It could probably have been resolved decades ago, and definitely within the last 10 years with genomic data, yet it is still not. Why? Essentially, it’s because of bias in academia. It begins early: data access, then there’s authors’ own publication bias, then finally editorial and reviewing bias (all caused by lack of political/belief diversity in academia). Here’s a recent example of the first, data access bias. How can there be this bias? Because academia has been hoarding the data that the public has funded them to gather, refusing to share it with anyone openly. Well, actually academics just threw away most of the data (‘we accidentally all the data’), but the data they didn’t just let perish, most of is safe-guarded for privacy reasons so others can’t use it to publish without the guy who collected it (‘steal his ideas’), and especially so nefarious characters (aka. political opponents) cannot get it.
We were applying to a large dataset that would probably be able to settle the race and intelligence, or at least, provide very strong evidence for or against genetics as cause. But instead we got:
I asked Prof. X about this project, and even though he does recognise its relevance, I am afraid that he declined to provide the data. The reason is that country C is facing a very delicate political situation at the moment, and race/ethnicity/ancestry is one of the topics at the core of debates and etc. Everyone in the country seems to be a little bit cautious when it comes to looking at ethnicity, especially regarding this such as intelligence or violence.
I am truly sorry that we will not be able to help at this opportunity, but I do wish the best of luck with your research.
And onwards we go towards applying for the next dataset.
