In last week’s sexy soaraway Darwin issue, Nature posed the question should scientists study study race and IQ? and asked people to lay out the cases for and against. Steven Rose made the case against, while Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams made the case for.
Now, I didn’t have anything to do with the commission of these articles, so I hope my colleagues won’t mind my saying that they left me dissatisfied. Greg Laden identifies the source of my dissatisfaction – the problem is not so much the answers as the question_. The question, says Greg, was deliberately sensationalist (_qv the New Scientist and the whole Darwin-was-Wrong debacle).
The problem is that the terms Race and IQ are not only politically loaded, but meaningless. As much as I hate to find myself agreeing with Steven Rose, he is right to say that nobody really knows what is meant by ‘IQ’, and the concept of ‘race’ is entirely outmoded – you might as well go study phlogiston. A better and more interesting question might be – Should scientists be studying human genetic diversity?
Here are my own arguments, for and against.
NO: Scientists should not study human genetic diversity because …
… the study, no matter if initially conducted with the best of intentions, will end up being divisive. History tell us that humans, from the school playground upwards, seek to corrall their fellow humans into groups based on external appearance. If it is the case that differences are more than skin deep, how much more potential for division will exist? Racists whose previous grounds for division have been argued away will simply find more ammunition. We always knew that Jews/Blacks/Hutu/Tutsi/Karen/Them/Kikuyu/Slavs/Ainu/The Gypsies In The Wood/Small Furry Creatures Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict [insert ethnos of your choice] were untermenschen , they will say: the fact they have [genetic marker] that predisposes them to [insert disease state] that will drain the purses of healthier, genetically fit people, proves us right all along.
Quite apart from racists, we already know that the insurance industry is very interested in getting to know our genetic predispositions so that they can load calculate our insurance premiums accurately. Reminds me of a joke I heard yesterday (which could indeed be construed as racist, which I think adds a piquancy to the argument)
Q: What’s the difference between a British actuary and a Sicilian actuary?
A: The British actuary can calculate the probability that certain people in certain age groups and following certain lifestyles will die in any given time interval in the future; the Sicilian actuary can tell you their names and addresses.
There is, therefore, an ethical dimension – we shouldn’t study human genetic diversity for the same reasons that we don’t use humans as experimental animals.
YES: Scientists should study human genetic diversity because…
… the fact is that human beings are genetically diverse, and no amount of political correctness can wish that away. As scientists we should be unafraid of studying this diversity, as we would study the diversity of any population. Dash it all, it’s interesting. To pretend that such diversity doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist by virtue of one’s politics is just silly.
As well as being interesting for untangling the course of human evolution and population history, understanding human genetic diversity will, no doubt, allow us to pinpoint those particular people who would benefit from certain kinds of therapeutic interventions. Genomes are genomes – they are color-blind: just as data are data – value-neutral. Sure, we have a duty to act responsibly, obtaining consent where needed and so on – as we’d do in any human-genetic study – but the benefits of understanding human genetic diversity outweigh the disbenefits.
To put one’s politics, or one’s values, in front of scientific discovery, however uncomfortable, is simply wrong. To paraphrase the woman who didn’t hold with Darwin – even if it is true that human genetic variation exists, let us hope it doesn’t become generally known!
So, there you have it. I must say that before I wrote this blog I was firmly in the ‘Yes’ camp, but now I’m not so sure.
What do you think?
Last updated:
Thursday, 19 Feb
2009 - 15:12 UTC
Still on the Yes camp (funny, because I usually tend to agree with Steven Rose!)
Racist will always put forward new arguments to justify themselves (and dismiss as biased any evidence piled against them). Stopping research in the area altogether just because we could potentially provide them with more ammo seems like a very high price to pay. And regarding the insurance companies…well, the fact that we study human genetic variation doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll have to provide them with a complete genetic profile of everyone of us. Privacy laws can easily be made to prevent this. It’s the same as arguing that we should stop research on mammalian cloning just because of the frivolous applications that people may have for it…
Good post. I have linked to it in the Nature Opinion forum discussion. I think I’m in the yes camp, but agree that words like “race” are not useful. I think you are completely right about the insurance industry and I for one do not believe or trust in “moratoria” on their knowledge of genetic information, etc. As you imply in your post, genetic diversity is not by any means only about what people look like, it is about the diseases they get or may get or may never get, and the diseases that their children may or may not get. All very difficult questions to wrestle with and I don’t think scientists or medics have a clue about the human side of it.
I think when we accept the benefits of technological and scientific advancement, we implicitly accept that some people may want to use these advances to their own nefarious ends. We then hope our society or government will be in a mature enough position to regulate and police against unwanted use of any advances.
Drawing arbitrary lines through which sort of genetic information is tasteful to explore and use does nobody any good. If, by examining gene pool “ethnic” groups of people we might improve our knowledge of immunity, or any other knowledge that will be directly valuable to society, we should do it. Even if we can’t say precisely yet what the benefits of that knowledge is – a pure science approach.
I think your “No” argument is weak: many of us already exist in a state where poor people (whether genetically or environmentlly caused) “drain the purses of” the better off. I think it’s called social responsibility, and it’s supposed to exist in capitalist, as well as socialist political systems. Knowing that in some cases there may be a genetic factor that is related to health, wealth or happiness still won’t allow us to categorise people perfectly all the time. Which is what the
gamblinginsurance industry does at the moment based on other information anyway.Oh, and we do plenty of experimentation on humans. Without medical trials, a large proportion of penniless students wouldn’t have any beer tokens.
That Nature Opinion Forum that Maxine mentioned is here
Oh, sorry, Henry – I thought there was a link to the N Opinion forum in your post, so did not re-link, now I see there is not. Thanks for linking!
Not a problem. I have to say I couldn’t find the page through the Nature site – I’m ashamed to say I had to Google it…
@Mike – “some people may want to use these advances to their own nefarious ends. We then hope our society or government will be in a mature enough position to regulate and police against unwanted use of any advances.”
I got quite a chuckle from that. The way you tried to separate “the Government” from “the people who would use these advances for nefarious ends”? Classic!
John: I had my thoughts carefully trained on a Blofelt-esque villain when I was writing that, but now I see the hopeless naïvite of my comments…
Meester Bond, I have been waiting for this nefarious opportunity
Hahaha. As someone once said, the most terrifying sentence in the English language – ’I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you’.
I agree. Studying ‘race’ in a world in which racism exists is bound to cause problems. Instead, why not research the genetic differences between politicians and the rest of the human population? I suspect they’re an entire breed apart.
Finally, a eugenics programme with immediate social benefits!
@ Angela – there has been some discussion in Nature’s correspondence columns about the proproeety of using ‘race’ as a synonym of ‘subsspecies’ when studying, for example, birds. See this in response to this
Pardon my ignorance, but I don’t understand this. Why are we talking about just race-based research, when the original contention was about research into race, gender and IQ? Of course, race- as well as gender-based research is important and necessary, call it any other name (though I disagree that ‘subspecies’ can be a synonym for ‘race’; I prefer ‘ethnicity’). As a result of such research, people from different ethnic groups and genders are known to possess certain risk factors for certain diseases (for example, breast cancer in Ashkenazi Jewish women), and can therefore be medically observed and treated earlier if need be. The genetic pre-disposition of certain ethnic groups towards certain metabolic disorders is another such example. Without ethnicity-based research, we would have never known this.
However, all these issues being researched pertain to observable and/or quantifiable differences. The same parameters cannot be applied to IQ, or rather intelligence. It is not a quantifiable variable, because it cannot be defined precisely.
It has been said (rather discovered) that men and women, or Europeans and Asians, have different spatial, analytical, sensory abilities and so forth. Those are higher neural functions, mappable to specific areas of the brain and/or attributable biochemical/neurochemical differences. Skills can be evaluated. Aptitude can be measured. But intelligence is not a quantity that can be precisely quantified in terms of an output. If I remember correctly, most of the so-called IQ tests suffer from one fault or the other.
If that is indeed so, any research that considers IQ as a variable is bound to be misleading and biased. Indicating someone or a group of people to be more or less intelligent, that too based on a faulty assessment, can only lead to prejudice and bigotry, and indeed, what purpose can it serve, what good can it do? A person showing less “intelligence” in any given field may excel in another field and vice versa.
Even if I put aside the ethical objections to research linking IQ with race and gender, can such a question be scientifically valid? Can such a question be ever free of numerous confounding factors? I think not.
Am I the only American(™) who reads these things?
You’re not studying “races”, you’re studying “brands”!
Seriously folks, this whole question is moot. Genetics is fairly well defined as “the branch of biology that studies heredity and variation in organisms”. (I say “fairly well”, because SOMEONE WILL disagree!)
The point of the study isn’t to identify “better” or “worse” races; but to identify TRAITS which are considered “positive” or “negative”. These traits will then be rearranged and sold as “The New and Improved Human Race!” to wealthy parents. The children born with these traits will take drugs, engage in moronic behaviors; and in all manner of new and improved ways be considered worthless and an utter disappointment.
I think that now’s the right point in the discussion to tell you about a book I’ve read and which I am meant to be reviewing, but I am not sure where to start.
The book is called The 10,000 year explosion by Harpending and Cochran. I’ve not heard of Cochran, but Harpending is an anthropologist of long standing, and this book seems to be a backlash against the political correctness that has paralyzed anthropology for decades, such that studying any human variation was seen as verboten, and that such differences as existed were superficial.
Well, say H and C, we know that human genetic variation has to be more fundamental than that, because we see it in genetics, susceptibility to disease and so on. They then give various case histories to show that genetics accounts for a lot more of human difference than we might think, and that a lot of human evolution has happened quite recently.
OK, fair enough – but some of their examples do make one gasp. The one that sticks in my mind cconcerns Ashkenazi Jews who suffer disproportionately high rates of diseases such as Tay-Sachs which are concerned with neural development. H & C then say that this is correlated with Ashkenazi ‘smarts’ and results for long selection for excellence in trades such as finance, and an emphasis on education generally. Well, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, and I think this is deeply suspect… I know lots of Jews, and I have to say that whereas some are bright, others are as thick as shite, much like people in general.
Careful Henry: that could get you labelled as anti-Semitic.
;)
As an example of the pitfalls, there is the example of that paper in Human Immunology a few years ago. The paper was withdrawn but this is a good description of the whole saga.
Thanks for that, Frank. Without seeing the article itself, I’d have to say that the bald conclusions are quite unconteoversial. Seems like bad timing and muddle rather than malice.
Yes, I think you’re right. I think there was a bit of political naivety too. That’s what I meant to say – that researchers do need to be very careful if looking into human diversity. An awareness of political and social issues is required.
I think there are probably copies of the original article around on the net in secret places (and of course on the shelves of libraries too).
From Gene Expression:
“Steven Rose: Wrong on the science of race, gender, and intelligence posted by ben g @ 2/17/2009 08:13:00 AM
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In the latest issue of Nature, competing editorials were written on the proposition that scientists should study race and IQ. Steven Ceci and Wendy Williams argued ‘Yes’, and Steven Rose argued ‘No’. In this article I will detail the scientific errors which underly Rose’s argument. The scientific reasons offered by him are largely a veneer meant to justify his “radical science” political views, but I will refrain from commenting on his politics until my next post on this.
Rose argues:
the categories of intelligence, race and gender are not definable within the framework required for natural scientific research, failing my first criterion of being well-founded. They also fail the second criterion of being answerable: we lack the theoretical or technical tools to study them.Let’s begin with his critiques of IQ:
to try to capture the many forms of socially expressed intelligent behaviour in a single coefficient — and to rank an entire population in a linear mode, like soldiers on parade lined up by height — excludes most richly intelligent human activities. Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, the intelligent hands of the craftsman or the intelligent intuition of the scientist all elude the ‘g’ straightjacketModern psychometrics isn’t claiming that all of a person’s intelligence is measured by IQ or g. IQ is used because of its strong and reliable correlations with educational and economic performance, independent of class and race.
Group comparisons of IQ are even more problematic. Attempts have been made to make ‘culture-fair’ or ‘culture-free’ tests, as if such a thing were possible, to allow comparisons of ‘g’ between people from very different societies.Rose doesn’t understand what is meant by “culture fair.” It doesn’t mean that the test prevents someone’s culture from having an effect on their IQ score. Rather, it means that culture does not effect the test’s predictive validity. And that is indeed the case. Worldwide the correlations between IQ and economic/educational success are high.
Rose goes on to critique the concept of biological race:
As for ‘race’, the problem is whether it is a biologically, as opposed to socially, meaningful category. Among geneticists interested in differences in gene frequencies between populations, there is increasing consensus that the word obscures more than it reveals, and should be replaced by the concept of biogeographic ancestry, which makes possible the study of subpopulations for relevant genetic and phenotypic characteristics… Broad divisions between ‘white’ or ‘Caucasian’ and ‘black’ or ‘Asian’, the groups generally discussed in the context of the IQ debate, especially in the United States, hide genetically important subpopulation differences within these groups.To begin with, it is biologically meaningful to talk of the ‘white race’ or the ‘asian race.’ These categories encapsulate a great deal of genetic variation, and are not arbitrary; as Steve Sailer has pointed out, Cavalli-Sforza’s principal components map corresponds to social categories of race.
Furthermore, discussing higher level categories does nothing to obscure lower level categories. If I know someone is a Christian, this doesn’t mean I cease to be interested in their denomination. And in fact, psychometricians do study more specific categories than the big 3 races; see for example Jason Malloy’s summary of Lynn’s worldwide psychometric work.
As for terminology, it is actually irrelevant whether we refer to population groups by their “race” or their “biogeographic ancestry.” The former has more social and historical baggage, and the latter is more long-winded, but they both point to the same empirical fact— group-based genetic differences.
Lastly, the IQ differences between blacks, whites, and asians interest researchers so much simply because the differences in educational/economic outcomes between these groups interest researchers (and the public) more than other group-based differences.
Rose moves on to gender:
the crucial question is whether it is possible to identify a biological — presumably genetic or neurodevelopmental — cause to any difference in the way men and women think and act. The problem is that from the moment of birth, boys and girls are treated differently, which shapes both their growing bodies and brains and how they are expected to behave… Thus, although there are minor average structural and biochemical variations between Western men’s and women’s brains (such as the volume of some nuclei and the distribution of hormone receptors), speculations on their implications for how men and women may think or behave lack any empirical basis.There are plenty of research methods that can be used to sidestep the problems that Rose raises here. To name a few, we can look at: kids raised as the opposite gender because of botched genital operations, how hormones correlate with various behaviors, the differences between girl or boy babies in their first months of life, human universals, etc.
Rose closes up the “scientific” portion of his article by citing many of the difficulties which prevent the resolution of the race and IQ debate:
The standard approach of population biologists to estimating the potential genetic contribution to a trait is to make a heritability estimate. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of this measure within a population, it is essentially just that: a within-population measure, only valid for a given environment. The nature of the equations means that if the environment changes, the heritability estimate changes too…Even if reliable correlations were found between some intelligence test score and a measure of brain physiology or activity held by a specific group, such a correlation says nothing about the direction of causation.This is an argument for more research, not less. This is an argument for genome-wide association studies, which will allow us to pinpoint the genes that effect intelligence and how they interact with the enviornment. This is an argument for more research on the neuroscience behind IQ and intelligence. This is an argument for further funding of projects to map out the genetic differences between human populations world-wide. This is not an argument for cutting off an important (albeit, politically inconvenient) avenue of science."
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/02/steven-rose-wrong-on-science-of-race.php
In relation to ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’ the authors Cochran & Harpending also were involved in the paper with Jason Hardy ’Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5), pp. 659–693 (2006).
There thesis about Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is subject to a cheap, simple experimental test: see whether heterozygotes for the diseases have higher IQ’s than their non-carrier siblings.
Here is a comment from one of the authors, Greg Cochran regarding that paper:
“Suppose that there are N balls in an urn, of which m are red. The hypergeometric distribution describes the probability that exactly k balls are red in a sample of p distinct balls drawn from that urn.
There are about 20 surprisingly common genetic diseases among the Ashkenazi Jews, of which 4 affect sphingolipid metabolism (and, incidentally, promote the growth of neural connections). We now know, to a pretty good approximation, how many human genes there are, and how many of those genes affect sphingolipid metabolism. Using a strategy that is an extended version of the simple hypergeometric model (also applying Bonferroni corrections for multiple comparisons, among other complications) you can get an estimate of the probability of such a cluster of mutations occurring by chance. It’s something less than 1 in 100,000. To do this, we used the Gene Ontology database (GO-EBI,EMBL-EBI, 2003), an established tool used to assess the statistical significance of human gene clusters obtained by high-throughput methods such as microarrays.
Rudyard Kipling wrote the Just-So Stories, which explain how the leopard got his spots and so on. He was not ion fact responsible for our current understanding of the hypergeometric distribution: that was a joke.
In my opinion, a careful look at the psychometric data, medieval history, and the biochemical effects of the sphingolipid mutations, combined with Gene Ontology calculations of cluster likelihood, combined with millions of simulations of the population genetics of a surprisingly frequency recessive lethal like Tay-Sachs ultimately produces something more than a Just-So Story.
Posted by: gcochran at Jan 22, 2009 3:29:54 PM"
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/01/the-10000-year-explosion/comments/page/2/#comment