The Antisocial Darwinist

OK, today is a national holiday, the observance of New Year’s Day, which fell on a Saturday this year. But tomorrow I have to go back to work after a 2-weekish vacation. Not looking forward to it.

Many of you know that I work at an urban university in the middle of a largish city. Well, it may not seem largish to those of you who like cities, but for someone like me who despises cities it seems pretty big. I live way outside of the city, on a LARP-farm in the countryside. Which means that, for the last two weeks, I have been living around sane people, but tomorrow I have to go back in the presence of crazy people, and I am not looking forward to it.

The blogger Z-Man opined today that “Red states and blue states have been replaced with normal states and Covid states” and I believe this is true, to a first approximation, but it’s unfortunately much more granular than that. The nightmarish policies enacted by Blue governors have caused a mass exodus of Reds from those states, but a combination of the effective government of Red states and the money-for-nothing life of urban centers has preserved Blue enclaves within our Red state cities. Which means that, for people like me, life is a schizoid balance between sane evenings and weekends, and batshit crazy weekdays. I haven’t worn a mask, nor have I seen more than a tiny handful of people wearing masks, for over two weeks. Don’t even know where my mask is right now; going to have to dig the filthy rag up before going to the office tomorrow. But once I get into town, you better believe I’ll see idiots walking on the sidewalks in masks, driving in cars with masks, conspicuously social distancing, etc. Guarantee I will hear at least one person a day make some kind of retarded comment about vaccines, either virtue signaling about their booster jab or complaining about the unvaccinated doing something or other. And omicron — I guarantee there will be people worrying about catching that fucking cold. SMDH, fam, I am not looking forward to it.

Z-Man describes in his post a “Great Divorce” in the development, where Reds have to figure out a way to separate from Blues before they both go crazy:

These two realities are showing up in population movements. Normal people are fleeing the lands of the Covidian for places like Florida. For sure it is not just the lunacy of Covid theater, but it is playing a big role. We now live in two separate cultural and psychological spaces. There are those with triple masks, barrels of hand sanitizer, and a full booster card. Then there are the purebloods with their bare faces and their increasing impatience with the Covidian…

Hear that Covidians? Our patience is wearing thin.

Like a marriage headed for divorce, Americans may be at that point of no return where one or both sides realize it is over. Normal people could tolerate the goofy politics and weird social fads, but Covid is the breaking point. Normal people are not just out of patience, they want out of this dysfunctional relationship. Normal people want a divorce from the mentally unstable. This relationship has reached its end.

Me, I don’t see a realistic scenario where a genuine split can occur between Red and Blue America. Who would get the nukes? Instead, I see it as a recurrence of the Cold War, but within one (very large) country, instead of between many. In a famous speech given at Westminster College in Missouri, Winston Churchill laid out a famous metaphor to describe what was happening in the lands that had been conquered by Leftists after the fall of the Third Reich (emphasis mine):

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe…. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

Churchill used the idea of an “iron curtain” to describe the seemingly impenetrable barrier between the free world — which really was just the world as it had been for generations before the Wars — and the madhouse of the Soviet Empire, where Bolshevik fanatics motivated by a quasireligious political fervor were running their populations through a meat grinder of torture, ethnic cleansing, and outright genocide.

Today I’ve come to think of the barrier separating traditional America from woke America as a Blue Curtain. On the one side, life remains as it has been for at least three generations — at least from the 1940s, with only modest changes. On the other, life is under the sway of the social media-fueled crazies of the Great Awokening. Nearly any situation one can get into behind the Blue Curtain has been altered somehow by the Wokians — between their racialist obsessions, their flirtation with communist economics, their retconning of western history, their weird sexual beliefs and mating customs, their crippling hypochondriasis, and their constant status-seeking denunciations of the world on the other side of the curtain, everything in Blue Country has the taste of madness and desperation to it, everything presents itself like some kind of funhouse mirror perversion of normal life. And in any situation on that side of the curtain that isn’t touched by this madness, one is constantly aware that it is looming just beyond the perimeter, and it only takes one jilted Karen to let it all flood in like water through a broken dam.

Whatever, it’s exhausting, and I am not looking forward to having to go back to it.

Edit: in the first edit of this article I attributed the first quoted piece to “J-Man”; it should have been Z-Man, and it’s now corrected. JayMan is in fact an excellent science blogger, and I refer any and all interested parties to his wonderful resource on Behavioral Genetics posted at the Unz Review.

Every Yule season I troll all the year-end “best-of” lists on a variety of metal blogs. Well, mostly just the splurge of lists posted every year on No Clean Singing (are there really any other metal blogs worth reading?), but there are always a few other things that crop up over the year by word-of-mouth, notoriety, or whatever. Between Christmas and New Years I inevitably spend a few days listening to tons of bands and treat myself to a big batch of new tunes to keep me occupied for the coming year. I figure I might as well post this year’s crop since there obviously aren’t enough lists already…

First, some new releases by classic bands were pretty good this year:

• Iron Maiden — Senjutsu
• Flotsam and Jetsam — Blood in the Water
• Cynic — Ascension Codes
• Hypocrisy — Worship

In particular the Hypocrisy record has really stuck with me since it came out. Here’s an earworm apropos to our current pharma-cursed era:

Then there were a few older records that have been on my radar for a few years — many years in one case — that keep popping up, so I finally decided to pick them up:

• Negura Bunget — Om
• Rivers of Nihil — Where Owls Know My Name
• Omnium Gatherum — Beyond

Then there were new releases by some more recent acts that I’ve been fans of for a long time:

• Converge + Chelsea Wolfe — Bloodmoon I
• Panopticon — …And Again Into the Light
• The Great Old Ones — Cosmicism
• Dordeduh — Har
• Thy Catafalque — Vadak
• Withered — Verloren
• Wolves In the Throne Room — Primordial Arcana

And last, my favorite, bands I’d never heard of until a few days ago that I’m excited to get to know better:

• Dormant Ordeal — The Grand Scheme of Things
• Spectral Wound — A Diabolic Thirst
• Dödsrit — Mortal Coil
• Fawn Limbs — Darwin Falls (How could I not have bought this one?)
• Lamp of Murmuur — Submission and Slavery
• Maysaloon — A Lip To Earth, A Lip To Heaven, and A Tongue To the Stars
• Necronautical — Slain In the Spirit
• Suffering Hour — The Cyclic Reckoning

And it’s worth separating out two records that stood out, both of which seem to be inspired by Dune. I still need to see that new movie version…

• Sunnata — Burning In Heaven, Melting In Earth
• Dvne — Etemen Ænka

I can’t say much about any of these yet since I’ve barely listened to any of them, certainly not enough to “review” them. Seems like I’ve been able to get more writing done on this blog in the last couple of months (yay tenure!), so maybe I’ll be able to sustain some regular (short) album reviews over the coming year.

One thing I miss about Twitter is that I don’t seem to come across Razib Khan’s writing as much any more. He has a blog (well, actually it’s a substack these days) which is really one of the best sources for unwoke human genetics synthesis you can find, but I already subscribe to so many damn substacks that most of them just drift past my radar. Fortunately I have friends who still lurk on Twitter so someone sent me this gem:

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1476425951143555078?s=20

I’m hesitant to say anything about the article because, I have to admit, I didn’t make it past the third paragraph. It’s really just a steaming pile of soviet newspeak mule shit, consistent with the dumpster fire of woke navel-gazing that the once-respected Scientific American has become. You know what’s coming from the tone of the first sentence. Measuring human traits is racist, bro.

For instance in paragraph 3 (beyond which I had to stop reading because I was afflicted with crippling diarrhea from what I had read, fam) the author tells us that E.O. Wilson was “dangerous” because he “spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms.”

OK, so the author contends that human behavior is not influenced by genetics. That’s not a strawman, that’s actually what she said. This of course is why the possession of 2 X chromosomes, as opposed to an X and a Y, has no effect on how people act. As I like to tell my evolutionary biology students, if you don’t believe that small modifications in gene regulation can affect behavior, slap a testosterone patch on your arm and record what you say to people around you for the next few hours.

But of course the real “gotcha” against the “behavioral psychology is racist” people is this: if behavior and intelligence aren’t genetic, how the fuck did we become like we are in the first place? Presumably they agree that humans have different behavioral patterns and intelligence levels compared to the other great apes — did that just sort of, you know, happen? Like, we just felt smarter or some shit when we evolved bipedal locomotion? (But of course even then, the genes that dictated bipedal gait would qualify as behavior-modifying genes, wouldn’t they?)

At its heart this philosophy is one of human exceptionalism, and thus is both a denial of evolution and of a piece with theories of intelligent design and special creationism. But unlike creationism, it offers no alternative explanation of why humans are as they are. Creationists believe that a supernatural power such as a god crafted human consciousness; the woke position is that we just sort of are, I guess, like some kind of cosmic moral quantum accident. As has been said before, wokianity captures all of the worst aspects of religion without providing the redemption arc that makes them enjoyable/productive. At least the creationists have a coherent explanation; the wokian attitude seems to be something like anybody who asks where humans came from is a RACIST.

Of course, the position this writer is taking is absurd, and I can’t imagine that any evolutionary biologist believes it in their own study system, although one despairs to notice that people who study behavioral genetics in fruit flies et al. sometimes exempt humans from the conclusions that come from their research, when it suits their own self-hating wokian religious beliefs. The obvious cognitive barriers to the acceptance that much of one’s beliefs and behaviors are sort of baked-in at birth is also understandable; but there are plenty of other psychologically demanding beliefs that evolutionary biology asks of us, such as the fact that evolution isn’t impressed with your high intelligence, and that no matter how many publications you have or how much money you accumulate, it’s only the number of kids you have that matter to the future of the species.

Well, I guess that last is pretty tough for people to accept, too. I can’t help but notice that the author of this creationist diatribe is a professor at something called the “Family Health Care Nursing Department” at UC San Francisco, specializing in “Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health”. I could be wrong, but a) that doesn’t really sound like an excellent pedigree for dropping hot takes about evolution, and b) it does sound like a bunch of euphemisms for “abortion”, which might shed some light on the author’s position. To be honest, it’s been my experience that people who are passionately partisan in favor of abortion rights don’t like being reminded that, whatever its merits, abortion selects against whatever gene variants make you think that abortion is a good idea. Perhaps the author is really uncomfortable thinking about how genetics might underlie why so many people on Earth really despise what she does for a living?

(Despite my conservatism I’ve always shied away from aggressive abortion takes — partially because the texts my religion is based on are clearly okay with straight-up infanticide by exposure of deformed or unhealthy children, but partially also because it seems like a problem that will solve itself, as Homo sapiens abortifaciens is evolutionarily displaced by populations that are less eager to kill their offspring. Granted it’s a bummer that those populations don’t look much like me, and also don’t much approve of my bloodline’s continued existence in general, but what are you going to do? You can’t blame people for just living, as we are all merely at the mercy of our genes and environments. Western civilization is its own enemy, and its self-annihilation seems like a foregone conclusion at this point.)

In conclusion I would highlight a point made by a commenter to Razib’s tweet which strikes me as underlying much of the brouhaha surrounding Wilson’s legacy — wokianity is an elite, luxury belief, and Wilson was not of the elite:

No question whatsoever as to the truth of this… it was in my face every day once I (briefly) penetrated the world of prestige evolutionary biology. I would remind folks that the best science is, at its heart, a blue-collar endeavor, with sweaty people toiling in a lab, or in a jungle, or on a boat five hundred miles from the nearest shipping lane, or doing crazy shit like lavaging mouse vaginas or fistulating cattle, and all of that is like home turf for the working class. It’s illustrative that wokianity has been far less effective at corrupting the field sciences, based on my own anecdotal experiences. But Ivy League theoretical biology? As I said before, Ed Wilson was a hero of mine, and I hope he gave those assholes heartburn every second he was on the Harvard faculty.

Yeah, the wonderfully alliterative title of this post is a quote from boriquagato, a Puerto Rican blogger who has made the observation that many of us have made — it’s over. The explosion of COVID cases in the vaccinated populations of Blue America has revealed once and for all the pointlessness of the restrictions we’ve been living under for the last two years, and have revealed the deeply flawed nature of the mRNA vaccines so many millions of us have been coerced into taking. The evidence is simply too extensive to ignore or conceal without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Many of the most perfervid covidians are backtracking now, frantically trying to retcon their positions to make it seem like they always knew this was going to happen and they aren’t actually psycho hypochondriacs. Even our Schläfrigführer Joe Biden seems to be giving up, presumably because he got wind of the epic smackdown he was about to get from SCOTUS over his purely politically punitive (so many p’s in this post!) vaccine mandates. Wiser people tell me we should just pat these folks on the back and let them surrender with dignity, but sorry, I’m of the “hear the lamentations of the women” school of battle, and I can’t help but notice that the mumbling, pants-shitting little fascist and his lickspittle apologists have a knack for embarrassing surrenders. May their descendants wear their shame for generations for what they’ve done to this country, and to the world.

So it’s over. We can expect life to go back to normal in the US, particularly on the free side of the Blue Curtain, as the vast squishy political middle begins to feel empowered to push back against the nomenklatura that have levied this nightmare upon them. No more masks, no more mandates, no more quivering Karens asking if you’ve had your fifth booster yet.

UNLESS, that is, you work at a university.

Where you may have gotten an email similar to the one I got from my bosses a few days ago, saying that you’re going to be forced to wear masks on campus again in the Spring. And you’ll never get to take the mask off unless you get vaccinated, irrespective of whether or not you have naturally recovered from the coronavirus.

So — just to be clear — as the rest of the world comes to the realization that the current crop of vaccines are incapable of mitigating the spread of the virus at all, and that masks have no impact whatsoever on the progress of the pandemic, and that natural immunity is vastly superior to the worthless vaccines, a medical university doubles down on pushing that garbage on the unfortunates laboring under its authority. Even though nobody else in the state is wearing a mask. You can walk into any business at the periphery of campus and not see a single face diaper anywhere. But, no, TRUST THE SCIENCE HEATHEN! Put your mask on, or how else will people know you are one of the good guys?

Here’s another delicious quote from that official email:

If you are not vaccinated and want to be able to unmask indoors when the requirement is lifted for the vaccinated, please make an appointment for a free, safe and effective vaccine provided by Employee Health and Student Health Services. Available vaccines offer undeniable protection against the worst outcomes of COVID.

Emphasis mine. Note how they have steadily backed off from any claims about the vaccines actually affecting community spread. They are no longer “free, safe, and effective” either. They just offer “protection against the worst outcomes of COVID”. I wonder how long they can hold that position before they have to move the goalposts back again?

A former grad student of mine sent me a text a couple of days ago — “E.O. Wilson passed”. I guess it’s no surprise — he was 92 — but still it’s a sad day for science, and especially for science in Alabama. Every semester Prof. Wilson’s name comes up in my classes and I make sure my students know that he is, perhaps, the most famous native Alabaman scientist — George Washington Carver and Werner von Braun lived and worked here but weren’t born here — and more than that, the fact that he was both Southern and one of the world’s most prominent evolutionary biologists should tell folks a thing or two about their prejudices toward the South.

I have been an admirer of Wilson’s work since my first attempt at getting a biology degree back in the 90’s, when I took a seminar class ostensibly on sociobiology — but really mostly focused on the recently-released and bizarrely controversial The Bell Curve. While my classmates were attacking straw men from Herrnstein and Murray’s magnum opus, I was discovering Bill Hamilton and Ed Wilson, and I guess the rest is history, as they say. I never looked at human behavior, or my own thought processes, feelings, and beliefs, the same way again.

Right up until starting my postdoc I have to admit I never paid much attention to the personal stories of the scientists I read. I’m a little bit of a sperg — a great example of my basic “human blindness” is that, without thinking about it, I wait for all the humans to get out of the way before I take pictures on vacation, even when I’m in a city, such that there are vanishingly few human faces (other than my kids) in my photo collection. I guess the first time I really became aware of “scientists as people” was the first time I read about James Watson getting “cancelled” over some incautiously worded speculation about race differences. Shortly after, on the advice of my PhD advisor, I read The Double Helix, Watson’s personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, followed by Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, which documents the lives of the 19th century pioneers of microbiology. This would have been circa 2011, so quite a bit before the Great Awokening when the personal struggles of dissident scientists really came to the fore, but even then I was somewhat surprised by how personally vicious the struggles between these people could be.

Anyway all of that is to lead up to the point that I have identified with Wilson as sort of a role-model since deciding to try out the academic life myself, mostly because of his heritage as a “smart country boy” like me, but also because we seemed to share at least a similar scientific worldview, and as the years progressed, it seemed we also shared similar enemies. Wilson spent most of his career at Harvard, where he worked in the same building with the famously Communist Richard Lewontin, who despised him so much he wouldn’t even look at him. Here’s a first-hand account of the tension from one of Lewontin’s graduate students, blogger Jerry Coyne:

Ed’s lab occupied the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) Laboratories at Harvard, while Lewontin’s lab, where I worked, was one floor below. But they might as well have been light years apart, for Lewontin intensely disliked Ed, and the feeling was mutual. (Ed had less rancor, he was more or less blindsided when Lewontin and Steve Gould—who worked in the adjacent main MCZ—began attacking him as a reactionary biological determinist after Ed published his landmark book, Sociobiology.)In fact, Ed originally helped recruit Dick to Harvard from the University of Chicago; but that didn’t make Lewontin temper his reaction when the Great Sociobiology Wars began.

But I did not share Dick’s dislike of Ed. If you knew Ed as a person—and I knew him as an acquaintance—you simply could not dislike him. (Dick and Steve’s animus was based purely on politics.). Ed was mild-mannered, gentle, and helpful: I’ve written before about how he got me into Harvard as a graduate student in a single day, an act of generosity I’ll never forget. I also taught two semesters of Bio 1 (introductory biology) under Ed, and was great friends with some of the people in his lab. The result was that I spent a fair amount of time on the fourth floor, but never in my six years at Harvard did I see Ed on the third floor—our floor.

Only one time I know of was he even near Lewontin. That’s when I was waiting with Dick for the elevator to the third floor, and Ed strode into the building and joined us in the elevator. The tension immediately became thick and palpable. It was a silent and uncomfortable ride up three floors; not a word was exchanged between the two Harvard professors, not even “hello”.

Emphasis mine — because yeah, there are people who would probably use the term “reactionary biological determinist” to describe me, and it would likely be less wrong than a lot of other things I get called. There’s apparently a whole strain of political thought that views any suggestion that variations in human behavior have biological roots as “eugenics”, which just seems weird to me. Basically, you have communist atheists stanning for “free will” against “reactionaries” and conservatives who believe in biology…. I expect it would baffle philosophers of previous generations.

So anyway, yeah, Wilson was a Harvard professor and I am a lowly state school flunky, so comparing myself to him is obviously like comparing my modest guitar chops to Joe Satriani. But the fact that he survived in the business for nearly 50 years with commies sniping at him about his work gives me some hope for the future — both my own future and the future of academic biology in general. I’ll do my part to keep carrying the torch forward for him.