My friend the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry is writing about what he calls, correctly, “the most dangerous idea in academia”—an idea that can get you banned or even fired if you even suggest it. It is, of course, the notion that different “races” differ on average in IQ or intelligence. It’s such a hot potato that many people think that research looking for any differences should be banned or strongly discouraged. (This, of course, is because any potential outcome save exact equality among groups is said to inevitably cause racism and bigotry.)
I’ll leave aside here the idea of what “races” are, for Luana and I explained our take in our Skeptical Inquirer paper “The Ideological Subversion of Biology.” We can use instead either the notion of “self-defined races” (the boxes one ticks on a form) or, as Luana and I wrote, human populations:
Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.
We discuss some differences between populations and self-diagnosed “races” that are known. There are also known differences in IQ, but the taboo question is whether any of those difference reside in the genes. On this subject I, like Maarten, am agnostic, as I simply don’t know the literature well enough (and am not sufficiently interested in it) to form an opinion.
Click on the screenshot below to read Maarten’s take:
Maarten was impelled to write the piece because one of his colleagues at Ghent University, Nathan Cofnas, is in big trouble because he’s promoted the most inflammatory version of The Forbidden Question: that a substantial portion of the differences in IQ between American blacks and whites (a phenotypic difference of about 15 points) is genetic:
My guest Han van der Maas, a renowned intelligence researcher at the University of Amsterdam, explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between ethnic groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson’s paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: future evidence might yet reveal such differences, and we should not try to cancel researchers who claim such differences are real.
Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department (and hundreds more in a letter to the rector) clearly think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire Nathan Cofnas because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups such as whites and blacks in the US—differences that are themselves well documented—have largely genetic causes, rather than environmental ones like socio-economic disadvantage or discrimination. He makes the same claim about the higher scores of East Asians and Jews (which exceed those of white Europeans, by the way). They dismiss all of this as “pseudoscience and racism.”
The question is whether Cofnas should be fired for his claim, and whether the research supposedly supporting it should be banned. I would argue that the answer to both questions is “no”, but researchers have to be very careful and sensitive in pursuing it. Maarten quotes the paper by Luana and me about this (his words indented, ours doubly indented):
Now, I perfectly understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims, and I agree that such hypotheses should be treated with utmost caution. As my friend Jerry Coyne wrote with Luana Maroja in their influential article The Ideological Subversion of Biology:
In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry.
Still, this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. If you are not prepared to extend academic freedom to ideas you fiercely disagree with, you do not really believe in academic freedom.
In light of calls for Cofnas’s firing, a number of people have signed an open letter defending Cofnas’s right to study this topic (or any reasonable topic); the letter is at the link below:
My colleagues Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan wrote an open letter defending the academic freedom of Nathan Cofnas. I have signed it as well, together with luminaries such as Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal , Susan Blackmore, Scott Aaronson, and Bryan Caplan. Here it is in full:
And the letter, which is short:
A statement in support of Nathan Cofnas’s Right to Academic Freedom of Expression
Two separate statements have recently been issued by members of Ghent University, in Belgium, calling on the university to rescind the appointment of Nathan Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher. One claims that his views “violate the university’s code of ethics and are morally beneath contempt”.
We oppose this attack on academic freedom. While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment. Of course, other academics should be free to criticise or repudiate those claims.
The statements mentioned above do not even attempt to engage with Cofnas’s empirical claims. Disagreements, whether about empirical claims, ethical principles, or the interpretation of the ethical code of a university, should be settled through free inquiry and open, civil discussion.
We commend Petra De Sutter, Rector of Ghent University, for her statement to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, that “As a university, we have a responsibility to create space for debate, but also to ensure an environment where people feel heard and respected.”
We agree that creating space for debate is an essential element of a university, and that space for debate should not be closed unless this is a last resort to prevent a clear threat of lasting substantial harm.
Note that the letter takes no position on the data itself; it’s a letter about whether Cofnas should be granted academic freedom to do his work. As Maarten himself says, “As most of the signatories, I do not endorse Nathan Cofnas’s claims and remain agnostic on the issue.” Luana and I, along with 145 other academics, signed this letter, with some signers named above.
It’s a sign of the ideologically-infused and chilling atmosphere in biology that one has to think for even a second before agreeing with the letter. Now you might think that finding genetically-based IQ differences betwen populations might cause “a clear threat of lasting substantial harm,” but for reasons outlined in our paper, Luana and I don’t agree. There are potential upsides in such data, just as there are potential upsides in looking at interpopulation data on medical conditions (the goal is to help individuals, not to demonize one group or another). After all, we don’t even know how the data will come out.
And it’s not at all clear whether finding out that an interpopulation difference has genetic causes will lead to increased bigotry. Since genetic contributions to being gay have been found, prejudice against gays has decreased, not increased. If you reject free will and accept determinism due to genes, physics, and one’s environment, one might see genetically-based differences as “forgiving,” for you cannot be blamed for the genes you get from your parents and that reflect long evolutionary histories.
Maarten goes on to show the difference in long-distance running abilities between Ethiopians and Kenyans on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (these are population differences rather than differences between the classically-defined “races”. Though I don’t know whether there have been tests to show that these differences are genetic (potential studies could include adoption at birth, rearing in different environments, and so on), I would be willing to bet that they are. But, as Maarten says, “measuring intelligence is far more complicated than crossing a finish line.”
Boudry adds that Cofnas has sometimes been brusque in his public pronouncements about his work, but this is not uncommon among academics:
Finally, what about Nathan Cofnas’s vigorous activism alongside his academic work? It is true that Cofnas is far less measured in his Substack posts than in his academic publications on IQ. For instance, his flippant way of expressing a statistical point about the racial IQ gap in academic achievement (similar to the point above about long-distance running) seems almost deliberately incendiary:
Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. […] In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.
Cofnas is also very combative in his attacks on “woke ideology”, and he genuinely believes only a “hereditarian revolution” can truly dismantle it—otherwise, we’ll be stuck fighting symptoms rather than root causes:
Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back.
I’m not convinced, but it’s a clever argument, and I’d encourage you to check it out with an open mind.
Finally, Maarten points out one harmful side effect of demonizing people for the kind of work they do in academia:
Calling for the dismissal of anyone who even touches the third rail of ethnic differences in IQ is also strategically unwise. Such attempts often fuel the phenomenon of “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people naturally become suspicious: What are they trying to hide? The result is a further erosion of trust in academia.
And that is not just a made-up reason. When the public perceives scientists to be espousing a political or ideological cause in their research, their view of science is eroded. Have a look at this paper showing that when the journal Nature, in a first, endorsed a political candidate (Joe Biden) for U.S. President in 2020, it reduced the public trust not just in the journal, but in scientists themselves.
Do weigh in below, and because the issue is a sensitive one, you might want to answer this poll.
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I voted because I understand the question’s context.
But only that.
As in, agreement with the common sense of the words e.g. “scientific”, implying empirical, or Feynman’s formulation. Or that consent and common sense ethics operates underneath.
Of course, as we know, these words etc. … what, fly out of control when driven by ideological winds….
As such, clear arguments such as those in the Ideological Subversion paper need to be … made clear… with such research.
I guess I’m an “absolutist” on this one, pretty much independent of context. I even find it abhorrent that some journals refuse on moral principle to allow any citations of results from the fatal (and obviously immoral) Nazi experiments on captive subjects, regardless of scientific value. I’m referring here to the cold-water survival experiments, which AIUI do have scientific value and of course can not be repeated today. Mengele’s “experiments” did not have any scientific value, nor did most Nazi “science”, but were driven by ideology; which reminds me of something….
I don’t think it should be forbidden, or people should be called bigots if they do that. But I think we should be somewhat discouraged, or at least we should be cautious while doing so because we do have the history of doing this poorly. There are also questions around if the methods used to measure IQ for certain groups can be extended to other groups as is or whether there are some other factors that need to be considered. I haven’t seen a satisfactory answer to this question.
Also, I don’t see any scientific utility of finding the average difference of IQ based on races because (a) races are pretty loosely defined and not scientifically rigorous (b) what are we going to do about it if we find some average differences?
However, there might be some utility when it comes to social science where one can push back against the idea that all differences in outcome are due to oppression. I think it is quite hard to tell apart what is innate in this context versus what is due to historical injustice. I find both sides often overstate what we conclude from the data. For this reason, I tend to push back against both sides in this context.
I agree about being cautious, as it is a very complex area. The philosopher Ned Block wrote an excellent paper on this in 1995.
https://www.joelvelasco.net/teaching/3334/block99-how_heritability_misleads_about_race.pdf
I cannot agree with the idea that anyone should ever say that some facts must not be stated, or some subjects must not be studied. We will get nowhere by shying away from reality, especially if we hope to change it!
Just suppose Cofnas is right. How does society then cope?
Well, we already know how to cope, because we have the same issue regarding within-population differences. If we take, say, white ethnic Norwegians, some will have IQs of 130 and others will have IQs of 70. And we also know that by far the biggest factor in that difference is genes (that is uncontrovertible these days; and note that nobody asks for the genes they are born with).
The IQ 130 people will be much more likely to get into a top university or medical school and then get a well-paid job. The IQ 70 person (through no fault of their own) has no way of competing with that academically. But that person still has full legal and moral rights as an equal citizen. And most people are in favour of some level of redistributive taxation to ensure that all citizens have at least a decent standard of living. The above causes no great problem for society; people accept it.
Now, suppose there are indeed genetically-caused differences in mean IQ between populations. These would be perhaps around 10 IQ points (vastly less than the above 60-point difference), and thus the differences in group means would be much less than the dispersion within groups.
That means it would make no sense to assess someone according to their group membership, one would instead assess each individual according to their merits and abilities, as judged, for example, by standardised testing. In other words, one would do exactly as one does for the ethnic Norwegians, that is, judge everyone on their individual merits and the content of their individual character (as somebody notable suggested). In other words, nothing much has to change, and the idea is not actually that “dangerous”.
But there might be a strong tendency to pick immigrants from the higher IQ groups. Would that even be a bad idea?
WEIRD countries don’t get many immigrants these days from other WEIRD countries, the ones with enough IQ > 110 residents to bother trying to attract them. (No slur intended: Countries are WEIRD because they have and nurture high-IQ residents who see no reason to emigrate anymore. They aren’t high-IQ just because many are white and WEIRD. At least I don’t think they are.)
To Coel, no, you shouldn’t pre-screen people according to group membership, for the reason you mention. The discriminatory power of race isn’t strong enough: the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. The issue is that with affirmative action mandates to preferentially hire members of the lower-average IQ group for reasons of “equity”, you will have to forgo the high performers at the top of the high-IQ distribution, and you will be lumbered with people in the middle of the low-IQ distribution, whose IQ will be that 10 points lower than if you’d taken a colour-blind approach to hiring. Do aptitude tests or something, which were banned in American because they failed too many black people.
Not true. Chinese do well on IQ tests but China is not WEIRD.
Many Indians seem little different from Europeans. Not sure about every group in the country, though.
From reading your article, it seems that no one can say definitively whether Nathan Cofnas is correct or not, and we will never know unless the issue is studied.
It’s also misleading to equate intelligence with IQ. They need to specify how they define ‘intelligence’. As James Randi said “People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave”. My brothers went university, they have degrees, but they are clueless about a lot of things.
It will be hard to take into account environmental issues. I’m lucky that my mum taught me to read before I went to school, and from a few years old my father would spend hours answering questions from his inquisitive children, like how fish can breathe under water. I’m lucky that parental care gave me a life long need to learn things, and read books. Children in poor homes may have huge potential, but with the wrong parents and without access to reading, they may never realise that. How can can I be categorised as more intelligent than someone who just didn’t have my opportunities?
It should be studied, but there are so many grey areas in the issues of intelligence that, even if it is studied, I think any outcome will still be disputed.
Maybe we could study the difference in intelligence between men and women first. See what kind of emotion that produces.
And maybe we should study the difference in intelligence between those who think it’s ok to study such issues, and those who think it’s not ok. I think I can guess what the result would be!
Or, as another experimental test, study the intelligence of scholars in academic grievance studies departments versus that of, say, auto mechanics—or, to control for environment, the janitors in the grievance studies departments’ buildings.
It’s been done. Some data suggest the average intelligence for men and women is very similar. But the spread is much larger for men, ie the village idiot is more likely to be a man.
That’s maybe because the dull woman can trade sex for sustenance and a roof over her head where you don’t see her. She has value no matter what. The dull man can’t hold a job so ends up a valueless beggar of alms, and that requires being out in public to solicit them.
I’m not disputing your central thesis that mean IQ is the same but the dispersion is wider, just the evidence from the visible village idiot.
And the global-village idiots show that effect at scale. 🙂
My understanding is that the average IQ scores of men and women are the same because that’s how the test was set up. The test is supposed to measure intelligence for all people — therefore the questions are selected so that the overall average for both men and women is 100.
If there are so many questions involving spacial ability that women don’t average 100, they throw in more verbal fluency till it’s even. They want to avoid bias.
I’ve no idea if races have similar differences in cognitive domains.
I think I’ve already seen that studied. It shows that men tend to be better at math.
Of course, that says nothing about any one person.
I don’t think differences were found in other areas.
The latest meta-analysis found men having a modest 2.57 IQ point advantage over women.
And my meta-meta-analysis finds that meta-analyses in general do not produce results meaningful to 3 significant figures.
And does this figure apply to general intelligence (g), verbal IQ or non-verbal IQ?
I also voted NO but have following concern: While the debate over academic freedom is vital, it is important to distinguish between philosophical provocation and scientific advancement. Nathan Cofnas is a philosopher, not a biologist or a geneticist; he is not producing new empirical data, but rather reinterpreting existing studies through a specific ideological lens. Furthermore, it remains unclear what he can actually do to objectively advance a field in which he lacks primary technical expertise. Without the rigorous methodology of the lab, philosophical synthesis risks becoming a “cherry-picking” exercise that mistakes logical consistency for biological reality.
And in the defence of academic freedom we each need to grit our metaphorical teeth and tolerate the large amount of obvious (to us) nonsense, hype, bias, and other rubbish that it allows. Given the likely applicability of Sturgeon’s Law, that really is the very best we can reasonably hope for.
The “Progressive” outlook which dominates academia (evidently in the Netherlands as much as in the Anglosphere) is today more authoritarian than is Holy Mother Church. As to the latter, Wiki informs us as follows.
“A June 1966 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith notification announced that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties.[37]
The canon law of the Latin Church still recommends that works should be submitted to the judgment of the local ordinary (typically, the bishop) if they concern sacred scripture, theology, canon law, or church history, religion or morals.[38] The local ordinary consults someone whom he considers competent to give a judgment and, if that person gives the nihil obstat (‘nothing forbids’), the local ordinary grants the imprimatur (‘let it be printed’). “
This has been a long-standing issue, going back decades even earlier than the Arthur Jensen and Philippe Rushton days in the 1980s. I was at U of Western Ontario when chair of psychology had to vet people allowed into an alternative room for Jensen after disrupters “cancelled” the first attempt. And many academics and politicians, including the Premier, called for Rushton to be fired. Led to the formation of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship in 1992. Still going. One of founders, Doreen Kimura, also in the psych department, was similarly taken to task although not as viciously, for studying biological factors in sex differences in cognition. American Psychological Association formed a committee to examine IQ and it generated a report in 1995, aptly subtitled Knowns and Unknowns. Summarized fairly at link below. Did include mention of possible genetic influences.
People critical of such research ignore the possibility that understanding any genetic influence could result in amelioration. Imagine if sickle-cell research was banned because of differences between the races. Years ago, psychologist at U of Manitoba selectively bred rats for maze learning aptitude (intelligence?) and then reared them under normal, enriched, or deprived environments. Large breeding effects between bright and dull rats under normal environments. Genetically dull rats as good as bright rats under enriched environments, and genetically bright rats as poor as dull rats under deprived environments. Simplistic analogy and I’m not sure if it was ever replicated, but makes the point that genes and environment act in consort, as does the nice example of Siamese cats and fur colouring effects of temperature.
Race, sex, trans, and like issues seem to arise at least in part because some people cannot separate the science from possible but not necessary negative societal implications, especially possible harm to groups of people. But the harm of not knowing or understanding is forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns
I voted “no” as I do believe in open inquiry and it is wrong to stop a pursuit due to political ideology. Nathan Cofnas is not someone whose views I support. I just don’t believe his positions are supported by the facts. Let his research be critiqued, not stopped. Let the truth come out, and prove me wrong if it is so.
I voted “NO” because I don’t think any subject shouldn’t be researched (under ethically designed studies) and because in searching for the truth, we may discover other variants or issues that we have yet to consider, including reasons for certain outcomes we haven’t considered in the initial posit.
However, unlike genetic determinates contributing to homosexuality creating an increased social acceptance of same-sex attracted people, the issue of intelligence is one of social competence and contribution. If any group of people is determined to be genetically predisposed to lower intelligence, this becomes the scientific rationale to pull back on funding in minority-majority communities since they’re genetically predisposed to be intellectually less capable of contributing to society. This also lends to people who see themselves as intellectually superior to justify certain human experiments on “lesser” ethnicities such as the Syphilis “experiment” in Tuskegee that took place between 1932 to 1972, and several others.
The belief in one’s “racial superiority” alone was the impetus for other known inhumane treatments of groups of people and experiments throughout history, so we do not have a great track record of treating people well based on the BELIEF of one’s genetic superiority. If we have hard scientific evidence that has undergone rigorous review that demonstrates different ethnicities are more or less intelligent than others, we will then have scientific justification for denying those groups opportunities, relegating people outside their will “based on their genetic capabilities,” and otherwise mistreating those groups of people. Based on how we’ve treated people based on BELIEF, I’m not optimistic about what we’ll do to people based on evidence.
” …we do not have a great track record of treating people well based on the BELIEF of one’s genetic superiority.” If that were entirely correct, there would be no such thing as Special Education, no programs for developmentally disabled individuals, and Charles and Yvonne De Gaulle would never have created the Fondation Anne De Gaulle.
I might put this differently. The woke insistence that all populations MUST be identical in cognitive abilities reveals the wokies’ underlying elitism—no surprise amongst symbol manipulators who apply the word “theory” to some of the word salads so named in the X Studies fiefdoms.
I understand what you mean by providing services to Special Needs individuals, but that isn’t based on “belief” about intellectual superiority but evaluation of one’s individual mental capacities. We have mistreated groups of people by ethnicity based on our beliefs about genetic superiority. That was the ideology behind experimenting on Jews in concentration camps and the beliefs that drove experimenting on African Americans.
I do not see any causal or necessary link between scientific findings and treatment of groups with differing mean IQs. At least 4 possible courses of remedial action are possible:
1. Give extra resources to the high IQ groups as they will benefit society more.
2. Give extra resources to the low IQ groups as they need them more.
3. Based on equity (not equality), give to all groups equally.
4. Deliberate ignorance of what are probably the best replicated findings in Psychology of relevant IQ group and individual differences. Hence the current ideologically-driven mess.
“Progressive” consensus in the groves of academe concentrates on option 4, while making empty declarations for #3. Most of us at WEIT no doubt favor both 1 and 2.
Hmm. As a fan of non-means-tested welfare benefits in general (such as US Social Security), because then even the rich have a stake in the system, and of UBI in particular, I favour #3 non-emptily.
And for any Marxist Revisionists in the house, consider that even current empty-suit AI™ has put us firmly on the path towards “To each according to their needs, from each pretty much bugger all¹”.
Also, for any Neoliberal Revisionists, consider that productivity is the ratio of economic output to labour input. So the highest possible productivity is when ….
…………
¹ Despite the industry’s blatantly self-serving hype that this round of automaton will be like previous ones and create more jobs than it destroys. Maybe ask some recent university grads about the entry-level job market.
The Tuskegee observational study replicated a Norwegian study to see if current syphilis treatments were (in)effective. It was nothing to do with race. It was a rare early example of querying long-established medical customs. Even now, I cannot find any evidence for the efficacy of penicillin in LATE syphilis.
We should follow scientific evidence where-ever it takes us, surely.
Nathan is a pretty scandalous guy, but very mild mannered and polite. I’ve read his substack, I wouldn’t call it incendiary. He seems to raise the hackles of a lot of people I’d like to annoy myself.
Speaking of which, shout out to Maartin AGAIN for his solid defense of Israel and western values. Cheers!
D.A.
NYC
This should be studied.
And if group differences do exist, it seems that nonwhite populations are on top. East Asians, specifically. They literally have larger brains on average than other populations, and although there is not a perfect relationship between brain size and intelligence, it is nonetheless is a factor.
Also, we seem to be much more accepting of possible genetic differences to explain the dominance of athletes of African origin in many sports, such as sprinting. People who claim that black athletes have an inherent advantage of a preponderance of fast-twitch muscle fibers don’t seem to get cancelled.
But if you (correctly) point out that East Asians have, on average, more of the tissue that we know is responsible for thinking, and suggest that this may contribute to their higher average IQ scores and performance on other cognitive tasks, you are a dirty no-good racist!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289697900040
Until I see a West African winning the marathon, or an East African winning the 100 metres, I will continue to think this difference is genetic. If so, of course, it is still the accumulation of historic environmental evolutionary adaptations (or chance?).
I voted “Yes”, and am surprised to find myself in a minority of 4%.
Everyone agrees that research should not carry “a clear threat of lasting substantial harm”. So we are all against some research, e.g. making animal viruses capable of infecting human populations, or testing how the pain-threshold to X varies between human populations. So there are no blanket statements possible here, we need to evaluate any proposed research on its own merits. Claiming that academic freedom should be total surely is dangerous ideology.
The vast majority of research should, I believe, not be forbidden. But I voted “Yes” because research that carries a minor risk of harm should be discouraged. And work that is scientifically likely useless (like studying the mean IQ in populations without questioning the IQ-concept itself and its tests, or without studying the variance) should also be discouraged. No need to make a law of that (i.e. “forbid” it), but if I were on a panel I would vote against funding it, i.e. I would discourage it. Supervisors who never discourage any scientific research proposal don’t do their job properly. And as to the societal impact of some research, or of some possible research outcomes, the fact that nobody can predict harm with certainty does not equate to a certainty that the research will do no harm. Let’s tread carefully.
It is fairly essential for society (especially America) that this issue be studied. Why? Well, it is now 60 years since the passing of the Civil Rights Act and since starting Affirmative Action, and yet there are still real and big gaps in academic achievement between different racial groups. These gaps have big consequences, and the passing of multiple decades has done very little to close these gaps. You can’t expect society to stop being interested in this topic. Hence:
Either there is still rampant and ubiquitous “systemic racism” pervading all aspects of American society (and if there is little actual evidence of that then that can only be because it is so all-pervasive, akin to fish not noticing water). If this really is the case then it is imperative that it be fixed, and urgently.
Or, the gaps are natural consequences of different group means in cognitive abilities. Sixty years down the line, it pretty much comes down to one of these two. Everything else has been tried (massive amounts of money have been thrown at the issue, for example the US spends more on education of each black child than it does per white child). We also know that family SES is not the cause, since it’s very easy to control for SES and it does nothing to explain the gaps.
Society is currently just fudging the issue, but that can’t continue indefinitely. I don’t see any possible “harms” from openly addressing the issue that are worse than the harms of continuing to fudge it.
The third possibility is that there are social and/or environmental factors which, broadly speaking, differ between the groups enough to make a statistical difference. The ones I see mentioned the most are what’s called “black culture” with its lower value placed on education and marriage, and Asian communities emphasizing education and duty to family. It’s not necessarily easy to tease such things out of the equation.
True, but why are these cultural differences there in the first place? Do certain groups develop different cultures purely based on environmental factors?
This is partly true, but the behavioural traits that add up to attitudes and “culture” are also strongly influenced by genes (as all behavioural traits are). (The teachers’ holy grail would be finding a way to instil study skills, diligence and desire into their less-able pupils, but human nature is just not that malleable.)
An alternative to not studying it is just to succumb to “black fatigue” and decide to abandon affirmative action and special programs for black children and “at-risk” black youth just because we are fed up with failure and fed up with reverse racism* on its own demerits. Just because the social guardians would deny us the data that might prove these programs are a useless waste of talent and poisonous to human flourishing, that doesn’t stop lawmakers from acting as if they know they are. We could even take “discouragement of research likely to be harmful” as evidence that the professors know they are, too, and want to keep AA for purely ideological reasons. Marcel, are you afraid that the research will do harm to black and indigenous minorities, or are you afraid that the resentful cut-off minorities will do harm to you?
(* We are fed up with studies like the one that purported to show, falsely, that white pediatricians let black babies die while black ones saved them, and that’s why we need to pull out all the stops to get more forty-watt blacks into medical school and displace those awful white people.)
You ask whether I’m afraid the research will harm minorities or me. Well, I’m afraid some research may lead to harming minorities and thereby harm everyone. I don’t want a society where some groups (as opposed to individuals) are better off than others. Systematic inequalities make everyone unhappy. (I lived in Scandinavia for a year, one of the most egalitarian societies. Loved it. They don’t win Nobel prizes nor does anybody build huge mansions for themselves. They do top all happiness rankings.)
It seems most people here answered the question “Do you think that all scientific work on IQ differences between black Americans and others should be forbidden?”. I would have said “No” to that question. But the question was whether some scientific work should be forbidden or discouraged, to which I say yes.
There is no such thing as “the research”. You can study any topic in many ways, and do so soundly or badly. Research on IQ, which is typically defined as “what my IQ-test measures”, is very easy to get wrong, for example by believing that your particular IQ-test is the only one conceivable. And the outcomes of such bad IQ-research can of course be misused to solidify inequalities in society.
Here’s an IQ research question that I would not discourage: Is it possible to design, for every human population, a specific IQ test that makes that particular population end up on top? That should do no harm.
I hope you’re joking! Designing a “test” that simply flatters the tested and provides no information is almost a Kafka-like idea.
I took Marcel’s suggestion to mean that if an IQ test could be tailored to show the intellectual supremacy of any desired group, it would undermine the entire business of intelligence testing and extinguish further “harmful” research about population IQ. The test produces no useful information but that outcome is itself the point of the research, to see if the test can be rigged that way and thereby discredited.
Then we could forge ahead with affirmative action to produce any desired definition of “equity” without that nagging worry that we were putting stupid people in entirely the wrong jobs that they were doomed to fail at (unless somebody smarter was made to do their work and cover for them so the nuclear reactor didn’t melt down), but be un-fireable on DEI grounds. Sort of like the iron-clad long-term employment contracts in cozily egalitarian Europe, but available only to members of equity-seeking groups.
I think that’s an excellent question. It gets into the idea of cognitive domains which I referred to above regarding men and women. IQ tests aren’t supposed to test knowledge (it would be easy to design a test where a particular race would come out on top), but test an underlying ability to learn, reason, and solve problems across all domains.
I’m guessing that it could be done — but that it wouldn’t be an IQ test because it would be too specific. If a particular race had, say, a higher than average ability to pick a tune out of background noise, that’s not general intelligence.
[Keeping it short – Da Roolz!] Maybe test design need not be too specific, just some fine-tuning of the mixture of tested cognitive domains? IQ testing is for information processing: language, logic, visual, auditory (and why not add the other senses?). That gives huge freedom to cook up suitable mixtures. Plus we can vary how each individual domain is tested.
Another research question: does growing up learning Chinese characters help with visual pattern analysis in IQ-tests? If yes, should we get rid of our alphabet? Or should we change the IQ-test?
It’s been done, long ago, precisely for the purpose of undermining the near-sacred status of IQ testing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity
For fun, take the test. IIRC, here’s one of the multiple-choice questions: “What does T.C.B. stand for?” Hint: it ain’t “That’s Cool, Baby”.
The whole reason that IQ is a valid concept is that, no, it does not depend much on the specifics of the test. Lots of different styles of IQ test give similar results. (There are indeed slight differences, for example, as Sastra says, men tend to score a bit higher on spatial tests and women a bit higher on verbal tests, but these are only minor differences.) So, no, there’s no way you could design a test to make a particular group look good (well, not unless you start defining “running fast” as a type of intelligence, or things like that).
The gaps between different races in cognitive ability are robust, do not depend much on the test, and are seen stably across different cultures, different countries, different decades, different levels of family income, are not easily reduced by education, and indeed do not seem to change much whatever.
People may well dislike that this is the case, but at some point we surely have to deal with reality as it actually is.
a NO vote for me.
Biological reality, truths, should be something we embrace. The differences within populations are protected by laws even as we know they are open to abuse. In which case high/low IQ make very little difference. The argument for and against peoples’ access to and what resources needs to be addressed. If all things were equal in our societies we would as we do now to some extent, identify, assist those who need help. We certainly have got better at it by pursuing and legislating towards fair societies. OK so we have a bit of way to go.
It is not a prerequisite to a full and engaged life to have high IQ, low IQ, or anything in between, it is how we function as individuals in any given society. By using reason, freedom of speech, to vent and discard bad ideas, we move on.
Here is a genetic empowered gift we don’t seem to get worked up about, good telomeres, for good looking aging! LOL! As far as I know this is true.
One spanner in the works, or not, AI is creeping up upon us and it may, in fact I’m sure it will have a lot to say about it, it could be a leveler, back to resource access if that be the case.
telomeres
a compound structure at the end of a chromosome.
Censorship is alive and well. We need to run another conference on the subject, to continue the conversation:
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/5/2/306
I just take it for granted that Jews and East Asians are smarter than whites. The taboo is odd for me.
Actually, I think the situation is more complex. Jews tend to be weighted towards the verbal side. Asians tend to be weighted towards the spatial side. Another oddity is that sex differences in Asians tend to smaller. Why? I haven’t a clue.
I know that that is the stereotype. And I know the numbers of Jewish Nobel winners etc. But I live in Israel, and every time I hear that stereotype, I take a look around…..
….and I remember, we have a lot of intelligent people among us (Like many other populations). We see that every day—we live in a country that has incredible tech and science, including that protecting us (if not hermetically) from missile attacks.
And we also see incredible stupidity every day, including that of our elected officials. Da Roolz prohibit details.
And I remind myself that intelligence is a property of individuals.
The simplest definition of race is that a racial group is a type of extended family, one that is more coherent and enduring than a basic extended family due to some degree of inbreeding.
That of course leaves the usual lumper vs. splitter arguments still to be hashed out, but that provides a sturdy conceptual basis for thinking about race.
Affirmative action is in big trouble in the U.S. at present in part because almost everybody, including leftist intellectuals, is by now ignorant of just how big the IQ gaps are among the races. To point out that if Harvard admitted and hired only on valid quantitative predictors of academic performance, the number of African Americans at Harvard would drop by 80% or 90% sounds unthinkable. It seems racist to note that most blacks get into Harvard on racial preferences, so if we get rid of racial preferences, then black representation at Harvard will plummet.
But virtually nobody can think through that logical sequence under the current taboos.
My impression is that many people just can’t imagine that without affirmative action, fewer blacks would get into Harvard. So they don’t see much reason to defend affirmative action. And lots of people who want to abolish affirmative action think doing that would only cause black admissions to drop by, say, 20%.
It just sounds racist to point out that all the data suggests that without racial preferences black admissions would collapse by at least 80% and probably more.
An eye-opening example of how under-represented blacks would be in elite institutions without racial quotas can be found by looking at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 159 law clerks. Ginsburg believed in affirmative action for thee but not for me because she needed the smartest clerks to outsmart Scalia’s clerks. So, over her long career, she employed one black law clerk, Paul Watford, out of 159.
Is 0.6% representation for blacks in an influential job enough?
I can see arguments pro and con on affirmative action. But I believe the public needs to know the statistical truth before it can be expected to make a wise decision.
Well, let’s look at faculty.
I have taught at a few US universities, including one state U and one Ivy. In the sciences, my experience is that Black faculty were just as qualified as any of their White/Asian colleagues. When universities did do racially biased hires, it was in administrative positions, such as Dean for Cultural Hogwash or some such.
However, the humanities are something else. Claudine Gay at Harvard is a good example. Even without reference to her plagiarism, she is a full professor with a number of publications that is ridiculously low. Even if she fleshed out her CV with numerous reference to her “community service” and other non-academic accomplishments, that number of publications would barely qualify her for tenure, unless they were ground-breaking, influential books etc. And they are not.
If so then the public will never make a wise decision. ISTM the the most common numerical knowledge about lotteries involves the quest for “my lucky numbers”, definitely excluding any notion of the expected value of one’s “investment”.
If I get the chance (🙂) I would very much like to teach a guest slot in a high school “stochastics” class — lotteries, Bayesian inference, martingales, etc.
Geez, Barbara, that BITCH IQ test article is wicked. I’m surprised the Wikipedia editors haven’t taken it down. Maybe the parody is so subtle that it went under their radar, or over their heads, or whatever.
Male/female differences in IQ (a complex topic to be sure) are probably as controversial as race difference. The vast majority of intellectuals have never heard that males and females are quite different. Here is a quote from James Flynn (now deceased).
“He points out that if you try to intentionally create a gender-neutral IQ test by throwing out items that favor one gender over the other, you find that you can’t eliminate a female verbal advantage and a male advantage for visual-spatial items”
Quotes from James Flynn not withstanding, I would tend to agree that race differences generate more heat than sex differences