Biologist EO Wilson's bold foray into the biological understanding of human and group behavior was hijacked last decade by anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides. In renaming sociobiology "evolutionary psychology," they determined to ignore differences and focus only on human universals. All that remained was for these equalitarians to grapple with JP Rushton's rather commonsense conclusion that Racism is in fact one of those universals.

In their 2001 study, Tooby and Cosmides claimed to be able to erase the "encoding of race" (a prerequisite for "malignant" Racism) through a 4 minute "memory confusion protocol." Most ingeniously, they were able to trick their subjects (UC Santa Barbara undergrads) into "encoding" groups by shirt color more strongly than by Race.

This implies that coalition, and hence race, is a volatile, dynamically updated cognitive variable, easily overwritten by new circumstances. If the same processes govern categorization outside the laboratory, then the prospects for reducing or even eliminating the widespread tendency to categorize persons by race may be very good indeed.

Lest you think this is an idle academic exercisze, policy implications abound:

Q: So what can be done to "erase race" in the real world?

A: Although further research is required, the results suggest that, to the extent that people of different races are working together to pursue common goals, race might become a less salient dimension of social life. The key, we would suggest, is not merely contact, but cooperation among individuals of different races. It might seem that this is putting the effect before the cause, suggesting that cooperation might eliminate racism (instead of eliminating racism leading to cooperation), but if perceptions of cooperation drive social categorization, multi-racial cooperation might help to "erase race."

So, on the subject of Race, EP comes full circle to the obfuscation of one of the founding elders of the anti-sociobiology movement, the jew ideologolue/activist Richard Lewontin, who, Rushton readers will recall, categorically denies the ability to specify any genetic causal influence whatsoever on behavior, calling instead "for the 'dialectical relation' elaborated by Karl Marx in which organism and environment are somehow 'fused' as subject and object."

"Race", as it is usually conceived, is not a sound biological category in the world. In humans, the overwhelming preponderance of genetic variation is within population and not between populations. Moreover, the genetic variation that exists is gradual and geographically graded, rather than sharply bounded. On top of this, the racial categories that we "see" do not correspond to biologically meaningful populations in the world.

For more discussion on why "race" is not a natural category of the biological world, see the following:

Hirschfeld, L. (1996). Race in the Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Lewontin, R. (1972) Evol. Biol. 6, 381-398.
Nei, M. & Roychoudhury, A. (1993) Mol. Biol. Evol. 10, 927-943.

Progress, itz?

Study:
Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization
Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/26/15387

Discussion:
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/erasingrace.htm

Sociobiology vs. EP:
Sociobiology at Age 25
by Steve Sailer
http://www.isteve.com/Sociobiology.htm

On the "variation" canard:

Most variation is within racial groups, not between racial groups. Two members of the same race are likely to differ from each other more than the average member of their race differs from the average member of another race. Sure, but so what? No single human category can account for a majority of all the many ways humans differ from each other. Try substituting other categories like "age:" "Most variation is within age groups, not between age groups." Yup, that's true, too. But, it doesn't mean that Age Does Not Exist.

You often hear that between-group racial differences only account for 15% of genetic variation. This number comes from a 1972 study by Richard Lewontin of 17 blood types, comparing variation between continental-scale races and between national-scale racial groups (e.g., Swedes vs. Italians). Now, blood types are, I suppose, important, but they hardly represent all we want to know about human genetic diversity. Certain other traits are known to be more racially determined -- the figure for skin color, not surprisingly, is 60%. What the overall number is for all the important genes remains unknown.

Still, let's assume that Lewontin's 15% solution is widely applicable. That's like going to a casino that has American Indian and African American croupiers, and 85% of the time the roulette spins are random, but 15% of the time the ball always comes up red for Indian croupiers and black for the black croupiers -- pretty useful information, huh?

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/cavalli-sforza_ii.htm

Personally, I think those involved in this crack-pot study need to be robbed, beaten, and raped by Jamal and his homies. Maybe that would clear-up their delusional thinking.

http://www.susanragan.com/news/images/cripsint.jpg

well that is a great post FS. I have heard of this study on NPR-- of course!

I note that KMD uses the term "evolutionary psychology" too. They can change the labels, and the truth will keep coming back. Seventy years ago it was called "anthropology" wasnt it?

here is an interview with EO Wilson

http://www.salon.com/people/conv/2002/01/14/eowilson/

an excerpt:

"Say you're president. What's your environmental agenda?

New, sustainable energy generation, new forms of transportation, conservation of natural resources and general improvement of the quality of American life with a simultaneous reduction in per-capita consumption of energy and materials. The president who exercised that kind of leadership would ensure his or her legacy for all time. "

[dump israel, sterilize groids, ethnic cleansing of cities would all be necessaries to get all that done no?]

Boy does this sound like a completely stupid waste of time, money and effort -
"...To test this idea they used an established psychological technique called the "memory confusion protocol". This involves showing subjects a series of photographs of people, together with sentences of a conversation that those people are supposed to be having.

After that (and without having been warned what to expect) the subject is shown the sentences in a random order, and asked who said what. The information the protocol provides stems from misattributions of words to pictures. Subjects tend to confuse who said what within groups that they have constructed mentally from the information available, rather than between those groups. But the only data available to construct those groups are the words and pictures, so the researcher can work out which criteria are, perhaps unconsciously, being used.

Dr Kurzban, Dr Tooby and Dr Cosmides used two variations of the protocol. In both, the photographs (all of young men) were assigned by computer to one side of the conversation or the other, with each side receiving two black and two white men. In the first variation, the content of the conversation was the only clue to coalition membership. In the second, the individuals on either side wore different-coloured shirts (grey and yellow).

The researchers made four specific predictions: that race would not be "encoded" into a subject's reactions equally in all social contexts; that shared appearance is not necessary for encoding membership of a coalition; that arbitrary cues other than race can assume the properties that race tends to exhibit in predicting membership of a coalition; and that, when that happens, the strength of racial stereotyping will drop. All of these predictions were shown to be correct.

In the first experiment, in which there were no visual clues about coalition membership, a lot of misattribution was correlated with skin colour. However, such misattribution was not overwhelming. Subjects misattributed statements on the basis of which side of the conversation they came from about half as often as they did on the basis of race; appearance is therefore not everything.

It is, however, important. In the second experiment, the results were reversed. Given the extra clue of shirt colour, the preponderance of misattribution was connected with apparent membership of a coalition. Race dwindled into insignificance.

The subjects had been given no prompting about the purpose of the experiment. They did not know that they were supposed to be looking for coalitions. But, subliminally, they noticed them anyway. That suggests their brains were more attuned to clustering by signals that would point immediately to group membership, than by prejudices about which individuals should be forming groups. In turn, that suggests that racial characteristics are operating merely as badges of convenience, rather than pressing deep, biologically determined buttons of discrimination. And that, though by no means a solution to the problems of racially divided societies, might provide a small chink for social policy to work on."

Copyright © 2003 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Man, that sounds like one worthless study.

As for the "more variation within a race than between races" nonsense, let's make a few observations: though Negroes differ in appearance, you can always tell they are Negroes. Same with every race. And though women differ in appearance, and men differ in appearance, you have no problem telling who is a woman and who is a man.

And there are always average appearances within a race, and the average differs from every race.

What is true for appearances is true for brains as well.

Here's another thing you might want to tell a lemming to consider: there are big differences in mentality and intelligence between different races of cats, races of dogs, and races of horses. There are differences in mentality for species all over the world; why would humans be an exception? Of course we aren't, as anyone can tell.