Just for the record (in case I am the “them” here), I have not ascribed motivations to anyone, other than using terms like “well-meaning” and “good-hearted” for egalitarians.
I have said the position taken by iiandyiiii and GIGObuster are creationist to the extent that they discount evolution and human history. That is, the fact that modern sapiens has been around 200K years; and the fact that all genes mutate; the fact that populations are separated by tens of thousands of years driving gene prevalence differences; and so on, are all anti-creationist positions.
To argue that it’s more likely than not that we are genetically egalitarian is much closer to a creationist viewpoint (“We showed up 5,000 years ago, and we haven’t evolved much”) than it is close to an evolutionary viewpoint (outlined above).
I am not labeling the opposition Creationists. I am labeling their viewpoint itself as being much more closely aligned with a creationist paradigm. And I am not suspecting motives, so to speak.
It’s particularly irritating to me to be labeled by GIGObuster as having some sort of “motive” of any kind; creationist; anti-AGW and racist have all been put out there.
And to be more precise then, your idea that our view is creationist is still bullshit. And the point stands, the methods you are using in this debate are used with gusto by creationists and climate change deniers.
This is the straw-man- pretending we have disputed any of those points. Though I’ll add that the separation between populations (and their gene pools) is far from absolute. But none of those points lead necessarily to your genetic explanation; the fact that some genes are different for different populations does not mean that all human characteristics with a genetic component must necessarily differ between populations. And if you’re not saying all characteristics must differ, then there is no reason to bring up the fact that populations’ gene pools have differences- it’s irrelevant to the discussion.
No, this is completely false. I’ll say again why (and you haven’t even tried to refute this)- just because two populations’ gene pools have differences does not mean that all (or any one in particular) characteristics with a genetic component must be different. We know that for most human characteristics, there is far more genetic variation within a population then between populations- and most characteristics, on average, do not differ between populations.
And I label your viewpoint as being “much more closely aligned with a creationist paradigm”; just like creationists, you brush off the very wide opposition to your explanation among the scientific establishment by saying that researchers are scared of “academic suicide”, or other nonsense. Just like creationists, you insist that the “days are numbered” for the more widely accepted explanation, and soon everyone will be forced to accept yours. Just like creationists, you spend the vast majority of your time trying to pick apart a competing explanation, rather than doing research to support your own.
Please, spread your wisdom on how black people would be better off if only everyone accepted that “blacks are dumber”. I’d love to hear how you differentiate yourself from probably every single person in history (particularly a certain period of US history) to have claimed that a particular minority would be better off if only they accepted their (alleged) inherent inferiority (or lesser ability on average, or whatever you choose to call it).
On the “creationist” front, you are confusing a distaste for what you see as stubbornness with the actual position taken. Let me challenge you again: which of the genetic arguments I make are close to the creationist position of how genes work and evolve?
Back to genes: when we see genes which are positively selected, that’s not just ordinary mutation variants. They are positively selected. I gave you a paper showing 1800 positively selected genes, including genes for neurobiological function. Not a peep of counter cite. Just the same old mantra that there’s no evidence. We are at the front edge of genetic research, and it is not looking good for the egalitarian crowd, my friend.
I just returned from a conference of engineers working in the healthcare software business. A thousand engineers in a ballroom; the nature of the business at hand was that these folks represented the cream at their firms. What’s your wag of how many of those folks were black?* Asian? What would happen if I went to a local professional basketball game? What do you think the general pattern is in scenarios all over the world where STEM field high-performance makes no allowance for anything but pure performance?
And the best you have is “show me the gene” and “what about teacher expectations?” OK…
*Answer: 1. Out of a thousand. 40 years on since we’ve made aggressive attempts for race-based AA, head-starts, magnet schools, special programs…1.
The “method” I have used is to post data and draw conclusions. But you want to paint me as a creationist? Without being able to give even one single example of how the data and arguments I’ve presented are aligned with a creationist viewpoint of how genes work and humans evolve? Not even one?
Let’s truck off to the local creationist congregation.
I’ll say, “Hi folks. We started off 200,000 years ago, diverged into multiple populations and a bunch of our genes mutated. Evolution and migratory patterns cause those mutated genes to develop disparate prevalences, and disparate population. This is a great example of evolution at work, right in front of our eyes.”
You say, “Hi folks. We’re all about the same, with gene pools that only differ for minor things like skin color and disease resistance. Evolution and positive selection of mutated genes is not a likely explanation for observed differences. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish modern folks from their human ancestors.”
Let’s see which one gets a stony silence.
PS: Climate change? Are you just bitter over Al Gore’s over eating, or something?
Aaand more bullishit, it is clear that you missed that I reported that more than just skin is there.
So yeah, the creationist tactics were linked already, they are just being copied by you, only the subject needs to be changed. As for your willingness to continue to look silly, as Obama could say:
Just one clarifying bit, I’m only point at the tactics that are clearly used by the ones that actually do follow pseudoscience.
Regardless of what one calls them, they remain fallacies, that works for me.
So in any case, so far we get from the side that is clearly refusing to check evidence we still get anecdotes, “eventual victory” fallacies, and more strawmen.
For example, the last tirade just continued to claim that we ignore evolution, again, the fallacy observed here is a strawman.
Going away from the still missing specific genes that express the differences in intelligence among races, the experts still report how misleading is to insist that even the changes observed fit the old race definitions:
Not a peep, because this isn’t evidence for the genetic explanation. You have lots of data you refer to- but none of it is actually evidence that different populations have different genes for high or low intelligence, on average. You have no evidence that “blacks are inherently genetically dumber, on average”.
Wow, an anecdote. Please, waste more of your time and mine with long anecdotes supposedly demonstrating that “blacks are inherently genetically dumber, on average”.
Yes, the best I have is asking for actual genetic evidence. The best you have? Anecdotes.
Your implication that positive selection means that something must be “better” demonstrates a poor understanding of evolution. Just because a gene is positively selected for doesn’t tell you that it’s “better”. It could be positively selected for because it drops a metabolically expensive and unnecessary process, for example, or to take advantage of a different protein that’s easier to make or use, or it could be a sexually selected characteristic (some behavior that is more attractive to the opposite sex)- and even if it’s “better” (that is, actually qualitatively improving a human capability) it could be one of the many, many “neurobiological functions” that is not related to intelligence. It could sharpen one of the senses, improve autonomic functions, improve fine motor control, or improve one of the many, many other functions of the nervous system.
This particular anecdote is an example of a pattern that is repeated pretty much universally. What you want to discount is that this outcome pattern is any evidence at all of differences not due to nurture. “Just anecdotes. Move along. There is nothing for you to see here.”
You want to argue, “If one does not absolutely rule out every possible nurturing influence, then you have no genetic evidence. You must supply the genes, the exact mechanism by which they work, and the exact prevalence difference among groups which are perfectly biologically divided.”
This unrealistic demand, which creates a non-nullifiable egalitarian hypothesis, is not persuasive. If the outcome differences observed were fairly trivial, or observed patterns anecdotal and mixed, or the nurturing differences profound, that would be a different story.
That’s not how it is. It doesn’t matter if we are looking at the NBA itself as the top tier, or basketball teams all along the way. Blacks will be over-represented relative to the starting pool of wanna-be’s all along the way. It doesn’t matter if we are looking at a room of NASA scientists cheering for Curiosity, CERN scientists gloating over Higgs, STEM PhDs, or high school math teams. Asians will be over-represented all along the way. The pattern is so markedly skewed toward some SIRE groups and away from others that a nurturing explanation should be easy to find, and profound. It should be as obvious a pattern as is the outcome pattern.
100 years ago, when women were not very represented in mathematics fields, someone might be inclined to represent that outcome difference as “genetic.” But it would be easy to find opportunity and cultural differences driving that difference. In point of fact, the obvious putative environmental explanations turned out to account for a relatively large amount of the outcome differences, and today that debate is down to the finer points, with whatever pattern difference is left fairly trivial.
That’s in marked contrast to SIRE outcomes in STEM fields. Outcome differences were noted; explanations advanced; remedies pursued. And yet there has been a broad failure to ameliorate outcome differences, even when subsets with similar SES backgrounds are compared. In fact, if you back out the influence of race-based afirmative actions (tacit or specific), the failure is even worse. To explain those patterns requires something more than “teacher expectations” or “crappy parenting,” in my view, since we only drag out those expectations as a special case for a single SIRE group, and since they are fairly trivial influences for an outcome pattern that is doggedly persistent. That pattern is resistant to the best efforts to change it. Broad, well-funded, extraordinary efforts.
Dismissing the everyday world all around you as anecdotal “no evidence” while advancing nurturing explanations that are increasingly obscure and contorted reveals a substantial a priori bias that the world is genetically egalitarian. This is particularly so given the failure of all efforts so far to correct what “must” be simply a problem of nurture and not nature.
Your definition of “universal” must mean “for the past few decades”, because Asian people were not over-represented at the top of those fields until quite recently. So did “environment” hold Asians back before that, or did they suddenly get a lot smarter, genetically?
Even these anecdotes don’t say anything about genetics. You just happen to believe that anecdotes from the magical period of “now” happen to perfectly represent the genetic hierarchy of ability, while any anecdotes from the past are unreliable due to an un-level playing field (another way to say “environment”).
The nurturing differences are profound, or at the very least we don’t know that they aren’t. Your “anecdotal patterns” are irrelevant for the aforementioned reasons, and the statistical patterns are irrelevant (when speaking of genetics) for most of history.
In the magical “now”, yes, they are over-represented. Not so at times in the past.
Again, in the magical period of “now”. Not so at times in the past.
It “should be”, says the guy who thinks that black people would benefit if only everyone actually recognized that they were inherently genetically dumber on average. No, I don’t think it necessarily should be an obvious pattern.
Women are still underrepresented in many fields, like engineering. I don’t believe this is because women have, on average, less inherent genetic ability for mathematics (or any other characteristic).
I don’t believe the efforts have been extraordinary- they’ve been half-hearted at best, and have only even been in existence for a few decades. And the fact that these patterns require more study and explanation says nothing about their cause- just that we haven’t found all of the causes yet.
Since I don’t believe the efforts so far have been particularly exemplary, I’m not willing to give up so easily. So now you’re appealing to “the everyday world all around you”. Gee, where have I heard that before?
A good blog piece. Thanks for it. Here is the source piece from Coyne, under the Why Evolution is True blog. The whole piece is worth reading. “In your interesting blog article “Are there human races?”, you write:”As has been known for a while, DNA and other genetic analyses have shown that most of the variation in the human species occurs within a given human ethnic group, and only a small fraction between different races. That means that on average, there is more genetic difference between individuals within a race than there is between races themselves.”– But this is patently false. I Tal (2012b) I show that pariwise genetic distances, from within- and between-populations, are substantially divergent (in fact, for Fst=0.15, reflecting average intercontinental differentiation from SNPs, the averages differ by almost 50%)…
I think that “races” are biologically real (though we can’t delimit them precisely), and are certainly not “sociocultural constructs.” The “sociological constructs” thing is simply political correctness imposed on biological reality.”
Here’s his opinion on intelligence differences: “Everyone wants to know, of course, if different races differ genetically in their abilities, especially intelligence. While I think there may be statistical differences among races in these things, it’s not as obvious that sexual (or natural) selection would operate as strongly on genes involving these traits as on superficial external characteristics. We just don’t know, and in the complete absence of data it is invidious to speculate on these things. It’s just as scientifically unsupported to say, for example, that there is no difference among populations in mathematical ability as it is to say that there are differences. In the absence of data, we must follow the apophatic theologians and remain silent. And, at any rate, any such differences cannot be used to justify racism given the tremendous variation we see in other genes between members of different populations.”
In sum, your cite supports the idea that populations are different genetically. Whether we call them “races” is a linguistic (and political) decision. As I said upthread, it’s definitional. What’s not definitional is that there are genetically-based populations as a consequence of evolution and human migration history. These populations have been separated for tens of thousands of years. Intra-population variation is broad enough that an average difference for a whole population is not sufficient reason to make an a priori assumption about a given individual in one population relative to an individual from a different population.
In short, exactly what I have been saying all along. To date, the measured outcome differences between the SIRE groups are large, and the nurturing explanations remain elusive. This has social implications; not implications for the performance of a given individual. Coyne’s conclusion on this is: “It’s just as scientifically unsupported to say, for example, that there is no difference among populations in mathematical ability as it is to say that there are differences. In the absence of data, we must follow the apophatic theologians and remain silent. And, at any rate, any such differences cannot be used to justify racism given the tremendous variation we see in other genes between members of different populations.”
I disagree that there is no data, and I consider apophasis simply a way to weasel out of an uncomfortable truth, whether the topic is theology or egalitarianism. The data for outcome differences among genetically disparate populations, not explained by nurturing differences, is deep and profound, stubbornly resistant to any and all efforts to change the shape of nature. I bet Coyne could look around his own peer group of evolutionary biologists at U of C, back out any who are there by special admission such as race-preferenced AA, and see that underlying pattern.
Yes, but the point that was made stands, you disagree, nothing new with that. The point remains that evolution is not ignored.
Once again, you have to resort to quoting the person that was being criticized, the point there was to show that many other researchers support that criticism, and once again, accepting evolution does not automatically mean that there is evidence of genes controlling the differences among races in intelligence, you continue to see the dismissal of old definitions of race and you think that going to groups helps you, again, the genetic differences are focused on medical issues, genes for intelligence differences are not there at all, once again you have no evidence and it is clear that science is not going to support your reprehensible ideas, because as your latest tirade showed, it is clear that contrary to that was said before Affirmative action and other ideas to deal with the gap are on the chopping block in your world.
By the way, I thought of an experiment that, while it wouldn’t provide conclusive evidence for any particular explanation, would at least give us a different sort of look at the heritability of intelligence between self-ID groups. It’s possible this has been done before, but I don’t think I’ve seen it.
Take two groups of parents- all with the same IQ. Let’s say 100 sets of black parents with an IQ of about 120, and 100 sets of white parents who score about 120 on the same IQ test. So smart black parents, and smart white parents. Then give all of their kids the same IQ test. What would we expect to be the results, based on an assumptions for the “genetic explanation” vs “environment explanation”?
If the genetic explanation is correct, then we would expect all adults with the same IQ to have similar genetic potential for intelligence- so a random 120 IQ white adult has the same “genetic intellectual potential” as a random 120 IQ black adult. So though the statistics might show there are fewer 120 IQ black adults then 120 IQ white adults per capita, once you find them and compare them, they’re about the same (as far as genetics for intelligence). So then we would assume that black kids with 120 IQ parents would score about the same as white kids with 120 IQ parents- after all, both groups of kids have the same “genetic intellectual potential” (or whatever you’d like to call it).
If the explanation is something other than genetic, for example that there are things intrinsic to the “black experience” (environment, not genetic) that serve as obstacles to academic and intellectual development, then we would expect the black kids with 120 IQ parents to score lower than the white kids with 120 IQ parents. This is because whatever it is in the “black experience” that obstructs intellectual and academic performance would still impact these black kids, even though their parents are smart, but would not impact the white kids.
If this has been done, I’d be very curious about the results. It wouldn’t be conclusive, but at least it would be something new to talk about.
Regression to the mean of IQ-matched cohorts for siblings and offsprings has been observed. I believe it has been argued both ways. Rushton and Jensen argued the point this way: “Jensen (1973, pp. 107–119) tested the regression predictions with data from siblings (900 White sibling pairs and 500 Black sibling pairs). These provide an even better test than parent– offspring comparisons because siblings share very similar environments. Black and White children matched for IQ had siblings who had regressed approximately halfway to their respective population means rather than to the mean of the combined population. For example, when Black children and White children were matched with IQs of 120, the siblings of Black children averaged close to 100, whereas the siblings of White children averaged close to 110. A reverse effect was found with children matched at the lower end of the IQ scale. When Black children and White children are matched for IQs of 70, the siblings of the Black children averaged about 78, whereas the siblings of the White children averaged about 85. The regression line showed no significant departure from linearity throughout the range of IQ from 50 to 150, as predicted by genetic theory but not by culture-only theory.” (Rushton and Jensen, 2005. Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences and Cognitive Ability
I believe their basic argument is that if you take outliers of a population–say, tall people–their offspring will be closer to the general average for the population. Taller parents would yield higher percentages of tall children, but on their average height would be closer to the average of the population since the kids would not necessarily inherit only the tall genes. They’d inherit the other genes for height as well.
If two matched outlier cohorts regress toward different means (it’s more or less mathematically a given that outliers will regress toward a mean), I’m not sure that helps us distinguish biology from nurture. Both might be different. By using matched siblings instead of offspring, Jensen was trying to correct for environmental variables (since siblings are more likely to have a fairly similar nurturing situation).
That sounds like the results are closer to my expectations for a non-genetic explanation.
But there’s no need to get too far into this example; it’s obviously not conclusive either way. My main point remains solid, I believe- that there’s nothing special about outcomes now (that is, the same environmental factors that created gaps in the past still exist, perhaps to a lesser degree- summed up by Flynn’s supposition that the quality of “environment” of black people in 1995 was similar to the quality of “environment” for white people in 1945, which explains why the average test scores of black people in 1995 match those of white people in 1945), and that sociological data can’t provide any insight into genetics, and that there is no actual genetic evidence for the genetic explanation. So there’s no reason to believe “black people are inherently genetically dumber, on average”.
It would be more effective if, instead of just ridiculing Rushton, Jensen, and others, egalitarians simply did research that showed the opposite of their conclusions.
If Jensen does a study showing that high-IQ black-white cohorts show a regression to disparate means for siblings, why not simply do a study showing this is incorrect? Why attack them, instead of simply getting the “real” data?
The answer is that such studies are reproducible and non-controversial, and so all that’s left is ad hominem attacks.
If I’m wrong, and you do have an opposing study, please feel free to post it. Otherwise, the point stands unopposed by anything except name calling:
If you take high-(and low-)IQ black and white cohorts where the high-IQ individual is an outlier for average intelligence for his SIRE group, and look at siblings of those outliers, you can normalize for nurturing because these are siblings raised in the same nurturing environment. If the sibling average IQ regresses toward means that are different for each cohort, that suggests the genetically-based average mean is different for each cohort (since you have corrected for nurture).
Now I understand you might disagree with the study, and possibly even dislike the authors. But the way for you and other egalitarians to discredit such a study is to do a study that disproves the point–not just use an ad hominem attack. This is the kind of study that is missing from the literature. Unless you want to straighten me out…
iiandyiiii, it’s not clear to me why you think even parental-offspring regression to disparate means would be evidence for nurturing influences. Is your general hypothesis that high-IQ blacks were themselves well-nurtured, but then lost that ability to drive proper nurturing of their children?