Race and IQ: A High School Science Fair Project Ignites a Storm

We don’t know the student’s name, but we do know that he hit a nerve — in fact, he hit a whole bunch of them. Identified only as a boy of Asian descent at C.K. McClatchy High School in California, the teen’s recent science-fair project, “Race and IQ,” propounded the thesis that differences in groups’ average intelligence influence their academic performance. He couldn’t win, though, because his project was removed after parents, staff and other students became “upset” and one girl said she felt “unsafe and uneasy.” The irony?

A project on evolution would no doubt have been well received — even though an assumption of racial differences is implicit in evolutionary theory.

In fact, The Sacramento Bee, which hasn’t yet evolved out of the progressive primordial soup, mentioned that the student’s thesis is associated with eugenics (which the Bee casts negatively), the science of improving the human race via selective breeding. The paper is likely unaware, however, that the term “eugenics” itself was coined by Sir Francis Galton — a cousin of famed evolutionist Charles Darwin — and that Galton made clear that in his eugenicist endeavors, he was merely building on his cousin’s work.

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