**SlackerInc **thinks that white people have a genetic tendency to higher IQ than black people, because the ancestors of white people needed higher IQs to survive the harsh winters of the Mediterranean Basin, as opposed to black people who lived a life of low-IQ leisure in the entirely tropical climate of Africa. Are you sure you support him?
That was a good post rat avatar.
I have to add only that Murray and their ilk tell us that those failures are not the bulk of the book, and they are *misleadingly *right. But that is also what pseudo scientists love, use lots of good or iffy science (for the day) and then ignore the march of science and new evidence.
Too bad that Harris was not like Carl Sagan when he dealt with Velikowsky, back then Sagan also pointed out that Velikowsky was being criticized too hard, gave him a chance; and then after being fair, Sagan did proceed to cut Velikowsky down to size.
That was because Velikowsky’s science was still shitty even if Sagan said that everybody else should be fair.
Harris was OK when pointing at unfair treatment, but fails spectacularly by missing the context and falling for racists who ‘shore do talk purty’.
Please don’t take strawman characterizations of my position as anything more than bullshit.
Kimstu, in the spirit of our earlier discussion about scientific accuracy, I would be most curious to hear your take in what rat avatar posted regarding the science of IQ.
I stand by my characterization of your position. The real problem here is that your position is stupid.
My “take” at present is that despite repeated readings, I don’t understand the relation between the quote in his post and the link that accompanies it.
Same subject, another iteration.
TL;DR
Race is NOT a biological trait.
Science does NOT know how to measure or even quantify intelligence reliably.
Any effort to make any assumptions based on a mix of the two is easily dismissed as 100% bull shit until those underlying issues can be dealt with.
If you base a hypothesis on bull shit, you produce bull shit.
Okay, both these statements I understand and agree with.
I’m not quite sure in what way EE’s characterization of your position is a strawman, though. ISTM that you have hypothesized at various points both that the African group which left Africa to become the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians was more intelligent on average than the humans who stayed, and that living in northern regions selected more effectively for intelligence than living in Africa.
(I’m leaving out some of the really peculiar stuff like claims that chimp/human comparisons are analogous to those between various human populations and that Africans trafficked to the New World must have been a relatively low-IQ group “not clever enough to avoid capture”. :dubious: ) Several problematic issues stand out in these arguments, most of which have already been addressed by other posters:
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AFAICT, according to current theories of relatively recent African origin (dating back to about 70-120KYA) of all non-African humans, there is no putative group of African emigrants that gave rise to only so-called “high-IQ” racial groups. All the theories seem to conclude that the post-African ancestors of northern Europeans and East Asians were also the ancestors of some combination(s) of darker-skinned groups ranging from West/South/Southeast Asians to Inuit and Australians.
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If distance traversed and climate challenges are supposed to be the drivers of this hypothesized post-migration intelligence boost, then I don’t understand why we wouldn’t see the highest IQ among, say, the aforesaid Inuit and Australians. If “surviving a single cold winter” is supposed to be such a powerful selection mechanism for intelligence, then by that reasoning surviving multiple arctic winters should breed a nation of Einsteins. Likewise, the ancestors of Australians who had to figure out freaking seafaring, besides being the first humans to extend human habitation beyond the range of earlier H. erectus, ought to score pretty doggone high in IQ.
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Likewise, if distance traversed and climate challeges are supposed to be the drivers of this hypothesized post-migration intelligence boost, then I don’t see why the inhabitants of the relatively local and comfy Mediterranean region got such an almighty jump on their fellow Eurasians in the race to civilization. Up until a mere handful of centuries ago it was the dusky wheel-inventing city-building eclipse-observing overseas-trading alphabet-using imperialists of southern Europe and environs who were indisputably the developmentally advanced bunch, not the illiterate blond barbarians in the north.
Yeah, but what did those Mediterraneans ever really accomplish, really? Philosophy? Geometry? Pha! **SlackerInc **is the proud descendant of high-IQ northern Europeans, who developed such marvels as Angry Birds and the Cuckoo clock.
The harsh temperate zone winters have honed his people’s genius to a razor-sharp edge. The only higher-IQ group are the Asians, none of whom have had their genius blunted by living in some namby-pamby tropical zone.
Let’s unpack, for a second (which is all it deserves) this ridiculous fallacy that tropical living is so easy that all evolutionary effort re: sex selection is minimised, whereas harsh Boreal living with its seasons necessitates creative smarts to get any…
yeah, I guess this is some sort of hominin exceptionalism?
Because it seems, on the face of it, that it’s in the tropics that the most creativity and effort is put in, across the board, at the whole sex selection thing. Sure, Holarctic animals make a stab at it, but c’mon - the tropics are where animals really get jiggy with it.
That’s leaving aside the ignorance that thinks dense populations are less likely to drive evolutionary innovation.
Kimstu, I’m disappointed that you are signing off on rat avatar’s extreme “nurture” position (which, admittedly, is still pretty common among social scientists). Even the scientists who wrote in Vox, and certainly the guy in the New York Times, disavow that sort of “race has no biological basis” position.
And you guys just love your “sun-kissed Mediterranean” snark. But I’m afraid your victory lap there is just a wee bit premature. It’s not very scientific of you to overlook the fact that much of the time modern “Cro-Magnon” humans were in Europe coincided with the most recent “Ice Age” (scientists call the peak of it the Last Global Maximum, or LGM). They had just gotten Europe settled when it hit, and at its peak the glacial ice sheets extended all the way to southern Hungary, and what is now Athens had colder winters than Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki do nowadays.
As a result, the total population of Cro-Magnons in Europe plummeted during the LGM, only to rebound after the glaciers receded and the climate warmed. And much of that smaller population huddling down by the Mediterranean was composed of people migrating from the north, as the ice sheets pushed them south. So in point of fact, the civilizational events of the past 3,000 years are not at all counterevidence for my hypothesis, which is a narrative about the past 40,000 years.
BTW, speaking of strawmen: what’s with implying that I’ve said Australian aborigines or Native Americans are low IQ? I don’t recall this at all and would appreciate a cite if you’re going to impute this to me. In fact, Australia boasts cave paintings that predate by tens of thousands of years any in Africa…as does Europe: Cave painting - Wikipedia
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No, they fucking don’tcall it that, please stop just hastily Wiki-wanking and then only half-remembering what you read. It’s embarrassing for you, you trying to talk the language of science and failing so pathetically.
I know I promised not to make fun of him anymore, but wow: gloating over catching me in a typo? Sad sight. Hard to watch an implosion like that, really.
I hardly think “global” is an obvious typo of “glacial”. I for one was under the impression that you were indeed referring to something other than the Last Glacial Maximum.
:rolleyes: Whatever. I had literally just looked at the term written correctly less than five seconds before I typed that in and simply substituted a different but phonetically similar word without being conscious of it. You think I wasn’t aware that it was about glaciation even though I mentioned that in the next sentence? You are desperately grasping at straws here. How about you try to come up with an actual argument instead?
Ah…there is your problem, you are using 18th century science books for your claim, how about updating your knowledge and quit using Hitlers bible and discredited Nordic Theory. Science knows now that claim was complete bullshit.
Europeans light skin, lactose tolerance and the MAJORITY of their DNA is due to mass migrations and replacements of the population well within the metal era (3,000-6,000 BCE).
In fact almost everything you assume (except blue eyes) is European is from very recent genetic additions to Europe and not some wishful thinking about a “Cro-Magnons” dream.
In fact, the populations that MOST resemble early hunter gatherers, but are still greatly changed by outside DNA have consistently been though of as non-European (Finn’s and other inferior ‘alpine’ stock).
You are almost certainly more closely related to the average Kenyan than Cro-Magnons, your beliefs are the Genetic equivalent of a flat-earth (that they were both mostly BS to begin with)
What scares you about accepting the modern data that we have? Is it that you won’t feel special? Is it that your great-great-great*-grandma was a dark skinned Euro who laid down with some light skinned Asian or a few times over or?
Because your world view doesn’t match with the best and most recent data we have. And I am curious on why this is so difficult to accept. As a (mostly) Karalian Finn it doesn’t bother me at all…but then again we only were accepted into the “White European” club when it became convenient for political reasons.
How do you presume to know what I thought? I’m bored enough of this thread that I couldn’t be bothered to see if there was something called the Last Global Maximum that was different from the Last Glacial Maximum. I certainly wasn’t going to correct you without looking for something called the Last Global Maximum, and that would take even longer than I just took typing this response because it’s hard to prove a negative.
I could add pages of this but here are a few cites that will be ignored. But no you aren’t primarily descendant from Cro-Mags.
Norwegians are about 50% Yamna
Ancient North Eurasian ancestry is the smallest component everywhere in Europe, never more than 20 percent.
The original mesolithic hunter-gatherers were dark skinned and blue eyed.
Lactose tolerance and greater height came with the Yamna people. (previous link)
Ancient European DNA dropped from 45,000 BP to 7,000 BP, from around 3–6% to 2%
Note that if you are European you have about as much Neanderthal DNA as Cro-Mag.
TL;DR, the Nordic Theory of “race” is Bull.
I’ve listened through the whole podcast now and I agree they talked past each other a lot. Despite that, it was still productive in that they each managed to get their points of view out there. I think your summary of their views is close to my own, but I have some important objections to the way you worded Sam’s positions.
First, I don’t think Sam has endorsed any of Murray’s books, papers, or policy prescriptions outside of the one chapter on race and IQ in the Bell Curve that has gotten Murray in so much trouble. I don’t think Sam would endorse much of Murray’s other work because Murray is broadly conservative and Sam is broadly liberal. In the podcast with Klein, Klein assumes Sam is familiar with the body of Murray’s work, and Sam corrects him by stating that he has only read one other book of Murray’s besides the Bell Curve.
So that is one point where Klein and Sam talked past one another. Klein is conflating the whole argument with Murray’s conservative body of work, while Sam is focused just on the race/IQ question. In my view, Klein made no further headway convincing Sam or anybody else that Sam was wrong to characterize Murray’s view on that particular point as mainstream. In fact I don’t see where Klein tried very hard to do so. If Klein wants to oppose Murray’s conservative policy views, he should argue with Murray, not Sam.
Second, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Sam or Murray are extrapolating genetic differences without considering sociology and history. Sociology and history are already incorporated in the environmental part of the equation, which Murray and just about everybody else acknowledge constitutes a substantial component of the IQ gap. Murray makes arguments that genetics also play an important part, but concludes that the science is too weak to even make a quantitative estimate as to what the relative percentages are. That’s not a controversial statement.
Klein hammered on the point of racist history a lot, just as Turkheimer et. al. hammered on it in the Vox article. I’m at a loss to understand why, because what insight does that give toward understanding the non-sociological, non-environmental components of the IQ gap, assuming there are any? He seems to think that Sam has never understood or considered the negative effect decades of racism might have on test takers, which is a pretty condescending position to take. If Sam has the same understanding that I have, than he has largely ignored all the invective against racial injustice as pointless repetition of one of the starting assumptions that everyone already understands and factors in from the outset. This is another point where they were just talking past one another.
The revelation I picked up from Klein’s focus on the history rather than the science is that Klein may really think racism and bias are the core issues that explain not just the environmental hypothesis, but also the fact that anyone would give credence to the genetic hypothesis. In other words, he seems to be starting from the intuition that racial bias is the whole answer and working backward from there. That’s not scientific.
I am not sure what scientific method you are referencing, but typically If the null hypothesis is supported, nothing unusual is going on; the factor under investigation has no explanatory power.
As it is generally accepted that the concept of race is a social construct, and not a biological trait, and as there is a known issue of bias in mental testing it is completely scientific to require any proposed genetic component to prove that link before considering a claim that is based on that discredited claim.
In reality the null hypothesis is the only hypothesis actually being tested in most forms of the scientific method, this is what most people would call “scientific”.
The alternative hypothesis that there is some race based component is absurd to test if you can’t even demonstrate that the null (or baseline) hypothesis doesn’t adequately account for the observed data.
Just as we can ignore the “Teach the Controversy” Discovery Institute ID campaign, we can ignore the BS race based argument until someone can show that there is a biological basis for race.
Pandering to dogma, which is what one is doing when someone give credence to the bell curve theory, which pre-supposes that race is a biological trait without evidence is far less scientific than expecting people who make claims to actually prove their claims.
Cro-Magnon isn’t actually a scientific term. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
That might be nitpicking a bit but since you used it in a sentence where you criticize other people twice for not being scientific about it, I thought I should point that out. Cro-Magnon is just a non-scientific term for all ice-age inhabitants of Europe. Which was much more genetically divided at the time than it is today.
There were at least four distinct genetic groups that we are aware of, none of which corresponds to the non-African understanding of races we have today. I think the group you are referring to were the Western Hunter-Gatherers. Which were black. African-type black.