Yesterday morning, before the debate happened, George Borjas wrote that

It will be interesting to see how the candidates walk their way through the long and winding minefield. At the same time, they will have to acknowledge the increasingly unforgiving mood of the general public towards illegal immigration, the apparent divergence between non-Hispanics and Hispanics on this issue, and the fact that (for most candidates) their current positions on illegal immigration seem at odds with positions taken just a few months ago.[The Borjas Blog: Republicans On Immigration]

And of course, if their current positions are at odds with the ones they held a few months ago, they could also be at odds with the ones they take after they’re in office. See under “Bait and Switch” in your dictionary.

Here’s the press release from the U. of Utah about the big Cochran - Harpending - Hawks - Moyzis - Wang paper. (Look for more coverage tonight and tomorrow in the press.)

Are Humans Evolving Faster?

“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

– “We aren’t the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago,” he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. “The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.”

– “Human races are evolving away from each other,” Harpending says. “Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.” He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, “and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then.”

“Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief that modern humans [those who widely adopted advanced tools and art] appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same. We show that humans are changing relatively rapidly on a scale of centuries to millennia, and that these changes are different in different continental groups.”

(more…)

From The New Yorker:

None of the Above
What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
by Malcolm Gladwell

 December 17, 2007

….And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances.

Judging by how often this unreplicated 1961 study gets cited in 2007, you’d have to say that one side in this debate is a little short on evidence.

Anyway, I just had time to skim Malcolm’s new piece looking for Eyferth so I can’t say how good it is overall. It’s a review of James Flynn’s recent book, so that’s a good omen. Malcolm’s modus operandi is essentially to fall into a deep, credulous infatuation with whichever social scientist he’s writing about, but, fortunately, Flynn is a worthy subject, a gentleman and a scholar. So, hopefully, Malcolm won’t go too far off the rails this time.

Here’s my VDARE.com review of Flynn’s book from last Labor Day, which both Dr. and Mrs. Flynn liked very much. And here’s my preview of the 2006 Flynn-Murray debate. And here’s my 2006 article with graphs showing that the long-assumed Flynn-effect convergence in IQs hasn’t happened yet on a global scale.

When reading Ruben Navarrette Jr, [Send him mail]it’s important to remember that he’s nominally a Hispanic conservative, like Linda Chavez and Raul Lowery Contreras. His column runs on Townhall.com. Here he is writing in favor of the EEOC persecuting the Salvation Army:

So don’t be surprised if many Hispanics applaud the decision by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to sue the Salvation Army because its thrift store in Framingham, Mass., required employees to speak only English on the job. The requirement was posted, and yet at least two Hispanic employees defiantly continued to speak Spanish while at work. The EEOC claimed that their firings violated the law. English-only proponents said the EEOC’s position violated common sense.

The critics are wrong. It’s not that a business doesn’t have the right to expect its employees to speak English. It does. It just doesn’t have the right to prevent workers from speaking languages other than English. That’s what this case is about, after all – not a requirement that employees be able to speak English, but a rule that banned the speaking of other languages.[The great language debateBy Ruben Navarrette Jr. , December 5, 2007]

But what Navarrette is forgetting is that employers are responsible, under another section of EEOC’s rules, the EEOC sexual and national origin harassment regulations, for their employees’ speech.

See Eugene Volokh’s article What Speech Does “Hostile Work Environment” Harassment Law Restrict? for the gory details of what speech employers are supposed to be monitoring and preventing.

Any racial slur or sexual harassment by an employee can result in fines or liability for an employer. How is the employer supposed to protect himself from this if he can’t tell what they’re saying? And of course, since Mexico has lower standards of what constitutes sexual harassment or racism than Americans do, the danger that a low-level Spanish speaking employee is saying something offensive is fairly severe.