Scientific racism

Scientific racism

Scientific racism is the use of technical systems and assumptions to validate the belief in racial superiority (Paludi, 2014).

The example of Yerkes' intelligence studies

One example is Yerkes' intelligence studies based on the army testing program. The analysis yielded two basic results. The test revealed a conceptual difference between social groupings. On the one hand, whites and the wealthy had a better intellectual capacity than African-Americans, Jews, the poor, and immigrants. Murdoch (2007) interpreted the variables as a result of different races' levels of education, poverty, and disease prevalence.

Heritability and intelligence

Heritability refers to the proportion of phenotypic variance attributable to genetic variation as stated by Bourrat (2014). In most of current intelligence research, it has been established that differences in the genes that individuals carry account for some of the differences in intelligence (Nisbett et al., 2012). However, heritability of intelligence does not show impacts of genes and environment on the intelligence of a particular person. Nor does it indicate the origin of the difference of intelligence between groups. Current studies on heritability indicate that genes and the environment are much more significant factors in a person's intelligence than heritability.

References

Bourrat, P. (2014). How to read ‘heritability ‘in the recipe approach to natural selection. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 66(4), 883-903.

Paludi, M. A., & Haley, S. (2014). Scientific racism. In Encyclopedia of critical psychology (pp. 1697-1700). Springer New York