The more I read the New Yorker, the more I realize two things. First, it’s rapidly become a sophisticated version of HuffPo, a liberal magazine marinated in Authoritarian Leftism. That became palpably clear when the editor, David Remnick, who was scheduled to interview Steve Bannon onstage at this month’s New Yorker Festival, disinvited Bannon. (Several speakers, equally craven and eager to parade their virtue, said that they’d withdraw were Bannon to appear.) From now on Remnick will bear the middle name of “Invertebrate”, sharing that moniker with Evergreen State College President George Bridges.

The second issue, which I’ve mentioned before, is that in general the New Yorker is anti-science, touting “other ways of knowing” and attacking science in oblique ways. A while back, during the Siddhartha Mukherjee epigenetics fracas (one in which Remnick again was resistant to correcting his magazine’s bad science), I reproduced part of an email written to me by a colleague:

The New Yorker is fine with science that either serves a literary purpose (doctors’ portraits of interesting patients) or a political purpose (environmental writing with its implicit critique of modern technology and capitalism). But the subtext of most of its coverage (there are exceptions) is that scientists are just a self-interested tribe with their own narrative and no claim to finding the truth, and that science must concede the supremacy of literary culture when it comes to anything human, and never try to submit human affairs to quantification or consilience with biology. Because the magazine is undoubtedly sophisticated in its writing and editing they don’t flaunt their postmodernism or their literary-intellectual proprietariness, but once you notice it you can make sense of a lot of their material.

. . . Obviously there are exceptions – Atul Gawande is consistently superb – but as soon as you notice it, their guild war on behalf of cultural critics and literary intellectuals against scientists, technologists, and analytic scholars becomes apparent.

Well, the anti-science has once again surfaced in a big way, in a new column by Masha Gessen in the online magazine. Click on the screenshot to read it:

The premise of the article is that Elizabeth Warren, by publicizing genetic tests showing that she has a small part of Native American DNA in her genome—more such genome than does the average American—is playing into the Trumpian and racist idea that different ethnic groups are genetically different. Here we have the Left consuming the Left.

However, the idea that ethnic groups are genetically different, and can be identified with great accuracy by using a combination of different genes, is uncontestably true. It is not racist to say that, but scientifically accurate. Gessen is not only wrong, but denies scientific fact in the service of her (and the New Yorker‘s) anti-Trump politics.

Warren released the data, of course, to confirm that, as she had earlier asserted several times, she did indeed have Native American ancestry: ancestry that Trump denied and mocked by calling her “Pocahontas”. (Whether it was Cherokee ancestry, as Warren claimed, isn’t at all clear.)

Trump was an idiot to use the “Pocahontas” slur, but nevertheless there’s evidence that, before she had the DNA data, Warren was touting her “minority” status without knowing it for certain. The Snopes investigation of her claim says this, for example:

. . .the senator has often spoken of her Native American ancestry.

. . . The legitimacy of Warren’s claims to Native American heritage has certainly been challenged by many critics, and it is true that while Warren was at U. Penn. Law School she put herself on the “Minority Law Teacher” list as Native American) in the faculty directory of the Association of American Law Schools, and that Harvard Law School at one time promoted Warren as a Native American faculty member. But specific evidence that she gained her position at Harvard (at least in part) through her claims to Native American heritage is lacking. Warren denied applying for special consideration as a person of Native American heritage during her career, and when the matter was examined in 2012 in response to Brown’s claims, people with whom Warren had worked similarly denied her ancestral background’s factoring into the professional opportunities afforded her. . .

So Warren did represent herself as a “minority law teacher” without knowing if that was the case, though it’s pretty clear she gained no personal benefit from so doing. Well, if a tiny fraction of Native American DNA makes her a minority, so be it, but I can’t be bothered much about it, even if Trump makes a big deal of it. Warren may have stretched the truth a bit when she didn’t know her background for sure, but that’s nothing compared to the lies that our “president” emits daily; and I’d vote for Warren over Trump any day.

The release of that data, and the video that Warren just released (below), suggests that she will indeed be a Democratic candidate for President in 2020. (I’d rather vote for Biden, even if he is a bit long in the tooth, but Warren is better than any Republican candidate I can imagine.)

But back to the science and the New Yorker. First, here’s Warren’s new video:

Well, the video is a bit self-serving, but remember that Warren is up for re-election for her second term as a senator, although she’s not going to lose no matter what Trump says. The video is, I think, largely about her future candidacy for the Presidency.

But New Yorker author Masha Gessen criticizes Warren for playing into Trump’s “Pocahontas” rhetoric by even trying to determine her ancestry:

Warren ended up providing one of the clearest examples yet of how Trumpian rhetoric shifts the political conversation. The woman who is hoping to become the most progressive Democratic nominee in generations is not merely letting herself get jerked around by a Trumpian taunt. She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times also argues that Warren’s “Cherokee fight” will hurt her chances of being elected, saying “But what Warren should have done when the story resurfaced, what she obviously should have done, was to simply express mild regret for letting her enthusiasm for family lore carry her away into identifying as someone who might possibly receive affirmative-action consideration, apologize to Cherokee groups for any offense, and literally never speak of the matter again.”  Well, this will all be forgotten in two years, I suspect, so I’m not a fan of this Monday-morning quarterbacking.

I’ve talked about race before, and yes, there is no finite number of biological races, like “Blacks” or “Caucasians”, into which everyone can be neatly slotted. Not only are a lot of people the result of admixture between ethnic groups, but the groups themselves are not absolutely distinguishable by using a single gene. We have a constellation of genetic differences that shifts as one moves from area to area across the planet.

But using a combination of genes, one can determine one’s ancestry with pretty good accuracy; one can tell where one’s ancestors came from and what ethnic group someone belongs to. This is because different geographic populations differ on average in the frequency of different genetic variants, and by combining a lot of variants, as DNA tests now do, you can get a good idea of someone’s genetic makeup. The small frequency differences between groups can, when combined, add up to a good diagnosis of someone’s background. That is why DNA tests are generally accurate.

But look how Gessen gets it wrong:

It is important to understand that, contrary to the impression created by television and online advertising, a DNA test can never provide definitive information about one’s heritage. Ancestry-testing services deal in correlations: they collect data on genetic markers on the one hand and personal narratives on the other. If all or most of the people who identify as, say, Ashkenazi Jewish have a certain genetic marker, the database will learn to recognize the marker as “Ashkenazi Jewish”; chances are, most Palestinians in this world would have this marker as well, but as long as none of them has used this particular service, the marker will be known as “Jewish.”

The errors here include the claim that DNA databases rest on a correlation between “personal narratives” and DNA markers. In fact, much of the data come from collecting DNA from people in different places in the world, not relying on “personal narratives.” The rest of the paragraph, which rests on using a single marker, not only is wrong about how the databases are constructed, but is further wrong in implying that single markers are how companies like 23andme determine ancestry. They do it in fact by using a combination of many variants that differ geographically, markers that have been associated with ethnicity largely by sampling people from different areas. Doesn’t Gessen know that? After all, she does have some background as a science journalist.

Gessen steps deeper into the quicksand when she says this:

Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X—in this case, race as a biological category.

Note that she’s using in her argument a single genetic marker, not a combination of markers, which was used to diagnose Warren’s background. And his “circularity” argument is just plain wrong, not just in using a single marker, but in how people’s backgrounds are diagnosed, which is based on using a database of known background.

Well, race (ethnicity if you will, or geographic origin if you will further) is correlated with genetic composition; if this were not the case, DNA companies would be wrong nearly all the time. True, there are no fixed differences between “races”, and no finite number of easily identifiable groups, but rather a constellation of populations around the world that grade into each other, but which can be identified quite accurately by looking at a lot of genetic markers.

If, to Gessen, race is not a “biological category”, what does it mean to her? Is it, as many anti-science Leftists claim, simply a “social construct”? The “social construct” idea is wrong because there are genetic differences underlying different populations and ethnic groups that enable an individual’s ancestry to be identified quite accurately. The idea that ethnic groups differ on average in their genes is NOT a social construct, but a biological reality. You do not gain Black “racial identity” by being a Caucasian and simply claiming you’re black, as Rachel Dolezal learned to her sorrow. But if race was a social construct with no genetic underpinning, Dolezal could say she was of whatever ethnic background she wanted.

And this paragraph is where Gessen really goes off the rails (my emphasis):

Warren, meanwhile, has allowed herself to be dragged into a conversation based on an outdated, harmful concept of racial blood—one that promotes the pernicious idea of biological differences among people—and she has pulled her supporters right along with her.

The pernicious idea of biological differences among people? Really?

Here we see the real reason why Gessen objects to using DNA to determine ancestry and ethnic background:  because it is pernicious. Gessen is clearly one of those benighted souls prepared to deny biological reality in the service of her (and her magazine’s) ideology.

It happens to be true that there are biological differences among people—among groups of people living in different places in the world, among different ethnic groups. That’s not “pernicious” but a fact, and Gessen denies that fact because she wrongly believes that such denial will eliminate the racism supposedly based on biological essentialism. In this rejection of fact for ideology, Gessen is no different from a Biblical creationist who rejects evolution because it threatens her faith.

It is a staple of Leftist anti-science that it denies inconvenient truths, like biological differences between groups as well as between men and women (the latter two sexes contain largely the same genes, but the genes are turned on and off differently, and thereby affect behavior, morphology, and physiology).

Leftists reject genetic differences because they think that admitting those differences will promote sexism and racism. This has indeed happened in the past, but it need not be true now, as I’ve written repeatedly. People deserve equal opportunities regardless of their genetic background, but you can decide that even knowing that people of different backgrounds are genetically or behaviorally different. In general, morality and social welfare should not rest on a fulcrum of ethnicity or gender.

I have to restrain myself from calling Gessen names, as I have no use for those who deny the scientific truth in service of their ideology. Gessen is simply a latter-day Lysenko who thinks she’s helping the world by distorting genetic data. I have no use for the woman, or for the magazine that would publish such blather about genetics.

I’ll close with a quote from the reader who called my attention to Gessen’s piece. I asked this reader what he/she especially disliked about the piece, and the response was this (“SJW” is, of course, “social justice warrior”):

Well, that last sentence in particular! 😉 [JAC: the one I’ve put in bold above.] What is it about science that SJW-type leftists hate so much? On the one hand, they want all sorts of special treatment for—what do we call races when we deny the concept of races?—for people of, um, certain lineages, with grievances; but at the same time they argue against any sane bases for defining, let alone identifying, said populations.

I am not renewing my subscription to the New Yorker when it expires—not unless they start taking science seriously. Did anybody actually vet Gessen’s article or check the validity of her scientific claims? Is there a scientist on the staff, or anyone with a respect for the scientific truth?