Början på ett mediakrig om mångkulturen?

Reich starts out strong, telling the story of his work on identifying African-origin alleles that drive increased prostate cancer risk in African-Americans – and the dumbshit responses he got from his colleagues. He mentions an anthropologist that questioned his mention of “African” and ” European” DNA segments: he was flirting with racism. What a fool. By the way, there’s something odd and interesting in that early result: why would most of the risk variants all land in one small segment of the genome? But back to the fools: Reich talks about the anthropologists [ Montagu] , geneticists [Lewontin] , and sociologists that have argued that ‘race’ has no biological reality, that there are not really any significant biological differences between races, that research into such differences should be banned ( why is this necessary if differences don’t exist?), etc. All liars, of course. Although I can think of a few people saying similar things that are not liars: they’re just not very bright.

Speaking of such differences, here’s one Reich elucidated a few years back. The white count (white blood cells, neutrophils) is about a standard deviation lower in people of African descent than it is in Europeans? Why? Turns out it is innate, biological and quite simple: there’s a variant of the DARC gene that has a frequency > 99% in West Africans and < 1% in Europeans: that variant causes the lower white count. That African DARC variant is an almost perfect defense against vivax malaria, which is surely why it became so common.

Reich explains how recent genetic analysis shows that people’s genes cluster in ways that correspond pretty well with old-fashioned notions of ‘race’. He prefers to talk about 'ancestry', because (in his view) the word 'race' is too ill-defined and loaded with historical baggage. Whatever.

He goes on to say that people that deny the possibility of substantial differences between populations just can't do it anymore: they're putting themselves in an indefensible position. He is wrong: sure, their position is logically indefensible, the facts are against it, but what does that matter? The significantly crazier idea that there are no differences between the sexes – that sexual dimorphism itself is a myth promulgated by the Gnomes of Zurich or the orbital mind-control lasers – has become very powerful in much of the Western world: barking-mad craziness apparently doesn't need to defend itself.

He says that geneticists have tended to 'obfuscate' on this topic, mentioning Richard Lewontin. I'd put it a bit differently: they lie.

Reich mentions independent genome bloggers, some of them skilled analysts, who are on the whole less inclined to go along with the usual falsehoods. He thinks that means you can’t keep up the charade: again, he’s very likely wrong, not least because those skilled genome bloggers have a tiny audience. More important, Reich himself doesn’t want to keep up the charade. That may matter.

Reich goes on to demolish some fairly common false arguments about how different human races – excuse me, ‘ ancestral populations ‘ – really can’t be very different, at least not in any traits that would upset people. You know, for the same reasons that dog breeds can’t really be very different.

First, an argument that somehow it’s very hard, or takes forever, for natural selection to change traits that are influenced by many genes. I have no idea where this piece of nonsense originated – we’ve been selecting on highly polygenic quantitative traits forever and a day without any special problems. In the standard formulation for estimating the effects of selection, the number of genes influencing the trait drops out of the equation entirely. It just doesn’t matter. Reich understands this, not least because he’s done analysis of selection for height in Europeans.

Some might say that genetic influences in height are one thing, but surely genetic influences on cognition and behavior are mystically unknowable. Reich knows better: he knows that recent studies are finding those influences. Reich weasels a little, suggesting that these variants may influence educational achievement by influencing timing of childbirth – but probably not, since the pro-educational alleles also result in larger brains.

He also knows that the plus alleles, the ones that increase intelligence, are getting rarer at a scary pace, decreasing IQ at something like a point a generation. This illustrates a pattern with Reich: this was roughly understood a long time ago, just from looking at demography and fertility patterns. It was known before genomic analysis existed. Cyril Kornbluth knew about it back in the 1950s – thus his short story “The Marching Morons”. Reich could have known this when he was twelve, but I doubt if he did. Reich often seems to think that if a result wasn’t proved using powerful contemporary genomic methods (what he uses), it wasn’t really known at all. If I don’t know it, it’s not knowledge: that’s a wrong way of thinking.

next fallacy: human populations just haven’t been separated long enough to have changed much due to selection. He knows that’s not correct. He points out that in many cases populations have been separated for 50,000 years, while some African groups appear to have been separated far longer, perhaps 200,000 years. A recent study showed that there has been noticeable evolutionary change in the English over the past 2000 years: selection for increased height, infant head circumference, blondness, etc etc. If it can happen there in 2000 years, it can happen anywhere.