Turkheimer’s Stance

Turkheimer is noticeably incorrect about some of the most prominent figures in his field from the last century. That on its own is not a damning indictment for anyone. If these men were alive, however, his comments would be libel. If it can be substantiated that his beliefs come from a place of bias, however, then there may be something worth discussing.

Let’s take Turkheimer at his word when it comes to something else. In his review of Snyderman & Rothman’s The IQ Controversy, The Media, and Public Policy, he writes:

If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history [emphasis always mine]. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment.

Let us ignore that Turkheimer’s views about the atomic bomb — perhaps the most powerful prophylactic against large-scale military conflict ever conceived — are likely puerile. Scientists should not withhold judgment regarding matters of fact. Science is the pursuit of truth, not theoretical applied egalitarianism. Conclusive documentation of some phenomenon should come with similarly definitive reporting. Other researchers have noted this “unfortunate and aberrant tendency” (p. 718) being applied only to the social sciences. Turkheimer, evidently, does not believe in science qua science, but instead, science qua something else. What could he want?

Turkheimer has maintained these views. Writing in 2018:

I should be clear that I am not making a “both sides do it” argument. It is the hereditarians who are trying to reach a strong and potentially destructive conclusion, and the burden is absolutely on them to demonstrate that they have a well-grounded empirical and quantitative theory to work with. So, if you are out there and think that group differences t [sic] are at least partially genetic, please explain exactly what you mean, in empirical terms.

In the first highlighted quote, he makes an assumption — a baseless one. No one has ever demonstrated harm arising from hereditarian views. Ideologues like the abovementioned Gould, Lewontin, Kamin, and Rose have all made attempts to insert their preferred myths about the harms of hereditarianism into the popular imagination, but these have never held any water. For instance, it is often claimed that America’s Johnson-Reed Act was inspired by cognitive testing. This is contradicted by the historical record and has not once been substantiated.

Turkheimer provides other examples, namely, the Holocaust and Jim Crow. Invoking the latter is evidence of yet more puerility. The causes of Jim Crow were not beliefs in scientific group differences and it was not held aloft by these either. Jim Crow was intended to suppress the economic rise of blacks; it was protectionism writ large but research was not a signatory.

In the former case, he is confused. He has taken to Twitter to convey two things: (1) idle speculation is only wrong if it is hereditarian, and; (2) group differences are harmful to idly talk about. Note his tacit implication: that group differences research at the time (and by association, now) was responsible for the Holocaust and Jim Crow. This is perhaps a hubristic view. As a “scientist,” Turkheimer may imagine the things he says have a great deal of influence on political machination. He may not. He may believe these things did earlier. They did not, but I welcome him to show that they did. It is a fact, however, that environmentarian beliefs (a la Lysenko et al.) have caused enormous harm. Turkheimer lobbies for enormous harm to science with no as-yet justified reason.

Either way, group differences researchers have always been passionately liberal. Galton, Spearman, and Jensen were certainly so (Cattell and Eysenck, perhaps less). A left bias is what surveys of IQ researchers indicate. This is what surveys of allied fields show as well. The portrayal of these people as anything other than classical liberals can only be made with tendentious evidence and threadbare arguments about hidden motives that — unlike Turkheimer’s — have never been revealed in any substantive fashion. Jensen never called to suppress research or any form of pre-scientific idle chatter but Turkheimer has and continues to. Turkheimer is no liberal and certainly no proponent of scientific integrity. The topics of his snide, libelous remarks often are.

Contrary to Turkheimer’s insinuation, the Nazis vehemently opposed the Galton-Spearman tradition. They preferred a Jungian, typological and völkisch conception of intelligence, more akin to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences or Sternberg’s Triarchic Abilities. In fact, the arguments of Gould, Lewontin, Rose, Kamin, Sternberg, and Gardner are hardly distinguishable from those made by prominent Nazi psychologists (few, if any, Nazis considered themselves to be concerned primarily with mental measurement; this was “bourgeois”).

Given that I’m a native German speaker, I can read sources on this that Turkheimer may be unaware of. Erich Rudolph Jaensch and Friedrich Becker offer an excellent description of Nazi views towards intelligence and group differences. From their writing we can see that the Nazis believed intelligence research represented the victory of a “bourgeois spirit”; that intelligence measurement — especially with a predominant general factor a la Spearman — was an “instrument for Jewry” to “fortify its hegemony” over white Gentiles; that the use of intelligence testing in schools was “a system of examination of Jewish origin,” etc. Almost exactly like Sternberg (and more recently people like Nassim Taleb), the Nazis claimed that, because people differ and thus intelligence differs, there should be examinations not for “intellectualism,” but for “practical intelligence.” The Nazis claimed that correlation and factor analysis were invalid tools for understanding anything (compare this to Hilgard 1955 p. 228: “Correlation is an instrument of the devil”) and that even if a general factor emerged from ability tests, it was invalid; that life was more complex than a dominant general factor (a fact no one contests); and that regardless of what the results showed, they would be unconvincing, because understanding is always distant, multifaceted, complex. In Volkmar Weiss’ Vorgeschichte und Folgen des arischen Ahnenpasses: Zur Geschichte der Genealogie im 20. Jahrhundert (also recommended is Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab) he records that the Nazis rejected IQ tests; if they had accepted them, they would have had to admit that Jews outperformed Germans and that Slavs performed very similarly to Germans. This is completely inconsistent with what Turkheimer implies and with the apparently popular view that Nazis cherished and frequently used IQ tests. When it came to group differences in humans, the Nazis were pragmatic nihilists capable of denying evidence when it suited their agenda — like Turkheimer.

The disdain for the “bourgeois” displayed by the Nazis was shared by their intellectual successors, Lewontin et al. With the same collectivistic impulse, both groups attacked the individualistic g-based Galton-Spearman-Jensen paradigm. The first articulations of the criticisms of intelligence brought forward by pop intellectuals like Gould et al. were made by the Nazis (this includes “reification” and certain types of accusations of class bias). Exchanging the terms “1%” or “dominant class” for “Jews” would make it impossible to distinguish their arguments. The censure of Luria by the communists for his interest in intelligence is yet another example of the totalitarian (this time communist) opposition to this sort of research — les extrêmes se touchent.

The Nazis also believed much of the Jewish-Gentile difference to be the result of environments, not genes. The Nazis were typological thinkers when it came to anthropology, but types were often the result of the environment (certain types of education, they believed, would make Germans more like Jews). In Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he mentions a blackguarding type bearing an indelible blemish from his cramped home environment. Hitler believed that by improvement of German rearing environments, these blackguards could be precluded from existing, without a single shot being fired. Similarly, the Nazis believed that Jewish children could be re-educated away from their Jewishness. Heredity was secondary for the Nazis. Lothrop Stoddard’s trip to the Nazi eugenics courts in Into the Darkness is an almost farcical illustration of this fact. Many young Jewish children were forcefully adopted into German families out of the Nazi belief in the impotence of heredity and the fluidity of the mind.

How could Turkheimer have believed the study of heredity and “reductionism” to g was related to the Holocaust or the Nazis in general? It’s hard to say because he has never substantiated anything he’s said on this matter. It doesn’t seem likely he can. It does seem likely, however, that he makes these claims for ideological reasons. It’s very easy to taboo research as a means of combatting it when the empirical evidence is not on your side. But do we know that Turkheimer has Naziesque views on intelligence research, capable of motivating him to push for a taboo, like the enlightened progressives Lewontin, Rose, Kamin, and Gould? In fact, we do:

Scientific rightists are comfortable using race as an explanatory variable, tend toward single-factor models of ability, would not mind having their views characterized as philosophically reductionist, and accept a moderate to large degree of genetic influence in most human behavior; leftists reject race, at least as a biological variable, support multifactorial views of ability, support more holistic views of the philosophy of science, and are suspicious, to put it mildly, of genetic accounts of behavior. Schönemann’s work is an important part of a literature that is founded on a thoroughgoing rejection of a complex of ideas embraced by school of establishment psychometricians and behavior geneticists under the influence of Galton, Spearman, and Pearson, by way of Burt, Eysenck, and Cattell, and more recently by Jensen. Of course, grouping together such an enormous and varied collection of psychometric theorists only serves to emphasize the differences among them, but that is precisely the point I wish to make: The psychometric establishment includes considerable variability of opinion about issues like single factor models of ability, the quantification of genetic influence, and the applicability of psychometric theory to social issues involving race and poverty. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the centroid of this multivariate belief space lies to the right of the scientific and political center. One need only turn to the preemptively titled, « Mainstream Views on Intelligence », published in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) to get a flavor of the central tenets on which the establishment is able to agree: Intelligence is a meaningful attribute of human beings, well-represented by a single factor called g, and substantially heritable; it is an important determinant of social and economic success in America, and contributes to an unknown degree to differences in socioeconomic status between White and Black Americans…. [I have skipped a great deal of content which is good and I will admit shows well on Turkheimer, because I wanted to save space. I recommend reading this whole paper. It is a good illustration of the publicly reasonable Turkheimer, as opposed to the other Turkheimer who lacks scientific integrity.] A psychometric left would recognize that human ability, individual differences in human ability, measures of human ability, and genetic influences on human ability ‘are all real but profoundly complex, too complex for the imposition of biogenetic or political schemata. [t would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago. Opposition to determinism, reductionism and racism, in their extreme or moderate forms, need not depend on blanket rejection of undeniable if easily misinterpreted facts like heritability, or useful if easily misapplied tools like factor analysis. Indeed it had better not, because if it does the eventual victory of the psychometric right is assured.

A lot of this is commendable. Much of the rest is not. The similarity to Nazi conceptions of cognitive ability is obvious. The point here is not to disqualify Turkheimer, as there is no real problem with having beliefs that are similar to those held by bad people. There is a problem, however, with his habit of lying about the beliefs of others and their relationships to these bad people. When Turkheimer claims Jensen et al. to be similar to the Nazis, he betrays that his own beliefs more closely resemble them and that he has expressed the sort of unscientific, fundamentalist opposition to empirical fact which only belongs in a dogmatic church. The people Turkheimer praises have done similarly; the people he smears have not. This is a matter of fact, and it matters because it shows Turkheimer is not acting in good faith.

His biases expressed above have undoubtedly influenced his work. For example, on the general factor of personality (GFP). As noted above, Turkheimer is opposed to explanations of phenomena which are unidimensional or nearly-so (though of course, things like g and the GFP do not preclude or in any way militate against nuance). He, therefore, considered it adequate evidence to orthogonalize the GFP and declare the residual item clusters as evidence against the plausibility of the GFP. He claimed these clusters pointed to evaluative rather than descriptive personality variance, but his method could not have supported this claim in any way but a subjective one. The methodological limitation is met on the other end by the failure to even test if this hypothesis is true. Turkheimer’s study included no attempts to relate content to criterion variables, so its conclusion was impossible. It is lucky that other researchers were as unconvinced as I am because it’s these researchers who will ultimately make contributions to our understanding instead of manufacturing sophistic attacks under the guise of science.

Some researchers have responded in rather simple ways such as by controlling for the social desirability of questions; others have emphasized the continual criterion validity of the GFP in spite of Turkheimer’s claims; some have preempted his study with proper factor analysis; yet others have used MTMM, which does not directly invalidate explanations based on item valence but still makes them unlikely; some have even emphasized the relationship of the GFP to objective behavioral outcomes and pathology. Most importantly, contra-Turkheimer is work which has used ipsative personality evaluations. The ipsative format is more commonly known as “forced choice.” When there is no difference in the item valence, the GFP continues to emerge. It is unsurprising that Turkheimer believes otherwise and that he does so on the basis of such weak evidence.

To interpolate into Marx, for Turkheimer, vague “complexity” is a passe partout which explains everything because it explains nothing. It is nothing more than a ruse. Turkheimer is absolutely certain when it comes to disproving various theories that don’t comport with his views, but by his own standards, this is never a real possibility.

The bad faith of Eric Turkheimer is more than obvious from his gallingly ignorant and insulting remarks towards more scientifically-inclined researchers. For instance:

Only @KirkegaardEmil would proudly advertise support for the author of “Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power” and “Swindlers of the Crematoria” as a list of “who’s cool in behavioral genetics and IQ.” He that lieth down with dogs shall wake up with fleas.

Since that tweet, the person Turkheimer attacked has published and replicated the result of a paper showing that the mean Jewish advantage in cognitive ability compared to white Gentiles is mediated by an advantage in their mean polygenic scores. But the inaccuracy regarding Kirkegaard’s attitudes towards Jews (like myself and Jensen; Kirkegaard himself is also part-Jewish) is beside the point. Here, Turkheimer’s remarks have been shown to be nothing more than an ungrounded character attack, ostensibly based on his reading and misinterpretation of a Wikipedia page. Turkheimer’s commentary is unwarranted, incorrect, and unbecoming of a putatively trustworthy researcher. It is worth noting that Turkheimer is willing to cite apparently abhorrent people like Kirkegaard if it supports his Weltanschauung. Kirkgaard lieth with dogs but Turkheimer lyeth with a straight face.

In the second highlighted quote, Turkheimer indicts himself. Turkheimer does believe group differences have a genetic component, and yet he has never formally explained how these might work. I am of course talking about social class differences, sibship differences, differences between family members. Why do we accept these differences but not racial ones? These are just as statistical in nature and are thus just as constrained theoretically and empirically as are race differences. I attribute this admission to the fact that Turkheimer would probably be discredited if he did not admit even these differences.

The between-group heritability calculated via DeFries formula (which Turkheimer acts ignorant of) is at least 71–73% for the Jewish-white Gentile difference. There is no difference between the validity of this heritability and the heritability found through the study of twins, nor is there any reason to think this is different than the similarly-sized differences between US blacks and whites. On that point, Turkheimer is wont to underestimate heritability. In his introduction to the special issue, he gives an off-hand figure of 0.4 for the heritability of extraversion. It is doubtful that Turkheimer does not know that personality traits have higher heritabilities when they’re measured with item response theory methods instead of (the) crude methods (which he uses but is — mysteriously — not criticized for) like comparisons of twin resemblance or Falconer’s equation. But it is in his interest to give the lowest possible credible estimates for heritability. This is because Turkheimer understands that variance components are not independent of group differences.

Every credible person in this field recognizes that high heritabilities within groups do not mean that the between-group heritability for some trait is necessarily high or even greater than zero. However, variance components do constrain the variance attributable to different sources. To determine how large the environmental differences would need to be in order to explain a group gap entirely in environmental terms, Jensen, in his 1998 The g Factor, supplies the formula (d/√1-h²) where d is the size of the mean difference in some trait in terms of Cohen’s d and h² is the narrow-sense heritability of a trait. If groups display a 1 d difference in some trait that’s 50% heritable, the environment must be 1.41 d worse on average in the group with the lower mean level of the trait in question. For the black-white gap in intelligence, which Turkheimer is most focused on, the difference in the US is 1.1 d and the latent heritability has been found to reliably turn out greater than 85% in adulthood. Assuming the naïvely corrected heritability from Panizzon et al. (2014) of 91%, and assuming that both races show the same heritability, the necessary environmental gap is 3.67 d. This means that black environments meet the white mean environmental quality less than 1% of 1% of the time. Given that socioeconomic status measures index environmental quality and the gap in datasets like the NLSY, NELS, NSID, NCPP, and various test standardization samples are usually around 0.65 d, this suggestion is simply incredible.

Summa: Turkheimer likes to imply that Nazi ideology resulted from hereditarianism, implying that modern IQ research is liable to give way to Naziism. His understanding of Nazi belief regarding heredity is best-described as naïve and pragmatic. He does not consider there to be any danger associated with environmentarianism despite the fact that it has harmed many people (and in spite of the possibility that biological attributions may be associated with tolerance and outcomes directly opposite what he has claimed, like reduced sentencing severity for criminals). When it comes to potential harms from hereditarianism, the onus is on Turkheimer to show them, but all he has for his case is misrepresentation. His bias has contaminated his work and led to shoddy empiricism that comports with ideology but not logic. Turkheimer does believe in genetic group differences, but only selectively. Turkheimer is not an agnostic with regards to the sources of group differences. Turkheimer understands the relationship between variance components and group differences, though he acts as if it’s irrelevant. Bad maths does not disturb Turkheimer if it comports with his ideology, which can be summarized as such:

Opposition to findings that comport with a unidimensional view of cognitive ability; Opposition to high heritabilities; Opposition to the existence of genetic group differences; A dogmatic insistence that there is no genetic component to (select) group differences.

When one’s ideology involves the wholesale denial of genetic differences between groups— as it does for Turkheimer — one cannot be trusted to discuss the existence (or non-existence) of these differences in an objective, scientific manner. Turkheimer echoes this sentiment.