Can’t you tell me what it’s called or something? This is a very long thread.
Sorry, got pulled into a call. It’s Scarr, Pakstis, Katz, & Barker, 1978
Other similar studies with same finding are: Witty & Jenkins, 1936 and Loehlin, Vandenberg, & Osborne, 1973.
Also Eyferth (1961).
A hypothesis I’ve seen floated in this thread and elsewhere is that intelligence was selected for among early immigrants out of Africa. The idea being that the harsh environments of Europe and Asia would have been given the survivial and reproductive advantage to the braniacs who could strategize the necessary defenses to stay alive and even thrive.
Is there any evidence to suggest animals in harsher climes are more intelligent than genetically similar counterparts in warmer places? I would think physical attributes (size, fat deposition, hair, metabolism) would matter much more than mental ones, but perhaps there are studies that show cognitive differences too?
In the absence of human data, we can look at animals to give credence to a certain theory. Can those supportive of Murray et al. point to interesting animal studies?
It’s a ridiculous argument for many reasons, chiefly that Africa has tons of harsh environments of its own. Further, any truly advantageous trait would have very easily made its way back into Africa, since Africa has never been isolated.
Also migrations mostly go from harsh climes to less harsh climes, that being the point of migrating.
And these theories never put Australian aboriginals at the top of the intelligence list.
Straw man. Straw man, straw man, straw man!! :smack:
Who, precisely, is disputing this?!? Certainly not Harris or Murray, and no one that I can recall seeing in this thread (please refresh my memory if I am forgetting someone).
No, it really shouldn’t, for the same reason I went into extensively earlier (to quickly recap: 100 years ago, the men’s record in the 100m was slower than the women’s record set in 1988; but it would be absurd to use that fact to argue that “we just don’t know if men actually have a genetically derived advantage in sprinting”).
As someone who was born in East Africa, not far from where “Lucy” was found, and who has also visited northern Russia, Finland, and Sweden, I’m not seeing it. :dubious:
Why exactly do you think people/animals migrate? Things getting a little too soft in the current neighborhood, time to induce a little natural selection ? The grass is greener right here? Do geese fly north for the winter in your neighborhood?
Of course you are, and you only continue to willfully miss the point, as **iiandyiiii **said: “it’s not reasonable to claim, without actual genetic data, that white (or European) people have superior genes for intelligence, on average, as compared to black (or sub-Saharan African) people.”
Your long winded and useless reply was done just to hide the fact that your cite about “There is genetic data, you just don’t accept it.” does not counteract what he said.
Being able to fly as a bird is less variable across many species, something like height or intelligence is something we see vary FAR more between individuals, suggesting this is partly based on the differential genetic combinations that contribute to intelligence inside them.
And people keep asking me to prove something. I am a lay person, I am not offering or trying to PROVE anything. I am making assertions about what I think is most likely. That’s not a proof, it’s an educated guess based on the facts we know and observations we see. If the genes and frequency of genes that contribute to intelligence vary between individuals and populations, why would you not EXPECT differences in average measurements of something like intelligence via iq? This assumption and educated expectation makes zero claims in and of itself about which races have a higher iq than others, or the magnitude of any potential differences, it’s more a primer and mode of thinking of a mind that would make them less surprised or resistant to the notion that if we observed different measurements of something like average iq between different groups, that would make SENSE to see since gene frequencies vary not JUST between individuals, but between different groups as well.
I will repeat this again. This is NOT SPECIFICALLY about race !!! Black Africans that migrate over in 2017 to the US are not a random sample, they tend to be from elite circles, the higher iq subsections of their own host populations. We see the same for indians and chinese and people coming from Australia. I was in another thread that was talking about silicon valley San Francisco housing prices, and I wondered aloud why more people did not just create their own enclaves elsewhere with less housing constraints? And one commenter chimed in from Australia that was in computer science and said he moved to silicon valley because that was where most of the action was and a magnet for talent and opportunity. That was not a RANDOM selection of an Australian to move to the bay area, and those kinds of selection pressures, EVEN on short time scales kickstarted not by natural selection, but human selection and migration patterns can produce different populations with different averages.
This is NOT hard stuff guys, this makes total intuitive sense, else I would not be the one able to string things together.
Small changes in the brain can produce measurable results. Forget different races and populations.
JUST look at individuals. The severely mentally retarded all the way up to genius savants that were performing calculus as young children. There is vast variation that is largely based on the wiring of peoples brains. What, pray tell do you think governs that? AFTER you have taken care of the basics like not starving or sensory deprivation or abuse? We see FAR more variance between individuals with the extremes, WHY is it SUCH a stretch for people like you to imagine that we’d see SOME sorts of variance between populations?
We can’t prove it. We can’t PROVE IT !!!
…
But you measure it, have been measuring gaps over the decades, some have narrowed, but not closed. Why? You and others are all too eager to swat away people like me who just say, without PROOF, we think it’s *likely *because there are some genetic differences between different groups.
And I am primed to think that is the case because unlike some of you, those genes that influence intelligence? I do not presume their frequency remains CONSTANT across all populations of people. We don’t see that between individuals, why the hell would you or anyone else expect it to be constant between different groups?
I don’t think this is a “people/animals” situation. I think it’s unique to people. Your supposition would involve a continuous flow out of Africa by many groups over a long period of time. Instead, the genetic evidence I’ve seen is that all the peoples of Asia, Europe, and Australia have as their origin one ethnic group in East Africa. So the founder population for the majority of the world’s population appears to have originally been quite small, and did not (until pretty recently) involve successive waves of migration merging with the original one.
So why did they leave? Maybe things were getting too crowded, and food was scarce. Maybe they were unpopular in their homeland and were basically pushed out, like the Mormons. And/or maybe they had something different about them that made them more curious to see what the rest of the world held, rather than staying and negotiating things in the milieu their ancestors had stayed in for so many generations before them.
None of this, BTW, is to suggest that there would have been no natural selection among the people who stayed in Africa. In some ways, that process might have been even more intense, due to the greater competition for resources and greater number of different genes in play. But that evolution would have had different pressures and different outcomes.
ETA:
Right. But what they take as an unspoken assumption is that the default expectation (due, as you’ve said, to ideological blinders) is what I’ve called the axiomatic “Blank Slate” model. Or more specific to this subject, the basic assumption is that IQ would *not *vary between populations, and this assumption is clung to unless and until it is disproven beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Race is still not actually a thing.
“Makes intuitive sense to a person with no understanding” is never a good metric for the truth of an idea.
Fact 1: We have no evidence connecting genetics to racial outcomes. There’s no evidence indicating that any specific intelligence-correlated genes or gene expressions are more or less present among specific populations.
Fact 2: We have an abundance of evidence connecting racism to racial outcomes. There is a ton of evidence linking specific societal ills to racism, and again linking those ills to IQ.
Possibly, but keep in mind that my last IQ test turned up more than a few standard deviations higher than average, and think what that says about you. Then, just to really fuck with your head, consider that Ian Juby is a member of MENSA.
How about you define those groups for us, fucko? How many times do I have to say it - race isn’t an actual thing. There’s no coherent definition of biological race.
Boy, I hope some random idiot stumbles by this thread to tell us all what he thinks. That would be super awesome.
So…your alternative explanation is they left because things were easier elsewhere then there were here? Great counterexamples, dude.
“Paging Dr. Dunning and Dr. Kruger to the white courtesy phone.”
Didn’t someone suggest rural Americans are less intelligent than their urban counterparts because you’d essentially have to be stupid to stay in isolated, low-opportunity areas? I swear I saw that assertion made here.
Only a stupid person would deliberately leave a comfortable environment for one that is less hospitable. It’s more likely that people migrated out of bad environments in search of better ones. But they could’ve also been been driven out of comfortable environments into bad ones by stronger tribes.
Or they could’ve simply moved into comfortable areas that suddenly become uncomfortable as climate changed. Several possibilities.
Right because there were no other places between Africa and the Swiss Alps back in the day. The Mediterranean was invented in 1968–coincidentally on the same day racism died.
I’m somewhat attached to **SlackerInc’s **idea that it’s only the more intelligent geese who fly south for the winter and only because their curiosity makes them wonder what’s down there.