Mr. C began this conversation with a barrage of criticisms of my review of Charles Murray’s book Human Diversity. Murray’s book makes an elaborate argument for genetically determined differences in IQ between individuals, groups and ancestral/racial populations. Rather than attempting to answer all of Mr. C’s objections to my review, I limited my first response to a few of them. It quickly became apparent, however, that Mr. C wanted a more detailed discussion of the issues, and I obliged. As the conversation continued, it seemed more and more clear to me that Mr. C’s readings in science had consisted primarily of technical and popular sources that confirmed his preexisting conviction that some racial groups are inherently inferior to others because worldwide inequalities could only be explained by his stereotypes of those groups. My arguments that his technical claims were mistaken and that historical and environmental forces presented a much more plausible explanation for these differences seemed to have no effect on Mr. C. In the end, we both agreed that the conversation was not progressing and that any reader of our comments would have to make his or her own evaluation.
Mr. C’s initial objections to my review of Murray’s book:
This review has been getting a great deal of praise from readers, many of whom may be vulnerable to confirmation bias. However, the astute reader will notice that Dr. Jackson never actually claims that anything Murray said is false (though he implies it a couple of times). Rather this review is a classic example of what Michael Levin pointed out years ago, namely that the non-hereditarian explanation for human diversity lies entirely on finding fault with data supporting a genetic contribution. Dr. Jackson mentions the “unreliability” of certain genetic techniques and provides supporting citations, but does not tell us what those citations actually say. This gives the review a veneer of academic scholarship, but it is only a veneer. He mentions Richard Lewontin’s 1972 paper, which claims that genetic differences between races are minimal and provide no basis for racial classification, but fails to mention the obvious problem with Lewontin’s reasoning. (Google Lewontin’s fallacy.) Dr. Jackson also makes an unwarranted comparison between quantum physics and current genomic research, and suggests that biologists may be reaching the limit of understanding how genetics contributes to human cognition. The genomics revolution is scarcely 20 years old, and Dr. Jackson believes it has already reached its limit. This seems to be less an expression of belief and more an expression of concern regarding what further investigation may reveal.
Dr. Jackson is silent on his own belief regarding the contribution of nature and nurture to human cognitive diversity, but one is left with the impression that he believes in a 100% environmental explanation. The evidence to support such a belief is non-existent. Dr. Jackson described Murray’s work as a hereditarian edifice built on a foundation of sand. However, his review of human diversity is an egalitarian fantasy supported by nothing but wishful thinking.
[NOTE: Before I replied to the above post, another commenter posted a response (since removed) defending my review, to which Mr. A made the following additional comments]:
IQ is highly heritable, in the neighborhood of 80% by adulthood. This was acknowledged by the APA [American Psychological Association] in its official response to The Bell Curve. IQ is a very important factor in one’s educational and job success (see Gottfredson, 1997, Intelligence 24: 79-132, and Schmidt and Hunter, 2004, Journal of personality and social psychology 86: 162-173). I think I can assert without providing a reference that one’s job is also an important determinant of one’s class. So there you have a simple syllogistic argument for genetics being an important factor in class disparities. Charles Murray did not overstate the case for this. And let’s be honest, few intelligent people doubt this or have a problem with it. Those who have a problem with it might do so, because of racial disparities, particularly racial disparities in IQ. In other words, if IQ is highly heritable then perhaps race differences in IQ also have a genetic basis. Regrettably, it is very difficult to reconcile the state of the world, both past and present, with the idea that all races have equal cognitive abilities. Most of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, continues to be mired in poverty, disease, and general misery. The island of Hispaniola, is split between two countries. Haiti is 95% black and is a desperately poor nation, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, while its neighbor to the east, The Dominican Republic, is predominantly mixed race, and only 11% black. The DR has a GDP per capita that is eight times larger than Haiti. At the end of World War II, both Japan and Germany were essentially piles of rubble, but they quickly rebuilt and became prosperous nations. In 1960, South Korea had a GDP per capita that was lower than many countries in SS-Africa. Today it is an economic powerhouse, as is China. BTW, East Asians have higher average IQs than whites. I could go on. To describe all these disparities as purely environmental in origin is untenable, and a large majority of experts on the subject believe that the black-white IQ gap has a significant genetic component (Rinderman et al., Intelligence 78 (2020) 101406.
You are correct that Dr. Jackson does not claim that he believes that race, class, and sex disparities are 100% environmental, but his critique leaves the distinct impression that he is arguing for a minimal role for genetics and an overwhelming role for environment. Alternatively, or perhaps in addition to this, he may be arguing that untangling genes from environment is so complex that it is hopeless and we can never place even rough values on each. That’s nonsense, and probably why he invoked quantum mechanics. Perhaps this comparison is better than I first thought. For example, when one performs the double-slit experiment with individual photons, it is not possible to predict where individual photons will land on the screen behind the slits. However, when one continues to fire many individual photons at the double-slit, eventually an interference pattern emerges. Similarly with individual people, one cannot predict their intelligence from their race (or class); however, when large numbers of people are involved another pattern emerges, namely a normal distribution, or Bell curve. And the midpoints of those bell curves will be characteristic of one’s race or class. For further reading about the evidence for a genetic component to race differences in intelligence, see the following:
(1) Rushton and Jensen (2005) “30 years of research on race differences in cognitive ability.” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11: 235-294. (2) Richard Nisbett’s rebuttal to (1) is in the same issue, p. 302-310. (3) Richard Nisbett’s book “Intelligence and how to get it” (2010) contains a not-too-lengthy section on the black-white IQ gap in which he argues for a 100% environmental cause. (4) Rushton and Jensen wrote a review of Nisbett’s book in which they provide a point-by-point rebuttal. The Open Psychology Journal 3: 9-35. They describe Nisbett’s book this way:
“The more we read ‘Intelligence and How to Get It,’ the more we came to see it as a work not of scholarship, but of advocacy. Sadly, it is not the case that Nisbett simply sees the evidence differently than we do, or even favors his interpretation over ours when the evidence is mixed or ambiguous. Rather, he did his readers and the field a disservice by misrepresenting much of the available information.”
If you are interested in reading about the heritability of other personality traits, I recommend Robert Plomin’s excellent book, Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are.
My response to Mr. C:
Dear Mr. C: Some of your comments refer to positions I don’t hold, others to issues already addressed in the review (you need to read it more carefully). Here, though, are some responses to specifics: Regarding researchers admitting the unreliability of genetic techniques, Akey (2009) refers to the poor concordance among genetic studies as “sobering” (p. 714), and, after considering some mitigating possibilities, adds “Despite the above considerations, there is no escaping the general conclusion that the overlap among studies is underwhelming” (p. 715). Likewise, Hassl and Payseur (2016) note that the traditional technique produces “numerous false positives” and add that the popular alternative “does little to further our understanding of human biology” because it lacks real evidence and tends to result in “cherry-picking” and “fanciful stories of adaptation” (p. 15). Keep in mind that Murray chose these sources, not me. Regarding Nisbett, here is a summary from a Vox article (dated 6/17/17) of his stance on variance parsing: “the only reasonable response: It is not possible to give a meaningful estimate of the percentage.” Regarding Lewontin’s alleged “fallacy,” even Edwards, the originator of this accusation, acknowledged that Lewontin’s numbers were correct; he just didn’t like what they implied. No one in the research community takes the “fallacy” charge seriously, except ideological hereditarians. Regarding the truth-status of Murray’s more problematic claims: they are generally neither true nor false, because they are both unprovable and unfalsifiable. This also bears on Levin’s critique: the burden is on hereditarians like Levin and Murray to make their case, not on others to disprove it, and despite more than 100 years of their attempting to do so, using ever-more baroque statistical manipulations, hereditarians have never been able to make the sale.
Response by Mr. C:
Dear Dr. Jackson: Thank you for taking the time to respond in person. I will try to keep this short. First,
“No one in the research community takes the “fallacy” charge seriously, except ideological hereditarians.”
But I suppose those who reject Lewontin’s fallacy are not “ideological environmentalists?” Mother nature appears to take Lewontin’s fallacy quite seriously, as a person can send a DNA sample to companies like 23andme and find out with a fairly high degree of accuracy what his/her ancestral background, i.e. “race,” is. They do this by analyzing the distribution of millions of individual SNPs. If you are of mixed race, they can even break down your ancestry by chromosome fragments. Pretty strange for a social construct. Nature obviously takes heredity quite seriously. Like it or not, humanity is subject to the same laws of heredity as the rest of the living world. It used to be the religious right that rejected that idea; now it’s the religious left (i.e. the race-does-not-exist crowd).
“the burden is on hereditarians like Levin and Murray to make their case, not on others to disprove it,”
On the contrary; the burden of proof lies with the side making the claim that is contrary to observation/intuition. Intuition says that the Earth isn’t moving. Thus, when Galileo claimed that the Earth and other planets revolved around the sun, the burden of proof was on him to show it actually does. I hope you agree that the evidence is now overwhelming for a heliocentric solar system. Intuition says that species remain unchanged. Thus, when Darwin made the claim that species evolve and change over time, the burden of proof was on him to show that they do. I hope you agree that the evidence is now overwhelming for that. Observation indicates that human races are not equal, not only based on their histories, but on modern day observations, as indicated in my previous comment. Thus, the burden of proof is on those who claim the races are, in fact, equal when observation says they are not. Since IQ testing first began, over 100 years ago, the black-white IQ gap has remained steady at about one standard deviation. Some claim it has narrowed a bit in recent years; others say it has not. However, the bottom line is raising IQ has proven to be remarkably resistant to environmental intervention. If you can provide me with any references to the contrary, I would be interested to read them. But please limit them to interventions that had impacts lasting into adulthood. I am well aware of most of the others.
Lastly, I will humbly ask the following: Do you have a biological theory to explain why one would expect that different human populations evolving separately for tens of thousands of years in wildly different environments should have necessarily developed identical intelligences? Why is it that our most energetically expensive human organ, the human brain, stopped evolving when humans left Africa? Or was it before that? If so, when and why?
My response to Mr. C:
Dear Mr. C: Your idea that racial inequality is some kind of obvious starting point is problematic. The simplest assumption is that “different human populations evolving separately for tens of thousands of years” generally retained the defining feature of homo sapiens (the capacity to adapt to “wildly different” environments), and that this essential parity lasted until populations in one geographically favorable region managed to establish sufficient trade and technology to leverage military power over other regions that hadn’t done so yet, creating the current world order. Far from being based on neutral “observation/intuition,” theories of white supremacy were developed during this period within slave-trading and colonizing powers to justify and legitimize their policies of exploitation. If you truly want to understand the “remarkable resistance” of this situation to change, you could start by Googling “institutional racism.” The mission of “race science,” on the other hand, has always been to provide self-soothing justification to members of dominant groups. Why do you think scientists of race went to such great lengths to elaborate theories of racial inequality, rather than simply allowing those theories to be tested by inviting members of “inferior” races to be included as equals and seeing what happened? Thomas Kuhn (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) examined your claim that “obvious” intuitions were held as scientific truths until they were disproven by later observations. What he found was that throughout scientific history, when older intuitively “obvious” theories were challenged by new and compelling evidence, those who held the older views almost never gave them up. What they did instead was to argue more and more complicated and convoluted versions of the old theories, which then progressively lost support in the scientific community as new and less biased scientists came along and accepted the new paradigm. This is exactly what has now happened as old theories of white supremacy, and particularly the concept of “race,” have gradually been discredited and rejected by the larger scientific community (even Murray admits that the “race” concept is no longer scientifically legitimate— see p.135). So yes, the burden was on “race scientists,” and no, they were not able to meet it.
You yourself conflate the concepts of population and “race.” The former is a biological concept with a reasonably precise scientific definition; the latter is a folk concept which combines biological, social, psychological, and political claims based on traditional beliefs and which has no scientific validity. But no one who understands the reasons for the scientific rejection of the “race” concept argues that “races do not exist.” “Races” are made socially real by the way racial classifications are constructed and used. This is why “race” is considered a social construct (not a nonexistent one). Individuals are assigned to racial categories based on phenotypic makers like skin color (or on genotypic markers, as Murray attempts to do) and those categories then become socially real by the way those individuals are treated based on beliefs in those categories. An analogy would be to astrological categories. People are “assigned” to various astrological signs based on biologically real events (birth on a certain day of the year). Astrological categories like “Capricorn” are not nonexistent—they have social reality for the people who adopt them and then act in certain ways toward others and themselves based on their beliefs in these categories. However, astrological categories like “Capricorn” are neither meaningful nor productive in the empirical scientific sense. The same can be said about the social (but not biological) reality of racial categories.
Regarding your “humble” question, of course it is always possible that specific populations (not “races”!) differ from each other genetically. (As I noted in my review, such differences are not likely to follow Murray’s “continental race” categories, much less traditional “racial” lines—nor is there any reason to think that such differences would align with the 19th century belief in a progressive rather than a differentiating evolution.) But this “humble” question—a favorite of “race science” advocates everywhere—is an empty one because it can only be answered with endless and empty speculation. Furthermore, it is based on some serious misunderstandings of the issues. Here are two: First, the way you posed the question (and the way it is typically posed) implies that intelligence is a unitary biologically-based entity that varies quantitatively from less to more, as formalized in the psychometric concept of general intelligence or “g.” But this claim has been repeatedly debunked by critics over the past 100 years, and especially since the early 1990s. The “g” concept is a purely statistical one and the biological/genetic interpretation of this concept is based entirely on correlation-causation fallacies and circular reasoning. Ideological hereditarians like Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen have simply ignored or evaded the critiques of this interpretation (or don’t understand them), although these critiques have been articulated again and again by a number of scholars in the research literature (I cited a couple in my review and could list several more if you’d like). The success with which ideological hereditarians have ignored these critiques (and supported each other in doing so) is a continuing demonstration of the weakness and insularity of their position. Second, and more importantly, the question assumes that developmental processes can be definitively parsed into genetic and environmental components {“nature” and “nurture”). This idea was pioneered in the 1920s and 30s in animal and plant breeding experiments focusing on simple physical traits in strictly controlled environments, where it had some limited validity. Since the mid-20th century, some writers with strong hereditarian agendas have attempted, without sufficient justification, to extend this model not only to humans and to uncontrolled environments but also to psychological traits with poorly defined and unpredictable social and cultural influences. Some of the conceptual and empirical problems with this tactic are mentioned in my review, including extensive gene-environment interactions, nonlinear relationships, and the use of statistical glosses that skew results toward the genetic. The simple fact, though, is that the parsing of genetic and environmental variance in ordinary human development has never been methodologically sound, has regularly produced empirical inconsistencies, and is, at best, scientifically questionable and, at worst, scientifically incoherent. This should also explain to you why critics do not adhere to “ideological environmentalism,” which would be just as empty as ideological hereditarianism (take another look at the Nisbett quote).
Response by Mr. C:
Dear Dr. Jackson: Thank you again for responding. I always appreciate the opportunity to consider intelligently argued perspectives contrary to my own. I realize I am unlikely to change your mind on the heritability of intelligence, personality, and behavioral traits, and particularly not on their differential distributions among different human populations. However, I will respond to some of your remarks, in case there are curious readers following this dialogue.
Regarding your objection to the term “race,” I will concede the word and use any term you like. “Population” seems to be the currently accepted euphemism. My personal preference is John Baker’s term: “ethnic taxa,” as it can be applied to any genetically distinguishable population. It just seems to me that once particular clades of the human phylogenetic tree become sufficiently separated, a term like race becomes more informative. However, here I will endeavor to use the word population.
Looking at the state of different human populations, both past and present, it is very difficult to understand why you think equality should be the default assumption. This indicates more than a little naivete regarding evolutionary biology. If you have not already done so, I suggest you read “The 10,000 year explosion” by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending; also “A Troublesome Inheritance” by Nicholas Wade. Evolution can and does occur rapidly under intense selection. I submit Canis lupus familiaris as exhibit A, not only for it’s great morphological variation, but primarily for the variable personality and cognitive differences between breeds.
“Why do you think scientists of race went to such great lengths to elaborate theories of racial inequality, rather than simply allowing those theories to be tested by inviting members of “inferior” races to be included as equals and seeing what happened?” First, “inferior” is your word, not mine; my term is simply “different.” Second, do you seriously think that experiment has not been done? In the United States, for over fifty years, blacks have enjoyed not mere equality, but preferential treatment in education, employment, and a host of other opportunities unavailable to whites. Within the United States, this preferential treatment has obviously not achieved the desired result. When whites are driven away and our cities become subject to black rule, the results have been, among others, Detroit and Baltimore, which were once beautiful, prosperous cities. Similar whole-country experiments have been done and the results were Zimbabwe and South Africa. Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was once the breadbasket of Africa; today it is simply a basket case. South Africa was once a nuclear power; today it is struggling to produce electric power.
I completely agree with you about Thomas Kuhn’s observations about scientific truth’s and how one theory replaces another. However, in this case you are confused about which side represents the old, dying paradigm and which represents the new. It was only in the middle of the 20th century that the belief in racial (populational?) equality was popularized, through the efforts of Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu, among others. As near as I can tell, they simply asserted it to be true. Did they actually present “new and compelling evidence” for this? If so, please enlighten me. You also mention how adherents of the old paradigms “argue more and more complicated and convoluted versions of the old theories” in an attempt to hold onto them. Hmmm. Might you be referring to nebulous concepts like “institutional racism” or “systemic oppression” or the more recent “white privilege,” which are used to explain persistent world-wide populational inequalities?” If these concepts are real, why do they exert stronger effects across oceans, in places like Haiti and Africa, then they do closer to home, like in the United States? Do you know of any majority black country, where blacks enjoy a higher standard of living than in the United States? Also, why does institutional racism have such disparate effects on non-white populations in this country? East Asians in the United States are over-represented in STEM fields and enjoy higher average incomes than whites. Why have those racist institutions exempted East Asians (formerly known as Orientals) from their negative effects? And why are our racist institutions unable to project their toxic influence across the Pacific to Japan, China, and South Korea? Why is it that even a horribly impoverished and oppressive regime like North Korea still has the human capital required to build nuclear weapons? My answer is simple: different human populations have different (heritable) distributions of cognitive and behavioral traits, which result in the formation of very different societies. What are the “complicated and convoluted” explanations to which you refer? Also, what are those “ever-more baroque statistical manipulations” to which you referred in an earlier comment? The statistics I have seen regarding population differences are pretty simple: normal distributions, means, standard deviations, and correlation coefficients. I am pretty sure those are all covered in introductory statistics.
Lastly, I recognize that these populational differences are unfortunate and very problematic, and I would honestly prefer they did not exist but, in the words of the late Stephen J. Gould, “Nature doesn’t give a damn about my preferences.” (And yes, I am aware of the irony in quoting Gould.) The current orthodoxy of populational equality that remains unrealized only because of systemic oppression by whites is both untenable and unjust. Perpetuating this myth is doing more harm then good, as it generates a great deal of racial resentment and hostility, and is undoubtedly a major contributor to the epidemic of black-on-white violent crime. Populational inequality is a major problem to be solved, and will require solutions at multiple levels. However, I am of the opinion that it is always easier to solve complicated problems when working within the context of reality, rather than fantasy. Please let me know if you would like me to respond to any of your other comments.
My response to Mr. C:
Dear Mr. C: Dropping the word “race” and substituting the word “population” (or fancy terms like “ethnic taxa”) will not do the job. That would be analogous to dropping astrological labels and substituting technical astronomical language to make the same old pronouncements about Capricorns, such as “individuals born when the region of spacetime at R.A. 22h and Dec. -20 deg. is prominent at 12am GMT have the following personality traits. . . “ Do you see the problem? The fallacy lies not in terminology but in the underlying unscientific thinking based on the stereotypes and intuitions of folk beliefs. To demonstrate the validity of race (or astrology) you would have to show how scientific methods, research, and findings actually support these traditional notions of race (or astrology). This is exactly what people like Murray have tried to do for more than 100 years, and they have produced, as a result, armchair theories based on selected and distorted findings. This is particularly true of their definitions of “race” which do not correspond with the genetic facts. I listed some of these non-correspondences in my review of Murray’s 8th chapter. And in discussing other chapters I additionally detailed how Murray therefore has to poke, prod and reshape actual scientific findings, repeatedly, to make his arguments come out “right”—in his misuse of Rosenberg’s research, his misrepresenting the dynamics of allele dispersion, his distortions of variance estimates, his selective survey of cluster studies, etc.—and I referenced scientific sources that substantiate these critiques. So when you ask about “convoluted explanations,” I suggest you take another look at some of those. The statistical manipulations you question include both “introductory” and “advanced” variants. Examples of the former include Murray’s moves from correlation to causation (often concealed by careful rhetoric), and of the latter, his failure to confront the problems of interaction effects and nonlinearity. And if it’s baroque manipulations you want, I refer you to the master manipulator Arthur Jensen, who supplies Murray’s central arguments about general intelligence. Jensen’s entire case for the biology and centrality of “g” was systematically dismantled by one of your favorite authors, Stephen Jay Gould in the Mismeasure of Man (you’ll see lots of attacks on that book by “race science” people, but they studiously avoid Gould’s critiques of “g”). Jensen made several attempts to respond to Gould, which did not hold up. In his last attempt (Contemporary Education Review, 1982) he triumphantly invoked a little-known statistical technique known as the Schmid-Leiman transformation to demonstrate that “g” is orthogonal and therefore central. The only problem is that the Schmid-Leiman transformation is designed, specifically, to produce orthogonal outputs—i.e. Jensen’s argument deliberately used an obscure technique designed to force exactly the answer he wanted. How’s that for baroque? After this article, Jensen never addressed Gould’s critiques again. (Jensen’s circularity is well-known in the psychometric community; in the journal Psycoloquy 10(23), 1988, he summarized his final position on the “g-factor” and was taken to task in several comments by other psychometricians for his circular reasoning—none of this ever bothered Jensen, nor does it bother those like Murray who cite him reverently).
I assume your comments about “preferential treatment” refer to affirmative action. This raises several issues, and I will just respond to two of them. First, even if we assume that affirmative action means “preferential treatment” and that it has been unsuccessful (and both of these assumptions can be contested), this would establish nothing about race and genetics. There are conservative writers who are highly critical of affirmative action but who have severely critiqued the genetic analyses of Murray and “race science.” Two examples are James Heckman and Thomas Sowell. You can agree or disagree with their arguments about affirmative action, but those arguments are not based on bad science, as are the genetic arguments of Murray et al. Second, your claim that minority groups have had “preferential,” or even equal, access to opportunity in the U.S. betrays a lack of knowledge of the history and current conditions of these groups. You seem to have disregarded my suggestion that you check out some of the sources on the cumulative effects of structural and institutional racism. But there is a whole literature on this topic in the fields of sociology, law, political science and economics (look at the Wikipedia references on this subject). Instead you rely on inferential leaps based on your intuitions of what you take to be national and ethnic traits. Your list of domestic and global inequalities is a description of the problem, not the causes. For example, you have mentioned Haiti a couple of times now. But are you aware of the long history, carefully documented by Laurent Dubois and other historians, of enslavement, revolution, punitive sanctions, military coercion, occupation, and financial exploitation of that country? Likewise, there is a deep literature on the dispossession of African Americans—not only by slavery, disenfranchisement, and domestic terrorism, but also by theft of family wealth, and deliberate exclusion from New Deal and subsequent programs (e.g. housing) that discriminatorily elevated poor Whites into the middle class while consistently withholding access from Blacks (for example, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations). Similarly well-documented are racial disparities in law enforcement and sentencing—including when controlling for other variables (see Kansal & Mauer, The Sentencing Project), in access to prenatal care and nutrition (see Disparities and Inequities in Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes, astho.org), and in exposure to pollutants and neurotoxins (see Robert Bullard, Environment and Morality). So the playing field is not level, and never has been. And genetic conclusions cannot be drawn from invalid comparisons with East Asians, who never experienced such total and sustained discrimination and who were able to migrate by choice, retain intact families, and benefit from unbroken cultural traditions of filial loyalty, duty and diligence (see, for example, Xu et al., Understanding Chinese Culture). And speaking of minorities, Native Americans are genetically close to East Asians (*Li et al, 2008; *Xing, et al., 2010), so by your reasoning they, too, should be at the top of the STEM hierarchy. But their history of forced migration, dispossession, and discrimination is similar to that of African Americans, as are their social outcomes and test scores. In short, you routinely ignore the effects on human behavior of cultural factors, inherited social structure, threats to health and development, and long-term exploitation and discrimination—a serious neglect under any circumstances, let alone when those external influences are systematically skewed in one direction. Focusing on these factors which you ignore is not “environmentalism;” it is simply correcting for inferential bias.
Response by Mr. C:
“…more and more complicated and convoluted” explanations to hold onto the dying model of populational equality. Thanks for introducing me to that phrase. It’s a keeper. Though I know the second half of that sentence is not what you had in mind.
My initial inclination was to let your last response be the last word, and say simply that I think an objective person reading our exchange would have enough information at this point to make a reasoned decision regarding the question of whether genetics plays a role in human group differences. However, I could not resist responding one more time. First, your long explanation arguing for the non-existence of g is a red herring. Personally, I think the concept of general intelligence provides the simplest and best explanation for the correlation of individual performance in multiple different cognitive tests. Is g real? Is consciousness real? Is life real? The answer to all three is yes. They are all emergent properties of complex systems. The g factor is an emergent property of brain anatomy and physiology (which is itself the product of a genetic program). Simply put, some brains work better than others, that is, if you regard high intelligence as better than low intelligence (admittedly, a value judgment). But again, whether g is real or not is a red herring. Whatever it is you think IQ tests measure; whether you want to call that g or j or multiple intelligences, or a statistical artifact, it is undeniable that it plays an important role in life outcomes (though I would not be at all surprised if you claim it does not). For example, you are not going to find rocket scientists and brain surgeons with IQs of 85 or lower, at least not without the assistance of affirmative action, and probably even with it. Likewise, it is unlikely that you are going to find people with IQs of 130 and above in prison or homeless or working in menial labor jobs, though other personality traits and life circumstances mean that is not impossible, just unusual.
Regarding your claim about Native Americans, I again refer you to the concept of evolution. American Indians arrived in the new world before the dawn of civilization, which likely selected for high intelligence in both Europe and Asia. Regarding your explanation for the state of Haiti, how did the various events you mention result in the permanent dysfunction of the country? Shall we now turn to the other 40+ countries that make up Sub-Saharan Africa to figure out a unique explanation for each of them, or is “colonialism” a sufficient catch-all excuse? If so, can you please walk me through a step-by-step explanation as to how being a former colony also results in permanent dysfunction? Of our two competing models, which do you think would be favored by application of Occam’s Razor?
Regarding your objection to the word “population,” I am legitimately confused. Perhaps it was my somewhat sarcastic use of the word to which you object. What word would you use to describe groups of people who can be genetically and morphologically distinguished from each other? If the word “population” does not fit the bill, then what does? Or perhaps you would prefer there be no word for it at all?
“Don’t you see, the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” – George Orwell, 1984.
Finally, what is your proposed solution to persistent world-wide populational inequalities? Since you seem to be arguing that all human populations have largely, if not precisely, the same cognitive potentials, from a Pygmy to a Swede, from a Japanese to an Australian aborigine, how do we make that potential a reality? Or is that even a desirable goal? After all, that would reduce human diversity, which we all know is our greatest strength. If it is a desirable goal, what must white people do, both at home and abroad? (I specify white people, because presumably whites, who comprise only ~10% of the world’s population, are to blame for inequality all over the world.) Or in the words of Herrnstein and Murray, “what do you want to try that hasn’t already been tried?” Is the solution to keep doing more of the same? More affirmative action at home, and casting more money abroad? Given your ideal solution, how much longer until we reach the multi-cultural utopia that so many on the left envision? Perhaps yourself included.
My response to Mr. C:
Dear Mr C: Regarding your most recent response: a couple of points:
1. “g” is a mathematical construct that summarizes a set of correlations among measurements. Such a set is not the same thing as that which is being measured, nor as the factor or factors that cause it to vary. Gould and other sources I cite have elaborated this point and its implications in detail.
2. “Population” is a scientific term with a fairly precise meaning based on gene frequencies within a specific area. “Race” is an informal term referring to unclearly defined groups traditionally believed to share innate traits (stereotypes), and that term has therefore come to be regarded in the research community as scientifically ambiguous, inaccurate and unproductive. But don’t take my word for it. See Murray, p. 135: “I have found nothing in the genetics technical literature during the last few decades that uses race except within quotation marks. The reasons are legitimate, not political, and they are both historical and scientific.”
3. Regarding “solutions” to longstanding injustices, you should be able to figure out what most of them would be. What is more relevant to this discussion are the flaws underlying the hereditarian ideology that is chronically invoked to avoid implementing them effectively.
I believe I have answered the rest of your comments (often more than once). Your arguments seem to express a sincere belief that intuition and common sense support your position. However, the purpose of scientific investigation, and of all careful scholarship, is to question intuitions and common sense by examining them against the evidence. In each of my responses I have referred you—either within my comment or by directing you back to parts of my review—to findings, from history, social science and research in genetics that contradict your beliefs. Your response has been to dispute the findings reported in these references, often by making more appeals to what you believe to be commonsense intuitions. So we do seem to be going in circles. We can just agree to disagree. And, as you note, any open-minded and objective reader will find enough information from both of us to make his/her own judgments.
Response by Mr. C:
Dear Dr. J:
Thanks again for your response. You get the last word
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Psyche and Sense 