The internet is blowing up this morning over Psychology Today’s latest bit of linkbait, a supposedly scholarly analysis that claims to prove that black women are less attractive than other women, and speculates as to why.
The whole thing is a pile of crap. Not just because it’s absurdly racist and obnoxious (which it is), but because it’s utterly scientifically incoherent. There’s a lot of stupidity in the piece, but for me one sentence stood out from all the others:
“For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races.”
I’ll repeat that: Because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes.
Why is this the stupidest sentence in the whole stupid article? Because — and I can’t believe I even have to type this — all humans are descended from common ancestors. No population of humans has “existed longer” than any other, because we all share the same great-great-great-great-(and so on)-grandparents. One group may have left Africa earlier or later than another, but we’ve all been on the planet the same length of time.
Which means none of us have been mutating any longer than anyone else.
By definition.
Seriously. This is just jaw-droppingly, mind-bogglingly stupid. The only way one subset of humans could have “existed much longer in human evolutionary history” than another is someone had dropped white people and black people onto the planet at different times, and the only people who believe that are Neo-Nazis and UFO cult adherents.
(PS: The “race” with the most harmful genetic mutations? White people.)
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May 16, 2011 at 2:47 pm
CHH
I’ve had every single emotion possible after reading the original article. Not everyone will be able to push their emotions aside and realize how poorly written this article is. Many people will believe that it’s now been scientifically proven. Others will continue to grapple with inferiority complexes imposed by idiocy like this and endorsed by institutions that are supposed to create a better understanding of the human psych. What a blunder. Psych Today should be embarrassed.
May 16, 2011 at 4:03 pm
Lauren--NY
Excellent response. What an embarrassing article.
May 16, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Flaregun
The claim that the “African” “Race” is “older” than others seems *very* logically dubious to me as well, but I’m not a geneticist, I can’t claim to know for sure how they might classify such things. But even if one were to accept the conceit that the “African” “Race” is in some convoluted definition “older”, wouldn’t the fact that all the other races therefore spring from this “African” “Race” mean that all other races are the *result* of genetic “mutations”? So that if the “African” “Race” today doesn’t have these “mutations” that resulted in other “races” dividing off from it, wouldn’t that mean they’re *less* mutated?
But then, really, that all sounds like I’m trying to argue the finer points of something who’s fundamental assertions are pretty much nonsensical to begin with. From the excerpts that I’ve read this article seems like a textbook example of something that’s so far off it’s not even wrong.
(and for the record, just so you know where I’m coming from: I’m white, male, and I seem to go through different “phases” where I find all sorts of different ethnicities & body types “attractive”, so the idea of trying to find some scientifically valid definition of what is considered “attractive” seems pretty stupid to me even *before* you bring “race” into it.)
May 16, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Kevin T. Keith
I hadn’t read the article; the reactions I’d seen made it clear that was unnecessary. But this bit is just staggering.
Like you, I’m just reeling at the thought that anybody wrote that, and that the editors let it through. It’s just . . . oy.
Good response, though.
May 16, 2011 at 8:26 pm
WTF? Psychology Today Publishes Article: “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?” «ScrollPost.com
[…] […]
May 16, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Matt
Hi,
I’m not here to defend the content or conclusions of the Psych Today piece, however I’m pretty sure that the quoted statement about genetic populations being older or younger and therefore carrying more mutations, is true if clumsily stated.
Assume you have a population of animals, and then a small subset of that population is geographically isolated (an earthquake traps the subset on an island). The larger group will generate more mutations because each new offspring will contain some mutations and they have more offspring. The smaller group will have fewer mutations. Those mutations will propagate through the smaller group faster, but there will still be fewer of them.
The vast majority of these mutations are benign. We call some of these genetic markers and we have used them to track the paths that the various subsets of the the human species took when they moved out of Africa and populated the world. If what you were saying was true we would not be able to track genetic markers and the genome itself would have no genetic clock.
I’m not a scientist, but I’m pretty sure about this, and I saw a similar comment in the tread that linked this from C&L.
It’s great to call out pseudoscience, and by all accounts the Psych Today article seems to be just that, but it helps no one to make scientific errors in service of that argument. You should probably revisit this and make sure that the above post is accurate.
May 16, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Angus Johnston
Matt, the Nature article I linked in the piece shows that Europeans actually have more mutations in their genome than Africans, and that this reflects the smaller size of their initial population group. So even if we grant your generous interpretation of the sentence in question (which I’m disinclined to do, frankly), it’s still incorrect — and refuted by empirical data.
Also, the prominent evolutionary biologist PZ Myers put up a blogpost on the Psychology Today article a few hours after I posted this, and he made the same argument I’ve made here.
I make my share of mistakes, but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t one of them.
May 16, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Matt
Angus,
Thanks for the reply. PZ is as good as gospel in my book, so I guess the error must lie with me.
I was referring to this:
“The recent African origin theory for humans would predict that in Africa there exists a great deal more diversity than elsewhere, and that diversity should decrease the further from Africa a population is sampled. Long and Kittles show that indeed, African populations contain about 100% of human genetic diversity, whereas in populations outside of Africa diversity is much reduced, for example in their population from New Guinea only about 70% of human variation is captured.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#Distribution_of_variation
Which, I thought was pretty mainstream stuff that PZ and the rest of the evo field agreed with. I think that PZ is taking issue with “existed much longer” and I am giving the author the benefit of the doubt on that point, Which, if stated correctly, would be more along the lines of “Because the African population passed through fewer periods of geographic isolation and numerical depopulation than its European and Asian descendants, it has more genetic diversity.”
Anyway, didn’t mean to start trouble on your blog, or provide fodder for racists. Nor did I mean to come off as snarky when I made my remark about mistakes. Sorry if I did any of those things. And for the record, this article is terrible. None of the genetic issues at play here mean squat in terms of attractiveness.
May 16, 2011 at 9:41 pm
Angus Johnston
No offense taken, Matt.
My understanding is that the vast majority of variation in human populations is the result of the pseudo-randomizing effects of sexual reproduction, not the kinds of random mutations that are under discussion here. So yes, given what you describe, it would make sense that African populations (which of course correlate only vaguely with contemporary concepts of “race”) would have more genetic diversity than many others, particularly the most isolated groups.
Mutation is a different story, though. I’m wading in over my head with this next bit, but that Nature abstract I linked argues that the “excess proportion of segregating damaging alleles in Europeans is probably a consequence of a bottleneck that Europeans experienced at about the time of the migration out of Africa.” I’m not at all clear on how that mechanism works, but I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere as well.
And again, I do think that the Occam’s Razor explanation of Kanazawa’s statement is the literal one — that he remembered reading somewhere that “Africans” are the oldest “race,” and munged that into the statement we see in the article. It really takes a LOT of twisting and stretching to make it mean anything else.
Yes, it’s a mind-boggling error. But at the same time, it’s a completely plausible one — it’s the kind of mistake I see my students making when they haven’t really grasped a concept, and aren’t confident enough in their reasoning skills to apply common sense to the problem.
I really do think that that’s what happened here.
May 16, 2011 at 9:56 pm
Matt
You are probably right. I think Kanazawa’s making an error, and I am being overly generous in correcting it. I’m assuming the error came from simplifying complex ideas for popular publication, but that is hardly an excuse when the topic is so incendiary. He should have been more careful to accurately represent his ideas, not less.
Let me make a few little caveats and then I’ll stop. There is no difference in the “pseudo-randomizing effects of sexual reproduction” and the “kinds of random mutations” all of those are technically mutations. Any distinction made between them is largely artificial, based on mechanism or outcome. Until the scince on epigentic change gets more nailed down, all genetic change comes from mutation.
Second, the Nature article you linked is about proportional damaging alleles, while the argument I was making was about the total, I’m not disputing the nature findings.
Finally, if you need further proof of the Psych Today author’s failure to grasp the concepts at play, you shouldn’t pass up this doozy:
“And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health).”
Every part of that is just wrong. The VAST majority of mutations have no effect at all. Moreover, the more genetic diversity a species has the more , the hardier and more survivable it tends to be. I don’t know about you, but I find resistance to disease to be very attractive, and from an evolutionary perspective, we all should, even if we don’t realize it. Moreover, most deleterious mutations have no effect on appearance.
May 16, 2011 at 10:04 pm
Angus Johnston
Useful stuff, Matt. Thanks.
I think it’s fair to say that the fact that I understand these issues better than Kanazawa is itself a damning indictment of his command of the material.
I mean, really. I’m a CULTURAL HISTORIAN, for God’s sake. I don’t know anything.
May 16, 2011 at 11:23 pm
Changamire
I’ll indulge my Monday laziness and start with “what Matt said.”
The emigrant diversity bottleneck, btw, is called the “Founder Effect.” And, as others have pointed out, it has no aesthetic meaning whatsoever. The existence of a greater range of genetic variations within Africa than outside of it–migrations in the last 500 years notwithstanding–means exactly bupkis unless you’re charting human migration patterns and issues related to the establishment of various regional populations. It actually kicks the legs out from any argument that “race” objectively exists. To draw the conclusions Kanazawa does using it is…well, it’s nigh psychotic.
I’m a cultural/social historian of Africa, so I feel your brain-pain. This is extra bonus facepalm-inducing because of all the time I have to spend in class trying to parse the myths from the realities they misuse. It’s hardest in situations where there’s a piece of data that is being horrendously misused or misrepresented. To hear my colleagues in US history tell it, though, you have your own particular zombie foes to decapitate.
May 17, 2011 at 7:45 am
Angus Johnston
Thanks for popping in, Changamire. And yeah, I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the science of race as it relates to American history and culture — lots of myths there.
It’s only when we have to reach back more than a millennium or so that I start getting fuzzy.
May 17, 2011 at 10:10 am
The Stupidest Ostensibly Scientific, Genome-Based, Racist Ridiculousness | stupidest.com
[…] Neither have we. But some (assholes) have. So here we are, in the most egregious post ever in Psychology Today… This entry was posted in stupid science. Bookmark the permalink. ← The Stupidest […]
May 19, 2011 at 2:02 pm
links for 2011-05-19 « Embololalia
[…] The Single Stupidest Sentence in the Psychology Today Piece on Black Women’s Attractiveness I can’t believe I even have to type this — all humans are descended from common ancestors. No population of humans has “existed longer” than any other, because we all share the same great-great-great-great-(and so on)-grandparents. One group may have left Africa earlier or later than another, but we’ve all been on the planet the same length of time. Which means none of us have been mutating any longer than anyone else. By definition. (tags: evolution racism race) […]
June 2, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Nyla
First, his article was not even pertinent enough to publish. If he’s in the business of writing and publishing garbage then myspace, facebook, and maybe even starting his own social network would be ideal for him.
Second, I’ve never believed in the mono-genetic theory that all civilization started in Africa. Only black civilization started in Africa. Yes, I’ve seen the documentary the Real Eve and a host of others took Anthropology courses and biology course and even consider the Glogers Law Theory. Still not convinced. We are different in race (white, black, spanish etc..) because we are suppose to me and we will never know the truth because that is only for the highest divine to know. The challenge was to see if we could get along as being different and as a human race we have failed. Thus, the statement made by the Asian man. Slavery proves it as well. I’m sure I’m right! Black women don’t need to justify our beauty we already know our swagger. For those who want to bring on the defarmation of character, slander, and call us less attractive, nappy headed whatever I’d rather be all of those things than to have the ugly hearts that our counterparts have embedded in them. So sad to live life in the twighlight zone, but good luck with that.