“Superior: The Return of Race Science,” by Angela Saini

“People so much wanted the story to be true . . . that they couldn’t look past it to more mundane explanations.” – Angela Saini, Superior.

I happened to be reading this book around the same time as I attended the Metascience conference, which was motivated by the realization during the past decade or so of the presence of low-quality research and low-quality statistical methods underlying some subfields of the human sciences.

I like Saini’s book a lot. In some sense it seems too easy, as she points at one ridiculous racist after another, but a key point here is that, over the years, prominent people who should know better have been suckers for junk science offering clean stories to support social prejudices. From Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century to David Brooks and the Freakonomics team a hundred years later, politicians, pundits, and scientists have lapped up just-so stories of racial and gender essentialism, without being too picky about the strength of the scientific evidence being offered.

Superior even tells some of the story of Satoshi Kanazawa, but focusing on his efforts regarding racial essentialism rather than his gender essentialist work that we’ve discussed on this blog.

As Saini discusses, race is an available explanation for economic and social inequality. We discussed this a few years ago in response to a book by science journalist Nicholas Wade.

As Saini points out (and as I wrote in the context of my review of Wade’s book), the fact that many racist claims of the past and present have been foolish and scientifically flawed, does not mean that other racist scientific claims are necessarily false (or that they’re true). The fact that Satoshi Kanazawa misuses statistics has no bearing on underlying reality; rather, the uncritical reaction to Kanazawa’s work in many quarters just reveals how receptive many people are to crude essentialist arguments.

A couple weeks ago some people asked why I sometimes talk about racism here—what does it have to do with “statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science”? I replied that racism is a sort of pseudoscientific or adjacent-to-scientific thinking that comes up a lot in popular culture and also in intellectual circles, and also of course it’s related to powerful political movements. So it’s worth thinking about, just as it’s worth thinking about various other frameworks that people use to understand the world. You might ask why I don’t write about religion so much; maybe that’s because, in the modern context, religious discourse is pretty much separate from scientific discourse so it’s not so relevant to our usual themes on this blog. When we talk about religion here it’s mostly from a sociology or political-science perspective (for example here) without really addressing the content of the beliefs or the evidence offered in their support.

Tomorrow’s post: Laplace Calling