Thanks SJ. But evolution stopped 50,000 years ago, since race does not exist and all humans are the same. So a bunch of old bones can't tell us anything interesting. Science.
I wonder if James Watson is the person in history who has seen the most scientific advancement subsequent to their breakthrough in their own lifetime.
He co-discovered the molecular structure of DNA in 1953. Nowadays DNA sequencing is everywhere and it’s impossible to imagine whole fields without it: medicine, biology, genomics, etc.
A friend of mine told me a method of judging the brilliance of people like Watson. I don't know if it's original to him but I think it's pretty compelling. How long were all the prerequisites in place to make the discovery before the guy made it? For example, the components of photography (silver nitrate, lenses) were around for hundreds of years before someone (depending on which invention you consider to be photography- I'd say 1800 Thomas Wedgewood) invented it. Watson and Crick figured out the structure of DNA maybe a decade or less after DNA was found to be genetic material and at about the same time as Rosalind Franklin made the crystals.
Agree. Here's something to ponder- how are elements of the collective unconscious, like fear of heights, passed down and implemented? I can almost believe we will figure out how to the brain handles fear of heights but I shall be long dead before we figure out how it is encoded in the genome and implemented embryologically.
It's a similar mechanism. Somehow we are genetically primed to react to certain patterns in the visual field with fear. So many questions. How much detail is encoded? Is it a vaguely spidery shape or is color infill required? Is it encoded like pixels or more like vector graphics or a combination or something entirely else? Is movement in the image encoded? How much do we start with and how much do we learn later by adding our spider threat lived experience to the file?
I'm not sure what you mean. For one I thought skulls vent verboten when the Deutsche got a bit too excited about them and couldn't stop filming how excited they were to demonstrate their theories in grade school classrooms. But icky? Wuttchamean? They're in lots of old pious paintings to imply (or even spell out) memento mori, and they're on lots of flags, uniforms, desks and graves for similar reasons (either directed at their owners or at his enemies).
Otherwise...I'd guess most people always found em a bit off putting.
Some notes and thoughts on the anthropologist Ralph Holloway's "place in history." With a word on the interesting pairing at Columbia University, in the mid-1960s, of two men: Holloway (a White-Protestant) and Stephen Jay Gould (Jewish). Both were then young scholars at Columbia (same time, same field, same institution), but representing such different visions of the Study of Man and our approaches to it:
_____________
RALPH HOLLOWAY
- born, Feb 1935, in Philadelphia, "to Ralph Holloway, who was in the insurance business, and Marguerite (Grugan) Holloway, a secretary. He attended high school in Philadelphia [...] He later moved with his family to Albuquerque...";
- 1956: Drexel Institute of Technology, Co-op Program in Metallurgical Engineering;
- 1959: BA, Geology and Engineering, University of New Mexico;
- May 1964: PhD, Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley;
- ca. Summer 1964? Hired by Columbia University;
- By 1969, he was "isolated and marginalized at Columbia" (by his account) but went on producing great work;
- May 2003: Retired from teaching at Columbia University.
_____________
I ask, first of all: How possible would a "Ralph Holloway" [b.1935] be, if born seventy years later (i.e., a non-elite U.S. White-male, born 2000s)? Or fifty years later (same, born 1980s)? Or even just thirty years later (same, born 1960s)?
Ralph Holloway ended up excelling in his field. He was clearly well suited and adept. An exemplar of the classic USA in many respects. Holloway didn't have any sort of particularly elite start, to believe his biography. Even if not poor, also note elite. But he went from obscurity and New Mexico to a Columbia professorship. (I ask in passing: How much money did his parents spend on test-prep, and other gamings of the "college-admissions system"? Is that number "zero"?)
The system treated Ralph Holloway FAIRLY, along the way, I think is the way to render it. Institutions identified him as adept and talented, smart, useful, potentially a great contributor. At the critical points -- such as Berkeley taking him in, around 1959; or Columbia University hiring him, in 1964 -- there were openings, possibilities.
Meanwhile (so to speak), huge numbers of Ralph Holloways in later-born decadal cohorts, in the USA and beyond, have been blocked, blocked out of "their own" institutions. That's the tradeoff with the USA's racial-favoritism policy (i.e., it is not cost-less or victim-less to affirmative-action someone up the ranks, you just never see the victims and cannot identify them).
"The Great Dumbing Down" is a new Sailerism to me. It aligns with the passing of few decades of policies, norms, and institutional cultures (and even pop-culture) discouraging or outright preventing new Ralph Holloways from emerging. Isolating, marginalizing new Ralph Holloways in ways more absolute and cruel than Ralph Holloway's own marginalization (whatever, exactly, it was). It's not down to an absolute level of zero, of course, but with far-worse probabilities of percolating up, than were available in the mid-20th century.
Ralph Holloway saw an early element of the Great Blocking-Off (to coin a term based on one of my previous sentence's wordings), with his characterization of himself as "isolated and marginalized" by the late 1960s. Maybe so, but remember that he'd been hired in the first place (in 1964)!
Ralph Holloway shares much in common, it seems to me, with classic pre-1945 racial-anthropologists like Carleton Coon; and with classic American types found commonly throughout the 18th- and 19th-century, and most of the 20th-century. He had to adapt to the late-20th-century dispensation, but remained of the classic type. The American White-Protestant tradition oriented around inquiry and drive for knowledge rather than politicized storytelling.
The late-20th century, alas, belongs not to such men as Holloway. The late-20th century belongs, rather, to such people as Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). Gould, incidentally, was a PhD student at Columbia, 1963-1967. The two were at Columbia at the same time together: Most of Gould's tenure as a PhD-candidate at Columbia overlapped with Ralph Holloway's (early) time there as a professor. Holloway and Gould, together at Columbia. An interesting contrast-moment in the divergence of American elite-academia in the middle and later decades of the 20th century.
Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" (1981) was an agenda-setting excoriation against racial-anthropology and "HBD." The influence of that book, and others like it, over the half-century between ca.1965-2015, is enormous. That which came to be called Wokeness draws heavily from these ideas. I'd say it's not too much to say that the book was an indirect attack on Ralph Holloway himself, who was still very active in the 1980s.
In 2011, Ralph Holloway co-published a paper that refuted Gould: "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"
In the wider culture, or political culture, Gould won and Holloway lost. That, at least for a long while. It's not clear what comes out the other end of this strange-so-far decade of the 2020s.
Just how fully undermined, in 2025, _is_ the late-20th-century consensus about Race and physical anthropology (that both are supposedly pseudosciences and vaguely evil)? What will it by in 2035? We'd like to think Holloway Defeats Gould in the longer run, well before their 100th birthdays. It's hard to guess how much power Wokeness still has in it.
Good points but if you look wider, and further back in time, anyone being a Columbia professor of anthropology is unusual. Back in the 1800s and 1700s the kind of people who became scientists and professors were born to rare and fortunate circumstances. As the US became super rich in the 20th century and college became reality for, well probably too many people, a lot of those people noticed that tenured college professor was a pretty sweet gig.
It's only natural that the fighting for those limited positions would get dirty.
On the subject of Columbia, this winning admissions essay was put on Twitter two days ago, by user 'Ladidai.' Apparently it's genuine, despite the posting date.
“I would crawl miles every day to get to the only school in the village.” My grandfather’s words have echoed in my mind since childhood, a powerful reminder of the sacrifices that shaped my family’s path. Born into poverty in a small Nigerian village, he viewed education as the only way out. Against unimaginable odds, he earned a place at Columbia University, where he transformed his life and built a foundation for future generations. Though he has since passed, his stories remain with me, guiding my journey.
My father carried that torch forward, battling the deeply ingrained racism of pre-Civil Rights America. He, too, found refuge in Columbia’s halls, where his intellect could thrive despite the obstacles he faced beyond campus walls. "I broke my knees running away from white women," he would joke, a somber note to the paranoia and fear Black men often endured. Yet, he persevered, becoming a distinguished medical professional and proving that his father’s sacrifices were not in vain.
Born in the United States, I have been afforded opportunities my grandfather and father could only dream of. Yet, their struggles are not lost on me: they fuel my determination to continue the legacy they built. Columbia is more than an institution -- it is the foundation of my family’s aspirations and the crucible in which our resilience was forged. Columbia stands as my sole choice, for I desire no alternative -- its legacy is interwoven with my own, making it the only place where my aspirations can truly take root. To become the third generation of Columbia graduates and medical professionals in my lineage is not merely an ambition; it is my life’s duty.
Every exam and extracurricular is a step I take toward my future. The culmination of these efforts is a tribute to the miles my grandfather crawled and the battles my father fought -- literally. Columbia is not just my dream -- it is my inheritance, my destiny, and my promise to them.
"I would crawl four miles every day to and fro the only school in the village." My grandfather's words have echoed in my mind since childhood..."
There was some discussion on whether "to and fro" is correct as used there. The consensus was it's not correct but as it's quoted material it can get a pass.
The bigger problem I have is she uses the word "crawl" without explaining it. Crawl? Is the grandfather a paraplegic? How long does it take to "crawl four miles"? It sounds a lot like a parody, or satire. Without explanation it sits unpleasant, but the Black girl writer is soon hustling the reader along and buttering them up for the ideological slaughter.
James D. Watson's obituary will definitely be "updated": he is far more well known and occupies a central role in the history of 20th century science, whereas Holloway is not a name that is well known to the general public (I will confess to never having heard of him before).
Steve --- Give us some comments on the global controversy of the Trump Tariffs, completely dominating the international news today. The now-revealed data-crunching behind the rates may relate to your proposed idea of a "Great Dumbing Down":
"The Trump administration...used quite a simple calculation [to determine the new tariff rates]: the country’s trade deficit divided by its exports to the United States times 1/2. That’s it. [...] For example, America’s trade deficit with China in 2024 was $295.4 billion, and the United States imported $439.9 billion worth of Chinese goods. That means China’s trade surplus with the United States was 67% of the value of its exports — a value the Trump administration labeled as “tariff charged to USA.” But it was no such thing. “While these new tariff measures have been framed as ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, it turns out the policy is actually one of surplus targeting,” noted Mike O’Rourke..." (CNN)
I was raised, like all good men of my generation, to think tariffs had been proven bad just as surely as intelligence cannot be in any way genetic. Suspiciously this was always and only supported by the one example from the Great Depression. Recently I read the Wikipedia article on tariffs in the US and found their record is actually mixed...and that they have always been (counter-intuitively to a Reagan man such as myself) a peculiar fetish of the republican party.
That calculation is strange. I can absolutely see the argument for negotiating harder with the Chinese on trade; shoulda been done long ago, but the trade deficit has much to do with monetary policy and the Chinese buying up our cheap debt.
I guess Trump followers don't generally like a lot of intellectual fag talk so he keeps it simple. I would sure like to hear some detailed arguments on his policies, thought. You know, like I get Greenland is important for national security, but maybe he could give us a few paragraphs on the details of why the current situation is untenable?
I don't think economics is really Stevev's bailiwick. But I'll weigh in.
First off, Americans have been chronically consuming about 5% then they produce for a long time--and more like 15% in real goods. (The US economy has more fluff than most.) This needs to be fixed or they reckoning will be much uglier down the road.
If it wasn't for all the minoritarian glop imposed upon Americans--"racism!", school busing, soft on crime, gay marriage, trannies ... and most of all immigration lunacy--the free trade with China thing would alone be enough to discredit our Establishment nabobs. China is a huge country with a pretty smart population--which anyone sentient knew up front. It has in a few decades of fast development gained absolute advantage in sector after sector without its labor costs rising to dramatically enough to "level the playing field". All this was completely predictable.
An example is Germany's economic problems--which predate the issues with Putin's War and the energy price issue, and the ongoing challenges of the European car industry which will simply be destroyed if Europeans do not protect themselves.
The plain fact is protection is often quite reasonable and required. No nation--certainly not the US--has ever industrialized under anything like "free trade", excepting Britain which had the advantage of going first and being a technologically leader until the later half of the 19th century.
~~
Secondly, all that said, Trump's approach is the wrong approach. The right approach is to institute some form of trade based capital controls. Exporters--who essentially import dollars back into the United States--get some sort of credit, and importers must acquire these credits to--export dollars overseas. Our (I'm an American) government can set any level of trade balance--and in fact current account balance--it finds desirable, by selling these "trade credits" itself.
But every other government can do the same. There's nothing "hostile" about such a policy. It is managing your own trade balance and everyone else is free to manage theirs and still trade with you on a level playing field.
Beyond that the West--I'd prefer as a collective--needs to protect itself from being eaten by the Chinese. A) They are a competitor race and civilization. And B) They have not yet--and are not likely to adopt Western norms nor the independent nations/free trade model essentially imposed by America post War.
Of course, there really isn't any point to Western resistance to Chinese dominance, unless the West throws off the toxic minoritarian glop, stops the immigration madness and works toward a eugenic fertility recovery. With minoritarianism in place, there is no West anyway. What are saving the "West" for--to coddle swarms of Latinos, muzzies and blacks. Might as well just toss the keys to the Chinese.
On rivalry with China, and general East vs West rivalry ("a competitor race and civilization" in your wording):
The trend in the past ten- or twelve years has been towards concern about conflict or rivalry with China, about China's machinations or aggressive designs, aggression against virtually every neighbor, global spying operation (many countries have banned TikTok), its anti-Western posturing. Bipartisan in US politics. I've noticed Steve Sailer hasn't been much been affected by this trend. Their bid to set up colonial-like relationships all over the map, including likely even in Eastern Europe, might have caught his attention but it never quite did so (that I readily recall).
The tone and mood ca. 2020 of the China Question is a world apart from what it had been ca. 2005. The national-security and foreign-policy elites of ca. 2020 are united in being anti-China, after a shift in the 2010s aligned with the Xi Jinping presidency. Steve Sailer has been a heavy-hitter in discourse since the 1990s but may still tend to think of China in the 2020s as he thought of it in the 1990s and 2000s.
Humanities professors (in this instance, cultural anthropologists) are, in general, completely ignorant about the natural sciences, and natural scientists (in this instance, physical anthropologists) are generally completely ignorant about the humanities. In some fields, like political science, the two groups have come to a truce, which means that neither side interferes with the other (e.g. I am a political philosopher in a political science department, and the scientists don't even ask what I do and I usually return the favor). For a variety of reasons, however, anthropology departments have chosen the 'victory or death' route.
One advantage that humanities professors generally have over natural scientists in these conflicts is that they (humanities professors) are more fluent in selling their ideas to the great unwashed masses (i.e. the media). Indeed, given the media's ignorance of almost everything, the professors that they trust most are usually the stupidest group of professors in the world (i.e. education professors). Check out almost any story about higher education in the broadest sense of the term and you'll find journalists quoting education faculty, who know nothing about anything.
It is very curious that liberals/progressive love to promote science until they don’t. For example, when it comes to religion, they heavily criticize evangelicals and biblical literalists because they view them as being anti-science. But, when it comes to racial differences, where the gaps can be proven objectively, then they are against science. Go figure.
I think it might be that skulls are just a convenient vehicle for transmitting a message about what you are supposed to find ick.
I'm grateful that anyone wants to be a forensic anthropologist because skulls do give me the ick. I think that's pretty common. Let's say I wanted to ickify some set of ideas in the minds of the public. saying "with skulls on top!" could be very helpful.
"only bad people think humans are sexually dimorphic... WITH SKULLS ON TOP"
If you read Elizabeth Weiss (noted skull toter)'s jaw-dropping memoir, there was a tremendous amount of cootie-mongering around her cancellation. Colleagues at her university came up with essentially magical protocols about how you suddenly had to use masks and gloves "to avoid contamination" when handling bones that had been in their teaching collection for decades and had been handled by hundreds if not thousands of students already. It was obviously meant to convey a message about the ickiness of Weiss and any anthropologist doing work like hers, it was essentially a magical prohibition about spiritual contamination.
eventually you were not allowed to look at, photograph, or look at photographs of the material. Not joking. These are rules about what is tapu.
I corresponded with Dr. Holloway when I was a grad student. He was a very interesting man in so many ways and I doubt his career path could be replicated today.
He called human beings the most dangerous species on the planet because our brains create, via arbitrary symbols, delusional systems of patterned insanity.
Say what now?
Lot of room for enormously interesting blue-skying there. But to do that blue-skying you have to know comparative neuroscience, molecular neurogenetics, and paleoneurology, things cultural anthropologists know nothing about, dismiss as irrelevant and leading to Nazithought.
Anyways, he started out at Drexel studying metallurgical engineering in a program that was half classroom and half working in industry, in his case at a company manufacturing stainless steel. But his family moved to New Mexico so he transferred to the university there, deciding that metallurgy was boring and he wanted to study anthropology. But his dad told him he'd never get a job with that degree and he should study geology and get a job with an oil company.
To pay his way through college he didn't get a student loan or have pop pay, he went to work as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields. Alas, when he graduated he couldn't get a job with the oil companies. But he did find employment with Lockheed working on heat-resistant metals, just what he was studying at Drexel. So getting a geology degree was a total waste.
Metallurgy still bored him and he still was interested in anthropology so he entered a Ph.D. program at Cal where he became interested in the evolution of the brain but was told there was nothing to learn there. His mentor wanted him to study baboon behavior in order to understand human behavior. Holloway thought that was stupid and found a mentor who would let him study the brain and he did his dissertation on the primate brain. It was so well received he got multiple job offers, accepting the one from Columbia because his wife was a New Yorker.
Thus began his long career, starting off with studies of the lunate sulcus, which defines the anterior boundary of the primary visual striate cortex. The cortex anterior to the lunate sulcus is the parietal and temporal lobe association cortex, where higher cognitive functions occur....
Aaand from there deep into specialized research.
One big controversy he got into was whether an increase in brain size had to precede any organizational shift in brain components. It was generally believed that the brain did not reorganize until after there was an increase in brain size, and Holloway believed that reorganization took place before the increase in brain volume. He was convinced that the earliest hominids had brains that were fundamentally different from those of apes, despite their small size, and that they were capable of more complex social behaviors than those of apes, as would be expected if the hominid brain's reduction in the primary visual cortex signaled a relative increase in the parietal association cortex.
Holloway also got into the differences between male and female brains, for example discovering that females have larger corpus callosa (connecting the brain hemispheres and facilitating communication and coordination of sensory, motor, and cognitive functions) relative to brain size than do males and that the splenium (important for processing visual and spatial information) in particular is more bulbous in females than in males.
Well, I could go yakking on but essentially Holloway's life was, as he put it, a quest for truth, replication, and letting data trump emotional biases. I know, dream on.
He got in trouble for insisting that an understanding of the roles of nature and nurture in how IQ scores vary among populations is impossible without knowing how the human brain varies and why it does so. He also got in trouble for saying that human physical and mental variation should be celebrated and its study encouraged, rather than the opposite. It is strange that while the dominant cultures shouts that diversity is our strength, discovering just what that diversity consists of and why is forbidden.
So Steve, have you noticed that Mr Unz is now using his blog to promote the Israel-killed-Kennedy pet theory of his? You were right to jump ship; the man has become a true whack-job.
Hamlet’s willingness to jump down in the grave and get his hands dirty with bones is presumably supposed to suggest his enlightened Renaissance-man status. In contrast, a host of pre-modern taboos about dead bodies seem to be returning: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/australians-are-destroying-our-ancient-past/
Thanks SJ. But evolution stopped 50,000 years ago, since race does not exist and all humans are the same. So a bunch of old bones can't tell us anything interesting. Science.
I wonder if James Watson is the person in history who has seen the most scientific advancement subsequent to their breakthrough in their own lifetime.
He co-discovered the molecular structure of DNA in 1953. Nowadays DNA sequencing is everywhere and it’s impossible to imagine whole fields without it: medicine, biology, genomics, etc.
A friend of mine told me a method of judging the brilliance of people like Watson. I don't know if it's original to him but I think it's pretty compelling. How long were all the prerequisites in place to make the discovery before the guy made it? For example, the components of photography (silver nitrate, lenses) were around for hundreds of years before someone (depending on which invention you consider to be photography- I'd say 1800 Thomas Wedgewood) invented it. Watson and Crick figured out the structure of DNA maybe a decade or less after DNA was found to be genetic material and at about the same time as Rosalind Franklin made the crystals.
It’s fascinating.
Humans had been breeding animals and plants for thousands of years before Darwin came up with the theory of natural selection.
I think the brain is still very poorly understood despite knowing all the things we do with it.
Agree. Here's something to ponder- how are elements of the collective unconscious, like fear of heights, passed down and implemented? I can almost believe we will figure out how to the brain handles fear of heights but I shall be long dead before we figure out how it is encoded in the genome and implemented embryologically.
Or why women are far more afraid of spiders than men. The difference is so stark it can only partially cultural.
These are things that I (and many of us here BTL) find interesting but no one in academia cares or is allowed to care.
It's a similar mechanism. Somehow we are genetically primed to react to certain patterns in the visual field with fear. So many questions. How much detail is encoded? Is it a vaguely spidery shape or is color infill required? Is it encoded like pixels or more like vector graphics or a combination or something entirely else? Is movement in the image encoded? How much do we start with and how much do we learn later by adding our spider threat lived experience to the file?
I'm not sure what you mean. For one I thought skulls vent verboten when the Deutsche got a bit too excited about them and couldn't stop filming how excited they were to demonstrate their theories in grade school classrooms. But icky? Wuttchamean? They're in lots of old pious paintings to imply (or even spell out) memento mori, and they're on lots of flags, uniforms, desks and graves for similar reasons (either directed at their owners or at his enemies).
Otherwise...I'd guess most people always found em a bit off putting.
I've always wanted a skull for my own desk as a memento mori. But they're hard to find.
Are you kidding me, they're everywhere!
Some notes and thoughts on the anthropologist Ralph Holloway's "place in history." With a word on the interesting pairing at Columbia University, in the mid-1960s, of two men: Holloway (a White-Protestant) and Stephen Jay Gould (Jewish). Both were then young scholars at Columbia (same time, same field, same institution), but representing such different visions of the Study of Man and our approaches to it:
_____________
RALPH HOLLOWAY
- born, Feb 1935, in Philadelphia, "to Ralph Holloway, who was in the insurance business, and Marguerite (Grugan) Holloway, a secretary. He attended high school in Philadelphia [...] He later moved with his family to Albuquerque...";
- 1956: Drexel Institute of Technology, Co-op Program in Metallurgical Engineering;
- 1959: BA, Geology and Engineering, University of New Mexico;
- May 1964: PhD, Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley;
- ca. Summer 1964? Hired by Columbia University;
- By 1969, he was "isolated and marginalized at Columbia" (by his account) but went on producing great work;
- May 2003: Retired from teaching at Columbia University.
_____________
I ask, first of all: How possible would a "Ralph Holloway" [b.1935] be, if born seventy years later (i.e., a non-elite U.S. White-male, born 2000s)? Or fifty years later (same, born 1980s)? Or even just thirty years later (same, born 1960s)?
Ralph Holloway ended up excelling in his field. He was clearly well suited and adept. An exemplar of the classic USA in many respects. Holloway didn't have any sort of particularly elite start, to believe his biography. Even if not poor, also note elite. But he went from obscurity and New Mexico to a Columbia professorship. (I ask in passing: How much money did his parents spend on test-prep, and other gamings of the "college-admissions system"? Is that number "zero"?)
The system treated Ralph Holloway FAIRLY, along the way, I think is the way to render it. Institutions identified him as adept and talented, smart, useful, potentially a great contributor. At the critical points -- such as Berkeley taking him in, around 1959; or Columbia University hiring him, in 1964 -- there were openings, possibilities.
Meanwhile (so to speak), huge numbers of Ralph Holloways in later-born decadal cohorts, in the USA and beyond, have been blocked, blocked out of "their own" institutions. That's the tradeoff with the USA's racial-favoritism policy (i.e., it is not cost-less or victim-less to affirmative-action someone up the ranks, you just never see the victims and cannot identify them).
"The Great Dumbing Down" is a new Sailerism to me. It aligns with the passing of few decades of policies, norms, and institutional cultures (and even pop-culture) discouraging or outright preventing new Ralph Holloways from emerging. Isolating, marginalizing new Ralph Holloways in ways more absolute and cruel than Ralph Holloway's own marginalization (whatever, exactly, it was). It's not down to an absolute level of zero, of course, but with far-worse probabilities of percolating up, than were available in the mid-20th century.
Ralph Holloway saw an early element of the Great Blocking-Off (to coin a term based on one of my previous sentence's wordings), with his characterization of himself as "isolated and marginalized" by the late 1960s. Maybe so, but remember that he'd been hired in the first place (in 1964)!
Ralph Holloway shares much in common, it seems to me, with classic pre-1945 racial-anthropologists like Carleton Coon; and with classic American types found commonly throughout the 18th- and 19th-century, and most of the 20th-century. He had to adapt to the late-20th-century dispensation, but remained of the classic type. The American White-Protestant tradition oriented around inquiry and drive for knowledge rather than politicized storytelling.
The late-20th century, alas, belongs not to such men as Holloway. The late-20th century belongs, rather, to such people as Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). Gould, incidentally, was a PhD student at Columbia, 1963-1967. The two were at Columbia at the same time together: Most of Gould's tenure as a PhD-candidate at Columbia overlapped with Ralph Holloway's (early) time there as a professor. Holloway and Gould, together at Columbia. An interesting contrast-moment in the divergence of American elite-academia in the middle and later decades of the 20th century.
Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" (1981) was an agenda-setting excoriation against racial-anthropology and "HBD." The influence of that book, and others like it, over the half-century between ca.1965-2015, is enormous. That which came to be called Wokeness draws heavily from these ideas. I'd say it's not too much to say that the book was an indirect attack on Ralph Holloway himself, who was still very active in the 1980s.
In 2011, Ralph Holloway co-published a paper that refuted Gould: "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
In the wider culture, or political culture, Gould won and Holloway lost. That, at least for a long while. It's not clear what comes out the other end of this strange-so-far decade of the 2020s.
Just how fully undermined, in 2025, _is_ the late-20th-century consensus about Race and physical anthropology (that both are supposedly pseudosciences and vaguely evil)? What will it by in 2035? We'd like to think Holloway Defeats Gould in the longer run, well before their 100th birthdays. It's hard to guess how much power Wokeness still has in it.
Good points but if you look wider, and further back in time, anyone being a Columbia professor of anthropology is unusual. Back in the 1800s and 1700s the kind of people who became scientists and professors were born to rare and fortunate circumstances. As the US became super rich in the 20th century and college became reality for, well probably too many people, a lot of those people noticed that tenured college professor was a pretty sweet gig.
It's only natural that the fighting for those limited positions would get dirty.
On the subject of Columbia, this winning admissions essay was put on Twitter two days ago, by user 'Ladidai.' Apparently it's genuine, despite the posting date.
https://x.com/ladidaix/status/1907247002884132877
.
“I would crawl miles every day to get to the only school in the village.” My grandfather’s words have echoed in my mind since childhood, a powerful reminder of the sacrifices that shaped my family’s path. Born into poverty in a small Nigerian village, he viewed education as the only way out. Against unimaginable odds, he earned a place at Columbia University, where he transformed his life and built a foundation for future generations. Though he has since passed, his stories remain with me, guiding my journey.
My father carried that torch forward, battling the deeply ingrained racism of pre-Civil Rights America. He, too, found refuge in Columbia’s halls, where his intellect could thrive despite the obstacles he faced beyond campus walls. "I broke my knees running away from white women," he would joke, a somber note to the paranoia and fear Black men often endured. Yet, he persevered, becoming a distinguished medical professional and proving that his father’s sacrifices were not in vain.
Born in the United States, I have been afforded opportunities my grandfather and father could only dream of. Yet, their struggles are not lost on me: they fuel my determination to continue the legacy they built. Columbia is more than an institution -- it is the foundation of my family’s aspirations and the crucible in which our resilience was forged. Columbia stands as my sole choice, for I desire no alternative -- its legacy is interwoven with my own, making it the only place where my aspirations can truly take root. To become the third generation of Columbia graduates and medical professionals in my lineage is not merely an ambition; it is my life’s duty.
Every exam and extracurricular is a step I take toward my future. The culmination of these efforts is a tribute to the miles my grandfather crawled and the battles my father fought -- literally. Columbia is not just my dream -- it is my inheritance, my destiny, and my promise to them.
I've made my choice.
Now make yours.
I see a different version:
"I would crawl four miles every day to and fro the only school in the village." My grandfather's words have echoed in my mind since childhood..."
There was some discussion on whether "to and fro" is correct as used there. The consensus was it's not correct but as it's quoted material it can get a pass.
The bigger problem I have is she uses the word "crawl" without explaining it. Crawl? Is the grandfather a paraplegic? How long does it take to "crawl four miles"? It sounds a lot like a parody, or satire. Without explanation it sits unpleasant, but the Black girl writer is soon hustling the reader along and buttering them up for the ideological slaughter.
See also this comment by Wanda, in which she writes:
"I doubt [Ralph Holloway's] career path could be replicated today."
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/when-did-skulls-become-racist-and/comment/105799757
James D. Watson's obituary will definitely be "updated": he is far more well known and occupies a central role in the history of 20th century science, whereas Holloway is not a name that is well known to the general public (I will confess to never having heard of him before).
Steve --- Give us some comments on the global controversy of the Trump Tariffs, completely dominating the international news today. The now-revealed data-crunching behind the rates may relate to your proposed idea of a "Great Dumbing Down":
"The Trump administration...used quite a simple calculation [to determine the new tariff rates]: the country’s trade deficit divided by its exports to the United States times 1/2. That’s it. [...] For example, America’s trade deficit with China in 2024 was $295.4 billion, and the United States imported $439.9 billion worth of Chinese goods. That means China’s trade surplus with the United States was 67% of the value of its exports — a value the Trump administration labeled as “tariff charged to USA.” But it was no such thing. “While these new tariff measures have been framed as ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, it turns out the policy is actually one of surplus targeting,” noted Mike O’Rourke..." (CNN)
The methodology they used to calculate the tariff-rates by country was first identified by James Surowiecki: https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1907657860793696281
I was raised, like all good men of my generation, to think tariffs had been proven bad just as surely as intelligence cannot be in any way genetic. Suspiciously this was always and only supported by the one example from the Great Depression. Recently I read the Wikipedia article on tariffs in the US and found their record is actually mixed...and that they have always been (counter-intuitively to a Reagan man such as myself) a peculiar fetish of the republican party.
That calculation is strange. I can absolutely see the argument for negotiating harder with the Chinese on trade; shoulda been done long ago, but the trade deficit has much to do with monetary policy and the Chinese buying up our cheap debt.
I guess Trump followers don't generally like a lot of intellectual fag talk so he keeps it simple. I would sure like to hear some detailed arguments on his policies, thought. You know, like I get Greenland is important for national security, but maybe he could give us a few paragraphs on the details of why the current situation is untenable?
I don't think economics is really Stevev's bailiwick. But I'll weigh in.
First off, Americans have been chronically consuming about 5% then they produce for a long time--and more like 15% in real goods. (The US economy has more fluff than most.) This needs to be fixed or they reckoning will be much uglier down the road.
If it wasn't for all the minoritarian glop imposed upon Americans--"racism!", school busing, soft on crime, gay marriage, trannies ... and most of all immigration lunacy--the free trade with China thing would alone be enough to discredit our Establishment nabobs. China is a huge country with a pretty smart population--which anyone sentient knew up front. It has in a few decades of fast development gained absolute advantage in sector after sector without its labor costs rising to dramatically enough to "level the playing field". All this was completely predictable.
An example is Germany's economic problems--which predate the issues with Putin's War and the energy price issue, and the ongoing challenges of the European car industry which will simply be destroyed if Europeans do not protect themselves.
The plain fact is protection is often quite reasonable and required. No nation--certainly not the US--has ever industrialized under anything like "free trade", excepting Britain which had the advantage of going first and being a technologically leader until the later half of the 19th century.
~~
Secondly, all that said, Trump's approach is the wrong approach. The right approach is to institute some form of trade based capital controls. Exporters--who essentially import dollars back into the United States--get some sort of credit, and importers must acquire these credits to--export dollars overseas. Our (I'm an American) government can set any level of trade balance--and in fact current account balance--it finds desirable, by selling these "trade credits" itself.
But every other government can do the same. There's nothing "hostile" about such a policy. It is managing your own trade balance and everyone else is free to manage theirs and still trade with you on a level playing field.
Beyond that the West--I'd prefer as a collective--needs to protect itself from being eaten by the Chinese. A) They are a competitor race and civilization. And B) They have not yet--and are not likely to adopt Western norms nor the independent nations/free trade model essentially imposed by America post War.
Of course, there really isn't any point to Western resistance to Chinese dominance, unless the West throws off the toxic minoritarian glop, stops the immigration madness and works toward a eugenic fertility recovery. With minoritarianism in place, there is no West anyway. What are saving the "West" for--to coddle swarms of Latinos, muzzies and blacks. Might as well just toss the keys to the Chinese.
On rivalry with China, and general East vs West rivalry ("a competitor race and civilization" in your wording):
The trend in the past ten- or twelve years has been towards concern about conflict or rivalry with China, about China's machinations or aggressive designs, aggression against virtually every neighbor, global spying operation (many countries have banned TikTok), its anti-Western posturing. Bipartisan in US politics. I've noticed Steve Sailer hasn't been much been affected by this trend. Their bid to set up colonial-like relationships all over the map, including likely even in Eastern Europe, might have caught his attention but it never quite did so (that I readily recall).
The tone and mood ca. 2020 of the China Question is a world apart from what it had been ca. 2005. The national-security and foreign-policy elites of ca. 2020 are united in being anti-China, after a shift in the 2010s aligned with the Xi Jinping presidency. Steve Sailer has been a heavy-hitter in discourse since the 1990s but may still tend to think of China in the 2020s as he thought of it in the 1990s and 2000s.
Humanities professors (in this instance, cultural anthropologists) are, in general, completely ignorant about the natural sciences, and natural scientists (in this instance, physical anthropologists) are generally completely ignorant about the humanities. In some fields, like political science, the two groups have come to a truce, which means that neither side interferes with the other (e.g. I am a political philosopher in a political science department, and the scientists don't even ask what I do and I usually return the favor). For a variety of reasons, however, anthropology departments have chosen the 'victory or death' route.
One advantage that humanities professors generally have over natural scientists in these conflicts is that they (humanities professors) are more fluent in selling their ideas to the great unwashed masses (i.e. the media). Indeed, given the media's ignorance of almost everything, the professors that they trust most are usually the stupidest group of professors in the world (i.e. education professors). Check out almost any story about higher education in the broadest sense of the term and you'll find journalists quoting education faculty, who know nothing about anything.
It is very curious that liberals/progressive love to promote science until they don’t. For example, when it comes to religion, they heavily criticize evangelicals and biblical literalists because they view them as being anti-science. But, when it comes to racial differences, where the gaps can be proven objectively, then they are against science. Go figure.
If you ever die, Steve, I'm sure the Times will write a fresh, up-to-the minute obituary.
I think it might be that skulls are just a convenient vehicle for transmitting a message about what you are supposed to find ick.
I'm grateful that anyone wants to be a forensic anthropologist because skulls do give me the ick. I think that's pretty common. Let's say I wanted to ickify some set of ideas in the minds of the public. saying "with skulls on top!" could be very helpful.
"only bad people think humans are sexually dimorphic... WITH SKULLS ON TOP"
If you read Elizabeth Weiss (noted skull toter)'s jaw-dropping memoir, there was a tremendous amount of cootie-mongering around her cancellation. Colleagues at her university came up with essentially magical protocols about how you suddenly had to use masks and gloves "to avoid contamination" when handling bones that had been in their teaching collection for decades and had been handled by hundreds if not thousands of students already. It was obviously meant to convey a message about the ickiness of Weiss and any anthropologist doing work like hers, it was essentially a magical prohibition about spiritual contamination.
eventually you were not allowed to look at, photograph, or look at photographs of the material. Not joking. These are rules about what is tapu.
Interestingly Shakespeare himself subscribed to the bone-touching taboo:
Good friend for Jesus sake forebeare,
To digg the dust enclosed heare.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Several of M.R. James’s ghost stories turn on exactly this bad juju.
OT: I can't understand how you are not all over this story...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/world/australia/dachshund-dog-australia-island.html
From the pictures it would seem to be a great spot for one of those seaside golf courses you are partial to, as well.
I'm disappointed you couldn't find your way to work the name Horatio into this
This is the second Steve post in a week that didn't come to my email. Anyone else not getting some?
I corresponded with Dr. Holloway when I was a grad student. He was a very interesting man in so many ways and I doubt his career path could be replicated today.
He called human beings the most dangerous species on the planet because our brains create, via arbitrary symbols, delusional systems of patterned insanity.
Say what now?
Lot of room for enormously interesting blue-skying there. But to do that blue-skying you have to know comparative neuroscience, molecular neurogenetics, and paleoneurology, things cultural anthropologists know nothing about, dismiss as irrelevant and leading to Nazithought.
Anyways, he started out at Drexel studying metallurgical engineering in a program that was half classroom and half working in industry, in his case at a company manufacturing stainless steel. But his family moved to New Mexico so he transferred to the university there, deciding that metallurgy was boring and he wanted to study anthropology. But his dad told him he'd never get a job with that degree and he should study geology and get a job with an oil company.
To pay his way through college he didn't get a student loan or have pop pay, he went to work as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields. Alas, when he graduated he couldn't get a job with the oil companies. But he did find employment with Lockheed working on heat-resistant metals, just what he was studying at Drexel. So getting a geology degree was a total waste.
Metallurgy still bored him and he still was interested in anthropology so he entered a Ph.D. program at Cal where he became interested in the evolution of the brain but was told there was nothing to learn there. His mentor wanted him to study baboon behavior in order to understand human behavior. Holloway thought that was stupid and found a mentor who would let him study the brain and he did his dissertation on the primate brain. It was so well received he got multiple job offers, accepting the one from Columbia because his wife was a New Yorker.
Thus began his long career, starting off with studies of the lunate sulcus, which defines the anterior boundary of the primary visual striate cortex. The cortex anterior to the lunate sulcus is the parietal and temporal lobe association cortex, where higher cognitive functions occur....
Aaand from there deep into specialized research.
One big controversy he got into was whether an increase in brain size had to precede any organizational shift in brain components. It was generally believed that the brain did not reorganize until after there was an increase in brain size, and Holloway believed that reorganization took place before the increase in brain volume. He was convinced that the earliest hominids had brains that were fundamentally different from those of apes, despite their small size, and that they were capable of more complex social behaviors than those of apes, as would be expected if the hominid brain's reduction in the primary visual cortex signaled a relative increase in the parietal association cortex.
Holloway also got into the differences between male and female brains, for example discovering that females have larger corpus callosa (connecting the brain hemispheres and facilitating communication and coordination of sensory, motor, and cognitive functions) relative to brain size than do males and that the splenium (important for processing visual and spatial information) in particular is more bulbous in females than in males.
Well, I could go yakking on but essentially Holloway's life was, as he put it, a quest for truth, replication, and letting data trump emotional biases. I know, dream on.
He got in trouble for insisting that an understanding of the roles of nature and nurture in how IQ scores vary among populations is impossible without knowing how the human brain varies and why it does so. He also got in trouble for saying that human physical and mental variation should be celebrated and its study encouraged, rather than the opposite. It is strange that while the dominant cultures shouts that diversity is our strength, discovering just what that diversity consists of and why is forbidden.
RIP, Dr. Holloway, RIP.
So Steve, have you noticed that Mr Unz is now using his blog to promote the Israel-killed-Kennedy pet theory of his? You were right to jump ship; the man has become a true whack-job.
Not just that. He's doing that while posting under Steve's name.
Shards and bards, genes and memes.