Race and IQ – off limits?

There’s an interesting pair of articles in the journal Nature (whose editor Sir John Maddox recently died) on the morality, or at least correctness, of researching the connection between race and IQ. Is it morally defensible, or does it merely clear the path for louder and more vociferous expressions of racism?

The most obvious argument in favour of research into this area is simply that the search for truth is the only aim of science, and that we shouldn’t let our political views on the relative morality of a certain branch of research get in the way. If all our scientists treaded too carefully every time they explored a certain area, we might never have reached the scientific heights we have (opposition from religious leaders, for one, would have been too strong). Indeed, there are many discoveries for which it was virtually impossible to conceive of a use until much later. Riemann’s work on non-Euclidean geometry looks—and probably is—somewhat esoteric and seemingly pointless, but without it, Einstein’s groundbreaking work on relativity would not have been possible. Now it might be somewhat rash to suggest that research in the relation between race and IQ would yield results on a similar scale or on a similar level of importance, but that is not to say that it cannot enlighten us.

Those who fear that what we discover might be misinterpreted and fall into the wrong hands are forgetting that racists will use any evidence, no matter how dubious, for their purposes anyway. If they truly fear the consequences of such research, then what of the possibility, as Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue, that the very lack of such research is fertile ground for racists? After all, the only controversial results that research in these areas has yielded so far are that the average IQ of African Americans is lower than the average IQ of white Americans. To use this statistic, or any other like it, as grounds for racial intellectual superiority, is not only sophistic and wrong, it is actually, ironically, rather stupid. No self-respecting scientist would consider that as proof that white Americans are cleverer than African Americans. There are countless other considerations to take, not least of which are cultural background and socioeconomics—the same factors which make white Americans from poorer areas have lower IQs than those from richer areas.

Furthermore, as Steven Rose (who is against such research) argues, “race” is not really a biologically meaningful word anyway. It would be much more accurate to replace it with  biogeographic ancestry. This, I think, is so obvious as to be completely uncontroversial. An example he cites on the importance of the distinction is the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, and of the relative risk to Tay-Sachs disease. But Rose uses this distinction as a basis for why IQ and race should not be researched. This seems to me rather weak: in that case, why not explore IQ and biogeographic ancestry?

The very existence of the Flynn effect must be, to any reasonable person, proof of the fluidity of intelligence and the influences that culture and socioeconomics have on it. The Flynn effect so persuasively shows this, it seems that the strongest argument against further research into this area is that it is hard to see what it could yield. Indeed, a much more potentially fruitful field of research is that of the relation between IQ and intelligence, of what intelligence actually is (it’s extremely difficult merely to give a good universal definition), and of how intelligence comes about.

Some conundrums to ponder:

Einstein’s IQ has been estimated at 160. By any standards this is high, but by the standards of geniuses? The American magazine columnist, author, lecturer and playwright Marilyn vos Savant has an IQ somewhere between 167 and 230. Her contribution to the Monty Hall problem and her two cents on Andrew Wiles’ solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem have been controversial among mathematicians, to say the least. Clever as I’m sure she is, she’s no Einstein. What does this say about the relation between IQ and intelligence? Or indeed, between intelligence and genius?

How can we compare the intelligences of the greats in entirely different fields? Is Shakespeare’s intelligence comparable to Einstein’s? The obvious argument would be that his emotional intelligence was higher, but not his cognitive intelligence. However, there are many writers, critics, and bardolaters who would contend that Shakespeare’s powers were cognitive just as much as they were emotional.

Research into the correlations between “race” and IQ should not be controversial. But it should be pursued responsibly, and with a view to the much larger goals that it might lead to.