The Bouncing Basketball of Race Realism

There is a blog, Occidentalist, I’ve been occasionally commenting at this past month or so. The blogger, Chuck, is a race realist. He is fairly typical in holding a human biodiversity perspective, a semi-deterministic model of genetics. He is somewhat of true believer, but he occasionally expresses some niggling doubts about standard race realist beliefs. It is too bad he doesn’t take his own doubts seriously.

He also doesn’t take seriously some of the most interesting recent data. That is the strangest thing about this type of person. They are intellectual and knowledgeable to an extent, but they are committed to a particular worldview in a quite unscientific way. Science is used merely to express their certainty and so used selectively, instead of as a pathway of curiosity and learning.

I shared an analysis of some recent research that is paradigm-shattering (which I’ve previously posted about in my blog). None of the old theories can explain much of it, partly because it isn’t clear exactly what is in need of explanation, the unknowns being unknown. I highlighted one study in particular:

“Somehow, though, invisible influences intervened. With the scientists controlling for nearly everything they could control, mice with the exact same genes behaved differently depending on where they lived. And even more surprising: the differences were not consistent, but zigged and zagged across different genetic strains and different locations. In Portland, one strain was especially sensitive to cocaine and one especially insensitive , compared to the same strains in other cities. In Albany, one particular strain— just the one— was especially lazy. In Edmonton , the genetically altered mice tended to be just as active as the wild mice, whereas they were more active than the wild mice in Portland and less active than the wild mice in Albany. It was a major hodgepodge”

I made three basic points about this and the other studies:

1) We can no longer honestly claim percentage estimates about genetic vs environmental influence. It isn’t just that past research wasn’t controlling for all confounding factors. Genetic researchers are beginning to realize they don’t even know how to control for all confounding factors because quite a few apparently are unknown at present. We don’t even know how to attempt to disentangle these factors so as to isolate them all. More importantly, we can’t figure out how to separate genetics from the environmental background of this complex web of confounding factors.

2) It has typically been assumed that if researchers controlled for all obvious genetic and environmental factors it should lead to the same basic results. Slight variances are to be expected, but nothing to the extreme differences as found in that mouse study. It demonstrates possibly very minor differences, so small as to be presently undetectable, can lead to major alterations in end results. It demonstrates how powerful environmental conditions can be, even when they are being controlled for with the best methods researchers know how to use.

3) In the uncontrolled conditions of human lives, the environmental influences would be even more powerful. No human study of genetics has come even close to how well controlled this mouse study was done. Even most animal studies aren’t that well controlled. This relates to the issue of the poor quality of much medical research, specifically in terms of race realism.

His response was dismissal, as if it meant very little, just a mild curiosity at best:

“None of this is to say that epigenetics isn’t marginally interesting.”

Ho-hum… *yawn*… nothing interesting here, folks… just move along.

It was like he couldn’t even see it, not really. In his mind, it wasn’t there in some basic sense. He assumed he had seen it all before and so he didn’t need to look at this new data in order to take it seriously, because if he had seen it all before how could new data show him something he hadn’t already seen, right?

It wasn’t just about epigenetics. The study I highlighted brought up other issues about environmental conditions, confounding factors, and scientific controls. It challenges Chuck’s assumptions and conclusions at a fundamental level, and yet he could barely acknowledge what I had shared. He just went on repeating his same basic argument, like he has done a thousand times before.

I’m reminded of a social experiments about inattentional blindness, where focusing one thing makes people unaware of other things. One study had the subjects count the number of times a basketball was dribbled. While they were preoccupied, a person in a gorilla costume came out and began dancing where he was easily seen. When asked about it, most people didn’t remember a dancing gorilla, despite the extreme oddness of such an intrusion. It simply didn’t fit into the parameters of their focus of concern, the bounding basketball. Even if the subject was right about their claim of how many times the basketball bounced, they still missed the most interesting thing that was happening.

Race realists such as Chuck are like this. They share a lot of data that is correct, but the obsession about certain data disallows them from appreciating other data. They know what they know in great detail, and they often love to swamp discussions with a ton of data. The failure is that their knowledge lacks a larger context of understanding. Their opinions can never change, no matter the data, as long as they continue to narrowly focus on that bouncing basketball of race realism.