In the first of two opposing commentaries, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good. In the second, Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue that such research is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth.


Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ? NO: Science and society do not benefit
Steven Rose is a neuroscientist and emeritus professor at the Open University, UK.
Email: S.P.R.Rose@open.ac.uk


Are there some areas of potential knowledge that scientists should not seek out? Or, if they do, should they keep the knowledge secret, hidden from the hoi polloi? Certainly Francis Bacon, that great theorist of the birth of modern science, thought so. For with knowledge comes power — potentially dangerous power. In his utopian novel The New Atlantis, scholars determined which of their findings were too dangerous to be shared. Modern governments, obsessed with biosecurity, make similar decisions about what can be researched, how, and in what way disseminated. Private companies bind researchers with non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements. Genetic tests for disorders that have no treatment, such as late-stage Alzheimer's, are often not offered for ethical reasons. As Steven Shapin's book The Scientific Life documents, the idea of free, untrammelled and publicly-disseminated research, if it ever corresponded to reality, looks distinctly unrealistic today.

To meet the canons of scientific enquiry a research project must meet two criteria: first, are the questions that it asks well-founded? Research based on the assumption that burning coal releases phlogiston fails this test. And second, are they answerable with the theoretical and technical tools available? As the eminent immunologist Peter Medawar pointed out, science is the art of the soluble. Further, given that our society already accepts a number of restrictions to the pursuit of knowledge, it is sensible to require that funded research also addresses questions that either contribute to basic scientific understanding, offer new beneficial technological prospects, or aid sound public policy-making. These criteria are, of course, those used by both public and private funding bodies.

So what should we make of the century-old but regularly-recycled call for research aimed at discovering whether there are group differences in intelligence?

These days the 'groups' under consideration are 'race' and 'gender'. But it has not always been so. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he regarded it as so self-evident that white Anglo-Saxon upper-class males were the most intelligent as not to need evidence. Half a century ago, at least in Britain, class was the more relevant grouping, leading to eugenic concerns that the genetically inferior workers were outbreeding their superiors. The issue of race and intelligence became prominent in the United States in the late 1960s, perhaps in response to the civil-rights movement. Arthur Jensen's How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? (A. R. Jensen Harvard Educ. Rev. 39, 1–123; 1969) argued that the deficit in black IQ was too great to be explained by deprivation and must be genetic. Similarly, the sex/gender question, naturalized through most of western scientific history, was thrust into the public domain as part of a backlash against emergent feminism in the 1970s by publications such as The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg, which argued that men, by grace of their physiology, were 'naturally' more successful than women at whatever society judged to represent success.

The categories judged relevant to the study of group differences are clearly unstable, dependent on social, cultural and political context. No one, to my knowledge, is arguing for research on group differences in intelligence between north and south Welsh (although there are well-established average genetic differences between people living in the two regions). This calls into question the motivation behind looking for such specific group differences in intelligence, sheds doubt on whether such research is well-founded, and begs whether answers could possibly be put to good use. As we shall see, a more thorough look at the field will prove that it fails all three of my criteria for justifiable science.

It's just ideology masquerading as science.

There is a difficulty in the first instance of measuring 'intelligence'. For around a century, this has been done with the IQ test, originally developed in France as a way of supplementing teachers' assessments of their pupils. In the hands of later psychometricians, the tests became increasingly reified, and seemingly made more scientific by the development of the term 'g' to encapsulate 'crystallized' or 'general intelligence'.

Social and cultural influences have a huge impact on our definitions and measures of race, gender and intelligence.

However, except to a small band of dedicated psychometricians, it seems obvious that to try to capture the many forms of socially expressed intelligent behaviour in a single coefficient — and to rank an entire population in a linear mode, like soldiers on parade lined up by height — excludes most richly intelligent human activities. Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, the intelligent hands of the craftsman or the intelligent intuition of the scientist all elude the 'g' straightjacket.

abundantly more at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7231/full/457786a.html