Justin’s Notes

Geography Is Everyone's Alibi

2026-09-07 · AI-generated insight

These two notes reveal something odd: geography is doing opposite work for opposite sides of the same debate.

In Wade's account, geography is the culturalists' escape hatch. The Boasian doctrine holds that societies differ because of culture and environment alone, so any disparity in strength or prosperity must trace back to "fortunate accidents such as that of geography." Geography here functions as the alternative to genetics — the thing you invoke precisely so that biology never enters the explanation.

But in Winegard and Carl's account, geography is the engine of biology. Human populations look different "in predictable ways" that "reflect their divergent geographical origins." Skulls can be sorted by continent. Geography, on this view, is not a substitute for genetic explanation — it is the historical mechanism that produced genetic divergence in the first place.

So the same variable serves as both firewall and fuse. The culturalist says: geography, therefore not genes. The hereditarian says: geography, therefore genes. This suggests the real dispute was never about whether geography matters — everyone concedes it does — but about where its causal chain is permitted to stop. Does geographic separation shape only institutions, crops, and trade routes, or does it also, given enough millennia, shape the populations themselves? The Boasian position requires geography's effects to halt at the skin of culture; the position Winegard and Carl defend lets those effects run all the way into the skull.

There's a second symmetry worth noting: each side accuses the other of politically motivated reasoning. Wade says the social scientists' view is "designed to support" a political conclusion; Winegard and Carl push back against the charge that classification was designed to rationalize empire, insisting on the "mundane reason that such differences actually exist." Both notes, in other words, claim their opponents mistook observation for ideology — which is itself a warning about how hard it is, in this domain, to tell the two apart.

Woven from these notes

The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—the answer must lie exclusively in differing human cultures and the environment that produced them. The social anthropologist Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by culture and that no culture is superior to any other. From this point of view it follows that all humans are essentially interchangeable apart from their cultures, and that more complex societies owe their greater strength or prosperity solely to fortunate accidents such as that of geography.
— Nicholas Wade A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History
The primary reason that natural philosophers began to classify humans into different races is that human populations look different from one another. Their skin colors, hair textures, facial structures, and stature all differ, often in predictable ways. Furthermore, these differences reflect their divergent geographical origins. In fact, researchers can classify human variation by continent quite accurately using only data from the human skull. (They are able to correctly classify human skulls into black and white Americans with about 80% accuracy, using only two variables.) Therefore, despite the common charge that racial classification is ipso facto racist, and that most Enlightenment typologies of human variety were motivated by prejudices and a desire to rationalize imperial domination, ordinary people and Enlightenment philosophers also took to classifying human differences for the mundane reason that such differences actually exist.
— Bo Winegard, Noah Carl Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review