> I feel that he chills intellectual inquiry in this area by calling anyone interested in these questions racists and so forth. Well, duh? Chomsky's explicitly

> I feel that he chills intellectual inquiry in this area by calling anyone interested in these questions racists and so forth. Well, duh? Chomsky's explicitly trying to chill discussion/research into hypothesis. First because it has no intellectual value -- it's like asking whether red is a better color than purple. Even if there were an answer to such an odd question, it would be useless. Hence, the answer is more likely to be used as a rhetorical sword in political debates than for e.g. effective interventions (which are pretty difficult to imagine short of eugenics in any case). Second because he doubts it's a sincere inquiry. He questions, I think, whether the outcomes of this research will be scientifically grounded and used for good, or more likely to be taken on face value (no matter how confounded/weak) and become an excuse to validate overtly racist eugenics/immigration policies. In other words, Chomsky is calling bullshit on this line of "research" being either "intellectual" or a sincere "inquiry".