Another of my rants about PC science

When it comes to writing popular science about human behaviour, it's amazing the dodgy arguments you can get away if you write from a politically correct perspective.

Take for example, David Berreby's 2005 book Us and Them: Understanding your tribal mind.

Starting with the reasonable assumption that people have a psychological disposition to want to belong to groups, which Berreby describes as "human kinds," he then makes a huge leap of logic and claims real-world, long-standing groups can easily be replaced by newly invented groups, as long as they satisfy our tribalistic urge to bond with others that we perceive to be similar to ourselves.

Thus identification on racial, religious or national lines could just as easily be replaced with other possible sources of identification such as left-handedness or temperament.

While many sources of identification do change over time, some sources of identification, such as being a Muslim or a Jew appear to be much more durable than others, yet Berreby fails to explain why such sources of identification are so persistent, and he continually attacks the idea that traditional forms of identification, such as race, religion or gender, are any more significant than potential sources of identification like left-handedness.

Nor does Berreby suggest any logical reason why adopting other sources of identification would be more rational than those we currently have - would a society of left-handers for example be more prosperous and cohesive, or less corrupt than a society composed of say, Irish Catholics or ethnic Japanese?

Are far as races are concerned, Berreby adamantly states that they don't exist as a significant biological concept and they only account for a few minor characteristics such as hair type or skin colour.

The logic behind this claim is that there are few, if any, genes unique to particular races.
However, race realist scientists already concede this and focus there investigations on the frequency of particular genes within races, and given how new this gene science is, wouldn't it be unwise to make categorical statements about whether races do or don't exist, based on preliminary findings from studying the human genome?

Berreby also pulls out the tiresome "fuzzy boundaries" argument to refute the validity of different races.

This argument is based on the idea that because there are people on the margins of continents who have no clear racial identity, race can't be a valid biological category.

But if you follow the logic of the fuzzy boundaries argument, then any human condition that exists along a continuum, such as depression or being overweight, can't be biologically valid either. Only in the politically sensitive area of race or gender relations could an intellectual get away with making the claim that because something is difficult to define at the margins, it therefore can't exist.

Berreby's ignorance of scientific research into racial issues appears to be highlighted by his claim that race realists like Philip Rushton argue that a smaller brain equals less intelligence, and that Blacks are less intelligent than White and East Asians because they have a smaller average skull size.

"...The evidence for a connection between brain size and intelligence is not there. Women's heads are generally smaller than men's, but women do not score lower on intelligence tests."

Now I'm certainly no scientific expert in intelligence research, but I think the claim is that a smaller brain relative to body size tends to correlate with less intelligence.

Hence the common sense observation that women, although smaller, have about the same intelligence as men, and nerds with relatively big heads and weedy bodies tend to be smarter than smaller-headed muscular jocks.

For a leading science journalist to misinterpret or deliberately misrepresent this argument is a sad indictment on the current state of academic discourse.