Racial IQ hereditarians claim there's a "taboo" on their work. This trope "supplies a ready explanation for the failure of the hereditarian research program to convince the larger scientific community to accept their research findings on innate racial differences". https://twitter.com/jpjjr1961/status/1313885483349479430

In this paper, John Jackson carefully dismantles the trope that there is a "taboo" on the hereditarian position in racial IQ research by addressing its flawed premises.

'Establishing their research as “mainstream” is important for hereditarians. There are two rival explanations for why hereditarian research is not widely accepted outside their small circle of researchers.'

'The first is the banal explanation that they are not, in fact, producing reliable and empirically robust, scientifically meaningful conclusions; an explanation clearly unacceptable to hereditarians.'

'Thus, they offer their rival explanation: there is an unacceptable political dogma preventing discussing the scientific truth of racial differences.'

'One problem is that while these “environmentalists” are invoked, they are seldom cited; just who holds this position? Pinker’s (2002) claim of a widespread belief in a “blank slate” is based on a tendentious misreading of the relationship between evo bio & the social sciences.'

'Despite hereditarians’ claims that they are simply searching for scientific truth, race, and IQ research is inseparable from social policy... Hereditarian researchers still call for establishing a two-tiered educational system for White and Black people (Cofnas, 2020, p. 134).'

'Despite their self-professed distaste for ad hominem attacks, hereditarians often label their critics as “Lysenkoists,” thus associating their critics with the mistaken genetic theories... with Stalin’s murderous regime.'

'In a milder form of the same argument, hereditarians accuse their critics of consciously or unconsciously letting their liberal political sensibilities guide their research (Clark & Winegard, 2020; Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020; Jussim et al., 2015; Winegard et al., 2015).'

'Surely if their critics were so deeply misinformed about genetics, geneticists themselves would ally themselves with hereditarians, but the opposite is the case: for 50 years, geneticists have been among the sharpest scientific critics of the hereditarian position.'

'According to hereditarians, this must have been because geneticists were closet “Lysenkoists” or somehow did not understand their own subject matter.'

A far more likely reason is that geneticists found the extraordinarily strong claims made by hereditarians insufficiently supported by evidence e.g. Kempthorne criticized hereditarians on the grounds that Jensen’s evidence & method were too weak to support his claims.

'The Kempthorne case illustrates how geneticists generally think of the hereditarian position. Further evidence is supplied by resolutions from professional societies of geneticists which overwhelmingly reject hereditarian psychology.'

'When the NYT science writer Nicholas Wade published the hereditarian book, A Troublesome Inheritance (Wade, 2014), it met with a point-by-point rebuttal in a book co-authored by a geneticist (DeSalle & Tattersall, 2018) & a letter signed by 100 geneticists... '

In the face of scientific rejections, hereditarians narrow the field of “relevant experts” to only include themselves. Critics of their field are ignored or demeaned, regardless of expertise. Hereditarians thus create an illusion of mainstream research.

'The hereditarians charge that the institutions of peer review and academic freedom have failed... Failure to accept the hereditarian claims were thought to doom western civilization to intellectual and cultural decline from dysgenic overbreeding by the less intelligent... '

'According to hereditarians, recognition of ineluctable racial differences in intelligence and morality would lead to new understanding and acceptance of average differential outcomes in wealth, education, criminal conviction, and social position.'

'With such acceptance, racism, said [by the hereditarians] to be caused by Black frustration and White resentment (e.g., over affirmative action) would be greatly reduced, in their view.'

'We did not find evidence to support the claims of a taboo on hereditarian publishing, which we would characterize as a “myth.” Hereditarians have published on racial differences across many subdisciplines of psychology in a broad range of journals and are well-cited.'

'Hereditarian work is widely discussed in the media, and claims that the presentations are inaccurate indicate visibility, not taboo. Their work has been promoted in books for the public... with advertisements and cover blurbs announcing that the topic was “taboo.”'

'The most reasonable explanation is that belief in a taboo helps the hereditarian community to explain why they have been unsuccessful after 100 years in convincing most psychologists of the average genetic deficiencies of Black people.'

'Tenured psychologists have not been dismissed from their faculty positions for their research on race differences, and they have often enjoyed the support, of their university colleagues and administrators, despite disagreement with their views.'

Final Conclusion Summary: The evidence offered for the sweeping claims of a taboo on race/IQ was extraordinarily weak, and we should be alarmed by the racist & antisemitic political activism of authors who make this claim.