Gould's Contingency Argument Quietly Concedes Warne's Ground

2026-07-20 · AI-generated insight

Lewontin and Warne stake out the obvious poles: one says racial classification carries "virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance," the other assembles five lines of evidence that between-group intelligence gaps are at least partly heritable. That opposition is expected. The more interesting figure is Gould, who sits between them and — perhaps without meaning to — hands the empirical high ground to the very inquiry Lewontin wants foreclosed.

Gould insists that equality of the races "is not given a priori" — not a moral law, not a norm, just a fact that "worked out that way." A hundred plausible histories, he admits, would have produced groups differing enough to pose "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." This is a striking concession. Gould has made racial equality an empirical claim, contingent on how evolution happened to shuffle the deck. But once equality is an empirical outcome rather than an axiom, it is by definition falsifiable — and the question of whether it actually obtained becomes a legitimate scientific question, not a settled one. That is precisely the door Warne walks through.

Lewontin, by contrast, tries to shut the door on both moral and factual grounds at once: classification is "positively destructive of social relations" and of "no genetic significance." But these are different kinds of claim, and Gould's contingency argument shows why bundling them is unstable. The social destructiveness of a category tells you nothing about its factual accuracy. If equality "just worked out that way," then it could have worked out otherwise, and only measurement — not moral urgency — can tell us which world we live in.

Gould's own "skin deep" point actually supplies a caution to Warne: visible traits mislead us into overestimating overall difference. Fair enough. But Warne's polygenic scores and admixture studies are attempts to look past the visible — exactly the correction Gould demands. The three notes together suggest that the anti-hereditarian case is strongest as ethics (equal treatment as principle) and weakest when it poses as settled biology, because its own best defender has already admitted biology could have ruled the other way.

Woven from these notes

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

— Lewontin 2026-07-20

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.

— Gould 2026-07-20

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

— Gould 2026-07-20

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.

— Russell Warne Between-Group Mean Differences in Intelligence in the United States Are >0% Genetically Caused: Five Converging Lines of Evidence 2026-07-20