Good luck with your career in research if you are looking at racial differences.
5/12/14, 4:59 AM
Anonymous said...
Everyone should read Rushton. It really fits with reality.
5/12/14, 5:07 AM
Anonymous said...
A person's behavioral traits don't emerge in isolation. They are ALWAYS a response to the surrounding environment, including how people around him/her behave. Take aggression, for example. People (even adults, not just babies) moving from low-trust societies with no rule of law to a prosperous society where the law is enforced see their aggression diminish over time as they learn that trusting strangers won't invite calamity. This holds, of course, as long as only small units of people move in isolation (like individuals or families); mass migration will preserve the home culture to a large extent. You HBD people are barking up the wrong tree when you try to posit a genetic basis to every behavioral trait while giving group dynamics short shrift. Nicholas Wade, to his credit, states that he speculating. The commenters on this blog, on the other hand, treat the genetic basis of behavior as gospel, based purely on a bunch of empirical studies.
I'm probably a minority here, but I'm happy to see the qualification Wade is placing on certain aspects of his book. The goal is not to start a riot. The advance of science and culture is incremental. Giving those who are skittish about these topic a little reassurance is never a bad thing.
The point is to change minds and and advance the argument. It may bring some satisfaction to throw a tantrum in public, but it is never going to change one mind. Wade is showing a great deal of wisdom here I think.
5/12/14, 5:57 AM
Discard said...
Look up "Rush for the Lifeboats" at American Renaissance. It tells how nobody will want to be the last one espousing racial equality. Nicholas Wade is telling his NYT readers to get their lifejackets on and stay close to the boat deck.
5/12/14, 8:17 AM
Anonymous said...
"Good luck with your career in research if you are looking at racial differences"
There'll be 1000s of differences with medical consequences.
Also any differences where at least part of the cause can be improved for everybody e.g. iodine deficiency.
5/12/14, 9:17 AM
Anonymous said...
You won't stop racial research or IQ research done by the Chinese.
5/12/14, 12:03 PM
doombuggy said...
You HBD people are barking up the wrong tree... treat the genetic basis of behavior as gospel, based purely on a bunch of empirical studies.
And you think your group dynamics provides a fuller explanation? Genetics is part of it, not the whole thing. How do you expect to approach a full explanation without considering genetics?
5/12/14, 1:10 PM
Anonymous said...
From Steve Hsu's May 8th posting has this up:
"Leonard Lopate interviews Nicholas Wade (veteran genetics correspondent for the NYTimes) about his new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The interview is slow at first but the second half is good."
5/12/14, 1:36 PM
candid_observer said...
I don't think people on the HBD side really are giving Nicholas Wade proper credit for his approach in the book.
Wade has been writing subversive pieces for The NY Times for nearly 30 years. Wade knows subversion.
My guess is that Wade pretty well figured out what he might write at the book level with maximal subversive impact. Couldn't talk about IQ for reasons obvious. Didn't want to neglect the point that cognitive/emotional traits may differ across races because otherwise there wouldn't be enough subversion. Of course, the evidence of genetic differences outside of IQ hasn't been studied so extensively that the best possible case could be made. So he leaves it as speculation.
My guess is he's probably done a good job finding the highest point of subversion in subversion/argument space.
5/12/14, 2:16 PM
Anonymous said...
"The reader may also wish to keep in mind that this book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be."
Poor old Nick is quite naive, The New Atheists and all the Evolutionary-centric scientists have a more consistent litany of "oughts" than the Catechism of The Catholic Church- just read their tweets, blogs, and other social media. Is there any issue where you can't predict their take on it? It would have to be a very abstruse issue before a layman would see a difference of opinion.
5/12/14, 3:56 PM
Anonymous said...
candid_observer
"I don't think people on the HBD side really are giving Nicholas Wade proper credit for his approach in the book.
Wade has been writing subversive pieces for The NY Times for nearly 30 years. Wade knows subversion."
Agree on the first part but if the second part is also true then the lack of credit on the hbd side would mean he judged it very well.
From Chapter 1 of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance:
“Since much of the material that follows may be new or unfamiliar to the general reader, a guide to its evidentiary status may be helpful. Chapters 4 and 5, which explore the genetics of race, are probably the most securely based. Although they put the reader on the forefront of current research, and frontier science is always less secure than that in the textbooks, the findings reported here draw from a large body of research by leading experts in the field and seem unlikely to be revised in any serious way. Readers can probably take the facts in these chapters as reasonably solid and the interpretations as being in general well supported.
“The discussion of the roots of human social behavior in chapter 3 also rests on substantial research, in this case mostly studies of human and animal behavior. But the genetic underpinnings of human social behavior are for the most part still unknown. There is therefore considerable room for disagreement as to exactly which social behaviors may be genetically defined. Moreover, the whole field of research into human social behavior is both young and overshadowed by the paradigm still influential among social scientists that all human behavior is purely cultural.
“Readers should be fully aware that in chapters 6 through 10 they are leaving the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative arena at the interface of history, economics and human evolution. Because the existence of race has long been ignored or denied by many researchers, there is a dearth of factual information as to how race impinges on human society. The conclusions presented in these chapters fall far short of proof. However plausible (or otherwise) they may seem, many are speculative. There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it.
"The reader may also wish to keep in mind that this book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be."
"Wade's speculation disclaimer"
15 Comments -
Do you recommend this book, Steve?
5/12/14, 4:23 AM
IOW, our eyes don't lie.
5/12/14, 4:27 AM
Since 1945 we stopped seeing and/or looking.
Good luck with your career in research if you are looking at racial differences.
5/12/14, 4:59 AM
Everyone should read Rushton. It really fits with reality.
5/12/14, 5:07 AM
A person's behavioral traits don't emerge in isolation. They are ALWAYS a response to the surrounding environment, including how people around him/her behave.
Take aggression, for example. People (even adults, not just babies) moving from low-trust societies with no rule of law to a prosperous society where the law is enforced see their aggression diminish over time as they learn that trusting strangers won't invite calamity.
This holds, of course, as long as only small units of people move in isolation (like individuals or families); mass migration will preserve the home culture to a large extent.
You HBD people are barking up the wrong tree when you try to posit a genetic basis to every behavioral trait while giving group dynamics short shrift. Nicholas Wade, to his credit, states that he speculating. The commenters on this blog, on the other hand, treat the genetic basis of behavior as gospel, based purely on a bunch of empirical studies.
5/12/14, 5:37 AM
I'm probably a minority here, but I'm happy to see the qualification Wade is placing on certain aspects of his book. The goal is not to start a riot. The advance of science and culture is incremental. Giving those who are skittish about these topic a little reassurance is never a bad thing.
The point is to change minds and and advance the argument. It may bring some satisfaction to throw a tantrum in public, but it is never going to change one mind. Wade is showing a great deal of wisdom here I think.
5/12/14, 5:57 AM
Look up "Rush for the Lifeboats" at American Renaissance. It tells how nobody will want to be the last one espousing racial equality. Nicholas Wade is telling his NYT readers to get their lifejackets on and stay close to the boat deck.
5/12/14, 8:17 AM
"Good luck with your career in research if you are looking at racial differences"
There'll be 1000s of differences with medical consequences.
Also any differences where at least part of the cause can be improved for everybody e.g. iodine deficiency.
5/12/14, 9:17 AM
You won't stop racial research or IQ research done by the Chinese.
5/12/14, 12:03 PM
You HBD people are barking up the wrong tree... treat the genetic basis of behavior as gospel, based purely on a bunch of empirical studies.
And you think your group dynamics provides a fuller explanation? Genetics is part of it, not the whole thing. How do you expect to approach a full explanation without considering genetics?
5/12/14, 1:10 PM
From Steve Hsu's May 8th posting has this up:
"Leonard Lopate interviews Nicholas Wade (veteran genetics correspondent for the NYTimes) about his new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The interview is slow at first but the second half is good."
5/12/14, 1:36 PM
I don't think people on the HBD side really are giving Nicholas Wade proper credit for his approach in the book.
Wade has been writing subversive pieces for The NY Times for nearly 30 years. Wade knows subversion.
My guess is that Wade pretty well figured out what he might write at the book level with maximal subversive impact. Couldn't talk about IQ for reasons obvious. Didn't want to neglect the point that cognitive/emotional traits may differ across races because otherwise there wouldn't be enough subversion. Of course, the evidence of genetic differences outside of IQ hasn't been studied so extensively that the best possible case could be made. So he leaves it as speculation.
My guess is he's probably done a good job finding the highest point of subversion in subversion/argument space.
5/12/14, 2:16 PM
"The reader may also wish to keep in mind that this book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be."
Poor old Nick is quite naive, The New Atheists and all the Evolutionary-centric scientists have a more consistent litany of "oughts" than the Catechism of The Catholic Church- just read their tweets, blogs, and other social media. Is there any issue where you can't predict their take on it? It would have to be a very abstruse issue before a layman would see a difference of opinion.
5/12/14, 3:56 PM
candid_observer
"I don't think people on the HBD side really are giving Nicholas Wade proper credit for his approach in the book.
Wade has been writing subversive pieces for The NY Times for nearly 30 years. Wade knows subversion."
Agree on the first part but if the second part is also true then the lack of credit on the hbd side would mean he judged it very well.
5/12/14, 4:37 PM
Very interesting article by Rod Dreher about how open minded our favorite Darwinists are: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/glenn-beck-sam-harris-jonathan-haidt-open-minded-atheism/
5/12/14, 5:35 PM