Big Think

David Berreby commented on Pinker v. Gladwell on November 19, 2009, 12:40 PM

It's no endorsement of witch-hunters to say that non-witch-hunters also disagreed with Summers. I said some scientists thought he was wrong. I didn't say they thought he should lose his job. (In fact, Summers was canned because of his lousy political skills, which made the gender uproar both the last straw for Harvard and a pretext for his resignation. To say he was driven out for this one statement is inaccurate and naive.) The PC attack on Summers was ridiculous. Why? It was all about roping off a subject so that debate can't take place -- in a place that should be dedicated to that debate. Pinker's attack on Gladwell seems to me similar in spirit: We shouldn't have to listen to this guy, he's anti-intellectual, and anti-science. Nailing Gladwell for glibness and superficiality on the specifics is fair and helpful. But saying he's a ``populist'' is tantamount to saying he hasn't got any place in the conversation at all. That's different. I don't see how it serves a controversial topic in science to insist that it isn't controversial. That's the point of my post. I wasn't saying Pinker is alone or surely wrong. I was just saying his claims for today's analytical methods are not shared by all psychologists, nor by all biologists, nor by all scientists. The idea that there are ``genes for'' behavior, for example, stimulates many interesting hypotheses, but ``let's assume x and see where it leads'' is very different from ``x is true.'' As Simon Fisher put it here (Cognition 101(2): 270-297, September 2006): `` [T]he deceptive simplicity of finding correlations between genetic and phenotypic variation has led to a common misconception that there exist straightforward linear relationships between specific genes and particular behavioural and/or cognitive outputs. The problem is exacerbated by the adoption of an abstract view of the nature of the gene, without consideration of molecular, developmental or ontogenetic frameworks.'' Is this populism? Why do Asians do better academically than whites even when the Asians are raised by white parents? I'd guess it's because Americans expect Asians to do well academically. This could be tested by comparing the test scores of Asians raised by whites in Asia with those Asians raised by whites in North America. According to one of the commenters, those scores should be the same. I'd expect them to be different. Because in the U.S. Asian academic effort takes place in the context of expectations about ``Asians.'' An only-in-America racial category, by the way -- in Japan it's people of Korean ancestry who have lower test scores than their fellow-students. And Koreans in Korea score better than ethnic Koreans in Japan. Doesn't make sense if scores reflect genetic differences in populations. Does make sense if scores reflect the effect of social status on performance.