Selected Writings About Intelligence
26th May 2018
Researchers of group differences have pointed out until they are blue in the face that believing in equal rights is not contingent on believing all people are born with the same abilities and that merely by discussing the causes of group differences in mean IQ they are not intending to question the moral basis for sexual or racial equality. You can believe that there are between-group IQ differences – you can even believe that these differences are 80% heritable – and still remain committed to equal rights….
But anti-hereditarians seem to have extraordinary difficulty grasping this point – it is as if they want their opponents to be making this false inference even though, by imagining this sin, they are unconsciously committing it themselves. If you argue that any research into group differences is ‘dangerous’ because it threatens to undermine the basis for equal rights, you are implicitly accepting the twisted logic of the racist’s argument, namely, that if people aren’t equal in their capabilities, then we would be justified in denying some groups their civil rights. It is this inference that is racist, not any claim about group differences, whether true or not, and it is not one that most intelligence researchers are guilty of. No doubt some hereditarians are racists, but then the beliefs of some cultural determinists are pretty toxic too, such as Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot.
These are points that cannot be too often repeated, and are areas in which proglodytes are subject to massive cognitive dissonance.