(3089/898) Fox and Tiger

1974) [R]ace is not a very useful scientific concept. We know roughly what we are talking about - skin color, hair form, and so on, and there are rough divisions of mankind on this basis. But they are very rough and scientifically not very useful.

Racial differences were useful in the evolutionary sense in the period when the human species was spreading out all over the globe. These minor adaptations, which is what they are, helped us to adapt and spread into numerous micro-environments. Now when we have clothing, buildings, artificial climate control, these physical adaptations just don't mean very much. Individuals live all over the globe regardless of their skin color or hair form. We just don't really need these adaptations anymore. [...]

[I]f we were to expand to other planets and environments, then race and racial differences could become important again. [...] Genetic variation could again then by useful At our present moment on Earth, however, there's scarcely any use for it at all.

Robin Fox
interviewed by Frank Miele in
"The Imperial Animals 25 Years Later" in
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1975) ROBIN FOX: We have a deeply built-in fear of the stranger. This is part of a Paleolithic spacing mechanism. Tribes were separated in space and there were some individuals that were like you and some that were not like you. Therefore, we have a similarity detection mechanism built into us. From childhood, we tend to develop a picture of an ideal form or face from observation of the people around us. We have a special part of the brain that sorts through faces looking for familiarity. Those that are least familiar are those that are going to be the most frightening.

And even if nature doesn't provide the cues to familiarity, like skin color, for us, we provide it for ourselves with things like costumes, haircuts, tatoos, headdresses, things through the nose, or anything that distinguishes who we are from who they are. Skin color is merely one aid to this inborn xenophobia. Something deep down in that Paleolithic brain registers "Different, DIfferent, Different!"

LIONEL TIGER: I agree, but I defy either of you to tell me the observable racial differences between a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosnian Muslim, for example.

FOX: As I said, if there isn't any observable difference to separate the in-group from the out-group, we'll make one up.

TIGER: So we make up religious categories, such as Muslim versus Catholic versus Orthodox, or whatever. People appear to find such differentiation easy to learn and are then quite willing to find their group superior to the other group, and then to find it necessary to "defend" their group against the other.

Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger
interviewed by Frank Miele in
"The Imperial Animals 25 Years Later" in
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1976) We can't necessarily go from "is" to "Ought," but we can certainly go from "Is" to "Is." The Darwinian perspective is not necessarily, or even desirably, a set of moral recommendations. It is merely an empirical starting point that permits you to get the facts right. On that basis, you might then try to create some sensible social policies. For example, when Karl Marx and his friends created their vision of a utopian world based on a severe misunderstanding of Homo sapiens they doomed half the planet to disaster for 70 some years. If Marx had actually paid some attention to Darwin in some systematic and thoughtful way, rather than merely thinking of himself as the economic analog of Darwin, he might have concluded that you might want to have the family and the kinship structure still form the basis for a large part of the social system. The kinship structure is a part of living biology. Instead Marx denied the power of the family altogether. [...] If you don't understand the family nature of human beings, and opt instead for some kind of bureaucratic ideal of impartial non-emotionality, you're probably going to get it all wrong.

Lionel Tiger
interviewed by Frank Miele in
"The Imperial Animals 25 Years Later" in
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1977) [W]e should be skeptical [...] of the division [of academia] into disciplines that we now take for granted. [...] The academic disciplines were only separated in the late 19th century, when universities suddenly burgeoned, because everybody began staking out claims to their own little bit of reality. [...] [M]y own experience has been that all the interesting problems occurs in the interstices between disciplines. [...] That's where the interesting work in the future is going to be done. Within 20 years, most of what's now being done in the universities will look like a sort of giant obituary for dead thought.

Robin Fox
interviewed by Frank Miele in
"The Imperial Animals 25 Years Later" in
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)