Posted on 04/06/2018 7:01:28 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
‘I am worried,” writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in the New York Times, “that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.”
Reich was responding to anticipated resistance to his forthcoming book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. The “well-meaning people” Reich references are those who argue that race is a “social construct,” that there are no significant genetic differences among people of different racial ancestry. Maybe there are differences in appearance and other physical traits, these people say, but there definitely aren’t any in intelligence.
Such people responded with rage and fury to the publication in 1994 of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book, The Bell Curve. That book, solidly based on the then-available psychological research, explored differences among races in intelligence as measured by rigorous IQ tests.
Herrnstein and Murray’s conclusion was that those differences are the result of both nature and nurture—genes and environment—in as yet unknown proportions. They predicted that research like Reich’s would provide a clearer understanding of just how much is genetic.
Reich obviously wishes to avoid the demonization endured by Murray, who was shouted down at Middlebury College just last year. Reich is at pains to say that his findings should not be used to justify racist practices, such as the slave trade, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust.
He also makes a point that is obvious to the ordinary person but that he—and some of his critics who wrote to the Times—thinks needs reiteration, which is, as one reader put it, “differences in individuals vary far more widely than populations.” When we are comparing traits of people with different genetic ancestry, we are looking at averages, such as the differences between American whites’ and Asians’ IQ scores. (Asians’, on average, are higher.) But within the white and Asian populations, there is wide variety—which can be represented as a bell curve.
The assumption of “well-meaning people” is that ordinary Americans aren’t capable of grasping this. My view is that they understand it very well. They have learned—from school, from work, from everyday life, from public events—that there is a wider variation within each measured group than there is among measured groups.
To take a concrete and accurate example, they suspect that even if blacks might on average score lower than whites on average in intelligence tests, it does not change the fact that former president Barack Obama is a highly intelligent person. Indeed, you can read reams of anti-Obama commentary and look in vain for claims that he was not smart enough to be president.
In arguing that racial differences do not justify racial discrimination, Reich steps out on some possibly dangerous turf. “Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound,” he writes, though some Times readers would volubly disagree. Yet, “we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.” A fortiori, we should do the same for those with different racial ancestry, whose average differences are far less profound.
It’s a strong argument. Contrary to the fears of “well-meaning people,” the difference in average racial IQ scores does not undermine the case against racial discrimination. Ordinary Americans can and do see that racial discrimination against individuals is irrational and that the advances in knowledge about genetics by Reich do not make it any less so.
But the continuing existence of racial gaps, even as the IQ scores of all groups rise (that’s the Flynn effect, identified and named by Herrnstein and Murray), does undercut the case for racial quotas and preferences and the “disparate impact” legal doctrine established by the Supreme Court 47 years ago.
The justification for quotas is the assumption that in a fair society, we would find the same racial mix in every school, every occupation, and every neighborhood. Any significant deviation from statistical equality, in this view, can be evidence of persistent racial discrimination.
This notion suffuses the behavior of leaders in colleges and universities, in large corporations, in government at all levels. Many such leaders regard enforcing quotas as a moral duty, even if they place people in positions for which they’re unprepared. For these “well-meaning people,” David Reich has a (probably unintentional) warning: Science is undermining the rationale for the work you’re doing.
And the same goes for people who deny differences in class. In fact, differences in class can be more extreme than differences in race.
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Few ‘intellectuals’ accept Murray’s reasoning and bell curve.
Hence the ‘white privilege’ argument.
Are WE capable of judging all people as individuals?
The left doesn’t think so.
Maybe the Indians had it right with the caste system?
If it isn’t the climate nutters on the left trying to abuse science for political and social ends, it’s people supposedly on the right playing the same damn game with this.
Here is an idea. Just hire whomever you want, based on their resume and interview?
Just have people prove their individual abilities and both sides stop trying to use scams to get one over on some other group of people because they think they have a moral, historical, or some goofy biological right to stuff.
That’s as profoundly Un-American of a remark as I can imagine. I hope you made it without thinking.
He was not competent enough to be President. He was also half white.
The fact of the matter is that despite all the burbling on about individualism and all that, there really, truly, actually are significant and observable differences between the major racial groups on this planet. One of those differences is in average IQ and the standard distributions for IQs of individuals in each racial group that form around those averages.
This fact carries with it significant public policy questions relating to everything from crime to welfare to affirmative action to education policy.
Pretending that these differences don’t exist, and herpa-derping about “racism” when someone points them out is not going to make them going away. Refusing to accept them and refusing to craft rational public policy as a result of them is simply going to result in our society continuing to decline because we can’t face “uncomfortable” realities.
Human biodiversity isn’t going away, people. FReepers would do well to accept this reality.
I also remember then Anthropologist Richard Gould and his dishonest tirade against Murray and his book. Gould was a disgrace to the scientific community. let's see where Reich goes with this.
The revenue of the entire “discrimination lawsuit” industry rests upon two assertions:
1) That there is no statistically meaningful difference between ethnic populations, as far as intelligence (or any other factor determining success)is concerned, and therefore
2) Any statistical disparity between two groups MUST be due to illegal discrimination, which must be remedied by government action.
If it is recognized that statistically significant differences DO exist between groups, then the entire basis for the discrimination industry goes away, and the lawyers will have to find some other source of income. They do NOT want to do that.
The Obamster was as smart as Joseph Goebbels.
Hmmm... Take the city folks out to the dairy to inspect the Jersey, Guernsey, Holstein, and Brown Swiss cows.
<>They are capable of inter-breeding.
<>The butter fat content of the milk is different.
The average IQ for Africans in sub-Sahara Africa is 70, in Haiti it’s 68. An IQ of 70 is the threshold for mental retardation in the US.
No, the caste system puts in concrete what the Left is doing, where people and their descendants are forever treated according to what group they belong to, rather than their actual individual talents.
By the well meaning people, do you mean Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, the entire Democrap Party, Hollywood Idiots, late night TV talk show hosts etc.
I really don't have a horse in this race. I just think the debate should continue honestly with each side developing and collecting data to support their arguments without questioning the motives of those they disagree with.
RE: The average IQ for Africans in sub-Sahara Africa is 70, in Haiti it’s 68.
Just curious, what is your source for this?
No. Class is entirely a social construct.
The premise of the article is in fact a primary theme of the TV series the Wire depicting black Baltimore society. The masses lack the intelligence and ability to escape their plight. However, there are some including Stringer Bell and Avon Barkley who possess greater intelligence. They induce those of lesser intelligence to their will
Extrapolating, the same thing happened to the ancestors of black America centuries ago in Africa. The inferiors were made slaves aand exported out of the country.
Well said.
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