All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 22, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
43:10
Helmuth Nyborg: "What Made Europe Great & What Could Destroy It" (2017)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Our first speaker, Professor Helmuth Nyborg, has been fighting against this terrible anti-free speech wave that has swept across Europe.
At one time, he was entirely relieved of his teaching duties at the University of Aarhus in Denmark because of his research on IQ differences by sex and by race.
It's hard enough to study those things in the United States, but in Europe, it's even worse.
He had to launch a full-scale lawsuit in order to get his teaching responsibilities back.
And even more recently, Professor Nyborg was the subject of a charge from the Danish government for having conducted dishonorable science, of all things.
Of course, he cleared his name, and that charge has been dropped.
But this just goes to show you the incredible oppression of...
Free thought and divergent thought that prevails not only in Denmark, but most of Europe today.
And in the teeth of all of this persecution, Professor Nyborg has continued to do his research, showing the very grit and determination that it took in 1960 to win a bronze medal for his country in the Olympics in sprint canoeing.
Well, today, Professor Nyborg will speak on what made Europe great.
And what could destroy it?
Please welcome Professor Nyborg.
Thank you very much, Jarrett.
I think I'll begin by warn you, because I will challenge your view on civilization, on democracy.
I think they are entirely physical problems.
It's not a new idea.
Ludwig Boltzmann, the famous mathematician and physician, he said in 1859 that Darwinian selection probably was a selection according to How efficiently you can collect energy and prosper from it.
Okay. I have a lot of data, so I will sometimes proceed very fast and hope you are a fast reader.
And Jared actually warned me that you are so well-versed in intelligence that I could almost skip most of my slides.
Okay. I will use Charles Murray's 2003 book, Human Accomplishment, to define what I call high civilization.
Murray noted that it was the white European males born in or originating within this small marked area of Europe, who produced almost all the major advances in science and in the arts since the 14th century.
As agreed by at least 50% of the authoritative sources.
They made civilization great in Europe, and some of them, perhaps some of you, later traveled to offshoot countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia.
So what made these people so special?
To explain this, I will use the thermodynamic solar irradiance selection hypothesis.
I call it the TSIS.
It is based entirely on physical and chemical principles.
One is that sun power weakened as the early migrant traveled up north.
Another that this reduces the vital capacity of the Econiche.
Survival thus became increasingly harder the further north they went.
This figure shows the geophysics behind it.
We now see that Murray identified the physically optimized survivors who reached the northern marine west coastal climate I have marked in the red circle.
They, and only they, developed what Francis Galton calls high civilization already in 1869.
What precisely do we mean by physically optimized?
A reasonable hypothesis is That the increasingly colder, energy-poor climates select for a larger brain, higher IQ, and the ability to cooperate.
But can we check the velocity of that?
Yes, already in 1984, Beals and his colleagues found that the prehistoric brain size is more closely related to temperature than are other.
Do we also see contemporary traces in the data?
Yes, the blue and the red bars illustrate the temperature-related volumes of 10,000 to 1.2 million year-old brain specimens.
Beals and his colleagues concluded that each degree of equatorial distance adds 2.5 cubic centimeter to the volume.
The gray bars are Rushton's and Rushton's 2003 estimates.
So the rule we can deduct from this seems to be that the colder the climate, the larger the brain now and then.
What about selection for intelligence?
We know that intelligence correlates 0.3 to 0.45 with brain size.
Do we find temperature-related north-south gradients for intelligence?
The answer is yes.
You see here that IQ correlates 0.77 with latitude and explains about half the variance cross-nationally.
Mean sub-Saharan IQ is about 90. That's where I'm going fast now because you all know that.
Rising to 85 in the Middle East and 297 in Northern Europe.
And 105 in Northeast Asia.
The thermodynamic TSIS hypothesis forbids an east-west gradient in brain size and IQ because there is no temperature gradient to cause it.
In fact, none is found.
What about altruism?
Survival in still colder northern places calls for negotiation and cooperation during orchestrated hunting, construction, and sharing of shelters and meager food resources.
To check, I extracted a first principal component from several cross-national variables like freedom, tolerance, inclusion, and safety, and named it altruistic sociability.
This construct explains 78% of the total variance, so I plotted it against absolute latitude.
This is what you get here.
It correlates 0.82 with latitude.
Warm African countries score low, cold Nordic countries high, and Middle Eastern countries in between.
Again, there is no East-West gradient.
This supports the idea that cold climate selects for brain size, intelligence, and cooperative capabilities.
How does all of this relate to our current discussion of race differences?
The problem is here that, at least as I see it, that our current racial classifications are problematic.
The obvious solution is a complete genome scan of all people, but they are still expensive and they are not yet complete.
Let me in the meantime suggest that we begin to classify people by the climate and the ecological niche they have survived in for multiple generations.
This time I extracted A first principal component from three entirely geophysical variables: current resident distance from equator, skin color, which is a multi-generational indicator of the prolonged prehistoric geographic residence of one's forefathers,
and then finally annual resident average temperature.
This ecotyping explains 91% of the total cross-geographical variance in combined distance, color, and temperature.
This is a map of five ecotypes after I split them into a continuum of equidistant pentiles.
Very warm ecotypes live around equator.
They live with an IQ of 69, and they live around the ninth degree, and they have an average aeronaut temperature of 26. Up here, we have the very cold ecotypes living around 54th degree, with 9 degrees centigrade average temperature,
and their IQ is 98. How can we do ecological mean level statistics by correlating the mean ecotype IQ with the mean ecotype brain size?
And here you see the result.
The correlation is a stunning.99.
This means that the ecological level where errors tend to balance out.
There is a perfect, virtually perfect inverse relationship between mean ecotype IQ and mean brain volume.
And this confirms the rule that the colder the climate, the latter the brain.
So do different ecotypes create different lives and different societies?
One way to check this is to consult the Human Development Index.
This index emphasizes that the developmental level of a country should be judged from people and their capacities rather than from their economy.
Warm ecotypes go low, but the index rises sharply from average ecotype living around the 14th degree latitude with temperatures below 24 degrees and rising still.
Cold and very cold ecotypes at high latitudes are progressively more developed ecotypes, thus differ in how sound a country they are able to create.
Do they also differ in level of democracy?
The blue curve shows the almost monotonic IQ rise across ecotypes.
The flat part of the red curve indicates little tendency of warm ecotypes to create.
So you see here that they differ in level of democracy.
And democracy index goes up as you go from warm to cold.
And you can see it's a drop here in the average equotype IQ.
That might signify the Middle East that there has been a sort of assortative mating that has favored first-cousin marriages, which means breeding depression,
which means that IQ and a number of recessive illnesses are prevalent.
And that might explain why Middle Eastern countries deviate from this pattern of from warm to cold and the better.
And democracy index goes up sharply as we go from cold to very cold.
We are now able to answer the question, what made Europe great?
It seems like the white-cold selected ecotypes.
who have produced these unique historically scientific and artistic productions and have developed democracy and freedom and welfare, they live up in this very small area.
And you see here, this is the population increase from the 14th century and up, actually.
And then this is the number of significant events happening.
These significant events are not made by those who have the largest brains.
They have the next largest brains, and they have what we call a resident here in cold marine areas.
Interestingly enough, Northeastern people with larger brains are not those who take most of the Nobel Prizes.
It is the lesser brain, but the brain size cannot be too small for gathering.
Nobel Prizes.
Unfortunately, the cold ecotypes of today and their way of living has recently come under considerable pressure.
You here see the declining end of a curve from Charles Murray's book, and high civilization began to decline already around 1850, according to Charles Murray.
It has declined ever since, whether measured by the number of significant people or significant discovery, whether weighted by the population number or not.
Why? Charles Murray wisely abstained from giving an explanation.
I am not that wise.
Back in 2001, I identified two sets of destructive causes.
Intrasystemic and extrasystemic, both of which reverse cold selection, you could say classical Darwinian selection.
The intrasystemic factors include improvement in food, sanitation, medication, and care for the feeble.
For the first time in history, the unfit began to have more surviving children than the fit.
The fit also Uses contraceptive means more effective than the others.
This skews the reproductive balance against the fit.
White welfare states began to support the survival and reproduction of high-risk groups, which further reduces IQ.
It also increases the rate of harmful recessive genes transmitted to the next generation and raise the mutational load.
This all means that white welfare states slowly destabilize the basis for their own high civilization by contemporary intrasystemic reversal of the evolutionary efforts of coal selection.
Here you see what happens to Denmark.
Up here you have the number of Danes.
From 1975 up to 2075, this is the measured area and these are the projected areas.
And you see that Danes are going out of business slowly but surely.
Notice that this is a logarithmic scale, so it goes from 100 and down here where you have 1% of the population.
Those four groups that really are taking over Denmark are from the Indian subcontinent, South Asia, and so from the Middle East, from North Sahara, and then from Russian states, Russian former states.
Those who remain below 1% of the population are people immigrating from other northern countries or from Western Europe, from...
European offshoots, which include United States and Canada and so on, people from South and Middle America and from North East Asia, they will remain below 1% of the population.
These are the growing people and these are the declining people.
And it actually depicts a picture of a major historic demographic transition, perhaps never seen before in history.
It means that the white welfare states, I believe that this generalizes even more to Sweden and Norway and to Germany.
And this means that the white welfare state slowly destabilizes the basis of their own high civilization by contemporary, intrasystemic reversal of the evolutionary effects.
An important factor here is the decay in differential fertility.
Ecological mean brain size and mean fertility almost perfectly inversely correlate with a stunning.97.
Warm, small-brained, low IQ ecotypes have on average more than three children and cold ecotypes far less than the 2.05 children needed for a stable reproduction.
We get this reproductive picture of the current situation, whichever way we measure fertility worldwide.
The average cold and very cold ecotypes to the right are the future losers in the demographic war game, whereas warm ecotypes to the left are the winners who take it all.
This out-of-control demographic transition spells global destiny for white competence.
With immigrant fertility based on country of origin rates and immigration rates kept constant, we see that the lower curves that the winners With IQ 110 will remain less than 20% of the population in Denmark for the rest of the country.
The upper curve suggests that with average IQs between 90 and 110, this group will grow slowly.
The real educational and economic problem is reflected in the middle curve, indicating that low IQ winners will double in number before 2080.
Their training potential allows only for taking the very slow, simple, supervised jobs seen to the left of the red line.
What is worse, these jobs are rapidly disappearing in cold-ecotype high-tech societies, and a new and fast-growing underclass is formed, which actually may fuel Racism on both sides.
Another problem is the inverse relationship between IQ and various social pathologies.
For example, the line at the bottom suggests that 90% of those low IQ individuals tend to drop out of high school.
They risk running into various occupational, financial, and family problems.
A recent report indicated that even the third-generation immigrants born, raised, and educated in Denmark lie far behind Danish pupils in primary school.
They are even further behind than the first wave of immigration.
That means their grandparents.
This suggests that even high-level social engineering prove unable to solve the problem, which then presents irreversible difficulties in cold ecotype countries.
The inverse relationship also means that replacing cold ecotypes with warm will raise the corruption index nationally as well as internationally.
And I think the available crime statistics and other shows that this is the case.
With respect to religion, almost all warm ecotypes admit they believe in a personal god, and warm dogmatic believers are more fertile than cold, selected atheists or agnostics.
Moreover, Muslims have more children than any Other religious grouping.
I had a publication coming out together with three colleagues a few months ago which documents this.
This presents particular complicated problems for cold ecotype countries in the red circle.
The majority of immigrants to, say, Denmark thus come from countries marked dark in the figure over here.
And the figure to the left shows that more than half of all Muslim practices first-cousin marriages.
This increases their inbreeding depression, as I just mentioned, lower IQ, and it put a heavy load on medical, psychiatric, and social institutions.
A further problem is that Islam challenged the common political and democratic principles of cold, ecotype areas.
In general, Islam's view on women's role in society, the importance of Sharia law, and the proper type of punishment differ from the ideals of open societies.
A particular demographic interest is, I think, that almost half of all Muslims favors death penalty for leaving Islam.
This fortifies group coherence.
To an extent not seen in other religions and makes Islam politically rather powerful.
A final example of external damage to cold ecotype areas takes point of departure in the observation that sex crimes are in general inversely related to IQ.
This graph from Sweden reveals that about half of all convicted sexual perpetrators since 2005 come from Middle Eastern Muslim countries, despite them being less than 10% of the total population.
About a fifth of the perpetrators are from Africa, even if their part of the population is even lower.
Deviations from a strict north-south gradient in what I just talked about.
The Inuit population deviates because their very cold areas promote inbreeding depression for IQ and other traits.
And actually they have an IQ that is markedly lower than Danes.
Very cold-selected Northeast Asian people, like Chinese and Japanese, were possibly forced down south again during glacial times, but their large brain size, high IQ, and altruistic sociability were conserved.
The ancient Egypt, Greeks, and Roman empires may have been established by some Central European cold ecotypes who were forced back south.
By a sudden climatic change some 8,000 years ago.
But there's still insufficient data to document that.
Some red-haired, some blue-eyed people are found in areas where the Egyptian empire ruled, but that's not enough to prove the case.
So one demographic rule seems to be that sudden local climate changes and related famines have caused mass immigration in all directions throughout history.
The impressive temporal stability of the North-South gradient for brain size, IQ, and democracy is therefore all the more impressive.
Let me in conclusion suggest that High civilization is a geophysical phenomenon.
High civilization is possible only after coal migratory energy optimization, which excludes the possibility that warm ecotypes can support it.
Warm ecotypes can in general not adapt to life in coal ecotype areas.
Then we have to remember that The distribution of all polygenic traits like IQ and altruism are normally distributed, which means that you can always expect that people from warm,
ecotype areas will have some percentage of highly gifted people who can easily adapt to a life in a high-tech society.
But as a general rule, they will not be able to do that when we talk about the groups.
Samuel Huntington has made some interesting observations.
What I just said collides with most of the current political understanding, including what Samuel said.
He, for example, sees demographics' survival in terms of a class of civilizations.
I think the data rather suggests a class of geophysical ecotypes.
The perspective is here that high civilization drowns everywhere if the less intelligent, fertile, religiously determinate, warm ecotypes take over, and that will reduce the quality of the intelligent,
barren, less dogmatic cold ecotypes and their homes, basically as a consequence of the current irresponsive and unopposed demographic The existential results would be a deconstruction of the Enlightenment period.
We may be at the brink of a new dark era.
This situation seems to leave cold ecotypes with three options.
We can submit.
We can initiate honorable repatriation of warm ecotypes.
Or my personal fear is that we face civil war.
Unfortunately, the past 50 years of uninformed migration policy by most Western leaders makes submission the most likely outcome.
I personally find that our children deserve a better future.
But it undoubtedly will take a more informed political determination than we see right now and so in the ancient Rome.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Well, I'm sure that Professor Nyborg will be willing to take some questions, but I have one that I would like to ask.
On this scheme of warm ecotypes and cold ecotypes, where do the Eskimos fit in?
You certainly know that Denmark and Greenland are associated.
And it is the case that people, Inuit people from Greenland, would like to free themselves.
But with an average IQ that is far below the average Danish, I think it will end the culture up there.
And, of course, they would be taken over by some more powerful nations.
That would probably be the United States because Russians would also be interested in this global perspective to gain control over Greenland.
People with an average IQ that low would have difficulties to keep an efficient social and democratic system running.
Why is their average IQ low despite their high latitude?
It is probably because when you go further north than Denmark or Scandinavia, then the resources are very scarce.
Which means that the place can...
Entertain few people because there's not enough to eat.
That's the energy aspect of it.
And then you have to marry the girl in the next town.
But the next town isn't there.
There are only some small places.
So you would see that there will be some consanguinity.
And that might explain why the high northern people cannot develop a high society.
Do you think that within continental Europe there are any significant differences in, you know, culture, intelligence or otherwise between, say, northern Europeans or southern Europeans, since that's kind of been a question that's been in the movement for years now?
There have been several studies of IQ differences between north and south, and it seems to confirm the general rule of...
The more south, the lower the IQ, the smaller the brains.
So yes, I think we see the correlated lower quality of societies.
I think you all know that Greece, for example, has always had a fairly high corruption index and their democracy has been overruled several times by military forces and so on.
This happens less often in Scandinavia.
So I think there are north-south differences even within Europe.
Yes. Professor, you've just provided the best explanation I've ever heard about the way the world works.
I really hope you'll make this available in a book form so it's not just something that this relatively small group of Americans has a chance to hear.
I hope it's something that can be heard by the entire world because it's our only hope.
Thank you very much for your talk.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes, sir.
You alluded to this briefly about the case of Russia, but although they have made certainly significant contributions in music, science, literature, they're not really comparable to Northern Europe.
Would that be because of the traditional totalitarian society and oppression there?
Would there be some other explanation for it?
If you draw a line and you go up from the low IQ countries to the high IQ countries, you would see that socialist countries are significantly below that line.
It seems to be the case, and I'm not a politician, so I'm guessing widely now, It seems to be the case that if you have planned economics, then all individualistic endeavors are subdued,
which means that raw capitalism cannot function.
And even if I don't like raw capitalism in the most brutal sense, it seems that any society with a good economy requires some individualism.
But then again, we have the problem that you have very large brains in Japan and China.
And again, you see that at least China are actually dropping at the high end of the curve in productivity, perhaps because their political system.
But precisely what is meant by that, I don't know.
Sir, you have shown a high correlation.
between temperature from the cold to the warm and the factors promoting the rise of civilization.
However, as we all know, correlation is not the same as causation.
Have you controlled for any and all other factors that may affect the rise of civilization?
Showing that the correlation and the causation are the same.
I have to admit that when I first prepared for this talk, I went up to 67 slides and then realized that that would perhaps transgress my possibility of expressing that.
But what I cut out was actually the physical explanation.
Because I think...
That correlations are nice, they might point to causation, but they do not prove it.
But Ludwig Boltzmann said back in the 18th century, if we see Darwinism as a physical law, then we might apply physical principles in order to explain it.
I cut that part out of my presentation because it would be too complicated to explain here.
But a former gentleman mentioned the book.
I will put it in the book.
And that doesn't satisfy you here.
I realize that.
Hello. I have a question trying to understand the correlation between IQ and behaviors like democracy and creativity.
We have China clearly, by your standards, a high IQ country, which is anything but a democracy.
and similarly exhibits very little capability for creativity, especially in technology.
They're continually having to outsource it.
So what other factor besides IQ do we have to take into account to explain the presence of creativity and democracy in some IQ peoples and absence in other IQ peoples?
I think it's a very good question, and people always say that when they cannot answer it.
I think that...
We have to see IQ as a necessary but not sufficient condition.
The effects of IQ can be subdued by political systems.
You have the Indian caste system where you can see that highly gifted people from the untouchable groups are never allowed to Express their potential, which means for India, the system of castes will actually subdue their productivity.
I think the same is seen for socialist countries.
And it's interesting because Scandinavian countries are often seen as socialist.
But apparently there's some sort of individualism that also gets through.
And that might...
Point a picture of a very complicated situation where IQ is just one component in a very complex interplay of how IQ is expressed in a particular system.
I don't know if that answers your question.
No, thank you, but I guess we're gonna have to work out, you know, the relationship between the overlay of culture on top of the foundation of IQ, I guess that's not done yet.
Right. Hi, thank you.
Very great speech.
My question is, so you focus a lot on the G factor, but how do you explain that East Asians are very specifically good at visual spatial IQ and their verbal IQ is much lower than Northern Europeans, for example?
If you go to Greenland, I have been actually traveling quite a lot in the Arctic areas as a sailor in my former life.
There you are really relying on your visuospatial skills.
Because when you walk up the icy street, the icy ways, then everything looks like everything else up there.
And only those who have a very high visuospatial skill will survive, find their way to the game, or find their way home again.
But if you talk too much in these areas, you scare the ice beers away.
That might be the easy explanation of a very difficult situation of sorting out why Northeast Asian people do well in architecture and arts and so on, but not very well in linguistic languages.
And why they have so hard to learn new languages.
So basically those other specific parts of intelligence that are outside the g-factor are relative to other...
Environmental factors besides temperature?
Yeah, you see, when you calculate IQ, and I believe that the D factor is the way to do that, then you subsume a lot of things at the item level, then you put that statistical to zero.
Then you have the group factors like visual spatial skills, verbal skills, mathematics, memory, and so on.
And then you do further analysis, you get at the G. And the G is free of the indicator, which means that it's not dependent on whether you scored on verbal or visuospatial.
But if you remain at the first order group level, then you will see differences among people in visuospatial and linguistic skills.
And it's well known that Jews score very high on verbal abilities.
Okay, thank you.
You're welcome.
In regards to political systems, why do you think it is that high IQ people, and in particular European people, were both the ones to create democracy and the ones to revive it in the 18th century?
I'm not sure I really understood it.
You said in the 18th century?
No, I'm asking why it is.
What do you think it is that high IQ people came up with democracy?
In the first place, what do you think the mechanism is between high IQ and democratic societies?
I think in order to create democracy, you need high IQ and you need freedom to express it.
So when people have a high IQ, they can get an education.
An education that...
It might sharpen your view on what is important in this situation to prefer, and it also requires that you are able to cooperate in a democracy, which means that altruistic socialism goes together with high IQ.
You cannot take IQ alone and define democracy in that terms.
So even if you are very high IQ, you are very productive.
You have to understand that sharing with other people is a good idea.
And that's a bit against capitalism.
It said you should optimize for yourself.
So democracy is a balance between high IQ ability to look through what's important, not important, and the ability to give some part of your productivity to other people.
But the problem with democracy is that if you give too much to the weak, then you have a problem of increasing exponential proportions.
And that means, again, that democracy will eat its own children.
So that is a moral problem, that to be very good, you have to protect the weak.
But if you protect too many of them, the whole system breaks down.
How do we solve that problem?
I have no idea.
Well said.
Thank you.
Here's my ignorance and therefore here's my frustration.
If evolution is for real, and I believe it is, then any people group on that map you showed is actually the stupendous badass for that place in the world.
At least until mass transportation and everything and immigration and all that.
So there's IQ.
That's great.
But that must mean there's some other Q. For which the Somali and the Gambian is at the very top.
There must be something they're better at than anything that we are good at.
Otherwise, they wouldn't still exist, would they?
And I don't understand what that is.
Well, I'm not sure I know that either, but I think that each ecotype puts different pressures on people.
And some eco-types, some eco-niches are more kind than others.
So low IQ people can survive in places where there always will be a little bit to eat.
But if you live up in the cold northern countries, you really have to be ingenious to find your food.
▲
Export Selection