I think these studies can be very dangerous. Do we really want to prove things about people based on their genetics? It makes me uncomfortable and could be used by very evil people to kill many people for many different reasons. No people are perfect and any group could find some flaw in another people to justify an extermination. Just my opinion though.
This great response to the "dangerous knowledge" argument is taken from Prof. J. Philippe Rushton's speech at our Preserving Western Civilizaton conference from last February:
Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic FallacyAn enormous gulf separates the knowledge base of experts in the behavioral sciences and what the politically correct gatekeepers stop from
appearing in the mainstream media and policy discussions. The world’s population groups are obviously not interchangeable. Indeed, some group differences have proven so intractably that debates over potential remedial treatments have spanned generations. Long-standing group inequalities pose a problem in developing countries such as India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and South Africa as well as the US (Klitgaard, 1986; Lynn, 2008; Sowell, 2004).
The “naturalistic fallacy,” identified by philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), occurs when reasoning jumps from statements about what
is to prescription about what
ought to be. An example of the naturalistic fallacy would be approving of all wars if scientific evidence showed warfare was part of human nature. The converse of the naturalistic fallacy is the “moralistic fallacy”—jumping from prescriptions about what
ought to be to statements about what
is. An example of the moralistic fallacy: claiming that, because warfare is wrong, it cannot be part of human nature.
The term “moralistic fallacy” was coined by Harvard University microbiologist Bernard Davis (1978) in response to demands for ethical guidelines to control the study of what could allegedly become
“dangerous knowledge”…such as the genetic basis of IQ. For well over a generation, the study of the genetic and racial aspects of IQ has given rise to the best examples we have of the moralistic fallacy in action. Happily, under the sheer weight of evidence, there are now signs this anti-intellectual and unscientific prohibition is breaking down, at least in the academic world. Most of the opposition to the genetic hypothesis consists of mere moralizing and worse, the creation of a threatening and coercive atmosphere incompatible with academic freedom, free enquiry, and the civil liberties of a truly democratic society.
Despite repeated claims to the contrary, racial group differences are as large today as when first measured nearly 100 years ago. They, and the associated gaps in living standards, education levels etc., are rooted in factors that are largely heritable, not cultural. IQ differences are attributable more to differences in brain size than to social, economic, or political factors. There is little or no value in denying reality. Improving opportunities and removing arbitrary barriers is a worthy ethical goal. Equal opportunity is laudable. But we must realize that it will result in equitable, though unequal outcomes.
Jensen (2006) proposed “two laws of individual differences”—(1) individual differences in learning and performance
increase as task complexity increases, and (2) individual differences in performance increase with practice and experience (unless there is a low ceiling on proficiency). Consequently, the more we remove environmental barriers and improve everybody’s intellectual performance, the greater will be the relative influence of genetic factors (because the environmental variance is being removed). However, this means that equal opportunity will result in unequal outcomes,
within-families,
between-families, and
between population groups. The fact that we have learned to live with the first, and to a lesser degree the second, offers some hope we can learn to do so for the third.
Topic: Evidence That Intelligence Is Largely Inherited (Read 7990 times)