The following is a guest post by commenter Mephisto:
Too many “Arm Chair Internet Geneticists” and “Know Nothing HBDers” (redundant, I know) like to use the same drivel, that is almost effortlessly debunked with irrefutable (and even entry level) facts:
Two or three years after “The Bell Curve” came out, Myerson, Rank, Raines & Schnitzler at Washington University in Saint Louis, looked at the VERY SAME longitudinal database that Murray and Herrnstein used to demonstrate this persistent IQ gap between whites and blacks. They found something Murray and Herrnstein didn’t mention.
What they discovered was that when African Americans in the US go to college, they raise their IQ FOUR TIMES FASTER than whites who go to college, and in the process close the average IQ gap between whites and blacks in half in just 4 years. This would not be possible if IQ was fundamentally related to biology, and yet it was EXACTLY (going by the very database that Murray and Herrnstein used) actually demonstrated:
http://wupa.wustl.edu/record_archive/1997/11-06-97/7682.html
So there goes the entire argument of the book, and every single related study. (I have other irrefutable ways to dismantle this book and such studies, that I could use in a heartbeat. But … that would just be pounding the red stain on the ground that USED TO BE the dead horse.)
Those who have even a pedestrian level of knowledge when it comes to genetics, and do not rely on crtl+c and crtl+v, know “the exact reason” why race IS a social construct. Not because it’s some “feel good slogan” or whatever “logic riot shield” dismissal HBDers like to prop up, to use against their opponents; but the proven fact that they like to skate around, and ignore.
Start with “Fst” (fixation index).
“Fst”, a measure of genetic distance, is a statistical measurement of the fraction of a variation found between samples.
There is substantial and unequivocal evidence that there is currently only one race, or subspecies, of human on the planet: Homo sapiens sapiens. Humans do not show enough genetic variability within populations for any given population to be categorized as a subspecies. The level of genetic differentiation required to classify a population (or group of populations) as a subspecies is an Fst greater than 0.25. Multiple studies of a variety of segments of DNA in humans clearly demonstrate that this level IS NOT REACHED in humans, even in mtDNA.
Human Fst scores average about 0.17, WELL UNDER the subspecies mark. On a molecular level where we (researchers) study and learn, this range is staggeringly wide.
It is also extremely important to note that there is not a single unique genetic marker that can be used to differentiate the “big few” races; that is, there are no Asian, Black, or White genes or alleles. Since there are groups that share multiple “core” traits with the big three, that are identical to them, on a molecular level.
See also:
- Myerson, J., Rank, M. R., Raines, F. Q., & Schnitzler, M. A. (1998). Race and General Cognitive Ability: The Myth of Diminishing Returns to Education. Psychological Science, 9, 139-142.
- HBD
- The Bell Curve
- IQ
- Anti-black racism as a guide to science
Can you likewise back up your claim of 0.32 for the FST between Bantus and Australian aborigines?
@Abagond
You asked me this in the other thread, but I will reply in this thread, since it pertains to this guest post.
That Fst distance comes from Cavalli-Sforza’s 1994 work, The History and Geography of Human Genes, from which Mephisto has taken a chart drawn from that same source. Some of the other numbers for Fst distance are higher than the threshold of .25 that Mephisto asserted. The distance between Bantus and Koreans is .26 and between Bantus and southern Chinese is .29. Between the San and the Aborigines it is .27.
Mephisto wrote:
Human Fst scores average about 0.17
What does the average matter? It’s the distance between two populations that matter. If an Fst of .25 is the requisite for sub-species categorization, then there are multiple human populations that meet that criteria.
It is also extremely important to note that there is not a single unique genetic marker that can be used to differentiate the “big few” races; that is, there are no Asian, Black, or White genes or alleles.
This is a ridiculous assertion. Races are not determined by one marker, no more than they are by one trait. All people with black hair wouldn’t bet the same race. It’s the combination of genetic differences that would determine a race or sub-species, not one gene.
Anyway, there are mutations that originated in certain populations, such as the mutation for lactose tolerance that Europeans possess. The small minority of Africans that are also lactose tolerant have a completely different mutation. If any Africans share the European mutation, it’s due to admixture. The same goes for the mutation for light skin. It is different in Europeans than it is in northern Asians.
Then we also have the Melanesians who have unique alleles from admixture with the Denisovans, which has not been found in other populations.
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Please note that I provided the chart, not Mephisto. It seems to go with what he is saying, so I added it, but he might ask me to take it down.
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The Belle curve authors didn’t get much flak over that publication
At least one is Jewish so I suppose he is allowed to either tell the truth or be racist, whatever the case may be
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opps excuse speiing…I meant “Bell” curve
Ding Dong!
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After reading that article that Mephisto linked to, it’s clear that it’s bunk. The article cherry picks quotes from the researchers and since it doesn’t show the results of the study itself, it’s essentially worthless. They used the same data that Herrnstein and Murray did and claim that the college education cut the achievement gap in half. They are basically stating that Black college graduates are smarter than Black high school seniors. That should be a given. It seems to me that they just compared scores of Black seniors to Black college grads and postulated that it was college itself that made their IQs rise, instead of looking at the obvious fact that those who made it through college have higher IQs to begin with.
Their claim that Black students’ IQs rose seem to be complete conjecture. They didn’t track individual student’s progress. They just reused Herrnstein and Murray’s existing data.
Why would you even post an old article about a study that had yet to be published or even peer reviewed? If the study was valid, surely there’d be better info about it.
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Since I admit to being a fan of ctrl+c and ctrl+v, I’ll keep this post close to my hotkeys for necessary knowledge-bomb dropping.
@ Sagat: Are you a geneticist? Are you a psychologist or anthropologist or biologist?
Because as an anthropologist studying human variation (as in, I spend 5 days out of my week learning about this) I can tell you that the average Fst number is VERY IMPORTANT! You did notice that the “distance” between two populations — rightly called variation — matters, but missed the whole point that if two populations are under the necessary amount of variation, then it disproves the ENTIRE THEORY that there are different biological races of humanity. Sorry, but that’s the way science works: if you have a single, solitary gap, then you have to start from scratch.
Also, all people with black hair ARE the same race, just like blondes, brunettes, red-heads, and everything in-between. The determinant for difference races is actually more taxonomic than genetic, as anyone who’s taken an entry-level college course that mentions Linnean taxonomy.
The determinant for different species, is of course, pretty standard: a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. Since humans are obviously capable of this with each other, there is no different species of humans, and as we showed above, there are no subspecies of humans.
I mean, seriously man! I’ve been seeing Abagond post refutations of this stuff week after week, and yet you still contest it? The science community — the people who spend their whole lives talking about this and, y’know, get PhD’s in it — have proved, time and again, that race IS NOT biological.
It’s cultural, and for me it only takes looking at the problem with Jews in HBD theory to see that. You notice when they talk about Jewish intelligence BS, they never mention the Jews of Color and THEIR IQ test-scores. As a White Jew, I find that very telling.
But anyhoo, good guest post!
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Sagat:
The study in question was peer-reviewed and published:
Myerson, J., Rank, M. R., Raines, F. Q., & Schnitzler, M. A. (1998). Race and General Cognitive Ability: The Myth of Diminishing Returns to Education. Psychological Science, 9, 139-142.
It was based on the same longitudinal study as “The Bell Curve”, so presumably they could compare high school and college IQs of individuals.
You said:
“They are basically stating that Black college graduates are smarter than Black high school seniors. That should be a given. “
But they also found that black IQs go DOWN during high school. Is that a given too?
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I thought about bringing up this Myerson study earlier. I remembered it was mentioned in a psych textbook of mine in the genetic and environmental influences on intelligence section. A lot of good information, but it was a lil too Black & White when discussing group differences. As if those are the only groups in America and in the world.
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If anyone can email me a copy of that Myerson study, I will gladly do a post on it: abagond at gmail.
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Forgive my ignorance, but how is the “average Fst” relevant as to whether large populations of people have differing traits from other large populations of people? It seems perhaps more of an arbitrary taxonomic metric rather an indicator which would predict the existence of statistically significant differences.
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You notice when they talk about Jewish intelligence BS, they never mention the Jews of Color and THEIR IQ test-scores. As a White Jew, I find that very telling.(zek j evets)
Good point..
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Abagond,
The study in question was peer-reviewed and published:
It hadn’t yet been published when that article was written. That was my point. Mephisto presented that link like it was a slam dunk for the case that IQ is malleable, but if you read the article then I think you can agree that it’s short on details and absent any hard data. I found that the article hardly made a case. If there’s better info out there, then do post it.
But they also found that black IQs go DOWN during high school. Is that a given too?
I’ve read numerous studies that have shown the IQ gap to widen from early adolescence up until adulthood so I do see that as a given.
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“I’ve read numerous studies that have shown the IQ gap to widen from early adolescence up until adulthood so I do see that as a given.”
Great.
Post 3 of them and we will consider your sources.
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@zek
I can tell you that the average Fst number is VERY IMPORTANT! You did notice that the “distance” between two populations — rightly called variation — matters, but missed the whole point that if two populations are under the necessary amount of variation, then it disproves the ENTIRE THEORY that there are different biological races of humanity
Have taxonomists even adopted this .25 distance in Fst as a requisite of sub-species classification that Mephisto has stated? As far as I know, there is not a set standard using this method. If you know where I can find info about this supposed standard then please direct me to it.
From Merriam-Webster medical dictionary:
a category in biological classification that ranks immediately below a species and designates a population of a particular geographical region genetically distinguishable from other such populations of the same species and capable of interbreeding successfully with them where its range overlaps theirs
Do humans not meet the above criteria? I think it’s obvious that we do.
It’s cultural, and for me it only takes looking at the problem with Jews in HBD theory to see that. You notice when they talk about Jewish intelligence BS, they never mention the Jews of Color and THEIR IQ test-scores.
The difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim is often discussed. If you see people talking about high Jewish IQ then they are always talking about Ashkenazi Jews. It’s well known, especially in Israel, that Ashkenazim make up the cognitive elite.
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@King
I wrote: I’ve read numerous studies that have shown the IQ gap to widen from early adolescence up until adulthood so I do see that as a given.
That’s a misstatement on my part. When I wrote that the IQ gap widened with age, I was comparing the Black mean at different ages to the standard mean of 100. If Whites and Blacks are matched by age, the IQ gap actually does not widen and sometimes narrows, because White IQ also drops with age.
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@ Sagat
OK, Understood.
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@Sagat: But see, humans from a certain geographical region ARE NOT genetically distinguishable. They may be phenotypically distinguishable (which is where everyone talking about race gets hung up on at some point) but like I, and many others have said: the variation is too small to designate subspecies or species. Heck, you can’t even compare it to breeds of dogs! I kinda wish I could get my primatology and bio-anthro professor up here in this conversation.
He’d find it… funny.
Because taxonomists DO NOT get to designate genetic variation and say what is a species or what isn’t. Taxonomists are glorified namers. It is worth remembering that a taxonomy is a construct to help understand the evolution of species, their progression, their inter-relation, but does not reflect reality. And if you ever need proof of that, just look at how many conflicting taxonomies there are! Shoot, I had to make one as a freshman for homework.
The people who use the Fst standards are biologists, geneticists, and other scientists working in those fields dealing with variation. Notably, Richard Lewontin in his work with Stephen Jay Gould, also The HapMap Project, and other smart people.
As for the Jews, you forgot the Mizrahim, Beta Israel, the Kaifeng Jews, Jews in South America, as well as a whole host of other Diasporic communities. Jewish is not a “race” in the strict sense of the word necessary for science.
That said, Ashkenazim do not make up the “cognitive elite” because so many of the Jews in Israel that hold power are actually both Ashkenazi AND Sephardic. Why? Because the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain during the Reconquista and subsequent Inquisition. And where did they go? Well, quite a great many went to France, Germany, and then into the Slavic states.
There are so many problems with talking about Jews in IQ tests, because even the very definition of “Jew” in the discussion is a stereotype! It’s as funny as it is sad.
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@zek j evets: these guys sound familiar, don’t they? All this talk about racial purity, racial differences, this race is better than this one yadayadayadayada…
I think this is sort of “The Racial Biology part 3: The Return of the Master Race”. But unlike those guys in their brown hot shorts some 60 years ago, these guys are so nerdy that they do not feel comfotable in snappy uniforms and mass rallies or pogroms and jewbashings. Nor they dare to ride around in those funny pointy hoods etc.
Aw, I guess these guys fancy them as the intelligetsia of the Fourth Reich. It’s up to the nazi skinheads and beer hall hooligans do the dirty work again, once these geniuses get their theories in practical program…
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Sagat–
Exactly.
I think that certainly the article Mephisto linked, but maybe also the study, was so intentionally misleading as to be outright dishonest.
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As for Hernstein and Murray The Bell Curve being the bible of the race realist crowd, there’s been a ton of further corroborating scientific studies done since it as well. There just hasn’t been a best selling book with discusses and meta analyzes them, together with challenging studies.
However this meta review of studies in a peer reviewed journal does:
Jensen is the dean of the field within psychology of psychometrics. Rushton is a professor of psychology in Canada.
To be clear, it’s the environmentalists who take a radical, scientifically unsupported position that differences in intelligence between individuals and between races or ethnicities are entirely due to environmental or cultural reasons. Hereditarians postulate from the evidence that it’s something like 50/50 genes and environment, give or take.
The notion that there’s not strong scientific support for the hereditarian position is absurd and totally belied by the evidence. It’s the radical environmentalists, most of whom are leftists, that need to demonstrate their 100% environmentalist causation of differences in individual and average racial IQ. They haven’t remotely done so. Leftists just scream racism instead.
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“Hereditarians postulate from the evidence that it’s something like 50/50 genes and environment, give or take.”
Based on little and confused evidence, and the vapid hope of somehow proving their own genetic superiority. It is a faith-based religion for loosers.
Again:
How much of “determination” is genetic?
How much of “laziness” is genetic?
How much of one’s misanthropic and anti-social tendencies are genetic?
How much of one’s interest in any given subject, is genetic?
How much of “patience” is genetic?
How much of “concentration” is genetic?
These are the real components of true intelligence and they are clearly so complex as to be immeasurable to anyone but an idiot or a charlatan.
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Leftist PC orthodoxy defending squid ink. Taxonomic classifications are based on observed biological differences and postulated ancestry. Same with human races. Our ability to read the human and other genomes in fine detail is quite recent, has required very complex technology and huge computing power, and so on. So yes of course common divisions into races is based on observed characteristics. Nonetheless the major geographic race of a person, or often the relatively recent mixtures of them can now be determined by genetic methods. There is a genetic substrate to race.
This is bs, with a grain of truth to it. Race is to some degree a social construct but it also has a definite genetic basis to it.
This position is taken by scientists on the left, especially by those outside the areas of psychometrics and behavior genetics and genetic anthropology for PC political reason, in the name of radical egalitarian myth maintenance. And you know it.
One’s race is one’s group of ancestors. If the great majority of your ancestors are from one major geographic race, then that’s your race. If there’s been a recent mixture your mixed. This common sense understanding also is fundamentally biological. In border lands between major races where there aren’t major barriers like oceans or severe deserts there’s often a good deal of interbreeding and hence intermediate or strongly admixed racial groupings which might or might not be seperately classified, as a matter of social construct.
So too the one drop rule for blacks, first maintained by whites but now mostly by blacks, is far more social construct than biological reality. 1/8 black ancestry doesn’t make a person fully black except as a social construct, and it follows from that, in a cultural sort of way.
As well it’s true that there’s a lot more variation on a partly biological mediated trait such as IQ within major geographic races than there is between them. The normal or bell curve distributions of IQ among blacks and whites heavily overlap, is another way of getting at the same reality.
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King–
The twin studies evidence suggest quite a lot, for one thing.
These areas have been far less scientifically studied than IQ, partly because they’ve proved difficult to reliably measure and quantify. Sequencing the genome directly is a recent and highly complex and technologically difficult development, but progress is galloping along.
The evidence so far for heritable differences rather than entirely environmental ones has been indirect, through cleaver studies such as finding the close similarities of identical twins raised apart on matters such as IQ but also many of the personality type traits you list above.
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Leftists academics will and are doing anything to prevent the heresy that blacks are 1 standard deviation less smart than whites on average, and the a substantial part of the cause for this is very very likely genetic, from getting out there into the broader intellectual or public consciousness and discussion.
First they denied that the mountain of studies showing that differences in IQ is very subtantially but not entirely heritable, exists or has scientific validity. Hence the firestorm of leftist attack on The Bell Curve.
Then they tried to deny that IQ exists or predicts anything pretty well, and then that IQ tests quite reliably measure it.
And after that they came up with this rediculous position that race does not exist, because most racial traits overlap with other races, and so on and so forth. It’s absurd.
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And it’s all clear as day ideologically driven.
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zek–
An absurd argument. Yes I understand it.
I also consider it ridiculous.
Race is about ancestry. Aust. Aborigines with black hair do not share relatively close ancestry with black haired Italians.
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The twin studies evidence SUGGEST quite a lot, for one thing.
Translation: I have no real evidence, just an unshakeable faith that IN THE FUTURE these things will somehow be borne out to prove me correct.
“Sequencing the genome directly is a recent and highly complex and technologically difficult development, but PROGRESS IN GALLOPING along”.
Translation: I have a firm religious belief that the gods of science will be able to figure everything out for me in due time. What I perceive today as very “promising” will surely SOME DAY be seen as absolute proof of my convictions.
Your belief system is rooted in an unproven idea that all things are quantifiable, observable, and provable through scientific observation and experimentation. That belief is a leap of faith.
However, it is at least equally likely that science will not ever be able to answer some of the questions that we are both asking.
The difference between you and I, is that in the absence of REAL evidence, I don’t assume one way of the other. However, you have a need to believe that you already know which way the conclusions will eventually fall.
That is because your belief is more of a religious personal need than a dispassionate scientific observation. It’s basically a crutch.
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zek—
Yeah Ashkenazim and to a I think a lesser extent Sephardim.
Cochran and Harpendig’s genetic theory for why the Jews developed IQ’s about 2/3 of a SD higher than Christian Euros is interesting. Simplifying it’s that in Christian Europe Jews were both uniquely excluded from many economic areas such as land owning or military service and a chance to rise to nobility, and also uniquely privileged to enter others such as money lending, and forms of tax farming. These social and economic niches richly rewarded the more intelligent. The well off had more children who survived to themselves have children. They postulated that the biological mechanisms involved a sort of overclocking of the brain, to borrow from computer building hobbyist terminology. For example an enhance nerve insulation. The same genetic changes they postulate have lead to much higher incidence of certain genetic neurological defects among Jews, such as Gaucher’s disease.
Jews seemed to have occupied similar niches in Islamic Spain, i.e. the Sephardim did, but not in the rest of Islamic lands, where Greeks and Armenians had similar upper middle man and intellectual roles.
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King—
That’s retarded. I said or implied no such thing. You asked for quantification of how much various traits other than IQ are genetically determined, and I replied that the traits have proven very difficult to reliably measure on many personality traits. From which you come up with the above. Idiotic.
How do you explain the finding that identical twins raised apart are found by both scientists and other folks to usually have strikingly similar personalities as well as measured IQs – if not by a very strong genetic role? BTW I’m all but sure that if one twin was severely abused or deprived that the personalities would be quite different. Extremes of environmental differences definitely have effects.
There is a mountain of REAL scientific evidence collected and analyzed along with what contradicting evidence in The Bell Curve that IQ is partly heritable or genetically determined. There is a further more recent mountain of evidence similarly collected and analyzed in this scholarly article. Given this evidence the burden of proof is properly on those who deny that genetic differences play a very substantial roll in individual and racial IQ differences.
Click to access PPPL1.pdf
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“That’s retarded. I said or implied no such thing. You asked for quantification of how much various traits other than IQ are genetically determined, and I replied that the traits have proven very difficult to reliably measure on many personality traits. From which you come up with the above. Idiotic.
I agree your rather dull-witted prognostications of what is and isn’t “galloping along” and what evidence does not prove, but certainly does “suggest” is quite idiotic at that.
“How do you explain the finding that identical twins raised apart are found by both scientists and other folks to usually have strikingly similar personalities as well as measured IQs”
Don’t be a fool! There are as many identical twins who are raised apart who do NOT have similar personalities or IQs. Did you actually think that this was evidence of something? For all you know the similarities are due to identical prenatal conditions or other such factors… the point is you simply don’t know.
“There is a mountain of REAL scientific evidence collected and analyzed along with what contradicting evidence in The Bell Curve that IQ is partly heritable or genetically determined.”
The question is not whether heredity has ANY role in our development at all. Most of us believe that heredity is one of very many factors. We’re just not deficient enough to believe that it’s a firm 50% or anything like.
We’re also not dense enough to believe that intelligence is actually segregated along artificial “racial divisions like “Black” and “White” and” Asian” which mean almost nothing genetically.
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@doug: “Race is about ancestry.” Ok. Tell us your ancestry, say, ten generations back. And remember, the race biologists “proved” 100 years ago that only germanic race is the real one. All the others are horse manure. 😀
So in order to be part of the real white men you must have no irish, spanish, italian, greek, any slavic or any mixed ancestors. Only pure germanic blood will do. So you roots must be only on white anglo saxon Britain, Germany, Scandinavian countries and nothing else. All the others are mixed rubbish.
Remember that when you track your own family roots. No native americans. No slave blood at all. No mediterannean african-latin-arabic mishmush, just pure clean germanic blood. Austrians won’t cut it because they were mixed with slavs and other crap. Only pure german blood will do.
Good luck 😀
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This study is persuasive:
a number of experiments are able to test all of these environmental theories. For one transracial adoption experiments control for all the shared aspects of the environment that differ between whites and blacks (parenting, income, nutrition, neighborhood), while structural equation models test for possible uncommon factors between whites and blacks that could be acting on IQ (which would include things like racism). These experiments do not lend support to any existing or plausible environmental theories for the remaining lower intelligence scores of people of African descent in Western societies. The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study found that, by adulthood, the difference in IQ scores between adopted black and adopted white children raised side by side in the same high income households in mostly homogeneous Northern US upper class neighborhoods was 18 IQ points (p 185):
The W-W/W-B difference is 8.3 IQ points. The B-W/B-B difference is 9.5 IQ points. And the W-W/B-B difference is 17.8 IQ points.
The difference in IQ scores between 2 black biological parent adoptees and 1 black biological parent adoptees is nearly 10 IQ points despite the fact that both share the exact same social identity.
Similarly a dozen mixed race children that were raised under some mistaken information that they had two black biological parents nevertheless developed IQ scores like the other mixed race children.
There are no simple or plausible environmental theories to explain these kinds of findings.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
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As is this whole post:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
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King–
Provide evidence for that assertion. You can’t.
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sam–
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The quote above is not something I agree with, nor the concept of a “real white man”.
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All of this race and IQ talk is just another version of the scientific racism and theories of social Darwinism that thrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just look at the pathetic crap they tried to pass as science back then(which apparently worked considering it was widespread in academia at the time).
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Social_Darwinism.aspx
Craniologist who used numerous tools to classify human skulls. Ultimately concluding, not surprisingly, that White people had larger and therefore more advanced skulls. As if bigger heads make someone smarter.
The utter embarrassment that was phrenology! Claiming one can use the bumps on people’s heads to tell them their behavior/character traits. This was later applied to “races.” Belgium colonial authorities actual used this particular method to say Tutsi were genetically superior to Hutu. Ironically we now know these two populations are the most genetically similar to each other despite the ethnic inequalities that led to the genocide.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/phrenology.aspx
Anglo-Saxon myths of an Aryan race evolving separately somewhere in Iran. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, with rounder heads(which supposedly made them smarter), conquerers, and superior rulers. Eventually moving West into Europe. Mediterraneans and other Europeans bordering Mediterranean Sea and Asia were said to be impure from racial mixing while Nordics, Anglo-Saxons, etc maintained racial purity.
This same crap that they used back then to justify colonialism is exactly what they are using now to justify their modern racism.
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@Doug:
I wouldn’t dignify Sam with an answer. He’s an annoying intrusive child trying to disrupt an adult conversation, and is better ignored.
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@Doug1
Are you still citing the Minnesota Trans-racial adoption study? I thought I already showed you the why the Euro-admixture makes you smarter crap is highly unlikely. Why didn’t you respond to that comment? I’ll post it once more.
“Other bits of evidence they’ve trotted up have been debunked, such as the small study of the illegitimate children raised in Germany of allied solders, “black” and white and white German women, during the occupation.”
You claimed this has been debunked, yet you provide no proof. The children were half African American and half German. Even if that one study was found to be incorrect I still provided plenty of other evidence that destroys the admixture argument and puts a dent into this entire race & IQ theory. Please explain Caribbean Blks and AAs have higher IQs than continental Africans? Why Mulattoes are poor w/in Brazilian & Cuban society, but are rich w/in the Caribbean? Why Blk & mixed brazilians are so poor and uneducated even though they have substantial European ancestry. I could easily give you an answer based on environment, but I really want to hear you out.
– If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.
-Blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups.
-The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q.
-A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.
In Table 1- Enrollments by color/race at all levels of schooling – Brazil – 2000 at the 2nd to last page you can see that Blk and Pardo(brown/Mulatto) Brazilians have similar education rates clearly unequal to their White Brazilian counterparts. Yet, genetic studies show Blk Brazilians are only 55%African and 35-40% Euro on avg, Pardos are more Euro than African, and Whites are about 80%Euro, 10% Afro, & 10%Amerindian. Why so much racial inequality in Brazil among non-Whites(Blks & Pardos) and Whites if the non-Whites are Whiter less pure than African Americans and White Brazilians are only 80% Euro on avg? Pardo and Black education is near identical to each other.
Disparities in Education and Race
http://congreso.us.es/cesrea/OKpapers/25%20Rosemary%20DORE%20e%20MO
Brazilian racial ancestry
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/11/091102_brazil_black_ap.shtml
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@zeke:
Jews are not a race. No one but nazis and anti-Semites even tries to claim so.
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That education link keeps education breaking.
Click to access 25%20Rosemary%20DORE%20e%20MOREIRA%20Black%20Movement%20and%20Education%20Brazil.pdf
Anyways the presence of a Mulatto/Black underclass in Brazil is well documented on as well as the inequalities in the Caribbean when it comes to color; with Mulattoes being apart of the privileged class. This is not surprising considering they legally received early emancipation, better jobs, and superior education throughout the colonial period, while most mixed race Brazilians(and other Mulattoes in Latin America) were kept at a lower-status. Of course I wouldn’t be surprised if you were to throw all of this info out the door. It’s easier to accept when you actually KNOW the general political & socio-economic history of these countries as well as the state of these contemporary societies.
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@Doug1
Two Kenyans could have ancestors living in a Eastern Africa for centuries and not have the same ancestry. Ancestry is about familial relationships. If you extend that outward you don’t get some big family or race.
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“Provide evidence for that assertion. You can’t.”
Haha, You say that as if you can actually prove the opposite.
-That most identical twins who are raised separately are much more alike than many strangers, of the same age, who happen to be similar in some ways.
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I wonder… which pair most likely share the most ancestors. Sasha Obama, a black girl, and her White grandmother or Sasha Obama and some random Black chick? If Sasha Obama mothered a child to a Kenyan man would her children have similar ancestry to their White great grandmother compared to a random White person like yourself?
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@ Cynic
Ancestry is about familial relationships. If you extend that outward you don’t get some big family or race.
As the chart at the top of the page shows, all people are related. We just have different degrees of separation. We are not all equally related. How you define race or divvy up population groups can be up for debate, but the fact remains that different peoples share closer relations with some groups than they do with others.
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What about this site:
http://www.understandingrace.org/
Most of the information is basic, but they have some interesting charts. I found this one particularly interesting:
http://www.understandingrace.org/humvar/race_humvar.html
It shows the real human variation vs the one racists (here meaning: “people who believe race is a biological fact”) think it’s true. I found it to be really telling.
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Doug1,
The quote above is not something I agree with, nor the concept of a “real white man”.
So, what makes a real white man, in your opinion?
What Sam said is what racists generally believe to be true….
… unless they are of Irish, Spanish, Italian, Greek or Slavic origin. 😀
And, since we’re dealing with the genes… I believe many of you are familiar with the recent DNA genealogy projects, such as iGenea and the problems and issues their results cause all over the world? Of course, one problem might be the accuracy and interpretation of such results (you CAN NOT link halpogroups with ethnic groups, it simply doesn’t work that way!)
But what I find particularly interesting is the anger and conflict these interpretations cause. For example, according to these results, Macedonians (as in: former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia) seem to have more ancient Greek blood than Greeks! (Ouch!) The rest of ex-Yugoslavian republics + Albania fight over who has the most indigenous genes! The Irish don’t have as much Celtic genes as they thought they had! (Ouch!) Swedes have more Slavic genes than Finns! (Ouch!)
… And that’s just Europe (and note even all the cases are mentioned here).
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To Mira and Sam:
What Sam said is what racists generally believe to be true….
It is what Neo-Nazis believe… it is not what adherents of HBD believe. Based upon a task ushered upon me by Obsidian I reviewed a number of the HBD sites (Sailer, Halfsigma, Guy White, and GNXP) all basically state that European Jews and to a lesser extant North East Asians have higher average IQs than Gentile Whites. Sailer goes further and estimates that Brahmin Indians have an average IQ around the same level of European Jews. Hardly the stuff of Nazis but arguably still racist.
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@Mira
That site is actually part of a tour that is running in my city right now. It’s run by the American Anthropological Association. I assume that you know of it’s founder, Franz Boas, his Marxist views and their explicit goal of promoting racial egalitarianism. Their agenda is not hidden.
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Yes, I am more than familiar with Boas’ work.
Now, he was one of the first people who argued racial egalitarianism, but his views would be seen as controversial today.
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@uncle: the Indian indians were a bit problematic for nazis since the real aryans came from those neck of the woods (aryan being the same as iranian :D) and also because in India the swastika had been used for couple millenia before the nazis did.
One has to remember that the nazis were actually promoting arab “freedom” and had the backing of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. They together came to conclusion that arabs and nazis were on the same page and since herr Himler, the master of the master race men indeed, was the guardian of racial purity and still promoted arab issues, one can see that the nazis thoughed well of their fellow arabs racially. They even had a SS-Waffen division made up of the Balkan muslims, russian cossacks, and some SS troops recruited from India etc. So it seems that even the nazis had some confusion on this matter. Not that it surprises anyone with brains… 😀
@nonserviam: since I am half century old I do not consider myself being childish at all. I just made a question to a guy who, for some reason, wants to prove scientifically that blacks are stupid. I think it is valid question in this case. If you are promoting racial superiority and claim that it is about ancestry, then I assume you must have spotless ancestry racially? I mean, how can you claim racial superiority if you are mixed mash yourself? How can you state that n*****s are beneath the white man unless you are sure that you are a pure white man?? 😀 You can’t.
What I find extremely childish and funny is this: guys like you and Doug are promoting racial hierarchy, value system based on race, but for some reason you guys try to avoid the real terms. You do not want to be called racists. Doug uses the word “race realist”. Well, I can tell you who call themselves “race realists” in Europe. Right, the racists, neo nazis and nazi skinheads etc. And how do I know this? I have a childhood friend who has been involved with the skinhead movement more than 20 years and is a neo nazi, racist etc.
We do not share any political ideas nor we are on the same page on this race issue, but he is open with me and tells me openly about HBDers, racial realists etc. He is proud to be a white racist and finds guys like you hilarious just like I do. Actually he calls guys like you “cowards” and “whimps”. Words of a racist, not mine.
Maybe it is just the old neighborhood were we grew up, you know, the cultural effect, but we value honesty and thing called Being a Man, being who you are up front. Excuses and endless justifications are not part of that, so my skinhead childhood friend sports openly swastika tattoos etc. and if anyone asks, he openly states his stand on these issues. And no, he is not a junkie, drunk, alchoholic, unemployed or any of that. He is educated, has his own business etc. But still, he finds guys like you pathetic and extremely funny, and I must agree with him on this one.
And why they use the name “race realist” over here? Because, just like you, they know that in these days being a racist is not that great or fashionable. They also know that in some countries it is illegal. That is why they came up with the name “race realist” which is just one more sanitised version of the real deal: racist. You know, you can slip it into conversation at the cocktail parties, “by the way, I am a race realist”, unlike “by the way, I am a racist”. 😀
So unless you are a racist, the whole issue is useless, meaningless. What you are going to do with this information that blacks are more stupid than whites? What are you going to use it for? Change policies? If so, then you are talking about politics based on race. And what do you call that?? 😀
I know guys like you will dance around these questions because you know in deep down that most people will laugh at you if you say you are a racist. You know that you might get into a real fight for that. I mean real, physical fight. But as long as you can act civilized, talk about “science” and sneak around the halls of Academia, you are safe. You will not answer straight because you are affraid. You are affraid that somebody really sees you as you are: as racists.
The big question is the same my skinhead friend asks when he is listening guys like you or reading your “scientific” babbling: what are these guys affraid of??
There was one brittish guy in Europe who tried to convince audiences that Auschwitz and others did not exist, that the whole Holocaust is a fraud. My old childhood chum hated that pussy. He was a coward and whiner. Like my skinhead pal once said: we should be proud of what the nazis did.
I think you are not there yet. For some very strange reason you are not proud of what you guys really are: White racists defending the rights of the white race. I have no other explanation for you behavior but the fear and/or shame. For some strange reason you try to avoid being called racist and come up with snappy terms like “race realist”. Why?
Why you do not want to be who you clearly are? Why you try to deny it, when at the same time you are trying to prove your racist point “scientifically”?? I think that is very very interesting indeed. Why try to hide?? 😀
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The Cynic said:
“This same crap that they used back then to justify colonialism is exactly what they are using now to justify their modern racism.”
Co-sign. (And thanks for the info on adoption studies.)
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To Sam:
@uncle: the Indian indians were a bit problematic for nazis since the real aryans came from those neck of the woods..
But they made it clear what they thought of Jews.. not only in words but in deeds… add to the mix Slavs, Roma…etc.
If you want to call HBDers racist .. fine you could make a case for it by the modern definitions of racism. But simply put they are not Nazis and not all are White and several are Jewish (Halfsigma for one..) .. and they all seem to think that Jews and East Asians have higher average intelligence than gentile Whites. Continually comparing them to an ideology which some clearly have repudiated (Halfsigma and Guy White..others may repudiated Nazi ideology but I specifically read articles by those two that took apart Nazi ideology) seems foolish.
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The Cynic said:
“Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.”
This also corroborates a study I once saw that mulatto children with white mothers have higher IQs than mulatto children with black mothers. I think the gap is 8pts IIRC. That’s particularly interesting in light of the fact that black women have somewhat higher IQs than black men while white women have somewhat lower IQs than white men.
Whites from the south score lower than whites from the north. In fact one study early last century showed that blacks from the norths scored higher than whites from the south.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ymFz0q8hFZEC&lpg=PA75&ots=468zCSxC7a&dq=northern%20blacks%20score%20higher%20than%20southern%20whites%20IQ&pg=PA75#v=onepage&q=northern%20blacks%20score%20higher%20than%20southern%20whites%20IQ&f=false
Now what would explain why whites from the north would score higher than whites from the south when we are talking about the same race here?
What explains why white ethnics from Europe did as poorly as black children?
http://books.google.com/books?id=JMxpBOnQIH8C&lpg=PA31&ots=WMNLOs-MZH&dq=northern%20blacks%20score%20higher%20than%20southern%20whites%20IQ&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q&f=false
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@Abagond
Your welcome. I remember Doug1 saying that the Flynn effect was the only proof of environmental influences on IQ. That reminded me of another adoption study with Richard Weinberg and Sandra Scarr in 1976 that looked at the socio-economic and cultural influences on intelligence. They had White families that were highly educated and above avg in occupational status and income adopt Black children. When they tested them for IQ they found that the Black kids scored several points higher than both White & Black averages.
http://books.google.com/books?id=RwMBD5TSMawC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Scarr & Weinberg study is on pg. 309, but 308-310 has really great information on the topic of group intelligence. A table(7.2) on the percentages of Burakumin IQ compared to other non-Buraku Japanese in given ranges(I think I have mentioned enough that Buraku are NOT another race/ethnicity/genetic population than majority Japanese). Page 308 also has lot of good info on how Chinese/Japanese American children show NO differences in intelligence to Euro-Americans in early childhood. If this kids our born with higher intelligence then why does the Chinese/Japanese and Euro-Amero gap increase EVERY year after school starts with Asians scoring higher than Whites in Science and Math by Middle School.
@Tulio thx for those studies
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Mira said:
“Most of the information is basic, but they have some interesting charts. I found this one particularly interesting:
http://www.understandingrace.org/humvar/race_humvar.html
It shows the real human variation vs the one racists (here meaning: “people who believe race is a biological fact”) think it’s true. I found it to be really telling.”
I love that chart. Thanks! I am so tired of charts like the one at the top of this post where Africans are shown as some little branch off to the side (sometimes way little and way off to the side) when in fact they are the ROOT of mankind.
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To Tulio:
Now what would explain why whites from the north would score higher than whites from the south when we are talking about the same race here?
Nutrition..? They liked their cousins very much..? Although the latter is a more humorous thought the former is more likely. Fortification of foods became increasingly more common in the US between the World Wars basically was widespread by the 1950s. The South was notorious for ailments related to nutritional deficiencies pre WWII.
“Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.”
This also corroborates a study I once saw that mulatto children with white mothers have higher IQs than mulatto children with black mothers. I think the gap is 8pts IIRC. That’s particularly interesting in light of the fact that black women have somewhat higher IQs than black men while white women have somewhat lower IQs than white men.
In a way that is denigrating to Black women… eg that implies that Black women on average raise children to be less cognitively capable than White women … (additionally it might be possible that Asian women raise children to be more cognitively capable than White women…) but I suppose that could be true. I don’t know.
For men at least according to this article… it is the mother’s genes that carry intelligence:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/brainy-sons-owe-intelligence-to-their-mothers-1339099.html
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Uncle M said:
“In a way that is denigrating to Black women… eg that implies that Black women on average raise children to be less cognitively capable than White women … (additionally it might be possible that Asian women children to be more cognitively capable than White women…) but I suppose that could be true. I don’t know. “
I’m not denigrating anyone. Parental behavior does vary from culture to culture and this has implications on mental development as your growing brain is creating more neural pathways. I’m sure the babies from Rwanda that Madonna adopted will grow up to be more intelligent than they would have if they grew up in a mud hut in the bush. Like Malcolm Gladwell says, IQ more than anything is probably a measure of how modern you are…assuming the basics such as proper nutrition have been met.
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Cynic said:: “Page 308 also has lot of good info on how Chinese/Japanese American children show NO differences in intelligence to Euro-Americans in early childhood. If this kids our born with higher intelligence then why does the Chinese/Japanese and Euro-Amero gap increase EVERY year after school starts with Asians scoring higher than Whites in Science and Math by Middle School.”
I’ve read elsewhere that asian children tend to mature slower than white children who mature slower than black children (I don’t recall the source offhand), so theoretically that could also explain the differences in IQ performance over time for the 3 groups.
Additionally, the tendency for asian parents to heavily stress education does not preclude a genetic component from also being at work.
As for the Burakumin example, I think that has somewhat limited applicability, as it only demonstrates that discrimination may be one manner in which IQ performance is reduced, but that does not preclude genetic differences from being present between groups of people.
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I do think there might be some truth to this “IQ = how modern you are”. I am not convinced, but it does seem to offer an explanation. Economic stability and/or wealth also seem to play a certain role.
I mean, just take a look at former Yugoslavia. Average IQ in the 70s and 80s (before the mess) was higher than it is today (after the war and conflicts and poverty and other problems). Some would say it could be explained with the brain drain, but IQ should not measure your level of education but your intelligence (and plus, there are many educated people left). Still, the IQ is much lover than in was in the 70s and 80s.
(I’m talking about both the Yugoslavian IQ and individual IQs of the republics ( = states) within Yugoslavia, that are today individual countries). So no, I simply don’t buy the genetic argument in this matter; and this example shows IQ can spot a different trend than the usual one (decreasing over time).
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@Randy
-“I’ve read elsewhere that asian children tend to mature slower than white children who mature slower than black children (I don’t recall the source offhand), so theoretically that could also explain the differences in IQ performance over time for the 3 groups.”
Well it would be nice of you to find that source. Either way I think it’s unlikely explanation for the widening gap between Chinese/Japanese and White American school children.
-“As for the Burakumin example… that does not preclude genetic differences from being present between groups of people.”
Wow, so now you’re suggesting that such a significant genetic difference in intelligence can be found within the same population? I’m guessing you must not believe in the “snow makes you smarter” hypothesis considering you don’t believe it did much the Burakumin.
-An excerpt from the NYT
Japan’s Invisible Minority: Better Off Than in Past, but StillOutcasts
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 30, 1995
The issues are those that Americans associate with race; in Japan the burakumin are not a different race at all.
A 35-year-old study in Japan found that buraku children had lower I.Q.’s than non-buraku children in the same public schools. Scholars who examined the data say the differences reflect general apathy and lack of self-esteem, a result of discrimination and contempt from society as a whole.
Yet Japan has not overcome its divide. For if the three million burakumin, amounting to a bit more than 2 percent of the population, are now rarely burdened by overt discrimination, they face the same problems as some minority groups in America: disproportionate poverty, high crime rates, low education levels, many single mothers, dependency on welfare benefits and resentment from a public that believes they are getting special help.
They are an occupational minority group rather than a racial one. Indistinguishable in appearance from other Japanese, they were discriminated against simply because they were the descendants of people whose jobs were considered ritually unclean, like butchering animals, tanning skins, making leather goods, digging graves and handling corpses.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E7DB1139F933A05752C1A963958260&fta=y&pagewanted=1
-“as it only demonstrates that discrimination may be one manner in which IQ performance is reduced”
What a leftist remark…
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Cynic said: “Wow, so now you’re suggesting that such a significant genetic difference in intelligence can be found within the same population? I’m guessing you must not believe in the “snow makes you smarter” hypothesis considering you don’t believe it did much the Burakumin.”
I’m saying that any number of factors can cause people to not perform up to their genetic potential, however nothing can cause people to exceed their genetic potential.
Someone with a high potential genetic IQ could score low due to poor nutrition, lack of educational support, parasitism, etc. Such an example does not imply that persons with low IQ scoring are also affected similarly, unless one has a genetically similar control group that scores higher.
Regarding the development progression of black, white, and asian children:
“The scientific study of general intelligence: tribute to Arthur R. Jensen By Helmuth Nyborg” Page 177:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CT1GgunY_-IC&lpg=PA43&ots=pa3v6tnFK0&dq=black%20white%20asian%20maturity&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q=black%20white%20asian%20maturity&f=false
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@Randy
-“parasitism”???
-” Such an example does not imply that persons with low IQ scoring are also affected similarly, unless one has a genetically similar control group that scores higher.”
So do you believe that the reason Burakumin score low is solely or at least mostly due to environmental reasons considering their is no genetic difference btwn them and other ethnic Japanese? What is your guess concerning this particular group?
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Cynic,
It’s possible that parasitism is a causative factor in lowered cognitive performance.
“Parasites and pathogens may explain why people in some parts of the world are cleverer than those in others” http://www.economist.com/node/16479286
As for the Burakumin, I’m just speculating here, but it appears that environment probably plays a significant role in their poor academic showing in Japan, although I wasn’t able to locate the original study which showed Burakumin in the US performing equivalently to non-Burakumin Japanese.
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Only the dishonest say that IQ is caused by genetics alone and only the stupid say that genes have no effect on a person’s mind.
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@Randy Garver
When looking at this quote of pg. 271 of Jefferson M. Fish’s, “Race and Intelligence: Separating Science From Myth” I found this quote…
“As voluntary minorities, the Burakumin in the United States perform well. Or, to put it differently, there is no evidence that they do less well in IQ tests and in school to other Japanese immigrants. In fact, the only study of Japanese immigrants school performance in the United States that identified them indicates that they do slightly better in school than other Japanese immigrants(Ito, 1967).
Which brought my attention to the citation at the end of the quote, which then led me to the reference section at the end of the book. Where I found this on pg. 276
Ito, H. (1967). Japan’s outcasts in eh United States. In G.A. Devos and H. Wagatsuma (Eds.), Japan’s invisible race. Berkeley: University of California Press.
I also find it interesting that the author mentions a visit to an elementary school in Osaka, Japan in 1999 where he found that the achievement gap btwn buraku & non-Buraku widens as the children progress into higher grades.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=race+and+intelligence+separating+science+myth&ots=Lly0DV85Xv&sig=jv07E7Cmd_mcvdCcZrdiaHbtSGU#v=onepage&q&f=false
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@Randy
I hope that helps you in your search.
I also think it’s great that you acknowledge the possibility that the “environment probably plays a significant role” in the 15-16 point IQ gap between one group and another. 🙂
And better yet, you even admit that past and/or current discrimination MAY have something to do with it.
Of course I know that bc of your prejudices you don’t think this situation could ever apply to Black and White Americans. You know, bc they’re populations are like totally different species…
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“Only the dishonest say that IQ is caused by genetics alone and only the stupid say that genes have no effect on a person’s mind.”
I think that most of us agree with that.
But then it comes to a question of degrees, and out comes the racial broad brush of intelligence aptitude based on the three-race paradigm.
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This article was a nice edition to the morning papers
@King
co-sign
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@uncle: I’m just havin fun with these guys 😀 in my juvenile way.
But how come they don’t tell what they are going to do with this knowledge that blacks are more stupid than whites, jews or not, and japanese??
And hey, Japan was one of the Axis powers in WW2 😀
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Question: How in the world did the average black American IQ get all the way up to 85 if differences in IQ are mostly genetic?
According to Richard Lynn the average black African IQ is 67 while the white European IQ is 99.
Since black Americans are 15% white on average, that means their IQs should average only 72:
99*0.15 + 67*0.85 = 71.8
To get to 85 strictly on genetics alone, blacks would have to be 55% white on average, which is clearly not true.
So that leaves 13 points left (85-72), which must come from the environment.
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Cynic said:“Of course I know that bc of your prejudices you don’t think this situation could ever apply to Black and White Americans. You know, bc they’re populations are like totally different species…”
You must have me confused with someone else. I don’t have a personal or emotional stake in any of the proposed models.
Actually, that’s not quite correct. I would prefer such differences to be non-genetic in origin, otherwise that would imply that scholastic underperformance of minorities is unfixable.
But at the end of the day, it is what it is, whatever that turns out to be.
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@ Cynic:
Randy blames poor black school performance mostly on blacks being bad parents.
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@Randy Ok
@Abagond
I have wondered that myself. I believe their is absolutely no validity to the Euro-admixture raises IQ theory. Several studies contradict this thought. Honestly I don’t even think people should bring up studies like the Minnesota Trans-racial adoption anymore. It’s safe to say the admixture argument has been destroyed.
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Thanks for this interesting and well informed series of posts on this topic.
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Sagat,
Only the dishonest say that IQ is caused by genetics alone and only the stupid say that genes have no effect on a person’s mind.
Genes do have an effect (an important one) on IQ, but they are not the only thing that determines a person’s IQ.
However, important as they might be, genes have nothing to do with race, since race is not a biological fact.
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They do and it is. It is only our incomplete (at the moment) understanding of this reality that allows the denial.
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It is your blind faith in the “incomplete” that demonstrates your ignorance and mental weakness.
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For your age, sam, you seem to have a remarkably youthful understanding of the world. Congratulations.
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nonserviam,
Well, in that case, you should prove it (prove that race is a biological fact). Many people tried, but failed. If nothing else, new proofs suggest otherwise, but if you really want to go that way…
And remember, we’re talking about race in usual sense of the word: white, black, etc. (4, or 5 or 6 races in total). NOT the real biological races that do exist, but there are thousands of them.
Also, if you do believe race is a biological fact, please define:
white race
black race
In terms of genetics. Genetics only, please. Which groups of genes do ALL black people share, but NONE of the non-blacks do? What are genes that NONE of the blacks have? (Same for whites). Etc.
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Mira,
However, important as they might be, genes have nothing to do with race, since race is not a biological fact.
If a Korean man and woman have a child together, what will the child look like? Will it look like a Nigerian? A Swede? Or like a Korean? (That’s obviously a rhetorical question).
Our genes determine our physical traits and our genes are passed on from our parents. The reason people from different parts of the world look different is because they express different genes because of generations of selection for and against certain traits. I think you can agree with and understand that.
If the word “race” is disagreeable to you, then you can just say population groups. And population groups around the world do not all have the exact same percentage of alleles nor do they all express the same traits. This is a simple fact.
Genes do have an effect (an important one) on IQ, but they are not the only thing that determines a person’s IQ.
Yes, that is a true statement. Now I want you to follow that logic to it’s natural conclusion. Since all groups around the world do not have the exact same percentages of various alleles, it’s not possible that all groups will have the exact same mean IQ. It’s statistically and biologically impossible.
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Anyone who sits on the sideline predicting the future outcome of currently unsettled scientific investigation, is clearly a dummy.
“We are currently MAKING GREAT STRIDES in proving that humans are now evolving into an advanced reptilian form within the next billion years”
You see?
DUMMY talk.
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“Now I want you to follow that logic to it’s natural conclusion. Since all groups around the world do not have the exact same percentages of various alleles, it’s not possible that all groups will have the exact same mean IQ. It’s statistically and biologically impossible.
Except that:
You don’t really have any truly scientific basis for knowing to what degree alleles effect I.Q. do you?
In fact, you probably can’t describe exactly what an I.Q. even is, beyond a test result.
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@nonserviam: yep I do. I stay young and not grow old or fearful which maybe has happened to you. 😀
But say, what are you going to do with the information that blacks are more stupid than whites? That is your point, right? Ok, lets throw in the japanese and the jews so nobody can call you a nazi. But you state that blacks are more stupid than these, right? So my question is this: what are going to do with this information? 😀
Also, why it is so important to you to know that you are smarter than blacks? Does it make you better? Does it make you feel, hmm… superior?
I know that there is only one human race. You deny it and believe that somewhere in the future it will be proven. I know that all whites are not smarter than blacks. You deny it and hope that somehow in the future it will proven beyond doubt.
I think the real difference between you and me is that I live in this world and have seen it here and there, met people all over in five continents, and based on my own experiences I know that you are wrong in your beliefs.
You have every right to believe in what ever, but once it becomes a political ideology which is aimed straight at our fellow humanbeings, it is no longer your private affair. Particulary when you say it out loud. Then it becomes public affair, like in this debate. 😀
I am not a politically correct person, never was and never will be, so I have no problem meeting and getting to know all kinds of people and all kinds of human ideas. I have met neo nazis. I have met racists. And you, my friend, are a racist. Period. Just like Doug here.
And let me end this by saying that you and I might get along just fine if we met face to face, I usually do get along with almost anybody. We just see this world and our fellow humans in different light. You see them as races in some value system which places you on top of the pile. I see all of us, you and the blacks, just as humanbeings. Warts and all.
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Sagat,
Obviously, physical appearance depends on genes, and you inherit them from your parents. That still doesn’t make race a biological fact.
If the word “race” is disagreeable to you, then you can just say population groups.
I don’t have a problem with the word, but it’s meaning: the way they are defined is way too random.
The problem with the concept of race is that you can define it anyway you want. You could define race based on height, eye colour and straightness of hair. So all tall people with brown eyes and straight hair are one race, all short with brown eyes and curly hair are another, all tall with blue eyes and curly hair are a third race, etc etc. Nothing prevents you from doing that. Hey, you could also claim you are doing it based on biology: after all, you are taking genetics into account! (Since height, eye colour and hair texture are genetic traits).
You can also go one step forward and claim these groups posses different IQs (they are different genetically, so why not?), different behavior or even different mentality. Those tall, blue eyed people with curly hair are lazy by nature; it’s just the way they are born, it’s in their genes. After all, they are so different than short people with brown eyes and straight hair, who are intelligent and hard working! (Note that I am short, brown eyed with straight hair 😉 ).
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All those “theoreticians” are walking on extremely thin ice since the biological concept of “race” in humans is nothing more than an arbitrary definition within human perception. Genetics will never give a pure answer as purity will stubbornly remain a myth as long as human nature prevails.
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Femi,
Genetics already proved there’s no such thing as a biological race- not the way it’s usually defined anyway. To define real biological races, you’d have to have thousands of them.
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I think what some people find problematic with the fact race is not biological is that it seems it has to be, because physical differences between various “races” seem so huge and obvious.
However, there is no real, logical reason why physical attributes such as skin colour, hair texture or nose shape should be more important than some other ones (eye colour, height, etc).
What I’m saying is, people would say a tall, brown eyed white guy with curly hair resembles more a short blue eyed white guy with straight hair than he resembles a tall brown eyed black guy with curly hair.
People are taught to pay attention on some physical features and disregard others. So in my above example, the guy shares some striking physical features with the black guy (body shape, eye and hair colour, etc) and yet, people disregard that because it’s “obvious” one is whtie and the other one is black.
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@ Mira
I know and you do (and hopefully the majority in the world) but according to official (!!!!) US documents there are just a handful of “races”, backed up by local so-called “scientists” and blindly believed by roughly 5% of the world population with the tendency to “spread the word” to the “uninformed rest of the world”. Plus, all the junk literature is based on that. That’s what’s really worrying.
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Well, the thing is, race is real; unfortunately, it still is. Disregarding it or playing colour blindness doesn’t seem to help. But it’s not a biological fact.
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King,
You don’t really have any truly scientific basis for knowing to what degree alleles effect I.Q. do you?
Is that a serious question?
Our brains obviously are essential to our ability to think and our genes affect our brains. Do we know every single gene that affects our brains? No. That doesn’t change the first fact.
We don’t know every single gene that affects a person’s height either. So does that mean we should disregard the very obvious fact that differences in genome affect the the different group averages in height around the world?
And yes, I picked height as an example, because I’m sure you will point out that average height has changed in different populations throughout the years. But that doesn’t mean that all populations will grow equally or infinitely tall.
In fact, you probably can’t describe exactly what an I.Q. even is, beyond a test result.
Another bunk question. Yes, IQ is a test result. An IQ test measures traits that we as a society have put value on: cognitive ability and problem solving skill. Do IQ tests measure all aspects of a person’s mental capacity? No. They aren’t designed to. They measure skills and abilities that correlate with academic and life success. And for populations, a higher mean IQ correlates strongly with stable, well functioning, high technology societies.
Yes, the value of a high IQ is subjective, just like beauty is subjective. But it’s still important, because just like beauty it’s something that is valued and desired.
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Mira,
The problem with the concept of race is that you can define it anyway you want.
Sure. We can define anything any way we want. We could say that all tables should be rectangular and then here comes a circular table to disrupt our definition. “Race” or any other word or concept is just a construct that we as humans design to understand our world. Arguing about race almost always centers around differences in definition. You define it one way and I another way. And once you realize that’s what the argument has come to, then it’s as about as stupid as arguing that a round table isn’t a table because all tables are rectangular.
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Even though it seems that Dr. Charles Drew never took an IQ test, no one questions his intelligence.
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“Yes, the value of a high IQ is subjective, just like beauty is subjective. But it’s still important, because just like beauty it’s something that is valued and desired.”
Some beautiful couples have ugly children, and some ugly couples have beautiful children. It’s not that simple.
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Sagat,
But if criteria to define a race is random, then how can people believe it has any weight? How can people believe it’s real, a biological fact, etc, and not just a random thing we invented? (= a cultural construct).
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“Is that a serious question?”
Assume that it is.
“Our brains obviously are essential to our ability to think and our genes affect our brains. Do we know every single gene that affects our brains? No. That doesn’t change the first fact.”
Do you know what circular logic is, or do I have to explain it to you?
1) Our brains effect our ability to think.
2) We don’t know what part of our brain development is genetic and which is stimulative and environmental.
3) So anyway, in the first fact, our brains still effect the way we think.
Congratulations on saying absolutely nothing in three sentences.
“We don’t know every single gene that affects a person’s height either. So does that mean we should disregard the very obvious fact that differences in genome affect the the different group averages in height around the world?”
If you don’t know to what degree genes specifically affect someone’s height, as opposed to nutrition, or the presence of certain minerals in the environment, then you can’t really say much about the “purely genetic” affects can you? You don’t know if the genetics are responsible for 10% of the growth or 85%. The fact that there is SOME effect is a given. The important question is how much? OBVIOUSLY!
” An IQ test measures traits that we as a society have put value on: cognitive ability and problem solving skill. Do IQ tests measure all aspects of a person’s mental capacity? No. They aren’t designed to. They measure skills and abilities that correlate with academic and life success. And for populations, a higher mean IQ correlates strongly with stable, well functioning, high technology societies.
An I.Q. test measures CERTAIN kinds of cognitive aptitudes (NOT abilities) many other’s it does not measure at all.
There has NEVER been some kind of societal poll to determine which most “socially valued” cognitive traits should be tested for… Or do you know of such a poll? I somehow doubt it.
IQ tests do test for SOME of the skills that MAY lead to academic or life success, varying quite widely depending on which test you take.
However, academic and life success is much more predicated on things that are often not tested for at all in most I.Q. tests.
1) How motivated are you to learn when you’re not being tested? Long-term.
2) How moral are you?
3) How well can you connect and form meaningful relationships with people?
4) How seriously do you take yourself?
Just to name a few.
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Sagat:
Quite so. Material reality exists independently of our perception of it (I don’t think the observer effect applies to race much).
Mira:
I beleive the answer can be found here. No need for me to be redundant. Yes, the racial groups have fuzzy boundaries, and yes, racial distinctions exist within a continuum, but neither of these invalidate their reality.
You do realize this is a strawman, right? Races (OK, population groups) aren’t defined by any EXCLUSIVE gene group. It’s the relative FREQUENCY of appearance of certain gene clusters within certain population groups of mostly common origin that matters. Like I said above, races and racial differences exist on a continuum.
Race-as-a-social-construct is superimposed on the race-as-biological-reality. Obviously, the fit isn’t perfect. So let’s investigate the matter further, as science should.
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Not that I have much hope that once the scientific debate is settled, the political one will be as well. Look no further than evolution vs. creationism for a counterexample.
And race, of course, is much more fraught with political and psychosocial implications, taken all too personally by all too many people, for an impartial investigation to proceed smoothly.
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@nonserviam and doug1
Blacks do poorly in schools than whites because whites generally still go to better schools. End of story.
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Femi:
“Purity” is a straw man. Races have fuzzy boudaries, racial differences constitute a continuum.
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James Baldwin said:
“What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.”
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Calculator said: “Blacks do poorly in schools than whites because whites generally still go to better schools. End of story.”
How do you explain this:
African-immigrant graduation rate: ~96%
African-american graduation rate: ~56%
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@randy
I’m not even going to try to respond to your data until you first cite and reference them from a credible. Until then, they’re just made-up numbers.
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^from a credible source.
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To Calculator:
I’m not even going to try to respond to your data until you first cite and reference them from a credible. Until then, they’re just made-up numbers.
Randy’s assertion:
“African-immigrant graduation rate: ~96%
African-american graduation rate: ~56%”
Found this article re: African-immigrant high school graduates in a Nigerian newspaper:
http://ndn.nigeriadailynews.com/templates/?a=18081
“Wednesday, she will give the valedictory speech – in English – at the Social Justice Academy in Hyde Park. As a high-achieving African immigrant, she is not alone. According to Census numbers, African immigrants have a 96 percent high-school graduation rate nationwide – 12 percent higher than the national average.”
However the one thing that sticks out is the claim that the nation average for high school graduates is 84 percent. The figures I have seen would indicate the overall average for high school graduation is lower… although they may be including people who receive their GEDs.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34swanson.h29.html
“Among Latinos, 56 percent successfully finish high school, while just 54 percent of African-Americans and 51 percent of Native Americans graduate. “
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To Tulio:
I’m not denigrating anyone. Parental behavior does vary from culture to culture and this has implications on mental development as your growing brain is creating more neural pathways.
Sorry… I am not trying to shoot the messenger, I didn’t think you were trying to denigrate Black women. The interesting thing here is that it would appear that the culture of the mother bears substantially more weight that the culture of the father. Granted a mother will generally have more and sometimes much more contact with the child especially in the first year or two depending upon the family circumstances.
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@nonserviam:
“Not that I have much hope that once the scientific debate is settled, the political one will be as well. Look no further than evolution vs. creationism for a counterexample.”
Are you kiddin?? 😀
Maybe in some Looneytown Redneckville US there is a debate about this, but nowhere in the world of science or anywhere else around the globe. As a matter of fact, for some reason the majority of creationists are also so called race realists and HBDers. Funny, right?? 😀
Which one you are; creationist or evolutionist? Oh, wait, I bet the latter since you want to be taken seriously and believe that evolution proves that white man is superman? 😀
I also have a question for you: is the genes determine what we become and who we are, how do explain that I became a big strong guy from a lazy weakling in just ten years?? When I started I could barely benchpress 30kg and after abot ten years I did 145kg. How that can be if I was born weak?? 😀
If the genes have determined that the blacks are more suitable for athletics than academics, since they have no IQ to speak of and are more animal like according to the race realists, how do you explain the white european sprinters who have popped up every now and then?? Are they hidden blacks?? Is there a hidden black sprinter gene in their genetic cocktail or what?? Was Valeri Borzov a white n****r??? Really?? 😀
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That’s more like a straw man argument. Or rather an argument to blur and distract from the issue.
If you claim there are distinct groups of which each individual of the world population can be unambiguously assigned to, you have to draw the line at some point. That “drawing the line” part is inevitably arbitrary.
On the other hand, if there is ambiguity (which is in fact the case in reality) any attempt at precise grouping will fail. Then again if the claim is that the groups are not distinct, what is the point of even defining them?
On a side note, refusing the attempts at putting a scientific yard stick at the social concept of “race” has nothing to do with colour blindness. There already are scientifically well documented genetic fingerprints across ethnic groups. Inner-continental, that is. Trying to lump groups together to higher level groups is scientifically pointless.
There are plenty of other potential purposes though.
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King,
Do you know what circular logic is, or do I have to explain it to you?
That was just my way of dismissing your question, which I thought was pointless.
It doesn’t matter how much alleles affect IQ, the fact is they do. So even if it is just 10 percent, which is unlikely, it still doesn’t change the fact that all groups are not genetically identical. If alleles have some effect (which they do, of course) then it’s impossible to have worldwide group equality in IQ.
That idea of worldwide group parity is so ridiculous, I don’t understand how anyone could promote that. All human beings would have to be clones for that to be true. Even the most ardent racial egalitarians can admit that genes affect IQ on the individual level, but then deny that they do on the group level. It’s not statistically possible for all groups to have the exact same percentages of individual variation. I think you know that, so then you move on to your downplaying of the value of IQ testing.
Whatever you want to think about IQ tests, I think you know that they have value. Would you let a brain surgeon with an IQ of 85 operate on your child? Of course, it’s pretty damn near impossible for a brain surgeon to have an IQ that low, so then again, you can see how IQ scores have importance.
Do IQ scores have real world implications? You know they do. Are IQ scores the only thing to consider when it comes to a person’s abilities? No. Still the second point doesn’t negate the first. A hard working imbecile with great people skills and solid moral values would be great as a cart pusher at Wal-Mart, but no one would consider letting him fly an airplane.
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@sagat: I hate to repeat myself but I belonged to a group of soldiers who scored extremely low in IQ tests because we found them very funny. We just messed around with them and the scores were really, really low. I mean they were the lowes ever in finnish military. Yet we handled rockets, computer based systems etc. like nothing every day at service. Funny, eh?
One of the guys who scored like 20 or so became a mayor of a mid size town. Another became a manager of a mid size company. One became a philosopher. One is an IT specialist who has lectured and advised some major US hich tech companies and their leaders. He did not even finnish his basoc education. TRUE! 😀
Not one of us ended in some mac job or like that. This was a group of some hundred guys. Now, if the IQ tests are indicators of something, how the hell we managed to do so well? I mean, you say that they do reflect the reality, so how the hell IQ tests did not prove that with us?
Aha, we did not take them seriously? That is right, but according to you they do prove something. What? Only if you take them seriously? Really? So they are not absolute indicators after all, are they?? Oh, so you have to believe in them?
You get my idea?? 😀
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Sagat:
1. IQ tests are a poor measure of intelligence, at least when applied to other countries. There is no way, for example, the average IQ of Jamaica is 71. That would mean half the people there are retarded. Come on.
2. Sure the races, however you define them, cannot have EXACTLY the same level of intelligence. But if any part of mankind was markedly more intelligent due to genetics, it would have been on top for the past 5,000 if not 30,000 years. Whites have been clearly on top for the past 250 years or so. That is almost certainly cultural, not genetic. Humans just do not evolve fast enough to account for the twists and turns of history. That would be like blaming my melted ice cream cone on global warming. The scale is all wrong.
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Are you sure?
How do you explain this then? Scientifically, that is.
Both peoples in the links below have about the same average height, same complexion, same facial and hair structure, same body type etc. but they are genetically almost the most distant any two peoples can be.
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Sam,
Aha, we did not take them seriously? That is right, but according to you they do prove something. What? Only if you take them seriously? Really? So they are not absolute indicators after all, are they?? Oh, so you have to believe in them?
I’ll say that you actually make a good point with your last comment. Not everyone who takes a cognitively demanding test puts forth the effort to make the test meaningful in it’s predictions. Since Finland ranks highest in all of Europe on the PISA and other standardized tests, I’d say that you and your friends are the exceptions. Or maybe not. Maybe Finns are way smarter than everyone realizes and jokers like you pull down the average. 🙂
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Another example is French football player Christian Karembeu.
I know from several Americans I talked to that in the US, he would be classified together with African American/Black at first. The truth is, he couldn’t be any further genetically from that group. David Beckham is most likely closer genetically to him than, let’s say, Thierry Henry.
These are NOT exceptions that so-called “confirm” the rule. Those cases trash the rule.
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Femi,
I don’t understand what you are getting at. I think you’ve misinterpreted my statement to mean something other than I meant it.
My point was that all people are not genetically the same. And your point is that some people look similar despite being genetically distinguishable? I’m not sure how that disproves my first statement.
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@ Sagat
You said, “all humans would have to be clones for a worldwide group parity to be true”.
I say – no, they don’t!
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The point is, if two groups of humans which are genetically very different can look very similar, why can’t two groups of humans which are genetically very different have a similar level of intelligence?
I’d like to have a scientific explanation for that. That’s all.
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Here’s a nice example of how different and similar we all (homo sapiens sapiens) are at the same time…
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Femi,
I understand what you are saying now.
First of all, Andaman Islanders may look similar to Mbuti pygmies (I think those are Mbuti), but they are not phenotypically the same. You can just look at their pictures and see that they don’t have the same facial structure. And while some tribes of Andaman Islanders have the same average height as pygmies, others don’t. One tribe is six feet tall on average. I don’t have time to look it up, but you can read about them on this great site:
http://www.andaman.org/
…why can’t two groups of humans which are genetically very different have a similar level of intelligence?
Yes, there are certain groups who are genetically different yet have similar IQ levels. I don’t dispute that. You may find some disparate groups matching up on certain measures, but it’s not statistically or biologically possible that ALL groups around the world will match up.
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No? Prove it!!!!
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You’re trying to insult my (and other people’s) intelligence, aren’t you?
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I see. All of a sudden, height becomes an issue.
All right then, I declare all individuals worldwide who are taller than 6 feet a “race”.
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This entire thread is fascinating to me, and I’m enjoying the debate! One interesting thing that should be noted, is that the arguments that the HBDers and ‘race realists’ are using are exactly the same ones that have been used since the inception of the socio-political landscape. The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter discusses this in depth. Which is why I’ve refrained from commenting in this thread (until now) – I’m halfway through the book and see the same tired arguments about “I’m better than you because of the intangible X, Y, or Z!!!” Human beings have been applying, then changing, the classifications of other human beings since this insane practice began.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/267561/march-17-2010/nell-irvin-painter
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My flying, typing fingers got ahead of my fevered cerebrum…the second sentence should have been:
*exactly the same ones that have been used since the inception of the socio-political landscape pre-USA…this nonsense began well before 1776.
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@sagat: we just might be, we just might 😀 and on the average, nobody around here takes IQ tests too seriously. Maybe that is why our kids are so darn smart and rank so well in PISA?? 😀
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War by Other Means
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Corrupt IMF loans money to dictators and places perpetual debt onto countries
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@sam:
No, not funny. Stupid.
As long as you pull ludicrous unsubstantiated assertions out of your arse and try to assign idiotic views to people who don’t hold, or even explicitly repudiate them, you will not be taken seriously.
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@Femi:
You have a right to remain obtuse, of course, but how many times does it have to be repeated that no single trait is exclusive to any racial group?
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Also, Femi, are blue and yellow not distinct colors because green exists?
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“how many times does it have to be repeated that no single trait is exclusive to any racial group?”
Then how about people who are:
1) taller than 6 feet
2) right-handed
3) straight hair
4) round eyes
4) and a mole on their left cheek
Is that a race, genius?
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@Uncle Milton
Re: Jews and HBD.
Jews are almost always found on both sides of any debate, due to their high presence among the cognitive elites. Half Sigma and Guy White are merely bloggers (and GW isn’t Jewish, merely non-antisemitic). However, there are academics who happen to be Jewish, who are pro-HBD — either explicitly or through their research: Michael H. Hart, Michael Levin, Seymour Itzkoff, late Hans Eysenck, late Richard Hernnstein, Robert Weissberg, Arthur Jensen (Jewish on his mother’s side). Hell, even Cesare Lombroso, as crude as his discourse had been, was of Jewish backround.
Nazis, the scum of humanity, managed to poison a lot of wells, among them serious study of man as a biological being. But now it is being reclaimed as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry.
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@King:
That sounds like my husband Tars Tarkas except he is bald, has beady eyes, has a mole on his left cheek but not the facial one. Perhaps he is a race!
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Are these traits consistently co-inheritant, noncompos?
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Also, does this combination occur in one population group singnicantly more frequently than in others?
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“significantly”, obviously.
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“Also, does this combination occur in one population group singnicantly more frequently than in others?”
Why don’t you name a feature that occurs in the “Black Race” (population group) more frequently than in others.
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The answer is pretty simple, actually: it depends on how you define the group.
(Ok, the mole was way too much, but the rest of it, yes, it’s really possible to find groups in which these features occur more than the others). But these groups are not the same as “races” in the common sense of the word.
Like I said before, what we learned about race makes us pay more attention on some biological features than the others. There’s no reason for a tall white guy with brown eyes and black hair to belong to the same race as a short white guy with blue eyes and blonde hair, but NOT a black guy who is tall, brown eyed and black haired. Our culture is making us see these people belonging/not belonging to the same race, not their genes.
Also, if race is a fact, then how come the same person can belong to different races, depending on who’s judging? (It’s very culturally specific: not everybody share US ideas about race. Adriana Lima, for example, is as white as Heidi Klum to me. But she is not considered white everywhere. How come, if race is a biological fact?)
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“That sounds like my husband Tars Tarkas”
Tars is a Greenie!
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We’re obviously arguing in circles here. I (and others) have repeatedly answered these points. I can be bothered to re-state the obvious only so many times.
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That’s because you and other proponents failed to prove that there are race-specific genes.
Saying some genes occur more frequently in a group doesn’t make it one of the things that define the group. It’s a logical fallacy.
For example, you could say blue eyes occur more in white people. But blue eyes are not marker of whiteness, since most of the whites don’t have blue eyes. (Or green or gray, for that matter). The most common eye colour is the same for all races: brown. So you can’t take genes that determine eye colour as marker of whiteness (or lack thereof).
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Of course, unless you define white as “Aryan in Na.zi sense of the word”, but that’s another story.
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The Ravaging of Africa – Military Warfare Pt 1
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The Ravaging of Africa – Economic Warfare Pt 1
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The Ravaging of Africa – Corporate Plunder Pt 1
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The Ravaging of Africa – Resistance Pt 1
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Scientific definition of colour (unequivocal and repeatable worldwide with identical results (unless the observer suffers from colour blindness) :
A portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is detectable by the human eye and can be interpreted by the brain.
Blue – visible light or the reflected portion of white light from an object at a wavelength of 440-490 nm
Green – visible light or the reflected portion of white light from an object at a wavelength of 520-570 nm
Yellow – visible light or the reflected portion of white light from an object at a wavelength of 570-580 nm
On a side note, you would have to add red to green in order to get yellow.
Scientific definition of “race” (unequivocal and repeatable worldwide with identical results) : ??
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@nonserviam: I don’t mind that you guys don’t take me seriously, I don’t take you seriously either. I mean, how can I? 😀
You are just a guy who wants to be smarter than the damn n*****s, for some reason. That is all. But instead of being open about your convictions, you want to hide behind some pseudo scientific mumbojumbo. That is because guys like you are cowards. You are affraid what might happen if you would come out as a racist. Maybe you have a coward gene in you, I don’t know. Maybe you daddy and grand daddy were cowards too. Might be, if you are right about the genes.
Be that as it may, you do not have the nerve nor guts to say it out loud. That is why you need HBD, IQ tests etc. You need them to show that The N****r is more stupid than you. That is the only reason for these so called “scientific” evidences of your superiority vis a vis blacks. That is all it is about. Everything else you babble is just camouflage. You say it again and again: whites are smarter and more intelligent than blacks. Again and again. That is you real agenda. That is what you want to say.
And since there is not a shred of evidence on this, you use the language to hide it. You use terms “someday”. “will prove”, near future” yadayadayadayada. You sound like a lot of guys who say that next week, next month, next year, next decade this and that is going to happen according to predictions. Well, maybe. But as for now, there is no evidence of separate human races nor that whites are genetically smarter than blacks. That is a load of warm, smouldering manure and deep down you know it.
I have no problem with your idea that n*****s are stupid. That is you idea, not mine. I do not agree with you on this nor many other things. But of you think I take you guys seriously, guess again. I try but I just can’t. 😀
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An excellent series of videos Goldfire. Its a shame the central topic of them is of less interest here than what categories legitimately define a racial group. Or whether IQ contributes significantly towards intelligence. So What?. So What?…
Even if the HBDers or race realists are right. The actions and polices of the American and European governments, corporations and private businesses plundering and looting Africa form colonialism to this present day says much more.
All of this testifies to the magnitude and the levels of achievements that IQ intelligence has bestowed upon them. For such superior people the only method they can devise for continuous growth and prosperity of their own countries and people is one that impoverishes, stagnates and kills off the lives of other countries and their people.
Then…come up with complex theories and studies to show and explain how those same countries and people are really responsible for the situation they find themselves in.
In todays world this is what having the highest IQ politically, economically, culturally and socially translates to.
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@ sam
That sums it up quite accurately… lol
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Yes Kwamla. The videos Goldfire posted are accurate and relevant.
I keep mentioning some of the present day issues in (mostly resource rich) African countries also on this blog but it seems like the majority is so remote and quite possibly can’t relate to most of it. It doesn’t directly affect them. And people don’t like being guilt-tripped. Perhaps all people who live in the consumption-addicted West are in one way or another responsible by wasting precious resources. Resources that are extracted under often scandalous conditions from African soil. As soon as the West, chiefly big corporate, know or at least suspect that interesting raw material is available in abundance, they lure and bribe the local authorities (sometimes even more drastically) into investments which lead to astronomical debt. Debt that the Western investors and the world bank know very well the African countries will never be able to pay back. So they have to keep mining, pumping, deforesting etc. beyond capacity. And that just pays back the interest. Then in order to get more output they have to invest even more which means more debt etc. it’s a vicious circle.
The simple person in the street has no say in this. Until the next rigged election and subsequent uproar…
My source: I have two cousins in Douala who work in the export business.
Someone tell me what that has to do with “race” or inferior intelligence.
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sam,
Why is it that people can have fact-based discussions about potential group differences such as west africans having muscle physiologies that favor them in sprinting events or white people having lower centers of gravity that favor them in swimming events, but if someone suggests that a particular group might be better at solving math problems people seem to lose their composure?
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Do Black people really have muscle physiologies that favor them in sprinting? Most Olympic sprinters do possess a greater percentage of fast twitch muscles. HDBers say that this applies to the general West African descent population bc of the numbers of medals Black ppl have won. Though, is it wise to make such an assumption? Basically what you are doing is taking the extremes of a population and applying it to billions of people. Sort of like Mira’s blue eyed example.
Using occupational over-representation to define a group seems potential disastrous to me. For instance some may say Blacks are naturally fit for basketball bc there are so many Black athletes in the NBA. In the 1030s, 40s, and 50s Jews used to dominate the sport and people would say they were somehow genetically perfect for playing basketball. I mean our mostly Black basketball team has been beaten by all White European teams as well as White Argentina in the Olympics and FIBA.
Anyways can someone provide a study that concludes Blacks/West Africans have more fast twitch muscles than others in general(meaning not just a study on Black athletes alone)?
http://understandingrace.com/lived/sports/index.html
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@Randy Garver
I did find one study that said that Whites have lower centers of gravity that helped them in swimming, while West Africans have higher centers of gravity that give them a “hidden height” advantage in sprinting. However, all of this was attributed to the location of their belly buttons.
An excerpt from AFP:
“It so happens that in the architecture of the human body of West African-origin runners, the center of gravity is significantly higher than in runners of European origin,” which puts them at an advantage in sprints on the track, he said.
Individuals of West African-origin have longer legs than European-origin athletes, which means their belly-buttons are three centimeters (1.18 inches) higher than whites’, said Bejan.
That means the black athletes have a “hidden height” that is three percent greater than whites’, which gives them a significant speed advantage on the track.
In the pool, meanwhile, whites have the advantage because they have longer torsos, making their belly-buttons lower in the general scheme of body architecture.
“Swimming is the art of surfing the wave created by the swimmer,” said Bejan.
“The swimmer who makes the bigger wave is the faster swimmer, and a longer torso makes a bigger wave. Europeans have a three-percent longer torso than West Africans, which gives them a 1.5-percent speed advantage in the pool,” he said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hRv5sUxxWidc9Go7BQLl8iSIwcJw
I don’t think anybody is surprised by physical differences in populations though. White people tend to have light skin. Physical difference. Black girls tend to have bigger asses. Physical difference. Pygmies tend to be shorter. Physical difference. Masai tend to be tall. Physical difference.
These are things people already know. If their weren’t sometimes drastic physical differences between “races” I don’t think any of us would argue over whether or not such a thing is biologically real.
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Cynic,
My point was more about the tone of the debate than the specific content. If you talk about physical performance, folks will generally have a content-based discussion. If you talk about math performance, emotion-based discussions seem to arise.
But regarding the running issue I found the following:
“Why are Jamaicans so good at sprinting?”
http://www.slate.com/id/2197721/
“Peering Under the Hood of Africa’s Runners”
http://www.jonentine.com/reviews/AAAS_peeringUnderTheHood.htm
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@randy: Emotional? I have no stake in this. I’m a finn, real White white man from way up north western part of Europe, well north anyway.
According to HBDers and others I am pretty smart guy and well capable of dealing with anything that has to do with intelligence. Right? I have not a drop of black blood in me, where as lots of americans do in some form, since the days of slavery etc. I have no other ethnic groups either. Pure white bread, eeh breed finn.
So for me it makes no difference if you really believe that n*****s are more stupid than you. What I can not understand and keep asking is this: since race is central part of your self image and the way you define the world around you, since it is very important to you to prove scientifically that whites are better (more intelligent at least) than blacks, why you do not declare that you are a racist?
You are a racist by defintion. Your own words here in this debate prove it. You do believe that science shows that you as a white man are smarter than blacks by biology. That is racism. And forget now those old KKK guys or uneducated red neck white trash toothless bozos. Think what you keep pounding here. You see?
So I still wonder why you guys do not want to state the fact that you are racists? Like I said before, I have no problem with that. I have no emotions for that. Why you do? Why you can not, will not say who you are?
You understand? I have no hate for you. I have no emotions for you. Ok, maybe I’m slightly amused, but other than that, nothing else. I just can’t put my head around the fact that a guy who is otherwise an open racist can not say it out loud. Why it is so, Randy??
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sam,
You just pretty much proved my point about the tone of intelligence-based discussions vs. athletics-based discussions.
BTW, I’ve not stated that one race is smarter or better than another, nor do I ever use racial epithets. I happen to be happily married to a lovely caramel-colored woman of a different ethnicity, and have little-to-no consideration of race in my own self-image.
Perhaps you might wish to examine your own sensitivities to these issues.
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I wasn’t arguing against your point. Your last comment simply inspired mine.
Anyways can we really boil down Jamaican dominance to race? I don’t know if you now this, but they aren’t the only country with a 90% West African descendant populace. Damn near all of their neighbors have the same demographic. Even Caribbean countries like Puerto Rico that are “White” have high lvls of West African ancestry. Why don’t these countries wield the same results?
I also found this really nice genetic blog entry with one of the authors of the ACTN3 gene study(w a link to the study):
http://www.genetic-future.com/2008/08/gene-for-jamaican-sprinting-success-no.html
“At this point I probably should confess to having a more than casual interest in this story: I was one of the authors on the first study showing an association between this gene and elite athlete status back in 2003, and this gene has been the central focus of my research for a good part of the last six years. (The opinions I express here are purely my own, by the way, and in no way are meant to represent the views of my research institute.)
Does the ACTN3 gene explain Jamaican sprinting prowess?
The underlying argument here is intuitively simple: (1) variation in the ACTN3 gene is strongly associated with elite sprint athlete status; (2) the “sprint” version of ACTN3 is more common in Jamaicans than in individuals of European ancestry; therefore (3) this variant may well play a role in the increased sprinting prowess of Jamaicans relative to Europeans. At first blush this sounds pretty convincing; however, while ACTN3 may play some role in the disproportionate success of Jamaican sprinters, I’d argue that it’s likely to be a pretty small one. Here’s why:
The difference in frequency between Jamaicans and Europeans is not as great as it would appear. The articles quoted above describe the proportion of individuals who have two copies of the 577R (“sprint”) version of the gene; a more appropriate comparison is the proportion of individuals who have at least one copy of 577R (that is, including both R/R and R/X individuals), since it’s only the complete absence of α-actinin-3 that is reliably associated with reduced sprint performance. This starts to look less impressive: it’s 98% in Jamaicans compared to about 82% in Europeans. In other words, in both populations a sizeable majority of individuals have an ACTN3 status compatible with elite sprint performance.
The ACTN3 frequency reported for the Jamaicans by Morrison is not unique to Jamaicans, nor is it particularly surprising – our group has previously reported virtually identical frequencies in individuals from both West Africa (the ancestral source of the bulk of the Jamaican gene pool) and East Africa, in a collaboration with the same group at the University of Glasgow that Morrison has been working with on the Jamaican study. In fact, that study showed that an even higher frequency of α-actinin-3 expression (99%) is found in Kenya – in members of tribes whose members dominate international long-distance events, but have a notable dearth of representatives in track sprinting; we have more recently found similarly low frequencies in populations across sub-Saharan Africa. There’s simply no clear relationship between the frequency of this variant in a population and its capacity to produce sprinting superstars.
Finally, when Usain Bolt was pacing restlessly at the starting line of the 100 metre sprint – even in the very first round of Olympic heats – the very low frequency of X/X individuals among Olympic sprinters means he was lined up against a group of athletes who almost certainly all express α-actinin-3! In other words, while the ACTN3 variant may have played a small role in getting Bolt to the Olympics, it can’t possibly explain the astonishing advantage he has over his competitors.
I’ll concede that the small difference in the frequency of α-actinin-3 expression between Jamaicans and Europeans may result in a slightly larger fraction of the Jamaican population being suitable for elite-level sprinting (all else being equal), but it’s a tiny piece of the overall explanation at best – and it can’t possibly explain why Bolt is so much better than his fellow West Africans and other Olympic-level sprinters. Clearly there are other factors at work.”
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“They found that the Africans averaged significantly more fast-twitch muscle fibers—67.5%—than the French Canadians, who averaged 59%.”
http://www.jonentine.com/reviews/AAAS_peeringUnderTheHood.htm
This doesn’t seem to be a significant difference to me…
Either way this is all interesting stuff. Thx for the articles Randy.
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Randy said:
…or white people having lower centers of gravity that favor them in swimming events…
This needs to be roundly mocked with a satirical post.
Growing up I had regular access to a swimming pool – or anywhere I could regularly swim – for just two years. So not only am I not an Olympic swimmer, I can barely swim to save my life.
This idea that conditions are so equal that only obscure genetics can account for the differences in performance utterly reeks of a white privilege mindset.
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Abagond—
The simple answer is that environment matters relatively more compared to genetics where it’s poor; and relatively less where it’s stimulating.
No hereditarian intellectuals claim intelligence is almost all genetically differentiated. Second of all those that think that genetics are somewhat more important in individual and black/white IQ differences, think that is the case under current American conditions. Not under all conditions.
Consider as a good analogy, four pots of soil where corn seeds are planted. In the first two they receive the right amounts of sun and water, but two different strains of seed are planted. In the second two they receive way too little water, and the same two different strains of seeds are planted. In the poor environment both plants with be stunted and not so different in meager corn husks; in the rich environment both plants will but tall and lush, but the better strain of seed with produce fuller husks. Genetics here matter more in good environmental conditions; environment matters more in poor conditions. Same is likely in IQ. Though the conditions that matter most are human interaction, and probably learning to read and write and do math.
So yes poor nutrition and a environment where puzzle solving isn’t part of daily life as much, and less schooling, and other things not as well understood, very likely do depress IQ scores in black Africa. (Though they’ve generally been given in Africa to children that are going to school etc.)
Btw, greater familiarity with abstract puzzle solving through modern life, TV game shows, video games, consumer choice etc. is often theorized to be a lot of what’s behind the Flynn effect, which seems to have mostly or entirely stopped now in developed countries. Many psychometricans think the Flynn effect doesn’t really indicate increasing intelligence other than some earlier nutritional effects when e.g. iron was added to wheat and iodine to nutritional salt. Instead it tracks increases in skillzs tested on IQ tests that aren’t heavily G loaded but are instead part of the noise that’s hard to completely eliminate from IQ tests.
Studies have tended to show that African Americans are between 17-22% white. 20% is often used as a rough estimate, not 15%. Simple algebra indicates that without that admixture American blacks would have an average IQ of about 80. Almost all American blacks came from West Africa. So yeah it may be that 10 or so of the approximately 30 pts IQ spread between ssAfricans and Euro peoples is due to environment, from nutrition, to genuinely poorer leaning environments, to the Flynn effect not having clicked in yet. So maybe the West African potential is more like 80 than 70, or about what it is now for blacks in the US if their white blood is factored out.
And yes there’s the possibility that changes in black American culture might narrow the very stable 15pt or 1 standard deviation gap. But no one has figured how to do that in more than 50 years of trying on an academic basis and more than 40 years of trying on a wide scale social basis. Further blacks don’t seem very enthused about changing their culture to be more like white or NE Asian culture, by and large.
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The simple basic fact about race in American life, that’s in fact highly relevant for understanding diverse sorts of gaps and so on, is that for whatever combination of nature and nurture, but at least a large part of it very likely on the evidence, genetics, blacks are a lot less smart than whites or the Asians we let into this country, 1 standard deviation less so.
As a corollary, a lot smaller percentage of blacks have IQs above some threshold than whites. 25% of whites, but less than 5% of blacks have an IQ above 110, the level that’s more or less needed to graduate from a decent 4 year college. 9% of whites, but only 1% of blacks have IQs above 120, the level generally necessary to rise high in big or middle business, do less than elementary accounting work, etc.
Further the part that might be mutable, no one’s figured out how to durably change despite 40 years of trying. The failure of other things in experimental designs to enable change suggests to many that culture may be the culprit.
But blacks don’t seem to want to change their culture to be closer to that of whites or NE Asians very much.
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And Doug1 is still talking about this Euro-admixture crap. The most BS argument in this whole debate. I don’t even know why he continues to bring it up when their is so much contradictory evidence.
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Interesting topic, and one that we’ve kicked around quite a bit and I suspect we’ll continue to do so in the weeks and months to come.
Here’s my take on the matter, taken from my blog, today’s post:
Why We Write (About HBD)
I am often asked, “Obsidian, why do you spend so much time talking about HBD? Why do you spend so much time arguing with HBDers?”. Usually, these kind of questions are asked not necessarily in a dispassionate, curious sort of way, but more along exasperated lines; some of my readers think I have better things to write about; others think I focus on the HBDers because I’ve “run out” of interesting things to say, and so forth.
The reason(s) as to why I write (and will continue to do so) is rather simple, actually.
For one thing, it is my view that it is virtually impossible to be an American and NOT be fascinated with, even obsessed with and by, the issue of Race. America is perhaps the most racially diverse nation on the planet and in the history of human beings, and is rapidly changing along these lines as we speak. A big reason for our collective fascination/obsession about such things, is due to the founding ideals of our Republic – that, by recognizing and affirming our inalienable rights as human beings, we work toward a more Perfect Union.
But that rubs up against other notions, and here is where HBD – Human Bio-Diversity – comes into play. Strictly speaking, this merely refers to the ways in which human beings, be they individually or collectively, differ from each other; but such a term takes on a different meaning in what has become known in some circles as the “HBDsphere”. There, the focus is quite a bit narrower; it has mostly to do with racial differences in intelligence and IQ, the argument being, that much of what we see in terms of human behavior, cultural norms and mores, human potential and accomplishment, is accounted for or explained along these lines.
Being an American, and following somewhat loosely the long line of tradition in Black American society as a “Race Man”, I have as much interest in HBD as my arch nemeses do, though from different approaches and with a different focus. But there’s another reason why I’m so interested in the topic, and it also has to do with my particular heritage as an African American.
And that is because the HBDers wish to take their perverted view of HBD, and to apply it to the public square; they wish their view of things along these lines, to inform public policy, which can and will have a direct impact on me, and that is something that I feel needs to be vociferously challenged. For example, Michael Levin, author of the book Why Race Matters, makes it quite clear that not only is racial profiling by the police a necessary practice in order to reduce crime, of which Black Males commit more of, but that it should be markedly increased. How does that square with the American ideals of individual rights, civil liberties and so forth? Levin doesn’t quite answer, and neither do those who cotton to his views. Therefore, under Levin’s rubrick, I too would be subject to unlawful searches and seizures, regardless as to my individual track record in terms of upholding the law.
What about Affirmative Action, another favorite topic of the HBD crowd. Per their arguments, AA gives unqualified or underqualified Black applicants elite college spaces and cushy job assignments over more deserving White (and some even argue, Asian) ones – even when it is clear that said Black applicants were indeed qualified. To the HBD set, the ONLY way AA can be seen, is through this lens; it simply isn’t possible for real job and educational discrimination against Blacks, can exist in our time (even though we have all manner of proof to the contrary, such as the University of Chicago’s Black name/White name study). Again, the assumption is that if a Black person has attended and graduated from an elite school or holds a prestigious position at a company or agency, or is in any other way successful in a “brain work” capacity, then the case is clear – he/she was an AA hire/admit, and only the kind of AA admit (read: un/underqualified) they’re comfortable with discussing. (Of course, “affirmative action” that is “class-based” is something the HBDers can get behind – nor are they bothered in the least with naked nepotism. But of course, why should they, given that both of these things would benefit (poor and presumably, “deserving” White Males?) Which brings me to the next point…
The HBDers love to discuss IQ, especially as it relates to differing racial groups – in other words, comparing White and Black. For my part, I don’t deny the possibility of differences along these lines – but so what? I say that because again, per our founding ideals, everyone is to be judged not on the basis of their group, but on their own individual merit. “Exactly!”, says the HBDers – “that’s what we’ve been saying all along!”.
The problem with their sloganeering is, that for much of our country’s history, African Americans have NOT been judged as individuals, but rather as one large group – and what the HBDers themselves propose, is nothing different, in actual practice. A good case in point is wrt the whole Race/IQ thing.
Assuming one buys the premise of the argument, one must also acknowledge that there is a segment of African Americans who are smarter on average than a larger segment of White Americans – but, short of giving out IQ tests and such, how are we to know a bright African American, from a more duller one, in everyday life? The short answer is, we don’t – the HBDers’ position (again, see Levin) is such that it will, by definition, toss all Blacks in the same boat, regardless as to documented cognitive ability or potential or track record of lawabiding behavior or adherence to middle class norms. Of course, the bulk and mass of HBDers won’t honestly come clean about this, which leads me to the next point:
A major reason as to why I talk a goodly bit about HBDers, is because they are flatout hypocrites. They say that they want to be given their rightful place in the public square and to be heard, yet they practice the very same kinds of shutout tactics on their own blogs and websites and venues that they decry are being foisted on them by “leftists”. They spend a tremendous amount of time bemoaning the ills of those born on the leftend of the Bell Curve, but refuse to address anything on the rightend of said curve. They say they want a real debate on the issues they wish to discuss and the positions they take, but they either punk out and/or shutdown anyone who actually takes them seriously about it.
The other day, I was asked by another commenter at a blog I frequent and even have on my blogroll, Chuck Ross, why am I so very interested in debating a bunch of nobodys and losers, especially given the fact that what they are talking about will never gain traction in the public square, nor in terms of public policy?-think again. Although he’s known best for The Bell Curve, Charles Murray put out another work that dealt with what he saw as the failure of the public welfare system and was particularly concerned about the role African Americans played within it. The book was called Losing Ground – and it winded up playing a significant role in the Welfare Reform debate of the Clinton government of the 1990s. Welfare reform was indeed passed, and Charles Murray had a direct hand to play in that.
Now, one could argue as to whether that was good or bad – for what it’s worth, both sides of the political aisle felt that Welfare Reform was a resounding success – all I’m saying is that those who think HBDers, and Murray definitely is one, can’t or don’t have any pull in the halls of political power, are fooling yourselves. They can and in some cases, most certainly do. And I think it is important to have concerned voices on the other side of the aisle that can bring a goodly bit of perspective, nuance and above all else, reason to the debate, on serious questions that may just effect all of us.
One of my bemoaners in this regard, is the founder of the Traditional Catholicism blog, Alte. Although she is of African American heritage, I think she would agree with me that she’s more German than Black, both in terms of culture and appearance, and so I thought her recent registering of disdain at my frequent discussion of HBDers was quite interesting, especially in light of a recent and very interesting article she wrote. I say that because her adopted homeland is, right now as we speak, in the grips of a similar HBD discussion, with prominent German technocrat and politician-banker Thilo Sarrazin’s book, “Germany Abolishes Itself”. Despite efforts to quash the work, it has gone on to be a runaway bestseller in Germany, and has sparked all manner of real debate along HBD lines – in fact, I call it the German version of The Bell Curve, which is fitting, since Sarrazin borrowed a bit from that book itself, as well as many of that book’s sources and ideas.
One of the big areas of focus for both Sarrazin’s and Murray’s books, is the notion that the dull are reproducing at a faster rate than the bright – and both books have no qualms about discussing measures directed at reducing the numbers of the former. But the latter book says virtually nothing about getting the brighter sections to reproduce more; Sarrazin’s book, on the other hand, does, but only haltingly:
“In Chapter 8, “Demography and Population Policy,” Sarrazin brazenly violates the unwritten rules of the game of democracy. He writes of the “shift in the population structure towards one of less intelligent or uneducated groups.” In our society no one is allowed to think such a thing, much less to draw conclusions from it!
On page 375 Sarrazin even quotes this reviewer, who had written: “In the early 1970s a loose group of individuals who had thought seriously about the relationship between IQ and birth rate was able to influence social and educational policies in the GDR [German Democratic Republic—East Germany]. This group was also able to bring about a range of policy decisions that resulted in a qualitative population policy, even though that term was never used and there was never any public discussion of the issue. (In a democratic society, perhaps that’s the only possible way to achieve something in this field—that is, through cross party political consensus with minimal public discussion.)”
In 1996 J. Dorbritz and K. Schwarz published a table in the Zeitschrift für Bevölkerungswissenschaft (“Journal of Population Science”) showing that the portion of childless women in western Germany aged 30&3150;39 with technical skill certification was 31 percent, while the portion of childless women in this same age and educational group in the former GDR (eastern Germany) was only 5 percent. Similarly, the portion of childless women in western Germany aged 30&3150;39 with university degrees was 37 percent, but the portion of childless women in this same age and educational group in the former GDR was only 8 percent.
This shows that in the period 1970–1990 the German Democratic Republic was the only state in modern times that achieved an extraordinarily successful qualitative population policy and in which higher education for women was not a form of “birth control.” In the GDR the basis for this was an overarching consensus without public discussion—that is, precisely the opposite of what’s being kicked off with your book, Mr. Sarrazin! Such a thing has never happened in a democratic society because it’s contrary to its very nature.”
That’s right – Sarrazin is making the case, that prior to Germany’s reunification and while East Germany was still under Communist rule, it was able to fashion a system where its bright Women bore babies at the height of their fertility. If what he says above is indeed the case, it would only buttress what I said a year ago – that the only way to get bright, White Women to have babies, is to strip them of their ability to choose their baby daddies, and under which circumstances to have said babies. This can only happen in a totalitarian state, like East Germany. Give Women the choice, and they choose not to have babies – at least not with Jeremy the STEM Guy, if they can help it. Yao Ming couldn’t happen in today’s Germany.
Perhaps Alte might’ve been cool with a kind of Stasi-inspired matchmaking system; I find it hard to believe any American (or modern day Western, for that matter) Women would go for it, however.
Oh, remember what I just said about about Murray’s Losing Ground, and how it informed the Clinton government? Here’s another snippet of the review of Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself:
“In that regard, Sarrazin takes note of President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform laws in the US. Perhaps, with this book, Sarrazin can help to achieve something similar in social policy in Germany, at least in the short run, with regard to immigration—at a time when government spending must be cut.”
Need I say more? Well, just one thing – again, please notice the deafening silence, when it comes time for the HBDers to actually address their own baby dearth – and when they do, they sputter and stumble about, mumbling about “taxes” and “affordable family formation” and the like, but they never look dead in the eye at the implications of their own sacred cows. In our time – one from which there is no turning back, I might add – Women have the right to choose, who will or won’t be, their baby daddies. And there is mounting evidence, that quite a few Women would rather hookup with the turkeybaster and go it alone, than to settle for Jeremy the STEM Guy. Perhaps that is for good reason – after all, there are limits to human potential in certain areas, for certain groups – and history has always recorded far fewer Men leaving behind genetic heirs, than Women.
Right?
And that, is why we write, about HBD.
Now adjourn your asses…
The Obsidian
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@Femi:
“Someone tell me what that has to do with “race” or inferior intelligence.”
Outside of the fact that one can hardly be bothered to increase his/her intellectual quotient whilst starving and fighting to keep life and limb intact? Nothing much I guess. Although I do find it curious that whites care to measure the IQ’s of people they’ve placed in the most dire circumstances imaginable for the past 500 years. What won’t they do to help themselves feel superior? I shudder to wonder, albeit they’ve left no stone unturned in their quest thus far, LOL.
Speaking of which, I would be interested to know if there’s been a study done genetically linking unadulterated “evil” with white people. I wager that when the “evil” gene is found in abundance amongst our R&R pinker brethern, all things will become ever more clear.
The question, really, is whether sociopaths are more intelligent than the rest of us, or just more criminally inclined?
I think you already can guess my answer. 🙂 🙂
R&R = Rather Reptilian
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I’d like to cosign on Mira’s comments. Even though we are in slightly different fields (archaeology compared to anthropology) we draw upon the same basic foundations of knowledge.
Race has ALWAYS been culturally constructed, and attempting to justify its biological existence is proof that racism into the 21st century is far more insidious and subversive than ever.
Another example (of the multitudes) is that despite all of the genetic studies done, and all of the studies on ancestry, and all of the PhD’s both for & against, there is still no unequivocal answer in modern genetics that defines race.
Essentially, THERE IS NO DEFINITION OF RACE for humans in genetics. All definitions are based on observable phenotype, skin-color, bone-structure, nose, lips, hair, and other physical characteristics which ARE genetic — in that they are inherited genetically — but ARE NOT confined to race.
To echo what Mira said, why is a tall blue-eyed blonde considered the same race as a short brown-eyed red-head? Such fallacies like this can be taken even further.
Why are some American Black people who are not even fully Black — due to rape in their family tree around the time of Slavery, as well as mixing with American-Indians — still considered Black? Could my girlfriend, who is mixed with Choctaw, as well as White, call herself Mixed and be believed? Or what about White? Would that be considered legitimate?
Are the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings White? Nope. Hell, according to some, they don’t even count as his legitimate descendants.
How about this: can I consider myself Middle-Eastern because my ancestry goes back to ancient Israel? Go ahead and get back to me on that…
See, the problem is not that everyone who is not a “race realist” is crazy, but that the “race realists” have determined the rest of us are too politically correct to admit what they see as “the facts”, or “the truth”, or some other BS label.
Personally I find HBD laughable, but politically it is a dangerous precedent, because history has shown us that whenever scientific-racism (or any kind of pseudo-scientific-prejudice) rears its ugly head… bad things are sure to follow.
For my people, the last time we encountered scientifically-backed anti-Semitism the Holocaust happened.
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I notice a problem here. Liberals deny the existence of race but at the same time implement an ever expanding system of race based privileges. But if race cannot be determined by any objective means how will they know how to distribute the privileges and punishments of a “social justice” society.
Let’s take an example: Mr. Mc’Racist gets together with his “white privilege” buddies and starts a company. He only hires what he perceives to be whites but reports to the government as having 50% black work force. Now if the government comes knocking, how will they prove that he doesn’t have 50% black employees if there is no objective standard for determining race?
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@dav
Why do you guys always have to politicize arguments? Wth does the topic of human variation have to do with “race based privileges?” God some of you people are mad if you honestly believe this society works in favor of non-White people!
And tell me. Do you have any surveys that suggest that the majority of people who define themselves as liberals are in favor of programs like Affirmative Action? I’m Black and I have never believed in Affirmative Action!
This is one of the main reason why I cannot take HDBers seriously. Their political motives are clear as day!
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dav,
Some people might deny existence of race, and liberals might be some of these people.
However, there’s a difference between saying race is a cultural construct and believing race doesn’t exist. Race does exist; the fact it’s not biological but cultural doesn’t make it any less real.
Also, in your example, it’s really easy to determine who is black: black (as any other race) is taken based on the way people self-identify themselves. It’s how it’s done in census, and all the scientific researches. If you say you’re black, you’re black. Of course, you might encounter some problems if others don’t see you that way, but the “official” way of determining the race is self-identification. (At least that’s what is used in research).
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@dav
-Again why do you say liberals deny the existence of race? What surveys do you have that suggest this is a left vs right thing?
-Anyways, the people who do not believe race has any biological validity do believe the concept exist in the SOCIAL realm. People discriminate based on phenotype, not genes. Race may not be real biologically, but racism is.
-“expanding system of race based privileges.”
Explain this system and how it is expanding.
Read this statement and let it marinate in your mind.
The geographical maps of principal component values constructed by Cavalli, Menozzi and Piazza in their famous “The History and Geography of Human Genes” show continuous variation over the whole world with no sharp boundaries and with no greater similarity occurring between Western and Eastern Europeans than between Europeans and Africans!
That right there proves their is biologically NO such thing as “White people!” This does not stop people in our society from believing that “White people” are superior to “others.”
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@dav: revealing comment 😀 “Its the liberals! Its the Left! Its the commies! Its the Hippies! Its those goddamn n*****s!”
Funny how so called race realists always seem to lean towards the conclusion that somewhere in the crowd there is a fifth column making the life a White man miserable by all kinds of commie tricks 😀 And it is those goddamn liberals or lefts or commies or… Somebody else than me! 😀
@randy:
“BTW, I’ve not stated that one race is smarter or better than another, nor do I ever use racial epithets. I happen to be happily married to a lovely caramel-colored woman of a different ethnicity, and have little-to-no consideration of race in my own self-image.”
And yet in this discussion you take a stand for separate races and genetic differences of races and so on? And this caramel colored??? 😀 What an earth is that?? She is a candy for you? Talk about seeing your woman as an object! 😀
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@dav:
“Now if the government comes knocking, how will they prove that he doesn’t have 50% black employees if there is no objective standard for determining race?”
Easy, unless Mr Mc’Racist and his white privilege buddies happen to own an NFL or NBA team the likelyhood that blacks made up 50% of their workforce would be past belief. 🙂 🙂
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Obsidian–
This is so obtuse.
The answer is that in everyday life there are many, many sorting mechanism. One of the first is – what sort of work does the person do and how high has he/she risen.
Another is how far in school did the person go, how well did he do, and what q
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… and what quality of college and if applicable professional school did the person go to.
Sometimes people are asked for or volunteer their sat scores, e.g. on some job applications.
And then there’s just talking to the person. That together with asking about schools and jobs is how it’s done socially.
Of course.
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sam asked:And yet in this discussion you take a stand for separate races and genetic differences of races and so on? “
From a scientific standpoint, it seems plausible to me that populations of people may share genetic differences from other populations of people. Even if the lines of demarcation aren’t precise, I don’t think that makes such distinctions functionally useless.
“And this caramel colored??? 😀 What an earth is that?? She is a candy for you? “
Indeed!
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Well, this “politically correct” nonsense is absolutely irrelevant when it comes to natural science. That’s one of their life lines to plant their junk into the heads of as many people as possible. It might work in some parts of this world where it is an insult to be called “PC”, “lefty” or whatever but it certainly won’t fly with everybody.
The main problem with those junk scientists is that they base their theories on a fundamental they fail to deliver an unambiguous scientific definition for. “Race”, that is. They solely rely on populism and the malleability of their audience, assuming the term is “intuitive” to most people. The problem is that in science, it is totally irrelevant how “intuitive” a dimension might be. If it is the central topic of your scientific research, it is the scientist’s sole responsibility to deliver a scientific definition for it. Everybody who has written a thesis or other academic papers knows that if you don’t deliver scientific definitions for your central subjects, you fail. The “well, that’s common knowledge” excuse will not pass, at least not in most European universities. That’s actually an excellent rule. I’ve seen friends at Uni fail their exam because of inadequate definitions or relying on hearsay.
Science can never be assumed to be intuitive for anybody, scientists included.
In other words, these HBD-ers, “race scientists” etc don’t even have a leg to stand on as long as they don’t deliver a clear definition of what they actually write about.
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The leftist academic invention that race doesn’t exist, as a way of combating the reams of evidence from a century of IQ testing that blacks are reliably 1 standard deviation or 15 IQ points less intelligent than whites aka Euro ancestry people, is ridiculous.
The census bureau thinks race exists. The US government in awarding affirmative action and enforcing soft quotas through “disparate impact” regulations thinks race exists
Race is about ancestry.
There aren’t any fixed number of races because the pie can be sliced into bigger pieces, or more finely divided pieces. One can’t say exactly how many neighborhoods there are in a city for the same reason.
Further some people have mixed ancestry. Lot and lots of people do in Central Asia, where Caucasians from Iran and Western Asia or the Middle East meet Eastern Asians such as Mongols and their descendants. North Africans are a mixture of mostly Berber and Arab etc. Caucasians and ssAfricans, 2/3 and 1/3 respectively, more or less. Though the higher classes tend to be more Caucasian.
It’s simply a fact now that DNA tests can show what major geographic population or racial group most of a person’s ancestors come from. In fact the can determine how much of a self identifying black person’s ancestry is white aka Euro.
Henry Louis Gates, the head of the African American studies department at Harvard, has used such DNA test results to tell various volunteers including Oprah how much white ancestry they have in a PBS mini series. He also has a book out that uses these results.
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What’s a social construct around race is that “one drop” makes a person black. Operationally, one drop has usually meant any noticeable amount of ssAfrican appearance.
It’s a social construct that the children of one white and one black parent are black. The genetic reality is that their ancestry is half of each, or in America actually probably somewhat majority white, since the average amount of white ancestry among blacks is slightly less than 20%.
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zek–
Because they share closer ancestry by a wide margin than either do with West Africans.
The one drop rule, applied only to African Americans in the US, until modern days mostly by whites or by both, but in more recent times mostly by blacks, is certainly a social construct.
But that West Africans and Europeans are different major geographic races is not only a social construct. It also has real ancestral reality, and hence genetic reality.
Because the races were for the most part, except in clinal areas such as Central Asia and N.Africa, seperated and didn’t interbreed much, and existed in different ecosystems and social ecosystems or cultures too, there was an opportunity, and plenty of time for different major races to evolve slightly differently. Less than a thousand years is more than enough time to do so in fact, as Cochran and Harpendig among others have shown.
But slight differences can have big effects in human competition.
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Most leading human genetics know damn well that race exists and is real at the genetic.
Most of them just don’t want to get their funding, and careers, chopped off the left PC vigilantees in academia and the mainstream media, as was done to James Watson, perhaps the most eminent geneticist alive, co discovered of the structure of DNA for which he won the Nobel prize, and the builder up from practically nothing of one of America’s leading genetic research labs.
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The Cynic–
You didn’t even link to any sources for your contradictory evidence. You gave no indications of sample sizes.
The “investigators” asking top performing Chicago public school students what race their parents and grandparents are, didn’t even sound like a scientific study, or something that followed scientific method. The one drop rule the black community nearly always applies would make a grandparent with 60% white ancestry, “black” in the high performing student’s telling. So utter bunk.
Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, has proposed that a very large sample size nationwide study be done, where self identifying black subjects have DNA samples taken by scientists, and are then given IQ tests. DNA tests can now reliably tell how much black, and white and Amerindian ancestry a person has.
A correlation could then be done between intelligence and percentage of white ancestry of those self identifying as African American.
But this study won’t be done. It won’t because leftists and blacks and PC adherents won’t let it be done. For these reasons the federal government, source of nearly all research grant money won’t fund it. Researches will be afraid to do the work or try to get funding. Look what happened to James Watson.
He proposed this three or four years ago. A study such as he proposed hasn’t been done.
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Doug1:
The Pioneer Fund has poured millions into research about racial differences. It paid for much of the research that “The Bell Curve” was based on.
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Doug1 said:
“Most leading human genetics know damn well that race exists and is real at the genetic. “
How do you know that most leading human geneticists secretly agree with you?
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abagond
Yeah because the federal government, mediated by panels of academic gate keeping panels, won’t fund most research that looks like it might tend to upset the PC orthodoxy on the relative lack of importance of heritable or genetic differences in in individual and especially racial differences in IQ.
Meanwhile the federal government has funded tens of billions of dollars of research that tries to prove one kind of environmental variable or another that can account for these differences — to little success.
There’s nothing even handed or fair minded about this whatsoever. It’s ideologically driven, and taboo avoiding. Even those that don’t believe in the taboo avoid breaking it to blatantly or in a high profile way, in order to keep their careers and funding.
This is a plain and obvious fact and everyone in relevant fields to these questions know it.
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This is a plain and obvious fact and everyone in relevant fields to these questions know it.
Yep, it sure is.
It also used to be a ‘plain and obvious fact’ that the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it! After all, so many learned scientists of the time agreed, so that made it irrefutable. And, let’s not forget the ‘plain and obvious fact’ that if you sailed your ship off of the edge of the world, gigantic monsters awaited – Lord Cthulhu and his minions, don’tcha know! 😎
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After all, so many learned scientists of the time agreed, so that made it irrefutable.
No need to use past tense!
http://theflatearthsociety.org/
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The scientific definition of “race” in humans is still pending….
Where is it?
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Femi,
It is highly unlikely we’ll get it, ever, so don’t get your hopes too high.
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As a biological term, race denotes genetically divergent human populations that can be marked by common phenotypic traits.[2] This sense of race is often used by forensic anthropologists when analyzing skeletal remains, in biomedical research, and in race-based medicine.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_humans%29
Note there are coarse and fine divisions of mankind into different races, and some people are of course of mixed races genetically, though they may as a matter of social construct be assigned to one or the other race.
Races as a biological term is about ancestry.
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This sense of race is often used by forensic anthropologists when analyzing skeletal remains
WRONG. You can’t determine race based on skeletal remains. Trust me.
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Yes you can. Trust me. Read wikipedia. Do other research.
I was quoting wikipedia btw.
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Where is the worldwide accepted unambiguously scientific definition for it?
Worldwide, as in 100% of the world population, not only 5% of it.
Worldwide as in – distilled water boils at 100°C at 1 bar air pressure and freezes at 0°C at 1 bar air pressure. Anywhere in this world.
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Doug,
You are joking, right? I am an archaeologist. I did measure bones. You CAN NOT tell race based on bones.
It’s quite difficult to tell true biological facts, such as sex or age, but you can achieve this with some expensive methods- not measuring bones per se. And you can’t do that with race.
And if your knowledge of the matter is Wikipedia, then I really don’t know what more to say.
But I did look at Wikipedia, and I’ve noticed two things. First is that you fail to quote views that see race as a cultural concept. Second is this:
Click to access Galileo%20Wept-%20A%20Critical%20Assessment%20of%20the%20Use%20of%20Race%20in%20Forensic%20Anthropology.pdf
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Which common phenotypic traits precisely? Which precisely are the genes that determine those?
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Mira–
No I’m not kidding you. Forensic anthropology is a whole academic subdiscipline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_anthropology
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@ Doug1
That’s not a scientific definition of “race”.
Once again. Where is it?
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Mira–
No it’s just easy to find immediately with little effort.
There have been numerous reference to forensic anthropologists being able to tell race at Gene Expression, the on of the leading and probably the leading human genetics blog on the web.
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Doug,
I didn’t mean you were kidding about the existence of forensic anthropology; I meant you were kidding me on Wikipedia being your main source of information.
I am about to sound snobbish, but if you don’t have any actual (professional) knowledge on the matter, I can’t have a serious discussion with you.
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Doug,
I’d rather take scientific papers than Wikipedia, thank you.
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Don’t always underestimate wikipedia. The following is quite accurate if I correctly remember my mother’s (RIP) discipline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy-Weinberg_principle
Once again. Where is the definition of “race”?
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@Doug1
Forensic anthropologist can use thousands of bone measurements from whites in New York and compare them to the bones of white people from Georgia. Using several statistics and probabilities they can pretty accurately separate a Georgian from a New Yorker. This does not make a White Georgian or New Yorker apart of separate races or make them genetically similar. It’s just statistics and nothing more.
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@ The Cynic
Exactly. Statistics not only don’t prove anything, but first of all they do not constitute a scientific definition.
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@doug:
“North Africans are a mixture of mostly Berber and Arab etc. Caucasians and ssAfricans, 2/3 and 1/3 respectively, more or less. Though the higher classes tend to be more Caucasian.”
Are friggin kiddin me??? 😀
You ever read history?
“…higher classes tend to be more Caucasian.”
What?? Like the king of Morocco is what, azerbaidzani or abkhasian? Tsetshen?? Those guys come from Caucasus region.
We’ve been trough the term “caucasian” which americans use for white men and let me tell you, it sounds so funny over this side of the Big water. Take a good look of the azeris. Do they look like blue eyed blond vikings? 😀 Does the president of Algeria look like a swede from Uppsala or finn from Kemi?? Or german from Sauerkrautland? 😀
I almost fell from my chair, man. Wikipedia?? Holy maroly! There you go, man. You believe that is The truth?? You do know how it works??
Oh man, this getting nuttier all the time. Nutty but funny 😀
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The biological definition of race is a geographically isolated breeding population that shares certain characteristics in higher frequencies than other populations of that species, but has not become reproductively isolated from other populations of the same species. [That is it’s still capable or interbreeding with other races within the same species, its population members have just not done so very much for some time.] (A population is a group of organisms that inhabit the same region and interbreed.) Human racial groups compose a number of breeding units that in the past remained geographically and reproductively isolated, yet could interbreed and produce viable offspring within the species Homo sapiens sapiens.
In other words a race is a population of descendants of common ancestors that were geographically isolated from other populations and didn’t interbreed with other races much at all in human prehistory especially, except at some clines between geographic races. This fact combined with the effects of inhabiting different ecosystems on average and different social ecosystems, or cultures, e.g. early agriculture, cities and writing, or late to all that, has lead though the process of evolution, including survival of the fittest and sexual selection, to significant racial differences.
It’s possible to divide the humans into just two races, ssAfricans, and everyone else. More commonly the century and more ago division into Caucasians, Orientals and Africans leaves lots of people out (e.g. Amerindians) and lumps widely different populations together, e.g. Asian Indians and NE Asians.
Stanford’s Luigi Cavalli-Sforza is the dean of investigating “The History and Geography of Human Genes”. He was the first to divide humanity into what he calls major geographic populations (aka races) using DNA genetic analysis. His DNA analysis can determine ancestry, and when human populations split apart into largely non interbreeding populations, due to geographic separation primarily.
He divides humanity into 6 or 7 primary geographic races. This has been widely accepted among human genetics researches who study population differences. Going from Europe east:
1) Caucasians (which includes Europe, Western Asia and N. Africa (though there’s a substantial minority of ssAfrican genes in N. Africa too, about 1/3),
2) sub Saharan Africans,
3) South East Asians (aka Austronesians)
4) North East Asians
5) Aborigines (incl. Papuans)
6) Amerindians.
Asian Indians seem to be a mixture of those that became Aboriginies later on (as they moved out of Africa beach combing around the Indian Ocean and then into SE Asia, New Guinea and Australia), those that became SE Asians, and Caucasians from Iran (the Aryans of the Bahgavad Gita etc.). With that much mixture they could be considered a 7th principal race.
Of course Amerindians vary quite widely and can be subdivided. Western and Eastern Africans vary a good bit and can be considered different sub races. Koisans or Bushmen aren’t very numerous any more*, but could be added as a 7 or 8th principal race, in terms of genetic distance and time of splitting off.
————–
*(This was mostly the work of the Bantus arriving somewhat after the Dutch Europeans in South Africa, but also of the Afrikaners, both of whom drove them to marginal semi desert lands)
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The chart at the top of this post illustrates this. Note the colors correspond to 5 of the 6 major geographic races which Cavalli Sforza first genetically established. (For some reason Amerindians have been left out in the chart. However the color labeled European should be labeled Caucasian, because e.g. it includes Iranians, Western Asians, and N. Africans.) The individual columns correspond to what could be called sub races. Though in fact the divisions that are within the actual Europe as opposed to Caucasians who are called Europe on the chart, are pretty minor compared to some of the other divisions, due to lots of interbreeding due to tons of migrations and conquests mostly.
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Oh and Austronesians = SE Asians
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Femi–
Yes it was. And how would you know? You’ve evidence neither intelligence nor knowledge.
But I’ve also given you a better, more detailed one.
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*evinced
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It’s all about Politically Correct politics, and surviving in academia and the media. “Just don’t use the word race”:
Why use the term ‘race’, when ‘geographic ancestry’ or ‘continental origin’ are more accurate and less costly in social terms, especially since Wade’s definition of ‘race’ is “continent of origin”? I suggest acknowledging the correlation between racial labels and continents of origin, and saving the term ‘race’ for contexts in which social costs are outweighed by other costs.
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http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/just-dont-use-word-race.php
Sorry for the double quote. Somehow the quote got into the WWW address box in firefox. Well I know how.
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Doug, what do you propose to do with all this ‘knowledge’? Kill all the n***ers?
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@Doug1
Do you go into a convulsion every time you type words like leftists, PC, or liberal?
Why do you think liberals have higher IQs than conservatives?
“Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm
Hehe seriously though, stop pulling the leftist card and going on rampages about this mythical PC police ruining all of your “race realist” fun.
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@doug: man, you are funny! 😀
“In other words a race is a population of descendants of common ancestors that were geographically isolated from other populations and didn’t interbreed with other races much at all in human prehistory especially, except at some clines between geographic races. This fact combined with the effects of inhabiting different ecosystems on average and different social ecosystems, or cultures, e.g. early agriculture, cities and writing, or late to all that, has lead though the process of evolution, including survival of the fittest and sexual selection, to significant racial differences.”
And show me a single human population that has been interbreeding for a biologically long time and I show you some serious problems, you know, like making babies with your sister etc. And on that subject, show me a single group of humans that has had no contact with any other genetically. Just one, pure, non mixed human population any where in the world.
Well, you can’t. There is none. We all are results of mixing “racially” and genetically. There is no pure race nowhere on this planet. And why is that? You are hot for the genes. Check any gene map and you’ll be surprised. We all have common ancestors, we all are just branches of the same tree. There is no two or three human genetic trees or maps. For anyone with any intelligence that is enough to show that we are all the same race. Bada bing!
Also you reveal in your own words that you have no idea what evolution is. You are one of those who think that evolution is something like dog breeding, which has also very serious problems for the dogs, and so on (survival of the fittest = whites are on the top ergo the most fittest).
First, the most common grass is as far developed as you are as a biological spieces. It is there. It has survived and is doing very well. Actually it survives in conditions which would be catastrophic for you as a spieces, so according to your logic, you must the weaker link in evolution. Also bacteria must be superior to you since they could kill you at a whim. Right? 😀
You say that so called caucasians include “western asians”. Really? Which ones? Tadzikis? Uzbeks? Uighurs? Kurds? Iranians? The Huns? Avars? Isn’t the racial difference based on ones physical features like you earlier seemed to point out? Have you ever been in North Africa? I recommed lots of traveling for you and you will be surprised. It is a cultural thing, my friend. Not a biological one.
Uzbeks have slant eyes, to use the racistically correct term, and so do rest of that bunch. And now you tell me that they are secretly white men in yellow mans skin? Mongols who are secretly white men? 😀
Reminds me of one joke in Full Metal Jacket: a general tells confused infantry man: inside of every vietnamese is an american wanting to get out!
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Now back to humans.
Which “certain characteristics”, precisely?
What are those “higher frequencies”, in numbers precisely?
Where does “isolation” occur geographically, precisely?
How long does the “isolation” have to last, precisely?
Last but not least, which are the genes that unambiguously determine “race” in humans, precisely?
If this is supposed to be a scientific definition, it can be represented in mathematical terms. And world maps are readily available, for the geographical part.
Here we go. That phrase reads like the wishful conclusion this “race realism” is supposed to yield. No further questions.
No, it’s the junk scientists who do this. They hijack the research of respectable scientists, dig long debunked pseudo science out of the dirt and concoct their own “definitions”.
“The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clear to Darwin.” Cavalli-Sforza
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On a side note (however related), some people really need to get out more. And not in terms of popping down to the pub and rant about “monkeys” and “pakis” with their lager lads over a pint.
I mean, travelling the world, not in a group with a tour guide in front but actually go stay in different places, interact with the locals, get a direct feel for how similar in all our differences we all are as a species. It’s not only a humbling experience, it’s probably the most enriching for every human.
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Mira, I feel bad for Doug, because he actually tried to debate you IN YOUR OWN FIELD!
Using Wikipedia.
I mean, sure it’s a great reference source for on-the-fly answers — but not something you can go to the mat with someone with in a serious discussion.
And of course, he’s also wrong ; )
I know a great many forensic anthropologists who work for SFPD, they teach some of my classes, and some of them are my peers or grad-students working as TA’s. NONE of them (and I quote) “can tell a Black guy’s femur from a White guy’s femur. F***, we’re lucky to be able to get the age and sex right with how bones look after years in the ground.”
Notice also how the deranged ideology comes out in code-words like “PC, leftist, liberal” and so on. I think someone mentioned Doug going into convulsions? Frothing at the mouth? I’d go even further to classify this as a serious pathology combined with extreme confirmation bias.
But that’s just a hazard of a guess!
As for the discussion at hand: I noticed James Watson was brought up. I find this funny because Watson actually stated that he regretted what he said about race & intelligence. Hardly an enthusiastic proponent of HBD, but I digress. Being extremely smart does not stop you from being a racist — and since most of the other smart people think he’s crazy, I’d say his credentials don’t hold water for the argument.
The fact is that you cannot homogenize Africa. It is an entire continent filled with hundreds — if not thousands — of different cultures and ethnic groups! Saying that “Africans are this” is tantamount to saying “Asians are this” or “Americans are this”. It is a stereotype (as opposed to a generalization) and basically undermines any serious argument.
So when James Watson says that “Africans” don’t do well on IQ tests, he’s missing the fact that “African” can mean Maasai, Cameroonian, a Boer, Egyptian, Nigerian, or even Pygmy’s! And that’s without even touching on the subject of how IQ test are inherently flawed because of cultural bias in their construction. We cannot accurately measure IQ through tests like you take in school. Just doesn’t work, and psychologists have known that for decades, so let’s not skip the whole compendium of assessed knowledge, okay?
Finally, I’d like to personally debunk the false connection between race and ancestry.
Ancestry is who you descended from genetically. That does not mean you are the same race. By this logic I must be Middle-Eastern instead of White, and Henry Louis Gates is actually an Irish King!
I mean, really? For real? For really real??
Nu-uh kids, this game ain’t kosher.
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Sam–
The Eurasian steppe, home of horse nomad warriors for much of history, is a major clinal zone in its western central areas. Most of the ethnic groups which you mentioned are Eurasian mixes, tending to have more NE Asian blood, probably importantly due to the dominance of NE Asian horse nomads in more recent centuries, such as the Mongol and Ghengis Khan, with his prodigious number of descendants, as one quite famous example.
Iranians and Kurds are very largely Caucasian however, as are the semitic peoples, Arabs and Jews alike. So too the the Berbers of N. Africa.
This is all based on currently ongoing genetic science. Take your head out of the sand, black man.
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Doug1:
Are the Central Asians a mix of NE Asians and Europeans or is the the other way round where the NE Asians and Europeans descended from them? Which came first? Can we tell, and if so, do you have a source for that?
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zek–
He said he regretting any implication that people might have drawn that Africans are humanly inferior and of less worth than Europeans. It was a closely worded statement. He never said he recanted saying they do less well on IQ tests or eve that they are less intelligent, so far as abstract reasoning goes. The media strongly implied and mislead that he did but that’s not what his actual quotations said.
” Dear media,
Please read the actual text of James Watson’s apology printed in the Independent, instead of mangling it and interpolating it with your own claims:
”
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
The British Independent newspaper is the one that kicked off the firestorm by printing quotations from Watson that ssAfricans do less well on IQ tests than Europeans, and that that has implications or should for the development aid strategies. That quotation, as well as a slice of the evidence that what Watson said is true, and also that it’s partly for genetic reasons, is also in that long article.
No he’s not. And non of them do very well on IQ tests, except Euro origin Boers. Though Egyptians, who are about 2/3 Caucasian, do a lot better than the others. The reason for the term sub Saharan Africa is because that’s where black Africans live. The continents were named according to geological criteria, though really on that basis Eurasia is one continent. The Saharan desert has been a major though hardly completely impassible barrier to human interbreeding. Hence there has been a good deal of interbreeding between black Africans and N. African Caucasians.
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zek–
The truth is racist.
That is using the absurd definition for racism that you’re using and that the left has largely now succeeded in getting intellectuals to adopt, often out of a kind of 1984 fear factor of being read out of elite society and careers by being called a “racist” yourself for pointing out that the shifting definition is nuts.
Watson is one of the most eminent geneticists alive.
Most other smart geneticists thing he’s right, not crazy. The leftist stranglehold at universities just makes it very impolitic to say so.
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zek–
Yeah it might require a skull to be able to tell black from white racial ancestry.
DNA analysis is way better at that these days.
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@Doug1
You know most smart geneticist? Why do you think leftist have obtained such a strong stranglehood on many universities in this country?
Why are so many scientist liberal(52%) and so few conservative(9%)?
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/141264/most_scientists_politically_liberal_(reality_must_have_a_liberal_bias)/
http://people-press.org/report/528/
Do you think it is because liberals are inherently intellectually superior to conservatives? I mean if IQs are mainly a result of genetics it would seem so…
“Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm
I would really like answers to all of these questions Doug.
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@ Doug1
Why do you keep bringing up politics if you claim this is strictly about science? The scientists who argue that there is no scientific evidence for “race” in humans or for any causation of geographical origin to intelligence never mention politics.
Could it be that you have a political agenda? And you and your ilk alone?
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Femi–
Because though it should be just about science, the left in strenuously enforcing political correctness in every broad open public forum, and many others as well, doesn’t let it be just about science. Instead it tries to deny funding. And it gets guys like Watson fired. And Summers from President of Harvard, for breaching the genders are just the same taboo as well, to pick to fairly recent very high profile examples.
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Femi–
They’re being partially disingenuous for what they consider to be the social good, and they ALL, every last one of them, know it. Every last one.
Race is a fuzzy set. It doesn’t have clean and sharp boundaries. Whatever racial clumps one uses on the basis of ancestry and relatedness, there will be lots of people with mixed ancestry. It’s a rare African American whose ancestors go back to slave days here as opposed to being a post 1965 immigration law newer arrival, who has less than 5% white aka Euro ancestry.
Those you claim race has no scientific basis do so using facts like these. And also the one drop rule for being black. And also the fact that traits like IQ greatly overlap. It’s simply massively wrong for example to believe that all blacks are less intelligent than all whites. The IQ bell curve distributions heavily overlap. But they are also significantly separated – by one standard deviation.
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@Abagond
How long is my comment gonna be in moderation? Is their a sum kind of limit to links you can post b4 the comment gets stuck in mod? I would like to know, so I can avoid this l8r on
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@Doug1
My comment w/o the links 😦
-Do you even know most smart geneticist?
-How do you think leftist have obtained such a strong “stranglehold at universities?” Why are so many university professors liberal(43%) and so few conservative(9%)?
Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: January 17, 2010
New York Times
-Why is that when the Pew surveyed 2,500 scientist they discovered that 52% identify as liberal, while only 9% are conservative?
Most Scientists Politically Liberal (Reality Must Have a Liberal Bias)
Steve Benen
July 13, 2009
-Do you think it’s bc liberals are inherently superior intelligence in intelligence than conservatives? If environment has little affect on IQ test than I suppose it’s in their genes right?
“Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.”
Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds
Feb. 24, 2010
Science Daily
I would really like to hear your answers to all of these questions Doug.
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I see, you’re the expert on mind reading.
In other words, there is no scientific definition for it.
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Femi–
Wrong. I’ve given you one.
Lots of things are fuzzy sets. Tall and short for example.
Men are taller than women. That’s a scientific reality in every human population. That doesn’t mean that all men are taller than all women. That doesn’t mean that in some ethnicities the average woman isn’t taller than the average man in another ethnicity. The average Nuer woman is undoubtedly taller than the average pygmy man, and may be taller than the average southern Nigerian.
One can draw a sharp and clear dividing line between tall and short. Or as is more commonly done different ones for men and women. But the concept of tall and short are fuzzy sets.
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This is all based on currently ongoing genetic science. Take your head out of the sand, black man.
First of all, ‘Sam’ is from Finland. They may have black people there, but I am pretty sure that Sam ain’t one of them! This is based upon his previous posts where he states his ancestry unequivocally. Now Doug, please answer my question. What do you propose to do with your ‘vaunted knowledge’? Kill all blacks? Do you propose a program of eugenics? It’s one thing to blather on about these things, but how do you propose to ‘remedy’ them? By your druthers, if anything, you should be bowing down to sam since he is nordic. Hence he has superior intelligence to you. He is the ideal specimen for your genetic and racialist research and knowledge. Start bowing guy!
As for James Watson:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article3022190.ece
Yes Doug, he has considerable amounts of black ancestry! Maybe he ain’t that smart after all, at least he ain’t as smart as he would be had he been ‘pure’ white!
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Tall and short has no scientific significance at all. It’s not even intuitive.
155 cm, 182 cm or 210 cm is what you have to come up with. Anything else is junk science and political rubbish.
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@ Doug1
Here’s a fuzzy set for you. Life expectancy. The life expectancy overall of the USA, Cuba and Denmark are 78.3 years. So that means Americans, Cubans and Danish could be of the same race.
Hey, it’s statistics. They explain everything, don’t they? If you disagree, why?
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Herneith–
The Icelandic lab that came up with those results got it wrong it’s since been shown, and discussed at GNXP.
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Mostly white Cubans whose ancestors come from Spain are of the same major geographic race as Danes and white Americans.
White Cubans do way better than other large Hispanic groups in America. Other Hispanic groups, and some later arriving dark Cubans, tend to have a good lot of ssAfrican or Amerindian ancestry.
Longevity is more influenced by elements of the environment, such as diet, medical care, levels of violence and other cultural factors than racial ancestry.
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So the diet, medical care and levels of violence are the same in these three countries?
(I’ve got news for you, they aren’t)
Denmark and Spain are separated by more than 2000 km for billions of years. Spain and Africa are separated by less than 50 km for many millions of years.
You’re turning in circles here. You keep throwing around the terms “race” and “racial” without ever having given a unambiguous scientific definition for it. A definition that is applicable anywhere in the world.
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Femi–
There are racial differences between Denmark and Spain, yes. But the ancestral distance isn’t very great. It’s pretty big so far as within Europe ancestral distances go, but not in the overall world wide picture.
As well there’s been a good lot of fairly recent mixing. As the Western Roman Empire was collapsing German goths migrated / fought their way to Spain and settled there and mingled with the local population.
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And the conclusion is…?
As you stated yourself, geographical isolation is a parametre in defining “race”. Danes and Spanish were geographically isolated from each other for farther and longer than Spanish and Africans.
Where is the precise definition for “race” in humans?? Once again.
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Actually the colored chart at the top of this post represents the “genetic distance” between various ethnicities or fairly micro divisions sub sub races that are numbered (and labeled) by the height of the lines connecting different groups.
The major geographic races (though with Amerindians left out for some reason) are represented by different colors, though with Caucasians mislabeled as Europe since their members include Iranians, Western Asians such as Arabs, and N. Africans. Sub divisions or sub sub races within them are indicated by numbered (and labeled) entities.
The height of the lines connecting different colored and as a subdivision different numbered groups, indicates genetic distance between them, which by this DNA technique used here, is primarily a matter of how long ago the groups split apart into primarily separately breeding populations.
The greatest genetic distance is between ssAfricans and everyone else, as seen by the height of that interconnecting line in the chart above. The next greatest genetic distance is between Aboriginals/Papuas and everyone else except ssAricans. The next is between SE Asians (Austronesians) and other Eurasians. The least is between Caucasians (labeled Europe) and NE Asians (labeled Asian).
The label names chosen are those of continents for PC reasons. The actual subgroups included though show that it’s really done on a major continental scale race basis, rather than a strict geographic continent one.
Spain isn’t picked as a national group within Europe for no doubt arbitrary reasons to keep the number of groups down so the chart can fit on a page. But if we use Italy as a rough proxy for Spain, the genetic distance from Denmark isn’t very great.
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Danes and Spanish were geographically isolated from each other for farther and longer than Spanish and Africans.
Wrong, according to the genetics. And also history.
The straits of Gibralter were a major barrier to mass migration, though not so much to trade and limited numbers of elite warriors in historical times. It’s not just the distance. The currents are very strong there. Crossings aren’t made at the narrowest juncture for that reason and because of that big ole rock also.
The Saharan desert was also a major obstacle to mass migration between N. Africa and ssAfrica. Though there has been a good lot of mixing of ssAfrican genes into the majority Caucasian population in N. Africa. It’s a clinal area like parts of Central Asia.
Spain isn’t much a clinal area between the major geographic races, though sure there’s a touch of dark “Moorish” blood from N. Africa mixed in there. There’s a lot more German / Gothic admixture though.
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That’s exactly the problem with those theories. “Rough proxies”. There’s not even a hint of precision or mathematical representation, thus none of those methods can be taken seriously on a scientific level.
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The Cynic said:
“@Abagond
How long is my comment gonna be in moderation? Is their a sum kind of limit to links you can post b4 the comment gets stuck in mod? I would like to know, so I can avoid this l8r on”
Three or more links will send your comment to moderation. But links are also a big thing the spam filter looks at, so just one link could get your comment stuck in the spam filter.
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The Cynic–
Yes you do. That’s exactly what a race is. It’s also why there are finer and coarser divisions of race. Except we’re talking about relatedness going back 10s of thousands of years, in the case of the major geographic races.
If people didn’t tend to mate and have children within their own race, then the major geographic races would disappear.
But they do. Even when they live near each other as in America.
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Calculator
The single most important thing that makes better schools better, is the higher average intelligence of their students. A second important factor particularly in these permissive ACLU winning lawsuits against school discipline times, is how disruptive how many of the students are. Blacks tend to be much more disruptive than whites.
After they’ve been teaching awhile, and often from the get go, the best teacher usually want to teach the brightest students.
NYC schools that poor Asians mostly attend tend to become good schools fast, and go downhill fast if the percentage of NAMs rises by a lot.
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@Doug1
No, you don’t.
What do you think about liberals having higher IQs and being over-represented in brainy science compared to the general population?
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The Cynic—
Some studies have shown that while other have shown that they’re the same or Republicans have slightly higher IQs than Democrats. A lot depends on how you define liberal and conservative. This is not by any means always free from bias.
Basically I think it’s very important to social scientists, the great majority of whom are leftist/liberals, to find in social science studies that liberals have higher IQs than conservatives. So they do find that often enough.
Here’s something I came on recently.
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/02/blue-state-and-red-state-iq-is.html
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As for the later part of your question, in the harder sciences almost as many scientists identify themselves as centrists or conservatives, as do as liberals.
In the social sciences and humanities it’s very hard to get promoted, get invited to the fun parties, or for that matter even get hired, as a professed conservative these days at most universities, certainly the more elite private and public ones.
Basically what happened is that social science and humanities faculties in the sixties, in the spirit of classical open minded liberalism as opposed to predominant leftism euphemistically called liberalism as today, hired a bunch of adjunct and then full professors despite their being far New Leftists, which was a strong movement among college kids at the time. Once lots of leftists got in, they stopped letting conservatives be hired, and it was a considerable demerit to be a centrist. That’s an exaggeration but more or less what happened.
There’s a tendency for many people to grow more conservative as they get older and learn more about the world and become less idealistic. But the atmosphere developed on most campuses that it’s damn hard to be an open conservative in social science and humanities fields where political leanings has some bearing on e.g. the kinds of questions one asks, even if not biasing the science, as it sometimes does with leftists. It’s even hard to be a centrist. Further college students are thoroughly propagandized to the left in those fields these days and for decades now. Professors were college students once.
As well real smart leftists tend to want to go into fields where they can spout their leftist quasi religion and/or change the world they think. So they tend to want to go into things like journalism or academia.
There’s a tendency for real smart centrist and conservative college students to want to go into fields that will allow them to make a lot of money, since they don’t regard their beliefs as a quasi religion, but rather more often fact and logic based. So they tend not to go into academia but rather go into Wall St. or big business via an MBA, or into BigLaw or sometimes lucrative sides of medicine.
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I don’t agree with a lot of what Doug1 has to say, but I really believe that there’s a little bit of a liberal bias in the academia.
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@Doug1
I see Hawaii is in the bottom 5 states in IQ according to that list. Whites make up about a quarter of that states population, while African Americans are only about 1%, and Asians(specifically E. Asians) make up the biggest group in Hawaii. Wonder what their SAT/ACT scores are like.
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Really? What does that mean? 1+1 might be somewhere around 2.1? Certainly not in scientific circles. It will always be 1+1=2 anywhere in this world, regardless of what check box the scientists put their political votes on. That’s the bottom line. And that’s the only thing that counts. Everything else MUST be dismissed from a scientific standpoint.
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I guess I’ll regret this, but I have to ask: what is a liberal bias in academia? (In this particular case, I mean).
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@Doug1
“Once lots of leftists got in, they stopped letting conservatives be hired, and it was a considerable demerit to be a centrist.”
It’s interesting how you can claim a group of people can use their power within an institution to discriminate and marginalize another group(as if their is a box where you can check conservative, liberal, etc. when looking for a job).
Of course that couldn’t be the case with Blacks. Their stupid and lazy. People who implicitly or explicitly think like Doug1 are sooo few in numbers w/in American society. It’s just a coincidence that their is a positive correlation of traditionally oppressed minorities w/ lower IQs and socieo-economic levels all over the world.
Native Americans from Canada to Argentina, Roma Gypsies in Europe, Muslims in Europe, Israeli Arabs, Australian Aboriginals, Maori New Zealanders, Burakumin/Koreans/Ainu in Japan.
A coincidence. Right Doug1?
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Mira:
In America, liberal bias = leans towards a Marxist view of the world. (In Britain “liberal” means something like what Americans would call libertarian.)
Liberals have a more blank-slate view of people. They lean towards nurture, not nature. They tend to blame the ills of society on society, not on individual shortcomings. Society is not presumed to be naturally just and can, in fact, be evil.
In America conservative bias leans towards a Christian view of the world which blames the ills of society on personal immorality, on the shortcomings of individuals. Society is presumed to be just or as just as humanly possible. Evil societies are found only in enemy states or in the distant past.
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Yup, no anti-Black bias in the good ol’ US of A. This situation cannot be applied to jobs, courts, laws, banks, education, housing, etc. All of our institutions are racism free. Blacks just like to whine a lot, so they don’t have to accept their inefficiencies.
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part 2
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Abagond,
In America, liberal bias = leans towards a Marxist view of the world.
And I guess it’s not seen as a good thing, right? 😉
Liberals have a more blank-slate view of people. They lean towards nurture, not nature. They tend to blame the ills of society on society, not on individual shortcomings. Society is not presumed to be naturally just and can, in fact, be evil.
Well, I was raised in a socialist country so I’ve learned these things from the day one. They all seem “natural” to me.
But I still don’t get what “liberal bias” might mean in this particular case. That people who think race is not a biological fact lean towards “nurture” so much they forget about the biological issues?
Actually, I think there might be a common misunderstanding of a term often used in this thread: social construct.
The fact something is a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Let’s forget race for a second. Let’s talk about sex. Sex is a biological fact. Unlike race, there is a simple definition of a male human, and of a female human. But even such a natural thing is socially constructed by people, and the social construct of sex is called gender.
So, gender is not natural. But it is real, it’s very real.
Similarly, race is real. It is a social construct and it’s real. Even if there was a biological base to race (like sex is to gender), it wouldn’t make a difference.
But- IS THERE a biological base to social construct called race? Everything we know points that no, there isn’t. There seem to be races based on genes, but since humans are very diverse, there are so many (hundreds, even thousands of them)- hardly similar to 5-6 socially constructed races we have today.
And let me note that proponents of “race as we know it is a biological fact” still didn’t give us a working definition of race as a biological fact. You know, the one that can actually be used to define these 5-6 races based on biology ALONE.
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@Kwamla and Goldfire
I’ll admit I don’t know much about African politics or issues, but, ultimately, wasn’t it the African people who decided to go to war against other African people.
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@Kwamla and Goldfire
I’m not supporting the idea of war, I’m just asking since I’m trying to better understand.
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@Kwamla and Goldfire
Here, let me explain why I asked. During the Yugoslav War, the U.S. and other Western countries decided not to sell any arms to the participants in the war, even though one side had a superior military advantage. Ever since then, a lot of people have criticized the U.S. and the West for not helping a people by selling them weapons.
Now, African people are killed by other Africans. The West sells arms to them, and now the U.S. is criticized. It’s like, whatever the U.S. does, there’s always something wrong.
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Well, US and other Western countries did support one side quite well in Yugoslavian war(s), so I don’t think your example is a good one.
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Mira
Which side did the U.S. support?
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First they chose to support Serbs. This is something not many people know. But then, under certain circumstances, they started supporting whoever was against Serbs at the time. Of course, the fact Russians were “supporting” Serbs (but not really- but that’s another story) also helped in making a decision. It included, but was not limited to: warfare support, sending troops that didn’t do anything (including preventing genocide on all sides involved), and of course, military intervention. And don’t forget the media, we should never forget about that one.
So it’s safe to say west was involved more than enough.
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***zek j evets
@Sagat: But see, humans from a certain geographical region ARE NOT genetically distinguishable. ***
Yes they are. Have you read any studies by Hua Tang & Neil Risch?
“Numerous recent studies using a variety of genetic markers have shown that, for example, individuals sampled worldwide fall into clusters that roughly correspond to continental lines, as well as to the commonly used self-identifying racial groups: Africans, European/West Asians, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans (Bowcock et al. 1994; Calafell et al. 1998; Rosenberg et al. 2002).
Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
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***You are joking, right? I am an archaeologist. I did measure bones. You CAN NOT tell race based on bones. ***
Forensic anthropologists do this with a high level of accuracy.
Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept, Biology and Philosophy 25 (2010), 143-162.
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***Where is the precise definition for “race” in humans?? Once again.***
What is the precise definition for culture? I suppose Femi is going to tell are there are no different cultures either.
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@ The Cynic:
1. I think that those videos were themselves racist. Because it makes it seem like ALL white people are racist – and that in itself is racist! Most do not see colour – just like that one woman said in the video. She should know. You are only making racism worse. If we just stop talking about it, it will go away (or whatever it was that Morgan Freeman said).
2. The truth will set you free – except when it is about white people. In that case, it makes blacks cry and give up. So it is best to avoid it in that case. For the good of black people.
3. That reporter, that John Quiñones guy, I bet he’s Mexican, Latino for sure. He just wants to blame white people for his own shortcomings in life. You can’t trust what he says. He’s biased. Only white people can see racism in a fair way. And besides, he’s a hypocrite: I bet he makes way more money than most white people.
4. Yes, I am being sarcastic. Thanks for the videos.
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I never said “race” as a man-made social construct does not exist. We all know it does but that’s not the issue.
The point is that those so-called “race realists” put on a laboratory smock and make scientific claims they are not even able to deliver scientific definitions for. And we’re not talking social science here. If the claim is made with biology, the definitions have to be made within biology alone.
Instead of distracting from the issue, why don’t you deliver a scientific (biological) definition for “race”. Applicable worldwide at any time.
If your comment implies that “race” is indeed cultural only, I can live with that. But why so much effort to prove it biologically?
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@doug:
“The truth is racist.”
Well, there you go! Finally! It took some time but there it is, your point of view. Thanks, buddy 😀
“Some studies have shown that while other have shown that they’re the same or Republicans have slightly higher IQs than Democrats.”
So, now you are expanding your racial views to politics? Republicans and democrats are different race, since their IQ tests show differences?? Man, that is so hilarious!! 😀
And yes, I know it is very sad for you to know that I am indeed a pure finn, with some swedish (pure germanic stock) in the family from 1500’s. You know, we have church books here down to that time so we can check if there are any n*****s in our blood line and since I have none and you, being in States might have some racial mixing, I really must be way above you racially.
What? You do not like it?? Well, if you state that pure white men are more smarter and intelligent than sSAfricans, I must be way above you mixed mishmash of genes. Right?
And it must be really burning your behind that I am not a leftist or any other politically. Actually I am not politically oriented at all, in traditional sense. See, I grew up next to the USSR and visited that place enough times to see what that was all about. I did not like it so I was never a leftist in that sense.
Yep, we finns could and did travel there wayyyy back when. It is one of the good things about being from a small country, you can slip unnoticed into some really strange places because the other guys do not see you as an enemy. We were known by locals as Vodka turists. We finns like to drink and soviet vodka was both cheap and very available. Not that I was drinking then nor I do now, but that is the way it used to be.
Most important thing was this: we saw that the russian were just humanbeings. Just like us. Not monsters or commie herds marching to destroy the west. Just guys trying to survive that mess called USSR. They do have very different culture but they are just like us, no matter what herr Himmler and others said about their race.
That is the beauty of traveling, you really meet people. You see them eye to eye, face to face. You really understand that we are all the same race. Your hair may different of mine, you skin may be different color, but once we sit down together and have a good time, we all are the same race. Like femi, I do recommed traveling to all. Specially to you doug. Get on goin, man. The best thing is this: you realize that it is the culture. It really is. Not some strange notion of race, but really a culture.
I must ask your forgivness ladies, but I must point out to doug some other empirical information that I gathered during my traveling years. And this goes to show what it is all about.
Once you are butt naked with a woman in bed, all that cultural stuff litterally flies out of the window. At that moment you really realise that we are humans. No ifs, buts nor nothing. Trust me, man. Love is the same and it really brings home the very basic existence of humans. We are all the same. Lady might be darker, she might have tatoos, she might use different parfumes, but once the thing gets going, you will be one.
Now I can not talk about sex with a different race since I have no experience on that, but I assume that having sex with a gorilla or chimpanzee is a bit diffrent kind of experience. Not to mention cows and mules. Now they are different race, other spieces. I also have found out that I, for some reason, do not feel attracted towards these different races sexually. Somehow an elephant does not make me feel the same as one lady did many years ago in one tropical country. But hey, it might be just me.
Anyways, I’ll stick with my own race, human race that is. I suggest that we all do. Since there is no other human races around.
PS. See, I’m not even politically correct doug 😀
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lol @ sam
You always come up with entertaining comments that hit the nail on the head 😉
Co-sign.
Anybody denying this is not a heterosexual human male.
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@ SAM
WTF, lol you are too much sometimes, but everything you say is true. You have such a uniquely blunt way of saying it, it this typical of Finns?
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Mira—
Yes, common ancestry. Going back tens of thousands of years, in the case of the major geographic races, of which there are 6 as I explained and detailed above. (6 without calling clinal mixtures such as in central Asia, India and N. Africa separate races.)
Since this is a statement at a popular, common sense level, I’ll address it at that level. That statement is utterly absurd. You ask most people around the world speaking different languages etc. if there’s such a thing as race, and you know damn well what answer you’ll get, if they’ve in fact encountered very different races, such as blacks in E Asia. You have to go to a politically correct leftist dominated American university within the last 15-20 years or so to learn the propaganda that race doesn’t exist as a biological reality. I still think most university graduates don’t believe that. Only the real ideologs buy that garbage.
What the genetic markers reflect is ancestry, and when breeding populations slit apart to separately intrabreed for the most part.
The entire chart above, which reflects the major geographic races (except Amerindians for some reason) by the different colored groups, and certain selected illustrative subgroups or sub races within them as the numbered items, was created using genetic markers ALONE.
Free your head from the clouds of ideology.
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@ Mira, Mephisto, Zek, etc:
What is wrong with defining race as a genetic distance of 0.1 or greater? Going by the chart at the top of the post that would give us eight not-unreasonable races:
1. Australian
2. New Guinean
3. Austronesian
4. Amerindian
5. East Eurasian
6. West Eurasian
7. Sub-Saharan African
8. Mbuti Pygmy
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You can define races biologically any way you want. But chances are they won’t match social races.
Biologists should judge your idea of 0.1 genetics distance (whether is valid or not), but even if it is, I can point at the obvious socio-anthropological problem: people wouldn’t accept them. Because they don’t match the existing social construct of race.
For example, out of 8 races you proposed, Mbuti Pygmy and Sub Saharan African are seen as members of the same race.
And that’s just one example. People will still see people as belonging to the same 3-4 races. You simply can’t make them see differently. HBDers are the first to group all “blacks” together (as inferior, etc), even though they are, for all we know, most diverse of all social races, and some of the people considered “black” are actually genetically quite different than any other people on Earth, black, white, or any other. In other words, there are whites and Asians and other blacks who are more closely related than these people.
All in all, I am not against defining race in biological terms, if biologists can think of a valid definition. But I can say for sure that these biological races DO NOT match existing social races. Above all, social race “black” must be reconstructed, since it doesn’t make much sense, biologically.
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@abagond: to answer to your question: there is only one race of human beings on this planet. Period. You can draw maps, tables, measure genetic differences, but they all concern one human race and its variations.
The only other human races are long gone. Do not take my commie word on it. It is scientifical fact. Ask paleonthologists. Ask basically anybody outside the racist sphere. They might be even some conservative scientists, but they all tell you the same: there is one human race.
First, we all can interbreed. I can have babies with any woman on this planet. It can not happen between different races. Dogs do not make babies with monkeys.
Aha, you say, what about wolves and dogs? Well, they both belong to the same race. Russians did an interesting study way back when where they took some pure breed dogs and let them go wild. In just few generations these top notch dog show specimen started to change their physical appearance and loose so-called race distinctions. They started to resemble each other physically and in very short time in biological sense they strated to become wolflike. They lost their fancy color schemes, dots and spots, and started to resemble each other more closely. To put is short, they started to become wolves again.
So, there is only one human race.
@student: I do not know if we finns are so blunt but one of my friends was living in LA years ago. Her boyfriend was a tv-producer and they used to go to all these fancy parties all the time. At one party there was an actress, whom my friend refused to name. She was wearing a hidious dress. Of course everybody was telling her how wonderful that dress was. My friend did not say anything. The actress of course started to demand that my friend tells her opinion. She said that the dress was ok. The actress of course saw that my friend was not honest so she demanded that she tells honestly what she thinks. My friend asked couple times does the actress really want to hear it and she answered yes. So my friend told her that is was the most terrible piece of cloth she had ever seen, in her opinion. No more Hollywood parties for her.
I put a video here if Í can find it which shows how blunt we finns can be.
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Ok, there might be a different way I understand the word “race” than sam (and the rest of you).
Sam mentioned other human races, that are long gone now. But we call it human species here. There’s only one of them left.
Now, I guess the term “race” is more appropriate, because races can interbreed, and different species can’t. And for all we know, Homo Sapiens Sapiens did interbreed with the Neanderthals, so it might be more appropriate to call them races than species.
Still, the term “species” is commonly used in my culture (along with mythical human species, such as Yeti).
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Blunt finn during full speed formula 1 drive: Kimi Räikkönen
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Most do not see colour – just like that one woman said in the video.
Yes, they don’t see colour as your black behind is being carted off to jail in a case of mistaken identity, because they cannot tell you apart.
What? You do not like it?? Well, if you state that pure white men are more smarter and intelligent than sSAfricans, I must be way above you mixed mishmash of genes. Right?
By your reckoning, Doug is a borderline retard!
Dogs do not make babies with monkeys.
I beg to differ. Here’s monkey Mary
with the product of her illicit tryst with Fido!:
http://thepoodleanddogblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451580669e200e55295dccf8833-320pi
You can see the shame on Mary’s face!
That Fido gets around! Here he is trying to get a leg-over with Hattie the heifer!:
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT5iQ9yIkYteU-BdowK-5cfiMu2nlbP8jdyd-XzlRmx-DGYLjtx_g
No wonder they compare men to dogs! Perhaps they do share genes after all, if there is a gene for being promiscuous! Perhaps one day it will be like Planet of the Apes! I always wanted to see Dr. Zira get the groove on with Charlton Heston’s character(forgot his name)! The kids would have been pretty, pretty ugly that is!
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Col. George Taylor
http://planetoftheapes.wikia.com/wiki/George_Taylor
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Where’s that 0.1 coming from? Why isn’t it 0.05 or 4?
It is an arbitrary human definition. We are talking about the same species here. You can define “race” any way you want as long as you predefine an arbitrary number.
I know for a fact that my grandmother wasn’t a Wolof, a Kamba or a Fulani, nor a Jamaican or Black American. By nowadays standards it could be genetically proven that she was a Douala with some Yoruba admixture.
My father is so-called “white” by US standards but quite different from Germanic, Celtic, Slavic or Coptic. Easily proven with a DNA sample where they would find ancestry from Northern India.
That’s all we need to know (if we choose to). It’s well-known, reviewed and scientifically widely accepted.
The motivation of those “race realists” is very obvious. They hope one day to be able to boil all mankind down to exactly two groups – n****rs and humans. Hence the absurd efforts they make.
This is getting like discussions about god’s (non-)existence.
I’m out.
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Hang on. One more…
Talking about “PC”. The “race realists” I’ve encountered during my few years in the USA always put on their best PC behaviour in dealing with me but as soon as I turned my back they referred to me as the “sand n***er” (apparently because of my Arab looks although I have absolutely no Arab origin). How do I know? Bystanders listen and talk, you know…
“Politically correct” usually translates to “two-faced hypocrites” in those who are the quickest to shoot at it.
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abagond
@ Mira, Mephisto, Zek, etc:
What is wrong with defining race as a genetic distance of 0.1 or greater? Going by the chart at the top of the post that would give us eight not-unreasonable races:
1. Australian
2. New Guinean
3. Austronesian
4. Amerindian
5. East Eurasian
6. West Eurasian
7. Sub-Saharan African
8. Mbuti Pygmy
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***But chances are they won’t match social races.***
Mira,
Please see my link above to a paper by Neil Risch & Hua Tang. Genetic clusters correspond almost perfectly to social races.
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Abagond
Something other than the enter key made it post before I was ready.
Anyway that pretty much works for me.
Pygmies are generally included because there aren’t all that many of them (they’re right at the 1.0 on this chart as well), and they’re hardly of continental scale. Hard to call them a major geographic race. Aboriginies and Papuans are usually combined for similar reasons. Koisans or Bushmen aren’t one of the numbered groups on this particular chart, but would I think show more genetic distance from other groups than pygmies (from other things I’ve read based on the science), but there are even less of them.
So doing that you get to the six I listed. Which is what’s generally used for the major continental scale geographic races.
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*Pygmies AREN’T generally included because …
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Femi,
I don’t like political correctness, partly because of the reason you mentioned. It’s not really being honest and loving people around you. It’s about being polite and not reveal your ugly side.
For the same reason I dislike the idea of “tolerance”. I don’t want to be tolerated, I want to be loved and accepted. And if I’m not, I prefer to know it. I don’t want you to smile to my face just so you can think of yourself as a good person. If you dislike me, or who/what I am (or you think I am), good for you. You don’t have to be polite around me. Your tolerance doesn’t help me.
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Please see my link above to a paper by Neil Risch & Hua Tang. Genetic clusters correspond almost perfectly to social races.
Ah, but you see, social races are not the same all around the world. A person can be white in one culture, but non-white in another… without changing genetic material.
There’s no one way races are constructed and understood.
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Mira–
Actually we now have solid evidence that they did, but only to a limited degree. All of the six major geographic races except ssAfricans have a little bit of Neatherthal genetic material in them, about 1-4% depending on the group, iirc. Presumably only the small minority of Neanderthal genes which were advantageous in modern humans fixated in modern populations.
This was found in a large German study that was published last year. They painstakingly retried DNA from several different Neanderthal sites and compared them with modern humans. They took painstaking care and had what are apparently sound DNA filtering steps to ensure that their samples were contaminated with modern human DNA during the retrieval and analysis process. (But yeah this does need to be replicated especially for this reason.)
It’s not so surprising that Neanderthal genes haven’t been found in ssAfricans so far, given the range of Neaderthals where modern humans are believe to have encountered them. One Neanderthal specialist (the guy I link below for describing this study and it’s implications) thinks Neanderthal genes are likely to be present in ssAfricans to SOME small degree lower than 1% at least.
What’s surprising to me is that Aust. Aboriginies have Neanderthal genes at all, given the hypothesized beach combing route around the India Ocean to Australia and New Guinea.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertals-live-genome-sequencing-2010.html
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I should say probably to only a very limited degree. The degree of fixation of Neanderthal genes we have in the modern out of Africa population could have come about with as few as a few dozen mating apparently, or anyway less than 100, over a long period of time.
btw, the definition of species in biology, even in vertebrates, is no long that different species can NEVER mate and produce fertile offspring. It’s more that it’s observed very rarely even when they two different species occupy overlapping geographic ranges. Also this concept of what demarks a species doesn’t work at all well in many kinds of plants and other life forms. It’s close enough for government work, more or less, for mammals.
Yeah species has become a bit of a fuzzy set too.
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Ummm…. I guess I’ll post this again(for the thousandth time) since it seems some of us have problems understanding why the classical American concept of race just doesn’t work in biology.
“It is indeed possible to combine the information from covarying traits into weighted averages that take account of the traits’ covariation (technically known as “principal components” of variation). When this has been done, however, the results have not borne out the claims for racial divisions. The geographical maps of principal component values constructed by Cavalli, Menozzi and Piazza in their famous The History and Geography of Human Genes show continuous variation over the whole world with no sharp boundaries and with no greater similarity occurring between Western and Eastern Europeans than between Europeans and Africans! Thus, the classically defined races do not appear from an unprejudiced description of human variation. Only the Australian Aborigines appear as a unique group.”
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/
And how the hell did you guys start to talk about Neanderthals? I’m behind on reading the posts. I hope you guys aren’t talking about how Neanderthal genes are supposedly advantageous. If Europeans have Neanderthal genes, than so do most African Americans and other “New World” Blacks.
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And how the hell did you guys start to talk about Neanderthals?
Sam mentioned other human races that don’t exist anymore, and then I mentioned Neanderthals.
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Femi–
This is really a canard.
People who are just race realists or who espouse a HBD (human biodiversity) point of view and who aren’t also bigoted racist denigrators, white supremacists or neo Nazis masquerading under a race realist label, don’t do that.
You won’t hear that sort of thing, from people like Charles Murray, Razib Khan of GNXP (who’s a Bangladeshi American atheist from a Muslim background), Steve Sailer, Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpendig, John Hawks, Cavalli-Sforza, John Derbyshire, and so on and so forth. you won’t even hear it from folks who aren’t in anyway primary disseminators of HBD information, but sorta in the HBD blogosphere, like OneSTDV or Chuck Ross, that Obsidian’s always battling with. You won’t hear it from me. Ever.
It’s really completely different. The effort is to understand the true, not feed hate.
BTW if you read him closely and realize he avoids flash point words like “race”, preferring things like major geographic populations, you’ll realize that a major NY Times science reporter, Nicholas Wade, who focuses on human evolution, genetics, human prehistory migrations and so on, is pretty much in the HBD camp as well. This is often remarked by Steve Sailer and at GNXP.
None of the the stuff I’ve talked about on this thread comes from white nationalist, white supremacist, or racially bigoted type sites or books, etc., which i don’t read and never have. Well a couple of them very few times to get a feel for what types of things are there. It comes from the science and from books and sites that spread word about human prehistory, HBD and race realism scientific findings.
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***A person can be white in one culture, but non-white in another… without changing genetic material. There’s no one way races are constructed and understood. ***
Does there need to be one way that races are constructed and understood? Imagine trying to divide the United States into “regions.” There are many ways to do it so that there are 4, 5, or even 10 regions. Necessarily, some lines will be blurry and/or arbitrary. Is Oklahoma in the Mid-West or the South? Doesn’t Greenwich Connecticut belong in the same region as New York City?
But none of this changes the fact that the South is warmer than the Northeast and the difference is due to geography.
These divisions is somewhat arbitrary and conventional. But that the more basic truth: geographically separated groups of human beings in fact exhibit measurable genetic differences. This can hardly be surprising; that’s how evolution works. And many of these groups have been effectively separated from the others for tens of thousands of years.
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The Cynic–
That’s probably true actually, from the European admixture.
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Does there need to be one way that races are constructed and understood?
Yes, if they are a biological fact. No, if they are a cultural construct.
Doesn’t Greenwich Connecticut belong in the same region as New York City?
I wouldn’t know. This is the first time I hear of Greenwich Connecticut.
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The Cynic–
So what. No scientist or student to the science has ever claimed otherwise. That doesn’t mean there are no major geographic races. It just means there are clinal regions as I’ve endlessly stated on this there, where there’s a lot of mixture.
This certainly isn’t true as presented on the above chart. It should be born in mind that what the above shows though is primarily time of breaking off into primarily non interbreeding groups, except in clinal areas.
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Ok, let’s try this from another angle.
There are many groups of people who didn’t have much contact and didn’t interbreed. Does that automatically make them different races?
Also, if you go enough back in time, all people are Africans. So what’s stopping us to go back in time as much as we can?
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“This certainly isn’t true as presented on the above chart. It should be born in mind that what the above shows though is primarily time of breaking off into primarily non interbreeding groups, except in clinal areas.”
Sigh… I just posted about population clustering on the other post. Guess I’ll do it once more
“A clustering of populations that does correspond to classical continental “races” can be acheived by using a special class of non-functional DNA, microsatellites. By selecting among microsatellites, it is possible to find a set that will cluster together African populations, European populations, and Asian populations, etc. These selected microsatellite DNA markers are not typical of genes, however, but have been chosen precisely because they are “maximally informative” about group differences. Thus, they tell us what we already knew about the differences between populations of the classical “races” from skin color, face shape, and hair form. They have the added advantage of allowing us to make good estimates of the amount of intermixture that has occurred between populations as a result of migrations and conquests.”
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/
Micro-satellites are colloquially known as “junk DNA” by geneticist. I don’t have the exact percentage, but they only look at a tiny bit of your genes looking for your population cluster. This is not your entire genome.
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That last comment was directed towards Doug1
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Mira
Race is both a social construct to some degree (and more in the minds of some people than others) but also has a biological substrate and reality to it.
That reality is ancestry.
A biological race is a group of descents from a primarily common ancestry, with some small amounts of introgression of other races from interbreeding. It’s not a small amount in bordering or clinal regions between major geograpic races for the most part. (So far as bordering goes what matters is how big the barriers are or aren’t against mass migration.)
The major continental scale biological races share common ancestry more than 10k years ago.
But also less than 100k years ago, which is currently the earliest time when out of ssAfrica migrations of modern humans is thought to have occurred. Probably around 80k years ago two major out of Africa migrations began, one that was beach combing around the Indian Ocean and into Pupua New Guinea and Australia, and the other up through Egypt and Israel, later branching into Western Eurasians and Eastern Eurasian, and probably by a further branching, into SE Asians.
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The one drop rule for African Americans is clearly far more of a social construct, than a view of race based on biological ancestry.
However the vast majority of black americans have by far majority African ancestry.
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The Cynic–
They were chosen because they are maximally informative about ancestry. Specifically about the time when different human groups branched apart in migrating out of Africa, and then further branched apart into separate breeding populations.
They weren’t chosen to correspond with preconceived social notions of race at al. That’s not what Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s intent or design was about at all, as you’d know if you read his “History and Geography of Human Genes” as I have, long ago.
The passage you quoted is being intentionally misleading without exactly lying. Cavalli-Sforza’s methods are thoroughly respected by those working in related genetics areas and he has a school of scientiest that are extending his work.
CS wasn’t setting about to show e.g. that because Europeans are a major cluster within Western Eurasians or those that have traditionally been called Caucasians, they’re genetically smarter. He wasn’t testing phenotypically active gene areas for that at all. For one thing when he did the bulk of his work, he couldn’t. The human genome hadn’t been fully sequenced yet.
Some people are looking for phenotypically active genes that different by race and have certainly found them in areas that effect medicine, genetic diseases and so on. Bruce Lahn has found genetic variations (alleles) which look like they’re one (of many) alleles effecting intelligence, which vary among major geographic populations, i.e. races.
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The Cynic–
Further it’s not like leftist scientists or anyway anything like all of them treat work like this even handedly and fairly. Many attack it any way they can, not for scientific reasons but for ideological ones.
By and large though Cavali-Sforza’s work is very highly regarded and accepted.
Partly this is because he WASN’T setting out to shown that one racial group has e.g. higher intelligence producing alleles than another. Instead he was trying to learn about human prehistory migrations and ancestry and so on through genetic methods.
It’s only when the absurd leftist PC notion started getting widely pushed that “race does not exist” or “race is entirely a social construct” that he started getting attacked very much, such as in your quote.
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Race is not just a social construct, any more than ancestry is a social construct.
At root, it’s as simple as that.
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The Cynic–
That’s certainly true.
The whole genome is what’s being looked at now, and in recent years.
It’s complicated, difficult stuff. But the work is piling up.
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@Doug1
Here this sums up everything you don’t seem to grasp about human variation perfectly. When you read this the first time I want you to read it as if EVERYTHING is 100% truth. After that feel free to pick apart anything you want and questions it.
http://newsreel.org/guides/race/whatdiff.htm
“Noah Rosenberg, Marcus Feldman and others analyzed the variation in 377 different DNA sequences from 1056 individuals from around the world. They found that 95% of the DNA variation they studied is due to differences between individuals within any continent. But they also found they could use the remaining 5% of the variation as genetic “footprints” indicating the continent from which an individual’s recent ancestors came.
Some were quick to interpret these results as evidence that old-fashioned notions of the “races of man” have been correct all along. But does it? What do these studies actually tell us? And why should our interpretations matter?
Reports about such studies commonly fall prey to three confusions: they conflate DNA markers of ancestry with markers of race. They mistake the fact that some gene variants are more common in some populations than others as signs of racial “difference” between those populations. And they assume that disparities in group outcomes can be attributed to inborn, or genetic, differences between races.
But the DNA sequences studied by Rosenberg and his colleagues are not genes. Known by geneticists as “microsatellite short tandem repeats” (and more colloquially as “junk DNA”), they do not code for proteins, but just sit there taking up space in our DNA. Mutations in DNA sequences that don’t code for anything are not affected by natural and sexual selection. They are neither selected for nor against but are simply passed down, generation to generation. Comparing these accumulated mutation patterns can provide clues to ancient population movements. But they have no effect on physical traits such as skin color or hair form or blood type.
In other words, the study accomplished the same thing our eyes do everyday. You can look at someone and stand a pretty good chance of identifying the continent where that person’s recent ancestors lived, especially if you’re gazing at someone whose family has resided in the same place for several generations – as did all the subjects of the study.
But what’s that got to do with “race”? We all have ancestors from elsewhere – and if we go back far enough, about 70,000 or so years ago, all our ancestors can be traced back to Africa. But if our idea of race assumes that different groups each share among themselves a different suite of inborn traits, then we have to ask, “What difference makes a difference?” Certainly not micro-satellite short tandem repeats.
Still, there’s no question that some gene forms show up more often in some populations than others: alleles that code for blue eyes, or the A, B, O blood groups, and of course, those alleles that influence skin color . (We all have the same 30,000 or so genes. But some genes come in different forms, or varieties, called alleles.) But just because some members of a population might carry a specific gene form, doesn’t mean all members do. Only a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jews carry the Tay-Sachs allele.
That’s because most human variation falls within, not between populations. About 85% of all genetic variation can, on average, be found within any local population, be they Swedes, Kikuyu, or Hmong. About 94% can be found within any continental population, consistent with what the Rosenberg Science study found. In fact, there are no characteristics, no traits, not even one gene that turns up in all members of one so-called race yet is absent from others.
Indeed, the Rosenberg team found they could cluster the individuals in their sample into several different statistically significant groups, only one of which corresponded to five continents. They also found that no matter which clustering scheme they used, individuals could be placed in more than one group.
The reason for all this within-group variation is because unlike most other species, modern humans, Homo sapien sapiens, are young, only about 150,000 years or so old, and we’ve always moved. Human populations just haven’t been isolated from each other long enough to evolve into separate sub-species, or races. As humans migrated around the globe, populations bumped into each other and shared their mates – and genes. Sometimes genes flowed across great distances – through trade, war, slavery, piracy, exile and migration. More often they flowed from village to village to village.”
Hopefully you read ALL of that Doug1 because I see a lot of your beliefs about race that are simply untrue popping up repeatedly in the comment section.
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Mira–
Curious, what country are you in?
Polish living in Britain perhaps? (You said you grew up under socialism.)
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doug
You are full of crap. I saw that silly stuff you wrote about blk women not being rapped by wht men cause they really wanted to be taken by the big white alpha.
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Polish living in Britain perhaps?
No. What makes you think I live in Britain?
I live in Serbia.
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@Doug1
“Bruce Lahn has found genetic variations (alleles) which look like they’re one (of many) alleles effecting intelligence, which vary among major geographic populations, i.e. races.”
Here is a quote from Sagat on the Orlando Patterson post:
“Those alleles that Bruce Lahn discovered are most likely associated with brain function, as they are variants of the microcephalin gene. Further research has shown that they are also positively selected, so we know that they have a benefit on reproduction.
Research by Phillipe Rushton, who many here would call a racist scientist, did not find any correlation between these genes and IQ or brain size. So what do they do? We don’t know. They obviously have a beneficial effect, but in what way?
Many alleles have multiple associations. The gene that causes near sightedness, for example, also causes a 6-8 point increase in IQ. Those microcephalin variants may cause something outside of brain function that lead to increased fitness for those that carry it.”
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The gene that causes near sightedness, for example, also causes a 6-8 point increase in IQ.
Ha! Something to make me proud to be near sighted! 😉
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@Doug1
Every comment that you just recently directed towards me concerning my first post can be proven wrong here:
http://newsreel.org/guides/race/whatdiff.htm
When you read this the first time I want you to read it as if EVERYTHING is 100% truth. After that feel free to pick apart anything you want and questions it.
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The Cynic–
That doesn’t prove anything I’ve said wrong and isn’t close to the relevant science.
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The Cynic–
Sagat’s point was that Rushton, though he would be considered by many here as a racist scientist, has scientific integrity. He didn’t juice the results in the direction he may have wanted, or a lot here would claim he wanted.
That doesn’t mean his finding is right though. I wonder how large his sample size was. Basically I don’t know enough about that Rushton particular work.
The search for alleles that effect general intelligence (or specific intelligences) is in it’s early days. Techniques are rapidly getting more powerful. However it’s likely a pretty complicated combination of alleles.
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@Doug1
“That doesn’t prove anything I’ve said wrong and isn’t close to the relevant science.”
Okay now you’re simply believing what YOU want. You don’t care about actual science. All you want is something that allows you to justify your racism and/or political motives. Even if you have to depend on pseudo-science to do so.
Please tell me how Noah A. Rosenberg and Marcus W. Feldman are not real scientist? I mean if their work isn’t relevant to science than what are they? You do know that w/o their work you wouldn’t even know about microsatellites or be able to use them to trace ancestry?
-The DNA sequences they studied were not genes.
-Microsatellites short tandem repeats don’t code for proteins, all they do is take up space in our genes.
– Mutations that don’t code for anything are not affected by natural and sexual selection.
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eeb/people/rnoah/
http://www-evo.stanford.edu/marc.html
Answer me honestly. Did you even bother to read all of the link? I really think you should bc I see you repeating things that are SPECIFICALLY addressed w/in the writing.
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***Race is both a social construct to some degree (and more in the minds of some people than others) but also has a biological substrate and reality to it.***
Absolutely correct. I would be interested to learn if those disputing this would ignore this in choosing a bone marrow donor.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110220/ts_afp/scienceuspopulationfood
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@Doug1
If you do not know enough about Rushton’s work why did I see you cite one of his studies in an earlier post? Or maybe I am thinking of Uncle Milton. Anyways the point is you took a leap with the Bruce Lahn stuff. The brain has many functions and their was absolutely NOTHING in Lahn’s study that pointed to those alleles having anything to do with intelligence. Why bring him up when all he did was make a hypothesis that one of the most famous contemporary HDBers debunked? All it does is make Lahn’s work look weaker than it already is
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***brain has many functions and their was absolutely NOTHING in Lahn’s study that pointed to those alleles having anything to do with intelligence. ***
I think the more interesting point in relation to work by the likes of Lahn, Ben Voight, Williamson, John Hawks & co, is that it shows that there has been recent regional evolution. Which shouldn’t be surprising as people look different, but there work indicates that selection also relates to genes affecting brain function.
nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
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@Schwartz
I read that article when it first came out.
1)The role of the genes were unknown
2)I know many of you guys are ignorant when it comes to African history, but believe it or not, not all of Africa was a band of hunter-gather groups. Kanem-Bornu, Songhay, Mali, Ghana, Axum, Nubia, Kongo, etc. Plenty of civilizations there.
3)”Which shouldn’t be surprising as people look different”… yeah I agree with that.
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Ah really? So why the zealotry?
You know exactly what I’m talking about. You and your ilk.
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None of the the stuff I’ve talked about on this thread comes from white nationalist, white supremacist, or racially bigoted type sites or books, etc., which i don’t read and never have.
Could have fooled me! I’m with sam, just say you hate blacks and call it a day! You still haven’t answered my question. What do you propose to do with all this ‘knowledge’, a eugenics program perhaps?
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@ Herneith
Do you really think you’ll get an honest answer from any of those hypocrites? (rhetorical question obviously)
Here’s another one for Doug1 or whoever else wishes to find the ultimate proof that there are just two “races” – n****rs and “good” people.
You live in a country that declares itself as the “example of the civilised world”. You are brainwashed with this “race” nonsense from early childhood on and firmly believe that 95% of the world population has to follow suit your ideas. Ideas you’re not even able to back up within the realm you claim them to be in. You are brainwashed into believing that everybody else is wrong. Not only that, you live in an environment where ignorance is happily cultivated as long as it makes money, well known to the so-called “rest of the world”. That alone is…. but… you know what. F*ck you.
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@Doug1
Where was that “proof” that you had that debunked the similar IQ scores of the White & mixed race German/African American military children?
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***that debunked the similar IQ scores of the White & mixed race German/African American military children?***
This study doesn’t really tell us much as military recruits were pre-screened by psychometric testing (note that about 30 percent of US african americans failed pre-induction mental tests for the military, compared with 3 percent of europeans).
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Doug1
Since Cynic brought it back up, here’s the link to the Rushton study about the microcephalin and ASPM variants.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:9mCi7hfbTKcJ:psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2007%2520Biol%2520Letters%25202.pdf+Rushton+ASPM&hl=en&sig=AHIEtbQ-CfIOLab3fUztKiCWM2EopxUI8g
I’m sure Rushton himself was surprised at the results of his research.
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I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, there’s a Channel 4 documentary with Rageh Omaar “Race and intelligence”. Although it’s only 1 hour, it seems balanced and reasonable.
The interview with the geneticist Steve Jones is particularly revealing.
I can’t tell how to get it but if you bump into it, I do recommend watching it.
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***The interview with the geneticist Steve Jones is particularly revealing.***
Jones isn’t particularly reliable, he doesn’t seem aware of genetic variation amongst groups.
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He is well aware of genetic variation. He clearly says it in the interview.
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So what is his argument then? I can’t find the link, so could you paraphrase it?
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The whole film is on Youtube in several parts. The Jones interview is in this part
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I had a good laugh when I watched the documentary I posted. That was when Rushton talked about female hip sizes and made the connection with brain sizes and intelligence.
Jones is a biologist and geneticist, Rushton is a psychologist. Rushton is obviously the more qualified genetics expert of the two, going by his amazing theories … lol
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Omg… Rushton is so wrong when it comes to race and bones. Lol I think I already covered that you can take a million measurements of skulls from whites in New York and whites from Georgia, come up with some statistics, and find out the probability of whether the skull is a New Yorker white or a Georgian white.
Not to mention his brain studies have been debunked by South African paleontologist, Philip Tobias.
“Three times Nobel nominated anthropologist Philip Tobias, compared 7 racial and national groups in a study on brain size/weight, in which he reported that the brain size of American blacks was larger than any white group.”
http://www.africaresource.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=554:race-and-brain-size-blacks-have-bigger-brains&catid=105:genetics&Itemid=360
Zack Cernovsky also wrote a reply to this crazy man on his ridiculously flawed brain studies.
btw brain size and intelligence are not perfectly correlated.
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Re the Myerson study:
“Mephisto presented that link like it was a slam dunk for the case that IQ is malleable, but if you read the article then I think you can agree that it’s short on details and absent any hard data”
Correct. And even if it did present some hard data, it would just be one lone study contradicting the large body of research that has found IQ to be increasingly stable throughout life (at least up until adulthood), and thus not all that malleable in college.
But, if the Myerson study is correct, then “there goes the entire argument of the book [TBC], and every single related study” — pretty strong words based on such weak findings. If you conduct one study that debunks all the previous studies, then either you’re a transendant genius or you’ve done something wrong (cf. Jacques Benveniste’s silly “memory of water” theory that claimed to lend credence to the power of homeopathic remedies, even though all other studies that have been conducted before or since have shown homeopathic remedies to be bunk).
Anyway here’s a more recent (and substantially more comprehensive) study from 2003 that takes the Myserson study into account, along with several others into this specific question, and finds that some research indicates blacks get more of a cognitive boost out of college, other research indicates that whites do, and other research indicates no difference (Lamont Flowers, by the way, the lead author of this study, is himself African American).
And this study’s own conclusion? “… even in the presence of an extensive array of controls for background and precollege traits, institutional characteristics, and academic and social experiences, ***Caucasian students make significantly higher
cognitive gains in college than African American students do in the first 3 years of college***.”
That’s why it’s not a good idea to base your opinions (and then trash the opinions of others) based on a single study.
Cognitive Effects of College: Differences Between African American and Caucasian Students
by Lamont A. Flowers and Ernest T. Pascarella
from: Research in Higher Education
Volume 44, Number 1, 21-49
Abstract at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/m62h207064372682/
Full PDF at: http://people.clemson.edu/~lflower/cognitiveeffects.pdf
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“Those who have even a pedestrian level of knowledge when it comes to genetics, and do not rely on crtl+c and crtl+v, know “the exact reason” why race IS a social construct.
Start with “Fst” (fixation index).
“Fst”, a measure of genetic distance, is a statistical measurement of the fraction of a variation found between samples.
There is substantial and unequivocal evidence that there is currently only one race, or subspecies, of human on the planet: Homo sapiens sapiens.”
Oddly, it never dawned on the author that the question of whether there are human subspecies is wholly independent from the question of whether regional ancestral populations are genetically different in socially significant ways. It seems rather obvious to me that whether or not pygmies and watusi represent distinct subspecies is a question independent from whether or not the 6 sigma or so height difference between the two populations is partially mediated by genetics.
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“The level of genetic differentiation required to classify a population (or group of populations) as a subspecies is an Fst greater than 0.25. Multiple studies of a variety of segments of DNA in humans clearly demonstrate that this level IS NOT REACHED in humans, even in mtDNA.”
My reply: It should be noted that there is no set Fst value for identifying subspecies. Mephisto’s apparently using Alan Templeton’s arbitrary numbers. For his source, Templeton cites Smith et al. (2007):
“A standard criterion for a subspecies or race in the nonhuman literature under the traditional definition of a subspecies as a geographically circumscribed, sharply differentiated population is to have F* values of at least 0.25 to 0.30 (Smith et al. 1997).”
Here’s what the Smith et al paper actually says:
“Dichopatric populations are regarded as subspecies if they fail to exhibit full differentiation (i.e., exhibit overlap in variation of their differentiae up to 25-30%), even in the absence of contact (overlap exceeding 25-30% does not qualify for taxonomic recognition of either dichopatric populations or of parapatric populations outside of their zones of intergradation)”
The paper doesn’t event discuss Fst! It discusses the 75% rule — if members of populations within a species can correctly be assigned to their population > 75% of the time, those populations can be defined as subspecies. Well, since this is the authority that Templeton (and Mephisto) want to use, let’s use it!
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@ podard: Nicely done. Seems you were way ahead of me: just yesterday I mentioned the same 2003 study in rebutting the original post.
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[…] my badly wounded Research Assistants uncovered a Valentine’s Day gem: a guest post entitled Mephisto on race & IQ. Too many “Arm Chair Internet Geneticists” and “Know Nothing HBDers” […]
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As I said, that’s essentially what I’ve done. Or rather what Cavalli-Sforza has done.
Except when talking about “major geographic populations” i.e. races, he leaves off Pygmys, since they’re tiny in number and only live in a couple of relatively tiny areas of Africa. One could have put Koisans/Bushmen on your list too but they’re omitted from the major races list for the same reasons. Also native Australians and New Guineans are nearly always combined for similar reasons. Then, using more popular names I’ll slightly reframe your list thusly:
1. Australian Aborigines
2. SE Asians/Austronesians/Pacific Islanders
3. Amerindians
4. NE Asians
5. Caucasians /Arabs/Iranians
6. Sub Saharan Africans
And maybe
7. S. Asian Indians
Which is what I said on this site initially.
One can make a pretty good case for having a 7th major geographic race, S Asian Indians. They appear from genetic studies to be a complex mixture of an early substrate of Austronesians/Aborigines (before those groups slip apart on the beach combing migration that ended up in SE Asia and Australia), and Caucasians from Mesopotamia (Dravidians), Iran and Central Asia. In eastern India and Bangladesh there’s some E. Asian admixture as well. Extensive genetic work on India has only been coming in more recently. There’s also a good bit of internal Indian sensitivities involved. There are caste differences and regional ones. Also Indians have historically liked to think of themselves as more (entirely) Caucasian than they now appear to be (probably as a result of British colonialism, with the early plausibility that linguistic study of Sanskrit, an Indo European family language, gave to that).
Voila. This division is WIDELY culturally recognized in America, Europe and elsewhere. I think Indians are widely seen as a separate major race by most, especially non Indians. We have all of these races in fairly substantial numbers in the US, other than Australian Aborigines who don’t get around much.
Nope, it works very well with commonly held social constructs of race, as I’ve slightly reworked it.
As for people thinking about 3-4 races only, nope. Europeans and Americans may tend to forget about Aborigines and no they aren’t very important historically or at present to other groups, but they are socially recognized as being very racially different from Caucasians and NE Asians. Many Americans and probably more Europeans combine North and SE Asians into East Asians, but everyone with much familiarity of NE and SE Asians realizes they’re pretty different.
Brits talk mostly about Europeans, Asians and blacks, and by Asians they have in mind S Asian Pakistanis and Indians, but they definitely recognize NE Asians such as Chinese as a distinctly different race.
No, my group of 6 or 7 based on biology and how major the group is (which is part of the argument for splitting out S. Asians from Caucasians), works VERY well with socially constructed notions of what the major races are in societies around the world, provided they’ve come into sufficient contact directly or vicariously with each of them
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If you could stop typing tome of bullS**t long enough, maybe someone would read your post. A right regular snooze fest you are! What did I learn? That there are a lot of jacka**** out there with plenty of time on their hands, hahahahaha!!
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@ Doug1
Firstly, “races” should not be overlooked because of their population size. If you feel that they meet your definition of observable race, then they should be included on that basis. If you want to use population size to omit races on the lower end, then you should also use population size to identify Super Races on the higher end, like the East and Southeast Asian super populations.
Secondly, everybody already acknowledges race on the casual, observable level. We all know that people look different and that these can be loosely categorized into large “racial” groupings. It’s just important to see these as such, and stop trying to treat them as if they are distinct and discrete genetic races who have significant evolutionary differences—particularly in poorly understood areas like intelligence,, creativity, and personality.
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King–
Of course they shouldn’t be ignored when doing fine levels of detail or technical work.
However the can and should be excluded from the category of “major continental scale geographic races”. (Note continental scale is not quite the same thing as exactly corresponding to the somewhat arbitrarily demarcated geographic continents.)
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I have followed this discussion of race and intelligence for some time and I think almost everyone involved is looking at things from the wrong direction.
I shall base by argument on a singla assumption:
Intelligence can be measured, and IQ tests do so accurately!
So this means that lets assume for a second that the differences in racial IQs are true. Lets assume that blacks have anaverage IQ of 75, lets assume whites have an average IQ of 100, and lets assume asians have an average IQ of 106. So what?
What does this tell me of the black guy that is sitting besides me on the bus?
The problem with this discussion, is that we are all trying to prove or disprove the differences between the races, that we forget the use of a very significant word: Average!
An average score or measurement is a mean score that tells you nothing of the highest score or lowest score used to calculate it.
In other words, knowing that blacka have an average IQ of 75 only tells me something about the probability to meet a person whose coresponds to that, or is around that. This number will be the highest point on the bell curve. But there are scores on both sides. So there are people with IQs of 135 and above(though less in numbers than among whites or asians), as well as there are people with IQs of 50! The bell curve for whites also does not deny that there are whites with IQs of 85 and below…call them retarded if u want.
As I said before, this are average scores!
Many people understand these racial IQ averages as saying that whites are more intelligent than blacks. that is absolutely wrong. It does say something about the percentages of the races represented on different IQ levels. But does it tell you if the the white guy sitting opposite you in the train has a higher IQ than the black african guy sitting next to him? No it doesn´t. The black guy may well have an IQ above 135, and the white guy may well be under 85. We all certainly accept that that these extremes exist in all races! There are extremely low IQ whites and blacka and asians, aswell as there are extremely high IQ whites blacks and asians. The only differerence lies in the perceatages they represent in their respective populations! So how do I know who is who just by looking at them?…simple I can´t.
That is why this racial averages could be very dangerous, if the authors and researchers don´t explain to the public what an average is and what it means.
I´ll give you an example:
black 100m sprinters averagely cover the distance in 10.2s. Whites sprinters do it in 10.5s. This does tell me that there is a higher probability to meet a black sprinter who covers the distance in 10.2s than there is to meet a white. Nor does it say no whites can run the distance in 10.2s or faster. And it tells me nothing about the fastest person in the world. He could be white, or black. A racial average IQ tells me nothing about the IQ of the race of the most intelligent person in the world…he/she could be black, white, or asian.
Inspite of these IQ scores, we must be carefull to treat people as individuals and not as members of a race bound to the racial averages. That is the danger I see in these discussions, especially when dealing with the american public which is really not very educated.
Apart from that…we could, just for simplicities sake group humans into races. But we need to avoid acting like those races have clear cut boundries. The racial groups only indicate the proximity to a certain geographical area, and even that is tricky as we see with andamanese and pygmies.
There is a very slow transition as you move up from central africa toward europe:
the hair loosens more and more, the skin lightens more and more, etc. There is no telling where negroid characteristics stop and where caucasoid charachteristics start.
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@ akteddy79
I take your point, but I’m afraid that it is a rather naive one, given human nature. What you are saying *as an example) is that White people (as as group) are quite a bit smarter than Black people (as a group). But never mind, because hey, that doesn’t say that any given White person is smarter than any given Black person.
But of course, what it does say, is that CHANCES ARE, (and all things being equal) a randomly selected White person is quite likely to be genetically smarter than Black person. I suppose that wouldn’t have any impact on… how people are hired for jobs that require an intellectual component? Do you think that wouldn’t have an impact on who people would be more likely to vote for?
Besides, very few intelligence experts think that an I.Q. score represents the genetic or potential intelligence of a person.
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Okay..
Lets start with there’s a high dropout rate for black kids in college. Ergo, those who finish will be the higher IQ ones who can handle the course. Also, there’s another study on GPA improvement that showed the ‘gap closing’ was a statistical phantom. Both white and black improved by the same amount in one study, but it looked like more because the blacks original grades were poorer, and the less able students drop out (again, mainly black). You need to watch out for stats manipulation like that in this kind of study. The study concluded that it was closing the b/w gap (by percentage improvement), btw. You actually had to look at the scores to realise they’d failed to close the gap at all and both groups improved their GPA by exactly the same.
Also like to add that there have been so many inter racial and twin adoption studies that show IQ in early adulthood is about 70% hereditary and that IQ tests aren’t culturally biased that I marvel at how the author of this failed to notice them (and some of the people who left very ignorant comments on the subject). I also notice the absolute fixation on lower black IQ. You know, Ashkenazis score about as much higher that Europeans as Europeans do above Africans, but it never gets mentioned.
As for genetics: the IQ within a family can range typically 30 points ( average 15 points from the average either way), mostly genetically determined. There’s no genetic reason or evolutionary reason to support the same intelligence between races when it varies so much within a family. Being closely related does not mean homogenous. And having way more than a passing familiarity with the anthropology and genetics side of this argument, I can tell you the genetic similarity of human groups is vastly overstated. You should look up the essay ‘Lewontin’s fallacy’ which explains why clustering voids the claim of ‘raceless.’
Click to access Edwards.pdf
“In popular articles that play down the genetical differences
among human populations, it is often stated that
about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to
individual differences within populations and only 15%
to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It
has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo
sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic
data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is
unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact
that most of the information that distinguishes populations
is hidden in the correlation structure of the data
and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.”
In fact, you’d have to believe the evolution of the human brain stopped cold about 130k ago, before African and non African populations split up, and that environment has no selective effect on intelligence. You’d also have to ignore (known for a fact) that brain affecting mutations appear in the Eurasian population but not in Africans that have a date of 40k or so. You also need to ignore that non Africans have a little Neanderthal in them (a source of non African DNA) and that the relative brain size is different between populations.
Someone above commented that IQ gets more herediatary with age, correctly. It starts of at about .2 in preschool, and increases to as much as .8 in mid adulthood. To the person whining about this: If you aren’t familiar with these facts or studies, why the hell do you think you have a valid opinion on this debate? Look them up for yourself.
Anyone curious; I am repeating parts of this almost verbatim from a post (anon) by a phd specialist in the evolution of the human brain. He’s so terrified of being hounded from his job he dared not stick his name on it publicly. Which is pretty common. ONLY 15% of psych phds support the evnvironmental explantion (Snyderman and Rothman poll), but hardly anyone will come out publicly as being pro genetic differences, as they all know there’s a good chance they’ll lose their jobs if they do.
Look up the letter ‘Egalitarian fiction, collective fraud’ if you want the see some facts on the subject. It exposes how science is gagged by the media and how the psychologists are too scared to speak out.
Click to access 1994egalitarianfiction.pdf
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King’s comment couldn’t be more wrong.
“Besides, very few intelligence experts think that an I.Q. score represents the genetic or potential intelligence of a person.”
As wrong as he could be. Read the letter below for what they really think.
Dec. 13, 1994 Wall Street Journal p A18
Mainstream Science on Intelligence
Since the publication of “The Bell Curve,” many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstate current scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are actually firmly supported.
This statement outlines conclusions regarded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence, in particular, on the nature, origins, and practical consequences of individual and group differences in intelligence. Its aim is to promote more reasoned discussion of the vexing phenomenon that the research has revealed in recent decades. The following conclusions are fully described in the major textbooks, professional journals and encyclopedias in intelligence.
The Meaning and Measurement of Intelligence
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings–”catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.
Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments. They do not measure creativity, character personality, or other important differences among individuals, nor are they intended to.
While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence. Some use words or numbers and require specific cultural knowledge (like vocabulary). Others do not, and instead use shapes or designs and require knowledge of only simple, universal concepts (many/few, open/closed, up/down).
The spread of people along the IQ continuum, from low to high, can be represented well by the bell curve (in statistical jargon, the “normal curve”). Most people cluster around the average (IQ 100). Few are either very bright or very dull: About 3% of Americans score above IQ 130 (often considered the threshold for “giftedness”), with about the same percentage below IQ 70 (IQ 70-75 often being considered the threshold for mental retardation).
Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.
The brain processes underlying intelligence are still little understood. Current research looks, for example, at speed of neural transmission, glucose (energy) uptake, and electrical activity of the brain, uptake, and electrical activity of the brain.
Group Differences
Members of all racial-ethnic groups can be found at every IQ level. The bell curves of different groups overlap considerably, but groups often differ in where their members tend to cluster along the IQ line. The bell curves for some groups (Jews and East Asians) are centered somewhat higher than for whites in general. Other groups (blacks and Hispanics) are centered somewhat lower than non-Hispanic whites.
The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks. The evidence is less definitive for exactly where above IQ 100 the bell curves for Jews and Asians are centered.
Practical Importance
IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Its relation to the welfare and performance of individuals is very strong in some arenas in life (education, military training), moderate but robust in others (social competence), and modest but consistent in others (law-abidingness). Whatever IQ tests measure, it is of great practical and social importance.
A high IQ is an advantage in life because virtually all activities require some reasoning and decision-making. Conversely, a low IQ is often a disadvantage, especially in disorganized environments. Of course, a high IQ no more guarantees success than a low IQ guarantees failure in life. There are many exceptions, but the odds for success in our society greatly favor individuals with higher IQs.
The practical advantages of having a higher IQ increase as life settings become more complex (novel, ambiguous, changing, unpredictable, or multifaceted). For example, a high IQ is generally necessary to perform well in highly complex or fluid jobs (the professions, management): it is a considerable advantage in moderately complex jobs (crafts, clerical and police work); but it provides less advantage in settings that require only routine decision making or simple problem solving (unskilled work).
Differences in intelligence certainly are not the only factor affecting performance in education, training, and highly complex jobs (no one claims they are), but intelligence is often the most important. When individuals have already been selected for high (or low) intelligence and so do not differ as much in IQ, as in graduate school (or special education), other influences on performance loom larger in comparison.
Certain personality traits, special talents, aptitudes, physical capabilities, experience, and the like are important (sometimes essential) for successful performance in many jobs, but they have narrower (or unknown) applicability or “transferability” across tasks and settings compared with general intelligence. Some scholars choose to refer to these other human traits as other “intelligences.”
Source and Stability of Within-Group Differences
Individuals differ in intelligence due to differences in both their environments and genetic heritage. Heritability estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8 (on a scale from 0 to 1), most thereby indicating that genetics plays a bigger role than does environment in creating IQ differences among individuals. (Heritability is the squared correlation of phenotype with genotype.) If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100% because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin.
Members of the same family also tend to differ substantially in intelligence (by an average of about 12 IQ points) for both genetic and environmental reasons. They differ genetically because biological brothers and sisters share exactly half their genes with each parent and, on the average, only half with each other. They also differ in IQ because they experience different environments within the same family.
That IQ may be highly heritable does not mean that it is not affected by the environment. Individuals are not born with fixed, unchangeable levels of intelligence (no one claims they are). IQs do gradually stabilize during childhood, however, and generally change little thereafter.
Although the environment is important in creating IQ differences, we do not know yet how to manipulate it to raise low IQs permanently. Whether recent attempts show promise is still a matter of considerable scientific debate.
Genetically caused differences are not necessarily irremediable (consider diabetes, poor vision, and phenal keton uria), nor are environmentally caused ones necessarily remediable (consider injuries, poisons, severe neglect, and some diseases). Both may be preventable to some extent.
Source and Stability of Between-Group Differences
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.
Racial-ethnic differences in IQ bell curves are essentially the same when youngsters leave high school as when they enter first grade. However, because bright youngsters learn faster than slow learners, these same IQ differences lead to growing disparities in amount learned as youngsters progress from grades one to 12. As large national surveys continue to show, black 17- year-olds perform, on the average, more like white 13-year-olds in reading, math, and science, with Hispanics in between.
The reasons that blacks differ among themselves in intelligence appear to be basically the same as those for why whites (or Asians or Hispanics) differ among themselves. Both environment and genetic heredity are involved.
There is no definitive answer to why IQ bell curves differ across racial-ethnic groups. The reasons for these IQ differences between groups may be markedly different from the reasons for why individuals differ among themselves within any particular group (whites or blacks or Asians). In fact, it is wrong to assume, as many do, that the reason why some individuals in a population have high IQs but others have low IQs must be the same reason why some populations contain more such high (or low) IQ individuals than others. Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but that genetics could be involved too.
Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals from the same socioeconomic backgrounds. To illustrate, black students from prosperous families tend to score higher in IQ than blacks from poor families, but they score no higher, on average, than whites from poor families.
Almost all Americans who identify themselves as black have white ancestors-the white admixture is about 20%, on average–and many self-designated whites, Hispanics, and others likewise have mixed ancestry. Because research on intelligence relies on self- classification into distinct racial categories, as does most other social-science research, its findings likewise relate to some unclear mixture of social and biological distinctions among groups (no one claims otherwise).
Implications for Social Policy
The research findings neither dictate nor preclude any particular social policy, because they can never determine our goals. They can, however, help us estimate the likely success and side-effects of pursuing those goals via different means.
The following professors-all experts in intelligence an allied fields-have signed this statement:
Richard D. Arvey, University of Minnesota Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., University of Minnesota John B. Carroll, U.N.C. at Chapel Hill, Raymond B. Cattell, University of Hawaii ,David B. Cohen, U.T. at Austin Rene W. Dawis, University of Minnesota Douglas K. Detterman, Case Western Reserve U.Marvin Dunnette,University of Minnesota Hans Eysenck, University of London Jack Feldman, Georgia Institute of Technology Edwin A. Fleishman, George Mason University Grover C. Gilmore, Case Western Reserve U.Robert A. Gordon, Johns Hopkins University Linda S. Gottfredsen, University of Delaware Richard J. Haier, U.C. Irvine
Garrett Hardin,U.C. Berkeley Robert Hogan,University of Tulsa Joseph M. Horn, U.T. at Austin Lloyd G. Humphreys, U.Ill. at Champaign-Urbana John E. Hunter, Michigan State University Seymour W. Itzkoff,Smith College Douglas N. Jackson, U. of Western Ontario James J. Jenkins, U. of South Florida Arthur R. Jensen, U.C. Berkeley Alan S. Kaufman, University of Alabama Nadeen L. Kaufman, Cal. School of Prof. Pshch., S.D.Timothy Z. Keith, Alfred University Nadine Lambert,U.C. Berkeley John C. Loehlin, U.T. at Austin David Lubinski, Iowa State University David T. Lykken, University of Minnesota Richard Lynn, University of Ulster at Coleraine Paul E. Meehl, University of Minnesota R. Travis Osborne, University of Georgia Robert Perloff, University of Pittsburg Robert Plomin, Institute of Psychiatry, London Cecil R. Reynolds Texas A&M University David C. Rowe University of Arizona J. Philippe Rushton U. of Western Ontario Vincent Sarich, U.C. BerkeleySandra Scarr, University of Virginia Frank L. Schmidt University of Iowa Lyle F. Schoenfeldt, Texas A&M University James C. Sharf,George Washington University Julian C. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University Del Theissen, U.T. at Austin Lee A. Thompson,Case Western Reserve U.Robert M. Thorndike, Western Washington University Philip Anthony Vernon, U. of Western Ontario Lee Willerman
It bugs me how people (like King) make these blanket statements without checking first.
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This is for Mr. Evets, who is desperate to make sure we all understand that though muscles, bones and other tissues are subject to evolution, magically, human brains are not.
I may be racist, but I’ve got no vendetta against any people. I was a population biologist and studied population genetics in several mammal species before changing careers (because I wanted money). I knew anthropologists who were desperate beyond measure to ignore certain salient facts, but the flat-earthism of their almost rigidly ideological positions is becoming untenable.
In short order, the moral universe occupied by this ideological sect is going to be badly shaken. I strongly advise finding another perch, and restating the values we share in a way that is independent of new data. Base it on social utility and aspirations ,not pre-supposed facts that may or not be true.
I now make my case.
A)
Many of the differences between individuals in broad categories likely emerge from differences in how genes are expressed in different sexes and how different sub-populations of humans have experienced cultural and social selection factors. This is not only not radical, this just makes humans mammals.
These categories do not necessarily correlate with socially-defined “race” or “gender”; narrowly-defined “Ancestry” and “sex” are more on the money. You don’t need to get even close to speciation or sub-group to have identifiable subgroups within a population. The whole “Not much variation” is no argument: when we say “race”, shorn of cultural baggage, we mean only a fuzzy concept denoting a group within a group. Large numbers of mammal species have such groups; dog varieties are one. That they’re artificial and human-bred is irrelevant. The concept is what counts. All dogs are the same species.
Biology makes this both a very reasonable and actually a predictive hypothesis; indeed, in some ways it demands that this be the case, given that we are social mammals with a history of getting around the planet and adapting to a myriad of physical, economic and social environments. Such things appear to be true of all other mammals.
However, as pointed out, a hypothesis, no matter how reasonable, is not evidence.
Science is now bearing this hypothesis out, however, and I detail this below.
My point: we need to absorb this data and stop clinging to the notion that we are not in any way biological machines, or are machines only below the head.
I understand the reaction this entails, but science is science: if this describes the human condition accurately, the social and political ramifications are irrelevant. It is important for us to know the hard truth, not some convenient lie. The lie will poison us.
If these things are true, lies will serve only to imprison us and prevent problem solving.
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Slate
Articles by William Saletan
This article says much well, and has not been effectively refuted. Its message of honesty and facing facts without abandoning values is important.
It sums up what many liberal geneticists are feeling. It’s discomfiting and disturbing, but reality does not appear to be helping the Universalist position.
Answer: Find comfort and solace in the human diversity that exists. Explore it fully. Do what we can. If there are uncomfortable truths, embrace them and work with them.
Science will steam ahead, regardless, so there’s not much we can do about that.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/liberalcreationism.html
How environmental and cultural explanations are weak, at best:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/environmentalimpact.html
And the conclusion:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/all_gods_children.html
And a follow-up:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/regrets.html
“I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.…
In fact, there’s a mountain of evidence that differential evolution has left each population with a balance of traits that could be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on circumstances. The list of differences is long and intricate. On average, compared with whites, blacks mature more quickly in the womb, are born earlier, and develop teeth, strength, and dexterity earlier. They sit, crawl, walk, and dress themselves earlier. They reach sexual maturity faster, and they have better eyesight. On each of these measures, East Asians lag whites and blacks. In exchange, East Asians get longer lives and bigger brains.
How this happened isn’t clear. Everyone agrees that the three populations separated 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. Even critics of racial IQ genetics accept the idea that through natural selection, environmental differences may have caused abilities such as distance running to become more common in some populations than in others. Possibly, genes for cognitive complexity became so crucial in some places that nature favored them over genes for developmental speed and vision. If so, fitness for today’s world is mostly dumb luck. If we lived in a savannah, kids programmed to mature slowly and grow big brains would be toast. Instead, we live in a world of zoos, supermarkets, pediatricians, pharmaceuticals, and information technology. Genetic advantages, in other words, are culturally created.
From the second piece:
When I look at all the data, studies, and arguments, I see a prima facie case for partial genetic influence. I don’t see conclusive evidence either way in the adoption studies. I don’t see closure of the racial IQ gap to single digits. And I see too much data that can’t be reconciled with the surge or explained by current environmental theories. I hope the surge surprises me. But in case it doesn’t, I want to start thinking about how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic difference, even between races.
The current favorite alternative to a genetic explanation is that black kids grow up in a less intellectually supportive culture. This is a testament to how far the race discussion has shifted to the right. Twenty years ago, conservatives were blaming culture, while liberals blamed racism and poverty. Now liberals are blaming culture because the emerging alternative, genetics, is even more repellent.
Back to the first:
“The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.”
William Saletan says it well in his third piece. It’s very important to add this.
Why write about this topic? Why hurt people’s feelings? Why gratify bigots?
Because truth matters. Because the truth isn’t as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it. And because you can’t solve a problem till you understand it.
And other notes, that do not provide succour to white racists:
Whitey does not come out on top. If you came here looking for material for your Aryan supremacy Web site, sorry. Stratifying the world by racial IQ will leave your volk in the dust. You might want to think about marrying a nice Jewish girl from Hong Kong. Or maybe reconsider that whole stratification idea.
5. Intermarriage is closing the gap. To the extent that IQ differences are genetic, the surest way to eliminate them is to reunite the human genome. This is already happening, including in my own family. In 1970, 1 percent of U.S. marriages were between blacks and nonblacks. By 1990, it was 4.5 percent. It may be the best punch line of the IQ debate: The more genetic the racial gap is, the faster we can obliterate it.
6. Environment matters. Genetic and environmental theories aren’t mutually exclusive. Hereditarians admit that by their own reading of the data, nongenetic factors account for 20 percent to 50 percent of IQ variation.
7. IQ is like wealth. Many people who used to condemn differences in wealth have learned to accept them. Instead of demanding parity, they focus on elevating everyone to an acceptable standard of living. Why not treat IQ the same way? This seems particularly reasonable if we accept IQ in the role for which science has certified it: not as a measure of human worth, but as a predictor of modern social and economic success… If racial differences persist, is that really so awful? Conversely, if we can raise the lowest IQs, isn’t that enough to justify the effort? One of the strangest passages in IQ scholarship is a recent attempt by hereditarians to minimize their own mediated-learning study because, while it “did raise the IQ of the African students from 83 to 97, this is still low for students at a leading university.” You’ve got to be kidding. Screw the other universities. Going from 83 to 97 is a screaming success.
8. Life is more than g. Every time black scores improve on a test, hereditarians complain that the improvement is on “subject-specific knowledge,” not on g (general intelligence). But the more you read about progress in things other than g, the more you wonder: Does g expose the limits of the progress? Or does the progress expose the limits of g?
9. Children are more than an investment. All the evidence on race and IQ says black kids do better at younger ages, particularly with help from intervention programs. Later, the benefits fade. Hereditarians say this is genetics taking over, as happens with IQ generally. Suppose that’s true. We don’t abandon kids who are statistically likely to get fatal genetic diseases in their teens or 20s. Why write off kids whose IQ gains may not last? The economics may not pay off, but what about human rights?
And last and very not least, exactly how I feel about the issue of genetic differences between groups, either socially or biologically defined:
10. Genes can be changed. Hereditarians point to phenylketunuria as an example of a genetic but treatable cognitive defect. Change the baby’s diet, and you protect its brain. They also tout breast-feeding as an environmental intervention. White women are three times more likely than black women to breast-feed their babies, they observe, so if more black women did it, IQs might go up. But now it turns out that breast-feeding, too, is a genetically regulated factor. As my colleague Emily Bazelon explains, a new study shows that while most babies gain an average of seven IQ points from breast-feeding, some babies gain nothing from it and end up at a four-point disadvantage because they lack a crucial gene.
The study’s authors claim it “shows that genes may work via the environment to shape the IQ, helping to close the natureversus nurture debate.” That’s true if you have the gene. But if you don’t, nurture can’t help you. And guess what? According to the International Hapmap Project, 2.2 percent of the project’s Chinese-Japanese population samples, 5 percent of its European-American samples, and 10 percent of its Nigerian samples lack the gene. The Africans are twice as likely as the Americans, and four times as likely as the Asians, to start life with a four-point IQ deficit out of sheer genetic misfortune.
Don’t tell me those Nigerian babies aren’t cognitively disadvantaged. Don’t tell me it isn’t genetic. Don’t tell me it’s God’s will. And in the age of genetic modification, don’t tell me we can’t do anything about it.
No, we are not created equal. But we are endowed by our Creator with the ideal of equality, and the intelligence to finish the job.
In the follow-up, the fourth article, Saletan points out how liberal ignorance of this very likely fact of human existence is empowering right-wing groups, often armed with something smelling a lot like a more accurate map of human diversity than liberals seem to have.
The threats from ignoring this reality for Liberal ideas of justice, social equality and freedom are not small.
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Gene Expression Article
This paper is a takedown of the furor that attended the savaging of Watson, and the non-sequiturs and bad science used by the naysayers.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
The piece is revealing. A relatively well-meaning scientist, saying inconvenient things, was pilloried and drummed out of scientific life on the basis of purely emotional and ideological reaction. It illustrates how the quest for facts – ie, the neutral examination of humans are animals and objects of study – is difficult when faced with value-based judgments of the nature of the work. People are sensitive to issues, in the same way the religious were sensitive to the displacement of spiritual concepts and dogma. But the implication is clear, from the science: The ideologues have already lost, and as each day passes, the reaction given to Watson will seem more and more like an irrational witch-burning or the movement of a Christian right-wing to ban the teaching of evolution.
As the linked paper says,
“Of course pointing to the testing data alone is hardly sufficient to quell these latter-day inquisitors. There is, sadly, an infinite regress of obscurantist objections designed to intellectually moot these issues entirely. These objections are not scientific, and are at odds with the data, logic, and, more often, both.”
Like the objections to heliocentrism in the solar system, these Religious Adherents (modern dya ideologues) will be unseated. It’s not an if: It will happen.
What happens to our liberal sentiments when this happens? This is a huge issue.
Proponents of liberal ideas need to stake out this territory now, because the factual foundations of their current state are built on sand.
It’s hard for us to be neutral about people and genes. We have delusions about free will, individuality and groups, because we need identity. We cling to these delusions like life-rafts on a stormy ocean. But the truth is: Biology cares little for our delusions. It is what it is. Humans are just another object of study for science. We should treat them as such, and science will. Sentimentality has no place. Politics have, in the end, no place.
Quotes Watson: It’s not about racism at all.
“To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief…
The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity….
To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers.“
Attitudes Elsewhere
And further, note that in China, there is absolutely no fear of the social ramifications of this debate. It’s very strong. No geneticists I know from China think the debate in the West is remotely rational. Indeed, they think it’s much like the experience scientists had under Mao: Follow orthodoxy or be expelled.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115040765329081636-T5DQ4jvnwqOdVvsP_XSVG_lvgik_20060628.html?mod=blogs
The 37-year-old Dr. Lahn says his research papers, published in Science last September, offered no view on race and intelligence. He personally believes it is possible that some populations will have more advantageous intelligence genes than others. And he thinks that “society will have to grapple with some very difficult facts” as scientific data accumulate. Yet Dr. Lahn, who left China after participating in prodemocracy protests, says intellectual “police” in the U.S. make such questions difficult to pursue.
Dr. Lahn’s group zeroed in on the role of two genes, called ASPM and microcephalin, that are known to have a role in brain size. Humans with defective copies of either gene are born with brains only about one-third the normal size.
Studying DNA from several species, the Chicago team found that, over millions of years, the genes had undergone more rapid change in monkeys, apes and humans than in other animals. Their next step was to determine if evolution had continued in modern humans. Dr. Lahn’s graduate students began decoding DNA from 1,184 people belonging to 59 groups from around the world, including Bedouins, Pima Indians and French-speaking Basques.
The data showed that evolution had continued in recent millennia. A statistical analysis of DNA patterns suggested that new mutations in each of the two brain-related genes had spread quickly through some human populations. Evidently, these mutations were advantageous among those populations — just as the genetic variant promoting milk digestion was advantageous to early Europeans. Dr. Lahn and his team further observed that the new mutations are found most frequently outside of Africa.
…
One mutation, which according to his estimates arose some 40,000 years ago, coincided with the first art found in caves, the paper observed. The other mutation, present mostly in people from the Middle East and Europe, and estimated to be 5,800 years old, coincided with the “development of cities and written language.”
It should be noted that this is both evolutionarily very plausible and, in terms of recent understanding of how evolution works in a social context, extremely likely.
This science is treated as if it’s poison, and not just another aspect of human diversity.
“You have to follow the data wherever it leads, but speculating in this field is dangerous,” says Spencer Wells, head of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, a five-year, $40 million effort to collect DNA samples from 100,000 indigenous people. Dr. Wells says the project team might try to find evolutionary reasons for physical differences such as why Danes are taller than pygmies. But Dr. Wells says National Geographic won’t study the brain. “I think there is very little evidence of IQ differences between races,” he says.
(A priori belief deemed socially acceptable driving what science says should be rather than what evidence suggests might be true; closing an avenue for research)
The accuracy of Dr. Lahn’s work and his views on race came up in his tenure review last fall, says a person familiar with it. After debate, his department voted unanimously in his favor, according to another faculty member. A more senior committee agreed and awarded Dr. Lahn the post of full professor, although it wasn’t unanimous, this person says.
Dr. Lahn stands by his work but says that because of the controversy he is moving into other projects. Earlier this year, Mr. Easton of the university’s media department forwarded Dr. Lahn a paper by two economists looking at the IQ of infants of different races. Dr. Lahn wasn’t interested. “I’m surprised anyone studies this,” he replied in an email.
Dr. Lahn says he isn’t as eager as he once was to continue studying brain differences. P. Thomas Schoenemann, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, says that at Dr. Lahn’s request he collected DNA from 25 people whose brain sizes he had studied previously. But the two scientists haven’t been in touch recently.
The university’s patent office is also having second thoughts. Its director, Alan Thomas, says his office is dropping a patent application filed last year that would cover using Dr. Lahn’s work as a DNA-based intelligence test. “We really don’t want to end up on the front page…for doing eugenics,” Mr. Thomas says.
More recently, Dr. Lahn says he was moved when a student asked him whether some knowledge might not be worth having. It is a notion to which he has been warming. Dr. Lahn says he once tried testing himself for which version of the brain genes he has. The experiment’s outcome was blurry “but it wasn’t looking good,” he says. He hasn’t tried testing himself again.
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I do not believe those variants of microcephalin were found to correlate with intelligence.
See the citations here, especially 7 and 8.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcephalin#cite_note-AutoR3-15-16
Also,
British data indicates only small to no racial gaps.A very detailed analysis here in posts mostly from early-mid April 20012,some starting early Feb.): http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/
A few of the entries:
http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/a-gaping-hole-in-the-masters-evolutionary-theory/
http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/more-evidence-uk-math-and-reading-achievement-gaps/
http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/race-class-and-cognition-in-the-uk/
There are recent studies from Africa that show iq rises.
Here is one:
“Environmental Affordances Predict IQ Test Performance of
Kenyan High School Students”
abstract:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2026172
From abstract:
“IQ test scores (assessed by Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices) are obtained for 437 Kenyan high school students from a wide range of socio-educational circumstances. Eight of the ten hypotheses are supported. The mean Kenyan IQ is found to be similar to that reported for Americans of the same age,”
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