Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The arguments about racial differences in intelligence, and in social behaviors, that I've engaged through Wade's book in these last three weeks remind me of the argument about language as a human trait, that I've discussed at other times in this blog and on others. I'll just give over this entry to thinking about the reason I am so reminded. B.F. Skinner famously described language as a form of "verbal behavior," fashioned by a lifetime of positive and negative reinforcements, in a way not in principle different from the way a rat manages the navigation of mazes when properly reinforced by grain. Noam Chomsky, even more famously, critiqued Skinner in a way that involved the question of innateness. Our brains, Chomsky maintained, are hard-wired for language. The wiring involves a "finite set of rules operating on a finite vocabulary to generate an infinite number of acceptable grammatical sentences and no un-acceptable ones." Now, views of so...

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 ex...

As I said in yesterday's entry, Wade argues that the human race has continued to evolve subsequent to its spread across the eastern hemisphere. When it had spread, it was in effect divided into three habitats: Africa, east Asia, and 'the rest,' that is, all Eurasia west of the Himalayas. The geographical barriers were great enough to make further evolutionary (genetic) change a matter of divergence. From this situation arose distinctions among races/subspecies that are not "social constructs," but genetic facts. As the result of a period of climate change and melting ice caps, rising sea levels cut Australia off from East Asia, though allowing for a lot of "stepping stones" between. This allowed for the divergent development of the Aborigine people of Australia. Later, around 15,000 years ago, the northernmost east Asians, Siberians, crossed into the Americas. Some genetic divergence has arisen subsequent to that crossing, too.  Thus, by the time...

My recent reading has included A Troublesome Inheritance (2014) by Nicholas Wade. Wade is an experienced science journalist -- he is a graduate of King's College, Cambridge, was deputy editor of Nature , and before going freelance he was both a reporter and an editor at The New York Times, where  he wrote frequently about scientific and environmental matters. His book has the subtitle "Genes, Race, and Human History," which suffices to reveal how fraught is the subject matter. The point he wants to make is that biological evolution continues to change the human genome, and does so at time scales which are relevant to an understanding of history, not just dim pre-history. Evolution by natural selection isn't just about the fossil "Lucy" and her peers. It's about the fellow or gal in the mirror this morning. Evolutionary psychologists, he says, commonly "teach  that the human mind is adapted to the conditions that prevailed at the end of the...