The FDA’s approval in 1990 of cochlear implants that enable some of the deaf to hear set off a political struggle. On one side were the hearing parents of deaf children, who tend to assume that five senses are better than four. On the other were deaf civil rights activists who saw technological ...
This week’s awarding of the (quasi-) Nobel Prize in economics to David Card for, in part, an immigration study that I definitively undermined way back in 2006 raises a nagging question in my mind: As cancel culture gets ever more pervasive, are my better insights tending, perversely, to dumb down ...
In Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, the best-selling cognitive scientist comes out, perhaps unsurprisingly, in favor of rationality. Since the 1990s, Pinker has been a leading spokesman for a sort of ultra-sophisticated common sense. ...
Behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality has been much anticipated by scientists worried that the dumbing down of discourse in the name of diversity might eventually get their funding cut. After years of trying out on the science ...
The sudden crossing of the Rio Grande river at Del Rio, Texas, by 15,000 Haitians is a reminder that the most prophetic novel of the last half century was the late Jean Raspail’s 1973 book The Camp of the Saints about a million third-worlders landing on the beaches of France, and whites being ...
Why is it so hard to predict the future? For example, why didn’t the Biden Administration guess that few soldiers of the now-defunct Afghan National Army would feel like risking becoming the last Afghan to die for the American-backed government, so once the U.S. closed Bagram air base there’d ...
After a pandemic pause, momentum in behavioral genetics is once again building, threatening to undermine confidence in the conventional woke wisdom. Now, I’ve been warning against genetic triumphalism because the world keeps changing and nobody knows what will come next. But the prospect for the ...
How seriously should whites take the ever-increasing levels of racial hate expressed toward them in outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post? Perhaps the fad over the past eight years to express fear and loathing of “whiteness” (i.e., whites) will always be more bark than ...
Can racial gaps in cognitive skills narrow? Possibly. After all, we have seen a number of historic examples of ethnicities pulling ahead of their neighbors by doing things smarter after they came to enthusiastically acknowledge the superiority of Western European modes of thought. Two famous ...
“There is a great deal of a ruin in a nation,” replied Adam Smith to a friend who lamented that General Burgoyne’s defeat by the American rebels at 1777’s Battle of Saratoga had ruined Great Britain. And the United States in the 21st century has seemed exceptionally impervious (so far) to ...
