NYT Science Denialism
How DARE intelligence researchers research intelligence?!?! “Eppur Si Muove”
Not surprisingly, demands to shut down scientific research are growing as the years go by and scientists keep discovering ever more non-woke facts. Hence, the New York Times runs a protracted 3,900 word article in its news section about the pressing need to crack down on science.
The article is mostly of interest as a case study of just how ignorant the mainstream media is about I.Q.:
Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
The National Institutes of Health failed to protect brain scans that an international group of fringe researchers used to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people.
By Mike McIntire
Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter, has been with The Times since 2003.
McIntire is not part of the NYT’s traditionally more or less competent Science section staff. He’s employed by the NYT as an “investigative reporter” and works on topics like the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni celebrity controversy, gun control, Trump’s tax returns, etc. He has a bachelor’s in poly sci and he seems to know basically less than zero about psychometrics.
I.e., he’s another Amy Harmon:
“Eppur si muove.”
Jan. 24, 2026
Genetic researchers were seeking children for an ambitious, federally funded project to track brain development — a study that they told families could yield invaluable discoveries about DNA’s impact on behavior and disease.
They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015. Promotional materials included a cartoon of a Black child saying it felt good knowing that “scientists are taking steps to keep my information safe.”
The scientists did not keep it safe.
A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.
The New York Times reporter sounds genuinely shocked (and not in a Captain Renault “shocked, shocked” sense) by the very idea that blacks are less intelligent on average and that that explains a fair amount of their famously lower earnings.
Q. Who could even imagine such a far-fetched theory?
A. Bad people. Evil people. That’s who.
Now, you know and I know that the idea that lower average intelligence among black is causally linked to lower average income is not at all scientifically controversial.
All that remains in dispute among intelligence researchers is why African-Americans average lower I.Q.s: the mainstream view among psychometricians suggests that both nature and nurture play a role, But there remains a definite fringe of scientific experts devoted to the extremist position that only nurture could possibly influence the gap in average intelligence seen over and over and over among different races.
But it’s likely that the great bulk of New York Times journalists, not to mention their 12 million paying subscribers, are simply utterly ignorant of these fundamental social science facts.
I asked Google “When was the last time that the New York Times mentioned that gaps in I.Q. among different races really do exist and are important?” and it replied:
Recent mentions of racial I.Q. gaps in The New York Times primarily frame the subject as a debunked or unscientific “race science” used to promote division. While the Times historically reported on the existence of these gaps as significant data points, modern coverage focuses on their closing or the misuse of data by “fringe researchers”. …
April 10, 1988: One of the last times the Times discussed the gap as a significant, established disparity was in “An Emerging Theory on Blacks’ I.Q. Scores”. It stated that while the 15-point gap was “quite significant,” experts attributed it to social and environmental “castelike” positioning rather than genetic endowment.
That was a good article about Nigerian-American social scientist John Ogbu’s theory that shunned castes like the Burakumin in Japan or African-Americans tend to have lower average IQs. It began:
An Emerging Theory on Blacks’ I.Q. Scores
By Daniel Goleman
April 10, 1988
MOST social scientists know - though few publicly discuss it - that there has been a puzzling gap of about 15 points in I.Q. test scores, on average, between blacks and whites in America ever since the tests were first widely used more than 70 years ago. After long debate over why blacks score lower, and what it means, a fresh theory is putting the discussion into perspective.
That theory challenges earlier views that had laid the blame on a defect in heredity or home life, and points instead to the social and psychological toll taken by broad social inequities that stand in the way of academic success for many blacks.
To be sure, the gap does not apply to all blacks, but is based on the averages of millions of test scores. There are blacks among the brightest 1 percent on I.Q. tests, just as there are whites among those with the lowest scores. But on the whole, the difference in I.Q. points between the groups is quite significant. It means that the top sixth of blacks score only as well on I.Q. tests as do the top half of whites.
So, 39 years ago, the news section of the New York Times still allowed itself to occasionally state the facts in such a straightforward Steve Sailerish manner that would cause it to cancel itself today. But since then …
McIntire burbles:
Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor.
As I’ve been reporting for many years, the National Institutes of Health’s Adolescent Brain Cognition Development tracking study is one of most impressive scientific efforts to date. Costing $440 million taxpayer dollars, it recruited a panel of over 10,000 children and subjected them to just about any test imaginable — IQ, DNA, MRI, etc.
As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine three years ago:
Because the taxpayers are shelling out for the ABCD, it was intended to be operated on the “open science” model with the data broadly available. But that freedom is being squeezed because some scientists have lately used these huge new longitudinal databases to look into key questions of the age and found politically unwelcome answers. For example, tenured Cleveland State professor Bryan J. Pesta recently was fired after publishing a paper using the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment Cohort to examine the impact of racial admixture on IQ.
Back to the NYT’s screed against science:
Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study.
Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.
But not the New York Times. It is much too saintly to provide its readers with links to impious science.
“It’s evil,” said Dr. Terry L. Jernigan, national co-director of the ABCD Study and a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Diego.
Doing science that I don’t want you to do is e-v-i-l.
“It’s not just that the science is faulty,
For reasons.
but it’s being used to advance an unethical agenda.”
Bad!
As we all know, the reason George Floyd was a career criminal wasn’t because he was kind of an idiot who couldn’t get a better job, it was because of … I dunno … FDR’s redlining.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
And anybody who points out any evidence to the contrary is a Bad Person.
That’s how The Science works.
First, you decide who is Good (us) and who is Bad (them) and then … well, that’s all you need to know.
Why do you want to know what the truth is when we’ve already told you who is good and who is bad?
Are you BAD?
The misuse of the children’s data has validated longstanding concerns that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ genetic information held by the N.I.H. could fall into the wrong hands. The agency grants widespread access to stimulate new medical discoveries. But critics say the N.I.H. has failed to address the risks that the data, even with personally identifiable details removed, could be misused in unethical research, for commercial purposes or by foreign adversaries.
Oh, boy.
NIH has released countless copies of its dataset, hundreds to researchers in China. Why?
Paywall here.
