I always get rather suspicious when people start talking about papers
being unsuitable to publish because of their content. Research should
not just tell you what everyone knows anyway, but well constructed
research should have place even when the findings are controversial.
Stevan used the example of race and IQ in the lecture. Surely even if
strong evidence is found of differences in IQ between races, such a
finding could be put to good use by people other than the BNP. It
could be used in assessing the usefulness of educational initatives
aimed at ethnic minorities, for example.
Similarly research of sexual coercion and rape should not be held
back simply because it might not be politically correct. If people
are researching this topic, it shows there's an interest in this
topic.
I believe that great care needs to be taken when controversial
research is suppressed. After all, many scientific discoveries came
from controversial research, e.g. the planets orbit round the sun,
not the sun.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Feb 13 2001 - 16:23:16 GMT