Human Diversity Quotes

“The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer—but there’s a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don’t have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”—but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them.

Here they are:

1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures.

2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability.

3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things.

4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior.

5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.

6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.

7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.

8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior.

9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.

10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“Siberian silver fox. In 1959, Soviet biologist Dmitry Belyaev decided to reproduce the evolution of wolves into domesticated dogs.33 Instead of using actual wolves, he obtained Siberian silver foxes from Soviet fur farms and began to breed them for tameness. The foxes were not trained in any way, nor were they selected for anything except specific indicators of tameness as puppies. In the fourth generation, Belyaev produced the first fox puppies that would wag their tails when a human approached. In the sixth generation, he had puppies who were eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention, licking their handlers—in short, acting like dogs. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of puppies exhibited these characteristics from birth. By the twentieth generation, that proportion had grown to 35 percent.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“Under this hypothesis, genetically-grounded personality differences widen in the most gender-egalitarian societies for the simplest of reasons: Both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“The most famous illustration of what happens to those who question the orthodoxy is what befell economist Larry Summers. On January 14, 2005, Summers, then president of Harvard University, spoke to a conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce.16 In his informal remarks, responding to the sponsors’ encouragement to speculate, he offered reasons for thinking that innate differences in men and women might account for some of the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering. He spoke undogmatically and collegially, talking about possibilities, phrasing his speculations moderately. And all hell broke loose. An MIT biologist, Nancy Hopkins, told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” and that she had to leave the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”17 Within a few days, Summers had been excoriated by the chairperson of Harvard’s sociology department, Mary C. Waters, and received a harshly critical letter from Harvard’s committee on faculty recruiting. One hundred and twenty Harvard professors endorsed the letter. Some alumnae announced that they would suspend donations.18 Summers retracted his remarks, with, in journalist Stuart Taylor Jr.’s words, “groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“Under those conditions, first-wave feminists were too busy to say much about questions of inborn differences between men and women. An exception was Kate Austin, who compared the plight of women to those of Chinese women with bound feet: “We know that at birth the feet of the little baby girl were straight and beautiful like her brothers, but a cruel and artificial custom restrained the growth. Likewise it is just as foolish to assert that woman is mentally inferior to man, when it is plain to be seen her brain in a majority of cases receives the same treatment accorded the feet of Chinese girls.”4 As Helena Swanwick put it, “There does not seem much that can be profitably said about [the alleged inferiority of women]… until the incubus of brute force is removed.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“biology, with devastating effects.”2 Why the resistance? Because the social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodoxy that is scared stiff of biology.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“Biology is not going to put us out of business. The new knowledge that geneticists and neuroscientists are providing, conjoined with the kinds of analyses we do best, will enable us to take giant strides in understanding how societies, polities, and economies really function. We are like physicists at the outset of the nineteenth century, who were poised at a moment in history that would produce Ampères and Faradays.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“The sciences form a hierarchy. “Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology,” wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“Most recently, the task of assembling the genetic story for specific phenotypic traits has begun. It is still in its early stages, but progress is accelerating nonlinearly. Hence the nervousness that has prevented open discussion of what’s going on in the geneticists’ parallel universe: the fear that we will discover scary population differences in what I have called cognitive repertoires.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“I could answer by telling you that such selective sweeps create a valley of genetic diversity around the site under selection, that they leave a deficit of extreme allele frequencies (low or high) at linked sites and an increase in linkage disequilibrium in flanking regions—but that doesn’t tell you much unless you’re a geneticist.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“But this is also a good time to remind you that “a lot different” does not come close to comprehensively different. On the contrary, those who would try to make the case that one sex is superior to another should recall some of the personality traits described in chapter 2 on which males and females do not appear to differ. Some of those involve personality traits that many men like to associate with being male, such as forcefulness in expression, self-reliance, and venturesomeness; others involve traits that many women like to associate with being female, such as openness to the inner world of the imagination, spontaneity, and openness to new experiences. In those instances and many other important traits such as commitment to fulfilling moral obligations and thinking things through before acting, males and females are indistinguishable.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.3”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”6”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class