The Strange, Secret, Open Triumph of Race Science
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Essays<br>The Strange, Secret, Open Triumph of Race Science<br>There's now a bizarre gap between what's still taboo and what's accepted
Richard Hanania<br>Aug 13, 2026
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Up until the early 2000s, there were serious and respected academics who argued that the IQ gap between blacks and whites in America was at least partially genetic in origin. In 1969, a Berkeley psychologist named Arthur Jensen published “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard Educational Review. Jensen’s conclusion was not much, and he wrote that although people dislike the idea of genetic differences in intelligence between groups, the hypothesis has “been neither contradicted nor discredited by evidence.” The Bell Curve (1994) famously took this idea to a mass audience. One of the co-authors was Richard Herrnstein, a professor at Harvard. Other scholars, like Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, were able to maintain academic positions in Anglosphere countries while openly arguing for similar ideas. None of these people were fringe in their views. When intelligence experts were polled on the causes of black/white IQ differences in a 1987 paper, 45%, a plurality, said that genetic and environmental factors both mattered, compared to 15% who said the gap was purely environmental in origin and 1% who said completely genetic.<br>It was genuinely shocking to me how bad the arguments against the hereditarian hypothesis were in those years. Geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that on many genetic markers there was more variation within races than between them. This somehow meant that the concept of race had “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is such a bad argument that it is now called “Lewontin’s fallacy.”<br>Writers like Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould tried to say that humans had separated too recently for important cognitive or behavioral differences to exist.<br>This can be refuted by…simply looking at human beings. Honestly, that’s all you need to do. There is obviously enough temporal separation between human races to make them appear very different. So the idea that there couldn’t be cognitive or behavioral differences was always based on the at least implicit assumption that physical features change much faster than mental traits. I’m aware of no principle of evolution that indicates that is the case. And we’ve actually seen species change in their mental traits on time scales that are much shorter than those that separate major human races.<br>In fact, when we breed animals for certain kinds of behavior, we usually end up changing their physical appearance too. The same is true when going in the opposite direction. Chickens selected for body weight become more aggressive. And dog behavior varies according to traits like weight and skull shape. If among animal species you see two populations that have zero overlap in physical appearance, then the odds that they would have no statistical differences on important behavioral or cognitive traits are quite low. The main reason that races diverge in physical appearance in the first place is that different environments selected for different physical features. It’s simply not credible that regions with such diverse climates wouldn’t also shape cognitive and behavioral traits. You wouldn’t expect this with any other species.<br>The fact that Gould and Lewontin were able to publish influential articles and books with such terrible arguments reflects how much desperation there was to refute the hereditarian hypothesis. The typical liberal found the ideas put forth by Jensen and others like him so uncomfortable that they couldn’t even stand the thought of genetic racial gaps being an open question. They needed people with fancy credentials to tell them that natural race differences were impossible.<br>Herrnstein died in 1994, and Jensen passed away in 2012. They left no successors. The Trump administration might claim to be bringing back free speech on university campuses, but the taboo on postulating natural racial differences in IQ is so strong that it’s one thing that is well beyond the power of the law to remedy.<br>If you see an open box below, it means you are not yet subscribed to the newsletter. Sign-up to get more articles like this in the future. Most articles are free, and always will be.
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And yet…science has marched on. In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues found that humans outside of Africa had 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. That same year, scientists first reported on the discovery of an archaic hominin population called Denisovans, who make up about 4-6% of the ancestry of Melanesians. Trace amounts of Denisovan heritage can be found in other modern populations including East Asians and Native Americans.<br>Ancestry in the 1-6% range might not seem like a lot, but even small genetic influences can have a major effect. For...