Northman's Fury

The topic, it seems, is not going to go away anytime soon.

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

. . .

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.

It has never been so much that we are fundamentally equal as it is that we should get equal treatment.  Equal pay for equal work.  The same punishment for the same crime.  In simple terms, that you get judged on your merits and actions and not other factors beyond your control.  It has never actually worked that way, but that is the ideal.

I was going to launch into another screed about racism and so forth, but I covered most of those arguments back when Watson made his less-than-PC remarks about blacks.

To summarize; we have neither a good measure nor definition for intelligence, so linking it to DNA and making racial comparisons based on that is beyond ridiculous at this point.

Now, the article speculates that we may find a way around that issue in the future, which is entirely possible, but that makes, or should make, no difference to any legal frameworks regarding discrimination.

So long as it is only a statistical measure, it is both unfair and wasteful to hold whole segments of society to their average scores.

The problem is the same one any kind of aggregate discrimination runs into.  What’s true of a group doesn’t translate into being true for the individual.  Take the quite factual statement that in the US, whites are richer than blacks.  There’s no dispute about it, and whole programs and polices get based on it, (about those there is dispute).

Now, pick two individuals at random, one from each group, and tell me which one is richer?  The average is useless at the individual level.

Of course, wealth isn’t, (or shouldn’t be), based on your genes, and intelligence, or at least its potential, probably is, but the variations in its level within population groups will still hold true.  Even if, by some strange chance, whites turn out to have the best cards in the intelligence pool, there isn’t any shortage of stupid whites to go around.  (Check the blogosphere, you can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting one.  In fact, their preponderance gives me serious doubts regarding how well we’d place.)

Further, the differences between populations must be incredibly small or we wouldn’t be having the debate.

Think about it for a moment.  All of the other genetic “discoveries” mentioned in the NY Times article; skin and eye colour, disease susceptibility, and other physical traits, were long known to have a genetic basis before people began mapping DNA to find the specific pieces.

Linking intelligence to populations that way, on the other hand, has always fallen apart whenever external environmental factors get taken into consideration.

So even if we do find racial markers linked to intelligence, it won’t be of any rational use for discriminating amongst individuals, (not that prejudice has ever been a rational exercise; more an exercise in rationalization).

Anyway, the real interesting moral questions come down the road when this sort of research gets applied to individuals.  Job selection based on your genetic code is already the stuff of (mostly) bad sci-fi, and the idea of using genetic information to deny insurance coverage is already here.  But what about pre-screening embryos and aborting those that don’t measure up?  Sterilizing the less intelligent to improve the gene pool?

All the ugliness of the Eugenics movement, but this time with clear, empirical, scientific evidence to back it up?

That’s something worth thinking on.

If I ever get to wondering how "book-learning" got such a bad rap, I don't have to look much further than stories like this:

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.

. . .

At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern foraging peoples.

But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?

Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.

Somehow I doubt that the Neanderthals would have survived for better than 100,000 years in a harsh environment if they showed such casual disregard for their child-bearing women and young children's safety. I also can't think of a single example in the animal kingdom where that dynamic holds true. Either the Neanderthals were incredibly unique, or these people just aren't thinking things through. The relative primitiveness of Neanderthal weapons should make it not too great a surprise that they never developed delicate sewing instruments, which is about all the evidence that's offered for their theory. The far more likely explanation is that they just weren't as cognitively developed as us modern types and got pushed into extinction.

Now, if you really want to piss today's women off, you could try combining the two theories and say that the reason the Neanderthals died out is because they were too stupid to keep women in their place. At the very least, such an argument should prove that our more primitive ancestors' genes have survived to be passed down to some people.

And by that I mean the lesser cognitive ability, because the proponents of this theory make it clear they believe this whole "division of labour" issue that caused the Neanderthals to die out, was a cultural issue, not genetic.

Dr. Stiner said that in her view there was not time for them to change their culture. “Although there may have been differences in neurological wiring,” she said, “I think another very important key is the legacy of cultural institutions about social roles.” Is there a genetic basis to the division of labor that emerged in the modern human lineage? “It’s equally compelling to argue that most or all of this has a cultural basis,” Dr. Stiner said. “That’s where it’s very difficult for people like us and Richard Klein to resolve the basis of our disagreement.”

Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted for 15,000 years; three times the length of recorded history, which would make their "cultural institutions" quite impressively resistant to change. I think there may be a cultural basis for this theory, but I doubt it has anything to do with the Neanderthals'.

You eat carefully, do not smoke, exercise regularly and think you are taking good care of yourself. But if you drive to work in a heavily congested area such as Los Angeles or Washington, the traffic may be undermining your efforts. A new study has found that while Los Angeles residents spend about 6 percent (1.5 hours) of their day on the road, drive time accounts for between 33 and 45 percent of their exposure to harmful air pollutants.

The two most common pollutants are diesel exhaust from trucks and ultrafine particles produced when car engines begin to accelerate. Both have significant detrimental health effects.

No real surprise here either. The fact that exhaust fumes are bad for you is pretty well acknowledged. I just thought it would be another good opportunity to shake my head at the fact that the US has made it illegal to sell low- or zero-emission vehicles in most states.