Economics:
Philosophy:
...Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
"The Acquired Immune System: A Vantage from Beneath", Hedrick 2004 (immune systems as parasites; excerpts)
I absolutely loved this. The concept of the adaptive immune system as something that gives the ability to get a slight advantage over your conspecifics, at the expense of selecting your pathogens to be more virulent such that loss of the adaptive system becomes fatal, reminds me forcefully of all sorts of things in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genome structure. Things that happen because they can and then get locked in place by other things built on top of them even though they themselves are harmful, or sheer selfish elements. Like poison/antidote pairs of genes in bacteria that stick around even though they increase average generation time because fluctuations in the levels of the two make a small fraction of bacteria grow extra slowly and be stress-resistant, or the evolution of the spliceosome to make sure self-splicing introns always leave leading to vertebrate genes that are 90% spliceosome-requiring introns, or the sheer abundance of transposons that make up more than half of our genomes...
I don't think most progressives assume stereotypes are arbitrary or random. The standard progressive view seems to be that the stereotypes were based on the fundamental attribution error: attributing negative traits that a group has to their innate nature rather than to negative influences.
Example: Members of group A enter region dominated by group B. The educational system in region B focuses on entirely different languages and historical periods than the educational system in region A. Group B considers intelligence to be demonstrated by a mastery of language and history. Group B then assumes that members of Group A are inherently unintelligent, instead of assuming that there's a good reason why otherwise competent members of Group A are completely inept at Group B language and history.
Group C denies group D access to certain types of training for reasons that are, at the time, valid. The reasons become invalid. Group D asks for access to those types of training. Group C points out that Group D currently has no demonstrated skill at those types of tasks. Group D is being stereotyped as inherently bad at something, when in fact they are merely untrained.
Why don't progressives put the same effort into dismantling insulting stereotypes of their political opponents (certain types of rich people) in the same way that we do for other groups? Presumably, because rich people can afford to hire PR agents, and are not suffering harm from stereotypes*, and because people generally do not make their political opponents look better.
*I haven't seen evidence for rich people being harmed by stereotype threat, but if some study shows they are, please link me to one.
The standard progressive view seems to be that the stereotypes were based on the fundamental attribution error: attributing negative traits that a group has to their innate nature rather than to negative influences.
The problem is that progressives consider it evil to attribute negative traits to innate nature and will refuse to update in that direction even if changing influences doesn't improve the trait.
Thus if a negative trait happens to actually have an innate cause, progressives end up going on witch hunts trying to find the w̶i̶t̶c̶h̶ oppressor whose evil s̶p̶e̶l̶l̶s micro-aggressions are causing the negative influences.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
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