What are the responsibilities of geneticists?

Still works. Just replace “philosophy” with “genetics”

Janet Stemwedel has published an essay in Scientific American. It’s good. You should go read it. It’s also on a subject that I, someone who teaches genetics to college students, worry about. All you have to do is look at racists on the internet, or any of those gomers of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, and you’ll find them chattering away about their version of genetics, citing genetics papers they’ve read or glanced at, but barely understand, and drawing sweeping, and unlikely, conclusions from, for instance, GWAS studies. We’re all so interested in what we can do that we aren’t cautious enough about saying what we can’t do, and what are the invalid interpretations that can trap people searching for genetic certainty in their genomes.

She has some strong suggestions.

For one thing, they [scientists] must be frank and vocal about the weakness of studies that purport to find correlations between race and differences in traits like intelligence or propensity violence. This includes methodological weaknesses like treating IQ as a good proxy for intelligence, or treating “race” as something with clear genetic grounding. A finding that particular genes or sets of genes are associated with a complex behavior does not demonstrate a causal relation or rule out the importance of environmental factors—and indeed, the assumption that genes and environment vary independently is usually false. An average difference in a trait associated with a set of genes between two populations does not rule out that the individual variations within those populations may be greater than the average difference between populations. All of which is to say it’s hard to draw conclusions that are strong, clear and well-supported from much of this work. To the extent that race science is just bad science, scientists have a duty to call it out, rather than letting it stand unchallenged.

I’ve been thinking that I ought to incorporate one of Richard Lewontin’s books into my genetics class — something like It Ain’t Necessarily So : The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, maybe. The catch is that in a traditional genetics course, we have an obligation to teach the core concepts, and taking time to teach about how genetics is misused is sometimes premature.

For another thing, scientists must do some soul-searching about why they are so motivated to look for evidence that traits like intelligence or propensity to violence are written in our genes, or that they would be different for people in different racial groups. Of all the bits of truth they could discover about our complex world, why this focus? Could it be that scientists are following their preexisting hunches, biases that come from being humans living in a culture built around those biases—or that funders are seeking scientific validation for their biases? Any scientist who dismisses this possibility has forgotten that objectivity requires the communal project of scrutinizing scientific conclusions to find how they might be mistaken.

I’ve got a few awful books on my bookshelf, often written by evolutionary psychologists, that make me wonder about the mental state of the authors. They have some grand theory about human behavior that I know can’t possibly be backed up by significant genetics research, but apparently the public wants that nice pat answer to explain why everything is the way it is.

Also, a lot of those kinds of books seem to be written by professors of marketing. Seriously, if you see a book that purports to be about biology, and the author is employed in a business school, don’t waste your time. Which leads into Stemwedel’s next point…

There’s a further question scientists ought to ask themselves when reflecting on why they study the scientific questions they do: What will the knowledge I’m building be good for? How could it be put to use? Do scientists imagine that a finding of genetic differences in intelligence among racial groups would be used to drive more school funding to Black and brown communities, or as a justification to focus school funding on white communities? Or that a finding of genetic differences in propensity for violence among racial groups would be used to do anything but double down on current overpolicing of communities of color?

In the case of James Watson, for example, I think he’s made a career of trying to buttress evidence that he is an intrinsically superior person. They didn’t call him Lucky Jim for nothing — he stumbled into a major discovery, and I wonder if he wonders what might have made him so fortunate. It can’t possibly be that anyone with the right training could have done it, so he finds a refuge in the fact that he’s Scots-Irish. Others know that the status quo has treated them well, so they want to perpetuate what is currently a racist society for the benefit of themselves and their children. Others, I think, are so steeped in a culture of racial bias that they don’t even think about it — black people must be inferior, so let’s search for a rationalization for holding what is an odious belief.

It’s probably a messy mix of all of those things, and more. I’m pretty sure that if genetics has broad fuzzy edges that psychology is probably even worse.

Behold, the new Republican defense against accusations of racism

You see, if you don’t count their attitudes towards black and brown people, they aren’t racist at all!

“About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear. Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”

We could flip that argument around. The aggregate maternal mortality rate for white and black people is so bad that Louisiana is one of the worst states to be pregnant in…and if you don’t count the privileged white people, the rate is even worse, and tells us that Louisiana is a hell hole for black women.

What crimes were committed in your neighborhood?

There’s a dark blot covering my house in this map.

That map is from a report from the Department of the Interior discussing the long, ugly history of Indian boarding schools. It’s 100 pages long, but you can get a summary here.

The findings show from 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 federal schools across 37 states, some territories at that time, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven schools in Hawai’i. Some of these schools operated across multiple sites. The list includes religious mission schools that received federal support, however, government funding streams were complex therefore, all religious schools receiving federal, Indian trust and treaty funds are likely not included. The final list of Indian boarding schools will surely grow as the investigation continues. For instance, the number of Catholic Indian boarding schools receiving direct funding alone is at least 113 according to records at the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions.

It’s appalling. This country engaged in cultural genocide, and we’re only beginning to document what these places were like, often prompted by the discovery of unmarked graves on the sites. (I’ve seen memos from my university that they are going to search the site of the Indian boarding school on campus, but I haven’t seen much action yet). Basically, though, these weren’t schools so much as prisons for children.

The first volume of the report highlights some of the harsh conditions children endured at the schools. Children’s Indigenous names were changed to English names; children’s hair were cut; the use of their Native languages, religions and cultural practices were discouraged or prevented; and the children were organized into units to perform military drills.

The report cites findings from the 1928 Meriam report in which the Interior acknowledged “frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.

How inadequate?

Examples included descriptions of accommodations at select boarding schools such as the White Earth Boarding school in Minnesota where two children slept in one bed, the Kickapoo Boarding School in Kansas where three children shared a bed and the Rainy Mountain Boarding School in Oklahoma where, “single beds pushed together so closely to preclude passage between them and each bed has two or more occupants.”

The 1969 Kennedy Report, cited in the Department investigation, noted that rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse: disease; malnourishment; overcrowding,; and lack of health care at Indian boarding schools are well-documented.

It also found schools focused on “manual labor and vocational skills that left American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian graduates with employment options often irrelevant to the industrial U.S. economy, further disrupting Tribal economies.”

I can understand why the Republicans want to shush every mention of race from our history books, because racism seems to have been the primary operating principle of of the United States government since the moment of its inception. All that talk of “liberty” and “freedom” and “equality”, but the unspoken modifier was “for white people only.”

There are a lot of maps in the full report. You should take a look to see if your house is covered with a dark blot.

The bigotry is leaking in everywhere

I’ve long struggled with what to think of Richard Dawkins, once a hero, now a muddled old man. Here is a revealing tweet (I also think he uses Twitter as a shooting range, with his foot as the main target), in which he praises Douglas Murray, of all people.

I have not read any of Murray’s books, I’ve started a few of his shorter articles and given up at the pain, and I’ve listened to a few of his interviews on video. I have never seen the reason for his popularity among a certain sector, except that he’s very good at putting a shiny semi-scholarly sheen on some very bad and bigoted ideas, and his anti-immigrant position is popular among conservatives. Here’s a devastating follow-up tweet:

Yikes. Do I ever want to read anything by Murray ever again? No I do not. He’s probably going to get more face-time with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris, though.

Jesus. The West, the West, the West. What is it? What is he trying to defend? He sure does hate and fear immigrants, or “the developing world” which is invading/assaulting “the developed world”, not recognizing that if any assault has been going on, it’s been in the other direction, for centuries. And there on the first page of his book, he has to misrepresent his critics: “they” (leftists? communists? the Jews? This is just bad writing, invoking vague boogeymen) talk about equality but don’t support equal rights, talk about anti-racism but are racist themselves, “they” equate justice with revenge. This “they” seem to be a really confusing grab bag of miscellaneous weirdos, and I come away with the sense that “they” are just a faceless, amorphous straw man on which the reader can slap any resentments they might have.

The kicker is the excerpt from the Buffalo mass murderer’s manifesto. Yeah, that guy, the white man who charged into a grocery store with an assault rifle to gun down black people.

Yikes. The West, the West, the West. The mischaracterization of Leftists: they hate the West for its crimes, but love the “socialist countries” who do the same thing. And it’s all at the bidding of George Soros, the Jew.

You know, I haven’t read any books by Soros, nor any articles, and I’ve never viewed any videos of him. I haven’t the remotest idea what he sounds like, and barely recognize his face, and only because I’ve seen caricatures of him drawn by Nazi wannabes — if I passed him on the street, I wouldn’t give him a second glance. Yet somehow, he is our master.

Apparently, though, the murderous asshole’s manifesto goes on at length about “the great replacement”, which is the same garbage Tucker Carlson rants about.

Somehow, Richard Dawkins, who always votes Left, has found himself in the same camp as Douglas Murray, Tucker Carlson, and the Buffalo murderer. If I were him, it’s at this point, if not earlier, I’d stop and ask myself, “could I be wrong?” (Wait a minute, I did question my association with a community of bad actors about a decade ago, and got out quick, but maybe not quick enough.)

These are not good arguments against “wokeism”

What do you get when a gang of far-right loons gather together to complain about modern medicine? An amazingly revealing expose of what actually bothers them. This essay, In Medical Schools, Woke Ideology Trumps True Healthcare, is a summary of a discussion sponsored by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a far right conservative/libertarian organization that tries to tell universities what they ought to do, and they hosted a little group of conservative nuisances to whine about medical schools.

The webinar, entitled “Hypocritical Oath: The Origins and Consequences of Woke Medical Education,” featured Dr. Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist, lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute [enough said]; Aaron Sibarium, associate editor at the Washington Free Beacon [a conservative website founded by a billionaire hedge fund investor]; and John Sailer, a research associate at the National Association of Scholars [I’ve written about these clowns before] and author of numerous articles on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in medical education.

Oh, no! Not the “Wokes” again! Perhaps they’ll start out by defining what they mean by “woke”.

Satel began the talk by speaking about how woke ideology has taken over psychiatric care. She stated, “any kind of psychotherapy that takes place under such conditions, where patients are reflexively branded as oppressed and encouraged to see themselves as feeble victims, is doomed to fail.” She made the point that therapy is meant to help individuals identify the inadvertent ways in which they undermine their best interests and how they can adapt if they are unable to change. To be sure, one’s health can be affected by social factors—but not exclusively. There are other factors that impact health, despite the new social doctrine of the day.

No, that’s not what it means. I agree that any psychotherapy that reflexively branded as oppressed and encouraged to see themselves as feeble victims their patients is going to fail, but that’s not what goes on. Can you imagine trying to motivate a mass movement under the banner of “YOU’RE ALL FEEBLE VICTIMS!” Sorry, nope, being conscious of oppressive social systems is not the same as accepting victimhood.

She also parrots the conservative/libertarian line about personal responsibility.

The choices one makes on a daily basis, for example, have long-term effects on health. Satel highlighted an often ignored fact: individuals, no matter their circumstances, still have some agency when it comes to their own health. Unfortunately, the concept of individual agency has slowly withered away, replaced by the far more popular victimhood ideology. In today’s victimhood society, it is almost unthinkable to take responsibility for one’s actions and the possible negative effects they may have.

Sure, personal responsibility is important. So why can’t rich entitled folks acknowledge their personal responsibility for denying others civil rights, or a living wage, or some measure of security in housing and food? Everyone has some agency, but we also have an unequal distribution of privilege and ability. We have “some” agency, but we also have “some” unfair societal biases. Sally Satel does not work harder than someone in an Amazon warehouse, and “personal responsibility” isn’t going to pay your medical bills.

Sailer spoke next about how institutional policy has resulted in woke medical schools. He noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has twenty-four paid DEI officers, and half of these officers are in fields related to healthcare (12), and a majority of those are in the medical school (8). The university, as a result, has convened a task force to integrate social justice into the curriculum. Sailer says these kinds of policies and task forces are present on almost all medical campuses in the country.

DEI and social justice, for example, are now a part of the tenure and promotion process at many medical schools. This means that if one objects to the politically correct idea of the day, one’s job as a professor may be in jeopardy. Objective truths such as, “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman,” may now cause faculty to lose their jobs.

Whoa there, John. You forgot to tell us why diversity and equality and social justice are bad things for doctors to learn about. Why shouldn’t we expect a doctor to care about the health and welfare of their patients? Shouldn’t doctors oppose unhealthy working and living conditions?

Also, you’re being sneaky and dishonest, John. a man is a man, and a woman is a woman is only an objective truth if you’ve clearly defined what you mean by the complex terms “woman” and “man”, and I suspect you’re trying to smuggle in some bigotry.

Sailer also spoke about the White Coats for Black Lives group and its beliefs. Its members believe in a variety of radical notions including, but not limited to: dismantling fatphobia, abolishing prisons, dismantling capitalism, and queer/trans liberation. What is remarkable is the effectiveness with which this radical group has enacted concrete policy changes, including at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Davis, the University of Minnesota, and many others.

Yes? Again, what is your objection to dismantling fatphobia? Do you think we should build more prisons? Do you fail to see the glaring flaws in capitalism? What do you want, queer/trans imprisonment? Sailer is simply taking for granted that his audience opposes these things that humane people with the goal of making the world better are trying to implement. Just like his “a man is a man” statement is just a call for bigots to fill in the blanks.

I look at the list of things these anti-“wokists” oppose, and they all look like fine ideas to me, and they always fail to explain why they’re agin’ ’em. What’s wrong with queer/trans liberation? What are they afraid will happen if queer people have equal rights and autonomy and are protected from discrimination and hate? It’s the unspoken stuff behind their words that is most revealing.

Please, medical schools, continue to make it a priority to train doctors to be ethical human beings who respect the existence of others. That’s what “woke” really means, you know.

Worst school mascot ever

My god, even their Indian mascot looks awfully white. My high school’s mascot was the Kent-Meridian Royals, and even he (a European-looking guy in a crown*) didn’t look as stereotypically white as that guy.

It’s been 50 years, and no one noticed? That this Texas high school called their drill team the “Indianettes” should have been a big flag on that.

The Indianettes have been a PN-G tradition for more than 50 years. This year, the drill team is made of 54 members and will march with the band during half time. Members participate in many activities all year long, including summer camp, pep rallies, and half time performances during football season, and basketball performances, competitions, and spring show in the second semester. Tryouts are held in the spring of each year for sophomores and juniors.

They had to go to Florida, of all places, before anyone perked up and said, “HEY! That’s hella racist!”

The company’s Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, apologized Friday after a performance from a Texas high school’s drill team was laden with Native American stereotypes, including repeated chants of “scalp them!” It came just days after the company faced intense backlash over its silence to Florida’s controversial sex education bill, labeled by many critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

How could this possibly be the first time anyone called this flamingly racist act out?

Now follows the usual pro forma disclaimer.

The company [Disney] told the Associated Press the performance, done by Port Neches-Grove High School’s “Indianettes” drill team on Tuesday, “did not reflect our core values, and we regret it took place.” It claimed the performance did not match the audition tape sent by the school to the park’s organizers.

Every time one of these kinds of bigoted displays are put on, someone has to come out all wide-eyed and tell us that gosh, that didn’t reflect our values. Except that it did.

That’s Disney, expressing surprise that someone said something racist in their park. What about the school district itself? Platitudes.

“We are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our school district,” it said in a statement. “Our district is nearing 100 years old, and our Board of Trustees is committed to always making the best decisions for our students, staff, and the communities of Port Neches and Groves.”

They’re old, y’all. If we can expect old people to have bigoted attitudes, that of course means we should allow old institutions to do likewise. Don’t you know they’re committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion? If they say it enough, that makes it so.

I thought that surely there must have been some prior push-back for such a blatantly racist chant, so I checked. There is an Association of Indian Athletes at the school! I wonder what they think of it. Except…

AIA, the ASSOCIATION of INDIAN ATHLETES, is a community service organization for female athletes. This group allows freshman-senior female athletes to join as a united front and give back to the community that gives them so much support during their individual seasons.

Oh. It’s not a group made up of Native American students at all. It’s a collection of mostly white female students who call themselves “Indians”, because that’s the school mascot. Yikes. It just gets ickier and ickier the deeper you dig.

*Huh. I went looking, and it seems even that goofy looking king was too much for the school. The old mascot was retired, and now it’s a lion. Has Port Neches & Groves school considered changing theirs, too?

North Idaho. Enough said.

This woman does not believe you should define people by their race, but she carries a sign that says “proud white supremacist”, because white supremacist is synonymous with “patriot”.

No, it’s not.

She’s from Hayden Lake, by the way.

Minnesota-flavored racism

What a way to spread the reputation of your town. New Prague High School, a little place southwest of Minneapolis, hosted a girl’s basketball game, and the spectators started taunting the players from the Robbinsdale team.

Some people in a high school basketball crowd are being accused of taunting visiting players, many of whom are students of color, with monkey noises during a close game.

The racist chants happened at the girl’s basketball game between Robbinsdale Cooper and New Prague in New Prague Tuesday night, according to accounts.

One public Facebook post, shared more than 450 times, says some adults and students supporting the home New Prague team “started to make loud MONKEY NOISES,” directed at the Robbinsdale Cooper players, as the tightly contested game neared its end.

This seems to be a habit at New Prague.

Damian Johnson, head boy’s basketball coach at Benilde St.-Margaret’s and former Gopher, said on Twitter he “wasn’t surprised at all” to hear Williamson’s claims. He told Bring Me The News that during a Jan. 31 game between the Benilde and New Prague 9B teams, two girls in the stands referred to a Benilde player as a “monkey” while he shot free throws.

A player on the St. Louis Park boy’s hockey team said similar comments were made during the school’s game against New Prague this Tuesday. At least two New Prague players, he told Bring Me The News, called a student on the St. Louis Park team a “monkey” and told him to “go back to the 1860s” as that player was leaving the ice.

Other schools are responding strongly.

In a response to alleged racist taunts during a Feb. 15 high school boys hockey game, St. Louis Park will not compete in any contests against New Prague for at least until the end of the school year.

In an email to New Prague athletics director Brad Skogerboe sent on Monday, St. Louis Park AD Andrew Ewald said the ban “will continue until the harm that was caused is repaired and we are assured that any of our stakeholders, most importantly our students, will not be victimized by racism by any New Prague stakeholder in the future.”

But wait — that seems backward. The schools with black students are canceling their competitions with New Prague? Does that mean the racist high school wins in a forfeit? The penalty ought to be that New Prague is not allowed to compete. Further, apparently New Prague only recently applied to, and was accepted into, the West Metro conference. Kick them out. There’s no excuse for tolerating that kind of behavior.

Deplatforming works!

Remember Charles C. Johnson? No? There was a time a few years ago when he was the bad boy du jour, the awful far-right provocateur who was creeping all over social media, getting all kinds of attention, taunting and doxxing people, saying anything he felt like on social media to stir up responses. He even started a “news” site or two to peddle his brand of assholery.

Then he was banned on Twitter in 2015.

It’s like he fell off the planet after that. Sure, he tried a few more stunts, got a little attention now and then, but he wasn’t the raging viral infection he was in the early years of the 2010s. Milo Yiannopoulos should have been paying close attention, because he few years later he would be getting the same oxygen-deprivation treatment, and look where he is now, peddling gee-gaws on a militant Catholic YouTube show. I had completely forgotten Johnson myself — oh, the fickleness of internet fame — until I saw this clip on Twitter.

Blacks have a proclivity towards violence, and it’s driven by one gene, this MAOA variant that the Blacks have, Google it and do your own research. It’s all wrong, it’s fundamentally wrong, based on a few anecdotal level science papers that don’t even claim that the MAOA allele is causal, or that it’s unique to Black people. Johnson is not a scientist or science communicator. He’s barely qualified to tie his own shoes. And yet, there’s Joe Rogan, handing him a megaphone and letting him ramble on, only feebly asking, But could it really be true, though?. (In case were wondering, here’s a John Horgan article shredding the whole idea.)

That’s always been Joe Rogan’s job. He’s a popular, independent platform with a complete lack of responsibility, eager to promote the most odious trash without vetting anything. Johnson was at his peak, an attention-grabbing racist asshole, and that’s actually what made him attractive to Rogan. The time to ask But could it really be true, though? was before he brought on a liar like Johnson.

That clip, by the way, is one of hundreds that Spotify is now frantically deleting, including a multitude of cases where Rogan is happily using the N-word. People are now excavating all these clips of Rogan’s racism, like the one where he calls a Black neighborhood Planet of the Apes, which Spotify can’t touch — the internet doesn’t forget that sort of thing. And don’t forget the misogyny!

That guy on the left, who is telling his anecdotes about sexually harassing women at his comedy club, really ought to be in jail, rather than making Rogan guffaw and clap at the story of a woman being ruined.

Rogan ought to contemplate the fate of Charles C. Johnson, and Milo Yiannopoulos, all of their popularity demolished in a relative moment as more and more people used their own vileness, the tool they used to claw themselves to the top of the social media heap, to dash them down into the refuse heap of history. It happens fast on the internet, you know.

So that Second Amendment thing is kinda…flexible, huh?

Once again, the Minneapolis police flaunt their fascist behavior once again. Using a no-knock warrant, they burst into a person’s apartment in the early hours of the morning, and 9 seconds later, when a man stirs under his blanket and reveals that he has a gun, bang-bang-bang they shoot him dead. His name was Amir Locke. He was not named in the warrant. He was not associated with any criminal investigation. Maybe it was stupid to be sleeping with a gun, but the body-cam video shows a sleeping man abruptly awakened and disoriented, and killed within seconds. I guess that’s what a no-knock warrant is, permission to barge into someone’s home and murder the occupants.

The police statement is amazing.

An officer fired his duty weapon and the adult male suspect was struck. Officers immediately provided emergency aid and carried the suspect down to the lobby to meet paramedics, the report states. The suspect was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died.

Huffman tried to explain the police tactics used during the raid, stating that the footage shows the barrel of the gun from under the blanket forced the officers to make a split-second decision.

The chief also admitted that Locke was not named on the warrant the officers were executing—and said it was not immediately clear whether he had any connection to the original St. Paul homicide investigation that prompted the raid.

Boy, the passive voice is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. “An officer shot a man, killing him” would be a lot shorter and cleaner. They call him a suspect to make it sound like he was suspiciously bad, when he wasn’t a suspect in anything at all, just a guy sleeping. It wasn’t the officer’s fault, he saw a gun and was forced to kill him. Those good Samaritan officers then provided emergency aid — how kind of them — to deal with the two bullet holes they had just blown in Locke’s chest.

There is, of course, no expression of remorse, no recognition that maybe they’d been a teeny-tiny bit overzealous and trigger-happy, and that, just maybe, they’d fucked up big time, again.

You can actually buy this flag for $11.66 at Amazon. America!

Well, now they’re in trouble. They have just criminalized owning a gun in your own home, a crime that earns an instant death penalty. I’m sure all the white Republican gun nuts are going to march on Minneapolis en masse to protest this abrogation of their constitutional rights. At the very least they’ll be tearing down their thin blue line flags, and politely discussing reforming police policy. Right?

Oh, wait. Amir Locke was black.

Never mind, they’re frantically searching police records right now to find out if he had a parking ticket in 2015, in order to justify the murder.