From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 01:37:55 MDT
At 11:20 AM 9/20/02 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>Should some groups of
>people be found to have genetic limitations, we'll need to learn more about
>them, rather than try to deny them. Only after we understand, we will be
>able to help.
This is one of the cruxes where painful unpacking of premises is needed. I
haven't got the time to do this in a formal manner, but some questions
occur to me.
What motivates anyone to ask if `some groups of people have genetic
limitations' that require appropriate treatment (intensive costly
education, gene therapy, segregation, enslavement, whatever)?
In general, I think, it's a pre-scientific `chunking' of our experienced
world that coarsely aggregates people into sets on the basis of some
bindingly apparent discriminator--sex, say, or age, height, skin tone, eye
shape, hair type, verbal accent. We seem to have a propensity to carve the
world into groups of this sort, treating some people as inside the `us'
boundary and others inside the `them' boundary, and for these sets to get
confused with `friend' versus `foe' AND `sexually unappealing' versus
`wickedly attractive' and many other possible readings.
In the real world, America's hideous history of enslaving dark skinned
Africans plainly set up a tradition that cannot help but evoke a `natural',
`inevitable' categorization process using skin tone, etc, as primary
discriminators--even by those who repudiate that history, who regard
themselves as `color-blind'. Against a history of ruthless subjection and
denial, people so segregated are likely to share a bunch of cultural and
personal characteristics, whether or not those are encoded as proclivities
in their genomes. But really, the interesting initial question for people
smart enough to notice this cognitive background is not
`do some groups of people have genetic limitations that require appropriate
treatment'?
but rather
`do some individual people have genetic or other limitations that require
appropriate treatment'?
We know, for example, that deaf people have a sort of limitation, in the
context of a larger culture where most people can hear and speak. But while
it might seem perverse for the deaf to treasure the accommodation they've
made to the condition--via signing--it's arguably none of the business of
the hearing to regard them as suitable cases for enforced adjustment. Does
this group have a genetic limitation? Some do, most don't (I gather), since
hearing loss is often caused by infection or injury.
Stupid people certainly have a limitation, especially in a high energy,
high information society. Is there likely to be a genetic component in
their stupidity? It seems extraordinarily unlikely that there wouldn't be,
although we also know that a lot of minimal or even serious brain and
developmental damage can occur during stochastic unfolding of the genome
into the phenotype--in the womb, and in infancy. In many cases, there's an
intrauterine component that has nothing to do with the initial genome, but
which interferes with optimal development--foetal alcohol syndrome is an
obvious example, and more generally there are various ways in which a
mother's stress cortisol levels can modulate the intelligence and certain
personality factors of her child.
All this being so, it should be obvious that looking at ancestry-based
groups of humans as `races' is not just arbitrary and grounded in ancient
wrongs and self-interest, but likely to be systematically misleading. Now
that we're starting to unpack the genome and uncover the true complex
contributions of various alleles, we stand at the start of an era where
people can blessedly put aside all this ancient and largely malevolent crap
and direct their attention back where it should be: on the individual. If
it turns out that one individual, due to distinctive genome, birth order,
peer group, access to learning, etc is likely to turn out as thick as two
planks, that'll be a fact we need to deal with.
My 2 IQ points.
Damien Broderick
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