Who's afraid of the big bad data?
Before the advent of internet blogging and stuff, there was an email list of people interested in race and stuff. Steve Sailer was there, Charles Murray, Phil Rushton, and others. Name was Human Biodiversity Group. Some hater even has a list of the members. I want to bring attention to a specific conversation where Charles Murray tried to arrange an adversarial collaboration to investigate race and intelligence. The specific conversation was here, and sadly no longer works because Yahoo Groups are defunct, and apparently Wayback Machine does not have a proper archive. But Archive does have it. Maybe I archived it. Here's the text and an image backup:
Charles Murray
Sep 16, 2005
An interesting story that I think reveals volumes:
It is now possible using genetic markers to do much better than classify people as "black," "white" or "Asian." The method for doing so is implied in the studies using genetic markers, with the most recent being Tang, H., et al. (2005). "Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity, and confounding in case-control association studies." American Journal of Human Genetics, 76, 268–275.
The next step seems obvious: take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as “white” or “black,” but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum.
And so I emailed some scholars on both sides of the IQ/race debate, suggesting that they jointly design and conduct such a study. I told them I would undertake to find someone to fund the study. It would be easy to find such a funder, but only if scholars from both sides were on board (otherwise, the funder would fear being called racist). I don't think I'm betraying a confidence when I say that Jensen and Rushton were enthusiastically in favor. Those on the other side, whom I will not name, declined.
So the racialists are raring to go, Mr. Naff. Are you willing to join up?
Charles Murray
I emailed Charles in 2019 to ask if he recalled anything about this. Sadly no, but he did find this also interesting minor piece on the attempted suppression of Jensen's magnus opus The g Factor (one can find their existing in the Unz archive, but no PDF, but here's a PDF!):
James Flynn would later feel the same and also eventually got it out.