Razib Khan at Gene Expression: The misrepresentation of genetic science in the Vox piece on race and IQ objects to this Vox piece about Charles Murray.
I have a number of concerns about the Vox piece but curiously the main claim that Razib objects to is not one of them. I am not close enough to the field to know whether or not it is *now* true that “no self-respecting statistical geneticist would undertake a study based *only* on self-identified racial category as a proxy for genetic ancestry measured from DNA”, but what Razib presents is not a counterexample. Rather it is a reference and quotes from Neil Risch in the early 2000’s which looked (to me) more like an analysis of how well racial/ethnic self-categorization *might* be (or might have been) used as a proxy for genetic structure [based on microsatellite markers] (back when the cost of the latter was prohibitive) rather than an actual use case. And, as Razib himself admits, “This isn’t 2005”. So, for what little it’s worth, I do find it hard to imagine how a “statistical geneticist” (as opposed to a sociologist for example) might need to use only self-identification of subjects rather than actual DNA analysis as input into a study at this time.
Back in the 1970’s (20 years *before* ‘The Bell Curve’), I joined demonstrations against seminar speakers promoting the work of Shockley and Herrnstein because they treated as gospel (and advocated social policy supposedly based on) the conclusions of twin studies whose data had substantial unexplained patterns of what looked like fraudulent manipulation.
I did not necessarily believe that the conclusions were false though, and had some academic interest in whether or not they might be – but felt that that investigation would be premature without some prior thought about how to deal with the impact of whatever turned out to be the case. My general stance in favour of freedom to investigate does accept limits based on the possibility of knowledge causing social harm (so I don’t really want to know whether or not some “races” are intellectually inferior to others) – as well as on some rights of personal privacy (so that I also hold in check any curiosity I may have about my neighbours’ sex lives for example).
Ever since then I have been disappointed by the left’s strategy of complete denial rather than addressing the hypothetical question of how best to deal with the possibility of eventually being faced with an “inconvenient truth”.
What would be the best social policies for dealing with a situation in which some readily observable characteristic turned out to be correlated with something real and valuable but less easily measurable? (Say if people with red hair had a measurably higher average rate of dishonesty for example)