Barrel Strength

I sent a letter to Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail. This was the article in question. An exposition at the Royal Ontario Museum on Darwin could not find corporate sponsorship. Wente concluded that new scientific findings on the biological bases of sex, race and character difference were as offensive to liberal dogmas as evolution is to the creationists.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinions/columnists/Margaret+Wente.html

Dear Mrs Wente:

Your article on Darwin in this Saturday’s Globe was well taken.  The implications of modern research for notions of equality, race, intelligence, character and crime are extremely challenging for those who have believed that only the structures of society prevent the achievement of equality, and engender racism/sexism/nationalism.

For my part, I find the concept of political equality to have a religious or moral basis, not a factual one. I do not think that if, for instance, group A was on average stupider than group B, that that fact would necessarily diminish the rights of group A vis-a-vis group B. Yet, conversely, those who predicate political equality in factual equality always seem to give the impression they think that political inequality would be an inevitable consequence of genetic inequality. It seems to me to be a matter of choice by us about how we want to live.

So if overseas Chinese or Japanese have average IQs of 104 and Caucasians in North America have IQs average IQs of 98-99, does this mean white people should have lesser political rights? Absurd. Yet the intransigence with which arguments like those in  “The Bell Curve” are attacked would seem to envision just such a thing. The smart have enough advantages over the stupid without needing different and more extensive political rights.

It would be daring for anyone to argue the contrary. Yet without facing the question squarely, the egalitarian party seems to assume its truth.

The vast amount of new information coming at us from the life sciences will serve to dispel the notions that have been promulgated endlessly through the sociology, women’s studies, anthropology and other special-interest departments of universities: that only political arrangements need to be change, and can be changed, to institute the perfect society, as the professors conceive it.

I keep  thinking that people should not be allowed to graduate from university without having read considerably into human evolutionary thinking. Yet they do.

I recommend for your entertainment “Before the Dawn” by Nicholas Wade, science editor for the New York Times. In the same vein I also highly recommend Geoffrey Miller’s “The Mating Mind”, which delves into the implications of Darwin’s second major theory, sexual selection. Only sexual selection is directed, efficient, and rapid enough for  us to have emerged in the last 100,000 years from hunter-gatherers in Africa to correspondents on the Internet in North America. And what does sexual selection this mean for feminism? It means each sex - though not each person of that sex- is pretty much as the other sex wants them to be. Every birth represents selection for the next generation. Evolution is happening now. (Wade’s book gets into this).

This reminds me of my pet hobby-horse: everyone writes about evolution as if Darwin had not written his second major book on sexual selection: “The Descent of Man, or Selection in Relation to Sex” (circa 1872). We are all selecting each other all the time, roughly speaking. All of which is scary but is handled normally by the bringing up of children and the values parents impart to them about life, marriage, and breeding, which in free societies children follow or ignore as they see fit.

A very well directed article. Nice to see something so un-PC in the Globe and Mail.

With best wishes

Dalwhinnie