[mcguire]

"In society in general we've decided to take as an assumption that everybody is identically capable in everything and thus that any and all differences must then be attributable to some form of discrimination, bias, or prejudice."

This is false, as you partially admit later. The default assumption in society is that many groups are intellectually, morally, emotionally, and physically inferior. This assumption has been made in our society for hundreds of years. And it has led to many poor outcomes---not for the ones benefitting from the assumption, though.

The countervailing hypothesis, that everyone is "identically capable" until clearly demonstrated otherwise, is very recent and hardly universally accepted. And the idea that this hypothesis is "contradicted by reality" is also not clearly true, since the data is not unambiguous.

In other words, if you find that the fundamental research on which your scientific field is based was falsified, you don't start to clean up the mess by assuming the falsified results are true.

[rjf72]

It's paradoxical as I do agree with you that this is a rather new ideology and is not widely accepted. Nonetheless, the view has a disproportionate hold on power. You're unlikely to face any consequence for suggesting outright false things that fit the ideology, but you can face extremely severe consequences for stating things, even well supported, that run against the ideals of the ideology.

However, I do not agree that the science is ambiguous here and I am very open to anything to the contrary. I can offer specific studies, but I'm fairly sure you'd agree that the more we reveal through genetic research, the greater a role it seems to play in practically everything. Yet there is the issue that many critical genetic factors are unevenly distributed and have very high rates of heritability. What gives reason to believe that it might be that people are "identically capable" in spite of this?

One final point I'd add is that in society power was traditionally not driven by assumption of power, but by power itself. Whichever group was able to prove itself smarter, more powerful, etc than another group had a tendency of imposing its will on the 'weaker' group. Power was rarely given, but often taken. This trend only came to a rapid freeze since the birth of nuclear weapons which have rather revolutionized the notion of power. In a world without nuclear weapons we would not have this unsteady "balance" of power between Europe, China, Mideast, US, and each of their respective allies.