WHY BOTH SIDES ARE WRONG IN THE RACE DEBATE

Is race a biological reality? Or is it a social construction? It is a debate that shows no sign of being resolved. The more that we know of the genetics of human differences, ironically, the more fractious the debate seems to get, and the more entrenched the various positions seem to be.

The latest issue of the magazine American Scientist contains a review by the biologist Jan Sapp of two books that insist that race has no biological validity. Sapp agrees. ‘The consensus among Western researchers today’, he suggests, ‘is that human races are sociocultural constructs’. Nevertheless ‘the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population.’

The distinguished evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who possesses impeccable liberal and anti-racist credentials, took umbrage at the review. ‘If that’s the consensus’, he snorted, then ‘I am an outlier’. Coyne insists that ‘human races exist in the sense that biologists apply the term to animals’. The equally distinguished biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks responded with what he himself described as a ‘rant’ against Coyne. ‘I have really had it with anti-intellectualism masquerading as biological science’, Marks fumed, claiming that Coyne  ’isn’t interested’ in what anthropologists have learnt about human population differences and comparing Coyne’s view on race with that of Creationists on evolution.

Why are we still having these kinds of debates? Why has a deepening understanding of genetics, and of the human genome, not helped to answer the questions, even among those who insist that their views derive solely from the facts? 

ON HUMAN DIGNITY, EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS AND THE SHAME OF GREENPEACE

Last October I wrote an essay about the decision of the European Court of Justice to deny a patent to the German neuroscientist Oliver Brüstle who had developed a method for turning human embryonic stem cells into neurons which could then be transplanted into patients with diseases such as Parkinson’s. The Court had decided that no patent could be valid on a process that involved the destruction of an embryo; such a patent was subversive of ‘human dignity’ and hence ’immoral’ and contrary to ‘public order’. I was critical of the Court’s decision, and equally so of Greenpeace, the organization that had brought the case before the Court:

If the court judgment is difficult to fathom, the attitude of Greenpeace is even more so.  So hostile has the organization become to ‘big science’ that it is happy to line up with some of the most reactionary and obnoxious groups in Europe and jeopardize vital medical research… It is about time we stopped indulging theologians and Luddites in the absurd myth that they occupy the moral high ground. They don’t. They are using moral norms drawn from dogmatic and reactionary visions of life to prevent the practical alleviation of human suffering.

A version of that post was published in the Swedish newspaper Götesborg-Posten. Greenpeace took umbrage at my criticism of the organisation, and its Swedish campaign director Patrik Eriksson wrote a reply, to which I responded. I am publishing here Eriksson’s reply to my original essay (translated into English) together with my response.

ALL ANIMALS HAVE AN EVOLUTIONARY PAST. ONLY HUMANS MAKE HISTORY

It has long been known that different groups of chimpanzees have different cultural habits. Now, new research has revealed the degree of behaviour plasticity among orangutans, plasticity that gives rise to cultural differences between different groups, each possessing behaviours specific to that group, and each passing on such behaviours from one generation to another.

For many, the empirical discoveries about ape cultures are important not just because of what they tell us about the mental abilities of the Great Apes, but also because of what they tell us, or potentially tell us, about humans and human cultures. (‘Great Ape’, I know, is often seen as synonymous with the family Hominidae, which includes humans; here I’m using the term to refer to non-human members of Hominidae.) In particular, many see such studies as shining significant light upon the common evolutionary roots of human and Great Ape culture.  ‘Now we know that the roots of human culture go much deeper than previously thought’, Michael Krützen, the lead author of the orangutan study suggests. ‘Human culture is built on a solid foundation that is many millions of years old and is shared with the other great apes.’

In one sense, of course, this has to be true. Humans are evolved beings and our propensity for culture must have evolved at some point in our evolutionary journey. If the Great Apes possess the same cultural propensities as humans do, then there are likely to be common evolutionary roots for those propensities. But do they possess the same cultural propensities?

STEM CELL RESEARCH IS MORAL. IT’S THE CRITICS WHO ARE MORALLY REPUGNANT

Court rulings on scientific patents are usually arcane and boring and of interest only to specialists. Not so this week. On Monday, the European Court of Justice made a landmark ruling banning any patents on scientific techniques that involve embryonic stem cells. It is a ruling that could endanger research into new therapies for incurable and life-threatening diseases and one that defies basic tenets of logic, morality and justice.

The case began in the 1990s when German neurobiologist Oliver Brüstle developed a method for turning human embryonic stem cells into neurons. The cells of an adult human are highly specialised – under normal circumstances a liver cell will always stay a liver cell, and a skin cell can never become anything else. Stem cells, however, can develop into any kind of tissue – liver, skin, nerve, heart. The best source of such stem cells are tiny embryos, a few days old, called blastocysts. Researchers hope that by growing specific tissue from these cells, it may be possible to repair damaged organs in patients suffering from conditions such as dementia or blindness. Because such tissue can be grown using the patients’ own DNA, so problems of tissue rejection, so often the bane of transplants, can be sidestepped. Professor Brüstle himself was on the verge of transplanting lab-grown brain tissue into patients with Parkinson’s disease.

In 1997, Brüstle obtained a patent for his technique of creating neurons. The environmental group Greenpeace challenged that patent in court. Brüstle’s work, it claimed, was ‘contrary to public order’ because embryos had been destroyed to gather the stem cells.

EARTHQUAKES, NEUTRINOS AND THIS THING CALLED SCIENCE

What links the trial of six scientists in the Italian town of L’Aquila, accused of failing to predict an earthquake, with the neutrinos that may have travelled faster than the speed of light? The answer is that these two very different stories that have hit the headlines in recent weeks both throw light upon changing perceptions of science – and upon how the social role of science is changing too.

In April 2009, a devastating earthquake struck the town of L’Aquila, killing 308 people and leaving more than 65,000 homeless. A year later six seismologists and a government official were charged with manslaughter for providing the authorities with ‘incomplete, imprecise and contradictory information about the nature, causes and future developments of the seismic hazards.’

IN PRAISE OF RAY TALLIS

A reporter from the US Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me to see if I was willing to be interviewed about Ray Tallis. Apparently the Chronicle is running a big spread about Tallis to mark the American launch of his new book Aping Mankind.  I was more than happy to offer my views. I have long thought of Tallis as one of the hidden treasures of British culture, to set alongside the likes of the Horniman Museum, Little Atoms and Richard Overton’s forgotten masterpiece An Arrow Against All Tyrants.

Of course, anyone who has appeared on Desert Island Discs – and been chosen by Kirsty Young as her luxury to take to her desert island – could hardly be said any more to be hidden. After decades of burrowing away, writing poetry and philosophy at the crack of dawn before settling down to his day job as Professor of Gerontology and Project Director of Neurosciences in Greater Manchester hospitals, Tallis has, over the past few years, finally found an audience. He has also found a place on Prospect’s list of 100 top British intellectuals, been named as one of the Economist‘s top 20 polymaths in the world, become a fixture on the literary festival circuit, and pops up regularly on shows such as Start the Week, Night Waves, Late Review and A Good Read.

In a culture such as ours that rarely breeds public intellectuals, a figure such as Ray Tallis, who is as lucid talking about Parmenides as about potassium uptake, as eloquent discussing Heidegger as human evolution, while also getting his hands dirty running a large chunk of the NHS, is both unusual and exciting. ‘If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath’, the journalist Andrew Brown once observed, ‘it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder.’

THE SCIENCE OF SEEING WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE

Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is one of the classic works of history of science. Gould, who died in 2002, was, as many probably know, not only an evolutionary biologist and influential popularizer of science, but also a vocal critic of racial theories. The Mismeasure of Man is a full-frontal assault on ideas of race and IQ that helped transform they way that many looked upon these issues. The importance of Gould’s work, as Marek Kohn put it in his book The Race Gallery is that ‘it examined both the historical context of race science, and the data too’.

A key part of Gould’s argument, which brought together the historical context and the data, and seemed to reveal how the one influenced the other, was his discussion of the work of nineteenth century racial scientist Samuel Morton, one of the most important scientific figures of his day. When Morton died in 1851, the New York Tribune said of him that ‘probably no scientific man in America enjoyed a higher reputation among scholars throughout the world than Dr Morton.’ His reputation was built on his home collection of more than a thousand human skulls scoured from every corner of the globe. ‘Nothing like it exists anywhere else’, enthused America’s leading naturalist of the time Louis Agassiz. Friends and enemies alike referred to Morton’s charnel house as the ‘American Golgotha’.

REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE, MORALITY & THE MORAL MAZE

The Moral Maze is a show with its strengths and weaknesses, a format better suited to debating some issues than others. This week’s programme, on the relationship between science and morality, was somewhat messy, inevitably perhaps given the complexity of the issue, the subtlety of many of the arguments and the depth of knowledge required. Nevertheless, there were, I thought,  useful parts of the debate. I was particularly struck by Joshua Greene‘s skepticism about the ability of science to settle moral questions, given the general thrust of his academic research.

Greene is perhaps the world’s leading moral psychologist and his work has thrown much light on the character of our moral evaluations. There are, Greene argues, two modes of moral thinking. One is intuitive, the other consciously reasoned. The analogy he often uses is that of the distinction between automatic and manual modes in a digital camera.  The automatic mode is quick but inflexible. The manual mode is flexible but slow. Much the same is true, he suggests, of the two modes of moral thinking. He also famously suggests that Kantian notions of rights and duties emerge from our intuitions while conscious, reasoned moral evaluations are driven by utilitarian cost-benefit analyses.

MORALITY ON THE BRAIN

This week’s Moral Maze on Radio 4 explores the relationship between science and morality, and in particular the idea that science provides the means to establish moral norms.  It has an all-star cast of witnesses including Jerry Coyne, Joshua Greene, Ray Tallis and Giles Fraser.

I gave a talk last year to the ‘Talking Brains’ conference at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, on ‘Science, Morality and the Euthyphro Dilemma’  that took a skeptical look at some of the arguments of those whom I call ‘neuromoralists’. It picks up and develops many of the themes I touched on in my review of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape and examines a few of the issues that hopefully we will debate on The Moral Maze. Here is a shortened, edited version of the talk.

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SCIENCE, MORALITY AND THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA

Can science help define our moral framework? And if so how? The idea that science, and in particular neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, can throw light on moral choices has become conventional wisdom in recent years. How it can do so is, however, still a matter for fierce debate.

There is a wide spectrum of views about how science can illuminate our moral lives. At the soft end of this spectrum is the suggestion that our capacity for moral thought lies in our evolutionary history, the evidence for which derives primarily from primatology and evolutionary and developmental psychology. The degree to which our capacity for moral thought is the product of natural selection remains a matter of debate. In principle, however, the idea that our ability to think in terms of right and wrong may in part have evolutionary roots should not be controversial.