I recently had an opportunity to read the unpublished concurring opinion of Justice Robert H. Jackson in the BROWN v BOARD decision. The BROWN decision came down in May of '54, and Jackson died in October of that year, so his participation in this decision was in a sense his swan song. The decision to strike down de jure racial segregation in public education was unanimous, 9-0. Justice Earl Warren's opinion was the only opinion, a fact of some historic significance since it meant there were no dissenting (or even distinct) judicial words around which the sizeable resistance to the implementation of this decision could rally. It appears to have been precisely for that reason that Jackson was persuaded NOT to publish the concurring decision, NOT to grant resisters an inch. Jackson's concurrence was different from Warren's opinion in important respects and, yes, one can see why Warren urged him to drop it. Consider this passage: The white South harbors in hi...
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What we nowadays call science is a specific practice that developed within a specific time and place, that is, within, Europe beginning around 1500, that is, during Columbus's voyages. This was also, I believe, around the time when a Polish fellow whose Latin name was Copernicus was taking up in a serious way the study of astronomy, where he would in time make a name for himself. So: what was this new thing? Any formulation draws debate. Sticking to a very abstract level, I think one can say that science is a self-corrective process in which hypotheses are developed and refined so that they can suggest experiment. (In the case of astronomy, since we can't haul planets into a laboratory, 'experiment' has generally meant targeted observation.) These experiments can then falsify some hypotheses, uphold others, and demand the refinement of still others. Scientific peers seek to confirm each other’s results and build on each other's f...
Melville was "a great, deep artist, even if he was a rather sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful his book commands stillness in the soul, an awe. "In his 'human' self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out, He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things Men do." What the heck does all that mean? D.H. Lawrence, who was himself IMHO a "deep artist, even if he was a rather sententious man," did not use the phrase "a real American" as a compliment. Ever. For him, the real American prototype was Ben Franklin, whom he saw as a wealth-...
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...
Now people seem to be working to figure out the difference between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. Caitlyn felt like a woman trapped in a man's body, and is now "out" as a woman, with the help of surgery, drugs, and a world-famous photographer. Rachel appears to have "felt" black, estranged from her Causasian family, and trapped in the body you see in this photo -- the carrot-haired and quite light-skinned woman in the center of the back row. Are the two cases similar or different in terms of what judgment (if any) rational observers can make about them? If they are different, is either of them to be judged to have done anything dishonest or even imprudent? Well, let me not weigh in on such matters. I argue about no one's identity except my own -- and not that either, if I can help it. I simply observe that the animated sitcom SOUTH PARK covered this ground long before it was news. The character Kyle Br...
Perhaps my coming posts will seem more timely than some of my recent posts. But I solemnly promise to make no serious effort in that direction. I have never aimed for timeliness. I remember long ago reading a discussion about the "three kinds of news." Some news is of scheduled events, and much of the story can be written well in advance, even if it has to be subject to some editing and blanks have to be filled in. Sports news is characteristic. The Red Sox will play the Yankees next Tuesday: a journalist in the field knows in advance which pitchers will start, the full line-ups, etc., subject to last minute scratches that can be taken care of by a quick edit. He could write most of that story before the first pitch is thrown. The most dramatic sort of news story, though, consists of shocks. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor. Airplanes have flown into skyscrapers in southern Manhattan. A train has gone off its rails with serious casualties, of as-yet indet...