Has the nature-nurture issue been definitely settled in favor of nature?

Great Debates
61

This is simply not true. I’ve taken anthro classes at 3 difference colleges scattered across the country and I read as many anthro journals as I have time for and I have not encountered this assertion once in an anthropological journal or class. I have encountered it outside of anthropology (when I took a Woman and Gender studies class which was non-scientific and full of BS), but never inside of it.

I have been taught in my classes in any scientific field that deals with this subject (so I assume that this is standard) that the nature versus nurture argument is a false dichotomy. And, from what I have learned in my classes about how evolution works, it is impossible to separate genes from environment. After all the environment can affect the expression of phenotype.

Furthermore, and this is a very important point that is often neglected in these conversations, just because IQ has a genetic component and people vary in their IQ in part because of these genetics doesn’t mean that different groups of people vary in their IQ from each other. In other words, within group variation does not prove proof for between group variation. This was hammered into our heads in multiple classes and I’ve had to explain why this is true on a few finals and I can see why considering how many people make this mistake all the time.

LonesomePolecat, is there bias in academia? Yes. Is there bias in academia regarding this issue? As with any issue, I think there is some bias. Has there been any suppression of facts or destruction of genuine theory as to this subject of race? No, that has not occurred. I’ll use examples from the history of Physical Anthropology to say while I feel certain I can say that.

Carleton Coon was the President of the American Association of Physical Anthropology and he believed that in polygenesis which was a dominant force for most of the early history of Physical Anthropology. In 1961, a non-academic published a good arguing for racial segregation in scientific terms, using past research to support his claims. The AAPA voted to censure his book due to the shoddy claims in his work. Coon resigned from the AAPA due to what he believed to be a suppression of a valid scientific theory. He went on to pubish his own book, ‘The Origin of Races’ which was not well received within the scientific community. He believed that each ‘race’ had evolved separately from <i>Homo erectus</i>.

We studied the history of these movements and the varying way in which thinking shifts in my classes, and with all the major scientists who are condemned by the larger anthropological body, in each case it seems to be that either they lack the background and understanding of what they speak and distort the data through their misunderstanding (probably non-intentionally) or they hold fast to theories which have very little empirical support.

I think the reason why a lot of people get confused is that they don’t understand the language that we use. I see it a lot when people question evolution and bring up the ‘it’s only a theory’ argument. One of the things that most people don’t know about and thus gets confused in the press is what ‘heritability’ is. I think this was the biggest problem with the Bell Curve, people were equating heritability with genetically determined. Just because IQ is found to be very heritable doesn’t mean it is genetically determined!

62

I’m a little confused. It seems you are saying that if the egalitarians propose some “nurture factor,” and evidence comes out which undermines or rules out this “nurture factor,” the egalitarian hypothesis is not undermined. Is that right?

63

My claim was that there is “is a bit of a taboo against hypothesizing or arguing that natural mental abilities are not distributed evenly among races or ethnic groups”

tomndebb’s claim – that “the “violent” reaction was not really within the scientific community; the separate (and not really vehement) negative reaction within the scientific community is based on the fact that he has participated in zero studies of the issue andin this case made some fairly stupid off-hand remarks just before he addressed an audience at a museum.” – does not contradict mine, even if true.

Indeed, he states there was a “violent” reaction to Watson’s comments. Clearly Watson evoked such a reaction by violating a taboo.

64

Nope, dead wrong. If “egalitarians” hypothesize that a particular “nurture factor” has a significant influence on race-linked differences in intelligence/ability, and then reliable evidence comes out which shows that this particular factor does not play a significant role, then yes indeed, that hypothesis about that particular factor would be undermined.

But that evidence would not undermine in any way the broader hypothesis that nurture in general is responsible for the race-linked differences. Ruling out any one nurture factor is not at all the same as ruling out the influence of nurture in general. That’s because human development involves a metric assload of different nurture factors, which interact with one another and with genetic factors in immensely complicated ways.

The sloppy thinking that annoys “egalitarians” is precisely this kind of willingness to extrapolate from results about individual factors to conclusions about the influence of nurture and environment in toto. It isn’t “liberal dogma” or deference to a “taboo” to point out that such reasoning is illogical crap.

65

In that case, there is essentially no indirect evidence which could possibly falsify or even undermine the egalitarian hypothesis. Because if you eliminate 100 possible nurture factors (and all possible combinations thereof), the egalitarians can come with epicycle #101 and claim that there is no evidence undermining their position.

66

I am aware of these findings.

The notion that grade school test measurements reflect adult ability is what should be in question here. Notice that the “debunking” which occurs in the cite references childhood exams.

Suppose that I were to decide that whites are just as capable as blacks at basketball because in grade school they performed about equally if given equal opportunity. Would that convince you their average cohort performance as adults must also be equal? Would it convince you that over-representation of blacks in the NBA must be due to some non-genetic cause? Or might you instead reasonably infer that grade-schoolers have not finished expressing their full potential, and that grade school athletic ability reflects only that maturation to that age-point is similar for both cohorts.

Remember that genetically based potential, particularly with respect to the uniquely human characteristics of our brain my not be fully expressed until maturity–say 18 years old.

67

I do not question your earnestness, nor the earnestness of any academics. I do think that it would be career suicide for any academe to take a public stance implying there is an inferiority among almost any population compared to another. It just isn’t done and it just isn’t worth it.

I admire your willingness to rigorously protest the notion that race-based cohorts might be differently-enabled from one another. While I am not willing to accuse you of being disingenuous, there is a sense that the lady doth protest too much, sort of like creationists who are over-zealous protecting the shibboleths upon which their entire belief system rests. The consequences of them being wrong are so dire to their paradigm that the consideration of alternatives is not easily embraced.

You ask for studies with constraints that cannot be met. Yet you advance no reasonable explanation for the universal difference in performance among various populations–including race cohorts–over the entire world. It’s not as if blacks academically outperform south asians in africa, underperform them in India and perform equally in Canada. The rank order is always the same in every system, everywhere. It’s not as if whites are crummy basketball players in Jamaica, proportionately represented in Bermuda, and over-represented in the US. White men can’t jump. They aren’t lazy. They aren’t undermotivated. They aren’t culturally influenced. They don’t lack role models. They don’t deliberately choose to underperform and earn less because of peer pressure. There may be a germ of truth in any of those explanations, but basically they (on average) can’t make NBA-grade ball.

As I mentioned earlier, attacks against nature as the root cause of race differences rest on attacking available studies (and nitpicking about examples or whatever) instead of doing the obvious: design a study which lays to rest the argument in favor of nurture once and for all. The problem is simple: every study favors nature, so the only possible attack is to attack existing studies. It’s not as if there are dissenting studies about race differences. There is only dissent about why, and why the gap is always there despite efforts at changing nurture.

It’s a testable hypothesis, it has been tested, and the result–damn you, Mr Unfair Creator–is in: it’s nature. It’s nature when you compare two individuals, and it’s nature when you compare two cohorts. So if you unilaterally declare a cohort to not be connected by nature (the “race is not a genetic category” argument) you end up with no viable alternative explanation. Instead, what happens is that an argument is advanced that it’s enslavement history over here; post-colonialism over there; cultural attitudes elsewhere; bad geographical luck; famine; disease; war; …after a while the constellation of explanations advanced to explain the otherwise obvious does become disingenuous.

We are, mostly, our genes, and the nurture we get is layered upon them. Ask any parent who has two totally different children. :wink:

It’s not that nurture has no contribution, it’s not that life is equally fair for all populations but it is what it is.

There is a reason so many asians are in higher mathematics and so many blacks are in the NBA. Nature. Not Nike. Not rap music. Not Chinese parenting. (Except to the extent that those influencers are themselves a product of underlying nature.) Even our culture follows from our nature to a substantial extent. As a matter of fact, it’s more likely that common ability for various things will have a far larger affect on associations than race, per se. This is because two people of whatever “race” who have similar ability will have more in common than simple external appearances. It is not race that sets us apart nearly so much as it is a common nature, and the large overlap of abilities ensures that people of many different population pools will create cohorts that cross race lines. A couple of intellectuals ruminating over Poincare’s (sp?) theorem couldn’t give a rat’s butt about what “race” each other is from–their commonality is found in their common genius for weird stuff. It is nevertheless their genetic heritage that gives them that common potential to grasp math.

It doesn’t mean–for any of you out there spitting to say so–a damn when it comes to the next individual you meet on the streets. So chill.

68

If I saw researchers even come close to eliminating 100 possible nurture factors and all possible combinations thereof, I’d take the arguments in favor of race-linked genetic factors determining race-linked performance gaps a lot more seriously, even though it still wouldn’t constitute conclusive proof of such claims. But at present, all we seem to have are scattershot studies eliminating one or two nurture factors under various specialized circumstances, and a bunch of sloppy thinkers using those results to jump to completely unwarranted conclusions.

It’s not the fault of liberals that the study of human intelligence/ability is fiendishly difficult and complex. If you haven’t come up with scientifically convincing evidence in favor of a particular conclusion, it’s no use going around pouting, “well, even if we did have scientifically convincing evidence, those mean old closed-minded dogmatic liberal egalitarians would refuse to accept it!”

Whining that people are fundamentally prejudiced against the position that you espouse does not excuse you from the obligation to provide valid and thorough evidentiary support for that position.

It would probably be career suicide for any academic to take a public stance espousing the position that the earth is under surveillance by extraterrestrial aliens, too. Not because it’s impossible or even seriously unlikely, but simply because there is currently no reliable scientific evidence supporting it.

Then you have misinterpreted my position, or I haven’t made it clear. I most certainly do not object to the notion that race-based cohorts might be differently-enabled from one another. I think it sounds rather unlikely, given the frequent lack of correlation between racial identity and actual genetic descent, but I certainly don’t consider it impossible, and I don’t object to that notion per se or protest it in any way.

What I do most definitely protest and object to are half-assed so-called “common sense” claims to the effect that race-based cohorts have been convincingly SHOWN to be differently-enabled from one another. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bunkum.

Like I said to brazil84, it’s not my fault (or the fault of liberal academics in general) that this subject is so complicated and so hard to research in a scientifically rigorous way. You’re not entitled to get away with sloppy thinking and jumping to conclusions just because it’s difficult to get answers on this subject any other way.

Cite, please. In particular, I’d like to see your cite for the implied assertion that the dark-skinned, curly-haired “black” Malayali and Tamils of South India academically underperform the light-skinned, straight-haired “Asian”/“white” North Indians.

69

But why? By your stated logic, conclusive elimination of 100 possible nurture factors is NOT evidence which undermines the egalitarian hypothesis. Are you now changing your position?

70

Nope, that’s not what I said.

Nope.

71

Would it be reasonable to stat the faced-based cohort being differently enabled position as that there is evidence that the very many genes for intelligence and all the rest are somehow strongly correlated with the relatively few genes expressing racial appearance? (Do you know how many there are.) A mechanism for this would have to be shown taking into account the lack of genetic isolation of any so-called racial group.

Perhaps expressing it this way shows the implausibility. If it were true, you’d think any genes discovered for intelligence and the like would have to be near genes for “race.” That sounds unlikely to me.

The nature explanation for our characteristics makes no such claim about racial correlation of course. It sounds like the article quoted in the OP does a sleight of hand switching of this specific and unproven claim for the more general nature claim. It’s kind of like saying there is a genetic basis for “blondes have more fun.”

72

:shrug:

Here’s what you said:

And earlier, you claimed that there were “ninety-five gajillion other nurture factors.”

It clearly follows (by your logic) that eliminating 100 of the “95 gajillion nurture factors” “would not undermine the broader [egalitarian] hypothesis”

Looks to me like you are the one engaged in sloppy thinking.

73

:wink:

If you are down to deliberately distorting my posts, I think I’ll give up grinding the ax.

You know, and I know, that “black” is not a skin color but a short-hand term for sub-saharan ancestry out of Africa. Neither the Malayali nor the Tamils self-identify with that group. It’s fun, and usually productive in a superficial sort of way, for those who take your position to distract the argument by bogging down the opposition in terminology. Frankly, it’s too tedious for me to bite.

I wish higher academia every success in recruiting and graduating blacks from science, engineering, mathematics and other hard sciences so that their representation becomes commensurate with their distribution among the general population. I wish the NBA success in recruiting and playing equally capable asians and whites commensurate with their representative numbers.

In the interim I will not accuse you or the NBA of bigotry or racism should either fail, because the explanation for me, at least is not only scientifically obvious, but common everyday observation of the world. I look forward to being proved wrong and the advancement of genomics may indeed prove me wrong. I will not be betting my stock money that the nature-nurture issue will be settled in favor of nurture, however. At least some of the ten dollars I have left from this week’s market “correction” will be invested in genetics-oriented companies, because I put my money where my position is, so to speak.

Let me take a wild guess here: in your own experience you have not noticed an academic success rate for the cohort self-described as “black” proportionate to their population…anywhere in the world. Let me make a further guess: your explanation for that varies by location and circumstance, and is not a simple one. And a further guess: you have not seen very much progress in American higher education in test score gaps despite several decades of sincere and honest effort on the part of educators.

And one final guess: no explanation that puts nature above nurture for differences among race-based cohorts will ever pass your personal sniff test or satisfy you convincingly.

I nevertheless appreciate your comments here and I do give them serious consideration. If you have an explanation for the NBA’s over-representation of black athletes, I’d be interested in it. I leave the further digestion of IQ and standardized test score differences to those who have more stomach for arguing it than I. Perhaps BrainGlutton will want to weigh back in, having opened the can of worms.

74

Chief Pedant, there is absolutely no evidence for most of your assertions. If you make such broad claims, you need to provide cites.

75

I agree. By the Kimstu standard, there’s no evidence that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer.

Think about it: For every epidemiological study which connects smoking and lung cancer, it’s possible to postulate some X factor which invalidates the conclusion.

And yes, it’s possible to construct a super-complex model, replete with epicycles, which explains away all the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer.

But ultimately, reasonable critical-thinking people will prefer the simple, reasonable explanation – even if that explanation is contradicts what they want to believe.

76

My apologies: I certainly did not know that you were using “black” specifically to refer to sub-Saharan Africans rather than to all groups of people who “look black”, including many South Indians, Sri Lankans, and Australian aborigines. To my mind, that’s what a racial category such as “black” means: the people in it generally share superficial phenotypic characteristics such as skin tone, hair and eye color, etc., that enable observers to classify them all together as a “race”. (And what does “self-identifying” have to do with your classification of racial categories, anyway? Surely self-identification is a cultural factor?)

And I’m definitely baffled by your apparent exclusion of non-sub-Saharan dark-skinned Africans from the racial category “black”. Maybe I’m missing something, but plenty of Sudanese, Tunisians, and other inhabitants of North African countries look definitely black to me.

Moreover, as many research articles such as this one have noted, there is actually more genetic diversity in many respects among sub-Saharan African populations than there is in populations outside that region. In other words, different sub-Saharan Africans are likely to be more different from each other, in terms of their actual genetic makeup, than, say, some Northern Europeans are from West Asians. So why would we expect to see a genetic factor in intelligence that specifically characterizes sub-Saharan Africans?

I mean, your particular identification of an allegedly genetically meaningful “racial cohort” here looks kind of crazy. It doesn’t include non-African black-looking people: they’re not “black”. It doesn’t include black-looking Africans from north of the sub-Saharan region: they’re not “black”. But it somehow does include all sub-Saharan Africans, even though their populations actually contain more genetic diversity than many “multi-racial” populations in other regions.

Given these odd restrictions, what on earth is racially or genetically significant about the category “black” that you’ve constructed? It apparently has nothing to do with how closely its members really are related genetically, nor with how closely they resemble one another phenotypically. So what makes it a distinct “racial cohort” with any meaningful biological basis?

If you have an explanation for professional basketball’s over-representation of Jewish athletes in the 1930’s and 1940’s, I’d be interested in it. Commentators in the early days of professional basketball tried to explain the high percentage of Jews among successful players in that sport in just the same “nature”-based ways that you are now trying to explain its high percentage of black players:

It would be more accurate to say that by the Kimstu standard, there’s no evidence that smoking cigarettes causes alcoholism. Yes, smokers are significantly over-represented among alcohol abusers, but that doesn’t prove that the smoking was what caused the alcoholism.

Similarly, some groups of blacks on average are over-represented among low academic achievers, but that doesn’t prove that having black physical characteristics was what caused their low achievement.

Uh-huh. Just like sportswriters in the 1930’s preferred the “simple, reasonable” explanation that Jews excelled in professional basketball because they were well suited to it genetically.

77

Whew! :lights cigarette:

Hah! I’d not heard that before.

“Writers opined that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes, which of course cut against the stereotype that Jewish men were myopic and had to wear glasses, but who said stereotypes had to be consistent?” (Here) Man, jews just own everything!

78

Lol. By your standards, there’s no epidemological evidence that anything causes anything.

I challenge you to show me epidemological evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. Because I’m pretty confident that I can explain away any such evidence by speculating that there is some other factor – not controlled for in the study – which accounts for the results.

By your standard, that’s all I need to do.

Uh-huh. Probably they thought so because Jews dominated all over the world in sports which required superior jumping ability. Because the difference was pervasive and intractable and and persisted for decades even though other groups tried en masse to succeed at the game. :rolleyes:

Actually, just for kicks, I did a google search to find an actual quote from one of these alleged 1930’s sportswriters. Here’s one that I found. I don’t know if it’s representative, but it sure is interesting:

79

Permit me to distill this to two points:

  1. Black is not a genetic cohort.
  2. In the past, the NBA had over-representation by a particular group; it now has over-representation by a different group. Therefore over-representation at a particular moment in time is not a function of some sort of innate ability of the group currently over-represented.

I’ve answered the first objection earlier. Any two cohorts are artificial constructs in the sense that the same total population of both cohorts can be divided into two (or more) completely different cohorts if different criteria are chosen. Tall and short v white and black, for example. Rather than be distracted by that, let me return to the question: Is a given difference nature, or nurture? The evidence that the difference between a cohort that does well academically and a cohort that does poorly academically is genes and not nurture is consistent, overwhelming and unilateral. Efforts at nurturing the less-naturally-gifted notwithstanding, gaps remain. Since (self-labeled) blacks underperform (self-labeled) whites on standardized tests (the MCAT I referenced above, for example), and since nature is the predominant determinant of an individual’s performance, cohort differences must also reflect an underlying (average) difference in nature of the two cohorts. The endless machinations around definitions of race are smoke and mirrors. Obviously the more broad a definition of “race” is, the looser the underlying genetic connection, but so what? If we divide the entire human race into short and tall, there may be enormous genetic diversity in general, but the cohort that’s tall has a difference from the short cohort in the height gene(s).

This is the takeaway: our differences are nature mostly, with nurture layered on top. Feel free to make your own categories, race or otherwise.

Back to the NBA. Here’s the flip answer: scope out film from back in the day and scope out last week’s highlights. Who is the better athlete?

It’s a pretty desperate (and just let me get one dig in here: pitiful) argument to pretend that there is no objective evidence that today’s NBA stars aren’t the greatest athletes in the world at their sport, chosen from an open system with wide open enrollment. In 50 years it is not going to be the Inuit’s turn to star in the NBA. Sheesh. I didn’t bother to look up the veracity of your “sportswriters” (never a group known for intellectual insight, in my opinion) but I’ll just take a wild guess and say the black athlete was cut out of the selection pool early on, and I’ll take another wild guess that the Jewish athletes weren’t outperforming blacks elsewhere in the world. Black athletes kick ass in the NBA because their cohort has the best damn sports genes, period.

(And yes, TomnDeb; it’s a sub-cohort of all blacks). But it’s genes, not nurture. We ain’t there in the black community making sure they spend their life trying to get into the NBA.

80

My point is not to take sides in the nature vs nurture debate. (I already expressed my view and feel no need to go back to it.)

My reservations about the discussion are that different posters (and lots of people off this board) treat any sort of examination of the specific population that includes those descendants of West African slaves imported to the U.S., who have interbred with some proportion of Europeans and indigenous North Americans, by extrapolating the results to all sub-Sharan Africans, today. That sloppy thinking continues on to making sweeping statements about sub-Saharan Africans that is based on cherry picked examples from different groups across Africa.

I don’t think it should be all that diffficult–particularly on the SDMB–to be a bit more precise in identifying groups to avoid over generalizing claims.