From Egalitarianism to Runaway Inequality.

In Race, Ethnicity and Nation, (2007) Peter Wade states that “The impact of genomics on race studies has generated a good deal of controversy, particularly in the U.S.A. The key question has been the old chestnut of whether ‘race’ has any biological reality. Gilroy holds out hope that ‘the meaning of racial difference is being reconstructed by the impact of the DNA revolution and of the technological developments that have energized it’, although he recognizes that ‘genomics may send out the signal to reify “race” as code and information’ and that it will take some work to produce a ‘post-racial’ version of what it means to be human. Foster and Sharp capture the ambivalent results of genomics in a world before that work has been done: ‘It was hoped by some that the sequencing of the human genome would undermine the view that racial and ethnic classifications have biological significance. This position was based on the prospect that by showing that there are numerous genetic similarities across all social classifications and no genetic features that are entirely unique to any particular racial or ethnic population, genomics would provide definitive evidence that race and ethnicity are social, not biological, classifications. Ironically, the sequencing of the human genome has instead renewed and strengthened interest in biological differences between racial and ethnic populations, as genetic variants associated with disease susceptibility, environmental response, and drug metabolism are identified, and frequencies of these variants in different populations reported.’”

Unfortunately, even though medical practitioners are gathering the tools to match different genes to differing disease treatments—pharmacogenomics—is not as yet being widely utilized. It will take the profit motive to move it to television advertisement like current drugs, with patients then requesting that doctors perform the recommended genetic testing. And the tests available are expanding at remarkable speed. So the nature/nurture debate is being renewed all over again with racial egalitarians in an entirely defensive posture—no research is coming forth showing human equality.

In Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, (2003) Bill McKibben admits that we have been making germline modifications to mice since 1978 and humans may not be far behind. However, without germline modification, far simpler means are available with numerous assisted reproductive technologies coming on the market. Soon embryos can be selected that will be freer from disease and more intelligent, athletic, tall, attractive—whatever one wants in a child. Globally, inequality is increasing with regards to wealth, making assisted reproductive technology easily available to the wealthy, and the egalitarians do not like it one bit. So they argue both against allowing genetic engineering to take place while simultaneously arguing that if it cannot be stopped, then the underclass must be given the same opportunities as the well-off. Fat chance. They have denied for about eighty years now that genes matter—now they want-in on the benefits of neoeugenics.

McKibben even admits that “Endless studies of twins raised separately make very clear that virtually any trait you can think of is, to some degree, linked to our genes. Intelligence? The most recent estimates show that half or more of the variability in human intelligence comes from heredity…. In November 2001, a team of UCLA scientists released one of those sets of results that you don’t necessarily want to hear. They’d taken twenty pairs of twins, half of them identical and half fraternal, and used the newest medical scanners to examine their brains. The scanner could distinguish gray matter, the areas of the brain mainly composed of the heads of nerve cells. And what they found was that each set of identical twins had virtually the same amount of it, while the fraternal twins, who share only half of their genes, varied far more widely. Or, in the words of Dr. Paul Thompson, writing in Nature Neuroscience, ‘We found that brain structure is under significant genetic control. . . . The quantity of frontal grey matter, in particular, was most similar in individuals who were genetically alike; intriguingly, these individual differences in brain structure were tightly linked with individual differences in IQ. The resulting genetic brain maps reveal a strong relationship between genes, brain structure, and behavior, suggesting highly heritable aspects of brain structure may be fundamental in determining individual differences in cognition.’”

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Posted by Matt Nuenke on Monday, February 28, 2011 at 01:18 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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