Back in 2006, The Edge annual question to leading scientists was: What is your dangerous idea? As I noted at the time, one of the more interesting contributions was from Steven Pinker - Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
The 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.
Pinker is still making similar points, but to say this is a contentious area nowadays would be putting it mildly, and, unsurprisingly, he's been getting in trouble. He was recently "outed" as a member of the alt-right in a social media frenzy when he suggested, in a panel discussion, that people are often driven to the Right because various truths are denied or censored by an increasingly authoritarian Left.
From Jerry Coyne:
Here are the claims that Pinker says are true but unpalatable to many on the Left:
Capitalist societies are better than Communist ones.
Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests. The Harvard person Pinker describes as having been excoriated for suggesting such a thing is ex-president Larry Summers (see here). Note though, that Summers’s statement was about “intrinsic aptitude”, not interests, and Pinker doesn’t mention aptitude. Nevertheless, it’s likely that men and women differ in some average “aptitudes”. At any rate, any differences in aptitude are irrelevant to the moral claim that everyone should have equality of opportunity and be treated as equal under the law, which is Pinker’s point (see below).
Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.
The overwhelming majority of terrorist suicide acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.
But here’s the important part. After reciting these Leftist taboos, Pinker, at 3:49, begins to explain how these that these facts do not license unequal treatment of women or ethnic groups—that opposition to racism and sexism is a political and moral commitment and does not rest on any observed differences between groups.
The battle rages on. Here, in the Guardian, is Angela Saini - Racism is creeping back into mainstream science – we have to stop it. By deciding beforehand that any talk of group differences is just the slippery slope to eugenics, and has to be banned. Science, in other words, governed by ideology rather than evidence. Which is somewhere we've been before.
The Guardian commenters are not kind. My favourite:
This is the Guardian!! There's a thousand different genders but only one race.