Thatcher Speech: The Genetic Revolution
The Hudson Institute's magazine published the text of my 12/99 speech to the Thatcher Seminar on the greatest opportunity and danger facing the world over the next century: our new ability to manipulate our own genetic code. If you have a fast web connection and a MS IE 4.0+ browser, click above to see the entire slide show.

The Future of Human Nature
"As we all know from watching old science fiction movies, humans will evolve into hyper-intelligent, 97 pound weaklings. Our descendents will mutate into androgynous pencil-necked geeks barely able to hold up their basketball-sized brains. And as Steven Spielberg demonstrated in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., highly evolved species are also altruistic pacifists. Of course, the same sort of movies forecasted that in the year 2000 we'd all helicopter to work in our one-man autogyros. So, we know the future ain't what it used to be, but what will it be?"

Equality v. Truth: Darwin's Enemies on the Left
"Stephen Jay Gould, a famous sports nut, cannot even turn on his TV without being confronted by lean East Africans outdistancing the world's runners, massive Samoans flattening quarterbacks, lithe Chinese diving and tumbling for gold medals, or muscular athletes of West African descent out-sprinting, out-jumping, and out-hitting all comers. No wonder Gould is reduced to insisting we chant 'Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow: … Human equality is a contingent fact of history,' like Dorothy trying to get home from Oz."

The Reality of Race []
"What is a 'race'? It is essentially a lineage, a family tree. A racial group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some extent. Thus, race is a fundamental aspect of the human condition because we are all born into families. Burying our heads in the sand and refusing to think clearly about this bedrock fact of life only makes the inevitable problems caused by race harder to overcome." 

Seven Dumb Ideas about Race
"Many intellectuals now try to wish away the problems of race by defining "race" as merely a mass hallucination afflicting all of humanity—other than we few members of the Great and the Good."

Human Genome Disinformation
Jack Kemp wrote, "The human genome project shows there is no genetic way to tell races apart. For scientific purposes, race simply doesn't exist." In response, evolutionary biologist Gregory M. Cochran snorted, "Then how come forensic anthropologists can determine a suspect's racial makeup from the DNA in hair or semen left at the scene of a crime?"

Darwinophobia I—Cavalli-Sforza in The Atlantic
"Population geneticist Cavalli-Sforza has practically no professional expertise whatsoever on the subject of racial differences in behavior. C-S has carefully avoided studying genes that influence 'character, temperament, or intelligence.' Cavalli-Sforza only researches 'junk genes' that don't do anything."

Mapping Human History
Olson stops every few pages to tell you that there are no races that have been absolutely isolated genetically since the beginning of time because—you will be shocked, shocked to learn this—humans have been known to outbreed. This makes Mapping Human History resemble a geology book that repeatedly admonishes the reader that the Earth is not flat.

"Seven Daughters of Eve"
Population geneticist Bryan Sykes has grasped a simple fact about population genetics that resounds emotionally with the average person, yet has largely eluded most learned commentators. Namely, genes are the product of genealogy. Each individual's genes are descended from some people, but not from some other people. Thus, Sykes discovered, people often feel a sense of family pride and loyalty to others, living and dead, with whom they share some DNA.

Afghanistan's Family/Race Problem & Ours
Assembling a post-Taliban government in a land where every extended family has been the sworn enemy of practically every other family is particularly perplexing for Americans. Because we rely less upon our extended families than anyone else on Earth, we run into severe conceptual problems understanding Afghans, who rank clan honor over all else. Yet understanding how Afghans—and most other humans—think will also help us grasp our most persistent domestic problem: race.

Is Love Colorblind?
Interracial Marriage—Who Wins? Who Loses? While interracial marriage is increasingly accepted by whites, a surprising number of Asian men and black women have become bitterly opposed. Why?

More on interracial marriage: Readers' responses, Arthur Hu's funny article, etc.

5 graphs making the statistics in this article clearer. National Review chose not to run these, claiming my prose style is so supremely lucid that even without graphs every reader would instantly grasp the meaning of even the most technical passages. If you disagree, check out these graphs.

 

Immigration Is Retarding Interracial Marriage
"The native-born are certainly doing their part to merge the races in California: 'Multiracial births to native-born mothers rose dramatically between 1982 and 1997—from about 14% to nearly 21% percent, a 50% change.' The problem is that multiracial births to immigrant mothers, never a large number to begin with, declined slightly to merely 7% by 1997. Since 45% of California babies are born to foreign-born mothers, multiracials' share of the overall population is barely climbing."

Part 2: Mexico's Insidious Color Continuum
"After an experiment lasting nearly 500 years in Latin America, intermarriage has utterly failed to eliminate racial inequality. Mestizo nations like Mexico and mulatto nations like Brazil are bywords for vast concentrations of wealth among the white ruling class contrasted with extreme poverty among the darkest citizens. In fact, in Mexico racial segregation is worsening."

Part 3: How Latino Intermarriage Breeds Inequality
"The Hispanic influx into California seems to be simply recreating the racial hierarchy of Latin America. For example, America's leading Latino politicians tend to marry Anglos. Thus, the Mexican-American elite is likely to become even whiter over the generations. While upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans marry blonde Anglos, downwardly mobile white men often wed Mexicans. Now, there is plenty to be said for getting hitched to a Mexican lady. But sadly, there is a big social cost to Anglo-Hispanic marriages: 'In most homes headed by an Anglo/Latino couple, Spanish becomes the household language.'"

Are Caublinasians Genetically Superior?
"It's time to confront the question that's been whispered about Tiger Woods ever since this Mozart-like prodigy first appeared on television as a three year old playing golf with Bob Hope: Are multiracial people like Tiger genetically better than the rest of us? Until recent decades, that query was unthinkable: "miscegenation" was assumed to be the royal road to racial ruin. But, now we have enough scientific evidence to answer with a resounding ..."

The Clash of Continents
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond

"To Diamond, the three most important engines of history are location, location, and location."

The Half Full glass
The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability by Arthur Jensen

"Denouncing Jensen proclaims one's faith in empirical egalitarianism, which serves as the perfect excuse for ignoring the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. By declaring that everyone could Be Like Me (if only they were properly socialized), the clever can, with clear conscience, continue to surreptitiously wage class war against the clueless." This is a hugely important, and shamefully neglected book, and my review offers a new perspective on the IQ wars.

Human Biodiversity: inFrequently Asked Questions

The social impact of biological differences among people is one of the most fascinating, important, and least discussed topics of our age. Here's the first draft of "Does Race Exist?."
So, you don't think biological differences among the various peoples of the world can affect modern life? Well, check out this pantheon of highly biodiverse celebrities: The Human Biodiversity Hall of Fame

Track & Battlefield—w/Dr. Stephen Seiler
Everybody knows that women athletes are narrowing the gender gap separating them from male athletes' performance. Yet in running, the most quantifiable sport, everybody is wrong. Based on a major new study, the article explains why women are running slower in the Nineties, offering new insights into the nature of masculinity, the causes of ethnic inequality, the role of hormones (natural and illegal steroid), and the role of women in the military.

For track buffs: additional in-depth analysis and statistics

The Words Don't Match the Pictures: Why the Polite Lies We Tell About Race & Sex Are Undermined by What We See on ESPN

This is the first chapter of my not-yet-finished book about what we can learn from sports about the current controversies over race and sex. It's the clearest introduction to my work.
Note From Steve Sailer : April, 2000—Well, it won't get finished. When I got hit with nonHodgkins lymphoma in late 1996 (60 months in remission and counting!), I ran out of energy to accomplish this. Meanwhile, Jon Entine had been working on a similar book on sports and race on and off since 1989. So, I helped him a little with his book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It. It turned out excellent (click here to buy Taboo).

Great Black Hopes
Black Athletes triumph by toiling intensely at those games where they tend to enjoy not just cultural, but also physical and mental edges over whites. This suggests a new, pragmatic view of racial differences. (This was probably my most important early article.)

A Better Way in Kosovo?
"A year ago, NATO attacked Yugoslavia. It's worth recalling President Bill Clinton's explanation of Why We Fought: "The principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multiethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy." Well ... happy anniversary, Kosovo! What could the West have done instead? The answer, shockingly enough, is to have sponsored and made humane the inevitable ethnic cleansing."

Why Multiculturalism and Democracy don't mix (Balkans case study)
Democracy is what caused the mess in the Balkans. Multiculturalism works fine ... under a real dictator, like Tito. He had multiethnic Yugoslavia locked down tight, nice and peaceful. But when the inhabitants got more say in their lives, they started killing each other. They wanted democracy. But they knew that to have it, they needed mono-ethnic states.

Feature: Who exactly is Asian American?
Who exactly is an "Asian-American?" The U.S. government's official racial definition is coming in for criticism as being both too narrow (because it leaves out West Asians, such as Arabs, Israelis, and Iranians) and too broad (because it clumps together the East Asians of China and the Philippines with the quite different South Asians of India and Pakistan). The central issue is the status of South Asians.

Feature: Parsis face success, survival
Last year, a Miami psychotherapist visited a Sydney database administrator's Web site for help in finding the girl of his dreams, who turned out to be a flight attendant based in the Persian Gulf. Welcome to the dizzyingly cosmopolitan realm of Parsi matchmaking, where the Internet is helping one of the most culturally sophisticated ethnic groups keep alive one of the most ancient but endangered major religions.

Analysis: Race now—Not black & white-1
Probably the most striking moment during the otherwise interminable 2002 Academy Awards broadcast was Halle Berry's emotional Best Actress Oscar acceptance speech. Having campaigned for the Oscar on the platform that she should receive it as a symbolic reparation to all the African-American actresses before her who had not won it, Berry exulted, "It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."

Analysis: White prof finds he's not—2
How white are blacks? How black are whites?

Analysis: Mexico's missing blacks—Part 3
Where did Mexico's blacks go? The nearly complete absorption of Mexico's identifiably African people offers an intriguing contrast to the persistence of a rather distinct black race in the United States.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]

August 02, 2002