Do blame victims

The straw victim

Victim blaming is a well disseminated concept in modern feminism, and perhaps one of those with the greatest reach outside of its circles. Unlike many other feminist favorites such as the patriarchy, the idea is almost self-explanatory. In its canonical form, victim blaming is about shifting part of the blame, for instance when a girl is raped, from the perpetrator of the crime and to the victim, because of her supposedly irresponsible behaviors such as dressing provocatively.

Unlike with the patriarchy, the concept of victim blaming seems to make sense on the face of it. After all, there is something perversely illogical about blaming someone who is doing nothing illegal, when someone else decides to violate their rights. If, in a game of soccer, a forward manages to dribble his way past the last defender, we can easily understand the defender's temptation to grab a hold of his opponent's shirt. The way the rules of soccer work, intentionally fouling is often optimal play. But no one right in their mind would tell the forward that he should not have provoked the defender by trying to score or that the defender does not deserve a card.

Unfortunately, however convincing this might seem, it is merely a shallow rebuttal of a straw man. This becomes evident the moment we choose a more interesting case - say, a smoker who has contracted lung cancer. With some sophistication, we can entertain these two notions at the same time - that cancer is a terrible condition we wouldn't wish on anyone short of maybe this guy - but also that smoking is a dangerous habit, which in this case may have contributed to the development of cancer.

The staunch disavowal of victim blaming suggests that we should not belabor the exact cause of the cancer, or its relationship to the patient's smoking habits. But how can we reconcile this sort of attitude with informing people about the risks of smoking? Are we supposed to run campaigns to raise awareness among potential smokers and heavily tax the sale of cigarettes to actual smokers, but pretend there is no causal relationship in the cases where someone is actually diagnosed with cancer? Were we to stoop to this level of dishonesty, would we even be fooling anyone?

And is there no room to discuss the differences between our moral obligations to help out people who get ill through no fault of their own - such as being born with a genetic defect - and those who to various degrees have brought diseases upon themselves through their choice of lifestyle?

False dichotomy

It might seem a bit dishonest to completely change the topic to medical conditions to make a point. It isn't always obvious whether an analogy holds - that is to say, whether the point in the analogy actually carries over to the situation we are trying to understand. So, to bring the focus back to criminal offenses:

Suppose John commutes to work by train every morning. One day, a total stranger gets on and stabs him with a knife. Other passengers come to his aid - the assailant is subdued and turned over to the police. The investigation reveals that he is a long-time sufferer of schizophrenia with no particular motive for the attack.

This fictitious case is engineered so that John has done nothing out of the ordinary to expose himself to danger. There is no particular reason why John was attacked, rather than any of the other people in the train car. It is difficult to imagine what John could or should have done differently to protect himself.

In this case, nobody is going to suggest than John had it coming. Because there is actually a coherent logic operating behind what is called victim blaming, and it relates to whether the victims are taking reasonable precautions to protect themselves. As a contrast:

Suppose Emma is the mother of a twelve year old daughter. One day, her daughter asks if she can go mall to meet a girl she has recently met over the Internet. Without asking any questions, Emma tells her to have a good time and gives her some money so they can have lunch together. Her daughter never comes home. Investigation reveals that the new friend was actually middle aged man impersonating a schoolgirl.

It is difficult to blame the twelve year old girl for her misfortunes and it feels heartless to tell the mother than the should have known better. But - the mother really should have known better and she has a responsibility to take care of her daughter. And of course, this is not to say that abducting, possibly raping, possibly murdering a girl isn't wrong. It is hard to imagine anything more deserving of the death penalty. But this is a textbook example of a false dichotomy - presenting two choices as either-or, when they are not mutually exclusive.

Imagine these two hypothetical rules:

1. Do not kidnap young girls. No, really, don't. Actually, don't kidnap anyone.
2. Do not send your pre-teen daughter off to meet strangers from the Internet unsupervised.

There is no supernatural force which compels us to pick just one. Both these rules can be in effect, simultaneously. It is very unfortunate that not everybody abides by the first rule, but wishes aren't horses. Indeed, in an ideal society where nobody ever broke any laws, the second rule would be entirely unnecessary. But in the real world, the second rule is not an endorsement of abduction - it is a sensible precaution, borne out of compassion for children.

False dichotomy revisited

But maybe we do not want to accept the second rule. After all, we would like a society that is safe for children and where the criminals don't win - where we do not limit our own experiences or those of our children. Do not girls have a right to be in public spaces without fearing for their safety? Is it fair that they suffer the cost of having to take all sorts of precautions, while molesters roam uninhibited?

Perhaps not. Let us assume that there exist adult men who appreciate the company of young girls - this is not fictional. Let us further assume that there are laws against acting on these urges - against abduction, of course, and perhaps also the grooming itself. Finally, suppose that despite the risk of severe punishment, there are still people who will disregard these laws. We still seem to be in the real world rather than at Hogwarts.

Then we have to evaluate our options. We can double down on the principle that nobody should break the law, ever - it is illegal, after all. We can exercise our right to live in a safe society by refusing to do anything about the situation at all. The price of this policy is much too high to pay - that of our children becoming prey.

Or we can thrust to the issue into the hands of law enforcement. If a girl is abducted, even if she was meeting a stranger from the Internet all by herself, then the police aren't doing their job. The fault lies not with the mother, but with a lack of surveillance; that there weren't any officers patrolling the area; that no bystanders noticed what was going on and stepped in.

It is symptomatic, merely by trying our best to not blame victims, we automatically steer towards blaming everybody else. If there is something inherently wrong about blaming victims, because the blame lies entirely with the perpetrator, how can we square this with police blaming?

Watch me, Big Brother

It is easy to preempt the answer - keeping us safe is their job! That is all good and well. But are we sure that we really want the sort of Orwellian police state that would be necessary to guarantee everybody's safety at all times? If we want to really do away with victim blaming, there is no reason to stop with people letting their guard down in public spaces.

Who is to say that I should lock my bike? That I shouldn't leave my car unattended with the engine running? That I shouldn't expect to get my money back, if I lend a thousand dollars to a perfect stranger who promises to pay me back? Stealing is clearly illegal, after all, and it's not a crime to be careless with one's private property. It would be prohibitively costly and involve endless routine controls to realize this utopia.

This is veering off into absurdity, perhaps, but that is exactly the point. The moment you accept that people should lock their bikes, that they should avoid passing out drunk in certain parts of town past midnight, or just that they should keep their distance from dangerous animals in the wild - if you concede that there is at least some point where people must be expected to take the responsibility for themselves, then the question has completely changed its nature.

Joint effort

We are no longer refusing any and all sorts of victim blaming, but instead trying to strike the best balance between civil liberties, police budgets, draconian prison sentences and personal responsibility. But this is not a novel problem - indeed, the societies we live in today are the products of sincere attempts by intelligent people to find the best possible compromise.

When any of our security measures fail, it should and must be pointed out. If the police fails to show up in reasonable time or if a dangerous murderer is carelessly released back into society, we should find fault with the police or the judicial system, even though the criminal himself bears the ultimate responsibility. Similarly, when people become subject to crimes while failing to take appropriate precautions, we should point out what they could have done differently, regardless of what feminists think about victim blaming.

That is not to say we have no sympathy for the victims, or that we approve of what has happened to them. It is just being honest about the unfortunate fact, that combating crime is a difficult problem. Even with every other part of society doing its best to protect us, there are further precautions we can take to keep ourselves safe - that in some cases, failing to do so will have manifest consequences.

And sometimes, bad things happen to good people, despite them making every reasonable effort to stay out of trouble. It is unfortunate, but it is no easier to find infallible solutions for crime, than for diseases. Sometimes, the cure is worse is than the illness. Often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, most likely wrongly:

Those who would give up their freedom for security, deserve neither and will lose both.

Species is a social construct

Fuzzy boundaries in biology

On the face of it, species might look like a straightforward concept. In layman's terms:

A species is the largest group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing offspring.

This might seem both sensible and serviceable, but in fact it falls apart the moment you start inspecting it. The only reason it sort of works is that we already have some good common sense intuitions about what defines a species, recognized by every culture however primitive or isolated, and that non-biologists rarely need concern themselves with the edge cases.

One problem is the fact that cross-species breeding is possible. A well-known examples is the mule, which is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. The reciprocal hybrid is less common and called a hinny. The existence of such hybrids presents two alternatives: either to merge donkeys and horses into a single species, or to amend the definition.

The common solution is an extra qualification - that the offspring produced must be fertile. This is not entirely arbitrary - after all, from an evolutionary perspective, infertile organisms do not contribute to the species' lineage and are almost irrelevant. Unfortunately, this sort of patchwork solutions gives rise to new problems. In list from:

• Which species do mules belong to? A new separate species, or none at all?
• As it happens, such hybrids are scientifically classified as Equus asinus x Equus caballus, which is not itself considered a proper species.
• Mules aren't always infertile. This is catastrophic.
• Two otherwise very similar mules - they could very well be siblings - which should sensibly belong to the same species, might actually not, depending on their fertility status.
• A mule capable of two-way cross-breeding would pull horses and donkeys together into a single species. This might not actually happen with mules, but the problem is not entirely theoretical.
• The traditional members of a species are not all fertile. Depending on your definition, you might have to exclude organisms until they reach reproductive age, or after menopause, or those born sterile for reasons such as male cases of Down Syndrome.
• It isn't possible to ascertain the fertility status of every individual organism. Seeing as very few of the possible breeding pairs in a population is ever realized, a nebulous concept of potentially fertile must be introduced. How far should these hypotheticals be stretched?
• For instance, there are species where cross-breeding requires artificial insemination.
• Outside of the world of mammals, self-pollination and asexual reproduction is an even larger headache. In some cases, even the boundaries between individual organisms are difficult to draw.

Species are socially constructed

Classifying species is difficult and involves a myriad of factors, such as reproduction, appearance, behavior and distribution, and nowadays also genetic profiles. The big strokes leave very little room for debate, while edge cases are often somewhat arbitrary. As case in point, the exotic animal dog was reclassified as a subspecies of wolf in 2005.

These characteristics are reminiscent of what sophists like to call social constructs. The concept is very difficult to define - this is, as it happens, by design, because the whole point of calling something a social construct is to constantly shift between two subtly different interpretations. The essential idea is that categories are defined by people, or in other words socially constructed, and thus, such categories do not necessarily reflect any meaningful, intrinsic differences. We could for instance socially construct categories of people - we could call those born in the thirty-one day months fullborn, and the rest halfborn. If we stretch our imaginations, we could imagine a society where people really cared about these categories, for instance by prohibiting intermarriage, and this cautionary tale would encourage us to treat categorizations with skepticism.

The problem is that, in the trivial sense, all concepts are social constructs. For instance, chemists obsess over the proton count of atoms, and use them to categorize atoms as belonging to different elements, while the neutron count is generally considered unimportant. Grouping by elements is technically a social construct, and the whole system could in theory have been as arbitrary as with full- and halfborns. But the elements are not social constructs in the more profound sense - they are not a mere fiction without any underlying validity. People generally do not waste their time fiddling around with entirely invented categories, though there are of course exceptions, such as astrological signs.

For a moment, let's consider languages, simply because they provide a very clear example. Their classification is a social construct - indeed, even the languages themselves are invented by people out of thinnest air. The boundaries between dialects and languages are somewhat arbitrary and influenced by cultural factors and historic accidents, one quaint example being Urdu and Hindi. However, none of this even begins to prove that there is nothing inherently or meaningfully different about them. The whole idea is so preposterous that it isn't even worth undressing. Skipping without argument from pointing out that categories are defined by people to claiming that the categorization is fundamentally misguided is the whole of the parlor trick, and it won't help an American understand Chinese.

Similarly, any claim that species as we have decided to group them aren't meaningfully different from each other is simply dead on arrival. To find something wrong, or even worth questioning, you have to zoom in on small details on the fuzzy boundaries. And indeed, whether there are exactly seven subspecies of lion is still open for debate. But this should not, does not - can not - invalidate the entirety of biological taxonomy.

Subspecies are even more socially constructed

There is a whole intellectual enterprise devoted to disproving the existence of human races. To pick apart each of these individual arguments is to walk right into the trap - the whole strategy is a hodgepodge of argument by shotgun, discredit by nitpick and shifting of goalposts. It is better to construct a positive claim - to state a position and to back it with evidence.

As discussed previously, the concept of species is largely based on the idea that all organisms that can reproduce with each other should go in the same group. As far as humans are concerned, everyone alive today is of the same species. Historically, it is more complicated.

However, there exist distinctions which are smaller than those between actual species, which are nonetheless worth observing. The most familiar example is that of dog breeds. Classifying these differences between populations within a single species yields subspecies. Unlike with proper species, which are anchored to the ability to reproduce, there are no hard and fast rules for what constitutes a subspecies. See for instance the following mess:

Traditionally, 12 recent subspecies of lion were recognised, distinguished by mane appearance, size, and distribution. Because these characteristics are very insignificant and show a high individual variability, most of these forms were probably not true subspecies, especially as they were often based upon zoo material of unknown origin that may have had "striking, but abnormal" morphological characteristics. Today, only eight subspecies are usually accepted, although one of these, the Cape lion, formerly described as Panthera leo melanochaita, is probably invalid. Even the remaining seven subspecies might be too many. While the status of the Asiatic lion (P. l. persica) as a subspecies is generally accepted, the systematic relationships among African lions are still not completely resolved.

The words subspecies, race and breed are all mostly synonymous, with slightly different connotations. Breed is used for a strain created or modified by selective breeding, especially dogs, but also horses and cattle. Race has traditionally been used rather interchangeably with species, essentially being Germanic and Latin words for the exact same thing, but race has mostly gone out of fashion for anything other than Human subspecies, which supposedly do no even exist.

When there is substantial variation within a species, but the variation is too continuous to delimit the population into distinct subspecies, we are dealing with a cline. The simplest example is that of a species covering a large geographic area, such that there are significant differences in for instance temperature across its range. This often causes the individuals at different extreme ends to differ substantially in for instance size.

There is no profound distinction between clinal variation and true subspecies, only a difference in degree. Concerning subspecies, emphasis added:

These are separate groups that are clearly distinct from one another and do not generally interbreed (although there may be a relatively narrow hybridization zone), but which would interbreed freely if given the chance to do so. Note that groups which would not interbreed freely, even if brought together such that they had the opportunity to do so, are not subspecies: they are separate species.

Essentially, a cline would generally transform into two subspecies, if the intermediary organisms were to be wiped out.

Whether the racial diversity in humans more resembles true subspecies or clines is of limited interest to anyone but those who hope that, if they muddy the waters with this sort of technicalities, people will forget about races altogether. The question that people actually want answered - and others obfuscated - is whether there are genetic, non-superficial differences between humans of different heritage. Squabbles over whether the categories should be called races, haplogroups or superextended families and exactly how continuous the differences are, while not universally without merit, generally only serve to distract from this issue.

It is not immediately obvious that the lions in the two pictures above aren't just the same individuals in slightly different lighting conditions. Actually, the lions in the first picture are African lions (of which six different subspecies are recognized). In the second picture are Asiatic lions, which belong to the subspecies most distinct from the African lions.

These two bears are strikingly different, but mostly because of their colors. Surprisingly, they are not classified as mere subspecies of bear, but as two entirely distinct species, Ursus arctos and Ursus maritimus. The polar bear even used to have a genus of its own, but this would not do, seeing as brown and polar bears interbreed in the wild. The requirements for belonging to different species can be everything but stringent:

However, the two species have mated intermittently for all that time, most likely coming into contact with each other during warming periods, when polar bears were driven onto land and brown bears migrated northward. Most brown bears have about 2 percent genetic material from polar bears, but one population residing in the Alexander Archipelago has between 5 percent and 10 percent polar bear genes, indicating more frequent and recent mating. Polar bears can breed with brown bears to produce fertile grizzly–polar bear hybrids, rather than indicating that they have only recently diverged, the new evidence suggests more frequent mating has continued over a longer period of time, and thus the two bears remain genetically similar. However, because neither species can survive long in the other's ecological niche, and because they have different morphology, metabolism, social and feeding behaviors, and other phenotypic characteristics, the two bears are generally classified as separate species.

Extended family groups

With this very extended preamble, it should be clear that biology does not really provide any conclusive answers when it comes to subspecies, but at best very rough guidelines. Rather than deal with human races directly, though, it is instructive to first consider the smallest genealogical unit, namely the family.

It is so well established that traits run in families that it seems pointless to dwell too much on it. One objection which always turns up is the ever persistent nature versus nurture conflict - family members usually share both environment and genetics. But we know of innumerable characteristics with little to no nurture component, where families still display their likeness. A famous case is that of haemophilia in European royalty, which is an inherited, chromosomal disorder. Facial similarity is another quick example which everybody has experience with. It shouldn't be hard to tell who of these three men is the odd one out:

The answer, of course, is the one in the middle. The other two are brothers.

Height is another attribute with a strong genetic component. The following picture is indeed remarkable - perhaps even staged - but serves to get the point across:

If one admits that family members tend to resemble each other in certain ways - and this is hardly a novel idea - what is left to discuss is merely how these correlations scale up as we get to larger and larger family groups. It is well established that mega-families which do not interbreed can develop to become very different - this concept is the basis of all of biological taxonomy. It is also proven by experiment that controlled breeding can cause a reasonably uniform population to diverge into as dramatically distinct family groups as that of the Chihuahua and the St. Bernard. It is entirely trivial that geography ensures large scale breeding cliques, particularly historically, but also today.

In short, matters of genetic inheritance give rise to family differences in the small scale of things. It is also perfectly indisputable that parentage is also what distinguishes chimpanzees from humans. It would be a very strange condition of things, if genetics reliably produced these differences at both extreme ends of the scale, yet nothing at all in between - if a Frenchman resembled his brother more than his other countrymen, and his fellow humans more than other primates, yet he was no more like another Frenchman than a Chinese.

It is again instructive to look at pictures and reaffirm what everybody already knows, but sometimes chooses to forget.

Pictured above is women's faces, sampled from different countries across the world and crudely averaged . The countries of origin is whited out here, unlike in the original picture. Literally any clown can at a glance tell something about where the pictures were taken. For instance, the very first face is clearly not from Ethiopia or Thailand - she looks rather Caucasian, but perhaps a touch exotic, suggesting an origin somewhere in between Europe and the Far East. It would be hard to rule out Turkey or Iran, but the correct answer is Uzbekistan.

This ability - to classify origin by face absent of social cues - very clearly demonstrates a genetic difference, particularly if you keep in mind that the face of someone adopted expresses her genealogical origin rather than her upbringing. With a truly meaningless social construct, such as full- and halfborns, classification by appearance would be simply impossible. It is interesting to note that it is much easier to tell different human population groups apart than subspecies of lion, but hardly conclusive - humans are also much better at telling individual humans apart than individual lions.

One commonly accepted, but utterly nonsensical claim is that racial classification is simply a superficial matter of skin color. The face in the fourth picture is among the brightest ones, but she very clearly belongs somewhere in the Far East. Fifth picture, third column has darker skin and much the same hair and eyes, but it still seems more closely related to the first picture. In fact, the sort of untrained racial classification that anybody can do is fairly sophisticated, involving skull shape and bone structure and such things which sound like echoes of Nazi science. Look for instance at how well a black and white drawing can capture racial identity without relying on color cues, even after blanking out the characteristic eyes.

A second and just as trite objection to existence of human races, is that the differences are merely skin deep. It would have been a truly remarkable coincidence for genetics to reliably create differences in appearance, but nothing else. It is also plainly false - some non-controversial examples include running performance, lactose intolerance, blood types and sickle-cell anemia. 

Twin births is also a fascinating example. Note how vast the difference is, and that it is even larger when narrowing the focus from twin births in general to dizygotic twinning:

Of the 30 people you meet in Europe or the USA, one of them is likely to have a twin brother or sister. The lowest chance of meeting a twin is in Asia, where 1 in 70 persons is a member of a twin and the highest chance in Nigeria where 1 in 12 persons is a member of a twin pair.

So, if both super- and non-superficial differences exist between human population groups, how else can the idea of human races be discredited? One popular tactic is to claim that the generally accept racial classifications - Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, for instance - are social constructs which do not correspond to the actual genetic realities - i.e. that racial classification is not inherently wrong, but that the way everybody tries to do it meaningless.

But is it true? The following map is from the late nineteenth century:

Unsurprisingly, the map corresponds more or less with the distinctions we can draw with the naked eye. Considering its age and the popular notion that racial classification is non-scientific hatemongering, it is remarkable to compare this with a modern genetic clustering analysis.

It must be stressed that this analysis is done entirely without human input to introduce socially constructed biases. It is due to purely mathematical, statistical analysis. The algorithm simply tries to bin all individuals into seven, most-distinct groups. Note that the sample contains disproportionately many individuals of Indian origin.

The results are almost perfectly in line with the common sense notions of race, and suggest only minor modification from the Ethnographische Karte above. The computer generated groups are roughly:

• Orange - Sub-Saharan / Negroid
• Blue - Caucasian / White
• Red - South-Asian / Indian
• Pink - East-Asian / Mongoloid
• Purple - Native-American
• Green - Austral-Asian / Aboriginal
• Yellow - artifact, possibly due to disproportionate representation in sample?

Conclusions

One unresolved point of contention is the purely semantic issue of whether racial differences are large enough to entail actual subspecies classification. There really isn't any good way to settle this question, short of trying to size up the difference relative to those between accepted subspecies in other species. Regardless of what the answer might be, the meaningful differences between human population groups will still remain, and they will still to some degree correspond to the racial terms people already use. Whether East Asians constitute a race or an extended family does not truly matter - realities should inform conventions, but conventions do not decide reality.

Exactly what the differences are, and exactly which are the most useful and correct divisions and subdivisions are questions still open to investigation. This does not mean that we are presently entirely ignorant. There is a wealth of good science already available, but hidden by a desperate desire to preempt the answers, by insisting that questions of human races are fundamentally immoral and misguided.

When the results never turn out how you would like them to, it's tempting to stop looking - and perhaps to pretend you never tried looking in the first place.