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Almost any biological race discussion is taboo. No doubt there are people who are going to cross these lines but it's not a common argument and not one biologists are comfortable venturing into. A good discussion here on what is taboo in biology http://www.nature.com/news/ethics-taboo-genetics-1.13858

.. And any type of race/iq inquiry is something that has to be taboo and outside of the scientific community. For a society that values egalitarianism there are some questions that we need not try to confirm or deny



Willful ignorance of the natural world has never led to anything good for humanity. That we have to ban certain lines of inquiry because we might not like the answers is positively medieval. As a technologist, I find the idea abhorrent.


I can understand that position, but dealing with inquiries outside the hard sciences gets complicated Keeping some things taboo is the better path especially with something like evolutionary biology which is no where near a hard science.


Evolutionary biology is absolutely a hard science. It's rooted in both empirical evidence and models derived from statistics and game theory.

You haven't presented an argument: you've presented a fear-based assertion. I absolutely disagree that it is ever better not to know. Every single time someone has made that argument and tried to enforce it, it's retarded our progression as a species.

The Catholic Church in medieval Europe did tremendous harm, and all it was trying to do was save our immortal souls. It was doing good work. It was better not to know, right? How much progress might we have made in mathematics had Hippasus not been murdered for providing the existence of irrational numbers?

People who share your views do us all tremendous harm. We could make life better for billions of people if we gave up our taboos on researching ourselves.

That said, I do appreciate the honest. It's not often that I see people out right admit to wanting to ban certain lines of research. Your doing it is refreshing.


Note that sociology is deeply rooted in empirical evidence statistics as well. I think we can agree that that it is a soft science. Hard science requires no subjectivity, no hidden variables, and re-creatable experiments. Soft sciences have a place, but not in telling us what is true.

Until you can take a genome and build computational models of intelligence it is foolish to be so confident to draw any conclusions in IQ research.




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