Heritability in Political Science

So a law student at that bastion of free thought, Harvard Law School, made the mistake of speaking her mind to jerk after a dinner party, and made the double mistake of committing it to paper. In this way we are far wiser than the luminaries who saved western civilization after the fall of Rome, those hopeless bigots were stupid enough to leave a record of their thinking.

Eugene Volokh hits most of the important parts:
1.) No one is ever going to trust the science on genetics and IQ if everyone rightly believes that only one answer is actually acceptable to science.
2.) Convening the Cambridge Inquisition over an empirical question is wrong.

Really, all four parts are worth considering if you have an interest.

I'm obligated by history and principal to say that there's a special circle in Hell reserved for corrupt cops, and teachers who savage their students at the behest grievance mongers -and the offense is made worse if the teacher is either ignorant or has botched his or her responsibilities previously. They're worse than Judas, Cassius, and Brutus -and even Satan. Those traitors at least had the decency of a cause.

But this is basically expected, and in the same way I avoid places where I expect to find crooked cops, I avoid places where I expect to find crooked academics. Hence why I don't address racial issues much, and when I have to, do so as perfunctorally as thoroughness will allow.

Frankly, this is old hat. But at the risk of contradicting my last post, what bothers me most about this is the constant shifting of what is and is not allowed to be genetic. First, an important caveat is that it isn't the same scholars making these points, so my irritation is probably with the discipline rather than the academics. I leave it to others whether this is an improvement.

The big thing in Poli Sci at the moment is genetic explanations. Alford, Funk, and Hibbings kinda opened the door with their argument that ideology is genetic, and an army of political behaviorists marched through it. I've since read arguments that voting behavior, ideology, authoritarianism, and a bunch of other behaviors are genetically inheritable -and I find these arguments basically tendentious. AFH's article uses an extraordinarilly lax definition of Conservative, the voting behavior argument was actually that some people have a genetic predisposition to be stressed, and such people vote less (becaus I needed biology to explain to me that people who don't like to make decisions tend to make less of them), and so on.

However, we're not allowed to think that, given that the best predictor of academic performance is the mother's academic performance, that achievement gaps are basically resistant to every intervention we try and persist between races for decades, that maybe academic ability (usually measured in IQ or derivatives) might be genetically heritable.

The Authoritarianism argument I read was worse: the author stacked the deck in order to avoid drawing the obvious racist conclusion by only analyzing whites because, as he admitted, the strongest Authoritarians (I hate this concept...) in the US are... African-Americans. This, of course, didn't stop him from then continuing to argue that Conservative White Republicans were a unique bastion of racial hatred and illiberal sentiment -but by that point I'd stopped caring. I think the SOB got an award for that article too...

In other words, my read of the poli sci literature to this point (which is admittedly cursory, but it isn't my field) is that genetic heritability is only allowed for white people. Gee, love that apolitical, self-correcting nature of SCIENCE!(tm) following the evidence wherever it leads.

And, as you might've picked up, I'm rather dismissive of the entire enterprise as either tendentious or vacuous, for reasons which I'll happilly explain some other time. So, take this for what it is: an aspect of my discipline that I don't like, think is probably rotten from birth, and should be pruned from the discipline. But I won't get my way so this stupidity will certainly continue.