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Is this really true in the case of HBD? Almost all of the new evidence is validating what were previously commonplace beliefs.
This paper is just strong evidence in support of Ronald Fisher’s additive genetic model. Plenty of hereditarian work is just validating Galton.
The intellectual arguments were widely accepted, and then rejected following World War 2, despite the evidence still supporting them. I wouldn’t be so confident that theories rejected while having the weight of evidence will be adopted because the evidence, which was already pretty clear, becomes even more overwhelming.
You're not wrong here, but I think an important thing to note is that "evidence" was in fact assembled and constructed to prop up the new consensus. Even though that evidence can't stand up to interrogation, actually trying to interrogate it was largely taken as evidence that you're a witch/believe lightning precedes thunder. The strategy wasn't to just go "Ok just ignore all evidence, science doesn't apply here and you just have to accept what the societal elite say the science is", but to actually assemble a convincing facsimile of evidence and say that doubting it gets you removed from polite society.
That people have now removed the figleaves and essentially demonstrated that tabula rasa is a polite fiction adopted for social rather than scientific reasons matters, and absolutely will have an impact on how these theories are interpreted by society.
I’d be interested in learning or reading more about this. My impression is that it really was just: “ignore all evidence, science doesn't apply here and you just have to accept what the societal elite say the science is" until Arthur Jensen and William Shockley attempted to remind everyone that hereditarianism is true, and that the blank slate consensus was fabricated.
The post war period had things like the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, but that really wasn’t evidenced based. It is a pure moral document (that many scientists refused to sign because it lacked evidence).
Only in the late 70s and 80s did figures like Lewontin and Gould emerge to try to claim that it was evidence-backed. This could be a blind spot for me, but that’s my understanding of the timeline.
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