My class just finished our section on _What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee_ today. I admit there are some reasons not to like this book, but overall I find it timely (rather than cobbled together out of a bunch of articles), wide-ranging (rather than unfocused), trenchant (rather than ‘trollish’) and ‘important’ (i.e. I agree with Marks and hence he is preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned). I particularly enjoy when he completely looses it and starts totally flaming his opponent’s position:
To say that statement was “wrong” would imply that we really know the proportion [of Asian and African genes in Europeans] to be, say, 80:20, rather than 65:35. To call it wrong would be a massive understatement. It is _less_ than wrong; it is not _even_ wrong. (italics in original)
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“Not even wrong” was the trademark of the celebrated physiciste Wolfgang Pauli, of course.
Funnily enough, I have to write a mini-essay on social scientistes’ ideas on race and ethnicity in the next couple of weeks, but I’ll have to get back to Marks some other time: the University of Openness is filling me fuller than a French goose as it is. (Thanks for the ‘dzup, though but.)
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Can one read Marks’s statement here with Californian inflection? It makes my inner ear thrum with nostalgia to hear such emphasis.
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