"In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice" reads the headline on an
article in yesterday's New York Times. The Times re****ts that some
people are fretting about the implications of new discoveries about
genetic differences between races:
The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear,
could undermine principles of equal treatment and
op****tunity that have relied on the presumption that
we are all fundamentally equal...
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together
highly speculative conclusions about the historically
charged subject of race and intelligence from the new
biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan
described a recently published study that linked several
snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database
used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed
that two of the snippets were found more often in
Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular
bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q.
snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds
or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or
that their combined influence might be dwarfed by
environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic
differences between races, proclaimed the author of
the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer,
means "the egalitarian theory," that all races are equal,
"is proven false."
Note that "the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal" is quite
different from the notion "that all races are equal." The former is a
moral principle, a premise about the basic dignity of every individual;
the latter is an empirical presumption about group averages in
measurable traits. Someone with an IQ of 80 is as human as someone with
an IQ of 120; and this is so regardless of whether the average IQ of one
race is different from that of another.
What worries people like those in the Times story is that racial
differences in IQ or other traits seem to lend empirical sup****t to
racist theories. But those theories are qualitatively wrong, so that no
empirical evidence could make them right. If all individuals are of
equal dignity and worth regardless of IQ, then a group is not
fundamentally superior or inferior to another group by virtue of
differences in average IQ.
It seems that some very smart people mistakenly think that intelligence
is a measure of fundamental worth. Maybe they're a little too impressed
with their own brilliance.
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
|
