The question here should be: why haven’t scientists studied race And IQ in an openly didactic setting? — Ed.
Just in case anyone has missed it, the pair of duelling essays in the latest issue of Nature is well worth a read. The topic is whether there is any justification for scientific exploration of associations between gender or race and intelligence; Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams from Cornell argue the affirmative, while Steven Rose takes up the opposing case.
The debate continues as a lively discussion on Nature Network, which contains many thoughtful comments from both sides.
Ifind it pretty hard to stomach the notion that any field of scientificenquiry should be completely off the table, even an area as contentiousand politically charged as this one – in fact especially insuch an area, since nowhere are solid facts needed as desperately as ina debate driven largely by ideals and emotions. Thus while Rose makessome fair points about the difficulties of defining both race andintelligence, I find his overall argument less than compelling.
In fact this sentence from Rose’s final paragraph is downright worrying:
In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions ofwhether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or womenwould not merely be meaningless — they would not even be asked.
This borders on defining anyone who even thinks aboutgroup differences in cognition as a bigot. Poisoning the well in thisfashion is a highly effective strategy for shutting down debate on aparticular topic – but this is a terrible strategy for a scientist to adopt.