But Politics Has No Place In Science!

Until science threatens political correctness. Research into human dna…

… is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percent of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin-deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all created equal.

There isn’t an experienced domestic animal breeder on the planet who doesn’t acknowledge the profound influence of genetics on intelligence and behavior. Traits such as trainability, aggression, prey drive, docility, bite inhibition are highly heritable and difficult to modify. The realization that behavior could be selected for and fixed within a population is how breeds evolve out of species, and how identifiable family lines evolve out of breeds. It’s why retrievers retrieve, pointers point, border collies herd, and basenjis steal from the fridge. It’s why some family lines in Dobermans like to carry shoes in their mouths, generation after generation – and others don’t.
Yet, despite thousands of years of practical knowledge gained in the field of agriculture, despite mountains of published research generated in the lab, the very scientific community that accepts that animal sub-populations can be significantly distinct from one another is reflexively resistant to the possibility that that such differences may exist between sub-populations of humans.
And when the science finally forces them to face the evidence?

Although few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between individuals have yet been tied to physical or behavioral traits, scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common in certain continental groups, and can be used to distinguish people of different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose during the tens of thousands of years human populations evolved on separate continents following their ancestors’ dispersal from humanity’s birthplace in East Africa is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for disease.
Many geneticists are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to non-medical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time and a dangerous time.”
“There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said Marcus Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s not there yet for things like IQ, but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.” Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he wants to create “ready response teams” of geneticists to put such socially fraught discoveries in perspective.

They should consider augmenting such teams with a dog breeder or two. We seem to have figured out how to identify and exploit genetic strengths and weaknesses “beneath the skin” without assigning global superiority to any one breed. We might be able to teach them something.