On the Uses of Arguments

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one's opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, Notebook E, 1775-76

Vitamin C Abolishes Endurance Training Effects

Here's a paper I need to get out of the way: Oral administration of vitamin C decreases muscle mitochondrial biogenesis and hampers training-induced adaptations in endurance performance. Briefly, the authors took a group of young men and had them train on stationary bicycles. One group took one gram of vitamin C daily, the other did not. A parallel study was done on rats using the same general idea - only with rats, one can exercise them to exhaustion. The result: vitamin C put a major dent in the training effect due to exercise.

The figure above shows gene expression of two of the most important internal antioxidant-enhancing enzymes, superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase. The first bar shows levels without training, the second with training, and the third with training plus vitamin C, which shows that the vitamin practically abolished the training effect. The reason seems to be that reactive oxygen species (ROS) formed during exercise are important signals for the synthesis of more mitochondria, the cell's energy factories. Vitamin C quenches the ROS and thus the signals.

As noted before on this blog, glutathione is by far the most important antioxidant, and it's made internally from amino acids. Other antioxidants, as can be seen here, can hamper its production.

Our paleolithic ancestors would probably have been ingesting only small amounts of vitamin C, so any dose larger than say, 100 mg, must be considered quite unnatural. That is not to say that megadoses of vitamin C may not be useful in certain medical conditions, but overall it seems best to avoid that. Many holistic practitioners recommend doses of several grams a day, which could be positively harmful to health. At the least, we can say that athletes should take small doses if any.

Thank you for your indulgence.

Nativists Restless, Prefer Their Own People to Others

The NY Times editorial board wrote a blog post, The Nativists Are Restless, Continued, which is just the type of bilge I wouldn't normally read, except that Steve Sailer had to go and send me there. Nevertheless, it's a useful look inside the minds of immigration enthusiasts, whom we might call xenophiles.

Over at that great source known as Wikipedia, where I went to discover whether "nativism" has any meaning besides something liberals hate, it says:

Nativism is an opposition to immigration or to specific ethnic or cultural groups because the groups are considered hostile or alien to the natural culture, and it is assumed that they cannot be assimilated. Opposition to immigration is common in many countries because of issues of national, cultural or religious identity. [...]

In scholarly studies "nativism" is a standard technical term. However, in public political discourse "nativist" is a term of opprobrium usually used by the opposition, and rarely by nativists themselves (they call themselves "patriots.").

Given my reactionary views, I've never quite understood why it is that liberals think it denigrating to call someone a "nativist" which, as Wiki notes, is merely the flip side of "patriotism". On the other hand, most liberals seem to think that "patriot" is a term of abuse too; or was, it's in fashion again with Obama in office.

The Times writes:

We wanted to introduce readers to some of the people making the nativist case for immigration crackdowns. The harsh Republican line on immigration is usually depicted as motivated by concern about jobs, national security, drugs or terrorism. But that tune has a persistent undercurrent of fretfulness about race, culture and ethnicity. Many hard-liners want to shut the Golden Door because they believe the latest waves of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries pose a grave threat to America’s identity as a white, European country.

Again, I don't get it: the Times writes like those are bad things.

For the record, The Times does not support open borders, and never has.

We support comprehensive immigration reform, a combination of stricter enforcement at the border and the workplace, a chance for those already here to earn legalization, and an improved system of future legal immigration.

They say that they don't support open borders, yet they would like to legalize every illegal here, as well as increase legal immigration.

Enforcement alone won’t work — any attempt to uproot and expel 12 million illegal immigrants is unfeasible and self-destructive. It hurts our citizens, by perpetuating an underclass of exploited workers who tolerate low pay and bad working conditions. We want a path into the country that immigrants will go through, not around.

Enforcement won't work? Operation Wetback did. Punishing employers and landlords might work even better.

A commenter there wrote:

Mankind is not indigenious to the Americas as it is to Africa, so all of our ancestors immigrated here originally.

The United States of America was the first big country composed of people without any common national heritage. When the Constitution was written the demographics could have resulted in a German speaking country as easily as an English speaking country.

Jesus wept.

Peter Brimelow writes in response:

But while it may not be “respectable”, the fact remains that what the New York Times calls “race, culture and ethnicity” is the most powerful way to analyze American politics. And the analysis suggests that the Democrats are in a precarious position: they are a coalition of minorities and must at all costs prevent America’s majority from uniting. Hence the NYT’s hysteria.

Moral for the GOP: Stop. Immigration. Now. Deport. Illegals. Now. Reform the Citizen Child Clause. Now.

"What the New York Times calls “race, culture and ethnicity” is the most powerful way to analyze American politics." Words to live by.

Update: Pat Buchanan has some choice words on the Times:

Let it be said. There is nothing wrong about Americans fighting to preserve the culture and country they grew up in. That is what patriotic conservatism is all about. And if the Times can understand and support the right of native tribes like the Navajo and Apache to preserve their unique character and culture, why this viral hatred of those of us who wish to preserve the Western and Christian character of America?
Why does the Times want to see our America destroyed? From what poisoned well comes this hatred of the America we love?

The 10,000 Year Explosion or, Everything You Wanted to Know About the Causes of Human Biodiversity but Were Afraid to Ask

The 10,000 Year Explosion, the new book by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, is subtitled "How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", and that succinctly encapsulates the book's main thesis. An alternate subtitle, the one I've used as the title of this post, will be understandable to the initiated ("human biodiversity" being one of those terms for the cognoscenti). Whether every single detail presented by Cochran and Harpending pan out, the incontrovertible facts that human evolution is still taking place, is likely proceeding faster than ever, and has had remarkably diverse effects among different peoples in different geographical areas, mean that the liberal creationists have been backed into a corner. "The psychic unity of mankind" is dead.

One fascinating chapter is on the Indo-European expansion, and the authors make a good case that the Indo-Europeans may have had a genetic advantage over other peoples, and that that advantage was nothing so obvious as intelligence, but lactose tolerance. This makes much sense, as the puzzling question as to why they were able to expand and conquer huge swathes of territory has vexed archaeologists ever since the Indo-European language family was discovered. It seems to me that if this idea pans out, it will be a major contribution to the Indo-European question. The Indo-Europeanists have long seemed to need a sword to cut through the Gordian knot of confusion that surrounds the topic, and Cochran and Harpending may have supplied it.

The story of the Ashkenazi Jews and how they became so intelligent I found not totally convincing.. The theory asserts that Jews were no smarter than others before the Middle Ages, and that other, non-Ashkenazi Jews are still no smarter than non-Jews. However, the Spaniards in the Middle Ages were quite concerned about Jews being more able than Christians, and considered them a threat partly because of this. After the Jews were expelled from Spain, the ones that had converted to Christianity and remained were known as New Christians, and these New Christians became prominent in many sectors of Spanish life, as physicians, clerics, and royal officials. It may be merely anecdotal that some of these men became prominent; so far as I know, we have no statistics. It does seem interesting, however, that non-Ashkenazi Jews had at least a reputation for intelligence and ability in that time and place.

Cochran and Harpending also hypothesize that the lack of immunity of Amerindian peoples helped to bring down their rule and open up the Western Hemisphere to colonization, and that is surely a large part of the explanation. But the history of the encounters between Spaniards and Indians also shows that the Spaniards were far more organized and more loyal to each other as fighters than the Indians. In the first great battle between Pizarro and the Incas, the Spaniards slaughtered thousands with relative impunity; the Incas were just no match militarily. The Inca empire also was polygamous and highly stratified socially, so that the masses of the empire may have felt little loyalty and therefore had little compunction to fight. Similarly, the Aztec empire brutally repressed non-Aztecs, and Cortes found ready allies among the repressed. So while massive colonization may have not have been possible had the Indians possessed immunity to western diseases, the conquest of the Americas was all but inevitable.

How Far We've Come

Jean-François Millet painted this image, called Man with a Hoe; it's owned by the Getty Museum in Southern California. The painting is used as an illustration in Cochran and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion. Painted around 1860, it's one of the more depressing paintings I've seen. From the description at the Getty:

A religious fatalist, Millet believed that man was condemned to bear his burdens. This farmer is Everyman. His face is lit, yet composed of blots of color that give him no individuality. He is big and dirty and utterly exhausted by the backbreaking work of turning this rocky, thistle-ridden earth into a productive field like the one being worked in the distance. A tribute to dignity and courage in the face of a life of unremitting exertion, Man with a Hoe was long considered a symbol of the laboring class.

And to think that so many people romanticize the pre-industrial era.