How should we debate Race Creationists?

Technical details must not distract us from the big picture.

Written by Simon Laird.

You wake up tomorrow in an alternate universe. America is ruled by Christian televangelists. Joel Osteen is the President. Harvard, Yale and every other major American university proclaims that Christ is King, Genesis is literally true, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

In this alternate universe, an “Evolutionist” is one of the worst things someone can be accused of being. Democrats often insinuate that Republicans are secretly motivated by Evolutionism, but Republicans trip over themselves to explain that they’re not. “Wanting law and order has nothing to do with Evolutionism” they protest. “It’s not Evolutionist to oppose affirmative action.”

In hundreds of Hollywood movies, the villains are Evolutionists. When these villains commit murders and other wicked deeds, it is heavily implied that these wicked actions are an inevitable consequence of their belief in the depraved ideology of Evolutionism.

Every mainstream university has a Department of Creation Science where people study the works of Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and Richard Lewontin. Many people privately suspect that these Departments of Creation Science lack scientific rigor, but they never say so publicly—because doing so would be career suicide. There are a few outlier universities where professors insist that humans evolved from apes over millions of years, but no one listens to these oddballs.

In this alternate universe, it isn’t illegal to be an Evolutionist. Some eccentrics make YouTube videos presenting the scientific case for evolution. But YouTube bans many of their videos and they are forced onto ghettoized alternatives like BitChute and Odysee.

Naturally, you have to keep your belief in evolution secret if you have a normal job. If you express your beliefs at work, you will of course be fired. Your boss doesn’t really have a choice. If you remain employed after voicing your Evolutionist views, any other employee can sue your boss for “creating a hostile work environment for Jesus.” Under US law, these “hostile environment for Jesus” lawsuits carry heavy damages. So your boss’s choice is to either fire you or go bankrupt. Even if you express your beliefs in a forum unrelated to work, you could be opening your employer up to lawsuits.

So you find yourself in this alternate universe. But you are a good, honest person who wants to speak the truth. What should you do? Should you timidly nibble around the edges of Creationist Dogma? Should you spend years of your life getting a PhD in Creation Science so that you can have the authority to contradict the Creation Science professors in the universities?

Or should you tell the truth, boldly and clearly: that Creation Science is false and humans evolved from apes over millions of years?

There are many converging lines of evidence for biological race differences in intelligence and other mental traits. People of mixed race have average IQs between the average IQs of their parents’ races. Black and white children adopted into middle class homes still differ in average IQ when they grow up. MRI scans reveal average racial differences in brain size and shape. Admixture studies yield a negative association between African ancestry and IQ. No policy has been able to reliably close or even reduce the racial IQ gap.

Among the most powerful arguments of all is the evolutionary one. Evolution left us with differences in skin, hair, bones, heart, stomach, spleen and almost every other organ. It is practically impossible that evolution would have affected every organ in the body except the brain. The different branches of the human species have been living in different environments for tens of thousands of years. Again, it is practically impossible that groups inhabiting such diverse environments would evolve in exactly the same way.

One could try to argue that evolved race differences in intelligence are small, but the official mainstream position—that such evolved differences are zero—is essentially impossible.

Some people who deny biological race differences like to get bogged down in the technical aspects of molecular genetics. Young Earth Creationists use the same tactic.¹ Consider Professor John Sanford’s “Genetic Entropy” argument. Sanford, the Cornell geneticist² who co-invented the “gene gun”, claims that the genome is constantly deteriorating, so it would be impossible for animals to develop new, useful adaptations over millions of years. Sanford argues that evidence from molecular genetics proves the human species cannot be more than 6,000 years old.

Professor Sanford knows a lot more about molecular genetics than I do. But even though he is an expert in molecular genetics and I am not, I can confidently reject Sanford’s Creationist arguments because he gets the epistemic priority backwards. The fact that humans evolved is more strongly-evidenced than any particular claim in the field of molecular genetics. Hence if molecular genetics contradicts the fact that evolution happened, we should doubt molecular genetics before we doubt evolution.

As Helena Cronin noted in a debate with a sex-difference denier, “Sex differences in mentality have been in the making for 800 million years. If they don’t show up in neuroscience, it’s the neuroscience that needs to get real.”

Many experts have gotten into the weeds of Sanford’s molecular genetic arguments, and rebutted them. I’m glad that such rebuttals exist, but one wonders if they are an effective method of science communication.

Consider a reasonably smart but uninformed person who watches a debate between two experts on whether or not humans evolved. If the two experts spend a lot of dealing with the technical aspects of molecular genetics, the viewer might come away with the false impression that in order to establish whether humans evolved, he would first have to learn a lot about molecular genetics.

The truth is that you can have well-informed views about whether humans evolved without knowing any molecular genetics at all. Charles Darwin had well-informed views about evolution a century before the structure of DNA was discovered.

If you were in the alternate universe, how would you approach Young Earth Creationism? You couldn’t take half-measures and just say you disagree with it. You would have to go all in: you’d have to be clear that Young Earth Creationism is completely false. Because if you weren’t clear about that, you’d be vulnerable to a devastating counterargument: “Almost every expert disagrees with you.” And the only response to that argument would be, “The experts are lying and the universities are corrupt.”

If you attempted to soft-pedal your case by saying that Young Earth Creationists are wrong but they’re acting in good faith, then you’d have no way to explain why anyone should listen to you. If the experts were intellectually honest, it would be extremely unlikely that you had found something that every single one of them had missed. A lay person in the alternate universe would be justified in ignoring you and trusting the expert consensus.

You would need to tell the whole, unvarnished truth: “Young Earth Creationism isn’t just wrong, it is fundamentally wrong. And the experts are acting in bad faith.”

We shouldn’t be mean-spirited. But I worry that taking an overly polite tone with Race Creationists does a disservice to the general public because it gives the false impression that biological race differences is a subject that honest and well-informed people can disagree about. It isn’t. Race Creationism is like Young Earth Creationism. They are both doctrines that people believe for essentially religious reasons. And they were never supported by sound evidence.

The idea that all branches of the human species are identical on every mental trait was always wrong. It was as wrong as the idea that all breeds of horses are equally fast, that all breeds of corn are equally fecund, or that all breeds of cows produce the same amount of milk.

The reason why many smart and honest lay people still believe in Race Creationism is that they grew up in a culture where that belief is the norm, and they’ve just never had the time to look into it more deeply. Those honest lay people have been led astray by intentionally dishonest experts.³ Engaging bad-faith actors in polite debate without making clear that they are bad-faith actors does a disservice to honest lay people who want to learn the truth.

So how should we debate Race Creationists? While we should be willing to debate anyone in principle, we must make crystal clear that doing so is like debating whether the earth is flat. The best way to do this is to constantly draw comparisons to doctrines like Flat Earthism. This is not a tactic that Race Creationists will appreciate, but it’s truthful and can be done politely.

Furthermore, we ought to head off some of the moral concerns that people have about race science. As I argued in Aporia last year, poverty in Africa is not solely a product of African genes. It really is possible for the global poor to have dramatically better lives, even if their IQs can’t be substantially raised. But the first step towards improving life for everyone is to acknowledge basic facts.

When we treat race deniers with greater seriousness than we treat Young Earth Creationists, we run the risk of giving the public the false impression that race denial is more intellectually serious than Young Earth Creationism.

Simon Laird holds a Master's degree in economics from George Mason University and works for a political organization in Washington, DC. He writes about philosophy on his Substack.

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1. For a comprehensive study of similarities between “Cognitive Creationists” and “Young Earth Creationists”, see this paper.

2. He is now semi-retired, but remains at Cornell as a Courtesy Associate Professor.

3. Here some quotes from Eric Turkheimer:

If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment.

When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.

Why don’t we accept racial stereotypes as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false? They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings. No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that Africans have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table-tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

What would you think about a Young Earth Creationist who said the following?

We don’t accept Evolutionist claims as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false, because it is a matter of ethical principle that human beings are not the descendants of mere beasts.