And you could draw these lines wherever you want and come to completely different conclusions. However, you chose to draw them along lines that are already sociologically damaged. This doesn’t strike you as problematic at all?
The “nurture” effects that have been controlled for do not come close to accounting for all possible effects.
All permutations? False.
Everything we do and are as humans? False.
You have no genes. We don’t even know what genes influence intelligence, much less their prevalence in different populations.
Further, there is no reason why disparate outcomes now should just happen to perfectly reflect some sort of genetic hierarchy of intelligence, but disparate outcomes from the past did not. There is no reason to assume that the paltry, few decades long attempts at correcting some of these outcomes represent anything close to humanity’s best efforts.
You have no genetic evidence, and your explanation doesn’t even fit all the facts.
Basically, because human society is so far from an equal-opportunity society, disparate outcomes in education, crime, etc., simply cannot tell us anything useful about any possible genetic tendencies towards high or low intelligence, aggression, etc. Until things are actually equal, the only possible data that could tell us if any particular group has a genetic tendency towards higher or lower intelligence is the genes themselves.
Nope. What we’re complaining about is a failure of basic rigor. If you cannot provide the genes responsible, then you should be able to provide solid evidence that accounts for the type of confounding factors (institutionalized racism, cultural biases, etc.) that are present in this discussion. And you simply haven’t. You’ve accounted for a few factors, but that’s barely scratching the surface. Meanwhile, sociological factors are far more reasonable to explain the actual issues present.
Right, exactly. I have seen other people take a different approach, which is to just say this is an area scientists should not explore for moral reasons. That is at least more intellectually defensible, so I can respect their position in that sense, though at the end of the day I still disagree.
Well assuming that’s correct, it follows that the demand for support in an area where the majority of people have IQs under 75 would not necessarily leave the area unable to produce crops; to field an army; and so forth. It might do a lousy job, of course.
I basically agree with this, subject to the caveat that such a place might be raised somewhat by foreign efforts, for example foreign aid, or foreigners getting involved in commerce, and so on. Indeed, generally speaking it seems that black African nations do have poor agriculture and poor commerce. I’m not a military expert, but I would guess their militaries are pretty lousy by Western standards too.
I’m a little confused by your response. Are you disputing the quotes I found which indicate that retarded people can work?
Do you dispute that your own quote says explicitly and unconditionally that mentally retarded people can become fairly self sufficient?
That’s an important question, but I think it’s a bit off-topic. The claim under discussion, or at least what I thought was under discussion, is that just from simple observation, one can reject the claim that African countries have very low average IQ. If simple observation yields evidence which is consistent with very low average IQ, then the claim fails.
If you would like to concede that point and move on to the next question I am willing to do so.
Well before I put much credibility in the anecdotal reports of anonymous people online I would like some indication that they can make an objective assessment.
Earlier in the thread (Post #10) a cite was provided that their average IQ is 85. Since IQ tests are generally set up to have a standard deviation of 15 and generally exhibit a distribution which is roughly normal in shape, it’s reasonable to assume that the standard deviation for African Americans is roughly 15 and roughly normal in shape.
With those assumptions, and checking a normal distribution table, gives an approximate figure of 25.5%, which I rounded down to 20% on the assumption that the average IQ and standard deviation figures I used might be a bit off.
What’s the minimum percentage to make a trait “typical”?
Which you admit that they very well might be. Very poor agriculture; very poor commerce; etc.
Assuming that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily follow that such people would “perish.” They might lead difficult lives, of course. But that’s a different issue.
Well it would depend on the degree of outside involvement. Generally speaking, poverty, people living in miserable conditions, disease, dependance on outside help, widespread illiteracy etc. Like Detroit on steroids. But this could be ameliorated to a large extent by outside involvement. For example if such a society were blessed with natural resources, it might be able to reduce the level of poverty quite a bit.
If I understand you correctly, I’m rather skeptical of this claim. If the average IQ in the US is 98 that means that there are roughly 20 million Americans with IQ’s under 75.
If there are 60 million people taking care of these Americans, that’s nearly 40% of the entire American workforce.
That I agree with.
A cite upthread referred to “mild retardation” as covering 55 to 70 IQ. I believe the people I helped take care of were toward the lower end of that range, probably no higher than the low 60s if I remember right. Still, it always struck me as pretty crazy that in a state otherwise stingy with social services, so many employees and resources were devoted to 24/7 monitoring and assistance of two guys who were ambulatory, could dress and bathe themselves, use the toilet in private without assistance, etc.
And this was duplicated across town in a good number of “ISLs”, enough that the periodic dances held for these “consumers” filled a decent-sized venue with all the consumers and staff present. Though I was part of it for a few years, I would describe it as a pretty seriously inefficient system, a real money pit. I never could understand why conservatives didn’t back off a bit over the relative pittances involved with food stamps (a genuinely worthy program IMO) and get outraged about this level of taxpayer boondoggle. I guess people just feel really sentimental in the abstract about the mentally disabled, though IME that wears off fast if you work closely with them.
Human Action’s cite said as follows:
(my bolding).
Of course common sense says that people with IQs which are lower would require at least as much attention.
That may be so, but your claim was about “each mildly retarded individual” and not a subset of those individuals.
Possibly those people had other mental problems besides just low IQ. There’s no way that the United States could be devoting so much resources to everyone who is mentally retarded, even if the cap were 70 and not 75. Possibly it could be happening if the cap were 65 but even then it seems pretty unlikely.
Anyway, my point stands:
Even in the United States with all of its resources, mentally retarded people do not generally receive the equivalent of full time adult care.
In what sense are the high-income, high-family-education black kids “sociologically damaged” for the skillset of SAT-taking beyond low-income, low-family-education whites?
What I try to do is look at data, and if the conclusion is problematic, decide if it’s problematic because we don’t want it to be true, or problematic because the data is bad.
The data showing average performance differences for skillsets despite normalization of nurturing is pretty good, and the alternate explanations are pretty weak.
I get it that you don’t think alternate (non-SES) explanations have been rigorously-enough controlled for. Whistling in the dark, in my opinion, for egalitatarians.
What egalitarians want to do is stubbornly insist that it’s more likely than not that nature has exempted genes underpinning the way our brains and athletic abilities are wired for from all other evolution. This is an extraordinary leap of faith, without foundation in any other animal or plant group besides humans. We readily accept observed differences among other groups of animals as being related to genes over nurture even where we don’t have the exact gene. We simply put together separation time+evolutionary pressure+observed differences+control for obvious variables, and reach a conclusion that evolution is at work for those average residual differences. We don’t pretend all horse groups have no genetic evidence for differences simply because we can’s specify a gene, for example.
Egalitarians want a special exemption for this for humans, with the underlying tenet that evolution has not been at work for human traits since anatomically modern humans appeared 200kya. The Mbuti are not allowed to have differently wired brains from the Ashkenazi–not because of careful analysis, but because of egalitarian fiat.
I find this proposition remarkable tenuous, and the “rigor” you demand artificially unattainable. But I will readily admit that we are quite a long way from identifying exact genes that drive specifically quantified outcomes in perfectly blinded studies for which every putative variable no matter how trivial, is normalized.
So if you want to continue to have faith that evolution doesn’t affect human skillsets, I would say you should be comfortable for some time in your faith. Such a faith is akin to a belief that prayer changes natural law, because there are no circumstances in which every single variable can be accounted for.
It is telling for me that the “obvious” variable–SES–has not panned out. I find it equally telling that it is such a pervasively accepted explanation it is advanced as a knee jerk reaction by people who have never even looked at the data. With specific respect to SAT-taking skillsets our best alternative nurturing explanations are things like low teacher expectations or stereotype threats or the like. Whatever allows you to persist in a delusion that all human groups are equal and exempt from evolution, I guess…
Hmm… How about this country has a history of racism? Hell, it was even brought up earlier in the thread that the SAT questions have, historically, had a racial bias. People with “black-sounding” names are less likely to be hired, all things being equal. For fuck’s sake, the president was accused of being from Kenya on account of basically nothing more than his skin color. By claiming that the best way to interpret haplotypes is along the classic racial lines (which is bullshit) you’re immediately separating the groups not by genetics, but by sociology. At which point no actual genetics are necessary to explain the problems involved - not when we can look at this country’s history and say, “Yep, there we go, here’s why we have these problems”. Given that, without any genetic evidence whatsoever, there is no way to make the inferences you would imply.
But so is yours. I recommend you watch that video, as it has a lot to say about genetics and race, all very well-cited. Look, let’s make this really clear. “African-american”, when treaded as a racial group, is liable to have more genetic diversity than literally everything else in America combined, simply due to how varied African genetics are. There’s no reason to draw them into a single group, and then use that as a comparison, and at the same time it has the unfortunate baggage of, you know, literally everything before the 1960s being the nation taking that group and collectively fucking them up the ass. Seriously, what genetic basis do you have for your groupings?
No, the problem is that your attempt to limit the reasonable explanations to simply genetics have failed miserably. Nothing in the data indicates that genetics is the only cause, the attempts to control for additional variables in the data have been pathetic, and there is no evidence of the genes that would indicate this. I guess I’m just failing to understand why you think it’s genetic.
Bullshit, poisoning the well, accusing me of holding a position I do not hold and/or overgeneralizing, and strawmanning. Anything else I need to say to that?
No, but we also control for other variables a lot more stringently. There are no social structures which would influence results (like, you know, slavery, institutionalized discrimination, ghettoization, etc.). We don’t just assume genetics.
Tough titties. You made an assertion that you could not back up? Gasp You know what happens in science when that happens? The idea gets discarded. As was scientific racism, for additional reasons as well. You have not controlled stringently for a number of factors, and you neglect the overwhelming degree of research that has been done which runs directly counter to this hypothesis.
I never made this assertion.
But it’s not telling that your groups are drawn along unscientific lines that match sociological groups? Or that genes associated to continental divides tend to cap out at around 11%? Or any number of other facts that completely fail to match up with your ideas. And there are a lot of problems with your ideas.
But you know what, I might be misunderstanding you.
Please clarify what races you think there are and why you classify them as such.
It’s becoming clear to me that little is actually being communicated here. I’ll let this go a while longer but I’m leaning toward closing it and asking all sides to head to their respective corners for a breather.
I’ve read every post and for the most part I see some good arguments. I’m not smart enough to participate but I am enjoying posts from both “sides”. So I hope the thread can continue with civilized comments.
Sadly, standard operating procedure. This poster and the few others that make the same argument have repeatedly used this refuted line of reasoning that is basically an attempt to back up the concept of biological race. The science is clear that this is wrong but they cling to the idea with all their might.
The genes responsible for our brains have obviously not been exempted from natural selection - that’s how we got our brains, after all. But, there are a couple problems with the “IQ is a product of evolution” argument.
First, it has not been substantiated that we even know what intelligence is. We are finding that other animals are much more intelligent than they had previously been given credit for, not because they’ve gotten smarter, but because we had the wrong assumptions about what intelligence is and how it manifests itself. In many cases, humans differ only in degree, not kind, for intelligence, when compared to other animals. So, we don’t even have a full handle on what intelligence is yet.
Second, because of the first point, we don’t have an accurate means of measuring intelligence, in humans or other animals. IQ tests simply don’t cut it. IQ scores may correlate with intelligence, but that doesn’t mean IQ necessarily represents an accurate measurement of intelligence.
Third, of course intelligence, whatever it is, is biological. That does not mean it’s necessarily genetic, or wholly genetic. Even aside from social and other environmental factors, the environment of the womb and the stimulation and interactions provided during the first few years of life can have a drastic effect on brain development in humans. Individual brains are not created by reading a DNA blueprint, but connections are made and destroyed as the brain grows and develops. There is a feedback loop between “nature” and “nurture” that is often ignored in favor of an all-or-nothing approach to the question.
Fourth, there have been no genes positively identified as being directly associated with intelligence in humans. Such may, or may not, exist. The brain might be a direct product of DNA. Or, it might not. It is likely greater than the sum of its parts, so to speak, in that intelligence is what happens once you pass a certain threshold of neural interfaces, and the number and interconnectivity of those interfaces may have little to do with direct genetic influences. Thus far, all genes supposedly linked with intelligence have been those which affect neurotransmitters, which, while part of the equation, are but a small part. Anyway, until such a direct link genetic is found, it is little more than speculation to claim that intelligence is genetic (or even that some fraction of intelligence can be directly associated with genes). Again, biological, certainly. Genetic, maybe. There is still not sufficient evidence to claim that IQ, whatever that may be, is a direct consequence of ones genetic heritage.
Here’s the crux of the problem. The single most important factor in a kid’s school performance is his parents. If they value education and are involved in his learn gin, he will likely do well. The problem is that most of these bad schools are in poor communities, mostly black communities, where the family structure has been put through meat grinder. Some school districts have an incidence of angle-parent households of near 99%. Now, while there are many single parents doing a good job for their kids academically, they don’t tend to be the kids in these bad areas. School spending in these areas is usually higher than other areas, but it doesn’t matter. Money is not the problem. See The Kansas City Experiment where the schools were completely rebuilt—new—with every possible advantage to education approved, to the tune of $2 billion dollars. The result: after a couple of decades? No improvement. The problem is what I mentioned: the largest determinant in how well a kid does ion school is his parents and their degree of interest and involvement.
Abigail Thernstrom, author of a couple of books on the problems with education was on some egghead talk show I came across about a year or two ago. Speaking to the panel, she claimed that she could look at ONE thing and tell you how well that could would be doing in school. That one thing: the number of books present in the home. Pretty interesting.
Back to the point. The problem is that THE problem with these kids in these bad schools is not the kids or the teachers or the schools. It’s the shitty parenting. That and what is created to a neighborhood when you have a whole bunch of shitty parents.
The best voucher schools seek to address this by redefining the role of the school. When I was a kid in the suburbs, schools could just focus on academics. But for many of these kids, some super basic life stuff is not covered in the home. So the schools take it upon themselves to do it. This is more work, so some schools expand the school day to maybe 6:00 and/or 6 days a week. This has the added benefit of keeping the kids off the streets.
Quick anecdote from one of her books. There was a charter school, I wanna say it was either Newark or Gary or Harlem, anyway, when the kids there entered the classroom, they had to sit on the floor. If they wanted to sit at a desk they had to pay for it by renting it. Not real greenbacks, but "money they would earn from good behavior. Doing things like raising their hands before they spoke, handing in assignments on time, making sure they were neat, holding their buddy’s hand when they were walking to the lunch room, things like that. I felt hopeful for these kids. Think about the school just down the street from them where these kids, from the same neighborhood, were not being taught these non-academic life skills. I think it puts them at a great advantage.
So, to restate, the problem is the parenting. And few people are comfortable indicting large swaths of the population that are so often not only a minority, but one flavor of minority. Black kids in these areas have a really raw deal. Sending them to the same school that their parents went to and failed them, and their grandparents, is cruel. We need more charter schools.
There are, however two thing we can do that I think would help. One is to not think of school solely as an on-ramp for college. It’s not for everyone. I have friends who do well and never went to college. I think it’s because the school steered these kids to trade schools. That did two things, it removed uninterested kids from the academic classrooms so the teacher was able to spend more time on kids that wanted to learn the subject matter and less dealing with bored and often unruly kids. Even more important, it educated these kids and gave them the tools to do well in the world doing something they had an affinity for.
The other step, which also would reduce class size and make the teachers job easier with a time consuming problem is to stop allowing those who are here illegally to overburden our schools with kids that are not proficient in English. I admit this is not a simple problem, in that we don’t want to knowingly create a future wave of uneducated adults. And if the kids are here legally on their own, their entitled to that education. But, what we can do is not encourage further illegal immigration by being as embracing as some are to those who are here illegally now.
Politically incorrect, around these boards, absolutely. But taking those two steps would undoubtedly improve our schools.
Ok, fine, but what does any of this have to do with IQ (or, more importantly) inherent genetic intelligence of Africans or their descendants in the US?
Of course, your nonsense is pretty well demolished by history in which sub-Saharan Africa had perfectly fine commerce and military before the intrusion of Europeans and Arabs. There are large tracts of desert and jungle in which agriculture was not productive and other lands that were better suited to grazing, but there was nothing wrong with agriculture in the regions where the land permitted. And I would not try to explain to several thousands of British and Italian soldiers why they died at the hands of “poor” military experience, despite having modern weapons to employ against Africans.
I am still not sure whether you are truly that uninformed or whether you are simply playing the naïf for the purpose of trying to outlast the other posters in this thread.
People who suffer various levels of developmental disability can perform work in a situation in which either higher functioning people are surrounded by supportive fully functioning people or where more disabled people are under the direct supervision of people who have been trained to assist them. Certainly, they “can work,” but you are working from a claim that half the people in a region would require the support of a majority of people, (denied by your claims of disability), or the support of trained people, (of whom there would have been none in the thousands of years up to the present and who make up a negligible number, today).
A number of people can become “fairly self sufficient,” but that is only among the top tiers of such people and your claim for a population in which about half of the people are developmentally disabled requires that a very large number of that group would be much more severely disabled. Even the “fairly self sufficient” claim notes that they are not independent, but require specific assistance to survive. They can buy their own groceries and pay their own rent and utilities, (generally after being reminded), but they cannot finance their own mortgages or, in pre-industrial societies, know when to plant and harvest crops or how to store them to survive through the winter or how to respond to situations of droughts or pest invasion.
That you are posting, repeatedly, in apparent ignorance of this knowledge calls into serious question your ability to engage in this discussion.
Okay, first of all I want to condemn in no uncertain terms the chilling effect of having a moderator threaten to close the thread down. I don’t think this has become any more heated or personal than the average GD thread, so I can only conclude this threat is being made because exploring this particular scientific territory is too uncomfortable for some (most) people. There are some people, as I noted upthread, who will at least flat out frame it that way, which I find more honest though I still oppose that position (that this should be off limits for intellectual exploration), especially on the SDMB of all places.
This is absolutely right. Africa, nearly universally agreed to be the cradle of humanity, is where all the genetic diversity is. A small band struck out from the Horn and populated the rest of the world (mixing with Neanderthals and perhaps other groups along the way), meaning as I understand it that Norwegians and Han Chinese are closer genetically than two randomly selected sub-Saharan Africans would be.
So let’s throw out the idea that “black people are in a particular, closely genetically related, ethnic group that suffers from low intelligence”. But what if that is coming at it from exactly the wrong direction?
What I mean is: maybe people of African origin should be seen as “regular” human beings, having that nice diverse gene pool (albeit still less diverse than many primates due perhaps to a Stone Age genetic bottleneck, though this is disputed) and still hanging out in the home continent where our species involved. From this framing, it is the denizens of Asia and Europe that are exceptional. So let’s think about that initial band that struck out to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and establish new civilizations, to boldly go where no (hu)man has gone before. Wouldn’t they be self-selected from the start? Think of the people you know who like to travel and explore, and others you know who prefer to just stay in the place they grew up and are familiar with. Which group seems more intelligent?
Then it seems quite plausible to me that there would be evolutionary pressures on this group as they moved out and dealt with novel situations, landscapes, flora and fauna, not to mention the need to survive winters. And these pressures would tend to promote quicker natural selection for nimble minds, I’d think.
I mean, evidence is mounting that the world’s elite long distance runners are not only concentrated in East Africa, but within a group (“tribe”) called the Kalenjin that is a minority even within Kenya and makes up less than one tenth of one percent of the world’s population. Why then is it so hard to imagine that a small band that spread out to Europe and Asia could be the elites in brainpower?
I completely agree that we do not have the capacity to perfectly and fully define intelligence. In fact, we probably get into Godelian problems in attempting to do so, unless we manage to make AIs smarter than us to do it for us. And I’m a big supporter of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Not that his framework is the final word, but a good attempt to expand the definition. (Note too that his musical-rhythmic and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences are areas, not measured by IQ tests, in which black people often excel.)
But I also think there is no question but that IQ tests and standardised tests like the SAT are measuring something significant. I never took an SAT or ACT prep class or any of that kind of thing, and I aced them both. To me, if you can’t do the same you are, in a significant way, just not as “on the ball” mentally as I am in that regard. I can’t imagine getting as many of those questions wrong as the average black person does (or even the average white person). I’m kind of agog, like “how could you not know that?”.
But in my experience, as I keep saying, it is the “nurture only” camp that takes that all-or-nothing approach. Those in the Stephen Pinker camp (of which I count myself as one) acknowledge the dovetailing, the feedback loop you talk about. But they also keep in mind the idea I threw out upthread, of being keenly aware of what “necessary but not sufficient” means–on *both *sides of nature/nurture.
And there is a lot of evidence that there are things that African and African-American mothers do, starting in utero and continuing in key developmental periods of young childhood, that are far from optimal that–you are right–are not about genetics (or if they are, it is another feedback loop where the genetics are spurring the suboptimal parenting behaviour). But many of the same egalitarians will reject attempts by mostly white experts and social workers to improve these things as being “paternalistic”, “white man’s burden”, etc. And stories like this one call into question how much good these interventions really do anyway, when people are stubbornly ignorant and/or lazy. (Admittedly, that aid worker is also an idiot.)