There is an interesting article in The Independent today regarding comments by the famous Dr. Watson (of Watson and Crick fame) regarding differences in intelligence between African and other peoples.
I am not writing to defend his conclusions, and I doubt them to be true. I am writing to illustrate the intellectual pickle in which proponents of evolutionary theory find themselves.
Dr. Watson writes:
"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
He is exactly correct, and this is indeed the huge elephant in the evolutionary room that no one seems capable of addressing. If we embrace the evolutionary origins of human beings, we are left having to conclude exactly the principle Dr. Watson concludes. We cannot have our evolutionary cake and eat it too. It is absolutely possible, given the assumptions of evolutionary theory, that such intellectual or other variations could exist across the diverse variety within our human species, much as they exist across other species. And to say so does not make Dr. Watson or anyone else a racist. In fact, to embrace evolutionary theory regarding human origins you pretty much HAVE to agree with the principle stated above, or you are letting your personal moral or political sensitivities override the principles of the science you embrace. And you are revealing fundamental ignorance regarding evolutionary theory.
If scientific research proves that it isn’t in fact the case that such variations exist, it still does not undermine the possibility that such variations could exist. But the politically correct powers that be will destroy anybody whose science leads them to that conclusion.
As for me, I rest in the fact that all human beings of every race and gender were created in the image of God and find their fundamental equality in that reality.
Ultimately, given time, after the truth of God-given human equality has had opportunity to overcome sin-based prejudices (even amongst "Christian” peoples), this age old Judeo Christian view of human origins will provide the principles that will lead to policies of equality. On the other hand, if our politics find grounding in principles of evolutionary understandings of human origins (which must require or teach no principle of equality whatsoever), eventually some sort of race-based differential of policy will result. At the present moment, culture wide, our human equality assumptions are invalid to the extent that they are rooted in evolutionary principles.
There was another side item in the article on Dr. Watson. As the article said:
“In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual."
I mean, the hypocrisy and inconsistency behind the objections to this comment are too numerous to mention. So, we can abort a healthy child for any reason, and that is not objectionable? We can abort a child because it is not of the preferred gender (and studies have shown conclusively that the vast majority of abortions done due to gender have resulted in the abortion of female babies) but not because of predicted or supposed sexual preference? We can abort children for being imperfectly formed? That is the most terrible reason of all.
So, predicted sexual preference above and beyond all others is the one reason we can’t abort a child. Talking about unusual and exceptional rights given to one sub group of the society. Wow. Now THAT’S discrimination!
By the way, I don’t think we should abort children for any of these reasons, because I believe that all children, whatever their race, gender or predicted sexual preference, are human beings made in the image of God.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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8 comments:
My (limited) understanding of the science says he's wrong -- the relatively young age of our species, along with extensive interbreeding among ethnic groups, means that the differentiation among populations he proposes is not factual.
We do know that intellectual capacities (and other attributes) vary among individuals.
Unless you want to deny that such differences exist among individuals, then an assertion of our fundamental equality in the eyes of God -- however true it may be -- is irrelevant to the discussion. Meanwhile, our society has worked out a system of equality under the law. None of which means you aren't smarter, taller, or faster than I am.
In any case, facts don't create intellectual pickles for science, which deals in data, but they might create problems for the discussion of science...
I needed to make 2-3 spelling/grammatical changes since and there is no way to edit comments as far as I know, I removed my comment and am now reposting it.
Ed,
Because you have been my blogging hero of late, I hate to disagree with you, but...
It is simply not the case that there has been insufficient time for variations to develop within the human species that could include cranial and intellectual differences. In fact, there is some evidence that Homo sapiens mated with Neanderthal man, and that traces of Neanderthal are to be found in the DNA of many modern human populations. This has caused a revision of the question as to whether Neanderthal was either a separate species or sub species or Homo sapiens. This discovery certainly adds to the possibility of significant diversity amongst human populations. There is not only variation among individuals within a population, but genetic variation between populations at different levels. Controversy abounds as to whether this variation should be construed as racial, rather than as a product of geographical isolation, but the variation exists nonetheless.
Not only that but we are pushing the date for the arrival of Homo sapien's on the scene farther and farther back in time. this increases the possibility of localized variations between populations. Not only that, there is no absolutely clear path of development, especially as regards the relationship of Homo sapiens to other human-like hominid species. Many of these species or sub species or varities of the same species co-existed and competed, and possibly interbred. We do not have a clear map charted out just yet as to exactly how much of this took place. Further DNA mapping will answer many of those questions.
For the record, I am one of those folks rather uncomfortable with the very concept or notion of “race.” It is a very hard thing to define. Whether the variations are to be thought of as having to do more with environmentally (and geographically isolated) stresses on all members of that isolated community, or whether variations reflect more traditionally what we think of as "race" is an ongoing question. I just don’t know if the concept of “race” will hold up over time.
I am sorry but you do not have authority to wave your hand and declare a point irrelevant. The point of the article referencing Watson did not focus or concentrate upon the legal or constitutional definitions of equality. That may be your main concern but it wasn't the stated main concern of Watson’s research, nor, in the article, of his critics. IF equality under the law is the main concern, then you certainly have a point, but I don't think you can declare by fiat that the metaphysical, scientific, and ontological issues don’t matter. Indeed (in agreeing with you at one level), we are free to declare any number of varying people groups (or varying species for that matter) as equal under the law. There are movements afoot to extend individual legal rights to non human creatures. I find that inappropriate at every level, but it’s out there.
And the truth is, or was, that the nature of our ultimate identity did play an important role in the establishment of our national charter. Although our Declaration and Constitution are two different documents with different purposes, they are cut of the same cloth, involve many of the same people, and certainly draw from the same world view well, and principles established in the former no doubt informed the latter. Our common metaphysical/ontological origins seem to have had bearing on how our Framers understood our rights. As the declaration says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...” So, to our framers, the notion of our human rights and our common heritage as created beings was quite relevant.
My ultimate point speaks to the basis for establishing the notion of the fundamental equality of members of the human race. Historically in western civilization over the last 2000 years this equality was based on a philosophical/theological precept. Despite all the horrendous things people have done to each other in denying such fundamental equality and rights of persons, even amongst supposedly “Christianized” cultures, the breakthroughs have largely come when sufficient people have been convicted of our common heritage as human beings made in God’s image. We can look at our own heroic British and then American abolitionists of the 19th century as an example. So, actually, it is quite relevant.
Again, for the record, I do not agree with Dr. Watson’s conclusions about intelligence and about African peoples. I full expect and hope that rigorous scientific research will show him to be wrong. However, evolution as a precursor for understanding human identity is inherently racist in a general sense of the word, and any view of the human person rooted in it will struggle to find a true and adequate cause for and case for human equality.
When I sit with my African or Asian or "mixed race" friends, with my female friends, with friends of a different sexual orientation, or with people who have been inappropriately marginalized by our culture and treated as sub human, or even as I sit with my enemy, or the enemy of my country, whomever, I know that our fundamental identity and equality does not rest in evolutionary theory but in our common heritage as human beings created by God in his image. And that is the controlling reality that impacts my deeply help core belief that I sit amongst equals in the fullest sense of the word.
Perhaps I expressed myself poorly.
You seemed (to me, at least) to be offering up equality in the eyes of God as a refutation of the possibility of differences between people and groups of people.
My point is simply that equality of all people and peoples in the eyes of God (a concept I endorse!) does not preclude differences among people and peoples on a more earthly plane.
My (again limited) understanding of the science leads me to think that race is a very wobbly construct, and that there is often more commonality across "racial" groups than within them. That alone would seem to give the lie to Watson's beliefs.
And none of it seems to me a challenge to evolutionary theory.
Ed,
That clarification makes a big difference. I am not intending here to challenge evolution per se, but the problem of having a principled theory of human equality when evolutionary theory is the sole or primary basis. I think Watson's general view (in the first quote) is true, but as to the specifics of his basic factual idea that provoked the article - well, that I hope will be soon refuted based on the evidence.
A couple of points:
“We cannot have our evolutionary cake and eat it too. It is absolutely possible, given the assumptions of evolutionary theory, that such intellectual or other variations could exist across the diverse variety within our human species, much as they exist across other species.”
There is another possibility. The argument you raise seems to posit a false dichotomy. Crick is a brilliant but apparently doddering old soul who has subsumed the prejudices of his boyhood and given them a veneer of scientific plausibility. We all (You, me and Ed Cone, at least) agree, with no more than our gut to guide us, he is wrong. But it isn’t so dire for evolutionary theory. Crick seems to have unconsciously used a cognitive distortion called confirmation bias, which is basically cherry-picking your data to bolster an argument. This is not to say he has necessarily done this knowingly. I would wager Crick is a sweet old guy who feels he hasn’t a racist bone in his body and that he is merely reporting the data.
Crick seems to be making an argument that relies on bell curve distributions of I.Q. tests. He compares European whites with African blacks, and the whites clearly do better as a group. But I.Q. tests are quasi-scientific. They are culturally derived documents, typically Euro-centric. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the a test reflecting a cultural bias as long it is used within the culture it is biased towards, but imagine how you might do on a I.Q. test designed by a Bushman. You would probably flunk spectacularly. Yes, now the tests strive to be culturally fair, but it is hard enough to control for cultural bias in tests aimed at a single multi-ethnic population such as the U.S. There is more than ample reasons to believe that the U.S. tests can’t manage even this limited cultural fairness. Imagine how one would try to construct a test that was as culturally valid in Ireland as Zimbabwe. So much of the apparent differences in the intelligence of groups have to do with the cross-cultural validity of the test, and you can’t give different tests to each group without completely reducing things to an apple/oranges comparisons.
Secondly, even if cultural bias was not depressing black African scores, Crick doesn’t account for the fact that the bell curves heavily overlap. Most (the vast majority) of white Europeans and black Africans will fall into the same range of intelligence. The differences are at the very low and very high ends of the curves, but I'll bet the distributions will look really similar. Thirdly, Crick seems to have relied on unscientific anecdotal evidence to bolster his claims (the bit about black employees). i take this as more evidence of confirmation bias. Fourthly, Crick makes an unwarrented value judgment about what he and many other European whites would consider intelligence, and then assumes it must have a genetic explanation.
If a thing can be called intelligence actually exists, again you must recognize the cultural element. Evolution is not simply a genetic phenomenon; it is relevant to culture as well. Just as certain genes are adaptive in certain environments, certain cultural elements like ways of conceptualizing the world, social order, and values can be adaptive in the appropriate environment. Rent the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. In it we see naïve, childlike Bushmen who would almost certainly bottom out any western I.Q. test bell curve, who in the course of the movie are revealed to be near geniuses within the environment they grew up in. The white European characters are blithering idiots.
This basic idea goes to your broader point about the equality of man as well. The premise that white Europeans are smarter than black Africans should be restated as white Europeans have a made cultural adaptations to their specific environments, and black Africans have made similar cultural adaptations to their specific environments. To say one is superior to the other is naïve and an unwarranted value judgment. The good news is that when individuals and populations move, cultures hybridize more easily than people. If something in the host culture is adaptive to the immigrant, he is virtually certain to pick it up, and the converse.
There is no such thing as a primitive being or a primitive culture. There are only beings and cultures that are more adapted to specific environments and circumstances than others. To call one superior or more intelligent in comparison is cultural hubris. I feel any worries about the implications of population genetics, intelligence and equality should collapse at this point.
Basically anything Crick says doesn’t have any real import to the theory evolution. His ideas are oversimplifications and distortions at best. Crick is lost in the fact that European culture has not reached a stasis point in the hybridization process it is undergoing. But it will happen.
Oh, and the thing you implied about Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons making whoopy, and Europeans having Neanderthal genes, I am afraid most of the recent scholarship doesn’t support that. Chimps and humans are about 98% genetically identical. Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (who were for the most part anatomically identical to modern Europeans) would presumably be even more similar. Let’s say 99 &44/100% identical, so it would seem to reason that because human populations NEVER intersect without somebody knocking boots, and our two favorite kinds of cave men were in the same neck of the woods for 15,000 years or so, so there should have been a lot of half and half babies.
The problem with that is it isn’t reflected in the 4000 samples of Cro-Magnon mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) studied by about 2004. Advantages to mDNA are that it more stable and less contaminatable than the regular work-a-day DNA. But fortunately and unfortunately, it only comes from the mother, because there is no room in sperm for mitochondria. The unfortunate part is it says nothing about the male line. The fortunate part is it isn’t affected by random assortment in reduction meiosis (it doesn’t get scrambled as the eggs cells are dividing and maturing). So it basically stays the same, but does mutate at a fairly predictable rate. So geneticists can compare samples and tell how long ago the two individuals had a common ancestor in their direct maternal lines (Mom’s mom’s mom’s …mom, you get the picture). If great, great, great to the whatevereth power, grandma in your mom’s direct maternal line was a Neanderthal, you should have Neanderthal mDMA, slightly mutated. 4000 Cro-Magnon mDNA samples tested had no Neanderthal in them, and Neanderthal mDNA is apparently quite distinctive from Cro-Magnon. Oh, and modern human mDNA das been extensively studied and mapped too.
This tells us something. You pick from the following:
1) They were all good lil’ boys and girls.
2) They never really got that close to each other, like State and Carolina fans.
3) Cro-Magnon dudes didn’t go for big bone gals.
4) The descendants of hybrids somehow are missing from the fossil record.
5) Despite the obvious genetic similarity, there was an intrinsic incompatibility that prevented hybrid conceptions. It would seem at least Neanderthal women were effectively sterile to a Cro-Magnon mating. Or if hybrids were born, they were born were sterile like mules, and we just haven’t found any yet in the fossil record. We can’t be sure of what mating Neanderthal men with Cro-Magnon women would result in from genetic evidence, but I would wager it wouldn’t work either.
OK, we're talking about Watson and not Crick. Francis Crick died in 2004. He believed that bacteria came from other planets since there was not sufficient time to have developed the complexity of bacteria in the time it actually arose on the earth. I think he had a good point, about the time/complexity issue.
I think you were referring to James Watson, the subject of the article I referenced in my post. If not, the post was about Watson, not Crick.
You guys seem to be missing the point of my post, which I believe I stated clearly enough the first time.
I am NOT trying to argue about evolution, and whether it happened or didn't or whatever.
What I am arguing is that when we begin with evolution (as Dr. Watson and his critics were doing), there is no ultimate basis for affirming the inherent equality of different human beings. Even with regard to legal rights, the legal rights of persons as granted in our constitution derives from a view of the origin of persons as put forth clearly in our declaration. The constitution does not explain the "why" of equality, but we can assume that what is stated in the declaration reflected the mindset of our Founders.
I have read recent articles about Neanderthal and Homo sapiens interbreeding which contradicts what you have written, but I will have to find where that was. I read a lot in scientific journals and don't always take notes and remember where (and when).
In either case, we still have no reason for stating as if by philosophical fiat the inherent equality of all Homo sapiens populations, or any sort of biological or anatomical necessity that all populations are equally talented in every area of human endeavor. You are correct that I think Watson's views about African peoples will in time be refuted by the evidence, but, starting from a naturalistic background, it will require nothing less than very concrete biological evidence to refute it. It is not any more inherently racist to believe that than it is to believe that Caucasians have lighter skin, on average.
Watson was right when he said, as I quoted before:
"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
That is a correct statement, no matter how quirky Watson may be. And this remains the ugly elephant in the room when we root our identity in naturalistic views of our origins. Not only can we not root any conceptual construct related to our equality in such a view of our origins, but the process of evolution inherently leads to inequality amongst groups and populations. It is purposeless and pointless, the mere random result of time and chance events, with no inherent meaning, and without any regard to progress, the latter being merely an illusion.
I take comfort in the truth that all human beings of whatever color or nation of origin or age or income status or ability to compete are made in the image of God, and that in so bearing that divine image have meaning, sanctity, and equality one with the other.
Whatever the scientific conclusion would be, I believe that scientists have to make moral considerations when publishing. The way Watson has written and published I deem not responsible. It creates heated discussion (which he probably intended) and it can be easily (ab-)used to fuel hatred and divide.
Also, race is a very vague notion. there are distinct social, religious, biological, cultural factors that inform the discursive delimitation of races.
I agree with you, that by a particular evolutionary reasoning one might come to controversal conclusions such as Watson's. But that is only the case when one excepts the the moral application of evolution theory, which I don't.
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