throwaway6449

It's pretty nice to see that Reich is literally hammering home that HBD as HBD proponents see it isn't real yet you think it furthers your argument. Three things:

1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure. They're also subject to evolutionary convergence. For this reason they can't be a good proxy for classifying populations phylogenically, even though they do come up in medicine. Also, because of the very one-dimensional and extreme selective aspect of it, it is highly dubious that very complex traits (let alone undefined traits like "intelligence") could be involved.

2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works. You can't treat selective breeding the same way you treat natural selection. You need to look up basic concepts before we have a reasonable discussion.

3. You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field. I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.

FYI, Galileo was called out because his science was considered shoddy at the time, notably because of the poor quality of instruments that didn't take things like parallax into account. That he turned out to be right afterwards is more of a coincidence. Also, he called the Pope an idiot. The moral of the story isn't that truth prevails despite the evil church, it's that no one likes a contrarian smartass, especially when their arguments are wrong.

Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.

Dawkins hasn't been relevant in the field of evolutionary biology for 15+ years and I don't know why people pay attention to whatever he says just because he built a brand about being an an edgy atheist.

There are literally dozens of arguments as to why 'eugenics' (beyond very basic hanging fruit like eliminating monogenic diseases etc.) wouldn't work and doesn't make sense to begin with and many of them have been spelled out in the tweet's replies and blog posts, I'll let you do your homework.

Lol Carl is a hack and he got fired because of that. Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. Meanwhile Saini's books got inputs and reviews from all prominent scientists in the field (Graham Coop, Ewan Birney etc.) none of which are HBD proponents.

HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.