For years, PumpkinPerson (PP) has been pushing an argument which states that “if you’re the first branch, and you don’t do anymore branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches.” This is the concept of “more evolved” or the concept of evolutionary progress. Over the years I have written a few articles on the confused nature of this thinking. PP seems to like the argument since Rushton deployed a version of it for his r/K selection (Differential K) theory, which stated that “Mongoloids” are more “K evolved” than “Caucasians” who are more “K evolved” than “Negroids”, to use Rushton’s (1992) language. Rushton posited that this ordering occurred due to the cold winters that the ancestors of “Mongoloids” and “Caucasoids” underwent, and he theorized that this led to evolutionary progress, which would mean that certain populations are more advanced than others (Rushton, 1992; see here for response). It is in this context that PP’s statement above needs to be carefully considered and analyzed to determine its implications and relevance to Rushton’s argument. It commits the affirming the consequent fallacy, and assuming the statement is true leads to many logical inconsistenties like there being a “most evolved” species,
Why this evolutionary progress argument is fallacious
if you’re the first branch, and you don’t do anymore branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches.
This is one of the most confused statements I have ever read on the subject of phylogenies. This misconception, though, is so widespread that there have been quite a few papers that talk about this and talk about how to steer students away from this kind of thinking about evolutionary trees (Crisp and Cook, 2004; Baum, Smith, and Donovan, 2005; Gregory, 2008; Omland, Cook, and Crisp, 2008). This argument is invalid since the concept of “evolved” in evolutionary trees doesn’t refer to a hierarchical scale, where higher branches are “more evolved” than lower branches (which are “less evolved”). What evolutionary trees do is show historical relationships between different species, which shows common ancestry and divergence over time. So each branch represents a lineage and all living organisms have been evolving foe the same amount of time since the last common ancestor (LCA). Thus, the position of a branch on the tree doesn’t determine a species’ level of evolution.
The argument is invalid since it incorrectly assumes that the position of the branch on a phylogeny determines the evolution or the “evolutionary advancement” of a species. Here’s how I formulate this argument:
(P1) If you’re the first branch on the evolutionary tree and you don’t do any more branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches. (P2) (Assumption) Evolutionary advancement is solely determined by the position on the tree and the number of branches. (C) So species represented by higher branches on the evolutionary tree are more evolved than species represented by lower branches.
There is a contradiction in P2, since as I explained above, each branch represents a new lineage and every species on the tree is equally evolved. PP’s assumption seems to be that newer branches have different traits than the species that preceded it, implying that there is an advancement occurring. Nevertheless, I can use a reductio to refute the argument.
Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario in which this statement is true: “If you’re the first branch and you don’t do any more branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches.” This suggests that the position of a species on a phylogeny determines its level of evolution. So according to this concept, if a species occupies a higher branch, it should be “more evolved” than a species on a lower branch. So following this line of reasoning, a species that has undergone extensive branching and diversification should be classified as “more evolved” compared to a species that has fewer branching points.
Now imagine that in this hypothetical scenario, we have species A and species B in a phylogeny. Suppose that species A is the first branch and that it hasn’t undergone any branching. Conversely, species B, which is represented on a higher branch, has experienced extensive branching and diversification, which adheres to the criteria for a species to be considered “more evolved.” But there are logical implications for the concept concerning the positions of species A and species B on the phylogeny.
So according to the concept of linear progression which is implied in the original statement, if species B is “more evolved” than species A due to its higher branch position, it logically follows that species B should continue to further evolve and diversify. This progression should lead to new branching points, as each subsequent stage would be considered “more evolved” than the last. Thus, applying the line of reasoning in the original statement, it suggests that there should always be a species represented on an even higher branch than species B, and this should continue ad infinitim, with no endpoint.
The logical consequence of the statement is that an infinite progression of increasingly evolved species, each species being represented by a higher branch than the one before, without any final of ultimate endpoint for a “most evolved” species. This result leads to an absurdity, since it contradicts our understanding of evolution as an ongoing and continuous process. The idea of a linear and hierarchical progression of a species in an evolutionary tree culminating in a “most evolved” species isn’t supported by our scientific understanding and it leads to an absurd outcome.
Thus, the logical implications of the statement “If you’re the first branch and you don’t do any more branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches” leads to an absurd and contradictory result and so it must be false. The concept of the position of a species on an evolutionary tree isn’t supported by scientific evidence and understanding. Phylogenies represent historical relationships and divergence events over time.
(1) Assume the original claim is true: If you’re the first branch and you don’t do any more branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches.
(2) Suppose species A is the first branch and undergoes no further branching.
(3) Now take species B which is in a higher branch which has undergone extensive diversification and branching, making it “more evolved”, according to the statement in (1).
(4) But based on the concept of linear progression implied in (1), species B should continue to evolved and diversity even further, leading to new branches and increased evolution.
(5) Following the logic in (1), there should always be a species represented on an even higher branch than species B, which is even more evolved.
(6) This process should continue ad infinitim with species continually branching and becoming “more evolved” without an endpoint.
(7) This leads to an absurd result, since it suggests that there is no species that could be considered “more evolved” or reach a final stage of evolution, contradicting our understanding of evolution as a continuous, ongoing process, with no ultimate endpoint.
(8) So since the assumption in (1) leads to an absurd result, then it must be false.
So the original statement is false, and a species’ position on a phylogeny doesn’t determine the level of evolution and the superiority of a species. The concept of a linear and hierarchical progression of advancement in a phylogeny is not supported by scientific evidence and assuming the statement in (1) is true leads to a logically absurd outcome. Each species evolves in its unique ecological context, without reaching a final state of evolution or hierarchical scale of superiority. This reductio ad absurdum argument therefore reveals the fallacy in the original statement.
Also, think about the claim that there are species that are “more evolved” than other species. This implies that there are “less evolved” species. Thus, a logical consequence of the claim is that there could be a “most evolved” species.
So if a species is “most evolved”, it would mean that that species has surpassed all others in evolutionary advancement and there are no other species more advanced than it. Following this line of reasoning, there should be no further branching or diversification of this species since it has already achieved the highest level of evolution. But evolution is an ongoing process. Organisms continously adapt to and change their surroundings (the organism-environment system), and change in response to this. But if the “most evolved” species is static, this contradicts what we know about evolution, mainly that it is continuous, ongoing change—it is dynamic. Further, as the environment changes, the “most evolved” species could become less suited to the environment’s conditions over time, leading to a decline in its numbers or even it’s extinction. This would then imply that there would have been other species that are “more evolved.” (It merely shows the response of the organism to its environment and how it develops differently.) Finally, the idea of a “most evolved” species implies an endpoint of evolution, which contradicts our knowledge of evolution and the diversification of life one earth. Therefore, the assumption that there is a “most evolved” species leads to a logical contradiction and an absurdity based on what we know about evolution and life on earth.
The statement possesses scala naturae thinking, which is also known as the great chain of being. This is something Rushton (2004) sought to bring back to evolutionary biology. However, the assumptions that need to hold for this to be true—that is, the assumptions that need to hold for this kind of tree reading to even be within the realm of possibility is false. This is wonderfully noted by Gregory (2008) who states that “The order of terminal noses is meaningless.” Crisp and Cook (2004) also state how such tree-reading is intuitive and this intuition of course is false:
Intuitive interpretation of ancestry from trees is likely to lead to errors, especially the common fallacy that a species-poor lineage is more ‘ancestral’ or ‘diverges earlier’ than does its species-rich sister group. Errors occur when trees are read in a one-sided way, which is more commonly done when trees branch asymmetrically.
There are several logical implications of that statement. I’ve already covered the claim that there is a kind of progression and advancement in evolution—a linear and hierarchical ranking—and the fixed endpoint (“most evolved”). Further, in my view, this leads to value judgments, that some species are “better” or “superior” to others. It also seems to ignore that the branching signifies not which species has undergone more evolution, but the evolutionary relationships between species. Finally, evolution occurs independently in each lineage and is based on their specific histories and interactions between developmental resources, it’s not valid to compare species as “more evolved” than others based on the relationships between species on evolutionary trees, so it’s based on an arbitrary comparison between species.
Finally, I can refute this using Gould’s full house argument.
P1: If evolution is a ladder of progress, with “more evolved” species on higher rungs, then the fossil record should demonstrate a steady increase in complexity over time. P2: The fossils record does not shit a steady increase in complexity over time. C: Therefore, evolution is not a ladder of progress and species cannot be ranked as “more evolved” based on complexity.
P1: If the concept of “more evolved” is valid, then there would be a linear and hierarchical progression in the advancement of evolution, wjtcertsin species considered superior to others based on their perceived level of evolutionary change. P2: If there a linear and hierarchical progression of advancement in evolution, then the fossil record should demonstrate a steady increase in complexity over time, with species progressively becoming more complex and “better” in a hierarchical sense. P3: The fossils record does not show a steady increase in complexity over time; it instead shows a diverse and branching pattern of evolution. C1: So the concept of “more evolved” isn’t valid, since there is an absence of a steady increase in complexity in the fossil record and this refutes the notion of a linear and hierarchical progression of advancement in evolution. P4: If the concept of “more evolved” is not valid, then there is no objective hierarchy of superiority among species based in their positions on an evolutionary tree. C2: Thus, there is no objective hierarchy of superiority among species based on their positions on an evolutionary tree.
There is one final fallacy contained in that statement: it affirms the consequent. This logical fallacy takes the form of: If P then Q, P is true so Q is true.” Even if the concept of “more evolved” were valid, just because a species doesn’t do any more branching doesn’t mean it’s less evolved. So this reasoning is as follows: If you’re the first branch and you don’t do anymore branching, then you’re less evolved than higher branches (If P and Q, then R). It affirms the consequent like this: You didn’t do anymore branching (Q), so this branch has to be less evolved than the higher branches (R). It incorrectly infers the consequent Q (not doing anymore branching) as a sufficient condition for the antecedent P (being the first branch), which leads to the flawed conclusion (R) that the species is less evolved than higher branches. Just because a species doesn’t do anymore branching doesn’t mean it’s less evolved than another species. There could be numerous reasons why branching didn’t occur and it doesn’t directly determine evolutionary status. The argument infers being less evolved from doing less branching, which affirms the consequent. If a species doesn’t do anymore branching then that branch is less evolved than a higher branch. So since the argument affirms the consequent, it is therefore invalid.
Conclusion
Reading phylogenies in such a manner—in a way that would make one infer the conclusion that evolution is progressive and that there are “more evolved” species—although intuitive is false. Misconceptions like this along with many others while reading evolutionary trees are so persistent that much thought has been put into educating the public on right and wrong ways to read evolutionary trees.
As I showed in my argument ad absurdums where I accepted the claim as true, it leads to logical inconsistenties and goes against everything we know about evolution. Evolution is not progressive, it’s merely local change. That a species changes over time from another species doesn’t imply anything about “how evolved” (“more or less”) it is in comparison to the other. Excising this thinking is tough, but it is doable by understanding how evolutionary trees are constructed and how to read them correctly. It further affirms the consequent, leading to a false conclusion.
All living species have spent the same amount of time evolving. Branching merely signifies a divergence, not a linear scale of advancement. Of course one would think that if evolution is happening and one species evolves into another and that this relationship is shown on a tree that this would indicate that the newer species is “better” in some way in comparison to the species it derived from. But it merely suggests that the species faced different challenges which influenced its evolution; each species adapted and survived in its own unique evolutionary ecology, leading to diversification and the formation of newer branches on the tree. Evolution does not follow a linear path of progress, and there is no inherent hierarchy of superiority among species based on their position on the evolutionary tree. While the tree visually represents relationships between species, it doesn’t imply judgments like “better” or “worse”, “more evolved” or “less evolved.” It merely highlights the complexity and diversity of all life on earth.
Evolution is quite obviously notprogressive, and even if it were, we wouldn’t see evolutionary progression from reading evolutionary trees, since such evolutionary relationships between species can be ladderized or not, with many kinds of different branches that may not be intuitive to those who read evolutionary trees as showing “more evolved” species, they nevertheless show a valid evolutionary relationship.
For years it seems as if Bo Winegard—former professor (his contract was not renewed)—does not understand the difference between social constructivism about race (racial constructivism refers to the same thing as social constructivism about race so I will be using these two terms interchangeably) and biological realism about race. It seems like he assumes that racial constructivists say that race isn’t real. But if that were true, how would it make sense to call race a social concept if it doesn’t exist? It also seems to me like he is saying that social constructs aren’t real. Money and language are social constructs, too, so does that mean they aren’t real? It doesn’t make sense to say that.
Quite obviously, if X is a social convention, then X is real, albeit a social reality. So if race is a social convention, then race is real. However, Bo’s ignorance to this debate is seen perfectly with this quote from a recent article he wrote:
Some conservative social constructionists and culture-only theorists (i.e., non race realists) have pushed back against the excesses of racial progressivism
In this article, Bo (rightly) claims that hereditarianism is a subset of race realism (I make a distinction between psychological and racial hereditarianism). But where Bo goes wrong is in not making the distinction between biological and social racial realism, as for example Kaplan and Winther (2014) did. Kaplan and Winther’s paper is actually the best look into how the concepts of bio-genomic cluster/racial realism, socialrace, and biological racial realism are realist positions about race. The AAPA even stated a few years back that “race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences. Membership in socially-defined (racial) groups can have real-life impacts themselves even if there are no biological races in the human species (Graves, 2015). That is: The social can and does become biological (meaning that the social can manifest itself in biology).
there is an alternative position: race realism, which argues that people use the concept of race for the same reason that they use the concept of species or sex
And he also wrote a tweet while explaining his “moderate manifesto”, again pushing the same misconception that social constructivists about race aren’t realists about race:
(2) Modern elite discourse contends that race is illusory, a kind of reified figment of our social imagination. BUT, it also contends that we need to promote race-conscious policies to rectify past wrongs. Race is unreal. But some “races” deserve benefits.
… I should note that race, like many other categories, is partially a social construct. But that does not mean that it’s not real.
Bo makes claims like “race is real”, as if social constructivists don’t think that race is real. That’s the only way for social constructivists to be about race. I think Bo is talking about racial anti-realists like Joshua Glasgow, who claim that race is neither socially nor biologically real. But social constructivists and biological racial realists (this term gets thorny since it could refer to a “realist” like Rushton or Jensen, who have no solid grounding in their belief in race or it could refer to philosophers like Michael Hardimon (like his minimalist/populationist, racialist and socialrace concepts) and Quayshawn Spencer (his Blumenbachian partitions), are both realists about race, but in different ways. Kaplan and Winther’s distinctions are good to set these 2 different camps a part and distinguish between them while still accepting that they are both realists.
I don’t think Bo realizes the meandering he has been doing for years discussing this concept. Race is partially a social construct, but race is real (which hereditarians believe), yet social constructivists about race are talking about something. They are talking about a referent, where a referent for race here is a property name for a set of human population groups (Spencer, 2019). The concept of race refers to a social something, thus it is real since society makes it real. Nothing in that entails that race isn’t real. If Bo made the distinction between biological and social races, then he would be able to say that social constructivists about race believe that race is real (they are realists about race as a social convention), but they are anti-realists about biological races.
Social constructivists are anti-realists about biological races, but they hold that the category RACE is a social and not biological construct. I addressed this issue in my article on white privilege:
If race doesn’t exist, then why does white privilege matter?
Lastly, those who argue against the concept of white privilege may say that those who are against the concept of white privilege would then at the same time say that race—and therefore whites—do not exist so, in effect, what are they talking about if ‘whites’ don’t exist because race does not exist? This is of course a ridiculous statement. One can indeed reject claims from biological racial realists and believe that race exists and is a socially constructed reality. Thus, one can reject the claim that there is a ‘biological’ European race, and they can accept the claim that there is an ever-changing ‘white’ race, in which groups get added or subtracted based on current social thought (e.g., the Irish, Italians, Jews), changing with how society views certain groups.
Though, it is perfectly possible for race to exist socially and not biologically. So the social creation of races affords the arbitrarily-created racial groups to be in certain areas on the hierarchy of races. Roberts (2011: 15) states that “Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.” She argues that we are not biologically separated into races, we are politically separated into them, signifying race as a political construct. Most people believe that the claim “Race is a social construct” means that “Race does not exist.” However, that would be ridiculous. The social constructivist just believes that society divides people into races based on how we look (i.e., how we are born) and then society divides us into races on the basis of how we look. So society takes the phenotype and creates races out of differences which then correlate with certain continents.
So, there is no contradiction in the claim that “Race does not exist” and the claim that “Whites have certain unearned privileges over other groups.” Being an antirealist about biological race does not mean that one is an antirealist about socialraces. Thus, one can believe that whites have certain privileges over other groups, all the while being antirealists about biological races (saying that “Races don’t exist biologically”).
Going off Kaplan and Winther’s distinction, there are 3 kinds of racial realism: bio-genomic/cluster realism, biological racial realism, and social constructivism about race (socialraces). These three different racial frameworks have one thing in common: they accept the reality of race, but they merely disagree as to the origins of racial groups. Using these distinctions set forth by Kaplan and Winther, we can see how best to view different racial concepts and how to apply them in real life. Kaplan and Winther (2014: 1042) “are conventionalists about bio-genomic cluster/race, antirealists about biological race, and realists about social race.” And they can state this due to the distinction they’ve made between different kinds of racial realism. (Since I personally am a pluralist about race, all of these could hold under certain contexts, but I do hold that race is a social construct of a biological reality, pushing Spencer’s argument.)
Biological race isn’t socialrace
These 2 race concepts are distinct, where one talks about how race is viewed in the social realm while the other talks about how race is viewed in the biological realm. There is of course the view that race is a social construct of a biological reality (a view which I hold myself).
Biological race refers to the categorization of humans based on genetic traits and ancestry (using this definition, captures the bio-genomic/cluster realism as well). So if biological and socialrace were equivalent concepts, then it would mean that genetic differences that define different racial groups would map onto similar social consequences. So if two people from different racial groups are biologically different, then their social experiences and opportunities in society should also differ. Obviously, the claim here is that if two concepts are identical, then they should produce the same outcomes. But socialrace isn’t merely a reflection of biological race (as race realists like Murray, Jensen, Lynn, an Rushton hold to). Socialrace has been influenced by cultural, social, and political factors and so quite obviously it is socially constructed (constructed by society, the majority believe that race is real, so that makes it real).
There are of course social inequalities related to different racial groups. People of different socialraces find themselves treated differently while experiencing different things, and this then results in disparities in opportunity, privileges and disadvantages. These disparities can be noted in healthcare, criminal justice, education, employment and housing—anywhere individuals from a group can face systemic barriers and discrimination. People from certain racial groups may experience lower access to quality education, reduced job opportunities, increased chance of coming into contact with the law, how they are given healthcare, etc. Sin s these disparities persist even after controlling for SES, this shows how race is salient in everyday life.
The existence of social disparities and inequalities between racial groups shows that socialrace cannot be determined by biological factors. It is instead influenced by social constructs, historical context, and power dynamics in a society. So differences in societal consequences indicate the distinction between the two concepts. Socialrace isn’t a mere extension of biological race. Biological differences can and do exist between groups. But it is the social construction and attribution of meaning to these differences that have shaped the lived experiences and outcomes of individuals in society. So by recognizing that race isn’t solely determined by biology, and by recognizing that socialrace isn’t biological race and biological race isn’t social race (i.e., they are different concepts), we can have a better, more nuanced take on how we socially construct differences between groups. (Like that of “Hispanics/Latinos.) Having said all that, here’s the argument:
(P1) If biological and socialrace are the same, then they would have identical consequences in society regarding opportunities, privileges, and disadvantages (P2) But there are disparities in opportunities, privileges, and disadvantages based on socialrace in various societies. (C) So biological race and socialrace aren’t the same.
The claim that X is a social construct doesn’t mean that X is imaginary, fake, or unreal. Social constructs have real, tangible impacts on society and individuals’ lives which influences how they are perceived and treated. Further, historical injustices and systemic racism are more evidence that race is a social construct.
Going back to the distinction between three types of racial realism from Kaplan and Winther, what they phrase biological racial realism (Kaplan and Winther, 2014: 1040-1041):
Biological racial realism affirms that a stable mapping exists between the social groups identified as races and groups characterized genomically or, at least, phenomically.2 That the groups are biological populations explains why the particular social groups, and not others, are so identified. Furthermore, for some, but by no means all, biological racial realists, the existence of biological populations (and of the biologically grounded properties of their constituent individuals) explains and justifies at least some social inequalities (e.g., the “hereditarians”; Jensen 1969; Herrnstein and Murray 1995; Rushton 1995; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002). [This is like Hardimon’s racialist race/socialrace distinction.]
Quite obviously, distinguishing between the kinds of racial realism here points out that biological racial realists are of the hereditarian camp, and so race is an explanation for certain social inequalities (IQ, job market outcomes, crime). Social constructivists, however, have argued that what explains these differences is the social, historical, and political factors (see eg The Color of Mind).
(P1) If race is a social construct, then racial categories are not fixed and universally agreed-upon. (P2) If racial categories are not fixed and universally agreed-upon, then different societies can define race differently. (C1) So if race is a social construct, then different societies can define race differently. (P3) If different societies can define race differently, then race lacks an inherent and biological basis. (P4) Different societies do define race differently (observation of diverse racial classifications worldwide). (C2) Thus, race lacks and inherent and biological basis. (P5) If race lacks and inherent and biological basis, then race is a social construct. (P6) Race lacks an inherent and biological basis. (C3) Therefore, race is a social construct.
Premise 1: The concept of race varies across place and time. For example, we once had the one drop rule, which stated that any amount of “black blood” makes one black irregardless of their appearance or background. But Brazil has a more fluid approach to racial classification, like pardo and mullato. So this shows that racial categories aren’t fixed and universally agreed-upon, since race concepts in the US and Brazil are different. It also shows that race categories can change on the basis of social and cultural context and, in the context of Brazil, the number of slaves that were transported there.
Premise 2: Racial categories were strictly enforced in apartheid South Africa and people were placed into groups based on arbitrary criteria. Though this classification system differs from the caste system in India, where caste distinctions are based on a social hierarchy, not racial characteristics, which shows how different societies have different concepts of identity and social distinctions (how and in what way to structure their societies). So Conclusion 1 then follows: The variability in racial categorization across societies shows that the concept of race is not fixed, but is shaped by societal norms and beliefs.
Premise 3: Jim Crow laws and the one drop rule show how racial categorization can shift depending on the times and what is currently going on in the society in question. The example of Jim Crow laws show that historical context and social norms dictated racial classification and the boundary between races. Again, going back to the example of Brazil is informative to explain the point. The Brazilian racial system encompasses a larger range of racial groups which were influenced by slavery and colonization and the interactions between European, African, and indigenous peoples. So this shows how racial identity can and has been shaped by historical happenstance along with the intermixing or racial and ethnic groups.
Premise 4: As I already explained, Brazil and South Africa recognize a broader range of racial categories due to their historical circumstances and diverse social histories and dynamics. So Conclusion 2 follows, since these examples show that race doesn’t have a fixed, inherent and objective biological basis; it shows that race is shaped by social, historical, and cultural contexts.
Premise 5: So due to the variability in racial categorization historically and today, and the changing of racial boundaries in the past. For instance, Irish and Italian Americans were seen as different races in the 1900s, but over time as they assimilated into American society, racial categories began to blur and they then became part of the white race. Racial categories in Brazil are based on how the person is perceived, which leads to multiple different racial groups. Apartheid South Africa has 4 classifications: White, Black, Colored (mixed race) and Indian. These examples highlight the fact that based on changing social conventions and thought, how race can and does change with the times based on what is currently going on in the society in question. This highlights the fluid nature of racial categories. The argument up until this point has provided evidence for Premise 6, so Conclusion 3 follows: race is a social construct. Varying racial categories in different societies across time and place, the absence of an objective biological basis to race, along with the influence of historical, cultural, and social factors all point to the conclusion that race is a social construct.
Conclusion
Quite obviously, there is a distinction between biological and social race. The distinction is important, if we want to reject a concept of biological race while still stating that race is real. But hereditarians like Bo, it seems, don’t understand the distinction at hand. Bo, at least, isn’t alone in being confused about race concepts and their entailments. Murray (2020) stated:
Advocates of “race is a social construct” have raised a host of methodological and philosophical issues with the cluster analyses. None of the critical articles has published a cluster analysis that does not show the kind of results I’ve shown.
But social constructivists need to do no such thing. Why would they need to produce a cluster analysis that shows opposite results to what Murray claims? This shows that Murray doesn’t understand what social constructivists believe. Of course, equating race and biology is the MO of hereditarians, since they argue that some social inequalities between races are due to genetic differences between races.
Social constructivists talking about something real—a dynamic and evolving concept which has profound consequences for society. Rejecting the concept of biological races doesn’t entail that the social constructvist doesn’t believe that human groups don’t differ genetically. It does entail that the genetic diversity found in humans groups doesn’t necessitate the establishment of rigid and fixed racial categories. So in rejecting biological racial realism, social constructivists embrace the view that racial classifications are fixated by social, cultural, and historical contingencies. The examples I’ve given in this article show how racial categorization has changed based on time and place, and this is because race is a social construct.
I should note that I am a pluralist about race, which is “the view that there’s a plurality of natures and realities for race in the relevant linguistic context” (Spencer, 2019: 27), so “there is no such thing as a global meaning of ‘race’ (2019 : 43). The fact that there is no such thing as a global meaning of race entails that different societies across time and place will define racial groups differently, which we have seen, and so race is therefore a social construct (and I claim it is a social construct of a biological reality). Hereditarians like Bo don’t have this nuance, due to their apparent insistence that social constructivists are a kind of anti-realist about race as a whole. This claim, as I’ve exhaustively shown, is false. Different concepts of race can exist with each other based on context, leading to complex and multifaceted understandings of race and it’s place in society.
The second argument I formalized quite obviously gets at the distinction between biological and social racial realism shows the distinction between the two—I have defended the premises and have given examples on societies in different time and place that had different views of the racial groups in this country. This, then, shows that race is a social construct and that social constructivists about race are realists about race—since they are talking about something that has a referent.
Last week I articulated a framework I call Dualistic Experiential Constructivism (DEC). DEC is a theoretical framework which draws on mind-body dualism, experiential learning, and constructivism to explain human development, knowledge acquisition, and the formation of psychological traits and mind. In the DEC framework, knowledge construction and acquisition are seen as due to a dynamic interplay between individual experiences and the socio-cultural contexts that they occur in. It has a strong emphasis on the significance of personal experiences, interacting with others, shaping cognitive processes, social understanding and the social construction of knowledge by drawing on Vygotsky’s socio-historical theory of learning and development, which emphasizes the importance of cultural tools and the social nature of learning. It recognizes that genes are not sufficient for psychological traits, but necessary for them. It emphasizes that the manifestation of psychological traits and mind are shaped by experiences, interactions between the socio-cultural-environmental context.
DEC shares a key point with constructivism—that of rejecting passive learning and highlight the importance of the learner’s active engagement in the construction of knowledge. Kolb’s experiential learning theory proposes that people learn best through direct experiences and reflecting on those experiences, while DEC emphasizes the fact significance of experiential learning in shaping one’s cognitive processes and understanding of knowledge. DEC also relies heavily on Vygotsky’s socio-historical theory of learning and development, where both the DEC and Vygotsky’s theory emphasize the role of socio-cultural factors in shaping human development along with the construction of knowledge. Vygotsky’s theory also highlights the importance of social interaction, cultural and psychological tools and historical contexts, which DEC draws from. Cognitive development and knowledge arise from dynamic interactions between individuals and their environment while also acknowledging the reciprocal influences between the individual and their social context. (This is how DEC can also be said to be a social constructivist position.) DEC is also similar to Uri Bronfenbrenner’ecological systems theory, which emphasizes the influence of multiple environmental systems on human development. With DEC’s focus on how individuals interact with their cultural contexts, it is therefore similar to ecological systems theory. Finally, DST shares similarities with Learner’s relational developmental systems theory focusing on interactions, genes as necessary but not sufficient causes for the developing system, rejecting reductionism and acknowledging environmental and cultural contexts in shaping human development. They are different in the treatment of mind-body dualism and the emphasis on cultural tools in shaping cognitive development and knowledge acquisition.
Ultimately, DEC posits that individuals actively construct knowledge through their engagement with the world, while drawing upon their prior experiences, interactions with others and cultural resources. So the socio-cultural context in which the individual finds themselves in plays a vital role in shaping the nature of learning experiences along with the construction of meaning and knowledge. Knowing this, how would race, gender, and class be integrated into the DEC and how would this then explain test score disparities between different classes, men and women, and races?
Social identities and test score differences: The impact of DEC on gender, race and class discrepancies
Race, class, and gender can be said to be social identities. Since they are social identities, they aren’t inherent or fixed characteristics in individuals, they are social categories which influence an individual’s experiences, opportunities, and interaction within society. These social identities are shaped by cultural, historical, and societal factors which intersect in complex ways, leading to different experiences.
When it comes to gender, it has been known that boys and girls have different interests and so they have different knowledge basis. This has been evidenced since Terman specifically constructed his test to eliminate differences between men and women in his Stanford-Binet, and also evidenced by the ETS changing the SAT to reflect these differences between men and women (Rosser, 1989; Mensh and Mensh, 1991). So when it comes to the construction of knowledge and the engagement with the world, an individual’s gender influences the way they perceive the world, and interpret social dynamics and act in social situations. There is also gendered test content, as Rosser (1989) shows for the SAT. Thus, the concept of gender in society influences test scores since men and women are exposed to different kinds of knowledge; the fact that there are “gendered test items” (items that reflect or perpetuate gender biases, stereotypes or assumptions in its presentation).
But men and women have negligible differences in full-scale IQ, so how can DEC work here? It’s simple: men are better spatially and women are better verbally. Thus, by choosing which items they want on the test, test constructors can build the conclusions they want into the test. DEC emphasizes socio-cultural influences on knowledge exposure, stating that unique socio-cultural and historical experiences and contexts influences one’s knowledge acquisition. Cultural/social norms and gendered socialization can also shape one’s interests and experiences, which would then influence knowledge production. Further, test content could have gender bias (as Rosser, 1989 pointed out), and subjects that either sex are more likely to have interest in could have skewed answer outcomes (as Rosser showed). Stereotype threat is also another thing that could influence this, with one study conceptualizing stereotype threat gender as being responsible for gender differences in advanced math (Spencer, Steele, and Quinn, 1999). Although stereotype threat affects different groups in different ways, one analysis showed empirical support “for mediators such as anxiety, negative thinking, and mind-wandering, which are suggested to co-opt working memory resources under stereotype threat” (Pennington et al, 2016). Lastly, intersectionality is inherent in DEC. Of course the experiences of a woman from a marginalized group would be different from the experiences of a woman from a privileged group. So these differences could influence how gender intersects with other identities when it comes to knowledge production.
When it comes to racial differences in test scores, DEC would emphasis the significance of understanding test score variations as reflecting multifaceted variables resulting from the interaction of cultural influences, experiential learning, societal contexts and historical influences. DEC rejects the biological essentialism and reductionism of hereditarianism and their claims of innate, genetic differences in IQ—it contextualizes test score differences. It views test scores as dynamic outcomes, which are influenced by social contexts, cultural influences and experiential learning. It also highlights cultural tools as mediators of knowledge production which would then influence test scores. Language, communication styles, educational values and other cultural resources influence how people engage with test content and respond to test items. Of course, social interactions play a large part in the acquisition of knowledge in different racial groups. Cultural tools are shared and transmitted through social interactions within racial communities. Historical legacies and social structures could impact access to cultural tools along with educational opportunities that would be useful to score well on the test, which then would affect test performance. Blacks and whites are different cultural groups, so they’re exposed to different kinds of knowledge which then influences their test scores.
Lastly, we come to social class. People from families in higher social strata benefit from greater access to educational resources—along with enriching experiences—like attending quality pre-schools and having access to educational materials, materials that are likely to be in the test items on the test. The early learning experiences then set the foundation for performing well on standardized tests. Lower class people could have limited access to these kinds of opportunities, which would impact their readiness and therefore performance on standardized tests. Cultural tools and language also play a pivotal role in shaping class differences in test scores. Parents of higher social class could is language and communication patterns that could potentially contribute to higher test scores. Conversely, lower social classes could have lack of exposure to the specific language conventions used in test items which would then influence their performance. Social interactions also influence knowledge production. Higher social classes foster discussions and educational discourses which support academic achievement, and also the peer groups in would also provide additional academic support and encouragement which would lend itself to higher test scores. On the other hand, lower class groups have limited academic support along with fewer opportunities for social interactions which are conducive to learning the types of items and structure of the test. It has also been shown that there are SES disparities in language acquisition due to the home learning environment, and this contributes to the achievement gap and also school readiness (Brito, 2017). Thus, class dictates if one is or is not ready for school due to their exposure to language in their home learning environment. Therefore, in effect, IQ tests are middle-class knowledge tests (Richardson, 2001, 2022). So one who is not exposed to the specific, cultural knowledge on the test wouldn’t score as well as someone who is. Richardson (1999; cf, Richardson, 2002) puts this well:
So relative acquisition of relevant background knowledge (which will be closely associated with social class) is one source of the elusive common factor in psychometric tests. But there are other, non-cognitive, sources. Jensen seems to have little appreciation of the stressful effects of negative social evaluation and systematic prejudice which many children experience every day (in which even superficial factors like language dialect, facial appearance, and self-presentation all play a major part). These have powerful effects on self concepts and self-evaluations. Bandura et al (1996) have shown how poor cognitive self-efficacy beliefs acquired by parents become (socially) inherited by their children, resulting in significant depressions of self-expectations in most intellectual tasks. Here, g is not a general ability variable, but one of ‘self-belief’.
…
Reduced exposure to middle-class cultural tools and poor cognitive self-efficacy beliefs will inevitably result in reduced self-confidence and anxiety in testing situations.
…
In sum, the ‘common factor’ which emerges in test performances stems from a combination of (a) the (hidden) cultural content of tests; (b) cognitive self-efficacy beliefs; and (c) the self-confidence/freedom-from-anxiety associated with such beliefs. In other words, g is just an mystificational numerical surrogate for social class membership. This is what is being distilled when g is statistically ‘extracted’ from performances. Perhaps the best evidence for this is the ‘Flynn effect,’ (Fkynn 1999) which simply corresponds with the swelling of the middle classes and greater exposure to middle-class cultural tools. It is also supported by the fact that the Flynn effect is more prominent with non-verbal than with verbal test items – i.e. with the (covertly) more enculturated forms.
(1) If children of different class levels have experiences of different kinds with different material, and (2) if IQ tests draw a disproportionate amount of test items from the higher classes, then (3) higher class children should have higher scores than lower-class children.
The point that ties together this analysis is that different groups are exposed to different knowledge bases, which are shaped by their unique cultural tools, experiential learning activities, and social interactions. Ultimately, these divergent knowledge bases are influenced by social class, race, and gender, and they play a significant role in how people approach educational tests which therefore impacts their test scores and academic performance.
Conclusion
DEC offers a framework in which we can delve into to explain how and why groups score differently on academic tests. It recognizes the intricate interplay between experiential learning, societal contexts, socio-historical contexts and cultural tools in shaping human cognition and knowledge production. The part that the irreducibility of the mental plays is pivotal in refuting hereditarian dogma. Since the mental is irreducible, then genes nor brain structure/physiology can explain test scores and differences in mental abilities. In my framework, the irreducibility of the mental is used to emphazies the importance of considering subjective experiences, emotions, conscious awareness and the unique perspectives of individuals in understanding human learning.
Using DEC, we can better understand how and why races, social classes and men and women score differently from each other. It allows us to understand experiential learning and how groups have access to different cultural and psychological tools in shaping cognitive development which would then provide a more nuanced perspective on test score differences between different social groups. DEC moves beyond the rigid gene-environment false dichotomy and allows us to understand how groups score differently, while rejecting hereditarianism and explaining how and why groups score differently using a constructivist lens, since all human cognizing takes place in cultural contexts, it follows that groups not exposed to certain cultural contexts that are emphasized in standardized testing may perform differently due to variations in experiential learning and cultural tools.
In rejecting the claim that genes cause or influence mental abilities/psychological traits and differences in them, I am free to reason that social groups score differently not due to inherent genetic differences, but as a result of varying exposure to knowledge and cultural tools. With my DEC framework, I can explore how diverse cultural contexts and learning experiences shape psychological tools. This allows a deeper understanding of the dynamic interactions between the individual and their environment, emphasizing the role of experiential learning and socio-cultural factors in knowledge production. Gene-environment interactions and the irreducibility of the mental allow me to steer clear of genetic determinist explanations of test score differences and correctly identity such differences as due to what one is exposed to in their lives. In recognizing G-E interactions, DEC acknowledges that genetic factors are necessary pre-conditions for the mind, but genes alone are not able to explain how mind arises due to the irreducibility principle. So by considering the interplay between genes and experiential learning in different social contexts, DEC offers a more comprehensive understanding of how individuals construct knowledge and how psychological traits and mind emerge, steering away from genetically reductionistic approaches to human behavior, action, and psychological traits.
I also have argued how mind-body dualism and developmental systems theory refute hereditarianism, thus framework I’ve created is a further exposition which challenges traditional assumptions in psychology, providing a more holistic and nuanced understanding of human cognition and development. By incorporating mind-body dualism, it rejects the hereditarian perspective of reducing psychology and mind to genes and biology. Thus, hereditarianism is discredited since it has a narrow focus on genetic determinism/reductionism. It also integrates developmental systems theory, where development is a dynamic process influenced by multiple irreducible interactions between the parts that make up the system along with how the human interacts with their environment to acquire knowledge. Thus, by addressing the limitations (and impossibility) of hereditarian genetic reductionism, my DEC framework provides a richer framework for explaining how mind arises and how people acquire different psychological and cultural tools which then influence their outcomes and performance on standardized tests.
“the study of the brains of human races would lose most of its interest and utility” if variation in size counted for nothing ([Broca] 1861 , p. 141). Quoted in Gould, 1996: 115)
The law is: small brain, little achievement; great brain, great achievement (Ridpath, 1891: 571)
I can’t hope to give as good a review as Gould’s review in Mismeasure of Man on the history of skull measuring, but I will try to show that hereditarians are mistaken in their brain size-IQ correlations and racial differences in brain size as a whole.
The claim that brain size is causal for differences in intelligence is not new. Although over the last few hundred years there has been back and forth arguments on this issue, it is generally believed that there are racial differences in brain size and that this racial difference in brain size accounted for civilizational accomplishments, among other things. Notions from Samuel Morton which seem to have been revived by Rushton in the 80s while formulating his r/K selection theory show that the racism that was incipient in the time period never left us, even after 1964. Rushton and others merely revived the racist thought of those from the 1800s.
Using MRI scans (Rushton and Ankney, 2009) and measuring the physical skull, Rushton asserted that the differences in brain size and quality between races accounted for differences in IQ. Although Rushton was not alone in this belief, this belief on the relationship between brain weight/structure and intelligence goes back centuries. In this article, I will review studies on racial differences in brain size and see if Rushton et al’s conclusions hold on not only brain size being causally efficacious for IQ but there being racial and differences in brain size and the brain size and IQ correlation.
The Morton debate
Morton’s skull collection has received much attention over the years. Gould (1978) first questioned Morton’s results on the ranking of skulls. He argued that when the data was properly reinterpreted, “all races have approximately equal capacities.” The skulls in Morton’s collection were collected from all over. Morton’s men even robbed graves to procure skulls for Morton, even going as far to take “bodies in front of grieving relatives and boiled flesh off fresh corpses” (Fabian, 2010: 178). One man even told Morton that grave robbing gave him a “rascally pleasure” (Fabian, 2010: 15). Indeed, grave robbing seems to have been a way to procure many skulls which were used in these kinds of analyses (Monarrez et al, 2022). Nevertheless, since skulls house brains, the thought is that by measuring skulls then we can ascertain the brain of the individual that the skull belonged to. A larger skull would imply a larger brain. And larger brains, it was said, belong to more “intelligent” people. This assumption was one that was held by the neurologist Broca, and this then justified using brain weight as a measure of intelligence. Though in 1836, an anti-racist Tiedemann (1836) argued that there were no differences in brain size between whites and blacks. (Also see Gould, 1999 for a reanalysis of Tiedemann where he shows C > M > N in brain size, but concludes that the “differencesare tiny and probably of no significancein the judgment of intelligence” (p 10).) It is interesting to note that Tiedemann and Morton worked with pretty much the same data, but they came to different conclusions (Gould, 1999; Mitchell, 2018).
In 1981 Gould published his landmark book The Mismeasure of Man (Gould, 1981/1996). In the book, he argued that bias—sometimes unconscious—pervaded science and that Morton’s work on his skull collection was a great example of this type of bias. Gould (1996: 140) listed many reasons why group (race) differences in brain size have never been demonstrated, citing Tobias (1970):
After all, what can be simpler than weighing a brain?—take it out, and put it on the scale. One set of difficulties refers to problems of measurement itself: at what level is the brain severed from the spinal cord; are the meninges removed or not (meninges are the brain’s covering membranes, and the dura mater, or thick outer covering, weighs 50 to 60 grams); how much time elapsed after death; was the brain preserved in any fluid before weighing and, if so, for how long; at what temperature was the brain preserved after death. Most literature does not specify these factors adequately, and studies made by different scientists usually cannot be compared. Even when we can be sure that the same object has been measured in the same way under the same conditions, a second set of biases intervenes—influences upon brain size with no direct tie to the desired properties of intelligence or racial affiliation: sex, body size, age, nutrition, nonnutritional environment, occupation, and cause of death.
Nevertheless, in Mismeasure, Gould argued that Morton had unconscious bias where he packed the skulls of smaller African skulls more loosely while he would pack the skulls of a smaller Caucasian skull tighter (Gould made this inference due to the disconnect between Morton’s lead shot and seed measurements).
Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action. (1996: 97)
…
Yet through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation. Morton mad e no attempt to cove r his tracks and I must presume that he was unaware he had left them. He explained all his procedure s and published all his raw data. All I can discern is an a priori conviction about racial ranking so powerful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines. Yet Morton was widely hailed as the objectivist of his age, the man who would rescue American science from the mire of unsupported speculation. (1996: 101)
But in 2011, a team of researchers tried to argue that Morton did not manipulate data to fit his a priori biases (Lewis et al, 2011). They claimed that “most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified.” They argued that Morton’s measurements were reliable and that Morton really was the scientific objectivist many claimed him to be. Of course, since Gould died in 2002 shortly after publishing his magnum opus The Stuecure of Evolutionary Theory, Gould could not defend his arguments against Morton.
Weisberg (2014) was the first to argue against Lewis et al’s conclusions on Gould. Weisberg argued that while Gould sometimes overstated his case, most of his arguments were sound. Weisberg argued that, contra what Lewis et al claimed, they did not falsify Gould’s claim, which was that the difference between shot and seed measurements showed Morton’s unconscious racial bias. While Weisberg rightly states that Lewis et al uncovered some errors that Gould made, they did not successfully refute two of Gould’s main claims: “that there is evidence that Morton’s seed‐based measurements exhibit racial bias and that there are no significant differences in mean cranial capacities across races in Morton’s collection.”
There is prima facie evidence of racial bias in Morton’s (or his assistant’s) seed‐basedmeasurements. This argument is based on Gould’s accurate analysis of the difference between the seed‐ and shot‐based measurements of the same crania.
Gould is also correct about two other major issues. First, sexual dimorphism is a very suspicious source of bias in Morton’s reported averages. Since Morton identified most of his sample by sex, this is something that he could have investigated and corrected for. Second, when one takes appropriately weighted grand means of Morton’s data, and excludes obvious sources of bias including sexual dimorphism, then the average cranial capacity of the five racial groups in Morton’s collection is very similar. This was probably the point that Gould cared most about. It has been reinforced by my analysis.
[This is Weisberg’s reanalysis]
So Weisberg successfully defended Gould’s claim that there are no general differences in the races as ascribed by Morton and his contemporaries.
In 2015, another defense of Gould was mounted (Kaplan, Pigliucci and Banta, 2015). Like Weisberg before them, they also state that Gould got some things right and some things wrong, but his main arguments weren’t touched by Lewis et al. Kaplan et al stated that while Gould was right to reject Morton’s data, he was wrong to believe that “a more appropriate analysis was available.” They also argue due to the “poor datasetno legitimateinferences to“natural” populations can be drawn.” (See Luchetti, 2022 for a great discussion of Kaplan, Pigliucci and Banta.)
In 2016, Weisberg and Paul (2016) argued that Gould assumed that Morton’s lead shot method was an objective way to ascertain the cranial capacities of skulls. Gould’s argument rested on the differences between lead shot and seed. Then in 2018, Mitchell (2018) published a paper where he discovered lost notes of Morton’s and he argued that Gould was wrong. He, however, admitted that Gould’s strongest argument was untouched—the “measurement issue” (Weisberg and Paul, 2016) was Gould’s strongest argument, deemed “perceptive” by Mitchell. In any case, Mitchell showed that the case of Morton isn’t one of an objective scientist looking to explain the world sans subjective bias—Morton’s a priori biases were strong and strongly influenced his thinking.
Lastly, ironically Rushton used Morton’s data from Gould’s (1978) critique, but didn’t seem to understand why Gould wrote the paper, nor why Morton’s methodology was highly suspect. Rushton basically took the unweighted average for “Ancient Caucasian” skulls, and the sex/age of the skulls weren’t known. He also—coincidentally I’m sure—increased the “Mongoloid skull” size from 85 to 85.5cc (Gould’s table had it as 85cc). Amazingly—and totally coincidentally, I’m sure—Rushton miscited Gould’s table and basically combined Morton’s and Gould’s data, increased the skull size slightly of “Mongoloids” and used the unweighted average of “Ancient Caucasian” skulls (Cain and Vanderwolf, 1990). How honest of Rushton. It’s ironic how people say that Gould lied about Morton’s data and that Gould was a fraud, when in all actuality, Rushton was the real fraud, never recanting on his r/K theory, and now we can see that Rushton actually miscited and combined Gould’s and Morton’s results and made assumptions without valid justification.
The discussion of bias in science is an interesting one. Since science is a social endeavor, there necessarily will be bias inherent in it, especially when studying humans and discussing the causes of certain peculiarities. I would say that Gould was right about Morton and while Gould did make a few mistakes, his main argument against Morton was untouched.
Skull measuring after Morton
The inferiority of blacks and other non-white races has been asserted ever since the European age of discovery. While there were of course 2 camps at the time—one which argued that blacks were not inferior in intelligence and another that argued they were—the claim that blacks are inferior in intelligence was, and still is, ubiquitous. They argued that smaller heads meant that one was less intelligent, and if groups had smaller heads then they too were less intelligent than groups that had smaller heads. This then was used to argue that blacks hadn’t achieved any kind of civilizational accomplishments since they were intellectually inferior due to their smaller brains (Davis, 1869; Campbell, 1891; Hoffman, 1896; Ridpath, 1897; Christison, 1899).
Robert Bean (1906) stated, using cadavers, that his white cadavers had larger frontal lobes than his black cadavers. He concluded that blacks were more objective than whites who were more subjective, and that white cadavers has larger frontal and anterior lobes than black cadavers. However, it seems that Bean did not state one conclusion—that the brain’s of his cadavers seemed to show no difference. Gould (1996: 112) discusses this issue (see Mall, 1909: 8-10, 13; Reuter, 1927). Mall (1909: 32) concluded, “In this study of several anatomical characters said to vary according to race and sex, the evidence advanced has been tested and found wanting.”
Franz Boas also didn’t agree with Bean’s analysis:
Furthermore, in “The Anthropological Position of the Negro,” which appeared in Van Norden)- Magazine a few months later, Boas attempted to refute Bean by arguing that “the anatomical differences” between blacks and whites “are minute,” and “no scientific proof that will stand honest proof … would prove the inferiority of the negro race.”39 (Williams, 1996: 20)
In 1912, Boas argued that the skull was plastic, so plastic that changes in skull shape between immigrants and their progeny were seen. His results were disputed (Sparks and Jantz, 2002), though Gravlee, Bernard, and Leonard (2002) argued that Boas was right—the shape of the skull indeed was influenced by environmental factors.
When it comes to sex, brain size, and intelligence, this was discredited by Alice Lee in her thesis in 1900. Lee created a way to measure the brain of living subjects and she used her method on the Anthropological Society and showed a wife variation, with of course overlapping sizes between men and women.
Lee, though, was a staunch eugenicist and did not apply the same thinking to race:
After dismantling the connection between gender and intellect, a logical route would have been to apply the same analysis to race. And race was indeed the next realm that Lee turned to—but her conclusions were not the same. Instead, she affirmed that through systematic measurement of skull size, scientists could indeed define distinct and separate racial groups, as craniometry contended. (The Statistician Who Debunked Sexist Myths About Skull Size and Intelligence)
Contemporary research on race, brain size, and intelligence
Starting from the mid-1980s when Rushton first tried to apply r/K to human races, there was a lively debate in the literature, with people responding to Rushton and Rushton responding back (Cain and Vanderwolf, 1990; Lynn, 1990; Rushton, 1990; Mouat, 1992). Why did Rushton seemingly revive this area of “research” into racial differences in brain size between human races?
Centring Rushton’s views on racial differences needs to start in his teenage years. Rushton stated that being surrounded by anti-white and anti-western views led to him seeking out right-wing ideas:
JPR recalls how the works of Hans Eysenck were significantly influential to the teenage Rushton, particularly his personality questionnaires mapping political affiliation to personality. During those turbulent years JPR describes bundled as growing his hair long becoming outgoing but utterly selfish. Finding himself surrounded by what he described as anti-white and anti-western views, JPR became interested in right-wing groups. He went about sourcing old, forbidden copies of eugenics articles that argued that evolutionary differences existed between blacks and whites. (Forsythe, 2019) (See alsoDutton, 2018.)
Knowing this, it makes sense how Rushton was so well-versed in old 18 and 1900s literature on racial differences.
For decades, J. P. Rushton argued that skulls and brains of blacks were smaller than whites. Since intelligence was related to brain size in Rushtonian r/K selection theory, this meant that what would account for some of the intelligence differences based on IQ scores between blacks and whites could be accounted for by differences in brain size between them. Since the brain size differences between races accounted for millions of brain cells, this could then explain race differences in IQ (Rushton and Rushton, 2003). Rushton (2010) went as far to argue that brain size was an explanation for national IQ differences and longevity.
Rushton’s thing in the 90s was to use MRI to measure endocranial volumes (eg Rushton and Ankney, 1996). Of course they attempt to show how smaller brain sizes are found in lower classes, women, and non-white races. Quite obviously, this is scientific racism, sexism, and classism (which Murray 2020 also wrote a book on). In any case, Rushton and Ankney (2009) tried arguing for “general mental ability” and whole brain size, trying to argue that the older studies “got it right” in regard to not only intelligence and brain size but also race and brain size. (Rushton and Ankney, just like Rushton and Jensen 2005, cited Mall, 1909 in the same sentence as Bean, 1906 trying to argue that the differences in brain size between whites and blacks were noted then, when Mall was a response specifically to Bean! See Gould 1996 for a solid review of Bean and Mall.) Kamin and Omari (1998) show that whites had greater head height than blacks while blacks had greater head length and circumference. They described many errors that Lynn, Rushton and Jensen made in their analyses of race and head size. Not only did Rushton ignore Tobias’ conclusions when it comes to measuring brains, he also ignored the fact that American Blacks, in comparison to American, French and English whites, had larger brains in Tobias’ (1970) study (Weizmann et al, 1990).
Rushton and Ankney (2009) review much of the same material they did in their 1996 review. They state:
The sex differences in brain size present a paradox. Women have proportionately smaller average brains than men but apparently have the same intelligence test scores.
This isn’t a paradox at all, it’s very simple to explain. Terman assumed that men and women should be equal in IQ and so constructed his test to fit that assumption. Since Terman’s Stanford-Binet test is still in use today, and since newer versions are “validated” on older versions that held the same assumption, then it follows that the assumption is still alive today. This isn’t some “paradox” that needs to be explained away by brain size, we just need to look back into history and see why this is a thing. The SAT has been changed many times to strengthen or weaken sex differences (Rosser, 1989). It’s funny how this completely astounds hereditarians. “There are large differences in brain size between men and women but hardly if any differences in IQ, but a 1 SD difference in IQ between whites and blacks which is accounted for in part by brain size.” I wonder why that never struck them as absurd? If Rushton accepted brain weight as an indicator that IQ test scores reflected differences in brain size between the races, then he would also need to accept that this should be true for men and women (Cernovsky, 1990), but Rushton never proposed anything like that. Indeed he couldn’t, since sex differences in IQ are small or nonexistent.
In their review papers, Rushton and Ankney, as did Rushton and Jensen (I should assume that this was Rushton’s contribution to the paper since he also has the same citations and arguments in his book and other papers) consistently return to a few references: Mall, Bean, Vint and Gordon, Ho et al and Beals et al. Cernovsky (1995) has a masterful response to Rushton where he dismantles his inferences and conclusions based on other studies. Cernovsky showed that Rushton’s claim that his claim that there are consistent differences between races in brain size is false; Rushton misrepresented other studies which showed blacks having heavier brains and larger cranial capacities than whites. He misrepresented Beals et al by claiming that the differences in the skulls they studied are due to race when race was spurious, climate explained the differences regardless of race. And Rushton even misrepresented Herskovits’ data which showed no difference in regarding statute or crania. So Rushton even misrepresented the brain-body size literature.
Now I need to discuss one citation line that Rushton went back to again and again throughout his career writing about racial differences. In articles like Rushton (2002)Rushton and Jensen (2005), Rushton and Ankney (2007, 2009) Rushton went back to a similar citation line: Citing 1900s studies which show racial differences. Knowing what we know about Rushton looking for old eugenics articles that showed that evolutionary differences existed between blacks and whites, this can now be placed into context.
Weighing brains at autopsy, Broca (1873) found that Whites averaged heavier brains than Blacks and had more complex convolutions and larger frontal lobes. Subsequent studies have found an average Black–White difference of about 100 g (Bean, 1906; Mall, 1909; Pearl, 1934; Vint, 1934). Some studies have found that the more White admixture (judged independently from skin color), the greater the average brain weight in Blacks (Bean, 1906; Pearl, 1934). In a study of 1,261 American adults, Ho et al. (1980) found that 811 White Americans averaged 1,323 g and 450 Black Americans averaged 1,223 g (Figure 1).
There are however, some problems with this citation line. For instance, Mall (1909) was actually a response to Bean (1906). Mall was race-blind to where the brains came from after reanalysis and found no differences in the brain between blacks and whites. Regarding the Ho et al citation, Rushton completely misrepresented their conclusions. Further, brains that are autopsied aren’t representative of the population at large (Cain and Vanderwolf, 1990; see also Lynn, 1989; Fairchild, 1991). Rushton also misrepresented the conclusions in Beals et al (1984) over the years (eg, Rushton and Ankney, 2009). Rushton reported that they found his same racial hierarchy in brain size. Cernovsky and Littman (2019) stated that Beals et al’s conclusion was that cranial size varied with climatic zone and not race, and that the correlation between race and brain size was spurious, with smaller heads found in warmer climates, regardless of race. This is yet more evidence that Rushton ignored data that fid not fit his a priori conclusions (see Cernovsky, 1997; Lerner, 2019: 694-700). Nevertheless, it seems that Rushton’s categorization of races by brain size cannot be valid (Peters, 1995).
It would seem to me that Rushton was well-aware of these older papers due to what he read in his teenage years. Although at the beginning of his career, Rushton was a social learning theorist (Rushton, 1980), quite obviously Rushton shifted to differential psychology and became a follower—and collaborator—of Jensenism.
But what is interesting here in the renewed ideas of race and brain size are the different conclusions that different investigators came to after they measured skulls. Lieberman (2001) produced a table which shies different rankings of different races over the past few hundred years.
Table 1 from Lieberman, 2001 showing different racial hierarchies in the 19th and 20th century
As can be seen, there is a stark contrast in who was on top of the hierarchy based on the time period the measurements were taken. Why may this be? Obviously, this is due to what the investigator wanted to find—if you’re looking for something, you’re going to find it.
Rushton (2004) sought to revive the scala naturae, proposing that g—the general factor of intelligence—sits a top a matrix of correlated traits and he tried to argue that the concept of progress should return to evolutionary biology. Rushton’s r/K theory has been addressed in depth, and his claim that evolution is progressive is false. Nevertheless, even Rushton’s claim that brain size was selected for over evolutionary history also seems to be incorrect—it was body size that was, and since larger bodies have larger brains this explains the relationship. (See Deacon, 1990a, 1990b.)
Salami et al (2017) used brains from fresh cadavers, severing them from the spinal cord at the forum magnum and they completely removed the dura mater. This then allowed them to measure the whole brain without any confounds due to parts of the spinal cord which aren’t actually parts of the brain. They found that the mean brain weight for blacks was 1280g with a ranging between 1015g to 1590g while the mean weight of male brains was 1334g. Govender et al (2018) showed a 1404g mean brain weight for the brains of black males.
Rushton aggregated data from myriad different sources and time periods, claiming that by aggregating even data which may have been questionable in quality, the true differences in brain size would appear when averaged out. Rushton, Brainerd, and Pressley, 1983 defended the use of aggregation stating “By combining numerous exemplars, such errors of measurement are averaged out, leaving a clearer view of underlying relationships.” However, this method that Rushton used throughout his career has been widely criticized (eg, Cernovsky, 1993; Lieberman, 2001).
Rushton was quoted as saying “Even if you take something like athletic ability or sexuality—not to reinforce stereotypes or some such thing—but, you know, it’s a trade-off: more brain or more penis. You can’t have both.” How strange—because for 30 years Rushton pushed stereotypes as truth and built a whole (invalid) research program around them. The fact of the matter is, for Rushton’s hierarchy when it comes to Asians, they are a selected population in America. Thus, even there, Rushton’s claim rests on values taken from a selected population into the country.
While Asians had larger brains and higher IQ scores, they had lower sexual drive and smaller genitals; blacks had smaller brains and lower IQ scores with higher sexual drive and larger genitals; whites were just right, having brains slightly smaller than Asians with slightly lower IQs and lower sexual drive than blacks but higher than Asians along with smaller genitals than blacks but larger than Asians. This is Rushton’s legacy—keeping up racial stereotypes (even then, his claims on racial differences in penis size do not hold.)
The misleading arguments on brain size lend further evidence against Rushton’s overarching program. Thus, this discussion is yet more evidence that Rushton was anything but a “serious scholar” who trolled shopping malls asking people their sexual exploits. He was clearly an ideologue with a point to prove about race differences which probably manifested in his younger, teenage years. Rushton got a ton wrong, and we can now add brain size to that list, too, due to his fudging of data, misrepresenting data, and not including data that didn’t fit his a priori biases.
Quite clearly, whites and Asians have all the “good” while blacks and other non-white races have all the “bad.” And thus, what explains social positions not only in America but throughout the world (based on Lynn’s fraudulent national IQs; Sear, 2020) is IQ which is mediated by brain size. Brain size was but a part of Rushton’s racial rank ordering, known as r-K selection theory or differential K theory. However, his theory didn’t replicate and it was found that any differences noticed by Rushton could be environmentally-driven (Gorey and Cryns, 1995; Peregrine, Ember and Ember, 2003).
The fact of the matter is, Rushton has been summarily refuted on many of his incendiary claims about racial differences, so much so that a couple of years ago quite a few of his papers were retracted (three in one swipe). While a theoretical article arguing about the possibility that melanocortin and skin color may mediate aggression and sexuality in humans (Rushton and Templer, 2012). (This appears to be the last paper that Rushton published before his death in October, 2012. How poetic that it was retracted.) This was due mainly to the outstanding and in depth look into the arguments and citations made by Rushton and Templer. (See my critique here.)
Conclusion
Quite clearly, Gould got it right about Morton—Gould’s reanalysis showed the unconscious bias that was inherent in Morton’s thoughts on his skull collection. Gould’s—and Weisberg’s—reanalysis show that there are small differences in skulls of Morton’s collection. Even then, Gould’s landmark book showed that the study of racial differences—in this case, in brain and skull size—came from a place of racist thought. Writings from Rushton and others carry on this flame, although Rushton’s work was shown to have considerable flaws, along with the fact that he outright ignored data that didn’t fit his a priori convictions.
Although comparative studies of brain size have been widely criticized (Healy and Rowe, 2007), they quite obviously survive today due to the assumptions that hereditarians have between “IQ” and brain size along with the assumption that there are racial differences in brain size and that these differences are causal for socially-important things. However, as can be seen, the comparative study of racial brain sizes and the assumption that IQ is causally mediated by it are hugely mistaken. Morton’s studies were clouded by his racial bias, as Gould and Weisberg and Kaplan et al showed. When Rushton, Jensen, and Lynn arose, they they tried to carry on that flame, correlating head size and IQ while claiming that smaller head sizes and—by identity—smaller brains are related to a suite of negative traits.
The brain is of course an experience-dependent organ and people are exposed to different types of knowledge based on their race and social class. This difference in knowledge exposure based on group membership, then, explains IQ scores. Not any so-called differences in brain size, brain physiology or genes. And while Cairo (2011) concludes that “Everything indicates that experience makes the great difference, and therefore, we contend that the gene-environment interplay is what defines the IQ of an individual“, genes are merely necessary for that, not sufficient. Of course, since IQ is an outcome of experience, this is what explains IQ differences between groups.
Table 1 from Lieberman (2001) is very telling about Gould’s overarching claim about bias in science. As the table shows, the hierarchy in brain size was constantly shifting throughout the years based on a priori biases. Even different authors coming to different conclusions in the same time period on whether or not there are differences in brain size between races pop up. Quite obviously, the race scientists would show that race is the significant variable in whatever they were studying and so the average differences in brain size then reflect differences in genes and then intelligence which would then be reflected in civilizational accomplishments. That’s the line of reasoning that hereditarians like Rushton use when operating under these assumptions.
Science itself isn’t racist, but racist individuals can attempt to use science to import their biases and thoughts on certain groups to the masses and use a scientific veneer to achieve that aim. Rushton, Jensen and others have particular reasons to believe what they do about the structure of society and how and why certain racial groups are in the societal spot they are in. However, these a priori conceptions they had then guided their research programs for the rest of their lives. Thus, Gould’s main claim in Mismeasure about the bias that was inherent in science is well-represented: one only needs to look at contemporary hereditarian writings to see how their biases shape their research and interpretations of data.
In the end, we don’t need just-so stories to explain how and why races differ in IQ scores. We most definitely don’t need any kinds of false claims about how brain size is causal for intelligence. Nor do we need to revive racist thought on the causes and consequences of racial differences in brain size. Quite obviously, Rushton was a dodgy character in his attempt to prove his tri-archic racial theory using r/K selection theory. But it seems that when one surveys the history of accounts of racial differences in brain size and how these values were ascertained, upon critical examination, such differences claimed by the hereditarian all but dissappear.
Reducing “intelligence” to the brain is nothing new. This has been the path hereditarians have taken in the new millennium to try to show that the hereditarian hypothesis is true. This is basically mind-brain identity as I have argued before. Why are African countries so different from other more developed countries? The hereditarian assumes that biology must be a factor, and it is there where they try to find the answer. This was what British Eugenicists in Kenya tried to show—that the brain of the Kenyan explained how and why East Africa is so different in comparison to Europe regarding civilizational accomplishments.
In this article, I will discuss eugenic attitudes on Kenyans and their attempted reduction of intelligence to the brain, how these attitudes and beliefs went with them which grew out of Galtonian beliefs, and how such beliefs never died out.
Eugenics in Kenya
Eugenic ideas on race and intelligence appeared in Kenya in the 1930s since it promised biological solutions to social problems (Campbell, 2007, 2012). Of course these ideas grew from the heartland of eugenics where it began, from Francis Galton. So it’s no surprise that Britons who went to Kenya held those ideals. Moreover, the attitudes that the Britons settlers had in Kenya on the law in regard to Africans seems reminiscent of Jim Crow America:
The law must be a tool used on behalf of whites to bend Africans to their will. It must be personal and racially biased, the punishment swift and sharp. (Shadle, 2010)
This story begins with F. Vint (1934) and and Henry Gordon (1934) (who was in Kenya beginning in 1925). (See Mahone, 2007.) Gordon met Vint while he was a visiting doctor at the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi (Tilley, 2005: 235). Both of these men attempted to show that Africans were inferior to Europeans in intelligence, and used physical brain measures to attempt to show this.
Vint used two measures—brain weight and brain structure. He also argued that the pyramidal cell layer of the Kenyan brain was only 84 percent of the European brain. Vint used others’ comparisons of European’s brains for these studies, never studying them on his own. So he concluded that the average Kenyan reached only the development of a 7 or 8 year old European. While Vint (1934) argued that the brain of the Kenyan was 152 grams less than the average brain of the European, he didn’t explicitly claim in this paper that this would then lead to differences in intelligence. We can infer that this was an implication of the argument based on his other papers. Campbell (2007: 75) quotes Vint in his article A PreliminaryNote on the Cell Content of the Prefrontal Cortex of the East African Native on the subject of brain weight and intelligence:
Thus from the both the average weight of the African brain and measurements of its prefrontal cortex I have arrived, in this preliminary investigation, at the conclusion that the stage of mental development reached by the average native is that of the average European boy of between 7 and 8 years of age.
Note the similarity between this and Lynn’s claim that Bushman IQ is 54 which corresponds to that of European 8 year olds. (See this article for a refutation of that claim.) So Vint believed that he had found the reason for racial backwardness, and this is of course through reduction to biology. Campbell (2007: 60) also tells us how the eugenic movement in Kenya grew out of British eugenic ideas along with the brain reductionism they espoused:
Eugenics in Kenya grew out of the theories disseminated from Britain; the application of current ideas about the transmission of innate characteristics, in particular intelligence, shaped a new and extreme eugenic interpretation of racial difference. The Kenyan eugenicists did not, however, use the most obvious methods, such as pedigrees, statistics and intelligence testing, which were applied by British eugenicists when assessing the intelligence of large social groups. When examining race, an area in which British eugenics had not prescribed a methodology, the Kenyan doctors most radically made histological counts of brain cells and physical measurements of brain capacity. This led to the adoption of a particularly pathologising theory about biological inferiority in the East African brain.
Gordon (1934) found an average cranial capacity of 1,316 cc in comparison to an average cranial capacity of 1,481 cc in European. This led to the conclusion that the Kenyan brain was both quantitatively and qualitatively inferior in comparison to the European brain. This of course meant that the brain was what we need to look at as this would show differences in intelligence between groups of people that we could actually measure. Gordon (1934: 231-232) describes some of Vint’s research on the brain, stating that physical and environmental causes must not be discounted:
Dr. Vint’s report on bis naked-eye and microscopic examintion of one hundred brains of normal male adults is to be published shortly in the Journal of Anatomy; but in order that we may have a little more light on the question of whether the East African cerebrum is, on the average, on a lower biological level than the European cerebrum, I may mention these facts:
In the areas of the cortex examined, Dr. Vint found a total inferinrity in quantity, as compared with the European, of 14-8 percent. His naked-eye examination revealed a significant simplicity of convolutional pattern and many features generally called primitive; e.g. the lunate sulcus, described by Professor Elliot Smith, was present in seventy of the one hundred brains. The microscopic examination showed the important supragranular layer of the cortex to be deficient in all the six areas that Von Economo examined, and the cells of these areas to be deficient very markedly in size, arrangement and in differentiation.
These, I think, are enough of Dr. Vint’s new facts to make us feel that the deficiencies found in examination of the living are indeed associated with suggestive deficiency in the native cerebrum; that we are in fact confronted in the East African with a brain on a lower biological level. This, I submit, is a matter requiring investigation by the highest expert skill into the question of heredity or environment or both.
However, going back above to what Campbell stated about Kenyan eugenicists not using tests, Gordon (1934) states that the Binet was “quite unsuitable“, while the Porteus maze test was “both suitable and to native liking.” Gordon stated that although the sample was too small to draw a definitive conclusion, the results trended inline with Vint’s measures of the brain at puberty as described by Gordon. Gordon, it seemed, had a negative view on cross-cultural comparisons between whites and blacks:
I find, on coming out of the darkness and confusion of Africa into the clear and tranquil air of European psychological thought and practice, that mental tests and mental ages by themselves are largely depended upon for the diagnosis of amentia. I venture to say only this: In my experience of many thousands of natives, intelligence in its ordinary connotation is present amongst them often to an enviable degree; nevertheiess, I believe we may do the native injustice and even injury if we are content to estimate his “intelligence” only in terms of his apparent ability to cope with the exactions of European scholastic education. Moreover, in the present state of psychological knowledge it seems to me that any use of mental tests as a means of comparison between European and African—races of widely different physical and social heritage and environment—carries the risk of misleading African education and legislative policy. The field for research by the trained psychologist of broad outlook is enormous in East Africa; his presence would be welcome. (Gordon, 1934)
Nevertheless, despite Gordon’s surprisingly negative view on the cross-cultural validity of tests, he did still believe that to ameliorate amentia in the native population that eugenic measures must be undertaken.
We can see now how Vint and Gordon attempted to infer mentality from the brain—and of course inferior mentality in the brain of the East African, in this case Kenyans (of course, the tribes that were studied). So due to Vint’s studies, it was proclaimed in this 1933 commentary in Nature titled European Civilisation and African Brains that due to brain differences, “Europeanisation” for the Kenyan just wasn’t possible. It was Gordon’s intention to use the study of racial differences to enact eugenic policies in Kenya. For if Kenyan “backwardness” is due to their intelligence which is due to their deficient brain, then this would have implications for their education and health. Regarding “backwardness”, Gordon (1945: 140) had this to say:
A few of the important questions ancillary to this leading qualitative question are: (I) Mental deficiency, ignored by the laws of Kenya including the immigration law; (2) Unprevented preventable diseases; (3) Miscegenation, present and future; (4) The introduction of contraceptives to Asiatics and Africans and no appearance of organized family planning.
The second momentous qualitative issue is the accepted “backwardness” of our African group and the question: what is backwardness? This condition, long discussed, has never been investigated; its causes and nature are wholly unknown; the correct treatment for it is wholly unknown. There are some who think they know these things and have unwittingly intensified a situation containing a deep appeal for truth. This situation must inevitably be encountered by a population inquiry.
I have often pointed out that scientific light upon “backwardness ” is required for commonsense thought and action in regard to difficult questions in trusteeship for our Africans, of which I name only the following: (I) Scholastic education and vocational training; (2) Mental deficiency and mental disorder; (3) Alcoholism and drug addiction; (4) Adult and juvenile crime; (5) The ayah question; (6) The urbanization of a backward rural people; (7) The capacity of the East African Native to acquire British culture.
Such questions cannot be lightly brushed aside or lightly answered by a nation anxious to help up a weaker people; nor is the responsibility of taking charge of that people and its future without scientific answers to such questions one to be lightly continued. It should be more widely known that the differences between the white and the black man are far from being confined to colour, and that to proceed as if the resemblances were all that matters may be a grievous error.
Gordon stated that the most important “resource” for study was the population, which other scientists ignored. Gordon dubbed this the “population problem.” Due to these kinds of eugenic ideas, there were blood banks in Kenya that were racially segregated (Dantzler, 2017). What Gordon, Vint and other Kenyan eugenicists were worried about was amentia, which is intellectual disability or severe mental illness. Although Gordon (1934) did discuss some environmental influences on the brain development of the East African in his talk to the African Circle, Gordon argued for eugenic proposals due to what he claimed to be a high level of amentia in the population which led to decreased intelligence. In this same talk, he discusses the previous research of Vint’s, showing data that the brain growth of the East African was about half as much as that of the European. He also stated that they were inferior to Europeans not only in brain measures, but also in “certain physical and psychophysical attributes, but also inreaction to the mental tests used by the enquiry, although itis not pretended that mental tests suitable to the East Africanhave yet been arrived at (Gordon, 1934: 235). He then stated that only eugenic proposals could fix the inborn attributes of the so-called “aments.” Thus, if there are differences in the brain between Europeans and East Africans, then “efforts to educate the African to the standard of the European could prove to be either futile or disastrous” (Mahone, 2007).
So without a good understanding of eugenics and how it works, then it didn’t make sense to try to develop African civilizations since their inferior mentality due to their brains made it a forgone conclusion that they wouldn’t be able to upkeep what they would need to to be educated and in good health. Thus, to Kenyan eugenicists like Gordon and Vint, Kenyans were biologically inferior due to their brains.
It is worth noting that Gordon didn’t believe that human races were the same species and that the Kenya colony was in danger of degrading due to the emigration of “mentally unstable” Europeans from the upper classed. He did, though, believe that some of them could be cured and become useful in the colony, he did believe that such the “mental unstables” should not have been sent to the colony (Campbell, 2007). Gordon also claimed that high grade “aments” could flourish in a low level society undetected, only being detected once introduced to European civilization.
After Gordon and Vint, came J. C. Carothers who, despite lacking psychiatric training was sent to Kenya as a specialist psychologist (Prince, 1996: 235). He became the director of the Mathari mental hospital in Nairobi in 1938 and held the position until 1950 (Carson, 1997) while studying the “insane” at the Mathari mental hospital (Carothers, 1947). Although he seemed to be influenced by Gordon and Vint, and seemed to share the same brain reductionism as them, he looked at it from an environmental tilt although he did not discount heredity in being a factor in racial differences. Carothers claimed that mental illness and cognitive/mental deficiency are “normal physical state[s]” in the African:
In searching for a plausible theory of African psychology, Carothers attempted to explain a perceived difference between Africans and Europeans. He notes gross variation in physical characteristics, such as skin color, which he then correlates with supposed differences in cognitive capability. He quotes Sequeira, the renowned dermatologist, in support:
“both the cerebral cortex and the epidermis are derived from the same elementary embryonic layer–the epiblast….It should therefore not be surprising on embryological grounds to find differences in the characters of the cerebral cortex in different races (2).”
Carothers also investigated the general shape, fissuration and cortical histology of the African brain as compared to the European brain. While he notes that “no sweeping conclusions in regard to African mentality can be arrived at on the basis of these data,” his general conclusion was that Africans exhibit a “cortical sluggishness” due to under-use of the frontal lobes, which inhibited their ability to synthesize information (3).
With the frontal lobe hypothesis, Carothers claimed that cognitive or mental inferiority was an inherent state in the African. “With the Negro,” he writes, “emotional, momentary and explosive thinking predominates… dependence on excitement, on external influences and stimuli, is a characteristic sign of primitive mentality.” According to Carothers, the African’s “mental development is defined by the time he reaches adolescence, and little new remains to be said” (3). In this supposed child-like permanence, “above all, the importance of physical needs (nutrition, sexuality)” prevail (2). This belief was used as proof that Africans could not appreciate the Victorian moral values of hard work and education, the desire for which was said to have come in part through denial of the sexual drive. By extension, the African was denied the possibility of reaching a civilized state.
Carothers also claimed that the African exhibits an “impulsivity [that is] violent but unsustained, … an ‘immaturity’ which prevents complexity and integration in the emotional life” (2). Using this discourse of violence, he medicalized “mental illness” as a normal physical state in the African. When the British administration in Kenya called upon Carothers to assess the Mau Mau rebellion (1945-1952), ethnopsychiatry was “commandeered to clothe the political interests of the colonists in the pseudo-scientific language of psychiatry to legitimize European suzerainty” (4). After due investigation, Carothers reported to the British government that “the onus for the rebellion rests with the deficiencies characteristic of the native Kenyans and not with the policies of the British colonial desire” (3). (Carson, 1997)
In 1951, Carothers (1951: 47) argued for a cultural view to explain the “frontal idleness” of the African, while not discounting “the possibility of anatomical differences” in explaining it:
This frontal idleness in turn can be accounted for on cultural grounds alone, but the possibility of anatomical differences, is not thereby excluded.
Finally, a plea is voiced for expert anatomical study of the African brain and, in view of his resemblance to a certain type of European psychopath, of the brains of the latter also.
Carothers published a WHO report in 1953 where he stated that he would relate cultural factors and malnutrition and disease to mental development (Carothers, 1953). Carothers (1953: 106) stated that “The psychology of the African is essentially the psychology of the African child.” This claim, of course, seems to gel well with the Gordon-Vint claim that the brain growth of the East African seems to subside way earlier than that of the European brain. Carothers also reinterpreted Vint’s findings on the thinner cerebral cortex.
[Carothers] introduced an interpretation which permitted education to play a role in post-natal cerebral development. Noting the remarkable enhancement in interest and alertness “that comes to African boys and girls as a result of only a very little education… often comprising little more than some familiarity with written symbols in reading, writing and arithmetic;’ he raised the question whether,”it is not possible that the maturation of those cortical cells in Europe is also dependant on the acquisition of that skill” (Carothers, 1962, p. 134). (Prince, 1996: 237)
Though regarding the so-called thinner cortex of the African, Tobias (1979) stated:
Published interracial comparisons of thickness of the cerebral cortex and, particularly, of its supragranular layer, are technically invalid: there is no acceptable proof that the cortex of Negroes is thinner in whole, or in any layer, than that of Europeans. It is concluded that vast claims have been based on insubstantial evidence.
However, Cryns (1962: 237) stated that while there are differences in brain morphology between whites and blacks, there was no evidence that this accounted foe the alleged inferiority in intelligence in Africans:
With regard to brain fissuration and the histological structure of the cortex, both Carothers (14, p. 80) and Verhaegen (49, p. 54) state that there is no scientific evidence sufficient to assume that mental capacity is in some degree related to the surface or structure of the cerebral cortex.
The general conclusion, then, to be drawn from the above anatomical and physiological brain studies is that there is sufficient empirical evidence indicating the existence of morphological differences between White and Negro brains, but that there is no sufficient evidence to indicate that the morphological peculiarities found in the African brain are of functional significance, i.e., account for an alleged intellectual inferiority.
Gordon and Vint’s works and conclusions in the modern day
Reading the works of these two men, we can see that what they are saying is nothing new—since contemporary hereditarians argue for almost similar conclusions. Rushton was one of the main hereditarians who argued that biological reductionism was true and he authored many studies with Ankney on the correlation between general mental ability (GMA) and the brain (Rushton and Ankney, 2007; 2009).
Rushton, however, aggregated numerous different measurements from different time periods, even from authors who did not subscribe the racial hierarchies that Rushton proposed—in fact, this “hierarchy” changed numerous times throughout the ages (Lieberman, 2001). The current hierarchy came about due to East Asia’s economic uprise starting after WW2, and the “shrinking skulls” of Europeans began in the 1980s with Rushton (Lieberman, 2001). Although Lynn, (1977, 1982) did speak of higher Japanese IQs, it is of course in the context of “Japan’s dazzling commercial success.” (See here for a refutation of Lynn’s genetic hypothesis regarding Asians.)
It is quite obvious by looking at how contemporary hereditarian research is trending, that the biological reductionism of Gordon and Vint is still alive today in fMRI and MRI studies. Contemporary hereditarians have also implicated the frontal lobe as being part of the reason why blacks are “less intelligent” than whites, and as we have seen, this is a decades-old claim. These beliefs were held due to outdated and outright racist views on the “quality” of the greatest “resource”, according to Gordon: The population.
Conclusion
Eugenics in Kenya—as it was in America—wasn’t a scientific movement; it was a social and political one. Eugenic ideas were practiced all over the world from the time of antiquity all the way to the modern day. The biological reductionism espoused by Kenyan eugenicists is still with us today, and instead of using post-mortem brains and crude skull measures, we are using more sophisticated technologies to try to show this reductionism is true. However, since mind doesn’t reduce to brain, this is bound to fail.
As we can see, the kind of gross biological reductionism hasn’t left us, it has only strengthened. The mental and physical reductionism inherent in these theories have never died—they just quieted down for a bit after WW2.
What is inherent in such claims is that there are not only racial brains, but racial minds. What Gordon, Vint and Carothers tried arguing was that it wasn’t due to the rule of the British and the society that they attempted to create in Kenya, the capacity for rebellion was inherent in the Kenya native. This seems to me to be like the “drapetomania” craze during slavery in America: pathologizing a normal response—like wanting to escape slavery—and create a new psychological diagnosis to explain why they act a certain way. The views espoused by the scientific racists in Kenya were not new, since earlier in the 19th century the inferiority of the “black brain” was well-noted and discussed. Although I have found one (1) view from Tiedemann (1836: 504) who claims that his studies led him to the belief that “by measuring the cavity of the skull of Negroes and men of the Caucasian, Mongolian, American, and Malayan races, that the brain of the Negro is as large as thsg of the European and other nations.”
Campbell (2007: 219-220) explains that although most probably still held their eugenic beliefs, the changing intellectual climate in Britain was a main reason why the eugenics movement in Kenya was not sustained.
By the late 1930s, although there had been no radical change in settler attitudes to race and no upheaval in the policy or personnel of the colonial administration the Kenyan eugenics movement petered out. We must assume that individuals retained their eugenic beliefs, but its potency in Kenya’s lore of human biology was lost. The causes of the demise of Kenyan racial eugenics lay in the financial retrenchment of the 1930s and responses in the metropole at a time when scientific racism was being increasingly undermined on both political and intellectual grounds. Without metropolitan support, Kenyan eugenics could not be sustained as a social movement. The size and composition of the Kenyan European community was such that there were not enough individuals with the intellectual and scientific interests and authority to establish an independent, self-sufficient organisation. Kenyan eugenics was forced to look to the metropole for financial, intellectual and institutional legitimacy. The demise of Kenyan eugenics is therefore intimately linked with a changing intellectual climate in Britain.
The views espoused by Gordon, Vint and Carothers have not left us. After Arthur Jensen revived the race and IQ debate in 1969, searches for the cause of why blacks are less intelligent than whites began coming back into the mainstream. Rushton and Jensen relied on such works to argue for their conclusion that the cause of lower intelligence and hence lower civilizational attainment and academic performance was due to genes and their brain structure. Such antiquated views, it seems, just will not die. Lieberman (2001) showed how the racial hierarchy in brain size has changed throughout the ages based on current social thought, and of course, this has affected hereditarian thinking in the modern day.
Although some authors in the 18 and 1900s proclaimed that brain weight had no bearing on one’s mental faculties, quite obviously the Kenyan eugenicists never got that memo. Nevertheless, there are a few studies that contradict Rushton’s racial hierarchy in brain size, showing that the brain’s of blacks are in range with those of whites.
Discussions on the “quality” of brains of different groups of course have not went away, they just changed their language. It seems to me that, like with most hereditarian claims, it’s just racists citing racists as “consensus” for their claims. Gordon (1934) asked why the brain of the Kenyan does not develop in the same way as the European’s. Since the reductionism they held to is false, such a question isn’t really relevant.
The concept of “genotypic IQ” (GIQ) refers to a theoretical genetic potential of IQ. Basically, GIQ is one’s IQ without any corresponding environmental insults, and of course it is due the interaction of many genes each with small effect (which is the justification for GWAS). This, though, is like the concept of true score. “A true score is the hypothetical average of a thousand parallel testings of someone’s intellectual abilities.” Nevertheless, this concept of GIQ is used by hereditarians to proclaim that “genotypic intelligenceis deteriorating” (Lynn, 1998) and this is due to “dysgenic fertility“, which is “a negative correlation between intelligence and the number of children” (Lynn and Harvey, 2008: 112), while “genotypic IQ” is “Genotypic intelligence is the genetic component of intelligence and it is this that has been declining” (Lynn and Harvey, 2008: 113) or is the IQ they have if they have access to optimal environments. I will argue in this article why the concept of GIQ is nonsense.
What is GIQ?
So GIQ is the so-called genetic component of intelligence. This, of course, is based on the assumption that genes are causative for IQ. This is based on the assumption that, however weakly, heritability can tell us anything about genetic causation (it can’t).
Lynn (2015) talks about the GIQs of Africans, pygmies, and aborigines. He also claims that the IQ of African Americans is “solely genetically determined“, since it hasn’t changed in some 80 years. This claim, though, is false (Dickens and Flynn, 2006). Nevertheless, the claim of GIQ arises due to the assumption—which hasn’t been tested, nor can it—that IQ and other psychological traits are caused/influenced by genes. I have argued at length that this claim is false.
If women with a low IQ give birth to their children earlier than women with a high IQ, the mean genotypic IQ of the population will also decrease (Comings 1996), even if the number of children in both population strata should be the same. If the number of children across the IQ distribution is not equal (Blake 1989), the next generation will have a different IQ distribution.
Quite obviously, the hereditarian claim of GIQ is that some individuals—and of course groups—are genetically more intelligent than others. Nevertheless, a women “with a low IQ” doesn’t have a low IQ due to genetics; if we think about the nature of IQ and the types of items on the test, we then come to the conclusion that these tests aren’t a test of one’s genetic potential for learning ability (as many have claimed), but it’s merely what one has been exposed to and learned.
We have also used this concept of GIQ to attempt to show that these genes we have found to be associated with IQ have been in decline. Cretan (2016)—in a paper titled “Was Cro-Magnon the Most Intelligent Modern Human?“—tries to argue that GIQ has decreased since Neolithic times, and that the decrease in height and brain size since then is expected, since they are moderately correlated. However, the so-called brain size increase seems to be an artifact (Deacon, 1990a, 1990b). Cretan (2016: 158-159) writes:
Genotypic” intelligence changes across millennia because the genetic variants, or alleles, that enable people to develop higher intelligence change their frequencies due to mutation and selection. Evolution by mutation and selection implies that at a certain selection pressure favoring higher intelligence, the genotypic intelligence of a population remains constant. At selection pressures below this break-even point, intelligence will decrease; at higher selection pressure, intelligence will increase. In the complete absence of selection, genotypic IQ will not remain constant.
As we can see, this concept of GIQ and the so-called decrease in it has been sounding hereditarian alarm bells for decades. People like Lynn and Jensen push eugenic ideals on the basis of low intelligence people having more children, pushing for a negative eugenic practice to prevent people with low IQ from having children. Jensen, in his infamous 1969 paper, was pretty much explicit with these aims, and then in 1970 he stated that heritability can tell use one’s genetic standing when it comes to intelligence. Richard Lynn, in his review of Cattell’s Beyondism, called for “realistically phasing out” certain populations, but that it wasn’t eugenic:
“Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population?” – Jensen, 1969: 95, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?
“What the evidence on heritability tells us is that we can, in fact, estimate a person’s genetic standing on intelligence from his score on an IQ test.” – Jensen, 1970, Can We and Should We Study Race Difference?
…
“What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of “phasing out” of such peoples.” [Lynn]
This is an example of negative eugenics—preventing those who were thought to have undesirable traits from breeding. William Shockley—who was Arthur Jensen’s inspiration—talked about paying people to undergo sterilization. This was called the voluntary sterilization bonus plan:
Shockley is proposing varying bonuses to anyone with an IQ under 100 who agrees to be sterilized upon reaching child-bearing age. He would pay volunteers $1,000 for every IQ point below 100, with “$30,000 put into a trust fund for a 70-IQ moron, potentially capable of producing 20 children.”
…
Under the plan, bonuses would also go to potential parents based on the “best scientific estimates” of their having such “genetically carried disabilities as hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea and so on,” with taxpayers getting no money to participate.
This is another example of negative eugenics, but there is of course also positive eugenics—encouraging those with desired traits to have more children. In his article Bright New World, Moen (2016) discusses this kind of positive eugenics, while endorsing the claim of GIQ. Moen proposed that women should be paid modest sums of cash to have children with high IQ sperm donors, not their husbands:
Here I would like to suggest an alternative way to raise global IQ: giving prospective mothers modest monetary incentives to have children that genetically belong not to their husbands (or to ordinary sperm donors) but to high-IQ sperm donors.
These are the kinds of views and ultimate consequences that derive from such thinking that there is GIQ. Since we know that IQ can’t be genetic, there can be no GIQ. If there can be no GIQ, then such proposals like these negative and positive eugenic ideas that I just cited would merely just be getting rid of people that are not socially desireable—mainly the lower class, along with blacks since they are more likely to be lower class and have lower IQs (due to knowledge exposure and differential access to cultural and psychological tools). This concept of GIQ has, since the advent of IQ tests in America, been used to sterilize people in the name of eugenics. The moral wrongness of eugenics is why we should reject this concept, nevermind the irreducibility arguments. Eugenic policies discriminate against people based on arbitrary criteria and violate their reproductive rights.
Arguments against GIQ
Now that I have described what GIQ is and how it has been used in the past in the name of eugenics, here are a few arguments to invalidate the concept.
P1: If IQ is solely determined by one’s genetic makeup, then IQ scores should remain stable through one’s lifetime. P2: IQ scores do not remain relatively stable through one’s lifetime. C: Thus, IQ is not solely determined by one’s genetic makeup.
P1: If IQ is solely determined by genetics, then individuals with high IQ parents should also have high IQ scores. P2: If individuals with high IQ parents also have high IQ scores, then adoption should not affect their IQ scores. P3: Adoption does affect the IQ scores of individuals with high IQ parents. C: Thus intelligence is not solely determined by genetics.
P1: If the concept of GIQ were true, then one’s IQ would be determined by their genetics. P2: Genes don’t determine traits, nevermind psychological ones. C: Therefore, the concept of GIQ is false.
P1: If psychological traits are reducible to genetics, then environment plays no role in shaping IQ and the concept of GIQ is true. P2: The environment plays a significant role in shaping IQ, as adoption studies show. C: Therefore psychological traits are not reducible to genetics and the concept of GIQ is false.
And
P1: If psychological traits are irreducible, then the concept of GIQ is false. P2: Psychological traits are irreducible. C: Therefore, the concept of GIQ is false.
Both of these argument draw on the irreducibility of the mental arguments I’ve been making for years. If the mental is irreducible to the physical, then the concept of GIQ can’t possibly be true.
P1: Either the concept of GIQ is true and implies that IQ is determined by genes alone, or the concept of GIQ is false and other factors other than genes contribute to IQ. P2: If the concept of GIQ is true and implies genetic determinism, then it ignores the significant impact that environmental factors have on IQ and may perpetuate discrimination against those with low IQ. P3: If the concept of GIQ is false and other factors other than genes contribute to IQ, then efforts should be focused on addressing these other factors rather than assuming that genes are the sole determinant of IQ. C: Thus, either the concept of GIQ perpetuates discriminatory attitudes if true, or it distracts from addressing the true determinants of IQ if false.
P1 is logically true, while P2 and P3 are supported by scientific evidence, so the argument is plausible.
The concept of GIQ assumes that IQ is largely determined by genetics, and that individuals have different genetic potentials for IQ. There is no clear, consistent definition of intelligence. The factors that contribute to IQ are complex and multifaceted. So any attempt at reducing one’s IQ to their genes or to make predictions about one’s IQ from their genes along is inherently flawed and oversimplified. Thus, the concept of GIQ is not a valid or useful way of understanding intelligence, and so attempts to use it to make policy or social decisions would be misguided. So this argument challenges the concept of GIQ, since there is no accepted definition of intelligence. That’s more than enough to discount the concept entirely.
Conclusion
I have described the concept of GIQ that many hereditarians in the literature have espoused. It is described as one’s genetic potential for IQ sans environmental insults. The usual suspects are arguing for a GIQ. However as can be seen historically, this concept had led to destructive consequences for groups of people and individuals who are deemed less intelligent. It has been argued that those who have low IQs should not have children and that either people should be paid to not have children and get sterilized or to influence high IQ mother’s to have children not with their husbands but high IQ sperm donors. Eugenics is morally wrong so we should not do that, nevermind the fact that genes don’t work how hereditarians need them to. Nevertheless, I have given a few arguments that the concept of GIQ is misleading at worst and socially destructive at best. This is yet another reason why we should ban IQ tests.
Thus, the concept of GIQ is merely false eugenic nonsense.
The concept of eugenics has a long history. Back in 2018, I surveyed the history of eugenics throughout antiquity to the modern day in different countries. It seems that the Greeks were the first to employ the concept. Both Aristotle and Plato wanted the state go be in charge of the birthing process, which is a classical definition of eugenics. People have even been sterilized in recent history, as recent as 20 years ago in California.
After the defeat of the Nazis in WW2, though, such eugenic ideas have never left. They have just changed form. We are in the new millennium and so we have new technologies that may allow us to screen for certain disseases and terminate then early on in the process. In this article, I will argue that using such technologies to prevent the births of such people are eugenic. I will give a few arguments and then I will connect them.
The “new eugenics”, same as the old eugenics
“New eugenics” refers to the use of advanced genetic technologies to improve or enhance genetic traits of humans or to selectively breed humans with desired traits while discouraging or preventing the reproduction of those with undesired traits. This tracks with “classical eugenics”, which was a socio-political movement in the late 18th to early 19th century which aimed at improving the human gene pool through encouraging the selective breeding of those with desirable traits while discouraging or preventing the reproduction of those with undesired traits, through coercion such as forced sterilization and euthanasia of individuals who have undesired traits like mental illness, physical disabilities or criminal tendencies. So as can be seen, both the old and new eugenics both involve the same basic practice of selective breeding of humans based on their genetic traits. Thus, both forms of eugenics are reductive in nature.
Both kinds of eugenics are morally wrong. By “morally wrong” I mean that it is not in accordance with accepted ethical principles and values. So calling eugenics “morally wrong” indicates that it is ethically unacceptable to most people, since it goes against the fundamental principles of human dignity, social justice, and human autonomy.
It’s a violation of human dignity and autonomy (Zaluski, 2010) since it makes decisions about a person’s life and reproductive choices based on their genetic makeup rather than their own desires and preferences. It can also stigmatize certain groups while perpetuating existing socio-economic inequalities by reinforcing the dominance of certain groups while marginalizing others. So it can result in further stigmatization and discrimination of certain groups based on their perceived genetic traits which would then lead to a loss of social cohesion along with a decrease in societal well-being. Selective breeding can also lead to a loss of genetic diversity in humans, which could then have further negative effects on our species’ ability for long-term survival and adaptation. And there are concerns involving the new eugenics like gene editing and PGD while there of course could be unintended, unforseen consequences and side effects while new forms of inequality and discrimination could emerge.
So here is the argument that eugenics is morally wrong.
P1: If a practice involves the selective breeding of humans based on their genetic traits, it is permissible only if it respects the autonomy and dignity of all individuals involved. P2: Eugenics involves the selective breeding of humans based on their genetic traits. P3: Eugenics does not respect the autonomy and dignity of all individuals involved. C: Therefore, eugenics is morally wrong.
Premise 1 can be defended by the idea that every human has inherent value and deserves to be treated with respect and dignity regardless of their genetic makeup. Premise 2 is an accepted feature of both the old and the new eugenics. Premise 3 can be supported on the basis that eugenic practices involve the imposition of genetic traits on individuals without their consent, and it could also lead to the stigmatization and marginalization of those with so-called undesired genetic traits which would violate the fundamental ethical principles of human dignity and autonomy. So from (1), (2), and (3), and Conclusion follows that eugenics is morally wrong since it involves the selective breeding of humans based on their genetic traits while failing to respect the autonomy and dignity of all individuals involved.
Eugenics won’t work because genetic reductionism is false
Genetic reductionism is the view that genes are the primary determinants of human traits. It is the view that complex traits and behaviors can be reduced to and explained by genetic and biological factors while non-genetic and environmental factors are insignificant determinants. In the eugenic view—and in the view of most people—traits are primarily genetically caused, and by using genetic engineering and similar new-age tools, we can then guide out evolution and prune out both genes that lead to undesired traits and, in effect, people too. However, genetic reductionism is false. It is false because there is no privileged causal role in development of any of the developmental resources, genes included (Noble, 2012). So it then follows that eugenics can’t work, since eugenics is genetically reductionistic, and genetic reductionism is false. So the practice of eugenics is unlikely to work and may lead to unintended consequences. Here’s the formalized argument:
P1: If eugenics is based on the assumption that genetic traits are the primary determinants of human traits, then eugenics is genetically reductionistic. P2: Eugenics is based on the assumption that genetic traits are the primary determinants of human traits. P3: Genetic reductionism is false. C: Therefore, eugenics cannot work.
Just like eugenics is genetically reductionistic, so is hereditarianism and that’s also why hereditarianism cannot work. And many hereditarians, like Lynn, Jensen, Shockley, and Cattellheld eugenic views (just like Murray and Herrnstein, but they were much more careful with their language, though the underlying ideas are the same) and they are, of course, genetic reductionists. It is, after all, with the advent of IQ tests that eugenics had it’s start in America, and that’s one of the reasons why IQ tests should be banned, since they can and have led to morally wrong policies.
New genetic technologies are eugenic
I have given a pro- and anti-argument for the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) back in 2018. PGD is a procedure which allows parents to screen embryos for genetic abnormalities before implatiation during IVF. This process is often based on the desire to avoid certain traits or to select for certain desirable traits. As I argued above, the new boss is the same as the old boss—the new eugenics has similar end-goals as the old eugenics. PGD doesn’t involve coercion or forced sterilization like the old eugenics, yet it still has intended goals which are similar to the old eugenics by creating “genetically better” people by selecting for certain genes while avoiding others, under the assumption of genetic causation of socially-desired and undesired traits. This can then lead to the homogenization of our species, since people with certain traits could become more common while others without them become rarer. This can also lead to the discrimination of those who do not have the desired traits. Thus, PGD is a form of new eugenics and it is eugenic because it has the same end-goals as the old eugenics.
P1: If PGD isn’t a form of new eugenics, then it does not involve a selective breeding process based on genetic traits that can lead to a homogenization of the human population and discrimination against those who do not possess the desired traits. P2: PGD does involve a selective breeding process based on genetic traits that can lead to a homogenization of the human population and discrimination against those who do not possess the desired traits. C: Therefore, PGD is a form of new eugenics.
I have already provided an argument which establishes that eugenics is morally wrong. Now here are a few more arguments which establish PGD as a eugenic practice.
P1: If prenatal testing is used to screen for diseases to abort babies, then it is selectively terminating those with undesirable genetic traits. P2: If selective termination of those with undesirable genetic traits is practice then it is a eugenic practice. C: Thus, if prenatal testing is used to screen for diseases to abort babies, then it is a eugenic practice.
P1: If prenatal testing is not a eugenic practice, then it is not selectively terminating those with undesirable genetic traits. P2: Prenatal testing is selectively terminating those with undesirable genetic traits. C: Therefore prenatal testing is a eugenic practice.
P1: If a practice is eugenic, then it involves the selective breeding or termination of individuals with undesirable genetic traits. P2: Prenatal testing involves the selective termination of individuals with undesirable genetic traits. C: Therefore, prenatal testing is a eugenic practice.
As can be seen, it is quite obvious that the new eugenics is the same as the old eugenics and the goals shared are very similar. Thus, the only distinction between old and new eugenics is that for the new eugenics there is no state coercion for the use of the new genetic technologies to screen for undesired traits like diseases. In this regard, it is used negatively, but there is though the chance that it will be used positively. By “negative” and “positive” I’m referring to negative and positive eugenics.
Now, I can connect the arguments I’ve made and argue that eugenics is morally wrong and that it rests on the false premise of genetic reductionism.
P1: If prenatal testing is used to screen for diseases to abort babies, then it is a eugenic practice. P2: If selective breeding or termination of individuals with undesirable genetic traits is a eugenic practice, then eugenics is based on the false premise of genetic reductionism. P3: Eugenics that is based on the false premise of genetic reductionism ignores the complex interplay between genetics, environmental factors and other developmental resources and fails to fully appreciate the inherent worth and value of every human being. C: Therefore, using prenatal testing to screen for diseases to abort babies is a form of eugenics that is based on the false premise of genetic reductionism and is morally wrong.
IQ, embryo selection and PGS
While we have already begun to implement such tools and methods in the public, a recent study concluded that testing embryos for complex traits like height and IQ is “premature”, with the top-scoring PGS embryos gain would be approximately equal to 2.5cm in height and 2.5 IQ points (Karavani et al, 2019). But these values were derived from PGS which were derived from GWAS, so it’s just based on correlation. Most authors of course assume that “intelligence” is “highly polygenic”, they need not only correlation, but a mechanism (Munday and Savalescu, 2021). Unfortunately, the eugenic dreams of IQ-ists to increase IQ through these methods won’t work. Since one’s IQ is a function of the type of psychological and cultural tools they are exposed to from birth, and the items on the test are biased towards a certain social class, there are known ways to increase IQ that don’t have anything to do with genetically reductionist GWAS/PGS/PGD pipe dream. The argument can be made like this:
P1: The potential gain of embryo screening for traits such as height and cognitive ability is not significant. P2: The gain due to embryo screening for height and cognitive ability is small, with an average gain of only ≈2.5 cm for height and ≈2.5 IQ points for cognitive ability. C: Therefore, there is no significant case for using preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select embryos for implantation based on height or cognitive ability.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that even if the so called gains were significant and that PGS were causal that we should use PGD to select those traits
Conclusion
Although it has been said that common arguments against genetic reductionism rest on a strong version of genetic reductionism/determinism, and so the arguments “are therefore unsound” (Resnick and Vorhaus, 2006). The kinds of arguments, assumptions and considerations in this discussion of genetic modification and PGD assume, also, any kind of genetic determinism of traits.
At the end of the day, methods like PGD can lead to the destruction of fetuses on the basis of its genetic constitution. Eugenic selection could also have unintended consequences in the future since genetic variance could be reduced which would impinge on one’s ability to choose a partner, so it would lead to a limitation in partners for future people. Irrespective of the moral arguments made here, I think that the open future argument makes the best case against genetic modification of humans. This will yet again be another argument from human autonomy. Not only will we be impinging on one’s individual autonomy, but we don’t even know what kind of traits could be desirable from a survival point of view in the future. So that’s another reason to not genetically modify embryos or to select certain embryos over others.
P1: Future people have a moral right to choose (or not) the characteristics of their own genome. P2: Genetic modification of an embryo involves making choices about the characteristics of the future person’s genome. C: Therefore genetic modification of an embryo is morally impermissible since it violates the moral right of the future person to choose (or not choose) the characteristics of their own genome.
While genetic reductionism is a form of biological determinism, there is also what is called epigenetic determinism. Any kind of reducing X to deterministic proclivities is false. Nevertheless, I have distinguished between the old and the new eugenics, and showed that the only difference between them is that in the new eugenics, there is no state-sponsored coercion or forced sterilization occurring. (Although that, sadly still happens today.) Since genetic reductionism is false, then any attempt to “defend eugenics” (Anomaly, 2018; Wilson, 2019; Veit et al, 2021) are doomed to fail. But genetic engineering “is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements” (Sandell, 2007).
Cold winters theory (CWT) attempts to explain the variation in IQ scores between countries. According to the theory, what explains a suite of observed differences is differential evolution by natural selection in different environments. Due to the exodus out of Africa, this led to the colonization of new biomes with novel things that early Man would not have been accustomed to. Thus, they would then need to be able to adapt their actions and behavior to their new environment. Since they were in novel environments, early man would then need to acquire new skills to survive. So those who could not, had a lower chance to reproduce, and so, there was selection-for and selection-against certain traits. So, over time, this led to differences in the phenotype between groups that evolved in different environments, and the driver of this was natural selection. Hereditarians have said as much, and this theory is a cornerstone to their thinking. The observed differences, in order to be of any use to hereditarians, must be due to evolution, particularly due to evolution by natural selection.
Emil Kirkegaard has a good overview of the history of this theory. Nevertheless, I myself have made critiques of CWT, which rely on the fact that it makes no risky, novel predictions (contra Lynn). In this article, I will mount some more arguments against CWT, and I will further show how the logic for the theory crumbles due to the use of shoddy reasoning and the use of ad hoc hypotheses to save the theory from falsification. I will conclude that the CWT has no scientific value and is nothing more than a just-so story that explains what it purports to explain while not successfully predicting novel evidence.
Cold winter theory – Lynn
One of the earliest instance of CWT can be found in Wallace (1864). In his article, he states things that contemporary hereditarians would then argue. In 1987, Richard Lynn argued that the selective pressures of cold winters explains the high IQs of “Mongoloids” (Asians) (Lynn, 1987). Lynn states that the higher IQs of Asians can be explained by the selective pressures of cold environments. He posits adaptations that evolved in Asians, which cold winter environments then selected-for. In 1991, Richard Lynn argued that surviving in novel environments that our species didn’t evolve in led to selective pressures which increased the IQs of “Caucasoids” and “Mongoloids.” The two groups had to survive in cognitively demanding environments and, due to the cold, needed to create shelters, make clothes and fire along with hunting game. So this explains why the two groups have evolved greater intelligence than Africans. Although Ian Deary is himself an IQ-ist, he rightly states that Lynn’s theory is nothing more than a just-so story:
Another review of the thorny issue which Lynn deals with in the first paper may be judged worthwhile if there is a wealth of convincing new evidence, or a Flynn-like (1987) fine-toothcombing of the past evidence. Neither of these objectives is achieved. Therefore, the Pandora’s box has been opened once more, some may say, to no great purpose. What of Lynn’s evolutionary account of the origins of intelligence test score differences between groups? It puts me in mind of Kipling’s Just So stories. When one is more used to examining factor analyses or anova tables the type of evolutionary evidence that is offered here is difficult to evaluate. One suspects that there is an infinite number of more or less plausible historical accounts of the causes of racial differences in IQ test scores, and that all would leave aside uncomfortable facts (like the intelligence needed to exist in hot arid climates). The issue addressed in Lynn’s first paper is difficult enough, but the evidence is far too sparse to be telling the story of how the eskimo got his/her flat nose. (Deary, 1991: 157)
Thus, if this relationship were to hold, then those who experienced the harshest, coldest conditions should have the highest IQs. However, this is not what we see. Arctic people have IQs around 91, and so, this seems to be a piece of evidence against CWT. Lynn, though, has an ad hoc hypothesis for why they don’t have higher IQs—they had a small population size and so high IQ generic mutations didn’t have a large chance to appear and then become stabilized in the genome like they did for Asians (population size for Arctic people 56,000; for Asians 1.4 billion; Lynn, 2006: 157). So due to geographic isolation along with a small population size, Arctic people did not have the chance to gain higher IQs. This is nothing more than an ad hoc hypothesis—an ad hoc hypothesis is produced “for this”, and a hypothesis is ad hoc if it cannot be independently verified. It’s a case of special pleading, as Scott McGreal’s argues.
The fact of the matter about CWT, is that the conclusion was known first (higher IQs in certain geographic areas), and then a form of reverse reasoning was used in order to attempt to ascertain the causes of the observed differences between groups. This is known as reverse engineering, where reverse engineering is defined as “a process of figuring out the design of a mechanism on the basis of an analysis of the tasks it performs” (Buller, 2005: 92). This is also one of Smith’s (2016: 227-228) just-so story triggers:
1) proposing a theory-driven rather than a problem-driven explanation, 2) presenting an explanation for a change without providing a contrast for that change, 3) overlooking the limitations of evidence for distinguishing between alternative explanations (underdetermination), 4) assuming that current utility is the same as historical role, 5) misusing reverse engineering, 6) repurposing just-so stories as hypotheses rather than explanations, and 7) attempting to explain unique events that lack comparative data.
Lynn (1990) attempted to integrate gonadotropin levels, testosterone and prostate cancer into the theory, stating that by having fewer children and showing mote care to them, non-African populations then shifted to a K strategy, which then led to a concomitant decrease in testosterone and subsequently aggressive tendencies (Rushton, 2000: 263). However, this is based on the false assumption that testosterone is directly responsible for aggression, meaning that as testosterone increases so does aggression. They have the cause and effect backwards, though—aggression leads to an increase in testosterone, so Lynn’s explanation fails.
Rushton then comes along and champions Lynn’s “contributions to science” (Rushton, 2012), while also praising Lynn’s theory as explain why northerly populations evolved higher IQs and larger brains than southerly populations (Rushton, 2005), while making the grandiose claim that “documenting global race differences in intelligence and analysing how these have evolved may be his crowning achievement” (Rushton, 2012: 855). Rushton wrote an Amazon review of Lynn’s book, and then again in the white nationalist magazine VDare. Of course Rushton would go to bat for Lynn, since Lynn’s theory is a cornerstone of Rushton’s r/K selection theory, which is where we will now turn.
Cold winter theory – Rushton
Starting in 1985, Rushton began arguing that there was a suite of dozens of traits that the races differed on (Rushton, 1985). He collated his arguments in his first book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (Rushton, 1995), and he argued that what explained the differences in these traits between his races were the selective factors that influenced and dictated survival in those environments. Rushton and Jensen (2005: 265-266; cf Andrade and Redondo, 2019) argued that there are genetically-driven differences in IQ scores between races (blacks and whites, in this instance), and one of the largest reasons for these differences was the different types of environments the two races were exposed to:
Evolutionary selection pressures were different in the hot savanna where Africans lived than in the cold northern regions Europeans experienced, or the even colder Arctic regions of East Asians. These ecological differences affected not only morphology but also behavior. It has been proposed that the farther north the populations migrated out of Africa, the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters (Rushton, 2000). As these populations evolved into present-day Europeans and East Asians, the ecological pressures selected for larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and lower levels of testosterone—with concomitant reductions in sexual potency, aggressiveness, and impulsivity; increases in family stability, advanced planning, self-control, rule following, and longevity; and the other characteristics listed in Table 3.
So this is where Rushton’s r/K selection comes in. He proposed that “some groups of people are more K selected than others” (Rushton, 1990: 137). So if some groups are more K selected than others, then some groups would have different trait values when compared to others, and this seems to support Rushton’s theory. However, Rushton’s theory can be explained environmentally, without appealing to genetics (Gorey and Cryns, 1995) and it also has not been independently replicated (Peregrine, Ember and Ember, 2003).
Devestating Objections to CWT
Objection 1: The fact of the matter is, when it comes to CWT, this is a perfect example of ideas and beliefs that shift with the time based on current observations. Aristotle argued that since the ancient Greeks had the middle geographic position between Asia and the rest of Europe, they were spirited and intelligent and therefore continued to be free while those who inhabited cold places like Europe lacked intelligence and skill, they had spirit while those in Asia were intelligent while being skilful in temperament, while also being subject to slavery. It was the Greeks who were right in the middle—they were just right, like Goldilocks—to have both all of the good and none of the bad traits they associated with those in other geographic locales. Meloni (2019: 42) cited one Roman officer who stated that recruitment of individuals from cold climates “as they had too much blood and, hence, inadequate intelligence. Instead, he argued, troops from temperate climates be recruited, as they possess the right amount of blood, ensuring their fitness for camp discipline (Irby, 2016).” This is solid evidence that who is or is not “intelligent” can and has changed with the times, along with other explanations of differences between people. This, then, proves the contingency of the concept of “more intelligent people”, and that people will marshal any kind of evidence for their pet theories at the time they have observed them and work backwards to form an argument, a kind of inference to best explanation. Thus, an evolutionary psychologist or IQ-ist transported back to antiquity would have formulated a different theory of intelligence, which obviously would have been at-odds with what they try to argue for today.
Objection 2: In 2019, I contrasted the CWT with the vitamin D hypothesis. I argued that there was one successful novel prediction made by the VDH—namely the convergent evolution of skin color in hominids that left Africa (Chaplan and Jablonski, 2009: 452), which was successfully predicted by Chaplan and Jablonski (2000). I wrote:
If high ‘intelligence’ is supposedly an adaptation to cold temperatures, then what is the observation that disconfirms a byproduct hypothesis? On the other hand, if ‘intelligence’ is a byproduct, which observation would disconfirm an adaptationist hypothesis? No possible observation can confirm or disconfirm either hypothesis, therefore they are just-so stories. Since a byproduct explanation would explain the same phenomena since byproducts are also inherited, then just saying that ‘intelligence’ is a byproduct of, say, needing larger heads to dissipate heat (Lieberman, 2015). One can make any story they want to fit the data, but if there is no prediction of novel facts then how useful is the hypothesis if it explains the data it purports to explain and only the data it purports to explain?
It is possible to think up any kind of story to explain any observation to give it an air of scientific objectivity. Of course it is possible to argue that other climates can select higher intelligence, as Anderson (1991), Graves (2002), and Flynn (2019) have argued. Sternberg, Grigorenko, and Kidd (2005) have also argued that it is possible to think of any kind of explanation/story for any kind of observed data. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is this: There is no reason to accept the CWT, since there is no independent evidence for the theory in question.
Objection 3: If the Lynn-Rushton CWT were correct, then we would observe lower variation in IQ scores between whites and Asians, since it is well-accepted that natural selection reduced genetic variation in traits that are important for survival (Howe, 1997: 70; Richardson, 2017: 46). In the hereditarian conception, of course intelligence is important for survival, and so if the hereditarian argument for CWT is true, then we should observe lower variance in IQs in whites and Asians compared to blacks, but we don’t see this. (Also see Bird, 2020 for an argument against the hereditarian hypothesis, showing that there is no natural selection in blacks and whites on cognitive performance.)
Objection 4: Hereditarians have relied on the concept of heritability for decades. If T is highly heritable, then T has a genetic component and what explains the variance in T is genetics, not environment. Many critiques of the heritability concept have been mounted (eg Moore and Shenk, 2016), and they spell trouble for the hereditarian CWT and the hereditarian hypothesis as a whole. But these estimates are derived from highly confounded studies, and so the “laws” derived from them are anything but.
Objection 5: Rushton and Lynn posit that Asians are K- while Africans are r-selected. Rushton rightly stated that Africans endure endemic and infectious disease, which he wrongly stated was an r trait. He also stated that cold winters shaped K traits in Asians and European populations. However, based on the (accepted at the time) tenets of r/K selection, it would actually be Africans that are K and Asians that are r, since groups that move out of environments they evolved in and into new ones are freed from density-dependent control (Anderson, 1991: 59).
Objection 6: The irreducibility of the mental to the physical means that psychology can’t be an object of selection since it is not physical. Intelligence is posited as a psychological trait, so it cannot be selected. This is a devestating objection to not only the CWT but to most hereditarian hypotheses which reduce mental states to brain states or genes. Such irreducibility arguments make hereditarianism untenable.
Arguments against CWT
With all this being said, here are a few arguments derived from the discussions above. It is well-established that the CWT hardly had any evidentiary basis. It’s merely the argument of ideologues.
P1: If CWT were true, then there would be independent evidence for it. P2: There is no independent evidence for the CWT. P3: The correlation between race and IQ is better explained by social and environmental factors than by the CWT. P4: The evidence cited in support of the CWT, including Lynn’s national IQ data, is fraudulent and lacks scientific rigor. C: Therefore, the CWT is false.
Premise 1: This is a basic tenet of scientific explanation. Independent evidence refers to evidence not used in the construction of the hypothesis. The only evidence for CWT is the observation of differences in IQ between people that inhabit different geographic locations. So if CWT were true, it is entailed that there should be independent, novel evidence to support the hypothesis. It is evidence that isn’t based on the original assumptions or data used to construct the hypothesis. If there is, then that raises the probability that the state of affairs that is proposed is true. Independent, novel evidence is important, since it helps confirm or disconfirm a theory or hypothesis by providing additional support from sources that were not originally taken into account. Evidence is novel when it is not already known or expected based on prior knowledge or previous observations. So novel evidence would, in this instance, refer to evidence that supports the theory and is distinct from the evidence that is used to support it. So in order for CWT to be scientifically valid, there would need to be independent evidence that shows a direct causal link between intelligence and cold winters.
Premise 2: This is a denial of the claim that there is independent evidence that supports CWT, on the accepted definition of “novel, independent evidence.”
Premises 3 and 4: These two premises are linked—access to education along with nutrition better explains the relationship between latitude and IQ. There is also the fact that Lynn’s “national IQs” are fraudulent (Sear, 2022). Thus, there is no evidentiary reason to accept Lynn’s IQs (the only reason is bias and that it “explains” the differing civilizational states of different races). It’s merely working backwards (returning to reverse engineering) since they have their conclusion in mind and then construct an argument to prove their already-held conclusion.
So the Conclusion follows—CWT is false since there is no independent, novel evidence for it. Therefore the only reason to believe it is bias in thinking against groups of people.
P1: The CWT suggests that differences in average IQ scores between racial groups can be largely explained by differences in the coldness of the winter climates that these groups evolved in. P2: All of the evidence used to support the CWT is based on previously existing data, such as Lynn’s national IQ data or historical temperature records. P3: There is no new independent evidence that supports the CWT beyond this existing data. C: Thus, there is no novel, independent evidence for the CWT.
Or
P1: If there is new independent evidence for the CWT, then the CWT can be independently supported. P2: There is no novel independent evidence for CWT beyond the existing data. C: So the CWT cannot be supported by new independent evidence.
These arguments are valid and I hold them to be sound, based on the discussion in this article and my previous articles on the matter of CWT and the prediction of novel facts of the matter.
Conclusion
We don’t need evolutionary stories to explain IQ differences between countries (Wicherts, Borsboom, and Dolan, 2010). Lynn’s national IQ data is highly suspect and should not be used (Sears, 2022). High intelligence would be useful in all environments. The Rushton-Lynn CWT states that those who migrated to more northerly, colder biomes needed to plan ahead for the winter, and they would also need to plan and create hunting parties to procure food. This, of course, is ridiculous. Because you need to plan ahead to survive anywhere. Moreover, Will et al (2021) state that their:
analyses detected no such association of temperature with brain size. … These results suggest that brain size within Homo is less influenced by environmental variables than body size during the past 1.0 Ma.
Since I have shown that the evidentiary bases of the CWT doesn’t hold, then it isn’t logical to hold the belief that the CWT is true. Views like this are expressed in Rushton (2000: 228-231), Jensen (1998: 170, 434-436) and Lynn (2006: Chapters 15, 16, and 17). Since the main proponents of the model hold eugenist ideas, then it can be posited that they have underlying alterior motives for pushing this theory. Even a claim that there is “molecular genetic evidence” for CWT fails, due to, again, the irreducibility of the mental.
Nevertheless, there is no novel, independent evidence for the belief that cold winters shaped our minds and racial differences in psychological traits after the exodus out of Africa. There can be no evidence for it since we lack time machines and we can’t deconfound correlated traits. So these considerations point to the conclusion that the CWT is a mere story based on data which was then used to work backwards from an already-held conclusion. Thus, CWT is false.
Rushton, Lynn, Kanazawa (2008, 2012), (Kanazawa assumed a flat earth in his 2008 paper; Wicherts et al, 2012) Hart (2009), and Winegard, Winegard, and Anomaly (2020) therefore, are nothing more than just-so storytellers since they lack novel evidence for their assertions. So the so-called argument for evolutionary differences in intelligence/IQ rests on a house of cards that is simple to push over. The six objections laid out in this article are devestating for the CWT. There never was any evidentiary support for CWT—the kind that scientific hypotheses need in order to be valid, it’s merely an ideological series of statements, not an actual scientific hypothesis.
The hereditarian hypothesis posits that genetic/biological factors are responsible for IQ (“intelligence”) and other psychological traits. The claim is basically, IQ is heritable. It is heritable on the basis of twin, family and adoption studies, along with results from GCTA, GWAS and other newer tools that were created in order to lend credence to the twin, family and adoption estimates.
I have distinguished before between what I call “psychological hereditarianism” and “racial hereditarianism.” In this article, I will distinguish between the two more, and while psychological hereditarianism isnt necessarily racist, it can be used for racist aims.
Psychological hereditarianism
Psychological hereditarianism is the belief that psychological differences between people are due largely to genetic or biological factors rather than environmental ones. Claims such as this have been coming from twin studies for decades, and it has been commonly said that such studies have proven that aspects of our psychological constitution are genetically heritable, that is genetically transmitted.
Four kinds of studies exist which lend credence to psychological hereditarianism—family studies, twin studies, adoption studies, and GWAS.
Family studies
Family studies examine the similarities in individuals of the same family when it comes to their cognitive abilities (scores on IQ tests). These studies show that those who share more genes have similar scores than those who don’t. To the hereditarian, this is evidence for their hypothesis that genetic factors contribute to psychological traits and differences in them. Correlations are used to measure the strength of the relationship. An expected value of 50 percent (.5 correlation) between siblings is expected, as they share half of their genes. The correlation that is expected between unrelated individuals is 0, since they presumably don’t share genes (that is, they’re not from the same family).
However, there is one huge issue for family studies—environmental confounding. While people in the same families of course share the same genes, they also share the same environments. So family studies can’t be used as evidence for the psychological hereditarian hypothesis. Behavioral geneticists agree that these studies can’t be used for the genetic hypothesis for psychological traits, but they disagree with the implications of this claim for the next thing I will discuss.
Twin studies
Twin studies again use the correlation coefficient and compare twins raised together or “apart”, to then argue that genes play a substantial role in the etiology of psychological traits like “IQ.” These studies have found that identical twins have more similar cognitive abilities than fraternal twins, which to the twin researchers points to the conclusion that genetic factors contribute to substantially to psychological traits like IQ and other traits. However, the main limitation of such studies comes down to twins reared together. It is assumed that identical and fraternal twins share equally similar environments. This claim, as admitted by twin researchers themselves, is false (Joseph, 2014; Joseph et al, 2015). They then pivot to two arguments—Argument A and Argument B (Joseph et al, 2015)—but A is merely circular and B needs to be shown to be true by twin researchers, that is, they need to rule out and identify trait-relevant factors.
Limitations of twin studies include: not being generalizable to the general population; they’re based on many of the same (false) assumptions that were originally formulated on the 1920s at the advent of twin studies; the findings are misunderstood and blown out of proportion; they lead to volunteer/recruitment bias; and it doesn’t allow the disentangling of G and E since they interact (Sahu and Prasuna, 2016). The “advantages” of these studies aren’t even advantages, since it is conceptually impossible to tease out the relative contributions of G and E to a trait. Nevertheless, twin studies don’t show that psychological hereditarianism is true, and perhaps the most famous twin study of all—the MISTRA—hid the data of its fraternal twins (the controls). Joseph (2022) has an in depth critique of the MISTRA and why conclusions from it should be outright rejected.
Adoption studies
The issues with adoption studies are large, as large as the issues with twin studies. Assignment of adoptees to homes isn’t random, they look for homes that are closer to the homes of the biological mother. This restriction of range reduces the correlation between the adopted children and adopted parent. Adoptees also experience the womb of their biological mother’s (obviously). The adoptive parents are also given information about the adoptee’s family, and this along with conscious and unconscious treatment of the adoptee may help in making the adopted child different (see Richardson and Norgate, 2006; Moore, 2006; Joseph, 2014). Basically, the additive gene model is false, and adoptions don’t simulate a random design.
GWAS
The larger issue at hand here is how the aforementioned have been used to search the genome for the genes that lead to the high heritabilities of IQ. This has then led to the creation of polygenic scores. These studies examine the association between genes and IQ in large samples of individuals. These studies compare the genomes of people who have a certain trait, and they then look for correlations between the genes and the traits in that population. GWASs may miss rare genes with large effects. These studies only merely show associations between genes and traits, not causation. Another issue is population stratification—which is “differences in allele frequencies between cases and controls due to systematic differences in ancestry” (Freedman et al, 2004). GWAS, then, are compromised by this stratification, and attempts to correct for it have been found wanting (Richardson, 2017; Richardson and Jones, 2019; Richardson, 2022). There is also the fact that larger sample sizes won’t help the endeavor of proving that genes contribute to psychological traits—since large databases contain arbitrary correlations, then by increasing the sample size this then highly increases the chance for spurious correlations (Claude and Longo, 2017). At the end of the day, the associations found are weak and could possibly even be meaningless (Noble, 2018). There is also the fact that PGS ignore development and epigenetics (Moore, 2023). Basically, genes don’t work how hereditarians need them to.
The fact of the matter is, these research methods continue to push the false dichotomy of nature vs nurture (the first instance of which appeared in a 13th century French novel on gender). There is also the fact that the “laws of behavioral genetics” rest on twin, family and adoption studies. So if the assumptions of these studies are false, then there is no reason why we should accept the conclusions from them. There are no “laws” in biology, especially not the “laws of behavioral genetics.”
Racial hereditarianism
Racial hereditarianism, on the other hand, is the belief that there are inherent, genetic differences in cognitive ability and other psychological traits between racial and ethnic groups. One—most often unstated—claim is that one group of people are inferior to another (as can be evidenced by the labels of the categories used by Terman), and it has been used to justify discriminatory policies and forced sterilization of people found to have lower IQs. Genetic inheritance explains the how and why of some races having higher IQs than others.
The most famous racial hereditarians are Lynn, Rushton, and Jensen. Over the last 50+ years, these authors have dedicated their lives to proving that certain racial groups have higher IQs than others for genetic reasons. These differences aren’t due just to environment or culture, they say, there is a significant genetic component to the differences in scores between racial and ethnic groups. Since IQ is related to success in life—that is, since IQ is needed for success—then what explains average life outcomes between racial and ethnic groups are their IQs and the ultimate cause is their genes which ultimately cause their IQ scores. Due to the strength of genetic factors on IQ, they say (like Jensen), social programs are doomed to fail.
The argument against psychological hereditarianism and racial hereditarianism
The argument against these is simple—the mental is irreducible to the physical and so, while there are of course correlations between “traits” like IQ and genes, that doesn’t mean they’re causal and due to the irreducibility of the mental to the physical, we can’t find what they need us to find in order to prove their theses.
P1: If racial hereditarianism is true, then cognitive differences between racial groups are primarily due to genetic factors. P2: There is no empirical (or logical) evidence that supports the claim that cognitive differences between racial groups are primarily due to genetic factors. C: Thus, racial hereditarianism is false.
P1: If psychological hereditarianism is true, then individual differences in psychological traits are due primarily to genetic factors. P2: There is no empirical (or logical) evidence that supports the claim that individual differences in psychological traits are primarily due to genetic factors. C: Thus, psychological hereditarianism is false.
Both forms of hereditarianism I’ve discussed here are false, and ultimately they are false since the mental is reducible to the physical. Both of them, however, are inherently reductionist and attempt to reduce people to their genes or their brains. They have, in the past, led to the sterilization of certain people deemed “unfit.” Of course, the hereditarian hypothesis isn’t necessarily racist, though it can be used for racist aims. It can also be used for classist aims. It can be launched at whatever a society deems “unfit”, and then they can try to correlate biological factors with what they deem “unfit.” The very notion that certain races are superior or inferior on intelligence is a form of racism. Such ideas have been used in the recent past in order to justify discriminatory policies against people. So while the psychological hereditarian hypothesis may not be racist (it could be classist, though), how it has been articulated and then even put into practice is inherently racist. In any case, here’s the argument that the hereditarian hypothesis is a racist hypothesis.
P1: If the hereditarian hypothesis is true, then differences in IQ and other traits among racial and ethnic groups are primarily due to genetic factors rather than environmental or social factors. P2: Differences in IQ and other traits among racial and ethnic groups are not primarily due to genetic factors, but rather environmental or social factors. C1: Therefore, the hereditarian hypothesis is not true. P3: If the hereditarian hypothesis is not true, then it cannot be used to make claims about inferiority or superiority. P4: The hereditarian hypothesis has, historically been used to make claims about the innate superiority or inferiority of certain racial groups, thereby justifying discriniminatory policies and harmful stereotypes. C2: Therefore, the hereditarian hypothesis is a racist hypothesis.
I’ve shown how P1 and P2 are true exhaustively, so C1 follows from those 2 premises. P3 follows from the conclusion in C1, and P4 is a historical fact. So C2 follows. So by referring to the hereditarian hypothesis as a racist hypothesis, I mean that the hypothesis has been entangled with racist and discriniminatory policies since it’s inception.
So I have articulated a distinction between psychological and racial hereditarianism, where psychological hereditarianism is about the genetic transmission of psychological traits and where racial hereditarianism is the belief that there are inherent racial differences in psychological traits due to genetic differences between groups. While there are of course genetic differences between groups and individuals, it doesn’t follow that said genetic differences cause differences in psychological traits, which is the main claim of hereditarianism. The issue of the reducibility of the mental isn’t an empirical matter, it’s a conceptual one. So the hereditarian hypothesis, therefore, is refuted on conceptual, a priori grounds.
In the year 2000, philosopher Stephen Kershnar published a paper titled Intrinsic Moral Value and Racial Differences (Kershnar, 2000). In the article, he argues that whites and Asians have greater per capita moral value than blacks, since ceteris paribus, autonomy is proportional to intelligence and moral value is proportional to intelligence. In this article, I will show how Kershnar’s argument is flawed.
Kershnar’s argument
(P1) Other things equal, intrinsic moral value is proportional to autonomy. (P2) Other things equal, autonomy is proportional to intelligence. (C1) Hence, other things equal, intrinsic moral value is proportional to intelligence. [(PI), (P2)] (P3) Whites and Asians have greater per capita levels of intelligence than blacks. (C2) Hence, other things equal, whites and Asians have greater per capita intrinsic moral value than blacks. [(Cl), (P3)] (P4) Other factors do not offset this difference in per capita moral value. (C3) Hence, all things considered, whites and Asians have greater per capita intrinsic moral value than blacks. [(C2), (P4)]
The inference in C1 is transitive property of equality where if A = B and B = C then A = C. Intrinsic moral value is proportional to autonomy (A = B) (P1), while autonomy is proportional to intelligence (B = C) (P2), so intrinsic moral value (A) is proportional to intelligence (C), so A = C justifying the inference. It also uses a form of proportional reasoning to show the A = C (intrinsic moral value = intelligence). P3 and C1 are then used to derive C2 through deduction. He then assumes the truth of P4, which then establishes C3, which states that, ceteris paribus, whites and Asians have greater per capita moral value than blacks, so C2 and P4 are used to derive the conclusion in C3.
Critical discussion of Kershnar’s argument is scant, being that over the 23 years since the paper was published, there are a mere 7 citations of the paper, 3 of which are from Kershnar himself. The implication of the argument is that the United States should deprioritze aid to Africa, since rendering aid there would be useless based on their average “intelligence.” He, of course, relies on IQ differences between blacks, whites, and Asians as grounds for his argument here. He brings up the myth of “general intelligence”. In any case, he states that differences in IQ being due to genetic or environmental factors doesn’t matter—since lowered IQ due to environmental factors result in “a lowered level of intelligence that results from environmental deprivation correlates with less autonomy, other things equal, every bit as much as a lowered level of intelligence that results from genetic factors” (Kershnar, 2000: 217). This claim, of course, is nonsense, as IQ isn’t a measure at all, nevermind a measure of “general intelligence.” Thus, C1 and P3 can be rejected, which would mean that, also, C2 then doesn’t follow.
Kershnar’s argument is basically saying that whites and Asians have more inherent value or worth than whites and Asians. Conclusion C2 which is derived from P3 is false and if is further based on a misunderstanding between the nature of IQ scores and so-called “intelligence.” Nevermind the fact that Asians are a selected population. Now I will discuss each premise.
Premise 1: This premise claims that intrinsic moral value (IVM) is proportional to autonomy. It is a reductionist view, which equates morality with autonomy. Numerous other factors also contribute to autonomy, and autonomy and moral value cannot be reduced to a single number. Nevermind the fact that IVM and autonomy aren’t measurable variables.
Premise 2: Like P1, P2 also assumes a reductionist view of of autonomy which equates it with “intelligence.” I don’t doubt that cognitive ability is related to autonomy, however, Kershnar’s claim that autonomy is proportional to intelligence is outright false, and so P2 must be rejected.
Conclusion 1: Even IF P1 and P2 are accepted (and I see no reason why we should accept them), it does not follow that IMV is proportional to “intelligence.” Many other factors contribute to IMV than merely “intelligence.” Thus, P2 and C1 are not entirely true.
Premise 3: This claim is just straight-up false. There is no reason to claim that differences in IQ scores are differences in “intelligence.” While Kershnar does assume that IQ is a measure of g, and also tries to argue that even if the observed IQ differences are due to either genetic or environmental factors that it doesn’t hurt his overall argument, it actually does. Due to what we know about the nature of IQ test construction and the ability to build in or out what the test constructors desire, we therefore cannot and should not accept the claim in premise 3. Furthermore, there are philosophical arguments (Spencer, 2014; Hardimon, 2017) that while race exists and is a social construct of a biological reality, we cannot be justified in claiming that, over and above physical differences, genes contribute to socially-desired/-valued traits. Even if there were differences in “intelligence” between races, this would not justify the claim that differences in Intelligence and autonomy translate to IMV. The rejection of P3 makes his argument crumble.
Conclusion 2: This conclusion is outright racist. It is racist since it assumes that intelligence is directly related to moral worth. The claim that certain racial groups have more intrinsic value than others has been, in the past, used to justify morally repugnant actions such as Jim Crow, slavery and segregation. C2 isn’t false because it’s racist—that’s merely a descriptive claim about C2—but it is false since it is based on false premises (C1 and P3). So C2 must be rejected.
Premise 4: This premise is straight up ridiculous. It is false because it assumes that other factors don’t off-set IMV. IMV is influenced not only by individual characteristics or traits, but also by social and cultural contexts and factors such as education and upbringing.
Conclusion 3: C3 is derived from C2 and P4. As already discussed, C2 is outright racist but it being racist isn’t why it’s false, it’s false since it is based on false premises. P4, again assumes that no other factors influence per capita IMV.
Refuting Kershnar’s argument
Now that I have analyzed Kershnar’s premises, I will now provide an argument against Kershnar’s argument.
P1: Autonomy isn’t solely determined by cognitive ability. P2: IMV isn’t solely determined by cognitive ability or autonomy. P3: The claim that whites and Asians have greater per capita intrinsic moral value than blacks based on differenced in cognitive ability is unfounded and outright discriniminatory. C: Thus, the argument that whites and Asians have a greater per capita IMV than blacks is invalid and so Kershnar’s argument isn’t sound.
P1 states that autonomy isn’t solely determined by cognitive ability. There are many other factors that determine autonomy, like socio-environmental factors which are independent of cognitive ability. P2 asserts that other factors contribute to an organism’s moral value. The idea that cognitive ability is related to one’s moral value has been used in the past to justify discriminatory policies and forced sterilization of people found to be “low IQ.” This is one reason why IQ tests should be banned, since they have been used to justify discriminatory policies and sterilization in the past. Further, infants, children, people with cognitive disabilities and animals are considered to have moral value, even though they don’t have the same cognitive capacities as adult humans. P3 claims that Kershnar’s overall claim that whites and Asians have greater per capita IMV than blacks is unfounded, along with the fact that it is outright discriniminatory. Here is an argument for P3:
P1: If claims of IMV based solely on differences in cognitive ability are justified, then discriniminatory beliefs and practices are also justified. P2: Discriniminatory beliefs and practices are not justified. C: So claims of IMV based solely on cognitive ability aren’t justified.
Thus, the conclusion of the original argument against Kershnar’s argument follows—like in my argument to ban IQ tests, if we belief the hereditarian hypothesis is true and it is false, then it will lead to certain discriniminatory policies and beliefs. Since Kershnar’s argument is, basically, an argument using hereditarianism for our moral values, then this, too, is another reason why IQ tests should be banned. Nevertheless, Kershnar’s argument isn’t sound and it is refuted.
Conclusion
An implication of Kershnar’s argument is that we should not give aid to African countries (I argue that we should) and that, if we saved Europeans and Africans, that it would be more morally praiseworthy to have saved Europeans over Africans (Engelbert, 2015). Engelbert’s (2015: 186) note 16 also talks about the “repugnancy” and “absurdity” of Kershnar’s argument.
On the absurdity point: Kershnar’s argument that more intelligent beings possess greater autonomous agency is based almost entirely upon thought experiments involving comparisons between humans and non-human animals, or between humans with normal cognitive abilities and those with serious disorders that inhibit mental functioning. Thus, the notion of “intelligence” he utilizes bears little resemblance to the use of the term in psychometrics (from which he draws his claim that racial groups differ in “intelligence”). Kershnar provides no reason for thinking that autonomy, understood in the way moral philosophy uses the term, is proportional to intelligence in the psychometric sense. On the repugnancy point, it’s also worth noting that Kershnar’s extrapolation of comparisons between “human beings and pigs” (2000, p. 222) to comparisons between Whites and Blacks is full of troubling implications.
Nevertheless, Kershnar’s argument is outright racist, but that doesn’t mean that it’s false. I have outlined the reasons why it’s false, his assumptions are hardly argued for (like the claim that autonomy is proportional to “intelligence”), and so, Kershnar’s argument must be rejected. I also have provided a counterargument against Kershnar’s, which thusly invalidates it. Now here is one final argument against Kershnar’s:
P1: All human beings have inherent moral value and worth regardless of their cognitive ability and race. P2: Autonomy is a fundamental principle of moral value. P3: Autonomy isn’t solely determined by cognitive ability but also by factors like cultural background, personal experience, and social context. C: Thus, it is morally wrong to claim that whites and Asians have greater IMV than blacks based solely on cognitive ability, since it violates the principle of non-discrimination.
At the end of the day, Kershnar’s argument seems to be deployed in order to deny aid to African countries. However, giving aid to African countries will decrease their birthrate, as empirically shown in other countries. C3 in Kershnar’s argument is both scientifically and morally flawed. For reason—among the others laid out above—Kershnar’s argument is unsound and must be rejected. Kershnar’s argument applies hereditarian “science” to moral worth of racial groups, which is another reason why the argument doesn’t work, since hereditarianism isn’t a valid science.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 