LSE Idiocy
From comments in this Crooked Timber post, a somewhat overlooked
part of "evolutionary psychologist" Satoshi Kanazawa's extraordinarily
crap article for Psychology Today:
For example, because they have existed much longer in human
evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes
than other races.
As comment #30 points out, this is staggeringly stupid:
Does he think that other "races" were created from scratch more
recently than Africans with no deleterious mutations? Even using his
assumptions they will have inherited harmful mutations from their
ancestors in just the same way as Africans have.
And as you say, all this ignores the fact that harmful mutations will
be selected against. In reality we expect a balance between natural
selection (lowering the frequency of harmful mutations) and new
mutations.
Seriously, saying something this dumb ought to be grounds for your alma
mater to revoke your PhD.
Considering they've stood by him as he's made
numerous
other scientific and methodological gaffes, I expect LSE and
Psychology Today will probably promote Kanazawa instead.
