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

Great Debates
101

Sorta reminds me of the old joke when a neighbor denies stealing a donkey. Just then the donkey brays. “What?!!” says the protesting neighbor to the owner? “You gonna take the donkey’s word against mine?!”

Stop w/ this sort of nonsense first: “…rigorous DNA studies show to be more closely genetically linked to one another than they are to people outside the group…” Take a deep breath and think for a moment. Use my example of short people and tall people to understand why your requirement is silly. Tall and short is height genes. Tallness is a genetic trait that separates that cohort into the tall group even if the researcher cannot meet the criteria of "rigorous DNA studies blah blah blah " to define either group. Take that one off the table. It’s not just unreasonable; it’s a foolish argument. The rest of the world is way more genetically diverse than the pygmies, but guess what? The rest of the world is taller–and the difference between the two groups regarding that trait is their genes!! I don’t usually get my dander up when I am trying to explain such a simple point, but at the risk of shouting, “THE PHENOTYPIC TRAIT IS THE COHORT, OK?” If you are black, you belong to a cohort which is able to perform superior to other cohorts in the NBA.

Alright, next question: is a trait nature or nurture?
Well, if it’s nature we’d expect it to be unfixable by nurture. I can’t make a short guy taller than his maximum genetic potential allows him to be by nurturing him. His genes define that maximum. Can’t make the Pedant an NBA star, and can’t make the Pedant win a Nobel for proving that all semistable elliptic curves with rational coefficients are modular, even if you nurtured him for 50 years. We might expect nurture to improve the Pedant’s weaknesses but a gap would remain between the Pedant and the Best in Class for a given phenotypic expression.

Is there evidence that intelligence, personality, athletic skills, musical talent–you know the drill–is nature and not nurture? If you want cites here, look 'em up yourself or look around your family. If you haven’t found any, you haven’t looked. You haven’t looked at twin studies and you haven’t looked at your siblings, to name two, but there are hundreds.

Is there evidence that races–a cohort of self-labeled individuals–perform differently? It is to this point that I hold that studies universally say yes, and if you are unaware of them you haven’t looked. I have cited two in previous posts, but to the best of my knowledge there are no standardized test score comparison studies with racial cohorts which do not show the same rank-order.

Is there evidence that nurture does not close this “race”-base gap? I have given you two cites for this–the first from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test showing that wealthy blacks underperform poor whites, and the second from the American Association of Medical Colleges http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2007/mcatgparaceeth07.htm showing that despite four (or more) years of equivalent preparation (nurture), the black-white score gap for MCAT remains huge. Now I do not want to pretend for a moment that these two cites represent the entire argument but neither am I going to turn a SDMB post into a reference paper just because you are unwilling to research the literature yourself.

Is there common-sense evidence of black-white differences that must be nature? I’ve given you my friends in the NBA as common-sense proof of that, and you returned some lame quote from a 1930’s sportscaster. My friend, the donkey is braying in the back yard on that one. :wink: I’ll be taking the donkey’s word against your protestations. And I suspect that your refusal to admit the obvious there is that once you open the door to that common-sense observation, your other shibboleths are toppleable. Of course “blacks” are not a gentetically homogeneous group. Neither are whites, or any other large human group. Got nuttin’ to do with whether or not the observed differences in a phenotypic trait is genetic. Go back to the tall/short example til it sinks in.

You’ve basically trumpeted the standard academic pablum: races can’t be perfectly defined, intelligence can’t be easily measured and no study can be rigorous enough to prove anything. Relax. You are right. And yet the donkey brays: imperfect a cohort as “race” as it may be, with respect to the skillset for standardized tests and the skillset for handling a basketball, it does separate us into groups, the rank-order is universally the same and is not eliminated by nurture. Not here. Not there. Not anywhere. *Res ipsa loquitur *. It’s nature. However imperfect the category, that division of cohorts groups a differential distribution for those gentetic traits. It does not mean some other subgroup within the larger cohort–the Sissoko clan in Mali–isn’t smarter than the Kimstus in LaLaLand.

In the meantime, though–and to the point of the OP–nature more than nurture defines us. It makes us tall; it makes us fast; it makes us smart. It makes us–me, anyway; I am sure you are lovely in person–surly. :wink:

Finally, some advice from this geezer: beware of hitching your just society boat to the notion that intelligence, say, is not genetic. The genome is being defined. If I’m wrong, I’ll be delighted. If you’re wrong you’ll be devastated, like a young-earth creationist finally having to accept evolution. I want a just society that looks past race, for the same reasons as you. We won’t get there by pretending that what we don’t want to be true is not true.

102

Of course not. No epidemiological study can establish causation with absolute certainty.

But I’m not asking for studies that show absolute certainty of causation. I’m just asking for studies that aren’t complete crap when it comes to indicating causation.

You’re trying to argue that if I’m not going to insist on standards of evidence that are impossibly rigorous, then I have to be willing to accept your standards of evidence that are complete crap. This argument is bullshit, and I’m not buying it.

103

Do sub Saharan Africans actually have bigger brains than others?

I’m not endorsing this article. It is interesting, though.

104

Lol. I’m a little confused about the “complete crap” standard. Is that the same as your earlier standard, which required that all possible “nurture factors” be controlled for? Or is it something new?

I have a feeling that “complete crap” = any evidence which might undermine your faith in the egalitarian hypothesis.

I’m making no such argument.

105

I presume that you are asserting that by our current definition of intelligence that native Americans and Papuans have less intelligence while East Asians are more intelligent. I’ll need a cite for that ! And if you come up with socio economic expressions of their society, or IQ tests, then hell, your not giving African Americans a chance at all. Do you agree with Rushton ?

106

Frank Sweet, in the article I linked, and other on his site, debunks your notions of “race” quite effectively. You don’t have a good definition, and shouting about it isn’t going to change that fact. You can’t just say that the current US social definition is adequate. It has varied over time in the US, it continues to vary from one country to another, and it only correlates in the roughest way with the underlying genetics.

Frank Sweet’s a trained scientist and military historian. He’s a geezer too. Maybe you all could get together and have a grump off. As a relative youngster, I would argue that you’ve spent all your life buying into the American race ideology, and you can’t see that it’s largely fictional. If you wanted to make arguments about genetics based differences in IQ, the US population is a particularly bad data set, because there’s so much overlap between the populations you seek to compare.

You’d have a better shot if you sought to compare, say, Australian Aborigines and Arctic Inuit. ( And hey, they’ve both got generous distributions of microcephalin, the brain size gene!) But that’s not politically useful, and this discourse is all about American politics. Being against affirmative action is a perfectly respectable political position, of course. Affirmative action has been under attack, and has been consequently curtailed since the 1970’s. In fact, several states have anti AA measures on the ballot for November, so I expect further curtailment.

What’s interesting about your NBA argument is that you don’t seem to know as much as you need to know about the subject. Today the NBA has a number of standout white players, but few if any are white Americans. Unless you’re working with another definition of race, Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash are the same race as white Americans, but they play roundball a hell of a lot better than most of the white Yanks currently playing today.

Why do white American guys, relatively speaking, suck at b ball? Are they shying away from the sport because it’s dominated by black men? Why doesn’t the disparity show up as sharply among white American women? Do white American guys believe, consciously or subconsciously, that they can’t compete against black men? What’s going on? Whatever it is, it can’t be reduced to a simple nature vs. nurture dichotomy.
I

Again, your definition of nurture is patently absurd. Does any reputable scholar in any field believe that equivalent incomes automatically result in equivalent nurturing? Or that brain development a human being undergoes in college is in anyway comparable to brain development which occurs in the womb and in early childhood? If your argument depends on this, you’ve already lost.

107

[bolding mine]

That last sentence was incoherent. Try again.

108

No, Chief, you don’t get it. Yes, height is determined by height genes, but degree of similarity in height does not necessarily correlate to closeness of genetic kinship.

For example, the Watusis in Africa and the Dutch in Europe both tend to be very tall. But that doesn’t mean that the tall Dutch are necessarily more closely related, genetically, to the tall Watusis than to the shorter Germans.

But a shared phenotypic trait does not necessarily correlate with close genetic kinship. See the example above of the Watusis and the Dutch.

But you’ve provided no evidence so far that that cohort is GENETICALLY similar in any way that meaningfully differentiates it from other cohorts. Not phenotypically, genetically.

Sure, but those conclusions are based on studies of individuals that we KNOW are closely genetically linked. Particularly the separated-twin studies: we find two people who are genetically IDENTICAL but separated at birth, we find that despite significant differences in environment, they have similar levels of ability in area x, y, or z, we find many other instances of separated identical twins where the results are similar, and ta-daa! We can conclude with confidence that many personality traits and abilities are strongly influenced by genetic factors. Yay, science!

Sure. As I noted above, it’s quite clear that in many areas, racial differences correlate with differences in achievement. But it is totally unclear whether those differences are caused by race-linked GENETIC factors. As I keep pointing out, we haven’t even established a reliable pattern of genetic kinship between different individuals in the same racial category.

Family income at the time of taking the SAT is not in any way comparable with “nurture” as a whole. Amount of extra preparation during college years at the time of taking the MCAT is not in any way comparable with “nurture” as a whole. And what’s more, you still haven’t shown any genetically significant link among the members of the test cohort.

What I returned was a valid parallel with the phenomenon that you now claim as “common-sense proof” of your assertions. You say that since black players dominate professional basketball today, that’s “common-sense proof” that blacks have superior “sports genes” to non-black athletes.

I repeat: since Jews dominated professional basketball between about 50 and 70 years ago, is that “common-sense proof” that Jews have superior “sports genes” to other white athletes? If not, why not? If so, what happened genetically to the Jews between then and now to decrease their dominance among white basketball players?

There are a host of similar questions that could be asked. If blacks have superior “sports genes”, then why are they not as disproportionately represented in baseball (never mind hockey) as in basketball and football? And why has the percentage of blacks in baseball decreased by about half over the past ten years? Does that count as “common sense proof” that blacks recently suffered some kind of unfavorable mutation to their “baseball gene”?

I think you’re the one who needs to do that. You need to understand that phenotypic similarity does not necessarily correlate to closeness of genetic kinship.

Oh, I completely concur that intelligence is (probably) largely genetic; there’s significant scientific evidence in favor of that position.

What there is currently NO significant scientific evidence in favor of is the position that race-linked performance differentials on intelligence tests are genetic in origin. That’s not to say that they can’t be, or that it would be the end of the world if they were. But there is no significant evidence that they are.

109

In answer to the first part. [Bolding mine.]

110

Same old song: you don’t have any evidence to offer, and you’re trying to distract attention from that fact by claiming that even if you did offer evidence, I’d be too prejudiced to accept it. Still not a convincing argument.

111

Well then ignore that sentence and just give me the cite. To make it simple, just give me the cite for less intelligence amongst Papuans.

112

Okay, to be clear. You are claiming Papuans are less intelligent than average. Okay I got it and I’m calling bullshit.

113

Haha. You are right in the sense that I have nothing which would qualify as evidence under the Kimstu standard.

As far as I know, anyway. You won’t even tell me what your new standard is. Only that you reject evidence which you deem to be “complete crap.”

i.e. you have shifted the goalposts to some secret place so that you can continue your special pleading and sloppy thinking.

114

I don’t know what exactly you mean by “our current definition of intelligence”, but the definition of intelligence that the self-described “racial realists” use, based on the concept of g or generalized intelligence, results in higher scores for East Asians than for whites, who in turn score higher than blacks. I don’t know where the Papuans (presumably black?) are said to fall on this spectrum; Native Americans are apparently claimed to be somewhere between blacks and whites. Link:

115

Nope, goalposts are in the same place they always were: provide some significant and scientifically valid evidence in favor of your conclusion.

If you can’t do that, then your only alternative is to go on whining about how the mean old liberal scientific establishment is too politically correct to tolerate your hypotheses or accept your results. Like creationists, the self-described “racial realists” tend to fall back a lot on whining as a substitute for convincing argument.

116

Umm, would that “signficiant and scientifically valid evidence” have to rule out every possible “nurture factor”? Simple yes or no question.

117

To conclusively prove that genetic factors and not nurture factors are responsible for the difference? Sure would (as I’ve said before in this thread). To merely support that contention to some extent? No, but it would have to show significant correlation involving a meaningful genetic similarity.

But you can’t even produce that. All you’ve got is whining and nitpicking about how unfairly your evidence would be received if you ever bothered to offer any. C’mon brazil, I’ve answered lots of your questions, let’s see you answer one for me:

CITE??

118

Ok, I’m glad you abandoned your earlier position.

Do you agree that there is a “meaningful” genetic similarity among the ethnic group known as “Ashkenazi Jews”?

Quote the claim I made and I will try to back it up with arguments and/or evidence.

119

What are you calling for? You’ve already got plenty.

Anyway, one of the leading proponents of genetically based, “racial” inferiority, puts the Papua New Guinea mean IQ at 84. Of course, he’s a scumbag with a reputation for falsifying data and getting basic statistics wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Global_Inequality

120

No, I haven’t abandoned any position I’ve taken in this thread. But you seem to be having a hard time understanding them, and I’m not sure why. Chief Pedant, for example, also seems to be misunderstanding some fundamental issues in the science, but at least he’s not misinterpreting the straightforward meaning of the arguments I’m making.

:rolleyes: More dodging, more ducking. No, you tell me what specific claim you’re making about the influence of genetic factors on race-linked differences in ability, and then show me what evidence you’re offering to support it.

Not “arguments and/or” evidence. Evidence.