This isn’t even about the science; it’s about the rhetoric that even precedes the debate on the merits of the science.
As I’ve mentioned, Andrew Sullivan is being assailed from all sides by a group of bloggers who claim that his complaint that academic discussions and research of group differences in IQ are snuffed out by “p.c. egalitarianism”. Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged that assertion, and by doing so proved Sullivan’s point. Coates – who readily admitted that he barely knows what “standard deviation” is, which implies that his critique of Sullivan is anything but scientifically-based – questioned Sullivan’s desire to explore the debate by suggesting that since the science behind racial IQ differences was once embraced by racists, slaveholders, and eugenicists that he can’t help but project similar characteristics on anyone, today, who broaches the topic. By that logic, Coates (and other liberals) can’t support labor unions either since they were once often used as tools to crowd out black labor.
But to Sullivan’s original point about “p.c. egalitarianism”. He wrote a post in response to a piece at Alternet which gave examples of where researchers and scientists have avoided venturing down the path of IQ discussion for fear of what it would do to those researchers’ careers. We have another very recent example, possibly, where a seminar scheduled to be conducted by Dr. Steve Hsu titled “The Genetic Basis of Variation in Mental Abilities” was cancelled for reasons which Hsu refuses to mention (I’ll take blogger’s license in assuming that the seminar fell on the wrong side of the “p.c. egalitarianism” divide).
Only speaking for myself, the interest in the Race-IQ question and The Bell Curve partially stems from the same response I have to ever having a door slammed in my face. Being forbidden to enter makes me want to do just that. It piques my curiosity. Why can’t I explore this room? What is being hidden from me? In any embattled debate between nurture and nature, I see the nurture side similar to those in a game of capture the flag whose charge is in sight of the opposing team. The battle becomes more entrenched and violent as their jewel becomes at risk.
Most of the acrimony comes from blank slatists’ and anti-racists’ beliefs about the intentions of those sniffing around the Race-IQ question. But it’s worth remembering that slave-owners and eugenicists embraced racial differences in order to mold society in a certain way; most of the people like Sullivan, Murray, or Steve Sailer who root around the topic today are somewhat against a molding of society, though one that moves in a different direction. The difference between today’s so-called racists is that they are operating, thankfully, on the premise that even if blacks are found to have an innate lower group average IQ, this reading does not diminish the rights due them by virtue of their humanity.
That being said, here are all of the links to the various opinions on this debate:
Sullivan’s posts are here, here, here, here, and here.
And we have many responses from the left:
Ta-Nehisi Coates: here, here, and here.
Amanda Marcotte, The Root, Gawker, Dr. X, Alternet, Daily Kos
And a couple from the right:
Richard Spencer and Rod Dreher
Now Steve Sailer and Razib Khan have weighed in.
A longer treatment coming tomorrow.
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Gawker has to be the worst site on the internet. When Murray and Sullivan claim that whites have higher IQs than blacks, Gawker claims that it’s because Murray and Sullivan are white supremacists. But when they also point out that Asians have higher IQs than whites, Gawker accuses them of saying Asians are “more cunning”.
It’s a pretty transparent and sloppy rhetorical slight of hand. And, like Coates, it basically proves Sullivan’s point about “p.c. egalitarianism”.
Leftists always laugh when science throws people religions into doubt. I bet they don’t think it’s as funny when it happens to them.
[GLP: I do find my jaw dropping more at the scissor sister sites - Gawker and Jezebel - than at any other.]
Personally I could understand the hyper-scepticism about IQ tests being used to characetrise a group’s intelligence. I’m of the “the tests tell us something useful, but aren’t the whole story about intelligence” crowd.
The real difficulty is that so many other metrics say the same thing. Cliched, yeah, but the comparative scarcity of black inventors, the black educational difficulties and THEN IQ tests too cause things to mount up. Even with nobel prizes, most of the black winners have been peace prizers.
I just take people as they are though, I’m sure there are plenty of black people smarter than me. If I meet one I’m not going to think he’s any less clever for being black. You could be from the most retarded social group on earth, but if you’re smart, you’re smart. Yet still after saying this I’m racist as fuck. ah well.
Genetics is a new science still in its embryonic state. A few decades from now we’ll have much more information about the role genetics place in the different types of intelligences.
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Dreher’s post was hardly surprising for a conservative, and by the end he just comes out and says it:
“Then again, I believe there is a such thing as forbidden knowledge — that is, knowledge that ought to be suppressed, for the greater good of all.”
Right. Suppressing the conclusions derived from scientific pursuits, which are after all materialist endeavors, is an age old goal of conservatives.
[GLP: Out of all the posts linked, Dreher's is the most egregious. But you're right, he is being true to his conservative roots: don't touch the forbidden fruit because you can't handle the Truth!]
Perhaps there are people who promote HBD with the goal of introducing a system where people are treated as inferior or superior based on their race, but I haven’t seen them. What really motivates HBDers is that racial “achievement gaps” of various kinds are a very prominent topic in public discussion in America, and legislative and judicial attempts at eliminating the gaps touch on most people’s lives. When HBD explanations are beyond the pale as they are, it means that the gaps, and in particular the problems of blacks, are always attributed, directly or indirectly, to white racism, even though “institutional racism” and similar are little more than conspiracy theories compared to IQ research which represents one of most robust bodies of theory and data in all of social science. In this sense HBDers are motivated simply by a concern for truth and justice.
[GLP: Exactly. Too, there is also the fact that many like myself become irritated that our arguments (not that I'm anyone who is making original arguments on this front) are just tossed aside as mere racism or bigotry. A lot of it's for the sake of argument; there is an academic question at hand that hasn't been answered.]
Chuck, once again, a fight between Andrew Sullivan and TNC is a fight between a crazy person and a mental midget. And I mean those terms seriously, not merely offhandedly or jokingly.
It’s nice to see race/IQ “debates” popping up amongst the SWPLs. However, these two unserious thinkers are detrimental to intelligence and are the wrong people to “debate” such an issue in that sphere. Besides, we all know what will happen: TNC will lose intellectually but claim victory, lefties will rally around him to prove they’re not racists and refuse to engage the subject, and Sullivan will have to go back to posting more of his delirious, AIDS-dementia-inspired conspiracy theories regarding Trig Palin to get back the lefty ball-licking he’s going to lose.
Forget it.
The only good thing about this is that it’s heartening to see the well-spoken and intellectual people who are speaking their minds and expressing their support for the generally non-controversial idea that humans are also subject to evolutionary processes (and differences in intelligence are one of the results).
There’s still a lot of push back from the “Hear No Evil!” crowd, but there’s a lot more sensible voices being raised (and representing themselves well) than there are on the other side.
Social studies vs hard scientific evidence. In the information age we should be going with the latter. If its true that a specific group lags behind all others in IQ, measures can then be taken to improve their IQ, proper nutirition being one of them, exposure to great and challenging ideas another. By wishing a problem away it doesn’t go away. By bringing it out of the closet then you can deal with it and make it go away for real.
Wow, Amanda Marcotte’s piece is a train wreck. How is it possible to jam so many factual and logical errors in one short article? Is there any other topic where it’s possible for someone to be scientifically illiterate to that extent without losing credibility in the eyes of the educated public?
JL,
An evolutionary psychologist just got done jamming Marcotte, figuratively, for her pretending to understand evo psych. Quite an enjoyable read:
http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/10/amanda-marcotte%E2%80%99s-ugly-prejudices/
I noticed you didn’t include a link to the response by Freddie DeBoer. Here it is:
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/11/narrative-is-distortingthe-mechanism-is.html
My link addressed the question as a clinical psychologist, and it was limited to challenging the claim that non-racial intelligence research is under a professional blackout in my field. Sullivan has now conceded the point twice, first based on the evidence I presented, and, today, more firmly after he consulted with several of my fellow psychologists who are in academic research. I’m trained as a researcher-practioner and do intellectual assessments all the time. These days my connection to the research is as a professional consumer.
The subject of race and IQ is, indeed, toxic and psychologists avoid it, a point I never disputed, but research into intelligence is thriving, and notwithstanding the assertions of a few researchers who had a campus appearance canceled or funding denied (it happens a lot to researchers), there is a great deal of genetic research that is ongoing, but as one of the other psychologists Sullivan consulted notes, it is within-race heritability, rather than between-race heritability that is being studied.
I didn’t explain my motives in my several posts on the subject, but I actually made a point of all this because I thought Sullivan was lumping us in with a lot of the know-nothing criticism of intelligence research. We’re actually very comfortable with the subject of intelligence. It’s part of mainstream psychology. I’ve never sensed any professional tension around the subject outside of the race research, specifically. For the record, I don’t think that research should be suppressed. Might there be some lefty campus undergrads or liberal arts people outside psychology who bristle at what we do more broadly? Sure. That’s not limited to race research. There’s a great deal of misinformation about what we do out there.
http://drx.typepad.com/psychotherapyblog/2011/11/sullivan-on-study-of-intelligence-ctd-1.html
Dr X,
Thanks for the comment.
I don’t recall everything that Sullivan has written on the subject so I can only take on his initial argument and add my own thoughts to it. IQ and intelligence may not be controversial topics in the field, but I wonder how much potential research is avoided or how many research questions are left untouched because they do venture too close to the IQ-race boundary.
The entire debate in the blogosphere around this – which matches what you’ve observed in the field of psychology – has drawn a giant buffer zone around this topic which leads me to believe that not only are specific questions about IQ and race not asked but also tangential questions or questions that might lead to uncomfortable results.
Can someone link to the evolutionary psychologist’s comment at Amanda Marcotte’s pots? I can’t seem to find it with my search function. I don’t really have the brain energy to expend on a non-psychologist’s polemics that go on at that length, so of course I’ll abstain from offering an opinion, but I would to really like to read what the evo psychologist had to say in the comments.
Thanks
Dr X,
I’m not sure which comment you’re talking about. I didn’t know an evo psychologist commented at her place. The only interaction b/w a psychologist and Marcotte that I’m aware of is the link I posted a few comments above:
http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/10/amanda-marcotte%E2%80%99s-ugly-prejudices/
The truth is, as I’ve said, much deeper than anti-racism and racism.
People don’t like to think that were animals. It’s why conservatives will ultimately balk at accepting any talk of this, too. it’s obviously absurd to think that height, dietary predilections and eye color are genetically influenced while behavior, mental acuity and various mental faculties (not to mention supposedly wholly taught behaviors like taste in music and sexual proclivities) are not. it’s as if, for every species of animal on the planet, all aspects of its existence are programmed by evolution, hard-wired into a complex neural computer that learns but learns because it’s programmed to – but for some reason, either God’s special creation or liberal ideology, which is also pretty “creationist” in its approach, the *human brain* is uniquely immune to evolution.
The patent absurdity of this position, logically, is obvious; but for these non-thinkers, the implications of this obvious truth is too painful.
Not just for race and society. They have to believe that we’re special snowflakes and unlike anything else, because their worldviews – both conservatives and liberals – are unable to contemplate a state in which we are animals.
Liberals are as much guilty of this as conservatives. The truth is that we are all uncomfortable with this; some of us just know this and then deal with our discomfort. Others can’t.
Marcotte and the average hard-core creationist suffer from this human need to see us as fundamentally distinct. Their problem is much deeper than any social ideology.
I haven’t read the post or the comments yet, but let me guess – some leftists stumbled heard someone remark that racial differences in intelligence might exist. They called the people racists/nazis/white supremacists, ignored all evidence contrary to their beliefs no matter how delicately the race realists presented it, and finally they felt good about what enlightened people they were and declared victory.
Debating these twits is a waste of time.
I don’t think the problem is deeper than a social ideology. People use that to mask what is really going on. The blank slate is perfectly compatible with a layman’s understanding of nature.
All German Shepherds are equal in cognitive ability. No such thing as a smart German Shepherd or a dumb one. They are all the same in this regard except for rearing and training.
Human races (which don’t exist) aren’t equivalent with different breeds of dogs. They are equivalent to German Shepherds with different coloration. Some have black masks, some tan, some are all tan, some all black, some have short hair, long, et cetera. They are all the same dog though.
It’s almost certain that your blank slate laymen is wrong about dog intelligence within a breed, nature versus nurture in general, and humanity not having any degree of speciation, but the view is entirely consistent. There is no cognitive dissonance involved.
The bigger stumbling block is entirely a social ideology, and not just the racism aspect; but more to how the truth of HBD would speak to the arrangement of human society, even within a race. The existence of essentially a Genetic Aristocracy.
Parents not being able to tell their kids that they can be anything they want to be as long as they put their minds to it. The narrative of genetic winners and losers, and that most people are basically genetic losers. That is average, or somewhere slightly above or below; nothing special, along with most of their line of ancestors and given assortive mating their prospective descendants for the foreseeable future.
Even still, arguably not wanting to put mankind into its’ proper place in the natural world is a social ideology. I don’t think most people care that their Uncle is a monkey though. They certainly do care that their, and their children’s path, as determined by cognitive potential, is much more deterministic than anyone wishes to believe.
Fatalism has been popular in history though. The pre-Enlightenment, pre-Nationalist European masses wouldn’t have been shocked by HBD. Smart people have smart children, and farmers beget farmers, and so forth? This is news?
It’s the parable of the 19th century Italian peasant again. “We were happy until they taught us how to read. Now we read the newspaper every week, which tells us how bad we have it compared to the English.” Everyone was fine living the lives their ancestors had lived until the idea spread that what was possible for English peasants should be possible for Italian peasants. Except here we are 150 years later and Italian ‘peasants’ are still worse off than (ethnically) English ones.
@dragnet:
I read the link you suggested. At first read, I thought he was pretty reasonable, but once I took a second look at his argument, it stinks of just total bullshit projection. It’s pretty clear that the social narrative that’s being constructed is not one written by the people quoting scientific studies, but instead is being written by the people who do nothing other than “speculate” on “true causes.”
I posted a very thorough response to his article on his blog. If he doesn’t publish it there I may repost it in a comment here (if GLP doesn’t mind).
Not falling:
Be my guest.
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“Then again, I believe there is a such thing as forbidden knowledge — that is, knowledge that ought to be suppressed, for the greater good of all.”
Who does Dreher think he is? H.P. Lovecraft? And is “the Bell Curve” really just a cleverly-renamed Necronomicon?
I wonder what other sorts of knowledge Dreher would like to be snuffed out, for the greater good of all? “Origin of the Species”?
My guess is Dreher also loves movies where beta boy gets the girl in the end.
Manny Goldstein,
I pose a similar question in my post from this morning. Who is in charge of deciding which knowledge should be avoided? Is there a panel for this? A Knowledge Czar perhaps?
A Knowledge Czar? Well, give them time…
My guess is all this is just fueling Ta-Nehisi Coates’s self-importance, and his delusions of grandeur that he isn’t Affirmative Action; while simultaneously raising deeply recessed concerns that he actually is Affirmative Action, if he doesn’t know it already.
Other than facing the cognitive dissonance of personally confronting his being Affirmative Action, Ta-Nehisi Coates wins no matter what the outcome, and the Atlantic makes a move towards irrelevance as Ta-Nehisi becomes a star among his people and brings them over and The Atlantic makes a move for them.
Since the blog author seems to have chosen not to publish my comment / reply to his posting, I am pasting my reply here:
Original article: http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/11/narrative-is-distortingthe-mechanism-is.html
Sorry, but I didn’t find this particular argument very persuasive at all. In fact, my takeaway is that while the author wants to create the impression that it’s those overzealous sketchy guys wanting to establish their insidious narrative, the author himself is the one selling a narrative carefully constructed to obfuscate substantial legitimate issues.
First off we have it asserted that research into race and IQ isn’t being suppressed. And yet … We know that such research, if not suppressed, is “strongly discouraged” by professional, political, and social means. How do we know this? Well, simply put, we can observe history. Pinker’s The Blank Slate talks extensively about how research in Sociobiology / Evolutionary Psychology / Whatever you’d like to call it has been opposed, from the regular ho-hum denunciations of researchers as Nazis and Fascists, up to and including attempts to charge researchers with crimes. As for what impact this has had, we can’t know.
Our author claims, “The ‘race realist’ movement has always pushed a narrative where politics corrupts empiricism,” and then follows with an example about homosexuality and the commonly-held but empirically-unsupported genetic theory of homosexuality. Isn’t it fascinating that it’s a politically correct narrative which has constructed this imaginary scientific consensus on the genetic origins of homosexuality without having to actually produce any, you know, evidence.
Somehow, our author insists, the prevailing politically correct narrative about homosexuality being genetic is meant to cast doubt on “the press” and “standards of evidence.”
As I read the author’s piece here I felt a little unsettled, and as I look again I realize why. Here we have a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand. We’re meant to be transferring our skepticism on the imaginary consensus about the genetic origins of homosexuality into skepticism about the “the press” and their “standards of evidence.” But there isn’t some imaginary “the press” at work in this discussion, foisting controversial claims in the public eye to generate controversy. Just as the politically correct consensus on homosexuality has led people to scientifically unsupported beliefs on the nature of homosexuality, it’s the politically correct consensus on race that has led people to scientifically unsupported beliefs on the nature of racial differences. This sort of group consensus ex nihilo can’t handle the intrusion of inconvenient facts, so they must be suppressed.
It’s pretty clear who is forming the narrative here, because all of the objections to IQ (and race) tend to follow certain rote scripts. How often does it come up in these discussions that “Race is a social construct” or “There are more genetic differences between members of a race than between different race”? It is untrue that race is purely socially constructed. Genetic testing has established the validity of folk taxonomic categories. The latter claim about genetic differences is a misconception brought about through sophistry that is quite simply false for what most people claim it means. And like every other uninterested amateur, the author of this blog also spends considerable time talking about how he speculates the “true causes” of the racial IQ differences will be ultimately explained by … Parenting, health, and education. All are issues which researchers in the field have looked at extensively, hoping, praying, that it would explain the IQ gap. But it hasn’t happened.
In fact, the major claims our public discourse becomes trapped on are well known and uncontroversial in scientific fields. IQ is genetically heritable. This is a clear and well known scientific fact, but despite this, it’s still a politically controversial claim. Take this passage from The Blank Slate:
“In 1971 the psychologist Richard Herrnstein published an article called “IQ” in the Atlantic Monthly. Herrnstein’s argument, he was the first to point out, should have been banal. He wrote that as social status becomes less strongly determined by arbitrary legacies such as race, parentage, and inherited wealth, it will become more strongly determined by talent, especially (in a modern economy) intelligence. … The basic argument should be banal because it is based on mathematical necessity: As the proportion of variance in social status caused by nongenetic factors goes down, the proportion caused by genetic factors has to go up.”
p.106-107
Of course as is quite predictable, Herrnstein’s argument was met with an outraged backlash. Here we have an observation that is admittedly banal, a mathematical and logical inevitability. However because the heritability of intelligence is such a hot-button issue even simplistic logical observations are met with furor (in Herrnstein’s case, this observation was met with death threats).
The obstacle for the author here seems to be that, while there is strong evidence that IQ is genetically heritable (with > 50% heritability) the specific genes responsible for IQ are not known. This is rather disingenuous. We don’t need to know every gene, although we definitely know some) to know the outlines of genetic heritability (and, regarding the question of races, population genetics).
The author accuses those who would like to shift the public debate to include the possibility of genetic differences between population groups of “hysteria.” Hardly. Any research that identified environmental causes for an IQ gap between different human populations would instantly be elevated to scientific sainthood. Instead the hysteria emanates from people who want to insist, like those who opposed Herrnstein in the 70s, that accepting any notion of heritability of human psychological traits is a poison pill that leads to racism and inequality.
Take a look at the author’s concluding paragraphs, and you can see this exactly at work, with pointless musings about how he “find[s] the case for egalitarianism, equal protection before the law, and the assumption of equivalent human dignity totally unchallenged” — a total non-sequitur which does little more than shift the focus of the debate from one of factual “Is” questions of science to abstract moral and political discussions of “Ought.” But that is a point an entirely other discussion that our author has magically swapped in place of the one we thought we were having.
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> I’m of the “the tests tell us something useful, but aren’t the whole story about intelligence” crowd.
Most of the sophisticated ‘hereditarians’ are pretty much like you, I would say. I certainly think there are other cognitive powers. Creativity and social intelligence are only the most obvious. There’s something to phronesis, practical intelligence as distinct from IQ. There’s something to wisdom, and there’s much more.
For example, Ashkenazim don’t seem more creative than aboriginal North Euros, whereas their mean IQ is of course considerably higher and they practically own modern physics. Especially outside of literature, Ashkenazim are not very much overrepresented in the canons of European culture. The reason is that art, and traditional philosophy (Heraclitus to Heidegger etc but not Russel and Kripke), are far less IQ-determined than modern physics is.
At the same time, I along with the prominent hereditarians would say IQ is the most informative single variable in the human sciences and ‘futurology’. Perhaps partly because it’s so measurable.
A tribal man will look at today’s office drone and consider that his SQ *Survival Quotient* is zero because he doesn’t know how to build a house with his own hands, nor a fishing boat, nor provide food for himself and his family without an air conditioned middle man.
“In 1971 the psychologist Richard Herrnstein published an article called “IQ” in the Atlantic Monthly. Herrnstein’s argument, he was the first to point out, should have been banal. He wrote that as social status becomes less strongly determined by arbitrary legacies such as race, parentage, and inherited wealth, it will become more strongly determined by talent, especially (in a modern economy) intelligence. … The basic argument should be banal because it is based on mathematical necessity: As the proportion of variance in social status caused by nongenetic factors goes down, the proportion caused by genetic factors has to go up.”
Herrnstein contradicts himself here. Race and parentage are genetic, not arbitrary. He’s also wrong about social status correlating to intelligence. Kim Kardashian and other wealthy, famous, high status celebrities attest to that. He wrote this back in ’71 though so his wishful thinking into a utopian future is understandable.
haha, Desi gets three comment in under her new handle before dropping the name Kardashian. she handily covered the under for a Kardashian mention. we here at GLP had the O/U at 6.5 comments.
Huh?
Thanks, glp, it was late and I was just getting a little last minute reading in, missed the link and misunderstood JL to be talking about a commenter who had actually addressed this subject. My fault.
Evolutionary psychology, btw, is not a subject that sits very well with a big slice on the liberal side who would rather see human tendencies purely through a moral prism and social constructionist framework. On the other hand, what I often see on the right is an abject failure to appreciate social construction. We do have a representational mind that does in fact construct narrative models of the world, which is why we’re always quarreling with each other about reality, especially social reality. Spouses, for example, will argue about the facts and meaning of something that happened 10 minutes earlier, because of the constructive function of consciousness.
Either view in the extreme makes for a much simpler world and a rather one dimensional humanity. We would be oh so much more comfortable creatures were our minds so simple, but then we’d be a lot less interesting.
Can we just start killing the leftists? There’s no point in arguing with them anymore, and they WILL destroy us if they can.