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How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level. We've known for a long time now that intelligence, mental health and a whole bunch of other traits relating to ability and personality are very heavily influenced by genetics, and it's perfectly logical this could lead to differences in outcomes on an individual as well as population level.
However this gets dismissed away with a lot of spurious reasoning (which is usually presented with a huge amount of nose-thumbing and "Scientists say..." type wording in order to scare the reader into not questioning it). As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.
There is also another level to this denial of evolutionary principles that extends far beyond genetics, however. Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
I'm no religious nut - I'm quite atheist, but religion is a social technology that exists so that large-scale societies can remain cohesive and retain a shared moral foundation, and I would call it a good thing overall (and yes, my perspective often pisses off both religious people and atheists). However this is never properly engaged with by the orthodoxy outside of "yeah people facing hardship make up bullshit to make sense of the world, it's got no validity or use outside of that". Such stock explanations that handwave away traditional social norms (at least, those which contradict the woke moral system and outlook) as being functionless at best and damaging at worst are painfully common, despite many of these social norms being absolutely everywhere up until recently.
Among the supposedly educated any discussion of these topics through these non-approved lenses tends to invoke accusations of "social Darwinism" with the implication that applying any kind of evolutionary logic to humans and human societies is invalid because it could be used to justify Bad Things. This is all consequentialist reasoning which has no bearing on the truth of the claim itself, and lumping in all kinds of belief systems under the same category is a very clear composition fallacy which is clearly done to tar every single idea contained within its bounds with the same brush.
More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding and come off to me as being borderline superstitious. In order to strongly believe that insights from genetics and evolution can't be applied to human behaviour and that humans do not come programmed with specific predispositions that depend on what you've inherited, you have to believe in metaphysical, dualist ideas of the mind which are essentially detached from anything physical that could be affected by genetics. Once you adopt a view of the human mind as a physical entity the shape of which is determined by the specifications of genetic instructions, it opens up that whole Darwinian can of worms and everything that stems from it, and many wokes simply do not want to acknowledge the possibility that it could have any amount of validity. Unless they're able to maintain an absolutely unreal amount of cognitive dissonance, I'm unsure how their ideas can be anything but superstitious.
It's even worse when it comes to their idea of social norms as something that just drop out of the sky and persist and propagate over the long term regardless of the adaptiveness of these norms, since there is clearly nothing controversial about the idea that societies compete against each other, and this will tend to select for those norms that promote functioning (which is why you find common threads). But you still come across this type of knee-jerk denial nevertheless. Regardless of how well-read they may be, their reasoning remains fundamentally sloppy, and I'm unsure how they manage to square this circle.
There's an industrial grade motte-and-bailey around the 'race is a social construct'. I encountered a medical doctor talking about how race was really just a social construct as opposed to biological, how there were really just populations with different distributions of alleles. The very next sentence she talked about how Ashkenazi jews are predisposed to have more of various kinds of illnesses. It seems that race is indeed biological! The argument is very much reliant on authority - I wasn't going to ask a pointed question about how those two ideas could be reconciled in a crowded room.
"Wealth is just a social construct - there are all kinds of complexities with debt, income, currency, liquid/illiquid assets and cost of living. Therefore progressive income tax is unfair and we should have a flat tax system!"
Nobody would accept this - wealth is a real thing and it's clearly a self-serving argument.
"Race is just a social construct - there are just populations with different distributions of alleles. But these different distributions of alleles don't have any substantive impact on intelligence or personality. Differences of outcome are a result of social institutions and/or oppression - these must be reduced by affirmative action."
I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.
Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.
As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.
Oh there are obviously issues with institutions, history and so on - but the sheer biologicality of it! Those very black-white mixed-race children have issues getting bone marrow because their parents often can't be donors. It was subtle discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury that doomed Newtonian physics. Above bone marrow issues alone would be enough to disqualify the 'race is not biological' argument if we were working purely quantitatively. A quick trip to the Olympics shows that African/blacks dominate sprinting but there's not a single black weightlifter to be found at the very top.
Race may be a social construct in a certain sense, but it's a very strong, useful social construct. The distinction between green and blue is arbitrary and continuous - but it's still there. There are such things as turquoise but green and blue are still real and useful. If the sky was green one day I'd be pretty shocked, if my apple was blue I'd know not to eat it!
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But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.
If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.
IIRC there've been a few experiments with teaching monkeys to use vending machines and they cottoned onto wealth very quickly.
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I've noticed what you observe constantly. It's this bizarre phenomena of unidirectional knowledge I've almost singularly encountered in those that are woke and "educated". There are other forms of disordered thinking I've encounters among the religious right. But this particular form of disordered thinking I've only encountered there.
When I say unidirectional knowledge, I'm talking about bring up a fact, but you are only allowed to acknowledge the truth of that fact when you are using it to point in an approved direction. Otherwise you must deny it. So in your case, the fact is "race is a biological fact". If you use that fact to say anything unapproved, it's false. Like pointing out large measured IQ differences between African Americans and everyone else. But if you use that fact to help target funding towards neoliberal client populations, say African American's with sickle cell anemia or Jews in the New York media with other special health needs, then it's true.
Or maybe to take a less charged example. I'm tall. That's the fact. If it's pointed out I'm stronger and can reach high places, I will admit I'm tall. If it's pointed out I cost more to feed, and I'm awkward in confined spaces, I will deny until my dying breath that I'm tall.
A lot of this double think is facilitated by academia churning out split definitions. They will cleave "tall" into "good tall" and "bad tall". And they'll force all of society to adopt those terms, so you can't even think coherently about the topic anymore. I mean look what they did to sex and gender.
IIRC the measured IQ differences aren't "between African Americans and everyone else", they're between Africans and Whites/Asians, with other groups somewhere in the middle.
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More on unidirectional knowledge, which is a nice phrase that crystalizes what I've observed for years:
The Classic Merited Impossibility
Great Replacement Theory (the thing that is criticized) isn't an empirical claim, it's just a normative claim. The GRT is that "demographic replacement of whites is bad." The opposite normative claim, "demographic replacement of whites is good" is mainstream and appraised.
Is it racist to believe that Mexicans are more criminal than white people? (ctrl + f "psyche" for full context)
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I'll agree that it can be really hard to talk about complicated things in public. If I was asked the question implied above I would say it was more the case that race genuinely is a social construct, but that ethnicity shows human variation from shared history and genetics. So, 'Black' is a racial category but is never going to be an ethnic grouping, because there are dozens or hundreds of ethnicities with wildly differing histories and genetics that are lumped into that category; but Ashkenazi Jews are in contrast an ethnicity with a shared history and gene pool, as are say Telugu Hindus. So there is biology of ethnicity, but it's more difficult to have biological facts about the broader categories referred to as race.
An example of this that I can think of is health outcomes of South Asians or people from the Indian subcontinent, in Britain. There are high rates of predicted genetic problems if you're of South Asian descent, which can affect how likely a woman is to be referred for certain tests in pregnancy or a child for certain tests in infancy, because some South Asian groups have favoured kinship relations such as cousin marriage for cultural reasons. Other sub-populations within the South Asian heritage groups favour exogamy and are hence very much less likely to have the same rate of birth defects. But it's less acceptable for your midwife to sit down and enquire, "So, is the dad a first cousin of yours, are your mum and dad first cousins to each other?" than it is to have you check a 'race identity' box where you indicate you have heritage from the Indian subcontinent and they then refer you for additional tests on the basis of that racial category even though it's a broad category amongst whom many will not have any elevated risk.
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