Postmodern Critic
Morgan Bell
Jeff MusallIs Attempting To Research Possible Differences In IQ Based On Race Racist?
March 16th 2009 11:13
From here:
Q: Should scientists study race and IQ?
A: NO: Science and society do not benefit
In the first of two opposing commentaries, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good.
Are there some areas of potential knowledge that scientists should not seek out? Or, if they do, should they keep the knowledge secret, hidden from the hoi polloi? Certainly Francis Bacon, that great theorist of the birth of modern science, thought so. For with knowledge comes power potentially dangerous power. In his utopian novel The New Atlantis, scholars determined which of their findings were too dangerous to be shared. Modern governments, obsessed with biosecurity, make similar decisions about what can be researched, how, and in what way disseminated. Private companies bind researchers with non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements. Genetic tests for disorders that have no treatment, such as late-stage Alzheimer's, are often not offered for ethical reasons. As Steven Shapin's book The Scientific Life documents, the idea of free, untrammelled and publicly-disseminated research, if it ever corresponded to reality, looks distinctly unrealistic today.
Darwin 200Should scientists study race and IQ? NO: Science and society do not benefit
Online collection.
So what should we make of the century-old but regularly-recycled call for research aimed at discovering whether there are group differences in intelligence?
These days the 'groups' under consideration are 'race' and 'gender'. But it has not always been so. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he regarded it as so self-evident that white Anglo-Saxon upper-class males were the most intelligent as not to need evidence. Half a century ago, at least in Britain, class was the more relevant grouping, leading to eugenic concerns that the genetically inferior workers were outbreeding their superiors. The issue of race and intelligence became prominent in the United States in the late 1960s, perhaps in response to the civil-rights movement. Arthur Jensen's How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? (A. R. Jensen Harvard Educ. Rev. 39, 1123; 1969) argued that the deficit in black IQ was too great to be explained by deprivation and must be genetic. Similarly, the sex/gender question, naturalized through most of western scientific history, was thrust into the public domain as part of a backlash against emergent feminism in the 1970s by publications such as The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg, which argued that men, by grace of their physiology, were 'naturally' more successful than women at whatever society judged to represent success.
The categories judged relevant to the study of group differences are clearly unstable, dependent on social, cultural and political context. No one, to my knowledge, is arguing for research on group differences in intelligence between north and south Welsh (although there are well-established average genetic differences between people living in the two regions). This calls into question the motivation behind looking for such specific group differences in intelligence, sheds doubt on whether such research is well-founded, and begs whether answers could possibly be put to good use. As we shall see, a more thorough look at the field will prove that it fails all three of my criteria for justifiable science.
There is a difficulty in the first instance of measuring 'intelligence'. For around a century, this has been done with the IQ test, originally developed in France as a way of supplementing teachers' assessments of their pupils. In the hands of later psychometricians, the tests became increasingly reified, and seemingly made more scientific by the development of the term 'g' to encapsulate 'crystallized' or 'general intelligence'.
However, except to a small band of dedicated psychometricians, it seems obvious that to try to capture the many forms of socially expressed intelligent behaviour in a single coefficient and to rank an entire population in a linear mode, like soldiers on parade lined up by height excludes most richly intelligent human activities. Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, the intelligent hands of the craftsman or the intelligent intuition of the scientist all elude the 'g' straightjacket.
The flexibility of IQ
Group comparisons of IQ are even more problematic. Attempts have been made to make 'culture-fair' or 'culture-free' tests, as if such a thing were possible, to allow comparisons of 'g' between people from very different societies. But IQ is clearly a flexible construct as amply demonstrated by decisions in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and Britain to 'adjust' test questions to equalize the scores of boys and girls, because in previous versions of the tests girls had scored higher. When Lev Vygotsky tested Russian peasants back in the 1930s, he found that answers that seemed logical to an urbanite were responded to quite differently, but with parallel logic, by the peasants.
As for 'race', the problem is whether it is a biologically, as opposed to socially, meaningful category. Among geneticists interested in differences in gene frequencies between populations, there is increasing consensus that the word obscures more than it reveals, and should be replaced by the concept of biogeographic ancestry, which makes possible the study of subpopulations for relevant genetic and phenotypic characteristics. There are some well-recognized, meaningful genetic differences between groups, for instance between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in terms of their risk to TaySachs disease, and the study of such differences may reveal important clues with respect, for instance, to disease propensity. But such groups are not normally considered socially distinct races for the purposes of studies of group differences in intelligence. Broad divisions between 'white' or 'Caucasian' and 'black' or 'Asian', the groups generally discussed in the context of the IQ debate, especially in the United States, hide genetically important subpopulation differences within these groups. See box
This is partly why James Watson's ill-advised remark that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really" was recognized not merely as inflammatory, but as scientifically unacceptable in terms of its lumping together of all Africa.
'Gender', that inherently biosocial construct, presents even greater difficulties. In the context of the present debate, the crucial question is whether it is possible to identify a biological presumably genetic or neurodevelopmental cause to any difference in the way men and women think and act. The problem is that from the moment of birth, boys and girls are treated differently, which shapes both their growing bodies and brains and how they are expected to behave. It is not just that the biological is expressed through the social and cultural, but that the social and cultural in turn shape the biological. One only has to note how the understanding of what it is to be a man or a woman in Europe or North America has shifted over the past century, to say nothing of how gender relations vary in other cultures. Thus, although there are minor average structural and biochemical variations between Western men's and women's brains (such as the volume of some nuclei and the distribution of hormone receptors), speculations on their implications for how men and women may think or behave lack any empirical basis.
To conclude: the categories of intelligence, race and gender are not definable within the framework required for natural scientific research, failing my first criterion of being well-founded. They also fail the second criterion of being answerable: we lack the theoretical or technical tools to study them.
The standard approach of population biologists to estimating the potential genetic contribution to a trait is to make a heritability estimate. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of this measure within a population, it is essentially just that: a within-population measure, only valid for a given environment. The nature of the equations means that if the environment changes, the heritability estimate changes too. Moreover, the measure relates to a randomly interbreeding population useful for agricultural purposes such as estimating optimal genotypes for crop yields or milk production but not for people. Even if reliable correlations were found between some intelligence test score and a measure of brain physiology or activity held by a specific group, such a correlation says nothing about the direction of causation.
As for the third and final criterion, if attempts to answer these group-difference questions are fraught with scientific fallacies, might there nonetheless be some public-policy implications making investigation worthwhile? The answer sometimes advanced is that if there were such differences, and their causes were understood, the less well-endowed groups could be 'compensated' by some form of differentiated education. But in practice, claims that there are differences in intelligence between blacks and whites, or men and women, have always been used to justify a social hierarchy in which white males continue to occupy the premier positions (whether in the economy in general or natural science in particular). Using pseudoscience, based on concepts as ill-founded as was phlogiston, to justify preordained conclusions should not serve as the basis of sound policy-making.
In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless they would not even be asked. The problem is not that knowledge of such group intelligence differences is too dangerous, but rather that there is no valid knowledge to be found in this area at all. It's just ideology masquerading as science.
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