Writing about race, genetics, and IQ sometimes leads to conversations with other people about these complicated topics. For example, prior to 2021, book reviews posted on Amazon by me and others often elicited comments by those who read the reviews. Occasionally, a reviewer or commenter attempted to make a serious argument for inherited and/or racial differences in IQ, to which I sometimes responded with a challenging comment. This led to some exchanges, and a few interesting discussions. I saved some of these discussions because I believed they revealed common and fundamental flaws in hereditarian and/or racialist arguments that were not always obvious until they were fully unpacked and critiqued. (These Amazon discussions ended in December 2020, when that site abruptly removed all comments, stating only that the commenting option was “rarely used.” The reviews remain.)
In this section, I present three conversations about these topics that I had with persons anonymously designated by letters of the alphabet. All exchanges between me and my critics (Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C) are complete and verbatim, minus identifying information. The conversation with Mr. D–a mutual exploration of some of the most common racialist fallacies–includes additional editing for length and clarity. The three conversations can be accessed as follows:
Conversation with Mr. A and Mr. B: Mr. A. had written a scathing Amazon review of Angela Saini’s book Superior. I responded with an equally severe critique of Mr. A.’s review, and the conversation that ensued (which briefly included another participant, Mr. B.) gradually moved to deeper issues and revealed, I believe, how common but serious misunderstandings about scientific inference often underlie hereditarian arguments.
Conversation with Mr. C: Mr. C. posted several criticisms of my review of Charles Murray’s book Human Diversity, which led to a polite but increasingly adversarial discussion, first about scientific claims and methods, and eventually about race. While we both invoked scientific sources, Mr. C. increasingly appealed to intuitively held beliefs, which (in my opinion) constituted an implicit acknowledgement that genetic racial inequality is not supported by credible scientific evidence.
Conversation with Mr. D: Mr. D, who had read my review of Russell Warne’s book In the Know, asked me to clarify some of the problems he saw in the claims of Warne and other authors arguing for innate racial differences in IQ. This launched a wide-ranging and detailed conversation, by far the longest of the three, in which I sketched the history of “race science” and how I came to critique it, and analyzed many of the technical misunderstandings and misrepresentations upon which racialist claims are typically based.
Psyche and Sense 