Is Gene Expression racist?
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of days getting to know the Gene Expression people, some of whom take issue with my characterization of their blog as “racist”. Given that their main poster believes that Blacks need to be genetically engineered to boost their IQs, the question is settled as far as I’m concerned. There are others who contribute to Gene Expression who probably aren’t racist, just misguided about the significance of IQ tests.
It would be nice if we had an test that could really measure native brain power, but the IQ test isn’t it; it’s a great predictor of college performance, and that’s about all. It would be less nice if race were a valid scientific construct rather than a fuzzy statistical artifact of conditions on this planet 40,000 years ago, but it’s not, and given the rate at which people breed with members of what once would have been considered taboo tribes, it’s less significant every day, and that’s good.
- January 14th
last word from me on this thread:
people shouldn’t judge on appearences-but they do.
we are all equal before God and/or the law-but are all not all equal.
the greatness of “liberalism” (broad-sense) is that it takes the individual as the basic organizing unit of society and sanctifies it in a way that other societies have sanctified the family (china), corporative body (high medieval europe) or royalty (divine right of kings europe). that being said-in civil society, other levels of organization, religion, ethnos and race, still exist. we don’t need to deny those truths even though they have no legal standing.
best
razib
Thanks Rich!
You always were one of the good ones.
Race is an illusion, Jason – that’s what I’ve been saying, not that intelligence is environmental or any such nonsense. In this modern world, nearly all of us inherit from a family tree that draws some several of the racial groups that were defined before we knew anything about the genome.
If you want to study human biodiversity, the first thing you have to do is discard the notion of race and replace it with the concept of population group, of which there are 2,000 (in CS’s work) or more.
New World societies have achieved their hegemony in world affairs because we’ve been willing, more or less, to discard the notions of race, class, and caste that have weakened Old World societies and made them unable to capitalize on their human assets.
Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge humans by their appearances.
btw, for the record, i’m agnostic on whether higher black female IQs is genetic or environmental/cultural.
Do black females have bigger brains?
doubt it. but white females don’t have bigger brains and have about the same IQ as while males. and whales have bigger brains….
(i’m assuming that body to brain size ratio matters)
“? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small.”
Sailer misrepresents Cavilli-Sforza’s findings, and even admits as much. . .”
Your challenge here is unrelated to what we were arguing, and leads me to believe you are left with little more to add to this dialogue than equivocation. You repeatedly used the argument that Africa was the most diverse continent, as a claim to counter the idea that its peoples could share any significant patterns of disributed traits. You were then challenged by several people on why you were misusing that claim. Razib himself challenged it on several separate occasions, yet you still continued to repeat the argument with an utter lack of concern for those important objections. I figured maybe a clarifying quote from Cavilli-Sforza (who’s research I believe is responsible for your oft mis-used soundbite) might help to finally get you to pay attention:
“? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small.”
This legendary diverity that you keep cheerleading, in the face of all reasoned arguments to the contrary, is in junk genes, Richard. But now the king of diversion, must sidetrack the larger debate and drag me down a whole new trail. Now I must defend Steve Sailer b/c I used Cavilli-sforza’s quote off of his website (Oh no, another tainted source!).
At this point I am going to challenge your tangential objection, b/c I said I would, and be on my way. The reason for this is two-fold: 1)At the beginning of this conversation you stated your premises as to why nothing but an 100% environmental explanation for the achievement gap is possible. I feel since that time you have made statements that have respectively disagreed with each of your original premises, and that resultingly point more to our conclusion- the possibility of a partially genetic explanation. I might out-line this at a later date on the GnXp Message Board. 2)The pointlessness of this Sailer diversion leads me to believe you are no longer interested in the topic of the main conversation. I thought the point in dispute was African diversity? I use a C-S quote off of Steve’s website, and now for some reason I have to answer for Steve’s alleged (and completely unrelated) lie about Sforza’s view on race. In on-going debate-style conversations like this such needless wandering will always result in a restrictive exponential increase in the amount of typing it will take to fully respond to all of your points. I feel that we have reached the ceiling of my post-length tolerence. Moving on. . . .
The funny thing about the word “race” is just that- it’s a word. Like any word the idea it is invested with is dependent on the speaker. Mr. C-S discusses why he rejects “race” here:
“I don’t like the word “race” because it corresponds to old subdivisions that are inconsistent with genetic reality and unjustifiable by a rational classification. Moreover, there is no real use of such classifications and, what is worse, there is always an associated racist flavor.”
In other words, he feels the word “race” connotates something platonic (essential) and Linnaeun (perfectly hierarchical and sub-divisible) and racist (pre-applied value judgements). The Anthropological Association of America rejected a similar definition of race:
“In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.”
The problem or “squid ink”, that Mr. Sailer was reffering to was the fact that rejecting a word, does not make the phenomenon it was used to originally describe go away. I could say I reject “love” b/c it corresponds to old ideas of intangible spiritual ideals and hokey sweetness. But then if I’m a neuro-psychologist who goes on to write an 800 page book on the origin and workings of feelings of “affection” in the human animal, without using the word “love”, then I am being semantic and nothing more. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza is a “population” geneticist, and we can use the word “population” as a substitue for describing statistical genetic relationships, but like the switch from negro, to colored, to black, to African-American, shuffling terminology does nothing to rid the idea of its baggage in the minds of anyone. Steve Pinker wrote an article on this “squid ink” tactic called “The Game of the Name” for the New York Times.
So no, Richard, Mr. Sailer is neither a misrepresentor, or a liar, or a mind-reader, or a candidate for the “master-race” for that matter (he’s half-Jewish), he just understands how language works, and “The Name Game” is fun but ridiculous.
And what of the connotations of race that the AAA and Mr. C-S were seeking to reject? Does Mr. Sailer invest his definition of “race” with the triple “errors” of Platonicism, Linnaeunism, and bigotry? In fact Steve has rejected all three: he has stated that race is neither essential or perfectly sub-divisible, and he has stated that value is indeed at the level of the individual. In effect Sforza and Sailer and the AAA all equally agree on what race is not. For a well-written manifesto of what race is to Mr. Sailer, I would recommend his essay on the matter titled: It’s All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective. I think in this essay he fairly well clarifies that he understands race neither to be Platonic or Linnaeun. Steve’s definition of “race” is no more or less than what C-S means by a” population”. Whatever word we use for the phenomenon it is relative in two senses: [From article. My comments are in brackets]
“First, it’s all about who your relatives are. A modern Darwinian approach to race would start from the bottom up, with the father, mother, and baby. All mammals belong to biological extended families, with a family tree that features all the same kinds of biological relatives as you or I have?grandfathers, nieces, or third cousins and so forth. And everybody belongs to multiple extended families?your mom’s, your dad’s, etc.
Which leads to my modern definition of race:
A racial group is an extended family that is inbred to some degree.
That’s it?just an “extended family that is somewhat inbred.” There’s no need to say how big the extended family has to be, or just how inbred
We know that humans have not been mating completely randomly with other humans from all over the globe. Most people, over the last few tens of thousands of years, just couldn’t afford the airfare
. . .in anybody’s family tree, certain statistical patterns will stand out. Just ask somebody, “What are you?” and they’ll tell you about some of the larger clusters in their family tree, such as, “Oh, I’m Irish, Italian, and Cherokee.”
. . . This is a scaleable solution. Do you want to know a lot about a few people? Then, the more inbred, the more distinct the racial group. Or, do you want to know a little about a lot of people? The less inbred, the larger the group. [remember Richard we can know a lot about the few people of West and East Africa, as you admitted, or we can clump them together and know a little, but still useful, less, because they are still share more genes with eachother than they do with the Japanese or Han Chinese]
. . .The bottom-up approach simply eliminates any compulsion to draw arbitrary lines regarding whether a difference is big enough to be racial. [in other words it doesn't matter "how many" races there are] With enough inbreeding, hereditary differences will emerge that will first be recognizable to the geneticist, then to the physical anthropologist, and finally to the average person. [this would be the continental sized groupings on Sforzas book cover]
. . .The second sense in which race is all relative: it’s pointless to make absolute statements about the significance or insignificance of race. You always have to ask, “Compared to what?”
. . .You have to look at it relatively. If you were planning to climb Mt. Everest and somebody were to say, “The difference between Mt. Everest and sea level is insignificant, it’s just a 0.15% difference in the distance from the center of the Earth,” you’d roll your eyes. But, when somebody says the same thing about genetics, it’s treated as a profundity.
Similarly, we are constantly told, “there are more genetic differences within races than between races.” This is, in general, true. But it hardly means that the differences between races therefore don’t exist.
. . .Keep in mind that 80% of the variation observed was within racial groups. Which is about what you’d expect from observing the world around you. In every racial group, there exists a wide variety of physical and personality types among men, from the most hyper-masculine to the most gentle.
Still, few who watch sports on television, follow Olympic running results, or examine interracial marriage patterns, will be surprised that blacks on the whole score highest on those androgen receptor gene alleles associated with greater masculinity. . .[-->whites-->asians]”
There is certainly no reason to think that “Sailer misrepresents Cavilli-Sforza’s findings”, and this applies esspecially to the “junk gene” African diversity that was the primary issue anyway. Furthermore, there is no reasonable contradiction that can be noted between Sforza’s work and Steve’s interpretation of that work. You took a superficial disagreement over nonclamenture and conflated it into some big phony scandal.
I would like to close by thanking you, despite the many ugly confrontations we had, for having such a frank and open dialogue. I am not trying to being cute or sarcastic, I genuinely like exploring issues with those who disagree, because it is the only chance for me to see issues from differing perspectives. I thank you for the time you spent in this conversation, and hope that you or anyone else who wishes to praise, add comment, or disagree will come over to the new GnXp Message Board and start a thread or join in on a conversation.
harmon-
1) human biodiversity effects your politics depending on what your politics are-i’m a libertarian by inclination, so it doesn’t have that much effect. but most public policy is set by liberals or conservatives in this country-who tend to favor types of social engineering (liberals) or incentives (conservatives) that would be impacted by possible group differences
2) as far as your brilliant assertion that finnish designed IQ tests tend to show finns test well
A) Raven’s Marticies
B) amazing how tests designed by WASPs seem to show that asians and jews do very well. better in fact than the WASPs that designed them!
To Richard:
…graduate from university in America, but the IQ tests tell us that males are generally smarter than females, and the male brain is certainly larger than the female brain.
Thomas Sowell says that says that black females have higher IQs.
harmon,
if you’re curious why it matters, visit our blog.
a 12.75 point differene would mean about 15% of blacks have higher IQs than the average white (87.25 vs. 100)-that matters.
yes, ultimately we should be judged as individuals, but social policy effects US ALL….
every year the major news journals come out with an article roughly titled “WHY AREN’T THEIR MORE BLACKS IN MATH & SCIENCE?” (with no balancing articles like “WHY AREN’T THEIR MORE WHITES IN PRO-BASKETBALL?” “WHY AREN’T THEIR MORE ASIANS IN ENTERTAINMENT & THE ARTS?”). the implication is that our society must be dysfunctional, and more outreach is necessary to african-americans so that they will enter engineering & science, with are also often hinted to be racist havens. there are also articles that ask, “WHY AREN’T THEIR MORE WOMEN IN MATH & SCIENCE.” i think a lot of conservatives would give a mixed biological & social reason for the latter. but they’ll not stand to give the same for ethnic minorities, but tend to focus on social pathologies. but, what may be perceieved as social pathologies might be rational adaptations that build on prior social structures influenced by both environment, history & genes.
harmon,
I sympathize with your sensitivity to the issue, and I agree that human value is presupposed, and at the level of the individual. The biggest reason this issue is interesting to me is becuse I feel that any information about humanity is good information. I also believe that a world that will not address the likelihoods and possibilities of man’s reality ends up inadvertantly putting a low premium on both man and truth. Perhaps if I paraphrase your concerns you can better understand why this is issue is truly important:
“Dude (I suppose that’s the social correct salutation here..?)
Who cares about this stuff? I mean, when it comes down to it, let us suppose for the sake of argument that man did evolve from a friggin’ ape. So where does that leave us? We’re all still better than a bunch of smelly apes. Or worse, we look better too – double whammy! So now what?
All that matters is the individual person you are dealing with. The guy across the table, down the hall, around the corner. He’s an individual unique person, & you deal with him as you meet him. THE FACT THAT MAN EVOLVED FROM CHIMPS, DOESN’T MEAN A THING!”
In other words, knowledge doesn’t have to be justified by its relative utility, it is instead its own inherent virtue.
Razib, ol’ Dude, from what I see, all you are doing is playing the liberal game with a different colored ball. In other words, “you are what your group is.” Screw that.
Jason, my Dude, you are, of course, absolutely correct that knowledge is good stuff. But as Will Rogers would say, the trouble with the world ain’t what people don’t know, it’s what they know that ain’t so.
“Knowledge” couched in social terms like race and “gender” (ugh) isn’t knowledge – it’s politics. You want to talk about genetics, fine – talk about genetic markers & such. Go study up on the double helix. But don’t come at me with social constructs.
And to both of you, the first thing you should do when you start talking about IQ tests is go take one – in Finland. You (and your brothers and your cousins and your aunts) would both come up low on the scoreboard, because you would find out that, on a Finnish IQ test, lo & behold, it’s the FINNS who score the highest of all the groups who take it. Ergo, everyone else is a problem to be solved, but the Finns are alright.
If you look at the cover of the book I linked to, you’ll see a color-coded map that relates very closely to those same old-fashioned racial categories your grandpa probably talked about
You can’t judge a book by its cover, Jason. If you actually open the cover and read the book, you find some information that contradicts Sailer’s theories about race. I’ve taken several science courses at the high school and university level, and I can tell you with some authority that the general practice of science education leans much more heavily toward reading text and numbers than it does to book cover analysis. I don’t know that there’s a general rule about such things, but I imagine most authors would tell you that the text wins out when there’s a contradiction between text and book cover.
Similarly, when an author says someting, and some critic, like your man Sailer, says “the author really means the exact opposite of what he said”, I would tend to hold the author’s rendition of his findings in more esteem than that of the critic.
I’m funny like that.
“WHY AREN’T THEIR MORE BLACKS IN MATH & SCIENCE?”
Indeed. In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, India is listed as having an average national IQ of 81, which would put it midway between average of African Americans (according to you folks) and Zambia (77). India produces a large number of skilled IT engineers every year, and is now one of the world’s leading producers of software.
So why aren’t there more blacks in IT, given that they’re smarter than Indians, speak English, and have access to the American univesity system? Granted, India has a large population and all that, and it has the national exam system and the several IITs, but American blacks have the SAT system and a much larger pool of universities.
The question really gets interesting when you compare black males and black females in America with respect to university education in general. Nearly twice as many black females as black males graduate from university in America, but the IQ tests tell us that males are generally smarter than females, and the male brain is certainly larger than the female brain.
So these are questions that we are right to ask, and should be even more willing to ask than we are according to the facetious analysis I’ve provided here, which assumes your own positions, razib. Sweeping these questions under the rug of a facile and pseudo-scientific genetic analysis just doesn’t cut it for me.
As I’ve stated before, if one accepts genetic group differences in athletic abilities, I don’t understand why that same person can’t accept the possibility of similar differences in IQ. And no, I don’t think IQ is a “universal survival” trait as you seem to. It’s clearly not, especially after a certain minimum.
If intelligence is not a universal value, why do we care about it? There’s a qualitative difference between intelligence and sprinting ability, and neither is 100% nature or 100% nurture.
It’s interesting that the group analyses of IQs tend to assume a normal distribution and only look for the peak of the bell curve, yet the two groups we know the most about – American males and American females – actually distribute intelligence differently.
I would submit to you that distribtion is more important to Mother Nature than is the peak of the bell curve, and that should become clear when you think about patterns of the distribtion of power in societies organized in various ways.
Dude (I suppose that’s the social correct salutation here..?)
Who cares about this stuff? I mean, when it comes down to it, let us suppose for the sake of argument that it can be scientifically undisputably irrevocably proven that blacks, as a group, are 12.752 points lower on the IQ scale than western Europeans. So where does that leave us? A whole bunch of blacks will be smarter than quite a few western Europeans. The smartest guy around could easily be a black guy. Or worse, a black woman – double whammy! The dumbest could easily be some guy from France, probably the prime minister. So now what?
All that matters is the individual person you are dealing with. The guy across the table, down the hall, around the corner. He’s an individual unique person, & you deal with him as you meet him. YOUR RACIAL GROUP, HIS RACIAL GROUP, DOESN’T MEAN A THING!
Sheesh!
Richard.
1) Jewish intermarriage rates are high. If you believe that Jewish people are more intelligent on average than gentiles, you could easily see marriage between a smart Jew and a smart gentile.
2) Jewish intermarriage rates contribute little to the overall intermarriage rate.
3) Historically, Jews and gentiles did not marry. The intermarriage rates you see now are just that–the current intermarriage rates. The children of these marriages won’t be entering high school or college for a decade or two. (this also applies to other “mixed” marriages–they’re much more common now, but the progeny won’t be entering school for awhile)
4) If West African sprinting and East African distance running were “adaptations” to local conditions, why do West African descended Americans continue to excel, 400 years after leaving those conditions?
I’m confused. You seem to believe that IQ advantages can/would be “mixed” out by one generation of intermarrying, but athletic advantage can’t be, even after 10-20 generations of living in different environments, and some not inconsiderable race-mixing.
By the way Richard. I’m not arguing what evolutionary reasons may have existed that produced IQ differences. I don’t pretend to know. All I know is that the evidence indicates to me that it’s hard to come up with a 100% “nurture” argument for the group differences in IQ. I’d love to see a good study that posited a plausible 100% nurture argument, but I haven’t yet. As I’ve stated before, if one accepts genetic group differences in athletic abilities, I don’t understand why that same person can’t accept the possibility of similar differences in IQ. And no, I don’t think IQ is a “universal survival” trait as you seem to. It’s clearly not, especially after a certain minimum.
David
Alright, I’m getting sleepy. I’ll finish later, but I’ll briefly say this: Cavilli-Sforza, Mr. Sailer, and I are actually all in agreement to the idea behind “race” (If you look at the cover of the book I linked to, you’ll see a color-coded map that relates very closely to those same old-fashioned racial categories your grandpa probably talked about); the only dispute that may exist between us and cavilli-sforza is nothing but a superficial semantic one, which can be easily resolved. I will do that tommorow.
Ah, the return of those ever so fair and persuasive klan and nazi references. When arguments all fail its time to fall back on the methods of juvenile emotional debate.
“But when we’re comparing sub-groups of humans, with the ability to transer adaptive mutations, this logic no longer applies, unless you’re now trying to say that black people aren’t human.”
Maybe it’s my fault for making a previously unclear argument, or perhaps I just have low reading comprehension, but I honestly, honestly, have no idea what you’re trying to communicate here. You made a theoretical argument Richard, that argument was that there was some sort of “optimal” level of intelligence that would be more beneficial to have in ANY possible set of environmental circumstances. Maybe in a Cartesian world this might be true (though I’m not too certain why “a little more” intelligence wouldn’t always be better in that universe), but in the real world having a bigger and/or more intelligent brain involves trade-offs (some known- others not) that could make selection for this trait either beneficial to survival or not beneficial to survival depending on the specific environmental circumstance. The “transfer of adaptive mutations” and all of those distractions has nothing to do with, and no bearing on my actual argument. There is no a priori assumption that intelligence is the “best” solution, because it is all contextual. If I’m confusing you by jumping around to forking chimps and neanderthals, I will try to clarify: the point of the analogies was that survival doesn’t necessarilly require any trait. That is as far as my analogy goes. Please don’t take it further. Just trying to get you to look around and see that humans aren’t the only living creature. None of this “maybe you think blacks aren’t human” inflammatory garbage. Whether it’s at the level of phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, or race, no trait should be considered somehow “universally optimal” or beyond contextual benefit to the organism. Get it? Context. You have a bad evolutionary theory Richard. You have already admitted that populations can and do have different statistical distributions of genetic traits (regarding west and east africans). Also, aptitude, personality, and behavior are some of those traits that you have attested to as having genetic components, and that individuals differ in those components. I am telling you right now that no level of intelligence, no kind of personality trait, and no behavioral proclivity that can be found in the entire spectrum of human variation is objectively optimal in EVERY possible selection environment. There is no circumstance what-so-ever where it will be reasonable for me to accept your statements to the contrary. It’s ludicrous. There is absolutely no reason to think that different selection environments wouldn’t work to select for different distributions of these aptitude, personality, and behavioral traits that are within the catalogue of normal human variance.
Summary: “Now the interesting thing about intelligence is that it’s universally a survival value, as I understand intelligence, so there’s no genetic reason that one group would develop more or less of it than any other group; it’s not something that has localized importance.”
In Richard’s Manachaen world, evolutionary traits actually are “inferior” and “superior”, because he has personally defined them in absolute Platonic values. But in the universe of prudent evolutionary theory, the “superiority” or “inferiority” of a trait, or collection of traits, or distribution of traits within a population is determined by contextual selection pressures. Survival is the only goal, and there are some generally reliable, but no hard-and-fast rules on how to get there. This applies esspecially, and this should go without saying, to all the diversity that exists within normal human variance. Despite what Richard would have anyone believe, no normal human is “inferior” from the stand-point of the universe, and given the right contextual environment anyone of us could have been the template for darwin’s optimal survivor.
Is Sailer’s mind-reading ability symptomatic of his membership in the Master Race, Jason?
Jason says: “As Cavilli-Sforza says in “History & Geography of the Human Genes” [via Mr. Sailer]:
“? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small.”"
Sailer misrepresents Cavilli-Sforza’s findings, and even admits as much in this quote (from Sailer himself):
The New York Times has hailed “Genes, Peoples, and Languages”, the new book by Professor Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the dean of population geneticists, for “dismantling the idea of race.”
In the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond salutes Cavalli-Sforza for “demolishing scientists’ attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races”.
Cavalli-Sforza himself has written, “The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise”; and that “The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose.”
Don’t believe any of this. This is merely a politically correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out that keeps his life’s work — identifying the myriad races of mankind and compiling their genealogies — from being defunded by the commissars of acceptable thinking at Stanford.
Frankly, you’d have be seriously deficient to take the racist Sailer’s account of Cavilli-Sforza’s work over that of Cavilli-Sforza himself. Cavilli-Sforza rejects the idea of race; Sailer embraces it. Cavilli-Sforza recognizes that racial boundaries are arbitrary, and that any way you want to slice it, there is more variation within races than between them.
So how many continents are there, and why?
from a private e-mail i just received on non-Pioneer IQ studies:
None of the work by Sandra Scarr, Richard Weinberg and colleagues on the Transracial Adoption Studies were funded by Pioneer. Indeed, no transracial adoption study involving Blacks and Whites has been funded by Pioneer (one on East Asians reviewed by Richard Lynn probably was; the others on East Asian
adoptions by Whites were not).
The great majority of Black-White IQ studies were not funded by Pioneer, including The Bell Curve, or any of the other work by its two authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The best current review of all that literature, using military, corporate, and higher education samples (N = millions) is
Philip. L. Roth et al., Ethnic Group Differences in Cognitive Ability in Employment and Educational Settings: A Meta-analysis, 54 PERSONNEL PSYCHOL.,
297, 310-14 (2001).
No-one on the Roth et al team were supported by Pioneer.
Only two of the two dozen or more studies of Magnetic Resonance Imaged brain-size/IQ relations showing a 0.40 correlation between brain size and IQ were funded by Pioneer.
The great bulk of work done in behavioral genetics in Intelligence has nothing to do with Pioneer e.g., none of the work done in the Colorado Adoption Project, the Virginia 30,000, the Austrlian Twin Registry, or any of Robert Plomin’s work.
“Species split off from ancestral lines when a mutation leaves them unable to reproduce with the ancestor species, and that’s why humans and apes don’t get married, generally speaking.”
This is irrelevant to what I was saying or disputing [now, watch the emphasis]:
Richard said: “Now the interesting thing about intelligence is that it’s universally a survival value, as I understand intelligence, so there’s no genetic reason that one group would develop more or less of it than any other group; it’s not something that has localized importance.”
Jason said: “Let me put it like this Richard: SOMETHING has to account for, in all those many eons of human evolution, why an ape population could fork, one part of the split could grow more intelligent and survive, while the other part of the split could stay the same in intelligence and survive.”
Regardless of the mechanism (which was not in question, or in any way related to my point), higher intelligence in no way has to be thought of as a “univers[al] survival value”. Clearly, animals survive that lack it, and ones that have it don’t. Did the Neanderthal out-live the chimp? To quote myself:
“Trade-offs, especially the ones necessary for intelligence, are one of the great stories of evolution. A brain is actually a very expensive thing: it eats a lot of energy, it takes a long time to develop, etc.”
Do you really believe that the relentless caloric demands of a brain and the 12-15 or so years of care that it takes for a human to become self-reliant aren’t going to be liabilities in some evolutionary environments?
If the answer is “yes, I concede that this could be a liability to be selected against in some environments”, then your original idea that “there’s no reason that one population would be selected for more intelligence than any other group”, is theoretically false. You ignore the trade-offs of greater intelligence as if they didn’t, or even couldn’t exist.
And this doesn’t even include the high rates of depression, myopia, and schizophrenia and other “harmful baggage” that go along with greater intelligence, increasing its liability.
And even that doesn’t include a million hypotheticals as to why your bold assertion that “EVERY group would select for the SAME DISTRIBUTION of intelligence in ANY POSSIBLE environment” is evolutionary hog-wash.
“I would remind you that African genetic diversity is actually greater than that of any other regional group.”
Yes, that makes for a great soundbite, Richard, and you keep repeating it [even after Razib and Troy disputed it], but it only holds true for junk genes. You know, those genes that don’t actually do anything but allow scientists to make forensic geneological trails back in time. As Cavilli-Sforza says in “History & Geography of the Human Genes” [via Mr. Sailer]:
“? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small.”
Summary: 1)Yes, mutation is nifty but it has nothing to do with this conversation. 2)The idea that there is an “optimal” intelligence that every environment would select for if it could is bogus. 3)The famed genetic diversity of Africa is a myth.
richard,
yes, what you are talking about is the genetic diversity of mtDNA and other neutral genes. there are many lineages. but this sort of thing starts become confusing, because what we mean by “diverse” depends on the subset of genes we look at.
for instance, jason is correct that studies of mtDNA or y-chromosome indicate a lot of genetic diversity & a close relationship between the khoisan & non-khoisan peoples of sub-saharan africa-but what about polymorphic traits dependent on genes that DO SOMETHING and so might result in sharp phenotypic divergences between the khoisan and non-khoisan? some of henry harpending’s work indicates that the non-junk genes can give us a more detailed adaptive history of a population than the more steady lineage info we are getting now.
also, as far as genetic diversity goes-i would also suspect from what i know of the history & archaelogy that mtDNA & y chromosome diversity would be much greater in the arch of west africa up to igbo-land (i believe the mande speaking region)-while the great swath that stretches eastward toward the indian ocean and down around the rift toward the cap that is “bantu speaking” would be more uniform as it is the result of a more recent demic expansion.
as far as this statement is concerned:
And as to the assertion of yours that “there actually is very little genetic diversity within Africa” I would remind you that African genetic diversity is actually greater than that of any other regional group.
this depends on what sub-set of genes you are looking at. even though africa populations have been relatively stable for longer than other populations, and so developed many mutations that result in many differentiated lineages-it does not follow that they will be simulteanously diverse in physical adaptation.
And as to the assertion of yours that “there actually is very little genetic diversity within Africa” I would remind you that African genetic diversity is actually greater than that of any other regional group.
This is generally ascribed to its longer history, and it’s about point 2 or 3 in Genetics of Human Populations 101.
Jason, you’re really factually challenged; I think you should stick to your drawrings instead of trying to do all this science stuff, because it obviously makes your head hurt. Species split off from ancestral lines when a mutation leaves them unable to reproduce with the ancestor species, and that’s why humans and apes don’t get married, generally speaking. So comparisons between plant or animal groups not capable of cross-breeding aren’t really meaningful to the present discussion about race and IQ.
You ask me to consider races as I considered sub-races for the sake of a point on running, but you missed the fact that intelligence isn’t a localized adaptation. That was the point.
A message by me, to Richard, from the GnXp comment box:
Oh, and I’m still waiting for a better defense of this curious assumption :
“Now the interesting thing about intelligence is that it’s universally a survival value, as I understand intelligence, so there’s no genetic reason that one group would develop more or less of it than any other group; it’s not something that has localized importance.”
Let me put it like this Richard: SOMETHING has to account for, in all those many eons of human evolution, why an ape population could fork, one part of the split could grow more intelligent and survive, while the other part of the split could stay the same in intelligence and survive. It is NOT the default assumption that all possible evolutionary environments will necessarily result in, or select for, the same level or kind of animal intelligence. Perhaps all human populations, in some sort of grand cosmic coincidence, ALL do have exactly the SAME distributions of aptitude, but it wouldn’t be because of your flawed theoretical foundation for assuming it.
the gap should be inelastic if ALL the differences are genetic, not if SOME of them are. i think the evidence is probably pointing to a middle conclusion, that SOME of the gap is genetic, though there might still be room. an extreme conclusion on either side (the gap being all environmental or all genetic) is not compelling to me.
The fact that scores diverge as the gene pool converges should tell you something.
Richard. Your idea that the “gene pool converges” has little basis in fact. Sure the intermarriage rates have increased, but again what’s the evidence that it’s very signicant?
In the USA, the intermarriage rate (including the much-more numerous Hispanic/European-American marriages and Asian/European-American) is just under 3% as of 1990.
I doubt the children of these marriages are numerous enough to make a statistically significant dent in the data.
And, as Razib notes, none of us are proposing the gap is entirely genetic. No one makes a claim to 100% heritability of IQ. Jason states as much earlier.
I’ve noted before, and I believe Jason has too, that the IQs for African countries are suspiciously low. With improved nutrition, education, and less political instability, I’m certain IQ scores will improve rapidly in these countries. The million dollar question is “how much?”
Hopefully we’ll find out soon. Regulars at gene expression know I’m a big fan of Ghana. I also have some hope Senegal will improve under a more open political leadership.
I have to repeat my question about athletics. I along with the others don’t understand how you can accept that nature is part of it, but you deny that nature could have anything to do with IQ, etc. Even when you look at European countries, with their miniscule West African black populations, you see outsized participation from them in short-distance track events (and other sports).
Actually, David, the intermarriage rate is much higher than you imagine; among Jews, for example, it’s 58% nationally, and 80% in the Frisco Bay Area where I live, which is certainly enough to affect the genetic basis, if there is one, of the alleged Jew/gentile IQ gap.
Is that happening?
Your comparison between specific athletic abilities and intelligence is apples to oranges. Athletic ability as a generality isn’t a property of racial groups; what we see is specific athletic abilities in specific sub-racial groups, such as the sprinting ability of West Africans and the long-distance running of East Africans, and these are adaptations to local conditions.
Intelligence in the grand sense (not just the ability to perform certain kinds of verbal tricks) is a universal, with survival value in all places at all times. Therefore, we can’t account for supposed differences in intelligence according to an appeal to local conditions.
That would be saying that some climates favor stupidity, which is clearly absurd. Some of your racist idiots such as Rushton maintain that harsher conditions in Europe and Asia forced the gene pool toward greater heights of intellect; if this were the case, Eskimos would have the highest IQs, and they clearly don’t; in fact, you have to question the intelligence of anyone who would choose to live in such a sorry climate.
Rushton’s argument that harsh climates cause higher intelligence strikes me as Lysenkoism, or at least Lamarckianism, but it’s certainly not Darwinism.
of course they don’t support my thesis
Does anyone who’s not been supported by the Pioneer Fund?
Abigail Thernstrom wrote, quoted by RB: “So race is special. Race is particularly dangerous.”
Does that mean people should hide their heads in the sand and not research the issue? Or should hide or ignore data that one finds when researching the issue? That’s what you’re implying, Richard.
of course they don’t support my thesis
Does anyone who’s not been supported by the Pioneer Fund?
see the list here (some have PIONEER FUND connections, most do not). also, sandra scarr’s transracial adoption studies (the results of which can be interpreted both ways) and army intelligence test data have no relationship to the pioneer fund (the latter seems to indicate that both blacks & whites who are enlisted in the army are more intelligent than the general population-though the gap still exists).
According to your Stalking the Wild Taboo site, razib: There is no persuasive evidence that the IQ BELL CURVES for different racial-ethnic groups are converging. Surveys in some years show that gaps in academic achievement have narrowed a bit for some races, ages, school subjects and skill levels, but this picture seems too mixed to reflect a general shift in IQ levels themselves.
But in fact there is persuasive evidence that the IQ gap narrowed progressively from 1971 to 1989, a significant period of time in testing terms, and has expanded since then. If the assertions about the accuracy of IQ tests and the innate differences in IQs between Americans who are predominately white and those who are predominately non-white were real, the gap should be steady from year to year, if not from generation to generation.
An increasing gap in IQ scores between the two groups also raises questions in light the increase in intermarriage, which should push the two groups closer together, just as it should push WASP Americans closer to Jews and to Asian Americans. As I don’t see trends in the test scores tracking changes in the population, I have to conclude that these effects are predominately social instead of genetic.
The PBS link says that the gap in black/white SATs in the United States narrowed from 1971 to 1988, and has been growing since; it also says, to quote directly: “despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual ability than whites.”
I don’t see how that supports your position about genetically-based black intellectual inferiority, Razib. Follow the link to Abigail Thernstrom’s interview and note this: “There’s a very good reason why race is a suspect category and only race is a suspect category in American constitutional law. Race is very special. Sorting people out on the basis of one drop of blood of this racial group or that racial group or this ethnic group or that ethnic group, is very, very dangerous in a society with as rotten a history of racism as we have and, of course, racism continues to be a problem in this society. So race is special. Race is particularly dangerous.”
of course they don’t support my thesis-that there is a genetic component-i was just providing evidence that the test gap is more than just SATs (you asked David for more examples).
and yes, a show like this would never get on PBS if it gave equal time to the likes of jensen & eysenk, so they are pushing and environmental/cultural explaination. there is surely something to that-but i doubt it will be enough to bridge the gap-studies by sandra scarr and linda gottfredsen indicate that transracial adoptees tend to approach their biological parental IQ, not that of their adoptive parents (and not just in between, as they get older, they come closer and closer to the IQ of their biological parent-the studies aren’t totally clear cut in supporting either side, but my reading is that they tend to support those who assert SOME genetic component because those who reject it absolutely have a higher standard since they don’t accept any sort of compromise in the test gap).
i’m not saying that all the experts agree with me on this-i’m not saying that it is established what the causative reasons are on the level of newtonian mechanics or even evolutionary theory.
i am saying that asserting there might be a genetic component to the black-white IQ difference should not lead someone to a *prima facie* conclusion that the asserter is a racist.
as far as not finding the “genetic causes,” intelligence or g is almost certainly a polymorphic trait. tracking down with portions of the genotype effect intelligence is going to be the work of generations-but remember, we haven’t found a “language gene,” but chomsky’s hard-wired theory has been established for a generation now [1].
there isn’t a smoking gun, just lots of evidence that points in the same direction. for instance, i’m skeptical that the sub-saharan IQ of 70 is actually accurate, the 20% white gene-load in the african-american population isn’t enough to account for the 15 point gap. the lynn-flynn effect has been kicking in throughout the world. yes, “intelligence,” or the tests, are somewhat elastic. but just because i cede that doesn’t mean that i have to reject ANY genetic component-if you look at national IQs, ALL the african ones are low, not just most, ALL. i don’t think they are as low as 70-nutrition, lack of educational stimuli, etc.-being factors, but since they are all in the same range, through a wide swath of cultures and to some extent environs, that indicates there might be an inelastic component. the IQs of american blacks and afro-british are about the same, 85. personally, i am skeptical that the variables of discrimination are exactly the same in the two regions.
nuf for now.
[1] actually, there is some recent work in pinpointing regions of the brain AND genome that have effects on language processing
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/etc/gap.html
i embedded it in the world “article” with a tag.
“I haven’t seen this data, so I’d like for you to share it if you please.”
so i provided a link to a PBS site-and you reply:
“Dude, Razib has posted lots of links, primarily from Pioneer Fund lackeys. What I’m looking for is one link to one global study that firmly establishes the alleged low IQ of black-skinned people, so I can rip it apart.”
so 1) i didn’t link to the pioneer fund, 2) you didn’t ask for “global studies,” you just changed the goal-post after-the-fact and claimed i didn’t satisfy your requirements.
ups…forgot to sign my name.
“Or just like they (to my knowledge) have never been in an Olympic swimming final. ”
There have been some black swimmers of distinction.
http://www.swiminfo.com/lane9/news/3488.asp
” I used to be a pre-olympic swimmer and basketball player, which isn’t an allowed combination according the racial theorists.”
Richard can this please stop at some point? Here is what I said:
“No one population is “superior”, b/c anatomical variety involves trade-offs. Well-muscled American west-african blacks may have physiology that gives them edge in sports such as football and basketball, but those same features make them ill-suited, for the most part, in similarly outstanding performance in areas such as swimming and diving.”
Sometimes you are so cynical, I don’t even think you know what your trying to dispute.
“I asked you nicely to share your data on the alleged inferiority of black people”
Richard do you consider people with lower IQs inferior to yourself? That seems to be what you are implying.
The problem with devout “anti-racists” is that in their effort to defend humanity they inadvertantly devalue it. In essence Richard is telling us if blacks did end up having lower mean IQs, they would be inferior. That’s why he must close his mind to its very possibility. He has set up his own crippling moral paradox.
You see the same flawed formulas with Creationists who blamed Columbine on the teaching of evolution in schools, because “what do you expect kids to do when you tell em’ they just monkies?”
In either case it shouldn’t matter if a man had a lower IQ than me, or evolved from an ape, b/c his human worth is presupposed.
“Athletic differences, like most things, are a combination of nature, nurture, and culture.”
But aptitude, personality, and behavior are not I guess?
btw, Rushton continues to publish in peer-review communities, and we’ve already been over the Pioneer fund. Your frequent guilt by association arguments have never been a convincing debate tactic. You have to provide some logical dismissals of actual data.
“What I’m looking for is one link to one global study that firmly establishes the alleged low IQ of black-skinned people, so I can rip it apart.”
I’ve got a better idea, why don’t you find me one study from any time or any place in which a nice represenative sample of Blacks have out-scored Asians or whites. In the meantime here is a survey of world IQ data (Table 5):
http://socio.ch/internat/volken.htm
Notice the black country scores all cluster at the bottom, the white countries cluster intermedietely, the asian countries at the top. This pattern happens no matter what culture the respective populations become a part of.
I promised you I would have a reply last night. I’m sorry, I got busy/distracted. Hopefully I will get to it in the next couple-O-days.
Cheers (
The Bell Curve cites the racist kook Rushton several times, which calls its credibility into question; I’m looking for an unbiased source.
Athletic differences, like most things, are a combination of nature, nurture, and culture. I used to be a pre-olympic swimmer and basketball player, which isn’t an allowed combination according the racial theorists.
Oh well.
Try looking at the Bell Curve. Lots of references there.
And again, white children raised in poor environments by single parents still do better on average than even middle class (or higher) blacks.
Sorry I’m busy preparing a talk to provide more evidence that you can “rip apart,” but if your reasoning is as formidable as your comments on medicine in gnxp.com, forgive me for not trembling before your mighty brain.
To what do you attribute differences in athletic abilities?
David
Dude, Razib has posted lots of links, primarily from Pioneer Fund lackeys. What I’m looking for is one link to one global study that firmly establishes the alleged low IQ of black-skinned people, so I can rip it apart.
It’s a simple request and it should be easy to supply. Absent such evidence, I tend to blame the low intellectual performance of African Americans on the single mother homes you already cited, and not on a global genetic deficit.
I believe Razib meant to say “dude, Richard, David is 1/4 black”:)
And no, I don’t think my darker-skinned relatives are inferior. In fact, my grandmother’s (who’s my black ancestor, and a retired nurse) brother is a retired professor of English Literature at the UC-Berkeley, having obtained his Ph.D in the subject at Stanford. He has also authored several published books. Her other brother started work as a welder, eventually running his own contracting business.
No, I don’t think they’re inferior. Nor do I think race controls your destiny. But it influences some parts.
David
Richard. I never said black people are inferior.
I stated they “score poorly” relative to whites and Asians on just about every IQ test imagined (SAT, GRE, army IQ tests, Stanford-Binet etc). Even when you slice the data to compare similar socio-economic backgrounds.
That’s a fact. Razib provided you with evidence and links for me (thanks). It’s just like the fact that blacks in America commit a disproportionate number of crimes. You can talk about why that is, but you can’t ignore it. (I favor the near-ubiquity of single-parent homes as a primary reason for this disparity)
Just like there are racial differences that are relevant in medicine that go beyond sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis.
Just like the fact is that West Africans and their descendants have dominated the ranks in sprinting for quite some time (after they were allowed to compete, and their nutrition improved). Or just like they (to my knowledge) have never been in an Olympic swimming final.
And you can’t call me a “boy in a white sheet” for stating it. We can discuss the reasons for those factual differences, but you calling me a KKK member for stating it is just sticking your head in the sand and resorting to the crudest of ad hominem attacks.
And as for the genetic diversity of Africans, yes that’s clear. It’s also interesting to note that sprinters come from West Africa, while excellent distance runners come from East Africa, particularly along the Rift Valley. Somehow I doubt there’s a real good cultural explanation for that.
David
dude-richard is 1/4 black, to keep asserting this “inferiority” stuff is offensive, at least in his context! i’m sure he doesn’t think his relatives are “inferior.” why does DIFFERENT have to be inferior? can one NEVER divorce assertions that can be empirically disputed from value judgement? are we always trapped within our ideological & linguistic box? have i jaunted into PoMo land?
I asked you nicely to share your data on the alleged inferiority of black people, David, I didn’t demand it. I’m curious as to whether anyone except J. P. Rushton and his buddies funded by the eugenicist Pioneer Fund think this is an established fact. Given the great genetic diversity of African peoples, this claim strikes me as problematic, and I’ve never seen a legitimate scientist make it.
Richard. There’s your evidence.
I love how you demand evidence for my claim, yet you never provide evidence for your assertions on the gnxp board, AND you ignore all the references I provide.
I’ve lost any respect I had for you. I doubt you care, and I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.
Enjoy living in denial, I here it’s blissful there.
It’s certainly well populated.
David
“hear” dammit. I hear it’s blissful there.
grumble grumble.
this article about a FRONTLINE documentary talks in detail about the persistance of the black-white test gap from early childhood onward. it is a sociological fact. the scholars in this case obviously believe there is a strong environmental determinent (probably they assert it accounts for all the discrepancy). nevertheless, the gap does exist.
also, note this:
The gap cannot be easily explained. Contrary to what might be expected, Meredith Phillips and her colleagues suggest in The Black-White Test Score Gap that parents’ income differences by themselves have almost no effect on children’s test scores. Rather, they urge us to look further back in a child’s family tree.
mcwhorter offers the cultural explaination. dinesh d’souza pointed out in END OF RACISM that in california whites that were raised in poverty still scored higher than upper-middle-class black teenagers on the SAT. most of the explainations mooted in public are environmental/cultural, but i find that they are becoming progressively more byzantine without any genetic alternative as a contributory factor. for instance, claude steele’s idea of “expectation threat” is very provocative, but i don’t understand how expectation threat can occur in all black schools-especially in middle class suburbs of cleveland and chicago that are nearly all black but the students still perform far more poorly than comparable white communities.
…our inherited substrate shouldn’t be ignored a priori
When you cubbyhole people by race, you do in fact ignore 95% of their inheritence. That doesn’t seem to advance your objective.
i cubbyhole peoples, not people (as in one specific individual)-so in the case of a people, it is that 5% that matters and differentiates the two groups.
also-i talk about evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics sometimes-which is the other 95%, but plenty of others cover these topics (as in the folks at UCSB that you quoted).
There’s a gap on every IQ test I’ve read about.
I haven’t seen this data, so I’d like for you to share it if you please.
i loved mcwhorter’s book-and he explains a lot, but a lot of the critics of the book LOSING THE RACE also pointed out that it was heavily anecdotal. the problem is separating the interdependencies between culture & biological predispositions, the two can feed into each other.
as an example, assume two kids with a small difference in academic aptitude. child A does a little better in early elementary school than child B (assume child A is a bit above the mean performance while child B a bit below). these initial differences could be a function of genetic inheritance, but as time goes on, child A pursues school with vigor because they succeed at tasks more easily than average, while child B does not because they get discouraged by the performance discrepancy with the mean. what was initially a small difference, can rapidly magnify to a yawning chasm by the time they are seniors in high school.
the key point is i’m not saying genetics explains everything-but we are biological creatures, and our inherited substrate shouldn’t be ignored a priori.
Richard. Problem is that not only do inner-city blacks score poorly, but middle class blacks who live well in integrated suburbs also score below their white counterparts. It’s a real struggle to explain that away using environment. You can try, but it’s a difficult argument.
John McWhorter does a pretty good job of explaining self-sabotage among blacks, David; it’s not too difficult to understand how a culture that perceives high achievment in school as “acting white” wouldn’t encourage children to hit the books. SAT scores respond to coaching and study, and aren’t pure measures of IQ.
It’s not just SAT scores, and you know that. There’s a gap on every IQ test I’ve read about. And don’t tell me the tests are racist, because I find it laughable that white racists designed tests deliberately to put whites below East Asians.
I don’t doubt culture and nutrition play a role. I find it hard to believe that college-educated black parents don’t exert some influence.
You can make the same argument with sports. I don’t think there’s a huge underrepresentation of whites in short-distance sprinting because whites get it in their heads that they can’t run. While that may play a role, again, any kid in 6th grade can put on a pair of shoes and race. You rapidly discover who’s the fastest kid in class (that was me).
David
“Jason, the $ sign goes before the number, but the % sign goes after it.”
Well, if we’re going to correct my writing errors, we could be here all day. :)
Richard, I appreciate all of your repsonses (although I really wish our dialogue could take on a more respectful, dispassionate tone). I am going to cut-and-paste your response into The GnXp Message Boards, and respond to it there, probably much later today. I really hope you, as well as Atrios, or anyone else who would like to share their opinions, for that matter, will register in and respond there too. I sincerely believe that public debate and discussion on this matter will be a good thing for all parties involved. I am very eager for others to talk about this, no matter what their opinion, b/c I believe we can all grow stronger off of eachother (even if that means learning how to deal with/dispute opposing opinions better). Maybe some minds will even get changed.
Jason, the $ sign goes before the number, but the % sign goes after it.
As far as the heritibility of IQ goes, I’m quite sure that genetics has quite a large role in the test performance of individuals.
The issue with the alleged gap in intelligence between whites and blacks is the compound errors in the definition of race, in the ability of IQ tests to accurately measure intelligence in individuals who weren’t raised and schooled in similar ways, and in the nature of averages with respect to distribution.
Most Americans have an inheritance that draws from many different population groups that are separated outside of America, or were so at the time that this nation was founded. So we’ve effectively created a new race here, and it’s certainly the case that African natives don’t regard African-Americans as anything but Americans. The so-called research done by head- and penis-measuring types like Rushton which alleges to show that African Americans are the same as African natives is just as flawed as that which alleges to show that Africans — the most genetically diverse of the continental groups you call races — are all the same.
It’s admitted all around that individual variation within a racial group is much, much more significant that any variations between groups, by a factor of 20 to 25 times. This is not to say that intelligence is environmental, it’s to say that inheritence is individual.
Richard, we give each other a lot of grief on various topics, I’m glad to see one that we agree 100% on.
Anil, the Gene Expression people tell me I’m a politically correct liberal, so you and I must agree on just about everything.
“the Gene Expression people tell me I’m a politically correct liberal”
I’ve never said you’re anything but what you demonstrated in our discussion, Richard: a Republican who would gladly ignore any fact if it could help get rid of affirmative action.
(Also, for someone who pretends to hate “stereotypes” so much, you certainly haven’t hesitated to repeatedly take any one person’s opinions from the GnXp comment board and attribute them to everybody there.)
So, can either Anil or Richard tell me why only an %100 environmental explanation is suitable, or even more plausible, as an explanation for the persistent b-w IQ gap? Does considering otherwise make someone a “crossburner”? Yes or no? Also, can someone tell me why partially heritable traits, such as ones that affect aptitude, personality, and behavior, should logically (much less morally!) be expected in %100 equal distributions across world populations, when this is virtually unheard of for any variant trait?
http://www.africana.com/DailyArticles/index_20010927.htm
http://www.sallysatelmd.com/html/a-nytimes3.html
Here are some links that got left out from above.
Also sory fer al teh misspelings. to lazy to use the spel chek.
I’ve unblocked Razib so he can comment on this if he wishes.
miscegenation
Are you for real? Your concept of “race” cloaks a multitude of regional and tribal groups among whom interbreeding would have been considered a no-no not that long ago.
i’m a libertarian-i don’t believe in government coercian or positive eugenics. on the other hand, i believe if given the chance, parents would want super-bright children. IQ probably starts to become meaningless somewhere above 150-so if you assume that group one has IQ 100, and group 2 has IQ 85, group 2 would benifit from genetic engineering to increase IQ.
IQ boosting would be a broad social good. for anyone. it would though ameliorate the possibe differences in aptitudes between different groups.
right now, we assume that ALL GROUPS HAVE EQUAL APTITUDES. the result is that liberals devise new social programs to “uplift” groups to express their potentional. conservatives excoriate underclass social structures and cultures and encourage their own rival social engineering programs (vouchers, enterprise zones, privating public housing). if some aptitudes were genetic on average between groups, then we have an even harder task: identify the points in the genome that effect “g”-general intelligence, and figure out ways to manipulate these segments of the genome (gene therapy).
(btw, snyderman and rothman did a study in 1987 of 1200 intelligence experts, and about half thought that the black-white IQ gap had a genetic component, while 1/5 thought it had no genetic component, with the balance not sure or refused to give answer)
http://gnxp.com/gnxp_board/viewtopic.php?t=9
To anyone unfamiliar with the situation let me provide somewhat of a backstory. My name is Jason Malloy, I am 24 year old art school graduate, as well as an enthusiastic reader of the web log called Gene Expression. Gene Expression was the result of the merging of five popular blogs back in June of 2002, and it was engineered by two South-East Asians, a geneticist known as Godless Capitalist and a biochemist named Razib. The idea was to provide perspectives on the current state of the controversial sciences of human nature. This includes the fields of sociobiology, IQ, and genetics. All three of these sciences are mistrusted by the American public (%50 of which disbelieve in evolution), and are continuously under attack by moralists and activists on the Left and the Right. In essence there has become two views in the sciences today- the one the public knows about, and the one the scientific professionals know. All three fields of inquiry- sociobiology, IQ, amd genetics, have been vehemently attacked, both presently and in the past, as “racist”. GnXp was never about hatred, it was about questions, and about answers. In short it was about a disspationate search for the truth of evolved man, no matter how challenging or frightening those truths might be.
Inevitably, the most controversial topic Gene Expression writes about is the one of race. One question Gene Expression asks is if the races of man are different, or if they are %100 the same. GnXp says that they are not %100 the same. But it be absurd to say that GnXp is racist because of that, because no one believes this. If we could take any one native from Senegal, and any one native from Korea, I think any honest individual would be able to pick out who came from where. This is only talking about the most reliably discrete portions of their respective racial phenotypes, many more features of their respective biologies are shared, but distrubuted differently on a statistical curve. These curves are many, and have incredible variations from population to population. People who participate in GnXp discussions are particularly interested in this because they come from all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds, and its implications for medicine are really astounding. Ignoring race, makes the (mostly white) moralists feel good about themselves, but for American minority populations, such willful ignorance can and has caused a great deal of suffering and death, as treatments and prescriptions, and procedures that are optimal only for whites are used on patients of ethnicities they were not designed for. At times these treatments can be ineffective and even harmful. Other times, better treatments were available, but ignored for ideological reasons at the expense of the patient. Another place where these statistical population variations interest people and GnXp is in the area of sports. Just as we might agree that the vast majority of Eskimos are Shorter than the vast majority of Dinkas, literally tens of thousands of such differences exist between racial populations, including things, but not limited to, such as skeletal structure, muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency and lung capacity. Anybody who watches the Olympics have already noticed what ethnicities take what sports, and which ones others are virtually absent from. You won’t find many Samoans taking the diving gold, or many East Asians winning the 100-meter run. No one population is “superior”, b/c anatomical variety involves trade-offs. Well-muscled American west-african blacks may have physiology that gives them edge in sports such as football and basketball, but those same features make them ill-suited, for the most part, in similarly outstanding performance in areas such as swimming and diving.
http://www.africana.com/Utilities/Content.html?&../cgi-bin/banner.pl?banner=Blackworld&../DailyArticles/index_20011106.htm
Two authors who talk about these significant and facinating population and racial differences are Jon Entine and Sally Satel, esp. as it applies to sports and medicine. For further exploration here are some links:
http://www.jonentine.com/science_genetics.htm
http://www.jonentine.com/sports.htm
These differences of body in racial populations are fairly controversial, but are supported by an unsurmountable body of scientific evidence. Perhaps if these were the only differences covered by GnXp, the website would not recieve the kind of of charges that Richard are levying against it, but the website, using common sense and the weight of mainstream scientific opinion, does go further. For you see, since all credible scientific naturalists abandon the notion of Cartesian duality, the picture would be incomplete to leave the picture at the superficial level of the body. Individual humans differ not only in the “physical” traits I have been discussing here, but in “mental” ones as well. Not only do individuals differ in aptitude, behavior, and personality, it has been decided that these differences are in some part (40-%80) genetic. For instance Indentical twins raised apart are measured to be more similar than fraternal twins raised together. This includes things such as personality, IQ, and criminality. That being said, as the measured physical traits of different populations statistically vary, so do the measured mental traits. Now ask yourself, why would these inhereted mental traits that differ between individuals not cluster within closely related people just like the physical ones do? The most internally coherent and parsimonious answer to this question, is that inhereted traits of aptitude, personality, and behavior are not evenly distrubuted throughout world populations, but are just as statistically uneven as the inhereted physical traits such as the ones of skeletal structure, muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency and lung capacity discussed above. These patterns would be predicted from this model and not surprisingly they do occur. NorthEast Asians, on averge, have higher mathematical than verbal aptitude whether they are raised in Asia, or in Europe, or Africa, or America. They also have lower rates of criminality, divorce, and sexually transmitted disease (as well as a lot of other patterened data), than native white or black population (on average), no matter what culture they are raised in. Similarly, West-African blacks show cross-cultural patterns as well. Whether they are raised in Europe, Asia, or Africa blacks have higher verbal than mathematical aptitude. They also (on average) have higher rates of criminality, divorce, and sexually transmitted disease, etc., than the surrounding asian or caucasion populations of the cultures where they are raised. This experiment is repeated daily throughout the world, with stable results. It has also been repeated under more controlled and measured scientific circumstances under the famous Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption Study conducted by Sandra Scarr. White, black, and Mulatto babies were all given up for adoption to reletively affluent White families, and then studied as they aged to evaluate their progress of aptitude and behavior. The results of the expiriment were what could be expected from my assumptions stated above. The black babies, though there IQs did end up higher than the A-A mean, were lower than those of the Mullatto children, who themselves had lowered measured IQ (on average) than the white children. Further evidence to support the default assumption (stated above) is the reletive stability of the black-white IQ difference over 100 years of measued testing. It has remained at an anamolous 15 points (1 SD) different mean score. This is through years of changing circumstances and different conditions of society. Why would Jim Crow blacks score at the same disadvanteged rate as post Jim-Crow blacks? Further, why would blacks raised in Europe, Israel, Australia, etc. have the SAME mean difference in measured mental ability than the local caucasion populations? Why 1 SD? I imagine it is for the same reason that Kenyan’s take %60 of the distance running metals in the Olympics, whether they are raised in Kenya or not.
This is not a complete listing of the reasons for the suspicion of these diffrences, but it is a start. I have to say that it doesn’t come as a surprise that a MAJORITY of those in related scientific feilds suspect that the black-white IQ gap is IN PART caused by genetic factors, as well as Environmental ones.
www. gnxp.com is NOT a racist website. It is a website devoted to honest discussion and debate about human differences and similarities. The great majority of us there believe in equality before the law as our central guiding Jefforsonian principle. We care about the nature and reality of mankind, because we are Humanists, and humanists hold as a constant right the dignity of all men, b/c human dignity is presupposed instead of contingent on external conditions or anything we may discover.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf
Mainstream science on Intelligence:
[on measured b-w differences] “Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but that genetics could be involved to”
Misguided about the significance of IQ tests? I think not. A trait called Conscientiousness rates as high as g in measuring real world success. And by real world success, I don’t mean college grades.
Again you misrepresent Razib’s reasoning. Anyone who wants to, check out what he said on the website gnxp, go to the message board and check out the “Race” forum and the topic “Richard Bennett takes on gnxp” and see for yourself what Razib says, in it’s proper context (it’s near the bottom of the page).
Here’s my take on what Razib said: I think that if one accepts the evidence that IQ has a substantial genetic component, and all the evidence thus far shows that black populations that trace their ancestry to Africa as a group lag behind other populations such as Caucasians and East Asians in terms of IQ, then one may reasonably come to the conclusion that genetic engineering may be a viable means by which one can increase a group?s IQ. I don’t have an IQ of 160, but if I wanted to increase it to or above that level, then genetic engineering seems to be the only viable option, because the evidence for environmental strategies to raise one’s IQ by that much in adulthood are non-existent.
As for a test that would be a better indicator of native brainpower, neuroscience may offer us something tangible. Check out http://www.megasociety.net/MegaPress/index.html
and the free e-book: “Discussions on Genius and Intelligence” with Arthur Jensen. You may have to download the free Acrobat e-Reader. In the interview Jensen alludes to chronometric measurements that may have some advantages over IQ tests in this area. Being a science nut, I am salivating at the chance to see the results. I don’t care whether my current views on this matter change, as long as my views reflect the weight of the evidence.
Another fuzzy statistical artefact that exists must be family relatives. Could Mr. Bennett tell me whether such a thing (family relatives) exists? If it exists, where does it start and where does it end?
“and given the rate at which people breed with members of what once would have been considered taboo”. The rate of miscegenation is probably much higher in North America and Western Europe than in the rest of the world, and still it’s probably not that high in absolute terms. My gf is Taiwanese, her ex-bf was a Lebanese muslim. He straight out told her that his parents would never let him marry someone of non-Lebanese ancestry, even if they were muslim. If you want – I could give you numerous examples of situations cognate to this.
“Given that their main poster believes that Blacks need to be genetically engineered to boost their IQs”
This is an epic distortion of the point actually made by Razib. Disgusting.
Of course Pioneer wouldn’t fund adoption studies, Razib, the whole idea of “race-mixing” is something they’re vehemently oppposed to, and in any case these studies have sample sizes too small to prove anything that isn’t common sense.
Check the footnotes in The Bell Curve and you’ll find everybody the Pioneer Fund supports among them, with the exception of the ones they support to do Holocaust Denial. That’s one reason that it’s not academically respectable.
Jason, you’re still mixing apples and oranges. There are environments where non-humans do better than humans, that’s obvious, and the oceans would be one of them. But when we’re comparing sub-groups of humans, with the ability to transer adaptive mutations, this logic no longer applies, unless you’re now trying to say that black people aren’t human. While you may believe that, saying it won’t increase your credibility, and saying that black people have smaller brains than white people doesn’t do much for it either.
If intelligence isn’t a universal survival value in humans (even black ones!), what good is it? Bear in mind that I’m using the term in a broad sense, not merely in a test-score sense, so I would include creativity, intuition, induction, estimation, and long-term memory in the mix as well as the traits measured by IQ tests, which would be short-term memory, vocabularly, analogy, summary, and deduction.
“Intelligence in the grand sense (not just the ability to perform certain kinds of verbal tricks) is a universal, with survival value in all places at all times. Therefore, we can’t account for supposed differences in intelligence according to an appeal to local conditions.
That would be saying that some climates favor stupidity, which is clearly absurd.”
This is evolutionary nonsense, Richard
I don’t know how you could look anyone in the eyes and recite this theoretical excrement. David, you may certainly field this one, in your own way if you want to, but I am already grilling Richard for this tripe here:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=65
I guess by your theory, Richard all those non-intelligent, non-human animals who are surviving just fine are some sort of evolutionary paradox. If some climates didn’t “favor stupidity”, there wouldn’t exist right now the non-intelligent chimps who forked off of our shared evolutionary ancestor, you blowhard.
“Your comparison between specific athletic abilities and intelligence is apples to oranges. Athletic ability as a generality isn’t a property of racial groups; what we see is specific athletic abilities in specific sub-racial groups, such as the sprinting ability of West Africans and the long-distance running of East Africans, and these are adaptations to local conditions.”
First of all, its nice to see you admit to ethnic adapations. While sub-dividing racial populations does tell us much more, you are also missing out on the larger picture if you don’t zoom-out as well. Blacks of Sub-Saharan origin are more closely related to eachother than to those outside of the continent. In fact, outside of junk genes, the pygmies, and the khoisan, there actually is very little genetic diversity within Africa. Whatever trade-offs blacks are making locally, enabling them to specialize for certain running events, they are still, as a population whole, able to out-run Asia on average. We usually consider the sports that blacks succeed at most as more masculine (football, basketball, running and jumping, heavy-weight boxing), while the Asian athletes excel at sports of grace (figure-skating, diving, gymnastics). Relavent statistical differences in things such as height, bone density, and testosterone makes for some dramatic differences in the athletic achievements, and kinds of athletic achievement, between racial populations. In this way we are able to make statistically important conclusions about races, in the same general way you just did with sub-racial populations.
Sorry, razib, but I don’t see where you posted a link of any kind, so you must be talking about some other thread somewhere.
Jason said: But aptitude, personality, and behavior are not [partially genetic] I guess?
I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe it. I said most things are a combination of nature, nurture, and culture, as is individual intelligence. I don’t happen to believe that “race”, such as it is, predicts individual intelligence.
dude-i’m hung-over.. :) but yeah, that’s what i meant