New Australian PM offers apology to Aborigines (but no money)

And, no, they they don't get their continent back, either.

But, that's not the point. The point is that all the white folks in Australian politics feel really good about themselves today. The Washington Post reports:

In a historic vote that supporters said would open a new chapter in Australian race relations, lawmakers on Wednesday unanimously adopted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's motion to apologize to Aborigines on behalf of all citizens. ...

The apology is directed at tens of thousands of Aborigines who were forcibly taken from their families as children under assimilation policies that were not abandoned until the middle of the last century. ...

The apology ends years of divisive debate and a decade of refusals by the conservative government that lost November's elections.

Rudd received a standing ovation from lawmakers and from scores of Aborigines and dignitaries invited to witness the event. Many wiped away tears.

Rudd ruled out compensation, however ...

This popular "Stolen Generations" topic was the subject of Philip Noyce's acclaimed 2002 movie "Rabbit-Proof Fence" about three half-white girls in the 1930s who are forcibly taken from their loving, caring Aboriginal communities by a racist Australian official (played by Kenneth Branagh) and put into boarding schools, from which they run away to go back home by following Australia's long rabbit-proof fence that divides agricultural land from waste land..

What possible reason besides genocidal racism might Australian authorities have had for taking children away from the custody of their Aboriginal mothers?

Obviously, none whatsoever. Don't even think about anything you've ever learned about the home life of Aborigines. Force yourself not to think the word Alchoholism. Don't think about why Britney Spears lost custody of her children, either. That had to be pure racism, too.

If any explanation other than racial genocide even flits across your mind, then you're a genocidal racist.

The bizarrely ironic thing is that the star of "Rabbit-Proof Fence," an illiterate 11-14 year old half-Aborigine girl named Everlyn Sampi, hated working on Noyce's grueling movie and kept running away. She'd be found and returned to Noyce.

When it was over, Noyce, who had grown fond of his unruly star, became alarmed at the fate awaiting her if she returned to her alcoholism and sexual abuse-stricken community. So, like the evil Branagh character in his movie, he enrolled her in ... a boarding school. Noyce mused, "I found myself thinking, ‘I have to look after her. She can live with us. I’ll send her to school."

But, she didn't like Noyce's boarding school and, just like the character she played in the movie, left for home.

Australian columnist Andrew Bolt has the instructive story of Noyce and his star here, and historian Keith Windschuttle puts it in larger perspective in the New Criterion here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

50,000 Years of Nativism Down Under

Nicholas Wade writes in the NYT:

A lock of hair, collected by a British anthropologist a century ago, has yielded the first genome of an Australian Aborigine, along with insights into the earliest migration from the ancestral human homeland somewhere in northeast Africa. 

The Aboriginal genome bolsters earlier genetic evidence showing that once the Aborigines’ ancestors arrived in Australia, some 50,000 years ago, they somehow kept the whole continent to themselves without admitting any outsiders. 

The Aborigines are thus direct descendants of the first modern humans to leave Africa, without any genetic mixture from other races so far as can be seen at present. Their dark skin reflects an African origin and a migration and residence in latitudes near the equator, unlike Europeans and Asians whose ancestors gained the paler skin necessary for living in northern latitudes. 

“Aboriginal Australians likely have one of the oldest continuous population histories outside sub-Saharan Africa today,” say the researchers who analyzed the hair, a group led by Eske Willerslev of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. 

Dr. Willerslev is an expert at working with ancient DNA, which is usually highly fragmented. Use of the ancient hair reduced the possibility of mixture with European genes and sidestepped the political difficulties of obtaining DNA from living Aborigines.

The "political difficulties" boil down to the fear that current Australian Aborigines aren't closely related to the people who left archaeological traces in Australia, as long as 44,000 years ago, but are instead related to dingo dog-owning Asians or Polynesians who would have shown up a few thousand years ago. I'm not exactly sure why that would be politically bad for Aborigines, but Australian history is highly emotional, kind of like academic politics, perhaps because so little happened in the history of Australia. (A few years ago, a friend sent me an excellent history of Australia, but when I got done reading it, the only name I could remember is Sir Don Bradfordman, the great cricket player.) 

But ironically, this end run around Aboriginal sensitivities appears to have confirmed their fondest hopes about their vastly ancient pedigree. (I very seldom take an independent stand on specific questions of what happened tens of thousands of years in the past, because, well, what do I know?) 

The rest of the article is quite interesting, too, because it lays out all the reasons for why these results seem unexpected.

One thing worth noting is that despite evidently being separated for thousands of generations, Aborigines and Europeans are not only interfertile, but tend to come out looking overall European in just a few generations. The 1/8th Aborigine boy above looks like the young Bing Crosby, which is not uncommon. This is relevant to the question of how Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans could successfully mate after a long separation.

By way of comparison, here are pictures, also from Ahnenkult, of the Greenland Eskimo descendants of Matthew Henson, the black sharecropper who was the right hand man of polar explorer Robert Peary. The half black / half Eskimo son looks like a comedian on BET, while the 1/4 black grandson doesn't look all that black but the 1/8th black great-grandson does. He looks like the actor in a 1990ss episode of Arliss who played a part-black part-Eskimo tennis prodigy.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Denisovans

For the last couple of decades, there has been a popular theological concept that every living human being was 100% descended from modern humans who came Out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, so therefore there hasn't been enough time for evolution to cause any changes among people, so, therefore, Science Proves the complete genetic equality of all human racial groups.

So, what happened to the not-so-modern humans who were around back then, like the Neanderthals? Well, to Prove Racism Wrong, they had to have been utterly exterminated, the victims of a 100% genocide with no living descendants whatsoever. You see, old theories that some of the old non-African humans weren't completely obliterated were racist, because that would imply that living humans aren't all identical by descent, so they had to be utterly wrong. So, the old humans had to die. You can't make anti-racist omelet without exterminating a few lineages.

In reality, it's not actually a good idea to get too worked up over some theory you hold about the distant past. It's especially not a good idea to create political/moral/religious dogmas dependent upon some assumption you make about the far past. You never know what somebody might dig up. 

It's a better idea to keep an open mind about the present. If, say, men of West African descent keep making the Olympic 100m finals, well, that's pretty interesting. There are a variety of ways that that could have come about, and there's a variety of evidence for assessing those theories. In contrast, the conventional wisdom that anybody who notices these patterns must be evil because Science Proves that these patterns shouldn't exist is just setting yourself up for a fall.  

Not long ago, it turned out that, sure enough, non-Africans tended to be a few percent Neanderthal by descent. Then, it turned out that some people (but not others) were related to an archaic group christened Denisovans. 

A new paper that came out today finds evidence of Denisovan ancestry in various islands off the southeast coast of Asia, such as the Mamanwa negritos of the Philippines and Australian Aborigines. Dienekes has some follow-up on it.

Meanwhile, a second big paper that came out today (see below) says that Australian Aborigines didn't intermarry with anybody after they got to Australia 44,000 years ago. 

You'll notice that there seem to be at least superficially contradictory lessons here about human nature: the ancestors of Australian Aborigines mated with a different quasi-species somewhere in the past, then maintained splendid isolation genetically for many tens of thousands of years in Australia, with no subsequent intruders mating with them until the 18th Century. So, maybe the general rule to draw from this is that You Can't Tell about human history. You've got to go look it up.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

IQ for economists: After trying hard for half a decade to completely ignore the data set on average national IQs in Lynn & Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, economists are now starting to attack it, albeit with embarrassing results.

For the next generation of economists who might be looking around for something important but vastly underexploited to analyze, let me review a key point. The nature vs. nurture arguments about IQ can be a distraction because they aren't all that relevant for your purposes. What is important for economists is the stability of national and group average IQ scores. If they have zoomed all over the place relative to each other, they don't have much explanatory power about how we've gotten to where we are. And if they are likely to change quickly and unpredictably over the next few years, why bother worrying about them?

For better or worse, however, we can be confident that differences in average group IQ are going to be around for a long time.

The relative gaps among groups have been fairly stable for several generations. East Asians may have picked up a few points on everybody else over the last 40 or 50 years, and Maoris in New Zealand may have done the same (although New Zealanders tell me that may just be mixed race people reclassifying themselves to get affirmative action benefits), but otherwise, remarkable relative stability is the norm.

One of Lynn's recent books, for instance, lists 620 IQ studies of different groups going back, in a few cases, to the first quarter of the 20th Century. I've created a graph showing that there has been no overlap of average scores among Japanese (23 studies in red), Hispanics in America (17 studies in green), and Australian Aborigines (17 studies in blue).

The Japanese have consistently scored somewhere around 105 on a scale where white American are pegged at 100, Hispanics in the U.S. at about 90 (which, by the way, is roughly the world average), and Australian Aborigines at very low levels.

I don't know what causes differences in average IQ, but the evidence is overwhelming that they were stable enough over the 1950-2000 era to be used in studies, and, with almost as much assurance, that they will be stable enough over, say, the 2000-2030 era to be important to study for the future.

If a gap between two groups suddenly disappeared in all the babies being born tomorrow for some magic reason, the gap among the workforce wouldn't begin to shrink until 2025 and wouldn't disappear until 2072.

So, the current realities demand far more study than they've gotten from the economics profession.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Aborigines and whites

From Ahnenkult, here's an interesting picture illustrating the logic of the Australian humanitarian progressives now reviled as racists for the "Stolen Generations:"

Before the development of antibiotics, full-blooded Australian Aborigines were dying off at a rapid rate from tuberculosis and other Afro-Eurasian diseases. The half-white children of Aboriginal mothers tended to be more resistant to diseases, but they tended to be neglected and abused by their often alcoholic Aboriginal relatives. So, reasoned the social workers, why not raise them in white ways in boarding schools, allowing them to find a place in white society and marry whites? Because Aboriginal looks tend to be relatively recessive when mixed with European looks, as compared to Sub-Saharan African looks, within a couple of generations you get a kid who looks like a cross between Prince Charles and Bing Crosby, so their descendants would be largely indistinguishable from the general population. Problem solved.

Of course, as we all know now, those reformers were The Worst People of All Time. 

And yet, antibiotics aside, sensitive 21st Century Australians are better at feeling superior to their ancestors than at actually solving the problems that their ancestors confronted. For example, when Australian director Philip Noyce made the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence a decade ago condemning Evil Old Social Workers by showing girls who run away from their boarding school to return to their Aboriginal mothers, his adolescent star ran away from the set and had to be rounded up. Then when filming was over, Noyce saw what a disaster her Aboriginal home life was, so he ... paid to put her in a boarding school.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jared Diamond's "Collapse"

"Societies don't die by accident - they commit ecological suicide" says an article trumpeting Jared Diamond's new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

Diamond studies four ancient societies across space and time: Easter Island in Polynesia, the native American Anasazi tribe in what is now the southwestern United States, the Maya civilization in Central America, and the isolated Viking settlement on the coast of Greenland. Although diverse in nature and context, these four societies experienced what Diamond calls "ecocide," unintentional ecological suicide.

Contra Diamond, in reality, most societies down through history died because they were conquered. Generally speaking, not suicide, but homicide was the fate of most extinct societies.

Diamond cites the Maya, but I cite the Aztecs and the Incas. He cites the Anasazi, but I cite the Cherokee, the Sioux, and countless others. He cites the Easter Islanders, but I cite the Maoris, the Tasmanians, the Australian Aborigines, the Chatham Islanders (exterminated by the Maori), and so forth. He cites the Vikings in Greenland, but I cite the Saxons in Britain and the Arabs in Sicily, both conquered by the descendents of the Vikings. We can go on like this all day.

Diamond used to be a terrific independent thinker, as shown in his 1993 book The Third Chimpanzee (indeed, many of my examples come from this book). But he sold out to political correctness, most profitably, in his bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Here's my review of GG&S from National Review in 1997:

Diamond is not content, however, to merely write the history of the last 13,000 years. He also claims that his evidence is of great political momentuousness because it shows that no ethnic group is inferior to any other: each exploited its local food resources as fully as possible. For example, after the Australian Outback explorers Burke and Wills exhausted their Eurasian-derived supplies, three times they had to throw themselves on the mercy and expertise of the local Stone Age hunter-gatherers. These Aborigines, the least technically advanced of all peoples, may not have domesticated a single Australian plant in 40,000 years, but in 200 years down under scientific whites have domesticated merely the macadamia nut. Farming only pays in Australia when using imported crops and livestock.

But, are indigenous peoples merely not inferior? In truth, on their own turf many ethnic groups appear to be somewhat genetically superior to outsiders. Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection. And in fact, Diamond himself briefly cites several examples of genetic differences impacting history. Despite military superiority, Europeans repeatedly failed to settle equatorial West Africa, in part because they lacked the malaria resistance conferred on many natives by the sickle cell gene. Similarly, biological disadvantages stopped whites from overrunning the Andes. Does this make Diamond a loathsome racist? No, but it does imply that a scientific-minded observer like Diamond should not dogmatically denounce genetic explanations, since he is liable to get tarred with his own brush.

The undeniability of human biodiversity does not prove that we also differ somewhat mentally, but it's hard to imagine why the brain would differ radically from the rest of the body. Consider the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The ant's personality traits -- foresight and caution -- fitted him to survive his region's predictably harsh winters. Yet, the grasshopper's strengths -- improvisation and spontaneity -- might furnish Darwinian superiority in a tropical land where the dangers are unpredictable.

Like many, Diamond appears to confuse the concepts of genetic superiorities (plural) and genetic supremacy (singular). The former are circumstance-specific. For example, a slim, heat-shedding Somalian-style body is inferior to a typically stocky, heat-conserving Eskimo physique in Nome, but it's superior in Mogadishu (and in Manhattan, too, if, you want to become a fashion model and marry David Bowie, like Somalian supermodel Iman). In contrast, genetic supremacy is the dangerous fantasy that one group is best at everything. Before the European explosion began in the 15th Century, it seemed apparent that no race could be supreme. Even the arrogant Chinese were periodically overrun by less-cultured barbarians. The recent European supremacy in both the arts of war and of peace was partly an optical illusion masking the usual tradeoffs in talents within Europe (e.g., Italian admirals were as inept as English cooks). Still, the rise and reign of Europe remains the biggest event in world history. Yet, the era when Europeans could plausibly claim supremacy over all other races has been dead for at least the 60 years since Hitler, of all people, allied with Japan.

The historian who trumpets the political relevance of his work must consider both the past and the future, which Diamond fails to do. Surprisingly, ethnic biodiversity is becoming more important in numerous ways. Until recently, one's location and social position at birth closely constrained one's fate. But, as equality of opportunity grows, the globalized marketplace increasingly exploits all advantages in talent, including those with genetic roots. Pro sports offer a foretaste of the future: many are resegregating themselves as ethnic groups increasingly specialize in those games they're naturally best at. In summary, Diamond may prove a better guide to the last 13,000 years than the to next 13.

Only 7 of those 13 years have gone by, but I'd have to say I'm way ahead of Diamond at this point in forecasting the diverging paths of economic development around the world: I was specifically thinking about South Indian programmers and Chinese manufacturing engineers.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Out of Africa, with Benefits"

Here's that big new science story I teased a couple of days ago. By Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea. 

All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA. 

An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them.  ...

Next, the researchers looked for evidence of interbreeding. Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute geneticist, compared the Denisovan genome to the complete genomes of five people, from South Africa, Nigeria, China, France and Papua New Guinea. To his astonishment, a sizable chunk of the Denisova genome resembled parts of the New Guinea DNA.

“The correct reaction when you get a surprising result is, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” said Dr. Patterson. To see if the result was an error, he and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of seven more people, including another individual from New Guinea and one from the neighboring island of Bougainville. But even in the new analysis, the Denisovan DNA still turned up in the New Guinea and Bougainville genomes. ...

Dr. Bustamante also thinks that other cases of interbreeding are yet to be discovered. “There’s a lot of possibility out there,” he said. “But the only way to get at them is to sequence more of these ancient genomes.”  

If the genomes of New Guineans come almost 5% from non-modern humans, then the obvious next step is to test the genomes of Australian Aborigines, who are last in line in the original Southern, Indian Ocean shoreline route Out of Africa. However, there are a lot of regulatory barriers against testing Aborigines, perhaps out of fear that scientists will find something like this. After all, Aborigines look a little archaic, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if their genes turn out to be a little archaic.

It was lucky that the first findings of non-modern human ancestry involved Europeans, or it would have been hard to get up the political courage to publish this.

So, the Out of Africa model of evolution of the current human race turns out to be mostly, but not wholly, correct. Greg Cochran calls the new model "Out of Africa, with Benefits:" modern humans picked up useful genes from older human types, and not all of those inheritances spread equally to the entire current human race, probably in part because they aren't equally useful in all environments.

Here's an FAQ by John Hawks. And here are comments by Dienekes.

By the way, here's an interesting 2006 article on Nick Patterson, one of the scientists involved. He's had successful three careers, first as British and American government cryptologist, then as a quant for James H. Simons' hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and now as a genome researcher.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Affordable Family Formation" and "Sailer Strategy" at work in Australia:

Continuing iSteve.com's recent All Australia All the Time theme, I see, thanks to Jack Strocchi, that Tim Colbatch reported in the Sydney Morning Herald last November that much the same process that is dividing the US map up into red and blue is at work in Australia:

New Political Divide Is All About Values:

A new divide is reshaping Australians' political loyalties. Analysis of voting shifts, booth by booth throughout Victoria, reveals that a cultural divide is growing alongside the income divide that traditionally dictates our votes - and, increasingly, is overshadowing it.

In the past six years, many elite suburbs and coastal areas have moved towards Labor [the left party]. The middle and outer suburbs have gone towards the Liberals [the right party].

From its high watermark in 1998, when it won its second-best vote in Victoria for 50 years, Labor has slid from 53.5 per cent of the two-party vote to 49 per cent, a swing to the Coalition [right] of 4.5 per cent.

Yet at scores of polling booths, voters generated swings of more than 10 per cent - while at other booths, Labor was polling even better in 2004 than in 1998.

The new divide is based on values rather than incomes. "Australia is dividing between the cultural elite on one side and middle Australia and everyone else on the other," says social analyst Bernard Salt, a partner at KPMG and author of The Big Shift.

Educated insiders living close to the city are increasingly Labor-oriented, while the outsiders living in middle and outer suburbs are increasingly Liberal-oriented...

Take Melbourne, one of just three seats where Labor did better this time than in 1998. Within two kilometres of each other, two booths swung in wildly different directions. Voters in the booth under Richmond's housing commission flats gave the Liberals a combined swing in 2001 and 2004 of 12 per cent. But over Punt Road and up a dozen income levels, East Melbourne residents voted Labor, with a swing almost as large.

Educated insiders living close to the city are increasingly Labor-oriented." Take Batman in the northern suburbs. Almost all the booths in inner-suburban Northcote swung to Labor or held fairly steady, yet in Reservoir the swings to the Coalition ran as high as 13 per cent.

Similarly, in Maribyrnong, inner middle-class Essendon was slightly better for Labor this time than in 1998, whereas outer working-class St Albans and Sunshine were much worse.

... In outer-suburban marginals such as La Trobe, suburbs dominated by families with children and mortgages - such as Berwick, Boronia and Ferntree Gully - swung heavily to the Coalition [right]. But Sassafras and Mount Dandenong swung to Labor [left]. The analysis suggests that interest rates and the Mitcham-Frankston freeway helped draw Coalition votes, just as the GST inflated Labor's vote in 1998.

In contrast to the role born-again Christians played in US President George Bush's re-election during the week, religion seems not to have been a factor here. Analysis by Andrew Kopras of the Federal Parliamentary Library shows that the electorates with most non-believers are nearly all outer-suburban Liberal seats.

Mr Salt argues that there is a "groovy, inner-urban green culture" that identifies with Labor, even in affluent suburbs such as Middle Park, Parkville and North Fitzroy. And it has spread to coastal resorts and bushland settings by "sea-changers and tree-changers".

"You can almost draw a line around that culture a few kilometres from the city," Mr Salt says... Mr Salt said big swings to the Liberals among people on welfare were no surprise. "Even people in housing commission flats no longer see themselves as aligned to a particular class, but to the values set of middle Australia," he said. By contrast, "I think most sea-changers and tree-changers are Labor voters. These are inner-city people so they've got property wealth and green values."

While Prime Minister John Howard, now in his fourth term in office, is best known in the U.S. for his support of the Iraq Attaq, Australia's actual participation in the fighting has been prudently nugatory. Not a single Australian soldier was even injured in Iraq until October 2004, 19 months after the invasion. As far as I can tell, no Australian soldiers have yet been killed in action. Michael Duffy wrote in March:

At the peak of their commitments to Iraq, Britain had 45,000 people there and the US about 150,000. Relative to population sizes, to match this Australia should have had between 10,000 and 15,000 people in the Middle East at some point. In fact we peaked at just 2000. There are now fewer than 600 Australians serving there, to be joined next month by another 450.

Republicans in America should note that the hot issue for John Howard was cracking down on immigrant refugees. This paid off at the ballot box in recent elections. Howard has been winning on what Peter Brimelow calls the Sailer Strategy:

Michael Millett wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002:

White fringe fury feeds Labor's fall

But controversial new research suggests an even bigger issue at play, one that Labor [the left party] will struggle to overcome as long as elections are fought on anything other than conventional hip-pocket issues. It is what Melbourne academic Bob Birrell refers to as the "new political divide" of birthplace.

Birrell's thesis, outlined in a just-released article in his People and Place journal, published by the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, is that birthplace can be just as strong a voting determinant as class or educational background. Moreover, that Howard [the center-right prime minister] is winning the political war by directly targeting the white vote, that is, Australian-born voters in outer-suburban seats with a potent mix of conservative social, cultural and national security policies. Labor's inability to match the Howard pitch is costing it dearly.

Birrell points out that Labor is being forced back to its inner-city strongholds - seats with a high proportion of ethnic voters (more specifically, seats with a high concentration of voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds). At the election in November last year, Labor held 19 of the top 20 electorates in which more than 30 per cent of residents spoke a language other than English at home.

Yet these impenetrable inner-city defences do little to assist Labor out where it really counts - out there in the "white bread" marginals that fringe the major cities.

It is here, asserts Birrell, that Labor's progressive social justice agenda runs up against native-born, middle Australia conservatism. While bipartisanship protected Labor's weaker flanks during the 1980s, it was Howard's hard-edged social conservative agenda, and his attack on Labor's "global vision" that cost it the brick veneers in the late 1990s.

Howard's success lay in turning the anti-Keating movement [Keating was the last Labor prime minister] into a viable new constituency. According to Birrell, it is at its most potent in the outer-suburban marginals, where Australian-born voters are predominant. These voters have a stronger sense of national identity, are wary of immigration and multiculturalism and are most likely to criticise policies involving concessions to minority groups, such as Aborigines and migrants.

Birrell analyses voting data and the highly respected Australian Electoral Survey (AES), which attempts to gauge how the electorate votes across a whole range of criteria, to isolate this new factor. His focus is on NSW, and the mass desertion of Labor votes on the suburban fringes of Sydney.

The figures are stark. Labor dominates the New South Wales [Sydney and environs] ethnic seats, with little noticeable shift in votes there between 1993 and last year. But in the half of NSW's 50 seats where the non-English-speaking presence is low, Labor's hold is almost non-existent. It held 16 of the 25 seats in 1993. It now possesses four.

The swing against Labor on the suburban fringe has been pronounced...

Why such a big swing? For answers, Birrell looks to Mark Latham, the outspoken Labor frontbencher. From his base in Sydney's unfashionable outer-western suburbs, Latham has raised the uncomfortable notion of "white flight", caused by aspirational families fleeing troubled neighbourhoods for perceived safe havens on the city fringe.

"In most cases, the population are changing rapidly due to movement into the areas, overwhelmingly from Australian-born and mainly-English-speaking-born persons moving from elsewhere in Sydney," Birrell writes. "They could well include some of Mark Latham's aspirational voters - voters with enough capital to afford a new dwelling 50 kilometres or more from the centre of Sydney. Latham hypothesises that such people do not want the troubles of other areas to follow them to the fringe.

"Given the attention paid in Sydney to social tensions associated with the city's changing migrant population, it could well be that these people would be especially susceptible to negative messages about Labor's social and cultural vision."

It is obvious that Howard's security message also resounds strongly here. Nationalist sentiment - embodied in Howard's declaration that "we decide who comes here" - was at the heart of the Coalition's response to the Tampa and its strong border protection policy at the last election.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Australian governments spend twice as much on Aborigines

The Australian newspaper reports:

The 2010 indigenous expenditure report released today shows that for the year 2008-2009 expenditure “related to” indigenous Australians totalled $21.9 billion, or 5.3 per cent of total general government expenditure.

While expenditure on non-indigenous Australians is estimated at $18,351 per person, expenditure on indigenous Australians per head of population is estimated at $40,228. ...

The report is the first of its kind and was agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments to assist policy makers in reducing disadvantage for indigenous Australians.

Expect the Australian Parliament to vote an apology about 2065 for The Spoiled Generations.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why do Caucasians differ so much in hair color?

Why do Caucasians differ so much amongst themselves in hair color, while everybody else (with the exception of some blonde Australian Aborigines) has dark brown hair? Here's my theory, which has been getting some favorable responses.

Blonde and red hair are favorable mutations for women because they make men notice them more. Fair hair reflects more light than dark hair, so it catches the eye more. Women like shiny jewelry for the same reason.

But, why then doesn't blonde or red hair become universal? Well, it would lose scarcity value if all women had it. But, also, while it's good for your daughters, under pre-modern conditions it was bad for your sons. It tended to hurt males at hunting and war. I recall attending a golf tournament on a sunny day and standing behind the green when a friend asked, "Which players are coming next?" I glanced at the tee 500 yards away, and said, "I can't tell who all is in the next group, but you can definitely see the sunlight glinting off Greg Norman's hair." The Australian pro Norman, who is no doubt of partial Nordic descent judging by his name and appearance, has extremely blonde hair. Fortunately, by now Northwestern Europeans have largely beaten their swords into golf clubs, but in days of yore, Norman's hair would have served disastrously as a beacon calling attention to his presence. Of course, in the Nordic homelands there aren't many terribly sunny days.

Thus, blonde hair becomes more common the farther in Europe you go north, where the sun is low in the sky and the land heavily forested and therefore shady. Within Northern Europe, red hair becomes more prevalent the farther west you go, where, due to the Gulf Stream, the weather is extremely misty. (I'd guess that the Western Irish are around 1/3 red-haired.) So, in Northwest Europe, you can have lots of blondes and redheads because lack of direct sunlight meant that highly visible hair worked well for women, without much penalizing their men folk when hunting or raiding.

In line with this theory, in movie love scenes, the actress almost always has lighter hair and skin color than the actor. This suggests that we still associate fairness with the fair sex. 12/13/01

Diversity before Diversity: Evonne Goolagong

A running theme at iSteve over the years has been to question the conventional wisdom that white racism long completely prevented the efflorescence of talent among the diverse and thus, under our more enlightened system of today, various diverse superstars in numerous fields will be arriving Real Soon Now. 

Yet, in quite a few fields, I can recall various non-whites of the past who accomplished more than their more numerous and more accepted co-ethnics today. For instance, Pancho Gonzales, a cholo from East L.A., was among the the top American tennis players from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, while there are no Mexican-American touring pros today.

With the French Open tennis tournament going on currently, I'm reminded that Australian Aboriginal-surnamed Evonne Goolagong won the French Open in 1971, 41 years ago, following up with a Wimbledon triumph later that year. You can't get much more diverse than Australian Aborigine. During this peak era in the popularity of tennis in general and women's tennis in particular, Goolagong (after her marriage, Goolagong-Cawley) won 7 Grand Slam individual titles from 1971-1980. She was well-liked by the public; not as pretty as Chris Evert, but cuter than Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. 

One question is how Aboriginal she is. There was never any doubt in the public's mind about her surname: Goolagong is an obviously Aboriginal sounding word, similar to "billabong," which is famous from the opening line of Australia's unofficial national anthem "Waltzing Matilda:" "Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong."

On the other hand, Aboriginal looks seem to be somewhat recessive. If she weren't named "Goolagong," it's not clear if non-Australians would have immediately guessed she was part-Aboriginal. This was an era of fashionable tanning and tennis players then tended to be well-tanned. Also, the most prominent Aboriginal facial feature, the heavy brow ridge, is less noticeable among female Aborigines.

Both her parents identified as mixed-race Aborigines who were assimilated into rural Australian working class culture. They were as beige-skinned as her, but some of her seven siblings ranged from brown to black. The Goolagongs were poor but not impoverished. They were the only Aboriginal family in a small town, and the Goolagong kids went to school with the white kids. Her father Kenny Goolagong was an itinerant sheep-shearer, but also the town's golf champion. In the British commonwealth, golf is a less elitist sport than in America. And, Australia is possibly the most sports-oriented culture on earth.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Cochran: A lot of apparent racial similarities are only skin deep:

Was headbutting Algerian Berber soccer star Zinedine Zidane provoked by a "racist" comment? Not being a lipreader, I'll merely point out that Zidane is slightly fairer-skinned that the Italian he flattened.

Zidane looks strikingly Teutonic because the Berbers and the Germans can reasonably be grouped in a vast Caucasian racial group with common ancestors. Similarly, East Asians and American Indians display certain similarities because they shared common ancestors back before the end of the last Ice Age.

But there are also lots of other visual or functional similarities among various groups spread far apart across the globe that are more likely caused by separate convergent evolution than by unchanging descent or by acquisition of genes through intermarriage.

Greg Cochran points out that many similarities among widely dispersed peoples are not caused by them having the same genes, but instead by having different genes that evolved to do similar things. For example, some of the sub-Saharan tribes that have high degrees of lactose tolerance have mutations giving them that capability than are different than the mutations found in the lactose tolerant northern Europeans. Or, as Cynthia M. Beall of Case Western has determined, three high altitude groups -- Andean Indians, Tibetans, and Ethiopian highlanders -- have three different adaptations that allow them to thrive at 10,000 feet or more.

Unfortunately, at present we only know what a fraction of all genes actually do, although we're learning fast.

There are a lot of other candidates for this tendency that apparent racial similarities are often only skin deep.

- For example, blonde hair is found among Caucasians and a few Australian aborigines in the center of the Outback.

- The Ainu aborigines of Japan, who have as much body hair as Robin Williams and beards like ZZ Top, were long thought by physical anthropologists to be displaced Caucasians, but genetic research has rendered that idea unlikely. They're apparently just really hairy East Asians.

- A yellowish cast to skin color is found in East Asia and among the Bushmen of Southwest Africa.

- Melanesians are often black-skinned and wooly-haired, but their neutral genes are as unlike sub-Saharan Africans as just about anybody on Earth.

- The pygmies of Central Africa and the pygmy negritos of the Andaman Islands and points East are probably not racially related.
The steatopygia of the Andamanese and the Bushmen / Hottentots women is likely convergent evolution.

On the other hand, some of these similarities could be left over from the original out-of-Africa group. Perhaps, originally all human women were fully steatopygous, and the Bushmen, some Pygmies, and the Andamanese are the only ones who didn't evolve away from that template.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Cochran: A lot of apparent racial similarities are only skin deep:

Was headbutting Algerian Berber soccer star Zinedine Zidane provoked by a "racist" comment? Not being a lipreader, I'll merely point out that Zidane is slightly fairer-skinned that the Italian he flattened.

Zidane looks strikingly Teutonic because the Berbers and the Germans can reasonably be grouped in a vast Caucasian racial group with common ancestors. Similarly, East Asians and American Indians display certain similarities because they shared common ancestors back before the end of the last Ice Age.

But there are also lots of other visual or functional similarities among various groups spread far apart across the globe that are more likely caused by separate convergent evolution than by unchanging descent or by acquisition of genes through intermarriage.

Greg Cochran points out that many similarities among widely dispersed peoples are not caused by them having the same genes, but instead by having different genes that evolved to do similar things. For example, some of the sub-Saharan tribes that have high degrees of lactose tolerance have mutations giving them that capability than are different than the mutations found in the lactose tolerant northern Europeans. Or, as Cynthia M. Beall of Case Western has determined, three high altitude groups -- Andean Indians, Tibetans, and Ethiopian highlanders -- have three different adaptations that allow them to thrive at 10,000 feet or more.

Unfortunately, at present we only know what a fraction of all genes actually do, although we're learning fast.

There are a lot of other candidates for this tendency that apparent racial similarities are often only skin deep.

- For example, blonde hair is found among Caucasians and a few Australian aborigines in the center of the Outback.

- The Ainu aborigines of Japan, who have as much body hair as Robin Williams and beards like ZZ Top, were long thought by physical anthropologists to be displaced Caucasians, but genetic research has rendered that idea unlikely. They're apparently just really hairy East Asians.

- A yellowish cast to skin color is found in East Asia and among the Bushmen of Southwest Africa.

- Melanesians are often black-skinned and wooly-haired, but their neutral genes are as unlike sub-Saharan Africans as just about anybody on Earth.

- The pygmies of Central Africa and the pygmy negritos of the Andaman Islands and points East are probably not racially related.
The steatopygia of the Andamanese and the Bushmen / Hottentots women is likely convergent evolution.

On the other hand, some of these similarities could be left over from the original out-of-Africa group. Perhaps, originally all human women were fully steatopygous, and the Bushmen, some Pygmies, and the Andamanese are the only ones who didn't evolve away from that template.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Ashkenazi Jewish Genes in 3-d

In response to readers' questions about how Ashkenazi Jewish genes compare to other groups', Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending sends along a 3d graph he and Greg Cochran created for (but didn't use in) their famous paper on the evolution of high IQs among Ashkenazi Jews.

You can click on the graph to see it in a larger, more readable version. The main left to right axis is the first Principal Component, accounting for 45% of the variance. The axis running from the middle bottom to the upper right is the second Principal Component, accounting for 25%, while the vertical axis is the third PC, accounting for 15%.

As always, the principal components methodology doesn't tell you what the axes mean. That's just how the data cluster and you've got to come up with insights to figure out why. (Don't look to me for them.)

On the first two axes, Ashkenazi Jews are rather close to "Europeans" and "Russians." They are similar to Yemenites (from Southern Arabian peninsula) on the first axis, but not on the second. And they are similar to Samaritans (who currently subsist on two hilltops in Israel), good, bad or indifferent, on the second axis but not on the first. They are fairly similar to the Druze (of Lebanon and Israel) on the first two axes, but not on the third.

On the other hand, if you included some Australian Aborigines, Bushmen and Tierra del Fuegans on this graph, probably all six of these data points would look clustered fairly closely together.

So, Ashkenazis look pretty European on this chart compared to a few Middle Eastern groups. But, as the recent graph showed, genetics has progressed to the point where Ashkenazis (at least those with four Ashkenazi grandparents) can now be reliably distinguished from other Europeans.

Tautologically enough, when it comes to ancestry, everything is relative.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"What have you changed your mind about?"

Every New Year's Day, literary agent John Brockman promotes his stable of science writers by having them propound on a question of interest. This year's query is "What have you changed your mind about?"

MARK PAGEL
Evolutionary Biologist, Reading University, England

We Differ More Than We Thought

The last thirty to forty years of social science has brought an overbearing censorship to the way we are allowed to think and talk about the diversity of people on Earth. People of Siberian descent, New Guinean Highlanders, those from the Indian sub-continent, Caucasians, Australian aborigines, Polynesians, Africans — we are, officially, all the same: there are no races.

Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like miniscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

The new figure for us, then, is significant. It derives from among other things, many small genetic differences that have emerged from studies that compare human populations. Some confer the ability among adults to digest milk, others to withstand equatorial sun, others yet confer differences in body shape or size, resistance to particular diseases, tolerance to hot or cold, how many offspring a female might eventually produce, and even the production of endorphins — those internal opiate-like compounds.

We also differ by surprising amounts in the numbers of copies of some genes we have. Modern humans spread out of Africa only within the last 60-70,000 years, little more than the blink of an eye when stacked against the 6 million or so years that separate us from our Great Ape ancestors. The genetic differences amongst us reveal a species with a propensity to form small and relatively isolated groups on which natural selection has often acted strongly to promote genetic adaptations to particular environments.

We differ genetically more than we thought, but we should have expected this: how else but through isolation can we explain a single species that speaks at least 7,000 mutually unintelligible languages around the World?

What this all means is that, like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations — including differences that may even correspond to old categories of 'race' — that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem. This in no way says one group is in general 'superior' to another, or that one group should be preferred over another. But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.

Arnold Kling has some highlights of other answers here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What were Neanderthal genes good for?

Many years ago, Gregory Cochran began pushing the idea that modern humans have some small percentage of Neanderthal inheritance, and that humanity as it exists today acquired by interbreeding with Neanderthals certain useful gene variants that had been evolving separately in cold Europe. Both predictions appear to be true, and now studies are looking at which fitness-enhancing gene versions were picked up wholesale from Neanderthals.

At West Hunter, Cochran reviews some new data:

Exactly which kinds of Neanderthal alleles would give advantage was less obvious.  I suspected that Neanderthals would be resistant to local pathogens, and that such genetic defenses could easily pay off in modern humans moving into Eurasia.  It looks as if some of that happened – there is a good chance that some common HLA alleles in Eurasians originated in Neanderthals, and some Neanderthal variants involved with defense against viruses have become common. 

I thought that anatomically modern humans might have picked up alleles that dealt better with the big swings in day length characteristic of northern latitudes.  In an earlier talk, Sakararaman  mentioned a common Neanderthal version of the CLOCK gene in Europeans, but that doesn’t show up in the paper, so maybe that turned out to be a mistake. 

It looks as if both Europeans and East Asians have picked up Neanderthal versions of  several keratin filament genes, involved in hair and skin formation. Not fixed, but pretty common.  This might have something to do with the non-kinky hair found in most Eurasians. 

Some of these common Neanderthal alleles may have some effect on the central nervous system, but as usual, we have such a poor understanding of gene function that it’s hard to tell. A Neanderthal variant of TANC1 is common in Europeans, and that gene is thought to regulate dendritic spines and excitatory synapses.  Looking at the broader question, an unusual number of selected Neanderthal alleles were found that are associated with major depression. So maybe those alleles affected mood regulation. Perhaps depression is part of a strategy for dealing with long winters. 

There are gene deserts in which you find very few Neanderthal alleles, presumably because those alleles didn’t work well in modern humans. There is a dearth of testes-associated gene,  not too surprising because they evolve particularly rapidly and are therefore more likely than average to be incompatible with a sister group that diverged some time ago.  The area around FOXP2 is such a desert:  Neanderthals were perhaps worse at speech, or any rate different in some way that didn’t mesh. 

There are some signs of reproductive incompatibility with modern humans, but obviously not enough to prevent adaptive introgression. David Reich suggests that Neanderthals were “at the very edge of being biologically incompatible”.  I doubt that, for two reasons.  First, the known cases of species intersterility in primates all took longer to develop. Bonobos and chimps manage, and they’ve been separated something like 800,000 years. In addition, there is evidence that African hunter-gatherers (Bushmen and Pygmies)  picked up some genetic material from an unknown archaic group, one that split off considerably earlier than Neanderthals, something like 900,000 years. ...

In our book, we suggested that the big bang of the Upper Paleolithic,  the dramatic increase in cultural complexity seen in Europe some 40,000 years ago, might have been triggered, at least in part, by an influx of adaptive Neanderthal alleles. Right now, from the evidence in these papers, I’m not seeing a strong case for that. Of course we only understand what half these genes are doing,  so the fat lady hasn’t finished singing, but  we may well be wrong.  Of course that dramatic increase in cultural complexity did happen, and for that matter, it is still true that average IQ scores are quite low in sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora.  But IQ scores are also low in populations such as Australian Aborigines that have about the same amount of Neanderthal admixture as other people outside of Africa – so at minimum the story is  more complicated.

     

NYT review of "A Troublesome Inheritance"

The New York Times hands their veteran reporter Nicholas Wade's book to somebody I've never noticed, Arthur Allen. A quick search suggests this Arthur Allen is this writer for the Huffington Post.*

Charging Into the Minefield of Genes and Racial Difference
Nicholas Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’
MAY 15, 2014

By ARTHUR ALLEN

Few areas of science have contributed more to human misery than the study of racial difference. In the 1920s, eugenicists from top American universities promoted the sterilization of the unfit and later praised Hitler’s racial codes while advocating laws that would exclude thousands of Jews from our shores. 

One of my commenters notes: "At least the reviewer waited until the second sentence to bring up Hitler."

Contemporary researchers have found it useful to examine genetic variations that affect traits like diabetes in Native Americans or high blood pressure in African-Americans. But in the shadow of the Holocaust, scientists in the United States have largely avoided the classification of races as a “futile exercise,” in the words of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza; the very concept of race is a matter of scientific debate. 

Almost a decade and a half ago, both leftist anthropologist Jonathan Marks and I pointed out the obvious problem with this popular interpretation of Cavalli-Sforza's forgivable attempt to use the newly fashionable race-does-not-exist verbiage to not get Watsoned avant la lettre: Just look at the map on the cover of Cavalli-Sforza's 1994 magnum opus the The History and Geography of Human Genes:

I noted in VDARE in 2000:

This is Cavalli-Sforza's description of the map that is the capstone of his half century of labor in human genetics: "The color map of the world shows very distinctly the differences that we know exist among the continents: Africans (yellow), Caucasoids (green), Mongoloids … (purple), and Australian Aborigines (red). The map does not show well the strong Caucasoid component in northern Africa, but it does show the unity of the other Caucasoids from Europe, and in West, South, and much of Central Asia." 

Basically, all his number-crunching has produced a map that looks about like what you'd get if you gave Strom Thurmond a paper napkin and a box of crayons and had him draw a racial map of the world.

From the left, the perceptive Marks wrote in his 2003 book What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes:

But things quickly worsened, for Time ran a color figure from The History and Geography of Human Genes, in which each of the non-existent human races actually came color-coded: Africans yellow, Mongoloids blue, Caucasoids green, and Australians red. 

Quite literally! 

It was the old essentialist fallacy of Linnaeus, except now with different colors and computerized.

Cavalli-Sforza's map of the Old World from
the cover of a different edition.

But who can notice the cover of Cavalli-Sforza's book when on the inside he uses the word "populations" instead of "races?"

By the way, Marks is by nurture a leftwinger, but by nature he's a Noticer, and that hasn't made him very popular.

Back to Arthur Allen's review of Nicholas Wade:

In “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” however, Nicholas Wade argues that scientists need to get over their hang-ups and jump into studies of racial difference. “The intellectual barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past,” he writes.

Mr. Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, draws on the wealth of evolutionary data that has emerged from the decoding of human genomes. This research has enabled scientists to imagine our prehistory with more precision, and the picture is one of unexpectedly significant genetic change since many of our ancestors left Africa. Since this evolution affected traits such as skin color, body hair and the tolerance of alcohol, milk and high altitude, why not intelligence and social behavior as well? Mr. Wade asks. 

The central problem here is that if significant genetic-controlled behavioral differences exist among races, with scant (at most) exception they haven’t been discovered yet. To build a case with the evidence at hand requires a great deal of speculation, with the inevitable protrusion of the nonscientific worldview. 

Mr. Wade presents a few scattered genetic studies and attempts to weld them into a grand theory of global history for the past 50,000 years. Where Jared Diamond argued in “Guns, Germs and Steel” that environment and geography enabled Europe to develop a highly successful civilization, Mr. Wade says environmental pressures led to genetic differences that account for much of that advantage.

Here's my anecdote about when I pointed out to Dr. Diamond at the 2002 Milken Global Conference that his documentation of the massive environmental differences between continents would tend to select for the evolution of genetic differences between continental races.

“The rise of the West,” he writes, “is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.” 

Conservative scholars like the political scientist Francis Fukuyama have long argued that social institutions and culture explain why Europe beat Asia to prosperity, and why parts of the Mideast and Africa continue to suffer destabilizing violence and misery. 

Mr. Wade takes this already controversial argument a step further, contending that “slight evolutionary differences in social behavior” underlie social and cultural differences. A small but consistent divergence in a racial group’s tendency to trust outsiders — and therefore to accept central rather than tribal authority — could explain “much of the difference between tribal and modern societies,” he writes. 

This is where Mr. Wade’s argument starts to go off the rails.

At times, his theorizing is merely puzzling, as when he notes that the gene variant that gives East Asians dry earwax also produces less body odor, which would have been attractive “among people spending many months in confined spaces to escape the cold.” No explanation of why ancient Europeans, presumably cooped up just as much, didn’t also develop this trait. Later, he speculates that thick hair and small breasts evolved in Asian women because they may have been “much admired by Asian men.” And why, you might ask, did Asian men alone prefer these traits? 

Maybe Mr. Allen should ask Charles Darwin, whose 1871 classic The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex offers at vast length a sexual selection theory for racial differences.

Mr. Wade occasionally drops in broad, at times insulting assumptions about the behavior of particular groups without substantiating the existence of such behaviors, let alone their genetic basis. Writing about Africans’ economic condition, for example, Mr. Wade wonders whether “variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make.” 

For Mr. Wade, genetic differences help explain the failure of the United States occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “If institutions were purely cultural,” he writes, “it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another.” It’s hard to know how to begin to address such a puzzling statement.

But pointing-'n'-sputtering is the standard response.

Mr. Wade acknowledges that specific evidence for the influence of “social behavior” genes is quite limited. The one example he presents repeatedly is the MAOA 2R variant, the so-called warrior gene that has been linked to violent behavior in men abused as children and is more common in blacks than whites or Asians. Mr. Wade admits that such genes at most create a tendency to violence, and adds that there may be other, yet undiscovered violence-susceptibility genes that could skew the racial picture. 

Mr. Wade’s distinctive focus is on how evolution, in his view, shaped different races’ “radius of trust,” or ability to assume loyalty to, say, a nation rather than a tribe, and to punish those who violate social rules. Modern civilizations select out violent individuals and their genes, which might be more valuable in tribal societies, he argues. 

When it comes to his leitmotif — the need for scientists to drop “politically correct” attitudes toward race — Mr. Wade displays surprisingly sanguine assumptions about the ability of science to generate facts free from the cultural mesh of its times. He argues that because the word “racism” did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1910, racism is a “modern concept, and that pre-eugenics studies of race were “reasonably scientific.” This would surely surprise any historian of European colonies in Africa or the Americas. 

“Science is about what is, not what ought to be,” Mr. Wade writes. “Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.” Yet he acknowledges that views of scientific truth are highly contextual. The philosopher Herbert Spencer “was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century, and his ideas, however harsh they may seem today, were widely discussed,” Mr. Wade writes. Why does he suppose that Spencer was so popular? Was it science’s “shifting sands” that gave his ideas credibility, or their tendency to support what powerful people wanted to believe?

What is it that powerful people want to believe (or, at least, want the rest of us to believe) today?

The philosopher Ludwik Fleck once wrote, “ ‘To see’ means to recreate, at a suitable moment, a picture created by the mental collective to which one belongs.” While there is much of interest in Mr. Wade’s book, readers will probably see what they are predisposed to see: a confirmation of prejudices, or a rather unconvincing attempt to promote the science of racial difference.

Arthur Allen is the author of “The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl,” to be published by W. W. Norton in July.

 

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* This Arthur Allen is almost certainly not the other Arthur Allen, I am relieved to say, whom a Google search turns up as a suspect in the Zodiac Killer mystery.