Well, just what sort of performance factors do you think are behind the variations in grades?
Also, what would we be discussing if we started such a thread exactly?
First, Grades are extremely subjective. They cannot even be reasonably compared within the same discipline across institutions–or even within an institution. Mr Smith’s “A” in introductory English might be quite different from Mrs Jones’s “A”.
Second, GPAs do not reflect the rigor of courses taken. An excellent student might take advanced Physics and Calculus; a marginal one General Science and Intro to Math. Those two sets of grades reflect very different capabilities.
Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity.
As you may be aware, one of the approaches to dismantling arguments that races vary in their average potential because of genetic differences is to argue that there is no such thing as “race” except insofar as it is a purely social or cultural concept. SIRE is simply shorthand for “Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity.”
Hmm, that is interesting, and not what I would have expected, but I’m not convinced.
They haven’t exactly cherry-picked the studies as few directly compare blacks to whites, also many of the studies aren’t about academic self-esteem (e.g. The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.) so aren’t that relevant to my point.
When I do a search for black students’ academic self-esteem, I just seem to find ones that reinforce my view, like this or this
And perhaps, my turn for a question:
If SIRE cohorts can be shown to have gene prevalence differences coding for various phenotypic traits, and if genes govern our intelligence as human beings, why in the world wouldn’t there be genetically-based intelligence differences among SIRE groups? Are genes controlling intelligence somehow off-limits to nature?
I’ll get back to you later Chief (what should I call you?), but I think it could be argued that too much self-esteem could lend itself to poorer academic performance. Of course, self-esteem doesn’t have the same benefits or disadvantages for everyone.
Also, Mijin, the links require logins.
Call me anything you like.
YWTF was the first to use Chief Pendant. I believe she was making fun of me, but it makes me chuckle and I’ve taken a bit of a liking to it.
Self-esteem is now bad for us? What about stereotype threat…good for us, then?
No, I’m not arguing that either are major explanatory factors for race differences in achievement. I’m just saying that self-esteem shouldn’t be taken as so narrowly indicative of achievement. A person with self-esteem that’s too high will over estimate themselves, simply put. The obsession with pinning things down to vague factors like self-esteem reflects pecularities of blame-shifting when it comes to achievement gap in our culture.
Firstly, the search goes on because that’s science. Secondly, post the cite that clearly shows that genes are responsible for the black-white gap in IQ. Post a link to the study that specifically tests “The Black population is enriched for an allele of a gene or genes that detrimentally affect IQ”. Also post the independent repetition of this particular study.
Also, the fact that you think opportunity, wealth, and educated parents are normalized between black and white populations shows that you are apparently unaware of the world outside of wherever you live. Even in the studies that you of course failed to post, where the authors find some sexy variables that they control for, such as SES, they did not compare apples and apples populations and none of the authors would claim they did. We do not know near enough about the effects of family, subculture, society as a whole, genetics, epigenetics, diet, neuroscience and biology, psychology and sociology in general to make a comparison where every important factor is controlled for between groups.
To somewhat support your view, bullies, conduct disordered teens, and kids in gangs are renowned for their excellent self-esteem. These same groups of individuals are not known for their academic excellence.
Do black people object to it? The only people in my life whom I’ve ever heard get into a snit over the observation that blacks predominate in sports are white liberals. I’ve seen liberal posters here on the SDMB baldfacedly admit that blacks are superior to whites athletically but then contend that if we should admit to the fact that black people are athletically superior to whites, it admits an inate genetic difference between the races which can then be used by bigots to claim white intellectual superiority. So, the truth having a liberal bias and all, political correctness dictates that we either ignore or lie about the obvious fact of black dominance in sports because to admit it opens the door to false claims driven by racism. This is one of my biggest gripes about political correctness, and it’s one of the reasons I roll my eyes when people claim that the truth has a liberal bias. In my opinion the way to deal with bigoted claims of that sort would be to point to the fact that intellectually blacks are capable of exactly the same things that whites are: we can all learn to read, do math, pass the exams and get driver’s licences, learn and hold down jobs, etc. So in any practical sense there is absolutely nothing that white people can do in terms of everyday intellectual ability that black people can’t do just as well. There is also an unlimited number of brilliant black people one can point in order to refute such claims. How could a genetically inferior race of people produce people of the intellectual ability and accomplishment of - to use a recent example widely known from the news- Henry Louis Gates? Or Cornell West? Or Quincy Jones? Or any of a number of other certifiable black geniuses? Additionally, I would defy anyone new to these boards to pick out the black posters from the white ones based soley upon the intellectual quality of their posts. It can’t be done. And the reason it can’t be done is that there is no difference between the races when it comes to intellectual abilty.
So why can’t we just man up and admit that yeah, blacks predominate in sports and the reason is that genetically they have greater ability? Liberals which I’ve been exposed to personally or in print seem to have no problem hurling insults and invective at people for far less cogent statements that this, so why not deal factually with false and bigoted claims of black intellectual inferiority when they arise, rather than to insist that everyone turn a blind eye to the obvious and then excoriate anyone who refuses to play along as being ‘racist’?
It genuinely and truly pains me to know that posters such Nzinga Seated and you with the face and Hippy Hollow and Skald the Rhymer and the board’s other black posters have to come upon threads or posts in which it is claimed or insinuated in some way that black people are intellectually inferior to whites. The notion is utter nonsense and needs to be treated as such. But the way to do that is not to hurl claims of racism at anyone and everyone who looks at the fact that people comprising approximately sixteen percent of our population make up approximately ninety percent of our sports teams and conclude from that fact that that race must be more physiologically gifted than other races.
I watched a Youtube clip recently between some Christian hothead and Christopher Hitchens in which the hothead insisted upon claiming that since Jesus performed so many miracles and arose from the dead, they were therefore proof that he was God incarnate. Hitchens responded that for the sake of argument he was willing to concede the miracles which the Bible attributes to Jesus, but that even so those miracles do not necessarily equate to proof of God’s existence. And, even though I do most definitely believe in God (though not in what one would probably view as the traditional sense), it is undeniable that Hitchens had a good point. A person might very well turn water to wine and arise from the dead, but it still doesn’t follow that these miracles translate into proof of the existence of God; they only prove the existence of a man who has the ability to perform miracles. And, if one is truly honest with himself intellectually, he has to concede that in this case Hitchens is right.
Thus it is just as true that superior black athletic prowess does not automatically translate into black intellectual inferiority. (In fact, to succeed in upper-level sports requires a fair amount of intelligence itself.) So why can’t we just admit that when it comes to sports, blacks are more gifted than whites and stop with the fiction that there is no difference between the two (or the sexes, for that matter)?
You are right, of course, and we’ve been down that road quite a few times.
We are not going to see a single study published in a western journal that reaches a conclusion that one race is genetically superior to another. Such a study would not get funded or published; such an author would be committing academic suicide; such a concept is anathema to academia regardless of whether or not the data is there.
Your last sentence neatly summarizes the laundry list of variables that are trotted out when any comparison purports to normalize nurture. To date, of course, not a single effort to correct for those putative differences has resulted in eliminating the gap, but there is always one more that can be thought of…I’ve seen the blame for the underperfomance of wealthy blacks on the SAT ascribed to lousy grandparents, for example.
Which is why, except for annoying egalitarian liberals here on the Dope, I’m content to wait for genotyping to show that there are consistent genetic prevalence differences among SIRE cohorts. With that data there will be an unpublished tacit acceptance that we are differently-enabled genetically. It will be followed by functional analysis of specific genesets that prove once and for all the disparately prevalent genes are not somehow magically equal in function.
Animal populations with disparate geneset prevalences are not equal, and neither are humans. This is easy to accept for animals, but the social overlay makes it more difficult to accept for humans. It is, nevertheless, also the case for humans. The nail in the coffin for those insisting various social issues are insurmountably confounding variables is genetic analysis, and it is upon us.
Enjoy allowing your variables to set your mind at ease while you can.
[QUOTE=Dreen]
Also, Mijin, the links require logins.
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:smack:
Unfortunately, the liberals are correct here in drawing such a rigid line for exactly the reason you posit: It is not going to work to admit genetic differences in SIRE cohorts create a physiologic advantage for sports but do not create a physiologic difference for cognitive skillsets.
The liberal position is built upon two foundations. The first is that “race” is too soft a category to be meaningful at all. This ends up not helping them much because a splitter will then simply talk about “populations” and as it turns out all of the sub-saharan populations will be in the same pickle of cognitive underperformance relative to eurasions on pretty much any comparison study. The second liberal tenet is that only the barest and most superficial genetic differences can exist among populations. It’s a bit like creationists coming around to evolution–the creationists allow for teeny changes but not big ones.
Unfortunately, every argument you advance about how “obvious” it is that blacks are–as a group–physiologically superior for athletics–can be advanced for cognitive differences. Therefore, such a position must be aggressively attacked to show that only nurturing variables effect those outcome differences, and the differences are unaffected by geneset prevalence disparities. The presence of outliers is not evidence for egalitarianism anymore than a handful of whites in the NBA is evidence of average physiologic equality.
That’s science and it is very difficult to control for all these variables in human populations. You are essentially left with nonexperimental designs which leave a lot of room for alternate interpretations. At the same time, in the face of ambiguity, being settled on something just says something about you and not a thing about the data.
Don’t hold your breath. Well-funded studies on mental illness are not finding easy-to-point-out-and-replicate genetic differences between the mentally ill and nonmentally ill populations. Taking schizophrenia for example, this is a disorder where on any number of measures there are several standard deviations difference between the populations and still there is no single gene or set of genes that explains a big percentage of this difference. What you are talking about is a less than single standard deviation of difference in normal populations. Your last couple of sentences have been muttered by behavior geneticists for years and they consistently come up short except for single-gene examples like MECP2 and Rett Syndrome. Once again, have fun doing this with normal populations.
I honestly haven’t seen a single person argue that this wouldn’t be the case with humans, but to argue that this genetic variation is neatly dovetailed with our racial social constructs and stereotypes is a bit hard to swallow. It’s the 1800s all over again, or maybe it just never went away. That reminds me, why not make it the 1800s all over again or do more to keep up the legacy? Back then a bunch of rich people worked hard to figure out why everyone else was so inferior intellectually. Much of their work is in disrepute because of elementary variables that they did not understand or ignored at the time of their work. You are successful, there are probably a lot of rich people that are fascinated with this question, and the number of PhDs able to do the work is increasing every year. Now’s the time!
Can you find a study and its independent replication that points to a gene or genes that affect IQ without regard to race? I think your approach of races –> genetic differences –> genes affecting intelligence –> biased distriubtion of alleles for these genes is ass-backward. Why not start with genes affecting intelligence? Surely that must be well-funded and the studies published?
Even this is controversial. No member of liberal academia wants intelligence reduced to genes; it’s only a step from there to comparison of populations, and that terrifies the egalitarians.
Still, information wants to find a way out…
From The Economist a couple weeks ago:
*It (The BGI–formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.
Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.*"
So have patience. Your wish is coming.
No decent behavior geneticist would reduce the question of any behavior to genes. I like whiny conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but there are actually dozens of studies on genes and measures of intelligence. Try this guy’s work from the 90’s on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plomin. Try looking up “qtl mapping iq” or “linkage analysis iq” or “gene association iq” in pubmed. There will be lots of intelligence in mental disorders stuff but you will also find it in nonmentally ill populations. So there, now I am helping you out.
See what a nice guy I am? Cheer up and go forth to find those genes and don’t let those liberal types get you down.
Oh by the way, the Dragon’s DNA article you linked to, as described, (and I should know better than to trust a reporter’s description but my level of giving a shit is too low to read about the project myself) is doomed to failure.
Since neither Arthur Jensen nor J. Phillippe Rushton have ever had a paper rejected of which I am aware, and both continue to publish at regular intervals*, this claim of yours is simply false. It is a claim with no basis in fact and asserting it simply puts you into the realm of CT proponents.
- Technically, Jensen has not published anything “recently,” but he is 87 years old and was still pumping stuff out as recently as five years ago.
You are right, and I stand corrected in my haste to make a point.
I should have said, “no modern Western academician without tenure who hopes to have a fruitful career, a decent appointment and friends in academia.”
The liberal academic world (which is almost all of it when it comes to this notion of genetic egalitarianism) is waiting for Jensen and Rushton to die, along with perhaps Richard Lynn and Michael Levin. And all of them are relative pariahs who don’t get things published in mainline journals without accompanying pieces reassuring the reader of alternate views. Nor do they easily find publishers for books.
The Western world has decided: We are all basically a single family of man and there are no cognitive skillsets which vary by genetically-groupable population. In the modern work world, it is anathema to express an alternate opinion, and for many–perhaps all–larger corporations and institutions it would be a fire-able offense to express that opinion publicly. Witness the demise of James D Watson.
Oh please. Papers that show certain groups score higher on certain tests is not the same thing as saying that group is “genetically superior.”
Showing that females score slightly higher on language tests does not mean that girls are “genetically superior” to boys.
Showing that males score slightly higher on math tests does not mean that boys are “genetically superior” to girls.