Race Differences in Behavior

Assault on Psychology: Research on Race Differences Anathematized

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Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) has been called the Father of Modern Science. So it is fitting that he was, perhaps, the first scientist to be censured and silenced by political forces represented in his day by the Catholic Church. The issue then was evidence Galileo presented supporting the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system that contradicted the Aristotelian geocentric theory espoused by the establishment.

Elites have often used science to support the dominate ideology while suppressing evidence incompatible with their beliefs. One notable case was the rise of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), a Ukrainian biologist, rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the inheritance of environmentally acquired characteristics. This theory won favor because it fit well with the creation of the New Soviet Man: human nature was not innate, but as malleable and adaptable as were the characteristics of spring wheat.

The ideological orthodoxy of today is egalitarian multiculturalism, sometimes described as social or cultural Marxism. According to this doctrine the perceived differences between racial groups are superficial physical traits or cultural characteristics determined externally by history and the social environment.  All ethnic groups have equal potential for social development. A multicultural society is the most desirable and progressive social arrangement. There are no legitimate group interests that would preclude social harmony in a diverse and inclusive society.

Over the past half century, as social Marxism has tightened its ideological grip on the main stream media (MSM), education, corporations and the government, very few public persons have challenged its canon. But a handful of social scientists, mainly psychologists, have, along with Galileo, gone where the evidence led them. Because psychology deals with intelligence and behavior, the field is especially important for egalitarians to control. This essay will take a brief look at five psychologists who have contested established dogmas, and paid a price for doing so. Read more

White Men Can’t Jump, Black Men Can’t Shot-Put

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raceandsport_frontcoverRace and Sport: Evolution and Racial Differences in Sporting Ability
Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2015

 

The Ulster Institute’s latest study in human differences will come as a pleasant surprise to those who have complained about their previous somewhat narrow focus on IQ. Race and Sport is not the first book to venture into the taboo area of innate racial differences in athletic aptitude, but it is the most thorough and systematic so far.

The ice was first broken by Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It (2000). Numerous publishing houses rejected this work before it could see the light of day; some publishers were explicit about their fear that discussion of innate Black superiority in sport would lead inevitably to genetic explanations for low Black intelligence. A more serious objection to Mr. Entine’s thesis is that there are many sports Blacks do not dominate, and not all of these are winter sports (where an environmental explanation might be convincing).

Dutton and Lynn see reason for cautious optimism in the relative lack of furor surrounding the more recent publication of David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (2013). Epstein accepts that athletic ability is partly genetic in origin, although he does not focus on this matter. Read more

Science and Politics in Academe: Good Research is Not Enough

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At first glance, few people are as disagreeable as individuals with a touch of Asperger’s. Basically, they are high-IQ guys who tend to intuitively grasp things like logic, mathematics, and mechanics, yet are remarkably inept at socializing with other people. Because of their inborn characteristics, people on the Asperger’s end of the spectrum are often “nerds” who spend far more time facing a computer or slaving away in a lab than with other people. We have all seen The Social Network (2010) and its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged personality: a strange mix of raw genius, social clumsiness and lack of scruples, the latter allowing Zuckerberg to rip off the Winklevosses and betray his best friend Eduardo Saverin according to the wish of the gleeful manipulator Sean Parker. (Notice that the shared Jewishness of Zuckerberg and Saverin didn’t prevent the former from betraying the latter. That community has its breakdowns in ethnic networking too.)

Dark Enlightenment figure Nick Land claims that the biodiversity people — those scorned as “racists” by the mainstream media and parasitic class — are endowed with low agreeableness. They tend to have “low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. …  Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement.”

There is a grain of truth here. Trying to understand one’s fellows from the objective, disinterested point of view of science is not a behavior everyone will be attracted to or able to attain. Calm reflection about abstract principles is different from both blind habit and the passionate defense of some dogma — or one’s people. The pure scientist, after all, can never “take his own side.” He must forever be purely objective.

Honest — sometimes excessively; balanced in his epistemology to the point of favoring the groundbreaking — or plain truth in general — to popular dogmas; naively believing that his grand abstractions are an excellent recipe for society, like the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet who believed in an unlimited and exponential progress in future history. Read more

A bit of IQ realism in the LA Times

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Christopher Chabris, a psychologist at Union College, and Jonathan Wei, a researcher at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and at Case Western Reserve University, wrote an op-ed refuting a central dogma of cultural Marxism, that standardized tests have no validity (“Hire like Google? For most companies, that’s a bad idea“). What the professors write is not as surprising as where it appears. In general, while academic research continues to show the value of IQ testing, the mainstream media has been hostile to IQ testing because of the touchy subject of race differences.

Their article was a response to highly publicized comments by Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, who told the NY Times that “GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless…. We found that they don’t predict anything” (much to the delight of Tom Friedman, among others). Chabris and Wei:

Decades of quantitative research in the field of personnel psychology have shown that across fields of employment, measurements of “general cognitive ability” — which is another way of referring to the old-fashioned concept of intelligence or IQ — are consistently the best tools employers have to predict which new employees will wind up with the highest performance evaluations or the best career paths. We shouldn’t rush to assume that Google, with its private data, has suddenly refuted all that work. …

Chabris and Wei attribute Google’s experience to “restriction of range”— that is, once you select from a pool of high-IQ people, other traits within that pool become important contributors to individual differences. Bock’s emphasis on other qualities, such as intellectual humility (not being obsessed with having a high IQ score) and being an emergent leader (someone who can lead when appropriate but also follow when appropriate) certainly makes sense. But among potential Google employees, these other traits occur within a pool of people already selected for high IQ — even for those employees without a college education. One need not be a college graduate to win Google’s CodeJam competition, but you can’t possibly win without a high IQ. In the words of one winner, the problems were “more like mathematical work or solving logic puzzles.” Read more

A Tale of Two Trials: What the George Zimmerman and O.J. Simpson Verdicts Reveal About Racial Denial

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One transparent outcome of the “not guilty” verdict in the George Zimmerman trial is the racial disconnect between the average American and the nation’s powerful elites (the mass media, politicians, and “civil rights” leaders). The ever-widening gulf between racial reality and racial fantasy—the daily repetition of Black violence in contrast with the media-driven narrative of nonstop injustices of an oppressed minority—seems more pronounced in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict.

We live in an era of extreme racial denial. The nation’s media and political elites—what Joseph Sobran termed the “hive”—live in a fantasy realm that dismisses latent racial differences, an existence defined by unrealistic egalitarianism and hyper-liberalism; racial disparities are merely symptomatic of the lingering impact of slavery, racism, and discrimination. The emphasis is always on some inanimate object—“mean” streets, “gun” violence, “epidemic of violence,” “crack” cocaine, “heat waves,” “underfunding” of Head Start, the lack of upward “middle class mobility”; or the fault of law enforcement—“police brutality,” “deficient” law enforcement strategies, “racial profiling,” or “Stand Your Ground” laws.

The crux of the Zimmerman case is fundamentally about holding Blacks accountable for their own actions. The jury of six females—five Whites and one Hispanic—reached a reasonable conclusion that the defendant acted in self-defense in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The evidence presented at trial countered the prosecution’s claims that Zimmerman was the aggressor, stalked Martin, initiated the altercation, and as a “wannabe” cop shot Martin—an innocent “unarmed” 17-year-old bystander. Most of the media coverage in the wake of the verdict reinforces the unfounded assumption that Trayvon Martin was innocently preyed upon—nothing more than a victim of “profiling,” who was just an “unarmed” teenager, a kid, trying to get home. This is the fantasy that our elites are hyping and one the jury simply rejected outright.

The Zimmerman jury, after a careful assessment of the evidence, concluded that Martin was the aggressor. After an initial encounter, Martin forced Zimmerman to the ground after sucker-punching him, pounded Zimmerman’s head against the concrete sidewalk, and after 45-seconds of screaming and fearing for his life, Zimmerman shot Martin to save his own life.

The verdict has produced a predictable tsunami of racial demagoguery from beltway pundits. Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Tavis Smiley, and Jesse Jackson have exploited the jury decision to project their own warped views about the endless suffering of Blacks from White oppression. Read more

Remembering a Scientific Pioneer—Arthur R. Jensen (1923–2012)

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Jen-sen-ism (jen’se niz’em), n. the theory that an individual’s IQ is largely due to heredity, including racial heritage. [1965-1970]; after Arthur R. Jensen (born 1923), U.S. educational psychologist, who proposed such a theory; see -ism]—Jen’sen-ist, Jen’sen-ite’, n., adj.

— The Random House and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionaries

Arthur Jensen’s death on October 22 is a pathetic reminder of the strangehold of political correctness on our society. To the extent that it has been mentioned at all, Professor Jensen’s death has been contextualized in such a manner that leaves little doubt among readers that Jensen was wrong about his ideas on race differences in IQ. Thus the New York Times obituary mentions Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of IQ testing, despite Gould’s well-established track record as a leftist activist who likely engaged in fraud to support his views (see also here). The obituary also gives far less prominence to Jensen than to one Sonja C. Grover, an educational psychologist at Lakehead University in Ontario who feels that “you cannot separate social science from human rights.”

However it also quotes Prof. James Flynn whose work has indicated rising intelligence over recent decades and has taken the rather cautious view that “The best we can say is that it is more probable that the I.Q. gap between black and white is entirely environmental in origin.”

“Jensen was a true scientist, and he was without racial bias,” Professor Flynn added. “It never occurred to Arthur Jensen that people would use his data to argue for racial supremacy. Now, to be fair to his critics, over time he became more and more convinced that the evidence did show a genetic component.”

I suppose we should be grateful for the statement that Jensen was a true scientist, but how in the world are his critics supported by the simple fact that Jensen continued to believe that racial differences were genetically influenced when his own views are hardly a ringing endorsement of environmentalism? Read more

Race realism: Breaking into the mainstream

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A friend  and I were talking about Arthur Jensen–the psychologist who reignited the race and IQ debate with his 1969 paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” published in the Harvard Educational Review. My friend said that starting with that paper there had been a huge amount of supportive research published in reputable academic journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. There have also been major works like The Bell Curve that provoked a national discussion in newspapers and intellectual media. And there have been major works by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn published by academic presses.

The thrust of my friend’s comments was that it was just a matter of time before it becomes standard wisdom, informing all respectable discussions of the issue, even among politicians and the mainstream media. Read more