Channel 4's "Race: Science's Last Taboo"

There are download links for the six documentaries that make up this series in this thread.

Based on Alex Kurtagic's review of the "Race and Intelligence" episode, Richard Hoste sees signs of progress for hereditarianism:

In this show, even an opponent of the race-IQ link admit that intelligence is determined to some extent by heredity and that there are general biological race differences. The audience is told that races differ in skull size. Channel 4 even grants the IQ gap, but chalks it up to environment. Gould would’ve called them all Nazis.

Even treating this as a debatable scientific question on television is huge. Lynn and Rushton’s books are shown on national TV. We’ll have to wait and see if there’s a spike in how they’re selling. The obviousness of HBD makes it very dangerous to bring up, even to debunk.

And although the black host is there for PC reasons, his admitted emotional attachment to the issue makes him appear not very credible in his denials.

I agree that as blank-slate/race-does-not-exist propaganda, the series is rather weak, presenting the viewer with a schizophrenic jumble of discordant facts and opinions, ineptly edited together and failing as a rational argument in favor of the positions it was presumably meant to advance. But I'm not sure this gives cause for optimism. Egalitarians never succeeded based on the strength of their reasoning; they succeeded by making moral claims and by imposing personal and professional costs on their enemies. Inconvenient facts are no match for incantations of "racism" or "the Holocaust" -- or so the producers and presenters of this series seem clearly to believe.

Hoste may be right, however, that on net those responsible for the series have scored an own goal. The appeals to racism and The Holocaust seem even more forced than usual, and the motivations of many of the presenters and interviewees are nakedly telegraphed. One example is mentioned above by Hoste. Other examples include an Indian woman with a half-white child hosting the episode that promotes Alon Ziv's theory of mixed-race superiority, or Jonathan Marks stating:

When I read my students Madison Grant, and I read it angrily, my students say, "Why do you take such a personal interest in this?" And I say, well, because it was my grandparents and great-grandparents that he was trying to keep out of the United States.

That's from the "Human Zoos" episode (which explains how ethnographic displays at the 1904 World's Fair led inevitably to The Holocaust).