Justin’s Notes

The Ones Doing the Forbidden Research Are More Careful Than the Ones Forbidding It

2026-07-21 · AI-generated insight

Read side by side, these notes stage a quiet reversal of the usual morality play. We expect the taboo-breakers to be the reckless ones and the guardians of orthodoxy to be the sober voices of caution. The evidence here points the other way.

Look at how Warne actually writes. His claim is deliberately minimal — that the genetic contribution to group differences is greater than zero — and he wraps it in fences: "the data are not fully conclusive," "the exact degree... is not known," and a restriction to "native English speakers born in the United States." This is the prose of a man measuring his words to the millimeter. Reich, too, leads with "deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused," conceding the danger before making his point.

Now set that against the AAA meeting in the third note. A professional body of scientists voted to denounce a book that, by their own show of hands, exactly one of them had read. The condemnation was total; the examination was nil. This is the inversion: the people accused of standing on a "slippery slope" are hedging every sentence, while the people defending scientific rectitude are issuing verdicts on unread evidence.

The synthesis worth naming is this: the norm of "forbidden inquiry" does not actually protect epistemic standards — it corrodes them. When Reich says it is "simply no longer possible to ignore" the data, the real scandal isn't that a heresy might be true. It's that suppression substitutes a moral reflex for the very habits — reading the argument, calibrating confidence, admitting uncertainty — that give scientific authority its value in the first place. Warne's obsessive qualifications and the AAA's blind vote are two responses to the same taboo, and the taboo made the cautious researcher careful and the establishment careless.

This is why "Scientific Authority and Public Trust" is the load-bearing thread. The public trusts scientists to have looked at the evidence. The Coon episode shows an institution betraying that trust in the name of protecting it — and the hedged papers show individuals honoring it while being told they shouldn't have looked at all.

Woven from these notes

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.”
— David Reich How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race'
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
Carleton Coon was one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century and a champion of the study of racial differences. In 1961 he was elected president of the American Anthropological Association. It was during this year that Carleton Putnam's infamous book Race and Reason came out. Putnam's book argued that there were significant differences between the races and that this had important political implications. A few anthropologists became upset when they saw the book gain popularity and wanted the AAA to intervene. But they knew that Coon supported the book and that, as a result, having the AAA take action against it would be difficult. So they organized a secret meeting behind Coon's back in order to issue a statement denouncing Putnam's work. Coon found out about the meeting and went to stop it. Upon entering the meeting Coon asked all the association members who had actually read Putnam's book to raise their hands. Only one rose. He then asked for the hands of everyone that had even heard of the book prior to that meeting. Only a few hands rose. None the less, the statement against the book passed. Coon, disgusted by the actions of his peers, resigned from the AAA (1). This incident stands out in the history of science as a particularly clear example of scientists not living up to what people expect of them. People often take what scientists say for granted. They trust that scientists have looked at the evidence rationally and are giving the public as accurate an account of all the relevant facts as they can. When explaining science to laypeople researchers are expected to only make authoritative statements on topics they are knowledgeable of, to not lie about scientific evidence, and to not omit obviously relevant facts. People trust scientists to do these things and so feel comfortable taking what they tell them for granted. (See