I’m about to read Murray’s ‘Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender,
Race, and Class’ which came out last year. Can anyone recommend an
author that summarises the counter arguments?
I’m a psych. Nothing special but I’ve got a couple of publications using quantitative data and I’m aware of the main issues relevant to the replication crisis. (Also I’m aware that this isn’t a debate sub and that wasn’t my intent for coming here anyway so appreciate that the mods might have to delete this).
But anyway, looking at the 10 propositions (I assume you mean here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity) and without having a actually read the book, I’d say that:
- points 1, 2 and 3 are accepted and not even all that controversial.
- point 4 is past my depth. But it strikes me as a fairly meaningless assertion.
- point 5. I don’t know. I suspect this is the crux of most the controversy.
- point 6. I’m skeptical of as from what I understand there hasn’t been enough time for evolutionary pressure to be meaningful since we walked out of Africa.
- point 7. Seems reasonable as long as you’re attributing this to culture.
- point 8. Social behaviour? This seems like bullshit. Childhood adversity is one of the best predictors of adult maladaptive social behaviour (from what I understand). I would need to know what Murray means by social behaviour and how he differentiates this from personality; particularly agreeableness and extra version. The issue here may be that Murray is talking exclusively about psychology while omitting abnormal psychology (which obviously can be greatly influenced by environmental factors).
- point 9, I doubt that Murray would have robust evidence for determining cause and effect here.
- point 10. Seems reasonable but again, as long as we’re talking about psychology generally and not abnormal psychology.
> points 1, 2 and 3 are accepted and not even all that controversial.
What's the difference between a "vocation centered on people" and "vocation centered on things" in political science (or psychology?) and how are you quantifying this?
Fair enough. I'm happy to change to say that it's all controversial. I don't know the ins and outs of this but I can imagine that trying to distinguish jobs as 'centered on things or people' would quickly become complicated.
It falls apart once you look at the specifics.
Programming went from a female dominated career to a male dominated career within a century. Did it suddenly start being about “things” in the 1980s? Of course not.
Doctors, lawyers, politicians, and management are all male dominated careers. They’re also about people. Is being a surgeon more about “things” than being a nurse? No.
Meanwhile teachers were once all female, that’s changing, while professors used to be all male.
The real difference, once you dig into it, is status. When programming went from low status to high status, the women got kicked out. Men historically dominated the higher statuses of the same vertical (doctors vs. nurses and professors vs. teachers). That’s starting to change, but the status of a job has historically explained the difference between genders more than some bullshit “things vs. people” axis.
Based on my understanding:
1. is wrong ([https://www.genderscilab.org/blog/gender-equality-does-not-equal-gender-neutrality](https://www.genderscilab.org/blog/gender-equality-does-not-equal-gender-neutrality))
2. is right, but some evidence it is a malleable relationship ([https://www.pnas.org/content/108/36/14786](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/36/14786)) and likely not an adaptation ([https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/668168](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/668168))
3. is a distinction that doesn't seem to have a solid theoretical basis ([https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264233313\_Interests\_Gender\_and\_Science](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264233313_Interests_Gender_and_Science)
4. I'm less sure about, but brain dimorphism is less straightforward than Murray proposes and association to behavior is challenging
5. Is not true ([https://www.igb.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/Longetal2009.pdf](https://www.igb.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/Longetal2009.pdf))
6. Is not true, there are a handful of adaptations, but they're hardly 'extensive' and adaptations have occurred within Africa at a similar rate
7. Technically correct because of genetic drift but not as important as Murray suggests (and his primary analysis here is laughably bad but that's a post for another time)
8. Is not true ([https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/35/3/520/735787](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/35/3/520/735787))
9. Is very overstated and also not true considering the ultimate cause of class structure is our political and economic system (I wrote this one [https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol23-3-bio-politics/genetic-basis-genome-wide-association-studies-risk/](https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol23-3-bio-politics/genetic-basis-genome-wide-association-studies-risk/))
10. Is essentially unscientific and vacuous
The exact point that’s wrong is about whether the pattern is larger in “gender egalitarian” countries, with the implication always that when genders are treated equally they heavily sort into stereotypical gender roles and taken as evidence that it’s biological not social in origin. I think that article does a good job defusing the implied arguments
I was going only off the title. Perhaps there are deeper implied arguments, but not necessarily. Usually these ‘controversial’ takes tend to be more nuanced than what the storm they rile up would have you assume.
Re. Point 7. What’s the argument for there not being continental population differences in psychological capacities when there are clearly differences in physical capacities? E.g long distance running.
So 7 isn't just about phenotypic differences but differences at genetic variants that cause the phenotype (e.g. the phenotypic differences are due to genetic differences)
I actually did a study on that for cognitive traits and it's basically not true at all! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.24216 Genetic variants associated with education and cognitive ability are not anymore diverged than the rest of the genome (which isn't much at all). Long distance running is another case that likely isn't due to genetics (at least no one was provided solid evidence for it yet)
> There's more genetic diversity among Africans than among the whole rest of the world combined
[If you know anything about Haplogroups you would know that is simply not true.](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cx1XFUY8JgI/WHpg-occenI/AAAAAAAADNU/Fxyw0sGAWvgEdTmViUZBV5Igblw-xsTrwCPcB/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/World_Map_of_Y-DNA_Haplogroups.png)
Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue With a Racist or A Brief History of
Everyone Who Ever Lived handles the race section fairly well. Something
like Testosterone Rex or The Gendered Brain for the sex sections. For
The class sections maybe something like She Has Her Mother’s Laugh?
If you want a book that really gets to the heart of the metapolitics
of Murray’s book then I’d recommend Angela Saini’s books Superior and
Inferior, There’s also some older stuff by Richard Lewontin either
Biology as Ideology or Not In Our Genes. I second Panofsky’s Misbehaving
Science, William Tucker’s Funding of Scientific Racism is also good.
Feel free to DM me for advice on accessing some of these *wink wink*
Cheers. I’ve already read Fine’s Test Rex. From what I could gather that despite the way it was championed to me, she wasn’t actually offering an alternative to bio explanations of gender differences but just pointing out the ways that the current data is inconclusive.
You may find more of that in Lise Eliot or Gina Rippon's stuff, though my perception is that a lot of effort in general is spent by everyone showing that biological explanations are overenthusiastic and weaker than thought, but without well defined sociocultural mechanisms because that is quite a tall order to elucidate.
Paper-wise there may be stuff by people like Janet Hyde or Daphna Joel that also helps
I think Kevin Bird is doing some good
research in this area. (Hopefully this is on SciHub or you could ask
the author to send you the article - I may or may not have access to it
through my library, but let me know if you want me to check.)
Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of a Man was quite influential but
it’s getting a little old. I’m interested in reading Superior
by Angela Saini as well.
The most concise is probably Agustin Fuentes’ Race, Monogamy, and
Other Lies They Told You. Also Jonathan Marks’ Human Biodiversity
(ironically enough, I don’t know if this is where they took the term
from but it’s basically anti-hbd before hbd) or The Alternative
Introduction of Biological Anthropology. The [Race Reconciled issues of
American Journal of Physical Anthropology](https://www.livinganthropologically.com/biological-anthropology/race-reconciled-debunks-race/).
There are some older books that were written in response to The Bell
Curve like The Bell Curve Wars and Intelligence, Genes, and Success:
Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve. In terms of history, I’d check out
some of Paul Lombardo’s work like A Century of Eugenics in America and
Jackson, Jackson and Depew’s Darwinism, Democracy, and Race, Leonard’s
Illiberal Reformers, or Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare
State.
Yeah. Definitely interesting books but I struggle to see how Politics of Heroin is a direct refutation beyond 'rest of world struggling since CIA interference'.
AFSOC the premise was wrong. Then all non western knowledge would have the same or greater complexity than the western canon +O(1). Since we know the West is so fucking great and this can’t be the case we’ve reached a contradiction. QED ~~libtard~~ blue camp.
/s
> Reasons and Persons
Really? I wouldn't have put Parfit as even being in the ballpark of this topic.
Not that I would know as I've only read second hand accounts of his stuff.
Thanks for the list.
I haven’t read it yet, but based on an interview of the author, I bet
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee is a much better description of the
policy implications of race in America than anything Murray has to
say.
I don't really like Matt Yglesias but he had another great takedown of Murray at Vox [https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-murray-policy-wrong](https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-murray-policy-wrong)
Dang, I somehow both
(1) didn't know about this article from Yglesias, and
(2) first saw it from the last guy I expected to recommend MattY
By the by, are you enjoying his Twitter snark being unleased from vox? He was weirdly protective of Siskind after the NYTimes article, but I think he's got the heart of a sneerer.
Matty is just a true centrist, in that for every good take he has there's an equally bad take so he always averages in the middle. It frustrates me to no end.
> weirdly protective of Siskind after the NYTimes article
and then went completely silent when the leaked email embracing HBD came out, even when multiple people called his attention to it :thonks:
So there’s an interesting case of a guy who used to be a race realist
and then, through reading, convinced himself that race realism was
wrong. Rationalwiki
article on him.
Here are the two books he recommended that he said changed his
mind.
Not specifically anti-HBD but Adam Ruthetford/s How to Argue with a
Racist and Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science are both
very good. They are quite recent, easy to digest and provide important
context about the development of scientific racism.
[deleted]
Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue With a Racist or A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived handles the race section fairly well. Something like Testosterone Rex or The Gendered Brain for the sex sections. For The class sections maybe something like She Has Her Mother’s Laugh?
If you want a book that really gets to the heart of the metapolitics of Murray’s book then I’d recommend Angela Saini’s books Superior and Inferior, There’s also some older stuff by Richard Lewontin either Biology as Ideology or Not In Our Genes. I second Panofsky’s Misbehaving Science, William Tucker’s Funding of Scientific Racism is also good. Feel free to DM me for advice on accessing some of these *wink wink*
How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford
I think Kevin Bird is doing some good research in this area. (Hopefully this is on SciHub or you could ask the author to send you the article - I may or may not have access to it through my library, but let me know if you want me to check.)
Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of a Man was quite influential but it’s getting a little old. I’m interested in reading Superior by Angela Saini as well.
The most concise is probably Agustin Fuentes’ Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You. Also Jonathan Marks’ Human Biodiversity (ironically enough, I don’t know if this is where they took the term from but it’s basically anti-hbd before hbd) or The Alternative Introduction of Biological Anthropology. The [Race Reconciled issues of American Journal of Physical Anthropology](https://www.livinganthropologically.com/biological-anthropology/race-reconciled-debunks-race/). There are some older books that were written in response to The Bell Curve like The Bell Curve Wars and Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve. In terms of history, I’d check out some of Paul Lombardo’s work like A Century of Eugenics in America and Jackson, Jackson and Depew’s Darwinism, Democracy, and Race, Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers, or Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State.
Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education (Critical America, 2)
Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century (History and Philosophy of Biology)
Misbehaving Science by Aaron Panofsky
Neo-liberal genetics by Susan McKinnon
The Divide by Jason Hickel
Adapting Minds by David J. Buller
Making Sense of Evolution
Evolution Gender and Rape
Rock, Bone, and Ruin
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
The Rights of Indians and Tribes by Stephen L. Pevar
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy
The Dawn of Belief: Religion in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwestern Europe
Western Esotericism: A Concise History
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
Questioning Collapse
Others in the Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness.
Elements of Statistical Learning
Reasons and Persons
Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms
Discrete Mathematics and its Applications
Kolmogorov Complexity with Applications
Against the Romance of Community
Word and Object
Hosue of Leaves
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
It’s not a book but this essay by Nathan Robinson is the best takedown of Murray.
I haven’t read it yet, but based on an interview of the author, I bet The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee is a much better description of the policy implications of race in America than anything Murray has to say.
You don’t need to do this to yourself at all, Murray is a troll
how has nobody mentioned the Mismeasure of Man, yet? Gould and Murray had a huge fucking feud over this exact thing.
Not in our genes and human diversity by Richard lewinton are by far the best book which challenges genetic determinism
How to argue with a racist and superior are also quiet good
Jonathan Marks’ books are all great and give a lot of historical context.
While not an explicit attack on HBD, I would highly recommend Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Our Worst.
It goes into a lot of depth about the interplay between genes and other factors.
Have no book recs, but some people tried creating an antiHBD subreddit a while back, no idea how that worked out.
I’ve only read the “Class” chapter of Human Diversity and I liked it a lot.
So there’s an interesting case of a guy who used to be a race realist and then, through reading, convinced himself that race realism was wrong. Rationalwiki article on him.
Here are the two books he recommended that he said changed his mind.
https://www.amazon.com/DNA-Not-Destiny-Misunderstood-Relationship/dp/0393244083
https://www.amazon.com/Genes-Brains-Human-Potential-Intelligence/dp/0231178425
Not specifically anti-HBD but Adam Ruthetford/s How to Argue with a Racist and Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science are both very good. They are quite recent, easy to digest and provide important context about the development of scientific racism.