Anti-hereditarian bias

Anti-hereditarian bias refers to the taboo on research and hypotheses in the area of human behavior which concern the large role heredity plays in explaining human behavior. Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there have been debates over whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or whether such a dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the appropriate framing of the debate.

Examples

The Race and IQ Taboo

Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there has been manufactured controversy over whether this is mainly due to genetics. In general, old-fashioned common sense is that genetics is the cause, and the data bears this out. However, coinciding with the rise of leftism in Western societies, this has been increasingly denied. Today, the evidence is overwhelming that genetics explain the differences between races in average IQ, but it is extremely taboo to acknowledge this, and the evidence is shamelessly denied by the media and mainstream academics.

Old common sense indicates that race and IQ are genetically linked. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote of his "suspicion" that black people were "inferior to... whites in endowments both of body and mind." During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea that there are differences in the brain structures and brain sizes of different races, and that this implied differences in intelligence, was a popular topic, inspiring numerous typological studies. Samuel Morton's Crania Americana, published in 1839, was one such study, arguing that intelligence was correlated with brain size and that both of these metrics varied between racial groups.

Through the publication of his book Hereditary Genius in 1869, polymath Francis Galton spurred interest in the study of mental abilities, particularly as they relate to heredity and eugenics. Galton hypothesized that intelligence was normally distributed in all racial and ethnic groups, and that the means of these distributions varied between the groups. In Galton's estimation, ancient Attic Greeks had been the people with the highest incidence of genius intelligence, followed by contemporary Englishmen, with black Africans at a lower level, and Australian Aborigines lower still.

But this was denied by abolitionists. Abolitionists of the 19th century continued to advance the theme of ancient Egypt as a black civilization as an argument against racism. On this basis, scholar and diplomat Alexander Hill Everett argued in his 1927 book America: "With regard to the intellectual capabilities of the African race, it may be observed that Africa was once the nursery of science and literature, and it was from thence that they were disseminated among the Greeks and Romans." Similarly, the philosopher John Stuart Mill posited in his 1849 essay "On the Negro Question" that "it was from Negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization."

In 1903, the African-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois published his landmark collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk in defense of the inherent mental capacity and equal humanity of black people. Du Bois argued that black populations just as much as white ones naturally give rise to what he termed a "talented tenth" of intellectually gifted individuals. This is scientifically false, as the IQ of blacks is a standard deviation lower than that of whites.

At the same time, the discourse of scientific racism was accelerating. In 1910 the sociologist Howard W. Odum published his book Mental and Social Traits of the Negro, which described African-American students as "lacking in filial affection, strong migratory instincts, and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, lacking in persistence and initiative and unwilling to work continuously at details. Indeed, experience with the Negro in classrooms indicates that it is impossible to get the child to do anything with continued accuracy, and similarly in industrial pursuits, the Negro shows a woeful lack of power of sustained activity and constructive conduct." In 1916 a team of psychologists, led by Robert Yerkes and including Terman and Henry H. Goddard, adapted the Stanford-Binet tests as multiple-choice group tests for use by the US army. They found the typical 1 standard deviation gap between blacks and whites, which has never faded since then.

In the 1920s, leftist infiltrators started gaslighting about racial differences in intelligence; although not discounting them, the idea was promoted that they were on a smaller scale than previously supposed and also due to factors other than heredity. In 1929, Robert Woodworth, in his textbook Psychology: A Study of Mental Life, made no claims about innate differences in intelligence between races, pointing instead to environmental and cultural factors. He considered it advisable to "suspend judgment and keep our eyes open from year to year for fresh and more conclusive evidence that will probably be discovered". This was contrary to the previous consensus of all scientists. As leftism increased in the population, increasingly leftist scientists would increasingly ignore more and more evidence on the question, until they eventually tabooed the topic completely.

In the 1930s, many scientists were still not leftists. The English psychologist Raymond Cattell wrote three tracts, Psychology and Social Progress (1933), The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937) and Psychology and the Religious Quest (1938). The second was published by the Eugenics Society, of which he had been a research fellow; it predicted the disastrous consequences of not stopping the decline in the average intelligence in Britain by one point per decade. In 1933, Cattell wrote that, of all the European races, the "Nordic race was the most evolved in intelligence and stability of temperament". He argued for "no mixture of bloods between racial groups" because "the resulting re-shuffling of impulses and psychic units throws together in each individual a number of forces which may be incompatible". He rationalised the "hatred and abhorrence ... for the Jewish practice of living in other nations instead of forming an independent self-sustained group of their own", referring to them as "intruders" with a "crafty spirit of calculation". He recommended a rigid division of races, referring to those suggesting that individuals be judged on their merits, irrespective of racial background, as "race-slumpers". He wrote that in the past, "the backward branches of the tree of mankind" had been lopped off as "the American Indians, the Black Australians, the Mauris and the negroes had been driven by bloodshed from their lands", unaware of "the biological rationality of that destiny". He advocated what he saw as a more enlightened solution: by birth control, by sterilization, and by "life in adapted reserves and asylums", where the "races which have served their turn [should] be brought to euthanasia." He considered blacks to be naturally inferior, on account of their supposedly "small skull capacity". In 1937, he praised the Third Reich for their eugenic laws and for "being the first to adopt sterilization together with a policy of racial improvement". In 1938, after newspapers had reported on the segregation of Jews into ghettos and concentration camps, he commented that the rise of Germany "should be welcomed by the religious man as reassuring evidence that in spite of modern wealth and ease, we shall not be allowed ... to adopt foolish social practices in fatal detachment from the stream of evolution". In late 1937, Cattell moved to the US on the invitation of the psychologist Edward Thorndike of Columbia University, also involved in eugenics. He spent the rest of his life there as a research psychologist, devoting himself after retirement to devising and publicising a refined version of his ideology from the 1930s that he called beyondism. In 1935, Otto Klineberg wrote two books, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration and Race Differences, dismissing claims that African Americans in the northern states were more intelligent than those in the south. He argued that there was no scientific proof of racial differences in intelligence and that this should not therefore be used as a justification for policies in education or employment.

The hereditarian standard began to weaken in the 1940s in reaction not to evidence, but to excessive build up of leftists in the sciences and the astroturfing of their fallacious, evidence free environmental arguments. In the 1940s many psychologists, particularly social psychologists, began to argue that environmental and cultural factors, as well as discrimination and prejudice, provided a more probable explanation of disparities in intelligence. According to Franz Samelson, this change in attitude had become widespread by then, with very few studies in race differences in intelligence, a change brought out by an increase in the number of psychologists not from a "lily-white ... Anglo-Saxon" background but from Jewish backgrounds. The 1950 race statement of UNESCO, prepared in consultation with scientists including Klineberg, created a further taboo against conducting scientific research on issues related to race. Ironically, the best evidence suggests that this shift happened due to dysgenics, specifically mutational pressure, which increases leftism by a significant amount.

1960–1980

By the 1960s, leftism had risen to be very common, even in majority, in academia. Protesting this, in 1965 William Shockley, Nobel laureate in physics and professor at Stanford University, made a public statement at the Nobel conference on "Genetics and the Future of Man" about the problems of "genetic deterioration" in humans caused by "evolution in reverse". He claimed social support systems designed to help the disadvantaged had a regressive effect. Shockley subsequently claimed the most competent American population group were the descendants of original European settlers, because of the extreme selective pressures imposed by the harsh conditions of early colonialism. Speaking of the "genetic enslavement" of African Americans, owing to an abnormally high birth rate, Shockley discouraged improved education as a remedy, suggesting instead sterilization and birth control. In the following ten years he continued to argue in favor of this position, claiming it was not based on prejudice but "on sound statistics". Shockley's outspoken public statements and lobbying brought him into contact with those running the Pioneer Fund who subsequently, through the intermediary Carleton Putnam, provided financial support for his extensive lobbying activities in this area, reported widely in the press. With the psychologist and segregationist R. Travis Osborne as adviser, he formed the Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED).

All of these ultimately held academic positions in the Southern states, notably Henry E. Garrett (head of psychology at Columbia University until 1955), Wesley Critz George, Frank C.J. McGurk, R. Travis Osborne and Audrey Shuey, who in 1958 wrote The Testing of Negro Intelligence, demonstrating "the presence of native differences between Negroes and whites as determined by intelligence tests". In 1959 Garrett helped to found the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organisation promoting segregation. Early hereditarians did not understand that leftism itself was caused by dysgenics. But they did understand that it was false and related to bad genes in some ways. In 1961 he blamed the shift away from hereditarianism, which he described as the "scientific hoax of the century", on the school of thought –the "Boas cult" – promoted by his former colleagues at Columbia, notably Franz Boas and Otto Klineberg, and more generally "Jewish organizations", most of whom "belligerently support the egalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proved". He also pointed to Marxist origins in this shift, writing in a pamphlet, Desegregation: Fact and hokum, that: "It is certain that the Communists have aided in the acceptance and spread of egalitarianism although the extent and method of their help is difficult to assess. Egalitarianism is good Marxist doctrine, not likely to change with gyrations in the Kremlin line." In 1951 Garrett had even gone as far as reporting Klineberg to the FBI for advocating "many Communistic theories", including the idea that "there are no differences in the races of mankind".

One of Shockley's lobbying campaigns involved the educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen, of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Although earlier in his career Jensen had favored environmental rather than genetic factors as the explanation of race differences in intelligence, he had changed his mind during 1966-1967 when he was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Here Jensen met Shockley and through him received support for his research from the Pioneer Fund. Although Shockley and Jensen's names were later to become linked in the media, Jensen does not mention Shockley as an important influence on his thought in his subsequent writings; rather he describes as decisive his work with Hans Eysenck. He also mentions his interest in the behaviorist theories of Clark L. Hull which he says he abandoned largely because he found them to be incompatible with experimental findings during his years at Berkeley.

In a 1968 article published in Disadvantaged Child, Jensen questioned the effectiveness of child development and antipoverty programs, writing: "As a social policy, avoidance of the issue could be harmful to everyone in the long run, especially to future generations of Negroes, who could suffer the most from well-meaning but misguided and ineffective attempts to improve their lot." In 1969 Jensen wrote a long article in the Harvard Educational Review, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"

In his article, 123 pages long, Jensen insisted on the accuracy and lack of bias in intelligence tests, stating that the absolute quantity g that they measured, the general intelligence factor, first introduced by the English psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904, "stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics". He stressed the importance of biological considerations in intelligence, commenting that "the belief in the almost infinite plasticity of intellect, the ostrich-like denial of biological factors in individual differences, and the slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes, and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior." He argued at length that, contrary to environmentalist orthodoxy, intelligence was partly dependent on the same genetic factors that influence other physical attributes. More controversially, he briefly speculated that the difference in performance at school between blacks and whites might have a partly genetic explanation, commenting that there were "various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors." He advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance." Concerned that the average IQ in the US was inadequate to answer the increasing needs of an industrialised society, he predicted that people with lower IQs would become unemployable while at the same time there would be an insufficient number with higher IQs to fill professional posts. He felt that eugenic reform would prevent this more effectively than compensatory education, surmising that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education". He pointed out that intelligence and family size were inversely correlated, particularly amongst the black population, so that the current trend in average national intelligence was dysgenic rather than eugenic. As he wrote, "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? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." He concluded by emphasizing the importance of child-centered education. Although a tradition had developed for the exclusive use of cognitive learning in schools, Jensen argued that it was not suited to "these children's genetic and cultural heritage": although capable of associative learning and memorization ("Level I" ability), they had difficulties with abstract conceptual reasoning ("Level II" ability). He felt that in these circumstances the success of education depended on exploiting "the actual potential learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities". He suggested that, in order to ensure equality of opportunity, "schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities."

Jensen's article was widely criticized despite its lack of empirical faults. Criticisms were ideological in nature, and after a short time, the conclusions of the article were buried and ignored. Throughout his life, Jensen endured harassment for the article from students and academics.

1980–present

In 1995, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve. A key thesis of this book was that there is a 15 point IQ gap between blacks and whites; this explains most performance gaps between the races, and it is substantially due to genetics. This caused great controversy. Herrnstein died shortly after the book's release by natural causes, but Murray would go on to experience extensive harassment, including speaking bans, cancelations, and physical assaults on college campuses.

In 2007, James D. Watson, Nobel laureate in biology for the discovery of DNA, gave a controversial interview to the Sunday Times Magazine during a book tour in the United Kingdom. Watson stated he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really." He also wrote that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so." This resulted in the cancellation of a Royal Society lecture, along with other public engagements, and his suspension from his administrative duties at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He subsequently cancelled the tour and resigned from his position at CSHL, where he had served as either director, president or chancellor since 1968. However, Watson was later appointed chancellor emeritus of CSHL, and, as of 2009, he continued to advise and guide project work at the laboratory. In 2019, he lost several honorary titles after repeating facts about race and IQ in public.

A 2009 debate in the journal Nature on the question "Should scientists study race and IQ?" involved position papers by Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams arguing "yes" and Steven Rose arguing "no". It is notable that both sides agreed that, as Ceci and Williams put it, "There is an emerging consensus about racial and gender equality in genetic determinants of intelligence; most researchers, including ourselves, agree that genes do not explain between-group differences."