Not a single one of the leading population geneticists agrees with this, including J. Craig Venter, who led the Human Genome Project. I suggest you read Mark Yudell’s Race Unmasked or any of the papers by Alan Templeton on the subject, starting with this one.
Biologists haven’t just started using “ancestry” as a substitute for “race.” They are two distinct and non-interchangeable concepts, with the latter being a very weak proxy for the former.
The strongest “evidence” for “race realism” is that self-identified races align with continental geographic ancestry, but so what?
You can do a DNA test on a black person and say their ancestors originated from Africa, that’s not exactly meaningful, when you consider that sub-Saharan Africa has the largest human biodiversity on the planet, and all human biodiversity is, in fact, a subset of this. A Khoisan is more distant genetically from an Ethiopian than Africans as a whole are from white or Asian people.
To quote evolutionary biologist Michael Muehlenbein:
[T]he mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups.
Broadly speaking, for a category to be meaningful, a label should reflect characteristics that all group members share. From that perspective, racial labels are crude, unsystematic and superficial—a poor reflection of the underlying genetics. Traditional racial typologies largely relied on phenotypical characteristics, mainly skin color, which is why they ran into complications trying to systematize them.
For example, early 20th century anthropologists had a hard time reconciling the fact that Ethiopians and Somalis had black skin but their facial structure more closely resembled white people and Arabs, so they were called “Hamitic” Caucasians. At the same time, so-called Negrito peoples of the Philippines and Melanesia where classified as a subrace of negroid—the same as Mbuti Pygmies, though genetic testing has shown that the two groups are actually the most genetically distant on the planet.
As for Charles Murray…He’s an intellectually dishonest hack who doesn’t care where his statistics come from so long as they support his pet project of attacking the welfare state. He includes a disclaimer that he’s “resolutely agnostic” about the contribution of genetics to IQ, but his neutrality on this issue is belied by the fact that he disproportionately draws from so-called “hereditarian” sources that are making that claim.
Notice how Richard Lynn accounts for almost a full page of the Bell Curve’s bibliography.
Lynn has called for “incompetent cultures” to be “phased out,” which he insists is not a call for genocide.
If you want to claim that this is “moral panic” or some such nonsense, then I assure you his work can—and has—been firmly challenged on methodological grounds.
Also to give you some idea of his scientific rigor, or lack thereof: He once published a paper on race differences in penis size based entirely on self-reported data from the World Penis Website.
In Chapter 15, Murray and Herrnstein cites Marian Van Court, who writes regularly for the Neo-Nazi site Counter-Currents. Also they prolifically cite Rushton, Jensen, Gottfredson and a number of other Pioneer Fund affiliates
By contrast, he cites James Flynn, the most prominent voice from the other side of the debate, six times:
Former Pioneer Fund President JP Rushton was once reprimanded for coercing his students into filling out surveys about their personal sex life, including penis length and how far they could ejaculate. He’s cited almost twice as many times, despite being a notorious racist crank.
If anything, Murray is not maligned enough. Yes, I’m not being objective. I’ll admit that, but at least I’m transparent about my biases and I support my conclusions well. I’m not taking a bunch of far-right junk and passing it off as disinterested science, like Murray. Often, the facts fall on one side or the other. Balance and faux objectivity are an inferior substitute for the truth.
