Oct 17 2008

If you don’t want to know, don’t ask

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 9:20 am

Science in the age of Obama will be even more politicized than it is now…. and it is already very politically driven.  There are a great many questions that are probably answerable with suitable research, and many of these questions are just to un-PC to even be asked, let alone funded.  John Derbyshire has a provocative article on this point, and here are some key graphs:

[W]e are passing from the Age of Physics to the Age of Biology. It is not quite the case that nothing is happening in physics, but certainly there is nothing like the excitement of the early 20th century. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.

The life sciences, by contrast, are blooming, with major new results coming in all the time from genetics, zoology, demography, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychometrics, and other “hot” disciplines. The physics building may be hushed and dark while its inhabitants mentally wrestle with 26-dimensional manifolds, but over at biology the joint is jumpin’.

…..

Whether it will go on jumpin’ may depend on the result of November’s election. There is a widespread feeling in the human sciences â€” particularly in genetics, population genetics, evolutionary biology, and neurophysiology â€” that the next five to ten years will see some sensational discoveries. Unfortunately those discoveries will have metaphysical implications more disturbing than were those of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and Dirac may have seriously upset our ideas about matter and energy, but at least they left our psyches and our political principles intact.

Those items may not remain intact much longer. The conceptual revolution among human-sciences researchers has in fact already taken place. This is not widely understood because (a) news outlets are very reluctant to report it, (b) powerful political forces have an interest in suppressing it, and (c) researchers prefer getting on quietly with their work to having their windows broken by mobs of angry protestors.

Most people still think of human-science controversies in terms of nature/nurture. As a matter of real scientific dispute, that is all long gone. Nature/nurture arguments were at the heart of the sociobiology wars that roiled the human sciences through the last third of the 20th century. (The 2000 book Defenders of Truth, by the Finnish sociologist of science Ullica SegerstrÃ¥le gives a full â€” and so far as I can judge, very fair â€” account.) The dust of battle has pretty much settled now, in science departments if not in the popular press, and nature is the clear victor. Name any universal characteristic of human nature, including cognitive and personality characteristics. Of all the observed variation in that characteristic, about half is caused by genetic differences. You may say that is only a half victory; but it is a complete shattering of the nurturist absolutism that ruled in the human sciences 40 years ago, and that is still the approved dogma in polite society, including polite political society, today.

…..

We are about to find out whether our traditional devotion to free speech and free enquiry can survive real, incontrovertible results from the human sciences; and in particular, in the event of an Obama victory, whether that devotion can survive under a left-liberal administration headed by a cultural Marxist â€” an administration much more interested in shoring up the soft totalitarianism of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” than in permitting the discovery of true facts about human nature.

There are questions that biologists aren’t supposed to ask, and questions social scientists aren’t supposed to ask, and so on.   I’ve reported on other manifestations of this here and here and here and here.  And, in the current climate change controversy, there is a clear preference for research funding to go to scientists who will affirm anthropogenic climate change, on the order of 100 to 1.  Most researchers know they don’t have much chance of getting funding if they are skeptical in any way about climate change, and its causes, despite the many experts who demur.

Herewith, questions we aren’t supposed to ask, whose answers would threaten current orthodoxies all through the politically correct universe in which we live.

1) What, exactly, is contribution of genetics to the intelligence of populatons of varying races and origins?  The answer to this question need not threaten any particular individual, since we know that geniuses are found in all population groups, and dunces, too.  This is a question about norms for populations, and it threatens the Left because it has implications for public policy in education, employment, etc., particularly in the matter of affirmative action (which ALWAYS comes down to quotas, in the end), and exactly how we will evaluate our success in such matters.

2) Some social science research I’d love to see:

a)  On the matter of who listens to which talk radio shows, and why left/liberal talk radio shows mostly fail:  What proportion of left/liberal talk radio listeners have jobs?  What proportion of right/conservative talk radio listeners have jobs?  How many listeners to right/conservative talk radio would have the option to watch TV in the same time slot?  How many listeners of left/liberal talk radio would have the option to watch TV in the same time slot?  This is not idle curiosity, nor is it mere polemics.  Congress under Obama will certainly renew the “fairness doctrine” requiring as many hours of “left” radio as “right” radio from each station.  (No similar requirement will be imposed on TV, or publicly funded university faculty hiring, or government civil service hiring, or….  you get the idea.)  If it could be absolutely proved that talk radio is mostly right leaning because the people who are listening at that time are people with jobs, who would not be ABLE to watch TV at the same time (the main competition, surely), it would at least embarrass Congress…  for about 5 minutes, maybe.

b)  On a similar matter, I really haven’t seen anyone report these numbers (I expect they are available, somewhere, but the reason YOU don’t know, either, is because they aren’t reported widely):

For both Democrats and Republicans:  what proportion of each, in terms of registered voters,

have jobs?

pay income tax?

are non-military government employees or retirees, in any capacity?

are military or retirees, in any capacity?

inherited wealth?  (have to set a standard for “wealth”)

Along these lines, there is an absolutely huge list of social science research relating various demographic groups to political orientation, and it is even possible we will discover some genetic basis to political tendency (though I’m sure it would be highly modifiable by environment, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a connection).

Imagine the fallout if it were discovered that a particular genetic marker produced 70% or more members of a certain political party, and if that genetic marker were found to be very common in a particular racial group, but not in another.

THAT would be fun.

I’m just getting started with this, I think.  Inquiring minds want to know.  I may have some more questions for biology and social science to address in an upcoming post.  This whole area, of course, is related to the ways political correctness affects what’s allowed to happen in academia, as well as “the sciences”.

Leave a Reply