So Africa is screwed up because people are dumb, but if you go to Africa you won’t notice people are dumb.
This is undeniably so. But what comes with it is a form of culling or selective breeding that also impacts genetics. Leaving aside Jimmy the Greek type theories, it is difficult to say what was selected for doing the hundreds of years of slavery, although I do think it is safe to say that the average African who was captured and enslaved was not likely to be smarter than the average non-captured peer. (I was born in Africa and lived there as a teenager, and I can report that the African people I talked to certainly believe this.)
After emancipation, though, we can see in the historical record a clear pattern of selective targeting, of those African Americans who showed a talent for politics, law, etc. during Reconstruction, by the Ku Klux Klan for lynching. I fear this has had a immeasurably vast impact on the African American gene pool. To point this out should not be seen as an insult to black people as it was obviously something very evil and systematic done to them by white people.
It would be as if Jews, and others who campaign against anti-Semitism, were outraged by anyone stating that the population of Jews in Europe is much smaller than they were before the Nazi ascent to power. It sucks, it was a horrible thing done to them that was not their fault. It is not a comment on their worthiness as a people. Similarly, we should not shrink from aggressively trying to abate lead in housing that is disproportionately inhabited by minorities, even at the risk of insulting those who grew up in such housing and for whom it is too late to undo the damage to their intelligence.
No, this is wrong. As I noted upthread, the ratio of full time salaries dedicated to each mildly retarded individual (not including the cost of their food, shelter, transportation, and medical care) is at least three and probably more. Whether this level of support is remotely necessary is another question. A well organised society could reduce costs by going back to the large institution model; a less organised one, by leaving the task to family members and/or letting people live in miserable conditions.
Ugh, stupid five minute edit limit. Make that “an immeasurably vast” impact.
What people believe and what is true aren’t the same things.
People where I was born and lived as a teenager believed all sorts of things about Black people, too. Very little of it was true.
Genetics doesn’t work this way.
There were never lynchings sufficient to influence the gene pool. Actually, the incidents of lynching are overblown. They happened and in horrifying numbers, but they weren’t anything near as common as you suggest. Before slavery was abolished? Happened rarely. A healthy slave was expensive and not something to waste through lynching unless otherwise necessary. And freedmen were not generally apt to hang out where they were likely to be killed easily.
And even if lynchings were so common, it is insufficient to kill a person. You must find and kill all his children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren if you’re targeting seniors) to ensure his genes haven’t spread. You don’t kill a person’s genes when you kill the person. You must kill off his entire family tree.
This is the worst sort of post-hoc justification. It makes sense in a storybook way in which you accept the premise of the story but ignore what you actually know about history and biology.
Non-starter. Even in the US into the 20th century, there really weren’t sufficient resources to devote to having fully half your adult population require this sort of supervision.
I think it’s far from clear that this would have a significant effect on the gene pool, or even if it did, that the effect would be as described. African Americans descend from a very diverse group of populations all along the western coast of Africa (and, of course, the whites and native Americans who also contributed genetically). It’s just as reasonable to surmise that it was only the craftiest folks who survived and reproduced.
Just to flesh this out, the Tuskeegee Institute reports that there were 3,446 lynchings of black people between 1882 and 1968.
Thanks.
And even if we increase this by an order of magnitude to account for an underestimate, we’re still nowhere near the level of affecting the gene pool. And presumably, some, if not most, of these lynchings wouldn’t involve the intellectual elite among Blacks in America.
Okay, you’ve convinced me that the KKK’s terrorism after Reconstruction is not likely to have made a deep genetic impact (though the social impact was surely dramatic).
But what you have not convinced me is that the teachers and administrators at all those inner city, so-called “failing schools” should be blamed for the low test scores of their students. They are getting thrown under the bus because no one wants to say out loud that “this is the best we can do with this population”. Think how unfair that is to the teachers hired at these schools: they are essentially sacrificial lambs. And they know they are (for the most part) trying their best, getting the most they can out of these kids, but as long as the numbers don’t rise to at least the average level found at mostly white schools, they are going to be castigated as failures. And maybe under these conditions, you will increasingly find it hard to hire good teachers, because who wants to be put in that position?
Who said they should? You’re creating a straw man argument here, and a rather poor one.
What we know about education is that only a fraction of the results lie with the students. The rest depends on parental involvement (and not just their genes), community involvement, and a host of other factors.
It’s a rather poor excuse that we give up because of just 1 of those factors - genetics. It’s also a poor excuse to claim people who don’t blame genetics are blaming school staffs. It’s neither true that genetics is solely responsible for poor outcomes nor that the alternative is to lay the blame on teachers’ feet. There are a host of problems providing universal education, and those problems aren’t just in the US. But trying to lay blame on just 1 factor (whether it is the teachers or genetics or whatever) is simply moronic.
Not to mention that just throwing our hands up in the air and saying “these kids are unteachable” is often a rather poorly disguised excuse of giving up because the people involved are often already the disenfranchised (minorities or the poor or other such category). It’s often just code for racism/classicism.
ETA: I should add - none of this addresses the main points of the thread thus far, namely (1) that genetics as an explanation for low IQ scores is poorly established and (2) the idea of an entire continent with an effective IQ of 70 makes no sense.
“Claim”? C’mon. Not only is this incredibly widely the case in our culture outside of the villainised teachers’ unions (which got more media attention, Waiting For Superman or the rebuttal film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman? Not even close), but the federal government clearly is set up to not only “blame” school staffs, but take action against them if the scores stay low (as they will, no matter what they try–you can take that to the bank). From Wikipedia on NCLB, specifically AYP:
(Ha, this is my state. Clevah. I suspect though that even the lowered standards are still not low enough that the most heavily minority inner-city schools–or their descendants, whether charter or whatever–will ever be able to pass muster.)
Here’s what is supposed to happen, by law, if a school does not achieve AYP:
Funny, I don’t see any item on that list that involves assessing whether natural ability along with parental and community involvement are so deficient that the school’s staff cannot be blamed and thus should not be ‘replaced’ (fired) or the school dissolved or taken over by the state. It’s all about a time limit, test scores, and BOOM if you don’t manage to get blood from a turnip, or a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
SlackerInc, you’re arguing with no one here that I can find. That’s called a straw man. Feel free to address something anyone in this thread has actually said.
I teach test prep, and many of my students improve by over 200 points on the SAT after 12 x 2 hour lessons. I cost $75/hour. All of my students are at least middle class. Most are upper middle class. Most are white. Most are of average intelligence (by my estimation), but end up scoring well above average as a result of costly private tutoring.
Even without tutoring, wealthy white kids do better on the test. They generally go to better schools, have more educated parents who use English correctly more often, and so forth. It’s all socioeconomic.
I have an IQ of 145. I do not believe that I am a “genius” in any way. My family is wealthy and highly educated, and I was encouraged to use educational toys from a very young age. My dad’s job allowed my mom to stay home so I was highly supervised and therefore always on top of my homework. We could afford lots of puzzles, “Brain Quest” games (anyone else remember those?), and I went to private preschool. I had a huge advantage. I also had a grandpa who was a psychiatrist interested in intelligence who constantly gave me logic games and so forth. I believe that my IQ would have been tested at 20+ points lower if I grew up in a different situation. This is obviously anecdotal but I think worth relating.
Proof that I am not a genius:
I scored absolutely average on the LSAT.
I have invented nothing and innovated nothing.
I have made a huge number of impulsive and stupid decisions.
I have a very hard time learning new languages despite an excellent formal education.
I am highly disorganized (in physical space and mentally).
I have a poor concept of spacial relations.
And so on.
My friend Marlon, who is black, comes from a background very similar to mine. His parents have a similar amount of money and he had a stay-at-home mom. We score similarly on standardized tests, read similar books with similar levels of understanding, and went to the same graduate program. I would assume that his IQ is very close to mine.
My friend Elaina, who is white, comes from a poor family. Her parents divorced at a young age and she spent a lot of time alone at home. She is better than me at learning languages and is very creative. She does not score well on standardized tests, did not go to private schools, and is now stuck in a dead end job. I’m sure her IQ is 125 or less. I am not smarter than her. She just hasn’t had the same luck I have.
Again, I know that’s all anecdotal and only worth so much, but I’m sure many of you have experienced similar?
More anecdotal stuff: My IQ is just about the average of my parents’. My brother has the same IQ that I do. Our extended family is all in the 135-155 range, other than one aunt who I believe scored a 165. She had a schizophrenic break since and does not function normally. Her IQ has dropped very significantly (due to both the illness and medications, I would imagine). No one in my family seems to be more than “bright.” We are Jewish.
Very interested in this topic and look forward to more posts.
Weren’t Ashkenazi Jews the highest- scoring ethnic group in that Bell Curve deal?
Iandyiii, the unfair policies and the demonisation of teachers in policy and popular culture as I described come directly from the paradigm that students with proper instruction can achieve the same results matter what their family or ethnic background. I would be very surprised if the people arguing in this thread against a genetic basis for IQ actually agree with me that inner-city schools are not “failing” their students and that there is really nothing that can reasonably be done to get their scores up to comparable levels with the average American student population.
That’s all fine, but I’m pretty sure it’s an accepted practice in this forum to only argue against what other posters have said, and not what you think they might believe.
Which is more or less the definition of a straw man argument.
At any rate, I still don’t see how this relates to a genetic argument about IQ.
So, let’s give SlackerInc some benefit of the doubt. I’m actually on board with not blaming teachers. I still think we could use better teachers in the US, but I think we could use better everything in the US, so that’s a bit of a wash.
So, if we don’t blame the teachers and school administrators, it’s necessarily genetic? I’m sorry. Where does that line of reasoning come from? That’s basically the same argument fundamentalist Christians use against atheists, i.e. if we disprove atheism, Christianity must be right, thus ignoring every other religion on the planet.
If we disprove poor teaching as the most important factor, that doesn’t immediately lead to accepting genetics as the primary factor. And considering the correlation between income, food security, etc and test results, it’s rather ridiculous to claim that’s where we should first look.
It’s a string of assumptions in a row with nothing to connect them. Inner city = black = low IQ = bad test scores.
Everyone who posts their IQ on the Internet seems to choose 145…it’s unfortunate that your other scores are so ordinary.
You are badly mistaken in your assumption that the SAT scores by Self-Identified Race and Ethnicity are a result of socioeconomic status. I encourage you to look up data instead of simply promulgating knee-jerk assumptions.
Start here
*"But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these observable facts from The College Board’s 2006 data on the SAT:
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 130 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 17 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of more than $100,000."*
I encourage more reading and fewer standard knee jerk assumptions. Other data (and I believe, cited upthread) show equally poor black performance when parental education is controlled for. Children from black families where the parents have college+ education underscore white children with high school and under education…moreover, within any school system, the rank order of scores by SIRE groups will almost always be the same, with asians outscoring other SIRE groups on quantitative scores, for example.
To date, correction for any known factor has failed to produce equivalent results among SIRE groups, for everything from gene frequencies to disease states to blood chemistries, to performance on any number of skillsets from athletic ones to ones involving various intellects.
Given the fact that SIRE groups have genes which cluster by SIRE group, and are present in high enough penetration to suggest positive selection for those genes (in turn suggesting that the clustering genes represent some sort of advantage), and given that the source populations have been separated by geography for tens of thousands of years, and given that evolution affects every gene, it would be surprising indeed if SIRE groups were equivalent at anything.
There are many ways to group humans and many soft edges for groupings. But nature is nature and she has no inclination to be fair.
Most of what you see posted on this board against the idea that SIRE groups have differences because they have different average gene pools is a result of well-meaning but blind faithfulness to a concept of egalitarianism, and an unwillingness to even consider the genetic evidence. It amounts to an earnest, but recreational, outrage at the idea that nature does not wire all human groups identically. One need only to look at any other animal species to understand how silly a belief this is.
I should add that the practical problem of adhering to the idea that “it’s all socioeconomic” is typified by the Fisher v UTexas case that went to SCOTUS. What happens right now is the highest-scoring black students come from high SES families. Unfortunately, their scores are markedly inferior to whites and asians from similarly high SES. As a result, if a school wants to consider SES as a factor, they have to rule out the highest-scoring black students, because they are not from low SES backgrounds. At every SES level, the rank order remains the same, and the same groups end up with the lowest scores.
Because of this, schools want and need to reserve “black and hispanic” as a special consideration all to itself, irrespective of SES. That way, they can get those lower-scoring but high-SES black students through their admissions process. These race-based set-asides are necessary to get our good black students into higher education, and I support this race-based AA for precisely the reason that average group differences are hard-wired into our genes. If we want a balanced-looking society we just have to suck that fact up and account for it. We just need to get over the peanut brains who want to make something of it. Who cares what some two-bit race-baiting nitwit thinks about his group’s “superior” genes? Those folks are themselves at the low end of the entire intelligence spectrum anyway.
This is both a mischaracterization of your opponents’ arguments and it’s blatantly false- there is no genetic evidence. Maybe someday, but not yet. And Frank Sweet and Ron Unz, linked to previously, do an excellent job of demonstrating that the genetic explanation does not fit all the facts.
There is evidence that evolution affects all genes.
There is evidence that SIRE groups have disparate gene pools, driven by historic migration patterns for human groups and the ongoing effect of evolution.
There is evidence that genes within those pools have been driven to high enough penetration to suggest positive selection.
There is evidence that SIRE groups have different performance outcomes even when longstanding explanations such as “socioeconomic differences” are accounted for.
There is evidence that performance gaps such as black-white gaps for athletic skills such as sprinting or performance gaps such as black-asian gaps for STEM sciences are stubbornly persistent in the face of all “social” or “cultural” permutations.
There is evidence that genes underpin everything we do and are as humans, and the evidence of genes’ effects increases with every publication.
There is evidence that neurophysiologic genes in particular, vary by SIRE group.
You are confusing “no evidence” with “no absolute proof.” You are hiding your egalitarian bias behind an insistence that, until an exact relationship is defined between a geneset and a specific result, there is “no evidence.”
I don’t think you know what the term “no evidence” means.