Taboo Issues in Social Science: Questioning Conventional Wisdom

This book is an expedition into a number of controversial issues in the social sciences with the intention of challenging the conventional wisdom on those issues. While most social science research is interesting and important, a fair amount of social science research is thinly disguised advocacy research in which conclusions too often precede inquiries. The primary topics are those that the journal Nature described as "Taboo." In order of the degree of censure, the topics are: race, sex differences, intelligence, and violence. The only way to examine these topics with the social science seal of approval attached is through a strictly environmental lens. To bring biological factors to bear on them is politically incorrect and can bring the wrath of the academy down on one's head. Although many researchers successfully bring biology into their research on these issues, they are said to risk career and reputation for doing so. Speech codes stifling free intellectual exchange pervade the ivory tower, and an overwhelmingly liberal faculty hell-bent on eliminating any vestiges of opposition to their ideology. This is unconscionable in an institution that is supposed to value free exchange of all ideas and opinions. The current state of academic social science is examined before entering the substantive realm to try to explore how the topics I explore have become protected from any claims of "naturalness." Because the left rejects the idea of human nature, it insists that these things are products of social learning and/or social construction and are entirely fluid. To maintain this position in light of the huge and exponential successes of the natural sciences, the left embraces such frames of reasoning as postmodernism, radical relativism, multiculturalism, and political correctness, all of which are examined in this book. Also discussed are human nature, whiteness studies, political temperaments, various criminal justice issues, and capitalism versus socialism. "Taboo Issues in Social Science is a much needed and timely book that is sure to generate a lot of discussion, debate, and research. In this book, Dr. Walsh courageously tackles head-on some of the most politically sensitive areas in the social sciences and does so in a way that is convincing and empirically driven. He leads us through the political landscape and covers a broad range of topics that are largely considered to be taboo, including the linkage of biology to race, the lack of racism in the criminal justice system, and some of the negativities associated with feminism. His writing is crisp and his argumentation scholarly. While not everyone will agree with his arguments, everyone needs to read this book in order to better understand the intersections among politics, scholarship, and taboo research agendas. Professor Walsh has done the social sciences a service by writing this book, and you should do yourself a service by reading this book."