10 years after the "looming crisis in human genetics"

[Miller]

@puddleglum

My reading of the survey is that intelligence professionals seem to be leaning toward an explanation that is at least somewhat genetic.

Literally two sentences earlier, you quote your own source saying:

There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation.

So, where are you getting this “lean” from?

[Kobal2]

@you_with_the_face

The irony here is that Harris was the one who immediately interpreted the Neanderthal finding through a politicized racialist prism. He could’ve just dispassionately and objectively considered the science, thoughtfully mused about what this could mean about long held assumptions regarding mating between Homo species, and then moved on with life like most people have done with this neat but ultimately trivial discovery. But instead, dude immediately brought ideology into it. And then projected that same mindset onto everyone else. I just can’t.

I mean, Sam Harris is the guy who opines that white women shouldn’t go into elevators alone with black men, so, you know. GO FIGURE.

[Gyrate]

@orcenio

It might be hard to remember, but there was a time when the SDMB was struggling with a racism problem. Perhaps it is better to say, a “race-realist” problem.

From about late 2008-2010 there existed a consistent weekly stream of postings touting the genetic intellectual inferiority of Black people, the careful misrepresentation/abuse of scientific writings by leading geneticists, the confident advocating of speculative 18th century racialism as the accepted consensus of the scientific community, coupled with wholesale historic revisionism in regards to any/all African countries (and other Black majority countries such as Haiti).

So you’re saying there was a spike in racist posts right before and for a while after America elected a black President of Kenyan descent. Correlation vs causation… <flips coin>

[puddleglum]

@Miller

Literally two sentences earlier, you quote your own source saying:

So, where are you getting this “lean” from?

The APA Intelligence Task Report was in 1995 and the survey of the intelligence experts was in 2013-2014, this indicates that over those 18 years the consensus seems to have moved to it being as least partly genetic.

[RioRico]

@Buck_Godot

Well, population growth is slowing, particularly in the wealthier countries who are also those countries more likely to embrace LGBT rights. Now I don’t in any way think that these are connected, but if I were of such a mind I could claim that the stats back me up.

IIRC Japan’s birthrate has fallen tremendously over the last generation and I don’t notice that country being a hotbed of queer activism. Looking at a World Factbook table, the world’s lowest birthrates (<8.60 per 1000) are GREECE, TAIWAN, SOUTH KOREA, SLOVENIA. PUERTO RICO, JAPAN, ANDORRA, SAINT PIERRE AND MIQUELON, and MONACO, with the last at the bottom. The highest birthrates (>40 per 1000) are (counting down) ANGOLA, NIGER, MALI, UGANDA, ZAMBIA, BURUNDI, BURKINA FASO, and MALAWI. Prosperity seem a stronger correlation.

[orcenio]

@puddleglum's link

The survey reports answers for up to 102 intelligence experts on 38 questions…

Experts were skeptical of the quality of media reports on intelligence research (Table 4). In general, mean expert ratings of media accuracy were around 3–4, on a scale of 1 (very inaccurate) to 9 (very accurate). Only two media outlets received positive ratings, the blogs of Steve Sailer (M = 7.38, N = 26 ratings) and Anatoly Karlin (6.10, N = 10 ratings). Unfortunately, the survey did not consider James Thompson’s blog Psychological Comments, which was just beginning when the survey was administered. All three blogs are currently hosted by The Unz Review.

In case anyone isn’t familiar with these two individuals.[

@wikipedia

Sailer is known for promoting racist and anti-immigrant theories[13] and has been credited with coining the pseudoscientific term “human biodiversity” in the 1990s, with the term later being used among the alt-right as a euphemism for scientific racism.[14][15][16] In his writing for VDARE, Sailer has described black people as inherently lacking judgment.[17]

](Steve Sailer - Wikipedia)[

@rationalwiki.org

Anatoly Karlin (Анатолий Карлин)[1] is a Russian nationalist and anti-Semitic neoreactionary with alt-right and white nationalist views.

](Anatoly Karlin - RationalWiki)Now, why would a paper polling 102 experts want to know their opinions about some racialist bloggers? Why would the pollsters describe the bloggers as “media”? Why would the bloggers be considered so favourably by many of the people who they polled? In fact, just exactly how do we know that the pollsters took all the necessary steps to ensure that the opinions expressed are an accurate reflection of cognitive data/research?

[orcenio]

Unfortunately, the survey did not consider James Thompson’s blog Psychological Comments, which was just beginning when the survey was administered. All three blogs are currently hosted by The Unz Review.

Apparently James Thompson is **also **a well know racialist.[

@rationalwiki.org

James Thompson is a HBD pseudoscientist[2] who holds sexist and racist opinions.

](James Thompson - RationalWiki)Unfortunately for the pollsters, the race-realist community is just too insular to hide any of the connections. They even cite frauds like Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst.

[orcenio]

Wait a minute![

John Fuerst (online alias: Chuck)

](John G.R. Fuerst - RationalWiki)Am I crazy? I must be going insane, right?

[Bryan_Ekers]

@RioRico

IIRC Japan’s birthrate has fallen tremendously over the last generation and I don’t notice that country being a hotbed of queer activism. Looking at a World Factbook table, the world’s lowest birthrates (<8.60 per 1000) are GREECE, TAIWAN, SOUTH KOREA, SLOVENIA. PUERTO RICO, JAPAN, ANDORRA, SAINT PIERRE AND MIQUELON, and MONACO, with the last at the bottom. The highest birthrates (>40 per 1000) are (counting down) ANGOLA, NIGER, MALI, UGANDA, ZAMBIA, BURUNDI, BURKINA FASO, and MALAWI. Prosperity seem a stronger correlation.

Well, yeah, prosperity. They gays ain’t got kids to eat up all their money and ask for BoxStations or Pokermans or whatever.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@orcenio

It might be hard to remember, but there was a time when the SDMB was struggling with a racism problem. Perhaps it is better to say, a “race-realist” problem.

From about late 2008-2010 there existed a consistent weekly stream of postings touting the genetic intellectual inferiority of Black people, the careful misrepresentation/abuse of scientific writings by leading geneticists, the confident advocating of speculative 18th century racialism as the accepted consensus of the scientific community, coupled with wholesale historic revisionism in regards to any/all African countries (and other Black majority countries such as Haiti).

In retrospect, these posts were done in a classic white nationalist tradition that had previously dominated the political and societal musings of western countries for centuries, and continue to serve as the ideological meat of today’s Alt-right movement. Not all of the deeply committed posters who were pleading for a racial hierarchy of intelligence and a racial essentialist interpretation of modern genetics here would identify as white nationalists, but they never failed to advocate the ideas, adopt the terminology, take the historical perspective, and make the speculative forecasts of the most fringe of white nationalist sentiment.

This thread is a tribute to one such apocalyptic prediction, imploring the adoption of such views out of the 12 month inevitability of its arrival. I made a similar thread nine years ago demanding an update to what was supposed to be the “much feared revelations on human evolution and inequality between the classes/ethnicities/races” but was unironically met with more wait-n-see predictions (pull the other one, eh?). It’s important to look back and take stock on these tactics, because the core strategies of racialists never changes. Of course some people and posters move on, there’s always greener pastures to preach, but the same racialist theories always emerges reinvented as newly discovered, alarming, airtight, and imperative. Charles Murray, to-this-day, still unshamingly predicts a racialist scientific unveiling “within a few years”.

Well, ten down and here’s to another ten.

So what was the general gist of their claim? That genetics would vindicate their racism some day? Someone would find the smart gene and realize that some races had more than others?

[Kimstu]

@puddleglum

The APA Intelligence Task Report was in 1995 and the survey of the intelligence experts was in 2013-2014, this indicates that over those 18 years the consensus seems to have moved to it being as least partly genetic.

:dubious: Whose “consensus”? I note from your link that over 80% of the “intelligence experts” were in psychology departments, 8% in education, about 3% in economics (!) and 2% in sociology. Less than 7% held positions in biology or physical anthropology or had genetics as their research field of study.

So why should we look to them for an informed “expert consensus” on the role of genetic influences on measured intelligence test differences?

Actual geneticists, such as David Reich whose 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here I just finished reading, seem to be far less presumptuous about assigning measured test differences to genetic causes. They seem to think that we have a very long way to go in order to properly understand the relationships between genes and abilities.

Of course there are bound to be significant average differences between different populations—such as the increased susceptibility of many African groups to sickle-cell disease or of Ashkenazi Jews to Tay-Sachs disease, for instance—but we are nowhere near a “consensus” about possible genetic explanations, in whole or in part, for far-reaching societal differences linked to very broadly defined racial categories.

[Kimstu]

@David Reich

If selection on height and infant head circumference can occur within a couple of thousand years, it seems a bad bet to argue that there cannot be similar average differences in cognitive or behavioral traits. Even if we do not yet know what the differences are, we should prepare our science and our society to be able to deal with the reality of differences […]

Hardly a “consensus” about the existence or nature of specific genetic causes for race-based differences in test results, as puddleglum is trying to claim.

@Damuri Ajashi

So what was the general gist of their claim? That genetics would vindicate their racism some day?

Yeah, basically. “Scientific racists” are always convinced that the definitive empirical vindication of their views is just around the corner, and they’re always tweaking their interpretations of new results to support their views.

My favorite example is the recent phenomenon of “Neanderthal reclamation”: i.e., as soon as racists found out that ancient DNA studies showed that non-African populations including Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry, suddenly we started getting a spate of popularizations declaring that Neanderthals were really smart and fully human instead of just an outcompeted bunch of thick-jawed troglodyte losers. As noted by the author of a book on the resurgence of “race science”,

[…] this was in the 1800s, in the Neander Valley in Germany - Western European scientists looked at this ancient species and thought, why did this person go extinct? It must have been that, you know, they were stupid. They’re lower down the evolutionary ladder, using the language of the time. You know, Neanderthals were this kind of thuggish, brutish, stupid species that just couldn’t survive the evolutionary race with modern humans. […]

[…] over the last, let’s say, 20, perhaps even 30 years, it slowly dawned on scientists that perhaps Neanderthals share some ancestry with modern-day Europeans - in fact, many people around the world, but including modern-day Europeans.

[…] in the last ten years, we’ve seen journal articles and papers in the press saying Neanderthals were really smart. They were sensitive, just like us. They were people, just like us. So what happened? Suddenly, just by dint of association with Europeans, Neanderthals have gone from being this stupid, brutish, thuggish, lower-down-the-evolutionary-ladder species, and now they are people like us because they’re European.

[orcenio]

@Damuri_Ajashi

@orcenio

It might be hard to remember, but there was a time when the SDMB was struggling with a racism problem. Perhaps it is better to say, a “race-realist” problem.

From about late 2008-2010 there existed a consistent weekly stream of postings touting the genetic intellectual inferiority of Black people, the careful misrepresentation/abuse of scientific writings by leading geneticists, the confident advocating of speculative 18th century racialism as the accepted consensus of the scientific community, coupled with wholesale historic revisionism in regards to any/all African countries (and other Black majority countries such as Haiti).

In retrospect, these posts were done in a classic white nationalist tradition that had previously dominated the political and societal musings of western countries for centuries, and continue to serve as the ideological meat of today’s Alt-right movement. Not all of the deeply committed posters who were pleading for a racial hierarchy of intelligence and a racial essentialist interpretation of modern genetics here would identify as white nationalists, but they never failed to advocate the ideas, adopt the terminology, take the historical perspective, and make the speculative forecasts of the most fringe of white nationalist sentiment.

This thread is a tribute to one such apocalyptic prediction, imploring the adoption of such views out of the 12 month inevitability of its arrival. I made a similar thread nine years ago demanding an update to what was supposed to be the “much feared revelations on human evolution and inequality between the classes/ethnicities/races” but was unironically met with more wait-n-see predictions (pull the other one, eh?). It’s important to look back and take stock on these tactics, because the core strategies of racialists never changes. Of course some people and posters move on, there’s always greener pastures to preach, but the same racialist theories always emerges reinvented as newly discovered, alarming, airtight, and imperative. Charles Murray, to-this-day, still unshamingly predicts a racialist scientific unveiling “within a few years”.

Well, ten down and here’s to another ten.

So what was the general gist of their claim? That genetics would vindicate their racism some day? Someone would find the smart gene and realize that some races had more than others?

Allow me to help you.

[MrDibble]

@Kimstu

the increased susceptibility of many African groups to sickle-cell disease

One quibble -
When you characterize this as “African groups”, you buy a little into a misdirection. It’s “groups who live with malaria”. Sickle cell crosses racial boundaries quite handily. It’s genetic, for sure, but not tied to commonly-understood race in any way.

[puddleglum]

@Kimstu

:dubious: Whose “consensus”? I note from your link that over 80% of the “intelligence experts” were in psychology departments, 8% in education, about 3% in economics (!) and 2% in sociology. Less than 7% held positions in biology or physical anthropology or had genetics as their research field of study.

So why should we look to them for an informed “expert consensus” on the role of genetic influences on measured intelligence test differences?

Actual geneticists, such as David Reich whose 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here I just finished reading, seem to be far less presumptuous about assigning measured test differences to genetic causes. They seem to think that we have a very long way to go in order to properly understand the relationships between genes and abilities.

Of course there are bound to be significant average differences between different populations—such as the increased susceptibility of many African groups to sickle-cell disease or of Ashkenazi Jews to Tay-Sachs disease, for instance—but we are nowhere near a “consensus” about possible genetic explanations, in whole or in part, for far-reaching societal differences linked to very broadly defined racial categories.

Most people who deal with intelligence research are psychologists. That is why the survey of intelligence experts are psychologists.

Obviously we don’t fully understand the relationship between genes and abilities. This does not mean we know nothing about the relationship. In the survey 83% of the experts thought there was more than 0% genetics factor. That seems like it is approaching a consensus.

There is definitely a consensus that sickle cell disease and Tay-Sachs are genetic.

[puddleglum]

@MrDibble

One quibble -
When you characterize this as “African groups”, you buy a little into a misdirection. It’s “groups who live with malaria”. Sickle cell crosses racial boundaries quite handily. It’s genetic, for sure, but not tied to commonly-understood race in any way.

Black americans are 24 times as likely to carry the sickle cell trait then white americans. Among newborns black babies with sickle cell are 1 in 400, hispanics babies are 1 in 36,000, and white babies are 1 in 80,000. That seems pretty tied to commonly understood race.

[RioRico]

@puddleglum

Black americans are 24 times as likely to carry the sickle cell trait then white americans. Among newborns black babies with sickle cell are 1 in 400, hispanics babies are 1 in 36,000, and white babies are 1 in 80,000. That seems pretty tied to commonly understood race.

How do you objectively define “black” and “white”?

[monstro]

@puddleglum

Black americans are 24 times as likely to carry the sickle cell trait then white americans. Among newborns black babies with sickle cell are 1 in 400, hispanics babies are 1 in 36,000, and white babies are 1 in 80,000. That seems pretty tied to commonly understood race.

Tay-Sachs disease is more common in Ashkenaxi Jews, French Canadians of southeastern Quebec, the Old Order Amish of Pennsylvania, and the Cajuns of Louisiana than the general population.

Does that tie closely to understood race too?

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

[puddleglum]

@RioRico

How do you objectively define “black” and “white”?

I define it using self report since only .5% of reports are inaccurate. If that is not good enough then genetic definitions could be used.

[puddleglum]

@monstro

Tay-Sachs disease is more common in Ashkenaxi Jews, French Canadians of southeastern Quebec, the Old Order Amish of Pennsylvania, and the Cajuns of Louisiana than the general population.

Does that tie closely to understood race too?

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

No, I don’t consider any of those groups to be races.