A few months ago on this site I posited Derbyshire’s Law, inspired by the well-known Godwin’s Law:
Derbyshire’s Law: As the comment thread following an online article relating to race and/or IQ grows longer, the probability of a commenter declaring that Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man is the last word on the subject approaches 1.
I was therefore glad to see Derbyshire’s Law vindicated on the comment thread to this exceptionally silly column by Tim Stanley in the Daily Telegraph. [“IQ tests don't test your intelligence. They test your patience,” DT, Dec. 7th.]
The Law is affirmed by a commenter timed as “3 hours ago” on a thread whose oldest comments are “a day ago” at the time of reading. Taking the latter to mean 24 hours, the current Derbyshire Quotient here is 21/24, or 88 percent of the time into the thread.
