Should science study race and IQ?

Should science study race and IQ? A recent article in Nature ("Should scientists study race and IQ") says yes, as long as the research is done carefully and kept free of outside influence and premature application by social scientists and politicians. Science did not give rise to bigotry. After all, scientific studies of race and IQ began in relatively modern times, only after long centuries of "pernicious folk-theories of racial and gender inferiority predated scientific studies." The authors believe that first-rate scientific research will, in the end, dispel much of the racial bigotry that still exists.

Some scientists hold more 'acceptable' views, ourselves included. We think racial and gender differences in IQ are not innate but instead reflect environmental challenges. Although we endorse this view, plenty of scholars remain unpersuaded. Whereas our 'politically correct' work garners us praise, speaking invitations and book contracts, challengers are demeaned, ostracized and occasionally threatened with tenure revocation.

Acts of censure edge close to Lysenkoism. They also do a disservice to science. When dissenters' positions are prevented exposure in high-impact journals and excluded from conferences, the dominant side goes unchallenged, and eventually its rationale is forgotten, forestalling the evolution of crucial ideas.

I am sympathetic to the need to for scientists to carefully examine everything, no exceptions. I'm concerned, though, that we need to look extra-closely at the concept of "race," which I consider to be virtually useless in daily matters. Nor should we allow the simplistic concept of "IQ" to serve as a variable, given much more expansive ways to measure intelligence (see, for example this post on Howard Gardner's work). For more on the dangers of misusing "IQ," see Steven J. Gould's 1996 book, "The Mismeasure of Man."

In sum, we should do good science and I believe that good science would suffocate bigotry. The article points out several examples of this. Good science should be done on only after kicking out the clumsy, pernicious concepts of "race" and "IQ," reframing the debate as the relationship between fine-grained genotypic variation and competence in each of the many ways in which humans display competence. Because genotypic variation within "races" is at least as wide as genotypic variation among "races," a meaningful scientific exploration would not amount to a simplistic survey of how people with different colors of skin do on standardized intelligence tests. That would not be good science. Good science will always take into account the convoluted ever-changing environment, and that is not easy to do when we are dealing with basic concepts that are vague.

I'm not convinced that we are prepared to begin the necessary research on this general topic, because too many of us, including many well-trained scientists, have not done their ontological homework (consider the incoherent and clumsy stumblings of DNA co-discoverer James Watson, described in the article). Are "race" and "IQ" useful constructs with which to do this sort of research? Time will tell if we are intelligent enough to sharpen our constructs before running off to demonstrate our "truths."

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George Will’s irresponsible article denying climate change and the Washington Post’s irresponsible fact-checking

George Will has written an irresponsible article denying climate change (AKA global warming). Here’s the basic problem with George Will’s writing, as stated succinctly by The Wonk Room:

In “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will attacked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for discussing a worst-case scenario of California drought caused by the decimation of Sierra snowpack, falsely claiming Chu predicted this will come to pass “no later than 10 years away.” Will also incorrectly claimed that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ — based on a 45-day-old blog post by Daily Tech’s Michael Asher, one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.

Will’s article is riddled with falsehoods. The radically untrue nature of Will’s article is beyond dispute. Confronted with Will’s cauldron of conservative climate denial propaganda, the Washington Post was faced with a stark choice. It could either A) confess that it failed to do any competent fact-checking or B) compound Will’s lies with its own by claiming that it did real fact-checking. It chose “B.”

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Creationists blather their way through Darwin Day

If you visit Ken Ham's creationist site, you'll see an article titled, "Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?" Here's a key concern raised in this article:

Perhaps the most bitter pill to swallow for any Christian who attempts to “make peace” with Darwin is the presumed ape ancestry of man.

It's difficult to believe the ignorance displayed by this sentence. Why can't creationists understand that not only did humans evolve from other ape-like creatures (the scientific evidence is abundant and irrefutable), but that humans are apes. Check the features listed here:

The similarities can be seen throughout our bodies. For instance, humans and the African apes all lack external tails and have hands with a thumb that is sufficiently separate from the other fingers to allow them to be opposable for precision grips. Humans are also sexually dimorphic--males are 5-10% larger on average and have greater upper body muscular development. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, we are omnivorous. We kill other animals for food in addition to eating a wide variety of plants. Internally, our bodies are even more similar to the great apes. We have essentially the same arrangement of internal organs and bones. We share several important blood types. We also get many of the same diseases.

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The real problem with the economy

I'm not an economist, yet I know that the most vocal economists these days are not shooting straight with us. You can see it in their faces and you can hear it in their voices. Niall Ferguson is a professor of history and a professor at the business school at Harvard. His analysis of our economic problems rings true to me. He starts with the premise that we are in hock up to our eyeballs and we are in massive denial that this is the real problem:

The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Average household sector debt has reached 141 per cent of disposable income in the United States and 177 per cent in the United Kingdom. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets forty, sixty or even a hundred times the size of their capital. Average U.S. investment bank leverage was above 25 to 1 at the end of 2008. Eurozone bank leverage was more than 30 to 1. British bank balance sheets are equal to a staggering 440 per cent of gross domestic product

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The age of agnotology: culturally constructed ignorance

Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford who has pointed out a bizarre modern phenomenon: the coexistence of easily available factual information and ignorance. That is the subject of Clive Thompson's article in Wired:

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution.

Thompson suggests that we need to develop more tools like Wikipedia to allow society as a whole to "build real knowledge through consensus," thereby allowing us to expose systematic lies for what they are.

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