Careful - that’s not evidence of racism on it’s face, i.e. racial discrimination in jobs. Perhaps blacks simply aren’t as qualified for jobs.
The fact that they aren’t, however, would in turn be attributable to racism, in education, etc. Still racism, but not in hiring.
(No, I’m not saying that actual hiring discrimination no longer exists).
Nope, you completely misunderstand my position. I do not insist that the “default hypothesis” be that “groups are similar” or that “nurturing is the ONLY driver” for group differences.
What I insist on is merely not jumping to the conclusion that any particular difference is due to any particular cause without scientifically showing it to be so.
Nah, I just refuse to endorse your Religion of Inequality without seeing some genuine scientific evidence for it.
Which is pretty much all that all your arguments boil down to: “I know my beliefs about genetic differences are right, despite the lack of scientific support for them, and someday you’ll realize it too! Neener neener neener!”
Are you kidding? There’s tons of evidence. Not evidence that “nurture” is the entire explanation, but plenty of data that shows it’s at least part of it (as opposed to zero evidence for your genetic explanation). Pretty much all of the links you’ve shown regarding crime stats or education shows that they try and “normalize for nurture”- correct for different incomes, school quality, etc. So obviously these little aspects of “nurture” have something to do with the disparate outcomes- or they wouldn’t have to be corrected for.
For one thing, these “millions of dollars and thousands of programs” have been in place for a matter of decades, after literally centuries of discrimination and subjugation. And by many measures the gaps have shrunk.
For another thing, human behavior is incredibly complex- far more so then animal behavior. To put it simply- “nurture” is a far greater aspect of human behavior then it is for animal behavior. Humans have a far lengthier childhood then animals do.
What does this even mean? Who hasn’t acknowledged that “groups are different”? Or is this just a statement so vague to be essentially meaningless?
More straw man crap. No one is saying that groups “are the same genetically”, another meaninglessly vague statement. No one has said “outcomes are equal”. We’re not even saying “all populations have the same levels of genetic potential in intelligence and aggression”, or something like that. We’re not making any claims at all- except perhaps that the only evidence as to the cause of disparate outcomes between races/ethnicities/groups to be found so far falls in the “nurture” category. There’s no other evidence. None. Zero. You got nothing. All you can do is say “the gap still exists! See! They’ve tried to kill the gap, but they haven’t succeeded yet! So therefore they never will!”
Yup. As I noted above, this is typical of Creationists and other pseudo-scientists passionately rooting for the success of a particular hypothesis about a very complex scientific issue that requires a long time and a huge effort to study.
They get impatient with how long it’s taking for everyone else to discern “the Truth” of their favored hypothesis, so they arbitrarily decide that the evidence is sufficiently complete and declare victory.
And then they claim that anybody who objects that the evidence is still a long way from sufficiently complete is just a blinkered ideologue.
And here we are, back to your singular obsession.
(By CP: In none of the threads anywhere that I can think of do you or other egalitarians present evidence for a nurturing explanation.")
First, I should have said “evidence for an exclusively nurturing explanation.”
I have agreed many times that nurture plays a role along with nature.
Let me give you a practical example of why I discard the bias you have toward nurture instead of nature.
Currently in education and STEM careers, the SIRE group of “black” is significantly underrepresented. We might reasonably consider that the odds are heavily biased against blacks for various socioeconomic reasons. Perhaps we throw in other nurturing reasons (culture, whatever) and conclude that the start pool at college is disproportionately underrepresented by blacks for entirely nurturing reasons. But let us now take those new proportionate pools and follow them. What happens? At every subsequent level the black group continues to underperform despite an increasingly identical nurturing experience. Four years on their MCAT scores are abysmally lower than their asian counterparts. Upon acceptance to medical school (again, filtering for the top tier of students) ther licensing exams are lower. 5 years later, their specialty exam scores are lower. 3 years later their subspecialty exam pass rate is lower. By the time you get to the most elite fields, asians are substantially overrepresented and blacks are remarkably underrepresented.
In law, similar trends hold with the LSAT and the Bar exams.
In quantitative science fields, similar trends hold again, with abysmal track records for awarding PhDs in STEM fields, and disproportionate underrepresentation against the starting college pools–not the general population.
We don’t see this in other disadvantaged groups. We don’t see it in disadvantaged asian immigrants to this extent. It is a very pervasive pattern, and it is a pattern similarly replicated around the world. What seems to be missing is not nurturing, but the genesets underpinning those skillsets.
I believe that ignoring the differences among SIRE groups has pervasive consequences that hurt our ability to drive a society where every group gets a chance for their piece of the pie. We are better off getting over the fact that there are innate average differences and then working on building a society that gets around that than we are pretending we all have equal potential. If we decide “race” is purely social and nurturing is the default explanation, then opportunity and socioeconomic status will become the filters for obtaining admission to good schools and opportunity in STEM (and other careers). We won’t be willing to consider race as a criterion, and as a consequence we won’t be able to have affirmative admissions or minority set-asides or any number of other informal and under-the-table preferences because we want every group to get a chance. We’re not going to see a violent impulsive crime in the context of the young black male’s genetic heritage and we’re just going to keep chasing ephemeral nurturing explanations in the blind faith that one of them will eventually bring us to the egalitarian Truth.
We can work around innate differences. We’ve found ways to make good firefighters out of women without insisting that the LPGA be opened up to men. We’ve just accepted our differences, made accommodations, and moved on. We should do the same with race.
Every cite, posted by you or others about education, crime, or economic stats contains evidence of the impact of nurture (though not “evidence for an exclusively nurturing explanation”, which may be essentially impossible- as hard as it is to rule out “nurture” altogether, it’s just as hard to rule out “not nurture”).
Says you, with no genetic evidence. All you’ve got is “the gap” (that is, the disparate outcomes between races/ethnicities/etc). Again- this is your argument in a nutshell:
“-The gap exists.
-There have been efforts to eliminate this gap.
-The gap still exists despite these efforts.
-It is therefore impossible to eliminate this gap.
-Genetics must be responsible for this gap.”
That’s all you’ve got- and you can write and cite pages and pages about this gap, and its persistence (though by some measures it has shrunk)- but until there is actual genetic data, all you’re doing is repeating that argument over and over again. We’ve already acknowledged the gap exists- you don’t need to provide more data about the gap. You’ve made a hypothesis to explain the gap. This hypothesis can be tested (with difficulty, perhaps, with today’s technology).
Science is hard.
No, we really haven’t. We’ve learned to accept a lower performance standard. This isn’t good. It’s (arguably) acceptable, but not good.
Sure we have, over and over again.
It’s not just testosterone levels, but the androgen receptors. The shorter version of the androgen receptor gene is associated with aggressive behaviour. All studies indicate that African Americans have a higher frequency of the short version than whites or Asians. So even with the same level of testosterone there would be a stronger activating effect on average for african americans.
Another thing to look at is MAO-A variants.
I don’t have as much of a dog in these race fights as Americans.I’m from India, our contexts are simply too different. Nor do I have much experience in debating what is obviously a hot-button topic here at the Dope. So, if my point has been addressed before, do me the favour of repeating yourself. And please be gentle 
From a purely scientific point of view, why should the null hypothesis be “Genes have no impact on population behaviour” ? It seems to me, given how massively important your genes are at an individual level(I hope nobody is contesting this point?) the default position on this question ought to be “Genes have an impact on population behaviour/outcomes”. To my mind, the assertion being made is that they don’t have such an impact. Shouldn’t the burden of proof lie with those making that claim?
It’s not. The problem is that “race” is not a genetically defined population. And the fact that so many people have pushed such ideas and then turned out to be completely wrong or outright liars doesn’t help either.
Because the null hypothesis in science is always “no difference”. The reason for that lies in how science works. If you can detect “no difference” between a world in which an entity does not exist, and a world in which it does, then in science the existence of the entity rejected. Science can’t prove whether something exists or not. All it can do is prove that existence under some circumstances. Hence, the null hypothesis always defaults to “no difference”.
In regard to your specific argument, you are utilising two logical fallacies in tandem.
The first is an undistributed middle: while genes may explain behaviour, they don’t explain all behaviour,
Your argument runs as follows:
Genes are massively important to behaviour at an individual level.
Different populations behave differently.
Therefore the behaviour in the populations must be due to genes.
To see why this fails logically consider the analogy:
Tyre pressure is massively important to the top speed of any individual vehicle.
Motor cars have higher top speeds than bicycles.
Therefore the higher speed in cars must be due to higher tyre pressures.
The conclusion is not true of course. Bicycle tyre pressures are typically much higher. The reason why it fails is because, while tyre pressure *is *massively important, it isn’t the only factor that determines top speed. The source of power is also rather important.
The other fallacy you are engaging in is one of composition. You are attributing the sum of the parts to that of the whole.
Genetic behaviour is massively important at an individual level.
Blacks as a group behave massively differently to Whites.
Therefore Blacks must be exhibiting different genetic behaviour to Whites.
To see why this fails logically consider the analogy:
The type of brick is massively important to its weight at an individual level.
The black brick house weighs more than the white brick house.
Therefore blacks bricks must weigh more than white bricks.
Of course there’s no reason to assume such a conclusion is true. Even if Black bricks were much lighter, a house built of them could obviously weigh more just by using more bricks, or because it contains other building materials in addition to bricks.
In exactly the same way, the fact that genes are important in individual behaviour, that does not allow us to conclude one single things about their importance in group behaviour. To draw that conclusion we have to first establish that all other factors between the groups are equal. Just as we can only predict the size of a house based on the bricks it is made of after we have established that all other factors, such as number of bricks, are equal.
The problem is that we have no reason at all to believe that is the case. “Negro” is in no sense a genetically coherent group, and “African American” is even less coherent. All AAs don’t share genetic commonality that they don’t also share with a sizable minority of non-AA citizens of the USA. Moreover, AAs are not culturally homogeneous, nor are White Americans.
There is no more basis for assuming that AA differences are genetic than there is for assuming that a difference in house sizes is due to the size of the bricks they are made of.
Some confusion may be springing from the fact that “null hypothesis” is often popularly interpreted as “what we think is true” or “what’s most likely to be true”. This confusion in turn often leads so-called “race realists” to argue that their opponents are “clinging” to the null hypothesis out of bias, because otherwise why would they assume it?
But a null hypothesis, as Blake explains, is always of the “Nothing to see here” variety, no matter whether researchers consider that the likeliest explanation or not. Everything is initially assumed to be just random variation or some undetermined cause.
To make a scientifically convincing case for the influence of any particular cause, you have to come up with either a reliably predictive model explaining how your hypothesized cause is operating, or statistically significant test results showing at least that the correlation between hypothesized cause and observed phenomenon is real and fundamental.
The “reliably predictive model” bit is why we don’t have to assume that, say, dogs might be just randomly varying forms of cats or watermelons until proven otherwise. We have a model of biology that is very successful at explaining the genetic differences between dogs, cats and watermelons, and predicting which one will result from a particular mating.
But we don’t currently have any such model for how human genetic variation at the population level (much less at the socially-defined “race” level, which is a much murkier category in terms of genetic differences) affects complex traits like intelligence and behavior.
Nor do we even have any results of statistical tests that guarantee the correlation between racial genetic differences and differences in intelligence or behavior, because it’s so difficult to exclude the effects of environmental differences.
So at present, the null hypothesis of “no genetic impact on racial population behavior” still stands. That doesn’t mean that it has been confirmed, or that anyone should feel personally convinced of its truth, or that the non-“race realists” are somehow “winning” the argument. It just means that so far, it has not been contradicted by scientific evidence.
Ok, that makes sense.
I’m not at all excluding the middle. You’re misreading or mischaracterising my argument for extending individual to group behaviour, and the analogy you use is far from accurate. I have at no point said genes are responsible for all group behaviour(Although, at some level of abstraction, and probably not a useful one for debates like this, they must be). Here’s a different analogy to clarify for you my thought process -
Tyres are made of rubber and steel. The density of rubber used is massively important to the tyre’s weight
Motor cars weigh more than bicycles.
Therefore the higher weight of the motor car must in some part be due to the density of rubber used, and to say that it is not would be the unreal assertion.
Once again, I have at no point made the statement that genes determine group behaviour, only that they have an impact on it. And there is a fairly plausible causal chain for something like impulsively committed crime. If indeed there are different average levels of testosterone in different human populations, and if testosterone affects aggression, ceteris paribus (of course) you would expect heterogeneity in crime rates.
Obviously, one would have to control for other factors.
Again, I have at no point made any assertions regarding ‘race’. In fact, I would have appreciated your participation in this thread, where I asked if humanity could be divided into genetic sub-populations. Didn’t receive any definitive answers there, although I did expand my knowledge a little
No, but you have said that they are responsible for some forms of group behaviour, which is an undistributed middle if you reach that conclusion from a premise that genes are responsible for some individual behaviour.
And that is your argument, correct?
:dubious: I think I must be misreading something here.
Because you have just argued that, if I show you a car that weighs 12, 000 kg and a bicycle that weighs 15kg, you can tell me that the density of the rubber on the car’s wheels *must *be higher than that of the bicycle wheel.
Because if the density of the rubber on the car can ever be lower, then clearly the higher weight of the motor car can not be in some part be due to the density of rubber used. And as such your argument is proven to be false.
If this is your thought process, then it’s a classic example of an undistributed middle *and *an example of why they are invalid.
Substance A is heavier then substance B.
Vehicle C is heavier then Vehicle D.
Therefore vehicle D must be made from substance B.
You simply can not construct such an argument logically. A vehicle can be incredibly heavy despite being made of lightweight components, or it can be incredibly light despite being made of heavy components. The weight of the components does not have to correlate to the weight of the vehicle.
And the genetic behaviour of the individuals does not have to correlate to the genetic behaviour of the group, for precisely the same reasons. No one is saying that it can’t correlate, simply that you can’t conclude that they do correlate.
So if the “impact” isn’t deterministic, then what precisely is the “impact”.
I can’t quite follow what you are trying to express here. If genes do not in any way determine behaviour, then something else is must be determining behaviour. And presumably that something else is environment or culture. It’s hard to see what else it could be, but let me know if you have some other else in mind.
In which case all you are saying is that the behaviour of Blacks is determined by culture and environment, and not in any way determined by genes.
Is that correct?
If.
If there was evidence it was linked to a specific gene or suit of genes.
And if the frequency of the gene corresponded to the frequency of crime.
And if those genes were not also common in non AAs.
Then you would have a valid argument. It wouldn’t have anything at all to do with the arguments you have presented so far.
But we have nothing even remotely like that. People have been lookingfor along time, and they have found nothing.
The null hypothesis remains in effect. If someone proposes that a mechanism exists, it is up to them to demonstrate that it exists. Until they do it is assumd that it does not: No difference.
What you can’t do is construct an argument that differences in individual behaviour is due to by genetic differences, and that behaviour between two groups is different, so the two groups must have genetic differences. That is totally invalid
Precisely. And an that has never been done. Hence the argument contains an undistributed middle and is logically invalid. The sole purpose of controlling for other factors is to establish that the middle term is not undistributed. Until you have done that, you are applying an undistributed middle.
:dubious:
So when you said “Genes have no impact on population behaviour” in a thread specifically and solely about race, the populations you were referring to were not racial?
Can you explain what those populations were if not racial, and why you thought they could be relevant to this thread.
If you were honestly asking whether genes can determine behaviour in any population, ever, then of course the answer is yes. A family of genetic idiots will all be idiots. So if that is your only question then of course the answer is “yes”.
This thread, however is about races, not ay other sort of populations.
Of course you can divide humanity into genetic sub-populations. We commonly call some of those those sub-populations families. It seems self-evident that we can genetically distinguish family lines. We can also construct arbitrarily ever-larger groups by combining family lines. We can thus divide humanity into an infinite number of genetic sub-populations, anywhere from 6 billion to two. That is beyond dispute. Moreover, we can decide which genetic lineages to follow, so we can construct huge numbers of different clusters at any scale. So we can genetically divide humanity into 6 populations of equal size, or we can divide it into 6 population, 5 of which contain just a few thousand individuals, or any other combination you want.
The question in this thread, however, is whether we can scientifically construct genetic sub-populations that correspond to race. And the answer to that is unambiguously “No, we can’t”. People within races are no more closely related than people in different races. A point that has been hashed out ad nauseum on these boards for at least 10 years.
Do a search for my name and “Race” and you will see that the subject has been settled to the satisfaction of everyone willing to actually accept the science.
Nope. All I have argued is that the density of the tyre must affect whether the car is heavier than the bicycle. It may not be the only thing that has an effect, but it must be one of them.
Mind explaining to me how a vehicle made of heavy components can be light? (I have already said other factors should remain the same.)
Why would you assume “have an impact on” is the same thing as “determine” ? I apologise if my writing wasn’t clear enough, but for me one allows for other factors to have a role, the other doesn’t. So if I were to say genes determine behaviour, it would mean I think they are the only factor responsible for behaviour. If I said culture determines behaviour, it would mean the same thing. On the other hand, if I were to say, as I have, that genes have an impact on group behaviour, it means they are one of the factors that contribute to group behaviour along with cultural and environmental factors, in much the same fashion that (although to a different, unknown extent) a car tyre’s density would have an impact on its total weight, but it would not determine what that weight was.
Incorrect, see above.
Of course if. I’m talking about a hypothetical here. There are cites in this thread that claim higher average testosterone levels among the black population. What is your opinion on the validity of those cites? If you accept that different levels of testosterone could exist across different populations, could the reason for that be anything other than genetic? Genuinely curious.
Yes. As the other thread I started should tell you, I have no interest in ‘races’
Ok. I wasn’t aware that the thread was required to hew THAT closely to races. I was really responding to the sort of reasoning that iiiandyiii makes here
Which seems to say that he’s arguing there is no evidence for genes having an impact on group behaviour, and I found that strange. Maybe he’s just saying, like you, that groups can’t be racially segregated. I have no real problem with that.
I’ll repeat a question I asked in the other thread about the arbitrariness of construction of groups from family lines - you can answer it here or there(or I suppose, not at all)
Sure ok, that’s what prompted me to start that other thread anyway. I don’t care about the race angle.
But you can’t assume that the car tire ['scuse US spelling] is denser than the bicycle tire just because the car is heavier.
The “race realists” are saying, in effect, “Tire density is indisputably one of the factors affecting vehicle weight, and since we see that Vehicle 1 is heavier than Vehicle 2, that must mean that Vehicle 1’s tires are more dense.”
(What they’re literally saying, of course, is “Genes are indisputably one of the factors affecting individual intelligence and behavior, and since we see that Group 1 of individuals compares thus-and-so to Group 2 in terms of intelligence or behavior, that must mean that their intelligence/behavior genes are substantially different.”)
Obviously, that argument is flawed.