I recently ordered Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America.
I decided that I need to read these books after a friend of mine pointed me to some conservative blogs discussing what they call "human biodiversity."
The essential notion of biodiversity, as applied to race, goes something like this: there are important differences between races; these differences are immutable because they are either genetic in nature or so deeply culturally ingrained that they are effectively permanent; and that racial inequality is therefore a fact of life over which public policy can have very little impact.
Now, before you get too terribly worried, I have not found any of these conservative ideas appealing in the least. In fact, I'm tempted to use bile-tinged language -- and perhaps even bile-infested rhetoric -- to express my thoughts on that point of view. But instead, I'll take a more sedate approach. One of the smartest people I know warned me to avoid appealing to morality when attempting to determine the veracity of a falsifiable hypothesis. His point is a good one.
So to the extent that I discuss ideas that I'd like to denounce in spectacular fashion, I will attempt to avoid indulgence in that most pleasurable of sports, at least while assessing the claims of my fellow homo sapiens in on the right. (But I can't promise I won't call one of their ideas idiotic after proving it is stupid!)
But back to the books I just ordered and look forward to reading soon. From what I understand, one of them (Taboo) presents the biodiversity argument as applied to sports; another (Blank Slate) doesn't directly address race, but does talk about the heritability of traits; and the last one (Faded Dreams) argues that racial inequality is a socially-constructed phenomenon and shows that public policy has had and can have an impact on racial inequality. (It is obvious that public policy can have a negative impact on racial equality. You need look no further than Jim Crow laws, slavery, or even the 2000 Florida election, to see the truth of that. But Faded Dreams also argues the converse, that public policy can also have a positive impact on racial inequality.)
There is not much point in saying more than that about the books, so in the meantime, I will point out two academic articles on the general topic of racial inequality as it relates to intelligence. The question both articles address is whether inequality is due to nature (genetics), nurture (environment), or both.
The first article, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability," presents the hereditarian viewpoint. The authors (J. Philippe Rushton of University of Western Ontario and Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California, Berkeley) review thirty years of research that they say demonstrates that racial differences in intelligence are caused by genetics and environmental factors. As you read their paper, however, I think you'll see that their initial assertion that the differences are 50% genetic and 50% environmental is a bit arbitrary, perhaps intended to make their position sound like a reasonable compromise between opposing factions. If that is in fact their intent, it is an unfortunate stratagem to employ in an academic research paper.
Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, penned a response to Rushton and Jensen entitled "Heredity, Environment, and Race Differences in IQ." Nisbett's paper offers an excellent analysis of the their hereditarian theory, effectively debunking it. It's a good starting point for research on the theory that environment is the dominant factor in shaping intelligence (as measured by IQ).
© Jed Lewison