Search Results for: is race only a social construct

In a long and wonky post on genetics and race, Razib Khan defends a biological understanding of “race”: The history of a population affects [its] genome, and its genome affects the nature of its traits and diseases.  Because of differences across populations statistical geneticists with medical aims routinely restrict their data set to individuals of … Continue reading Is Race Only A Social Construct? Ctd

John H. Richardson doesn’t have many fans in the in-tray: Looks like a shoo-in for a Poseur Alert. “Enacting a hero’s journey”? Puh-lease. Another reader: If there is one cause that doesn’t need a rebel, it is sex. Having sex, enjoying sex, is enough of its own reward that I don’t think we also need to burden … Continue reading Sex As Grace, Ctd

A reader writes:

Haven't these questions already been settled?  In the same breath that Volokh demands scientific consensus as proof, he decries the current consensus as "not enough".  Why not?  Because, he says, the free exchange of views on the subject is "too dangerous".  I was not aware that Murray or Hernstein had been assassinated for their work arguing that race is a determiner of intelligence.  In fact, I was under the opposite impression that numerous studies, peer-reviewed as The Bell Curve was not, were produced following its publication showing its methodology and conclusions to be incorrect, subjective and illogically drawn from the evidence, and exposing the underlying flawed assumptions that drive the work. 

In other words, I was under the impression that, in this case, the academic and scientific community did what it does regarding all ideas; held it up to scrutiny, put the evidence to the test, and found their arguments wanting, as these genetic arguments for intelligence have consistently been found wanting since the early days of eugenic thought.  We don't typically have a free exchange of views regarding flat-earth theory either, and for similar reasons; because it is demonstrably false.  Again and again it has been shown to be false, just as, again and again, there has not been shown any statistically significant difference in intelligence between different "racial" – what does that word even mean, anyway? – groups.  Really, how many times does the question need to be answered before those asking the question are satisfied?

Another writes:

As a clinical psychologist married to a biophysicist/physiologist and thus aware of a lot of the work done on this in both fields, I'd like to start with a very brief summary of what is now known about the human genome.  And that is that the various clades, or groups of people carrying similar genes whose migrations have been traced, do not really correspond well with what we think of as race, which ends up being a social or sociological construct more than a physical reality.