Race and intelligence (utility of research)

Theories of race and intelligence have been challenged on grounds of their utility. Critics want to know what purpose such research could serve and why it has been an intense an area of focus for a few researchers. Some defend the research, saying it has egalitarian aims or that it is pure science, others say that the true motivation for the reserch is the same as that of the eugenics movement and other forms of scientific racism. . Even supporters of intelligence research have described such research as analogous to "working with dynamite" or "dangerous play" in sports.

Public policy and pure science
As to whether research in this area is desirable, John C. Loehlin wrote in 1992, "Research on racial differences in intelligence is desirable if the research is appropriately motivated, honestly done, and adequately communicated." [emphasis original] Defenders of the research suggest that both scientific curiosity and a desire to draw benefits from the research are appropriate motivations. Researchers such as Richard Lynn have suggested that conclusions from the research can help make political decisions, such as the type of educational opportunities and expectations of achievement policy makers should have for people of different races. Researchers such as Charles Murray have used their conclusions to criticize social programs based on racial equality that fail in Murray's eyes to recognize the realities of racial differences.

is one supporter of the partially-genetic position and states: "Lying about race differences in achievement is harmful because it foments mutual recrimination. Because the untruth insists that differences cannot be natural, they must be artificial, manmade, manufactured. Someone must be at fault. Someone must be refusing to do the right thing. It therefore sustains unwarranted, divisive, and ever-escalating mutual accusations of moral culpability, such as Whites are racist and Blacks are lazy."

Similarly, J. Phillipe Rushton and Aurthor Jensen write “we will never make progress in race relations if we operate on the belief that one segment of society is responsible for the plight of another segment and that belief is false.” They argue that policy-makers and judges aggravate racial tensions when they mistakenly attribute “the underachievement of black people to prejudice and discrimination by white people,” rather than to genetic disadvantages. Rushton adds, “It’s very harmful, this philosophy we currently have, which is that anybody, all of us, we can just reinvent ourselves. We can grow and change and develop into something very different, that somehow we’re not constrained genetically…The more you can realize who you are earlier, and that includes race and IQ, then personally the more you can accept it, the easier it will be.” Parents, Rushton explained, easily accept the idea that some of their children are more gifted intellectually or physically than other ones and society, has to accept the same notion.

Although it may appear paradoxical, it could be argued that an indirect outcome of social egalitarianism would be to raise the genetic contribution to intelligence to as high as possible, by minimizing environmental inequalities and any negatively IQ-impacting cultural and socio-economic differences. If all such inequalities could somehow be completely eliminated, any remaining group (but not individual) IQ differences would then be 100% hereditary: the only remaining factor that could potentially contribute to race-based outcome differences.

Some of the less popular proponents of the research, such as Chris Brand feel it is important to maintain a perspective of what they call race realism. The term "race realism" describes the theory that racial distinctions are enduringly important because racial groups differ by nature (genetically) with regard to such important behavioral tendencies as intelligence and impulsiveness. Like other more main-stream researchers they hope that by demonstrating genetic differences in races they can influence and make what they feel will be improvements to public policy.

Science and ethics
Dr. Bruce Lahn, a professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago who's findings indicate what he calls signs of recent evolution in the brains of some people, but not of others has moved away from this area of research "It's getting too controversial," he said in a Wall Street Journal article.

Although, Lahn stressed that his studies only examined two genes, and that the genetic variations within apopulation are often almost as great as the differences between groups."If we look at multiple genes, the ethnic variations--such as the ones we found--are likely to be counterbalanced by other differences," Lahn said. web sites and magazines promoting white "racialism" quickly seized on Dr. Lahn's suggestive scientific snapshot. One magazine that blames black and Hispanic people for social ills hailed his discovery as "the moment the antiracists and egalitarians have dreaded."

"More recently, Dr. Lahn says he was moved when a student asked him whether some knowledge might not be worth having. It is a notion to which he has been warming. Dr. Lahn says he once tried testing himself for which version of the brain genes he has. The experiment's outcome was blurry 'but it wasn't looking good,' he says. He hasn't tried testing himself again."

Francis Collins, director of the genome program at the National Institutes of Health criticised Lahn's findings "This is not the place you want to report a weak association that might or might not stand up."

Racism




In the 19th and early 20th century research on race and intelligence was often used to confirm that one race was 'superior' to another. Francisco Gil-White, author of Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on Black People Using Phony Science says that modern reaserch has similar motives. A political motivation is frequently ascribed to those researchers who support the idea that race is a meaningful genetic method of grouping and is significantly linked to intelligence. Many have been described as racists. Researchers such as Amanda Thompson, Elazar Barkan and Steven J. Gould have suggested that "Scientific racism" has been used to perpetuate the idea of the intellectual inferiority of African Americans and that it was used to justify slavery and segregated education in America.

One criticism of the research supporting the partially-genetic positions and claimed public policy implications in Bell Curve, in the magazine the New Republic was: "Our society, our polity, our elites, according to Herrnstein and Murray, live with an untruth: that there is no good reason for this [racial] inequality, and therefore society is at fault and we must try harder. I ask myself whether the untruth is not better for American society than the truth."

Some scholars, such as Karen Lee and Gloria Ladson-Billings wonder why the Black/White gap has been such an intense focal point of study. In the focus on the Black/White achievement gap Lee sees a legacy of older racist ideas. Ladson-Billings has said that educational researchers have named and emphasized the achievement differentials between blacks and whites in ways that do not parallel the study and naming of other achievement differentials. Commenting on the effort to counter the notion that Blacks are genetically inferior to Whites, (eg, Jencks & Phillips, 1998), Lee asks, asks: “Why are investigations of this sort considered necessary— or even valid?” To my knowledge, there are no comparable studies examining the potential genetic basis for the differences in test score achievement between white and Asian and white and Asian-American students. If test score data can serve as an adequate and reliable basis for evaluating potential genetic differences in populations, then perhaps we should undertake empirical studies to determine whether there is a genetic basis for why Asian and Asian American students typically outperform their white counterparts, particularly in the areas of mathematics and science. The very question is absurd, however; and no scholar, to my knowledge, takes it as a topic worthy of empirical investigation.

Sociologist and demographer Reanne Frank says that some race and intelligence research has been abused "The most malignant are the "true believers," who subscribe to the typological distinctions that imply hierarchical rankings of worth across different races. Although this group remains small, the members' work is often widely publicized and well known (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Rushton 1991)" Dennis M. Rutledge writes that science has often been used as a justification to propose, project, and enact racist social policies, citing the work of Jensen, Herrnstein, and Murray as modern examples of this phenomena:

"(They) present us with lots of data, much of it mired in pages of jargon, but what is clear in the end is that they know just about as much or as little about genetics as did Pearson or Galton. They seek in the present day to overwhelm us with what they claim is the beauty and purity of their data, but their pronouncements are just as ideologically driven and racially and politically inspired as those of their predecessors."

More recently, Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg asked whether race and intelligence researchers Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton show "good taste" in their choice of research topics. Further, he asked, "'What good is research of the kind done by Rushton and Jensen supposed to achieve? Only vaguely cloaked behind their words is the purported demonstration that certain groups are, on average, genetically inferior to other groups, at least in that aspect of intelligence measured by IQ. The articles and books reporting on this research inevitably have the seemingly obligatory final public-policy section, which is somehow supposed to justify, in part, the usefulness of the research. The “Implications for Public Policy” section (Rushton & Jensen, Section 15) that is included in works of this kind (see also Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Jensen, 1969) seem to have the intention to provide a public-policy rationale for work attempting to show that one group is inferior to another and that not much, if anything, can be done about it. It is therefore worthwhile to examine whether any of the alleged public-policy implications follow from the data. If not, the argument that the research is useful in formulating public policy is impugned.'"

Moralistic fallacy debate


Some academics argue words like racism are used politically in academic contexts to try to artificially close discussions. Robert M. Rosenzweig, former president of the Association of American Universities, states "they are not in my experience typically used to illuminate the debate [but rather] to close the debate [...] by silencing it with a label [such that] the very effort to overcome the label changes the nature of the debate in which one has to engage". Glayde Whitney argued in his controversial 1995 presidential address to the Behavior Genetics Association that our emotive responses to uncomfortable racial history have left us with a systemic cognitive bias regarding objective discussion of race matters. Drawing from former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow, Whitney states: "'Since the second world war we have been suffering what [Brimelow] calls 'Adolf Hitler's posthumous revenge on America.' The posthumous revenge is that the intellectual elite of the western world, both political and scientific, emerged from the war 'passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia.' The aversion to racism has gone so far that [...] the many and important distinctions between objective investigation of group characteristics, and prejudicial pejorative values are lost in a political atmosphere... [The end effect is that] we feel uneasy because we have been trained - like Pavlov's dog - to recoil from any explicit discussion of race.'"

The position that what is good bears on inquiries into what is has been criticized by Harvard University microbiologist Bernard Davis as the "moralistic fallacy", an implied converse of the naturalistic fallacy, see. Davis says that empirical research results have no relation to what is morally good.

Stephen Pinker argues that opposition to racism is based on moral, not on scientific assumptions: "the case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups..." (The Blank Slate, p. 145).

Linda Gottfredson argues: "The ideal, implicit in many popular critiques of intelligence research, is that all people are born equally able and that social inequality results only from the exercise of unjust privilege. The reality is that Mother Nature is no egalitarian. People are in fact unequal in intellectual potential—and they are born that way, just as they are born with different potentials for height, physical attractiveness, artistic flair, athletic prowess and other traits."

Sternberg argues that the moralistic fallacy is a deliberate straw man: "Modern social science has not taken the view that all babies are born with equal intelligence or learning ability. Are there any psychologists who seriously study intelligence who believe that genetic factors play no role in individual differences in intelligence? I doubt it. This is yet another of the many examples of straw men created in their article to foster belief in an untenable position by arguing the alternative. Where there is genuine disagreement in the field is not over whether there are individual differences of genetic origins, but rather whether there are group differences of IQ that are genetic in origin (i.e., of what they believe to be biologically defined racial groups)."