But are they?  We're big-brained and so we're very much socially constructed and we learn our social behaviours.  However, we also clearly have genetic pre-dispositions as individuals which help make our own personalities.  We also have species traits such as the inclination to protect our young which is so strong an inclination that we tend not only to protect our own young but protect the young of other people and also to protect the young of other species!  At the genetic level, we as individuals are just carriers of genes which work together.  Even if sets of genes are not working together to inspire their carriers to favour their own propagation then our ancestral environment 100K years ago may have produced brains which form social bonds based on similar appearance or which are inclined towards a natural in-group/out-group discrimination of which skin colour is an obvious difference on which to form groups.

All that is not to say that racism is justifiable, of course.  The fact that we are big-brained as a species and live by rational thought means that we can choose to over-ride natural inclinations of that sort.  Afterall, they would be fairly weak inclinations.  We just need to be encouraged a bit, I expect.  Possibly through philosophical ideas of equality and fairness, carried by a political system.

Yes, evolutionary science illustrates the biological process involved in the formation of the human and non-human animal species. And the survival behaviour characteristics which have been passed on, through 'natural selection'.

Nevertheless, a combination of factors constitute to the shaping of 'personality and aptitudes'. Genetics alone can never be more than part of the story. Whilst behaviour geneticists identify 'Molecular genetics' as a significant study in explaining how genes (in this particular dimension) influence individual differences, there's no evidence that suggests we're "taught" to hate because of these various differences. Ergo, 'nurture and nature' are intertwined, but behaviour is also observed, imitated and 'taught' - through social constructionism.

Oh, and racism defies logic - therefore, irrational.

I think there's a bit of a difference between favouring family, and believing them to be physically or intellectually superior, isn't there?



There hasn't been a lot of discussion here about the other material surrounding C4's series. My understanding was that Jane Elliott was referring to the process of institutionalising prejudice, and there's a C4 article about it at: http://www.channel4.com/progra...you-calling-a-racist

Seeing as it's Sunday...

Well, that's 'scientific racism' you're talking about.  I don't know anyone who has that attitude but I know quite a few who racially or ethnically discriminate at some level or other simply because people are different.

If we're inclined to in-group/out-group thinking and behaviour then all it takes is for someone to be different.  I suspect myself that we're biologically inclined to that sort of thinking.  It's then a matter for us to rise above it.  That's the opposite of thinking we'd all get on like a house on fire if only we were not taught as we grow up to think in group terms - racial or ethnic group terms in this case.