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What sort of ideas will guide our elites twenty years from now? You can find out by observing university students, especially those in the humanities and social sciences. One popular idea is that race doesn’t exist, except as a social construct. Its proponents include Eula Biss, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine:
Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. […] Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.
What does the second sentence mean, exactly? One often hears it among the educated, even those who dislike genetics and biology. Where does it come from?
From a study by geneticist Richard Lewontin, in 1972. He looked at human genes with more than one variant, mostly blood groups but also serum proteins and red blood cell enzymes.
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The problem here is the assumption that genetic variation within a human group is comparable to genetic variation between human groups. In fact, the two are qualitatively different. When a gene varies between two groups the cause is more likely a difference in natural selection, since the group boundary also tends to separate different natural environments (vegetation, climate, topography) or, more often, different cultural environments (diet, means of subsistence, sedentism vs. nomadism, gender roles, state monopoly of violence, etc.). Conversely, when a gene varies within a population, the cause is more likely a random factor without adaptive significance.
Read full, original post: A Modern Myth
