← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Conservative
Thread ID: 9082 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-08-16
2003-08-16 11:30 | User Profile
The following was posted by Prof. Rushton at [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/26474]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/26474[/url]
I am currently reading and reviewing some of the several hundred year history of debates over race and intelligence. Weizmann, Smedley, and others are correct that inegalitarian philosophy --- especially using the scientific evidence available --- has (surprisingly) almost never played any part in the defense of racism. The claim that it has, and that IQ tests were developed by racists, for racists, and inherently are racist, is almost pure propaganda, made by people who hate what IQ tests actually show.
The defense of slavery in Britain before the 1830s, and in the U.S. before the 1860s, was indeed based mainly on the concept of property rights and historical precedence. The scientists of their day, who had found 100 cubic centimeter differences in skull sizes, for example, between Blacks and Whites were very divided over slavery and when one or two of the Southern politicians tried to introduce skull size differences and evolutionary thinking into the debate, they were quickly hushed by their colleagues who were afraid that this would alienate their religious supporters who preferred to use the Biblical story of the Curse of Ham to justify slavery as the next best argument after property rights. The abolitionists for their part also preferred biblical arguments for abolition over scientific equalitarianism, although there was certainly some of that. There are many interesting twists in this story (which I may write up) because Charles Darwin, for example, supported his then controversial theory of evolution in his 1871 The Descent of Man by reference to the then non-controversial data on skull capacity differences, and he made many references that would be considered "racist" today. Darwin, however, although believing in innate racial differences in skull size and intelligence, was totally opposed to slavery.
During the Civil Rights Movement over segregation in the US (1945-1965, roughly), the segregationists only rarely depended on any scientific evidence to support their arguments for "separate but equal." They defended their system using constitutional arguments, mainly the US Supreme Court's decision in 1898 that upheld the doctrine. However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed itself in its famous1954 decision, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, using social science testimony that the races were equal and that it was segregation that had made them unequal. Most Southerners were truly stunned by this, never believing for a moment that social science testimony could be used (and so they had presented none). A handful of southerners subsequently fought back through the courts attempting to reverse the Brown decsison with their own scientific evidence from IQ tests, twin studies, brain size measures, and Carlton Coon's 1962 evolutionary book, The Origin of Races. Most southerners, including most Southern Governors, refused to support this initiative, again because it might upset religious sentiments and also because they were legal conservatives who did not believe that laws should be altered and changed other than by legaislative action and precedent. The "race-scientists" won one big victory in the 1962 Stell Case in Georgia and a couple of smaller ones, e.g in Mississippi, but the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal against their Brown decision based on them. (Then Kennedy was assasinated, Lyndon Johnson came to power, and the Civil Rights Era came into its own through legislation).
Over the last thirty years, there has been a battle over Affirmative Action. Blacks and Civil Rights activists are mostly in favor and use the low occupational and educational performance of African Americans (and even, sometimes, their low IQ scores) as evidence that society is full of racism. Why else would Blacks be underrepresented and underperforming? Now those who oppose affirmative action are totally against using IQ scores, brain size differences, twin or adoption studies, or evolutionary ideas generally least these backfire and cause damage to the cause by alienating people and being seen as racist. They try to oppose affirmative action by recourse to a political philosphy of individual rights instead and/or an argument that affirmative action is inadvertently hurting Blacks.
There are other battles over race and ethnicity that can be looked at with interest --- the 1924 Immigration Act in the US that gave higher quotas to North European than to other countries is often said to have rested on the IQ data gathered during World War I (in the States, 1917-1918). However this doesn't seem to have been the case. (Mostly it was trade union concerns about low wages and nativist feelings of being overwhelmed.) Even today, the immigration restrictionists dare not point to IQ or other evidence because they fear it will cause backlash. Instead they talk about conserving the national parks from too many people, or perhaps, the need to slow the rate of absorption of people of different "cultures."
The post World War II decolonization period is also interesting. Few of the Imperialist factions in Britain, France, or other powers seriously justified their colonial empires using the inferiority argument based on scientific data. They argued, instead, that they had a duty (White Man's Burden) to be benefactors and bring the natives up to speed, which would be accomplished faster with Imperial tutelage than without it. The Apartheid South African situation is especially interesting. I had lived in South Africa as a small boy aged 4 to 8 (1948-1952) and revisited it recently (1998) to collect IQ data from universities there, and have followed the situation somewhat. What is striking is how under apartheid, no standardized IQ tests or education tests could be given to the different races. It was against the law! Each of the races had their own school systems, their own forms of tests, and so on. The Afrikaaners in particular, who were in political power, hated evolutionary thinking becaise of theiralmost theocratic ethnic belief system. Even today, among the Whites, although many are convinced Africans are mentally like children, their belief seems based on some kind of Lamarkian system that it will take several generations for the Africans to "catch up." There was no attempt by the apartheid supporters to use brain size data or IQ score data. In fact more IQ data has been collected post-Apartheid in South Africa and post-colonial era in other parts of Africa than before it.
It is all very, very interesting.
2003-08-16 11:49 | User Profile
Follow-up post by Rushton [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/26485]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/26485[/url]
Phil Rushton here replying to S. Gale who wants me to rebut the statement that
"Most proponents of IQ, skull size, etc... were racists."
(By "racists" I'm referring to treating all people in a distinctively separate line of descent as though they were all the same, usually to mistreat them. Where a "race" ends and an "extended family" or "tribe" begins, I'll leave to others to try to explain).
I'm mainly making the argument that the science and politics criss-cross so much that its completely wrong to link proponents of scientific evidence (like IQ scores) with racism and elitism. For example, in the 19th century, the biggest "racists" were the scientific liberals who opposed the royalist-church views on the divine right of kings and the equality of man under God. They used the "Hottentot Venus" and her buttocks and labia and other sexual aspects of Blacks, as well as the skull size differences to argue that humans were so different from one another that they needed separate creations. They could not have all been created in the Garden of Eden. This was the first version of the debate between polygenists and monogenists. Paul Broca, the famous French neurologist who discovered Broca's area for speech, was a polygenist and weighed African and European brains at autopsy (as well as upper vs lower class French brains, and French vs German brains) and supported the idea that the Garden of Eden could not be made to fit such diversity. When skulls of Blacks and Whites were found in Ancient Egyptian tombs from 3,000 years previously showing the same 100 cubic centimeters that modern (19th century) studies were finding, this supported the separate origins theory. Earlier Voltaire and other supporters of these ideas risked their lives if the conservative forces of Royalty had got ahold of them. These views were seen as "revolutionary" and upsetting the conservative tradition" of the time, as was Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, even though they were from excellent lineages themselves.
As for IQ scores, Cyril Burt was knighted by a British Labour Government in 1946 for using the IQ test as an instrument of liberal-socialist value to get a much higher proportion of working class children into select secondary schools in Britain than were getting in based on "headmaster's reports," much more prone to class bias. The conservatives in the educational system and parliament bitterly opposed the IQ test as too "meritocratic" and not taking family traditions into account. It was only in the 1960s that the IQ test became associated with elitist conservative ideas in Britain when the comprehensive school movement wanted to extend equalitarianism to everyone. Mainstreaming of severely handicapped children today shows this process has not yet bottomed out. In the US, the SAT and other selective tests to Harvard were often opposed by conservative old school tie types who wanted their own less bright children to be secured a place against the "clever" but not the right type who might get in with SAT/IQ tests. The SAT only became unpopular in liberal circles when it was found that Blacks did not do well on them. Otherwise it was seen as a force for liberals and meritocrats against established priviledge.
Apparently Stalin banned IQ tests as "bourgeois" and Hitler banned them as "Jewish" and both of these were socialists but the general link of IQ tests with conservatives is just not so. True, too, that if you want to do research or teach about brain size and IQ from an evolutionary perspective in a university today, you may find your behavior denounced in your university by Militant Feminists, the Science for the People Brigade, and Fred Weizmann, but in the great world out there your just as likely to run afoul of the Fundamentalist Christians and, frighteningly even more so, the Funadmentalist Muslims.
The Scientific Evolutionary Perspective (including IQ tests and brain size) is mainly at an orthogonal right angle to the left-wing right-wing continuum where fanatics who kill people sometimes take over and demand that genetic science, especially human behavior genetics, not be taught (20 to 30 years in the Soviet Union; still not in Muslim countries; still not in most social science departments in the West). In North America today, an unholy alliance has begun between mainly left wing Native Americans and right wing fiundamentalist Christians to denude museusm of all found Indian bones to stop research on the evolutionary origins of the peopling of Americas. (The Indians have their own creation myths; they've ALWAYS been here, this is their land; they were NOT just the first to arrive.)
Morton Hunt has written a great book called THE NEW KNOW-NOTHINGS about the left-wing and right wing inhibitions on science.
Hope this helps. No-more time. Maybe I'll write a book about it.
Sincerely, and all the best, Phil Rushton