Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, August 22, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats, and National Eat a Peach Day. Although the day is designed to promote the consumption of peaches, it always makes me think of this iconic Allman Brothers album cover from 1972. The album was called “Eat a Peach”:
Wikipedia’s explanation of the title:
At the time the artwork was finalized, Duane Allman was still alive and the title had not been finalized. As a result, the album lacks a title on the cover, which was an unusual approach for bands at the time. Powell later said, “When we showed it to someone at the label, he said, ‘They are so hot right now, we could sell it in a brown paper bag'”. Atlantic initially intended to title the album The Kind We Grow in Dixie, the label of the postcard series Powell had seen in Athens,but the band refused. Trucks suggested they name the album Eat a Peach for Peace, after a quote from Duane Allman. When the writer Ellen Mandel asked him what he was doing to help the revolution, he replied:
I’m hitting a lick for peace—and every time I’m in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace. But you can’t help the revolution, because there’s just evolution. I understand the need for a lot of changes in the country, but I believe that as soon as everybody can just see a little bit better, and get a little hipper to what’s going on, they’re going to change it. Everybody will—not just the young people. Everybody is going to say, ‘Man, this stinks. I cannot tolerate the smell of this thing anymore. Let’s eliminate it and get straight with ourselves.’ I believe if everybody does it for themselves, it’ll take care of itself.
Drummer Butch Trucks considered Allman’s comment a sly reference to the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, one of Allman’s favorite poets. An untrue story persisted for many years after the album’s release that it was named after the truck Allman crashed into, purported to be a peach truck. The album art was later selected by Rolling Stone magazine in 1991 as one of the 100 greatest album covers of all time.
You might be surprised to know that Duane Allman (who died in a motorcycle accident before the album was released) was not just a Georgia redneck rock musician, but liked T. S. Eliot. And you might remember that Eliot’s Prufrock contains these lines:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
To honor Eat a Peach Day, here’s a song from the album, which contains several classics. Duane Allman was dead by the time of this performance, but Dickey Betts and Greg Allman played. Both are now gone as well. (Their recorded version of the blues classic”One Way Out” is here.)
It’s also National Bao Day, National Pecan Torte Day, and World Plant Milk Day. I don’t impugn those who drink oat milk, soy milk, or the like, but I once had a latte with soy milk, which I drank because I lost a bet. I will never have another.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 22 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT argues, probably correctly, that Trump’s declaration of “economic warfare” against Iran means that he doesn’t want to resume military action (article archived here).
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure investors worried about the pressure campaign on Iran on Thursday, declaring that a resumption of “large-scale” fighting was unlikely.
The problem for the Trump administration is that Iran was also listening.
President Trump this week promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran, a “crushing” operation to “cripple” Iran. The U.S. clampdown is formidable, a combination of wartime destruction, a naval blockade and sanctions that have already put the Iranian economy under more pressure than its regime has experienced in decades.
But between the lines of the administration’s threats was a signal that Mr. Bessent made as clear as ever on Thursday: Mr. Trump does not want to go back to war right now. The president is waging an economic campaign against Iran having already spent weeks bombing the country earlier this year, and having stepped back from multiple threats since then to resume the violence.
As a result, experts say, Mr. Trump is stuck in a conflict with limited leverage, a demonstrated vulnerability and an emboldened adversary. Even as Iran reels from shortages and inflation, Mr. Trump is likely to increasingly feel the pressure of the approaching midterm elections in the shadow of an unpopular war and high gas prices. It is a dangerous combination, experts say, that could prompt Iran to sense American weakness and lash out.
“They read him now as not wanting to escalate militarily,” Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for presidents of both parties, said of Iran’s leaders. “That creates an incentive for them to show that they may escalate militarily.”
. . .As a result, experts say, Mr. Trump is stuck in a conflict with limited leverage, a demonstrated vulnerability and an emboldened adversary. Even as Iran reels from shortages and inflation, Mr. Trump is likely to increasingly feel the pressure of the approaching midterm elections in the shadow of an unpopular war and high gas prices. It is a dangerous combination, experts say, that could prompt Iran to sense American weakness and lash out.
“They read him now as not wanting to escalate militarily,” Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for presidents of both parties, said of Iran’s leaders. “That creates an incentive for them to show that they may escalate militarily.”
The way out, according to the article, lies in the U.S. somehow forging an alliance with China, which absorbs most of Iran’s oil. But that’s unlikely. And, worse, an emboldened Iran could start attacking the U.S. and its allies again, which will trigger U.S. military action. The fact is that economic warfare won’t work, and it’s simply ludicrous to think that this kind of pressure will make Iran abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.
t has not been a banner summer for the United States. The country is mired in a war with Iran with no graceful exit opportunities; a new round of tariffs threatens to further disrupt fragile global trade relations; and the domestic economy faces inflation combined with paltry growth. President Donald Trump has not been a positive force for the U.S. this year, and many of his administration’s policies don’t bode well for the future. But by weakening America, Trump may strengthen the rest of the world.
Take military alliances — Trump is forcing U.S. allies to become more self-reliant. The war in Iran was supposed to cement U.S. leadership in the Persian Gulf and hasten the expansion of the Abraham Accords between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Instead, the conflict has put distance between Americaand its regional partners, especially Saudi Arabia. In late July, the Trump administration signed a deal with the kingdom for civilian development of nuclear energy. Then, a day later, the administration said that the deal was actually contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, which it had no immediate intention of doing. Within weeks of the agreement falling apart, Saudi Arabia signed a NATO-like defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan that bypasses the U.S. and makes any agreement with Israel unlikely. Trump’s threat on Monday to bomb Oman if it interferes with negotiations with Iran is even more likely to hurt U.S. standing in the region.
Other countries are also pivoting away from the U.S. as it becomes a more inconsistent ally. Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to annex Greenland have led European nations to rely increasingly on their own defense capabilities and non-U.S. alliances. Although Europe still needs some U.S. support, popular opinion has flipped from seeing the U.S. as a valuable partner to viewing Europe as independent and responsible for its own defense.
Similar trends are evident among Asian nations hoping to counter China’s power. Instead of leaning on American defense, countries such as Japan and the Philippines are looking more to each other and enhancing their military capabilities. While this is not yet sufficient to replace reliance on the U.S., these countries are leagues ahead of where they were even a decade ago. Trump’s decision to reduce U.S. military cooperation with South Korea, citing his “very good” relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, could also accelerate this move away from the U.S.
And, of course, allies are becoming more independent from the U.S. economy. Countries around the world are finding new trading partners and trying to limit their dependence on the dollar as the sole vehicle of international commerce. . .
I’m not so jingoistic about the U.S., but the article largely fails to show how these changes are, in sum, will be better off for the world than if countries remained closer to the U.S. Perhaps that’s true under Trump, but he won’t be President forever, and future administrations will be faced with repairing any damage done by this realignment—if that damage can be repaired.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press (she’s back this week), called “TGIF: Give us your pee.”
→ I love the DSA leadership: Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who’s always going on TV to tell people to stop opening businesses, lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn home that his parents bought for him. I love that. He’s got a degree from Yale, a house from Mom and Dad, and enough hair to do a hipster bun. That’s the 2026 dream, right there. He says things like: “We don’t think that anybody should have the constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.” Which is exactly what you say when your hardworking immigrant father is sweating for those double-digit returns (good for you, Mr. Gordillo, the elder one!). I love this logic, by the way, that the Constitution never says specifically that you should see a big return on your investment, so actually it’s illegal.
Anyway, the elder Gordillo went on the record with the New York Post to confirm the arrangement. He’s proud of his economic success, as he should be. You gotta love humans. We achieve freedom and pleasure of untold scale and then one generation later we get a degree from Yale and decide it totally sucks here, man. If you think Gordillo the Younger is an aberration, I present to you:
→ Arday’s Law: The strange, sad saga of Jason Arday continues. This is the professor who seemed to have lied about his credentials in obvious and silly ways, was accused of extensive plagiarism in his research, and was also hoisted up as the youngest black professor in Cambridge history who also happened to be, according to his boss, “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Okay!
When Jason Arday’s story unraveled, he killed himself. It’s a tragedy. But one we will learn from. I’m sure the academy over there is taking a long, sober look at themselves in the mirror and figuring out how to deal with their complicity in this whole affair so it doesn’t happen again. Just kidding! The British are responding in the only way they know how: censorship. Vast, draconian censorship. A popular petition, supported in a statement from the (formerly) venerable Amnesty International, is calling for a new law—Arday’s Law—to limit how many articles can be written about someone in a defined time period. A joint statement at Amnesty UK’s website called the investigation into Arday a “brutal, racist witch hunt”! The proposal for Arday’s Law reads:
This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame. By doing so, we can ensure that individuals are not subjected to undue public pressure and potential mental anguish caused by excessive media coverage.
JAC: That’s totally insane.
→ University of California refuses to bring back the SAT: The University of California Regents say they need more time to review the SAT and whether it has a place in their admissions process, but won’t consider recommendations until next year. So for now, the school is letting kids in on vibes. The results are predictable.
The statistician Nate Silver put it well this week: “I don’t think elite higher ed is going to become irrelevant but it’s probably tracking to become ~50% less relevant in the new steady state, and that’s probably a good recalibration.” He went on: “Fewer and fewer interesting ideas come out of elite higher ed. Close to totally irrelevant on AI.” It’s sad but true that no one’s Ivy League degrees were worth much after I got mine.
Smart, hardworking people paid for all these fancy buildings and then let a tiny activist cohort fill them with fools. As though the magic-endowed bricks of Berkeley would make a kid who can’t do math suddenly a math genius. The magic dining hall could make anyone a brilliant writer; you just have to get them in there. It’s a sweet idea, isn’t it? I honestly wish it were true. But it’s not. So sorry!
A few weeks after that initial email, Cofnas published a post on Substack under the title “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge,” in which he cast doubt on the academic integrity of Arday. The English academic had been named Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor a few years previously and had since become a minor U.K. media celebrity.
The Substack post showed that Arday’s Ph.D. included numerous passages lifted directly from another thesis and questioned the autistic professor’s claim that he was mute until the age of 11 and once ran 30 marathons in 35 days. Cofnas’s takeaway: Arday was both a fraud and the tip of a woke iceberg. Across Western institutions, he concluded, there are thousands of Jason Ardays, promoted because of what they represent rather than their ability.
The story became a social-media sensation, seized on by the right as an example of the quest for diversity corroding academic integrity and by the left as a racist attempt to hound a successful man because he was Black. The British press went to town with tale after tale, which gradually picked apart Arday’s at times fantastical back story.
. . .Cofnas, speaking from Belgium in one of his first interviews since Arday’s death, said he doesn’t regret publishing his Substack post. But he also said Arday was unfairly hounded by the press and let down by Cambridge University, which overpromoted him and then abandoned him when under scrutiny. Cambridge said it provided Arday with mental-health support, and has launched an investigation into its hiring practices.
“I was part of a series of causes that led to that outcome,” but “you have to be allowed to criticize powerful people,” Cofnas said of Arday and his death. “The British media published 249 articles about Arday in a 22-day period. I published one article, which was 100% factual,” he said.
. . .Cofnas argues that hereditarianism isn’t about skin color per se. He has written that in the U.S., for instance, “rednecks” are likely to have lower IQs than other American whites. He points out that Blacks who migrated to the U.K. on average perform better in school than British whites.
“I think he’s dangerously tactless in a radioactive topic” and “should exercise more caution,” Steven Pinker, author and Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, said of Cofnas’s rhetoric on genetics’ role in intelligence. Pinker said examining potential racial discrepancies in intelligence “could cause harm to African Americans” and lead to discrimination against them. “There’s times in science where the best policy is don’t go there,” he said.
I’ve discussed this with Pinker and am not sure I agree with him. Although I wouldn’t do such research, as it doesn’t interest me, and many people involved in it do seem to be obsessed with the topic (I consider obsession with it to be a red flag for of racism), but the taboo presumes certain outcomes that we just don’t know. (Note that Pinker doesn’t say that the research could cause harm to Caucasians if they’re found to have genetically lower IQs than blacks or Asians.) Finally, as Luana and I argue in our Skeptical Inquirer paper:
It should be clear from this example that the reasons for studying genetic differences between ethnic groups is to boost the success of individuals whose DNA is known, not to rank different groups for one trait or another. But to do this boosting, we must first understand the nature of genetic differences among groups. Many objections to this kind of work vanish when you realize that while the focus is on population-specific DNA segments associated with achievement, the ultimate goal is to help each person do their best.
In our view, then, research on cognition or educational attainment within and between groups should not be demonized, banned, or automatically denied publication, and the data should be publicly available. It goes without saying that scientists should be cautious about such research and vigilant against its misuse or misrepresentation. But in the end, it’s hard to argue with the idea that the more we understand—and that includes genetics—the more success we’ll have with social policies. Indeed, there are good arguments suggesting that stifling research on IQ, or equating this research with racism, will cause more harm than good. After all, political equality should be a moral imperative, not an empirical hypothesis, and ultimately the value of a human being does not and should not depend on their IQ or years of schooling.
A Texas court on Friday slashed a $50 million judgment to $1.5 million against Infowars founder Alex Jones after he falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting was a hoax.
The ruling does not affect a $1.25 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a legal victory for him after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.
Despite the multiple financial judgments against him in Connecticut and Texas, Jones has yet to make any payments as he appeals the amounts and the attempt to liquidate his company.
The unanimous opinion by the Texas Third Court of Appeals found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not show evidence that harassment inflamed by Jones’ hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the state’s $750,000 cap on damages for each plaintiff.
Heslin and Lewis’s 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was among 20 children and six educators killed in the attack in Newtown, Connecticut. The lawsuit and the 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time he was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.
However, on his streaming show Friday, he called the Texas ruling “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment,” and said he will continue to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court to get the remaining damages thrown out.
“I got lawyers who are good constitutional lawyers and they are not backing down,” Jones said.
Mark Bankston, an attorney for Heslin and Lewis in Texas, shrugged off the appeals court ruling as “irrelevant” given that Jones still faces massive financial judgments.
. . .Jones and his company have filed for bankruptcy, and those legal proceedings continue. The satirical website The Onion also moved to take over Jones’ Infowars platforms and turn his bullhorn of conspiracy theories into parody sites.
Jones gave up the Infowars brand in April and moved to a new location, switching his shows to new websites and posting them on his personal X account. The Onion, meanwhile, has set up its own Infowars webpage on its website, running videos of shows parodying Jones.
I can see that the Sandy Hook parents would be so incensed at Jones’s denialism that they’d go for the big bucks, and so far they’ve won. But the chance that Jones will become depauperate is about nil. And, at The Onion, I’ve found an Inforwars page, but it doesn’t amount to much. There’s a Wikipedia page on plans for the retooled site, but it appears to be just getting underway, and I think it will eventionally disappear.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej discuss Latin binomials:
Hili: Who coined that stupid term Homo sapiens? Andrzej: Linnaeus, a Swede. He couldn’t stand being criticized.
Hili: That explains a lot.
In Polish:
Hili: Kto wymyślił to głupie określenie Homo sapiens?
Ja: Linneusz, Szwed, nie znosił krytyki.
Hili: To wiele wyjaśnia.
From several people, more disturbing behavior at Ghent University courtesy of Maarten Boudry. This is hardly an objective investigation; it has a pre-specified end.
This internal email from a tenured professor at Nathan Cofnas’ department shows not only that the “barrage” of complaints about the “negative effects on well-being” was perfectly coordinated, but that it was explicitly encouraged by rector Petra De Sutter herself. If this is… pic.twitter.com/AUwzygmP8y
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was nearly 3 years old, and would have been 85 today had she lived. https://t.co/w3naAWvPd7
Interesting. I thought it was going to end with Cook tripping and falling and ending up with her head in the bucket with the rope wrapped over her hands and feet. These artists have no sense of humour.
A work that made a particular impression on me consisted of well lit, whitewashed, completely empty, connected rooms. I only read about it and would not have paid to see it. But I thought it was a nice idea.
The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art had concrete blocks with radio aerials stuck on top. I didn’t see the point. Nor did I see the point in suitcases with grass growing inside them.
I won’t be at all surprised if Arday’s Law is enacted; it would benefit politicians, too. Just imagine the next Brit pol who’s caught up in the Epstein mess. Too bad, there’s a limit on articles you can right about him.
Lest we be too smug in our transatlanticness, though, there is a proposed law in California (AB 2624) nicknamed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” Shirley, you may remember, is the person who exposed the daycare fraud in Minnesota among other things.
This bill would, commencing October 1, 2027, similarly establish an address confidentiality program for a designated immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer, as defined, who faces threats of violence or harassment from the public because of their affiliation with a designated immigration support services facility. This bill would additionally prohibit a person, business, or association from soliciting, selling, or trading on the internet the personal information or image of a designated immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer with the intent described above. The bill would also, among other things, prohibit a person from posting on the internet the personal information or image of a designated immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer, or other individuals residing at the same home address, with the specific intent that another person imminently use that information to commit a crime involving violence or a threat of violence that is likely to occur against such an individual. The bill would define various terms for these purposes. By imposing new duties on local agencies and creating new crimes, this bill would create a state-mandated local program.
You may remember that Shirley’s initial exposé consisted in going to addresses that were listed as daycares in MN, and showing that they were empty. He then headed to California.
I think it would be impossible to monitor such a law. With hundreds of potential sources over different time periods the job of collation and enforcement would be horrendous.
Readers of this website might be interested to know that the ebook version of “Crick: A Mind in Motion”, written by friend of the site Dr. Matthew Cobb, is currently on sale for US$1.99.
Eat a Peach is a great album. I have it on vinyl—more than one copy—and, of course, it can be streamed easily as well. I haven’t listened to it in a long time. Blue Sky makes me smile.
Agreed. Trump doesn’t want to go back to kinetic warfare. I can only hope that he has bumbled his way into a path to economic victory.
But what will “economic victory” entail? Will Iran come back to the bargaining table? Maybe, but no bargain made with Iran will be of any value. (Haven’t we learned anything in our dealings with them?) Will Iranian citizens rise up against the regime? Will there be a coup? Will the IRGC declare martial law and create a hermit state like North Korea? Will Iran lash out and attack somewhere outside the Middle East in an effort to widen the war? Economic pressure sounds like it might lead to something, but what? As I often ask: How will the cogs fit together? Meaning, how will one thing cause another, and then another, and then the other? We don’t know.
Jessica Cook’s art exhibit would be much improved if she only put some paint into that can she’s spinning. Just saying.
The WSJ has an article this morning saying the political leadership of Iran wants to end the war, but IRGC does not agree. The IRGC seem to be the ones with the guns, and they’re using them to attack shipping in the Strait, in order to obtain control and charge fees.
Like you say, it’s hard to predict what happens next.
The first problem for me with Cofnas, admittedly knowing next to nothing about him or his work beyond what has appeared here and elsewhere online, is: what is IQ, and how is it measured?
Even if one accepts that every person has such a measure as an IQ, some measure of the innate intelligence of that person, how is that IQ to be measured across vastly different populations (different ages, different languages, different environments, etc.) with any sense that the measure is valid across all of them?
Over decades, IQ researchers have put huge efforts into the sort of questions you ask.
First, IQ is not attempting to measure “innate” intelligence, it’s attempting to measure actual intelligence (it’s simply the average performance on different sorts of intelligence tests).
And everyone accepts that such performance changes with age (obviously 15-yr-olds score better than 5-yr-olds) and is affected by upbringing and environment (so a child brought up in today’s West is way better at IQ tests than the same child would be if brought up in a pre-literate culture with no formal schooling).
Despite all of that, the reason that IQ is a useful and valid concept is that it is not that sensitive to how intelligence tests are constructed and not that sensitive to environment and upbringing (presuming we’re talking about the ranges of those typically encountered in developed countries today).
Further, IQ is the single best predictor of a person’s future success (e.g. the measured IQ of a child aged 10 is much better than any other single piece of information about that 10 year old in predicting how much they’ll be earning aged 50, relative to their peers).
Thus, overall, IQ is among the best established and most reliable indicators in the whole of psychology and human behaviour.
Much of the reason why this is so is that IQ (measured intelligence) does seem to be mostly about biology (“innate” intelligence), with environment being a lesser effect.
Thus what affects how well an 18-yr-old (in a Western nation with compulsory schooling) does on maths exams is about 70% to 80% down to biology (largely their set of genes, but also other biological process such as randomness in brain development in the embryo and young child), and only about 15% “shared environment” (environment that siblings living together would share).
This is all pretty well established by things like twin studies and adoption studies.
Many intelligence researchers have spent a great deal of time (and money) in attempts to establish quantitative norms, quantify social influences, etc. One example, from a long time ago on an island far way, was the Hawaii study, in which researchers compared scores across different cultures in Hawaii—a place with a plethora of such cultures. I don’t recall any specific results.
If we decide that human behavior is worth understanding, we cannot escape the conclusion that human intelligence is worth understanding. The idea that it is too dangerous to study is intellectual cowardice. (Just to be clear, I am not criticizing anyone on this forum.) While one can certainly make the argument that IQ tests are flawed and we need better tools (which can be said of a great many measurement tools in a great many fields) delegitimizing study of such an important trait of Homo sapiens because of political attacks comes close to Lysenkoism. Honest work done in good faith by good scientists, and the scientific (as opposed to political) debate that results is how we advance.
I have a similar gripe about the common notion (even expressed above in today’s WEIT) that creative people who love what they do, do it in good faith, and are highly focussed on doing it well, are in addition supposed to be responsible for the uses and misuses of their results by others. There are due-process institutional bodies that are given those responsibilities — grant committees, ethics review committees, etc. Pinker’s “There’s times in science where the best policy is don’t go there” sounds much like Falstaff’s “The better part of valour is discretion.”
Absolutely.
It is possible to study, for example, genetic and environmental influences of intelligence, and state that on your research page on your website. Or you could state that you are interested in racial influences on intelligence. The latter statement is guaranteed to evoke opposition from those who are seeking racism and social justice causes, and that researcher will have a target painted on his/her back. (There will also be opposition from those who sincerely believe that such studies will be used to justify racism, and that latter group includes some serious scientists.)
So..in many ways it depends on how one frames one’s research. Personally, I would say that studying genetic influences on behavior (in any species) is interesting. But race doesn’t interest me much. In any event, as has been noted by a number of people on this site, someone like Cofnas seems to be doing everything that he can to provoke people and get himself fired. (Of course, I think that his firing deligitimized his department and his university. But if he wanted to provoke that firing, he couldn’t do a better job.)
Derek, we don’t need to retreat into the fog of definitional abstractions. Coel points out the reasons why. Moreover, significant mean differences exist among populations both in IQ—whatever it truly is—and the predicted outcomes. Those are facts. What to do about it while treating each person as an individual rather than emblematic of the population mean of their diverse group is the challenge.
As to why the topic is taboo, I won’t retrace the interminable debates about blank-slate ideology, the marshaling of facts for nefarious ends, and so on. There is an additional facet that, in my estimation, might impede rational discussion: the foundations of self-worth among the highly educated elite. Consider, for example, the odd phenomenon in which achievements of the distant past—Rhodes Scholar, Ivy League pedigree, summa cum laude—are regularly invoked by both self (CV) and others and treated as having contemporary relevance. Should we routinely introduce the state-championship high-school football star as such when he is in his sixties?
In a subculture that strongly status-signals about intelligence and its enduring outcomes, anything that threatens intellectual reputation among peers is to be avoided at nearly all cost. This contributes to the herd-like conformity in which educated opinion can quickly coalesce on approved positions across an array of politicized social matters; those who dissent usually do so discreetly.
Correspondingly, those who publicly dissent quite often see their intelligence assailed (and usually their moral worth, too). To be accused of having low intelligence becomes an insult—and we accept that it should be considered as such. But why should it be? Is anyone here insulted when someone correctly suggests they lack athletic prowess? Or musical ability? Or artistic talent? Or social finesse?
We seem to have entangled intelligence with worth as a human being. Few would explicitly avow so, but our behaviors suggest differently. And if we have tied intelligence to self-worth, it is understandable that discussions of group differences in intelligence would provoke moral indignation.
In one of Jordan Peterson’s UoT undergrad lectures (I know, I will have to wash my mouth out later), he asks the question: Would you like your child to have an IQ of 80 or an IQ of 120?
There’s something fishy about the guy playing the Shamisen. He’s playing in the open so where’s the echo coming from? Looks and sounds to me like he’s “miming” to a pre-recorded track.
I had that Eat a Peach album back in the 70s and very much enjoyed it despite being more into classical music and progressive rock at the time. I bought it because I liked so many of the songs from it that I heard on the radio (I gave away my vast collection of vinyl when I moved overseas many years later).
Regarding the IQ heritability controversy, a few years ago Sam Harris debated the issue with Ezra Klein, who ducked, dodged, ignored and weaved on every point Harris made. Harris’s main message was that as studies of genetic influences on behavior progress, we will be forced to confront this issue eventually, so outright opposing research on genes and intelligence is useless.
As for modern “art”, there is a famous art museum in the south of the land of Oz which displayed a rotting animal carcass as “art”!
Interesting. I thought it was going to end with Cook tripping and falling and ending up with her head in the bucket with the rope wrapped over her hands and feet. These artists have no sense of humour.
All I can think is “the floor’s gonna be ruined”.
It must be hell trying to teach modern Art Appreciation to the masses.
A work that made a particular impression on me consisted of well lit, whitewashed, completely empty, connected rooms. I only read about it and would not have paid to see it. But I thought it was a nice idea.
The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art had concrete blocks with radio aerials stuck on top. I didn’t see the point. Nor did I see the point in suitcases with grass growing inside them.
Then there was this: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36391761
Also interesting: that Asian guy sure can play!
But why is he in the water?
I won’t be at all surprised if Arday’s Law is enacted; it would benefit politicians, too. Just imagine the next Brit pol who’s caught up in the Epstein mess. Too bad, there’s a limit on articles you can right about him.
Lest we be too smug in our transatlanticness, though, there is a proposed law in California (AB 2624) nicknamed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” Shirley, you may remember, is the person who exposed the daycare fraud in Minnesota among other things.
The bill says:
You may remember that Shirley’s initial exposé consisted in going to addresses that were listed as daycares in MN, and showing that they were empty. He then headed to California.
I think it would be impossible to monitor such a law. With hundreds of potential sources over different time periods the job of collation and enforcement would be horrendous.
Readers of this website might be interested to know that the ebook version of “Crick: A Mind in Motion”, written by friend of the site Dr. Matthew Cobb, is currently on sale for US$1.99.
Thank you!
Eat a Peach is a great album. I have it on vinyl—more than one copy—and, of course, it can be streamed easily as well. I haven’t listened to it in a long time. Blue Sky makes me smile.
Agreed. Trump doesn’t want to go back to kinetic warfare. I can only hope that he has bumbled his way into a path to economic victory.
But what will “economic victory” entail? Will Iran come back to the bargaining table? Maybe, but no bargain made with Iran will be of any value. (Haven’t we learned anything in our dealings with them?) Will Iranian citizens rise up against the regime? Will there be a coup? Will the IRGC declare martial law and create a hermit state like North Korea? Will Iran lash out and attack somewhere outside the Middle East in an effort to widen the war? Economic pressure sounds like it might lead to something, but what? As I often ask: How will the cogs fit together? Meaning, how will one thing cause another, and then another, and then the other? We don’t know.
Jessica Cook’s art exhibit would be much improved if she only put some paint into that can she’s spinning. Just saying.
The WSJ has an article this morning saying the political leadership of Iran wants to end the war, but IRGC does not agree. The IRGC seem to be the ones with the guns, and they’re using them to attack shipping in the Strait, in order to obtain control and charge fees.
Like you say, it’s hard to predict what happens next.
I watched “award winning artist” Jessica Cook and immediately thought “boy, Cirque du Soleil has simply got to stop having open auditions.”
lol. I thought, “Nice work, if you can get it.” Presumably she gets paid for doing this.
The first problem for me with Cofnas, admittedly knowing next to nothing about him or his work beyond what has appeared here and elsewhere online, is: what is IQ, and how is it measured?
Even if one accepts that every person has such a measure as an IQ, some measure of the innate intelligence of that person, how is that IQ to be measured across vastly different populations (different ages, different languages, different environments, etc.) with any sense that the measure is valid across all of them?
Over decades, IQ researchers have put huge efforts into the sort of questions you ask.
First, IQ is not attempting to measure “innate” intelligence, it’s attempting to measure actual intelligence (it’s simply the average performance on different sorts of intelligence tests).
And everyone accepts that such performance changes with age (obviously 15-yr-olds score better than 5-yr-olds) and is affected by upbringing and environment (so a child brought up in today’s West is way better at IQ tests than the same child would be if brought up in a pre-literate culture with no formal schooling).
Despite all of that, the reason that IQ is a useful and valid concept is that it is not that sensitive to how intelligence tests are constructed and not that sensitive to environment and upbringing (presuming we’re talking about the ranges of those typically encountered in developed countries today).
Further, IQ is the single best predictor of a person’s future success (e.g. the measured IQ of a child aged 10 is much better than any other single piece of information about that 10 year old in predicting how much they’ll be earning aged 50, relative to their peers).
Thus, overall, IQ is among the best established and most reliable indicators in the whole of psychology and human behaviour.
Much of the reason why this is so is that IQ (measured intelligence) does seem to be mostly about biology (“innate” intelligence), with environment being a lesser effect.
Thus what affects how well an 18-yr-old (in a Western nation with compulsory schooling) does on maths exams is about 70% to 80% down to biology (largely their set of genes, but also other biological process such as randomness in brain development in the embryo and young child), and only about 15% “shared environment” (environment that siblings living together would share).
This is all pretty well established by things like twin studies and adoption studies.
Many intelligence researchers have spent a great deal of time (and money) in attempts to establish quantitative norms, quantify social influences, etc. One example, from a long time ago on an island far way, was the Hawaii study, in which researchers compared scores across different cultures in Hawaii—a place with a plethora of such cultures. I don’t recall any specific results.
If we decide that human behavior is worth understanding, we cannot escape the conclusion that human intelligence is worth understanding. The idea that it is too dangerous to study is intellectual cowardice. (Just to be clear, I am not criticizing anyone on this forum.) While one can certainly make the argument that IQ tests are flawed and we need better tools (which can be said of a great many measurement tools in a great many fields) delegitimizing study of such an important trait of Homo sapiens because of political attacks comes close to Lysenkoism. Honest work done in good faith by good scientists, and the scientific (as opposed to political) debate that results is how we advance.
I have a similar gripe about the common notion (even expressed above in today’s WEIT) that creative people who love what they do, do it in good faith, and are highly focussed on doing it well, are in addition supposed to be responsible for the uses and misuses of their results by others. There are due-process institutional bodies that are given those responsibilities — grant committees, ethics review committees, etc. Pinker’s “There’s times in science where the best policy is don’t go there” sounds much like Falstaff’s “The better part of valour is discretion.”
Absolutely.
It is possible to study, for example, genetic and environmental influences of intelligence, and state that on your research page on your website. Or you could state that you are interested in racial influences on intelligence. The latter statement is guaranteed to evoke opposition from those who are seeking racism and social justice causes, and that researcher will have a target painted on his/her back. (There will also be opposition from those who sincerely believe that such studies will be used to justify racism, and that latter group includes some serious scientists.)
So..in many ways it depends on how one frames one’s research. Personally, I would say that studying genetic influences on behavior (in any species) is interesting. But race doesn’t interest me much. In any event, as has been noted by a number of people on this site, someone like Cofnas seems to be doing everything that he can to provoke people and get himself fired. (Of course, I think that his firing deligitimized his department and his university. But if he wanted to provoke that firing, he couldn’t do a better job.)
Derek, we don’t need to retreat into the fog of definitional abstractions. Coel points out the reasons why. Moreover, significant mean differences exist among populations both in IQ—whatever it truly is—and the predicted outcomes. Those are facts. What to do about it while treating each person as an individual rather than emblematic of the population mean of their diverse group is the challenge.
As to why the topic is taboo, I won’t retrace the interminable debates about blank-slate ideology, the marshaling of facts for nefarious ends, and so on. There is an additional facet that, in my estimation, might impede rational discussion: the foundations of self-worth among the highly educated elite. Consider, for example, the odd phenomenon in which achievements of the distant past—Rhodes Scholar, Ivy League pedigree, summa cum laude—are regularly invoked by both self (CV) and others and treated as having contemporary relevance. Should we routinely introduce the state-championship high-school football star as such when he is in his sixties?
In a subculture that strongly status-signals about intelligence and its enduring outcomes, anything that threatens intellectual reputation among peers is to be avoided at nearly all cost. This contributes to the herd-like conformity in which educated opinion can quickly coalesce on approved positions across an array of politicized social matters; those who dissent usually do so discreetly.
Correspondingly, those who publicly dissent quite often see their intelligence assailed (and usually their moral worth, too). To be accused of having low intelligence becomes an insult—and we accept that it should be considered as such. But why should it be? Is anyone here insulted when someone correctly suggests they lack athletic prowess? Or musical ability? Or artistic talent? Or social finesse?
We seem to have entangled intelligence with worth as a human being. Few would explicitly avow so, but our behaviors suggest differently. And if we have tied intelligence to self-worth, it is understandable that discussions of group differences in intelligence would provoke moral indignation.
In one of Jordan Peterson’s UoT undergrad lectures (I know, I will have to wash my mouth out later), he asks the question: Would you like your child to have an IQ of 80 or an IQ of 120?
There’s something fishy about the guy playing the Shamisen. He’s playing in the open so where’s the echo coming from? Looks and sounds to me like he’s “miming” to a pre-recorded track.
Aha! You figured out why he’s in the water! It’s a clue that the performance is fishy.
Mirii Baniri ??
LOL
I had that Eat a Peach album back in the 70s and very much enjoyed it despite being more into classical music and progressive rock at the time. I bought it because I liked so many of the songs from it that I heard on the radio (I gave away my vast collection of vinyl when I moved overseas many years later).
Regarding the IQ heritability controversy, a few years ago Sam Harris debated the issue with Ezra Klein, who ducked, dodged, ignored and weaved on every point Harris made. Harris’s main message was that as studies of genetic influences on behavior progress, we will be forced to confront this issue eventually, so outright opposing research on genes and intelligence is useless.
As for modern “art”, there is a famous art museum in the south of the land of Oz which displayed a rotting animal carcass as “art”!
“but Dickey Betts and Greg Allman played. Both are now gone as well.”
Their keyboardist Chuck Leavell carries on, with the Stones, and when they’re not touring he’s a Georgia tree farmer and author. A very cool guy.
Otherwise, what’s the history on the Shamisen? Ancient or post-1849?
Hili asks “Who coined that stupid term Homo sapiens?”
What about Homo erectus??
Alas, Binga’s Windham Express seems to have shut down a number of years ago. A local radio station carried the story, and there’s also another funny sign: https://wjbq.com/bingas-windham-maine-no-more-after-change-of-hands/