Written by Bo Winegard.

Although I cannot be certain, I assume that the celebrated heroes of history were better men than I am. I say this not out of confession or humility, but because it is true. More generally, few truths seem more self-evident than that some men are better than others. Yet few propositions today encounter fiercer resistance. The mere assertion appears indecent, transgressive, even faintly malevolent. It certainly runs contrary to the popular interpretation of the soaring words that open the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”

Yet, for my part, I can make no sense of the claim that all men are created equal unless it is understood as an assertion of political rights. More troubling still, the contemporary egalitarianism that so often invokes these words (while simultaneously despising their author) is not merely empirically false but pernicious, inspiring as it does a species of relativism whose refusal to judge reduces the world to an insipid mélange of mediocrity, where pop songs are celebrated with the same enthusiasm as the masterpieces of Mozart, where rap lyrics are analyzed with the same diligence as the poetry of Chaucer, where the dogmas of Christianity are mocked as readily as the profligate superstitions of New Age belief, and where the West is regarded as merely one civilization among others—notable, if at all, only for its violence and rapacity.

The dominant view today, it seems, is that any admission that some people, some things, or some cultures are better than others is not merely mistaken but morally dubious. “Who are you to judge?” has become our defiant slogan. Yet the case for equality is so frail that its defenders, when pressed, resort to fallacies, sophistries and moral hectoring, among which the motte-and-bailey is perhaps the most common. For these egalitarians begin with the bold claim that human beings are at least roughly equal in their traits and talents, only to retreat, when confronted with obvious counterexamples, to the more defensible but largely vacuous position that although men may differ profoundly in their abilities, they remain metaphysically or morally equal. Having abandoned their original assertion for one much more vaporous, they then frequently impugn the character of those who persist in dissent. “Are you saying that some human beings are inferior to others? How dare you!”

Well, yes and no. This is where precision becomes essential.

Human beings are not merely different; they are different in ways that are directly relevant for moral evaluation. Whatever one might make of equality in the afterlife, on our planet, men are manifestly unequal. I see no plausible way of escaping this conclusion. A talented neurosurgeon is better than a common thief. This example is extreme of course, but the principle applies mutatis mutandis to other comparisons. If the criminal is worse than the law-abiding citizen, then the saint is surely better than the average man. Once we admit the legitimacy of such judgments, the doctrine of human equality (metaphysical or otherwise) begins to look rather shaky.1

Empirical equality. The most expansive conception of human equality is empirical equality or the belief that human beings are, in some meaningful sense, equal in their traits and talents. Yet this doctrine is so clearly contradicted by ordinary experience that it is rarely defended without an intimidating veneer of jargon or a distracting catalog of qualifications. Nevertheless, it remains implicit in many progressive approaches to public policy and is still, in one form or another, a major feature of Marxism and other blank-slate theories of human nature, which treat man as almost infinitely malleable. Change the environment and you change human nature. Inequality is created, not natural. And it persists only because of the systemic injustices of our society.

Although only the most radical progressives explicitly embrace empirical equality, many otherwise moderate liberals hold to it insofar as they regard claims of significant sex or race differences with profound suspicion. Thus, if one points out that disparities between blacks and whites in the United States are partially caused by intelligence differences between blacks and whites, one is often accused of promoting racism. Similarly if one contends that institutions that are dominated by women may function less well than those dominated by men, one is accused of promoting misogyny. The sacred value of equality, though it violates the plain evidence of our senses, is hard to let go.

Metaphysical equality. One way to reconcile the obviously incorrect view that humans are equal with the longing that they be equal is to introduce the concept of metaphysical equality. People who hold this view often use poetic phrases such as that humans are “equal in the eyes of God” or that they have “equal dignity.” They argue that this kind of equality is perfectly consistent with human variation because metaphysical equality is not an empirical claim at all. At first, this might sound like a verbal consolation prize, a way of telling a terrestrial loser that all people are equal in heaven. Yet the doctrine is more powerful that that, for the rhetoric of metaphysical equality has inspired genuine moral concern, sacrifice and even revolution. I do not dismiss its effectiveness as poetry or propaganda, but I do not believe it withstands intellectual scrutiny.

Consider two profoundly different human beings: Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the sadistic SS, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor who resisted Nazism at great personal cost. What, precisely, does it mean to say that these men were metaphysically equal?

Read more

Negativity Bias in Person Perception: Exploring the Reverse Side of the ‘What is Beautiful is Good’ Stereotype in Women. Tobias Kordsmeyer and colleagues test for negative halo effects in two samples, comprising photos of German and Brazilian women, respectively. They document strong such effects, whereby women deemed more attractive were rated as significantly less socially and intellectually competent.

The genetics of specific cognitive abilities. Francesca Procopio and colleagues carry out a meta-analysis of the heritability of specific cognitive abilities (reasoning, knowledge, processing speed etc.). Across estimates from 77 studies, they find that specific cognitive abilities are about 50% heritable (similar to g). Interestingly, they find that the variance in specific cognitive abilities that is independent of g has about the same heritability.

Read more

Here’s a free preview:

Watch the full video below:

Read more

Written by Noah Carl.

The writer David Oks recently penned an article titled “Why China got rich and India didn’t”. It went super viral, racking up over 3,700 likes. Notwithstanding this immense popularity, I don’t think it offers a convincing explanation.

Read more

Written by Noah Carl.

It is well known that the US has a higher homicide rate than other Western countries. In the latest version of the UN’s dataset, it has a rate of 5.8 per 100,000 — compared to 1.3 in France, 1.1 in Britain and 0.9 in Germany. So the country is at least five times more homicidal than its former colonial ruler.

The standard explanation on the Right is simple: racial demographics. The US has a large black population, and black people (for whatever reason) commit homicide at incredibly high rates. Indeed, the US is about 14% black, while the blackest country in Europe, Britain, is only 4% black. Here’s what Ann Coulter had to say in 2013:

On the gun crimes, we keep hearing how low they are in Europe, and oh they’re so low and they have no guns. If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium. So perhaps it’s not a gun problem. It is a demographic problem.

How she could have known that white Americans commit murder at the same rate as white Belgians is unclear, since Belgium does not publish homicide data broken down by race or ethnicity. Indeed, the evidence we do have suggests that she was wrong. Belgium’s overall homicide rate in 2012 was 1.6. Meanwhile, the homicide rate for non-Hispanic white Americans in the same year was 2.7.

Read more

Written by Alden Whitfeld and Arctotherium.

Jason Richwine coined the term “Irish Retort” to describe one of the most common tactics deployed in debates over immigration. Raise any concerns about mass immigration today and the response is automatic: “What about the Irish!”

When Irish immigrants arrived in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were poor, Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) and heavily overrepresented in crime. Nativists panicked then too. Yet over time, the Irish assimilated, climbed up the social ladder, and became indistinguishable from the average American. The implication is clear, though usually left unstated: today’s immigrants will follow the same arc, and any claim to the contrary is just recycled bigotry.

It’s a neat story, rhetorically powerful and emotionally satisfying. The problem is what it leaves out. Careful studies using multi-generational data show that differences in social outcomes are much more persistent than is commonly assumed. What appears to be rapid convergence is often an artifact of looking too narrowly or too briefly. With this in mind, let’s examine how well the story of rapid European assimilation holds up.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.1

This selection process radically alters how we interpret the observed convergence in outcomes. Abramitzky et al. (2014) show that most European immigrant groups that arrived in the early twentieth century, including the Irish, Italians and Russians, already had above-average incomes in the first generation. (There was often little difference between first- and second-generation outcomes.) It is not difficult to turn a group into a success story when many of its poorest members voluntarily leave.

Even after accounting for selection, European economic differences did not evaporate entirely. Using a unique three-generation dataset linking immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940, Ward (2020) finds substantial persistence in occupational income across European ethnicities. As this is the first study to use linked grandparent-grandson data, it demonstrates that intergenerational correlations are stronger when measured properly. As Ward notes, his findings cut directly against the “melting pot” narrative in which ethnic differences fade within a generation or two. They don’t.

Nor did immigrants simply arrive as blank slates and then absorb American culture. They brought their values, habits and norms with them, and these left durable imprints on the places where they settled. We understand this intuitively when it comes to cuisine: Italians didn’t just eat pasta themselves; they taught Americans to eat pasta.2 But the same logic applies in other domains.

A growing literature shows that cultural behaviors persist across generations and shape economic outcomes (Giuliano & Tabellini, 2020; Simpser, 2020; Richwine, 2023; 2024). Fulford et al. (2018), using ancestry data for U.S. counties from 1850 to 2010, show that counties settled by immigrants from richer European countries are more productive today. A 1% increase in GDP per capita of the weighted average of the origin countries predicts roughly a 0.3% increase in the long-run GDP per capita of the county.

And this effect is not simply driven by differences in education between immigrant groups. The researchers also find that once traits like historical state capacity (the length of time for which a nation has had an independent state), trust and cooperation are taken into account, formal education no longer predicts a group’s impact on county productivity. Berger & Engzell (2019) report similar results for inequality and mobility: differences across counties reflect the composition of the groups that settled them.

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: the nativists of the time were correct. Specifically, they were correct about the political impact these new arrivals would have.

The 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigrants entered a country with virtually no welfare state. But their descendants powered the New Deal and, more decisively, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, permanently shifting the American political spectrum leftward. Medicaid, Medicare, and the expansion of Social Security were not accidents; they were the predictable consequences of a transformed electorate (and are, incidentally, responsible for America’s fiscal woes). Any short-run cost-benefit analysis conducted in 1920 would have missed the point entirely.

The result was a durable “Europeanization” of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics. As can be seen in the chart below, there is a strong correlation between the fraction of immigrants in a county between 1910–1930 and support for state welfare spending.

None of this was unforeseeable. Contemporary observers like Senator David Reed explicitly warned, in defence of the Immigration Act of 1924, that mass immigration from populations less accustomed to self-government would produce electorates more reliant on the state.

There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.

Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.

What could not be modelled precisely was the timing. Political integration takes decades, and as such, these effects only became electorally decisive in the late 1920s, with milestones such as Al Smith’s 1928 nomination. Had someone conducted a fiscal analysis of this immigration wave in 1920, they would have concluded it was beneficial. But immigration reshaped politics itself: once immigrants and their descendants gained political power, they used it, and this was predictable.3

Studies of internal migration reveal that even regional differences within a country persist over time. Population movements change societies. While the Great Migration is usually discussed among historians insofar as it pertains to black Americans, numerically speaking, a larger number of white Southerners left the South. This movement measurably increased political conservatism, as measured by Republican vote shares, opposition to the Civil Rights Act, support for Reagan’s tax cuts, and opposition to the certification of the 2020 election (Bazzi et al., 2023a; 2023b).4

Evidence from crime and literacy further undermines the lazy analogy between European immigration then and Hispanic immigration now. Moehling & Piehl (2009) show that, while some European immigrant groups were overrepresented in crime, such as the Irish, it was largely in minor offenses like public drunkenness. Differences in serious crime were generally small. While Italians were somewhat overrepresented in serious crime, they still committed far less than Mexicans, who were the clear exception.

The paper also punctures the myth of European illiteracy. Literacy exceeded 85% for most European groups and large majorities spoke English. Again, Mexico stood apart, with substantially lower literacy and English proficiency.

The same pattern is seen in incarceration data from 1900–1930 (Abramitzky et al., 2024). Once again, Mexicans had much higher rates than native-born Americans, whereas all European groups were the same or lower.

Put differently: European differences were real but comparatively modest.5 That is not evidence of dramatic assimilation success; it is evidence that gaps were small to begin with. And the gap between whites and Hispanics, both historically and today, is far larger.6 Invoking the Irish or Italians as evidence for the power of assimilation is therefore not convincing.7 The Irish Retort doesn’t work.

This essay is adapted from a longer article published at Heretical Insights.

Alden Whitfeld is an independent writer who does research on immigration and politics. Arctotherium is an anonymous writer interested in demographics and the future of civilization.

Become a free or paid subscriber:

Aporia

Social science. Philosophy. Culture.

Like and comment below.

Written by Bo Winegard.

I’m pretty sure I was wearing my Rage Against the Machine hat when I bought The Portable Edmund Burke. I was young and radical. Reading Chomsky, Zinn, Marx, Fanon. In a charitable mood, I thought conservatism was solace for the old. In a cynical mood, I thought it was a cover for greed and plunder. But I had read about Burke’s eloquence and, fancying some well-written prose, I decided to give him a try. Besides, I delighted in gainsaying bad political arguments. And being intellectually arrogant, I was certain I would find plenty to mock in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

I was not converted overnight. I was not even converted ten years later. But I look back fondly on my first reading of Burke. I was not surprised by the force and beauty of his rhetoric. Even his critics conceded his brilliance as a stylist. But I was surprised by the force of his arguments—or rather, by their moral seriousness. For Reflections is not written like a tight philosophical treatise; it depends as much on the moral imagination as it does on formal reason. And the moral imagination is moved more by poetry than by axioms and deductions.

What I found in Burke was a reverence for tradition, an understanding that institutions are often wiser than individuals, and a recognition that stubborn problems are stubborn precisely because they admit no easy solutions. At the time, I believed that poverty was less a puzzle than a condition created by design. In principle, it seemed no more difficult to solve than elementary algebra. A better society was only a few radical changes away. Of all my early leftist beliefs, this optimism was the first to go.

Read more

Investigating the replicability of the social and behavioural sciences. Andrew Tyner and colleagues attempted to replicate 274 separate findings from papers published in social science journals from 2009–2018. Overall, 55% of the claims replicated in the sense of obtaining a statistically significant result. The average Pearson correlation was r = .25 in the original studies and r = .10 in the replication studies. (Note that there is a companion paper on reproducibility.)

Tweet by Ryan Burge. The author examines ideological differences between mainline clergy and their congregants in the US. Analysing data from the Cooperative Election Study, he finds that clergy are far more liberal than their congregants. Among clergy, 45% identify as liberal Democrats versus 12% who identify as conservative Republicans. Among laity, 24% identify as liberal Democrats versus 37% who identify as conservative Republicans.

Read more

Here’s a free preview:

Watch the full video below:

Read more

Written by Peter Frost.

Mean IQ has risen in Europeans over the past 10,000 years. This upward trend began when hunting and gathering gave way to farming, and it continued as farming brought a cascade of new challenges.1 Nonetheless, there were periods of stagnation and even decline, notably during the Imperial Era of Rome and, more recently, since the early 20th century.2

These are the findings of a new field of research, archaeogenetics, which uses ancient DNA to chart genetic change over time, such as changes in genes associated with cognitive ability. To date, the focus has been on Europe, where we have the most data. But at least one study concerns East Asia, where mean IQ has followed a similar trajectory over time, albeit with interesting differences.3 Eventually, we’ll learn how cognitive ability has evolved in South Asia, the Middle East, West Africa and other regions.4

A new picture of human evolution is taking shape. Was it ever anticipated by Charles Darwin or any of his contemporaries? This question prompted me to look through the early literature for anyone making the following points:

• Mean IQ rose at a faster rate when hunting and gathering gave way to farming.

• This rise continued well into the time of recorded history. It continued as long as new demands were made on cognitive ability, and as long as individuals who met such demands enjoyed higher reproductive success. Whenever this selection pressure weakened, mean IQ stopped rising or even fell.

• There was a positive feedback loop between human intellect and the products of human intellect.

Darwin, in fact, did argue that human evolution continued past the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. But he believed it proceeded at a slower pace. In this, he was influenced by two of his closest associates: Alfred Russell Wallace and Francis Galton.

Wallace thought that cultural change made genetic evolution less necessary for material advancement, particularly with the rise of civilization.5 Meanwhile, Galton saw civilization as weakening natural selection: “the finest young men” are killed in war; the children of short-lived parents marry earlier and have children earlier; and primogeniture prevents the younger sons of landowners from marrying.6

Darwin concluded that cognitive ability increased only somewhat, or perhaps not at all, as humans became “civilized”:7

Hence in civilised nations there will be some tendency to an increase both in the number and in the standard of the intellectually able. But I do not wish to assert that this tendency may not be more than counterbalanced in other ways, as by the multiplication of the reckless and improvident; but even to such as these, ability must be some advantage.

After Darwin, academia followed the lead of either Wallace or Galton. But one contemporary did argue that cognitive evolution accelerated during the time of modern humans.

His name? Friedrich Engels — the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx. Engels was interested in the natural sciences and the works of Darwin specifically. In 1859, he made a point of obtaining a copy of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. He immediately wrote to Marx:8

Darwin, by the way, whom I am just reading, is quite splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had not yet been destroyed, but now that has been done. Never before has such a wonderful attempt been made to prove historical development in nature, and certainly never with such success.

Over the following decades, he wrote several essays from a Darwinian perspective, most notably The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Apes to Man (1876).9

This essay seems to argue for all three of the above points, particularly the tendency of cultural evolution and genetic evolution to drive each other forward:

The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development. This development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape, but on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society.

The first part seemed obscure to me, so I went back to the original German and used Google Translate:10

The feedback effect of the development of the brain and its obedient senses, of the increasingly clarified consciousness, capacity for abstraction, and power of drawing conclusions on labor and language gave both [labor and language] constant new impulses for further development—a development that by no means came to an end once humans had finally separated from the apes.

In other words, there was a positive feedback loop between the development of the brain (consciousness, abstraction, reasoning) and the growing complexity of work and language, which in turn favored further development of the brain. This is the feedback loop at the heart of gene-culture coevolution — a concept that would remain unknown for another century and a half.

Am I seeing something that isn’t there? Perhaps my interest in gene-culture coevolution is making me assume that others share this interest, particularly the evolutionarily inclined. It is significant, then, that another writer also thought “the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution was made by Friedrich Engels in his remarkable essay of 1876.”

That writer was Stephen Jay Gould, and he saw the same feedback loop between genes and culture:11

An enlarging brain (biology, or genes in later parlance) then fed back upon tools and language (culture), improving them in turn and setting the basis for further growth of the brain—the positive feedback loop of gene-culture coevolution.

Adapting to nature: cold winters theory

According to Engels, gene-culture coevolution was not yet predominant when humans were still adapting to new natural environments as they spread around the globe. These humans were already modern Homo sapiens, as shown by his use of the term “fully-fledged man” [des fertigen Menschen].

[Man] spread over the whole of the habitable world, being the only animal fully able to do so of its own accord. The other animals that have become accustomed to all climates — domestic animals and vermin — did not become so independently, but only in the wake of man. And the transition from the uniformly hot climate of the original home of man to colder regions, where the year was divided into summer and winter, created new requirements — shelter and clothing as protection against cold and damp, and hence new spheres of labour, new forms of activity, which further and further separated man from the animal.

This is “cold winters theory” — the idea that the seasonal cycle of northern regions selects for planning, as well as the ability to create special clothing and shelters for winter. It had many proponents in the 19th century, but Engels is most likely referring to a paper written by Wallace in 1864:12

So when a glacial epoch comes on, some animals must acquire warmer fur, or a covering of fat, or else die of cold. Those best clothed by nature are, therefore, preserved by natural selection. Man, under the same circumstances, will make himself warmer clothing, and build better houses; and the necessity of doing this will react upon his mental organisation and social condition … a hardier, a more provident, and a more social race would be developed, than in those regions where the earth produces a perennial supply of vegetable food, and where neither foresight nor ingenuity are required to prepare for the rigours of winter. And is it not the fact that in all ages, and in every quarter of the globe, the inhabitants of temperate have been superior to those of tropical countries? All the great invasions and displacements of races have been from North to South, rather than the reverse.

Adapting to culture: gene-culture coevolution

With the rise of farming, the human mind no longer had to grapple solely with the cognitive demands of the natural environment. Cognitive demands were now being created by culture, itself a creation of the human mind.

Selection for cognitive ability thus shifted farther south, to temperate or even subtropical latitudes. Such regions had the greatest potential for population growth and hence for social complexity — what we call “civilization.”

Engels describes this new stage of human evolution:

By the combined functioning of hand, speech organs and brain, not only in each individual but also in society, men became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and were able to set themselves, and achieve, higher and higher aims. The work of each generation itself became different, more perfect and more diversified. Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind — religion.

The southward shift in selection for cognitive ability can be seen in ancient DNA. The inverse correlation between winter temperature and cognitive ability is strongest in the oldest European samples. It then grows weaker over time and finally disappears with the end of hunting and gathering in Europe.13

Engels ended his essay with a criticism of the “Darwinian school” for tending to see the human mind as a disembodied entity — a ghost in a machine — and not as an organ that has evolved to meet specific needs.

All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour.

Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them. In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.

Conclusion

It may seem jarring to see Engels advocating not only gene-culture coevolution but also cold winters theory and the idea that the human brain continued evolving into historical times. No less jarring is Gould’s apparent endorsement. For this, I have but one explanation: life isn’t simple.

Engel’s essay was never finished. It would eventually be published in 1925, long after his death, together with other incomplete manuscripts by him on the natural sciences. Had he finished it, and found a better translator, he might have influenced evolutionary thought in the years after Darwin.

As things turned out, the leading intellectual heirs of Darwin were Wallace and Galton. For different reasons, their legacy has discouraged researchers from investigating the recent evolution of cognitive ability.

Wallace rightly believed that the pace of cultural change overtook the pace of genetic evolution in our species. But he wrongly concluded that the growing importance of culture caused genetic evolution to slow down and lose importance. In fact, the human genome changed more quickly as Homo sapiens adapted to faster-changing cultural environments.14

Wallace’s view of human evolution gained broad support, particularly its corollary that culture is overwhelmingly responsible for human differences. The latter view became especially popular from 1933 onward, as alarm grew over the rise of Hitler and Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism — the original meaning of “racism.”15 For many, the struggle against Hitler would continue long after 1945 and eventually become a struggle against any belief that human differences are more than skin-deep.16

As for Galton, he rightly believed that civilization can cause cognitive evolution to halt or even reverse. But he wrongly assumed that stagnation and decline were the usual outcome. In fact, civilization has more often been an impetus for higher levels of cognitive ability.

We’re now in the year 2026. With Nature publishing the latest Reich Lab paper, we can read Engel’s 1876 essay in a new light and acknowledge its significance. Will the same be done for the papers by Davide Piffer, Emil Kirkegaard, Yunus Kuijpers and Michael Woodley of Menie?

The advance of science is due not only to exceptional individuals but also to our willingness to recognize them and build on their work.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

Become a free or paid subscriber:

Aporia

Social science. Philosophy. Culture.

Like and comment below.

Written by Bo Winegard.

Perhaps it will be a mercy killing. The humanities have finished their life cycle from triumph through decadence to decay. All that is left is the dying.

When I am in a surly mood, this seems right. The humanities deserve to die. They have abdicated their cultural responsibility, draining colleges of precious resources while promulgating progressive balderdash. Their eulogy, like that of a once-great man who became an eccentric crank in old age, will focus on the glory of their youth, passing over the waste of their later years in tactful silence.

Yet it’s hard to resist the feeling that something irreplaceable is vanishing beneath the decay. However degraded the modern humanities may have become, they still preserve fragments of a great inheritance: Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Melville and Tolstoy. One cannot watch such a tradition collapse with indifference. Instead one is led to melancholic reflection and interrogation: What purpose do the humanities, at their best, serve and what exactly is being lost with their disappearance?

My answer is unashamedly elitist.

Read more

Written by Noah Carl.

The debate over the causes of persistent racial IQ gaps tends to get bogged down in statistical nitty-gritty. Researchers clash over questions like “how similar is the linkage disequilibrium structure in different ancestral populations?” and “do signals of polygenic selection persist when using effect sizes from family-based GWAS?” These questions are undoubtedly important (I do not mean to suggest otherwise). However, the excessive focus on such arcane matters risks distracting from the bigger picture: environmentalism is highly implausible.

Read more

The Equality Paradox. Shuichi Tezuka introduces the “equality paradox”: anyone committed to treating others equally regardless of race must reject racial equality of outcomes (since races have different average abilities). The assumption that equal treatment must mean equal outcomes has led to discrimination against whites and Asians, as well as death sentences for non-white defendants who would ordinarily be ineligible due to low IQ.

Cultural norms of exogamy and mobility shape hunter-gatherer genetic evolution. Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias and colleagues explore how hunter-gatherer groups maintain genetic diversity in the face of ecological pressures that limit population size. Analysing data on two Central African groups, they observe two distinct “strategies”. In one group strict exogamy prevails, while in the other, social norms prescribe that men travel far to find a mate (regardless of group membership).

Read more

Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:55 Inside the PNAS Study

04:18 Genetics vs Culture Clues

07:52 Publication Pushback

09:20 Scandinavian Replication

11:39 Assortative Mating Explained

14:58 Marriage Patterns and Inequality

18:57 How People Match by Status

25:34 Building the Massive Dataset

32:10 What Social Status Means

37:13 Responding to Critics

39:43 Sibling Correlations Argument

42:32 Wealth Shocks Fade Out

45:34 Adoption and Adult Outcomes

46:30 Norway Study and Wilson Effect

48:48 Critiques and Measurement Error

52:39 Moral Panic and Racism Claims

56:24 Funding Bias in Social Science

01:01:36 Why Even Geneticists Downplay Genes

01:04:24 Where the Field Goes Next

01:06:19 Book Publishing Roadblocks

01:12:05 Book Structure and Policy Implications

01:15:46 Academic Publishing Chills Debate

01:19:30 Closing Thoughts and Farewell

Watch the full video below:

Read more

Written by Lipton Matthews.

Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at the University of Birmingham, is one of the most prominent voices in Britain’s Empire debate. He has gone so far as to assert that British rule was “far worse” than the Nazis. Andrews represents a broader movement within academia that sees Western colonialism as the defining evil of human history. This movement suffers from a profound lack of perspective. Conquest and domination were not Western inventions but recurring features of human society.

Britain spent over £12 million to suppress the slave trade during the 19th century, a large sum for the era. Yet today, Britons are browbeaten and made to feel guilty over their country’s past. Mongolians, meanwhile, face no such pressure — despite the Mongol Empire being responsible for some of the most catastrophic destruction in all of history. There are no calls for Mongolian reparations; no curricula are being scrubbed; no statues are being torn down.

The simple fact is that conquest, tribute extraction, forced labour, population displacement and domination of subjugated peoples are constants across human civilisation. What makes Western colonialism distinctive is not its brutality but the degree to which it’s been subjected to critical examination.

Few episodes in history match the Mongol expansion in terms of killing. The Mongols offered conquered peoples a choice: surrender and pay tribute, or face annihilation. During the sack of Baghdad alone, hundreds of thousands were killed in a matter of days. Mongol forces also destroyed the House of Wisdom, the largest library in the world at the time. Books were thrown into the river in such quantities that historical accounts describe the Tigris running black with ink, before turning red with blood. Deaths attributed to Genghis Khan’s conquests have been estimated at 40 million, representing roughly 10% of the world’s population.

Not only that. Research has found that Mongol invasions did lasting damage to institutional quality, measurable in contemporary GDP per capita figures. Nations invaded by the Mongols became more autocratic as a result; those that weren’t developed more liberal, decentralised institutions.

The mechanism is straightforward: when resistance was met with slaughter, surviving populations were forced to prioritise the military and national defence. After the expulsion of its Mongol rulers, China turned inward under the Ming dynasty, built the Great Wall and largely abandoned its maritime capabilities. (Zheng He’s fleet, which dwarfed that of even Christopher Columbus, was left to rot.) Russia consolidated into a single autocratic state as a response to the Mongol threat, having previously been a loose federation of principalities. Islam’s Golden Age was effectively ended by the sack of Baghdad.

All this, yet Mongolia receives close to zero criticism. Conquered peoples of Eurasia are not even mentioned in the debate. (As recently as 2008, Mongolian authorities erected a huge, stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan.)

Let us turn from Eurasia to the Americas. Before the Spanish ever set foot there, a vast colonial system had already been constructed by people indigenous to that continent — the Inca Empire.

Incan imperial expansion involved the systematic seizure of resources from newly conquered territories. All wild animals and mineral resources were claimed as property of the state, personified by the divine ruler. Gold, silver and other materials were appropriated from the peoples that had previously controlled them. And provincial elites were required to deliver an annual tribute to the capital.

More significantly, the Inca displaced subject peoples on a massive scale. Between three and five million (a third of the imperial population) were resettled, as entire regions were claimed by the state. At Cochabamba in Bolivia, the emperor ordered part of the eastern valley vacated, and some 14,000 workers drawn from surrounding groups were drafted in to produce food for the army. Underpinning all this was an intricate bureaucracy imposed upon subject peoples, who had no say in who governed them.

Some individuals were permanently detached from their kin groups and then assigned to Inca elites, serving as a kind of bound labour. This included adolescent girls, who were confined to segregated state precincts where they worked until awarded in marriage. These were not isolated abuses, but rather official practices of the Empire.

Among the occupational categories documented in chronicles of the period were administrators with specific responsibility for human sacrifice. Such individuals appear alongside gold miners, feather workers and storehouse guardians in formal registers of state duties. The victims of Inca human sacrifice were of course overwhelmingly drawn from subject peoples, and many were children.

The Inca Empire was, by any reasonable definition, a colonial system. It was built on conquest, seizure of resources, mass population displacement, and detachment of individuals from their local communities. The fact that its perpetrators were not European is irrelevant.

Another case of non-European expansionism with striking parallels to European empire-building is the Nupe colonisation of Okunland in what is now north-central Nigeria, lasting from 1840 to 1897. It warrants attention because it demonstrates that the features most commonly attributed to European colonialism — slave-taking, imposition of administrators and manipulation of local elites — were practiced by an African imperial power against an African subject.

The conquest of Okunland was motivated by political rivalry and appetite for resources. Internal power struggles between Nupe princes made the wealthy region of Okunland an irresistible target. Around 1840, forces led by Etsu Usman Zaki overran several Okun settlements. Between 1840 and 1850, the large town of Kirri was taken. When it fell, able-bodied men were carried off as slaves, and a tribute of 6,000 cowries was imposed on the survivors.

Kabba, the largest Okun settlement, held out longer. Nupe forces pillaged the surrounding countryside in order to starve the population into submission. Eventually, a peace treaty was signed under which Kabba agreed to pay a tribute of 72,000 cowries. The Okun people thus became a Nupe dependency.

What followed was a system of concentrated, unaccountable power. An official known as the Ogba functioned as the sole representative of Nupe authority in a given area. Wielding immense power with no formal checks on his conduct, his aim was to collect as much tribute as possible for Bida (the imperial capital). Matters grew worse under Etsu Maliki, reaching a “monumental level of absurdity”. Taxes were raised so high that when cowries and slaves were not available, people were forced to pay with their own children.

Like European powers, Nupe authorities sometimes governed through local intermediaries. In Oworoland, chiefs who collaborated had their authority extended across entire regions; those who refused were stripped of influence. Empowering local elites is therefore not a European invention. The Nupe did it decades before Britain employed similar techniques across Nigeria. Despite this, only the British version features prominently in debates about colonial injustice.

It is entirely legitimate to examine Western colonialism. What’s wrong is to examine it in isolation, as though conquest and domination were products of European modernity. The Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history, causing institutional damage that is still measurable in living standards today. The Inca established a vast colonial system complete with administrators for overseeing human sacrifice. The Nupe colonised Okunland using methods indistinguishable from those later employed by European powers.

Mongolian authorities are not being asked to apologise for 40 million deaths, even as they build giant statues of the man responsible. The Inca legacy is treated as just another part of South America’s cultural heritage. And Nupe colonisation of Okunland remains largely unknown outside of specialist circles. What motivates most academic critics of Empire, it seems, is not so much anti-colonialism as opposition to the West.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

Become a free or paid subscriber:

Aporia

Social science. Philosophy. Culture.

Like and comment below.

Written by Bo Winegard.

In a recent tweet, the always provocative Richard Hanania wrote: “How you know the race and IQ people are just bigots: if you take IQ seriously, your main cause should be getting everyone on earth with a 110 IQ or higher into your country. This would be the only logical position one can hold.”

The race-and-IQ people targeted by Hanania are not specified, but he is presumably referring not merely to those who believe that human races vary in cognitive ability (since every relevant expert accepts that) but to those who believe it is important to speak candidly about race and IQ rather than retreat into silence or noble lies.

If so, the argument appears to be this:

Those who believe honesty about race and IQ is preferable to silence, and who nevertheless disagree with Hanania’s preferred immigration policy, are not merely mistaken but bigoted. And they are bigoted because they do not wish to admit everyone with an IQ of 110 or higher into the country.

Now, Hanania is prone to hyperbole, so before arguing against this claim, it is worth restating it in less incendiary terms:

People who believe IQ is an important trait, one that reliably predicts positive social outcomes, and who believe it is substantially heritable should support the admission of as many high-IQ immigrants as possible. If they oppose this, the most plausible explanation is racial animus or xenophobia. They are just bigots.

But even in this softened version, the argument remains unpersuasive. It assumes that if a person opposes bringing in, say, twenty million Chinese immigrants with IQs above 110, the only possible explanation is bigotry. After all, wealth is good—and larger, smarter, more specialized populations tend to generate more wealth. Refusing the opportunity to import millions of high-IQ immigrants thus appears, from this perspective, like refusing a winning lottery ticket. If not prejudice, what else could explain such “irrational” rejection of an obvious economic benefit?

Read more

Written by Bo Winegard.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. That was my first effort to understand eternity and, therefore, my first effort to understand God. I do not remember how old I was, but, having been taught a kind of amorphous Christianity by my parents, I took the existence of God and life after death for granted. The precepts and dogmas did not particularly move me; what riveted me was eternity.

My young mind could not grasp a timeless reality, so I tried to conceive eternity as a series of days that never ended, one followed by another, and so on without limit. But this perplexed me. Surely everything must end; how could anything simply go on forever? And yet life after death was said to be eternal, and the eternal, by its very definition, does not end.

Each day then must be followed by another like an endless string of beads. But again the question returned: how could the beads continue forever? I pictured taking the beads off one after another but then realized that eventually I would have a gargantuan and ever-growing pile of beads with a still endless string ahead of me. The more I tried to imagine it, the more vexing it became. My mind was caught in one of those devious traps in which the harder one struggles to escape, the more firmly fixed one becomes.

For a long time, I did not resolve this tension. Being naturally skeptical, I was no dogmatic believer. Yet I accepted some vague outline of Christianity and found the thought of an omnipotent deity comforting, even if I could not fathom him. At the same time, being naturally neurotic, I feared damnation and struggled to subdue sinful thoughts. I would often feel a blasphemy rising to mind and then try to repress it, curse it, deny it, lest my soul be imperiled by my own iniquity. Some nights I lay awake for hours in an excruciating loop. An insult to Jesus would pop in my head followed by a contrite attempt to propitiate through praise followed by another insult.

The fear of hell haunted me.

Read more

How Politically Diverse Are University Faculty? Shiri Siddiqi and Michael Regnier review recent studies on the political views of US academics. They note that such studies have produced ratios of liberal to conservative faculty ranging from as low as 2:1 to as high as 82:1. While liberals and leftists are substantially overrepresented in academia, the most comprehensive studies tend to show lower levels of imbalance.

Education and Skills during the first Industrial Revolution in England. Alexandra de Pleijt and colleagues examine the contribution of education to the Industrial Revolution in England. Analysing new data at the parish level, they find that the expansion of schooling lowered barriers to entry for apprenticeships in occupations that required reading, writing and arithmetic. It therefore played a crucial role in early industrialisation.

Read more

Here’s a free preview:

Watch the full video below:

Read more

Written by Noah Carl.

The exorbitant price of housing is one of the most important issues facing young people in Britain and the US. And yet, whenever a right-wing politician draws the obvious link with mass immigration, he or she is accused of misdiagnosing the problem and using inflammatory rhetoric.

In the 2024 vice presidential debate, JD Vance referred to the “connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices”. He also affirmed that housing is “totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants”. For these seemingly anodyne observations, Vance was denounced as someone who “perpetuates racism”. And various fact checks appeared purporting to debunk his claims by appealing to “experts”.

In Britain, Nigel Farage has likewise been accused of “scapegoating” migrants for suggesting that immigration puts pressure on housing and public services.

Read more