My point is simpler than that:
Where we find equivalent nurturing and disparate outcomes, it’s reasonable to assume genetically driven differences.
For the markedly disproportionate representations of starting populations that we see in basketball, genetic differences are likely at play.
Our source populations for the SIRE groups of “black” in the US are largely (not exclusively) drawn from subpopulations in west africa. Within those populations I suspect a high prevalence for genes that underpin the skillset for basketball. (I wouldn’t expect those genes in subpopulations like the Kalenjin, necessarily.) It seems reasonable to me that there are subpopulations of europeans that also have gene prevalences driving basketball success.
It’s not as if I’m determined to find some undisclosed and specific genetic component for every performance outcome difference. Nor is it the case that every exception proves the rule. And within any population there will be outliers above a group average that easily exceed the average to a great enough extent to compete anywhere.
Look at an overall pattern. Adjust for environmental influences, and what you have left is evidence for a genetically-driven difference.
I’d like to get back to academic test scores, which are quantifiable and well-studied.
But I’m curious if this sort of thing makes you think whites, as a SIRE group, are actually superior to blacks as a SIRE group at basketball, and if you see no pattern of disproportionate representation.
I have no doubt that an Olympic team, cobbled together from a group of individual stars within our NBA, refereed in a strange setting, might lose to a white team. I’m not sure that means they have lower skillsets for basketball, and I consider the general weeding-out process from elementary school to college to pro to be a much more accurate gauge of performance ability.
Were you planning to get back to me some more about your creatine kinase comments above to demonstrate once again your vast grasp of genetics?
And have you ever retracted your ridiculous comment that all humans have exactly the same genes, or are you hoping that issue just quietly goes away too?
Have you begun to come to an understanding that any given gene has a nickname for its general category of function, but dozens or hundreds of variations which range from advantageous to harmful to silent?
I’m still waiting for you to “school” us some more, because, hey–you are a Jetson and I am Barney Rubble. Now there’s a solid approach to persuasive debate…
Perhaps you could catch up on the posts above regarding the Flynn effect to put my comments in perspective.
In particular, you might want to look over the summary paper by Flynn of his research posted by iiandyiiii.
Among the more remarkable underpinnings of his conclusions is an analysis that rests upon his research showing the current adult black IQ is 85, and that in 1972 it was 79.
Do you agree with Flynn’s data regarding adult black IQs in the US?
If you do, what do think the black IQ was in the 50’s? The 30’s?
If you don’t, why do you accept his general conclusions if you don’t accept his underlying data?
And what do you make of IQ scores rising from the '70s to the end of the 20th century while SAT scores were dropping over the same period? (See the links upthread)
Either we are getting smarter (as measured by IQ) and intelligence is not very fixed genetically, or there’s something fishy in Denmark…er…Scotland. That is, either these IQ data show average population shifts for cognition, or they don’t reflect average cognition for the whole population, and they are just a curiosity.
I don’t disagree with the Flynn phenomenon as an observation, particularly. It’s just not clear to me that his data reflects average cognition for whole populations. I have no expertise with IQ scores, tests, selection of participants, or much else. I do have a sense that an IQ test–especially the g loaded subcomponent–is trying to show something more closely related to fundamental cognitive ability than what an academic test is trying to show (mastery of taught content).
And this does have a specific real-world consequence. I can take an unschooled person with a very high IQ and teach him mathematics or a job skillset. As you know, we often see these sorts of kids come through academia. Post Vietnam, we’d get candidates for med school who had crappy childhoods in Vietnam, made it to the US, caught up to speed in high school, excelled in college, and had a decent application. But I can’t take a low IQ person and get him to master content.
So back to the Flynn effect: I’m unconvinced we are actually getting cognitively smarter, and Flynn’s black-white gap seems extraordinarily high. So I don’t think Flynn’s research and conclusions have much practical application to the question of whether or not the persistent non-SES-dependent black-white academic test score gap is genetically based.
But if Flynn’s IQ scores really are measuring something substantive across whole populations, we have an even bigger problem: current adult black IQ scores in the US are still a full standard deviation below whites, and have gained against whites only 6 of 21 points in 40 years. Since performance gaps for academic test score gaps show up even when SES is not only normalized but tilted markedly in favor of blacks, what hope is there that we might someday close this stubbornly persistent academic score gap? If IQ is rising for all, and relatively faster for blacks because their environment is improving relatively faster, and if smarter kids can do better on academics, then why do score gaps not close when a high SES environment should be producing very high-IQ black kids?
How long are we going to keep saying, “Well; there are unexplored environmental variables. Science is hard. We shouldn’t jump to a genetic conclusion prematurely”?
What the heck? Flynn wants to argue that black IQ scores are rising because of a relatively higher rise in SES, but folks who use Flynn for that argument want to also argue that high SES isn’t the germane factor for academic scores…
You still don’t seem to be getting the (uncontroversial, accepted-by-everyone) Flynn effect. It doesn’t cover all time- just since the 30s or so, and it illustrates that in countries around the world, intelligence test scores have been rising by a remarkably consistent amount. Researchers estimate that, in 1932, the average IQ test scores in America (all of America) using today’s tests would be 80. So black people in 1972 scored about the same as all Americans in 1932.
It’s reasonable to compare the black and white test-score gap to the past-present white test score gap (the gap is similarly sized for various time periods)- and we know that the past-present white gap was not due to genetics. So we know for certain of an uncontroversial gap (the Flynn effect) that was due to non-specified “environmental” factors. Whatever the factors for the past-present white gap, and we don’t know exactly what they are, they could be the factors for the present black-white test-score gap. So we have a similarly sized gap with environmental and not genetic causes.
Yes, we know you have no hope. But when there’s data that the gap has closed to some degree, and with my belief that the efforts to close it have been pathetic, then there’s plenty of room for hope.
We don’t know, but obviously there may be other factors.
We’re certainly not going to give up after a few decades of half-hearted effort. And we’re certainly not going to accept a conclusion without actual positive evidence for it.
Where does Flynn argue this? I’m pretty sure you’re just pulling this out from the aether.
Can you refute Mr. Lapite’s articles point-by-point? If not, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that you are unable to do so.
(Read the comments too, while you’re at it.)
Yes, and I’d like to get back to ethnicity and dick size. Unfortunately, you and brazil won’t play along and ignore me. Which is sad because there’s hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of American white women (and their vaginas) that have been rescued from the Isle of 5.5 - 6 inches (Where’s FEMA?). Since you’ve talked about blacks having higher testosterone levels, it would seem you would jump at the opportunity to discuss penis size and blacks, including thickness, length, and endurance. Apparently, not.
The problem is that if NBA is supposed to be the barometer of black superiority in basketball, there’s no way they should’ve lost to a white team. I haven’t Wiki’d it but I suspect that the U.S basketball team isn’t the best in the world.
Exactly. A test that purports to measure any subset of innate cognitive ability, but that shows these kinds of obviously non-genetic diachronic effects in the test scores, is clearly not controlling fully (or even “reasonably”) for the effects of non-genetic factors on test performance.
I completely agree with you that this idea of innate cognitive ability is what an IQ test is trying to show, and I even agree that an IQ test most likely is better designed to show it than typical academic content-based tests are.
What I find very unconvincing, based on the evidence of phenomena like the diachronic “Flynn effect” of rising IQ test scores even in overwhelmingly single-race populations, are claims that IQ testing in its present state is capable of reliably showing innate cognitive ability, or anything closely related to it.
Cultural and social factors are clearly still so entangled in the IQ testing process that we can’t even reliably compare the IQs of one generation with those of its own ancestors or descendants, even if the tested population is racially very homogeneous.
As long as it takes to explore the environmental variables, of course. You can’t claim to have conclusively identified the cause of an effect before you sufficiently understand all the factors. Duh.
Sorry, Chief, but the fact is that science IS hard, especially the science of something as complex and ramified as human intelligence. Scientists are not allowed to jump to conclusions prematurely just because it might be frustratingly time-consuming (or even, in the present state of our scientific knowledge, impossible) to get to a point where we are able to deduce conclusions scientifically.
"Black-white differences in academic achievement have also narrowed throughout the twentieth century. The best trend data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has been testing seventeen-year-olds since 1971 and has repeated many of the same items year after year. Figure 1-2 shows that the black-white reading gap narrowed from 1.25 standard deviations in 1971 to 0.69 standard deviations in 1996. The math gap fell from 1.33 to 0.89 standard deviations. When Min-Hsiung Huang and Robert Hauser analyzed vocabulary scores for adults born between 1909 and 1969, the black-white gap also narrowed by half.
Something else which has previously been mentioned is the followng:
"Although racially mixed children are culturally black in America, and are almost always raised by black parents in black communities, this is not true everywhere. Klans Eyferth studied the illegitimate children of black and white soldiers stationed in Germany as part of the army of occupation after World War II. All these children were raised by their German mothers. There was considerable prejudice against blacks in Germany at the time, and any child of a German mother who looked black was also presumed to be illegitimate, which carried additional stigma. But mixed-race German children did not attend predominantly black schools, live in black neighborhoods, or (presumably) have predominantly black (or mixed-race) friends. When Eyferth gave these children a German version of the Wechsler IQ test, children with black fathers and white fathers had almost identical scores. "
What I found interesting about this is that the last time this study was brought up **Chief Pedant **mentioned that because the military selects only high-performers, the children of military personnel are selected for high intelligence. So you couldn’t use the test results of black soldier’s children to show that any test gap was environmental.
He then, a day later, pointed out that the children of black American soldiers underperformed the children of white American soldiers even when they both attended military schools, and he treated this as evidence of a genetic gap.
It looks to me as though Chief Pedant’s story changes depending on the point he wants to make. Could you clarify, Chief Pedant?
If you don’t want to defend your post, that’s up to you.
I suggest you not then pretend that those who post something are less schooled than you.
You have made the unsupported and incorrect statement that all humans have exactly the same genes.
You have ridiculed my post on creatine kinase.
Then, when challenged, you have decided not to respond. That is your prerogative, but it doesn’t put you in much of a position to ridicule the educational level of others, Mr Jetson.
I suggest finding more substantive ways to present your points.
I believe the thrust of his two articles are that the Haplogroup D version of MCPH1 is not “the” intelligence gene, and that “race realists” who promote it as such are wrong in doing so.
I’m good with that. The fact that it is so positively selected tells me it probably does something advantageous, but the idea that it can be reduced to “the” intelligence gene is a stretch.
It’s a good example of how a given gene can have such a marked prevalence different from one populatin to the next, and that’s how I’ve used it. I can’t speak for others.
I recall reading that Bruce Lahn himself was asked if he had the “good” MCPH1 version of the gene, and if I recall correctly, he said something along the lines of “Well, it’s not looking good.” But I don’t know if he was serious.
A more interesting aside to the Bruce Lahn MCPH1 story for me is that following this paper Bruce decided to pursue other interests. Bit too hot of a topic…
Sure. First, on the black-white gap…it narrowed over the last couple decades of the twentieth century and then has mostly stalled. My copy of that book is dated 1998, I think. I don’t know if there’s been an update. Most of the research in it is well prior to '98, and one of the articles was from the '30s, as I recall.
OK…there are two studies involving military children I’ve talked about here.
One is the classic Eyferth study of WW2 black soldiers who fathered children with German mothers. This was a small study; I think about 90 in a mixed race group and about the same in an all-white group. The admixed kids had average IQs, as did the white boys. The white girls were a bit below par, as I recall. The main criticism of the study, aside from its small size and the odd result of white girls with below par IQs, was the fact that the source populations were not necessarily a representative cross section of either population. In particular, blacks were screened against military IQ standards, of which about 30% of blacks failed (this was about ten times the rate of white failure for the military IQ exams). In other words, 30% of the lowest-scoring black population were eliminated as possible fathers.
The second study was a more recent one done by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. They looked at scores for black and white students in overseas military schools. The scores of black students were significantly lower.
I’m not sure what contradiction you find here…the first study is not evidence the gap is environmental, and neither is the second.
I know you jumped into the middle of the thread and are anxious to pitch in, but you won’t find me making all that much out of IQ scores one way or the other in the above thread. iiandyiiii brought it up when he injected the Flynn effect into the discussion. For the same reason, I’m neither especially partial to or opposed to the notion of the Flynn effect. (Well; I admit the idea that we are getting smarter this fast seems like horseshit to me. But I’m not opposed to me getting smarter, which would be really cool. )
I note that its promoters are sketchy around two things:
Flynn’s data for blacks is pretty grim, even if you don’t think IQ is the be-all and end-all. IQ measurements are not without any merit, and so a chap who comes along and promotes an IQ for blacks of 79 in 1972, with some abysmally lower score going back at least a couple or three decades prior to that is not the best asset, in my book, for those wanting to promote an idea that we’re all pretty much the same except for opportunity. As I mentioned above, IQ is trying to measure basic cognition, not mastery of taught knowledge. So it’s a pretty inconvenient truth that accepting Flynn’s research means accepting a current IQ gap of a full standard deviation for adult blacks, and a much worse gap in the past.
Rising IQ scores don’t correlate with academic test scores, which have been flat or diminished over the same period. If, therefore, rising IQ scores are some sort of testing anomaly–or if IQ isn’t measuring anything substantive–than there’s no point being made with the Flynn effect at all.
I do argue that the evidence is clear that academic test score gaps are not closed by even a complete reversal of SES ratios. I argue that the science for looking at environmental variables is not particularly hard, and the ones that are left are lame. I argue that those of you who advance these vague and mysterious undiscovered variables are clutching at straws because the obvious ones, advanced and assumed for so many years, have totally crapped out.
I’ll ask you again, two questions:
Do you accept Flynn’s data that the current adult black IQ in the US as of 2002 is 85, and was 79 in 1972, with a even lower scores prior to that?
What nurturing influences would you like to advance as the ones most likely to explain why rich black kids with educated parents underscore poor whites and asians with uneducated parents?