Race and Intelligence, Parts 2 through 1,000,000

And just when we thought the whole "race and intelligence" thing was dying down, here comes Slate's William Saletan with a huge three-page spread detailing the arguments for and against (but mostly for) "racial theories" of intelligence. That in turn generated a fury of blog posts from some of the best of the web (and some of the not-so-best).

Saletan's main argument was that racial IQ differences are more or less a scientific fact, and the question is whether those differences are genetic or environmental. He comes down on the side of "genetic," and then spends some time asking how society should respond to such genetic differences. One answer: we should use science to make people's IQs equal.

Racialist Steve Sailer naturally backed Saletan all the way. Conservative blogger Ross Douthat praised Saletan for his bravery in speaking up for what Douthat thinks will soon become mainstream science. At The American Scene, Noah Millman (hey, he stole my name, grr) thinks that liberals, being inherently more "realist" than conservatives, will actually jump on the emerging race/IQ bandwagon before conservatives.

Not so fast, said Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell. "[T]he ‘scientists’ whom Saletan praises are demonstrable charlatans and cranks." Matt Yglesias agreed, wondering why racialists keep claiming that "there's overwhelming opposition in public opinion to the view that whites are intrinsically smarter than blacks and also that there's strong scientific consensus in favor of that hypothesis," when actually "[t]he "black genes make you dumb" crowd is siding against what most researchers believe." And Eric Turkheimer at Cato Unbound claimed that the question of whether we should even study racial IQ differences is a moral question, not a scientific one, and so we shouldn't be thinking about this topic at all.

Whew. Well, that's the debate. I think that's all the links I'll post on the subject, as it's now pretty played out. But I'd like to add one more thought here...something I think everyone else has overlooked.

Every race-and-IQ study that any racialist ever cites shows that Asians are, on average, significantly ahead of whites. But go back 150 years, and European countries had steamships circumnavigating the globe, interchangeable parts and mechanized sewing machines, steam engines and electricity and Newton's Laws and the periodic table. China and Japan and Korea had nothing remotely in the same league. Despite their lower average IQs, Europeans managed to conquer the world, invent modern science, and change the trajectory of humanity forever, while the Asian countries basically sat on their high-IQ butts and twiddled their thumbs for 400 years or more.

Which just goes to show: the capabilities of individuals are often of less importance than the way in which those individuals are organized. Sociopolitical systems that allow people to cooperate in a productive, nonviolent way, that encourage innovation and constant improvement, will succeed, and systems that focus on maintaining rigid internal control and hierarchies will fail, regardless of the IQs of the people under those systems.

And that is why the debate over race and IQ is so beside the point.