The Risk of Science and Race

The New York Times has an article that lays out the risk very clearly, it is the EXPECTATION that more research in genetics will indeed prove innate differences in the races in physical and mental attributes. And if there is one thing we can know about the history of science, scientists will find what they look for. Consider this:

“Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to treat all as equal before God and before the law,” Perry Clark, 44, wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark, a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist.“When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100 meters?” he asked.

“To say that such differences aren’t real,” Dr. Clark later said in an interview, “is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the band marches by.”

First, to answer the good doctor's question, Alan Welles of Scotland won the Olympic gold medal in 1980. Prior to that, Valery Borzov of the then-Soviet Union won the 100 meters in the 1972 Olympics. Prior to that, Armin Hary of Germany won the 100 meter dash in 1960. 1956? White American Bobby Joe Morrow. To wit, from 1956 to 1980, white men won 4 of 7 100 meter dash Olympic gold medals. Presumably, for the good doctor, all these genetic changes occurred since 1980. MORE.  

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  1. From the years that you cited, how many participants were not Caucasian?  How many had access to the same training, coaching, equipment and financial support? In other words – I can’t tell from either the Times’ commenter or from your data what the evidence suggests:  there simply isn’t enough data to be of use.

    Real science doesn’t make the evidence support the hypothesis, Armando, so please don’t apply that spurious attribute to it.

    Real science leads where the evidence takes it, and it re-tests and looks critically at generalizability.  It is disinterested and skeptical.

    It isn’t used to advance one’s agenda, either. A science blog you might really enjoy is called Respectful Insolence. *G* I can’t imagine why you aren’t a contributing editor there!

  2. And the source is a racist blog.

    Well, worrying about blog credibility is kind of a waste of effort, but I thought the Times had standards and good juornalistic practices and stuff like that.

    • robodd on November 11, 2007 at 03:40

    Sprinting is a kind of a one dimensional aspect of track.  Not too many great black one milers, but many at distances longer than that–but mostly from African countries.  What explains this, according to Clark?  

    Bad things happen when science and culture collide.  Scientists need to stick to science and stop trying to come up with social hypotheses from scientific data, particularly in areas in which they have no training, nor expertise.

  3. you can investigate all questions of race.

    Understanding Race

    (you can answer that “nonblack sprinter” stupidity for yourself at this site btw).

    also

    Is Race Real? is great.

    PBS Series

    American Anthropological Association Statement on Race

    sorry about the length, but it’s worth posting in its entirety

    In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

    Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.

    Historical research has shown that the idea of “race” has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.

    From its inception, this modern concept of “race” was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. *Thus “race” was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. *Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used “race” to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.

    As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each “race,” linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Numerous arbitrary and fictitious beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought.

    Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to reflect the public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the “racial” categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.

    Ultimately “race” as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere. But it was not limited to the colonial situation. In the latter part of the 19th century it was employed by Europeans to rank one another and to justify social, economic, and political inequalities among their peoples. During World War II, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler enjoined the expanded ideology of “race” and “racial” differences and took them to a logical end: the extermination of 11 million people of “inferior races” (e.g., Jews, Gypsies, Africans, homosexuals, and so forth) and other unspeakable brutalities of the Holocaust.

    “Race” thus evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into “racial” categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.

    At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call “culture.” Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.

    It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different language and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world.

    How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The “racial” worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called “racial” groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.

    [Note: For further information on human biological variations, see the statement prepared and issued by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 1996 (AJPA 101:569-570).]

    • Turkana on November 11, 2007 at 03:50

    borzov won because eddie hart and rey robinson were dq’d, when their coach gave them the wrong start times, in a prelim round.

    but yes- they will find what they’re looking for. which is not how science is supposed to work.

  4. Genetics is science only to a point.

    When you start looking at intelligence and the difference between races it’s pure conjecture and largely relates to  a combination of semi-sceintific genetics, sociology and psychology. Psychology and Sociology are fields of discipline that do not lend themselves to  scientific testing. Almost Nothing can be proved. Theories cannot be tested on humans because the variables cannot be controlled.

    Science requires testing. And the same result (212 degrees for boiling water) has to occur everytime for a “sceintific finding”.

    Intelligence has nothing to do with testing. It has to do simply with an organism doing things that are beneficial to themselves. And that can have nothing to do with education. Education is not a requirement for intelligence.

    Intelligence is not understood.

    The problem with the idea of the difference between the races in terms of intelligence can be summed by Watson, Nobel Prize winner who said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

    He’s just a crotchey old racist.  

  5. Ronald Fisher, Watson, Dawkins, Bell, Sullivan and now Clark

    vs Romualdi et al, National Science Foundation/SERC article (2002)

    Using a range of statistical methods, we show that classification errors are at best around 30% for autosomal biallelic polymorphisms and 27% for the Y chromosome. Two data sets suggest the existence of three and four major groups of genotypes worldwide, respectively, and the two groupings are inconsistent. These results suggest that, at random biallelic loci, there is little evidence, if any, of a clear subdivision of humans into biologically defined groups.

    With odds like that, perish the thought of scientific methods of ethnology.

    Except these assholes will not let up on rapid genetic recombination theory until people happily volunteer to be subjects of genetic therapies and/or to model phenotypes of the master race, (Indo-Euro/Aryan). Because their centennial agenda is pure politics.

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