The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine


illustration

In Defense of the Bell Curve:
The Reality of Race and the Importance of Human Differences

Last week, we republished the cognitive psychologist Diane Halpern’s critique of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Dr. Halpern is one of the world’s leading scientists in the study of cognitive differences, including both race and gender, and she herself has encountered controversy for just daring to study the subject.

Below, we republish the late U.C. Berkeley anthropologist Vince Sarich’s article, “In Defense of The Bell Curve: The Reality of Race and the Importance of Human Differences.” Sarich was also a very controversial scientist for his research on race and group differences, from which he never backed down.

At Skeptic magazine, there are no sacred cows, no ideas too hot to touch. It is our belief that truth will win out in the bright light of open discussion, debate, and disputation. After reading both articles, judge for yourself how to think about the bell curve.


The Bell Curve and the many commentaries on it have brought several issues into an often uncomfortably sharp focus. Though race is by no means the most important of these, the historical baggage the term carries and the reality it symbolizes, require us to get past it before we are able to deal with more substantive matters. Yet that same baggage and those same realities often raise emotional barriers so powerful that they defy facts, reason, and logic.

Many commentators would have us believe that The Bell Curve is obsessed with race, and thereby provide a prime exemplar of pots, kettles, and blackness, evidenced in the following quote from the sociologist Alan Wolfe: “Murray and Herrnstein may not be racists, but they are obsessed by race. They see the world in group terms and must have data on group membership.” This is an interesting charge, says Charles Krauthammer (1994), “given the fact that for the last two decades it is the very liberals who so vehemently denounce Murray who have been obsessed by race, insisting that every institution—universities, fire departments, Alaskan canneries—must have data on group membership.”

We can begin this trip out of political correctness by noting that on genetic grounds alone there can be no doubt of the existence of a substantial number of human races. Races are, if you wish, fuzzy sets.

It is the liberals who have oppressively insisted that we measure ethnic “over-” and “underrepresentation” in every possible field of human endeavor. Here is a liberal establishment forcing racial testing for every conceivable activity, and when a study comes along which does exactly that for SATs and IQ, the authors are pilloried for being obsessed by race.

No one who has actually read The Bell Curve could honestly document any such obsession. But, by the same token, no one even moderately conversant with the American society of the last 20 to 30 years could deny the accuracy of Krauthammer’s assertion that “it is the very liberals who so vehemently denounce Murray who have been obsessed by race.”

Further, it is these “very liberals” who deny that there is any significant genetic, biological, and evolutionary substance to race, and argue that it is, in effect, nothing more than a social and cultural construct. This view is epitomized in a recent story in Time (January 16, 1995), that carries the subtitle: “A landmark global study flattens The Bell Curve, proving that racial differences are only skin deep.” The reference is to The History and Geography of Human Genes, a recent, massive compilation and analysis of human gene frequency data (Cavalli-Sforza, et al., 1994). The story is an honest summation of that work—given that the genetic distances among human races are minimal, and that sections 1.5 and 1.6 of the book are entitled “Classical Attempts to Distinguish Human ‘Races’,” and “Scientific Failure of the Concept of Human Races.” One looks in vain, however, in both the Time piece and the book on which it is based for any definition of the term “race.” This omission is typical of race-debunking efforts. They never bother to define what it is that they are debunking. So let’s start there.

The Reality of Human Races

We can begin this trip out of political correctness by noting that there is a substantial amount of agreement on both a working definition of the term “race” and on the existence of races in species other than our own. Races are populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations, and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features.

We can agree that we are all members of a single species—Homo sapiens—and that each of us is also a unique individual. The most basic evidence that races exist is the fact that we can look at individuals and place them, with some appreciable degree of accuracy, into the areas from which they or their recent ancestors derive. The process involved is illustrated by a thought experiment where one imagines a random assortment of 50 modern humans and 50 chimpanzees. No one, chimp or human, would have any difficulty in reconstituting the original 50 member sets by simple inspection. But the same would be true within our species with, say, 50 humans from Japan, 50 from Malawi, and 50 from Norway. Again, by simple inspection, we would achieve the same 100% sorting accuracy. Granted, in the second experiment fewer sorting characteristics were available, but not nearly so few as to produce any doubt as to the placement of any individual. Extending this look-see experiment to the whole of the human species would obviously give us a substantial number of such geographical groupings. The addition of direct genetic evidence—from blood groups to DNA sequences —would provide further resolving power. But there is a real problem here that goes well beyond ideology and political correctness.

The Nature of Categories

One might clarify the problem of defining groups by reference to the issue of color categorization. We know that speakers of various languages that have a term for “red” (and who also have a comparable number of basic color terms) will also show a remarkable degree of agreement as to the range of the spectrum to which the term applies, and as to which hues are better reds than others (Berlin and Kay, 1969). We look at a rainbow and we tend to see not continuity, but rather a small number of specific colors that we have no trouble naming. This example tells us that whatever may be going on with respect to cognitive processing of the visible light spectrum, we have no operational difficulties in at least this realm with the notion that categories do not have to be discrete. Red does shade imperceptibly into orange, and orange into yellow, but we have no difficulty in agreeing as to where red becomes orange, and orange, yellow. Thus, human cognition can handle categories that are not discrete. The flip side of that is that categories can be real without necessarily being enumerable— and that is the critical matter for this article.

In other words, we can easily forget that categories do not have to be discrete. If this were not so, then why should the notion of “fuzzy sets” been seen as so revolutionarily productive? Races are fuzzy sets.

How Many Race Are There?

One of the most commonly asked questions about race is: “How many races are there?” I contend that this is the wrong question. “How many” requires a precise integer as an answer— 3, 7, 15, whatever. But the nature of the category “race” is such as to make such an answer impossible, depending as it necessarily does on the degree of sorting accuracy required in a context where the categories involved are not discrete. Races, after all, are not species, since all humans are fully interfertile. Therefore, races must necessarily grade into one another. But they do not do so evenly. Even today, for example, to drive along the road north from Aswan to Luxor (a hundred miles or so) is to cross a portion of ancient boundary between, to use old anthropological terms, Caucasians and Negroes. These two large groupings have been separated for millennia by the Sahara Desert. The Sahara has caused the populations north and south of it to evolve in substantial genetic independence from one another. And that is all one needs for race formation— geographical separation plus time.

The race quantity answer depends on the degree of sorting accuracy with respect to individuals. If it is something close to 100%, then the areas involved could become smaller and more distant from one another, with at least 20 races easily recognized, or larger and less separated, in which case one would see the few “major” races that everyone has tended to see. If, however, the criterion were something more like the 75% which has often sufficed for the recognition of races in other species, then obviously the number would be very large. In either case, if we use a straightforward definition of race such as a population within a species that can be readily distinguished from other such populations using only heritable features, then there can be no doubt of the existence of a substantial number of human races. But, I hear you ask, don’t the races all blend into one another? Yes, they are supposed to blend into one another. That’s what races do. Nature’s categories need not be discrete. It is not for us to impose our cognitive limitations upon Nature.

The Cause of Racial Separation

If all that is needed for racial differentiation is geographic separation and time, then why have humans remained a single species? The answer almost certainly lies in the fact of glacial cycles throughout the existence of our genus. These have necessitated major movements of human populations at fairly frequent, if irregular, intervals throughout the million years or so that Homo has existed outside of sub-Saharan Africa and therefore been susceptible to differentiation into races. Thus, there would have been periods of relative glacial stability (such as the last 10,000 years or so) during which racial differentiation would have become more marked; and periods of glacial movement, such as the retreat which began about 18,000 years ago, during which gene flow would have pretty much obliterated the previously developed racial boundaries. This logic also leads to the conclusion that most existing racial variation must have developed since that last period of large-scale, world-wide gene flow; that is, over the last 15,000 or so years. There is extensive evidence at a number of disciplines—anatomy, linguistics, biochemistry, archeology—which is consistent with such a scenario. The most straightforward is the fact that Homo sapiens fossil skulls found in areas currently populated by “Caucasians” and ranging in age from about 15,000 to 30,000 years are not more similar to those of modern “Caucasians” than they are to those of other major racial groupings.

The question of the antiquity of human racial lineages remains one of the most controversial areas of human evolution. Basically two quite opposed views predominate, neither of which takes the fact of glacial cycles into account. (1) Regional Continuity or Multiregional Evolution. Homo erectus populations in different areas of the world are seen as having appreciable direct genetic continuity with modern populations in those same areas. This theory sees significant aspects of modern racial variability as having separate histories for the high hundreds of thousands of years. (2) Out of Africa or African Eve. Homo sapiens have a single, relatively recent (something around 100,000 years ago) origin in some limited area and are characterized by some novel adaptation which enabled them to expand out of that homeland, replacing the more primitive humans they found along the way. Racial differentiation then followed. Most people in the field have tended to see #1 as implying much more significant racial differences because they would have had longer to develop. This has also been a major factor contributing to its relative lack of support.

But, as the late Glynn Isaac (perhaps the most influential archeologist involved in studies of early Homo) pointed out to me in a Berkeley seminar many years ago, it is the Out of Africa model, not that of regional continuity, which makes racial differences more functionally significant. It does so because the amount of time involved in the raciation process is much smaller, while, obviously, the degree of racial differentiation is the same—large. The shorter the period of time required to produce a given amount of morphological difference, the more selectively important the differences become. The Out of Africa model in its earlier formulations envisioned perhaps 40,000 years for raciation of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The current formulations would nearly triple that figure, and, thus reduce the implied significance of racial differences. Obviously the model I outlined above would do the opposite, increasing that significance well beyond anything contemplated in recent years. But that might not be all. During the last 10,000 years human cultures have differentiated to a much greater extent with respect to achievement than was the case previously. Thus, not only might the time involved for raciation have been brief, but the selective demands on human cognitive capacities might have differed regionally to a substantially greater extent than could have been the case previously (see Sarich, 1995, for an extended discussion of these matters).

How Large are Actual Racial Differences?

Current textbooks on human biology and human evolution go out of their way to deny either the reality, the significance, or both, of race in our species. Their efforts would appear to be based in the hope that if we can make races disappear, racism will follow. For example:

Race: In terms of biological variation, a group of populations sharing certain traits that make them different from other groups of populations. In practice, the concept of race is very difficult to apply to patterns of human variation.

The first sentence is fine. But the second implies that most human variation is not racially patterned. Which is certainly true. Most of the variation in our species, and in all other species, is found within and among individuals. But truth here has nothing to do with relevance. No one argues that race is the only dimension along which humans vary genetically. But, by the same token, there is more than enough heritable variation to produce human groupings which conform to any generally accepted definition of the term “race.” This fact tells us that a substantial amount of human variation is clearly racially distributed, and leads to the question of how different from one another human races are.

The answer is, it depends on what you are looking at. At the level of morphology human races are more strongly differentiated from one another than are any other mammalian species. I first became aware of this fact when considering the arguments in the anthropological literature as to the place of the Neandertals. There one would often see statements to the effect that “Neandertals are too different from us to be part of our evolutionary history,” but “too different” was never quantified. Quantifying it by using a standard set of measurements, correcting for size and calculating an average percent difference per measurement, gave some substance to the claim. Neandertals are, in fact, about twice as distant, on the average, from various extant human populations as the latter are from one another. But that exercise also demonstrated that (1) the anatomical distances among some modern races, for example, East Africans and Central Siberians, were much larger than those between Neandertals and the modern human populations most similar to them, and (2) racial morphological distances within our species are, on the average, about equal to the distances among species within other genera of mammals, as, for example, between pygmy and common chimpanzees. I am not aware of another mammalian species where the constituent races are as strongly marked as they are in ours.

The genetic distances are, in contrast, very small, and the no-races-in-our-species protagonists (such as Cavalli-Sforza) have seized on this fact to buttress their position. However, one needs to put the data into an evolutionary context to see what they really mean. The problem here lies in the fact that morphological evolution in our species has been extremely rapid, and this is not some sort of anthropocentric judgment. It can be demonstrated through two simple observations. We and our two closest living relatives—gorillas and chimpanzees— are about equidistant from one another at the DNA level with about 1.7% sequence difference seen in each of the three comparisons. Yet, morphologically chimps and gorillas are far more similar to one another than either is to us. This must mean that there has been much more morphological change along our lineage than along those leading to the African apes since the three genera last shared a common ancestor some 4.5 million years ago (the amounts of sequence change at the DNA level are the same). The current racial situation in our species is then entirely consistent with the history of our lineage: much morphological variation and change, little genetic variation and change.

Racial Differences in Athletic Ability

Another tack has been to acknowledge racial differences, but then argue that they are generally small with respect to differences among individuals within races, and, in any case, likely to be functionally irrelevant for any features of particular importance for the species. Consider the following example from sports. Every year perhaps 75 young men newly make NBA (National Basketball Association) teams. Of these, about 60 will be Black, and 15 White. (I am here using four years as the average length of a NBA career, and the current racial composition of the league as a source for these figures. “Black” means, in this country, that the individual has a substantial amount of obvious recent sub-Saharan African ancestry. “White” means no obvious ancestry other than European.) These numbers mean that the chance for a Black to play in the NBA is about one in 4,500; the corresponding figure for a White is about one in 90,000. We can then ask from how far out on their respective bell curves these 75 are drawn. Recourse to a z-score table tells us that 1 in 4,500 takes us about 3.4 SD (standard deviations) from the mean; 1 in 90,000 is about 4.3 SD from the mean. I submit that this almost one SD difference between populations in this suite of abilities based on a fundamental human trait is pretty substantial. In other words, it is simply not true that “bipedalism is such a critical aspect of the human adaptation that one would not expect to see great differences from either the individual to individual level, or between populations.” Bipedalism is certainly a “critical aspect of the human adaptation,” but it does not follow that therefore individual and group variation in what might be termed the quality of the bipedal adaptation would have been reduced. Indeed, it seems to me that, if anything, we might expect quite the opposite result. It took me a long time to figure this out, and thus it might prove useful to others to recount some of that process. The context is the relationship, if any, between brain size and cognitive performance.

Racial Differences in Brain Size

Discussing racial differences in athletic ability can get you into trouble, as some sportscasters have discovered. Discussing racial differences in brain size can be literally life threatening, as some psychologists have discovered. This issue ultimately divided Charles Darwin from Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin was entirely comfortable with the notion that the human mind had evolved through natural selection, just as did the human body. Wallace, on the other hand, to the end of his much longer life, insisted that while our body had evolved, our mind must have been created. (See Michael Shermer’s essay on this subject in Vol. 3, #1 of Skeptic.) A century later the very influential book The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould also, in effect, denied that our brains had evolved. Gould spends the first two chapters telling us that brain size and intellectual performance have nothing to do with one another, without once bothering to remind us that our brains have not always been the size they are today. Nor is that awkward fact mentioned anywhere else in the book. You could never learn from it that in our evolutionary lineage brain size had increased from around 400cc to 1300–1400cc over the last four million years. Why this omission?

I think the answer is quite straightforward. That part of Gould’s psyche concerned with basic evolutionary biology knew that those large brains of ours could not have evolved unless having large brains increased fitness through minds that could do more. In other words, individuals with larger brains must have been, on the average and in the long run, slightly better off than those with smaller brains. How advantaged? Dare one say it? By being smarter. What else? If variation in brain size mattered in the past, as it must have, then it almost certainly still matters. And if you are going to argue that it does not, then you are going to have to explain why it does not. I do not think you can do this while maintaining your intellectual integrity. Thus Gould just ignored the demands of the evolutionary perspective by denying, implicitly, that our brains had evolved. I find it of some interest that no one has really challenged him on this point.

The evolutionary perspective demands that there be a relationship— in the form of a positive correlation—between brain size and intelligence. That proposition, I would argue, is not something that need derive from contemporary data (although, as we will see, those data do give it strong support). It is what we would expect given our particular evolutionary history; that is, it is the evolutionary null hypothesis, and, thus, something to be disproven. It seems to me that a demonstration of no correlation between brain size and cognitive performance would be about the best possible refutation of the fact of human evolution. It took me a long time to figure out what really ought to have been obvious: descent with modification by means of natural selection has been, and continues to be, the reality. It should be incumbent on those who would deny our evolutionary history to show that our biology is not involved. Otherwise there is an implicit creationism present in those who persist in ignoring the evolutionary perspective when they try to explain some aspect of our behavior (all too common in the social sciences). Brain size is an effective proxy for behavior, and it reminds us that evolutionary processes and evolutionary lineages are rather good data.

In other words, natural selection requires genetically-based phenotypic variation to work on; thus throughout the period of change in brain size, there must have been present a substantial amount of genetic variation for brain size, and, likely, the greater the advantage of larger brains, the greater the underlying genetic variation for brain size. I had long been frustrated by the canalization argument (the more important the characteristic, the less variation) with respect to human intelligence, my teaching experiences telling me that cognitive performance was one of our most variable features. Yet at the same time I was unable to refute the logic of the argument. This lasted until 1983 when I remembered Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection: “The rate of increase in the fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.”

This says it all. An earlier statement of the general argument was made by the late Bernard Davis in 1976:

Let me further emphasize that, even if no one had ever devised a test for measuring IQ, we could still be confident, on grounds of evolutionary theory, that our species contains wide genetic variance in intelligence. The reason is that natural selection cannot proceed unless it has genetic diversity, within a species, to act on; and when our species is compared with its nearest primate relatives, it is obvious that our main selection pressure has been for an increase in intelligence. Indeed, this change proceeded at an unprecedented rate (on an evolutionary time scale): in the past three million years the brain size of the hominid line increased threefold. Such rapid selection for increased intelligence could not have occurred unless the selection pressure had a large substrate of genetic variation to act on.

Brain Size and Cognitive Performance: Data Validate Theory

Any suggestion on one’s part that people with bigger brains are, on the average, smarter by virtue of those bigger brains leads the listener to doubt one’s intelligence, if not one’s sanity. The general belief is that this inherently sexist and racist notion died an ignoble death sometime in the last century. Its recent resurrection began with a 1974 article by Leigh Van Valen. In it he reviewed the literature and concluded that the published correlations between brain size and intelligence (as measured by standardized tests) were unrealistically low because they did not allow for the fact that external measurements of head size were an imperfect indicator of brain size. Correcting for this attenuation indicated that the actual value was probably about 0.3. (The Mismeasure of Man does not even mention Van Valen’s work.) A subsequent large scalestudy of Belgian army recruits, which also used a much wider variety of tests of cognitive function, gave figures consistent with Van Valen’s analyses (Susanne, 1979). Since 1987, there have been several studies on this subject in which the brain size of living individuals was measured directly and accurately using magnetic resonance imaging (e.g., Willerman et al., 1991; Andreasen, et al., 1993; Wickett, et al., 1994). These suggest that Van Valen’s estimate was, if anything, conservative— the consensus being in the area of 0.4 or a bit more. Although, as argued above, a positive relationship was to be expected on the basis of simple evolutionary considerations, the actual correlations found are higher than just about anyone would have predicted prior to Van Valen’s pioneering effort.

A correlation of 0.4 means that of the average of 17 IQ points separating two randomly chosen individuals (within sex and population), about 7 IQ points would derive from the differences in the sizes of their brains. The same would hold for populations, and existing human populations can differ in their means by as much as 2 SD in brain size. Thus, this variable alone could lead to close to a 1 SD difference in mean intellectual performance among them. With respect to the difference between American Whites and Blacks, the one good brain size study we have (Ho, et al., 1980) indicates a difference between them of about 0.8 SD; this could correspond to a difference of about 5 IQ points; that is, about one-third of the observed differential.

It should also be noted that these data strongly suggest that IQ tests are, in fact, measuring something that has been significant in human evolution, given that performance on them correlates so nicely with brain size. And what of the common accusation of circularity that intelligence is what the tests test? As Daniel Seligman notes, in A Question of Intelligence (pg 15):

[Herrnstein] said it was not at all intended as a put-down of IQ tests, certainly not as a complaint about circularity. It represented, rather, the perspective of a psychologist who believed (a) that “intelligence” needed to be anchored to some unambiguous operational definition and (b) that the cluster of abilities measured by IQ tests constituted a reasonable anchor. Fast analogy: You could define length…as “a distance or dimension expressed in units of linear measure.” You could also define it as the thing that tape measures measure.

Individuals and Groups

So far I have tended to go from group to individual and back again without addressing the fact that any number of commentators on The Bell Curve have argued that: (1) individual variation within groups is generally greater than variation between groups, and (2) the existence of functionally significant genetic differences among individuals (with which most of them apparently feel comfortable) does not necessarily imply such among populations (with which they, along with most people, definitely do not). But the obvious truth of these two assertions in no sense justifies the object lesson we are supposed to draw from them—that therefore group variation is not something that need particularly concern us. First, the fact is group differences can be much greater than individual differences within them; for example, hair form in Kenya and Japan, or body shape for the Nuer and Inuit. And even when the first assertion is correct, as it is for most human characteristics, the differences between groups can, as already noted, be quite consequential. There is a much weaker case to be made for the relevance of the second assertion. While a qualification such as “does not necessarily” makes it technically correct, the statement as a whole implies that we should expect a connection between individual and group variation to be the exception, rather than the rule.

The evolutionary perspective begs to disagree. Consider again the example of brain size. Wi thin sex and population, the coefficient of variation (standard deviation / mean x 100) is about 10%, a value typical for mass or volume characters. Two randomly chosen same-sex individuals within a population would then differ by about 12%, or about 150cc. But so can two populations. And this should not surprise us. Remember that our brain has increased in size some 1000cc in the last 3 million years. This is often termed “an explosive rate of growth,” yet it works out to only ¼ drop per generation. It could have gone faster, given what we know of individual variation and heritability for the character. That it did not implies that the huge advantages conferred by having more brain to work with must have been offset by (almost) equally large disadvantages. In other words, the adaptation here is best seen as a very slow moving compromise involving small relative differences between large forces. We should then have no expectation that those advantages and disadvantages would have balanced out in the same way in different populations at differing times and in differing ecological and cultural circumstances. But this same argument will apply to most aspects of individual variation. Given the number of characteristics in which functional variation is present, the ways in which they will balance out in two populations evolving more or less independently of one another are almost guaranteed to be different in the two. The balancing will take place at the level of individual phenotypes, and thus there is, in general, going to be a direct, inescapable connection between individual and group variation whenever evolutionary change is taking place.

Harmful Truths or Useful Lies?

Of all the thousands of words in print about The Bell Curve, about its data and arguments, perhaps none cut so close to the bone as those of Nathan Glazer in the October 31, 1994, issue of the New Republic (pp 15–16):

The authors project a possible utopia in which individuals accept their places in an intellectual pecking order that affects their income, their quality of life, their happiness. It may be true that we do not commonly envy the intellectual capacities of others—we allow Albert Einstein and Bobby Fischer their eminence—though I think even at this level the authors underplay the role of envy and rancor in human affairs. But how can a group accept an inferior place in society, even if good reasons for it are put forth? It cannot.

Richard Wollheim and Isaiah Berlin have written: “If I have a cake, and there are ten persons among whom I wish to divide it, then if I give exactly one-tenth to each, this will not…call for justification; whereas if I depart from this principle of equal division I am expected to produce a special reason.” Herrnstein and Murray have a very good special reason: smarter people get more and properly deserve more, and if there are more of them in one group than another, so be it. Our society, our polity, our elites, according to Herrnstein and Murray, live with an untruth: that there is no good reason for this inequality, and therefore our society is at fault and we must try harder. I ask myself whether the untruth is not better for American society than the truth.

And Bill Clinton, in a press conference of similar vintage, said:

I haven’t read it. But as I understand the argument of it, I have to say I disagree with the proposition that there are inherent, racially-based differences in the capacity of the American people to reach their full potential. I just don’t agree with that. It goes against our entire history and our whole tradition.

Are All Men Created Equal?

The issue here is not so much about “inherent, racially-based differences in the capacity of the American people to reach their full potential.” It is about inherent, racially-based differences in the potentials themselves. The “entire history and our whole tradition” is, of course, encapsulated in our Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….

Which takes us back to Glazer, and the real need to ask “whether the untruth is not better for American society than the truth.” The untruth in Jefferson is his first truth: “that all men are created equal.” We know Jefferson did not believe that to be literally true, or perhaps more fairly, that he could not have believed it true unless one word were added to his sacred text: “ ….all men are created equal, in that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…” This addition in no way detracts from the power of the text (and only slightly from its rhythm), but does provide the advantage of literal truth—understanding, of course, that, ever since 1859, “creator” has had to be read as “the evolutionary process.” Reading it that way also has the virtue of ultimately leading us to an understanding of why “the evolutionary process has made all men equal” is no better than the original text. Also note that last right—it is not “happiness” but “the pursuit of happiness”—an opportunity, not a result.

Like most white Americans of my sex, class, and generation, I came into a world that soon made me a racist and a sexist. And then, like most well-educated people of that generation, as I grew up I repudiated both race and sex as explanations for differences in the behavior of human beings.
—Carl Degler (1991)

There have, in fact, been attempts to provide a justification based in evolutionary biology for a literal reading of “all men are created equal.” Gould, for example, entitled one of his essays “Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History,” and summarized his argument as such (1985, p. 198):

Homo sapiens is a young species, its division into races even more recent. This historical context has not provided enough time for the evolution of substantial differences. But many species are millions of years old, and their geographic divisions are often marked and deep. H. sapiens might have evolved along such a scale of time and produced races of great age and large accumulated differences— but we didn’t. Human equality is a contingent fact of history.

The problems with this line of argument are many. First, it is strange to have one of the inventors of the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” argue that human races cannot be very different from one another because they are too young. Second, nowhere in the article does Gould give us an example of a species in which races are as strongly marked as ours. The reason very likely is, as I have already noted, that there isn’t any such species. Third, there are substantial racial differences present today—however they may have come about. I have already discussed two of these: athletic performance and brain size. Thus, Gould has it backwards. It is from the present that we obtain most of our knowledge of the past, and not, as most paleontologists would have it, the other way around. Finally, at least for our purposes, there is a strong tendency just about everywhere to extend the “there are no significant racial differences” argument to one which says “there are no significant gene-based differences between individuals.” And as more and more groups are seen as needing some sort of official recognition, this extension becomes more and more inevitable.

Nature, Nurture, and the Individual

The above extension is, and for a long time has been, the prevailing point of view in the social sciences and humanities. If one takes a course at U.C. Berkeley in, say, Anthropology 3 (Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology), or Sociology 1 (Introduction to Sociology), one will hear an enormous amount about individuals as constituents of groups, and precious little about individuals as individuals. There will be little discussion of genes, evolution, or biology. It then goes almost without saying that you are not going to hear anything about free will or personal responsibility. The willful development of this situation in this country is very nicely documented in Carl Degler (1991). His Preface begins (and I quote directly and at length because the statement is so representative):

Like most white Americans of my sex and class (the son of a fireman) and my generation (born in 1921) I came into a world that soon made me a racist and a sexist. And then, like most well-educated people of that generation, as I grew up I repudiated both race and sex as explanations for differences in the behavior of human beings. Indeed, I spent a good deal of my youth and adulthood arguing by voice and in print against biology as a source of human behavior, not only in regard to race and sex, but in other respects as well. How and why that sea change occurred in my thinking concerned me only peripherally. I knew there had been a time when biology was thought to be an important way of explaining why social groups differed, why some people were considered better than others. But that was another time. In my new outlook it was a given that the repudiation of biology had resulted from a penetrating, perhaps even lengthy scientific investigation of biology’s inadequacy in accounting for the ways in which human groups differed. In ruling out biology as a cause for human differences, I thought of myself as defending a truth as solidly established as the heliocentric universe. Human nature, I believed, was constructed over time, not inherited from time. I had no trouble accepting Karl Marx’s famous remark that man made his own history, not entirely as he pleased, meaning that history may limit us at times, but biology has little to say about our social behavior.

Today, in the thinking of citizens and social scientists alike the deeply held assumption is that culture has severed for good the link between human behavior and biology. The conviction is that human beings in their social behavior, alone among animals, have succeeded in escaping biology. The irony is heavy here. For that belief is accompanied by another deeply held conviction: that human beings, like all other living things, are the products of the evolution that Charles Darwin explained with his theory of natural selection. The irony is almost palpable as Darwin entertained no doubt that behavior was as integral a part of human evolution as bodily shape. And that is where Book III enters. It seeks to tell the story of how biological explanations have begun to return to social science… It is important to recognize that this “return of biology” is not simply a revival of repudiated ideas, like racism, sexism, or eugenics.

The problem here is that a “return of biology” means a return to the idea that sex and race will have consequences, and if you recognize this publicly, then you become, for many, a racist or a sexist. But the fact is, the evolutionary process cannot and does not produce equality either among individuals or groups.

Much of the furor surrounding The Bell Curve thus derives from a very real problem. Herrnstein and Murray are officially agnostic on the degree of genetic involvement in racial differences in intellectual performance, give gender differences one small paragraph on p. 275, and mention the implications of our evolutionary history not at all—but all that does not really help. The fact is that deep down all too many of us are aware of the reality of group differences, and of the virtual certainty that genes are somehow involved in producing some of those differences. But, as Ernst Mayr pointed out in 1963: “Equality in the face of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem incapable.”

Consider the treatment of E. O. Wilson after the publication of his masterful Sociobiology in 1975. Or, a more recent example, the June, 1993 issue of Scientific American. features a lengthy essay by John Horgan, one of their staff writers, entitled “Eugenics Revisited,” and teased on the cover as “The dubious link between genes and behavior.” This one was so egregious—especially given the venue—that I was moved to send a long letter to the editor, publisher, and other officials of the magazine. I had no illusions that it would be publicly acknowledged by them (and it wasn’t, though I did get a letter from the editor Jonathan Piel). Scientific American continued in this vein in its January and February, 1995 issues. In the first, Tim Beardsley, one of their staff writers, authored a piece entitled For Whom The Bell Curve Really Tolls, and subtitled: “A tendentious tome abuses science to promote far-right policies.” My thought is that you have to be pretty far left to see any of Herrnstein and Murray’s “messages” as “far right.” And Beardsley apparently has no compunction about penning flat-out lies, such as: “…numerous studies have demonstrated that early childhood surroundings have a large role in molding IQ scores—while very few studies have indicated a significant role for heredity.” Anyone who could write that those last 10 words presumably would also describe our national debt as composed of very few dollars. The February issue then contains a review of The Bell Curve by Leon Kamin, one of the authors of the 1984 book Not in Our Genes. His position can be inferred from the title, and from the fact that he and his coauthors were willing to state: “For all we know, the heritability (of IQ) may be zero….” And, in its final paragraph:

We should recall that the title of the article by A. R. Jensen…was “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” The answer, from cross-racial and crossclass adoption studies, seems unambiguous. As much as social organization will allow. It is not biology that stands in our way.

I submit that someone who could seriously entertain the notions that the heritability for any human performance measure could really be zero, and that our biology places no limits on a human performance, has thereby removed himself from serious consideration as a scholar of anything.

The Decline of Racism in Society

From an evolutionary perspective freedom can only mean freedom of opportunity, which, in the context of this article, necessarily leads to the question of how we are to recognize it among races and groups when we are living in a world where functionally significant, gene-based, racial and other group differences may well be the rule rather than the exception. It is here I think The Bell Curve makes its most meaningful single contribution (pp. 323–4). There we find the income data for young (average age = 29) year-round workers of three racial/ethnic groups: White, Black, Latino—with Latinos earning 86% and Blacks 77% as much as Whites. But when IQ is held constant (average = 100 for all three groups), both the Latino and Black figures climb to 98% of that for Whites. This result (which could be seen as remarkable only if one accepts the “this is a racist society” mantra) tells us about the degree of equality of opportunity in recent American society, and yet only one commentator of the more than 100 I have read or heard (including Murray and Herrnstein themselves) seems to have found it worthy of comment. This was Daniel Seligman, himself the author of the highly readable and most informative 1992 volume, A Question of Intelligence, who titled his brief column in the December 12, 1994, issue of Fortune, “News Nobody Noticed”:

Your servant has now read scores of reviews of The Bell Curve. Most have fiercely criticized the book’s thesis, which emphasizes the centrality of IQ in lives and careers, and most have dwelt insistently on race and the 15-point blackwhite IQ gap. But, oddly, we have yet to read a review noticing the racial news built into a table on page 324. In a rational world, the news would be on the front pages…. The news is about racial discrimination in America. As we all keep reading, blacks earn a lot less than whites, even when you compare workers of similar ages and educational backgrounds. This table confirms this finding. But it points to something else one has never before read: that when you control for age and IQ, the blackwhite earnings gap just about disappears….

Obvious implication: At least so far as younger workers are concerned, employers no longer engage in irrational discrimination based on race. They discriminate based on IQ—which is rational, given the avalanche of data linking IQ to performance in many different job markets. Fascinating question: How can it be, in a world where racial discrimination is (properly) an object of enormous concern, that we are ignoring powerful evidence of its decline?

I would add that Seligman’s comment that employers “discriminate based on IQ” has to be taken metaphorically. What they are doing is rewarding performance (as any rational employer would). The connection with IQ, as Herrnstein and Murray point out (pp 80–81), is that it is the best single predictor of performance—better than biographical data, reference checks, education, interview, or college grades. And as to his final question? The cynic in me cannot help commenting “So what else is new?” One does not really expect our media to report anything positive about this society, does one?

The Rise of Racism on College Campuses

No society has an unstained history. The treatment of individuals of sub-Saharan African ancestry is without doubt our largest and deepest stain, and that history, as are all histories, is beyond change. Given those truths, the worst thing we could do is to repeat that past in the name of producing an equality of results, by again allowing the treatment of an individual to be influenced by that individual’s race (or sex, or ethnicity, or any other grouping). Yet, increasingly over the past 30 years we have been doing just that.

What we are getting at Berkeley is two communities, separable on racial/ethnic grounds, and increasingly divergent from one another academically, socially, and in ethos—a result desired, presumably, by no rational soul.

My own direct experiences with such race-norming, quota-driven treatment of individuals has been at U.C. Berkeley, where, for the last 10 years or so, a substantial percentage of freshman admissions (up to about 40%) has been reserved for “underrepresented minorities,” and where race, ethnicity, and sex have become major factors in the hiring of new faculty. For students, what this has done is to produce two populations separated by race/ethnicity and performance who wind up, in the main, in different courses and pursue different majors. That is only to be expected when the SAT difference between the White and Asian students on the one hand, and Black and Latino students on the other, is about 270 points (1270 v. 1000; about 1SD difference). This is equivalent to about three to four years of academic achievement, and U.C. Berkeley is no place to play catch-up. And, as far as anyone knows (there are no published studies on the matter), no catching-up in fact takes place. I wrote of this situation in 1990:

The Berkeley administration has, in its admissions policies, especially over the past five years or so, ignored certain unpalatable realities, and given us an even more unpalatable set of results. They have given us a situation where the association between race/ethnicity and performance is real, obvious, and of ever-increasing strength. What we are getting at Berkeley is two communities, separable on racial/ethnic grounds, and increasingly divergent from one another academically, socially, and in ethos—a result desired, presumably, by no rational soul. It is, frankly, difficult to imagine policies more deliberately crafted or better calculated to exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions, discourage individual performance among all groups, and contribute to the decay of a magnificent educational institution.

The fact is that any group-based policies are bound to have effects of this sort. As I have already noted, the evolutionary necessity of individual variation is almost always going to lead to group variation, and statistical realities require that group differences get exaggerated as one goes toward the ends of the bell curves involved. Thus, when you look at group representations with respect to the high-visibility pluses (e.g., high-paying jobs) and minuses (e.g., criminality) in any society, one can virtually guarantee that they are not going to be equal— and that the differences will not be trivial. The problem is in recognizing and adapting to those realities, and not, as has so often been the case with responses to The Bell Curve, denying them. I noted this in a letter to a Berkeley Faculty Senate committee on “diversity”:

This current focus on “diversity,” if continued and “successful,” can only have the effect of rewarding individuals for making their primary allegiances to certain defined groups, and, thus, of tribalizing our society. It would require a mind completely closed to current realities, never mind historical ones, to remain ignorant of the disastrous effects of tribalization. One therefore has to suspect that anyone supporting policies that tribalize is either ignorant, or simply playing the very effective political game of “divide and conquer.” The number of different roles to be played in a society increases as the complexity of a society increases. Ours is a very complex society that will only become more complex in the future. The number of different roles to be played will thus increase, requiring a larger number of allegiances for individuals within the society, and selecting against those whose primary allegiance is to a particular group—be it one based on biology (race, sex, age) or culture (ethnicity, religion). If one of your roles is chemist, then one set of your allegiances is to the community of chemists and chemistry. You are then a chemist, period— and not a female, or White, or Catholic, or old. To the extent that you do not look at it that way; that is, to the extent that you see yourself as some sort of hyphenated chemist, you will necessarily reduce the effectiveness of your chemistry. And this is going to be true for each of the other roles you will come to play. To the extent that you see yourself as a hyphenated anything, your achievement in that “anything” will tend to be reduced. And to the extent that a society encourages and rewards individuals for looking at themselves in such a fashion, it necessarily reduces its total level of accomplishment.

Skeptic magazine 3.3

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 3.3 (1995)

Buy the print edition

There are certain harsh realities in life. One of these is that groups, whether age, sex, race, ethnic, or whatever, are groups, and groups of anything are very likely going to differ from one another. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be groups, would they? I can then confidently guarantee that when we measure performance by groups, we are going to find group differences in performance. Some part of those differences will be nature-based, some part will be nurture-based, some will be will-based. No society has, or can have, the power to even things up. Societies are not omnipotent. They can provide opportunity; they cannot mandate individuals or groups making equal use of those opportunities, and, therefore, they cannot make either individuals or groups come out even. Individual and group variation are realities that they cannot will out of existence. They can try, and what happens then, is, unfortunately, no secret: a temporary leveling-down bought at enormous cost. They can in no sense make groups equal. They cannot level up—only down—and thus any such leveling is necessarily at the expense of individual freedom and, ultimately, that society’s total level of accomplishment.

Ending Racism Without Ending Race

There would appear to be a substantial consensus among some of the more “conservative” commentators on The Bell Curve as to its policy implications, and, for better or worse, I find myself in total agreement with them. Seligman, for example, closes his A Question of Intelligence with: “One major message of the IQ data is that groups are different. A major policy implication of the data, I would argue, is that people should not be treated as members of groups but as individuals.” Herrnstein and Murray give us the same message, but at much greater length, in their Conclusion (pp 549–552).

I opened with a quote from Charles Krauthammer. His conclusion says it better than I can:

I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of balkanization. My answer is simpler: Stop counting by race. Stop allocating by race. Stop measuring by race. Let’s return to measuring individuals.

It seems hopelessly naive to propose this today. But it was not naive when first proposed by Martin Luther King and accepted by a white society that was finally converted to his vision of color blindness. Instead, through guilt and intimidation, a liberal establishment has since mandated that every study of achievement be broken down by race. ‘The Bell Curve’ takes that mandate to its logical conclusion.

Enough. As both Murray and Thomas Sowell explicitly state, knowing the group score tells you nothing about the individual. Well, we have seen the group score. Let’s go back to counting individuals. How many of Murray’s critics will agree to that?

Amen. Let’s go back to counting individuals. And how do we encourage such behavior? Simple. Just remove all reference to group identity from both statutory and administrative law. Period.

About the author

Dr. Vincent M. Sarich (December 13, 1934–October 27, 2012) was an American Professor Emeritus in anthropology at UC Berkeley. He taught courses in Physical Anthropology, Human Biology, Human Variation in an Evolutionary Perspective, and Evolution of Human Behavior, along with graduate seminars in comparative biochemistry. He was best known for his work in molecular dating in which he found that the accumulation of immunological differences among albumins occurred as a regular function of time, which lead him and Allan Wilson to propose a molecular clock of primate albumin evolution. They concluded that our closest living relatives were the African apes and that we had shared a common ancestor with them no more than about 5 million years ago, a revolutionary idea at the time. His later work centered on racial variation within the human species in which he suggested that while the species may be relatively old, races are young with most of the interpopulational variation having developed within the last 15,000 to 20,000 years. He was best known to skeptics for his many debates on evolution and creationism with Duane Gish and Phil Johnson.

Bibliography
  • Andreasen, N. C., M. Flaum, V. Swayze, D. S. O’Leary, R. Alliger, G. Cohen, J. Erhardt, and W. T. C. Yuh. 1993. “Intelligence and Brain Structure in Normal Individuals.” American Journal of Psychiatry 150:130–134.
  • Beardsley, T. 1995. “For Whom the Bell Curve Really Tolls.” Scientific American 272:1:14–17 (January).
  • Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, University of California Press.
  • Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press. Princeton, N.J.
  • Davis, B. 1976. “Evolution, Human Diversity, and Society.” In Zygon 11:2:80–95.
  • Degler, C. N. 1991. In Search of Human Nature. Oxford University Press.
  • Gould, S. J. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton.
  • ___. 1985. “Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of Evolution.” In The Flamingo’s Smile. New York: Norton.
  • Hardin, G. 1959. Nature and Man’s Fate. New York. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
  • Ho, K.-C., U. Roessmann, J. V. Straumfjord, and G. Monroe. 1980. “Analysis of Brain Weight.” Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine 104:635–645.
  • Horgan, J. 1993. “Eugenics Revisited.” Scientific American 270:6:122–131 (June).
  • Kamin, L. 1995. “Behind the Curve.” Scientific American 272:2:99–103 (February).
  • Krauthammer, C. 1994. “Liberals, Obsessed by Race, Can Hardly Complain.” The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) 23 October 1994.
  • Mayr, E. 1963. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Sarich, V. M. 1995. Race and Language in Prehistory. In press. For copies write: 555 Pierce, Unit 730, Albany, CA. 94706.
  • Seligman, D. 1992. A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America. New York: Birch Lane Press.
  • ___. 1994. “News Nobody Noticed.” Fortune 12 December:255.
  • Smith, C. L., and K. L. Beals. 1990. “Cultural Correlates with Cranial Capacity.” American Anthropologist 92:193–200.
  • Subramanian, S. 1995. “The Story in Our Genes.” Time 145:2:54–55 (16 Jan 1995).
  • Susanne, C. 1979. “On the Relationship Between Psychometric and Anthropometric Traits.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 51:421–424.
  • Van Valen, L. 1974. “Brain size and Intelligence in Man.” In American Journal of Physical Anthropology 40:417–424.
  • Wickett, J. C., P. A. Vernon, and D. H. Lee. 1994. “In Vivo Brain size, Head Perimeter, and Intelligence in a Sample of Healthy Adult Females.” Personality and Individual Differences 16:831–838.
  • Willerman, L., R. Schultz, J. N. Rutledge, and E. D. Bigler. 1991. “In Vivo Brain Size and Intelligence.” Intelligence 15:223–228.

This article was published on April 26, 2017.

 

50 responses to “In Defense of the Bell Curve:
The Reality of Race and the Importance of Human Differences

  1. Ted Fontenot says:

    https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/forbidden-knowledge

    Sam Harris’s interview with Charles Murray.

  2. Bruce says:

    I believe Skeptic.com are to be congratulated for posting these two articles on The Bell Curve. Both articles offer considerable help in understanding a very complex issue.
    It is disappointing (but not altogether surprising) to read – in the comments – several verbal attacks that lack ANY attempt to further our knowledge. Like the booers at Middlebury College and Villanova University, or the water pourers at Harvard, they are holding on to their pre-conceptions and have closed their minds to any discussion, any attempt to understand the difficult and important topic of race relations.
    The two articles are quite old, as is the Bell Curve. I would love Skeptic to invite Murray to present the talk that he planned to give at either Middlebury or Villanova. There is, perhaps, a high probability that he has become more entrenched in his views over time, but there is also a possibility that he has subsequently come to understand some further nuance that is pertinent to going forward from here.
    I would also suggest that Skeptic invite Professor Halpern to submit an update on the progress that has been made in reducing Racial and Sexual prejudice, both in America and worldwide.
    The Bell Curve was published twenty three years ago; almost a generation and approximately 10% of the time since we started on our EXPONENTIAL journey out of ignorance with the Age of the Enlightenment. I believe it is time to review the progress that has been made in our understanding of these social problems and especially progress that has been made in finding solutions.

  3. Ithejury says:

    This long argument from Vincent Sarich which is in defense of the book “The Bell Curve” is actually a very good argument demonstrating the poor research behind the book “The Bell Curve”. The reason for this very bold statement is that the entire argument presented is nothing more than an independent review of the criticisms of the book. None of the arguments defend the research and claims of the book itself as they were presented. The arguments presented in this “review” are identified from other sources and the author himself. The reason for this is because the arguments presented in the book are indefensible as they are presented in the book. The book is simply a poor bit of research and even Vincent Sarich, who was attempting to support the ideas of the book, could not refer to the book in his defense of these ideas. There is no stronger argument for poor research and the inability to use that very research in the defense of the research.

    Independent of the views presented in the book and whether or not you agree with them, the argument presented in the Diane Halpern review was that the book was politically based and based on poor research. The defense of the book presented in this review ignores this point completely. This review is nothing more than a reiteration of the argument without any actual defense of the book itself. Vincent Sarich basically admitted that the books was political pulp by his long winded arguments in support of his ideas and lack of defense of the book itself. He “doth protest too much, methinks”.

    Rarely can a clear winner be seen in the debate without addressing the subject matter directly as in this case. It is clear to me that both Diane Halpern AND Vincent Sarich see the book as a poor example of research.

    “The Bell Curve” has, once again, been shown to be political pulp and not valid research.

  4. Chrysippo says:

    I suspect that most who revealed something worthwhile in the arts or sciences had an agenda and often had to fight against the thought police of their day – but I’m glad they persevered (well, perhaps not the found-art sculptors).

    Deliberate self-blinkering to the actual causes of difficulties hampers effective resolution.

    ‘I may not like you or what you are saying so I shall fight to the death to stop you’ as Voltaire’s less enlightened twin might have said.

  5. awc says:

    I agree that studying the information is good science.

    It seems those most interested though have an agenda.

  6. Chrysippo says:

    Continuing vitriol and an inability to differentiate between an isolated example and an evolutionary trend – some do like to wear a nerve on their sleeve. Brain to body mass ratios do play a part there being a relationship between the size of such and behavioural ability to affect one’s environment. Use your search engine of choice. As with motion in physics survival traits in biology are relative.

    Few, if any, statements of the book were refuted; neither mere dislike of something nor cries of foul constitute valid criticism. Sarich did in fact point out some flaws in the arguments of the book’s opponents but a line by line review with supportive reasoning and referenced studies would need at least a whole volume in itself and not provide an accessible article.

    “All countries now have an African immigrant population, but, their Olympic teams are almost 100% indigenous, non-negro persons. Why is that?”

    I can only speculate though my guess would be that it is not because of lack of physical prowess but owes more to cultural constraints, discrimination, poverty, denial of full citizenship and so on. But I admit ignorance here; I do not even know how accurate the quoted statement is.

    A heated exchange but I’m impressed that no creationist (yet) has likened agnostics to members of a certain mid-20th century European political movement.

  7. T. T. Rothach says:

    Ugh. Need some pepto-bismal to digest this. When I heard that the findings of the Bell Curve would be debated in a rational, skeptical way-I expected a rational and skeptical article, not this Frankenstein monster of a blog post.

    The only connection between this article and the Bell Curve is the title. This article explains why Dr. Sarich himself believes in the existence of race.

    And that is it.

    If this were really a defense of the Bell Curve, each statement of the book that has been criticized would be quoted, and corroborating evidence from other studies presented to prove the book’s conclusions are valid.

    This has not remotely happened.

    This article has made me think that the Bell Curve should be banned-if this is the best proponents can come up with. As with other commenters, I disagree with the author’s statement, to the effect, that “since U.S. Olympic teams consist mostly of Negroes, it must be a racial thing.” All countries now have an African immigrant population, but, their Olympic teams are almost 100% indigenous, non-negro persons. Why is that?

    I also criticize the author’s enthusiasm over brain sizes. Verne Troyer is one of the smallest humans ever born (he starred in “The Love Guru” if you want to see how tiny he is), but, he’s of average intelligence. His skull is the size of a grapefruit. There is no way his brain is 14000ccs or whatever. Unless I don’t know what a cc is. How does all the racial brain size differences explain a 40-year-old the size of an infant?

    My conclusion is that the directors of the Skeptics Society are flushing their brains down the toilet. While snorting crack.

    • Raymond says:

      Dwarfism is a genetic abnormality, not an evolved heritable trait, so your comparison has limited value. Larger brains evolved in hominids because they provided an advantage: greater cognitive performance. How could it be otherwise? If not all races evolved the same size brains, it stands to reason that some races (on average) would have greater cognitive abilities than others.

    • Alex says:

      “All countries now have an African immigrant population, but, their Olympic teams are almost 100% indigenous, non-negro persons. Why is that?”

      Very few countries have anything close to the sheer number of African immigrants within their population. For instance, the black population of the UK and Canada make up about 3% of the total, while in the USA it’s 12.6%. Canada and the UK are probably at the high end; many European countries have far lower percentages.

      I haven’t done any studies on the matter, but I suspect that if you looked at the composition of each Olympic team and compared them to the demographics of the parent nation, you would find that blacks are generally overrepresented; the disparity just isn’t as obvious at first glance because they’re drawing from a smaller pool.

      “I also criticize the author’s enthusiasm over brain sizes. Verne Troyer … There is no way his brain is 14000ccs or whatever. Unless I don’t know what a cc is. How does all the racial brain size differences explain a 40-year-old the size of an infant?”

      You’re making a common mistake; confusing averages with individuals. A larger brain, on average, means higher intelligence. That does not mean that someone with a smaller brain cannot be more intelligent than someone with a larger brain.

      This mistake is one of the biggest problems we run into when discussing population statistics. The same type of mistake is made by critics of The Bell Curve when they claim that the authors are advocating Eugenics, or suggesting that blacks should not be treated the same as whites. Murray and Herrnstein repeatedly go out of their way to point out that the general trend in a population does not tell you anything about any specific individual. Just because blacks have lower IQs does not mean that a specific black person you’re looking at must have a low IQ.

      Don’t confuse populations with individuals.

  8. Chrysippo says:

    I so love those who take the moral high ground with a stance of this is the way things ought to be and you must be an nasty ‘…ist’ of some sort if you try to examine how things actually are. If a possible scientific outcome might be unpleasant to our current sensibilities then all the more reason for its elucidation so that we may be better prepared. Worrying about the harmful use to which knowledge could be employed would have prevented our emergence from caves (or from the Garden of Eden, for those of religious bent).

    All those who expressed horror at the article failed to counter one statement with a fact or reasoned opinion though of course different interpretations may be honestly argued from any one body of evidence. But whose take gives the better predictions?

    What struck me was the mental picture of three groups: humans, gorillas and chimpanzees where the inter group DNA difference is approximately 1.7%. Not only is it obvious which inter group pairings where differences are most easy to discern but also intra group. If any of the two great ape groups comprised more than one species or subspecies I would not be able to select at that level; however, if the human group were randomly selected, for each member I could relatively easily adduce a regional origin which some argue does not even justify the minor infraspecific level of race. This is ‘ought’ trumping ‘is’.

    Were I to be as closed-minded as some respondents the temptation would be strong to say if you complain the argument is too difficult or technical to follow then perhaps you ought not be commenting on such matters.

  9. Robin Collins says:

    I don’t think the author went sufficiently into the question of how we define “races”; why we make certain choices to categorize people into group populations that are defined as races. Why we choose skin colour instead of eye colour, for instance. He began with a definition of: “Races are populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations, and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features.”
    There are many heritable features that one might arbitrarily choose. And this is surely the primary point (and critique of the concept of race), which is that the choices are arbitrary. Once those races are not “separated geographically” any more, are they still “races”? Or is there a need to segregate “heritable features” in order to retain the concept of race? Let’s say we have a cosmopolitan world wherein there is no geographical separation. Would we still see skin colour (or whatever) as evidence of races?

    • Raymond says:

      Skin color is the most obvious feature difference, so naturally it will be the first category people perceive as race. When skin color is similar (as between East Asian and Caucasians, or between African and native Australians) then other features will be perceived. As the author says, races are not clearly delineated, rather “fuzzy sets”.

      When there is no longer geographical separation, the distinguishing heritable features would still be there, and remain evidence of races. If enough interbreeding took place over a long period of time, then the differences would dwindle, and the tendency to perceive races might lessen. “Gene flow” would obliterate racial boundaries, as the author suggests happened between ice ages. On the other hand, other factors might come into play that could hinder gene flow, such as a tendency to want to stay within your own group, reproductively speaking.

      Maybe. Or perhaps too much rambling :)

  10. Raymond says:

    The NBA reference is admittedly simplistic. However, basketball is a sport where opportunity is relatively equal, unlike sports that require more specialized equipment. Every high school in the USA, whether predominantly black or white, has a basketball team. Is it so impossible that inherent racial abilities might exist? Or is the concept just too scary for some?

    The basic point of the article is simple: natural selection cannot magically result in equality, no matter how much we might like it to. Kudos to Michael Shermer for being bold enough to revive the discussion.

    • Grace Fury says:

      So what? Even if I were to think that you had, without a doubt, established the inequality of brain function or “intelligence” within the species, according to your definitions of the word, then what?

      What would that “intelligence” direct you to think and do from there?

      Would it necessarily improve your moral sphere or just drive you to think more “efficiently” on behalf of the sacred human survival of those that are “just like you”?

      Or better yet, would such arguments superficially drive voting others, “just like you”, without any moral examination at all, to operate suddenly with high moral responsibility or simply to purge/demote socially the undesirables, according to your *intelligence* and cross-confirmed studies of those who do not conquer the tests written by those just like you?

      If race doesn’t matter, then why all the studies to confirm or deny the differences between them? Krauthammer wants to be rid of racial differences – legislatively of course – so long as he’s in charge and has the right “science” to back his sense of superiority. What else is new?

      • Raymond says:

        Personally, I don’t know “then what”. I do know that understanding the reality of any situation is always better than remaining in ignorance. Better to deal with reality than try to sweep it under a rug.

        The article makes solid points about how universities end up divided into classes, between those who get in based on ability and those who get in based upon artificial racial quotas. We are seeing education driven to the lowest common denominator. And that is very sad..

        Race does matter. And treating all people fairly does matter. A level playing field may be the best we can hope for.

  11. Michael says:

    I must question Sarich’s command of his basic research tools. He stated in the discussion on race and athletics, “Recourse to a z-score table tells us that 1 in 4,500 takes us about 3.4 SD (standard deviations) from the mean; 1 in 90,000 is about 4.3 SD from the mean. I submit that this almost one SD difference between populations in this suite of abilities based on a fundamental human trait is pretty substantial.” An elementary knowledge of statistics informs one that the difference is not substantial at all. In fact, the area under the curve (probability) that such a difference exists is a mere 0.0003. Meaningful distinctions for such sensitive research questions require exponentially more than this. It leads me to question his understanding of ‘statistical difference’ and thus his ability to assess “The Bell Curve” with a full palette of abilities and a truly scholarly perspective. Sarich may be articulate and erudite but that does not necessarily imply command of the quantitative skills needed to reach a valid and reliable conclusion.

    • Raymond says:

      How can you say there is no substantial statistical difference? If there were none, wouldn’t one expect NBA players to appear in the same proportion of black and white as the general population?

    • Paul Cornelius says:

      I use statistics all the time and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Area under WHAT curve? And how did you come up with the number 0.0003? It’s a fact that 75% of NBA players are black and the US population is about 12% black. If you’re trying to explain how that isn’t statistically significant, I suggest that you might want to check your calculations.

  12. Tzindaro says:

    The late John Campbell, editor of Analog Magazine, who was very proud of his Scottish ancesstry, noted that while a vastly disproportionate number of names of scientists and engineers were of Scottish origin, hardly any musician of note was from a Scottish background, and the reverse was true of people of African descent. He considered these different talents to be genetic, not cultural and that Africans have an inborn talent at music but lack the genetic ability to do engineering, while Scotts are good at engineering but incapable of doing anything musical.

    The question that comes to mind is, if some races are better at some things than other races, so what? Maybe one race does better at science and engineering but is no good at something some other race can do better. This whole debate is misguided because it depends on the assumption that intellectual academic ability is more worthwhile than musical ability or some other abiility.

    So here is a suggestion. Maybe whites are better than blacks at doing the things needed to succeed in the culture invented and designed by whites. And maybe blacks are better at some other subjects, but happen not to have the genetic ability to do as well as whites in the white culture they happen to live in at this time in history. And maybe whites would tend to be failures in an African society that had other values and priorities.

  13. Adam Weyhrich says:

    So the entire argument seems to be:

    There is variation between ethnicities (races) in brain size
    Bigger brains must mean more intelligent.

    The rest of the entire piece is built on that shaky premise. Long winded. Overly technical (science jargon).

    However my absolute favorite part is the claim that humans are the most diverse group (racially) of any mammal. How do you figure? Is anyone putting red squirrels & grey squirts into sporting compitions against each other? Has anyone studied the diversity of smell between groups of mice?

    This article has exactly the problem as “The Bell Curve”. Bad, incomplete, or misleading science as a basis for the rest of it all.

    • Raymond says:

      It is evident from evolution that, in general, bigger brains means more intelligent. Otherwise, what were bigger brains selected for? To fit hats better?

      • MJ Dunbar says:

        So by that logic, the potential intelligence of humans will eventually peak when our heads get too big to hold up? Perhaps we should start to investigate which race has the largest neck, since in the end they will have the co related trait required to support the natural imperative of head expansion.
        This article and so many in this “publication” are so full of arguments based on assumptions that are nonsense they not only prove the opposing point they also lend credence to claims of right wing bias…too bad…it would be nice if arguments were limited to …I don’t know…science and evidenced based argument.

  14. John R says:

    This is an interesting essay for it’s presentation of data and the immediate arguments around it. But as it builds to the conclusion the quality starts to stray with distance from the data.

    While I agree with the general conclusion about looking at individuals, the last statement comes as a shock. It is a non sequitur in making such a leap. Removing references to groups from law and regulations does not follow logically or realistically.

    I also have problems with his claim that being a hyphonated (name your tune) would negatively impact a person’s performance. This argument is plucked out of the ether and is a straw man at best. No one is any one thing and only one thing. Chemist or fisherman or mother. This is just absurd and really needs nothing further said. I suggest it be dropped in any revisions.

    The point about leveling things up is less clear to me but strikes me as specious. Who knows what outcomes would we might see if societies had true equal opportunity. That condition has never existed across a nation or even a culture. I sense some begging the question going on here. But I’m hardly an expert. It would be nice to have some data or examples and not just hand waving.

    Thank you, Skeptic, for presenting both these essays. I learned a lot and have much to chew on.

  15. Lolz says:

    The main conceit after all the data is “Let’s go back to counting individuals. ” and not groups. Unfortunately that would require that in the course of the last 400 years of culture and sciences within the Americas : the act of looking at the individual and not his group as a measure of merit and inclusion ( imixed raced or mixed gender schooling) was something achieved.

    Now, if intelligence is as inheritable as nobility, surely the Kings would have out-lasted the rise of a republic of merchants and then a republic of landless peasants ( anybody here rent rather than own?). And in certain European lands they have.

    But to speak of a certain phenotypic variation as the true source of adaptability removes the data input by mindless chance (I.e the world outside the organism). Still the rising death rates of middle age white -Americans is not a product of natural selection? Or is it?

  16. Pacopicopiedra says:

    Bob Zannelli, how do you explain last week’s article about The Bell Curve? Was that thorough critique of the book also an example of Shermer’s extreme political views? Or does that article not count for some reason?

  17. Agamennon says:

    When “The Bell curve” was published the prominent evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, completely debunked it.

    http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html

    His objections were based on many elements, the most egregious being that “The Bell Curve” authors selected data sets that leaned toward their arguments and ignored contrary information.

    For example, with equal opportunities, middle class blacks in Africa outperform middle class whites in the USA on both IQ tests and college entrance exams.

  18. t paine says:

    I approve this message.

  19. Novy Glass says:

    Some of the comments here represent the current efforts of Political correctness to only accept the establishment mindset without thinking outside the box. It is scary to see intelligent people react in such an extreme way. It seems to be popular now to shoot the messenger if we don’t like the Message. College campuses in many parts of our country have the free speech policy of North Korea. All scientific thought and study should be at least considered before rejecting it in some knee jerk fashion. We should not be afraid of Ideas and theories.Rather consider them in context they were given and accept them or dismiss them on merit according to the evidence. Passionate name calling and knee jerk reactions do not promote the growth of knowledge. Scientific study should not be a prisoner of political correctness.No subject should be off limits. We should encourage complete Freedom of thought! There seems to be a sophisticated veneer on a return to the dark ages and that promotes an interference of progress. Let’s hold to the idea the earth is flat because it is the politically correct thing to do. Otherwise we are headed back to the days of burning heretics at the stake.

    • 123elle says:

      Hmmm — knee jerk, shoot the messenger, outside the box, return to the dark ages, earth is flat, burning heretics at the stake, political correctness.

      Sir, do you really think in these cliches or just write in them?

      • Mark LaJoie says:

        You oughtn’t automatically discount a statement because you think it is a “cliche”. After all, a cliche is a truism become trite. For instance: Some people are smarter than others, but what is considered smart depends on history and environment. Those who live in cities need different mental adaptations than hunter-gatherers wandering the savannah. So when you try to compare groups with different social environments, it is not bigotry to point out that they naturally differ in various ways in the distribution of norms. Sometimes it is smart to be “liberal” and other times it is smart to be “conservative”.
        The real stupidity arises when you can’t tell one time from another.

  20. 123elle says:

    This article proposes a number of unproven points, and then proceeds to take off on them as if they were accepted orthodoxy.

    ‘For example, the quote he sets out states “[…the effect]…of tribalizing our society. It would require a mind completely closed to current realities, never mind historical ones, to remain ignorant of the disastrous effects of tribalization.”

    He has not in any way either defined or proven his own concept of “tribalization.” Yet he goes on to imply (smear) by association that “anyone supporting policies that tribalize is either ignorant or simply playing hte game of divide and conquer.” He inflicts his concept of “tribalization” on the reader as if it were as true and valid as the law of gravity.

    This is nonsensical. He trusts us to assume that “tribalization” is shorthand for various minorities associating and identifying with one another, to the detriment of society — a terrible, awful, and not very good thing.

    Yet, as a Jew, I am reading more and more now that the very tightly closed and intermarrying society of Ashkenazi Jews over the years has had the effect of actually raising the collective IQ of Jews. This is ascribed to marrying Jewish daughters only to the smartest and most religiously oservant sons, and to rituals that supposedly sharpen the brain for physics and math. Hmmm. So the supposed “tribalization” of my subculture “works” evolutionarily, but in the cases of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, including women, I suppose, it only Balkanizes and degrades the larger society.

    This is where the author’s fundamental prejudice and bigotry emerge from the obfuscating fog of half-baked statistics and assumptions. I have found that supporters of The Bell Curve always cloak their racism in lofty scientific conclusions drawn from supposedly incontrovertible surveys and statistics.

    They are so wily at, and so committed to these machinations that I can only assume they believe it all deeply and totally. “So come right out and scream it,” I always want to tell them. You actually believe that blacks and Hispanics are dumber than whites, correct? Their pin-brains cannot physically hold all the knowledge that those of whites can, correct?

    Now look at all the concatenations you had to sweat so hard over, just to try to make that true. And of course to make people like me gag down that simple idea.

    I don’t have the time to pick out all the false equivalences from this pile of aging mental strudel. However, I’d really like to know why the people whose academic credentials and achievements I really respect believe that you are full of it. And the academics of note who support your idea (including you yourself, Mr. Sarich RIP) are overwhelmingly old — old enough to be speaking from suspected dementia. James Watson, who apparently lost his mental censor, did scream out his racism at last, now that he is only a shell of the brilliant scientist he was.

    BTW, anybody who can’t find a more credible advocate than Krauthammer to drive home his point is throwing a giant wrench in his own works.

    • Tzindaro says:

      Throughout all generations, the smartest young boys from Jewish families have been smart enough to leave the Jewish crapola behind them and get baptised at an early age. The Churches were always willing to accept converts. They mostly married someone from a Christian background and that was the end of their existence as far as the Jewish community was concerned. Only the stupid ones stayed Jewish in places where the dominant culture would accept converts, which was almost everywhere before the rise of 19th century pseudobiology changed the definition of Jewishness from religion to race.

      If evolution really meant anything in such a case, which it does not, then Jews would be among the LEAST intelligent group. If that is not so, the fact would disprove the evolution theory as far as this particular subset is concerned.

      • 123elle says:

        You say:

        “The smartest young boys from Jewish families have been smart enough to leave the Jewish crapola behind them and get baptised at an early age. The Churches were always willing to accept converts.”

        Would you like to cite the sources you obtained this information from? As an atheist and a Jew myself, I think all religions are “crapola” but I don’t think the smartest Jewish males converted and got baptised,” (baptised of all things) — unless there’s some comprehensive study I haven’t heard of. There are many intelligent Jews who reject religion, including their own, and I know that in Spain the conversos had to convert to stay alive (which didn’t even work all that well), but as for the most intelligent Jews converting, I think not, unless you show me proof.

        • Tzindaro says:

          I did not mean to imply the Christian religion is any saner or more intelligent than the Jewish one, and I agree with you that all religions are false-to-fact and irrational, but if being a Jew was a liability because of discrimination, which it was almost everywhere in Europe for centuries and one could opt out by joining the dominant group, one would have to be a fool to remain a Jew. The smart kids would figure that out at an early age and only the stupid ones would stay part of the Jewish gene pool after they grew up and could leave home. So, if there is anything to the theory of evolution, one would expect the average intelligence of the ones who stayed Jews to be less than that of the ones who were smart enough to convert.

        • Grimbeard says:

          “if there is anything to the theory of evolution, one would expect the average intelligence of the ones who stayed Jews to be less than that of the ones who were smart enough to convert.”

          You’re talking about something that, you claim, occurred a couple of hundred years ago, for only a few generations. Evolution takes a *lot* longer than that.

  21. t paine says:

    Did you all read the two articles posted here or did some of you accidently think this was Huffpo or Vox?

  22. Eric says:

    I find the NBA comments in all these articles hilarious. Yes, there are more blacks that you would expect in the NBA. But the NHL has something like a grand total of 30 black players out of 1500. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball used to have ~18% black players in the mid 1980s, but that’s dropped to less than 7% today, while Latinos have gone from 11 to 27% in the same time frame. (https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/baseball-demographics-1947-2012)

    Perhaps we should admit that the racial breakdown in sports has far more to do with culture and opportunity than any inherent racial ability? Of course, that might call into doubt everything else in this pile of nonsense.

    • Paul Cornelius says:

      A good point. I think the author’s fallacy is here: he considers basketball prowess a “suite of abilities based on a fundamental human trait” – suggesting that it’s completely hereditary (like race) rather than learned. But the last time I checked, millions of people are born black but none are with an NBA contract. That takes talent of course, but also work, dedication, practice, opportunities, coaches, etc. If black skin and basketball skill were as simply correlated as the author claims, Nigeria (170 million black people) would easily crush the USA (44 million black people) at basketball.

  23. Frank says:

    Who / what is Jacob referring to?

  24. Jacob says:

    I guess we’ve betrayed our skeptic value?

    Sherbet you twat, does the bell curve really tell you anything useful? Really?

    Shamrock why have you gone this absurd route? Do you just really want to call black people niggers but the big mean SJWs would punch your racist ass in that tiny dick?

    Fucking please.

  25. Bob Zannelli says:

    More and more the so called Skeptic’s publication has become an advocate of Shermer’s extreme right wing political views and now apparently this loving gentle form of scholarly prejudice based on skin pigmentation. I guess he’s taking a brief break from singing the praise of Donald Trump to host this “scholar.” The Bell Curve has been been roundly criticized by most social scientists for using cooked data in support of an agenda. The concept of race isn’t even considered to be a sensible category in defining human groups, any more. Among actual social scientists race is recognized as a social construct, not an actual biological division between humans. I think the Skeptcs magazine has become little more than a forum for Shermer’s extreme political views , it can only be saved the removal of Shermer from this organization and publication

    • MBDK says:

      Bob Zannelli said
      “the so called Skeptic’s publication has become an advocate of Shermer’s extreme right wing political views”

      and
      “The concept of race isn’t even considered to be a sensible category in defining human groups, any more.”

      This is indicative of the fact that you (along with others) have missed the entire point of his article. Political views and definitions do not and cannot influence the course of nature. It is the very insistence that the politically correct versions of our world mandate separation by race, sex, etc. that detracts from the absolutely more beneficial assessment of individuals according to their own unique abilities.

      Your attempt to put a political spin on the article, rather than to argue coherently upon the content therein, is suggestive evidence that you may have no logical counterpoint(s). Please understand that I write this not to disrespect you, rather in an attempt to get you to think more deeply about what and why you wrote such things.

      • Grace Fury says:

        Let me ask you this. What exactly is served by this attempt to find brain distinctions between members of the same species – which does not necessarily address (or define) “intelligence”, as one comment has already noted? What “good” can come from it? What is served by these studies, if not to judge, morally, or define social orders, based on those “results” from incomplete or compromised scientific points of view?? As this article or any other plays “gotcha” and find so-called blind-spots in others (or unclear positions), we cannot necessarily assume his/her position is therefore universally “true”.

        I mean, the the author says, ‘it is important to recognize that this “return of biology” is not simply a revival of repudiated ideas, like racism, sexism, or eugenics.’

        But when scientists want to claim they have “the way” to moral behavior, as now seems the trend, we have a problem. If everyone looks to science to tell us what is and to deliver the order of things, then a “return to biology” based on any exhaustive, loaded or biased argument that poses questions, but does not answer all others, while it adores a dominant ruling class or gives just enough basis to support it (good enough for disordered people and their politicians), becomes an obstacle and actually stands to exacerbate problems…or to under-fund/resource the less fortunate “genetically-speaking” by racial category (or by judgment of Sarich and others) and still worse, possibly at the onset of someone’s *environmentally* compromised life.

        So, perhaps we ought proceed as if we are equal, relatively speaking. I think that is where Jefferson’s (or Franklin’s) genius lies…in uncertainty. We are sentient beings on the same playing field – relatively speaking.

        But we can do better as one – in defense of others, like the animals we kill and eat for pleasure with no regard for their “experience”, even if we can never truly understand it or relate to it.

        Let’s work from that general “greatness” and work through that problem and others like it — to improve the human experience and by default many others. Yes?…so that we don’t have to slaughter to feel good on “Easter Sunday”? :-)

        • Alex says:

          I’m always amazed by seeing – on a skeptics website – people asking questions such as “What exactly is served by this attempt to find …” and “What good can come of it?”

          It’s akin to asking “why do all these scienticians keep wasting money on fruit flies?”.

          Even if no immediate benefit is apparent, that in itself does not make a particular line of inquiry worthless. The better question is “why SHOULDN’T we be looking at this?”

          In times past the answer might have been “because it’s heretical”. Today it’s more likely to be “because it’s racist” or “because it’s offensive”. All three answers boil down to the same thing: because it offends the sensibilities of a group which does not want anyone looking too closely at their accepted “truths”.

          I’m not a fan of arbitrary limits on scientific inquiry; even less so when such limits are based entirely on emotion or the blind defense of an ideology.

    • Paul Cornelius says:

      Perhaps you should re-read carefully the introduction that precedes the article itself. It presents the reason why this article was featured at this particular time, and makes clear that it is the counter-argument to the one presented last week. Since last week’s article was highly critical of “The Bell Curve”, do you think that Michael Shermer has suddenly changed political outlook in the past seven days?

  26. brad tittle says:

    I was a exchange student to Germany in 1985/86. I took all of the same courses in Germany that I would have taken in the US. One of the courses was physics. I did my best to understand everything, but there were some terms I struggled with. m/s^2 was one of them. I took physics again after I got back. The first time the professor said meter per second per second, it made perfect sense.

    When I took the SATs over there, I didn’t do as well as I did taking them over here. Part of it could have been related to it being the first time I took the test. Part of it might have had to do with being in a not so perfect german thinking frame of mind. I was not thinking in my native language… My native language though was much more fluent cognitively.

    On the flip side though, there is still a dearth of women in Engineering. The story behind “Hidden Figures” happened more than 50 years ago. Most engineering schools still aren’t quite flush with females.

    Someone might say that they aren’t being molded well enough by their early teachers. Maybe, they are just too sane to become Engineers.

    I have 0 desire to discourage women from pursuing engineering. I have been trained though, not to. It is dangerous of me to talk in the manner of an engineer around anyone who is NOT an engineer. Genetically it is even more dangerous. Unfortunately, I as a white, euro type male cannot fix that. I have to be careful talking like an engineer in front of men. Talking like an engineer in front of women is not the way to woo them. That presents a nearly impossible hurdle to be reduced from the male side. Add race to that equation and I go stuttering into the corner.

  27. William Warmuth says:

    I have no explaination of why people are racist, but they are. Removing legal reference to race would be akin to relaxing the Voting Rights Act, immediate discrimination.

    Trying to follow your reasoning of historic justification of racism makes my head hurt. You are refuting facts not in evidence so let’s just undermine your metaphor. My eye may be able to see red but I didn’t create red. Radiation exists across a spectrum we’ve defined by frequency and a small part of which we can “see”. Maybe there are other, more useful ways of measuring radiation which will further our scientific understanding. If you don’t have eyes there are no colors but you can still use the microwave oven.

    We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us who tried to understand our world despite lacking modern information. They may have noblely tried but as we should expect, they came up with simplistic and incomplete notions.

    You have been educated “to the test” and your high performance is a tribute to your teachers and your mental gymnastics but it doesn’t define “intelligence”.
    Are there camels in Hamburg?
    Or try taking an IQ test in a foreign language. Your result would fit on the bell curve.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how Akismet processes your comment data. Comments are closed 45 days after an article is published.

Skeptic Magazine App on iPhone

SKEPTIC App

Whether at home or on the go, the SKEPTIC App is the easiest way to read your favorite articles. Within the app, users can purchase the current issue and back issues. Download the app today and get a 30-day free trial subscription.

Download the Skeptic Magazine App for iOS, available on the App Store
Download the Skeptic Magazine App for Android, available on Google Play
SKEPTIC • 3938 State St., Suite 101, Santa Barbara, CA, 93105-3114 • 1-805-576-9396 • Copyright © 1992–2024. All rights reserved • Privacy Policy