As this 2nd generation Jamaican-American of Black, White (English), and Chinese descent blogger asks How much hard evidence do you need?
He notes why this is such a touchy subject:
Same old, same old, Arthur Jensen was already mentioned and replied to on post #571 “there is “even less empirical support for a genetic explanation.”” of intelligence differences among races, And having said that once again is relevant to report, once again that was also a Pioneer Fund fellow.
This attempt to disparage people and organizations as having bias by citing the SPLC is rich. RICH!
Meh, your attempts at distraction are, as pointed before the science remains lousy, It is clear that you are only avoiding the scientific drubbing they had (already mentioned in the previous post), it is pertinent to report that those that continue to rely on them are not going to be taken seriously.
The issue of Ethics and the politics of this can not be avoided, just as the science.
By you. Or by the SPLC and those who share their biases. I can definitely live with that.
Then learn to live in a shrinking circle, as pointed before, it really stretches logic when independent skeptical sites that bother to look at what most experts say about the current scientific status is out there, are correct about astrology, antivaxination and genetically modified organisms. (this last bit is a good test on finding if a source is looking at the science or just biases) etc. But somehow they can not figure out that most experts are wrong on this subject. Their bias will continue.
Nah, it is more simple to realize they do check at what experts report, since groups like Rationalwiki can indeed trample on many leftists that are against GMO, it was to be reported that they also report that guys like Jensen are not being taken seriously among the experts.
And when others that also look at skepticism also report on how off base guys like Jensen were, it is once again important to mention to all that even when biases are investigated the racialists like Jensen are not as supported in scientific circles as you imagine they are.
Actually, what Flynn said was that lower class people should have fewer babies, and that one possible mechanism of effecting that was to make birth control as convenient as drinking water, the way we fluoridate water.
That’s a bit different from your spin here.
But what I was referring to was the attribution of the idea that I had something to say about certain groups reproducing, or reproducing with one another.
Flynn’s notion was that low-IQ groups reproducing was not good for the country because a lower average IQ was not good for the country. While he did not identify their lower-IQ SIRE groups, anyone looking at New Zealand demographics (or living in NZ, like Flynn does) knows which populations are disproportionately represented in those lower classes. That’s why Flynn got so much heat about it…he was essentially sayng that mostly aborginal peoples should be encouraged by as convenient a means as possible to have fewer children.
No he was not saying that, you need a cite for that.
So a multi-decade 30-40 pt gap is trivial? And the higher the math score, the ratio of men to women goes way up. And despite great academic success in college women aren’t represented much in STEM fields.
Seems to me your position should be that women aren’t as capable as men, but white/asian women have more to offer than minorities. This seems to be the general consensus anytime I check out “race realism” blogs.
Liberals want AA because they think minorities and women are just as capable as others but there are institutional/cultural barriers. If you think that’s just a bunch of BS but still want AA then…well, good luck with that. Especially if you think the egalitarian view is going to be on the wrong side of history.
Why not? If it’s really true that different races have such large and innate differences in capability then this has serious ramifications for society.
Well that’s just a matter of semantics. You are of course free to define “not working” any way you like, but the ultimate question is whether small genetic differences can have a significant impact. Which they obviously can.
You yourself pointed out that baboon organs have been transplanted into humans. At the same time, I doubt that even you would dispute that observed differences in intelligence between humans and baboons are due in large part to genetics. In short, the “organs work the same” argument is a red herring.
Anyway, I notice that you ignored my request for you to back up what you said about my supposed claims about inferiority and superiority. Of course you are unable to back up your claim. I have no interest in a discussion where I am strawmanned, i.e. where you respond to what you imagine or wish I said as opposed to what I actually said.
So this exchange is over.
In case you’re not familiar with b84, this is when he pretends to ignore you. He’s been pretending to ignore me for a while, yet he still shows up in threads I’ve started. Don’t worry, everyone just laughs at him.
I think this article is pretty reasonable. It does start with Flynn, which I find a bit disconcerting. Flynn currently asserts that the right number for average adult black IQ in the United States is 85, and that 40 years ago it was 79. While this may make his hypothesis of rising IQ easier to support, I find those numbers untenably low.
Then it takes the usual tack of setting up the strawman that non-egalitarians are all about insisting there is such a thing as biological racial purity:
“How can any rational person take seriously notions such as the Aryans or racial purity? Some probably assert these things as a matter of establishing power. Being a member of a pure race is a quick and simple way to establish one’s superiority.”
This strawman is nonsense, of course, and completely irrelevant to the real issue: There is good reason to deduce that average intelligence differences among populations are driven by genetic factors in addition to environmental ones.
The article you cite admits to evolutionary and migratory differences creating genetic clustering among populations. It quotes a source suggesting there is about 6% of genetic variation accounted for by “races.” It suggests the concept of “superiority” should be discarded, even if outcome differences exist.
It makes the mistake of suggesting that, if differences are genetic (for example, genetic differences driving violent behavior), we shouldn’t create any social policy at all. This is a bit lame, and a clear strawman. Only an idiot would say we shouldn’t help the disadvantaged, regardless of why they are disadvantaged. We do it it in every classroom, every day.
It gives a nice quote from Peter Singer at the end:
*"…the genetic hypothesis does not imply that we should reduce our efforts to overcome other causes of inequality between people.
…the fact that the average IQ of one racial group is a few points higher than that of another does not allow anyone to say that all members of the higher IQ group have higher IQs than all members of the lower IQ group…"*
Most of all, it doesn’t say that genetic reasons do not underlie observed intelligence correlation differences among populations. And that’s the basic point. They do. The kind of wording you see in this article is the kind of wording you see in almost every thoughful essay. People do not want to be told bluntly there is no Santa Claus, even if there is no evidence of genetic egalitarianism across population groups. Every time we study the subject we find that our gene prevalences are different, our genes drive intelligence, and no amount of wordsmithing lets us come out and say: “Folks: every SIRE group and every population has gene pools that drive equal potential.”
On the whole, the essay has the tenor of someone letting down egalitarians gently. There are differences–real genetic differences–among populations. Maybe even for intelligence. Those differences don’t mean one "race’ is superior. I’m good with that.
by CP:
“Actually, what Flynn said was that lower class people should have fewer babies, and that one possible mechanism of effecting that was to make birth control as convenient as drinking water, the way we fluoridate water.
That’s a bit different from your spin here.
But what I was referring to was the attribution of the idea that I had something to say about certain groups reproducing, or reproducing with one another.
Flynn’s notion was that low-IQ groups reproducing was not good for the country because a lower average IQ was not good for the country. While he did not identify their lower-IQ SIRE groups, anyone looking at New Zealand demographics (or living in NZ, like Flynn does) knows which populations are disproportionately represented in those lower classes. That’s why Flynn got so much heat about it…he was essentially sayng that mostly aborginal peoples should be encouraged by as convenient a means as possible to have fewer children.”
I believe I already posted a cite.
From the article:
Otago University emeritus professor Dr Jim Flynn was commenting on census figures that show mothers without a higher education were the anchor of New Zealand’s current fertility rate…
Statistics show women without tertiary qualifications who had reached their early 40s had produced 2.57 babies each.
In contrast, women with a higher education were producing just 1.85 babies each.
(Quotes from Flynn)
“Everyone knows if we only allowed short people to reproduce there would be a tendency in terms of genes for height to diminish. Intelligence is no different from other human traits…
A persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually…
I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote…You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote”
The thing that got Flynn in hot water was that, although he used the “lower education” phrase, the demographic comprising that lower education group was disparately aboriginal. Further, it’s pretty bluntly his opinion that genetics is what underpins the outcome differences for that group; that’s why we need to have fewer dumb people breeding (or more smart people breeding) according to Flynn.
Ahh, the conspiracy canard again (and the “egalitarian” straw-man). Of course- it couldn’t possibly be that you have no genetic evidence for the genetic explanation; it has to be that most scientists have decided that they’d rather not make a huge and exciting discovery about human genetics.
It’s certainly easy to ignore your critics when they’re all part of a conspiracy. And it’s certainly easy to ignore your complete lack of evidence when you can just say that the scientists are afraid to pursue it.
There’s no evidence that supports the genetic explanation to the exclusion of environmental explanations. There’s lots of evidence for various environmental impacts on the test-score gap, though there remains a part of the gap that is, so far, unexplained. You and others have made a hypothesis- that on average, black people are inherently genetically dumber- but that’s as far as you’ve gotten. The hypothesis has not been tested.
I haven’t looked carefully at gender differences for scores, and the effects of efforts to ameliorate environmental studies, but if you give me a cite, I’ll look it up and comment. If nurturing influences are reasonably the same and outcomes differ, then of courrse I’d agree the residual difference has evidence of being a genetic difference.
Liberals want race-based AA because they want all groups represented in the benefits of society. So do I.
What “serious ramifications”?
Thanks for that link.
iiandyiiii, might you be able to read the page Chen019 linked to? If you are, do you still hold to your claim of their being zero evidence?
Virtually every argument about differences between the “races”- including specific tactics like the straw-man of “egalitarianism” and the silly “creationist” slur, and even the weird “asians will never dominate basketball” that occasionally comes up- that CP loves to use, over and over again, comes from the largely discredited research and opinions of J Philippe Rushton.
For more about Rushton, see here, here, and here.
Some gems from Rushton- he has suggested that the effectiveness of the Nazi war effort was a result of racial purity. He has hypothesized that black people have a “promiscuous reproductive strategy”. He has worried that demographic shifts endanger our “Northern European civilization”. And most amusingly, he was reprimanded by the university that employed him for accosting people in a shopping mall and asking them about their sexual habits and the size of their anatomical features, to support his “theory” that black people have certain larger anatomical features (and Asian people have smaller), and that, somehow, this large anatomical feature indicates a trade-off with brain function.
Rushton’s claims that black people have smaller brains, on average, have also been discredited- for example, the Maasai herders have larger brains, on average, then white people in Egypt- and African Americans, on average, have the same-size brains as white people in regions with similar climates.
That link offers nothing new, and no actual evidence for the genetic explanation. I’ve explained what the evidence would consist of- an identification of the genes responsible for high and low intelligence, a broad survey showing the prevalence of these genes in various populations, and a verification of these results by showing a close correlation between presence or absence of these genes and intelligence among individuals (which could include things like comparing individuals from different populations who happen to have the same genes for intelligence, and seeing if they score the same on intelligence tests).
It’s just more of the same- that because there are gene differences between populations, genes for intelligence must differ between populations. That does not necessarily follow- and even if it did, it doesn’t tell you anything about which groups have the “superior” or “inferior” genes for intelligence. Sociological data provides no information about genetics, it can’t, and it never will.
In addition, Chen’s link refers to discredited notions about race- like the so-called “warrior gene” (which is actually far more prevalent in people of Chinese descent then European descent).
No, this time you are not comprehending. Flinn was not looking at what you are making a cathedral of rhetoric of.
I already know your quote, the requested cite refers to your ass pulled "he was referring to “certain groups” and not New Zealanders on the whole.
Again, he was not referring to ethnic or other groups, just their levels of education, point being that all groups are affected.
So, once again we need a big fat site of that supports what you claim Flinn said. He was not referring to economical divisions not ethnicity or race.