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race you November 26, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , trackback

Razib has a terrific post on race over at Gene Expression. The post focuses on two things: first, that “perceptions of race are as much a matter of psychology and culture as they are of genetics” and, second, that “[c]ultural priors matter”. The post, of course, goes into much more detail about how a person’s race, especially if that person is ‘mixed-race’*, is to a huge degree a matter of perception. I suggest reading it before reading more of mine.

This is one of the reasons I dislike the idea of ‘ethnic determiners’ of any sort — IQ, athletic ability, tendency to commit crime, income level, anything. Are personality traits heritable? Is intelligence heritable? Violence? I think this is beside the point, really.

The problem I have with statements along the lines of “trait T is higher among ethnic group E1 than among group E2″ is the idea of an ethnic group. Are there genetically heritable physical traits among people? There certainly are. Is it possible that a cluster of such traits could include physical features, skin tone, and general intelligence? Certainly. But the idea that a large group of people, where ‘membership’ in the group is subject so much to the viewer, would necessarily share such a group of heritable traits seems to me to be a very long stretch. If ‘caucasians’ are on average less intelligent than ‘asians’, than what of someone who’s mother was ‘caucasian’ and father ‘asian’? When’s the last time you heard someone posit that slender, red-haired, freckled people were, on average, better at anything at all (except being slender, red-haired, and freckled)? What are these things we call races if not more than figments of our over-sensitive, foreign-fearing imaginations?

My current position is that the notion of ‘race’ is one that is best discarded, as it hardly seems to have much bearing on reality and is little more than an artifact of a time when tribalism was a much more active as a guiding social principle.

*Whatever the hell that means.

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