Check with Bruce Lahn how how angst-ridden the community is about studying race-based gene variants that might relate to neurophysiology…
Of course populations don’t differ in every single characteristic. But they differ in a lot, and where they differ, it’s because evolution has diverged. So when we study characteristics, we find more often than not (feel free to look some up ) that there are average differences for populations separated long enough.
Evolution diverges organisms over time, and we tend to study characteristics that are noteworthy in some way, such as for disease or physiology.
The more fundamental point is that average gene variant prevalences vary remarkably by self-identified race.
it is nice that you choose the simple objective trait of height, yes it simplifies pointing to genes.
but the sorting of tall and short without further populatoin information does not allow leaping to genes alone.
nutrition, and the intergenerational impact on nutrition for example have the large effects. Of course in a rich nation, not as impacting, but even in the european case, the echoes were seen in certain populations that experienced substantial food deprivation versus neighboring but not deprived. not the genetic, but the epigenetic. To take those populations and naively lump and draw conclusions from simplistic average will give you wrong information and conclusions. And this for a straightforward genetic trait.
I am more than on the right track, I understand the hand waving game of repitition on average to imply a coherent group conclusion on a not coherent group.
Maybe yes, maybe no, that is the strong assumption that is lept to without proof.
no, not really
oh yes it is an abuse, or it is better to say perhaps a very simple minded and naive use of the simple mean. the simple arithmetic mean used to try to characterise the heterogeneous population is a common error in the analytics that can lead to the unfounded and the skewed conclusion. It is for this reason that in the proper analysis there is the attention to the variation and we use different statistical tests. Building the causitive conclusions on a supposed simple averages is naive.
if as a financial economist I am so simple minded as to advance a conclusion across the population on something like a simple average based analysis of a heterogeneous population around the effect of an unevenly distributed characteristic, I will be led into error. it is better to identify that it is not a valid analytic grouping.
Hand waiving declarations about an average differences in this case betrays…
If you’re saying “maybe genes are partly involved in the explanation for the test-score disparity”, then fine. No big deal. But you say above that populations don’t differ in every single characteristic… so why are you so damn certain that intelligence does vary in terms of genetics, when society is profoundly unequal? Why are outcomes so convincing to you now, when through the rest of history there’s no way anyone could say with a straight face that black people have lower outcomes in various statistics because of genetics rather than societal factors?
Here’s the best way to think about genes: They underpin the maximum possible expression of a trait that optimum nurturing can drive.
Where we see average outcome differences for traits, we should examine nurturing variables. If we suspect that nurturing explanations are not sufficient, we should examine whether there might be a difference in genesets.
I don’t think we’ll come to an agreement on whether there are nurturing variables so unique to blacks as a group that they are over-represented for sprinting and under-represented for SAT performance for any reason related to gene variant prevalence.
Parsing out the exact interactions between genetic drivers and nurture is devilishly difficult. Even for disease, where we do care socially, an enormous amount of effort still yields only a tiny amount of knowledge about the exact way in which a gene drives outcome. So you are pretty safe demanding an exact explanation for a given outcome.
For example, if we want to look at Hypertension by race, we’d see huge differences by race, but also huge differences within the same race in different parts of the world. So do gene prevalence differences for “hypertension gene variants” drive hypertension outcomes, or not? In my world of medicine, here’s a pretty nice overview of some genetic factors in health disparities. Toward the bottom the authors say this: “While acknowledging the potential of molecular genetics, the tone in this presentation generally has been one of skepticism or outright rejection of many aspects of research on the genetics of race and health. However, there is one crucial area where a convincing answer to an important question has emerged. As suggested previously in the analysis of candidate gene data, the scope of human genetic diversity can now be modeled with a high degree of sophistication. In analyses based on large numbers of SNPs as well as haplotype distributions, the distinction between African and all non-African populations stands out with unmistakable clarity.” (underlining for emphasis by CP)
I think that’s a reasonable way to put the dilemma about race and health. We know for sure gene variant prevalence differs by race for most of the things we study in health. And we know those gene variants frequently make a measurable outcome difference. See this example this tablefor the C825T polymorphism allele frequency by black/white race groups. (It’s a gene variant that affects response to an antihypertensive medicine called a thiazide diuretic.)
One tiny snippet of DNA. The typical story of finding a distribution difference by “race.” Nowhere near the full story, for sure, and parsing out neurophysiology would be an order of magnitude more difficult.
But if I just get you to step 1: Gene variant prevalences vary by race, I think that’s a good place to start to understanding the science of it. C825T is the kind of hint that gene variant prevalence differences–along with nurture–drive different outcomes for hypertension in self-identified race cohorts. You could nurture those two cohorts identically, and you’d still be left with an outcome difference for thiazide response between blacks and whites because their self-identification associates them into cohorts with different gene variant prevalences. The two cohorts do not have the same average gene pool from which each individual draws their genes, so the outcomes diverge because their genesets have diverged.
If you are more comfortable living in a world where nature has treated all groups with equal reverence for genes whose functions we care about, that seems a nice, gentle world.
I think academic performance on quantified exams is driven to a substantial degree by average gene pool differences because highly privileged, wealthy black children given unlimited opportunity still underscore poverty-stricken whites and asians from uneducated families.
Similarly, I think sprinting and other power athletic performance is driven to a substantial degree by average gene pool differences because highly privileged, optimally-coached whites given unlimited opportunity still underperform poverty-stricken blacks given limited opportunity.
In both examples I consider nurturing to have been reasonably normalized and I consider the starting candidate pools to have reasonably similar motivation to excel in those arenas.
(Not to mention the blah blah blah about average gene variant prevalence differences I have bored you with above.)
And this is where we differ. You think wealthy black children have been given “unlimited opportunity” and I don’t, not even close. You think nurturing has been “reasonably normalized” and I don’t. Those are the differences, and why I see your conclusion as ridiculous.
More of this bullshit egalitarian straw-man, cockroach man. Maybe when you stop comparing the intelligence of black people to cockroaches you’ll recognize that this is a bullshit fantasy straw-man argument that has nothing to do with me.
That’s not what he did. Someone else already called you on this. As funny as you might think “cockroach man” is, :rolleyes:, he did not compare black people to cockroaches.
Yes he did. He didn’t mean to - it was a slip. But I believe that slip was more revealing about his true beliefs than all the rest of his posts on the subject combined. And as long as he uses bullshit straw man arguments against me, then I’m going to remind everyone that he compared the intelligence of black people to cockroaches. I’ll stop reminding everyone about it when he stops with the bullshit straw men.
I apologize for the name-calling, Chief Pedant. I may bring up your post that compared cockroaches to the intelligence of black people, without name-calling, especially if you continue to ascribe straw-man arguments to me that I have repeatedly said do not apply to me.
iiandyiiii, I put the actual quote about this above so it would be clear what I said.
I am perfectly comfortable with you putting in a quote from me as it long as it retains the full context of the quote.
What I said was not a slip, and it did not inadvertently compare blacks with cockroaches.
It is not helpful in the course of a debate to resort to name calling, or distortion, or ad hominem attacks.
It is particularly distracting (an annoying) for you to keep returning to this when all I ask is that you actually quote me instead of layering your own interpretation without quoting me.
Insults belong in the Pit.
Ad hominem attacks belong in Foolish Debates and not Great Debates.
Erroneous interpretations repeated ad nauseum don’t belong anywhere.
I will stop calling you names, and I apologize for calling you names.
I believe that the comparison was in fact a slip, but I’m fine with never mentioning it again, if you stop ascribing straw man arguments that I’ve never made to me. That’s not helpful in the course of a debate either.
Would you accept that a wealthy black child with educated parents has, on average, a nurturing advantage for academic performance over a white or asian child from a poverty-stricken background and whose parents are uneducated?
That’s the dilemma U Texas is facing with Fisher and SCOTUS. U Texas wants black students not from the 10% rule category. That’s because the best black students don’t come from the poor neighborhoods. They come from privileged blacks living in privileged neighborhoods.
But if U Texas does not consider race-alone AA criteria, poverty-stricken whites and asians from underprivileged backgrounds will have substantially better academic performances–including all standardized test scores–than the privileged black students. U Texas needs to overlook academic criteria and use race criteria in order to get black diversity where their black students are not just the marginal performers admitted via the 10% rule.
The rubber meets the road for race egalitarians in real life.
By race egalitarians I mean those whose default assumption is that gene variant prevalence is not the likely driving factor for disparate academic outcomes among races. These race egalitarians argue that all sorts of nurturing variables are the likely explanation.
The practical problem is that in real life, no one has been able to identify nurturing variables that are correctable such that average differences in academic performance disappear. And the average difference is so profound that highly privileged black students underperform extremely underprivileged asians. So when U Texas wants to advance nurturing opportunity as a criterion, they can’t think of any nurturing explanation to account for those privileged black candidates underperforming underprivileged asians. (And ditto for all higher institutions; even more so for the selective ones.) If they could think of them, they would, and just apply them.
This dilemma is created by race egalitarians who promote the idea that all races are about equally endowed genetically for all the traits we value. It is lovely as a construct, but it breaks down as a social policy. It has severely limited black admission to higher education in states like California, and it has severely limited US blacks with enslavement histories from competing with immigrant blacks. SCOTUS, using the egalitarian assumption, may actually rule against U Texas in Fisher, since very few race-alone strategies will pass strict scrutiny tests for equal treatment.
We should not default to egalitarianism for races. We know that evolution diverges and we know the average aggregate gene pools for self-identified race-based groups have different prevalence for gene variants.
If we leave self-identified race categories alone, and reject genetic egalitarianism as a default assumption, then we can make social policy which drives equal outcomes for position in society the same way we make social policy which reflects the reality that males and females are not genetically equal. We can be perfectly comfortable making policy that assigns race-based quotas or targets just as we might assign gender-based quotas or targets.
Nature is not egalitarian. She has no idea which genes we value. And ironically, some of the genes we value the most are not related to academic outcomes. The highest average starting salaries, for example, are probably found in the sports world. If we wanted to drive equal outcome by race there (say, Olympic sprinting or the NBA), I don’t think anyone really thinks we could do it by increasing nurturing opportunity for whites and asians. Because sports is such a small slice of the overall success pie, we just accept that different populations and different races are going to have disparate outcomes because the gene pools from which they draw give them a better chance of the right underpinning geneset.
In academia, we don’t have the luxury of overlooking disparate representation. It’s too critical, on average, to success in society.
So it’s time to lay genetic egalitarianism aside. We should accept that different races have different gene pools driving different outcomes. We should accept that, although we should continue to make sure everyone gets equal opportunity, we still need to account for genetically-driven disparity if we want every race group to be proportionally represented at the table.
No, absolutely not. It’s possible that some do – I imagine Obama’s children have nurturing advantages over the vast majority of children of any race. But in America, I don’t accept that, on average, wealthy black children have an advantage in nurturing over even poverty-stricken children from other races. I think society is still unequal enough that even wealth and education are not always enough to overcome systemic societal inequalities. Society is not just unequal, it’s profoundly unequal, in my view.
At the bottom of pretty much every social statistical indicator (including all the test scores we talk about) in the US are two groups (which are about as far apart as any two groups can be, in terms of genetic ancestry) – African Americans and Native Americans. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that these are the two groups that have been most abominably treated in American history.
We agree on affirmative action, but for very different reasons. I think your position is absurd, since we don’t need to hypothesize what life would be like for African Americans if everyone thought they were, on average, inherently and unchangeably less intelligent due to their race – that was most of American history, and for most of American history that was a big part of the justification for oppression and mistreatment.
Find another word, please – your long-term straw-manning (and associating it with creationism) has sullied this one.
Many possible nurturing variables have been identified, though not confirmed. You’ve rejected them all out of hand. In particular, I think it’s likely that there is an enormous amount of every-day differences between how people from different races are treated: as children that could include teacher expectations and treatment, media depictions and role models, and many more.
We also know that, among poor self-identified black children, the amount of African ancestry has no correlation whatsoever to lower test scores. This is one of the only experiments and studies that has successfully normalized nurturing factors, in one of the simplest ways imaginable – only testing black children.
Based on American history, that’s not what we’ll do – we’ll oppress and segregate and brutalize. Miscegenation would be more and more anathema to white people. Eugenics will make a comeback.
A return to the past, in other words.
And you never have to mention this again in any post arguing with me, since I have never disputed it and never will. It’s totally irrelevant. I’ve asked and pleaded so many times, and you just don’t get it. Stop, please. Stop with this straw-man argument that has nothing to do with me.
I disagree on all these points. We know that, among black children, African ancestry has no correlation with lower test scores. You don’t like this study and reject it out of hand, but there’s nothing wrong with the methodology. Modern methods might certainly improve the experiment, but you seem uninterested in this for some reason.
We’ve identified the key points of disagreement – whether nurturing and opportunity have been normalized, and whether the Scarr study is a good study.
) that there are average differences for populations separated long enough.