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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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"phenotypic null hypothesis", according to Google Ngram, does not appear before 2002 and it's usage going after 2010. It's a neologism.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=phenotypic+null+hypothesis&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cphenotypic%20null%20hypothesis%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cphenotypic%20null%20hypothesis%3B%2Cc0

And disingenious one. For testing medications, null hypothesis "it doesn't work" is useful because we have voluminous history of ineffective medications. We don't have prior history of controlled experiments on population IQ differences. It's like theists requiring atheists to prove.

Jack and Jane both collected some stones on beach. Compute average size of stone each of them collected. Must they be same, exactly to 10-digit after comma, unless proved otherwise?

Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes

As been said, it is looking at rightists under leftists theory of universe. What about "rightists don't want certain kind of government-mandated redistribution which give a net harm to society" or "rightists don't want their bikes stolen"?

Now I am going to violate rules and say that intelligence is clearly biological. It's not controversial to say that fish are smarter than jellyfish, and crocodiles are smarter than fish, and rats are smarter than crocodiles. It's only when feelings are hurt it requires some "phenotypic null hypothesis". Yes, intelligence has long causal chain, but so are many biological phenomena.

Your