Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution 541
sciencehabit writes "A best-seller by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade about recent human evolution and its potential effects on human cultures has drawn critical reviews since its spring publication. Now, nearly 140 senior human population geneticists around the world, many of whose work was cited in the book, have signed a letter to The New York Times Book Review stating that Wade has misinterpreted their work. The letter criticizes "Wade's misappropriation of research from our field to support arguments about differences among human societies."
Ideally it wouldn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Are You Kidding? (Score:2, Interesting)
How is that controversial? All you need to do is look at average testosterone levels to begin to see why different races have different percentages in the ranges of cultural expression, and health, etc.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0039128X92900325 [sciencedirect.com]
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
and those traits which are successful in a specific society will then go on to build the society that those traits are best adapted to. like a feedback loop.
The evidence for this is actually pretty inconclusive, which is where some of the disagreement stems. It's easy to hypothesize this, but hard to prove it. In particular, many evolutionary biologists are skeptical that historical-timescale social changes and changes in genetic makeup are closely tied.
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually have studied it; some of my colleagues work directly in this area. It's a fairly big interest here in Scandinavia, because some populations can be identified with relative genetic stability over significant periods of time, which makes some kinds of studies easier. Iceland has particularly good records and genetic isolation, but much can also be done in other parts of Scandinavia. And it is quite difficult to correlate societal changes with genetic changes even with these detailed records. For example the major shifts in Scandinavian society from warlordish violent societies to peaceful egalitarian societies don't appear to be related to genetic shifts.
Re:Are You Kidding? (Score:2, Interesting)
How is that controversial? All you need to do is look at average testosterone levels to begin to see why different races have different percentages in the ranges of cultural expression, and health, etc.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0039128X92900325 [sciencedirect.com] [sciencedirect.com]
Age-adjusted testosterone from their Table 2:
white 637
black 657
Asian 688
How big a differences does it take to affect "cultural expression?"
Re:Are You Kidding? (Score:3, Interesting)
And all of this would go away if we mentioned that "ability" doesn't mean "rights". The ability to do something does not (or at least, should not) imbue more or less "rights". The problem, with typical PC thinking, is that modern liberalism equates equal outcome with equal rights. Outcomes are both ability (talent, skill) and effort (practice, dedication), but rights are self evident, and do not rely upon either.
I don't have a problem with people having different abilities/skills based on inherited traits. And inherited traits are NOT racist if they primarily fall along skin color or ethnic lines.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:3, Interesting)
First, you can take sample populations that 'exclusively possess" a particular feature, and they turn out not to. That is, it may be common for Danes to be blonde, but you can look at a large group of people from Denmark and see many people who don't have blonde hair, or otherwise don't fit whatever model of how that group should look someone is offering. You can try to filter your sample, for example, looking only at people who have records of descent from natives to that area going back five or ten generations, and that still will give you a population that has many exceptional examples wo don't have all the features you think make up a race. This happens near universally - you can go to more isolated villages or look at whole regions where it is believed the inhabitants lived cut off from other races, and you will still find that there are lots of exceptions. You can test this with 'extreme' examples - If you look at 100 Zulus, maybe half will look like stereotypical Zulus, and there will be 10% that are atypically short, lighter skinned, broader faced, narrower nosed or even with a "roman" nose, etc. (And it won't be the same 10% for each feature). Yeah, you're probably not going to find a blonde Zulu with epicanthic folds that stands 4" 3" as an adult in a sample of just 100, but you will find a lot of people who look not quite like what the standard model Zulu (or Polynesian Islander or Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be.
Second, those physical racial features have mostly evolved over periods as short as 10,000 years. You can find cases where they may have had longer periods of isolation, but even those are pretty short as regards human evolution. For example, the best estimate for when proto-Asiatic ancestors of the Native Americans crossed the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska might be as high as 20,000 years, but most ethnolgists think that, a) people kept following along on that same route until much more recently, and b) the various Pacific peoples also made it to the New World sometimes by oceanic routes. So, even the differences between a 'typical' North Korean and a "typical" Cherokee probably accrued over less than 10,000 years. (And the differences between "atypical" ones of each group? They took the exact same total time. Try to visualize that.). That's set against an evolutionary history of roughly 100 times as long for the development of tool use, fire, and other innovations that show original thinking, invention, creativity, general intelligence and what some people still call progress. The genes that let some of our ancestors figure out how to make a better clay pot than the last design have been steadily circulating among populations and leaving behind artifacts in all cultures. If those genes are still very rare, then the claim is that genes for being smart, creative, and adaptable don't have any better survival value than the others, as they get into populations the same ways as the genes for short Zulus, but somehow, they are not being selected for, over periods 100's of times as long. In fact, it's a claim that creative intelligence has negative survival value.
The reason this "science" on racial differences is nothing but good old fashioned racism follows from these two points. The argument becomes "Intelligence has no survival value. Nature selects against it except under very special circumstances such as Ice Ages. Inferior genes water down the superior ones unless the superior ones are kept isolated from them." Ultimately, this becomes the "one drop of black blood makes you black" argument of the Civil War era American South. And none of that, from the claim that bad genes can water inherently good genes down until they vanish, to the echoes of apologetics for American slavery, is science.
Re: Are You Kidding? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Are You Kidding? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no gene which makes you "good at business".
And how do you know that? Studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised apart have found remarkable things: I remember an account of one case where as adults, both men had (among other similarities) chosen identical belt buckles, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and held the packs in rolled up sleeves of their T-shirts in the same way. Of course, nobody says that proves there's a "belt-buckle choice gene," but it seems to indicate that genes can influence behavior in complex ways we do not understand. The idea that some genetic patterns might make you (on average) better at business is not outlandish at all.