Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

Charles Murray, “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Cox and Murray, 2020, 319pp. plus 180 pages of references and appendices’

Charles Murray acknowledges that he is a controversial figure ever since his association with The Bell Curve publication in 1994.  Although he had this current book, Human Diversity, read by many geneticists and neuroscientists, he had to agree NOT to publically thank them by name for helping him determine if this book had any errors. To be publically commended by Murray can be career-ending for any college professor of sociology, (P. 322) despite the acknowledgment by geneticists and neuroscientists that biology (nature) has a significant influence on social groups.

The basic bare bones of the book’s argument are that the last half of the twentieth century saw developments of epochal importance:  First, technology: the economy, and the legal system became ever more complex, making the value of the intellectual ability to deal with that complexity soar.  Second, the latter half of the twentieth century saw America’s system of higher education become accessible to everyone with enough cognitive talent (IQ).  By 2012, what had been predictions about the emerging cognitive elite had become established social fact; fact that Murray described in his book Coming Apart which I reported on some months ago. 

The findings presented in this current book boil down to just three cautious conclusions (p. 204):

1.       Human beings can be biologically classified into groups by sex and by ancestral population (race).  Like most biological classifications, these groups have fuzzy edges.  This complicates things analytically, but no more than that.

2.      Many phenotypic differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior that we observe between the sexes, among ancestral populations and social classes have a biological component.

3.      Growing knowledge about human diversity will inevitably shape the future of the social sciences.

My Notes:

Pg. 2:  The core doctrine of the orthodoxy (accepted wisdom) in the social sciences is a particular understanding of human equality: and it is incorrect.    Call it the sameness premise: In a properly run society, people of all human groupings will have similar life outcomes.  Individuals might have differences in abilities, the orthodoxy (usually) acknowledges, but groups do not have inborn differences in the distributions of those abilities, except for undeniable ones such as height, upper body strength, and skin color.  Inside the cranium, all groups are the same.

The sameness premise theoretically applies to any method of grouping people, but three of them have dominated the discussion: gender, race, and socioeconomic class.  In terms of those groups, it is expected that they should have similar distributions of family income, mental health, and life expectancy.  Large group differences in these life outcomes are prima facie evidence of social, cultural, and governmental defects that can be corrected by appropriate public policy.

The intellectual origins of the sameness premise go back to the Enlightenment and the concept of humans as blank slates (called tabula rasa in my Catholic religion classes).  The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth century with the leading roles played by Emile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.  The political expression of the orthodoxy had its origins in the mid-1960s with the legal triumphs of the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism.  In the beginning, the orthodoxy consisted of specific allegations and solutions: Racism keeps Black unemployment high.  Sexism stunts women’s careers.  Affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws are needed. 

Pg. 3:  Three of the main tenants of the orthodoxy may be summarized as follows:

Gender is a social construct.  Physiological sex differences associated with childbearing have been used to create artificial gender roles that are unjustified by inborn characteristics of personality, abilities, or social behavior.

Race is a social construct.  The concept of race has arisen from cosmetic differences in appearance that are not accompanied by inborn differences in personality, abilities, or social behavior.

Class is a function of privilege.  People have historically been sorted into classes by political, economic, and cultural institutions that privilege heterosexual white males and oppress everyone else, with genes and human nature playing a trivial role if any.  People can be re-sorted in a socially just way by changing those institutions.

Pg. 6:  Why there is so little about Evolutionary Psychology in Human Diversity:  Hundreds of millions of years of evolution did more than shape human physiology.  It shaped the human brain as well.  A comparatively new discipline, evolutionary psychology, seeks to understand the links between evolutionary pressures and the way humans have turned out.   Accordingly, evolutionary psychology is at the heart of explanations for the differences that distinguish men from women and human populations from each other.  Ordinarily, it would be a central part of Murray’s narrative.  But the orthodoxy has been depressingly successful in demonizing evolutionary psychology as just-so stories.  So Murray decided that incorporating its insights would make it too easy for critics to attack the explanation and ignore empirical reality.  (I put The Ape That Understood the Universe on my Kindle, another book I have now read.)

Pg. 7:  On certain important points, points that are covered in most of the chapters, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and Murray claims ‘we don’t have to argue about them anymore’.  But to meet that claim requires that the author is careful to state ten propositions precisely (each covered by its own chapter) and; totally within current scientific consensus:

1.       .  Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures.
2.       .  On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability.
3.       .  On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things.
4.       .   Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior.
5.      .    Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.
6.     .     Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local (i.e., continent by continent).
7.          Continental population differences associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.
8.     .     The  shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior.
9.          Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.
10.  .      Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.

Cognitive Repertoires: is the book’s abbreviation for personality, abilities, and social behavior.  For the rest of the book, cognitive repertoires = characteristics of personality, abilities, and social behavior.

Pg. 16:  Questioning the orthodoxy has consequences:  A famous illustration of what happens to those who question the orthodoxy is what befell economist Larry Summers.   In 2005, Summers, then president of Harvard University, offered reasons for thinking that innate differences in men and women might account for the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering.  All hell broke loose.  An MIT biologist, Nancy Hopkins told reporters that she felt ‘I was going to be sick,’ and that she had to leave the room because otherwise I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up’ One hundred and twenty Harvard professors endorsed the letter critical of Summer’s comment.

Pg. 204:  Part III in the book presents class as a function of the genetic lottery plus character, determination, hardwork, and idiosyncratic circumstances.  The sociological, economic, and psychometric evidence for it has been available since at least the 1980s.  That is why Herrnstein and Murray were able to write “The Bell Curve” in 1994 which documented the ways in which a segment of American society is morphing into a caste-like upper class with inherited wealth as only a tangential contributor. 

Pg. 42:  The traits that differ along the People-Things dimension are not shocking.  The technical studies tell us that women are, on average, warmer, more sympathetic, more altruistic, and more sensitive to others’ feelings than men are.  Murray additionally believes that these traits are more pronounced in the most gender-egalitarian nations because freedom that women still suffer in traditional (Muslim) societies sometimes suppress the expression of inborn personality traits. 

Pg. 79:  By 2015, women had a presence in high-status jobs that was inconceivable in 1960.  From 1960 to 2018, women went from 1 percent of civil engineers to 17 percent; from 5 percent of attorneys to 35 percent; from 8 percent of physicians to 42 percent.  In 1960, there was one woman in the US Senate.  After the 2018 election, there were 25.  In the 1960 House of Representatives, there were 19 women.  After the 2018 election there were 102. By 2016, women got 33 percent more bachelor's degrees than men.  Also, women now surpass men in professional degrees.

Pg. 126:  Males and females are different: A lot different.  The distinctions that show up in the phenotypic evidence on personality, abilities, educational choices, vocational choices, and career paths are interconnected both conceptually and empirically.  This coherent picture fits seamlessly within the context of evolutionary pressures over millions of years.

RACE

Pg. 130:  In the 1970s and 1980s, the backlash against the concept of race adopted two propositions: The genetic differences among human populations are insignificant, and humans left Africa too recently for important differences to have evolved.  These arguments were most famously expressed by geneticist Richard Lewontin and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, both of Harvard. 

Pg. 134:  Since the genome has been sequenced, race has again arisen and each of the following concepts has its own chapter in the book:

            *It was discovered that human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.

            *Advances in the ability to date evolutionary changes have revealed that evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local to the different continents.

            *Raw race differences in genetic material related to cognitive repertoires are common, not exceptional.

Pg. 143:  Around 6 million years ago, the first hominins diverged from chimpanzees, becoming fully bipedal sometime more than 4 million years ago.  Homo habilis, who was bipedal and apparently used stone tools, appeared about 2.5 million years ago.  About 2 million years ago came our likely direct ancestor, Homo erectus.  Hominins first expanded out of Africa around 1.8 to 2.1 million years ago and eventually spread throughout Eurasia.

Pg. 144:  In 1987, genetics entered the debate of where Homo Sapiens originated.  It appears that today’s humans are descended from a single female who lived in Africa sometime between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.  So the number of generations since humans left Africa is probably around 2,000 and almost certainly no more than 5,000.  A favorable mutation with an unusually large s value can go to fixation in a few hundred generations, but under commonly observed values of s, a mutation is likely to take thousands of generations to reach fixation. 

Pg. 177f:  Scientists have known since the 1860s that a race of advanced hominins other than Homo sapiens once lived in Europe.  More recently they have established that Neanderthals lived in Asia as well.  They descended from Homo erectus along a separate line from Homo sapiens.  The timing of the split has been estimated as early as 800,000 and as late as 400,000 years ago.  It is now established that anatomically modern humans bred with both Neanderthals and another recently discovered archaic hominin, the Denisovans.  Neanderthal DNA has been found in about 1 to 2 percent of the genome in modern Europeans and East Asians. 

Addenda, Wikipedia:

Denisovans apparently interbred with modern humans, with about 3–5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians and around 6% in Papuans deriving from Denisovans. Denisovans may have interbred with modern humans in New Guinea as recently as 15,000 years ago. There is also evidence of interbreeding with the local Neanderthal population, with about 17% of the Denisovan genome from Denisova Cave deriving from them.

Pg. 158:  Mutation.  The evolution of completely new traits—hearing or eyesight, for example—requires mutations. 

Pg. 174:  One of the unexpected findings since the sequencing of the genome has been how much evolution has taken place in the recent past, continuing up to the present.  From the dawn of the genomics era, studies of recent selection have found that ‘local adaptation’ was widespread with ‘local’ meaning that the genes under selection varied by continent.

Pg. 228f:  The bulk of the variance in success in life is unexplained by either nature or nurture.  Researchers are lucky if they explain half of the variance in educational attainment with measures of abilities and socioeconomic background.  They’re lucky if they can explain even a quarter of the variance in earned income with such measures.  The takeaway for thinking about our futures as individuals is that we do not live in a deterministic world ruled by either genes or social background, let alone by race or gender.  But Proposition #9 is about social classes, not individuals.  The takeaway for thinking about the future of Western societies is that the role of genes is important for shaping class structure.  The most important single heritable trait that explains socioeconomic success is the general mental ability known as g, which in turn is best measured by a good IQ test. 

IQ tests are not biased against minorities. Education does raise IQ but within a narrow range.  IQ scores are usually stable after age six until decline in old age. 

Pg. 256:  Children who had been praised for being intelligent subsequently displayed less task persistence and less task enjoyment.  They became more concerned about getting a good score than about learning new things.  They became protective of their image as ‘smart’ and reluctant to jeopardize it.  

Pg. 270:  At some point, the promise of CRISPR for gene editing will be realized, and all bets are off about the ability to change people by design in substantial numbers.  If we’re looking at the long term, Proposition #10 will certainly be wrong eventually.  Not now.

Pg. 273ff:  Two hallmarks of genuine science are proof of causation and the ability to predict.  Until the 1960s, the social sciences barely participated.  Econometrics and psychometrics were already established disciplines, but for the most part social scientist wrote narratives with simple descriptive statistics.  Yet, most of social science ultimately rests on biology.

(Murray recommends Stuart Ritchie’s book: Intelligence, All That Matters.  I have it on my Kindle.)