But to be fair, that also applies to the many other explanations put forward as well: it’s racism, it’s culture, it’s poverty, it’s Ebonics, it’s biased tests, it’s not eating breakfast. All simple answers and none of them having anything to back them up.
Yes it is. I am a fair and I will admit that. My academic background is in behavioral neuroscience and good luck figuring anything simple or meaningful when it comes to mapping genes to any behavioral trait especially an over-arching one like general cognitive ability. The science is progressing but slower than expected .
What we do know is that much of cognitive ability is generically determined with another significant contribution from environment (that includes everything from early childhood nutrition to general health and parental influence, not just formal schooling). We also know that not all human populations are the same genetically. The same general genes are common among all people and most populations have members that represent all human genes because of cross-breeding but the prevalence of certain genes is very different among some populations.
A lot of people have a hard time wrapping their mind around this. It isn’t like there are distinct genetic boundaries like countries but instead more like a map with colors that represent certain genes that tend to smear at the boundaries of old migration patterns and also pop up as dots in other odd locations due to migration anomalies.
My main point is that all other explanations have failed to explain the intellectual gap so far so it is only academically honest to look for other explanations no matter how politically unpalatable they may be. Those of lines of research have at least as good evidence as the alternate explanations so you shouldn’t call someone a racist for wanting to pursue that line of research. It will either be true or not in the end and the science should speak for itself. Right now the results are promising but also complicated and inconclusive.
Are you prepared to reevaluate this question in 10, 15, or 20 years if biological markers for certain traits have been found and have a different prevalence among populations?
Nope, the simple solution implied in your comment is that we only look at one of those explanations.
This issue has many fathers, and it is the racialists that want to continue to use an explanation that has lost support where it counts. That is the main point here, the current experts came to the current view of seeing race as a factor that is not as important or critical as many racists or racialists see it.
The constant attempt at “demonstrating” that most scientists are not following or approving of the societal solutions based just on genetics are the problem here as they are not having much support nowadays.
And once again, read the OP again, you are eons better than Chief Pedant. He is not letting science speak and the honest thing is indeed to acknowledge that the items CP is pushing are indeed inconclusive as they are based not only on inconclusive evidence but misleading conclusions.
What it is really missed here is a lack of awareness that there are many recent examples of that research also falling for errors that coincidentally do follow errors committed by groups with shady agendas.
I’m willing to consider the possibility. But when you look at it, the argument is really weak.
Okay, let’s accept for the sake of argument that intelligence is a genetic trait and it corresponds with race. Is being arrested also a genetic trait? Is poverty a genetic trait? Is poor education a genetic trait? Is lower life expectancy a genetic trait? Is unemployment a genetic trait? Is illegitimacy a genetic trait?
Now, there’s probably people that are going to argue that all of these things have a genetic basis. But we’re expected to believe that all of these genes (none of which have ever been found incidentally) are all coincidentally found in the same group along with darker skin?
Occam’s Razor. It’s a lot more believable that all of these things are evidence of a single phenomenon - like racism - rather than a host of genetic traits.
And if these phenomena are genetic, why don’t they act like genetic traits? Statistics on things like poverty and education and crime and life expectancy have all changed significantly in the last few decades. Black people in 2013 have the same genes they had in 1913 - so why would their characteristics change if they are genetically based?
But the way society has treated black people has changed during the same period that the phenomena changed. That’s strong evidence that these phenomena are caused by social factors and not genetic traits.
As to what should be done, I think it’s clear. Fighting racism has improved the lives of Black Americans and improved America society in general. So I think we should keep fighting racism.
God knows what the cause is for such a huge disparity between blacks and whites in things like standardized test scores and educational achievement, but the anti-racialist arguments in this thread are pretty lame. I think we can agree that on average, men are taller than women. That does not mean that all men are taller than all women, so trotting out examples of highly intelligent and successful black people to refute the idea that there is a genetic component to intelligence makes about as much sense as citing women in the WNBA to refute the fact that men are taller than women.
And I can make no sense of Little Nemos argument. There is no particular reason why if intelligence has a genetic component, that things like arrest rates must also. Clearly there is a biological reason women are shorter than men, but that doesn’t mean there is a biological reason that they wear perfume.
Are you actually reading the thread? Or just shitting in it for kicks?
The examples of intelligent and successful black people were given directly in response to a poster who claimed no such people existed. That’s a directly relevant refutation.
Granted, that poster subsequently admitted the original claim was factually in error and only made for Og knows what reasons, but still, this defense of yours is pretty damned lame.
I’m going to give you some benefit of the doubt that you didn’t realize that it was a side discussion that wasn’t directly relevant to the genetic argument. Otherwise, you’re a damned fool who needs to read the thread before shooting your gob off.
Actually they are good enough to counter the reality that the other side is the one with the lame explanations, the point of the examples of intelligent black people was to counter the certifiable lame idea that we could not find any.
In general terms we should not forget that the most up to date science arrived to the conclusion that races did not have a good reason to be used in biology and genetics. What we have here are people that want to ignore that and also ignore that research that is not taking into account that is is not wise to extrapolate specific populations to social constructs like race.
As The Great Antibob noted, **fumster **and others are indeed just showing the lamest of attention to what we and scientists are actually saying. 
BTW that previous citation from PBS I made was referred and the site mentioned before, It shows the positions of many experts in the matter, if one stills want to call that a lame argument it just demonstrates that one also has trouble identifying the quality of sources and citations.
Originally Posted by **Rigamarole **
So, where are all the black physicists and mathematicians and engineers . . .
It isn’t my intention to hold debates here in the Pit, which seems to me to be more appropriate for name-calling or venting frustration when one’s arguments are failing.
However I don’t think the gist of your comment here leaves an entirely accurate impression for the degree of genetic admixture for most sub-saharan lines which would self-classify as “black.”
From a Y-chromosomal standpoint, haplogroup R1b made it back into the central Sahel; haplogroups G, J and T into parts of northern and eastern africa. But the vast majority of sub-saharan africa is not very admixed for post-africa Y-chromosomal lineages, as far as I am aware. Even today, many of those populations remain reasonably segregated, for historic religious and linguistic reasons. To the best of my knowledge, mtDNA groups are even more distinct (I guess daddy gets around more than mommy when it comes to traveling, or something 
) Many of the mtDNA lines in sub-saharan africa split off from a common mtDNA matrilineage as long as 60-100 thousand years ago; perhaps more.
At the most basic level for arguing a group-based genetic advantage reflected within todays “socially-constructed” SIRE groups, one would have to postulate a post-african advantageous mutation (at least an L3 mtDNA line or later) or other event (say, for instance, acquisition of advantageous genes from a Neanderthal admixture). Based on population migrations of which I am aware, it does not seem reasonable to imply that such genes would be smoothly admixed back into a sub-saharan population. The fundamental debate, of course, is whether there is any evidence such advantageous mutations occurred at all. But if they did, it is disingenuous to represent that migratory patterns would have caused them to be homogenously re-mixed with ancestral sub-saharan populations as a whole.
Were such putative gene shifts conferring a neurobiological advantage to have occurred, one would expect to find differences that are most profound between the least admixed populations, and the least profound between relatively admixed populations. Modern SIRE groupings that are socially constructed in admixed populations would have outcomes somewhere between ancestral populations and populations containing a higher prevalence of advantageous genes. Outcome differences would be most profound between the ancestral populations and descendant lines post-advantageous mutation (assuming the advantageous mutation had reached a penetrance high enough to affect an average performance).
We can look at “africa” and “non-africa” populations and see an example–even at such a crude grouping level–with the haplogroup D variant for MCPH1. This has not been shown to be an advantageous gene (although its prevalence in non-african groups does suggest positive selection pressure and not genetic drift) but it is definitely a good illustration that human migratory patterns have not driven post L-3 mutations back into sub-saharan african populations for anything approaching homogeneity.
Much of this thread seems to be a rehash of debate and not so much a pitting.
I’d prefer to debate in GD, and reserve the Pit as a place to have my name unilaterally sullied by those unable to carry on a debate where it belongs.
As iiandiiii requested in the OP: mock me here.
But may I request moving the actual debate to GD?
I answered CP’s latest post in the GD thread, but I’ll repeat part of it here-
To believe in the genetic explanation, I would have to believe this: that it’s just a coincidence that the poorest and lowest-scoring large ethnic group in America just happens to be the one that was the most brutally treated over the past several centuries- I would have to believe believe that there is no causal link between these two things. I would have to believe that it’s just blind “luck” that the “dumbest” American ethnic group (according to you) is the one that is descended from the most brutally treated- and would have to believe there is no causal link here. I would have to believe that centuries of terrible treatment, physically, psychologically, and economically, do not continue to have effects on our media, culture, and the physical, psychological, and economic well being of these past victims’ descendants.
That’s quite a coincidence to believe in, with no evidence. I’m not prepared to believe such a coincidence without strong evidence for it- and there’s no genetic evidence for it at all.
Jews.
Are you blaming this on the Jews? Or are you seriously trying to claim that past brutality of the Jews has no effect on media, culture, and our world society today? Please, I’d just love to hear about how the Holocaust and other past brutality have no repercussions for today.
I am saying that past consistent brutality, mistreatment and persecution of Jews over the last coupla thousand years did not cause them to be the “poorest and lowest-scoring large ethnic group in America”.
I’ll ignore the fact that I was talking about America, and not the world at large, but I don’t agree with you that all instances of past brutality, especially when the brutal treatment were of very different sorts (though both were, obviously, among the worst episodes in humanity’s history of mass cruelty), result in the exact same ramifications for the descendants of the victimized group. But feel free to believe that all past brutality (in whatever forms) should have the exact same effects on media, culture, society in general, and the actual descendants of those brutalized.
There was widespread antisemitism in America as well. From its founding until just a few decades ago.
I see. So genocide doesn’t result in lower academic scores (in fact, probably boosts them). Slavery does. Gotcha.
In America, the treatment of Jewish people, however deplorable, does not come close to comparable to the treatment of black people.
No idea what your point is here. Whatever it is, it has little or nothing to do with what I’m saying.
FWIW iiandyiii is on my ignore list because of his past dishonesty.
Ahh yes, he “ignores” me, by showing up in the thread I started. His definition of “ignore” must be a bit different then mine!