Since GC is abroad & busy I thought I would link to two of my favorite past posts of his.
First, Pattern Classification in Population Genetics, which was a follow up to the Lewontin’s Fallacy post. Note that in The Ancestor’s Tale Richard Dawkins also states that Lewontin ignored the importance of the correlation structure of the many variables that go into our perception of a particular “race.” On a personal note, I am in some ways a living refutation of the analogy between a lactose-tolerant vs. lactose-intolerant and a black & white race. My skin color is firmly within the normal range of African Americans (to give a general impression, I am likely lighter than the median African American, but darker than black-white biracial individuals). Yet I almost never am termed black. When I lived in eastern Imbler I usually had the qualifier sand added to any “nigger” epithet, underscoring that even bigots implicitly understood the importance of correlation structure. Though my skin is dark, my hair is straight and my features are not particularly African, in other words, I fall outside the normal range of correlated features which characterize black Americans.1 I think part of the problem is that the use of the terms “black” and “white” as well as the hypodescent social rule in American culture has tended to transform the explicit discourse into a univariable conversation. Skin color has become the single universal token, even though implicitly most people understand that race is more than just color, ergo, light skinned Japanese Americans are also “People of Color” (though they are more similar in complexion to whites than blacks).
Next, check out Thompson and Gray: Neuroscience, genes, and IQ. Though I think cognitive science and psychometrics have a lot to offer, the real action in the next few decades is going to be the grey space between molecular biology and psychology, in other words, neuroscience which will put more flesh on to the dendrites, axons and their intervening synapses as well as the “chemical soup” which aids and abets in maintaining our mental equilibrium. The 1990s was termed “the decade of the brain,” but this will probably be the “century of the mind.” The only thing I would add is that there are many interesting phenomena besides IQ in my opinion. The saliency of “nonrational” factors in our decision making might be a hot topic, or the chemical processes and physical structure that bound and shape the “mental modules” which enhance our ability to intuitively understand some concepts but also constrain out perception of the world around us (or, conversely, the falsification of this hypothesis and the emergence of the plastic brain).
Related: A Golden Age of Brain Exploration in PLOS.
1 – When I was in seventh grade a 9th grader came up behind me and asked loudly if I was “from Africa” (I found out he had a book report due on Africa). When I turned around he jumped back and said “sorry.” It was winter and I remember that I had a hat on, so all he saw was the patch of brown skin on the back of my neck. In other words, one variable, but when I turned he registered all my other features and switched his assessment. This is conventional human intuition, not rocket science. The ancient Greeks, often ridiculed for their lack of empiricism by moderns, were careful to distinguish between the “wheat colored” people of northwest India and Egypt as similar in color, but different. Similarly, they noted that the “black” people of southern India and Ethiopia were also distinct in appearence despite the superficial similarity of color. So they also had their stock of common sense.
Posted by razib at 01:51 AM