Tuesday, October 9, 2012

End of an era....and good riddance

J. Phillipe Rushton, the notorious 'race' scientist at the University of Western Ontario, has died.  His passing will be mourned by those who harbor racist ideas and seek scientific justification for them.  He will also be mourned by those who wish to stir the pot of ideological science that today, in the main, basically denies the reality of racial differences (except perhaps in the case of some disease susceptibility variation).  As with deniers of climate change or evolution, deniers of sound science will miss Dr Rushton.

Science needs to be open to ideas of all sorts, and mavericks are often treated as outsider heretics and denigrated as not playing with a full mental deck.  This is natural human behavior, but tribal intolerance should be resisted since, after all, some new ideas really are major advances.  But we should be intolerant towards ideas that sound good, adopt the right rhetoric, but simply do not respond to the evidence or reflect a sophisticated understanding of the science being invoked.

We won't belabor Rushton's racist theories except to say that he treated races as groups with group differences, stressed socially uncomfortable traits like group intelligence and sexuality differences, and used post hoc rationales to explain what he saw as differences.  He took present-day group trait distributions as if they were permanent and of evolutionary relevance.  Generalizations such as the assertions such as that mean genital size differs among continents, or mean IQ scores should be based on actual and strong evidence.  But even without knowing the data in such specific instances, one must recognize that average group differences in such traits are, a priori, to be expected.  Given the principles of how populations evolve over time, we would never expect continental populations to be exactly the same in any complex trait.  That would be so improbable as to be essentially impossible.

The observed differences are likely to be statistically 'significant' if samples are large enough, since different populations evolve independently in widely dispersed locations.  They have different genetic variation and environmental experiences.  But that does not mean that the differences are important, which is a totally subjective judgment.  Even Rushton rather sanctimoniously and patronizingly agreed that each continental population was well adapted to its locale.  As so often happens in this area, he was just calling the facts as he claimed to see them.  And he accepted a naive Darwinian dogma that attributes the differences to natural selection, which becomes a far stretch in the absence of any actual evidence.

Group differences need not in the main reflect genetic variation, but can be due to environmental variation, which is an elusive factor that changes over time and may--often does--swamp genetically based differences, especially for behavioral traits.  Also very important is the choice of traits to study.  Why genitals and IQ?  These are commonly used traits by racists that have strong emotional reactions.  What leads one to study them, if not a basically racist (in the negative sense of the word) intent?

Rushton noted that Africans have bigger genitals (at least males--we don't remember what he said about females, and don't care to check) and smaller brains than Asians, and are hence less intelligent and more sexually driven--stereotypes of modern times if there ever were any.  Not that long ago, the developed world considered northern Europeans to be barbaric dolts, and much more recently Asians were the ignorant coolies recruited to build our railroads.  Africans were childlike and didn't have souls, so we could enslave them.  You know the story.

Rushton had the usual sort of convenient Just-So natural selection theories, one, in this case, had to do with r and K selection--reproducing fast and not caring much for each offspring, or reproducing slowly and giving great child care.  Hypersexed individuals just want to rut away, while their Asian  contemporaries want to think more deeply (Confucius and all that, don't you know!).  This theory, even some of Rushton's fans have noted, didn't hold much water.  It's a convenient after-the-fact story.

The Irish?  They got rhythm!
Superficial, or even glib, users of evolution to prove social value judgments about groups of people, and attribute them to Nature's way are by no means new.  Like the 13th century scholar and Welsh aristocrat Gerald of Wales about the year 1200, who touring and writing about the then exotic Irish, wrote "The only thing to which I find that this people apply a commendable industry is playing upon musical instruments; in which they are incomparably more skilful than any other nation I have ever seen. ... unlike that of the Britons to which I am accustomed, is not slow and harsh,.."  Of course, much of what was written about the Irish's inherent barbarity was justification for conquest.  We pick this example because we just heard a discussion of Gerald's life on the BBC Radio 4's In Our Time and it seemed coincidentally apt.  The Irish got rhythm, the Brits?  Nah!
 
Generalizations about peoples, and the treatment of peoples as discrete categories are not an invention of Darwinian fervor.  They are common--and they're making a comeback in our resurgence of behavior/evolutionary genetics today.  They are applied to individuals and to groups, dressed in evolutionary rhetoric.  But at their heart they reflect convenient and naive use of evolutionary theory. History shows how such ideas, in science, religion, or other areas of human politics, can be very dangerous.   In that sense, to Rushton (his ideas, not his person) we can only say, good riddance.

The times I've seen Rushton on television have shown him, to me, to be rather a superficial dolt.  This is not because I find his ideas so utterly superficial.  There are people whose ideas are wrong, in my opinion, or even offensive, but who are at least thinking at a serious level and who actually do some science themselves.  Typical of mavericks such as Rushton, is that he sent a mass mailing (at least twice!) to thousands of scientists, of a digest of his book on this subject.  It is no different from a bible tract in this sense, and even contains the typical statements about how he is doing this because he's been repressed by the mainstream.  Creationists do this all the time, too.

But we must hasten to add that Rushton was just another superficial player in the evolutionary pat-story game.  Advocates on the other side, who deny the existence of human racial (that is, geographic) differences, invoke similar kinds of arguments, just as superficially and with just as much a covert, or even overt, sociopolitical agenda.  The problem is the lack of constraint on selective use of scientific theory or facts, by whichever side.  Anything one imagines he sees today, can be justified on the grounds of natural selection, since such arguments are usually not open to any  kind of proof.

Instead, tempered, sophisticated evocation of evolutionary principles are hard to come by, because it is just so very easy to make up stories about what might plausibly have happened, and then to believe that they are true.  Naturally, we adopt stories that fit other aspects of our worldview (see yesterday's post).  The type of story that predominates in any period cycles between Nature and Nurture, to put it in one common framework.  The fact is, Nature is difficult to understand in such simple terms, and we are far from knowing enough....and since evolutionary events occurred in the distant and nearly wholly unobserved past, the challenge to stick to what we can confidently say is the greater.

Social politics, which essentially means competition for social and economic power, are a part of the human reality.  We take sides, whether in savory or nasty ways, and we select any argument we can make to convince others of our rectitude.  But at least in science, we should do our best--do much better--to stay within what we know rather than what it is convenient to wish.

25 comments:

Holly Dunsworth said...

"Superficial, or even glib, users of evolution to prove social value judgments about groups of people, and attribute them to Nature's way are by no means new." In terms of the thinking, kind populace, THIS is what scares people away from evolution, what makes them sympathetic to creationist 'arguments'... THIS is why evolution has a PR problem. It's used to prove negative (or just differential) value judgments.

Thank you for writing this.

Ken Weiss said...

Indeed, that is part of the problem. It's not well known, but William Jennings Bryan's defense against teaching evolution in schools, in the famous Scopes trial, was largely due to this widespread use of 'evolution' to justify empirialism, discrimination, eugenics, and racism.

Holly Dunsworth said...

There are noted and respected scholars on the Facebook BioAnth News group (full of students, faculty, and I think anyone interested) who discuss adaptation as if they really think there could only have been one (1) kind of selective mechanism at work a the trait in the past, making it what it is today. As if there's one good reason, one story, for this or that bump on the skull. As if there's one reason that's better or stronger than any others that sound reasonable. And it's hard to read these threads because it's hard to witness, hard to believe, that people are still talking this way. Ken and Anne know this, but in case others are reading my thoughts, I'm not advocating that we don't study natural selection. I'm saying that understanding the evolutionary history of a complex trait is rarely ever going to be as simple as coming up with the one good best reason that it exists as it does right now in a living organism. This is one of the practices/methods, approaches/assumptions that people are griping about when they accuse paleoanthropologists of being creationists -- because it's studying evolution with the assumption that everything has its perfect place/use, or if it doesn't now, it did in the past. But clearly now, as the thinking goes, most things are doing what they were built to do, what they're adapted for, even though they were different in the past and were good enough, were adaptive enough, to get them/us here *and* even though it would be such a coincidence to be alive and thinking about all this just as all the perfect adaptations have hit their stride, have peaked, don't you think? I guess it's not a stretch to think we're the perfect observers, here at the perfect time, if you're already thinking in these Panglossian ways.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Yes!

Holly Dunsworth said...

When I was growing up and learning evolution, well learning nature, (without any use of the e-word), the word "evolution" was instead something horrible (as you describe above) and that was far worse than its implications for the Genesis being wrong. At least to me, not being surrounded by too many fundamentalists and understanding early enough on that the bible wasn't literal about everything since I just didn't believe the miracles were magic by about sixth grade. Anyway, what I'm saying is, evolution is denied a great deal by non-creationists who are afraid of what it means for society's nastiness and don't want to know about evolution so that they too don't have to face the "truth" of this sort, which of course, isn't true.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Long story short. What I had to overcome as a child wasn't evolution's threat of the Bible as much as evolution's nastiness. And I think this is greatly greatly overlooked as an educational obstacle. Instead, we all focus on those zany creationists, because, I fear, it's fun to make fun of them but mostly because it's far easier to show how wrong they are.

Ken Weiss said...

It's a profound point and secular biologists often are asked how there could be kindness and morality, or even religion, if we're a purely a material world.

Philosophers and even theologians have provided various answers, and evolutionary biologists have done that, too. David Sloane Wilson is one, but there have been many others.

And many have feared that religion is what tames the inner beast and, true or not, should be preserved for that reason alone (or, to others such as Marx, because it provides solace and hence pacifies the masses).

Anne Buchanan said...

It's another mistaken determinist view, I think, to assume that because evolution happens we are destined to be evil, that evil is innate. Once we've got culture, all bets are off.

Holly Dunsworth said...

And to bring this around to Rushton... clearly penis size matters and is adaptive. It's linked to a certain reproductive strategy where you make lots of babies and fast -- presumably because women flock to your toy, or, conversely because the longer the sword the better to fight off other males, like giraffes with their big necks. And if you have that kind of tool, you don't want to be too smart or else you'd care too much for your lovers and your babies and it would go to waste. So although you're gifted in the pants, you cannot be as gifted in the noggin/ heart/ soul.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Ayn Rand helped out with that one.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Evolution means there's no heaven or hell. You just go to nothingness, probably.

So.... To some this is freeing -- heaven sounds like it sucks!

To some this is too terrifying to face.

Ken Weiss said...

Yes, but the question is, then, why be nice to anybody unless it's for selfish reasons? That's what philosophers and ethicists et al. have tried to debate, and as I noted earlier, some evolutionary psych people have tried to argue for the fitness value of religion or cooperation.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Who cares why be nice? Be nice! It's nice.

Ken Weiss said...

We like tractable answers to mysterious questions. In the wild, animals (and our ancestors) may often have to make decisions. Maybe we're programmed to do that, which requires somewhat simplified assessment of situations. A relentless meditator may have been lion meat. Or maybe that, too, is just a just-so story....

Holly Dunsworth said...

One of the funniest quotes from our household... (me speaking to my dog who just used up my speaking honorarium which was meant for a pair of new shoes on his vet bill)
"I do what I do to make you make me happy"

Anne Buchanan said...

This all shows why it's so hard to agree on which arguments are most valid: selection vs cultural determinism (or tolerance) vs genetic determinism vs drift. They all make a certain modicum of sense, so we're back to yesterday's post about overdetermined arguments and what they hell constitutes evidence in the first place. Do we believe what we believe based on evidence or do our prior beliefs define what we accept as evidence?

Anne Buchanan said...

Ha, Holly! Which made him wag his tail and grin, which made you happy, which...

Ken Weiss said...

I come to work, which makes my Chair happy, and he reports that which makes his Dean happy, and they pay me which makes me happy (and shows, for behavioral psych types, that I can deceive!), and I get food which makes the grocer happy.

BUT in all of this glee and mirth, going to work does NOT make ME happy!

Holly Dunsworth said...

We are stuck assuming so many complex things are all the same. Being nice, being depressed, being tall, being autistic, ... multiple, complex causations.

And as if nonhuman animal behavior is merely genetic... RIGGGHHHHT. As if it was that simple so that we could just write them off as meat robots, as good genetic models for behavior, and focus all our energy on our own complexity.

Anne Buchanan said...

We wrote a post early on called "Do Ants Think?" and I love that a lot of people land on MT because they are wondering just that.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Yes yes yes!!! I need to dig that one up again.

Ken Weiss said...

You're sounding dangerously like a Jain. Watch a bee, butterfly, or tiny ant....and tell me that it isn't thinking, assessing, valuing, seeking pleasure! Its basic nervous system involves similar cells, synapses, genes. It certainly does complex behavior. To dismiss it as 'just molecular signaling' and hence justify the abattoir is too convenient.

But if you avoid stepping on ants or swatting roaches, what about using antibiotics? Who says a bacterium isn't just an innocent trying to make an honest living?

And, if it comes to that, how can a Jain eat a carrot, orange, or tomato. Who says they want to be boiled, chopped, or crunched alive?

Holly Dunsworth said...

And we're back to the nastiness of evolution problem. To how learning about evolution shows us that not only are we related to these things but we must kill them to stay alive even if they are more than meat robots.

I say: Suck it up humans. Life's nasty but it's great too and you only get this one.

Ken Weiss said...

It is actually quite interesting to speculate on why life, which presumably began by organizing non-living chemicals, evolved to depend on cannibalizing other life, rather than simply just slurping down ocean water. Maybe non-living materials became too scarce. More likely, living matter is already pretty similar to what you and I need to keep going, making an efficient and convenient source of what we need.

So, instead of 'evolution by natural selection' or 'evolution by gene duplication', the real slogan for life is 'evolution by cannibalism'

Holly Dunsworth said...

My dept chair used to teach a course (with a bioanth) called "Incest and Cannibalism" which was intended to cutely include EVERYTHING. And... at a large enough scale, it does. (the nickname for the course was even better... something like if you can't eat it, bleep it.)