May 26, 2008

National Review "Determined" To Ignore Realities Of Genetics

Symptomatic of the intellectual and moral decline of National Review into just another dispenser of the conventional wisdom is its latest cover story Escaping the Tyranny of Genes, [June 2, 2008], an ambitious but remarkably muddled attack on the human sciences.

Remember—this was the magazine that, under then-editor John O’Sullivan devoted its cover to a symposium on The Bell Curve instead of the simultaneous GOP Congressional takeover. No doubt that’s a reason O’Sullivan was purged.

Sigh.

In the current issue, software executive Jim Manzi warns darkly of powerful (yet unnamed) "genetic maximalists," who threaten human freedom in ominous (but unspecified) ways.

That's because these “popularizers” unscientifically ride the sociobiological "reigning presumption of academic America" in a climate in which "mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-all ideology."

Unfortunately, Manzi never explains what planet in what year he's describing: Htrae in the year 8002 D.A. maybe?

Manzi proclaims:

"If the pretense to scientific knowledge is always dangerous, it is doubly so when wedded to state power, because it leads to pseudo-rational interventions that unduly extend authority and restrict freedom. That the linkage of race and IQ is provocative to contemporary audiences is not surprising: It is almost a direct restatement, in the language of genetics, of the key premise of Social Darwinism."

Manzi then recounts the stereotypical litany of early 20th Century horrors from eugenics to the Holocaust.

Who, exactly, are these dangerous proponents of "geneticism" who are currently running amok? National Review gives Manzi 3000 words, but he doesn't come up with any names more recent than Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was born in 1841.

Perhaps Manzi is alluding to James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who indeed mentioned "the linkage of race and IQ" last year. Yet, as you will recall (although Manzi and the NR editors seem to have forgotten), Watson was not immediately elected Big Brother. Instead, in our world, he was subjected to a Two Minute Hate and kicked to the curb by the medical research laboratory he had built up for four decades.

Barely anyone (except me in VDARE.COM) stood up in public defense of America's most prominent man of science. National Review did—nothing.

From a political standpoint, what's amusing about Manzi’s article appearing in National Review is how it's just a more sophisticated-sounding rehash of a run-of-the-mill Big Think article that a hack like Sharon Begley would write in Newsweek. Manzi’s essay is noticeably lacking in ideological balance. There's not even a pro forma mention of anti-Darwinist Lysenkoism under Stalin to balance the eugenics-led-to-Hitler cliché.

Nor is there any mention of the actual reigning model of human behavior that buttresses government policy in a host of fields from education to affirmative action to immigration: what Steven Pinker calls "The Blank Slate"—that human beings are infinitely malleable.

Ideas like this—powerful, popular, and wrong—have more than enough spokesmen already.

An obvious distinction eluded Manzi. Yes, there are a lot of articles in the press about human evolution and genetic discoveries. Much of this journalism is silly or overhyped. On the other hand, anybody who tries to synthesize the logical implications of the new discoveries for topics touching on fashionable identity politics is likely to be ignored—or, if important enough to serve as an example—crushed, like Watson and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers.

From Manzi’s vague article, it's difficult to figure out what he fears. But I would guess it is something like the silly 1997 eugenic dystopia sci-fi flick Gattaca. (Tagline: "There Is No Gene for the Human Spirit.")

Weirdly, Manzi argues that it would be okay to establish a scientific totalitarian state:

"Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably, so that we can live in Woodrow Wilson's 'perfected, co-ordinated beehive.'"

Nevertheless, we shouldn't, yet, because science hasn't become accurate enough:

"Until then, however, we need to keep stumbling forward in freedom as best we can."

Well, that's a relief!

Although Manzi can't seem to find any living human beings who advocate converting American into a dictatorial scientocracy, he still spends much of his article laboriously (but pointlessly) documenting that the human sciences aren't advanced enough at present to implement Gattaca. It's a "straw man argument" raised exponentially to the point of self-parody.

Manzi warns us about these "science popularizers" who

"now believe that … we can explain the causes of the behaviors of individuals and groups sufficiently to predict these behaviors scientifically."

And that's bad, because:

"But if translated into public policy, their belief would likely have disastrous results."

Well, what one "science popularizer" (me) wants is more skepticism about the dogmas about behavior that underlie current public policy—much of which already has disastrous results.

Despite his seeming erudition, Manzi doesn't understand what science is.

He uses the word "scientifically" (as in "predict these behaviors scientifically") to imply some absolute threshold of quality, like "investment grade" or "blue chip." But, in reality, to predict human behavior "scientifically" doesn't mean you're right, oh, say, 87.5 percent of the time or any other arbitrary cut-off. It just means you are more right than random chance.

Science isn't absolute, it's relative. It's a process for increasing the relative accuracy of predictions. The more accurate compared to randomness your predictions get, the more scientific they are.

But there's no end to the process.

Manzi, a software engineer, arrives at the same anti-empirical endpoint as the postmodernists and Creationists, albeit from an unusual pathway. He suffers from the engineer's fallacy of lacking an appreciation of the incremental nature of how science works, especially biological sciences.

Manzi comments on The American Scene blog:

"I have a very practical view of science ... I think we privilege its findings not because of some rational critique of its methods, but because airplanes generally stay up. I was trying to say that we currently do not have, and it’s not obvious that we ever will have, the ability to predict non-obvious individual or group behavior reliably."

From an engineer's standpoint, you'd better get most everything right before you take the airplane up for a test flight. You need a high degree of "reliability" for the entire plane before you can put it to use.

But, of course, that's the wrong end of the telescope for thinking about the human sciences. He's thinking about genetics like an engineer, not like a scientist.

Do we know how to build a human being, much less a society, from the DNA up?

Of course not.

But … so what? We don't want to.

What we want to do is to be more effective at the things we want to do, like, say, educating our children. And for that we need more knowledge. We don't need perfect knowledge, we just need more knowledge. (And, let's not forget, the courage to acknowledge that knowledge).

In contrast to engineering, the human sciences are analogous to, say, botany. Botanists didn't have to build a redwood tree from scratch and make sure it's 99.99% perfect to keep it from falling down. The redwood tree was already out there, standing up by itself.

Instead, botanists made discoveries about redwood trees incrementally. "Gee, it's really tall." "Its wood must be termite resistant." "It's related to the Sequoia tree, but it's not the same." And you can go on making discoveries in botany for, roughly, ever.

Similarly, we're about at the same point with human genes as Linnaeus was with flora and fauna in the 1700s, when he started out to taxonomize Creation.

There are tens of thousands of human genes. At present, we only know what a few of them precisely do; we have a hunch about some more of them; and we're completely clueless about the rest.

To the engineering mindset, this uncertain state of affairs is alarming. But to the naturalist mindset, it's fun. There are all sorts of things, big and small, left to find out. Each thing we find out will help us make more accurate predictions about reality.

Granted, the predictions will never be perfect.

But, so what?

Manzi assumes that we must "believe that we can remove the mind-body problem from the purview of philosophy by reducing the mind to a scientifically explained physical phenomenon" in order to "predict these behaviors scientifically."

That's ridiculous. We don't have to solve possibly insoluble metaphysical problems to make better predictions about human behavior. We just have to make better predictions.

Contra Manzi, we already make predictions that are reliably more accurate than random guesses about individual and group behavior. We do it all the time.

I'll make one right now. I predict that men of West African descent will be over-represented among the eight finalists in the 100-meter dash to determine the Fastest Man in the World at the Olympics this summer.

How can I make that prediction? Do I understand how all the gene variants work together in leg muscles to give West Africans an advantage in sprinting? Have I solved the mind-body problem?

Heck, no.

I simply made that prediction because the last 48 finalists over the last six Olympics have all been men of West African descent. That's not likely to have been a random fluke.

Now, Manzi may say that's "obvious." But its obviousness isn't derived from the logic of the conventional wisdom of human biouniformity. In fact, the Olympics are a major embarrassment to the currently dominant worldview.

Similarly, I predict, contra George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, that the mandate in the No Child Left Behind Act that by 2014 every public school student in America will score on tests of math and reading at least "Proficient" (the second highest level on a scale that runs from "Below Basic" through "Basic" and "Proficient," to "Advanced") can only be achieved by massive fraud. Considering the vast expense and hoopla of NCLB, that seems like a useful thing to be able to predict.

So, in six years, we'll see who is better at making predictions about human behavior when it comes to education: a bipartisan consensus of America's Great and Good … or me.

I have no idea exactly which genes, if any, are the reason NCLB will turn out to be a gigantic bust. Someday, we may know. But, in the meantime, we don't have to wait around for the genetic information to make a prediction about NCLB's feasibility.

These examples of predictions raise the obvious question of burden of proof. Making predictions about behavior is an inevitable part of policymaking. So why should the burden of proof be on those of us who are trying to use more information to make better decisions—rather than on those who are trying to enforce a myth?

For instance, to expand on Manzi's airplane argument, NCLB is the social engineering equivalent of building a giant airplane, and I'm the passerby standing on the tarmac saying, "It's not going to fly."

And the social engineers building the plane indignantly reply: "Do you know how every single part works together out of the 22,000 parts in the plane?"

And I say, "Nope. But I do see you're building the plane out of lead, and that's way too heavy to get off the ground."

In contrast to Manzi's hallucinatory theory of the political implications of the genetic revolution, let me offer a prediction of how the politics will play out that is more plausible.

We’re living in an Emperor's New Clothes moment. And those moments can go on a lot longer than Hans Christian Andersen suggested. People who have been making fools of themselves seldom say,

"Why, yes, that little boy is right and I am wrong. Of course the emperor has no clothes, just as Occam’s Razor would suggest."

Instead, what they typically say for a protracted period is:

"What a stupid, evil little boy who attacks our poor emperor. That brat just can’t see that our emperor is wearing a higher form of clothing that you have to be really smart and fit for your post to see."

And the closer the emperor's procession comes and the more obvious his nakedness becomes, the angrier the crowd will become at that little bastard.

So, I suspect that, outside of the United States and its First Amendment protections, the word "crimethink" will continue to slowly move from metaphor to reality as the police power is brought down upon heretics.

Within the U.S., outspoken dissenters won’t be investigated by the police. But they will be rendered largely unemployable because institutions will worry that they present too much risk of the employer losing job discrimination lawsuits.

In pockets of the Internet, obscure or anonymous individuals will continue to exchange facts and ideas. But, really, how many people like to look for truth for its own sake?

The long-term outcome will be an increasing stultification of intellectual life in the West—rather like in Brezhnev's Soviet Union. Mathematicians and astronomers at the abstract end were relatively free. At the practical end, engineers were, too. But any Soviet scientist or intellectual in the middle, who tried to theorize about human beings, was in danger of losing his career or his liberty.

So will it be in the West. And, to adopt (appropriately) a Marxist slogan, National Review is now part of the problem.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]