Race, IQ, And The Heritage Foundation Resignation

After the Heritage Foundation put out a report claiming that immigration “reform” will cost more in public funds than immigrants will contribute in taxes, opponents accused one of the contributors of racism because of his PhD dissertation at Harvard. Jason Richwine has suddenly resigned from the Heritage Foundation and it seems he was forced to do so. According to Fox News, his resignation “has triggered an impassioned skirmish among conservatives – who are divided over whether Jason Richwine was unfairly targeted.” Richwine argued in his dissertation that “the average IQ of Hispanics and other immigrants is lower than that of the country’s white ‘native’ population and that the disparity will likely persist over generations.”


First of all, the Heritage Foundation is not repudiating their immigration report because of Richwine’s contribution to it, so I don’t see why anyone there considered it a good idea for him to resign in response to the controversy. Others are blaming the immigration paper on DeMint’s leadership as a politician. But the study was created, and Richwine was hired, before DeMint began his job there.
Here’s the problem: only by allowing open study about IQ without shame can we be liberated from fears and superstition. Back in 2002, Thomas Sowell (a great economist who also happens to be an African-American) wrote a masterful column about the issues, pointing out how many mistakes have been made regarding IQ and how only later investigations overturned those mistakes. If we stifle the study of IQ by a politically correct regime that punishes those who break the “taboo,” we will never find where we have gone wrong. In fact, studies have debunked myths relating race to IQ. If such research is suppressed, such corrections will be suppressed. Many people will infer that we are afraid of IQ research because we are afraid of the truth.


Think about the precedent that has been set. A man who wrote a paper that makes claims that cast doubt on a current political push (immigration “reform”) is being attacked for breaking a “race taboo” in his past. How does that help a conversation about any issue? The man is obviously being attacked for political, not scientific, reasons.


For the record, I want people from other countries to be free to reside here if they are not secret agents planning to attack the US. I am also an IQ skeptic. I don’t think IQ predicts much other than one’s ability to score high on IQ tests. And from what I’ve read (which isn’t much), IQ can change extremely fast. Furthermore, it even changes between the sexes. Sowell points out:
“Studies had shown that females predominated among high-IQ blacks. One study of blacks whose IQs were 140 and up found that there were more than five times as many females as males at these levels. This is hard to explain by either heredity or environment, as those terms are usually defined, since black males and black females have the same ancestors and grow up in the same homes. Meanwhile, white males and white females have the same average IQs, with slightly more males at both the highest and lowest IQs.”


So I am quite doubtful about Richwine’s Harvard dissertation thesis.


However, until I become much more well-read on IQ studies, I really don’t have a right to say much. Yet that is what both Liberals and pro-immigration conservatives are doing—judging Richwine’s scholarship according to a preconceived notion of what conclusions he ought to arrive at. Depriving a man of his job is not likely to convince him that he is mistaken.
We ought to allow free discussion, argue about scientific claims, and not punish people for speech.

http://lastresistance.com/2101/race-...n-resignation/