The rule books of many dead tree RPGs read like works of Victorian anthropology, full of stony-faced assurances that individuals from one race are more intelligent or muscular than individuals from another.
This is psuedo-intellectual claptrap covering for what is in essence an unreflective populist political opinion pared down to such a simplistic axiom that its probably less nuanced than even the typical populist political position is derived from.
To begin with, humanity is a fairly recently evolved species. We've only been around as modern humans about 200,000 years. Now, that might sound like alot of time, but when you are talking about biology generally the time frames are measured in millions of years. A few hundred thousand years is a biological and genetic blink of the eye. So, not surprisingly, humans aren't particularly genetic diverse. And, as a species that is not particularly geneticly diverse, its not at all unsurprising that you don't find a particularly wide range of ability between what are, from a biological perspective, very recently separated racial groups. And, its even less suprising when you consider, as Kipling liked to note, that whatever pretences to racial superiority the men of the various human races liked to have, when it came to chasing after females none of them were particularly discreminating about it. So in short, we are all pretty closely related to each other biologically speaking.
Not that that is to say however that there are no differences between different human racial groups. In fact, there are a variaty of differences that are readily observent to even the most casual inspection. It would be extremely surprising if those differences only ran skin deep. It's not a coincidence that Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, has a particularly new world genetic make-up with a heavy percentage of west african characteristics (the Carribean version of what we PCly refer to as 'African American'). If you look at recent sprinting history, its pretty heavily dominated with runners from a fairly narrow band of new world former slaves mixed with about (if we go by averages) about a 20% mixture of aboriginal american and caucasian. You can trace a line from Jamaica up into Arkansas, and much of the world class sprinters are from there or immigrated from taht region. Likewise, there are all sorts of differences between genetic groups that have been identified, and as the saying goes you can demonstrate any sort of result ethnic or gender related genetics that you want just so you phrase your results in a way that that you make the white and/or male seem to be getting the shorter genetic straw. There are already lots of minor variations that have been established by science with little contreversy through this well-practiced and well-known methodology.
If you don't believe that, spend some more time in a genetics lab than you do reading polical opinions draped with the psuedo-scientific langauge and statistics as intellectual cover for the fact that the author is just some guy bloviating. No, Marx, your theories weren't 'Science'. Could you and everyone of your descendents of every political stripe on either side of the aisle please get over it.
Anyway at some point, it gets to be really farcical if you believe that the basis of believing all men are created equal is that all men are equally intelligent, strong, fast, or whatever. That sort of opinion is unsustainable in the face of facts, but fortunately not required to believe in legal, moral, spiritual, or political equality.
Before any numnuts thinks that he can derail my little rant by accusing me of racism, I should probably say that I have every reason to believe that real genius is found the world over in every culture and race, and that personally, the smartest person I ever met was Nigerian.
However, whether or not humans vary by intelligence or strength or whatever according to ethnic groups isn't a position I really need to take a strong position on here to prove my point (I'm agnostic on the whole question truth be told), because this Futurismic makes my argument immensely easier by claiming that its somehow racist to think that amongst basically unrelated species that there might be variation in intelligence, strength, endurance, speed, ect. That argument however eloquently it may be phrased and however many big words you use to do it is laughably rooted in the writer's prejudices as a guy that studies political science all the time.
To begin with, no one has a real problem stating that there might be differences in intelligence, speed, endurance, perceptiveness, emotional disposition, and so forth between an elephant, a trout, a cricket, an owl, a tiger, an oxen, and a bear. Among even relatively closely related species - close enough that they can hybridize - like lions and tigers, it's well known that the tiger is sufficiently stronger and more agile on average that in a one on one fight between the two big cats the lion really doesn't have a chance. If the poundage is even remotely similar, the lion loses 100% of the time.
So when we start suggesting that other sentient species out there have a genetic heritage closer to that of cats, or dogs, or trout than to hairless simians, it becomes really clear that between sentient species in general there might be massive differences in disposition and abilities.
Here's what I think: I think merfolk could probably breath underwater longer than humans on average. There might also realitically be some other differences as well.
The authors position really only makes the slightest bit of sense if you think that all alien races are presented to be nothing more than metaphorical commentaries on various human races and there relations. That is, you have to believe that whenever anyone creates an alien race, somewhere in his head he's thinking, 'These are symbols for the Japanese.' or 'Metaphorically, we understand these to be Jews', 'This is a metaphor for the White treatment of Native Americans', or some such crap as that. Of course, not only is that not the case, but if that sort of lame current topical symbolism really all you can do with science fiction and fantasy then its a pretty barren genre indeed having a relevance only for a few short years before being discarded into the garbage heap of things and ideas of interest only to historians of the era.
Of course, I don't believe that at all. Unless we are talking about color by numbers sci-fi plots by guys with the last name Cameron, I don't believe that aliens and fantasy races are even necessarily primarily commentary on race relations among the relatively undiverse tribe called 'humanity' much less that its some sort of of the moment political commentary. I would like to believe that fantasy and science fiction can address far broader and certainly far more timeless questions than whatever the latest things the various political partisans happen to be ranting over.
Now sure, there are reasonable points that can be made against the usual treatment of races in fantasy and science-fiction. The most obvious of which is the problem of having one member of the race provide the model for the whole of the species. I mean presumably most realistic races are going to be as diverse individually as humanity, and most realistic races will come from planets having as many historical cultures as humanity. I say most because it's an open question whether diversity is a salient trait of humanity. Perhaps other races will be near clones that look on us as being extremely hetrogeneous, or perhaps conversely other races will have been around 300 million years and have as much genetic diversity amongst them as say is found amongst insects as a whole and yet will still consider themselves one people. We just don't know. The point though is that the author generally allows a single individual to serve as the model for the entire race and tends to give the race a single defining culture or even a single defining trope.
And yes, that's unrealistic, but its also completely unrealistic to ask the author to do anything else. I mean, even Tolkien, whose lifetime creative output has been compared in complexity to the mythological output of entire cultures and nations couldn't possibly attempt to match the cultural complexity of the real world he was apart of. He couldn't even manage to finish his own relatively simple worldbuilding efforts in the course of a lifetime of activity and deep thought. To ask an author to create a truly three dimensional depiction of an invented race is wholly unreasonable, much less do this and also tell a story rather than write something that reads like a dry anthropology textbook. If we want to be fair, we can't be too hard on an author that lets a single relatively complex individual represent an entire fictional race - most especially when that author doesn't cope out and say something like, 'Klingons = idealized 16th century Japanese samurii'.
The ironic thing about this is that there seems to be alot of things that the author believes that I do agree with. I'm quite happy to skewer the self-contridiction and moral morass that is identity politics, for example. But the author of the essay spends way to much time addressing, "The problem with this kind of species essentialism is that it rests upon highly questionable philosophical bases.", and never seems to touch on the more important point that, once we leave the realm of genetic groups with such a recent shared common ancestor, "Species essentialism rests on much less questionable biological basis.", or even the perhaps even more salient point that he might be digging up "species essentialism" where the questions of biology and modern politics aren't even really a part of the issues that the author is addressing.
I haven't played Mass Effect II. Maybe the problem here is that author's of Mass Effect II really are just using invented races as standins to comment on present politically charged topics or the present (percieved) state of human race relations or even what happened last year, and so its natural to write an essay critiquing what they did on those grounds. In which case, I wish that the author wouldn't paint with so broad of a brush, because it reveals for all his obvious knowledge of politics are real derth of information about other topics. For example, its quite clear from a reading of Tolkien that humans, elves, and orcs are biologically identical, and to the extent that Tolkien ever wrote anything to be analogous to anything, humans, elves, orcs are intended not to remind the reader of various human races, but of the diverse ugly and beautiful impulses within their mind.
