Bryan Pesta no longer has a job. This is good news; Pesta was a professor at Cleveland State who was notorious for publishing racist ideas and promoting the work of his fellow racists. I wish that were enough to have gotten him fired, but it wasn’t — it took a lot of effort to expose him and discredit his work.
Publications like Pesta’s may fly under the academic radar, but can seep into popular misperceptions of race and lend them a scholarly veneer. Pesta was heavily involved, for example, in editing a 2010 version of Wikipedia’s article on race and intelligence, according to the site’s discussion-forum archives. At the time, the article cited both Pesta’s work and that of other “racial hereditarians.” The racist manifesto of Peyton Gendron, the man accused of murdering 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store this year, cited some of Pesta’s racial-hereditarian colleagues and predecessors.
Despite nearly a dozen publications over more than a decade arguing for the intellectual inferiority of Black people, Pesta earned merit pay for research and eventually promotion and tenure at Cleveland State. Finally, this year, after researchers at other institutions filed complaints, the university fired him.
But those complaints weren’t about the legitimacy of his research.
I knew about Pesta. RationalWiki had a short article on him (which needs to be updated, it still reports he is a professor). Is there just a tiny and frequently ignored minority of people who are aware of the hereditarian infection in popular science? It’s not as if he was subtle and hiding in the shadows.
Many of his papers about race ran in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed journal that has drawn fire for publishing other racial-hereditarian arguments. Three of his articles appeared in Mankind Quarterly, which a writer in The New York Review of Books once called “a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.” Two were published in the Journal of Intelligence, an international, open-access periodical that advertises its quick review and publication process.
Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.
Publishing in Mankind Quarterly ought to be regarded as a great blaring klaxon alerting you that there is a huge fucking problem here.
Also concerning: Pesta has legitimate academic qualifications, “with bachelor’s, an M.A., and a master’s in labor relations and human services,” and also has a doctorate in psychology. Do you notice what’s missing? He has no background in biology or genetics, but he’s pushing radical distortions of genetics and using poor genetics methodology. From the description of his research, I’m unimpressed.
Pesta’s papers also consistently maintain that racial gaps in test scores can’t be explained by factors like discrimination or economic status. In 2008, for example, he published an article in Intelligence arguing that the gap between Black and white students’ IQ scores could be explained entirely by Black students’ lower intelligence rather than any bias in intelligence measures.
The article relied on a study of 179 students in Cleveland State’s introductory accounting courses categorized as either Black or white. Pesta’s co-author was a CSU accounting professor, Peter J. Poznanski, who has since retired. The university did not appear to be bothered by the article, even linking to it on its “EngagedScholarship@CSU” page. (After The Chronicle inquired about the paper, the university left up the abstract but removed the link.)
Wait, what? He makes sweeping conclusions that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people on the basis of a tiny study of his own students, categorizing them as black and white, and then…what? Assessing their intelligence on the basis of their performance in an introductory accounting course? That’s nuts. I wonder if the students knew they were being measured up as exemplars of particular races. Cleveland State seems to have had no problem with this kind of biased and inappropriate analysis.
Even if his methodology wasn’t weak and flawed, his ability to interpret the data ought to be called into question.
A 2014 paper Pesta published in Intelligence, “Only in America: Cold Winters Theory, Race, IQ, and Well-Being,” takes up the historically baseless theory that people who evolved in cold climates — Europeans and Asians — became smarter because cold winters made survival more difficult. Pesta’s paper finds that IQ and average temperature are correlated in U.S. states even though nearly all their residents are descended from people who came to America within the last 400 years, meaning the supposed difference couldn’t have been caused by evolution in place.
Instead, he proposes another hypothesis, the “founder effect,” arguing that certain types of people, genetically and culturally, were drawn to certain communities and areas — ignoring America’s long history of forced migration for people of color. He does add, though, that it’s “possible that significant historical events” — he mentions the Civil War but not slavery or segregation — could have also created regional differences in well-being and education. He also writes that his study doesn’t disprove the Cold Winters Theory, but shows only that phenomena other than evolution can drive geographic differences in IQ scores.
Wow. The reviewers were lying down on the job with that one — it should have been instantly rejected, unless the journal Intelligence just has appallingly low standards.
That didn’t get Pesta fired, though. What did get him axed was the discovery that he’d violated the terms of service in using (well, misusing and abusing) a confidential NIH database. Crossing NIH, from whom all blessings and large grants flow, is a really bad idea, not just for the individual researcher but for his institution.
Independently, Kent Taylor had a similar reaction to Pesta’s new work. Taylor, a molecular biologist and genomics researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, wasn’t familiar with Pesta but found the article methodologically shoddy.
More important, he couldn’t see how such a paper could have passed ethical muster with the NIH.
Taylor fired off emails to the NIH, Cleveland State, and the University of Minnesota* alerting them to the article.
Taylor’s letter to Harlan M. Sands, who until this past April was CSU’s president, was short and to the point. It called Pesta’s article “both a violation of the data-use agreement and unethical.”
That was the last straw. He’s outta there.
Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.
Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.
Unfortunately, the lingering stench of his published papers remains, still being cited, still being trotted out in every pseudoscientific argument by a Nazi on Twitter.
* Unfortunately, one of Pesta’s co-authors, Jordan Lasker claims to be affiliated with UM’s school of economics. He is not listed anywhere in my university’s directories, and seems instead to be at Texas Tech University? All these guys seem dodgy to me.
The article relied on a study of 179 students in Cleveland State’s introductory accounting courses categorized as either Black or white.
No way a little sampling bias might be embedded in that study? /s
As far as my foray into the field goes, IQ and IQ testing is generally a stinker in psychology. In fact, it is such a stinker that most of the field’s serious books discussing it and the history of it have a huge disclaimer about it.
It boils down to this: IQ is tool invented by a bunch of eugenicists to be used as a metric to measure fitness to reproduce and live in society. Its been used for that for over seventy years, is still enshrined in law for similar purposes in a lot of places and that is still one test that can cause loss of person’s human rights if they fail it badly and enough times. And the eugenicists who invented it were divided into two groups: eugenicists “just a little bit” racist and eugenicists “holy shit, I can’t believe how racist you are! I mean, damn.” racist. Yes, I know eugenics was popular at the time, but this group was very enthusiastic about it. The other “disagreement” they had at the time, if it can be called that, is whether those who failed the test should be imprisoned for life or sterilized and released (saves the money on food and personnel, you know?). It was squabbling about details, because both groups agreed that those who failed the test shouldn’t be allowed to breed.
So I can’t say I am surprised. The field of IQ research was tainted from the start and is still ripe for abuse.
In fact, it is such a stinker that most of the field’s serious books discussing it and the history of it have a huge disclaimer about it.
Unfortunately, some psych professors, like Jordan Peterson, won’t shut up about it, in spite of it’s having been debunked over and over. It’s “Intellectual malpractice” or something like that.
My favorite IQ test story is that during the early days of the eugenics movement, when they were looking for “morons” they used the ASVAB (the Army’s IQ test) and gave it to illiterates – who were surprisingly bad at answering questions they couldn’t read.
Re: Marcus Ranum @ #3…
My favorite one is cited by Stephen J. Gould in Mismeasure of Man. The first truly mass IQ testing was the WW1 induction use of the Army Alpha test (there was also an Army Beta test…for those who couldn’t read). It turned out that Northern Blacks outscored Southern Whites. Test score correlated well with years of formal education.
If IQ tests actually measured anything innate and immutable, then it would be impossible to get better at them with practice.
@5, Doesn’t that assume the so-called “tests”, and testing procedures, do not require any leaned skills (like literary) and knowledge / guesses about the culture / cultural bias of the test-setters, etc.? Learned skills can be improved (and knowledge obtained), and those improvements could easily show up as “getting better”.
Just to be clear: I am another who says “this is all bunkum” regarding iq tests / testing. I am inclined to concur that if a so-called “iq test” was like a voltmetre-reading or chemical assay, then the “impossible to get better at them with practice” point would be a powerful one.
As has been noted many times, one group for decades scored low on IQ tests and were considered dumb.
“In northern Ireland, Catholics (mostly white) scored about 15 points lower on IQ tests than Protestants, who are also mostly white. ”
In the USA, Catholic Irish score equal to WASPS on IQ tests. This is true of Irish Irish today as well.
We know a huge number of environmental variables have large effects on IQ test scores.
“Environmental conditions such as inadequate or no prenatal care, (my addition, inadequate early postnatal upbringing to age 2), inadequate education, health care and nutrition, being frozen out of the job market, lack of father figures, the negative self-destroying psychological effects that may accompany such environmental factors (e.g. feelings of inferiority and depression) have an impact on intelligence.”
Anyone relying on IQ test scores to say that one ethnic group or another is genetically inferior in intelligence is just making a simple, obvious error in logic and scholarship.
This is the equivalent of arresting someone for a RICO violation. Is it the egregious crimes they committed? Nope, but it’s what we can use to get them out of here
Actually, if I recall my Stephen J. Gould correctly, the origin is a test that a French psyschologist (Alfred Binet) came up with to identify schoolchildren who might need extra help to succeed in school. As such, the fact that it tested language and culture was a feature, not a bug, since a knowledge of (in this case, French) language and culture were necessary to succeed in school. The expectation was that the children who tested low would get special instruction so that they would eventually test as well as the other schoolchildren.
But of course, the people whose voices get heard (and thus determine what counts as “knowledge” or “science”) are the ones who benefit from the current power structure and system of inequalities, so no matter what you give them, they’re going to turn it into a tool to maintain and justify the current arrangement of who’s on top and who gets trampled underfoot. In the old days, they justified things as being “God’s will”, now they invoke “science.”
Plus ça change, …
As Allison@9 points out, this is not true. Such tests were originally intended by their inventor, Alfred Binet, to identify areas of specific weakness and strength in individuals’ (particularly childrens’) performance on cognitive tasks. They were then seized on by eugenicists and racists, but in fact even the results produced in mass testing (which was not what Binet intended them for) refute the hereditarians’ position: the Flynn effect demonstrates unequivocally that large differences in measured “IQ” can result from environmental causes.
There’s a paper from a couple of years ago by Andrew Winston “Why mainstream research will not end scientific racism in psychology” published in the journal Theory & Psychology that seems relevant here. Winston argues that there has always been, and continues to be, a robust community of people within the domain of psychology who have actively worked to uphold racist ideologies as having scientific merit.
There aren’t just a few bad apples in various scientific circles who keep this stuff up. Contrary to PZ’s question, I don’t think any reviewers “fell down on the job.” The editorial board of Intelligence (and a few other mainstream reputable psychology journals) has quite a few people who are known to be friendly with white supremacy and eugenics ideologies, and so the reviewers were probably selected on the basis of whether they, too, were friendly with those same ideologies.
In mainstream scientific circles, no ideas get less scrutiny before being published like ideas tied to white supremacy. That’s not an accident. That’s not a failure of our community. That’s what a very sizeable part of the scientific community thinks is the goal of science – to prove whites better than everyone else. This is the system working as intended in the minds of a lot of scientists. And the ultimate defense trotted out by white supremacists in scientific communities to successfully shut up the rest of the scientific community is “academic freedom.” Doesn’t matter how long these ideas have been discredited, how dare any of the rest of us question the academic freedom of our colleagues, how dare we try to silence their “contributions” to the field because, after all, these are all empirical questions, aren’t they.
call me mark:
When I was in elementary school, back in the 1970s, I was given IQ tests four times over a three-year period. I improved my score each time. Different testers. Two different locations. I improved my score by over 20 points which should not be possible as age is factored in. In elementary school I discovered I was really good at taking tests. And actually practiced taking tests. And teachers made sure I was there on any days that state standardized tests were happening. My IQ didn’t improve, my test-taking ability improved. Or my ability to emulate college-educated white men improved (I got so good at it that eventually I became one).
Not to pile on, but IQ was not invented for eugenics. It was Alfred Binet, and as pointed out already, his purpose was to identify struggling school students so they could receive educational assistance. The fact that it has subsequently been abused to support racism, eugenics, and economic disparity is a tragedy of the human capacity for motivated misunderstanding, not a flaw in the fundamental concept.
Oggie: Mathom@12–
Me too. I realised in high school that practising IQ-style tests improved scoring. It shouldn’t be a surprise since this is true of pretty much any skill. Of course, you couldn’t practise on official IQ tests as these were (and still are) tightly controlled and only available to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. They don’t want testees to be familiar with the test…which, as you say, immediately shows the folly of implying IQ is an innate ability.
I’m going to disagree with one thing you said, though. “My IQ didn’t improve, my test-taking ability improved.” Since IQ is defined by how many standard deviations your score is from the standardised population mean, I would argue that this does mean your IQ improved. (To me this is not in conflict with your broader argument; rather, it adds weight to it.)
ChrisLawson:
Sorry. You are correct. My IQ did improve. My intelligence relative to my age did not increase. Or, considering how many adult* books I was reading, maybe my corpus of knowledge was expanding faster than my age increased.
Damn. Now I’m wondering what intelligence (not military intel (been there, done that)) actually is. I know the dictionary definitions of intelligence, but is there a workable definition that is used consistently through the academic pantheon?
Get your mind out of the gutter. Through elementary school, I devoured every Time-Life series my parents had. And they had lots.
it seems to me to have been inevitable that the IQ test would be so easily abused. It like many other test was heavily influenced with ranking. It was not just a measurement tool. Can you even make a measurement tool and apply it people and populations and not have it become a tool for ranking individuals.
The question that is supposed to be the purpose of the test what is the intelligence of the tested is not understood very well at all and so is poorly defined that it leads to much confusion,dispute and abuse.
What is it with people that have the desire and apparent need to propound in areas in which they have so little knowledge, experience nor expertise ?
“racist ideas” = oxymoron
Here’s something a lot of the trolls parroting this pseudoscience either don’t understand or choose not to admit: genes determine physiological characteristics and nothing else. “Intelligence” is not in itself a physiological characteristic. So if you want to show that our genes determine our intelligence, you have to first specify which physiological characteristics affect our intelligence (after you’ve given us a useful definition of “intelligence,” that is); then you have to figure out which genes affect which of those particular characteristics; and only then can you categorize groups of people based on the “intelligence-determining” parts of their respective genomes.
And so far at least, I have not read or heard of one single study that did any of those things. All I hear is “Studies show blacks have lower IQs on average than whites; so the difference must be determined by genetics, since blacks and whites clearly have different genes.” Followed by the flat assertion that all those studies totally controlled for environmental factors, so we know the differences don’t come from environmental factors, trust us!
There’s also the matter of scientists simply not being able to come up with a workable definition of what “race” is in the first place:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-do-so-many-researchers-still-treat-race-as-a-scientific-concept?utm_source=pocket-newtab
…but I digress…
Categorigizing people by “race” has about as much scientific merit as categorizing people by hair or eye color. We’re all the same species as our hominid cousins are long gone.
To those that insist on Alfred Binet, you are technically correct, the best kind of correct. Counterpoint to that is that when somebody says “IQ testing” you don’t think SAT testing and scores (despite SAT being one type of IQ test), you think something else. You think about the thing invented by good ole Henry Herbert Goddard, who took Binet-Simon tests and “improved” and standardized them. And then eugenicists and the whole of society ran with it.
From the start, Binet’s test was, to quote wikipedia “intended to identify “mental retardation” in school children”, although, to be fair, Binet really didn’t intend for the test to be used to identify those children that were “sick” and should therefore be removed from school and cared for in asylums. His point was from the start that IQ tests can be improved upon and those children could be helped by using different teaching methods and spending more time teaching them. Unfortunately, Binet was very lonely in that opinion. The rest of the IQ test pushers? Just as I described them, especially certain Henry Herbert Goddard.
To those that insist on Alfred Binet, you are technically correct, the best kind of correct. Counterpoint to that is that when somebody says “IQ testing” you don’t think SAT testing and scores (despite SAT being one type of IQ test), you think something else. You think about the thing invented by good ole Henry Herbert Goddard, who took Binet-Simon tests and “improved” and standardized them. And then eugenicists and the whole of society ran with it.
From the start, Binet’s test was, to quote wikipedia “intended to identify “mental r-word” in school children”, although, to be fair, Binet really didn’t intend for the test to be used to identify those children that were “sick” and should therefore be removed from school and cared for in asylums. His point was from the start that IQ tests can be improved upon and those children could be helped by using different teaching methods and spending more time teaching them. Unfortunately, Binet was very lonely in that opinion. The rest of the IQ test pushers? Just as I described them, especially certain Henry Herbert Goddard.
“Pest ” + “pasta”: not a good combination. With that family name he should not criticize the ancestry of others.
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Myself, I categorise people after the amount of bristle growing out of their ears. My version of apartheid will be based on this criteria.
Should be ‘criterion’, not criteria.
(Goddamn complex English grammar. While I have no evidence that zee joos deliberately messed up the grammar rules, this will in no way prevent me from making this claim, often and loudly)
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About “flying under the radar” -apart from the one who literally shook the Fuehrer’s hand 1936, the International Olympic Comittee was not long ago led by a man who had proudly posed for a photo in his Spanish fascist uniform. This did in no way impede his ability to socialize with the top establishment of the West, including USA.
There is a frightening level of tolerance for far-right kooks that is not extended to the left.
Oggie: Mathom @15: “is there a workable definition [of “intelligence”] that is used consistently through the academic pantheon?”
No.
could it be that the far right only threatens democracy and voting while the far left threatens money and property?
and also has a doctorate in psychology. Do you notice what’s missing? He has no background in biology or genetics
Sorry PZ. He may not but a psych background in behavioural genetics is not to be sneared at.
@ 13 chrislawson
Essentially we have a standard psychological instrument perverted to some social use by some assehole who totally misunderstands the theory or research. Well, we also do have some quack claiming to be “psychological” when they are totally quackery.
@ 20 jo1storm
Nice summary. Pity, but most readers here probably have no idea who Binet was.
It is very tiring reading all the wailings about IQ testing by people who know nothing about the subject. . All of this has been debated and more or less settled in the academic area about 50 or 60 years ago. Give it up. You do not have a clue about the topic.
Today, we get popular press authors who know sweet FA about the issue writing crap. Again, if you do not understand the 120 year issues and the complicated theoretical arguments then you need to do some reading.
What an interesting argument! Too bad you have no leg to stand on.
“All of this has been debated and more or less settled in the academic area about 50 or 60 years ago. Give it up. You do not have a clue about the topic.”
60 years ago = people still getting sterilized and lobotomized if they fail IQ test. Last recorded lobotomy in US was performed in 1967. Similar procedures have been performed up until 1990s, only with a different name.
50 years ago = 1970s. Again, not that long ago.
Year 2015 wasn’t that far away. And neither was 1970. And there’s that… “interesting” number of around 60.000 victims of lobotomy and forced sterilization. There is small but significant overlap between them, of several thousand victims of both. Year 2003 was not that far away either!
So yeah, the argument was “settled” 50 or 60 years ago. And it was settled that against IQ testing. It is still one test that can cause the loss of your human rights if you fail it badly and often enough. Including forceful sterilization by your legal guardian.
What an interesting argument! Too bad you have no leg to stand on.
“All of this has been debated and more or less settled in the academic area about 50 or 60 years ago. Give it up. You do not have a clue about the topic.”
60 years ago = people still getting sterilized and lobotomized if they fail IQ test. Last recorded lobotomy in US was performed in 1967. Similar procedures have been performed up until 1990s, only with a different name.
50 years ago = 1970s. Again, not that long ago.
Year 2015 wasn’t that far away. And neither was 1970. And there’s that… “interesting” number of around 60.000 victims of lobotomy and forced sterilization. There is small but significant overlap between them, of several thousand victims of both. Year 2003 was not that far away either!
So yeah, the argument was “settled” 50 or 60 years ago. And it was settled that against IQ testing. It is still one test that can cause the loss of your human rights if you fail it badly and often enough. Including forceful sterilization by your legal guardian.
@pz my comment appears to be stuck in moderation thanks to R-word.
What an interesting argument! Too bad you have no leg to stand on.
“All of this has been debated and more or less settled in the academic area about 50 or 60 years ago. Give it up. You do not have a clue about the topic.”
60 years ago = people still getting sterilized and lobotomized if they fail IQ test. Last recorded lobotomy in US was performed in 1967. Similar procedures have been performed up until 1990s, only with a different name.
50 years ago = 1970s. Again, not that long ago.
Year 2015 wasn’t that far away. And neither was 1970. And there’s that… “interesting” number of around 60.000 victims of lobotomy and forced sterilization. There is small but significant overlap between them, of several thousand victims of both. Year 2003 was not that far away either!
So yeah, the argument was “settled” 50 or 60 years ago. And it was settled that against IQ testing. It is still one test that can cause the loss of your human rights if you fail it badly and often enough. Including forceful sterilization by your legal guardian.