ow should scientists react to the wave of authoritarianism and intolerance that is
sweeping college campuses? Based on my conversations with my fellow scientists, there
seem to be two strategies. One is to deny that anything is wrong, while steadfastly
avoiding any comment on anything controversial. The other is to change their beliefs
so they can convince themselves that what is controversial is beyond the pale of
discussion.
Both attitudes are forms of self-censorship, and it's how humans often react in a repressive environment. In academia we're free to say anything we like, as long as it is the same as what everyone else believes. If it's not, we keep quiet, lest some bureaucrat or administrator take offense (or pretend to take offense on someone else's behalf) and destroy our career.
That's a polite way of saying that we actually have much less freedom of speech than we think. Freedom of inquiry is contracting, and many of us are in deep denial about it.
One time, a fellow scientist confided in me that they believed in creationism. They told me the arguments behind it, and then begged me not to tell anyone. Creationism is something that I regard as a probable scientific dead-end. But freedom of inquiry, like freedom of speech, is all or none. We must be free to consider any possibility, even creationism.
DNA double helix. Structure of Promoter-Bound TFIID and Model of Human Pre-Initiation Complex Assembly. From Louder et al., Nature 531, 604–609 (2016). Link The bases (A,G,C, and T) are shown in blue. Rendered in Chimera
Then there's James Watson, a brilliant scientist who won the Nobel Prize along with Francis Crick for discovering the double helix structure of DNA. Perhaps foreshadowing their future outspokenness, their paper also contained this sentence, noted for being the only humorous line—a thigh-slapper by scientific standards—ever to appear in a scientific journal:
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
Watson was stripped of his honors last week by his employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, because he stopped cracking jokes and started saying things people didn't want to hear, namely that different races have different IQs, and that the differences can be ascribed to genetics.
This is something that, while undoubtedly impolite, could in principle be demonstrated true or false, if one were inclined to do so, by examining the evidence. But for the authoritarian mind, evidence is irrelevant: if a speaker challenges the accepted dogma, he or she is a heretic and must be excommunicated, made to grovel if possible, and fired in disgrace.
This makes us scarcely better today than 16th century Europe, where anyone expressing an idea considered heretical, like Ulrich Zwingli (1531) and Giordano Bruno (1600) and thousands of others, were burned at the stake.
For the record, my opinion is that if survival of the human species is a desirable goal (and I recognize this is a value judgement), and if IQ is tied to survival (which I take to be self-evident), then all humans need to have their IQ raised. Focusing on differences among groups, whether genetic or cultural, distracts us from the bigger, more important picture. Therefore, Watson's claims are of little scientific interest. But he must be free to make them.
Science will screech to a halt if scientists refuse to inquire about natural phenomena like human intelligence for fear of being driven out of science. The administrators and bureaucrats at CSHL are primarily to blame for this, as is the government for empowering them, but scientists are still the raison d'être for research funding, and they must start defending their right to entertain unpopular ideas if they wish it to continue to exist.
What if it turned out that by studying group differences in IQ we could discover how the brain works? Or if there were some unknown biological toxin that interferes with intellectual functioning in one group but not another? If it is illegal—as it already is across wide swaths of Europe—to suggest that such a difference might exist, we will never discover those things.
Granted, it would have been more expedient for Watson to qualify his conclusions, or to couch them in impenetrable jargon, to stave off the inevitable criticism. But why is this necessary? Why is his idea so outrageous?
It is because of an assertion made by many academics that everyone is identical at the group level, and to think otherwise is to claim moral superiority of one group over another. These activists believe that males and females, and all ethnic groups, have identical native ability. Therefore, if there are differences in achievement, they must be caused by discrimination.
Since measurable group differences in achievement are strongly evident, the activists must convince us that racism is everywhere. They know that proving that group differences exist would destroy their ideology. Therefore no one must be free to question their initial assertion.
It was Julius Axelrod, another Nobel laureate, who told us we should never be afraid of being wrong. I never got the opportunity to find out why he believed this, but the reason, I believe, is clear: science depends on the freedom to be wrong; without it, science will devolve into a sterile monoculture.
To say something judged false is embarrassing. To fail to stand up for a colleague because defending them might get you in trouble is simple cowardice. To pretend to see both sides of a question in order to avoid taking a stand is intellectual dishonesty, and it is the type of dishonesty that will see the boundaries of science mysteriously but inexorably contract until none of what is left is worth preserving.
We must have an unyielding allegiance to empirical truth, however inconvenient it may be. James Watson might be factually correct or he might not, but it is to the shame of Cold Spring Harbor that they pilloried him for expressing his opinion, and a disgrace that so few in the scientific community defended him.
jan 18 2019, 4:40 am. last edited jan 18 2019, 7:07 am
Update, Feb 05 2019:
Another point: Advocates assert that IQ tests are racially biased. It is true that
psychometric measurements are not 100% accurate. But the claim that the tests
exhibit cultural bias, whatever that may be, is unprovable, so activists often
bully people into agreeing with them. When bullying is used instead of rational
argument it's a sign that the argument is on shaky ground. Perhaps Watson was more
interested in rejecting the bullying than in the question of whether there are
group differences in IQ.
