The Return of Race Theory -- Part One

One of the great intellectual taboos of the past half century has been "race theory" -- the suggestion that race specific patterns of behavior and demonstrated ability have a genetic basis. But lately these ideas have been creeping back into respectable circles, first in academic and scientific contexts and more recently in the popular press where invaribly they are exaggerated and mis-reported. Slowly but surely the great sociological synthesis that dominated acceptable intellectual discourse throughout the West in the decades after WWII is rapidly crumbling and an older "scientific" tradition is being reasserted.

Here's a recent example. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

MAORIS carry a "warrior" gene that makes them more prone to violence, criminal acts and risky behaviour, a scientist has controversially claimed.

Dr Rod Lea, a New Zealand researcher, and his colleagues told an Australian genetics conference that Maori men had a "striking over-representation" of monoamine oxidase - dubbed the warrior gene - which they say is strongly associated with aggressive behaviour.

He says the unpublished studies prove that Maoris have the highest prevalence of this strength gene, first discovered by US researchers but never linked to an ethnic group.

This explains how Maoris migrated across the Pacific and survived, said Dr Lea, a genetic epidemiologist at the New Zealand Institute of Environmental Science and Research.

But he said the presence of the gene also "goes a long way to explaining some of the problems Maoris have".

"Obviously, this means they are going to be more aggressive and violent and more likely to get involved in risk-taking behaviour like gambling," Dr Lea said before his presentation to the International Congress of Human Genetics in Brisbane.

Read the whole thing here.

Oh my! Racism is getting respectable again, and once again it comes, as it did in the past, with fully credentialed "scientific" imprimatur.

This is one of the reasons why I keep insisting that the pronouncements of scientific authority must be considered in relation to moral, political, social and economic considerations.