^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

In a November 18th article for Slate ("Regrets"), William Saletan is backtracking. Hard. "I don't want this role," he explains. "I'm not an expert. I think it's misleading to dismiss the scenario ... Every responsible scholar I know says we should wait many years before drawing conclusions." What's Saletan equivocating about? Vampires? Spoon-bending? The Easter bunny? No, my friends. Mr. Saletan is talking about the sad old racial intelligence hierarchy.

Of course, he doesn't call it that. But the unfalsifiable hypothesis of genetic superiority, despite studies that call into question the legitimacy of the persistent-IQ standard upon which its current manifestation is based, is as sexy now as it was a half-millennium ago. And it will continue to be sexy, no matter what the science says, for as long as there are aggregate differences in education level, parenting, and nutrition between ethnic groups in a given country.

Back to the Saletan article for a minute. Remember how he's claiming he's not an expert? That he isn't really asserting anything? Here's the money quote from the article ("Liberal Creationism") that he had written ten days earlier:

Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution ...

Evolution forced Christians to bend or break. They could insist on the Bible's literal truth and deny the facts, as Bryan did. Or they could seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity. Today, the dilemma is yours. You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

So that's the situation in a nutshell: Saletan isn't an expert, he isn't implying anything--but if you don't believe that blacks and Latinos are, on the aggregate, intellectually inferior (though he would never use that exact phrase, of course), then he thinks you're "deny[ing] the facts."

The basis for Saletan's argument is twofold. First, he relies on IQ. If you've read the study above, you'll find that--despite huge differences vis-a-vis education, median income, and cultural environment--black American kids are already beginning to close the "permanent" IQ gap with white American kids. But they aren't closing it fast enough for Saletan, who argues in a subsequent article ("Environmental Impact") that "the debate over the IQ surge is a lot like the debate over the Iraq troop surge ... the case for it is as fragile." He cites the fact that the primary gains were made during the mid-twentieth century, but that the numbers have remained more or less stable since then. The fact that there has been no significant increase in educational opportunities for black children over the past 20 or 30 years is apparently lost on Saletan. As Thomas Sowell points out in The Bell Curve Wars (p. 76), the Flynn effect--the increase of IQ over time--at least taints, and arguably destroys, any purported evidence of genetic racial inferiority. As Sowell notes:

Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are racial, even partially?

Saletan then turns to the old tried-and-true argument for racial supremacy (though, again, I'm sure he wouldn't use that term himself): brain size. Since black and Latino brains tend to be smaller than white and Asian brains, Saletan argues, the intelligence correlation is obvious. To debunk this I need only cite the first neuroscience textbook I happened to Google up--Purves, Fitzpatrick, et. al., Neuroscience (2nd edition), Sinauer:

Any program that seeks to relate brain weight, cranial capacity, or some other measure of overall brain size to individual performance ignores the reality of the brain's functional diversity. Thus, quite apart from the political or ethical probity of attempts to measure “intelligence” by brain size, by the yardstick of modern neuroscience (or simple common sense), this approach will inevitably generate more heat than light. A more rational approach to the issue, which has become feasible in the last few years, is to relate the size of measurable regions of known function (the primary visual cortex, for example) to the corresponding functions (visual performance), as well as to cellular features such as synaptic density and dendritic arborization. These correlations have greater promise for functional validity, and less pretense of judgment and discrimination.

Saletan, to his credit (sort of), spends the third part of his series ("All God's Children") arguing that individual racial discrimination can't be justified by aggregate genetic differences in intelligence. But this argument, frankly, isn't very convincing either. He preaches human equality, but he damns it with faint praise. In a series full of weak arguments, his argument for equality in the face of unproven biological disadvantages is probably his weakest. He offers no substantial arguments against school segregation, for example, or even against slavery--when I know, and he surely must know, that both of these policies were products of the racial-differentiation philosophy and the caste system that preceded it. He seems to be blissfully unaware of the fact that his argument for the inevitability of racial advantages, which repeats the scientific errors of the past, would probably also produce the the policy errors of the past.

It's not clear to me why Saletan took it upon himself to write this foolishness. He admits that he doesn't understand the topic ("I'm not an expert"), but cites his understanding of the topic as his central motivation in writing the article ("because you can't solve a problem till you understand it"). He equivocates on the issue of whether or not intelligence differences really are racial, but seems to believe that it's vitally important that we leave that option open. (As opposed to what?)

And as far his statement that "[e]very responsible scholar I know says we should wait many years before drawing conclusions" goes, I would argue that blacks and Latinos in the United States have waited entirely too long to live in an equal society. If Saletan chooses to believe that race and intelligence are biologically correlated, that's his right--but the flimsy evidence he brings to the table is not worth taking seriously. Like others positing wild, unproven theories with far-reaching social consequences, calling on their critics to prove a negative or forever hold their peace, Saletan would be well-served to remember the words of Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

See also:

• Institutional Racism