It’ll be something like an “Exact pi-squared test”…yeah, that’s it… It makes about as much sense.
Lol. You think I’m naive enough to go down that path? Again, impossible standards and in this case impossible universally agreed upon definition combined with another’s arbitrary "null hypothesis " all indicate nothing more than deliberate obfuscation.
Neuroscientists even are coming to the conclusion that free will itself is nothing more than an illusion. That would also strengthen the claim that different genetic distributions result in different athletic outcomes.
Is this even English?
Finish elementary school and it won’t be confusing.
No, it isn’t, that’s the point - unless you’re being circular and defining your population as people bearing the trait in question. But then your defining Southern African Bantu as a separate population from Central African Bantu, or people in the north of France as a separate population from people in the south.
So , you know refusing to define your terminology means you’re not even attempting a scientific approach, right? So we should care what you say, why?
Let’s keep the personal remarks out of this discussion.
[ /Moderating ]
No, they aren’t. And no, it wouldn’t.
Think what you will.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-probably-dont-have-free-will
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html
There are more. I didn’t say there was a universal consensus. But in a deterministic universe how exactly does one choose? And doesn’t sexual orientation http://www.bu.edu/today/2010/nature-vs-nurture-the-biology-of-sexuality/ and things like OCD also point to hardwired thinking?
And psychopathy has a genetic influence.Is Psychopathy Genetic? - Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation
Funny how there are so many sources that show a very strong link between brain development, largely guided by genes, and mental processes. Or do you think a wolf in the right “environment” can learn calculus?
Anyways, many people’s brains are obviously wired to seek psychological comfort from myth. Believing in fairy tales and divine beings helps them get through life. Why should this uncomfortable topic be any easier to reach consensus?
As I’ve noted in other threads, if kinesiologists determined after decades of research that Walloons have a gene that makes them naturally superior at croquet, or that Welshmen have a natural gift that makes them dominant at tiddlywinks, or that Lapps are phenomenal at Twister, absolutely nobody would care.
Why not? Because those would be interesting trivia factoids, but they wouldn’t carry any larger meaning, and nobody would be waiting for another shoe to drop.
It’s different when African-Americans are part of the equation. It’s pretty obvious that the fastest sprinters in the US (and in much of the Western world) are of West African descent. But many people are uncomfortable accepting that or discussing it, because there are other BIG shoes waiting to drop.
If African Americans were as prosperous as white Americans, and if their education levels were as high, nobody would care that they dominate certain sports or that they dominate certain positions in team sports. But things AREN’T equal. Which means that “Black men sure are strong and fast” has implications that “Estonians are great at playing pinochle” doesn’t.
IF one accepts the notion that one race or one ethnic groups is genetically superior at certain things, you’re opening the door to David Duke stepping in and saying that some races and ethnic groups are genetically stupider and inferior. You allow the KKK to argue “Nature made blacks big, strong and dumb… which is why they’re ideally suited for slavery and menial labor.”
THAT is behind most of the reticence and reluctance to talk about black dominance of certain sports. Nobody wants to give vile bigots a chance to say, “AHA! So you ADMIT there are important differences in ability between the races!!!”
Cite please.
This is GD, so show us the evidence that supports your assertions.
“Reluctance to talk about it”? Americans can’t fucking shut up about it.
Oh horseshit! A search through the Dope for threads on this subject shows…ah…oh…well…there are more popular topics of conversation.
Give this man a medal, this is exactly right. The prime animus for logical (and fearful) people here is to work to deny that talking point for the racists in our midst, even if they have to dodge obvious and repeated and consistent observations of group differences.
My problem with this is that I don’t want people with the ability to study and do something about it to sit on their hands and not do the research to fix the problems.
I read something about a gene that affects the efficacy of breast feeding having a boost to the childs IQ or not. In most people, the gene that allows breast feeding to confer a boost to IQ is present, but in the much smaller % that does not have that gene, there is no boost to iq.
Question. Is the frequency of the non optimal gene for enhanced breast feeding for iq identical across all populations?
If yes, then one would not expect it to alter any of the average differences across populations. If the frequency is not identical across all populations, then one would expect to see a differential effect based between populations.
Is this study correct or real? How the hell would I know that? I’m not a scientist, but I can still think through the logical implications of such a reality.
Do genes or mixtures of genes that affect intelligence exist in human beings as heritable traits? If the answer to that question is Yes, then a simple follow up question is simply whether the frequency of those genes that affect intelligence in a positive or negative direction are constant across all populations? If the answer is no, than any sane rational honest human being ought to expect some genetic variation in intelligence. Populations is a more useful term here because this goes beyond race, if only 20% of one race had an idealized mixture of gene combinations that enhanced iq, and were sent to a deserted island to create a separate society, the offspring of that society would have a much higher frequency of the beneficial alleles than the general population that was not selected for. This is beyond race because it is not specific to race, but race is what most people use and care about.
You can’t fight ignorance by pretending to have more knowledge than is currently available.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Same thing on sex ratio differences, we don’t notice different ratios of males/females being born across different races/populations, this suggest that this is NOT the kind of thing that is variable in the way other things are.
[/quote]
Actually, we do notice different ratios of males and females being born across different populations in certain cases, but those differences are due to environmental factors: i.e., sex-selective abortions and other forms of gynecide.
So this is an example of a trait where
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there can be significant (and heritable) variation on the level of individuals,
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but there are no significant genetic-based differences on the level of populations,
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although there can be significant observed differences between populations which are due to environmental factors.
Intelligence might well be the same sort of phenomenon, with the caveat that in the case of intelligence it’s much harder to separate out genetic and environmental factors as possible causes of the observed differences.
There’s nothing about honestly admitting that the subject is not yet scientifically understood that prevents people from doing further research on the subject.
Quite the contrary, in fact.
I don’t see why we should arbitrarily assume that one set of (realistic) conditions for prehistoric humans would exert significantly greater selection pressure for intelligence than another. Life has never been easy or safe for the vast majority of humans anywhere until comparatively recently, and being smart has always been an advantage.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
And the idea that over tens and hundreds of thousands of years of human migration that such pressures remained IDENTICAL and produces zero real variation in average human cognition, is absurd to me.
[/quote]
But since, as you keep telling us, you’re not an expert and not a biologist and not a palaeontologist or anthropologist or any other kind of scientist whose job is to understand this stuff, why should we pay any attention to what you consider “absurd”?
As I noted, you are of course entitled to your own opinion about what you’d “imagine” or what seems “absurd” to you. But you’re not entitled to expect anybody else to agree with your opinion just because to you it seems so incontestably obvious.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Equality must be built into nature because… nature itself is a liberal like the rest of us.
[/QUOTE]
Again, you’re fulminating against a strawman. Nobody is claiming at all the “equality must be built into nature” for any reason whatsoever, or even asserting that equality is “built into nature”.
We’re just pointing out that so far, no valid scientific evidence substantiates the assertion that equality is not built into nature, as far as average levels of intelligence in different populations are concerned.
I think it’s already been shown here that claims that research on these topics is stultified are bullshit.
And for anti-racists, the problem isn’t that there might be good research, it’s the shitty, or even fraudulent “research”, like Rushton et al, as well as the extrapolation of good population-based research to entire races by scientific racists, that are the problem.
Yep.
Studying populations that seem to have a high prevalence of a particular trait is potentially useful, though largely as a means to an end: helping us find the gene(s) responsible and what effect they have.
Trying to find average differences in races however, firstly runs into the problem of how exactly you define who belongs to each race. Then, when you do your study, you will inevitably have a much weaker difference in prevalence of traits than if you studied populations. The signal to noise is much weaker.
Trying to find average differences at that level is scientifically / statistically not meaningful, but the idea is appealing to people who want to make broad brush statements and treat everyone of a certain colour a certain way. “Blacks are better at sports”, “Asians are better at studying” and so on.
I’m more offended by the generalization of the traits of a tiny nonrandom sample (i.e. those who can compete in sporting events at the professional and/or Olympic level) to an entire population than I am about any of this “race” bullshit. Seriously, taking a strongly-filtered sample and treating it like a random one to be used to make inductive claims about a population? That’s stats-nerd blasphemy and I want it stopped.
It’s as math-derpy as someone saying “well, der, uh, guh, the weat’er guy said dere was a fitty p’cent chance of rain on sat’day and a fitty p’cent chance of rain on sunday, so, derp, up, guy, dat means der’s a hunnert percent chance o’ rain dis weekend, herp!”
If that’s true then I’m glad to be wrong. My ultimate goal with all this is to break up the tyranny of genetic lotto gutting the prospects of human beings, both for individuals and larger percentages of some populations (should what I suspect be the case).
And that will involve expanding out our knowledge and capacity to alter genes with techniques like CRISPR, and identify and catalog any and all genes/gene interactions that affects the mind of people. Not so that every human being becomes a hyper intelligent carbon copy, so that most people are above the threshold of aptitude where their primary constraints on the direction they want to take in life is personal preference rather than cognitive training weights damping their efforts.
:dubious: