What seems sort of funny is that now that the existence for potential taboo censoring has been recognized, in recent decades there are several charlatans, conspiracy-mongers, or other ideologues who paint themselves as subject to scientific taboo despite "being accurate" in their own minds. The pendulum has swung towards over-acceptance of claims.
This was a time referred to as the "nadir of race relations" in the US, and if you read the output about humans as a species from that period, you'd be a lot less impressed. It's all out of copyright and a lot is available online. It's not what most of us would look at as science, now. It's more like mythmaking.
So, the "scientific consensus" of that era involved a number of scientists from many countries who agreed with policies and goals that, in retrospect, we now see as not only politically partisan but also specifically aligned with Nazi political ends.
Your argument is a very common one but very flawed. Antisemitism, ultranationalism and eugenics aren't bad because the Nazis did it. It's exactly the other way round!
Eugenics are just as flawed and criminal when a Swedish doctor or a British politician advocate for it.
If the scientists of that era said that certain humans were an inferior species to Homo sapiens, and the scientists after World War II said that's not true, we shouldn't assume that the pre-war view was pure untainted science and the post-war one was the result of overcorrecting for political/moral reasons - we should consider the possibility that the pre-war scientific consensus was tainted by political/moral views that we now rightly reject.
Its incredible how little people know about the period in American history between the end of Reconstruction and the start of WWII beyond just: "WWI", "Market Crash", "Great Depression".
Following one theme: Nadir of race relations, Red Summer of 1919, and Great Migration (one of the largest movements of people in history).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
It makes it so much more difficult to have an objective discussion about the past simply because people are unaware of it, or simply understand it at a very high / hand-wavy level. "Some bad stuff happened then eventually it stopped."
I want to say yes, because how are you even distinguishing that world from this one? There exist humans who are fifty IQ points smarter or dumber than other humans who also exist.
The batshit crazy idea is that these differences are caused by or intrinsically bound with skin color.
As for sex differences, here's the money quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
> All or most of the major tests commonly used to measure intelligence have been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between males and females.
We believe in egalitarianism, therefore IQ tests that show a sex difference are wrong, therefore we use IQ tests that show no sex difference.
Now, if there are biological differences between the sexes, they could not only go either way, they could go both ways. It's possible that on average women are better at X and men are better at Y, so you could really design a test to show whatever result you want.
It's also obviously the case that no matter what the averages are, the world's highest-scoring male will almost certainly have a better score than the world's lowest-scoring female and vice versa. So arguments of the form "women can't do X" are stupid even if you can find a statistically significant difference in the averages using some metric. Because most people are not exactly average.
Discrimination is the assumption that all members of a group are the same.
Sure but they're not all in the same ethnic group. What if a populous group had the peak of their intellectual curve far down the range? If, say, Gauls/French people were almost entirely simpletons equivalent to someone with Down Syndrome? Would they be enslaved and turned into a worldwide servant class? Every other group that were thought of as being inferior can be demonstrably equal to their oppressors but I think a world in which they weren't could be very different.
It takes a long time, an evolutionary timescale for that sort of difference to emerge. There’s an argument that the reason that modern humans are so homogeneous is because we wiped out all competition long before we had recorded history or civilisation.
The brain is just another blob of flesh, and what we understand of its capacities suggest it's at least partially inheritable. You'd have to ignore a lot of evidence to believe that all humans are intellectually equal. If there is variation and there is mutation and there are different pockets of populations, there are going to be evolutionary differences between them. Then in terms of sexual selection, we'd have to believe that intelligence as a criterion for mate selection is equally important across cultures, and also impacts offspring fitness the same across all cultures and environments -- vs, say, disease or sun resistance in the tropics. Otherwise, differences would naturally arise over time.
The tricky part is coming up a way to define, much less measure, "intellectual capacity" across different cultures and ways of knowing. IQ tests are pretty biased and arguably a useless measure of evolutionary fitness in many human cultures. Even if you could create the perfect cross-cultural IQ definition and test, administering and collecting such a thing would be nearly impossible in a world where many countries don't even have proper birth records or thorough population censuses (even a basic count, without in-depth testing).
We already know that, within the upper and lower bounds, there can be great variations of "intelligence" WITHIN populations group, as well as smaller differences between them. But we lack the methodology and cultural transparency to be able to accurately measure whether the cross-cultural error bars fall within the intracultural ones. That's not for lack of trying, mind you... many careers have either risen to infamy or else have been destroyed for daring to suggest such things.
In other words, it's not that all humans are equal, it's that we're SO diverse it's hard to group us into neat little groups, whether by race, ancestry, skin color, intelligence, or any other genetic factor. Because the underlying genes themselves don't work that way. They're always changing and competing.
The principles of egalitarianism are a cultural ideal (not shared by much of the world, mind you), not necessarily scientific observations. The scientific input to the ideal, if anything, is not that "the are no differences between groups" but "there are so many differences that these groupings don't really make sense; there are a million other equally valid groupings".
Surely we already know that there was research (whatever its quality or rigor) back pre-WWII that was supposed to defend racist theories. And that’s political. So I don’t understand why we would be surprised that there was a (political) backlash once millions ended up dying in part because of that kind of research.
I have that funny gut feeling, too; I suspect he's more than half-way to deciding that modern races are actually separate species.
"It's snowing so there can't be unfrozen water in the air" or whatever.
Horse and donkey, for example are not the same species because their offspring, a mule, is not fertile.
I think it was Richard Dawkins who extended this idea through time. We could mate (sorry) with our immediate ancestors, who could with theirs, etc. and in fact there's a continual chain like that all the way to any other mammal. When did we stop being our ancestral species and become H. Sapiens? No clear line.
This is really just an instance of Sorites paradox. But the inability to draw a precise line between two (or more) states does not mean there aren't two (or more) states.
What is it that makes a PB&J clearly a sandwich, and excludes a stack of pancakes with butter in between - and doesn’t exclude a club sandwich.
More generally, the key delimiter for sandwiches is the aspect ratio of the individual items contained by the bread. For something to be a sandwich, all of the major items inside must have one dimension which is substantially smaller than the other two. Sliced meats, bacon strips, cheese slices, sliced vegetables, lettuce leafs, spreads, patties, etc are all valid. Thinly spread peanut butter and jelly between bread is a sandwich, but a bread bowl with a pool of jelly and peanut butter where the depth is comparable to the radius would not be a PB&J sandwich. Flat cheese slice between bread is a sandwich, mozzarella sticks are not sandwiches. Hot dogs are by default not a sandwich, but if you cut the hot dog into thin strips it becomes a sandwich. An oreo is a sandwich but a quadruple stuffed oreo is not. The only commonly accepted sandwich which this definition claims to be a pseudosandwich is the meatball sub.
Regardless of these facts and it not meeting your criteria, it is still both in common usage and by explicit name a sandwich!
(Also, love it!)
(Sorry, can't resist keeping this going, this is some good discussion).
It's true I guess that the aspect ratio for most ingredients is 'flat', but many are thicker than the bread, and the whole sandwich is 'sideways' aspect ratio wise.
That said, just because something has a word in the name doesn't mean it's a subset of that category. Strawberries aren't berries, english muffins aren't muffins, prairie oysters aren't oysters, black pudding isn't pudding, etc.
I don't really get how your prescriptive rule means open faced sandwiches somehow "contain" their contents. Then again, since I don't believe in being prescriptive, I don't really care to think hard enough about the contortions of logic required by your approach.
A container is something which contains. If you can manipulate something by the bread part and the contents stay put, they are contained. While the aspect ratio rule may be legitimately controversial, if you don't restrict your definition of sandwich at least to stuff contained by bread then what isn't a sandwich?
The whole point of this exercise is to taxonomically categorize foods as being sandwiches or not sandwiches, how would you do that without being prescriptive?
Now that you’ve said this I do remember Richard Dawkins making that argument. That’s pretty compelling.
It's mostly based on DNA analysis these days, I think.
Based on the admixtures of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in modern humans, we once had a lot of sex with those other humans (and they with us), resulting in fertile offspring, but the differences between us and them are pretty meaningful and probably worthy of not considering us and them just subspecies of the same species.
For example, Neanderthals probably could not vocalize in the same way that we do; and being capable of speaking is quite an important distinction. They had very different anatomy, including that of important joints (shoulders).
The bigger problem are things that have massive morphological differences but can still successfully interbreed, such as dogs, coyotes and wolves. They produce fertile hybrids and there is good evidence that this occasionally happens in the wild, but nevertheless it is rare and they have clear, stable morphological distinctions, even in areas where they overlap.
Even worse, that definition is entirely useless for paleontology, as it is impossible to know if two individuals species could even interbreed, nevermind knowing if their offspring would be fertile. Even modern genetic evidence (which is extremely rare for fossils anyway) is very open to interpretation on the matter of potential interbreeding ("Neanderthal" genes in modern humans could more or less as easily be common genes older than both H. Sapiens and Neanderthals - we have far too little evidence to be sure, and no chance of genetic material from an older ancestor).
Or, in this case with ancient human remains, there's no way to check viability when all subjects have been dead for a hundred thousand years.
All can interbreed all can have fertile offspring with each other. Then look at the genetic variation between all three species.
Yeah this type of science is the stuff which destroys careers...
By 1963 it was again okay to talk about multiple hominid species, so the scientific consensus started moving back in that direction.
I find this fascinating because I never realized science could be so political.
More interestingly still, when the author talks about species being mis-identified as homo sapiens despite stark morphological differences and that they probably represent an extinct close relative, that gave me a funny gut feeling. Felt like dangerous territory to talk about …
Fascinating