When so many studies fail to be replicated, or draw different conclusions from the same set of facts, it does not instill confidence in the social sciences. Whether this is because of sloppy methodology, ideological infection, or other problems, the result is that even if there are right and wrong answers to many of our questions about human action, most social scientists are not yet in a position to find them. It is not that none of the work in social science is rigorous enough, but when policymakers (and sometimes even other researchers) are not sure which results are reliable, it drives down the status of the entire field. If medicine could break with its barbarous past, isn’t the same path open to the social sciences? For years, many have argued that if they could emulate the “scientific method” of the natural sciences, they too could become more scientific. But this simple advice faces several problems. Among the issues that plague contemporary social scientific research: Too much theory: A number of social scientific studies propose answers that have not been tested against evidence. The classic example here is neoclassical economics, where a number of simplifying assumptions — perfect rationality, perfect information — resulted in beautiful quantitative models that had little to do with actual human behavior. Lack of experimentation/data: Except for social psychology and the newly emerging field of behavioral economics, much of social science still does not rely on experimentation, even where it is possible. For example, it is sometimes offered as justification for putting sex offenders on a public database that doing so reduces the recidivism rate. This must be measured, though, against what the recidivism rate would have been absent the Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB), which is difficult to measure and has produced varying answers. This exacerbates the difficulty in (1), whereby favored theoretical explanations are accepted even when they have not been tested against any experimental evidence. Fuzzy concepts: Some social scientific studies can lead to misleading conclusions because of the use of “proxy” concepts for what one really wishes to measure. A recent example includes measuring “warmth” as a proxy for “trustworthiness,” in which researchers assumed — on the basis of studies which show that we are more likely to trust someone whom we perceive to be “on our side” — that perceptions of scientists as “cold” meant that they would be less trustworthy as well. But the two concepts may not be interchangeable. Ideological infection: This problem is rampant throughout the social sciences, especially on topics that are politically charged. Two ongoing examples are the bastardization of empirical work on the deterrence effect of capital punishment and the effectiveness of gun control on mitigating crime. If one knows in advance what one wants to find, one will likely find it. Cherry picking: The use of statistics allows multiple “degrees of freedom” to scientific researchers, but this is the most likely to be abused. In studies on immigration, for instance, a great deal of the difference between them is a result of alternative ways of counting the “costs” incurred by immigration. This is obviously also related to (4) above. If we know our conclusion, we may shop for the data to support it. Lack of data sharing: As the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers reports in Psychology Today, there are numerous documented cases of researchers failing to share their data in psychological studies, despite a requirement from APA-sponsored journals to do so. When data were later analyzed, errors were found most commonly in the direction of the researcher’s hypothesis. Lack of replication: Psychology is undergoing a reproducibility crisis. One might validly argue that the initial finding that nearly two-thirds of psychology studies were irreproducible was overblown, but it is nonetheless shocking that most studies are not even attempted to be replicated. This can lead to difficulties, where errors can sneak through. Questionable causation: It is gospel in statistical research that “correlation does not equal causation,” yet some social scientific studies continue to highlight provocative results of questionable value. One recent sociological study, for instance, found that matriculating at a selective college was correlated with parental visitation at art museums, without explicitly suggesting that this was likely an artifact of parental income.
Notes
Many scholars have criticized The Mismeasure of Man periodically throughout its 38-year history. For example, James T. Sanders stated that Gould’s attempt to link his argument to anti-racism was a ploy to smear intelligence scholars and Gould’s enemies as evil people. Arthur Jensen argued in 1982 that Gould misrepresented Jensen’s ideas and often demolished strawmen that no intelligence scholar believes, including the boogeyman of “biological determinism.” John Carroll showed that Gould understood neither the purpose nor interpretation of factor analysis (a statistical procedure often used to evaluate data from psychological tests) and that Gould’s attacks on factor analysis do nothing to alter the importance of intelligence tests, nor the mass of evidence—impossible to dispute—that they predict real-life outcomes. Most criticism of The Mismeasure of Man was confined to the recherché world of psychologists who study intelligence. However, a new debate opened up in 2011 when a team of anthropologists argued that Gould’s analysis of the data on cranium measurements from 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton was flawed. Gould cast Morton as a racist who fudged his data to match his beliefs about white racial superiority because of a supposed larger skull capacity. Instead, the anthropologists argued, it was Gould who manipulated the data to support his biases. This ignited a series of follow-up articles in the scholarly literature by authors taking a variety of positions regarding Morton’s data and Gould’s interpretations. Weisberg believed that the re-analysis was flawed and Gould was mostly correct. Kaplan and his colleagues claimed that Morton’s interpretations were flawed, but that Gould was incorrect in believing that he could discern Morton’s actions and motivations. Finally, Mitchell believed that Morton’s data were accurate and that the interpretations were colored by the racism of the era, but the claim that Morton subtly manipulated the data was a fiction created by Gould.
From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.
The past 30 years of research in intelligence has produced a wealth of knowledge about the causes and consequences of differences in intelligence between individuals, and today mainstream opinion is that individual differences in intelligence are caused by both genetic and environmental influences. Much more contentious is the discussion over the cause of mean intelligence differences between racial or ethnic groups. In contrast to the general consensus that interindividual differences are both genetic and environmental in origin, some claim that mean intelligence differences between racial groups are completely environmental in origin, whereas others postulate a mix of genetic and environmental causes. In this article I discuss 5 lines of research that provide evidence that mean differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups are partially genetic. These lines of evidence are findings in support of Spearman’s hypothesis, consistent results from tests of measurement invariance across American racial groups, the mathematical relationship that exists for between-group and within-group sources of heritability, genomic data derived from genome-wide association studies of intelligence and polygenic scores applied to diverse samples, and admixture studies. I also discuss future potential lines of evidence regarding the causes of average group differences across racial groups. However, the data are not fully conclusive, and the exact degree to which genes influence intergroup mean differences in intelligence is not known. This discussion applies only to native English speakers born in the United States and not necessarily to any other human populations.
obvious: As long as most scientists accepted the ancient division of races, they expected important genetic differences. But the recent origin of races… squares well with the minor genetic differences now measured. Human groups do vary strikingly in a few highly visible characters (skin color, hair form)—and this may fool us into thinking that overall differences must be great. But we now know that our usual metaphor of superficiality—skin deep—is literally
Equality [of the races] is not given a priori. It is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen.
It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
In 1997, Akira Iriye characterized UNESCO as a hub for cultural internationalism in the wake of World War II, and recent research has confirmed the impression of the organization as an excellent prism reflecting ways of thinking that became popular on a global scale and that it has sometimes even served as the initiating and powerful promotor of concepts that became popular and widely used, such as ‘world heritage’ and ‘global citizenship’. In this article, I have sought to demonstrate another example of the proactive role of UNESCO. The articles has focused on the organization’sefforts to launch a program supposed to combat racial inequality, which is not mentioned by Iriye, but which according to other scholars, placed the organization in the middle of a dispute in international scientific circles over the correct definition of the concept of race. Thus, in the article I have combined Iriye’s focus on the importance of cultural internationalism for global peace-making and UNESCO’s important role with the studies of the organization’s work within the field of race as well as my archival findings in order to draw a conclusion as to whether its showdown with the race concept had a global impact. What we see is that, from 1950 to 1967, UNESCO managed to issue four statements of race formulated by some of the world’s leading yet simultaneously carefully-chosen scientists, most Western and all stressing human equality. The organization’s preference for social scientists rather than physical anthropologists at the same time made the organization a centre of a dispute organized around the question of whether the natural or social sciences should take precedence in determining the origins of human difference, of social division, and the attribution of value. Outside of UNESCO headquarters, the statements for the same reasons caused severe criticism in a time still characterized by European colonialism, American segregation, and South African apartheid policies. Only on one occasion, in 1964, was a researcher chosen despite being overtly critical towards the organization’s work and only in 1967 could the panel of scientists be characterized as truly global in its scope and composition. UNESCO also issued a series of publications that were able to infiltrate national educational systems and which represented a steady bombardment of publications that at least physical anthropologists had to deal with. Critique of their content nonetheless only added to public awareness of the organization’s work. As the cases on segregation reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the outcome of UNESCO’s race program would also play a role. This article shows that experts affiliated with the organization were on several occasions brought in as expert witnesses and that the statements on race highlighted as the newest available research, paving the 16 P. DUEDAHL way towards the eradication of state-approved segregation in the U.S., whereas South Africa chose to withdraw from UNESCO. In sum, the statements and the authority with which the experts spoke had an impact and came to play a major part in imposing the new post-war view of man in several countries. However, it is only after 1960 that UNESCO’s cultural internationalism within the field of race can be said to focus on racism as a problem that had to be solved on a global scale. The main reasons for this was that discussions within academic circles ahead of UNESCO’s race efforts had mainly been going on among Western scholars, that UNESCO failed to locate non-Western scholars, and that dealing with racism was perceived as most urgent in the U.S. and South Africa. Also the expensiveness of translating UNESCO’s findings into all languages, the difficulties of promoting the content in a way that would have an impact on a larger group of people, and the lack of control over the many national environments that received and were supposed to distribute news from UNESCO made a difference. Only after a range of anti-Semitic incidents, the demands of a number of new Asian and African member states, and pressure from the UN, did the initiative gradually change. Altogether, it proved to be more difficult and to take a considerably longer time than initially imagined by UNESCO to turn a few scholar’s idea of race into one with a truly global appeal and impact.
Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness—directional selection—from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution8,9. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.
The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored. The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—the answer must lie exclusively in differing human cultures and the environment that produced them. The social anthropologist Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by culture and that no culture is superior to any other. From this point of view it follows that all humans are essentially interchangeable apart from their cultures, and that more complex societies owe their greater strength or prosperity solely to fortunate accidents such as that of geography.
Until the 1890s Boas used the term as his fellow anthropologists did: as another word for civilization or “high culture.” Franz Boas’s exposition of the concept of culture as an alternative to race in accounting for differences among human groups was a genuine seminal contribution. The idea not only conquered his own field of anthropolgy but spread as well to other social science disciplines. The diffusion was remarkably rapid. Again and again in the early years of the new century American social scientists outside of anthropology testified to the influence of his writings on their conception of human nature and the place of biology or race within it.
Boas’s influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated. At the same time that racial segregation was being imposed by law in the states of the American South, and eugenics was emerging as a hereditarian solution to social problems. Boas was embarking upon a life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture.