PerseusWizardry
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User ID: 1815
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
Are my philosophy professor's objections to the biological definition of race sound?
My philosophy of race class has considered and dismissed the biological definition of race. We've explored five objections to race-as-biological:
Objection 1: It isn't possible to locate the boundaries between racial types with any precision. The biological definition of race aims to divide humanity into distinct categories on the basis of physiological traits that don't admit of clean divisions. but this is hopelessly arbitrary given the absence of differences of kind between purported racial groups (there are only differences of degree). Skin color, for instance, varies along a continuum without discrete segments that perfectly track racial distinctions. "Short" and "tall" aren't good enough for anatomy or basketball, and neither can the imprecise idea of "races." Race attempts to bracket "lumps" apart from each other, but this is a vain effort because there are only continuua.
Objection 2: Scientific authority: Scientists don't talk of "races" but instead prefer to speak of "populations." As John H. Relethford says in his introduction to biological anthropology:
Until the 1950s, much of biological anthropoloigy was devoted to racial description and classification. Most sciences go through a descriptive phase, followed by an explanatory phase... Today biological anthropologists rarely treat race as a [scientifically useful] concept. It has no utility for explanation, and its value for description is limited.
Objection 3: There are no reliable lumpings/clusters of characteristics for "race" to track. For example, skin color is supposed to go with a certain hair texture and with certain facial features, consistently, but racial traits just don't hang together this way: many dark skinned people have straight hair, aquiline noses, thin lips, and many light skinned people have curled hair, full lips, and wide noses.
Objection 4: Modern dictionaries do not define race biologically.
The last objection makes very little sense to me, but here goes:
Objection 5: Human heredity is much more complicated than the transmission of racial essences. It involves a myriad of environmental factors, to produce the traits that distinguish humans from each other. Biological race-thinking is incapable of producing an adequate scientific account of this complexity.
Do you find these objections convincing? If not, why not?
PerseusWizardry
11mo ago
I didn’t intend this as an argument for Christianity and am not myself religious. Obviously the probability of Christianity is greater given deism, though, and I guess fine tuning suggests a god with an interest in our lives. But it’s indifferent with respect to Christianity vs some other religion like Islam, and I don’t think it’s strong enough evidence that it implies that “one of the world religions must be true.” A Christian would have to use it in a cumulative case for their religion that also invoked some more specifically pro-Christianity evidence. Supposedly they have done so in the form of historical support for the resurrection of Jesus, but I am very skeptical.
PerseusWizardry
11mo ago
This is question begging. You observed the naturalistic origin of life? You can’t say “I know life originated naturalistically because I observe the existence of organic life but not its initial origin.”
PerseusWizardry
11mo ago
Why do you think the multiverse exists?
PerseusWizardry
11mo ago
The universe is heading toward a state of maximal entropy; when it reaches that state, known as “thermal equilibrium”, all life processes will be impossible. If you imagine all the possible ways of arranging stuff in the universe, an extremely high proportion of them would put the universe in thermal equilibrium immediately. Life is only possible (for a while – it will eventually run down) because our universe luckily started out very far from thermal equilibrium, with extremely low entropy, 14 billion years ago, for some unknown reason.
So, given that almost all ways of assigning values to the universe’s parameters would be unfriendly to life, why does the universe in fact have life-friendly parameters?
The initial entropy of the universe was ridiculously low. According to the traditional Big Bang theory, the universe originated in a giant explosion about 14 billion years ago. At its beginning, the universe had an incredibly low entropy. According to one estimate, if you randomly picked a possible initial state for a universe, the probability of picking one with such a low entropy is about 1 in ten to the power of ten to the power of 124. The low initial entropy, in turn, is crucial to explaining life and everything else in the universe that we care about.
PerseusWizardry
10mo ago
Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.
PerseusWizardry
10mo ago
Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.
I thought Wolfers conceded to Caplan on his blog that the effect size is ridiculously small (like, you would need a million dollars in yearly income to actually raise your happiness by 1 SD). Wolfers responds to Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/wolfers_respond.html Caplan: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/the_wolfers_equ.html
Not convinced? Consider: Wolfers’ result implies that to raise happiness by one standard deviation, you have to raise income by 1/.35=2.86 log points. How much is that exactly? In percentage terms, that’s (e^2.86)-1 – an increase of 1,640%. So if you currently earn $50,000, Wolfers’ coefficient implies you’d need an extra $820,585 per year to durably increase your happiness by one lousy standard deviation. In math, that’s not “zero effect of income on happiness.” But in English, it basically is.
I do believe in evolution, but my understanding is that evolution is only intended as an explanation of the diversity of life but not its initial origins. For that, the abiogenesis story is the only serious naturalistic candidate of which I’m aware, aside from the “panspermia” idea that life evolved somewhere more favorable to life and traveled to the earth in a stable vehicle.
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