Third parts of my notes on What it means to be 98% chimpanzee by Jonathan Marks - a book not about chimpanzees, but about relation between science and society. amazon/What-Means-98-Chimpanzee-People/dp/0520240642 Damn, how to make basic tags working in facebook? Page 51 --- We tend to divide people into a few large categories: white, yellow, black, red, or the more politically correct Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Americans. And we tend to perceive facial features that stereotypically follow this division: light skin, almond eyes, kinky hair, beaked nose. In fact, these categories do not reflect any natural division of the human species and have principally been the construction of social history --- Thats depends from the definition of natural division. Second, he claims the division was not based on biological fundaments and was solely product of social history; this is the extraordinary claim, yet he provides no evidence. Moreover, he is wrong, when he writes later, in page 52: For Ancients...But there was no hint of the existence of any small fundamental number of natural human kinds; The Arabs, Greeks, Egyptians had noticed different kinds of people. Its not some result of sudden obsession yb Europeans starting in last 500 years, or something. Page 66 --- establishing a single category (African/ black/Negroid) to encompass them all reflects an arbitrary decision about human diversity, one that is not at all dictated by nature. --- Thats right; He later repeats Lewontins fallacy that more variation is within Africans than within all other human populations; and that Africans actually subsume the variation present within other human populations. Now, remember what he argued just few pages before? That we divide birds as separate class from crocodiles and turtles? Page 68 ---- Dividing and classifying are cultural acts and represent the imposition of arbitrary decisions upon natural patterns—especially in the erection of boundaries within a species where none exists in nature. ---- First sentence: full agreement. Second sentence: he is arguing against strawman. We classify blue and green as different colours, despite there are no natural borders between them. But blue and green seems to be based on natural properties, isnt it, and are different colours, despite our boundaries between them are arbitrary (and despite there are languages which do not differentiate between those two colours). He repeats this many times later: Page 69 ------ she is “half-black” biologically, and “black” socially. Half of the biological contribution is ignored in the construction of a social identity. The biological and social realities contradict each other, and the social reality, based on a folk model of heredity, dominates. Race turns out to be an optical illusion. It’s not the pattern of human differences we encounter empirically. Humans vary principally locally, not continentally ------ In first paragraph, he arguments that since races are partially constructed by culture and depend on society which creates them, then there are NO real biologically-based division. Second, since there are multi-racial persons, then there are again no races. In other words, because families are definde in different ways in different cultures, and because I may belong to two different families, it means family is social construct with no biological fundaments -- dead wrong. This is social construct AND it has biological fundaments. Second paragraph is again wrong. Human vary also continentally. After decades of genetic research we know that yes, there is continuum in human variation, and yes, there are places where this continuum seems to be disturbed - deserts, seas, mountains created barriers to human mixing. As one geneticist put it: there is not so much difference between races as racists hoped and not so little difference as anti-racist hoped. The existence of this natural barriers its what causes clustering arguments to work. You just put some genes and order your program to find clusters within those genes. Your cultural impact is the number of clusters you want to find. If you say find three clusters then your algorithm will divide neatly people into sub-saharan Africans, Asians, Europeans. Four? Maybe Indian cluster will emerge. And so on. So yes, the number of clusters is culturally defined; but yes, it has biological basis. You say what is your social identity, provide your dna, and you know what? more than ninenty percent of time you social category will fit your membership in computer-generated cluster, unaware of whether African is cultural category or not. Sometimes Marks is making really bizarre arguments. Page 72 ---- although trained forensic anthropologists can allocate modern remains into a small number of categories given to them, it is much harder to sort prehistoric remains, and almost impossible to sort skeletons accurately from places other than West Africa, East Asia, and northern Europe. If you put human bones from the Middle East, North Africa, and New Guinea together in a pile, they would be almost impossible to sort accurately, and it would actually be impossible to tell even how many geographic regions were represented. Why? Because you would no longer be distinguishing among discrete and familiar populations ---- So, because trained anthropologist mostly work with modern categories and not with other, it means that categories are absurd and are not based on reality. I assure Marks that after more training anthropologist would have no problems with sorting bones from Middle East from North Africa, with accuracy far greater than chance (than never 100% sure) But then, it seems that the problems Marks has are with the race word; and we will see, he would happily accept all claims if we would simply replace race with population
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:05:07 +0000
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