From my new Taki’s Magazine column:

Halting the Pursuit of Knowledge
Steve Sailer

November 22, 2023

This ought to be a golden age of the social sciences.

The immense reduction in the cost of DNA testing is allowing massive assaults on the most venerable conundrums of nature vs. nurture, such as whether the IQ gap between whites and blacks is smaller in more racially admixed African-Americans as the hereditarian theory would predict, a question that Margaret Mead found worth writing about how to examine a century ago. (Summary answer: yes.)

And Harvard economist Raj Chetty has made audacious breakthroughs in getting his hands on anonymized versions of confidential information, such as his database of 21 million Americans’ IRS tax returns across two generations. This allows us to know for the first time that black men around age 30 in 2010 were imprisoned three to ten times more than young white men whose parents had exactly the same incomes in the 1990s.

Of course, these findings do not prove once and for all what we might call the Bell Curve hypothesis that the sizable racial gaps in cognitive performance and law-abidingness are due to both nurture and nature rather than solely to social construction alone.

But that’s how most scientific theories work: You can’t fully vindicate them, you can only refute them.

Read the whole thing there.