The scientific field of genetics, though a boon to scientific inquiry, has muddied the social waters with respect to Racism, by providing some racists a framework with which they couch their arguments in pseudo-scientific rationales. Ultimately, defending against that kind of insidious misuse of science requires a certain stubborness in adherence to specific moral principles, because acknowledgement of scientific principles usually leads to a gray area. Tacitus for example waded into the quagmire in a joust with Steve Sailer[1], and (IMHO) came out reasonably victorious, but not without ceding some high ground on debate.
How to navigate this contentious intersection of social policy and scientific inquiry? I start by asking myself some basic questions, which I will refer to as the "Cognition Questions":
CQ1. Do genetics influence cognition?
My answer: probably yes.
CQ2. Does race influence cognition?
My answer: 1. probably no, on an individual basis, and 2. possibly but nearly impossible to verify one way or another on a racial-group basis.
CQ3. Does IQ provide a true measure of cognition?
My answer: almost definitively not, since the IQ test is heavily biased in terms of cultural assumptions. That latter statement is a statement of psychology more than genetics.
CQ4. Is the human brain the seat of cognition?
My answer: I don't know. Physiologically, probably yes, but spiritually, almost definitely not.
My answers to Cognition Questions 1-4 inform my acceptance of the basic premises of human biodiversity (h-bd):
1. Humans, like all animals, have been subject to natural selection pressures.
2. Geographical and reproductive isolation produces intraspecies variation both because of genetic drift and because isolated groups are in different selection environments.
3. There is a long list of physiological traits of genetic origin whose incidence differs by geographical ancestry.
4. The brain is not a special organ which is off-limits to the effects of selection pressure and drift.
GC at GNXP defines people who deny premise 3 as "h-bd deniers" and provides examples of their arguments (with his own rebuttals). I find premise 3 convincing, because of my answer to CQ1 and because I make a distinction between race and geographical ancestry in CQ2.
The real moral question hinges on premise 4, however. I think that it might be a red herring, however, depending on how you answer CQ3 and CQ4. Based on my answers, I think I can accept premise 4 because I don't think that it has any fundamental bearing on the issue of race and cognition.
As a scientist myself, I am loath to deny a line of research because of a fear of its abuse. As the Tacitus discussion illustrates, there are however legitimate moral concerns that I do share, but ultimately cannot allow to bias my view on whether it shoudl proceed. The HapMap project is an example of a legitimate endeavour that has been almost derailed by moral concerns, as was the Human Genome Project itself (also see GC's spirited comments here)
Genetics WILL ultimately reveal the truth about h-bd - but the deeper question of human cognition is, I think, beyond the reach of Science. The absolute conviction of people like Sailer to the contrary is, I think, revealing.
[1]I've never read anything by Sailer or at VDare and neither do I intend to. I'm perfectly content in steering clear and ignoring their existences. Sometimes however the GNXP crowd links to Sailer as an authority, which I probably will interpret as weak evidence henceforth due to my bias in Tacitus's favor. If some scientific point is justifiable on the merits, then it should not need the imprimatur of a compromised and questionable figure like Sailer to give it legitimacy. Surely other non-controversial authorities exist?
9 comments:
aziz, razib here
props to being pretty objective, even if i disagree the general thrust of your conclusion. a few points:
Genetics WILL ultimately reveal the truth about h-bd - but the deeper question of human cognition is, I think, beyond the reach of Science.in the realm of cognition, i suspect you are focusing on the IQ issue too much. i have my own opinions on this point, but "general intelligence" is almost certainly a polygenic trait that is affected by hundreds of locii (though to varying degrees). there are other "cognitive" traits that seem to vary according to population. for example, my post shy blue eyed boy focuses on "introversion" & the relationship to the genes that influence coloration which might have pleiotropic effects on personality. obviously there is overlap between groups, but the post above opens the possibility that the contrast between quiet shy scandinavians and outgoing italians might have a biological component (that is, if blondes tend to be shy, and italians have fewer blondes in the population, etc.).
i can also bring up a simpler example, there has been a fair amount of recent research has pointed to the likelihood "that the lower expression of the MAOA-uVNTR polymorphism is related to a history of early abuse and may sensitize males" (from the abstract). so in this case, you have one locus with a powerful behavior affect (perhaps a regulatory gene that shuts on or off a whole cascade of hormones, etc.). if i had to bet, i suspect there wouldn't be enormous variability in the % of the population in disparate groups of the "off" allele. but, the possibility exists that this might prove to be true.
as for public policy ramifications, i tend to stay away from that, because the clear implication of the above research is that boys with the "off" version of the polymorphism at that locus should be placed in good homes at all costs. liberal democracy treats individuals as individuals before the law, so not much will change there.
on the other hand, organ donation is an issue, because different populations have different frequencies of HLA polymorphisms that determines tissue response. certain groups, like asian americans, need to be recruited, because the chances of matches within ethnic groups is usually higher than without ethnic groups (and mixed-race individuals often have problems with finding matchings because they often have novel HLA allele combinations).
Surely other non-controversial authorities exist?well, i would recommend Race: The Reality of Human Differences, co-authored by vincent sarich. sarich pioneered the us of molecular techniques in the 1960s which established a far more recent coalescence time for the chimpanzee-hominid split than paleontologists had thought. he was later vindicated by the fossils that were discovered. he worked a lot with allan wilson @ berkely, out of whose lab came all that work in the 1980s about "mitochondrial eve." sarich presents the argument in favor of a strong version of "human biodiversity" without much political baggage.
from where i stand, half of tacitus' objection to steve had to do with the paleocon vs. mainstream con split. in other words, it has to do with values & ends, as much as disputes over the topic of human biodiversity.
aziz -
Thanks for keeping it calm.
Concerning the reliability of IQ as a measure, I want to point you to this post on the fact that IQ correlates with brain structure.
That is, MRI measurements of brain geometry correlate with pen and paper IQ tests. And the correlations are nontrivial (.33 overall, .25 genetic factors - precise definitions of these terms at the link), especially for something so prima facie improbable.
I mean, it's pretty amazing. You wouldn't be able to predict the letters in your name or the street number of your house through direct measurements on the brain. But we can make a decent guess at your IQ, a guess that will beat random odds. Check out the article
Also, Aziz, re: Sailer.
Tacitus has shifted his position quite a bit in those comment threads. But one of the things he did say was this:
http://tacitus.org/story/2004/6/26/7177/62474
I don't think there's anything wrong with asserting that there are inheritable physical attributes within specific subgroups of people. There's a reason the best distance runners come from the east African highlands, after all. Now, is everyone going to condemn him as a racist? Sportscasters have been fired for far less. Where's the molecular biological evidence, I ask? He's basing this solely on non-genetic measures of performance such as Olympic medals, "natch".
It would be supremely ironic if someone who tries as hard as Tacitus does to express moderate views on controversial topics was smeared as a racist for his trouble.
I shall ignore Tacitus' intemperance towards h-bd believers for now - the point is just that he thinks that we are evil, but agrees with us on at least premise 3 of the above. For even getting to premise 3 his career can be ruined.
That, in a nutshell, is why I think it's unfair to put Sailer in the bozo bin without reading him. There are all kinds of people who disagree with you on all kinds of things. Why should premise 4 - an eminently reasonable premise in the light of this (see below) - be the moral threshold that separates good from evil?
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000808.html
GNXP readers can pick up a mild HBD angle at around 2 minutes & 40 seconds, when the interviewer asks about the contrasts in the multi-nation survey, Dr. John Maziotta responds that there are "...differences between Asian brains and European brains...brains in Asian populations tend to be spherical...European brains tend to be more elongated...this must be some aspect of evolution and how the genetics of the brain determine its shape and structure...."
I mean, Sailer has called for nothing more radical than an immigration reform act. Tacitus has called for the same thing. Maybe Tacitus should feel ashamed of himself for siding with a National Socialist :)
conrad:
I encourage you to check out this post.
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002366.html?entry=2366
there is a full PDF link here as well:
http://www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/IQ/NRN2004_IQ.html
...but let's take a step back. i'll be happy if people don't think i'm a "jack booted thug" even if i bring up the possibility of inter-group IQ differences being partly attributable to differences in genotype. there is a spectrum of trivializing inter-group differences.
there are those who would oppose attempts to tailor medical regimes based on statistical differences between populations. for example, many drug trials are based on sample of white males, and the results from white males are uncritically generalized. this is not cool in the short-term before personalized genomic tailoring of drugs & treatment is feasible, you have to take into account as much of the information as possible. it's like the USA sending powdered milk to areas of africa that suffered famine without realizing that most adult africans have issues with lactose digestion, so instead of relief, many suffered from diarrhea. of course, over 90% of northern europeans can process lactose fine, so that "lactose intolerance" is classified as a disease, though the majority of the world's population suffers from a mild case of this phenotype.
from where do these problems come from. two sources:
1) ignorance
2) ideology
the ignorance part stems from the old lewontin paper that asserts that 85% of differences are between individuals, while only 15% is attributable to group identity ("race"). there are serious problems with this, in that certain phenotypes do not show such overlap. lactose tolerance is an example. sickle cell anemia is another. by emphasizing human commonalities (this is pretty obvious, and you are only trying to convince bigots on this point), they neglect the differences that can be very important in certain contexts.
then there is the ideological point. those who wish to assert a malleability of human nature simply see inter-group differences as something that is a symptom of the disease of "determinism." they distort dynamic the gene-environment interactionism, the statistical reality of behavior and biology, and pretend as if some genetic scientists want to recast themselves in the role of "the fates." that's not what all it's about.
as apollo said, Gnothi se auton ("Know thyself"). in such a way, men and women can be true masters of their own destiny, because the seas must be charted and the mountains surveyed before they can be scaled.
Tacitus was right in that a conclusive finding of HBD in human intelligence will lead to a strongly redistributionist state. i've said this before, but if you find the redistributionist arguments in Rawls' A Theory of Justice persuasive, the reality of HBD will do nothing to change. if you are unconvinced, HBD will do nothing to change that (though i am influenced by Rawls' thinking though i don't buy all his axioms and the resulting propositions).
group differences emerge from individual differences, that is, group differences are the sum of its parts. much of Rawls' work is based on individual differences (of various kinds, genetic and non-genetic), and the addendum that various groups might differ in some fashion doesn't change much from where i stand, redistribution is based around individualistic utilitarianism.
let me use an analogy: the russian oligarchs are mostly jewish. there might be many reasons for this, nonetheless, a redistributionist would probably argue that they should pay their taxes and so forth. their jewishness is irrelevant, they pay taxes because they are rich, not because jews tend to be rich. similarly, cognitive and developmental studies seem to indicate that males tend to work things out in a physical manner more often than females given the same inputs. nevertheless, men and women have equal rights to buy guns and suffer the same penalties for crimes. no matter the likely average group differences.
where group differences come into play is to nullify uncritical acceptance of the paradigm that difference of outcomes is caused by racism, prejudice or some constraint on freedom. this applies to non-genetic factors, after all, few jews are pig farmers. nevertheless, an acceptance that groups on average might differ in aptitudes and orientations might suggest that all differences of outcome can not be attributed to social factors that can be re-engineered through legislation.
finally, note above that i said that race should be an important factor in health before full genomic sequencing becomes available. one's racial identity can be a piece of the puzzle used to evaluate probalistic assertions. in the case of full genomic sequencing though for each individual racial identity would become far less important since we have a more fine-grained direct view into the genome. but, we don't have that yet, so racial identification does add some data that might be of utility....
The broader point is that no one is really arguing for some form of Lysenkoism in genetics or a restriction of research agendas;frankly, that's not true conrad. for example, conferences have been disrupted and cancelled relating to the genetics of criminality. there are obviously ethical issues here, but there is a faction that a priori says "don't go there." the idea that racial identity might have some medical relevance is considered problematic by those who assert that inter-racial variation is trival.
I can understand why there is a healthy amount of scepticism in some quarter to these extra-disciplinary forays.sure, fair enough, but the fact is that i'm less concerned about *extra-disciplinary forays* than the fact that some people simply reject a priori the reality of inter-group differences, no matter the extent or trait. for example, one individual in the "tacitus" thread asserted that he was on average more related to someone of another race than his own race genetically. there are some serious problems with this sort of thinking (extrapolating from lewontin's "85% of variation is between individuals"). as aziz noted there have been objections to the haplotype map. we aren't talking about 2nd and 3rd order issues having to do with public policy based on science, we are talking the root science itself, as people are concerned with the potentional rather than reality of problems....
You should remember that the first waves of writers and thinkers on social and political theory that were influenced by Darwinism were found on both the Right and the Left; in fact one could make a good case in arguing that the latter up to the early part of the last century were far more numerous and most Socialist doctrines such as Marxism borrow heavily from and would be difficult to understand without a Darwinian theory of evolution and how social change happens.i'm well aware of that, the marxist geneticist jbs haldane was a eugenicist for a period (before he found the ethical issues too problematic), and maggie sanger also had those leanings. i use those data points on my blog to blunt the charge that we are nazis since after all members of the left are less likely to hurl crap when their own idols might be stained by it.
and the left is still involved in the intersection of biology and sociology. peter singer recently wrote a book about the darwinian left, and many of the original theorists of sociobiology are center-left, and robert trivers was a radical who supported the black panthers.
the political issues are not cut & dried. the scientific issues are developing. if the objectiosn were limited to IQ i might be able to accept that being "off limits", i understant the volatility and sensitivity of the topic. but as the protests against the hapmap and behavorial genetics as a whole indicate, that isn't the extent of it, there is a general opposition in some quarters to the re-expansion of biology back into the study of human behavior and societies (ergo, the glee with which some leftist scientists greeted the charges against anthropologist napoleon chagnon, though they later had to back off from most of the charges).
It is that I can�t see any sensible or effective opposition; I mean Creationists can still argue that evolution needs to be scrapped but I wouldn�t call their efforts, at least outside the US, all that effective or serious.our difference in opinion might be a function of geography. the united states has strong identity politics movements rooted in the academy. the possibility that there might be 2nd or 3rd order implications from data that undermines their ideologies is enough for them to target deviants.
creationists have no voice in the academy, that is not true of those who suggest that they have had enough of genetic science. this tack is especially easy because some conservatives have joined in for their own reasons (the data doesn't always please the Right either, as they have their own utopian conceptions of human nature).
is the restrain those who make these kinds of forays outside their own discipline � and I have to say make fools of themselves as well as their subject in the process? I certainly would have more sympathy if this was done; unfortunately I can�t see that this is the case � though what has happened is that scientists in the field have themselves been divided along various ideological lines on these issues.well, this is one reason that many scientists who do this sort of research disavow racialist or sexist inclinations or implications in their research. scientists are by their nature caution, recall what happened after the cloning of dolly? the fact is that scientists aren't the only problem, the media tends to give the biggest megaphone to sensationalists and the public has a far easier time consuming oversimplified pap than the nuanced and often uninteresting minutiae of real science. there's enough blame to go around.
I don�t see why you think Haldane or Sanger are taken to be the �idols of the Left� unless you have a very conservative view of what the Left comprises. Moreover, it porbably isn't a good idea to take individual thinkers and use them as counter-examples since in Europe at least, pretty much up to the rise of Stalin Marxism and other socialist theories were enormously attractive to intellectuals and I would hazard that a disproportionate number of them in the eary 20th century would have been attracted or influences by these strains at the time.i don't harp on intellectual robustness in arguments with people what accuse me of being a "nazi," that's really not the point. selective quotes from people who are perceived as progressive and forward thinking can blunt the righteousness of many an accusor.
the rest of it i won't address, because it doesn't matter much in this discussion whether we disagree, rather, i am simply asserting that an open-mindedness on certain topics needs to be had. some people will not concede that, rather, a refusal to assent to certain propositions will result in the explicit accusation that you are a "nazi" and what not.
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