Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?

[blutoski]

I have heard the term 'cultural bias' many times and I still don't know for sure what it means.

Somebody's already mentioned Gould, but a classic example was to impact speed or accuracy. eg:

Speed: require participants to fill out the test with a pencil knowing that subjects from one ethnic group would never have used a pencil before. In the Southern US this would be because blacks were systematically barred from schools until the mid-20thC. Having one ethnic group spend more time just learning to handle the test tools biases their score of intelligence due to a cultural factor.

Accuracy: ask questions from outside the culture. eg: asking underprivileged kids 'general knowledge' about how scoring works in polo or tennis or who won the America's Cup yachting race in 1990.

Does anyone know how Asian kids do on the 'cultrual bias' tests?

If the cultural bias is toward Asian culture, they would do better than others; if the cultural bias is against Asian culture, they would do worse than others.

 

[dudalb]

Banned? No.
Given a low priority when allocating money for research? Yes.

 

[Earthborn]

I have heard the term 'cultural bias' many times and I still don't know for sure what it means.

The answer is actually fairly simple, but the issue usually ignored by those who try to study IQ differences between population groups. "Culture", as defined by cultural anthropologists -- the scientists who study culture -- is simply: learnt (human) behaviour. That is, all the behavioural patterns humans have that aren't "hardwired" from birth but developed during the interaction with other human beings and the environment.

A test that is not "culturally biased" is therefore a test that does not depend on any learnt behaviour patterns, requiring no prior skills or knowledge. It should be possible to administer it to any person anywhere in the world, from a Silicon Valley geek to a feral child, and not depend on any language or custom. Any person should be able to pick it up, know what is expected of them and do that. It's a high bar to take for a psychological test, but that's what is required to make it "culturally unbiased". I'm not convinced a culturally unbiased psychological test is even possible; or that such a test would measure anything useful. All psychological tests depend on behaviour, and behaviour depends on the process of learning to develop.

As Blutoski points out, even seemingly subtle cultural differences can have an effect, such as not having used a pencil very often. People tend to think the customs of their own culture are the most obvious and natural, just because they have learnt them from an early age. They may even think those aren't skills that depend on culture at all. So if people from one culture start designing something like an IQ test, they tend to have it test for things they consider obvious and natural thereby biasing the test.

Also important are differences in attitude towards the skills tested. Not all cultures value skills in the same way. Western culture in particular values abstract thinking (for example abstract concepts such as numbers and shapes) very highly, and IQ tests tend to test for those. If you lived among people who valued abstract thinking much less, you would have less practice with it.

Instead of blaming IQ differences on genetics, you might ask whether African-American culture has different attitudes toward the abstract mathematical and language skills taught in schools -- and tested by IQ tests. Do black parents on average encourage their children less than white parents to practice those skills? Do they view "book learning" more negatively? Do the differences in spoken dialect create a language gap? All those things might explain the IQ gap.

 

[blutoski]

The answer is actually fairly simple, but the issue usually ignored by those who try to study IQ differences between population groups. "Culture", as defined by cultural anthropologists -- the scientists who study culture -- is simply: learnt (human) behaviour. That is, all the behavioural patterns humans have that aren't "hardwired" from birth but developed during the interaction with other human beings and the environment.

A test that is not "culturally biased" is therefore a test that does not depend on any learnt behaviour patterns, requiring no prior skills or knowledge.

I don't think that's correct. Humans share a great deal of culture. The goal with a culturally neutral IQ test would be for the culturally learned components to be either shared or equal across cultures. There's nothing special about IQ tests except for their politically dramatic implications; I don't think its reasonable to assume that human cultures are so totally different as to make practically all comparisons invalid.

For example: a Chinese IQ test would standardize 10 year old vocabulary on Chinese 10 year old vocabulary. Its English language counterpart would standardize 10 year old vocabulary on English 10 year old vocabulary. Adjusting for socioeconomic and clinical factors, underperformers are probably struggling approximately equally.

At the end of the day, if there was a culture that did not respect learning and their specimens did not learn much and therefore did not know much, and we compared them to a culture that emphasized learning who learned and understand more... and the latter specimens scored higher on an IQ test... I'm thinking this is producing the correct result. The latter are probably 'smarter' by any definition. Yes, it's cultural, and that's a cause of the difference in IQ.

There is a difference between cultural biases that skew and botch the results vs cultural differences that contribute to the results.

It should be possible to administer it to any person anywhere in the world, from a Silicon Valley geek to a feral child, and not depend on any language or custom. Any person should be able to pick it up, know what is expected of them and do that. It's a high bar to take for a psychological test, but that's what is required to make it "culturally unbiased". I'm not convinced a culturally unbiased psychological test is even possible; or that such a test would measure anything useful. All psychological tests depend on behaviour, and behaviour depends on the process of learning to develop.

As Blutoski points out, even seemingly subtle cultural differences can have an effect, such as not having used a pencil very often. People tend to think the customs of their own culture are the most obvious and natural, just because they have learnt them from an early age. They may even think those aren't skills that depend on culture at all. So if people from one culture start designing something like an IQ test, they tend to have it test for things they consider obvious and natural thereby biasing the test.

Also important are differences in attitude towards the skills tested. Not all cultures value skills in the same way. Western culture in particular values abstract thinking (for example abstract concepts such as numbers and shapes) very highly, and IQ tests tend to test for those. If you lived among people who valued abstract thinking much less, you would have less practice with it.

Instead of blaming IQ differences on genetics, you might ask whether African-American culture has different attitudes toward the abstract mathematical and language skills taught in schools -- and tested by IQ tests. Do black parents on average encourage their children less than white parents to practice those skills? Do they view "book learning" more negatively? Do the differences in spoken dialect create a language gap? All those things might explain the IQ gap.

Agreed.

My personal model for factors that influence IQ is that firstly the genetic predisposition gives a person a 'range' of potential assuming no head injury... say 80 to 130. A person with a genetic disorder that impacts intelligence would have a narrower range, such as 30 to 90 for Trisomy 21. Then the fetal development narrows that down a bit. A person with genetic potential for 80 to 130 and carried by a woman with an adequate diet and no infections / but exposed to high doses of alcohol / will be born with FAS and perhaps have an adjusted range of 60 to 110. After birth, the socioeconomic conditions and parenting will ultimately shape the final IQ to between say 90 and 100.

Lots of factors. Lots to learn.

 

[Delvo]

the issue usually ignored by those who try to study IQ differences between population groups.

That's precisely the same as the Creationist claim that paleontologists and archeologists "ignore" the complications in carbon-14 dating.

A test that is not "culturally biased" is therefore a test that does not depend on any learnt behaviour patterns, requiring no prior skills or knowledge. It should be possible to administer it to any person anywhere in the world, from a Silicon Valley geek to a feral child, and not depend on any language or custom.

No. It's one that doesn't "depend on" stuff that would differentiate between the people who are actually taking the test.

Instead of blaming IQ differences on genetics, you might ask whether African-American culture has different attitudes toward the abstract mathematical and language skills taught in schools -- and tested by IQ tests. Do black parents on average encourage their children less than white parents to practice those skills? Do they view "book learning" more negatively? Do the differences in spoken dialect create a language gap? All those things might explain the IQ gap.

Nobody is assuming those things can't contribute, and for that matter, the kinds of questions you're posing are exactly what the research is all about investigating.

 

[Jono]

Phenotype only confuses the issue, unless you can claim that the property you are interested in also has a phenotypic expression. If, for example, I can show that down syndrome kids look a certain way (which they do) and this is dependent on the same genes that give rise to the syndrome, I'm home free. But that's the step that I think is getting skipped here.

Phenotype, or morphology rather, can be a generally decent yardstick but it doesn't tend to work, overall, as the chiefly predictive one. For ecotypes/races/populations it has only at best a very rough and crude predictive power, though not meaningless. In any case, the question of whether taxonomical groupings (species, sub-species, breeds, races, ecotypes) are meaningful or not, or to which extent they are meaningful, is not interchangable with whether or not they are biological actualities or not. The latter is, as I regard it, evidently the case.

 

[Earthborn]

I don't think its reasonable to assume that human cultures are so totally different as to make practically all comparisons invalid.

Even subtle differences may have a measurable effect, and while it does not make comparisons invalid, it does make it important to be careful what conclusions one draws from those comparisons. If a test shows that people of a certain population group score lower than another group, do you then conclude that group is inherently worse at the task tested and any attempt to educate them better is wasted, or do you conclude that the group is not educated effectively in the task and requires better education?

For example: a Chinese IQ test would standardize 10 year old vocabulary on Chinese 10 year old vocabulary. Its English language counterpart would standardize 10 year old vocabulary on English 10 year old vocabulary. Adjusting for socioeconomic and clinical factors, underperformers are probably struggling approximately equally.

Of course you can do this is see how a Chinese child compares to the average of Chinese children, or how an English child compares to the average of English children. It won't let you compare the average of Chinese children with the average of English children -- which is what IQ race comparisons try to do -- because you used two different tests.

There is a difference between cultural biases that skew and botch the results vs cultural differences that contribute to the results.

When IQ tests are used in an attempt to measure the differences in innate genetically caused cognitive abilities between "racial" groups, cultural biases that skew the results and the cultural biases that contribute to the results are one and the same; they prevent one from measuring the thing one is trying to measure. You may find different scores between "races", but you won't discover how the difference is caused.

 

[Earthborn]

The two (that I spotted with a quick glance through the results page) with the most interesting implications, though, were the sixth and ninth, which go a step beyond just the fact that the differences exist and illustrate sociological implications.

Those are some stellar sources you've got there.

The "sixth" is even from a White Nationalist site, and basically sums up it it's supposed sociological implications in words that might as well read "no wonder those Jews are so crafty".

That's precisely the same as the Creationist claim that paleontologists and archeologists "ignore" the complications in carbon-14 dating.

Carbon-14 dating is a teensy bit more of an objective measurement than IQ tests. It doesn't require the same constant updating of its scoring, and it measures a much better defined concept. Most importantly though, paleontologists and archeologists don't use the method to measure things it wasn't intended for. When IQ tests are used to measure which kids in school are a bit quicker than the others, and which ones are a bit slower and might need a bit more tutoring, there is no real problem. If they are used though to measure the differences in innate cognitive abilities between races, I'd say that is a use the IQ test isn't intended or suited for.

No. It's one that doesn't "depend on" stuff that would differentiate between the people who are actually taking the test.

This makes no sense because IQ tests does depend on stuff that would differentiate between people taking the test; it differentiates them by scoring smart people higher than less smart ones. The Race-IQ researchers also differentiate between people of different races and how IQ scores are different in different races.

Nobody is assuming those things can't contribute, and for that matter, the kinds of questions you're posing are exactly what the research is all about investigating.

I wish it was, but I am not seeing a lot of Race-IQ researchers showing much interest in the social factors contributing to race IQ differences, and I am seeing a lot of them trying to explain the differences as innate and inherent to race.

 

[dann]

The infamous Danish IQ 'researcher' Helmuth Nyborg tried to prove that women's IQs are inferior to men's. The weirdest thing about this idea was he did so by using standardized IQ tests that are calibrated (as IQ tests usually are) to have women (on average) score as well as men (on average). (I can recommend this website devoted to Nyborg's many mistakes, but unfortunately it's in Danish only.)
Of course, you might design an IQ test to do the same thing for, say, tribes of African pigmies and New York stockbrokers, i.e. calibrate IQ tests to make the two groups achieve the same score on average, no problem, but for some reason nobody seems to be interested in that kind of test!
How intelligent is the average IQ test designer?
IQ: The democratically purified racism

 

[bpesta22]

The infamous Danish IQ 'researcher' Helmuth Nyborg tried to prove that women's IQs are inferior to men's. The weirdest thing about this idea was he did so by using standardized IQ tests that are calibrated (as IQ tests usually are) to have women (on average) score as well as men (on average).

Nice!

I made this exact same point in a paper showing sex differences on elementary cognitive tasks, despite no differences-- go figure-- on a paper and pencil IQ test:

http://www.csuohio.edu/business/academics/mlr/documents/pesta_08_paid_sex_iq.pdf

I'm agnostic as to whether there might be a 3 point mean IQ difference between men and women (but leaning toward yes).

Re the issue of cultural bias. This is a question that can be answered conclusively with statistical analysis. The answer is no.

 

[Earthborn]

How intelligent is the average IQ test designer?

The article mentions number sequence questions, but misses the most serious problem with them: every answer is correct. No matter what the sequence is, there is always a possible algorithm that can produce it, and no mere sequence of numbers unambiguously reveals what algorithm was used. Then there are the "one of these is not like the others" questions for which you can also come up with an argument for every option. These questions are exercises in guessing what answer is expected of you, rather than finding the one unambiguously correct answer.

 

[Perpetual Student]

The accuracy of scientific results can only be as good as our measuring tools allow. Even if useful tools are available, if confounding factors prohibit obtaining meaningful results, little can be gained. This is nothing new and is true of all scientific inquiries.
So, we have population groups that we know developed differing characteristics while in mutual isolation in prehistory. The question is, do these differing characteristics include cognitive skills? If we are confident that we have tools and methods that can reliably measure these differences and account for confounding factors, interesting and useful results might be obtained. If these tools are not yet available, only misunderstanding and bad science can result by using unreliable methods.
As a layman in this arena, I do not know enough about these tools to make a meaningful evaluation. Based on some of the comments here, I don't think many others are in a much better position than I am.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

These questions are exercises in guessing what answer is expected of you, rather than finding the one unambiguously correct answer.

Well helloo cultural bias!

The most important thing I learned about passing exams was that knowing and understanding the subject wasn't enough, you had to know what answers they wanted. And that is a cultural thing - go to the wrong school or read the wrong books, and you have a much a harder job coming up with the 'right' answers.

But how does this relate to race and its misuse in science? It is virtually impossible to separate 'race' from culture, and nobody wants to anyway. Fact is the real reason most people want to tease out racial differences is to validate their cultural biases.

 

[EgalitarianJay]

I have debated internet racists on this subject on numerous occasions. The common response from them to proposals that Race-IQ research needs to be banned is that it is politically correct censorship from people who are afraid of an inconvenient scientific finding. I believe the motivation for Race-IQ research unquestionably is to validate strongly held ideological views for which racist stereotypes like the intellectual inferiority of certain groups is extremely important to the ideology. I don't think that banning such research is the answer because it does embolden racialists who declare that they are being censored. I firmly believe that such research should be subjected to rigorous scientific critique to investigate whether or not it has any validity.

Thankfully there are scholars who have done exactly that.

I emailed a few of them myself for answers to questions I had on the topic and read a few books on the subject.

The genetic hypothesis for the cause of racial differences in IQ scores is based on several premises.

1. General intelligence can be quantified by a single metric known as g.
2. Standardized tests can be utilized to measure g.
3. g is mostly genetically determined.
4. Races differ consistently in their performance on intelligence tests.
5. This difference must in part be due to the genetic differences between races.
6. Races of human being can be unambiguously defined by biological means.

The problems with this theory are numerous. For starters the presumption that there must be a partial genetic cause to group differences in IQ relies heavily on the fact that within group heritability has been shown to be high, about 50%. But within group heritability tells us nothing about between group heritability. Just because a trait is highly heritable doesn't mean that it is unevenly differentiated across large populations. There is no scientific basis for assuming that the inheritance of a polygenic trait like intelligence is different for any geographic population within a species which is common knowledge to most biologists and geneticists.

THE EFFECT OF ENVIRONMENT ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Psychometricians admit that intelligence is clearly a polygenic trait (e.g., Jensen, 1973). The existence of a continuous distribution of intelligence, although not necessarily a bell-shaped one, is itself an indication of a polygenic trait. Jensen advanced the argument that there must exist differences at literally thousands of loci that account for the African deficit in intelligence. Despite this assertion, he was never able to demonstrate mechanistically why or how the existence of genetic variation necessarily meant the deficiency of one population in a particular trait. Thus, his scenario was, in the final analysis, ridiculous. It is true that at the time he put forth his argument, data were just emerging on the measurement of genetic variation (polymorphism) in humans of various races (Nei & Livshits, 1989; Nei & Roychoudhury, 1982).

However, anthropological data demonstrating that even morphological traits are not consistently differentiated between races had existed for centuries (J. Diamond, 1994, Brace, 1995). Take the example of skin color, which varies on a cline from tropical to arctic. Several "racial" groups have dark skin, including non-European Caucasians and Australoids. A tree of human "racial" groups would have both of these populations on the branches farthest away from Africans (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, & Piazza, 1994). Thus, clearly dark skin does not vary consistently with "racial" category.

To modern population geneticists the idea that races differ consistently for any trait is nonsense. For example, there is more genetic variation among the people of the African continent than there is among all the rest of the human species combined (J. Diamond, 1994), and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that this variation excludes alleles that impact intelligence. Moreover, as Dobzhansky and Montagu (1975) so eloquently point out, natural selection for mental ability is overwhelmingly uniform throughout the world.

SOURCE: The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 64, No. 3, Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities (Summer, 1995), pp. 277-294

A lot of racial hereditarian research is fixated on trying to prove that environmental and cultural differences alone cannot explain racial disparities in IQ score. Much of this type of research has been exposed as being highly selective and ignoring studies that contradict genetic interpretations of the cause for racial IQ score differences. The idea that you can eliminate factors related to the underlying causes is also fallacious because there are not only environmental but psychological factors which effect IQ score which cannot be controlled for. As it is numerous studies show that IQ scores of disenfranchised groups such as African-Americans can be boosted with intervention programs and there are even IQ studies which show that there is no correlation between racial ancestry and intelligence.

J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen (2005) ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black–White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoption studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black–White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black–White IQ gap is nil.

Source: HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND RACE DIFFERENCES IN IQ A Commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005) Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 302–310

Some hereditarians such as J. Philippe Rushton have sought evolutionary explanations for why we should expect the genetic hypothesis to be correct. Rushton attempted to identify a selection mechanism that could explain his data on race and IQ using an ecological concept known as r/K selection theory. I debated several racialists on this subject who defended his research and contacted a few scholars who had critiques his work.

One of my opponents contacted Rushton for comment which lead to the following email exchange:

1. Rushton's arguments rely on r- and K- life history theory. These designations are general descriptions of investment in reproduction and somatic tissue on opposite ends of a spectrum (r- = more reproduction/less soma and K- = less reproduction/more soma.) The problem with this notion is that it has been shown to be incorrect in a series of experiments with a wide variety of organisms. No one took this theory seriously after about 1990.

2. Even if r- and K- theory were correct, I showed that Rushton applied it backwards. By the theory, Africans should be K- selected (K selection occurs in stable environments, such as the tropics) while r-selection was to be favored in fluctuating environments, such as the temperate zones. So by Rushton's reasoning, Africans should be more genetically capable of intelligence, and Europeans/Asians less.

3. Throughout his work, Rushton selectively uses examples to support his ideas. I have caught him manipulating data in unclear ways, for the purposes of making his points.

4. Rushton requires the existence of biological races, which humans do not have. The existence of geographically based genetic variation is not the same as proving races exist, or that in life history features all Africans are different from all Europeans.

Several years ago Joseph Graves did write a book chapter critique of my life-history explanation of race differences. I no longer recall it in detail except that he had ducked the main part, that is, the data.

As you know, most race research focuses on Black-White differences in the US in IQ, education, crime, and marital stability. My research went a lot further to cover some 60 variables such as speed of maturation, brain size (three separate indicators), rate of producing twins at birth, longevity, testosterone, sexual behavior, etc. Moreover, I looked at African descended people in the Caribbean, Canada, the UK, and sub-Saharan Africa. and found the same Black-White differences where ever they were studied. Most crucial, I looked at East Asians on all the same 60 characteristics and found they had higher IQ scores, larger brains, less sexual activity, less crime, fewer twins per 1,000 births etc.

In other words, a highly consistent three-way pattern of racial differences exists in brain size, intelligence, sexuality, personality, speed of maturation, life span, crime, and family stability in which East Asian descended people fall at one end of the spectrum, African descended people fall at the other, and European descended people fall intermediate, typically close to East Asians. East Asians are slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, with larger brains and higher IQ scores. They also engage in greater social organization and less crime than Africans who are at the opposite ends in each of these areas. My 1995 book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior summarized these theories and the evidence supporting them.

So, the fundamental question is, how do we explain the consistent three-way pattern? No environmental theory alone can do so. Only evolutionary theory in which genetics are crucial can account for the pattern If Dr. Graves can come up with a better theory or show the data is different than I described, he should do so. But he has not done so.

Rushton's memory of my critique is quite limited. First, it began with an evaluation of the efficacy of r- and K- theory in general. Professional life-history evolutionists (of which I am, and he is not) no longer regard r- and K- theory as a useful research paradigm. This dismantling occurred due to a series of experiments that tested the predictions of r- and K-theory and showed that they did not hold up in a wide variety of species. Second, I demonstrated that Rushton misapplied r- and K- theory; indeed by MacArthur and Wilson (the originators of r- and K-theory) Africans would be K-selected and Europeans and East Asians (r-selected); just the opposite of what Rushton claimed. Third, I demonstrated that much of the data he cited to make his case was flawed either in collection or source; particularly data like "social organization" and "crime". Thus at three levels his r- and K-theory approach to human life history variation fails. So I challenge the notion his 3-way spectrum is real; secondly even if it were real, he has not presented an evolutionary theory that could explain it; and third that environmental differences could easily explain much of what he reports.

As for that email, the bulk is just filler, a restatement of the abstract for Rushton's book. His thesis here is simply that this conjunction of data (his 'highly consistent three-way pattern of racial differences') is significant and can only be explained genetically.

The problems with this claim are so great that it's sometimes hard to know
where to begin, but in general, here are some of the main problems:

(1) Aggregation of data is only useful if some degree of control and comparability are exerted over the data being aggregated - otherwise, you end up with the GIGO Rule (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Many of Rushton's data sources are exceptionally poor, to the point of being caricatures of scientific research: thus, one of his primary sources on 'sexual behaviour' is a book of 19th-century travel porn, of no serious scientific value, and many of the studies that he cites on IQ and brain size are based on datasets that even people who agree with him accept as unreliable. In the most direct sense, many of his data are the garbage in the GIGO Rule.

You may or may not have read David Barash's review of Rushton's
methodology: "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of ****." Barash, David 1995.
Review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior. _Animal Behaviour_ 49:1131-1133

(2) Aggregating data on (say) brain size or twinning rates into his three 'racial' groupings conceals the very significant variations in aggregated characteristics _within_ those racial groups. Essentially, he reduces very, very, very diverse characteristics down to single numbers, then generalizes those single numbers to every population within his putative races. However, averages among diverse populations tell you almost nothing about the distributions of those diverse characteristics, nor about the evolutionary pressures that might have brought them into being.

(3) Many of the characteristics that he thinks are evolutionarily determined have actually changed dramatically over historical time-periods in different parts of the world (and are extremely variable _within_ his 'racial' populations - see #2 above): besides obvious things like longevity, fertility and infant mortality rates, these include characteristics like twinning rates, speed of sexual maturation/first menarche and so on. He treats them as immutable evolutionary differences, whereas in fact they seem entirely sensitive to historical contingency over short time-scales.

Best

Scott

In 1994, The Free Press published Richard Herrnstein and Charles R. Murray’s The Bell Curve. This book claimed that the ‘black’ race was genetically deficient in intellect and that this deficiency was responsible for their social stagnation in American society. Few people realized that this claim was heavily influenced by the racial ideas of Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton. Many view Rushton as a respectable scholar who has raised important questions concerning how evolutionary theory allows us to understand the significance of race in modern society. In reality, he is a spider spinning a pseudoscientific web of incorrectly stated hypotheses supported with dubious evidence. His ideas have not graduated beyond those of the anthropologists of the early 20th century. They were convinced that race was a key explanatory variable in the evolution of human society.


Rushton’s technique of misrepresentation of legitimate research is similar to the tactics utilized by creationists when they assault evolution. Typically the creationist will present a large number of distortions of scientific fact, such that if the evolutionary biologist were to address them all, the audience would simply get lost in the details. Thus, it is necessary to first dismantle the core assumptions of Rushton’s work, i.e. r- and K-selection theory. Having accomplished that, it becomes easier to understand how he has misrepresented biological data to fit his bankrupt hypothesis. In addition, much of his social science data has been collected by dubious means. Thus, Rushton argues genetic causality for racial differences utilizing a discredited theory and questionable data.

Concluding Remarks

J.P. Rushton’s view of human evolution suffers from the use of antiquated and simplistic theoretical models concerning life history evolution. In addition, his methods of data analysis, results, and data sources call into question the legitimacy of his research. In the unabridged version of his book, he claims ‘to have reviewed the international literature on race differences, gathered novel data and found a distinct pattern’ (Rushton, 1995: xiii). This is fallacious on many accounts. Although the scope of the literature is international, to an extent, the data are not novel and the pattern he ‘found’ is hardly distinct from common racist stereotypes. He has only spun a tangled web of disingenuous construction speculations, in which:

1. He failed to grasp the history and formulation of density dependent selection theory.

2. He failed to review the critical experiments that falsified the central predictions of r- and K-selection theory.

3. He incorrectly applied r- and K-theory to explain human life history evolution.

4. He has presented data that are woefully inadequate to test any specific hypothesis concerning the evolution of human life histories.

Source: What a tangled web he weaves: Race, reproductive strategies and Rushton's life history theory Anthropological Theory Vol 2(2): 131–154

The research of Rushton and other racialists is pseudoscience and has been demonstrated to be so by numerous scholars with the expertise to critique them. Once the research has been discredited and marginalized there is really no need to have it banned and open up a can of worms over academic freedom. Racists are free to spread their propaganda but they will continue to hit roadblocks because their theories are not valid.

 

[Delvo]

it it's supposed sociological implications in words that might as well read "no wonder those Jews are so crafty".

So, finding out that some group other than white gentiles scores lower than them proves that they fixed the results the way they wanted, and finding out that some group other than white gentiles scores higher than them proves that they fixed the results the way they wanted... which proves that intelligence research exists only for the sole purpose of making groups other than white gentiles appear to be both above and below white gentiles on the intelligence scale.

This makes no sense because IQ tests does depend on stuff that would differentiate between people taking the test; it differentiates them by scoring smart people higher than less smart ones. The Race-IQ researchers also differentiate between people of different races and how IQ scores are different in different races.

You're trying to conflate two completely separate issues: eliminating bias built in to the test (input) and finding differences among results after the test has been taken (output). That's like saying that, in various sports, the rules and the restrictions on equipment make no sense because they still play the games and get a variety of scores.

I am not seeing a lot of Race-IQ researchers showing much interest in the social factors contributing to race IQ differences, and I am seeing a lot of them trying to explain the differences as innate and inherent to race.

Then you are only looking at what socio-political bias gives you permission to see, because what you've just described bears no resemblance to the research that's actually been going on.

I believe the motivation for Race-IQ research unquestionably is to validate strongly held ideological views for which racist stereotypes like the intellectual inferiority of certain groups is extremely important to the ideology.

And the basis for this accusation in the evidence is...

The genetic hypothesis for the cause of racial differences in IQ scores is based on several premises... For starters the presumption that there must be a partial genetic cause to group differences in IQ...

There's no such premise at work. There is a premise that such a thing is at least possible, but that's obviously nothing like "must be". It sets up a question to which the answer could only be found by research, whereas anyone who actually did start with a "must be" would have no incentive to do research. (They might even try to get research banned based on claims of what they already know the answer "must be". Hmm... where have I seen something like that...)

 

[marplots]

This makes no sense because IQ tests does depend on stuff that would differentiate between people taking the test; it differentiates them by scoring smart people higher than less smart ones. The Race-IQ researchers also differentiate between people of different races and how IQ scores are different in different races.

You're trying to conflate two completely separate issues: eliminating bias built in to the test (input) and finding differences among results after the test has been taken (output). That's like saying that, in various sports, the rules and the restrictions on equipment make no sense because they still play the games and get a variety of scores.

A better way of putting it would be that the research is trying to compare sports ability by looking at scores from a baseball team and a hockey team. If different cultures are playing different games, it's a mess.

Who is the better athlete, the gold medalist in the hammer throw or the gold medalist in the slalom?

 

[EgalitarianJay]

And the basis for this accusation in the evidence is...

The fact that most hereditarian researchers are involved with or have recieved grants from the Pioneer Fund, an organization that has funded racist research supporting segregation, eugenics and even the Nazis.

Most supporters of racialist research are also involved with racist political movements such as White Nationalism. It's obvious that this research is meant to support racist ideological agendas.

There's no such premise at work. There is a premise that such a thing is at least possible, but that's obviously nothing like "must be". It sets up a question to which the answer could only be found by research, whereas anyone who actually did start with a "must be" would have no incentive to do research. (They might even try to get research banned based on claims of what they already know the answer "must be". Hmm... where have I seen something like that...)

Perhaps "must be" is too strong a term. Would you settle for "highly plausible?"

My central point is that the claim that measured differences in phenotype between two genotypes that are not reared in the same environment is highly suggestive of genetic differences between those genotypes is unreasonable. The suggestion itself violates basic principles of quantitative genetics. Genotype and phenotype relationships are only comparable when the environment the genotypes are reared in is the same.

Demographic groups such as White and Black Americans generally have noticeable differences in the quality of environment they were raised in and multiple variables can effect IQ test score because of this. So there's no scientific basis to presume that there are innate mental differences between races and no genetic evidence supporting the claim. The research supporting the genetic hypothesis for the cause of racial differences in IQ is biased and ignores evidence that invalidates the hereditarian theory.

 

[Jono]

The fact that most hereditarian researchers are involved with or have recieved grants from the Pioneer Fund, an organization that has funded racist research supporting segregation, eugenics and even the Nazis.

Guilt by association as follows (Morpheus, 'that you?) ; damned if you do and damned if you don't.

 

[EgalitarianJay]

Guilt by association as follows (Morpheus, 'that you?)

If you know that screenname then you are in some way involved with The Phora which only supports my point that this research appeals to people with racist ideological views. The researchers themselves are motivated by racist ideology. The evidence is the nature of their research.

What is Racism? How will I Know it?

Modern racist ideology wishes to appear as a part of normal intellectual discourse. Even worse, it attempts to portray its critics as the racists. Is the recognition of biological variation in humans necessarily racist? Is the attempt to classify such variation and show correlation between physical and mental characteristics necessarily racist? The answers to these questions very much depend upon how these processes are accomplished. For example, Webster's defines racism as "a doctrine without scientific support. that claims to find racial differences in character, intelligence, etc. that asserts the superiority of one race over others and seeks to maintain the supposed purity of a race."

By this definition any view of a particular race that is not scientifically substantiated could be considered "racist." There are limitations in even this definition, but it shall serve our purpose for now. In the Bell Curve (1994), Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray claimed that they had summarized more than a century's worth of scientific data substantiating their view of the statistically significant and repeatable IQ superiority of East Asians and Caucasians over Negroids. In their study, they repeatedly confused ethnicity and race. Taken at face value, such a study is not necessarily racist. However, I shall endeavor to demonstrate in this volume that Western attempts to do so have historically been both motivated by racist social agenda and infused throughout with racist ideology.

Herrnstein and Murrary's study illustrates the following common errors, which are consistently associated with studies purporting correlation between race and complex behavior:

• making claims that are not substantiated by the data,
• making mathematical and statistical errors that conveniently support one's hypothesis,
• ignoring alternative hypotheses that can explain the results equally well,
• ignoring theory and data that challenge core assumptions, and
• making sweeping policy recommendations that conform to racist philosophies and practices

I will show throughout this work that the history of the study of human variation in the United States coincides with Webster's definition of racism. What is also clear is that because many people (scholars included) assume the validity of our racial categories, they ascribe to them the power to explain human characteristics that they simply do not have.


Source: The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium p. 8 and 9

Racialism and Racist Agendas

C. LORING BRACE University of Michigan Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. J. Philippe Rushton. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995. 334 pp

Virtually every kind of anthropologist may be put in the position of being asked to comment on what is contained in this book, so, whatever our individual specialty, we should all be prepared to discuss what it represents. Race, Evolution, and Behavior is an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy for the promotion of "racialism." Tzvetan Todorov explains "racialism," in contrast to "racism," as belief in the existence of typological essences called "races" whose characteristics can be rated in hierarchical fashion (On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 31). "Racism," then, is the use of racialist assumptions to promote social or political ends, a course that Todorov regards as leading to "particularly catastrophic results." Perpetuating catastrophe is not the stated aim of Rushton's book, but current promoters of racist agendas will almost certainly regard it as a welcome weapon to apply for their noxious purposes.


The author, J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, received his doctorate in social psychology at the London School of Economics, focusing on social learning theory. He takes evident pride in claiming to represent the continuity of the "London School" tradition founded by Sir Francis Galton, identified as a "spiritual fascist" by the late Sir Peter Medawar (Times Literary Supplement, January 24, 1975 p. 83).


I mention this here because Rushton has tried to portray those who have criticized his assumptions as being "either unable or unwilling to separate their political agendas from the scholarly pursuit of truth" (p. 256). Whether or not he identifies with Galton in his guise as "spiritual fascist" or as "dilettantish racist" and founder of the "science" of eugenics (Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1968, p. 167), he has acknowledged the continued support of the Pioneer Fund, an organization noted for its promotion of Nazi racist propaganda in the 1930s and credited by Stefan Kuhl with continuing to provide backing for what amounts to a virtual who's who of scientific racism (The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, New York: Oxford, 1994, p. 9). While he accuses his opponents of having political instead of scientific motives, clearly it is Rushton's position that is based on the politically secured status quo rather than on science it is his own stance, and not that of his critics, that can be characterized as a manifestation of "political correctness" (American Psychologist 50:725-726, 1995).


Rushton starts with an a priori faith in the existence of "the races," of which there are basically three: "Caucasoid," "Mongoloid," and "Negroid." His justification for this is the undocumented assertion that this is how "a team of extraterrestrial scientists" would perceive things if they should arrive on earth "to study human beings" (p. 1). No criteria are ever set up to decide how these groups are established or what traits should be used in determining membership. This means that his acceptance of "race" is ultimately arbitrary and subjective. When "the races" are compared in terms of appearance and performance in the quantities of uncritically collected data assembled in his book, "racial" identity is determined by "self-assessment." Rushton's basic units, then, are rooted in folk belief and not in biology. The possibility that the vast majority of the human biological traits that have been shaped by evolution are clinally and independently distributed in association with the relevant selective forces is never once considered, and the word cline is simply missing.

One running concern is how these folk categories compare on such matters as intelligence and reproductive behavior. Sex rears its head again and again in the discussion, with much of the information on comparative sexual performance based on "self-assessment." Rushton is obviously much taken with the "salience of... buttocks and breasts" (pp. 167, 231) as measures of sexuality, although there is a dearth of objectively collected data. More telling is his evident fascination with the "Negroid" penis as an index of "potency" and libido. In his earlier publications on these matters, his information came from "self-assessment," but he has bolstered the "conclusions" at which he had previously arrived by reference to the alleged "data" gathered by a 19th-century figure identified only as a "French Army Surgeon."

These were presented in a two-volume exercise in ethnocentric prurience (Untrodden Fields of Anthropology, Paris: Librairie de Medecine, Folklore et Anthropologie, 1898 [reprinted by Krieger, Huntington, NY, 1972]) in which the author discourses at length on the size, angle, and hardness of the erections of males from all over the world. Not a single measurement is recorded, and there is no mention of how the redoubtable chirugien acquired all that "information." Oddly enough, although Rushton cites this source for his conviction that relative sexual potency is demonstrated by comparative penile size, this was not the opinion of the good surgeon himself. It was his view that "the testicles...are the true index of manly vigour," and that these were of relatively lesser size in "the African Negro" (1898, 2:429).


The main message of Rushton's book is that African ancestry ensures a deficiency of "intelligence, law abidingness, sexual restraint, and social organizational skills" (p. 236), and that these are all genetically fixed. There is no hint at the nature and complexity of the interactions between genetic and environmental factors that influence their course of development. Correlations of 0.16 and 0.18 between head size and IQ are claimed to be "significant" (p. 40) and therefore an indication of cause and effect. The fact that correlation does not necessarily indicate cause is never mentioned, and none of the potentially relevant developmental conditions are ever considered. The focus is entirely on genetic input with no consideration for an environmental contribution. Like so many racialists, Rushton stresses high "heritability" without ever pointing out that the statistic actually is an index of the proportion of genetic and environmental input, and that it is never a fixed quantity. A high figure indicates a highly favorable environment for the development of the trait in question.


The book clearly qualifies as "bad biology," but consider some of what is passed off as anthropology. In addition to a roster of undocumented assertions and elementary errors in fact too extensive to enumerate here, we are told that, in Africa, "biological parents do not expect to be the major providers for their children" (p. 156) and that "it is almost certain that only evolutionary (and thereby genetic) theories can explain it" (p. 264). Here Rushton has taken the r/K generalizations applied by evolutionary ecologists for between-species comparisons and applied them to pass judgment on human "races." The slightly shorter African gestation length and slightly higher rate of twinning qualifies "Negroids" as committed to the r-strategy of producing offspring in quantity without much care given to their future survival. Northern "races," in contrast, favor the K-strategy of giving more care to fewer children. None of this is based on any data derived from realized-reproduction figures, and one would never guess from it that there are more than three times as many Chinese as Africans in the world.


The background for Rushton's approach is in his assumption that the African savanna home of human origins provided an easily acquired but unpredictable subsistence (p. 231). This supposed lack of predictability meant that there were fewer rewards for thinking ahead, and, besides, African savanna-dwellers "were largely scavengers" (p. 228). Presumably such conditions led to the mindless rabbit-strategy of child production that he believes is typical of those who have continued to live in Africa. For the real hunters in the north, by contrast, life was harsher but highly predictable-conditions that favored the development of intelligence and attention to child care. Not a single study dealing with the problems of human survival either in the arctic or the tropics is cited, and these claims are nothing more than manifestations of sheer unwarranted prejudice.

Elsewhere Rushton has been quoted as saying, "I really do believe I have made a major breakthrough in understanding human evolution" (The Globe and Mail, February 4, 1989, p. A6). In fact, he has done nothing of the sort. At best, it is a recycling of an old and oft-repeated version of the kind of creation myth exemplified by the Garden of Eden story in the Judeo-Christian Bible. From the perspective of an anthropologist, the kindest thing that can be said about this is that it can be regarded as a classic manifestation of what Wiktor Stoczkowski calls "anthropologie naive," (Anthropologie savante: de 'origine de l'homme, de l'imagination et des idees regues, Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994). A less forgiving reader will recognize this as an attempt to provide a "scientific" justification for the repetition of virtually all major themes of "racial" denigration that have accumulated in the writings of the Western world since the beginning of the Renaissance. Quite evidently, it is a manifestation of blatant bigotry.

 

[Delvo]

You might have a point there, if all of the people who ever analyzed the results of an intelligence test whose subjects' races (or ethnicities) had been recorded, were all named "Rushton".