There is a great interview with the blogger who calls herself “HBD Chick” at Hoover Hog. Her focus is Northwestern Europe and its contrasts with the rest of Europe. One of her foci is cousin marriage and the consequences for civility and organization of a society. Cousin marriage. she suspects, focuses loyalty and altruism with the clan (we call this ‘corruption’) and interferes with loyalty to and organization of larger groups, like nations.
She inadvertently sets out a challenge to people like me: what exactly would be the consequences for kin selection (or whatever we call it these days) of say ten generations of common cousin marriage? Time to get to work……
Like many of us who are fascinated with human diversity, she has little or no interest in what are called race differences. The original impetus for “HBD blogging” seems to have been the reaction of thoughtful knowledgeable people to the self-righteous squealing and outright lying that followed The Bell Curve and before that Jensen’s 1969 monograph. No one it seems cares much about that any longer.
West Hunter 
“Like many of us who are fascinated with human diversity, she has little or no interest in what are called race differences.”
Exactly. Lovely nod to HBD Chick. She’s been a big inspiration for my own blogging (as have yourself and Dr. Cochran). To me, it seems silly to focus on “race” differences – as if the continental races are the only human groups that could appreciably differ in their average traits (as David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed and Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America suggest about Euro-Americans).
DHF is a fave. Thanks for the tip on Woodard
I get a sizable amount of traffic from hbdchick, who honors me by putting me on her blogroll in “thought-provoking”. And yet for the life of me, I can’t understand a single one of her posts! I don’t know if it’s the e.e. cummings thing or the term “cousin marriage”. And the diagrams. I think science defeats me with the diagrams. I feel sooooo inadequate every time I check out her blog. Given that my entire heritage is German, Scotch Irish, English, Welsh, and French, I should give it another go.
I’m much more interested in the political maneuverings that the West, particularly America, is engaging in to avoid dealing with “HBD” and the totalitarian nature of groupthink that distorts policy decisions, particularly in education. The cause of the differences matters little to me, once it’s clear that the causes aren’t easily fixable.
hbd*chick’s honor of Education Realist is merited.
absolutely! glad i could send you some traffic, ed. (^_^)
@ed – “And yet for the life of me, I can’t understand a single one of her posts!”
sorry ’bout that. some of that probably has to do with me being confused half the time when i blog (i can see you nodding in agreement there, mr. cochran (~_^) ) — explanations don’t become clearer when one is still trying to work the answer(s) out oneself.
one of these days i’ll write it all down in one place, and i’ll throw in some Big Letters, too! i’ll let you know when that happens. (^_^)
That very well could be the reason I have trouble following, given that science isn’t my domain of knowledge, which is putting it mildly.
I’m exactly the opposite kind of writer, really. As a talker, I’m all over the place (and I talk A Lot), and have to ruthlessly structure my thinking, take a verbal qualude, and engage in all sorts of mental editing techniques to keep my discourse focused for public consumption. But while my writing itself is often unstructured, I usually don’t even start an essay until I know what I want to say. Writing, for me, is acknowledgement that it’s not just talk anymore, that I have come to some sort of conclusion.
That is indeed an excellent interview. While I’m not a “major player” in terms of HBD blogging (see my posts on such here; most of my blogging deals with matters other than HBD), I’ve also blogged about matters other than interracial differences.
Introduced to HBD by JayMan and also influenced in some ways by hbd* chick, I’ve taken an interest in differences within the various Hispanic subgroups (full disclosure: I’m Hispanic – part Dominican part Puerto Rican), with some posts on education (though Education Realist has much more experience in that domain)…
“Like many of us who are fascinated with human diversity, she has little or no interest in what are called race differences.”
What do you mean by this? How could someone interested in HBD not be aware/interested/cognizant of race differences?
Perhaps it would be better to say that that isn’t all that she’s interested in…
@anon1 – “How could someone interested in HBD not be aware/interested/cognizant of race differences?”
what toddy cat said.
of course i’m aware/interested/cognizant of race differences. it’s just that i, personally, find the differences between smaller populations — north vs. south vs. west vs. east europeans, west vs. east vs. south africans (bantus), east vs. southeast asians — more interesting. and i want to know which of those differences are connected to human biodiversity.
I just checked out your site hbd chick and I must say I found your links both to breaking news and other interesting blog sites to be very impressive. Thank you for all your hard work, or maybe I should say sharing a mutual joy of learning new things.
@dave – “I found your links both to breaking news and other interesting blog sites to be very impressive.”
awww, shucks! thanks for saying so. (*^_^*)
Lame answers to the “woman” questions, disappointing. Sisterhood is dead!