In Amy Harmon’s New York Times article In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice (November 11, 2007), the author's shoddy reporting is manifest in the processed thinking from which it was borne. To either side of us, we have wise and discerning people that presume science will eventually prove blacks are inferior to whites. “Others hope that the genetic data may overturn preconceived notions of racial superiority by, for example, showing that Africans are innately more intelligent than other groups”, the author says, almost as an afterthought, having interviewed or referenced no one anticipating that result. This "hope" to see DNA "overturn" the belief of "racial superiority" by actually proving Africans are "innately more intelligent" is consistent with the mind-numbing logic of Victorian ethnocentrism.

This is less about the absurdity of the premise and more about how mainstream this thread of thinking is. For example, Harmon quotes a blogger of biology from Gene Expressions (gnxp.com), “Let's say the genetic data says we’ll have to spend two times as much for every black child to close the achievement gap ... [black children] can be given educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique talents and limitations.” She also goes as far as to quote responses to political blogs, like Half Sigma (halfsigma.com), where one individual humorously evaluates their own neurosis, rhetorically, while abhorring others: “Should I advocate discrimination against blacks because they are less smart? Should I not hire them to my company because odds are I could find a smarter white person? Stop trying to prove that one group of people are genetically inferior to your group. Just stop.” The trans-affiliated belief that those falling under the umbrella of the Black American identity are inferior is captured well, if anything, by the author.

Professors from prestigious universities like Harvard and Stanford contributed to Harmon’s article; all of this after the mainstream-for-a-biologist James D. Watson, winning a Nobel Prize the same year, unequivocally, to the international press, pronounced the inherit inferiority of black people. What should have been treated as the ravings of a quack actually set the tone for learned circles that addressed the issue. In the article, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Professor of Black American studies at Harvard University issues caution to what he calls the “era of the ascendance of biology”, stating, “we have to be very careful.” Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University posits “ready response teams” to address the “clear differences between people of different continental ancestries.” While biology can't substantiate the inferiority or superiority of perceived races, however slight it may turn out to be, at the moment, “I can see it coming," says this biologist, and “it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.” The human brain being the last scientific frontier, notwithstanding, Professor Feldman, using the classic concept of I.Q. in anticipation of this developing dilemma, troubles me more than the naive caution of the distinguished professor of African American studies.

Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass, hints at how these prejudices are not ‘new’. He offers that by “living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small,” while at the same time allowing the supposition of genetic inferiority to linger. The synthesis of the bio-evolutionary, socio-biological and theories of identity politics reported in Ms. Harmon’s article goes to the popularity of an enduring confrontational pattern in reputational selection, tacitly being modernized in mainstream discourse. Reputational selection is an uncharted variable in the socio-empirical sciences, intersecting with the bogeyman of group selection in particular. No one is to blame for the fatuousness of this article, especially not the author, for by the very laws of nature this is standard fare. “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white”, asserted David Hume in the 18th Century (the “most important philosopher ever to write in English" according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Not the premise but the popularity of such assertions is the more striking. Using examples of mainstream discourse, like this New York Times article, can help us better understand reputational selection, the latch-key theory in sexual selection, and gauge it's potential vitality to human evolution.

But who am I kidding? I just find the article absurd.

All quotes, with the exception of David Hume, from: Amy Harmon, In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice, New York Times, Nov. 11, 2007.