Except that in some societies (including modern America) IQ is somewhat negatively correlated with reproductive fitness (for women, not really for men). Now, yes, that wasn’t the case a few centuries ago, as far as we can tell, but it’s not impossible that during human evolutionary history there have been times when there was both positive and negative selection on IQ.
And, anyway, evolution is also shaped by things other than natural selection (e.g. genetic drift, bottlenecks, dumb luck).
I’d be happy to have that discussion elsewhere, but probably best not to take this thread off topic.
I don’t follow you. Do you mean, IQ correlates positively with sterility, negatively with fertility, in a biological sense? Or, in a social sense?
We . . . put them.
[rimshot]
Dumb people ain’t afraid to get freaky and have a bunch of babies.
Social. Lower-IQ women have more children (though this is really more due to education than IQ, per se.) IQ/education don’t much correlate with number of children for men.
We take care of them and love them.
I had a cousin who wanted to see “Just how Jewish we are” Since we are blond haired blue eyed Jews who seem to have nothing in common with the Mediterranean Jewry. He paid $250.00 for a DNA test and was told that he is more Neanderthal than Jewish!
Another thing to consider is that “races” are no all homogenous, and the division of people into “races” often tends to be more political than biological or anthropological. Maybe in our hypothetical situation, the government comes down and passes affirmative action laws that affect “black people” and “white people”. There are two problems with this:
You are taking some people who might have mixed and/or uncertain ancestry and pigeonholing them into a convenient box for your program. People can get pretty upset when a judge tries to adjudicate their race to something that they don’t agree with.
Racial groups are not homogeneous. So even if it is demonstrated that “white people” in general have an intelligence range of X-Y with this deviation pattern, that doesn’t mean that all white people must demonstrate that. Perhaps Swedes have an intelligence range that is different when compared with, say, Scots, Basques, or Walloons, but that is balanced by a similar deviation in the other direction when it comes to Tuscans and Sorbians. Should the individual ethnicities, then, get special treatment (either positive or negative) based on this, or do they just get lumped in with other white people? Is that fair? You’re as dumb as <person of another race>, but because your race, on average, is smarter, you get discriminated against. If you decide to drill down deeper like this, you get into problems defining the edges of ethnicities. Sure, Angus MacDonald the Highland sheep-farmer who eats oatmeal for breakfast every day and has won Piper of the Year for the past 30 years is Scottish. But what about someone who was born in Texas who can trace 3/4 of their ancestors to people who left Scotland in the 1870’s? What if the family has been in North America since 1720? How about the Scots-Irish? Are they still Scottish or have they been sufficiently Irishized that they have to get counted as Irish?
The general principle has been that, for example, people who claim to be Scottish are considered to be Scottish and people who say they are not Scottish are considered to be non-Scottish. In most countries, you don’t get anything special either way, so that encourages people to honestly evaluate themselves and make a good faith judgment. That becomes a problem, however, when you start to tie civil rights and entitlements to ethnic identity. If I can get my kid into college on the strength of “Being Scottish”, I sure am motivated to scrutinize that family tree and find any excuse to start sending him to school in a skirt and register him for piping lessons.
I agree with this. If we’ve identified specific intelligence genes, that means that anyone could carry them. Not just people who look a certain way. Since not all the members of the minority group will be affected and some members of the majority will be, testing will be required to determine who is exactly is at high risk for low IQ. Anyone who flags as “deficient” would face a stigma. So there would be consequences and implications on just about everyone in society (because we all may be carriers, as well as our children). Not just the “dumb” minority group.
Of course, it won’t stop people from being prejudiced against just that group. That group would face enormous prejudice. It wouldn’t benefit society at all to have a subpopulation so marginalized and ridiculed. That’s why I think AA would still be needed.
So how do we help these low-IQ populations? At first, one would think that AA could help - where they are given point boosts, quota spaces, etc. to help them get into schools and jobs. Since this plan is going to cross racial boundaries, we’ve lost that part of the assessment and now we pretty much only have IQ scores and/or school records to go by. What stops me (or you, or anyone else) from deliberately doing poorly in order to get AA? I don’t think I can get into Harvard on the basis of my smarts, so I play dumb and drool over an IQ test and get placed in the “Harvard for the Intellectually Disadvantaged” program where I get lots of special tutoring. How is that fair?
Currently, a lot of folks think black folks are intellectually inferior. Yet, black people who apply for jobs/admissions still have to prove that they are credentialed and qualified. Their application may be weighted more because the institution wants to demonstrate it cares about diversity or because it believes that race offers an important intangible benefit (for instance, maybe the institution serves a predominately black clientele). But they still have to meet the basic requirements for entry. This wouldn’t change under the hypothetical. AA would still only exist to promote diversity and inclusiveness. Not put random schmoes into positions they aren’t suited for, all in the name for PCness.
Let’s say science has determined that people with significant X ancestry are 50% more likely than the mainstream to have a below average IQ. That’s a high percentage, but there are still plenty of people in that group who would have a normal or above average IQ. And yet it wouldn’t stop bigots from discriminating against Xians wholesale, even for “easy” jobs. They’d say stuff like, “Why should I have to hire X people, when they will be only harder to train and less trustworthy, as evidenced by all these white papers I found on the internets?” Even if every single X person was certifiably “dumb”, they would still need to be protected from unfair labor practices, the same as the disabled are right now.
If you were a member of X and you knew you could work a register or sweep a floor just as well as anyone else, even though almost everyone would be prejudiced against you, wouldn’t you want there to be safe guards in place to protect you from discrimination? I know I would. And I think it would be in society’s best interest to do so. People don’t suddenly become smarter and more law-abiding when they can’t find employment.
Punishing people in general doesn’t make much sense, and justice systems based on that idea are going to face a lot of issues as we find the neural and genetic correlates of aggression and other behaviours, which is already happening.
However, there are other reasons for putting people in prison: reforming, deterrence, protecting the public…and all these remain valid after we know the neural causes of behaviour (indeed the only one affected is reforming, where it will become more effective the more we understand the brain, even if we don’t try to directly manipulate the brain).
Yes, but again the justification for that need not be they deserve less punishment. Other justice systems say it’s because they need less rehabilitation before they are free to return to society.
I don’t know why ya’ll are acting like I said criminals will be turned lose on the streets or something. I just said that the criminal justice system will be “upturned”. That could mean a lot of things, really.
That’s not how I interpreted your point at all. Your strawman-ing yourself…
You were saying that mitigating circumstances generally lead to lighter sentences and your implication at least was that if we were to find a “guy jerk node” or whatever, that would be a mitigating circumstance, and at the very least we would consider it unfair, in your words, that there are more guys in prison. That’s what I’m responding to.
I’m simply saying that doesn’t necessarily follow in a system focused on reform, deterrence and protection.
For example, let’s say there’s an individual that we determine, from his neurology, is a slave to his guy jerk node and can’t help committing violent crimes. Well in that case far from giving him a more lenient sentence, we would have to virtually throw away the key until such a time we can think of a way to help this person overcome that impulse.
I always notice in threads like this that people seem more interested in fighting the hypothetical than answering it. I think one of the toxic outcomes of the modern PC movement, as evidenced by threads like this, is that certain avenues of inquiry have become thoughtcrimes. Our entire conceptual system of civil rights is constructed under the axiomatic basis that there is equality of ability.
The advantage of this is that it is ethically simple and gives unambiguous, clear cut answers to thorny moral issues. After all, if everyone is intellectually equal, then you have no sound basis to discriminate against anyone. The disadvantage is that it’s intellectually narrow and has the tendency to steamroll over empirical findings that are uncomfortable. Entire fields of study have become politically toxic because of the rigid orthodoxy of the modern PC movement.
Personally, I find it to be bullshit. Equality for people who are all equal is hardly equality at all, it’s just plain common sense. To me, the real test of the civil rights movement is in constructing a morally viable system for in which differences need to be accounted for and dealt with in a meaningful way. In this regard, I find the thinking of certain “good” racists, along with bioethicists like Peter Singer and certain people within the PUA/red pill communities to be far more interesting. I don’t think many of them are necessarily correct but at least they’re making an honest attempt to grapple with what it means to treat real human differences rather than sweeping them under the rug because the conclusions are so uncomfortable.
In any case, in the real world, we have certain analogies that can help illuminate the hypothetical. One obvious one is gender and physical strength. Women, on average, are systematically physically weaker than men. There’s some degree of overlap between the bell curves but the overlap is small and the tests for strength are objective enough and the biological reasons are well enough understood that pretty much everyone accepts that the differences are real and to a large extent innate.
If we use this as an illustrative example for a society where there exists a group A and a group B where the As are systematically, innately less intelligent than the Bs (because A doesn’t always have to be better), then we can predict the following:
Bs will naturally gravitate towards jobs that are more dependant on intelligence and As will gravitate towards jobs that are more dependant on other strengths like social skills or physical strength. (Remember, according to the economic law of comparative advantage, even if Bs are better at As at every single skill, it’s still profitable for Bs to focus on what they are most best at and leave the rest to As).
Bs will have a culture that glorifies the intellect, some would say mindlessly and As will instead talk about how intellect isn’t everything and how As are superior in other aspects.
As that try to study too much will be accused of “acting B” and not being A enough.
Technological changes will change the relative importance of intelligence in certain professions but cultural change will be slower to happen, leading to friction.
Certain professions will, by law, be restricted to Bs only because it’s simpler to manage a group of all Bs than a mix of Bs and As. Pioneering As will fight these laws and be met with much hostility at the time but be remembered as pioneers after the fact.
Over time, a lot of the hard work of integration will be the separation of what is intrinsically a result of intelligence vs what are merely incidental social factors. For example, Bs, as a group, stereotypically happen to like crochet and croquet while As stereotypically find crochet circles uncomfortable to be in and find croquet to be a silly game. There will be effort by the As to reduce the use of croquet analogies and to stop the practice of business being conducted on the croquet field.
Negative stereotypes of the Bs superiority can be as equally damaging as those of As inferiority. For example, it’s assumed that Bs will always have the upper hand in contract negotiations against As and the courts will be unsympathetic about lawsuits that Bs bring up against As.
There would be special “As only” leagues for intellectual games like chess. Occasionally, an A will want to compete in general competition and there will be a big debate about whether the other league is Bs only or open for all.
My point was that the hypothetical subpopulation, if disproportionately represented in the justice system, will have to be reevaluated by the criminal justice system if it is found to be intellectually disadvantaged due to biological underpinnings. This seems quite non-controversial to me. Do you think I’m saying something more than this?
Um, I didn’t say “guy jerk node” and I don’t know what that even means. And I didn’t say it would be unfair if they were sent to prison. I’m saying it would be unfair if they were punished the same way as people who were not impaired. Perhaps if you would read what I wrote instead of inferring a bunch of stuff I didn’t, you wouldn’t have to accuse me of strawmanning.
Right now our system is focused more on deterrence and protection, rather than reform. If we learned that a huge percentage of criminals could be rehabilitated by teaching them how to control their impulses and teaching them critical thinking skills, then it would be unethical to keep concentrating resources on punishment and protection. This is all I’m saying.
How about we put him in a special facility for inmates who have impulse control disorders? Impulse control disorders are currently treatable, you know. Or we give him some jail time if he agrees to commit long-term psychotherapy? Perhaps we would be too lazy or nihilistic to come up with these solutions (so I’m not saying that anything would automatically follow from anything), but it certainly wouldn’t make sense to keep doing what we’re doing now. It would certainly be difficult to argue that the criminal justice system is fair if we treat Group X the same way we do everyone else.
Again, this doesn’t seem that controversial to me. So I’m curious where you thinking my reasoning is off.
This is a failure to understand evolution.
Evolution is about reproductive advantage. It’s not about evolving superior functions. The forces of evolution are completely random at the level of biologic change, and a given mutation does not occur in isolation. So each descendant organism gets its random mixture of changes, and the only question is whether or not there was a net reproductive advantage.
Evolution might trade fertility for strength, or cold tolerance, or food processing, or whatever.
If some human populations were around 200kya, that’s prima facie evidence they had the “right” genes for that time and place. If a branch splits off and pursues its own path, that branch may develop completely different gene pools for completely different reasons of luck and environment (where the environment is different).
Evolution doesn’t give a crap about “superior” this or that. It would happily make a species dumber than a rock if the tradeoff were a reproductive advantage. And it acts, by definition, at a very local level because changes are passed only to descendant lines, and any one organism exists only in one locale (especially historically) at a time.
We can bear this in mind, but we are not so stupid that we think there’s no such thing as a broad concept of intelligence, or that it is completely unmeasurable simply because it is not perfect.
Think of an IQ as a 40 yard dash time. It doesn’t tell me that guy is going to be fantastic at sport X. But it does tell me something.
I’m not sure if things would change much. A lot of people already assume this to be true.
There would be social pressure against breeding with the dumb race. You’re diluting the human gene pool by doing that. You already see this line of thinking in racialist thought. But most people already marry inside their race, so meh.
AA would be dead. AA rests on the assumption that everyone is equal, they just need help cutting through the red tape.
It’d be interesting if there were other humanoid species still around who could interbreed and communicate with us. They might be comparable in many intellectual domains, wholly ineffectual in others. Would we let them live by themselves in reservations? Or maybe integrate them into society but treat them like the mentally handicapped? Informed consent could be tricky. Or if they’re prone to violence.