The Evil That Men Do

From the Transcript:
In Shakespeare’s play, Marc Anthony says of Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” I don’t know if much good was interred when Richard Lewontin died last month, but a great deal of evil lives after him. He was one of the first people to claim that race is a meaningless social construct. And that, of course, is why we are supposed to love him.


Somehow, none of the obituaries mentioned that in 1985, he co-authored a book called The Dialectical Biologist. On page 165, it says that “as working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our own research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy.”
There are racial differences because the races evolved independently without contact for 50 to 100 thousand years or more. In animals, the equivalent of race is subspecies. As Wikipedia explains, “When geographically separate populations of a species exhibit recognizable phenotypic differences, biologists may identify these as separate subspecies; a subspecies is a recognized local variant of a species.” That sounds like a perfect definition of race, because that is exactly what it is.
The race deniers look more idiotic all the time. When you find a dead body rotted beyond recognition, a forensic anthropologist can look at the bones and tell you the race. As this article notes, this is a puzzle: “if races don’t exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them? The author admits he can even tell Japanese from Chinese bones, but then goes full Richard Lewontin and writes, We should “not fall into the trap of accepting races as valid biologically discrete categories because we use them so often.” It’s in the bones. It’s real. It’s useful. But it’s not biology.

Here’s the latest lunacy. Programmers are spending millions trying to get artificial intelligence software to read X-rays and scans. Really good AI catches things doctors can’t. When a doc reads an X-ray he can’t tell a Japanese foot from a Norwegian foot. But, AI can: “Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient’s Racial Identity In Medical Images.” Are the people who cooked up the software pleased? No. They’re appalled. They don’t want the computer seeing race and they don’t even know how it does. But the machine gets it right every time, even from just part of the body, and even if the image is artificially blurred so people can’t make it out at all.
Does this loon really think that because the software can tell races apart, it’s going to discriminate? Does he think some malicious motive gave the software the “worst superpower” of detecting race? How hard can this be? It sees race because it’s there.

And guess what: You have the same superpower. Three-month-old babies have the same superpower. And every time our rulers want to set up preferences for “people of color” they use their “superpowers” to detect race, too.

How much longer can this foolishness last? Richard Lewontin would be very proud of the evil that lives on.