Saturday Hodgepodge

That the human species has geographic variation is not at issue. It clearly does, as Feldman’s colleagues have argued. It just doesn’t support the standard racial typology. Alleles had to evolve and spread somewhere. But they do spread, too… So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen indicates that humans nicely group into distinct populations of less than the 54 found by Feldman’s group (probably a lot more – for instance, Papua New Guinea is not represented in their sample set). And this leads us to the paper by the Human Race and Ethnicity Working Group (rare to see a paper that doesn’t list all the authors). They rightly observe that while there are continental differences in genetics, there is no hard division, and genetic variation doesn’t match up with cultural differences per se. There is a genetic substructure to the human population, but it isn’t racial.

This tendency [towards denying the existence and significance of an objective reality] is a result of a number of things, but mostly it’s a result of dogma. Religious dogma, political dogma, cultural dogma—the common denominator is the steadfast reliance on ideas that don’t respond or correspond to reality. Most of it, I suppose, tends to be tied to religious/theistic dogma, given that speculation about metaphysics (not to mention many religions’ teachings that the material/corporeal world is not something to worry about and is only a means to an end) is likely to lead to a disdain for the material world, and therefore a disdain for empirical fact… The limitations of what we know about the world are significant enough without people deliberately ignoring the things we do know for the sake of expediency.