On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Philip Hart wrote: > > > 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? > This thread covers fraud, evolution, civilization, cigars, cheese steaks, and bourbon, which are intimately related to reading about Dragaera (particulary bourbon). But I wonder if the stat-guy (sorry, deleted that one) has been keeping tabs on the percentage of posts that are on topic? Maybe I'm just jealous because only Lott's name rings a bell... Ken