Will Saletan tries to clean up the mess over his ill-conceived Slate series on race and intelligence, which was shredded here, here, here, and here (among others):

Last week, I wrote about the possibility of genetic IQ differences among races. I wanted to discuss whether egalitarianism could survive if this scenario, raised last month by James Watson, turned out to be true. I thought it was important to lay out the scenario’s plausibility. In doing so, I short-circuited the conversation. Most of the reaction to what I wrote has been over whether the genetic hypothesis is true, with me as an expert witness.

I don’t want this role. I’m not an expert. I think it’s misleading to dismiss the scenario, as some officials have done in response to Watson. But my attempts to characterize the evidence beyond that, even with caveats such as “partial,” “preliminary,” and “prima facie,” have backfired. I outlined the evidence primarily to illustrate the limits of the genetic hypothesis. If it turns out to be true, it will be in a less threatening form than you might imagine. As to whether it’s true, you’ll have to judge the evidence for yourself. Every responsible scholar I know says we should wait many years before drawing conclusions.

Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to “the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime (“Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous”) and heresy (“Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people”). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I’m sorry. I owe you better than that.

In general, I’m baffled that Saletan thought he was qualified to arbitrate a scientific debate as complex as the one over race and intelligence. But his ignorance about Rushton is even more disconcerting. He didn’t even have basic biographical information about the supposed experts whose work he was drawing on, so what was he doing when he was reporting the story? Who was he talking to?

Update 12/1 1:31 PM: More from CMU’s Cosma Shalizi:

In my first post about this, I said that there were
two possible interpretations of Saletan’s actions: that he didn’t know that the
ideas he was spreading were crap, or that he did, but spread them anyway to
advance an agenda. Saying that the second interpretation was more charitable
wasn’t just a joke. Sadly, this partial mea culpa supports
the first interpretation, that of incompetence. To put it in
“shorter
William Saletan” form, what he is saying is: I am shocked — shocked!
— to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing
supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists.
And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard
(as Yglesias
says) to see why, logically, he should strain out those gnats he
displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group
inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming
thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher
that is really quite stunning —
as Brad
DeLong says, this seems like a trained incapacity.

But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on “peer review and
rebuttals to expose any relevant issue”. There are two problems here.

One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is
really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton’s papers, in
particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example,
in the very same
issue of the very same
journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan’s
main sources, Richard
Nisbett, one of
the more important
psychologists of our time, takes his turn
banging his head against
this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about
the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would
have taken about five minutes with Google
Scholar to find a
demonstration that this is crap. So I really have no idea what Saletan
means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals — did he think
they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had
to guess, I’d say that the most likely explanation of Saletan’s writings is
that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial
differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that
way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed
inquiry into just how he managed to screw up so badly seems
unprofitable.

Matt Yglesias also chimes in:

Saletan was busy trying to have his cake and eat it, too, and when confronted with Rushton’s rhetoric suddenly finds himself choking on it. But of course the research “proving” blacks’ genetic inferiority to whites is shot through with racism; what else would the race-science paradigm possibly be infused with? Somehow, Saletan was so busy with his counterintuitive pirouettes that he didn’t notice what side he’d landed on.