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Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution
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."
I hadn't even heard about this book before now. Sales will probably triple each time they fuss about it.
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Geneticists admit that physical appearance varies thanks to mutations and variations in the expression of the genome, so why is intellectual variability so verboten? Because it's politically incorrect?
In other words, if white people exclusively possess blond hair and blue eyes, and Asians possess epicanthal folds and very dark hair, why is it so hard to believe that IQ, a physical aspect of the mental organ we call the brain, might vary as well?
Seems very bizarre to me. And irrational.
Read the TFA. People aren't getting upset about skin color: Quote: "In the book, Wade suggests that such genetic differences may help explain why some people live in tribal societies and some in advanced civilizations, why African-Americans are allegedly more violent than whites, and why the Chinese may be good at business."
Ideally it wouldn't matter. If one racial group had a greater number of more intelligent people than another then - so what? After all we have the same situation with things like height, strength, and so on. You might find that Chinese are under-represented in basketball, but a Chinese basketball player who could make the grade would be given exactly the same encouragement and opportunity as anyone else. Same should go for IQ.
Political Correctness has no place in discussions that are scientific in nature.
Skewing other people's research to fit your agenda is not scientific.
The people who did the actual research are saying that it's NOT correct.
It's an extremely sensitive topic, for obvious historical reasons. Despite the mountains of hard scientific evidence to the contrary, the political dogma, at least where I live, is that we are all born as blank slates and any measurable difference between individuals is due to environment. We would all be as good as Tiger Woods at golf if we lived his life. This includes differences between the sexes, and isn't hyperbole or an exaggeration.
It's a nice thought, and if it were true governments could mold the behavior of its citizens to be exactly what they wanted.
It's easy to accept physical differences, like skin tone, height, and facial features are genetically determined, but to suggest that there might also be differences across individuals and races in the brain, and therefore behavior, is so politically incorrect most scientists will not touch it with a ten foot pole. I'm not suggesting that any particular race is "better" than any other, but I don't see how you can claim that there are no genetic differences between races that effect behavior if you accept the current model of evolution. I mean, why wouldn't there be? How do you justify that claim?
While I don't agree with this guy's conclusions myself, this type of hyper-PC bullshit storm is why being in academia is so obnoxious. Science should be determined by the evidence available and the best interpretation of it at the time, not by people's feelings or politics.
Secondly, someone citing your work doesn't mean you agree with their conclusions (or especially their politics). The correct response, if you care enough, is to follow up by pointing out where their interpretation falls short. The incorrect response is to write some whiny letter crying about how seemingly racist conclusions were drawn from your publications and it deeply offends you.
I mean, come on: "We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures." What a pathetic retort. But I bet they feel better now, and that's all that really matters.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Indeed, it's not as though cultures of European stock have been uniformly ahead of the curve. There's just so much that can randomly happen, for example a strong case could be made that if the social changes wrought by the black death hadn't taken place, Europe might still be languishing at a near medieval level of technology. Or say the Minoans, they had indoor plumbing, air and light control, aqueducts and sophisticated codes of law what, four thousand years ago, then their island exploded.
Is he seriously taking a snapshot of modern US culture and trying to explain it mostly by genetics?
Oh, come on. Political Correctness has no place in discussions that are scientific in nature.
On the other hand, science does, and this book is not science, but opinion, if you want to be polite about it. Racist opinion, to be precise, which have been around in some guise or other since who knows when? This kind of racism-disguised-as-science was common throughout 18th and 19th centuries and generally went along the lines of 'Us White (North-) Europeans Are Better Than The Rest' and was used to justify why we had a moral duty to go out and 'civilize' the inferior races.
Science is not made by taking a hand-picked assortment of data, twist it a few times and going 'Look, I can make the data match my opinon' - for anything to be science, you must have a hypothesis, which suggests a logically coherent explanation of all observed facts, makes testable predictions - and which survives experimental testing. It takes only 1 failed prediction to kill a theory.
Northern Europeans clearly evolved to have fair skin and hair, and they evolved from ancestors who did not have fair skin and hair.
Correct me if I am wrong, but that is hardly the main point of this book, is it? To quote from the article:
In the book, Wade suggests that such genetic differences may help explain why some people live in tribal societies and some in advanced civilizations, why African-Americans are allegedly more violent than whites, and why the Chinese may be good at business.
So, black people are violent (meaning 'primitive'?), Chinese are cunning ('good at business') and The White Man is the epitome of civilisation? And this is not racism - how? This is just a worthless rehash of junk from the days of the colonialism.
what is globally accepted in animal breeding, that certain behavioral tendencies accompany accompany genetics right along with certain physical characteristics, is the worst taboo to apply to people.
which is ridiculous. populations living in specific social environments will SELECT FOR and AGAINST various physical and behavioral traits... 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.
is there something totally crazy here?
THL phish sticks
No, they're saying that you can't just take their research and make claims that it doesn't substantiate and then appeal to their authority to support your claims.
To give a computer science analogy (I'm out of stock of car analogies), imagine that you worked on Hadoop and you'd made sorting large data sets go 50% faster. Then someone publishes a book arguing that P=NP and uses your result (which doesn't even do comparison-based sorting) as the basis for their claim. You'd be in pretty much the same position as the researchers in TFA. Would you say that the author is an idiot, or would you keep quiet?
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The same scientists publish things such as proof that testosterone levels vary by race ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ) then create a politically correct shitstorm when someone dares note that this has behavioral implications. How ridiculous can this get?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
So which differences in skin tone, height, and facial features uniquely define the races
Who says it has to be distinct, unique enough perfect compartmentalization enough to put people entirely, precisely in one box of the next?
But are you REALLY pretending that you can't immediately spot some people as being obviously of Mongolian, or Russian, or Ethiopian extraction? I can spot people of Scandinavian heritage a mile away, and can readily see the differences between people carrying DNA from the Andes vs. DNA from the jungles of Central America. Why are you trying so hard to pretend those differences are plainly obvious? What do you gain, other than street cred with the willfully obtuse politically correct set?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As you say, the European lead in politics and technology could have happened "randomly". There are other strategies to explain it, like Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel". And then there's this evolutionary story. Any one of these could be true, or a combination, or some other story that we just haven't worked out yet. Along the way, science proposes - and then eventually (hopefully) rejects - false theories. Some of the ideas about population genetics that are in circulation now will be consigned to the dustbin. It's the same story in chemistry, neurology, etc. Science is full of false theories that teach us something valuable when we find enough evidence to reject them.
But something very different is happening here. There is a lot of scorn and finger-wagging for simply proposing that an evolutionary story might have produced geographically inhomogeneous distributions of human character traits. This is not how real scientists react to the proposal of a false theory. You don't submit an angry mass NYT condemnation of the physicist that proposes the variability of the speed of light, or the doctor who proposes a novel and improbable metabolic pathway of leukemia cells. The book is available. If scientists think some of its claims are shown to be false by evidence we already have, they should say which those claims are, and reference the invalidating evidence.
Rickets.
Everyone knows that evolution is limited to effects from the neck down.
You're being a prat and trying to see conspiracies about ignoring genetics where none exists. In the real world, the state of knowledge of genetics and cultures is far far too poor to attribute nebulous concepts to genetics.
There is no gene which makes you "good at business". This is not the XMen world where you have a mutant gene which gives you some superpower. The real world is far more complex and far messier.
The geneticsts know this. Now you do.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's an extremely sensitive topic, for obvious historical reasons. Despite the mountains of hard scientific evidence to the contrary, the political dogma, at least where I live, is that we are all born as blank slates and any measurable difference between individuals is due to environment. We would all be as good as Tiger Woods at golf if we lived his life. This includes differences between the sexes, and isn't hyperbole or an exaggeration.
It's a nice thought, and if it were true governments could mold the behavior of its citizens to be exactly what they wanted.
It's easy to accept physical differences, like skin tone, height, and facial features are genetically determined, but to suggest that there might also be differences across individuals and races in the brain, and therefore behavior, is so politically incorrect most scientists will not touch it with a ten foot pole. I'm not suggesting that any particular race is "better" than any other, but I don't see how you can claim that there are no genetic differences between races that effect behavior if you accept the current model of evolution. I mean, why wouldn't there be? How do you justify that claim?
If you read the scientific consensus in the beginning of the 20th century, they had the exact same view as you are saying. They had journals which listed what characteristics what races and sub-races had, and had intricate rankings of races - with uber-mechen and under-mechen. It is the basis of eugenics and was the root of the philosophy of Nazi justifying killing of the inferior races.
Their failing was that they considered every little difference in societies to be genetic.
Perhaps you could be or could not be Tiger Woods but so far, there hasn't been an obvious genetic test to determine that. However, there is no getting around the fact that Tiger Woods is a successful professional golfer because his dad is a golf instructor and he had training when he was young as well as access to professional network that his dad had established to be successful.
The counterexample to that comes from Gladwell's example of the Canadian hockey team and the birthday phenomenon. There are almost no professional hockey players born at the end of the year. Most of them are born in the beginning of the year. The reason is that coaching is done by age and the kids who are born later in the year have 6-12 month disadvantage over kids born earlier in the year. So, in this case, access to training and coaching was more vital than the genetic component. If genetic was important, then there would be a more even distribution of birthdays.
Uh, no. The point is that the people objecting to the book in this case are scientists who say that their research is being misrepresented by this fuckwit.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Political Correctness has no place in discussions that are scientific in nature.
Skewing other people's research to fit your agenda is not scientific.
Neither is skewing your own research to fit your agenda. PC has no place in science.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Why are you trying so hard to pretend those differences are plainly obvious?
Sure, you can see a lot of people who clearly come from some place... but you can also see a lot more people who don't clearly fall into any bucket, especially in the US where everyone is so mixed up. You might see a redhead with curly hair and freckles, and that person may have a bunch of African ancestry despite those traits being so traditionally "Irish". Even if you were right about that person being "Irish" - so what? Irish people didn't always look like that - there has been quite a bit of genetic exchange over the millennia, and it is doubtful that your idea of what an Irish person looks like would be true when Christians were being fed to lions. So now your idea of "race" is frozen at some point in time. Scientifically, it is OK to say that race is meaningless as a classification system while still accepting that traits are heritable.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the researches here are skewing anything.
You have to be very careful attributing things to genes rather than environment. Testosterone level, since you mentioned it, rises and drop in response to winning or losing in competitions, and increases in response to exercise. The nature of our encounters with others (dominance) and exercise (which depends on job function) are both clearly culturally influenced.
Guys, he can "misinterpret" your works as much has he likes, that's the whole point of "original research" and "original opinion". He takes your works and forms is own conclusions. It's him, not you. As long as he cites you.
Hell, you don't have to agree with him. Obviously.
He's a reporter, he wasn't claiming to be doing "original research", he was claiming to communicate the existing research.
And just like he's allowed to write about, and misinterpret, their research, they're also allowed to call him out for misrepresenting their work.
I stole this Sig
The problem is, people are suggesting there are differences across races but then cannot really show compelling, conclusive scientific evidence to support their claim.
For instance, scientific research (something that is not widely reported in public venues for obvious reasons of political sensitivity) clearly shows a huge IQ gap between blacks and whites, consisting of 10-20 points and persisting across the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Some have argued that this gap is genetic (and we certainly cannot rule it out); however, there is no conclusive evidence to support their claim that the IQ gap is genetic.
Similar IQ gaps (such as between whites and Native Americans) have disappeared over time in the past, so anyone should be very skeptical of a claim that blacks have a lower IQ because it is a genetic population trait and not an environmental trait.
Like with the IQ gap, many people (most of them not actual research scientists like this author) are making these nature over nurture arguments on a wide variety of topics without sufficient research to back them up but rather to fit into their own world-view about cultures and population groups being genetically inferior or superior, an antediluvian throwback to the pseudoscience of anthropology at the turn of the 19th century.
That is a misuse of science and the actual researchers are right to call-out the author on his misinterpretation of their work.
This reminds me of a fiasco a few years ago when a colleague of mine published a paper reporting his objective discovery that male-female sexual intercourse has some health benefits that did not result from any other form of sex such as masturbation or homosexual sex. The vitriol of the truth-phobic PC backlash that ensued almost made him wish he had never published.
Sent from my Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2).
Design, but looking at a dachshund, I wouldn't use the term "intelligent".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
The base assumption that everyone could be Tiger Woods if only their dads were golf instructors is such a load of twaddle.
And yet it explains the phenomena of Drew Barrymore, Tori Spelling, Miley Cyrus, Emelio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, and a host of other "famous" actors whose names you know only because their parents were famous actors or producers. I would have included Jamie Lee Curtis in that list, but her performance in A Fish Called Wanda was pretty good so maybe she has some innate skill.
In today's world where we're not restricted by geographical boundaries and genes are free-flowing around the world,
That's a very privileged and first-worldish view of the planet. Most of the planet still has huge restrictions on the free-flow of genes, and much of it is based on the economics of travel.
I think the Caliphates would contest that.
Yes it is because that "false theory" is being published as a book AND because it claims to cite those scientists.
Thus it is implying that those scientists support that "false theory".
And since the "false theory" is racist, it is implying that those scientists who are implied as supporting that "false theory" are also racist.
So a public condemnation of the "false theory" and the author and the work is entirely reasonable.
The scientists who work he based his premise on are saying their research does not support this conclusions. The scientists are showing you with their research. You would know that if you read the article.
Have you actually kept statistics to back that assertion, or is it just a gut feeling ?-)
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