The critic draws this contrast: Survival by reflex requires a thousand unrelated tools, hammered into shape by a thousand separate processes on a thousand anvils. Survival by reason, on the other hand, requires only one tool, one process, one anvil. An animal that avoids nightshade berries by reason has all the equipment he needs to avoid tigers, smallpox, ill-designed bridges, thalidomide, altruists, avalanches, and all the perils of this life.

But is it clear that reason is as unitary a faculty as all that? If the critic is right, then there ought to be only one kind of intelligence. But consider so-called “idiot savants” — people who can perform impressive calculating feats like multiplying two thirty-digit numbers in their heads in a few seconds. Some of them are otherwise intelligent, some are quite the reverse. [12] It is a common occurrence for someone to be a genius in one field (such as mathematics, chess, or music) and no other. [13] Would you defer to Einstein’s judgement on a question of politics? [14] Or to Beethoven’s on mathematics? [15] Or to Bobby Fischer’s on linguistics or etymology? [16] Or to that of a randomly selected college professor on the free market? [17]

More generally, persons concerned with devising IQ tests and defining IQ almost immediately discover that devising a test to select the brightest thinker is like devising a test to select the best athlete. In athletics, you devise a kind of decathlon: so many points for sprinting ability, so many for long-distance running, so many for the pole vault, and so on. The decision as to how much a given event or skill should count is essentially arbitrary, and if a black militant declares that boxing and basketball are the only real tests of an athlete, while a Norwegian argues for cross-country skiing as the best measure of all-round fitness, there is no objective basis for rejecting either claim. Similarly, an IQ test is a blend of several tests. Some of the questions are diagram analogies:

Such questions are easy to devise. If they measure intelligence, why not make the test entirely of such questions? The reason is that persons who score well on this sort of question may score badly (or vice versa) on other sorts which have just as good a claim to be considered measures of intelligence. Even when we eliminate anything that looks like a cultural-dependent question — vocabulary tests are the most obvious offenders — the problem remains.

A sensitive element is introduced when group performances are compared. On some questions, women score better than men. On others, men score better than women. Standard IQ tests have a mix of questions so proportioned that the average scores for women and for men will be equal. If an ardent feminist (or anti-feminist) argues that this constitutes slanting the tests to avoid showing which sex is really more intelligent, the only reasonable reply is that intellectual ability, like athletic ability, is not a single thing. [18]

(07e) The PDist’s Dilemma: One Gene or Many?

Objection:
  The preceding section confuses intelligence with rationality. Admittedly there are many mental abilities that different men can have in different proportions. No PDist denies this. He remembers that Ken Danagger was tone-deaf. [19] But a tone-deaf man is no less rational than a musical genius. A man who cannot add four and seven without counting on his fingers lacks a mental ability that Euler and von Neumann had. But he is no less capable than they of grasping the fact that if the correct answer is eleven then it cannot be twelve.

Rationality, unlike intelligence, is unitary. Intelligence is a matter of degree. But Rationality is an all-or-nothing trait. You either have it or you don’t. Man is rational because he is an agent of volitional consciousness, and there is no such thing as being more or less volitional. That is what I mean by saying that rationality is a unitary trait, and as such more economical.

Reply:
  Let us suppose that rationality is indeed unitary, not a complex of separate traits, but a single thing, so that an animal either has it or doesn’t, period. A single mutation, a single gene, produced a rational individual (as rational as Aristotle, though probably less intelligent) from non-rational parents.

The trouble with this hypothesis is that it renders the Darwinian hypothesis irrelevant. Darwinism purports to show how small random fluctuations in genetic material can be channeled by Natural Selection so as to produce a new species over many generations. Now, when the individual steps are small, the result is largely a matter of Natural Selection, but when they are large, it is largely a matter of luck. [20]

Let me illustrate. Suppose that you go to a casino with a hundred dollars in your pocket, determined to play roulette until you have doubled your assets or gone broke, whichever happens first. The wheel has eighteen red numbers, eighteen black, and two zeros, on which the house wins, so that if you bet on a color, you have eighteen chances to win and twenty chances to lose on each spin. (The discrepancy is called the house edge and is what keeps casinos prosperous.) Now if you bet your whole bankroll on a single spin, your chances of winning are 9 in 19, or about 47.36842 percent, which gives you a fighting chance, though not quite an even one. If your betting unit is one n'th the size of your initial bankroll, your chances of doubling that bankroll are 1/[1+(20/18)~n], where “/” means “divided by” and “~” means “raised to the power.” [The dot-matrix printers did not have a means for printing superscipts. the calculation James wants to present is: 1 ÷ [1 + (20 ÷ 18)ⁿ.] The smaller your individual bets, the smaller your chances of ultimate success, as shown in the following table:

In other words, when you reach the final result ($200 or empty pockets) in a few large steps, the result is largely a matter of what is commonly called “Luck.” When you proceed by a series of small steps, the dominant factor is the house edge, which makes it all but inevitable that the house will end up with all your money.

Now Natural Selection is like the house edge. If the genetic material in a biological population is subject to small random fluctuations, then Natural Selection will tend to eliminate the harmful ones and leave the beneficial ones to accumulate, so that the end result is, for example, not merely an eye, but a pair of eyes (for depth perception), and not merely eyes, but eyes that distinguish colors, that have an adjustable focal length, that can be turned in their sockets, and so on. If, on the other hand, the eyes are produced by a single mutation, it is much more a matter of chance whether they have the details nicely worked out, or are just something the animal can live with. If the standard typewriter keyboard arrangement had developed gradually, with numerous small variations competing for the approval of typists, one might expect the end result to be an efficient arrangement. In fact, it was devised in one step, and all that can be said for it is that typists can live with it. [21]

Similarly with the development of the mind. Suppose, on the one hand, that it came about, as we may suppose the eye did, as the result of numerous small mutations. Now Natural Selection goes to work, and whenever a given trait is even slightly advantageous, its possessors, having a slightly lower mortality rate or slightly higher reproduction rate, slowly come to outnumber their rivals. And so the new trait is established, and can combine with or serve as a starting point for subsequent improvements. And through all this, the pressure of Natural Selection toward a thoroughly competent organism is as inexorable as the pressure of the house edge toward a profitable evening for the casino. But the culling process is based entirely on the external physical behavior of the animal. It is therefore just as long, tedious, and uneconomical as the process of eliminating less fit reflexes and leaving the better ones. Externally considered, the two processes are identical!

Suppose, on the other hand, that the mind was produced in a single step, by some remarkable mutation. This eliminates the long slow process, with its lack of “economy,” but does so at the price of making it no longer a result that has anything to do with Natural Selection, except in the restricted sense that the mutation is not a lethal one. It produces a result that the organism can live with, but not necessarily one that is finely tuned, or even coarsely, to the needs of the organism. There is no reason at all to expect that it will be a suitable or adequate instrument for the pursuit of truth. Thus the PDist hypothesis of rationality acquired in a single step, instead of a short cut that enables the rational mind to reach the goal ahead of reflex, turns out to be a short circuit that destroys the mind, or at any rate destroys the possibility of describing the origins of the mind in PDist terms.

(07f) True versus False Thoughts

Objection:
  You have been leading me on a false scent. The issue is not thoughts versus reflexes, but true thoughts versus false ones. Admittedly Natural Selection does not, as such, favor thought over reflex. Many species survive without thoughts. But Dr. Branden does not claim that without free will men could not have thoughts. He claims that without free will, there would be no reason why their thoughts should be evidential. If your argument is to parallel his, you must claim that Natural Selection is just as likely to produce a species whose thoughts have no resemblance to reality as one whose thoughts are substantially sound. Your strategy must be to contrast the rational, not with the non-rational, but with the irrational, the anti-rational. To contrast true thoughts, not with no thoughts, but with false thoughts, and claim that false thoughts are just as useful.

A species that, to use your own illustration, leaves nightshade berries alone because it believes that nightshade berries are the property of elves, and is similarly deluded about everything else, is the sort of suggestion that I can only regard as the sick fantasy of a disordered mind! I refer not to the mind of the supposed entity whose belief in elves contributes to his survival (since there is no such entity), but to the mind of the theist who proposes to defend belief in God by persuading us that a belief in elves is potentially useful.

You say that an organism’s ideas might be false but useful, and adduce the example of the rabbit that survives by running because it believes the fox wants to play tag. An apt illustration, sir! The word “hare-brained” describes your ideas perfectly.

Reply:
  I am happy to accept the PDist’s concession that PDism in no way favors thinking over non-thinking entities, and I now prepare to meet him on his chosen ground, the contrast between two animals, one of whom has a basically correct notion of reality, and the other a basically distorted notion. The question is whether we can automatically assume, without further inquiry, that the former is better equipped to survive.

Let us start with a simple example. Suppose that a man is born with his color perceptions all awry. Those objects which other people see as red, he sees as green, and vice versa. In fact, he reverses every pair of colors which appear as opposites on the color chart. Now this man will never have any occasion to discover that he is different from his neighbors. He will learn to point to grass and call it “green,” and to tulips and call them “red.” He will mean something different from other people by these words, but this will be no hindrance to him in conversing with his neighbors, in interpreting traffic lights, in painting pictures, or in any other activity.

Let us take another example. Suppose someone believes that he is a robot made of metal and at least as indestructible as a Sherman tank. You ask of him why he dodges cars when crossing the street. He answers, “To avoid denting their bumpers!” You ask him why he eats. He answers, “To avoid becoming a social outcast! Eating has great social significance for humans. They feel friendlier toward someone they have shared a meal with. They are uncomfortable eating in front of someone who is not eating. They dislike those who have a different diet. People here despise the French for eating frogs and snails, and the Eskimos for eating blubber, and the Chinese for eating dogs. Some of them will distrust a man because he drinks alcohol, or because he doesn’t, or because he drinks bourbon instead of Scotch, or vice versa. Can you imagine how they would feel about us robots if we never ate anything at all? How much more alien we would seem to them? We are newcomers to your country, a small and little-understood minority, and we cannot afford to be careless about such things.”

You ask him about other aspects of his behavior. To each question he has a perfectly plausible answer. He has a systematically distorted belief about the nature of reality, but his over-all physical behavior is not very different from anyone else’s, and he seems likely to live to a ripe old age, dodging cars, eating well, avoiding cold and damp (rust, you know!), and generally at peace with his environment.

Impossible, you say? I don’s see why. His error is less radical than that of Christian Scientists, who think that all material objects are illusions, and who nevertheless go around pretending to sit on the chairs that seem to be there, and mange quite nicely, and incidentally, are considered just as good risks by the life insurance companies as anyone else.

Why should there not be a whole species of animals that have radically wrong beliefs about the nature of the world but whose beliefs form the basis for useful actions? They think that they are moving when they are really being still, and vice versa, but they are also confused about when it is safest to move and when it is safest to be still, so everything works out all right.

Here the PDist may object:
  I claim that man needs rationality for survival, not infallibility. I am accordingly unmoved by your contention that a man who is mistaken about one particular thing is not automatically destined for an early grave. I grant that not every error is fatal. We would all be dead if it were.

Let us take a look at your examples. A man with his color perceptions reversed. I agree that the man you describe will not be at all less likely to survive on account of his error. I simply deny that you have described a man with an error. After all, we define “blue” by pointing to a series of blue objects and saying “I mean this.” [22] If two people point to the same objects, are they not offering the same definition, and do they not mean the same thing? Clearly, by recognizing colors correctly we simply mean being able to distinguish correctly between like-colored and unlike-colored objects. And this the man can do as well as anyone.

As for your man who thinks he is a robot, I think it unlikely that this delusion will never have any unfortunate consequences, but I note that you have postulated just one error, about one thing, everything else normal. To extrapolate from that to notions about someone’s being simply out of touch with the truth is a philosophical blunder on a par with suggesting that, since we occasionally read a newspaper article with a misprint and fail to notice the misprint, “reading” instead a coherent sentence, it is therefore possible that this morning’s paper contained nothing but misprints, and that we read it without noticing.

You go on to suggest the Christian Scientist as an example of a man who is mistaken, not just about a detail here and there, but about the whole nature of reality. He thinks that all material objects are illusions, and what could be more sweeping an error than that? I reply that in one sense it is a sweeping error, and in another sense not. A man who holds that the Earth is still, and that the sun, the stars, and the planets revolve around it has in one sense committed a sweeping error. He is wrong about the motion of every thing he sees. In another sense, the motion of the Earth is a technical detail of astronomy. Most people, even people with a good scientific training, unless they happen to be astronomers, go for days at a time without glancing at the ground under their feet and reminding themselves that of course it is moving around the sun at several miles a second. In the same way, a Christian Scientist would give a radically wrong answer to the question, “What is that chair?” (provided that he understood what you were driving at — otherwise he might answer “It’s a Chippendale.”) But his attitude toward it when metaphysics is not being discussed is like anyone else’s. What do you do with chairs? You sit on them. But they aren’t real? Then you aren’t really sitting, but you don’t let it bother you. Big deal. I can’t see that the peculiarities of Christian Science constitute the kind of radical disorientation that your position requires.

Now, having warmed up, gained a little momentum, and started to roll, you attempt (for the first time) an example of a species that is really wrong about everything. Of course, you immediately hit a snag. One cannot exchange ideas of moving and being still, because there are many ways of moving, but only one way to be still.

You tried a cheap shot a few paragraphs back by challenging me to build a conscious entity from non-living parts, just to show that it could be done. I now challenge you to a far more reasonable task. Construct a verbal description of a species and its interaction with the physical world around it, where the thoughts of the species are false, not just here and there, but to an extent that would justify us in saying that reality and their idea of reality have nothing in common. But also show how, by acting on their idea of reality, they always do the right thing to keep out of trouble. When you have done that, then I will begin to take your argument seriously.

To this objection from the PDist I reply as follows:
  You are asking me to write the equivalent of a full-scale novel. (This reminds me that there are a number of novels around about people who radically misinterpret their situation and are protected from serious mishap by their own naiveté. Pioneer, Go Home, No Time for Sergeants, and The Good Soldier Schweik come to mind.) I readily grant that I am not up to the task. But I do not think that this proves the PDist’s point. Suppose that English were the only language in the world. Someone advances the theory that other languages are possible. A skeptic challenges him to prove the point by inventing a language [23] that is not an obvious adaptation of English, like Pig Latin, or, on a higher level, pidgin English. He says, “Of course you can make up a few words. You can announce that in your language ‘koira’ is the word for dog and ‘kissa’ the word for cat, and ‘herr’ the word for a Kantian philosopher. But can you construct an entire language and talk in it? And if you could, can you really compare the result to English? It is natural to call a dog a dog, because it is one. A is A. It is highly artificial and contrived to call it anything else. The two ways of communicating are simply not parallel. Obvious the whole idea of a genuine language non-trivially different from English is an idle dream. To say that such a language is not only possible, but could be just as simple and natural and useful and efficient as English, and that we could just as well have been taking [talking?] this language all along, is nothing but the sick fantasy of a disordered mind! Let me rephrase that. It is a ‘herr’-brained idea!”

Let us compare two scenarios. In the first, a light shines into a man’s eyes. Nerves react, and trigger a mental act of awareness, so that the man thinks, “This is too bright. I will close my eyes.” The mental acting of deciding triggers a motor nerve impulse, which causes the man to close his eyes. In the second scenario, light shines in a man’s eyes. Nerves react, and trigger a mental act of awareness, so that the man thinks, “That is too salty. I will spit it out.” The mental act of deciding triggers a motor impulse, which causes the man to close his eyes. In either scenario, an unfathomable gap has been leaped both ways. There is no sense in which one of the two thoughts, “This is bright,” and “This is salty,” is an event more unlike the twitching of the optic nerve than the other.

With few exceptions, words do no resemble the things they refer to, so that “dog,” despite our monolinguist’s conviction to the contrary, is not really a more natural word for a dog than “koira.” In the same way, mental acts do not resemble the physical situations that they are about. Every mental act is a radically different thing from every physical process whatsoever. [24] And so the thought, “This is too bright,” is not a more economical (or direct, or simple) part of a causal sequence involving a bright light and the physical act of avoiding it than is the thought “This is too salty.”

That, I remind the reader is the whole point of Dr. Branden’s assertion that if our thoughts were simply caused by physical factors, there would be no reason for them to be true.

There is an apparent simplicity to saying, “The arrangement is that when this man is confronted with something blue, he perceives blueness, when he touches something cold, he perceives coldness, and so on.” Just so there is an apparent simplicity to saying, “The arrangement is that we call dogs ‘dogs,’ cats ‘cats,’ and so on.” But this is our old friend the confusion between simplicity of explanation and simplicity of construction. It need not detain us.

I may note in passing the peculiar terms of the PDist’s challenge. He asks me to describe a non-trivial delusion which has no dangerous consequences. But his method of treating my examples shows that he takes the absence of dangerous consequences to be sufficient reason in itself for classifying a delusion as trivial. This smacks of pragmatism, of which more later.

(07f) From Survival to Utility to Truth

The PDist offers us the following syllogism:

Or, as otherwise stated:

Now the connection between competence to survive and competence to discover the truth cannot simply be taken for granted in all areas. A skeptic might argue as follows:

If, as the PDists tell us, our reasoning powers evolved because it was conducive to survival to be able to solve certain kinds of problems rationally, then our minds are competent to deal with problems and situations like those faced by our pre-hominid ancestors. But this does not mean that they are competent to deal with all problems. Frogs have eyes, developed to help them survive and deal with reality. It would be natural to suppose that a frog can see every not-too-small object in his field of vision. But this turns out not to be the case. The optic nerve of the frog is actually so constructed that he sees only objects moving in a particular way — like flies. There is a realm (call it Realm A) of things he is equipped to see, and another realm (call it Realm B) of everything else. Our own lungs are equipped for breathing an oxygen atmosphere, where we evolved. They are not equipped for breathing a methane atmosphere, where we did not evolve. What more natural than that our minds should be similarly restricted — that there should be a Realm A of things that man’s mind is competent to investigate, and another Realm B that it is not.

For example: It is plausible to say that correct beliefs about the position and velocity of a tiger are useful (meaning life-preserving, and Darwinianly advantageous) in avoiding a tiger, and that correct beliefs about the position and velocity of a ship or a plane are useful (in the same sense) in setting the plane down on a runway or navigating the ship to its destination. We might also argue that the skills of navigation are present, in root form, in the avoiding of the tiger, that both involve the same kind of reasoning about spatial relationships. So far there is no problem.

But now modern physicists tell us that space is curved (whatever that means). They tell us that triangles (especially very large ones) have angles that do not add up to one hundred eighty degrees. They tell us that objects (especially very small ones) do not have exact co-ordinates of position and velocity, but only approximate ones, and that the inexactitude lies not in our observations but in the objects themselves. They tell us that the Law of Causality is only approximately or ‘statistically’ true. They say that if two events happen some distance apart at ‘about the same time,’ it may be that one observer will say that one event happened first, another that the other happened first, a third that they happened simultaneously, and that all three are right — that there is no objective (i.e. observer-independent) answer to the question of what happened first. They say that two people at Point A, who witnessed an event some time ago at Point A, may disagree on how long ago it happened, and (provided one of them has travelled) they may both be right. We complain that all this talk is an insult to our intelligence — that it contradicts our fundamental notions of space, time, cause, and reality — in short, that it is contrary to common sense. They cheerfully reply:

“You must remember that our common-sense notions of things developed as a result of observing middle-sized objects (neither so large as a galaxy nor so small as an electron) either standing still or moving at moderate speeds. And our common-sense notions do in fact describe such objects correctly, or as near as makes no difference. It is only when we venture outside the realm of such objects that reality takes on a topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland sort of character and common sense goes out the window.”

To this I (the skeptic) reply that not only our common sense but also our minds as a whole developed as a result of dealing with middle-sized objects moving moderate speeds. It was not to the survival advantage of our remote ancestors to derive correct mathematical equations about quasars, as opposed to incorrect ones, for the simple reason that they never troubled themselves about quasars one way or another.

It follows that, like the frog with his specialized vision, we have a Realm A (middle-sized objects moving at moderate speeds) which we are competent to investigate, and a Realm B (everything else) which we are not. We know that we are not competent to study Realm B for three reasons. First because everything starts going crazy when we do. Second, because a consideration of our evolutionary history makes it clear that this is not the sort of things our minds developed to study. Third because our minds are only equipped to find truth on those areas that it is useful for us to explore, and relativity and quantum theory are not among those areas. The chief practical effect of such explorations thus far is the prospect of wiping out the human race, and that is not what I call useful!

Before my atheistic readers begin eagerly copying out the preceding paragraphs as evidence that theists are the sworn enemies of the mind, let me emphatically state that the position of the skeptic as just stated is not my own position. I happen to think that the mind of man is equipped to investigate objects of any size, moving at any speed. But then, I think that it was designed for that purpose. The PDist, on the other hand, thinks that it evolved while studying Realm A, surviving because it thought useful (and therefore true) thoughts about Realm A. Why should he expect its thoughts about Realm B to be either useful or true? How can he avoid simply writing off Realm B as unknowable?

(It is not an answer, by the way, to quote Dr. Branden’s dictum that nothing is unknowable, that to claim to know that something is unknowable is to contradict oneself. [25] That is simply the objection that the competence of the mind is an axiom. We’ve been through that before. Of course Realm B is not unknowable. The point is that the PDist premise leads to the (absurd) conclusion that it is, and that therefore (modus tollens) the PDist premise must be false.)

Now it may seem to the plain blunt man-in-the-street, who never paid much attention to Einstein anyway, that giving up the claim to have the kind of minds that are capable of figuring out whether Einstein was right is a minor concession. But it is only the thin end of the wedge. The skeptic continues:

Realm A consists of those matter on which we are fitted to make true judgements, because they are the sorts of matters which our remote ancestors made judgements when the human mind was in the process of evolving, and are matters on which right judgement was conducive to survival. Realm B is everything else. Now we know that some judgements are in Realm B How do we draw the boundary between the two realms? If we are not sure which realm a given matter belongs to, is that question itself in Realm A or Realm B? Does trying to decide that question put us into an infinite regress? Were infinite regresses among the questions that Neanderthal Man contemplated? It seems that in order to decide what goes in which realm, we must know something about the evolutionary history of the human species. But what can be less likely than that our remote ancestors formulated hypotheses about their own evolutionary history, and that Nature punished the ones whose hypotheses were incorrect by killing them off? But if this did not happen, then evolutionary theory is in Realm B<, which means both that PDism is in Realm B and that every question about the boundary between the realms is a question in Realm B. I think that the time has come to check my premises and repudiate PDism! 

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue. Readers who prefer to ignore the links in the text and follow the notes on a separate page, may open a separate page with the references here.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet, especially here. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[12] Martin Gardner, Mathematical Carnival (Vintage, 1977), page 66.
  The ability to do arithmetic rapidly in one’s head seems to have only moderate correlation with general intelligence and even less with mathematical insight and creativity. Some of the most distinguished mathematicians have had trouble making change, and many professional “lightning calculators” (although not the best) have been dullards with respect to all other mental abilities.

[13] Eliot Hearst, “Man and machine: Chess achievements and chess thinking,” in Chess Skill in Man and Machine, ed. Peter W. Frey (Springer-Verlag, 1977), page. 182.
  Nonchessplayers commonly regard the chessmaster as a “brain” or “quiz kid” who is sure to be a success in any kind of intellectual endeavor. Of course, chessmasters like to encourage such flattering appraisals, but there is little or no evidence from psychological studies or personal observations to substantiate the belief. An admittedly crude Russian study performed with the cooperation of participants in the 1925 Moscow International Tournament failed to yield any support for the idea that chessplayers are generally more intelligent than nonchessplayers.
  [See the remainder of the article.]

[14] Find a good Einstein quote. ??? [James never seems to have gotten around to finding the quotation he wanted to use. The reader will find a discussion of Einstein’s political views on a Wikipedia page devoted to them. A quotation from his book The World As I See It may have been suitable for James’s purposes: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”]

[15] Beethoven never mastered the multiplication table. In order to calculate fourteen times two, he wrote fourteen 2s and added them up.

[16] Fischer belongs to a group which holds that the Anglo-Saxon peoples are descended from the ancient Israelites. In support of this, they derive the word “British” from the Hebrew “brit” (covenant) and “ish” (man) — hence, “man of the covenant.” Again, the Israelites were descended from Isaac, and “Isaac’s sons” yields “Saxons.” [James is referring to the Worldwide Church of God, founded by Herbert W. Armstrong.]

[17] An official who worked for the Office of Price Administration during the Second World War records somewhere that a professor of his acquaintance suggested to him, perfectly seriously, that in order to simplify commerce and avoid a multitude of regulations and complications the OPA ought to establish a price of one dollar for every item whatever, from a used car to a tube of toothpaste. This seems to me to go beyond lack of background in economic theory. And yet the author of this brainwave may have been perfectly competent or even brilliant in his own specialty. [James gives no source for this story.]

[18] Richard M. Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier (Doubleday, 1979), pp. 200ff.
  ... males are better at manipulating three-dimensional space. When boys and girls are asked to mentally rotate or fold an object, the boys will overwhelmingly outperform girls. “I folded it in my mind” is the typical male response. Girls, when explaining how they perform the same task, are likely to produce elaborate verbal descriptions, which, because they are less appropriate to the task, result in frequent errors.
  In an attempt to understand the sex differences in spatial ability, EEG measurements have recently been made of the accompanying electrical events going on within the brain....
  In eleven subtests of the WAIS (the most widely used test of general intelligence), only two subtests (digit span and picture arrangement) reveal similar mean scores for males and females. On six of the nine remaining subtests, males scored higher than females. The three tests where the females scored highest were similarities, vocabulary, and digit-symbol substitution.
  Further support for differences in brain functioning comes from Wechsler’s experience with other subtests, which he eventually had to omit from the original WAIS battery. A cube-analysis test, for example, was excluded because, after testing thousands of subjects, a large sex bias appeared to favor males. In all, thirty tests eventually had to eliminated because they discriminated in favor of one or the other sex.
  [See also the rest of the chapter, and the book.]

[19] AS 728m (782ss).

[20] To avoid misunderstanding, I specify that I do not consider either a mutation or the result of spinning a roulette wheel to be a causeless event. I mean simply that, given our present knowledge, one guess is as good as another as to which number will come up on the next spin, although we can make all sorts of statistical predictions with considerable confidence and accuracy — and similarly for mutations.

[21] ??? typewriter arrangement. [I have no idea what James wanted to say here. If it was just a matter of his not being able to recall what the arrangement is called at the moment he was preparing the dot-matrix printout, the word is “querty.”]

[22] A. Rand, “Intro. to Obj. Epistemology” 5/10/2e [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 5, number 10 would be October 1966. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume.] & IOE 53. [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, the monograph published by The Objectivist, Inc., 1967, page 40; the Expanded Second edition published by New American Library in 1990, page 41.]

[23] Someone will point out that there are invented languages, not just hints as in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the far more ambitious constructions of J.R.R. Tolkien, but full-fledged languages. I reply that either, like Esperanto, they are closely related to existing languages or, like Resol [also known as Solresol; see the Wikipedia article], they are so completely artificial that not even their most enthusiastic advocates can actually converse in them. Volapuk [also known as Volpük; see the Wikipedia article] is both.

[24] Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought (Macmillan, 1939); pages 336–37, apud N. Branden, PSE 8. [The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam, 1971), page 8].
  We speak of an idea as clear or confused, as apposite or inapposite, as witty or dull. Are such term s intelligible when applied to those motions of electrons, atoms, molecules, or muscles, which for [the reductive materialist] are all there is to consciousness? Can a motion be clear, or cogent, or witty? What exactly would clear motion be like? What sort of thing is a germane or cogent reflex? Or a witty muscular reaction? These adjectives are perfectly in order when applied to ideas; they become at once absurd when applied to movements in muscle or nerve....
  On the other hand, movements have attributes which are unthinkable as applied to ideas. Movements have velocity; but what is the average velocity of one’s ideas on a protective tariff? Movements have direction; would there be any sense in talking of the north-easterly direction of one’s thoughts on teh morality of revenge?

R. [Robert] Efron, “Biology Without Consciousness — and Its Consequences,” 7/2/12c-13e [February 1968] & PBM vol. 11 (1967) p. 15. [Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. II, no. 1, Autumn 1967, page 15. James’s “vol.11” is a typographical error.]
  This evasion become massive when the reductionist attempts to deal with the one phenomeon encountered in living organisms which does not remotely resemble anything found in the inanimate world — the phenomenon of consciousness.

[25] N. Branden, “IAD: Are certain things unknowable?” 2/1/3 [January 1963; the title James has used is the title that appears in the table of contents for The Objectivist Newsletter. The item itself carries the title “Is there any validity to the claim that certain things are unknowable?”].