Interesting podcast conversation between Sam Harris and Charles Murray (of "Bell Curve" fame)

In a rush, very quickly:

—Not sure what Kimstu thinks that Scandinavian baby adopted by an African village was going to do for sunscreen 3,000 years ago.

—If northern Europeans are such mutts, how come they still have recessive traits like blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale skin?
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Same thing that all the real-life Scandinavians living in Africa in the pre-sunscreen-lotion 19th and 20th centuries did:

  • Get sunburned.
  • Get very tanned.
  • Get into the habit of wearing more cloth on their bodies than their darker-skinned neighbors, as, e.g., Africans with albinism have often done in African societies.
  • Possibly die somewhat earlier from skin cancer.

But none of that would intrinsically prevent them from learning to function and “compete” just fine during their life within such a society.

I don’t understand why this puzzles you. Many other people besides northern Europeans also have blue eyes (e.g., many Afghanis), blonde hair (e.g., many Italians) and/or pale skin (e.g., many Iranians and Turks). Such phenotypic characteristics are not markers of genetic “purity” or isolation or non-"mutt"ness.

Say what? You repeating the same nonsense doesn’t make it any more true. You fools are the ones perpetuating the myth that brain structure from which intelligence is manifested doesn’t have influence from genetics. Your lazy ad hominem attacks don’t help your case either.

Are skin, eye and hair colour important criteria for sorting species subsets or extended families or, to be blunt, race?

I never assumed disjointedness. I said different subsets of a set with members of significant variation are unlikely to have the same distributions of traits.

The rest of your post is irrelevant.

Are they or should they be? What are you meaning to ask? In the real world, phenotype is used to sort people into groups. That’s just how it is. Should societies or people behave in such a fashion? That’s a good question.

Cite? Where are any of us saying that genetics has no influence on intelligence?

If you are conceding that point where is your debate?

What do you mean by “variation”, and what do you mean by “distributions of traits”? I’m trying to understand how you are distinguishing between phenotypic and genetic characteristics, but you are not being at all clear about it.

More to the point of this thread, though, is the question “What relation do these socially sorted phenotypic groups have to distinct genetic populations?”

More scientific racists should read Nell Painter’s The History of White People, for an insight into just how incredibly recent the idea of an overarching European “white race” even is: your harrumphing Edwardian scientific racist of a hundred years ago would have been outraged to hear that he was part of the same race as an Irishman or an Italian.

There’s no conceding a point I never disputed.

My argument is that the evidence that black people are inherently inferior in intellect and certain creative abilities due to genetics is far, far weaker than the evidence against this assertion.

That’s what’s been discussed for pages and pages.

Is iiandyiii in or out?

“I tried to get out, but they keep pulling me back in.”
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There are other people in the thread who haven’t asserted their belief in inherent black intellectual inferiority; so far I’m fine with engaging them.

Exactly. Nobody’s denying that individual intelligence/mental ability appears to have a strong genetic component, as in smart parents generally have smart kids, etc.

But the point is that according to all available evidence, the influence of genes on intelligence/ability is a very complex mix of various genetic traits, and there is no valid reason at present to believe that such traits were or are more strongly selected for in some human populations than in others.

Add to that the facts that there is large individual variation in intelligence within all human populations, and that non-genetic heritability and other environmental factors also strongly influence intelligence levels, and you end up with the “race realist” hypotheses of genetic causes for measured intelligence differences among racial groups looking extremely flimsy and fishy.

No, but for halfwits they’re a handy shibboleth.

You do understand that IQ scores are significantly higher among whites and Asians than among others, and that thanks to their recessive traits, they are likely to have parents who have little to no ancestry that is not white (or Asian)? There’s something of a syllogism here, if you just stop refusing to see it.
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Yes, nobody is disputing that fact.

That makes no sense. Of course plenty of self-identified white people, for example, have significant amounts of non-white ancestry, even when they have stereotypically “white” physical traits. Where exactly are you drawing the line between “little to no” and “significant” ancestry? Can you give us a number on this, please, or at least a numerical range?

Not a logically valid syllogism, though. You’re attempting to argue essentially as follows:

  1. Individual intelligence appears according to all the available evidence to have a strong genetic component.

  2. Groups of racially white and (East/South) Asian people generally share “most” (although you shy away from defining “most”) of their genetic ancestry with other white and Asian people, respectively.

  3. Groups of racially white and Asian people tend to score higher on IQ tests than other racial groups.

Attempted conclusion. Therefore, the group IQ score differences are probably significantly due to genetic factors associated with these racial groups.

There are logical holes in that argument that you can drive a truck through, to wit:

Correlation isn’t causation. It’s not as though there are no group differences between whites/Asians and other groups except their genetic ones. Unless you can control for all the non-genetic causes of average differences between racial groups, your decision to attribute a particular difference to genetic rather than non-genetic causes is just blatant cherrypicking.

Dodging quantification. Many people who self-identify as black actually have more European ancestry than many people who self-identify as white. Especially in the US, there is a huge variation in the percentage of European ancestry found among people racially classified as black. If IQ scores were strongly dependent on race-linked genes, we would expect to find scores of black-identified testees reflecting their percentage of European ancestry. But AFAIK no such phenomenon has ever been found. (In fact, AFAICT it’s the other way around: children of recent African immigrants with much less European ancestry than most African Americans tend to do better on IQ tests.)

You are sweeping all of these inconvenient facts under the rug by clinging to very crudely delineated qualitative racial-group classifications and demanding that they be considered genetically meaningful without looking closely at the actual amounts of various genetic heritage.

Confusing heritability with genetic determination. As I pointed out to octopus with the above-linked cite, even the undeniable heritability of intelligence can involve a lot of non-genetically determined factors. You are mixing up different concepts and phenomena in an ill-informed sludge and then pouting that other people are “refusing to see” your obvious self-evident truth.

Yep, octopus was indeed going for the straw man argument, IOW just lying about what we are talking about. Octopus is hopelessly confusing heritability with genetic determination.
And that was a great post Kimstu.

You need to pick a lane. If you’re going to take the “correlation isn’t causation” position here, why don’t you also do it with “smart parents generally have smart kids”, at least as regards the genetic component?

I also have to say it’s funny to hear “correlation isn’t causation” trotted out by the same crowd that is so quick to embrace the notion that because black kids who are suspended from school are more likely to end up in prison ten years later, we should stop suspending them from school and that will help solve the problem. (Ignoring the very real possibility that the kids getting suspended possess an inherently higher level of criminality, which gets them suspended when they are minors and then gets them in prison when they are adults.) Basically, correlation isn’t causation when it might reflect poorly on black people; but it is causation when the result goes the other way. It’s so ridiculously transparent, this “reasoning”.

Which reminds me of another controversial Sam Harris position I thought I’d throw into the mix, since the race/IQ one is getting a bit stale. He has said many times that aside from a few notable cases where the police are clearly guilty of something heinous (like that guy who got shot in the back), most of the filmed encounters that result in black people getting shot by cops look to him like a case of people needing to “learn how to get arrested”. Thoughts?
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Indeed I do, as you’ll note from my being careful to say that intelligence appears to have a strong genetic component rather than claiming that it definitely does have one. That’s also relevant to the “difference between heritability and genetic determination” point.

I’m happy to acknowledge the plausibility of reasonable hypotheses about genetically determined traits influencing inheritance of intelligence at the parent-to-offspring level, even if they’re not definitively proven at this point. But my flexibility on that score doesn’t extend to letting you get away with constructing entire syllogistic arguments based on serious logical errors and gratuitous assumptions.

Now you seem to be blatantly confusing scientific analysis with social work. You do recognize that actual children dealing with behavioral issues aren’t lab rats that we can run controlled experiments on, right? When it comes to helping real live kids with policy decisions, we don’t have the luxury of going through rigorous empirical testing before we choose an approach. We have to try to work out what will be most beneficial based on common sense and compassion.

When it comes to academic investigation of the causes of racial-group testing differences that are dwarfed by within-group individual variation, though, we can and should be more rigorous in our methodology. We don’t have to put up with guesstimation and guessperiment in the hope of blundering into an effective solution. We can afford to simply say “We don’t know the answer to these questions yet, and we’re not going to pretend we have answers when we don’t.”

After all, even you acknowledge that we ought to be just dealing with individual kids’ learning needs as individuals without trying to force racial-group templates on them, right? In the discussion of IQ test scores and race, we have every reason to be scrupulous in not treating correlation as equivalent to causation, and no reason whatsoever to be sloppy about it.

My thoughts are that Sam Harris’s willingness to make an ass of himself shooting off his mouth on subjects he’s largely ignorant about does not constitute an obligation on my part to take his pronouncements seriously. I’ve got enough to do just fighting ignorance part-time right here on these boards.
(and thanks, GIGO. :))