William Saletan

In 2004, he wrote the book Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.[4]

In a series initially posted on November 18, 2007 on Slate.com, Saletan assessed the relationship between race and intelligence, specifically the question of whether race is a genetically determining factor in intelligence. He ultimately did not discount the hypothesis that it is, concluding: "When I look at all the data, studies, and arguments, I see a prima facie case for partial genetic influence."[5]

Counterarguments were subsequently published by Richard Nisbett[6] in The New York Times, Stephen Metcalf[7] in Slate and Malcolm Gladwell[8] in The New Yorker.

Saletan's fourth entry in his series on race, IQ and equality, entitled "Regrets", acknowledged overlooking ties between one of his primary sources, J. Philippe Rushton, and advocates of white supremacy, saying, "I was negligent in failing to research and report this." Saletan added: "The thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited,” and then went on to describe how that author is pretty clearly a white supremacist.[9]

Matt Yglesias,in the pages of the Atlantic, wrote: "Saletan, basically, is apologizing for having cited a racist's work in penning his column. Which would be a reasonable thing to do, except that the thesis of Saletan's column was that one of the key empirical claims of white supremacism is true."

Some commentators were far more critical. Brad Delong wrote: "What William Saletan does not say is: 'Not only did I write credulously and unreflectively about claimed genetic racial gaps in IQ scores, but I did an incompetent and zero-assed job of doing my research. Why? Because I have insufficient work ethic, I am not very good at my job, I wanted to believe, I wanted to 'puncture taboos', and I thought trying to make African-Americans feel smaller was kinda fun.'"