Isegoria

Charles Murray suggests (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class) that it’s plausible to expect phenotypic differences among races, based on discoveries made in the last 30 years since the genome was sequenced:

It was discovered that human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.

Advances in the ability to date evolutionary changes have revealed that evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local to the different continents.

Raw race differences in genetic material related to cognitive repertoires are common, not exceptional.

Murray then moves on to what the orthodoxy gets right:

Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu were right to say that many nineteenth-century conceptions of race were caricatures divorced from biological reality. Richard Lewontin was right that race differences account for only a small fraction of the biological variation existing among humans. Stephen Jay Gould was right to reject the once widely held belief that humans evolved independently in Europe, Asia, and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years.

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Scientifically, it is an error to think of races as primordial.

Charles Murray’s Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class starts with sex (or gender) and moves on to race:

Naturalists Carl Linnaeus and Johann Blumenbach proposed formal groupings of populations into races based on distinctive morphological features.

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Among scholars, the opening of the twentieth century saw a scientific backlash not only against the idea of a racial hierarchy but against the idea of race itself. Its most prominent spokesman was Franz Boas, a pioneering anthropologist and a fierce opponent of what he labeled “scientific racism.” A British anthropologist who studied under Boas, Ashley Montagu, took his mentor’s position to new levels of passion (“Race is the witchcraft, the demonology of our time”) and set the rhetorical tone for today’s academic orthodoxy. The book from which that quote is taken, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, was originally published in 1942 and remained in print throughout the rest of the century.

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In 1972, Lewontin published an article titled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” In it, he analyzed genetic diversity among the different races with the tools available at the time and found that less than 15 percent of all genetic diversity is accounted for by differences among groups. He concluded with a passage that has since become canonical:

It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.

Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.

The canonical version of the orthodoxy’s second proposition appeared twelve years later, written by Gould for his regular column in Natural History magazine. “Equality [of the races] is not given a priori,” he wrote,

It is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn’t happen.

Gould argued for this conclusion along several lines, some of which echoed Lewontin. But he also offered a new proposition that quickly became popular: “[T]he division of humans into modern ‘racial’ groups is a product of our recent history. It does not predate the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens, and probably occurred during the last few tens (or at most hundreds) of thousands of years.” Four Gould, the implication was obvious:

As long as most scientists accepted the ancient division of races, they expected important genetic differences. But the recent origin of races… squares well with the minor genetic differences now measured. Human groups do vary strikingly in a few highly visible characters (skin color, hair form) — and this may fool us into thinking that overall differences must be great. But we now know that our usual metaphor of superficiality — skin deep — is literally accurate.

And so, he concluded in his 1984 article, “Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow; more important, understand it as the center of a network of implication: ‘Human equality is a contingent fact of history.’”

James Thompson reviews Charles Murray’s Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class:

Charles Murray, a sociologist by background and a datanaut by inclination, has carved out a prominent place in American intellectual debate by the simple expedient of writing clearly about difficult subjects. He is an Enlightenment Regular Guy, who does not want Americans to lose ground, or be split apart or be cast asunder by imperious elites and their lucrative patterns of frustration. He crunches data, and writes his conclusions in plain text, with helpful explanations about the harder statistical bits. No wonder some people hate him for it.

Having “The Bell Curve” on my university library shelves 26 years ago seemed somewhat daring. I was bewildered by the passions it arose. He had found a dataset and analysed it carefully, using histograms rather than correlation coefficients. I enjoyed the powerful clarity of the findings, and ruefully acknowledged that “bell curve” was a snappier phrase than “standard normal distribution”. I wish I’d had the talent to write it. Perhaps many other academics felt their noses put out of joint by a job well done.

We owe the inspiration for this book to Murray’s wife, who was so outraged by the attack he received at Middlebury College that she urged him to enter the fray on more contentious topics. Cherchez la femme. On the logical premise that “I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb” Murray has obligingly bundled up all the taboo subjects, examined them and explained that they are not so frightening after all. This time he is not crunching new stuff (beyond some interesting investigations of class differences), but mostly explaining what a whole torrent of new research may mean for all of us. In that sense he is following up on his work on Human Excellence, identifying those thoughts and findings which later ages will find of note in ours. These are exciting times, and although we cannot be sure that this is a whole new chapter in our understanding of ourselves, it certainly feels it might be.

Critics will quickly note that Murray’s aim is seditious. He wishes to destroy the proposition that in a properly run society, people of all human groupings will have similar life outcomes. Clearly, they won’t, and the fast flourishing genetic revolution is what provokes Murray to provide a progress report, one he hopes will be out of date shortly. Incidentally, writing a book about the genetics of human behaviour is a selfless act. This book took a long time to write, working through complex new research, but Murray is aware it might have a shelf life of a few months. Given that his explanations of basic issues are helpful, I think it will last far longer.

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The book is a master-class in explaining, and is far closer to text-book than meta-analysis, though it performs that latter function. Sadly, Murray cannot name his many advisors who looked at drafts of his book and made helpful suggestions. Contemporary academia is poisonous on race, sex and class. Happily, there are many knowledgeable people who were able to help him give an accurate and balanced account, without needing to share in the lime light. Veritas liberabit vos.

Murray is a good top-level guide to genetic discoveries precisely because he is outside the field looking in, with the purpose of being an explainer. Good writers in science quickly make you feel you knew the subject anyway. He is to behavioural science what Feynman’s lecture notes were to physics. Which reminds me of a Feynman quote highly relevant to what Murray is doing in the this book: Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

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It is very strange that an author who goes to such lengths to be kind, considered and balanced should be excoriated. Stranger still that the attacks should be so rigidly extreme when the text itself is mild, cautious and proudly admiring of the average citizen. Murray is not a polemicist: he just keeps the score, and explains his judgments. He does not eschew the correct nomenclature of digging instruments. I think he makes good calls, and if you want to see the steps in his arguments, he lays them out for you in the appendices.

The purpose and test of this book is whether it will be read. I hope so. The writing invites reading. The tone is balanced, restrained, and friendly to those for whom all this research may be news. When the topics are complicated and technical, anyone can baffle. Being legible is harder. Anyone who wants to know the score on the possible causes of sex, race and class differences will be amply rewarded in understanding if they read this book. It deserves to mark a turning point in public understanding of the biological factors in human behaviour.

Psychologist John Holland devised his theory of vocational choice in 1959. It posited six clusters of orientations. He did this with no regard to sex differences, but — as Charles Murray points out in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class — there are huge differences in where men and women land on some of those orientations, on average:

The authors assembled a database from 81 samples that amounted to 243,670 men and 259,518 women. On average, women’s vocational interests tilted toward occupations involving work with or understanding of other people; men’s vocational interests tilted toward working with things.

The biggest tilts involved the Realistic orientation — a male preference — with an effect size of –0.84, and the Social orientation — a female preference — with an effect size of +0.68.

On the Data-Ideas dimension, there was virtually no sex difference.

On the People-Things dimension, the effect size was +0.93, meaning that women were on the People end and men were on the Things end of the dimension — a large effect size by any standard.

Charles Murray continues to explain sex differences in cognitive skills (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class):

The most famous cognitive measure is the IQ test. The tests are designed to minimize sex differences, but minor sex differences in test scores do exist, and they have usually, though not always, favored males.

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Girls outscored boys in reading in every single PISA country, with effect sizes that ranged from a low of +0.08 in Peru to a remarkable high of +0.83 in Jordan.

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“Sex differences in mental rotation and line angle judgment performance were universally present across nations, with men’s mean scores always exceeding women’s mean scores.”

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In all, the test yielded 26 male-female comparisons. Twelve of them amounted to an absolute effect size of less than 0.1. Women outscored men on six of the seven measures of accuracy with an effect size greater than 0.1, and they outscored men on four of the seven measures of speed with an effect size greater than 0.1.

• Females had more accurate memory for items involving words and people.
• On IQ-like items, women did better on the verbal ones; men did better on the spatial ones.
• On the three subtests measuring social cognition, females were both more accurate and faster than males on all of them.
• On the subtest measuring motor speed, males were faster than females.

On average males have substantially better visuospatial skills than females — as evidenced by the Piaget water-level test and the bicycle-drawing test — while women have better social cognition. Bright men can compensate, as Charles Murray explains (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, based on Diane Halpern’s Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities):

Males are rarely good at both systemizing and empathizing. In contrast, these skill sets are largely independent in women.

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The same study found evidence that men apply systemizing skills to empathizing tasks. Put another way, even when men do well in social cognition tasks, they are not using the cognitive tools most naturally suited to that purpose.