…that C CAUSES F.

C&B agree this language is useful as a “quick or informal” “shorthand”. I simply say it should be used rigorously as well.

In any case, that interlevel “causation” is explained by intralevel causation plus interlevel constitution. So I think this is just a semantic disagreement.

After reading the whole Craver & Bechtel article (I’d only read excerpts before, including the hotdog example), I think my disagreement with Eric is purely semantic.

We agree that a cause C CAUSES (intralevel) an effect E which CONSTITUTES (interlevel) a higher-level state F.

I say that means…

I think you misunderstood me initially. I am NOT talking about any DIRECT causation across scales or levels. I am talking about direct causation WITHIN a level of organization.

I don’t recognize the Craver & Bechtel reference. Were they the ones with the hotdog vendor crossing the street example?

…which CONSTITUTE chroreiform movements. To collapse all these molecular processes, linked in causal mechanisms, into “the same entity” just hides all the causation that’s going on!

The macro movements are constituted by molecular processes, but NOT those directly involving the gene.

Do we agree that the clock gears CAUSE the hands to move? If so, then I think the only disagreement is about what “telling time” is. I agree that if you could tell time by watching the gears, then the gears would be “telling time”.

Similarly, the Huntington’s variant CAUSES molecular processes…

And again following the analogy, the Huntington’s variant itself (its presence in the genome) CAUSES the choreiform movements in the same way that the clock gears themselves CAUSE the clock to tell time.

So, where’d I go wrong here?

The expression of the Huntington’s variant at the molecular level CAUSES—not constitutes/composes—the choreiform movements of the body. There are lots of chemical substances and processes which constitute those movements, but there are CAUSAL mechanisms leading from the DNA to those processes.

You could go further and say the gears themselves cause the clock to tell time. (The gears wouldn’t turn the hands if they weren’t there in the clock.) That may be less precise than saying the turning of the gears, but it’s no less true.

Now the genetic case is analogous…

I see the clock gear analogy differently and I can’t see where my mistake is.

First, with the clock itself. The turning of the gears does cause the clock to tell time; it does not constitute or compose it. What constitutes it is the motion of the hands over the dial; the gear motion CAUSES that.

“We know there are no uncontrolled confounds, because we discovered the mechanism.”
“What’s a ‘mechanism’?”
“A causal process where we know there are no uncontrolled confounds.”

Seems you need a more direct conception of mechanism for the concept to be useful?

Interesting post!

There’s something that bothers me though (maybe my misunderstanding) in the “Mechanism is Unconfounded Causation” section. Doesn’t your “quick and dirty” definition of “mechanism” lead to circularity? Like…

…were also only assuming heritability and nothing else, like Lewontin, probably because I misread.

But if you’re assuming we ALREADY know an IQ variant X and its frequency in different races, then sure it’s like the island example and it’s clear. Thanks!

I understood that and the island example, but it wasn’t clear how that carried over to Lewontin’s point about races, maybe because I misunderstood your whole point?

Lewontin’s example was about heritability, by itself, not implying between-population “genetic” differences, right? I thought you…

If anybody could explain this to me I’d appreciate it. The context by the way is criticizing Lewontin’s “two populations of seeds” thought experiment.

Somehow the sentence sounds intuitively reasonable, but I don’t know how to translate it to precise language, much less to a result in statistics.

Specifically, who are the “you”, “me”, and “groups of people like” you/me? Are you and I in the same population? If so, aren’t the “groups of people” also in the same population?

Or are you and I in different populations? If so, the premise of the conditional is exactly what we’re trying to answer!

I think that question mostly comes down to how you define “biological reality”, not to anything about race itself.

Depending on that definition, race is either not biologically real at all; or biologically real only to a trivial, insignificant degree.

This is my last reply here. Have a good one!

Uh, no.

bsky.app/profile/rong...

OK, no more posts from me. I did post one reply after that but before I read your post.

Like, don’t even label that concept I quoted “race”. I think the “race” label might be misleading. Call it R-groups or something. Then I’m saying that R-groups existed thousands of years before that R-groups concept existed.

That’s separate from the question of whether it’s really a race concept.