But I don’t think anyone is saying that. What some are saying is that if you have two distinct (or fairly distinct) genetic groups within the same economic system, then is their group economic success or lack thereof due to any genetic difference? Comparing group A under economic system X with group A under economic system Y doesn’t make much sense. Comparing groups A and B under economic system X makes more sense, although I still think it’s a leap to go from economic success (or lack thereof) to genetic cause, and in this case a perceived genetic difference in intelligence (loosely defined as the ability to score on a standardized test).
Popular opinion on this board to the contrary, I’m not on a mission to dissuade people of their notion that we cannot possibly have population diferences in genetics which generate differing socioeconomic outcomes. I am bemused at efforts to advance all possible alternate explanations and how readily those are accepted even when they are absolutely wrong (the notion that blacks underperform on the SAT because they are poor, for instance). It ends up being an impossible mission anyway; there is powerful psychologic resistance against the notion. It is a fundamental article of faith for those who believe it, and not even the most obvious examples dissuade them.
Let me address the fat point, because I do find it irritating to have words put in my mouth. If we control for nurture and still find a difference, then it’s genes.
I don’t care what you do for a living. If you don’t think there are gene prevalence differences at population levels you are dead wrong. If you don’t think genes control intelligence, you are wrong again. And frankly, if you don’t think there is a strong, studied and persistent correlation between wealth and intelligence you are wrong a third time.
If this topic were subgroups of species other than the human one there would be no controversy and no contortions to find other explanations. Nurture would be examined and controlled for, and what was left would be assumed to be genetic.
What is of interest to me is that I could take two populations of whites with differing levels of wealth and education and demonstrate a correlation between IQ and achievement for those two parameters. I could argue that the differences between the two populations is genetically-based intelligence, and the reaction would be minimal. Let one group be white and the other black and the reaction is quite different. I can argue that intelligence is obviously genetic; any family of five kids has one smarter than the rest–with the same nurture. I can argue that gene prevalence obviously varies by “race”–look at relative frequencies of genetic diseases such as sickle cell. I can argue that genes controlling height vary in prevalence by population. But let me–or anyone–suggest that genes for intelligence might also vary in prevalence by race or population, and all of a sudden it cannot be so. Why? I ask, can it not be so? And if it were so, would not the consequence be variable success rates among populations? Sure, it’s possible the least intelligent kid in the family is the most successful and the brightest is locked up in an asylum. But that’s not the average story, is it?
And those exceptions neither prove the rule nor do they provide anything but a straw at which to grasp when someone claims there are lots of factors besides intelligence that might make ethnic chinese more successful that the other Malays even when mainstream Malay policy discriminates against the ethnic chinese. That same policy of discrimination is argued in exactly the reverse direction where a less capable population is discriminated against and ends up on the bottom.
It is mind-set and not science that causes such a strong reaction to the notion that different human populations have differing gene prevalences and differing outcomes based on those genes. And to date the immutability of outcomes confirms that hypothesis.
But in decrying this, you end up commiting the same crime. Every time you dismiss other explanations in favor of genetics, you’re no better than someone who dismisses genetics in favor of their pet theories. Faith is exactlywhat you’re practicing.
When you look at two different populations and simply compare one with another (as you’ve done with the Malays and Chinese), you have no means at your disposal to control for nurture. Controlling for potential confounders actually requires knowing a lot about the people you’re looking at and using certain statistical processes such as logistical regression, stratified analysis, and/or matched-controls; crude eye-balling ain’t gonna do anything…especially when you really have nothing to eye-ball. The conclusions you reached about Malays and Chinese are 100% baseless because of this.
Hey, I just mentioned my job so that you know that my rejection of your opinions has nothing to do with the conclusions you draw, but the ham-fisted way you’re drawing them. But maybe you should care what I do for a living, because I’m not the type to be silent when someone is dissiminating ignorance on a subject that I’m well-versed on, and I actually take pleasure in pointing out your mistakes because it may help educate someone reading this thread.
Again, I haven’t ruled out the role of genes. But surely you can see that’s different than declaring that genes are the answer, based on nothing except that a disparity exists.
I’m curious: when have you ever tested this out? Have you done this here because I’ve never seen you say anything like this? I’d be the first to call you wrong on this, too.
And you mentioned animals earlier. I’m also a veterinarian, and I can tell you that you’re wrong about that, too. (The hits keep on coming.) “Nurture” is very important in food animal husbandry. When you compare two herds of animals that perform differently, the disparity usually comes down to managment, not genes. If that wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be so many goddamn animal husbandry books on the market.
See, this makes no sense to me - it’s special pleading. These “economic systems” did not come out of nowhere, they are a creation of the very people under discussion. Surely a nation full of genetically superior persons predisposed to economic success would create an economic system predisposed to success?
Of course, one could well argue, that isn’t the whole story - once could say that the economic systems were now wholly the creation of (say) the Chinese, but were rather the outcome of China’s particular history. Thus it is totally unfair to use the relative poverty of the Chinese in China as evidence of their genetic inferiority and lack of fitness for economic advancement. After all, it isn’t their fault that China was in the grip of a crumbling Manchu dictatorship at the turn of the 20th century and promptly carved up by imperial powers including the Japanese. I’d certainly agree.
But does it then not follow that the particular situation of the Chinese in Malaysia may not be the creation of the Chinese either, but rather a result of their particular history - and thus, just as is the case of the Chinese in China, the relative success of the Chinese in Malaysia can effectively tell you nothing about their alleged “genetic superiority”?
The point is this: there is no such thing as a controlled experiment, where one can remove the effect of culture and historical factors from the equation and find real evidence of genetic difference. The “genetic difference” theory is effectively unfalsifiable. It may certainly be the case that there are genetic differences in intelligence, but there is so far no real evidence of this, and most certainly a comparison of the relative economic success of two groups in the same country is not evidence of this.
No. I was thinking about the comparison of Chinese in Malaysia and Chinese in China. The economic system in China was imposed by a small minority of the people, not “the very people”.
But you’re only looking at a snapshot in time. The Chinese were once the richest nation in the world, and may very well be again some time. Economic systems vary over time, so which snapshot do we take as the “true” measurement.
Yes, that is the point. It’s very hard to discern the genetic basis for single human behavioral traits, and near crazy to think we could do so for such a complex set of behavioral traits that lead up to “economic success”.
If you can’t correct for all the other factors well enough to prove it IS genetic (or at least has a genetic component), you also cannot correct for all the factors to prove it ISNT genetic either.
Ironically, in the distance future, if a genetic factor was proven, one might say it could be a good thing depending on how you spin it.
Guy A. Your a looser!
Guy B. Of course I am, I am genetically predisposed to it. Whats your excuse? 
Well, at least it’s better than being genetically predisposed to be a tighter.
Not even that. It was to a large extent shaped by a history in which “the people” had little or no input into.
Just as one’s individual chances for success or failure often are.
Well of course.
As you can see, I’m not actually of the opinion that the snapshot of success or failure at any one time can tell one anything of genetic superiority.
I guess the paradigm example of this I’m familiar with would be East European Jews. Some of my ancestors were East European Jews, and I always find it amusing to see Jews these days trumpeted as one of the “genetically superior” groups based on present success - when my great-grandparent immigrated from Romania, they were as poor and ignorant peasants as could be found, and the notion that they were “genetically superior” would have been laughable to the Anglo-Saxons they now lived among, as they were so clearly inferior.
Yup.
As long as that can be restricted to those with XX chromosomes, it could have its uses … 
This is the truth as few tell it, thank you.
Let’s start with animals since you are a vet. That one’s simple: modern animal husbandry has been successful because of the obvious conclusion that nearly every trait we care about is controlled by…ta da…genes. Sure; if two herds of the same genetic population perform differently it’s management. But when two populations of cows perform differently with the same management, it’s genes. And modern animal husbandry is all about not pretending a cow is just a cow. It owes its success to accepting that you gotta have the right genes to perform and that it’s really dumb to think all cows–and even all subpopulations of cows–must somehow be equal. The key conclusion: genes govern every potential. Nurture only enables that potential to be realized.
Now if we notice that two populations of humans perform unequally, we should look at nurture and nature for our two possibilities.
I’d like to start by persuading you only of one thing: there are obvious genetically-based differences in ability between that population self-described as white and the one self-described as black.
I’d like to use the skillset required for the NBA as my proof case.
In the NBA there is a marked over-representation of blacks, particularly if one looks at playing time. Is the cause nurture? Well, as a profession, it is at the pinnacle for our fame-and-wealth-oriented society. I think it’s fair to say it is nearly always chosen over any other career when it is an option. Would you say then, that blacks must have better coaching? Better opportunity to learn to play? Better facilities? Exactly where are whites disadvantaged to the point of severe underrepresentation in a highly sought-after field?
Now I know the game of requesting cites. I know the game of pretending there is no way to control for nurture between, say, the ethnic chinese and the rest of the Malay. I know the game of criticizing IQ tests or introducing red herrings or pretending that because it’s impossible to test for every confounding influence there must be no way to draw conclusions.
But the donkey brays in the backyard against the protest of the guy in front that he didn’t steal it. We as a society–and societies the world over–have been utterly unable to close race-based gaps in performances for different skillsets. When all is said and done and the rhetoric exhausted, there lie the immutable differences.
If it makes you feel better to believe that there are no differences, go right ahead and believe that. It’s the current socially correct thing to believe, and it’s career and academic suicide to express an opposite opinion. But whether it’s the New Haven case or the Medical School Admissions Tests or the SATs or the NBA or PhDs in math and engineering, the world around us bears no evidence that the problem is disparate nurture.
You’re very close. If you had said:
“But whether it’s the New Haven case or the Medical School Admissions Tests or the SATs or the NBA or PhDs in math and engineering, the world around us bears no evidence that the problem is disparate nature.”,
you would have been much, much closer to the mark.
Two groups of animals co-existing in one herd differ from humans in one important way: Animals don’t practice culture. They don’t discriminate against each other (in ways that humans do), they don’t have things such as values and attitudes, and most importantly, they are at the whim of humans in terms of getting their basic needs met. So a producer can hold nurture constant between the two groups and confidently determine that the low performers probably are that way because they lack certain heritable charactertics.
Call me when human herds can be assessed using controlled experiments in this manner. And call me when humans have been bred in the selective manner that livestock have been bred.
And no one here is saying that they have to be equal. The only declarative conclusions have come from you. To prove that they aren’t innately equal means you have to rule out other explanations. Farmers have to do this, why can’t you.
If cows that have low milk yield tend to graze in the southern part of the pasture, it would behoove that farmer to get off his arse and make sure that the reason their yield is low is not because they’re not getting enough water over there. Any dairyman who jumps to the conclusion that these cows are just genetically inclined to be low producers before checking out the obvious theories first will likely not stay in business very long.
CP, I don’t know why the NBA is such a common motif for you. Blacks have not always dominated this sport for one thing. Second thing, almost every sport shows disparities that you could use to make this case, but for some reason you keep coming back to basketball. I think blacks are overrepresented in b-ball the same reason whites are overrepresented in hockey, tennis, volleyball, and golf.
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Like begets like. Black kids are more likely to dedicate themselves to the sport because they have black role models on the courts. White kids are less likely, for the same reason.
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Accessibility. It’s free to play basketball. All you need is a hoop and a ball. Don’t even need a team to practice your shooting skills. All you need is time. Kids with low financial resources will gravitate to a sport like this.
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Cultural emphasis. Black kids with dreams of pursing a career in sports and entertainment may be more likely to be encouraged by their parents and peers, than a white kid whose parents have white-collar aspirations for him/her.
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Scholarship opportunities. Sports are a college gateway for many low SES students. Who do you think is going to take advantage of this the most?
I don’t think you can persuade me that blacks have an inherent advantage over whites in the b-ball arena without some biological data. Like height. Tall height is an advantage in b-ball, right? The typical height rangeof a guard is 6’0-6’7 and for centers, it’s 6’10-7’2. If blacks have an advantage over whites in this sport, I’d expect the former to be taller than the latter. Wouldn’t you?
According to wikipedia, American white males between 20-39 years of age an average of 5’10.4. Black men in the same age group are 5’10.1. In other words, black men are shorter than white men, on average. How do you reconcile this finding with your theory?
It’s a common motif because it’s such an obvious example of genetic advantage.
Blacks have, in fact, dominated this sport since it became open to all. It is easy to show the other sports you mention remain relatively closed to blacks because of lack of opportunity.
Not a single one of your confounding factors is an acceptable explanation for the difference, and in fact it’s a nice example of trying to explain outcome differences using everything but the obvious: blacks are superior genetically to all other groups for the skillset for basketball.
Role models does not explain it. There were many more white role models before the natural superiority of blacks exerted itself. All potential NBA athletes are driven by the reward of fame and fortune and role model plays no substantial role.
Accessibility plays no role. While it’s true basketball is availabe to blacks, it’s not true it’s not available to whites and it’s silly to suggest that there is some sort of disincentive for whites to play basketball. There are many more white basketball players than there are black, just based on the size of both groups. What happens is that white representation drops off at increasingly higher levels, because they are not as good.
The idea that white parents–or the white athlete himself–would somehow prefer an alternative career to the NBA for their children is ridiculous. While it’s true white parents might encourage their child to pursue an alternate career, that choice is made only when it becomes obvious the kid is not going to make the NBA. The NBA, for those with the ability to make it, always is the first choice. Everything else is a backup.
Scholarship opportunities have nothing to do with the disparity. Scholarships are offered on the basis of performance. Blacks outperform whites by a wide margin, on average.
Height, by itself, does not present a sufficient advantage if the tall person is clumsy. Height does not nearly outweigh the rest of the NBA skillset, and as you mention, height differences are minimal. What has that to do with anything?
I use the NBA because it presents such an obvious–and less threatening–example of the difference between the average performance of blacks and whites. It nicely showcases the farce of pretending there are nothing but cultural differences. Those who protest otherwise stare in the face of the most obvious and plain truth: blacks are much better at basketball, on average, and the genes which underpin the truly superior phenotypes are much more prevalent. There is no nurture–absolutely none–which can be argued accurately that blacks are somehow better nurtured. It’s nonsense to suggest that, and no reasonable objective observer would do it.
At a population level, our genetic differences are obvious and plain. This does not mean a given individual is superior. It does mean we have to be very very careful to ignore this truth. The danger is that we will come to accept the untruth that we are all the same. When we try to build a society based on that premise, we will leave behind the disadvantaged groups, having assumed they need only equal opportunity to find equal representation. That will be a sad day, indeed. While whites failing to make the NBA can find other successful places in society, blacks failing to make the New Haven firefighter leadership will be left in subservient roles.
I find that unacceptable and disappointing. I suspect that, as a group, blacks will find it so as well.
It’s undisputable that height carries an advantage in basketball. Sure, it’s just one biological characteristic that is correlated with advantage. But it’s an important one, don’t you think? Height is the first thing people think about when they think of the game. That aside, it’s interesting that you have yet to provide data for any heritable characteristic in support of your theory, while I’ve at least attempted to do so. And it’s dismissed without even so much as a pause, it seems.
If you can’t point to height as an advantage that blacks might have over whites, what other biological markers can you point to? Let’s assume that blacks have speed on their side. Why would this ability not lead blacks to dominate in sports such as soccer, tennis, and hockey? I’m curious why black domination in basketball alone is taken as proof that they have a genetic advantage. Do you think whites have a genetic advantage in predominately white sports using this same rubric, or do you find it easy to dismiss this notion because it isn’t in harmony with your beliefs about black people?
I suspect the role of “nurture” is obvious to you when we consider why volleyball players tend to be white. At least I hope it is obvious to you. It’s obvious to everyone else, because I never heard anyone speculate that whites are at inherent advantage when it comes to that game.
(bolding mine)
If this truth is so obvious and plain, where the hell is the data? The more you insist on the rightness of your beliefs without providing any evidence to support them, the more apparent it becomes that your beliefs aren’t derived scientifically.
Yeah, you keep saying this. Repetition doesn’t make something the truth, though.
Ancient people used to think that it was obvious and plain that the universe revolved around the earth. Of course we all know they were wrong. Right?
Scientists don’t reach conclusions simply because they are “obvious and plain”. That’s the starting point of science, not the end point. Science works by forming a hypothesis based on what is “obvious and plain” and then testing it. So, while I think it is a very reasonable hypothesis to suggest that Blacks have some genetic advantage in basketball, it’s not a scientific fact until it is tested and proven to stand up to scrutiny. It’s often difficult to perform experiments on humans, but it wouldn’t be particularly hard to test this hypothesis if someone could the funding to do so.
Once again, let me explain the marker is the outcome itself: a superior ability to play basketball.
I have already suggested that the test of nurture requires equal opportunity for that sport. While I do not pretend to be expert, I suspect that tennis and ice hockey are not particularly nurtured in communities where blacks are the predominant population.
I would be willing to wager that if volleyball, as an example, caught on as a sport in the black communities (in my community it’s essentially a women’s sport), black women would be over-represented at the top tiers.
I get the feeling that, if I can’t point out exactly what the genetic advantage is for the NBA, you won’t accept that it is there. But that’s a strawman. There are only two possibilities for the over-representation of blacks: nature and nurture.
In terms of nurture, whites are clearly advantaged. In terms of motivation to attain the NBA, their motivation is clearly as high. Scope out attendance at a typical NBA game and tell me every kid there does not dream of being an NBA hero some day. Whites outnumber the black population by about 3 to 1 and are outnumbered in the NBA by 3 or 4 to 1; higher if you consider playing time and top-level performers. This is a staggering disproportionate representation that has no reasonable explanation other than a difference in ability.
I submit that the only reason for this is a genetic advantage because there is no nurturing advantage. And I submit the only reason for questioning that is a fundamental mind-set that it cannot be so–with perhaps a secondary reason that admitting a genetically-based difference in performance between this particular pair of cohorts opens a door to admitting that any differing outcomes can, in fact, be based on genetics.
Essentially a line is drawn in the sand by all those who do not want mother nature to be unfair. And yet the only species we apply the special constraint of equality to is humans. If two herds of cows perform unequally and the herd that underperforms has better nurturing, we look to genes. Let it happen with two human groups and all the tired old half-baked and utterly unsupported nonsense is presented as alternate explanations.
Across this country and across the world, differing outcomes for various populations with similar opportunity and similar nurturing occurs over and over and over again. Tens of thousands of sports teams and standardized examinations produce the same results despite every effort to ameliorate any nurturing differences. I can look up online test results for high schools in Illinois and tell you which scores at the same school belong to which groups. I can regularly win a sight-unseen wager over what the relative representation is on the basketball teams. And in college or post-grad work it would be even easier. I can ask you look up PhDs earned in Engineering v PhDs in social sciences and have you see how, when the post-discriminatory doors were opened, the number of blacks earning PhDs rose remarkably for social sciences but not for STEM (Science, Tech, Math, Engineering).
Sure, there are some “confounding variables.” But, as the proof case of the NBA shows, they are not so confounding as to make what is plainly true somehow in doubt. What I am lobbying for is that we drop this ridiculous notion that groups cannot have average differences which are genetically based. We are so afraid of admitting this that we have invented whole social policies based on pretending it is not so. And social policy built on erroneous premises generates neither justice nor satisfaction.
It is your choice to refuse to accept this and wait for proof that I am incorrect or wait for equal opportunity to produce equal results. As with the ethnic chinese and the rest of the Malays, it will be a very long wait.
What I’m wondering about is, if intelligence and economic success is so clearly genetically based, why do African Americans routinely under perform when compared to European Americans? After all, it’s not like there hasn’t been extensive interbreeding between the two populations ever since they first started co-habitating on this continent. Or to be less politic about it, white slave owners raped the shit out of their black slaves. There are damned few, if any, African Americans of slave descent who do not have significant European genes. And yet, they consistently earn less, have less education, commit more crimes, and live shorter lives. If those factors were genetically controlled, then there should be no discernable difference between the two populations. So, having eliminated nature as the cause behind the disparity, it must, clearly, be due to nurture.
Based on SNP analysis, African Americans have around 20% European ancestry (and the abstract goes on to confirm that it was mainly male Europeans who were swapping the chromosomes, as you said):
So this hardly shows that they should be genetically indistinguishable from European populations. And population-level IQ scores of African-Americans are in fact significantly higherthan that of Africans, though it is true that the latter are subjected to conditions, such as micronutrient deprivation, that demonstrably decrease intelligence environmentally, not genetically.
20% is a lot of genetic material, though. For the sort of differences Chief Pedant is talking about to develop, you’d need two populations to evolve in isolation from each other. But there’s been a pretty consistent overlap between European and African American populations from the get go.
Or, we can look at some other immigrant groups that came to the US. Take the Irish, for example, who’ve historically had a rough go of it on their home island. For a good few centuries there, they were the ignorant, indigent backwater of the British Isles. Socially, they had many of the same problems that blacks have in the US. But when they started showing up in the US in droves, suddenly, they’re flourishing. And the immigration push wasn’t exactly selecting for success. We were getting the poorest and most desperate. You don’t generally pack yourself onto a coffin ship and leave everything you’ve ever known behind forever if you’re getting along okay in your home country, after all. Obviously, if someone’s a poor, ignorant criminal in their home country, and a successful entrepreneur after they immigrate, it wasn’t genes that made them poor and dumb back home. If social influences could conspire for centuries to keep the Irish down, then it’s reasonable to suggest that the problems in the African American community are likewise due to social influences. At the very least, they can’t be dismissed as cavalierly as Chief Pedant has been doing in this thread.
Or, hey, how about Australia? Started out as a penal colony, right? Here’s a country where the population was literally selected for penury and criminality. If these traits are genetically determined, then Australia should be the most fucked up place on the planet. But they seem to do pretty well for themselves now.