Hope clouds observation--for the Right and Left alike

Man-caused global warming, if acknowledged fully, would severely crimp the short-term profits of many very large corporations--along with the lifestyle of the average American.

So it doesn't exist. Not for those corporations and right-wing Americans at least.

Evolution, if acknowledged fully, would mean that important scriptural works like the Bible and the Q'uran must be taken figuratively, not literally.

So it doesn't exist--not for fundamentalists at least. And that's a majority of Americans.

The overpopulation crisis, if acknowledged fully, would lead to all nations adopting China's One Child policy, providing every form of birth control to everyone with no questions asked--including abortion--as well as leading to a poorer lifestyle for everyone in graying rich country populations, as well as leading to a disproportionate need to reduce nonwhite populations on the whole, for exigent reasons. 

So it doesn't exist--not for doctrinaire right wingers, due to the abortion aspect and the lifestyle crimp aspect--and not for doctrinaire left wingers, due to the nonwhite aspect leaving one open to accusations of racism.

President Obama's intelligence and discipline have been obvious and repeatedly demonstrated for decades. But he's a black man. And black men are not intelligent--not if you're an angry old white man of the Southern persuasion.

So the President's intelligence doesn't exist. Remember all the right wing japes about him only being clever when he had a teleprompter? Not to mention all the other nonsense they've said about his smarts. 

Race makes racism possible. But racism is wrong. So race doesn't exist. At least not if you're a doctrinaire leftist. 

I was thinking about that last one yesterday when the NY Times published a longish essay by a philosophy professor about how race is a "social construct" yada yada.

Hundreds comments mostly agreed with the good professor, blathering endlessly about how there's no such thing as race.

Here's my comment, which you can see in the thread near the end:

The Republican Party's hostility to both science and scientific thought is so blatant and widespread that's it's easy to overlook the ways in which doctrinaire Leftists show the same character defect.

What I glean from this article and most of the comments is how easy it is to get a Liberal Arts college degree without learning even the rudiments of science. Instead we see smug academic parochialism.

Race is a feature of every kind of living organism, not just people. It's the first step towards speciation--the way in which evolution leads to a different species, genus, family, order, class, and even phylum. The human species started out as a race of proto-hominid that evolved into a separate species--ours--which then spread out and started to subdivide, in the same way that other species of organisms do--through geographical and/or ecological isolation, with differing evolutionary pressures on each isolated gene pool. 

Only two kinds of people deny that human beings are living creatures that evolved like other living creatures: religious fundamentalists and liberals--strange bedfellows indeed.

You can't deny that there are human races unless you also deny that there are different races of, say, corn, or cats, or malaria. Yet no one in this thread has talked about our species in the context of the rest of Earth's biosphere.

A Liberal Arts BA needs to include far better grounding in science and critical thinking in general.

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I added some details about just what "race" means scientifically as a response to another comment in the thread:

 The evolution of one species of living organism into two or more starts with gene pools of that species becoming geographically and/or ecologically isolated (eating different kinds of foods, for example), leading to that species developing into different races, as any introductory biology course would teach.

Thus Orientals and Caucasians differentiated from common stock in western Asia roughly 50,000 years ago, when the former moved east and the latter, west. Orientals had to evolve adaptations to the harsh winters of the central Asian steppes, including the epicanthic fold, while Caucasians had to evolve lighter skin so they could still synthesize Vitamin D under the cloudy skies of western Europe.

Racial differentiation usually continues to the point where individuals from the isolated groups can no longer produce fertile offspring when they try to interbreed. This process is called speciation.

For example, horses and donkeys--different species of the same genus--can reproduce but the offspring (mules/hinnies) are not fertile. In time, in the natural environment, their descendants would no longer be able to produce any offspring at all--as is now the case with their more distant cousins the tapirs and rhinoceroses.

How anyone with a college education might imagine that homo sapiens is exempt from these evolutionary processes, to which all other living organisms are subject, is beyond me.

Racism isn't exactly racism

As a scuba diver I should have realized this: racism isn't racism.

It's actually a natural part of speciation--the way in which one species of animal or plant divides into different races, then into different species (more on this later).

Our race has outgrown the need for what we call racism, but treating it as innately evil is a big mistake.

You can't "cure" people of a natural trait, nor can you stamp it out with moralizing and accusations. Those can shut people up--but they'll keep on muttering the things you don't want them to say, and they'll say them out loud to like-minded people, while using cover terms with you that give them plausible deniability.

Thus "keep the Negro down" morphs into "states' rights" and a devotion to "limited government." And that makes it triply hard to do anything about it, even when proponents of these things don't hesitate to trample on states' rights and aggressively expand government when it suits them.

So first we have to understand just what racism/speciation is.

Basically, it's the way in which a new part of a species consolidates whatever evolutionary advantage that caused the new race to develop in the first place. Humans are visual animals, so the differences we use are mainly visual. A scent-oriented species would focus more on differences in smell.

Suppose some members of some animal species start to exploit a new ecological niche. I'll illustrate this with a neutral example, from another species.

The Namib desert beetle was originally a black beetle, and it still is across most of southern Africa's Namib desert. The beetle's black shell enables it to crawl out into the sunlight at dawn and warm up quickly (remember, insects are cold-blooded). It goes about its business until the heat of the day, when it hides from the sun and takes a siesta to avoid overheating. In the late afternoon it comes out again, and uses its dark shell to stay active as late as possible.

But some of these beetles wound up living on the coastal strand of the Namib desert. There the noonday heat isn't so hot. There a beetle with a light-colored shell can stay active through the heat of the day, which more than makes up for them having to wait longer to get going in the morning (because the light shell doesn't absorb heat so well).
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Where what we call racism comes in is how did each Namib beetle race "fix" its geographical advantage? Speciation works not just from isolation, but from the speciating races coming to prefer their own kind when it comes to mating. That preference preserves the advantage. Otherwise you'd get a mid-hued beetle that's inferior to the white and black phases in each one's ecological niche.

I brought up my experience as a scuba diver because tropical coral reefs are the richest, most diverse habitats on this planet. And it has become clear that the wild color and fin variations among similar races/species aren't just mating displays--they help those races/species preserve the advantages they have in each one's ecological niche.

That advantage doesn't have to have anything to do with the differentiator. Thus one butterfly fish might have a longer snout but a smaller mouth, letting it get at prey in crevices that others can't reach. However, its color/fin scheme could be what helps males and females find each other.

And once two races become reproductively separated, they progress to becoming actual different species--i.e., the different species don't produce fertile offspring if they mate with each other. A horse can breed with a donkey, but the resulting mule or hinny is sterile, and so take no part in evolution.

The trick with the human species is that we've been around long enough--perhaps 100,000 years--to divide into different races and subraces, each adapted to a different environment, but not long enough for those races to become different species. And once we started adapting the environment to ourselves instead of vice versa, and started flying all over the place, the process of speciation stalled, and will probably never occur now, although we keep evolving at a microscopic level.

So--racism is really just an aspect of speciation. It isn't immoral or moral. It's an evolutionary holdover designed to keep, for example, the Oriental's epicanthic fold over their eyes and flatter nose and thicker, coarser hair, all to protect their eyes and faces and heads from the incredibly harsh winters on the steppes of central Asia. These adaptations to nothing to help a Han Chinese in Shanghai or an Indonesian living on the equator, but they stick around because the adaptations don't reduce their effectiveness elsewhere either.

Whereas Oriental skin tone does vary from Siberia to the equator, because that does make a difference. Though now there are light-skinned Han Chinese living in equatorial Sulawesi. They just use lots of sunblock.

You might ask why, then, is there so much plastic surgery done in Asia to make Orientals look more Caucasian; why Tehran is the world nose job capital; why the first black millionaires in America made their fortunes from skin lighteners and hair straighteners; why there are more bottle blondes of every race than real blondes. And why so many mixed-race marriages occur.

The answer is that the human mind is flexible. You can find individuals who go against the tide about almost everything. Also, there's an additional human trait, which pushes against incest (children never fall in love with parents they were raised with, nor siblings), and towards exogamy (hybrid vigor--visit Pitcairn Island and you'll understand).

It's also possible that blondes are regarded as prettier for biological reasons we don't fully understand. The zoologist Desmond Morris has some interesting speculations about this in his book "the Naked Woman."

Racism is speciation. It exists, and its universal, not just among humans, but among most if not all living organisms. For humans it's also obsolete (unless we start colonizing other planets with really different conditions). But the way past it isn't enraged accusations of immorality. At worst the racists are just atavistic. Mainly it's an educational challenge.

That still leaves us with about 20% of Americans unable to admit that President Obama is a smart guy (independent of whether you agree with his policies), solely because of his skin color.

We just have to keep patiently pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. Or, if you share my mischievous streak, you could try to explain to fundamentalists (as most of them are) that they're just being Darwinian when they do this.