Are you engaging with me or ignoring me? (You have to admit, you walked right into that Einstein deal.)
I made no claim about a “master race”. It looks to me like the average black person has many attributes that are superior to those of the average white person. But performance on aptitude tests that white people designed is not one of those things (this is an indisputable fact, the only controversy being the reason).
The trials and travails you described would indeed be expected to mold a people into a hardy group of survivors. But there’s no reason to expect they would select for math ability or vocabulary.
ETA: You referred to their being owned as livestock. Do you dispute that livestock animals tend to be less intelligent than their wild counterparts? The complexity of the captive life, the amount of decisionmaking involved, is simply not as great.
You and Klein are free to dispute that genetics are not involved in test score differences, just as Murray is (or should be) free to dispute that they are. Neither hypothesis is proven and it is likely that neither can be, given the current state of the research. The arguments Murray presents to validate IQ testing and the comparison of racial groupings have been disputed by some and may ultimately turn out not to be correct, but they are still also within the bounds of mainstream science. Or at least they were back in 1994.
The muddiest part of the science may be the question of racial groupings, as they are indeed somewhat arbitrary. Racial diversity is clinal, so it is difficult (impossible?) to pick a single bright line where one grouping ends and another begins. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that racial diversity doesn’t exist or that relatively distinct populations can’t be defined. Given that, if we all accept that genetics varies in individuals, I see no reason why they wouldn’t similarly vary on average between populations of individuals. I’d expect the genetic differences at the population level to be pretty small in comparison to environmental differences and inter-population variation, though, and thus difficult to tease out.
As a result of the article, plenty of others have. But I haven’t changed my mind that Sam is too sensitive and too hostile toward Klein. I think Sam has been taking a lot of heat ever since the Murray interview and Klein is the poor target who gets to bear the brunt of all that. It’s a bad look for Sam.
I suspect that environmental factors account for more of the cognitive variation than genetic ones. If so, and if the environmental factors and testing errors could be reliably estimated and adjusted for, there is no reason why properly adjusted test scores for some or all populations of African-Americans might not be higher than for some or all white populations.
I predict that the racial implications will be slim to none.
Let me put it this way:
If we knew all the genes associated with intelligence I think it’s a *feasible *scenario that a small group of people, like the much-touted Askenazi jews, could have some measurable advantage after all. E.g. “We have found 8 genes associated with intelligence and Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high numbers of 3 of them!”
But among “races” as people popularly understand the term – where you’re talking about groups of hundreds of millions of people, with far more diversity within a group than between groups, huge overlaps in performance between groups on just about any attribute you care to measure, and any IQ test gap between groups closing…yeah not so much.
It won’t stop people wishing they could treat people with different skin colors as if they were different species of Middle Earth though.
I do think that if we could get representative samples of people from each of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of ethnicities, and gave them some sort of test that actually determined intellectual capacity independent of environmental factors, we would see minor differences between ethnic groups.
However, those differences would be much smaller than the differences between random members of the groups, and would not have anything correlated with skin pigment.
But notthern Europeans ARE a distinct group. The error is in seeing everyone of sub-Saharan African origin as a distinct group.
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I don’t think I understand your claim then. I was thinking that you had come to the realization that you cannot just lump in all sub-saharan people as one big group, but I guess you are actually making a different claim?
Africa is the birthplace of humanity. The vast majority of the human gene pool still resides there and in the Pan-African diaspora. The peoples native to Asia, Europe, and the Americas are descendants of a small group of intrepid explorers (or perhaps outcasts) who left the mother continent. They became large in absolute numbers of individuals, especially in Asia, but their gene pool is still much smaller than in Africa.
So Africans are the central mass population of humanity. My Bayesian prior here is that it is backward to see Caucasians as the norm, and Africans as “below normal” IQ. Rather, Africans are the norm (and much more diverse, presumably containing highly variable subgroups), and Europeans and Asians are satellite offshoots who are particularly easy to identify with the naked eye. They are abnormally high in IQ compared to average humans.
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But it is! How is it different from the Ashkenazi Jew example you referenced?
And I am saying whites are one subgroup superior, on average, in certain types of intelligence. There are undoubtedly other such subgroups who are sub-Saharan Africans, but they are much smaller in number and geographic range, and because they are Africans with dark brown skin, we make the cultural error of not recognizing them as a distinct group.
Of course, the key remains that that is about inherited intelligence, something that researchers tell us that it is not related to race for the pedantic reason that there is really none.
This is a study of children subject to fetal drug exposure (results of outcomes from disease populations are not applicable to wider groups). Also, it concludes:
First, it may be that paternal IQ and education are so closely related to maternal IQ and education that they add no additional predictive value to child cognitive outcome; this possibility is supported at least in part by our analyses… Finally, unlike maternity, absolute confirmation of paternity requires genetic testing.
So they actually explain the reason for no predictive power of paternal IQ (did you read the whole thing? Didn’t I tell this to you before?)
A newspaper article (which happens to get the science wrong. Quelle surprise).
I have to agree with Evil Economist on this one, and not just for the pedantic reason that he was aware of that research, but because you are wrong, it is those sources that are telling you that your point is not as good as you thought it was.
The simple logic is that he just had to notice that you did not read the paper properly. Therefore Evil Economist is more reliable than indeed a nobody on the internet that misunderstands research.