Wow. You can’t make that up, can you? People are hilarious.
How does the theory of evolution fit with the idea that all men are genetically “equal”?
It may not be sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary. If your claim is that someone is uniquely shaped for basketball, it’s a darn good bet that they’ll be tall if nothing else. But, if you want to break out charts of bone measurements and prove that particular ratios are the optimum and that if I was to go to West Africa, I’d find those ratios in a particularly large supply, then go for it. You’re the one making the claim. It’s your job to back it up, not mine.
I don’t think that evolution favors genetic superiority just fittness to the environment.
All straw men are genetically equal.
See post #17.
See the TVTropes page on Evolutionary Levels – an amusing guide to cultural manifestations of a popular misconception about biological evolution, to wit, that it represents “progress” in some teleological sense. It doesn’t, it’s a blind process like water running downhill. The horseshoe crab has hardly changed at all in more than 400 million years; it doesn’t need to, it is adequately formed to thrive in its environment, and that is as much evolution as the “ascent of man.”
N.B.: Science is by definition value-free. It does not make value judgments. True, the whole human scientific enterprise is driven by one value assumption: “Knowledge is good.” But no scientist would claim even that as a scientific fact. Science cannot say any organism is “higher” or “lower” in the evolutionary “scale” than another, only – at most – that one organism is more or less complex than another.
Post #17 says that theyre are not physiologically “equal”, but that they are psychologically “equal”. Does that mean there is no connection between physiology and psychology?
You say:
Okay, so for instance, there are more black guys than white guys in the NBA.
There are also, at most, 450 players in the NBA. That’s roughly 0.00015% of all men in America. It’s a pretty big leap to think that the demographics of that tiny group say anything about the population of the rest of the world. And simple observation will tell you that most people, regardless of ethnicity, are in no danger of ever playing in the NBA.
So co-worker says:
Fine, most black people are average, and so are most white people. But still, there’s a lot *more *black people than white people who are exceptionally skilled at basketball.
You say:
Not necessarily. Consider two things: not everyone who is capable of playing in the NBA *wants *to play, and not everyone who is capable and wants to play gets in. It’s possible that, from the pool of everyone who’s capable and interested, more black people get in. It’s also possible that, from the pool of everyone who’s capable, more black people are interested. The only way we could begin to extrapolate from the NBA to ethnicities in general is if the NBA represented everyone who is capable of playing at that level.
The bottom line is, while it’s entirely possible that there are certain physical abilities that are more prevalent in certain ethnic groups, the only way we can determine whether that’s true of the general population is by studying the general population, or at least a representative sample of it, not an artificially selected handful.
You seem to have ignored the black non-Africans of Australia/Melanesia.
No, it means that while innate physical differences between human “races” clearly exist, there is no proof innate psychological differences exist.
Nor, now that you mention it, is there any proof – nor any good reason to think – that there is any connection between physiology and psychology. Cesare Lombroso, among others, had theories along those lines, but it all turned out to be a pseudoscientific – and highly regrettable – dead end. See also phrenology. And Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.
For a parody treatment, see Captain Swing in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Night Watch.
At a rough guess, there is more data supporting a link between physiology and psychology than there is for the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, Anthropogenic Global Warming, and The Theory-That-Moron-Pseudoscientific-Racists-Can-Never-Die, combined.
In fact, when I want to say to my wife that I love her, I say “I love you more than all the data supporting the link between physiology and psychology combined!” and she realizes that I love her more than anything.
Not that I don’t otherwise agree with the thrust of your argument.
You may be interested in the story of the domesticated silver fox
Essentially a successful breeding program of wild silver fox selecting for mild temperament has resulted in physiological changes very similar to the change from wolves to dogs.
Well, to nitpick, its physical appearance has hardly changed (because it hasn’t needed to, as you noted). I’m pretty sure all sorts of interesting stuff’s been happening with e.g. salinity compensation methods or intercellular oxygen transport or antibodies or whatever, just because the ocean and intertidal environment now isn’t what it was 400 Ma ago.
I make a much simpler claim: Where opportunity is normalized, differences in performance are genetically-driven.
Those with a blind faith that the family of man consists of populations so homogeneous that they cannot be disparately enabled are not going to be persuaded–ever–that opportunity is normalized. It’s like any other faith.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I find it remarkable that nature would somehow allow certain genes to vary in prevalence by racial group, but restrict gene variation for anything that would lead to inequality. So nature apparently lets physical appearance vary, but not physical ability, as if there were some Arbiter who doesn’t let nature cross the boundary line for Egalitarianism?
In the specific case of the NBA (hi, you with the face! ), if you want to believe blacks have some enormous nurturing advantage that permits them to take almost all the NBA jobs, have at it. A number of white and asian basketball players who were successful from grade school on until they encountered the highest levels of basketball and found themselves inferior, will be surprised to learn their desire or practice discipline was apparently just not there.
I don’t follow basketball, but it’s my impression only a fairly small subpopulation of Eurasians have been successful, and–as a broad average–blacks are substantially over-represented. If you are a splitter instead of a lumper, you might observe that generally, West Africans and a smaller population of East Europeans are over-represented. Perhaps that’s just “cultural” and the hordes of other putative candidates just abandoned their NBA dreams because their culture influenced them. The culture I observe is that a career in professional sports is generally given first place and abandoned only when one is outperformed, but hey, maybe you notice something else.
If you are just looking for studies that show physiologic differences among populations, there are thousands upon thousands of such studies, peer-reviewed, in ordinary scientific and medical journals all over the world. I expect within the next few years (5-10, say), elucidation of the genome will help identify which genes vary in prevalence, and from there we’ll start to figure out how the genes actually work.
I’d caution you against taking a stand which rests its case on faith that gene prevalences don’t vary by population. And it seems a bit of stretch to admit that they do but argue that the genes are just “different” and not unequal.
And on the topic of Jews dominating the NBA back in the 30s…it’s kind of silly to pretend the NBA was the career then that it is now, that it was sought after as a career so avidly by all groups, or that the pathway to it was equally open to all groups. But I guess we shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good strawman.
City A has a population that is statistically more likely to be unable to produce serotonin than the population of city B. That is a pshysiological difference or inequality. People from City A are generally more depressed and pessimistic than people from City B. That is a psychological difference or inequality.
Highly subjective, frequently inaccurate, undocumented on a genotypic/phenotypic basis and prone to extremely detrimental consequences.
Sorry, I was making up the theory about pseudo-scientific racists.
In case you weren’t joking, The Flying Dutchman posted a link to a famous study on selection and resultant physiological/behavioral changes in silver foxes.
Other examples I will give are fairly classic:
I could not find a good summary in one spot, but Tryon’s Maze Bright and Dull rats (1922) show the importance of gene x environment interaction in the development of learning and memory in rats. This would be instructive for those who are so sure they can pin down IQ differences to races. (On this note I could not find a free-full-text review of the work, but if you have access to online journals through a university there are a great number of studies on Short and Long-Attack Latency Mice. They’re really great, in a nutshell, selection for differences in a measure of aggression lead to co-selection for a large number of other behaviors, many of which are linked in the functioning of the hippocampus.)
10 years before the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) by Charles Darwin, there was Berthold cutting the nuts off roosters and watching their male-typical patterns of behavior decline (their behavior returned when the testes were replaced).
11 years before the publication of Darwin’s work, there was the accident of Phineas Gage. Getting a tamping iron through his frontal lobe was unfortunate for him, but great for the field of neuroscience and is a popular teaching tool among psychology professor’s everywhere.
These examples illustrate two things I would like to get across to you. First, these classic studies are 90 years or more old. The basic characteristics of Berhold’s gonadectomy and hormone replacement studies have survived to this day as standard evidence in testing the influence of hormones on behavior. The usage of genetically defined animals to study behavior has grown immensely since 1922. The field of neuroscience as a whole, which behavioral endocrinology and behavior genetics are just a part, has a conference with more than 30,000 attendees every year and at a conservative estimate must have 2-3 football fields worth of posters, a majority of which are on the link between physiology and behavior specifically. There are dozens of smaller conferences and here are some links to journals that regularly publish on the subject:
The Journal of Neuroscience
Hormones and Behavior
Behavior Genetics
Second, these examples give a taste of the many layers of physiological processes a gene’s transcript must go through before it can influence a behavioral trait. It starts with inheriting the full complement of human or rat or silver fox genes, although there are many versions of these genes. These genes are just a code to make a protein. They must be transcribed from DNA to RNA and then translated to protein. The transcription from DNA to RNA can involve dozens of proteins and these are all coded for by genes. RNA is modified in several ways, and the list is continually growing, before it is translated to protein and all these modifications are performed by specialized proteins. The protein needs to be properly modified and then transported to the part of the cell where it can have a function. Specialized proteins perform all these functions as well. A protein that has a specific function usually only works when it is interacting with other proteins. This is particularly true of neurotransmitter receptors, most of which are complex structures built of many proteins. Everytime I say protein, there is a gene that codes for it. For a single IQ gene to be expressed it is interacting with the environment supplied by hundreds of other genes. All of which can vary in their code.
Which leads to cell-to-cell communication. Hormones are the classic example of how one cell can release a substance and effect the physiology of another cell. Neurotransmitters are the same thing. Our cells are participating in a growing list of intercellular cross-talk all the time. All the elements of this communication are coded for by genes because of the proteins that are involved in performing these functions. So genetic variation can lead to interindividual differences in behavior due to effects on the communication between cells as well.
Especially during early development, part of the cellular communication is all about getting the cells to proliferate and migrate to the right place. This process leads to the formation of the brain for example. The genetic variants that we inherited from our parents once again contribute to the environment that leads to the proper formation of the brain. And then an accident with a tamping iron can screw it all up so that a mild mannered guy becomes a jerk.
Now looking at it through the lens of all these IQ/Race/Environment arguments. A gene that may have an effect on IQ is expressed in the tiny environment of the cell (a neuron for argument’s sake) and it is already interacting with literally hundreds of environmental inputs just to get the thing turned into a protein that has been put in the right part of the cell to perform its function. So a gene must have a pretty strong effect for it to elicit a specific observable difference in behavior before it can outweigh the influence of thousands of other genes whose protein products are interacting with it during development. This is why single gene disorders or differences are probably not good models for understanding the patterns of differences we see in more interesting behaviors across populations, such as IQ.
The only place in all this where I directly brought up an environmental input is the tamping iron. Starting from before making the sperm and eggs, environmental inputs not due to your genes (we are interacting with people all the time who have a different complement of human genes so their genes may be influencing the expression of our genes as well) are constantly shaping the process of development, and leading to interesting results like the gene x environment interaction in Tryon’s rats. In the face of all this, I would say that focusing on something like race as an explanation for differences in behavior is boring and makes no sense at all.
Anyway, the evidence for a link between physiology and psychology is huge.