The Strange, Secret, Open Triumph of Race Science

There's now a bizarre gap between what's still taboo and what's accepted

Up until the early 2000s, there were serious and respected academics who argued that the IQ gap between blacks and whites in America was at least partially genetic in origin. In 1969, a Berkeley psychologist named Arthur Jensen published “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard Educational Review. Jensen’s conclusion was not much, and he wrote that although people dislike the idea of genetic differences in intelligence between groups, the hypothesis has “been neither contradicted nor discredited by evidence.” The Bell Curve (1994) famously took this idea to a mass audience. One of the co-authors was Richard Herrnstein, a professor at Harvard. Other scholars, like Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, were able to maintain academic positions in Anglosphere countries while openly arguing for similar ideas. None of these people were fringe in their views. When intelligence experts were polled on the causes of black/white IQ differences in a 1987 paper, 45%, a plurality, said that genetic and environmental factors both mattered, compared to 15% who said the gap was purely environmental in origin and 1% who said completely genetic.

It was genuinely shocking to me how bad the arguments against the hereditarian hypothesis were in those years. Geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that on many genetic markers there was more variation within races than between them. This somehow meant that the concept of race had “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is such a bad argument that it is now called “Lewontin’s fallacy.”

Writers like Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould tried to say that humans had separated too recently for important cognitive or behavioral differences to exist.

This can be refuted by…simply looking at human beings. Honestly, that’s all you need to do. There is obviously enough temporal separation between human races to make them appear very different. So the idea that there couldn’t be cognitive or behavioral differences was always based on the at least implicit assumption that physical features change much faster than mental traits. I’m aware of no principle of evolution that indicates that is the case. And we’ve actually seen species change in their mental traits on time scales that are much shorter than those that separate major human races.

In fact, when we breed animals for certain kinds of behavior, we usually end up changing their physical appearance too. The same is true when going in the opposite direction. Chickens selected for body weight become more aggressive. And dog behavior varies according to traits like weight and skull shape. If among animal species you see two populations that have zero overlap in physical appearance, then the odds that they would have no statistical differences on important behavioral or cognitive traits are quite low. The main reason that races diverge in physical appearance in the first place is that different environments selected for different physical features. It’s simply not credible that regions with such diverse climates wouldn’t also shape cognitive and behavioral traits. You wouldn’t expect this with any other species.

The fact that Gould and Lewontin were able to publish influential articles and books with such terrible arguments reflects how much desperation there was to refute the hereditarian hypothesis. The typical liberal found the ideas put forth by Jensen and others like him so uncomfortable that they couldn’t even stand the thought of genetic racial gaps being an open question. They needed people with fancy credentials to tell them that natural race differences were impossible.

Herrnstein died in 1994, and Jensen passed away in 2012. They left no successors. The Trump administration might claim to be bringing back free speech on university campuses, but the taboo on postulating natural racial differences in IQ is so strong that it’s one thing that is well beyond the power of the law to remedy.

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And yet…science has marched on. In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues found that humans outside of Africa had 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. That same year, scientists first reported on the discovery of an archaic hominin population called Denisovans, who make up about 4-6% of the ancestry of Melanesians. Trace amounts of Denisovan heritage can be found in other modern populations including East Asians and Native Americans.

Ancestry in the 1-6% range might not seem like a lot, but even small genetic influences can have a major effect. For example, Tibetans have a Denisovan-derived genetic variant that helps in high-altitude environments, indicating that it was important in their evolutionary history. For now, scientists can only speculate regarding most traits our hominin cousins may have given to different populations.

Aside from finding traces of other species in our DNA, scientists have also shown that human evolution can operate on shorter time scales than previously thought. We already knew that important evolutionary changes could happen in a few generations just from observing the natural world and the history of plant and animal breeding, but for some reason people have demanded a higher standard when it comes to showing the same thing for humans.

Now we have the necessary evidence to put all doubts on this point to rest. Much of the research showing recent human evolution has come out of David Reich’s lab at Harvard. A paper from just this year looking at DNA of individuals from over the course of the last 10,000 years finds evidence for strong selection pressure on hundreds of alleles, and approximately one-standard-deviation-shifts toward lower body fat, less propensity toward schizophrenia, and higher cognitive abilities among Western Eurasians, who are defined as people from Europe or the Near East. You can listen to Reich talk about this paper and more on Dwarkesh’s podcast.

The rise of 23andMe also made the arguments of people like Gould and Lewontin look more and more ridiculous. About one-in-five Americans has taken a mail-in DNA test. People want to know about their ancestry. I remember when I was in college, the ideas of Gould were so dominant that a girl I knew expressed surprise that you could identify a person’s race through bone structure. Maybe Gould would’ve never made that specific argument, but this was how ideas of people like him got filtered down to the general public.

It’s possible that groups converge to be similar on some specific trait, like intelligence. In America, blacks and whites are of about equal height, despite being biologically distant from one another. But it’s always been ridiculous to believe that there aren’t some important mental traits that differ systematically between human populations. You didn’t need studies on Neanderthal interbreeding, cross-racial adoption, or GWAS scores in order to see this. A child can grasp this idea with a few minutes of clear thinking.

Looking back, I think that reading the arguments of the race deniers broke my brain when I was younger. The fact that such obvious sophistry could be treated as serious scholarship drove me insane, and made me into Young Hitler. Surely it must be a Jewish conspiracy or something. Gould and Lewontin were both Jews! Sure, so were Herrnstein and Jensen. But I needed someone to blame, and so paid less attention to that. The world couldn’t be this irrational. I still find Gould’s essay “Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History” deeply offensive for the atrociousness of its logic. The article should forever live in infamy as an assault on common sense, rational thought, and the bedrock principles of scientific inquiry.

“Look at me, I’m at Harvard. Don’t think my research tells you anything about blacks and whites. But here’s some data on how ‘Western Eurasians’ are smarter than ‘Africans’, something completely different. He he he he, I’m so clever”

But whatever. Our eyes weren’t enough. Now, thanks to Reich, we have the approval of official science to think these thoughts.

So thirty years ago, you had people arguing that there were significant genetic differences on non-superficial traits between major races. Others replied that there wasn’t enough biological variation between races like blacks and whites for that to be true. But not even people like Rushton and Lynn argued that human races were partly Neanderthal or that importance changes had occurred on the scale of hundreds or a few thousand years. Cochran and Harpending were among the first to propose this in a popular book in The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009), and the genetic data would become much more firmly established in subsequent years. Something like “race science” ended up being vindicated well beyond what virtually any major figure was arguing before the 2010s.

When David Reich started to discuss his work publicly, he worried that his ideas might give ammunition to bigots. So, in 2018 he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times trying to allay such concerns while criticizing James Watson and the journalist Nicholas Wade.

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes…

If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

So Reich believed that science was soon going to show that there were human population differences, but that there was no reason to expect that those differences would match our “stereotypes.” Yet, as Cochran has pointed out, if population differences exist, they are much more likely to track what we see in the real world than be in tension with it. A 2012 paper showed that alleles associated with being tall were more common in Northern than Southern Europe. Should we have been surprised by this? Before 2012, were we to expect that it was just as likely that genetic data would tell us that actually Italians should be taller than Swedes? Instead, looking at DNA confirmed the “stereotype” about height differences between European populations, because the stereotype was based on observing the world.

Maybe research in the future will tell us that actually Jews should be winning all the marathons? Or that East Asians are bad at math? What’s the point of even studying population differences if they supposedly predict nothing about the real world, and we shouldn’t expect Kenyans to end up being better at long-distance running than any other population?

I like to imagine Reich thinking that in 2050, we might have an American president who accepts the scientific data on race differences and gives a speech like this:

My fellow Americans, we’ve been organizing society all wrong. You know how all the NFL cornerbacks are black? Well, I have some irrefutable science showing that actually, sports would be a lot more entertaining if East Asians got those jobs instead. I know they’re overrepresented in science and tech fields right now, but trust me, running and jumping is where they’re strongest. They’re also naturally really outgoing, and blacks are supposed to be quiet. Who would’ve thunk? As for who should be dominating tech, well, you’re not going to believe this, but…Gypsies have the highest GWAS scores. Also, Jews should hate arguing, don’t know how we screwed that one up. Such is the power of stereotypes, which created a world in which groups show strengths that have nothing to do with their underlying traits. I know the transition to a world of Gypsy tech executives and Korean point guards will be tough, but science has shown that this is the only way for our nation to reach its full potential.

I don’t often accuse scholars of dishonesty. I think people are very good at convincing themselves of things they need to believe, in accord with Robert Trivers’ theory of self-deception. But it’s really hard to think that Reich buys his own arguments. He’s too close to the data, and he obviously decided to study population differences, of all the things in the world he could study, because he thought the topic was interesting. Nobody gets into investigating the genetic basis of racial variation in cognitive and behavioral traits expecting to refute stereotypes. That’s why left-wing ideologues like Gould simply demanded that everyone cover their eyes and blatantly reject the idea that biology could have anything to do with important group differences.

I don’t begrudge Reich for this. He realized that there was no way he’d be able to do his work if he gave any hint that his research might tell us something about, say, why some nations are richer than others. So he is left alone to advance science forward. People wanted to believe Stephen Jay Gould, and now they want to believe Reich when he says his research tells us nothing about whether “stereotypes” are true, but at least Reich is making groundbreaking contributions to science, while Gould was just pushing failed leftist dogma. Knowledge is valuable for its own sake.

Reich pulls off quite the trick by saying that it was “Western Eurasians” who were selected for intelligence. Don’t you dare suspect that this has any relevance to stereotypes about whites and blacks! We’re talking Western Eurasians and sub-Saharan Africans, something completely different. It’s an interesting question why there are no longer Stephen Jay Goulds around to point out the logical implications of what Reich is saying. Maybe it’s that academic Marxists have just gotten a lot dumber. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were often Jews who came from families with traditions of left-wing radicalism. Gould himself said that he learned Marxism at his “daddy’s knee.” Today, the far left prioritizes diversity, which has led to its intellectual decline. And “red diaper babies” isn’t really a thing anymore, with politically active Jews now mostly becoming standard liberals or focusing their energies on supporting Israel. So while talking about IQ or sociobiology at all once caused alarms to go off, to be left alone today all you need to do is talk about Western Eurasians instead of whites and declare your opposition to your research being used to validate stereotypes.

The lesson here is that humans will never accept racial differences in intelligence, regardless of what evidence or data comes forward. My whole life, people like Charles Murray have said stuff like “One day, science may prove beyond all doubt that races differ on cognitive traits, so we have to get ready and do away with the idea that this would be some kind of moral catastrophe in order for us to treat everyone as an individual.” No, people will never be able to live with the hereditarian hypothesis, no matter what science shows or doesn’t show. We already know that human races have traces of DNA from what are arguably different species! This hasn’t caused anyone to rethink environmentalist dogma.

We are able to compartmentalize very well. And this is a good thing, because if we couldn’t, leftists would shut down Reich’s lab. They feel confident that he can go on talking about who is a Neanderthal and who is a Denisovan and what was selected for across Europe as long as he doesn’t go and explicitly say “white people are smarter than other groups because of their genes!” like Jensen did.

Even though I urge caution on this topic, I’ll never denounce anyone for telling the truth. But I will ask them what they think about Indian immigration, and if they express the slightest hesitation, I will tell them they are not motivated by the search for truth or the best interests of humanity, and when they happen to be right it’s by accident. And in the rare case that they do welcome Indians into their nation, I will counsel them that they need to put the race science aside and focus on battles they can win.

They can do this because, thankfully, Nathan Cofnas is wrong. He believes that wokeness will always be around unless we talk about racial differences in IQ, since hereditarianism provides the only non-woke explanation of group differences in outcomes. Cofnas assumes that the marketplace of ideas works in the same way his own mind does while writing a philosophy paper. First, he’s wrong because the world will never accept it, so if you think hereditarianism is necessary for defeating wokeness, then you should just resign yourself to wokeness. But I don’t think hereditarianism is necessary to defeat wokeness either. If the world can accept David Reich’s research while denying the likelihood of inherent group differences in IQ and behavior that confirm so-called stereotypes, then rejecting racial hereditarianism is certainly compatible with libertarianism, conservatism, socialism, or just about any other political philosophy known to man.