[NYTr] Debunked 40 years ago, IQ Debate Has New Chapter Online

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Francis Boyle

Debunked 40 years ago, IQ Debate Has New Chapter Online (NY Times)

[Most  of these individuals and the organizations involved are simply
promoting bigotry and racism against African Americans, including the
Newspeak Times, Slate, Cato, Manhattan Institute, and the Harvard Club.
There is no scientific evidence to support the proposition that Blacks
are genetically inferior to Whites in terms of intelligence. See Richard
C. Lewontin et al, "Not In Our Genes." Dick has been ranked the  No. 1
population biologist in the world since I was his student in Population
Biology back in 1970, when he was in the forefront of debunking
Jensen's "Harvard Educational Review" article on "Can We Boost IQ and
Scholastic Achievement?" No surprise that Harvard would publish such
racist garbage then, or that the Harvard Club sponsored this racist
debate today. As Stephen Jay Gould established in his "Mismeasure of
Man," this type of racist pseudo-science began at Harvard with Agassiz
and his "craniology." This new "debate" will simply give more
ammunition  to the Federalist Society and the UChicago Law and
Economics Movement who already subscribe to the debunked "Bell Curve"
of Hernstein and Murray and the Manhattan Institute. Science has
nothing to do with this "debate." It is better understood in terms of
the endemic, systemic, and pathological sociology  and  psychology of
racism in American society going back to slavery. -FAB]


The New York Times - Dec 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/books/01race.html

I.Q. Debate Adds a Chapter Online

By PATRICIA COHEN

Ever since the Nobel prize winner James D. Watson asserted six weeks
ago that Africans have innately lower intelligence, fervid debates
about race, genes and I.Q. have sprung up on the Web, in publications
and in conference rooms.

But in recent days, along with long-simmering arguments over evidence,
have come others about whether the topic is even worth studying, or
whether it can be discussed openly without spurring charges of racism.

“It’s a subject that almost dare not speak its name,” said Howard
Husock of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, as he
introduced a debate Wednesday night between James R. Flynn, the author
of a new book “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge University Press), and
Charles Murray, a co-author of “The Bell Curve,” the controversial 1994
book about intelligence that set off a previous free-for-all on race,
genes and I.Q.

The risk of giving ammunition to racists or undercutting principles of
equality hovers over such conversations like an uninvited dinner guest.
That unwelcome visitor has been loitering at the online magazine Slate
since last week, when it ran a three-part series arguing that hard
science is showing that blacks’ I.Q. scores are lower than those of
whites — and whites’ scores are lower than those of Asians — because of
genetically based differences in intelligence.

Appearing on a site with a liberal bent and written by its generally
liberal science and technology columnist, William Saletan, the articles
drew particular attention — and particular scorn. “William Saletan and
the Editors of Slate Demonstrate That They Are Not Members of the
Genetic Elite” was the headline on the Web site of the economist Brad
DeLong (delong.typepad.com). On his popular political Web site,
talkingpointsmemo.com, Joshua Micah Marshall referred to it as “Will
Saletan’s nauseating foray into black genetic ‘pseudo-science.’”

Mr. Flynn and Richard Nisbett, two noted researchers on intelligence,
also criticized the Slate series as grossly one-sided. Mr. Flynn said
he was most persuaded by evidence that the environment causes I.Q.
differences, but added that certainty on either side is misplaced given
that the research is still in its infancy.

On Wednesday, Mr. Saletan posted a fourth article labeled “Regrets,”
confessing that he had not realized that J. Philippe Rushton, a
researcher on whom he had heavily relied, is the president of an
organization that has financed a segregationist group. He also amended
his previous position, stating that it was too early to come to any
firm conclusions about the causes of racial differences in intelligence.

“If I had to do it again, I would have been much more circumspect about
judging” the evidence, Mr. Saletan said in an interview. He later added
that he should have written about inequality and left race completely
out of it.

Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, said that since Mr. Saletan is a
senior writer, his posts went up without anyone there reading them.
“Given the sensitivity of the subject, Will’s commentary should have
been carefully edited in advance of publication, and it wasn’t,” he
wrote in an e-mail message.

Mr. Weisberg said he was disturbed by the casual “what if” thought
experiment and some of the sources Mr. Saletan cited. “I wouldn’t have
stopped Will from writing on this subject, but I would have challenged
him on these and other issues,” he wrote.

He added that a rejoinder by another Slate writer, Stephen Metcalf, was
scheduled to be posted Monday.

Mr. Saletan said he was completely unprepared for the voluminous and
vehement reaction. “I did not mean to start a wildfire.”

A subject as sensitive and complicated as this deserves to have a
higher level of proof, he said, adding that he erred in treating it
like any other topic.

“I don’t agree that it’s best not to discuss it,” he said, but “you
have to do it in a responsible way and always with a constructive
purpose.” Judging from his own experience, he said, the Internet is not
a place where that can be done at the moment.

“I’m a little disappointed in myself,” he added.

Linda S. Gottfredson, a sociologist at the University of Delaware,
insists that Mr. Saletan has nothing to apologize for. Ms. Gottfredson,
who along with Mr. Flynn had been participating in a separate monthlong
online debate about intelligence sponsored by the libertarian Cato
Institute, wrote that Mr. Saletan “may be the first journalist to so
directly acknowledge the scientific evidence” supporting a genetic
explanation for racial differences in I.Q. “and to be allowed to
publish his views.”

She calls the fierce response generated by the Slate articles evidence
of “moral panic.” Ever since the 1970s, Ms. Gottfredson said in an
interview, most researchers have steered clear of the subject
altogether (Mr. Murray aside). “No one wants to stick their neck out
and say what they really think for fear that they’ll get shot down like
Watson or criticized,” she said. “People are in hiding.”

Amid the controversy over his comments last month, Dr. Watson, 79,
apologized for his remarks and resigned as chancellor of Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.

Ms. Gottfredson says the cause of the black-white achievement gap is
one of the most pressing social science questions, and the refusal to
consider genetic causes means either blaming white racism or black
culture, making it someone’s fault and placing the issue “in the moral
realm.”

“We’re ginning up more tensions by denying it,” she contended.

To Eric Turkheimer, a psychology professor at the University of
Virginia who specializes in behavior genetics, the research itself is
morally weighted. Given the complex interaction between genes and the
environment, Mr. Turkheimer said, “the question is fundamentally
impossible to settle scientifically because we can never take people
out of their environment.”

That doesn’t mean research into genetic differences in intelligence
should be banned, he said, but it should be judged. “What troubled me
about posts at Cato” — an exchange Mr. Turkheimer participated in —
“and the tone of Saletan’s blog is the assumption that because these
papers are labeled as science, they are value-neutral and they’re as
deserving of respect as any other scientific hypothesis,” he said of
genetic racial theories.

“But you can’t get away from what these people are trying to prove,
which is exactly the basis of the stereotypical beliefs that informed
segregation here for 200 years.”

If the Internet, as Mr. Saletan says, is not the place for civil
discourse about race and I.Q., the Harvard Club clearly is. That is
where the Manhattan Institute held its debate this week. “Not one
single person has run out of the room screaming,” Mr. Murray said at
the evening’s end to the 70 or so guests, a handful of them black. This
issue has “festered in the American psyche,” he added. “Everybody
pretends it doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Flynn, who said he had been attacked by both conservatives (for
playing down the significance of genes) and by liberals (for arguing
that black culture is at the root of the I.Q. gap), told the group, “I
want to say how deeply I believe in this sort of discussion.” He later
explained that his own desire to disprove the genetic arguments is what
spurred his research.

“If at any time we had cut off scientific examination of race in the
past,” he said, “we would have more racial prejudice than we do now.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company