The weather, we are told, was lovely until we got here. As soon as we arrived, though, a vaporous and malevolent weather-system moved in, and rain poured down continuously until sometime before dawn today. All games were cancelled. (If you have ever wondered what it is like to spend three days in Lake Mary, Florida, in a monsoon, drop me a line, and I will describe the experience for you.)

Today was pleasant enough, though, and there will be basball tonight at last, starting at 7 p.m.

Unfortunately, Nina and I were booked on a flight back to New York at 7:15 p.m., and now we are at the airport in Orlando.

It now turns out that there is a ferocious nor’easter pummeling the New York region, with torrential rain and savage gales. At the moment, though, our flight, according to the departures board, is merely “Delayed”. We shall see.

Remember our piece a while back about the “Monty Hall problem”? Well, reader J. Kapok has now sent along a dispiriting item about the relative mathematical capabilities of people and pigeons. Here.

We’re off again shortly. Back to normal next week.

For tonight: an essay from Mark Alexander on the Second Amendment case now making its way through the Supreme Court. Here.

Also, there is a new website, Alternative Right, that has been attracting a fair amount of attention in the conservative blogosphere. I haven’t had a chance yet to look it over, but here are some discussions of it, over at Mangan’s and at Reflecting Light.

Meanwhile, in a hopeful sign of a long-overdue cultural awakening, the Dutch political party PVV, led by the increasingly popular Geert Wilders, has just won some decisive political victories in Holland — though you’d never hear about it by reading the Times. More than anyone else in Europe right now, Mr. Wilders is, to borrow a favorite phrase of the Left, “speaking truth to power” — and for daring to speak his mind about the existential threat posed to Western Europe by Islam and unchecked immigration, he is under indictment on what amounts, effectively, to a Sharia-charge-by-proxy of blasphemy against the Prophet. The government’s shameful persecution of him may be beginning to backfire, though, as the PVV now seems to be attracting widespread support, and is on the march. Learn more here.

Orrin Hatch wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post yesterday excoriating the democrats for considering this option to pass their health-care package. (You can read it here.) Here’s a wee sample:

This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope. And the havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government and damage the prospects of bipartisanship.

Less than a year ago, the longest-serving member of the Senate, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, said, “I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget ‘reconciliation’ process in 1974, and I am certain that putting health-care reform . . . legislation on a freight train through Congress is an outrage that must be resisted.”

For his trouble, the liberal TV host Rachel Maddow gave Mr. Hatch an earful on her show last night. (You can see it here.) She did not mince words, and said many times, quite without equivocation, that Mr. Hatch was lying. (Not “mistaken”, or “being misleading”, mind you, but lying.) She listed, as evidence of his hypocrisy, all the bills that Mr. Hatch had helped to pass using reconciliation. There were more than a few, although Ms. Maddow seemed not to notice that they were all, arguably, exactly the sort of bills that the reconciliation procedure was intended by its creators to apply to, unlike the one presently at hand.

Apparently the feud has now spilled over into Twitter, if you are interested in following that up. (I’m not.)

So who’s right? Seems to me that both may be overstating the case a little, but my own sympathies are with the conservative opposition, as readers will already know. I realize, of course, that statecraft occasionally requires taking a principled stand in defiance of transient popular passions, but in this case the bill is so bad, the expansion of government so egregious, the tactics so underhanded, and the general sentiment of the polity so willfully disregarded, that I rather find myself hoping that the Democrats attempt this brazen ploy, fail spectacularly, and are gutted at the polls in November.

It would be nice to be able to cite some utterly impartial authority as regards the competing claims made by Mr. Hatch and Ms. Maddow, but so polarizing is this health-care business that disinterested parties are hard to come by. But if you would like to read an in-depth examination of the matter from someone who can speak with “unimpeachable” authority on matters of Congressional procedure, Newt Gingrich — the former Speaker of the House, and himself an enormously polarizing figure — today issued a detailed essay on the matter, peppered with informative links. Have a look here.

It seems clearer and clearer that much of the diversity in the living world is due to little variations in important rules, and to tiny adjustments of powerful control systems. Now a group of researchers at Harvard have advanced our understanding by teasing out, from a study of — what else? — Darwin’s-finch beaks, a powerful mathematical generalization of morphological variation, with only three parameters.

Here.

You can learn more here. (I will also take this opportunity to pre-empt any waggish comments about how handy a jug of this stuff might be on a Friday night.)

This is, of course, what various concerned sorts have been saying all along, although I had for some reason thought that the idea had been shown, generally, to be false. These games are hugely popular, and are the focus of an enormously profitable industry, so you can bet that the usual battle lines, easily predictable and tiresomely familiar, will soon be drawn.

I have no expertise whatsoever to bring to bear here — all I can say, from my own wholly unscientific sampling of the phenomenon, is that I used to play a fair amount of Doom with my son Nick when he was a boy, and he turned out to be as amiable a fellow as you could ever hope to meet.

Whenever there’s a new result in the social sciences, can some new laws be far behind? Indeed, the good professor is already looking forward to some benevolent social engineering:

The researchers conclude that the study has important implications for public policy debates, including development and testing of potential intervention strategies designed to reduce the harmful effects of playing violent video games.

“From a public policy standpoint, it’s time to get off the question of, ‘Are there real and serious effects?’ That’s been answered and answered repeatedly,” Anderson said. “It’s now time to move on to a more constructive question like, ‘How do we make it easier for parents — within the limits of culture, society and law — to provide a healthier childhood for their kids?’”

Ah yes, those pesky limits. Well, in the meantime, Dr. Anderson has some advice for anxious parents:

But Anderson knows it will take time for the creation and implementation of effective new policies. And until then, there is plenty parents can do to protect their kids at home.

“Just like your child’s diet and the foods you have available for them to eat in the house, you should be able to control the content of the video games they have available to play in your home,” he said. “And you should be able to explain to them why certain kinds of games are not allowed in the house — conveying your own values. You should convey the message that one should always be looking for more constructive solutions to disagreements and conflict.”

Geez, I dunno. When a bunch of those Hell Knights pop up out of nowhere, I’m pretty sure I’m still going for my BFG. Let Satan sort ‘em out.

It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are wrong, it shouldn’t matter, because the things they want us to do are for our own good anyway; some hand-waving about the objections lately raised by skeptics, and assurances that the subjects of those objections — which include such things as the CRU scandal, the disappearance of primary data, the unreliability of the latest GISS report due to the removal of many of the reporting stations from the data set, and a great deal more — are negligible trivialities; an insistence on referring to carbon dioxide, which we exhale with every breath, and which Earth’s food-chain depends on for its very existence, as a “pollutant”, including a metaphorical comparison of CO₂ to feces; castigation of the media as pawns of scurrilous corporate and conservative interests for not serving as compliant propaganda outlets; characterization of public skepticism and free debate as “hatred and divisiveness”, and so forth.

But what stood out above all was this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Well, that certainly puts the cards on the table. This is perhaps the clearest expression yet of the liberal worldview as a kind of secular religion, in which, having rejected the prospect of salvation through God, we must instead achieve salvation here below, by becoming Divine ourselves.

Al Gore, then, is the Redeemer. If we will just come to our senses, smite the unbelievers, and place the flaming sword of Justice in his hands, we shall all be saved.

If you had any lingering doubt that this man is a dangerous megalomaniac, this ought to settle the matter.

Meanwhile, the inquiry into the Climate Rearch Unit’s malfeasance continues. Here is the memorandum just presented to Parliament by the independent Institute of Physics.

The sovereign extends his arms over the whole society; he covers its surface with a web of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls are unable to emerge in order to rise above the crowd; it does not break wills but softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces men to act, but constantly opposes itself to men’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it presses down upon men, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and it finally reduces each nation to no longer being anything but a herd of timid and industrious animals, whose shepherd is the government.

I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the exterior forms of liberty.

Now read this.

So for tonight, then, here’s a pungent little rant about the sorry state of my former homeland, from Mark Steyn.

The argument made by both is that if the world is, as secular-humanist types are inclined to suppose, an elaborate causal clockwork and nothing more, then it is inconsistent for us to speak, in any context whatsoever, in normative terms. In their view, if I, a Darwinist, say something like “I really ought to get this sutured up” or “you shouldn’t fire that thing in the house”, I am being dishonest; I am “smuggling” in a teleological stance that is inconsistent with my metaphysics.

What both fail to grasp is that they insist upon a false dichotomy: that teleology either exists in the world absolutely, at the level of metaphysical bedrock, or it doesn’t exist at all. What they cannot, or will not, do is to consider the possibility that purposes can enter the world as an emergent property, or by-product, of living systems. This view is of course unavailable to Mr. Auster, given that the only mechanism yet proposed by which such emergence can occur is the one first described by Darwin — but it should be accessible, I should think, to Dr. Fish.

The problem, really, is definitional: both Auster and Fish will acknowledge that we are obviously motivated by normative dispositions, and will also agree that our artifacts, and indeed even the various parts of the bodies of living things, have purposes. The issue then, is what constitutes a “real” purpose, as opposed to a merely illusory, “smuggled” ascription of purpose. To both men it seems that only a purpose that exists distinctly from, and logically prior to, the purely physical manifestation of the system that acts upon it can be considered genuine. Ultimately any such “real” teleology must either repose, through us, in God, or exist as a brute metaphysical fact — or not exist at all.

But this is a mere convention, a definition, a habit of thought; I think it is what is sometimes called a “frame error”. Why must we accept it? Why insist that purpose must have a grounding, as purpose, prior to the physical systems that instantiate it? Why can it not be an emergent property of systems built out of purposeless components of the world, by purposeless processes, and relevant only to those systems? The objection appears to be that it is just obvious that purposelessness cannot give rise to purpose, that matter cannot give rise to intention. And if we accept that objection, as both Auster and Fish seem to, then indeed we do have only two choices: to deny the existence of all purpose, and to declare any normative assertion a sham and a fraud, or to insist on a transcendent grounding in some metaphysical foundation — either God or brute fact. On this view, when we look at the exquisite “design” of a bird’s wing, we must either say that some intentional artificer brought it into being for the sake of an Aristotelian final cause, or that, despite its many superb optimizations and aerodynamic features, we must not suggest that it is in any sense “for” flying. And because a bird’s wing so obviously is “for” flying, this is often presented, by Auster and others, as a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, and evidence in favor of this or that metaphysics, usually some sort of theism.

But, as others have pointed out (including me: see, for example, here, here, and here), there is another way we can look at this: that there is a process by which systems can arise that bring into existence their own purposes, purposes that exist only at the level of, and within the scope and context of, the systems themselves. I will not rehearse the arguments here; I’m sure they are familiar enough to readers of this website, and I have examined them in more detail in the links above.

So when a phototropic plant inclines itself toward the sun, it is perfectly sensible to say the plant is doing so for the purpose of gathering more light: despite being a purely physical system, as an evolved, living physical system it is a system that has interests. (Note also that it is not at all necessary for the plant to understand, or even be aware of, those interests; forming such representations is a costly, and largely unnecessary, luxury that only a very few living systems can afford.)

Now you may object by saying “No, that isn’t real purpose, that only looks like purpose!” And I will respond by saying that your intuition misleads you: that purpose like this is as real as it gets, and that your intuitive understanding of what “purpose” must be is at the very least arbitrarily restrictive, and misses what is, most likely, the true nature of all the purpose in the living world.

Simply put, living things are special. By virtue of their being the product of a natural engine of design, they are by their very nature purposeful — even though the process that generates them isn’t.

So where does this leave us in terms of normativity? It means that normative statements have no absolutely objective truth-value; they must be considered within a particular scope. In other words, any normative assertion must be evaluated in terms of the aim and purpose of the object of the assertion. Living things have an interest in survival, which requires feeding; therefore it is coherent to say that a hungry snake within range of a mouse “ought” to strike; it must be borne in mind that this “ought” applies only in the context of a snake that has an interest in surviving. It is what we would think we ought to do if we were in the snake’s position, given what we know about snakes, and about hungry animals generally. The snake need not be aware of any of this, or even conscious at all, but we, given the context, can predict the snake’s behavior because we understand what its interests are. We humans are in a far more complex position: we not only have interests, but we can think about our interests, evaluate and modify them in the light of other interests, and so on. But the principle is the same: any normative assertions we make are comprehensible only within the scope of our own aims and interests, which are in turn the emergent product of the processes that brought us into existence, and to our present situation.

I must make clear that all of this still leaves us a long way from anything resembling moral absolutes: as I have written elsewhere, I don’t think there is any such thing. The closest we can come, I think, is to acknowledge that moral systems are conducive to human flourishing in various ways, that we are by nature moral animals who are predisposed to condition our behavior according to such systems, and that we have no reason to reject this part of our nature. (Whether a naturalistic understanding of the non-transcendent nature of our moral intuitions is corrosive to their expression, however, is another question.)

Finally, it appears — surprisingly — that Dr. Fish overlooks the necessary role of emotion in forming normative valuations, and focuses only on the fact that reason alone cannot tell us what we ought to do. But we’ve had enough for tonight, I think.

lich: southern dialectal survival of O.E. lic “body, dead body, corpse,” cognate with O.Fris. lik, Du. lijk, O.H.G. lih, Ger. leiche “dead body,” O.N. lik, Dan. lig, Goth. leik, from P.Gmc. *likow.

Even highly acute minds can shut right down when this topic comes up. Because such diversity would be, for many, an intolerable fact, a common move is to deny the impartiality of the measurement, or — in an even more audacious rejection of reality, and of the evidence of our own experience — to deny that the concept of “intelligence” actually corresponds to anything real in the first place. As an example of this, here’s a column by David Brooks from a few years back. Read it first, and then read this point-by-point demolition of it by Alex B. over at Gene Expression.

As for why there should be such diversity of IQ amongst various groups, various suggestions have been put forward; perhaps the most compelling is the idea, presented with clarity and rigor in Michael Hart’s Understanding Human History, that adaptation to agricultural life in temperate zones — which requires careful planning and technical innovation in order to survive cold winters — creates a selection pressure in the direction of higher intelligence.

Critics of such views often insist that group differences in average intelligence, to the extent that they are real, must be the result of cultural influences: poverty, racism, and so on. There is no doubt whatsoever that these are important factors, that exert a significant influence. What is often overlooked, however, is that biological and cultural evolution are far from separate processes, and that they are often tightly connected.

In his book Apes or Angels?, Cornelius Troost cites the Ashkenazi Jews as a particularly instructive example of this. The Ashkenazis have among the highest IQs of any human population, and the reason appears to be due to a process of cultural pressure that in turn led to selection at the biological level. We read [p. 146];

Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Jason Hardy found that Yiddish-speaking Jews from Germany, France, and Poland were discouraged from any occupations except money-lending and tax collection. These occupations required high intelligence, especially in mathematics. From 800 A.D. to 1700 A.D. they served as the financial experts in these societies. Since they were also a self-contained population reproductively, they were subject to … selection which removed genes detrimental to success in those restricted jobs.

There is no doubt about the superiority of Ashkenazim in IQ. They are 3 percent of the US population but have won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes. They account for half the world’s chess champions. They are 20 percent of the professors at our major universities. The Ashkenazim are greatly overrepresented in the winner’s circle of the esteemed Fields Medal in mathematics.

On IQ tests the Ashkenazim score some 12-15 points above the white mean of 100 in the US. While this difference is impressive, at the upper end of the bell curve one out of 70 Ashenazim score above 145 while only one out of 700 white gentiles do so. About one-fourth of all white Americans above 145 are Ashkenazi Jews.

This is a remarkably salient result, made so in particular by the high reproductive isolation of the Jewish people.* If you had wanted to design an experiment to try to cultivate high intelligence, you could hardly have concocted a better one. And note that although the shaping influence was entirely cultural throughout — restriction of Jews to particular occupations, together with self-imposed reproductive isolation — the effect, after centuries, is now innate: Ashkenazi babies are born smart.

“Well,” you may object, “even if all of this may be true, why bring it up? It serves no purpose but to further divide and stratify an already tense and factious society. There’s nothing you can do with this knowledge, after all, other than to discriminate against people.”

The answer to that is that as matters stand, we do not proceed from an agnostic stance on this topic. We have already staked out a position — that all human groups are necessarily exactly identical as regards cognitive faculties — and it is one that entails enormous costs, in particular with respect to stubborn “achievement gaps” that we insist must be closed no matter how vain the effort, or ruinous the expense. It is increasingly clear, however, that this position appears to be at odds with reality — so the only recourse is either to perform ever-more-painful social and intellectual contortions to defend it (including harsher and harsher censure of those who insist on looking at the facts), or else to do the hard work of accommodating this knowledge in a just and compassionate way, by realizing that the aim of a just society simply ought to be the fair and equal treatment of all, as individuals, under the law: a goal that should in no way require the political suppression of facts, however unwelcome they may be. As Steven Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate, such thinking “elevates sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions.”

Well, it appears that some of my more liberal-minded Park Slope neighbors have already gathered outside with a cauldron of pitch and a bushel of feathers, so that probably ought to be all for now, I think. Somebody’s at the door.

* Note: In the original version of this post, I quoted an erroneous statistic that said the current rate of Jewish intermarriage was 0.5%. This appears, clearly, to have been quite wrong. I apologize for my carelessness.

The tale is told in the Book of Esther, also known as the Megillah. Summing up briefly:

During a feast, a drunken King Ahasuerus [likely Xerxes] commands his wife, Vashti, “to show the people and the princes her beauty” (by dancing naked for them, this is generally interpreted to mean). She refuses. Ahaseurus, wrathful, and concerned as to the precedent this will set, gets rid of her, and there Vashti’s part in the story ends. The king, seeking a new wife, then has an assortment of fair young virgins gathered before him, and selects one named Esther. Esther is in fact a Jew, whose real name is Hadassah; she calls herself Esther so as to conceal her true origin.

Esther’s cousin (and foster father) Mordecai learns that the king’s vizier, Haman (who has a grudge against Moredecai and has learned that he is Jewish) has persuaded the king to issue a decree calling for the extermination of all the Jews. Mordecai tells Esther, and urges her to intercede with the king.

Esther, at a banquet, reveals to Ahasuerus that she is Jewish, and that Haman’s plan will result in her death. The king orders Haman hanged, and while he cannot reverse his decree, he issues another written by Mordecai and Esther, allowing the Jews to defend themselves. They hit back hard, and on the 13th day of Adar they kill 75,000 Persians, including Haman’s ten sons.

The tale is traditionally celebrated with feasting and drinking of wine, to honor Esther’s bravery and the triumph of the Jews over those who would slaughter them. But recent years there has been controversy, from a feminist and pacifist perspective, over whether such celebration is appropriate. In particular, feminists have re-interpreted the story so as to focus on Vashti, who refused to subordinate herself to the king, as its true heroine, and to diminish the role of Esther herself, who, despite her bravery, sought only to influence events through her husband. This is of course a complete inversion of the traditional interpretation of the story; indeed, it makes its heroine a woman who wasn’t even Jewish.

Yesterday I came across an interesting article that examines this revisionist view of the Megillah. Here’s how the author, Abby Wisse Schachter, sees it:

Clearly, it is the very notion of Jewish self-defense, not to mention Jewish vengeance against an anti-Semitic populace, that is so discomfiting to those present-day Jews who like their faith nice and universal and are made especially uncomfortable by unconstrained nationalist sentiment. To the extent that Esther is a specifically Jewish heroine who embraces specifically Jewish nationalism, specifically Jewish self-defense, and specifically Jewish revenge, she is to be held at arm’s length. Meanwhile, the “lovely to look at” non-Jewish woman of whom the Book of Esther says only that she “refused to come” to her husband’s banquet, must be brought from the periphery to the center—less, it would appear, because of her own qualities, which are nonexistent in the text, and more because she is not Esther.

To fit the new role in which she has been cast, Vashti herself must be redesigned, her passivity portrayed as something active, as an act of resistance against maledom. And to continue this perverse revision of the book that bears her name, the active female defender of the Jews who defeats the more powerful male adviser to her husband by using one of the few means of influence a woman in ancient times might have been able to wield is then bizarrely belittled as passive, a mere tool in the hands of her older male relative.

You can read her essay here.

Seriously, this is outstanding. Have a look here.

No longer. Tonight I invite you to contemplate the stupefyingly unlovely Psychrolutes marcidus, known to bathypiscophiles the world over (you know who you are) as the incomparable Blobfish. Here he is:

This cheery little fellow lives in the deep water off Australia and Tasmania. You can see at once that he has a natural buoyancy, but what you probably didn’t know is that he achieves it not as most fish do, with an air bladder, but by virtue of a body made almost entirely of a viscous goo, with a density slightly less than that of water.

Unlike we bitter wretches who moil for gold here above, scratching a meager living from the stony soil, the Blob-fish lives a life of comfort and ease in the inky depths. Lacking, due to his gelatinous constitution, any muscle to speak of, he wallows in place without a care, dining on whatever floats by. Small wonder that he has such a merry twinkle in his eye!

Before we say goodbye, let’s peek in on our little friend one last time, as he waits happily for a tasty snack to drift his way: a juicy little worm, perhaps, or a nice piece of whale poo.

Au revoir, M. Blob-fish! Bon appétit!

I got to know Doug (and even met Sharona!) back in 1981, when I assisted in the mixing of the band’s third album, Round Trip, at Power Station Studios. I never saw him after that, but you get a good sense of what a person is really like during the long and confining process of mixing an album together, and I will say that Doug Fieger was a very likeable fellow indeed. I’m sorry to hear he is gone.

You can read his obituary here.

Certainly a welcome trend, for what it’s worth. Read the article here.