Scientific racism: a basic primer

The debate over racial science is popularly portrayed one of science vs. ideology. And it is.  Just not in the way most people think. 

Race has been in the news again quite a bit recently. Paula Deen, a celebrity chef, was refreshingly honest about her racism, and is now out of a job.  A couple of months ago one Jason Richwine also lost his job due to his racist beliefs.  Richwine is the more interesting case--he didn’t use racial slurs, but instead disguised his racism in the borrowed clothing of science.  To sum, the Washington Post discovered that Richwine, the coauthor of a prominent Heritage Foundation study on immigration, received his doctorate from Harvard on the basis of a dissertation that, even by Heritage Foundation standards, was jaw-droppingly racist.  The Heritage Foundation hastily showed Richwine the door. When I feel down, I like to imagine the awkward after-the-fact discussions at Harvard as to how they produced a PhD with a dissertation that was too nutty even for the Heritage Foundation. 

The public and media response to Richwine makes a striking contrast with the reception of the infamous The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1994.  There was much more public controversy over Murrary and Herrnstein’s work than there was over Richwine’s similar work today.  Charles Murray has noticed this, but blamed it on the Heritage Foundations lack of “balls” compared to the American Enterprise Institute, where Murray happens to lair.  He’s wrong, of course.  He’s Charles Murray.  Dominant attitudes in US society have changed for one thing. Another thing that has changed is the availability of information (i.e., the Internet).  The scientific critiques of the work of people like Richwine are far more accessible to the public than they were in the 1990s. 

However there still seems to be strong popular suspicion that opposition to racial research is based on political beliefs rather than science. You can see this in, for example, Andrew Sullivan’s defence of (fellow wonk) Jason Richwine or skeptic Harriet Hall’s enthusiastic discussion of Berezow and Campbell’s Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left--“Scientifically studying gender or racial differences is discouraged, if not completely taboo. It would be politically incorrect to find evidence suggesting that abilities are not fairly distributed.”

One  can point to a number of reasons that opposition to scientific racism is seen as ideological—the persistence of racial attitudes, the popularity of sociobiology and genetic determinism in the media, Libertarian political ideologies and the conequent need to explain long-term racial socio-economic inequality in a perfect economy, and so on.  But one simple, and I think easily-addressed, popular misconception is the idea that the study of human biological variation is the study of race—to deny the biological reality of race is to deny the biological reality of human variation.  Andrew Sullivan presents a good example of this kind of thinking. 

But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.

 To sum, “race exists because…um…evolution does.”  

This is a misconception that scientific racists ( recently "race realists" but now Human Biodiversity (HBD) advocates) exploit.  The problem here is confusion between “race” and “population.”  Scientific racists, as well as a few well-meaning, but possibly tone-deaf, scientists, will use the two interchangeably.  Since “race” is an empty term, this is easy to do.  A researcher may write about “race” while defining it the same way as “population” (for whatever reason), and then be surprised when their work is lauded on Stormfront and shows up on the HBD Bibliography.  The simple fact is, if you want to use the word “race” you are not going to be able to separate it from its historical and social baggage.  You know what it means, so don’t use it.  

So what is “Race”?
Race is a vague folk concept, and like most folk concepts, is hard to scientifically pin down and operationalize . Basically it seems to be a bounded group of people with a similar "genetic makeup." Each race has a distinct genetic lineage with great historical depth (i.e. races are fixed and primordial units of human division). The human race is divided into a fixed number of races, usually five or six, (but there are taxonomies with many more). The standard taxonomy comes straight from the 18th-century classification--Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, etc.--but with more p.c. terminology (White, Asian, Black). Races usually have inherently different traits and abilities, usually labor-based—different races are suited for different tasks.

And what is "Population"?
A population is a local interbreeding group ("interbreeding" meaning that partners are found within the group more often than outside the group). Populations are definable entities. They are local, and the edges are (usually) clinal, fuzzy and indistinct as opposed to sharply bounded. On every continent you can have thousands and thousands of populations, moving around, dying out, forming new populations, and combining with other populations--doing all the things people do to screw up neat ideological categories.

Populations are also heriarchically organized.  That people reproduce with other people in the same vicinity means how you define a "population" depends on how you define the vicinity.  There is going to be population variation at a continental scale. But this is NOT the same thing as race.

So if races don't (biologically) exist, why are there individual genetic differences between "races"?
Human variation is complex, multidimensional, and historically and environmentally patterned. If you have a sufficiently complex set of patterned data, and you draw random lines through it, dividing it into X parts, the parts you create will differ, especially if you cherry pick the data carefully enough. To use an analogy, think of a mosaic. It is patterned, it is complex, and it tells a story. Now randomly draw lines through it, dividing it into four parts.  The colouring and constituents of those four parts are, mirabile dictu, going to be different. You now have five parts that are "scientifically proven” to be different. And you have lost the true richness of the story.

Race is not the same as population, and the existence of populations does not any way demonstrate the existence of races.

Racial Science as Pseudoscience
John Horgan half-jokingly asks "Should research into race and IQ be banned?".  Massimo  Pigliucci concludes a recent article by asking “When is enough enough?” It is time to start asking this question.

The simple fact is scientific racialism is a degenerate research program, now largely the province of zealots cocooned in right-wing think tanks. Its proponents have spent the last 200 years lurching from dataset to dataset, technology to technology, arguing that each new thing is going to be THE thing that finally proves that their object of study actually exists, but never pulling it off. And the human consequences of their research have been dire. I know of no legitimate research program that has gotten a pass like this.

At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, a racial hygienist measures a woman's features in an attempt to determine her racial ancestry. Berlin, Germany, date uncertain.

— National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. (from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Scientific racism shouldn't be banned, but it is time for it to join research in cold fusion, homeopathy, and psi on the scholarly fringes.
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References

Hall, Harriet
2013    Progressive Mythology.  Science-Based Medicine. May 21. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/progressive-mythology/

Horgan, John
2013     Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned? Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network. May 16. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/16/should-research-on-race-and-iq-be-banned/.

Pigliucci, Massimo
2013     What Are We to Make of the Concept of Race?: Thoughts of a Philosopher–scientist. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848613000447.

Sullivan, Andrew
2013    Race and IQ. Again. The Dish, May 14.  http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/14/is-christopher-jencks-a-racist/
 

Looters, archaeologists, and hitmen.

Here we have another media outlet, the Daily Mail, that hasn't bothered to look up the difference between "archaeology" and "looting".  To be fair the Daily Mail hasn't sunk quite to the level of National Geographic--at least this article highlights the acquisitive, destructive, and outright weird side of looting rather than presenting it it as a fun-filled pasttime.  

Mail Online: Archaeologist, 72, who kept headless native American mummies in his back garden after looting graves and tried to pay for hit on rival with OPALS dies in prison

(Ok, yes.  It IS an awesome headline.)

National Geographic and Spike TV, you might want to take note--if the protagonists of Diggers! took out hits on each other and kept the headless bodies of children in their backyards, it might do wonders for your ratings.  Have your people call mine.

Industrial archaeology and workplace archaeology

I have, through no desire of my own, been doing industrial archaeology—working on the foundations of an early 20th-century gold-mining facility in a state park, but it could be any industrial site.

"Glassworks. Midnight. Location: Indiana."
Lewis Hine 1908, Wikimedia Commons

The bulk of this project is traditional industrial archaeology, which is to say trying to reconstruct the various stages of the process by tying together historical documents (maps, flowcharts, etc.) with the current physical remains (a multi-tiered concrete foundation with footings and pads for machinery and plant). I am finding it interesting, in spite of myself, but it isn’t very satisfying.  Ideally I’d like to be able to push it a bit, going beyond considering the  facility solely as the outcome of engineering decisions about efficiency and process to treating it as a place of work and a livelihood for the people who spent most of their day there.  Call it Workplace Archaeology.

Recently a lot of archaeologists working on industrial sites have been thinking the same thing, trying to engage industrial archaeology with the anthropological and social-historical concerns of the broader discipline.  There has been some archaeological work on Workplace Archaeology.  Paul Shackel’s (2000) work at the Harper’s Ferry Armory is an early example.  Michael Nassaney and Marjorie Abel’s (2009) study of the residue of cutlery production is another. More recently Lucy Taksa (2005) analyzed the Eveleigh Railroad Shops in Sydney, Australia, from the perspective of workers’ resistance.  There have also have been a lot of thoughtful programmatic statements (e.g., Casella 2005; Symonds 2005), but we always tend to end up at the same place.  We can’t actually get at workers as workers. 

Usually industrial sites speak to us only of management. The place of work remains the place of technological and economic efficiency, the domain of the capitalist.  We can only really see the workers when they are in their homes (if they are fortunate enough to have a home).  This is simply the way the archaeological record is for the later 19th century.  Home is not a place of production for most workers.  It is, as far as the male factory worker goes, a place of consumption.¹  We see workers in the archaeological record, not as producers, but as consumers.  

Unless you have some exceptional deposits or remains, that is pretty much where you are stuck.  Nothing in the material remains of the site I am working speaks of the workers.  The documentary record was better, especially now that now many government records are have been digitized and are searchable.  I was able to identify some of the workers and catch snapshots of them every ten years through census records.  I gained a much better sense of the workforce after this—who they were, their backgrounds, and what became of them.  What I learned was actually not what I expected, which makes it worthwhile. 

But did I learn this through “archaeology”?  No.  The straight archaeological remains from the site really are just about technology and engineering layout.  I can’t see anyway around that.  But who cares?  It’s not a game.  With any industrial site, you need to get the workers in there by hook or by crook.  You can’t just cut the historical research off at the technology and design of the industrial feature. 

If the only people we talk about at industrial sites are managers and capitalists, and we only talk about the workers as consumers, we are reproducing some insidious political narratives.

¹The house is the workplace of his wife, and we need to start considering it in those terms—as a the site for the production and reproduction of the family, but that is another topic.  Even then there is little from this angle.  The household is still treated as a site of consumption. 

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References cited

Casella, Eleanor Conlin
2005 “Social Workers”: New Directions in Industrial Archaeology. In Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions, edited by Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds, 3–31. 1st ed. Springer, New York, NY.

Nassaney, Michael S., and Marjorie R. Abel
1993 The Political and Social Contexts of Cutlery Production in the Connecticut Valley. Dialectical Anthropology 18(3-4): 247–289.

Shackel, Paul A.
2000 Archaeology and Created Memory: Public History in a National Park. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publisherd, New York.

Symonds, James
2005 Experiencing Industry: Beyond Machines and The History of Technology. In Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions, edited by Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds, 33–57. 1st ed. Springer, New York, NY.

Taksa, Lucy
2005 The Material Culture of an Industrial Artifact: Interpreting Control, Defiance, and Everyday Resistance at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops. Historical Archaeology 39(3): 8–27.

Looting and the urge to grope history

A damaged petroglyph at Volcanic
Tablelands (Greg Haverstock BLM)
NBCNews.com

I had an earlier post on some archaeological site vandalism that actually may not have occurred--at the Glenwood Erratic in Alberta, Canada.  I thought it was a shame that that incident had gotten so much attention, because vandalism is a real problem on Native American sites.  Now some real vandalism has taken place at a petroglyph site, this one on BLM land at the Volcanic Tablelands near Bishop, California (Huus 2012, Sahagun 2012).

The looters used power saws to cut away at least five petrogyphs (one of which they broke and left in the parking lot), and deface a number of others.  They would have had to use at least a portable generator and a ladder to get get at the petroglyphs. This is more than casual vandalism. The effort suggests it was done for money.

Greg Haverstock, the BLM archaeologist at Bishop, notes the monetary value of the panels at $500-$1,500 a piece.  That's not much given the effort and risk. I wonder if they had a guaranteed buyer to make it worthwhile--an antiquities collector who will now own something they can't show off too much.

Just from the point of view of an archaeologist, I don't get the antiquity-collecting mentality. But looters and collectors do strike a chord with the US public.  Obviously there is the populist appeal of being "jes' plain folks" against "pointy-headed intellectuals," an argument that always plays well in the US.  But the needs that drive looting also make sense to a public marinaded in the assumptions of capitalism.

Reductionism and context
The idea that complex phenomena (like, well, human history) can only be understood when reduced to a pile of constituent physical bits is an ingrained one. When archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians talk about "context," the usual response is a polite but blank look.

In this vandalism case, however, the notion of context is pretty easy to understand. The petroglyphs formed a physical unit--the looters had to break them to get them out.  Most people get that some meaning has been lost. In other cases, where there is not a physical connection that needs to be physically destroyed, people have a harder time seeing the need to maintain context (or "provenience").

Commodification
The second intuitive appeal here is that nearly everything is reducible to a thing that can be alienated--bought and sold. The value of, in this case, Native American cultural heritage is a financial one.  Even in those rare cases where looters are caught and prosecuted, the assessment of damages is a financial assessment.  In this society it has to be, I suppose, but it does make for strange arguments.  How much money is the knowledge that was destroyed worth (awkward since so since we have no idea what that knowledge potentially was)?  How much money is the anguish over the violation of an ancestral burial worth?

Related to this is Americans' instinctive distrust of the commons. The idea that there are things out there that are worth money but are not owned by anyone disturbs many people. Looters on federal or state land are seen, not as stealing from the public trust, but as individuals taking on the government.  The conversion of the commons to private property seems almost righteous.   

However the petrolyphs have a sacred character, and this was a act of desecration. I think many Americans (although obviously not all) are uneasy with too much mixing of commerce and religion. So there is a sense that not everything should be commodified, which might contribute to some of the outrage over the vandalism.

Fetishism
Looted artifacts, these now-isolated commodified objects, have a meaning that goes beyond their use-value.  There is an almost erotic aspect to how this is expressed--touching, feeling, holding the past. Ric Savage¹, the former wrestler who stars in Spike TV's reality show American Looters Diggers, usually expresses justifies his activities using this trope.

“Anywhere anything ever happened, there is going to be something in the ground,” Savage explains. “Relic hunting depends on the hunter and what they are interested in and looking for. I look for historical artifacts. Modern coins, jewelry — that’s more scavenging. I like touching history.”

But critics don’t like Savage touching history. The Society of American Archaeology has criticized relic hunters for promoting illegal looting. [Huus 2012]

Of course the driving force behind the antiquities market is not the urge to "touch the past," but the urge to own the past.   And it's not even "the past."  It is a single isolated object that happens to be old.  There are people, many people, who feel they cannot appreciate the past (or other cultures) unless they can own it. If it isn't theirs, they can't feel any connection with it or have any understanding of it. The physical act of holding and owning an object satisfies some yearning for connection.  But of course it doesn't--that's why people have collections of artifacts.

When the only pleasure is ownership, the urge to consume is never satisfied.

¹Sorry for the juxtaposition of "erotic" and "Ric Savage."

UPDATE (2/2/13).  The petroglyphs have been recovered, due to an anonymous tip.  Whoever left the tip did not give their name, giving up the chance for a $9000 reward.  This suggests the looters themselves left the tip.  They were pbviously unable to sell the petroglyphs.  Unfortunately they remain at large.  

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References

Hoekstra, Dave
2012  "Relic hunter Ric Savage finds his Navy Pier souvenir."  Chicago Sun-Times, March 20, 2012.
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/11422670-421/relic-hunter-ric-savage-finds-his-navy-pier-souvenir.html  (last viewed Nov 21, 2012)
 
Huus, Kari
2012 "Theft of sacred rock drawings stuns California tribe, federal officials." NBC News, March 20, 2012. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/19/15284584-theft-of-sacred-rock-drawings-stuns-california-tribe-federal-officials?lite (last viewed Nov 21, 2012)

Sahagun, Louis
2012  "Petroglyph thefts near Bishop stun federal authorities, Paiutes."  Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2012,  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-petroglyphs-theft-20121119,0,6886011.story (last viewed Nov 21, 2012)

Jon Stewart on the history of anti-immigrant hysteria

19th-century nativism.
"The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things"
by Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, 2 September 1871.
Wikimedia Commons

Jon Stewart puts the US Right's nativist hysteria in historical context.  It's all good, especially since he is responding to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and Bernie Goldberg.  The both get a quick lesson on how Irish and Jewish immigrants were decried in exactly the same terms now used for Latino immigrants.   But the highlight is about the 04:00 mark.

You don't need to worry so much.  What you are demonstrating is the health and vitality of America's greatest tradition--a fevered frightened ruling class lamenting the rise of a new ethnically and religiously diverse new class, one that will destroy all that is virtuous and good, and bring the American Experiment crashing to the ground.  Except you are fogetting one thing.  That is the American Experiment--an ethnic group arriving on America's shores to be reviled and hated, living in squalor (or, if they are lucky, Squalor Heights), working hard to give their children or grandchildren the opportunity to @#$%* on the next group landing on our shores.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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One of my favorite things: Zotero

Having lanced my evo-psych boil for the time being (although I am sure it will erupt again), I thought I'd do something a little more fun, and cover one of my favourite research/productivity tools.  That would be Zotero.

It's free and open-source. I think it started off as a bibliographic manager, but has expanded well beyond that to a library and file of notes. You can grab the citation (usually a painless single click), and stash the pdf (usually grabbed automatically) and your notes (via a built-in editor) underneath the bibliographic entry.  If it is a webpage, zotero grabs a snapshot.  You used to be able to annotate webpages, but that function seems to have been recently dropped.

Once you have the entry, you can tag it.  You can also have another level of organisation by creating folders of citations.  I use tags mainly as permanent keywords (except for workflow-related tags like "To Read") and use folders for specific projects, which I delete when I'm done.

Creating a citation and bibliography in a document is just a matter of dragging and dropping, but for more involved work there are dedicated plug-ins for Word and OpenOffice. If you remember doing bibliographies manually, this is science-fiction, the kind with jet packs and flying cars.

You can sync your Zotero library among multiple computers using a remote server.  Zotero.org has limited space, but I use JungleDisk (for about $8.00/month).

There are a couple of other Zotero-related applications that I find indispensable.
The main one is Zotfile.  This is an add-on that manages the pdfs attached to the references.  It will automatically rename pdfs to something a little less cryptic than the usual downloaded article filename. You can set the renaming rules, but the default author's-surname_date_title works for me.

If you use a tablet for reading, Zotfile will send the article you want to your tablet via Dropbox.  Read it on your tablet from Dropbox, mark it up and annotate it, and, when you are done, use Zotfile to retrieve it from Dropbox back into Zotero.

Zotfile will then extract your mark-ups and annotations and create a note under the bibliographic entry!!  This is brilliant. Zotfile is free but you should definitely make a donation.

 On my smartphone (Android) I have Scanner for Zotero.  With this I can scan a book's barcode and upload the bibliographic information into my zotero database.

Obviously I have an 8" Visio Android tablet (a Costco special) for reading pdfs. I use ezPDF Reader for this task.  It's not free ($2.99), but worth every penny, and more.  It's the best app for marking-up and annotating PDFs. As I noted earlier once you are done, Zotfile can go through and create a text file from your highlighted or underlined sections, and your marginal notes.

Zotero. Yes.   

Steven Pinker and archaeology

Traveling in a hammock, Belgian Congo
National Museum of African Art
Smithsonian Institution
1977-0001-171

This is my second post on Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature (the first is here). This book is such a steaming pile, I need to vent but really don't want to spend time on it.  So I am going to end this particular foray into the colonial mindset and finish up on Chapter 2, which is the main archaeological and anthropological section. In this chapter Pinker argues that there has been a significant decrease in violence as a result of the development of the state. He presents his main evidence for this in a chart—Figure 2-2 in the book, but the same data is presented in two separate charts in an Edge talk he gave. The archaeological charts is below, but it is probably best to look at the chart in the book.

In my earlier post on the topic, I went over some of the more general conceptual issues Pinker faces in comparing non-state/state violence.  In this post I am concentrating on the actual quality of his evidence.  I am just going to talk about the archaeological data, otherwise things are going to get totally unmanageable, and I will never get to stop writing about the book. 

Pinker's evidence that the development of the state led to a significant decrease in violence is gleaned from a grab-bag of archaeological and ethnographic studies--studies that focus on human violence. He uses different datasets at each stage of his chart, none of which I think he really understands. His data for prehistory is the percentage of skeletons showing signs of fatal violence within each site, or group of sites.  The data for modern hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies is for the most part ethnographic data gathered through oral histories and reports.  The data for states is probably the most reliable (other than the Ancient Mexico figure). A big problem is here is that, although Pinker intends the chart to compare violent deaths in state and non-state societies, the only actual “state” included in the chart is the US (in 2005). The data are all harvested from secondary sources, some of which are highly questionable, and none of which were trying to answer Pinker’s basic question (actually it is an assumption, but let’s be charitable) —”is there a decline in violence from non-state to state societies?”

Even to those without an archaeological, anthropological, or historical background Pinker’s Figure 2-2 must appear dubious.  The big issue is figuring out exactly what is being compared here; what are the categories on the X axis and what is being measured on the Y axis?  The entities being compared are very different.  We start off with prehistory being represented by cemetery sites, or clusters of cemetery sites, leap to 19th/20th century hunter-gatherer/horticulturalist societies, then we come to “states.”  Notice that of the eight categories here, only one, the “U.S.  2005” is actually a state.  The rest are geographical regions (Ancient Mexico, Europe, and the World).  Pinker has made no effort to maintain an even roughly consistent scale of comparison.  This is important since the bigger the sample, the more variation will wash out.

The time frames represented by each category also fluctuate wildly, from days at one end up to centuries at the other.  What sense does it make to compare a mass-burial from a one-day massacre (the Crow Creek Site) to the planet Earth in the entire 20th century?  What possible conclusion can one draw from such a comparison?  

In the following table, I’ve listed the archaeological sites he uses in his argument.  I reviewed his original sources and, where I could figure it out, included the number of individuals in each cemetery (data that he really should have included).  There are some issues with his data that I need to address before proceeding.  A relatively minor, but still  significant, problem with this figure is how poorly it is cited.  One has to go through a pile of references hoping to find a match.  Fortunately Pinker used only three sources for his archaeological and ethnographic data—Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), an article in Science by  Samuel Bowles ("Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?"), and Azar Gat’s 20008 War in Human Civilization.  Even so, I couldn't find all the sites in these books, so the chart may not be fully cited.

Site	Dates	# burials	%  deaths by warfare
Nubia, nr. Site 117	12000-10000 BCE	39	3
Djebel Sahaba Nubia (Site 117)	2000-10000 BCE	41	46
Calumnata, Algeria	6300BCE-5300 BCE	53	4
Gobero, Niger	14000-6200 BCE	35	0
Volos’ke Ukraine	7500 BCE	18	22
Vasiliv’ka Ukraine	9000 BCE	32	1
Boggebakken Denmark	4300-3800 CE	17	12
Vedbaek Denmark	4100 CE	17	14
Skateholm I, Sweden	4100 BCE	30	7
Brittany	6000 BCE	?	8
Ile Teviec France	4600 BCE	16	12
British Columbia 30 sites	3500BCE-1674 CE	745	23
Central California	1500BCE-1500 CE	?	5
Central California	1400BCE-235 CE	?	5
Central California (2 sites)	240CE-1770 CE (?)	248	4
S. California 28 sites	1400 BCE-235 CE	840	6
Kentucky (2750 BCE)	2750 BCE	?	6
Crow Creek, South Dakota	1325 CE	486	60
Illinois	1300 CE.	264	16
Northeast Plains	1435 CE	?	15
Sara Nahar Rai, India	2140-850 BCE	10	30

I've grouped my carping about the archaeological evidence into three main categories: (1) Pinker's understanding of the data (2) Pinker's sample size, and (3) the manner in which Pinker selected his sample.

1) Poorly understood data

Djebel Sahaba (Site 117) and the “nr. Site 117” Site.  These sites should be grouped.  they probably belong to the same community.  Pinker uses grouped data in other cases, so he probably should here.  Or Djebel Sahaba should be dropped as representing something exceptional, either the remains of a battle or massacre, or the community buried people who died by violence separately.  Speaking the sites that might represent exceptional events…

Crow Creek, South Dakota.  This is a notorious site.  It is a mass grave, the remains of a massacre.  Using this site as just automatically representative of prehistoric mortality is senseless, especially when your sample is already small and biased.  There are no mass graves from Europe in the 20th century?  What would Pinker’s state-level death rates look like if he used cemetery data (as he should have)?

Vedbaek, Denmark, and Boggebakken, Denmark.  This is bad.  Unless there are two Mesolithic sites with 17 burials in Vedbaek, these are the same site.  Keeley calls it Vedbaek; Bowles calls it Boggebakken. The site is sometimes called Vedbaek-Boggebakken (e.g., Jochim 2011:127).  If these are the same site  (as they certainly seem to be), this is probably the most egregious error in Pinker’s data.  The rest of the errors can be attributed to lack of understanding of the evidence and appropriate methods.  But, this, THIS, is sheer laziness. He made no effort to clean his data.

As a side note, this mistake shows the importance of not just dumping other people’s numbers in to a hopper—“Vedbaek” (from Keeley) is 14% mortality, while “Boggebakken” (from Bowles) is 12%-- different numbers for the same site. This is probably because Bowles was only counting adults.  If you are going to use numbers from different studies, make sure the numbers mean the same thing. 

2) Sample sizes

Another issue to be aware of, especially if one quantifying and comparing data, is sample sizes.  Pinker doesn’t include how many individuals are represented by each cemetery in his sample, so I trawled through the sources to recover that information (information that should have damn well been in the book).  The problem here is the smaller the number of individuals in the cemetery, the greater the statistical impact of an individual showing evidence of violent death.  If there are only ten individuals in a cemetery, the percentage will jump by 10% increments.  Those are big jumps.   Note Sara Nahar Rai has a total count of only 10.  Ile Teviec only 16.  Boggebakken has a count of 17 (as does Vedbaek, for obvious reasons :) ).  Volos’ke has 18.  We need to consider whether these are adequate samples, especially when the comparative cases are continents and the entire world.  For Pinker’s analysis, which boils down to visual comparisons of percentages of uncorrected data (with the prehistoric data being summarized as a mean without error bars), I would be hesitant to use anything less than 50, simply because the statistical impact of single deaths is going to be exaggerated. 

3) Sample selection

This is probably the single largest problem with Pinker’s evidence.  In any kind of quantitative study, a first consideration is sample selection.  Is the sample biased?  Is it representative or has the author cherry-picked only the data that supports their position?  What is immediately obvious in reading Pinker’s discussion of his data is the absence of any kind of methodological discussion, and how few sites are presented as evidence.  Those are two big, bright red flags.  Pinker presents his methods for sample selections as being simply the sites “that he knew of”.  The criteria of selection is simply that he knew of the sites, more precisely he knew of these sites because they were given in tables in Keeley (1996) and Bowles (2009)—two sources dealing with violence in prehistory. Keeley was interested in demonstrating the existence of violence in prehistory, not its extent.  For this goal it was adequate to simply find sites where violence existed.  It is basically a collection of anecdotes.  We cannot use his collection of sites to infer the extent of violence because he only picked sites that showed evidence of violence.  The sample is fine for Keeley’s argument, but not for Pinker’s.  Bowles, beyond noting that he “studied all available archaeological and ethnographic sources that present (or are cited as presenting) relevant data”, does not discuss his sample selection at all, which is surprising for a Science article.  The emphasis of his article is on intergroup violence, and his sample is certainly skewed towards cemeteries that show signs of violence.  

If these are the only sites that Pinker “knew of”, he did not do enough research.  What he needed here was some kind of sampling design.  In relying solely on Keeley and Bowles, (as well as Gat for the ethnographic data), Pinker guaranteed, whether he realised it or not, that he would have a dataset consisting of practically nothing but cemeteries that show evidence of violence.  I don’t know how many prehistoric cemeteries have been excavated, and I don’t how many show no evidence of violence (hundreds at least, maybe thousands). Pinker needed a sampling program that would take  into account a population of all known cemeteries, not just those that showed evidence of violent death.  Given Pinker’s selection of the data, it is a given that non-state societies will be more violent, but this is the result of cherry-picked evidence, not necessarily reality.

I think, since WWII, we have seen an overall decline in death by violence.  Does this 60 years translate to “states are less violent than non-state societies.”  Of course not.  I am not sure it is even a meaningful question due to the different ways in which states and non-state societies deliver violence, and due to historical variation.  It may be possible to answer this question, or at least weigh in on it, but Pinker hasn’t done so.  He is not even wrong. You cannot pull something like this off without a great deal of historical understanding. If Pinker has such an understanding, it is not evident in Better Angels.  Instead he approaches the historical disciplines as factoid mines, carefully picking out the numbers he wants, and tossing them into an ideological hopper.  Better Angels fails as science and as history at a very basic level.   

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References cited

Bowles, Samuel
2009     Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors? Science 324(5932):1293–1298.

Gat, Azar
2008     War in Human Civilization. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press.

Jochim, Michael
2011     The Mesolithic. In European Prehistory: A Survey, Sarunas Milisauskas, editor, pp. 125–152. New York, Springer.

Pinker, Steven
2011a     A History Of Violence Edge Master Class 2011. Edge. http://www.edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker.

2011b     The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. First edition  New York, NY, Viking