Citing 'biology' to pretend that some people are better than others

Thomas Zimmer wrote this very interesting paragraph in Democracy Americana yesterday:

Most importantly, studies that don’t simply correlate educational attainment and voting decision but include and control for other factors clearly indicate that the “education polarization” narrative vastly overestimates the impact of education. Study after study suggests that education functions mostly as a proxy for other factors that have a much greater impact on political attitudes and decisions. The most important among those by far is racial resentment. As a concept, racial resentment is not necessarily the same as biological racism (meaning: the assumption that some races are biologically inferior/superior). Since the 1980s, for instance, the American National Election Studies (ANES) attempt to measure racial resentment by asking people whether they believe the significant wealth and income discrepancies between Black and white Americans are mostly a result of racist discrimination or rather a function of Black cultural deficiencies (a lacking working morale, perhaps, or pathologies of the Black family; or maybe Black people simply don’t try hard enough)? Based on their responses, people are placed on a scale from lower to higher levels of racial resentment. The correlation between where people fall on the racial resentment scale and their voting decisions is vastly stronger than that between voting and educational attainment. In the 2020 election, for instance, almost 90 percent of the people with low racial resentment scores voted for Joe Biden; over 90 percent of those at the higher end of the racial resentment scale supported Donald Trump. Talk about “polarization.”

His blog is paywalled. I'm a paid subscriber, and perhaps you can become one too.

Anyhow, what interests me about this passage is the recognition of how the idea of "biology" can be used to wield epistemic authority while saying things that are actually false.

This is linked to the idea of "biology" as it is used to attempt to correct and corral trans people, which I've been thinking about lately.