Are “Nerds” Just a Hollywood Stereotype?

Yes, MIT has a football team.

The other day on Twitter, Nick B. Steves challenged me to find data supporting or refuting his assertion that Nerds vs. Jocks is a false stereotype, invented around 1975. Of course, we HBDers have a saying–“all stereotypes are true,” even the ones about us–but let’s investigate Nick’s claim and see where it leads us.

(NOTE: If you have relevant data, I’d love to see it.)

Unfortunately, terms like “nerd,” “jock,” and “chad” are not all that well defined. Certainly if we define “jock” as “athletic but not smart” and nerd as “smart but not athletic,” then these are clearly separate categories. But what if there’s a much bigger group of people who are smart and athletic?

Or what if we are defining “nerd” and “jock” too narrowly? Wikipedia defines nerd as, “a person seen as overly intellectual, obsessive, or lacking social skills.” I recall a study–which I cannot find right now–which found that nerds had, overall, lower-than-average IQs, but that study included people who were obsessive about things like comic books, not just people who majored in STEM. Similarly, should we define “jock” only as people who are good at sports, or do passionate sports fans count?

For the sake of this post, I will define “nerd” as “people with high math/science abilities” and “jock” as “people with high athletic abilities,” leaving the matter of social skills undefined. (People who merely like video games or watch sports, therefore, do not count.)

Nick is correct on one count: according to Wikipedia, although the word “nerd” has been around since 1951, it was popularized during the 70s by the sitcom Happy Days. However, Wikipedia also notes that:

An alternate spelling,^[10] as nurd or gnurd, also began to appear in the mid-1960s or early 1970s.^[11] Author Philip K. Dick claimed to have coined the nurd spelling in 1973, but its first recorded use appeared in a 1965 student publication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.^[12][13] Oral tradition there holds that the word is derived from knurd (drunk spelled backward), which was used to describe people who studied rather than partied. The term gnurd (spelled with the “g”) was in use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by 1965.^[14] The term nurd was also in use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as early as 1971 but was used in the context for the proper name of a fictional character in a satirical “news” article.^[15]

suggesting that the word was already common among nerds themselves before it was picked up by TV.

But we can trace the nerd-jock dichotomy back before the terms were coined: back in 1921, Lewis Terman, a researcher at Stanford University, began a long-term study of exceptionally high-IQ children, the Genetic Studies of Genius aka the Terman Study of the Gifted:

Terman’s goal was to disprove the then-current belief that gifted children were sickly, socially inept, and not well-rounded.

This belief was especially popular in a little nation known as Germany, where it inspired people to take schoolchildren on long hikes in the woods to keep them fit and the mass-extermination of Jews, who were believed to be muddying the German genepool with their weak, sickly, high-IQ genes (and nefariously trying to marry strong, healthy German in order to replenish their own defective stock.) It didn’t help that German Jews were both high-IQ and beset by a number of illnesses (probably related to high rates of consanguinity,) but then again, the Gypsies are beset by even more debilitating illnesses, but no one blames this on all of the fresh air and exercise afforded by their highly mobile lifestyles.

(Just to be thorough, though, the Nazis also exterminated the Gypsies and Hans Asperger’s subjects, despite Asperger’s insistence that they were very clever children who could probably be of great use to the German war effort via code breaking and the like.)

The results of Terman’s study are strongly in Nick’s favor. According to Psychology Today’s  account:

His final group of “Termites” averaged a whopping IQ of 151. Following-up his group 35-years later, his gifted group at mid-life definitely seemed to conform to his expectations. They were taller, healthier, physically better developed, and socially adept (dispelling the myth at the time of high-IQ awkward nerds).

According to Wikipedia:

…the first volume of the study reported data on the children’s family,^[17] educational progress,^[18] special abilities,^[19] interests,^[20] play,^[21] and personality.^[22] He also examined the children’s racial and ethnic heritage.^[23] Terman was a proponent of eugenics, although not as radical as many of his contemporary social Darwinists, and believed that intelligence testing could be used as a positive tool to shape society.^[3]

Based on data collected in 1921–22, Terman concluded that gifted children suffered no more health problems than normal for their age, save a little more myopia than average. He also found that the children were usually social, were well-adjusted, did better in school, and were even taller than average.^[24] A follow-up performed in 1923–1924 found that the children had maintained their high IQs and were still above average overall as a group.

Of course, we can go back even further than Terman–in the early 1800s, allergies like hay fever were associated with the nobility, who of course did not do much vigorous work in the fields.

My impression, based on studies I’ve seen previously, is that athleticism and IQ are positively correlated. That is, smarter people tend to be more athletic, and more athletic people tend to be smarter. There’s a very obvious reason for this: our brains are part of our bodies, people with healthier bodies therefore also have healthier brains, and healthier brains tend to work better.

At the very bottom of the IQ distribution, mentally retarded people tend to also be clumsy, flacid, or lacking good muscle tone. The same genes (or environmental conditions) that make children have terrible health/developmental problems often also affect their brain growth, and conditions that affect their brains also affect their bodies. As we progress from low to average to above-average IQ, we encounter increasingly healthy people.

In most smart people, high-IQ doesn’t seem to be a random fluke, a genetic error, nor fitness reducing: in a genetic study of children with exceptionally high IQs, researchers failed to find many genes that specifically endowed the children with genius, but found instead a fortuitous absence of deleterious genes that knock a few points off the rest of us. The same genes that have a negative effect on the nerves and proteins in your brain probably also have a deleterious effect on the nerves and proteins throughout the rest of your body.

And indeed, there are many studies which show a correlation between intelligence and strength (eg, Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Assessments of Age Changes in Physical Strength as Related to Sex, Social Class, and Mental Ability) or intelligence and overall health/not dying (eg, Intelligence in young adulthood and cause-specific mortality in the Danish Conscription Database (pdf) and The effects of occupation-based social position on mortality in a large American cohort.)

On the other hand, the evolutionary standard for “fitness” isn’t strength or longevity, but reproduction, and on this scale the high-IQ don’t seem to do as well:

Smart teens don’t have sex (or kiss much either): (h/t Gene Expresion)

Controlling for age, physical maturity, and mother’s education, a significant curvilinear relationship between intelligence and coital status was demonstrated; adolescents at the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex. Higher intelligence was also associated with postponement of the initiation of the full range of partnered sexual activities. … Higher intelligence operates as a protective factor against early sexual activity during adolescence, and lower intelligence, to a point, is a risk factor.

Source

Here we see the issue plainly: males at 120 and 130 IQ are less likely to get laid than clinically retarded men in 70s and 60s. The right side of the graph are “nerds”, the left side, “jocks.” Of course, the high-IQ females are even less likely to get laid than the high-IQ males, but males tend to judge themselves against other men, not women, when it comes to dating success. Since the low-IQ females are much less likely to get laid than the low-IQ males, this implies that most of these “popular” guys are dating girls who are smarter than themselves–a fact not lost on the nerds, who would also like to date those girls.

 In 2001, the MIT/Wellesley magazine Counterpart (Wellesley is MIT’s “sister school” and the two campuses allow cross-enrollment in each other’s courses) published a sex survey that provides a more detailed picture of nerd virginity:

I’m guessing that computer scientists invented polyamory, and neuroscientists are the chads of STEM. The results are otherwise pretty predictable.

Unfortunately, Counterpoint appears to be defunct due to lack of funding/interest and I can no longer find the original survey, but here is Jason Malloy’s summary from Gene Expression:

By the age of 19, 80% of US males and 75% of women have lost their virginity, and 87% of college students have had sex. But this number appears to be much lower at elite (i.e. more intelligent) colleges. According to the article, only 56% of Princeton undergraduates have had intercourse. At Harvard 59% of the undergraduates are non-virgins, and at MIT, only a slight majority, 51%, have had intercourse. Further, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex.

The student surveys at MIT and Wellesley also compared virginity by academic major. The chart for Wellesley displayed below shows that 0% of studio art majors were virgins, but 72% of biology majors were virgins, and 83% of biochem and math majors were virgins! Similarly, at MIT 20% of ‘humanities’ majors were virgins, but 73% of biology majors. (Apparently those most likely to read Darwin are also the least Darwinian!)

College Confidential has one paragraph from the study:

How Rolling Stone-ish are the few lucky souls who are doing the horizontal mambo? Well, not very. Considering all the non-virgins on campus, 41% of Wellesley and 32% of MIT students have only had one partner (figure 5). It seems that many Wellesley and MIT students are comfortingly monogamous. Only 9% of those who have gotten it on at MIT have been with more than 10 people and the number is 7% at Wellesley.

Someone needs to find the original study and PUT IT BACK ON THE INTERNET.

But this lack of early sexual success seems to translate into long-term marital happiness, once nerds find “the one.”Lex Fridman’s Divorce Rates by Profession offers a thorough list. The average divorce rate was 16.35%, with a high of 43% (Dancers) and a low of 0% (“Media and communication equipment workers.”)

I’m not sure exactly what all of these jobs are nor exactly which ones should count as STEM (veterinarian? anthropologists?) nor do I know how many people are employed in each field, but I count 49 STEM professions that have lower than average divorce rates (including computer scientists, economists, mathematical science, statisticians, engineers, biologists, chemists, aerospace engineers, astronomers and physicists, physicians, and nuclear engineers,) and only 23 with higher than average divorce rates (including electricians, water treatment plant operators, radio and telecommunication installers, broadcast engineers, and similar professions.) The purer sciences obviously had lower rates than the more practical applied tech fields.

The big outliers were mathematicians (19.15%), psychologists (19.26%), and sociologists (23.53%), though I’m not sure they count (if so, there were only 22 professions with higher than average divorce rates.)

I’m not sure which professions count as “jock” or “chad,” but athletes had lower than average rates of divorce (14.05%) as did firefighters, soldiers, and farmers. Financial examiners, hunters, and dancers, (presumably an athletic female occupation) however, had very high rates of divorce.

Medical Daily has an article on Who is Most Likely to Cheat? The Top 9 Jobs Unfaithful People Have (according to survey):

According to the survey recently taken by the “infidelity dating website,” Victoria Milan, individuals working in the finance field, such as brokers, bankers, and analysts, are more likely to cheat than those in any other profession. However, following those in finance comes those in the aviation field, healthcare, business, and sports.

With the exception of healthcare and maybe aviation, these are pretty typical Chad occupations, not STEM.

The Mirror has a similar list of jobs where people are most and least likely to be married. Most likely: Dentist, Chief Executive, Sales Engineer, Physician, Podiatrist, Optometrist, Farm product buyer, Precision grinder, Religious worker, Tool and die maker.

Least likely: Paper-hanger, Drilling machine operator, Knitter textile operator, Forge operator, Mail handler, Science technician, Practical nurse, Social welfare clerk, Winding machine operative, Postal clerk.

I struggled to find data on male fertility by profession/education/IQ, but there’s plenty on female fertility, eg the deceptively titled High-Fliers have more Babies:

…American women without any form of high-school diploma have a fertility rate of 2.24 children. Among women with a high-school diploma the fertility rate falls to 2.09 and for women with some form of college education it drops to 1.78.

However, among women with college degrees, the economists found the fertility rate rises to 1.88 and among women with advanced degrees to 1.96. In 1980 women who had studied for 16 years or more had a fertility rate of just 1.2.

As the economists prosaically explain: “The relationship between fertility and women’s education in the US has recently become U-shaped.”

Here is another article about the difference in fertility rates between high and low-IQ women.

But female fertility and male fertility may not be the same–I recall data elsewhere indicating that high-IQ men have more children than low IQ men, which implies those men are having their children with low-IQ women. (For example, while Bill and Hillary seem about matched on IQ, and have only one child, Melania Trump does not seem as intelligent as Trump, who has five children.)

Amusingly, I did find data on fertility rate by father’s profession for 1920, in the Birth Statistics for the Birth Registration Area of the US:

Of the 1,508,874 children born in 1920 in the birth registration area of the United states, occupations of fathers are stated for … 96.9%… The average number of children ever born to the present wives of these occupied fathers is 3.3 and the average number of children living 2.9.

The average number of children ever born ranges from 4.6 for foremen, overseers, and inspectors engaged in the extraction of minerals to 1.8 for soldiers, sailors, and marines. Both of these extreme averages are easily explained, for soldier, sailors and marines are usually young, while such foremen, overseers, and inspectors are usually in middle life. For many occupations, however, the ages of the fathers are presumably about the same and differences shown indicate real differences in the size of families. For example, the low figure for dentists, (2), architects, (2.1), and artists, sculptors, and teachers of art (2.2) are in striking contrast with the figure for mine operatives (4.3), quarry operatives (4.1) bootblacks, and brick and stone masons (each 3.9). …

As a rule the occupations credited with the highest number of children born are also credited with the highest number of children living, the highest number of children living appearing for foremen, overseers, and inspectors engaged in the extraction of minerals (3.9) and for steam and street railroad foremen and overseer (3.8), while if we exclude groups plainly affected by the age of fathers, the highest number of children living appear for mine and quarry operatives (each 3.6).

Obviously the job market was very different in 1920–no one was majoring in computer science. Perhaps some of those folks who became mine and quarry operatives back then would become engineers today–or perhaps not. Here are the average numbers of surviving children for the most obviously STEM professions (remember average for 1920 was 2.9):

Electricians 2.1, Electrotypers 2.2, telegraph operator 2.2, actors 1.9, chemists 1.8, Inventors 1.8, photographers and physicians 2.1, technical engineers 1.9, veterinarians 2.2.

I don’t know what paper hangers do, but the Mirror said they were among the least likely to be married, and in 1920, they had an average of 3.1 children–above average.

What about athletes? How smart are they?

“Athletes Show Huge Gaps on SAT Scores” is not a promising title for the “nerds are athletic” crew.

The Journal-Constitution studied 54 public universities, “including the members of the six major Bowl Championship Series conferences and other schools whose teams finished the 2007-08 season ranked among the football or men’s basketball top 25.”…

• Football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than their classmates. Men’s basketball was 227 points lower.

• University of Florida won the prize for biggest gap between football players and the student body, with players scoring 346 points lower than their peers.

• Georgia Tech had the nation’s best average SAT score for football players, 1028 of a possible 1600, and best average high school GPA, 3.39 of a possible 4.0. But because its student body is apparently very smart, Tech’s football players still scored 315 SAT points lower than their classmates.

• UCLA, which has won more NCAA championships in all sports than any other school, had the biggest gap between the average SAT scores of athletes in all sports and its overall student body, at 247 points.

From the original article, which no longer seems to be up on the Journal-Constitution website:

All 53 schools for which football SAT scores were available had at least an 88-point gap between team members’ average score and the average for the student body. …

Football players performed 115 points worse on the SAT than male athletes in other sports.

The differences between athletes’ and non-athletes’ SAT scores were less than half as big for women (73 points) as for men (170).

Many schools routinely used a special admissions process to admit athletes who did not meet the normal entrance requirements. … At Georgia, for instance, 73.5 percent of athletes were special admits compared with 6.6 percent of the student body as a whole.

On the other hand, as Discover Magazine discusses in “The Brain: Why Athletes are Geniuses,” athletic tasks–like catching a fly ball or slapping a hockey puck–require exceptionally fast and accurate brain signals to trigger the correct muscle movements.

Ryan Stegal studied the GPAs of highschool student athletes vs. non-athletes and found that the athletes had higher average GPAs than the non-athletes, but he also notes that the athletes were required to meet certain minimum GPA requirements in order to play.

But within athletics, it looks like the smarter athletes perform better than dumber ones, which is why the NFL uses the Wonderlic Intelligence Test:

NFL draft picks have taken the Wonderlic test for years because team owners need to know if their million dollar player has the cognitive skills to be a star on the field.

What does the NFL know about hiring that most companies don’t? They know that regardless of the position, proof of intelligence plays a profound role in the success of every individual on the team. It’s not enough to have physical ability. The coaches understand that players have to be smart and think quickly to succeed on the field, and the closer they are to the ball the smarter they need to be. That’s why, every potential draft pick takes the Wonderlic Personnel Test at the combine to prove he does–or doesn’t—have the brains to win the game. …

The first use of the WPT in the NFL was by Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys in the early 70s, who took a scientific approach to finding players. He believed players who could use their minds where it counted had a strategic advantage over the other teams. He was right, and the test has been used at the combine ever since.

For the NFL, years of testing shows that the higher a player scores on the Wonderlic, the more likely he is to be in the starting lineup—for any position. “There is no other reasonable explanation for the difference in test scores between starting players and those that sit on the bench,” Callans says. “Intelligence plays a role in how well they play the game.”

Let’s look at Exercising Intelligence: How Research Shows a Link Between Physical Activity and Smarts:

A large study conducted at the Sahlgrenska Academy and Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, reveals that young adults who regularly exercise have higher IQ scores and are more likely to go on to university.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and involved more than 1.2 million Swedish men. The men were performing military service and were born between the years 1950 and 1976. Both their physical and IQ test scores were reviewed by the research team. …

The researchers also looked at data for twins and determined that primarily environmental factors are responsible for the association between IQ and fitness, and not genetic makeup. “We have also shown that those youngsters who improve their physical fitness between the ages of 15 and 18 increase their cognitive performance.”…

I have seen similar studies before, some involving mice and some, IIRC, the elderly. It appears that exercise is probably good for you.

I have a few more studies I’d like to mention quickly before moving on to discussion.

Here’s Grip Strength and Physical Demand of Previous Occupation in a Well-Functioning Cohort of Chinese Older Adults (h/t prius_1995) found that participants who had previously worked in construction had greater grip strength than former office workers.

Age and Gender-Specific Normative Data of Grip and Pinch Strength in a Healthy Adult Swiss Population (h/t prius_1995).

 

If the nerds are in the sedentary cohort, then they be just as athletic if not more athletic than all of the other cohorts except the heavy work.

However, in Revised normative values for grip strength with the Jamar dynamometer, the authors found no effect of profession on grip strength.

And Isometric muscle strength and anthropometric characteristics of a Chinese sample (h/t prius_1995).

And Pumpkin Person has an interesting post about brain size vs. body size.

 

Discussion: Are nerds real?

Overall, it looks like smarter people are more athletic, more athletic people are smarter, smarter athletes are better athletes, and exercise may make you smarter. For most people, the nerd/jock dichotomy is wrong.

However, there is very little overlap at the very highest end of the athletic and intelligence curves–most college (and thus professional) athletes are less intelligent than the average college student, and most college students are less athletic than the average college (and professional) athlete.

Additionally, while people with STEM degrees make excellent spouses (except for mathematicians, apparently,) their reproductive success is below average: they have sex later than their peers and, as far as the data I’ve been able to find shows, have fewer children.

Stephen Hawking

Even if there is a large overlap between smart people and athletes, they are still separate categories selecting for different things: a cripple can still be a genius, but can’t play football; a dumb person can play sports, but not do well at math. Stephen Hawking can barely move, but he’s still one of the smartest people in the world. So the set of all smart people will always include more “stereotypical nerds” than the set of all athletes, and the set of all athletes will always include more “stereotypical jocks” than the set of all smart people.

In my experience, nerds aren’t socially awkward (aside from their shyness around women.) The myth that they are stems from the fact that they have different interests and communicate in a different way than non-nerds. Let nerds talk to other nerds, and they are perfectly normal, communicative, socially functional people. Put them in a room full of non-nerds, and suddenly the nerds are “awkward.”

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are not nerds, so many nerds have to spend the majority of their time in the company of lots of people who are very different than themselves. By contrast, very few people of normal IQ and interests ever have to spend time surrounded by the very small population of nerds. If you did put them in a room full of nerds, however, you’d find that suddenly they don’t fit in. The perception that nerds are socially awkward is therefore just normie bias.

Why did the nerd/jock dichotomy become so popular in the 70s? Probably in part because science and technology were really taking off as fields normal people could aspire to major in, man had just landed on the moon and the Intel 4004 was released in 1971.  Very few people went to college or were employed in sciences back in 1920; by 1970, colleges were everywhere and science was booming.

And at the same time, colleges and highschools were ramping up their athletics programs. I’d wager that the average school in the 1800s had neither PE nor athletics of any sort. To find those, you’d probably have to attend private academies like Andover or Exeter. By the 70s, though, schools were taking their athletics programs–even athletic recruitment–seriously.

How strong you felt the dichotomy probably depends on the nature of your school. I have attended schools where all of the students were fairly smart and there was no anti-nerd sentiment, and I have attended schools where my classmates were fiercely anti-nerd and made sure I knew it.

But the dichotomy predates the terminology. Take Superman, first 1938. His disguise is a pair of glasses, because no one can believe that the bookish, mild-mannered, Clark Kent is actually the super-strong Superman. Batman is based on the character of El Zorro, created in 1919. Zorro is an effete, weak, foppish nobleman by day and a dashing, sword-fighting hero of the poor by night. Of course these characters are both smart and athletic, but their disguises only work because others do not expect them to be. As fantasies, the characters are powerful because they provide a vehicle for our own desires: for our everyday normal failings to be just a cover for how secretly amazing we are.

But for the most part, most smart people are perfectly fit, healthy, and coordinated–even the ones who like math.

 

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Cathedral Round-Up #27: Critical Criminology

2005 Riots, Paris, France

Today we’ll be looking at the chapter on “critical criminology” from Criminology: The Core (Instructor’s Third Edition) by Larry Siegel. According to Cengage:

“It’s no mystery why Larry Siegel remains THE best-selling author in Criminal Justice. … Grounded in Siegel’s signature style — cutting-edge theory plus meticulous research — this book covers all sides of an issue without taking a political or theoretical position and provides a broad view of the interdisciplinary nature of the field.”

The book covers 5 different schools of Criminology Theories: Neoclassical Choice theory (eg, Cesare Beccaria;) Biosocial/Psychological Trait theory, (Freud, Piaget, Edward O. Wilson;) Social Structure/Process theory, (Clifford R. Shaw and Edwin Sutherland;) Marxist Critical Theory, (Marx;) and Life Course/Latent Trait Development theory, (Sheldon Glueck and James Q. Wilson.)

I don’t have time to read the whole book (not if you want this post to go up this month,) so we are going to focus on Chaper 8: Critical Criminology.

Major Premise (from the book’s inside cover): “Inequality between social classes (groups) and the social conditions that empower the wealthy and disenfranchise the less fortunate are the root causes of crime. It is the ongoing struggle for power, control, and material well-being that creates crime.” Critical Criminology was founded in 1968 and is unapologeticly Marxist.

Each chapter begins with an example crime. The choice for Critical Criminology is fascinating: the November 2005 Muslim riots in southern and western France and the suburbs of Paris.

What sparked the rioting? The immediate cause was the accidental deaths of two Muslim teenagers who were electrocuted as they hid in a power substation to escape a police identity check. Hearing of the deaths, gangs of youths armed with brick and stick roamed the streets of housing estates torching cars and destroying property. …

A majority of France’s Muslim population, estimated at 5 million, live in these poverty-stricken areas. Many residents are angry at the living conditions and believe they are the target of racial discrimination, police brutality, and governmental indifference.”

Is this the best the Critical Criminologists have? (Incidentally, according to Wikipedia,the police were responding to a report of a break-in, the rioting lasted for 3 weeks and some 8,973 cars were burned. 3 people died.) This sounds more like an argument against Muslim immigration than an argument that racism causes crime, because if the French were really so racist, Muslims wouldn’t move there.

But let’s let the Critical Theorists explain themselves:

According to Critical Theorists, crime is a political concept designed to protect the power and position of the upper classes at the expense of the poor. Some of these theorists… would include in a list of “real” crime such acts as violations of human rights due to racism, sexism, and imperialism and other violations of human dignity and physical needs and necessities. Part of the critical agenda, argues Criminologist Robert Bohm, is to make the public aware that these behaviors “are crimes just as much as burglary and robbery.”…

See also my post, “No, Hunter Gatherers were not Peaceful Paragons of Gender Egalitarianism.”

“Capitalism,” claims Bohm, “as a mode of production, has always produced a relatively high level of crime and violence.”

Note: Bohm is either a moron or a liar. Pre-industrial economies had far more violent crime than modern, capitalist economies.

Crime rates are much lower in countries with advanced, capitalist economies than in countries with less-developed economies.

Countries with poorly defined or enforced property rights or where property is held in common are not bastions of civility.

In fact, the rise of capitalism in Europe over the past seven houndred years was accompanied by a dramatic decrease in crime.

My biggest complaint about this chapter is the total lack of data cited to support any of the claims. This is not necessarily the author’s fault, as the Critical Criminology field is overtly hostile to actual research:

Critical criminologists rarely use standard social science methodologies to test their views because many believe the traditional approach of measuring research subjects is antihuman and insensitive. Critical thinkers believe that research conducted by mainstream liberal and positivist criminologists is often designed to unmask weak, powerless members of society so they can be better dealt with by the legal system. They are particularly offended by purely empirical studies, such as those designed to show that minority group members have lower IQs than whites or that the inner city is the site of the most serious crime whereas middle-class areas are relatively c rime free. Critical scholars are more likely to examine historical trends and patterns…

Back to definitions:

Critical Criminologists reject the notion that law is designed to maintain a tranquil, fair society and that criminals are malevolent people who wish to trample the rights of others. Critical theorists consider acts of racism, sexism, imperialism, unsafe working conditions, inadequate child care, substandard housing, pollution of the environment, and war making as a tool of foreign policy to be ‘true crimes.’ The crimes of the helpless–burglary, robbery, and assault–are more expressions of rage over unjust economic conditions than actual crimes. … Marxist thought serves as the basis for critical theory.

I have now read In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, Gang Leader for a Day, Leeson’s work on pirates, The Pirates’ Own Book, God of the Rodeo, Outlaws on Horseback, No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels, Donnie Brasco’s The Way of the Wiseguy, and Original Gangster: The Real Life Story of one of America’s Most Notorius Drug Lords, by Frank Lucas. I also have a close personal friend who was homeless for a couple of decades.

I’m not an expert, but I feel like I know something on the subject.

Very few people in modern, capitalist countries are committing crime out of desperation. My friend survived for years by going to soup kitchens and never stole a wallet or held up a convenience store. We have welfare and subsidized housing. There are exceptions, but most violent criminals are not Jean Valjean; it’s not economic desperation that drives people to put meat cleavers into their boss’s skulls or rape children.

But back to the book. On the origins of Critical Criminology:

Mainstream, positivist criminology was criticized a being overtly conservative, pro-government, and antihuman. What emerged was a social conflict theory whose proponents scoffed when their fellow scholars used statistical analyses of computerized data to describe criminal and delinquent behavior. Several influential scholars embraced the idea that the social conflict produced by the unequal distribution of power and wealth was at the root cause of crime. …

Richard Quinney also proclaimed that in contemporary society criminal law represents the interests of those who hold power in society. Where there is conflict between social groups–the wealthy and the poor–those who hold power will create law that benefit themselves and hold rivals in check. … Crime is a function of power relation and an inevitable result of social conflict.

This is not entirely wrong (if it were entirely wrong, far fewer people would believe it.) The wealthy do in fact have a disproportionate say on which laws are passed and how they are enforced. They can afford better lawyers and can often buy their way out of situations the poor are just stuck with.

But again, this is not what drives a man to put a meat cleaver in another man’s skull, nor is it why society nigh-universally condemns unprovoked skull-cleaving. It is not only in the interests of the rich to prevent violent crime–they, after all, use their money to insulate themselves from the worst of it by buying into low-crime, gated communities with private security forces. If anything, the poor, as the disproportionate victims of crime, have the most to gain from strict law enforcement against violent criminals.

My formerly homeless friend was once beaten into a coma and nearly died on his way home to the park bench where he spent his nights.

If crime were all about fighting back against oppression, criminals would only target the rich.

There is one branch of Critical Criminology, Left Realism, which acknowledges that crime is actually really unpleasant for its victims. Since it is relatively sane, we need not worry about it.

With thanks to the Heritage Foundation

Back to the book:

Critical criminologist are also deeply concerned about the current state of the American political system …

While spending is being cut on social programs, it is being raised on military expansion. The rapid buildup of the prison system and passage of draconian criminal laws that threaten civil rights and liberties–the death penalty, three strikes laws, and the Patriot Act–are other elements of the conservative agenda. Critical Criminologists believe that they are responsible for informing the public about he dangers of these developments.

Hold on. I’m going to need a couple more graphs:

Source: Heritage Foundation

The “Three Strikes Laws” were passed in 1994 in reaction to the crack-driven crime epidemic throughout the hearts of America’s cities and appear to have done a pretty good job of preventing black people from being murdered.

Back to the text:

Critical criminologists have turned their attention to the threat competitive capitalism presents to the working class. The believe that in addition to perpetuating male supremacy and racialism, modern global capitalism helps destroy the lives of workers in less-developed countries. For example, capitalists hailed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 as a significant economic event. However, critical thinkers point out that the economic boom has significant costs: The average manufacturing wage in China is 20 to 25 cents per hour; in a single yea (2001) more than 47,000 workers were killed at work, and 35.2 million Chinese workers were permanently or temporarily disabled.

According to the AFL-CIO, 4,836 workers were killed on the job in the US in 2015. Since there are 320 million Americans, this works out to about a 0.0015% chance of dying on the job.

Since China had about 1.272 billion people in 2001, that works out to about a 0.0037% chance of dying on the Chinese job.

Obviously it’d be great if no one died on the job, but these are not horrific odds. By contrast, China’s Great Leap Forward, when it implemented a communist system, was a horrific disaster that killed between 18 and 55 MILLION people.

(Also, 35,398 Americans died in car/motorcycle accidents in 2014, so you are much more likely to die driving your car to the grocery tore than employed in China.)

Meanwhile:

According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms.^[4]

From Human Progress

Now, I admit that capitalism does not always produce good results. Sometimes priceless natural resources get destroyed. Sometimes people’s jobs get outsourced. Often employers decide they’re okay with a level of job-induced harm to their employees’ health that their employees would not be okay with. But on the whole, capitalism produces good results far more often than communism.

But back to the book:

In our advanced technological society, those with economic and political power control the definition of crime and the manner in which the criminal justice system enforces the law. Consequently, the only crimes available to the poor are the severely sanctioned “street crimes”: rape, murder, theft, and mugging.

EvX: Available? How are crimes “available” to anyone? Are crimes like Pokemon, where you have to go to the Pokemon center to get your first starter crime, but if you sleep in the rich take all of the good crimes like insider training and you get stuck with some random Pikachu from the back, and it turns out to be a home invasion?

And if the rich are running the whole show, why don’t they make it so none of the laws apply to them? Why don’t they rape and murder poor people at the same rate as the poor rape and murder each other?

Back to the book:

Because private ownership of property is the true measure of success in American society [Source needed] (as opposed to being, say, a worthy person), the state becomes an ally of the wealthy in protecting their property interests. [How?] As a result, theft-related crimes are often punished more severely than are acts of violence, [Source needed] because although the former may be interclass, the latter are typically intraclass.” [Source needed]…

Empirical research confirms that economic downturns are indeed linked to both crime rate increases and government activities such as passing anticrime legislation.

I’ve heard this one before. Scroll back up to that graph of homicide rates over time and note the massive decrease in crime during the Great Depression. By the time the Depression crime drop petered out, crime was at one of its lowest points in the entire 20th century. Even in 2013 (the year the graph ends) crime was higher than it was after the Depression.

To be fair this drop is better explained by the end of Prohibition than by the Depression. But the Depression saw a massive decrease in crime: this theory is bogus.

Let’s finish up with Critical Feminist Criminology:

Critical feminism views gender inequality as stemming from the unequal power of men and women in a capitalist society, which leads to the exploitation of women by fathers and husbands. …

Patriarchy, or male supremacy, has been and continue to be supported by capitalists. This system sustains female oppression at home and in the workplace. …

Critical feminists link criminal behavior pattern to the gender conflict created by the economic and social struggles common in postindustrial societies. … Capitalists control the labor of workers, and men control women both economically and biologically. This ‘double marginality’ explains why females in a capitalist society commit fewer crimes than males.

So, when Capitalism oppresses men, it makes them commit “crime,” but when it oppresses women, it makes them not commit crime. Because capitalism wants to exploit workers by locking them in prisons where they can’t really do much work, but it wants to exploit women by making them do the dishes, because a capitalist system could never see the value of getting people to work for pay. Got it?

The text continues:

Because they are isolated in the family, they have fewer opportunities to engage in elite deviance… Women are also denied access to male-dominated street crimes.

So women are like… Some kid who was locked in his room and so couldn’t even get a cruddy crime-emon?

Seriously, though, do these guys not know that women are allowed to leave the house? Most of them have cars and do things like “drive to work” and “drive to the supermarket.” Yes, it’s true that existing, male-dominated street gangs and the Mafia generally don’t take women, but if women wanted to go out and punch people and steal their wallets, they would. If they wanted to make their own gangs, they would. If someone is actually a violent criminal, their husband saying, “Don’t go outside, make me a sandwich instead,” would not stop them from doing violence. If there’s one trait criminals tend to have in common, it’s that they don’t refrain from crime just because society disapproves of it.

Over in reality, women don’t commit much crime simply because… they aren’t that interested in committing crime.

 

Critical Criminology is a deep subject and I have only skimmed its surface. I haven’t discussed Mumia Abu-Jamal (the chapter’s other Profile in Crime;) restorative justice; the failure of restorative justice in South Africa to prevent horrific, race-motivated farm murders; instrumental vs. structural theorists; etc.

In closing, I’d just like to repeat, in the book’s defense, that the author is laying out the field for us, not advocating on its behalf. The book also has sections critiquing Critical Criminology theory and chapters devoted to sociobiology and developmental theories.

And in potentially related news, between 85 and 93% of French Muslims voted for Hollande, the Socialist candidate, in 2012.

Parsis, Travellers, and Human Niches

Irish Travellers, 1954

I.

Why are there many kinds of plants and animals? Why doesn’t the best out-compete, eat, and destroy the others, rising to be the sole dominant species on Earth?

In ecology, a niche is an organism’s specific place within the environment. Some animals eat plants; some eat dung. Some live in the sea; others in trees. Different plants flower and grow in different seasons; some are pollinated by bees and some by flies. Every species has its specific niche.

The Competitive Exclusion Principle (aka Gause’s Law) states that ‘no two species can occupy the same niche’ (or positively, ‘two species coexisting must have different niches.’) For example, if squirrels and chipmunks both want to nest in the treetops and eat nuts, (and there are limited treetops and nuts,) then over time, whichever species is better at finding nuts and controlling the treetops will dominate the niche and the other, less successful species will have to find a new niche.

If squirrels are dominating the treetops and nuts, this leaves plenty of room for rabbits to eat grass and owls to eat squirrels.

II. So I was reading recently about the Parsis and the Travellers. The Parsis, as we discussed on Monday, are Zoroastrians, originally from Persia (modern-day Iran,) who settled in India about a thousand yeas ago. They’re often referred to as the “Jews of India” because they played a similar role in Indian society to that historically played by Jews in Europe.*

*Yes I know there are actual Jews in India.

The Travellers are an Irish group that’s functionally similar to Gypsies, but in fact genetically Irish:

In 2011 an analysis of DNA from 40 Travellers was undertaken at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. The study provided evidence that Irish Travellers are a distinct Irish ethnic minority, who separated from the settled Irish community at least 1000 years ago; the claim was made that they are as distinct from the settled community as Icelanders are from Norwegians.^[36]

It appears that Ireland did not have enough Gypsies of Indian extraction and so had to invent its own.

And though I originally thought that only in jest, why not? Gypsies occupy a particular niche, and if there are Gypsies around, I doubt anyone else is going to out-compete them for that niche. But if there aren’t any, then surely someone else could.

According to Wikipedia, the Travellers traditionally were tinkers, mended tinware (like pots) and acquiring dead/old horses for slaughter.

The Gypsies appear to have been originally itinerant musicians/entertainers, but have also worked as tinkers, smiths, peddlers, miners, and horse traders (today, car salesmen.)

These are not glorious jobs, but they are jobs, and peripatetic people have done them.

Jews (and Parsis, presumably) also filled a social niche, using their network of family/religious ties to other Jews throughout the diaspora as the basis of a high-trust business/trading network at a time when trade was difficult and routes were dangerous.

On the subject of “Madeburg rights” or law in Eastern Europe, Wikipedia notes:

In medieval Poland, Jews were invited along with German merchants to settle in cities as part of the royal city development policy.

Jews and Germans were sometimes competitors in those cities. Jews lived under privileges that they carefully negotiated with the king or emperor. They were not subject to city jurisdiction. These privileges guaranteed that they could maintain communal autonomy, live according to their laws, and be subjected directly to the royal jurisdiction in matters concerning Jews and Christians. One of the provisions granted to Jews was that a Jew could not be made Gewährsmann, that is, he could not be compelled to tell from whom he acquired any object which had been sold or pledged to him and which was found in his possession. Other provisions frequently mentioned were a permission to sell meat to Christians, or employ Christian servants.

External merchants coming into the city were not allowed to trade on their own, but instead forced to sell the goods they had brought into the city to local traders, if any wished to buy them.

Note that this situation is immensely better if you already know the guy you’re selling to inside the city and he’s not inclined to cheat you because you both come from the same small, tight-knit group.

Further:

Under Bolesław III (1102–1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border in Lithuanian territory as far as Kiev.^[32] Bolesław III recognized the utility of Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country. … Mieszko III employed Jews in his mint as engravers and technical supervisors, and the coins minted during that period even bear Hebraic markings.^[30] … Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided; they formed the middle class in a country where the general population consisted of landlords (developing into szlachta, the unique Polish nobility) and peasants, and they were instrumental in promoting the commercial interests of the land.

If you need merchants and goldsmiths, someone will become merchants and goldsmiths. If it’s useful for those merchants and goldsmiths to all be part of one small, close-knit group, then a small, close-knit group is likely to step into that niche and out-compete anyone else trying to occupy it.

The similarity of the Parsis to the Jews probably has less to do with them both being monotheists (after all, Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs are also monotheists,) and more to do with them both being small but widely-flung diasporic communities united by a common religion that allows them to use their group as a source of trustworthy business partners.

Over hundreds or thousands of years, humans might not just move into social niches, but actually become adapted to them–Jew and Parsis are both reported to be very smart, for example.

III. I can think of several other cases of ethnic groups moving into a particular niche. In the US, the gambling and bootleg alcohol trade were long dominated by ethnic Sicilians, while the crack and heroin trades have been dominated by black and Hispanic gangs.

Note that, while these activities are (often) illegal, they are still things that people want to do and the mafia/gangs are basically providing a goods/services to their customers. As they see it, they’re just businessmen. They’re out to make money, not commit random violence.

That said, these guys do commit lots of violence, including murder, blackmail and extortion. Even violent crime can be its own niche, if it pays well enough.

(Ironically, police crackdown on ethnic Sicilian control in NYC coincided with a massive increase in crime–did the mafia, by controlling a particular territory, keep out competing bands of criminals?)

On a more pleasant note, society is now rich enough that many people can make a living as professional sports stars, marry other professional sports stars, and have children who go on to also be professional sports stars. It’s not quite at the level of “a caste of professional athletes genetically optimized for particular sports,” but if this kept up for a few hundred years, it could be.

Similarly, over in Nepal, “Sherpa” isn’t just a job, it’s an ethnic group. Sherpas, due to their high elevation adaptation, have an advantage over the rest of us when it comes to scaling Mt. Everest, and I hear the global mountain-climbing industry pays them well for their services. A Sherpa who can successfully scale Mt. Everest many times, make lots of money, and raise lots of children in an otherwise impoverished nation is thus a successful Sherpa–and contributing to the group’s further genetic and cultural specialization in the “climbing Mt. Everest” niche.

India, of course, is the ultimate case of ethnic groups specializing into specific jobs–it’d be interesting to see what adaptations different groups have acquired over the years.

I also wonder if the caste system is an effective way to minimize competition between groups in a multi-ethnic society, or if it leads to more resentment and instability in the long run.

Zoroastrian (Parsi) DNA

Farvahar. Persepolis, Iran.

Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest surviving religions and possibly its first monotheistic one. It emerged in now-Iran about 3,000 years ago, but following the Arab (Islamic) conquest of Persia, many Zoroastrians migrated to India, where they became known as the Parsi (from the word for “Persian.”) To be clear, where this post refers to “Parsis” it means the specific Zoroastrian community in India, and where it refers to “Iranian Zoroastrians” it means the Zoroastrians currently living in Iran.

Although Zoroastrianism was once the official state religion of Persia, today only about 190,000 believers remain (according to Wikipedia,) and their numbers are declining.

If you’re thinking that a diasporic community of monotheists sounds familiar, you’re in good company. According to Wikipedia:

Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta observed in 1563 that “there are merchants … in the kingdom of Cambaia … known as Esparcis. We Portuguese call them Jews, but they are not so. They are Gentios.”

Another parallel: Ashkenazi Jews and Parsis are both reported to be very smart. Famous Parsis include Queen Guitarist Freddy Mercury, nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha, and our Harvard-employed friend, Homi K. Bhabha.

Lopez et al have recently carried out a very interesting study of Zoroastrian DNA, The Genetic Legacy of Zoroastrianism in Iran and India: Insights into Population Structure, Gene Flow, and Selection:

Historical records indicate that migrants from Persia brought Zoroastrianism to India, but there is debate over the timing of these migrations. Here we present genome-wide autosomal, Y chromosome, and mitochondrial DNA data from Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians and neighboring modern-day Indian and Iranian populations and conduct a comprehensive genome-wide genetic analysis in these groups. … we find that Zoroastrians in Iran and India have increased genetic homogeneity relative to other sampled groups in their respective countries, consistent with their current practices of endogamy. Despite this, we infer that Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) intermixed with local groups sometime after their arrival in India, dating this mixture to 690–1390 CE and providing strong evidence that Iranian Zoroastrian ancestry was maintained primarily through the male line.

Note that all diasporic–that is, migrant–groups appear to be heavily male. Women tend to stay put while men move and take new wives in their new homelands.

By making use of the rich information in DNA from ancient human remains, we also highlight admixture in the ancestors of Iranian Zoroastrians dated to 570 BCE–746 CE, older than admixture seen in any other sampled Iranian group, consistent with a long-standing isolation of Zoroastrians from outside groups. …

Admixture with whom? (Let’s just read the paper and see if it answers the question):

Furthermore, a recent study using genome-wide autosomal DNA found that haplotype patterns in Iranian Zoroastrians matched more than other modern Iranian groups to a high-coverage early Neolithic farmer genome from Iran ^…

A study of four restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) suggested a closer genetic affinity of Parsis to Southern Europeans than to non-Parsis from Bombay. Furthermore, NRY haplotype analysis and patterns of variation at the HLA locus in the Parsis of Pakistan support a predominately Iranian origin. …

In (1) and (2), we detected admixture in the Parsis dated to 27 (range: 17–38) and 32 (19–44) generations ago, respectively, in each case between one predominantly Indian-like source and one predominantly Iranian-like source. This large contribution from an Iranian-like source (∼64%–76%) is not seen in any of our other 7 Indian clusters, though we detect admixture in each of these 7 groups from wide-ranging sources related to modern day individuals from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Europe, Pakistan, or of Jewish heritage (Figures 2 and S7, Tables S5–S7). For Iranian Zoroastrians, we detect admixture only under analysis (2), occurring 66 (42–89) generations ago between a source best genetically explained as a mixture of modern-day Croatian and Cypriot samples, and a second source matching to the Neolithic Iranian farmer WC1. … The two Iranian Zoroastrians that had been excluded as outliers exhibited admixture patterns more similar to the Lebanese, Turkish Jews, or Iranian Bandari individuals than to Zoroastrians (Table S8).

Parsi Wedding, 1905

If I assume a generation is about 25 years long, 27 generations was about 675 years ago; 32 was about 800 years ago. (Though given the wide range on these dates, perhaps we should estimate between 425 and 1,100 years ago.) This sounds consistent with Parsis taking local wives after they arrived in India between the 8th and 10th century CE (after the Arab conquest of Perisa.) Also consistently, this admixture isn’t found in Iranian Zoroastrians.

The Iranians’ admixture occurred about 1,050 and 2,225 years ago, which is an awfully broad time range. Could Croatian or Cypriot migrants have arrived due to the Greek/Roma/ Byzantine Empires? Were they incorporated into the Persian Empire as a result of its territorial conquests or the Arab conquest? Or were they just long-distance merchants who happened to wander into the area?

The Fire Temple of Baku

The authors found that Parsi priests had “the lowest gene diversity values of all population samples studied for both Y and mtDNA,” though they didn’t have enough Iranian Zoroastrian priest samples to compare them to Parsi priests. (I bet this is similar to what you’d find if you sampled Orthodox rabbis.)

Finally, in the genetic selection and diseases section, the authors write:

In the case of the Iranian Zoroastrians, … some of the most significant SNPs… are located upstream of gene SLC39A10 … with an important role in humoral immunity⁶¹ or in CALB2 … which plays a major role in the cerebellar physiology.⁶²

With regard to the positive selection tests on Parsis versus India Hindu/Gujarati groups, the most significant SNPs were embedded in WWOX … associated with neurological disorders like early epilepsy … and in a region in chromosome 20 … (see Table S11 for a complete list). …

Genetic isolation and endogamous practices can be associated with higher frequencies of disease prevalence. For example, there are reports claiming a high recurrence of diseases such as diabetes among the Iranian Zoroastrians, and Parkinson, colon cancer, or the deficiency of G6PD, an enzyme that triggers the sudden reduction of red blood cells, among the Parsis.

However, the authors warn that these results are weak (these are rare conditions in an already small population) and cannot not be depended upon.

Homeschooling Corner: Math Philosophy

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.–Gottfried Leibniz

Fibonacci Spiral

You may have noticed that I talk a lot more about math than reading or writing. This is not because I dislike the language arts, but because they are, once learned, not very complicated. A child must learn to decode symbols, associate them with sounds, and then write them–tricky in the beginning, but most children should have the basics down by the age of 6 or 7. For the next several years, the child’s most important task is simply practice. If a child has a book they love to read, then they are already most of the way there and will probably only need some regular instruction on spelling and punctuation.

Math, by contrast, is always advancing. For every new operation or technique a child masters, there is another waiting to be learned.

I don’t hold with the idea that mathematical concepts must be taught in a particular order or at particular ages–I introduced negative numbers back in preschool, they’ve learned about simple logarithms in elementary, and they seem none the worse for the unusual order.

Count on Math gives the logic behind Particular Order:

Developmental sequence is fundamental to children’s ability to build conceptual understanding. … The chapters in this book present math in a developmental sequence that provides children a natural transition from one concept to the next, preventing gaps in their understanding. …

When children are allowed to explore many objects, they begin to recognize similarities and differences of objects. When children can determine similarities and differences, they can classify objects. When children can classify objects, they can see similarities and difference well enough to recognize patterns. When children can recognize, copy, extend and create patterns, they can arrange sets in a one-to-one relationship. …

This developmental sequence provides a conceptual framework that serves as a springboard to developing higher level math skills.

This logic is complete bollocks. (Count on Math is otherwise a fine book if you’re looking for activities to do with small children.)

Humans are good at learning. It’s what we do. Any child raised in a normal environment (and if you’re reading this, I assume you care about your children and aren’t neglecting them) has plenty of objects around every day that they can interact with, observe, sort, classify, etc. You don’t have to dedicate a week to teaching your kid how to tell “similar” and “different” in objects before you dedicate a week to “classifying.” Hand them some toys or acorns or rocks or random stuff lying around the house and they can do that themselves.

Can you imagine an adult who, because their parent or preschool skipped straight from”determining similarities and differences” to “making patterns,” was left bereft and innumerate, unable to understand fractions? If the human mind were really so fragile, the vast majority of people would know nothing and our entire civilization would not exist.

More important than any particular order is introducing mathematical concepts in a friendly, enjoyable way, when the child is ready to understand them.

For example, I tried to teach binary notation this week, but that went completely over the kids’ heads. They just thought I was making a pattern with numbers. So I stopped and switched to a lesson about Fibonacci numbers and Pascal’s triangle.

Then we went back to practicing addition and subtraction with regrouping, because that’s tricky. It’s boring, it’s not fun, and it’s not intuitive until you’ve really got base-ten down solid (base 10, despite what you may think, is not “obvious” or intuitive. Not all languages even use base 10. The Maya used base 20; the Babylonians used base 60. There are Aborigines who used base 5 or even 3; in Nigeria you’ll find base 12.) Learning is always a balance between the fun stuff (look what you can do with exponents!) and the boring stuff (let’s practice our times tables.) The boring stuff lets you do the fun stuff, but they’re both ultimately necessary.

 

What else we’ve been up to:

Fractions, Decimals, and Percents, by David A. Adler. A brightly-colored, well-written introduction to parts of numbers and how fractions, decimals and percents are really just different ways of saying the same thing.

It’s a short book–28 pages with not much text per page–and intended for young children, probably in the 8 to 10 yrs old range.

I picked up Code Your Own Games: 20 Games to Create with Scratch just because I wanted to see what there was outside the DK Workbooks (which have been good so far, no complaints there.) So far it seems pretty similar, but the layout is more compact. Beginners might feel less intimidated by DK’s larger layouts with more white space, but this seems good for a kid who is past that stage. It has more projects than the shorter DK Workbooks but they’re still pretty simple.

I also happened across a Singapore Math Workbook, which seems fine. Sample problem:

Emily and Jasmine had the same number of stamps. After Emily gave Jasmine 42 stamps, Jasmine had twice as many stamps as Emily. How many did Jasmine have at the end?

At a movie, 1/4 of the people in the theater were men, 5/8 were women, and the rest were children. If there were 100 more women than children, what was the total number of people in the theater?

Our recorders arrived, so now we can play music.

Finished reading The Secret Garden, planted seeds, collected and identified rocks. Nature walk: collected fall leaves and pressed flowers. Caught bugs and observed squirrels for Ranger Rick nature workbook. Read about space and worked with cuisenaire rods. Etc.

 

Anthropology Friday: Outlaws on Horseback: The Starr Clan, Bill Cook, and Cherokee Bill

Welcome back to Anthropology Friday. Today we’re continuing with Harry Dago’s Outlaws on Horseback, beginning with an interesting description of Texas post Civil War:

“Texas was rapidly recovering from the poverty and prostration of years of carpetbag rule and the dislocations of the Civil War… When peace came, there was no “hard” money in the state. In east Texas, the Negroes, no longer slaves, refused to work cotton. Out on the plains and down in the brush country of south Texas, millions of unbranded Longhorns were running wild. … It was not until Joseph G. McCoy opened his cattle market at Abilene, Kansas, and the great trail herds began moving north that the economy of Texas began to revive. By the early seventies, millions of dollars of Yankee money were flowing back into Texas. Banditry became more profitable.

“Jim Reed, looking for bigger game than could be bagged on the cattle trails, left Texas … for the cabin of Watt Grayson, in the Creek country, some miles west of Tom Starr’s stronghold. Old Watt was one of the three subchiefs of the Creek Nation and had become rich by subverting United States government funds from the tribal treasury. Reed had spent so much time in the Territory, often disposing of stolen Cherokee horses in Kansas for Tom Starr, that he was familiar with the tale of Watt Grayson’ hoard.

“On the night of November 19, 1873, the three men broke into the Grayson cabin… The bandits strung up the old couple by the thumbs, burned their feet and otherwise tortured them until they were willing to talk. A cache beneath the floor yielded $30,000 in gold and notes, some of it in Confederate currency.”

Yamacraw Creek Native Americans meet with the trustee of the colony of Georgia in England, July 1734.

EvX: The Creek, one of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” moved along with the Cherokee to “Indian Territory” in modern Oklahoma. Today they are known as the Muscogee. , because it is of course our custom in English to refer to other people by their own autonyms, just like we now call the Germans the Deutsche, the Japanese the Nihonjin, and the Finns the Suomalaiset–no wait we don’t do that. We don’t do that at all. We only bother changing the customary names of small, obscure groups so that elites can show off how much better they are than all of the confused, low-class people who don’t have the spare time to keep up with the latest PC names.

Creek it is.

William Bowles aka Estajoca, 1763-1805

Anyway, the Creek are an interesting people with a relatively advanced pre-Columbian culture. They’re most likely descended from the local Mound-Builders, who built cities and monumental architecture throughout the Mississippi valley prior to the arrival of European diseases (and horses) with the Spanish, (which decimated their numbers and upset the balance of power in local Indian communities by making nomadic raiding more profitable.)

I don’t want to digress too far, but you should read the story of the State of Muskogee, founded by William Bowles aka Estajoca. The tale is pure, great frontier history.

But back to Dago and the notorious Starr Clan of the Cherokees:

“Though the blood-stained feud which the Starr clan had waged against the John Ross faction for several decade in retaliation for the murder of James Starr, Tom Starr’s father, was now quiescent, the Starrs were still stealing horses from their fellow Cherokees. …

“Stories of Tom Starr’s cruelty are legion. He stood six feet six in his socks, and despite his years was as straight as the proverbial arrow. … for twenty years he had been the clan elder, and the Starrs had slit the throats of countless followers of John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

“The Tribal Council, dominated by the Ross faction, had outlawed them and deprived them of all their tribal rights. But the killings had continued, and in desperation the council had offered to rescind it edict, grant them amnesty and restore their rights.

“Tom Starr had said no; he wanted more than that–namely the allotment money the clan had not received for years–and he got it. …

“Usually when a railroad was built into new country in the 1870s, new towns sprang up and civilization (at least of a kind) followed. Nothing of the sort happened when the rambunctious “Katy” Railroad, undeterred by hell and high water, slashed and slopped its way down through the Nations to Texas. Indian Territory remained a wilderness. … The only attempt at law enforcement came from the roving deputy marshal working out of the U.S. District Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and the Indian police and tribal courts. Thievery and crimes of violence continued to occur with grisly frequency.

“This was in July, 1886. Sam [Starr] had been on the scout almost continually for two years. [“On the scout” means hiding out in the wilderness to avoid the police.] Late in September Chief Bill Vann, of the Cherokee police, [plus several others, including Frank West, whose testimony had previously convicted Sam and Belle and put them in prison for nine months] … caught him as he was riding through a cornfield.

“Chief Vann called on him to surrender. When Sam raked his hose with his spurs, … Vann emptied his pistol at him. Two of the slugs unseated Starr and another killed the mare. Sam was disarmed and taken to a farmhouse to have his wound treated.”

EvX: Interestingly, in the 1800s, not surrendering immediately when the police told you to was grounds for them to try their best to kill you. Today we hold our police to a much more difficult (and dangerous) standard: they are supposed to capture suspected criminals, even ones who’ve led them on high-speed chases, without killing them.

The flip-side to this bullet-ridden coin is that when outlaws turned themselves in voluntarily, they were generally assumed to be acting in good faith, and often got quite light sentences by modern standards.

Back to Sam Starr:

“News of Sam’s capture and where he was being held went winging along the Starr clan’s grapevine… Shortly before midnight, a score of Sam’s brothers and relative broke into the farmhouse… and carried Sam away to his father’s stronghold. Two weeks later he was sufficiently recovered to visit Belle. …

Belle Starr, “outlaw queen”

“Belle demonstrated her sagacity by urging him to surrender himself to the District Court at Fort Smith, where with good Counsel (J. Warren Reed) he would have a much better chance of defending himself than in one of the tribal courts. The Choctaw and Creek chiefs hated Tom Starr and his sons, holding them responsible for numerous thefts and robberies. With the Ross faction in command of the Cherokee Tribal Council, his chances of escaping the death penalty in a Cherokee court wold be slim. … Once he was in the custody of the federal government, the Indian police could not touch him. …

“Sam was indicted and promptly released on bond… [The lawyer’s] advice to Sam was to go home to Younger’s Bend and keep out of trouble.”

EvX: Released on bond! Sam is a wanted man, a fugitive, a murderer and outlaw, and they’ve just released him on bond and told him to behave! The thinking, as I mentioned, is that a man who has turned himself in has shown some kind of contrition for his acts and so is less likely to commit more.

“Sam followed [this advice] until the evening of December 21, when the neighborhood was invited to a “stomp” dance at “Auntie” Lucy Suratt’s place… The dance was in progress when [Sam, Belle, and Belle’s daughter] arrived. The night was cold and a bonfire was blazing in the yard. …

“Belle was surprised to see Frank West squatting on the ground on the opposite side of the bonfire. Sam saw West and pushed her aside. He was half-drunk and in an ugly mood. He accused West of wounding him and killing [his horse]. … Whipping out his pistol, he shot [West] through the neck. As West went down, he managed to get a revolver out of his overcoat pocket and send a bullet crashing through Sam’s side. Both men were mortally wounded. Sam staggered to a cottonwood and wrapped his arms around it to keep from falling. Life was running out of him, however, and he slid to the ground.

EvX: So ended the lives of both Sam Starr and Frank West, whose testimony had previously put Sam in prison for a short while. Belle Starr was left a widow, but quickly found a new outlaw paramour, as she always did:

“[Belle Starr’s daughter, Pearl] and Cole Younger share the dubious distinction of being the only ones among Belle Starr’s intimates, through either blood or sex, to die of natural causes. The others–her brothers Preston and Bud, her son Eddie, her “husbands” and lovers (Jim Reed, Sam Starr, John Middleton, Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, Jim French, Jim July)–all met violent death, a fate which she herself did not escape. Today, more than seventy yeas later, her name endures.”

EvX: How times change. Belle might have been a well-known person in Dago’s day, but I’d never heard of her before this book. (There are many characters in the book whose fame, Dago claims, well long endure but whom I have never heard of.) I suspect this is largely due to the massive decrease in interest in Westerns and the history of the “Wild West” during my lifetime.

Bill Cook, leader of the Bill Cook gang, only 1/8th Cherokee

“Though it is largely unknown, the Bill Cook Gang played an important role in the history of horseback outlawry in what is now eastern Oklahoma. If its life as an organized gang under the leadership of Bill Cook was brief, it was spectacular. In one week short of three months, they successfully committed ten assorted stagecoach, store, bank and railroad holdups. It i a record un-matched by the James-Younger Gang or any other. In the course of it, they killed only one man, which is another record.”

EvX: Bill Cook does not appear to have a Wikipedia page, but according to Old West Legends:

Growing up to become one of the outlaw leaders of the Cook Gang, William “Bill” Tuttle Cook was born near Fort Gibson in 1873 in the Cherokee Nation, but was left homeless at the age fourteen when his mother died in 1887.

Starting out as an honest young man, he served as a scout for the U.S. Marshals from Fort Smith, Arkansas, guiding them through Indian Territory. However, he soon started running whiskey to the Indians and in 1893 was sentenced to 40 days in jail by Judge Isaac Parker. During his incarceration he vowed he would put together an outlaw gang when he was released and the following year he did.

If you don’t want to incarcerate or or execute large numbers of criminals, then one of the fastest ways to decrease crime is to eliminate the profits/potential for violence by making the activity legal. For example, lots of people want to gamble. Goodness knows why, but they want to. Illegal gambling has long been an easy way for criminals to make lots of money. If people are going to do it anyway, perhaps it would just be better to let them do it without funding criminals in the process.

But back to Dago:

“[Bill Cook] was the son of Jim Cook, a Southerner from Tennessee who had fought in the Union army. Like so many others, he drifted into Indian Territory after the war and married a quarter-blood Cherokee woman, which enabled him to acquire a headright near Fort Bigson. They had two sons, Bill… and James… The boys were orphaned when they were in their teens. They were placed in an Indian orphanage, from which Bill ran away in 1887. He was then barely fourteen. …

The Cook Gang and the Cherokee Strip:

“One thing remains to to be said about the Cooks and that concerns the circumstances that put young Jim Cook into the Cherokee prison for eight years. So turn back to the spring of 1894, when after endless negotiations, the federal government purchased the so-called Cherokee Strip from the Cherokee Nation. … the Cherokee Nation had definite treaty rights to the “outlet” which, as usual where Indians were concerned, had been ignored when it was thrown open to white settlement on September 16 of the previous year, resulting in the sensational Cherokee Strip “run” that brought thousands of whites racing across the Kansas line to claim free land and make new homes in today’s Oklahoma. It was to “quiet” all Cherokee claims to it that the purchase was made. Of the total amount paid, a third went into the Cherokee National Treasury. It left $6,640,000 to be divided individually among all who could make legitimate claim to being at least one-eight Cherokee. After a lengthy checking of tribal roles, the figure arrived at was $265.70 per person.

“It is remarkable that in outlaw-infested Indian Territory six million dollars could be distributed without a major robbery taking place. This was accomplished, however. Thousands of Cherokee were begowked, robbed, cheated, but only after they received their share of the “Strip” money. … A blind man could have foreseen that putting such a huge sum of money in the hands of largely ignorant Indians was bound to result in their being ruthlessly exploited by white sharpers. Nothing was done to prevent it. The results were often tragic and often ludicrous.

“In the weeks before the distribution was made, a horde of unscrupulous agents and racketeers crisscrossed the Cherokee country, selling the Indians things they did not need and did not know how to operate, all at extravagant prices, and on credit against their Strip Money, taking notes in payment. A carload of cheap sewing machines and washing machines was unloaded at Gibson Station. On the “luxury” side came musical instruments, which the Cherokees could not play, and an endless variety of feminine finery.

“When a distribution point was set up, the Cherokees flocked in by the hundreds to find a carnival atmosphere prevailing. Gamblers and bootleggers operated openly, along with thugs and pick-pockets. At Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, there were tent shows, a mery-go-round, every device for extracting money from the Indians. And the agents with their notes were there, too. They got their money before the man who had bought on credit got his.

“Cherokee” Bill, also only 1/8th Cherokee

Young Jim Cook had the necessary Cherokee blood in his veins to qualify for his $256.70, and he wanted it, as did his brother Bill and Cherokee Bill. Their names were on the Tahlequah roles, but since they were wanted by both the Indian police and the U.S. deputy marshals, they knew it would not be safe for them to appear… To get their money, they hit upon the device of getting someone to go in and collect it for them. …

“She had no difficulty getting it, but when Ellis Rattling Gourd, chief of the Cherokee police, read the names on the letter she presented to the treasurer, he realized at once that the three men were in the neighborhood…

“Ellis Rattling Gourd was back in the morning with a posse of seven men, including Sequoyah Houston… Jim Cook, peering around a corner of the building, was seriously wounded by a slug… He tossed away his Winchester a he went down and lying on the ground was struck several times more. A few moments later, Cherokee Bill stepped out boldly and killed Sequoyah Houston. …

“Jim Cook’s condition was grave. Desperate as the chance was, his brother insisted on getting him to a doctor at Fort Gibson. … When Jim recovered from his wound he was convicted of being a party to the killing of Sequoyah Houston and sentenced to eight years in the Cherokee prison. He escaped once, but was recaptured and served his full sentence. When he came out it was to find that life in the Territory had changed drastically; the Cook Gang was just a fading memory.” …

Henry Starr, actual Cherokee

“Ironically enough, two members of his gang were destined to become far better known in their time than he. One was Henry Starr, the gentleman bandit and bank robbery, by marriage the nephew of Belle Starr. The other was Crawford Goldsby, Alias Cherokee Bill, the bloodthirsty mad dog who killed for the love of killing and was accounted the most vicious of all Indian Teritory-Oklahoma outlaws. Both organized gangs of their own when the U.S. deputy marshals and Indian police scattered and destroyed the Cook Gang. That was normal gang procedure. They were constantly being broken up and re-forming.”

EvX: This is an important point. I was reading recently about (recent) government attempts to fight gang violence/activity by going after the gang leaders, on the assumption that with no one to direct operations, the gangs would fall apart. (The difficulty with this approach, as we’ll see later, is that gang leaders often insulate themselves with several layers of plausible deniability from the gang’s day-to-day criminal operations.)

But it appears that gangs operate more the way Dago describes: splitting and merging as needs and opportunities present themselves. According to the article, the government had therefore recently switched to mass-arresting hundreds (thousands?) of gang members.

The law came down hard on the Cook Gang:

“Not one had escaped. The guns of the U.S. marshals and the Indian police had snuffed out the lives of Lon Gordon, Hank Munson, George Sanders, the Verdigris Kid and Sam Butler, Bill and Jim Cook, Jess Snyder, Will Farri, Chicken Lucas, Curt Dayson and Skeeter Baldwin were behind bars.”

Cherokee Bill and Henry Starr, however, were not through:

“Because of the alias of Cherokee Bill, the only name by which he is known, Crawford Goldsby is widely and erroneously believed to have been a Cherokee Indian. Actually he was only an eight Cherokee. The rest of him was a weird mixture of other bloods. George Goldsby, his father, saw honorable service as a trooper in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, an all-Negro regiment, our first, which distinguished itself in the Apache campaigns in Arizona. On his enlistment papers he put himself down a a Negro, but in late years he claimed to be of mixed white, Mexican, and Sioux descent. The assorted blood strains from which Cherokee Bill sprang did not end there, for his father married Ellen Beck, who was half Negro, a fourth Cherokee and a fourth white. Perhaps the assorted origins of his parents clashed violently in Cherokee Bill and made him the cruel, psychopathic killer that he was. Certainly some of his murderous traits appeared in Clarence Goldsby, his younger brother.”

EvX: Theory: it’s not so much that different “bloods” were incompatible as that certain kinds of people were more likely to cross racial lines in the 1800s, including criminals trying to evade capture in their hometowns by heading across state lines into Indian Territory.

“[Bill] was not much over thirteen when she packed him off to the Indian School at Cherokee, Kansas, and she kept him there for three years. Being part Cherokee and having gone to school at Cherokee, Kansas, were enough to fasten the nickname of “Cherokee” on him. Where the “Bill” came from is not known.

“His mother, as indomitable in her way as he was in his, insisted that he continue his education. With what must have entailed some sacrifice on her part, she sent him east to the Carlisle Industrial School for Indian youth… Hundreds of Indian boys went to Carlisle. They came from many tribes. Apparently, Crawford Goldsby is the only one who returned home to become an outlaw. …

“Cherokee Bill came up for arraignment before Judge Parker, charged with the murder of Ernest Melton, the Lenapah painter. From the moment they first faced each other, the air was charged with a personal enmity between judge and prisoner seldom recorded in any courtroom. Cherokee Bill had been a thorn in Parker’s side for years, and he was prepared to show him no mercy. Though the evidence against the accused was overwhelming, he knew from the moment J. Warren Reed appeared as counsel for the defense that the case would be bitterly contested to the very end.”

EvX: The full story of Judge Parker and J. Warren Reed, esquire, is too long to recount in its entirety, but Parker had set it as his duty to rid Arkansas and neighboring Indian territory of outlaws and bandits, sometimes by less than Constitutional means. Reed, seeing the opportunity to defend lots of clients, made it his duty to stop Parker from packing juries and hanging criminals.

Eventually Reed succeeded so well, he got Parker’s court shut down and put himself out of a job.

But back to Cherokee Bill’s trial:

“Very likely the astute Reed, in his feud with Parker, was so anxious to take the case that money, for once, meant little or nothing to him. The trial was certain to attract tremendous attention, perhaps more than any other ever heard by the Fort Smith court. With the evidence against the notorious outlaw so strong, Reed undoubtedly expected Parker to run roughshod over the defendant’s legal rights. Sufficiently goaded, he might overstep the rules of jurisprudence flagrantly enough to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that a fair trial could not be had in the Fort Smith court–which Reed had been contending for years.

“The trial became an endless series of clashes between defense counsel and the bench. Bullied, exasperated beyond endurance, Parker laid down some rules of his own, limiting the cross-examination of witnesses by both the prosecution and the defense … The jury was out only a few minute and returned with a verdict of guilty. …

“The death sentence was pronounced and the day of execution named. His mother wept when she heard it. …

“Reed immediately took an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to have the verdict set aside, stipulating on five counts that Crawford Goldsby, alias Cherokee Bill, had not received a fair trial. It stayed the date of execution until the high court could review the case. …

“Among Cherokee Bill’s fellow inmates was one with whom he was well acquainted from his days with the Cook Gang. He was Henry Starr, under sentence of death for the killing of Floyd Wilson…

“After supper on the evening of July 26, on what had been a hot, sultry day, not a breath of air stirring, the prisoners were allowed out in the corridors. At seven o’clock the signal was given for them to return to their cells. …

“Cherokee Bill had entered his cell, and there was no confusion until Eoff and Keating [the guards] reached his cell door. [Cherokee Bill] had removed his hidden revolver from its hiding place. Suddenly, Eoff and Keating found themselves covered… Keating was ordered to hand over his pistol, butt first. Instead of obeying, the guard backed away and started to draw. the outlaw fired instantly and Keating staggered back, mortally wounded, his face a bloody smear.

“Eoff ran for the gate. Cherokee Bill, out into the corridor, blazed away at him. … Bedlam broke out all over the prison. Men who had not yet been locked up rushed from their cells, and full-scale riot was ready to erupt. Guards and other prison officers drove them back at gunpoint. …

“With gunsmoke hanging heavily in the corridor, Henry Starr got Eoff’s attention. With courage seldom, if ever equaled by a man outside the law, he said quietly, “If you guards will stop shooting, I’ll go into Bill’s cell and get his gun.”

“His offer was accepted… As the sounds of shooting died away, they heard hm calling to Cherokee Bill. The latter had barricaded himself, but he permitted Starr to enter. What passed between them will never be known. Certainly it was more than Starr’s laconic statement. “I jut said, ‘Bill, your mother wouldn’t want you to do this. Give me your gun and call it quits.’…

“When [Judge Parker] got the news, he started back to Fort Smith at once, but not before calling in reporters and denouncing the Supreme Court for interfering with the Fort Smith tribunal, recklessly granting appeals and setting aside the justly deserved convictions of known killers. … His health was failing, but he came back to Fort Smith with a fresh burst of energy. At last he had such an iron-clad case against Cherokee Bill that even the learned judges in Washington would not dare dispute it. …

“Invitations to the hanging had been limited to one hundred, but hundreds of others, denied the privilege of the yard, witnessed it from the walls and adjoining rooftops. Before the black cap was adjusted, Cherokee Bill was asked if he had anything to say. His answer was a fitting epitaph to his ferocious career. “Hell, no,” he snarled. “I came here to die, not to make a speech.”

Free Speech is Downstream from Territory

(Journalist?) Angus Johnston provides moral justification for this act (to save space, I’m going to quote instead of screenshot most of the thread):

It’s not just a speech act. It’s a test. It’s a test to see whether you can get away with it. It’s an attempt to shift boundaries. It’s an attempt to frighten, to cow, to subdue. It’s a challenge: “Are you going to stop me?” It’s not “political speech” in the way we typically think of that term. It’s not simple advocacy of Nazism. It’s street harassment. …

I think it’s the same as a woman pepper-spraying a man for accosting her with sexual insinuations while she walks to the subway. I think it’s the same as a gay man punching the guy who threatened him and shamed him for kissing his boyfriend goodbye. I think it’s the same as clocking someone you see yelling at an old Jewish lady, telling her she should have been gassed like her mom.

We can distinguish coherently between different kinds of speech, and how we respond to them. We do it all the time. …

Not getting harassed by antifa.

Before I consult with a lawyer about whether a police officer would consider these cases equivalent, I would like to point out that people do, in fact, wear Nazi symbols on a regular basis–even in Johnston’s vicinity–and normal people definitely do not punch the wearers unless they want to die right now.

Yes, I am talking about outlaw bikers and their ilk.

That said, Johnston is right about one thing–it is a shit test. I highly doubt the average Vagos (or other outlaw) actually cares that much about promoting the 80+ yr old military ideology of a foreign country, but they do care about declaring that they are the biggest, baddest bad-asses in the area and that therefore you shouldn’t mess with them. Wearing the most offensive symbols possible sends the message: I am so bad-ass that you can’t stop me.

The entire point of criminal gangs (outlaw motorcycle clubs included) is to control territory; with territory come resources and (most importantly) women.

And I guarantee you Johnston and the other antifa are not going to punch the Vagos in their faces, because while they want to keep “Nazis” out of their spaces, they know they can’t stop the Vagos.

“But what about Free Speech?” I hear you asking.

You get Free Speech when you control a space.

Let’s take a look at this video: Black girl decolonizing the space around the president – Evergreen State College. Normally, the president of a college owns that space. But as you can see, this black student has decided to claim his space, and there is nothing he is willing to do to stop her. He has relinquished his space. He has surrendered.

The world “decolonize” is specifically chosen to signify the removal of white people, who own the land Evergreen State is built on by virtue of having conquered it. Of course, since black are not indigenous to the area, a black person taking it over is equally “colonialism.” True “decolonization” would return the land to the Native Americans who once owned it, not black newcomers. But the point here is to drive out whites from white spaces, with bats and tazers, if necessary, not to benefit the Indians.

Other videos/articles from Evergreen are equally telling—professors trapped by students; college shut down for three days because of violence; the president forced to state that the college’s occupation of this land is illegitimate. Oh, and let’s not forget the violent Berkley protests/riots that shut down Milo’s speech.

Free speech is a luxury you enjoy after you secure a territory.

University of Missouri protests

While you were laughing at the whiny cry babies with their “safe spaces,” liberals were using “victimhood” as the justification to mark their territory: places where you and your ideas are not welcome.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution’s John Villasenor, professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, found that 44% of [University] Students Incorrectly Think the First Amendment Does Not Protect Hate Speech.

1,500 students at four-year universities were asked if the First Amendment protects hate speech (The correct answer, based on 200+ years of law and Supreme Court rulings, is “Yes.”)

The student’s answers:

• “Hate Speech not protected”: 44%
• “Protected”: 39%
• “Don’t know”: 16%
• Men who answered correctly: 51%
• Women who answered correctly: 31%
• Republicans who answered correctly: 44%
• Democrats who answered correctly: 39%
• “Independents”: 40%
• Think “shouting so that the audience cannot hear” is an acceptable way to oppose an unpopular speaker: 51%
• Think violence is acceptable: 19%

Let’s be clear: it’s not just any ideas that are unwelcome. The most unwelcome ideas are directly related to the question of Who should be allowed in the country/region? We are literally arguing over who should be allowed in the US (and Europeans over who should be allowed into their countries.) The vast majority of what people are calling “Hate Speech” is actually speech aimed at stopping foreigners from entering an area or advocating that they should be expelled.

Professor Weinstein’s crime that sparked the Evergreen State riots wasn’t wearing a Nazi armband or advocating his own gassing, but his disinclination to leave campus when the SJWs decided to have a symbolic day of kicking all of the white people off campus. It is literally about tribal control of space and violently kicking out everyone the SJWs don’t like.

Do conservatives do it, too? You betcha. Here’s what happened when Richard Spencer tried to occupy a space and give a speech:

Compare that against what protesters were allowed to do Baltimore. From the Baltimore Mayor’s speech:

“I’ve made it very clear that I worked with the police, and instructed them to do everything they could, to make sure the protestors were able to exercise their right to free speech… We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

Now let’s go back to the beginning, because I do want to address the legal question implicit in Angus Johnston’s claims: Having consulted with a lawyer and a police officer, I can say with certainty that Johnston’s argument is “legally garbage.” Punching people just because they happen to be wearing Nazi armbands is definitely illegal and you can go to prison for assault if you try it.

Blocking traffic, as the BLM protesters have often done, is also illegal. So is burning and looting, as the Berkley protestors did. Johnston is not offering legal advice (and I don’t recommend going to him for legal advice;) he is speaking from the perspective of someone who believes that the police will look the other way and allow you to break the law by punching Nazis. Since he believes that the Nazis are entering his territory, he believes that the power structure in his territory will support violently driving Nazi invaders from his territory.

Conservatives tend to be several years behind liberals. Conservatives are still talking about Free Speech, while liberals are talking about Controlling Territory. You have to control the territory before you can have free speech. Otherwise you get whatever speech the people who do control the territory allow you.

Take Twitter: Do you have free speech on Twitter? No. Twitter has banned or censored thousands of accounts. You have what speech Twitter decides to allow–in the name of “safety.”

Okay, so you can switch to Gab–unless, in a nigh-unprecedented move–it gets booted from its registrar for violating Australian hate speech laws. Or Google censors it so you can’t download the app.

Well, maybe you could just make Youtube videos and get out your ideas that way–except that Youtube is now censoring videos that don’t even violate its terms of service if someone finds them “offensive.” Even Numberphile–a Youtube channel about math–has been censored by Youtube!

The biggest question of the Trump Presidency–the question that drove him into office–is territorial: Who owns America? Who should be allowed in? Who should benefit from America’s wealth? (The same questions are being asked across Europe.)

And this is precisely the conversation the left is trying to shut down.

In multi-ethnic democracies, political parties don’t represent ideas about how the country should be run. They represent ethnic groups. Free speech is downstream from territory.

Peak Dog vs. Degenerate Dog?

This is Balto, the famous Siberian Husky sled dog who led his team on the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome, Alaska. The windchill of the whiteout blizzard when Balto set out was −70 °F. The team traveled all night, with almost no visibility, over the 600-foot Topkok Mountain, and reached Nome at 5:30 AM.

Balto is not the only dog who deserves credit–Togo took a longer and even more dangerous stretch of the run.

And this is a modern Siberian Husky:

Now, don’t get me wrong. He’s a beautiful dog. But he’s a very different dog. I think he’s trying to turn into a German Shepherd-wolf hybrid. Balto practically looks like a corgi next to him.

Siberian huskies were bred by people who depended on them for their lives, and had to endure some of nature’s very harshest weather. We moderns, by contrast, like to keep our dogs inside our warm, comfortable houses to play with our kids or guard our stuff. Have modern huskies been bred for looks rather than sled-pulling?

On the other hand, winning times for the Iditarod have dropped from 20 days to just 8 since the race began in the 1970s, so clearly there are some very fast huskies out there.

Anthropology Friday: The James-Younger Gang

Welcome back to Anthropology Friday. Today we’re continuing with Dago’s account from Outlaws on Horseback of the James-Younger gang. Wikipedia has some background on the gang:

The James–Younger Gang had its origins in a group of Confederatebushwhackers that participated in the bitter partisan fighting that wracked Missouri during the American Civil War. After the war, the men continued to plunder and murder, though the motive shifted to personal profit rather than for the glory of the Confederacy. ..

For nearly a decade following the Civil War, the James–Younger Gang was among the most feared, most publicized, and most wanted confederations of outlaws on the American frontier. Though their crimes were reckless and brutal, many members of the gang commanded a notoriety in the public eye that earned the gang significant popular support and sympathy. The gang’s activities spanned much of the central part of the country; they are suspected of having robbed banks, trains, and stagecoaches in at least ten states: Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and West Virginia.

But back to Dago’s account. Here is some background on Cole Younger, and what prompted him to become an outlaw:

Cole Younger, 1889 (lived 1844 – 1916)

“A week after the battle at Lone Jack, Cole [Younger] risked coming to see his mother. He was caught in the house by Union militiamen… and escaped only through the connivance of Suse (short for Susan,) who had grown old as a Younger slave.

“Two months later, Union troops came to the house again in the middle of the night and searched it from cellar to garret for Cole. Infuriated by not finding him, they ordered Mrs. Younger to set fire to the place. She had her four youngest children with her. An early fall storm had put a few inches of snow on the ground. She pleaded that if the intruders were determined to make her burn her own home they wait until morning. …

“When she offered to cook them something to eat, they agreed to wait. At the crack of dawn, however, they hitched a horse to a wagon, tossed a mattress and some blankets into it. Some furniture having been gathered into a pile, they forced her to set it afire…

“In his autobiography, The story of Cole Younger, by Himself, published in 1903, he makes much of the burning of his old home and the treatment his mother and brothers and sisters received, though hundreds of other families were burned out in that fashion”

EvX: Dago quotes an excerpt from Kansas, a Guide to the Sunflower State about the state of things between Missouri and Kansas before the war:

For two years a state of open warfare existed. Armed bands of border ruffians from Missouri made forays into Kansas and were answered by retaliatory companies of Jayhawkers. Men were called out into the night and shot down for no other reason than they supported or were suspected of supporting the opposite cause…. Fields were laid waste and towns were sacked, all int he name of the cause, but more often to gratify personal revenge or avarice. …

Dago continues:

“While formal war was being waged between the North and the South, the old border warfare [between Kansas and Missouri] took on new dimensions, blazing up like a forest fire out of control as opposing bands of bushwhackers and guerrillas spread terror, death and destruction wherever they rode. As 1862 opened, a man could go to his door after nightfall only at the risk of being shot down. Every night in one direction or another, the sky was red as some farmer’s home went up in flames. It was murder, arson and robbery without hope of redress. The opposing factions pretended to have a quasi-military status. Actually, they had none. The flag under which they rode might be the stars and stripes of the North, or the stars and bars of the confederacy, but their real emblem would have been emblazoned with the skull and crossbones of piracy.

“Northern sympathizers were no safer from Red Legs and Jayhawkers than Southerners and vice versa. …

Jesse James:

Jesse and Frank James, 1872

“With the end of the war, families had begun streaming back to the Burnt District to begin life anew. … Dr. Samuel [Jesse James’s father] had the old home repaired and made livable… Between doctoring and farming, he was making a humble living, when Jesse catapulted the family into prominence by robbing the bank at nearby Liberty. After that, life was never the same for Zerelda [Jesse’s mother] and the doctor. Other robberies and train holdups followed, all attributed to the James-Younger Gang. The hunt for them was intensified, but dangerous as it was, they often slipped in out of the brush and spent the night at the Samuel house. It was not long before information to that effect was int he hand of the Pinkertons [a private detective agency.] What they did about it ended in stark tragedy. …

“For months, a score of the agency’s best operatives had been crisscrossing Missouri… the results were distinctly embarrassing… As the year of 1874 drew to a close, the score read: three detectives and only one outlaw, John Younger, killed… And trains continued to be held up and banks robbed with annoying frequency.

“However, on January 5, 1876, the agency got a break. Jack Lad, one of their best operatives, who had been working as a pseudo farmhand within several miles of the Samuel home, wired the Kansas City office that Frank and Jesse were visiting their mother…

The Pinkerton Detective Agency, founded in 1850, is still in operation

“There is some disagreement as to what followed, but it concerns only what one of the Pinkertons tossed through the window that he had opened. The only light within came from the fireplace. It was a bitter night, the temperature hovering around zero. The doctor, Zelda, their two young children–Archie, aged eight, and Fannie, aged five–and a Negro servant woman, who had come west from Kentucky with Zelda and her husband, had retired for the night. Whatever it was that came sailing into the room, it exploded, and the effect was ghastly. Zelda’s right arm was torn off at the elbow. Archie was disemboweled and died almost at once. Dr. Samuel and the Negro woman were seriously injured… The irony of it was that Frank and Jesse were a hundred miles away.

“A feeling of revulsion against the Pinkertons swept the state. …

“Wellman is one of the few [writers who do not think it was a grenade]… I can only ask: why not? I recall the part played by Pinkerton men in the bloody strike at the McCormick Reaper Company Works, in Chicago, and again in the revolt of the steelworkers at the Homestead Mills, in Pittsburgh. The Pinkertons of that era are not sacrosanct with me.”

EvX: Wikipedia gives an interesting account of this incident and its aftermath:

In 1874, the Adams Express Company turned to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to stop the James–Younger Gang. The Chicago-based agency worked primarily against urban professional criminals, as well as providing industrial security, such as strike breaking. Because the gang received support by many former Confederate soldiers in Missouri, they eluded the Pinkertons. …

Allan Pinkerton, the agency’s founder and leader, took on the case as a personal vendetta. … On the night of January 25, 1875, he staged a raid on the homestead. Detectives threw an incendiary device into the house; it exploded …

Many residents were outraged by the raid on the family home. The Missouri state legislature narrowly defeated a bill that praised the James and Younger brothers and offered them amnesty.^[10] Allowed to vote and hold office again, former Confederates in the legislature voted to limit the size of rewards which the governor could make for fugitives. This extended a measure of protection over the James–Younger gang by minimizing the incentive for attempting to capture them.

One man’s outlaw is another man’s, er, freedom fighter?

Interestingly, the Pinkerton Detective Agency is still around:

Pinkerton, founded … by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 and currently a subsidiary of Securitas AB.^[1] Pinkerton became famous when he claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln, who later hired Pinkerton agents for his personal security during the Civil War.^[2] … Pinkerton was the largest private law enforcement organization in the world at the height of its power.^[3]

During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. One such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie.^[4] The ensuing battle between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to the deaths of seven Pinkerton agents and nine steelworkers.^[5] The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

But let’s get back to Dago. How well did outlawry pay?

“After the robbery at Liberty, in February, the James-Younger Gang did not strike again until October 30, more than eight months later, when they looted the bank at Lexington, Missouri. …

“three, possibly four, stagecoach robberies can be rightly charged up to them over the decade and a half of their spectacular banditry. In all that time, however, they entered only a dozen banks (counting their misadventure at Northfield) and held up only seven trains. Add to that the Kansas City Fairgrounds robbery and you have the complete score of their major undertakings–twenty in all…

“Many estimates have been made of how much money they got away with. The popular reckoning is half a million dollars. Cole Younger, who was the only one of the bandits to say anything about it, claimed that they never got half of what they wee supposed to have taken. … The best answer as to what became of the money is that it was spent. A little simple arithmetic is all that is required to arrive at that conclusion. If in fifteen years the loot totaled half a million dollars,t he yearly take was less than $35,000. Divided among eight to ten men, all it amounted to was handsome wages. Cole Younger says they got nothing like half a million dollars. ..

“Turn back to the robbing of the bank at Liberty. Greenup Bird, the cashier, in a sworn statement, says the outlaws rode off with $57,072, of which $40,000 was in bonds, $15,000 in gold coin an the balance, scarcely more than $2,000, in silver and greenbacks. The bonds were nonnegotiable, hence worthless to the bandits. The gold was an even more tantalizing problem, since there was so little of it in circulation that to start spending it was certain to fasten suspicion on whoever possessed ti as a member of the robber gang. The only way out of the dilemma was to dispose of the gold to a “fence”…

“all commentators agree that they got $9,000 for their $15,000 in gold. …

“If, as claimed, twelve men took part in the Liberty bank robbery, a little more arithmetic reveals that each man netted only a little over a thousand dollars.”

EvX: I note that this is the exact same problem many pirates had. It’s one thing to capture a galleon, and quite another to walk into town and buy a farm using a chest full of stolen doubloons without getting noticed.

“Though the proceeds of the Gallatin robbery added up to very little, it unleashed a veritable hornet’ nest of trouble on the James-Younger Gang. … It was high time t get out of Missouri again. By twos and threes, they crossed the line into Indian Territory and holed up in old Tom Starr’s domain, east of Eufala. They knew old Tom from guerrilla days. He had ten brothers, several sons and daughters. With all of his progeny and kinsfolk, he was the head of perhaps the largest of all Cherokee clans, and he ruled it with a cruel, iron hand. The “Starr country” was wild, desolate, without roads, and no one attempted to cross it who was not known to be friendly with its overlord. Its limestone cave were a perfect refuge for men on the scout. Then, too, a man could turn a dollar by stealing horse and cattle for Tom Starr.

An Amusing Incident:

“On June 3, 1871, the world heard from the James-Younger Gang again. This time it was the prosperous town of Corydon, Iowa… Several blocks from the Ocobock Brothers Bank, their objective, a political rally was in full swing. … When they walked out, the grain sack was bulging with $45,000 in assorted bonds, gold and paper currency.

“It was one of the gang’ richest hauls. Jesse felt so good about it that as they passed the meeting on their way out of town, he stopped and interrupted the speaker.

“‘What is it?’ the Great Man demanded with understandable annoyance…

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Jesse called back, “But there’s something wrong down at the bank. In fact, it’s just been robbed. Maybe you better look into it, sir.”

“With a mocking laugh, he and his fellow conspirators put spurs to their horses and dashed away.”

Jesse’s First Train Robbery:

“…on July 21, Jesse had his way about it and they did the “spectacular”–their first train robbery. … Securing a spike bar and a sledge hammer, they went east of town a short distance, to a curve, pried off a fishplate, removed the spike and attached a rope to the loosened rail so that it could be pulled out of alignment. Hiding behind an embankment, they had nothing to do but wait until the express came panting around the bend.

“It was after midnight when it hove into view. Years later, Cole Younger said that they expected the train would stop when the locomotive left the tracks. Instead it plowed ahead a few feet and toppled over… the engineer was caught in the cab and scalded t death. …

“The express car yielded less than $3,000. … “Railroad records show,” says Croy, “that $75,000 went through the following night.” The gang had missed the jackpot by only twenty-four hours. …

“In the four weeks following the Gads Hill holdup, the Pinkertons sent their best men into Missouri. But no arrests were made. They complained to their superiors that they could get no cooperation from the inhabitants of the border counties of western Missouri, where the outlaws had a number of hiding places, that the James-Younger Gang had friends in every crossroads village and on every farm. It is true that there were many who, for one reason or another, were sympathetic to Jesse and his men, but the overwhelming majority kept silent because they were afraid to inform on them.

“What was more to the point, Jesse had perfected a secret intelligence system that worked so well that whenever a stranger appeared in Clay County word of his presence was quickly conveyed to him by his hangers-on.”

Frank and Jesse’s Weddings:

Zerelda Mimms, wife (and cousin) of Jesse James, not to be confused with Jesse’s mom who was also named Zerelda

“Jesse and Frank were back in Missouri in April. It was marriage, not robbery, they had on their minds this time. Not too much is known about Frank’s marriage in 1874 to Annie Ralson, the daughter of a respectable Clay County family, other than that her people objected so strenuously to her marrying Frank that she had to elope with him. On April 24, 1874, Jesse married Zerelda Mimms, who had been waiting for him for eight years. No elopement for him. Dressed in the finest raiment money could buy, he boldly came into Kansas City and was married by a minister.

“What kind of women were these who married famous outlaws, men with a price on their heads, wanted dead or alive? They were a far cry from what today we call “gun molls.” They lived on “outlaw” money, but on no other count can they be faulted. They took no part in the lawless deeds of their husbands … They were loyal to the men they married, and Frank and Jesse were true and loyal to them. If there is one untarnished page in the life of the James brothers, it is to be found in their marital relation with Annie and Zerelda.”

 

EvX: Things went pretty well for the James-Younger Gang until they decided to head north to Minnesota. They thought the Swedes would be easily-robbed pushovers, but instead they fought back. Of the 8 outlaws who walked into town that day, only two escaped. The three Younger brothers, Jim, Cole, and Bob, were captured and sent to prison, and three other men were killed.

Jesse and Frank went into hiding. Frank appears to have adjusted to settled life, but Jesse soon attracted a new gang of followers.

Jesse’s downfall:

“…Tucker Basham, well-heeled with his share of the Glendale lot, did some foolish bragging that led to his arrest. William H. Wallace, the newly elected and vigorous prosecuting attorney of Jackson County, put the screws on young Basham and got a full confession from him. …

“[Outlaw] Bill Ryan was picked up near Nashville, Tennessee, in the course of a week-long carouse… The description of him that was sent out caught the eye of Deputy U.S. Marshal Whig Keshlaer. … Ryan was brought back to face trial in Missouri.

“People shook their heads in consternation–not over the outcome, which they regarded as certain, but at the prosecutor’s audacity in pushing through an indictment of Ryan. Never before had a member of the gang been brought to trial in Jackson County. There was not a chance in a million, they said, that he could impanel a jury that would bring in a verdict of guilty.

“Wallace’s life was threatened. …

[Jesse James then robbed a train and killed its conductor, Westphal.]

“In Independence, Wallace proceeded with the trial of Bill Ryan. Basham’s confession was introduced, and it created a sensation. … That night Tucker Basham’s home was burned to the ground. And now, unexpectedly, a remarkable thing happened. A score of men who had fought for the Confederacy, many under Quantrill, and who in their hearts were still as “unreconstructed” as on the day Lee surrendered at Appomattox, rallied behind Wallace. … The wavering jury took courage and stood firm. The evidence against Ryan piled up and he was sentenced to twenty-five years in the Missouri Penitentiary. …

“Frank was the only one Jesse had left… Of the men who had ridden with him since Northfield, four were in prison… Two were dead–Ed Miller and Wood Hite. Why he didn’t call it a day and get out of Missouri, even out of the United States, no one will ever know. …

“It happened on the morning of April 3, in the modest house in St. Joe in which Jesse was living with his wife and children, under the alias of J.D. Howard. A single shot was heard by the neighbors. They ran in and found the bearded man, whom they knew as Mr. Howard, lying dead on the floor.

“Bob Ford says in his sworn statement:

Jesse and I had a talk yesterday about robbing the bank at Platte City, and which Charley and I both agreed to assist.

“Between eight and nine o’clock this morning while the three of us were in a room in Jesse’s house, Jesse pulled off his coat and also his pistols, two of which he constantly wore, and then got up onto a chair for the purpose of brushing dust off a picture. …

“So as quickly as possible, I drew my pistol and aiming at Jesse’s head, which was no more than four feet from the muzzle of my weapon, I firered, and Jesse tumbled headlong from the chair on which he was standing and fell on his face.

“Bob Ford’s moment of glory was brief. A wave of revulsion at the cowardly manner in which the treacherous asssassination had been accomplished swept over Missouri. In the outburst of feeling Jesse’s crimes were temporarily forgotten, and men and women spoke of him as “our Jesse” … Bob Ford fled the state, only to be reviled wherever he went. … Four years after the slaying of Jesse, Charly Ford, in ill health and worn down by the stigma attached to him, committed suicide with a pistol in a clump of underbrush near his home in Richmond, Missouri.”

EvX: After Jesse’s death, Frank James turned himself in to the authorities, was tried, and acquitted.

Cole Younger was later pardoned and released from prison–a fascinating story, but too long to recount here. I urge you to read the book if you want to hear it.

Navigation and the Wealth of Nations

Global Determinants of Navigational Ability, by Coutrot et al:

Using a mobile-based virtual reality navigation task, we measured spatial navigation ability in more than 2.5 million people globally. Using a clustering approach, we find that navigation ability is not smoothly distributed globally but clustered into five distinct yet geographically related groups of countries. Furthermore, the economic wealth of a nation (Gross Domestic Product per capita) was predictive of the average navigation ability of its inhabitants and gender inequality (Gender Gap Index) was predictive of the size of performance difference between males and females. Thus, cognitive abilities, at least for spatial navigation, are clustered according to economic wealth and gender inequalities globally.

This is an incredible study. They got 2.5 million people from all over the world to participate.

If you’ve been following any of the myriad debates about intelligence, IQ, and education, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “multiple intelligences” and the fact that there’s rather little evidence that people actually have “different intelligences” that operate separately from each other. In general, it looks like people who have brains that are good at working out how to do one kind of task tend to be good at working out other sorts of tasks.

I’ve long held navigational ability as a possible exception to this: perhaps people in, say, Polynesian societies depended historically far more on navigational abilities than the rest of us, even though math and literacy were nearly absent.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the authors got enough samples from Polynesia to include it in the study, but they did get data from Indonesia and the Philippines, which I’ll return to in a moment.

Frankly, I don’t see what the authors mean by “five distinct yet geographically related groups of countries.” South Korea is ranked between the UK and Belgium; Russia is next to Malaysia; Indonesia is next to Portugal and Hungary.

GDP per capita appears to be a stronger predictor than geography:

Some people will say these results merely reflect experience playing video games–people in wealthier countries have probably spent more time and money on computers and games. But assuming that the people who are participating in the study in the first place are people who have access to smartphones, computers, video games, etc., the results are not good for the multiple-intelligences hypothesis.

In the GDP per Capita vs. Conditional Modes (ie how well a nation scored overall, with low scores better than high scores) graph, countries above the trend line are under-performing relative to their GDPs, and countries below the line are over-performing relative to their GDPs.

South Africa, for example, significantly over-performs relative to its GDP, probably due to sampling bias: white South Africans with smartphones and computers were probably more likely to participate in the study than the nation’s 90% black population, but the GDP reflects the entire population. Finland and New Zealand are also under-performing economically, perhaps because Finland is really cold and NZ is isolated.

On the other side of the line, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Greece over-perform relative to GDP. Two of these are oil states that would be much poorer if not for geographic chance, and as far as I can tell, the whole Greek economy is being propped up by German loans. (There is also evidence that Greek IQ is falling, though this may be a near universal problem in developed nations.)

Three other nations stand out in the “scoring better than GDP predicts” category: Ukraine, (which suffered under Communism–Communism seems to do bad things to countries,) Indonesia and the Philippines. While we could be looking at selection bias similar to South Africa, these are island nations in which navigational ability surely had some historical effect on people’s ability to survive.

Indonesia and the Philippines still didn’t do as well as first-world nations like Norway and Canada, but they outperformed other nations with similar GDPs like Egypt, India, and Macedonia. This is the best evidence I know of for independent selection for navigational ability in some populations.

The study’s other interesting findings were that women performed consistently worse than men, both across countries and age groups (except for the post-90 cohort, but that might just be an error in the data.) Navigational ability declines steeply for everyone post-23 years old until about 75 years; the authors suggest the subsequent increase in abilities post-70s might be sampling error due to old people who are good at video games being disproportionately likely to seek out video game related challenges.

The authors note that people who drive more (eg, the US and Canada) might do better on navigational tasks than people who use public transportation more (eg, Europeans) but also that Finno-Scandians are among the world’s best navigators despite heavy use of public transport in those countries. The authors write:

We speculate that this specificity may be linked to Nordic countries sharing a culture of participating in a sport related to navigation: orienteering. Invented as an official sport in the late 19th century in Sweden, the first orienteering competition open to the public was held in Norway in 1897. Since then, it has been more popular in Nordic countries than anywhere else in the world, and is taught in many schools [26]. We found that ‘orienteering world championship’ country results significantly correlated with countries’ CM (Pearson’s correlation ρ = .55, p = .01), even after correcting for GDP per capita (see Extended Data Fig. 15). Future targeted research will be required to evaluate the impact of cultural activities on navigation skill.

I suggest a different causal relationship: people make hobbies out of things they’re already good at and enjoy doing, rather than things they’re bad at.

 

 

Please note that the study doesn’t look at a big chunk of countries, like most of Africa. Being at the bottom in navigational abilities in this study by no means indicates that a country is at the bottom globally–given the trends already present in the data, it is likely that the poorer countries that weren’t included in the study would do even worse.