Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Race, Genes, and Cancer

Black people, on average, are more likely to die of cancer than white people. Is part of that difference genetic? The Journal of the National Cancer Institute just published a big study on this question. If you haven't heard about the study, maybe that's because you get your news from television, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, or the New York Times, which have ignored it. Why would they ignore it? Because the study suggests the answer is yes. It's OK to report that racial differences in cancer outcomes are caused by poverty and discrimination. It's not OK to report that they're inherited.

More here.

Bias and Biodiversity

Steve Sailer has replied to my last comment on our differences over racial inequality. He accuses me of triangulating against him. He's right. The only part he left out is that sometimes you get triangulated because you're actually wrong.

Here are three passages that crystallize where we disagree. First:

To Saletan, my having spent years toiling at the unpopular task of correctly figuring out one of the central conundrums facing modern America—how race, IQ and public policy interact—makes me a bad person.

Stop right there. Race and genes interact. Genes and IQ interact. But to say that race and IQ interact, without even mentioning genetics or environment, is a scientific and moral mistake. It's like saying that race and criminality interact, without acknowledging any intervening variable. Race is not a causal unit.

Second:

For purposes of sensible public policy, arguing over whether genetics plays a role in racial differences in achievement is a red herring. What's crucial to understand is that racial differences—for whatever reasons—are unlikely to vanish Real Soon Now, as all right-thinking people are supposed to assume.

Say it's discovered in 2010 that the entire cause of the black-white IQ gap is some hitherto unknown micronutrient needed by pregnant women that African-Americans don't get enough of, and a crash program is put into place immediately to solve the problem. If that happened, the IQ gap among working-age adults still wouldn't disappear until the late 2070s. ...

Of course, if there really are genetic differences in average intelligence among the races, that would make the "disparate impact" notion look silly. But it's not actually necessary to know that. It's merely enough to know that fair and valid predictors of future job performance have routinely found substantial gaps for decades.

That's a pretty clear statement that public policy has no responsibility to redress any cause of racially unequal outcomes. Hey, I'm all for colorblindness. But segregation? Denial of schooling? Some injustices demand redress. Sailer's argument rationalizes too much. Did childhood poverty deprive you of equal educational opportunity? Did Jim Crow impair your family's ability to accumulate financial and cultural assets? Too bad. You and the other kids screwed by this legacy have flunked "fair and valid predictors of future job performance." Here, take this mop. And hang onto it, because your kids will need it.

It's one thing to say we can't affect the distribution of talent. It's quite another to say we have no responsibility to affect or compensate for the distribution of resources.

Third:

As long as legal immigrants are carefully selected for optimum benefit to current American citizens, as well as (to quote the Preamble to the Constitution) "our posterity", and are quite limited in number, then I don't see much reason to consider race in choosing legal immigrants.

Others would disagree. Overall, it's not a particularly big issue as long as we change the law from the current system of "family reunification" chain migration.

Don't see "much" reason? Not a big issue?

What reason would there be to consider race in choosing immigrants? And if we did that, are you saying you wouldn't mind?

Sailer and other exponents of "human biodiversity" seem to want more attention and respect than they've been getting. Here are two ways they can earn it. First, show as much interest in biodiversity within racial and ethnic groups as in biodiversity between them. And second, take into account the reality of racism, not just the reality of race. That's part of human nature, too.

Portrait of Artest as a Young Man

It's hard to keep your mind on work when your favorite sports team is playing out of its mind. My team, the Houston Rockets, lost its star guard, Tracy McGrady, midway through the season. Then it lost its backup center, Dikembe Mutombo. Then, three days ago, it lost its center, Yao Ming. Yao and McGrady are done for the season; Mutombo is done for good. You might as well ask a country to fight a war without its army, navy, and air force. But on Sunday afternoon, the Yaoless, McGradyless, Mutomboless Rockets—a bunch of role players who'd been shrugged off by general managers around the NBA—stomped the Los Angeles Lakers, this year's front-runners for the league title. Their playoff series stands tied at 2-2.

Why am I bringing this up in a science blog? Because we've been talking lately about stereotypes, and the subject came up in a New York Times account of a confrontation between the Rockets' Ron Artest and the Lakers' Kobe Bryant during the series. Artest was angry that Bryant

had elbowed him near his neck. He jawed angrily at Bryant, at close range. Then, having made his point—and having been ejected by the referees—Artest calmly walked off the Staples Center court. ... Artest's turbulent past—a blur of technical fouls, scuffles, a smashed television camera and a domestic violence arrest—is fading but not forgotten. The consensus among the Rockets was that the Game 2 ejection stemmed not from Artest's actions but his résumé. Artest joked that it was akin to racial profiling—"past history profiling," he said with a chuckle.

"The thing about Ron is, he will never get the benefit of the doubt again," [Rockets forward Shane] Battier said. "Any questionable situation, people will automatically stereotype and refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt."

I love these guys. But there's no such thing as stereotyping a man based on his own past. Stereo means more than one person. Being judged by your own behavior is the opposite of stereotyping. And "racial profiling," as defined by the ACLU, means "targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin." If Artest were being targeted based on race, Battier would be getting the same treatment. But Battier gets the opposite treatment: If your grandmother bumped into Battier while asking for his autograph, she'd be whistled for a charge.

It seems a bit unfair that Battier gets the benefit of the doubt and that Artest doesn't. Referees, like the rest of us, are influenced, often unconsciously, by opinions they've formed about each player. Battier has earned a reputation for lawyerly adherence to the league's rules. Artest has earned a reputation for hotheadedness. For this reason, Artest is far more likely than Battier to be deemed guilty of a foul, even in identical circumstances.

Is this kind of discrimination wrong? If so, you'd better take it up with Martin Luther King Jr. His dream was that people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Character isn't whatever you did just now. It's the pattern of your life: your personality, your reputation, your profile. Judging a man by his character means taking account of that pattern. "Past-history profiling," the neologism Artest coined in jest, is actually a pretty good translation of what King envisioned.

So don't fret about the profiling, Ron. The civil rights generation fought for your right to be judged on your own history. The rest is up to you.

The Race Conversation, Continued

Based on the evidence so far, there's good reason to believe that genes influence everything and exclusively control nothing. Intelligence, in particular, is a field with lots of evidence for heredity but little evidence for the precise impact of any known gene. We're very early in this research. If you start poking around in scholarly debates over IQ and general intelligence, or "g," you start to realize how much the field resembles astronomy or particle physics, with entities and qualities being calculated from complex inferences rather than directly observed. That's not to say inferences and calculations aren't scientific. But we should beware mistaking them for unshakeable facts.

More here.

First They Came for the Mexicans

Wasn't it just this morning that we were talking about the perils of classifying and treating people according to race?

Look at the news from China this afternoon. According to the New York Times:

The Chinese authorities have confined dozens of Mexicans to hotels and hospitals despite having no signs of human swine virus, Mexican consular officials said Monday. ... Since last Thursday, when an AeroMexico flight from Mexico City arrived in Shanghai with an infected man, Chinese health officials have been rounding up his fellow passengers as well as travelers on other flights who showed no signs of illness. But authorities also sequestered a number of Mexican passport holders who had not been home in months ...

This is exactly what I worried about in last week's discussion of thermal scanners:

If you think heat is a bad proxy for flu infection, ask yourself whether it's worse than nationality. Travel companies are canceling flights to Mexico. Today, Japan began denying visas to Mexicans on arrival. Governments and businesses want an easy way to identify, segregate, and scrutinize the people most likely to be carriers. Which group would you rather they target? People with excess body heat? Or Mexicans?

Looks like China has already decided to target Mexicans. And please don't try to defend this as a logical response to a flu that came from Mexico. When you're rounding up Mexicans who haven't been home during the flu's existence, logic is out the window.

Strictly speaking, this isn't inappropriate classification and discrimination based on race. It's inappropriate classification and discrimination based on nationality. But the point is the same: Beware the easy recourse to crude categories.

The Paradox of Discrimination

Look who's flirting with animal rights.

In recent days, the New York Times has published two in-house commentaries on Spain's move to legislate rights for apes. "We like to think of these as absolutes: that there are distinct lines between humans and animals," Donald McNeil, Jr., wrote Sunday. "But we're kidding ourselves." Yesterday, Adam Cohen added that "showing respect for apes would elevate humans."

I agree with my human colleagues. But that agreement is the beginning of a huge mess.

The mess starts when we abandon an old religious idea. "Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking," McNeil recalls. He remembers the words his guide spoke at the time: "A gorilla is still meat. It has no soul." This, McNeil notes, is the position of Spain's Catholic bishops: Humans have souls; animals don't.

Secular humanists reject this dogma. We understand that there's something wonderful and uniquely worthy of respect in the power, richness, and subtlety of the human mind. But to us, the soul doesn't explain these wonders. It describes them. That's one reason why the destruction of human embryos doesn't torment us the way it torments pro-lifers. We don't believe in ensoulment at conception. We believe in the gradual development of mental capacities.

This puts us in an awkward position. We call ourselves egalitarians, yet we deny the equality of conceived humans. We believe that a woman deserves more respect than a fetus. A 26-week fetus deserves more respect than a 12-week fetus. A 12-week fetus deserves more consideration than a zygote. We discriminate according to ability.

This is also why ape rights appeals to us. It's not a claim of equality among all animals. It's a claim that apes resemble us in ways that insects don't. It's a kind of discrimination. Cohen observes that Peter Singer, the philosopher behind the ape rights movement, believes that "species should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis." And McNeil reports:

In an interview, Mr. Singer described just such calculations behind the Great Ape Project: he left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he felt all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture -- rather than, say, rights to education or medical care.

This multi-tiered approach to species and rights isn't just Singer's position. It's your government's position. As Cohen points out, chimps get special protection under the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act. McNeil adds:

Even animal cruelty laws have a bias toward big mammals like us. For example, in a slaughterhouse, chickens are sent alive and squawking into the throat-slitting machine and the scalding bath. But under the federal Humane Slaughter Act, a cow must be knocked senseless as painlessly as possible before the first cut can be made.

In other words, as the pigs of Animal Farm put it, some animals are more equal than others. And if that principle applies to other animals -- discriminating among them based on humanlike capacities -- does it also apply to us? Are some humans more equal than others?

We've already established that you accept this principle if, like me, you discriminate among preborn humans based on degree of development. And if you accept that humans and apes gradually evolved from common ancestors, then you'd also probably discriminate among born humans based on degree of evolution. As McNeil observes, the archaeological record of human bones "suggests that some of our ancestors exited this world as stew." Were the ancestors who gnawed those bones truly human?

We don't like to face such questions. Like creationists, we ridicule anyone who lumps us together with other primates. Cohen says animal rights activists "come off as loopy" when they say things like, "I am an ape." But according to the U.S. government, that statement isn't loopy. It's fact. All of us are great apes.

If preborn and prehistoric humans are less worthy of respect, what about born, living humans who seem functionally subhuman? McNeil says we're kidding ourselves when we imagine that "certain ‘human' rights are unalienable." He mentions a terrorist who beheaded a reporter. Is it possible, he asks, to forfeit your human rights for subhuman behavior?

On the other hand, if we deem some people less human than others, does it lead us back to the bad old days of racism? McNeil raises this question in the context of his African guide's comment about the butchered gorilla: that it was just "meat" because it had "no soul." The comment, he writes,

was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother? Whether or not Africans had souls -- whether they were human in God's eyes, capable of salvation -- underlay much of the colonial debate about slavery.

To say the least, that's a controversial analogy. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals made a similar comparison three years ago and was charged with racism. "They're comparing chickens to black people?" an NAACP spokesman protested at the time. Cohen offers the same objection, faulting PETA for "boneheaded moves, like the ad it ran juxtaposing photos of penned-up animals with starving Jews in concentration camps." He doesn't mention his own paper's juxtaposition of gorillas with Africans a day earlier.

Not that I should be throwing stones. I've got my own contradictions to sort out: that it's wrong to eat animals but not meat; that it's wrong to compare mistreatment of blacks to mistreatment of animals; that it's wrong to "predict the criminal propensity of unborn children based on the color of their skin"; that we should "prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true"; and that it's pernicious "to group people by race and compare averages."

I'm still working my way through the puzzle of equality as we learn more about human and animal biology. So are McNeil, Cohen, and others. It's a communal dialogue between morals and science. Where it will lead, I can't say. But what strikes me at this point in the conversation is that equality and discrimination are intricately related. What we often call equality -- sorting creatures into biological groups and treating each group member as identical to the others, but different from members of other groups -- is also discriminatory. That's the paradox of "human rights."

Each of us mixes the two in our own way. Spain extends its "community of equals" to gorillas but not gibbons. Catholic bishops demand rights for zygotes but not chimps. PETA equates racial with interspecies equality. The NAACP discriminates between discriminations.

For my part, I've come to suspect that the first problem to deal with isn't inequality. It's indiscriminateness. Discrimination in the best sense means seeing each individual as she is. It takes effort. You have to look past the surface of things. It's easier to assign individuals to groups and judge them that way. But it's also, to the same extent, unfair. The unfairness arises not from inequality, but from how we organize it. Inequality, at the biological level, is mostly nature's fault. Indiscriminateness is ours.