[dvfjsdhgfv]

I think the discussion about this already over, i.e. it's now a part of the social contract that we don't question certain things, not because they're true or false but because of social cost of challenging them. For example, we know that the distribution of certain psychological traits in both genders is a bit different, but discussing it - either in the social context or the academia - is more or less a taboo in order to protect the vulnerable, and in part also because of the expectations of desirable traits in today society [0]. For the same reason, nobody in the right mind would organize a study of IQ differences between races, and if someone was stupid enough, their professional life in the academia (and probably beyond) would be finished.

In general, in the West any study of relationships between the aspect of the body (any inherent traits) and the mind/psyche is forbidden. A few years ago the Chinese published their famous study of facial traits of convinced criminals. [1] The result was that there were more variations from the mean among the convicts than the rest of the population. Of course everybody criticized the study as unethical and minority-reportesque.

The only danger I see is that by effectively renouncing to analyze any links between the body and mind we might lose some important insights, and the vulnerable groups could also greatly benefit from discovering these. But the danger that the result of this kind of research will be used against us is not negligible, as the history shows.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pd

[silicon2401]

It's a terrible shame that objectivity and knowledge are what society has decided to suppress instead of harmful use of knowledge.

[curtisblaine]

But this is... dystopia. Science should be free to research everything.

[foldr]

It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications.

What is controversial is using cherry-picked scientific results to tell just-so stories about why the gender distribution in certain fields is imbalanced.

The study on the facial features of criminals was criticized mainly for its shoddy methodology, not for being unethical (see e.g. https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim...). Of course, people did point out that the research could have unethical applications – which strikes me as an obvious and fairly undeniable point. Your assertion that research of this nature is "forbidden" in the West is trivially refuted by googling: e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288373839.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366989/

[dvfjsdhgfv]

There is a sea of difference between the Chinese paper and the other two you mentioned. The Chinese were very straightforward: can we identify facial traits that are more present in criminals? To a certain degree, they answer positively by saying there is a greater variation in facial traits in criminals than in the rest of the population. Of course there was a lot of criticism of their methodology (to which they answered [0]).

The first article you mentioned describes the bias of eyewitnesses related to stereotyped "criminal look". But the researchers are very clear: "Further research is needed to identify the features that are associated with the criminal stereotype and how they affect lineup decision processes. The specific elements associated with criminal face stereotypes have not yet been identified."

The second article deals with our interpretation of certain traits (which, in this case, are listed) and it's careful not to imply these traits are actually related to criminality. On the contrary: "such evaluations could inappropriately influence decision making in criminal identification lineups. Hence, additional research is needed to discover whether and how people can avoid making evaluations regarding criminality from a person’s facial appearance".

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135

[foldr]

The Chinese paper is almost certainly wrong. A simple explanation for why other people aren't publishing the same claim is that it's both inherently implausible and unsupported by any of the available evidence. You can find plenty of equally kooky and potentially controversial papers published in Western countries. E.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761245146... Of course we can play a game where you keep denying that any example I give is exactly parallel to the paper you cited. However, I'm sure that if you do a few Google scholar searches you'll be able to find something that satisfies whatever criteria you have in mind.