I remember reading the Science (I wasn’t familiar with the one in Cell) study earlier this year (it’s from Sep 2019 but I’m waaay behind) and thinking it might stir up just this sort of shit storm. Thanks for posting that summary, although I wish I’d been wrong there. It touches on how many people don’t have strong emotions tied to ancient* origins. But some do. And that can cause some wrinkles with research that touches on ancient population movements. I recall some touchiness here wrt indigenous peoples of North America.
And here we are. There is a heavily vested set of interests that do not want to address racial discrimination. They benefit from the lasting effects of past discrimination, current discrimination, or both. They believe that any active attempt to redress past harm will disadvantage them in some way. So any research that could possibly suggest that there is innate biological difference contributing to the differing outcomes for socially constructed races is grabbed as justification for that difference and reason to never address those differing outcomes.
In other words:
These two almost entirely overlap curves are slightly shifted! Therefore trying to make up for all the wealth stolen from black people over the last 200 years will never make SAT score distributions exactly the same. Therefore, criminal justice reform and affirmative action are a waste of time.
or
These studies show that even when given the best situation on earth today, female identifying students are less likely to pursue math and physics than male identifying students. Therefore physics professors should be free to be sexists and any attempt to encourage female identifying students to pursue these disciplines is a waste of resources.
There is a huge difference between suppressing a scientific theory and critiquing or even disagreeing with the methodology and conclusion of specific research.
And an even bigger difference between suppressing a scientific theory and disagreeing with how some research results are used to justify political action.
Turn it around and ask what purpose there could be to pursue such a theory? It is almost impossible to settle (there are so many variables) and the results of such a study would be essentially useless. Scientists prefer to study questions whose answer would be of some use.
Racists and sexists. More importantly, people who don’t consider themselves racist or sexist but consider any attempt to proactively address past or current inequalities to be either a direct accusation that they are racist or sexist, or a direct threat against their status and the status of those like them.
For people like that any scientific sounding excuse can be used to justify their feelings that the status quo shouldn’t change that much.
It’s not too difficult to think of examples of left-wing suppression of science. Anti-GMO activists led by groups including Greenpeace and the Earth Liberation Front have repeatedly vandalized and destroyed crops in test fields, while ironically complaining that there isn’t enough research on genetically modified foods.
Speaking of ELF, it’s been involved in other criminal acts aimed at suppressing research.
"…a fire destroyed laboratories, offices, and archives at the Center for Urban Horticulture, University of Washington, causing a total of $7 million in damages.[51] The arson destroyed 20 years of research and plant and book collections. The ELF claimed responsibility based upon the incorrect belief that the University was involved in genetic engineering of poplar trees.[52] No genetic engineering was being conducted. In the wake of the attack, an FBI spokeswoman in Portland, Oregon said “I don’t think there’s any doubt the ELF is upping the ante”.[(Earth Liberation Front - Wikipedia)
The Animal Liberation Front has conducted bombings and arson attacks against people and organizations conducting research it doesn’t like.
This is probably the closest to a real example I have read here so far. And this is more about suppressing a technology than a scientific theory. I have seen quotes about some of these groups opposing open source, health oriented GMO like golden rice because even if it benefits poor people, it makes GMO look good and they believe unredeemable evil rather than a technology that could be used for good or bad ends.
Yeah but think about it, for such a discovery to be unequivocal it would imply at least a good understanding of the genetic or neurological correlates of intelligence (if not a good understanding of the actual mechanisms) and how they relate to different forms of intelligence.
And that would be huge. It would have huge implications for how we see ourselves. It would give a massive boost to AI. It may reopen the discussion on human genetic engineering (and some countries no doubt would plow straight into doing it).
Amidst all this, racists gonna racist, but it would be such a trivial issue to most people compared to the bigger implications of these discoveries and the changes happening to society.
Hmm, this is all less comforting than I thought when I started writing this… We won’t need to worry about racists, but we will need to worry about skynet and superhumans.
Yes. In a hundred years time, we might be less concerned about how much innate intelligence we each possess, and more concerned about how well our particular genotype interacts with intelligence-augmentation technology.
It will become an arms race.
Hmm. Maybe some science/technology does need to be closely regulated after all.
I’d say it’s more damaging to suppress science because of unfounded accusations than it is to research reality. It’s not sexist to distinguish that there are differences between the sexes. It’s obvious.
Genetic modification of humans is inevitable don’t you think? We are going to have a hard time competing against machine intelligence without some tinkering.
Regulation isn’t necessarily suppression. There are dozens of dangerous technologies, including the genetic engineering of pathogenic organisms (that hasn’t happened in this case, but maybe one day it will). Nuclear weapons are an technology that needs regulation, and even self-driving vehicles could make nasty weapons. These things need sensible and comprehensive control, not suppression.
If people are claiming the opposite, that all differences between groups are necessarily due to prejudice and therefore we need quotas and affirmative action to create equity. That can result in just as much discrimination. In general, you can’t have evidence based policy without evidence.
Well there is that remarkably persistent meme about the size of certain male body parts.
That one is fairly amenable to scientific measurement; certainly more so than is intelligence. All we need is a ruler and enough volunteers to give a suitable sample size. Perhaps a small payment could entice everyone in a prison or a military unit to “volunteer” so there’s no self-selection to confound the results.
