Racial science has discovered the power of flattery. Last year, three scholars published a paper, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, in which they argued that Ashkenazi Jews were considerably more intelligent than other Europeans, because their history of moneylending and other financial pursuits favoured genes associated with cleverness.
The principle at stake was essentially the same as the one underlying The Bell Curve, in which Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein suggested that black people might be innately less intelligent than white people, that race is biologically real and that some races are intellectually superior to others.
But the public reaction was strikingly different. There was none of the outrage that followed The Bell Curve‘s appearance in 1994. Instead, there were thoughtful commentaries on the paper’s arguments.
At a meeting in New York, where psychologist Steven Pinker spoke about the Ashkenazi paper, writer Maggie Wittlin was troubled. Reporting for Seed magazine, she said: ”People will hear what they want to hear. And many in attendance were there to hear that Jews are naturally smarter than everyone else.”
Seduction is more powerful than provocation — and more insidious. And it is not directed at one ethnic group. As Pinker has noted, race has raised its head in public several times in the past year, and the lack of reaction has been notable.
Murray restated his case in the magazine Commentary. The British biologist Armand Marie Leroi argued in The New York Times that race was a scientifically meaningful and medically valuable concept. His case has the implicit support of the United States Food and Drug Administration, which has approved the heart drug BiDil, intended specifically for black people.
Discredited by association with the Third Reich, and then discarded by mainstream science, racial science is pushing for rehabilitation on a range of fronts.
Last month, Pinker told the Edge website that ”the dangerous idea of the next decade” will be the notion that ”groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments”. It is all the more dangerous for being bound up with ideas about how populations vary in their susceptibility to disease. The implication is that we must take these ideas as a package.
We are ill-prepared to respond to the complex challenges posed by racial arguments bobbing in the unstoppable tide of genetic research. In the past it was easy: an ominous reference to the Nazis and a snippet of scientific reassurance — such as the observation that there is more variation within so-called races than between them — would do the trick. But the hard-core advocates of race science have spent years working out answers to the standard rebuttals.
Over the years, the denial of race became almost absolute. Differences were only skin-deep, it was said, despite the common knowledge that certain groups had higher incidences of genetically influenced diseases. It became a taboo, and as the taboo starts to appear outdated or untenable, denial will be replaced by acceptance.
But we don’t need to take it as a package. In particular, we should not be misled into thinking sexes and races are the same kind of thing. Evolutionary theory affirms that, in general, male and female behaviour will differ. On race, however, it has little or nothing to say.
Whereas there is a fundamental asymmetry between the genetic interests of men and women, because women have to invest more resources in their offspring than men do, different peoples are much the same.
Although hard-core race theorists talk about the bracing effects of cold open spaces upon East Asian mental abilities — which they consider to be greater than those of any other group — they are pushed to explain why such environments should promote intelligence any more than, say, the Australian outback.
If life in groups of clever primates was the main driving force behind human intelligence, as many scientists nowadays believe, it’s harder still to see why intelligence should vary with the landscape.
For most people, these are unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable arguments. Critical and frank discussion from publicly engaged scientists would be welcome. But perhaps the most constructive thing to do is to reflect on our own attitudes.
Our ideas about race are a mishmash of received opinions, partly remembered facts and subjective impressions. They probably include more old-fashioned racial notions than we would like to think, but clever approaches, such as the Ashkenazi paper, may lure them to the surface.
We have gone beyond the stage where the question of racial science could be seen as a straightforward contest between decent values and sinister pseudoscience. It’s no longer black and white. — Â