The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, With a New Afterword by Charles Murray

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, With a New Afterword by Charles Murray

Herrnstein Richard J., and Murray Charles, 1994

Chapter 3 : The Economic Pressure to Partition

SPECIFICS SKILLS VERSUS G IN THE MILITARY … What explains how well they performed? For every one of the eighty-nine military schools, the answer was g – Charles Spearman’s general – intelligence. The correlations between g alone and military school grade ranged from an almost unbelievably high .90 for the course for a technical job in avionics repair down to .41 for that for a low-skill job associated with jet engine maintenance. [25] Most of the correlations were above .7. Overall, g accounted for almost 60 percent of the observed variation in school grades in the average military course, once the results were corrected for range restriction (the accompanying note spells out what it means to “account for 60 percent of the observed variation”). [26]

Les conséquences et coûts sociaux de la pornographie

Aujourd’hui plus que jamais, la pornographie est consommée en une quantité de plus en plus grande. La faute à la pornographie en ligne, accessible et anonyme. Les conséquences sociales deviennent une préoccupation. C’est exactement le sujet dont il est question dans le livre de Mary Eberstadt et Mary Anne Layden (2010) intitulé “The Social Costs of Pornography”.

L’ouvrage est un condensé d’études, de témoignages et d’observations faites par des cliniciens et psychologues. Bien que les recherches en ce domaine particulier ne sont pas toujours claires, les auteurs présentent une liste des découvertes dont elles sont presque certaines qu’elles ne souffrent d’aucun doute.

Pamela Paul (p. 13), une journaliste du TIME Magazine est régulièrement citée par les auteurs. Dans son livre “Pornified” (2005), Pamela écrit :

Aujourd’hui, le nombre de gens qui regardent la pornographie est stupéfiant. Les américains louent plus de 800 millions de vidéos et DVDs pornographiques (environ un cinquième de tous les films loués est pornographique), et les 11 000 films porno tournés chaque année dépassent de loin la liste annuelle de 400 de Hollywood. Quatre milliards de dollars par an sont consacrés à la vidéo pornographique aux États-Unis, plus que le football, le baseball et le basketball. Un internaute sur quatre regarde un site pornographique à un mois donné. Les hommes regardent de la pornographie en ligne plus qu’ils ne regardent tout autre sujet. Et 66% des hommes de 18 à 34 ans visitent un site pornographique chaque mois.

Coming Apart, by Charles Murray

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

Charles Murray (2012)

Chapter 2 - The Foundations of the New Upper Class

The Enabler: Wealth

The poor didn’t actually get poorer – the growth of in-kind benefits and earned-income tax credits more than made up the drop in pretax cash income – but they didn’t improve their position much either. ⁵

The Savanna Principle

The Savanna Principle

Satoshi Kanazawa
Manage. Decis. Econ. 25: 41–54 (2004)

PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

For instance, one of the entities that we know for sure did not exist in the EEA is television. The fundamental principles of EP would therefore imply that humans have difficulty recognizing and dealing with TV. This indeed appears to be the case. People who watch certain types of TV shows are more satisfied with their friendships, just like they are if they have more friends or spend more time socializing with them in real life. It appears that the human brain has difficulty distinguishing between real friends and imaginary ones they see on TV, because it did not exist in the EEA (Kanazawa, 2002). It is this fundamental observation, that our brain and its psychological mechanisms are strongly biased to view and respond to the environment as if it were still the EEA, which leads to the Savanna Principle.

It is true, as critics of EP often point out, that the EEA, tens of thousands of years past, is not directly observable. We can make inferences about it, based both on archeological records and ethnography of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, but it is unlikely that we will ever know all the details of the EEA. It is therefore impossible for us to draw all the implications of the above observation for our current social behavior. However, there are certain things about our ancestral life in the EEA that we know reasonably well. We know that our ancestors lived in small bands not exceeding 200 individuals; they did not live in a metropolis where everybody can be anonymous. We know that all communications between people in the EEA were direct and face-to-face; they did not have telephones, computers or even writing that allowed them to communicate without facing each other. It is my suggestion in this paper that these few facts that we know about the EEA are sufficient to use the Savanna Principle to figure out which hypotheses about human behavior are likely to fail and why.

De Gustibus Est Disputandum

De Gustibus Est Disputandum

SATOSHI KANAZAWA, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2001.

Principles of Evolutionary Psychology

Our preference for sweets and fats is an example of an evolved psychological mechanism (Barash 1982:144-47). Throughout most of human evolutionary history, procurement of sufficient calories to sustain our bodies physically was a particularly severe problem of adaptation (survival); malnutrition was a common problem. In this environment, those who had a “taste” for sweets and fats (which have higher calories) were better off physically than those who did not have the same taste. Those who had this taste therefore lived longer, led healthier lives and produced higher-quality offspring than those who didn’t. They in turn passed on their taste to their offspring, over many thousands of generations, until most of us living today have a strong preference for sweets and fats. (See Buss 1995:5-9 for other examples of evolved psychological mechanisms.)

Note that we do not consciously choose or decide to like sweets and fats. We just like them but otherwise don’t know why; sweet and fatty foods just taste good to us. [...]

Social sciences are branches of biology

Social sciences are branches of biology

Satoshi Kanazawa, 2004.

3. Puzzles: wage penalty for motherhood, wage reward for fatherhood (and bigger reward from boys than girls)

In a recent study, Budig and England (2001) find that mothers earn less than non-mothers with similar characteristics. The negative effect of motherhood on wage is greater for married mothers than for unmarried mothers. Their finding is in stark contrast to Lundberg and Rose’s (2000) discovery that fathers earn more than non-fathers with similar characteristics. In other words, there appears to be a wage penalty for motherhood and a wage reward for fatherhood.

Quelle solution pour les inégalités sociales ?

Richard Wilkinson donne une conférence sur les inégalités sociales.

Pression sociale et libre arbitre

La manipulation et les pièges de l’esprit
par Jean-François Lepage

Des choix que nous croyons poser en toute liberté sont en vérité souvent influencés par des contraintes ou des pièges qui nous sont tendus à notre insu. Il arrive même que ces pièges, on se les tende à soi-même…

Precautionary principle : An Evolutionary Perspective

In his 2010 paper, “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent”, Kanazawa stated :

When our ancestors faced some ambiguous situation, such as rustling noises nearby at night or a large fruit falling from a tree branch and hitting them on the head, they could attribute it either to impersonal, inanimate, unintentional forces (wind blowing gently to make the rustling noises among the bushes and leaves, a mature fruit falling by its own weight from the branch by the force of gravity and hitting them on the head purely by accident) or to personal, animate, intentional forces (a predator sneaking up on them to attack, an enemy hiding in the tree branches and throwing fruits at their head).

Given that the situation is inherently ambiguous, our ancestors could have made one of two errors of inference. They could have attributed the events to intentional forces when they are in fact caused by unintentional forces (false-positive or Type I error) or they could have attributed them to unintentional forces when they were in fact caused by intentional forces (false-negative or Type II error). The consequences of Type I errors were that our ancestors became unnecessarily paranoid and looked for predators and enemies where there were none. The consequences of Type II errors were that our ancestors were attacked and killed by predators or enemies when they least suspected an attack. The consequences of committing Type II errors are far more detrimental to survival and reproduction than the consequences of committing Type I errors. Evolution should therefore favor psychological mechanisms which predispose their carriers to commit Type I errors but avoid Type II errors, and thus overinfer (rather than underinfer) intentions and agency behind potentially harmless phenomena caused by inanimate objects. Evolutionarily speaking, it is good to be paranoid, because it might save your life (Haselton and Nettle 2006).

Recent evolutionary psychological theories therefore suggest that evolutionary origin of religious beliefs in supernatural forces may stem from such an innate bias to commit Type I errors rather than Type II errors. The human brain may be biased to perceive intentional forces (the hands of God at work) behind a wide range of natural physical phenomena whose exact causes are unknown. If these theories are correct, then it means that religion and religiosity have an evolutionary origin. It is evolutionarily familiar and natural to believe in God, and evolutionarily novel not to be religious.

Then, if the precautionary principle, so often despised by economists, is evolutionarily familiar, it appears that this attitude is highly beneficial because this will improve our reproductive success. As such, ideology like liberalism is maladaptative; by promoting unnatural attitude, it tends to decrease our reproductive success, unless the relation has been distorted by government’s laws (an example of this is provided by Kanazawa & Savage, 2009, p. 122). This is why liberalism correlates with higher IQ, and this is why high IQ is detrimental. Not surprising if the so-called “racism” correlates with low IQ. Given the precautionary principle, it is natural to distrust strangers. Again, this is because the consequence of Type II errors (thinking that the danger is not there when it is) does not worth the risk.

Why Nobody Seems to Know What Exactly Social Capital is

Why Nobody Seems to Know What Exactly Social Capital is

Satoshi Kanazawa & Joanne Savage, 2009, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology.

Abstract: There is no consensus on what social capital is because there is no widely accepted theory of values. Capital is a resource that helps individuals achieve some goal, so one needs to know what humans seek to achieve before one can define what capital is (social or otherwise). Evolutionary psychology is a strong contender for a general theory of values. From this perspective, social capital is any resource that inheres in relationships between individuals that help them attain reproductive success. An evolutionary psychological perspective on social capital can solve some empirical puzzles: Why women have more kin in their personal networks than men do; why black women are more likely to have children out of wedlock; why social capital often has opposite effects on status attainment of men and women; and why social capital appears to be declining in the US. An evolutionary psychological perspective can tell us what exactly social capital is, why humans are social and social capital is important to them, when and where humans maintain social relationships, and how to measure social capital precisely.