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Few members of the scientific community agree with these points of view, preferring instead merely to keep open the possibility that the races of man can be intellectually ranked. To Curt Stern, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, it seems unreasonable to conclude that "because there is no evidence of inherent inequalities, the situation couldn't exist." Says University of Colorado Anthropologist John Greenway: "I would not want to say that an Australian Aborigine is dumber than I am, because there is no way to tell. In their noncompetitive society there is no way to make any tests and hence no way to make comparisons. We don't know what the differences are between different racial groups and there is a strong prejudice against finding out. Suppose you made a study to determine if there are differences between the brains of whites and Negroes and proved it?" Nobel Laureate William Shockley, a solid-state physicist, drew outraged reaction from the scientific community when he charged that "inverted liberalism" raises taboos against research into man's genetic intellectual differences and "paralyzes the ability to doubt."
A scientist who is closer to the pertinent field put it in less provocative terms. "The idea that human races differ in adaptively significant traits is emotionally repugnant to some people," wrote Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in Mankind Evolving. "Any inquiry into this matter is felt to be dangerous, lest it vindicate race prejudice." Undeniably, racial prejudice is social or cultural in origin rather than biological, and it is understandable that anthropologists, who hesitate to make value judgments on the basis of biological fact, would hesitate also to enter what is fundamentally a sociological—and highly emotional—controversy. Anthropologist Morton Fried says that "participation in a 'debate' over racial differences in intelligence, ability or achievement potential is not participation in a scientific debate at all. It means lifting in the public eye the status of studies otherwise disqualified and rejected by science." Interpreted one way, such studies apparently suggest that the U.S. Negro is inferior to the U.S. white. On IQ tests, he generally averages 15 to 20 points lower. The results of World War I alpha intelligence tests have frequently been cited as evidence of the Negro's mental inferiority, since the Negro soldier invariably ranked below the white soldier on a state-by-state basis. But the same test results can be used in another way to demonstrate that Negroes are smarter than whites. On the alpha tests, for instance, Negro soldiers from the Northern state of Ohio outscored whites from eleven Southern states. Beyond this, it could be inferred from the tests that Northern whites are superior to Southern whites, because they almost always did better.