Why is racism wrong?

[David Sims]

But racist arguments are based on BAD science. Race itself is not a scientifically sound concept. It is a cultural concept. That is why views of race and racial categories vary within different cultures. The closest thing that comes to racial categories in science is in biological (forensic) anthropology, which categorizes all humans into three categories: Caucasian, African, and Asian, or more offensively termed, Mongoloid. This categorization is inherently flawed, because people who are Hispanic, for example, end up being classed in totally different categories, even within the same families. It's bloody bad science.

How is it that you know that racist arguments are based on "bad" science? I didn't notice any badness in the methods used by racists when I had a look at them. Let me tell you how a racist would answer your claim that "race itself is not a scientifically sound concept." Here goes.

Egalitarians depend upon their slogans, for that is all they have for use in debate. All the evidence is against them, so we should never hope that they will ever give up a slogan of which they have grown fond. One of them is "Race is a social construct."

The idea that race might be a social construct began as a hypothesis by Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, in 1972. He claimed that the genetic differences between races were so slight that no one working only with genetic data would categorize people as Asians, whites, blacks, mestizos, etc. Lewontin said that racial classification "is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance."

The egalitarians were quick to pick up on Lewontin's words and create a number of slogans from them, including "Race is a social construct" and "There's only One Race, the Human Race." The Lewontin hypothesis almost immediately became a required belief among the politically correct. And that was unfortunate for them, because less than 30 years later it would become possible for geneticists and forensic scientists to conduct a statistical analysis of genetic markers in order to see whether their clusters correlated with the commonly identified racial groups.

They did. By 2005, it was well documented that Lewontin had been wrong. Practically every analysis of genetic markers demonstrated the biological reality of racial identities. In one of them, conducted by Tang, Quertermous, and Rodriguez, et. al., in 2005, all except five of 3636 test subjects (including Asians, whites, blacks and mestizos) sorted statistically into the cluster of genetic markers that corresponded to their self-identified racial group. The success rate for predicting how someone would classify himself racially, using only his genes as information, was 99.9 percent, according to that study.

The egalitarians have been slow to acknowledge the significance of such studies as those of Tang, et. al., an they continue to insist that race involves no differences other than trivial and "cosmetic" ones affecting the color of skin and slight differences in the shape of physical features. They reject the validity of any observation, no matter how well repeated or documented, that indicates the existence of racial differences having a degree of social significance to which they disapprove.

The egalitarians point out, correctly, that "human groups" differ by only a fraction of a percent of their genes. Of course, humans and chimpanzees differ by only two percent of their genes, and most of the genes of both men and apes have nothing to do with the differences between them, but rather function to determine them both as animals rather than plants, as multicellular animals rather than single-celled ones, as chordates with a central nervous system, as vertebrates with a backbone, as warm-blooded mammals instead of fish or reptiles, as primates rather than felines, ursines or ruminants, as hominids rather than monkeys. Doing all that uses up 98% of our genes.

If the racists were disputing the equality of humans and oak trees, a much larger fraction of the genes would be relevant to the debate. But because the dispute involves, instead, the equality of the several races of mankind, the only genes that deserve attention are that fraction of a percent that cause human racial differences to occur. The similarity in all the rest of the genes is irrelevant and does not constitute a valid talking point for the egalitarian side. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be asked whether farm tractors and passenger cars are the same things because they both burn fossil fuels, both require lubricant on their moving parts, and both have wheels, transmissions and internal combustion engines.

Consider, for example, the idea that poverty causes crime. The egalitarians usually attribute the non-white excess in the per capita rates for the perpetration of serious crimes to cultural factors, chiefly poverty, while denying that any genetic factors are involved. But if that were true, then poor whites and poor blacks would exhibit equal per capita rates for serious crimes, and they do not.

In 1995, there were 218.3 million whites and 33.1 million blacks resident in the United States. Of the whites, 24.4 million whites and 9.5 million blacks met the federal definition of poverty. Poor whites outnumbered poor blacks by a ratio of 2.57. If poverty were the cause of violent crime, then for each 100 murders committed by blacks, about 257 murders would have been committed by whites. But that isn't what happened.

Instead, about 55% of US murders in 1995 were committed by blacks. In other words, for each 100 murders committed by blacks, only 82 murders were committed by all non-black groups combined!

Even if you assumed that whites committed all of the murders in the United States in 1995 that blacks did not commit, the whites could only be responsible, at most, for 82 murders for each 100 murders perpetrated by blacks.

These facts, ascertained by an examination of crime statistics, are in conflict with a prediction that can be reasonably drawn from the egalitarian cultural-cause theory, which is therefore wrong. Poverty isn't the cause of black violence, and the famous "poverty causes crime" hypothesis is an egalitarian myth.

Ahem. End of presentation.

So, futilethewinds, in what way is the racist argument dependent on "bad science"?

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Here's what I've observed when whatching racists debate egalitarians:

Racists attribute to race what can be explained by history, culture, and geography.

I've noticed the opposite. Egalitarians bring forth every alternative to genetic factors that they can think of and insist that racial differences must be caused by one of them, or by several of them in combination, but on no account can genetic factors be an important contributory cause. The egalitarians never say why this must be so. The racists, on the other hand, usually disprove (or provide good reasons for doubting) each of the alternatives proposed by egalitarians and say that genetic factors have not yet been disproved by any similar criticism. The egalitarians, say the racists, never disprove; they merely rule out.

Racists rely on hasty generalizations and fallacies of composition.

I have not noticed that racists actually do this. Racist arguments are usually much better supported by facts than egalitarian ones are. The idea that racists "rely" on hasty generalizations and on fallacies is something egalitarians often say. But they seldom come up with examples (quotes) of racists doing this; they merely allege that racists do this.

Racists cherry-pick their 'empirical facts' shamelessly to get the conclusion they want to reach in the first place.

Not in my experience. Rather, egalitarians do most of the cherry-picking, while the racists continually point out that cherry-picking is what the egalitarians are doing.

For example, I recently observed a discussion between a racist and an egalitarian on YouTube. The egalitarian identified Neil deGrasse Tyson, a black astrophysicist, as the reason the racist was wrong about blacks in general having inferior IQs. Here's what the racist said in reply (using several separate posts that I've strung together below).

In debate, cherrypicking is a very commonly used fallacy. Yes, I'd heard of Tyson. Statistically there were bound to be a few smart blacks.

The IQ distribution for US-resident blacks having an average of 85 an a standard deviation of 12.4 doesn't mean that there are no blacks at all with IQs above 140. It only means that only one black in about 218000 will have an IQ above 140. Meanwhile, of course, one white in 83 has an IQ above 140, so given equal sized populations, there will be about 2600 times more white geniuses than black geniuses.

Do the math.

f(μ) = ½ − [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(x̄,μ) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

x̄ = the racial average IQ
x̄ for whites is 103 (measured)
x̄ for blacks is 85 (measured)

σ = the racial standard deviation in IQ
σ for whites is 16.4 (measured)
σ for blacks is 12.4 (measured)

μ = minimum IQ
μ = 140 (chosen for example)

f(μ) = fraction of a race having an IQ above μ.
f(140) for whites = 0.01203226093 (calculated)
f(140) for blacks = 0.00000459328 (calculated)

Since there are about 5.5 times more whites than blacks in the United States, white geniuses will outnumber black geniuses by a ratio of about 14300. If all the white people in the USA were replaced by blacks having the IQ distribution of US-resident blacks, the number of geniuses in the country would fall from about 2.4 million to only about 1000.

We know from an extensive body of scientific research that the distribution of intelligence, within a single race, is very nearly normal. The normal distribution has a probability density function of

PDF(x) = [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 }

And it has a cumulative distribution function of

CDF(x) = ½ { 1 + erf[(x−x̄)/(σ√2)] }

or

CDF(t) = [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(−∞,t) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

The normal distribution's probability density function is sometimes called a "bell curve." You've seen it before.

You might be wondering why intelligence within a race is very nearly normal. The reason has to do with the way human heredity works.

For most people, intelligence is determined by a number of locations on their DNA. Each of these locations has several possible configurations of atoms, and some configurations are better (i.e., create more intelligence in a person) than others do.

If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you know that rolling a single die will give you a flat probability distribution because each side of the die has exactly 1/6th chance of showing face-up. But if you roll two dice, some totals of the dots on their upward faces will be more probable than others, with seven being the most likely, while two and twelve are the least likely. It turns out that rolling more than one dice and tallying up the sum of the resulting dots will, over time, produce an approximation to the normal distribution.

Something very much like that happens with the genes that cause human intelligence. Each of the locations on the DNA that affect intelligence is like a rolled die. The configuration of atoms that happens to land in that location is like the number of dots on the upward face of the die after it has been rolled. That's why intelligence within a race follows the bell curve.

Now, in each race there's a slightly different set of possible genes for the intelligence-determining locations. The white race has a set that either includes more highly favorable genes than are found in certain other races or else in the white race the favorable genes are much more abundant, and hence more likely to get assigned to these DNA locations, than they are in certain other races (like blacks). Maybe both of those explanations is true. But that's basically why races differ in average intelligence.

Racists ask loaded questions and make nonsensical challenges.

I haven't noticed that, either. Racists ask important questions and make challenges that their egalitarian opponents often find difficult to answer well. I have, just now, given you a taste of racist argument. If you find fallacies or falsehoods in them, please show me where with quotes.