Wikipedia's science denialism on race & intelligence

Tracing Woodgrains’ recent Substack on all the damage done to Wikipedia by one energetically obsessive leftist editor, David Gerard, should lead to heightened skepticism about Wikipedia’s decline in objectivity on a number of topics, such as its notorious “Race and Intelligence” article.

Using Web Archive, I dredged up the first saved version of “Race and Intelligence” from the previous decade, February 13, 2010. While less than coherent, it’s vastly better than the current bogus Wikipedia version of the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Race and intelligence

The 2010 version comes, not unreasonably, with multiple warnings that the topic and contents are controversial:

This article also discusses issues regarding ethnicity and intelligence.

This article is currently being discussed in mediation. Please check with the mediator or other mediation participants before making any significant revisions, as the outcome of that discussion may involve major restructuring of the article.

--07:37, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.

Its neutrality is disputed. Tagged since May 2009.

It may not present a worldwide view of the subject. Tagged since October 2009.

It is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Psychology or the Psychology Portal may be able to help recruit one. Tagged since December 2009.

An editor has expressed concern that it is unbalanced. Tagged since April 2008.

The race and intelligence debate is a controversial issue, where considerations on both the nature of race and the meaning and measurement of intelligence have the potential to pre-empt the entire debate, according to many scholars.[1][2][3][4][5][6] Important related questions include whether intelligence can be accurately described by a single number, and whether the nature of intelligence is the same across cultures, as well as the emerging consensus that "races" as they are commonly understood are a social rather than a biological category.[7]

At the base of the debate is the observation that intelligence quotient (IQ) tests have demonstrated significant differences in the average scores of different population groups, particularly US Blacks and Whites (racially self-identified for the most part).

So, it states up front the basic fact that there exist racial differences in average IQ scores, most notably between white and black Americans.

No consensus exists regarding the meaning and/or relevance of these differences, and numerous interpretations have been proposed to clarify them. A particularly controversial facet of this debate is the relative degree to which the development of intelligence is affected by genetic factors on the one hand and environmental factors on the other.

This isn’t the most lucid prose, but at least the 2010 article got across the two basic facts about the topic:

• Empirical racial differences in intelligence exist beyond controversy.

• What remains controversial are the causes of the differences.

Within individuals, some factors of intelligence are clearly affected by genetics. However, no set populations of humans have been found to have significant genetic differences that would affect the average group intelligence. Also part of the debate is whether measures such as IQ can meaningfully quantify such differences, and whether it would be beneficial or ethical to study differences if they did exist.[6] Various explanations for racial group differences have been proposed, such as the effect of a population's health, differences in education quality, sub-conscious psychological factors, and institutional racial discrimination. While environmental differences could statistically account for differences in test scores, no specific environmental factor has been identified as a definitive cause, and no direct evidence exists for genetic factors.[8]

So, neither reasons of nature nor nurture have yet emerged as proof of the causes of the universally observed empirical differences in average IQ.

Although research and debate on race and intelligence encompasses a variety of topics, the nature versus nurture question attracts the most public attention.

Then the article goes into much more detail, starting out with the post-Bell Curve 1995 report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns by a task force of the American Psychological Association (APA) headed by psychologist Ulric Neisser:

The long-standing 15+/- point difference between the intelligence test scores of African Americans and White Americans, though it might have narrowed somewhat in recent years, remains unaccounted for despite proposed explanations claiming systematic bias, differences in culture or socioeconomic status (SES), or genetics as the sole underlying cause.

The 2010 article isn’t ideal, but a close reader would learn a lot from it and find in it decent arguments for most sides of most questions in this controversy.

In contrast, the current “Race and Intelligence” Wikipedia article is reminiscent in its smug tone and utterly one-sided propagandizing of Stalin’s Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Here’s the opening of the article as of July 11, 2024:

Race and intelligence

Discussions of race and intelligence – specifically regarding claims of differences in intelligence along racial lines – have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the modern concept of race was first introduced. With the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century, differences in average test performance between racial groups were observed, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. Complicating the issue, modern science has concluded that race is a socially constructed phenomenon rather than a biological reality, and there exist various conflicting definitions of intelligence.

Trust what The Science has concluded!

In particular, the validity of IQ testing as a metric for human intelligence is disputed.

Nah. We are 119 years into the era of IQ testing. We have gone undergone replications crises in most fields of psychology, except for psychometrics.

Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between groups, and that observed differences are environmental in origin.

Nah, that’s actually not true.

America has been trying at vast expense to close cognitive gaps between the races for six decades since the 1960s with little success.

Pseudoscientific claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have played a central role in the history of scientific racism.

Ironically, the the assertion by the small coterie of Wikipedia Science Deniaslists that inherent differences in intelligence are pseudoscience is a classic example of pseudoscience. A clique got together and decreed all other opinion other than their own on the complex question of race and intelligence to be “fringe” “pseudoscience,” so therefore no other ideas will be tolerated. Trust only The Science, not the Pseudoscience! How do you know which is which? Trust a small group of pseudonymous Wikipedia editors who managed through obsessive bureaucratic tenacity that would have brought a smile to the lips of Uncle Joe to monopolize the process of dogmatically outlawing all opposing scientific thought as Fringe Crimethink.

The first tests showing differences in IQ scores between different population groups in the United States were the tests of United States Army recruits in World War I. In the 1920s, groups of eugenics lobbyists argued that these results demonstrated that African Americans and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to Anglo-Saxon white people, and that this was due to innate biological differences. In turn, they used such beliefs to justify policies of racial segregation. However, other studies soon appeared, contesting these conclusions and arguing that the Army tests had not adequately controlled for environmental factors, such as socioeconomic and educational inequality between the groups.

Sorry, but over the last 107 years, America has seen an absolutely overwhelming number of cognitive tests showing that whites average higher intelligence than blacks. For example, Sean Reardon’s Stanford Educational Data Archive could not find a single school district out of the 2000 biggest in the US where blacks scored as high as whites.

This doesn’t prove that blacks will never equal whites in intelligence at some point in the future, but, clearly, more than a half century of lavish spending to bring that about has utterly failed.

It could in fact be that the liberal policies that have dominated over the last 60 years have perversely made the racial gap worse, and that the IQ gap could be narrowed by more rightwing treatment of blacks, such as demanding better behavior of them than liberal whites have required for the last several generations.

But we haven’t tried that. Instead, what we have tried, various left wing panaceas, have utterly failed.

Later observations of phenomena such as the Flynn effect and disparities in access to prenatal care highlighted ways in which environmental factors affect group IQ differences. In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Nah, sorry, that’s bogus. The last positive empirical finding in the liberal direction was the Flynn Effect almost a half century ago. It’s been 30 years since The Bell Curve was published and there has been zero empirical progress toward new data refuting it since then.

All that has happened since The Bell Curve has been that Science Denialists have organized more furtively and viciously to deny science.

People like David Gerard are nasty folks.

UPDATE: In the comments to this Substack, Rene Magritte suggests:

Rene Magritte

4 hrs agoLiked by Steve Sailer

There are a few other old versions of this article that I think are better than the one you linked to from 2010.

https://archive.is/8cYHT

This version, from 2007, is probably the most detailed the article has ever been, although it didn't stay that way for long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Race_and_intelligence&oldid=637890061

This version, from 2014, also was fairly good. It was written primarily by the Wikipedia user Maunus, who was personally opposed to a genetic explanation for group differences, but who also cared about the arguments for that position being adequately represented. There aren't many people like that left at Wikipedia anymore nowadays.