Whatever people think of Lasker (Cremieux) and his views, isn't data being available to all interested parties the best way to find the truth?
The article mentions this towards the very end:
Adam Candeub, the top lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a law review article in 2024 criticizing the N.I.H.’s discouragement of stigmatizing research. He compared it to the persecution of Galileo.
“A liberal society should support the search for truth,” Mr. Candeub wrote, “regardless of how uncomfortable and unsettling that truth turns out to be.”They have interests, that align with funding, which aligns with actionable data. And they follow them.
So who would even do such research? The best you could find is some meaningless difference in mean scores that is likely swamped by environmental factors. And the fact that "race" is far fuzzier than our intuition leads us to think (it turns out we're very good at applying racial labels to people, that genetically are simply not so clear especially at the edges of categories).^*
So it's hard to fund research with no purpose, that scientists aren't particularly interested in conducting. Instead [GWAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) studies answer more useful questions that are actionable (you can do a genetic test and calculate a risk in principle).
* I'll clarify this statement because it's a common misconception. There are clearly genetic differences between racial groups. But they are complex statsical genetics that are impossible to cleanly pin down without large levels of miscategorization. And GWAS studies are answering the question which genes are associated with cognition and disorder.
Other answers: if placebos work, why would we restrict peoples choice and their dissemination?
Because placebos rarely are innocent in often they become avoidant measures away from empirical science.
Your view point is a local minimum in that you want to ignore societal impact. One of those impacts is using valid data to tout pseudoscientific methods.
We know GIGO but the general populace does not
You should use the samw logic ans find yourself arguing against vaccinea and herd immunity.
How is that relevant? Is Lasker seeking to (let alone succeeding at) suppressing voices that disagree with his own?
He might not engage with his critics (e.g. David Bessis) but AFAICT he's not doing anything to suppress them.
1. This research may prove that there are significant intelligence differences by race.
2. Public knowledge of this fact could lead to discrimination on an individual level based on group membership.
3. This is bad for society.
4. Therefore we should not conduct research down this path.
In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”
They have an online training and everything!
"(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;"
It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest.
Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.
Or more accurately, if it were genetic the races would look very different.
The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.
So you have two choices:
1. Everybody is black.
2. The other races roughly stand, but there are dozens of different black races.
Or you can be more accurate and say race is cultural.
While genetic diversity between races are from selection. Thus the inter-racial genetic differences are more likely to manifest in trait differences that humans find more meaningful (which I use purely in a descriptive manner, not prescriptive), such as physiological (medical, metabolic), psychological & behavioral (personality), cognitive (intelligence), and of course physical (appearance, athletic).
The intra-racial differences that arise from genetic drift result in things that are still tangible genetic differences, e.g. ABO blood group frequencies, but don't map well onto characteristics that human societies place emphasis on as much.
And to address your point that:
>The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.
This is because the level of genetic diversity as influenced by genetic drift is primarily a function of population size, and Africa being the origin of the Homo sapien species, and probably the Homo genus as a whole, has always had the highest level of effective population size. Thus genetic drift in Africans is least likely to be able to cause allele fixation on particular genes, and so such diversity is better preserved. But as already mentioned, these forms of genetic diversity is less likely to impact the observed traits that most humans, both academics/social scientists and your average joe, find "meaningful".
Is this also true for other mammals such as cats, dogs, pigs, cows, horses?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation
edit since i was feeling really daring today i found an old archived page of a wiki holding a lot of interesting thoughts from him, such as eugenics to prevent the loss of western civilization, and other points that at this point you should imagine. link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwi...
If it isn't a scientifically valid concept, then why did the NIH label the genetic data by race?
The construction of race at any given time and place will tend to have non-zero correlation with genetic frequencies, in part by chance and in part because it is usually largely (but not entirely) drivn by appearance which is to some degree associated with some aspects of underlying genetics.
> e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia.
People with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (and within that, even more West Africa), India, the Middle East, and Mediterranean are more likely to have the gene that provides malaria resistance with one copy and sickle cell disease with two than other populations.
While the highest incidence group is also commonly “Black” in most constructions of race, a lot of the American perception of it as a nearly exclusively Black disease is because the population perceived as Black in the US is heavily drawn from West Africa, and the US population also underrepresents other populations in which it is more common than average AND does not include, and may not construct as Black, populations constructed as Black elsewhere in the world where it is not common.
And when the science on race and intelligence came out, the response of the scientific community was not "your categories are bad, and here is my study on intelligence that actually uses scientifically valid genetic groupings." It was "any further science on this subject will not be funded and if you express disagreement it will risk your career."
The sickle cell stuff is likely related to the fact that most "black" people in the US are descended from slaves that pretty much all came from the same small region in West Africa.