A couple of people have asked me whether I’ll be reviewing Shelby Steele’s new book about race: Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country. I reply that I won’t, and explain why.Because science, that’s why; the science of human nature, now firm enough to tell us without reasonable doubt that there are innate statistical race differences. Behavior, intelligence, personality: everything we have been able to measure about these classes of human traits tells us they are all highly heritable. It follows that localized mostly-inbreeding populations, under selection pressures of different environments, will develop distinctive group profiles on these traits.Black and Hispanic populations aren’t ever going to exhibit the same behavioral profiles as European whites and East Asians, though of course there’ll be lots of individual exceptions and outliers. It’s a fantasy. It would actually violate the laws of biology.Conservatives educated in literature and the humanities cling to the fantasy because they can’t understand the science. That’s too bad, but I’m tired of trying to educate them. I no longer want to engage in any way with race denialism. It’s just ignorant.So no, I won’t be reading Shelby Steele’s book for review, unless someone offers me a large sum of money for the trouble. (I can be reached via Taki’s Magazine.)In future I won’t be reading or listening to any material on race topics that denies the simple reality of group differences. It’s like listening to creationists or flat-earthers.
The quote has a link to Jayman's blog (who is half black, by the way, so can't possibly be accused of racism), which discusses with endless detail and hyperlinked scientific studies the basic assertion that intelligence, personality and behavior is genetic, not based on the environment. The more we learn about this field, the higher the percentage assigned to 'nature' grows, approaching all the way to 100%. 0% is assigned to nurture. Let me repeat that. 0% is assigned to nurture. No one else has any effect on you. Not your peers, not your parents, not your spouses, not your socio-economic-status, nothing. The only percentage not assigned to genetics, pure hereditary nature, is a sort of social scientist dark matter, a completely unknown factor, which mysteriously is neither inherited nor environmental. It is not the result of any shared environment, ie, it isn't due to anyone else's words or actions or any constructed societal level system imposed upon you from outside, and yet you aren't born with it either -- you could call it the soul or free will if you wanted, but most likely it's just a statistical artifact born from insufficiently effective measurements, and if mankind were studied thoroughly and long enough, this mysterious socio-behavioral dark matter would simply vanish into thin air and we'd discover that, in fact, 100% of intelligence, behavior and personality was all fated at birth and due entirely to genetics.
The point is that Jayman, alongside hundreds of other scientists, have exhaustively completed and compiled all the studies one would ever need to come to an honest conclusion about this question. The research is so vast and so overwhelmingly in favor of 'nature' that 'nurture' is left literally with 0% left to brag about. A parent has no visible statistical influence on any important trait in a child's life aside from the genes they imparted to them before a single day of parenting had begun. Adoptive parents have a 0% correlation to their 'children.' That child's criminality, education levels, income levels, IQ, whatever you want to look at, has absolutely nothing to do with how you (or anyone else like a meddlesome teacher or social worker or priest) raise it. Mentors are a worthless waste of time. "It takes a village" is a worthless waste of time. School is a worthless waste of time. Daycare is a worthless waste of time. Everything imaginable is a worthless waste of time. Everyone is fated to succeed or fail at birth and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.
In an era where CRISPR has already perfected germ-line genetic engineering, we can in fact control the fates of our children. We could make them as intelligent, personable, handsome, law-abiding, etc as we wanted. But that has to come via genetic engineering at the very roots of a person's existence, you cannot graft it on to people after the fact. It's like trying to paint spots on a tiger and calling it a cheetah when you're done. There is nothing hopeless or despairing about the point that people's basic nature is resilient and cannot be readily reconfigured like 'soviet man' was envisioned under the communist era. This is actually a good thing, like an old tree that refuses to be broken by wind or rain, whose roots dig deep into the earth and supports itself with a fierce inner strength, unyielding and self-reliant for its own existence. No matter what trauma people go through and no matter how bad the circumstances people are born into, if they've got the right stuff they can rise above all that and still succeed in life. This is an inspiring message that means there's far more karma to the world than one would initially expect.
For the people doomed to failure via bad genes there's all sorts of solutions -- abortion, sterilization, or CRISPR. Go figure, virtually all of these solutions are banned by various ignorant do-gooders, who instead insist on worthless people being born by the billions in the most wretched places in Earth, and then somehow trying to 'fix' them once it's already too late and they're outside of the womb through ceaseless expensive taxpayer funded experiments, all of which end in failure.
The problem is there's nothing interesting left to debate with heritability deniers. They are completely ignorant of all the facts and all the studies, or simply refuse to believe them even after hundreds of studies have been made across hundreds of years by top class scientists using peer reviewed and published standards of utmost validity. What is there to say to such people? Like Derbyshire said, they're no different from flat-earthers or creationists. There could not be a more solid scientific basis for the fact that nature is all powerful and nurture is utterly powerless. The science is in and it is decisive. The Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption study is just one brick in this scientifically erected edifice of indisputable Truth, but even it on its own would have been enough to end all honest debate on this question long ago. The people you're still arguing with, you're still trying to convince, are either too stupid to grasp basic facts or too evil to embrace the light of truth into their lives and into their souls even when they know it to be indisputably true. The only answer to both of these groups is a disdainful dismissal of anything they say or do and absolute contempt. If it were only possible, violence could do away with them all like a broom pushing so much dirt into a dustpan, because that's all they are worth, just a bunch of intellectual garbage that needs to be shuffled away alongside all the other raving lunatics who think up is down or left is right. But seeing as how we're the powerless minority and the lunatics run the asylum, all we can do is insult them with the strongest terms possible and refuse to associate with them or give them even the slightest affirmation of human dignity or respect. Derbyshire has it right when he says it is counterproductive to even debate these issues with the liars and the fools. What's the point of even stooping to their level? They have no facts. No studies. No science. Nothing to base their arguments upon. We have thousands of years of revealed historical fact, hundreds of years of documented scientific studies, brain scans, dna maps, and all rational people on our side. Acting as though they are our equals in a debate is already an indefensible condescension that simply showers undeserved honor on an honorless foe.
If the genetic foundation of human nature were established, two immediate programs could be put into place that would make the world a virtual heaven on Earth -- the basic income and eugenics/CRISPR genetic engineering. If it is no longer your fault that you can't get a job or become a productive citizen in society, because you simply weren't born with the correct personality traits to get ahead in life, no one can hold it against you for being lazy or shiftless or stupid. No one would berate you on your life course and no one would nag you to do better. They would accept you for who you are, with the limits you were born with, and out of pity and mercy see to it that you still could live a dignified and happy life with a basic minimum income all thinking feeling creatures deserve just by existing. This basic minimum income could be extended across the entire planet with ease, and all suffering across the entire benighted globe could end tomorrow. (Remember, the world's per capita GDP is now above $13,000, easily enough to give everyone a first world level life.)
The second program that could immediately be passed upon the realization of nature's importance and nurture's unimportance would be birth licensing. You couldn't just pollute the gene pool by spraying any random mix of sperm and eggs into future generations like peeing in a swimming pool. To have a child, you would need to show society that by doing so you would be improving the average of what we already have, not detracting from it. If the parents show genetic maps that correlate to high IQ, incomes, low criminality, etc, then they're free to have children. The children would be genetically screened for known flaws and aborted if there were any problems. If there were none, they would be allowed to be born and inherit the world. If the parents were of low genetic stock the only way they could get approval to reproduce would be if they agreed to use CRISPR to artificially insert all the useful genes children should have -- beauty, intelligence, law-abidingness, honesty, conscientiousness, empathy, etc -- once CRISPR has given their children a clean bill of health they're free to proceed just like the eugenic couple and given a license of their own for one genetically pure child. Good luck affording this procedure, but that's none of my concern. People do not have the human right to reproduce. The world's resources are limited, your freedoms always end when you start to have an adverse impact on others, and a genetically flawed individual's birth is about the worst impact imaginable on all the rest of the world's inhabitants. Including the worthless person's own life, which will no doubt be miserable from start to finish, like that depressed guy who took himself and 150 other people with him down on a plane. If only eugenics had culled that man from the beginning, he never would have been born, and those 150 other people would still be alive and happy today.
With a basic income taking care of everyone on Earth, and careful screening to take care of the Earth's future, humanity would unfold into a modern and eternal paradise that nothing could ever hurt again. The science is already available. The money is already available. The only thing we're waiting on is these heritability deniers to accept the Truth that all science has put on a table right in front of them. The sin of not accepting the truth of heredity, therefore, is not just some abstract sin against God for not living in a scientifically rational and honest manner. It is literally condemning to misery and ruin billions of people's lives now and in the future. It could well mean the end of the world, as we descend into worse and worse dysgenic generations that muck up the Earth further and further beyond repair. There could be no graver sin than denying people the citizen's dividend or birth licensing, and there could be no flimsier excuse than mindlessly not believing in the power of nature despite the thousands of studies that have revealed it to us over and over again from every imaginable direction.
Anyone who denies heredity at this point should die and burn in hell. The last thing any of us should do is treat our opponents with courtesy, as though they are worthy of human rights or God's grace any longer. They don't merit being congenially debated as though they're our equals anymore. They are evil and all I have to say to them is 'die.'
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