>>13736592And also it's usually bad to speculate about why an author wrote a paper. But when it comes to anti-hereditarians we have half a century of bad faith arguing, mountains of data that makes their position untenable, and plenty of admissions that they are politically motivated to the point that they will never accept what is plainly in front of them. This is a movement that cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, as it is not scientific, they are not willing to change their beliefs from overwhelming evidence, and instead are trying to use science to justify their beliefs.
I think they wrote this paper as a crash course in heritability so journalists and leftists would stop making such outdated arguments against genetics. I think they were trying to push the tabula rasa stance more towards a "woah genes so crazy we can never know why some people are smarter" instead of the "intelligence has nothing to do with genetics" stance they have now. This paper was written back in 2017 so their effort didn't work. But we're seeing this again with Kathryn Paige Harden trying (and failing) to get the left to admit genes matter, this time getting a lot more backlash. It's interesting to see what will happen. I think leftists, who must take the anti-hereditarian stance for their politics to be feasible, are going to have to keep bashing down scientifically minded people who want to steer them away from gene denial. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing people calling for an end of heritability and intelligence research as the left goes DFE mode to try and save face.
