A post of mine from 12 years ago:
Steven Pinker is well known for advocating teaching “race science” (19th century racialism with vague 21st century genetic possibilities and implications) as a real, and imperative, on-going scientific debate.
There are clear ethical concerns of propagating age-old harmful racism by rehashing popular racialist (and genetically essentialist) assertions as an never ending de jour debate. It becomes even more insidious when those advocating these racialist ideas reject the requirement of establishing causal links, or genetic correlates to behaviour, or any objective racial framework (the idea of essential racial categories are always explicitly advocated while no rigorous attempt is made to delimit these categories).
It still amazes me how much people will cloak themselves as lone, besieged bastions of rationality and scientific freedom, all in the hopes of completely avoiding addressing the real world issues of racism and the ethical concerns that flow from their fixations and advocacy.
Either way Pinker sometimes acknowledges a lack of evidence with the racialists that he gives his favour to (check out his supportive tweet of Nicholas Wade’s horrible race book) but he also says very dumb things in support of indefensible racist, wack-jobs like his decades long relations with OG internet Alt-Righter Steve Sailer (as I mentioned in my above 12 year old post and from yesterday’s article below in the Guardian ).
Many critics allege that Pinker’s recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people”. Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels , among many others, on his website.