On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Paul Echeverri wrote: > On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 18:29:15 -0800 (PST), Philip Hart > <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> wrote: > > > For those not keeping score, Bellesiles is a discredited historian of > > gun issues in early America - sort of the left-wing version of John Lott. > > That sort of implies you believe Lott's been discredited, which I hardly > think is the case, certainly nowhere near the scale of Bellesille's > widespread fraud. It depends on how you feel about Lott apparently making up data, coding with what seems like fraudulent intent, and anoymously or under a false name praising himself on blogs and amazon.com (v. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/lott98update.html). Eugene Volokh recently dropped Lott. I recently saw that Bellesiles is still getting peer-reviewed publication (which seems like a receipe for disaster) - I don't know if Lott can say as much. > > This is the first I'd heard of non-ideological disagreements with Diamond > > - is there something peer-reviewed I could check out? > > Not that I can think of offhand, but he lost me in the foreword with his > Noble, Smarter than Us White People, Savages bit. I totally didn't get that - he's an ethnologist and has some interest in arguing that stone-age people in New Guinea, the Amazon, etc. are innately as smart as us and are sophisticated in their knowledge of their environment. After all, the thesis that "the West conquered the world because us White folks are just plain superior" is still popular. Incidentally, I don't want to get into an argument about the Flynn effect, but I've read that a result of our recent evolution during civilization is a shrinking of the average brain size, perhaps in order to make us less agressively "adult" and hence better village- dwellers - i.e., we've domesticated ourselves from wolves to golden retrievers. > > ps - "Echeverri" has a cool linguistic story, right? - maybe Basque? > > Give the man a cigar. Thanks, but can I have a cheese steak or a shot of bourbon instead?