Winegard and Carl Dismantle Saini's _Superior:The Return Of Race Science_

I was just complaining about Saini's catastrophically terrible arguments. Winegard and Carl absolutely destroy them. In fact, if you read nothing else about the politically correct account of race and why it's a wreck, read that piece. This isn't a close-run thing. The PC account of race and the science of race is just wrong. It's a tissue of (largely textbook) fallacies, the most prominent of which is guilt by association. Its main failing is that it is a bit of political correctness--its premises are political and its conclusions pretend to be scientific. It's basically produced by taking ostentatiously anti-racist political premises and then asking what might be on the scientific wish list of someone passionately devoted to them.
   Winegard and Carl identify four main theses in Saini's book:

• ‘Race’ is not a meaningful biological category
• Genes can only contribute to population differences on certain “superficial” traits
• Studying whether genes might contribute to population differences on non-superficial traits is tantamount to “scientific racism”
• Almost everyone interested in whether genes might contribute to population differences on these other traits is a “scientific racist”

None of these is true. Again: not that truth is of paramount importance to Saini's side of this disagreement. Their main point, of course, is: If you disagree with us, you're a racist. In fact, being "overly" concerned with evidence and truth in this context is probably enough to make you a racist, racist.
   Saini's arguments--well, they're not really hers...they're arguments at large on the contemporary left--are neo-Lysenkoist pseudoscience. As such, they're more the products of the contemporary leftist worldview than of actual, respectable scientific reasoning and evidence. They're not worth taking seriously as biology--but I think they're eminently worth taking seriously sociologically, as a kind of window into that worldview.
   I do understand the allure of political correctness here. It's initially much more comfortable to stick one's head in the sand about these particular truths. In fact, you may have to be a bit of an asshole to face up to them. You've got to be willing to be falsely accused of racism--and that's something that a lot of good people just can't take. In general, the extremist left has people bamboozled and cowed. The fact that they're so adept at the latter means that their efforts in support of the former needn't be too plausible. Some of the arguments of the kind rehearsed by Saini really are hard to see your way past. I had to have Lewontin's fallacy explained to me; I couldn't see what was wrong with it. But most of them are pretty thin gruel. They can afford to be because so many people are so desperate to believe them--largely because they are so terrified of being accused of racism. This one-two punch of pseudoscience and moral terrorism has made the PC left the powerful and dangerous cultural force it is.
   Oh and--in case you don't recognize the name, Noah Carl is the guy (actually: one of the many guys...) who's been hounded mercilessly of late by the PC internet mob; Cambridge yanked his position after rabid accusations of thoughtcrime...