Some Words on Racial Anthropological Taxonomy
There is a fear of acknowledging race in today’s society. In the rational concern of combating the racist memes that lead to diminished human rights and the rise of slavery and genocide, an irrational avoidance of anthropological taxonomy has pervaded.
There is a vast difference between saying, ’Look at these completely different skull shapes! I bet we can use this to learn more about brain differences and thus how different people think differently,’ and saying, ’Look at these completely different skull shapes! This one must be better because it looks like mine.’
It is similar to the assumption that the Neanderthals were lesser creatures mainly because their skulls differed from ours. A great deal can be learned of their thought and behaviour by studying their skulls, indeed, yet using words such as ’greater’ and ’lesser’ in such a generalised manner is not only trivialising and unscientific, but a disservice to any attempts to gain a basic understanding of human evolution and the racial differences that exist today.
I have been spending some time lately in a forum which carries some strange, seemingly irrational negative bias versus certain races. This is distressing. However, despite this, their anthropological taxonomy forums are the largest and greatest congregations for anthrotaxonomical classification I have found anywhere within the Internet. Unfortunately, due to their beliefs, their range of expertise is self-limited to Europe, but I see no one else taking this remotely seriously. I find it a shame that only such people seem willing to engage in this topic of discussion. I cannot be the only liberal transhumanist interested.
I wanted to say something else, but it is gone, now.
Whereas I don’t think that there’s any problem in recognizing cranial or morphological variation in general and how it’s distributed around the world, its homogeneities and heterogeneities, phrenology, i.e., looking at “completely different” skull shapes and betting that “we can use this to learn more about brain differences and thus how different people think differently” is quite a bit outdated, and whatever the scopes of craniometry may be, it does not go that far. If there’s something to learn about how people think different from brain anatomy, it’s far, far better to look directly at… brain anatomy! Not indirectly, at skull shapes. But even then, it’s likely that the study of how people think differently will yield more interesting things by studying not even brain differences in its overall shape or even some more evidently functional differences in neurophysiology (which may not be interracial), but on actually by studying how people think different and why, directly. Psychology and maybe a bit of well conducted MRI and neurology. That’s far more precise than anything we could infer from bone shapes.
All true. Yet even if it is almost uselessly vague and unreliable, a very primitive observation to pin anything on, the relationships aren’t nonexistent. A skull with a forehead 3.5″ in height that slopes back at an angle of 35° is unlikely to house as large a prefrontal cortex (to say nothing of how well it is utilized, of course) as one which is 5″ in height and doesn’t slope at all. The consequences of that, though, yes, could be next to nil.
Of course, this varies perhaps more within single haplogroups of different time periods than between multiple haplogroups during the same period, thus I’d consider it only marginally a racial issue, but still, it seems to follow. Taxonomists are pretty accustomed to recognizing these correlations in other animals.
I also recognize that, to return to my forehead example above, a larger prefrontal cortex or any other feature of the brain is no guarantee of its performance, and if you think I’m trying to sketch out a concrete statement about the value of any one type of skull, you’ve got me all wrong. A larger cortex may very well have poorer neuronal connections than a smaller cortex, functioning more slowly or wasting more energy, or some other detriment entirely. I don’t know, as that’s well beyond my present understanding of neuroscience, although I’m trying.
By the way: open the pod bay door, please.