I have less time for Lawrence Auster’s site than I used to, but I came across someone saying something so incorrect about quarks that it could not be allowed to stand. The issue everyone else was more concerned with though is the possible end of the Y chromosome.
I wrote:
Quarks are not entities with no properties. They experience all four fundamental forces. This includes gravity (they have mass) and electro-magnetism (they have charge). There could not be different “flavors” of quarks if there were not properties to distinguish them. Antiquarks are defined by having properties the same magnitude as their counterparts, but with the opposite sign.
The bit about the shrinking Y-chromosome has been known for some time. It has a page at Exit Mundi*, for example. I think it technically would be possible to continue the species after men disappeared. Sperm exists to fertilize eggs with its DNA. We could extract DNA from one woman’s egg and use it to fertilize another egg. Specialization by gender has had a massive impact on our species (and others, I would think) so if that process continued we would expect the “women” of the future to be quite different from those of the present.
*I didn’t include this in the original email, but the Exit Mundi page is here.
Auster responded:
Do you realize that you don’t sound like a human being? The neutral, affectless way you talk about ending humanity through science by turning humanity into something else, something without the male sex? You write: “I think it technically would be possible to continue the species after men disappeared. Sperm exists to fertilize eggs with its DNA. We could extract DNA from one woman’s egg and use it to fertilize another egg.” We could. as though it were something entirely doable and there would be no reason not to do it. Why do you sound like this? I think that your radical materialism has detached you from normal human reactions and values. That’s why you can speak of the end of humanity, brought about by science, as though it meant absolutely nothing, as though it were nothing more than an interesting experiment being performed by a race of aliens upon mankind, as in some sci fi horror movie. Except that you don’t feel any horror—because you’re one of the aliens. .
If you want to have discussions with me, you must, at least, try to sound human. I’m not interested in having conversations with pods, or with humans who sound like pods.
I clarify:
I’m not advocating the end of the Y chromosome, nor did it appear anyone was from Ben’s excerpt. As mentioned, our species is highly adapted to its existence. I’m commenting on the observed trend that leads some to believe it may disappear, and wondering what could be done if that occurred. You would view it as a great loss if it went away, but would it not be an even greater loss if all of humanity became extinct? Existential risks don’t mitigate themselves, and declaring them too horrible to think about hardly helps matters.
He says:
I have no idea what you’re referring to.
I clarify some more:
Sorry, I can be unclear at times. I’ll try to lay out the steps in my thinking.
1. There is an observed trend of the Y chromosome shrinking.
2. If it continues (and maybe it won’t) it could disappear.
3. The human species depends on the Y chromosome to perpetuate itself.
This naturally raises the question: if the trend does continue and the chromosome disappears (presumably it will simply lose its functionality and render men infertile at a sufficiently small size, but you get the idea), will that be the end of the species? Perhaps not. We will be losing an important part of humanity, but like the hiker who had to remove his arm trapped under a bolder (an inapt analogy since it was on his initiative that the arm was removed) we will be preserving the rest. 45 out of 46 chromosomes is a lot better than 0.
You might argue that our descendants, having changed to a single-sex, will no longer be our species. However, the first generation produced through such means would be indistinguishable from women now, and we of course consider them human. Over time the nature of these “women” would change to adapt to a world without men. The result could understandably be considered a different species, though “species” itself is such a fuzzy term it’s all rather subjective.
Entitled to an Opinion 
July 20, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Jesus, that is some industrial-grade stupidity at Auster’s site.
July 21, 2009 at 12:57 am
And I don’t even care for some of their viewpoints that you do! To be fair, I doubt most people know more about quarks. But most people don’t speak of them either.
July 21, 2009 at 7:33 am
It was more the doubting of the existence of the Y chromosome…I mean, quarks are hard to understand, but everyone (I presumed) has seen a picture of chromosomes. It’s calling science is “a joke” because it tells us things that we sometimes don’t want to hear. It’s pure distillation of conservative dumb.
July 21, 2009 at 7:30 pm
At first I was going to dispute your characterization, as Ben referred to the Y chromosome as “an absolute, foundational truth”, but I checking again I also see he says “That’s if the bloody thing exists in the first place.” I’m guessing that was a stab at humor though. It’s harder to tell when reading text over the internet.
July 21, 2009 at 12:45 pm
“In a new study, researchers say there is a dramatic loss of genes from the human Y chromosome that eventually could lead to its complete disappearance — in the next few millennia.”
No they don’t. They say: “it has been proposed that within a few million years the human Y will lose all of its genes”. That’s bad misrepresentation even by science journalism standards.
This is a non-story (the element of “imminence” anyway) that keeps popping up through some mixture of sensationalism and politics.
The greater part of Ms. Chitale’s article in fact explains why this is a non-story, but most people who read the headline will not read or understand the article:
However, Melissa Wilson, lead author of the study and graduate research fellow at Penn State University, pointed out that if there is no difference between a male who has lost a particular gene and one who still retains it, especially if both are still fertile, then that gene must be nonessential. [. . .]
“The key flaw in the logic [of Y chromosome deterioration] is the assumption that the Y chromosome can only lose genes,” Page said. “But the human Y chromosome has gained genes not even on the X chromosome. Men who lose those genes do not transmit their Y chromosome.”
Additionally, large sections of the Y do effectively recombine:
How frequently does gene conversion occur in the MSY palindromes? Near uniformity of arm-to-arm sequence divergence in both human and chimpanzee palindromes (Table 2 in ref. 1 and Fig. 1b) suggests a steady-state balance between new mutations that create differences between arms, and gene-conversion events that erase these differences. [. . .]
Given the abundance of gene conversion in palindromes, we infer that Y–Y gene conversion has accompanied and shaped the evolution of multi-copy testis gene families in the MSY. Perhaps some selective advantage stemmed from the palindromic duplication of MSY testis genes during human evolution. If so, has Y–Y gene conversion had a role in that advantage? Has it allowed genes in palindromes to resist, or at least retard, the evolutionary decay that is a hallmark of Y chromosome evolution19? This could explain the observation, as reported in the accompanying paper, that intact testis-specific genes tend to be located in palindrome arms whereas non-functional copies of these genes seem to be distributed randomly
July 21, 2009 at 7:34 pm
You say a million, I say a millennia; you say a billion, I say a Brazilian.
I had heard about the error-correcting duplication on the Y-chromosome. Given the limited space, does that significantly reduce the amount of information that can be stored?
July 21, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Translation: logic and analysis frighten me. My inability to cope with reason causes me to demand that your content be restricted to associational processing only.
There is a distinction I frequently find useful: there are people, and then there are tailless monkeys that someone foolishly taught to speak. Guess which category Auster appears to fall into?
July 21, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Lawrence Auster, (peace be upon him) is a political hysteric, quite the opposite side of the coin from mtraven’s blase fundamentalism.
The respect which Mencius has for Auster’s intelligence, probably has something to do with their grandmother’s mutual ethnicity.
July 21, 2009 at 7:48 pm
That doesn’t explain his befuddling respect for Bill Whittle though.
July 21, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I guess I don’t mind being the opposite of hysterical. What is this fundament I supposedly adhere to though?
I share the ethnicity you are probably talking about and it doesn’t increase my respect for Auster one whit. On the contrary, for a goy to have a goyisher kopf is one thing, but for a yid, oy, a shande!
July 22, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I think I’d sign up for a church of fundamentalist blase. My family actually left one methodist church because they started expecting more enthusiasm than we were comfortable with.
July 23, 2009 at 3:02 am
Auster is like the “traditionalist conservative” (Auster’s words, not mine) Jewish dad that Mencius never had but wishes he had.
Mencius was stuck with your boring, typical, liberal lefty schleppy Jewish dad.
I’ve always felt that this, which overlaps with the common ethnicity bit, is the reason why someone who aspires to be such a deep and original thinker would publicly reveal such admiration for Auster.
Speaking of Auster, those familiar with his “work” will know that he covers violent crime, specifically those by non-whites and foreigners.
But did you know that he has a personal connection to an immigrant murderer? Auster’s grandmother – Anna Auster, an immigrant Polish Jew – shot and killed her husband (Lawrence’s grandfather) in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1919:
http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2009/04/lawrence-auster-and-killer-immigrants.html
I suppose Auster would say, no biggie, it was kept all in the family, so to speak. No real Americans killed.
Auster has now said a few times that it was good that the US excluded Eastern European Jews in the early 20th cent., judging from Jewish behavior and actions in the US for the past 50 years. That’s a pretty rough standard Auster holds his fellow Jews up to. Apparently Jews get 50 years to destroy a country before their entrance and toleration becomes judged a mistake.
July 23, 2009 at 8:05 am
Yes, I did know. It was brought up by a commenter in a previous thread here on violence by foreigners committed against white women.
I consider it significant that most violence is within (rather than between) racial/ethnic groups and think it diminishes the case for immigration restriction. It is the remaining spillover externalities that must be weighed against benefits.
July 22, 2009 at 3:48 am
There’s a distinction to be made between “dumb” and irrational.
I don’t think Auster is dumb, at least not in the conventional sense. Some of the things he says strike me as insightful, some as irrational, some as rantings, some as worthy of attention, some as off-the-wall. I’d never want to correspond with the guy, because he seems like too much goddamn trouble.
His pod people response to you is particularly kooky, but a lot of smart people are a little bent.
July 22, 2009 at 9:49 am
Bill Whittle… certainly has a less than human tone. He’s more of a jukebox than a man.
mtraven, you do not quibble with the racehist’s analysis of the research which spawned this thread.
Nor would you quibble with an alternative analysis of the research, written from a differing perspective, but drawing the same conclusions with different language.
If anything, you might be more amenable to the latter choice.
Hence…the fundamentalism crack; about people who get their opinions in the mail and stick to them…until they receive new opinions, also in the mail.
July 22, 2009 at 9:27 pm
He’s more of a jukebox than a man.
I’m imagining Whittle as a low-tech Darth Vader.
July 22, 2009 at 9:56 am
Do you realize that you don’t sound like a human being? The neutral, affectless way you talk about ending humanity through science by turning humanity into something else, something without the male sex?
Has he never heard of Asperger’s?
July 22, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I think the concept is rather bogus myself. I’m not give the whole Szaszian spiel, but didn’t we used to just say someone was a nerd? Is our understanding actually improved by this unfalsifiable diagnosis?
July 23, 2009 at 10:28 am
Yeah, I think it is, because it links nerdiness to the clinical phenomenon of autism as part of a spectrum, which is (imo) true.
Also it sounds cooler
July 24, 2009 at 8:44 am
I don’t feel like looking up the link, but Simon Baron-Cohen’s “reading the mind through the eyes” test has been used to determine where individuals reside on his “empathizer -> systemizer” spectrum. People who score very low are more likely to be men and more likely to meet Asperger’s criteria in other respects.
July 24, 2009 at 12:11 pm
“Aspie” is more specific than “nerd.”
I find it to be a helpful term of description.
Plus obviously all Aspies are God’s special angels on Earth, and the idea that their characteristics are somehow “inhuman” shows a lack of imagination.
July 24, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Chip, that sounds like the Thinking/Feeling axis, or Agreeableness personality factor. What does “Aspergers” contribute beyond that?
July 22, 2009 at 10:14 am
The loss of the Y chromosome wouldn’t abolish the male sex. There simply wouldn’t be a specific chromosome that carried male-specific information.
Birds are already like this – except it’s females that result from a single copy of the sex chromosome and males that have two, if I recall correctly.
So the pod person exchange becomes doubly bizarre, as Auster’s statements have nothing to do with the actual situation being discussed.
July 22, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I just read about that in John Maynard Smith, but I thought it was simply the reverse of humans: females have one of each and males have two of one. Wikipedia supports this (“ZW sex-determination system”), but insects apparently do have XX/X0, which is like you describe.
July 23, 2009 at 1:14 pm
It seems I didn’t recall correctly. Thanks for the correction, TGGP.
July 23, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Actually, given that birds have a much shorter generational period than humans, wouldn’t the persistence of the two-chromosome system suggest that humans are unlikely to lose theirs?
What factors would make the human Y different from the avian W chromosome?
July 23, 2009 at 7:57 pm
I don’t know if the avian W chromosome is also much shorter than Z, or how fast (if at all) it is deteriorating. Insects have even shorter generations, and X0 is a more extreme version of asymmetry, so that might be better to look at.
July 23, 2009 at 10:30 am
This guy doesn’t sounds like a human being either, he sounds to me like the flushing of a toilet down which Enlightenment values are being disposed of.
July 23, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Are enlightenment values that typical of humans?
July 27, 2009 at 12:03 am
Are Enlightenment values desirable in humans?
July 27, 2009 at 6:23 pm
McCloskey, Wilkinson & Sumner seem to be interested in that question. But they are all motivated to find evidence they’re looking for. I wonder if any anti-Enlightenment intellectuals have done any rigorous study of the matter.
July 26, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Of course, all mammals have the XY scheme, so if Y chromosomes were going away it would happen in short-generation species long before “us” (see how cleverly I imply I’m a human without it looking forced?).
A Y chromosome only needs one gene anyway. The genes that tell how to be male aren’t on the Y they’re scattered everywhere. You just need one gene that acts as a sort of master switch to activate the others.
July 26, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I’m not sure if the degeneration happens at the same rate in other species. I don’t have any priors on its pace in humans relative to other mammals though.
July 26, 2009 at 5:37 pm
TGGP,
Here’s a link to the test.
Some background is provided in SC-B’s book, The Essential Difference., which is a fun read.
To look at an individual’s eyes and decode the emotion being expressed is sort of a remarkable ability, and the fact that highly intelligent people — usually men — often perform poorly suggests that something distinct from “agreeableness” or “feeling” is being measured. Aspergers, like “gifted” or “genius,” is just a word, but it seems to describe a recognizably distinctive and empirically detectable cognitive style that sees certain patterns to the exclusion of others. The intercorrelation of “eyes” results with other independent measures of perceived Asperger’s- and autism-linked traits supports Baron-Cohen’s theory that a systemizer-empathizer spectrum has special explanatory power. I think the scale is probably more descriptive than the traits you mention for reasons of economy.
The potential snare, as always, comes into focus when the metrics are used as a measure of pathology, with all that pejorative baggage. That’s where my sympathy turns to Szasz.
July 26, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I got 27 out of 36 (or 28 out of 39 if the practice one is included), which I’ll just assume certifies me as a good driver. The instructions didn’t say what’s a normal score, whether for the general population or broken down by gender. 19 out of the 36 faces were male, which might slightly skew results if they did break them down by gender.
One point Szasz often emphasizes is that in physical medicine there is a distinction made between the symptom and the disease, and the objective is to understand the etiology. The vaccine cranks have their own theory of etiology, what’s SC-B’s?
July 26, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Erratum: SC-B’s book should read: “S-BC’s,” i.e., “Simon Baron-Cohen’s.”
July 27, 2009 at 10:36 am
I don’t know if it still holds, but for a while Baron-Cohen was pushing the assortive mating thing – the idea that a critical mass of nerds have been meeting and breeding in an increasingly tech-driven meritocracy thereby creating a generation with disproportionately high rates of autism.
It’s possible, though my own hunch is that fad-driven diagnostic bias may turn out to explain the whole shebang.
July 27, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I was in elementary school when it was all the rage, so I was diagnosed with A.D.D and put on Ritalin as a kid. Though they seem to describe somewhat opposite symptoms, the Aspergers diagnosis reminds me of A.D.D before it, which many now consider a fad diagnosis. There were a number of people that self-diagnosed as A.D.D back then, but it wasn’t quite as common as it is for people to do that with Aspergers now.
July 28, 2009 at 12:26 am
I think diagnostic fads are a problem and every time I see a trend brewing, I’m inclined to reconsider Foucault’s remarks on “the clinic.” But the question can and should be disentangled from any morally glossed prescription. I think Asperger’s has descriptive value. Doesn’t make it a disorder.
I missed out on the scrips, but I love Ritalin recreationally. It’s like coke with brakes. Or you can snort it for the full-on.
July 28, 2009 at 12:52 am
I’m disinclined to take meds even when they’re prescribed, so I don’t know much about that. The “with brakes” part makes me wonder, are its effects less-than-linear with respect to the quantity ingested? I’d heard that nutmeg or Robotussin is mind-altering with sufficient doses though apparently fine for kids in small doses. Intuitively one tends to assume linear trends, though Kurzweil and others should have disabused me of that assumption.
July 28, 2009 at 8:38 am
No one ever tries nutmeg twice. And it has no effect in small doses – the amount necessary for the oils to trigger the psychoactive effects is far, far larger than would normally be ingested.
I wouldn’t suggest it to someone unless you were trying to condition them never to use drugs.
July 28, 2009 at 9:45 am
All of these diagnsoes seem not to consider the natural variability of human nature. My brother commented to me a couple of years ago that one or both of his kids had been diagnosed as ADD, and he thought that he himself probably would have qualified had such a condition been identified when he was growing up.
Growing up, I can well remember my brother reading for hours alone in his room as a teenager. His particular interest was politics, but he didn’t limit himself to that topic alone. My brother’s “problem” wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate, but rather that he couldn’t concentrate on stuff that bored him, which was probably most of the stuff being taught in school. Since I suffer from the same malady, it’s easy for me to identify.
Do any of these diagnosticians consider the possibility that sampling a potpourri of subjects (most of them boringly taught) between the ages of 2 to 22 is a recipe for boredom? How the hell would you know what direction to go in if you were equally interested in everything? Isn’t boredom itself a necessary goad to immersion in one’s natural field of endeavor? In any event, the people who prove to be accomplished in anything are often pretty monomaniacal about it, which means they don’t give a shit about most of the other stuff you’re trying ot get them to learn.
BTW, my brother ultimately went the lawyer route. Unsurprisingly, it’s boring as all hell, so there’s no real escape.
On an unrelated note, Robitussin and other cough medicines containing DXM produce a psylocibin like, stroboscopic high . . . or so I’ve been told.