Immigration and IQ

Is it worth commenting on awful science?

Paige Harden and I (this post is strictly by me) have a reply to an article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Take a look at it, and the original article if you have a strong stomach, before reading the rest of this post. It is HERE.

I have a lot to say about this and it will take several posts.

Our reply is self-explanatory, and I won’t rehash it here. Instead, I would like to reflect a little on the ethics of publishing dreck like the target article, and the decisions faced by scientists like Paige and I when we are asked to comment on it.

You really should go read the target paper to get a clear view of how awful it is. The original opening paragraph of our response:

One might think that a paper combining such banal racial stereotypes, amateurish scientific execution, and poor editorial judgment would leave us uncertain about where to begin, but fortunately this manuscript offers an obvious place to start. This is a study of how immigrants to Germany from various countries, about half of them from Syria, perform on a standardized test of matrix reasoning. One predictor of immigrants’ test performance is a rating of their “evolution,” which was derived from two purported characteristics of their home country– “skin lightness” and “brain size.” What is called “skin lightness” was not quantified by measuring the light refracted off people’s skin, as has been done, for instance, in carefullyconducted genomic studies documenting that Southern African populations with the oldest genetic lineages have the lightest skin pigmentation within Africa. 1 Instead, a “student”, not otherwise described, consulted a map in a mid-century book, Le razze e i popoli della terra [Races and peoples of the earth, 1953/1967], by the Italian geographer, Renato Biasutti, who sketched global variation in skin tone based on existing ethnographic reports and his imagination. The reader is left to infer that darker skinned people are less “evolved.” Country-level estimates of “brain size” were obtained in similar fashion: A student simply consulted a map from Beals et al (1984) 3 (presumably Figure 3, not 4 as stated in the paper), which we reproduce here. We repeat: This map is how “brain size” was quantified in a paper accepted by a peer-reviewed journal.

If you compare this to the published opening they are pretty much the same, except that the outrage has been edited out. We (mostly Paige, who is a much nicer person than I am) did the editing ourselves, at the urging of editors. I am something of an intellectual hothead, and editors have been asking me to tone down my writing for my entire career. I recognize that it is almost always better to do so, and it is certainly a bad look to refuse. It is an unquestioned scientific virtue to be as cool and level-headed as possible, even as, perhaps, you are sliding in the knife.

There is a point at which the demand to be civil and collegial starts to be counter-productive, however. This piece is as close to Nazi propaganda as anything I have ever seen published in a supposedly reputable journal. We are talking about immigration to Germany, mind you, and whether it is acceptable to denigrate immigrant candidates with darker skin using the assertion that they are less evolved.

There is an obvious risk to agreeing to comment on something like this, which is that no matter how critical one is, the very act of participating in the process helps normalize the discussion, accepts the premise that the relative evolution of immigrant candidates is the sort of topic that thoughtful scientist ought to be discussing politely. That process has already begun over on the other platform:

There is a vicious cycle at play here. A journal like JCI decides it is acceptable, or at least necessary in order to maintain intellectual diversity, to publish a paper that suggests dark-skinned people are less evolved and cognitively inferior. They recruit respectable (at least in Paige’s case) scientists to respond. When we respond with outrage and disgust, we are told to tone it down lest we seem uncollegial. We agree to do so, and wind up helplessly complicit in making pseudoscientific racism acceptable, just another topic for rational discussion among polite scientists.

More to say tomorrow.