Is hereditarian research "abhorrent"?

A point-by-point response to a recent paper.

Written by Noah Carl.

A lot of epithets get thrown at hereditarian research: “racist”, “eugenicist”, “white supremacist” etc. A new paper by Lucas Matthews, James Tabery and Eric Turkheimer argues that it’s… “abhorrent”. The paper was published in the Hastings Center Report. This is the journal which, back in 2023, published a paper saying that hereditarian research should be held to higher evidentiary standards, and that when such standards are not met, “there should be a very strong presumption against its being conducted, funded, or published”. The authors – of whom there were nineteen – made this blatantly anti-Mertonian recommendation despite claiming to have “very diverse views”. Bo Winegard and I submitted a brief commentary on the earlier paper, but the editors declined to publish it. So rather than risk the same outcome again, I thought I’d respond to the new paper here.¹

Matthews, Tabery and Turkheimer: There is one more area in the value-harm map: scientific research that has little value and poses significant harm … It is this science that we call “abhorrent.” It is abhorrent because it serves no end other than to cause harm … Our case study is the genomic race science that we described at the outset.

The authors devise a “value-harm map” for classifying scientific research. The map has two dimensions: value (e.g., scientific value) and harm. So research can vary in terms of how valuable it is and in terms of how much harm it poses. The authors use “abhorrent” to describe research that has little value and poses significant harm. And they assert that “genomic race science” constitutes an example of such research. In fact, they go as far as to say that “its abhorrent nature warrants moral disgust”.

The first thing to say is that this is a rather unsatisfactory definition of “abhorrent”. It implies that extremely harmful scientific research would not qualify as “abhorrent” so long as it has at least some value. For example, several scholars have argued that the monstrously unethical experiments carried out by Nazi scientists during World War II have scientific value. If they’re right, then under the authors’ definition, those experiments would not qualify as “abhorrent”.²

Now, I don’t doubt for a second that the authors believe the Nazi experiments were, indeed, abhorrent. So why are they re-defining the term in such a way that might exempt the Nazi experiments? One possible reason is that doing so allows them to apply a highly emotive and negative term to an area of research of which they disapprove.

Matthews, Tabery and Turkheimer: The new genomic race science is harmful in a number of ways. Most obviously and dangerously, it fuels the weaponization of genetics and genomics … It contributed to the murder of ten Black people in Buffalo in 2022 … The new genomic race science does harm more insidiously when it contributes to the long and disturbing history of research that has been used to promote or justify discriminatory ideologies and policies.

The authors outline several ways in which “genomic race science” is harmful, such as that it could be used to “justify discriminatory ideologies and policies” or even “overt violence”. These are not unreasonable concerns. However, the authors neglect to mention some important details about the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto. It did cite material that could be characterised as “genomic race science”. But it also cited uncontroversial material relating to individual differences in intelligence, such as a 2015 paper in Nature Genetics. According to the authors’ argument, then, this paper must have “contributed to the murder of ten Black people”. What’s more, the manifesto explicitly rejected “race science” concerning Jews, dismissing Richard Lynn’s estimate of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ.

There’s a more significant problem with the authors’ argument: they consider the potential harms of “genomic race science” but ignore the potential benefits.

They do briefly mention Arthur Jensen’s view that “taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on futile attempts to eliminate the IQ gap”. Yet they don’t seem to count “not misallocating resources” (my words, not theirs) as a potential benefit. In other words, homing-in on the causes of racial IQ gaps could allow us to allocate resources more effectively. If the gaps turn out to be largely genetic, putting resources towards eliminating them would be wasteful and society would be better off spending the money on something else. Even simply giving the money to poor people in the form of unconditional cash transfers might be a better use.

The other key potential benefit of homing-in on the causes of racial IQ gaps through “genomic race science” is reducing resentment of more-successful groups. If the gaps turn out to be largely genetic, this could help to dispel the belief that those groups only got ahead thanks to racism, supremacy or privilege. Throughout history, many groups have faced resentment and even persecution because their success was taken as evidence of unfair advantage, including the Chinese in Indonesia, the Armenians in Turkey and the Jews in Europe.

The authors classify “genomic race science” as “harmful” on the grounds that it may have certain harmful effects. However, such research may also have certain beneficial effects, and it is far from clear that the potential harms outweigh the potential benefits. The authors’ argument would be tantamount to claiming that nuclear physics is “harmful” because it can be used for nuclear weapons without considering that it can also be used for nuclear power.

Matthews, Tabery and Turkheimer: Racism is also a major source of social harm. Social harms are best represented by drastic racial disparities in social goods, such as voting rights, education, health care, employment, housing, incarceration, and income or wealth inequality. Black Americans are poorer than non-Hispanic white Americans and live in substantially less valuable homes.

The authors discuss racial disparities in the US as if the country had only two racial groups. However, there are also Asians, who do better than whites on most social indicators despite having been subjected to racism. Now, you might say that blacks have faced more racism than Asians, and you would have a point. However, if racism were an important cause of racial disparities, you’d still expect Asians to do worse than whites. Yet they do better. And Jews in America do exceptionally well, despite having originally fled there to escape the holocaust. Overall, there is little or no association between the amount of racism a group has faced and how well it does in contemporary society.

Matthews, Tabery and Turkheimer: If there were research programs that could provide reasonably definitive answers to these questions in a nonbiased way, it would be difficult to justify not conducting them, and scientific genies are difficult to keep in the bottle in any event. But there are no genies.

The argument here seems to be that since current “genomic race science” cannot definitively establish whether genes contribute to racial IQ gaps, such research is “valueless”. (They actually use that word in the paper.) This seems to be a straightforward non-sequitur – an example of the continuum fallacy. If the research could not shed any light on the matter, then, yes, it would be “valueless”. But if can shed some light, then surely it must have some value.

The authors would need to claim that admixture studies, say, shouldn’t cause us to update at all in the direction of hereditarianism being true. There are now at least four admixture studies that have found evidence consistent with hereditarianism, namely a positive association between European ancestry and IQ among blacks. (Recall that black Americans are about 20% European on average, owing to intermixing in the past.)

Insisting that these studies shouldn’t cause us to update our beliefs at all would be a rather difficult. Back when early admixture studies suggested there was little or no association between European ancestry and IQ among blacks, some environmentalists, notably Richard Nisbett, took this as strong evidence against hereditarianism. In his 2009 book Intelligence and How to Get it, Nisbett describes admixture analysis as “by far the most direct way to assess the contribution of genes versus the environment to the black/white IQ gap”.

Source.

The excerpt above is from a paper published in 2012 on which Eric Turkheimer himself was an author. In fairness to Turkheimer, it does say, “We maintain”, so perhaps he has held the same view all along. However, the mere fact that he and his co-authors chose to mention Nisbett’s argument indicates they believed it was not entirely without merit.³ Indeed, admixture analysis has been applied to numerous other phenotypes, including by luminaries like David Reich. It’s only when the method is applied to IQ that we’re told the studies are too confounded to show anything useful.

Matthews, Tabery and Turkheimer: Whether a program of research is just controversial (or something worse) hinges on a balance between its practical or theoretical value and the magnitude and probability of the harms it may produce. On this analysis, the new genomic race science is not just controversial science but, rather, abhorrent science. It is abhorrent because it is both valueless and harmful.

Here the authors are summing up their argument in the final paragraph of the paper. Which gives me the opportunity to raise one more objection – specifically, a reductio ad absurdum. When they classify “genomic race science” as “harmful”, they presumably mean that various harms are caused by people believing in hereditarianism as opposed to environmentalism. Hence any research that raised the likelihood of hereditarianism being true would presumably qualify as similarly “harmful”.

Suppose someone carried out a study to examine whether each of several environmental factors explained the black–white IQ gap. And suppose the study concluded that none of them could explain it. By providing evidence against environmentalism, such a study would surely reduce the likelihood of environmentalism being true and correspondingly raise the likelihood of hereditarianism being true. By the authors’ logic, it would therefore qualify as “harmful”. And since it wouldn’t provide a definitive answer, it would also qualify as “valueless” (or of insufficient value in any case). So the study would have to be deemed “abhorrent”.

The authors’ argument proves too much. It is not merely “genomic race science” that is “abhorrent” but environmentalist research too.

Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.

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1. Tabery and Turkheimer are authors on the earlier paper, as well as the new one.

2. Others dispute that the Nazi experiments have any scientific value. Regardless of who is right, the general point stands. Under the author’s definition, research that involved torture or murder would not qualify as “abhorrent” as long as it had scientific value.

3. Nisbett was the first author on the paper.