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

[rat_avatar]

@SlackerInc

How about this, which doesn’t require any romantic notions of “pure” “Nordicism”:

If your ancestors pushed out from the ancestral home of humanity, into an inhospitable environment (recall that some migrations died out), and kept the fire burning for tens of thousands of years through a harsh ice age, you are guaranteed to have nothing but resilient, adaptable ancestors in your lineage. This doesn’t have to be about evolutionary change over that time so much as selecting for expeditionary groups that started off with good genes.

If all your ancestors stayed in the cradle of humanity, your existence might be simply chance (that diverse genome ping-ponged its way through random mixing down to you). Or your ancestors may have strong sperm that outcompete other men’s sperm, and the women come to puberty earlier and produce more offspring over their lifetime. Or the men may better physically dominate other men in a dense, extant population.

BTW, have you ever notice how “invasive species” tend to be more evolutionarily fit than the ones who have been in one ecological niche throughout their evolutionary history?

How does that fit in with multiple replacement and migration events?

Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?

And have you ever done the math on how in-bread we are? Do you realize that if you have European ancestry that you are a DIRECT descendant of any European alive in around 900AD who has a living descendant?

The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe

Lets say you even trace your family tree back to Charlemagne 42 generations ago that he is just one of 4,398,046,511,104 direct ancestors at that level? Of course there weren’t 4 trillion people on the earth back then, so our family trees look more like family wreaths.

What protects against DNA washout over even smaller timelines.

And how do you account for how there is more genetic diversity in Siberia than in all of Europe? Or how humans in general are really surprising due to their lack of genetic diversity?

Or how Chimps show much greater genetic diversity than humans. Groups of chimpanzees within central Africa are more different genetically than humans living on different continents.
Or how even conditions like Sickle cell anemia which people assume are divided across racial boundaries are not.
As you are the one who is maintaining the position that this categorization is possible, or that there was some form of evolution leading to definable traits related to race can you provide cites to support this position that aren’t from a discredited book that predates genetic testing?

This is why terms like “cline” or “a gradation in one or more characteristics within a species or other taxon, especially between different populations.” are used in actual science, and broad culturally insensitive terms that do not match up with the data like with the concept of race are not. When traits do map to populations or sub-populations it is never as simplistic as a racial category or with anything that really resembles a hard boundary.

Maybe you think that there is more diversity in the human genome than there really is?

Provide some cites, argue your case, make some points please.

[SlackerInc]

Dictionary.com defines “evolutionary fitness” as “The probability that the line of descent from an individual with a specific trait will not die out.”. If you don’t think kudzu is evolutionarily fit by this definition, I don’t know what to tell you. The same goes for people with Caucasian and especially East Asian lines of descent, which have far outpaced those of their ancestral cousins who stayed behind in Africa.

BTW, how is it that people of European ancestry are the only ones in the world to have significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA, but some of you want to deny that they are a distinct genetic population? C’mon.

Also, don’t think I haven’t noted with satisfaction how quickly the “sun-kissed Mediterranean” jibe got put on ice as soon as I reminded you about that pesky ice age that took up most of the span that anatomically modern humans have been in Europe. You guys are too churlish to openly acknowledge when I score a point on you, but you do it very well in implicit terms. (This includes not only chastened or surly silence, but also nitpicking about termiunology as a way to change the subject or preserve some fraction of a point for yourselves.)

[SlackerInc]

Rat avatar, I’m not going to rehash stuff I’ve said at length before. Go back and read all my posts in this thread and then come at me. (Not the whole giant thread, just my posts.). I have been singing louder than anyone the story of how little genetic diversity there is in the populations that left Africa. That’s what allows them to be distinct (Steven Pinker has called races “large, inbred extended families”), and it’s why I consider whites a legit race but blacks to not be one in the same sense, as they are far too diverse genetically.

If you’ll go back and read my posts, you’ll also see how I dismiss this canard about “bright boundaries” between races/populations.

[SlackerInc]

Now let’s see who is first to crow over my typo “termiunology” (what I get for posting on my phone without my glasses on). Yup, you got me! :rolleyes:

[rat_avatar]

@SlackerInc

Rat avatar, I’m not going to rehash stuff I’ve said at length before. Go back and read all my posts in this thread and then come at me. (Not the whole giant thread, just my posts.). I have been singing louder than anyone the story of how little genetic diversity there is in the populations that left Africa. That’s what allows them to be distinct (Steven Pinker has called races “large, inbred extended families”), and it’s why I consider whites a legit race but blacks to not be one in the same sense, as they are far too diverse genetically.

If you’ll go back and read my posts, you’ll also see how I dismiss this canard about “bright boundaries” between races/populations.

You are missing what I am saying here.

Almost all human genetic variation is relatively insignificant biologically; that is, it has no adaptive significance.

The fact that you think “White” is a valid category demonstrates that this point wasn’t addressed with previous posts.

You are aware that “White” as a category, didn’t even exist until Bacon’s Rebellion? And that it was mostly created to prevent the under classes from uniting in power against the monied elites?

How about you provide a definition of what “white” even is in your mind, because it has never had a hard definition.

In fact my paternal grandfather was blocked from applying for citizenship when he first came to this country from Finland, as they tried to apply the Chinese Exclusion Act to Finns until a court case forced the governments hand.

In fact most of the anti-immigration legislation of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was targeted at Italian, Eastern-European and Irish immigrants who weren’t considered “white” at the time. Many of those people only became “white” due to the cold war and desires to unify the country against communism int he 1950s.

What it seems like you are doing, is ignoring the fact that the Africa example shows where the model doesn’t work, and you are conceding that but trying to maintain the same flawed logic to apply to a population that is just as poorly defined under a race.

But if such a definition does exist in your mind, please share it but I am willing to bet that I can give examples that will have you carving out more and more exceptions to try and maintain your pre-decided idea of what white is.

[rat_avatar]

SlackerInc,

You may also want to search for “regression toward the mean”.

Having two parents with a higher IQ don’t mean that they will have children that are as smart as they are or smarter. In fact, depending on the type of trait; parents at the extreams are more likely to have a child that is closer to the mean.

Of course, because like the racial categories, no where through this thread did anyone actually seem to point to genetic markers that indicate IQ. I provided a cite that listed some but for the most part they have eluded detection so far if they do exist. The markers from my site are way to far down in the the noise to have any real significant impact.

Outside of markers that are related to cognitive deficits I am having a hard time finding anything that could even be used as a specific marker that isn’t related to environment.

In fact some of your earlier posts directly contradict you claim the idea that there is a significant genetic cause, like the adoption story.

As no one on the hereditists side seems willing to offer a concrete definition of intelligence or a test for it. And is also so far not willing to provide a concrete criteria for what qualifies as a race the entire claim is unfalsifiable.

As the burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others; I would appreciate some workable definitions.

As you have invoked the claim of others being “unscientific”, if you are unwilling to offer these cites or definitions that would be required to move to a testable claim, will you concede that your claims are also unscientific?

Unfortunately it is a human cognitive bias to find patterns where they don’t exist in stereotypes, but that is what the scientific method is meant to avoid.

So far it appears, as I claimed before, to just be a rehashing of the Discovery Institutes “Teach the controversy” argument, which is not a valid scientific model.

[rat_avatar]

@SlackerInc

BTW, how is it that people of European ancestry are the only ones in the world to have significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA, but some of you want to deny that they are a distinct genetic population? C’mon.

Native American people carry both Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA, and that they carry more than Europeans.

East Asians have 20% more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, probably due to a second encounter

What is the basis for your claim? At least one Neanderthal admixture event happened at some point with a common ancestor of the out of Africa migration that ended up being the most successful.

But there are lots of reasons that could have resulted in that outcome that have nothing to do at all with that admixture. It could have been chance, or the weather conditions for those migrants etc…

This is where you are being unscientific and assuming that correlation equals causation.

[Evil_Economist]

@SlackerInc

Also, don’t think I haven’t noted with satisfaction how quickly the “sun-kissed Mediterranean” jibe got put on ice as soon as I reminded you about that pesky ice age that took up most of the span that anatomically modern humans have been in Europe. You guys are too churlish to openly acknowledge when I score a point on you, but you do it very well in implicit terms. (This includes not only chastened or surly silence, but also nitpicking about termiunology as a way to change the subject or preserve some fraction of a point for yourselves.)

Wait, you think you “scored a point”? Hahahahaha.

Let me remind you, here’s the actual argument you made, in all its stupid glory:

@SlackerInc

the people who left Africa were a self-selected group that already possessed higher than average IQ before they left, before they became “white” or “Asian”?

and here it is again:

@SlackerInc

It’s not hard to imagine that a group intrepid enough to push that far away from home would be self-selected for intelligence

Now, how the fuck would the existence of an ice age in any way support your stupid fucking argument?

Also, when answering the above question, be sure to address the fact that migrations out of Africa occurred *between *ice ages.

[GIGObuster]

@nachtmusick

An article by David Reich (Harvard geneticist) in the NY Times set off the current round of bickering over the Murray/Harris podcast. Reich argues that there is a biological basis for race and that the idea that race has no biological meaning has become an orthodoxy on the left, but isn’t supported by current genetic science.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

I agree with rat avatar, David Reich is tone deaf, and the response from other researchers points to what I noticed before.

Opinion: How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics

I think that Reich and some researchers are also using a very wide brush that ignores that while there may be genetic differences regarding intelligence among the human race they are not reason enough to defend racism, and many of the ones he appears to criticise are mostly deniers in the popular press; but when I check issues like climate change or planetary disasters, it is clear to me that that is par for the course and Reich looks very naive there. However, most researchers are not like Reich is worrying about, and most of the posters here warning others about Murray and their ilk are also not like that.

And before some other dunderhead tries to use that opinion from David Reich in an attempt to make Murray and Sam look better, it has to be noted that Murray is also in the David Reich list of shitty racists:

@David Reich

consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.

One of Mr. Wade’s key sources, for example, is the anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has asserted that people of sub-Saharan African ancestry have no propensity to work when they don’t have to because, he claims, they did not go through the type of natural selection for hard work in the last thousands of years that some Eurasians did. There is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement. Indeed, as 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.

Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.

So where was Murray there? You may ask? Not hard to be added to his list of ignorant racists because as I noticed already, and orcenio pointed out back in post #406, Murray made sure to add himself to the David Reich’s shit list of racists by constantly defending birds of a feather like Nicholas Wade:

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20170108&postcount=406

@orcenio

Also check out my post on how Wade’s racist book was received by proponents for racialism. It includes a humourous quote from…Charles Murray, who (as always) couldn’t have been more wrong.

@orcenio

Also Wade did get some positive reviews, but mostly they came from White Nationalists and Charles Murray.

@Charles Murray

It is hard to convey how rich this book is. It could be the textbook for a semester’s college course on human evolution, systematically surveying as it does the basics of genetics, evolutionary psychology, Homo sapiens’s diaspora and the recent discoveries about the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred since then. The book is a delight to read—conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven’t seen for a few decades.

Wade’s racialism wasn’t celebrated by scientists, but thoroughly debunked. Wade, of course, did what racialists always do…Deny, ignore, and wholesale dismiss all of the scientists while claiming persecution and conspiracy.

[rat_avatar]

Posting this out there, because people tend to conflate evolution with natural selection, while ignoring genetic drift, including the founder effect I referenced before.

Genetic drift, bottleneck effect and founder effect | Biology | Khan Academy

I am to lazy to type it out on here or try to do diagrams and math on the dope, but if any reader thinks evolution is purely driven by merit or advantages it will be well worth your time to watch this video.

[MrDibble]

@SlackerInc

If your ancestors pushed out from the ancestral home of humanity, into an inhospitable environment (recall that some migrations died out), and kept the fire burning for tens of thousands of years through a harsh ice age, you are guaranteed to have nothing but resilient, adaptable ancestors in your lineage.

Yeah, those Neanderthals, soooooo adaptable. All those millennia of living on the fringes of cold glacial Europe, made them *so *resilient and adaptable. They totally outcompeted the weak, uncreative tropical sapiens who came against them…

What a fucking ignorant idiot about evolution you are.

[Grim_Render]

@SlackerInc

How about this, which doesn’t require any romantic notions of “pure” “Nordicism”:

If your ancestors pushed out from the ancestral home of humanity, into an inhospitable environment (recall that some migrations died out), and kept the fire burning for tens of thousands of years through a harsh ice age, you are guaranteed to have nothing but resilient, adaptable ancestors in your lineage. This doesn’t have to be about evolutionary change over that time so much as selecting for expeditionary groups that started off with good genes.

If all your ancestors stayed in the cradle of humanity, your existence might be simply chance (that diverse genome ping-ponged its way through random mixing down to you). Or your ancestors may have strong sperm that outcompete other men’s sperm, and the women come to puberty earlier and produce more offspring over their lifetime. Or the men may better physically dominate other men in a dense, extant population.

BTW, have you ever notice how “invasive species” tend to be more evolutionarily fit than the ones who have been in one ecological niche throughout their evolutionary history?

If this theory was correct, we’d expect to see better genes in Patagonia and Greenland than elsewhere. Because those genes would have gone though the most generations of adapting to new environments or surviving in harsh ones. In practice we don’t see that, so no.

In general, human expansion was so slow that there were little adapting to new environments. They normally did all the intermediate environments at a very slow pace. Leaps to totally new ones would be rare occurrences

We know that there can be some genetic clustering at the wavefront of expansions. See Cane Toad legs for example. But we also see that this only applies at the wavefront. It reverts to normal as soon as the environment normalizes.

In other words, if that theory was correct and the edge of human expansion did select for adaptability, once the edge is past and people settle down into their environment for the next forty thousand years, adaptability loses out to strong sperm and dominant physiques in short order.

Also, Africa itself has a number of different environments, which our ancestors pushed into against hominid resistance.

[SlackerInc]

@rat_avatar

In fact some of your earlier posts directly contradict you claim the idea that there is a significant genetic cause, like the adoption story.

What do you mean? What posts of mine does this refer to?

I must say, you and GIGO are making me rethink my intention to post on Francophone sites to sharpen my French. It surely would be beneficial to me, but I am not sure I should subject them to the headache.

@Evil_Economist

Now, how the fuck would the existence of an ice age in any way support your stupid fucking argument?

1. It negates the “sun-kissed Mediterranean” snark, was my main point.
2. Those who came before the ice age and settled up north migrated to the (now not so sun-kissed) Mediterranean to wait out the glacial period. The numbers were much smaller, representing those most adaptable to cold winters.
3. It puts that self-selected intelligence to the test. Like the anthropic principle, they would otherwise be an archaeological curiosity, nothing more.

@GIGObuster

while there may be genetic differences regarding intelligence among the human race they are not reason enough to defend racism

Whoa, you moved those goalposts so far, they’re in a different stadium!

@rat_avatar

Posting this out there, because people tend to conflate evolution with natural selection, while ignoring genetic drift, including the founder effect I referenced before.

https://youtu.be/IRTn0iNkAHI
I am to lazy to type it out on here or try to do diagrams and math on the dope, but if any reader thinks evolution is purely driven by merit or advantages it will be well worth your time to watch this video.

Ahem. This was me, yesterday, responding directly to you:

@SlackerInc

If all your ancestors stayed in the cradle of humanity, your existence might be simply chance (that diverse genome ping-ponged its way through random mixing down to you).

:dubious:

@Grim_Render

In other words, if that theory was correct and the edge of human expansion did select for adaptability, once the edge is past and people settle down into their environment for the next forty thousand years, adaptability loses out to strong sperm and dominant physiques in short order.

You clearly know your shit. Respect. But it’s only been about one-third that long (about 13,000 years) since the warming of the Late Glacial Interstadial, when Europe began to be repopulated. So the time between that “edge” and that of Ötzi (Ötzi - Wikipedia) and his sophisticated technology—designed to adapt him to a wintry climate—was only about 7,000 years.

Additionally, even taking your point, if one population is honed by adaptability on the “edge” but then “loses out to strong sperm and dominant physiques in short order”, but another population has been selecting for the latter the whole time, couldn’t there still be differences preserved, even if they are not as stark as they may have been at the “edge” time?

Also, what do you think about this:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.12437

Present‐day genetic, phenotypical and linguistic differences are largely related to discontinuity of and impeded migration between human source populations during glacial periods, rather than simply geographical distance, and in the post‐glacial period there has not been enough time for displacements and admixture of human populations to completely blur these differences.

[andros]

Ho! Ha ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!

[Mijin]

Can’t believe this whole “whites get their smarts from harsh Europe climate” / “whites are derived from the smart population that left Africa” has gone on for so many pages.

Even if I thought it was the most wonderful hypothesis I ever heard, even if there hadn’t been all that pesky counter-evidence to handwave, there’s no evidence for the hypothesis, and no predictions it makes.
So it’s a “just so” story with no actual relevance to the discussion.

What do you want to happen, SlackerInc? Should we accept your hypothesis as true, even though at this time it’s entirely baseless?

@SlackerInc

You guys wield skin color like it’s a cross against a vampire. I have no issue there, sorry. (I have known several very dark-skinned South Asian people who were exceedingly intelligent.)

I think this particular quote is quite telling.

Meeting “several” smart south Asians was enough to disavow you of the notion of dark skin = teh stupid.
Can I infer from that you’ve never met smart people with recent African ancestry? Do you think they don’t exist?
If not, why the inconsistency?

[SlackerInc]

You cannot so infer. A bell curve has tails in both directions, after all.

ETA: I have never OTOH met a South Asian person who was not at least fairly intelligent. But I have not been to South Asia, and I’m sure such people can be found there, outside the self-selected group that is capable of emigration.

[dropzone]

@SlackerInc

You guys wield skin color like it’s a cross against a vampire. I have no issue there, sorry. (I have known several very dark-skinned South Asian people who were exceedingly intelligent.)

Ah, the classic “Some of my best friends are _______” defense. :rolleyes:

[SlackerInc]

@dropzone

Ah, the classic “Some of my best friends are _______” defense. :rolleyes:

Sam Harris has pointed out, in justifiable exasperation, that this is in fact a reasonable defense. The fact that it’s a cliched meme to mock the line does not change this fact. You don’t get to make something true just because a lot of people say it.

[Mijin]

@SlackerInc

You cannot so infer. A bell curve has tails in both directions, after all.

ETA: I have never OTOH met a South Asian person who was not at least fairly intelligent. But I have not been to South Asia, and I’m sure such people can be found there, outside the self-selected group that is capable of emigration.

But don’t you appreciate the inconsistency there?
So meeting “several” smart south Asians is significant in your view, even if it’s a selected group, yet if I point out n smart Africans they can be trivially handwaved.

The second thing is, actually the bell curve is not so trivial if your hypothesis were correct. You are suggesting the existence of an intelligence trait which either evolved in Africa and then disproportionately left, or evolved outside of Africa (you’re not consistent on which).
Well, if that’s true, what I would not expect to see is the same kind of distribution of intelligence, just left-shifted a tinge. I would expect that trait to be rare to nonexistent across most populations in Africa, so whatever abilities this trait is supposed to imbue, even if it’s just being good at IQ tests, should just not occur in Africa.

If you disagree with this logic, what exactly does your hypothesis predict?

[rat_avatar]

@SlackerInc

What do you mean? What posts of mine does this refer to?

I must say, you and GIGO are making me rethink my intention to post on Francophone sites to sharpen my French. It surely would be beneficial to me, but I am not sure I should subject them to the headache.

1. It negates the “sun-kissed Mediterranean” snark, was my main point.
2. Those who came before the ice age and settled up north migrated to the (now not so sun-kissed) Mediterranean to wait out the glacial period. The numbers were much smaller, representing those most adaptable to cold winters.
3. It puts that self-selected intelligence to the test. Like the anthropic principle, they would otherwise be an archaeological curiosity, nothing more.

Whoa, you moved those goalposts so far, they’re in a different stadium!

Ahem. This was me, yesterday, responding directly to you:

:dubious:

You clearly know your shit. Respect. But it’s only been about one-third that long (about 13,000 years) since the warming of the Late Glacial Interstadial, when Europe began to be repopulated. So the time between that “edge” and that of Ötzi (Ötzi - Wikipedia) and his sophisticated technology—designed to adapt him to a wintry climate—was only about 7,000 years.

Additionally, even taking your point, if one population is honed by adaptability on the “edge” but then “loses out to strong sperm and dominant physiques in short order”, but another population has been selecting for the latter the whole time, couldn’t there still be differences preserved, even if they are not as stark as they may have been at the “edge” time?

Also, what do you think about this:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.12437

1. Ötzi’s maternal line died out, which does nothing to justify the “superiority” of this “white” race you can’t even define.
2. Ötzi’s Swedish Farmers paternal line wasn’t very related to the the pre-Ice Age Hunter Gatherers, you are doing the equivalent of calling the average current day American a “Native American”
3. Ötzi’s time was way after the metals era and most of hist genetic material is from the middle east and near Asia.
4. "loses out to strong sperm and dominant physiques in short order” means you still don’t get what genetic drift is, or how evolution works.
5. You need to google “Russell’s teapot” related to your full NON-SCIENTIFIC non-substantiated bigioted and racist claims like “couldn’t there still be differences preserved, even if they are not as stark as they may have been at the “edge” time”
   In 1492 a population migration and replacement event started to happen in the Americas, your argument is basically claiming that, Due to the hardship they had to endure (which was the same as Europe) that Native Americans like like Elizabeth Warren are more intelligent than the rest of the world.

Heck it isn’t even that fair, because she is more genetically related to Native Americans than Ötzi was to the Co-Mags.

Of course because your position is not based on fact or data you will just once again handwave away the impacts of the numerous migrations into Europe to protect an idea of white supremacy (which thinking whites are smarter due to some super special env challenge is btw)

But me and the rest of the 579 million “Native Americans” who live in North America by your logic look forward to yet another response which ignores the problems with your claims.