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Sunday, December 15, 2019

Race science crackpottery from HBD Chick

HBD Chick, like many defenders of race science who fancy themselves champions of free and open debate, has blocked Pinkerite on Twitter. But I occasionally take a peek at what she's up to from one of my other Twitter accounts.

As usual, it's race science crackpottery.

I am perfectly fine with calling Coyne and Pinker scientific racists. (I've already called Khan a racist.)

Others have called HBD Chick a racist, and The Forward grouped her in with Razib Khan and Steve Sailer. (Many have called Steve Sailer a racist.)

And when the hell is a representative of Bill Watterson going to tell HBD Chick to
stop abusing Watterson's copyright by associating Hobbes with her racism?



HBD Chick's tweets here illustrate perfectly the attempt by race science proponents to have it both ways - to make claims about race and intelligence (AKA strong pinkerism) while maintaining an escape hatch with their mumblings about "fuzzy boundaries" (weak pinkerism.)

I've noted that Steve Sailer uses the defense that critics of race science are guilty of trying to make race into "platonic essences." I'm surprised HBD Chick didn't use that term (she's very fond of Steve Sailer and vice versa.) That's the trick they use when critics of race science ask, if race is the biological reality that they, Pinker, Coyne and Khan like to claim it is, why can't they give biologically valid definitions of race or give us a list of all the races.

But it could be argued that they learned from Steven Pinker that in order to maintain some credibility, unless you are guaranteed a sympathetic audience, you have to outsource the strong pinkerism to people like Linda Gottfredson.

The claim that race is "a useful heuristic" concerning human populations is wrong. As I demonstrated last week, race science considers "Native American" and "East Asian" to be separate races, like they consider "European" a separate race. However 23andMe, while grouping "European" as a "global population" due to genetic similarities, grouped Native American in with East Asian.

Race science considered Native American and East Asian to be so distinct they assigned them different group IQ scores and claim those scores are based on innate genetics-based intelligence.

Race science depends on pre-20th century concepts of "race" and they prefer to keep it that way. Which is why even though 23andMe has been grouping East Asians and Native Americans together since at least 2017 based on genetic testing, this information is completely ignored by proponents of race "science."

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