From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Sep 25 2002 - 20:28:55 MDT
At 06:40 PM 9/24/02 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>> perhaps you can
>> refresh my memory on what precise public policy recommendations H & M
>> drew from the existence of human sub groups who are carriers of the
>> mtDNA mutation 13513A or the mutations that produce juvenile
>> myoclonic epilepsy, or anything remotely along those lines?
>### Elaborate?
I'm so tempted to answer `mu'.
I sad `race' is a category historically projected upon people with immense
internal variation but sharing certain trivial common features due to
ancestry, this original projection being malignly or ignorantly motivated.
You said no, it's a useful set of distinctions, because for example you
know that some people with certain ancestral histories have a greater than
usual chance of carrying the mtDNA mutation 13513A or the mutations that
produce juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, and as a doctor this fact can guide
your diagnosis and treatment.
I asked how this special and unusual set of discriminators, which of course
are knowable in the first instance only via arcane medical procedures, has
any bearing on the usual hokey ways in which people conceptually carve up
or chunk the populations around them, and which lay behind the research on
alleged group IQ differences that H&M derive their policy considerations from.
In the meantime, you've provided a sort of answer to this implied question
when you replied to Olga: the proof is in the pudding. In my view this is
very close to circular reasoning, but I'm going to drop out of the
discussion at this point because it makes me too sad.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:17 MST