Medicine’s Neil S. Greenspan pens article in Genes : “Genes, heritability, ‘race’, and intelligence: Misapprehensions and implications.”

Neil S. Greenspan, professor of pathology, penned an article in Genes titled “Genes, heritability, ‘race’, and intelligence: Misapprehensions and implications.”

The article discusses the role of genetics in determining measured differences in mean IQ between putative racial groups. Greenspan explains that while the last several decades of research have demonstrated that genetic variation can influence measures of cognitive function, the inferences drawn by some participants in the controversy regarding the implications of these findings for racial differences in cognitive ability are highly dubious.

The article concludes that there is no compelling scientific rationale for focusing on and devoting substantial effort to determining mean differences in intelligence or other cognitive functions between groups with incompletely defined and dynamic (and therefore not definitively definable) boundaries.