Category Archives: Science

April 15, 2012

On The Firing of John Derbyshire by Andrew Klavan

Posted on April 15, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“And Derbyshire does not seem to be speaking out of hate either. He’s not a person who thinks blacks (the main target of his racism) should be denied any rights or targeted for harm. He believes rather that science shows black people to be less intelligent and more prone to violence than whites.”

I love National Review — love the magazine, love the website, love the people there, love their work. And I know that NR has to protect its brand name and is well within its rights to decide whose work it will publish and whose it won’t. Furthermore, all joking aside, (because I hate political correctness and I kid around about stuff like this a lot), I think racism is a kind of moral sickness. It’s an insult to God and self-destructive to boot. It reminds me of that old definition of resentment: “It’s like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die.”

And yet — and yet — for all that, I wish National Review hadn’t ended its association with John Derbyshire over Derbyshire’s openly racist article for Taki’s Magazine.

Two reasons I feel this way. The first and simpler one: Derbyshire is not a secret racist. He’s an avowed racist. He has been for years and years. Other writers at National Review have chided him for it, even yelled at him for it. But to fire him now has a touch of Inspector Renault to it. As in, “We’re shocked — shocked — to find racism coming from a racist!” It smacks of nervous CYA before the expected onslaughts of the left. Personally, I say to hell with the left. Leftism, even assuming its good intentions, has been more destructive to our black citizens than the bloody Klan. So let the left condemn us. They will anyway.

But secondly — more importantly — and more difficult to explain: I believe racism like Derbyshire’s deserves a full and free airing. It represents a strain of thought that exists on the right and is shared by some people of good will. I have friends who agree with Derbyshire. I have argued with them — loudly sometimes. But I don’t abandon them because I can see they aren’t motivated by hate. And Derbyshire does not seem to be speaking out of hate either. He’s not a person who thinks blacks (the main target of his racism) should be denied any rights or targeted for harm. He believes rather that science shows black people to be less intelligent and more prone to violence than whites. He believes that to deny the evidence of this is tantamount to a kind of creationism.

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Posted in Andrew Klavan, Free Speech, John Derbyshire, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Science

April 14, 2012

Strong men more likely to vote Conservative

Posted on April 14, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Physically strong men are more likely to hold right wing political views because they believe society should be geared to personal struggle and self-preservation, an academic study claims.

Researchers cite muscle-bound Hollywood action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone as evidence that aggression is linked to conservative politics.

And it may all stem from the hunter-gatherer instincts of macho men – which are a hangover of out cavemen origins when the strongest ruled the roost.

The ultimate example is Schwarzenegger who went from muscular action hero to Republican governor of California, the experts say.

Researchers from Griffith University in Australia said the Hollywood examples were typical of a phenomenon among modern men with an aggressive side.

They tend to build up their upper body strength and become subconsciously obsessed with their fighting ability, they told the journal Human Nature.

Lead researcher Aaron Sell said men were ‘designed for fighting’ and the tougher they are, the more this influences their behaviour and attitudes.

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Posted in Chuck Norris, Culture, Republicans/Neo-Cons, Science

April 6, 2012

Colleges skimp on science, spend big on diversity

Posted on April 6, 2012 by ifnm| 1 Comment

This doesn’t just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.


Sherry Lansing, chairman of the University of California board of regents, pauses as she speaks during a press conference following the University of California board of regents meeting on July 14, 2011, in San Francisco.

How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about “investing” in education? Quite a few, if you’ve been listening to the president at all.

In fact Americans have been investing more and more in education over the years, led by presidents Democratic and Republican. But it’s become glaringly clear that we’re getting pretty lousy return on these investments.

That’s been evident at the K-12 level for a long time. Teacher unions and education-school types have had custody of most of our public schools for more than three decades, during which test results and high school graduation rates have been mostly stagnant.

It has come to the point that Democratic politicians like former New York City superintendent Joel Klein, past and current Chicago Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have taken on the teacher unions.

Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, deserves credit for doing a bit of this as well. All this, despite the fact that teacher unions funnel millions of taxpayer-funded dollars into Democratic campaigns.

On higher education Democrats and many Republicans as well have followed the same course as on public schools: Shovel in more money, in this case in the form of Pell Grants and subsidized student loans.

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Posted in Affirmative Action, Democrats/Progressives, Education, Multiculturalism, Radicals, Science

March 19, 2012

Why British are free-thinking & Chinese love conformity: It’s all in the genes claim scientists

Posted on March 19, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

‘We demonstrate for the first time a robust association between cultural values of individualism–collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene,’ said Joan Chiao, from the department of psychology at Northwestern University.


All together now: Japanese men praying

Cultural stereotypes may be deep rooted in our genetic makeup, say scientists.

Common traits like British individualism and Chinese conformity could be attributed to genetic differences between races according to a new study.

The study, by the department of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois, suggests that the individualism seen in western nations, and the higher levels of collectivism and family loyalty found in Asian cultures, are caused by differences in the prevalence of particular genes.

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Chiao and her colleagues combined data from global genetic surveys, looking at variations in the prevalence of various genes. The findings were matched with other research which ranked nations by levels of individualism and collectivism.

The team focused their attentions on the gene that controls levels of serotonin, a chemical in the brain which regulates mood and emotions.

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Posted in Culture, Science

March 18, 2012

People happiest when they feel like they ‘belong’ to a country

Posted on March 18, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

They have found that the kind of pride that makes people happiest is when they feel they ‘belong’ to a country, regardless of ethnicity.

[Note: This article was originally posted on December 15th, 2011. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]

Feeling proud to be British makes you feel good about life in general, according to scientists.

They found that the kind of pride that makes people happiest is when they feel they ‘belong’ to a country, regardless of ethnicity.

Researchers studied interviews of 41,000 residents of 31 European nations and found civic pride was most linked to a general feeling of well being.

This is often because those who felt a country’s laws, traditions and institutions made them feel they belonged often had a better quality of life overall.

The study was conducted jointly by political scientists and sociologists at Washington’s American University and Belgium’s Catholic University.

They found the links between national pride and happiness were high across Europe.

But they were highest where a person felt the country in which they lived contributed to their overall lifestyle rather than their own ethnic background.

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Posted in Europe, Nationalism, Patriotism, Science

March 10, 2012

People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

Posted on March 10, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they “effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.”

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people’s ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as “above average” — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]

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Posted in Elections, Government, Science

February 1, 2012

The problem with unlimited kindness

Posted on February 1, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. …. The sum of Marxism, semiotics and feminism is 0 + 0 + 0 = 0”

PATRICK KEENEY enjoys a witty tossing and goring of a contemporary sacred cow

“For ye have the poor always with you. – Matthew 26:11”

In this posthumously published essay, the late Australian philosopher David Charles Stove (1927 – 1994) provides a brilliant if disquieting analysis of benevolence as both a seductive and destructive force in the modern world.

Stove was an academic philosopher who wrote for both the popular press and the learned journals. He was a brutally honest writer, dismissive of the intellectual fashions of the day. He had no time for political correctness, and could be withering in his assessment of certain voguish trends in the academy. He was also fearless. Here, for example, are his thoughts about the university that employed him:

“The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. …. The sum of Marxism, semiotics and feminism is 0 + 0 + 0 = 0” (page x).

Stove’s expertise was the philosophy of science, and his technical work centered on the problem of induction. David Hume was his hero, and Stove’s scholarly writing follows in the robust tradition of British empiricism. He was contemptuous of relativism, post- modernism and indeed any approach to science which sought to refute the realist notions that there is a knowable universe about which we can make true statements. For Stove, it is a plain and irrefutable fact that science has discovered a great deal about our world, and that we know more about our world now than we did 100 years ago, let alone 500 years ago. In Stove’s estimation, anyone who would dispute such claims is either intellectually impaired, dishonest, or engaged in one or another form of irrationalism.

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Posted in General News, Science

January 29, 2012

Video: European Cavemen Discovered North America

Posted on January 29, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Traditional history tells us that European settlers discovered America about the time of the Renaissance. But revolutionary new archaeological data and the latest DNA research reveal that Europeans visited our shores far earlier – some 17,000 years before Columbus was even born.


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Posted in History, Science

Department of the Interior’s anti-science political correctness

Posted on January 29, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

This is anti-science lunacy cloaked in 21st century Marxist rhetoric. Weren’t these tribes nomadic? How can we determine what tribes existed six thousand years ago? Will our enlightened government decipher that Aztec Mesoamerican remains should go to Mexico and while Mayan remains should be repatriated to Belize or El Salvador?

Research science and physical anthropology has taken a giant leap backward under the stewardship of the hard left, politically correct, multiculturalists running the Department of Interior. It is no surprise that the Obama Administration will now enforce radical racial and ethnic litmus tests on scientifically significant human remains up to 12,000 years old.

From the Boston Globe:

New federal protections could mean that most of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums, and federal government agencies may soon be transferred to tribes.

Under the new regulations, museums and agencies are required to notify tribes whose current or ancestral lands harbored the remains that the tribe is entitled to have them back.

Prestigious institutions from Harvard to the University of California Berkeley have already begun working through storehouses of remains uncovered by archeologists, highway and building contractors, and others since the 19th century. A few are surrendering bones to Native American tribes, and others are evaluating whether to do so.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Government, History, Obama, Political Correctness, Radicals, Science

January 28, 2012

We are Australian

Posted on January 28, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Let’s close off the claim to Indigenous Australians, and just move on as Australian’s on equal footing, sharing the same rights, the same laws and the same flag, for they did no more than colonise in Australia in a similar way to what we did years later.

Up until the 1950’s, it was widely believed that Australia wasn’t inhabited by the Aboriginals until 10,000 years ago. The breakthrough use of Carbon 14 dating extended the date to around 40,000 years ago, more complex dating procedures have extended this to 60,000-70,000 years ago.

This extension to 40,000 and then 60,000+ years has occurred since the discovery of Mungo Man. He was largely given the tag of the first Indigenous Australian aborigine and in essence this is true, as he predates the Australian aborigine by some 50,000 years and his DNA is now non existent.

Mungo Man is dated up to 60,000+ years ago and has a genetic tag that is now extinct, prior to his discovery the current Australian Aborigine is only dated back to 10,000 years, it is really logical to conclude that Indigenous Mungo Man is not related to the current Australian Aborigine and therefore they can no longer claim to be Indigenous to Australia.

The word Indigenous means being the “original inhabitants” of a territory

ANU evolutionary geneticist Simon Easteal set about analysing the DNA from Mungo Man and comparing it with sequences of the same gene from the other early Australians, not to mention 45 living Aboriginal people, 3,453 people from around the world, two European Neanderthals, and finally chimps and bonobos, or pygmy chimps.

Easteal produced a likely “evolutionary tree” for the gene, which is only passed on by women. It went like this: first to branch off were the chimps and bonobos; next the Neanderthals, then Mungo Man’s clan, and after that, the common ancestor of all people alive today.

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Posted in Australia/Oceania, Entitlements, Multiculturalism, Science