Malcolm Gladwell has published an excellent article on IQ and race in the New Yorker. It’s almost enough to get me to forgive the New Yorker for the Darkness in El Dorado debacle. Here’s a taste of what Gladwell has to say:

When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

I grew up in a culture similar to that Gladwell is describing, only it was in Melbourne in the 1970s. At that time, there was a lot of talk about how Italian and Greek immigrants were marrying among themselves, creating ethnic enclaves, not performing to the level expected of citizens, and rorting our work safety insurance schemes. In Melbourne, low back pain was colloquially referred to as “Mediterranean back.” Now, of course, nobody talks about the inferiority or the cultural exceptionalism of Greeks and Italians. They’re just Australians now. But the need for an ethnic scapegoat persists, and so in the 1980s it was Vietnamese immigrants who were creating ethnic enclaves. Now they are just Australians. For a short while the focus turned to Lebanese immigrants, but that seems to have passed. Then the then Immigration Minister (Kevin Andrews — never allow this name to be forgotten) tried to engineer a fear of Sudanese and Somali refugees out of absolutely nothing — no reports of violence, no reports of criminality, no reports of ethnic tension, and the puzzled denial by the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police that there was any problem.

What has this to do with IQ scores? Not much, really…in theory. Ethnic tensions have almost nothing to do with intelligence per se. But the desire to find an ethnic scapegoat in society must be matched by a measure by which to justify the scapegoating. And IQ fits like a glove. You only need to read Saletan, with his claims of “liberal Creationism” and the regurgitation of absurd beliefs, you only need to observe (as Gladwell did) Charles Murray’s distaste at being presented evidence against his thesis, you only need to read the comments that this blog has attracted recently, to see that the IQ-determinism movement is founded on a desire to believe in racial differences. Saletan is positively gleeful about it.

And, you know, to all those who happily search Google for evidence that only confirms their racial prejudices, I ask why did you not find Gladwell’s article? Well, OK, it was only published this week. Fair enough. But there is nothing in Gladwell’s article that has not been said before by others. Gladwell is particularly articulate and deserves all credit for his marvelous article. But it is founded on work by James Flynn…work that has been going on for 25 years and has been discussed in New Scientist, Scientific American, American Scientist, WIRED, and the New York Times. This is not obscure information. And yet William Saletan, in a lengthy article about IQ and race, did not even mention James Flynn — the single most important figure in IQ research in the last quarter century — because Flynn’s findings undermine Saletan’s thesis.

Perhaps the most telling point about all this is William Saletan’s subsequent “regret”, a small addendum on Slate explaining how he now wishes that, well, it’s kinda complicated. Better to let Saletan use his own words:

I’m not an expert. I think it’s misleading to dismiss the scenario, as some officials have done in response to Watson. But my attempts to characterize the evidence beyond that, even with caveats such as “partial,” “preliminary,” and “prima facie,” have backfired. I outlined the evidence primarily to illustrate the limits of the genetic hypothesis. If it turns out to be true, it will be in a less threatening form than you might imagine. As to whether it’s true, you’ll have to judge the evidence for yourself. Every responsible scholar I know says we should wait many years before drawing conclusions.

This raises two questions. The first is, does Saletan really expect us to believe this? I challenge anyone to go back and re-read Saletan’s original piece and find the slightest hint that there are any doubts or that responsible scholars should wait for more evidence. Those “caveats” were not real caveats. Real caveats would involve explaining the contrary evidence and interviewing people like James Flynn, which Saletan did not do. A genuinely cautious approach to the evidence would not lead one to call one’s critics “Liberal Creationists.” In short, those “caveats” were weasel words. The only reason Saletan wrote “partial” and “preliminary” and “prima facie” was so that he could defend himself when his armchair scholarship was attacked by people who had actually investigated the evidence thoroughly. The second question is, if Mr Saletan is not an expert, then what on earth inspired him to write a lengthy, and openly combative opinion piece in a prominent journal? I guess we can expect further Slate pieces from Saletan along the same lines. Might I recommend “Niels Bohr’s Stupid Atom: Those Copenhagen Dummkopfs”?

But the most interesting question is not Saletan’s squirmy retraction. (”Hey, don’t blame me for saying all those awful things. I’m not an expert!”) It’s what forced him to squirm. You see, Saletan discovered that the source of a large swag of his argument came from an infamous racist.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to “the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime (”Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous”) and heresy (”Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people”). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

Well, good on Saletan for recognising that his article was based on racist diatribe. It’s nice to know that he can be big enough to retract that…what’s that? He’s still not retracting his argument? This is Saletan’s retraction:

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I’m sorry. I owe you better than that.

It appears that Saletan’s error was not that he regurgitated half-baked racist claptrap from a privileged position in a public forum. Saletan’s error was that he did not mention that his source was full of half-baked racist claptrap. Here is Stephen Metcalf’s more thorough takedown of Saletan’s grossly deficient scholarship.

But there is one point left that cannot go unremarked. Saletan said, in his defence, “In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.” But you know what? This is one statement that deserves more than mere criticism. It needs to be called what it is. A shocking distortion. If Saletan had really researched his article with a view to finding rebuttals, he would have found them. None of the information he missed is obscure. None of it is hiding unread and undetected in the Lithuanian Journal of Applied Insect Trajectories. Flynn’s work has been published in leading scientific journals. Almost every scientific paper on IQ published in the last twenty years should refer to Flynn’s key publications. How could Saletan possibly have missed it?

Let’s just review the situation: Saletan publishes a lengthy opinion piece that promotes the idea that sub-Saharan Africans and Americans of African descent are genetically, innately, less intelligent than whites and Asians and Jews. After a barrage of criticism, he realises that he did not in fact uncover any of the critical flaws in his argument even though these flaws have been described many times over in the published literature. He discovers the the source of much of his information is a supporter of segregation and an opponent of increased education funds going to underprivileged blacks. He concedes that he is not an expert on what he wrote about. He suddenly discovers the virtues of caution in reporting scientific findings and recommends watching the evidence develop over the next few years before drawing any conclusions. You would think, wouldn’t you, that this would be a good opportunity to retract his article? But he does not. For all his concessions and regrets and Damascene conversion to scientific caution, Saletan never retracts any of his statements or arguments. The extent of his mea culpa is to regret not informing the readers of the source of his information.

And this, dear readers, is what is wrong with the IQ hereditarians. They want to believe. Even when their evidence crumbles in their hands, even when their sources are discredited and their arguments skewered, they do not change their minds. Instead they deflect criticism onto irrelevancies. (Memo Mr Saletan: your failure was not so much that you failed to describe the source of your information, but that you reported it as factual and impeccable in the first place. When it comes to transgressions, apologising for the minor does not make amends for the greater.) One simply cannot refuse to give ground under such a barrage without a massive emotional investment in one’s position. Who, Mr Saletan, is the creationist now?