By Stephen Watson 
Recent years have seen a resurgence of “racial science” (the attempt to establish races as robust biological categories) and with it the attempt to ascribe the psychological and intellectual characteristics of people of different races to genetics (called “hereditarianism”). If the hereditarian thesis is correct, then the disparity in performance between black and white people on IQ tests, and presumably on economic and social outcomes, is due to innate ability rather than environmental factors such as discrimination or childhood poverty. Advocacy of such ideas is not only to be found on far-right websites; some of it has made its way into the mainstream scholarly literature, lending it an air of credibility.
In a series of blog posts, philosopher of biology Jonathan Kaplan takes on some recent hereditarian papers, arguing that they are not merely wrong, but are intellectually dishonest. In his first post, he addresses a paper entitled “Dodging Darwin: Race, evolution, and the hereditarian hypothesis,” which argues that evolutionary biology is failing to apply the same methods of explaining the psychological attributes of different races as it does to the physical. Kaplan charges the authors with misrepresenting the intent of many of the works they cite (including one of his own), and of obfuscating use of the term “Darwinian Research Tradition,” as if modern evolutionary biologists were still cribbing from Darwin.
It is worth noting that another movement that often abuses the name of Darwin in this way is creationism and intelligent design: Darwin was important, but he was also wrong on several points (including being, like most 19th century intellectuals, a bit of a racist), and science has moved on since his day.
The crux of Kaplan’s attack is that the authors underestimate the threshold required to declare that we have found an adaptive explanation for some trait. Two obvious examples — skin pigmentation and adult lactose tolerance — are considered to be genetic adaptations to conditions, but establishing them as such took a lot of work in fields in such as archaeology, anthropology, and developmental biology, in addition to genetics. No comparable body of work exists that would allow us to declare that, for example, Asians are disposed to be “collectivistic.”
We look forward to future installments of the series.
As a historian it strikes me how the concept of race has morphed through the ages. The Romans had no such concept, gladly enslaving Greeks, who looked very much like themselves, while forming alliances with Nubians, who were African. Much later, in Europe, race became synonymous with nationality, hence the English race, the Irish race, the German race (before there was a Germany), etc. That was before race became a justification for such atrocities as slavery, and even then it took centuries to evolve. In the seventeenth century Africans were enslaved simply because of a demand for labour, only much later were science and religion brought into play to justify the institution of slavery, the United States being a notable example. Such justifications were subsequently brought into play again to support Jim Crow laws and segregation. It should be noted that in Rome, given a lack of racist justification for slavery, the manumission rate was sometimes so high that the senate felt the need to legislate a maximum from time to time. A freed slave became a supporter in one’s political campaigning.