Your paraphrase is correct.
OK, maybe I just don’t have that gene, but I still find this confusing. How did you find the gene if not by using the tests? And to determine that the gene was a “smart” gene, the people who had it must’ve outperformed others on the test. So how is it that the group that has the gene outperforms when you’re looking for the gene, but does not outperform when you’re not?
At this point, while I’ve got ideas on many things, I have no idea why you think you’re able to paraphrase me effectively, and I’d appreciate your not doing so going forward, since your paraphrases are, charitably, mistaken. Feel free to quote my direct language, as you might quote someone’s writings in Sanskrit, however.
Is your brain temporarily on the fritz? I’ve seen you discuss subject matter a lot more complicated than this without any problem, but for some reason, you’re struggling to digest a hypothetical simple enough a high school freshman could get.
How you would find a gene is no mystery. Collect saliva from each of your 500,000 subjects, isolate the DNA in each sample, and look for the damn gene. Then compare a subject’s genetic test result with their cognitive test result. If those with Gene X are significantly more likely to score high on the cognitive test than those without, then by gollee you can conclude Gene X is associated with intelligence. That, plus all the findings from previous studies, cinches the conclusion that Gene X is the “smart gene”.
It’s not at all implausible that 13% of the population could defy expectations, while still allowing for a significant overall association between Gene X. 13% is relatively small chunk of the total population, and if the association between Gene X and intelligence is strong enough, you still would expect it to be significant even if there are a lot of “outliers”. And also, we can posit that within that 13% black cohort, the association holds true as expected. In other words, blacks with Gene X perform better on cognitive tests than blacks without Gene X, after income and education are controlled for. The breakdown simply occurs when blacks are compared with whites.
If having a single gene for intelligence is giving you heartburn, then shit, pretend that Gene X is actually a cluster of 10 genes. The more genes from this cluster that one has, the better they perform on cognitive tests. Pretend that blacks on average have 6 of these genes while whites have 5, and yet blacks don’t outperform whites on cognitive tests as would be expected from population-level findings.
If you still can’t stop fighting the hypothetical at this point, then we must conclude LHoD is correct in his prediction.
I honestly don’t think you’ve thought thru the data set that would produce the results you are hypothesizing. For instance, you say 13% (blacks) is a small percent of the population, but in your hypothetical, blacks are significantly more likely to have the gene than white people, so much more than 13% of the population has the “smart” gene, but aren’t particularly smart compared to the population as a whole. If that’s the case, I don’t think you’re going to so easily conclude that this is a smart gene in the first place (back when you weren’t controlling for race).
Your original data set is going to tell you that the correlation isn’t quite right. Then you’re going to figure out that the gene acts differently in the two ethnic groups, and all it does is boost the intelligence of individuals with it above what his ethnic group’s average is without the gene.
No mystery. The data did NOT predict that blacks should be smarter than whites after all.
This is easy to address – suppose everyone with gene XYZ, which turns out to be very rare, scores better than 120 on IQ tests. There are other genes that are found that might correlate with higher or lower IQ scores, but XYZ has a 100% (or close enough) correlation – so it’s considered as rock-solid a correlation as any can be. Further, all the other genes that are found that may or may not actually be involved are found to be spread out pretty equally among every population.
But not XYZ. XYZ is only present in .0001% of those with no African ancestry. Among those with African ancestry, it’s present in 0.1% – 1000 times more prevalent.
If you don’t like these numbers, then you can tweak them (maybe .001% vs 1%, or some other ratio) until it fits the goal of the hypothetical.
So what? How would anyone think that that type of situation would predict that black people should be smarter than white people, if the two base populations (blacks and whites without the genes) don’t all have the same average IQ? Remember, that was the mystery.
I thought the hypothetical was something to the affect of “people with sub-Saharan African ancestry were found to be more likely to have genes for high intelligence than those without such ancestry”.
And blacks have to have lower test scores than whites, on average. So if blacks and whites without the gene DO have the same average test scores, then blacks WILL outperform whites. But the hypothetical says they don’t.
I think there is either an inherent contradiction in the hypothetical, or it is no mystery at all.
As I modified it, the other genes for intelligence are found to be distributed equally. Test scores still might differ between various ethnic groups/races, but this difference isn’t found to be correlated with any other genes for high or low intelligence. So in the modified hypothetical, the only gene for high or low intelligence that is more prevalent in one group is XYZ, strongly correlated with high scores, and (while still very rare) much more prevalent among those with African ancestry.
OK, so why is this hypothetical of any interest?
I thought if fulfilled the intent of the original hypothetical – that there is shown to be a difference in some level in the prevalence of genes for high intelligence, and it is found that black people (or people with African ancestry) are more likely to have certain genes for high intelligence.
But the purpose of the hypothetical was to show that the results would be ignored because… well, I’m just not seeing WHY they would be ignored. There is nothing mysterious or anything.
For instance, I would and see if Nobel Prize winners were more likely to have this gene, or this gene correlated with higher income or something. If it didn’t correlate with anything useful in the real world, then it wouldn’t be a particularly useful gene to have (unless you are a professional test taker).
Then let’s assume it correlates highly with success, in addition to high test scores.
No, you are misinterpreting what I’ve laid out. Blacks, as a group, are more likely to have the gene than whites, but that’s not the same thing as saying everyone who is black has the gene. The sentence in bold doesn’t follow from anything I’ve written. It’s a fault conclusion because you’re overthinking something that shouldn’t be overthought.
If 66% blacks have the gene while only 55% whites do, then this would be in keeping with the hypothetical. With this disparity in gene frequencies, one would expect blacks as a group to do better than whites as a group on cognitive tests. But in this hypothetical, that is not what we see. The average score for blacks on the cognitive test is lower than the average score for whites.
Yes you can. Especially if there is a long chain of other supporting evidence.
Lol. You really are fighting this hypothetical tooth and nail, aren’t you?
The results would be ignored or mocked because people are conditioned to see blacks as innately inferior. Any science that refutes this–and in fact, supports that blacks would actually be superior if not for environmental factors–would be too radical to be accepted without a big fight.
It does correlate with something useful. Cognitive ability. The only issue is that it’s not a magic bullet capable of overcoming negative environmental pressures. Much like genes for height don’t overcome poor diet and health.
To dismiss the importance of a smart gene if can’t it ensure financial prowess or Nobel laureate status is sheer foolishness, John. Would you express such a thing if we were talking about Asians having this gene? After all, poverty is rampant in many parts of Asia, and they aren’t raking in all the Nobel awards either. But these pesky facts somehow didn’t keep you from saying whites would pursue gene therapy to get Japanese smart genes. Ain’t that something.
I never said anything about what the average score is for blacks or whites without the gene. You are twisting yourself up in knots for no good reason.
Let’s say that disproportionately more Nobel Prize winners have Gene X than the rest of the population.
But whereas only 2% of the population self-identified as “white” have the gene, 60% of people with west African ancestry have it.
As stated upthread, the gene is very sensitive to environmental factors. Not only is it sensitive to early childhood stress, but diet also appears to be important. For reasons that are poorly understood, the sugar lactose downregulates Gene X. Carnitine has a similar effect. This explains why vegetarian carriers of Gene X tend to outperform non-vegetarians, and why west African carriers outperform African American carriers (the former consuming far less dairy and red meat than the latter).
Gene X was discovered years ago just on a whim. A geneticist was intrigued after reading about a family where all three kids had produced perfect scores on the SAT. Turns out the family belonged to a church (Seventh Day Adventist) that had several other families with “whiz kids”–families that were also black. The geneticist found that the families were genetically different except that all the children possessed Gene X. The families also consumed very strict vegan diets. There was one family in the congregation that had Gene X, but whose children were “typical”. But this was the one family that did not refrain from dairy products.
This led the geneticist to carry out some additional studies. Including the one that you with the face mentioned.
Carriers of Gene X are more vulnerable to malaria than non-Gene Xers. Those who contract malaria before the age of 10 are likely not to see cognitive enhancement in adulthood. Furthermore, Gene X carriers only comprise 10% of the population in western and central Africa. However, it is believed that the proportion of carriers was a lot higher in the population that was brought to the New World. The exact cause of this disparity is not known, but some propose a mechanism similar to what’s presented in this hypothesis. Perhaps slaves with Gene X were savvy enough to avoid the oppressor’s whip, and thus more likely to pass on their genes to future generations.
I really like this hypothetical, for the record. And I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if something like it turned out to be true.
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Indians don’t group with East Asians under any meaningful, genetically based grouping scheme, so your use of the term ‘asians’ is ludicrous. South Asians are (mostly) a mixture of two ancestral racial groups, one of which was probably related to Persians and other West Eurasians, and the other of which was a distinct group related to modern day Andamanese. Neither of them was particularly close to East Asians.
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You do realize that India’s human development index, average education levels, and PISA test scores are distinctly unimpressive, right? India’s HDI as a whole is similar to a moderately-high African country like Ghana, and the poorest states in India are comparable to some of the poorer countries in Africa like Sierra Leone.
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Power sprinting is a much easier trait to identify and explain than intelligence. This is not to say it’s any more heritable- as we know, the heritability of intelligence is quite high, although less so than height- but it’s easier to make strong statements about sprinting ability than about intelligence.