Red Flag of Twin Studies

Consider this a public service announcement. The moment someone turns to twin studies as reliable and meaningful evidence, it’s a dead give away about the kind of person they are. And when someone uses this research in the belief they are proving genetic causes, it demonstrates a number of things.

First and foremost, it shows they don’t understand what is heritability. It is about population level factors and can tell us nothing about individuals, much less disentangle genetics from epigenetics and environment. Heritability does not mean genetic inheritance, although even some scientists who know better sometimes talk as if they are the same thing. The fact of the matter is, beyond basic shared traits (e.g., two eyes, instead of one or three), there is little research proving direct genetic causation, typically only seen in a few rare diseases. All that heritability can do is point to the possibility of genetic causes, but all that allows is the articulation of a hypothesis to be tested by actual genetic research which is rarely done.

And second, this gives away the ideological game being played. Either the person ideologically identifies as a eugenicist, racist, etc or has unconsciously assimilated eugenicist, racist, etc ideology without realizing it. In either case, there is next to zero chance that any worthwhile discussion will follow from it. It doesn’t matter what is the individual’s motivations or if they are even aware of them. It’s probably best to just walk away. You don’t need to call them out, much less call them a racist or whatever. You know all that you need to know at that point. Just walk away. And if you don’t walk away, go into the situation with your eyes wide open for you are entering a battlefield of ideological rhetoric.

So, keep this in mind. Twin studies are some of the worst research around, opposite of how they get portrayed by ideologues as being strong evidence. Treat them as you would the low quality epidemiological research in nutrition studies (such as the disproven Seven Countries Study and China Study). They are evidence, at best, to be considered in a larger context of information but not to be taken alone as significant and meaningful. Besides, the twin studies are so poorly designed and so sparse in number that not much can be said about them. If anything, all they are evidence for is how to do science badly. That isn’t to say that, theoretically, twin studies couldn’t be designed well, but as far as I know it hasn’t happened yet. It’s not easy research to do for obvious reasons, as humans are complex creatures part of complex conditions.

For someone to even mention twin studies, other than to criticize them, is a red flag. Scrutinize carefully anything such a person says. Or better yet, when possible, simply ignore them. The problem with weak evidence that is repeated as if true is that it never really is about the evidence in the first place. Twin studies is one of those things that, like dog whistle politics, stands in for something else. It is what I call a symbolic conflation, a distraction tactic to point away from the real issue. Few people talking about twin studies actually care about either twins or science. You aren’t going to convince a believer that their beliefs are false. If anything, they will become even more vehement in their beliefs and you’ll end up frustrated.

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What Genetics Does And Doesn’t Tell Us
Heritability & Inheritance, Genetics & Epigenetics, Etc
Unseen Influences: Race, Gender, and Twins
Weak Evidence, Weak Argument: Race, IQ, Adoption
Identically Different: A Scientist Changes His Mind

Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth
by Jay Joseph, PsyD

“The reader whose knowledge of separated twin studies comes only from the secondary accounts provided by textbooks can have little idea of what, in the eyes of the original investigators, constitutes a pair of ‘separated’ twins”—Evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, neurobiologist Steven Rose, and psychologist Leon Kamin in Not in Our Genes, 1984¹

“The Myth of the Separated Identical Twins”—Chapter title in sociologist Howard Taylor’s The IQ Game, 1980²

Supporters of the nature (genetic) side of the “nature versus nurture” debate often cite studies of “reared-apart” or “separated” MZ twin pairs (identical, monozygotic) in support of their positions.³ In this article I present evidence that, in fact, most studied pairs of this type do not qualify as reared-apart or separated twins.

Other than several single-case and small multiple-case reports that have appeared since the 1920s, there have been only six published “twins reared apart” (TRA) studies. (The IQ TRA study by British psychologist Cyril Burt was discredited in the late 1970s on suspicions of fraud, and is no longer part of the TRA study literature.) The authors of these six studies assessed twin resemblance and calculated correlations for “intelligence” (IQ), “personality,” and other aspects of human behavior. In the first three studies—by Horatio Newman and colleagues in 1937 (United States, 29 MZ pairs), James Shields in 1962 (Great Britain, 44 MZ pairs), and Niels Juel-Nielsen in 1965 (Denmark, 12 MZ pairs)—the authors provided over 500 pages of detailed case-history information for the combined 75 MZ pairs they studied.

The three subsequent TRA studies were published in the 1980s and 1990s, and included Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and colleagues’ widely cited “Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart” (MISTRA), and studies performed in Sweden and Finland. In the Swedish study, the researchers defined twin pairs as “reared apart” if they had been “separated by the age of 11.”⁴ In the Finnish study, the average age at separation was 4.3 years, and 12 of the 30 “reared-apart” MZ pairs were separated between the ages of 6 and 10.⁵ In contrast to the original three studies, the authors of these more recent studies did not provide case-history information for the pairs they investigated. (The MISTRA researchers did publish a few selected case histories, some of which, like the famous “Three Identical Strangers” triplets, had already been publicized in the media.)

The Newman et al. and Shields studies were based on twins who had volunteered to participate after responding to media or researcher appeals to do so in the interest of scientific research. As Leon Kamin and other analysts pointed out long ago, however, TRA studies based on volunteer twins are plagued by similarity biases, in part because twins had to have known of each other’s existence to be able to participate in the study. Like the famous MISTRA “Firefighter Pair,” some twins discovered each other because of their behavioral similarities. The MISTRA researchers arrived at their conclusions in favor of genetics on the basis of a similarity-biased volunteer twin sample. […]

Contrary to the common contemporary claim that twin pairs found in TRA studies were “separated at birth”—which should mean that twins did not know each other or interact with each other between their near-birth separation and the time they were reunited for the study—the information provided by the original researchers shows that few if any MZ pairs fit this description. This is even more obvious in the 1962 Shields study. As seen in the tables below and in the case descriptions:

• Some pairs were separated well after birth
• Some pairs grew up nearby to each other and attended school together
• Most pairs grew up in similar cultural and socioeconomic environments
• Many pairs were raised by different members of the same family
• Most pairs had varying degrees of contact while growing up
• Some pairs had a close relationship as adults
• Some pairs were reunited and lived together for periods of time

In other words, in addition to sharing a common prenatal environment and many similar postnatal environmental influences (described here), twin pairs found in volunteer-based TRA study samples were not “separated at birth” in the way that most people understand this term. The best way to describe this sample is to say that it consisted of partially reared-apart MZ twin pairs.

The Minnesota researchers have always denied access to independent researchers who wanted to inspect the unpublished MISTRA raw data and case history information, and we can safely assume that the volunteer MISTRA MZ twin pairs were no more “reared apart” than were the MZ pairs

Are Wrens Smarter Than Racists?

Race realists and racial supremacists have many odd notions. For one, they believe humans are separate species, despite all the evidence to the contrary (e.g., unusually low genetic diversity as compared similar species; two random humans are more likely to be genetically similar than two random chimpanzees).

But an even stranger belief is that humans, despite being such a highly social species, are assumed to be incapable of cooperating with other humans who are perceived as different based on modern social constructions of ‘race’. Yet, even ignoring the fact that all humans are of the same species, numerous other species cooperate all the time across large genetic divides. This includes the development of close relationships between individuals of separate species.

So, why do racists believe that ‘white’ Americans and ‘black’ Americans must be treated as separate species and be inevitably segregated in different communities and countries? That particularly doesn’t make sense considering most so-called African-Americans are significantly of European ancestry, not to mention a surprising number of supposed European-Americans in the South that have non-European genetics (African, Native American, etc).

Wrens don’t let racism get in the way of promoting their own survival through befriending other species who share their territory. Do human racists think they have less cognitive capacity than wrens? If that is their honest assessment of their own abilities, that is fine. But why do they assume everyone else is as deficient as they are?

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Birds from different species recognize each other and cooperate
by Matt Wood, University of Chicago

 

Cooperation among different species of birds is common. Some birds build their nests near those of larger, more aggressive species to deter predators, and flocks of mixed species forage for food and defend territories together in alliances that can last for years. In most cases, though, these partnerships are not between specific individuals of the other species—any bird from the other species will do.

But in a new study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, scientists from the University of Chicago and University of Nebraska show how two different species of Australian fairy-wrens not only recognize individual birds from other species, but also form long-term partnerships that help them forage and defend their shared space as a group.

“Finding that these two species associate was not surprising, as mixed species flocks of birds are observed all over the world,” said Allison Johnson, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Nebraska who conducted the study as part of her dissertation research at UChicago. “But when we realized they were sharing territories with specific individuals and responding aggressively only to unknown individuals, we knew this was really unique. It completely changed our research and we knew we had to investigate it.”

Variegated fairy-wrens and splendid fairy-wrens are two small songbirds that live in Australia. The males of each species have striking, bright blue feathers that make them popular with bird watchers. Their behavior also makes them an appealing subject for biologists. Both species feed on insects, live in large family groups, and breed during the same time of year. They are also non-migratory, meaning they live in one area for their entire lives, occupying the same eucalyptus scrublands that provide plenty of bushes and trees for cover.

When these territories overlap, the two species interact with each other. They forage together, travel together, and seem to be aware of what the other species is doing. They also help each other defend their territory from rivals. Variegated fairy-wrens will defend their shared territory from both variegated and splendid outsiders; splendid fairy-wrens will do the same, while fending off unfamiliar birds from both species.

“Splendid and variegated fairy-wrens are so similar in their habitat preferences and behavior, we would expect them to act as competitors. Instead, we’ve found stable, positive relationships between individuals of the two species,” said Christina Masco, PhD, a graduate student at UChicago and a co-author on the new paper.

Black Global Ruling Elite

One of my favorite activities is reversing arguments, in order to make a point. It is using the structure of an argument to contradict someone’s claim or to demonstrate the fundamental irrationality of their worldview. Also, sometimes it can just be an act of playful silliness, a game of rhetoric. Either way, it requires imagination to take an argument in an unexpected direction.

To be able to reverse an argument, you have to first understand the argument. This requires getting into someone else’s head and seeing the world from their perspective. You need to know your enemy. I’ve long made it a habit to explore other ideologies and interact with those advocating them. It usually ends in frustration, but I come out the other side with an intimate knowledge of what makes others tick.

The opposing group I spent the most time with was HBD crowd (human biodiversity). HBDers are filled with many reactionaries, specifically race realists and genetic determinists. The thing about reactionaries is that they love to co-opt rhetoric and tactics from the political left. HBD theory was originated by someone, Jonathan Marks, making arguments against race realism and genetic determinism. The brilliance of the reactionaries was to do exactly what I’m talking about — they reversed the arguments.

But as chamelion-like faceless men, reactionaries use this strategy to hide their intentions behind deceptive rhetoric. No HBDer is ever going to admit the anti-reactionary origins of human biodiversity ( just like right-libertarians won’t acknowledge the origins of libertarianism as a left-wing ideology in the European workers movement). The talent of reactionaries is in pretending that what they stole was always theirs. They take their games of deception quite seriously. Their trolling is a way of life.

“There’s only one thing we can do to thwart the plot of these albino shape-shifting lizard BITCHES!” Their arguments need to be turned back the other way again. Or else turn them inside out to the point of absurdity. Let us call it introducing novelty. I’ve done this with previous posts about slavery and eugenics. The point I made is that, by using HBD-style arguments, we should actually expect American blacks to be a superior race.

This is for a couple of reasons. For centuries in America, the most violent, rebellious, and criminal blacks were eugenically removed from the breeding population, by way of being killed or imprisoned — and so, according to HBD, the genetics of violence, rebelliousness, criminality, etc should have decreased along with all of the related genetically-determined behavior. Also, since the colonial era, successful and supposedly superior upper class whites were impregnating their slaves, servants, and any other blacks they desired which should have infused their superior genetics into the American black population. Yet, contradicting these obvious conclusions, HBDers argue the exact opposite.

Let me clarify one point. African-Americans are a genetically constrained demographic, their ancestors having mostly come from one area of Africa. And the centuries of semi-eugenics theoretically would have narrowed those genetics down further, even in terms of the narrow selection of white genetics that was introduced. But these population pressures didn’t exist among other African descendants. Particularly in Africa itself, the complete opposite is the case.

Africa has more genetic and phenotypic diversity than the rest of the world combined. Former slave populations that came from more various regions of Africa should also embody this greater genetic diversity. The global black population in general, in and outside Africa, is even more diverse than the African population alone. As such we should expect that the global black population will show the greatest variance of all traits.

This came to mind because of the following comment:

“Having a less oppressive environment increases variance in many phenotypes. The IQ variance of (less-oppressed) whites is greater than (more-oppressed) blacks despite less genetic diversity. Since women are on average more oppressed (i.e. outcasted more for a given deviance from the norms and given norms that take more effort to conform to) their traits would be narrower.”

The data doesn’t perfectly follow this pattern, in that there are exceptions. Among certain sub-population in oppressed populations, there sometimes is greater IQ variance. There are explanations for why this is the case, specifically the theory that females have a greater biological capacity for dealing with stressful conditions (e.g., oppression). But for the moment, let’s ignore that complication.

The point is that, according to genetic determinism, the low genetic diversity of whites should express as low IQ gaps, no matter the environmental differences. It shouldn’t matter that, for example, in the US the white population is split between socioeconomic extremes — as the majority of poor Americans are white and the majority of rich Americans are white. But if genetic determinism is false (i.e., more powerful influences being involved: environment, epigenetics, microbiome, etc), the expected result would be lower average IQ with lower class whites and higher average IQ with higher class whites — the actual pattern that is found.

Going by the data, we are forced to conclude that genetic determinism isn’t a compelling theory, at least according to broad racial explanations. Some HBDers would counter that the different socioeconomic populations of whites are also different genetic sub-populations. But the problem is that this isn’t supported by the lack of genetic variance found across white populations.

That isn’t what mainly interested me, though. I was more thinking about what this means for the global black population, far beyond a single trait. Let us assume that genetic determinism and race realism is true, for the sake of argument.

Since the African continent has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined, the global black population (or rather populations) that originated in Africa should have the greatest variation of all traits, not just IQ. They should have the greatest variance of athleticism to lethargy, pacifism to violence, law-abiding to criminality, wealth to poverty, global superpowers to failed states, etc.

We should disproportionately find those of African ancestry at every extreme across the world. Compared to all other populations, they would have the largest numbers of individuals in both the elite and the underclass. That means that a disproportionate number of political and corporate leaders would be black, if there was a functioning meritocracy of the Social Darwinian variety.

The greater genetic variance would lead to the genetically superior blacks disproportionately rising to the upper echelons of global wealth and power. The transnational plutocracy, therefore, should be dominated by blacks. We should see the largest gaps within the global black population and not between blacks and whites, since the genetic distance between black populations is greater than the genetic difference between particular black populations and non-black populations.

Based on the principles of human biodiversity, that means principled HBDers should support greater representation of blacks at all levels of global society. I can’t wait to hear this new insight spread throughout the HBD blogosphere. Then HBDers will become the strongest social justice warriors in the civil rights movement. Based on the evidence, how could HBDers do anything less?

Well, maybe there is one other possible conclusion. As good reactionaries, the paranoid worldview could be recruited. Accordingly, it could be assumed that the genetically superior sub-population of black ruling elite is so advanced that they’ve hidden their wealth and power, pulling the strings behind the scenes. Maybe there is Black cabal working in secret with the Jewish cabal in controlling the world. It’s this Black-Jewish covert power structure that has promoted the idea of an inferior black race to hide the true source of power. We could take this argument even further. The black sub-population might be the ultimate master race with Jews acting as their minions in running the Jew-owned banks and media as front groups.

It’s starting to make sense. I think there might be something to all of this genetic determinism and race realism. It really does explain everything. And it is so amazingly scientific.

Tortured Data

“Beware of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confesss, but confession obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion. ”
—Stephen M. Stigler, “Testing Hypotheses or Fitting Models?” (1987)

That is useful advice for everyone, but even moreso a warning to those seeking to massage cherrypicked data to tell just-so stories. In particular, a few HBDers (human biodversity advocates) can be quite brilliant in their ability to speculate and gather data to support their speculations, while ignoring data that contradicts them. This is seen in the defense of race realism, a popular ideology among HBDers.

Some HBDers and other race realists are so talented at speculating that they come to treat their ideologically-driven interpretations as factual statements of truth, even when they deny this is the case. Just as they deny the consequences of such ideologies being enforced for centuries through social control, political oppression, and economic inequality. A result can be misinterpreted as cause, an easy error to make when evidence for direction of causation is lacking. It leaves the field open to self-serving bias.

When one starts with a hypothesis that one assumes is true, it’s easy to look for evidence to support what one already wants to believe. There are few people in the world who couldn’t offer what they consider evidence in support of their beliefs, no matter how weak and grasping it might appear to others. This is even easier to accomplish when looking for correlations, as anything can be correlated with many other things without ever having to prove a causal connection, and it’s easy to ignore the fact that most correlations are spurious.

None of that matters to the true believer, though. Torturing the data until it confesses is the whole point. As in real world incidents of torture, the validity of the confession is irrelevant.

Race as Lineage and Class

There is an intriguing shift in racial thought. It happened over the early modern era, but I’d argue that the earliest racial ideology is still relevant in explaining the world we find ourselves in. Discussing François Bernier (1620-1628), Justin E. H. Smith wrote that (Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, p. 22),

“This French physician and traveler is often credited with being the key innovator of the modern race concept. While some rigorous scholarship has recently appeared questioning Bernier’s significance, his racial theory is seldom placed in his context as a Gassendian natural philosopher who was, in particular, intent to bring his own brand of modern, materialistic philosophy to bear in his experiences in the Moghul Empire in Persia and northern India. It will be argued that Bernier’s principal innovation was to effectively decouple the concept of race from considerations of lineage, and instead to conceptualize it in biogeographical terms in which the precise origins or causes of the original differences of human physical appearance from region to region remain underdetermined.”

This new conception of race was introduced in the 17th century. But it would take a couple of centuries of imperial conquering, colonialism, and slavery to fully take hold.

The earliest conception of race was scientific, in explaining the diversity of species in nature. It technically meant a sub-species (and technically still does, despite non-scientific racial thought having since diverged far from this strict definition). Initially, this idea of scientific races was entirely kept separate from humanity. It was the common assumption, based on traditional views such as monotheistic theology, that all humans had a shared inheritance and that superficial differences of appearance didn’t indicate essentialist differences in human nature. Typical early explanations of human diversity pointed to other causes, from culture to climate. For example, the belief that dark-skinned people got that physical feature from living in hot and sunny environments, with the assumption that if the environment conditions changed so would the physical feature. As such, the dark skin of an African wasn’t any more inherited than the blue-pigmented skin of a Celt.

This millennia old view of human differences was slow to change. Slavery had been around since the ancient world, but it never had anything to do with race or usually even with ethnicity. Mostly, it was about one population being conquered by another and something had to be done with conquered people, if they weren’t to be genocidally slaughtered. The wars involved nearby people. Ancient Greeks more often fought other Greeks than anyone else and so it is unsurprising that most Greek slaves were ethnically Greek. Sure, there were some non-Greeks mixed into their slave population, but it was largely irrelevant. If anything, a foreign slave was valued more simply for the rarity. This began to change during the colonial era. With the rise of the British Empire, it was becoming standard for Christians to only enslave non-Christians. This was made possible as the last Pagan nation in Europe ended in the 14th century and the non-Christian populations in Europe dwindled over the centuries. But a complicating factor is that Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa included a mix of Christians and non-Christians. Some of the early Church Fathers were not ethnically European (e.g., Augustine was African). As explained in a PBS article, From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery:

“Historically, the English only enslaved non-Christians, and not, in particular, Africans. And the status of slave (Europeans had African slaves prior to the colonization of the Americas) was not one that was life-long. A slave could become free by converting to Christianity. The first Virginia colonists did not even think of themselves as “white” or use that word to describe themselves. They saw themselves as Christians or Englishmen, or in terms of their social class. They were nobility, gentry, artisans, or servants.”

What initially allowed West Africans to be enslaved wasn’t that they were black but that they weren’t Christian, many of them having been Islamic. It wasn’t an issue of perceived racial inferiority (nor necessarily cultural and class inferiority). Enslaved Africans primarily came from the most developed parts of Africa — with centralized governments, road infrastructures, official monetary systems, and even universities. West Africa was heavily influenced by Islamic civilization and was an area of major kingdoms, the latter not being unlike much of Europe at the time. It wasn’t unusual for well educated and professionally trained people to end up in slavery. Early slaveholders were willing to pay good money for enslaved Africans that were highly skilled (metalworkers, translators, etc), as plantation owners often lacked the requisite skills for running a plantation. It was only after the plantation slave system was fully established that large numbers of unskilled workers were needed, but even many of these were farmers who knew advanced agricultural techniques, such as with rice growing (native to West Africa, as it was to China) which was a difficult crop requiring social organization.

We’ve largely forgotten the earlier views of race and slavery. Even with Europe having become Christianized, they didn’t see themselves as a single race, whether defined as European, Caucasian, or white. The English didn’t see the Irish as being the same race, instead portraying the Irish as primitive and ape-like or comparing them to Africans and Native Americans. This attitude continued into the early 20th century with WWI propaganda when the English portrayed the Germans as ape-like, justifying that they were racially ‘other’ and not fully human. There is an even more interesting aspect. Early racial thought was based on the idea of a common lineage, such that kin-based clan or tribe could be categorized as a separate race. But this was also used to justify the caste-based order that had been established by feudalism. English aristocrats perceived their own inherited position as being the result of good breeding, to such an extent that it was considered that the English aristocracy was a separate race from the English peasantry. As Americans, it’s hard for us to look at the rich and poor in England as two distinct races. Yet this strain of thought isn’t foreign to American culture.

Before slavery, there was indentured servitude in the British colonies. And it continued into the early period of the United States. Indentured servitude created the model for later adoption practices, such as seen with the Orphan Trains. Indentured servitude wasn’t race-based. Most of the indentured servants in the British colonies were poor and often Irish. My own ancestor, David Peebles, came to Virginia in 1649 to start a plantation and those who came with him were probably those who indentured themselves to him in payment for transportation to the New World see: Scottish Emigrants, Indentured Servants, and Slaves). There was much slavery in the Peebles family over the generations, but the only clear evidence of a slave owned by David Peebles was a Native American given to him as a reward for his having been an Indian Fighter. That Native American was made a slave not because of a clearly defined and ideologically-determined racial order but because he was captured in battle and not a Christian.

More important was who held the power, which in the colonial world meant the aristocrats and plutocrats, slave owners and other business interests. In that world as in ours, power was strongly tied to wealth. To have either indentured servants or slaves required money. Before it was a racial order, it was a class-based society built on a feudal caste system. Most people remained in the class they were born into, with primogeniture originally maintaining the concentration of wealth. Poor whites were a separate population, having been in continuous poverty for longer than anyone could remember and to this day in many cases having remained in continuous poverty.

A thought that came to mind is how, even when submerged, old ideas maintain their power. We still live in a class-based society that is built on a legacy from the caste system of slavery and feudalism. Racial segregation has always gone hand in hand with a class segregation that cuts across racial divides. Poor whites in many parts of the country interact with poor non-whites on a daily basis while likely never meeting a rich white at any point in their life. At the same time paternalistic upper class whites were suggesting ways of improving poor whites (forced assimilation, public education, English only laws, Prohibition, War on Poverty, etc), many of these privileged WASPs were also promoting eugenics directed at poor whites (encouraging abortions, forced sterilizations, removal of children to be adopted out, etc).

Even today, there are those like Charles Murray who suggest that the class divide among whites is a genetic divide. He actually blames poverty, across racial lines, on inferior genetics. This is why he doesn’t see there being any hope to change these populations. And this is why, out of paternalism, he supports a basic income to take care of these inferior people. He doesn’t use the earliest racial language, but that is essentially the way he is describing the social order. Those like Murray portray poor whites as if they were a separate race (i.e., a separate genetic sub-species) from upper class whites. This is a form of racism we’ve forgotten about. It’s always been with us, even as post-war prosperity softened its edges. Now it is being brought back out into the open.

Social Construction & Ideological Abstraction

The following passages from two books help to explain what is social construction. As society has headed in a particular direction of development, abstract thought has become increasingly dominant.

But for us modern people who take abstractions for granted, we often don’t even recognize abstractions for what they are. Many abstractions simply become reality as we know it. They are ‘looped’ into existence, as race realism, capitalist realism, etc.

Ideological abstractions become so pervasive and systemic that we lose the capacity to think outside of them. They form our reality tunnel.

This wasn’t always so. Humans used to conceive of and hence perceive the world far differently. And this shaped their sense of identity, which is hard for us to imagine.

* * *

Dynamics of Human Biocultural Diversity:
A Unified Approach
by Elisa J. Sobo
Kindle Locations 94-104)

Until now, many biocultural anthropologists have focused mainly on the ‘bio’ half of the equation, using ‘biocultural’ generically, like biology, to refer to genetic, anatomical, physiological, and related features of the human body that vary across cultural groups. The number of scholars with a more sophisticated approach is on the upswing, but they often write only for super-educated expert audiences. Accordingly, although introductory biocultural anthropology texts make some attempt to acknowledge the role of culture, most still treat culture as an external variable— as an add-on to an essentially biological system. Most fail to present a model of biocultural diversity that gives adequate weight to the cultural side of things.

Note that I said most, not all: happily, things are changing. A movement is afoot to take anthropology’s claim of holism more seriously by doing more to connect— or reconnect— perspectives from both sides of the fence. Ironically, prior to the industrial revolution and the rise of the modern university, most thinkers took a very comprehensive view of the human condition. It was only afterward that fragmented, factorial, compartmental thinking began to undermine our ability to understand ourselves and our place in— and connection with— the world. Today, the leading edge of science recognizes the links and interdependencies that such thinking keeps falsely hidden.

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference:
Race in Early Modern Philosophy
by Justin E. H. Smith
pp. 9-10

The connection to the problem of race should be obvious: kinds of people are to no small extent administered into being, brought into existence through record keeping, census taking, and, indeed, bills of sale. A census form asks whether a citizen is “white,” and the possibility of answering this question affirmatively helps to bring into being a subkind of the human species that is by no means simply there and given, ready to be picked out, prior to the emergence of social practices such as the census. Censuses, in part, bring white people into existence, but once they are in existence they easily come to appear as if they had been there all along. This is in part what Hacking means by “looping”: human kinds, in contrast with properly natural kinds such as helium or water, come to be what they are in large part as a result of the human act of identifying them as this or that. Two millennia ago no one thought of themselves as neurotic, or straight, or white, and nothing has changed in human biology in the meantime that could explain how these categories came into being on their own. This is not to say that no one is melancholic, neurotic, straight, white, and so on, but only that how that person got to be that way cannot be accounted for in the same way as, say, how birds evolved the ability to fly, or how iron oxidizes.

In some cases, such as the diagnosis of mental illness, kinds of people are looped into existence out of a desire, successful or not, to help them. Racial categories seem to have been looped into existence, by contrast, for the facilitation of the systematic exploitation of certain groups of people by others. Again, the categories facilitate the exploitation in large part because of the way moral status flows from legal status. Why can the one man be enslaved, and the other not? Because the one belongs to the natural-seeming kind of people that is suitable for enslavement. This reasoning is tautological from the outside, yet self-evident from within. Edward Long, as we have seen, provides a vivid illustration of it in his defense of plantation labor in Jamaica. But again, categories cannot be made to stick on the slightest whim of their would-be coiner. They must build upon habits of thinking that are already somewhat in place. And this is where the history of natural science becomes crucial for understanding the history of modern racial thinking, for the latter built directly upon innovations in the former. Modern racial thinking could not have taken the form it did if it had not been able to piggyback, so to speak, on conceptual innovations in the way science was beginning to approach the diversity of the natural world, and in particular of the living world.

This much ought to be obvious: racial thinking could not have been biologized if there were no emerging science of biology. It may be worthwhile to dwell on this obvious point, however, and to see what more unexpected insights might be drawn out of it. What might not be so obvious, or what seems to be ever in need of renewed pointing out, is a point that ought to be of importance for our understanding of the differing, yet ideally parallel, scope and aims of the natural and social sciences: the emergence of racial categories, of categories of kinds of humans, may in large part be understood as an overextension of the project of biological classification that was proving so successful in the same period. We might go further, and suggest that all of the subsequent kinds of people that would emerge over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the kinds of central interest to Foucault and Hacking, amount to a further reaching still, an unprecedented, peculiarly modern ambition to make sense of the slightest variations within the human species as if these were themselves species differentia. Thus for example Foucault’s well-known argument that until the nineteenth century there was no such thing as “the homosexual,” but only people whose desires could impel them to do various things at various times. But the last two centuries have witnessed a proliferation of purportedly natural kinds of humans, a typology of “extroverts,” “depressives,” and so on, whose objects are generally spoken of as if on an ontological par with elephants and slime molds. Things were not always this way. In fact, as we will see, they were not yet this way throughout much of the early part of the period we call “modern.”

Race Realism and Symbolic Conflation

My last post, in response to a race realist, was mostly written for my own amusement. It wasn’t a particularly serious post. Something about that kind of intellectual dishonesty is compelling. But I wonder how much of it is self-deception, being taken in by one’s own ideological rhetoric.

I had no desire to analyze race realism to any great degree because it ultimately isn’t about race. It’s similar to how, when conservatives argue for pro-life, it isn’t really about abortion. And it’s similar to how, when apologists argue about the Bible, it isn’t really about historicity.

When you accept their framing, there is no way for the debate to go anywhere because the purpose of the frame is obfuscation, as much to cloud their own mind as to defend against criticism. This is particularly clear with apologetics in being used as a tool of indoctrination for young missionaries, since the purpose isn’t so much to convert unbelievers as to further convert the already converted, the missionary strengthening their own ideological worldview. Maybe there is an element to this with any ideological debate.

This is something that has fascinated me for a long time. I’ve pretty much given up on online debates. I’ve been involved in too many of them and they rarely if ever go anywhere. I’ve changed my mind about many things over my lifetime. And on most issues, I don’t have a strong opinion. But it’s hard to argue with an ideologue when one isn’t an ideologue. The problem is that most people interested in ‘debate’ are ideologues.

There is no way I can ‘win’ a debate with an ideologue because there is no way for a real debate to even happen. As long as the ideologue determines the frame, he can never lose and he will simply go around and around in circles. Try to debate a religious apologist sometime and you will quickly see the power of ideological rhetoric. Apologists can be masterful debaters for the very reason that intellectual honesty isn’t their motivation. They will never concede any point nor fairly deal with any criticism.

Here is the problem for me about race realism. I’m neither an anti-environmentalist hereditarian nor an anti-hereditarian environmentalist. The entire nature vs nurture frame of the debate is meaningless, as it can’t speak to what we actually know in terms of scientific research. Such a debate within such a frame becomes a battle of ideological rhetoric, having little to do with seeking truth and understanding. Ideologues tend to like meaningless frames because they are more interested in the frame and the agenda behind it than they are in the topic itself. To be fair, these frames aren’t entirely meaningless, just that they don’t mean what they superficially appear to mean.

This is the only part that interests and concerns me. I want to understand what motivates such behavior, what makes such a mindset possible, what locks in place such a worldview. It isn’t just ideologues or rather everyone has the potential to be drawn into an ideologue’s mindset. Our minds are constantly being bombarded by ideological rhetoric. Few people ever learn to escape the frames that have been forced onto them, often since childhood. We pick up frames from parents, teachers, ministers, reporters, politicians, etc. And these frames are immensely powerful.

I’ve been trying to understand what this all means for years now. It’s the main project of my blogging. It is what led me to formulate my theory about symbolic conflation.

I realized that race realism is a great example of how this works. Race realism effectively uses political correctness, just-so stories, social constructs, etc… and all of this fits into symbolic conflation. Ideas are taken as reality, speculations as facts. The purpose isn’t to argue about the science but to use it for purposes of rhetoric, to shore up the racialized social order. This is why the race realist can never honestly deal with heritability and confounding factors, since it really has nothing to do with the science taken on its own terms.

Race is used as a proxy for other things: class, social control, etc. What makes a social construct so powerful is that it is taken as reality. The symbol is conflated with the world itself. The symbol becomes embedded within every aspect of thought and perception. It is unimaginable to the race realist that race might not be real. It is at the core of their entire sense of reality.

So, why is race so useful for this purpose? Like abortion, it touches upon the visceral and emotional, the personal and interpersonal. The symbol isn’t just conflated with reality but is internalized and felt within the body itself, expressed through embodied thought. The symbol becomes concretely real. Then the symbol takes on a life of its own. Only personal trauma or other severe psychological experience could cause it to become dislodged.

Social constructs aren’t just ideas. Or to put it another way, ideas aren’t mere abstractions. We are embodied beings and social animals. Ideas always are deeply apart of who we are. The most powerful ideas are those that aren’t experienced as ideas. An idea, as a symbol, may not be objectively true. But that doesn’t stop it from being experienced as though objectively real.

Something like race realism can’t be debated. This is because it is the frame of debate. The frame of debate can’t be changed through debate. As I once explained, “Rationality must operate within a frame, but it can’t precede the act of framing.” The moment the frame is accepted as the basis of the debate, what follows is inevitable. Debate becomes a way of making it difficult to challenge the frame itself. As such, debate is a distraction from the real issue. It isn’t about race realism. It’s about an entire worldview and social order, an entire identity and way of being in the world. The more it is debated the stronger the frame becomes, the more deeply the symbol becomes conflated with everything it touches.

This isn’t just about those other people. This happens to the best of us. We all exist within reality tunnels. But some reality tunnels are more useful and less harmful than others. The trick is to learn to hold lightly any and all symbolic thought, to catch yourself before full conflation sets in. The imaginative mind needs to be made conscious. That is the closest humans ever come to freedom.

Race Unrealist

I was noticing again a post by RaceRealist from last year: Strong Evidence, Strong Argument: Race IQ and Adoption. It’s in response to a previous post of mine: Weak Evidence, Weak Argument: Race, IQ, Adoption. I don’t want to waste too much time on it, but the intellectual dishonesty and simplemindedness of it amuses me. I’ll do a quick breakdown of it, that is quick by my standards.

In reference to my post, he says that it’s “an environmentalist in the B-W IQ debate regurgitates the same old and boring long-refuted studies and the same long-refuted researchers, to attempt to prove that the gap in IQ is purely environmental in nature. I have written on this before, so his reasoning that there is “weak evidence” and “a weak argument on race and IQ” is clearly wrong, as we know the studies and researchers he cites have been disproven. Steele then references another discussion he had on the black-white IQ gap, speaking about people being “uninformed” about a position while arguing it.”

First of all, I’m not a mere ‘environmentalist’ and I’ve never argued for a blank slate view of human nature. Anyone who has seriously studied the topic knows that the nature vs nurture debate is meaningless. There is no way to separate the two because genes never exist outside of nor are expressed separate from environment and epigenetics. Genetics, in an evolutionary sense, are simply a biological aspect of the environment. That is just reality, no matter one’s ideology.

I’ve never denied the role of ‘nature’. I’ve simply pointed out the obvious fact that it isn’t separate from nurture. That RaceRealist has previously expressed his ignorance on this matter is irrelevant. He neither disproves what he disbelieves nor proves what he believes. He just makes a lot of assertions based on weak evidence that he cherrypicks and strong evidence he ignores. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond to that in an intelligent and rational way.

“Since he’s saying that there is a “difficulty of replicability” with IQ tests in transracial adoption studies, he hasn’t read the ones for the hereditarian argument and seeing how they show the biological origin of IQ or he’s just being willfully ignorant.”

I have read about them. And I’ve written many posts about the issue. Just do a search in my blog about twin studies, adoption studies, heritability, etc (or look below at the blog posts I have listed). Any argument RaceRealist could attempt to make I’ve probably dismantled before. I don’t plan on repeating myself. It is pointless that he wishes to deny his own willful ignorance and project it onto others. I’m unimpressed.

“There are no racial biases in education nor policing. Police arrest less black offenders than are reported by the NCVS and affirmative action getting blacks ahead shows that the racial bias is for them, not whites. Saying that it’s “systemic and institutional” is a cop out since you know he doesn’t want to even entertain the idea of the hereditarian hypothesis.”

That is as willfully ignorant as one can get, as the overwhelming evidence is there for all to see, assuming one wants to see. But I can’t force knowledge onto those who don’t want to know. Trust me, I’ve tried. That is what amuses me. I’m laughing here as I write these words. It is so ludicrous. If I can’t have a meaningful debate with ignoramuses like this, I can at least mock them.

“Stereotype threat, my favorite. ST can only be replicated in the lab. “Prejudice” doesn’t matter.”

What the fuck does that even mean? Stereotype threat has been studied no different than anything else. I don’t know what is meant by “in the lab”. Stereotype threat has been studied, for example, in classrooms. I guess anything where research happens is in a sense a ‘lab’. Numerous studies have been done and replicated. It’s standard scientific research and well supported.

Prejudice doesn’t matter, he claims. Yet this is the same kind of person who complains about prejudices against whites and right-wingers, as if those supposed prejudices matter a lot. What he really means to say is that he doesn’t think anyone who isn’t like himself matters. He should be honest enough to state the truth, instead of hiding behind politically correct rhetoric.

“What other confounders could be controlled for that you think had a negative impact on the mean IQ of blacks at adolescence throughout adulthood?”

That is shocking that anyone who wants to pretend to not be a complete ignoramus could ask such a question. Does he really not know about confounding factors? Whose ass has his head been shoved up?

The confounding factors have been detailed in thousands of research papers, articles, books, and posts. Many edifying sources can easily found just by doing a web search for “confounding factors”. If he really wants an answer, he could use the search function on my blog, as I’ve listed confounding factors in numerous blog posts and comments. Even so, most of these confounding factors are obvious to the point of being common sense.

Yet he would, of course, dismiss out of hand any confounding factor for the simple reason that no confounding factor will ever fit into his preconceived belief system. RaceRealist’s entire post is a dancing around the issue of confounding factors, momentarily asking a question of me that he would never ask of himself, much less attempt to answer. He doesn’t want to know. It’s ignorance upon ignorance, all the way down.

““Internalized racial biases” don’t matter since blacks have a higher self-esteeem about their physical attractiveness (Kanazawa, 2011), so “internalized racial biases” (which includes things such as one’s thoughts of one’s self physically) do not matter as they are more confident than are whites. This is due to testosterone, which makes blacks more extroverted than whites who are more extroverted than Asians (Rushton’s Differential-K Theory). If these racial biases were really to manifest themselves to actually sap 15 to 18 (1 to 1.2 SDs) IQ points from blacks, this would show in their self-confidence about themselves. Yet they are more confident, on average, than the other two major races.”

I know what he believes. That has already been made perfectly clear. These just-so stories amuse me endlessly. I really can’t stop laughing. Watching a race realist make an argument is like watching a monkey dressed up like a human doing tricks in the circus. It has the vague appearance of something resembling an argument, but it is simply absurd on the face of it.

I can knock his points down like shooting at a flock of ducks with a machine gun.

The Kanazawa study doesn’t say what he claims it says. Blacks in the study are told to rate themselves, but no comparison is asked of them to rate others. So, we have no idea how they rate themselves compared to how they rate others. It could be simply a fluke in how different populations interpret the rating system and so may say nothing about actual perception of self relative to perception of others. Besides, Kanazawa doesn’t acknowledge and discuss confounding factors, much less try to control for them. Kanazawa doesn’t even mention who were used as test subjects or make an argument for why they are representative of the broader populations, which would require him to deal with confounding factors.

For example, maybe he was using test subjects that came from different backgrounds of socioeconomic class status, residential conditions, regional cultures, etc. Thomas Sowell argues that blacks adopted the white redneck culture before many of them migrated to states in the North. If that is the case, then multiple factors would need to be controlled for. What results would be seen with poor white Southerners or even poor whites in general? And how would they compare to blacks or at least particular black populations? We don’t know because Kanazawa’s research is near worthless, other than as a preliminary study to demonstrate that a better study needs to be done.

Does this really mean what Kanazawa and RaceRealist thinks it means? There is no evidence to support their ideologically-biased conclusion.

Oppressed populations often respond with pride. Think of the proud Irish when they were under the oppression of the English. Think of the proud Scots-Irish in impoverished Appalachia. For such groups, the personal sense of pride gives them an attitude of self-respect in a social situation that makes it difficult to achieve the more tangible forms of self-worth. If you are part of a privileged demographic, you don’t need as much overtly declared sense of self-respect because all of society regularly tells you that you are valued more than others. The privileged, by default, have respect given to them by others. That is not the case for the underprivileged.

If that is true, then an exaggerated concern for self-esteem as a compensatory mechanism might be standard evidence of societal disadvantage and systemic prejudice. Centuries of institutionalized racism could explain why this compensatory mechanism has been so important for the black population. For much of their past, the black population’s sense of self-value was all that they had, as the majority of the black population for most of American history couldn’t even claim the value of self-ownership. This sense of ferociously defended self-value could have been a means of survival under centuries of brutal oppression. If so, it took centuries to develop and so it won’t likely disappear very quickly, especially considering the legacy of racial prejudice has been proven beyond all doubt to continue to this day, not to mention what epigenetic factors may still be involved in influencing neurocognitive and psychological development.

Then again, there could be an even simpler explanation. Blacks on average deal with a lot more difficulties in life than whites on average, such as higher rates of: poverty, unemployment, police targeting, police brutality, etc. Maybe dealing with immense difficulties and managing to survive builds a sense of self-confidence, a proven belief that the individual can manage problems and that they will get by. Instead of a compensatory mechanism, it would be more directly an expression of survival in a dangerous and difficult world.

This could be easily tested by looking at other poor and disadvantaged populations. But it might be hard to find comparable populations that were historically oppressed in the manner of centuries of racialized slavery, chain gang re-enslavement, Jim Crow laws, race wars, lynching, sundown towns, redlining, etc. Simply being a non-white minority isn’t necessarily comparable. Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans didn’t experience oppression to this degree and they don’t show signs of higher self-esteem, the two maybe being causally related.

It’s telling that researchers like Kanazawa never bother to fully test their own hypotheses. And it’s telling that race realists have so little intellectual capacity to analyze research like this to actually understand what it does and does not say, what can and cannot be concluded from it.

The point is we don’t know, as many possible explanations can be articulated and need to be further researched (see: Factors Influencing Racial Comparisons of Self-Esteem, Gray-Little & Hafdahl). Interestingly, according to Twenge and Crocker (Race and self-esteem): “Blacks’ self-esteem increased over time relative to Whites’, with the Black advantage not appearing until the 1980s.” If testosterone explains the racial differences, then what evidence is there that black levels of testosterone increased around 1980 and what caused it? Testosterone levels is a strange argument to make, especially considering that self-perception and self-assessment has been proven to change according to environmental conditions, besides just stereotype threat: television watching, a presidential election, etc. Besides, there is much conflicting research about testosterone differences, some of it even showing no notable racial differences, specifically between blacks and whites.

As for Rushton’s differential k theory, there has been much debate about it with research showing different results. But as far as I know, no researcher has yet tested the hypothesis by controlling for all known confounding factors. So, for the time being, it remains an unproven hypothesis. Many have argued that Rushton’s research was designed badly, an inevitable outcome when confounding factors are ignored.

Yet more just-so stories shot down.

“It’s been discussed ad nasueam. The data attempting to say that blacks are just as intelligent are whites are wrong, as I will show below. The data for the hereditarian hypothesis is not weak, as I have detailed on this blog extensively.”

Race realists declare their beliefs ad nauseum. So what? I find it interesting that race realists are only able to make their arguments by ignoring the data that disconfirms or complicates their ideologically motivated conclusions and by ignoring criticisms of the data that they use as a defense. If you can’t make an intellectually honest argument, why would you expect others to treat you as though you were intellectually honest? A good question that RaceRealist should ask himself.

“Race is not a social construct, but a biological reality. If this debate is “about as meaningful as attempting to compare the average magical intelligence of those sorted into each Hogwarts Houses by the magical sorting hat”, why waste youre time writing this post with tons of misinformation?”

Declaring your beliefs doesn’t add anything to debate. Everyone knows what you believe. The trick is you have to prove what you believe. But that would require you take the evidence seriously, all of the evidence and not just what is convenient.

“Steele cites Block (2005), a “philosopher of science”. Rushton and Jensen (2005, p. 279) say that those (Block) who say that gene-environment interactions are so hard to entangle, why then, do identical twins raised apart show identical signs of intelligence (among many other heritable items)?”

I’ve written about this before. Identical twin research is some of the worst research around for the reason I constantly repeat, a lack of controlling for confounding factors, such as most twins raised apart still sharing the same in utero environment, sometimes the same early childhood environment, or else raised in similar environments because adopted to similar families in the same or similar community.

All of this is common knowledge for anyone not utterly ignorant on the matter. How am I supposed to argue against someone’s ignorance when they want to be ignorant? I don’t know. I haven’t figured out how to force the ignorant to not be ignorant. That would be a great trick, if I was capable of doing that.

“Eyferth comes out, of course, which the study has been discredited. To be breif, 20 to 25 percent of the fathers to German women’s children weren’t sub-Saharan African, but French North Africans. 30 percent of blacks got refused in military service in comparison to 3 percent of whites due to rigorous testing for IQ in 70 years ago. One-third of the children were between the ages of 5 and 10 and two-thirds were between the ages of 10 and 13. Heritability estiamtes really begin to increase around puberty as well, so if the Eyferth study would have retested in the following 5 to 8 years to see IQ scores then, the scores would have dropped as that’s when genetic effects start to dominate and environments effects are close to 0.”

That is really amusing. He admits that his race realism means nothing. Because it is inconvenient, he suddenly argues that not all blacks are the same and that we shouldn’t make broad generalizations about all blacks. Were the populations representative? Maybe not. But then that exact criticism has been made against much of the data race realists obsess over. That is the whole point.

Sure, there is a lot of imperfect data out there. That is the core of my argument about why only an ignoramus could state a clear, strong conclusion when we know so little and what we do know is of such uncertain value. Often we can’t even determine how representative various populations are because we don’t know all the confounding factors or how to control for them. That is my whole point. I do find it endlessly humorous that someone like RaceRealist can’t see how this applies to his own arguments.

I can’t help but laugh at the rest of his ‘analysis’ as well. He states that, “20 to 25 percent of the fathers to German women’s children weren’t sub-Saharan African”. So? About one in five American blacks have are mostly European. And more than one in twenty have no detectable African genetics whatsoever. That means there is a significant number of American blacks with little to no sub-Sarharan African ancestry that shows up on genetic tests. Most post-colonial black populations are heavily mixed in various ways.

The issue remains that ignorant race realists like to pretend that all blacks are somehow a single ‘race’ in any meaningful sense. But that is obviously untrue, even according to the data they use. This ignorance is further exacerbated because I have never met a race realist, at least not of this bigoted variety, who even understands what heritability means (hint: it isn’t the same thing as genetic inheritance, as any geneticist knows). Heritability rates would include any confounding factors not controlled for and, of course, most of those confounding factors would be non-genetic. Beyond that, there is no rational reason to assume that genetic factors have any more effect at one age than at another. Such an assumption comes from the lack of basic comprehension about heritability.

We know next to nothing about genetics, since almost all the research is based on measuring correlations. It is rare that direct genetic causation is ever studied and even more rare that it is proven. This is why many researchers have simply given up on finding genetic causes for much of anything. The fact is that genetics never exist or get expressed in isolation from non-genetic factors. The two responses to this are intellectual humility and willful ignorance. I’ve chosen the former and RaceRealist chose the latter.

“Headstart gains are temporary, and there is a fadeout over time.. Arthur Jensen was writing about this 50 years ago. IQ and scholastic achievement gains only last for a few years after Headstart, then genetics starts to take effect as the child grows older.”

Is RaceRealist utterly stupid? I ask that in all seriousness. The only other possibility is that he is being disingenuous. Why would it be surprising that a temporary change in environmental conditions often only has a temporary change in results for individuals temporarily affected? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

I could go on and on, ripping apart everyone of RaceRealist’s beliefs. But what is the point? I’ve already disproven this kind of bullshit again and again, as have many others. Such ignorance is infinite. That is why I end up just throwing my hands up in the air and laughing with amusement. I’ll go on mocking such people, as long as I continue to find them amusing. What other use can they serve?

As RaceRealist ends by quoting Rushton and Jensen in response to Nisbett, I’ll turn the table around. Nisbet writes, basically stating they are full of shit:

Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) article is characterized by failure to cite, in any but the most cursory way, strong evidence against their position. Their lengthy presentation of indirectly relevant evidence which, in light of the direct evidence against the hereditarian view they prefer, has little probative value, and their “scorecard” tallies of evidence on various points cannot be sustained by the evidence.

* * * *

If you actually care about knowledge more than ignorance, questioning curiosity more than dogmatic ideology, then you can read what I’ve posted before. I offer a ton of data, quotes, and sources:

Basic Issues First: Race and IQ
Heritability & Inheritance, Genetics & Epigenetics, Etc
What Genetics Does And Doesn’t Tell Us
What do we inherit? And from whom?
Identically Different: A Scientist Changes His Mind
Unseen Influences: Race, Gender, and Twins
Using Intelligence to Assess Intelligence
The IQ Conundrum
HBD Proponents, Racists and Racialists
Racial Perceptions and Genetic Admixtures
To Know Racism
Examining Our Racialized Lives
Racial Reality Tunnel
Race Realism, Social Constructs, and Genetics
Race Realism and Racialized Medicine
The Bouncing Basketball of Race Realism
Race Is Not Real, Except In Our Minds
Racist Realist
To Control or Be Controlled
Disturbing Study Highlights Racism
Racism Without Racists: Victimization & Silence
An Unjust ‘Justice’ System: Victimizing the Innocent
Are Blacks More Criminal, More Deserving of Punishment and Social Control?
War On Drugs Is War On Minorities
Substance Control is Social Control
Institutional Racism & Voting Rights
Black Feminism and Epistemology of Ignorance
Racist Ideology within Racial Terminology
Racecraft: Political Correctness & Free Marketplace of Ideas
Race-Racism Evasion
Racism, Proto-Racism, and Social Constructs
The Racial Line and Racial Identity
Scientific Races and Genetic Diversity
Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility
Working Hard, But For What?
Whose Work Counts? Who Gets Counted?
Worthless Non-Workers
Deep Roots in Dark Soil
“Before the 1890s…”
Opportunity Precedes Achievement, Good Timing Also Helps
Are White Appalachians A Special Case?
Americans Left Behind: IQ, Education, Poverty, Race, & Ethnicity
Class and Race as Proxies
Race & Wealth Gap
No, The Poor Aren’t Undeserving Moral Reprobates
The Desperate Acting Desperately
The Privilege of Even Poor Whites
To Be Poor, To Be Black, To Be Poor and Black
Poverty In Black And White
Black Families: “Broken” and “Weak”
The Myth of Weak and Broken Black Families
Crime and Incarceration, Cause and Correlation
On Racialization of Crime and Violence
Fearful Perceptions
Paranoia of a Guilty Conscience
John Bior Deng: Racism, Classism
Why Are Blacks Concentrated in Inner Cities?
From Slavery to Mass Incarceration
Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration, Race, & Data
Invisible Problems of Invisible People
Are Blacks More Criminal, More Deserving of Punishment and Social Control?
White Violence, White Data
More Minorities, Less Crime
Conservative Arguments Recycled and Repackaged
Race & Racism: Reality & Imagination, Fear & Hope
Slavery and Eugenics
Slavery and Eugenics: Part 2
Black Superiority
Eugenics: Past & Future
Slavery and Capitalism
12 Years a Slave, 4 Centuries an Oppression
Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope
Society: Precarious or Persistent?
Plowing the Furrows of the Mind
Union Membership, Free Labor, and the Legacy of Slavery.

More Minorities, Less Crime

The conservative obsession with the ‘other’ always amazes me. It seems to be endless.

The same fears and arguments are repeated for generations, even as the ‘other’ changes over time. The specific population in question is mostly irrelevant, just as long as they are perceived as somehow foreign or different. In the present, those on the political right obsess about Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims (sometimes Asians get attention, especially on the West Coast). But in the past, the same obsessiveness was often directed elsewhere: poor whites, Southern whites migrating to Northern cities, unassimilated ethnics (Scots-Irish, Italians, Germans, Irish, etc), various religious minorities (Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Mormons, Pietists, etc), and on and on.

Even as such people obsess over those others, they typically claim to not be racist and prejudiced. It just so happens that they have disproportionate interest in those people different from them immigrating from another country or moving from another city, state, or wherever. And, of course, they just so happen to like to look at the data on crime, education, IQ… any and all data, as long as it is cherrypicked and put into the proper culture war narrative and dog whistle rhetoric.

Unsurprisingly, the conclusion is always that those others are somehow a threat to the social fabric, to our way of life, and to our children. This kind of conclusion is always there in the background, even when only implied by the framing of public discussion. But outwardly, these conservatives are simply concerned in a respectable manner. They aren’t bigots, after all. Just interested and concerned.

It is a complete random situation that they so happen to focus on some data while ignoring other data, interpret the data in one way while ignoring the larger context. They are curious about the data, that is all.

Having a straight discussion is near impossible. What these people actually believe is rarely stated. They know their beliefs are politically incorrect and so they’ve learned to hide them. They may even have learned to deceive themselves. I suspect many of them genuinely believe they aren’t biased or prejudiced in any way, even as it is obvious that they are. Only bad people are bigots and they know they aren’t bad people — therefore, how could they be bigots? Many of them have internalized political correct rhetoric because that is what they were told to do. Almost everyone wants to be thought of as a good person, according to the prevailing social norms.

The problem is that, whether or not they are good people, some of what they promote is clearly not good. It’s also often not rational, sometimes even outright absurd. But interestingly, those on the political left rarely make the equivalent argument in the opposite direction. As conservatives argue that more racial and religious minorities leads to increased problems, liberals rarely argue that more racial and religious minorities leads to decreased problems. This is because liberals simply don’t make those kinds of arguments, not typically, as they tend to see this kind of focus as irrelevant and unhelpful.

Whatever the reason, this creates an imbalance. Maybe the political left should make equally strong counter-arguments, even if absurd, just for the sake of evening out the extremism on the other end. That way, the perceived ‘middle’ of mainstream public debate wouldn’t be shifted so far right.

In recent decades, there has been a steady increase in the total number and per capita of foreign-b0rns, racial/ethnic minorities, religious minorities, religious nones, and other similar demographics. Over the same time period, many of the problems conservatives focus on have been improving. Crime, violence, and drug use has decreased among the population in general, across the country, even among minorities and especially among the young. Average IQ has increased for the general population and nearly all demographics, and the racial IQ gap has shrunk. College attendance has grown. Teen sex, STDs, and abortions are down. These days, teens in general are so well behaved as to be boring prudes, just as conservatives claim they’re supposed to be.

These seemingly positive trends have been happening across the country. And, in many cases, it’s even going on across the world. Some consider this to be a Moral Flynn Effect, lending much evidence against racism, racialism and race realism. The same trends are seen in most cities, at least some of it related to environmental regulations that have decreased lead toxicity.

I hear conservatives in the town I live in. They have reasons to complain, as it is a liberal town. But if they don’t like this liberal town, they can’t blame it on the blacks, from Chicago or elsewhere.

Yes, there has been an increase in the minority population, including but not limited to blacks. The University of Iowa has also increasingly attracted a foreign-born population. The town is growing in diversity, which is magnified in the local public schools with minority students increasing from 29% to 36% over the past decade. That is probably at least in part having to do with white flight, as many white families have moved out to the bedroom communities in nearby small towns. Still, it is true that within the entire county the minority population has been continuously growing, even if not any drastic jump at any given point in time.

But none of this fits into the conservative narrative. While the racial and religious minority population has been growing (i.e., the WASP population shrinking), specifically within the city itself, the violent crime rate has been steadily dropping like a rock. If we were forced to make an argument based on this data, we’d have to conclude that whites were causing the higher crime rate in the past and now minorities are bringing moral order back, saving the whites from themselves.

So, why does no one make this argument? Not even many liberals here in town and around the country would think of such an argument, much less take it seriously and speak it out loud. You won’t see this argument made in liberal news media or by liberal politicians. Yet conservatives will make the opposite argument all the time, no matter what the data does or does not show. Why is that? Why is there this imbalance in public debate where conservatives can make the most extreme nonsense arguments while liberals try to be rational and moderate? I can tell you this much. Rational and moderate does not consistently win debates, elections, or public opinion.

Some conservatives might point to Chicago. There has been a recent uptick in crime, even if it still is lower than it used to be. Ignoring the larger trend, that uptick doesn’t support the conservative worldview. What people in towns like this near Chicago have been complaining about is that all those blacks are leaving Chicago to come here, ruining our good cities. Yet as they leave Chicago to come here, crime there in Chicago went up and the crime in many of the cities where the blacks moved to has gone down.

Why doesn’t anyone point this out? It’s not hard to see, just by looking at the data. People are constantly looking for causation in correlation. Why does this particular correlation get ignored? Anyway, in terms of per capita, much of rural America is far more dangerous to your life than Chicago. Few people talk about the crime wave of poor rural white people and how that crime is trickling into the cities, such as all that meth that gets made out in rural America. Data shows that most drugs (both in total numbers and per capita) are used, carried, and sold by white people. Why has the War On Drugs targeted mostly minorities? Why don’t we have a War On Whites, as we presently have a War On Minorities?

If conservatives genuinely cared about any of these issues, why don’t they focus on all the data that would help us deal with the real problems we are facing? And if liberals cared as well, why won’t they hit conservatives with the best arguments available? Why are the culture war debates so one-sided? It seems like few Americans on either side want to deal with any of this, as it touches too many raw nerves. I can’t blame it all on conservatives. In this liberal town, it was the local liberal media that has been shown to have a strong racial bias and it is the local police force that has one of the largest racial disparities in drug arrests in the country.

Obviously, liberals are part of the problem, sometimes in a more direct way but often through apathy and complicity. It makes one wonder that the reason liberals don’t argue strongly back against conservatives is because many of them on some level agree with the conservative claims, even if they wouldn’t admit it or maybe aren’t even conscious of it. Conservatives will stop making these worthless arguments when liberals finally get the moral courage to stop being part of the problem.

Racism, Proto-Racism, and Social Constructs

A less typical angle on race and racism is to look to the ancient world. Some early texts and other evidence can be used to this end. But these sources are sparse and the authors weren’t representative of the average person.

Plus, we end up projecting onto the past. That is how the early ideas of race developed, as those thinkers themselves looked to ancient texts. Scholars agree that modern notions of scientific racism didn’t exist in the ancient world. Still, it is normal in all periods for others to be perceived according to differences, although similarities are often emphasized.

It can be problematic to call this proto-racism, though. That is anachronistic. There is no proto-racism. There is just racism, which itself is inseparable from the rise of scientific thinking. It’s like calling the earliest Egyptian Empire proto-modern because it was an early example of what modernity would build upon millennia later. Or it’s like calling the Roman Empire proto-industrialization because they were an industrious people who liked to build infrastructure that helped their economy to develop.

Racism is a word with a ton of baggage to it. That baggage didn’t exist in the ancient world. Their entire way of looking at the world and identifying themselves is alien to us. This is something I don’t think many modern people appreciate, scholars included. Go far back enough in time and you’re in not just a foreign world but a foreign reality. It’s hard to enter a mindset so different from ours or even to imagine what that mindset might have been going by such limited evidence.

As an example, ancient people had a different sense of ethnicity, culture, language, and religion. These things didn’t exist to them. There was simply the world they knew. It also seems there was much fluidity in those societies. We can see that from how much people borrowed ideas and traditions from one another, and were regularly creating new syncretistic cultures and social systems.

The Greeks weren’t a single people. It took centuries for a collective identity to form through trade and travel. Greek culture became so influential that colonized people and even foreign empires adopted Greek mythology as their own origins. It was irrelevant whether or not people shared ancestry or necessarily looked like one another. A mythological system like that of the Greeks allowed for a fair amount of broad inclusion.

The same pattern was seen with the Celts. Like the Greeks, they had formed a large, influential trading society. It spread their Celtic culture, including religion and language, to other populations. The Irish weren’t Celtic when they took on Celtic culture.

To be Greek or Celtic was a specific worldview, not a race. It’s like calling oneself an American, an identity that contains diversity and means many things to many people. Yet Greeks and Celts, like other cultural groups, were perceived in terms of physical features. Romans saw as significant that Celts had blue skin. Were Celts born as a blue-skinned race. No, they dyed their skin blue. That is what Romans saw on the battlefield, a bunch of naked men who were blue all over.

Other cultures dyed their skin or hair various colors or else permanently modified their bodies in other ways: scarifying, tattoos, extending earlobes and lips, etc. Plus, each culture had a different way of doing their hair along with having different clothing, jewelry, etc that they wore or else lack thereof. Even two genetically near identical groups could appear as absolutely different in physical appearance, not to mention other aspects of culture, religion, language, and social behavior.

To ancient Romans or Greeks, the blue-skinned Celts were more foreign than darker-skinned Egyptians or even more foreign. Some Romans did speculate on such physical differences, but not more than they speculated about all of the thousands of other differences (and similarities) between various cultures. Besides, a barbarian was someone who spoke a different language, specifically a language that wasn’t Greek or Latin (or else spoke accented, provincial Greek or Latin), no matter their physical appearance. And a foreigner was simply anyone who was outside of one’s door, which is to say outside of one’s home and homeland. Ancients perceived certain groups as ‘other’, but race as we know it wasn’t a mental category they had to place people in.

Sure, white and black were colors with great symbolic value in the ancient world, often indicating moral and aesthetic value. It’s just not clear how that applied to people. Ancients unlikely portrayed all darker-skinned people as ‘black’, considering that darker-skinned people are actually varying shades of brown. The Roman Empire, in particular, was a cosmopolitan society including many Africans who weren’t just slaves but also gladiators, charioteers, soldiers, entertainers, philosophers, theologians, priests, and even numerous popes and emperors—diversity was found both in Rome and at the frontier and this diversity led to intermixing, through culture and marriage. Also, I doubt various swarthy Mediterranean peoples looked to the Irish and Scandinavians as being superior because of their lighter skin, no matter what was their view of the symbolic value of light and dark.

Besides, we’re not entirely sure the skin color and tone of various ancient populations, as much population mixing has occurred over the millennia. For example, the early Jews probably were darker-skinned before outbreeding with Europeans and Arabs (Palestinians are descendants of the original Jews that never left). Or consider how those early Jews perceived the Samaritans as a separate people, even though they shared the same holy texts. The ancients had plenty of prejudices, just not our modern prejudices. There is much debate about when and how long it took those modern prejudices to develop, but they certainly didn’t exist in classical antiquity.

Lets just be clear that skin color was no more defining of otherness than anything else, although in any given context in a particular text a particular defining feature would be emphasized. Sure, someone could look for all the examples of ancient people focusing one thing while ignoring all of the many more examples when ancient people focused on other things (and many have done this). But how would that offer any insight into anything beyond the biases of the person looking for examples to fit a preconceived ideological worldview?

Worse still, talking about proto-racism gives an air of inevitability to racism. How could proto-racism become anything other than racism? The theory of social construction offers an alternative perspective—as stated in a review of Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What?: “Hacking provides an interesting perspective on this whole trend by de-emphasizing the social aspect and focusing on the construction aspect. He views this simply as a way of arguing against the inevitability of something.”

Maybe the precursors to racism could be interpreted differently. And maybe their subsequent development is much more historically contingent than many assume, which is to say maybe there are many pathways that might not have led to racism as we know it or anything like it. What happened isn’t what necessarily had to happen.

Seeing the past with fresh eyes is difficult, as the main evidence we have are texts, what people wanted to be remembered and how they wanted it to be remembered. The texts that survived were either written by or favored by a long lineage of victors that shaped what civilization would become. And traditions of interpreting those texts have also been passed down by the victors. To impose one’s ideological views, racial or otherwise, onto others is the ultimate privilege for who controls the stories a society tells controls that society.

Consider a specific piece of evidence. In Airs, Waters, Places, Hippocrates of Kos has a passage that indicates a worldview of environmental determinism. Some modern scholars have interpreted this as proto-racism.

The problem with this is that environmental determinism is often used as evidence against modern race-based explanations of human differences. What Hippocrates argues is that people are the way they are because of the environments they live in, but that leaves much left to explain. He never claims that people have inherent traits outside of an environment, that people can’t change by changing environment. That is significant for in the ancient world, entire populations were known to migrate to new environments. This point is emphasized by how, during the colonial era, Europeans began to worry that their unique identity or superior character could be lost by spending too much time in native environments. Also, Hippocrates seems to argue, using Greeks as an example, that people in other environments can sometimes take the best traits from nearby environments while making them their own and so not be trapped by environmental determinism of their own narrow environmental niche.

By the way, the majority of the Greek population were slaves and the majority of slaves were ethnic Greeks. When Greek thinkers sought to justify slavery, they sometimes argued about physical differences. These perceived differences, however, weren’t skin color. Instead, the slave was different, even more animal-like, because he stooped over or something like that. It’s not as if supposedly stooped over people represented a separate race. Greek society was rare in having so many slaves, possibly the earliest example. The reason there were so many slaves is because Greeks were constantly fighting each other and they chose to enslave rather than kill the defeated people. Africans and other non-Greeks were rare slaves among Greeks and they were highly prized as more valuable than the ethnic Greek slave.

The negative connotation was in being enslaved, not in being a particular ethnicity or race. This is why group identity was so often based on kinship, more than even ethnicity. What differentiated the enslaved ethnic Greek and the free ethnic Greek is that they didn’t tend to intermarry, unless a slave gained freedom or a free person lost it, which wasn’t uncommon but even then a former slave wouldn’t likely marry far above their own class. Kinship identity in such a society was to some extent class identity (and that remained dominant until the end of feudalism and persists to this day with the aristocracy in Britain), although most importantly kinship was about familial descent. It required later multicultural colonial empires for larger group identities to form, but the fluidity of ancient ethnic/cultural/mythological origins demonstrates an early form of larger identity (specifically in how origin stories were more mythological than biological). It’s hard to make clear conclusions with confidence, as much vagueness exists in ancient texts.

Even if we wanted to accept that proto-racism is a valid theory, how is environmental determinism (or whatever other similar theory) clearly, necessarily, and inevitably proto-racism? Others have noted this is extremely weak evidence being used in a biased manner. We are in severely problematic territory. Race has been shown to be scientifically meaningless, as the genetic difference between humans is smaller than found in most similar species and certainly couldn’t justify the classification of racial sub-species. Trying to interpret the past according to a proto-racism lens based on modern racialist thought is asking for endless confusion and hence false conclusions.

There is already enough confusion in the world. This confusion is even found among highly intelligent and well informed people. This was demonstrated to me recently when talking to a guy I’ve known for many years. He is a left-winger in the Marxist tradition, although when he was younger he was a right-winger, maybe a libertarian or something like that.

I’ve talked to him many times over the years about race and racism. He is well versed in views such as race being a social construct. In talking to him not too long ago, he kept repeating that he didn’t think race as social construct meant what liberals think it means. I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at. He knows me fairly well and so knows that I’m not a typical liberal. He also should know that liberalism is a wide category, including much disagreement, as I’ve often explained this to him. Who are these ‘liberals’ he speaks of? And what does he think they think? I don’t know.

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t seem like anyone really knows what it means to say race is a social construct. The one thing that is clear is that ideas are powerful in the human mind, in shaping imagination and perception. Talking about this, we are going deep into the muddy waters of the psyche. The confusion that exists goes far beyond a single ideological group such as liberals.

I didn’t think too much about this at first. I figured maybe he meant that people weren’t thinking carefully enough. I’d agree with that much, if that is what he was trying to communicate. Then he said something that caught me off guard. What he said was basically this: That Africans look all the same. Or at least look more the same than Europeans. Of course, he used scientific terminology to make this statement. But the basic message was too close to bigotry for my taste. I was surprised to hear him say it.

Ignoring the racist connotations, it simply makes no sense scientifically. Africa has the most human genetic diversity in the world, moreso than all the rest of the world combined. I told this guy that I doubt Africans would agree with him about his assessment. He tried to defend himself by saying he visited Africa, as if a visit to Africa would even begin to touch upon the vast number of distinct populations across a vast continent, second only to Asia in size of landmass.

This racist/racialist/race-realist viewpoint is even more meaningless in the larger historical context. In the ancient world, all Mediterranean people had more genetically and culturally in common with each other than they did with the other societies far away on the the respective continents. For example, some Greeks looked to the Egyptians as their cultural forefathers, as the source of great art and high culture. A number of great thinkers in the supposed ‘Western’ tradition didn’t even come from Europe, such as Augustine who was an African (even some ‘Greek’ philosophers weren’t born and raised in Greece: Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius, etc). Millennia of Mediterranean trade had not only spread culture but also genetics. The genetic aspect can still be seen today, as certain Southern European populations and certain Northern African populations remain linked by common genetics.

The statement about all Africans looking the same (or more simiar than other found on other continents) in order to justify racial ideology could, at best, be called lazy thinking. The guy who made this statment is normally a more careful thinker. And he wouldn’t accept that kind of simplistic comment from someone else. That is the problem with ‘race’ as an ideological lens. By design, it adds confusion to the thought process. That is its purpose, to obscure details and pulverize them into a mass of generalizations.

Having been raised in a society where racial ideology is ubiquitous, such a social construct gets embedded deeply in our minds. Trying to free ourselves of such maladaptive thinking is like trying to remove a barbed hook out of your chest. This is one of the most powerful memes ever released into the world. It messes with your head in a way few things can. It’s a mind virus of plague proportions, easy to be infected and yet no known cure.

It’s hard for us to imagine a society that might have operated with entirely different social constructs based on entirely different worldviews and cultures. This is why the ancient world ends up being a foreign land. Go back far enough and societies begin to seem incomprehensibly alien to us. And this can be disconcerting. It’s more comforting to get the past to fit the present.

I would point out that we don’t even have to look to the ancient world to see how much the world has changed over time. The word race was originally used to refer to such things as breeds of cattle. It came to be associated with socioeconomic class in the feudal social order. Peasants were considered a separate ‘race’ from the aristocrats and monarchs. As others have pointed out, “in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity.”

It’s not just that broad groups were seen as different: Europeans vs Africans, Eastern Europeans vs Western Europeans, Germans vs French, Britains vs Mainland Europeans, English vs Irish, etc. Originally, race was seen as distinctions within a single society or some other defined population area, which is to say there wasn’t even an English race, much less a white race (such thinking persisted into modernity, such as how Antebellum American whites in the North and South talked about one another as if they were separate races, Roundheads and Cavaliers). If notions of race itself were so drastically different in the recent past, imagine how different was thinking millennia before race was even an idea.

It wasn’t until the era of colonial imperialism in Europe that Europeans even began to think of themselves as Europeans. This is because of their encounter with American Indians who were more different than any societies they had ever before seen. Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans had been interacting with and influencing each other for Millennia by that point. However, American Indians were foreign and strange beyond all imagination, and this required new ideological thinking.

If (proto-)racism existed in the ancient world, how would we recognize it without any word for and concept of ‘race’? Early texts show evidence of prejudice and othering. I get that some elite thinkers among an ethnic group like Athenians considered themselves as part of a distinct people, but that was such a small population that shared physical appearance, culture, religion, and language with neighboring Greeks. How could a tiny population be considered a race in any meaningful sense? Speculating on such meager and unclear evidence seems pointless.

Anyway, this isn’t ultimately and solely about race. Many scholars have questioned the application of a number of modern concepts to the ancient world, from the idea of a distinct thing called ‘religion’ to the experience of ‘individuality’ that we presently take for granted. The point being is that the ancient world isn’t merely the modern world in less developed form. The ancient world must be taken on its own terms. We must study those temporally distant societies as an anthropologist observes a newly discovered tribe.

It’s not only that our understanding of the present is projected onto the past. Also, how we interpret the past determines how we will see the present. More importantly, how we imagine the past, accurate or not, constrains the kind of future we are able to envision. And never doubt that imagination fueled by ideas is the most powerful force of humanity.

Anyone who claims to have all of this figured out is either lying or deceiving themselves. I could read something tomorrow that might change my entire understanding of social identities in the ancient world and how they relate to the modern world. Even the scholars in the the related fields disagree immensely.

One thing does seem clear to me, though. In the ancient world, all aspects of culture were central in differentiating people. That is unlike the modern world where race often trumps culture. It would have been incomprehensibly bizarre to the ancients that geographically distant and ethnically/nationally diverse peoples with different languages, religions, and customs would be considered as having a common social identity because of being categorized within an arbitrarily defined range of skin color and tone.

* * *

Nina Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color
reviewed by Josh Trapani

The Color of Sin / The Color of Skin:
Ancient Color Blindness and
the Philosophical Origins of Modern Racism
by Nicholas F. Gier

The central question: what was Hellenization
by Monte Polizzo Project

Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture
by Jonathan M. Hall

Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity
by Jonathan M. Hall

Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity 
by Irad Malkin (Editor)

Lee E. Patterson, Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece
reviewed by Naoíse Mac Sweeney

Denise Demetriou, Negotiating Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean: The Archaic and Classical Greek Multiethnic Emporia
reviewed by Meritxell Ferrer-Martín and reviewed by Álvaro Ibarra

Greeks, Persians, and Perseus: Oh, My!
Herodotus and the Genealogy of War
by Carly Silver

Herodotus’ Conception Of Foreign Languages
by Thomas Harrison

Race and Culture in Hannibal’s Army
by Erik Jensen

Us vs. Them: Good News From the Ancients!
by Carlin Romano

Understanding The ‘Other’ In An East Greek Context
by J.D.C. McCallum

Philosophy and the Foreigner in Plato’s Dialogues
by Rebecca LeMoine

Roman Perceptions Of Blacks
by Lloyd Thompson

Egypt In Roman Imperial Literature:
Tacitus’ Ann. 2.59-61
by Lina Girdvainytė

Papyrology, Gender, and Diversity: A Natural ménage à trios
by M. G. Parca

The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present
by Siân Jones

Alterity in Late Antiquity: Disrupting Binaries
by Susanna Drake

The Origins of Foreigners
by Emily Wilson

Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity
by Michael Broder

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, by Erich S. Gruen (Book Review)
by Craige Champion

Review: E. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (1)
by Jona Lendering and Bill Thayer

Reading Rabbinic Literature: It’s Not All Black and White
(A Response to Jonathan Schorsch)
by David M. Goldenberg

Jew or Judaean?
by Michael L. Sa

The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties
by Shaye J. D. Cohen