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City Journal associate editor Matthew Hennessey and contributing editor John Tierney discuss the politicization of science and how the Left’s dominance in universities and the scientific community actually threatens progress.
Read John Tierney’s article from the Autumn 2016 Issue of City Journal, The Real War on Science.
City Journal is a magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute.
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I’m super interested in what anonymous thinks about this.
The big difference, it seems, is that people on the right tend to want to limit government’s involvement in their lives – both at home and on the job, while those on the left want government involved in every detail of our lives. Therefore, conservative and libertarian views on this or that scientific issue is not automatically jammed into politics, while the same is not true for the left’s views. To people who believe that everything is political, science is just politics by another name.
Im curious to find what the 5 genetic races are and a decent laymans description.
Wikipedia is not helpful here.
Nicolas Wade discusses it at length in Before the Dawn. Essentially, it means human populations that were isolated from each other tens of thousands of years, and roughly corresponds to the continents (there are several different ways to cut it; doesn’t really matter). Relevant section:
As always, it’s more complicated than that. First, there’s a lot of diversity to be found within these groups: there are short Danes and tall Koreans, etc. The groups, however, are usefully predictive in several ways as there are, for instance, no natural Korean blondes. And taking people’s race into account is non-controversial in making medical diagnoses.
Second, Africa is kind of weird, and there is apparently more genetic variation among sub-Saharan Africans (as group) than between them as a group and other populations. For a weird analogy from a good piece I highly recommend:
As some commentators pointed out in that post’s comments, “fish” is kind of arbitrary itself, but that’s sort of besides the point. Any time you’re dealing with scientific classification, you’re going to get arbitrary delineations and that just comes with the territory.
If Sub-Saharan Africans are genetically weird, then wouldn’t they count as a separate race?
I should have been clearer, but that’s not quite what I was getting at.
First, my point was that Africa is weird compared to the other continents this context. This is for two reasons:
Also, it’s worth noting that race — while real — often doesn’t admit itself to clear lines. There’s endless argumentation among biologists as to whether two groups of animals constitute two closely-related species or two subspecies beginning to separate. Race is even more difficult this way.
At first there was the African race. Than that split into into the people who left Southern Africa and those who stayed. Then the the out of Africans split into the Caucasian race and the Asian race. The Aborigines of Australia and and the Native American people also became different races because they didn’t breed with the other races. Indians and Arabs are actually part of the Caucasian race.
Some groups are mixed. African-Americans and Ethiopians for example are a mix of African and Caucasian. Finns and Jews are sub races of the Caucasian race like the Japanese are a sub race of the East Asian race. How’s that?