From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Sep 13 2002 - 21:50:25 MDT
At 05:23 AM 9/13/02 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>By the early
>20th century a contrary dogma had arisen, most notably
>in the field of anthropology: all races and classes of
>human beings were innately absolutely equal, and it was
>even unscientific to question this.
Yes, but see below.
>One sees that in many cases such as this, there are *reasons*
>that the extreme positions and reactions of each side are *extreme*,
>and that the final historical judgment (about which we can of course
>only guess now) probably lies somewhere between.
There are plenty of astoundingly ignorant people on all sides of the
debate; I know from sorry experience that many very brilliant humanities
specialists *do* hold as a *dogma* that all races and classes of human
beings (excepting those obviously damaged) are innately absolutely equal,
and that it is even unscientific to question this. If one has to hold a
simplistic error, I suppose this is a safer and more benign one than the
belief that certain classes, `races', etc are inherently `superior' or
`inferior' generically.
However, from my fairly extensive reading I'd suggest that Lee's statement
of the `left' position (when it is of a scientific and informed kind) is
badly wrong.
Scientists such as Richard Lewontin do not assert, absurdly, that each
human genome has or could have identical phenotypic effects. What they *do*
say, I think, is that certain complex traits such as IQ are so
fantastically multifactorial and polygenic, based on interactions between
the protein expressions of perhaps eight or ten thousand brain-making and
-running genes, that inherited alleles in those genes are ceaselessly and
unknowably mix-mastered by human reproduction, even when it's restricted
and funneled by racist policies. In other words, the presumption of
rough-and-ready equality is a prediction from *epistemological
uncertainty*, not an assertion of *ontological reality*.
If this account is correct, the new genomics and proteomics and homeotics
will (or could or perhaps should) change the politics of IQ to a marked
extent. Once we learn what all the salient genes are, how they typically
and atypically interact, how they are damaged, silenced or optimally
expressed by environmental triggers, etc, we will suddenly have a full
ontological understanding rather than an indirect epistemological hunch
(something readily confounded by stupid culturally contaminated feature
detectors and generalization rules: `Whites can't click!') That should
return the emphasis where it belongs, and where I think most list members
assume it should stay: with the individual and his or her idiosyncratic
range of opportunities and deficits--bearing in mind, something the list
sometimes prefers to ignore, that this range (the `norm of reaction') is
itself large and dependent on environmental elicitors, reinforcers,
suppressors...
Damien Broderick
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