Justin’s Notes

Equality Built on Sameness Is Hostage to Statistics

2026-08-18 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy contains a subtle observation that the Winegard and Carl note turns into a live problem. Notice where each of his three worldviews grounds human equality. The Religionist grounds it in identical God-given attributes; the Culturist grounds it in an identical blank slate. Both make equality an empirical claim about sameness — and empirical claims can be falsified. Only the Biologian grounds equality in something else entirely: shared membership in a species, which is compatible with regional variation.

Lewontin's famous argument — that most genetic variation exists within populations rather than between them — is best understood as an attempt to secure Culturist-style equality using Biologian tools. If the science itself showed populations to be essentially uniform, then equality-as-sameness would be safe on scientific ground, no blank slate metaphysics required. Winegard and Carl's face analogy shows why this move fails: variation at any single locus says little, but correlated structure across many loci makes populations distinguishable, just as no single facial feature reliably sorts men from women while the whole face does so 95 percent of the time. Sameness measured one variable at a time evaporates when variables are considered jointly — which is, as they note, how reality actually presents itself.

The deeper lesson is about where you anchor moral commitments. If your case for human equality depends on an empirical finding of uniformity, you have made your ethics hostage to the next dataset, and you acquire a motive to police what the datasets are allowed to say — which may explain some of the heat around this research. Derbyshire's Biologian position, whatever else one thinks of it, is the only one of the three that is statistically robust: it never bet on sameness in the first place, so no aggregation of correlated differences can touch it. The uncomfortable corollary is that the popular scientific defense of equality was always the weakest one available.

Woven from these notes

There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed

In brief, Lewontin ignored the fact that differences among human populations are correlated. Although population variation at any one genetic locus tends to be small, global population structure becomes clear if one examines correlated differences across loci. For a simple analogy, consider men and women’s faces. If one takes any particular characteristic, say nose size, there is likely to be more variation within a sex than between the sexes (and it would be nearly impossible to classify faces by sex with any accuracy using only nose size). However, if one considers all facial characteristics together (which is, after all, how we actually experience human faces), then sex differences become sufficiently clear that an observer can guess the correct sex more than 95 percent of the time.

— Bo Winegard, Noah Carl Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review