Hat tip to goes to Steven Pinker for posting a link to it on Twitter.
I think we need people like Steven Pinker pointing this kind of thing out. We need people who cannot reasonably be considered "on the right," because right wingers get obliterated with the worst of insult from the left no matter how thoughtful, careful, or well studied they are when approaching this issue.
But it needs to be said, because while anti-science rightism is scoffed at, anti-science leftism is tolerated. And though the fundamentalist creationism is miles away from being taught in mainstream biology, Leftist anti-science already shackles progress in schools.
Anyway, to the article:
The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.
I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”It's worth noting that race can be defined as a genetic cluster one inherited from having ancestors from a particular geographic region. So it's hardly a new discovery that genes correlate between races. Race and genetic differences are tautological. I mean, where you think the most evident racial feature, melanin, comes from?
These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years.70,000 years is a long time. Could anyone plausibly believe that after all that time people wouldn't become different?
We might ask, if not to promote racism, if not to deny rights to certain races, if not to create racial prejudices and injustices, then to what end is all this being said?
Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.Color of your skin, your bodily dimensions, and your susceptibility to disease are one thing, but...
Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another.
But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.The most interesting paragraph in the whole article is this:
If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.Read the whole thing. He parallels race differences with gender differences, something much more socially acceptable to believe, and states the upshot which is to, "accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.
He also talks about the vacuum being left by not acknowledging race differences, and how people are filling the silence with their own preposterous conclusions.
And he reemphasizes a head first heart second attitude when moving forward. We can't let feelings prejudice science. And we should treat all people as individuals and to empower all people.
The bottom line:
Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.
