Guest post: implication is not insinuation
Originally a comment by Enzyme on That stat in a vacuum.
…a false conclusion that insinuates…
Yeah, but no. What’s gone on here – and I think it’s a fairly common mistake – is a slide from inference to implication or (in this case) insinuation.
Why does a disease apparently hit some populations harder than others? It might be that biological explanations can be quickly eliminated; but they aren’t wild, and they don’t imply or insinuate anything as morally loaded as the idea that there is something inherently wrong with the more vulnerable.
For example: imagine that the genetic lottery has thrown up a gene that makes carriers that bit more resistant to a certain pathogen. And imagine that that gene happens to be more common in population A than B. People from population B are therefore that bit more likely to succumb to that pathogen. One might infer from that a claim about inherent inferiority among Bs: but it’s not – or at least, it doesn’t have to be – implied. Nature doesn’t work like that.
It’s perplexing – and counterproductive – that this kind of highly moralised inference gets quite so much traction. If a claim about biology in this context is false, then it’s false, and we try to solve the problem by another route. But “worse at resisting this virus”, even if true, wouldn’t imply “worse all told”. That should be pretty obvious. The listener has to do the work to add that; but complaining about insinuations from bare hypotheses concerning reality hides that fact.
Sickle Cell Anemia is one example of such, being far more prevalent in West Africans than in African-Americans. African-Americans are still more prone to it than other Americans, but distancing from Malarial infections and inter racial marriages is rapidly closing the gap.
The people that argue “…a false conclusion that insinuates that there is something inherently wrong with Black and Latinx bodies” have not only transgressed against language (infer / imply / insinuate), but are also clearly not very informed about biology. Some populations really are more vulnerable to certain medical problems based on small differences in biology. The classic example of this is sickle cell anaemia in Africans.
(Curse you! I was going to relate that medical vignette! But at least I will complete it…)
Sickle cell anaemia is prevalent in large chunks of Africa (not just west) in the same regions as the prevalence of malaria, and not just coincidentally. Being a heterozygous carrier (i.e. one copy of the gene is the mutated allele, the other is not) of a certain recessive haemoglobin mutation provides increased resistance to malaria symptoms, and so is an advantage in those regions where malaria is common. It is only if two carriers have children together that it becomes a problem, with the child having sickle cell anaemia.
Another example: cows milk contains lactose, and digestion of lactose requires lactase, a digestive enzyme. Lacking this enzyme means lactose cannot be digested – lactose intolerance. Unsurprisingly, prevalence of that enzyme in a population tracks very well with whether a given population historically drank cows milk. Europe in particular drank it going back at least 5,000 years and so has widespread prevalence of the gene that produces lactase.
Such differences are the result of actual genetic differences between populations due to their different histories. It is becoming increasingly unpopular to mention that such things exist.
Yup: thanks, both. (Despite my screenname, I know the square-root of sod all about the wet sciences…)
The example that had crossed my mind two minutes after I’d submitted the comment was smallpox. People from the old world had had a few thousand years of the virus picking off the vulnerable, which made us a bit more resistant to it as a group. People from the new world hadn’t had that.
I don’t think it’s demeaning to Incas to point that out.
I believe sickle-cell is also present in populations around the Mediterranean. In the U.S. though, the obvious division is between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. So the division is a product of history as well.
WHO says that smallpox can be 30% fatal overall. Very substantial numbers of Whites were dying too, though nothing like the near-extinction levels of death among New World peoples.
I’ve never understood why people are so entranced by the idea that equality of worth qua person requires absolute equality by all other conceivable metrics. After all, that is the suppressed premise that drives the inference that there is “something inherently wrong with Black and [non-existent] Latinx bodies”, whose phrasing positively drips moral valence. People who subscribe to this view are of a kind with those who cannot conceive of normative equality between men and women without descriptive equality between them. Moral equality demands the denial of difference in physical capacity between male and female, for how can men and women be equal if men are taller, stronger, faster, etc.? For some reason, this sort of person simply can’t see that equal has more than one sense, that not-equali does not imply not-equalj. Nope, they commit themselves to total blank slatism.
But all groups differ. That’s just kind of what makes groups and individuals distinct. A normative equality requiring descriptive equality is simply unsatisfiable. And so we get an absolute refusal to entertain the possibility that there might be meaningful differences between populations not caused by outgroup oppression. If there were, then those differences might be gradable, and gradability implies a superior and inferior. Therefore group-ism.
The delicious and infuriating irony is that this view is itself group-ist. Difference in capacity explicitly entails difference in worth. They’re literally telling us they’re racist, sexist, etc. while calling everyone else racist, sexist, etc., apparently without being aware of what they’re doing. It’s one of the purest examples of projection one could possibly devise.