The Unwelcome Revival of 'Race Science'
One of the strangest ironies of our time is that a body of thoroughly debunked "science" is being revived by people who claim to be defending truth against a rising tide of ignorance. The idea that certain races are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and pundits who portray themselves as noble dissidents, standing up for inconvenient facts. Through a surprising mix of fringe and mainstream media sources, these ideas are reaching a new audience, which regards them as proof of the superiority of certain races.
Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the "alt-right", who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics.
One of the people behind the revival of race science was, not long ago, a mainstream figure. In 2014, Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science correspondent, wrote what must rank as the most toxic book on race science to appear in the last 20 years. In A Troublesome Inheritance, he repeated three race-science shibboleths: that the notion of "race" corresponds to profound biological differences among groups of humans; that human brains evolved differently from race to race; and that this is supported by different racial averages in IQ scores.
Another of Molyneux's recent guests was the political scientist Charles Murray, who co-authored The Bell Curve. The book argued that poor people, and particularly poor black people, were inherently less intelligent than white or Asian people. When it was first published in 1994, it became a New York Times bestseller, but over the next few years it was picked to pieces by academic critics.
One of the reasons scientific racism hasn't gone away is that the public hears more about the racism than it does about the science. This has left an opening for people such as Murray and Wade, in conjunction with their media boosters, to hold themselves up as humble defenders of rational enquiry. With so much focus on their apparent bias, we've done too little to discuss the science. Which raises the question: why, exactly, are the race scientists wrong?
I think the revival of this is largely down to the current popular opinions regarding intellectual truth. The idea that your truth is just as valid or more so than a scientists, because your opinion has reached more people. If you tweet a lie and it gets liked by enough people, does that makes it more valid than the truth? If enough people like my version of the truth more than another, does my truth become the better one?
It's a scary time for the world. We are arguably in a post truth world and if it allows for stuff like this to make a comback, well then brothers and sisters...
Edit:
Some great sources on debunking race realism.
Race and intelligence: A sorry tale of shoddy science
Debunking Phrenology
Last edited: