Blind Faith in the Equality of Races

The most rational of scientists can fall into pseudoscience when their personal bias is allowed to take over. The book “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine”, by Richard P. Sloan (2006) is such a book. Sloan defines what science is and how it is practiced, and then goes on to show how those who try to connect religion with healing in medicine have been very loose with the scientific facts. The book is excellent except when he takes several jabs at eugenics and intelligence, where his egalitarianism overpowers his science.

He has compiled a lot of data about science and its fundamentals. For example he states, “[from a 2005 Gallup poll], 75 percent of those polled believed in at least one of ten common pseudoscientific phenomena, while only 27 percent believed in none at all. Other polling data show similar findings.” I find this fascinating, because along with increasing a population’s intelligence, we must also improve rational thought. Perhaps, forming a eugenic group based partially on testing for not holding any pseudoscientific convictions, would be one way of bringing about rationality (see my review of “The Robot’s Rebellion”).

Then Sloan takes his first stab at defending Gould against Jensen: “In the language of science, the years of residence in the U.S. is called a confounder. The purported relationship between ethnicity and IQ was confounded by time spent in the country. What was seen as ethnic differences in IQ was really attributable to the amount of time in the U.S. and the resulting familiarity with American culture. When we take into account the amount of time different ethnic groups spent in the U.S., the ethnic differences in IQ disappear entirely.” I believe this is straight out of Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man.” There are two problems with this observation. First, those giving the tests realized almost immediately that the tests were testing for cultural knowledge and could not be used for recent immigrants. Second, he fails to mention that the difference between Blacks and Whites in intelligence does not disappear, as he insinuates.

In promoting Gould’s pseudoscience, Sloan has fallen into his own trap: “Remember that these secondary sources, especially those in book form, more often reflect the perspective of the reviewer than of the authors of the studies reviewed.” Sloan relies on Gould’s interpretations of the IQ debate solely—violating his own rule about using secondary sources.

In a long quote Sloan states, “Of course, this doesn’t mean that [church] attendance never reflects devotion. That’s obviously not the case. But it does mean that attendance and devotion are not equivalent. Attendance is an imperfect index of devotion. This kind of measurement imperfection is common in the social sciences, and once again we can turn to Stephen Jay Gould for a wonderful example. In his classic book The Mismeasure of Man, Gould addressed the difference between IQ and intelligence. Intelligence is an underlying construct. IQ is established by the result of a person’s performance on an IQ test. It is a score. While we may believe that IQ tells us something about intelligence, we recognize that IQ is not the same as intelligence. It is an index that only imperfectly reflects the underlying construct….

“Like intelligence, religious devotion, religious involvement, and religiosity are constructs that we may recognize as important but that are not directly accessible. Because of this, we cannot measure them directly. We can only infer their dimensions indirectly using indices that we believe reflect them. But just as IQ only imperfectly reflects intelligence, so attendance at religious services only imperfectly reflects religiosity or religious devotion.”

Psychometrics of course is just as scientifically grounded as epidemiology, but Sloan uses his book to go after the pseudoscience spiritual healing, then uses that pseudoscience to attack the hard science of intelligence and the results it has born out with regards to racial differences. (See here for a compilation of articles attacking Gould’s position on racial differences.)

And in his last jab at eugenics and IQ he states: “Linking scientific research to measures of moral probity or social worth is a dangerous occupation. Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of research is one we have already covered: the now-discredited eugenics policies based on studies about IQ and immigration conducted at the turn of the twentieth century, which suggested that different ethnic groups showed differing levels of moral probity, intelligence, or other measures of social worth. The eugenics movement held that intelligence and character were related to ethnic origin. Not surprisingly, high levels of intelligence and character were, according to the popular view, more likely to be found in Americans of northern rather than southern European origin, and both of these groups were more likely to possess these characteristics than blacks or Jews. Research studies of the era supported these views. Since then, we have discovered that these studies were seriously flawed, so much so that no conclusions could properly be drawn.”

This is a highly distorted view of the science of that time, as it was extraordinarily broad, global in nature, and changed over time. However, when I do read what was done 100 years ago, it was not all that bad with regards to understanding the principles of breeding. But the continuing need to link the Right with genocide via eugenics and racism, while Marxism gets a pass, shows how repetition of this simplistic connection is used to indoctrinate. This book could have been objective, but Sloan had to digress and distort science to the same degree that religionists are doing today—trying to link god and science.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Sunday, December 10, 2006 at 01:30 PM in IQ and Heredity
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Comments:

Posted by gwood on December 10, 2006, 03:44 PM | #

“What was seen as ethnic differences in IQ was really attributable to the amount of time in the U.S. and the resulting familiarity with American culture.”
This explains why American blacks score so much higher on IQ tests tham Asian Americans.

Posted by Rnl on December 10, 2006, 06:31 PM | #

... the now-discredited eugenics policies based on studies about IQ and immigration conducted at the turn of the twentieth century ...

I believe Jensen notes somewhere the ineptness of this method of rebutting psychometric evidence. It’s wrong to attack an academic discipline by reporting the errors of its early practitioners. On some questions in physics I could defeat Galileo and Newton in a debate, relying only on my high-school physics textbook, but that wouldn’t demonstrate the fallacy of modern physics. It would demonstrate only that physicists know more today than they did centuries ago, which is hardly a startling revelation. Knowledge accumulates in a discipline, so if you want to attack a discipline you must, if you’re serious, direct your attack against the results gathered by its practitioners in the present, not against the graves of its founders.

Since this point is so obvious, it’s hard not to question the honesty of anyone who would ignore it.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 10, 2006, 07:01 PM | #

“Since this point is so obvious, it’s hard not to question the honesty of anyone who would ignore it.” (—Rnl)

Precisely. They’re not honest, but have a political agenda. They constantly reach for sophistries.

Posted by James Bowery on December 10, 2006, 11:38 PM | #

f you want to attack a discipline you must, if you’re serious, direct your attack against the results gathered by its practitioners in the present, not against the graves of its founders.

The question isn’t whether they are serious—but what are they serious about? Clearly they aren’t serious about what they claim: The search for the truth. But they are very serious.

Posted by Rnl on December 11, 2006, 05:52 PM | #

Jim Bowery wrote:

Clearly they aren’t serious about what they claim: The search for the truth. But they are very serious.

You’re probably right, but I have some doubts. It is at least conceivable that Richard Sloan’s belief that psychometricians are pseudo-scientists is genuine.

Soren Renner’s comments in another thread are relevant:

Perhaps [Malcolm Gladwell] takes it as given that hate speech is false: That black people are less intelligent than whites is hate speech; therefore it is false; therefore blacks are not less intelligent than whites.

If an idea leads to or is consistent with “racism,” then the idea must be false. “Racism” is always wrong, both morally and factually. If the idea appears to be a scientific idea, then the evidence adduced to support the idea must have been misinterpreted or perhaps even fabricated. There can be no other explanations, since the truth of the idea has been ruled impossible ahead of time. After all, “racism” is bad and science is good. Scientific “racism” is a literal impossibility. A “racist” scientific idea—e.g. that measured Black-White differences in IQ reflect to a large extent heritable differences in intelligence—can therefore only be a pseudoscientific idea. It cannot be a real scientific idea, even though it may bear some superficial plausibility. This particular pseudoscientific idea is especially dangerous since it conforms closely to the daily experiences of most Euro-Americans and conforms superficially to our historical knowledge of the longstanding civilizational deficits of sub-Saharan Africa.

Now I find it hard to believe that a science writer could sincerely reason in the way I have just outlined, but it is conceivable that he might. “Racism” is a powerful and omnipresent concept in our era, and scientists aren’t immune to its malign effects, one of which is to cause smart people to reason as if they were dumb people.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 11, 2006, 07:11 PM | #

“Soren Renner’s comments in another thread are relevant: ‘Perhaps [Malcolm Gladwell] takes it as given that hate speech is false: That black people are less intelligent than whites is hate speech; therefore it is false; therefore blacks are not less intelligent than whites.’ “

(—Rnl)

Here’s an excerpt from Gladwell which shows (in all but the first sentence) how he completely fails to grasp the various aspects of academic racial reality, the meanings and foundations of its various claims. This man is ... how shall we say it? ... This guy is not very bright, is he? ... (That’s a definite noooooooooo on that, by the way ..........)

“The black-white achievement gap is real. The issue is what inferences are drawn from those observations of difference. There is enough uncertainty over what is meant by race, and enough uncertainty over what is meant by intelligence, and enough uncertainty over our ability to measure what we think is intelligence, and enough uncertainty over the science of measurement itself that — I think — it’s perfectly fair to question the motives of those who want to jump to the conclusion that the key variable in explaining this enormously complicated question is the shade of someone’s skin. Honestly. I thought we settled this issue in the 19th century.”

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 11, 2006, 07:14 PM | #

Let’s put it this way — I’d say this guy and David B. over at GnXp have roughly matching IQs ... Yes, that does get the point across, doesn’t it ... Let’s go with that then ...

Posted by CURTIS WILLIAMS on February 14, 2007, 01:15 PM | #

I am an 79 year old Afro-American with black, white and Native American ancestry. I took an IQ test on line and scored 121. I have also taken the Miller Analogies test at
a small college where I got my MSEd. and scored 95 out of 100. The white test giver praised my intelligence. I have a masters in French and am literate in German, Italian and Spanish, but long exposure to native speakers would greatly
improve my language skills. I corresponded for three years
with a Russian woman, writing to her in Russian, but I am still not fluent in Russian. We learn languages and cultures by experience, but eugenics helps. Was Percy Julian black?
Was George Washington Carver Black? But you can’t judge all
blacks by these exceptions. Opra is black and has interviewed
geniuses, but is she a genius? That’s acomplicated question.

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