facts. In the psychic area, these differences are important facts.
It seems much more sane to face these differences and investigate their
causes impartially than to play ostrich about them.

In fact, a free society best protects itself against the state-imposed
and anti-scientific ideologies of totalitarian systems (and against the
monstrous crimes against humanity which they generate) by refusing
to consent to political limitations on scientific inquiry. The antidote
to Nazi racist theories is not to deny that race differences exist, but
to investigate their causation, range and significance in an objective
and scientific fashion.

The present state of our knowledge about race and race difference
is anything but complete. The weight of evidence clearly suggests
that bio-genetic factors play a major role in causing psychic differ-
ences between races. This assertion is made, not because these bio-
genetic factors have been isolated, but because the environmental
factors which have been brought forward as exclusive causal agents
have been found incapable of producing the effects claimed for them.

The issue is not whether significant differences exist between the ob-
served and measurable mental performance of ethnically different
populations. It is rather whether these differences are caused ex-
clusively by environment or by a combination of environmental and
hereditary forces. If environment is the sole cause, then it follows
that a change in the relevant environmental factors will produce a
comparable change in observed differences in the mental performance
of the two races. The weight of evidence is that it does not do so.

If it were true that no inherited differences in the mentality of races
existed, empirical study would be sufficient to show this. The at-
tempted suppression of objective race-difference studies by environ-
mentalists would be self-defeating.

And in a larger sense, suppression is always self-defeating. A free
society is nourished by free scientific inquiry. A social science which
begins its investigations with morally or politically imposed premises,
which it refuses to submit to the acid test of evidence, must wither.
Here as elsewhere, work in the social sciences should be judged solely
on the basis of such considerations as honesty, objectivity, accuracy
of scientific method and scrupulously fair examination of the evidence.

FRANK C. J. McGURK, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Psychology,
Villanova University.

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