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.

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.

Charles Lane, Richard Lynn and the tainted sources of The Bell Curve

Earlier in this evo-psycho bros series I quoted Charles Lane's 1994 review of "The Bell Curve" but I failed to discuss before now the interesting exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books where Lane's review appeared.

The first letter is from Richard Lynn, who I've mentioned a few times in this series and who is still alive:

Lane’s second criticism of my work is that some of it has been published in the journal Mankind Quarterly, which he alleges has a “white chauvinist agenda.” If this were true, the journal would surely have refused to publish my work showing that Orientals have higher IQs than whites. The fact that the journal did publish this work shows the absurdity of Lane’s charge. 

Furthermore, of my 25 papers cited in The Bell Curve, only 3 have been published in Mankind Quarterly. To reject the whole corpus of my work on these trivial grounds reveals Lane as a bigoted ideologue rather than a serious scholar.

To which Lane replies:

As for Professor Lynn’s description of the Mankind Quarterly, of which he has been a contributor and editor for over two decades—including the period when the journal was directly controlled by the outspoken Scottish white supremacist Robert Gayre—it is laughable. I didn’t try to discredit his “whole corpus” of work based on this association. Rather, I made a critique of specific points based on my reading of the evidence. In this connection, it is noteworthy that Professor Lynn does not attempt to defend his spurious claim that the average IQ of black Africans is only 70—a refutation of which occupied a considerable part of my article.

The other letter is from then president of the Pioneer Fund itself, Harry F. Weyher which concludes:

I will not comment on the balance of the review except to note that it seems about the same quality as the foregoing. Charles Murray has appropriately called this book review “McCarthyism” (Wall Street Journal, December 2, 1994). 

Harry F. Weyher
President
The Pioneer Fund
New York City

Weyher died in 2002, but Murray is still alive, as I illustrated yesterday.

Lane's response was in part:

Still, if Mr. Weyher is suggesting the Pioneer Fund has never opposed racial integration he is being disingenuous. He was personally recruited by Wickliffe Draper to help the Pioneer Fund at a time when Mr. Draper was preparing to wage scientific battle against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Later in that same decade, the Fund financed spurious research into chemical means of separating white donors’ blood from that of blacks’ in blood banks. This year, Mr. Weyher, who now operates the Fund more or less single-handedly, said in an interview with GQ: “That decision [Brown] was supposed to integrate the schools and everybody said we’d mix ’em up and the blacks’ scores would come up. But of course they never did. All Brown did was wreck the school system.”6 

The same article’s author wrote that “the fund’s hereditarianism forms a kind of dogma that leads it to venture well away from strictly scientific topics to shape the larger debate over policy implications. Weyher freely admits that he would like to eliminate what he calls “Head Start-type” programs. But, to judge by the grants that it has made, the fund’s administrators are also interested in limiting immigration, stopping busing, reversing integration, and ending affirmative action.”7

The hostility towards helping poor children is a common theme of the hereditarians, and in an interesting piece in April of this year in Vox, Matt Yglesias writes:

The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve is that America should stop trying to improve poor kids’ material living standards because doing so encourages poor, low-IQ women to have more children — you read that correctly. It also concludes that the United States should substantially curtail immigration from Latin America and Africa. These are controversial policy recommendations, not banal observations about psychometrics.

Murray’s critics are frequently accused of mischaracterizing him, so I want to quote, at length, what he says the upshot of this is (emphasis in the original):

We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. 

The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe. 

The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves. There is no reason to assume that the hazards associated with low cognitive ability in America are somehow circumvented by having been born abroad or having parents or grandparents who were. An immigrant population with low cognitive ability will — again, on the average — have trouble not only in finding good work but have trouble in school, at home, and with the law.

These claims about the baleful impact of social assistance spending are not uncontroversial claims about science. Indeed, they are not claims about science at all. And since they constitute what Murray himself views as the upshot of his book, and because Murray is a policy writer rather than a scientist, it is correct and proper for fair-minded people to read the book for what it actually is: a tract proposing the comprehensive revision of the American welfare state along eugenicist lines.

Steven Pinker has steadfastly refused to admit to agreement with the Bell Curve's assessment of African Americans, while at the same time suggesting that Bell Curve's critics are unfair. We see him doing the same thing with Richard Lynn, which I will get to next.

Steven Pinker, defending "The Bell Curve" by linking to an article in Quillette, written by
admitted proponents of "human biodiversity" which defends statements about race and intelligence in "The Bell Curve" by stating: Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations." One of the authors thanks Pinker for his support.

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.

Evo-psycho bro conversion narrative ~ where are the scientists?

Literally Victorian
A politically correct snowflake upon
spying a copy of "The Bell Curve."

I should be writing about Steve Sailer's contribution to the Steven Pinker-edited edition of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" but Sailer's prose is such a chore. More about that soon.

But I stumbled upon this evo-psycho conversion narrative recently and wanted to discuss.

In his video with alt-right racist Stefan Molyneux, Brian Boutwell alludes early on to being talked into biosocial criminology by Kevin M. Beaver (who also chatted with Molyneux.)

And then I found a discussion of same in The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality edited by Kevin M. Beaver, J. C. Barnes, Brian Boutwell. Notice how often they use the words converted or conversion.

One of the key discussion points that repeatedly emerges when talking with biosocial scholars is how they converted to the biosocial perspective. Take, for example, the experiences of two of us (Boutwell and Barnes). Perhaps most fortuitous was that Beaver was a new faculty member - already deeply enmeshed in the biosocial perspective - when Brian Boutwell and J. C. Barnes arrived at Florida University (FSU) for their graduate studies. Like most students, they entered into the program with very little background in biology, genetics and evolutionary psychology. Boutwell completed his doctoral training in criminology. Barnes studies criminology and criminal justice, also receiving a doctorate in criminology. Our exposure, though, was to the same concepts, theories, and ideas that most of our colleagues experienced in their graduate and undergraduate training in various sociology, political science, and criminology/criminal justice programs. How, then, did we arrive at our current stance that biosocial research is perhaps the most appropriate method for studying human behavior? 

Boutwell’s conversion to biosocial science occurred during his first semester in graduate school at FSU. Many of the graduate students elected to enroll in a class known as Proseminar. In the course, a different faculty member would lecture each week regarding his or her particular substantive area of research, offering the students a broad overview of what the faculty as a whole was doing within the college. It was intended, in many ways, to jump start potential mentoring relationships between new students and current faculty. Each week, following the lecture, a group-based reaction paper was due, which included a general response to the topic of that week's presentation. Brian's group was assigned to write a reaction paper to the lecture given by Kevin Beaver. That week, Kevin discussed the broad strokes of biosocial research, offering a very general overview of the basic concepts and ideas. The reaction paper, interestingly enough, expressed concern and reservation regarding the dangers and moral questionability of biosocial research. On further reflection, however, Brian felt somewhat guilty about this incorrigible stance on a body of research he knew nothing about; he sought Beaver out for a further conversation. That conversation blossomed into a broader discussion, which eventually led to collaboration, publication, and ultimately a mentoring relationship that continues to this day (Boutwell & Beaver, 2008). 

Barnes' conversion to biosocial research involved far less resistance. He enrolled in FSU's doctoral program via the University of South Carolina's (USC) Master's program. Though he was not attending FSU with the intention of becoming a biosocial scholar, he was introduced to Kevin during his first semester and quickly developed a mentor-mentee relationship. Early discussions between Beaver and Barnes were not particularly "biosocial"but more broadly concerned current theoretical explanations of antisocial behavior. At some point J. C. and Kevin conjured up a paper idea, which J. C. was to take the lead on. The paper required a brief discussion of genetic factors related to human behavior. J. C., recalling a lecture from his time at USC, pulled his notes from a filing cabinet and was surprised to find that he had taken extensive notes on the subject and had even written in the margins of several papers comments such as "this is the type of research I want to do." 

Within a year of each other, Boutwell and Barnse because immersed in the work of behavior geneticists, psychiatrists, molecular geneticists, developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, and biologists. Terrie Moffatt and Avshalom Caspi's work, for instance, revealed the intimate connection between environment and genotype, and how ignoring either one produces an incomplete picture of human development. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, along with other eminent scholars like Richard Lynn, Hans Eysenck, and Linda Gottfredson, revealed the far-reaching importance for traits like human intelligence on a host of outcomes that criminologists and sociologists spend  great deal of time trying to understand. The writing of Judith Rich Harris, perhaps one of the most important yet least appreciated of child developmentalists ever, shook many of their closely guarded beliefs about the role of parenting in child development. And of course, the writings of Charles Darwin illustrated in a broad sense what true science should look like - unashamedly based in fact, carefully constructed, and logically assembled in a testable and falsifiable manner. The list could go on. 

Ultimately, the evidence for Brian and J. C. became too overwhelming. Human behavior was a product of biology and the environment. In some cases, biology appeared to matter more, and in some cases it appears to matter less. But in no instance was there a complete irrelevance for either biology of the environment when studying human behavior. Both are intimately intertwined and simply must be studied in all their interwoven complexity. For all three of us, there was no way around this fact. To operate in a void, only offering passing lip service to the importance of biology was simply not going to be good enough. 

Oddly enough, however, it has recently become almost "fashionable" to do biosocial research. Indeed, on might argue that setting up a "debate" between sociology and biology is tantamount to erecting a straw man. As we have already mentioned, certain lines of research (like findings in molecular genetics) have yet to penetrate some of the top journals in criminology. More important, there are still areas that are staunchly off limits to biosocial scholars. Consider the experience of one of the editors while sitting in his office on campus. The door was open and a colleague entered to chat. The conversation was pleasant, until the visitor noticed a copy of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994) lying on the desk. This realization prompted an odd look from the colleague followed by a very interesting question, which we paraphrase here: "Why would you read such a book. Don't you realize that it is a dangerous piece of literature?" You might have thought a rattlesnake lay curled on the desk. The idea had never entered the editor's mind that the book, or any of its ideas, was dangerous. The editor responded by asking whether the individual had read the book. The response was a resounding "no," why spend timer reading something that simply had to be false? 

Though it is a mere anecdote, the collegial conversation represents in a microcosm our experiences since converting to biosocial research. Indeed, there is evidence bearing on a larger trans int he field (Wright et al., 2008). A general rejection of biosocial research is clearly illustrated by Wright and colleagues' analysis of over 6000 criminology/criminal justice faculty members across 33 doctoral granting programs in the discipline. Of those faculty members, 12 reported any time of training or interest in the incorporation and examination of biological factors in relation to overt from of antisocial and aggressive human behavior. As Wright and colleagues note, that represents a whopping 2% of the scholars who are responsible for training the next generation of criminological scientists. If one thinks that the filed has moved past the need for a debate, perhaps one should reconsider.

It's funny how they admit to paraphrasing someone's response to The Bell Curve as "Why would you read such a book. Don't you realize that it is a dangerous piece of literature?" You can just imagine some Victorian woman, clutching her pearls and reaching for her smelling salts.

Evo-psycho bros like to imagine themselves as bad-asses, a courageous band of brothers facing down the politically correct anti-science mob. I can't imagine anybody referring to "The Bell Curve" as "dangerous" no matter how wrong they think it might be. Unless it's that "The Bell Curve" relies on studies provided by the white supremacist Pioneer Fund.

And by the way, don't hold your breath waiting for any of those Bravehearts to mention that "dangerous" fact. This is what Charles Murray said when he was forced to acknowledge the connection:

BILL BLAKEMORE
As for The Bell Curve's co author, Charles Murray, when we told him what we'd found out about the Pioneer Fund, he accused us of being on an intellectual witch hunt that would have a pernicious effect on research.

I've already discussed how bad evo-psycho bro "science" is - not only do they rely on data from white supremacists, but their methodology on race does not actually deal in the genetics of ancestry as Beaver admitted in an email to me.

Going by the narrative above, Boutwell and Barnes were not introduced to any critics of evolutionary psychology, so they probably don't know that Stephen Jay Gould called it Darwinian fundamentalism.

But part of the problem, as I have mentioned earlier in this series, is that so many scientists don't take the claims of evolutionary psychology seriously so few bother to address them. Gould used to engage with them directly but he's been dead since 2002. Linda Spelke, cognitive psychologist, debated Pinker, and although she presents an excellent argument against Pinker's claims the match up isn't equal - Pinker is a well-known, well-practiced media personality who considers evolutionary psychology a cause, and a political cause I would argue, while Spelke just wants to focus on her work. Real scientists focus on their work - evolutionary psychologists band together for The Cause.

PZ Myers is one of the few scientists out there actually bothering to address the many wacky theories these evo-psycho bros come up with, as we saw him do recently with Jordan Peterson.

I think Neil deGrasse Tyson said what many scientists think - if they think about it at all -  about the issue of gender/racial genetic differences.

In a 2014 interview with Grantland, Tyson said that he related his experience on that 2005 panel in an effort to make the point that the scientific question about genetic differences can't be answered until the social barriers are dismantled. "I’m saying before you even have that conversation, you have to be really sure that access to opportunity has been level." 

So there, that settles that, in Tyson's mind. And meanwhile there is a growing - through "conversion" -  network of Criminal Justice academics who are promoting the claim that blacks are by nature less intelligent and more criminal than whites and "orientals" and so it's their own biology, and not social injustice springing from the legacy of slavery - that is the primary reason for black crime.

Tyson, as one of the most prominent black scientists, would be perfect to address the issue but he'd rather not:

 In that same interview, Tyson said that race is not a part of the point he is trying to make in his career or with his life. According to Tyson, "That then becomes the point of people’s understanding of me, rather than the astrophysics. So it’s a failed educational step for that to be the case. If you end up being distracted by that and not [getting] the message." He purposefully no longer speaks publicly about race. "I don't give talks on it. I don’t even give Black History Month talks. I decline every single one of them. In fact, since 1993, I've declined every interview that has my being black as a premise of the interview."

I'm sure most non-whites in science professions feel the same way - tired of talking about their race. They have other interests, which is perfectly understandable, but the result is that right now there is a group of right-wingers making racist claims based on the flimsiest possible "science" to American college students, and they are not being directly challenged on the science.

And many of them are right-wingers -  in spite of how much whining the evo-psycho bros do about their opponents' political motivations, Boutwell, Beaver, Wright have given interviews to Stefan Molyneux and Wright actually has a book and web site devoted to "Conservative Criminology."

Their influencers have also appeared with Molyneux: Charles Murray, Richard Lynn and Linda Gottfredson. Hans Eysenck died in 1997 or I suspect he would have appeared too, but his connection to the far-right is well-documented.

And they aren't suggesting that it's only criminality and intelligence that are genetic faults of black people. As John Paul Wright wrote in Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research (my bolded emphasis):

...neighborhoods often stand in stark contrast to one another. Those composed of criminals, of large single-parent households, of drug abusers, of the mentally ill, and of individuals of limited intelligence are visibly different than those composed by the educated, the intelligent, and the pro-social. Unfortunately, these factors do tend to cluster on race. Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially.

With this view of black people considered scientifically valid in its Criminal Justice department is it any wonder that there are racist incidents at FSU?

When I read that phrase, "abilities of races to organize socially" it reminded me of something I had read recently from Steve Sailer, written in 2005:

What you won`t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

A year ago New York Magazine wrote of Sailer:

Sailer’s influence is impossible to understand without recognizing how far what he refers to as the conventional wisdom has drifted from the common sense of a large part of the country, creating a demand for people who are indifferent to the castigation that normally deters the airing of sometimes wrong, sometimes merely inconvenient ideas. “In 2017, I’m the voice of reason and moderation,” Sailer told us, in reference to the open ethnonationalists to his right and cosmopolitan liberals to his left. 

Of course we can see his influence on the evo-psycho bros, even if he doesn't get a shout-out in their scholarly tomes. It takes Steven Pinker to give Sailer his science bona fides.

And now I'm going to have to write about Sailer's contribution to the 2004 Science book edited by Pinker, next.

(PS there is a Pinker connection to  The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality. He gets a shout-out right in an essay title: Darwin, Dawkins, Wright and Pinker and the Reason That Crime Declined.)

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.

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. 

Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections

UPDATE 4/20/2018:

This chart & associated discussion has been updated with the addition of Sam Harris. You can see the revised version of the chart here:

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinkers-rightwing-alt-right-and.html 

Click the picture to enlarge.

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

What are hereditarians?

Although right-wing and alt-right are fairly well-known terms, "hereditarian" is not and requires an explanation.

"Hereditarian" an advocate of the theory that individual differences in human beings can be accounted for primarily on the basis of genetics. 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hereditarian

Although in practice the term most often refers to racial differences, as discussed by Linda Gottfredson:

Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black–White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are “substantially” genetic in origin... 

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005hereditarian-hypothesis.pdf

Other terms which are similar are "evolutionary psychology," "human biodiversity" and "racial realism." Related to these terms is "biosocial criminology."

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. 

https://stevenpinker.com/biocv

The Blank Slate

Written by Pinker, published in 2002, this is the New Testament to The Bell Curve's Old Testament for hereditarians. 

Although Steven Pinker claims in The Blank Slate that he doesn't agree with the conclusions about black intelligence made in The Bell Curve, he has never to my knowledge explained why, although he agrees with almost every other hereditarian claim, the Bell Curve is wrong about that. 

...Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this... 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2

Quillette

http://quillette.com

Quillette is an online magazine founded by Australian writer and former psychology graduate student Claire Lehmann. The publication has a primary focus on science, news, culture, and politics......The magazine has been praised by the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, who described it as a "superb online magazine", and has garnered support by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette

Steven Pinker has recommended Quillette articles on Twitter and said about Quillette:

...one of the most stimulating & original new web magazines. 

https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/909489258918027264?lang=en

Quillette has published many hereditarians, some of whom have been interviewed by Stefan Molyneux and republished articles in the white supremacist American Renaissance including Kevin M. Beaver, Brian Boutwell, Ben and Bo Winegard and John P. Wright.