Are there any proven hereditary psychological differences (intelligence or other) between "races"?

Great Debates
81

Your “criteria” are so laden with question begging, it is obvious you framed them in such a way to lead to your conclusion.

You explain the paucity of black players in the NHL is the result of a relative lack of interest from blacks. I agree. Why do you not allow this same explanation for whites in basketball? Basketball is the predominant game in the black community. No other sport even comes remotely close. Sure, some whites like playing basketball at a young age. But they also choose between basketball, football, hockey, golf, tennis, soccer, swimming, lacrosse, baseball, drama, musical instruments, etc. You use absolute population numbers instead of proportionate numbers for interest in basketball. I wonder why. So no, the pool of basketball participants is not heavily skewed toward whites. Your assumption is incorrect.

Unbelievably wrong. The desire to excel in basketball is held almost universally in black culture. Being the best at basketball automatically puts you at the top of the food chain. It is not a game that you need to be coached to learn (I am talking individual skill, not team skill). There are very few rules. Put the ball in the hoop. Schools and facilities are almost immaterial. You need a hoop and a ball. Better family structure helps in basketball? Uh, no. Going to an expensive basketball camp does not make you a better player. All of those camps are just money making outfits. You get better by playing as much as possible. What do you do when you have a terrible family at home? You escape by going to the court to play basketball all day against kids who all want to be at the top of the food chain. The most popular kids are the ones that keep the best court all day.

Again, wrong. It has been said over and over (and it appears you acknowledge it), the only way for many people in the black community to escape where they come from is through basketball. Notorious B.I.G. said it best - “Either you’re slingin crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.” Playing in the NBA is like becoming a doctor/lawyer/astronaut/president to kids in white communities. This is why almost every successful player in the NBA played basketball every single day for hours and hours while growing up. It is all they had. Go by courts in the hood if your city has not taken them down already. You will see them filled all day. Hell, around here you will see people playing basketball at any time of day. I mean it. I drive by at 4 am and there is a 5 on 5 game going on. This is anecdotal, but the white kids went home after basketball practice. The black kids went to the park and played 4 more hours. The idea that the motivation for whites to play in the NBA is as much as blacks is laughable.

Yes we can explain this pattern. It just does not fit into your confirmation bias. Nurturing heavily favors blacks. Whites have many more options and chose those instead of basketball, while blacks almost universally choose basketball, with football a distant second. You say whites choose other sports or to quit basketball because they see they are physically limited. I do not necessarily disagree that this is what is going through their heads. That does not mean they are physically limited, though. I submit it is a combination of whites misattributing their lack of skill due to less time played honing their skill as physical inferiority and the stereotype threat. See,

From Psychological Dynamics of Sport and Exercise - Diane L. Gill - Google Books

You clearly do not understand the cultural aspects of basketball. I cannot tell you what to do, but you should really think about coming up with another example to trot out every time this comes up.

82

The conclusion he reaches is also flawed.

(bolding mine)

Even if this cap can measure brainwaves and associate them with an IQ score, concluding that these brainwaves must have a genetic basis and therefore intelligence does too is to fall prey to the same pattern of dumbtard conclusions that has characterized scientific racism for more than a century. Nevermind the fact that the whole “correlation doesn’t equal causation” thing seemed to have completely escaped his attention.

83

A very apt metaphor for alleged evidence extracted from what’s emitted by an ass.

Seriously, Chief, you need to recognize that nobody is saying that innate racial differences CANNOT POSSIBLY exist. That’s a strawman that you keep waving around to distract attention from the inconvenient fact that innate racial differences HAVE NOT BEEN RELIABLY SHOWN to exist.

As kingbighair illustrated in demolishing your fallacious assumptions about “equality of nurturing” for racial groups in American basketball, a lot of such “patterns” are just in your own ill-informed head. Your perceptions of what constitutes an “obviously” innate difference are so riddled with confirmation bias and assumed conclusions that they will never persuade anybody who doesn’t already agree with you.

That’s the classic conspiracy-theorist lament: “They say that my evidence isn’t good enough, but that just shows that they’d never believe me no matter how good my evidence was! Criticisms of the quality of my evidence are just an excuse for not believing me!” Mmm-hmmm, yeah right, we’ve heard it all before from the creationists and the moon-landing-hoaxers.

84

Seriously, dude? Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton of the Pioneer Fund? Those are the sources you’re relying on?

85

Harsh winters? Like Inuit and the Native peoples of Canada? Like the ancestors of modern day Mexicans who originated in Siberia, and lived for generations in sub Arctic conditions?

Or do you mean the harsh winters of ancient Rome and ancient Greece? Maybe the harsh winters of the Fertile Crescent?

The brain size arguments have been fairly well debunked.

There’s a relatively simple way to test the relevance of variation in gene frequencies. Test the gene frequencies in hi IQ Africans studying in the US and Europe. If they display the same variation as African populations in general, your theory fails.

86

The goal isn’t to pursue disinterested scientific inquiry.

The goal is to get most white Americans to agree. It’s fundamentally a political argument.

87

No they haven’t, see this paper by UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson & Yale’s Jeremy Gray.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5, 471–482 (1 June 2004) www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf

Note the tribute to Jensen above by Sandra Scarr. Keep in mind that Scarr started the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study to prove Jensen wrong. Nonetheless, she concedes that the findings could be interpreted to support a genetic hypothesis & acknowledges Jensen’s integrity and commitment to finding the truth.

Also, note Scarr’s comment about how she tried to make her findings palatable for her colleagues who wanted the environmental position to be vindicated. Interestingly, there was a period where funding for twin studies was extremely difficult to come by for this reason - people didn’t want to have their environmentalist position displaced. So even studies like the Twins Reared Apart study by Bouchard had to obtain funding from Pioneer. It is incredibly ironic that Belowjob2.0 is suggesting the goal isn’t disinterested scientific inquiry. He’s right, except the bias is from the environmentalist side who don’t want to know (as Scarr conceded). The findings of Bouchard have been supported by many twin studies since.

88

So, the Pioneer Fund doesn’t have a political motive?

Unintentional comedy is the best kind.

89

But that very same article explicitly points out that neither this nor any other correlations of intelligence with physical characteristics necessarily indicate innate racial differences in intelligence:

The point about brain volume isn’t that there’s no relationship between brain volume and intelligence; rather, the point is that brain volume is influenced by developmental and environmental factors, not just by innate genetic factors. So measured differences in average brain volume between racial groups don’t necessarily show anything about innate differences in intelligence or cognitive ability.

90

The process in which some gene variants are favoured and gradually increase is the essence of evolutionary change in both natural and artificial selection. There are no complex behavioural adaptations in dogs without a recognisable precursor in wolves. They don’t have completely new complex adaptations, but there have been evolutionarily shallow changes, involving loss of function or exaggerations and redirections of function.

The differences between human groups are qualitatively similar if different in scale. Some people still point out Lewontin’s statistic of 85% of variation being within group while 15% is between group. In dog breeds it is 70% within breed and 30% between breed.

The Lewontin reasoning is incorrect though as it is the correlations that matter rather than the individual genes. For instance, even if you get anti-growth/pro-growth genes in both Great Danes and Chihuahuas the overall trend is different. An example in humans is that the majority of Nigerians and most from Northern Europe don’t have the sickle cell mutation, but Nigerians are far more resistant to malaria. They have malaria defense versions of many genes which is the typical pattern from natural selection - correlated changes in a population in the same general direction.

An example of selection in terms of cognitive ability is shown with Ashkenazi jews.

http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

91

This is sophistry. You can’t avoid acknowledging that the variation between different breeds of dogs is much larger than the variation between different human populations, so you argue that the variation between humans is “qualitatively similar”.

92

This discussion was started in part due to a discussion about Africa’s troubles. I find it very possible that different populations can have differing inherent intelligences. What I find really difficult to believe is that Africa is a basketcase because Africans are in fact just so dumb. If they were that different than everyone else you’d think teasing out even marginal differences wouldn’t be so controversial. It’d be obvious if they were so deficient that running a modern society was literally beyond their ken.

93

That’s because it is qualitatively similar. Also, I mentioned the variation stats in the following two sentences.

94

The question is, “Which group has a larger starting pool of potential players who would choose that sport over all others if they were able to be successful at it?”

While it is true that whites pursue a variety of sports, it is nevertheless the case that the starting pool of white basketball players beginning in elementary school is vastly larger than the pool of black players due to the differences in the relative sizes of the population and the popularity of basketball in general. Alternative sports are chosen when the primary interest does not result in success. A cursory look at the fan base for basketball should readily convince you that the interest and enthusiasm for basketball is pervasive in the white culture (an easy point to make in the middle of March Madness) and the notion that somehow the wider opportunities for lacrosse and hockey and so on dilutes out King Basketball is rather ludicrous. Feel free to take attendance at basketball games versus lacrosse games at your local high school to reassure yourself of this point.
by CP:
“The nurturing of whites for basketball is much greater than that of blacks. Better schools; better facilities; better coaching; better family structure to pursue interests; better you-name-it.”

I see. So the notion is wrong that every single sport holds that in order to maximize potential, good coaching is helpful? What is required to excel at basketball is just a neighborhood hoop? Lazier white players uninterested in improving themselves don’t practice as hard to reach their NBA dream? Black kids aren’t distracted by poor family situations requiring them to work while the white athlete’s wealthy parents buy him the best available coaching? Black kids don’t face more street crime, drug and gang culture and a destructive inner city culture? If you want a kid to have the best chance to excel at basketball you plunk him in destructive environment that sends a quarter of its young men to jail? The organized practice, disciplined coaching and structured training of high school, college and NBA teams are all superfluous to what it takes to develop top-performing basketball skills?
And all the feel-good stories of brilliant black basketball stars “overcoming the odds” to play at the highest level are nonsense? It turns out they had the inside advantage all along?

by CP:
“The motivation of whites to have the NBA as a primary end-goal is as great as that of blacks. While black athletes may feel they have fewer alternatives than whites, it is the case that talented whites stick with basketball as a primary pursuit up to the point where they are no longer competitive, and only then do they pursue a secondary goal.”

I do not think the white kid with high basketball skills at any age would consider it laughable that his NBA motivation is lower than any other until the reality of his underperformance sets in. Dreams are not abandoned until it is apparent the skillset is not high enough. Hero-worship for NBA stars themselves, NBA income and NBA glory is not somehow specially reserved for blacks.
It’s interesting how this “lazy whites” excuse is acceptable for explaining why blacks are superior at basketball but offensive as an explanation for their underperformance elsewhere. For whites who have an abnormally high aptitude for basketball and blacks who are also in the top tier, I do not buy a “lazy” explanation. It may be the case that whites who are mediocre at basketball have more off-hours past-time choices than blacks (including switching pursuits to hockey and lacrosse), but this has nothing to do with work ethic for those who have not yet been weeded out of the general track toward stardom.

by CP:
“Despite all of these enormous advantages, what we see is an enormous disproportionate representation of blacks in the NBA. We cannot explain this pattern by nurturing, because nurturing favors the under-represented group.”

I am familiar with the “sterotype threat” efforts to explain performance differences. I call bullshit on this for the example of basketball. Absolute trivial pap. Silly. Ridiculous. Deficient. Straw-grasping.

With basketball you have a clear case of a highly-desired pursuit, chosen above all others whenever the individual has an option. It is beyond inane to pretend that the desperation of basketball-as-the-only-option somehow accounts for every other short-shrift blacks are given on average, as a group.

Were the end-ratios skewed toward an overwhelming disproportionate number of whites and asians represented in the NBA, all of the cultural and environmental disadvantages of blacks would be trotted out as non-heredity explanations for the observed differences.

95

It’s not clear to me that shrillness and pretending my position should be associated with creationists and moon-landing hoaxes is particularly effective. Have at it if you think it’s a way to make powerful counter-arguments.

Every study of which I am aware shows a disproportionate under-performance by blacks, as a group average, on quantifiable academic standards.
Every black-majority nation of which I am aware under-performs white and asian-majority nations on such parameters as innovation and brain-power niche industries (IT outsourcing; patents…).
Every political system in every nation has approximately the same rank of outcomes for success by nearly any measure (educational performance, wealth, crime…) for similarly-defined racial populations.

In the United States, billions of dollars, thousands of programs and thousands of legislative efforts have done little to eliminate the persistence of these disparate outcomes. In pursuits requiring some skillsets, such as basketball, opening up opportunity has led to the flourishing of black representation. In other pursuits (STEM PhDs) opening up opportunity has had a trivial effect. In the first example of basketball, the difference from prior outcome has been so remarkable as to completely reverse the prior representation ratio.

I have given you an example of SAT scores unameliorated by family income and educational status of parents, and cited data showing wealthy black children and black children from well-educated households underperform poor and under-educated whites on the SAT. I’ve pointed out Ricci v DeStefani as a practical example of work-place equal opportunity not resulting in equal outcomes.

I’ve given you the example of equal college preparation still resulting in abysmally inferior MCAT scores for blacks. I’ve noted that that underperformance persists into post-medical licensing exams even after a further four years of equivalent medical education.

I submit that the onus for showing that group differences are not innate is on you and not me, since no effort to date in any system of any nation has eliminated them and since controlling for the commonly-advanced putative explanations such as income, education and opportunity do not hold up when those are normalized.

While I realize the feel-good secondary gain of being the White Knight Champion of egalitarianism, it has little support in reality, and your characterization of my position as being equivalent to “what’s emitted by an ass” is rhetorical silliness. While you may not agree with my position, characterizing it as a baseless strawman because differences “HAVE NOT BEEN RELIABLY SHOWN to exist” is nonsense. Like many others who want to be the hero for an egalitarian mother nature, you simply raise the bar of proving equal nurture to an absurd level and then rest content that your point is made. Since we are in a world of six billion individuals, you will be able to hide behind the pretense that differences “HAVE NOT BEEN RELIABLY SHOWN to exist” for some time. But your haste to portray kingbighair’s feeble basketball counter-arguments as “demolishing” my “fallacious assumptions” betrays an over-eagerness to deliberately ignore the donkey of outcomes braying in your own mathematical backyard.

96

What? Believe it or not, kids play sports because they are… fun. Not everyone plays a sport with professional aspirations in mind.

I never said basketball is not embraced in the white community. It is a sport enjoyed by all. I did say basketball is the predominant game in the black community, compared to a game among many in the white community. How is the idea that far more options leads to dilution ludicrous? You keep looking at society from a macro level, but it is communities that matter when developing athletes. Each community is usually fervent about a couple of sports. These are the sports that all of the best athletes will participate in and then compete against each other. It is a feedback loop type scenario and that is why you see regional superpowers in high school sports. So you find certain sports taking over an area, and top level athletes usually come out of these systems. In many white communities, sports other than basketball are the top regional sport. So you find really good baseball, swimming, soccer, wrestling, lacrosse, etc, programs because that is the sport the community has placed emphasis on. Do you see what I am getting at? In black communities, kids choose between basketball and football because that is what the community emphasizes. Contrast that with a white community, where the best athletes chose from a bevy of sports. And even though a whole bunch of white people may live in that community and play basketball, it might not be a sport that the community particularly cares about. So even though many whites play basketball, they are not playing against other elite basketball players because the best athletes are playing the sport the community supports. They do not have the advantage of playing within the feedback loop against the best possible competition. Therefore no elite players come out of that system. I hope this makes sense to the reader.

I already addressed this and I said nothing remotely close to your question. I said coaching does little for individual skill. It matters when talking about team defense and offensive plays. Individual skill is developed by repeated play. Basketball is a game of instincts. You have to recognize situations and react in split seconds. It is a game you need a feel for, and is usually dominated by players that have been playing constantly their entire lives. It is very much like soccer (which, by the way, is dominated by non blacks. How many teams from Africa have won the world cup? And I bet soccer is the most popular sport in Africa).

This is not a very good response to what I wrote. You are asking questions I already answered.

Coaching helps team basketball. That is undeniable. But you have no chance to succeed in team basketball at the highest levels unless you have an incredible amount of individual skill. That individual skill does not come from coaching. It comes from playing more than everyone else. I do not know what you are getting at with your last 2 questions.

I never said anything about lazy whites. I did say blacks are far hungrier to reach the NBA than whites. I think this is evidenced by the amount of time spent playing basketball and developing individual skill. No I do not have a cite for this. I am sorry you take that as whites being lazy.

Your opinion is noted.

97

Interest in playing a sport is a vastly different thing than interest in watching a sport. By that reasoning, given the huge following of NASCAR, every kid must want to grow up to be a race car driver.

98

I think that basketball might be a good example of the large effects of small differences. Let’s say that black kids have a slight advantage in height, vertical jump, and speed. This lets them be better at basketball than you’d expect by chance alone. Over time black kids see the success of other black kids and have confidence that they will be good at it as well. Meanwhile, white kids see that black kids have an advantage and start to have lower expectations. After a while what might have been a small physical advantage becomes a larger cultural advantage. The same thing probably happens with American Samoan linemen, Kenyan distance runners, and Northern European strongmen. That could also explain the disproportionate number of Asians in top colleges. Maybe a slight intellectual advantage gets culturally magnified.

ETA: I think you see this with European basketball. A large number of the white players in the NBA are from Europe, where they may not have had the opportunity of competing with as many black players.

99

Some important things to keep in mind from an evolutionary anthropologist’s perspective (and yes, we are a exact science).

just because IQ has a genetic component and people vary in their IQ in part because of these genetics doesn’t mean that different groups of people vary in their IQ from each other. In other words, within group variation does not prove proof for between group variation.

The problem with the Bell Curve and other studies like it is that people equate heritability with genetically determined. Just because IQ is found to be very heritable doesn’t mean it is genetically determined!

Let me tell you what we know about IQ and heritability and then explain what it means.

First of all, heritability measures the total variance in the phenotypic expression of a trait within a specific population that is due to genetic factors. This does not mean genetically determined! For example, painted nails is a trait that is highly heritable. This is true because when one encounters an individual with painted nails, that individually is more likely to be female and thus of a different genotype than a non-painted nails people who are more likely to be male.

When we do twin studies, we are measuring heritability. Depending on the study you read, IQ has a heritability between 0.3 and 0.8. Let’s be generous and say that IQ has 0.8 heritability. What this means is that within that population, 80% of the variety in IQ scores can be attributed to different genotypes (but not necessarily genetically determined!). As this is a population level parameter, you cannot say that an individual’s IQ is 80% determined by genes and 20% by the environment.

Furthermore, heritability only measures variance within the population, not between populations. It is bad science to say that to say that 80% of the difference in IQ scores between two (or more) populations is due to differences in genotypes.

On top of that, heritability changes! The heritability IQ score only pertains to that specific population at that specific time. Heritability can change as the environment changes. IQ heritability changes as the individuals being studied get older!

Finally, even above and beyond that, a high heritability values doesn’t mean that the trait cannot be highly influenced and changed by the environment! The genotype may limit the range, but the range may still be very, very broad.

Let’s take height for example. Height is a trait which has a very high heritability 0.8. However, anyone who has looked at immigrant families can see how quickly the children of immigrants can grow and quickly overtake their parents’ heights. Similarly, bad nutrition can severely restrict a population (North Korea versus South Korea). Because of epigenetics, a history of poor nutrition can have lasting effects that survive in the population long after the selection first takes place; especially if that trait is highly heritable.

IQ within populations has changed considerably over the years. Look at Holland for an example of a population in which IQ changed dramatically in a short amount of time. Look at the Flynn Effect. There’s also the matter that blacks IQ scores can change depending on what race gives the IQ test and the perceived racial bias of the test administrator. The fact that Ainu who consistently score low in IQ tests in Japan (where they are discriminated against) score much higher after moving to the states, where they face no racial discrimination.

I’ve been in this debate with Chief Pendant and he completely ignores science. Any good college textbook on evolution will have a section dealing with the nature of IQ tests (we talked about it in at least a few classes).

100

And, therefore, at least unless and until a great deal more is known than is known now and the whole subject is not so purely speculative, there are no good reasons to take any supposed differences between “races” into account when deciding whether to establish racially-discriminatory immigration policies, or whether to fund “Head Start” programs for inner-city children, etc.

IOW, There are no public-policy implications. (The second article in Chen019’s link.)

And that’s what this whole debate is really all about, isn’t it? That is, any public or intellectual interest in this purely scientific question is not, for the most part, purely scientific. The Bell Curve certainly was not written as a purely scientific exercise.