Internet video essayist Shaun just published an excellent analysis of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (and modern “race science” in general). It’s so excellent I just had to share it, but warning it is very long (2:40:00). I will highlight 00:54:00-00:56:00 in particular.
I couldn’t have said it better; and good God have I tried too. Check it out.
Your cite doesn’t support your claims. Give us a quote.
Very true, I didn’t mean to imply that populations susceptible to sickle-cell disease are only in Africa or of black African ethnicity.
Interesting phenomenon - so is there actually anthropological evidence out there that sheds light on Neanderthal intelligence, or is the painting of Neanderthals as either dumb or smart primarily fiction? It would be kind of amazing (and alarming) to me if the recent narrative of smart Neanderthals had no basis in anthropology. If it’s more the case that people just always thought Neanderthals were dumb without challenging that assumption, until they realized that today’s humans are part Neanderthal and then finally put in the work to investigate, then I think that’s different.
How widespread do you think “scientific racists” are? Is it a significant % of people investigating the potential linkages between genetics and intelligence?
I agree that I haven’t seen anything close to a consensus about intelligence and race being linked, but it seems like if 1) intelligence does have a genetic factor, and 2) genes are clustered in population groups, it seems like it could be POSSIBLE for genes correlated with higher intelligence to be found in different proportions in different “races”.
That being said, I am skeptical that this is likely to lead to anything particularly meaningful, since my understanding is that race boundaries are rather arbitrarily drawn and often don’t match up well with genetic clusters. Like if it is somehow demonstrated in the future that “white” people are more likely to have genes for high intelligence than “black” people, does it really mean anything? It could also show that short people are smarter than tall people, fat people are smarter than skinny people, brown eyed people are smarter than blue eyed people, or whatnot - but if the variation within the groups are significantly higher than the variance between the groups, then it’s not particularly useful. In addition, if intelligence is linked to hundreds or thousands of genes, instead of just a handful, it seems like it would be even less likely to be clustered within racial groups.
Seems like white people are more likely to have Tay-Sachs than the general population 
The incidence of sickle cell trait is also higher in Mediterranean and Hispanic people who are considered racially “white” than in, say, northern Europeans who are also considered racially “white”. On the other hand, there are groups who are considered racially “black” in, say, southern Africa and southern India and Australia who don’t have a higher incidence of sickle cell trait than “white” northern Europeans. So it’s inaccurate to generalize about sickle-cell susceptibility based on vague racial descriptors rather than actual populations.
Commonly understood ideas of “race” are useful for understanding genetic issues such as disease traits only insofar as they correspond to actual genetic differences between populations. Most of the broad racial categories we use are too imprecise for these purposes.
Well, IANA anthropologist, but AFAICT research was challenging the “brutish and stupid” stereotype of Neanderthals over a decade ago. But it’s only in the last few years, since definitive evidence was presented that Neanderthals interbred with humans outside of Africa, and specifically that racially “white” people tend to have more Neanderthal ancestry than specifically “black” people, that we really started seeing a trend in popular media to talk up the intelligence and sensitivity and “peoplehood” of Neanderthals. Extreme example from some racist blogger:
I don’t know, but that’s what the previously-quoted Angela Saini wrote her recent book about.
Insofar as “races” correspond to genetically meaningful divisions of populations, sure it could be entirely possible for populations to differ in genetic factors that contribute to intelligence. As previously noted, though, simplistic “race” classifications often don’t tell us anything valid about actual genetic similarity.
Not if we don’t even understand what “genes for high intelligence” means. I find it totally believable that one population could have a genetic trait that corresponded to, say, higher accuracy in spatial perception or faster vocabulary retrieval or whatever compared to another population, just because of random differences or selective environmental pressure. But it seems to me that “intelligence” considered very broadly is likely to have been advantageous in all human populations at all times.
So if somebody tells me that one group is genetically “more intelligent” than another, I’m going to want to know exactly what they mean by “intelligence” and how they measure it. Heck, we can’t even reach consensus on what it means for one breed of dog to be more “intelligent” than another, and that’s with a species that we’ve been deliberately breeding for specific cognitive and behavioral traits for thousands of years.
A trait can be fixed in a population not necessarily because it’s advantageous, but because the founders of the population just happened to have it through random chance.
So I can totally imagine that there could be a population that possesses an elevated frequency of a, say, “fast processing speed” allele compared to the general population. But like you said, would that be enough to make for an intellectually superior population? If we found that an indigenous tribe in the Amazon had a very high prevalence of a “fast processing speed” allele, would the rest of us collectively be impressed by their mental superiority? Or would a lot of people suddenly downplay the significance of processing speed on intelligence?
You wouldn’t consider Ashkenazi Jews to be a race? Until recently, there has been a historic tendency towards Ashkenazis to mate with mostly other Ashkenazis.
I’m pretty sure the definition of intelligence did not flip when Jews started having really high IQ scores. Why would these folks suddenly redefine intelligence because some obscure aboriginal group had high IQ scores?
Because of their skin tone, which is all they care about.
“If they were really superior intellectually, they wouldn’t be living in grass huts and living primarily off of roots and berries. And where are their symphonies and operas? Where are their Shakespeare’s and Newton’s? Besides, the average IQ of this population is only 70. Ergo, fast processing speed ain’t shit.”
In other words, people tend to be stupid when it comes to defining intelligence.
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The recent issues of the American Journal of Human Genetics has a hard paywall, but the quote is “Among nearly 202,000 individuals with SIRE [Self-Identifying Race/Ethnicity], 1,079 (0.53%) had GIA [Genetically Inferred Ancestry] strongly indicating a different racial/ethnic group.”
For another study that is not behind a paywall see this article from 2005.
“Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity”
If one race has 2,000 times as much chance off getting sickle cell anemia as another race then it would seem fine to generalize about susceptibility.
Obviously as one makes categories, the more categories, the more fine grained the distinctions between the categories. It seems arbitrary to say that only certain distinctions are useful and that any above that are useless.
The point is that “black” is a social, not biological, descriptor. The Southern slave-masters didn’t just happen to hit upon some biological truth by chance. They were ignorant and malevolent idiots, and this ignorant idiocy leftover from their malevolence still, unfortunately, has a huge impact on our society. It’s not remotely scientific.
No, the most common racial categories have to do with continent population, Black - Africa, White -Europe, Asian- Asia, Amerindian-Americas, Australia - Aboriginals. Ashkenazis would be a sub category like ethnic group.
Black is both a social and biological descriptor. Black and White people, have different skin colors, have differentbone and skeletal structures, have different muscle composition , and different brain structures. All of those are real biological differences.
It really isn’t, unless you start talking about sub-populations which kinda makes the use of race in a broad sense kinda useless. African-Americans are largely descended from West African populations where malaria was endemic, hence sickle-cell was more common. South African populations that read as “black” to Americans didn’t have that exposure and therefore do not have a high level on incidence.
ETA: That map doesn’t list the various other protective anti-malarial blood syndromes like alpha and beta thalassemia, which partly covers the incomplete overlap.
So those “black folks” who are relatively close blood relatives of myself, a “white person” are members of a different “biological race” than myself? And you’re saying that a “black” Somali is, genetically, more closely related to, say a “black” Namibian (or, for that matter, a “black” Texan) than a non-“black” Yemeni person, on average?
Do you really believe this antebellum nonsense? Sub-Saharan Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the planet put together. There are “black” groups in Africa (say, black Somalis, for example) that are far more closely related to non-black groups than to certain other far-flung “black” groups. “Black” Andaman Islanders have a much closer biological ancestry with non-“black” Southern Asians than with “black” Africans.
There’s no possible biological grouping that includes Nigerians and Andaman Islanders that wouldn’t also include most Europeans and Asians. “Black” is no more a biological indicator than “people from Des Moines”. In fact, people in Des Moines likely have a lot more in common, in terms of biological genetic ancestry, on average, than the group of over a billion that constitutes “black people” on Earth.
I don’t “find” it surprising that Andaman islanders are “closely” related to south Asians, because they are from “islands” off the coast of “south” Asia.
The idea that only perfectly discrete groups exist is silly. Platypuses are mammals that lay eggs, Boa constrictors are reptiles that give birth to live young, does this mean that the categories of mammals and reptiles are meaningless?
If you look at a person’s face, generally you can guess their race with relative accuracy, if you look at just the skeleton you can guess their race with relative accuracy, if you just look at their muscle tissue you can guess their race with relative accuracy, if you look at their dna you can guess their race with relative accuracy. There are going to be people who don’t fit categories exactly or have more in common with other races but almost no categories are perfect.
“Black people” isn’t just imperfect, it’s wildly inaccurate (“relative accuracy” is a joke, considering all the huge varieties in all these characteristics) – it almost certainly has less validity, in terms of average closeness of biological ancestry, than “people born in Minnesota”!
