" Because I’ve never heard of anybody saying that such a concept is prima facie unacceptable."
That’s a meaningfully different statement. I don’t doubt real scientists usually listen politely to real scientists. But you’ve never heard of ANYBODY - that is a set that includes all human beings - rejecting the topic as unacceptable? But of course you have, it’s the default setting of most decent people in a liberal society. In polite conversation suggesting there could be intellectual differences between races - even if just presented as a question for discussion - will be treated with the same disdain as if one suggested we go a-cross-burnin’. Hell, I know MY reaction would be a skin-crawling “oh shit, here comes the racist” feeling.
The aversion to “race and intelligence” (or, frankly, race and basically anything) discussions absolutely is a real thing and it’s very understandable why. The fact is, 99% of the time anyone says anything about it, what will follow is the most pungent pseudoscientific malarkey and so a person will naturally tend to not want to hear about it. It is NOT a socially acceptable topic to bring up and anyone who does will be treated with great suspicion, at best, even if they’re the 1% who are real scientists.
And you know as well as I 99% of sports-related discussion is horseshit, too. So people will react pretty negatively to that, too. A person saying black people are inherently better at basketball instantly sets off my “he’s a doofus” alarm.
Well, tackling this question, logically it cannot, since one would have to assume white athletes were similarly advantaged. Not to point out the obvious, but ALL great athletes must have some genetic advantage. Peter Dinklage is a great actor but he was not destined to be an NBA All-Star.
While such genes could in theory be more prevalent in black athletes, one would have to assume those white athletes who excel also have genetic advantages. It is rather obvious that Mike Trout is much faster, stronger, and has quicker reflexes than most people. There may not as as many of them in a given athletic endeavour but the genetic advantages seem to confer upon a small number of individuals, not an entire population. Maybe black people can on average run faster than white people, or be likelier what white people to reach the extremes of possible sprinting speed, but the fact is most black people are only going to go 100 metres in less than 10 seconds if they are driving their car at the time.
In any case I’ve seen little evidence for such things. Most elite sprinters are black, but a rather amazing number of them, a number that defies statistical chance, seem to hail from Jamaica, a country that contains maybe one percent of all the black people in the world. That is a rather curious thing indeed; how could the black sprinting gene be so concentrated in Jamaica? It is also the case that athletic endeavours that would, logically, be conducive to the same physical traits, such a speed skating, are rather noteworthy in their dearth of Jamaican champions; indeed, speed skating is strikingly dominated by Dutch people, while nearby Belgium, with a genetically similar population, is noteworthy for not being good at any Olympic sports at all. Surely there isn’t a speedskating gene unique from the sprinting gene?
[QUOTE=RickJay]
But you’ve never heard of ANYBODY - that is a set that includes all human beings - rejecting the topic as unacceptable? But of course you have, it’s the default setting of most decent people in a liberal society. In polite conversation suggesting there could be intellectual differences between races - even if just presented as a question for discussion - will be treated with the same disdain as if one suggested we go a-cross-burnin’. Hell, I know MY reaction would be a skin-crawling “oh shit, here comes the racist” feeling.
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I think you’re inadvertently mixing up the distinct concepts of (1) “there could possibly be such genetic differences of some sort”, which is what I was talking about, and (2) “Observed Phenomenon X about racial groups in Society Y could well be valid evidence of such an alleged genetic difference”, which is what the vast majority of such discussions seem to be about.
Yes, most people engaging in polite conversation in a liberal society know enough about the ignorant and misinformed tendencies of “race realism” to dismiss discussions of type (2) right out of the gate. But no, that doesn’t necessarily imply that they would also automatically reject any discussion of type (1). And in fact, I’ve never seen anybody do so.
But if you have evidence to the contrary, by all means, produce it.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
A person saying black people are inherently better at basketball instantly sets off my “he’s a doofus” alarm.
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But that’s a classic example of what I’m calling “type (2)” discussion.
It’s not an intellectually honest consideration of the variety of possible discoveries about genetic factors in intelligence that population genetics research might unearth at some point in the better-informed future. It’s merely a typical specimen of the irresponsible, unscientific, ass-extracted naive speculation that “race realists” love to indulge in.
There is nothing squeamish or “PC” or otherwise inappropriate about being unwilling to engage with irresponsible, unscientific, ass-extracted naive speculation on a scientific subject.
“coherent and discrete” You can, willy-nilly, make any grouping of humans you like. So a grouping is a set of humans, like, say, “self-identified Blacks”. A coherent & discrete biological entity would be any particular unit of biological classification. Any taxonomic rank, basically.
It’s worse than that; even the basic measures of intelligence and other complex psychological traits aren’t understood worth a shit. We universally measure intellectual potential in terms of the intelligence quotient, a metric developed over a century ago and since been the focus of research and debate, and yet it correlates only loosely to academic performance and almost not at all to professional or personal success. Despite attempts to develop a more nuanced and spectral view of intellectual capacity, there is no other widely accepted metric for intellect, so trying to compare overall intellectual capacity between specific populations suffers not only from the question of how much of intellectual capacity is determined by social environment and development influences such as rearing methods and nutrition, but the essential problem of fundamental uncertainty of what is being measured. Unlike athletic ability, which can be evaluated on a strictly functional aspect for a given level of conditioning, we just have no universal method or measure that is independent of socialization and skills. Even non-verbal pattern recognition or aptitude at a discrete skill set such as arithmetic provides only a rough and incomplete metric of some aspect of intellectual aptitude.
There is no scientific definition of “race”. Race, as currently applied, is almost purely a sociological construct based upon superficial phenotypes (skin color, hair color and form, facial characteristics) and a presumption of shared cultural experience. As a patent example, take a look at the US Census definition of race from 1790 to 2010. Not only has the concept and grouping of races been laughably fungible (“Quadroon”? “Other Spanish”?) and excluding significant portions of the global human population, it munges together some groups and separates others that are from distinct haplogroups. And that it treats “Black/Negro” (Sub-Saharan Africans) as one continuous grouping is risible given the fact that the population of Africa comprises greater overall genetic variability and phenotypical diversity in measurable physical and functional characteristics such as height, facial features, skin tone, mean and extreme athletic performance, et cetera compared to all other human populations combined.
The most laughable basis of all supposed races, though, are the so-called “Caucasian” whites of largely Western, and Northern European extraction, most of whom have only remote association with peoples of the Caucasus mountains, language, or culture, aside from intermarriage or rape from ancestors participating in Eurasian trade or invasions such as the religious crusades. European populations have a curious mix of distinct “founders” characteristics from early tribal population groups combined with substantial but statistically traceable mixing from the various migrations, conquests, and intermarriage.
First of all, we don’t have to state this as a hypothetical; there is no question that some distinct populations will have greater athletic abilities than others, both in the mean and the extreme. And while any physically able person can be an athlete, the people who compete on a professional, world-class level are not just the result of training and motivation but also have the advantage of optimal innate capability. However much I might train, I will never dunk like Michael Jordan, throw a pass like Brett Favre, or climb like Chris Sharma. The same applies to intellectual skills as well; I’ll never write like Thomas Pynchon, think about physics and math like Ed Witten, or act with the intensity of Robert Downey, Jr. These people don’t represent the mean potential of these widely varied capabilities; they are the extreme outliers. Their accomplishments are a result of the specific innate capabilities combined with hard work and typically obsessive training and study, and we recognize them not just for the effort but for being the extreme top of human potential.
By the same token, however, we should not be so reductionist as to say that these accomplishments are only because of that potential; famed Hungarian chess author and coach László Polgár coached his three daughters from an early age to be elite chess players as a deliberate test of his hypothesis about the trainability of intellect. In a field heavily dominated by male competitors, Zsófia is rated as an International Master and Woman Grandmaster, while Zsuzsa and Judit are rated as unrestricted Grandmasters. (Notably, Polgár and his wife were not single-minded about the coaching, encouraging their daughters to develop other interests and pursuits outside of chess.) While the Polgár sisters no doubt inherited their parents’ intellectual capabilities they rapidly advanced to outplay their father at an early age, arguing strongly for Polgár’s thesis.
Similarly, over one fifth of Nobel prizes have been won by Ashkenazi and the Sephardic Jews, which comprise about a fifth of a percent of the global human population. It is tempting to argue that this relatively distinct haplotype pool demonstrates strong evidence of the heritability of intellect over training until you consider the deep cultural importance that education and intellectual achievement is held in these cultures and how encouraged and pressured young Jewish students are to excel at exercises that also prepare them for the focus and discipline required for academic, scientific, and political accomplishment.
From this standpoint, it is not a surprise that the best world class athletes in many fields are dominated by “blacks” of various African linages; given the wide genetic variability of that overall population, combined with the social pressure in the US to perform athletically and often minimal encouragement and dismal opportunities to excel academically, it should be entirely expected that blacks demonstrate the extreme of athletic accomplishment in many sports and perform at a subpar level in the mean in intellectual pursuits. This, however, says very little about the athletic abilities of the supposed “black race” in the mean, or intellectual capability in the extreme.
Genetically distinct populations not only may but will, in fact, have different statistical distributions of athletic, intellectual, and other capacities. Measuring these and distinguishing them from the general human population as a whole in any useful way, however, is not only a problem of imprecise measurement but a matter of statistical utility; that is, if we determine that the hypothetical Orange race is intellectually, artistically, or athletically superior to the Blue race by five percent of whatever metric you want to use to assess that, should we invest most education and training in Oranges and only a minimal level in Blue, with great waste on the sub-mean of the former? Or should we try to identify the most capable students and offer them the opportunity to develop their best potential regardless of where they fall on the Orange-Blue axis?
I’m genuinely just trying to understand what people are talking about when they state that race has no basis in biology.
The study I linked above demonstrates pretty clearly (and there are others that have done similar work) that the grouping of self identified race sorts pretty neatly into discrete biological entities by principle cohort analysis in GWAS, a very common biological classification based on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP). SNPs are pretty widely used for identification of traits and diseases. And, so, to me, there is a direct link between race (self identified) and an accepted, definable and quantifiable measurement of biological consequence. Where am I losing this?
(As an aside, I’m NOT prefacing this toward any proof that race is related to intelligence, which is likely nonsense. Just that I think there is a tendency to go way too far and say that race has no biological basis.)
A good, proper liberal will accept that natural selection affected certain physical traits (i.e. the Kenyan runner) but could not conceivably affect traits of intelligence or psychological makeup.
Let’s look back at this in, oh say, 100 years, and see how much or little your political sensibilities affected common sense judgement.
This is an argument that gets made all the time in threads like this, and I think it’s a bit deceptive.
Let’s assume, for the sake of simplicity, that there are a few fairly distinct genetic/racial groups from Africa. One of them is Kalenjin, discussed above, who dominate marathon running. Another one, in this hypothetical, is the Abduljabbars, who it turns out have a genetic predisposition to be amazing at basketball.
So, looking at the NBA, which clearly has a way-out-of-proportion number of black players, we examine their precise genetic heritage, and find that a huge percentage of the players in the NBA right now have Abduljabbar heritage.
So a black person in the USA who has Abduljabbar heritage is far more more likely to end up in the NBA than either a white person, or a black person without Abduljabbar heritage.
(Remember, this is purely a hypothetical.)
So, we’re in that hypothetical situation, and someone says “hey, wow, look at the NBA, look at all those black people, clearly blacks are better at basketball than whites”. Is that person right? Or wrong?
The general SDMB position is to say that that statement is wrong, because the actual advantage comes from having Adbuljabbar heritage, and black is a poorly defined term, and there are plenty of blacks with no Abduljabbar heritage.
At the same time, however, if we took the entire next generation of American babies and had them raise in Skinnerian boxes by robots, and every one of them was trained from birth to do nothing but excel at basketball, so throwing out all possible environmental and cultural factors, and then we selected from them the 10 or 20 best basketball players, and reintegrated them into American society and saw what race they appeared to be based on the common American understanding of race, odds are good that a disproportionate number of them would, in fact, be black. Because they would largely be people with Abduljabbar heritage, who appear in casual American terms to be “black”.
So, in that hypothetical, I don’t think that the observation that the NBA is dominated by blacks, and the speculation that that might be genetic in nature, is WRONG. It’s incomplete, but it’s not wrong.
Or to look at it another way, it’s one thing to say “race is not a precisely defined biological concept”. I agree with that. But I think some people want to take that further and treat race-as-commonly-understood as being completely divorced from biology… as if it’s just something that is randomly assigned to people with no rhyme or reason, like “last digit of social security number” or something.
If it turns out that one particular year the NBA happens to have a disproportionate number of players whose SSN ends with a 7, that is almost certainly a coincidence, with no possible biological reason. But I don’t think we can automatically say the same about the preponderance of NBA players who are black.
I think the problem is that you’re confusing overlap of racial categories and genetic heritage with dependence of racial categories on genetic heritage.
Many people in the same self-identified racial group, such as African-Americans, self-identify partly on the basis of knowledge of their heritage. Everybody knows that most African-Americans are at least partly descended from African populations who were genetically different in various ways from the ancestral populations of most European-Americans.
But that racial category is not a necessary or reliable indicator of closeness of genetic kinship among its members. (See the discussion of well-defined genetic populations on the previous page for what’s required for a group to be considered a population in the genetic sense.) There are many people who don’t self-identify as African-Americans who are more closely related to self-identified African-Americans (SIAAs) than other SIAAs are, and vice versa. In addition, there are other genetic populations whose members tend to look very similar to SIAAs, but who are actually less closely related to the ancestral African populations that most SIAAs come from than most European-Americans are.
When biologists say that racial categories have no biological basis, they don’t mean to deny that racial self-identification on average has a larger-than-random correlation with genetic similarity, at least at the very broadest level. They simply mean that racial categories are not based on identifiable genetic criteria. So they’re useless in and of themselves for accurately and reliably identifying the genetic heritage of individuals.
Consider this example: On looking at a random group of black people, can you tell which ones are most closely related to European (Caucasian) populations? No, you can’t, because an African-American with, say, 30% European heritage might have, say, darker skin and curlier hair than a particular African with no European heritage. And some dark-skinned curly-haired South Asians are more closely related to European populations than to any African population.
Here’s an analogous example of the difference between overlap and basis: Lots of (non-Native American) Minnesotans are descended from Scandinavian immigrants. Does that mean that the average Minnesotan has a higher probability of having a large percentage of Scandinavian ancestry than, say, the average Arizonan? Yes, it does. Does it mean that demographers can confidently use “Minnesotan” as synonymous with “Scandinavian-descended”, or that being Minnesotan in any way depends on having Scandinavian ancestry? No, it does not.
Oh for pity’s sake, have you not even read the thread?! This is exactly the sort of thing I mean about “race realists” relying on ignorant naive assumptions and strawman arguments rather than honest and precise debate.
From the very first response in this thread (and I should know, because I wrote it), we “good, proper liberals” have been acknowledging over and over again that population-level genetic differences (which you inaccurately characterize as “natural selection”: n.b., natural selection is not the only cause of genetic differences) could conceivably affect traits of intelligence or psychological makeup.
What we are refusing to accept, since at present there isn’t an iota of scientifically valid evidence for them, are the ignorant pseudoscientific claims by “race realists” that there currently exists any scientific evidence or scientific explanation of genetic mechanisms to convincingly support attributing observed differences in such traits across vaguely-defined ethnocultural racial groups to genetic factors.
Golly, Stringbean, your level of incomprehension here is like not understanding the difference between the statements “It is intrinsically impossible to establish a self-sustaining human colony on Mars” and “There is no self-sustaining human colony on Mars at present, nor is there likely to be one in the near future, because it would be hellaciously difficult and complicated to establish.”.
Aren’t you even slightly embarrassed to display that kind of cluelessness about simple statements of fact? Especially if, as you claim, it’s intended for the perusal of “all posterity”?
But in that hypothetical, you’ve radically oversimplified the actual genetic diversity involved.
Nobody is arguing with the reasoning in your hypothetical, in which all black people either have or don’t have a clearly identifiable “Abduljabbar gene” that is known to be linked to exceptional basketball ability, and no white people have the “Abduljabbar gene”. Sure, in that hypothetical it would be perfectly reasonable to say that black people on average are genetically better at basketball. Duh.
The massive logical fallacy that most “race realists” commit is in claiming that such oversimplified hypotheticals are useful models for explaining observed real-life differences in real-life racial groups.
That’s simply ridiculous. That’s like a three-year-old painting rocket fins on a tin can and calling it his “spaceship”. He may enjoy the analogy and the imaginative play it affords him, but no reasonable person would believe for an instant that his tin can could meet the scientific and engineering challenges that an actual spaceship would have to survive. Same with these “one-gene” hypothetical thought experiments and the realities of actual human genetics.
I appreciate this response, but the study that I linked to simply looked at self identified people. It didn’t concern itself with why the identified or any of the above. It simply showed that every single one of the people who self identified as African American grouped together in a separate group than every single one of the people who self identified as European American. Sure, some were closer to European than others, but all grouped together. One could easily and reliably take a data point of the genetics and predict the way that person self identified. So, not only was it not useless, it was absolutely predictive based on identifiable genetic criteria.
What difference would it make if that were true? You still wouldn’t be able to broad brush a racial group. You still wouldn’t be able to hire NBA players, or neuroscientists, on the basis of skin colour.
But that’s exactly what some people would like to do, it’s why they care so much about this.
But not predictive of anything particularly interesting to geneticists, which is kind of the point here.
Yes, the linked study showed that a group of 136 self-identified African-Americans all had some genetic ancestry statistically determined to be African, as did a group of 94 Africans, whereas a group of 38 self-identified European-Americans did not. But that doesn’t show anything more than that, as I said, racial category overlaps with genetic heritage (in its broadest definition) to a considerable extent.
Look at what the researchers in your study were actually investigating, and what they concluded:
In other words, the researchers found that the vague racial classification of “black” shared by the African-Americans and the Africans was useless for the purposes of investigating the specific genetic characteristics they wanted to know about.
Like I said, nobody’s claiming that racial category and genetic heritage don’t overlap on average and to some extent. But that is not sufficient to designate race as a biologically-based category. Nor does it justify trying to extrapolate from racial category to specific genetic characteristics in the way that “race realists” so often attempt to do.
That’s exactly the point, and precisely incorrect. SNPs, which is what a GWAS study is based on, are absolutely particularly interesting to geneticists as they are directly indicative of differences in traits. Damn near every difference in traits that we know about is based on SNPs. To say that they are not interesting to geneticists is like saying numbers are not interesting to a mathematician.
In whose words? That’s not remotely what the authors said there. It’s actually the opposite of what they are saying. They are saying that looking at mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers (non SNP markers) are insufficient to determine one’s race based on genetics, and that a SNP analysis is required. And, the SNP analysis shows that in general, African Americans are differentiated from Africans, by virtue of having more similarity to Europeans than Africans, but are still largely (and unsurprisingly) between the two groups.
And, with near 100% accuracy (Figure 2, via principal component analysis), one could take a sample of DNA from a self identified African American and determine, sight unseen, that this person was an African American. I mean, this is one of several similar studies, and they are pretty damn conclusive. Look at figure 2, and tell me that given an unidentified dot, you couldn’t determine what that person identifies as racially with damn high certainty.
It doesn’t say anything about intelligence (and again, gun to my head, I think there is no racial component that would make any significant difference to intelligence), but it clearly invalidates this meme that race is entirely a sociological construct. One doesn’t have to ignore the existing science in order to not be racist.
I didn’t say that SNPs aren’t interesting to geneticists: I said that racial category (in this case “black”, the category which is shared by the Africans and African-Americans in this study) is not particularly interesting to geneticists. Precisely because a vaguely defined racial category such as “black” tells us very little about an individual’s specific genetic heritage.
[QUOTE=Fiveyearlurker]
They are saying that looking at mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers (non SNP markers) are insufficient to determine one’s race based on genetics, and that a SNP analysis is required. And, the SNP analysis shows that in general, African Americans are differentiated from Africans, by virtue of having more similarity to Europeans than Africans, but are still largely (and unsurprisingly) between the two groups.
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Exactly my point: the fact that African-Americans and Africans are both racially “black”, whereas Europeans are not, was not useful information in the study. Because the study was concerned with specific genetic heritage of people with mixed European and African ancestry, a distinction which is completely invisible on the level of the broad racial category “black”.
[QUOTE=Fiveyearlurker]
And, with near 100% accuracy (Figure 2, via principal component analysis), one could take a sample of DNA from a self identified African American and determine, sight unseen, that this person was an African American. I mean, this is one of several similar studies, and they are pretty damn conclusive. Look at figure 2, and tell me that given an unidentified dot, you couldn’t determine what that person identifies as racially with damn high certainty.
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It appears that you’re somehow distinguishing “African American” as a “racial category” in its own right, one not shared by, e.g., Africans. Whatever kind of ramified ethnic classification scheme you’ve got in mind here is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a conventional broad-brush racial category such as “black”, which applies to both Africans and African-Americans, and which consequently is indeed completely useless for this study’s purpose of distinguishing the actual genetic heritage of African-Americans from that of Africans.
Geez, Fiveyearlurker, I really am not seeing where this disagreement is coming from. I understand your point that the study investigated genetic ancestry in people of mixed European and African heritage, and that self-identification as African-American (based on widespread shared knowledge within one’s birth culture of descent from African ancestors in a European-dominated society) is indeed typically a good marker for having mixed European and African genetic heritage. Nobody’s disputing that.
But this does not necessarily have anything to do with being “black” in the conventional racial-phenotype sense. Lots of people who are considered “black” have very different genetic heritage.