Over the past few days my break from dissertation writing has been to go through the sources on Coontowns Human Biological Diversity resource. I’m what is called, in technical terms, a sadist. Today I will present my breakdown on their “Requisite Material for Novices.” There a full 18 sections on the website, and I would really like to take every single one down, but some help would be lovely (this section took five hours over two days)! So if anybody else wants to tackle a section just PM me and I’ll leave it to you. I’ll try do one of these every day or two.

Before I start actually attacking the claims I would like to raise my major issue with this resource. It is a classic example of a Gish Gallop. Moving past the slight irony in people defending race realism using a debating tactic named after a creationist a Gish gallop is when you present someone with such a plethora of information they cannot reply, critique or analyse all of it. (yet here I am, trying to respond to all of it, woe is me!). If the compiler of this resource was actually interested in proper, effective intellectual discussion they would have presented this in an essay format, rather than just:

Subject heading

List of sources

By presenting it as an essay it is easier to find, properly understand, and critique information. Its current presentation, however, makes extracting the information a daunting task. If it was me compiling this resource I would have presented short essays on the key texts which underpin my thesis, outlining their key arguments and the popular and academic criticisms (positive and negative, of it). This way my readers will immediately know the general argument for my thesis and its strengths and weaknesses, and can pursue a more in-depth understanding at their own leisure. This is my biggest issue with this Coontown list; it is perfectly designed to convince people who value science/intellectualism but aren’t actually scientists or intellectuals. People with proper academic training would ignore this because it has been presented in a completely uncritical fashion, just a list of sources (with no dissenting opinions presented) with no evaluation or analysis.

What I also find interesting about these requisite materials is the make a very weak claim; that there have between genetic changes between population since the development of agriculture. This is not full-blown race realism, however, it seems to be used to justify race-realism. This is another debating strategy, where you ease somebody into something. You start off showing that genetic changes have occurred in the last 10,000 years, and then slowly move from that to 'Blacks are lesser apes and should be deported' (a stickied post on Coontown currently demands the deportation of all 'apes'). Interestingly, it particular seeks to assert that the claim "no genetic change has happened in the last 40,000 years" is false. This phrase is presented as a sort of academic consensus, and refutation of it serves to inspire doubt in academia, so that a reader is more susceptible to anti/non-academic views.

Requisite materials for novices

Cochran, Gregory and Henry Harpending. 10,000 Year Explosion. New York: Basic Books, 2010

The basic claim of this book is that human genetic diversity has increased at a greater rate since some 10,000 years ago. This is not a claim I want to dispute, to me in its basest form it actually seems true. Their stronger thesis, that human evolution has accelerated in the same time period is also not one I personally wish to dispute, my knowledge of genetics is not strong enough. That being said, human evolution has accelerated over the last 10,000 years is not logically equivalent to the claims made my race realists.

There is a review of Evolving Human Nutrition: Implications for Public Health which invokes Cochran and Harpending to argue against the claims of Evolving^1. However, a review of 10,000 Year Explosion calls the list of behavioural adaptions the authors claim arose after agriculture “bizarre” and claims the authors “provide no evidence whatsoever that there is any genetic basis to the specific behaviours in their list.” This review also attacks the final chapter of the book, which claims that Ashkenazi Jews “got their smarts” through genetic changes. This argument is described by the reviewer as “[an] unsupported claim based on sketchy, unpublished or anecdotal data and selective use of tenuous historical information." ² This review is in a peer reviewed, academic source.

There are more positive reviews of this book and these are presented on the website for the book. What is notable to me is that none of these reviews appear in peer reviewed/academic journals. The closest is in The Wall Street Journal and even that is not glowing, claiming “the authors don't say enough about the developments in genetic science that allow them to make inferences about humanity's distant past. Readers will wonder, for instance, exactly how it is possible to recognize ancient Neanderthal DNA in our modern genomes.”³ Another positive review also looks into similar claims made by other writers regarding human evolution. He looks at a claim that the industrial revolution was a result of natural selection and basically claims that the maths does not add up; there has not been enough time for significant genetic changes to affect intelligence.⁴

It seems to me that the claim that human evolution stopped 40,000 years ago is false, and Cochran and Harpending have done well to demonstrate this. That being said, it is not clear that we have the knowledge of genetics to claim which traits have arisen since agriculture (beyond reasonably superficial differences, like lactose-tolerance and sickle celled anaemia) due to genetics. More importantly, we certainly lack the understanding of genetics to make claims about behavioural differences based on natural selection between populations. Its problems with sourcing and lack of supporting evidence also need to be addressed by further sources.

Frost, Peter. “The emerging synthesis in human biodiversity.” Evo & Proud, Jan. 3, 2015.

This is not an academic source, not peer-reviewed and a secondary source. Two of these sources are the authors of the previous mentioned book, and 4/12 are written by the same person. Despite having a bibliography this article does not source specific claims and claims like “most mental and behavioural traits have moderate to high heritability” or “We see the same genetic overlap between many sibling species that are nonetheless distinct anatomically and behaviourally” or “With the collapse of the old left in the late 1980s, and the rise of market globalization, antiracism found a new purpose ... as a source of legitimacy for the globalist project” most definitely need sources.

So, this source is not worth much. Moreover, its writer Peter Forst is not an academic, and his biggest achievements seem to be working for National Geographic in Peru and being a founding member of South American Explorers. Effectively, I don't feel the need to actually counter the claims of this argument because I have no reason to think they are justified. Frost has not performed any experiments to show genetic differences, and has not added anything original to the discussion. If these primary sources are not in the HBDR later on then this seems to me to be a significant problem with the database, if these primary sources are in the HBDR later on then this is just a worthless source (part of the Gish gallop).

McAuliffe, Kathleen. "They Don't Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To: Our species—and individual races—have recently made big evolutionary changes to adjust to new pressures." Discover Magazine, Feb. 2, 2009.

This is another non-academic source, (as far as I can tell Discover is a pop-science magazine and is not peer-reviewed, although this may be incorrect) and once again it heavily sources Cochrane and Herpending. This is what I mean by a Gish Gallop, whoever assembled this list could easily have left this and the last source, and just cited Cochrane and Harpending, but that makes their resource less daunting. It is better to have more sources, repeating the same claims, than it is to have one source which can easily be attacked.

Moreover, this article doesn’t make particularly strong claims. It does allow for the idea that evolution has occured between human groups in the last 10,000 years. Most of the differences between ‘racial groups’ it presents, however, are not behavioural, and it also mentions an argument that “the tools for studying the human genome remain in their infancy” as well as an argument that “sunlight and pathogens were among the strongest selective forces, and skin and the immune system underwent the most dramatic change; evolutionary pressures on the brain are not nearly as clear-cut.” Essentially, while it again supports the hypothesis that humans have undergone genetic change since the adoption of agriculture it does not conclusively claim that these genetic changes justify race realism.

Miller, Geoffrey. "The looming crisis in human genetics." The Economist, Nov 13, 2009.

Another non peer reviewed source. Seeing a theme here? While the last two at least sourced multiple papers this one literally only sources 10,000 year explosion. This article also makes huge, unsourced claims. Claims like “We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals” need sources, it is essential. That is such a huge claim, especially when two paragraphs later you are saying “if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often?” The criticism of GWAS tests to show heritability are expressed by the article as such:

The missing heritability may reflect limitations of DNA-chip design: GWAS methods so far focus on relatively common genetic variants in regions of DNA that code for proteins. They under-sample rare variants and DNA regions translated into non-coding RNA, which seems to orchestrate most organic development in vertebrates. Or it may be that thousands of small mutations disrupt body and brain in different ways in different populations. At worst, each human trait may depend on hundreds of thousands of genetic variants that add up through gene-expression patterns of mind-numbing complexity.

This is the same criticism we have been hearing all through what has, essentially, been a series of reviews of 10,000 year explosion. We do not have the means to test what differences between populations are genetic and which aren't. This also adds a second criticism too, that it is probably not just one gene which causes heritable traits, instead it is a collection of alleles reacting to each other.

Outside In. "Five Stages of HBD." Outside In, Oct. 21, 2013

This isn't a source, this doesn't present an argument. This is the first truly nothing source. It is a strawman of anti-race realist (or anti-HBD as they like to call it) arguments. In fact, it doesn’t even present them as arguments, it literally presents them as ‘denials’ essentially just complaints towards an unpalatable theory. Yet, this unpalatable theory has so far only been defended by one source, which is controversial, and then a series of reviews of that book, then this non-source. It also doesn’t actually argue against the straw-men it presents, it just asserts that they are intuitively false. This is embarrassingly bad.

Sailer, Steve. "The Race FAQ." VDare, Dec. 16, 2007.

This is actually interesting. It is written by a controversial right wing, anti-immigration blogger. (Here is what RationalWiki which is a pretty terrible source, but whatever) has to say about him. What I find interesting is that Sailer essentially makes a claim against race-realism without even realising it.

"Similarly, racial groups can be lumped into vast continental-scale agglomerations or split as finely as you like.”

His answer to “how many races are there?” is, well it depends how you define race, which is relative to the specific discourse you are having. This is one of the major criticisms of race realism, that race is a discursive construct. Here is an article stating that race is a social construct and showing how the different discourse of different times has produced different definitions of race. While I would not take this The Atlantic article as gospel, it is non-academic as any of the HBDR sources, it provides an explanation of the basic position.

Salter, Frank. "Misunderstandings of Kin Selection and the Delay in Quantifying Ethnic Kinship." Mankind Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2008)

This is peer-reviewed, so a good sign. The journal it is published in, however, was founded by 'The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics.' This may suggest a bias problem. Once again, one of the key sources for this article seems to be Harpending.

I can’t actually access this article, my university has not subscribed to Mankind Quarterly, so I can only go off what the abstract says. The abstract essentially argues that the greater genetic difference within ethnic groups than between them is not evidence against race realism, as there is also greater genetic difference within nuclear families than there are between nuclear families. Their argument is that these within differences are basically ‘junk’ differences, small differences which have little pronounced effects, while the between differences are significant differences which were greatly influenced by Natural Selection.

Unfortunately, I am unable to find a review for this article, or a paper which sources it. As such, I cannot provide sufficient commentary. The lack of references to this text, and the possibility of bias is, however, sufficiently damning as one of these factors likely explains the other.

Wade, Nicholas. "Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally." New York Times, June 26, 2007.

In this article we see many of the same claims as earlier, once again this is not a peer reviewed article. Claims about lactose-tolerance and sickle celled anemia are present. This one does make a claim about a behavioural and brain changes:

Two years ago, Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, reported finding signatures of selection in two brain-related genes of a type known as microcephalins, because when mutated, people are born with very small brains. Two of the microcephalins had come under selection in Europeans and one in Chinese, Dr. Lahn reported.

He suggested that the selected forms of the gene had helped improved cognitive capacity and that many other genes, yet to be identified, would turn out to have done the same in these and other populations.

Neither microcephalin gene turned up in Dr. Pritchard’s or Dr. Williamson’s list of selected genes, and other researchers have disputed Dr. Lahn’s claims. Dr. Pritchard found that two other microcephalin genes were under selection, one in Africans and the other in Europeans and East Asians.

Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.

Unfortunately he does not source these claims, however, I have found some information on Lahn’s study. The Wall Street Journal claims “What the data didn't say was how the mutations were advantageous. Perhaps the genes play a role outside of the brain or affect a brain function that has nothing to do with intelligence.”

Essentially this article makes no substantive claims about genetic differences outside of superficial changes. Certainly not enough to justify full blown race realism.

Conclusion:

While there are other articles in the “Requisite materials for novices” there are given sections of their own in the table of contents, so I will look into them another day.

Having examined these sources what I will claim is this: genetic differences between human populations have likely arisen since the development of agriculture. The only genetic differences we have observed, however, tend to relate to superficial factors. Moreover, we do not have the knowledge or the tools to make claims about human genetics relating to behaviour.

The first section of texts presented in the Human Biodiversity Resource do not present a convincing argument for race-realism. They lack peer-reviewed sources, and their only peer-reviewed source has a possible problem with bias. Moreover, their work focuses heavily on the work of Henry Harpending. This would not be such a huge problem, as his book was quite ‘revolutionary’ and published quite recently, however, many of the sources presented are merely non-academic, poorly sourced reviews of this book and more depth is required to make a convincing argument. Harpending’s book essentially gives us reason to investigate the genetic differences between races, however, it does not provide sufficient evidence to justify race-realism.

The sources continually argue against the idea that there has been evolutionary change between populations in the last 10,000 years without ever showing how this justifies race-realism. Claims that the evolutionary changes are likely to have affected the immune system and skin more than the brain, or behaivoural determiners are never challenged, and given that a common criticism of the race-realists claims seems to be that they lack the genetic evidence to support their views, all the race realists have is a hypothesis which requires a lot more justification.

1: Grant A. Rutledge and Michael R. Rose. Review of “Evolving Human Nutrition: Implications for Public Health” by Stanley J. Ulijaszek, Neil Mann, and Sarah Elton, in The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 89, No. 1, March 2014.

2: Hunley, Keith. Review of “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution”, by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, in Journal of Anthropological Research vol. 65, no. 4, p63-64

3: Christopher F Chabris. “Last-Minute Changes” in The Wall Street Journal Feb 12, 2009. Accessed at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123440723977275883

4: Hsu, Stephen Recent Evolution in Humans December 17 2008: http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2008/12/recent-natural-selection-in-humans.html