Here, I’ll make you smarter than Sam Harris on this subject in five paragraphs or less.
The idea of a black race including humans with widely varying ancestries and ethnicity does not come from the study of biology. It was invented by slavers in America. They wanted to justify treating transatlantic slaves differently from indentured servants from Europe. This imagined “race” of humans was held to be inherently unintelligent, and therefore could rightly be treated differently.
Is it just a big coincidence that Murray’s speculation about genetic differences just so happens to map onto both the categories of humans and their inferiorities invented by nineteenth-century slavers? Perhaps, in this galactic coincidence, the slavers’ self-serving creation of a black race just so happened to align with an underyling difference in the propensity to have genes associated with intelligence? No, it’s not a coincidence.
We know it’s not a coincidence because the only reason to investigate genetic differences on the level of race is to support racism. Classification of humans into a handful of races based (very) loosely on continental origin of ancestors isn’t an especially useful classification regime if you want to understand or predict the distribution of non-superficial heritable traits. There’s too much genetic diversity within those categories, and in any event, they don’t actually map onto any proper measure of genetic distance. If you had a dial you could turn where 0 was all humans and 10 was immediate families, going smoothly from least to closest genetic relationship, at no point on the dial would you find a set of populations groups that includes the categories invented by slavers.
Despite this fundamental disconnect between genetics and the idea of races, some like Murray continue to insist that investigation of population genetics at the level of racial categories is useful. They argue that if there are differences in gene propensity between self-identified racial groups, then these differences justify the usefulness of racial categories as an analytical tool and justify the search for additional differences in propensity. But the results of such racial analysis are only meaningful if you start with the premise that racial categories are not arbitrary. Accordingly, guys like Murray assert that there are observed differences at the level of race that demand explanation at the racial level. But the obvious cause of differences at the level of race is that race was the creation of racism. It was and continues to be a category of classification explicitly created to keep people in bondage. Identifying the results of that bondage as evidence of some underlying difference is a monstrous instance of reverse causation.
The reason few real scientists are interested in research on racial genetic differences is that it’s not especially interesting discover a difference in gene propensity between arbitrary categories invented by slavers. If a scientist discovered that people named Jerry were more likely to get testicular cancer, it would not be heralded as a scientific revolution. It would be regarded as the discovery of statistical difference between arbitrary groups that doesn’t tell us about why one arbitrary set contains more people with that gene. The same is true for investigation of racial difference. Even when you discover some difference, like propensity to have sickle cell genes, all you’ve discovered is that different arbitrary sets contain different sub-populations of people. It is at most a crude step toward discovering the actual underlying cause (in that example, ancestry among people afflicted by malaria). There’s no particular reason to start at the crude step. Except, of course, if your goal is to support policies to oppress black people (or guys named Jerry), then that level of analysis makes perfect sense. And so it is with guys like Murray. If you want to rail against affirmative action, you have to analyze people at the level of race.
Addressed on the podcast, and a perfect illustration of why I am not interested in engaging with anyone who doesn’t listen to it. The discussion there is already in response to what you said here. If you had specific rebuttals to those responses , that would be contributing something new and interesting.
But I will just point out that if race is make-believe, the same must needs be true of racism. You can’t have it both ways.
The Salem witch trials analogy sounds clever at first blush, I grant you. But it doesn’t hold up. What are the corresponding analogues for BLM, the CBC, the NAACP, or affirmative action?
This is a phenomenally stupid thing to say. If you’d like me to explain it, I’d be happy to, but I think you should be able to figure it out on your own.
What’s to explain? Slavers created a category to classify and oppress people. It worked really well. We had chattel slavery for hundreds of years, and related oppression a hundred years after. People fighting that oppression are, often, the victims of it. They are all too often defined by it. That doesn’t make the category not arbitrary ab initio or suggest some underlying genetic basis for it.
Is this the best discussion that The Straight Dope can do about this topic?
There are two thoughtful people discussing an important topic, and both have opinions that are within mainstream of the science in the field. (Murray says that intelligence is determined partly by genetics and partly by the environment, same as most other researchers.)
I assume you limited the nominees to 2017 because you don’t want your claim that you called the election (you were for it before you were against it, LOL) from 2016 to be in the running? :dubious:
So let’s be clear: you presumably believe women and GLBTQ+ people are victims of discrimination based on actual innate, inborn characteristics, but black people are just a make-believe category? You must therefore think it’s perfectly valid for Rachel Dolezal to identify as black? Just as valid as for Barack Obama to do so, anyway. Right?
My God you’re being dense. Race is no more valid a biological or genetic concept than national origin. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a real sociological and historical concept. There are no biological races. There are indeed sociological races, which have changed many, many times (and probably are still changing). Racism isn’t based on biology – it’s based on sociological categorization that was invented and utilized mainly to justify various forms of oppression.
nothing “thoughtful” about Sam Harris, who willfully refuses to bother to understand an entire discipline of human knowledge because it conflicts with his “I’m so smart I can figure it out all on my own”-derived prejudices
or Charles Murray, who apparently has never taken an anthropology class in his life
Israel is an important topic, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to feel compelled to hear what Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford have to say on the matter.
lolno
that’s like saying that David Irving’s opinions are within the mainstream of Holocaust scholarship because he acknowledges that there were a shitton of dead Jews.
No. None of that follows. Racial classification is something imposed upon you, for most people, based on customary superficial characteristics (some genetic), known family, and cultural practices. Some people don’t get readily classified. How they self-identify then depends on any number of individual circumstances. Americans treat Barack Obama as black before he opens his mouth. That makes him black. People treat Rachel Dolezal as white before she identifies otherwise. That’s the main difference, for sociological purposes.
None of that affects the question of whether racial classification is based on convenience to dead Virginians as opposed to some biological truth about genetic clustering. It’s the former, not the latter.
I’ll be “dense” like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris every day of the week, and twice on Tuesdays, before being “smart” like iiandyiiii. Thanks all the same.
And with that, I am done–unless and until someone wants to discuss the actual content of the podcast.
OP, EVEN IF the interview has something new and interesting to say (which you have made no effort to confirm), under what circumstances would YOU take an hour and a half of your precious time to discuss something on a message board that’s already been discussed hundreds of times already? Why can’t you just tell us the innovative arguments that haven’t already been hashed over in previous threads about this subject?