Poor old Steve Sailer is about to go into overload over the latest big question on the Edge website. The question posed to scientists and pseudo-scientists is “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” It is an interesting question for two reasons. One is some ideas in science hang around long after their validity is expired. Despite the philosophy of science stuff that tells us how science is supposed to work, bad ideas still creep in and stick around as truth. Vested interests defend invalid theories for all the familiar reasons.
Most of what makes up psychiatry, for example, is fairly worthless now that we have some understanding of genetics and brain chemistry. The idea that you can talk someone out of being depressed or schizophrenic is ridiculous, but we still have talk therapy. All over America, drug counselors try to talk people out of being addicts, even though it does not work and can never work. There’s money in the old bad idea, so the profession will not let go of it, no matter what’s happening in neuroscience.
The other reason this is a great question is it flushes out the fakers within our intelligentsia. All societies have an intellectual elite. In theory, our intellectual elite is based in reason, so they should always be ready to purge bad ideas. In reality, they are just as superstitious as prior elites, maybe more so. Dumb ideas that support the prevailing secular morality, for example, are protected, while good ideas that challenge it are rejected.
A good example is the second respondent in the list, Nina Jablonski, the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. Her idea to retire is race.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed the continued proliferation of scientific treatises on race. By the 1960s, however, two factors contributed to the demise of the concept of biological races. One of these was the increased rate of study of the physical and genetic diversity human groups all over the world by large numbers of scientists. The second factor was the increasing influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. Before long, influential scientists denounced studies of race and races because races themselves could not be scientifically defined. Where scientists looked for sharp boundaries between groups, none could be found.
Granted, anthropology is not science. At best, it is taxonomy. Anthropologists can add to the stock of human knowledge by cataloging, describing and recording human societies, past and present. It is useful to know the daily life of the typical Spartan, for example. That allows us to build a realistic model of Spartan life which can help explain their history as a people and their demise. This kind of information helps fill in the picture of history. It helps us understand why they lived and why they gave way to some other people.
Similarly, detailed descriptions of modern people are useful to real scientists teasing out genetic relationships between collective traits and specific genes. That said, this women should know that race is a real thing and an important aspect the human animal. But, she wishes it were not and would like everyone else to pretend it were not real. She is an example of why many fields are dismissed by the empirically minded. They tolerate and promote unserious people like Nina Jablonski.
The fact is, the modern word is in a race of sorts. One side of the intellectual elite is learning the true nature of human diversity, which increasing looks to be invalidating core beliefs of the ruling elite. The other side of the race is where proselytizers like Nina Jablonski come into the picture. She is trying eliminate any decent from the prevailing orthodoxy before science invalidates it. It’s nice to think that the truth will win out, but the way to bet is the inconvenient science is what eventually gets retired by these people.