Justin’s Notes

Equality Held Hostage to an Empirical Bet

2026-08-21 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy makes visible something Reich's essay gestures at but doesn't name: the "orthodoxy" Reich describes is not simply an error, it's a load-bearing wall. What Derbyshire calls Culturism — the Boasian doctrine of a uniform, plastic human nature — did more than describe humanity; it underwrote moral equality. If human nature is the same everywhere, then equality is a fact, not merely a commitment. Notice how Derbyshire's Religionism does the identical work with different materials: God-given attributes "are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality." The "psychic unity of mankind" is a secular soul.

This reframes why Reich's colleagues are anxious about population genetics in a way that "politics corrupting science" doesn't capture. The orthodoxy made a strategic wager: tie equality to an empirical claim of biological sameness, and racism becomes not just wrong but false. The cost of that wager is that equality is now hostage to the data. Reich's announcement — that it is "simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences" — is the margin call coming due. The slippery-slope fear he sympathizes with is real precisely because the orthodoxy built the slope itself, by conceding that if differences existed, they would matter morally.

Derbyshire's Biologism offers only a thin replacement: "our equality consists in being members of a single species." That's honest but weak — species membership grounds much less than psychic unity did. Reich, tellingly, occupies a position Derbyshire's taxonomy doesn't cleanly accommodate: a Biologian by evidence who wants to preserve the Culturists' moral conclusions. His essay is an attempt to do what the orthodoxy declined to do — decouple equality from sameness, so that findings of difference land as facts rather than verdicts.

The synthesis: the choice was never between science and ideology, but between two ways of securing equality — as an empirical claim (fragile, falsifiable) or as a normative commitment (safe from data, but requiring the harder philosophical work Reich's essay only begins). The orthodoxy chose the first; Reich is discovering why the second was always the sturdier foundation.

Woven from these notes

The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored. The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
— David Reich How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race'
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