From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Sun May 09 2004 - 21:38:02 MDT
[rhinoceros]
This is going to be a bit lengthy. Take a look and see if it suits you.
I am a regular lurker in a yahoo group/mailing list,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/.
Mostly scholars, and they often post very interesting stuff. Last month they got close to a flame war about the scientific validity of "race" in biology. It started from this book:
"Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen" by Arthur Robert Jensen, Frank Miele
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/081334008X
Scientific American Editorial Review:
Arthur R. Jensen is the psychologist who set off an enduring controversy with his 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review holding that an individual's IQ is largely attributed to heredity, including racial heritage, and that efforts to boost IQ educationally do not achieve much. Miele, senior editor of Skeptic magazine, set out to "skeptically cross-examine" Jensen on his views. The questions and answers traveled by e-mail, but they read like a conversation. Jensen, now professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, holds that the scientific evidence is stronger now than it was in 1969 that IQ is highly genetic, that race is a biological reality rather than a social construct, and that the cause of the 15-point average IQ difference between blacks and whites in the U.S. is partly genetic. Miele hopes the exchange will enable the reader "to decide for yourself whether Jensenism represents one man's search for provisional, not metaphysical, truth through the co
ntinuous and vigorous application of the methods of science ...or a dangerous diversion back down a blind alley of old and disproven ideas, deceptively dressed up in modern scientific jargon."
[rhnoceros]
Well, some called Jensen a racist and a pro-nazi and pointed at some stuff he published in an anthropological magazine considered neo-nazist, others replied that science is science no matter where you publish... you get the idea. Things seem cool now and I am crossposting a reply by Ian Pitchford (PhD CBiol MIBiol, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate) who argues that the concept of "race" is spurious.
<begin quote>
"Race" is an intuitive concept of folk psychology, which explains why people feel strongly that it must make some sense. However, you wont find anyone using the concept with any consistency or scientific rigor, which is why mainstream biology finds no place for it. C. Loring Brace explained why this is so in a message to the list back in May 2001.
"The pigment in the skin is melanin, and its distribution is controlled by the length of time people have lived in situ in the tropics. High degrees of melanin in northern Australians, southern Indians, and tropical Africans is why observers perceive them as being similar and therefore putting them into the same "racial" category. The gradation towards lighter skin in the southern part of Australia is accompanied by the appearance of blond hair in some which creates problems for those who have decided a priori that Australians are "blacks." Things do indeed get much more complex when you consider things on the inside that cannot be seen. Hemoglobin S, the source of sickle-cell anemia, has a distribution that is unrelated to the distribution of melanin. In America, most of the instances of hemoglobin S are found in people of African ancestry, so the assumption is that it is a "racial" trait. However, the case has been made that hemoglobin S was actually introduced into Africa from the eastern Mediterr
anean and the Middle East and flourished because it is associated with the ability to survive the effects of falciparum malaria. The distribution of hemoglobin S then is associated with the distribution of that particular kind of malaria in the western part of the Old World, and this crosses population boundaries and our perceptions of "race" as though they did not exist. Then add the distribution of the alleles in the ABO blood group system, and a completely different pattern emerges. Every time you add another trait that is distributed according to the intensity of a different and unrelated selective force, you get a different pattern of the distribution of that trait. This can never be understood if you start with a perceived "race" as the unit for analysis. Biological sense can only be made if each trait is studied separately in the light of the distribution of the selective force to which it represents a response."
Although a tendency towards essentialism is probably innate and helps to explain in part why the concept of "race" persists, it's also important to understand that the concept is extremely useful as a tool of social dominance. In fact, criminal justice systems across the world have been found to discriminate against subordinates (which ethnic minorities often are) in such a systematic fashion that Sidanius and Pratto have even formulated five basic principles, which they call "laws of law":
(1) The Disproportionate Prosecution Principle
When society's laws are violated, the level of negative sanction directed against subordinates will be greater than that against dominants, everything else being equal.
(2) The "Out of Place" Principle
When subordinates are accused of acts of violence against dominants, the accused face a particularly high risk of being found guilty and of suffering particularly severe punishment.
(3) The Social Dominance Orientation/Social Role Congruency Principle Within the criminal justice system, the level of social dominance orientation (SDO) among hierarchy enhancers will be relatively high, while the level of SDO among hierarchy attenuators will be relatively low.
(4) The Tolerance of Abuse Principle
The degree of negative sanctions against security forces for abuses of power will tend to be exceedingly small, especially in cases of abuse against subordinates.
(5) The Hierarchy-Terror Principle
The greater the degree of social hierarchy, the greater the use of formal and informal terror there will be.
The following are useful concrete examples of just what the enforcement of group-based social dominance means in practice:
".. the general provisions of the American Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 provides for the death penalty for those convicted of being "drug kingpins"... In March 1994, a report issued by the House Judiciary Subcommittee of Civil and Constitutional Rights concluded that racial minorities were being prosecuted under this statute in numbers far exceeding their proportions in the general population, or even the population of criminal offenders. The report found that 75% of those convicted under the drug kingpin provision were White and 24% were Black. However, racial minorities represented almost 90% of those against whom the statute's death penalty provisions were sought."
"While only about 13% of monthly drug-users are African-American, African-Americans are targeted in 35% of drug possession arrests, 55% of drug possession convictions, and 74% of prison sentences for drug possession... Blacks and Latinos constitute almost 90% of all those sentenced to state prisons for drug possession in the United States."
" while Australian Aborigines represent only about 2% of the total population, they constitute more than 38.9% of the occupants of criminal institutions for juveniles."
"... while Arab juveniles represent only 23% of Israel's juvenile population, they constitute 33% of those juveniles charged with criminal offences."
".. while foreigners represent approximately 27% of the Saudi population, they constitute approximately 66% of those executed in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, these executed foreigners are primarily from the low-status nations in Africa and Asia, rather than from the high-status nations in the West."
"In 1996 it was reported that in one Swedish prison as many as 75% of the prisoners were immigrants or ethnic minorities."
In the US a GAO report found that "in 82% of studies examined race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with a capital offence and/or receiving the death penalty. Specifically, those who murdered Whites were significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered Blacks."
"... police officers who are accused of brutality are often rewarded rather than punished by their departments.... the probability of having an officer removed from the LAPD for complaints of excessive force or improper tactics is in the order of 0.00228, or essentially zero. Similar results have been found in New York City".
"Paul Chevegny conducted a cross-cultural examination of police violence across several police departments and nations of the Americas, including the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Jamaica, and Mexico. Among other things, Chevigny found that police terror against subordinates is relatively common and involves low risk. Consistent with the fourth law of law, rather than resulting in negative sanctions against the police, brutality against subordinates often results in institutional rewards."
"The association between use of the death penalty and hierarchical social structure was not restricted to just the United States, but was found to apply for nations around the world. Using 147 countries and controlling for the possible effects of demographic and criminality factors (e.g. murder rate), the evidence showed that the greater the economic inequality within a nation, the more likely that nation was to put its citizens to death."
Racism has to be understood as one of the ideological supports for the maintenance of group-based social hierarchy, but of course, where ideological consensus fails, racism supports the threat and use of force and terror against subordinates both institutionally and informally. We can also predict that formal and informal terror based on the concept of race is likely to be highest in those societies that are most hierarchically structured.
I hope this is of some use.
Best wishes
Ian Pitchford PhD CBiol MIBiol
Research Office, Central Services Building Level 9
University of Huddersfield, Queensgate
Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK.
http://human-nature.com/
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