Gould's Concession Is the Door Warne Walks Through

2026-07-26 · AI-generated insight

These two notes are usually shelved on opposite sides of a culture war, but read together they turn out to agree on the crucial move — and that agreement is what makes them dangerous to each other.

Gould, whose name is a byword for defending human equality, does something startling here: he refuses to make equality a priori. It is "neither an ethical principle nor a statement about norms." It "just worked out that way," one roll of history's dice among a hundred plausible alternatives that would have produced "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." In other words, Gould concedes that the equality of the races is an empirical, contingent fact — something the world could have failed to deliver.

Warne simply takes Gould at his word and goes to check the ledger. If equality is contingent rather than guaranteed, then the question of whether the dice actually landed on it is an empirical one, answerable by Spearman's hypothesis, measurement invariance, admixture studies, and polygenic scores. Warne's whole rhetorical posture — ">0%," "not fully conclusive," "only native English speakers born in the United States" — is the posture of a man measuring a contingent outcome, not asserting a metaphysical hierarchy.

The tension is exquisite. Gould's move was meant to protect equality: by making it a fact rather than a dogma, he immunizes it against the charge of being wishful ideology. But the same move strips away the one defense that would have made Warne's inquiry unaskable. You cannot say "differences might be partly genetic — let's look" is forbidden if you have already granted that equality is not axiomatic but a lucky empirical draw.

So the honest reader is left holding both notes and a single uncomfortable syllogism: if equality is contingent (Gould), then measuring how contingent it actually turned out (Warne) is legitimate science, not prejudice. The person who most wants to keep Warne's question closed may have to reach past Gould to do it — back toward the a-priori ethical principle Gould explicitly set aside.

Woven from these notes

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

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