Thought about making a CASS thread on this, but I'd hope that pretty much everybody on TCS would agree with me on this, and if they didn't, I don't really want to argue it.
So, Sam Harris
is making the "black people are dumber because science" argument. (The article is about Steven Pinker, but Harris's quote is at the bottom.) This upsets me for two reasons. First of all, I thought we put this argument rest in the nineties, when
The Bell Curve made it and was roundly debunked. And secondly, I thought Sam Harris was smarter than this.
The Bell Curve's argument relied on twin studies )where adoptions occur in very similar socioeconomic backgrounds, ie,
exactly where you'd expect to see minimal impact of environment) plus the argument to personal incredulity, which is a fucking logical fallacy. Sam Harris seems to make the same argument to personal incredulity the Bell Curve's authors did, though he doesn't state it explicitly, but charitably, his argument seems to be "there's so much diversity in humans that you'd expect some cognitive differences because of genetic drift."
There's at least four problems with this argument.
1. Genetic drift only makes sense as a hypothesis when you have small, reproductively isolated populations, with observable differences, which you can't account for any other way. Since most human populations have neither been small nor reproductively isolated, genetic drift is extremely unlikely as an explanation even if we were sure that there were racial differences in cognitive ability.
2. Even if you had small, isolated populations where you would expect genetic drift suggesting that you would therefore expect genetic drift on any particular trait makes no sense unless you expect that trait to have little to no impact on fitness otherwise. In humans, we seem to select for a consistent level of intelligence. Too high and you risk autism, depression, and other sorts of neuroses, too low, and well, to quote the Austin Lounge Lizards: "
Life is hard, but life is hardest when you're dumb."
3. IQ tests measure something consistent. Within cultures, it seems to be a pretty good approximation of intelligence. Across cultures, including comparing, say rural Texas to upper Manhattan or 2010s Boston to 1970s Boston, it ends up being a terrible measure of intelligence. Despite many, many attempts to make culturally-neutral IQ tests, even the best still appear to be culturally loaded. And I've taken part in enough studies to know that IQ tests which ask things like "what city is associated with Carl Sandberg?" are still very popular.
4. Even if we
could develop an IQ test which was consistent across cultures, and we then found that yes, black people are dumber on average, it doesn't prove that difference is genetic. Poorer people have a range of environmental factors you would expect to impact performance, including nutrition, parental involvement, parental education, and a general sense of security.
Goddamn, I'm pissed right now.