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Will Goliath Blink? Charles Murray's Noble but Probably Futile Attack on the Orthodoxy.

Submission status
Withdrawn

Submission Editor
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Author
Bo M Winegard

Title
Will Goliath Blink? Charles Murray's Noble but Probably Futile Attack on the Orthodoxy.

Abstract

In this article, I review both Human Diversity and Facing Reality thematically rather than thoroughly, focusing exclusively race differences and ignoring the large (and excellent) sections in Human Diversity that address sex and class differences.

Keywords
cognitive ability, race, Crime, evolution, Charles Murray

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Paper

Reviewers ( 0 / 1 / 1 )
Reviewer 1: Considering / Revise
Reviewer 2: Accept

Thu 29 Jul 2021 20:35

Bot

Author has updated the submission to version #2

Reviewer

This is a nice, well-written review of the two most recent books by Charles Murray. I loved the style and some of the the literary flourishes (such as the corpse in the attic bit), though they can be a bit much at times, for example when adverbs and adjectives make the prose heavier than it has to be (e.g., "praiseworthy rebellion", "limpid, unembellished prose", "vexatious tactics", "a rewarding and courageous book that is nothing less than a vigorous and sustained attack", "Laudably balancing provocative ideas with judicious prose and ethical wisdom" etc.).

Here are some comments and suggestions for your consideration:

p. 1 "I review both thematically rather than thoroughly, focusing exclusively race differences": missing "on"
 

p. 4 it might be worth noting that the "not enough time for them to evolve unique psychological adaptations" has been used quite often by some prominent evolutionary psychologists, who have tried to distance EP from race-related research (and from behavior genetics more generally). This is interesting because EP is also in violation of a number of orthodoxies (about sex differences, mating, the function of aggression...), but by and large, the field has steered clear of anything associated with the biology of race.

p. 5 "This is understandable for those who only vaguely remember some guy named Mendel from high school biology. If pea plants can change dramatically because of differences in one gene, then why can’t humans? " Sounds a bit condescending; Lewontin's fallacy is a verison of this idea and has persuaded a lot of smart people over the years.

p. 5 hard/soft sweeps: you may also want to mention "polygenic adaptation", which is not characterized by sweeps to fixation but by subtle changes in frequency across large numbers of loci (see https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008035 ).

p. 5 "He examines the GWAS..." I re-reasd this paragraph a couple of times and it's not entirely clear what Murray did or what these correlations measure. Please clarify.

p. 5 "Murray resolutely refrains from speculating, declining to forward a single concrete example of a likely difference in cognitive repertoires." Well, Nicholas Wade did offer some (clumsy but explicitly labeled) speculations in A Troublesome Inheritance, and that more or less spelled doom for the book. It's a bit of a catch-22 for an author writing on this topic.

p. 6 "But this example is importantly different from the many incendiary race differences researchers may discover because it seems to “favor” the group that is not “privileged” (i.e., women). " An example of sex differences that are taboo might reinforce this point.

p. 8 Why "Africans" in the second paragraph? Sounds odd

p. 10 "... and Goliath won’t even blink." This is an effective ending, but somehow left me with many unanswered questions. What happens in practice if the orthodoxy becomes invulnerable? How are other disciplines (genetics, evolutionary biology) going to be affected? For how long is this sustainable? Any possible surprises on the horizon? Are Murray's worries and projections about the future reasonable? What are the prospects of attempts to criticize "systemic" theories without resorting to hereditarianism? And so on. In short, I think I would like to hear more about your thoughts and extrapolations. Of course this is completely up to you, but I thought I'd share my reaction.

FYI, here's a review of Human Diversity that used the book as a trampoline for all sorts of intriguing trains of thought:

http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/ . It's a very different approach (and more suited for a blog than a journal review) but I hope you'll find it interesting.

Author

Thank you very much for the review. I will take it under consideration and submit a new version soon. Thanks again! 

Bot

Author has updated the submission to version #3

Reviewer
Replying to Bo M Winegard

Thank you very much for the review. I will take it under consideration and submit a new version soon. Thanks again! 

Hi, I saw you uploaded version #3 of the manuscript and am wondering if you're going to reply to the comments as well.

Author
Replying to Reviewer 2
Replying to Bo M Winegard

Thank you very much for the review. I will take it under consideration and submit a new version soon. Thanks again! 

Hi, I saw you uploaded version #3 of the manuscript and am wondering if you're going to reply to the comments as well.


Hi, I'm very sorry. I included the changes in my new version, but I will also respond. 

Author
Replying to Reviewer 2

This is a nice, well-written review of the two most recent books by Charles Murray. I loved the style and some of the the literary flourishes (such as the corpse in the attic bit), though they can be a bit much at times, for example when adverbs and adjectives make the prose heavier than it has to be (e.g., "praiseworthy rebellion", "limpid, unembellished prose", "vexatious tactics", "a rewarding and courageous book that is nothing less than a vigorous and sustained attack", "Laudably balancing provocative ideas with judicious prose and ethical wisdom" etc.).



Thank you for the compliments and for the suggestions. My writing is adjective heavy, but I will leave it that way while acknowledging that it's not everybody's cup of tea! 

Here are some comments and suggestions for your consideration:

p. 1 "I review both thematically rather than thoroughly, focusing exclusively race differences": missing "on"


Thank you. I added this. 
 

p. 4 it might be worth noting that the "not enough time for them to evolve unique psychological adaptations" has been used quite often by some prominent evolutionary psychologists, who have tried to distance EP from race-related research (and from behavior genetics more generally). This is interesting because EP is also in violation of a number of orthodoxies (about sex differences, mating, the function of aggression...), but by and large, the field has steered clear of anything associated with the biology of race.


This was a great suggestion, and I added a sentence. I think EP did this strategically, although I suspect a few of the early EPs who were the most vocal about this were true believers as it were. 

p. 5 "This is understandable for those who only vaguely remember some guy named Mendel from high school biology. If pea plants can change dramatically because of differences in one gene, then why can’t humans? " Sounds a bit condescending; Lewontin's fallacy is a verison of this idea and has persuaded a lot of smart people over the years.



I honestly didn't mean this to sound condescending, and I was only referring to the views of ordinary lay people. Lewontin's argument has persuaded smart people, but is underdetermined, in my view. If there weren't moderate-to-large phenotypic (psychological) diffs that were caused at least partially by variation in genes, then his argument about the taxonomic insignificance of race might have been correct. And since many smart people think that all psychologcial variation is environmentally caused, it's not surprising to me that they buy his argument. At any rate, I don't think this is condescending, but I do get your point. 

p. 5 hard/soft sweeps: you may also want to mention "polygenic adaptation", which is not characterized by sweeps to fixation but by subtle changes in frequency across large numbers of loci (see https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008035 ).
 

p. 5 "He examines the GWAS..." I re-reasd this paragraph a couple of times and it's not entirely clear what Murray did or what these correlations measure. Please clarify.


I rewrote to try to clarify. Thank you for the suggestion. 

p. 5 "Murray resolutely refrains from speculating, declining to forward a single concrete example of a likely difference in cognitive repertoires." Well, Nicholas Wade did offer some (clumsy but explicitly labeled) speculations in A Troublesome Inheritance, and that more or less spelled doom for the book. It's a bit of a catch-22 for an author writing on this topic.


Absolutely. And Reich probably lied when he argued (like Henrich) that genetic variation will bear no resemblance to current "stereotypes." That is preposterous! But I understand the strategic calculus. 


p. 6 "But this example is importantly different from the many incendiary race differences researchers may discover because it seems to “favor” the group that is not “privileged” (i.e., women). " An example of sex differences that are taboo might reinforce this point.

p. 8 Why "Africans" in the second paragraph? Sounds odd

I changed this. Murray used "African," but I tried to remain consistent throughout. Thanks for the recommendation. 
 

p. 10 "... and Goliath won’t even blink." This is an effective ending, but somehow left me with many unanswered questions. What happens in practice if the orthodoxy becomes invulnerable? How are other disciplines (genetics, evolutionary biology) going to be affected? For how long is this sustainable? Any possible surprises on the horizon? Are Murray's worries and projections about the future reasonable? What are the prospects of attempts to criticize "systemic" theories without resorting to hereditarianism? And so on. In short, I think I would like to hear more about your thoughts and extrapolations. Of course this is completely up to you, but I thought I'd share my reaction.

I'll speculate here. I think it's probably sustainable for quite a long time. The costs appear small, since most important research is conducted and scholars simply obfuscate. On the other hand, having truth on one's side is nice and consistently defending errors or rejecting more plausible theories because they are politically inconveniant is vexing. I've learned not to make bold predictions, though, because I have been wrong so often! In 2014 or so, for example, I thought the time was ripe to start writing about race. Since then, it's only become worse. 

I think one can argue against systemic racism without resorting to hereditarianism, but it's difficult. In my view, if hereditarianism is false, then progressivism is the most reasonable alternative. After all, what could be causing such a large suppression of cognitive ability if not the legacy of racism? Culture? But where did the culture come from? And why does one group consistently create a less cognitively enhancing culture? At minimum, it's nearly impossible to fight against systemic racism without at least being honest about the underlying gaps. How else might we explain huge outcome disparities? 



 

FYI, here's a review of Human Diversity that used the book as a trampoline for all sorts of intriguing trains of thought:

http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/ . It's a very different approach (and more suited for a blog than a journal review) but I hope you'll find it interesting.


Thank you for the link! 

 

There is far too much snark in this paper for my liking. The author should ask himself: "Who am I trying to reach?" There is no point in preaching to the converted. He should be trying to reach people on the other side who are having doubts about their position or, perhaps, have never fully agreed with it. If those people are his target audience, he shouldn't be ridiculing them at every possible opportunity.

Ridicule often seems coherent only in the heat of an argument. On paper, it can be a lot less convincing. The author begins his paper by ridiculing "intellectuals" who deny that race exists and yet who "obsess about racial disparities and injustices and actively promote policies that treat people of different races differently." Well, the contradiction is only apparent. Race may not exist as a biological reality but it does exist as a sociological reality. At the end of the paragraph, the author finally makes this point: "although race does not actually exist, it is real because the masses believe that it is real and therefore treat people of different (illusory) races differently. And this differential treatment causes disparate outcomes." 

That argument may be wrong, but it is coherent. It makes sense to the people who believe it. Why not skip the ridicule and begin the paper with that argument?

The paper could easily be cut down to half its size by cutting out the snark and the gratuitous insults. And it would be a lot more convincing. Take, for instance, this sentence: "the West is beset by pervasive and powerful “isms” (sexism, racism, and classism) that hold people back like invisible chains." The author seems to be ridiculing the idea of invisible entities. But are genetic differences in ability any less invisible? Can you see a genome? Even IQ is not all that visible. I have met people with IQ in the 90s who can carry on a normal conversation and who seem visibly normal. Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but the author seems to be saying "If you can't see it, it doesn't exist." 

And then there's this sentence: "orthodoxy’s contention that race differences are superficial because humans are all Africans under the skin." The author seems to be referring to the "Out of Africa" model. That's another debate, and it has nothing to do with the debate over race. I have met proponents of the multiregional model and I have met proponents of the "Out of Africa" model. You are as likely to meet race realists among the latter as among the former. Phil Rushton believed in the Out of Africa model. I do, for that matter. Introducing the Out of Africa debate into this paper is like introducing the issue of climate change or COVID-19 passports. It's irrelevant. It will just alienate people in the target audience who might otherwise be sympathetic.

A second problem with this paper is overwriting. There are too many adjectives, too many adverbs, and too much verbiage. Again, this paper would be a lot more convincing if the author could simply get rid of all that dead weight.

Reviewer
Replying to Bo M Winegard

Thanks. I'm not going to insist on matters of style and tone, though I still think the review could be improved on these counts. The comment by "Khaki Damocloids" points to some of the same issues, and there is still time to reconsider. That said, I don't see any factually incorrect statements or problems with the content of the review, so I'm going to accept the manuscript.

Author

Thank you. I will read it once more thorougly and then resubmit a final draft. I will take your comments seriously, even if I ultimately reject some of the proposals. 

Bot

Author has updated the submission to version #4

Reviewer

Winegard presents a review of two books by Charles Murray (Human Diversity, Facing Reality). Overall I must concur with previous reviewers that the paper is a bit too long and its heavy prose at the beginning (which is rapidly abandoned by the author later) is discouraging and unnecessary. At 12 pages, the paper is clearly too short to replicate both books, but it is too long and meandering to be a concise summary of the main points. Both books deal with a simple – and in case of race, overlapping – theme: that easily measured biological differences between human groups (sex, race, class) are better explanations for differences in outcomes than the often mysterious social forces the standard social science model proposes. Murray often makes a case for this by pointing out the absence of a dose-dependent relationship between the proposed social cause and the effect, or the persistence of the effect once proposed mediators are controlled for, both standard procedures in the natural sciences. For example, sex differences are, if anything, larger in more gender equal countries, while black-white IQ gaps persist within the same job or socioeconomic status. Murray’s examples are very convincing and I am missing more of them – with a very simple presentation – from this review.

The focus of the review should especially be improved for Human Diversity. Here, the review only mentions parts about race differences, which are only a third of the book. In my view, sex and perhaps also class differences are just as controversial and in these cases there is even stronger evidence for  biological basis.

I don’t understand the description of Murray’s GWAS analyses in Human Diversity on page 5 (“Murray argues that we have strong evidence…”). For example, “The correlations are remarkably high, .98 for African and Asian groups and .97 for European groups.” – correlations between what? “The correlation for Africans and Europeans is .74” what does “and” mean here? A pooled sample? Training in one population and validation in another? In any case, I am not sure if this particular analysis deserves such a detailed description in a mere book review.

A response to opponents of race as a category I almost never see but the author could use is that while human genetic variation indeed is clinal and continuous, there is a difference in the size of admixed and unadmixed populations. For example, there are about a billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa with virtually only African ancestors and almost this much in Europe and Northern America with virtually only European ancestors going back tens of millennia. While there are admixed populations (for example, in the Sahel and in the United States) so clearly there are no “pure European” and “pure African” races, these number in the tens of millions at most. Human genetic variation often resembles a rainbow with bright red and blue bands and only faint hues of purple in between. A related point is that when history and technology produces unusual gene flow – for example, when European colonized the New World and imported African slaves – then populations which lived in perfect reproductive isolation suddenly find themselves close to each other, which makes the concept of “race” even more sensible to them that it seems when we look at modern genetic data. Although their descendants today are somewhat admixed, a Spanish conquistador, his indigenous servant and his African slave indeed did not have any common ancestors for tens of thousands of years.

The review of Facing Reality is the stronger part of this paper, but in my view still a bit too long. Winegard writes that “In many large cities in America, the violent crime disparity between Whites and Blacks is a multiple of 10.” I think this estimate might be towards the higher end because the white population of US cities tends to be above-average in human capital but the black population, if anything, is below-average. Are there nationwide comparisons on this, for example from FBI databases or victimization surveys?

In sum, my impression is that in the current form this review is stuck in an uncanny valley between a concise but data-based review of the books (perhaps best exemplified by Steve Sailer’s long-form articles) and a proper narrative review covering the same topic as the book (which should include original references, graphs and tables). For optimal impact, it should be simplified or extended further.