Towards a cybernetics of race: determinism and plasticity in ideological and biological systems

Towards a cybernetics of race: determinism and plasticity in ideological and biological systems

Ron Eglash, Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer

Anthropology has two contradictory strategies wrt race:

•Oppose myth with more accurate science—positivist battle of facts

•Expose myth as social construction—postmodernist battle of discourse

But you can’t do both!

“Empirical evidence shows that these racial groups do not differ in innate intelligence”

“Race is just a social construction, it has no empirical basis.”

So how do we bring together positivist and constructivst views?

How not to bring together positivist and constructivst views:

E.O. Wilson’s Consilience –reducing the humanities to an epiphenomena of genetic programming.

Richard H. Brown’s Toward a Democratic Science: “such a synthesizing poetics of truth is the view of science and society as texts.”

Some better examples of merging positivist and constructivist views:

Sandra Harding: “Strong Objectivity”

Donna Haraway: “Situated Knowledge”

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson: “Second Order Cybernetics”

Margaret Mead’s 1967 keynote address at the First Annual Symposium of the ASC:

“The Cybernetics of Cybernetics.”

10th Macy conference on Cybernetics, April 1957

Important tools from cybernetics for investigating race and racism

•Both biological and social systems can be described (incompletely) in terms of their information flows.

•Recursive information flows are key to the dynamics of both biological and social worlds.

•These recursive loops produce effects at multiple scales: and scale matters!

Recursion in Marshal Sahlin’s The Use and Abuse of Biology

•Molecules are predictable by the laws of physics.BUT

•Molecules that can talk about themselves—DNA— can produce systems too complex to describe with physics. •Hence the need for biological laws.

Recursion in Marshal Sahlin’s The Use and Abuse of Biology

•Biological systems are predictable by the laws of biology.

BUT•Biological systems that can talk about themselves—people—have some behaviors too complex to describe with biological laws•Hence the need for social science

Recursive “emergence” creates a zone of autonomy

Stephen J Gould replicates Sahlin’s argument of autonomy from recursive

emergence

“I can't think of an Earthly phenomenon more deeply intricate…—and therefore more replete with nonlinear interactions and emergent features—than the human brain.”

Is recursive “emergence” really enough to make the mind autonomous from genetic programming?

Amend Sahlin and Gould’s portrait: these recursive loops are nested. Is there so much interpenetration that the autonomy argument is nullified?

One way to gain autonomy is via differences in the scale of the loops.

Constitutional law: changes occurs on the scale of decades

State law: changes on the scale of years

Municipal law: changes on the scale of months

Organisms adapt to environments using loops at multiple scales: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, etc.

Genetic changes over hundreds of thousands of years

Behavioral changes over single year

Epigenetic changes over a decade

The extreme genetic similarity between humans is a result of the mismatch between the time scale of the genetic loop and the time scale of the cultural loop.

Significant human genetic adaptation occurs over hundreds of thousands of years

Significant human cultural adaptation changes over single year

Between phyla, genetic differentiation rates differ by reproductive rate and functional complexity.

Vertebrate evolutionary changes over hundreds of thousands of years

Virus changes over single year

Invertebrate evolutionary changes over thousands of years

Our parasites evolve faster than we do! So we have response loops at various scales

Genetic response to parasites

Behavioral response to parasites

Immune system response to parasites

Genetically distinguishable groupings attributed to “race” include results of genetic response to parasites, such as

sickle cell resistance to malaria

But this “racial distribution” will be different from those based on other characteristics:

Malaria distribution Sickle cell distribution

For example we get a different “racial geography” looking at the genetics of melanin distribution

Given the absence of sufficient genetic distinction to meet the definition of human races as subspecies, we could redefine races as “my melanin race,” “my lactose race,” etc.

WRONG RIGHT

Controversy over consolidating genetic distinctions as race not only occurs for humans, but for non-humans as well:

Department of the Interior ruled that hybrids of endangered subspecies cannot be protected—heightened racial distinction of:

Red Wolf

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that certain subspecies are too continuous to be considered distinct races—diminished racial distinction of: Western and Eastern Sage Grouse

Homeostasis between social forces for/againsta genetic system as race and “evidence” for race

Just as biological evolution uses these recursive loops to adapt to changing physical environments, concepts of race and racism itself adapt to changing social environments.

Changing definitions of race: Essentialist, Taxonomic, Population, Lineage

Changing strategies of racism: polygenesis, phenotypic, genetic, Post-racial

Racism is resilient because it too is adaptive:

As race becomes decentralized, so does racism—we can expect a “post-racial” racism that is based on decentralized notions of genetic superiority.

Anti-Racism efforts can also adapt:

Rather than establishing static, universal rules such as “oppose unilineal ranking” or “plasticity is better than determinism” we can influence the mutation, propagation and spread of the variants that oppose authoritarian abuse in our cultural ecology