If African Americans are more physically capable it’s a wonder the NHL is still not predominantly black.
Surely the stability and financial resources of a region have nothing to do with education, it’s a wonder we don’t air drop white kids in the Congo to smarten up the population!
No, this is not my contention at all.
I can’t speak to this exactly (though I know that any separation has not been absolute), but it has nothing to do with what I said about “race” and intelligence.
“Nurturing” is not quantifiable- there are just too many factors- so any study that claims to normalize for nurturing is making a specious claim. It’s possible to normalize for income, or education level, etc, but “nurturing” is just too huge (and vague) of a thing to measure.
No.
It could be- but there’s no evidence for it (which I’ve said over and over again). You believe that “black people” are genetically dumber- but I’m not going to believe that until I see genetic evidence for it.
From what I understand, it’s generally a self-identified title that means one believes that they see through society’s PC filter (or something similar) and recognize the “fact” that the races are not actually equal in ability (or morality).
CP- you’ve made a hypothesis- one that can be tested. Your hypothesis is “the best explanation for differing outcomes among races/ethnicities/etc. in educational achievements, economics, criminality, and perhaps other things like athleticism, is differing proportions of genes responsible for these things among different races/ethnicities/SIRE groups”. In order to test this hypothesis, you need to look at genes- lots and lots of genes- find the ones responsible for intelligence, criminality, aggression, etc., and you’re on your way to actually testing it. Short of that, all this back-and-forth is just arguing about an untested hypothesis.
You have bought into the idea that the only way to prove average functional differences is to identify the responsible gene.
This is not a very persuasive argument because it rests upon your assertion that nurturing cannot be normalized. Because nurturing cannot be normalized, you demand that a gene be identified. Yet equalizing all reasonable putative nurturing influences to date has not resulted in equivalent performance outcomes. Moreover, the general patterns for skillsets among populations have remained remarkably similar across cultures and political boundaries.
There are no countries where blacks outperform asians for quantitative pursuits, nor has this happened in the history of mankind. Once modern sports pursuits were opened to all comers, blacks achieved remarkable success and over representation (relevant to their starting pool distribution) in certain athletic pursuits despite overwhelmingly lesser nurturing advantages (such as coaching, facilities, family stability and so on). In the United States, commonly advanced nurturing advantages such as parental education and family income have been repeatedly shown to fail to equalize academic performance gaps when the nurturing influences are shifted in favor of blacks. For whites and asians, the performance gap in favor of asians for STEM fields has persisted despite any evidence that whites are somehow disadvantaged.
The pat answer from egalitarians is that these differences are somehow “cultural.” Exactly how that “cultural” difference drives performance differences is never identified.
It is reasonable to suppose the difference is genetic. Not only does equivalent nurturing not equalize differences, we know that gene pools are different. We know from mitochondrial DNA studies that some populations have been separated by tens of thousands of years. We know that, within those populations, many many genes code for markedly different phenotypic outcomes. We know that physiologic paramaters are different among different populations. With respect to intelligence, we would have to assume exactly parallel evolution in relatively isolated populations. Since this has not happened with any other traits, why should genes coding for intelligence be somehow protected from evolution?
Yet you persist in demanding the gene(s) themselves be identified. It’s actually much much easier than that: identify where nurturing is unequal and normalize that. If differences remain, they are genetic. In my family we children have had nearly identical nurturing, and yet exhibit markedly different skillsets. We have different genes. So it is at a population level.
In prior posts I have challenged you to identify what you propose as assymmetric nurturing to account for persistent performance differences among SIRE groups. I ask you again: What do you think accounts for the simple and well-accepted fact that children from graduate-level educated and wealthy black families underperform children from poor and undereducated white families for SAT scores? What do you think accounts for the abysmally lower MCAT performance scores for blacks who have had roughly equivalent antecedent college preparation for those exams? What do you think accounts for the marked over-representation of blacks for sprinting sport excellence?
You may advance some putative “cultural” reasons, but I put it to you that the simpler explanation, supported by the available evidence showing gene pools vary by population, is genes.
There’s no evidence that genes explain the difference. And once again I’m not challenging the fact that gene pools vary by population- but there’s no evidence that genetic tendencies towards intelligence does.
I don’t know exactly why these differences exist- I know that various aspects of nurture are at the very least a very large part of it- we know that upbringing, nutrition, parental involvement, etc, all have something to do with intelligence- and we know that many of these things differ among different groups. But we’ve only had good data on education, IQ tests, etc, for a few decades- and it just so happens that the different outcomes now accurately reflect genetic differences, while different outcomes in other periods of history (for example, 100 years ago) don’t? I don’t get what’s so special about now- why is “nurture” normalized now, but it wasn’t when Jews dominated basketball, or Irish immigrants dominated crime, etc? Apparently the jury’s out for you- you’ve made up your mind. For such an important topic, with such massive ramifications for society, I prefer to wait for actual genetic evidence for a genetic explanation. Just the fact that genes vary does not count as evidence- we know many other things can and do differ in quality and quantity (like nutrition in the womb, for example), and we know that these things can affect intelligence- so there’s actually evidence that they are at least part of the explanation for differing outcomes. But there’s no such evidence for genes- maybe someday, but not yet.
This is just false, and reflects a poor knowledge of genetics. Mitochondrial DNA only can track ancestry through the maternal line. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all humans is estimated to only be a few thousand years ago. Some isolated peoples like Andaman Islanders may extend this a bit, but considering the deep historical contacts between Europe, Asia, and Africa, there are certainly no large populations in any of these contacts with a MRCA of more than a few thousands years ago.
I put another thread on this misconception; you may have missed it.
The MRCA age of “a few thousand years” is based on mathematical modeling which ignores human migratory patterns known to have existed. It does not take into account any actual mtDNA or Y chromosomal studies which show marked population separations and trivial actual gene flow.
Just as importantly, the MRCA concept does not actually mean that any geneflow accrues to descendants, even though it seems as if it would, intuitively.
You can read a couple source papers if you are interested. I always recommend reading the actual sources rather than quoting Wikipedia, since articles there are frequently worded and edited to reflect author biases.
Here is a link to Joseph Chang’s mathematical modeling paper on MRCA. You may be interested in a couple of comments from the paper, if you have not had a chance to read it yet.
P 5: “A caveat to forestall potential misunderstanding: This paper is not about genetics. That is, it is not about who gets what genes; it is about something more primitive, namely, the ancestor-descendant relationship.
P. 24: If we wish to understand analogous questions in more complicated models that could better address phenomena such as the evolution of mankind, further study is required. For example, the absence of geographic structure is a key feature limiting the applicability of the model studied here to such situations.”
I might also recommend a letter by Rohde, Olson and Chang to Nature, if you find the topic of further interest. They are careful to clarify not only the limits of mathematical modeling, but also the difference conceptually between geneology (“iiandyiiii is my 6th great grandpa”) and genetic inheritence (“I got many of my genes from iiandyiiii”). These are two completely different things, and what is at issue for population gene pool differences is the gene pool itself, not most common recent ancestry. From the Nature letter:
“For example, a present-day Norwegian generally owes the majority of his or her ancestry to people living in northern Europe at the IA point, and a very small portion to people living throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, because DNA is inherited in relatively large segments from ancestors, an individual will receive little or no actual genetic inheritance from the vast majority of the ancestors living at the IA point.”
You can read Rohde’s full paper here. Note that Doug Rohde’s expertise is computer modeling and not anthropology or genetics. From Rohde’s full paper:
P.1: “Unfortunately, the age of our MRCA cannot as easily be estimated on the basis of genetic information because the relevant genes are not passed from parent to child with only occasional mutations but are, rather, the product of recombination. As a result of recombination, a given gene may not pass from parent to child. In fact, an individual’s DNA may retain none of the genes specific to a particular ancestor who lived many generations in the past.”
P. 24: "The African sim has almost entirely African ancestry, with 0.00092% Eurasian ancestry, primarily from the border countries. Due to the greater isolation of Africa, this sim has much less Indonesian, Australian, and American ancestry than did the Eurasians. The total South American ancestry, for example, amounts to just 1 part in 1.4 trillion. (The “sims” are the simulated individuals from the mathematical models that lead to various MRCA dates. Underlining by CP, for emphasis.)
In summary, it’s important not to confuse the general idea of who might have been a geneologic ancestor with what percentage of a population gene pool is shared with another population. It is this difference of gene pools, and the practical separation by tens of thousands of years–especially for the relatively isolated sub-saharan groups–that drives genetically-based phenotypic differences among humans.
Arguments such as what the definition of the term “race” is, or when the MRCA date is, are not particularly relevant to the basic idea that human population gene pools are disparate, with gene prevalences varying among those populations. Because evolution is constantly playing with gene experiments, it’s more likely than not that almost all genes achieving a signficant prevalence within a population code for phenotypically different outcomes. Even though most SNP substitutions might be silent, when an advantageous mutation does arise, it attains prevalence within that population and has a far lesser chance of getting spread to other populations. We are not yet homogenized for gene pools, even though modern migration patterns have given many geographic areas some degree of fairly widespread admixture. But it’s nowhere near homogenous, and nowhere near us all drawing from the identical well of genes.
This is all very interesting- and I’ll look into it when I get the time. It provides no evidence that some “races” are genetically less intelligent then others, from what I can see.
I accept that populations have different gene pools (with a great deal of overlap, obviously). I accept that characteristics like intelligence likely have a genetic component. We agree on these things. But then you make a jump- and you assume that this must mean that different populations have different access to (or proportions of) the genes for intelligence or other characteristics. I won’t make that jump until there’s evidence for it- and evidence of a genetic explanation consists of genetic evidence.
Consider this- different populations have different “parasite pools” (or, let’s say, “nutrition pools”, similarly with some overlap). And it’s likely (or even proven, in some instances, like various nutritional requirements for infants) that intelligence and other characteristics have a parasitic (lack of certain parasites, perhaps) and/or nutritional component. But that’s not enough information or evidence to say that different populations have different access to (or proportions of) the (lack of) parasites or proper nutrition for high intelligence or other characteristics.
You (I assume) don’t make the jump that differing nutrition and parasites at least partly explain differing outcomes in education/economics/crime/etc. Or if you do, you do because it’s proven that demographic x gets less Vitamin/nutrient xyz which is critical to brain development (or has greater proportions of a parasite that affects brain development).
There are likely dozens or more factors (on top of genes, parasites, and nutrition) that differ between populations and may have an effect on intelligence. There’s no reason the genetic explanation is any better than any of the others (it’s actually worse for many- we know that racism and discrimination has an effect on economics and crime)- not until there is evidence.
I’m not going to make the jump for the genetic (or nutritional or parasitic) explanation/hypothesis until there is actual genetic (or nutritional or parasitic) evidence. You shouldn’t either.
Like sickle cell? Same mutation in West Africa and southern Italy. How did *that *happen? 
Keep defending the old paradigm, even as the evidence against it builds from a trickle to a flood.
The “basketball Jews” argument has to be one of the weakest out there, and I’d suggest you stop promoting it. Jews (I assume you are talking about the SPHA and so on) dominated basketball when blacks weren’t allowed to be players in the white leagues. When this situation was normalized so that all who wanted to could compete, real superiority won the day (and, in fact, whites only dominated their own leagues; the black New York Renaissance was nearly unbeatable, even back then). It would be naive to assume that Barney Sedran would be able to compete with Kobe Bryant. Turn on an NBA game and find out which group came out on top when the starting pool became inclusive of all races. Yet today’s black NBA player has arguably substantially worse nurturing than does the white pool. Similarly, it’s easier today to find large comparison groups for academic testing because the pool of blacks with high-opportunity (family income; social status; parental education; school access…) is much larger than 50 years ago. Again, normalized nurturing–similar opportunity–has not erased performance differences.
Yes; like sickle cell.
Evolution within populations is driven by (among other things) selection pressure caused by the environment. We would expect, then, that prevalence for genes conferring protection from endemic diseases would be higher in populations exposed to those diseases. In the case of malaria, this is typically the tropics and the sub-tropics.
HbS itself is caused by a single substitution of valine for glutamic acid in the hemoglobin chain of HbA, so it’s not a very complicated mutution. I am not aware of any sources that suggest the distribution of HbS is somehow indicative of gene transfer across otherwise putatively isolated populations, so I’m confused about what point you are making. It’s a common mutation and one would expect that genes which promote sickling (including thalassemias) would be found to be prevalent in populations living near the tropics. These could be parallel de novo mutations or ancestral genes that were never entirely lost because migratory patterns preserved them…
I enjoyed Kuhn’s book in college philosophy class but I’m struggling to understand how it relates to gene flow across populations. I agree that paradigms are difficult to change, and I have found the current paradigm that all human populations are one big homogenous genetic family is very resistant to change. (I suspect an “egalitarian” gene must be at play. 
) No matter. Science will win the day. It’s taken a couple thousand years just to convince most westerners we’ve been around more than 5,000 years and that Adam and Eve in Iraq weren’t daddy and mommy.
Wait…you’re going to cling to parasites and nutrition as an equally likely explanation that children from wealthy and educated black parents underscore poor whites with undereducated parents on the SAT in the United States? (!)
You aren’t really trying to make me track that down, are you? I mean, at least try for Claude Steele’s stereotype threat or something. Give me something more than a straw your’re clutching, to show you actually have researched the topic before clinging to a given paradigm.
You posted a comment that something I said was “just false” and reflected “a poor knowledge of genetics.” I gave you the source material in support of my position, and instead of retracting your statement, you’ve postponed that topic and now want to take up nutrition and parasites.
I feel like that Dutch kid sticking his finger in the dyke holes. I’m running out of fingers.
There’s probably more evidence for pre-natal and infant nutrition as part of the explanation then there is for genes (hint- there’s zero evidence for genes), but I’m not interested in getting into the specifics of evidence for nutrition.
You just can’t get around the “zero genetic evidence” thing, except to try and change the subject. Why would genes be a better explanation than the dozens (or hundreds or more) of other factors that also differ between populations and may have an affect on intelligence and aggression? Why are outcomes now so demonstrative of genetic differences, as opposed to (different) outcomes at any point in the past? You believe black people are genetically dumber (and maybe more violent too), period, and then you look for stuff to support that. I don’t believe that because there’s no evidence for it. And until those genes are found, there won’t be any evidence for it. If you want to convince me, find those genes.
The genetic evidence is very strong.
In simple terms, the black SIRE group is “dumber” (to put it pejoritavely) for intellectual averages and “faster” for sprinting averages. This has been repeatedly and consistently measured. The question is, “Why?” and the answer is, “gene prevalence differences, because nurturing differences can be normalized and normalizing them does not eliminate the average gap.”
Ok.
Ok.
This is laughably presumptuous (you couldn’t possibly know), and ignores lots of historical data that conflicts (like Nubian civilization being far in advance of any European civilization at the time, or the invention of steel by the Haya peoplein Tanzania, or any number of other discoveries that you conveniently dismiss), not to mention many many years of athletic domination by non-black athletes.
You’ve eliminated every non-genetic aspect? Every species of parasite, every nutrient, every media influence, every cultural practice, etc? What a ridiculous statement.
It certainly hasn’t for sprinting, unless you’re just looking at top athletes. Or do you happen to have a study that measures the sprinting ability of large populations? And “repeatedly and consistently measured” puts a lot of faith in a pretty small number of studies over just a few decades, when making a claim about humans throughout history. There’s nothing close to a consensus on how to test intelligence, much less how it varies among populations.
Perhaps nurturing differences can be normalized, but they haven’t been yet (come on- normalize nurture in just a few decades after centuries of brutal discrimination??) - it sounds like an absolutely monumental task. Here’s an example of how to possibly normalize nurture- create 2 identical biospheres, run by robots- and provide the 2 biospheres with black and white genetic material… raise the babies from scratch, with identical robot parenting and robot teaching, and test them (with an agreed upon intelligence test), and then maybe you’ve actually managed to normalize nurture.
At least we’ve determined the source of the disagreement. You (hilariously) think that nurture has been normalized. I don’t.
It’s nonexistent. We’ve been over this, what, a hundred times?
The only part of your statement that’s true, and only partially true, at that.
Testosterone levels, like a lot of phenotypic qualities, are significantly influenced by environment. Let’s take brain function for another. I can change your brain function substantially by bashing you in the head with a hammer. I can also change your brain function to a lesser, but significant degree by feeding you sugar water just before you sit down to take a test. If I deny you exposure to light from birth onwards, I can make it so parts of your brain never develop at all.
False. Northern Europeans were quite backwards until recently. West Africa has been home to a number of civilizations in the course of it’s history.
In another case, nomads on horseback, of Central Asian ancestry, conquered most of Eurasia, crushing European resistance in the process. Nomads on horseback, also of Central Asian ancestry, conquered most of the Great Plains, before being crushed by European invaders.
You also make a fundamental error here. You’ve made it repeatedly before, I’ll point it out again, as I always do. People called “black” in the US are genetically different from people called “black” in Brazil, and both groups are genetically different from different from the 2,000 or so different African ethnic groups. These groups are also genetically different from one another.
As I’ve pointed out over and over again, phenotype is only a rough indicator of genotype. “Well, they look like what I think of as “black”” isn’t any kind of scientific standard.
Not at all, not even a little bit. You can’t normalize conditions in the womb. You can’t normalize nutrition. You can’t normalize infant care and overall child rearing practices. You can’t normalize the psychological effects of being part of a pariah group in a given society.
No offense, but you’re more of an engineer than a scientist. On the whole, that’s a good thing. We want our physicians to be practical, on-the-spot problem solvers, not seekers of truth. Still, your response, whenever someone tells you it’s more complicated than that, is to say that the complications don’t matter, and then reassert your original, disproved position.
You do seem sincere in your efforts to bring an updated version of South Asia’s hereditary caste system to the US. It’s done them so much good there, it’s perfectly understandable why you want to institute it here.
Yeah, 'bout a hundred times…maybe more.
But I try not to lose hope so that you are let down more easily when egalitarianism goes the way of Santa Claus, and Young Earth Creationists figure out that mother nature doesn’t care about doling out genes fairly nor did she start 5,000 years ago.
In the interim, more reading might help you, such as the contribution of Arabs to “Western Africa’s civilization,” human migration patterns underlying “central asian” genes, and so on.
You might further do some reading around genetic variation. I’ve explained repeatedly how irrelevant that argument is. Source populations are always more diverse than descendant populations; this does not mean somehow that the source population is not a groupable group. For example, one broad division for human populations would be out-of-africa versus africa. If, for example, an advantageous mutation occurs within mtDNA L3, the L0 population would not have access to it because geneflow did not admix back into L0 mtDNA populations to any significant extent. Yet the L0 and L1 populations might be hugely more diverse.
I understand your consternation over the softness of the designation of “black.” So let me give you a simple way to look at it. If I self-assign to a SIRE group of “black” my odds of getting most of my genes from pre-L3 (i.e., “african”) populations are much higher than if I assign myself to a SIRE group of “asian.” Both of those genesets are different from the ancestral L0 populations because nearly all genes change in small ways that accumulate over time. If, in the current L0 population there is a gene that codes for a phenotypic advantage in sprinting, and that gene was lost (or never developed) in an L3 descendant line, the group which descends from the recet L0 population will have a much higher chance of having that gene. And because even a self-assignment correlates more highly with recent L0 ancestry (it’s been well shown that self assignment to SIRE groups does correlate this way even though it’s a “social” construct), I now belong to a group with a different gene pool driving a different average phenotypic outcome.
Alas, Virginia, there is not an Egalitarian designing the world.
Another common tactic by the “race realists”- say that their opponents are similar to Creationists. This is ridiculous, of course- because they are the ones who believe things with no evidence (and, therefore, are far more akin to Creationists).
Ahh- so any contrary data can be dismissed by “the Arabs helped” or some other such nonsense. I suppose the Arabs invented steel for the Haya as well, and conquered Egypt for Nubia? That’s right- just ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit your narrative… if scientists find a great achievement by black Africans, just handwave it away (just like Creationists).
You offer nothing new. Nothing that hasn’t been offered by so many “race realists” (or whatever your preferred self-ID), nothing that hasn’t been ridiculed and showed as inadequate. Face the fact that you believe black people are genetically dumber, but not because of scientific evidence, because there is none.
This is where it starts to feel like arguing with an anti-vaxer, certain that not every stone has been rigorously uncovered…
This is your summary reply to the following?
“Black children from wealth and highly educated families underscore white children from poor and undereducated parents.”
Do you have a favorite putative unexplored condition that wouldn’t be normalized here?
Wealthy and educated black moms starve their fetuses?
Wealthy and educated black families feed their children crap?
Wealthy and educated black families give lousy infant care and have lame child rearing practices?
Wealthy and educated black families are pariahs?
Sigh…
Anyway, I believe I did get iiandiiii to Step One and Two of my Four Step “Accept Reality for the Effect of Gene Differences Among Populations” program when he admitted that gene prevalences do vary by populations, and those genes code for different phenotypic outcomes. We just have to start work on why knowledge transfer has been so limited in modern africa…maybe get him over the “it’s those damn colonialists” hump.
This rehashed trash makes me feel that I should reanimate my old So, it’s June… WHERE THE **** IS THIS LOOMING GENETIC CRISIS!? thread with the follow post: