Isegoria

Social scientists tend to be leftists, Steve Sailer notes, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists:

Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has been pointing out this paradox since his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980.

Now 77, Murray began planning to write his new book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class four years ago.

The title Human Diversity is impertinent because we are supposed to simultaneously worship diversity and pretend it doesn’t exist. Humanity is proclaimed to be both a rainbow of diverse delights and a beige putty that is wholly molded by arbitrary social injustices.

But would writing an honest book entitled Human Diversity be worth the abuse? Murray’s wife was skeptical. He explains in its Acknowledgments:

My wife and editor, Catherine…initially tried to talk me out of writing ‘Human Diversity.’ When I began work in the fall of 2016, the nastiness associated with the reaction to The Bell Curve was a distant memory. Did I really want to go through that again?

A kind and sensitive man, Murray had found the ignorant and malignant backlash against his 1994 magnum opus coauthored with the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, to be a depressing experience. The hate campaign against Murray contributed to virtually nobody paying attention to his fascinating 2003 book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.

But Murray finally got out of the media’s doghouse with 2012’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by the expedient of applying his superb analytic skills solely to white Americans.

Still, in early 2017 a leftist goon squad at expensive Middlebury College assaulted Murray and a professor, Alison Stanger, who was attempting to interview him:

Then came the radicalization of the campuses, when we learned that the bad old days were back no matter what. “Confound it!” said Catherine, or two syllables to that effect, on the day I returned from the riot at Middlebury. “If they’re going to do this kind of thing anyway, go ahead and write it.”

On the other hand, Human Diversity is not intended to be a sharp stick in the eye for Murray’s abusers. It is aimed instead at intelligent readers who want to learn about the state of the human sciences a fifth of the way through the 21st century. Human Diversity is something of a meta-review of recent meta-analyses that have been published in dozens of subdisciplines to summarize countless individual studies.

We’re lucky to have Murray to guide us through so much. Although Murray has made his career largely at think tanks rather than in academia, he is by nature less argumentative than professorial. He works hard at making his vast amount of material comprehensible. His prose style is pleasingly informal.

And Murray’s books have always been appealing physical objects, with elegant fonts, uncluttered graphs, and a little extra leading between the lines to make the text look less daunting.

He’s almost got me considering the hardcover edition — but the Kindle edition is too convenient, especially for quoting.

In the third chapter of Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, while discussing sex differences in neurocognitive functioning, Charles Murray presents a simple test of visuospatial skills, the Piaget water-level test.

Go ahead and give it a try.

Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question.

After you’re finished, go ahead and read the text below the diagram:

The test-taker is asked to draw a line to show how the water line would look in the tilted bottle. The correct answer is a horizontal line relative to the earth. Halpern reports that the best estimate, summarizing results over many studies, is that about 40 percent of college women get it wrong. Effect sizes favoring males range from –0.44 to –0.66. In Halpern’s words, “It is difficult to understand why this should be such a formidable task for college women.” And yet the result has been replicated many times, has been confirmed internationally, and is just about impossible to explain as a product of culture or socialization (if you doubt that, give it a try).

Almost all human traits are partly heritable, Charles Murray notes:

That’s been known for decades. But until a few years ago, no one knew what specific bits of DNA code determine any given trait. Now, however, geneticists have identified at least a few hundred variants in the DNA code that are statistically associated with important traits such as intelligence, depression and risk tolerance. Over the next decade, they are on track to identify thousands of variants associated with dozens of traits. That achievement will open up the ability to score genetic potential on those traits and thereby revolutionize the social sciences.

The methods of scoring are improving almost monthly, but the essence is simple. Each variant has a version (more precisely, one of the alleles in a single nucleotide polymorphism) associated with a small boost to the trait in question. If you add up those small boosts, you have a score for that trait, in the same sense that you have an IQ score if you add up all the correct answers to the questions on an IQ test. In the case of DNA variants, it is called a “polygenic score.”

Polygenic scores are revolutionary because they are causal in only one direction. They don’t drop because tests make you nervous or rise because you grew up rich. They’re impervious to racism and other forms of prejudice. Socioeconomic and cultural environments can play an important role in how those bits of DNA are expressed, but they don’t change the codes themselves. That means polygenic scores will offer social scientists something they’ve never had before: a secure place to stand in assessing what is innate and what is added by the environment.

Progress during the past five years has been rapid for many traits. In the case of IQ, the share of the variation in scores that can be explained from genetic material alone went from zero in 2015 to 5% in 2018 and 11% in 2019. That doesn’t tell us much about any individual’s IQ, but it’s enough to be useful in addressing many important issues.

[...]

I don’t expect such analyses will be free of controversy. I am asserting that they are technically feasible, will be conducted within a few years, and will offer powerful tests of questions that have been argued for decades.

I expect we’ll be discussing Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class quite a bit in the coming weeks.

The current efforts to curb coronavirus should remind us of the Samoan experience with the 1918 flu — or, rather, with the two very different Samoan experiences:

In 1918 the Samoan archipelago was split between American Samoa (a United States territory) and Western Samoa (previously a German colony but under New Zealand governance from 1914). The 1918 influenza pandemic killed a quarter of Western Samoans, while leaving American Samoa unscathed. Why were their experiences so different?

In late 1918 a second wave within a single pandemic of influenza was spreading throughout Asia and the Pacific. On 30 October 1918 the Union Steamship Company’s Talune left Auckland for its run through Polynesia. The new, more lethal influenza variant had arrived in Auckland with the spring, and several crew members were ill. On 7 November the Talune reached Apia, the main port of New Zealand-occupied Western Samoa.

In 1918 the two Samoas had been divided for nearly twenty years. The United States had sought American Samoa for Pago Pago harbour, a protected anchorage and coaling stop. Western Samoa had become a German colony, and under German rule efforts were made to increase its economic viability and attract European settlers. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Britain had asked New Zealand to occupy Western Samoa to prevent its use by German naval forces.

The two Samoas were in regular contact with each other, and controlled all access to the outside world through two ports: Pago Pago in the east and Apia in the west. The dangers of ship-borne disease were well known, and exclusion of many diseases, especially plague, had been implemented since the imposition of colonial governance nineteen years before.

How then to explain the differing responses to the approach of the pandemic? When the Talune docked in Western Samoa she was not put in quarantine. No word had come from Auckland by wireless, and the ship’s captain did not mention that influenza was in New Zealand. In fact, the captain instructed ill crew and passengers to hide their malady so as to prevent being delayed in Apia.

The Germans had developed their colony of Western Samoa as a commercial enterprise. European-owned plantations occupied one-fifth of the land, supported by a network of European planters and shipping agents. Three times more foreign ships visited Apia than Pago Pago. When the issue of quarantine arose, the New Zealand Governor, Colonel Logan, faced the hostility of this trading community, as well as significant logistical difficulties. Logan needed a larger infrastructure to cope with the number of ships quarantined, and would have had difficulty enforcing any such restrictive edict.

This disinclination to act also had an institutional element. Western Samoa had been taken by New Zealand only four years before, and Logan had received little guidance regarding the territory. In addition, the civilian medical staff in Samoa were both widely scattered and not well respected, and no medical advice regarding quarantine reached Logan.

German administration in Samoa had undermined traditional local authority by taking away the distribution of chiefly titles and reducing the stature of these leaders in local eyes. Thus when New Zealand forces assumed control they found a diminished set of traditional power bases, too weakened to act as effective proxies.

Facing a lack of experience, a dearth of instructions and an unhelpful infrastructure, Logan perceived little support. He chose to wait for directives. The port remained open.

American Samoa presented a different set of circumstances. During nineteen years of benign neglect the administration in Pago Pago had learned to act autonomously. Without oversight from Washington the naval bureaucracy had left most affairs to the traditional Samoan nobility and did not interfere in the granting of titles. The medical staff were naval officers with knowledge of quarantine.

To officials in Washington, American Samoa was a naval station with an incidental indigenous population. There was scant need for traders to maintain a permanent presence in the colony and no effort to attract settlers. This facilitated the American Governor’s use of quarantine: the absence of a trader community allowed General Poyer to impose measures without resistance, and the small number of ships visiting Pago Pago made such an effort manageable. When descriptions of the flu reached Poyer, he acted decisively. Quarantine was established, and implemented under the leadership of traditional chiefs. With modifications, the quarantine in American Samoa continued, with no fatal cases of influenza reported, until late 1921.

In contrast, Western Samoa suffered the highest known mortality of any state during the 1918-1921 pandemic. At least 24 percent of the population died, and most who died were between 18-50 years of age. Half of the most productive age cohort of Western Samoa, and the chiefly and religious elites, died. Western Samoa collapsed.