:dubious: Frankly, I’d like a little more evidence than the unverified assertion of one popular-science writer at Sports Illustrated, who’s trying to market his book about genes and athleticism as “exciting” and “controversial”, to support the claim that various (unnamed) academic researchers are in fact being “cowed” by political correctness from freely discussing their research.
I’m not saying it can’t possibly be true, mind you, just saying that this author’s unsupported assertion doesn’t demonstrate it to be true.
Kimstu has already handled the matter, but I’d just like to emphasize that this post is nonsense. You cited the NPR piece in question in response to this:
It is patently obvious that your attempted rebuttal had nothing whatsoever with the points Kimstu raised.
I get that you have a particular passion about the ills of “political correctness,” and prefer to guide the conversation in that direction whenever possible. And if in doing so you choose to continually dodge and weave, claiming to have made cogent rhetorical points while nimbly shuffling goalposts like a Three-card Monte artist, I certainly cannot stop you. But I will enjoy pointing it out.
As a practical matter, it’s probably best to assume it’s mostly environmental in the public square even if we knew it clearly wasn’t. For exactly the reasons you gave, but the one caveat I have is that I want some subset of academia/researchers that are directing research into advanced ways of minimizing the sorts of genetic gaps in aptitude between people (or at least raising the baseline to a point where people are generally better off) to openly discuss the topics and potential solutions with themselves.
If such people operate under the assumption that there are no differences, they might be less inclined to look for ways to raise the aptitudes of people. Maybe some collection of genes is found to slightly increase signal efficiency of neurons in the brain that leads to faster processing and connectivity, I want them to make note about how prevalent such genes are in the general population so we can eventually tweak humanity.
Also, you keep mentioning non scientific suppositions like average group differences in intelligence as “personal opinion”
I find this a bit flippant and dismissive, there are a huge range of opinions one can have, and just because they are not all backed up by some obscene catalog of evidence that only the most punitive scientific journal gatekeeper would require to get through does not mean they are of the same class.
The “opinion” that all religions are equally violent is not as sound an opinion as thinking Islamic doctrines lead to more violent behavior than say, the doctrines of Jainism.
If someone stated the latter view and based their rationale at the massive numbers of murders in the name of Islam, and the absence of murders in the name of Jain doctrine, that “opinion” is on firmer ground than the claim that all religions are equally violent. EVEN IF the person making the claim did not do some exhaustive study through history and time and read the specific doctrines and do population studies over decades… etc etc.
If someone came along and complained that they did not have all of that so their views were unsupportable and were just the persons “personal opinion” … it’s the kind of statement that seeks to treat reasonable and unreasonable opinions as similar in quality.
Oh, that’s what you think is it? How sweet (pats the child on the head in a condescending way for not achieving the conclusion through some twisted analysis that only the most arcane professors could weed through.)
This standard is far beyond what most human beings operate on in daily life and make reasonable judgement on things all the time.
Actually, you have that backwards. The crowd of Rushton, Lynn, Murray, Herrnstein, and their ilk simply declared that the matter was closed. They were not interested in “raising a baseline,” but in declaring the matter concluded with the declaration that there was nothing we could do to improve anyone.
Real scientists are looking to discover the actual genetic component to intelligence and when they parse out those genes, at that point we will be able to discuss tweaking humanity, but the silly claim that we should be categorizing people before any actual evidence exists is silly.
Well, since your imaginary “gatekeeper” does not exist, (as the continued publication of nonsense by Rushton, Lynn, and others demonstrates), there is no real reason to regard it as anything other than personal opinion.
You seem to be arguing that we should simply accept the personal opinions of one group as equal in quality to the efforts of actual scientists. I find that to be a really odd way to approach a subject. Do you equally support the beliefs of anti-vaxers over medical doctors to prevent contagious diseases? Sellers of crystals over researchers into oncology? They anti-vaccine and crystal believers would claim that they are making “reasonable judgments” in their declarations.
No, I’m saying that the belief that observed racial-group differences in measured intelligence have genetic causes is at present only an opinion, because it’s unsupported by scientific evidence.
Nobody is denying that the observed racial-group differences in measured intelligence actually exist. But their causes are not scientifically understood yet.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
This standard is far beyond what most human beings operate on in daily life and make reasonable judgement on things all the time.
[/QUOTE]
As I keep telling octopus, it’s not my fault that the subject you choose to have a very strong and passionately maintained opinion on is one that it’s very hard to investigate with scientific rigor.
Just because to you it seems very plausible and reasonable that racial-group differences in measured intelligence have genetic causes doesn’t obligate anybody else to consider that hypothesis persuasive or scientifically plausible, in the absence of genuine scientific substantiation.
Here, for example, are some additional facts found in studies of academic achievement and race that don’t support what you think of as your “reasonable opinion” on the subject:
*- In African-American children with mixed European and African ancestry, achievement levels don’t correlate with percentage of European heritage.
Black children raised by white parents have achievement levels on a par with those of white children rather than black children from black households.
Test performance is significantly affected by “stereotype threat”: i.e., students perform worse when aware that they’re expected to perform poorly because of identity stereotypes.
Black-white achievement differences have significantly shrunk (though not vanished) over the past several decades, a much too rapid change to be plausibly accounted for by race-level genetic adaptation.*
Of course, none of these facts in any way disproves the hypothesis that measured achievement differences at the racial-group level may be influenced by genetic factors.
But they certainly confirm that the study of race and measured achievement is a very complicated subject that can’t be credibly encapsulated by the sort of naive and selective inferences that strike you personally as “reasonable”.
So no, there is nothing patronizing or condescending about placing all views about the etiology of such racial-group differences firmly in the “personal opinion” category.
Nor is it “flippant” or “dismissive” or “twisted” or “arcane”, much less “obscene” (!), to insist that any such opinion has to meet stringent standards of scientific validity before it can be accepted as scientifically established, or even scientifically likely.
I’m sorry that this hypothesis whose acceptance and credibility you obviously care so much about happens to pertain to a subject that is extremely difficult to investigate scientifically, so even if your hypothesis is ultimately true, its full scientific acceptance and credibility are likely to be a long time in coming. But that’s not my fault, nor is it the fault of science.
You don’t get to demand that a particular hypothesis ought to be generally accepted as probable just because it seems so reasonable and plausible to you personally. The scientific facts as we know them so far do not support your subjective estimate of the likelihood of this hypothesis.
If surviving smallpox or malaria or lactose tolerance were sports this debate would be settled. I’m sure the argument would still be that the environment was ultimately the cause of the gene distribution that allowed survival in said environment…
Because lactase persistence and malaria resistance involve specific genes whose inheritance and function are clearly identified and well understood. This is not true of sports performance, academic achievement, or other complex human outcomes.
As I’ve said, I get it that you really really wish that the interaction of such complex outcomes with genetic factors were much simpler than it is, so everybody would agree with what you believe about race and genetics. Sorry you didn’t get your wish, but that’s just the way science is.
Sulking about how unfair it is that science is more complicated and difficult than you want it to be isn’t making your claims any more credible.
An individual genetic condition evolved in response to a particular disease or nutrition issue is not the same thing as overall “survival” in general.
And yes, the fact of an individual’s possessing a lactase-persistence gene or a malaria-protein antigen is indeed way, way, way less complex than the act of an individual’s running 100m. No athlete ever spent years practicing to acquire a lactase persistence gene or to remove a Duffy antigen, for instance.
This is exactly why it’s so hard to scientifically investigate complex human phenomena such as sports achievement or academic achievement in order to reliably determine how and to what extent genetic and/or non-genetic factors contribute to them.
[QUOTE=octopus]
I feel I’m debating a creationist.
[/QUOTE]
Your belief that your jumble of inapplicable non sequiturs in any way resembles actual debate is no more accurate than your belief that my position in any way resembles creationism.
All the actual science on this subject is on our side of this argument, not yours. You apparently can’t even comprehend the basic fact that the science of this subject is complicated.
And I’m saying that dismissal of the view as “mere” opinion needlessly diminishes the view based on standard observational evidence that amounts to a hell of a lot more than the opinion that all groups have identical average aptitudes. Both are opinions, but they are not both equally likely. The latter is far less likely.
Answer one question honestly. You and everyone else set against me in this forum.
What do you find more likely. That different population groups would have some average differences in aptitudes, or that different population groups aptitudes would show virtually no differences on average compared to any other group?
Note, I did not ask for water tight scientific proof, I asked what you think is more likely based on what we know. I did not ask whether your expectations are based on perfect knowledge, no ones is, but if you were forced to bet the life of your family on the truth of one view or the other, which would you expect to be more likely?
Answer that. If you can’t or refuse, so be it, but I think we know who’s deliberately dodging an honest question here and trying to play hide the ball with what they think about the world.
You’re confused about what constitutes “standard observational evidence”.
The evidence we actually observe merely attests to the existence of overall differences between racial groups in various complex outcomes. Nobody at all is denying that such empirical differences are observed to exist.
The “view” you’re endorsing is a hypothesis about the probable cause(s) of those observed differences.
That hypothesis is inferred from a selective focus on various facts about heritability of complex traits at the individual level and physical similarities at the population level. But none of those facts actually imply the sort of genetic causation at the racial-group level that your hypothesis proposes.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
that amounts to a hell of a lot more than the opinion that all groups have identical average aptitudes.
[/quote]
But nobody here is defending “the opinion that all groups have identical average aptitudes” as a scientific position. Just because we point out that the opposing opinion has not been scientifically validated doesn’t mean that we’re claiming this opinion is better.
You know, Salvor, it’s not actually mandatory to endorse one of two opposing opinions about a subject that is not scientifically well understood. It’s perfectly okay (in fact, scientifically conscientious) to say “We don’t know enough about this subject yet to form an informed opinion”.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Both are opinions, but they are not both equally likely. The latter is far less likely.
[/quote]
Using similar naive inferences, it would also be reasonable to consider it far less likely that different population groups would have the same average age of language acquisition, and the same average gender ratio, and the same standard number of teeth, and the same capability to acquire any language in infancy irrespective of the language’s characteristics. Naively, we would expect that genetically different populations evolving under different environmental pressures would develop some differences in these characteristics, rather than remaining identical (on average).
But in fact, we see that even genetically very different populations don’t differ significantly in these and many other characteristics. Why not? I don’t know. But it should warn us against naively assuming that population differences are automatically more “likely” than similarities.
Speaking scientifically, we don’t know the actual relative likelihood of the two opinions you mention, because we don’t understand the causes of these complex outcomes.
Honestly, Salvor, you come across a bit like somebody arguing that it’s more “likely” that the first sentient extraterrestrials will be found to be green instead of purple. We really can’t estimate the scientific likelihood of either of two opposing speculations, or of any other alternative speculation, if we don’t understand the nature and etiology of the scientific phenomena we’re speculating about.
I don’t know which of those two alternatives is more likely. BECAUSE THE CAUSES OF RACIAL-GROUP DIFFERENCES IN APTITUDES ARE CURRENTLY NOT WELL UNDERSTOOD.
When a subject is not scientifically well understood, we don’t know enough about it to estimate “what is more likely”. We’re just guessing based on naive inferences.
I’ve already explained why that dichotomy isn’t scientifically valid. Why are you so frantically trying to browbeat me into picking ONE OPTION OR THE OTHER GODDAMNIT PICK ONE PICK ONE in a false dichotomy?
“Everybody else knows in their heart that my view is right but they lie and evade because they’re afraid to come right out and say it” is a very common mindset among, shall we say, a certain group of people.
The name of that group is not “advocates of objective and responsible scientific honesty”.
Of course it’s complicated. But just because neither I nor you nor Stephen Hawking or any super computer can accurately model Niagara Falls and its turbulent flows does not mean that Niagara Falls does not exist.
What exactly is your conjecture? Provide proof of it.
Once again, you’re mixing up theoretically unpredictable chaotic systems, such as turbulent flow, with extremely complicated and under-studied but not theoretically undeterminable phenomena, such as aggregate genetic differences at the population level.
In any case, nobody here is at all attempting to argue that the relevant observed phenomena, namely empirical differences in outcomes at the racial-group level, don’t exist.
[QUOTE=octopus]
What exactly is your conjecture?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t have one. Because, as I’ve said, there’s no point in making speculative conjectures about extremely complicated phenomena that are not scientifically well understood, especially when I don’t have any particular preference for one possible explanation over another. If I did make any such conjecture, it would probably turn out to be at least mostly wrong anyway.
Why this (to me) self-evidently sane and logical position of sensible neutrality is arousing so much ire among the self-described “race realists” in this thread is something that I do not get.
Kimtsu, if we don’t observe the average age language is being learned as different between populations, then that suggests it’s one of the less variable human traits and phenotypes. Same thing with humans born with two eyes and two legs.
Intelligence and aptitude WIDELY varies between individuals, even within the same families with more similar environments, you get stronger signals from identical twins separated at birth than fraternal twins that were not identical separated. We know that part of intelligence is genetic and heritable on the individual level, we don’t NEED to know the exact details and causes to make some reasonable inferences about what is likely IF you assume that some of the difference is genetic. We also know it varies a great deal, different people learn at different rates, it is NOT TRUE that every kid picks up algebra at the same time or the same pace when learning. These differences are almost impossible to explain away by focusing solely on environment and nurture.
I’ll ask again, try not to weasel out of the question and play the intellectual cowards role.
Do you think part of our intelligence/aptitude is genetic in nature? Whether we know the exact details of it or not, do you think ANY meaningful portion of it is government by genetics or not?
Yes or no, no dodges, answer the question or quit and give up. I did not ask you for scientific PROOF of anything, stop bringing that up. We will agree for the sake of argument, there is no scientific proof that will sate you. So what? Is that the sum total of your analysis in life itself? Do you couch every expectation and observation in your life on whether you have signed off on approved scientific peer reviewed studies? Not for absolute claims of truth, but for mere assertions of likelihood?
Uh, nope: age of language acquisition varies a lot at the individual level, as any new parent will probably be happy to discuss with you at great length. But we don’t see the average age at learning to speak differing significantly between different populations.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
We know that part of intelligence is genetic and heritable on the individual level, we don’t NEED to know the exact details and causes to make some reasonable inferences about what is likely IF you assume that some of the difference is genetic.
[/quote]
Nope, it’s not automatically true that just because a trait is to some extent heritable at the individual level, it will produce average differences at the population level.
Consider my earlier example of sex ratio at birth, for instance. There exists a genetic trait in some men to produce significantly more X sperm than Y sperm, or vice versa, which is to some extent hereditary. But the average ratio of males to females is not significantly different across human populations.
If we had applied your naive notion of “reasonable inferences” to this particular trait, we would have ended up assuming that some populations would be likely to systematically produce more boys than girls, or vice versa. And we would have been wrong.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
We also know it varies a great deal, different people learn at different rates, it is NOT TRUE that every kid picks up algebra at the same time or the same pace when learning. These differences are almost impossible to explain away by focusing solely on environment and nurture.
[/quote]
Sure; nobody’s denying that the measured intelligence/aptitude levels of individuals are determined at least partly by genetics. That’s quite well established.
But it doesn’t therefore follow that measured differences in such levels between broadly defined racial groups are genetic in origin.
Just as heritable individual differences in X/Y sperm ratios don’t end up genetically altering the overall sex ratio at birth at the population level, it may well be true that heritable individual differences in intelligence don’t end up genetically altering average measured intelligence at the population level (much less the racial-group level).
I reiterate that I personally don’t care whether they do or they don’t; what I care about in this context is not making scientifically fallacious inferences based on sloppy reasoning.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Do you think part of our intelligence/aptitude is genetic in nature?
[/quote]
As I noted above, at the individual level it certainly is. But I don’t have an opinion one way or the other as to whether intelligence/aptitude differences at the racial-group level are genetic in nature, because the subject is just not well enough understood scientifically to base an opinion on.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Yes or no, no dodges, answer the question or quit and give up.
[/quote]
I already answered the question, several times over. It’s not a yes-or-no question, and it’s not my fault that you keep blindly insisting that it is.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
We will agree for the sake of argument, there is no scientific proof that will sate you.
[/quote]
Why sure there is, probably, somewhere in the future when the subject is better understood. But I’m not going to pretend that adequate scientific support exists before it actually does.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Do you couch every expectation and observation in your life on whether you have signed off on approved scientific peer reviewed studies?
[/quote]
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Seriously, though, of course I have plenty of unscientific opinions on non-scientific matters.
But I try to avoid forming such opinions on scientific subjects that are still too poorly understood to provide a scientific basis for opinion. (For example, I also have no opinion about what cosmic dark matter is made of, or about the amount of sea level rise to the nearest 10cm that will occur by 2060.)
Mind you, as I said, there’s nothing wrong with having an opinion on such matters even if it’s not yet possible to scientifically verify it, as long as we’re clear that it’s just one’s own opinion. But there’s nothing mandatory about having such unverified opinions either. So I generally don’t bother.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Not for absolute claims of truth, but for mere assertions of likelihood?
[/QUOTE]
Nope, holding unverified opinions about as-yet-unknown scientific likelihood is no more tempting to me than holding unverified opinions about as-yet-unknown scientific certainty.
Like I said, if I did go to the trouble of forming and maintaining such a speculative opinion it would probably turn out to be largely wrong anyway, so why bother? Who needs my unverified speculative opinion on an insufficiently understood scientific subject anyway?
[QUOTE=Salvor;19151385
Yes or no, no dodges, answer the question or quit and give up. I did not ask you for scientific PROOF of anything, stop bringing that up. We will agree for the sake of argument, there is no scientific proof that will sate you. So what? Is that the sum total of your analysis in life itself? Do you couch every expectation and observation in your life on whether you have signed off on approved scientific peer reviewed studies? Not for absolute claims of truth, but for mere assertions of likelihood?[/QUOTE]
To me, this comes across as a dilettante in genetics–if even that!–who is just asking questions. But who only wants answers that support his/her pre-hypothesis question–that is–I know blacks are Stoopid, but fast runners, so nothing will convince me otherwise.
So this must apply to all self-identified blacks the world-wide over, and not just some specific Kenyan tribe that happens to run well.
Sorry, I forgot you were using “running fast” as an alternative to “being smart”.
Who is angry? I just find it preposterous that any set of millions of people, regardless of how the set is chosen, have identical distributions of genes. Chaotic systems are exactly why I believe genes play a role. What do you thinking those who deny that humans have an impact on the climate? Even without a formal proof the understanding of even a tiny bit of chaos theory ought to be convincing that human activity has an impact.
I find the anti intellectualism with regards to climate change due to political reasons to be just as baffling.
Seriously, though, of course I have plenty of unscientific opinions on non-scientific matters.