You may recall that in 2019, Angela Saini wrote a book titled Superior: The Return of Race Science – which argued that nefarious claims about biol

Amazon deletes top-rated review of Angela Saini's 'Superior'

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2022-09-21 23:30:14

You may recall that in 2019, Angela Saini wrote a book titled Superior: The Return of Race Science – which argued that nefarious claims about biological group differences had been safely put to bed by Science, only to be reanimated by deplorable “scientific racists” in the last few decades. It wasn’t very good.

One minor problem for Saini, as Bo Winegard and I noted in our review, is that groups clearly do differ biologically, as you can tell by looking at them. (Europeans and Africans living in the same environment are not indistinguishable.) She tried to deal with this problem by drawing a neat line around what she called “superficial” traits. Skin colour, hair texture, facial structure – sure, those things do differ for biological reasons. But only a “scientific racist” would think that other traits might differ for biological reasons too.

Of course, “superficial traits” is not a real scientific category. (At one point, Saini lumps together “skin colour” with traits “that are linked to hard survival”.) It’s a category based on the fact that certain traits generate much stronger emotional reactions from people with egalitarian political convictions. For such people, it doesn’t “matter” if genes explain why some groups have darker skin and some have lighter skin, or why some groups are diagnosed with certain diseases at higher rates. But it would be really “bad” if genes explained why some groups score lower on IQ tests.