If you were to ask those people who marched for science if they believe in evolution, they would have answered with a resounding “yes”. Ask them if they believe that all branches of the human race evolved identically and you will be met with hostility. The problem, for them, is that an admission of the obvious — differential evolution, resulting in broad racial differences — leads to a fact that they don’t want to admit: there are broad racial differences in intelligence, differences that must have evolutionary origins.
“Science” — the cherished totem of left-wing ideologues — isn’t the same thing as science. The totemized version consists of whatever set of facts and hypotheses suit the left’s agenda. In the case of “climate change”, for example, the observation that in the late 1900s temperatures rose for a period of about 25 years coincident with a reported rise in the level of atmospheric CO2 occasioned the hypothesis that the generation of CO2 by humans causes temperatures to rise. This is a reasonable hypothesis, given the long-understood, positive relationship between temperature and so-called greenhouse gases. But it comes nowhere close to confirming what leftists seem bent on believing and “proving” with hand-tweaked models, which is that if humans continue to emit CO2, and do so at a higher rate than in the past, temperatures will rise to the point that life on Earth will become difficult if not impossible to sustain. There is ample evidence to support the null hypothesis (that “climate change” isn’t catastrophic) and the alternative view (that recent warming is natural and caused mainly by things other than human activity).
Leftists want to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming because it suits the left’s puritanical agenda, as did Paul Ehrlich’s discredited thesis that population growth would outstrip the availability of food and resources, leading to mass starvation and greater poverty. Population control therefore became a leftist mantra, and remains one despite the generally rising prosperity of the human race and the diminution of scarcity (except where leftist governments, like Venezuela’s, create misery).
Why are leftists so eager to believe in problems that portend catastrophic consequences which “must” be averted through draconian measures, such as enforced population control, taxes on soft drinks above a certain size, the prohibition of smoking not only in government buildings but in all buildings, and decreed reductions in CO2-emitting activities (which would, in fact, help to impoverish humans)? The common denominator of such measures is control. And yet, by the process of psychological projection, leftists are always screaming “fascist” at libertarians and conservatives who resist control.
Returning to evolution, why are leftists so eager to eager to embrace it or, rather, what they choose to believe about it? My answers are that (a) it’s “science” (it’s only science when it’s spelled out in detail, uncertainties and all) and (b) it gives leftists (who usually are atheists) a stick with which to beat “creationists”.
But when it comes to race, leftists insist on denying what’s in front of their eyes: evolutionary disparities in such phenomena as skin color, hair texture, facial structure, running and jumping ability, cranial capacity, and intelligence.
Why? Because the urge to control others is of a piece with the superiority with which leftists believe they’re endowed because they are mainly white persons of European descent and above-average intelligence (just smart enough to be dangerous). Blacks and Hispanics who vote left do so mainly for the privileges it brings them. White leftists are their useful idiots.
Leftism, in other words, is a manifestation of “white privilege”, which white leftists feel compelled to overcome through paternalistic condescension toward blacks and other persons of color. (But not East Asians or the South Asians who have emigrated to the U.S., because the high intelligence of those groups is threatening to white leftists’ feelings of superiority.) What could be more condescending, and less scientific, than to deny what evolution has wrought in order to advance a political agenda?
Leftist race-denial, which has found its way into government policy, is akin to Stalin’s support of Lysenkoism, which its author cleverly aligned with Marxism. Lysenkoism
rejected Mendelian inheritance and the concept of the “gene”; it departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection.
This brings me to Stephen Jay Gould, a leading neo-Lysenkoist and a fraudster of “science” who did much to deflect science from the question of race and intelligence:
[In The Mismeasure of Man] Gould took the work of a 19th century physical anthropologist named Samuel George Morton and made it ridiculous. In his telling, Morton was a fool and an unconscious racist — his project of measuring skull sizes of different ethnic groups conceived in racism and executed in same. Why, Morton clearly must have thought Caucasians had bigger brains than Africans, Indians, and Asians, and then subconsciously mismeasured the skulls to prove they were smarter.
The book then casts the entire project of measuring brain function — psychometrics — in the same light of primitivism.
Gould’s antiracist book was a hit with reviewers in the popular press, and many of its ideas about the morality and validity of testing intelligence became conventional wisdom, persisting today among the educated folks. If you’ve got some notion that IQ doesn’t measure anything but the ability to take IQ tests, that intelligence can’t be defined or may not be real at all, that multiple intelligences exist rather than a general intelligence, you can thank Gould….
Then, in 2011, a funny thing happened. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania went and measured old Morton’s skulls, which turned out to be just the size he had recorded. Gould, according to one of the co-authors, was nothing but a “charlatan.”
The study itself couldn’t matter, though, could it? Well, recent work using MRI technology has established that descendants of East Asia have slightly more cranial capacity than descendants of Europe, who in turn have a little more than descendants of Africa. Another meta-analysis finds a mild correlation between brain size and IQ performance.
You see where this is going, especially if you already know about the racial disparities in IQ testing, and you’d probably like to hit the brakes before anybody says… what, exactly? It sounds like we’re perilously close to invoking science to argue for genetic racial superiority.
Am I serious? Is this a joke?…
… The reason the joke feels dangerous is that it incorporates a fact that is rarely mentioned in public life. In America, white people on average score higher than black people on IQ tests, by a margin of 12-15 points. And there’s one man who has been made to pay the price for that fact — the scholar Charles Murray.
Murray didn’t come up with a hypothesis of racial disparity in intelligence testing. He simply co-wrote a book, The Bell Curve, that publicized a fact well known within the field of psychometrics, a fact that makes the rest of us feel tremendously uncomfortable.
Nobody bears more responsibility for the misunderstanding of Murray’s work than Gould, who reviewed The Bell Curve savagely in the New Yorker. The IQ tests couldn’t be explained away — here he is acknowledging the IQ gap in 1995 — but the validity of IQ testing could be challenged. That was no trouble for the old Marxist.
Gould should have known that he was dead wrong about his central claim — that general intelligence, or g, as psychologists call it, was unreal. In fact, “Psychologists generally agree that the greatest success of their field has been in intelligence testing,” biologist Bernard D. Davis wrote in the Public Interest in 1983, in a long excoriation of Gould’s strange ideas.
Psychologists have found that performance on almost any test of cognition will have some correlation to other tests of cognition, even in areas that might seem distant from pure logic, such as recognizing musical notes. The more demanding tests have a higher correlation, or a high g load, as they term it.
IQ is very closely related to this measure, and turns out to be extraordinarily predictive not just for how well one does on tests, but on all sorts of real-life outcomes.
Since the publication of The Bell Curve, the data have demonstrated not just those points, but that intelligence is highly heritable (around 50 to 80 percent, Murray says), and that there’s little that can be done to permanently change the part that’s dependent on the environment….
The liberal explainer website Vox took a swing at Murray earlier this year, publishing a rambling 3,300-word hit job on Murray that made zero references to the scientific literature….
Vox might have gotten the last word, but a new outlet called Quillette published a first-rate rebuttal this week, which sent me down a three-day rabbit hole. I came across some of the most troubling facts I’ve ever encountered — IQ scores by country — and then came across some more reassuring ones from Thomas Sowell, suggesting that environment could be the main or exclusive factor after all.
The classic analogy from the environment-only crowd is of two handfuls of genetically identical seed corn, one planted in Iowa and the other in the Mojave Desert. One group flourishes; the other is stunted. While all of the variation within one group will be due to genetics, its flourishing relative to the other group will be strictly due to environment.
Nobody doubts that the United States is richer soil than Equatorial Guinea, but the analogy doesn’t prove the case. The idea that there exists a mean for human intelligence and that all racial subgroups would share it given identical environments remains a metaphysical proposition. We may want this to be true quite desperately, but it’s not something we know to be true.
For all the lines of attack, all the brutal slander thrown Murray’s way, his real crime is having an opinion on this one key issue that’s open to debate. Is there a genetic influence on the IQ testing gap? Murray has written that it’s “likely” genetics explains “some” of the difference. For this, he’s been crucified….
Murray said [in a recent interview] that the assumption “that everyone is equal above the neck” is written into social policy, employment policy, academic policy and more.
He’s right, of course, especially as ideas like “disparate impact” come to be taken as proof of discrimination. There’s no scientifically valid reason to expect different ethnic groups to have a particular representation in this area or that. That much is utterly clear.
The universities, however, are going to keep hollering about institutional racism. They are not going to accept Murray’s views, no matter what develops. [Jon Cassidy, “Mau Mau Redux: Charles Murray Comes in for Abuse, Again“, The American Spectator, June 9, 2017]
And so it goes in the brave new world of alternative facts, most of which seem to come from the left. But the left, with its penchant for pseudo-intellectualism (“science” vs. science) calls it postmodernism:
Postmodernists … eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials rather than anything that could possibly be mutually agreed upon…. [S]cience therefore becomes an instrument of Western oppression; indeed, all discourse is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. In this scheme, there is no Western civilization to preserve—as the more powerful force in the world, it automatically takes on the role of oppressor and therefore any form of equity must consequently then involve the overthrow of Western “hegemony.” These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos. [Michael Aaron, “Evergreen State and the Battle for Modernity“, Quillette, June 8, 2017]
Other related reading (listed chronologically):
Molly Hensley-Clancy, “Asians With “Very Familiar Profiles”: How Princeton’s Admissions Officers Talk About Race“, BuzzFeed News, May 19, 2017
Warren Meyer, “Princeton Appears To Penalize Minority Candidates for Not Obsessing About Their Race“, Coyote Blog, May 24, 2017
B. Wineguard et al., “Getting Voxed: Charles Murray, Ideology, and the Science of IQ“, Quillette, June 2, 2017
James Thompson, “Genetics of Racial Differences in Intelligence: Updated“, The Unz Review: James Thompson Archive, June 5, 2017
Raymond Wolters, “We Are Living in a New Dark Age“, American Renaissance, June 5, 2017
F. Roger Devlin, “A Tactical Retreat for Race Denial“, American Renaissance, June 9, 2017
Scott Johnson, “Mugging Mr. Murray: Mr. Murray Speaks“, Power Line, June 9, 2017
Related posts:
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Conversing” about Race
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost
The IQ of Nations
Race and Social Engineering
Some Notes about Psychology and Intelligence
Politics and Prosperity 