Evolution and Human History, Part III

This will continue my examination of Nicholas Wade's book, A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE: GENES, RACE, AND HUMAN HISTORY (2014).

In my first blogpost on point, I observed and approved of Wade's observations that races are biological realities, and that their development has left more recent genetic traces than sometimes thought. Sociobiologists sometimes posit that we are adapted for a period of about 10,000 years ago. Wade convincingly makes the case that there is no reason to develop such an arbitrary line. Also, race-differentiated genetics go beyond obvious features such as skin pigmentation or hair follicles. They determine matters such as the whites of our eyes, or the phenomenon of blushing, which may well in turn mould the development of behaviors.

But in the second post, I made the case that Wade wants to press this point much further than his evidence will take it. He wants to argue that people inherit patterns of behavior in a strong sense, that behavior (for example, the tendency to obey authority unquestioningly) varies by race, with East Asians being more inclined to enthusiastic obedience than others, and that distinct civilizations in turn are distinct largely because of their different racial composition. He spends a chapter early on acknowledging the ugly history of precisely such ideas, but maintains that science is unwittingly coming around to the inference that there is some truth to them. I don't see that it is, and his efforts at persuasion fall far short.

I add a third post because I want to say something about intelligence, or its quantization, that is, IQ. And I'll add a fourth post to say a very few words about language.

Here is that something-about-IQ: Wade distinguishes himself from others who have made analogous arguments in that he does not stress IQ as a key part of the real or alleged racial differences on which he builds his book. I commend him for staying out of Buck v. Bell territory.

When he does raise the issue of intelligence, it is by way of considering the work of Richard Lynn, a psychologist from Northern Ireland, and Tatu Vanhanen, a political scientist from Finland. Lynn and Vanhanen have together argued, in words of theirs that Wade quotes, that "differences in the average mental abilities of populations measured by national IQ provides the most powerful, although not complete, theoretical and empirical explanation for many types of inequalities in human conditions."

Wade points out, accurately it seems to me, that Lynn and Vanhanen are guilty of the old mistake of confusing correlation with causation. A cannot be said to explain B simply because higher A corresponds to higher B or vice versa. Does higher IQ make a nation wealthier, or are the people of the wealthier nation simply better able to score high on the tests that measure IQ? In the 1980s, East German children scored significantly lower than West German children on standard tests. The obvious explanation involves the environmental differences. The gene pool hadn't had much of an opportunity to differentiate itself, and (fortunately) the physical separation that did exist at that time didn't survive that decade.

So ... good for Wade there. But his book is, as I hope this series of posts has shown, a very uneven one. I'll have one more point to make about the book, Sunday

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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