Philosophers in denial about race

I have pointed out that philosophers are hostile to physics, but they are really more broadly anti-science. An example is Scientia Salon, where philosophers of science defend all sorts of crackpot ideas. The latest is a complaint about people exposing bad science of Stephen Jay Gould. Essentially they say that Gould may have been wrong, but he faked his results for the purpose of promoting leftist politics, so he should not be criticized. And there is no such thing as race, because believing in race makes you a racist.

I do not know how skull measurements might correlate with race or intelligence, but it is a scientific question that can be settled with objective data. Instead Gould wanted to speculate about the possible racial biases of some guy who died in 1851. These leftist modern academic philosophers want to do the same thing.

One of the authors, M. Pigliucci, has abandoned the Rationally Speaking Podcast. It continues with:

In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll describes an "embarrassing" state of affairs in modern physics: that we still don't know how to interpret quantum mechanics, almost a century after its discovery. Sean explains why he thinks the "Many Worlds Interpretation" (MWI) is the most plausible one we've got, and Julia explores his thoughts on questions like: Can MWI be tested? Is it "simpler" than other interpretations, and why? And does MWI threaten to destroy our systems of ethics?

Sean Michael Carroll is a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He is a theoretical cosmologist specializing in dark energy and general relativity.

I am pretty sure that Carroll is not a professor. Not in this universe, anyway.

The MWI cannot even say that anything is probably true. There is nothing plausible about it.

Update: Anti-science philosopher Massimo Pigliucci responds:

When they talk about “race,” however, they talk about a category that has no biological meaning: there isn’t any such thing as the “East Asian, European, and African” races, so any statistics derived about these non-existent entities is biologically meaningless. On top of which, they are correlating brain size with “g,” a reified statistical entity based on IQ tests, the relationship of which with “intelligence” (however one wishes to define it) is at best problematic.

Modern geneticists and anthropologists routinely divide people that way. In fact, this
recent NY Times article describes research showing that those of East Asian, European, and African ancestry have 2.4%, 2%, and 0% Neanderthal DNA.

Of course these populations have more obvious differences that people have remarked on for millennia.

Pigliucci repeatedly defends Gould by denying that he accused Morton of mis-reporting skull sizes from ideological bias. But reader Coel points out:

This is from Gould’s “Mismeasure of man” (p94 of revised edition):

“Morton often chose to include or delete large subsamples in order to match group averages with prior expectations. He included Inca Peruvians to decrease the Indian average, but deleted Hindus to raise the Caucasian mean. He also chose to present or not to calculate the averages of subsamples in striking accord with desired results. He made calculations for Caucasians to demonstrate the superiority of Teutons and Anglo-Saxons, but never presented data for Indian subsamples with equally high averages.”

And:

“All miscalculations and omissions that I have detected are in Morton’s favor. He rounded the negroid Egyptian average down to 79, rather than up to 80. He cited averages of 90 for Germans and Anglo-Saxons, but the correct values are 88 and 89. He excluded a large Chinese skull and an Eskimo subsample from his final tabulation for mongoloids, thus depressing their average below the Caucasian value.”

How does that *not* amount to “Gould explicitly accused Morton of allowing his ideology to bias his results”?

Pigliucci is repeating Gould's libel by arguing that there is no such thing as intelligence because entirely false allegations about someone who died in 1851.

He also says:

Whether Gould was or was not a Marxist (which in my vocabulary is hardly a worse word than, say, libertarian) is irrelevant to the arguments.

To me, Marxist is a worse word, because libertarians believe in the free exchange of ideas, while Marxists believe in lying about race in order to promote racial animosity.

Remember that Gould was a Harvard professor in the History of Science, and he is most revered by academics in the periphery of science. Real scientists are disgusted by this ideological distortion of the facts.

Update: Here is a Pigliucci defender:

C. Van Carter wrote:

That’s known as Lewontin’s fallacy (Lewontin was a Marxist too). I’m sure you will repeat it many more times. Race deniers speaking of “groups” and “populations” is more semantic games.

Do you actually have anything productive to contribute? Or are you just here to go to the bathroom on this thread?

Dr. Pigliucci is both a practicing biologist and a professional philosopher, sporting at least two PhDs and with an impressive publishing record, in which he has demonstrated substantial expertise in the subject currently under discussion. I suspect that there is not a single thing that you understand that he doesn’t understand better. Especially, when it comes to “groups” and “populations,” and “races.”

You sound like a caricature of special pleading for racism. Why not go post on Stormfront or something?

The pattern here is to defend a Marxist who was wrong, brag about how smart the leftist is, and call anyone who disagrees a racist.

Update: Pigliucci doubles down, saying that there is no Lewontin's Fallacy, that the Marxists know better than everyone else, that all criticism of them is meaningless, that there is no scientific objectivity, and that there are no biologically relevant distinctions between human racial groups. (He now admits that there are statistically significant differences.)

I have criticized Pigliucci several times on this blog, and I did not even know that he was a human biodiversity denialist and a Marxist sympathizer My criticisms have more to with his anti-science attacks on physics, such as denying that causality is involved in fundamental physics, and subscribing to a paradigm shift view of its history.

Marxist love paradigm shift theory because they love viewing everything in terms of revolutions and grand social causes. They hate objective facts, reductionism, and much of hard science. Those are just distractions for lesser minds. What is important is the class struggle between the oppressor and victim classes.

Physicists do not just ignore philosophers for being irrelevant. Philosophers have declared war on modern science. Many scientists see philosophers as undermining science.