bnichols said:
[email hidden] wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:Harvard University speaking: No IQ-75 DAFN Left Behind,
yeah...
And as usual, MMD attempts to deceive by implying that
research backs up his personally-developed theory (i.e.,
the one he came up with using his dearth of any research
credentials <g>😉. He conveniently left out this part:
"'While many aspects of both cognition and cellular and
molecular biology are reasonably well understood at this
point, the connections between these two levels of
activity remain hazy,' says Joshua Sanes Ph.D. '76 ... who
will become the first CSN director in July...."
IOW, while it has been commonly accepted for years that
genetics does play *a* role in human development &
behavior, it has *not* been determined that (as MMD
claims) genetics is THE sole defining factor in criminal
behavior.
Not the *sole* factor, rather, genes define *tendencies*...
It's all in a new book. read carefully the part below about
behavior differences in babies of different races:
The following is from neoeugenics.comneoeugenics.comOpen ↗
A review of Race: The Reality of Human Difference by Vincent
Sarich and Frank Miele, 2004.
Sarich and Miele state: "While we were preparing the final
draft of this book, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in
2003 aired a highly acclaimed documentary, Race: The Power
of an Illusion. The contemporary scientific and ethical
consensus in both the media and the social sciences
regarding race was concisely summarized in the ten numbered
statements that appear at the beginning of the website that
accompanies the documentary (pbs.orgraceOpen ↗). The
documentary's numbered statements and their elaborations
follow; the chapter numbers shown in italics and enclosed in
square brackets refer to the chapters of this book that
challenge the particular statement.
"1. Race is a modern idea. [Chapters 2 and 3] Ancient
societies did not divide people according to physical
differences but according to religion, status, class,
even language.
"2. Race has no genetic basis. [Chapter 5] No one
characteristic, trait, or gene distinguishes all members
of one so-called race from all members of another so-
called race.
"3. Slavery predates race. [Chapter 2] Throughout history,
societies have enslaved others, often as a result of
conquest or war, but not because of physical characteristics
or a belief in natural inferiority. In America, a unique set
of circumstances led to the enslavement of peoples who
looked similar [that is, black skin became associated with
slave status in America—our explanatory comment].
"4. Race and freedom were born together. [Chapters 2 and 3]
When the U.S. was founded, equality was a radical new idea.
But our early economy was based largely on slavery. The
concept of race helped explain why some people could be
denied the rights and freedoms that others took for granted.
"5. Race justified social inequalities as natural. [Chapters
2 and 3] As the race concept evolved, it justified
extermination of Native Americans, exclusion of Asian
immigrants, and taking of Mexican lands.
"6. Human subspecies don't exist. [Chapter 6] Unlike many
animals, modern humans have not been around long enough, nor
have populations been isolated enough, to evolve into
separate subspecies or races. Despite surface difference, we
are among the most similar of species.
"7. Skin color is only skin deep. [Chapters 5-9, esp.
Chapter 6] Most traits are inherited independently of one
another. The genes for skin color have nothing to do with
genes for hair texture, eye shape, blood type, musical
talent, or athletic ability.
"8. Most variation is within, not between "races." [Chapter
7] Of the small amount of total human genetic variation, 85%
exists within any local population, be they Italians, Kurds,
Koreans, or Cherokees. Two random Koreans are likely to be
as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian.
"9. Race is not biological, but racism is still real.
[Chapter 10] Race is still a powerful social idea that
gives people different access to opportunities and
resources. Our government and society have created
advantages to being white. This affects everyone, whether
we are aware of it or not.
"10. Colorblindness will not end racism. [Chapter 10]
Pretending race doesn't exist is not the same as creating
equality. Race is more than stereotypes and individual
prejudice. To combat racism, we need to identify and remedy
social policies that advantage some groups at the expense
of others."
I will only review those empirical portions of the book that
deal directly with the scientific basis of species and
subspecies (or races, breeds, etc.). Asserting that "race is
a social construct" by trying to show the motives of people
long dead and gone, is not scientific. Science has nothing
to do with individual motives as long as the data is sound,
repeatable, and valid. But for those interested in the
historical arguments, especially the conspiratorial
allegations by the academic left that race was invented by
the colonialist West to justify slavery or other acts of
oppression, this book does an excellent job of showing how
civilizations have long understood concepts of race, and how
they have not changed over the last few thousand years in
attitudes about race.
It is easy to come up with objections to race from arm-chair
arguments that do not look at the actual data on
differences. This book covers these differences by looking
at previous and current work being done in genetics,
morphological comparison of differences, along with
cognitive and behavioral differences. If someone like
Lewontin tries to show that there is not enough genetic
differences between races or Gould's assertion that there
has not been enough time for human races to develop, then we
should be able to observe that humans, everywhere, do not
vary significantly in morphological, pharmacogenetic,
behavioral, cognitive, athletic, or any other trait that is
highly heritable or under genetic control. To date, they
make the arguments from theoretical assertions that
contradict what we can observe directly: humans vary
significantly between individuals and between races. None of
the race deniers take these observations into account—they
data is simply ignored when it does not fit their dogmatic
assertions.
Sarich and Miele state: "Strong evidence in the case for
race comes from examining the amount of variation actually
present in a proper comparative context. The differences in
morphology (cranial and facial features) between human races
are typically around ten times the
larger even than the comparable differences taxonomists use
to distinguish the two chimpanzee species from each other.
To the best of our knowledge, human racial differences
exceed those for any other non-domesticated species. One
must look to the breeds of dogs to find a comparable degree
[to humans] of within-species differences in morphology. We
also point out other aspects in which human diversity in
morphology, pharmacogenetics (body chemistry), and behavior
more closely parallels our best friends (the dogs) than our
nearest relatives (the apes), and what that reveals about
the origin of our species."
It is interesting to note that of the two chimpanzee
species, when they were first placed together in zoos and
mated, no one recognized the two as separate species. They
were so much alike in looks, only after their individual
behaviors were observed carefully was it realized that they
were very different. So here is a case where "skin deep"
differences were minimal, but behaviorally the two species
were very different. Also, note that with regards to the
classification of species, the fact that the two could mate
and have viable offspring was ignored as the criterion that
defines different species; so much for having a clear
definition of a species.
Sarich and Miele then look at differences between races in
athletic performance (see my review of Entine's book Taboo).
They note that one tribe in Kenya, the Kalenjin, are 2,000
times more likely to win international cross country or
marathon championships. These superb long distance runners,
for me at least, were easy to pick out in a large crowd of
marathon runners in New York several years ago. Extremely
small upper bodies with long muscular legs. A race selected
for long distance running, and explained by Entine as an
adaptation for cattle rustling, where this tribe would raid
neighboring tribes, steal cattle, and then run with them
until they escaped or slower runners got caught (no doubt
cattle thousands of years ago were not the docile
domesticated animals we are familiar with today).
Sarich and Miele also discuss how the courts also have no
trouble in recognizing race and accepts "the ability of the
average individual to sort people into races." It seems also
that racial classifications is rather innate: "Ordinary
people can and do divide [censored] sapiens into a number of
reasonably discrete groups on the basis of reasonably
objective criteria. No special expertise is required. A
series of experiments in cognitive psychology carried out by
social anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld showed that as
early as age three, children readily classify people on the
basis of racial characteristics, without having to be taught
to do so."
And not just for humans: "Why can we do this? Why, in fact,
are we so good at it? The reason is no mystery, or at least
it shouldn't be. [censored] sapiens is a socially interactive
species and was so even before we became quite so sapient.
The common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and all our
ancestors along the way must have been able to recognize the
members of their social group as individuals and, by
extension, tell the difference between any of them and
members of another group. So can baboons, wolves, dogs,
killer whales, and lions (but not the other big cats, who
are solitary) make such distinctions. The evolution of
interactive sociality strongly selects for individuals who
are able to recognize other similar individuals and adjust
their behaviors with respect to who else is involved. The
physical evidence for the evolutionary importance of this
ability can be seen in the large amount of brain tissue
devoted to these tasks at the base of our brains. As
Hirschfeld concluded, 'Because human groupings (i.e.,
collectivities of people based on gender, race, native
language, or kinship status) are integral parts of nearly
all social environments, acquiring knowledge of such
groupings is a necessary part of the child's early
development.'"
It is not surprising that as part of our evolutionary past,
just like other animals, it became necessary to be able to
discern friend from foe, and humans became capable of
detecting subtle differences. Are these differences just
skin deep or are they substantial? It would make no sense
for evolution to equip humans and other animals with the
ability to detect differences that were not salient. That
is, why give any species the ability to discern superficial
differences if there were not also real, genetic
differences, underlying the genes within the vehicle. That
is, as Dawkins has elaborated, organisms are just a gene's
way of being passed on to the next generation.
Now that we can look at genes directly and compare the
genetic makeup of different races, we can identify races
using fewer than 100 genetic markers, and these markers are
not even relevant to real traits. That is, they are just
patterns that show up in different races. In addition, from
these patterns we can determine any one individual's race
and or racial mix. The tools for genetic profiling are
rapidly becoming available, with ads showing up in Science
magazine for the latest kits and machines that can scan
thousands of genetic alleles or alterations in patterns.
Racial backgrounds are no longer just skin deep, but just a
swab of DNA away.
SARICH AND MIELE discuss how our brains became so large, and
when. The academic left still likes to pretend that there is
no correlation between brain size and intelligence, and yet
tracking of our increased brain size—tripling in size over
the past 2 million years—has always been assumed to
correlate with changes that make humans unique among
primates. "Many academics have spent so much time with the
printed word that they have come to take for granted that it
is the norm or, perhaps, the ideal. That sort of thinking
leads nowhere with respect to the origin and evolution of
language. No matter how difficult it might be, we need to
accept, at least for the sake of consideration and
discussion, the idea that the origin of gestural [sign]
language came first starting about 2 million years ago, and
that the growth of our brains over most of the next 2
million years was tracking the increasing sophistication of
gestural languages. This raises the possibility that the
very late addition of speech was the first of the 'miracles'
giving rise to [censored] sapiens somewhere in Africa about 50,000
years ago…."
"We explain that elapsed time does not determine the amount
of change in traits that have survival value. Anatomical
differences among human races can exceed those found between
chimpanzee species. Finally, evolutionary biologist Jared
Diamond has argued that the characteristics chosen to
distinguish between races are arbitrary. Choose a different
set of characteristics and you will come up with a different
set of races. We demonstrate that the comparison of randomly
chosen DNA variants produces the same races as the
commonsense view, the art and literature of ancient, non-
European civilizations, and anthropology."
They then ask a simple question: what are those who claim
that race is a social construct think they are claiming
"doesn't exist?" That is, if there are no real differences
between races, what exactly are they saying is not
different? Hair, stature, skin color, etc. Of course we know
the answer, anything that would endanger and egalitarian
dogma. That is, anything that is currently viewed as having
value such as athletic ability or intelligence. And how many
races are we to agree upon defining? "The fact is that, for
reasonable people, our species is divisible into a number (I
see no way of making a judgment as to why it should be a
'reasonably small number' and what number would be
'reasonably small' here—that's for Nature to tell us) of
reasonably discrete groups (yes) on the basis of reasonably
objective criteria (yes) with some reasonably evolutionary
explanation attached to the division (yes)."
This is similar to Arthur R. Jensen's explanation of how
races are defined in The g Factor: The Science of Mental
Ability (1998). Jensen uses the term lumpers and splitters
when it comes to races. That is, the number of races to be
defined depends on what you are attempting to do, learn,
study or describe. Sometimes several races are enough,
sometimes a few specific races need focused attention (like
Gypsies), and sometimes a world sampling of literally
hundreds of genealogies are of interest. It depends on what
the groupings are to be used for.
Sarich and Miele addresses Jared Diamond's attempt to deny
race: "There is a further critical flaw here. The proportion
of individuals carrying the sickle-cell allele can never go
above about 40 percent in any population, nor does the
proportion of lactase-competent adults in any population
ever approach 100 percent. Thus, on the basis of the sickle-
cell allele, there are two groups (possible races by
Diamond's criteria) of Fulani, one without the allele, the
other with it. So those Fulani with the allele would group
not with other Fulani, but with Italians with the allele.
Those without it, along with the Italians without it (in
both cases the majority) and all the Swedes, would form
another unit—in effect, primitive [censored] sapiens."
"Perhaps not, you might argue. Diamond is talking of
frequencies of traits in populations, and the frequencies of
lactase-competent adults are more similar in Swedes and
Fulani than in Swedes and Italians or Fulani and Xhosa (one
should note here that lactase-competence has clearly evolved
independently in Europeans and Africans). And, yes, he
is. But the discordance issue he raises applies within
groups as well as between them. He is dismissive of the
reality of the Fulani-Xhosa black African racial unit
because there are characters discordant with
it. Well then, one asks in response, what about the Fulani
unit itself? After all, exactly the same argument could
be made to cast the reality of the category 'Fulani'
into doubt. Diamond's no-race position is thus clearly
logically untenable and need concern us no further."
In short, Diamond attempted to define races based on
"discrete" markers. Of course, this has often been the straw
man that the race deniers continue to say those who believe
in races claim they are using to define race, when in fact
it is not.
Sarich and Miele then take on the Marxists' favorite mantra
for denying race, that there is more genetic difference
within races (85%) than between races (15%), declared by
Richard Lewontin in 1972. As they point out however, we
don't see this variation between individuals within a race
such as hair texture, stature, skin color, eye color, shape
of the nose, athletic ability, etc. That is, what people
notice about races is that they differ in meaningful ways in
physical characteristics as well as behavioral traits. In
addition, the genetic makers noted by Lewontin were
selectively neutral—any variant is just as good as another.
What is of real interest when it comes to racial differences
are those genes that have selective value under different
ecological conditions, such as genes for intelligence,
introversion, psychoticism, religiosity, ethnocentrism, etc.
None of these genes have been identified because all of
these traits are affected by multiple genes. We are just
beginning to put together the research programs that will
allow us to match behavioral or cognitive traits to their
specific genes.
What is important is to recognize that the differences we
observe are often highly genetic, and that they differ in
frequency or average amounts in different races. We do not
need to know the specific genes for a trait, as long as we
can test individuals on behavioral and cognitive traits in a
reliable way such that statistically, the results are highly
reliable. We can do this now with mental ability, and we are
starting to get more information on some rather obscure
traits like religiosity. Interestingly, racism,
ethnocentrism or xenophobia have remained unreified
enigmas—with little effort by the academic left to ground it
in either evolutionary selective terms, nor to explain how
it operates as a social advantage for Whites. All they have
been able to do is make racism and its eradication into a
dogma, one without validity. That is, do humans vary on
their individual levels of ethnocentrism, what is the
genetic component, do races differ in their average level of
ethnocentrism, and what advantages does it confer on
individuals and/or racial groups.
Sarich and Miele take a more analytical swipe at Lewontin's
assertions: "Yet the world had to wait until 2002 for
someone to explain the basic problems with Lewontin's famous
15 percent. It was Henry Harpending replying to a question
from Frank Salter. Lewontin had noted that 85 percent of the
genetic variability was among individuals within
populations, and only an additional 15 percent was added
when individuals in different populations were compared.
However, this analysis omits a third level of
variability—the within-individual one. The point is that we
are diploid organisms, getting one set of chromosomes from
one parent and a second from the other. To the extent that
your mother and father are not especially closely related,
then, those two sets of chromosomes will come close to being
a random sample of the chromosomes in your population. And
the sets present in some randomly chosen member of yours
will also be about as different from your two sets as they
are from one another. So how much of the variability will be
distributed where?"
"First is the 15 percent that is interpopulational. The
other 85 percent will then split half and half (42.5
percent) between the intra- and interindividual within-
population comparisons. The increase in variability in between-
population comparisons is thus 15 percent against the 42.5
percent that is between-individual within-population. Thus,
15/42.5 = 32.5 percent, a much more impressive and, more
important, more legitimate value than 15 percent. It's
interesting that Henry Harpending noted in an e-mail to us
that no one has ever published this calculation."
"One might argue here that the genetic distances involved
are so small that it makes no difference what level is being
discussed—100 percent of nothing is still nothing. The
appropriate and effective rejoinder, as previously noted
(and will note again), is 'dogs, dogs, and more dogs.' There
the amounts of both anatomical and behavioral variation
added by going to between-breed comparisons are obviously
far greater than for similar human between-race comparisons
(though certainly no one doubts they are gene-based, while
the degree of genetic variation is minimal, apparently much
as in us)."
Looking at other species alone, especially breeds of dogs,
makes the validity of subspecies, races or breeds of dogs
obvious. Unless one accepts denying evolution, and that
humans as yet have not escaped evolution's basic construct
of ecological differences acting on different subspecies,
then there has to be differences between races that are more
than "skin deep."
Sarich and Mield then address Gould's race-does-not-exist
mantra: "The basic reason Gould gives for his no-race
position is this: '[censored] sapiens is a young species, its
division into races even more recent. This historical
context has not supplied enough time for the evolution of
substantial differences.' (This from the man famous for his
theory [with Niles Eldridge] of punctuated equilibria.)"
They then go on to explain why Gould is wrong.
They looked at differences between human races, between
males and females, and differences between
primates—particularly chimpanzees and gorillas. What is
astounding is that there is greater morphological distance
between human races than there are between the two
chimpanzee species or between gorilla species/subspecies.
That is, the differences between human races are real, they
are substantial, and they did not take millions of years to
diverge. Humans, rapidly occupying every available niche
after leaving Africa 50,000 years ago, has been under
enormous pressure to adapt. To do this meant selection for
morphological, pharmacogenetic, behavioral, and cognitive
traits. Not only are there many human races, but there are
at least as many races as there are ecological niches, and
only humans can create their own niches with forethought.
What this means is not only are there human races, but
humans have evolved uniquely to alter there own cultures or
ecologies, further increasing unique selection pressures. So
culture has in fact increased human selection, not
eliminating it as Marxists would have us believe (or
creationists don't even contemplate).
Sarich and Miele explain: "Molecular data suggest that the
two chimpanzee lineages separated around 1.5 million years
ago; the comparable human figure is on the order of 15,000
years. In other words, the two chimp lineages are 100-fold
older, yet show the same amount of variation. That is a
remarkable result, the implications of which take a while to
sink in. The implications follow this logic: Human races are
very strongly marked morphologically; human races are very
young; so much variation developing in so short a period of
time implies, indeed almost certainly requires,
functionality; there is no good reason to think that
behavior should somehow be exempt from this pattern of
functional variability…."
"Thus the data, be they from corn or people, don't mesh with
the idea that strong selection on important features reduces
the amount of heritable variation in them. But why doesn't
it? What's wrong with what seems so eminently logical?
Things might work that way if only one or a small number of
genes were involved in producing a complex character like
the brain or the various structures involved in bipedalism.
But that isn't the case. The argument that selection was
involved at only one or a small number of genetic loci can
be disposed of with a simple thought experiment. Imagine
that this were the case. Then the idea would be correct, and
variation would rapidly be consumed."
"And then? Well, yes, that's the problem, isn't it? No more
variation, no more natural selection, no more adaptive
change, rapid extinction. More formally, this sort of
process would rapidly lose out to one in which the variation
used to produce the adaptation was in fact spread out among
as many genes as possible, such that new mutations could
readily reconstitute such variation as was lost to
selection. And the more important the adaptation, the more
likely it would evolve that way—that is, by involving as
many loci as possible in the selective process. That's why
we see all that functional variation out there in precisely
those features that have been so important in our
evolution."
To summarize then: race is real and humans as well as other
mammals recognize racial or subspecies differences for
adaptive reasons; the differences in genes that matter for
selection are the ones that make individuals and races
different from one another; and important characteristics
like high intelligence require flexibility and the ability
to change for evolution to work. Human races have been
diverging at an accelerated rate because humans are the
quintessential niche constructors—we have evolved into an
ecology changing species. In the future, this rate of
divergence can only accelerate as niches become more
complex, even in the face of increased intermarriage between
races. Divergence will outpace convergence due to race
mixing, with the likely introduction of new races at an
accelerating rate.
Of course, other species have also been impacted by human
alteration of niches, especially breeds of dogs. There is no
discernible difference between wolf genes and the many
breeds of domesticated dogs that evolved from wolves
thousands of years ago, and especially in the last few
hundred years.
As SARICH AND MIELE explain it: "…there were huge
differences between dog breeds, both in morphology and in
behavior. How different were they genetically? Had the same
methodology been applied to sorting out dog breeds as was
described for humans in Chapter 5? With such large
morphological and behavioral differences, shouldn't there be
large DNA differences between the breeds? (It is now well
known that the morphological and behavioral characteristics
that distinguish breeds from one another are genetically
based.) Vince's surprising answer was that (at that time)
not only were there no known DNA differences between the
breeds, but these methods couldn't even distinguish between
domestic dogs and wolves. Although it was possible to
identify individuals with the same microsatellite approach
that has been in use for the past two decades, only this
year (2003) have researchers been able to distinguish
between a few dog breeds by DNA differences."
Knowing that all organisms are biological units that to date
have not been able to escape the laws of evolution, no
matter how much in denial Marxists and fundamentalists have
become, I wonder if any of the race deniers would like to
put forth the theory that the differences in breeds of dogs
are due to their upbringing. Or perhaps humans have
stereotyped different breeds of dogs to such a degree that
we treat them so differently (institutional doggy breedism)
their behaviors are really environmental, and not genetic at
all! Of course such a proposition would seem absurd, and yet
we treat human races with the same just so stories to
explain away differences.
And here is one example where first dogs, then humans were
analyzed, with radically different reactions:
"We next enter into the transcript the following quotation
from Professor Freedman, who conducted some of the most
important of these studies: 'I had worked with different
breeds of dogs and I had been struck by how predictable was
the behavior of each breed. A breed of dog is a construct
zoologically and genetically equivalent to a race of man. To
look at us, my wife and I [Freedman is Jewish; his then
wife, Chinese] were clearly of two different breeds. Were
some of our behavioral differences determined by breed?'"
"Freedman and his wife set about designing experiments to
test that hypothesis; they are interesting both for their
scientific results and for the different receptions they
received in even the most prestigious scientific journals.
The Freedmans decided to observe the behavior of newborns
and infants of different races. The tests they used were the
Cambridge Behavioral and Neurological Assessment Scale.
Unlike the typical reflex tests performed by pediatricians,
these tests, called 'the Brazelton' after their developer,
measure social and emotional behavior."
"'How easily did the baby quiet? Was it able to turn to the
examiner's face and voice? Did it prefer face over voice or
voice over face? How did interest in the voice compare with
interest in a ball or a rattle? Was the baby very active or
did it just lie quietly? Did it fit comfortably in the
examiner's arms or did it fight being held? Did it generally
resist or accept our testing? Was it floppy or stiff? And
then there were all the reflexes: were they crisp or just
barely elicited?'"
"'White and Chinese neonates were different even though
hospital conditions and prenatal care were the same.'"
"'Caucasian babies started to cry more easily, and once they
started, they were more difficult to console. Chinese babies
adapted to almost any position in which they were placed:
for example, when placed face down in their cribs, they
tended to keep their faces buried in the sheets rather than
immediately turning to one side, as did the Caucasians. In a
similar maneuver (called the "defense reaction" by
neurologists), we briefly pressed the baby's nose with a
cloth, forcing him to breathe with his mouth. Most Caucasian
and black babies fight this maneuver by immediately turning
away or swiping at the cloth with the hands, and this is
reported in Western pediatric textbooks as the normal,
expected response. However, not so the average Chinese baby
in our study. He simply lay on his back, breathing from the
mouth, "accepting" the cloth without a fight. I must say
that this finding is the most impressive on film, and
audiences have been awed by other intergroup differences.'"
"'Other, more subtle differences are equally important. For
example, both Chinese and Caucasian infants would start to
cry at about the same point in the examination, especially
when they were undressed, but the Chinese babies would stop
crying immediately, as if a light switch had been flipped,
whereas the crying of Caucasian babies only gradually
subsided.'"
"When the Freedmans tested Navajo neonates, they were like
the Chinese, which might have been expected, given our
knowledge of probable Navajo origins. From traditional
anthropology to linguistics to DNA, Amerindians, especially
the Na-Dene tribes like the Navajo, are most closely related
to Asians, and not Europeans or Africans. This was impressed
upon me (Sarich) one afternoon when I was flipping channels
and found myself watching a girls high school basketball
game. I wondered, 'Where in Asia were we?' Then something
appeared that clued me in. I was with Navajos, but the
resemblance to northern Asians was striking."
"Freedman submitted the paper on racial differences in
neonate behavior to Science. The most prestigious scientific
journal in the United States, it had published his study of
behavioral differences in pups of different dog breeds
without any problem or controversy. The paper on race
differences, however, was rejected by a split vote of the
reviewers. Freedman then submitted it to Nature (the British
analogue to Science), where it yet again drew a split
decision by the judges. Fortunately, the editor broke the
deadlock by casting his deciding vote in favor of
publication."
Repeatedly, behavioral research shows that humans differ by
race, and that many differences in behavioral and cognitive
ability and styles are primarily genetic. How else can one
explain racial differences in newborns? It is a real stretch
to ponder environmental differences while in the womb that
could cause such large differences in behavior. The only
valid conclusion must be genetic, unless other evidence can
be produced showing an environmental cause.
Racial categories are of course "fuzzy sets" without clearly
distinct boundaries. But humans everywhere are adapted to
finding slight differences even in neighboring communities
and/or tribes, depending on the degree of separation. Races
of course grade into each other, especially the closer we
get geographically to the cross roads of civilizations from
North Africa to Southeast Asia. But nonetheless, there are
recognizable differences between races, and these
differences are very noticeable to those who interact, often
keeping racially separate because of antagonisms kept alive
with tribal or racial nuances or differences that outsiders
could not recognize.
Sarich and Miele explain why the out-of-Africa
rationalization for the non-existence of races is untenable:
"The shorter the period of time required to produce a given
amount of morphological difference, the more
selectively/adaptively/functionally important those
differences become. The Garden-of-Eden model in its earlier
formulations envisioned perhaps 40,000 years for raciation
within anatomically modern [censored] sapiens; for a time in the
late 1980s and 1990s, driven by the mtDNA work, dates of 100,000-
150,000 years were common; the most recent molecular
evidence (mtDNA and Y-chromosome) fits comfortably with the
40,000-year date. But that might not be all of it. During
the past 10,000 years, human cultures have differentiated to
a much greater extent with respect to achievement than was
the case previously. Thus not only might the time involved
in raciation have been brief, but also the selective demands
on human cognitive capacities might have differed regionally
to a substantially greater extent than could have been the
case previously…."
"Gould spends the first two chapters (100 or so pages)
explaining that brain size and intellectual performance have
nothing to do with each other without once noting that human
brains have not always been the size they are today. Nor is
that awkward fact mentioned anywhere else in the book. One
could never learn from it that brain size in our
evolutionary lineage increased from around 400cc to 1,300-
1,400cc over the past 4 million years. Why this omission? I
think the answer is quite straightforward. That part of
Gould's psyche concerned with basic evolutionary biology
knew that those large brains of ours could not have evolved
unless having large brains increased fitness through what
those large brains made possible—that is, through minds that
could do more. In other words, individuals with larger
brains must have been in some way, on the average, in the
long run, slightly better off than those with smaller brains
for a long time. How advantaged? Dare one say it?—by being
smarter, of course. What else?"
"But Gould's behavioral-creationist side, which clung to
the notion that deep down we are really all the same,
couldn't allow him to admit this, because then he would
have found it impossible to honestly sustain his argument
(pp. 30-112) that brain size, as far as we know, does not
matter. To conclude otherwise, he would have had to
recognize that if the variation did once matter (and it
must have), and if the variation is still there (it is),
then it almost certainly still matters—and if one is going
to argue that it does not matter, then one must explain why
it does not. I do not think one can do this while
maintaining one's intellectual honesty and integrity, and,
presumably, neither did Gould. Thus, he simply ignored the
demands of the evolutionary perspective by denying,
implicitly, that our brains had evolved."
"The evolutionary perspective demands that there be a
relationship—in the form of a positive correlation—between
brain size and intelligence. That proposition, I would
argue, is not something that need derive from contemporary
data (although, as discussed later, those data do give it
strong support). It is what would be expected given our
particular evolutionary history; that is, it is the
evolutionary null hypothesis and, thus, something to be
disproved. Indeed, it seems to me that a demonstration of no
correlation between brain size and cognitive performance
would be about the best possible refutation of the fact of
human evolution (I did write this, though no creationist has
as yet noticed). It took me a long time to figure out the
general point here: Darwin's descent with modification by
means of natural selection has been, and continues to be,
the reality. It is what we start with, not something we must
prove for each new issue that arises. In other words, there
was no particularly good reason to have to do the cognitive
performances as they relate to brain-size studies. They have
simply confirmed what we expected given human evolutionary
history and the nature of the selective process. But
creationists in general, and behavioral creationists like
Gould in particular, are very good at pushing our scientist
buttons, and we fall so easily into the trap they have set
for us. Show us the data, they ask—and we try to respond,
forgetting that the realities of evolution, evolutionary
processes, and evolutionary lineages are data—and usually
rather good data."
"In other words, then, natural selection must have
genetically based phenotypic variation to work on.
Throughout the period of change in brain size, a
substantial amount of genetic variation must have been
present for brain size; likely, the greater the advantage
of larger brains, the greater the underlying genetic
variation for brain size. I had long been frustrated by
the canalization (that is, continual reduction in one
direction) argument with respect to human intelligence, my
teaching experiences telling me that cognitive performance
was one of our most, not least, variable features, yet at
the same time being unable to refute the logic of the
canalization argument. This quandary lasted until,
sometime around 1983, I remembered Fisher's Fundamental
Theorem of Natural Selection: "The rate of increase in the
fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its
genetic variance in fitness at that time"—which says it
all. An earlier statement of the general argument was made
by the late Bernard Davis in 1976: 'Let me further
emphasize that, even if no one had ever devised a test for
measuring IQ, we could still be confident, on grounds of
evolutionary theory, that our species contains wide
genetic variance in intelligence. The reason is that
natural selection cannot proceed unless it has genetic
diversity, within a species, to act on; and when our
species is compared with its nearest primate relatives, it
is obvious that our main selection pressure has been for
an increase in intelligence. Indeed, this change proceeded
at an unprecedented rate (on an evolutionary time scale):
in the past three million years the brain size of the
hominid line increased threefold.... Such rapid selection
for increased intelligence could not have occurred unless
the selection pressure had a large substrate of genetic
variation to act on.'"
Sarich and Mield go on to explain with brain size alone,
differences between races can be as large as 2 standard
deviations. With brain size correlating with intelligence at
0.4, that means that at two standard deviations, we can
expect to see differences between races of .4 times twice
the standard deviation of intelligence (30) resulting in a
difference of 12 IQ points (0.4x2x15=12). And brain size is
only one area of brain anatomy that enters into general
intelligence, but it is also the oldest to be studied
because measuring skull size is very straight forward, and
includes comparisons between species.
General intelligence has as much variation as other group
differences like hair form, body shape, or skin color.
There is just no reason to think that intelligence has been
stagnant in the past, never deviating after reaching a
certain level at some time in the past. The default
hypothesis is simply that human intelligence, having
changed so rapidly, has a great deal of genetic
variability, and we would expect large differences between
individuals and races.
Sarich and Miele explain: "This same argument will apply to
most aspects of individual variation. Given the number of
characteristics in which functional variation is present,
the ways in which they will balance out in two populations
evolving more or less independently of one another are
almost guaranteed to be different in the two. The balancing
will take place at the level of individual phenotypes, and
thus there will generally be a direct, inescapable
connection between individual and group variation whenever
evolutionary change is taking place—that is, always." Or
simply, if there is a difference between individuals there
will be differences between races.
And again, "As we have shown, the morphological differences
between human races can exceed those found between
subspecies, or even species of our nearest relatives, the
chimps and gorillas, and other non-domesticated animals.
Yet, as Lewontin rightly pointed out, the genetic
differences between human races are small. We must look to
our best friend, the domestic dog, where breeders have
exercised extreme selection to find a level of variation
equivalent to that found in humans. Canine differences in
physique, behavior, and body chemistry have been produced in
a very short time (for the most part, a few hundred years).
Yet, despite the vast morphological and behavioral variation
among dog breeds, we are only beginning to be able to
distinguish between them, or even between dogs and wolves,
using the latest DNA evidence."
This book touches on numerous arguments for why we would
expect to find differences between human races, and yet one
comes away feeling that there are many more examples and
perspectives that could have been included. Then, why should
science spend an inordinate amount of time and effort
defending the concept of race when the attacks are coming
from the academic left, where no data is provided—just
absurd objections of every conceivable nuance? For every
step forwards in behavior genetics, showing how the races
differ, the academic left produces anecdotal, just-so
stories about how or why the research should not be
accepted. Nevertheless, what they don't do is provide any
alternative research showing how the environment can
increase general intelligence but a few points, and even
these gains are ephemeral in the end.
The real proof will come from an expanded program of
psychometric testing of behavioral and cognitive differences
between races, followed by discovering the genes
responsible. If the Human Genome Project is any indication
of how rapidly new genetic techniques can materialize to
speed up solutions, we may be linking actual genes to
intelligence in just a few years. That is the single most
troublesome expectation that the academic left now has to
contemplate, and puts new urgency on trying to dissuade
science from pursuing this forbidden knowledge.
Reviewed by Matt Nuenke, March 2004
