Like death, taxes and devastating meteor strikes, the season of debate about black intelligence has made its inevitable reappearance.
This time however, years of comparative IQ studies, careful statistical analysis and, a re-purposed, friendly sounding concept - different intelligences - have armed researchers who're so-inclined with formidable devices and disconcerting conclusions.
A common thread is the devout attachment to "truth" or, more specifically (and enjoying an even more elevated status than 'mere truth') "scientific truth". A typical refrain: 'These results make us uncomfortable, but they're true!'.
Experience shows LBOTalk isn't the best forum to discuss the truth or error of IQ testing, or, the even more profound question: what is human intelligence? (And for me, there's a much more interesting inquiry, which very few people ask: is human intelligence a successful adaptation?)
Our worst arguing styles always come to the fore.
It's rarely productive.
Much more productive, I think, is tracing this reinvigorated idea of racially (or, genetically) determined intelligence difference as it makes its way through our culture. What are the most likely consequences?
I think about this in much the same way I think about nuclear physics: in a different society and, perhaps more fundamentally, with a different cognitive tool set, we might have E equals MC squared without hydrogen bombs. That is, if we were something else, and not what we are, it might be possible to carry the knowledge of energy's relationship to matter without making weapons.
But we are only what we are; the bombs are with us, always.
Similarly, the study of group separated intelligence differences - which can be abstractly defended as necessary and noble - is often motivated by and servant to ideological considerations researchers, unwilling to confront some 'inconvenient truths' of their own, carry with them, always.
Consider the following essay Jordan pointed us to, written by geneticist Jason Malloy:
James Watson Tells the Inconvenient Truth: Faces the Consequences
<http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php>
In the following excerpt, Malloy writes to the media regarding they're (in his view) mishandling of Watson's statements on race and intelligence:
[begin excerpt]
Dear media,
Please read the actual text of James Watson's apology printed in the Independent, instead of mangling it and interpolating it with your own claims:
[Watson writes]
To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief...
The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity....
To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers .
Watson would only be retracting his intelligence claims if he considered those claims tantamount to claims of 'superiority' or 'inferiority', which he clearly emphasizes he doesn't. Watson is saying that questioning that all races are equal in intelligence is not racism, it is trying to figure out why the world looks the way it does, with the greatest engineers and the greatest musicians disproportionately coming, in a systematic way, from different racial backgrounds. In other words culturally separated people of African descent have been musical innovators across a diverse range of cultures (in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean), while culturally separated people of East Asian descent have excelled at math and science across a diverse range of cultures (in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean).
This is not a claim of racial 'superiority' or 'inferiority', either in terms of legal worth or even in terms of overall talent - since groups all have different strengths and weaknesses. It is simply the recognition that people of different genetic heritage, on average, reveal different talents wherever they are found in the world, and there is one explanation that best accounts for these observations: evolution.
In other words, Watson was thinking like a scientist. Which is exactly why he was punished.
The moral laws of our society dictate that we are not allowed to think scientifically about some issues. Especially not in public.
[end excerpt]
Notice the deeply embedded contradiction: on the one hand, Malloy (along with Watson, it appears) insists that what scientists such as Watson are after is neutral truth. "Difference" not "inferiority" is the mantra. But implicit assumptions are revealed:
"Watson is saying that questioning that all races are equal in intelligence is not racism, it is trying to figure out why the world looks the way it does, with the greatest engineers and the greatest musicians disproportionately coming, in a systematic way, from different racial backgrounds."
As every schoolchild knows, people may think of those theoretical "greatest musicians" as interesting and desirable but they will always defer to their apparent opposites, the "greatest engineers", as smart. There is a clear hierarchy of value assigned to various abilities. In the real world, saying that some groups of people are destined to be "great musicians" while others are likely to be "great engineers" is essentially the same thing as saying one group is dumber (if not less "talented") than the other.
No amount of protest about the holiness of 'scientific truth' will change this.
Malloy, like many of his colleagues, assumes his work can and does exist outside of ideology. This is one of the oldest and most dangerous of errors and typical of the sort of bullheadedness Ravi laments when he discusses 'scientism'.
Earlier, I wondered about consequences.
William Saletan, in a series of essays written for his "Human Nature" column in Slate, shows us just how awful things can, and no doubt will get, particularly in liberal hands. (Auguste Blanqui pointed to the first entry in the thread titled "Slate pushes racist Bell Curve thesis")
It starts here -
<http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/>
continues here -
<http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178124/>
and comes to it's rallying cry conclusion here -
<http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178125/>
From which, a critical excerpt:
[begin excerpt]
Genes can be changed.
Hereditarians point to phenylketunuria (PKU) as an example of a genetic but treatable cognitive defect. Change the baby's diet, and you protect its brain. They also tout breastfeeding as an environmental intervention. White women are three times more likely than black women to breastfeed their babies, they observe, so if more black women did it, IQs might go up. But now it turns out that breastfeeding, too, is a genetically regulated factor. As my colleague Emily Bazelon explains, a new study shows that while most babies gain an average of seven IQ points from breastfeeding, some babies gain nothing from it and end up at a four-point disadvantage because they lack a crucial gene.
The study's authors claim it "shows that genes may work via the environment to shape the IQ, helping to close the nature versus nurture debate." That's true if you have the gene. But if you don't, nurture can't help you. And guess what? According to the International Hapmap Project, 2.2 percent of the project's Chinese-Japanese population samples, 5 percent of its European-American samples, and 10 percent of its Nigerian samples lack the gene. The Africans are twice as likely as the Americans, and four times as likely as the Asians, to start life with a four-point IQ deficit out of sheer genetic misfortune.
Don't tell me those Nigerian babies aren't cognitively disadvantaged. Don't tell me it isn't genetic. Don't tell me it's God's will. And in the age of genetic modification, don't tell me we can't do anything about it.
[end excerpt]
This confused cry from the heart, which, echoing and technically refining earlier European maladies, combines supremacism, humanitarianism and a genetic engineering version of the White Man's Burden all into one, terrible package offers a glimpse of the sorts of horrors the 21st century may have in store.
Is it so difficult to imagine a future Clinton, Sarkozy or Merkel tenderly looking into the camera element's eye as they make an appeal for the introduction of 'intelligence enhancing genes' into the African pool to 'solve the problem of poverty'? A problem, they'll ahistorically argue, caused by cognitive deficits.
This, and other, even less pleasant scenarios, are all made possible by the marriage of two stubborn ideologies: scientism and white supremacism. They constantly mutate but show no signs of dying.
Because of this double helix of beliefs, it's inevitable that any and all cognitive difference studies can only lead to yet another Euro engineered, fiery car wreck.
For blacks.
.d.