Does every single thread about Africa need to get hijacked by racists?

[Gorsnak]

@Freudian_Slit

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?

No, because upper class people are smarter than lower class people (as is evidenced by their success) and therefore only have smart children.

[Freudian_Slit]

@Gorsnak

No, because upper class people are smarter than lower class people (as is evidenced by their success) and therefore only have smart children.

Hmm. It sure was stupid of me to have been born to a family that didn’t have huge sums of money initially. But they earned a lot more so does that mean I was smart? Perhaps not as smart as if I’d known enough to be born to a really rip roaringly rich family.

[Gorsnak]

@Freudian_Slit

Hmm. It sure was stupid of me to have been born to a family that didn’t have huge sums of money initially. But they earned a lot more so does that mean I was smart? Perhaps not as smart as if I’d known enough to be born to a really rip roaringly rich family.

You’ll have to ask Chief Pedant. The family I was born into was dirt poor, so my intellect isn’t capable of grasping all the ramifications of this correlation between wealth and genius.

[kimera]

Here is the actual science on intelligence from someone who actually studied it in a top University for Evolutionary Biology, rather than from the ‘make shit up because it fits my theories’ school of ridiculousness:

IQ seems to have a genetic component, but there is no consensus on what percentage that genetic component is.

Furthermore, there may be no genetic determination at all! Most people confuse heritability with genetically determined, but heritability does not mean genetically determined! When we do twin studies, we are measuring heritability. If IQ has an 0.8 heritability (a generous number), that only means that 80% of the variety in IQ scores can be attributed to different genotypes.

Even if there is a genetic component within the individual, that doesn’t mean that the same genetic component works between groups. In other words, within group variation does not prove proof for between group variation. Even if IQ has 0.8 heritability, it would be flat out wrong to say that 80% of the difference in IQ scores between two populations is due to differences in genotypes.

On top of that, heritability changes in response to the environment changing, as the exact same individuals studied get older, etc. If IQ was entirely genetically determined, we wouldn’t see this flexibility in heritability.

Even all that aside, a high heritability doesn’t mean that the trait cannot be influenced and changed by the environment. The genotype may limit the range, but the range can still be very, very broad. Height is the perfect example for this. Poor nutrition can severely resist not only the present generation, but also generations to come. This is caused by the environment, not on huge changes on the genetic level.

Finally, IQ within populations (and individuals) has been known to change dramatically based on the context of where the text was given. Ainu, a group of indigenous people in Japan, consistently score much lower than other Japanese when given IQ tests in Japan (where they face heavy discrimination), yet to do the same as Japanese in tests given in the US (where they aren’t discriminated against).

Rand Rover, you are the one who has beliefs contrary to science.

[BrainGlutton]

@kimera

IQ seems to have a genetic component, but there is no consensus on what percentage that genetic component is.

Is there any consensus as to what genes are involved?

(I need to know this, to gene-engineer my supergenius master race.)

[Chief_Pedant]

@kimera

Here is the actual science on intelligence from someone who actually studied it in a top University for Evolutionary Biology, rather than from the ‘make shit up because it fits my theories’ school of ridiculousness:

IQ seems to have a genetic component, but there is no consensus on what percentage that genetic component is.

Furthermore, there may be no genetic determination at all! Most people confuse heritability with genetically determined, but heritability does not mean genetically determined! When we do twin studies, we are measuring heritability. If IQ has an 0.8 heritability (a generous number), that only means that 80% of the variety in IQ scores can be attributed to different genotypes.

Even if there is a genetic component within the individual, that doesn’t mean that the same genetic component works between groups. In other words, within group variation does not prove proof for between group variation. Even if IQ has 0.8 heritability, it would be flat out wrong to say that 80% of the difference in IQ scores between two populations is due to differences in genotypes.

On top of that, heritability changes in response to the environment changing, as the exact same individuals studied get older, etc. If IQ was entirely genetically determined, we wouldn’t see this flexibility in heritability.

Even all that aside, a high heritability doesn’t mean that the trait cannot be influenced and changed by the environment. The genotype may limit the range, but the range can still be very, very broad. Height is the perfect example for this. Poor nutrition can severely resist not only the present generation, but also generations to come. This is caused by the environment, not on huge changes on the genetic level.

Finally, IQ within populations (and individuals) has been known to change dramatically based on the context of where the text was given. Ainu, a group of indigenous people in Japan, consistently score much lower than other Japanese when given IQ tests in Japan (where they face heavy discrimination), yet to do the same as Japanese in tests given in the US (where they aren’t discriminated against).

Rand Rover, you are the one who has beliefs contrary to science.

This is pretty much correct, with the usual spins to make the facts as least pejorative as possible to underperforming groups.

What has not happened, and what liberal academia has been unable to spin very effectively, is the elimination of stubbornly persistent underperformance of black populations despite aggressive measures to ameliorate differences, and despite corrections for commonly-cited underperformance reasons such as wealth, parental education and educational opportunity. There are examples (and you cite the Ainu) where differences do disappear when those factors are normalized. That such examples exist, and exist only for certain populations, reinforces the argument that genetically-based performance upper limits exist among various populations; else any population could find success proof cases.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Nzinga_Seated

I didn’t know this. Is that true? If so, I wonder why that is, too.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/etc/gap.html

Over the years, reseachers have documented persistent gaps in the performance of different groups on the SAT and other standardized tests. For example, the College Board reported that the average score for women bound for college this Fall is 43 points below the average score for men. The average score for Asian Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders on the SAT I math was 32 points higher than that for whites. But the greatest disparities have been documented between African Americans and whites.

Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, editors of the 1998 book The Black-White Test Score Gap, point out in their introduction that African Americans score lower than whites on vocabulary, reading and math tests, as well as on tests such as the SAT. This gap appears before kindergarten and persists into adulthood. The average black student scores below 70 to 80 percent of the white students of the same age, Jencks told FRONTLINE Similar issues arise when Mexican American and Latino students, as well as Native American students, are compared to white students, although this phenomenon has not been studied as widely, Jencks and Phillips say.

Among seniors who are entering college in the Fall of 1999, African Americans’ average scores on the SAT I Verbal were 93 points below white students’ average scores. Blacks scored, on average, 106 points less than whites on the SAT I Math.

The gap in SAT scores persists even at the highest levels of achievement. A study of the 1989 applicants to five highly-selective universities found that white candidates’ average combined SAT score was 186 points higher than the corresponding SAT average for African American applicants. Close to 75 percent of the white applicants scored over 1200 on the SAT, while 29 percent of black applicants did. The results of this study were reported in the 1998 book The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, by Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton universities.

The gap cannot be easily explained. Contrary to what might be expected, Meredith Phillips and her colleagues suggest in The Black-White Test Score Gap that parents’ income differences by themselves have almost no effect on children’s test scores. Rather, they urge us to look further back in a child’s family tree.

Whether or not a parent follows the middle-class parenting practices that are most likely to increase a child’s chances of doing well in school–having books at home, reading to the child, taking her on a trip to the museum, for example–depends on how the parent was raised. Even when black and white parents have the same test scores, educational attainment, income, wealth and number of children, black parents are more likely to have grown up in less-advantaged households. So part of the explanation for the gap may lay in the widespread discrimination in housing, education and employment that African American children’s grandparents faced.

In 1994, Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein and economist Charles Murray asserted in their book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that differences in cognitive ability between racial groups as measured by standardized tests are due in part to genetics. Jencks and Phillips, however, point out in The Black-White Test Score Gap that “despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual ability than whites.”

Recent studies have shown that later in life, when those students who make it to college and post-graduate studies are faced with standardized tests such as the SAT and the GRE, new factors come into play which might contribute to the gap. Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele and his colleagues have described what they call “stereotype threat.” According to their research, a student who feels he is part of a group that has been negatively stereotyped is likely to perform less well in a situation in which he thinks that people might evaluate him through that stereotype than in a situation in which he feels no such pressure.

Steele has conducted experiments in which he brings in black students and white students to take a standardized test. The first time, he tells the students that they will be taking a test to measure their verbal and reasoning ability. The second time, he tells them the test is an unimportant research tool. Steele has found that the black students do less well when they are told that the test measures their abilities. He also believes that the effects of stereotype threat are strongest for students who are high-achievers and care very much about doing well. They care so much about doing well, Steele says, that they feel that if they don’t they will be confirming the negative stereotypes associated with black students. (Read FRONTLINE’s interview with Claude Steele and, Steele’s article in The Atlantic.)

In another experiment, Steele brought in white and Asian men who were strong in math. He told them the math test they were about to take was one in which Asians do slightly better than whites. The white men performed less well when they were told this, than when they were not. Another experiment showed that stereotype threat also brought down the performance of strong female math students.

**Even though it has persisted, the black-white test score gap narrowed between 1976 and the late 1980s. Then it began to widen again.

The decline has proven that the gap can be closed.** “You can argue about why it happened, there’s a lot of room for that,” Jencks told FRONTLINE, “but something good took place that was both a surprise and a reason to believe that, if we worked at it, maybe we could make more good things take place.”

If it’s genetic it wouldn’t change. This is a social problem.

My cite earlier shows blacks do better then whites when corrected for socio-economic status. Which means the bigger factor isn’t race but whether your parents went to college, if you live in the country or the city, or if you come from 1 or 2 parent household. Social conditions being what they are, there’s a lot more black people living in the wrong social conditions. As time goes on that will change, and KKK rejects like the guy you quoted can shove an angry badger up their ass. Two angry badgers in fact.

[Nzinga_Seated]

@The_Tao_s_Revenge

KKK rejects like the guy you quoted can shove an angry badger up their ass. Two angry badgers in fact.

Goddamn! I would think even an indifferent badger would suffice for ass shoving. You gotta make 'em angry first? Overkill.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Nzinga_Seated

Goddamn! I would think even an indifferent badger would suffice for ass shoving. You gotta make 'em angry first? Overkill.

If you were a badger would you remain indifferent while someone tried ass shoving you?

[StusBlues]

@The_Tao_s_Revenge

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/etc/gap.html

But the greatest disparities have been documented between African Americans and whites.

Hold it–by definition, wouldn’t the greatest disparities have been documented between African Americans and Asians?

[Kimstu]

@Chief Pedant

Kimstu, do you have a cite for this?

Yup, I cited the work of Richard Nisbett back in the recent “Neanderthal genes” thread.

@Chief Pedant

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.”

No, it doesn’t, not necessarily. You can distinguish between different cultural groups in your ancestry, as well as between different genetic groups.

For instance, we can speak of “a percentage of French/German ancestry” without necessarily implying that there is any particular genetic difference in the French and German ancestral strains. We simply mean that some of the ancestors in question were part of the linguistic/political/cultural/social/national entity known as “France”, while others were part of the linguistic/political/cultural/social/national entity known as “Germany”.

Likewise, it’s perfectly valid to speak of “percentage of white/black ancestry” without necessarily implying any particular genetic distinction between those ancestral racial groups.

Mind you, I’m not arguing that there isn’t any genetic difference whatsoever on average between groups of people racially identified as “white” and groups of people racially identified as “black”. I’m just pointing out that the mere fact of talking about white vs. black ancestry doesn’t automatically imply genetic difference.
As usual, Chief, your problem is not that your basic premise about the existence of genetic differences in intelligence between racial groups is automatically impossible or intrinsically immoral. Your problem is that you routinely misinterpret, overstate, selectively ignore, and unintentionally misrepresent the data you encounter on the subject, in order to support your personal belief that your premise is definitely and indisputably true.

Jumping on a simple phrase like “white/black ancestry”, and trying to portray it as constituting some kind of actual evidence for genetic white/black differences, is just another example of how ordinary logic and facts take a back seat to building up your belief. It’s not that your belief is necessarily wrong; it’s that you are apparently incapable of distinguishing between data that actually support your belief and data that don’t. Everything you see is interpreted by you as furnishing evidence for your belief, no matter what it actually implies, or whether it’s even actually relevant to the issue.

I don’t care that you personally have already made up your mind on the subject while the jury’s still out, scientifically speaking. But you will never get respect for your arguments while you go on trying to pretend that the jury’s already delivered the verdict, if only the silly idealists would listen to it.

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Kimstu

I don’t care that you personally have already made up your mind on the subject while the jury’s still out, scientifically speaking.

What if the scientists do deliver a verdict that indicates that ‘blacks’ are less capable, mentally? What would be the implications of that? How would it change the way societies run? I mean, even a racist that wants to believe that blacks are mentally inferior would have to admit that even if it turns out that is true, they are still a lot dumber than a whole lot of black doctors, lawyers, scientists and philosophers that are way smarter than them. So I wonder why a lot of racists seem to be obsessed with this topic.

And I truly do wonder what would happen if that turned out to be true. I honestly can’t figure out how it would matter.

[Rand_Rover]

Kimera, what do you think my beliefs are exactly?

Here, let me help you. My only beliefs on the subject of race/IQ studies are that it’s a legitimate thing to study and the results should not be dismissed out of hand simply because they disagree with one’s feelings on the subject. I think even sven et al are acting just like those who dismiss evolution because it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

[Rand_Rover]

Why do some of you think KKK members would embrace these studies? The studies don’t show white guys uber alles–they tend to show asian folks on top of the IQ heap. “We should welcome our new asian overlords” doesn’t sound very KKK to me.

[Rand_Rover]

@Nzinga_Seated

What if the scientists do deliver a verdict that indicates that ‘blacks’ are less capable, mentally? What would be the implications of that? How would it change the way societies run? I mean, even a racist that wants to believe that blacks are mentally inferior would have to admit that even if it turns out that is true, they are still a lot dumber than a whole lot of black doctors, lawyers, scientists and philosophers that are way smarter than them. So I wonder why a lot of racists seem to be obsessed with this topic.

And I truly do wonder what would happen if that turned out to be true. I honestly can’t figure out how it would matter.

I agree. When it comes to whether you should select someone as your wmployee or friend or whatever, IQ is only one consideration, and may not be the most important consideration. Also, the task in examining an individual is to determine the characteristics of that individual, and the overall average characteristics of any group of which that individual is a part are only tangentially relevant.

[John_Mace]

@Nzinga_Seated

What if the scientists do deliver a verdict that indicates that ‘blacks’ are less capable, mentally? What would be the implications of that? How would it change the way societies run? I mean, even a racist that wants to believe that blacks are mentally inferior would have to admit that even if it turns out that is true, they are still a lot dumber than a whole lot of black doctors, lawyers, scientists and philosophers that are way smarter than them. So I wonder why a lot of racists seem to be obsessed with this topic.

And I truly do wonder what would happen if that turned out to be true. I honestly can’t figure out how it would matter.

I’m certain we did a GD thread on this topic within the last 2 years, if you care to search for it.

[foolsguinea]

I truly believe that some African nations are dominated by stupid/crazy warlords that will sow chaos wherever they go, & this is perhaps indicative of a native stupidity inherent in…

…the human race. Seriously, ever study European history?

[Blake]

@Nzinga_Seated

What if the scientists do deliver a verdict that indicates that ‘blacks’ are less capable, mentally?

The big problem will be how a scientist defined someone as Black, especially in the US. Is it 100% sub-Saharan ancestry in the past 10 generations? 5%? Because if it’s the former then 99.999% of Black people you meet won’t be less capable. And if it’s the latter then about one in three white people will be Black.

And this just the start of the problem.

What would be the implications of that? How would it change the way societies run?

The first thing it would do is mean that we would have to throw out or seriously modify a lot of equal opportunity and civil rights standards. At the moment most such standards basically say that, because Blacks make up 10% of the population, if they don’t hold 10% of any given position that is evidence of bias in the system. If only 1% of Blacks are genetically capable of qualifying for a position, then it is ludicrous to say that 10% of the positions should be held by blacks. Statistically you need only have one position in a thousand held by blacks to prove that there is no bias.

I mean, even a racist that wants to believe that blacks are mentally inferior would have to admit that even if it turns out that is true, they are still a lot dumber than a whole lot of black doctors, lawyers, scientists and philosophers that are way smarter than them. So I wonder why a lot of racists seem to be obsessed with this topic.

1. It will hinder equal opportunity legislation.
2. It reinforced my pre-existing views.
3. My group is better then yours. You are a lot a lot slower and weaker than a lot of Chinese athletes too. That doesn’t stop you enjoying it when a US athlete wins at the Olympics.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@BrainGlutton

Is there any consensus as to what genes are involved?

(I need to know this, to gene-engineer my supergenius master race.)

Take it from somebody who works with genetics and complex behavioral traits (although not studying Intelligence): No, no way is there a consensus on a single gene and certainly not on the multitude of genes likely to contribute to the highly varied trait we call intelligence.

[Normal_Phase]

@Nzinga_Seated

What if the scientists do deliver a verdict that indicates that ‘blacks’ are less capable, mentally? What would be the implications of that? How would it change the way societies run? I mean, even a racist that wants to believe that blacks are mentally inferior would have to admit that even if it turns out that is true, they are still a lot dumber than a whole lot of black doctors, lawyers, scientists and philosophers that are way smarter than them. So I wonder why a lot of racists seem to be obsessed with this topic.

And I truly do wonder what would happen if that turned out to be true. I honestly can’t figure out how it would matter.

It soothes their pathetic sense of inferiority.

Doesn’t this whole thread prove the OP’s point? There’s no point arguing with a committed “i’m not a racist i’m just stating the uncomfortable facts” type; it’s like arguing with a conspiracy theorist or a creationist. Best to just shut off the computer. Or spit in their face, if you’re unlucky enough to be around them in person.