Right Wing Reading Rainbow VIII: The Ten Thousand Year Explosion

Bioessentialist conspiracy theorists be like "I bet the genes are behind this."

If you’ve looked around for any significant period of time, you’ve likely noticed that we humans are not the same. We’re so different that we can spot these differences from a football field away, if not further.

That’s because of genes and recent human evolution.

Evolution doesn't care about your opinion. It doesn't care about your opinions on complexity. Your opinions on "relevant timescales" . Your opinions on fairness. It doesn't care. Evolution plays as hard as it needs to play, all the time, until we are all extinct.

I had a roommate who told me how he had trained himself to thank Allah every time he turned a doorknob. You need to have the same energy for biological essentialism and Darwinian selection. You need to be thanking your genes every time you blink your eyes or start your car.

Your favorite food? Genes. Your music taste? Genes. Your parents hit you as a kid? Genes.

The tree outside, the car you drive to work, the building you work in? Genes, genes, genes.

The sun in the sky? Fine, environment.

But how the sun feels on your skin?

Genes.

Before we step further, I do want to quote Bryan Caplan to the effect that You Don't Have to Raise the Average to Pull Your Weight.

A “burden on society” isn’t someone who produces less than average; it’s someone who consumes more than he produces. The birth of a future janitor is nothing to worry about as long as he’ll be self-supporting and peaceful. The vast majority of janitors are.

If janitors weren’t useful, employers wouldn’t pay them $20,000 for a year of their time. Many think there’s no place for unskilled workers in the high-tech economy of the future, but someone has to do their jobs. When there aren’t enough unskilled workers to wash dishes and collect garbage, skilled workers pick up the slack – and their other talents go to waste. If Bill Gates spent half his time cleaning his own office, making his own meals, and watching his own kids, he’d discover far fewer new ideas to enrich us all.

Moving on.

The Book

The Ten Thousand Year Explosion is a book that absolutely anyone can read if they want to understand Human Bio-Diversity. And once you’ve read it, you can then give it to basically anyone else, assuming you haven’t explicitly primed their defenses against the logical conclusions. You could probably get away with handing it to a coworker if that coworker wasn’t actively seeking to get you in trouble.

Many people have an idea that Humans have somehow stopped evolving now that we are no longer “in nature” but now “in civilization.” Or, if a bit smarter, they acknowledge that evolution is not a thing which “stops” given that humans reproduce, but that the sheer number of humans around, all breeding with each other, and with relatively low mortality rates outside of war, famine, disease, and crime, humans are evolving slowly and convergently.

And of course, evolution stops at the neck!

Not only has there been plenty of time for humans to evolve new traits in the past ten thousand years, but if hominids had been evolving for the past hundred thousand years as quickly as we have been for the past ten thousand, we would be even more distinct from chimpanzees than we already are. Civilization is the most disruptive environmental change on the planet, and the genetic adaptations to it, often in the realm of cognition, have been hard, fast, and unequally distributed.

Follow Up Readings

Other Books About Genes:

• The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Richard Dawkins is your master and the master of your parents. In the modern E-Right High Church Revival, it’s become very popular to counter-signal St. Richard of Nairobi, patron of Genes and Memes. They bombard him with facile non-arguments, mocking him for failing to properly grasp medieval syllogisms so absurd that to articulate them is to refute them. One of the most common non-arguments against Darwinism is that it cannot explain altruism. This is immediately reveals the ignorance of the anti-Darwinist, as providing such an explanation is precisely the thing that made Richard Dawkins famous in the first place. The Selfish Gene is not about a gene for selfishness, which likely would not propagate well, but rather that a gene is selfish, in that it propagates itself at the expense of its own host organism. If my father has a gene that makes him take care of his brothers (with the same gene) even at his own expense, and he passes that gene on to me, and I take care of my brother (with the same genes) at my expense, then it benefits my father, his grandfather before him, and the gene itself to pass on that gene, for however much it may negatively impact me personally. The “take care of your brothers” gene is highly successful, and it can be and clearly has been repurposed to promote care for the extended family of blood, tongue, and soil that makes a nation. The “take care of all sapient entities” gene is barely more successful than the “selfishness” gene.

• Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich. A more empirical version of 10KYE, going through direct evidence of population replacement, admixture, migrations, etc. Where Cochran and Harpending offer a very useful model for understanding how the evolutionary process persists, Reich explains when, where, and how Western hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and Yamnaya steppe herders entered each other’s gene pools. This is the book to read in order to grasp what precisely an Aryan is and how Neanderthal admixture happened. You would be amazed at how many HBD twitter personalities have built their entire brand off of simply having read this book and paraphrased its contents while adding pictures.

• The Son Also Rises, by Gregory Clark. Social status is a heritable quantity. In America, in England, in Sweden, in China, in India. High performing people mate with other high performing people. Or, rather, with the daughters of high performing people, who therefore have the genes of their high performing fathers. Generation on generation, successful families really are smarter, more patient, and more conscientious than the general population, and they are this way because of their genes. And just to make this point starkly clear, I am directly descended from Tiresias Simon Sam.

  

  Lasting 50% longer than the average Haitian president, he completed his full six year term (March 31, 1896 – May 12, 1902) and resigned under his own free will to avoid a constitutional issue. I do believe this makes me what the kids these days call Elite Human Capital.

Other Books about IQ:

• Hive Mind, by Garett Jones. You may remember my article on Nice Things and Why We Can’t Have Them. It’s very individually useful to be intelligent, but within a society, it will do more to affect your relative position than your absolute position. Ashkenazi-level IQ (107) in Haiti (67) is a great way to be a very big fish in a very small pond, but both you and the Haitians would be significantly better off if in absolute terms if you lived in the United States, or literally anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere other than Haiti.

• Why Race Matters, by Michael Levin. Races are real, races are different in intelligence, and they are different in intelligence because of their genes. Levin goes through the data. More importantly, Levin demonstrates that races differ in temperament, also because of their genes. Understanding this is crucial to understanding why groups with similar IQs do not always perform identically. Singaporeans don’t act like Jews, African Americans don’t act like Lebanese. Culture doesn’t fall from the sky, and if you take an infant who does not come from a population selected for authoritarian submission and delayed gratification and place the infant with a family and race that is so selected, that child is going to run into adjustment issues, no matter what his IQ is. Imagine a 138 IQ Haitian-American with a PhD in a social science who nevertheless, like many of his race, manifests aberrant low degrees (relative to the Euro-Aryan mean) of conventionalism, agreeableness, and authoritarian submission, and high degrees of cynicism, projectivity, and stereotypy. He might be prone to what some jokingly refer to “high IQ chimpouts.”

• A People That Shall Dwell Alone, by Kevin MacDonald. 10KYE’s final chapter extensively cites the work of one Dr. Kevin MacDonald in order to explain the precise selective pressures for “How the Jews Got Their Smarts.” What people like to forget about KMac is that his first book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, was actually quite positively reviewed by academics, including if not especially Jewish ones. For reasons that MacDonald himself could likely explain, Jews are actually perfectly willing to entertain novel academic theories about themselves, their history, and their unique place in the world. It was only the second and third books, which applied the sociobiological analysis forward to explain the popularity of Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school and Neoconservatism, that got the big backlash and retroactively invalidated the first. In a development that would be funny if it wasn’t infuriating, people on the HBD-right who either have not read his books or are intent on misrepresenting them assert that his claims in Culture of Critique are wrong because he ignores that Jews simply have high IQs. Even more absurdly, this statistic originally comes from Richard fucking Lynn, author of the equally disreputable book Eugenics: A Reassessment, though Lynn put Ashkenazi IQ at an absurd 110-115 instead of 107. Not only does MacDonald not ignore this but, as we see in 10KYE, all explanations of how and why Jews have high IQs cite MacDonald’s first book, which in turn directly cites Richard Lynn. Just as with Dawkins critics, and so too with people who ignore the fact that the term “The Flynn Effect” was originally coined by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein in The Bell Curve.

  • You’ll notice that the link to Dwell Alone didn’t go to Amazon, but to the HTML archive of the book on the Unz Review. That’s because the book is a genuine banned book and not a fake banned book like 1984 or Animal Farm. While we’re on it, I should redirect your attention to The Myth of American Meritocracy, by Ron Unz (as well as its sequel, American Meritocracy Revisited). I recommended it back in RWRR IV, and I’m going to recommend it again. Jews are smart, and you’re going to hear this a lot as you get into this thing of ours. It is true. You are told it explains things. It doesn’t. Ron Unz demonstrates clearly that Jewish over-representation in the Ivy Leagues, relative even to their share of the High IQ population, cannot be explained by any pattern of curricular or extracurricular achievement. There are more Gentile White Americans with IQs above 120 than there are Jews of any sort on the face of the earth. Affirmative action hurts Asians and Gentile Whites, and not only does it not hurt Jews, but any modifications to affirmative action in college admissions will reduce Black admission before it dares to impact Jewish admission.

And Something Fun

For something fun, I recommend Gun, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, the greatest work of science fiction ever written behind Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.

I’m playing, I’m playing.

Watch Lorenzo’s Oil and then watch Gattaca. Those aren’t books, they’re movies, and the latter was not exactly “fun.” Nevertheless, watching both of those movies in relatively close succession in high school biology had a very profound impact on this author at a very young age. Arguably a traumatic one in the case of the former.

When I hear someone whining to me about abortion as a sin and every child as a special blessing worth having, my mind always and immediately turns to Lorenzo and his family. His father was an economist for the World Bank, his mother fluent in five languages, and they only had one child. Unspeakable genetic opportunity cost from an avoidable dead end. So yeah, my heart hardens to their copes like Rameses (or perhap even more accurately like his father Seti). If you have a problem with that, watch the movie and then come back to me.

Personally, I consider Gattaca to be a utopia, one of the greatest put to film, and any undesirable elements are the result of a load bearing idiocy summarized well by Trevor Lynch:

First, the idea of a caste system between Valids and In-Valids makes no sense. A society that values eugenics values science and objective merit. Such a society would know that among the so-called In-Valids, you would find people of superlative intelligence, health, beauty, creativity, and other excellences, at pretty much the rate that we find them among naturally conceived people today. Thus the idea that In-Valids would be subjected to crass discrimination and oppression is simply an attempt to brand eugenics as an arbitrary, evil form of discrimination.

Let’s look at the case of Vincent. Vincent is apparently highly intelligent, but he is told that he is fit only for manual labor because of — get this — his weak heart. Yes, it is that stupid. In the real world, of course, a highly intelligent young man with a weak heart might be shunted into the precise job that Vincent ended up in: a programmer at the space agency.

The world of Gattaca is an idiocracy, not a meritocracy, eugenics as viewed by the dysgenic.

---

This is the eighth in a series of nine articles on right-wing book recommendations.

The next article will be about religion.

This series will be free for all to read, and I encourage you to share this post and all others in the series.

If you want to be notified of my articles as soon as they are released, you are encouraged to subscribe to this Substack. Thank you.