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Well, Ms Berlinski (you can call me Randy, I don’t mind), you forgot to make the sign of the devil before you mentioned Chomsky (I didn’t).
My bad. I have revealed an embarrassing unfamiliarity with your ways, I’m afraid, although I am entirely respectful of them, and more familiar with them, oddly, than many who would describe themselves as “of your ways.” But my failure to get the details right here is surely a genetic matter. Had I been raised as a Christian and not as a Jew, no doubt I’d be genetically just as disposed to get this one wrong–after all, the tendency to skip that part must be something just like, or at least relevantly like, the predisposition to carry the BRCA1 gene. Right?
Tsk, tsk. The correct response was “Pardon me for neglecting the full rigor of your informality.” (I stole that from Jack Vance) Can’t you get anything right?
When did this stop being fun? I was having fun, and all of a sudden you got weird.
Heh.
I dated someone who said that. Actually, everyone I’ve dated said that, now that I think about it.
That is not the message of Mr Wade’s book, and if I have that impression in my review, I apologise for having misrepresented it.
I think that most people will agree that the bulk of evolution in human societies is extrasomatic—embodied in language, culture, tradition, and shared knowledge (whether oral and passed from one generation to the next or written)—and not genetic. For example, there is no genetic difference whatsoever between North and South Koreans, and yet their cultures are about as different as any two you can find on the planet. Or consider East and West Germans before reunification: their behaviour was shaped by culture, not their genes, which were identical. Once the wall came down, what seemed like profound differences largely evaporated.
But it seems like there is a strained dogmatism among some cultural anthropologists in arguing that genetics never has an influence. Most people who contend that evolution stopped when modern humans appeared have no problem accepting that different breeds of dogs have substantially different behavioural predispositions due to having been selected for that over time. Aren’t human populations which are isolated for a number of generations comparable to that required to create a distinct breed of animal likely to have the same kind of feedback from culture to genetics which occurs in selective breeding of animals?
The full humor of that just hit me. I don’t laugh much, but this made me laugh out loud..
Hmmpf. My only real friend is Jewish. I’ll have to run this by him to see where I went wrong.
You might know him. He’s quite the thing among Aristotelians.
Oh, man, this reminds me of a funny story, but I just don’t know if I should tell the whole thing here. I may be able to compress this sufficiently to protect the innocent while preserving the hilarity.
Key points: So, I’ve just flown to Regent University to deliver a talk about Margaret Thatcher for their Annual Ronald Reagan Symposium. Regent University. As in, “Christian leadership to change the world.” As in, “founded by Pat Robertson.” As in (in case you’re still not getting the point), “One should not be hugely surprised to find Christians there, and if you’re the kind of person who finds the very existence of Christians some big huge inherently offensive problem, then you should not be taking their money to speak at their conferences.”
So, anyway, I’m sitting next to the Dean at dinner, and to my amazement, he describes a fairly personal situation (that’s not the “to my amazement” part, that’s the “I’m editing this” part) with the words, “Well, in our faith tradition we believe … ”
Upon which I interrupted and said, “Huh?”
After a pause, during which he looked at me with mild bafflement, I said, “Um … your faith tradition? Your faith tradition? Might you perhaps mean that you subscribe to a very obscure and quaint system of superstitions that few people have ever heard about … I think it’s called … let me see if I remember the name … it was something like, ‘Christianity‘?”
Which did get a laugh out of him, I’m pleased to report.
But my God (yes, mine), when we get to the point where the Dean of Regent University, of all men, feels compelled out of political correctness–and this in his own damned university–to refer to what is presumably not only his “faith tradition” but his Lord, light and salvation (and doctrinally, unless I am gravely mistaken–and I am not–what he also believes should be mine) as “our faith tradition,” we have really excelled the Soviet Union. Khrushchev-era.
It’s only a funny story if you have a dark sense of humor, I suppose.
But I do.
What are the implications of these facts for societies where current indigenous populations with those traits which generally promote socialization/peaceful coexistence limit child bearing; while at the same time those without them continue to reproduce? We seem to have reached a point – in the West, at least, via welfare – where the former group are obliged to subsidize the unlimited reproduction of the latter, setting natural selection on its head. Doesn’t this reduce selection of necessary traits for continued “functional” societies?
I grew up in Southern Africa and your article is my experience but of course, never to be discussed. I do find it amusing that american beauty is now the artificially enlarged rear ends of Kim kardashian as these were the norm with Zulu or Tswana wome. Those ladies would ask my secret to a small rear end.
Forgive me if this got covered in the comments, but I need to take issue with something.
Race is indeed a social construct. And it’s a social construct that varies from place to place and over time.
Yeah, you can show a child me, Yao Ming, and Wesley Snipes, and that can point out whose ancestry comes from Europe, East Asia, and Africa, but race as a concept is far more complex than that.
In the United States, Barack Obama, whose mother is of European ancestry and whose father is of African ancestry, is “black.” If you tested him, he’d probably show up as 50-50%, but in the US, he’s “black,” because we work under the odious “one-drop rule.” Different countries have different systems based on their individual historical circumstances.
If it were as simple as White-Black-Asian, maybe it would break down easier. But human beings have been migrating and mixing for the whole length of civilization. Where do people from India fall in the White-Black-Asian scale? Where do American Indians? Where do people from the Middle East? Each of those, in America, under our socially constructed system of “race” is a different category.
And then to extrapolate from that that the reason for X condition in Y country, seems fool hearty. Current conditions in Africa, or Europe, or China, or anywhere else, are the product of history. It’s far easier to explain the mess in various countries in Africa by history than trying to explain it with genetics.
And yet, rather than use the complex but accurate fields of political science and history to explain current political situations around the world, we need to use genetic testing and “race” to explain them?
This sounds like someone started with the conclusion (“race is why X”) and then worked backwards from there to find the answer they wanted. And that ain’t science.
A few comments:
1) Africa did have empires. Not literate, but empires. The Malians produced possibly the richest man ever. They even sent sailing ships to try to discover the other side of the Atlantic. http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-fortunes-of-africa-by-martin-meredith-1417562898
2) Natural selection was replaced in two ways. First, Africans in Africa were harvested for slaves on a massive scale. This rewarded slaver populations, including those tribes that could organize this sort of activity, and damaged more docile populations. This might increase aggression significantly. Second Africans in the United States underwent massive human selection. Those who were too uppidity were liable to get killed. White people could understand breeding. So rather than suggesting nature is the source of this variation we ought to look to other people. Slavery can breed for traits pretty quickly.
3) “Well, maybe-but the history of colonialism, the mission civilisatrice, and various democracy projects and attempts at nation building over the last two centuries may suggest it isn’t that simple.” Colonialism was largely a process of wealth extraction. For example, at the end of the colonial age, there were only 8,000 secondary school graduates out of a population of 200 million. Most were in just two countries, Ghana and Nigeria. There wasn’t a lot of civilizing going on. So there’s hardly a record there. (same WSJ article)
(more below)…
1) The slave and colonization business didn’t just damage the most promising genetic stock – it also undermined whatever stable social structures had been in place. And these don’t grow overnight. You might think the populations of the fertile crescent have the most experience with Empire (and thus most genetic familiarity), but they lack those social structures and are presently putting on a clinic on self-destruction. It is a reach to suggest a lack of genetic compatibility in this area – which is the largest nation-building effort in recent history.
2) Europeans did their own human selection – breeding out many of their best, brightest and most docile through the priesthood. I wonder what impact that might have had…
3) The social structure argument becomes more powerful when you look at black history in the US. To quote: “Sowell makes a convincing case that the folkways described by Grady McWhiney in Cracker Culture are similar to those of ghetto blacks today: “What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behaviors are projected today as aspects of a distinctive ‘black identity,'” he writes, “when in fact they are part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South.” (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/908gdgaj.asp). From that same article: “He points out that northern blacks outscored southern whites in armed forces tests in World War I, and that the sharp differences in black and white test scores so common today did not exist then, when there were sharper differences between the scores of various groups of whites.”
4) Finally, some charter schools have demonstrated phenomenal success in the education of African Americans from the worst possible backgrounds. In my mind, this by itself strongly undermines the argument for a fundamental lack of potential as made by the piece.
There are genetic impacts. But cultures quickly breed what they value and find ways to box behaviors that have no place in the broader culture. Hispanic culture, for example, tends to put more emphasis on family than education. This might just engender the idea that going away to school can take you out of the family – from both sides of the transaction. It self-promotes particular values. If there are genetic variations, I full-heartedly believe they can be overcome by the cultural norms. After all, as the author himself states, the genetic diversity within these groups far exceeds that between groups and yet the groups can maintain social identify.
Even if you decide to enshrine a particular value set, you shouldn’t assume genetic differences make for a better chance of realizing those values. American and European societies are facing massive cultural crises brought about by multiple generations of fundamental social change. Consider the “marriage gap” as reported by the Pew Social Trends in 2010. In 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all twenty-somethings were married. In 2008, just 26% were. In 2008, there was a 16 percentage point gap in marriage rates between college graduates (64%) and those with a high school diploma or less (48%). In 1960, this gap had been just four percentage points (76% vs. 72%).
IMO, this is a recipe for change – and no matter what the racial distinctions – it can risk not just bifurcating society, but breaking it down. Whatever values are being sought might be lost in the social disorder.
Ms. Berlinski, or Madame if you prefer, I wasn’t commenting on your post particularly. I just had a little hissy fit due to the subject matter. I usually always love the Sat Nite Science post. This time though, he tramps off into territory that cannot be discussed in polite, PC, society. Scientific inquiry at its core must be real, factual and testable. I’ve love a real discussion about why there are almost certainly race-related differences in intellectual ability as expressed in various ways, and about the scientific end of Darwin’s theory.
Tom- Why not start a post on those subjects you would prefer to discuss?
Sorry, Claire. I was busy trying to figure out how to crawl back off this limb I got out on.
Sorry Fred, ain’t buying it.
Barack Obama is black because Barack Obama…is black. I think we’ve all seen what he looks like, so I don’t need to post a picture.
No they don’t. The same race as defined in the US is defined elsewhere. Black is black in Africa, in China, in Mexico or in the US.
You’re confusing race with “ethnicity”.
Much less so than you would imagine…across races.
No one in England ever bred with Han Chinese in ancient times.
They bred with Saxons and Normans and Franks and Celts and Romans and Norseman etc etc etc. But those aren’t “races”.
Who said race is only white-black-asian? Only you did.
Each of these is a different category in every human society that has ever existed. You think…Indians…don’t consider race a “thing”?
Complex, yes. Accurate, no. There are multiple competing theories, and none claims to be anything as grandiose as a “general theory of economic development” or some such thing (except of course, Karl Marx’s BS…but that’s why its BS).
The resolution to this paradox is that natural selection does not necessarily pick the traits that we would like. The game is reproductive success, plain and simple. The fact that, for a brief window in the recent past, traits like abstract intelligence, trust of strangers, risktaking, literacy, nonviolence, etc. led to greater reproductive success does not mean that those traits must lead to reproductive success in the future. The traits we have come to regard as “good” for social functioning need not be the same as those traits required to function in a future society.
Fred, the response to your comment is a book-length argument. Fortunately, that’s the book Wade has written.
At the levels of anthropology, linguistics, and DNA, people’s characteristics “cluster” based on their ancestry. DNA is the most quantitative way to approach the subject. I’ve done statistical cluster analysis professionally. The goal is to group data based on similar characteristics. If you keep your paramaters tight, you reduce the number of clusters that emerge (in the limit, you get a single cluster). If you loosen your parameters too much, every data point becomes its own cluster.
Wade explains that DNA cluster analysis gives either five or seven clusters, depending on the parameterization. The five just happen to correspond to continent of origin — Africa, Indo-Europe, Aboriginal Australia & Pacific Islands, East Asia, and American Indian. If the constraints are relaxed somewhat, the Indo-European DNA cluster further divides into Europe, South Asia, and Arabia.
Although today people are more mobile than in the past, still the vast majority of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of where their parents and grandparents lived.
This can actually be helpful as medicine becomes more tailor-made. Since many diseases are specific to, or more prevalent in, different ethnicities, both diagnosis and treatment may be aided by knowing — and acknowledging — genetic heritage.
To All & John,
I guess I must chime in here and give my view. I find the argument between ‘race’ as a genetic determinant of human society and ‘race’ as a social construct determinant of human society to be immensely unproductive. This argument for me has an historical framework. Marx kicks off its social construct side in the 1840s with Das Kapital. Darwin responds with The Origin of the Species in 1860. Both are materialist reductionist hyper-speculative histories of the world based on little and often faulty data and are normally not classed as philosophies but ideologies. Both ideologies pride themselves on a contempt for morality. The difference between the two I usually summarize as:
Marx: Justifies the Murder of the Powerful by the Weak
Darwin: Justifies the Murder of the Weak by the Powerful
These arguments capture the imagination of Western Civilization and wildly increase their hold until a climactic event. In 1941 a huge tyrannical state based on an ideology of materialist reduction genetics faced off against a huge tyrannical state based on an ideology of materialist reductionist social constructs. The ensuing death struggle was truly remarkable in its savagery and total disrespect for human life.
I think the above sums up why I find this particular argument incredibly unproductive. Immanual Kant (sorry for the plug) towards the end of The Critique of Pure Reason discusses a whole class of specious (false) reasoning. He calls this dialectical reasoning. (Important: Kant predates Hegel and holds prior claim to the use of this term) The reasoning in question is dialectical because the argument is over that which can not be resolved. Thus an endless dialogue is produced that sheds no light.
John your reference to the designated attack anthropologist is rather in bad form. This gentleman was simply providing enough hard information to make it obvious that the gross over simplifications of genetic deterministic grand historical theories rest on incredibly shaky scientific ground. To give me the old canard that the new information is just around the corner and soon will be available is ridiculous. Of course, nothing the attack anthropologist said in any way supports the claims of the vast majority of social construct ‘race’ narrative peddlers. Most of these have hopelessly bought into the Marxist meta-narrative that has proven itself to be completely absurd.
Well, actually, we have gained knowledge by this exercise. We should now know what not to believe.
Regards,
Jim
I see the sparks of several debates emerging here. I look forward with some trepidation at another Evolution which our fine friend Tom seems to wish to start up again. Go for it man, but I warn you those tend to turn out like our SSM threads.
As to the subject at hand that John brings up with his book review. I think what people should always be very careful of when looking at these biological correlations is to remember how incredibly interconnected, and codependent, and multi-factorial all human behavior is. One gene with a correlation for increase in antisocial behavior does not a constitute an explanation for failed foreign policy, or anything really. It is an interesting fact from which one may generate some rather (admittedly) controversial hypothesis. These still would need to be proven and other hypothesis excluded. Furthermore there is the real possibility in humans we see the rise of an emergent state as witnessed by our sentience. Like with all emergent properties an understanding of the underlying parts is not sufficient for understanding the new state itself.
What I am curious to ask, because I haven’t read the book, is what does the author say about the modern world and race? It seems to me that while the populations of the continents were isolated from each other 30,000 years ago at least for the last several hundred years they have not been. It does not take a lot of interbreeding to allow for allele transfers to occur. Does he now predict that in the future humans will merge into one race? That would seem to be the logical conclusion.
Great post and great comments. I especially agree with the remarks from John, iWc, SoS and Valiuth about viewing genetic influences on behavior to be one potential causal factor, but not necessarily the most dominant one. Our society has trended too far toward the cliche that genetics = destiny, which is a gross oversimplification.
In this vein, there is a similar concept I think we should consider: when there is indeed a difference in a trait between two groups, but there is even greater variation in that trait within each group.
Let’s oversimplify and imagine we could identify the contribution of genetics to intelligence, and found that genetics makes race A 10% “smarter” than race B. But let’s also imagine that within race A and race B, the standard deviation from average intelligence is over 15%. How do we deal with that type of information?
Obviously we are nowhere near this type of precision when it comes to race. But how about when we tackle of the problem of physical strength in men and women when it comes to military qualifications?
James, this is where your argument completely loses traction.
Regardless of what Darwin or some of his adherents may have believed, there is nothing inherent in the theory of evolution which “justifies murder.”
Even without the theory of evolution, we have examples in everyday life of people who have incurable genetic conditions which make them “weak” (your term) – such as Down’s syndrome – yet the American society views their genetic condition as a reason for them to receive more care and treatment from all of us, not to justify their murder.
Yes! This so important, and so rarely understood. If I randomly select Man A and Woman B and they run a mile, without any more information I can’t say with any confidence who will have the faster time. But if I do the same with 10,000 men and 10,000 women (randomly selected), I can say with some confidence that the men’s average will be shorter, and that the top times will be dominated by men. So one can’t prejudge any individual’s ability or outcomes, even if we know what group he or she is a part of — the individual variation is too great. That’s true even when the group is overrepresented among marathon winners or Nobel Prize winners or violent felons.
Your comment makes some good points, but goes too far while missing a the mark elsewhere.
Son of Spengler is spot-on with his comment.
But I would take another step back: nothing in biology can be cleanly categorized, but that doesn’t mean that thinking in terms of categories can’t be immensely useful. Hair color – a classic genetic trait – doesn’t fall cleanly into discrete categories, but lies along a spectrum. Heck, even gender and species become blurry at the margins.
But that doesn’t mean that using these categories isn’t useful, provided we understand their limitations. So could it be with race, for instance with health and genetic predispositions – even if it may be off the mark with some people.
I certainly agree that it is absurd to use genetics to explain historical political movements, but last time I checked, nobody on this thread was doing so.
Oh, totes. I second this 100%.
Also, everybody needs to be reminded that correlation isn’t causation.
So even if such and such a group has a gene for something in 5% of their population, and therefore X, correlation still isn’t causation.
There’s a few things wrong with your statement. First, the name England comes from the Angles who settled there in the early Middle Ages, after coming over from Germany.
Second, the Huns probably came from northern China. They warred and pillaged all the way to Europe. If you don’t think they interbred, they most certainly did. When they got to Europe, they most certainly interbred.
There was a constant mixing of people in “ancient times.” So it’s entirely possible that Angles in Germany mixed with Huns from northern China, and their descendants carried those genes to England.
Pre-Angle Romano-Britain was a mix of local tribes and Romans. There wasn’t one Roman ethnicity. Romans came from all over the empire, including north Africa and Egypt (in Africa) and the eastern provinces (in Asia). And there were trade contact up and down the silk road, intermixing people of different populations even then.
And that’s just “ancient times.” The Middle Ages were full of invasions and migrations and movement of people, including the Golden Horde. And when they came through, they pillaged and raped.
So it’s entirely possible that you have Han Chinese genes, in a Hun who then carries them all the way to Europe, to then mix with locals in Germany, which is then carried to England, then to America, then to Texas.
The way to know is through genetic testing. Ricochet member Mike H recently posted his results, which showed him to be .01% Yakut. To me, that’s somebody ancestor migrating or being intermarried, long, long ago.
It also doesn’t imply that there is no causation. These studies are exploratory and in their infancy.
You’re not going to find causation today from genetics —> institutions and development.
Because in the modern world institutions and development —> genetic selection.
To have genetics drive institutional development you would need isolated populations over long periods of time, with no exogenous influences in their institutional development. But you never get that…today.
But the point being that in the modern world, institutions define what sort of behaviors are “acceptable” or “desirable” and hence they act in a similar way to natural selection in the past. They lead to greater preference for individuals which exhibit certain characteristics.