Descent of Man, Pt. IV
by Thomas Fleming
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Chapter 8: Sociality
Wade surveys the familiar terrain mapped out by sociobiologists (Wilson, Trivers, Hamilton) and their primatologist (Frans de Waal) and sociologist/anthropologist allies (especially Napoleon Chagnon, Fox and Tiger). This is a popular book from which we do not expect original research or insights; nonetheless, it is an uninspired rehash of the sociobiological position. Wilson blurbs the book enthusiastically, but it is not at all clear that Wade has paid very close attention to his arguments, citing only the popular book on Human Nature and not the pathbreaking Sociobiology.
Still, Wade gives us a good scissors-and-paste introduction. The basic points are:
1. Like chimpanzees, Homo sapiens is a violent creature, whose competitive behavior can be explained largely in terms of a genetic competition in which the greatest procreators (not the greatest fornicators) are the winners: Alpha male chimps account for 36% of conceptions, and another 50% are accounted for by other high-ranking males. Peripheral males kiss their sisters. Warfare among chimps and primitive men is very savage with high death rates. Hobbes, on this point, is more right than Locke.
2. Altruism emerged, so argues Hamilton, as a means of enhancing inclusive fitness, since primate altruism is primarily directed toward close kin that share our genes. Wade things that sociality can be partly explained by two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, but this is another chicken-and-egg problem. For example, in experiments on testosterone levels it appears that winning athletes experience in victory an elevation of the hormone. Cause or effect? I think both.
3. A comparatively new argument: Early man was not only a killer but a cannibal, and resistance to Mad Cow is the result of human adaptation eating human brains.
4. Religion evolved, as Wilson argued long ago, because it confers fitness. Wade also accepts the argument that religion and language evolved together, and that both are foundations of society. Unfortunately he also seems to fall for Roy Rappaport’s speculation that “sanctified statements were…an antidote to the misuse of the newly emerged powers of language.” Here we are back to just-so stories. Wade follows RR’s musings, derived from his study of Oaxacan “history”–in quotation marks because this history is a reconstruction done by archaeologists and anthropologists and then applied to other cultures they know even less about, i.e. ancient Egypt, a culture it takes a lifetime to understand. It never occurs to people like Wade or RR that they have painted themselves into a corner. We fight for food and women, because food and women actually exist and are necessary for survival and propagation. We develop language as a tool not just for communication and sociability but to communicate real facts about the real world. In the case of religion, however, we are not to imagine under any possible circumstances that rituals are directed toward a real being or beings or that they can have any effect that is not in the mind.
5. Marriage is a means by which a woman gains a partner in child-rearing. Pair-bonding also reduces aggression, as anyone can appreciate, who has seen what happens in a promiscuous trailer park or housing project. Being very PC, Wade tries to see something good happening when women choose to mate with several men–this way they are choosing the best fathers. Right. He clearly lives in some country I have never visited. He also glosses over the problem of who is going to rear the children. The answer is clearly social workers hired by the state, and we see the results all around us. E.O. said long ago that the degree of sexual dimorphism in humans suggests we are designed to be monogamous with a little room for men to cheat. This is too conservative an insight to be repeated today, now that we are desperately clawing our way back into the trees.
Banana, anyone?
Chapter 9: Race
Again, I’ll keep this brief, especially in view of the fact that Wade wastes a great deal of space defending the notion that it just might be licit to talk about race, despite the thoroughly dishonest statements of Richard Lewontin, and the professional associations of anthropologists and sociologists. Every normal human being has always known that there is more to race and ethnicity than skin tone, hair type, and eye shape. North Italians, predominantly of Celtic and Germanic background, and South Italians, predominantly of Greek and Italic ( with some Arab-Berber and even Phoenician thrown in the mix in some places) are quite different peoples to this day. Much of the differences result from cultural history; some from ethnicity. It is absurd to pretend that, say, China and France routinely produce the kind of runners that West Africa (and the parts of America where there are West Africans today) does. The questions of race are not whether or not it makes a difference but how much, what kind, and so what. So what, because even if we all believed that one race on average had superior intellect, self-discipline, and creativity, most of us in the polyethnic empire of the United States would still prefer a basically race-neutral society.
Some things about racial differences noted or claimed by Wade:
Racial differentiation probably began 50,000 with the exodus from Africa. The older races are probably African and Pacific Islander (New Guinea, Australia).
African-Americans are, on average, 17% Caucasian. (Am I right in believing that one could then predict that in significant differences between Europeans and Africans, the difference would be correspondingly lowered. If, for example, Africans scored 100 on a test and Europeans 80, we would expect of African Americans–what? A score of 97.4? Would someone competent in math do this and explain?)
Mexican-Americans, he says, are 39% Native American, 58% Caucasian, and 3% African, referring to but not citing a study. Now, I have read recently that the Mexican population is about 9% pure European, 30 % pure Indian, and 60% Mestizo. Let’s just guess and say Mestizos are on average half and half–I have no idea of what the reality is, but observation suggests it may be lower–then one would guess 60% Native, 39 % Caucasian.
In the US, mixed race marriages and matings must be less common than is often believed because surveys report 97.6% of respondents claiming to be of one race. This statement would be very imprecise about actual genetic background, but it should say something about the number of children of mixed race couples.
Citing the case of Iceland, where in only a thousand years genetic drift has produced 11 distinct gene pool regions, he points out that other racial and ethnic groups have had many thousands of years in which to develop distinctive traits.
The technique for identifying racial background, similar to DNA testing in criminal cases, is now far more sophisticated than when Lewontin and his buddies were popping off against E.O. Wilson. Stanford’s Marcus Feldman, though he avoids the term race, has looked at 377 DNA sites for 1000 individuals from 52 countries, and the results fell into the five predictable clusters: Caucasian, African, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander. Jonathan Pritchard has identified 200 genes that can be used to distinguish Africans from Caucasians from Asians. One problem with much of the early analysis is the fact that there is a lot of noise or lint in the chromosomes, filler material we all share but of no great significance. I’m no good with numbers, but I have said for years if there is only 1% genetic difference between us and chimps, then it would not take much genetic difference to have profound impact.
Finally, he takes up the question-begging argument that geography is more important than genes, citing the reductio ad absurdum of UCLA’s Jared Diamond who thinks both that geography has prevented New Guinea natives from leaving the Stone Age but that these people, because of the adversity they have overcome, are smarter than the rest of us. How does someone like this get tenure? As even Wade understands, if circumstances can make one race smarter than another, why cannot Asians or Caucasians be more intelligent. What I also do not understand is why the same argument about harsh environment would not apply to ancient Greeks, making them smarter but culturally retarded.
Well, that is it. Oh, you thought he would at least take up IQ studies? Think again. Noting that “any suggestion of a genetic basis for racial differences can engender strong passions,” he simply avoids the issue. It reminds me of the time I met with a great scientist. Discussing Jensen’s work on IQ, I distinguished between Jensen and the kook Shockley. Oh no, the scientist told me, Shockley’s work was impeccable and survived tough refereeing, but it would cost anyone his job to say so. Welcome to the land of the free.
I, too, hesitate to discuss race, not because I fear retaliation against truth-telling, but because I honestly do not like scientific racism. Everyone is bigoted in favor of his own people and against the qualities displayed by others, but the minute we use quantified date on race to determine policy, we are walking down a long dark road that others, like Justice Holmes, Margaret Sanger, and the progressives (and their German imitators) have walked. If IQ studies are valid, the one thing we might conclude is that Headstart is a waste of time and money, and that resources would be better spent in identifying talented members of this or that minority and encouraging them.
Chapter 10: Language
I’ll be very brief because Wade’s ignorance of languages and linguistics have encouraged him to adopt a kind of cafeteria approach, selecting bits of theory that appeal to him or encourage genetic explanations.
Some of the points he tries to make:
1. All languages 6000 known descend from a common progenitor; thus it should be possible to draw up a stemma with chronology. I know of no evidence for the general premise and therefore find little that is useful in the conclusions drawn from it.
2. Languages have been differentiated from 5-10,000 years.
3. Languages differentiated themselves as a means of asserting antagonistic and conflicting group identities. Even if we accept 1 & 2, there is no reason to accept conflict–as opposed to linguistic drift.
4. Indo-European speakers (languages in the Latin, Greek, Indo-Persian, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic families along with Hittite and Tokharian) can be traced back to people who raised burial mounds in Russia. These people, confident in their battle prowess, spread out over much of the world. Colin Renfrew’s rival theory, that our ag skills brought us success, is too stupid to be entertained by anyone with any knowledge of the history and literature of such IE peoples as Greeks, Romans, Persians, Celts, and Vikings.
5. None of the various conjectural datings of language he cites is conclusive. I won’t bore you with the details unless you demand it, but, to take Mark Pagel’s approach, he begins with the sensible but not proved assumption that a small group of words (18) are most conservative in IE. What then? As Wade acknowledges, languages change at different rates and borrow from each other. Icelandid is a conservative version of Old Norse, Norwegian progressive. Wade likes Mark Gray’s work because it seems more quantifiable even though it is contradicted by linguistic paleontology.
About this time I grew very weary, especially his support for Joseph Greenburg’s rather sweeping theories of the proto-language-which are endorsed by Cavalli-Sforza, a brilliant and imaginative scholar. The trouble is that there are rival explanations. For example, if several unrelated language families have a similar structure or word-order for questions, is it because they all descend from a prototype or because the human brain encourages certain structures? Beats me. Then there are questions of detail. Why does Japanese and IE languages begin questions with a k word (quid, what, etc.) Now, we know in the case of I languages that an initial kw can be realized as qu- (Latin), wh- (English), and p (Greek pos, pou, etc.), so it is pretty hard to draw firm conclusions from what may be chance similarities. This comparative work, as Wade acknowledges, is Greenburg’s weakest point.
To all of these arguments, all this old philologist can say is the Scottish “not proven.”
Chapter 11: History
I quit reading this chapter when I realized that, although there is much more evidence, Wade’s limited education renders him incapable of making profitable use of it. The discussion of the Sally Hemmings/Thomas Jefferson liaison does not mention either Joe Ellis’s lies about his career, the misleading information he gave the geneticists, the recantation of some researchers, much less the devastating article we published in Chronicles. Neither he nor Ellis the self-promoter know how to pose a problem. They had an ax to grind, and they ground it.
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1 Comment by Lee on 27 June 2007:
I’m sorry but I cannot stand this any longer. Digestion in the stomach takes place on two levels. Initially, in the upper stomach, properly masticated foods are both further reduced in size, and complex carbohydrates begin hydrolysis to simpler carbohydrates and simple carbohydrates are reduced to glucose by the mixing and agitation with enzymes from the saliva. In addition any ingested, sugar eating bacteria will work on these carbohydrates as well. Simple stuff you could reswallow with no problem.
In the lower stomach, HCl and protein reducing enzymes (which require an acid environment to work) are introduced in order to digest most of the “proteins” to amino acids. This is a corrosive mixture you would not want to reswallow. I put protein in ” ” because a lot of the stuff we eat is way overcooked and more than little of the protein is denatured and cannot be digested to amino acids. This stuff will be acted on by bacteria in the colon and will produce gas. Once the stomach has completed its work, it dribbles this mixture into the intestine where bile provides acid neutralizers, fat solubilizers, and other enzymes to complete digestion of the remaining proteins, all of the fats, and, in a well ordered intestine, a large quantity of lactobacillus bacteria (about the size of a brick) slowly complete the digestion of the carbohydrates to glucose.
The main problems with the American diet, in addition to too many chemical additives, is way too many quick carbohydrates (sugar or things that are quickly reduced to sugar) which are converted by insulin almost immediately to stored fat; meat and vegetables that are way overcooked to kill the e-coli that should never be there and in the process destroy all the natural enzymes that should have also been ingested; way too much of the wrong kinds of fats — mainly vegetable fats exclusive of olive oil; and too few minerals such as magnesium, phoshorus and iodine, etc, (but not calcium) which the salt companies (among others) profitably remove and resell for other industrial purposes.
We were not designed to live on fruit. No one needs 20′ of intestines to digest bananas, 4 or 5 ‘ will do just fine. Although, because of their minerals, enzymes, and fiber, they provide a nice complement to our diet.
2 Comment by Simon Newman on 28 June 2007:
Women mating with several men may be choosing the ‘best’ fathers in the genetic/fitness sense – those fathers are supplying genes that may give rise to children who will in turn have many children, and so on.
In a balmy environment like the tropics or modern welfare state, there may be little advantage in a father who’s a good husband and family man; mother nature or the welfare state provides enough easily gathered (by the mother) resources to ensure most offspring will survive to breed in turn.
Of course as the population shifts towards this single-parent or polygamous model, it may be that the welfare state breaks down and the balance of evolutionary advantage shifts back towards the monogamous model, with the dedicated husband-father.
3 Comment by TJF on 28 June 2007:
You make a good point but even on a tropical island or a housing project, children are better off under the protection of a strong and disciplined father. If one can judge from the stories in the Chicago Tribune, project kids from several generations of promiscuous mating do not have an easy life. Neglected by their drug-addicted teenage prostitute mothers, they eat poorly, receive inadequate health care, and are not infrequently murdered.
What one would have predicted is the emergence of matrilineality–tracing property and descent from the mother and calling upon the support of mother’s brothers who know that their nieces and nephews are related to them, something they cannot be sure of in the case of the children of their wives and/or girlfriends. This development is probably retarded by the welfare state that rewards irresponsibility.
4 Comment by Sir Charles Grandison on 28 June 2007:
I found this to be the sloppiest of Wade’s chapters so far. For one thing, note its unusual length–over twice as long as any of the other ones up to this point. It almost seems as if he’s hoping the admittedly interesting nature of the various tidbits he’s presenting can carry him through–but that he doesn’t quite know how to put it all together. Parts of it read like a bad undergraduate research paper, with the same sort of reliance on almost arbitrarily chosen sources whom he almost instantly adopts as absolute authorities, the random insertions of modern “evidence” (ultra-Orthodox Jewish handshakes in New York’s diamond district, !Kung men’s sexual preferences, etc.) and a whole lotta repetition.
And how fun it can be to watch how the religionless try to explain religion!
5 Comment by Robert Scott on 28 June 2007:
Doesn’t polygamy exist in western society in a distorted and obtuse way? There are many successful, famous, and/or attractive men who have a shared pool of attractive women always at the ready. Of course these relationships rarely, if ever, produce any children and when they do it is accompanied not by accustomed joy, but with tabloid drama. I think that if I hear another weepy story of a well-to-do middle-aged couple’s struggle to have children (because, unbeknownst to them, their rampant promiscuity has ravaged their reproductive organs), I shall have to start a campaign to have all famous people spade and neutered. And then of course there are all the celebrity couples with their tragic higher rate of children with birth defects and their sudden interest in finding a cure. Casual sex, anyone?
The results are more devastating to society when middle and working class people try to emulate the behavoir of those who hold their daily fascination. This is especially so with our ridiculous anti-marriage laws, which were enacted solely for the benefit of those who can afford it: the rich and the beautiful.
The widespread use of birth control and the constant encouragement given to women to pursue careers and become “independent” (i.e. be promiscuous) has produced a society of men and women so stridently selfish and repugnent that it certainly means, as TJF says, “we are clawing our way back into the trees”.
6 Comment by Michael on 28 June 2007:
The point about alpha males being responsible for a disproportionate number of conceptions among chimpanzees has its parallel amongst humans, as royal genealogies show. There is a better than 50% probability that anyone of western European descent can trace his ancestry to Charlemagne; if one has an Anglo-Norman line, it is almost certain. Almost 30 years ago I attended a lecture given by Dr. Howard Hamilton, a physician and geneticist at the University of Virginia medical school. Among the many interesting points he made was that, given the relatively small population of western Europe 1000 years ago, and the transmission of certain easily identifiable genetic traits, it was likely that any male of western European descent who has male pattern baldness can treace his ancestry to Charlemagne through his grandson, the emperor Charles the Bald. Many years later – after I had begun to suffer that syndrome – I found several of my lines to Charlemagne, and was not surprised that they went through Charles the Bald.
Zerjal et al. claim that a Y-chromosomal lineage found in a substantial minority of Asian men reflects that they are male-line descendants of Genghis Khan ["The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols," 2003, Am. J. Human GEnetics 72(3), 717-21]. I’m not sure how well these can be corroborated by genealogy – but it is probably the case that Genghis, like Charlemagne, can literally be called the father of his country.
One observes in the patterns of typical well-documented family trees that rank is preserved only in the senior male line. When descent branches off at some point from the royals in it via a junior male or a female line, the subsequent generation is of lower social rank, so that after several hundred years have passed the emperors have been succeeded to kings, the kings by dukes and counts, the counts by barons and knights, and these last by untitled gentry, each holding dominion over a diminished inheritance.
Sir Robert Filmer, in “Patriarcha,” tells us that kings have their authority over their subjects because they are the senior heirs-male of the great family that is a nation. Filmer’s name is now mentioned only as that of the fellow Locke set out to refute in his “Two Treatises of Government.” Yet Filmer’s argument is soundly based in the institutions of kinship as they existed in mediæval and early modern societies, as documented by genealogy. He may not have been Locke’s equal as a political philosopher, but he was a better anthropologist.
7 Comment by TJF on 28 June 2007:
Last year we had a long discussion of Patriarcha on this site. I don’t know if it has survived, but it can be reposted as a single piece.
8 Comment by Michael on 28 June 2007:
My quick search for Filmer or Patriarcha using the site’s search function did not turn up the discussion mentioned by TJF. It would be interesting to see, if it can conveniently be re-posted.
9 Comment by Simon Newman on 29 June 2007:
“And how fun it can be to watch how the religionless try to explain religion!”
I thought this was the weakest part of what was generally a useful pop-science book.
10 Comment by TJF on 29 June 2007:
The weakest part is probably is treatmen of the Tom and Sally “affair.”
I’ll add a little on the race chapter this afternoon.
11 Comment by Simon Newman on 29 June 2007:
TJF:
“You make a good point but even on a tropical island or a housing project, children are better off under the protection of a strong and disciplined father”
The individual child is better off of course, but if you’re a single mother who has 6 boys & 3 girls, 2 boys die before reproducing, but the remaining 4 children have 16 children who themselves go on to reproduce etc, your genes are doing much better than those of the married mother who has 2 children, who both survive to each have 2 children, etc.
Note that without monogamy, males are expendable, it doesn’t much matter how many males perish without breeding (whether due to violent death such as drive-by shootings, or simply no opportunity to breed, as in polygamous societies). The remaining males can still impregnate all available females.
12 Comment by TJF on 29 June 2007:
Ah, but you are treating the human species as if we were rabbits. In the long run our genes do better if they are carried by powerful and successful people. In general, the rich are often the biggest procreators and not just in Catholic and Muslim cultures.
The important point you are raising, though, raises the question: Why do certain kinds of affluent societies discourage high birth rates among the rich and powerful? That is a real puzzler for sociobiologists, who might invoke some notion that our k strategy of reproduction can become hypertrophic. The only parallel of our society that I know of is late republican and imperial Rome, but there, despite Richard Saller’s magnificent work on demography, we lack the data for comparative analysis.
13 Comment by TJF on 29 June 2007:
I have posted Chapter 8 above and here:
Chapter 9: Race
Again, I’ll keep this brief, especially in view of the fact that Wade wastes a great deal of space defending the notion that it just might be licit to talk about race, despite the thoroughly dishonest statements of Richard Lewontin, and the professional associations of anthropologists and sociologists. Every normal human being has always known that there is more to race and ethnicity than skin tone, hair type, and eye shape. North Italians, predominantly of Celtic and Germanic background, and South Italians, predominantly of Greek and Italic ( with some Arab-Berber and even Phoenician thrown in the mix in some places) are quite different peoples to this day. Much of the differences result from cultural history; some from ethnicity. It is absurd to pretend that, say, China and France routinely produce the kind of runners that West Africa (and the parts of America where there are West Africans today) does. The questions of race are not whether or not it makes a difference but how much, what kind, and so what. So what, because even if we all believed that one race on average had superior intellect, self-discipline, and creativity, most of us in the polyethnic empire of the United States would still prefer a basically race-neutral society.
Some things about racial differences noted or claimed by Wade:
Racial differentiation probably began 50,000 with the exodus from Africa. The older races are probably African and Pacific Islander (New Guinea, Australia).
African-Americans are, on average, 17% Caucasian. (Am I right in believing that one could then predict that in significant differences between Europeans and Africans, the difference would be correspondingly lowered. If, for example, Africans scored 100 on a test and Europeans 80, we would expect of African Americans–what? A score of 97.4? Would someone competent in math do this and explain?)
Mexican-Americans, he says, are 39% Native American, 58% Caucasian, and 3% African, referring to but not citing a study. Now, I have read recently that the Mexican population is about 9% pure European, 30 % pure Indian, and 60% Mestizo. Let’s just guess and say Mestizos are on average half and half–I have no idea of what the reality is, but observation suggests it may be lower–then one would guess 60% Native, 39 % Caucasian.
In the US, mixed race marriages and matings must be less common than is often believed because surveys report 97.6% of respondents claiming to be of one race. This statement would be very imprecise about actual genetic background, but it should say something about the number of children of mixed race couples.
Citing the case of Iceland, where in only a thousand years genetic drift has produced 11 distinct gene pool regions, he points out that other racial and ethnic groups have had many thousands of years in which to develop distinctive traits.
The technique for identifying racial background, similar to DNA testing in criminal cases, is now far more sophisticated than when Lewontin and his buddies were popping off against E.O. Wilson. Stanford’s Marcus Feldman, though he avoids the term race, has looked at 377 DNA sites for 1000 individuals from 52 countries, and the results fell into the five predictable clusters: Caucasian, African, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander. Jonathan Pritchard has identified 200 genes that can be used to distinguish Africans from Caucasians from Asians. One problem with much of the early analysis is the fact that there is a lot of noise or lint in the chromosomes, filler material we all share but of no great significance. I’m no good with numbers, but I have said for years if there is only 1% genetic difference between us and chimps, then it would not take much genetic difference to have profound impact.
Finally, he takes up the question-begging argument that geography is more important than genes, citing the reductio ad absurdum of UCLA’s Jared Diamond who thinks both that geography has prevented New Guinea natives from leaving the Stone Age but that these people, because of the adversity they have overcome, are smarter than the rest of us. How does someone like this get tenure? As even Wade understands, if circumstances can make one race smarter than another, why cannot Asians or Caucasians be more intelligent. What I also do not understand is why the same argument about harsh environment would not apply to ancient Greeks, making them smarter but culturally retarded.
Well, that is it. Oh, you thought he would at least take up IQ studies? Think again. Noting that “any suggestion of a genetic basis for racial differences can engender strong passions,” he simply avoids the issue. It reminds me of the time I met with a great scientist. Discussing Jensen’s work on IQ, I distinguished between Jensen and the kook Shockley. Oh no, the scientist told me, Shockley’s work was impeccable and survived tough refereeing, but it would cost anyone his job to say so. Welcome to the land of the free.
I, too, hesitate to discuss race, not because I fear retaliation against truth-telling, but because I honestly do not like scientific racism. Everyone is bigoted in favor of his own people and against the qualities displayed by others, but the minute we use quantified date on race to determine policy, we are walking down a long dark road that others, like Justice Holmes, Margaret Sanger, and the progressives (and their German imitators) have walked. If IQ studies are valid, the one thing we might conclude is that Headstart is a waste of time and money, and that resources would be better spent in identifying talented members of this or that minority and encouraging them.
14 Comment by Simon Newman on 29 June 2007:
Wade does mention that there are different alleles for intelligence in different races, but suggests that it might all ‘come out in the wash’ so that different evolutionary paths all lead to the same result, equal median intelligence in all population groups. This goes against the whole thrust of his narrative of evolutionary adaptation to different environments, and seems to have been put in lest he risk accusations of being un-PC.
Still, I think Wade, a New York Times journalist, has done valuable service in the cause of scientific truth in that, writing for a broad popular audience, knocks on the head the “Race is a Social Construct” meme that cultural Marxists had been propagating for the past few years. A race, to biologists, is just a visually distinct population group, all widespread species tend towards having multiple races – in other animals they’re commonly called sub-species.
15 Comment by Frank on 29 June 2007:
Dr. Fleming, IQ is based on a bell curve, but I don’t think that even if a person did the math it would necessarily be more than a mathematical abstraction.
Blue is dominant when combined with yellow.
Anyway, if no one answers you, I’ll pull out my statistics text book and answer your problem, but I don’t think it will be anything more than an abstraction.
16 Comment by Lee on 30 June 2007:
Your IQ is only and exactly what you score on a standardized test. No one seriously believes that it is a measure of anyone’s intelligence. It attempts to measure verbal and math skills. It does not measure creativity, musical skills, imaginativity, mechanical skills, etc. To those who actually believe that America has a high “quality of life”, see how far you can go after you eliminate the mechanics and electronicians. See how far you get if you only allow women with high IQs to breed and mother children.
Secondly, and most importantly, the mind, memory, imagination etc. are not material at all. Evolutionists (materialists all — that is those who only admit to the existence of the material world around them) assert w/o one shred of scientific (that is repeatable laboratory demonstration) proof that it is due to molecules. Notwithstanding the seeming fact that the soul (seat of these faculties) works thru the brain. Barring any such demonstration, I am unwilling to admit any genetic component of “intelligence” and do not believe their is any race superior in intelligence to any other. It is interesting to note that the one race he singles out as having a superior intelligence to all others is also known for their cultural eschewing of all manual labor.
That being said, I have no idea why others are quicker than I am, nor why I can’t sing and others sing beautifully and seemingly effortlessly. But the fact that I don’t have an answer doesn’t make Wade’s assertion correct nor even plausible.
17 Comment by TJF on 2 July 2007:
I agree entirely that Wade, in even tackling the question of race, has done the reading public a service. Although I have been very hard on him, primarily because he has, in general, done a poor job of covering an important topic, I took up this book because it does raise some important questions and forces us, conservatives in particular, to give up for a moment our dangerous attachment to angelism. Mind, I believe, exists independent of the brain, but without the brain or some equivalent, it is not good for much. If you don’t believe it, try dropping acid or drinking a liter of Scoth or hitting your head several times with a hammer.
In this connection, we should some day take up the question of neo-Thomism.
I’ll try to finish off this book by tomorrow. The language chapter is mildy interesting and then it degenerates into rhetoric about the significance of evolution.
18 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 2 July 2007:
1. “Rhetoric” is a good thing, not bad. Someone suggested the word “blovate” for what Dr. Fleming most likely means.
2. Re “race”. I wish to make a shocking and wonderous revelation to the world: I myself am a product of miscegenation. For I am a Borderer/Backcountry (misnamed “Scots Irish”; we are neither), we have our origin on the Borders of Scotland and England, we go back at least a millennium, and we are mixed.
Our race first was most likely the (1) aboriginal Britons, the folk that built Stonehenge. Then came the Celts, and that Celtic race that mixed with us the most were the (2) “Britons”, pushed to western England later by the West Teutons. Another Celtic race, (3) the Gaelic speaking Scots, invaded Scotland from Ireland, drove out the Picts, and mixed with us as well. The West-Teuton (“Anglo-Saxon”) race that next mixed with us were the Angles, specifically those Northumbrian Angles called (4) the Bernicians. In time (5) the Mercians, the (6) East Anglians, and (7) the Saxons (East, South, West) interbred with us. Then came the North Teutons: First the (8) Viking Danes of Danelaw, then the (9) Normans. In the reign of James I of England, some of us were moved to Ulster, a process that was accelerated by William of Orange (thus we’re called “hillbillies” to this day), and we mixed with (10) the local Irish. We started coming in droves to American c. 1717, and went straight to the Southern Piedmont and Northeastern Backcountry, and we’ve been moving west ever since. Some “indentured servants” of the VA Cavaliers, originating in (11) southwest and midland England, fled from the Tidewater to the Backcountry, and interbred with us. The (12) Aboriginal Americans (“Indians”) interbred with us too, the Indian Removal Bill notwithstanding.
When I spoke to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans about David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial book, and because Dixie’s army was largely Backcountry, I said that the audience was an good racial pool to test my mixed race thesis. I surveyed them as to eye color, hair color, body-build, facial shape, head shape, height, and whether they turned to lobsters in the sun or to Indians. Result: We’re all types. With my eye I could see a skin variety from ghostly pale to swarthy.
Just call me Mr. Mulatto.
There are not three races. Gobineau, Francis Galton, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, George Schönerer, and Adolf Josef Lanz were writers of fairy tales. Either there are 100,000+ races, or (more likely) the concept “race” is simply meaningless. And especially meaningless with respect to culture. The “race” of Oklahoma is Aboriginal American. The culture is Backcountry.
Either paleoconservatism purge itself of racialism, with which it has nothing to do, or it will get stuck by/in the Tar-Baby – by which I mean an injurious and foolish idea – and thus pass on to the remotest fringes of political seriousness.
19 Comment by TJF on 2 July 2007:
Racism, racialism, and all the other isms including conservatism represent a deviation from any wholesome world view, especially Christianity. On the other hand, the blind and willful anti-racialism that pretends that human beings are all the same is not only irrational but one of the main causes of racialism. But, since the human-hating Left controls the world, the only choice is to join them or not. If one chooses not to be a leftist, then it hardly matters what lies the Southern Poverty Law Center or David Frum or Wiliam Buckley tell.
20 Comment by TJF on 2 July 2007:
PS Metaphysically speaking, the fact that no species is a perfect representation of a genus does not mean that the genus does not exist. Biologically speaking, the fact that subspecies interbreed does not mean there are no subspecies. Racial subspecies are just as much a fact of life as the different breeds of dogs and chickens. If, either by dwelling upon such facts or by pretending they do not exist, we come to hate our fellow man (whether he is black or a white racialist) and forget the 2nd Great Commandment, then we should take a vow of silence on the entire subject.
21 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 2 July 2007:
I would ask whether
– to pose the choices as either racism or anti-racism, the human-hating left or the rest of us, dwelling upon race or pretending it doesn’t exist, would be that error called “False Dilemma”?
–to say that my argument is that there are no differences among human beings would be Straw Man? Differences do exist among human beings, some “racial” (i.e. physiological), some psychological, some historical. For culture, only the historical is meaningful. Just compare West Indian “Blacks” to Pre-1808 American Blacks. Or Serbs to Poles. Same race (Slav); very different cultures.
– to suggest that that by raising the question one violates divine ordinance is Red Herring?
(I’ll leave it to others wiser than I to decide if to call race another word for “subspecies”, and if to call breeds of dogs “subspecies”, are Begged Question, or if to compare dogs to humans is False Analogy.) King Philip Came Over From Germany on Sailing Vessels: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, variation. Is “subspecies” recognized as a biological category? (maybe it may be)
I shall begin now my own silence after these words: Of course my own argumentation, now or in the past, cannot itself withstand a searching review by rhetoricians. I do know this: (1) Race has nothing to do with Real Conservatism, be it of the Aristotelean/schoolman/Neo-Thomist/Catholic Social teaching variety, or the Counter-Enlightenment/Counter-Revolutionary variety. (2) Race is The Great American Vice (one that Europeans thankfully are [now] free of). It blots and blights everything it touches in Gringoland, and has always done so. It kills sense, it kills friendship, it kills honor — and I do fear it has killed me.
22 Comment by Michael on 2 July 2007:
As for genuses, species, and subspecies, I believe it is still held that members of a genus MAY interbreed, but the offspring are infertile. The most familiar example is the mule, the offspring of a jackass and a mare.
Subspecies, as members of the same species, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring having intermediate characteristics. In the wild these are ordinarily the consequence of geographic separation, e.g., the small jungle elephant of the Congo as contrasted with the larger variety of the west and south African savannah. It is routine to describe them as subspecies. Varieties of domestic dogs and horses could be considered artificially bred subspecies. The racial types of man could also reasonably be described as subspecies, if it were possible to have a reasonable conversation about race to which participants did not bring some underlying social or political prejudice or agenda.
23 Comment by TJF on 3 July 2007:
I am sorry to have offended Sid Cundiff. I entirely share his concern that any conversation about racial differences is likely to be “instrumentalized,” as they say in Italian, by people with unwholesome passions and nasty agendas. On the other hand, the best non-ideological research indicates that 1) human races exist, 2) the differences extend to more than physical appearance, 3) and some of these differences can now be located within the genome. As Wade points out, it is dangerous to reject such research if only because racial differences dictate different approaches to treating diseases. Most physicians already know something of this, just as most people know that I could never have made the Harlem Globe trotters.
Dog breeds, chicken breeds, etc. are not a false analogy or even an analogy. Many (most? all?) species are divided into subspecies, usually geographically separate. In the old definition of the species, it included all members that can naturally breed and produce fertile offspring. Today, I don’t know because it seems to me that statistical methods are being used in a more subtle or slippery way. When I spoke of genus and species, I should point out, I was using the terms in a logical, not biological sense, thus I am a species of genus man.
Racial differences are mainly known as statistical averages, but averages say nothing about results. In a polyethnic empire like the US, the best policy is to be color blind. If forced to give preference to a racial or ethnic group, no sane person would choose to give it to any group to which his children did not belong. If we have to have affirmative action, then I want it for European Americans. When I proposed this in a letter plus article I sent to Walter Williams, he said he could not disagree.
I also agree with my friend Sid that both southerners and conservatives have been harmed by the race issue. Sometimes it has been our own fault, but, ultimately, there is no remedy. We live in a revolutionary regime based on a religion whose gods include Lincoln and MLK. To criticize either or their policies–or even to oppose Marxist notions of equality–is to be by definition a bigot. I simply do not care what I am called by enemies I do not respect.
24 Comment by TJF on 3 July 2007:
Here are my dwindling thoughts on chapters 10 and 11. The book runs down hill rapidly, it seems to me, though I am happy to discuss the points and entire I have omitted. I’ll turn to Aeschylus for the next few weeks, first the Seven Against Thebes and then the Oresteia. I’m also taking requests for the next book.
Chapter 10: Language
I’ll be very brief because Wade’s ignorance of languages and linguistics have encouraged him to adopt a kind of cafeteria approach, selecting bits of theory that appeal to him or encourage genetic explanations.
Some of the points he tries to make:
1. All languages 6000 known descend from a common progenitor; thus it should be possible to draw up a stemma with chronology. I know of no evidence for the general premise and therefore find little that is useful in the conclusions drawn from it.
2. Languages have been differentiated from 5-10,000 years.
3. Languages differentiated themselves as a means of asserting antagonistic and conflicting group identities. Even if we accept 1 & 2, there is no reason to accept conflict–as opposed to linguistic drift.
4. Indo-European speakers (languages in the Latin, Greek, Indo-Persian, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic families along with Hittite and Tokharian) can be traced back to people who raised burial mounds in Russia. These people, confident in their battle prowess, spread out over much of the world. Colin Renfrew’s rival theory, that our ag skills brought us success, is too stupid to be entertained by anyone with any knowledge of the history and literature of such IE peoples as Greeks, Romans, Persians, Celts, and Vikings.
5. None of the various conjectural datings of language he cites is conclusive. I won’t bore you with the details unless you demand it, but, to take Mark Pagel’s approach, he begins with the sensible but not proved assumption that a small group of words (18) are most conservative in IE. What then? As Wade acknowledges, languages change at different rates and borrow from each other. Icelandid is a conservative version of Old Norse, Norwegian progressive. Wade likes Mark Gray’s work because it seems more quantifiable even though it is contradicted by linguistic paleontology.
About this time I grew very weary, especially his support for Joseph Greenburg’s rather sweeping theories of the proto-language-which are endorsed by Cavalli-Sforza, a brilliant and imaginative scholar. The trouble is that there are rival explanations. For example, if several unrelated language families have a similar structure or word-order for questions, is it because they all descend from a prototype or because the human brain encourages certain structures? Beats me. Then there are questions of detail. Why does Japanese and IE languages begin questions with a k word (quid, what, etc.) Now, we know in the case of I languages that an initial kw can be realized as qu- (Latin), wh- (English), and p (Greek pos, pou, etc.), so it is pretty hard to draw firm conclusions from what may be chance similarities. This comparative work, as Wade acknowledges, is Greenburg’s weakest point.
To all of these arguments, all this old philologist can say is the Scottish “not proven.”
Chapter 11: History
I quit reading this chapter when I realized that, although there is much more evidence, Wade’s limited education renders him incapable of making profitable use of it. The discussion of the Sally Hemmings/Thomas Jefferson liaison does not mention either Joe Ellis’s lies about his career, the misleading information he gave the geneticists, the recantation of some researchers, much less the devastating article we published in Chronicles. Neither he nor Ellis the self-promoter know how to pose a problem. They had an ax to grind, and they ground it.
25 Comment by Lee on 4 July 2007:
Off the top of my head, and without a book recommendation, and having spent some time on Wade’s scientism or assertion (as long as it is done by the right people) as science, you might want to spend one session on Richard Feynman’s two short essays on science. One is on the real nature (his opinion) of science and the other is the one on cargo cult science, which goes a long way to explaining the acceptance of scientism without actually using the word.
26 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 5 July 2007:
I formally offer an apology to Dr. Fleming. His very kind reply was far more than my intemperate posting deserved. Discussions on race tend to bring this out in me. We school teachers were once offered a diet of Leonard Jeffries. Not that this excuses or absolves my outburst. In fact, in terms of practical politics on this issue, Dr. Fleming’s view — color-blindness — is exactly mine. Let’s pray that it will be continue to be the view of the Supreme Court.
For my penance, I’ll be quiet for a while and learn from others.
27 Comment by TJF on 6 July 2007:
No apology is needed. My response to your message was much too curt and invited misunderstanding. As for your outburst, you are hardly alone. Please do not l let your penance extend to the forthcoming discussion of Aeschylus, a much more agreeable topic.