"But then again what is status? Women perceive status in a different way from men. Women are more familial, and tend to have a higher opinion of themselves than any objective appraisal. That is particularly true of elite families, who raise their daughters to be refined yet insufferable snobs, conditioned to think and regard everything as a status game." Bonfire of the Vanities illustrated this point quite well. Sherman McCoy's wife looked down on him for his inferior pedigree - he had a "hickish" name - ("like the Hatfields and the McCoys" (paraphrase)). She acted like an insufferable bitch towards him. He took a mistress.

You're probably familiar with Gregory Clark and his book Farewell to Alms. One of Clark's main theses in there is that the English middle class - merchants, landowners, etc. - outbred the lower classes starting from early middle ages and continuing at least until the industrial revolution. The correlation between fertility and income (that he uses mainly as an indicator for class) holds also within occupations in that wealthier landowners had more offspring, for example. I don't remember if he explicitly mentions IQ, but he emphasizes that over the centuries this has resulted in making 'middle-class values' (or more bluntly, 'human capital') such as conscentiousness, diligence, loyalty, reliability etc. more common among the populace as a whole due to the breeding differential and due to structural downward mobility in such a world. Since usually only the oldest son inherits the father's farm or occupation, the other sons 'trickle down' towards menial work, seafaring, military or such. I also remember him pointing out the obvious genetic component in this all. Keep that going a few centuries and you'll end up with a nation of shopkeepers. The point I'm trying to make is that focusing only on elites misses too much of the picture. You can get significant heritable results by just giving a slight but consistent advantage to those who are above average but not yet total outliers.

> The point I’m trying to make is that focusing only on elites misses too much of the picture. You can get significant heritable results by just giving a slight but consistent advantage to those who are above average but not yet total outliers. Yup. Also, Japan wasn't necessarily all that different for lacking a civil service exam. The smart, the wise, the creative, the brave, the highly-born (and mezzo-highly-born) recognize one another ; testing is not necessarily that big a deal. It /could/ make a considerable difference in practice, but I wouldn't hasten to assume so. As for elites and haute-elites sleeping with all the hot maidservants/ random chix, I'm no expert, but the balance of what I've read suggests that it was universal, the only big difference being whether it is covert or overt. Of course it's true that when/if haute-haute-elites are truly ruined by inbreeding depression, it won't really matter how many maidservants they lay. Their illegitimate offspring will perhaps be fitter than themselves, but will still not have excellent fitness: the pop is therefore not much improved.

The social policies coming from the Cathedral can be summed up in two words: incentivized irresponsibility. We don't need data to understand how to stop digging.

"Yet free health care must surely be dysgenic. I don’t actually want the low-born to suffer ill health, but that’s not relevant to free or subsidized medicine being dysgenic: it just is dysgenic." It depends. A fit, healthy man falls off a ladder and is *temporarily* unfit. Option 1) he lies in bed at home gets an infection and dies. Option 2) he gets fixed at hospital and is back being productive in six weeks. All singular, non-recurring medical situations are the same. One of the bodies arguing for national health insurance in the UK after WWI was the army because they had to reject so many recruits from the big cities for fixable health problems like rickets. That doesn't apply to a lot of medical ailments but it doesn't apply whether treatment is free or not. In a "Farewell to Alms" type scenario if the wealthy can afford medical treatments for very dysgenic illnesses then you get the same effect. . "Eugenics won’t come through the starvation of the poor" Switch sperm donors from medical students to special forces: IQ for the dumb, health for the smart and probably twice the likelihood of successful fertilisation as a bonus.

"Another lesser-known fact is that the number of male to female undergraduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments in the 1930s and they soared directly following the end of World War II. A highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. From then on female college enrollments began to catch up, especially in the 1970s. Gender equality was again reached around 1980 and subsequently women overtook men in college enrollments and graduation rates. The narrowing of the gender gap in enrollments to 1980 was a return or a “homecoming,” although the levels of college going were almost six times higher in 1980 than in the 1920s for both men and women. This article explores the homecoming of American college women and the reversal in the gender gap in college attendance and graduation. " THE HOMECOMING OF AMERICAN COLLEGE WOMEN: THE REVERSAL OF THE COLLEGE GENDER GAP Claudia Goldin Lawrence F. Katz Ilyana Kuziemko and even higher today. The regression to mean article would've meant that it didn't matter much if only the elite women dried out their wombs in academia, since the geniuses in a society come overwhelmingly from the middle classes due to their sheer numbers. "The middle class, to which in industrialized countries about a third of the population belongs, determines by its number of children whether the society goes up or down in the cycle. The offspring of the middle class supplies the largest percentage of socially upward mobile individuals and in each generation the highest absolute number of the highly gifted, with an IQ above 123 (Weiss, 1992). The highly gifted originate only to a small degree from the marriages of the highly gifted themselves, because the highly gifted proportion of any population is always very small." http://www.v-weiss.de/cycle.html how women changed academia back in 19th century http://unmaskingfeminism.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-feminization-of-rhetoric/

Human evolutionary decay is the result of adultery (men mating with other men's wives) which causes Fisherian runaway selection. Monogamy or at least restricted polygamy is also good for human evolution. This makes survival (as opposed to seduction) the primary evolutionary value with particular emphasis on lowering the mortality rate of one's children. So what all genetically successful cultures share is effective prevention of adultery. I go into detail in my article on Human Evolution.

I think eugenics typically happened in history at the tribal level. The superior tribe slaughtered the inferior one and replaced them wholesale. For example Germanic and Scandinavian tribes basically genocided Roman Britian (we know this because the English language is not a Romance language despite Britain being once Roman). We call the British people Anglo-Saxon which is based on the *non-English* tribes that drove them into the sea. By the time Britain drove off the Germans and Scandinavians many centuries later, they were themselves German and Scandinavian. Japan surely seeded Korea many times since it invaded numerous times in history. The whole deal of warfare in most of history was the more advanced side either took the land and got rid of the weaker one or ruled over and seeded the women of the weaker. Heck even as recently as WWII, French women were happy to be seeded by the German soldiers who were winning. That's just in a short window of time, too.

> we know this because the English language is not a Romance language despite Britain being once Roman So the Proto-Indoeuros genocided most of W-Eurasia? I think 'apartheid' is the more common understanding of how pure Brythonic Celts might have been treated after ~600. It seems like a lot of them were driven off, to places where they had to live at unsuitable density, presumably fight each other, and doubtlessly sub-flourish. That's a sort of passive and unorganized genocide. Probably a lot were enserfed or enslaved, that's just a guess, and it would be hard to imagine many women of superior fitness being enconcubined, or just married. Slave gang chains are I think known from purely Celtic times/places -- so how much more likely were the slightly more successful Germanics to employ enslavement/serfment of Celts. I would emphasize 'slightly': Germanics had a rather sudden expansion into Romano-Brythonic territory, but this was exceptional and is explained by the Roman sociomilitary abandonment. In general the Germanic expansion at the expense of Celts was ploddingly slow, and Celtic tongues or anyway artifacts quite recently blanketed the land very far indeed to the east and northeast.

> This to me is the interesting question though – do they? I dunno, empirically the correlation of comeliness and IQ has not seemed that impressive in studies I have glanced at. I thought it would be larger. Not all (pairs of) good traits will 'push' together to the same extent though, probably. It seems pretty clear that men are sexually selected rather more for phenotype, relatively, and women for genotype. Women ailing in some way are a lot more sexually attractive than ailing men, and I don't think that's hard to understand. The 'performance' of a woman in life tasks matters -- it's just that the performance of a man matters somewhat more. A man (especially historically) is trying to outperform, resist, and exploit other men in a stark winner-loser dialectic, where woman's activity is relatively slanted toward a calmer and steadier resiling against assorted biotic and abiotic factors -- much of her protection from mankind coming from her mate and male relatives. Since the major attacks on human life, attacks both gross and subtle, radical and mild, have come from microbes and humans, women have one less thing to deal with, or anyway try to address. Hence the relative erotic emphasis on their comeliness, apparently a direct index of genotype (cf. the facial identicalness of twins). Genetic mutation, I guess, is actually a third major attack on human life. My point is that the different pressures on the genders is one reason why some pairs of good traits don't push together as much as others. Of course, there are what I think Jensen may(?) have termed extrinsic and intrinsic reasons for traits to push together or be found together. Two traits correlate intrinsically inasmuch as they simply emanate from the same alleles. Two traits -- perhaps the same two -- have extrinsic correlation to the extent that they derive from separate alleles that tend to be found together. --Tend to be found together by virtue of sexual selection, or by virtue of their synergetic fitness value under natural selection. Anecdotally, just go to the Brahmin grocery store and go to the Vaisya grocery store. In my old hood they are 100 m apart ; the Brahmins are obviously different and 'better', even though I don't like them much. If they didn't have such a fucking headful of anticivilizational attitudes and humanely anti-human schemes, they would be just plain better, though Vaisyas would enjoy unique virtues even then. Even my SWPL friends, who have reluctantly halfway heard me out on heredity, confess that the grocery store experiment is pretty striking.

Duplicating email (got a delivery delayed notification) — I'm ok with thursday 21 evening, after 5PM.

[...] The sociology of dysgenia – “Eugenics is a great idea, and perhaps it’s not as complex as I make it to be here. But the fact remains that for all we speculate, we know very, very little about it.” – from spandrell. via foseti. [...]

@spandrell - "Swedes, Spaniards and Serbs have very different societies, some great, some very fucked up, yet their average IQ is pretty much the same." yes. this is why one of the messages i really want to get out there is that there's more to human biodiversity than iq. iq is obviously very, very (VERY) important -- but there are other aspects to human nature(s) that are also pretty d*rned important and that shouldn't be overlooked. i've got my own personal interest (ok, ok -- obsession!) with inbreeding/outbreeding and altruism/corruption/nepotism/etc., but there are, no doubt, other aspects of hbd that ought to be considered as well.

East Asians evolved their high IQs the same way that Europeans did... by surviving an ice age, back when they were called Neanderthals. Populations don't get smart through civil service exams, most people aren't civil servants. Populations get smart because of brutal selection pressures operating on the entire population... pressures like trying to survive an Ice Age with only stone tools. East Asians are approximately 40% more Neanderthal than Europeans. I'd link the study but I don't want to be flagged as spam, it's easy to google it. Neanderthals lived in Europe, but a small, isolated population of Neanderthal hybrids made it out to East Asia where they filled up the land and created a huge cushion that protected the easternmost parts of East Asia from further Sapiens admixture (or at least reduced it). Meanwhile, Europe's Neanderthal component and ice age IQ was drowned under wave after wave of Homo Sapiens from Africa, which is after all right next to Europe. Thus Europeans are less Neanderthal and less intelligent.