This offended Big Dyke, the person who controls the political line that homosexual behaviour is not merely behaviour, but an ineradicable biological condition, existing from conception or at least month 6 in the womb. Nixon was sent to thought correction camp, and when she emerged, she was heard to say that

“While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact.”

Actually it’s both, Cynthia. Mostly sexual activity is a series of choices and actions, but the Left would have us believe it is an inherent genetic condition. Indeed whether we believe it or not, that is the line that all Left-thinking people have to follow.

As Jim Goad writes in the always entertaining Taki’s Magazine:

” as an inveterate mocker of leftist contradictions, I will note that the SAME people who are INSISTING homosexuality is entirely genetic are precisely those who for generations now have denied and dismissed the idea that “race” or “gender” are anything more than “social constructs.” When it comes to race and gender, they will only accept environmental explanations; but when it comes to what you do with your naughty bits, they will only permit biological alibis. For race and gender, it’s 100% “nurture”; for sexuality, it’s 100% nature. Like always, they make no sense. But I enjoy watching how they struggle to fit straight pegs into gay holes.

For my part I share Goad’s amusement that the Gay Left believes that political and social tolerance will be greater if the rest of society come to believe that gayness is a biological condition rather than a choice, and yet at the same time they shout and scream that race is a social construct, so that tolerance will be greater on that ground.

Moreover, what  is the matter with a free market in sexual choice? Very probably they fear free choice  here as much as they fear it everywhere else. My God, if people were actually free to choose their sexual partners, who knows what could happen? Gays going straight! Straights going gay! Worse, no one would give a damn!  Curiously, they share the same fear of free choice here as religious and social conservatives. Which brings the intriguing question into focus: is the Left just a godless form of religious and social conservative? It bears thinking about,

They know they have to contend with the irregular recurrence of ice ages. They know, to the extent any science reaches them, that the earth is in an ice age, and we are in an interglacial period, shortly to come to an end.

The narrative has to be modulated. Ice ages. Global warming. How do they  reconcile the narratives?

Easy!

Global warming is delaying the onset of the next ice age! So says Dr. Luke Skinner of Cambridge University.

Says the Beeb Magazine:

“In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years – but emissions have been so high that it will not.

You are wondering: do I assume this is all centrally directed? By “this” I denote the studies and the media treatment of studies, more especially.

It amuses me to think that all this panic mongering is centrally directed,  no such assumption is necessary.

I think that the media’s treatment of man-caused global warming is like the case reported by Malcom Muggeridge, when he worked for the Guardian in the 1930s. He shouted down the hall to the senior editor “what’s our line on corporal punishment?”. The call came back “Same as capital punishment, only more so!”.

Something of the same nature is occurring in the media. First there is a Line on the issue. The Party Line. The party line exists easily even without the communist Party, because the tendency to leftism is eternal. Out with Marxism, in with Spaceship Earth and Global Warming.

Next, the Party Line has to change. Why? All the climate gate email hacks showed that the scientists (Trenberth, Briffa, Mann et al) were vicious little shits proclaiming anathema on their critics but seriously concerned they could not prove what they were insisting upon. Too much slowly accumulating evidence that AGW is either not happening, not happening fast enough, or that CO2 is not the cause of climate cycles.

Moving off the Party Line has to be done carefully, but it can be done boldly so long as the Party moves smartly and pretends it never thought any differently. In this case, CO2 is being blamed for slowing  the inevitable advent of the next ice age, as if this were a bad thing.

The loss in clarity of the narrative is apparent – that CO2 is not wholly bad – but the gain may be worth it. The clarity gained is to introduce to the faithful that ice ages occur. The science has to be fed to them bit by bit, lest they freak out when they realize how badly they have been conned.

Thus it is imperative when enough people at cocktail parties start to talk about ice ages and Milankovich cycles, and the warmist  faithful are being assaulted by too many well-informed skeptics telling them they are full of shit, then they must be informed of just enough science to make them comfortable again. CO2 bad! Bad humans! Bad! Gaia is angry!

I am not sure whether the Line is centrally directed, or whether it behaves as if it is. Your thoughts would be welcomed.

Extensive research into these sites reveals that there are a lot of women out there doing naughty things in front of their husbands or boyfriends, with his cock, with his friend’s cocks, with casual acquaintances, with girflriends, on beaches, in bedrooms, in cars, in parking lots, at swimming pools, nearly everywhere. And as for the men doing things with other men, don’t get me started. Their shamelessness is not less than the women’s and possibly greater.

There are sites for or about amateurs, gays, professional porn stars, trannies, big tit afficionados, teens, older women, bondage and discipline, male domination, female domination, cuckolds (fucking groups of black men while being photographed by the hubby seems to be a large niche), anal, public, nude beach, lesbian, facials, you name it.

All the photos appear to be in the public domain. I am waiting for the first female politician to run successfully for office despite a picture of her with her mouth stuffed with her former boyfriend’s dick. I expect this within the decade. So the Minister of Transportation (say) sucks dick? Meh. If an associate deputy minister of the department of redundancy disports herself on a nude beach, will anyne care?

I think of the hours of work each day that are required to maintain and update these sites. Perhaps I am wrong and the classification system allows for the more rapid recognition of photos consistent with the site’s themes. Surely however, a great deal of labour is poured into these sites for months and years on end. Whoever has maintained a blog knows how often that particular dog has to be walked.

More serious research should be conducted on the sex-habits of North Americans with porn sites as a proxy for actual behaviour. The big issue would be the discount to be applied to assess how representative the sites and the acts depicted are of actual behaviour. I read once that the average North American male has had seven sex partners in life, while the female has had five. Don’t ask me how they derived such figures. If we grant that this behaviour is distributed on a bell curve, then the top five percent of sex practitioners must have way more sexual activity than the norm. Or, as I think more likely, it is a power curve, then a very few people are the Amazons, googles, and hotmails of this world, and a long tail goes out to zero.

Is the inequality of sexual partners and activities increasing with increases of inequality of wealth?

In any case, there are issues of human behaviour worth investigating here. I suspect that, armed with some empirical data, and some skepticism about current ideas of who is doing what to whom, we might come to a better understanding of human nature in prosperous times. How many more bathtubs do we actually need than we have now? Zero to one, maybe. How many more sex partners, orgies, threesomes or kinky sex would you like to have than you have now? You get my point. Social scientists, stop your blathering about empowerment, racialized, otherness, queering, and do some empirical research. Tumblrworld awaits your intrepid explorations. But before you theorize, consult a mathematician for your models.

According to a recent international poll, Canada has the highest number of citizens (22 per cent) of any economically advanced country who deny that human activity causes global warming. We can fairly presume the vast majority of this 22 per cent are in what we might loosely call the conservative world in Canada. They read the anti-global-warming newspapers and commentators, and they rely on the handful of academics who debunk global warming.

If, despite the billions that governments have invested in the global warming scare, and the relentless stream of warmist propaganda, Canadians are least persuaded, perhaps it has something to do with the five months a year in which they have to heat their houses and put on hats, gloves, coats, and sweaters, just to go outside and scrape ice or snow of the windshield.

10,000 years ago this place had the same climate as Baffin Island, and 10,000 years from now it will have returned to that state, unless AGW is real and effective. Let us hope so, but if I am right, all the heating of the world by man that has occurred in the past 150 years will avail naught. Our descendants will be living in Tennessee, and over-wintering in southern Mexico.

Anthropogenic global warming will soon join phlogiston in the scrap heap of ludicrous ideas.

“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).

“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”

The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.

As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.

One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.

The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:

• g for general intelligence
• o for openness
• c for conscientiousness
• a for agreeability
• s for stability
• e for extraversion

Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.

And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.

“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”

Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.

The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.

Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.

Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.

One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.

So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.

There was once a comedy skit of two guys talking about women and sex, with shopping carts loaded with diapers in the aisles of Costco, with floor to ceiling boxes of diapers surrounding them. It slowly dawns on us that sexual activity leads to something quite different from the ecstatic communion of sexual bliss. It leads to little copies of yourself who strangely differ from you and your mate, wondering about the world, demanding lunch and entertainment. It also frequently leads to marriage, and eventually, depending on your choice of mate, divorce and custody arrangements.

As to the amazing and by no means obvious relationship of sex to reproduction I am not alone in wondering.

Sex at Dawn joins the growing ranks of books on human nature, as seen through an evolutionary perspective. It is subtitled “How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships”. It covers some of the same ground as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, albeit from different perspectives.
Anthropologists and biologists are asking how it is that man has come to dominate the planet, and what critical differences distinguish man from the other four great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons.

We have gone in the space of a several hundred thousand years from chipping rocks on the African plains to colonizing every available part of the planet. How this has occurred is, in effect, the Question. What mechanisms, what processes, could have caused to domesticate and transform ourselves in such a brief timespan as 150,000 years?

Apparently it has to do with sex. Our sex lives are essential to our rapid evolution. Many people are repelled by that answer, but according to Darwin, there are only two ways of doing it: natural selection and sexual selection.

As Geoffrey Miller puts, only sexual selection is directed, rapid and intelligent enough to have produced us, because natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, is too slow and random to have moved us up the food chain from dimwitted rock shapers of 400,000 years ago to people able to play Bach and appreciate it. That means women have selected men to be as they are: capable of violence but good around the kids, able to bring home the bacon, and faithful enough to be tolerated. And women have been selected by men to be as they are: good with kids, able to forage for themselves and the family, handy, beautiful (no facial hair please), and smart enough to appreciate our jokes.
This is a depressing conclusion for those who imagine the perfectibility of man is only held up by the existence of bad social structures (economic and religious arrangements). It is of no consequence to those who believe that man – in whatever condition he then was – received revelation as to how he should behave.

Sex includes better brains, which offer more entertainment value, bigger dicks and more beautiful chicks, and cleverer, more emotionally engaged men and women loving one another. I could have written that differently, but that is the main conclusion of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. We have conquered the planet by being smarter, which has entailed and caused us to be more sexy, to be more rapidly reproductive, and to share the burdens of reproduction better as between men and women.

We are each the result of sexual selection. Men have been selected by women, and women by men, and what you experienced in your mate selection days is what everyone has gone through. And, by and large, despite the fact that less than one percent of our sexual activity is aimed at reproduction, we have populated the planet with ourselves quite effectively.

This brings us to the controversy dealt with in Sex at Dawn. How much were we ever intended to be sexually faithful?

This issue bedevils our understanding of ourselves. The time before agriculture spreads backwards from 10,000 years ago into the mists of time. It is in this time that anatomically modern humans emerged, probably about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This long period is a sort of blank slate onto which writers project their theories of how we got be so smart and well adapted.

Did the family unit mean that much then? Did we pair-bond for longer than a few years, in order to raise children? Was the family the engine of human survival? Was evolution accelerated by sexual exclusivity, however short term, which is implied in the idea of family?

Or, to the contrary, did people just boink and move on? Did the hunter-gatherer pack or tribe enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity in the days before we had more property than we could carry on our backs? Did men choose sexual exclusivity for some relevant period of time as they supported their mates in breeding? In the absence of accumulation of property, did we have something to defend that made patrilineal relationships a sensible social institution? Did we grow up as a species knowing who our fathers were, and did they and their brothers teach us how to hunt? Or was dad just one of the guys who fucked mother on occasion, and also taught us how to catch fish and shape a spearpoint?
This is the context in which books like Sex at Dawn are written.

Sex at Dawn is engaging in an argument about the family and the pair-bond which lies at the core of it. Essentially it is stating that the human being was not meant for sexual fidelity and it is time we recognized that fact.

The argument goes like this.
1) The behavior of the human species since the invention of agriculture is of no relevance. Since we began to accumulate property (beyond what we could carry on our backs and pack-animals) only with the advent of settled existence, and that only with agriculture, the history of the last 10,000 years reveals nothing of our true nature. It is a distortion caused by property. Property enforces the need to assure ourselves of the fatherhood of our children, and therefore the sexual exclusivity of our pair-bonds.

2) If you want to know about how we behaved sexually before agriculture, compare the human body to those of the other 4 great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons. The evidence, in the form of penis size and shape, external testicles, female ovulation – whether hidden or evident, shows that we are designed to be sexually promiscuous. The existence in humans of “sperm competition” means that we were and are promiscuous, and that males have fucked women in group situations forever. Sexual exclusivity is a fantasy, a lie we keep telling ourselves.

3) As we pass out of the agricultural epoch, sexual arrangements are starting to leave behind the mould imposed by the property-obsessed homo economicus of the previous era.
As the authors state, “despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted…we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations” (p.310)

That, in essence is the book. I have rendered it as logically as I could, and spared you the ranting tone and the irrelevant asides on the religious suppression of human sexuality.

To which I respond:

1) The whole thing is an argument against the concept of marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime, fair enough. But who is arguing for marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime? The anthropologists argue merely that the human pair-bond was an engine of our reproductive success, in the raising of children and the transmission of culture to them. So it is pointless to argue about the pair-bond with people who are not saying it was ever wholly exclusive or meant for life.

2) That leaves institutional religion. The Christian Church and Islam have both praised the institution of faithful marriage and repressed sexuality in the interests of family stability. If you had responsibility for the human species in your hands, over the course of centuries, would you argue for anything less? Would your religion make explicit allowance for group sex and seasonal orgies? Point me the way to one such and I might join. But I doubt it would last for centuries, as the sexually repressive ones have.

3) As to improvising new familial configurations, what do you think has been going on for the last fifty years? As soon as we could escape the bonds of one man or woman for life, we have done so. Though the results are not entirely in yet, there is little ground for total confidence that sexual liberation is possible where children are involved. I am not ready to join David Warren in wholly condemning the modern era, but the importance of the family to the welfare of children is a non-negotiable truth, and free-form boinking will always take second place to the requirements of child-rearing. Child-rearing is the twenty to twenty five year mortgage. And if marriage fails, it is always a tragedy, even if leads to better outcomes eventually for the couple engaged in it. How it affects the children is the crucial test, and we do not yet have confidence to say it carries no cost to them. It is a price they pay for their parents’ inability to love one another for a lifetime.

4) Societies are in competition. The improvising of familial configurations in which we have been engaged for fifty years is a novelty. There is no reason to believe the society which engages in it will always prevail against those which suppress sexuality in favour of everyone doing their duty, and out-breeding the pleasure-seeking improvisers of family configurations.

So the advocates of the pair-bond may, with Baronness Thatcher, say that the facts of life are conservative, even if humans were, are and remain a randy bunch of adulterers, group-sex devotees, and polymorphously perverse libertines.

Einstein’s theory of light sets light as the fastest possibe speed, and is as well-established as Newton’s theory of gravitation was before Einstein’s. Have you noticed that, when it comes to real science, no one treats the neutrino observation and its authors as heretics to “settled science”? No harrumphing that a “consensus” has been violated?

My friend Tobermory writes:

Real scientists (as opposed to those whose “science” is subservient to their political agenda) are willing to consider the possibility, however remote, that even long-held, fundamental theories may be disproven by new data. Despite the radical and, as Rebel Yell says, unlikely nature of the claims from CERN, I noted that none of the scientists asked to comment in the article began by barking “the science is settled”.

A good review of the issue is found (thank you Glendronach) at a most intelligent site, the Gormogons. Worth a look on many counts.

The Czech physicist Lubos Motl has some useful observations to offer in relation to the neutrino finding.

I have a few cousins who believe it profoundly, but they are all Liberals and I avoid discussing any topic of controversy with true believers.

Probably by a natural process of affinity I have removed myself from the presence of such people, as I am too obnoxious, too condescending, and most of all, too knowledgeable about the geologic history of earth to be endured by warmists. They find it very hard to endure hearing of recent ice-ages, previous global warmings, and higher carbon dioxide concentrations tens of millions of years ago than exist now.
Yet you have surely noticed that, in the past year, the number of people of – shall we call them the informed classes- who espouse imminent eco-doom has declined? Have you noticed that pompous warmists have fallen silent?

Anthropogenic global warming was the largest, most sustained, best funded, and most persistent popular delusion since Marxism. It satisfied all elements of a pernicious metaphor – spaceship Earth. On spaceship Earth resources are always limited, and humans are always exhausting those limited resources because we are greedy, and we have not heeded the wisdom of Gaia.

Humans could not survive 6 weeks in open air without clothes, hunting gear, shelters and fire. Neither did our ancestors. That is why they developed sewing, hunting, fishing, farming, fire-making, and every other art conducive to survival and predominance. They knew they had to master their environments, not just live within them. Gazelles live within their environments. Look what happens to gazelles. If you do not want to end up as someone’s food, you had best keep a sharp lookout, travel in groups, belong to powerful clans, wield weapons, have a reputation for bravery and cunning, and have an exhaustive knowledge of plants, animals, and water sources. The automation of these functions by industrialization has permitted a great number of foolish people to walk about thinking otherwise, and still survive.

The second reason anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was so successful was that it fulfilled the aspirations of bureaucrats to manage the economy without accountability for results. It was a central planners’ dream come true, and unlike the Marxist version of central planning, all the AGW bureaucracy would need to do was to reduce living standards. They would not even have to have pretended to improve them.

“How shall we lower living standards today, Mr. Secretary?”
“Same way as always, boy. Tell them they are too rich and reduce their carbon dioxide emission quotas”.
“Aye aye, Mr. Secretary.”

Plus, the cap and trade idea was a wholly corrupt system whereby brokers would seize the scarcity rents of carbon emission quotas before the public treasury saw any of the money. To repeat, as government would have lowered carbon emission quotas, the remaining quotas would have become more valuable. But would governments have realized the benefits of these scarcities (resource rents)? Not at all. The traders in emissions quotas would have garnered all the increase of value, if value is the right term for the licence to burn fuel. And who might these brokers have been? The same people who brought you the recent financial crisis.
What happened? The Climategate leak of emails showed that the high-priests of AGW were engaged in massive cover-up of evidentiary gaps, vicious character assassinations, and unscientific group-think. The fact that there were only two observatories of global temperature in all the planet, and that billions if not trillions of dollars of investment would be shaped on the basis of fraudulent science conducted in one of them, shocked people into awareness.

Ultimately the global warmists could not control the discourse sufficiently to produce the results that would have justified the socialization of our economies. If there had been robust evidence that global temperatures were increasing, that CO2 concentrations were going up, that these were preponderantly caused by human activity and not natural forces, and that other causes: sun, cloud cover, did not play a role, the AGW scare might have had some strength.

Average global temperature has been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850. CO2 concentration has been increasing. The problem with warmist science was that the causal linkage between CO2 concentration and rising global temperature was assumed; computer modeling replaced observation, hypothesis and testing. The geological and glaciological history of earth was ignored, and contrary evidence suppressed. Many a career was sidelined by the relentless pressure to conform to the Prevailing Doctrine. Yet despite the calumny by warmists of their opponents, the massive distortion of funding to “prove” what could not be demonstrated, and the relentless propaganda, the warmist cause is in deep disarray. No wonder Al Gore is off his rocker.

The entire study of the evolution of languages has been delayed for thirty years by this dogmatic fathead. He is the most dreadful human being: arrogant, intolerant, narrow-minded leftist bigot. And now his theory of language is wrong.

“Leading linguistic thinkers (Chomsky and his acolytes – ed.) have argued that our brains are hard-wired for languages to follow certain sets of rules. But a team of scientists is challenging that premise in a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The team used biological tools to construct evolutionary trees for four language families and found that each of the families followed its own idiosyncratic structural rules, a sign that humans’ language choices are driven by culture rather than innate preferences.

The authors say their findings run contrary to the idea of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, which says the brain has hard and fast ordering rules for language. They also contradict the “universal rules” of Joseph H. Greenberg, who said languages tended to choose certain patterns over others.

“Culture trumps the innate structure of the human mind,” said study coauthor Russell Gray, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “We need to take much more seriously the role of cultural factors in changing language diversity.”

I do not believe that the issue at stake here is settled by any means, nor need it be. What it does signal, however, is  a large crack in Chomsky’s iconic status within linguistics, and the enlargement of the possibility of debate, which Chomsky has been loathe to tolerate.

When the Muslims took over the better part of the eastern Mediterranean, they inherited the Greek-speaking portion of what remianed of the Roman Empire. The major seats of Christianity included Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in what is now Turkey, Byzantium, and Rome. The world they inherited was both prosperous and infused with Greek thought, which was based in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Antioch and Alexandria, two of the four major patriarchates of Christianity fell to Islam, to be joined later by Byzantium in 1453AD.

Around the year 1000AD, a school of thought arose in Islam called the Mu’tazilites. They were Islam’s response to this Greek (Hellene) philosophical tradition. They sought to subject the Quran to the kind of dissection that rational minds engage in. Was the Quran coeval with Allah, as the theologians pretended? Had it existed before all time in the Mind of God? Questions such as these and others were asked and answered, and the theologians were not amused. Fortunately for the philosphers, they had the support of the then Caliph.

Against this philosophizing tendency – which tends to subject revelation to the rules of evidence and reason- arose the great analyst and philosopher Al-Ghazali, who rejected every premise of philosophy in his magisterial work, “The Incoherence of Philosophy”. His influence throughout the Islamic world was as pervasive and powerful in its way as Aristotle has been on ours, and it was wholly negative.

 Essentially al-Ghazali denounced Aristotle and Plato as un-Islamic, and advanced a theory of causality which eliminated all secondary causes. What this meant was that God was directly responsible for everything. By everything I mean every thing, action, appearance, event and manifestation was directly caused by God. No secondary causes exist.  No law of gravity. No three laws of thermodynamics. Nothing. God maintains the world not by law, but by his habit, and nothing constrains him to sustain it or from destroying at any given pico-second.

Thus an arrow shot from a bow did not move according to laws of gravity and aerodynamics, but by God’s absolute will.

Al-Ghazali argued that our reason could not know the world and that God was not reason. God was will, absolutely separate from his creation. God’s absolute independence of his creation could not be diminished in any way. Thus, in the Islamic doctrine, God implanted no part of Himself in human nature, whereas the Jews and Christians believe that they were made in God’s image. The reason we can know the universe or anything in it is that we partake somehow and somewhat of this divine nature. Western science, which is an outgrowth of Christianity,  rests on the belief that the laws of nature exist and are rationally apprehensible.

In the Christian tradition God was the Logos itself – the reason behind the world’s appearances. You may recall the opening of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was that Word. All things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made.” “Word” is the inadequate translation of the Greek Logos, which connotes inner logical order.

And further on in the same paragraph, John records: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt aomong us, and we saw the glory of it”.

These two ideas, of man being made in God’s image, and that God was Logos itself, are so deeply embedded in our thought that it is difficult for us to see how they operate. In that sense, Islam gives us clearest picture of what happens to society when different ideas of God, nature and the human capacity for knowledge prevail.

The argument made by Robert Reilly is that al-Ghazali was altogether too influential. For whatever reason, al-Ghazali’s ideas on the incoherence of philosophy, the inadequacy of human reason to understand the world, and the unknowability of God except through revelation, have had a huge, continuing and debilitating effect on Islamic society.

If nature depends immediately on God’s will, why inquire into anything? Indeed, inquiry verges on heresy, disrespect for the Almighty. Everything is “Inshallah” – as God wills. Inquiry is either blasphemous, heretical, or both.

And we ourselves become playthings, motes of dust in the divine whirlwind, rather than actors with moral responsibility. If God directs everything, then there is no standpoint from which man can act independently of God’s will. We cannot reproach God with anything, nor can we act independently of God’s will, and so have things for which we should repent. We are not actors. We are phantasms.

If God is pure will, rather than reason and love, then when humans model themselves on the divine attribute, they model the behaviour that is seen as divine. In the Islamic case, that is pure willfulness, that aspect of man that is like the Divine Essence.

In 2006 I coined the term Allah’s holodeck. This was my intuitive realization that, for the devout Muslim, they experienced themselves as directly moved by God. Thus,  if they robbed a bank and killed the guards, that was as God willed. The only religious  issue was whether they would still be sweating from exertion or fear when they thanked God after the bank robbery, and that issue  of propriety would be decided by shari’a, not by any innate moral sense or reasoning from first principles.

Reilly’s indictment of the baneful effect of Ghazali deserves your attention. He draws direct links between the disparagement of reason by al-Ghazali and the increasing stultification of the Muslim mind, which has been going on for a thousand years.

The UN’s human development report of 2002, written by Arabs themselves, shows the truly dreadful lack of education, publishing, translation, economic development, patents, and intellectual life generally in Arab Islamic lands. The fact that 4 million Finns produce more goods and services than 80 million Arabs is the consequence of the disparagement of reason that al-Ghazali justified.

The  full text of the Arab Human Development Report of 2002 is here.

Reilly cites an expert on Islam who says that “Islamic fundamentalism is not a solution, it is the cry of despair that that the lack of solution is no longer tolerable”.

Reilly’s argument, which I find wholly persuasive, is that the root of  Sunni Islamic problems in the present day is theological and epistemological: meaning, ideas about God and the capacity for knowledge.  They are deep rooted in the triumph of a philosopher who renounced philosophy a thousand years ago, and the society that accepted his views as definitive.

This may be apocryphal but it is a good story. At one time there was a dispute as to whether Isaac Newton or Gottfried von Leibnitz  had invented the calculus ahead of the other. Someone devised three very difficult problems in mathematics, and sent them out to Newton and Leibniz to solve. Newton sent back the answers by return of post; Leibniz sent back one answer 6 months later. At that point, the creator of the test said: “Voila, la griffe du lion”.

However unfair to the brilliant polymath Gottfried von Leibniz, lawyer, diplomat, historian, courtier, philosopher, correspondent, mathematician, linguist, premier exemplar of the Enlightenment, of whom we are all unworthy, “la griffe du lion” became a byword for “the mark of the master”.

So I wish to introduce to you the most audacious practitioner of mathematical reasoning about differences in the IQs of races, an American professor who goes by the name of “La Griffe du Lion”. He is truly brilliant and his dissections of the arguments about intelligence differences, whether between men and women, or between and among races, will make you truly unacceptable in almost all social circles where liberal cant is the accepted truth. This includes many if not most circles where people are nominal conservatives.

His arguments are a tough slog, but that is because you, the average reader of this blog,  only have an IQ of 130, and you need an IQ of 150 to really find out the flaws, if any, of his arguments. Don’t worry, I am not that smart either.

Try his dissection of male-female mathematics differentials, if you have the time and nerve.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm

A somewhat easier one concerns the impact of intelligence differentials between blacks and whites in handling voting machine technologies on the outcome of the Florida vote in 2000 that gave George Bush the victory and cost Gore the White House. I warned you; he will get you into trouble.

Read Steve Sailer’s ode to Griffe here. Even Sailer is in awe.

Conclusions first, evidence later. The goal is power, not truth.

Or why the term “climate science” has become an oxymoron.

You have probably heard of “The Black Swan”, a book by a Lebanese-born New York market trader and philosopher of knowledge named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Maybe you have not had time to read him yet. Let me help you to make the decision to do so.

A black swan, in Taleb’s definition, is an event which has three characteristics:

• it is an outlier, “as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”
• it carries extreme impact;
• despite its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Taleb, who is an Orthodox Christian from Lebanon’s elite, is at war with a vast category of higher-order fools, particularly in the area of finance. They are higher-order fools because they are measuring risk by means of intellectual tools that, by their very operation, rule out black swans.

Think of the most dramatic recent example: the attacks on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. I think most of you who witnessed it would have felt like me: this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening, O Lord, we are in a science-fiction universe! (It also illustrates that a black swan to the rest of us is not a black swan to the people who planned it).

Taleb is NOT saying that better predictive abilities will rule out black swans. He is arguing that, in a world far more affected by black swans than we care to believe, it is imperative that our mental tools accommodate their reality. And this, he says, is precisely what business schools and most statistical methods taught in universities fail to do.

The world, he says, is divided into events that come from Mediocristan, and those that come from Extremistan. In Mediocristan, the domain of the Gaussian bell curve of probability, outliers can have very little impact on the statistical norm. Put a hundred people in a line-up and weigh them. Measure their height. Measure their life-spans. Average height, weight and life-span will not depart significantly, that is to say, by orders of magnitude, from some average, even if you compare lard-asses to Laotian hill people, or smokers to alpine hill-dwellers. Even if you compare the average intelligence of 100 people to the average intelligence of Nobel-prize winners.

Then take wealth. Put Bill Gates in a line-up with 100 other people. The combined wealth of the other 99 will hardly be more than Bill Gates’ interest income in a day. Wealth distribution partakes of Extremistan. So does most of the forces and things that make the world as it is.

Taleb is not talking about the kind of risk that occurs inside casinos (the ludic fallacy, he calls it). Nothing that happens inside of a casino partakes of Black Swan-ness, else casinos would go broke as often as Lehman Brothers, Barings, and Wall Street crashes.

Nothing that you know will be the source of a Black Swan. Take for example, the elm tree that hovered over my country house. It started to die, so that progressively larger branches were falling off it. I had it cut down, to avoid the disaster of a 150-year old elm crushing my house. No Black Swan there. The course of events was foreseen and prevented. Most of what you insure against partakes of Mediocristan. Indeed, excluding risks coming from Extremistan is precisely what insurers try to do.

The essence of the Black Swan is that no recurrence of events, no matter for how long, rules out the catastrophe.  Put a few dots in a line.  Put as many dots as you like and make a projection through their mean.  If the dots derive from data subject to the rules of Mediocristan, you may have a valid trend. But if the dots derive from data obeying the mathematics of Extremistan, no matter for how long the data is derived, the trend line is just so much bullshit and self-deception. If a turkey lives a thousand days, it has every reason to believe its kindly feeder will feed it on day 1001. But on day thousand and one, it is killed. For the turkey (but not for us), its slaughter is an event from Extremistan.

Or as he says, you cannot foresee the event, but you can make yourself more robust against the consequences of unforeseen events. Society can stop putting blind people in charge of driving school buses.

Taleb frustrates those who want easy answers because his book asserts that the unpredictable lies in a domain of ignorance so deep that it cannot be computed, ever. It lies beyond the bell curves of Gauss, or even the mathematics of his friend, the late, the regretted Benoit Mandelbrot, whose mathematics inform us that Grey Swans are possible. (Mandelbrot has also written that the stock market obeys rules of risk that are far from those of the bell curve).

He writes:

“I am going to be blunt. Before The Black Swan (and associated papers) most of the epistemology and decision theory was, to an actor in the real world, just sterile mind games and foreplay. Almost all the history of thought is about what we know,or think we know. The Black Swan is the very first attempt (that I know of) in the history of thought to provide a map of where we get hurt by what we don’t know, to set systematic limits to the fragility of knowledge – and to provide exact locations where these maps no longer work.”

I have not conveyed the pleasure of reading Taleb. He is deeply and vastly well-read. He cites thinkers I had never heard of, as well as plenty that I have. He demolishes the reputations of learned fools with elegance and total intellectual clarity. His attacks on economists and finance professors for their systemic blindness to Black Swan phenomena are fierce, joyous, merciless.

“Research shows that academics are overrepresented in the systematizing, Black-Swan-blind category….I haven’t seen any formal direct test of Black Swan foolishness and the systematizing mind, except for a calculation George Martin and I made in 1998, in which we found evidence that all the finance and quantitative economics professors from major universities whom we tracked and who got involved in hedge fund trading ended up making bets against Black Swans, exposing themselves to blow-ups. The best-known such academics were, once again, the “Nobel”-crowned Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, whom God created so that I could illustrate my point about Black Swan blindness”.

“Normally, such people exit the gene pool; academic tenure holds them a bit longer.”

Most of all, he confirms you in the conviction that we are living in a Black Swan universe. Why does the stock market crash every eight or ten years on average, rather than the 780  odd years predicted by Gaussian bell curve distributions? Why do small bands of outliers create world-shaking religions? Seize states and plunge us into world wars? Invent devices that destroy previous industrial empires?

Taleb is the foe of the tidy-minded. He is the enemy of hubris. Reading his book will change how you think. It will compactify everything you know into a small quadrant, everything you might know into another, and keep your mind open to the need to fortify yourself against the consequences of things going badly wrong. A large amount of  debt , for example, is not a Black Swan except to the turkeys who hold it.

Ages ago, in another universe, I read a beautiful illustration of what Taleb was talking about in, of all places, Carlos Castaneda. You may recall from your distant hippie past that Carlos Castaneda claimed to have been under the personal tutelage of a Mexican Indian shaman, who was called Don Juan Matus. Castaneda’s teachings are to Don Juan as Plato was to Socrates; he writes as the foolish scribe who never understood what the Master was talking about. 

Don Juan insisted upon the division of the world into the tonal, and the nagual, which we would pronounce “nahual”. The tonal is the domain of the known and the knowable, and the nagual, the unknowable. One day, stirred by his students’ incessant questioning on this point, Don Juan organizes his apprentices to go on a picnic. They gather everything for this journey: plates, cutlery, baskets, even chairs and table. They drive for hours and then begin a hike up into the beautiful arid mountains of the Sierra Nevada, through the chapparal. They climb for hours and eventually find themselves on a flat look-out facing another, equally beautiful range of parallel mountains many miles away across the plain. The range is lit by the rosy afternoon glow of the sun. The view is magnificent: the space, the sky, the silence, the distant eagles, the clouds beginning to be lit from underneath by the setting sun. The table is set, as if it were at a banquet, knives forks and spoons in order, the tablecloth below, the chairs arranged. The scene is perfect in every way.

Then Don Juan says: “You have asked me about the tonal and the nagual: the known, the unknown and the unknowable. This, he says, pointing to the nicely arranged table, is the tonal, the domain of the known. And underneath the table is also the tonal, the domain of the unknown. And this, he says, with a gesture embracing all that surrounds them, the sky, mountains, the earth: this is the nagual.”

We owe to Nassim Taleb the first mathematical and philosophic discussion of the limits of the tonal , the knowable,  in the western tradition. For that we can be grateful. His book is a deeply personal  pleasure. Read it for that reason, if for no other. And do not be distracted by my likening its lesson to an anecdote in Castaneda. Taleb has produced a serious, learned, and delightful mind-changer. He dwells in the world of finance, and has brought deep learning to the problem of risk (the known unknowns) and uncertainty (the unknown unknowns). Mainly, he would say, it is the consequences of the latter which we need to fortify against, and we cannot do this until we acknowledge that this domain is powerful and ever-present.

The chief point of what came to be called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics was the role of the observer in formulating the experiement. Set up the experiment one way, and you see a particle, set up another experiment another way, and the same “particle” appears as a wave.

That the mind of the designer of the experiment should influence the outcome this way is intolerable to many who think about it. Einstein was the first and most important of physicists to reject the Copenhagen intepretation as incomplete (not incorrect, just not the complete description of reality) on the basis of a philosophical preference for realism.

In the years since the Einstein-Bohr debate, the general view has been that the Copenhagen interpretation has been successful. The experiments conducted to prove or disprove Bell’s inequality theorem have shown results consistent with the ideas inherent in the Copenhagen interpretation.

But here’s the problem, for some. You may recall Schrodinger’s cat, the creature who lies dead in the box simultaneously with being alive in the box. Schrodinger used his cat as a thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that, until the obervation is made, the probability of it being alive or dead is not determined. Its probability of being either alive or dead”collapses” into a definite observation when the observation is made, and not before. In physics they call this act of observation “collapsing the wave function”.

Physics gained something enormous with quantum theory, but it placed a new god (or God) at the centre by enthroning the act of observation. It dumped materialism – the doctrine that there is only matter and its motions -over the edge of the universe into oblivion. Now mind is at the core of physics. Observation is inextricably linked to the interplay of “material” particles. Observation is the characteritic of mind. Mind therefore enters as a fundamental constiuent of the material universe.

[As a brief aside, it is evident that the biological theorists have yet to come to grips with the philosophical implications of quantum physics. Dawkins take note.]

Once you dump materialism over the edge, you face a certain problem: God.

Quoting from Manjit Kumar’s “Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great debate about the nature of Reality”,

“The Copenhagen interpretation requires an observer outside of the universe to observe it, but since there is none – leaving God aside – the universe should never come into existence but remain forever a superposition of many possibilities”.

Since the world has come into being, the only way to get around the supercosmic observer summoning it forth (as in “I’ll see you to the door”) is to take refuge in the many worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett., published in 1957.

Every time there is a different observation, the universe keeps splitting into one where Schrodinger’s cat lives and another where it dies. It seems absurd at first that one should take refuge in many worlds rather than accept a deity who observes the universe into being, until you think about what the Copenhagen interpretation really does to liberate the universe from the primacy of matter. Once matter no longer matters, so to speak, what limit is there in principle on the generation of as many worlds as observers may contrive with thought alone?