Race and Intelligence Again -- Farther Afield

I finally broke down an e-mailed Andrew Sullivan (although I'd rather snipe at him from the safety of my own blog) about the series of posts he's been running on Race and Intelligence -- sparked by the latest reader comments.  Since I doubt he'll publish it, here's the e-mail, with a short version of my thoughts on the whole "controversy."

Dear Andrew Sullivan:

I've been following your posts on "Race and Intelligence," and regarding the latest comments on the e-mail concerning "the genetic basis of intelligence" by the Harvard law student, I see that the controversy continues on the same -- and to my mind, quite mistaken -- terms.  It all seems to have gotten tied up in various causes celebres -- racism, freedom of speech, and the like -- and has very little to do with what she actually said.

I've not seen any comments on this flap that focus on what the real flaw in the e-mail was:  it's not that she was expressing an unpopular viewpoint, or even treading on politically incorrect territory, but that she assumed that she knew that she was talking about (as do both her supporters and critics) without, apparently, ever examining her assumptions, which I think must be a fatal flaw in someone who plans on making a career out of dissecting formal arguments.  Her question is legitimate, but sadly uninformed.  (And I suspect if she had even the most rudimentary knowledge of genetics and how it works, she wouldn't have bothered to ask the question to begin with.)

Until she has, and can express, a clear idea of what she means by "race" and by "intelligence," she, like most non-scientists who tackle this issue (which as far as I can see is a non-issue to anyone who doesn't have an agenda), should keep mum.

"Race" is a fairly fluid concept, and, while it has some use as a descriptive term for taxonomists, in larger discussions it essentially no longer has any meaning.  In ordinary parlance, it's purely a social construct.  One need only remember that in the U.S., a person with a black ancestor has routinely been considered "black," no matter the relative proportion of black to white ancestry.  (And I'm deliberately not using the word "genes" here -- the genetic difference between human races is so small as to be unmeasurable. After all, we're not very far, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees.  How far can we be from each other?)  To pose a question of genetic inheritance based on cultural definitions is to construct a fundamentally flawed question.

Talking about "intelligence" and genetics in the same breath is asking for trouble.  The genetic basis of intelligence, like the genetic basis of just about anything (especially behaviors), is a set of potentials and nothing more.  These potentials are subject to environmental influences that start when the egg is fertilized -- why does anyone think that doctors place such stress on proper nutrition for expectant mothers?  Because the womb is an environment.  The problem here is that, while our Harvard 3L is talking about the expression of intelligence (test scores, one assumes, or other measures of performance), she is casting it in terms of heritability.  We're talking about a behavior here, not eye color, and human behavior, even for those areas that are "biologically determined," is way too complex to cast in such simplistic terms.

I don't fault her for asking the question.  I'm not going to impute an agenda or ideology as a foundation here -- it's the kind of air-headed "what if?" that one finds in students, which is a good enough excuse, and to start hurling charges of racism based on something like this is, at best, revealing of a lack of clear thought in her critics.  I'm not even sure I fault her for saying it without having a clear idea of what she was talking about -- she's asking a question, and it's a student's question, but that's one way we learn.  (And yes, I'm one of those who thinks we should be allowed to ask any question that occurs to us.)  I do think, however, that the only adult response is "Back up and define your terms."  That seems to have been eclipsed by the politics of those involved.

Next teapot.