Well, they’re an admixed population composed of Amerindian, European, and African ancestries.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0903045106.full.pdf+html
Also, populations can change over a relatively brief period. As I noted earlier, Greg Clark has written about genetic selection for traits useful for modern capitalism that could have arisen since medieval times.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/capitalism%20genes.pdf
Also, over this period skull sizes changed.
The percentage of African ancestry in Mexico is quite small, less than five percent.
Amerindian ancestry is a subset of Asian ancestry. In fact, some researchers use Chinese populations as the reference when testing for Amerindian ancestry in the Mexican population.
Mexican Americans are genetically Eurasian. 95 % + of their genes come from either Asia or Europe.
Again, let’s try not to forget that we’re talking in generalisations.
Regardless of the debate of average intelligence, it is clearly the case that some sub-saharan Africans are bright enough to be neurosurgeons or quantum physicists or whatever because…there are some black people doing those jobs.
It’s just that the way you were talking before, it was as though there would be a direct correlation between the intelligence of a population and their success in the world. That’s something I would dispute.
Direct correlation? I’m not so sure. But I do think that intelligence would be a benefit. But so would size and strength, resistance to disease, etc. I can envision that different attributes would be of greater benefit at different times. Though, to be honest, I think in the long run, intelligence wold be probably the winning attribute.
Yes; we are talking in “generalizations”–averages. That’s the whole point. Within a given population, how prevalent is the geneset for a particular skillset? And the average success within quantitative science fields for sub-saharan Africans–even transplanted ones–is very low. In the US and many other countries, what qualifies for “black” is often cultural; what is of concern to the debate is genetics. So, for instance, an individual who is culturally “black” but is of half Eurasian stock is not a pure representative of sub-saharan genetic libraries. Nevertheless, even those population pools (relatively mixed genetic heritage but culturally “black” )underperform Eurasians in the quantitative sciences, and fall somewhere on IQ tests between Asians and sub-saharan Africans.
OK; do you have any data?
There have been efforts to correlate IQ and the wealth of nations, as you probably know.
As a rule of thumb–an average–you’ll find nations with high average IQs outperform nations with low average IQs using such markers as socioeconomic success or, (where some sort of horrible political state prevents that such as in North Korea) something that demonstrates obvious cognitive depth such as the development of weapons and nuclear arsenals in North Korea.
It is possible, of course, to become wealthy simply by selling a natural resource, although history is full of nations who have simply had their resources plundered by the more capable, either internally or externally.
In general, and to the point of this OP, it makes sense to me that success is heavily dependent on a depth of brainpower, not just for an elite group, but throughout the whole spectrum so that ordinary infrastructure is capable of being supported. It is not sufficient to have a higher “national” or average IQ to drive economic success, but I would say it’s probably necessary.
I know that any graph that plots the IQ of an entire nation, (or even the average IQ of an entire nation) below 70 is using ludicrous data that pretty well destroys its credibility.
A nation in which the average IQ was below 70 would have no houses and no food. There would simply be too few people in the country to carry out tasks to sustain life for the overwhelming majority of disfunctional people.
OK, lets say that sub-saharan Africans have somewhat lower IQ than East Asians, I think that you can at least make an argument that this may be true. If you also agree that there are all these other factors, why do you put so much of developmental lag in Africa on IQ differences and not on the boatload of other factors that seem to have more direct observable effects?
Wait a minute so you’re saying that we have experienced significant evolution over the last few centuries? That civilization has somehow turbocharged evolutionary advantages not of man’s suitability to nature but of man’s suitability to civilization?
How long is this long run that you are talking about?
Yeah I gotta agree. I find it very hard to believe that the average IQ of any country = mentally retarded (mildly mentally retarded but still).
Yep, and the causal relationship may be the opposite to the one you’re assuming. As I mentioned previously, as nations become more wealthy / westernized, they experience a much faster “flynn effect” of increasing IQs.
Also, I’m suspicious of such a graph for the same sorts of reason that tomndebb pointed out.
That graph is based on data that was statistically flawedat best, and callously manipulated at worst, as has been pointed out numerous times. It’s glossing over the numerous criticisms of both the source data and the methodology to just show that graph. The graph is a lie.
To clarify, I’m not saying Chief is a liar, here, I’m saying the graph is the result of a deliberate attempt to manipulate statistics, a deliberate scheme to set the clock back to a decidedly pre-WWII view of race. And that comes as no surprise, as it was authored by a man with close links to Nazi Holocaust butchers.
I heartily agree. The idea of a “national IQ” is a bit overdone, and the idea of an IQ of 70 being functional is a stretch…I’m not sure I’m any more enamored with IQ testing as a metric than anyone else is, although I am skeptical of the idea it is completely worthless. I’d rather have my neurosurgeon be the guy who scored 150 than 110, for instance.
What we are looking at are patterns. Just patterns. Trends. Consistencies.
Defenders of the egalitarian notion that IQs/genetically-based skillsets cannot differ among populations want to ignore broad patterns and attack the idea by focusing on minutiae. If it were the case that there was no relationship between IQ studies which have been done and wealth, well that’s an argument against the pattern. If there seems to be a general agreement, then the pattern is consistent even if the particulars around how to measure IQ are not perfect.
I think it’s pretty obvious that intelligence should correlate with improved economics; smarter people can organize a smarter and more productive society while at the same time better ameliorate the vicissitudes of negative environmental circumstance. In short, smarter people are less at the mercy of nature and bad fortune.
The question is not so much whether intelligence is helpful–I think it’s a stretch to pretend it’s not–but whether or not intelligence is largely dependent on genes and whether or not those genes vary by population.
I consider the Flynn effect a poor argument that intelligence is not genetic. Here’s a recent discussion on it by Rushton and Jensen. May I point you to the quote from Flynn’s 2208 book, Where Have All the Liberals Gone, on p. 217 of the Rushton cite? :
“There are two messages. The first is familiar: You cannot
dismiss black gains on whites just because they do not
tally with the g loadings of subtests. But the second is new
and unexpected. The brute fact that black gains on whites
do not tally with g loadings tells us something about
causes. The causes of the black gains are like hearing aids.
They do cut the cognitive gap but they are not eliminating
the root causes. And conversely, if the root causes are
somehow eliminated, we can be confident that the IQ gap
and the g gap will both disappear”
Of course, Flynn is unable–like everyone else–to identify non-genetic root causes which can be successfully manipulated to actually eliminate the gap. The gap has never been eliminated despite normalizing for socioeconomic advantage or parental education or anything else. The most powerful evidence that there are fundamental differences among groups is the persistence of those differences given a common environment and the consistency of the pattern of differences yielding the same rank order for population groups in different environments. It’s not like blacks are on the bottom academic tier in sub-saharan Africa but on the top tier in Sweden.
The black-white gap has not narrowed in US testing in 20 years. We’ve discussed that here elsewhere before. It would appear that Flynn is beginning to understand that a past narrowing of IQ gaps is not evidence that the gap will actually be eliminated any more than a hearing aid causing improvement in hearing is evidence the underlying genetic deafness will go away.
I’d rather have my neurosurgeon be the guy that has performed more surgeries than the guy who did really well on a pattern recognition test, but that’s just me.
Speaking very broadly, do nations with higher IQs have more wealth or do nations with more wealth have higher IQs?
I think YOUR question (well position really) is whether or not intelligence is largely heritable and whether those genes vary by population but you are bringing up that question in the context of “why is Africa so fucked up?” and when you do that you are saying that the reason Africa is so fucked up is because the Africans aren’t smart enough to develop a prosperous stable society. In my experience, this has frequently been a prelude to “and therefore we should abandon affirmative action because whatever differences that still exist in our society is the result of an IQ gap and not racism or the residue of racism.”
But it does support the argument that a significant portion of the IQ gap may not be genetic.
OK so lets say we all tentatively agree that there is an IQ gap between races, so what? Are you saying that6 this IQ is a significant factor in why Africa is such a basket case?
Once again, I blame rap music (and all the shift in culture in the last 20 years).
I think a more accurate analogy would be to say that removing earplugs that have been interfering with hearing for generations doesn’t mean that the folks who used to have earplugs are ever going to hear as well as the folks who never had earplugs.
You are in the minority (at least with doctors), and you would be making a bad decision.
A dumb guy who has a lot of experience is unable to synthesize and apply the lessons of that experience, and unable to apply high-cognition analysis to making the right decision of what to do in the first place.
You can’t layer expertise onto poor protoplasm by repetition any more than you can turn me into Tiger Woods by making me practice golf 12 hours a day. You can make me a better golfer than I otherwise would be, but someone (and I report this sadly, from experience 
) with more superior innate potential can become a better golfer than I with in year or so, despite my 40 years of experience golfing.
Twenty dumb programmers working an entire career cannot write the program that one brilliant one can in a month.
etc.
Yes.
Wealth is a marker, but not the only marker, for what might be considered the “intelligence” of a whole nation and all its populations.
N Korea might be starving to death, but it’s hard to argue they aren’t very intelligent. One can look at other markers such as their nuclear weapons and rocketry program, and find a proof case for a highly intelligent population. And one might look at their isolation from the rest of the world and argue that, without the exchange of ideas, trade or foreign investment, they have minimized their economic success.
I argue that the average intelligence of populations within a political boundary affects their maximum potential for economic success. It is necessary–although not sufficient–for robust infrastructure to have highly-capable citizenry. Singapore would not have achieved its economic success if its population was less intellectually capable.
I argue that innate differences are precisely why we need Affirmative Action.
If we recognize that populations are innately different in their average potential, and if we set a goal to create a just and diverse society where everyone has a seat at the table, and if we accept that for the foreseeable future our populations will measure that justice by groups such as gender and race, then the only mechanism to create a diverse representation is race- and gender-based AA.
If, instead, we pretend that there are no innate differences and only opportunity creates the functional differences we see, we aren’t going to have any women firefighters. We aren’t going to be able to get black kids into medicine if they come from wealthy backgrounds; they’ll be asked to compete with eurasians from similar backgrounds and they won’t come anywhere near that level of competence–they aren’t currently competitive even with eurasians from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Proposition 209, which banned race-based AA for UC schools in California, had a negative effect on matriculation percentages for black and Latino students by limiting consideration only to opportunity. Even though schools vigorously sought to end-run the ban (by using essays, for instance, to figure out a student’s race), black and Latino students were unable to compete when the only consideration was equal opportunity and not race or ethnicity.
It is a dangerous and destructive mindset to make public policy based on bad science. The experience with the New Haven firefighters (Ricci v DeStefano) is a bellweather. Given equal opportunity, blacks will not compete on a par scholastically with eurasians any more than eurasians will compete with blacks for jobs in the NBA (hi, you with the face!).
It’s a lovely thing to rail (like MrDibbles and orcenio and even sven) against “racists” who believe there are innate differences in populations. But when we take their suppositions and make policy out of them, we find we have worsened, and not improved, our world even where our intentions might have been good.
I used to think like this, but the older I get the more I think it’s untrue.
I would bet on the person that’s spent more time and effort learning something, without hesitation. Many times I’ve seen people who maybe come across as being a little slow, knuckling down and getting the prize.
Also, I know something about nuerosurgery, as I’m training to be a neuroscientist, and work with neurosurgeons every day. It’s not like “House”; surgeons don’t often have to think out of the box. Because when they take a risk, people can suffer permanent impairment.
Sure, intuition comes into it, but it’s simply a case of gaining familiarity with repetition. If it requires a high IQ then so does learning to ride a bike.
You’ve used North Korea as an example a few times. Why not Kyrgyzstan, Laos or Afghanistan?
And note that North Korea is right beside China; an ally and a nuclear superpower.
Again, you’re speaking in absolutes. Of course there will be some female firefighters and black guys in medicine (btw there are a number of black doctors and consultants at the hospital in which I work, and there is no AA in Britain).
True.
So much of CP’s motive here is based on hostility towards US affirmative action. It’s a US political issue, not a scientific one.
FWIW, state schools in California aren’t allowed to use AA in determining admission to professional schools. In the past few years, only a handful black American students have been admitted to UCLA law and Berkley law. The numbers of Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander students have also substantially declined. I don’t know anything about the state medical schools, but I suspect the outcomes are similar.
Admitting students with significantly lower grades and test scores to elite schools, in the service of “diversity”, benefits no one. Proportional representation by ethnicity is never achievable anyway. Elite, competitive selection processes will always select more members of some ethnic groups than others. Student bodies at the top state schools in Cali are pretty much Asian and Jewish. Something similar is true across the country, though the money and connections still keeps the Ivies white.
What is your motivation in posting that I am hostile toward AA when I vigorously support it for the precise reason that, without it, we cannot hope to achieve anything close to diversity in medicine, law or most businesses?
I have made that position abundantly clear and I am annoyed that you would post otherwise.
While AA is most certainly a “political” issue in the USA, it’s a political issue because it is widely accepted that without AA, minority groups–and blacks in particular–will continue to be markedly under-represented.
Fair enough. If that’s your current position, then I acknowledge it and retract my statement.
I am aware that when you started posting here, you weren’t happy about AA. Somehow, I have a hard time believing that you’re okay with it.
Cali’s position on the issue is the right one, and it will gradually become the law everywhere in the country. Proportional representation based on ethnicity is a pipe dream in just about every competitive field. Different ethnic groups will always have different levels of interest, preparation, diligence, and motivation. In the interest of diversity, are we going to limit the number of Ashkenazi Jews and ethnic Chinese at Harvard in favor of more Irish Catholics? Just how far should we take this diversity thing?
it’s worth recognizing that the AA slots at elite schools like Harvard are being taken over by African and West Indian immigrants, and many of the native born “blacks” at school are actually biracials. These folk’s preparation and test scores are so much better than those of native born black Americans. How this helps native born black Americans is something that no one’s been able to demonstrate.
I thought I’d pop in because I came across this discussion like I invariably do with so many others- I google some paper relating to psychometrics or recent genetic research, or some concept, and I, invariably, find some jackass racialist trolls spamming some discussion board that’s often only meagerly related to nature-nurture issues. This is no exception.
I’ve seen Chen around quite often. I remember first seeing Chen getting shot down in a discussion relating to natural selection and IQ, and how the astoundingly pathetic reaction so many racialists had over the Lahn controversy was highlighted.
Now we have this discussion. Asking whether “genes play a role” in international differences between nations is one huge false dichotomy because the very agency in this regard are human beings who’s behaviors are underpinned by genes. A better question to ask is something like “Among whatever differences we see among populations, how deep-seated are they? How heritable, how malleable are they?” or “Whatever differences that do exist, and regardless as to how heritable they are, how predictive are they of such differences?”
The former question is abit obvious- obviously a group of sociopaths, or a nation ridden with crime, aren’t going to do well in the long-run, so this invariably comes down to the issue of IQ. And invariably you’ll see people spouting golden lines of thought like “well, uh, see, the SS africa is a dump because the average genotypic IQ is around 70 and not much else! Case closed.” (nevermind how the academics who parrot that figure never seem to make their minds up as to whether it’s genotypic or phenotypic, or how the things like malnutrition, disease, parasites etc. that predominate throughout SS africa would probably make their average IQ’s far lower if their genotypic IQ’s really were around 70 etc.)
And one big non-sequiter is how people are divided and pigeonholed in this discourse. Look at this thread. We have propagandistic creeps like Chen spamming the same articles about how humans are still evolving, with the subtext of “hmmm… humans are still evolving, and the evolution hasn’t been equal for everyone. Since those changes are reflected in genes, and genes are by definition “genetic” and “inherited”, that means these differences are going to be deep-seated and immutable, and therefore hereditarianism is true.”
I can’t count the number of times I see this thinking. You people merely exploit the foolish taboos that permeate much of this discourse and end up dividing people into extreme camps. You basically act like any concession that humans aren’t blank slates, that intelligence, personality etc. aren’t entirely environmental and also aren’t ultra-malleable is some huge confirmation for yourselves. Do you think that really makes much sense, that kind of leap?
So I have a question for Chief- what are you arguing for in face of this? You seem to doubt that SS africa’s average IQ is really around 70. You seem to believe that it’s a tad too simplistic to act like SS africa’s failings are due so heavily to one narrow-focused interpretation of this IQ score. (an IQ of 70 is a hinderance, no doubt, but it’s not like it’s so dramatically hindering. After all, classifications of mental retardation nowadays are no longer based entirely on IQ scores around this range.) So just what are you arguing for?
I also can’t help but laugh at how you people paint the psychological community and it’s views on heritability and malleability. Now, I don’t know of exactly how the general community views these things- I’m not an expert, I’m not even working in that field. But I find the idea of the behavior genetics and psychometrics community as being some huge bastion of hereditarianism to be, uh, stupid?
IQ, within the modern first world population, is about .7-.9 genetic on average, meaning about 5-8 points are due to environmental differences. You see this difference reflected in a markedly linear matter from MZ twins down to DZ twins down to normal siblings. Another thing about these 5-8 points is that they arise throughout the lifespan from birth to the mid 20’s when the brain becomes fully grown. They reflect narrow-focused environmental influences spread over the lifespan. Nor are these influences so homogenous as to capture the entire range of environmental influences.
Now, do I believe SS africans have the same average IQ and personality subsets as do “westerners”? (in this case, it almost invariably means american and british whites, and a handful of other northern european majority nations) Of course. Do I believe these differences are entirely environmental and will go away overnight? Hell no. But do I believe these differences are so deep-seated that not much can be done to mediate them beyond eugenic measures? No, no, no.
I’d peg the genotypic SS african IQ as being from the high 80’s to mid 90’s, going by brain size data and corrections for the extreme environmental influences throughout the continent.
