An Example of PC Science Denial: The Issues

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. —John Adams

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. —John Stuart Mill

TRUTH BOMB ALERT: If you are prone to bouts of howling hysteria upon hearing facts that you don’t like, think twice before reading this, or the next two posts after this.

     When we think of science denial, we are likely to call to mind fundamentalist Christians denying evolution, geologic plate tectonics, or any other well-substantiated theory that contradicts the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden 6000 years ago; or of conservative capitalists flatly denying anthropogenic global warming because they oppose anything that stands in the way of immediate economic interests, or because they just don’t want to change. We tend to associate science denial with people on the political right. But science denial is going on a rampage in the new “progressive” left nowadays, and it’s about time to air this thing out and spray some disinfectant on it. Science denial isn’t just for conservatives anymore. Maybe it never was just for conservatives. 

     This is going to be ugly, but covering it over and pretending it doesn’t exist because the truth might offend somebody, or out of fear of hysterical reprisals, etc., is more or less dishonest in the first place, and cowardly in the other. And to hell with political correctness. So let’s get on with it.

     But before giving an example (just one) of feminized PC science denial, I would like to declare here that I have no emotional axe to grind against any race of people. Almost all of my interactions with black people, for example (and Asians too), have been positive or neutral, and I am grateful to be living here in Burma, surrounded by good brown people. However, what I’m about to discuss will no doubt be labeled “hate speech,” “racism,” “Nazi white supremacism,” or some such. People who have pointed out the same information, very calmly and rationally even, have been howled at and cursed by people disapproving of “hate speech”; and a few months ago the presence of Charles Murray, who has written and spoken very bravely on this volatile subject, actually inspired an anti-hate riot at Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont (“Sexist racist anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!”). So for those of you who vehemently prefer the new leftist ideology to empirical reality, go ahead and dox me. I don’t give a damn.

     It is held as a foundational axiom of the new intersectional feminist, postmodernist, leftist ideology that all groups of people—males, females, whatever other genders there might be, and all ethnicities—are fundamentally exactly the same with regard to psychological traits, any differences being mere cultural constructs, and with the negative differences being mainly due to oppressive domination by white males throughout history. This involves some pretty blatant compound science denial, as it contradicts scientific knowledge (or at least accepted theory) in various respects. The respect I intend to discuss here is the supposed inherent cognitive equality of the various ethnicities. I say “ethnicity” because the new ideology denies the very existence of race, which is an issue I’ll probably discuss some other time, gawd willing. I still use the words “race” and “racial” though, because even if there is some ambiguity around the edges, still almost everyone can understand what they mean. For example, a black person is one whose post-prehistoric ancestors, at least most of them, lived in sub-Saharan Africa (although possibly excepting “capoid” Khoisan peoples); a white person is one whose ancestors mostly came from Europe (excepting maybe the Lapps); an East Asian person is one whose ancestors mostly came from East Asia (excepting the Ainu, for example), etc.

     The existence of psychological differences between races has been acknowledged for millennia, although most of such differences are hard to quantify and study by scientific methods. One difference has been extensively studied, however, and that is intelligence, usually quantified as IQ. Systematic intelligence testing has been conducted in the USA for at least a century, beginning no later than the first World War, with literally hundreds of studies since then; and IQ testing has been carried out around the world for several decades by psychologists, educators, and social scientists. The testing methods have been refined and improved over all this time, yet the results have remained essentially the same: The most intelligent “race” of people on this planet, of those who have been tested anyway, is the Ashkenazi Jews (not all Jews, mind you, but only those of Central and Eastern European ancestry), with an average IQ somewhere in the neighborhood of 108-115. After them come East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.) with IQ scores averaging from around 105 to possibly as high as 111. Next in rank of cognitive ability are whites, with the system calibrated so that they/we average out at exactly 100 (although American white people allegedly average around 103). After the Europeans come various “brown people”—West Asians, South Asians, American Hispanics, etc.) who average around 90. Next are American black people, who for the past century have averaged consistently at very close to 85. And at the lowest end of the spectrum are sub-Saharan black Africans and, according to one source I’ve seen, Australian aborigines, who have average IQ scores of around 70 (At least one study has aborigines as low as 62). Thus the black Africans and Australian aborigines, according to western psychological standards, would be, on average, borderline mentally retarded. It sounds bloody awful to say it, and of course it’s the modern equivalent of damnable heresy, but lots of studies have been conducted for a long time, in accordance with standards approved by such groups as the American Psychological Association, and subjected to professional peer reviews, and the results are consistent.

     The first line of defense against such unacceptable truths is simply to call bullshit—that is, to resort to ignorant or hysterical denial. But you are welcome to check out the information for yourself. Consult the most respectable psychological journals if you like. Or, what is easier, do a quick search on “race IQ” on your favorite Internet search engine. So long as you are not handicapped with a search algorithm tailored to a PC mentality, filtering out information that might cause one to feel frightened, unsafe, or victimized, then your first two pages of search results should provide several articles corroborating the data listed above. One veritable motherlode of information that I found on my first two pages of search results is Rushton and Jenson (2005), included in the Select References below, which states on page 2, “Currently, the 1.1 standard deviation [i.e., 16 points] difference in average IQ between Blacks and Whites in the United States is not in itself a matter of empirical dispute.” The professional psychological community, aside from a few of the more hysterical ones, have to accept that these test differences really exist.

     The next line of defense against such cold, harsh empiricism is to insist that the testing methods are biased, presumably in favor of the white people who conduct most of the research in this taboo realm. But the methods have been refined over and over again, no doubt with a very sincere desire to eliminate any racist bias, and the results have stubbornly remained essentially the same. In fact, there is the counterintuitive finding that black people actually do better, on average, on culturally biased tests than on tests heavy on plain, general cognitive ability, known simply as “g.” Also, the folks alleging bias have a difficult time of explaining why tests biased in favor of whites allow East Asians to score significantly higher than whites do. At least as early as 1996 the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs affirmed that standardized and approved IQ tests are not discriminative towards any ethnic or racial groups. So accusations of cultural bias cannot realistically account for the consensus of test results, and most knowledgeable dissenters have abandoned them.

     Despite continued refinements in testing procedures, the results obstinately remain the same, and the differences in measured intelligence between ethnicities don’t go away. For a few decades now even the most “progressive” scientists working in this field, most of them, no longer try to debunk the test results. It’s no longer a question of if different races have different cognitive abilities, but of why.

     Accordingly, politically correct psychologists and social scientists have been constrained to fall back on a third line of defense against what could prove to be a very ugly reality: the insistence that, although black people (for example) tend to score lower than East Asian people (for example), cognitive ability itself is not genetically conditioned at all, but is influenced entirely by environmental factors. This usually takes the form of the “culture only model” (that is, that IQ differences are 100% cultural in origin, a social construct), or the very similar “discrimination model” (that is, Blame Whitey—which is very much in fashion among advocates of Chomskyesque white guilt). Other theories may include assertions, which may very well be true, that environmental factors such as disease and malnutrition in Africa can account for at least some of the marked low scores in average IQ there. The main point all of these theories/explanations have in common is that the differences in cognitive abilities between racial groups is 0.00% genetic. Absolute Nil. Heredity is absolutely, positively not a factor. It can’t be, because then all groups of people wouldn’t be inherently equal, and furthermore white men would become a less convenient universal scapegoat. In short, the new leftist ideology would be undermined. Also, the assumption that blacks in America, for example, are more likely to have low socio-economic status because of discrimination would partly collapse; cognitive ability has been shown to be the most important factor in determining the likelihood of an individual’s economic success, being a more reliable indicator than, say, the socio-economic status of one’s parents, or their ethnicity, or whether or not they were married. If black people living in a white society have statistically lower IQ than everyone else, and if that lower IQ is genetically conditioned, then maybe whites aren’t entirely to blame after all. It could be that some ethnic groups are, at least in part, self-marginalizing. It could be, then, that so many American black youths are dropping out of school, joining gangs, engaging in a life of crime, and/or having several children by several different men while living on welfare, not entirely because their ancestors were enslaved hundreds of years ago, etc., but partly because they are making remarkably unintelligent choices, and within the context of an unintelligent “gangsta” subculture.

     Remember, though most people seem not to, that we are discussing statistical averages. An individual Japanese Jew may be an imbecile or a genius. So may a black person. Just as there are many women taller than many men, so there are many black people smarter than many East Asians. For a person to retort in anger, “So you think all black people are stupid!?” would itself be stupid.

     As the debate over racial IQ differences nowadays, at least among psychologists and social scientists, is mainly between two explanatory models, the hereditarian model (the default setting for which is to assume 50% genetic and 50% cultural influence on differences in cognitive ability) and the PC culture only model (which, in its crudest form, amounts to Blame Whitey), the next step to take in this discussion is to compare these two attempted explanations of the evidence, and to compare how well each one accounts for the facts. This will be the subject of the next post.

Select References

The following sources are merely a fragment of the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of studies to choose from. These are just some of my favorites. For those looking for more evidence (to agree with or find fault with), Rushton and Jenson, below, has a very long list of sources. It is somewhat dated now, though, as it was published in 2005; and as knowledge of genetics and of the human genome is increasing exponentially, knowledge of the genes’ effects on psychological traits also increases apace.

Rushton, J. P. and Jenson, A. R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (a journal of the American Psychological Association) 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294. (https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf) (This is a veritable treasure trove of politically incorrect empirical information. Table 5 especially is a real bastard.)

Saletan, W. (25 July 2011). Created Equal: Race, Genes, and Intelligence. Originally published by Slate Online. This contains much of the same information as Rushton and Jenson above, and may be partly based on it; but it is written in a less technical, more popular style, without all the reference notes. http://www.rense.com/general79/dut.htm

Murray, C., and Herrnstein, R. (1 Nov. 1994). Race, Genes, and IQ--An Apologia: The case for conservative multiculturalism. Published in the New Republic magazine. This consists mostly of a very meaty extract from Murray’s and Herrnstein’s hysteria-inspiring book The Bell Curve. Read it and try to tell me that Charles Murray is a man inspired by racial hatred. Compare his tone here with the tone of the college students who scream at him in protest. https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

Here is a very interesting interview of Charles Murray by Stefan Molyneux, discussing not only race and intelligence, but also psychological differences between the (two) biological genders, counterintuitive instructions on how to be a good parent, and a grim prophesy for the PC social sciences, especially those of “liberal” academia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lsa_97KIlc&t=5s

This YouTube video is of the first sources of information I ever saw on the issue of race and inherent intelligence, being clearly more right-wing in its politics (I don’t remember how I ever came across it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE9ONE0LhcU