(drumroll, please!)
William Saletan of Slate, on race and IQ.
Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence.
You sure did. I remember it well. It inspired one of my very first blog posts ever.
Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets.
I agree that your research and writing hurt. Pulling the crown jewel out of that morass of misunderstood moronity:
But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia. For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to “the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime (“Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous”) and heresy (“Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people”). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.
I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I’m sorry. I owe you better than that.
Uh, ya think? You based the MAJORITY OF YOUR FOUR-DAY-LONG ARTICLE on that guy’s “research!”
But anyway. Back to Lord Saletan’s NEW article on the subject–
I’ve been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won’t go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can’t honestly renounce the evidence I presented.
Wow. That statement arouses in me two feelings that won’t go away: that you possibly have a wee bit of an exaggerated picture about how big an impact what you write has on society as a whole and that today is not “Opposite Day,” cause you already did renounce it. Hello?
When you find yourself in a dilemma this difficult, sometimes the best thing to do is let it sit in your head until you find a way to make sense of it within your value system.
That’s a good description of how “Intelligent Design” must have arisen in the heads of its, er, creators when they were faced with the dilemma of “Evolution.” No pun intended, of course.
In last fall’s series, I asked myself why I was writing about such an ugly topic.
Because you’re lame?
“Because the truth isn’t as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it,” I concluded. “And because you can’t solve a problem till you understand it.”
Just because you personally have ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about the role race plays in intelligence really, really does not mean that nobody else has figured out what the truth is, dear. And I somehow don’t see you personally running out to solve anything.
I wrote my commitment on a piece of paper and leaned it against my computer monitor: The truth doesn’t care what you want.
That you had to actually go and do that says a lot. Most of us can keep an easy yet firm grip on that concept without having to burn it into our retinas on an hourly basis.
In a similar way, policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can’t find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you’re a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.
Oh, my God. Did you actually just state unequivocable facts, without prevarications? No, no! I wasn’t planning on respecting anything you had to say here!
The question I set out to explore last fall was how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic differences. That’s still an important project. We’re going to find many more genetic and trait differences among populations. You can’t meaningfully denounce every such finding or theory as racist. Racism has to mean something else. I think it should mean looking and settling for racial analysis when some other combination of categories—economics, culture, genetics—more accurately fits the data.
In the age of genetics, egalitarianism doesn’t mean you have to deny differences in racial averages. It means you have to beware the injustice this kind of grouping and averaging does to individuals.
Much better. So pleased to see you returning to soft-pedaling racism.
Last week, Rev. Jeremiah Wright told the NAACP that “European and European-American children have a left-brained, cognitive, object-oriented learning style” whereas “African and African-American children … are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style.”
Translation: Lookie look! Black people say racist stuff too! Isn’t that even MORE racist than anything I’VE said in this article??
…oh wait…he’s not actually talking about genetic differences resulting in the inferiority of one race versus another, is he…DAMN…yeah, but a black guy is CLEARLY shown here saying SOMETHING based on RACE!!!
Drawing a line against racial analysis doesn’t solve all the problems I raised about inequality.
Dude, the only problems you raised are your incompetence at basic research and your inability to comprehend the research of others.
In fact, it creates new problems.
Oh? God, I cannot WAIT to be enlightened…
On the right, it leaves the question of whether genetic generalization and determinism are wrong.
Um, that problem was already there. You even say so in the statement. How is this a creation of new…
On the left, it raises the question of whether any policy, including affirmative action, should be based on race.
OH oh oh, I get it! It isn’t that it creates new problems for EVERYBODY, it’s that, as USUAL, the left needs to pull it’s head out of its bleeding heart and stop trying to answer the problem of how much impact environment has versus genetics on people of different racial backgrounds by attempting to legislate some environmental equality between the races! Yes, that might be a problem, Will. For you.
I don’t know where those questions will lead. But I’m pretty sure drawing this line is the right first step.
Yeah, maybe you should write that on a piece of paper and tape it to your computer too.
Didn’t someone already write this study, and publish it in a huge, highly popular book called the Bell Curve?
And then didn’t sane people spend the next 20 years or so debunking everything it had to say?
Couldn’t he have just read the criticisms of the Bell Curve and been done with it?
Many moons ago, I predicted over at Echidne Of The Snakes that were Barack Obama to win the Presidency or even the nomination for the Presidency all of us would be in for a rare treat: we’d be served up with a series of screeds “proving” or purporting to prove the dullness and incorrigibility and general uselessness for all public purposes of all members of the black race. I think we’re seeing the leading edge of that now.
“Jared Diamond’s marvelous work Guns, Germs, and Steel powerfully demonstrated this by showing how geographic differences allowed some humans to have a head start on development, due to regional and continental advantages in crop production and animal domestication.”
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Forgets Evolution Did Not Stop 50,000 Years Ago, 1 May 2009
By BSR (Australia) – See all my reviews
1. Diamond omits that genetic change accompanied geographical changes, the increase in population & shift to agriculture (about 7% of the genome underwent change over the past 10,000 years & the rate of change in fact sped up). See ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution’(Perseus Books 2009) by Cochran & Harpending.
2. A fair fraction of the recent evolutionary change affected brain & axon growth. For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There’s a new version of a gene (DBA1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia.
3. There is considerable psychometric evidence of group differences consistent with the recent neurological changes (Ashkenazi Jews consitently average 2/3 of a std deviation above Europeans. East Asians have a group average of about 103, Europeans 100) Rushton, J.P. and Jensen, A.R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294. [easily located on the web]
4. Also, see ‘A Farewell to Alms’ by Greg Clark, Professor of Economics, UC Davis:
The study of wills reported in A Farewell to Alms implied that economic
competition could change the genetic composition of the English population over time. This study of rare surnames shows that indeed economic success in 1600 by a man could permanently increase the relative frequency of his surname, and by implication of his genes. This does not demonstrate that these genetic changes had significant impacts in changing the behavior of the average person in England by 1800. But Clark (2008) shows that economic success in modern societies has its roots a significant genetic component.”
5. Nesbitt’s arguments are convincing if you have no idea about psychometric research, the Flynn effect and twin studies.
6. In relation to the Flynn effect this is attributed to a combination of different environments (most gains are domain specific) and improved nutrition in some cases. However, there is no sign that this has actually reduced the b-w gap over the past 30 years. The B-W IQ gap is larger at the highest level of SES than at the lowest. There have been literally hundreds of IQ studies of various racial groups from many different countries and they show the same outcome. Also, the Ashkenazi Jewish average remains about 2/3 of a std deviation above the white average.
7. Looking at children’s scores overlooks the point that the impact of hereditability increases with age. This is long before the shared environmental component vanishes. The IQ boosts that have been reported with Head Start type interventions were temporary (very short lived) and were believed to be largely the result of teaching to the test. The shared environmental component equals zero for adults.
8. If you look at twin and adoption studies all adopted children reached adult IQs that were equal to their biological peers and which had no correlation with their adoptive families. Transracial studies were not limited to Blacks adopted by Whites but included Asians adopted by Whites. The Blacks ended up with lower IQs than their adoptive families and the Asians ended up with IQs higher than their adoptive families. http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004064.html
9. The GI study in WWII is not convincing. It is known as the Eyferth study. Environmental proponents always cite it because they have not found any other evidence to cite. Note that:
* The “study” consisted of a very small N. Some citations claim 98 and some 69. * Although the children’s IQ was measured, the parents’ IQ was not measured (neither was the rank of the US military father measured). So it is not known whether the children inherited the parental IQ.
* About 30 percent of US blacks failed pre-induction mental tests for the military, compared with 3 percent of white. So US black soldiers were a more IQ-selected and less-representative sample of their population than were white soldiers.
* Children were tested prior to the age at which the genotypic aspect of intelligence has become fully manifested. * 20% to 25% of the Black fathers were not African Americans but French North Africans.
10. Electroencephalography measurements of various types confirm the W-B gap. In fact, there are two index methods, using average evoked potentials and amplitude measurements, that can measure g as well as the best IQ tests.
11. The gap is lower on culturally loaded tests and higher on culture free or culture fair tests. The reason is that Spearman’s Hypothesis has been shown to be correct. When cultural factors are removed from tests, the resulting tests are more g-loaded. As g-loading increases, the W-B gap increases. (Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing)