Thanx for that article and I thought maybe the txt itself should
appear here. I have read evolutionary biology since I was a kid and I
remember I used to have to hide it, if I were caught with particular
books there would be fist fights, I have to LOL when I read how things
have turned completely around now;
That's because these “popularizers”
unscientifically ride the sociobiological
"reigning presumption of academic
America" in a climate in which "mass
media are inundated with this
biology-explains-all ideology."
Here are some recent links to the Grandfather [Godfather] of
EvolutionaryPimpology himself. You know the guy they pied in the face
because he said some things that reminded some people of something
else.
LordOfTheAnts: E.O. Wilson
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/eowilson/program.html
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=wilson&topic=complete
National Review "Determined" To Ignore Realities Of Genetics
By Steve Sailer
Symptomatic of the intellectual and moral decline of National Review
into just another dispenser of the conventional wisdom is its latest
cover story Escaping the Tyranny of Genes, [June 2, 2008], an
ambitious but remarkably muddled attack on the human sciences.
Remember—this was the magazine that, under then-editor John O’Sullivan
devoted its cover to a symposium on The Bell Curve instead of the
simultaneous GOP Congressional takeover. No doubt that’s a reason
O’Sullivan was purged.
Sigh.
In the current issue, software executive Jim Manzi warns darkly of
powerful (yet unnamed) "genetic maximalists," who threaten human
freedom in ominous (but unspecified) ways.
That's because these “popularizers” unscientifically ride the
sociobiological "reigning presumption of academic America" in a
climate in which "mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-
all ideology."
Unfortunately, Manzi never explains what planet in what year he's
describing: Htrae in the year 8002 D.A. maybe?
Manzi proclaims:
"If the pretense to scientific knowledge is always dangerous, it is
doubly so when wedded to state power, because it leads to pseudo-
rational interventions that unduly extend authority and restrict
freedom. That the linkage of race and IQ is provocative to
contemporary audiences is not surprising: It is almost a direct
restatement, in the language of genetics, of the key premise of Social
Darwinism."
Manzi then recounts the stereotypical litany of early 20th Century
horrors from eugenics to the Holocaust.
Who, exactly, are these dangerous proponents of "geneticism" who are
currently running amok? National Review gives Manzi 3000 words, but he
doesn't come up with any names more recent than Woodrow Wilson and
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was born in 1841.
Perhaps Manzi is alluding to James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of
DNA, who indeed mentioned "the linkage of race and IQ" last year. Yet,
as you will recall (although Manzi and the NR editors seem to have
forgotten), Watson was not immediately elected Big Brother. Instead,
in our world, he was subjected to a Two Minute Hate and kicked to the
curb by the medical research laboratory he had built up for four
decades.
Barely anyone (except me in
VDARE.COM) stood up in public defense of
America's most prominent man of science. National Review did—nothing.
From a political standpoint, what's amusing about Manzi’s article
appearing in National Review is how it's just a more sophisticated-
sounding rehash of a run-of-the-mill Big Think article that a hack
like Sharon Begley would write in Newsweek. Manzi’s essay is
noticeably lacking in ideological balance. There's not even a pro
forma mention of anti-Darwinist Lysenkoism under Stalin to balance the
eugenics-led-to-Hitler cliché.
Nor is there any mention of the actual reigning model of human
behavior that buttresses government policy in a host of fields from
education to affirmative action to immigration: what Steven Pinker
calls "The Blank Slate"—that human beings are infinitely malleable.
Ideas like this—powerful, popular, and wrong—have more than enough
spokesmen already.
An obvious distinction eluded Manzi. Yes, there are a lot of articles
in the press about human evolution and genetic discoveries. Much of
this journalism is silly or overhyped. On the other hand, anybody who
tries to synthesize the logical implications of the new discoveries
for topics touching on fashionable identity politics is likely to be
ignored—or, if important enough to serve as an example—crushed, like
Watson and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers.
From Manzi’s vague article, it's difficult to figure out what he
fears. But I would guess it is something like the silly 1997 eugenic
dystopia sci-fi flick Gattaca. (Tagline: "There Is No Gene for the
Human Spirit.")
Weirdly, Manzi argues that it would be okay to establish a scientific
totalitarian state:
"Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior
comprehensively and reliably, so that we can live in Woodrow Wilson's
'perfected, co-ordinated beehive.'"
Nevertheless, we shouldn't, yet, because science hasn't become
accurate enough:
"Until then, however, we need to keep stumbling forward in freedom as
best we can."
Well, that's a relief!
Although Manzi can't seem to find any living human beings who advocate
converting American into a dictatorial scientocracy, he still spends
much of his article laboriously (but pointlessly) documenting that the
human sciences aren't advanced enough at present to implement Gattaca.
It's a "straw man argument" raised exponentially to the point of self-
parody.
Manzi warns us about these "science popularizers" who
"now believe that … we can explain the causes of the behaviors of
individuals and groups sufficiently to predict these behaviors
scientifically."
And that's bad, because:
"But if translated into public policy, their belief would likely have
disastrous results."
Well, what one "science popularizer" (me) wants is more skepticism
about the dogmas about behavior that underlie current public policy—
much of which already has disastrous results.
Despite his seeming erudition, Manzi doesn't understand what science
is.
He uses the word "scientifically" (as in "predict these behaviors
scientifically") to imply some absolute threshold of quality, like
"investment grade" or "blue chip." But, in reality, to predict human
behavior "scientifically" doesn't mean you're right, oh, say, 87.5
percent of the time or any other arbitrary cut-off. It just means you
are more right than random chance.
Science isn't absolute, it's relative. It's a process for increasing
the relative accuracy of predictions. The more accurate compared to
randomness your predictions get, the more scientific they are.
But there's no end to the process.
Manzi, a software engineer, arrives at the same anti-empirical
endpoint as the postmodernists and Creationists, albeit from an
unusual pathway. He suffers from the engineer's fallacy of lacking an
appreciation of the incremental nature of how science works,
especially biological sciences.
Manzi comments on The American Scene blog:
"I have a very practical view of science ... I think we privilege its
findings not because of some rational critique of its methods, but
because airplanes generally stay up. I was trying to say that we
currently do not have, and it’s not obvious that we ever will have,
the ability to predict non-obvious individual or group behavior
reliably."
From an engineer's standpoint, you'd better get most everything right
before you take the airplane up for a test flight. You need a high
degree of "reliability" for the entire plane before you can put it to
use.
But, of course, that's the wrong end of the telescope for thinking
about the human sciences. He's thinking about genetics like an
engineer, not like a scientist.
Do we know how to build a human being, much less a society, from the
DNA up?
Of course not.
But … so what? We don't want to.
What we want to do is to be more effective at the things we want to
do, like, say, educating our children. And for that we need more
knowledge. We don't need perfect knowledge, we just need more
knowledge. (And, let's not forget, the courage to acknowledge that
knowledge).
In contrast to engineering, the human sciences are analogous to, say,
botany. Botanists didn't have to build a redwood tree from scratch and
make sure it's 99.99%% perfect to keep it from falling down. The
redwood tree was already out there, standing up by itself.
Instead, botanists made discoveries about redwood trees incrementally.
"Gee, it's really tall." "Its wood must be termite resistant." "It's
related to the Sequoia tree, but it's not the same." And you can go on
making discoveries in botany for, roughly, ever.
Similarly, we're about at the same point with human genes as Linnaeus
was with flora and fauna in the 1700s, when he started out to
taxonomize Creation.
There are tens of thousands of human genes. At present, we only know
what a few of them precisely do; we have a hunch about some more of
them; and we're completely clueless about the rest.
To the engineering mindset, this uncertain state of affairs is
alarming. But to the naturalist mindset, it's fun. There are all sorts
of things, big and small, left to find out. Each thing we find out
will help us make more accurate predictions about reality.
Granted, the predictions will never be perfect.
But, so what?
Manzi assumes that we must "believe that we can remove the mind-body
problem from the purview of philosophy by reducing the mind to a
scientifically explained physical phenomenon" in order to "predict
these behaviors scientifically."
That's ridiculous. We don't have to solve possibly insoluble
metaphysical problems to make better predictions about human behavior.
We just have to make better predictions.
Contra Manzi, we already make predictions that are reliably more
accurate than random guesses about individual and group behavior. We
do it all the time.
I'll make one right now. I predict that men of West African descent
will be over-represented among the eight finalists in the 100-meter
dash to determine the Fastest Man in the World at the Olympics this
summer.
How can I make that prediction? Do I understand how all the gene
variants work together in leg muscles to give West Africans an
advantage in sprinting? Have I solved the mind-body problem?
Heck, no.
I simply made that prediction because the last 48 finalists over the
last six Olympics have all been men of West African descent. That's
not likely to have been a random fluke.
Now, Manzi may say that's "obvious." But its obviousness isn't derived
from the logic of the conventional wisdom of human biouniformity. In
fact, the Olympics are a major embarrassment to the currently dominant
worldview.
Similarly, I predict, contra George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, that the
mandate in the No Child Left Behind Act that by 2014 every public
school student in America will score on tests of math and reading at
least "Proficient" (the second highest level on a scale that runs from
"Below Basic" through "Basic" and "Proficient," to "Advanced") can
only be achieved by massive fraud. Considering the vast expense and
hoopla of NCLB, that seems like a useful thing to be able to predict.
So, in six years, we'll see who is better at making predictions about
human behavior when it comes to education: a bipartisan consensus of
America's Great and Good … or me.
I have no idea exactly which genes, if any, are the reason NCLB will
turn out to be a gigantic bust. Someday, we may know. But, in the
meantime, we don't have to wait around for the genetic information to
make a prediction about NCLB's feasibility.
These examples of predictions raise the obvious question of burden of
proof. Making predictions about behavior is an inevitable part of
policymaking. So why should the burden of proof be on those of us who
are trying to use more information to make better decisions—rather
than on those who are trying to enforce a myth?
For instance, to expand on Manzi's airplane argument, NCLB is the
social engineering equivalent of building a giant airplane, and I'm
the passerby standing on the tarmac saying, "It's not going to fly."
And the social engineers building the plane indignantly reply: "Do you
know how every single part works together out of the 22,000 parts in
the plane?"
And I say, "Nope. But I do see you're building the plane out of lead,
and that's way too heavy to get off the ground."
In contrast to Manzi's hallucinatory theory of the political
implications of the genetic revolution, let me offer a prediction of
how the politics will play out that is more plausible.
We’re living in an Emperor's New Clothes moment. And those moments
can go on a lot longer than Hans Christian Andersen suggested. People
who have been making fools of themselves seldom say,
"Why, yes, that little boy is right and I am wrong. Of course the
emperor has no clothes, just as Occam’s Razor would suggest."
Instead, what they typically say for a protracted period is:
"What a stupid, evil little boy who attacks our poor emperor. That
brat just can’t see that our emperor is wearing a higher form of
clothing that you have to be really smart and fit for your post to
see."
And the closer the emperor's procession comes and the more obvious his
nakedness becomes, the angrier the crowd will become at that little
bastard.
So, I suspect that, outside of the United States and its First
Amendment protections, the word "crimethink" will continue to slowly
move from metaphor to reality as the police power is brought down upon
heretics.
Within the U.S., outspoken dissenters won’t be investigated by the
police. But they will be rendered largely unemployable because
institutions will worry that they present too much risk of the
employer losing job discrimination lawsuits.
In pockets of the Internet, obscure or anonymous individuals will
continue to exchange facts and ideas. But, really, how many people
like to look for truth for its own sake?
The long-term outcome will be an increasing stultification of
intellectual life in the West—rather like in Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
Mathematicians and astronomers at the abstract end were relatively
free. At the practical end, engineers were, too. But any Soviet
scientist or intellectual in the middle, who tried to theorize about
human beings, was in danger of losing his career or his liberty.
So will it be in the West. And, to adopt (appropriately) a Marxist
slogan, National Review is now part of the problem.
[Steve Sailer (email him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080526_genetics.htm
