Race is non-existent

Great Debates
201

The evidence is this:

The academic performance gap is persistent, consistent, pervasive across the world, and utterly resistant to efforts to eliminate it despite formal specialty programs to assist the disadvantaged, hundreds of millions of dollars in expenditures, and widespread special accommodation such as race based AA. A sports performance gap developed as soon as previously-excluded groups were included.

Biologic evidence for gene prevalence differences among SIRE groups is irrefutable.

Biologic evidence of population separations by tens of thousands of years with relatively small back-admixture is unrefuted. These separated groups can be roughly correlated with SIRE groupings in terms of the majority of genetic ancestry for those SIRE populations.

Biological evidence that genes drive a substantial proportion of our intelligence and physiological traits is unrefuted.

Biological evidence that genes mutate and that advantageous genes are distributed by positive selection pressure to descendants is unrefuted.

Not a single putative variable for a non-genetic explanation holds up for SIRE-based academic performance differences, including wealth, parental education or peer perception. In short, there is not a single countering piece of evidence against a genetic explanation. There is only conjecture that such an explanation might be found someday.

There is also a complaint that SIRE-based groups are crude groupings without narrow biological definitions. This is definitely true, and for this reason I have tried to continually stress that we are talking about broad group averages and not individuals. However, our society has decided that we want these “race” constructs and we want to drive proportionate representation across the socio-economic spectrum based on those groups. Therefore, an understanding of why there are average group differences is critical to create effective social policies that drive outcomes we want to see.

You hold that there is “no evidence” for a genetic explanation because you want a gene variant and a specific prevalence difference for that gene. This is an an acceptable position because you want an absolute standard for a very sensitive topic. However the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that such genes exist, and are driving immutable maximum potential average difference outcomes for SIRE-based populations.

202

This is a rather grandiose way of saying that disparate outcomes exist in the few decades we’ve had decent studies for after centuries of brutal discrimination.

“Roughly” doesn’t help your cause.

Considering how difficult (or impossible) it is to quantify things like parenting skills and attention, teacher expectations, and “oppositional culture” pressure, this is not particularly surprising. And according to Sweet, there’s plenty of countering evidence. Considering there’s zero genetic evidence for it, I hardly think it’s even close to conclusive.

Absolutely- and I think your understanding is highly flawed, and extremely biased.

This is incredibly false. There is zero genetic evidence, and what other evidence there is cannot credibly be called anything but “suspect”- and as Sweet notes, there is plenty of countering evidence.

You’ve put the cart before the horse- you’re convinced blacks are dumber- anything that says differently must be wrong, to you, no matter what it actually is. I hope one day you can recognize your own biases.

203

I agree, and I would add that the people who deny genetic differences in intelligence among races are, in reality, extremely obsessed with race.

For example, if there is a firefighter or police exam, and black people score a lot worse on the exam than whites, one possible response is to say “Who cares? We don’t categorize people by race and so we won’t worry about differences that show up in test results.”

Or if black kids score worse on statewide tests than white kids, one possible response is to say “Who cares? We don’t categorize people by race and so we won’t worry about any test score gap.”

But that’s not the typical response from those who deny genetic differences in intelligence among races. Instead, they insist that there must have been racial discrimination. And that a lot of societal resources must be spent to remedy this discrimination. And that institutions should engage in favoritism to counter these disparities. ETA: Or at least they do not oppose such policies.

Well fine, but now you’ve opened the door to hypothesizing that there is a genetic cause for some part of the gap. If Group X generally consists of people descended in large part from one part of the world; and Group Y generally consists of people descended in large part from another part of the world; and a disparity is observed between Group X and Group Y, it’s reasonable to hypothesize that the disparity has a genetic cause.

204

Yes, it’s reasonable to hypothesize, and that’s as far as it’s gotten. You’ve made a hypothesis, and that’s it. To test the hypothesis, find the genes.

205

[QUOTE=CP]
I am really curious about this statement: “Millions of ethnically Black Americans lack sub-Saharan genetic markers. They do. The gap follows self-identity, not genes.” What is the source of it? And is Sweet saying that "millions of ethnically black americans don’t derive a significant part of their ancestry from sub-saharan africa? If so, where does he think they derive their ancestry from? Are there millions of Navin Johnsons out there, or was this data simply culled from DNA testing that happened not to have a very broad cross-section of sub-saharan genetic lines? Were all those millions actually Swedes or something?
[/QUOTE]

No, you’re not curious. You just can’t accept it. You reject anything that conflicts with your dogma.

The science and the historical research are extensively documented in Sweet’s numerous other articles. Go, read, learn.

[QUOTE=CP]

However the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that such genes exist, and are driving immutable maximum potential average difference outcomes for SIRE-based populations.
[/QUOTE]

No one’s found a single gene like that. When Bruce Lahn thought he had found a variant which coded for high IQ, he was proven wrong, embarrassingly so. It turned out that the peoples of New Guinea had the variant in abundance, but the Han Chinese were largely lacking in it.

[QUOTE=CP]
Across the entire country (and the world, for that matter), the general pattern is always the same, and the rank order for SIRE groups is always the same. Isolated exceptions might exist, but those isolated exceptions (Sweet’s unreferenced immigrant population studies, for example) never seem to hold up when examining large groups.

[/QUOTE]

There aren’t any black Americans except in the US and Liberia. So, there can’t be the same pattern across the world. The Africans, the various Caribbean populations, the Brazilians, all have different gene pools. The Africans have enormous genetic variation from ethnic group to ethnic group.

Reference was made up thread to the Chadic languages speakers. These are mainly the Hausa, the dominant ethnic group of northern Nigeria. The Hausa are mainly Nilotic in ancestry, but they also have a substantial Afro-Asiatic element, and they speak an Afro-Asiatic language.Nilotic and Afro-Asiatic are primarily linguistic terms, but the majority of the speakers of each group also have genetic markers in common due to their common ancestry. So the terms can also reference ethnic/genetic groups.

Genetically, the Hausa are different from their Nigerian neighbors who generally have neither Nilotic nor Afro-Asiatic ancestry, and speak languages in the Niger-Kongo family, a completely different group of languages from either Nilotic or Afro-Asiatic.

From a genetic standpoint, you can’t lump the Hausa together with, say, the Igbo, as “blacks” or sub Saharan Africans. They’re too different, and even a minor difference in genetic variants can have substantial effects.

206

It’s unclear to me how past brutality affects a current study group not directly victimized by that brutality. I’m not aware that wealthy black children of educated parents are so obsessed with something that happened to their ancestors that they are not able to outperform poor white children with uneducated parents.

I haven’t seen privileged white children so distraught over grievances about what happened in their ancestry that they just can’t outdo asians.

207

Why am I not surprised? Many, many things are unclear to you. I’ll give you a hint- past brutality may affect things like teacher expectations, parenting skills, and “oppositional culture” peer pressure.

208

It’s not necessary to identify the specific genes in question to know that they must exist. For example, blood types were identified and known to be heritable long before the actual gene was identified.

Your argument is like that of a tobacco company executive demanding to know the exact genetic changes caused by cigarette smoke which lead to lung cancer.

Well what is the threshold for “too different” that prevents you from lumping two different groups together?

209

It’s kinda funny how the effects of discrimination are passed from generation to generation of blacks, kinda like genes. Even in Haiti which has been free of whites for hundreds of years.

But of course there’s always something for the Liberal Excuse Machine to grasp on to.

210

This is laughable, considering that the cigarette smoke-cancer link has overwhelming causal evidence (of the non-genetic variety) for it. It’s proven that there is a link between cigarettes and cancer. Cigarettes are linked to cancer (this is accepted), and there is also evidence of a link between ethnicity and various disparate outcomes (also accepted). The question is why, not whether the link exists. There’s no genetic evidence for the genetic explanation for the disparate outcomes. Your analogies need work.

211

Yes, it’s funny how centuries of brutal repression can have impacts decades afterwards. I mean, no other historical events have consequences well into the future, do they?

212

Poor analogy. You’re comparing a relatively simple biological phenomenon, blood type, to one of the most complex ones, brain function as measured by standardized tests.

Basically, this is rhetorical dodge. You don’t have the evidence, so you claim you don’t need it. Well, that was easy.

The groupings will always be arbitrary, in varying degrees.

The point here is that "blacks’ in Brazil often have a majority of European DNA. Different groups of “blacks” in Africa, in the single nation state of Nigeria, have widely disparate genetic origins due to migration. Depending on what genes you’re looking at, the jet black Hausas may have more in common genetically with Egyptian Berbers than they do with Yorubas in the same country.

213

The sources I’ve been linking to, Frank Sweet and Ron Unz, are conservative.

There’s nothing conservative about your position. It’s frank hatred. Nothing more.

214

Lol, I specifically chose blood type because it is so simple. The same thing is true of more complex attributes. For example it was known that height is heavily influenced by genes long before anyone identified the actual genes in play.

Probably they still have not identified all of the genes involved in height, or even the majority. And yet it’s still possible to know that the genes (and alleles) exist.

Anyway, do you concede that it’s not necessarily to identify the gene in question to be reasonably confident that some attribute is strongly influenced by genetics?

Nonsense, the evidence is overwhelming. Anyway, you asserted that the evidence is overwhelming that the disparity is not genetic.

Please summarize the 3 strongest pieces of evidence that the racial disparity in intelligence has essentially no genetic component.

So it’s never ever possible to observe a disparity between two groups of humans and conclude that the disparity is in large part the result of genetics?

So what? Please let me know exactly what the standards are for determining whether a group is too disparate genetically to compare with another group and conclude that a disparity is the result of genetics. I want to know where the goalposts are. TIA.

215

We talked a little bit about this upthread.
It’s a fascinating piece of the human migration story.

I’ll put in the link for citatation earlier tracing the R1b-V88 subclade as it jumps the Sahara to get into the central Sahel.

I believe Septimus used it as an example of genetic exchange getting from the out-of-africa haplogroup F line back into that part of sub-saharan africa.

The diagram on p 805 shows the approximate distribution for this Y-chromosomal line.

216

If you think there is some evidence or argument I am missing, please summarize it.

Nonsense, but let’s assume that my position is “hatred” for the sake of argument. Please summarize the evidence which shows my position is wrong.

(I understand that you really really wish my position were incorrect.)

217

I’m not trying to disprove your position- just show that there’s no evidence for it (which is true). But here’s some anyway- Sweet refers to some strong evidence against it- black and white children that are 1st generation immigrants show no test score gap, regardless of their region of origin, no gap appears between black and white adoptees of white parents, and while there is a correlation between sub-Saharan African appearance and the gap, there is no correlation between sub-saharan African genetic admixture markers and the gap.

Feel free to read Sweet’s many studies on the subject.

218

Is there room for a differing view?

I believe that “races” exist – that’s why, for instance, you can very often tell a Hopi from a Navajo (Dine) at a glance. It’s the result of many generations of reproductive isolation. The comparison to breeds of dogs is unflattering, but serves the point.

But intelligence is probably highly polygenetic, even more so than height is. We all have personal experience of smart people having dumb kids, and dumb people having smart kids, and, in one family, seeing both smart and dumb siblings, etc. Height is far more easily traced as a hereditary thing.

Overall, I far more agree with iiandyiiii than with brazil84. Non-genetic effects on sociology are much better explanations for the U.S. “racial gap” in academic achievement. The gap is (horribly) self-perpetuating. The non-genetic trait of “having a lot of books in the house” is pseudo-genetic: if your parents had it, you probably will too. The advantage of having a lot of books in the house, when it comes to academic achievement, is immense.

Also, the idea of intrinsic intelligence differences seems to be exploded by tests on children from similar social and economic environments.

219

“Exploded”? Are you able to add some examples?

The study quoted here is one of our bones of contention, as well as others showing that black children from families where the parents have graduate-level education underscore white children from families where the parents have high-school or lower educational levels. From that article in the JBHE:
" …there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."

Then there are MCAT and LSAT scores, which reflect black students from equivalent preparation substantially underscoring whites and asians.

Finally, I know of no studies demonstrating an SES advantage for asians, but they typically outscore whites.

iiandyiiii’s own cite from Sweet upthread, discounts SES as an explanation.

Offsetting the above are a handful of isolated studies without cites, the results of which are quoted by iiandyiiii upthread.

220

Nossir; I’ve been convinced by the cites provided by those who have been disagreeing with you already. I’d only be copying their notes.