On May 14, a disturbed teenager shot dead 10 black people in Buffalo, New York, in a racist murder. Commentators reached, as we do when in shock, for familiar arguments. Some blamed institutional racism, some gun laws, some online radicalization. A handful blamed scientists.
“Scientists have to recognize that their research can be weaponized,” wrote Janet D. Stemwedel, a philosopher of science at San Jose State University, in Scientific American. “They need to think hard not only about how their findings might be misinterpreted or misused, but also about the point of even conducting the studies they do of differences among racial groups.”
The shooter had posted an online rant, full of links to white supremacist sites and “great replacement” conspiracies — as well as to some scientific journals. As Stemwedel wrote, “There’s no reason to believe, on the basis of his screed, that the Buffalo shooter understood, or even read, the scientific papers.” But that didn’t stop the calls for de-platforming.
In the Daily Beast last week, Dan Samorodnitsky demanded an end to the publication of research into innate traits: “The time for simply debating whether there are meaningful genetic differences between humans is long past.” Such studies propped up an unjust social order by suggesting that more able people rose to the top. Worse, “research like this trickles down into violent thought, both through the end of a gun or the flow of a pen.”
There are some obvious flaws with this line of reasoning. For one thing, if we banned writing that might be misinterpreted, we would censor almost every serious piece of literature. Both books of the Bible have been used to justify violence and genocide, as has the Quran. Should they be banned because of how some people interpret them? What about the works of Karl Marx, whose doctrine inspired 100 million killings, making it the most lethal ideology invented? Should the communist corpus be held responsible for every crime carried out in its name?
For another, there is massive disproportionality at work. Critics don’t just want to halt the conversation about innate group differences — they want to repress any discussion of heritability, which is driving a great deal of medical research.
But the biggest problem is the idea that, in an internet age, you can get away with what Plato called a “noble lie” — a falsehood that the wise perpetrate upon the masses for their own good. The noble lie, in this instance, is that, barring some obvious superficial differences, human populations are essentially the same and divergent outcomes are down to social conditioning or structural discrimination.
In fact, there is a mass of evidence to the effect that male and female personalities differ in ways that are innate and consistent across cultures, and that perceived differences in ethnicity conform very closely to genetic differences. Charles Murray, whose 1994 book The Bell Curve Samorodnitsky blames for having legitimized a public discussion of group differences, compiled the evidence in a painstakingly comprehensive and expert way in his 2020 work, Human Diversity.
What he finds is hardly revolutionary. Men tend, on average, to be more focused on things and systems, women on people and relationships. Evolutionary selection pressures have not stopped, and local populations differ in aggregate traits — for example, different types of inherited immunity to certain diseases. Perhaps because Murray’s work is so detailed and measured, it has gone largely unnoticed.
To deny all this evidence is not simply futile. It is actively damaging because it weakens the ethical case against discrimination. As Friedrich Hayek put it in 1960:
“To rest the case for equal treatment of national or racial minorities on the assertion that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality would justify unequal treatment; and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in forthcoming.”
Since 1960, that evidence has indeed been forthcoming.
The real objection to discrimination is that it is morally wrong, not that it is unscientific. To put it another way, what is objectionable is ascribing group averages to each person, rather than admitting that they exist at all. It is wrong to say, “You shouldn’t study math because you’re a girl.” It is not wrong to say, “In aggregate, more male than female students will pick math.”
Once again, we see the essentially anti-Enlightenment nature of identity politics. If research might lead to uncomfortable conclusions or even to conclusions that someone, somewhere, might respond to badly, then the scientific method itself should be abandoned. So we continue our retreat from modernity.
