Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo
In 2007, Nobel Prize winning U.S. scientist James Watson was quoted referring to research suggested that black people were less intelligent than other races. His comments caused a storm of controversy, Watson was condemned. Although he apologised for the offence he caused his public engagements were cancelled and he left his British speaking tour in disgrace. Meanwhile, right wing websites hailed him as the new Galileo a martyr to political correctness which was concealing the fact that there is indeed evidence that shows different races score differently in IQ tests. But are the tests biased? Is race really a scientific category at all?
In this documentary, the first in a new season Race: Science’s Last Taboo, Rageh Omaar sets out to find out the truth, meeting scientists who believe the research supports the view that races can be differentiated as well as those who vehemently oppose this view. By daring to ask the difficult questions, Omaar is able to explode the myths about race and IQ and reveal what he thinks are important lessons for society.
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In the latest edition of Nature, Bruce Lahn & Lanny Ebenstein have an article entiled “Let’s Celebrate Human Genetic Diversity”. Lahn & Ebenstein comment:
“The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide, that were committed with the support of pseudo scientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.
We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position.”
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/Lahn.pdf
Jonathan Haidt, Psychologist, University of Virginia earlier this year outlined possible findings in the years ahead:
FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES
The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism..
A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
But the writing is on the wall. Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others. It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide “races”) adapted to local circumstances by a process known as “co-evolution” in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other. The best documented example of this process is the co-evolution of genetic mutations that maintain the ability to fully digest lactose in adulthood with the cultural innovation of keeping cattle and drinking their milk. This process has happened several times in the last 10,000 years, not to whole “races” but to tribes or larger groups that domesticated cattle.
Recent “sweeps” of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates.
The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event. (By “ethnic” I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.)
I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.
There are reasons to hope that we’ll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism. I expect that dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found, so that any group — like any person — can be said to have many strengths and a few weaknesses, all of which are context-dependent. Furthermore, these cross-group differences are likely to be small when compared to the enormous variation within ethnic groups and the enormous and obvious effects of cultural learning. But whatever consensus we ultimately reach, the ways in which we now think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project.”
Again it takes a “minority” t.v station like channel four to give us half-decent television viewing!
This show was just about what I’d expected it would be- skillfully avoiding the mass of studies that have repeatedly shown (mainly via interracial adoption studies and MRI studies of brain volumes compared to IQ tests) that IQ is indeed variable between racial groups and is related to brain size, but it DID quote the solo study (which was tiny and deeply flawed) that seemed to point to the desired ‘its all made up by racists’ message the show was quite obviously pushing from the get go. It manfully misrepresented IQ tests by pretending that the high end sorter used on graduates given as ‘an average IQ test’ was in any way like the standard IQ tests used on the general public, and which have ZERO relationship to the Raven’s matrices (visual puzzles) which are used to test in a culture-neutral way. It’s a total myth that IQ test are biased and not an accurate test of overall intelligence- on every occasion this has been claimed it has been proven to be untrue, and it’s really only trotted out as an argument now when the race/IQ subject is raised- just about all of America’s leading psychologists signed a long letter explaining this was a myth in the nineties.
I’d suggest reading the letters written by Linda S. Gottfredson if you want to see what psychologists really think about race and IQ (Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud) where a study of psychology PHDs showed that the majority of them believed the difference was at least partly genetic, with the ‘all environment’ supporters being in a notably small minority.
The program was so phenomenonally biased that it bordered on the dishonest in its insistence that ‘only some’ scientists support innate racial differences (actually the majority of psychology professors asked) and that IQ tests are culturally biased/not good measures of real intelligence (also an opinion NOT shared by psychology doctorates or supported by the research into IQ and life outcome, with which I am also familiar).
I’d also applaud Dr Watson’s common sense on avoiding the show based on the treatment of Lynn and Jensen. They were allowed to voice their opinions, but were forbidden to show any of the mass of evidence that supports them (I’m assuming it was edited out). The presenter then called them racist for holding an opinion which is based on a lot of solid scientific data and which is shared by the majority of professionals in their common subject.
I’d also like to comment that ‘race isn’t real’ is very far from being a consensus among geneticists- being familiar with papers published post 2000 on the subject I can tell Channel 4 that a LOT of publishing geneticists are supporting the ‘race is real’ side of the debate (although since this didn’t support the drive of the show it was pretended that since Prof Steve Jones didn’t support race as a biological reality, all geneticists shared his POV).
I’d also like to torpedo the claims that East Asians do better because of their ’studious culture’. East Asian children adopted into White American families show exactly the same higher IQ’s as their non adopted culturally Asian cohorts. Also not mentioned was that black children adopted by white families have the same IQ as other black Americans (so much for environment again) and that mixed race black/European children score halfway between the adopted white children and adopted black children- every interracial adoption study shows the same pattern.
Also not mentioned was the fact that IQ seems to be about 70% to 80% hereditable, with ‘virtual’ twins (different children adopted by the same parents at the same time) having a completely unrelated IQ scores- another blow to the ‘environment’ claims.
In all, this show was just a vehicle for Mr Omaar’s opinion in which scientific evidence to the contrary was scrupulously kept from the public eye and only the few people and single study that supported him were allowed to be more than a voiced inappropriate opinion to be denounced.
I was not impressed.
In the 1600’s Galileo was prevented by the RC church from claiming that the Earth went around the Sun. In the 2000’s the PC “church” prevents scientists from saying that racial differences may be more than skin deep ?
A vast body of scientific evidence was dismissed by the presenter and replaced by his orthodox PC view; yet no one complained ! Obviously there has been almost no comment (other than support) from the media because they are today’s Priests of the PC church. More disturbingly even the WWW has been all but silent; “dumbing down” of the populace has done it’s job !
We should expect that (as in the 80’s) these scientific heretics will be privately punished for their views with reduced funding for their non-PC research. Public floggings and book burnings just don’t get a mass audience these days.
Welcome to the new Dark Age.
PC used to mean Political Correctness.
PC now means Propaganda Control.
Dear Pavlov, I could not agree more.
I just watched another programme in the series concerning how it is better to be of mixed race.
The programme is like a propaganda to try to back young women in the council estate who sleep with black men from the inner city and get pregnant, so they can go around telling people that their kids are more healthy..etc. basically these PC people want us to integrate.
The style of the programme is to ask some liberal or PC genetics researcher for an opinion and then exaggerate what they said or draw further conclusions from it.
I want to say that for each one of these geneticists: Jones, Amos, there is another one equally as respected who has another opinion.
Let us address the issue of health. Inbreeding has its consequences, it can accelerate intelligence or other good traits as well as the prevalence of the odd negative trait but so what? We are not living in a village. Even if we were, we would get a village idiot but also an Einstein through inbreeding. The village idiot would not make much difference to the world but the genius would make a lasting difference. In fact, that is probably how technology and science evolved in Europe and in Asia and will continue to do so. So even if what they are arguing is true, it is no justification for a programme of indocrination to go mix the races. What these programmes are doing is exactly the same as what the Nazis did. The programmes are now saying that mixed raced people are better than pure races. The Nazis said the opposite. So the nazis and these PC people are using the same false tactic.
For example, I once went with my husband to central Sweden and a waitress served us and my husband said to me “why is she serving us?” for we felt rather inferior to her. You could imagine that some 1000 years ago this Viking would have had us as slaves. This girl was tall, blonde, beautiful, athletically in proportion, symetrical, so pleasant to the eye that you relaxed in her presence. Obviously, a Nazi could say “if you inbreed in Sweden your children will look like this!, do you want to look like this? or do you want to look like that ugly person in God knows, Madras or Ankara, or Peru or wherever”. Yes there are races that have much better looking people than others. Notice that the programme used the same tactic. She said that mixed raced children would be more healthy and better looking and so on. These PC programmes are really disgusting!
I wished to express agreement with Mr Stein’s analysis:
“(By “ethnic” I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.)”
and add to it. Of course there are many examples. For example people very quickly changed when they chose to live at altitude their lung sizes and other traits, and no doubt Mr Stein knows many more significant and better examples. However, I wanted to add this.
The programmes make a big meal about genetic differences but genetics is a new field. Methylation groups in the DNA and many things which we do not know about (thousands of enhancers and other cis-acting sites in the so called “junk” DNA) could be different between races of people in their presence and the way that they act and this is by no means fully understood or revealed in genetics research, and conveniently left out by people such as Jones in the interviews in the programmes. The DNA is a type of memory (we share most of it with chimps) but it is the details of the order of its execution, the chemical context and the gene gene interaction networks, metabolic and signalling pathways and how these unfold which holds a key. No doubt the genome as we know it is important but thinking about its differences between members of a race and across members of other races is to put a type of linear clustering on the problem (typical of Biologists). The problem is not linear.