“I am worried,” writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in the New York Times, “that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.”
Reich was responding to anticipated resistance to his forthcoming book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.” The “well-meaning people” Reich references here are those who argue that race is a “social construct,” that there are no significant genetic differences between people of different racial ancestry. Maybe in appearance and other physical traits, but not, definitely not, in intelligence.
Such well-meaning people responded with rage and fury to the publication in 1994 of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve. That book, solidly based on the then-available psychology research, explored differences among races in intelligence as measured by rigorous IQ tests.
Their conclusion was that those differences were the result of both nature and nurture — genes and environment — in as-yet unknown proportions. They predicted that research like Reich’s would provide a clearer understanding of just how much was genetic.
Reich obviously wishes to avoid the demonization endured by Murray, who was attacked by a mob at Middlebury College just last year. He is careful indeed to make clear that his findings should not be used to justify racist practices like the slave trade, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust.
Reich also makes a point that is obvious to the ordinary person but which he — along with some of his critics who wrote to the Times — thinks needs reiteration. Which is, as one puts it, “differences in individuals vary far more widely than in populations.” When we are comparing traits of people with different genetic ancestry, we are looking at averages, like the differences between American whites’ and Asians’ IQ scores (Asians’ on average are higher). But within the white and Asian populations there is wide variety — which can be represented as an actual bell curve.
The assumption of “well-meaning people” is that ordinary Americans aren’t capable of grasping this. My view is that they understand it very well. They have learned, from school, from work, from everyday life, from public events, that there is a wider variation within each measured group than between measured groups.
To take a concrete and accurate example, they suspect that even if blacks might on average score lower than whites on average in intelligence tests, it does not change the fact that former President Barack Obama is a person with well above average intelligence. Indeed, you can read reams of anti-Obama commentary and look in vain for claims that he was not smart enough to be president.
In arguing that racial differences do not justify racial discrimination, Reich steps out on some possibly dangerous turf. “Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound,” he writes (though some Times readers would volubly disagree even with this). “Yet we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.”
A fortiori, he goes on, we should do the same for those with different racial ancestry, whose average differences are far less profound. And it’s a strong argument. Contrary to the fears of “well-meaning people,” the difference in average racial IQ scores do not undermine the case against racial discrimination. Ordinary Americans can and do see that racial discrimination against individuals is irrational and vile, and that the advances in genetic knowledge do not make it any less so.
But the continuing existence of racial gaps, even as the IQ scores of all groups rise (that’s the Flynn effect, identified and named by Herrnstein and Murray), does still undercut the case for racial quotas and preferences and the “disparate impact” legal doctrine established by the Supreme Court 47 years ago.
The justification for quotas is the assumption that in a fair society we would find the same racial mix in every school, every occupation and every neighborhood. Any significant deviation from statistical equality, in this view, can be evidence of persistent racial discrimination.
This notion suffuses the behavior of leaders in colleges and universities, in large corporations, in government at all levels. Many such leaders regard enforcing quotas as a moral duty, even if they place people in positions for which they’re unprepared. For these “well-meaning people,” Reich has a (probably unintentional) warning: Science is undermining the rationale for the work you’re doing.
