The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.
I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
tptacek|9 months ago
peanutcrisis|8 months ago
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...