…but that’s not going to stop you from making an assessment anyway, right? Of course not.
Who’s the biologist?
And what does being a doctor have to do with anything?
All I know is, they both make the mistake of confusing heritability for genetic determination. A layperson’s mistake.
here, let me ask you something: It’s a safe bet that for most people, their genes absolutely code for having 5 toes on each foot and five fingers on each hand (there are someexceptions, of course) . Would you say that the number of fingers or toes a person has, has a high heritability? You’d be wrong.
And heritability is strictly a within-population, time-snapshot thing, so it’s useless to use in any kind of comparison between populations at all. In fact, overall, it’s a pretty abused statistic overall.
Good thing you’ve already owned up to your own ignorance, as your guess is about worth the pixels it’s posted in.
You’ve made this point again and again, and I don’t have any trouble understanding it. You think intelligence researchers are not the proper experts to assess genetic impacts on intelligence. Like meteorologists WRT climate science. OK? Do you agree that this is your point? No need to keep repeating it.
But while I agree with the general principle that you need to have the proper experts etc., I offered a specific reason for intelligence researchers to be the most suited experts in this case. Posts #892, #906, possibly others. Posts addressed to you, so you couldn’t have missed them. But you don’t even address them. All you do is just repeat your argument again and again. “Hey, it’s like a meteorologist with climate science, get it?” Brilliant.
The real truth is that nobody is even following your argument.
I’m not big on appealing to the crowd, especially when - as in this case - it’s entirely determined by what the crowd believed going in, and what they want to believe. The vast majority of the people posting in this thread are going to be on your side here, due entirely to the makeup of this board. No one is being won over by your logic or anyone else’s. People are following what you’re saying just enough to know that you’re on their side, and once they figured that out they will “have no trouble following what [you’re] pointing out” and will find themselves being convinced of its brilliance. (The more pathetic ones would kill for half your brains.) If you posted that you had a prophecy from God that all “races” had the same genes, you would probably have just as much agreement, or at least no overt disagreement.
So you can get over yourself.
Hectare.
As I said before, I’m staying away from nitty gritty genetic issues. If I start arguing about SIRE groups and clines and the like, then come back with this type of thing.
Much of your confusion over this whole issue is your baseline notion that if we are going to postulate a genetically based outcome for differences, we need a unique biological grouping. This is incorrect, and perhaps an example might help you.
Suppose I had Group Tall and Group Short. I want to postulate a genetically based difference for their height. I evaluate nurturing, find no reasonable nurturing explanation and make the deduction the difference is genetic. There may be absolutely no other biological binder for the grouping, but IF I choose to make a Tall and a Short group, and control for nurturing, a reasonable conclusion is that the difference is genetic.
Were there reasonable nurturing explanations for why wealthy and educated black families have children who substantially underscore poverty-stricken and uneducated children from white and asian families, a genetic explanation would remain only one possible explanation. However the fact that the nurturing in this instance is not only equivalent but vastly superior, genes become a more likely explanation.
Whether blacks self-identify because of appearance or any other reason is not particularly relevant.
What the history of human migration does is add weight to WHY the gene pools might be different.
I hope this helps as you think through this a little more, because you are wasting your time trying to rebut a strawman of whether or not races SHOULD self identify the way they do. The question is: Given that they DO self-identify into black white asian and so on, is an observed difference likely to be genetic? I’m fine with Obama considering himself black and Navin Johnson considering himself white. There will always be outliers from the general gene pool in any large self-identifying group.
The question is, what is the average gene frequency in that group? Is there likely to be an average gene pool that is different? The answer for self-identified races is “yes,” and the reason is the history of human migrations.
Good luck engaging GIGObuster. The world’s most passionate man for anthropogenic climate change, but whose contortions of English make him almost impossible to follow. (I think it would help him if his comma key broke.)
He means well, is very sincere, and has a good heart.
In general his two basic points underneath the contortions tend to be:
“The experts say” and
You are using a straw man
Also, and probably not relevant here–he’s a little defensive about Al Gore and wealthy lifestyles that contribute to AGW. Just a note in case you get sucked up into an AGW thread w/ Gb.
As a rule of thumb, Gb does not have a lot of personal analysis, nor trust for independent thinking. The “experts” are what define how we should think, and the “experts” we should trust are defined as experts according to how well they agree with GIGObuster. Experts of any kind, and data of any kind, which disagree with GIGObusters are not “experts.” They are rogue scientists, canards, Deniers and the like.
You are asking a rhetorical question. I think in a Democracy, it is up to We the People to protect a society which gives as much representation and protection to all as possible. In any political system, oppression by those in power of those not in power is always a concern.
I’m wondering if part of the reason you don’t accept a genetic explanation is that it is potentially dangerous to do so because of the possibility the information would somehow lead to abuse.
That’s an interesting reason to have, but of course it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a genetic explanation is tenable. Absolutely nothing.
I promise you that the Mbuti are genetically shorter than average, and will never dominate the NBA. I promise you that the Inuit are genetically stockier than average and will never dominate power sprinting. One society might use that information for abusive reasons. Another might try and find ways for the Mbuti and Inuit to participate in those sports as fully as possible. But regardless of what a society does, mother nature is mother nature.
As I have told you, a refusal to accept that there are immutable average differences in skillset outcomes between self-identified whites/asians and blacks means that race-based preferences will be discarded when opportunity is higher for a black candidate than a white/asian one. Without race-based AA, high-opportunity black candidates cannot compete because their academic performance is way below those of whites and asians in their SES peer groups. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, not a single black student would have been accepted to an American Medical School without race-based preferences allowing black students with lower scores to be admitted to medical school, regardless of adjustments for SES. This is because the highest-scoring black students are from high SES backgrounds, but still are far below their white/asian peers in those same high SES tiers. The high SES black candidates are barely equal to the lowest SES whites and asians.
And contrary to your assertion, this gap has not changed in 20 years.
I can post some current ACT SAT MCAT LSAT etc scores, but you can look them up on your own if you do some additional reading.
He isn’t. But I think there are only two answers available to you: you can be apathetic toward a society that becomes openly racist, or you can adopt a White Man’s Burden pose. I can see why you don’t want to admit that.
Without getting into the carefully wordsmithed argument that pretends “high heritability” is a term which can only refer to a with-in population group, and has no bearing on group comparisons, I’d like to point out a couple things:
Your argument seems to be that we are all the same group, so the heritabilityof intelligence would appear to apply to us all, and
That intelligence is inherited at all is powerful evidence that genes drive intelligence. Mention that to iiandyiiii would you?
It always makes me chuckle when we find it easy to figure out that a given family has a fabulous gene pool for intelligence because 5 of their 7 kids are brilliant while two are just average, but we refuse to acknowledge that the exact same reasoning applies to whole groups as long as we adjust for nurturing influences.
If we have highly-privileged groups underscoring low-privilege groups, and the highly privileged group is black, we suddenly don’t think privilege (wealth and education) is very significant, and we think the “heritability” is a commonly confused term.
But of course if we see highly privileged whites outscoring low-privilege blacks, then it’s obvious it’s the SES accounting for the difference.
I actually agree with you (& iiandyiiii) about that - it’s far likelier that this type of info would be used justify racism than to promote affirmative action, and it’s naive to think otherwise.
IMO this fear underlies much of the hysterical reaction to the prospect that it might be true. But in reality, whether it’s true and whether knowlege of that would be damaging are independent.
“Why wouldn’t many people, including leaders, just use such an assertion to exploit and oppress black people as they did before?”
As with “ad hominem” attack, some additional reading about what terms mean would do you well to learn in support of your role as a moderator.
If you stopped worrying about what was “racist” and started understanding what is “Correct,” you would be on your way to functional stands societies can take to make sure we all get included.
It will not be long before “race-based AA” is branded as “racist” by those opposing it.
Uh, where did I confuse ‘heritability’ with ‘genetic determination’, whatever that means?
The heritability of number of fingers or toes is pretty close to zero, although I think in rare cases you can have genetic mutations for polydactyly, etc… And of course heritability is environment-dependent. I’m not sure where I said anything to he contrary.
No I’m not. I’m genuinely curious as to how it’s reasonable to believe that such assertions, if widely accepted, would help black people, when in the past it has played such a huge role in hurting them.
This is part of the reason why I argue against racist statements, but it’s not part of why I argue against bad science like assertions about genes that have not been identified.
Your promises offer nothing, of course, and “shorter” and “stockier” is different than intelligence. Further, without information about the genes for height and stockiness (which we may have in these cases), an environmental cause is just as likely for a group’s shortness or stockiness as a genetic cause.
No it doesn’t. The two don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. Plenty of people support AA without accepting your claim. In fact, I think were your claim widely accepted, AA would be under a far greater threat than today.
Again – why would I accept that AA would be strengthened were your assertions accepted? I think the opposite is far, far more likely, based on US history.
Ooohhh… twenty years. Why that’s two decades. Back when I was in high school.
Pretty pathetic if you think 20 years means something is immutable.
And they would tell me absolutely zilch about genes. Academic tests simply provide zero information about the genes of a person or a group.
I sure did. I boned it and I owned it. I made a mistake, was shown I made a mistake, and I admitted my mistake. That’s a rarity these days, especially on the internet. There’s a lesson in that for you, y’know. Not the rarity part, the other part.
This is cyberspace, here there be flies. Magical gadflies that won’t be driven off no matter how you swat at them. They will only buzz louder. I had already bowed out, red in the face, but you labeled me a nitwit and decided I only chimed in because I wanted to…I don’t know, something about “the other side”. You could have responded with grace and good humor, or not responded at all since, as I say, I owned the stupid. Instead you got all stinky. And that’s how you draw flies, by smelling bad. Well, a gnat in my case, I can’t really aspire to fly-hood. Gnat-dom, tops. Anyway, another lesson for you, courtesy me.
Speaking of the other side, if the side you’re on is populated by racist assholes, then no matter how dumb you think someone with the opposing point of view is, they’re still right and you’re still wrong. FTR. Re-read the OP then do a real honest self-assessment. Read the whole thread again if you must. I mean I can see how wrong you are, and it’s well established I’m a dumb-ass. Learn from these lessons.
There are solid scientific and historical reasons to reject the nonsense Chief Pedant peddles, and they’ve been explained to him at great length many times over many years as well as in this thread. If anything here is hysterical, it’s Chief Pedant’s reaction when I pointed out that he’s resurrecting the same racist science that has been trotted out by everyone from slaveowners to Nazis and many other awful people in between. All he’s done is dress it up with words like “SIRE” instead of talking about the shape of the Negro skull or some other nonsense. It’s another just-so story using pretend science, and it gets updated about once a generation to include jargon and factoids from the latest popular science. These are fairly tales for smug adults that reinforce their worldviews rather than doing what science is supposed to do, which is enhance our understanding of the world. But science is usually vague and acknowledges complexity, and some people can’t stand that. They want to know that science says in plain terms that the world has to be a certain way. For obvious reasons, it’s always bullshit. Chief Pedant is too full of himself to get it; I doubt you care one way or the other. But that’s the story, anyway.
Still not a rhetorical question. Why wouldn’t that happen? Would that matter to you? How would you prevent that? I suspect you don’t give a shit, which is why…
That already happens. People like you are desperate to make the word racist mean something other than what it actually means.
If - and I stress, if, because it’s not scientifically proven - something is scientifically true, should we suppress the spread of such information because it could be used for oppressive or discriminatory purposes?
I ask this in a very broad, general sense - not just in terms of the topic of this thread.
I agree, and to add: if it is true, it’s going to come out sooner or later. Running from the question and discouraging or avoiding the research may help deny the racists ammunition now, but its going to make them stronger later.
That’s why I said **“if.” ** Read again.
By analogy, we don’t know if there is intelligent life in outer space, since it’s not scientifically proven that there is, but if it were scientifically true that there is, what should we do?
Also, refer back to this: “I ask this in a very broad, general sense - not just in terms of the topic of this thread.”
Who’s running? A study has been performed that showed zero correlation among self-identified African Americans between African genetic admixture and lower test scores. It’s an old study, but the methodology was fine. The other side has had plenty of opportunity to recreate this study with more modern genetic methods, but they have not done so. It wouldn’t necessarily be particularly difficult, nor particularly expensive. Why haven’t they done it?
If anyone’s running, it’s the side that makes claims about genes without actually doing any science about genes.
