Unbelievers
19th March 2018
Science-deniers are alive in well — in the ‘scientific’ community.
Eric Turkheimer seems to think that the possibility of racial IQ differences is refuted by an “ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair”. That’s an odd argument. Does it work with Downs and Fragile X? I doubt if he has ever used it for any other issue. Should I use it to deny the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, or smallpox epidemics, or asteroid strikes? If he thought that there just weren’t any such differences, he wouldn’t need special new ‘logical’ principles to prevent them from existing – would he?
Philip Kitcher advocates raising the bar for evidence supporting theories he doesn’t like. I’ve talked about this [The Veeck effect]. Why do you think he makes this argument? If populations really were effectively the same in IQ, there would be lots of easily observable evidence for it. No way to prove exact equality, but it wouldn’t be hard to show that group A and B were close. But nobody does, because nobody can. If this were true, it would show up in a genetic admixture study: so nobody will do one.