But whether something is true or not is independent of whether it’s pleasant or not, or whether society considers it “superior” or “inferior”.
Asians, in general, are shorter than white people, for instance. (Height is generally considered desirable.) It is certainly likely that this is due to genetics.
White people are significantly more vulnerable to skin cancer than dark-skinned people.
Nearly all cornerbacks and wide receivers in the NFL (positions that emphasize speed and agility) are African-American. A disproportionate number of marathon champions are Kenyan. Is this about superiority or inferiority? That’s a subjective question to answer, but the objective data is plain to see.
The difference between the two might be the difference between accepting the answer that comes from the search, and searching until you come to the answer you are willing to accept.
Exactly this. Bell curves between different demographic groups may be shifted in one direction or another, but so long as within-group variation is greater than between-group variation, this small shift in the bell curve says nothing about any given individual, regardless of which group they belong to.
The best insulation against racism is not to hide science that gives you insights into reality, but to treat individuals without regard to which group they belong to, because at the individual level it makes no difference.
None of these characteristics had anything to do with the incidents of slavery and genocide I’m referring to. They’ve always been justified by claims about intelligence and moral character, not height, foot speed, or even skin darkness, etc.
Again, the cure to this is to abandon treating people as members of groups, and treat them as individuals.
It doesn’t matter if 55% of group A tends to do better on measure X than group B, if the spread inside the group is massive. All you can then say is that in a blind selection a person from group A should be slightly more likely to be better at X. But if you are faced with a choice between two specific individuals, what group they belong to becomes completely irrelevant, as their own personal resumes and abilities will swamp their group characteristics.
So even if men on average are stronger than women, there are plenty of women stronger than plenty of men, and if faced with the choice between a scrawny small man and a musvular woman you’d be an idiot if you let their gender determine your choice.
So is it then wrong to study differences between men and women? Of course not. While you should never use such information to discriminate between individusls, it’s still useful to understand why we see large differences in behaviour between them. For example, why are teachers and nurses overwhelmingly female? Why are men not going to college at the same rate as women any more? Why do engineering schools find it almost impossible to recruit more than about 25% of women as a percentage of the class? Why do women vote differently from men?
Differences between demographic groups are important to study if you want to understand group behaviour. And that’s important because you want to distinguish between innate differences and differences that arise through coercion, sexism, racism, etc. And if you want to help a group, you need to understand what the problem is first.
Again, the problem of studying groups leading to discriminatory behaviour go away if you just treat people as individuals when interacting with them. Then there’s no problem at all studying differences between groups.
Don’t you see how illogical it would be to base discrimination on such a finding, assuming it is valid. You might conceivably make an argument for discriminating on the basis of IQ (I would not, but that is another question) but why would you use the amount of melanin in a person’s skin as a surrogate. Do you doubt that Paul Robeson was superior in IQ to thee and me? But a woman in the secretary pool of a NY law firm simply refused to take dictation from a black man and they fired him. During the 30s when she would have been in bad shape had they fired her. This argument simply doesn’t hold water.
There are topics, like “races have different IQs” that, while they shouldn’t be suppressed per se, should come with a boilerplate warning. I would have a problem with a lecturer bringing up some study saying blacks are this, asians are that, without mentioning the long history of pseudoscience in this area. And, indeed, having a point to bringing up such a study. Because, while such a comparison might be of paramount importance to a racist, comparing two overlapping normal distributions of huge populations is of questionable utility to science.
Also, I saw the thing about “dual use” technologies, but I think we can simplify that point: if governments try to make it difficult for the layman to research weapons of mass destruction, I have no issue with that.
This is a kind of suppression, but it’s important that scientists themselves are allowed to research, and publish, on dangerous technologies. But if, at any point, there’s something that looks like an “EZ guide to gassing a whole city” or whatever, I would consider it acceptable for a government to try to block that from being distributed. And of course that is the status quo, AIUI.
AFAICT, most if not all of typical popular-media accusations about liberals wanting to “suppress” or “censor” scientific research that might be “harmful” to egalitarian ideology are baseless. A lot of people who make such accusations are mistaking criticism and debunking of unscientific claims for attempted suppression of actual science.
I can’t think of any genuine modern instance of anyone explicitly advocating that a scientific theory ought to be suppressed even if demonstrably true. Creationists, for example, are proceeding from the unyielding assumption that evolutionary science is a priorinot true, so they don’t qualify for that category.
One could argue that certain scientific applications shouldn’t be researched because of their potential harmfulness, like some of the biological-warfare technologies mentioned by previous posters. But again, that’s not the same thing as demanding the suppression of a theory.
If you stretch the criteria to include ideological resistance to or misrepresentation of a scientific theory that contradicts a particular ideology, rather than outright suppression of it despite its acknowledged validity, then there’s a lot more scope for possible examples.
One that I can think of involves the recent ancestral-DNA reconstruction of ancient South Asian population dynamics by researchers including David Reich, who discusses some of their results here. These corroborate earlier inferences, based on linguistics, of Indo-European speakers from western Eurasia having entered northwestern South Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE. Such models contradict the narratives of totally indigenous Indian development espoused by some proponents of so-called “Hindutva” or “Hindu-nationalist” ideology. Here’s an article on how ideological views affected the reporting of this research.