This brings us to the latest example of the Gould Effect in action. It began with Toby Young, a UK journalist who gave the Constance Holden Memorial Address at the 18th annual International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) conference held in 2017 at the Montreal Neurological Institute. This address discussed media and academic bias against and hostility toward intelligence research. A transcript of the talk was subsequently published as an opinion piece in Intelligence (Young, 2018). Young was subsequently appointed to the newly created Office for Students, a government board tasked with protecting free speech at UK universities, among other things. Before the board had its first meeting, Young's appointment created a media firestorm in the UK largely because of negative reactions from political opponents to his generally conservative political views (for the first instance of this, see Anonymous, 2018). The opposition to his appointment became so aggressive that he resigned in short order. One of the most scurrilous attacks referred to his attending a ‘secret’ meeting of ‘eugenicists’ and ‘white supremacists’, which had been held for four years (2014–2017) – three times at University College London (UCL) – and organized by honorary senior lecturer James Thompson (these meetings were instances of the London Conference on Intelligence; LCI) (Anonymous, 2018; see also van der Merwe's [2018] ‘exposé’). The Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail newspapers, The Scientist, Russia Today, and numerous other news outlets repeated these charges against the conference – making no apparent effort to determine the basis in fact of any of the allegations. Young did in fact attend the 2017 LCI meeting for a few hours in his capacity as a journalist, so as to gather information that might help him prepare his ISIR address.
Contrary to allegations, the annual LCI conference was not secret but invitation only (like many small conferences). The attendees had a range of theoretical orientations and research interests, and their attendance does not imply agreement with the views of all of the other attendees, be they political, moral or scientific. The conference program covered many topics related to the fields of intelligence and personality research4 and there was no exclusive focus on ‘eugenics’ or IQ differences among populations (although both issues were discussed). Scientometric analysis of the abstract lists from all four years of LCI confirm this claim, revealing that a modest minority (38.7%, or 29) of the 75 talks given over four years dealt with population (racial, ethnic and national) IQ differences. Only 2.7% of talks (two) discussed the practicability and desirability of what could loosely be termed ‘eugenic’ reproductive genetic intervention.5 Talks about any kind of policy issue were rare (numbering three in total). The overwhelming preponderance of talks dealt exclusively with data or substantive theory. Moreover 48% of talks were associated with (either based on or in most cases yielding) ‘mainstream’ publications6 over four years. Thus, LCI's productivity is comparable to that of conferences in biomedical science — a field in which, according to one meta-analysis, 44.5% of conference presentations yield publications (Scherer, Langenberg, & von Elm, 2008). Finally, the speakers originated from 13 different countries in total, including Japan, China, Brazil and Slovakia, thus the conference can reasonably be described as cosmopolitan as opposed to “white supremacist” in character.
Despite these facts and apparently informed only by the sensationalized but objectively erroneous media coverage, UCL began an investigation of conference organizer James Thompson and the holding of LCI at the university. Based on both his academic publication and popular (e.g. his blog posts) records, however, it is abundantly clear that Thompson offers only fair and honest analyses in discussions of complex and controversial data - a far cry from how he has been portrayed in certain media.
Politicized outrage about certain findings in intelligence research, and therefore the Gould Effect, is unfortunately unlikely to abate. To some on the political left (from whom the preponderance of criticism originates), the scientific findings of intelligence research will forever constitute junk science at best and system-justifying elitism and racism at worst (e.g. Gould, 1981, Gould, 1996; Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984; Richardson, 2017). This problem may ultimately be intractable owing to the action of powerful unconscious biasing factors related to certain manifestations of egalitarian moral psychology (Winegard & Winegard, 2017). However, some of the blame must surely be shouldered by substantive failures in science education, especially as it pertains to the inaccurate representation of intelligence research in introductory psychology texts (Warne, Astle, & Hill, 2018), and also to the aforementioned general reluctance of universities to cover this important topic in their course offerings. As intelligence researchers, we therefore ought to be doing a better job of explaining what it is that we actually do and what the weight of evidence shows about the nature of human intelligence, how it is measured, how it develops and how it impacts the broader world – essentially stressing that the findings of intelligence research are entirely mainstream within the broader field of psychology (Gottfredson, 1997; Neisser et al., 1996). To follow the data in the 21st century requires explorations of genetic and neuroscientific methods that may lead to interpretations of data that are contrary to popular utopian beliefs concerning the infinite malleability of human nature or the absolute equality of human groups (e.g. Haier, 2017; Pinker, 2002, Sesardic, 2005, Wade, 2014). We need to be prepared to have honest public discussions about all these matters without rancor, and the most important step towards this goal is in freely and accurately presenting all sides of the relevant arguments, so that those who may choose to make careers for themselves in the psychological sciences and also in journalism can approach the more controversial aspects of our field fully equipped with the relevant theoretical and empirical facts, such that they can engage in the best possible critical analysis.