New study answers the black/white athletic performance difference question - It's just physics

Great Debates
81

Let’s stop there for a second. The issues of public policy that you wish to promote in the first sentence do not require accepting or not accepting your beliefs on the all importance of gene prevalences that you espouse in the second. A discussion of balancing the principals of equal opportunity and a belief that society benefits by having institutions with diverse memberships can be had without evoking genes; can be had more rationally IMHO. And if one believes that diversity is a goal that institutions may consider having, then one can also have a reasoned discussion about whether or not race-based affirmative action set-asides are either an effective or fair means of achieving that goal, also without needlessly poisoning the discussion with talk of genetic predispositions.

And I am afraid that you may be (accidentally perhaps) implying something in this next bit that only poisons any reasonable discussion further:

In this context it is hard to read this as anything other than implying that the group outcome of having the top (or less than the top) college grades from the most competitive institutions and the highest test scores must be only caused by genetics as well.

No. I’d prefer to leave it that the loose sociocultural group labelled as “Black” contains an extremely wide genetic diversity. That diversity includes a subgroup with the genes for speed, some of whom also have the opportunity and cultural environment to develop that gift. For any outcome that is highly dependent on genetic potential and for which a fair amount of genetic variability exists, the very top performers will come from those who are both members of the very particular subgroup with the genetic potential, and who have the opportunity and culture that drives superior performance. Both play roles.

Can we agree to that statement?

And here we plain disagree. The response depends on whether or not the system is in fact “rigged” - or perhaps more precisely phrased, systematically biased in some way, even inadvertently. And that is true whether group A has some genetic advantage or not, or has some advantage of culture or not.

Let us illustrate this in spirit of your Godwinization: Jews are over-represented among Nobel Prize winners. Do you really think that Joe Nazi’s hate will be soothed by a claim that Jews have genes that make them smarter as a group? Any more than by an explanation that evokes a cultural heritage and traditions influenced by historically being systematically denied opportunities to succeed in fields that did not involve trading in ideas?

Joe Nazi will hate in either case. By your way of thinking he might say that Jews need to be discriminated against in institutions of higher learning “to drive diversity and a sense of social justice. Without that, gene prevalence differences among races will continue to drive disparate outcomes.” Oh especially in both of our profession of medicine. Which was of course what was the case in America back in the 20’s through the 50’s.

Again, if you’d like to discuss how best to balance the principals of equal opportunity and diversity as a goal, have at it. Evoking genes as the cause for all disparate outcomes, or at least as the default explanation to be accepted barring proof to the contrary, will , I can promise you, make such a conversation die a painful death in its tracks.

82

Most everyone who has debated against CP has learned that this is his MO. It’s not really hard to spot.

83

While I’m not experienced with this forum, or CP, I find that tactic to be rampant among many hereditarians/racialists in this discourse. (I’ve been noticing it with him, too, such as his allusion to “significant genetic differences” among “SIRE cohorts”.)

Significant they may be, but how deep-seated? CP seems to think everything is genetic except for environments that only hold things back.

The thinking often goes like this- if you accept humans aren’t blank slates, that intelligence and personality are inherited to a degree, and that those traits likewise aren’t ultra malleable, then the other extreme is true- hereditarianism/racialism is the way to go, and anything contrary is blank slatism that acts like human evolution stopped at the neck.

No, I haven’t seen it said exactly like that, obviously- but those sentiments are common enough that that’s basically how it goes.

84

The question of significance indeed should be what is more important, especially if CP is trying to argue for public policy changes.

If it comes out that African Americans as a group are less likely than whites to possess some mysterious combination of genes associated with intelligence, how likely is it that this difference is all that significant? Because if it were hugely signficant, odds are we wouldn’t be in the year 2010 still arguing about this. If anything, neuroscientists would have noticed something off a long time ago, especially with the advent of diagnostic imaging. And if the difference were vast enough to be as passionate about it as CP seems, I and the other black dopers on this board would probably be too illiterate to post here, there would be very few academically accomplished black people, and there would no black middle class. Most of us would be sitting at the computer, scratching our heads, trying to figure out how to make the pretty lights on the screen appear.

So given that, what percentage of underperformance that is attributable to DNA would actually justify shifting resources away from environmental-targeted interventions and placing them on other efforts? What percentage warrants ignoring or minimizing the role that historical circumstances, the social environment, SES, and cultural values plays on where people end up in life, and instead emphasizing genes?

If a given child is found to have stunted growth and it’s determined that 5% of this stuntedness was solely due to genetics and 95% was due to the environment, practically speaking, how are we going to respond to this case any differently than a child whose stuntedness is 100% attributable to the environment? From a public policy standpoint, why should we give a fuck about this 5% contribution from genes, when a whopping 95% comes from things that we have a reasonable chance of addressing?

85

If it was that hugely significant, then african-americans would have IQ’s probably below 40. As it stands from measurements in the 1980’s- the average IQ of african-americans- and specifically those descended from the original slave populations, not those of carribean or recent african immigrant extraction- average closely around 85. That is indeed a significant difference, and even if it was somehow 40 or less- what would it really matter if that score wasn’t so deep-seated? Surely it would take longer to close a gap of 15 points, but what would matter is the malleability, immutability, and speed of change of that differential.

I don’t know how to address those nuances offhand. People like CP, who seemingly leans towards the hereditarian/racialist side of things, believes these differences are largely immutable- they can’t be significantly altered to any appreciable degree, and even if so, can only be done at great cost- a sort of cost that would do virtually nothing to invalidate their beliefs, and would basically be saying the only way to alter IQ’s even appreciably is by some very extreme environmental influences that fall far outside of the general range of environmental influences. IQ could be raised or lowered, but only in a manner that’s consistent with their views of malleability. Of course, CP might just think everything is utterly genetic sans environmental influences that outright depress things.

The existence of any environmental component warrants attention in that area, obviously. But what really, really matters are the trends and implications outlined above.

And I certainly do not believe those things, and nor do I believe the general psychological community- even those involved with psychometrics and behavior genetics- do so.

These are some pretty vague generalizations, and really don’t do much to capture these kinds of ranges. See pages 80-81 of this for a proper detailing: The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy - Mark Snyderman, Stanley Rothman - Google Books

The second paragraph on page 80 is especially illuminating. CP should read it too.

But I see what you’re saying overall, and I agree.

86

Also, “you with the face”, if any intellectual difference is known to have genes involved by way of examinations of social science data, heritability, general quantitative genetics etc. then certainly genes underpinning that trait, in a genetic analysis, would be found. But the existence of a genetic difference says little about it’s heritability, malleability, immutability etc.

87

Sure, but what the egalitarians don’t want to mention is that the “top performers” occur at every level wherever a performance curve is shifted to the right as a whole. Suppose, for instance, I’m looking at two cohorts for the skillset of sprinting. Yes, the ninth decile is over-represented for blacks, but so is the first decile. It’s not as if any average genetic differences are expressed in a way that only a handful of the populations are affected, and everyone else is bouncing around in a broad middle. The genetically-advantaged broad middle is not winning events at the top level of competition but it is still disproportionately winning events at the middling levels. The effect of this is that disparately successful performance is seen across the board for the two groups.

As to when to split and when to lump–I’m not particularly interested in that debate. I’ve said time and again, if you lump, then observed differences are genetic after accounting for nurturing. It’s that simple. Egalitarians never accept that nurturing has been normalized, and parade an endless laundry list to pretend that it cannot be reasonably accounted for.

And yet the donkey brays. In the words of Kenan Malik’s essay above with regard to Olympic sprinting, “…whoever it is, of one thing we can be certain: he will be black…”

Now Malik is a splitter, as you know, and as such accepts the biology of group differences but rejects the grouping of “race.” So he faces a contradictory dilemma solved only by very fancy linguistic footwork: “Race” is biologically meaningless, but a specific “race” will win the 100M because of superior biology. The egalitarians cheer; they have accepted science and preserved egalitarianism by reminding us how diverse race groupings are.

I’m not particularly opposed to that approach, but find that it seeks to solve a practical dilemma–groups are differently enabled because of disparate gene prevalences–with a linguistic one–we don’t like your groupings. And what comes out of that for the careless public is that all groups are generally similarly-enabled. That is to say, all populations are equi-potential. They are not.

The second misconception that arises is that “race” is purely socio-cultural rather than partly socio-cultural. We are all mongrels, and as much–most–genetic variation occurs within populations as outside of them. And yet we do cluster, genetically. See Rosenberg, for instance. We do not–even at the very loose grouping of “race”–all have access to same genetic repository. And where that repository is different for a remarkable gene, the remarkable gene takes on greater significance than ordinary trivial variations driving some artificial marker of general “diversity” of genes.

In my view, arguing about how to lump and split is not productive. I care only about pressing this point: If you lump, and you normalize nurture, the difference you observe is genetic.

88

Evoking genes as a cause for disparate outcomes will, indeed, cause such a conversation to die a painful death. It is an unacceptable conclusion in modern academia and evoking such an explanation is academic suicide and social anathema. Only a tenured professor with a secure career who is willing to endure ostracism would have a chance of promoting that idea, and such an academic can look forward to having every published article accompanied by one or more companion pieces reassuring the readership of an alternate view.

And so we see academia marching on with blinders in place, forever searching for the right nurturing disadvantage to explain away population performance differences. Genes do not explain 100% of performance differences; they explain 100% of the reason for persistent disparities despite nurturing normalization. They explain why we can normalize for wealth and education of parents and schooling and environment and still have persistent differences in average outcomes. They explain why socio-cultural explanations are permanently elusive and why egalitarians must ultimately take refuge behind linguistic footwork and speculation instead of science.

But science marches on anyway, and we are not so far from identifying genetic patterns and prevalences and functions that will put the final nail in the coffin for this antiquated Creationist notion that all groups are created genetically equal, drawing from the genetic library of Adam and Eve.

89

Ah, back to repeating your same list of braying points. Ah well.

One, so given this sort of response, we can drop the facade that you believe the subject is important because of your interest in “equal opportunity” and “diversity” and “social justice”.

Two, most of what you posted you could have knee jerk cut and pasted from many of your past posts … and maybe you did. But there was this claim that was new to me anyway:

The first part is merely trite if incomplete: if you controlled for all possible non-genetic factors, if we all had the same environments from prenatal through early childhood experiences to education to culture to adult opportunities and so on, then the differences that remained would a function of group size and genetic. It is the second that gets to what you want to claim, a very strange statement indeed that all of that group that you shorthanded as “nurturing” is now the same for all, and that “egalitarians” just won’t “accept” it.

What an odd thing to claim.

I mean I am happy to hear that you’ve accepted that if social and cultural factors (nurturing) were different then they’d play some role in outcome differences so they must be accounted for. Baby steps as someone said. But you are really going to claim that all of those factors are now all “normalized”?

Wow.

Three, back to your strawmen: you really need to stop pretending that you do not understand the difference between lumping according to sociocultural criteria, and lumping according to biologically meaningful markers, and when each has meaning.

If we are talking about how society treats people on the basis of group membership then those sociocultural groupings matter, whether they overlap with some biologic measures or not. In that discussion lumping and splitting as society has is what has meaning. That is the public policy discussion: How do we balance equal opportunity with diversity as goals; should they even be goals; what is the place, if any, for addressing past inequities and their lasting effects?

If we are talking about the science, about the genetic differences between different human subpopulations, then different dividers make more sense. Then we lump and split according to the genetic evidence. And in that sort of analysis “Black” is too broad to have much meaning; it is a placeholder only until we have a more precise one to use. And that is where science actually marches.

90

I’m well aware of the egalitarian strategy to put in place so many “variables” that it sounds like it’s just too damn complicated to normalize nurture. Of course I note that these were only put in play after the usual suspects–family wealth; scholastic opportunity; parental education…–failed to produce a normalization of outcomes.

And that’s the dilemma–the practical dilemma–we find ourselves in if we just pretend the problem of disparate outcomes is disparate opportunity. We’ve never actually showed any disparate opportunity the elimination of which elimates that pesky gap between the (putatively) “only socio-cultural” differences in races, have we? We can take wealthy black children with highly educated parents and show that they vastly underscore similarly-advantaged white and asian peers and barely score equivalently to poor whites and asians or whites and asians with uneducated parents. But hey, Mr Knee Jerk Suspicious Motive Chief Pedant, newsflash: I got a list of environmental variables a mile long…what about those?

And so it goes, with the egalitarians beating their endless drum of unproven and vague “environmental variables” as if they were marching to the rescue of Virginia’s belief in Santa Claus. And while they are at it, why not resort to suspecting motives of anyone interested in promoting the idea that our library of genes in our gene pool is what drives our differences? Meanwhile, back at the University, the asians continue to outperform at STEM fields and the blacks win the Track and Field sprinting forty years on after massive and persistent and focused efforts by government and academia to normalize environmental variables. And anyone who draws an inference that the reason is superior genes is at best hiding suspicious motives and at worst a racist.

Within our lifetimes (well, yours, anyway, as mine may be on the brink :wink: ) one of us will achieve comeuppance when the genome is better unraveled. It does not seem like we’ll be persuading the other in the interim, so let’s promise to return to the topic then.

In the interim, a modest suggestion from me not to bet on Eurasians retaking sprinting or sub-saharan african descendants overtaking quantum physics–Creationism, genetic diversity, and the meaninglessness of race notwithstanding.

In summary, then, will blacks dominate sprinting for the forseeable future?
And is the reason for this remarkably disparate domination genetic or sociocultural?

91

We can? Honestly that has not been my anecdotal experience in my mixed upper middle class community. As a general rule the Black two educated parent intact household kids have performed at least as well as the White ones, at least as many high level honors classes, as good of grades, as good of entrance test scores, as good of colleges.

So, yes, cite please. Please note, your claim was not just same income - but both sets similarly of wealthy (and wealth is not quite the same as income you know, though I’ll accept income as a proxy) and well educated parents. (You didn’t specify both two parent households so I won’t hold you to that requirement, but if you want to really make your point you’ll agree to that as well. Mile long these three - parental wealth, education level, intact two family home - aint.)

Albeit it is still odd in the extreme for you to think that consideration of culture, and its many variables, is some “strategy” - but so be it.

And funny you should bring up Asians. There is a book you may be interested in avoiding reading (as I know you’d rather not have your fantasies disturbed): The Geography of Thought. Funny thing about actual data, it often goes where you, CP, don’t believe it should.

92

*What? *You really need to provide cites.

93

I’m trying to like you. Stop with the snarks, wouldya? It doesn’t add anything. If that book weren’t $45, I’d buy it now, but I’m too cheap to pay $45 to be told Asians and Westerners think differently. Hello.

Scroll to the bottom [here](Standardized Tests: The Interpretation of Racial and Ethnic Gaps B) to see some data on educated parents and children’s SAT scores…and notice that what I said is that category for category blacks score much lower; being wealthier or more educated as parents not only does not bring up children’s scores to that of equally wealthy peers–it barely brings up average scores to those of poor and uneducated whites. See here for an effort to find some environmental variables to account for the wealthy underperformance (blacks take crappier courses; teachers have low expectations; black doctors’ children listen to rap; black nerds are ridiculed; Afrocentric curriculums forget to teach calculus; black households don’t encourage first-rate academic achievement; black students (apparently even wealthy ones) are shuffled off to shop classes…). I’ll let you argue for them. I’d be embarrassed to do so. Imagine if parallel arguments were advance to defend the underachievement of white athletes.

The end of this particular article explains why race-based AA is so important:

“On the math SAT, only 0.16 percent of all black test takers scored 750 or above compared to 1.8 percent of white test takers. Thus, whites were more than 11 times as likely as blacks to score 750 or above on the math SAT. Overall, there were more than 61 times as many whites as blacks who scored 750 or above on the math section of the SAT.
In a race-neutral competition for the approximately 50,000 places for first-year students at the nation’s 25 top-ranked universities, high-scoring blacks would be buried by a huge mountain of high-scoring non-black students. Today, under prevailing affirmative action admissions policies, there are about 3,000 black first-year students matriculating at these 25 high-ranking universities, about 6 percent of all first-year students at these institutions. But if these schools operated under a strict race-neutral admissions policy where SAT scores were the most important qualifying yardstick, these universities could fill their freshman classes almost exclusively with students who score at the very top of the SAT scoring scale. As shown previously, black students make up at best between 1 and 2 percent of these high-scoring groups.”

So why you can sit in your armchair and muse about why such differences shouldn’t necessarily be genetic, the fact is that this gap is not closing; it has not really narrowed in 20 years despite efforts to address these various putative environmental variables. During that time, what has happened in the athletic world? Is the world of academia somehow more discriminatory, racist and Archie Bunkerish than the sports world?

The above is not proof the core problem is genetic differences, but it certainly should give pause, even to a closed mind.

94

My turn for the cite game…

Do you have a cite showing equivalent outcomes among race groups for…well, for anything? If so, would you mind posting it, and is that what drives your bias away from assuming that population differences are genetically-based?

95

How many Kenyans have been in an Olympic 100m final?
how many Jamaicans have been in an Olympic 10 000m final?

Race ain’t just the colour of your skin.

96

Paperback is just $10.

While I’d love to actually see data that showed “and” rather than “or” (which was the claim) I still acknowledge the cite about test scores.

I’d be most curious to see what the results were in mixed race high income communities. I do realize that my observation is anecdotal but what I see, with Black and White students both of high achieving parents in the same community (two separate ones in which I have lived) is that the Black students achieve at least as well as the White children (actually usually a bit higher).

I also find this article to be interesting.

No I do not have studies at the ready. Neither do I take the position that racial groups do or will ever have equivalent outcomes. I merely find statements that presume a genetic cause for disparate outcomes to be ahead of data, and the question to be both unimportant and divisive.

97

Kenyans–at least the Kalenjin–probably don’t have the right genes for power sprinting, and the “Jamaicans” (of West African descent) don’t have the right genes for marathons.

We are, you see, our genes, and when we see over-representation like the ones you mention, it’s genes that drive it (to a far greater extent than ‘socio-economic’ / cultural drivers).

Both those groups typically self-identify as “black” but of course that SIRE group is quite loose, and so in my opinion while it’s correct to predict that the black “race” will excel in those two areas, it’s fine to argue for splitting as well. The key point is that when we find differences, and can account for nurture, it’s genes driving the differences.

98

Do you really think SAT scores have a genetic basis?

I thought you were talking about IQ scores.

99

Trying to answer my curiosity I find this much any way.

This book summary is also interesting. This was a case study of a mixed community in which there was a persistent gap. The findings do not exclude genetics but do support a cultural cause:

I must say that this conflicts mightily with what I have seen among the Black peers of my children. These are parents who are heavily involved in holding their kids’ toes to the academic fire, more than I am honestly, and their children’s achievements have been consistent with that.

Another take on Ogbu’s work. (NYT).

100

Yeah, and race is an automatic causational factor in physiological traits, which are likewise heavily genetic, right?