On Race Realism - Stop Denying Evolution
Ok, I'm going to post something here which may piss people off, but I don't care. Why? Because I've never shied away from an honest seeking to have true beliefs due to the consequences. I'm irrational like that.
Today's topic: race. Is it MERELY a social construct? That is, does it have no biological underpinnings?
If you know me, you know I hate mereism because it's an attempt to disparage something without owning your values and just admitting it like an overman. Race IS a social construct. So is the number 2. So is oxygen. Concepts are made by agents and reality is carved at whatever joints agents decide to conceptualize into existence. Whether or not the propositions the concepts in the mental map make conform to reality is a different story, but reality itself can be divided conceptually any number of ways.
Hell, species is a social construct and one which is not as clear cut as may have been thought. Apparently lions and tigers are the same species. I bet you didn't know that. The reason? Tigons and Ligers can be bred into existence and they are fertile. Given that the definition of a species is "that which is able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring," ... there ya go. Unless, you know, people want lions and tigers to be defined as different species - well then people are going to have to change how they carve up reality into the "species" concept.
Race is similarly problematic. It can mean ancestry, ethnicity, phenotypes, genotypes, a projection of group assignment based on these things, anything people want. Some of those definitions necessarily refer to biological underpinnings. The questions to be asked which will answer the initial question is whether or not people can be grouped by biology and whether people find biological groupings useful.
And the answer is absolutely yes to both.
Skin is the largest organ by surface area and it's typically the most easily identifiable characteristic of an individual at long distances. Hair color, eye color, even height are harder to discern. It's no surprise that police would want to categorically rule out a large percentage of the population in the hunt for a suspect. Skin color allows them to do that easily. But it's not just skin color is it? The suspect, Derrick Todd Lee has other phenotypic markers people associate with the negroid race.
Let's make everyone white and guess their lineage:
Today's topic: race. Is it MERELY a social construct? That is, does it have no biological underpinnings?
If you know me, you know I hate mereism because it's an attempt to disparage something without owning your values and just admitting it like an overman. Race IS a social construct. So is the number 2. So is oxygen. Concepts are made by agents and reality is carved at whatever joints agents decide to conceptualize into existence. Whether or not the propositions the concepts in the mental map make conform to reality is a different story, but reality itself can be divided conceptually any number of ways.
Hell, species is a social construct and one which is not as clear cut as may have been thought. Apparently lions and tigers are the same species. I bet you didn't know that. The reason? Tigons and Ligers can be bred into existence and they are fertile. Given that the definition of a species is "that which is able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring," ... there ya go. Unless, you know, people want lions and tigers to be defined as different species - well then people are going to have to change how they carve up reality into the "species" concept.
Race is similarly problematic. It can mean ancestry, ethnicity, phenotypes, genotypes, a projection of group assignment based on these things, anything people want. Some of those definitions necessarily refer to biological underpinnings. The questions to be asked which will answer the initial question is whether or not people can be grouped by biology and whether people find biological groupings useful.
And the answer is absolutely yes to both.
Skin is the largest organ by surface area and it's typically the most easily identifiable characteristic of an individual at long distances. Hair color, eye color, even height are harder to discern. It's no surprise that police would want to categorically rule out a large percentage of the population in the hunt for a suspect. Skin color allows them to do that easily. But it's not just skin color is it? The suspect, Derrick Todd Lee has other phenotypic markers people associate with the negroid race.
Let's make everyone white and guess their lineage:
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Take dog breeds. Breeds are a social construct - like everything else. Can the groups be fairly clearly defined by simple rules and observation and are there traits which a majority of the group share? If so, then it can be the case that the grouping is a proxy for traits or the traits indicate the presence of other traits. For instance, there are dog breeds that are more innately aggressive than other breeds. Anti-breedists will deny this. But they're wrong. If I see the traits which tend to hang around the core concept of, say, pitbull, am I allowed to infer anything about any given "pitbull"'s proclivities towards aggression? What about their ability to be a good race dog. Just because a dog was born of a chihuahua doesn't mean it can't win against greyhounds if it's given enough love and opportunities. We just need to spend more money to send it to racing college.
I side with the race realists here... ancestry and phenotypes can tell people about all sorts of mental, physical, and biological proclivities. Whether people find that useful or not for their particular goals is the only reason I accept to potentially discard a connection between race and ancestry.
Since I'm not a tool and I understand how evolution works, I feel comfortable reaching this conclusion:
Assertion 1: All conceptions are "social constructs" or "individual constructs"
Assertion 2: Separated breeding populations will tend to diverge
Assertion 3: Evolution tends to have a "use it or lose it" method of operation. For instance, brain and muscle mass require a lot of energy to support and will be tend to be selected against in environments where those with less of them can survive.
Assertion 4: Evolution doesn't stop at the neck
Assertion 5: Human breeding populations were historically separated by mountains, deserts, and oceans and were in significantly different environments.
Assertions 1-4 are rock-solid and simply cannot be denied. #5 is a little harder for me to assert given that I'm not an anthropologist, but the evidence I've seen points to it.
It's useful to use race as a proxy sometimes. You must have noticed that most basketball players and a fair amount of football players are non-white. And very few are asian. Is this because asians weren't loved by their parents? Is it because they were pushed by their parents (who operated as a mostly cohesive group due to culture) into academics over sports? What does having dark skin have to do with being a good sports player. Oh wait! Do you mean to tell me that those with naturally darker skin TEND to be taller, leaner, and have more fast-twitch muscle? So... groups of traits can HANG TOGETHER! Might it also be possible that people who are tall or who have dark skin tend to have children who are tall and have dark skin? Oh wait, it is!
File the above under "duh." So why, when it comes to the brain, do people flip their shit? I'm not saying that people should be treated like crap just due to the way they look. What I AM saying is that mental characterists such as IQ, time-preference, tendencies towards aggression and depression CAN AND DO depend on who your parents are EVEN IF YOU WERE ADOPTED - basically DNA matters.
And you don't need to find the specific genes to infer heritability as "race deniers" like to purport. I have a friend who is 6'3" and his father was also quite tall. I guess his parents loved him more than me and that's why he's taller? Oh wait, that's retarded. Has science isolated the specific gene or genes which is making my friend taller than me? No. Does that mean I can't find a connection between his father being taller than my father and him being taller than me? Does that mean that if he and I married equally tall women, I couldn't expect his children to be taller than mine? If heritability required specific genes to infer then I guess evolution as a science didn't start until 1953 when Watson and Crick discovered DNA.
I side with the race realists here... ancestry and phenotypes can tell people about all sorts of mental, physical, and biological proclivities. Whether people find that useful or not for their particular goals is the only reason I accept to potentially discard a connection between race and ancestry.
Since I'm not a tool and I understand how evolution works, I feel comfortable reaching this conclusion:
Assertion 1: All conceptions are "social constructs" or "individual constructs"
Assertion 2: Separated breeding populations will tend to diverge
Assertion 3: Evolution tends to have a "use it or lose it" method of operation. For instance, brain and muscle mass require a lot of energy to support and will be tend to be selected against in environments where those with less of them can survive.
Assertion 4: Evolution doesn't stop at the neck
Assertion 5: Human breeding populations were historically separated by mountains, deserts, and oceans and were in significantly different environments.
Assertions 1-4 are rock-solid and simply cannot be denied. #5 is a little harder for me to assert given that I'm not an anthropologist, but the evidence I've seen points to it.
It's useful to use race as a proxy sometimes. You must have noticed that most basketball players and a fair amount of football players are non-white. And very few are asian. Is this because asians weren't loved by their parents? Is it because they were pushed by their parents (who operated as a mostly cohesive group due to culture) into academics over sports? What does having dark skin have to do with being a good sports player. Oh wait! Do you mean to tell me that those with naturally darker skin TEND to be taller, leaner, and have more fast-twitch muscle? So... groups of traits can HANG TOGETHER! Might it also be possible that people who are tall or who have dark skin tend to have children who are tall and have dark skin? Oh wait, it is!
File the above under "duh." So why, when it comes to the brain, do people flip their shit? I'm not saying that people should be treated like crap just due to the way they look. What I AM saying is that mental characterists such as IQ, time-preference, tendencies towards aggression and depression CAN AND DO depend on who your parents are EVEN IF YOU WERE ADOPTED - basically DNA matters.
And you don't need to find the specific genes to infer heritability as "race deniers" like to purport. I have a friend who is 6'3" and his father was also quite tall. I guess his parents loved him more than me and that's why he's taller? Oh wait, that's retarded. Has science isolated the specific gene or genes which is making my friend taller than me? No. Does that mean I can't find a connection between his father being taller than my father and him being taller than me? Does that mean that if he and I married equally tall women, I couldn't expect his children to be taller than mine? If heritability required specific genes to infer then I guess evolution as a science didn't start until 1953 when Watson and Crick discovered DNA.
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Why do I find race realism to be useful considering that I believe individuals should be judged AS INDIVIDUALS first and treated with an equal default level of respect? (Though obviously some groups are going to be discriminated against - I mean I'm not going to go to a KKK bake sale... DISCRIMINATION!) Because pretending people are actually equal and that all differences are due to society and can be eliminated through "MOAR JUSTIZ!" is inefficient and has to do more with "mah feelings" and fitness signalling than it does with getting shit done.
Certain people with parents who are part of a certain ancestrial line doing more poorly in school? Maybe you don't need to fund the school more heavily to try to "fix the problem." There are definitiely social and familial components, but if genetics is swamping the results, you're getting very little bang for the buck. Certain people with parents who are part of a certain ancestiral line responsible for almost ALL violent crime and gun crime? Ban guns! Wait, that's dumb. |
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Until people are willing to have an honest talk about race and genetics, people will still walk around with their head up their collective ass. Egalitarianism is a failed religion with tragic results. Again, I'm not saying to treat people like crap due to their membership in some group they didn't choose, but I AM saying use your mind. Otherwise, go take a night walk alone and unarmed in Detroit or Baltimore and let me know how equality went.
When politics is raised above science and observation itself becomes taboo, it's only a matter of time before such a society is outcompeted by another whose members still value truth.
So, while people are free to define race as something which has no underlying non-subjective basis (outside of it being a concept), I find it useful to say NO, race exists as something which a social construct is identifying in non-agent-dependent reality.
As a final troll to the race denialists: if race is a social construct, then racism can't exist the way you want it. Because:
If race means "a group that people are put into for various reasons with no genetic basis" then racism must mean being against members of certain of those groups thus defined.
If a race is grouped by skin color then a racist must hate people by the color of their skin. If a race is grouped by origin, then the KKK would have to hate Dave Matthews who is a white South African, but be okay with Dr. Dre who was born in The United States.
Yeah, except they don't... at least not usually. So use different words if you're going to define race that way. Use phenotypist, pigmentationist, and a perfectly good extant word - ethnocentrist.
When politics is raised above science and observation itself becomes taboo, it's only a matter of time before such a society is outcompeted by another whose members still value truth.
So, while people are free to define race as something which has no underlying non-subjective basis (outside of it being a concept), I find it useful to say NO, race exists as something which a social construct is identifying in non-agent-dependent reality.
As a final troll to the race denialists: if race is a social construct, then racism can't exist the way you want it. Because:
If race means "a group that people are put into for various reasons with no genetic basis" then racism must mean being against members of certain of those groups thus defined.
If a race is grouped by skin color then a racist must hate people by the color of their skin. If a race is grouped by origin, then the KKK would have to hate Dave Matthews who is a white South African, but be okay with Dr. Dre who was born in The United States.
Yeah, except they don't... at least not usually. So use different words if you're going to define race that way. Use phenotypist, pigmentationist, and a perfectly good extant word - ethnocentrist.
