Race and Intelligence: scientific facts can be very racist

As Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life) famously said: When it comes to race science is corrupt.

Take note that the article says — in a round about way — that Europeans have more advantageous intelligence genes than other races; which explains why people of European racial stock have produced more great geniuses than any other race.

Some noteworthy, chilling quotes:

“Some knowledge is not worth having.” Yay! Let’s hear it for obscurantism! Can you imagine a scientist saying something similar in any other field? He’d get laughed out of town in the blink of an idea! However, when race comes up nobody says a peep.

One magazine that blames black and Hispanic people for social ills hailed his discovery as “the moment the antiracists and egalitarians have dreaded.” You better believe it!

“Other research is starting to explain variations in human skin color and hair texture. But scientists tense up when it comes to doing the same sort of research on the brain. ” Because they know what will be found: races exist and they are not equal in either character or intelligence…let’s hear it once again: races exist and they are not equal in either character or intelligence. Moreover, scientists know that if they study the question of race and intelligence and behaviour, they run the risk of having to kiss their careers good bye! See what happened to Rushton, Vanhanen, Brand, etc. Most have been attacked in terms of their jobs, tenure, funding, etc. here.

“Yet Dr. Lahn, who left China after participating in prodemocracy protests, says intellectual “police” in the U.S. make such questions difficult to pursue.” Indeed, when it comes to race everyone must chant the same inane pieties, and if they don’t they will be hounded and prosecuted for “hate.” On race-related issued, the Chinese have more freedom than us…in the formerly White West.

“Science doesn’t transcend the social milieu,” says Dr. Duster, of New York University.” The scientific community has been dominated by the egalitarians (”race is nothing but a social construct”) since at least the 1950s. They are fanatically shielding their dogma from scrutiny, anathematizing all those who deviate from the party line.

“Several scientific groups have set out to disprove or challenge Dr. Lahn’s discoveries.” As one poster on a WN board stated, and I quote him: “If one sets out to disprove or challenge someone else’s position, how can one claim to be objective? One is starting with a preconceived notion of what is true and what isn’t. Everything inconvenient to one’s position will be brushed under the rug. These people are starting out with an agenda, and anything that challenges this agenda they simply say is not “science.” In the USA, science is being replaced with propaganda, which masquerades as science. Generations of students are being systematically brainwashed. No wonder the country is slipping scientifically and culturally. What is happening specifically in race science is that the arguments of race scientists are being lost in a clamor of other voices screaming hysterical and irrelevant (but politically correct) nonsense.

“Mr. Easton borrowed a copy of “The Mismeasure of Man,” the famous attack on IQ tests and brain-volume measurements by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Mr. Easton helped Dr. Lahn with talking points about his research. “We said, ‘Don’t be shy about telling people what it doesn’t mean,’” As an ethnophobe and Jewish Marxist with a race-denying agenda, Gould et al. has more than anyone else promoted pseudoscience by embracing naive environmentalism in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are at least partly a product of our genes. Gould has been caught with his pants down in distortion after subterfuge, after outright lying; he has become the symbol of anti-empiricism. The following are just of few of the quotes I have collected from books that I have read exposing Gould for the fraud that he is. Others may be able to find many more. Here.

“But Dr. Wells says National Geographic won’t study the brain. “I think there is very little evidence of IQ differences between races,” he says.” Dr. Wells is either tremendously ignorant or a shameless liar. There is substantial evidence for IQ differences between races. Read: Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294; Lynn Richard, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, Washington Summit Books, Augusta, GA, 2005, 318 pp., US$34.95, ISBN 1-59368-020-1

Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition).
June 16, 2006. pg. A.1

Scientist’s Study Of Brain Genes Sparks a Backlash

Antonio Regalado

CHICAGO — Last September, Bruce Lahn, a professor of human genetics
at the University of Chicago, stood before a packed lecture hall and
reported the results of a new DNA analysis: He had found signs of
recent evolution in the brains of some people, but not of others.

It was a triumphant moment for the young scientist. He was up for
tenure and his research was being featured in back-to-back articles
in the country’s most prestigious science journal. Yet today, Dr.
Lahn says he is moving away from the research. “It’s getting too
controversial,” he says.

Dr. Lahn had touched a raw nerve in science: race and intelligence.

What Dr. Lahn told his audience was that genetic changes over the
past several thousand years might be linked to brain size and
intelligence. He flashed maps that showed the changes had taken hold
and spread widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas, but weren’t
common in sub-Saharan Africa.

Web sites and magazines promoting white “racialism” quickly seized on
Dr. Lahn’s suggestive scientific snapshot. One magazine that blames
black and Hispanic people for social ills hailed his discovery as
“the moment the antiracists and egalitarians have dreaded.”

Dr. Lahn has drawn sharp fire from other leading genetics
researchers. They say the genetic differences he found may not
signify any recent evolution — and even if they do, it is too big a
leap to suggest any link to intelligence. “This is not the place you
want to report a weak association that might or might not stand up,”
says Francis Collins, director of the genome program at the National
Institutes of Health.

Several scientific groups have set out to disprove or challenge Dr.
Lahn’s discoveries. His own university now says it is abandoning a
patent application it filed to cover a DNA-based intelligence test
that drew on his work.

As scientific tools for probing genes become increasingly powerful,
research into human differences has exploded. Most of the time,
scientists are looking for clues about the causes of disease. But
some research is raising tensions as scientists such as Dr. Lahn
venture into studies of genetic differences in behavior or intelligence.

Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and medical ethics at the
University of Wisconsin, criticizes Dr. Lahn for implying a
conclusion similar to “The Bell Curve,” a controversial 1994
bestseller by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book
argued that the lower average performance by African-Americans on IQ
tests had a genetic component and wasn’t solely the result of social
factors. Referring to Dr. Lahn and his co-authors, Prof. Ossorio
says: “It’s exactly what they were getting at. There was a lot of
hallway talk. People said he’s doing damage to the whole field of
genetics.”

The 37-year-old Dr. Lahn says his research papers, published in
Science last September, offered no view on race and intelligence. He
personally believes it is possible that some populations will have
more advantageous intelligence genes than others. And he thinks that
“society will have to grapple with some very difficult facts” as
scientific data accumulate. Yet Dr. Lahn, who left China after
participating in prodemocracy protests, says intellectual “police” in
the U.S. make such questions difficult to pursue.

Scientists believe that a small group of anatomically modern humans
struck out from Africa probably less than 100,000 years ago. After
arriving on the Eurasian land mass, they continued to split up and
eventually humans populated nearly every corner of the globe. One use
of genetic research is to probe how each group evolved differently
after becoming isolated from the others. Recently created genetic
maps of people of African, Asian and European ancestry make that
research easier.

For instance, researchers have found that most Europeans have a
genetic variant that lets them fully digest milk as adults. The
variant is much less common in Africa and Asia, where lactose
intolerance is widespread. Scientists theorize that it spread quickly
among Europeans because drinking milk from domesticated dairy animals
conferred a nutritional advantage. Similar evolutionary reasoning may
explain why many people in malaria-prone parts of Africa carry gene
variants linked to malaria resistance.

Other research is starting to explain variations in human skin color
and hair texture. But scientists tense up when it comes to doing the
same sort of research on the brain. Sociologist Troy Duster, who
studies the use of racial categories by geneticists, worries that
scientists will interpret data in ways that fit their prejudices. He
cites the sorry history of phrenology, a study of skull shapes
popular in the 19th century, and other pseudoscientific techniques
used to categorize people as inferior. “Science doesn’t transcend the
social milieu,” says Dr. Duster, of New York University.

Dr. Lahn traces his interest in human differences back to his youth
in China. Foreigners there used to have a special currency that they
could use at stores closed to ordinary Chinese. “I wondered why
people were different, and why Chinese were at the bottom,” he says.

By the time violence struck Tiananmen Square in 1989, Dr. Lahn, the
son of two physicists, was an undergraduate at Harvard University. He
channeled his curiosity into genetics and built his reputation with a
groundbreaking study of the Y chromosome. After taking a post at the
University of Chicago in 2000, Dr. Lahn won a prestigious fellowship
from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The fellowship pays most of his research bills and has allowed him to
pursue creative projects, often on attention-grabbing subjects. One
study looked at how promiscuity among female chimpanzees, gorillas
and humans affected the evolution of a gene that makes sperm sticky.
“Bruce is in a hurry to be famous,” says Martin Kreitman, a Chicago
colleague who is friendly with him.

Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropology professor who
recently published a theory for why Ashkenazi Jews tend to have high
IQ’s, says Dr. Lahn once suggested they co-author an article for
Scientific American about the genetics of behavior, in which they
could explain why “Chinese are boring.”

“I think that Bruce doesn’t understand political correctness,” Dr.
Harpending says. Dr. Lahn says he only vaguely recalls the
conversation but confirms that he wonders whether during China’s
imperial times there was “some selection” against rebellious
individuals.

In recent years, Dr. Lahn has become interested in why the human
brain is so large and complex. Although humans and chimpanzees share
about 96% of their DNA, human brains are about four times larger.
Even today, researchers can find a correlation, on average, between
people’s brain size and their IQ.

Dr. Lahn’s group zeroed in on the role of two genes, called ASPM and
microcephalin, that are known to have a role in brain size. Humans
with defective copies of either gene are born with brains only about
one-third the normal size.

Studying DNA from several species, the Chicago team found that, over
millions of years, the genes had undergone more rapid change in
monkeys, apes and humans than in other animals. Their next step was
to determine if evolution had continued in modern humans. Dr. Lahn’s
graduate students began decoding DNA from 1,184 people belonging to
59 groups from around the world, including Bedouins, Pima Indians and
French-speaking Basques.

The data showed that evolution had continued in recent millennia. A
statistical analysis of DNA patterns suggested that new mutations in
each of the two brain-related genes had spread quickly through some
human populations. Evidently, these mutations were advantageous among
those populations — just as the genetic variant promoting milk
digestion was advantageous to early Europeans. Dr. Lahn and his team
further observed that the new mutations are found most frequently
outside of Africa.

What the data didn’t say was how the mutations were advantageous.
Perhaps the genes play a role outside of the brain or affect a brain
function that has nothing to do with intelligence.

While acknowledging that the evidence doesn’t permit a firm
conclusion, Dr. Lahn favors the idea that the advantage conferred by
the mutations was a bigger and smarter brain. He found ways to
suggest that in his papers. One mutation, which according to his
estimates arose some 40,000 years ago, coincided with the first art
found in caves, the paper observed. The other mutation, present
mostly in people from the Middle East and Europe, and estimated to be
5,800 years old, coincided with the “development of cities and
written language.”

That suggested brain evolution might have occurred in tandem with
important cultural changes. Yet because neither variant is common in
sub-Saharan Africa, there was another potential implication: Some
groups had been left out.

The dean of the University of Chicago’s medical school, James L.
Madara, says he approached Dr. Lahn before the papers were published.
They discussed whether the report could be taken out of context. “Let
the chips lie where they may,” Dr. Madara says he told Dr. Lahn. As
long as the ideas and data are clear, “don’t worry about the
implications,” the dean said.

John Easton, head of media relations at the medical school, says his
office was worried the work could be misinterpreted and abused by
racist groups. Mr. Easton borrowed a copy of “The Mismeasure of Man,”
the famous attack on IQ tests and brain-volume measurements by the
late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Mr. Easton helped Dr. Lahn
with talking points about his research. “We said, ‘Don’t be shy about
telling people what it doesn’t mean,’ ” Mr. Easton recalls.

Mr. Easton says Dr. Lahn “makes us nervous” but “with Bruce we know
it’s not driven by personal bias.” That is because Asians “don’t
score at the top” in the frequency of the brain-gene mutations, Mr.
Easton says.

Dr. Lahn’s paper and talk at his university — in which he also
claimed the gene variants were probably linked to higher IQ —
provoked a strong reaction both on and off campus. Dr. Collins, head
of the federal genome program, obtained advance copies of the papers
and circulated them to top population geneticists. He wasn’t
persuaded by the statistical evidence for evolution and criticized
Dr. Lahn’s work in media interviews.

The papers won wide attention among researchers, and several
responded by setting out to test Dr. Lahn’s findings. Scientists at
the Broad Institute, a top genetics center in Cambridge, Mass., have
been reanalyzing some of the data and say they may challenge Dr.
Lahn’s finding that evolution acted on ASPM, one of the genes.
Broad’s influential chief, Eric Lander, says scientists probing
recent evolution run the risk of “seeing a difference, and saying
there is a story to fit it.”

A team at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently tested
whether the gene variants actually affect brain size. They studied
DNA from 120 people whose brain volumes they had already measured
using magnetic-resonance imaging. They didn’t find any difference.
“It certainly makes you want to look at other explanations” of what
the variations mean, says Roger P. Woods, a UCLA brain-mapping expert
who reported the results in May.

Some of Dr. Lahn’s co-authors are also uncomfortable with the work.
Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland who
provided DNA from remote African groups, says she is bothered how one
paper drew a link between the genetic changes and the rise of
civilization. She thinks it is too early to reach any conclusions
about why the changes spread and says it is “very simplistic” to
imagine that a single gene could have a major effect on complex
cultural traits.

Several groups of scientists have sent letters to Science criticizing
the papers. Dr. Lahn prepared responses, sending one earlier this
month, but Dr. Tishkoff wasn’t willing to add her name to them.

“You have to follow the data wherever it leads, but speculating in
this field is dangerous,” says Spencer Wells, head of the National
Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, a five-year, $40 million
effort to collect DNA samples from 100,000 indigenous people. Dr.
Wells says the project team might try to find evolutionary reasons
for physical differences such as why Danes are taller than pygmies.
But Dr. Wells says National Geographic won’t study the brain. “I
think there is very little evidence of IQ differences between races,”
he says.

The accuracy of Dr. Lahn’s work and his views on race came up in his
tenure review last fall, says a person familiar with it. After
debate, his department voted unanimously in his favor, according to
another faculty member. A more senior committee agreed and awarded
Dr. Lahn the post of full professor, although it wasn’t unanimous,
this person says.

Dr. Lahn stands by his work but says that because of the controversy
he is moving into other projects. Earlier this year, Mr. Easton of
the university’s media department forwarded Dr. Lahn a paper by two
economists looking at the IQ of infants of different races. Dr. Lahn
wasn’t interested. “I’m surprised anyone studies this,” he replied in
an email.

Dr. Lahn says he isn’t as eager as he once was to continue studying
brain differences. P. Thomas Schoenemann, a professor of anthropology
at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, says that at Dr. Lahn’s
request he collected DNA from 25 people whose brain sizes he had
studied previously. But the two scientists haven’t been in touch
recently.

The university’s patent office is also having second thoughts. Its
director, Alan Thomas, says his office is dropping a patent
application filed last year that would cover using Dr. Lahn’s work as
a DNA-based intelligence test. “We really don’t want to end up on the
front page … for doing eugenics,” Mr. Thomas says.

Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens

Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans