The hereditarian hypothesis is falsifiable in the Popperian sense. If, for example, your studies of racial admixture's correlation with IQ had reported the reverse findings, then the hereditarian hypothesis for racial differences in IQ would have been toast. The flexible egalitarian hypothesis is not good Popperian science. But it's also not necessarily wrong. E.g., the Flynn Effect was pretty unexpected and we still aren't too sure what all the causes of it are. So, it could turn out there might be environmental reasons that we haven't begun to conceive of, much less to measure. But that's pretty weak science
I think someone could make a reasonable argument that "The social consequences of the heredetarian hypothesis being true could be very bad, so we should weight our priors against it to some extent so we are more cautious about accepting it and require stronger evidence than we would for a less charged topic." Effectively we already do this in various respects. Weather forecasts overestimate the chance of precipitation because it is worse for people to leave their umbrellas at home when they need them than to bring them along and not need them. We require higher standards of evidence to accept new pharmaceutical drugs than to believe a random scientific study of little consequence. The important thing though is to be explicit about the fact that you are doing this and to stay open to changing your mind if the evidence is compelling enough. It seems to be that most people advancing the egalitarian hypothesis have already decided a priori that no amount of evidence will possibly change their mind (i.e., weighting the priors of the heredetarian hypothesis at 0% instead of just relatively low).
The hereditarian hypothesis is falsifiable in the Popperian sense. If, for example, your studies of racial admixture's correlation with IQ had reported the reverse findings, then the hereditarian hypothesis for racial differences in IQ would have been toast. The flexible egalitarian hypothesis is not good Popperian science. But it's also not necessarily wrong. E.g., the Flynn Effect was pretty unexpected and we still aren't too sure what all the causes of it are. So, it could turn out there might be environmental reasons that we haven't begun to conceive of, much less to measure. But that's pretty weak science
The bottom line is that egalitarians refuse to accept reality.
I think someone could make a reasonable argument that "The social consequences of the heredetarian hypothesis being true could be very bad, so we should weight our priors against it to some extent so we are more cautious about accepting it and require stronger evidence than we would for a less charged topic." Effectively we already do this in various respects. Weather forecasts overestimate the chance of precipitation because it is worse for people to leave their umbrellas at home when they need them than to bring them along and not need them. We require higher standards of evidence to accept new pharmaceutical drugs than to believe a random scientific study of little consequence. The important thing though is to be explicit about the fact that you are doing this and to stay open to changing your mind if the evidence is compelling enough. It seems to be that most people advancing the egalitarian hypothesis have already decided a priori that no amount of evidence will possibly change their mind (i.e., weighting the priors of the heredetarian hypothesis at 0% instead of just relatively low).
thanks for collecting this data.