This week, Slate's Will Saletan has decided to grace the world with his incredible lack of intelligence (h/t Atrios):
I Forget Where In the Order He Falls
But Will Saletan, no matter what his genetic code says, has got to be one of the top 10 stupidest fucking guys on the face of the planet. Quoth The Racist Fuckwit:
The lowest black IQ averages in the United States show up in the South, where the rate of genetic blending is lowest.
I really picked the wrong week to stop huffing paint fumes. No link as I have no desire to support a business model centered around the courageous notion that black people are stupid.
I think Atrios has exactly the right idea -- I'm not going to link to Saletan's idiotic three-piece series declaring "prima facie" evidence that genetic differences explain the variations in IQ amongst Asians, whites, and blacks.
I don't know if I've ever read anything by Saletan before, and I don't even know what his racial and ethnic background is, but after reading his article I can assure you that he is in no danger of being held up as an example of genetic superiority by any racial or ethnic group.
At some point in the future, I'm going to write a longer diary on this topic, but it's Thanksgiving eve, and I don't want to spend more of it dwelling on Will Saletan than necessary.
What I will do in the short space below is offer you a few links to recommended reading if you would like to pursue the topic further, and educate yourself on why Saletan may in fact be mentally retarded.
First, in the interests of total fairness, I will give you the most comprehensive academic research supporting Saletan's position (co-authored by a guy who spent four years as a young child living under apartheid in South Africa). Their essay is well-rebutted here and here.
Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer have authored two papers, here and here, both of which find the theories proposed by Saletan to be deficient.
Cosma Shalizi has an incredibly educational take on the topic, focusing on the science and statistics of the issue. You can find his writings on the topic here, and I'll recommend this post and this post as the best places to start. The first post is a very long piece, so I'll quote his conclusion here:
- The most common formulae used to estimate heritability are wrong, either for trivial mathematical reasons (such as the upward bias in the difference between monozygotic and dizygotic twins' correlations), or for substantive ones (the covariance of monozygotic twins raised apart neglects shared environments other than the family, such as maternal and community effects).
- The best estimate I can find puts the narrow heritability of IQ at around 0.34 and the broad heritability at 0.48.
- Even this estimate neglected heteroskedasticity, gene-environment interactions, gene-environment covariance, the existence of shared environment beyond the family, and the possibility that the samples being used are not representative of the broader population.
- Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment, correlations between variance components, etc. Under such circumstances, talking about "the" heritability of IQ is nonsense. Actual geneticists have been saying as much since Dobzhansky at least.
- Applying the usual heritability estimators to traits which are shaped at least in part by cultural transmission, a.k.a. traditions, is very apt to confuse tradition with genetics. The usual twin studies do not solve this problem. Studies which could don't seem to have been done.
- Heritability is completely irrelevant to malleability or plasticity; every possible combination of high and low heritability, and high and low malleability, is not only logically possible but also observed.
- Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed, responsive to purely environmental interventions.
I know that issues about race sometimes take a back seat around here, what with the war raging and the 2008 elections right around the corner. So why should a community focused on Democratic electoral politics care about an issue like this?
Leaving aside the obvious and primary substantive reasons, it's also tremendously important politically, if for no other reason than this:
The fundamental reality is that minorities are an incredibly important part of the Democratic coalition. Indeed, most whites support Republicans:
- In 2000, 54% of whites voted for Bush
- In 2004, 58% of whites voted for Bush.
- In 2006, 51% of whites voted Republican.
My point is simple: issues about race matter, not just on a substantive level, but also political. The more you learn about the growing conservative movement to embrace Saletan's ideas, the more you realize how important it will be in the coming years.
When I first learned about the well-organized efforts to spread the theories Saletan propounds, my reaction was moral outrage. I have since realized that a sober rejection of the idiotic lunacy of the claims is in fact a better response, as proving such a wild claim to be wrong is a source of moral vindication in and of itself.
So I'll let Atrios call him a "racist fuckwit"; he probably is, but I don't really know.
What I do know is that he's wrong, has no idea what he's talking about, and is pretty fucking dumb.