It takes a lot for Leftists to acknowledge reality. Evidence about the importance of genetics in human differentiation has been plentiful for over a century but it seems to have taken advances in the decoding of DNA to have forced Leftist recognition of that. Repeated findings of IQ-related genes appear to be too much even for Leftists to ignore. Some excerpts from the latest NYT article on the subject below. The article is filled with hokey terror about what ordinary Americans might do if told the truth of the matter but, given history, I have a lot more confidence in what ordinary Americans might do than I have in what Leftists will do -- given the untold millions that Leftists have slaughtered worldwide in the last 100 years. Leftist arrogance about what people should be told is pithily condemned by KBJ.
Anyway, having an article in the NYT on the subject should help spread awareness of the facts more widely than would otherwise have been the case. Maybe even my outspoken comments on the facts of the matter might come to be seen as "mainstream" one day. I doubt that I will live to see it, though. Most of what I say about IQ has been fairly orthodox for some years in the academic journals of psychology but there is a big gap between what you can safely say in a scientific journal and what you can say to the general public. Fellow scientists can be trusted. "The people" cannot be. That is why wise Leftist shepherds are needed to guide "the people". That they usually in fact guide the people to poverty and disaster cannot be mentioned too often, however.
When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind's remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical. But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.
Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans' resistance to certain diseases.
At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal. "We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. "We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused."
Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
"There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries," said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. "It's not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better."
"I've spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations," said Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "But living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small."
"Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to treat all as equal before God and before the law," Perry Clark, 44, wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark, a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist. "When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100 meters?" he asked. "To say that such differences aren't real," Dr. Clark later said in an interview, "is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the band marches by."
Source
Prof. Altschuler's claim above that the influence of genes is very small is misleading. It is true that the influence of genes ON SOME THINGS is very small but the influence of genes on other things (such as IQ and educational achievement) is large.
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ELSEWHERE
Karl Rove on blogs: ""People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog," Mr. Rove said during a speech about politics and the Web at the Willard InterContinental, a hotel just blocks from his former place of employment. "I'm a fan of many blogs. I visit them frequently and I learn a lot from them," Mr. Rove said. "But there also blogs written by angry kooks." Mr. Rove cited the results of a study that found that writers and commenters on liberal blogs such as DailyKos.com cursed far more than writers and commenters on conservative Web sites such as FreeRepublic.com"
Arab Muslim Trafficking in African Slaves : "The United States is the main focus of world opprobrium for its historical involvement in the enslavement of black Africans. However, neither the Americans nor the Europeans were the primary traders of black African slaves. Most slaves in Africa were either taken by Arab Muslims directly, or sold to the Arabs by the victors in African intertribal warfare. According to some sources, more than 140 million black African slaves may have been trafficked by the Arabs in the centuries since the founding of Islam. These slaves lived in brutal conditions, and the majority died in transit across Africa, Arabia, or the Indian Ocean. Only a tiny fraction crossed the Atlantic to end up in what is now the United States. The Arab traffic in African slaves has not ended. Even though slavery is officially outlawed in all Muslim countries, the practice continues to this day."
Britain's far-Leftist Minister of State: "Foreign Office officials have turned on Lord Malloch-Brown, their minister, describing him as a "liability" for the government. Malloch-Brown, a former United Nations official brought into government by Gordon Brown, has fallen out with some diplomats who have dubbed him "Bollock-Brown" for his off-message views. The minister has clashed with David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and caused embarrassment for Brown before the prime minister's trip to Washington by saying that Britain and America would no longer be "joined at the hip". Malloch-Brown is said to have been reprimanded by Miliband for suggesting the British government was about to open talks with Hamas and Hezbollah, the Islamic militant groups, and was forced to "clarify" his remarks in the House of Lords, which irritated Labour Friends of Israel, the campaign group."
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.
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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
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