Perhaps you would like to step up to the plate and offer even a single study showing equivalent performances on any quantitative tests at a group level between blacks and whites.
In terms of understanding that genes determine the potential of the brain for cognition, I missed your offer to teach my rabbit chess. You may give it the environment of your choice.
I didn’t know this. Is that true? If so, I wonder why that is, too.
I can think of a million explanations, most of which involve picking up a history book. But here’s the thing, none of those explanations are science, because the dataset you keep proposing to look at is not based on any distinguishable scientific criteria.
What’s your explanation for the fact that India had virtually none of these industries until after Independence, while Europe and the US had them prior? Was there a magic genetic transfer at independence?
Wait, what? I thought we were using technological pursuits as a barometer of intelligence? But the Indians in Uganda and South Africa were primarily laborers or merchants. Do they have different genes that make them prone to less technical pursuits?
You can’t even be consistent in the criteria you demand we look at. In some parts of the world, we’re supposed to look at “high cognition” pursuits. For Indians in other parts of the world, we’re supposed to look at “success” (is being a tailor or a shop owner a “high cognition” pursuit now?) The reason you can’t do this consistently is because you’re not actually trying to do science.
I have a million explanations for this. What I’m not trying to do is claim that those explanations are scientific. Because to claim that wouldn’t be science.
Dude, give it up. Once you posted the crap about early socialization and chemical/hormonal exposure being trivial, it became very clear that you have no idea what you are talking about and don’t even understand the basic science in this area. I mean you seriously have to be living in a cave to think that. None of what you have posted here constitutes scientific evidence of a GENETIC basis for anything. When you decide to actually approach this in a scientific manner, I’ll stop calling you out on your racist bullshit.
Perhaps you would like to show a study which controls for all the factors we know about which affect human brain development? How about posting an actual scientific study. Not a sociological one.
And just as you falsely claimed that I imagined “biafra” like conditions in America, now you falsely claim that I said anything which could reasonable be construed that you can teach a rabbit to play chess. You cry about being called a racist, but you have no problem flat-out lying in this thread.
There is no such study of which I am aware, and hiding behind such an absurd request has become the last defense for those who hope we are all equivalent.
What we can say is this:
Given the same educational opportunity, whites and asians outscore blacks (as for instance, on MCATs, LSATs and post-medical school exams).
If we look at the two most commonly-advanced environmental variables–wealth and parental education–wealthy blacks and blacks with educated parents underscore poor whites and whites with parents who never finished high school.
If we look worldwide, we will always–in every culture; every political system; every university; every everything–see a rank-order in academia with asians generally on the top and sub-saharand african populations generally on the bottom. Aggressive recruitment and funding and special help programs in higher education targeted specifically toward blacks has not been successful in changing their disproportionate representation in STEM PhDs.
Gene prevalence varies by populations, including racial groupings.
Genes affect maximum development potential for nearly all traits.
In the world of animal husbandry, where “racism” does not exist, breeding programs prove the concept that genetics is the primary determinant for traits when the environment is similar, even though a given environment cannot ever be made exactly identical.
I am aware that many will look over these various factors and take issue with them. The question is not so much whether the issue has been settled absolutely. A high standard should be demanded.
The question is this: What is the evidence that race-based groups are equal in potential?
Until we tackle that question, we’ll continue to see Ricci v DeStefano arise over and over again, as a consequence of laws based on nothing other than a totally arbitrary assumption that we are all equal, and therefore if a disparity shows up it must be “The System” instead of Mother Nature, which is at fault.
Do you think all people that do studies of this kind do so out of the motivation you describe?
Riiight. When you make SCIENTIFIC claims, it’s absurd to ask you to back it up with SCIENTIFIC data.
Again you keep trying to use transitory sociological data to imply something about genetics, just as I predicted in my first post. Each post you make merely proves my point.
Ok. This doesn’t say anything about which genes vary by which populations. We can obviously point to some (as in skin color or sickle-cell genes), but we can’t make definitive statements either way on a whole host of others, because we don’t know enough yet.
Nice try, and it shows your bait and switch tactics clearly. There’s no “maximum development potential” for something like eye color or hair color. That’s a non-scientific construct, and the fact that it doesn’t apply to a whole host of genetic expression shows clearly that you are attempting to shoe-horn non-scientific constructs into scientific paradigms.
Oh, please. Calling you out on your nonsense isn’t the same as “looking over” your statements. I’m demanding a scientific standard here from you, which you absolutely refuse to follow.
Since I never made this claim, why are you asking me? The only claim I’ve made is that we don’t have enough knowledge to know whether or not genetic factors related to intelligence are distributed differently across racial lines. You’ve provided absolutely no scientific evidence in this thread to refute my statement. Given the current state of our scientific research, the only proper scientific thing to do is to leave open multiple possibilities, not trying to foreclose possibilities that don’t fit into your racist world-view.
Amazing how you can’t stick to the topic of science while trying to make scientific claims. Now, we’re dealing with legal cases are we?
Oh, and I missed this before:
Five children who are genetically related? Wow. This isn’t an argument that proves or disproves a genetic basis for anything, but given how closely the genes would be for these children, it’s completely impossible to dismiss hormonal/chemical/socialization factors in this equation. You’ve actually provided an argument for considering hormonal/chemical/socialization factors to be important, rather than trivial. I guess you’ve started to make my arguments for me.
See, this is where the Pit threads get fun…
If you are too [del]retarded[/del] success-deferred to figure out that within a family of five children exposed to nearly identical nurturing the different capacities to learn are genetic, I can understand why you keep pretending there is no “scientific” evidence that intelligence differences at a population level are also genetic. If you prefer, take a whole group of Europeans at a college studying engineering. The high-performing ones perform highly because they have advantageous genes much more than they perform highly because they are richer, or luckier or any other bogus environmental crapola. In terms you might be able to grasp: the ones who do better do better because they are smarter.
I guess you got the unlucky chemical exposure in your clan, huh? Mercury, maybe? 
Like many others, you’ll just keep clinging to some bogus putative environmental difference despite the fact that every putative difference ends up failing as an explanation when it is actually studied. Sadly, in your lifetime and the next, barring more vigorous mixing of the gene pool, these differences are going to persist. They are genetic, and equalizing environmental influences never has and never will, make them go away until such time as the gene pool for humans is so mixed that races go away.
See figures 3-6 here, for instance.
*"Black children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children from families below the poverty line.
Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white children of parents with a high-school diploma or less."*
Well, I for one, enjoy reading Chief Pedant’s posts.
I think they were better in the original German, though.
Who says they have identical nurturing? We certainly couldn’t gather that from your quote. Apparently, you get to just make up stuff after-the-fact now and pretend you’re doing science. And I notice that you completely ignored hormonal and chemical issues during fetal and early childhood development. It’s extremely difficult to control for a factor like “nurturing” within a family group, and given how close the gene pool is in your example, it’s completely unscientific to not examine all those other factors which we KNOW can impact cognitive development. You can keep trying to peddle your non-science all you want, but anybody who has even had a basic exposure to these fields can spot your bullshit a mile away.
I’m beginning to suspect you might actually be the stupidest person alive, because you can’t even grasp the basic scientific issues here: (1) saying smart people do better at college doesn’t say anything about gene distribution across racial groups and (2) this is transitory sociological data.
I’m just going to start abbreviating transitory social, political and economic data as TSPEM, because I’m sick of typing it out, and it’s obvious you have nothing in the way of SCIENTIFIC evidence to offer.
I’m beginning to think you may have eaten a lot of lead-based paint chips as a child.
And yet, you still cannot provide any scientific evidence of anything, and you keep making non-scientific statements in this thread.
Sadly, for us, scientific research about the human genome and brain development will probably continue to proceed slowly. Until then, people like you will keep trying to dress up racism as science, and whenl called repeatedly on your bullshit, you will will simply ignore refutations to your non-scientific assertions.
I have no idea how genetic mixing will affect intelligence, and neither do you, because nobody has a clear idea on that yet. Making crap up doesn’t constitute as science.
Ack. That should be TSPED, not TSPEM.
But races aren’t “populations” in a genetic sense, in the way that families clearly are.
For instance, as I’ve pointed out in other threads, American kids who identify racially as “black” but who have a high percentage of white genetic ancestry don’t perform significantly better on IQ tests than American kids who also identify as “black” but have a low percentage of white genetic ancestry. Nor do biracial white/Asian children seem to have any significant correlation of test performance with actual degree of white vs. Asian genetic descent.
If these performance differences were indeed demonstrably genetic, we would expect to see them vary more with what your actual genetic heritage is than with what racial group you culturally identify with.
“Never has and never will” is a hell of a big stretch to conclude from less than fifty years of serious societal efforts towards racial integration and equality.
As I keep saying, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong or immoral about the hypothesis that there might be genetically-based differences in cognitive abilities between racial groups. Nor is there anything wrong with saying we should study race and genetics in general.
But anybody who is willing at this stage of the game to declare categorically that the science on the subject is already conclusively settled is either fooling themselves, or trying to fool others.
A goddess is in love with me? Swoon.
There is no such thing as “nearly identical nurturing”. That could only be achieved in a laboratory. Each child really is a special snowflake and reacts differently to the environment it is in in variable ways.
(emphasis mine)
Kimstu, do you have a cite for this? Because I believe intelligence is largely hereditary, I would not be particularly surprised. It’s my impression that intelligence drives success over any other variable, and that marriage most typically occurs within social classes (for lack of a better term). Under that construct, a highly intelligent black marrying a highly intelligent white would likely have highly intelligent children, but if the marriage occurs at the lower end of the social scale, and the white parent is of lower intelligence, the children are not likely to end up as the brightest candles on the altar just because a big percentage of their genotype is “white.” There are a lot more dumb white people running around than there are dumb black people.
I’ll have to dig around in my pile of references but I think I can point to some that show the opposite data (e.g. that on average, children of mixed race parentage perform somewhere between the means for their parental groups) … however I will be out of town a few days. This important thread may croak before I get back to my references.
Interestingly, the whole idea that there can be a “percentage of white/black ancestry” points toward a reasonable contention that there is something different in those genetic pools, even at the level of a general description of “white” or “asian” or “black.”
I’ve given specific examples of genes which are disproportionately distributed, including microcephalin haplotypes and more recently, neandertal admixtures. While I heartily agree that “black” is a foolishly large grouping, and as a grouping contains an incredibly diverse number of totally distinct subpopulations, I don’t agree with the proposition that it is therefore untenable to make an argument that observed differences at the race level are likely to be genetic.
If, for instance, I was studying US populations and found a high incidence of sickle cell trait in “blacks” versus “whites” I could still reasonably infer the difference was genetic (assume I did not have a test for the Hb S gene). I could make that inference despite agreeing with the proposition that “black” is a stupidly large category, and that within the stupidly large category of “black” there could be large sub-populations no more likely to have sickle cell trait than some categories of “whites” (whites, say, of Mediterranean descent where there are similar environmental pressures for sickle cell disease).
The argument is never that racial groupings are good groupings. The argument is that, if you use those groupings and you find phenotypic differences, then the difference is genetic if you can normalize opportunity and nurturing.
The counter-argument to my position typically rests upon two things: One cannot “group” into races reasonably and nurturing can never be normalized. I have no argument with the first point. Although I disagree with it, I find it irrelevant.
The second point says we cannot normalize nurturing. I disagree, and I find the total inability of academia to bring any number of groups, including blacks, up to par in terms of performance in the quantitative sciences the world over, to be reasonable evidence that there is an immutable–genetic–component to that persistent difference.
I’d be curious about what specific cultural or nurturing explanations you’d advance for the fact that adjusting for wealth and parental education does nothing to close the score gap, or that 8 years on after entering higher education (with medical licensing tests, e.g.) the gap persists, or that STEM PhDs awarded to blacks have barely budged in 40 years even while PhDs in less quantitative fields have improved their disproportionate representation.
I take it then, that wealthy black children, and children of black parents with graduate degrees, are reacting poorly to their highly-enriched environments and thus underperforming poverty-stricken white children and white children of parents unable to finish high school? I take it there must be some sort of way to tie that whole failure back to some multi-generational cultural heritage so that we can work historic institutionalized racism and slavery into an explanation, right? We certainly need to be able to find something other than genetic potential to explain away what is not just “identical” nurturing but vastly superior nurturing–at least for those two critical components of opportunity–for the underperforming black group, right?
Once you decide it just cannot be genetic, you are pretty much backed into a corner of vague environmental variables, none of which to date have held up to any scrutiny. What you have is a clear and immutable difference, stubbornly resistant to the notion that the immutability of these special snowflakes is a result of unchanging and inferior environments.
I am so angry I could spit. But I guess this thread has gone meta, and that’s interesting at least: the thread about why threads get hijacked by racists has been - wow!- hijacked by racists!
I don’t know how much good it is arguing about intelligence with folks who can’t even pass the Turing test. I mean, has there been any response by the “blacks are stoopid” crowd that couldn’t have been predicted in detail by, say, the OP? OP, I respect your noble intent. If you ever want to discuss Africa with people who actually, you know, live there, I’ll chat with you any time and we’ll try to ignore the racebots. I’m gonna leave now before I break Godwin’s law, which I am itching to do, so I won’t post in this thread again.
But, unless you explicitly recognize the cultural factors that influence the differences you might see, then accepting the conclusions as a meaningful comparison of smartness between races is racist.
You cannot normalize for social factors when the very choice of what you’re testing for is driven by what the culturally dominant race has chosen as indicators of intelligence.
If intelligence is about genetics, why are you equating people on the lower end of the social scale with being unintelligent? Couldn’t you be born to a relatively upper class family and still be unintelligent?