That is a great point and I think that this is where this is going. Sub-Saharan African blacks are not a race or one population. It does have the most genetic diversity in the world to this day so it it meaningless to classify them as a ‘race’. Any informed person agrees on that. However, as I stated above, the argument about races and populations has always been flipped ass backwards to me. It almost always focuses on why the people in sub-Saharan Africa under-perform on cognitive tasks consistently and the counter-argument is that they don’t have much in common. True.
The flip side is that some of the smaller groups of people that moved out of Africa in the first place underwent some transformational changes in the process picking up some advantageous traits and some not so good along the way (have you ever seen a chubby ginger chick sunburned to hell on the beach later trying to play volleyball let alone run a mile?). The Neanderthal Interbreeding Hypothesis is one such thing that could have happened to cause what we see today. I am happy that people are starting to be civil about this discussion here. You can lose tenure at major universities for even suggesting such a thing.
And sorry for any offense given, but that it not just a simpler assertion, it is a simplistic one. Differences (of all sorts) can be caused by genetics, by culture, by environment, or by some interplay between those factors. It is in my mind foolish to state that genetic variations have nothing to do with cognitive abilities, but even more foolish to state that differences in measured cognitive abilities are independent of culture and environment. Cognitive ability is an especially difficult trait to tease out as its very definition is domain and therefore culturally specific. You wrote (my bolding) “It is impossible to make up any kind on non-specific cognitive test in which kids of sub-Saharan African descent do better than their European or Asian counterparts no matter how or where they are raised.” and you are completely correct because the bolded part is true. It is also impossible to make up any kind of non-specific test that European or Asians do better on than those of sub-Saharan descent; every test of cognition is domain specific and the domain tested and the means it is assessed is culturally specific, a non-specific test of cognition does not exist. Most tests of cognition are Western specific and test domains that correlate well with “success” in the Western world via means that are familiar to those raised within Western societies. Creating a test culturally specific to African populations, for example, is not corrective; it is just repeating the error.
This does not mean that various human sub-populations cannot or do not have cognitive differences or even that it is a priori impossible for the genetic grist to play a role in those differences, but it does mean that “advantageous” and “superior” are subjective phrases that are domain and culture specific and that any a priori assumption that any measured difference is genetic in origin is not a scientific sort of assumption to make, but is instead reflective of a prexisiting belief system looking for validation.
If you are in need of a source illustrating how culture influences cognitive processes at a very basic level, even to how our senses filter the information that reaches our brains, I refer you to this book: The Geography of Thought. Really. Read it. The material is fascinating. Asians and Westerners literally see and hear the world differently and it is a product of culture not genetics, shown by the fact that Asians raised in the West see and hear and cognitively process like others raised in the West and to a greater degree the less exposure to Eastern influences they have early on. Again, this does not disprove the hypothesis that there are genetic contributions to cognitive differences, but it does prove that very significant sensoriperceptual and cognitive differences have cultural origins. Assuming that any measurable difference is genetic in origin is a very silly thing to do.
DSeid, I think you quoted me above instead of Chief Pendant. You sound like a very intelligent and informed person. My academic background is in behavioral neuroscience but also psychometrics. The reason that people that may and, I presume, people like Chief Pendant get ticked off in the academic sense is that you will get booed out of the room or stoned if you suggest these things in a real public environment although it is quite possible there is something to to it scientifically. There will always be the nature versus nurture debate and no one disputes that. The question just becomes how much each component comes into play and, in my opinion, the nurture argument picked up way too much steam starting in the 1960’s and has started to come down as we learn more about genetics and physiology. There has to be a backlash eventually. The people that supported the tabula rosa ‘clean slate children capable of anything they are raised for’ arguments were quacks at best.
It never made sense to me how biologists claim that evolution is a very slllooowww process in human terms yet here we are just a few thousand years later. Anyone can pick out someone who has a strong Scandinavian heritage as opposed to someone from Korea or Sub-Saharan Africa even if you adjust for skin tone in photos. I admit that I don’t know what caused it but there was obviously a series of human events that caused a very rapid change in populations.
The reason that I take a stand for this type of thing and am not apologetic about it is for scientific and certainly not political reasons. We get tired of pointing out the obvious and then having minor smoke screens and other diversions waved in our face. Maybe the Neanderthal Interbreeding Hypothesis will help shed some light on what we all see but I don’t know where that will lead.
(1) humans don’t have Neanderthal Y-dna either. Any of our Neanderthal ancestors are neither father’s father’s father’s … father, nor mother’s mother’s mother’s … mother, but rather from an “interior” point in the family tree.
(2) Neanderthal and sapiens sapiens may have been close enough for hybrid fertility not to be an issue, but if not, hybrid females would be more likely to be fertile than hybrid males (Haldane’s Rule). Thus in matings between Neanderthals and hybrids, the Neanderthal would most likely be male.
That said, I certainly understand the overlay of some in academe assuming that it is all nurture all the time and painting even those as balanced as Steven Pinker and his The Blank Slate as having some sort of racist agenda. But it is at least as much an error to go beyond the data in the other direction and as a psychometrician you above others are aware of the limitations of our toolbox. To state as fact that one group is cognitively superior to another bespeaks an agenda, to cast this recent information about the presence of Neander genes in Eurasian branches as bringing any information to bear on questions of cognitive differences, also bespeaks an agenda beyond the science and the quest for scientific honesty even in the face of taboo subjects.
Honestly I long ago bored of the nature/nurture debate and accept “naurture” - the fact that both interact in very complex manners. The fact that some persist in making statements that imply that either is all of any story, the fact that some work backwards from the fairly arbitrary and superficial sociocultural groupings that are “race” and try to impose those categories onto data sets that do not yet exist or are just emerging or accept crappy data because it fits their preconceptions, boggles me. And the question of whether or not there is a difference between population groups in any particular cognitive ability statistical mean is frankly not very interesting to me when the intragroup variation is as broad as it is, even when looking at very narrow genetic subpopulations.