I’m in the middle of Epstein’s “The Sports Gene.” I recommend it to you for some background reading to sober you up a little before you get to high on the “zero genetic evidence for differences” high horse. So far, what I’m reading is that the evidence that genes drive maximum sports performance is profound and extensive. It doesn’t take Einstein to draw a conclusion that, if genes and not just nurture drive performance for sports, and genes are driven by evolution, separated groups will have disparate gene pools. Will report back when I’m done…after we tackle the sports gene, we can discuss why you think somehow the intellect genes are too sacrosanct by mother nature to evolve along with every single other characteristic of isolated groups. Or are you a Creationist (in which case I’m not interested in arguing faith-based positions)?
See my prior posts on the Jewish basketball league to refresh your memory on the stupidity of thinking that argues against a genetic basis for the current NBA coloration.
Which I haven’t argued against. Yes, genes likely are heavily involved in athletics. And they’re probably involved in intelligence too.
Sure. Another thing I haven’t denied. Yes, different groups have different genes. In other news of the obvious, different groups live in different places.
Man, you’re a great one for straw men. You are the Chief Straw Man builder. The veritable King of the Hay People. As many times as we’ve done this, and you still don’t remember. I am not now and have never denied the possibility that different groups may have different genetic tendencies towards different characteristics. But you know what? You have no evidence. We know of disparate outcomes- this is evidence that outcomes are different. This is not evidence for different likelihoods of genes for intelligence in different groups. Your hypothesis is just that- a hypothesis to explain the disparate outcomes. There is no supporting genetic evidence, and until there is, it’s just another hypothesis- with no more support than a viral hypothesis, a “different expectations” hypothesis, a peer-group pressure hypothesis, etc.
More fail from the King of the Hay People. You’re the one that thinks a certain period of history (i.e. now) is special, not me. You’re the one that thinks outcomes now just happen to perfectly reflect some hypothesized (and evidence-free) genetic hierarchy of intelligence, but outcomes through the rest of history don’t. I’m not making claims about anything at all- I’m just pointing out the incredible weakness of your claims.
You’re the one that is convinced, on faith, apparently (considering the complete absence of genetic evidence) that black people are intellectually inferior. If you insist on the ridiculous Creationism analogy, then it fits you far, far better than it fits me.
I like the “Inuits in the NBA” idea. I’ll tell you what- let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s take a dozen Inuit babies and raise them in Los Angeles, and expose them to basketball every day. Let’s give them basketball peers, basketball parents, basketball idols, and of course, basketball courts. And let’s take a dozen African American babies, and raise them in Greenland. We’ll expose them to seal-hunting and fishing every day. We’ll give them hunting and fishing peers, parents, and idols (and perhaps, if needed, vitamin D supplements).
In 15 years, they’ll play basketball against each other, and they’ll see who can kill more seals and catch more fish. And then you can say how much you think genetics are involved…
It actually demonstrates the levels of acceptance of a basic idea: That Rushton and buddies are discredited.
And they cite the reasons why. The reality remains that just like creationists the fallback is now is to declare that there is a big controversy among experts and that that is enough. On the contrary, the fact that the “race realists” have to go back to the same discredited sources demonstrates that new ones are few and with problems too.
If it makes you and your egalitarian pards more comfortable proposing studies which cannot be undertaken so that your faith-based position of “no evidence for genes” remains intact, feel free to continue to propose them.
I’ll give you a specific reply for this though experiment, though: Let’s assume the samples you suggest using are representative of the best source pools those two groups have to offer for those pursuits. The Inuit babies would lose a basketball game, and the the african americans would win seal-hunting as well.
You see, if you don’t have the right genes for something, it doesn’t matter how much you are trained–you will still lose to those who have better genes underpinning the ability to perform that skillset. Seal-hunting and fishing are such simple skills that I propose pretty much any human subgroup can learn them. (Other physiologic adaptations by Inuit subgroups may put a tropical subgroup at a disadvantage for surviving the cold north, but I assume that’s not part of the thought experiment.) You can be taught how to seal hunt and fish, and as long as you have the capacity to absorb that, you won’t be at a disadvantage; if you’ve never learned it you will be at a disadvantage regardless of how bright you are.
OK; now we come to basketball. What would happen? Well, if you look at the genetics research presented in Epstein’s “Sports Gene” book, you’ll see how many genes are already thought to be at play in the basketball skillset, and how those genes are different within different groups. Black players in the NBA have longer wingspans (arm reach v height) as do almost all groups as you move toward the tropics; a higher center of gravity; different tendons and muscle types; and so on. If you take a population with those genetic advantages and then expose them to a new skillset for which those genes are advantageous, you’ll rapidly overtake a group that doesn’t have the right genes. Epstein quotes a researcher this way, “You can’t make a slow kid fast by training.”
Do me a favor. Read some research, or at least some popular summaries such as “The Sports Gene.” Here’s what you are going to find:
Human populations sort biologically, and self-sort according to those biological groupings, in such a way that gene pools from SIRE groups cluster differently for different genes. In other words, we are not a homogenous species.
Evolution can affect any gene, any time. That is to say, there is no given geneset made sacrosanct by evolution’s chance march. Evolution doesn’t care if it’s altering malaria resistance or neural synapses. It just shoots random darts at DNA and lets mother nature sort out which ones turn out to be advantageous for reproduction and penetration into the descendant group.
Modern SIRE (and other types of) groupings have been separated by tens of thousands of years for much of their baseline gene pool, and as a consequence, within those gene pools are thousands of variant genes. Moreover, there are genes that have been driven to high penetration within all sorts of human subgroups. What this means is that subgroups have signficant genetically-based differences.
Nurture and nature play significant roles in how we develop, but you cannot overcome nature with nurture. (Epstein’s book spends a great deal of time giving examples and studies that lay waste the silly idea promoted by Malcom Gladwell and others that all you need is practice…)
Quantitative measurements for skillsets–including ones related to intellect and sports performance–show a very consistent pattern across political systems; across socioeconomic statuses; across ethnic histories. The pattern nearly always results in the same rank-order for skillsets regardless of nurturing. It’s not a good bet that the next NBA champion could come from a properly-nurtured Inuit, nor that a properly-nurtured Mbuti will develop a new engineering marvel, nor that sprinting events in the 2020 Olympics will be dominated by properly-nurtured whites. (It’s not impossible; just not a good bet.)
For you, none of this is “evidence.” I suggest that the underlying supposition that genes drive outcome performances among SIRE groups is powerfully predictive, and that prediction is a powerful indicator. To date, none of the intensive programs and efforts directed at nurturing have overcome the prediction that, since genes are such a powerful driver, nurturing will be insufficient to erase differences among SIRE groups.
No, actually, human populations don’t sort, by themselves. They can be sorted, in different ways, according to the arbitrary criteria of the person doing the sorting.
What human populations do, in the absence of large scale interference by political and social institutions, is blend.
The rest of your arguments hinge on this. So, fail.
LOL- you don’t know much about basketball, if you think that any group of adults who (in my experiment) have never picked up a basketball would beat another group who had been playing their whole lives.
This is such a patently obviously ridiculous statement that I don’t know how an intelligent person could possibly believe it. Some particular individual may have the best genes in the world for basketball, but unless they’ve actually been playing and practicing for at least a little while they would have no chance in a basketball game against someone with average genes but years of experience. The same goes for boxing, soccer, football, chess, chopping down trees, hunting elk, and just about every sport and skill. Genes are just potential – they need real world experience to make a difference.
Undoubtedly most of the top athletes in a particular sport, like the NBA and the NFL have among the best genetics for athletics… but they also have worked hard to set themselves apart. There are probably lots of “top genes” athletes in the world who never made it in the pros- either because they didn’t have the opportunity (not many basketball courts in the Sudanese desert!) or they weren’t willing to put in the work. Drew Brees is pretty small for a football player, but he’s among the best QBs in history – and genes probably played a smaller role in his success than hard work.
Obviously- for one thing, because your #1 is false, and for another, because it doesn’t include any actually evidence about these groups’ genes.
More of your perplexing bias towards the NOW. There’s been barely a few decades of real effort towards correcting some of these disparate outcomes- and you know what? Some of the differences have actually shrunk! Now if we can shrink some of the test-score differences (by some measures) with the paltry and stuttering efforts we’ve made so far, in just a few decades, what can we do in a century? We’ll see… but I think there’s little reason to believe that the test-score gap, or academic outcome gap, or crime-stats gap, will stand forever and all time.
So to be clear, you believe that a nation with average IQ greater than 75 is fully capable of building a fully functional country whereas if the average IQ is 70, it’s basically impossible.
Do I understand you correctly?
Why not? Specifically what would happen or not happen?
Your own article says that such people can become “fairly self-sufficient.” So it’s not hard to believe that your typical African can and does participate in commerce as we have defined it. Perhaps he won’t do a very good job of it, which might be part of the reason African countries tend to be so poor.
I don’t administer formal IQ tests to the people I meet, but I do regularly meet people with the attributes you have described. I also regularly meet people who have “community support,” i.e. caseworkers to help them. Statistically, one can expect that roughly 6% of the US population has in IQ under 75. If one assumes that even half of those people are institutionalized, it’s still a virtual certainty that I have met and interacted with many many people with IQ’s under 75.
Well there is a lot more research on the IQ’s of black Americans and it’s reasonable to estimate that roughly 20% have IQ’s under 75. So if you include that as “typical” for the human race, it may very well be the case that in Africa you will find “typical” people. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from such a fact that there is not a very low average IQ there.
You keep fishing for specifics, so that you can fire off a canned response.
Have you, or have you not, spent time living with and working with a large number of people from sub-Saharan Africa? If not, don’t you think you should consider seeing if your theory passes the smell test before you start spouting off about it?
Some things that mobile technology is enabling right now:
Sharing of real-time market data, enabling farmers to sell their crops where they will fetch the best prices.
Mobile health assessment and messaging, allowing individuals and local community health workers to obtain targeted high-quality health information, track and report potential epidemics, and connect with larger hospitals and health centers.
Mobile banking, helping people run small businesses and enabling high-earners to transfer funds to their relatives in rural areas.
Security alerts, allowing people to protect their homes and families when there is potential instability.
It is, quite simply, transformative. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer just a few years ago, if I wanted to contact someone in the next village over, I’d have to pay a motorcycle taxi to physically deliver a note to them. Now, those same people are trying to play Candy Crush against me on Facebook.
Spot-on! When I first heard of these studies in a lecture in high-school circa 1978, I soon concluded, ‘Who cares? Anti-racism is all about judging people as INDIVIDUALS, not according to expectations based on what group they belong to! Intelligent (Blacks or Whites or Asians or Native Americans) deserve to be treated as intelligent PERSONS, no matter how plentiful or rare they may be!’
75 is the realm of possibility, yes, because 75+ isn’t disabled. Mental disability prevents normal social & intellectual function by definition.
By analogy, consider total blindness versus legal blindness in a test of dodging a thrown ball. I can assure you that the totally blind person will be struck by the ball. The person who’s right on the line of being legally blind? Well, he might be, or he might not, but he’ll hardly excel at it.
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Why not? Specifically what would happen or not happen?
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Are you not reading anything that’s been posted or linked to about mental retardation? That should make it pretty clear what such people can and cannot do. People that can’t remember things or plan are not going to be able to engage in agriculture, which requires both skills. People that can’t focus on one task or grasp abstract concepts aren’t going to be able to trade (being robbed or exploited isn’t trading). Crops would fail, trade would cease, armies would scatter.
Yes, with extensive life-skills training, which is not available in Africa to the extent it is the U.S., some of them can. Some people with one arm can climb Everest…how might a society of one-armed mountaineers fare?
It is hard to believe that the typical African is mentally disabled. It is even harder to believe that observing a group of people would not reveal that they are disabled.
And they struck you as being sufficiently capable, that an entire continent of them would continue to be, well, alive after a few months? Remarkable. That is an extraordinary claim.
No, people who are mentally disabled are not typical.
Look, we can go round and round on this indefinitely. If you have some evidence of the average African being mentally disabled, feel free to provide it. Because all you’re doing here is hand-waving away descriptions of what mental retardation means and entails.
What we should do is demand solid evidence when people try to use the social and cultural authority of science to bolster their ideological belief systems. When the evidence is lacking, we shouldn’t accept the standard, “I can’t get the evidence because science is hard” excuse making that is so common in these discussions.
If you can’t prove it, simply refrain from making the claim until such time that you can prove it.
One of the principles that Nassim Nicholas Taleb repeatedly emphasizes in Antifragileis that we should be deeply skeptical of narrative explanations proffered by theoreticians who have little empirical experience with the subject at hand. Their incomes and social status are dependent on appearing to know more than they actually do, and they aren’t held responsible when their claims go wildly wrong.
For example, psychologists whose limited expertise is in standardized testing, but want to inform us about the genetics of race. Economists who want to lecture us about the fine points of evolution and Darwinian selection. It’s all people pretending to have knowledge about subjects they don’t really understand for the sake of appearing authoritative.
That’s why the claim about a 70 mean IQ for Africans is obvious nutjobbery for anyone with passing familiarity with Africa and Africans. Sure, this fellow who speaks four languages to your one, and can make fine furniture with a few hand tools is actually retarded. Of course.
Agreed, particularly given the putative relationship between IQ and the ability to function in daily life…
Interestingly, a major proponent of the “70” number for black americans in the past is James Flynn, whose work on rising IQs (the “Flynn effect”) is frequently cited by well-meaning people not that familiar with what his research actually says. Because Flynn believes IQs are rising, and that the current average black adult IQ in the US is 85, his extrapolations backward yield an average adult black IQ of 70 (or below) in the previous century here in the US.
Given that an IQ of 70 is borderline impaired, Flynn’s data has never made sense to me.
Nature designs us to be reproductively successful within our environment, and taking a modern–european, really, in terms of the populations which developed it–concept like IQ and then trying to apply it quantitatively to populations separated from those european populations tens of thousands of years ago does not seem to me to be a good way to quantify differences in intellect. And I am one of those who thinks that substantial differences do exist. Were there some other sort of test tailored toward the way the brain works for an entirely different group of humans than my source pool, I would not be surprised to find my source pool coming up short on that alternate way to quantify brain function.