Uh, I didn’t say anything about SES, I agree with you that’s a crap explanation (and incidentally, I’m quite familiar with the material you cite; I’m friends with people who are pretty seriously interested in the race/IQ stuff, as well as IQ issues and heritability more generally, so it isn’t exactly news to me that poor white students outscore rich Black ones).
It’s not the case though that ‘maternal effects are small’. The Devlin et al. paper on IQ heritability in Nature, I think from 2007, estimated actual heritability of IQ at only 50%, and attributed 20% to maternal effects. (Maternal effects, here, means effects of the prenatal environment).
No one knows how large epigenetic effects might be, but we know that things like height and some metabolic parameters can have strong epigenetic effects (more specifically, you can have heritable changes in gene expression rather than in the actual content of the genome). Not everything that’s heritable is in fact genetically controlled, and vice versa.
I also don’t know why you would expect that “it seems unlikely we’d find a strong distribution of that crowd within the wealthy and educated black families”. Prenatal effects would also help explain why children of White mothers and Black fathers outscore the reverse.
The problem with comparing across ‘the world’ is that you’re not going to see particularly useful IQ estimates from severely malnourished and diseased populations. I mean, you will learn something about IQ, but not about people’s innate genetic potential.
Second and later generation immigrants would be expected to regress to the mean of a source population. If the parent immigrants were in a top tier, the children would likely do worse as they regress to a mean…but in any case, immigrants surely represent some kind of selected subset…
Consider that if I am a brilliant individual , my kids are likely to be less brilliant. If I’m a dullard, they are likely to be smarter than I. This is because my personal genes reflect my personal crapshoot at the genes table, but my kids reflect the combination of genes that trends toward my general gene pool.
Back to your “admixture” study from nearly 50 years ago, which always makes me smile.
So they take these inner city black twin sets (along with some going to parochial schools, I think) and infer an “admixture level” from their blood type and skin darkness (because this study is well before modern genetics), give 'em $10, dental care and a snack (guess which subpopulation is likely to take them up there? Answer–the ones already struggling just to survive, which are already the lowest intellectual tier) and then do some psychometric tests. Then they determine the percentage of admixture makes no difference.
Now here’s why this is comical (other than the general lameness of studying a group that’s already preselected for crappy performance and then saying admixture makes no difference among already crappily-performing selected subsets):
If this sort of thing were actually legit, it would be done in modern times by those determined to lay to rest genetic differences, and that would be that. The Pedant would get his comeuppance.
The fact that such studies are not carried out more rigorously in an era where both the genes and the study design can be done rigorously speaks volumes about the reticence to try and prove genes are not a driver of intelligence differences among race-based groupings.
Considering the Flynn effect, you’re not going to learn anything about “people’s innate genetic potential” from IQ estimates of wealthy countries either.
Black test-takers in the US today score higher on IQ tests than white test-takers from the US at various points in the past. Unless this means that modern black people somehow have a higher “innate genetic potential” than white people in the past, I think we can pretty clearly dismiss IQ test results as indicative of anything regarding a particular group’s “genetic potential” for intelligence.
Oh, I’m sure the study will be done sooner or later. Or we’ll identify particular QTLs linked to intelligence, and can look and see if they differ across racial groups. When either of those happens, we’ll have an answer, and that, as you say, will be that. Razib outlines it here:
And perhaps you can work on finding some science to support your egalitarian view of mother nature…then you won’t have to use ad hominem attacks to distract from a lack of data.
Clearly the Pit is where you belong, you cockroach.
This is awfully convenient, considering that the results would be expected to be exactly the same if the test-score gap is caused by cultural and societal factors and not genetic factors.
Probably because you continue to misstate how the study measured admixture:
Wrong wrong wrong. They estimated admixture level by gene loci. Read the damn study. And if you don’t think scientists were studying genes in the 70s, read about the fucking history of genetics, you pseudo-scientific jackoff.
So do the study, you coward. A study has been done, with good science, including studying genetic markers for admixture, that shows that black people with greater levels of black admixture do not score lower. If you don’t think this study is good enough, then find (or do) another fucking study.
Oooh, it’s a conspiracy, you tiny little coward. The data doesn’t support your assertions, so it must be a conspiracy. You’re a coward, dude.
Trending intelligence quantification across time is very problematic because of the mechanics of delivering a test to an identical audience under identical circumstance.
I am not particularly enamored with IQ testing, and when engaging in more formal debates over in GD, I tend to try to remember to use the term “academic test-taking skillsets” and the like for the evidence I find most convincing that race-based groupings have differences among them driven by genes.
See my earlier comments on psychometric testing in this thread…
The reason the Flynn effect is so heavily promoted is that if we are actually getting smarter faster than it’s possible to evolve, then intelligence must not be very related to genes, or else if intelligence is remaining constant, then IQ tests which vary over time must not be very good proxies for intelligence. For those interested, I recommend reading Flynn’s work; you’ll find some surprising nuggets in there such as acceptance of the fact that IQ tests measure something real (they aren’t bogus, or “culturally biased”); that Flynn’s estimate of the current average black adult male IQ is about 85; and that the regression he extends to past decades puts mean black adult male IQs in the US at below 70 several decades back. I find those numbers preposterous, and many Flynn-effect defenders are unaware of them.
Given the vicissitudes affecting administration of psychometric exams (who designs them, who takes them, who analyzes and reports them…), I think it’s difficult to compare them across decades. I don’t know what an “average” IQ data point for a population means from 50 years ago compared with one now. I certainly don’t see any empiric evidence that blacks have gone from mentally challenged (on average) during the 40s and 50s to an IQ of 85 now. I certainly don’t see any empiric evidence that whites are vastly smarter than they were 50 years ago. If you look at SAT scores, they trend down across the decades, so why is it that all these smarter people are getting harder to educate?
On the other hand, a contemporaneous study can be examined for variables of administration since it’s the same test given at the same time. If I give the same SAT exam to a large group of participants at the same time, and analyze the outcomes, I can be confident that the wealthy/educated/whatever contemporaneously alive population had X result for X variable.
I do believe that education and culture can affect an “intelligence” test. An IQ test is an instrument developed by a fairly specific population within a societal culture largely created by that population. Even the idea of “taking an exam” is cultural. I’m not sure how to interpret an IQ test given cold turkey to a Basarwa walking around in the Kalahari.
For that reason, what I try to focus on is whether or various skillsets and outcomes are driven by genes, and not whether or not one group is more intelligent or whether data showing IQ tests through the decades are at odds with all other proxies suggesting modern intelligence is fairly static.
And mine is a much easier task, because I do have access to skillsets and outcomes for which I can fairly directly quantify nurturing for that skillset.
See the rest of the posts above, and the replies by the various cockroaches.
For an “easier task”, you’re doing awfully pathetically at it. And the idea that you think you can “quantify nurturing for that skillset” is funny/sad, as always.
I’m so, so glad you’re sticking with the cockroach thing. Don’t you ever forget it! I know I won’t.
And horribly inconvenient for you that the study is nearly 50 years old and uses very crude proxies for “admixture” within a population already chosen to be at the low end of a skillset.
Had it any merit in “debunking” genetics as a driver for intelligence or academic skillsets, it would have been repeated ad nauseum, and trumpeted from every headline of every newspaper in the world.
Instead, every variable that can be manipulated in an effort to bring parity to race-based groups has failed so far, and the best you can do is keep pretending there is some secret undiscovered variable yet to be accounted for and fixed.
Meantime, the pattern remains stubbornly persistent.
You are not “mostly shooting down” anything.
You are shooting blanks. The smoke and noise have apparently obstructed you from being able to see that you missed your target.
Tell that to every institution of higher education in the United States, and every large corporation, all of whom have aggressive programs to for blacks, and assign to them a completely different standard for admittance and advancement.
It doesn’t use crude proxies for “admixture”, and there’s no reason to believe the population was “already chosen to be at the low end of a skillset”. You’re just grasping at straws here.
The scientific community has accepted its conclusions (and others that also shoot down the “blacks have inferior genetics for intelligence” assertion) for decades.
I know it sucks that all the major scientific organizations think your assertion is racist crap, but I guess science has a liberal bias, huh?
Ooohh… a few decades of sad, weak efforts haven’t worked, after centuries of brutality? I guess we ought to give up then.
No it doesn’t. It’s a snapshot in history. There’s not nearly been enough decent research to call it “persistent”.
Shooting blanks – like an actual, accepted study that debunks your assertion. Conveniently, you don’t like the study, but you (and your ilk) are too fucking cowardly to try and do a better study of your own.
Is this supposed to be evidence for something? Are you saying that American universities and corporations, in general, actually have a long history of trying to help black people? You can’t possibly be serious.
The argument is already one. I’m just attacking you because it’s fun, and because you’re a cowardly pseudoscientific jackoff who makes racist claims and won’t own up to it.
An anonymous 2013 survey of people who have recently published on intelligence (of whom about 220 participated) indicated that the majority of them think that at least some of the Black/White gap in IQ is due to genetic factors.
Quite possibly they’re wrong, but the situation is very far from being a ‘consensus’ in favour of your viewpoint. If you were right, folks like Steve Hsu would be treated with the same disdain, by Michigan State University, as a creationist or an anti-vaccine nut would be.
, my kids are likely to be less brilliant. If I’m a dullard, they are likely to be smarter than I. This is because my personal genes reflect my personal crapshoot at the genes table, but my kids reflect the combination of genes that trends toward my general gene pool.
