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Science Forum Index » Philosophy Forum » Again, Steven Sailer speaks the truth at Vdare....
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| animalishness... |
 Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 4:27 pm |
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Are Human Beings Alike Or Different? The Evidence Is In, But It’s Hard
To Talk About
By Steve Sailer
The human sciences are in a paradoxical situation. Vast quantities of
new data are pouring in, particularly from the exponential
improvements in genome sequencing. Yet theorizing about what the new
data imply has seldom been more career-threatening—as the fates of
James Watson and Larry Summers show.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the May 10, scientific conference on
"Evolution, Culture, and Human Behavior" at UC Irvine, which brought
together leading theorists for a day of presentations centered around
the debate over human uniformity vs. human biodiversity, flew under
the radar. It needed only a single normal-sized classroom.
Still, the few dozen spectators included an honor roll of prominent
figures in the human sciences.
For example, Leda Cosmides, the co-developer of the field of
evolutionary psychology. Also: John Hawks, the young anthropologist
from the University of Wisconsin, whose remarkably broad range of
expertise, from the oldest bones to the latest statistical techniques
for genetic analysis, has quickly made him a star science blogger.
Hawks is already a strong prose stylist. If he continues to improve,
he could someday fill the job of the human sciences' Public Sage—a
role for which such luminaries as Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson,
Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker have competed.
And in attendance: Gregory Cochran. In evolutionary theory over the
last decade, Cochran has been the straw that stirs the drink—as
slugger Reggie Jackson described his function on the tumultuous 1970s
Yankees baseball team. (Here's the unofficial Cochran Fan Site.)
There were four main speakers:
Shinobu Kitayama, director of the Culture and Cognition Program at
the University of Michigan.
Kitayama discussed the sizable differences in personality between
Americans and Japanese. Just as the stereotype would suggest,
Americans are more independent; the Japanese more interdependent.
Americans like to feel individually in control of the situation; the
Japanese are happiest when their group is cohesive.
Interestingly, the Japanese on the northernmost island of Hokkaido
generally fall midway between the Japanese and American norms.
Kitayama speculates that this is related to Hokkaido having been a
wilderness frontier, not settled until the late 19th Century, rather
like the United States.
Thomas J. Bouchard, the principle organizer of the famous "Minnesota
Twins" study that reunited separated twins.
Bouchard explained that the state of the art in twin and adoption
studies shows that IQ is highly heritable. Remarkably, the
heritability of IQ goes up as we age. Identical twins who grew up
together tend to become more alike in IQ when they are adults living
apart than when they were children in the same home.
The conference was organized and emceed by UCI professors
Chuansheng Chen and
Robert Moyzis, one of the co-authors of the late 2005 paper "Global
landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for Homo
sapiens" [PDF], which listed 1,800 genes that have been under varying
selection pressure in Africa, Europe, or East Asia over the last
50,000 or so years. This shattered the conventional wisdom that
Darwinian selection had somehow ceased to operate on the human species
when our ancestors first left Africa. The data now suggests what
common sense always implied—that when humans dispersed out of the
tropics, the new environments they encountered, such as cold weather,
led to important degrees of racial diversification.
The central argument of the conference turned out to be between the
other two speakers, the prominent anthropologists, Henry Harpending of
the University of Utah and John Tooby of UC Santa Barbara over, in
effect, whether diversity or uniformity best characterizes humanity.
Harpending spoke first on the accumulating evidence that human
evolution has actually accelerated since we came out of Africa,
especially after the invention of agriculture. This was proposed by
Harpending, with Cochran, Moyzis, Hawks, and Eric T. Wang, in their
important December 2007 paper "Recent acceleration of human adaptive
evolution", [PDF] which appeared in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences
For example, Harpending suggested that the prehistoric spread of Indo-
European languages across a huge swath of Eurasia from India to
Ireland might have been made possible by a beneficial genetic mutation
for "lactose tolerance." This allows many adults in this region to
drink milk without gastro-intestinal discomfort. In the right terrain
for dairying, a tribe whose adults can get much of their nourishment
from the milk of cattle or goats has a big competitive advantage over
tribes that can't—perhaps allowing the Proto-Indo-European-speaking
milk drinkers to impose their language and spread their useful gene.
By the way, a "lactose tolerance-centric" theory of world history was
put forward by the Irish dairy farmer-turned-economist Raymond D.
Crotty in his ambitious but little known 2001 book When Histories
Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism. (It
hasn't been published in the U.S., but you can read part of it on
Google Books. And here is a brief summary.) Crotty attributed the
medieval rise of property rights and the rule of law in Northwestern
Europe to deep roots going back to the type of European agricultural
society made possible by the evolution of lactose tolerance.
In contrast, John Tooby, co-founder of evolutionary psychology with
Leda Cosmides, who is his wife, countered Harpending's emphasis on
human biodiversity with their Gray's Anatomy Test. Open that 1918 book
of medical charts at random, close your eyes, and poke a drawing. In
all likelihood, whatever tiny anatomical detail you're touching can be
found in virtually everybody on Earth. (Or at least everybody of one
sex).
Although the parts differ in size from person to person, the basic
human blueprint is extremely uniform in terms of which parts are
used.
This uniformity is what allows sexual reproduction. Imagine that you
want to assemble a working Toyota Camry from the parts of two other
cars, Tooby suggests. You'll see that you'd better start with two
other Toyota Camrys.
As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker wrote in his 1994 bestseller The
Language Instinct, produced after a sabbatical year spent in Santa
Barbara with Tooby and Cosmides, "To a scientist interested in how
complex biological systems work, differences between individuals are
so boring!"
Well, that's one way of looking at it …
Tooby also suggested that human nature is reasonably uniform in many
behavioral areas as well. For instance, in virtually every society
currently in existence, incest within the nuclear family is unusual
and socially disapproved.
Sigmund Freud famously theorized that humans desperately want to
commit incest with their nearest and dearest relatives, and that makes
necessary the convoluted apparatus of Freudianism. But Finnish
anthropologist Edvard Westermarck offered a simpler idea way back in
1891: that humans have evolved an instinct to find incest repugnant
because it leads to birth defects. (In a 2007 paper in Nature, "The
Architecture of Human Kin Detection," [PDF] Tooby, Cosmides, and Debra
Lieberman offer what they believe are the two rules for recognizing
siblings—seeing your sibling being nursed by your mother, or being
raised together--that make Westermarck's instinct feasible.)
So who is right? Is the human race uniform or diverse?
Well, they're both right. It all depends upon what you're interested
in at the moment.
That's usually how it goes—the things that interest us the most, that
get us most worked up, are those that are on the knife edge, that look
different when viewed from different angles.
Let's consider a similar question that's remote enough that we can
think about without political biases getting in the way: Is the
universe empty or full?
Outer space is famously empty. You can't get much emptier than space.
By one account, the universe is about 0.00000000000000000000000000001
as dense as water.
And yet, outer space is also famously full of "billions and billions"
of stars, as Johnny Carson used to say when parodying astronomer Carl
Sagan. In 2003, a team of Australian astronomers estimated that there
are 70 sextillion stars in the known universe. That's
70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
Now, it's perfectly reasonable to conceive of the universe both ways,
depending upon what you need to think about at the time. The
incredible emptiness of space is terribly important to understand if
you are, say, contemplating an interstellar voyage. Nevertheless, to
be frank, once you grasp that fact, it gets kind of boring to think
about. So, astronomers spend more time thinking about the tiny
fraction of space that isn't empty, those 70 sextillion stars.
Similarly, the Wikipedia article on Human Genetic Variation reports
DATE, "Two random humans are expected to differ at approximately 1 in
1000 nucleotides …"
Well, that's not a very big number.
But Wikipedia goes on to say, "However, with a genome of approximate 3
billion nucleotides, on average two humans differ at approximately 3
million nucleotides."
Well, three million is a pretty big number. (It's not as big as 70
sextillion, but still …)
So, now we can see why, no matter what Pinker says, the African-
American 7'-1" basketball player Shaquille O'Neal and the Lebanese-
Colombian 5'-1" singer Shakira seem interestingly different.
Of course, probably they would not at all be very different at all
compared to space aliens possibly living on a planet going around one
of those 70 sextillion stars.
And if those aliens showed up in hostile flying saucers to conquer the
human race, no doubt Shaq and Shakira and everybody else would team up
to fight them off. Ronald Reagan said exactly this to the United
Nations back in 1987:
"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would
vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this
world."[Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General
Assembly in New York, New York]
But, we're not facing space aliens. So the differences between humans
are interesting—and important.
When it comes to thinking about race,—which is all about who your
relatives are—it’s all, well, relative.
[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.] |
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