An Open Letter To National Review`s Jim Manzi On “Escaping the Tyranny of Genes”


Dear Jim: [Email
Jim Manzi]

I`ve thought

some more
about why your National Review
cover story "Escaping
the Tyranny of Genes
,"
[June 2, 2008], into
which you clearly put a lot of effort, is getting
such
a skeptical reaction from the small number of
people whose respect you should worry about. (For
example, I`m told that 

Richard Lynn,
when he came to the part about the
Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, simply stopped
reading your article.)

I think I`ve figured out how you
went off track.

You started with the reasonable
goal, one that I`ve pursued myself

several times
, of trying to criticize the pop
journalism about genetics that has been common for the
last 15 years. There have been repeated sloppy headlines
about the discovery of "A Gene for … Homosexuality
(or Happiness or Infidelity or Whatever) "
. Some of
those

"Gene for"
headlines have turned out to be
wrong.

For example, gay geneticist
Dean Hamer
got enormous publicity in 1993 when he
declared he had found

“The Gay Gene”
(at

least for men
). This was hugely popular in the media
for a while because a

genetic cause for homosexuality
is

politically correct
—it`s assumed to be a rebuke to
Christians. But 15 years later, you never hear much
anymore about Hamer`s "discovery".

It`s probably not very true. As
physicist turned evolutionary theorist

Greg Cochran
has

argued


since the 1990s,
it`s

unlikely that a gene for gayness could evolve
,
because gay men have so fewer children.

Similarly, the hunt for genes that
cause fatal diseases has been going slower than
expected, probably because, as

English science writer
Matt Ridley

pointed out,
your genes didn`t evolve to kill you.

Your NR article didn`t spell
out what bad effects you expect to be caused by
credulous science journalism. When you were pushed to
clarify your fears in the comments section of The
American Scene blog, you

wrote
:

"I
suspect that the analogous policies that might be
established if an (incorrect) view of the linkage
between gene patterns and mental characteristics and
capabilities became more widely and deeply entrenched
would be unpredictable, but more likely to be related to
the relaxation of the notion of personal
responsibility—replacing justice with therapy, greater
paternalism in constraining economic, political and
lifestyle decisions for those who are `unable` to
exercise `true` choice, targeting government services
based on genetic content and so on."

That`s pretty vague. But perhaps
you fear a "liberal therapeutic regime" rather
like the one Anthony Burgess described in A Clockwork Orange,
where
the young thug Alex, rather than being locked up, is

conditioned
into not liking violence anymore.

Unfortunately, you didn`t spend
much time at all on these valid examples of weak pop
journalism that might support your thesis that the press
is overemphasizing genetic explanations. Instead, you
chose to devote a huge amount of space to a single
example—race
and IQ
—so incredibly ill-chosen as a case study for
your argument that it has proven disastrous to the
reception of your article.

As we all know, but you ignored to
your credibility`s severe detriment, much as the
mainstream media want to hear about the Gay Gene and
such, they do

NOT want to hear about racial differences in IQ.

And, the MSM especially do not want to hear about
evidence for genetic causes for

racial differences in IQ.
How many voices in the
press stood up to defend America`s most eminent living
scientist, James Watson, when he got fired last year?
(Answer: none—and

notably not National Review
).

Moreover, the small number of
race-and-IQ researchers, the

Arthur Jensens
and

Charles Murrays
, are not slapdash Dean Hamers going
with the flow of popular opinion. They tend to be
cautious and careful scientists aware that they are
infringing elite taboos by carrying out unpopular
studies certain to be picked at by legions of hostile
critics.

Real IQ scientists, like Cochran
and Henry Harpending, authors of the 2005 theory [PDF]
attempting to explain the evolution of
high average IQs among Ashkenazi Jews,
are generally
close students of the theory of natural selection. So
they are less likely to fall for evolutionarily dubious
ideas like the Gay Gene.

The evidence for a genetic link
between IQ and race is broad but not conclusive. For
example, Jensen and Rushton`s 2005 summary paper [Thirty
Years Of Research On Race Differences In Cognitive
Ability
(PDF)]
listed, I believe, ten different lines of non-genetic
evidence for a genetic link.


Occam`s Razor,
which tells us that the simplest
explanation is most likely right, suggests that Jensen
and Rushton are probably correct, especially because
there is so little evidence for the more socially
acceptable opposite view.

You mention
Sandra Scarr
`s Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study,
but what you don`t mention is that it

was originally trumpeted in the 1980s
as proof of
closing of the racial gap through improved home
environments for black children. (The adoptive fathers
averaged a year of grad school each.) When the black
adoptees were tested as 7-years-olds, they averaged
around 100. This was a very popular study at the time.

Then when Scarr went back and
retested the kids when they were teenagers, their
average IQs only came out to 89. This was horrible news
and so she buried it in her subsequent paper. Nobody
noticed what had actually happened except a
CCNY philosopher
named Michael Levin, who publicized
the actual results.[Comment on the Minnesota
transracial adoption study
. Intelligence , 19
, 13-20, 1994]This led poor Dr. Scarr to do a lot of
soul searching. [PDF]

There is the

Flynn Effect
—the tendency for average IQs to rise
over time—which shows we don`t fully understand IQ. But
otherwise, even though any social scientist who could
publish a valid study showing the race gap in IQ could
be eliminated would become an academic superstar, there
is remarkably little evidence supporting the
conventional wisdom. Thus, when James Flynn debates
Murray, he

ends up harping
on

Eyferth`s
unreplicated 1959  study of the children
of

black American soldiers and German women
for lack of
anything better to cite in the way of positive evidence.

But the Jensens and Murrays do NOT
claim they`ve proven their case. They hope to live long
enough to see the

genome analyses
dramatically lower the uncertainty
level.

Murray said in 2003 that we`ll know
from the genome studies one way or another within a few
decades. James Watson guesstimated in 2006 that it would
take
15 years,
but on second thought decided it might be
as little as ten.

In the long run, the number of
years or decades doesn`t much matter. We`ll find out,
one way or another. 

Hence, your race-IQ example is

precisely backwards
and undermines the point of your
article.

Jim, I imagine you are upset at
present that your article has elicited so much scoffing.
I hope this helps you understand where your chain of
argument derailed itself—so you can get back on track in
the future.


[Steve Sailer (
email
him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and

movie critic

for

The American Conservative
.
His website


www.iSteve.blogspot.com

features his daily blog.]