Race Science Is Not Real (It Is Also Not Wrong)

Summary of a scrapped post about race science

Newer, or less regular readers of Unglossed, will likely be caught off guard to learn this journal intermittently devotes attention to problems to do with race. Well: Consider the previous sentence your notice.

Last week, I composed a draft in this vein, which intended to serve as an introduction to rather bigger ideas, but also to develop my thoughts in response to a months-long twitter spectacle involving one lone progressive by the name of Will Stancil, on the side of the default liberal dogma that racial differences are not genetically determined, and an army of accounts contesting otherwise, which coalesced around Steve Sailer.

Generally, what has taken place is that Sailer and others who believe race is a basis of human differences have asked Stancil to refute their claims; Stancil has asked these others to refute his criticism of any type of thinking that could lead to making such claims. He has done this to defend the basic post-War-liberal premise that race is not a big deal in explaining group or individual qualities, except that “this” is not actually defending the truth of the premise, but only the necessity for purporting to believe it.

The thesis of my draft was essentially that both sides of the “debate” have made the same category error — namely, believing that their views are a product of Science™ (as opposed to “lower” forms of inference). The following is a more stripped-down rewrite, followed by a response to a related post by Richard Hanania.

Race science is not real

First, I have in fact made this point already when it comes to the contemporary proponents of “race science” or “human biodiversity” (HBD, as it goes); the new post was merely going to expand the critique to the liberal side of the debate. In the first case, if it were true that IQ studies prove some races are less intelligent (whether due to nurture or nature), then it would be true that some races are less intelligent — which means that this fact would be obvious to the casual observation of any intelligent person. “Science” wouldn’t be needed here, and wouldn’t add anything to knowledge; studying IQ this way would be akin to performing a study to show that taller people have higher heights.

There is more that could be said, but it will fit just as well in the next section.

That science doesn’t know if (natural) race differences exist doesn’t mean they do not exist

In the second place, regarding the liberal worldview Stancil has undertaken to defend, a repudiation of “race science” (by me or by scientific consensus), however reasonable, does not mean that racial differences don’t exist. To think otherwise is to confuse a method for generating beliefs — the collection of activities and claims we call “science” — with the power of adjudicating what is possibly true.

The set of things we call “science” is just a tool; the scientific method more narrowly defined is likewise just a tool. But like any tool, there are things they cannot do well. Much of biology falls into this category — this does not mean that biology is not real. The same goes for racial differences: The limitations of “science” in this realm do not, by depriving man of one method of generating positive beliefs, nullify anything about what is real. “If you can’t prove it with science, it doesn’t exist” — this is not and will never be true.

Now, what Stancil personally thinks or believes about the modern scientific “consensus” on racial differences remains elusive, despite weeks and weeks of debate; all that is certain is that he holds that this consensus is the only view one is permitted to entertain, anything else is a vile, Hitlerian outrage.

I speak here, however, of the vague, collective assumptions which he has poised himself to defend from the new scientific racists.

The core problem here is that most people in America, certainly most progressives, believe that the scientific consensus has moved beyond race science due to a decline in new evidence or a true repudiation of old evidence, rather than a raising of the standard of the field to an impossible height. In other words, it is not that race science is particularly good at producing knowledge — it isn’t — but it is also not that most biology is particularly good at this, either. Consider for example — there is always a fresh example — that it has just been suggested, in 2024, that one of the nutrients added to enriched flour might cause heart failure. You know, maybe. Until another study produces an opposite conclusion.

Sure!

What prevails in the modern research on racial differences, lets call it “racial biology,” is simply that a higher standard is used than all the rest of biology; because it is a taboo subject, and involves political connotations, researchers after The Bell Curve generally know to avoid making any substantive claims for fear of backlash.

Personally, I don’t even think this form of self-censorship is a particularly bad idea. Probably, human race politics shouldn’t be based on claims contained in the thing called “science;” it is ultimately a job for philosophy, lay rhetoric, votes, and violence.

Since once again I am talking about the disconnect between a collective idea being defended by Stancil, and the reality of “the science,” it is helpful to visit a summary of the topic offered by Turkheimer, et al. in 2017 in reply to a Sam Harris interview of Charles Murray. Since this essay appeared in Vox, it represents the justification for “why good-thinking liberals should understand that science doesn’t support natural racial differences in IQ.” The argument is that while there are obvious racial differences in IQ, science has not shown that these differences are collectively natural (genetic and tied to race). But by “not shown,” what they mean is exactly what I have written above: Can’t show. They write:¹

It is not possible to give a meaningful estimate of the percentage [of racial differences in IQ that are driven by genes]. […]

Unfortunately, Murray’s proposal that the IQ gap is the result of a little genetics and a little environment does not offer a way out of the scientific and ethical dilemma faced by the (alleged) science of race and behavior. Scientifically, there is no method that can apportion group differences in this way, no empirical analysis that might assign IQ differences between racial groups to one or another source, much less come up with a meaningful balance between the two.

There is not a single example of a group difference in any complex human behavioral trait that has been shown to be environmental or genetic, in any proportion, on the basis of scientific evidence. Ethically, in the absence of a valid scientific methodology, speculations about innate differences between the complex behavior of groups remain just that, inseparable from the legacy of unsupported views about race and behavior that are as old as human history. The scientific futility and dubious ethical status of the enterprise are two sides of the same coin.

This simply amounts to a vow not to “do racial biology” the same way any other biology precedes. All science once again is an imperfect tool for generating claims and beliefs. Normally, research attempts to build on previous claims and beliefs, and in the case of biology and medicine, these claims and beliefs occasionally lead to technologies which seem to provide benefits (or slowly poison your heart; anyone’s guess); in other cases they turn out to be dead ends built on fraudulent data.

So why can’t racial biology precede under these same rules? Well, because then lay citizens and politicians would use it to justify taboo political positions.

The title of Turkheimer, et al.’s post is “There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes.” So far as this is true, it is only in the sense that there’s no “good” reason to believe all sorts of things that make it to the abstract of biology papers every day, and from there appear in news headlines, merely because they are not politically controversial.

But once again, the exceptional circumspection of racial biology, whether appropriate or not, doesn’t equate to a “scientific” refutation of natural racial differences.

It just means that the scientific consensus has agreed to not lend its normally overrated social credibility to this one, politically sensitive issue (would that they had made the same agreement for experimental mRNA vaccines).

The HBD-fixated and their “secret knowledge”

As the draft of this post sat collecting dust on my dashboard, Richard Hanania published a substack post which also seems to be in reply to the same twitter spectacle, and also makes a similar argument (in part) regarding science.

Shut up About Race and IQ

Hanania’s post weds observations about the hypocrisy of race science on all sides to a more sprawling argument, one which regards inter alia the supposed superiority of open-borders multiculturalism as a social preference in general and among elites, and, presuming the reader agrees with this point, the need for libertarians in favor of the same to abandon a fixation on truth, and focus on hyping whatever the notional perks of one’s preferred view are to the public. The post feels like an embryonic book offering a new answer to the race/immigration/wokism debates. If I had to guess — though I wouldn’t, since I do not follow Hanania’s work closely enough — this “new answer” was prompted by the travails of Will Stancil and Steve Sailer on twitter.

Stancil’s name does not appear anywhere in Hanania’s post, but it is difficult not to suspect a relationship. Stancil’s primary foil in the last months of tweet debates regarding whether “HBD is true” has been writer and researcher Steve Sailer, who coined the term. Sailer rarely misses an opportunity to answer a rhetorical question on the platform with something along the lines of “because HBD.” Notably, Hanania’s new post is titled “Shut up About Race and IQ,” indicating a strong repudiation of his association with the HBD-fixated. In the content of the post, Hanania has nearly come around to the side of his own critic, Michael Lind, who wrote in Compact last year that “most neo-hereditarian writings fall into an opposite trap [of leftist blank-slatism], presenting race as the master-key for understanding every social and political issue.” Hanania was used as the poster-child for Lind’s critique; now his critique is lightly echoed in Hanania’s key observation: That the HBD-fixated typically only mention group differences because they hold a set of related beliefs about society and justice, which they imagine must be acknowledged as correct and preferable once the underlying biological reality is acknowledged; these political conclusions are, in their imagination, “unlocked” by racial science (emphasis added):

If someone is into HBD, it usually encompasses the following four beliefs.

1. Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)

2. Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)

3. People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)

4. Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)

I know many people who only believe in 1, but not 2-4. Almost to a person, they do not want all of us to be talking about group differences, often out of fear that doing so will lead to a belief in descriptive tribalism, justify tribalism, and reinforce zero-sum thinking. Yet if someone grabs you by the shoulders and demands you talk about race and IQ, you can assume that he doesn’t only believe in group differences, but the whole HBD package.

[…] It’s of course no accident that there’s a strong correlation between believing we should talk about 1 and accepting 2-4. People who get really into group differences and put it at the center of their politics don’t actually care all that much about the science. I think for the most part they just think foreigners and other races are icky. They therefore latch on to group differences as a way to justify what they want for tribal or aesthetic reasons.

Where Stancil really would seem to come into play, at least in my imagination, is that his twitter dialogues have generated ample public evidence that Sailer and other HBD-fixated can’t help but pivot the conversation from 1 to N. Often the N is not quite what Hanania has listed here, but just some embarrassingly unrigorous theory for how genetic group differences result in individual particularities — as if for the white men obsessed with HBD, the races of humanity are horoscope signs:

@whstancil (twitter.com)

This is not to say that Stancil has comported himself impressively — he has provided ample fodder for understanding the ethical naivety (Mean Things Bad) and reliance on raw authority of the progressive mindset. Research findings that don’t fit the progressive worldview he will declare as “debunked,” meaning simply that it has been agreed by mainstream “race science” to pretend the findings never happened. Sailer is right that Stancil hasn’t refuted a single HBD argument, but merely dismisses them without pretext or on grounds of being Bad Manners For White People. But still, one could hardly do better to reveal that alternative “race science” is also unscientific than Sailer’s ruminations about the physics of biracial quarterbacks.

But not only that, they have shown it to be low-class. The confused perception, by the HBD-fixated, of group differences in IQ for some esoteric element of knowledge, some secret which unlocks understanding of the world, reveals the HBD-fixated to have succumbed to Conspiracy Egotism — the “secret knowledge” in question becomes the center of the believer’s focus not because it is interesting, or maybe true, but because believing in it makes the believer feel like they are special.

It is no wonder that Hanania, who (seems to) brand his work for hypothetical high-IQ readers, would now suddenly insist on shutting up about IQ. (Note that in his new post, one of the first points he makes is that racial IQ differences are in fact not secret knowledge, just ignored knowledge, and makes .)

Moving forward (or backward) from HBD

And so if Hanania is renouncing HBD as, rather than a scientific fact which demands certain political conclusions, motivated reasoning for those same conclusions, he is perceptive enough to realize that only a system of self-aware motivated reasoning can provide a way back to his preferred conclusions. “Race science” must be thrown in the bin, because the truth of racial differences (natural or environmental) has never mattered to what anyones preferred demographic and political vision is. From here, he precedes to rebuild his argument for sustained immigration, free trade, etc. on the basis of “people like multiculturalism, especially elites” and a set of materialistic, utilitarian arguments.

I could write an entire separate post on what I see as the flaws in Hanania’s grand scheme, but what’s more important for this post is that I essentially agree with the approach he takes to arrive at it. Race “science” cannot offer insight into what whites, Blacks, or other peoples in America or the West should do regarding the ongoing crisis of civil rights preferences and expectations (i.e. wokism) and immigration. The answer must be found in asking “What do people want to do,” and “What are people willing to do?”

At the same time, it would be well for the HBD-fixated to understand that science is not their friend, but the “enemy of their enemy.” The collective, liberal impression that science has refuted or “moved beyond” earlier beliefs in natural racial differences is inaccurate.

Science simply has acknowledged that it isn’t the right tool to help humans think about this issue.

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1. Turkheimer, Eric. Harden, Kathryn Paige. Nisbett, Richard E. “There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes.” June 17, 2017. Vox.