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Please don't get me wrong. I am sure Mark Steyn is sincere here. I am sure he believes this stuff about "culture." Most educated people do. Most will continue to do so for a few more years, while the neuroscientists, geneticists, genomicists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and statistical sociologists sap away beneath them — until the ground gives way. (A professional academic biologist friend of mine is in the habit of snapping out, any time anyone takes refuge in this "culture" stuff: "Culture? Culture? What does that mean? Where does it come from? What are the upstream variables?")

So writes John Derbyshire. I gather he has been expelled from NR. The reason is not exactly clear to me....

However, it was just such stuff as exemplified in the above italics that on occasion rendered Derbyshire utterly unappealing to me on the pages of NR. So often I could find myself in sympathy with his views; and then he'd pop out with a statement like the above....

Very off-putting. To say the least.

It seems that Derbyshire has succumbed to "the spirit of the age," characterized by (among other things) the common expectation that science alone has all the answers.

Which in the end would seem to lead to a reduction of everything that exists to the statements and techniques of science. But since science to very large degree is about rendering reality into terms of abstract language — thereby giving us a "once-remove" description of Reality itself — on what basis should we expect science to be "exhaustive" in its descriptions? If its method requires it to dispense with all things immaterial and/or spiritual, does this mean that all things immaterial and/or spiritual instantly disappear from the real a/k/a natural world?

For Derbyshire, I gather, there seemingly are no "upstream variables." The world exhausts itself in chemistry, mechanics, physics and nothing more.... In the end, we humans are effectively only highly sophisticated machines, "robots"....

And I gather that is the defining difference between the worldview of a John Derbyshire, and the worldview of a Mark Steyn....

Myself, I tend to be found in Mark Steyn's camp....

JMHO FWIW

Thank you ever so much for posting this thought-provoking article, reaganaut1!

If intelligence isn’t at least in part determined by genetics, then why can’t a turtle be raised to have as high an I.Q. as a human being?

We absolutely know beyond dispute that different ethnicities have different physical characteristics, which are easily observable, as well as different health risks and problems, which are less easily observable but have been proven statistically. The brain is a less understood physical organ, but it is a physical organ which gives human beings intellectual and emotional characteristics somewhat different from those of turtles.

It would be simply illogical and baseless to say that the ONLY possible different characteristics between different ethnicities are the easily observable ones which we already have clear proof of. If one is interested in truth, one should remain open-minded about any possibilities which have neither been proven nor disproven.

That being said, this Derbyshire article didn’t even seem to be arguing the case for biological vs. cultural differences. He was only discussing differences as he observed them in the population and didn’t discuss their possible origins. He may have done this in other articles.