Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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...

June 2013 correction: Most of what I wrote here holds up. But I was wrong about the reference to "The Claimant." Somehow the Roger Tichborne case had escaped me. Oops. ______________________________ In my now-suspended blog I wrote several entries concerning Dorothy Sayers, and some comments she made in the introduction to her 1949 translation of Dante's Inferno . Today, while we are still quite early in the history of this blog, I'd like to stitch all those entries together. This is my best answer to the question: what did her allusions mean? The allusions in question arose because Sayers was addressing the question of why contemporary readers need as much apparatus as she had attached in order to understand an early 14th century poet. "Let us suppose that an Englishman were to write a contemporary Divine Comedy on Dante's model, and that in it, mixed up with a number of scriptural and mythological characters, we were to find, assigned to vario...