Harvard geneticist David Reich had an op-ed in the New York Times today that I find stimulating. As stupid genetics rants about human variation go, actually this one is better than many of them. Reich positions
himself against Henry Harpending, James Watson, Nicholas Wade, and Hitler. So
far, so good.
But
Reich, like many geneticists writing about race, does not really know what he
is talking about. One of the major scientific accomplishments of the 20th
century was to distinguish the study of race from the study of human variation.
Reich works on the latter. But he writes about the former because (1) it’s more
interesting; and (2) he doesn’t understand the difference.
He
argues against two groups of non-existent scholars: Those who believe everyone
is the same, and those who believe genetics has no effect on cognition or behavior.
He condescendingly refers to the first category of strawmen as “well-meaning
people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among
human populations.”
Anthropologists
have in fact been studying the differences among populations for a long time.
At issue are its patterns. They are, in order: (1) cultural; (2) quantitative;
(3) clinal; and (4) local. If there were
no differences among populations, we would not have been able to find that.
The
other category of strawman involves the denial of genetic “influences on
behavior and cognition”. Once again,
nobody denies it; at issue are its patterns.
Time was, when geneticists were taught to distinguish between the causes
of variation within groups and between groups. The old Harvard geneticist
Richard Lewontin explained it back in the days of the racist psychologist
Arthur Jensen and the racist physicist William Shockley. Suffice it to say that
Reich’s examples are all within-group examples.
(They are also correlations, which he implies are causative. Time was when geneticists were taught that
distinction as well.)
This is why it is
important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date
way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the
sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.
Yes, indeed. The
problem is that apparently he has not read widely enough to encounter such a
framework.
This is why knowledgeable
scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework
for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the
public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so
prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that
is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.
I generally don’t use the word pseudoscience, since it’s
usually being propounded by scientists, and only visible in retrospect, like
phrenology and eugenics. Unfortunately
the biggest boost that racial pseudoscience has traditionally gotten is the
combination of arrogance and ignorance that geneticists have brought. Remember Bruce Lahn, who identified the genes
responsible for the backwardness of Africans in Science in 2005? It’s not
that, as Reich says, “discoveries could be misused to justify racism.” It’s
that racism inheres in the research, because the people doing it have often
been ignorant and myopic. They are technologists, not scholars; that is the
danger.
Reich fears, like Lahn, that the rest of us may be “anxious
about any research into genetic differences among populations.” Again, no, that’s not the problem at all. It’s
that we don’t want racists studying human variation any more than we would want
creationists studying bipedalism. We know that their intellectual prejudices
corrupt their research. It’s been going
on for a long, long time.
I can’t wait to read his new book on
the racial invasions throughout prehistory.
And so I guess this reinforces that the answer to the question I posed last year is still "yes". It's a newer and more benign scientific racism - not the scientific racism of Harpending, Watson, and Wade - but whether it's ankle-deep or hip-deep, racist bullshit is still racist bullshit.
