I've heard that monkeys have a sense of fairness, and can demand to be paid the prevailing wage. Specifically, suppose you, an animal behaviorist, have two monkeys in side-by-side cages, clearly visible to one another, performing the same daily task. One day you feed a slice of banana to one of the monkeys, and a slice of cucumber (apparently less delectable to simian lips) to the other. The cucumber-fed monkey can become quite agitated about this and can even throw the cucumber back at the experimenter in disgust. My own unscientific hypothesis is that the banana-fed monkey draws the conclusion that this lab is a strict meritocracy. That fellow across the way should quit whining and work harder.
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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...