Silicon Valley Is Reviving the Discredited and Discriminatory Idea of ‘Race Science’ | Scientific American

Modern proponents of race science insist they're not motivated by racism but are simply reporting data on intelligence. This dubious claim was fostered by the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994, which propagated the idea that African Americans were intellectually inferior. 

This central thesis was eviscerated in scathing criticism by experts ranging from Stephen J. Gould to Noam Chomsky, many of whom noted the data presented were riddled with errors and spurious inferences. 

This fatal criticism however was not enough to stop even some Nobel laureates, most notably DNA double helix co-discoverer James Watson and transistor co-inventor William Shockley, from pushing discredited claims on race and intelligence. Overall their arguments about ostensible racial differences commit a statistical fallacy, ignoring extremely relevant lurking variables; while slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, this did not magically alleviate massive inequality or the legacy of historical harms that persist still.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/