Noah Millman on Nicholas Wade’s book and on HBD

Posted by Sappho on September 15th, 2014 filed in Books, Race

Noah Millman has an excellent review of Nicholas Wade’s race book. I’ve been meaning to link it for about a week, but keep putting it off till I have time to say something about it. But, what the heck, I’ll just link it; it stands on its own better than anything I can add to it. A taste:

Color this reader skeptical. After walking through the scientific consensus on the course of human evolution since the exit from Africa, Wade proceeds, in the latter half of the book, to grand speculation about the course of human history, speculation that unquestionably implicates the sorts of political and moral questions that Wade earlier claims are not implicated by the science of human differences.

To pick the most obvious and least convincing example, Wade asserts a genetic basis for the tribalism that has undermined nation-formation in much of Africa and the Middle East, and he argues from this assertion that the Iraq War was predictably an act of folly since a modern Western democratic system could not simply be transferred to the tribal world of Iraq. Quite clearly, Wade does think there are moral and political implications to this science.

Now, the Iraq War was predictably an act of folly, and a modern Western democratic system could not simply be transferred to Iraq. But the assertion of a genetic basis for tribalism is neither necessary nor sufficient to make that case. As Wade acknowledges, societies can adapt in dramatically different ways from the same genetic substrate. Japan went from isolationism to openness and Westernization to fanatical nationalist militarism to quietistic consumerism and democracy, all within a century, without ever ceasing to be highly conformist, shame-based, and ethnocentric. And most importantly, Wade has no evidence for his contention that tribalism is hard-coded into some populations’ genes but not into others. To demonstrate that genetic differences were the crucial factor in political developments would require a level of knowledge about the genetic basis of behavioral differences that Wade knows we do not have, as well as the kind of robust ability to control for other factors that we are unlikely ever to have.

I do have a few words, though, on his accompanying post, HBD and Me

But I find the political agenda of many of the biggest enthusiasts for the “science of human differences” to be thoroughly unpalatable. So I’m committed to making arguments why that agenda doesn’t follow from their premises – and why the dominant ideology that denies the importance of such differences doesn’t actually lead to a happy liberal egalitarian outcome.

I’ve long wondered how much interest in what’s called “human biodiversity” (HBD) is actually fueled by a desire to prove your own race superior, and how much it’s fueled more by a general hereditarian bias, that genes count for something, not necessarily tied to wanting any particular race to have all the good qualities. But isn’t the answer to that obvious? you may ask, particularly if you are, like me, liberal. Well, yes and no. When I look at actual blogs that self-identify as HBD, they’re virtually all tied to exactly that political agenda that Millman finds unpalatable; they’re boosters for exactly those supposed differences that would make white people look good, they’re full of opposition to immigration from Mexico, and the bloggers often actually sound angry when they rebut some argument for why you can’t conclude that black people, or Latinos, are genetically predisposed to commit more crime. Yeah, a thoroughly unpalatable political agenda.

But then you get other people who don’t obviously read that way, people like Razib Khan (who I think doesn’t identify with HBD now, but I think has in the past), who leans toward high heritability of many traits, but whose racial views are harder to read (even if he is conservative), or people like Andrew Sullivan, or Noah Millman, who has made nods toward the general concept of a “science of human differences” before this. I suspect that at least sometimes people don’t obviously read to me as favoring their own race simply because I haven’t read the posts where they do, in fact, just that. (When I first ran across HBDchick, it was her more neutral and science oriented links that I found, and so it took a little while to conclude that yes, she pretty much has the same politics as Steve Sailer.) But I’ve never figured it was everyone, and so it’s reassuring to see confirmation, both in Millman’s review of the Wade book and in his HBD post, that his position was about what I’d thought it was.

Where I go with that is that, of the three self-applied terms for people who believe that science proved that their favorite race has their favorite traits, and anyone who thinks otherwise is engaged in “race denial,” I’ve decided to use “racialism” rather than “race realism” or “HBD,” when talking about them myself. Because it’s the only one of the three terms that doesn’t sound as if it’s talking about something else. If I say that I reject “human biodiversity,” that sounds as if I’m rejecting population genetics, and even the significance of biological differences at an individual level, and I reject no such thing. If I say that I don’t believe in “race realism,” that could be taken to say that I feel some political obligation to reject Neil Risch’s and Esteban Burchard’s research on the medical significance of ethnic differences, and, again, I don’t reject any such thing. I reject sweeping conclusions that whole continents of people are tribalist, or more predisposed to be criminal, or just barely smarter than intellectually disabled. I reject racialism.

Sure, most of the people promoting racialism have shifted terms, first to race realism and then to human biodiversity. But racialism is a term I can use without scare quotes, because it means what it sounds as if it means.

As for whether there are any genetically driven mental or psychological differences at all between different population groups, well, there aren’t any significant ones that have been proven, and the one that’s most often promoted, IQ, seems shaky, given the past changes in IQ differences among different European ethnic groups. But, any at all? Oh, probably. People vary geographically, and lots of mental, psychological, and behavioral traits are partly genetic. All it would take, for there to be any such differences at all, would be for one unusual mental illness to be influenced by a gene more often found in one population group, and another by a gene more often found in another, or for some trait like extroversion to vary slightly from one place to another due to genetic drift. I don’t imagine the differences are large at all. And I think the null hypothesis, for any personality trait, should be to assume no genetically driven difference between population groups, not to assume that most cultural differences are in our genes. But I do have a sense of what such differences would look like, if they should ever be found. And that is: messy. Not systematically favoring one group, not all falling on one particular geographic boundary, and sometimes involving parallel evolution on different continents. They would look, in other words, like the traits we’ve already found that vary among populations, such as lactose tolerance and malaria resistance, rather than like a stacked deck.