The Case for Group Selection: Its Deniers

I’m not one to be suspicious of an intellectual just because he happens to be Jewish. But Emory University’s Melvin Konner seems to be a character straight out of The Culture of Critique. His 2003 book The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit is an enlightening look at what we know about the biochemical/genetic basis of human nature. Konner writes beautifully about the quest for scientific truth and how connected we all are in the end.

There’s one topic, however, on which he drops the placid demeanor. He calls The Bell Curve one of the “deliberate assaults on efforts to improve the school performance of African-Americans” and “politically motivated.” He assures us that convincing refutations of the book’s arguments have already been made.

Konner also asserts that J. Philippe Rushton’s application of r/k selection to human races has “no academic legitimacy and little relationship to real evolutionary theory.” His efforts “[taint] the whole Darwinian enterprise, strongly recalling the ‘scientific anthropology’ of the era of slavery.”

At his blog, Konner recalls listening to Martin Luther King Jr. speak and says that out of fairness, affirmative action should last at least 245 years. The anthropologist doesn’t think the case for group selection is sound either.

Incredibly, while writing a book about the biological basis of human behavior, on race Konner’s position is indistinguishable from Stephen Jay Gould’s:

The human genome project has draft -sequenced five people’s genes, three women and two men, self-described as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, and African-American. Craig Venter, head of Celera Genomics and one of two main leaders of the project, said, “In the five Celera genomes there is no way to tell one ethnicity from the other.”

Charles Murray has written that genetic analysis “classifies 99.9% of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves.” Someone isn’t being completely honest here. If Konner really believes what he’s written, he has an ethical obligation to use his position of power and influence to convince law enforcement officials who think they can identify race by DNA that they’re wrong.

Konner also informs us that there’s no correlation between IQ performance and white genes amongst African-Americans and that blacks adopted by whites parents do as well as whites do. No sources are given. The author rightly assumed that only those few of us familiar with race science would know that those statements are patently false.

All this alone isn’t enough to draw attention to Konner’s Judaism. A lot of white gentiles are also swayed more by sentimentality than logic on race issues and are even driven by fear of white racism to distort facts. But then Konner ventured into foreign policy. In 2006 a certain ex-president wrote a book highlighting the faults of a certain ethnostate that got a lot of coverage in the media. All of a sudden, there’s no longer any sympathy for struggling minorities. Konner defends the wall that the Israelis built on the grounds of self-defense (I wonder if he has as charitable a view of whites moving out of black neighborhoods to protect their families?) and accuses Carter of not making a positive contribution to the debate. His blog has shown an interest in the democracy movement in exactly one foreign country. No points for guessing which one. Konner also runs a different blog dealing with Jewish issues. The front page makes it clear that his site is concerned with “the fate of the Jews as a people, not as religious adherents.” If the word “people” were changed to “race,” would the meaning of that statement be any different?

If Melvin Konner needs proof of group selection, all he needs to do is look at his own activities. Are we to believe that it’s through working within the context of a universal system of ethics and dispassionate search for truth that he came to the conclusions that American blacks were victims in need of centuries of discrimination in their favor, that IQ for individuals is determined in a large part by genes but the black/white gap is due exclusively to environment, and that Israel was the only country in the world that needed his defense in the media? What the distinguished professor seems to want (and has) is a political universe where the crimes of whites centuries ago are relevant when talking about black failure and what Germans did 60 years ago is relevant in talking about Middle Eastern politics, but where it’s illegitimate to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers based on living conditions today or to justify white avoidance of blacks based on modern day African-American behavior. It doesn’t take Kevin MacDonald to see the only logical consistency underlying these beliefs.

In another context, Konner called MacDonald “worrisome.” He must be. His work hits too close to home.

Editor’s Note: Melvin Konner is also author of The Jewish Body: An Anatomical History of the Jewish People, Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School, Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Why the Reckless Survive…and Other Secrets of Human Nature, Dear America,: A Concerned Doctor Wants You to Know the Truth About Health Reform, and other works.