Thanks, I’ll check it out at a later time. Right now I don’t really have the time to sit down and actually go through either of them.
I’m pretty sure there is poof/evidence/reasoning, but I don’t think there was much of it in the OP.
I don’t think either result is that surprising. It would make sense that there would be a variety of “levels of motivation” among any given group of kids, and it makes sense that many of the least motivated would have among the lowest scores. And for a single test for kids, it makes sense that a tangible short-term reward could have tangible short-term effects for the poorly motivated.
It also makes sense that this reward-based motivation might not scale up to a longer term structure like a year of school- the kids might just lose interest in the rewards, or be unable to maintain a higher-than-usual level of motivation for more than a short time.
But it might indicate that a significant portion of low-scoring kids might have a problem with motivation, not intelligence. They might just not put that much effort into the tougher questions, even if they are capable. As far as the apparently self-reported motivation “scores” cited earlier, I’m not sure how reliable such self-reporting can be, especially by kids. Who knows if poorly motivated kids are more or less likely to overestimate their actual motivation levels.
It’s an interesting result.
BTW for the ones that want to check the PBS video of Race, the Power of an Illusion, you should skip 50 seconds to avoid text added by the poster. Or click the link here with that skip added:
I’m not that inclined to get my science from television…can you summarize what they say?
My observation is that the term “race” is not very useful. There’s just too much political baggage.
I like Jerry Coyne’s editorial, although I don’t see any compelling reason to accept that “there hasn’t been time” to show “substantial” genetic differences. Those are pretty subjective judgments, and so couching reassurance that differences are simply phenotypic differences for appearance driven by sexual selection and disease resistance driven by environment doesn’t do much for me.
But I think many people–especially those steeped in the “there’s no such thing as race” mantra are surprised to learn how well ancestral lineages can be parsed out even in admixed populations. And for many of them there’s good news: you are pretty admixed, so any performance outcome differences that do exist among populations are going to be ameliorated by the fact that your particular genes are admixed.
If you are an american black, that self-assigned SIRE group puts you in a cohort with an average of about 20-30% european admixture, for example. This is a vastly higher amount than a typical sub-saharan black. If there’s some kind of advantageous “intelligence” gene running around in the european gene pool, you’ve got a decent chance of having it in your personal genome. About 30% of americans self assigning to “white” have at least a small percentage of (recent) african admixture, so if you are a white guy looking for better a better athletic gene than your source population, all is not lost. Within both of those populations, superior genes still exist for any given trait that are superior to any given gene in the next population over. Further, in many countries, admixtures are even more common, blurring SIRE groups even more.
Ancestral populations at the level of continentally-defined “race” are themselves pretty crude categories.
While it’s true that we are not very smoothly homogenized, it’s equally true that no individual is defined biologically by his phenotypic appearance. You have to look at the actual geneset for any given individual to find out how he did in the evolutionary genetic lottery. The average outcome for an entire cohort is not an especially good way to make a very robust prediction on the geneset for a given individual, given the amount of overlap between source populations, the genetic variation within every population, and the unpredictability of admixture for any single individual.
What average outcome a SIRE group has may be driven by average gene prevalence for that group, but only the unschooled masses take this as a good way to *a priori *assign an outcome to an individual. I have noted with some irony that within the SIRE group of “white,” some of the lowest functioning intellects have assumed a personal significance from a group average not supported by their personal genome. 
I can’t remember the quote, but there’s this idea that your worst enemy in a debate is not the guy opposed to you. It’s the guy who agrees with your position, but is an idiot. Oh well; I labor on.
And there’s no genetic evidence for the genetic explanation for the test-score gap. And “Nurture” has not been normalized. In short, no reason to believe that black people are inherently genetically less intelligent, on average. In case anyone forgot.
So, do you agree that a straightforward test of whether or not there is an intelligence gene is to apply IQ tests to a variety of “black” people, and see if there is a positive correlation between “percentage of european admixture” and IQ?
Suppose you did this test and found no correlation; what would you conclude?
Actually, I think this has been tried using proxies like skin color tone…not much of a proxy. You’d need to look at the actual amount of genetic admixture, and use a large group.
But the better test would be to take two source populations and test their IQs, then take an admixed population where the parents are chosen randomly. This doesn’t happen, because IQ levels tend to mate with the same IQ levels.
As I’ve said earlier in the thread, for mating patterns in the modern world, IQ drives choice of mates. In other words, high IQ indviduals tend to marry high-IQ individuals, and low with low. You might see some regression to a mean for offspring, but I don’t think you’d see a marked effect.
Still, it’s not unusual to look across the world and see “coloreds” or “mulattos” doing somewhere between the two source populations from which they are admixed.
It does not necessarily follow that mulattos do in-between because of genetics. In many cases mulattos occupy the middle ground between the “pure-bloods” and the natives, and the mulattos’ environment follows accordingly - not first-class - but not bottom-of-the-barrel either. Environment can have an impact on IQ, intelligence, and/or performance on standardized tests.
I’d like to recommend: Ten facts about human variation, by Jonathan Marks (2010). It’s a quick, (relatively) recent article on commonly held misconceptions about human genetic variation; it’s also in point form making it easy to both skim and peruse. Perfect for interested non-Anthropologists (like myself).
Speaking of those old signatories, Vincent Sarich apparently died last October too.
Thanks for this.
Most of these points re reasonably stated. Unfortunately, he doesn’t address this question:
“Are there gene prevalence differences for positively selected genes that do cluster by SIRE group?”
I’ve given a cite earlier of a fairly good study that shows they do, and that’s the real issue to overcome for egalitarians. The practical outcome differences by SIRE groups are quite marked, so reassuring the public about these other less related “misconceptions” without addressing the key question above doesn’t really help.
I agree. But what I would be looking for is an exception to a general pattern that I see across populations and economic/political systems. I am simply saying that this general pattern of outcome success does not seem to have very many exceptions.
Suppose that creatine kinase reference ranges are markedly different for SIRE groups of white males and black males in the United States. Suppose further that the exact genetics have not been worked out for total serum creatine kinase levels. Suppose further that it’s impossible to absolutely normalize for environmental variables (“maybe blacks have more manual labor and are therefore more muscled…maybe their diet is different…”)
In such a scenario, would your position be that “there’s no genetic evidence for the genetic explanation for a creatine kinase gap”?
This approach, of demanding an exact mechanism for the biological process underlying a cause-effect link was used by tobacco companies for many years to promote the idea that smoking and lung cancer had not been proved to be related. No matter how overwhelming the evidence, it was always argued the evidence was circumstantial, and there was one more environmental variable that had not been considered.
It’s a good idea to be skeptical. In the case at hand, I’m not persuaded there’s “no genetic evidence,” because the obvious environmental factors have been reasonably accounted for. Accounting for environmental factors does provide evidence the residual gap is genetic.
Of course- “genetic evidence” means exactly that- genes. It would still be a fine hypothesis, but without actual evidence, we can’t be sure what the explanation is.
Also, it’s often glossed over- but intelligence is a vastly different concept then almost every other human characteristic- it makes sense that it should be treated differently.
I do not believe that this is so.
If they were all accounted for, which I don’t believe is true.
This is one of the dumbest rhetorical arguments put here, history and genetics tell us that as progress and evidence came, more and more researchers and experts stopped being skeptics regarding tobacco smoke.
And once again, experts in history, genetics, and anthropology (And most psychologists) looked at the evidence and more and more researchers and experts do agree nowadays that race is an illusion.
Straw men, bullshit points, willfully not reading, and now historical ignorance.
You have it backwards, past scientists gave a lot of justifications for prejudice back in the day, they do not now as evidence and the conclusions that carried the day continue to be supported. And that is why even the latest champion you refer to has so many agreements with the majority view that you have no choice but to brand him an idiot by you.
Oh, well, it is not my problem, so as mentioned before, please continue with the “evidence”, there is research to be done all right, but it is evidence that tells all about the fallacies some have to resort to keep going. It is data that history and sociology can use as the quoted article on why these fallacies keep cropping up do.
If you’re reduced to making the argument that slaveowners only raped slaves of equal IQ as themselves, then it might be time to take a step back.
It’s also been done using blood markers for racial heritage and also with interviews re: ancestry. All three studies resulted in the same conclusion–no statistical relationship between racial heritage and IQ. Those three studies may not have put a nail in the coffin of the intelligence gene, but they sure kicked it in the balls and took its wallet.
Even today, it may not be known the exact process by which cigarette smoke damages genetic material resulting in cancerous tissue.
Also, there is an alternative explanation: Cigarettes are widely believed to be harmful to one’s health. Therefore, the kind of person who smokes cigarettes is likely to engage in truly unhealthy behaviors which increase his risk of health problems.
Further, nobody has ever done a study where people are chosen at random and assigned to a smoking group.
Also, there is really no such thing as a “smoker” – there is just a continuous line between people who don’t smoke at all or who have an occasional cigar all the way up to people who smoke 4 packs a day every day. In addition, there are plenty of so-called “non-smokers” who are exposed to cigarette smoke every day at home or on the job.
Clearly, the line between “smoker” and “non-smoker” is an arbitrary one with no inherent biological meaning.
So if the standard proposed by egalitarians is applied to smoking and lung cancer, there really is no evidence at all that smoking causes lung cancer.
Of course, that also ignores that there was progress made recently on the mechanisms of why tobacco smoke is harmful.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/18/us/direct-link-found-between-smoking-and-lung-cancer.html
Once again, this last post just reeks of ignorance.
I believe that you persist in your own illusion that whether or not the term “race” is an illusion has much of anything to do with whether or not populations vary in gene prevalences.
When you come to an understanding of why these are separate considerations, you’ll save yourself time trying to dissuade me that “race is an illusion.”
Did you have a chance to read Jerry Coyne’s blog, by the way?
You might also be interested in another paper.
“Abstract
This paper examines population structure through the prism of pairwise genetic distances. Two complementary perspectives, framed as two simple questions, are explored: Q1: What is the probability that a random pair of individuals from the same local population is more genetically dissimilar than a random pair from two distinct populations? Q2: On average, how genetically different are two individuals from the same local population, in comparison with two individuals chosen from any two distinct populations? Models are developed to provide quantitative answers for the two questions, given allele frequencies across any number of markers from two diploid populations. The probability from Q1 is shown to drop to zero with increasing number of genetic markers even for very closely-related populations and rare alleles. The average genetic dissimilarity of two individuals from distinct populations diverges from the average dissimilarity of two individuals from the same population by a percentage dependent on estimates of population differentiation. This perspective also suggests a measure of population distance based on the intuitive notion of pairwise genetic distance, along with a simple method of estimation. Results from recent empirical research on inter-individual genetic distance in human populations are analyzed in the context of the theoretical framework.”
Oh, you mean the guy that you call it an idiot?
The reality is that he is in the minority on using the term and he is not opposed on most of what else the scientists report.
Once again, no easy pickings to support your strawmen, bullshit, ignorance in history, etc, and you even acknowledged that in the case of Coyne he agrees with many other researchers that agree with what I mentioned…
And once again, after showing how skeptical and scientific sites report on the issue, you still have to demonstrate that what the experts continue to report is just my illusion, otherwise it is just another dumb point of yours.