The Edge annual question to leading scientists: What is your dangerous idea?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Of the contributions I've read so far, Steven Pinker's is the one which best meets the challenge of the question:
Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperamentsThe year 2005 saw several public appearances of what will I predict will become the dangerous idea of the next decade: that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
In January, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a firestorm when he cited research showing that women and men have non-identical statistical distributions of cognitive abilities and life priorities.
In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense. )In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and that their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product of this evolutionary history.
In September, political scientist Charles Murray published an article in Commentary reiterating his argument from The Bell Curve that average racial differences in intelligence are intractable and partly genetic.
Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be dangerous. Summers was subjected to months of vilification, and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate inscribed by parents). The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless.
The intellectual tools to defuse the danger are available. "Is" does not imply "ought. " Group differences, when they exist, pertain to the average or variance of a statistical distribution, rather than to individual men and women. Political equality is a commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups; it is not an empirical claim that all groups are indistinguishable. Yet many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points, to say nothing of the wider world community.
"The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless."
Right. Which creates, for a conscious and responsible scientist, an unbearable situation of "damned if I would and damned if I wouldn't".
Especially in our PC-mad times. However, there is one paradox here: in our PC-mad times we are still ready to fight for freedom of speech for a maddest bigot, racist and hater of this or that minority.
Go figure...
Posted by: SnoopyTheGoon | January 02, 2006 at 12:20 PM
It is at least somewhat gratifying that the likes of Pinker can say such things these days without being castigated as racists, as they were in the 1960s and 1970s - when to intimate that intelligence has a genetic component (a glimpse of the blindingly obvious for most of us) brought down the full fury of the Politically Correct Left.
It has taken years of solid science to scotch that shibboleth, though the notion that some people (and some cultures) can be better than others is still a heresy for many Liberals, and we still don't like the word failure - witness the almost unanimous opprobrium of "elitism" in our schools on a recent "Any Questions". You cannot have little Johnny (Prescott?) scarred for life by failing his 11+. Just what do these people think Evolution is about?
And thank goodness that the behaviourism of B.F.Skinner and the genetic nonsense of Lysenko have met their demise, though I doubt the politically correct brigade will want to remember them.
Posted by: Richard | January 03, 2006 at 10:34 AM