This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
It is requested that an image or photograph of Henry Harpending be
included in this article to
improve its quality. Please replace this template with a more specific
media request template where possible.
The Free Image Search Tool or Openverse Creative Commons Search may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites. |
http://savageminds.org/2007/03/20/harpending-on-neo-liberal-genetics-so-so-wrong/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.168.47.9 ( talk) 18:05, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
You may find it helpful while reading or editing articles to look at a bibliography of Intelligence Citations, posted for the use of all Wikipedians who have occasion to edit articles on human intelligence and related issues. I happen to have circulating access to a huge academic research library at a university with an active research program in these issues (and to another library that is one of the ten largest public library systems in the United States) and have been researching these issues since 1989. You are welcome to use these citations for your own research. You can help other Wikipedians by suggesting new sources through comments on that page. It will be extremely helpful for articles on human intelligence to edit them according to the Wikipedia standards for reliable sources for medicine-related articles, as it is important to get these issues as well verified as possible. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 01:54, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
This article glosses over the fact that Harpending was a hugely controversial scientific racist. In fact, it doesn't contain in criticism of him at all. Joe Roe ( talk) 10:36, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Henry Harpending. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 01:17, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
I have removed the paragraph "Views on race" sourced entirely to the SPLC. Firstly, these things needs secondary sources: I don't see the SPLC's analysis cited anywhere. Secondly, these are rather inflammatory claims on a BLP and should not be given this much space. Third, I don't know if the SPLC has any expertise in genetics or anthropology, so their comments about his scholarship are rather beside the point. As far as I can see, Harpending's work is somewhat controversial but well within the mainstream. His work with Cochran has been cited many hundreds of times and his work generally many thousands of times. To call him a white supremacist and scientific racist etc. requires much stronger sourcing than this, especially on a BLP. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 07:47, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Let me first make a general point, and then go into specifics.
This is a biography page, and if some person is controversial, it's worth including the controversy. No problems so far. However, Harpending is primarily known for his professional work, as evidenced by the thousands of citations to his work. What is not proper, in my opinion, is have a "Views on race" section, a third of the whole article, entirely negative in tone, by an organization with no capability or pretentions to evaluating his work. It is, in principle, possible to write a good summary of the controversies Harpending is involved in, but this paragraph isn't it. I'll now give more specific comments.
Regarding the SPLC: as I said, the SPLC's area of focus is hate groups in the US. What is the connection between Harpending and "white supremacist" groups? Very little, from what I can see: he once gave a talk at a conference called "Preserving Western Civilization". That's basically it. The SPLC charge Harpending with being an "eugenicist" and "scientific racist", but don't quote a single academic paper of his in the section "In his own words". Instead a blog post and a speech at the H. L. Mencken club are cited. I don't blame the SPLC (much) for this: their area of focus is hate groups and they are clearly out of their depth on matters of genetics or anthropology.
Harpending and Cochran's most controversial paper is Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. and their book The 10,000 Year Explosion. There have been many reviews of both in the scholarly as well as the popular press. The discussion in NY Mag is one, but there are many others. As the NY Mag source itself says:
Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar with a flair for controversy, skipped cheerfully into the center of this minefield. The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish a genetic argument for the fabled intelligence of Jews. It contended that the diseases most commonly found in Ashkenazim—particularly the lysosomal storage diseases, like Tay-Sachs—were likely connected to and, indeed, in some sense responsible for outsize intellectual achievement in Ashkenazi Jews. The paper contained references, but no footnotes. It was not written in the genteel, dispassionate voice common to scientific inquiries but as a polemic. Its science was mainly conjecture. Most American academics expected the thing to drop like a stone.
It didn’t. The Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press, posted it online and agreed to run it in its bi-monthly periodical sometime in 2006. The New York Times, The Economist, and several Jewish publications risked their reputations to legitimize it. Today, the paper has a lively presence on the Internet—type “Ashkenazi” into Google and the first hit is the Wikipedia entry, where the article gets pride of place.
Moreover, the paper has been cited 190 times on Google Scholar. Here is a Nature review of various academic papers on the matter. See Table 1 for the citation.
If one wants to discuss the paper and the book seriously (including criticism/controversy), I am all for it. The paragraph which I removed is not the way to go about it. I will try to write a summary of the arguments in the paper and/or book, and the reception given to them soon. However, it would require a bit more work than quoting the SPLC, so it will take some time. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 11:59, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Henry Harpending. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 23:43, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
I mentioned in my edit summary here that mainstream sources have covered Harpending's work positively, so let me elaborate. Here is coverage in The New York Times, Here is The Economist, here is The New Republic, here is Scientific American, and here is The Financial Times. In almost every mainstream source to cover Harpending's work, and there are a lot, the coverage has been neutral or mildly positive. This includes sources written by experts in the field (the New Statesman article was written by Steven Pinker).
Now, compare the perspective taken by these mainstream sources to the one taken by the SPLC. The SPLC clearly is in the minority here, and it is grossly undue weight for it to dominate the coverage of how Harpending's work has been received. Perhaps what we ought to be doing is adding some of the other sources I've linked above, to show how overwhelmingly mainstream opinion disagrees with the SPLC in this case.
@ Joe Roe: Would you prefer that we add some of these other sources, instead of reducing the SPLC summary? 2600:1004:B14F:4062:3C9A:777A:2A66:C1A2 ( talk) 18:58, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
Looking at this discussion, it appears that user:Kingsindian made a similar proposal two years ago, but never followed through with it. I'd say it's time to go ahead with what he proposed, unless you would be okay with reducing the SPLC summary, which is an easier solution. 2600:1004:B14F:4062:3C9A:777A:2A66:C1A2 ( talk) 19:05, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
@ Joe Roe: sorry for taking so long to get this done. As per our discussion here, and your earlier discussion with Kingsindian, I've added some more detail about the broader impact and reception of Harpending's work. Something I was repeatedly struck by while researching sources for this new content is how highly-regarded Harpending's work has been among other members of the fields he worked in (anthropological genetics and evolutionary psychology). The majority of the accusations that he's a racist have come from people and organizations outside of his field, such as the SPLC.
Next I'd like to discuss what to do with the "views on race" section, because I still think this should not be its own section, and also that it gives undue weight to the SPLC. In the mean time I've modified a few parts of that section that were poorly-sourced, or that were not describing Harpending's views accurately. 2600:1004:B145:E660:2997:11CB:AECD:E003 ( talk) 01:12, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
There is one very good reason to avoid citing “An Encyclopedia of Extremists and Extremist Groups” for this article: this book literally repeats vandalism from an IP on Wikipedia, which stayed in an article far longer than it should have. I do not think that a book repeating vandalism from Wikipedia should be considered reliable. I’ll quote my synopsis of this issue from an email I sent to user: DGG (whose input here might be valuable) on January 31st of this year:
"Three years ago, an anonymous IP added two critical quotes [6] to the Linda Gottfredson article, one cited to a Wordpress blog and the other to a 1994 paper apparently referencing Barry Mehler in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, although with no title or issue number. I looked up the citation for the latter (Mehler 1994) at Google Scholar, with no results [7] indicating he's authored anything in that journal at all. The self-published blog source was eventually removed in 2017. The Mehler quote stayed in the article for almost 2 years, before being removed as unverifiable—but not before it was literally repeated in a book [8] published in 2018. This book cites the Southern Poverty Law Center for this quote, but the referenced SPLC article does not contain the quote.
Altogether, this looks like a clear case where a book published a false claim that originated in the Wikipedia article. It remained there for so long because at the time, the only people editing the Gottfredson article were people who disliked her, so nobody noticed this problem or did anything about it until after a published book had already repeated the material. The editors involved in these articles have always been diligent about removing poorly-sourced material that's favorable to people like Gottfredson, but if Arbcom wants poorly-sourced defamatory material to also be removed in a timely manner, it's necessary for these articles to be maintained by editors who haven’t been artificially screened for their viewpoint."
- Ferahgo the Assassin ( talk) 21:29, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
I don't think DGG is going to comment here again, so I'll go ahead and propose the specific changes I'd like to make.
@ Joe Roe: would those changes be acceptable to you? 2600:1004:B165:3E77:B1A9:81A7:2399:292A ( talk) 12:18, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
It is requested that an image or photograph of Henry Harpending be
included in this article to
improve its quality. Please replace this template with a more specific
media request template where possible.
The Free Image Search Tool or Openverse Creative Commons Search may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites. |
http://savageminds.org/2007/03/20/harpending-on-neo-liberal-genetics-so-so-wrong/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.168.47.9 ( talk) 18:05, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
You may find it helpful while reading or editing articles to look at a bibliography of Intelligence Citations, posted for the use of all Wikipedians who have occasion to edit articles on human intelligence and related issues. I happen to have circulating access to a huge academic research library at a university with an active research program in these issues (and to another library that is one of the ten largest public library systems in the United States) and have been researching these issues since 1989. You are welcome to use these citations for your own research. You can help other Wikipedians by suggesting new sources through comments on that page. It will be extremely helpful for articles on human intelligence to edit them according to the Wikipedia standards for reliable sources for medicine-related articles, as it is important to get these issues as well verified as possible. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 01:54, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
This article glosses over the fact that Harpending was a hugely controversial scientific racist. In fact, it doesn't contain in criticism of him at all. Joe Roe ( talk) 10:36, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Henry Harpending. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 01:17, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
I have removed the paragraph "Views on race" sourced entirely to the SPLC. Firstly, these things needs secondary sources: I don't see the SPLC's analysis cited anywhere. Secondly, these are rather inflammatory claims on a BLP and should not be given this much space. Third, I don't know if the SPLC has any expertise in genetics or anthropology, so their comments about his scholarship are rather beside the point. As far as I can see, Harpending's work is somewhat controversial but well within the mainstream. His work with Cochran has been cited many hundreds of times and his work generally many thousands of times. To call him a white supremacist and scientific racist etc. requires much stronger sourcing than this, especially on a BLP. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 07:47, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Let me first make a general point, and then go into specifics.
This is a biography page, and if some person is controversial, it's worth including the controversy. No problems so far. However, Harpending is primarily known for his professional work, as evidenced by the thousands of citations to his work. What is not proper, in my opinion, is have a "Views on race" section, a third of the whole article, entirely negative in tone, by an organization with no capability or pretentions to evaluating his work. It is, in principle, possible to write a good summary of the controversies Harpending is involved in, but this paragraph isn't it. I'll now give more specific comments.
Regarding the SPLC: as I said, the SPLC's area of focus is hate groups in the US. What is the connection between Harpending and "white supremacist" groups? Very little, from what I can see: he once gave a talk at a conference called "Preserving Western Civilization". That's basically it. The SPLC charge Harpending with being an "eugenicist" and "scientific racist", but don't quote a single academic paper of his in the section "In his own words". Instead a blog post and a speech at the H. L. Mencken club are cited. I don't blame the SPLC (much) for this: their area of focus is hate groups and they are clearly out of their depth on matters of genetics or anthropology.
Harpending and Cochran's most controversial paper is Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. and their book The 10,000 Year Explosion. There have been many reviews of both in the scholarly as well as the popular press. The discussion in NY Mag is one, but there are many others. As the NY Mag source itself says:
Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar with a flair for controversy, skipped cheerfully into the center of this minefield. The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish a genetic argument for the fabled intelligence of Jews. It contended that the diseases most commonly found in Ashkenazim—particularly the lysosomal storage diseases, like Tay-Sachs—were likely connected to and, indeed, in some sense responsible for outsize intellectual achievement in Ashkenazi Jews. The paper contained references, but no footnotes. It was not written in the genteel, dispassionate voice common to scientific inquiries but as a polemic. Its science was mainly conjecture. Most American academics expected the thing to drop like a stone.
It didn’t. The Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press, posted it online and agreed to run it in its bi-monthly periodical sometime in 2006. The New York Times, The Economist, and several Jewish publications risked their reputations to legitimize it. Today, the paper has a lively presence on the Internet—type “Ashkenazi” into Google and the first hit is the Wikipedia entry, where the article gets pride of place.
Moreover, the paper has been cited 190 times on Google Scholar. Here is a Nature review of various academic papers on the matter. See Table 1 for the citation.
If one wants to discuss the paper and the book seriously (including criticism/controversy), I am all for it. The paragraph which I removed is not the way to go about it. I will try to write a summary of the arguments in the paper and/or book, and the reception given to them soon. However, it would require a bit more work than quoting the SPLC, so it will take some time. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 11:59, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Henry Harpending. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 23:43, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
I mentioned in my edit summary here that mainstream sources have covered Harpending's work positively, so let me elaborate. Here is coverage in The New York Times, Here is The Economist, here is The New Republic, here is Scientific American, and here is The Financial Times. In almost every mainstream source to cover Harpending's work, and there are a lot, the coverage has been neutral or mildly positive. This includes sources written by experts in the field (the New Statesman article was written by Steven Pinker).
Now, compare the perspective taken by these mainstream sources to the one taken by the SPLC. The SPLC clearly is in the minority here, and it is grossly undue weight for it to dominate the coverage of how Harpending's work has been received. Perhaps what we ought to be doing is adding some of the other sources I've linked above, to show how overwhelmingly mainstream opinion disagrees with the SPLC in this case.
@ Joe Roe: Would you prefer that we add some of these other sources, instead of reducing the SPLC summary? 2600:1004:B14F:4062:3C9A:777A:2A66:C1A2 ( talk) 18:58, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
Looking at this discussion, it appears that user:Kingsindian made a similar proposal two years ago, but never followed through with it. I'd say it's time to go ahead with what he proposed, unless you would be okay with reducing the SPLC summary, which is an easier solution. 2600:1004:B14F:4062:3C9A:777A:2A66:C1A2 ( talk) 19:05, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
@ Joe Roe: sorry for taking so long to get this done. As per our discussion here, and your earlier discussion with Kingsindian, I've added some more detail about the broader impact and reception of Harpending's work. Something I was repeatedly struck by while researching sources for this new content is how highly-regarded Harpending's work has been among other members of the fields he worked in (anthropological genetics and evolutionary psychology). The majority of the accusations that he's a racist have come from people and organizations outside of his field, such as the SPLC.
Next I'd like to discuss what to do with the "views on race" section, because I still think this should not be its own section, and also that it gives undue weight to the SPLC. In the mean time I've modified a few parts of that section that were poorly-sourced, or that were not describing Harpending's views accurately. 2600:1004:B145:E660:2997:11CB:AECD:E003 ( talk) 01:12, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
There is one very good reason to avoid citing “An Encyclopedia of Extremists and Extremist Groups” for this article: this book literally repeats vandalism from an IP on Wikipedia, which stayed in an article far longer than it should have. I do not think that a book repeating vandalism from Wikipedia should be considered reliable. I’ll quote my synopsis of this issue from an email I sent to user: DGG (whose input here might be valuable) on January 31st of this year:
"Three years ago, an anonymous IP added two critical quotes [6] to the Linda Gottfredson article, one cited to a Wordpress blog and the other to a 1994 paper apparently referencing Barry Mehler in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, although with no title or issue number. I looked up the citation for the latter (Mehler 1994) at Google Scholar, with no results [7] indicating he's authored anything in that journal at all. The self-published blog source was eventually removed in 2017. The Mehler quote stayed in the article for almost 2 years, before being removed as unverifiable—but not before it was literally repeated in a book [8] published in 2018. This book cites the Southern Poverty Law Center for this quote, but the referenced SPLC article does not contain the quote.
Altogether, this looks like a clear case where a book published a false claim that originated in the Wikipedia article. It remained there for so long because at the time, the only people editing the Gottfredson article were people who disliked her, so nobody noticed this problem or did anything about it until after a published book had already repeated the material. The editors involved in these articles have always been diligent about removing poorly-sourced material that's favorable to people like Gottfredson, but if Arbcom wants poorly-sourced defamatory material to also be removed in a timely manner, it's necessary for these articles to be maintained by editors who haven’t been artificially screened for their viewpoint."
- Ferahgo the Assassin ( talk) 21:29, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
I don't think DGG is going to comment here again, so I'll go ahead and propose the specific changes I'd like to make.
@ Joe Roe: would those changes be acceptable to you? 2600:1004:B165:3E77:B1A9:81A7:2399:292A ( talk) 12:18, 3 September 2019 (UTC)