Tag: science

I always find it amusing when people have fainting fits over my references to various human sub-species, when, as Steve Sailer demonstrates, that is precisely the conclusion reached by Mr. Charles Darwin himself.  Not only did Darwin never doubt that, to him, the question was whether Man was divided into various subspecies or entirely different and distinct species. Note that Darwin reached his conclusions without the benefit of the DNA evidence which has demonstrated that humans are genetically divided into different sub-species. 

We will first consider the arguments which may be advanced in favour of classing the races of man as distinct species, and then the arguments on the other side. If a naturalist, who had never before seen a Negro, Hottentot, Australian, or Mongolian, were to compare them, he would at once perceive that they differed in a multitude of characters, some of slight and some of considerable importance. On enquiry he would find that they were adapted to live under widely different climates, and that they differed somewhat in bodily constitution and mental disposition. If he were then told that hundreds of similar specimens could be brought from the same countries, he would assuredly declare that they were as good species as many to which he had been in the habit of affixing specific names. This conclusion would be greatly strengthened as soon as he had ascertained that these forms had all retained the same character for many centuries; and that negroes, apparently identical with existing negroes, had lived at least 4000 years ago.* He would also hear, on the authority of an excellent observer, Dr. Lund,*(2) that the human skulls found in the caves of Brazil entombed with many extinct mammals, belonged to the same type as that now prevailing throughout the American continent.

Our naturalist would then perhaps turn to geographical distribution, and he would probably declare that those forms must be distinct species, which differ not only in appearance, but are fitted for hot, as well as damp or dry countries, and for the arctic regions. He might appeal to the fact that no species in the group next to man- namely, the Quadrumana, can resist a low temperature, or any considerable change of climate; and that the species which come nearest to man have never been reared to maturity, even under the temperate climate of Europe. He would be deeply impressed with the fact, first noticed by Agassiz,* that the different races of man are distributed over the world in the same zoological provinces, as those inhabited by undoubtedly distinct species and genera of mammals. This is manifestly the case with the Australian, Mongolian, and Negro races of man; in a less well-marked manner with the Hottentots; but plainly with the Papuans and Malays, who are separated, as Mr. Wallace has shewn, by nearly the same line which divides the great Malayan and Australian zoological provinces. The aborigines of America range throughout the continent; and this at first appears opposed to the above rule, for most of the productions of the Southern and Northern halves differ widely: yet some few living forms, as the opossum, range from the one into the other, as did formerly some of the gigantic Edentata. The Esquimaux, like other arctic animals, extend round the whole polar regions. It should be observed that the amount of difference between the mammals of the several zoological provinces does not correspond with the degree of separation between the latter; so that it can hardly be considered as an anomaly that the Negro differs more, and the American much less from the other races of man, than do the mammals of the African and American continents from the mammals of the other provinces. Man, it may be added, does not appear to have aboriginally inhabited any oceanic island; and in this respect, he resembles the other members of his class. …

Scoobius is dubious about Thomas Kuhn:

On a couple of different threads lately, knowing reference has been made to Thomas Kuhn and his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Like a lot of people I read it as a snotty college kid. But unlike a lot of people, I recall thinking at the time that there was something fishy about what he was saying, something perhaps even unpersuasive. To be honest it’s so long ago since I read the book, I couldn’t even tell you now with accuracy what his arguments were. I just recall thinking at the time, Hmm, I’d certainly like to at least hear the rebuttal and the counter-arguments, but universities being what they are, his book was assigned on the topic and no others; and it wasn’t my key area of interest, so I just let the matter drop.

Anyway, being as I’m the resident “no ideas but in things” gadfly and I’m just as interested in the human sociology of ideas and where they actually personally come from, as I am in the ideas themselves, I was thinking about the title of Kuhn’s book.

It seems to me that its enduring popularity may actually have little to do with the content of his specific ideas, and more to do with the fact that the title of his book contains the words “structure” and “revolutions.”

If there are two words that the intellectual class loves to use, two words that simply push their happy-buttons and send them into transports of catnip-induced bliss, they are “structure” and “revolution”. It may be that the thing remains on the permanent syllabus simply because those two words send intellectuals into ecstasy.

I very much disagree.  The main reason Kuhn remains popular is that his reasoning provides substance and cover for those who, for various reasons, doubt the legitimacy of the dictatorial scientific consensus.  While one will not be taken seriously by claiming that the Bible contradicts global warming, the latest dating of homo sapiens sapiens, or the raspberry bush of life, one can cite Kuhn and it tends to take the wind out of the sails of even the most authoritative scientist.

Kuhn is essentially historical jujitsu contra scientific overreach.  Whether he is strictly correct or not is almost irrelevant, because reminding scientists of their many false historical consensuses is the most effective antidote against their ridiculous tendency to claim that this time, at last, their assertions should be unquestioningly and unhesitatingly accepted.

As I’ve noted in the past, those who claim science is Man’s most accurate guide to the factual truth are absolutely wrong and it is trivially easy to demonstrate how and why they are wrong.  We have a word for science that is actually reliable, and that word is “engineering”.  With the partial exception of physics, most science that has not yet reached what we might consider its mature state is dynamic and remains incapable of providing predictive models that are much more reliable than those provided by other, non-scientific means.

Die by the science.  Yesterday, dh took mild exception to the following statement: “Consider the poor leftist who believes avidly that a) racism is evil and
b) evolution is true.  What is he to do when confronted by someone who
points out, on the basis of genetic science, that humans are not even
all equally homo sapiens sapiens?  If he is to cling to his
beliefs, he must either accept a continual state of cognitive dissonance
or bury his head in the intellectual sand.”

Dh asserted:  “Much like you don’t care about McRapey, those of us on the left aren’t
bothered by this. It is not great intellectual leap to acknowledge
racial advantages and disadvantages. We all recognize them everyday.
This can be done without ill will or animosity. Where we separate is in the “what to do about it” department.”

This is no doubt true of dh and other rational leftists, but it is easy to demonstrate that it does not describe the greater part of the Left, especially in light of Justin Smith’s editorial on philosophy and race in the New York Times:

The question for us today is why we have chosen to stick with
categories inherited from the 18th century, the century of the so-called
Enlightenment, which witnessed the development of the slave trade into
the very foundation of the global economy, and at the same time saw
racial classifications congeal into pseudo-biological kinds,
piggy-backing on the divisions folk science had always made across the
natural world of plants and animals. Why, that is, have we chosen to go
with Hume and Kant, rather than with the pre-racial conception of
humanity espoused by Kraus, or the anti-racial picture that Herder
offered in opposition to his contemporaries?

Many who are fully
prepared to acknowledge that there are no significant natural
differences between races nonetheless argue that there are certain
respects in which it is worth retaining the concept of race: for
instance in talking about issues like social inequality or access to
health care. There is, they argue, a certain pragmatic utility in
retaining it, even if they acknowledge that racial categories result
from social and historical legacies, rather than being dictated by
nature. In this respect “race” has turned out to be a very different
sort of social construction than, say, “witch” or “lunatic.”

While
generally there is a presumption that to catch out some entity or
category as socially constructed is at the same time to condemn it, many
thinkers are prepared to simultaneously acknowledge both the
non-naturalness of race as well as a certain pragmatic utility in
retaining it.

Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist
has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist
believes any longer that “negroid,” “caucasoid” and so on represent
real natural kinds or categories. For several decades it has been well
established that there is as much genetic variation between two members
of any supposed race, as between two members of supposedly distinct
races. This is not to say that there are no real differences, some of
which are externally observable, between different human populations. It
is only to say, as Lawrence Hirschfeld wrote in his 1996 book, “Race in
the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human
Kinds,” that “races as socially defined do not (even loosely) capture
interesting clusters of these differences.”

Yet the category of
race continues to be deployed in a vast number of contexts, and
certainly not just by racists, but by ardent anti-racists as well, and
by everyone in between. The history of race, then, is not like the
history of, say, witches: a group that is shown not to exist and that
accordingly proceeds to go away. Why is this?

This reveals several significant problems for dh’s position, (thereby wrecking the simile, I should note), beginning with the idea that the Left will not be bothered by the scientific support for the hypothesis that all humans are not only not equal, they are not even equally human.  Dh simply hasn’t recognized either the basis for the Left’s denial of race nor the probable consequences of a solid concept of science-based sub-species replacing the crude and superficial concept of color-based race.  He doesn’t recognize how significant the change from judging a man by the color of his skin to judging a protohuman or posthuman by the content of his genetic code is likely to be.

From Wikipedia: “Steven Pinker has stated that it is “a conventional wisdom among left-leaning academics that genes imply genocide”.”

The primary problem is that the anti-racial argument is almost entirely based on science that is outdated.  While the genetic categories don’t necessarily fall in line with the traditional racial ones; the major dividing line presently appears to be African (pure homo sapiens sapiens) vs non-African (partly homo sapiens sapiens, partly homo neanderthalensis, partly other subspecies).  It can no longer be pretended that the observed behavioral differences and capabilities must solely “result
from social and historical legacies”.  Such differences may result from them, but then again, they may not.  The fact that Nature is unlikely to reign entirely supreme does not mean that Nurture has not conclusively lost its pretense to sole kingship.

And while the racial prejudices of Hume and Kant may not be supported by the current state of science, the pre-racial and anti-racial conceptions they opposed are now known to contravene the current state of genetic science as well, and to the extent those conceptions have been utilized as the foundations for equalitarian ideology, that ideology is confirmed to be false as well.  This doesn’t justify either historical or hypothetical future racism, of course, but the replacement of racial pseudo-biology with genuine genetic science does destroy all science-based anti-racism of the sort to which Smith is appealing in his article.

Dh is correct to say that advantages and disadvantages of the various human subspecies need not require ill will or animosity to be acknowledged, but he is wrong to assume that the Left can manage it, given their emotional attachment to anti-racism as well as their ongoing state of denial concerning the science.  Since the equality to which they have been appealing for literal centuries is now confirmed to have no basis in science, this is going to leave them with no resort but to appeal to the very metaphysical grounds they have long affected to despise.  Being materialists, for the most part, to what can they possibly appeal, the possession of a soul?  Being fellow creatures made in the Imago Dei?

What is more likely, especially given the demographic, economic and technological realities, is a return to a left-wing eugenics much more virulent than its predecessor.  This may seem inconceivable to all bien-pensant leftists who make a religion out of equality, but the reality is that it is no less absurd or unlikely than the Left’s transformation from early 20th century racist eugenics to early 21st century equalitarianism and multiculturalism.

In answer to Smith’s question, the concept of race has survived because it has a basis in fact, being an observable shorthand for the more complicated, and less immediately obvious genetic categories that almost surely consist of more, and more definitely material, divisions than the traditional ones based on skin color.  What will we do about it?  What should we do about it?  The discussion is inevitable, but is not presently permissible within the bounds of public discourse due to the aforementioned head-burying response of the equalitarian Left.

The ironic fact is that the concept of “progress” is intrinsically absurd for the materialist; there can be no foreordained or inevitable arrangement of atoms across the universe when there is nothing to arrange them.  This is why the anti-racist genie of the left will readily return to the bottle just as rapidly, and just as thoughtlessly, as it emerged in the first place.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be so, but the reluctance of the Left to come to grips with philosophical implications of the relevant science doesn’t tend to lend one much confidence in this regard.

Steve Sailer helps expose the pseudoscience of social psychology:

Okay, but I’ve never seen this explanation offered: successful
priming studies stop replicating after awhile because they basically
aren’t science. At least not in the sense of having discovered something
that will work forever.

Instead, to the extent that they ever did really work, they are exercises in marketing. Or, to be generous, art.

And, art wears off.

The power of a work of art to prime emotions and actions changes over
time. Perhaps, initially, the audience isn’t ready for it, then it
begins to impact a few sensitive fellow artists, and they begin to
create other works in its manner and talk it up, and then it become
widely popular. Over time, though, boredom sets in and people look for
new priming stimuli.

For a lucky few old art works (e.g., the great Impressionist paintings),
vast networks exist to market them by helping audiences get back into
the proper mindset to appreciate the old art (E.g., “Monet was a rebel,
up against The Establishment! So, putting this pretty picture of flowers
up on your wall shows everybody that you are an edgy outsider, too!”).

So, let’s assume for a moment that Bargh’s success in the early 1990s at
getting college students to walk slow wasn’t just fraud or data mining
for a random effect among many effects. He really was priming early
1990s college students into walking slow for a few seconds.

Is that so amazing?

I
find it informative that the grand self-appointed defenders of Science
Reason are always focused on the nonexistent enemy of Religion while
showing absolutely no interest in real land of Woo, which is academic
pseudoscience.  As a general rule, it is safe to assume that if
midwitted charlatans such as Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond are
basing conclusions upon it, the scientific aspects, to the extent that
they exist at all, will be more than a little shaky.

I
would go so far as to point out that the MAJORITY of what passes for
science today is, in fact, nothing of the sort.  It’s not experimental.
It’s not replicable.  Despite the credentials attached to it, it has
nothing more to do with science than the proverbial PhD defecating in
the woods.  Science is not simply “what scientists do”.