Non-Technical Review of the "10,000 Year Explosion".

[A]

Nope. I didn't write it. I'm neither a qualified nor an impartial judge for Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's 2009 "The 10,000 Year Explosion".

That out of the way, I'll tell you what I did. I did something better: I searched the net for reviews to outsource the task. This is what I found.

Like most books, "The 10,000 Year Explosion" has had multiple reviews, some more technical, some less so, some favourable, others no so much, from the broader public and scholars.

Then I found this really thought-provoking gem. I consider it so for several reasons. Its author is one Emil O. W. Kirkegaard (unrelated to that Kierkegaard): he sounds like a normally intelligent and reasonably educated layman with a self-professed interest in science. Given that scholarly reviews commend the book for its non-technical language, appropriate to undergraduates, Kirkegaard's judgement suggests how the book could be received by its public.

Just as importantly, Kirkegaard is highly enthusiastic and his review leaves no room for doubt on that. I'll quote only the opening paragraph (do read the whole thing). Without further ado (emphasis mine):

"Review of The 10000 Year Explosion (Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending)

"November 7, 2012 by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

"This is a nontechnical overall introduction to how human evolution has happened. it mentions a lot of stuff i didnt know. i wud have liked more references. the book is openly race realist, and i was waiting for it to mention that the reason Africa is so backwards is that africans are so dumb, but it was only hinted at. instead, the authors focused the last chapter on a higher than average group, the jews. this is probably a smart move. once it has been acknowledged that the asians and jews are smarter than whites, one cannot shrug off other racial differences as being due to white racism, white supremacy, biased IQ tests, and so on."

How much of that is only a reflection of a non-professional reviewer's previous biases? Co-author Henry Harpending's profile at the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests Kirkegaard did not distort the book's basic message much, if at all.

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Social democracy has always been little more than a conclusion in search of an argument. That is not peculiar to social democracy. With social democrats, however, this became an art form.

That pre-ordained conclusion is twofold: (1) capitalism must be saved come what may, and (2) they are capitalism's saviours.

To uphold that conclusion is costly. New challenges pop up every day. In an emergency, any argument supporting The Conclusion will have to do. That explains social democrats' attraction to Keynes and to the less mainstream versions of his ideas. That also explains their often hard to disguise adoption of extreme right-wing ideas: ready-made arguments galore.

Fear not, a long and boring argument is not in this post. There is, I think, a more efficient argument. A picture is worth a thousand words:

(source)

In this particular case, however, the label "post Keynesian" involves not only a shady social democratic blogger posing as an academic while endorsing kooky thinkers with kooky ideas and links to doubtful groups, but real academics with a professional reputation to maintain who might think those endorsements aren't such a good idea. Like Caesar's wife, public intellectuals must be not only chaste, but beyond suspicion.

You see the problem there, don't you?

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Tyler Cowen reviews "The 10,000 Year Explosion" (January 22, 2009).

Steven Pinker's guarded but otherwise sympathetic comment on their earlier (and to Pinker evidently flattering) 2005 paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence", also reported in their book. It's interesting to observe Pinker attempting to remain impartial and detached. To his credit, he did try. Did he succeed? You be the judge.

Image Credits:
[A] "The BADGER explosion on April 18, 1953, as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site". Author: National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office. Source: Wikimedia. Work in the public domain.