Tag Archives: Scientific Racism

Race Scientists Ask You Believe in Impossible Things

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The White Queen and Alice from Alice Through the Looking Glass
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

When racial hereditarian researchers tell you they are objective scientists only concerned with the rigorous scientific pursuit of truth, what else do you need to believe to accept that claim? What are the markers of an open-minded researcher who is completely nonpartisan politically? We would expect that person to be careful not to entangle themselves and their research with those who are pursuing political ends; those who seek to use the mask of science to advance specific policy options and social orders. We would not expect them to draw upon political writers as authorities for their scientific claims. We would not expect them to collaborate with people pushing a political agenda.

In a recent article, Michael Woodley, Matthew A. Sarraf & Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre write that they believe the Holocaust happened. They also want to make clear that They are “hereditarians” not racists. Nor are they eugenicists. Oh, and Woodley especially wants us to know that he had nothing to do with his work being cited by the Buffalo shooter who killed African Americans in the name of racial purity. (I know what you are thinking, “Where does Woodley stand on the existence of Bigfoot?” Well, he appears to think the jury’s still out on that question).

Of course, anyone who must take to print to deny they are Holocaust deniers, a scientific racist, a eugenicist an inspiration for a racist terrorist might want to stop and think about why they are so characterized by so many people. An obvious question is, “Maybe it is me?” It appears that the authors never ask themselves that question. They portray themselves as objective scientists and their many, many critics must simply misunderstand the nature of science and objective inquiry because they are so blinded by “leftist” ideology. To believe their claims, you must believe a host of other impossible claims they use to support it.

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The Survival of the Unfit: Darwinism, Race, and Eugenics in the United States

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This is a paper that I first presented at a workshop at the University of Mississippi in 2012. I submitted it to a journal soon after and got a “Revise and Resubmit.” I then moved, switched computers and it got lost somewhere in all that. When I re-discovered it recently, I realized that it was really too late for me to bring it up-to-date with current work on eugenics given my other writing commitments. Therefore, I decided to post it here for anyone interested in these historical issues. I still like the paper and think it has something important to say.

Abstract: The historical relationship among Darwinism, eugenics, and racism is notoriously difficult to unravel. Eugenicists worried about the “survival of the unfit,” a phrase that should, prima facia, be nonsense for those with a Darwinian worldview in the early twentieth century. To be “fit” in a Darwinian sense meant adapted well enough to the environment to out-survive (and out-reproduce) one’s competitors. For eugenicists, the measure for “fit” could not be those best adapted to the environment in this way because they were concerned with the opposite situation: those who thriving and yet were “unfit.” Additionally, historians now reject the idea that eugenics was necessarily founded on racist assumptions. We can address these problems by examining the different forms of Darwinism adopted by early twentieth-century notions of “fitness” and how the term was interpreted in the context of American debates about immigration restriction and race. For some eugenicists, the idea of panmixia allowed them to argue that the unfit were outcompeting the fit. For others, notably Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn the idea of organic selection provided them with a Darwinian mechanism that solved the problem of the “survival of the unfit.”

Keywords:  Darwinism; Eugenics; Racism; Fitness; Panmixia; Organic Selection

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Genetics and Progressives

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Kathryn Paige Harden. 2021. The genetic lottery: why DNA matters for social equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Katheryn Paige Harden’s new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality hovers between a plea and a demand that social scientists incorporate behavior genetics into their research. Unfortunately, the book is based on a series of false assumptions about the social sciences that undercut the book’s central thesis.

Social scientists, Harden warns, “have been trained to view the results of behavior genetics with fear and loathing” (p. 277). Indeed, they are guilty of committing a violent crime:

The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences…is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It is stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that go no where. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations. Failing to take genetics seriously is a scientific practice that pervasively undermines our stated goal of understanding society so that we can improve it. (p. 186)

Well, anyone accusing their colleagues of being the moral equivalent of a stick-up artist must have good grounds to do so. Moreover, they must come from a research tradition that has never been guilty of “churning out critically flawed scientific papers!” Unfortunately, Harden misrepresents the fields the criticizes. She shifts standards of evidence to suit her pre-conceived goals. Most importantly, she fails to show that behavior genetics is at all relevant for the values and policies she endorses.

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Eugenics: Not Well-Born

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Karl Pearson, ed., The Treasury of Human Inheritance. (London: Dulau & Co., 1909): 284.

“Eugenics” means “well-born.” The term was coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. Despite thinking of it as a science, it was not. “Eugenics,” wrote Frank Dikötter, “was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a ‘modern’ way
of talking about social problems in biologizing terms.” The way to understand eugenics is not as a branch of biology, but a branch of politics. If science asks questions of fact: “What can we discover about the natural world?” politics is about what we should do: “What kind of actions should our society undertake?” Misunderstanding this basic distinction and you misunderstand the nature of eugenics.

Eugenics, which flourished in the years before World War II, was meant to help the human race improve itself by encouraging desirable people to pass on their genes and discouraging undesirable people to pass on their genes. There are lots of problems with this idea: Who decides what’s desirable or undesirable? How do we encourage or discourage people from reproducing? And the history of eugenics includes lots of bad, bad policies. Before World War II, in the United States, eugenic thought contributed to restricting immigration on racial grounds, forcibly sterilizing people against their wills, segregating people in institutions, prohibiting inter-racial marriages, and, in the case of Nazi Germany, contributing to genocide. On the other hand, it did a lot of good like……well…..actually no one thinks anything good came out of eugenics when it was in its heyday. It did great harm and absolutely no good whatsoever.

Naturally, there are people who want to bring it back. Let’s find out why they are wrong.

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The Myth of Race and IQ

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This paper is now accessible here.

The Psychology Department here at Michigan State very kindly invited me to give a Zoom brownbag talk on my work. I spoke on a paper I co-authored with Andrew Winston that will soon appear in the Review of General Psychology on the myth that there is a “taboo” on race/IQ research [One day later: The paper is out! You can access it here.]. Like many aspects of “cancel culture” there is almost no evidence that such a taboo exists. Here’s the paper abstract:

You can view the talk here. I’m very grateful to the Department of Psychology for the opportunity to share our work. Naturally, they are not responsible for anything I said.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Stephen Hsu: An Irresponsible Leader

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This is the sixth in a series of posts about Stephen Hsu. See the background here:

Hsu’s conduct during this controversy deserves a comment. It has been, in my opinion, reprehensible. A quick timeline might help.

On 27 August 2018, Ron Unz published a long essay in his “American Pravda” column endorsing Holocaust denial. He endorsed notorious antisemitic writers, he proclaimed Elie Wiesel a “fraud,” and proclaimed that Jews had basically invented the entire story of Nazi genocide:

Any conclusions I have drawn are obviously preliminary ones, and the weight others should attach to these must absolutely reflect my strictly amateur status. However, as an outsider exploring this contentious topic I think it far more likely than not that the standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite possibly, almost entirely so.

A few months later, on 16 May 2019, Hsu hosted his friend Ron Unz on his podcast holding him out as a brilliant person and allowing Unz to promote his “American Pravda” column at unz.com as a good place to start awakening Americans from their “slumber” (Hsu’s word) brought on by the mainstream media.

A little over a week ago, on 10 June 2020 the GEU pointed out Hsu’s relationship with the antisemitic Unz on a long twitter thread. The next day, I posted a long explanation of Unz, his racist website, and Hsu’s behavior on the podcast with his racist friend. What has Hsu done in response in the past nine days?

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Stephen Hsu and the Upside-Down World

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This is the fourth in a series of posts about Stephen Hsu. See the background here:

A picture of a girl looking at her reflection in a pond with the words,

Most defenses of Hsu have the power dynamics completely reversed.

It has been six days since my post on Stephen Hsu hosting a Holocaust denier on his podcast. He has not responded in any way and certainly not apologized. It has been four days since he has threatened a lawsuit against his critics, including graduate students at his own university. He has not explained or apologized for that threat.

There is a right-wing, online magazine called Quillette that is a home for people to publish their ideas about how race is real and black people are just dumber than white people, how scientists are afraid to talk about it, and regurgitate segregationist ideas about how the “equalitarian conspiracy” covers up the truth about racial differences. Naturally, they have now decided to ride to Hsu’s rescue. Hsu claims to be agnostic, on race differences in intelligence. But he seems to happily accept support from those who do believe in those differences. He claims everyone should be treated equally, but people who reject that idea rally around him. In their call to defend Hsu, Quillette simply recycles ancient arguments against racial egalitarianism that have been floating around the racist right for half a century. This time the strategy is what I like to call the “Lysenkoist Exchange.”

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Whitewashing Scientific Racism: Revisiting the Equalitarian Myth

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Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

It is one of the most famous scenes in literature: Aunt Polly commands Tom Sawyer to whitewash the front fence in punishment for some misdeed. Clever Tom pretends it is a joy to whitewash the fence and soon has tricked all his friends into whitewashing the fence for him, indeed, they pay him for the privilege. Similarly, Race Differences in Intelligence (RDI) researchers as well as outright racists often trick mainstream scholars into whitewashing the ugly history of their activities.

A perfect example is this article in the psychology journal, Intelligence where we are presented with an analysis of “controversies in the field of intelligence research.” It is a scientometric analysis meaning it is a quantitative account of such controversies as reported in the scientific literature. There is nothing wrong with that in principle but often such work needs supplementation by a detailed account of specific incidents in the database. As Lorraine Daston recently explained:

if you are looking for causal mechanisms, often only a detailed ethnography will reveal what exactly is the cause of some observed pattern in behavior. And it can work in the other direction — a hypothesis developed from ethnographic work may require statistical testing. These two modes of inquiry, so often opposed to each other, seem to me to work hand-in-glove, at least from the standpoint of the goals of scientific explanation.

Following Daston’s advice, it behooves us to look as some of the incidents in the article in order to get the clearest picture of the listed “controversies in the field of intelligence research” and what is missing from that picture.

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The Racist Right and “Equalitarianism”

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A picture of scales perfectly balanced

Equality

Here’s a word you don’t see every day: “Equalitarianism.” What is it? According to Quillette:

According to the equalitarian model, progressives are dedicated egalitarians. They think that all individuals, all groups, all sexualities, and all sexes should be treated fairly*. They are also especially sensitive to potential threats to egalitarianism, so they adhere to the belief that all demographic groups are roughly equal on all socially valued traits, a belief we call cosmic egalitarianism. Perhaps the most common form of cosmic egalitarianism is blank slate-ism, or the belief that humans are nearly infinitely malleable, and that all important differences among them are caused by the environment, not genes. Cosmic egalitarianism serves as a protective buffer to egalitarianism because it contends two things: 1) Group disparities are caused by prejudice and discrimination (unfairness), not group differences; and 2) We absolutely should treat all groups the same because they are basically the same. Equalitarians fear that if we accept that some demographic differences are genetically caused, we might start treating groups differently from each other. For example, maybe we would encourage men to pursue STEM careers more often than women. (It is worth noting that most people who believe that there are genetically-caused demographic differences would not forward such a bad argument and are committed to treating people as individuals. However, equalitarians, as noted, are very sensitive to potential threats to egalitarianism, and they view this as a potential threat.)

Whatever you may think of this definition, you must admit that the word “equalitarianism” isn’t one you hear every day.  The Quillette article maintains that the equalitarian/progressive bias in social psychology has prevented a clear view of racial and sex differences in cognitive capacity. It is a very old and tired argument. What is noteworthy is the use of the curious term “equalitarianism” which has a sordid history that reveals the unsavory politics of Quillette when it comes to race and science.

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Is Quillette Right? Are Scientists Afraid to Discuss Race? (Spoiler: No)

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Child huddling under blankets in bed.

Are scientists really hiding from the truth of racial differences?

Quillette, the online magazine, bills itself as a space where academics are free to explore “dangerous ideas.” They crow about their “commitment to the search for objective truth.” The implication is, of course, that academics have few venues to explore these “dangerous ideas” because of a smothering orthodoxy about what can and cannot be studied or said. This is a creaky trope among the American right wing who have been complaining about liberal/leftist domination of the universities at least since World War II if not before.

One of these “dangerous ideas” is race science.  In layman’s terms Quillette provides a forum for the idea that black people are just stupider than white people, evolution made them that way, and to reject this idea is to be against Darwin. It is nonsense, of course, but my question today is: is it true that this scientific truth has not been discussed in mainstream scientific literature? Has this stupid dangerous idea been suppressed by our lefty universities? Because they are committed to “objective truth” you would expect them to supply evidence for this suppression but they never do. Let’s look at the record, shall we?

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