Status Updates From Witches, Feminism, and the ...

half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in the old times walked among us. They were mistakes made flesh. They no longer uplifted the established rules; they endlessly criticized and undermined them, like the witches of yore. Unwell in body and mind, they were, at best, selfish and impulsive; at worst, they promoted depression

Autism, which is also associated with anorexia and Borderline Personality Disorder is itself characterized by a weak sense of self. Autistics lack the feeling that they are the same person across time and that they are in control of their thoughts and actions, possibly because, lacking empathy, they find that they cannot predict the consequences of their actions and, hypersensitive to stimuli, they are overwhelmed

If there is no objective truth, then why do postmodernists use Western medicine when they become ill instead of going to see a witch doctor? Why do wealthy Africans come to Europe for heart operations? The answer, as Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall notes, is that Western science gets results, because it is grounded in reality—in the objective truth

with greater female influence, society will become less efficient at nurturing genius, less inventive, and so less likely to win the battle of group selection

Life History Strategists are more environmentally plastic than fast Life History Strategists, meaning that they are more sensitive to their environment. This environmental sensitivity allows the organism to be optimally adapted to its environment at any given time, giving it a competitive edge in the highly competitive ecology that produces a slow Life History Strategy

Liberals have been found to value the moral foundations of equality and harm avoidance (which are also more typically female concerns), whereas conservatives value hierarchy and structure (an element of which is “truth”), group-loyalty, and sanctity. In this sense, objective truth—which could be regarded as a component of hierarchy and order—is less important than the feelings of the individual

in terms of female-influence damaging group selection, is that females are, on average, less focused on systematizing than are men. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has shown that the “extreme male brain” is intensely focused on systematizing, but deficient when it comes to empathizing. In the “extreme female brain,” this is reversed: it is strongly focused on empathizing but it is “system blind.”

push for the individualizing values: harm avoidance and attaining personal power, including through pushing for “equality.” You do this because you perceive yourself as not having power. People who are neurotic are likely to have aspects of low self-esteem and thus see themselves as lacking power, no matter how much they have in reality, and identify with others who lack power, feeling resentment and fear towards tho

stereotypical Early Modern witches, tend to be physically unattractive and masculinized, as well as single and childless. Like witches, they damage group selection by feminizing politics (reducing ethnocentrism) and academia; they push out geniuses (who benefit the group), who are obsessed with truth, in favor of “Head Girls,”

Ardent feminists would appear to be precisely the kind of women that would have been accused of witchcraft in Early Modern England

more people will be more and more individualistic, until a tipping point is reached in which the whole society flips to being fundamentally concerned with “equality” and “harm avoidance.” Just as people once competed for status by signaling their binding moral foundations, people will now do so by signaling their commitment to “equality” and “harm avoidance.”

under industrial conditions, maladaptive ideas emanate from the top of society, due to increasing levels of individualism, combined with such people having considerable societal influence. A low-IQ underclass now comprises a large portion of the bottom of society. A century ago, an underclass of this size simply didn’t exist. It’s worth noting, as well, that late Victorians had an average IQ about 15 points higher

Geoffrey Miller has argued that intelligence is extremely sensitive to mutation by virtue of the fact that the brain—as approximately 84 percent of the genome—is a massive mutational target. Thus, increased mutational load will cause intelligence to decline, because genetic health and intelligence have been selected for together, as both are adaptive. Congruous with this, intelligence is weakly positively assoc

north and west of this area, the English become increasingly Celtic. Similarly, if we move forward to England’s Civil War, support for the Puritans was mainly in the southeast of England and far south west, as well as in East Anglia, while the north was mainly Royalist. A similar cleavage can be found in England’s earlier civil war, the Wars of the Roses, in which two rival groups vied for power.

It would have made Europe much more religious and much more intelligent very quickly, likely helping to explain why both the Renaissance and the Reformation took place when they did.

Black Death swept across Europe between about 1347 and 1351. As Michael Woodley of Menie and I have argued, this, too, was a selection event. Between a third and half on the English population were killed by the plague, but among the serfs and free laborers, those of the lowest socioeconomic status, the death rate was roughly 80 percent

With the end of this warm period, and the beginning of a cold period that reached its nadir in the Maunder Minimum between 1645 and 1715, selection for these traits would have become increasingly savage, as people competed for fewer resources.

it should be noted that any kind of environmental harshness—including widespread execution—will select for intelligence. Intelligence is negatively associated with criminality and positively associated with the ability to solve social problems, something which tends to make intelligent people empathetic, altruistic, and civic-minded

Frost and Harpending calculated that this meant that up to 1 percent of the male population of Europe was executed each generation, with approximately another 1 percent dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Most of these felons, Frost and Harpending demonstrate, were young men, who could have gone on to have children.

this process would have altered the nature of Western personality

those of low IQ and poor impulse control, occupying the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, died out across generations. Intelligence is about 0.8 heritable and personality traits such as Conscientiousness are about 0.5 heritable, and both strongly predict socioeconomic status. This created “downward mobility,”