And again.
Cool, gotta link to a transcript? I looked on the NPR website but couldn’t find anything about heredity and population groups, except for the story about domestic dogs being descended from Middle Eastern grey wolves, which looked very interesting but probably not what you were talking about.
I think it takes a day or two for them to post transcripts. It was pretty good. The guy was making the argument that the whole nature/nurture debate starts with a faulty premise since the environment affects genes. He did touch on IQ and such. Nothing I hadn’t heard or read about before, but it made for some good background listening while I work (and post here) from home this AM.
That’s not how I learned it in high-school AP bio. Is this a recent discovery?
I don’t think it’s that recent, if it’s what I’m thinking of, which is environmental influences on gene expression:
I don’t know the history of this theory, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the bit about incubation temperature changing the sex of turtle embryos quite a while ago.
I have been hearing about gene and environment interaction since the early 90s if that helps. Twins studies are where you find a lot of the better data.
Here is quick bit from some Google-Fu
How much of the lead article ‘Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294.’ did you read? http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/
Note that proofs exist only in mathematics and logic. All scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives.
James Lee in a recent review of a book by Richard Nisbett suggested the following would be the most effective test (Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 247–255):
Thanks for posting this.
Or ever, for that matter.
Discoveries about the epigenone are pretty new, in that we’ve learned certain genes are turned on or off depending on environmental influences. But we’ve known for awhile that things like nutrition influence phenotype (height, weight, even IQ).
I can’t speak for BG, but personally I read it (though I didn’t scrutinize the tables closely), and I was struck by these remarks:
Again, there’s plenty of evidence for measurable differences in IQ between racial categories, and plenty of evidence that IQ is heritable (at least to some extent), and plenty of evidence that racial similarity correlates to some extent (though not reliably) with genetic kinship. But none of that evidence adds up at present to a convincing argument that measurable IQ racial differences are in fact genetic.
To take a simplified analogy: We know that skin color is to some extent hereditary. And we know that skin color is also influenced by sun exposure. Now, imagine that we’re comparing two populations of brownish-skinned people, both quite diverse genetically, where one population is on average measurably darker than the other. But (for the purposes of this analogy) we don’t know how skin color is transmitted genetically, and we can’t determine how much sun exposure each group has had.
In such a situation, how could we reliably conclude whether the average complexion difference was due to genetics, or to tanning, or some mixture of both? We couldn’t: we’d be reduced to arguing over which hypothesis seemed more plausible, but without any conclusive test.
AFAICT, that’s about where the discussion stands now on the issue of race and intelligence. We simply don’t (yet) have enough reliable data about either the genetic or the environmental factors affecting different racial categories to know for sure exactly what their roles are in determining measured IQ differences. Nor have we established “racial category” as a genetically meaningful grouping of populations.
The APA Taskforce report is interesting as they show that commonly cited environmental explanations do not account for the differences.
In discussing what they refer to as the ‘genetic hypothesis’ they cite the Eyferrth study from WWII (which has a number of problems outlined by James Flynn), but then make no mention of the much more recent Scarr Weinberg ‘Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study’, or various adoption studies featuring Korean adoptees.
An interesting point also is that the anonymous Snyderman/Rothman survey of 661 Behavioural Geneticists & members of the APA had quite different results in terms of accepting some genetic role.
There is a lot of pressure to not reach offensive conclusions. Scarr, who co-authored the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study mentions this in discussing the study in her tribute to Arthur Jensen:
Originally Posted by **Chief Pedant **
" 5) G is largely inherited and therefore intelligence differences measured among various populations reflect innate differences more than nurturing differences. Normalization of nurturing (for instance, studies showing that children of wealthy and educated black Americans underperform children born to poor and undereducated white Americans on SATs) lends support to the hypothesis that differences are not primarily due to nurture"
Children of wealthy black Americans underscore children of poor white Americans on the SAT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png ,and
The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test
“But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.”
Children of educated black Americans underscore children of undereducated white Americans on the SAT:
File:1995-SAT-Education2.png - Wikipedia
You make an error of logic, here. Even something being inherited doesn’t mean that it’s innate and genetic. Height, for instance, is correlated far more with parent height than even the most extreme studies of intelligence show that IQ is. But we consistently see regular increases in height around the world (except war-torn areas and, oddly, the United States) and a convergence between different ethnic groups. This belies the idea that inheritance equates to genetic predestination.
For my part, I think any objective scientist has to admit that there are differences between the races, due to evolutionary pressures. It’s pretty clear that black people are smarter than everyone else, as they started the first civilizations. European welfare bums, on the other hand, have spent centuries murdering each other and attacking their wealthier, more hard working neighbors. The sooner we all accept this, the sooner we can get to forming smart policy choices that will let white people and black people play out their proper roles in society.
You have confused the argument.
A common counter-argument made to the idea that race-based differences can be hereditary is that, since a “race” is not a (very tight) genetic population, it is inappropriate to draw a conclusion that differences might be genetic. That’s the misconception I’m dispelling here. It’s a weak counter-argument where it can be shown that the other confounder, nurturing, can be reasonably normalized.
For the example of tall people, one might raise an argument that nurturing (malnutrition, say) stunts growth. However by showing that nurturing is reasonably equal, the argument is diminished.
In the example of the consistently demonstrable differences between the populations defined as “white” and “black” in the US, one argument raised against heretitable influences is that nurturing cannot be normalized (and of course here on the Dope we’ve been round and round about that. See my cites requested by BrainGlutton, above, for SAT scores and income/parental education. Another example I’ve often cited is the underperformance on Medical and Law School Admission tests by blacks, even when exposed to similar or identical preparation curriculums; those testing differences persist into post-medical licensing tests as well.
It is not my intention to say that nurturing differences do not exist, but I do consider it significant evidence against nurturing as an explanatory difference when enormous effort for decades on the part of universities to overcome those nurturing differences have failed, and failed most significantly in quantifiable fields such as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematical disciplines. When we more aggressively opened up higher education pathways to blacks we saw a rise in PhD’s for many fields, but only a trivial difference in STEM fields. While all of this is not an absolute “proof” the differences are innate, it is certainly suggestive, and the fact that the underlying cohorts are not provably genetically-related somehow is irrelevant.
If I want to show greyhounds (or mutt group A) are innately faster than mutt group B, I don’t have to prove mutt group A or B are a genetic cohort–I just have to normalize nurture for the two groups. (I might add that the disproportionate prevalence of Sickle C trait in blacks does suggest there is some broad “family” there, but again, the fact that that is so or not so does not diminish an argument of whether or not some other particular difference is genetic.)
Well, I suppose we can rest easy that sub-saharan Africa will do just fine, then, and that here in the US all we need to do to get equal representation in society is have smart policies like equal opportunity for the same exam if you want to advance…
Oh wait; didn’t they do that for the firefighter exam in New Haven, and it didn’t work out?
That’d be a damning riposte, except for the fact that I agree. Africans are as much hurt as helped by the thoughtlessness that characterizes most of the charity given. And the descendants of slaves here aren’t substantially helped by affirmative action policies. I’m very much a racial “conservative.” The “problem” with black people isn’t that they’re inherently stupid, it’s a cultural issue. For the sake of comparison, look at recent Ethiopian immigrants to the USA–same genetic stock (not really, because within Africa you have 80% of the world’s human genetic variability, but bear with me), but they’re substantially outpacing those who have lived here for centuries. The legacy of slavery and other forms of government oppression of African Americans is still with us, because of the violence wreaked on important institutions within the black community like the family.
Also, it seems like you’re implicitly arguing “black people are inferior, therefore we should give them affirmative action.” Is that your actual point, or was this a clever attempt at a gotcha question?
I am in favor of race-based AA quotas because I do not think equal opportunity alone will result in equal representation due to innate average differences among race-based cohorts. To date no efforts at providing equal opportunity have resulted in equal results, and if we are to have a reasonably just society we need to have some sort of proportionate representation along commonly-accepted categories. While I look forward to a race-blind society, I do not see it happening soon, and among the persistent reasons for that is that races are innately different in capability for a number of skillsets.
But that’s just your hypothesis, not something that’s been convincingly shown.
You can’t convincingly show that “races are innately different in capability” unless you manage to effectively normalize for environmental differences in general among racial categories, which is an immensely complicated proposition.
Claiming that very limited and specific attempts at normalization, such as controlling for socioeconomic status in a study or aggressively recruiting black Ph.D. students, are adequate approximations to “normalization of nurturing” overall is simply bollocks. You might just as well claim that you’ve “normalized nurture” for your groups of greyhounds and mutts because you feed them from the same color food dish.
Yes, that means that the conditions of certain types of experiments on racial characteristics are intrinsically very hard, and perhaps impossible, to control, which is certainly a frustrating limitation to scientific progress in this field. But frustration doesn’t justify us in pretending that the experimental conditions have been adequately controlled when in fact they haven’t.
Kimstu,
Watching Kansas-Lehigh right now.
We’ve just gotta do something to improve the nurturing of asians and whites in general for basketball. They must have substantially inferior coaching, or programs, or external support or something to be so hugely underrepresented in a sport where the payoff is free college education and maybe even a shot at the NBA…unless maybe the white and asian wanna-bes dropped out voluntarily along the way so they could go push paper or participate in the glory of lacrosse instead.
Bullocks on me for thinking there could possibly be anything innately different among the capabilities of those groups at basketball to explain the dominance of the black athlete since we gave him a seat at the opportunity table. It’s gotta be environmental. It’s just so confoundingly hard to figure out where the **in general **under-opportunity must be for whites and asians. I’ll keep looking, though, and please keep reminding me that you can set the absolute proof bar so high I’ll be able to go to bed at night confident the Inuit and Mbuti will be the next groups dominating the court.
