Category: Science

Who We Are, And How The Races Got To Have Different IQ Scores

Introduction: When I Realized Koko The Gorilla Was Fake

When I was maybe eleven years old, I found a book in my elementary school library about Koko the gorilla. Supposedly, Koko could talk through sign language. At that age, I assumed this must be true. (After all, it was in a book at the library.)  Within a few years, I had forgotten about Koko the gorilla. I didn’t give it any more thought. Importantly, I didn’t reconsider whether it was true that Koko was capable of conceptual thought like a human being.

When I was about 18, I was watching Rush Limbaugh on TV. (He had a TV show in the early to mid 90’s). He did a comedy bit with a person in a monkey suit doing fake sign language that was supposed to be a parody of Koko the gorilla. The bit strongly implied that Koko couldn’t talk like a person. I remember thinking: “Oh yeah, that’s true. Clearly, Koko the gorilla is fake.” I hadn’t really thought much about Koko at all in the intervening years, but as soon as I saw this Rush Limbaugh bit, my mind refocused on the phenomena of Koko the “talking” gorilla, and quickly concluded it wasn’t real. (Note: I went back and found this clip on YouTube, and the bit may be from more like 1996, which would have made me about 22. I had forgotten this was actually about a story of children being taught that Koko was real in elementary school, like I had been.)

I bring this up because this was a minor piece of false information that I had been fed when I was still a child, and not fully capable of understanding that people can lie or commit fraud for a wide variety of reasons. The lying reaches up to the highest levels of our society, institutions and government. Think about what it took to have a book about a gorilla that could supposedly talk in an elementary school library. It meant there was some adult that had been authorized by other adults, in local and state government, to pick out this book, and put it into the library, despite how misleading and false it was. The book gave children the false impression that a gorilla mind and a human mind are more similar than they actually are. It helped to advance left-wing and egalitarian narratives that human beings are no more important than animals. A lot of what is taught in schools is of a similar nature. It’s about advancing a socio-political agenda held by most universities and major institutions today. That agenda will attempt to deny reality when it does not conform with it.

It is another moral axiom of that agenda that all human beings have the same intellectual capacity, and any difference is NOT because of genetics. Instead, all differences in intelligence or other aspects of the mind between human beings is entirely a result of some external factor, like “environment”, “discrimination”, “colonialism”, or “a legacy of slavery”.  To advance that moral axiom in schools, its proponents at universities, the news media, and in government have systematically denied reality for at least as long as I have been alive, and probably much longer. But, eventually, the truth will out. That seems to be what is happening now, when it comes to certain issues surrounding race, IQ, and the mental differences between races.

David Reich’s Book

In 2018 Harvard geneticist David Riech published a book aimed at a non-scientist audience.

The book discusses advances in the science of DNA analysis that allows scientists to extract DNA from the bones of ancient humans, and sequence their DNA. This has allowed scientists like Reich to develop databases of ancient human populations, and then compare the genes of those ancient people to the genes of modern humans.

“These advances mean that whole-genome study of ancient DNA no longer requires screening large numbers of skeletal remains before it is possible to find a few individuals whose DNA can be analyzed. Instead, a substantial fraction of screened samples dating to the last ten thousand years can now be converted to working genome-wide data. The new methods have made it possible to analyze hundreds of samples in a single study. With such data, it is possible to reconstruct population changes in exquisite detail, transforming our understanding of the past.” (Introduction, Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich)

Much of his book doesn’t have anything that would be considered obviously controversial. The second chapter discusses how scientists have concluded that Europeans contain approximately one to two percent Neanderthal DNA, on average.

More controversial topics come up, but are glossed over, or their implications are not considered. For instance, in Chapter 9, Riech says:

“In 2012, Sarah Tishkoff and her colleagues studied the biological impact of archaic admixture on the genomes of present-day Africans without access to ancient genomes like those of Neanderthals and Denisovans that had been used to document interbreeding between archaic and modern humans in Eurasia.’

Tishkoff and her colleagues sequenced genomes from some of the most diverse populations of Africa and analyzed their data to search for a pattern that is predicted when there has been interbreeding with archaic humans: very long stretches of DNA that have a high density of differences compared to the great majority of other genomes, consistent with an origin in a highly divergent population that was isolated until recently from modern humans. When they applied this approach to present-day non-Africans, they pulled out stretches of DNA that they found were nearly exact matches to the Neanderthal sequence. Tishkoff and her colleagues also found long stretches of deeply divergent sequences in present-day Africans whose ancestors did not mix with Neanderthals. Since Neanderthals have contributed little if any ancestry to Africans, this was likely to have been the result of mixture with mystery African archaic humans-ghost populations whose genomes have not yet been sequenced.” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Pg 208 to 209, emphasis added.)

So, not only are Europeans and Africans genetically distinct because Europeans generally contain some Neanderthal DNA, but also, Africans generally contain an unknown “ghost population” of proto-human DNA that Europeans do not have.

“We provide complementary lines of evidence for archaic introgression into four West African populations. Our analyses of site frequency spectra indicate that these populations derive 2 to 19% of their genetic ancestry from an archaic population that diverged before the split of Neanderthals and modern humans.”  (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax5097)

So, on average, present-day Africans contain anywhere from two to nineteen percent of their DNA from an archaic proto-human population that is even more ancient than the split between humans and Neanderthals. In the past, Africans bred with a population of proto-humans that was, presumably, even more primitive and backward than Neanderthals. It’s entirely possible that those genes affect not just African physiology, but African brains, and, by extension, African mental capabilities. (This is speculation on my part, but it is something that needs to be studied.)

Just as an interesting aside, West Africans formed the bulk of the slaves brought to North America:

“…a considerable number of enslaved people had their origins in the West African nation of Ghana, as well as neighboring parts of the Windward Coast, now Ivory Coast.” (https://www.history.com/articles/what-part-of-africa-did-most-slaves-come-from)

In other words, the two to nineteen percent archaic human population found in West Africans is presumably found in most of the people of African ancestry found in North America today. This potentially explains a lot about this racial group in the United States, and why they are so behind on many measurements of socio-economic success. It also points to a possible reason they were enslaved by their fellow Africans in the first place.

Of course, Reichs doesn’t say or imply any of this in his book. He doesn’t speculate like I am. (Although I think my speculation should form the basis for some scientific hypothesis that could be tested, but probably won’t, because scientists are afraid of the results of any such experiment.)

Reichs spends a lot of his time convincing the reader he’s not racist:

“The real offense of racism, in the end, is to judge individuals by a supposed stereotype of their group -to ignore the fact that when applied to specific individuals, stereotypes are almost always misleading…Everyone is his or her own person with unique strengths and weaknesses, and should be treated as such. Suppose you are the coach of a track-and-field team, and a young person walks on and asks to try out for the hundred-meter race, in which people of West African ancestry are statistically highly overrepresented, suggesting the possibility that genetics may play a role. For a good coach, race is irrelevant. Testing the young person’s sprinting speed is simple -take him or her out to the track to run against the stopwatch. Most situations are like this.” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Pg 267.)

Of course, this isn’t actually true for anything except, possibly sports, where sub-Saharan Africans appear to excel. I question even that, however. I suspect a lot of white people don’t dedicate their high school and college years to professional football or basketball, because they know that they have an infinitesimally small chance of getting into the NFL/NBA. Black overrepresentation in the NBA or NFL may just be a feature of white people being better at statistics and probability, so more of them focus their efforts on things that are a better bet of paying off.

Why can’t we just apply the metaphorical equivalent of a “stop watch” in fields like law, medicine, science, engineering, or any other job? Because it has been made illegal to do so. It is largely illegal, thanks to Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Civil Rights Acts, to require workers to take employer IQ tests. It’s called “disparate impact discrimination”, which is just a fancy way of saying black people don’t do as well on IQ tests. The “stop watch”, in things far more important than the high school track team, has been made illegal.

David Reich and every other mainstream academic out there loves to use sports analogies when it comes to the issue of race and IQ, because sports are the one area black people seem to do okay in. Reading between the lines, I think they are trying to convey to their audience: “I’m not racist! Please don’t think I’m racist! See? I acknowledge black people are better at something, so I’m not racist.”

I find it sad and pathetic. They need to stop caring if they’re racist. One of two things is true at this point. Either the concept of “racism” has been so twisted and expanded that it means nothing, and should be ignored as a useful concept, or, sometimes, “racism” means nothing more than acknowledging reality, in which case it’s a virtue.

David Riech’s Hidden Message:

Historically, I think a lot of scientists and intellectuals didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to admit, the obvious implications of their theories:

“For someone who has had more impact on religious thinking than anyone else born in the last 200 years, Darwin wrote very little about religion….The reasons for his reticence are complex. Darwin did not want to upset his wife, who was devout. He did not want to upset public opinion in any way that might retard the reception of his theory. He generally approved of the religious influence on society.” (https://www.faraday.cam.ac.uk/news/Darwins-religious-beliefs/)

David Reich is like Darwin and religion. He’s a “true believer” when it comes to the morality of egalitarianism and altruism. But, his science is constantly undercutting his “faith”, just like Darwin’s science undercut his religion. Darwin may not have wanted to fully admit what the theory of evolution did to the creation story in the Bible, but later thinkers would recognize the logical implications. Similarly, David Reich may not want to admit the logical implications of his work, but others eventually will. The truth will out. The “hidden message” of David Reich’s work is this:

Yes, race is real. Yes there are actual biological differences between races. Based on the genetic data that is being collected, we’ve got to acknowledge it at this point:

“Chapter 11, ‘The Genomics of Race and Identity,’ argues that the orthodoxy that has emerged over the last century —the idea that human populations are all too closely related to each other for there to be substantial average biological differences among them—is no longer sustainable…” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Introduction)

But, David Riech says: Let’s use a euphemism called “ancestry” and pretend like it’s not synonymous with what everyone already meant by “race”:

“…the language of ‘ancestry’ that geneticists like me have adopted is a reversion to traditional ideas of biological race. She has pointed out that in the United States, the ‘ancestry’ terms that we use map relatively closely to traditional racial categories, and her view is that the population genetics community has invented a set of euphemisms to discuss topics that had become taboo….But ancestry is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with ‘race’. Instead the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them. It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits, and the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful. If we continue to use it we will not be able to escape the current debate, which his mired in an argument between two indefensible positions. On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Pg. 253)

Here, Riech gives us a socio-political reason for not using the term “race”, rather than a scientific one. He simply assumes that anyone who speaks of race is “grounded in bigotry”, whatever “bigotry” means. It’s not “bigotry” to recognize differences in average IQ between races, or average differences in murder rates. It’s recognition of reality. Or, if it is “bigotry”, then sometimes being a “bigot” is a virtue.

I didn’t discover David Reich and his ideas through his book. I discovered him by watching an approximately two-hour long interview on YouTube. (I highly recommend listening to the video interview.) At several points, I had to rewind it and relisten to what Reich said. I found it shocking to hear an academic from Harvard University, an institution I have almost nothing but contempt for, saying what he was saying. My assumption was that Harvard does nothing but carry water for the egalitarian left. I was surprised to see one of the egalitarian left’s most sacred creeds being called into question. I don’t know if Reich has learned more since he wrote his book in 2018, or if he has simply decided that he is more committed to the truth than he is to any ideology. Some of Reich’s apparent discoveries since he wrote the book include:

1. Significant Evolution through natural Selection has occurred in Eurasia since the  Bronze Age, 5,000 years ago.

a. This contradicts Steven J Gould, who said: “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3721656/#b1-rmmj_1-1-e0006

b. The idea that human evolution has been quiescent for the last 50,000 years was a reflection of Gould’s left-wing, egalitarian ideology, rather than science. https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/the-mismeasurements-of-stephen-jay-gould/

2. Significant evolution through natural selection in Eurasia since the Bronze age has included:

a. Genes Correlated with IQ score. -An increase in those genes:

“In some cases, groups of SNPs were under selection together to influence polygenic traits. Some changes raised the frequency of beneficial traits, including some that are interpreted today as…Measures of behavioral and social status or cognitive functions, such as scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling…” (https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-reveals-natural-selection-has-accelerated-recent-human-evolution)

b. Genes correlated with Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia- A reduction in those genes:

“Other changes reduced the frequency of harmful traits, such as those that are interpreted today as: Reduced risk of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia…” https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-reveals-natural-selection-has-accelerated-recent-human-evolution

What the above findings tend to suggest:

(1) It’s not your imagination that black people, on average, seem less intelligent.

(2) It’s not your imagination that more black people seem to have more mental health issues:

“Compared to non-Hispanic White individuals, non-Hispanic Black individuals had a significantly higher prevalence of SSDs [schizophrenia spectrum disorders] (4.1% vs. 1.2%; adjusted odds ratio=3.49, 95% CI=1.37, 8.91) and psychotic symptoms (9.3% vs. 4.9%; adjusted odds ratio=2.04, 95% CI=1.15, 3.63), and non-Hispanic multiracial individuals had a significantly higher prevalence of SSDs (5.6%; adjusted odds ratio=4.59, 95% CI=1.53, 13.76).” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40887946/

(3) It’s not “all racism” or all “a legacy of slavery” that explains the fact that black people have lower IQ and more mental health problems.

(4) I want it be perfectly clear why this matters:

Current racial groups, like Caucasians and Africans developed within the last say, 10,000 years. Current Europeans come from genetic populations that haven’t had much interbreeding with Africans for at least 10,000 years. If there has been “directional selection” for IQ amongst Europeans in the last 10,000 years, then it occurred after European’s ancestors separated from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans. It implies that Europeans have evolved greater intelligence than sub-Saharan Africans since those two racial groups separated. It implies that European populations have more instances of genes that are correlated with higher IQ people. In plain terms, it means Europeans are, on average, smarter than sub-Saharan Africans due to their genetics. Biologically speaking, whether you want to call this “superior” or not depends on what environment you find those genes in. It appears those genes are not “superior” in a stone age or neolithic environment, like sub-Saharan Africa up until a couple of hundred years ago. Higher IQ is superior in a modern, industrial world.

Why The Assumption That “Intelligence is always useful in any environment” May Not Be True

In the past, I had doubted that there could be significant average genetic-based intelligence differences between races. My assumption was that intelligence is always useful, whether one lives in a stone age society, or an industrial society. This would mean that Darwinian evolution would always favor increased intelligence for human beings.

I am no longer certain that is true. First, Charles Murray’s Book “The Bell Curve” suggested to me there are differences in IQ between races. Now, David Reich’s work suggests that there was “directional selection” for the genes that correlate with higher IQ in the Bronze age of Eurasia, within the last 5,000 years. Regions of the world like Africa did not go through the Bronze Age, which strongly suggests that sub-Saharan Africans did not face the same selective pressure on the genes for IQ. (It’s just barely possible some other world-wide effect caused directional selection for IQ, for all the geographically isolated peoples of the world 5,000 years ago, but not likely.)

How do I reconcile these facts with my assumption that natural selection would always select for intelligence, because of my assumption that intelligence is always a benefit, regardless of technology level? I cannot explain it at this point, but, here is a hypothesis/speculation that I hope some scientist can test someday.

Intelligence is always a benefit for an adult human being. I am not so sure that intelligence is always a benefit for children, toddlers, or infants. It may be that a child with greater physiological capacity for intelligence (a bigger brain, or more neural connections in his brain, or whatever) expends more energy as a child than a child with lower intelligence capacity. In a stone age environment, where calories are very scarce, it might be that the children born with greater genetic capacity for intelligence have a lower probability of reaching adulthood than children with less genetic capacity.

Intelligence matters much less to a child’s survival. He is dependent on his parents and elders to a great degree. If the more intelligent child requires more calories than the less intelligent, perhaps he is more likely to die in childhood.

The phrase “intelligence is always a benefit” should perhaps be modified to: “Intelligence is always a benefit for an adult human being.” For children, the situation might be different.

Once the Bronze Age occurred, there was greater surplus food, and more children started surviving to adulthood, including more children with greater genetic capacity for intelligence. As adults, they were then more successful than less intelligent people, and were able to survive and reproduce in greater numbers.

Also, the mechanism of childhood mortality for more intelligent children might have been something else besides food. Maybe there is a negative correlation between genes for intelligence and genes for, say, immunity to disease. Maybe more intelligent children were less likely to survive in a stone age environment for some socio-cultural reason unique to stone age cultures. (Maybe smarter children were regarded as threatening to the tribe and were more likely to be killed or abandoned.)

Ancient African genes do not appear to have been tested for correlation to IQ yet. That is the next logical step. We need to confirm that the same directional selection for intelligence did not occur in Africans. (This would help confirm if it was a result of a Bronze Age environment in Eurasia, or something else. Sub-Saharan Africa would seem like a natural control.)

I had decided that IQ was at least partly genetic, and that the averages differed between the races, by about ten to fifteen years ago. But, I was never really sure. I never wanted to say too much about it because I’m not a scientist. I take great care in what positions I take, and think through the evidence as carefully as I can.

In her article rejecting racism as a form of collectivism, Ayn Rand said:

“Even if it were proved — which it is not — that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race — and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.” (“Racism”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/racism/)

It is certainly true that individual sub-Saharan Africans can buck the trend of their race, genetically. Population genetics is the study of populations, not individuals. I also don’t think genetics is 100% of the picture when it comes to intelligence. Your family and social environment growing up also seem to make a difference. The choices you make, especially in late childhood to early adulthood, make a difference.

At this point, however, I don’t think the first part of Ayn Rand’s quote can be considered open for debate any longer. As the environmentalists like to say with global warming, the science is settled. When a population geneticist from a leftist-captured institution like Harvard is admitting what David Reich is admitting, the science on the subject must be really strong.  Today, I think the question of race and IQ, and the average genetic differences between the races, is largely proved.

The One About the Sex Session Marathon

A few weeks back, there was a lot of buzz on the Internet and YouTube about a woman in her early 20’s who had sex with 100 men in a the span of about 24 hours. This was apparently “training” to eventually have sex with 1,000 men in a 24-hour period, and break some sort of world record. The woman is a sex worker, who does penis in vagina penetration pornography on the Internet, so she’s hardly what you’d call an “average” person. I have no idea what motivates her, and I’m not going to speculate.

I’m also not sure how she is defining “sex” for the purposes of the world record. I don’t know how you could have penetration to ejaculation intercourse with 1,000 men in such a short time span. By my calculation, that’s less than a minute and a half per man. I think there was some talk about the men being “prepped” by other people ahead of time? (I’m not going to delve too deep into that, as I’d rather not know the details.) Would that even count as one-on-one sex, or some sort of orgy, if the guys are being “pre-stimulated” by other people?

For me, there is a certain “ewe” factor, on a completely emotional level. I cannot imagine engaging in the sex act in front of a bunch of other-nonparticipants, and on camera, like that, but that could be because I grew up in a culture that may over-emphasize chastity for religious or socially conventional reasons that don’t always make sense.

However, sometimes traditions and social conventions have a good basis in something real, either in the past or even in the present. I think we should still try to figure out what those reasons are, since it establishes a context for the convention and points to possible exceptions or limits for it. For instance, the incest taboo has a scientific basis, so it is more than simply an inexplicable social convention.

I suspect there are psychological reasons for some of our conventions on sex, such as limiting promiscuity, but I don’t have enough knowledge about human psychology to say. I want to look at this entirely from the standpoint of biological and medical evidence that I am fairly certain about. (This is not to say there isn’t a psychological component to this that might make promiscuity a bad idea. I just don’t know enough about that to say.)

What is the biological and medical evidence for avoiding promiscuity?  I can think of two major reasons fairly quickly:

Avoiding unwanted pregnancy. Technologies like birth control and abortion have somewhat limited this concern. But, in the past, this would have been a major reason.

Avoiding sexually transmitted disease.

I think women should be particularly wary of promiscuity to avoid STD’s. The evidence I see says women are more likely to contract an STD from sex. Women are more likely to contract HIV from unprotected sex than men:

“The risk of HIV seroconversion per heterosexual act is estimated to be approximately twofold higher for the female compared to male partner…” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5882769/

“Overall, 19 (12%) male partners and 82 (20%) female partners were infected with HIV, suggesting that male to female transmission is 1.9 (95% confidence interval 1.1 to 3.3) times more effective than female to male transmission.”  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5882769/

““A meta-analysis of 10 studies exploring the risk of transmission through vaginal sex was published in 2009.4 It is estimated the risk of HIV transmission through receptive vaginal sex (receiving the penis in the vagina) to be 0.08% (equivalent to 1 transmission per 1,250 exposures).

A meta-analysis of three studies exploring the risk from insertive vaginal sex (inserting the penis into the vagina) was estimated to be 0.04% (equivalent to 1 transmission per 2,500 exposures).4” https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sexual-and-reproductive-health/hiv-aids/causes/risk-of-exposure.html

From what I’ve seen, women who have unprotected heterosexual intercourse with an infected partner are about twice as likely to contract HIV as men. The probability of contracting other STD’s seems to be higher for women also:

“Having sexual contact without using a barrier increases your risk of genital herpes. Barriers include condoms and condom-like protectors called dental dams used during oral sex. Women are at higher risk of getting genital herpes. The virus can spread more easily from men to women than from women to men.”

“Women, people with a history of sexually transmitted diseases, older people, Black people in in the United States and men who have sex with men diagnosed with genital herpes at a higher than average rate.”

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/genital-herpes/symptoms-causes/syc-20356161

“Females are at higher risk of acquiring genital herpes from a male partner than vice versa. Studies of heterosexual couples with one partner who had symptomatic recurrent genital HSV-2 (“source partner”) revealed annual transmission rates of 11–17% in couples with a male source partners and 3–4% in couples with a female source partners”

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/infectious-diseases/sexual-health-sexually-transmitted-infections/canadian-guidelines/herpes-simplex-virus/risk-factors-clinical-manifestation.html

A woman who eventually wants to have children is putting them at risk, too:

“A baby can be infected with HSV during delivery. Less often, the virus is passed during pregnancy or by close contact after delivery. Newborns with HSV often have infections of internal organs or the nervous system. Even with treatment, these newborns have a high risk of developmental or physical problems and a risk of death.”

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/genital-herpes/symptoms-causes/syc-20356161

Feminism has done a real disservice to women’s health by saying or implying women can have sex just like men. The danger for STD’s is greater, and even with access to abortion and birth control pills, unwanted pregnancy can happen. Abortion is a medical procedure, so there is danger there. Feminism ignores biological fact to tell women they are the same as men, when they are not. Women have the same fundamental rights as men to life, liberty, and property, but that doesn’t mean they are the same as men and it doesn’t mean that a rational woman shouldn’t behave, in many ways, differently than a man because of her physiology.

I’ve known women who pursued the feminist “I’m just like a man,” attitude and wound up regretting it later in life. I’ve seen women end up with STD’s because they weren’t sufficiently selective in who they had sex with, particularly unprotected sex. There are women reporting on social media and YouTube about getting HIV in their early 20’s after having unprotected sex with men they barely knew. I once heard a second-hand story about someone I’d met, but was no friend of mine, who had an unprotected sexual relationship with a woman even though he knew he had herpes. She wound up symptomatic, and when she told him, he lied and claimed he knew nothing about it.

Some will claim that herpes is “no big deal”, but as the quote above shows, herpes can lead to developmental and physical problems and greater risk of death for newborn children. I once heard another story about a woman who had herpes, and she had lost a child while giving birth to it. I don’t know for a fact that she had herpes when she gave birth, or that herpes had anything to do with it, but it certainly sounds like it may have been the case.

This is not to say that I think it’s okay for men to be promiscuous, from a medical and health standpoint. But, the risks are lower for them as a matter of biological fact. There are high “social risks” for men. In a certain sense, higher than for women. Sleeping with another man’s wife/girlfriend can lead to death by violence. A man could end up paying a lot of child support, and not getting to see their children much or at all. A woman might choose not to tell you that you are the father of her child. I’ve seen this happen before, too.

Men don’t have an ideology, taught in all schools, telling them to go out and have random sex, which I think feminism strongly implies or explicitly endorses for women. If anything, religion tells men not to have premarital sex, and so does feminism, the more extreme and Marxist elements of which, tend to make outlandish claims about how all heterosexual sex is rape.

My moral appraisal of the woman who had sex with 100 guys in 24 hours was pretty much “whatever”, at first. I don’t know her, and I don’t have any reason to particularly care. I also didn’t want to be morally “puritanical”, but then I wondered how much she is causing young women to think this is how they should live. I think it also encourages young men to seek out women that behave like porn stars. This, in turn, makes young women think they need to behave like porn stars to get a man. I wouldn’t be surprised if more pornography causes a spike in STD transmission. As a result, my more considered appraisal of her is fairly negative. I wouldn’t call what she is doing “evil”, I’d call it “mildly bad”, “not great”, or “ill advised”. I hope that teenagers and young adults out there recognize that she is not someone to desire or emulate, if only because of the health dangers.

None of this is to say I think pornography should be illegal. People need to learn to exercise the thinking faculties of their minds, and make good decisions on their own. The more government tries to protect people from their bad choices, the more people who do not think are protected from their lack of judgment and prudence, and the more it discourages the need to think.

Making porn illegal is analogous to giving people welfare, which discourages them from learning new skills to get into the work force. They become dependent on government and do not know how to work. Similarly, what I call “spiritual welfare”, like regulating porn, would cause people to become dependent on government in deciding what things on TV and the Internet are good for them, or not. It destroys the capacity in the population at large to think and reason these things out for themselves, and it makes them dependent on government.

Additionally, some stuff that might be considered “pornography” by the more puritanical conservatives might have beneficial uses. “Soft core porn” or “erotica” might have its place. For instance, a long-married couple might legitimately watch it to “spice up” their sex life -I don’t know for sure. Each individual can make up his or her own mind on where they want to draw the line on what they want to watch, and what they want to participate in, when it comes to sex. (They can also live with whatever consequences that come from that.) As an egoist, I am not primarily concerned with how others live their lives. If I don’t like it, I can just not associate with them. To me, being promiscuous is more like being a smoker. I think it’s probably unhealthy, but I don’t disassociate with someone just because they smoke. As long as they do that part of their life separate from our friendship or association, I’ll simply ignore it.

Reduction and Integration of the Neurobiological Concept of “Action Potential”

This Spring, I took a Saturday course at the local community college on Anatomy and Physiology. (It’s the course that people going into the medical professions, such as nursing, would take.) The textbook used was “Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology”, 11th Ed. (Martini, Nath, Bartholomew). The following was an issue that I ran into several times while reading the textbook, and how I solved that problem to advance my understanding of the concepts. (If anyone is interested, I made an A in the course.)

Chapter 12 of the textbook presents the concept of the “action potential” in nervous tissue.

The problem is it presents everything on a microscopic level, with a very abstract presentation of the electro-chemical processes.

Before I begin, I should go over the “textbook” explanation of what an “action potential” is, as best I understand it. (Keep in mind I’m not a scientist, much less a biologist, so this is just my best understanding.)

Neurons communicate with each other via electrical signals known as “action potentials”. These are defined as brief changes in the voltage across the membrane of a neuron due to the flow of certain ions into and out of the neuron. https://teachmephysiology.com/nervous-system/synapses/action-potential/

At pages 410-411 of the textbook, a series of diagrams are presented to show the generation of an action potential in a neuron. These include 4 steps in the action potential generation process: (1) Depolarization to threshold, (2) Activation of sodium ion channels and rapid depolarization, (3) Inactivation of sodium ion channels and activation of potassium ion channels to start repolarization of the neuron, and (4) time lag in closing all potassium ion channels, which leads to temporary hyperpolarization:

 

 

IMG_6197 IMG_6198

The diagrams in the textbook show what happens at a molecular or cellular level, with each diagram containing a little picture of what is supposed to be  a voltmeter to show what the voltage of the neuron’s inner membrane is at each point in the generation of the action potential. At resting membrane potential, the neuron’s inner voltage is -70mV. There are sodium ion channels that are closed at resting membrane potential. When depolarization occurs, the stimulus causes the voltage of the inner part of the neuron to become less negative, which causes the sodium ion channels to open, which allows sodium, a positive ion, to rush into the neuron. Since sodium is a positive ion, it causes the inner portion of the neuron to become much less negative, until it is a little bit positive. (+10mV according to the textbook). As the inner portion of the neuron continues to get more positive, it causes the sodium ion channels to close, and potassium ion channels to open. Repolarization can now occur, as potassium ions, which are positive are removed from the inside of the neuron, causing it to become more negative in charge on the inside. Eventually, the neuron’s inner portion is back around -70 mV.

The above explanation is what you can get from the book, but I was dissatisfied with this explanation. I wanted to know how scientists could have reached this conclusion.  Clearly, they didn’t just have a divine revelation from God. Since this all occurs on a microscopic, molecular level, you cannot see this process happening with your naked eye. In particular, I was bothered by the way the textbook presented the voltage differentials created by the change in sodium and potassium levels in the neuron. How could they get a voltmeter small enough to insert into a neuron to measure the voltage differentials? How could they possibly know that?

In the past, this would have probably taken a trip to the library, and looking through several books on the history of biology. (This is still probably the best way.) But, with the Internet, I started with some key-word searches on a search engine. I did this research several months ago, so I am somewhat recreating what I did, but as best I can recall, this is what I started my Internet search with: “discovery of action potential”.  From that, I found the following web site: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500626/

This article discussed a pair of scientists, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, who did research in this area about 60 years ago.  I then plugged “Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley” into another search engine, and got the following Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodgkin%E2%80%93Huxley_model

(A side-note on Wikipedia. I don’t consider it to be a reliable source, but I do consider it useful as a “jumping off point” for research. I will read the Wikipedia article, then look at the citations, and see if I can find more reliable sources on a topic from there. I think this is a perfectly acceptable use of Wikipedia.)

From reading the above Wikipedia article, I saw that they studied something called a “squid giant axon”. There was another Wikipedia article on that topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon

This article said:

“The large diameter of the axon provided a great experimental advantage for Hodgkin and Huxley as it allowed them to insert voltage clamp electrodes inside the lumen of the axon.”

To confirm this with a more reliable source, I then typed into a search engine: “why did they use the squid giant axon to study the action potential” From there, I found this article:

“A, John Zachary Young (1907–1997). His discovery of the squid giant axon in the 1930s was pivotal since it provided an electrically excitable membrane of sufficient area for Hodgkin and Huxley’s experiments.”

“Both Hodgkin and Huxley have stated that, following the failed attempts with the mercury droplets, it was the other who made the suggestion that a fine capillary electrode might be inserted inside the nerve fibre (Fig. 3A) to record the potential difference across the membrane.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3424716/

Basically, this particular squid neuron is very big. About 1 mm in diameter, and several centimeters long. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-squid-giant-axon-The-giant-axon-is-a-very-large-up-to-1-mm-in-diameter-and-long_fig2_276491039

After that, I understood how they could have measured the change in voltage in the inner membrane of a neuron. Scientists found a neuron that was big enough to let them insert the probe of a voltmeter into it. They then operated under the assumption that this particular squid neuron worked the same as other, smaller neurons, in other species, which seemed like a reasonable inference to me. (Given the fact that all animals are connected to each other by a common ancestor in our evolutionary past, it makes sense that once a particular biological system occurs, the same model will be “used” by evolution in other organisms.)

By looking at some of the history, I learned something about the scientific experiments and observations that went into formulating this abstract idea of the action potential. I was sufficiently satisfied from half an hour of Internet searches as to how they had arrived at this conclusion, that I could move on to the rest of my reading.

I hasten to add that sometimes I might not be able to find anything regarding how scientists arrived at an abstract idea presented in a science textbook. I am somewhat limited by time constraints, and this method does not always bear fruit in 15 minutes to half an hour of Internet searches. In those instances, I will sometimes just have to resign myself to memorizing the abstract model well enough to spit it back out on a test. When that occurs, I just recognize in my mind that I haven’t really learned anything. (If I have time later, I will go back and try to learn something about how scientists came up with this idea, but sometimes I don’t.) It’s somewhat disheartening that our educational system encourages rote memorization over actual learning of concepts, but as a student, you just have to recognize that the system is what it is, and do your best to operate in it. However, I try to keep my level of rote memorization like this to a minimum, since I think if you make this your habitual method of studying in high school and college, you’ll leave academia worse than an ignoramus. So, I recommend trying to use the method outlined here at least 80 to 90 percent of the time. At the very least, you’ll have questions in your mind, that, later on down the road, might lead you to the answers.

I should also say something about where I acquired this methodology of studying science textbooks. Since this method is also an idea, I didn’t just get it through divine revelation. (We get nothing through divine revelation.)

By studying the ideas of Ayn Rand, I learned that all knowledge starts with observation, that is our sensory-perceptual apparatus. From reading “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”, by Leonard Peikoff in college, I learned about the methods of “reduction” and “integration”, which relate to a concept’s “hierarchy” and “context”. Basically, integration, concerns the logical relationship of a concept to other concepts -that is, placing it in a context. For instance, above, I said that scientists assumed that the giant squid neuron was basically the same in its operation as the neurons in the human body, despite the size difference. I said this assumes that all animals share a common ancestor, which is a well-founded idea, based in Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection.  So, evolution through natural selection would form part of the context through which this idea of the action potential in neurons would be based.

“Reduction” relates to mentally following  a “chain” or “hierarchy” of ideas back to what you can perceive in the world around you. For instance, scientists can use a voltmeter, which has known properties to measure something that is imperceptible, the voltage of a neuron. They know through other experiments that certain voltages can perform certain tasks, such as lighting a light bulb, or spinning a turbine, etc. Chemists also are able to relate the concentrations of certain substances, like sodium, to the generation of voltage, which tells them something about the nature of otherwise imperceptible sodium atoms (that they are ions, which are charged atoms, with too few or too many electrons.) The important point of reduction here is that you want to develop a method or experiment to allow you to relate the unperceived to that which is perceived by your senses.

This explanation of Ayn Rand’s ideas on logic and epistemology is just a brief sketch. If you want to understand it better, I recommend that you pick up some of her books on the subject, or Leonard Peikoff’s book, read them, and decide for yourself if they relate to reality or not.  Like all ideas, you shouldn’t take them on faith, or assume that they are revelations from God.

An Observation While Learning Spanish Via The Comprehensible Input Method

I have been trying the comprehensible input method espoused by this site to learn Spanish.

The comprehensible input method seems correct to me, although I admittedly haven’t studied the science that they claim backs up the efficacy of the method. It just “rings true” to me based on my own introspection and knowledge of epistemology and language. The method discards learning grammar in favor of using pictures, gestures, and acting while speaking to make it more like the experience of a child first learning to speak. It also completely discounts speaking a language to learn it. Your are supposed to just gather “comprehensible input”, as that is the only way you are going to truly learn, according to the theory. The input is “comprehensible” because you understand the meaning of the speech, thanks to the gestures and drawings of the speaker, even through you do not understand the language yet.
Something I’ve noticed when listening to native or near-native Spanish speakers is they will mix in certain English words that usually reflects some new technology or imported concept, rather than adopt a specific word for it. Although this can also vary. Spaniards call computers “ordinators”, while Mexicans tend to call them “computeradoras”.

In this video, I noted that the speaker, a Spaniard, called the act of snowboarding, “hacer snow” a few times. In Spanish the substance that falls from the sky would be called “nieve”, so, to his ear, the word “snow” is connected with the concept of snowboarding.

Three Different Methods of Presenting Material In An Introductory Biology Textbook

I have been reading portions of the textbook, Campbell Biology, 12th Edition, Urry, Cain, Wasserman, Minorsky, Orr, as part of the second semester of a Biology for science majors course I have been taking at the local community college. The textbook has different approaches to presenting different concepts. Three of those approaches are discussed here. (These may not be exhaustive of the methods used to convey ideas in the book -they are just ones that I noticed as I’ve been reading it.)

First Method: Abstract

Some of the material is presented in a very abstract way. For instance, Concept 11.4 “Cellular response: Cell signaling leads to regulation of transcription or cytoplasmic activities” is discussed in the following way:

IMG_2051

Note how this section used a lot of complicated jargon. It doesn’t explain how the process it describes could be related to any experiment or physical demonstration to show it working. It just abstractly describes how a cell responds to an extracellular signal that causes a particular gene in the cell’s DNA to start encoding for a particular protein. Your only choice here is basically to memorize the process described, learn the jargon, and then repeat it on a test.

Second Method: Experimental

Some other material in the book is more of a description of the experiments that led to a particular scientific concept. For instance, Figure 15.3, “Inquiry” gives the basic outline of an experiment that was performed to determine that a particular gene for a particular characteristic in fruit flies was located on the X chromosome. (A sex chromosome):

IMG_2052

If you follow the explanation presented above, it leads to a very elegant, and easy-to-understand explanation of how they arrived at their conclusion, in my opinion.

Another example of the same approach is seen in a section called “Apoptosis in the Soil Worm Caenohabditis elegans”:

IMG_2050

 

The above discusses an experiment biologists performed on a type of worm to study the phenomena of “apoptosis”, that is, when a cell is programed to self-destruct for the overall benefit of the organism. The above explains that scientists noticed that the “suicide” of cells in this species occurred exactly 131 times during the normal development of this worm. From this, they were able to determine which genes were involved in programing the proteins that cause cell death.

It does not give the specific details of how they determined these were the genes, but it has given a sufficient overall outline, that, for me, the concept was clear: There are certain genes that trigger, after a certain amount of time, and cause the production of proteins that tell particular cells to self-destruct.

Third Method: Historical

The third major method of presenting concepts in the book that I noticed could be described as a “historical” approach. For instance, Chapter 22 “Descent with Modification: A Darwinian View of Life” gives a very historical explanation of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection.

It starts out by describing the history of biology before Darwin. For instance, it discusses Aristotle’s “scala naturae” by saying:

“Aristotle (384-322 BCE), viewed species as fixed (unchanging). Through his observations of nature, Aristotle recognized certain ‘affinities’ among organisms. He concluded that life-forms could be arranged on a ladder, or scale, of increasing complexity, later called the scala naturae (“scale of nature”). Each form of life, perfect and permanent, had its allotted rung on the ladder.”

It then goes on to describe the classification that Carolous Linneas came up with, which used a binomial, two-part system to name species. It then discusses the ideas of Georges Culvier, one of the first paleontologists. He noted that much of the earth was laid out with strata, or layers of rock. He also noted that more dissimilar life forms were located further down, in the older layers of rock. Then geologists started thinking that the Earth was much older than 2,000 years, which suggested there had been enough time for organisms to change from one form to another gradually over time.

The text then discusses a pre-Darwinian concept of evolution based on the idea that organisms that repeatedly use a particular characteristic make it grow stronger, and then that strengthened character gets passed on to their children. (Lamarckian Evolution) This turned out to be largely incorrect, but it was part of the “idea back drop”, or context, from which Darwin was thinking when he came up with his own ideas.

From there, the text discusses Darwin’s voyages on the Beagle, and how that allowed him to confirm the geological ideas of people like James Hutton and Charles Lyell, as well as Georges Culvier. The book then discusses the finches, with different beaks, that Darwin noticed on the Galapagos Islands, and how these birds were similar to a species of finch found on the mainland. This suggested they had come from the mainland, and had changed over time to adapt to the use of different resources. From all of this, Darwin came up with two general observations:

(1) Members of a population often vary in their inherited traits.

(2) All species can produce more offspring than their environment can support, and many of these offspring fail to survive and reproduce.

The book probably could have spent a little bit more time on describing the ideas of Thomas Malthus, which, it is my understanding, is where Darwin got the idea of resources being scarce, and that organisms reproduce past the “carrying capacity” of a particular environment.

The book then went on to say that, based on these observations, Darwin drew two inferences:

(1) Individuals whose inherited characteristics give them a higher probability of surviving and reproducing in a given environment tend to leave more offspring than do other individuals.

(2) This unequal ability of individuals to survive and reproduce will lead to the accumulation of favorable traits in the population over generations.

My point here is not to critique particular sections of the textbook. (Although my particular preferences in terms of how I think scientific material should be presented probably comes through here.) My point is simply to give illustrative examples of what I think are three different ways this particular Biology textbook presents material to the average Biology student. I am not a scientist or a teacher, so I will leave it to others to decide which of these methods of writing a Biology or science textbook is the best. Perhaps all have their place, but the differences in method of presentation should at least be recognized and considered.

My Experience With A Sedation-Free Colonoscopy

At some point I’ve meant to blog about my first colonoscopy in April of 2022, but I haven’t gotten around to it. My general practice doctor told me that they now recommend colonoscopies for anyone over 45 every 10 years, so I decided to bite the bullet and do it.

(If you don’t like discussions of body anatomy, I’d skip reading the rest of this.)

I opted to have it done without anesthesia. In the rest of the world, most people do it without anesthesia, but they mostly do it with sedation in the US. I chose no anesthesia because I think there are long term side effects from it. My understanding is that anesthesia can cause dementia in older people.  The connection between anesthesia and dementia is still debated by scientists, but if I can safely have a medical procedure without it, I’d rather err on the side of caution.

Finding a doctor in Dallas that would do it without anesthesia was difficult, but I finally found one. Looking back at my medical records, I believe his name was Dr. Ramakrishna V. Behara in Frisco, Texas. (Funny side note: I once went in to see a doctor, and they asked me who I was there to see. I said: “I don’t remember his name, but it’s the Indian one.” The girl at the front desk looked at me and said: “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”) Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is the profile of the doctor who did my colonoscopy: https://www.bswhealth.com/physician/ramakrishna-behara  He seemed knowledgeable and competent. I asked to meet with him at his office ahead of the procedure, and he agreed to do so. (I just needed to talk to the person who was going to be performing such a delicate procedure ahead of time, and look him in the eye.) I would recommend him if you are in the Dallas area, and are looking to do a sedation-free colonoscopy.

The night before, I had to fast and take a diarrhetic that kept me up all night on the toilet.

I had an early morning schedule at the hospital. I drove there, and they hooked up an IV, although I technically didn’t need one since I wasn’t using anesthetic. (They convinced me to ‘just in case’.)

After that I was wheeled  into the room with the doctor and two nurses. I was facing a TV monitor with the camera view on it. I thought I’d watch and enjoy the show.

That changed once they started. I had to close my eyes and focus on my breathing once they stuck the device in. It felt similar to what I think having a vacuum cleaner tube up my rectum would feel like.  It wasn’t painful, but it felt like I had to urgently defecate, but could not. The only pain I felt was when the muscles around my anal sphincter started to have cramps. I started saying “Oh god, oh god,” over and over, hoping it would be over soon. (I wasn’t sure how long colonoscopies lasted.) The nurse started patting me on the back, trying to soothe me, saying it was okay. Despite all that, the pain wasn’t bad. Like a session of bad cramps. (I think the nurses were more traumatized by my vocalizing discomfort than I was, lol.)

Afterward, I felt a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. I had overcome my fears. I do not like medical procedures, but as someone committed to the virtue of rationality as described by Ayn Rand, I recognize they are important to my long-term health and life, which is why I just did it, even though I had to somewhat ‘psych myself up’ to it. (I delayed several months getting up the nerve.) http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/rationality.html

I drove myself to work after the procedure, but I stopped off for some pancakes at IHop. I was starving from my 12-hour fast. They were the best damn pancakes I’ve ever had.

The good news is, I don’t have to do it again for 10 years. I also was glad I opted for no anesthesia, and I plan on opting for no anesthesia next time.

I thought I’d write on this because I saw an article about high profile people dying of colon cancer in 2022. If you’re over 45, seriously consider getting this done, regardless of whether you decide to opt for anesthesia or not. The procedure can drastically reduce your chances of dying from colon cancer.

 

Whoopi Goldberg On Systematic Nazi Mass-Murder

I was rather surprised to see this controversy, since I think Whoopi Goldberg is correct:

“‘Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people,’ she said on The View on Monday.” https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/feb/02/whoopi-goldberg-suspended-from-the-view-after-saying-holocaust-isnt-about-race

Jews living in Germany at the time of World War II can’t really be called another race, in my opinion.

Mein Kampf asserts that they are another race. If you read it, you’ll see that Hitler saw the perceived racial difference as the reason for regarding Jews as a danger to the German people. But, I don’t see any evidence that would justify treating Jews as a different race.

I think the concept of “race” is most likely a real concept, that is based in reality. I’m not an expert, but it is my understanding that forensic anthropologists can determine a skeleton’s likely ancestry with high probability by examining their skull. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26270337/  (Although there is debate, about the accuracy of this type of determination. So my certainty on this issue is not 100%. https://www.science.org/content/article/forensic-anthropologists-can-try-identify-person-s-race-skull-should-they )

I think the outrage here derives from the modern notion that race is “socially constructed” or that it isn’t a real thing. In this view, the white majority is simply imposing something on black people that doesn’t exist for purposes of exploiting them.

I think a lot of that debate turns around how “race” is defined. I’d say I define it as something like: “Where most of your ancestors originate from in the last 10,000 years.” Biological populations can have a lot of variations, but biologists seem to have no problem identifying a plethora of sub-species within other animal groups besides human beings. For instance, there are 9 sub-species of Tiger, and they all look the same to me, as a non-biologist. https://www.livescience.com/29822-tiger-subspecies-images.html So, why is it controversial to recognize that people whose ancestors are mostly from Africa, Asia, or Europe are different sub-species? (Especially when its fairly easy for me to tell the difference just by looking at them, but I see no difference with Tiger sub-species.)

I will also acknowledge that I am not 100% certain on this issue. Much of what we consider “race” may, in fact, have no basis in biological reality. It’s largely a scientific issue to be decided by scientists, but I suspect the issue is not being honestly addressed due to the fear by scientists that they will loose funding or jobs if they come up with answers the political left doesn’t like.

The danger of Mein Kampf doesn’t lie primarily in Jew hatred, but in the fact that it advocates collectivism:

“It took centuries and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring a whole people to the state of Hitler-worship. Modern German culture, including its Nazi climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy…

If we view the West’s philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.

The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)” ( The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, Peikoff, Leonard)

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/fascism-nazism.html

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=the%20ominous%20parallels%20by%20leonard%20peikoff&sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-TopNavISS-_-Results&ds=20

So, at worst, Whoopi Goldberg is guilty of saying something that is likely true (Jews are a not a separate race), which is based in a premise (race is something biologically real), that deserves more study. It certainly doesn’t justify suspension from her TV show. (But, these are the times we live in.)

Evidence of Pre-Columbian Violence In The Americas

In college, I got into a debate at the dining hall with another student. I don’t remember what started the debate, and I’m sure it was quite “free-wheeling”, covering many topics.  I was already stridently pro-Capitalist and I had been reading Ayn Rand for several years by that point. During the debate, I mentioned the fact that the Aztecs has practiced human sacrifice. My “liberal” debating opponent said he didn’t believe this happened. I was so shocked by his denial of this historical fact that I think I discontinued the debate soon after. This occurred around 1995.

I have recently discovered that there were many in the academic community that did deny that the Aztecs ever engaged in ritual murder. They said such evidence came from accounts by Spanish conquerors. They claimed that the Spaniards had reason to lie, because it justified their settling of Mexico, Central America, and South America.

Leftists and academics operated under the assumption that primitive cultures were largely peaceful and non-violent. This attitude probably has its origins in Rousseau and Karl Marx. (Marx and Engels believed in a prehistoric “golden age” of primitive communism. Warfare for Marx/Engels was a byproduct of “capitalistic exploitation”.)

Unfortunately for them, the archeological facts are increasingly painting a different, violent, picture of pre-Columbian America. Violence seems to have been common throughout North and South America, long before the white man arrived.

Aztec and Mayan  Ritual Murder-Cannibalism

“When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor…

… Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.” https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion

“Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled…. ‘It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,’ which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.”  https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-23-adfg-sacrifice23-story.html

“The Maya, whose culture peaked farther east about 400 years before the Aztecs founded Mexico City in 1325, had a similar taste for sacrifice, Harvard University anthropologist David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-23-adfg-sacrifice23-story.html

“The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.

‘We have found cooking dishes just like that,’ said archeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-23-adfg-sacrifice23-story.html

Mass-torture And Murder At Sacred Ridge Colorado Around 800 A.D.

“The bones that Osterholtz saw showed evidence of broken ankles, used to hobble the victims, beatings of the soles of the feet that were so severe the bone peeled away, and crushing and scraping to the top of the feet.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archeologists-find-evidence-torture-1200-year-old-massacre-180951922/

“More than a massacre, the scene at Sacred Ridge betrayed evidence of at least 33 people, men and women alike, having been not only butchered and burned, but, according to new research — also tortured.” http://westerndigs.org/evidence-of-hobbling-torture-discovered-at-ancient-massacre-site-in-colorado/

###

Anasazi Mass Murder, Scalping, and Cannibalism In The 13th Century

“By 1993, Kuckelman’s crew had concluded that they were excavating the site of a major massacre. Though they dug only 5 percent of the pueblo, they identified the remains of at least 41 individuals, all of whom probably died violently. ‘Evidently,’ Kuckelman told me, ‘the massacre ended the occupation of Castle Rock.’

More recently, the excavators at Castle Rock recognized that some of the dead had been cannibalized. They also found evidence of scalping, decapitation and ‘face removing’—a practice that may have turned the victim’s head into a deboned portable trophy.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/

Evidence of wide-spread cannibalism

“Suspicions of Anasazi cannibalism were first raised in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that a handful of physical anthropologists, including Christy Turner of Arizona State University, really pushed the argument. Turner’s 1999 book, Man Corn, documents evidence of 76 different cases of prehistoric cannibalism in the Southwest that he uncovered during more than 30 years of research. Turner developed six criteria for detecting cannibalism from bones: the breaking of long bones to get at marrow, cut marks on bones made by stone knives, the burning of bones, ‘anvil abrasions’ resulting from placing a bone on a rock and pounding it with another rock, the pulverizing of vertebrae, and ‘pot polishing’—a sheen left on bones when they are boiled for a long time in a clay vessel. To strengthen his argument, Turner refuses to attribute the damage on a given set of bones to cannibalism unless all six criteria are met.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/

Evidence of Human Remains In Human Feces Increases Probability of Anasazi Cannibalism

“Predictably, Turner’s claims aroused controversy. Many of today’s Pueblo Indians were deeply offended by the allegations, as were a number of Anglo archaeologists and anthropologists who saw the assertions as exaggerated and part of a pattern of condescension toward Native Americans…. Kurt Dongoske, an Anglo archaeologist who works for the Hopi, told me in 1994, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you can’t prove cannibalism until you actually find human remains in human coprolite [fossilized excrement].’” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/

“A few years later, University of Colorado biochemist Richard Marlar and his team did just that. At an Anasazi site in southwestern Colorado called CowboyWash, excavators found three pit houses—semi-subterranean dwellings—whose floors were littered with the disarticulated skeletons of seven victims. The bones seemed to bear most of Christy Turner’s hallmarks of cannibalism. The team also found coprolite in one of the pit houses. In a study published in Nature in 2000, Marlar and his colleagues reported the presence in the coprolite of a human protein called myoglobin, which occurs only in human muscle tissue. Its presence could have resulted only from the consumption of human flesh.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/

###

Massacre of Men, Women, and Children In Southeast Utah 2,000 Years Ago

“Nearly a hundred skeletons buried in a cave in southeast Utah offer grisly evidence that ancient Americans waged war on each other as much as 2,000 years ago, according to new research.

Dozens of bodies, dating from the first century CE, bear clear signs of hand-to-hand combat: skulls crushed as if by cudgels; limbs broken at the time of death; and, most damning, weapons still lodged in the back, breast and pelvic bones of some victims — including stone points, bone awls, and knives made of obsidian glass.

Signs of violence were evident in 58 of the approximately 90 bodies found in the cave. Most of the victims were men, but at least 16 women were also found among the dead, as well as nearly 20 children, some as young as three months old.” http://westerndigs.org/skeletons-in-utah-cave-are-victims-of-prehistoric-war-study-says/

Did The Violence Occur Over a Long Period of Time?- Maybe, But Evidence Seems to Say No

“The carnage found in Cave 7 could only be explained, Wetherill concluded, by the ‘sudden and violent destruction of a community by battle or massacre.’

And this interpretation held for more than a century, until 2012, when radiocarbon dating of some of the bones from the cave showed that the burials actually spanned many centuries — from the first century CE to the early 300s — suggesting that the dead represented several, smaller conflicts over time.

Now, a new analysis of the Cave 7 remains finds that, while the dates do cover a range, the victims of violence in particular appear to date from the same period, intimating that they’re evidence of a ‘single-event mass killing.’”

http://westerndigs.org/skeletons-in-utah-cave-are-victims-of-prehistoric-war-study-says/

 

###

Mass-Murder In South-Central South Dakota around 1325 A.D.

“At Crow Creek, a large Initial Coalescent village in South Dakota with a terminal occupation around  A.D. 1325,2such extrapolation is unnecessary (Willey,1990; Willey and Emerson, 1993; Zimmerman and Bradley, 1993; Zimmerman et al., 1981). Here, a mass deposit containing the remains of a minimum of 486men, women, and children was discovered in 1978 in a fortification ditch that par-tially surrounded the entrenched village. Most of these bodies had been mutilated, and many showed signs of exposure before interment. At least 89% of 415 identified frontal bones had cut marks indicative of scalping, and 41% of 101 identified skulls had round or ellipsoid depression fractures from round and axe like club-bing implements. Decapitation and possible tongue removal by humans also was evident by anatomical placement of cut marks on occipital bones, cervical verte-brae, and mandibles. Hands and feet may also have been purposefully removed, although carnivore damage also suggests scavenger activity. Isolated bones and body parts in various other contexts (Willey, 1990; Willey and Emerson, 1993),as well as burning of all identified structures (Bamforth, 1994), support the anni-hilative intent of the attack. However, a pronounced bias against 15–24 year old females, as well as the act of burial itself, suggests that some people may have survived through capture or escape (Willey, 1990; Willey and Emerson, 1993).In scale, the Crow Creek massacre is unparalleled anywhere in prehistoric North America, except possibly that at the broadly contemporaneous center at Casas Grandes described above.” (“The Archaeology of War: A North American Perspective” by Patricia M. Lambert, Pg. 225; Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 2002 )

https://courses.washington.edu/war101/readings/Lambert–archy%20of%20N%20Am%20warfare.pdf

Another Apparent Academic Dissertation About this Event, Which Notes that 60% of This Tribe Was killed:

“The major findings can be summarized as follows: At least 486 Arikara were buried, that number probably constituting roughly 60 percent of the village inhabitants.” https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268790968.pdf

This would probably be considered “genocide” today.

###

Evidence of Warfare in California/Western Great Basin

“Injuries from projectile weapons also have a long history of occurrence in this  region,  first  appearing  in  the  fifth  millennium B.C.  Identified  based  on  the presence of stone or bone spear, dart, and arrow points embedded in bone, bone scars  attributed  to  these  projectiles,  or  projectiles  found  lodged  in  body  cavities,  projectile  injuries  are  more  common  in  males  than  females  overall  (3:1) and tend to affect those between the ages of 18 and 40 years. Victims are relatively uncommon in samples antedating A.D. 600, ranging in frequency from about0 to 5% (Lambert, 1994). Projectile injuries are much more frequent in samples dating between A.D. 580 and 1380 (Lambert, 1994, 1997; Lambert and Walker,1991; Walker and Lambert, 1989), affecting 10% (39/402) of the sample from this time period in frequencies ranging from 0 to 22% for individual sites (Lambert,1994). Although clustering within and among graves is present (Lambert, 1994,pp. 141–147), mass graves are rare, suggesting constant but small-scale forms of engagement that nonetheless resulted in a high death toll over time (Lambert, 1994;see also discussions in Milner, 1999; Milneret al., 1991).” (“The Archaeology of War: A North American Perspective” by Patricia M. Lambert, Pg. 217-218; Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 2002 )

https://courses.washington.edu/war101/readings/Lambert–archy%20of%20N%20Am%20warfare.pdf

###

Why do I bring this up? Two reasons:

(1) It puts to rest the Marxist “Multiculturalist” notion that somehow the aboriginal people of the Americas learned violence from Europeans. (Note that, in the case of the massacre in 1300’s South Dakota, scalping did occur prior to arrival of the white man.)

(2) Cultures can and should be changed. These cultures were objectively inferior to Western culture at the time, to say nothing of Western or “Modern” culture today. Individuals have rights to life and liberty. Cultures that ignore those rights can and should be changed or done away with.

[Note: If you found this blog post of value, please consider a gratuity. Give whatever amount you think the post was worth. (Please do not send me money if you know me off the Internet.) http://deancook.net/donate/]

A Crow Possibly Solving a Problem Like a Human Being

Animal behavior interests me a great deal. I essentially see the human mind as “built on” an underlying “chassis” that reflects our species’ evolutionary development. So, there is a portion of the human brain that can be considered unique, and that makes us human, but there is also a lot of our brain structure that is the same as a chimpanzee’s or other other animal’s brain. This means that by learning something about animal behavior and the animal mind, we can learn something about ourselves.
 #
This video on BBC involves a crow appearing to “solve” a complex-reasoning problem. After watching it, however, I question whether the conclusion that is being drawn is necessarily the correct one.
 #
If the crow has done each of these individual things before to get a food reward, then he may just be doing each task randomly with the expectation of getting a food reward that doesn’t pay off?
 #
The first seven tasks that he has associated with food reward result in nothing this time, but operant conditioning causes him to eventually do the eighth task that results in food reward. In other words, there may not be a mental connection in his mind between doing task 1 and doing task 8, like there would be for a human being.
 #
A question I would like to ask whoever devised this experiment: Did the crow immediately know the correct order of tasks to perform? Even if he’s doing it in the right order from the start, that could be random, because he does the task that he can immediately perform simply because it’s physically available to him, not because he’s reasoning it out. (In which case, this is just a Rube Goldberg machine with a crow as one of its components.) It would seem more likely to suggest complex reasoning if the crow had never done any of the individual tasks before and he was able to figure it out.

What is Proof?

I was recently asked what I consider to be “proof”. This question came up specifically with respect to my blog post on why I am an atheist and not an agnostic.  So what is “proof”?

I hold that the most essential form of proof is observation -that which you can come into contact with by means of your sensory-perceptual mechanism. In other words, “proof” is generally what you can see, hear or touch. (Taste and smell would also count, but these are pretty weak senses for human beings.) There are other types of proof that are possible, but they are related back to observation.  Some things are not directly perceivable, but we know that they do exist because of how they interact with things that we can observe. We can observe the effects on things that we do observe directly, and thereby come to understand something about the imperceptible thing that was the cause.

In the natural sciences, much of what we would call proof involves observing the effects on things we can perceive by things that we cannot perceive, thereby providing evidence about the existence and nature of those imperceptible things. For instance, bacteria were first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, using a single-lens microscope of his own design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#History_of_bacteriology  With bacteria, human beings have been able to use a device with known properties to observe what was previously unobservable. The device was something that used specially shaped glass to amplify light. We knew that when glass was shaped in certain ways, it would make something appear bigger. We then extrapolated that if we bent and shaped this glass and combined it with other bent and shaped glass -other lenses- then it would amplify even smaller things. With sufficiently powerful enough lenses, such a device would eventually amplify the appearance of things that were too small to see with the naked eye. This device was named a microscope, and when Leeuwenhoek looked through it, he saw tiny organisms that were not visible with the naked eye, which were subsequently called “bacteria”.

The atom was discovered thanks to a number of observations made by scientists:
“In the early 1800s, John Dalton used the concept of atoms to explain why elements always react in ratios of small whole numbers (the law of multiple proportions). For instance, there are two types of tin oxide: one is 88.1% tin and 11.9% oxygen and the other is 78.7% tin and 21.3% oxygen (tin(II) oxide and tin dioxide respectively). This means that 100g of tin will combine either with 13.5g or 27g of oxygen. 13.5 and 27 form a ratio of 1:2, a ratio of small whole numbers. This common pattern in chemistry suggested to Dalton that elements react in whole number multiples of discrete units—in other words, atoms.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory

This knowledge was combined with other knowledge such as the phenomena of “Brownian Motion”:

“In 1827, botanist Robert Brown used a microscope to look at dust grains floating in water and discovered that they moved about erratically, a phenomenon that became known as “Brownian motion”. This was thought to be caused by water molecules knocking the grains about.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory

In the case of atoms, it was observed that a certain amount of tin always combined with a certain amount of oxygen in one of two ways, suggesting that whatever the ultimate constituents of tin and oxygen were, they must be discrete units. In other words, they must consist of units that cannot be divided any further -at least if you still wanted to speak of them as “oxygen” and “tin”. This knowledge, combined with other observations, such as Brownian motion, eventually led to the widespread acceptance of the existence of atoms. We inferred the existence of something, the atom, based on things that we could observe with our inborn sensory-perceptual mechanisms (our eyes).

The Theory of Evolution is another example of how we have come to have, at the very least, a theory, that explains our origins. There is no way to directly confirm this theory by direct observation. If it is happening, evolution happens over millions of years, with parents giving rise to slightly different offspring, who then are either more or less successful at survival because of these characteristics. These offspring have more children than those without those characteristics, and this continues on and on, until the resulting organism is so different from the original ancestor that it can no longer even be considered of the same species. This theory is based on things like:
(1) Geological observations that suggest the Earth is billions of years old.
(2) Observing the fact that different members of the same species of organism have different characteristics from each others. (E.G. some people have red hair while others have brown hair.)
(3) Parents are able to pass some of their unique characteristics on to their children. (E.G. blue-eyed parents have blue-eyed children.)
(4) Some of the unique characteristics an organism has can make it more successful at surviving and reproducing than if it didn’t have that characteristic. (E.G. a bacteria might have partial resistance to penicillin, while other members of its species do not, meaning resistant ones will tend to survive and reproduce.)

All of these observations suggest that, given sufficient time, one organism can be the ancestor of organisms that would be considered a completely different species, and that this occurs because of changing environmental conditions.

Proof of things that we didn’t observe by observing other things, and recognizing that there is a relationship, is not limited to the natural sciences. For instance, in a murder trial, all of the evidence that is presented is something that the judge and jurors can observe directly with their eyes and ears. For instance, the prosecution can present finger prints that were lifted from the murder weapon, and explain the chain of custody of the object such that no one had touched the murder weapon since it was discovered at the scene. Or, the prosecution can explain how each gun barrel leaves unique markings on the bullet when it is fired, and that the markings on the bullet found in the victim matches the markings on a bullet fired through the weapon by a ballistics expert.

Witness testimony can also establish other facts for the jury, such as if someone saw the accused walk into the victims house, and then heard a shot ring out. In that case, the jurors are relying on the eye witness’s observations, which are generally going to be believed, unless it can be show that the witness had some bias to lie or some mental problem that makes them unreliable. Even testimony such as someone seeing the victim and the accused in a heated argument a few days prior to the murder can be evidence, based on what we know about human nature. Human beings tend to do things because they have a motive for doing so, and if the accused hated the victim, then that would suggest he might have killed the victim. This recognition of human behavior is also based on observation.

What is the method of relating the things that we observe and then concluding the existence of something that we didn’t observe? The method of logic provides us with guidance in this area. Logic generally takes two forms: the inductive and the deductive. In deductive logic, we mentally place a specific instance into a general category or principle. It is reasoning from the general to the specific. For instance: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. “All men are mortal” is a general category or principle. Socrates is shown to be a specific instance of a man, and therefore everything that is known to be true about all men is true with respect to Socrates, i.e., that Socrates, just like all men, is mortal.

Deduction is a means of coming to have knowledge that doesn’t depend on direct observation of the conclusion, but the conclusion is based on other direct observations. In the case of the Socrates syllogism, you didn’t observe Socrates being born, growing old, and then eventually dying, but you were able to conclude without such direct observation that he is mortal -that Socrates will eventually die. What is the evidence for this?  One such fact is that every other man who is known to have lived eventually died. You then assume that since Socrates is in this category of “men”, that he has the same characteristics as other men, and is therefore mortal.

The above discussion of deduction leads to the other major form of logic. Where did the “all men are mortal” part of the Socrates syllogism come from? This is a complicated subject, and is not even fully agreed on today, but, in general, such knowledge is gained by observing a sufficient number of concrete examples of a thing and then generalizing that all members of that category possess that characteristic. For instance, it is impossible to actually observe all men and see that they are mortal, but you observe enough examples that you can eventually conclude that “all men are mortal.” The problem is that this can lead to generalizations that are erroneous. An example of this is the generalization: “All swans are white.” You observed numerous examples of white swans, and you conclude that they are all white. But, one day, you discover a bird that is morphologically the same as white swans, but it has black feathers. How do you know when you have a valid generalization versus an invalid one? I would like to know the answer to that one myself. In general terms, I think that if you are clear about the nature of the thing, and your purposes when you generalize, then it is possible to come up with valid generalizations. So, in the case of the invalid statement “all swans are white,” if you were clear about what a swan is and also about why the color of swans matters to you, then you probably wouldn’t make such a generalization in the first place. I cannot even think of a situation where it really matters whether swans are black or white. If you regard swans as a food source, then their color makes no difference. If you simply think swans are beautiful and graceful, then I think that belief applies to both colors. For my purposes here, the minutia of valid induction can be put aside. The point is that you generalize, or induce, by observing a sufficient number of examples to reach the generalization. Induction ultimately depends on your observations -on what you can perceive with your senses.

Someone might claim that they have a means of gaining knowledge other than through observation or logical reasoning, but I am aware of no such means. However, if they can provide me with proof, then I am open to hearing what they have to say. I just don’t know how you provide proof without proof, which seems to be what they are claiming.