Self-Censorship on Campus Is Bad for Science
30th May 2019
Evn The Atlantic realizes it.
I have taught evolution and genetics at Williams College for about a decade. For most of that time, the only complaints I got from students were about grades. But that all changed after Donald Trump’s election as president. At that moment, political tensions were running high on our campus. And well-established scientific ideas that I’d been teaching for years suddenly met with stiff ideological resistance.
Proglodytes are quick to label their opponents ‘science deniers’ but don’t seem to realize when they do the same thing.
In class, though, some students argued instead that it is impossible to measure IQ in the first place, that IQ tests were invented to ostracize minority groups, or that IQ is not heritable at all. None of these arguments is true. In fact, IQ can certainly be measured, and it has some predictive value. While the score may not reflect satisfaction in life, it does correlate with academic success. And while IQ is very highly influenced by environmental differences, it also has a substantial heritable component; about 50 percent of the variation in measured intelligence among individuals in a population is based on variation in their genes. Even so, some students, without any evidence, started to deny the existence of heritability as a biological phenomenon.
Welcome to our world.
May 30th, 2019 at 06:00
What could be more important evolutionarily speaking than the ability of the offspring to understand the parents?