The Great Taboo: a follow-up

"Findings related to group differences in intelligence are widely regarded as either morally wrong or morally dangerous (see Block and Dworkin 1974, 1976; Dennett 2003; Gardner 2001; Kitcher 1997; discussion in Gottfredson 2010, 2013). Prominent scientists and philosophers have stated that these findings should be either rejected or suppressed regardless of their scientific validity. One influential psychologist explicitly describes these claims as possibly being 'correct scientifically,' but rules them out a priori on moral grounds (Gardner 2009). A prominent behavioral geneticist asserts that they are refuted by an 'ethical principle' that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair (Turkheimer 2007)...

"From a philosophical perspective, scientific practice ought to involve simply abandoning hypotheses when they are disconfirmed. However, from a sociological perspective, when hypotheses are regarded as supporting certain moral values or desirable political goals, scientists often refuse to abandon them in the light of empirical evidence. We may not have freed ourselves of the tendency to conflate morality and science nearly as much as is usually supposed. The tendency to conflate morality and science is so strong that, as shall be documented, even highly sophisticated people trained in science and the philosophy of science frequently incorporate explicitly moral considerations into their scientific reasoning... [This has produced a] widespread acceptance of the idea among academics that either (a) morality requires people to hold certain beliefs about empirical matters, and that scientists should not conduct research that threatens to uncover facts that contradict these morally required beliefs, or (b) morality requires people to hold certain beliefs regardless of the evidence."

"In the Introduction to Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, philosopher of science Kitcher (1985) writes:

'Everybody ought to agree that, given sufficient evidence for some hypothesis about humans, we should accept that hypothesis whatever its political implications. But the question of what counts as sufficient evidence is not independent of the political consequences. If the costs of being wrong are sufficiently high, then it is reasonable and responsible to ask for more evidence than is demanded in situations where mistakes are relatively innocuous.'² (p. 9)

"He goes on to argue that sociobiological theories about human behavior do not meet the requisite higher standard for acceptance, given the alleged negative political consequences of accepting them. He deems 'general intelligence' a 'myth,' falsely claiming that 'various intellectual capacities are not well correlated' ³ and citing (presumably dangerous) implications of the theory of general intelligence for 'the construction of social policy' (pp. 200-201)...

"Accepting or rejecting hypotheses according to whether their truth would be politically desirable will cause us to adopt beliefs which are, in short, not epistemically justified. Leaving aside the intrinsic value of knowledge, to survive and flourish in the world we must understand the world as it is. Only then can we design effective means to accomplish our goals. While clinging to a false but comforting belief may not always have disastrous consequences in the short run, if such commitment stifles cumulative scientific progress then it is likely to lead us to engage in ill-informed action, and to prevent us from achieving desirable social goals."

"I don't challenge the critics' motives [that is, the motives of those demanding higher standards of proof for 'dangerous ideas] or even their tactics; if I encountered people conveying a message [such as an "awful racist hypothesis" (Dennett, 2003) that race differences in intelligence are genetic] that I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I'd want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it." (Freedom Evolves, 2003, by Daniel Dennett, pp. p160 and pp19-20)

"The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong (p 19)... In fact... modern 'Stone Age' peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples.... From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent... than the average European or American is." (pp. 19–20)

"Dennett (2003, 160) lauds as 'magnificent' the book wherein Diamond proposes the hypothesis of innate New Guinean intellectual superiority. But he dismisses the hypothesis of innate European intellectual superiority on moral grounds. The double standard advocated by Dennett is striking when we consider his treatment of different theories regarding the relative intelligence of different populations.

"The following (Hypothesis 1) is Diamond's argument for the innate intellectual superiority of New Guineans over Europeans:

"Hypothesis 1 New Guineans live in a constant state of tribal warfare. The less intelligent are presumably more likely to be killed in this conflict. This can be assumed to have increased the mean intelligence of New Guineans to above the European average. Confirming this is the fact that, in personal interaction, New Guineans seem to Jared Diamond to be more intelligent than Europeans" (Diamond 1997, 20-21).

"Hypothesis 2 Populations that lived in colder climates in the last hundred thousand years tended to evolve greater intelligence in order to handle the survival challenges posed by winter. Supporting this is the fact that mean brain size and measured intelligence of populations are highly, negatively correlated with the temperature of the region in which they lived during the last ice age (28,000 to 10,000 years ago) (Kanazawa 2008; Lynn 2006; Rushton 1995, 2010;Templer and Arikawa 2006). Europeans score more than two standard deviations higher than New Guineans on 'culture-fair' IQ tests (Lynn 2006)."

"It is obvious that his uncritical acceptance of Diamond's theory and his a priori rejection of hypotheses such as Lynn's have nothing to do with the relative scientific merits of the different theories."

"[Some Marxists,] the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the 'red diaper babies,' children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others of the left." (Dennett 2006a, 337)

"In an article that won the Australasian Journal of Philosophy's 'Best Paper Award' for the year 2013, [Alex] Barber (2013) refers to 'science's immunity to moral refutation' as a fact that 'even the most hardboiled moral realist must acknowledge.'... Barber concludes that fears about its moral consequences do not count as evidence against The Bell Curve's hypothesis.

"However, just two pages later-and after approvingly citing Kitcher's (1985, 9) argument that we should require dangerous hypotheses to meet higher standards of evidence (p. 636, n. 4)-Barber finds another way to dismiss The Bell Curve a priori on moral grounds. He asserts:

'If a study appears to license racism, this fact cannot stand as counter evidence in and of itself, but it does give us reason to suspect that we'll find problems with, say, the methodology used or the interpretation of data, since shoddy science with a racist agenda has a rich lineage.' (On The Bell Curve in particular, see Newby and Newby (1995).)

"The reader of the above passage might assume that Newby and Newby (1995)-Barber's reference to support dismissing The Bell Curve as scientifically bankrupt-contains an analysis of the book's methods and data analysis. The reader would be wrong. In fact, Newby and Newby (1995) contains no scientific argument at all. Instead, it dismisses The Bell Curve on moral grounds!

"Newby and Newby's strategy is to document alleged similarities between the theories in The Bell Curve and those of morally bad people such as Nazis. They write: 'We should recognize that the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s was respectable and generally accepted among society's elites until Hitler's Holocaust discredited the movement during World War II' (p. 16). Of course, the scientific basis of eugenics was not discredited by the Holocaust any more than the theory of relativity was discredited by the bombing of Hiroshima.

"The fact that the scientific basis of eugenics was not 'discredited' by the Holocaust-and Newby and Newby cite no other reason to think it has been discredited-means that their strategy of pointing out alleged similarities between the scientific views of Herrnstein and Murray and Nazi eugenicists does not, according to Alex Barber's espoused views, undermine the science of Herrnstein and Murray's book. Newby and Newby conclude their paper (p. 23), citing Lane (1994), by asserting that The Bell Curve contains 'tainted sources'-referring to thee fact that some of the researchers whose work The Bell Curve cites are allegedly fascists and white supremacists, and that some of the papers it cites were published in the Mankind Quarterly, which is a journal edited by a supposedly bad person (Roger Pearson).

"Even a philosopher who seems to bravely question whether a scientific hypothesis can be refuted by moral claims finds a way to dismiss intelligence research on moral grounds."

"Philosophers [N. J.] Block and [Gerald] Dworkin (1974) say that 'in light of the difficulty of preventing' 'harmful consequences which flow from the interpretation likely to be placed on' race differences-in-intelligence research, 'the proper course would be to avoid undertaking such research altogether" (p. 82).... They sum up their conclusion:

'We are not... saying that at all times or in all places investigation of racial genotypic differences in IQ scores should stop. What we are saying is that at this time, in this country, in this political climate, individual scientists should voluntarily refrain from the investigation of genotypic racial differences in performance on IQ tests.' (p. 98)

"Block and Dworkin point out that we would condemn a Nazi scientist for conducting research in nuclear physics knowing that their discoveries would be used to build atom bombs to drop on innocent people. 'At some point the harmful consequences for human welfare of one's research must enter into the decision whether to pursue it' (p. 81). This is no doubt correct. A scientist should not conduct research to help an evil regime kill millions of people. Block and Dworkin claim that the Nazi-physicist thought experiment illustrates in principle that a scientist can be morally obligated to refrain from, or to sabotage, honest research to avoid negative social consequences. A scientist must always, they say, weigh the value of honest research against its 'harmful consequences for human welfare.' (Chomsky 1976, 294–295 makes the same point by arguing that a psychologist in Nazi Germany ought to refrain from investigating whether Jews have a genetic disposition to engage in usury, lest whatever findings they obtained be used for propaganda.)"

"The German physicist knows what will happen if they succeed in figuring out how to split the atom. The scientist in the United States does not know to what use their work will be put, and this is a difference in principle, not degree, between their case and that of the Nazi physicist. Under normal circumstances, the scientist cannot possibly know what the social consequences of their work will be "whether good or bad. (Davis 1978; Sesardic 1992, 143–144)"

"... as Aristotle puts it, 'when one begins from an erroneous beginning, something bad inevitably results in the end' (Politics 1302a5–6). Usually the discovery and promulgation of knowledge betters human welfare, and usually ignorance has the opposite effect (Gottfredson 2005; Sesardic 1992, 144–145; see also Singer 1996, 228–229)."

"Not only has he [Arthur Jensen] written citation classics, but his once-controversial emphasis on general intelligence (g) spawned what all intelligence researchers acknowledge was an enormously fruitful research program. Due in part to his work, Sternberg and Kaufman (2012, 235) report that '[i]t is now as well an established fact as exists in psychology that g correlates with many forms of human behavior and their outcomes (see, e.g., Hunt 2011; Jensen 1998; Mackintosh 2011).'⁶ By contrast, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has never been empirically supported, and the assumptions behind it have been undermined by findings in cognitive science. Kaufman et al. (2013) put it rather bluntly:

'[One] criticism of [multiple intelligences] theory relates to its validity. Even though assessments exist to test Gardner's various intelligences (e.g., Gardner et al. 1998), these assessments have not been associated with high levels of psychometric validity, and the evidence regarding reliability of these and similar measures is mixed' (e.g., Plucker 2000; Plucker et al. 1996; Visser et al. 2006). (p. 814)...

"While Jensen has received no official recognition in the U.S. since 1969, and despite the fact that the course of events in the last 40-plus years has been consistent with the predictions in his 1969⁷, Gardner received a National Psychology Award for Excellence in the Media from the American Psychological Association (1984) for the book wherein he proposed the theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983), he received the William James Award from the APA in 1987, and he has been granted 29 honorary degrees."

'[E]ven if at the end of the day, the bad guys [such as Jensen, who emphasize the importance of g,] turn out to be more correct scientifically than I am, life is short, and we have to make choices about how we spend our time. And that's where I think the multiple intelligences way of thinking about things will continue to be useful even if the scientific evidence doesn't support it.' (at 45:11–31)

"Gardner's use of the term 'correct scientifically' seems to reflect a notion that there is another sort of 'correctness' besides scientific that can apply to empirical claims. IQ theorists are 'the bad guys,' he says. Based on his other speeches and his writings, it is clear that the nonscientific 'correctness' he alludes to is moral: it is possible to be correct scientifically but incorrect morally-or incorrect scientifically but correct morally."

"Gardner (2001) writes that he does 'not condone investigations of racial differences in intelligence, because [he] think[s] that the results of these studies are likely to be incendiary' (p. 8). Note that he implies that he believes that race differences in intelligence are likely to exist-he does 'not condone investigations of racial differences in intelligence, because [he] think[s] that the results of these studies are likely' - likely"'to be incendiary.'

'This stereotyping represented a complete perversion of my personal beliefs. If I did not speak up, who would? Who should? And so, I went on television in Australia and criticized that particular educational endeavor as 'pseudo-science.' That critique, along with others, sufficed to result in the cancellation of the project. (pp. 6–7)⁹

"Although Gardner opposed this research on moral grounds, he publicly attacked it as scientifically invalid ('pseudo-science')."

"Scientists might argue that their work is value free and that they are not responsible for the repugnant or even questionable values or actions of opportunistic leaders [who put their research to immoral use]. Rushton and Jensen (2005) seem to believe, as have others, that they do perform a kind of value-free science and that they merely respect the truth. However,…[d]eciding to study group differences represents a value judgment-that the problem is worth studying. Deciding to show that one group is genetically inferior on an index is a value judgment as to what is worth showing. These decisions, among others, indicate that there is no value-free science." (Sternberg 2005, 295)

"It is true that scientific investigation involves a judgment about what is worth studying... But matters of fact per se... are independent of value judgements. Sternberg seems to have a strong but mistaken intuition that facts and values cannot be separated. He seems to suggest that Rushton and Jensen are right vis-a-vis the scientific standard of 'problem solving' but wrong vis-a-vis the moral standard of 'taste in the selection of problems to solve.'"

"The quality of science is determined not only by the quality of problem solving but also by taste in the selection of problems to solve.…Would that Rushton and Jensen had devoted their penetrating intellects to other more scientifically and socially productive problems!" (Sternberg 2005, 300)

"According to Chomsky (1988): 'Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities.…But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists, and the like' (p. 164). It is wrong to either affirm or deny that there is a relationship between group membership and IQ, he says, because to affirm or deny this is to indicate 'that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexist[s], and the like.' This is a slight variation on the positions taken by Gardner and Sternberg: questions concerning potentially 'immoral' knowledge should not be asked at all."

"The reigning doctrine on race throughout the Western world today is the Standard Social Science Model, which I'll just trim down to 'Standard Model'... According to this doctrine, all observed group differences are the result of social forces... The common perception is that the Standard Model is a humane and socially healthful point of view, while race realism is the sick product of twisted minds. It seems to me that the opposite is the case. The Standard Model seems to me to be socially poisonous, a great generator of rancor, resentment, rage, and division-an evil and destructive doctrine.

"Imagine you are a member of a group that, in the generality, underachieves socially and economically: a black in the U.S.A., an Inuit in Canada, a Pacific Islander in New Zealand, even a Malay in Malaysia. If the Standard Model is true, the only possible explanation for your group's underachievement is malice on the part of other groups. Hence the rancor, resentment, rage, and division.

"If, on the other hand, group underachievement is a consequence of the laws of biology working on human populations, there is no blame to assign. The fact of group inequalities, even in societies that have striven mightily to remove them, is as natural and inevitable as individual inequality, which nobody minds very much. The only proper object of blame is Mother Nature; and she is capable of inflicting far worse things on us than mere statistical disparities between ancient inbred populations. Under a reigning philosophy of candor and realism, each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he's been dealt, in liberty and equality under the law. I hope this will be the point of view our elites will arrive at when the Standard Model has crumbled into dust... " ("John Derbyshire`s CPAC Speech: Will Our Multicultural Elites Ever Become Race Realists?" February 11, 2012)]

"...there is now overwhelming evidence that he [Gould] intentionally misrepresented 'dangerous' scientific findings on several occasions. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of his and his supporters' actions in the 'Morton Collection' controversy. Nineteenth-century American naturalist Samuel George Morton amassed a collection of nearly 1,000 human skulls of different races. He reported that the races differ in mean cranial capacity, with Caucasians having the highest and Africans the lowest. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Gould reanalyzed Morton's data, and claimed that there were no significant differences in cranial capacity among the races. He accused Morton of being unconsciously influenced by ideological beliefs about the superiority of Caucasians. Ironically, it was Gould's treatment of Morton which would later be exposed as an example of ideologically influenced science.

"[J. S.]Michael (1988) actually did remeasure more than 20% of Morton's skulls (the collection has been preserved), and found no evidence of bias on Morton's part. Gould repeated his accusation against Morton in the revised edition of The Mismeasure of Man (1996) without mentioning Michael's study.

". . . Lewis et al. (2011) remeasured 50% of the skulls, reexamined Gould's critique, and found that Morton's original analysis had been correct, and the crux of Gould's 'reanalysis' was not including lower-capacity skulls of non-Caucasian races in the analysis in order to bring up non-Caucasian averages.11 So it was Gould, not Morton, whose science had been influenced by ideology." [FOOTNOTE: " Although Lewis et al. (2011) were forced to use circumspect language when describing Gould's transgressions in their PLoS Biology paper, one of the authors of the study- anthropologist Ralph Holloway-was quoted in The New York Times as follows: 'I just didn't trust Gould….I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of 'The Mismeasure of Man' came and he never even bothered to mention Michael's study, I just felt he was a charlatan.'"]

"[Richard] Lewontin (1972) famously conducted an analysis of variance of allele frequencies at 17 polymorphic loci, using DNA samples from seven large human populations (and a much larger number of subpopulations). He found that only around 15% of the genetic variance is due to variation between races and ethnic groups, which meant that there is considerably more genetic variation within than between populations. He emphasized his belief that '[h]uman racial classification…is positively destructive of social and human relations'... Two years later, Lewontin (1974) suggested that the fact that some scientists continue to classify humans into races in spite of his (1972) discovery 'is an indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge.'

"Edwards (2003) argued that Lewontin's method for measuring the importance of between-group variation for human genetic diversity-conducting analysis of variance for many individual gene loci and averaging the result" ignores a key element of population differences. Namely, populations vary in their frequencies for specific alleles at different loci. The difference in allele frequencies at any particular locus may not be large-"vis-a-vis that locus there will, on average, be more variation within than between populations. However, since populations vary (if slightly) in allele frequencies at many loci, it is possible to assign people to separate, genetically related groups with nearly 100% accuracy when considering many loci... Edwards coined the term 'Lewontin's fallacy' to refer to the procedure of analyzing genetic diversity by measuring variation among individual genes while ignoring gene clusters.

"Edwards forwarded his (2003) paper to Ernst Mayr, perhaps the most important figure in the development of modern evolutionary theory. Mayr's reply, which has never been published before, is quite interesting:

'Thank you for your letter of 20 Aug [2003] and your reprint about Lewontin's trickery. I had already some years ago called attention to Lewontin's misleading claims. I suggest Lewontin's [2000] book The Triple Helix. The unwary reader will not discover how totally biased his presentation is. All evidence opposed to his claims is simply omitted! And if you present the truth you are denounced as a Nazi or Fascist! The public unfortunately is all too easily deceived! Particularly when wishful thinking is involved!

Best regards

Ernst Mayr'

"Many scientists have complained in private correspondences that Lewontin's science was heavily influenced by his politics. Francis Crick wrote to Peter Medawar in 1977: 'Lewontin…is known to be strongly politically biased and himself admits to being scientifically unscrupulous on these issues. That is, he takes them as political ones and therefore feels justified in the use of biased arguments.' Very few scientists have expressed such views [as Mayr's] in public, and, in some cases, they may have been prevented from expressing such views by reluctant publishers. Fear of being 'denounced as a Nazi or Fascist'-among both scientists and publishers of scientific material"€"has been effective in stifling open inquiry for decades into issues thought to have implications for morality or politics."

"Findings in this area have been rejected by many prominent scientists and philosophers for explicitly moral reasons... This is dubious... The modern scientist does not know in advance what the consequences of their work will be except that usually more knowledge is good and ignorance is bad. Second, if supposedly 'dangerous' scientific theories should be rejected or suppressed, who is to determine whether a scientific theory is unacceptably dangerous?... Attempts to systematically manipulate science for the sake of values' will tend to... transform scientific debates into moral debates-more and more disconnected from empirical reality...

"Finally,... the practice of rejecting scientific hypotheses because they have politically unwelcome consequences is likely to undermine social welfare as much as it undermines science. Having true beliefs about physics and chemistry is necessary to design airplanes that fly or medicines that cure diseases. In the same way, having true beliefs about human psychology is necessary to design social policies that work. Preventing cumulative progress in psychological science for the sake of social welfare-as advocated by those scientists and philosophers mentioned in this paper-will lead policy makers to design ineffective social programs based on incorrect theories. Even though it may be painful to think that certain disturbing scientific hypotheses are true or could be true, designing social policies based on comforting but inaccurate theories will lead to even more pain in the long run."

"James Flynn-"moral philosopher and discoverer of the 'Flynn effect'"observes that if there are significant, genetically based race differences in intelligence, 'the path to social justice will be more difficult.' To those who wish to prevent research that might uncover disconcerting truths, he poses the rhetorical question, 'Would anyone who holds humane ideals prefer to pursue them in a fantasy world rather than the real world?' (Flynn 1999, ¹²).

"Social justice will not be accomplished by insisting on a fantasy."

"Flynn is certainly right that universities avoid funding research perceived as threatening to political views favored in academe, but he is wrong on the last point. Many scientists do admit that politics affects their research priorities, as has been documented in this paper. No one believes anymore in those gods whose existence Socrates was accused of questioning. In retrospect, the Athenians' fear that disbelief in their gods would lead to catastrophe was unfounded. And the tradition of value-free reasoning... that Socrates initiated ultimately led to modern science, and did more good for our species than the ancient Greeks could have even hoped to receive from their false deities. Nevertheless, every revolutionary advance in science has been accompanied by concerns about consequences for the moral order: What if we are not located at the center of the universe? What if the earth is older than our religious books assert? What if we are descended from lower animals? Have no immortal soul? Belong to genetically different groups? Sometimes scientific discoveries have been used to justify evil ideologies or to build technology for evil purposes. Yet, on the whole, we always end up better off with the truth. Those who wish to improve human welfare would probably better advance their own aim by encouraging responsible and moral use of science, rather than attacking or preventing the accumulation of knowledge." ("Science Is Not Always 'Self-Correcting': Fact “Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence, Nathan Cofnas, Feb. 1, 2015)