Posted on 05/06/2014 5:19:14 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
‘This book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.’ So writes Nicholas Wade, the British-born science editor of The New York Times, in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance.
For some time the post-War view of human nature as being largely culturally-formed has been under attack just as surely as the biblical explanation of mankind’s creation began to face pressure in the early 19th century. What Steven Pinker called the blank slate view of our species, whereby humans are products of social conditions and therefore possible to mould and to perfect through reform, has been undermined by scientific discoveries in various areas.
But the most sensitive, and potentially troubling to the modern psyche, is the difference between human population groups that have evolved over the past 50,000 years. As Wade writes: ‘The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.’
The political objections are a reaction to the horrific things done in the name of race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the Final Solution, after which the UN’s Ashley Montagu made the influential declaration that race was to all intents and purposes a fiction. Before that, anthropologist Franz Boas had popularised the idea that we are entirely products of culture.
This has remained the conventional view, indeed the only one that academics could safely hold; yet a number of inconsistencies have begun to crack away at this noble idea.
Among them is the recent knowledge that evolution can take place far quicker than people once thought. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, in their book The 10,000 Year Explosion, argued that human evolution had sped up since the advent of the first cities. The drastic changes in our ancestors’ environment created new evolutionary pressures; among them were selection for qualities that were beneficial in our larger communities, such as lower levels of aggression, deferred gratification (vital for farmers), a greater willingness to trust people outside of close kin group, and the qualities required for craftsmanship, finance and various other complex skills. Thus civilisation had increased the rate of evolution, and was continuing to do so.
Their research was solid, yet as Wade says, ‘Scientific enquiry thus runs into potential conflict with the public policy interest of not generating possibly invidious comparisons that might foment racism’.
Among the areas explored by Cochran and Harpending, along with another academic, Jason Hardy, has been Ashkenazi intelligence, and yet a previous paper, despite being considered ‘fascinating’ by editors, could not be published in the United States.
It is obviously understandable why Jewish intelligence and success, the subject of extreme and violent jealousies through the ages, makes people nervous. But the outsized contribution of Jews to almost all fields must surely interest all but the dullest of minds: just 0.2 per cent of the world population, Jews accounted for 29 per cent of Nobel Prizes in the late 20th century, and 32 per cent so far in 21st century. That tiny, remarkable country Israel recently won its fifth Chemistry Prize in a decade.
One can admire Jewish culture and the Jewish work ethic, but the idea that this enormous level of achievement is purely cultural, while possible, certainly does not pass the Occam’s razor test. As Wade says, ‘People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it.’ They haven’t.
The same is true of the Chinese, who across Asia and now the rest of the world have formed highly successful business communities and, like the Jews, have suffered attacks from jealous neighbours: ‘If Chinese business success were purely cultural, everyone should find it easy to adopt the same methods. This is not the case because social behaviour, of Chinese and others, is genetically shaped.’
As he says: ‘New evidence strongly suggests that the very different kinds of society seen in the various races and in the world’s great civilizations differ not just because of their received culture – in other words, in what is learned from birth – but also because of variations in the social behaviour of their members, carried down in their genes.’
The implications of this will trouble many people, seeing as it suggests that certain traits differ on average among population groups. He cites the MAO-A enzyme; people with only 2 copies (rather than 3, 4 or 5) have a much higher level of delinquency. And ‘if individuals can differ in the genetic structure of their MAO-A gene and its controls, is the same also true of races and ethnicities? The answer is yes.’ A team in Haifa looked at people from seven ethnicities and found 41 variations in the portions of the genes they decoded, with ‘substantial differentiation between populations’.
So why do so many people confidently argue that there is no such thing as race, because there are ‘no clear distinct racial boundaries’. This he calls ‘verbal subterfuge’, arguing: ‘When a distinct boundary develops between races, they are no longer races but separate species. So to say there are no precise boundaries between races is like saying there are no square circles.’
Wade is critical of leading biologists, economists and psychologists who have simply dismissed possible non-cultural explanations as racist, or who pin their hopes in geographic determinism, or shy away from recent evolution because of the political implications. This, he says, has nothing to do with its scientific validity but the ‘political dangers’ that researchers face in ‘pursuing the truth too far’.
The political dangers are very real; various academics have lost their jobs or faced quite extreme harassment for voicing the belief that differences in group IQ scores are partly hereditary, despite there being solid evidence that intelligence is under genetic control.
And yet these ‘accusations of racism against anyone who suggests that cognitive capacities might differ between human populations groups… are shaped by leftist and Marxist political dogma, not by science.’ He says: ‘The common sense conclusion – that race is both a biological reality and a politically fraught idea with sometimes pernicious consequences – has also eluded’ much of academia.
This book’s ideas are indeed fraught but beyond carefully explaining the dangers of misusing science, the consequences are not for scientists to ponder, but rather lawmakers and others of influence; they can choose either to consider the evidence and make things work as best as they can, using what knowledge we have, or they can continue to ignore the ticking of Darwin’s unexploded bomb, punishing anyone who raises the subject.
This hostility faced by those with troublesome ideas is, of course, itself explained by evolution. As Wade mentions earlier on, we are social creatures, and we have evolved behaviours to live as such: ‘One is a tendency to criticise, and if necessary punish, those who do not follow the agreed norms.’ That is partly why, as a species, we find it easier to talk about how the world should be, rather than how it is.
Our cultural values are explained by genetic evolution? How magical!
I’m trying to figure out what relevance your post has to the subject of the article?
Well, OK, you could just say you don’t know either.
I note the author says nothing about whether evolution as described proceeds forwards or backwards. My belief is that it is becoming retrograde and much of what formerly passed as “advanced civilization” is actually going backwards. And yes, it can definitely go quickly.
Second Law of Thermodynamics says you’re on to something.
Evolution cannot be described as going backwards or forwards.
I saw recently that the size of the human brain has been shrinking. This can be explained by the effect of civilization: since so many survival functions are now delegated to society, people do not have to devote as much brain mass to survival. So people with smaller brains can still survive and pass their genes to their offspring.
Communities breed out aggression! Really? Like the Romans were not aggressive slaughtering millions and stealing their wealth and making slaves of the survivors.
One can admire Jewish culture and the Jewish work ethic, but the idea that this enormous level of achievement is purely cultural, while possible, certainly does not pass the Occam’s razor test. As Wade says, ‘People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it.’ They haven’t.
So why do Jews (Semites) succeed whereas Arabs (Semites) live in squalor. Did the success gene split 1400 years ago or did the Arabs accept a cult bent on destruction? Whenever I hear "Occam’s razor test", I know the writer is attempting to appear logical where there is no logic.
Does the Negro fail because he has dumb genes or is it that he accepts the culture of sustenance of the War on Poverty pursuing non intellectual pastimes.
Is that what you hide behind when discussing the book ‘The Bell Curve’ also?
Evolutionarily speaking, did the troublesome ideas evolve first, or did the tendency to criticize those troublesome ideas evolve first? Was it this mystical convergent evolution? Does evolution select for troublesome ideas and criticisms of those ideas or, as we have been proselytized to believe that evolution selects for the 4 F's…….fleeing, fighting, feeding, and reproduction. In the human genome where is the gene for criticizing an idea?
Indeed, what is said of Jews can so be said of Americans in general — less than 5% of the world's population, we create over 25% of the world's wealth, and contribute disproportionately to science, etc., etc.
Does that make us a different “race”? No, it just means we are especially talented at bringing out the human potentials in all of our races.
That would be for the same reason they have not copied other culture success stories. Because it is hard work, because it forces you to interact with people who may not like you and it means taking risks.
These are all things that most humans avoid.
If you don’t know enough history to understand then you do not know enough history to understand the explanation.
~‘People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it.’ They haven’t.~
Why would one group copy another? But you surely can await people copying one another within one group.
Their argument is absolutely illegitimate.
It is absolutely clear that difference between groups are solely cultural and there is no legit clues to prove otherwise.
Of course you need some intellectual and physical qualities for more achievments but if some ethnicies generally lacks that it is cultural as well.
If Muslims are leaning to inbreeding you can await a number of underforming freaks within their societies. If some other group doesn’t value education and gaining valuable skills and underperforming as a result it is exactly cultural.
So both groups put a high emphasis on education and learning and both have notable success but aside from that they have little in common. Yet this person jumps to a rather strange conclusion that it must have nothing to do with culture but with genes.
Of course the fact is that there are a number of other cultures in Asia that are successful but are not Chinese. But they do all place a high emphasis on education and learning.
But in places that have the same genetics but place no emphasis on education and learning there is a marked lack of success.
This study is totally devoid of anything that resembles logic and reason. A third grader could pick it apart.
I know it plays to certain peoples desire to assume that they are "special" but they delude themselves.
Most Darwinists know next to nothing about the man, nor what he wrote, nor why.
Wasn’t it Galton, Darwin’s cousin, whose views form the basis of eugenics? And of course Darwin himself claimed that most races are not evolving, and should therefore be weeded out of the gene pool, lest evolution march backward “into the swirling mists of the dawnless past.”
This gave the elitists - for the first time in history - a SCIENTIFIC basis for exercising rule over the unwashed masses.
Darwin’s bomb is not unexploded. Most people just don’t hear it.
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