Saturday, April 07, 2018

Mainstream press endorses scientific racism

Leftist publications are getting all excited about scientific racism again.

The Nation complains:
Nineties-relic Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) is popping up on campuses and in conservative media outlets, much to the delight of those who think his graphs confer legitimacy to their prejudices. Atheist philosopher and podcaster Sam Harris is extolling Murray’s highfalutin version of racist graffiti as “forbidden knowledge.” New York Times’ increasingly off-the-rails op-ed page gave genetics professor David Reich the opportunity to write that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races.’”
Reich goes further than that, explaining:
And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.
That means just about all traits, as most of them are 50% or more genetic. In other words, modern genomics is explaining racial differences.

A Wash. Post op-ed rants about Aristotle's logic and concludes:
Instead of discouraging low-IQ individuals from having children or paternalistically assigning them to their “proper place,” as Murray advocates, let’s work on identifying and rectifying the contexts that lead to low scores on IQ tests in the first place.
That is essentially an argument for sterilizing or exterminating brown and black people.

He complains that Aristotle wrote that many people are by nature fit to be slaves. He doesn’t mention that Aristotle was mostly talking about white people:
There were two racial types in ancient Greece: dark-haired whites and fair-haired whites, as well as gradations in between. The earliest known inhabitants were of the former type.

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