Your, and his, lack of reading comprehension is not my problem. The evidence indicates that those of W.A. descent may (“probably”, to be subjective) be enjoying a genetic advantage when it comes to speed. That’s simply a fact (the presence of the evidence, not that it rises to the level of “proof”). You and he can like it or not, the fact remains. And just because there is evidence that genetics may be playing a role does not mean that other factors are also at play. They clearly are. I have been 100% consistent in my position, in spite of the mischaracterizations and straw-manning by you, he, and others.
Piffle, I know also the past history of your sources, I do not need to be generous in noticing that you are back pedaling even here, collective investment is still a better explanation than the “probable” you mention, and BTW just like the historian mentions is what I did mention awhile ago, remember that the context is still a roast of crackpots, coming here to indirectly defend them is still a stupid thing to do, in reality it is you who has a reading problem.
You really that interested in what I believe in this thread, genius? Here’s what you do: go back through the last few pages, which should account for all my posts, and friggin read them. Know what you’ll find? (Assuming you can digest the friggin words.) That my position has been 100% consistent. Now back-pedaling. No weaseling. Nope. Much as you might try to contort things and ascribe positions to me that I do not hold. You’re a mighty straw man burner, aren’t you, Mr.GIGOToughie! :rolleyes:
Fine, so you agree even with assholes like brasil84, no surprise.
Remember, I’m referring to the title and the OP in this thread as what you are having trouble comprehending, you still need to understand that this a roast of some pseudo asshole racists, that you came into this specific thread attempting to pump up those maybes, perhaps, possibles, ‘cross my hearts’ and ‘it looks funny’ into “striking evidence” was really dumb. It just ends up as an indirect defense of the crackpot assholes, and a very silly defense still.
Actually, there is a certain logic to it. African have the highest degree of genetic diversity, so it shouldn’t be any surprise if they contribute to the extremes of human abilities, be that physical or intellectual. If, in fact, genetics peculiar to specific populations are the main contributing factor in those abilities.
Not for all of it but its hard to explain away the gap with the sort of environmental factors that we have not been able to control for.
No I have a statistical analysis that the green ones lay more eggs, not that they end up with more eggs.
So then nothing short of showing you the actual genes and how they cause lower IQ would be convincing? If you simply can’t be convinced by statistics then global warming is probably a myth as far as you are concerned too.
So? I’m not a genticist but I don’t think your rationale makes any sense at all. Maybe lower IQ is associated with a dominant gene.
It could be dumb luck, it could be the self selection exercised by the folks who leave Africa, it could be the extra hardship associated with leaving Africa, it could be any number of things. Why do Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQ? Why do Asians have higher IQ?
Yeah they do. They don’t point to it as a certainty but you would have to make a lot of unlikely assumption to believe that genetics had nothing to do with it?
And you would have to believe that racism and the hostile environment caused by racism hasn’t really changed very much in the last 75 years or so to think that you can explain it away with things like stereotype threat and background racism.
Its not genetics, its statistics. Its the basis on which a lot of people are claiming the existence of global warming. You are effectively employing the same sort of rationale that global warming deniers use.
No it hasn’t. Noone has proven that there is no genetic component to any of the IQ gap.
I don’t think the genetic gap is anywhere near as large as the racists and Republicans would like you to believe but there is about as much evidence for a genetic cause of some of the IQ gap as there is for anthropomorphic global warming. Its an uncomfortable truth and it probably serves very little purpose other than to pursue racist agendas but if you keep denying that it is not only possible but likely, it makes your judgment seem less reliable.
That BTW was the last IPCC report from a few years back, the latest is reported to come with even higher probabilities for problems to come.
Now, if you are on solid ground you need to point at the recent mess of work and consensus from geneticists or biologists pointing at what they consider “likely” (66%) because most of the items I have seen from many contributors of the coming IPCC report point out that a few of those "likely"s are now “very likely” (90% provability)
So, where are the 90% probable tables from the majority of geneticists and biologists of the world and what do they point to? Or just to be easy, the likely 66%?
Damuri Ajashi, I think I’ll just have to end it with disagreeing with you. I cannot see how you could possibly come to the conclusions you are making. There’s a lot of steps between seeing a difference in behavior for some fairly arbitrarily defined groups and demonstrating that its genetic in nature.
You couldn’t get 66% of the psychologists to agree to what intelligence is.
And the statistics say nothing about the genetics. The statistics show the test-score gap (or the “sprinting gap”)- but the statistics say nothing about why that gap exists. Answering that question requires a lot more investigation. All the statistics show is a real correlation, but nothing about causation.
And comparing it to global warming shows a concept error. There’s data that shows temperatures going up, there’s data that shows greenhouse gases like CO2 going up, and there’s data that shows that human activity causes an increase in greenhouse gases. It’s more than just correlation.
This is not a fact, and there is zero evidence that the statistical “advantage” is explained by genetics. As someone more learned than me explained to me recently, a statistical difference by itself provides zero evidence for causation. And all there is is a statistical correlation, large enough that random chance can be eliminated. So yes, top sprinters are more likely to be black then random chance would suggest. But on the question of why top sprinters are more likely to be black (or top basketball players, football WRs, etc), there is zero evidence for the genetic explanation. It’s a plausible hypothesis, but that’s all it is right now. Science is hard.
It’s an interesting aspect of these arguments, when they turn to athletic ability, that anti-racialists (if that’s the accepted turn) consistently compare situations in which which only subsets of the population have the interest or opportunity to compete (e.g. volleyball, basketball in the 1940s and so on) with other situations which are open to all and have almost universal appeal, most notably basketball today.
Other examples are also valid, but basketball in particular is extremely widely played, and everyone knows that people who successful at it at the highest levels can achieve more fame and fortune than they can realistically accomplish through virtually any other endeavor. The notion that there are enormous numbers of white kids who have the latent capabilities of being NBA stars but prefer to become accountants or lacrosse players is a serious stretch, and at any rate, when this argument is made, the counter-argument that curling is dominated by whites is not a valid one.
It’s also worth noting that even within the same sports, whites and blacks tend to be relatively more successful at different aspects of the games, e.g. whites and throwing, and blacks and speed.
As above, I’m skeptical of the evidence (if not the theoretical possibility) in favor of a genetic basis for group differences in IQ, but I think the evidence is somewhat stronger in the case of athletic ability.
[BTW, just to toss something else out there, it’s pretty well documented that black kids are more likely to have early puberty than white kids. It’s been suggested that there might be some genetic basis for this.]
If you offer Argument A and I describe that as an “argument from ignorance” don’t turn around and pretend that I’ve said Argument B is an argument from ignorance.
What I’ve described as an argument from ignorance is your argument that since you can’t think of a reason for genetic components of IQ to vary by population then there must be no genetic variation.
If, as you now claim, you have “evidence against the notion” which “is really ‘against’ and impressive”, then that’s not what I’ve described as an argument from ignorance.
ISTM that this is taking an overly simplistic view of these matters.
As a general rule, important scientific theories or principles are not established overnight by means of a single study published in a peer reviewed journal. Generally, one team publishes a study that supports or purports to support a proposed theory, others push back and quibble with that study, others try to replicate that study and/or do other studies testing the theory in different ways and so on. Eventually the proposed theory gradually wins - or fails to win - adherents based on the cumulative weight of the evidence.
It’s been said that new theories gain acceptance not by winning over their critics, but by winning over the new generation of scientists looking at the evidence from scratch, after the old generation of established opponents dies out.
In this context, it’s naive to assume that there is no price to be paid for a scientist pushing a theory of genetic racial differences in IQ because “few people will dispute such a finding once it survives the peer review process”. I would think a lot of people will dispute such a finding even if it survives the peer review process (& any such finding would undoubtedly be held - justifiably, IMO - to a much higher peer review standard than the norm). And not just dispute the finding, but brand the authors as racists pseudo-scientists, and any number of other pleasant adjectives such as litter this thread. And these authors will subsequently find it much harder to get jobs or tenure or honors or grants or anything else it is that they’re working for in their careers.
As a practical matter, this means that few if any scientists will be looking to find evidence of genetic racial differences, and if no one looks for it, it’s a lot less likely to be found. If it is found (assuming of course that it actually exists) it would likely be a byproduct of research into something else (e.g. non-racial research into genetic bases for IQ and non-IQ related research into genetic variation by race).
Study of genetic differences between different populations, and the way this affects health outcomes is ongoing, and not the least bit controversial. That’s how we know that the same mutation that causes sickle cell among West Africans also causes it among southern Italians and Sicilians. To give another example, research has done on the prevalence of Tay Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews and French Canadians, and the possible genetic causes. So, clearly and obviously, no taboo exists about exploring genetic differences between populations.
These aren’t new theories at all. They’re a revival of racialist theories which existed hundreds of years ago, first developed to justify colonialist expansion and slavery. These are list ditch defenses of dead ideas, not new proposals.
This is all speculation on your part. As it happens, many of the advocates of this racialist pseudoscience are tenured academics. If this kind of research damaged their careers, they wouldn’t have careers. Kevin MacDonald (evolutionary psychologist) - Wikipedia
No, they’ve looked. They just haven’t found any evidence to support the genetic hypothesis wrt to black Americans. This isn’t surprising. Through out the New World, the negative social outcomes associated with “blackness” follow social identity, not genetics.
Geneticist Bruce Lahn thought he had found a variant which explained some of the difference in measured IQ between populations. The variant was entirely lacking in most African populations, but common outside of Africa.
But the variant was also absent in China, but highly prevalent among the peoples of New Guinea. Stone age cannibals had it. The world’s oldest continuing civilization didn’t. Lahn became the object of a fair amount of derision. It was face saving to describe the reaction as pressure due to political correctness. The truth was more mundane. Nobody wants to fund failure and look foolish.
What is this, the Ice-9 theory of genetic mutations? Is it your claim that if a gene is dominant then all (no exceptions!) offspring will have that trait? Because if not, the test I just described will show a testable result (and if you argue the opposite, then I have bad news for you; the low-IQ gene will eventually be present in all individuals everywhere).
Of course. But some aspects are a lot more controversial than others.
[In addition, as I’ve noted earlier, the classic or current “races” are more about ethnicity than race, and even if they tend to have genetic variation, it’s something of a historical accident, and not meaningful in a purely scientific sense. To the extent that the study of broad ethnic groups like African-Americans has an accepted purpose it would be more on the medical side, where the random black guy in the doctor’s office might not know what percentage of his ancestry is from which sub-population, and where there’s therefore some use in knowing based on skin color that he may be more/less at risk for some ailment, or more/less likely to respond to some treatment.]
To be clear, I was not saying that these are new theories. I was just describing the scientific process in general.
ISTM that most of that Wiki page is devoted to a discussion of attacks on MacDonald from various sources.
Yes, this guy has tenure and his academic freedom is supported by his university, but it’s hard to imagine you seriously believe that most researchers are not going to be intimidated by the prospect of being branded one of the “Thirteen Scariest People in America” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example.
I understand that you will no doubt claim that all those denunciations are justified, but even if so, you can’t be holding this guy up as an example of someone whose career wasn’t damaged by this type of research.
Irina Privalova, tied 10th place woman’s 100 metres in 1994. Can anyone point to her West African heritage?
Record for woman’s sprint was set in 1988. Was her win the result of environmental factors such as malnutrition preventing African candidates reaching their genetic potential?
