http://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/
Does Race Exist? Do Hills Exist?
Although
my own academic background is in theoretical physics, I’m the first to
admit that field seems in the doldrums these days compared with human
evolutionary biology.
The
greatest physics discoveries of the last couple of years—the Higgs Boson
and strong evidence for Cosmological Inflation—merely confirm the
well-established beliefs that physicists have had since before I entered
grad school. It’s nice that such experimental evidence means that
individuals such as Peter Higgs, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde, whose
names have been prominent in the standard textbooks for decades, have
received or will surely soon receive their long-deserved Nobel Prizes,
but little new has been learned. Or so is the impression of a lapsed
theoretician who left that field over twenty-five years ago and who
mostly follows it through the pages of the major newspapers.
Meanwhile,
human evolutionary biology has been on a tear, partly due to the full
deciphering of the human genome over the last couple of decades and our
increasing technical ability to effectively read archaic DNA from
thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the past. In recent
years we have seen shocking discoveries that most humans possess small
but probably significant Neanderthal ancestry and that important genetic
changes have regularly swept through our genome. On the theoretical
side, it was long assumed that human genes had changed little since Cave
Man days, but we now understand that in some respects human evolution
may have actually accelerated during the last ten thousand years as our
rapidly growing population provided a much larger source of potentially
favorable mutations, while agriculture and civilization were
simultaneously applying strong selective pressures.
Although
my other projects have prevented me from following these developments
except through newspapers, blogs, and books, such evolutionary issues
have long fascinated me. During the early 1980s I even participated in
the field, studying under Harvard’s E.O. Wilson and felt that if physics
had not been an option, evolutionary biology would have been my next
choice. I remember telling all my skeptical friends in 1979 that Richard
Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was probably one of the most important books of the decade, and I stand by that opinion today.
Yet
although our understanding of the origins of modern humans and their
biologically-influenced behavior has grown by leaps and bounds over the
last couple of decades, these world-changing developments seem to have
received extremely scanty coverage in the mainstream press, meaning that
many of them have probably not penetrated into the public consciousness
of those who are not academic specialists. The assumptions and
world-views of most American intellectuals and journalists often seem
stuck in the 1980s, clinging to ideas that are almost completely
outmoded and incorrect, much like Soviet biology into the 1960s was
still crippled by the Stalinist legacy of Trofim K. Lysenko, who had
argued for the inheritance of acquired characteristics and purged all
those biologists who disagreed.
America’s
own Lysenko is surely the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay
Gould, whose platform in the prestige media and widely assigned books
have massively influenced entire generations of college students and
thinkers. Unfortunately, just like his Soviet counterpart, Gould
promoted ideologically motivated misrepresentations of reality,
sometimes backed by outright scientific fraud, and people who read his
books are regularly absorbing falsehoods.
In a
further parallel to the Soviet case, Gould and his Marxist circle of
friends and allies, including Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and several
others, regularly sought to purge or otherwise silence their most
honest and courageous colleagues. During the 1970s, Harvard’s Wilson
became their particular target for daring to publish his landmark book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,
and their wild ideological charges led radical student demonstrators to
demand the university fire one of its brightest tenured stars and even
to physically assault the mild-mannered Wilson at a meeting of the
American Academy of Sciences. Although Gould seems to have been a rather
mediocre scientist, some of his radical allies such as Lewontin were
first-class researchers, but also ideologues who allowed their politics
to dictate their science.
While
I was a graduate student at Cambridge University during the mid-1980s,
these events occasionally came up in casual discussions across the
dining tables. On one such occasion, a former grad student of Lewontin’s
said that during the height of the sociobiology controversy he had
asked his mentor why he was leveling such ridiculous accusations against
a colleague, with the reply being that those accusations were
admittedly scientific nonsense, but they served the political interests
of Marxism, which was far more important. Meanwhile, given Gould’s
strength in words but his weakness in thinking, I find it reasonably
likely that he simply believed many of the absurdities he was spouting.
As
the years and the decades have gone by, I’ve always assumed that
Gouldism was about to lose its grip on American intellectual life, but
that assumption has always proven wrong. The totally absurd notion that
genetics plays a relatively small role in influencing most human
behaviors represents a zombified doctrines, absorbing endless seemingly
fatal scientific wounds at the hands of prominent scholars but remaining
almost unkillable, more like a religious dogma than a scientific
doctrine.
For example, in 2002 Harvard’s Steven Pinker, one of America’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, published The Blank Slate,
an outstanding critique of this incorrect reigning dogma, which
specifically included a lengthy debunking of Gould, Lewontin, and their
circle. Not only was the book a huge seller and glowingly discussed
throughout the MSM, but I was stunned to read an equally favorable review in The Nation,
pole-star of America’s political Left. I naturally assumed that the
full collapse of Gouldism was underway, an impression enhanced once the
august New York Times later published an article describing an important instance of Gould’s scientific fraud.
But
a year or two ago, when I heard smart intellectuals still citing Gould,
I asked a prominent academic how that would possibly be the case. He
explained that whereas in the 1990s, probably 99% of intellectuals
believed in Gould, the massive revelations of recent years had merely
reduced that support to 95%, leaving Gouldism almost as entrenched as
ever. Whereas worldwide support for Stalinism substantially collapsed
following Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” Gouldian nonsense seems to
have largely avoided that fate.
But perhaps that is now about to change.
One
of the oddities of American intellectual life is that although a
full-fledged scientific revolution in human genetics and evolution has
been taking place for the last couple of decades, very little of this
has been reported in the mainstream media, perhaps because the findings
so totally contradict the numerous falsehoods that so many senior
editors presumably imbibed during the introductory anthropology courses
they took to satisfy their science distributional requirement as
undergraduates.
Indeed,
when I consider the major news stories on evolutionary breakthroughs I
have read in our MSM over the last dozen years, the overwhelming
majority seem to have been written by a single individual, Nicholas Wade
of The New York Times, who recently retired after twenty years
as a editor and reporter at our national newspaper of record, following
previous decades of work at top scientific publications such as Nature and Science.
When
I asked around a little, my impression was confirmed. Our nation of
over 300 million may be in the forefront of evolutionary discovery, but
Wade has long been almost the only reporter seriously covering these
fascinating developments in the mainstream print media. Meanwhile, the
weekly New York Times Science Section seems to be moving in the direction of People Magazine,
with so much of the coverage seemingly focused on phone apps, dieting,
and phone apps to assist with dieting. For example, fully half of the Letters page in this morning’s print edition was devoted to a heated debate on the “Science of Overeating.”
But
while his former colleagues often focus on the transient and the
trivial, Wade has spent the last couple of years producing an
outstanding book to bring awareness of the revolutionary discoveries of
modern genetic research to a broader American audience. Generations of
Soviets had been taught the inheritance of acquired characteristics in
their universities, and I assume they must have been shocked to discover
it was all an ideologically motivated hoax. I suspect that many
complacent American intellectuals may have a similar reaction to Wade’s
book, which focuses on the highly touchy subject of the genetic nature
of our distinct human races and the implications for society and
history, bearing the descriptive title A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. I’d certainly rank Wade’s book as the most important popular presentation of these ideas at least since Pinker’s Blank Slate.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I was also very
pleased to see him substantially cite my own major articles from the
last couple of years on race, IQ, and wealth and the Social Darwinist roots of modern China.
All
too many socially-conditioned Americans have absorbed the
Lewontin-Gould mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” which from a scientific
perspective is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or
perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good
parallel. It is perfectly correct that the notion of “hill” is
ill-defined and vague—what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt
from a hill and a hill from a mountain?—but nevertheless denying the
reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity.
Similarly, the notion of distinct human races—genetic clusters across a
wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness—is an obviously useful
and correct organizing principle, and one which was probably accepted
without question by everyone in the history of the world except for
deluded Americans of the last fifty years.
Anyway, let us suppose that the Gouldians rising up to denounce the heretic, such as anthropologist Agustin Fuentes,
are given their way and the common term “race” is purged from our
scientific vocabulary as being meaningless. Well, large-scale genetic
population clusters obviously continue to exist in the real world and
are an important element in ongoing research, both medical and
evolutionary. So it would make sense to conveniently replace an overly
cumbersome multisyllabic phrase with a short single-syllabic word now
suddenly gone unused, namely “race.”
Indeed,
I would suggest that one of the sources of present-day confusion is
that the very term “race” has undergone an unfortunate metamorphosis
over the course of the 20th century. Today, when people speak of “races”
they are almost invariably referring to the continental-scale
mega-races such as Asians, Africans, and Europeans. These “races”
certainly exist and are highly meaningful and distinct in genetic terms,
with blogger Steve Sailer slyly noting
that the cover of Prof. Luca Cavalli-Sforza definitive tome on human
genetic diversity displays a colored worldwide map looking much like
what Sen. Strom Thurmond in his dotage might have drawn on a napkin with
crayons.
But
I would argue that restricting the term race to merely that small
handful of huge groupings is extremely wasteful and we are far better
off also applying the term to its traditional meaning, typically aimed
at much smaller population groups. One hundred years ago, every educated
individual casually used phrases such as “the Anglo-Saxon race,” “the
Hungarian race,” and “the Chinese race,” and this is exactly the usage
to which we should restore. To be sure, these particular genetic
population clusters are naturally grouped into higher-level clusters as
well—with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles all being branches of the
larger Slav race, itself a component of the European mega-race, but the
word can remain flexible in scale without producing any serious
confusion. All these groups are exactly the sort of natural statistical
clusters that regularly appear during genetic population analysis, and
we might as well use the traditional popular term for them rather than
inventing an entirely new one.
As
for the full contents of Wade’s book, several reviews have already noted
a few small glitches here and there and I myself certainly took issue
with some of his arguments. For example, I think he is much too
accepting of Gregory Clark’s influential 2007 book
arguing that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain because the
British had undergone nearly a thousand years of uniquely strong
selection for economic success, a thesis I find extremely doubtful. I
also think Wade should have given far more attention to the seminal Cochran-Harpending theory
that the rapid growth of human population after the development of
agriculture has produced an equally rapid acceleration in
mutation-driven evolution during the last ten thousand years, and Wade’s
omission surely explains why the notoriously arrogant and irascible
Gregory Cochran published such an unfriendly review
on his own blogsite. Certainly everyone should explore all sides of
the ongoing debate and a small racialist website has conveniently
gathered together annotated links to the dozens of reviews
across the web, favorable, unfavorable, and mixed. But reading the
book itself is essential for anyone interested in the current state of
human evolutionary science.
I’d
originally intended to publish my own perspective several weeks ago and
was delayed by other pressing matters. But I have been very pleased to
see that Wade’s book is beginning to receive the major attention it so
greatly deserves. American intellectuals must begin shedding a
half-century of lies and dishonesty based on the dismally unscientific
dogma of Stephen Jay Gould and instead start to discover what modern
evolutionary biologists and genetic researchers have all known for years
or even decades. A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times may represent a huge step forward in achieving this important goal.
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