I’m honestly not trying to belittle you (I’ll confess I don’t have the same reservation about Rushton). Like Abiola, though, I do want to know something about your understanding of sociobiology. I don’t accuse you of holding the ’sociobiology = stupid blacks’ view, but that is the reductio ad absurdam of what you seem to be saying. And I’d like to have what you’re saying clarified before deciding whether it is (a) in fact the load of old bollocks that it might well possibly be or (b) something I might not agree with but can entertain as a reasonable hypothesis.

One indication that you might labour under a misunderstanding of sociobiology is your complaint that I blame Rushton for ‘trying to bring sociobiology close to evolutionary biology’. Whatever I’d blame Rushton for, surely not that. But nor need he try so hard - sociobiology _is_ evolutionary biology! (I.e., not every evolutionary biologist would accept its conclusions, but evolutionary biology is precisely what it’s about.) If you take the trouble to read Wilson’s book of the same name (and perhaps you already have), you’ll see that 90% of it or so is utterly noncontroversial (there might be contoversy among academics about the one idea or other, but not the sort of emotional controversy that led protesters to pour a pitcher of ice water over Wilson’s head). I should add, in case it isn’t clear already, that (unlike Scott Martens) I view sociobiology, on the whole, pretty favourably. I do dislike the cheap pulp fiction versions of it, whether these be used by sociobiology’s detractors or by people like Murray and Rushton to bolster their own dubious musings. I have no idea whether Wilson has ever made known his views about people like M. and R., but they would certainly be interesting to hear.

As for my politics, well, I am indeed quite liberal, but where I live that means something very different to the rather American way you are using the term. I’m afraid that I’m not terribly leftist, though. (Though in my younger days I did wear nine earrings, a leather jacket and a Palestinian scarf, so perhaps that counts.)

I don’t think the question of immigration ‘politically anathema’. As it happens, I’m generally in favour of free immigration, but don’t automatically condemn those who think otherwise (they’re not _all_ Le Pens). But sociobiology, or any sort of biology, has sweeet Fannie Adams to do with the question.

I’m not sure whether you are any kind of authority on biology’s role in social behaviour. You may not even be an environmentalist. You are appear to be more of a leftist agitator. This I construe from your employment of the time-honoured, liberal-left tactic of the slur. Then there’s the famous, all-conquering reduction (Rushton researching penis length at the shopping mall). To top it off we get the outright lie placed in the opponent’s mouth (black people are stupider than white, so thank God I’m north European). Not a very detailed or impressive response for someone who claims knowledge in the field.

It is courteous to treat your opponent’s arguments with the respect you would wish in turn for your own. But, regrettably, you seem to want to belittle, to humiliate if possible.

POn the one issue of substance you raise you are deeply unfair but you are not entirely wrong. Rushton, of course, is capable of defending himself and has done it to stunning effect. He is vulnerable, though, on some aspects of his thesis. The R-k issue that you mention is a regular point of attack. Even CB, on whom we may actually agree, challenges him there. For what it’s worth, I have some sympathy for Rushton’s migrationary model though I concede its speculative nature. The other danger area for Rushton is skull size and brain weight, and their relationship to IQ. Since Boas was utterly fraudulent in the head measuring department, even inventing 4,000 subjects to strengthen his conclusions, I can’t see that environmentalists would wish to protest too loudly here. But the point remains, of course, that
the link between brain weight and IQ is presently too tenuous to support the assertions Rushton makes.

You are apparently also suggesting that Rushton be considered suspect because his work brings sociobiology close to evolutionary biology. I am not aware what work evolutionary biologists have done on the issue of encephalisation and whether its opposite is really, as Rushton claims, sexualisation (to which his brief comments on testosterone production and penis length actually apply). It is a rich concept, though, and there is a vast amount of evidence available, for example in US victimisation studies.

The great issue of immigration deserves to be freed from the hate-speak that the liberal-left routinely employs against those with whom it disagrees. You, like Abiola, have preferred this tactic to answering the real questions that sociobiology raises. You do it because those questions are political anathema, not because they are in some way scientifically illegitimate. You must know that. It’s time to change.

it’s news to me that Charles Murray is a psychologist, eminent or otherwise. Anyway, perhaps Abiola was too harsh labelling those men ‘kook researchers’. Herrnstein, for one (and unlike Murray), seems at one time to have more or less on the rails, before he went off them. Let us be diplomatic, then, and call them, ehh, ‘fringe researchers’. ‘Kook’ certainly does apply to Rushton, though, I’m afraid. I mean, sure, his work in researching penis length down at the shopping mall is (wait for it) seminal and all that, but beyond that, I’m not certain his contribution will prove lasting. I’ve read some of his papers, you know. Don’t know whether he calls himself (as you have called him) a psychologist, but if he is, that might explain his sadly tenuous grasp of basic concepts from a different field that clearly fascinates him, evolutionary biology. (He relies heavily on the concepts of r- and K-selection in one of his major works, for example. Now, these are real terms, but Rushton gives the impression that he heard them explained a long, long time ago, and wasn’t paying close attention even then.) Pity you didn’t think to include Chris Brand amongst your eminent psychologists.

But all this is digression. What I notice most about your responses to Abiola is that you won’t answer his questions. Do you have the first clue what ’sociobiology’ and ‘heritable’ mean, or do you not? If you do, it might be as well for your argument to reverse the first impression you’ve given and start demonstrating your knowledge right about now.

One of the proprietors of this site (SM) and I had a bit of a ding-dong about sociobiology a while back, when I was still bothering to blog. We didn’t agree about much on the topic, but I think we’d agree it doesn’t mean ‘black people are stupider than white people, so thank God I’m a Northern European’.

“BTW I don’t buy the ‘British working man’ bit. . . I would say it is in the pubs of rural England - and there may even be an evolutionary selection according to attitudes taking place - where you will find more ignorance-based xenophobia.”

FWIW my impressions - based on living and working in four different regions in Britain, including London, my present home - are that the “social dynamics” of racism and xenophobia in Britain are very complex.

(1) London is a special case as it has always been more open than most other parts of Britain because of its size, the financial markets of the City and the port of London - which is why we still celebrate in pantomine the remarkable story of Dick Whittington from the 14th century: http://london.allinfo-about.com/features/dickwhit.html This is not to say racism doesn’t exist in London but it tends to be focused in particular professions or occupations and a few localities.

(2) Consider this from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

“The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.”

Similar attitudes persist even now in neighbourhoods with entrenched working class cultures, which is why Britain rated 21 out of 24 OECD countries for staying on rates in full-time education after 17. One outcome is hostility towards: (a) immigrants who compete in the unskilled part of labour markets in regions with high unemployment rates and limited job markets, and (b) ethnic cultures which esteem education as most asian cultures do. Several commentators have drawn parallels between the cultures of jews who came to settle in Britain around 1900 to escape the pogroms of mainland Europe and asian settlers who came in the 1960s and 1970s.

(3) Your comparison with rural areas is likely to be statistically biased. Rural England and small towns tend notoriously to be wary of incomers. Consider this example of parochial chauvinism from Orwell again:

“A year or two ago a friend of mine, brought up in the south but now living in the north, was driving me through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village. He glanced disapprovingly at the cottages and said: ‘Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but Yorkshiremen are splendid chaps. Down here it’s just the other way about - beautiful villages and rotten people. All the people in those cottages are worthless, absolutely worthless.’ I couldn’t help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that village. No, he did not know them . . .”

(4) As The Economist of 9 Aug commented, after WW2 London’s population (along with most other cities) shrank and went on shrinking until the 1990s when it grew: “Foreigners are moving in, and Britons are moving out, faster than at any time on record.” We can only speculate as to why. Monday’s Telegraph reported that many out-movers took advantage of the booming London housing market to cash in and move to lower priced property in rural areas in pursuit of the rustic idyll - and to places with much lower settlement by ethnic minorities who tend to be drawn to cities with larger labour markets. The Telegraph also reported that many who moved out are now trying to move back to London having lost their taste for rural living. . .: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/22/nrural22.xml

Isn’t the point that, at least since the end of hunting and gathering type societies and nomadic tribalism there never have been monocultural societies, so there really isn’t anything to go back to. This idea is really a naustalgic invention of nationalism, which is a modern phenomen.

“likely follow the 3-generation (American) pattern of integration:”

Patrick, I agree completely, indeed this is even very clear with the grandchildren of Andalusian immigrants here in Catalonia. The fathers continued to support real madrid, but the 3rd generation speak Catalan and are almost all fanatics for Bar?a. Of course they feel Spanish-Catalans, but unless you’re a purist nationalist, where’s the problem here.Place of birth is also important, my wife’s brother was born in Valencia, he came to Barcelona when he was three, and he continues to feel very Spanish, my wife was born in Barcelona, and she feels completely Catalan. At the same time the second generation is where the greatest tensions arise, born ‘here’ but belonging ‘there’.

And what doesn’t happen in the third happens in the fourth.

On the part of all my four grandparents I’m Celtic, but celtic seems to have been a culture not a race. I guess that makes us the largest ’stateless minority’ in the EU. Equally I don’t feel any special desire to cling to hard to this identity. I’m happy to become a mongrel.

“Another curiosity is places in Britain - and I’ve lived and worked in a few - where any migrants are regarded with suspicion”

Nice point Bob. My brother moved back to my grandad’s village a few years back. He left the area - as a migrant - in the late 19th century, but before that we can find parish records of the family going back several hundred years. Still he is treated as an ‘outsider’ by people who arrived only a generation ago. All this just has to be bunk.

“The big difference between now and the days of classical American immigrantion”

The classical American immigration was almost entirely European. But there are Irish, Greek, Italian etc Americans from this generation. Being Armerican or being Europena doesn’t mean giving up all other areas of your identity. But on the more recent US migration, the studies I’ve seen on the ‘Latinos’ seems to suggest that the situation is repeating itself. Terra-Lycos is an example of a business project based on trying to benefit from the ‘Spanish speaking’ dimension and it failed completely.

“reasons to suspect that things have changed”

This may also of course be true. Do ‘bloggers’ have a nation, or are we another stateless, non-geographical community. Castells is very good on the trans-national communities (and check out Vertovec if you don’t know him). This is all evolving and no-one knows where this is going. Bulgaria, for example, seems to be disintegrating, and I have jokingly described the Bulgarians as the first ‘virtual country’ since the young Bulgarians are everywhere except in Bulgaria. But I still think after the third generation things will change…….but it does depend on the relations between virtual and physical in our social structure.

“insisting on wearing Islamic scarves at school, very much as an affirmation of their cultural and religious identity”

these are very definite second generation - neither from here nor from there - phenomena. Frans is right to point out that people fear what they do not know, but the fear is on both sides. That’s why talking is important.

“the public debate that Sikh turbans caused”

We had this in the UK in the 60’s about driving buses, and then the motor cycle helmets. Fortunately this all seems well behind us. (BTW I don’t buy the ‘British working man’ bit. I was born in Liverpool just after WWII, there was a black population from the time of slavery, and they were completely ostracised. I am proud to be able to say that I was the first person I knew who entered the house of a member of this community. I was a young student outside the house of commons in 68 protesting Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech when we were charged by a group of extremely violent east London dockers who were there to support Powell. Ten years ago I met a group of recycled ‘dockers’ after the Thatcher years down here in Barcelona. Their attitudes on this and many other questions were very different. Or I look at the Man United football supporters in the metro when they come for a match here, obviously there is still racism, but the world has changed a lot. I would say it is in the pubs of rural England - and there may even be an evolutionary selection according to attitudes taking place - where you will find more ignorance-based xenophobia.

David, the situation with population genetics is a bit more complicated. We are different, but you can’t deduce anything important from this. Try Cavalli Sforza for a nice explanation of what seems to be the modern consensus, and Matt Ridley’s ‘genome’ for a well-informed critique of any simplistic theory of genetic reductionism. Abiola and I probably look very different. So what. Vive la Difference.

What kind of Europe do we want. One where you can have a European passport, and no-one can make any assumptions about what colour eyes and skin you have, what your religion is, what kind of food you eat or what kind of music you listen to. Free and inclusive.

They can there find:

“The pattern of people entering and leaving the United Kingdom changed over the 20th century. There was a net loss due to international migration during the first three decades of the 20th century and again during the 1960s and 1970s. However, since 1983 there has been net migration into the United Kingdom.”

In table 1.11, the estimated total population of Britain (that’s excluding Northern Ireland) in 2000-1 was 57.1 million, of whom 53 million were white.

Btw about half of all the ethnic minorities in Britain live in London, which is hugely cosmopolitan and also rated as being one of the most prosperous regions in all Europe in terms of GDP per head. Taken all together, ethnic minorities are estimated to comprise about 30% of London’s population. The local superstores I visit to buy groceries look like the united nations out shopping. It is not unusual to overhear Japanese being spoken or the Chinese dialects and mainland European lanuages or to see ladies dressed in full burqas. The people serving at checkouts must come from every continent on earth. I occasionally visit one huge superstore nearby which specialises in Chinese and east Asian foods. It would be an unusual day if I did not see groups or couples walking along, out shopping or playing in the parks where the individuals plainly come from different ethnic origins. No one bothers about this.

You are using language of a temper that a skilled debator would not require. Perhaps you would benefit your own case by a little moderatation.

I don’t know what your professional standing is. But if you have one I am astonished that you consider the eminent and influential psychologists I have mentioned, these being Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, the late Richard Hernnstein, Philipe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as “a bunch of fringe kook researchers.” I would ask readers to google each and check a few facts. You, too, Abiola, apparently.

Ziska,

I didn’t know that about Boas. Thank you. We can only speculate what effect on his mentality the inherent separateness of a jewish upbringing gave him, or how he would have developed under different circumstances. What we do know now, following the 2002 investigation by Sparks and Jantz of his 1910 figures on head sizes, is that Boas’ findings are nowhere in the original data. It is either the most extraordinary error or he simply made them up. Either way, social anthropology in general and environmentalism and anti-racism in particular have feet of clay.

The same applies to those strands of the post-war marxian left that took to abstracting group dominance from culture. They drew from social anthropology the confirmations required to go beyond a purely class analysis and to insert race into the equasion (one should remember that Karl Marx was himself a racist and didn’t even believe in equality with the Irish). This is the context in which Boas ties in to the marxian development of racial equality.

The point of all this is that multiculturalism is not as well founded as its proponents wish to believe. This is true of its intellectual foundation and, in my own judgement, also of its acceptance among white European hosts.

Finally, two questions to Abiola …

What percentage of non-whites do you think should obtain among the populations of Europe before the growth of the non-white element is limited? And how on earth would you do it?

The question is what kind of conclusions we draw from this, particularly for public policy. Very sensibly, many developing countries screen routinely for sickle-cell anaemia at birth. The affirmative-action policies advocated and practised in America depend on making ethnic distinctions. Curiously, those most incensed by the Jensen-Eysenck academic papers associating racial groups with IQ attainment also tend to be those most disposed to promote and defend affirmative action programmes. This is not something I understand.

Least you suppose I’m staking out a case for white supremacy, there is a district in the north of England I could mention which is hostile to incoming settlers from anywhere. It is one of those places where the second person singular - “tha” as a general substitute for thou, thee, thine - still survives in the local vernacular. Results recently published from the 2001 census show the local population to be 99.1% white. The district regularly features near the bottom of the schools league table for England based on school leaving exam results. It seems difficult to resist concluding that settlement there by immigrants could only improve educational standards. Indeed, I have met math teachers from inner city areas who say incoming ethnic asian children certainly improve math standards in classes.

Whether we attribute this to genetic or cultural differences is arguable but there is mounting evidence that different ethnic groups in Britain do show differences in average attainment in school leaving exams in which children from indigenous backgrounds do not show up particularly well.

I’m no expert and Abiola or someone would do a better job, but here’s my understanding of the current science:

Dividing people into negroid, caucausian, mongol has nothing to do with genetics. A black african might (with no caucasian ancestors) might very well be more closely related, genetically speaking, to me than to another black african. There are no accepted ways of assigning small populations to larger categories.

Differences between various small populations are fairly minimal too. There not a lot of genetic doiversity in our species. Talking about races is not warranted.

We do not find it objectionable, even if it is disconcerting, to discover Japan and SKorea regularly feature at or near the top of most international league tables of attainment by students at school. In England, by reports several studies show various ethnic Asian groups achieve better results on average in school leaving exams than do students from the indigenous white population. We also know that the percentage of single parent households with children is unusually high among ethnic caribbeans compared with other ethnic groups.

The question is what conclusions can we reasonably draw from these statistical associations. I don’t claim to be thoughly familiar with the vast professional literature on nature versus nurture but have the impression that the extent to which measurable personal characteristics are attributable to genetic factors remains unresolved. Genetic factors are certainly a significant influence, perhaps a predominant influence, and may set upper bounds, but no one is denying that environmental factors or nurture also count. There is also the question as to what significance we attach to having a high IQ beyond the ability to perform well at IQ tests.