{"id":2593,"date":"2014-06-28T18:15:01","date_gmt":"2014-06-29T01:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=2593"},"modified":"2014-07-03T01:38:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T08:38:41","slug":"a-fairy-tale-but-oh-so-feeble-pandaemonium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2014\/06\/28\/a-fairy-tale-but-oh-so-feeble-pandaemonium\/","title":{"rendered":"What if it were true?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kennan Malik provides a fairly nuanced response<\/a> to Nicholas Wade’s recent book (advocating the idea of cognitive differences between races), and (of course) I think he is right to join those who condemn the second half of Wade’s book. But despite the nuanced approach he takes to the first half (about the existence of race as a biological concept) I still think Malik falls into the trap of using incompletely convincing arguments to deny even the possibility of things that we all hope are false turning out to actually be true when he comes down in the end against the possibility of defining “race” in biological terms as “plausible but mistaken”.<\/p>\n

The problem with saying “those who think that \u2018race\u2019 is nothing more than a social construction and those who think it a natural category are both mistaken” is that it presumes to know what *all* of those who think it a natural category actually mean.<\/p>\n

There are<\/a> (probably several) perfectly good scientifically meaningful (and useful) concepts which coincide where applicable with the colloquial socially constructed concept of “race”. I can’t think of any that provides a *complete* classification of humanity into a finite number of subsets but such a classification is not necessary in order for a concept to be useful. Malik has acknowledged one such use in the assignment of medical treatments, and despite the lack (so far) of any convincing evidence it is not inconceivable that there may be statistical links to social propensities and cognitive skills as well. Of course, given our apparent inability to respond appropriately if such links really exist, it may well be inadvisable to look for them, and any claim of their existence would require an especially high standard of proof in order to be taken seriously. In fact, to look for them at all may be harmful and should not be encouraged, and for someone like Wade (who should know better) to claim to have found them on the basis of superficial analysis is just plain evil.<\/p>\n

In the meantime though, I think there may well be value in addressing the question of how we should deal with such links in the (perhaps very unlikely) event that they do turn out to exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kennan Malik provides a fairly nuanced response to Nicholas Wade’s recent book (advocating the idea of cognitive differences between races), and (of course) I think he is right to join those who condemn the second half of Wade’s book. But … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2593"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2603,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions\/2603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}