Andrew Sullivan has been involved (first part of his usual tripartite column) in the genetics of intelligence debate for along time – by his word, since Murray’s controversial The Bell Curve was published. The current state of the debate, according to Andrew, is that the left rejects any suggestion that intelligence, or for that matter much of any attribute of a human, vary based on genetics and racial grouping:
For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans. Our large brains and the societies we have constructed with them, many argue, swamp almost all genetic influences.
Which is understandable, as suggesting otherwise might lead to idiotic race-based supremacy claims. I say idiotic because it would indicate basic ignorance: statistics do not apply to individuals. (Also, statistics are descriptive, not prescriptive.) But what if science, the study of reality, says different? Andrew references an editorial from a geneticist at Harvard, David Reich:
… who carefully advanced the case that there are genetic variations between subpopulations of humans, that these are caused, as in every other species, by natural selection, and that some of these variations are not entirely superficial and do indeed overlap with our idea of race.
I have no opinion – I’ve not read The Bell Curve, and while Andrew used to reference the debate on his now-dormant blog The Dish, he didn’t go into it in much detail. But let’s stipulate Professor Reich’s conclusion, which seems reasonable, while assuming the political left continues its unbending ways. What will happen?
Reich simply points out that this utopian fiction is in danger of collapse because it is not true and because genetic research is increasingly proving it untrue. On the male-female divide, for example, Reich cites profound differences, “reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation.” On race, he is both agnostic about what we will eventually find out with respect to the scale of genetic differences, and also insistent that genetic differences do exist: “You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work.” Which means to say that the differences could be (and actually are) substantial.
This will lead to subtle variations in human brains, and thereby differences in intelligence tests, which will affect social and economic outcomes in the aggregate in a multiracial, capitalist, post-industrial society. The danger in actively suppressing and stigmatizing this inconvenient truth, he maintains, is that a responsible treatment of these genetic influences will be siloed in the academic field of genetics, will be rendered too toxic for public debate, and will thereby only leak out to people in the outside world via the worst kind of racists and bigots who will distort these truths to their own ends. If you don’t establish a reasonable forum for debate on this, Reich argues, if you don’t establish the principle is that we do not have to be afraid of any of this, it will be monopolized by truly unreasonable and indeed dangerous racists. And those racists will have the added prestige for their followers of revealing forbidden knowledge. And so there are two arguments against the suppression of this truth and the stigmatization of its defenders: that it’s intellectually dishonest and politically counterproductive.
Which is to say, adhering to the politically comforting may lead to untenable positions in the future – even disaster.
It was an interesting essay on the state of intelligence, and there’s a lot more to it. Perhaps we should simply dispense with the practice of measuring IQ, as it doesn’t seem to necessarily correlate with success in life, only with whether or not you can join the Mensa club.
