Mankind Quarterly: get your piping hot racism right here

I will continue with the review of the Winegard/Boutwell article on the reality of race tomorrow.

For now I present to you my exciting new research discovery.

I only just  recently learned of Mankind Quarterly and The Pioneer Fund in reference to The Bell Curve. Although the current archives of Mankind Quarterly only go back to 1982 and only provide abstracts, without a login, Unz Review, the former employer of evo-psycho bro Razib Khan and current employer of alt-right Steve Sailer, provides issues of Mankind Quarterly all the way back to the beginning, 1960, and you can download them in PDF format. They don't appear to be full issues, just individual articles.

And there are some doozies in there. I found a dire warning against race mixing in an article entitled Ales Hrdlicka on Race Deterioration and Race Destruction by Donald A. Swan from the January 1977 issue of Mankind Quarterly. Here is how it ends. I emphasized the last paragraph. WOW.

Nearly half a century has passed since the presentation of Professor Hrdlicka's paper on race deterioration and race destruction. During that time considerably more scientific evidence has been accumulated of the existence of large and significant differences between the primary races of man in cerebral morphology and on a variety of measures of behavior and intelligence. Specialized research designed to investigate the causes of these observed racial differences has demonstrated that genetic factors underlie these behavioral differences to almost the same degree as racial differences in anatomical, physiological, and biochemical traits. On the basis of these studies, it is evident that the white and yellow races are biologically more advanced and have attained a higher level on the evolutionary scale than the more primitive negrid and austrolid races. Consequently, mixture between the more advanced northern races and the more primitive tropical races can only be of disadvantage to the former and result in their racial deterioration.
For the United States of America, Hrdlicka's warning of nearly 50 years ago is still valid today—" assimilation of the colored population into the white is the one real cause of anxiety to those who contemplate the future of the American people."

Who is Donald A. Swan? Well now, let's see what Wikipedia says:

In 1966, Swan was arrested on mail-fraud charges. During the raid on Swan's apartment in Queens, New York, the police found Nazi memorabilia, weapons and ammunition.[2] 

A book by George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party was also found, as well as a photograph depicting Swan with American Nazi Party members.[3] 

Swan died in June 1981. After his death, Swan's papers were purchased and donated to Roger Pearson at the Institute for the Study of Man, under a Pioneer Fund grant of $59,000.[2][4]

I'd love to see the Pioneer Fund's financial statements. I did find an archived copy of the most recent, now defunct Pioneer Fund web site via the Wayback Machine.

I also found articles by Richard Lynn in Mankind Quarterly including this one, The Evolution of Racial Differences in Intelligence which provides details on the Northern Superiority hypothesis (I'm not aware of an actual name for it so I came up with one).

Lynn, like evo-psycho bro Brian Boutwell, is a guest at Stefan Molyneux's media outlets.

This is the same Richard Lynn who I discussed here, who claimed that the Irish are less intelligent than the English. Although I haven't found out how that fits in with his Northern Superiority hypothesis yet.

On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism written by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell, published by Quillette

The "races of Europe" created 
by Gilbert Grovsenor for 
National Geographic December 1918 -
 judging by font sizes in the map key, it looks like eight major 
races are listed: Pre-Aryan, Greco-Latins, Celts, Teutons, 
Slavs, Balto-Slavs, Armenians and Ural-Altaians

So the Winegard bros and Brian Boutwell want to have a discussion On the 

Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism  published by Quillette in June 23, 2016.

On March 27 2017 the Winegard bros published an article in defense of The Bell Curve.

In it they asserted that:

• ."..the strongest evidence (for the hereditarian hypothesis) is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations"

• "socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap (between Blacks and Whites)"

• "it is pretty clear that (cultural bias) does not play a large role (in differences in Black/White intelligence results)"

• "no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap"

• the environmental variables they dismiss are:

• parenting styles

• stereotype threat

• a legacy of slavery/discrimination

• unidentified others

They also reference their own work three times in support of the hereditarian hypothesis, as well as referencing six times work written by some combination of J. Phillipe Rushton, Arthur Jensen and other hardline hereditarian hypothesis supporters.

I think it's safe to conclude that the Winegards believe the hereditarian hypothesis proves that  "blacks" having lower intelligence test scores than "whites" is due to genetics.

The Winegard bros and Boutwell begin their Abhorrence of Racism article like this:

Most people believe that race exists. They believe that Denzel Washington is an African American, that George Clooney is a Caucasian, and that George Takei is an Asian.* 

The authors identify three "races": African American, Caucasian and Asian.

Later on...

*It is important to note that the social constructionist arguments about race are nuanced and are worth considering. We also recognize that much of the concern over race stems not from classifying individual ancestries, rather it stems more from worry over the attempts (both past and present) to “rank” racial groups based on some purportedly “objective” criteria of worth.

Their claim that social constructionist arguments are nuanced and worth considering seems to conflict with Steven Pinker's statement:

...there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever, that it is purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do  this Nazis. But on the other hand there is a quotation, I don't know who's responsible for it: "reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it."

As far as Steven Pinker is concerned, social constructionist arguments deny reality itself.

The authors suggest the issue isn't over race classification, but the "rank" of racial groups. Less than a year later they will publish an article which ranks "blacks" as less intelligent than "whites" and claim it's due to innate intellectual inferiority.

A little later they state:

With appropriate qualifications, however, we will argue that most people are correct: race exists. And although genetic analyses have shown that human variation is complicated, standard racial categories are not arbitrary social constructions. Rather, they correspond to real genetic differences among human populations  

OK, so although they claim race is not an "arbitrary social construction" it turns out that there is no clear way to distinguish one "race" from another.

...although the argument that human variation is continuous rather than discrete is correct, it does not vitiate a sophisticated understanding of race. It only refutes a platonic conception that few contemporary scholars take seriously.

Then it turns out that not only are there no discrete "races" but suddenly the term race has become interchangeable with "ethnicity" and "ancestry." This was a sleazy tactic that Jerry Coyne also used.

The geneticist Hua Tang and her colleagues, for instance, found that self-reported ethnicity corresponded almost perfectly with genetic clusters from 326 microsatellite markers  (a microsatellite marker is a piece of repetitive DNA in which a series of DNA base pairs are repeated). Other studies have demonstrated even more power to identify people’s ancestry accurately. These studies illustrate that, whatever the meaning of the claim that there is much more variation within than among races, researchers can, if they use the appropriate procedures, distinguish human ancestral groups from each other with remarkable accuracy. The significance of these genetic differences among groups is entirely an empirical question.

Does that mean there are 326 races? Or 326 ethnicities? Or 326 ancestries? Do words have any meaning to evo-psycho bros?

It's clear from the evo-psycho bro perspective why lack of clarity is useful. This way "race" means whatever they say it does, and it can change whenever they want. 

OK I'm taking a break. Evo-psycho bro incoherence makes me tired. And if you thought the bullshit was thick in the air so far, I should warn you we are are headed for a Category 5 storm: Hurricane Shitweasel.

The Winegard bros on The Bell Curve - let's wrap it up

Alt-right Stefan Molyneux created a 
lovely logo for evo-psycho bro Brian Boutwell - 
he appears to have gotten the image of his face
 from Boutwell's St. Louis University faculty page

Ugh. I am so tired of writing about just this one section of the Winegard brothers defense of The Bell Curve, published by Quillette. It's turned out to be even more ridiculous than I expected and my expectations were not high to begin with.

And I originally wanted to review what the Winegards think race is, in a separate article, but I felt I had to plow through this one first. So let's wrap this up.

At least there are only two more links.

Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).

Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. 

Link # 12 Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views.

The link presents an edition of Society magazine. The scholars listed include J. Phillippe Rushton, professional racist and Linda S. Gottfredson, professional racist. I expect there are some other racists in the table of contents, but at this point I'm suffering from too-many-racists fatigue and can't be bothered to research the other names.

Link #13 ...it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable

Whattaya know. This is a link to the very article I originally wanted to discuss, On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism written by the Winegard bros and Brian Boutwell.

OK, let's tally their supporting sources:

• 3 - their own work;
• 6 - work that relies directly on Jensen and/or Rushton;
• 2 - refutations of the hereditarian position;
• 1 - paper they think supports them but which denies skill is 100% innate;
• 1 - THE 2013 SURVEY OF EXPERT OPINION ON INTELLIGENCE which has a chart indicating the most reliable source of news on intelligence testing is Steve Sailer's blog.

Presumably the Winegards and Boutwell don't believe it's racist to declare differences in test scores by "race" to be genetic, but rather "race realism." Hopefully their article will explain not only what they consider the "reality of race" but also what they consider racism.

After I review that article I'll review the video that evo-psycho bro Brian Boutwell made with alt-right leader Stefan Molyneux. Who is Molyneux? According to Wikipedia:

A supporter of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, he has been described as alt-right by Politico and The Washington Post, and right-wing by CNN.[3][4][5][6] The Freedomain Radio internet community which he leads has sometimes been described as a cult.[7][8][9][6] Molyneux formerly worked in the software industry.

Molyneux is also a raging misogynist.   RationalWiki quoting Molyneux:

Women who choose the assholes will fucking end this race. They will fucking end this human race if we don't start holding them a-fucking-countable. Women who choose assholes guarantee child abuse. Women who choose assholes guarantee criminality. Sociopathy. Politicians. All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes, and I don't know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing assholes! 

The theory is that if someone is evil, it's his mother's fault because she deliberately chose to reproduce with "an asshole." This is evolutionary psychology logic, since in its view of humanity, everything is caused by genetic inheritance and nothing is caused by environment. Combine that with the Men's Rights Activists/Pickup Artists philosophy that women don't like "nice guys" and you've got yourself some raging alt-right Molyneux-style misogyny.

The real question is, how do Molyneux and his alt-right cult intend to hold women "a-fucking-countable" for all the evil in the world.

OK, I don't want to fall down the alt-right rabbit hole just now, I have enough to deal with their allies the evo-psycho bros. But here is Molyneux in a Youtube video with alt-righters Gavin McInnes, misogynist about town, Owen Benjamin, MRA/"comedian" and  Mike "pizza gate" Cernovich.

For an additional understanding of how extreme Molyneux is, here he is at Infowars:

STEFAN MOLYNEUX: LEFTISTS ARE JOYLESS ZOMBIES
Brainwashed liberals are trying to eradicate happiness for the rest of America

Journalists have been failing us for a long time concerning evolutionary psychology

Evo-psycho bro Jesse Singal, writer at New York Magazine, given a platform to white-wash the public statements of Steven Pinker in the New York Times, thinks he has a gotcha for those who criticize evolutionary psychology:

He's talking about Barbara Ehrenreich, leftwing writer and author of Nickel and Dimed a good piece of work.

Although I like some of her work I have issues with Ehrenreich. She's a Berniebro. She has idiotic ideas about the reason smoking was banned in New York City parks. And she used to hang out with my ex-husband when they both lived in Key West. Before he was busted for driving a Winnebago full of vacuumed-sealed bricks of marijuana through the Florida panhandle and did time in prison, a fate he had been tempting virtually all his adult life.

Anyway, unfortunately for Singal, Ehrenreich doesn't agree with him about evolutionary psychology and The Bell Curve. This is not the first time I've asked concerning the output of an evo-psycho bro: do they read the work they cite? He links to an article Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation, twenty-one years ago. Please note the darker yellow section I highlighted.

So no, Singal, she's not on your side. She called The Bell Curve "pseudo-biology."

The failure on the part of journalists to seriously engage with the claims of evolutionary psychology is a constant. The failure is either because the journalist is already in the tank for evolutionary psychology, in the case of Singal, or they are intimidated by all the science talk.

 I wrote on this blog in 2011:

Now it's not surprising that Pinker has a hissyfit over the New Yorker review of his most recent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." - Pinker is not accustomed to analysis by someone who is not baffled by his bullshit - and legions in the media are. Pinker is accustomed to being lionized and revered.

Here is a link to the New Yorker's review of Better Angels by Elizabeth Kolbert. It's almost as perfect a take-down of Pinker's idiocies as Louis Menand's review of The Blank Slate.

Back in 1994 Stephen Jay Gould, in his thorough review of The Bell Curve, discussed the problem:

The Bell Curve is even more disingenuous in its argument than in its obfuscation about race. The book is a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism, and it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on nonprofessional commentators. It runs to 845 pages, including more than a hundred pages of appendixes filled with figures. So their text looks complicated, and reviewers shy away with a knee–jerk claim that, while they suspect fallacies of argument, they really cannot judge. In the same issue of The New Republic as Murray and Herrnstein's article, Mickey Kaus writes, "As a lay reader of 'The Bell Curve,' I am unable to judge fairly," and Leon Wieseltier adds, "Murray, too, is hiding the hardness of his politics behind the hardness of his science. And his science, for all I know, is soft.... Or so I imagine. I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics." And Peter Passell, in the Times: "But this reviewer is not a biologist, and will leave the argument to experts." 

The book is in fact extraordinarily one–dimensional. It makes no attempt to survey the range of available data, and pays astonishingly little attention to the rich and informative history of its contentious subject. (One can only recall Santayana's dictum now a cliché of intellectual life: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.") Virtually all the analysis rests on a single technique applied to a single set of data—probably done in one computer run. (I do agree that the authors have used more appropriate technique and the best source of information. Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended—that is, either supported or denied—by such a restricted approach.) The blatant errors and inadequacies of The Bell Curve could be picked up by lay reviewers if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers—for Herrnstein and Murray do write clearly, and their mistakes are both patent and accessible. 

I think this explains, at least partially, how Pinker has gotten away with supporting the careers of professional racists for over twenty years. There is a direct connection from The Pioneer Fund to J. Phillippe Rushton (who served as its president) to Steven Pinker who consistently promotes the work of Rushton and to the next generation, the proponents of "human bio-diversity" being groomed by Quillette, the Winegard bros.

And yet you still find journalists like Singal parroting the right-wing line that the only problem with evolutionary psychology is political correctness.

The Pioneer Fund has bad news for Razib Khan

The Bell Curve relied on research from The Pioneer Fund, something you'll never hear about from the evo-psycho bros who defend the racist conclusions of the Bell Curve.

Here is a profile of the Pioneer Fund at the SPLC web site. The headline:

Started in 1937 by textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund's original mandate was to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic stock of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution."

One thing I keep wondering about the evo-psycho bros is how they explain the fact that although we are all ultimately Out of Africa, they still think some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others.

Turns out the Pioneer Fund has the answer!

The Pioneer Fund no longer has a web site, but you can find their old web site through the Wayback Machine and I found a FAQ page entitled "Controversies" there. They address the issue:

What about Jensen, Rushton, and Lynn? Don’t they espouse hereditarian views on the race-IQ issue? 

 A:      Their most recent books and articles present the technical evidence on which they reach their conclusion that there is some genetic component in the Black-White difference in average IQ. For example, they point to the fact that the race differences in average IQ show up worldwide, are highest on the general factor of intelligence, which is also the most heritable factor, and remain even in cases of trans-racial adoptions. 

Further, they note that these race differences in average IQ are paralleled by a matrix of sixty other traits, including brain size, rate of growth, rate of dizygotic (two-egg) twinning, hormone level, temperament, sexual behavior, fertility, lifespan, crime, and family stability. On each of these 60 traits, East Asians consistently fall at one end of the continuum, Blacks fall at the other end, and Whites fall in between—often close to East Asians. The consistency of this race-behavior matrix of traits around the world makes it unlikely that only social factors are involved. 

The now widely accepted “Out of Africa” theory provides one gene-based explanation for the race-IQ-behavior matrix. Originating in Africa about 150,000 years ago, with an exodus beginning about 100,000 years ago, the farther north the various ancestral populations migrated, the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters. These ecological pressures selected for individuals with larger brain size, slower rates of maturation, lower levels of sex hormone, and the other racial differences.

Apparently Africa is not a sufficiently cognitively demanding environment compared to The North. It appears that the Pioneer Fund gang think the farther north you go, the smarter you become. 

This is very bad news for evo-psycho bro Razib Khan - in fact I actually joked about the concept a couple of months ago:

So the real issue for Razib Khan must be: at what point did groups of people moving out of Africa become intellectually superior to those who stayed behind in Africa? What was it that prompted the increase in intelligence?

I assume it can't be as simple as moving geographically northward, since Razib Khan's ethnic ancestry is from Bengal, which is fairly far south.

But actually it is as simple as that, according to the Pioneer Fund: my ethnic group is smarter than Khan's simply due to being from farther north.

The Winegard bros and THE 2013 SURVEY OF EXPERT OPINION ON INTELLIGENCE

OK back to the Winegard bros defense of the claim in The Bell Curve that black people are intellectually inferior. I continue from this post.

Next paragraph:

For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). 

Link # 9 For these reasons, and many more
As with Link #3 we are back to  THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILIT by Rushton and Jensen.

Link #10 1980s survey

The survey was conducted by Mark Synderman who gave a positive blurb to the work of Rushton in the right-wing National review.

"Describes hundreds of studies worldwide that show a consistent pattern of human racial differences in such characteristics as intelligence, brain size, genital size, strength of sex drive, reproductive potency, industriousness, sociability, and rule following. On each of these variables, the groups are aligned in the order: Orientals, Caucasians, Blacks."
---Mark Snyderman, National Review

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting notes:

In a positive review (NR, 9/12/94) of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, a 1994 book by Philippe Rushton, reviewer Mark Snyderman eagerly recounted the book’s ”ambitious” and ”fearless” thesis: ”Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks.”

Apparently Mark Snyderman knows what "race" is: Oriental, Caucasian, Black.

However his co-author in the 1980s survey, Stanley Rothman, who opposed diversity policies in colleges, appears to have other ideas about which races exist:

We also tested for the effects of higher Hispanic and Asian enrollment. Hispanic enrollment has little effect on any group's ratings of the educational or racial climate. 

I don't know for sure if Rothman's "Asian" aligns with Snyderman's "Oriental" but Rothman seems to have identified another race, "Hispanic", and I'm not sure if that aligns with Caucasian or Black. Or if, in fact, Rothman has scientifically proven the existence of the Hispanic race.

 Link #11 In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts)

Holy shit. I'm going to have to end this post after this link because my mind is so blown!

And I really shouldn't be surprised after everything I've seen so far. But I admit, I gasped.

OK, so the point of the 2013 survey was to replicate the Synderman and Rothman (see above) 1980s survey, to see if there was any change in opinion. Here is how they describe their method.

2 Method
Experts
1. Authors of papers published in

• Intelligence
• Cognitive Psychology
• Biological Psychology (if article addressed intelligence or a related topic)
• Journal of Mathematical Psychology (i a i)
• Contemporary Educational Psychology (i a i)
• Journal of School-Psychology (i a i)
• New Ideas in Psychology (i a i)
• Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (i a i)

2. For the subject well known scientists or journalists writing on it.
3. Scientists emailed by ISIR member list (thanks to ISIR and David Lubinski!).
4. Scientists informed by ISSID website (thanks to ISSID, Don Saklofske & Michael Houlihan).
5. Scientists and interested students (NSt≤3) informed by colleagues.
Participation only after invitation (to prevent any seizing by interest groups).

Web based survey

• Questionnaire with 62 main questions.
• LimeSurvey.
• Anonymous. We only know who has never reacted and who has
ever reacted, but we cannot identify persons: how many questions a person has answered and what a person has answered.

You're welcome to read the entire paper, but once I got a look at their chart "Accuracy of news sources relating intelligence testing" I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

OK, get ready. It's incredible, except when you view it, assuming you've read the rest of my evo-psycho bros series you'll probably go "oh, of course."

The survey chart has horizontal bars. It uses two colors - the blue one represents the responses of the survey-takers in 2013, the yellow bar represents the survey-takers from the 1980s survey. Some of the news sources were not available in the 1980s, and some I guess were just not included by Snyderman and Rothman  - in any case there are a lot more blue bars than yellow.

The wider the bar, the more accurate the survey-takers consider the news source to be.


OK - HERE IS THE CHART OF NEWS SOURCES RELATING INTELLIGENCE TESTING LISTED BY GREATER TO LESSER ACCURACY AS DETERMINED BY THE 2013 SURVEY OF EXPERT OPINION ON INTELLIGENCE 

That's right. These intelligence experts esteemed "Steve Sailer's blog" above some of the world's most famous and established news sources, with Anatoly Karlin's blog coming in second. I can't find Karlin's blog, but maybe they mean his column in The Unz Review.

I haven't found Karlin's scientific credentials yet. So far the most significant thing I've discovered about Anatoly Karlin is he loves Trump and Vladimir Putin:

Putin Derangement Syndrome and Trump Derangement Syndrome continue moving towards an ever more perfect union.

Puzzle time for evo-psycho bros: how did the Irish evolve to be less intelligent than the British?

I'm Irish but I must be a "racial realist" and not reject the TRUTH of human bio-diversity:

The Irish have evolved to be less intelligent than the British!

Here's our dear old The Irish Times to tell you about it:

Irish people are less intelligent than the British and have lower IQ scores than most European countries, a University of Ulster academic has claimed. 

The average Irish IQ score is 96 compared with 100.5 in England and Wales and 97 in Scotland, according to Prof Richard Lynn, a former Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) psychologist and professor emeritus of the University of Ulster.

Four and a half points lower! Since IQ scores are the result of genetics as we learn from The Bell Curve there is clearly something more intellectually superior about British brains.

Oddly enough, the NYTimes favorite evo-psycho guy (before he retired) Nicholas Wade reported in 2007: English, Irish, Scots: They’re All One, Genes Suggest

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts, and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.
But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans.

I guess genes and IQ only matter when the comparisons are between different "races."

Barack Obama, race denier & Bell Curve critic

Before I get back to reviewing the incredibly bad scholarship of the Winegard bros on The Bell Curve, I want to take a side trip to discuss the political angle.

The defenders of Steven Pinker keep proclaiming that he can't possibly have any views in common with the alt-right because he's such a big liberal, as evo-psycho bro Jesse Singal said in his white-washing op-ed for the NYTimes:

The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.

Evo-psycho bro Jerry Coyne would like you to know what a big Democrat Pinker is:

Just a short note re yesterday’s post about accusations that Steve Pinker is a member of the alt-right simply because he called some alt-righters literate and intelligent in a discussion of how to keep people from becoming right-wing. I found on the Internet a list and discussion about Harvard donors to the Democratic Party, which apparently comes from “public filings” accessed by the Harvard Crimson. Among members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Pinker was the third largest donor to the Democratic Party...

But clearly Democrats don't all agree about race being something besides a social construct as Barack Obama makes crystal clear in his recent interview with David Letterman.

OBAMA 

"The long view on human history... uh... it turns out that we come up with all kinds of reasons to try to put ourselves over other people. Racism is a profound example of that but obviously, biologically there's no actual reality to it other than we made this thing up. We made it up, over time what happens is, because it manifests itself in very concrete ways: slavery, Jim Crow, subjugation, it becomes a social reality and it ends up having very real impacts. It is true that African Americans on average are poorer than other Americans. Well it's not because of their race it's because of the social constructs over the course of three, four hundred years that made them poor."

Now it's still unclear if Steven Pinker agrees with the premise in the Bell Curve that African Americans are genetically intellectually inferior to everybody else, but he has no qualms about promoting the work and/or careers of those who do, including J. Phillippe Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Steve Sailer,  Razib Khan, Ben Winegard and Bo Winegard as I have demonstrated in this evo-psycho bros series.

And we certainly do know that Pinker thinks that anybody who refutes the notion that all humanity is divisible into discrete biological races denies reality as he clearly states in this video.

I've written a book on the concept, The Blank Slate the Modern Denial of Human Nature, about the idea that any aspect of human talent or temperament has any biological basis has often been seen as political and morally and emotionally incendiary in most of the 20th century. And in the book I try to analyze how one can sensitively deal with discoveries of a biological basis of human personality and intelligence including possible discoveries about genetics of group differences. I think it's safe to say that the current approach, or at least in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence, I mentioned "The Mismeasure of Man" as the foremost example, to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups - there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever, that it is purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do  this Nazis. But on the other hand there is a quotation, I don't know who's responsible for it: "reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it." In a way it does matter what our emotional reaction is to various findings, they are what they are..."

So Steven Pinker believes so strongly in the concept of biological race that he thinks anybody who disagrees with him denies reality itself.

So Steven Pinker thinks that Barack Obama is a a reality-denier. 

In spite of Pinker being a Democrat.

Ironically I came to find Obama's criticism of The Bell Curve via Razib Khan's old web site. He reposted it at Unz here. He got it from the NPR web site. This is 1994, when Obama was a civil rights lawyer and writer living in Chicago. I assume this is a transcript from an actual audio recording. How I would love to have access to the audio of Obama saying these words.

NPR
October 28, 1994
SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET) 

Charles Murray’s Political Expediency Denounced
BYLINE: BARACK OBAMA
SECTION: News; Domestic
LENGTH: 635 words 

HIGHLIGHT: Commentator Barack Obama finds that Charles Murray, author of the controversial “The Bell Curve,” demonstrates not scientific expertise but spurious political motivation in his conclusions about race and IQ. 

BARACK OBAMA, Commentator: Charles Murray is inviting American down a dangerous path. 

NOAH ADAMS, Host: Civil rights lawyer, Barack Obama. 

Mr. OBAMA: The idea that inferior genes account for the problems of the poor in general, and blacks in particular, isn’t new, of course. Racial supremacists have been using IQ tests to support their theories since the turn of the century. The arguments against such dubious science aren’t new either. Scientists have repeatedly told us that genes don’t vary much from one race to another, and psychologists have pointed out the role that language and other cultural barriers can play in depressing minority test scores, and no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they’re pregnant are going to have developmental problems. 

Now, it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented. But Mr. Murray isn’t interested in prevention. He’s interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it’s artfully packaged and can admit for exceptions like Colin Powell. It’s easy to see the basis for Mr. Murray’s calculations. After watching their income stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, realor perceived, that minorities may enjoy. 

I happen to think Mr. Murray’s wrong, not just in his estimation of black people, but in his estimation of the broader American public. But I do think Mr. Murray’s right about the growing distance between the races. The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So’s the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we’re going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray’s book. We’re going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing and that the values of hard work and discipline andself-respect are somehow outdated. 

That being said, it’s time for all of us, and now I’m talking about the larger American community, to acknowledge that we’ve never even come close to providing equal opportunity to the majority of black children. Real opportunity would mean quality prenatal care for all women and well-funded and innovative public schools for all children. Real opportunity would mean a job at a living wage for everyone who was willing to work, jobs that can return some structure and dignity to people’s lives and give inner-city children something more than a basketball rim to shoot for. In the short run, such ladders of opportunity are going to cost more, not less, than either welfare or affirmative action. But, in the long run, our investment should payoff handsomely. That we fail to make this investment is just plain stupid. It’s not the result of an intellectual deficit. It’s theresult of a moral deficit. 

ADAMS: Barack Obama is a civil rights lawyer and writer. He lives in Chicago.

You have to wonder if Pinker thinks that Obama is one of those contributing to making the public discussion about The Bell Curve "ignorant and dishonest."

Obama says: "...it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented..."

And yet Arthur Jensen did deny early intervention was effective:

 In administering I.Q. tests to diverse groups of students, Professor Jensen found Level I ability to be fairly consistent across races. When he examined Level II ability, by contrast, he found it more prevalent among whites than blacks, and still more prevalent among Asians than whites. 

Drawing on these findings, Professor Jensen argued that general intelligence is largely genetically determined, with cultural forces shaping it only to a small extent. For this reason, he wrote in 1969, compensatory education programs like Head Start are doomed to fail.

Again, as I have demonstrated, Steven Pinker supports the work of Arthur Jensen, both directly as we see in this Boing Boing interview, and indirectly when he recommends the work of the Winegard bros, who constantly refer to Jensen in their work.

Pinker likes to pretend there are no political repercussions for racist swill disguised as science like The Bell Curve. But not for lack of "racial realists" trying as when Jensen proclaims Head Start was doomed to fail. The data show that Head Start did not fail.

Research has demonstrated strong long-term impacts of random assignment to high-quality preschool programs from the 1960s and 1970s, including Perry Preschool and the Abecedarian program. Head Start, the large-scale federal preschool program, has also been shown to improve post-preschool outcomes, including high school completion and health outcomes.

But if Jensen had his way, all those kids who did benefit from Head Start would not have, due to the assumption of their innate, racial, intellectual inferiority.

That is why people who really understand what Steven Pinker is all about, as PZ Myers does, express such disgust with Pinker and call him a lying right-wing shitweasel.

I want to add my support especially to the weasel epithet. I picked up on that aspect of Pinker long ago and said this in 2011:

Pinker is constantly inventing straw-man liberals and academics he can accuse of all kinds of awfulness, so it's always satisfying when the actual liberals at The New Yorker get a hold of his books and tell you how poorly-reasoned and all-around weaselly they are.

I really recommend the Letterman interview with Obama. Not only for Obama, who is wonderful of course, but because Letterman expresses regret that he wasn't more involved in the Civil Rights movement in his youth. Letterman in my experience has always been kind of a glib wise-ass, but he's incredibly sincere in this interview and tells Obama he's the only president he's ever really respected on a personal level. I was really surprised and impressed by Letterman.

And it's likely that David Letterman does NOT think that Barack Obama is a reality denier, unlike Steven Pinker. 

The stunning shadiness of the evo-psycho bros

I'm continuing to review the links that the Winegard brothers provided in their defense of "The Bell Curve" in Quillette. I've reviewed the first five here.

The Winegard bros maintained that the theory that some "races" are dumber than others is especially plausible because "there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations."

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

They then proceed to mention some of the alternative explanations and dismiss them without discussing them.  Like this:

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities.

They don't provide any examples of people discussing socioeconomic disparities even though "many" do. Instead they jump right to:

But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap.

Which includes a link to work by Arthur Jensen as I already discussed. So in this next paragraph they say:

Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).

Link #6: intelligence tests are culturally biased

They provide a link to an article from 2009 in the Huffington Post by Dan Agin Emeritus Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, who devotes one paragraph to the cultural bias issue. And they don't address his argument at all, they just move on.

Link #7: predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people

This is the first link they provide to support their position that is not written by the Winegard bros or Jensen/Rushton (Saletan references Jensen/Rushton before he apologizes for it) and they completely misrepresent it. The paper, Fact and Fiction in Cognitive Ability Testing for Admissions and Hiring Decisions is written to support the use of admissions/hiring decisions and does admit that cultural bias can have an impact on test results:

Standardized tests of cognitive abilities are grounded in the psychometric approach to intelligence, which has focused on understanding individuals’ ability to reason, plan, solve prob- lems, think abstractly, learn and adapt, and process and com- prehend complex ideas and information (Ones, Visweswaran, & Dilchert, 2005). This does not mean that cognitive tests are pure measures of individuals’ innate ability. Although highly stable over the course of decades (e.g., Deary, Whalley, Lemmon, Crawford, & Starr, 2000), test scores reflect developed abilities and are a function of innate talent, learned knowledge and skills, and environmental factors that influence knowledge and skill acquisition, such as prior educational opportunities.

Did the Winegards actually read the paper? Especially since the paper provides an explicit example of cultural bias in skill acquisition:

Now consider a skill assessment that shows some large racial differences and has effects on occupational and other outcomes. For example, there are very large Black–White group differences in swimming skills, with white swimmers, on average, being more skilled...

One could raise a legitimate societal concern that there are differential opportunities to learn swimming, as well as familial, social, environmental, peer, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to the difference. Indeed research has found support for some of these factors (Mael, 1995). However, this is not bias in the measure. The key points are that the swimming test is not the source of the difference and is a measuring a legitimate skill and a predictor of subsequent performance. We want life guards who can swim well. Addressing the skill disparity is a societal issue. Condemning the swimming test will not correct the societal issue any more than discarding a thermometer will make a fever go away. 

In other words, skill disparity caused by social conditions is not their problem.

Next paragraph in the Winegards' defense of The Bell Curve:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

Link #8: certainly not for lack of effort

Again they provide a link to a single source, in this case a book by Richard E. Nisbett called Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count and they don't address any of his arguments. They just declare it a failure and move on.

But what they say prior to that is truly jaw-dropping. The idea that "a legacy of slavery/discrimination" has no impact on black intelligence is an example of the primary problem with evolutionary psychology: its extreme resistance to acknowledging socio-economic factors.

David Buller demonstrated that David Buss, a giant in the world of evo-psycho bros, mistook female slavery for female choice because, I would argue, of the reflexive habit of evo-psycho to turn everything into evolved innateness

Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

You can build a case for "the legacy of slavery/discrimination" having an impact on intelligence in five minutes if you possess deductive reasoning ability and have access to the Internet.

Does poverty have an impact on intelligence? Yes.

Science Magazine: Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

Have black people in general been poor since the days of slavery? Yes.

ScienceDirect: Slavery, education, and inequality

Abstract: We investigate the effect of slavery on the current level of income inequality across US counties. We find that a larger proportion of slaves over population in 1860 persistently increases inequality, and in particular inequality across races. We also show that a crucial channel of transmission from slavery to racial inequality is human capital accumulation, i.e., current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that the underlying links run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education.

So there you have it - black people have been poorer than whites since the days of slavery and not only does the legacy of slavery impact the acquisition of wealth by blacks, an important cause is unequal education attainment.  Poor education leading to poverty and the stresses of poverty itself combine to provide a compelling case that blacks having lower intelligence scores than whites is not genetic.

I wasn't aware of either of the two studies I mentioned until I sat down to write this post. I made a tiny effort to look.

The Winegard brothers didn't find any compelling cases because they didn't bother to look.

Here is Steven Pinker on Twitter, in reference to the Winegard article, claiming he doesn't agree with The Bell Curve on race.

But if Pinker doesn't agree with the Bell Curve on race, and given that the "public discussion" of the book has focused on criticisms of what it says about race, and given that he maintains the discussion has been  "ignorant and dishonest" then what exactly is it about race in The Bell Curve that Pinker doesn't agree with?

More on the links in this Bell Curve article in the next post.

Thanks for the shout-out, PZ Myers

Thank you PZ Myers for giving me a shout-out on your blog: Dig into the racist circle jerk which is such a great title. Thank you for recommending my "ugly knitting" LOL.

For your reading convenience, the threads of this ugly racist sweater are connected by the tag "evo-psycho bros."

And also thanks PZ for elaborating on the racist angle concerning quarterbacks. I confess I didn't actually investigate the content of Sailer's discussion of quarterbacking, as I don't feel I am well-informed enough about football to fully understand the issues involved.

I should say to visitors that I am not a journalist nor a scientist, but a playwright with a day job as a web developer/technical writer. But I have an interest in anthropology and have been following the career of Razib Khan for over twelve years on this blog.

Thanks to my interest in anthropology - specifically the work of Marvin Harris and his book Cultural Materialism The Struggle for a Science of Culture - I became acquainted not only with Harris's "research strategy" of cultural materialism but also alternative research strategies including sociobiology - the former name for "evolutionary psychology." I first heard of Steven Pinker thanks to paying attention to the promotion of evolutionary psychology from the late 1990s to now. 

And by the way, if you haven't read this excellent review in The New Yorker of Pinker's Blank Slate, What Comes Naturally, I recommend you do. In my experience only the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer) out of all mainstream media outlets is not too baffled by Pinker's bullshit to clearly analyze Pinker's claims. 

I highly recommend all of Marvin Harris's work, and you can get an excellent comparison of three research strategies including cultural materialism and sociobiology online for free: R. Brian Ferguson was a student of Marvin Harris and wrote this excellent Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. His discussion of the work of Napoleon Chagnon is especially interesting. 

I still find it shocking that Steven Pinker has gotten away with promoting the career of straight-up racists including a prominent member of the alt-right, Steve Sailer all these years. Although you can see how he has gotten away with it when you read the white-washing Pinker's own statements were given by New York Magazine's Jesse Singal, particularly the part were Pinker blames universities and the media for radicalizing the alt-right, and which PZ rightly harshly criticized.

Journalists have dropped the ball on this issue. And so have scientists. 

PZ Myers is one of the few scientists who regularly criticizes evolutionary psychology and its proponents. 

The real issue of radicalizing the alt-right is not that the "truth" of female and black intellectual inferiority is being suppressed as Pinker claims, it's that there is a whole sociobiology cottage industry providing specious theories on the genetic intellectual inferiority of women and especially of African-Americans. Many scientists, it seems, consider the whole "human biodiversity" thing to be so ridiculous that they don't even take the time to criticize it. And so "scientific" racism is promoted, not only by obvious racist media like American Renaissance and VDARE, but by outlets like Quillette, respectable enough to publish Justin Trudeau's ghostwriter Jonathan Kay. Quillette may not come out and say, like Steve Sailer did, that blacks are intellectually inferior to all other "races" (although he'll give them basketball and jazz and rap) but they use the exact same fundamental sources: J. Phillippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. And Steven Pinker has consistently promoted not only Quillette but the work of Rushton and Jensen. 

Pinker's buddy Razib Khan was denied a post at the New York Times when Jamelle Bouie publicized the work of myself and others tracking his racialist career. But as Khan pointed out in this Undark piece:

Other scientists, he insisted, believe the same things. They just won’t admit it. “I’m sick of being the only fucking person that says anything,” said Khan. “I know I make people uncomfortable, but a lot of times I say what they’re thinking.”

There needs to be much more attention paid to the premises underlying evolutionary psychology, by journalists and scientists. Ignoring the evolutionary psychology industry is not going to make it go away. As we've seen with the election of Donald Trump, there's nothing so ridiculous and obviously false that some people won't believe it. Especially when their racist inclinations make them want to believe it.

The Winegard brothers and human bio-diversity

Unlike Pinker & Coyne, the HBD web site -
which links to work by them,
the Winegards & Razib Khan,
claims to know exactly what race is
and which races exist

For my discussion of the Winegard brothers' Quillette article about the Bell Curve I excerpted the section concerning the racial component of intelligence. What I want to do in this blog post is address the sources the Winegards linked in that excerpt.

Please note that in my opinion the Winegards failed to demonstrate that "race" has any real meaning outside of the colloquial one generally used by North Americans. I will get to that issue when I review their  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism piece.

On to the references for their Bell Curve piece.

Here is the first paragraph that contains links from the excerpt.

Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Link #1: The Saletan piece

The Saletan piece is used by the Winegards to show that at least one mainstream media contrarian is on board the belief in race-based intelligence differences. Its title is "Liberal Creationism" and was posted November 18, 2007.

What the Winegards fail to mention is that ten days later, November 28, 2007, Saletan posted an article titled "Regrets" and said this (excerpt):

...But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia. 

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. 

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

In his 1994 review of The Bell Curve, Charles Lane discusses the connection between The Bell Curve and the Pioneer Fund:

Which brings us back to Murray and Herrnstein. They cite in their book no fewer than thirteen scholars who have benefited from Pioneer Fund grants in the last two decades—the grants total more than $4 million. Many of The Bell Curve’s sources who worked for Mankind Quarterly were also granted Pioneer money.16

But the Winegards, who don't mention the shady racist sourcing of The Bell Curve also don't mention that Saletan apologized for failing to mention the shady racist sourcing of his beliefs in racial intelligence issues.

Link #2: a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations

In case anybody is foolish enough to buy into the Winegards presenting themselves as objective analysts of the claims in The Bell Curve, this link, used to argue "the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable"  links to their own work Human Biological and Psychological Diversity which shows them to be firmly in the "human bio-diversity" camp.

The next paragraph contains this:

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

Link #3: an impressive array of evidence to defend it

In addition to their own HBD paper, which I'm sure the Winegards feel is just as impressive, they describe another "impressive array of evidence" which turns out to be a paper THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY written by the previously mentioned (by Saletan) Phillippe Rushton president of the racist Pioneer Fund along with equally racist Arthur Jensen who argued that programs like Head Start were doomed to fail because the genetic stupidity of those the program served. Studies have proven Jensen was wrong but you'll never hear about that from the likes of the Winegard bros.

To take the paragraph as a whole, the Wingards are claiming that racists, funded by racists making racist claims, are providing "an impressive array of evidence" to defend racist conclusions. And the strongest evidence in favor of racist explanations, they claim, is that there are "no good alternative explanations." Later on the Winegards dismiss without argument poorly-presented alternatives, but since the Winegards are already True Believers in "human bio-diversity" they have no desire to seriously consider alternative explanations. I'll get to that in the next post.

Next paragraph

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.

Link #4: socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap

One again, they link to the work of Arthur Jensen, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence)

Link #5: almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap

This links to a piece on the Florida State University web site which you can't access without login credentials so I can't examine it, but presumably it's by Bo Winegard, the Winegard associated with FSU.

So what's the score so far? Of the five links, two are to their own work, two are to work by Jensen/Jensen & Rushton) and one is to a piece that Saletan apologized for because of a Rushton connection.

More looks at links in the next post. Don't worry, we haven't heard the last of Jensen and Rushton.

Quillette, the Bell Curve, race and the Winegard bros

It was my intention in this post to analyze the serious flaws of a piece published in Quillette on the issue of the existence of race as a biological reality but then I fell down the racist rabbit hole at  Quillette. So I have to step back and discuss a few other things first.

Quillette is not some kind of peer-reviewed science periodical, but rather a right-wing/libertarian project by Claire Lehmann.

According to her bio, Lehmann is a psychology grad student drop-out who in addition to contributing to mostly right-leaning media outlets (National Review, Commentary, The Spectator) mentions writing for her own Quillette as one of her accomplishments.

Quillette opposes feminism - every article posted about feminism in Quillette is an attack on feminists. And of course it taps anti-feminist Susan Venker to write glowingly of Camille Paglia, buddy of Rush Limbaugh, whose entire claim to fame is based on attacking feminists.

I'll save you the time in reading Venker's take, which is, as always: feminists hate men.

Now typically I'd just ignore Quillette like I ignore the National Review or any other piece of right-wing trash (read about the National Review's history concerning the Civil Rights movement here), but it is used as a source frequently by Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne. Meanwhile the third evo-psycho bro, Razib Khan, is contributor at Quillette.

And to my surprise and disgust I just realized that Jonathan Kay, who ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's Common Ground and who I was inclined to respect and with whom I agree about the perniciousness of anti-cultural appropriation was also a contributor. Maybe I'll have to apologize to Jeet Heer, who called Kay a "rightwing provocateur." Although Kay claims on Twitter he's taking a break from Quillette.

In addition to Razib Khan, Quillette's go-to guys for opinions on race appear to be Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell (the authors of  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism.)

The Khan piece I linked to early on in this post was co-authored by Boutwell.

Their bios at the end of the piece:

• Bo Winegard is a graduate student at Florida State University. Follow him on Twitter @EPoe187
• Ben Winegard is an Assistant Professor at Carroll College. Follow him on Twitter @BenWinegard
• Brian Boutwell is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. Follow him on Twitter @fsnole1 (NOTE: his actual account appears to be FSNole57 )

The Winegards and Brian Boutwell are proponents of "human biological diversity" as demonstrated in this piece: Human Biological and Psychological Diversity.

Not surprisingly, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker's old buddy, is a big fan of their work.

While looking for work in Quillette by the Winegard brothers and Boutwell I discovered the Winegards':  A Tale of Two Bell Curves which was published after the Reality of Race article.

Here is an excerpt:

Claim 4b: It is likely that some of the intelligence differences among races are caused by genetics.

This was the most controversial argument of The Bell Curve, but before addressing it, it is worth noting how cautious Hernstein and Murray were when forwarding this hypothesis: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might that mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.” (p. 311). This is far from the strident tone one would expect from reading secondhand accounts of The Bell Curve!

There are two issues to address here. The first is how plausible is the hereditarian hypothesis (the hypothesis that genes play a causal role in racial differences in intelligence); and the second is should responsible researchers be allowed to forward reasonable, but potentially inflammatory hypotheses if they might later turn out false.

Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.

Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).

Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. Science progresses by rigorously testing hypotheses, and it is antithetical to the spirit of science to disregard and in fact rule out of bounds an entirely reasonable category of explanations (those that posit some genetic causation in intelligence differences among racial groups). The Bell Curve is not unique for forwarding such hypotheses; it is unique because it did so publicly. Academics and media pundits quickly made Murray an effigy and relentlessly flogged him as a warning to others: If you go public with what you know, you too will suffer this fate.

I find it odd that this article, published in March 2017 talks about how "if you go public with what you know, you too will suffer (a bad) fate" and yet don't even mention Razib Khan, who co-wrote a piece in Quillette with the bros' other co-author Brian Boutwell. Even though it's in the public record that Khan lost a job working at the New York Times thanks to the controversy about his racism.

Apologists for The Bell Curve never tell you that one of the major sources of claims used by "The Bell Curve" is itself racist. In Charles Lane's 1994 review of the Bell Curve he writes:

Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828).2 But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.3 

Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.”4

Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.5 In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.”6 The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education;7 and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”8

I doubt that the readers of Quillette actually take the time to look at the hyperlinked references the Winegards provide in the piece.  However I did take the time, and the Winegards sources are primarily notorious scientific racists and their own work. I will review their sources in the next post.