From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Sat Jun 26 2004 - 22:15:49 BST
Hi Dan and all,
On 26 Jun 2004 at 1:22, Dan Glover wrote:
>msh says:
>And this brings us back to the question of scientific evidence in
>favor of the idea that "race" is a valid and useful construct. The
>OVERWHELMING evidence, as I believe I pointed out, is that the
>concept involves a social distinction based on superficial
>appearances. A distinction made for some pretty ugly reasons, and
>none of them scientific.
>
>Therefore, I see no logical consistency, agreement with experience,
>or economy of explanation in clinging to race-based explanations of
>human intelligence and behavior. I can, however, envision social
>reasons for such tenacity.
Hi Mark
I think you may be conflating biological and social patterns of
value. The MOQ is divided into four levels plus Dynamic Quality. The
inorganic and biological level patterns of value are objective. They
can be seen and studied with scientific instruments. The social and
intellectual level patterns of value are subjective. No instrument
can detect the President. As you note, normally we think of racism as
based on superficial and unfounded reasoning-- social patterns of
value -- subjective, in other words. Yet there are differences
between the races at the biological level as well as I noted in my
reply to Gav.
msh says:
Well, it's certainly possible that I'm conflating biological and
social patterns of value. So let me see if I can clarify my ideas,
for my own sake.
Let's work at the bio level and assume there are single human genes
for, say, skin color, eye color, eye-shape, hair color, hair texture,
nose structure, lip structure. Let's assume further that these
single genes may have only one of two possible on-off settings: black-
white, brown-green, round-oval, black-blonde, wiry-straight, broad-
pert, full-thin.
So we have a scientist, working at the bio level, who can "create"
on his computer all sorts of different looking people, just by
setting some genes on, some off.
Now let's assume our scientist working at the bio level has had no
social contact with other people till the day someone walks into his
lab and says: "Please provide me with the genetic makeup of an
African-American." I suggest the scientist would have no way to do
this, and would not even know what is meant. When he looks puzzled,
his visitor might say, "Well, ok, how about an Asian? A Native-
American? An Aborigine?" The scientist's continued bewilderment
would annoy his visitor to the point where the visitor says "Look"
then sits at the computer and flips the settings for our seven genes
to ON then says, "See, this is an African-American." The visitor
then goes on flipping switches, saying "And here's an Asian; and
this is an Aborigine; and here's a Native-American; and this is a
Northern-European."
From that point on, the scientist can make racial distinctions, when
asked for them, but in doing so he is making SVP distinctions, not
BVP distinctions.
Now let's get really whacky and say that there are single genes for
intelligence, violence, promiscuity and criminality, and that all of
these can be set to low-high. What a "scientist" like Rushton is
saying is that, within our SVP racial distinctions, "Northern
Europeans have these genes set to high-low-low-low in comparison to
African-Americans who have them set to low-high-high-high.
Anyway, Dan, thanks for your comments. As always, I'd be interested
to hear any more thoughts on what I've tried to say here.
Best,
Mark
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