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This page is from the late 1990s, so some of these won't work.

Renaissance Men

Edward M. Miller
For some time, I've believed that the most needed intellectual development would be for someone to come along and reunify the traditions of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. Well, that person is here: Ed Miller is an economist who has turned himself into a remarkable evolutionary biologist.

For example, it recently occurred to me that the remarkable personality differences so often seen among brothers raised in the same household could be the result of natural selection for personality diversity among one's descendants. Just as it's advisable to diversity your financial investment portfolio, it makes sense to diversify your most important portfolio: your descendants. To insure their survival, your genes want your descendants to include both aggressive, fearless risk-takers, and cautious stay-at-homes. I jotted down this idea, and sent it to Ed. He sent me back a 30 page paper he'd written on exactly that subject three years ago.

Ed writes mostly scientific papers, and does not seek out publicity. But, he's creating a remarkable body of work that will someday be understood as ranking among the most important in the study of human nature. The link is to the excellent collection of Ed's papers on Louis R. Andrews' interesting website, Stalking the Wild Taboo.

George Gilder
About 15 years ago, Gilder turned himself into a high-tech visionary, and has since made a lot of money. His computer articles are of course interesting and often brilliant, though it's hard not to be wrong a lot of the time in such a fast-changing field. What definitely has withstood the test of time, however, are his writings from 1975-1981 synthesizing sex, race, and economics.

Students of Human Diversity

Arthur Hu's Index of Diversity
This is a colossal collection of data (and highly sensible commentary) about group differences: race, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, etc.

J. Philippe Rushton
Dr. Rushton is a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, and author of what I call Rushton's Rule: that on a remarkably wide variety of physical, mental, and social measures, you find the African and East Asian averages at opposite ends, with the white average in the mediocre middle. I don't think anybody who has lived in multiethnic big cities could sincerely dispute this observation (I noticed it when I was at UCLA from 1980-82, and you probably are at least vaguely aware of this phenomenon, too). That of course has not saved Dr. Rushton from an enormous amount of abuse. The above link is to an autobiographical essay. And here's a good selection of his papers. 

Prof. Randy Skelton -- Biological Anthropology Course
Dr. Skelton has graciously posted the full text of his 38 lectures on Introductory Physical Anthropology at the University of Montana. A part-time forensic anthropologist (i.e., the cops call him in when somebody finds a decaying corpse and they need to establish its sex and race as the first step in identifying it), he is immune to the hoo-ha that pervades the field of anthropology. This link goes to his 37th lecture, a fascinating description of how populations differ in physical shape.

Michael Bailey
A psychologist at Northwestern, Bailey is a leading researcher into homosexuality, and one of the handful of realists on this subject where moralizing (whether of the religious or politically correct variety -- "Gays: Sinners Against God or Victims of Society?") is standard.

The Rev. Reggie White -- Remarks before the Wisconsin Legislature
Green Bay Packer lineman Reggie White recently made a speech in which he asked, "Why did God make us so different?" He then listed strengths of each major ethnic group in America, and concluded, "When you put all of that together, guess what it makes? It forms a complete image of God." He was vilified in the sports sections across America for saying this.

g-Men

Chris Brand
Dr. Brand is a London School differential psychologist, who was recently fired by Edinborough U., despite his 27 years of tenure, for expressing "disgraceful" opinions in his Internet newsletter. He appears to have put his involuntary free time to work publishing everything he knows (which is a lot) about the human mind on the Web. Highly educational and intensely opinionated. Lots of fun.  

Daniel Seligman
My all time favorite columnist, for many years author of Fortune's "Keeping Up" column. This is a link to his Forbes archive.

Sportsmen

Stephen Seiler 
My coauthor on "Track & Battlefield" on the growing gender gap in running performance. We actually are two separate people. I'm probably the evil twin, but Stephen's pretty politically impious, too. He's a Ph.D. sports physiologist from Texas currently teaching at Agder College in Norway. This is Stephen's homepage for scientifically-oriented endurance sport enthusiasts.

Amby Burfoot
Executive Editor of Runner's World, Burfoot wrote the ground-breaking 1992 article "White Men Can't Run."

John Manners
John Manners grew up in the highlands of Kenya and is friends with many of the gold medalist runners from the fascinating Kalenjin tribe: they're only 0.05% of the world's population, but they win 40% of the highest honors in men's distance running.

Track Statistics Links
Track & Field is a terrific source of raw data for anybody interested in human biodiversity. Various Scandinavian fanatics have put together websites with insane amounts of track statistics.

Evolutionary Psychologists

Steven Goldberg
Steve wrote the classic "The Inevitability of Patriarchy," which has a deep impact on me when I read it back in 1982: I finally saw a demonstration that the social science could actually be a science.

Jared Diamond
Diamond's articles in the Discover magazine are usually a delight. The early ones were collected in his brilliant book, The 3rd Chimpanzee. Recently, however, he's decided that what the world needs is another Scourge of Racism, which lead him to write quite possibly the dopiest article ("Race without Color") ever written on the subject of race. In it, he argues that traditional definitions of races are no more valid than races based on, say, lactose intolerance: thus Swedes and African Fulanis belong in the lactose tolerant race, while Japanese and African Ibos belong in the lactose intolerant race. (This would mean many children would not belong to the same race as both of their parents!) Not surprisingly, this is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom. Of course, he never seems to realize that races are simply based on family trees. They are extremely extended families.

Steven Pinker
Steven is a terrifically bright cognitive scientist, linguist, and evolutionary psychologist. He's also a big admirer or Tom Wolfe and Thomas Sowell. The dilemma he's facing is that he tries to deny the importance of human diversity -- at the end of The Language Instinct he loudly announces that nothing could be more boring than studying differences among humans. (In reality, what could be more interesting?) The problem is that without human differences to study, such as between stroke victims and healthy people, or between men and women, he wouldn't know much of anything about human nature in general. Similarities and contrasts are the warp and woof of information. So, he'll either have to hamstring his curiosity or come out of the closet and admit that the study of human biodiversity is critical to understanding human nature. We'll see whether he has the courage to follow the science rather than play it safe.

William Calvin
Calvin is an evolutionary neurophysiologist, rather in the mold of Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker. His website is enormous and gorgeous to look at.

Edward O. Wilson
The founder of sociobiology, this is a link to a couple of chapters from his bestseller Consilience.

Geoffrey Miller:
Dr. Miller is a young evolutionary psychologist at the University of London, home of the Galton school of differential psychology, who is trying to unite evolutionary psychology, with its emphasis on how all humans are the same, and differential psychology, with it's emphasis on how we differ. His upcoming book is Courting Minds: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature  

Dave Barry
Although lots of people prefer his exploding-cow-style stories, Dave Barry is also one of America's most insightful observers of human nature. Click here for the Amazon listing of his masterpiece, Dave Barry's Guide to Guys. This book contains enough brilliant (and of course hilarious) ideas about the differences between males and females to keep every evolutionary psychologist in America busy for a decade. The link above is to an archive of his old columns.

Economists

Thomas Sowell
That Sowell is never mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Economics says a lot about the dreary state of economics. Sowell's reached an interesting stage in his career: he's not particularly young anymore, so does he conserve his efforts and focus on writing a few things that will endure for decades, or does he write a huge amount in order to influence the world right now? He's chosen to write non-stop -- a book a year, a syndicated newspaper column, and his Forbes column -- so only intermittently does he reach his maximum level of eloquence. Still, pretty good Sowell is a lot better than practically anybody else.

Robert H. Frank
One of the more interesting economists, Cornell's Frank has written a Darwinian account of the role of human emotions, called "Passions within Reason."

Steven Durlauf
Steve and I used to compete in debate and speech tournaments back in high school. (He always beat me.) He's an economist now at the U. of Wisconsin, and is co-director of Economics research (along with Brian Arthur) at the celebrated Santa Fe Institute, home of Complexity Theory.

Military Men

John Keegan
The leading British military historian, Keegan's The Face of Battle may have been the first historical work to fully explain what combat is really like and why.

Charles Moskos
The leading sociologist of the military, Moskos was my main influence when writing "Where the Races Relate." 

Men (and a Woman) of Letters

G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton was an overwhelmingly intelligent man. He's little known today, except as an inexhaustible source for quotations. His current obscurity is partly due to his Catholicism, and partly due to his cheerfulness. In our high culture, "dark" is among the most prestigious adjectives. It probably stems from the link between artistic creativity and clinical depression. Nonetheless,  there are plenty of exceptions to this prejudice, and Chesterton, like Nabokov, was a big one.

Raymond Chandler
B&W movie versions of Chandler's work, even classics like Bogart's The Big Sleep, couldn't do justice to Chandler's Nabokovian eye. Fortunately, Chinatown looks and sounds like genuine Chandler (even though it's not).

Robert Heinlein
The biggest single influence on my boyhood, I recently reread about 20 of his science fiction books. Between 1959 and 1966 Heinlein published three books that remain cult novels today. Remarkably, they are worshipped by three almost mutually exclusive audiences: Starship Troopers (military men), Stranger in a Strange Land (hippies and New Agers), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (libertarians).

Vladimir Nabokov
I'm looking forward to someday seeing Adrian Lyne's censored version of Lolita. I picked Lyne out as the best man to film Lolita upon seeing his brilliant Pepsi ads of the early 1980's. Kubrick's version is fun but artistically wrong-headed: how could he film this gorgeous ode to the American outdoors in black & white in England?

Camille Paglia
Paglia's Sexual Personae would be my pick as Book of the Nineties. Since then she's devoted most of her enormous energy to becoming a pundit and a celebrity, as this link to her Salon column shows. 

Tom Stoppard
Two points: (1) The key to appreciating Stoppard is to read his plays before you see them. (2) During the Seventies and Eighties, Stoppard was the English-speaking world's only leading writer of drama or fiction to regularly include anti-communist themes in his works.

Evelyn Waugh
When I was in college in the late 1970's, nobody there (except me) thought of Waugh as a great novelist. Conservatives who denounce attempts to Expand the Canon should recall that they were largely responsible for expanding the canon so that Waugh could be recognized as a peer of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

P.G. Wodehouse
Like Waugh, Wodehouse was long dismissed as just another popular, middle-brow writer; but he's finally recognized as one of the true literary artists of the 20th century. Probably the closest we've since come to Bertie and Jeeves's superbly crafted stories about nothing is Seinfeld.

Tom Wolfe
Wolfe might well be the Great American Writer of the second half of the 20th Century. He's been largely missing in action since Bonfire of the Vanities, but this long article on Edward O. Wilson, neuroscience, IQ, evolution, and a lot of other stuff is certainly interesting, and shows that he's plugged into the most important intellectual trends.

Men of Law

Richard Posner
Professor Posner of the University of Chicago Law School and the Chief Judge of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is almost certainly the most important judge in America not on the Supreme Court. Yet, he's unlikely to ever ascend to that body because his curiosity forces him to write books on topics sure to get him in trouble if nominated (e.g., Sex & Reason).

Richard Epstein
The other brilliant Richard in the U. of C.'s "Law & Economics" movement, Epstein is author of the best book on race discrimination, Forbidden Grounds.

Daniel D. Polsby
Dan is a law professor at Northwestern. Most notably, he is the world's smartest opponent of gun control. I tried arguing with him a few times on the subject, and found it was like playing chess with Kasparov: bang, bang, bang, checkmate. He's also written hugely important law articles offering the first practical alternative to the political gerrymandering of Congressional districts.

Walter Olson
Libertarian critic of modern American law, Olson is author of The Litigation Explosion.

Nerds

Nerd Resource -- by Bill Chapman
Nerdishness is a hugely important topic in the modern world, with self-proclaimed nerds like Bill Gates increasingly dominating the global economy. Yet, as far as I can tell from web searches, no academic has yet undertaken any sort of formal study of nerdishness. Therefore, the best sources on this topic are websites developed by introspective nerds like Bill Chapman, a Cal Tech grad and Silicon Valleyite.

The New Hacker's Dictionary -- Portrait of J. Random Hacker
Steven Pinker of MIT rightly recommends this wonderful glossary as providing the best portrait of nerdishness. Especially useful is the "Portrait": it provides a more organized description of the typical computer hacker than the lexicographical section.

Bill Gates: Nerd or Autistic?
One intriguing avenue for future research into nerdishness is it's connection with the better-studied phenomenon of autism.

Up-And-Comers

Enter Stage Right
A couple of years ago, a Canadian college student (pseudonym Gord Gekko) e-mailed me to beg for articles for his new webzine. I sent him three unpublished efforts (two of them have since been published by NR), which were the only articles not by Gord Gekko in those issues, rather like the initial issue of "Ivory Tower" in Waugh's Put Out More Flags. Strikingly, Gord's webzine keeps getting better, and now has lots of articles each month by people who aren't even Gord at all! It's still pretty Ayn Randish, but that's a good phase for youngsters to go through -- after all, we now entrust the American economy to a long-time Rand disciple, Alan Greenspan.

Doug Newman
Doug is a witty fellow who puts out a "Christian Libertarian" homepage. Lots of wry humor. Odd how Christian and Libertarian are usually seen as incompatible today, when they were the two bedrock philosophies underlying the enormous progress in Britain and America during the Victorian age.

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