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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.
This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.
Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
What does "HBD" actually entail? It's a term you never see used outside of this forum, afaik. All I know is that it stands for human bio diversity and means that you take seriously the findings that all sorts of tests like the SAT etc show in terms of group differences? What else?
I would define it as:
The belief that individuals and groups meaningfully differ in nearly all measured attributes for biological and genetic reasons.
That’s really the extent of the belief. The point of contention is what is off limits to scrutiny through that lens. No one would object to the idea that skin color, eye color, or hair texture differ between individuals and populations for genetic reasons.
HBDers (alternately “race realists,” “hereditarians,” “scientific racists,” etc.) are those willing to apply that lens to all human traits.
To borrow your word： apply how? Apply simply in acknowledging the idea as worth further research? Or apply by accepting the hypothesis as axiomatic and then set public policies (re immigration, hiring, voting laws, whatever) in some seemingly reasonable way so that presumably the smarts make the decisions while any member of the dumbs must first pass intellectual muster to be taken half-seriously? Or something else? I ask this question genuinely, and I would be interested to read various answers.
Certainly not. It's not even empirically proven (in the "group differences are genetic" sense; "group differences exist" is easier to measure); it's certainly not axiomatic. I would like to see further research, since it's not empirically disproven either, but so long as the NIH is taking an Index Librorum Prohibitorum attitude to the question perhaps we shouldn't expect progress either way on that front.
So instead, could we just stop accepting the hypothesis' negation as axiomatic? Gifted education that ends up with too few black students might be a red flag worth looking into, but that doesn't mean it necessarily needs to be ended as a "glaring symbol of segregation". It's logical that, "given that "everyone is the same" is the accepted truth, someone must take the blame for how a group ended up performing badly" ... which means that if we want to avoid blaming innocents, we need to either make sure that "accepted truth" is always true or we need to stop always using it as a premise.
The most ironic tragedy behind the "everyone is the same" premise (in the stronger-than-just-anti-HBD sense that's starting to take hold, where even internal cultural differences are denied) is that it becomes so awkward that it ends up getting dropped anyway, just much more clumsily. Harvard goes from using "great emphasis on character and personality" to keep down Jewish numbers in the 1920s to using it to keep down Asian numbers in 2020 ... and yet: is the Personality Quotient test they're using at all detailed? Does it have a respectable inter-rater reliability and internal consistency reliability? Have they tried multiple tests, and what inter-method reliability did they see? Do they have evidence that higher Socio-Economic Status or expensive coaching or anything like that won't greatly affect the results? The SAT eliminated analogy questions because of worries about the SES bias of requiring students to know words (sure hope they don't read anything in college requiring a large vocabulary!), but our elite institutions are thrilled to rely on "does our admissions officer like your personality"?? Anyone truly watching out for racial biases from subjective inaccurate testing should worry that the call is coming from inside the house! An institution that actually cared about personality, rather than hoping it would be a plausible excuse for putting a thumb on the scale, would have been trying much harder to figure out how to evaluate it objectively.
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