Ethnic Names and Occupational Success in the Last Era of Mass Migration

"Ethnic" names were (apparently causally) associated with lower earnings among sons of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrants vs. higher earnings among sons of Jewish immigrants, suggesting Jewish ethnic networks contributed to Jewish occupational advancement. Also points out shoddy assumptions behind Fryer/Levitt black names resume studies:

David Agus: inbred retard?

Discussing a recent study (Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations) that found an effect for runs of homozygosity on height and IQ within populations, Greg Cochran notes:

Some retards (British papers) have been spinning this as saying that there are big benefits to mixed-race marriage. Untrue: to avoid lots of ROH (runs of homozygosity), just marry someone who isn’t from the same isolated population as you. We’re talking outside the valley or across the river : intercontinental travel is not necessary. Now there might be a degree of hybrid vigor in some distant crosses (currently unclear) – but likely not enough to compensate for someone coming from a group that has low trait values. Marry a Pygmy and your kids are going to be short. Marry someone from a population whose average IQ is below 90 (much of the world) and your kids will on average be less smart.

CBS medical contributor David Agus (who, wikipedia informs us, "graduated cum laude in molecular biology from Princeton University and received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1991") promotes this misinterpretation of the study in a segment on CBS This Morning:

Do kids from mixed genetic backgrounds have an advantage?

Additionally, although one would hope someone who majored in molecular biology at Princeton and co-founded a personal genomics company would know that any benefits from outcrossing will fully accrue in the first generation, Agus gleefully urges the viewer to imagine how much "taller and smarter" children will be if "people of different backgrounds" continue interbreeding generation after generation.

It's a pretty interesting study that tells us a lot because this is really the first couple generations where people of different backgrounds are having children and if this happens in one, one generation children are 1.2 cm shorter, think of if this continues to happen, so, taller and smarter.

Curiously, Agus, the grandson of a rabbi, married a pre-Connie Chung daughter of Maury Povich. That is, Agus chose to mate with a member of the same rather inbred narrow ethnic group as himself. But I'm sure now that he's aware of this study (confused though he may be about it) and excited about the eugenic prospects of racial mixing, he's urged his own children to marry Africans, with that same gleeful look in his eyes.

It’s Sunday night, and Agus is at Jerusalem’s Mamilla Hotel. He just arrived for the Global Forum, a gathering of 70 of the world’s thinkers hosted by Israel’s National Library, to discuss how the People of the Book can use their ancient lore for contemporary needs.

It was Shimon Peres, the honorary chairman of the event, who convinced Agus to attend. Agus and Peres are friends – though he’s not the nonagenarian’s doctor – and the two meet every six months or so. This time, Agus will be discussing Maimonides at the National Library, from the perspective of what he, Agus, believes.

But first he had to go back and read some of the good doctor’s words. It’s been a long time since Agus studied Maimonides at Philadelphia’s Akiba Hebrew Academy. What he found resonated. [. . .]

Now Agus combines teaching, research and patient work, along with spending a lot of time at places like the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Ideas Festival and TEDMED – TED for the health field. He’s also at the CBS studio at 4 a.m., several mornings per week.

“You get a passion to change things, and I decided I don’t care if I’m uncomfortable on camera,” said Agus, who calls himself an introvert by nature. “I need to be a role model and it’s awkward, but you have to do it, over and over again. I get to talk to four million people every morning on CBS. I can just talk, I can call a spade a spade. I look at my patients losing their lives on a daily basis, so I’ve got nothing to lose.”

[Steve Jobs’ ex-doctor is in, and he’s quoting Maimonides. http://www.timesofisrael.com/steve-jobs-ex-doctor-is-in-and-hes-quoting-maimonides/]

Some left response to latest Gould exposure

Nature editorial urges "caution when it comes to questioning the work of scientists who are no longer with us."

This month sees the latest episode: an assault on the work of US evolutionary biologist and celebrated author Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002. Although the critique leaves the majority of Gould's work unscathed, it carries a special sting because it deconstructs a posthumous attack that Gould launched on nineteenth-century physician Samuel Morton. In a 1978 paper (S. J. Gould Science 200, 503–509; 1978) and in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, Gould argued that Morton's measurements of the cranial capacity of hundreds of skulls from worldwide populations, reported in works published between 1839 and 1849, were unconsciously biased, by what he claimed was the physician's prejudice that caucasians were more intelligent, and therefore would have larger skulls. As Gould was canny enough to realize, a charge of unconscious bias sticks faster in science than one of fraud.

Nature editor isn't seething with indignation at the temerity of Lewis et al., or anything. He just wishes they would have published this paper while Gould was alive. Gould can't be faulted for failing to ever acknowledge or respond to a similar paper published 23 years ago -- eight years before Gould brought out a "revised" edition of Mismeasure of Man -- since that undergraduate effort was a "more modest" one:

Just as important is the readiness of the scientific community to undertake such studies, and to see them through the sometimes difficult publication process. The criticism of Gould was rejected by the journal Current Anthropology, and spent eight months in the review process at PLoS Biology. And although an undergraduate did publish a more modest study scrutinizing Gould in 1988, it is remarkable that it has taken more than 30 years for a research group to check Gould's claims thoroughly. Did Gould's compelling writing and admirable anti-racist motivations help to delay scrutiny of his facts? Quite possibly, and this is regrettable. Although future historians will be happy to scrutinize our most persuasive and celebrated luminaries, today's scientists should not leave the job to them.

Jonathan "reads Madison Grant angrily" Marks takes a slipperier tack:

Gould’s analysis of Morton is widely read, frequently cited, and still commonly assigned in university courses (refs.). Morton has become a canonical example of scientific misconduct...

Let’s pause right there. Who says it’s an example of misconduct at all, much less a canonical one? Gould didn’t; Gould argued that Morton fudged unconsciously. I wrote chapters on “Bogus Science” and on “Scientific Misconduct” in my book, Why I Am Not a Scientist (their Ref. 4), and didn’t mention Gould’s treatment of Morton, and I mentioned Morton himself only in passing, as a phrenologist. (Perhaps unsurprisingly , that interest of Morton’s – the scientific aspects of head bumps – doesn’t get a mention in the new paper.)

So why didn’t I cite it as a canonical example of misconduct? Two reasons: First, Gould himself didn’t think it was; and second, even Gould’s argument for unconscious fudging had been convincingly challenged in a paper published in Current Anthropology 23 years ago (their ref. 14).[. . .]

So I will take away two lessons from this. First, about Stephen Jay Gould. Gould, like everybody else in science, tended to see what he was looking for. That’s a good science studies lesson. Second, about this paper. For the most part, it is paranoid positivist rhetoric mixed with slovenly-argued bombast, and a warmed-over critique of Gould, not a significant new contribution to knowledge. If it were, it might have been publishable in a real journal, like Current Anthropology.

So we have: (1) Gould never accused Morton of "misconduct" (2) no one ever took seriously as an example of bias in science Gould's wholly self-invented fantasy of Morton unconsciously mismeasuring "threateningly large black skulls" (3) everyone knows this aspect of Gould's work was already "convincingly challenged" by the 1988 paper (4) Gould was biased but that just proves Gould was right.

At least we know Marks and Nature editor didn't coordinate their responses.

Of course, the fact that people like Gould frequently seem incapable of or uninterested in scientific objectivity hardly constitutes a convincing argument that people like Morton are similarly handicapped.

Norman Mailer on "WASPs"

A comment at Mangan's reminded me of this quote:

In his book Of a Fire on the Moon, ostensibly about the Apollo 11 moon shot, Norman Mailer was really writing about Wasps (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Or so he indicated during an interview with Leticia Kent, published in the current Vogue. Hymenopterist Mailer, who has called Wasps "the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented and root-destroying people on earth," has moved on to "some mysterious and half-spooky conclusions," notably that "the real mission of the Wasp in history was not, say, to create capitalism, or to disseminate Christianity into backward countries." It was to get the U.S. to the moon.

"The mind of the Wasp bears more resemblance to the laser than the mind of any other ethnic group," said Mailer. "To wit, he can project himself 'extraordinary distances through a narrow path. He's disciplined, stoical, able to become the instrument of his own will, has extraordinary boldness and daring together with a resolute lack of imagination. He's profoundly nihilistic. And this nihilism found its perfect expression in the odyssey to the moon—because we went there without knowing why we went."

Here's Mailer's idea of meaning. For comparison, James Bowery has written:

1) Since the iceages, Euroman was selected as a frontier subspecies to the point he has demonstrated his exceptional potential to bring life to the stars, 2) Euroman, hence the entire family of life, is in danger of extinction because alien influnces have taken over his societies, inhibiting his natural—genetically endowed—expression of his frontierism, turning his powers inward toward the destruction of himself and the planet.

Unfinished documentary on Jewish intellectual movements

Minority Rule would have been the late Byron Jost's second film, after the illegal-immigration documentary The Line in the Sand. About an hour of footage, consisting mostly of interviews with E. Michael Jones, Kevin MacDonald, Joseph Sobran, and others, has been uploaded to youtube. Subject matter includes Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School (continue reading).

David Brooks and "libido for the ugly"

During my life, I've managed to avoid reading more than perhaps a couple thousand of the words David Brooks has published. However, I've recently been reminded (by a column by Brooks, which I also haven't read, save for excerpts in a post by Steve Sailer) of some of them -- a few paragraphs from Bobos in Paradise I once stumbled across on Google Books:

The [New York Times wedding] section was also, predictably, WASPier. About half the couples who were featured in the late fifties were married in an Episcopal ceremony. Today fewer than one in five of the marriages in the Times page are Episcopalian, while around 40 percent are Jewish [. . .] it's pretty clear the trends of the last 40 years have been bad for the Episcopalians and good for the Jews. [. . .]

The section from the late fifties evokes an entire milieu that was then so powerful and is now so dated: the network of men's clubs, country clubs, white-shoe law firms, oak-paneled Wall Street firms, and WASP patriarchs. Everybody has his or her own mental images of the old Protestant Establishment [. . .] The WASPs didn't have total control of the country or anything like it, but they did have the hypnotic magic of prestige. As Richard Rovere wrote in a famous 1962 essay entitled "The American Establishment," "It has very nearly unchallenged power in deciding what is and what is not respectable opinion in this country." [. . .]

Meanwhile, every affluent town in America had its own establishment that aped the manners and attitudes of the national one. There were local clubs where town fathers gathered to exchange ethnic jokes and dine on lamb chops [. . .] The WASP aesthetic sense was generally lamentable--Mencken said Protestant elites had a "libido for the ugly"--and their conversation, by all accounts, did not sparkle with wit and intelligence. [. . .]

Though this elite was nowhere near as restrictive as earlier elites--World War II had exerted its leveling influence--the 1950 establishment was still based on casual anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and a thousand other silent barriers that blocked entry for those without the correct pedigree.

I found the text I've bolded quite ironic, considering that his NYT photo features Brooks -- in a pink shirt and tortoiseshell glasses -- attempting to ape the 1950s northeastern "WASP" aesthetic, with some unique additions of his own -- including garish tie and gap-toothed leer. More importantly, here's what Mencken actually said:

On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind.

This passage comes from a 1927 essay in which Mencken mewls about how ugly he finds "the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county". It's hard to see how Brooks could have mistaken Mencken as commenting on the tastes of "Protestant elites". (Mencken notes "the valley is full of foreigners" -- although he ultimately blames America for its lack of aesthetics.) Brooks evidently consciously misappropriated Mencken's line to add some weight to his anti-WASP sniping.

Moldbug: "Bring back Monarchy so I can live out my dream of becoming a court Jew"

OK, he didn't actually say that. He did say he thinks democracy is "bad for the Jews". In case there was any question about Mencius Moldbug's political priorities:

And there would be a lot more Jews in the world. This is the bottom line on democracy: it's been bad for the Jews. I'm aware that others have other criteria, but this is mine and I like it just fine.

Boasianism as a cult

Gelya Frank. Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 731-745.

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a lively, if sometimes hushed, in-house discourse about American anthropology's Jewish origins and their meaning. The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations have been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline. Jewish histories foreground the roles and deeds of Jews, actually a vety small minority: less than 3 percent of the world and of this nation's population (Schmelz and Della Pergola 1995). From that vantage, the development of American anthropology appears part of Jewish history. This essay brings together strands of these various discourses on Jews in anthropology for a new generation of American anthropologists, especially ones concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism.

The public silence or omission concerning anthropology's Jews is due mainly to the tone of liberal humanism and cosmopolitianism set by founder Franz Boas (1858-1942), himself a Jewish German immigrant, who in 1896 established the nation's first department of an- thropology at Columbia University. There has also been a whitewashing of Jewish ethnicity, reflecting fears of anti-Semitic reactions that could discredit the disci- pline of anthropology and individual anthropologists, either because Jews were considered dangerous due to their presumed racial differences or because they were associated with radical causes. [. . .]

Leslie White, a critic of Boas and a non-Jew, argued that the Boasians gained dominance by exclusionary practices and provocatively termed the Boasians a "cult" (1966:4). White labels Boas's analysis of race "inflexible," based as it is upon Boas's background as a Jew and belief in the ideals of the Revolution of 1848. Reworking statements by Boas's students into a polemic, White writes:

Boas, who was "of Jewish extraction" (Lowie, 1947, p. 310), had been intensely concerned with anti-Semitism since his formative years" (Kluckhohn and Prufer, 1959, p. 10). He wrote voluminously on racial problems, as did some of his prominent students. As I have argued elsewhere (White, 1947a), however, he never got to the heart of the matter. Much of his argument was based upon anthropometry and anatomy, which were largely irrelevant because race prejudice and conflict do not arise from lack of knowledge of facts of this sort.... Boas had virtually a closed mind, if we may trust Kroeber's [1956] judgment on this point. [1966:1S17]

White further charges that Boas had a closed attitude toward American-born scholars who were not Jewish (such as Clark Wissler and Ralph Linton) and tended to criticize or overlook anthropological work done by people who were not in the circle of educated Germans and "Forty-Eighters" (supporters of the liberal and socialist revolutions of 1848). White continues:

Let us have another look at the Boas School, the small, compact group of scholars that were gathered about the leader. The earliest were principally foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Goldenweiser was born in Kiev; Radin in Lodz; Lowie in Vienna, and Sapir in Pomerania. Kroeber's father was born in Cologne, and his mother was AmeIican-born, of Gelman antecedents. All were fluent in the German language. Like Boas, most were of Jewish ancestry. John Sholtz, writing in Reflex: A Jewtsh Magaztne (Vol. 6, p. 9, 1935) has observed that in the one field of anthropology alone, it is interesting to note the dispro- portionate position held by Jewish scientists in this country. Men like Boaz [sic], Golden weiser [sic], Lowie, Radin are easily the leaders in the field." . . . A school by definition tends to be a closed society or group. Kroeber tells of how George A. Dorsey, an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed. [1966:26]

[White, Leslie A.
1947 Review of Franz Boas, Race and Democratic Society. American Journal of Sociology 52:371-373.
1966 The Social Organization of Ethnological Theory. Monograph in Cultural Anthropology. Rice University Studies, 52(4). Houston: William Marsh Rice University]

Ernst Mayr on getting American citizenship

When the war was ended I immediately said again to the naturalisation people "Now I want to have my citizenship," and they delayed it, and - there was several things happened during that time also. For instance, there were two people who were my sponsors. One of the was Professor Schraeder [of the Department of Zoology, Columbia University], whom you know of course, and - because he lived in the same town of Tenafly, and he asked the agents one, one day, he said "Well why don't you let Mayr, lift all these things, restrictions on him, he's as good an American as any of us?" And this agent said "Well, if he was a baker or butcher or some tradesman like that, that's what we would do. But we don't trust these intellectuals." And then, I say something which is the honest truth and it may be held against me when I say it now; my colleague Robert Cushman Murphy went down to the naturalisation office in New York and he complained. This was already 1946 or 1947, several years after the end of the war and said "What is holding it up?" And that office at that time was entirely staffed to the last man by Jewish agents, and one of them said to Murphy "As long as we are here, no God damn German is going to be naturalised." Now, this is an important thing to know because many people in America know that such things happen all over the world, but of course they couldn't happen possibly in America. Well, this has happened in America. I finally had to sue the naturalisation service for citizenship and I came to court case and I had to submit, my wife and I had to submit fifty statements from various American citizens among whom were, I think, seventeen Jewish friends of ours, saying that we were perfectly good material for citizenship and there was no reason to hold it up any longer. And finally we got - we got it in 1950, too late to go to the Upsala Congress and the office, the naturalisation office with these particular agents, urged me to go to Upsala on a German passport, and I said that's all they want in order to stamp again and say "See, he's used the German passport to travel. See, how much of a American citizen he is." And so I couldn't go to the Congress because it might have again jeopardised my becoming an American citizen. I'm glad I had an opportunity now to say all this, I have never said this in public before, but all these facts can be checked in official documents, and we - neither my wife nor I ? My younger brother for instance, when the Nazis came to power was immediately dismissed and put in the army, there wasn't anybody in my family who was a Nazi. I had been fighting with Nazis when I was a student, so there was no justification for this treatment.

[Source: http://www.peoplesarchive.com/browse/movies/3254/en/]

Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany – February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts U.S.), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.