Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Steven Pinker and the scientific racists

Steven Pinker is on a book-promotion tour and so he's everywhere right now. He just published an item which mentions scientific racism without mentioning the connection between The Pioneer Fund and The Bell Curve. Pinker talks about scientific racism as though it only existed until the mid-20th century:
"Scientific racism," the theory that races fall into a hierarchy of mental sophistication with Northern Europeans at the top, is a prime example. It was popular in the decades flanking the turn of the 20th century, apparently supported by craniometry and mental testing, before being discredited in the middle of the 20th century by better science and by the horrors of Nazism. Yet to pin ideological racism on science, in particular on the theory of evolution, is bad intellectual history. Racist beliefs have been omnipresent across history and regions of the world...
And of course he doesn't mention his connection to scientific racist Steve Sailer. Can one infer from this that Pinker doesn't actually consider Steve Sailer a scientific racist?