Oh my god! I can’t believe it! Has the NY Times been taken over by white supremacists? But there’s an article in the NY Times that endorses the viewpoint that races differ in intelligence because of genetic reasons.
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”
And it’s not just some blogger saying this, but also a biology professor at Stanford University:
[M]any geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called "a very delicate time, and a dangerous time."
"There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries," said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. "It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better."
Dr. Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he said he wanted to create "ready response teams" of geneticists to put such socially fraught discoveries in perspective.
Reading between the lines, the NY Times reporter contacted many genetic researchers who didn’t want to say anything on the record. As if they know the truth and are afraid of the reaction to it.
This professor Feldman is foretelling that scientific proof of genetic differences are coming in the near future. Why else would he need a "ready response team" unless he knows that there’s going to be something to respond to?
My first instinct on reading this was to say "these people are racists!" But that wouldn’t be fair. We live in the age of science and I thought I should try to understand the other side’s argument. And after I tried to understand it, I think I may actually believe it. Actual genes have been discovered that are associated with intelligence. We can no longer just make fun of the idea that genes are related to intelligence. I mean, the proof is out there. And now it can be shown that the very same genes that are related to intelligence are not distributed equally in different population groups. Given this information, it just seems really dishonest to deny the possibility that different population groups have different levels of intelligence. If different breeds of dogs can have different levels of intelligence, why not humans? It’s the ultimate of hubris to think that we are so different from other animals that what applies to them doesn’t apply to us.
According to the article, some liberals have come to the conclusion that we should accept that there may be genetic differences between the races:
Yet even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that there may be genetic differences between races is important in preparing to address them politically.
“Let’s say the genetic data says we’ll have to spend two times as much for every black child to close the achievement gap,” said Jason Malloy, 28, an artist in Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr. Watson for the widely read science blog Gene Expression. Society, he said, would need to consider how individuals “can be given educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique talents and limitations.”
I really don’t know what to think, but I sense that this is too important of a topic to just ignore.