Not Even Wrong
by Alex
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)
“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.)
Can one read Marks’s statement here with Californian inflection? It makes my inner ear thrum with nostalgia to hear such emphasis.