nature vs nurture and racial bias

Mikalac Norman S NSSC MikalacNS at NAVSEA.NAVY.MIL
Mon Sep 11 06:13:18 PDT 2000


thank you for your interesting comment. if that article argues there is no obvious evolutionary mechanism to make racial bias genetically programmed, then i would be interesting in reading it if you can hunt it down.

however, when it comes to genetic programming, we have to look WAY, WAY back too, even before we became "human". it could be that ANYTHING that looks or acts differently from the parents and communal parent look-alikes would be avoided and that would include other animals. remember, before we became "human" we were walking as simian bipeds and before that on all fours. genetic differentiation was functioning then too. way back then, we (meaning our simian ancestors) had to fight or flee other animals and if we weren't successful, then we died early and didn't pass on our genes.

those genes could be carried over and then expressed again when, eons later, one human community came in contact with another of another race.

just some thoughts, mind you.

norm

-----Original Message----- From: Barry Rene DeCicco [mailto:bdecicco at umich.edu] Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 3:27 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: lbo-talk-digest V1 #3327

Subject: Re: nature vs. nurture, was FBI on Einstein

Norm wrote:


>racial/ethnic discrimination: if an infant imprints (emulates) on someone
>with specific appearance, speech and movement that feeds and shelters
>him/her, and shuns someone who looks, talks and acts differently who does
>not feed or shelter him/her, then his/her survival chances are better.
>that's nature. then you add a few years of what the parents whisper into
>johnnie's and janie's ears during infancy and you get someone who is more
or
>less discriminatory. that's nurture.

There was a comment on this by Robert Wright - a totally unapolegetic sociobiologist (or as they like to be called, 'evolutionary psychologist'). He commented that people meeting people of other races is very recent. Up until a few thousand years ago, people would only meet people who lived within a few hundred miles (at most).

This meant that, for practical purposes, almost all interaction was with people of one's own race. Therefore, almost all evolutionary pressure would come from competing/cooperating with others of the same race.

The article is in Slate, but I can't find it (their search facility is mediocre, and downloads crawl sooooooo slowly........).

Barry



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list