widespread species changes very little over the course of its existence, from the time it first splits off from another species to the time it goes extinct. However, occasionally small populations bud off and become reproductively isolated. This is speciation. Change is very rapid during this process of budding-off-and-isolation, slow otherwise. A new species that buds off sometimes replaces the old over all or part its range. Evolutionary change results from rapid evolution during speciation and species replacement.

The second scenario is the one that Eldredge and Gould claim is supported by the fossil record. Some paleontologists agree. Others disagree. This is not a fight in which I have a dog, except to note that the theory is not trivial or tautological.

The reason I care about this is that Lewis et al remeasurements are often interpreted, as they were by Trivers, as showing, via their remeasurements, that Gould was wrong about there having been bias in Morton’s original measurements of the skulls. For this to be true, the remeasurements would have to show that Morton’s original seed-based measurements were not racially biased. But the remeasurements do not do that, and cannot do that. Given that, the remeasurements were, at best, a stupid stunt — completely irrelevant to the argument in Lewis et al. At worst, it was meant to be misunderstood and was grossly intellectually dishonest. But either way, it was that stupid, completely irrelevant stunt that got them attention.

I don’t like people getting credit for stupid, irrelevant stunts that border on the intellectually dishonest, especially when the point of their paper was to attack someone else for not being as careful and intellectually rigorous as they should have been.

As for what is suspicious, again, I reiterate that Gould’s argument was that the *difference* in what happened to the averages in the different races was problematic, and I reiterate that the explanation for that difference is *not* chance (the larger variance of the seed-based measurements and smaller sample size).

The argument, again, is as follows: – Gould noted that Morton recognized that the initial measuring system he used (using seeds rather than lead shot, and making use an assistant to do some of the measuring) was unreliable, changed it, and remeasured the skulls he’d originally measured badly (doing all the measurements himself, with lead shot). So Gould credits Morton with recognizing that he had a problem, and finding a way to fix the problem, and then redoing his measurements with the new, no longer problematic, system. But when Morton remeasured the skulls, something odd happened: the skulls Morton associated with “African” and “African-American” populations increased in size much more than the skulls Morton associated with “Caucasian” populations. Gould speculated that the earlier method, using seeds, permitted Morton’s unconscious bias against Blacks to influence his measurements. When Morton switched to a more reliable method, Gould hypothesized, his bias was no longer able to influence the results; the room for an unconscious bias to skew the results was eliminated by the new system. The difference between the measurements when a less-reliable system and a more-reliable system were used was what suggested, to Gould, that bias might be at play, and was what was responsible for skewing the results when the less reliable system was used. Gould speculation, quoted above, about how this bias might work in practice, emerges from this line of reasoning. (Now, Gould might have been wrong — bias might *not* be the correct explanation. Other explanations are possible. But whatever the explanation is, it isn’t just that the original measurements were unreliable in a way that was random with respect to race.)

An analogy might be helpful. If I initially grade students in my class based on my “overall impression” of their ability, and then switch to using a multiple choice test, and one finds that the scores of women in my class suddenly improve markedly compared to the men with the introduction of the new testing method, one might, justifiably, think that my initial grading method (“overall impression”) was biased against women. (Of course, one might also think that bias had nothing to do with it, and some other explanation was the right one.) But — and this is the key! — the way to test the hypothesis that bias might have been at play in my earlier measurements isn’t to regrade the multiple choice tests! If you do that, and find that I generally scored the multiple choice tests accurately, and that my grading of the multiple-choice tests wasn’t biased against women, this provides no evidence whatsoever that my initial “overall impression” based system was similarly fair! And yet that is precisely the argument that Lewis et al spend almost a third of their paper developing, and precisely the results that were reported as proving that Gould was wrong. That’s just stupid.

I think it is obvious that this is a serious problem with Lewis et al’s papers, and the way that their paper has been interpreted. Does it matter much in the grand scheme of things? No, probably not. Gould made a lot of mistakes in his interpretation of Morton (and so, for that matter, did Lewis et al). Had Lewis et al focused only on the mistakes Gould actually made, their paper would not have been as popular, but it would have been more honest, and better for it.

Gould espoused standard modern Darwinisn. Gould’s evolutionary theory was always scientific mainstream although his meaning was not clear because he liked to make his actual main point (which concerned other matters) subtly and unnoticed. If you are against Gould on evolution you are peddling orthogenesis, the convenient mathematics of assuming a single gene is being acted on by natural selection or other eccentric thinking.

“In general, I enjoyed your essay. I think it would have been better without the mean-spirited personal comments about fame-mongering and self importance sprinkled throughout. I honestly don’t know what motivates the living to write about the dead or otherwise retired like that – except the desire for highly-visible copy.”

Whatever motivates a person to speak his mind about another person’s behavior and apparent value system, I am glad that some, like Trivers, are willing to do so. Such forthrightness is the only way that information, the validity of which will of course be evaluated, can get to a public that is by definition not part of a particular professional or political in-group. Motivation matters in all human endeavors, including science as Gould often maintained. Secondly, except for the fact that Trivers is not dead, your ascribing of motivation to him is no different than his ascribing motivation to Gould and Lewontin.

[…] and think in single notes, he thought in chords.” — Robert Trivers on W.D. Hamilton, Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small, Unz Review, […]

All great minds have their unique style and Bill Hamilton was no different. While Huey Newton would blast you against the far wall with the force of his argument, you had to lean in to hear what Bill was saying, so soft was he spoken.

By what definition can one consider Huey Newton a great mind?

Started out a pimp, died a crackhead. A perfect emblem of the age. Watch this, for laughs. WF Buckley and Huey Newton.

What does “5% smarter” mean?

Not much.I was using it to indicate the absurdity of thinking that someone with 5% more brain volume would be 5% more intelligent.In other words, it was a teeny-tiny joke.

We don’ have any absolute scale for intelligence (except perhaps the very crude memorized digit string test). For all we know a person with an IQ of 130 might be a 100 times smarter than one with an IQ of 100.

Our metrics are approximate in character.For example, a three SD gap (a 100 IQ vs a 145 IQ) is more consequential than a one SD gap (a 100 IQ vs 115).

James Thompson describes the ramifications of IQ here:

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-7-tribes-of-intellect.html

The main thing, of course, is that my initial point stands regarding brain volume and IQ.The two are related, and there is no reason to think that this relationship does not exist when studies are extended to inter-group variations in IQ

… assume that he is 5% smarter

What does “5% smarter” mean? We don’ have any absolute scale for intelligence (except perhaps the very crude memorized digit string test). For all we know a person with an IQ of 130 might be a 100 times smarter than one with an IQ of 100.

Kaplan,

So, what’s up with the quoted passage? Well, if you’d bothered to actually read Gould, you’d realize that what Gould noticed was that when Morton switched from measuring with seed to using shot, the average measurements for the different races changed different amounts, in a way that seemed to imply that the previous measurements (that Morton himself figured out were inaccurate), were biased by race.

Since you, Gould, and everyone else seems to agree that Morton was not satisfied with the measurements obtained by seed, what’s suspicious about it? Morton didn’t like the inconsistency of his measurements using seed and so he changed to BBs. And he didn’t need your input about his racial bias to make that change.

You, Gould, and everyone else also seem to agree that the BB method of measuring the skulls was accurate, so what’s this garbage about you using statistics to prove Morton was racially biased?

Either Morton was ultimately accurate in his experiments or he wasn’t. Focusing on the seed/BB measurements is a diversion from that critical point, since Morton himself was dissatisfied with the inconsistency of his original measurements using seed.

Big-brained White people have spread that filthy habit around the world (for a very long time.)

Dear fellow, rape has been around for a very long time.Indeed, animals have been known to do it…

So you actually have no valid measurement of intelligence specific to the origins of all those ‘little brained’ people you are so proud to lord it over.

Sure we do, dear fellow.IQ.Having a high one is useful every where, even in the jungle….

not to mention the destruction of entire societies with colonialism,

Dear fellow, non-White cultures have done plenty of destroying in their time.Try looking up Genghis Khan and Shaka….

all the morons who ducked the fact they’re ‘big brained White people’ who’ve set a chain of events in motion destroying the larger planetary habitat with run amok technology,

MMMM, you might want to look into the burgeoning Malthusian crisis in Africa…..

http://www.unz.com/isteve/why-africas-fertility-rate-threatens-the-globe/

*****
There is an additional contrast between Morton and Gould worth noting. To conjure up Morton’s mistakes, Gould lovingly describes the action of unconscious bias at work: “Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.” Indeed it is, but careful re-measures show that Morton never made this particular mistake—only three skulls were mis-measured as being larger than they were and these were all either Amerindian or African.
*****

Please repeat after me: Gould never claimed that Morton’s shot-based measurements (which is what Lewis et al compared their remeasurements to) were inaccurate. Never. Not at all. Gould in fact claimed, repeatedly, that after Morton switched from seeds to lead shot, and did all the measurements himself (rather than letting his assistant do some of them) that his measurements were accurate and reliable. Gould just flat out wrote that, OK? Flat out wrote in Mismeasure that after Morton switched to lead shot, and switched to making all the measurements himself, that Morton “achieved consistent results that never varied by more than a single inch for the same skull” (Gould, 1981 53).

So, what’s up with the quoted passage? Well, if you’d bothered to actually read Gould, you’d realize that what Gould noticed was that when Morton switched from measuring with seed to using shot, the average measurements for the different races changed different amounts, in a way that seemed to imply that the previous measurements (that Morton himself figured out were inaccurate), were biased by race.

As Jonathan Weisberg noted as well, the difference in the change is indeed suspicious (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ede.12077/abstract). Lewis et al claim it may just be random, but that’s a lousy hypothesis (my colleagues and I tested it statistically, and it is massively improbable — impossible, really — http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615000035 ).

Now, as it turns out, the hypothesis that seed is inherently easier to mismeasure than shot is problematic, too — so Gould’s preferred hypothesis isn’t that great, either (Jake Michael has done some great preliminary work on this). But something was wrong with Morton’s initial seed-based measurements, and that thing wasn’t random with respect to race.

Gould got some stuff very wrong re: Morton’s work. But the remeasurement of the skulls was a total waste of time, and completely irrelevant to Gould’s arguments.

I make simulations to find optimal solutions to some business problems. There is an element of heritability in them and “punctuated equilibrium” defiantly characterizes how the solutions improve. A model will flop around awhile finding slightly better solutions, and then some solution will arise that lends itself to rapid evolutionary improvement. In a brief period the solutions will improve by multiples. I’ve seen this over and over. I wonder if the idea wasn’t suggested to Gould by computer simulations. In simulations like this, another idea of Gould’s is suggested, the randomness of that first solution that leads to the others, the shear contingency of evolution, though I think, like all he said, he made too big a deal of this.

“Punctuated equilibrium” isn’t as trivial as Trivers makes it sound. It’s not just the idea that evolutionary rates vary. More specifically, it’s the idea that species usually change relatively little during the course of their existence, and that most evolutionary change happens during speciation, when small populations bud off from large ones, and become reproductively isolated. So a punk eeker would predict that rapid evolution early in bat history was a matter of lots of new, highly diverged species being generated, while evolutionary change within species would still be limited.

How has your comment added anything to, or changed anything about, Trivers’ explanation?

What you say in the part I highlighted in bold is also unclear. Punctuated equilibriumists can predict when rapid evolution takes place by looking at … when lot of highly diverged species begin to be generated?

That’s doesn’t seem to be a prediction, but a tautology.

@ all the morons who ducked the fact they’re ‘big brained White people’ who’ve set a chain of events in motion destroying the larger planetary habitat with run amok technology, not to mention the destruction of entire societies with colonialism, here’s my virtual middle finger .!.

Ronald, stick that finger up your nose and then put your head in a book, because your ignorance knows no bounds.

Environments have been recreated by man since Homo sapiens and his Homo predecessors first began expanding around the planet. It’s nothing new. It certainly wasn’t invented by white men. It didn’t even require much in the way of technology.

And today? Just the growth in China’s carbon emissions over the next few years alone will equal the U.S.’s entire output:

China’s greenhouse gas emissions are twice those of the United States and growing at 8 percent to 10 percent per year. Last year, China increased its coal-fired generating capacity by 50 gigawatts, enough to power a city that uses seven times the energy of New York City. By 2020, an analysis by Berkeley Earth shows, China will emit greenhouse gases at four times the rate of the United States, and even if American emissions were to suddenly disappear tomorrow, world emissions would be back at the same level within four years as a result of China’s growth alone.

Take a trip outside the United States or Europe and you’ll find no shortage of non-white people destroying their environment. Now you can use your computer, the internet, electricity, and all the other modern inventions to blame this condition on white men, but I don’t see you out there living the pygmy lifestyle, you clown.

ps, sweet dreams, it’s past my bedtime (central europe time) Ron out.

@ all the morons who ducked the fact they’re ‘big brained White people’ who’ve set a chain of events in motion destroying the larger planetary habitat with run amok technology, not to mention the destruction of entire societies with colonialism, here’s my virtual middle finger .!.

Meanwhile you’re all missing a critical component of intelligence measure. To assess the intelligence of a Black (or Red or Yellow or Brown), you have to conform them to your own big–brained White people social structure. This, by definition, means you are measuring them out of context to their original culture and this small but critical fact determines your measurement is invalid in relation to the social intelligence or culture they had been extracted from. So you actually have no valid measurement of intelligence specific to the origins of all those ‘little brained’ people you are so proud to lord it over.

@ Sean, what do you suppose the rapes you refer to might have to do with Christians?

http://ronaldthomaswest.com/2015/04/22/junipero-serra/

^ Big-brained White people have spread that filthy habit around the world (for a very long time.)

“Punctuated equilibrium” isn’t as trivial as Trivers makes it sound. It’s not just the idea that evolutionary rates vary. More specifically, it’s the idea that species usually change relatively little during the course of their existence, and that most evolutionary change happens during speciation, when small populations bud off from large ones, and become reproductively isolated. So a punk eeker would predict that rapid evolution early in bat history was a matter of lots of new, highly diverged species being generated, while evolutionary change within species would still be limited.

This might or might not be true — you can find people who know their stuff arguing on either side — but there is some substance to the debate. Anyway, even if punk eek is true, it still leaves you some big “Why” questions.

I couldn’t pass this one up .. put the average Dutchman in the average Pygmy’s habitat and see how far the Dutchman’s bigger brain (and by implication, his higher intelligence) will see him live attempting to find his way to Nairobi.

For a proper test, dear fellow, we would have to take a baby pygmy and a baby Dutchman and switch them at birth….

That’s why I insist there is a concept of social intelligence

I’m afraid that you are talking about social philosophy, dear fellow, and not some unknown variety of IQ

Unless, of course, you are simply saying that pygmy’s are too unintelligent to figure out ways to modify their environment….

Pygmies practice a form of spirit worship that focuses on achieving harmony with the forest in which they live. How is that working out for them? Pygmies live as slaves of the Bantu and have no rights.

The three complainants were pygmies, small people who have since time immemorial lived at the heart of central African forests. The rapes took place last June. “One of them is head of his village. He claims to have been raped by several men in front of his wife and children. His entire family was also attacked and made to suffer the same torture,” added the lawyer

Horrific rapes of Pygmy infants

Tooby:“In Gould’s view, most evolutionary change takes place when closely related biological lineages compete, with one surviving and spreading through the others’ ranges while the others go extinct…there is not much difference between a incipient species and a ‘race’ and in Gould’s world of sudden genetic revolutions there is not necessarily any difference at all”

West,

Your point doesn’t make any sense. The pygmies in central Africa are one of a small, marginal group of peoples who are slowly disappearing. So their “habitat” is shrinking, and has been shrinking for quite some time, precisely because they’re not as well adapted to it as you believe – at least in comparison to other neighboring peoples who are moving into, and taking over, what was previously pygmy habitat.

Forget the Dutch. What about the Bantu tribes? Pygmies relied on isolation to evolve and thrive. When that isolation was removed, they were enslaved, bred out, or so marginalized that they now rely on the good will of people like the Dutch to save them. In effect, they’ve become like so many black rhinos herded to, or encouraged to stay on, some refuge to keep outsiders from exploiting them to the point of genocide.

So what’s with this nonsense about how well suited they are to their environment? If the Dutch were so inclined, they could start building condos on pygmy territory tomorrow – and enjoy a comfortable life there. Can the pygmies say the same about Holland?

That’s why I insist there is a concept of social intelligence that doesn’t correlate with bigger brains having higher intelligence. If the bigger brains are higher IQ, why are they behind trashing the habitat necessary to everyone’s survival?

Blither blather. Do you know what habitat is necessary for survival? Of course not. You’re exhibiting your own stupid environmentalist bias as if its reality. But anyone can see by measuring the hard demographics that evolution doesn’t give a shit about your preconceived views of what’s good for the environment.

Thank you, Professor Trivers.

Here’s my own little comment on Gould:

http://cancerselection.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axillae-of-san-stefano.html

for example, the gulf between the average pygmy and the average Dutchman

I couldn’t pass this one up .. put the average Dutchman in the average Pygmy’s habitat and see how far the Dutchman’s bigger brain (and by implication, his higher intelligence) will see him live attempting to find his way to Nairobi.

http://ronaldthomaswest.com/2013/05/15/youve-got-apes/

Western scientists measure by a yardstick that is culturally biased to Western Science. It follows, other people’s genetics can be predisposed to an intelligence the European cultures do not know how to measure. There actually is another way to see these things but it’s almost impossible from within a cultural context to see exterior to that cultural context. European based culture is no exception. It’s called ethnocentric bias and it is a severe cultural bias.

That’s why I insist there is a concept of social intelligence that doesn’t correlate with bigger brains having higher intelligence. If the bigger brains are higher IQ, why are they behind trashing the habitat necessary to everyone’s survival? Just how smart has the industrial revolution been by comparison to societies exterior to European culture’s technical innovations? If trashing the planet with the industrial revolution’s technology can be construed to bear out a lack of intelligence, then ‘Houston has a problem.’ Deal with it.

Someone knows who is the “truly excellent Colombian biologist”?

Perhaps so, but even if brain size and intelligence are correlated within groups,

Just to be clear, the correlation is not one to one.Hence, you can’t point to a guy whose brain volume is 5% greater than yours and assume that he is 5% smarter:

Abstract

The relationship between brain volume and intelligence has been a topic of a scientific debate since at least the 1830s. To address the debate, a meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence was conducted. Based on 37 samples across 1530 people, the population correlation was estimated at 0.33. The correlation is higher for females than males. It is also higher for adults than children. For all age and sex groups, it is clear that brain volume is positively correlated with intelligence.

The mean correlation for females appears to be .40. It’s .41 for female adults. The other numbers are .38 for male adults, .37 for female children and .22 for male children.

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/brain-size-and-intelligence/

that would not imply that between-group differences in brain-size necessarily imply a between-group difference in intelligence.

I don’t see why not.Granted, one would have to be quite careful about differences in body size distorting results (cf, for example, the gulf between the average pygmy and the average Dutchman), but scientists are used to making those kinds of allowances (cf, for example, how they factor in sexual dimorphism when measuring differences in brain volume between men and women)

Not all that sure, but you are probably right. The interesting thing about Gould is that he knew the truth about the part played by genetically distinct sub populations such as sub populations isolated from one another by geographical barriers (or races if you prefer that term), but he didn’t think the stupid masses could be trusted with it.

Gould trumpeted old hat in new language, but his real point was epistemological or moral, and concealed as an apparently trivial byway to what ostensibly was his main argument. Gould was the Leo Strauss of evolutionary theory!

Some of the following people are well worth remembering for their great achievements, and the way they did them; others are not. But all were well known in their time and exercised undue influence. I have already described the parallel cases of Ernst Mayr and Huey Newton,

Regarding the description elsewhere of Mayr and Newton, was that in a publication or a similar internet write-up to this one? Anybody have a link

Dr. Trivers:

In general, I enjoyed your essay. I think it would have been better without the mean-spirited personal comments about fame-mongering and self importance sprinkled throughout. I honestly don’t know what motivates the living to write about the dead or otherwise retired like that – except the desire for highly-visible copy.

On your point about Iraq war linguistic analysis: I was working in this field, pretty much at ground zero at the time that the Bush I administration started practicing escallatio on the US intelligence and security communities over Iraq WMD. Despite the many backward-glancing memoirs and analyses of the time that have concluded otherwise, there was a very deliberate attempt to manipulate the intelligence process.

Perhaps so, but even if brain size and intelligence are correlated within groups, that would not imply that between-group differences in brain-size necessarily imply a between-group difference in intelligence.

It may be that the optic component of the nervous system contributes heavily to intellect. Birds and animals that move quickly through the trees like primates must have high optic perception. Dolphins and bats substitute sonics for optics and that might have intellect potential. Squirrels, on the other hand, as far as I have observed, seem less mentally quick.

[…] of Stephen Jay Gould here (a reluctant Darwinian, so Trivers doesn’t like […]

[…] readers sent me a link to a piece by Bob Trivers called “Vignettes of famous evolutionary biologists, large and small” (Trivers is of course also a famous evolutionary biologist.) His essay is at the Unz Review, […]

[…] readers sent me a link to a piece by Bob Trivers  called “Vignettes of famous evolutionary biologists, large and small” (Trivers is of course also a famous evolutionary biologist.) His essay is at the Unz […]

Across species I think brain-body size is a pretty good indicator of intelligence. Within species the correlation breaks down, as you mention. For example, for human midgets or breeds of very small dogs you would get ridiculous results using this rule.

The reason the rule works in general though is that most of the brain is used for “low-level” sensory and motor processing, which scales with body size. Extra brain tissue beyond this is presumably used for higher cognitive functioning.

Another factor to consider is the type of sensory processing. One factor contributing to the extra brain size in primates is their excellent visual processing, which involves up to 50% of neocortex, without any concomitant enlargement in body size, except for large eyes.

If one were to accept the simple relationship of brain to body size as a significant indicator of intellect it would seem that those humans with a very short stature and a normal head size (and that does happen reasonably frequently) would all have huge intellects. I doubt that and suspect that intelligence is based on rather sophisticated central nerve structures rather than bulk alone although it is probably likely nervous system size does make some sort of contribution. On that basis some rather small creatures may have unsuspected intelligences that have yet to be validated.

[…] Robert Trivers writes about Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist he quickly learned was strongly inclined towards intellectual fraudulence and faux scientific fakery:Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally […]

[…] la medicina darwiniana Todos los compuestos – y eso incluye el arsénico – son beneficiosos si se administra […]

Crows and chimps both have similar brain-body size ratios.

The only citations I can find of the petition you mentioned are the dozens of comments you have made repeating the same claim over the past few years. Is there a source for this? And what is this big idea that was falsified?

The article at
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1209_041209_crows_apes.html
indicates that crows have comparable intelligence to chimpanzees. I cannot say what this indicates about brain size and intellect but it must indicate something.

Don’t worry, I had to read over it a few times.

As far as I can see, the sentence is saying that it doesn’t matter if a rabbit has 100 children a week, or 3 children a year – the same traits will be inherited. The only notable difference is the number of rabbits expressing those traits.

Correct me if I’m wrong. As I said, I did struggle with the sentence too!

(Hadn’t realise that there was already a response! Think I am wrong.)

Careful. Next he’s going to be calling us “ice people”.

“The arguments they made in favour of leftist, marxist dogma … asserting that everyone is the same and there are no such thing as sex differences or race differences, in things like behavior and intelligence.”

Let me guess: Kothiru, no leftist marxist he, belongs to the race with (he believes) the highest intelligence.

We’re referring to a Newton of a different Hue.

I took sent chapters of my thesis out to famous thinkers (15 years ago).

Dawkin’s sent back a snooty and sarcrastic, but valuable and intellectually serious reply.

Dennett sent back a brief critical comment than was also valuable.

Williams sent me a warm and encouraging letter telling me that “he wished he’d thought of that”…and that he should have used the ideas more in his own work. I was floored.

Such great and humble man, and still an inspiration to me.

Ahhh…Sapolsky.

Years ago Robert Sloviter did great work on the effects of adrenalectomany on cell death in the brain, that falsified Sapolsky’s main ideas.

Sapolksy organised a petition to try and block the publication of Sloviter’s results.

…and then went on to write various popular works the pushed his falsified “big idea” hard.

Draw your own conclusions.

[…] a link to a great article by Robert Trivers posted at the Unz Review website entitled, Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small.  Included is a vignette of none other than Richard Lewontin.  As it happens, Prof. Trivers was […]

Wonderful stuff! I wish Prof. Trivers would drop everything else he’s doing and write an autobiography. Lewontin is an interesting case. Based on his recent phone interview with group selectionist David Sloan Wilson, he seems to have pulled in his horns a bit lately. When Wilson tries to draw him out on his objections to sociobiology, he just replies that it’s “too loose” for him. Take a look at “Not In Our Genes,” a Blank Slate classic he authored with Rose and Kamin back in 1984, and you’ll see his objections really amount to a lot more than that. It was basically a political tract in which he claimed that everyone who suggested that there was such a thing as human nature was an evil hireling of the bourgeoisie who was trying to stave off the glorious socialist revolution by supplying ideological props for the status quo. He named names. The evil hirelings of the bourgeoisie included Prof. Trivers, W. D. Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, and Konrad Lorenz, with Robert Ardrey thrown in for good measure. Among the many interesting quotes in the book (p. 52 of my paperback copy):

“The systematic distortion of the evidence by nineteenth-century anatomists and anthropologists in attempts to prove that the differences in brain size between male and female brains were biologically meaningful, or that blacks have smaller brains than whites has been devastatingly exposed in a detailed reevaluation by Stephen J. Gould.”

Now, as noted above by Prof. Trivers, we know the rest of the story.

Your statement, AKAHorace, that Lewis et al. “did not acknowledge” the work of an undergraduate student, is false. The student in question is John S. Michael. Here is a direct link to the publication of Lewis et al. (Open access). http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071#pbio.1001071-Michael1
You can there read that Michael is named in the text, and that his publication on the topic appears in the article as citation #14. John Michael’s work was also clearly covered in subsequent press about this topic, as shown in the article that appeared in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html?_r=0

You can use your IQ to get a high score on a “social intelligence” test. The reverse is not true (except to the extent that “social intelligence” is actually a proxy for IQ).

I’ve seen reference to genetic research that has all sorts of politically correct social scientists freaking out at the idea it will be construed to bear out White supremacy in intelligence. Their own lack of intelligence is to fail recognizing there are different kinds of intelligence in Humans. These politically correct scientists measure by a yardstick that is culturally biased to Western Science which originated with Western (European) mentality or intelligence, a world-wide contagious and malevolent social phenomena. These people who’ve initiated and sustained the industrial revolution to point of poisoned planet & environmental collapse are the ones mainly sold on how smart they are. Anyone can learn this mentality to one degree or another, but how useful is it?

Perhaps other people’s genetics are predisposed to an intelligence the European cultures do not know how to measure. Or alternatively stated, perhaps it is a matter of how our brains are organized differently in disparate cultures points to actually useful employ of intelligence.

It’s funny how many more leftist freaks there are at unz.com, once you wander out past the borders of iSteve.

Maybe the social scientists in question are freaked out because they know all about “alternative intelligences” and are disturbed by how squishy a defense they form?

Or maybe they’re just the usual leftist control freaks.

What a coincidence; happened to run across some the #BlackLivesMatter agitators on my way to class today; for some reason thought of Black Panthers (perhaps because of the way they were dressed) so I started to look at some Panther videos on Youtube on my IPhone; came across a Huey Newton video and recalled reading about him in Robert Triver’s book “Folly of Fools”. So when I got home from class I started flipping through that book again, flipped on my computer while doing so, and came across this article…

I expect you’re someone who can’t distinguish between individual IQ & real social intelligence.

Oh, I can quite easily distinguish between IQ and social philosophy, dear fellow

It seems you’re depending on western intelligence to reinforce the western intelligence point of view exclusive to other cultures’ insights.

MMM, the higher gibberish…..It’s the kind of thing that I’m quite used to hearing from [email protected] academics….

I expect you’re someone who can’t distinguish between individual IQ & real social intelligence. Referring to the ‘bell curve’ reinforces my point. It seems you’re depending on western intelligence to reinforce the western intelligence point of view exclusive to other cultures’ insights. As much as one might intellectually grasp a concept of ethnocentric bias, the fact of the intellectual grasp doesn’t necessarily overcome the bias. I doubt you would grasp the intelligence this woman writes about…

http://www.earthspirituality.org/archive/zimmerman_seminar.htm

…but other people will read this

A wonderful article! It is amazingly well written, and it shows the blunt honesty of the naturalist: tell it like you see it and let the chips fall where they may. I wish my geneticist father were alive to read it.

Their own lack of intelligence is to fail recognizing there are different kinds of intelligence in Humans.

No, there isn’t. Read a copy of The Bell Curve if you want to know the reasons why.

I’ve seen reference to genetic research that has all sorts of politically correct social scientists freaking out at the idea it will be construed to bear out White supremacy in intelligence. Their own lack of intelligence is to fail recognizing there are different kinds of intelligence in Humans. These politically correct scientists measure by a yardstick that is culturally biased to Western Science which originated with Western (European) mentality or intelligence, a world-wide contagious and malevolent social phenomena. These people who’ve initiated and sustained the industrial revolution to point of poisoned planet & environmental collapse are the ones mainly sold on how smart they are. Anyone can learn this mentality to one degree or another, but how useful is it?

Perhaps other people’s genetics are predisposed to an intelligence the European cultures do not know how to measure. Or alternatively stated, perhaps it is a matter of how our brains are organized differently in disparate cultures points to actually useful employ of intelligence.

http://ronaldthomaswest.com/2013/05/15/youve-got-apes/

^

True, bigger brains do not necessarily confer higher intelligence, but there is a statistically significant correlation between brain size and IQ

Rough analogy might go like this:

Imagine a roulette wheel with numbers 1 thru 10, let’s say 10 is the “winning” number; for our purposes, relating to a higher operating IQ.

Imagine another wheel right next to it, but it’s got 5 extra 10’s, making that roulette wheel a bit larger because of the additional 10’s added.

If you want to win, which spinning wheel would you rather place your bet on?

[…] From Robert Trivers. Here is Trivers on William Hamilton: […]

Are you referring to Michael’s study? It was discussed by Lewis et al. in their 2011 paper.