Genetics Porn

The reliably acute H. Allen Orr has published a trenchant review of A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade, which we link to without comment:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/05/stretch-genes/?insrc=hpma

Longtime readers of this blog will know that our salute of this article (in the still-solid New York Review of Books) owes nothing to political correctness.  We are perfectly open to the possibility that the thesis championed by Wade in the second part of his book, may have some validity.   But, being explosive, it needs much more backing than he has given it.  (Such is the identical reason for our chiding the "Universe as simulation" hypothesis.)

For our own polemic against ultra-Darwinist excess (well, "polemic";  actually it's pretty funny), try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-urysohn-metrization-theorem.html

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Another recent example of Darwinian academic overreach, though much less incendiary as its implications are confined within linguistics, is Language in a Darwinian perspective, by Bernard Bichakjian, which maintains that “every linguistics feature, be it a speech sound, a grammatical marker, or a syntactic strategy, interfaces with a neuro-muscular algorithm, and that selection pressures have steadily guided languages …”.   (Credit where credit is due, though:  the man gets full marks from a Popperian perspective, in which “a theory needs to stick its neck out.”   This one sticks out like an ostrich.)  The level-headed Fred Newmeyer dismisses it as “bizarre” (his one-word summary) in the Sept 2003 issue of Language, p. 583ff.   And since, unlike a potential best-seller by a New York Times science writer, which could well influence public debate on sensitive issues, along with such semipopular works as On Aggression, African Genesis, and The Naked Ape, Bichakjian’s influence if any  will remain confined to pockets of academia, there is no need to comment further in this place, other than to quote Newmeyer’s witticism (one of several in the review):

A lot can be said against Chinese writing [he means, the writing system -- the logograms] as ‘evolutionarily primitive’, but one must agree that it has allowed its users to develop at least as vibrant an intellectual and creative life  as that of their alphabetic neighbors.

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Orr remarks in a footnote, citing just one example from a fund of hundreds,

Geneticists have had an extraordinarily hard time finding genes that make substantive contributions to complex diseases like Type 2 diabetes. This doesn’t bode well, to put it mildly, for finding the genes that allegedly underlie subtle differences in predisposition to middle-class behavioral traits.

Such overreach is bad enough;  worse, is when the nihilistically inclined among neurophilosophers, conclude from a bit of petri-dish handwaving, that free will is an illusion, and morality with it.   Such views have the potential to wreak real mischief;  and we have polemicized against them here:  Eliminative Materialism

Note:  That essay does not specifically address linguistics, though the problems with reductionism of minds to neurons  are similar in several disciplines, and go back a ways in each.  Thus, Uriel Weinreich, contra the behaviorist simplifications of Leonard Bloomfield: 

Bloomfield’s neurological reductionism  depends on discoveries  that may never be made.

Bloomfield was the dean of American linguistics before WWII;  his introductory textbook Language (1933) was long standard, and contains much of lasting value; yet the early, pseudo-foundational chapter about Stimulus-and-Response, with its feeble fable about Jack and Jill, falls far below the standards of the rest of the book, and indeed feels perfunctory, contributing nothing even on its own terms:  like those Stalin-era exordiums in praise of the great leader, in Soviet texts about physics or what have you;  having made the needful obeissance, we move right along.

Rulon Wells had a nice line about all this (in “Meaning and Use”, in Word 1954):

In diagnosing the conflict between mentalism and mechanism, [Bloomfield] mislocates the issue, and thus plants his germ of truth  in the sand of confusion.

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The situation in genetics has an analogue in the field of linguistics:  quite apart from the difficulty of accounting for language development, or for the sort of intricate syntactic phenomena highlighted by Chomsky and his successors, from outside linguistics proper (height of the ancestral esophagus inferred from shards of crania; Bloomfieldian behaviorism; connectionism; …), progress has been discouraging even within the field, and the Chomsky current in particular.  In that same Review Article, discussing On Nature and Language by Chomsky (et, actually, alia, as Newmeyer points out), the one-word summary is:  “disappointing”.  The reviewer reluctantly concludes that, if anything, the Minimalist Program represents a step backward.

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Just a final word on the project of reducing genius to genes, or spirit to spit:
The eliminativists may prove  to their own satisfaction  that (say)  literature, and literary criticism, are nothing but secretions of the pineal gland (or however that hoary idea is tricked-out nowadays, in the latest scientific raiments), or that it evolved in the Jurassic for the purposes of attracting a mate (or more subtly -- like those initial pre-weight-bearing nubbins of wings -- simply to regulate body temperature),

but they will never produce any literature or criticism worth reading.