Wall Street:

That's fine, call them alleles or gene markers or whatever you want. I do not think that anyone who is interested in findings related to IQ is really interested in looking down on or up at a race of people or in applying racial generalizations to an individual. However, if it can be proven that people with certain genes are predisposed to have a high IQ or a low IQ relative to people without those genes, why is it so socially harmful to discuss it?

The harm comes not from the use but from the abuse of a simple theory, however well intentioned.

I'd like to use an analogy taken from your implied stomping ground, Mr Wall Street. I like this analogy because what we are really talking about here is in fact very much a question of investment, of our time, energy, votes and yes money, not in securities but in people. Let's take the efficient market hypothesis which I recently ran into again for the first time since since leaving college:

"Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is an idea partly developed in the 1960s by Eugene Fama. It states that it is impossible to beat the market because prices already incorporate and reflect all relevant information. This is also a highly controversial and often disputed theory. Supporters of this model believe it is pointless to search for undervalued stocks or try to predict trends in the market through fundamental analysis or technical analysis." (<link>)

As with Saletan's data, the devil is in the detail. The fallacious conclusion that it is pointless to search for undervalued stock is based upon a misapplication of a useful theory. The statement "it is impossible to beat the market because prices already incorporate and reflect all relevant information," should have included the words, IN THE LONG RUN, somewhere. The other fallacy is buried even deeper in the theory. I think it is called begging the question. The theory begs the question that the investor is in fact competing with the stock market. The long term investor may in fact be doing just that, but the day trader and the swing trader is NOT competing with the market, which is simply an abstraction used to describe the activity of real people, he is in fact competing with all the other investors. He is not betting at all, he is surfing the waves, or depending on the fact that he is smart and alert enough to use current data to stay ahead of the pack which can be depended on to behave predictably in the long run, but not before he does. He is in fact counting the cards in a game where the only bouncers are the big players and organizations who can and do actually influence the market.

I went into all that detail about investing because that's where the devil is with respect to genetic data, in the detail. It is dumb to use that data to make predictions about Barack Obama, for example, or for his supporters, or to turn the data on its head and try to use it to hypothesize about those constituencies that tend not to support him, under-educated White and Latino voters.

So what is this data good for then if it can't make reliable predictions about real people or even about constituent groups as large as the state of Oregon, or Iowa? Genetic data can be used to to make general determinations concerning the efficacy of policy decisions. It can also be used, less reliably, as a weak caution, as I wrote elsewhere, that some measure may be effective, or to explain why not; that is, to simply expand the scope of our deliberations during decision making. It's not for making conclusions. Get the difference?

So the old lady who thought that Obama was a Muslim, was quite correct to consider that possibility, given his name (also a common Jewish name), but stupidly wrong not to pursue the thought a little further, to also consider that his greatest campaign problems were caused by his Christian pastor, and his attendance at a Christian church, for the past 20 years. Of course no one who read his book, "The Audacity of Hope," would be under any doubt as to Obama's patriotism. The whole book actually paints the biographical setting , providing a verbal background for the concluding sentence, "My heart is filled with love for this country(!)" (Barack Obama writing in "The Audacity of Hope").

Reverend Wright's unscientific diatribe concerning genetic differences between the races, might have some temporary application when applied to isolated peoples in Africa. (The research was probably scientific, Wright's conclusions were simplistic and misleading.) The same can be said for poison preached by the KKK. Similarly, it is certain that in other places throughout the world, the same kind of nonsense can be applied to gender differences, where women are excluded from educational and financial opportunities.

Obama and Hillary's joint candidacies themselves are the most salient and compelling demonstrations of the injustice and moral bankruptcy of using academic labels to exclude people from treatments or opportunities, or to include them in sanctions or even unequal scrutiny.

So that's why I began by stating: The harm comes not from the use but from the abuse of a simple theory, however well intentioned.