Home Artists Posts Import Register

Downloads

Content

David and Matt are joined by scientist and leftist Kevin Bird (@thebirdmaniac) to talk about LR favorite Stephen Jay Gould, his radical science mileau, and reactionary genetics from the end of Jim Crow to the release of a new book, "The Genetic Lottery." Check out Kevin's review of the book at Massive Science here: https://massivesci.com/articles/genetic-lottery-review-paige-harden-kevin-bird/

Comments

Anonymous

Great guest. First heard of Kevin when I came across this great blog post while arguing with racists on the Sam Harris subreddit: https://kevinabird.github.io/2019/12/18/The-Genetic-Hypothesis-and-Scientific-Racism.html Thought I'd share some more resources I think would be useful for arguing against or understanding the context around race & IQ or 'race realism'. Kevin references 2 books in that post that I haven't gotten around to reading, but they seem like great recommendations: Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini (2019) The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund by William H. Tucker (2002) This blog post by professor of statistics Cosma Shalizi: http://bactra.org/weblog/494.html He critiques the concept of a 'g factor' using a fictional dialogue. He also has a much longer post that I haven't read breaking down why he considers 'g' a statistical myth: http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html The MedlinePlus page on heritability is useful to understand it's scientific meaning/limitations: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/inheritance/heritability/ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on "Heritability" is worth checking out to try to further understand some of the philosophical problems with the meaning/interpretation of heritability: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heredity/ There's this journal article on "The Mythical Taboo on Race and Intelligence": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1089268020953622 One of the authors, John P. Jackson, also runs a great blog - AltRightOrigins.com Another journal article on "How White nationalists mobilize genetics": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.24150 You can find the full version on Libgen if you search the DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24150 "Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy": https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y In that article, they reference this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159115001719 "The meta-analysis has shown low general heritability of the categorised behavioural traits analysed. Thus, the commonly used behaviour tests for many breeds, to determine the dog's eligibility for reproducing, traditionally required by many associations, is not supported by the present results of the meta-analysis." So even amongst dog breeds, which came about through selective breeding, and where I'd assume there's a much greater ability to control variables, the heritability of traits seems a lot more muddy than we assume. Might go to Kevin's point about how scientists from other fields warn of reading too much in to "results" about human behavioural genetics. Another resource I've found useful is the podcast 'Speaking of Race': http://speakingofrace.ua.edu It's by 3 professors from different fields - anthropology, history of science, & international studies. RationalWiki - taken with a grain of salt and checking the sources - is actually a pretty decent resource for getting an overview on these topics or a quick temperature check on some of scientists/figures in the 'race realist' sphere.