The Brussels Times has received the following right of reply from Nathan Cofnas in response to the opinion article The danger of legitimising hate through academia.
Do I legitimise hate?
Ghent University political science PhD student Nathan Remcho recently published an article about me titled “The danger of legitimising hate through academia”. Remcho makes several cavalier and bombastic accusations against me. But he does not seriously engage with my arguments or demonstrate much knowledge of the relevant scientific literature.
I am a philosopher of biology and ethics. My recent appointment as a postdoc at Ghent University is controversial because I defend “hereditarianism”—the view that genes play a nontrivial role in average race differences in traits such as intelligence.
I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously. (The “equality thesis” is the idea that all groups have identical distributions of socially relevant traits.) If all racial groups are on average innately the same, disparities must be the result of the environment. The persistence of extreme racial disparities presents us with a moral emergency to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome. In practice, this leads to blaming higher-performing groups for the condition of lower-performing groups.
The dogma of racial sameness—first asserted by John Locke in 1690—was always rooted in ideology, not evidence. After World War II, race science became morally tainted due to its association with Nazi pseudoscience, which was itself purely ideological. However, serious, unbiased scholars have understood since Darwin that natural selection operates above the neck as well as below. There is no reason to believe that all ancestral populations have evolved along precisely the same trajectories, and a lot of evidence that they have not done so.
Professional psychometricians and behavioural geneticists are far more likely to be hereditarians than most laypeople realize. In 2013–2014, Rindermann et al. conducted an anonymous survey of experts in intelligence research, which was published in the journal Intelligence (the flagship journal in the field). 84% of respondents said that the black-white IQ gap in the US is at least partly due to genes. The majority thought that the gap was at least 50% genetic. Hereditarianism is mainstream science.
Remcho writes that “The first thing to establish clearly is that Cofnas claims to base his arguments on rigorous scientific research while they in fact rely on false reasoning and a systematic misreading of science, history, and philosophy”. But he does nothing to “establish” this. It is simply an assertion.
He continues: “A central claim he [Cofnas] makes is that science is distorted by political values, but he fails to see the irony in his own presentation of political values as science. This is not research. This is propaganda.”
This is just another assertion without evidence, because there is no evidence that my science is distorted by politics. I have strongly argued in favour of a value-free ideal for science, and I follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of whether the conclusion is politically convenient for me. For example, although I am politically on the right, I have provided evidence that right wingers are significantly less intelligent on average than leftists. I have even argued that people who currently self-identify as hereditarians are on average much less intelligent than race deniers! (This doesn’t mean that hereditarianism is false. It reflects the fact that intellectual elites operate in an informationally polluted environment.)
On the other hand, I have documented numerous prominent scholars saying openly that we should reject hereditarianism—or refuse to conduct research that might support it—for political reasons. For example, Harvard psychology professor Howard Gardner (the creator of “multiple intelligences” theory) writes: “I myself do not condone investigations of racial differences in intelligence, because I think that the results of these studies are likely to be incendiary.” University of Virginia behavioural geneticist Eric Turkheimer writes that there is an “ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.” There are many similar examples. Which side in this debate is presenting political values as science?
Remcho attacks a straw man when he writes that “The concept of race as a discrete biological category with meaningful, heritable cognitive consequences is false”. No biologically informed commentator since Darwin has believed in “discrete” races. But races do not have to be discrete in order for race differences to be real.
Race can be compared to language. There is no sharp line separating Dutch and German. Some people speak creoles. Languages borrow words and grammatical structures from each other. It does not follow that it is meaningless to talk about the difference between English and Mandarin—or even Dutch and German. These are all issues that I have addressed in detail.
Remcho writes: “The American Anthropological Association, the American Society of Human Genetics, and decades of peer-reviewed research in behavioural genetics have consistently held that observed group differences in cognitive outcomes are better explained by environmental, historical, and socioeconomic factors than by genetic ones.”
First of all, decades of peer-reviewed research in behavioural genetics have consistently supported hereditarianism. Cross-racial adoption has virtually no effect on adult IQ. Recent work coming out of David Reich’s laboratory at Harvard University shows that there has been intense selection for genetic variants associated with intelligence and educational attainment in West Eurasians in the past several thousand years. Genetic variants associated with intelligence and educational attainment are not distributed equally among ancestral populations (i.e., races).
In 1998, the American Anthropological Association published a hysterical denunciation of the idea of race. This was a political statement coming out of a highly partisan academic discipline. Nevertheless, the statement was published with a disclaimer stating that “The following statement...does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of ‘race’”.
In 2018, the American Society of Human Genetics published a “[denunciation of] attempts to link genetics and racial supremacy”. While also a politicised document, what it says is more or less accurate. It states: “Although there are clear observable correlations between variation in the human genome and how individuals identify by race, the study of human genetics challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct.” What I’m saying is that variation in the human genome is correlated with racial categories. And this genetic variation can influence socially relevant traits such as intelligence.
In any case, public statements about race are inevitably going to be politicized. That’s why—if you want to argue by appeal to authority—it is better to look at anonymous surveys of experts. As I mentioned, only 16% of intelligence researchers share Remcho’s extreme anti-hereditarian perspective.
Remcho says that the 300 staff and students at Ghent University who signed a petition to fire me “are doing exactly what a university is supposed to produce: people willing to think critically about power, knowledge, and the uses to which both are put”. I argue for the opposite conclusion. The mob of 300 staff and students is using power to prevent critical examination of an orthodoxy based on lies. That is not the kind of behaviour that should be celebrated at a university.
