The New Republic is on life support? Good. #TNR is trash

Really, TNR died long ago.

It died when Marty Peretz inflicted his ultra-Zionism, plus his racism, on the journal. That's why, contra this former intern's claim, it's far, far away from "heterodox liberalism." Hell, Vox isn't the first place to halfway note that, as I blogged a few years back. Well, if you're on the Council for Foreign Relations, it's probably flat-out liberalism.

And, Mr. Greenberg, if it's impolite for me to email you calling Marty Peretz a racist? If you'd had a Twitter account, I would have done it more publicly, so consider yourself lucky.

And, if I had wanted to be impolite, I would have called Peretz a fucking racist, not just a racist.

Besides, The Nation publicly called you out. So did Gawker (insert irony, since new TNR owner Chris Hughes wants a new Gawker or something), but with more snark.

But, back to TNR's nearly 40 years of history being owned by ... a racist.

Instead, it had a nearly 40-year history of racism, racism fueled in part by a particular version of ultra-Zionism that is part of why some blacks have long been less than fully trusting of all Jews. Sorry, but I went there.

And, for Jews, especially with some degree of Zionism, to stay on, and to stay on not just through Peretz's craptacular management in general, but his racism, well ... it's no wonder that a lot of black journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates feel little sadness for your loss.

Hell, I wouldn't blame them if they had a shade or two of schadenfreude. It would be well-deserved.

That said, back to the racism.

It's racism that was only further fueled when Andrew Sullivan (anybody calls him a liberal, I'll kick you in the nads) devoted a full issue of the magazine to singing a paean to Charles Murray's and Richard Herrnstein's love song to racialism, "The Bell Curve," a move that inspired my bit of Photoshopping at left. And a bit of punditry about that Photoshopping.

Dylan Byars at Politico has the inside-the-Beltway mourning for the mag, which is cutting its print issues in half, looking to go digital first, and ... moving to New York!

Quelle horreur!

In reality? TNR was a training ground for some neoliberals, and even more a lot of neoconservatives.

You know, the type that, at various levels of alleged liberalism, worked to give Shrub Bush pseudointellectual, pseudoliberal "cover" for invading Iraq.

Yes, since Peretz finally let go of the paper, it's gotten better on not being racist. But, the inside-the-Beltway thinking otherwise? From the occasional articles I've grokked online, little has changed there.

For those who claim TNR wasn't racist, an old cover.
Via Ta-Nehesi Coates' Twitter feed.

Who, outside the Beltway, would mourn that, or call it "heterodox liberalism"? Speaking of, I wonder how national Democrats will pontificate. Or national bloggers? Why am I not surprised that Josh Marshall called TNR, Peretz version, "really good"?

Additional serious points about its current status.

The Daily Beast nails one other angle.

Current owner Chris Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook. He's been a partner in Gawker.

You can form some idea of what the new TNR is going to look like just from that.

Clickbait articles. Political gossip. Political picture. A bit gussied up, still. Commentary to hold that together.

In other words, a kinder, gentler version of the UK's clickbait newspaper, The Daily Mail.

On the other hand, for the Dylan Byars types and beyond? Some people at TNR, and probably starting with Leon Wieseltier, probably did need some kicking around.

As for what this does, or does not, say about #JournalismIsDying, political/opinion mags have been money-losers for decades. Ask National Review and The Nation. Rich benefactors is the only way they stay afloat.

Chris Hughes will either become a rich benefactor, or his Facebooky click-bait model will fail without his wallet, and he'll move on. If we're lucky, Hughes will screw up enough to kill it.

That said, said failure will be blamed on anything and everything else but neoliberalism, and Net 2.0 related items.

===

Corey Robin has some interesting thoughts. While acknowledging that TNR was racist and warmongering, he says that's not what's caused its semi-demise. Rather, in what's probably going to be infuriating to Sully of my Photoshopping, down through the sacked Franklin Foer and everybody who quit in sympathy this week, Robin said that it ran out of intellectual steam.

I would modify that. I'd say that it was rather that its intellectual steam got adopted by so much of the modern GOP, as well as neoliberal Democrats, that its one big idea became an inside-the-Beltway commonplace.

If you really believe faces evolved to absorb punches

I'm sure a number of my science minded friends saw the story last week about two University of Utah professors who claim, in the worst Pop Ev Psych idea since Randy Thornill claimed that rape was evolutionarily adaptive, that australopithecine faces evolved their heavy brow ridges to better absorb punches. (Here's a good, straight-up takedown by  Brian Switek.)

First, given the last prior stupidity to come out of the University of Utah, my first counterargument is that, in that case, our eyes evolved to see the certainty of room-temperature cold fusion.

Second, instead of pressures for intelligence, did Australopithecine brains start getting bigger to act as shock absorbers for their faces that allegedly evolved to absorb punches better?  Ergo, our neocortex is then that word that Pop Ev Psychers hate ... a SPANDREL!

So, I should thank my Australopithecine ancestry and lucky stars that a crude version of self-protection made me brilliant!

Third, does this explain the stereotypical beetle-browed look of modern violent criminals? Does it especially explain modern black criminality? Yes, I went there. Obviously, they kept the brow ridges that enlightened Caucasians lost when they moved out of Africa. And, of course, racialists like to take Pop Ev Psych just one step further.

Fourth, per a Tweet from Massimo Pigliucci, if you believe this trait extended unto modern homo sapiens, have you done rigorous testing on modern homo sapiens? Like, er, yourselves? No fair volunteering your fists for an old claim that the human hand evolved to punch. We're just talking about faces, so your volunteerism in the name of scientific research will be limited to that. I can work on finding volunteer fists for the other end  of the test myself. Maybe I'll start with some of those stereotypical beetle-browed African types, you know?

And, per my "second," above, the smarter you are on a good old IQ test, that means the better your brain is as a shock absorber, theoretically. In turn, that means your face must be punched harder and more often to test this extension of your theory.

We do know, or "know," per Steve Pinker, that we were Hobbesian brutes until recently, after all. So, surely, this arms race increased until some benighted, presumably Caucasian turning point.

One of the more laughable defenses of the pair I found was from someone on Facebook who claimed this didn't involved psychology. Really? Alleged increases in violence don't involve psychology? And, they don't involve evolutionary psychology when tied to claims about evolutionary biology? And, they don't involve Pop Ev Psych when stupidly tied together?

Alex, I'll take "Totally wrong British Facebook commenters" for $1,000, please!

I have to disagree with Massimo Pigliucci: a public intellectual misstep?

And, regular readers of this blog, or viewers of my comments on Google+, will probably be surprised. And they should be.

Oh, sure, we have some differences of opinion on what free will may or may not be. But, those are fairly nuanced positions on an issue where there's little certain knowledge at all.

Rather, I'm disagreeing a bit more substantially with ideas behind his latest post, On the Biology of Race.

Obviously, this can be an explosive issue. I certainly agree with the thumping he gives to Nicholas Wade's new book. He does acknowledge that Wade does give credence (if Wade isn't just using a rhetorical gambit; I've not yet read the book) to Hume's is/ought distinction.

But, trying to redefine the word "race"? No.

Massimo first notes this:

“Race” is a rather fuzzy concept in biology to begin with, even outside of the human case. More often than not, however, in biology a race is a subspecies, or incipient species

So far, so good.

But, then, we have at best, a stumble, at second best, a wrong turning, and at third best, a violation of at least the spirit of the Tractatus-era Wittgenstein and his famous quote, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Here's that wrong turning.

If human races are not subspecies, is there any scientifically meaningful way to recover the concept of “race” as it applies to our species, and how does this square with the “folk” concept of species (i.e., with talk of “blacks, Caucasians, Asians,” and so forth)?

Jonathan Kaplan and I (first reference mentioned in [6]) think there is. We suggested that human races are really what biologists call “ecotypes” [11], geographically distinct populations that have evolved some special way of adapting to their local environment.

I'm not disagreeing with him as a biologist. I have no academic standing to do so. And, I have no doubt the word "race" can be defined as an "ectype," as he does.

The real question is, Should it be?

In other words, should be be using the word "race" at all?

I say no, firmly so.

We've at least gotten past "race" used for a cultural grouping from one country, like "the English race" or the "British race," etc., that was common out of the mouth of a Teddy Roosevelt or a young Winston Churchill. It's time to take the next step, and, as much as possible, stop using "race" for people of different skin tones.

Unfortunately, Massimo focuses his ecotypes for human races exactly on generalized, or overgeneralized, or even stereotypical, racial characteristics:

The idea, then, is that certain superficial physical characteristics in humans — chiefly, but not exclusively, skin and eye color — did evolve genetically, likely in response to natural selection for adaptation to certain types of environments, most obviously dark skin to protect people from high levels of UV radiation, and light skin to minimize inability to synthesize vitamin D in places where high incidence of sunlight is not the most pressing problem.

Eye color may be a spandrel, or, at least, co-evolved.

Skin color? H. sapiens arctus could have evolved a different mechanism for Vitamin D needs, like more efficient obtaining of it from food sources. After all, Andeans and Himalayans have evolved different mechanisms for living at high altitude. And, Southeast Asians have evolved a rough parallel to West Africans' sickle-cell defense against malaria.

And, on skin tone, many East Asians, even ones at more northerly latitudes, are of slightly to moderately darker skin than many Europeans.

That said, he goes on to acknowledge some of this.

For instance, light skin evolved following different genetic pathways in Western and Eastern Eurasian populations. Moreover, although South Asian populations retained the ancestral dark pigmentation, its genetic modulation appears to be very different from that of, say, West African populations.

Fair enough? Well, maybe, maybe not. It's only a partial acknowledgement, not a full one. Nor is it an acknowledgement that by focusing on skin tone, Massimo's barking up the wrong ecotype tree.

Docgee in comments speaks for me here:

If you already have a perfectly good term, i.e., “ecotype,” then what’s the point of tacking “race” onto it? You admit that your definition has little in common with the “folk” definition, which is in fact very different. So what is there that’s so attractive about “race” that you feel the need to revive (and redefine) the term at all? Since most people feel they already know what “race” means, using it as an alternative to “ecotype” will only lead to confusion. And in the process, encourage the many racists among us.

Moreover, when you actually study the literature of population genetics you’ll see that there is no such thing as a human “ecotype” either. At least not in any sense remotely comparable to race. What “race” are the Ainu of Japan, who are phenotypically “caucasian”? What race are the Andaman Islanders, who look “just like” African Pygmies, but are much closer genetically to Asians. What “race” are American “blacks,” many of whom are primarily of European or British descent, yet simply look “negroid” to your typical American.

Exactly. While Massimo again gives a nod to a narrow focus on ecotypes:

As we have seen, insofar as biologically meaningful races are conceptualized as populations more like ecotypes than like incipient species, many of the arguments purporting to show that there are no human races miss their mark.

He still doesn't discuss why skin tone, contra a Docgee, should be the starting point for defining, or defining into existence, human ecotypes.

So, I correct myself. As a layperson, I'm not disagreeing with his knowledge of biology, I'm disagreeing with the way he's constructing definitions.

So, let's say that this is a philosophical disagreement. It's about philosophy of language, and since it's about said branch of philosophy in the use of science, it's a philosophy of science disagreement of sorts.

But, it's more than that.

Massimo stresses the value of public intellectuals, and that's the ultimate grounds of my disagreement. I think, again with Docgee having taken the words out of my mouth, that he is indeed erring as a public intellectual.

Two paragraphs above the last one, he says:

The upshot is that when people think of “blacks” as a race, they are not actually picking a scientifically coherent unit, only one that is defined by a mishmash of small and superficial set of biological traits (skin color etc.) and a convoluted cultural history.

Followed by this in the same paragraph of the "as we have seen" quote:

But again, biology provides no support for the very strong, essentialist-style conception of ‘race’ that has, both historically and at present, underwritten racism (of both the individual and institutional varieties), and indeed, biology reveals that the assumptions underlying such a conception of race are false.

So, why still use the word "race"?

I think Massimo is missing the boat on a branch of evolutionary biology that we both agree is often overblown. However, it is a branch that, with both the word "pop" and the idea of it removed, does have some legitimate contributions.

I'm talking about evolutionary psychology.

Xenophobia is an evolutionarily-guided human trait. The idea of the "outgroup" is deeply rooted.

And, skin color, when people from different parts of the world are thrown into close proximity, especially in larger numbers, is a mentally easy way to distinguish "outgroups."

And, those outgroups have been labeled with the word "race." Even as "we" know that there's no connection between skin tone and other heritable characteristics, people with PhDs still claim there are such connections.

Like Phillipe Rushton. Or, without a PhD, Steve Sailer, referenced as an expert by a Jamaican native, JayMan, who says he is of part African ancestry, here.

Massimo, if dipping into the waters of evolutionary psychology is too much, this might actually be a good time for a quaff of Dan Dennett and his observations about folk psychology. You use the word "folk" yourself, but don't seem to see this as an "aha" moment.

So, no, Massimo.

Because, pace Wittgenstein above and the later linguistic Wittgenstein, to speak of a term loaded with baggage that has sociological and political science connotations, is to speak of a word that, in the public square can't be so easily redefined, and certainly not unilaterally so. (The repeated comments of JayMan, complete with references to posts from his blog, to which I shall not link, are proof positive of this.) And, since political science, in a case like this might even connect to political philosophy, we're definitely back in public intellectual territory.

To riff on John Roberts, the way to stop talking about "race" is to stop talking about "race." Except when necessary to refute the traditional "folk" concept.

Period and end of story.

To try to redefine the word, still using biological concepts, still leaves the door open for the racialist Sailers of the world to commit deliberate bull's-eye fallacies by defining "ecotypes" the way they want to.

Per that later Wittgenstein, and ordinary language philosophy, simply deny that "race" as understood in common language has biological standing.

Amy Chua enters Jenny McCarthy Hall of Infamy

Per the History News Network, her new book, which I had heard about on NPR, is utter quackery, a mix of Social Darwinism and blatant racial stereotypes. Hence my header.

A Tweet on that page gives you the snark to justify that header:

Tiger Mom: Some races are just better http://t.co/qx1ZQZZoir - Dear Amy Chua & Jed Rubenfeld, the 1920s called and want their theories back

How so?

Here's a bit longer version, including about her racialist claims:

The author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which celebrated the superiority of Chinese American parenting styles, is set to publish a follow-up book in February. Co-authored with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America appears to be more of the same, expanding her cultural determinist argument, which imagined Chinese parenting as both superior and a pathway to inevitable success, to now include seven more groups (Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Iranian, Lebanese-Americans, Nigerian, Cuban exiles, and Mormons), whose success is attributable to their possessing the requisite values and cultural attributes. The selected groups, all of whom are immigrant groups, the selective grouping (only Cuban exiles; Lebanese-American but Nigerians), the lack of intersectional analysis, not too mention the dehistoricizing, reveals a flawed premise at its face.

Yeah, the idea that a certain group of exiles became geniuses for and upon leaving Cuba, the idea that Nigerian immigrants to the US are somehow smarter than other modern African immigrants, the idea that Lebanese-Americans are brilliant compared to Syrian-Americans? All wrong. (By the way, Amy, a century ago, racialists such as Charles Davenport thought Ashkenazi Jews were idiots.) 

And, more on the idea that Lebanese immigrants magically outperform Syrian ones? That Nigerian immigrants outperform others from Africa? She ignores an obvious discriminatory element: Most the Nigerian and Lebanese immigrants are Christian, the others Muslim.

Her own people were the subject of racial stereotypes in the U.S. 150 years ago, too. Indeed, in American, per James W. Loewen's detailed book, "Sundown Towns," the first sundown town in the U.S. was anti-Chinese, Rock Springs, Wyo., in 1868, and not anti-black.

Anyway, given the pull quotes above, you don't need to read the book unless you're really desperate for a healthy dose of pure-on pseudoscience. (That said, given Skeptic magazine's past history with genetic-based racialists Vince Sarich and Frank Miele, I'm curious what sort of review Michael Shermer's gang gives to the book.)

Also more seriously? Yes, Chua is Chinese and not Japanese, but some of the Japanese-American critiques from within its own culture as well as outside of the "model minority" trope should give her pause, one would think,

One other observation? Given that Chua is a professor at Harvard, this once again illustrates that the only guaranteed return from a Harvard education on a resume is an easy entree into the lifestyles of the elite. Her book on hyperpowers, as she calls them, claiming tolerance for minorities was the reason for their success, also seems thin soup.

Finally, per the header? If we can have annual Darwin Awards, we can have a Jenny McCarthy Hall of Infamy for pseudoscience whoppers. Last I checked, things like sociology and cultural anthropology were sciences of some sort.

Racialism at Heritage, suckitude at Hahvard

People following politics and think tanks closely have heard of Jason Richwine, until earlier this week employed by the Heritage Foundation, and his claim, in his PhD dissertation, that Hispanics are dumber than whites and condemned to stay that way.

Sounds like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, doesn't it?

Well, per The Nation, Richwine is a fanboy of them and their racialist ideas.

But that's a secondary issue.

Secondary, in a sense, to the issue of how such craptacular writing got approved by a Harvard dissertation committee.

Here's how:

The dissertation was approved, as all dissertations are, by a committee of three. The chair was George Borjas, an conservative economist who writes about immigration for  National Reviewand The Wall Street Journal. Borjas told Slate’s David Weigel, “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don't really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc.… In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I've long believed this, I don't find the IQ academic work all that interesting.”—not exactly an endorsement of the dissertation.

The second person on the committee was Richard Zeckhauser. He studies investing, not immigration, and his Harvard faculty website describes him as “a senior principal at Equity Resource Investments (ERI), a special situations real estate firm.” He told Wiegel that “Jason’s empirical work was careful,” but that he was “too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.”

The third member of the committee is the big surprise, and the big problem: Christopher Jencks, for decades a leading figure among liberals who did serious research on inequality—a contributor to The New York Review of Books, the author of important books, including Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?, The Homeless and The Black White Test Score Gap. Christopher Jencks knows exactly what’s wrong with the studies purporting to link “race” with “IQ.”

OK, so one of the three admits that he knows nothing about IQ research in this issue, and that he finds the question boring. And, while he may write about immigration, that doesn't mean he knows anything academic about it. The second admits Richwine overstretched, while also indicating he doesn't study either immigration or IQ. 

And the third is an alleged librul who clearly knows what racialism is.And refused to answer questions from The Nation about why he signed off on this shite.

Jencks, unlike the other two profs, also refused to answer Slate's questions, apparently. Slate shows that Richwine's in thick with the racialists, like Steve Sailer. 

Meanwhile, proof again that a Hahvard education is worth no more than that at State U., other than the right name on a resume. And, proof again that, despite the lies of both conservatives and neoliberals, class issues, and class divisions, are alive and well in America. And, add the names of a coward, a coward-lite and a hypocrite to those of Larry Summers and Niall Ferguson as among the teaching excellence at Hahvard, eh?

And, assuming Jencks isn't a traitor to previous political stances, why did he sign off on this? Pure laziness? Overwhelmed with too many theses to read? Again, neither one bodes well for the actual educational value of a Hahvard "education." Ditto on the failure to man up and answer the media.

And, in an interesting sidebar, I'll bet you didn't know Steve Pinker had this many toes dipped in the racialist cesspool. Still, should it surprise you? No.

Pop Ev Psych and sexism

Legitimate evolutionary psychology, as it has developed, has enough problem with scientific rigor, especially on gender issues. That all starts with its idea of an environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, or EEA. (Scratch that; I think ALL ev psych, even with the bathwater thrown out, is borderline pseudoscientific.)

Ev Psych "conveniently" postulates a long history of Homo sapiens as hunter-gatherers, with noble, brawny males battling to hunt down big game while dutiful demure women gathered up tubers, roots and herbs.

However, early in H. sapiens' history, and going back to our Homo erectus predecessors, we were scavenger-gatherers long before, and for many millennia before, become hunter gatherers. Nothing "noble" about it. Nothing particular androcentric about it, either. 

Of course, that's actually three scientific problems, or more.

• Getting human development wrong by ignoring scavenger-gathererers;
• Trying to artificially constrain the "evolutionary" part by limiting it to homo sapiens;
• Either accidentally or willfully putting Nos 1 and 2 in the service of sexist conclusions.  

That said, as someone who accepts the neo-Darwinian findings of evolution by natural selection, I don't argue with the baseline idea, that as hominids, including but not limited to H. sapiens, evolved, so did the minds expressed by their brains in interaction with their external environments.

I do object to the things above.

Beyond that, I object to:

• Making unfalsifiable statements, especially ones we may NEVER be able to falsify. And, given that brains generally don't fossilize, that covers a lot of territory.
• Telling "just-so" stories, for which Steve Gould, especially, criticized evolutionary psychologists. 

Pop Evolutionary Psychology is to legitimate ev psych (to the degree it's becoming more legit) as Dan Dennett's idea of folk psychology is to legitimate psychology (to the degree psychology is becoming more legit scientifically). And, in going beyond the first three issues with much of ev pscyh, Pop Ev Psychers seem determined to be egregious about the second set of bullet points.

(Note: This post was inspired, originally, and developed from, one I did about sexual objectification among Pop Ev Psychers and nth-wave feminists alike. And, yes, feminists can be sexists, just like blacks or other populations can be racists.)

The  EEA, being based on sexist ideas about hunter-gatherer societies’ operation, as well as further sexist ideas that Homo sapiens had a long period as hunter-gatherers when we probably had just as much a period as less sexy scavenger-gatherers, has shown itself to be bathed in about as much an aroma of sexism as a bottle of Old Spice gone past its expiration date. (This long and colorful metaphor assumes Old Spice has an expiration date, of course.) And, Pop Ev Psychers like to treat it like the Nicene Creed

Example No. 1 is like shooting fish in a barrel — Randy Thornhill claiming rape isevolutionarily adaptive. Tosh. Bullshit.

In pre-state tribe/band sized societies, you raped once, inside your clan, you were likely killed. There was little hierarchical structure for a chieftan, jefe or whomever to "pull rank" to rape lower-class women, either.

You raped some woman in another band? You immediately started a small-scale war, most likely satisfied when your clan handed you over ot the other clan to be put to death by them.

So, even if you were 100 percent sure your rape caused a pregnancy, it was only a break-even on "adaptiveness" if you were caught immediately. And, rape appears to be less likely to cause pregnancy than even the hit-and-miss of normal human sexual intercourse.   

Short of rape, though, there's plenty of other "just so" storytelling that's sexist.

Here's another. Theoretically, based on porn or whatever, we men in the modern West like big boobs. But,  Pop Ev Psychers claim that a genetic variation that appears to have given East Asian women, on average, smaller breasts, possibly to adapt to its cold winters (and per Jerry Coyne, even the issue that the genetic change coded for small breasts is debatable) was actually driven by sexual selection.

But Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he thought the more likely cause of the gene’s spread among East Asians was sexual selection. Thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.

There's a just-so story staring the likes of Ed Clint right in the face. 

Here's Coyne's take, though:

He wonders how the researchers concluded that the variant EDAR gene shrinks breasts at all, given that mice don’t have breasts­—at least, they don’t have pronounced lumps on their chests the way people do.  

Er ... good point.

That said, such nuttery has better-known touters than Joshua Akey.  

Per Massimo Pigliucci, it seems Michael Shermer's also still swimming in the waters of Pop Ev Psych sexism. Gee, what a shock!

Here's Shermer, in an ongoing dialogue about how much science does (Pigliucci) or does not (Shermer) need philosophy to guide discussions of ethics:

Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women. 

Just wow. And, as Massimo notes, simply not true!  

Shermer then goes on to claim rape is scientifically shows to be immoral, ignoring that Pop Ev Psycher Randy Thornhill claimed it was evolutionarily adaptive! Now, it is not true that everything adaptive should be moral. However, since Shermer himself has previously mangled David Hume's classic is-ought distinction, which in turn led to this dialogue between him and Pigliucci, I think it's legit to hoist him on this petard.

Meanwhile, it's not just differences in sexual desire. Whether it's Pop Ev Psych or John Gray-type pop psychology, the whole "men are from Mars, women from Venus," is getting more and more refutation.

"Sex is not nearly as confining a category as stereotypes and even some academic studies would have us believe," study researcher Bobbi Carothers, a senior data analyst at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. 

Are there differences? Yes:

Carothers, who completed the research as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Rochester, and her colleagues are not denying that men and women often do differ from one another. Women, for example, are known to have higher levels of anxiety than men, on average, and to react to bad news with more stress. Studies also turn up gender differences in aggression, sexuality, frequency of smiling, and body image, Carothers and her colleagues wrote.

But researchers haven't spent much time examining the structure of these differences, Carothers wrote. It's possible, for example, that men and women usually fall into distinct groups. In this categorical world, knowing someone is a man would automatically tell you that he's aggressive, interested in short-term sex over long-term relationships, good at math and bad verbally. Alternatively, gender differences could occur more often on a continuum. You might know someone is a man, but it would tell you little about his skills with math. 

Which possibility is more likely might seem clear to anyone who has ever known a guy who can't figure out a tip to save his life. But humans tend toward categorical thinking, the researchers wrote, and gender is about as basic a category as you can get.

Bingo. And here's some specific issues where gender differences are an overlapping continuum:

Men and women fell along a continuum on such measures as interest in casual sex, frequency of thoughts about sex, and the appeal of certain traits such as virginity, looks and wealth in a mate. The same was true of attitudes toward close relationships, empathy and other interpersonal factors.

In other words, if told that a person is more than 6 feet tall, you would be pretty safe in guessing that they were a guy. If told that a person is very empathic, you'd be much harder-pressed to correctly guess their gender.

So, let's just put this "men are from horndog, women are from demure" idea on ice. It's insulting to both sexes. It perpetuates stereotypes, many of which then translate into our legal system, such as judges still occasionally admonishing rape victims about how they dress. 

Oh, and women don't talk more than men, either. 

Their "gap" on spacial relations skills appears to be at least somewhat culturally driven.

But, a lot of people like to assume they do. And, there have been Pop Ev Psych just-so stories about that, too.
And, on the psychology side of Pop Ev Psych, let's make sure that claims aren't being made on the basis of biased psychological studies, with such bias including gender bias. (Per Robert Sapolsky, in "moving backward" from Pop Ev Psych to some thought within evolutionary biology in general on sexual selection, such sexism isn't confined to thoughts about human evolution.) It also seems that Pop Ev Psychers, like drug companies, don't have any problems with being "selective" on how they frame their research or on what results they report.

Now, I’m not saying there are no sex-based differences in formulation and expression of sexual desire. But, the differences are smaller than either Pop Ev Psychers, nth-wave feminists or male-hierarchy Christians will admit. And, all three are similar in throwing bullshit ideas against the wall, hoping something will socially stick, either due to religious prejudice (the Christians), reverse sex prejudice plus tribalism (the nth-wave feminists) or sex prejudice cloaked in pseudoscience (Pop Ev Psychers).

I'm also not saying every Pop Ev Psycher, let alone every legit evolutionary psychologist, has such sexual issues, but, unless anybody close to a Thornhill is deliberately marginalized, the legit movement risks getting tarred with this big, black brush.

And, speaking of "black," what if such Pop Ev Psych sexist nonsense statements were made about blacks vs. whites?

Well, maybe we don't totally have to.

I've blogged this before, but I'm going to do so again.

Shermer has had two known racialists, Frank Miele and the recently deceased Vince Sarich, on the masthead of Skeptic magazine.

The two co-wrote "Race," a horrible racialist book which believes the different races are subspecies headed toward speciation, ignores the cultural background of IQ tests and much more, as I note in this review. A sampling:

On page 1, the authors misinterpret a Lincoln quote about the difference between races, and infer that, rather than talking about the sociologocial fallouts from a clearly perceived difference in skin colors, Lincoln was talking about deeper differences in physical attributes. ...

Page 9 - Going with their unproven -- and logically fallacious idea-generating -- 50,000 year date for the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, Miele and Sarich then use this to bootstrap their own arguments about the degree of difference between races, claiming this shows how rapidly human evolution can progress. It's clear circular reasoning based on an already assumed point of view.

Pages 9-10 have a laughably racist "genetic" rather than sociological assumption of evidence for various types of athletic prowess. ...

And, the piece de resistance on page 10 -- the "mean sub-Saharan African IQ of 70." All together, now, can we say Bell Curve?

How bad is it, and are/were they? They're both associates of A-grade racialist Philippe Rushton. With Rushton, at least, I am comfortable with removing the second syllable from the word "racialism."

It's yet more reason not to trust Shermer on any issues like this. Given that racialists like this mentioned above and Arthur Jensen and others, have spouted just-so stories about alleged differences in brain sizes, brain size vs. penis size and more, I have no doubt some racialists have a foot in the currents of Pop Ev Psych.   

I'll also counter Shermer's "scientism" with repeated recent revelations of cheating on grants, Ben Goldacre's whole new book about selective research reporting in the pharmaceutical industry, and more.

Say, Joseph Mengele? Eugenics "research" in the US? Arthur Jensen? Shockley?

Science is, to riff on Euclid, NO royal road to morality. Period. End of story. 

And, as I've said before, science in general is no guarantor of morality. Science badly practiced, or abused and twisted, though, usually is a guarantor of bad ethics, sometimes in narrow ways, sometimes in broad ones.

Besides that, Pop Ev Psych, and to some degree "legit" ev psych, "whiff" on more than sexism. More below the fold.

#BrianDunning, #pseudoskeptic partner of #MichaelSherner, pseudoskeptic

Michael Shermer

Both Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, and Brian Dunning, a regular contributor to its blog, have pseudoskeptical  issues.

First, both regularly conflate libertarian politics and political philosophy with skepticism. Think John Stossel playing a skeptical poseur, especially with Dunning, who strikes me as just one step removed from a snake oil salesperson.

Second, in other cases, it goes beyond that. If it were only that, the conflation, it would be no big deal. But, it IS more than that, and it's harmful to the image of skepticism.

Brian Dunning via his website

Dunning is "great" at setting up straw men. Take this post on the Skeptic blog, where he claims, "I'm Not in the Pay of ('Big Whatever')."

Problem is, his critics, like me, and Max, who regularly slap him around, have not claimed he's in the pay of Big Oil, Big Pharma or whatever. That's a total straw man.

On his own blog, he does the same, with SUVs, for example.

Here's this:

Based in part on these generalizations, many so-called environmentalist groups have been lobbying, often successfully, for laws against SUV's.

No URLs linking to any alleged "laws against SUVs." Just an undefended statement.

Followed by this:

The vast majority of so-called SUV's are mechanically identical to conventional cars.

As proof, he lists a whole number of Japanese car-frame SUVs without a single US-made truck-frame SUV listed.

With deceptiveness like this, it's no wonder he faces both civil and criminal fraud charges for alleged Internet cookie stuffing schemes.

Shermer, meanwhile, has now joined Sam Harris as clearly being in the realms of "scientism" by claiming that the issue of confusing "is" and "ought" as first identified by David Hume is a fallacy.

First, as Massimo Pigliucci puts it in a great takedown, even if Shermer were right to raise some issues, it's not a logical fallacy.

Next, Shermer, who's not even a scientist, joins in the call for science to take over addressing issues such as morals and ethics, claiming philosophy is dead.

Of course, beyond wrongly trying to make science an absolute arbiter of morals (and other issues better addressed by philosophy), Shermer doesn't have much of a moral leg to stand on himself.

He has had two known racialists, Frank Miele and the recently deceased Vince Sarich, on the masthead of Skeptic magazine.

The two co-wrote "Race," a horrible racialist book which believes the different races are subspecies headed toward speciation, ignores the cultural background of IQ tests and much more, as I note in this review. A sampling:

On page 1, the authors misinterpret a Lincoln quote about the difference between races, and infer that, rather than talking about the sociologocial fallouts from a clearly perceived difference in skin colors, Lincoln was talking about deeper differences in physical attributes. ...

Page 9 - Going with their unproven -- and logically fallacious idea-generating -- 50,000 year date for the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, Miele and Sarich then use this to bootstrap their own arguments about the degree of difference between races, claiming this shows how rapidly human evolution can progress. It's clear circular reasoning based on an already assumed point of view.

Pages 9-10 have a laughably racist "genetic" rather than sociological assumption of evidence for various types of athletic prowess. ...

And, the piece de resistance on page 10 -- the "mean sub-Saharan African IQ of 70." All together, now, can we say Bell Curve?

How bad is it, and are/were they? They're both associates of A-grade racialist Philippe Rushton. With Rushton, at least, I am comfortable with removing the second syllable from the word "racialism."

This type of "thinking" and much more is why I 1-starred Shermer's "The Believing Brain." Among other nuttery of Shermer's, he believes in a Ray Kurzweil-type "singularity." (That's why I just "looooove" libertarians who call socialists "utopian." Shoe pinching, Shermer?)

And, why a mag like Scientific American, even though it has gone downhill in general in the last decade, IMO, gives a Shermer blog space ...

Is Obama full of crap on race issues?

A new AP poll, using test questions designed to elicit, even if a person consciously claims otherwise, one’s attitude toward other races, shows that racial prejudice hasn’t gotten any better since Obama got elected.

--> -->

And that means …

Either our "first post-racial president" is ignorant of this face, or he’s whistling Kumbaya in the dark, or he’ full of shit, or some overlapping mix, when he claims to be a post-racial president.

My take? I'd say 60 percent full of shit/40 percent whistling Kumbaya.

And, this fear of looking like “angry black man” bullshit? First, I’ve not heard White House insiders claim it’s a “driver” for Obama. That’s why I guesstimated the percentages as I have.

Second, even if it were, I don’t think Obama “does” angry that much.

Third, even if he did “do” angry on occasion, he’s not going to lose most independent voters inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, or the more conservative folks inside the Democratic party.

Instead, he’s just going to let tea partiers and more genteel-style old-line GOP racists offer up “I told you so” comments.

So, the 40 percent Kumbaya represents my thought that he does have a “messianic healer/unifier” strain in him. I think that, in turn comes from a mix of childhood development/psychology and deeper personality.

But, the 60 percent full of shit? It’s related to Obama being a post-racial president, in fact, in some sort of internal neoliberal-type reality in his own mind.

And, with that, I think the 60 percent “full of it” is almost entirely politically driven, but the 40 percent is at least partially the real Obama.

More thought on the issue of whether or not Obama has trouble accepting that he isn't a "post-racial" president. Here’s the fired African-American Department of Agriculture employee, Shirley Sherrod:

Sherrod still supports Obama and plans to vote for him. But, as she later wrote, she now worries that a president once thought by many to transcend race was actually “terrified” by it.

That’s a pretty strong statement. I wonder what, in private, some of his Chicago black supporters would say.

Anyway, start from the beginning and read the whole WaPost article. It’s pretty good.

More thought on the issue of whether or not Obama has trouble accepting that he isn't a "post-racial" president. Here’s the fired African-American Department of Agriculture employee, Shirley Sherrod:

Sherrod still supports Obama and plans to vote for him. But, as she later wrote, she now worries that a president once thought by many to transcend race was actually “terrified” by it.

That’s a pretty strong statement. I wonder what, in private, some of his Chicago black supporters would say.

Yes, Obama has “upbraided” black critics like Cornel West. But, has he been even 10-20 percent open to their criticisms?

Probably not:

As for West, the encounter left him speechless, “cool on the outside but burning inside,” he said.

Thin skinned, perhaps?

Also, perhaps reinforcing Obama’s self-perception as messianic, plus everybody’s take on him now as idealistic but very non-confrontational, is this:

Clayborne Carson, the Stanford University historian tapped by King’s widow to archive and study King’s papers, said Obama seems to relate most closely to King’s earlier approaches, when he focused on more universal themes and tried not to alienate whites. King took greater risks later in his life, Carson said, launching the Poor People’s Campaign and opposing the Vietnam War.

“What we’re seeing is [Obama] likes the early King, which was about coalition-building and the idealistic things he talks about in the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” Carson said. “But the later King, where he begins to realize that you have to confront the realities of American society and you can’t just wish them away, that’s where they differ.”

And, Obama isn’t going to change.

Anyway, start from the beginning and read thewhole WaPost article. It’s pretty good.