Another Right Wing Abuse of Science

I occasionally read Steve Sailer’s blog, because I am interested in human biological diversity. Today he links (http://www.isteve.com/) to an article by John Derbyshire at NRO (http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Commentary/SpecterOfDifference.htm). I do not know whether he does so approvingly, but I found the article to be a piece of utter claptrap.

The truthful part of the article is that recent discoveries about human diversity in the genes that influence brain development show that people in different racial categories are differently endowed and that it may be desirable to consider differential endowments in formulating public policy. The rest is just so much bulls**t. In describing the significance of the findings, Derbyshire writes:

“but if different human groups, of different common ancestry, have different frequencies of genes influencing things like, for goodness’ sake, brain development, then our cherished national dream of a well-mixed and harmonious meritocracy with all groups equally represented in all niches, at all levels, may be unattainable.”

I beg to differ. There are no human “groups” based on different common ancestry (with the possible exception of some organized families or clans, and these are generally limited to a few generations back with not much chance for big evolutionary leaps). What we have are individual human beings who, for certain purposes, may be classified into categories based on their ancestry. Derbyshire has impermissibly reified the concept of “race”. In the context of the scientific publications to which he refers, the concept is legitimate and meaningful and is part of what is being studied. It does not, however, follow that the concept is equally applicable in a discussion of the moral or political implications of the findings.

One may infer that Derbyshire believes that people ought to be regarded in terms of racial “groups” rather than being treated as individuals, but the motivation for doing so is unclear. Perhaps Derbyshire believes that doing so might inure to his advantage somehow. This is textbook racialism.

The findings to which Derbyshire refers may well have little or no moral or political significance since, as is well known, there is no way to get from “what is” to “what ought to be”. If racial category A is inferior to racial category B on average on some dimension, this does not signify anything about the moral or political worth of individuals in either category.

Derbyshire goes on to write:

“…science is, I shall always believe, a fundamentally conservative profession. Pseudoscience and wishful thinking — they are usually the same thing — have their natural home on the political left, Marx’s “scientific socialism” being only the best-known example. True science doesn’t care what we believe or what we wish for. It just tells us what is, and leaves us to come to terms with it as best we can. Science is a Daddy discipline, not a Mommy discipline.”

This is a gratuitous slur on anyone who might disagree with Derbyshire and ought to embarrass anyone who understands how science works. Science is neither “conservative” nor “liberal” in the political sense of those terms, and Derbyshire again misapplies terms from one sphere, politics, to another, science. I suppose that science is “conservative” in the sense that it moves deliberatively, but it can also be seen as “liberal” in that it is not wedded to preconceptions or traditional views. The characterization of science as conservative and conservatives as being allied with science are ridiculous assertions in light of the right wing’s assaults on science and any form of reality testing.

The right appeals to “science” when it is perceived that science supports a right wing position. In this case, Derbyshire implies that social programs are pointless, and as authority he cites findings that he suggests show that the beneficiaries of social programs are probably too inherently inferior to benefit from them.

Derbyshire also writes:

“in his working hours a scientist owes devotion to only one deity, the one Rudyard Kipling called “the God of Things As They Are.” That God is, as Kipling himself was, profoundly conservative in all His works, and conservatives, religious or otherwise, have nothing to fear from Him. To judge from history, in fact, His greatest delight is to make fools — or slaves, or corpses — of pacifists, family-breakers, sexual liberators, dispensers of unconditional welfare, love-the-world purveyors of Uplift, Scientific Socialists, and deniers of unpleasant truths.”

Here Derbyshire claims that science and even history back up “conservative” views. Moreover, the universe itself is “conservative”? And the universe loves to enslave or kill people who disagree with Derbyshire. I suspect that what really thrills Derbyshire is that he gets to claim that his apparently racialist views are "scientific".

This is the only thing by Derbyshire I have ever read, and I am convinced from this one piece that he is completely off his nut.