Amerika

Last September, Bruce Lahn, a professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, stood before a packed lecture hall and reported the results of a new DNA analysis: He had found signs of recent evolution in the brains of some people, but not of others.

It was a triumphant moment for the young scientist. He was up for tenure and his research was being featured in back-to-back articles in the country’s most prestigious science journal. Yet today, Dr. Lahn says he is moving away from the research. “It’s getting too controversial,” he says.

Dr. Lahn had touched a raw nerve in science: race and intelligence.

What Dr. Lahn told his audience was that genetic changes over the past several thousand years might be linked to brain size and intelligence. He flashed maps that showed the changes had taken hold and spread widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas, but weren’t common in sub-Saharan Africa.

WSJ via The Civic Platform

This research was immediately shut down, but it’s interesting to see how it shakes out.

Equality is the founding mythos of our civilization because it unites three groups.

• The proles. These are people who do not have a trade, work in cubicles, and really haven’t specialized in much of anything. They like equality because when you have nothing, equality is like a free boost to the next level.
• Business. Nothing has more powerful marketing than equality. Everyone’s equal, if they’ve got $8.99 for our product. Come one, come all.
• The oblivious consumer. Our society is consumerist, or driven by the purchases of consumers, mostly the eroding middle class. They want us to just keep the peace, that oldest of bourgeois values.

This happy coincidence means that it is very, very hard to find anyone in the West willing to go on the record about racial differences of any kind, but all of the above three groups will loudly and violently assert that there are no physical differences between races, castes/classes, genders, etc.

It’s religion, not science. Science is muffled because who wants to lose funding? Bruce Lahn was new to the game.

Tags: DNA, race