I must have missed it then. Where does the OP posit that genetic differences are the cause? The OP doesn’t ever posit any cause, he describes the result and reacts to it.
I think Tom wants you to discontinue posting about penis sizes in response to a post about Virginia test score requirements by race.
Your comment was that you were ridiculing my claim that I had scientific proof. The post to which you were responding was about the Virginia waiver standards.
So let me ask again: What “scientific proof” do want in support of my contention that those are the Virginia standards for the various gap groups?
I noticed you took offense that I think you are inferior. I might also encourage you not to confuse a group average with an individual ability. For all I know you are vastly superior to me from an intellectual standpoint, and I can kick your ass at basketball (nor do I have any idea what SIRE group you claim). I don’t list mine here except to mention that I was born and raised in a different country.
It’s easy to demonstrate that practically all Blacks are affected by the depressing factos.
I do not think we should give up on trying to close the gap. Nor do I think we should give up on giving a helping hand to under-represented SIRE groups, which is the point of my OP.
Anti race-based AA groups are arguing that socioeconomic status should be the primary consideration instead of race, because SES is a better measure of opportunity. See this Fisher v UT Austin amicus curiae brief, p 22, e.g. But the problem is that SES consideration instead of pure race will hurt black admissions, because the improved opportunity offered by higher SES does not offset the underperformance of black and hispanic SIRE groups.
While you may personally feel “opportunity” is not normalized by wealth or parental education (or the other factors you mentioned), there’s a default assumption by the anti race-based AA groups that it is. I think that’s based on the fact that no one’s come up with really good other explanations. Do you have some?
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Yes, those are averages. Your statement that:
The “most qualified” are going to be above average. There is a spread to the measurements and you are making statements about the “most qualified” which, by definition, are going to be better than average.
I’m not talking about diabetes- I’m talking about intelligence. There is no evidence to support the genetic explanation for the achievement gap (in education, test scores, economics, crime stats, etc). I recognize the existence of the gap, and your “side” has hypothesized that the best explanation is that some races have genetic tendencies towards lower intelligence or higher aggression (or something like that). You haven’t gotten past the “hypothesis” stage of this; find the genes for intelligence/aggression, show their prevalence in different populations, and show that individuals with (or without) these genes have higher (or lower) test scores and crime rates.
Wait a sec… **Chief Pedant **made the OP. What’s going on here?
There’s lots of evidence. There just isn’t any direct genetic evidence.
IANAG, but I don’t believe it is required by actual geneticists that a gene be identified before accepting that a trait is determined, either partly or wholly, by one’s genes. I think the major issues here are more along the lines of:
- Defining what intelligence even is.
- Controlling for environmental and cultural factors.
There can be no question, though, that intelligence is heritable, else chimps would be as smart as we are. The question is how to measure it and how it varies across populations independent of environment and culture.
What evidence? I see lots of evidence for the existence of the achievement gap. I see no evidence to support the genetic explanation for this gap. I don’t see how ruling out individual other factors, even multiple factors, is evidence for a genetic explanation.
I don’t dispute any of this. Even if there was a consensus on the definition of intelligence, and we know enough to say that intelligence is a function of a very large number of genes, we don’t know what most of these genes are or how they function.
I’m not ruling out the genetic explanation- I just see no evidence for it, so to me it has the same value as any other explanations that have no supporting evidence (like, say, airborne brain parasites that are more likely to enter the bloodstream of individuals with larger amounts of melanin in their skin).
You are obsessed with the genetics side of the equation, and I’d like to save that for a different debate…
The problem at hand is that schools need to consider race alone because all other factors don’t seem to make any difference in improving scores and performance outcomes. It’s one thing to abstractly postulate that “something” non-genetic makes a performance difference, but unfortunately for schools, neither they (nor anyone else) has managed to find that “something” and correct for it.
So until they do find the secret non-genetic reason for performance differences, school are left with race-alone as the ONLY way to get proportional SIRE group representation, and to compete for the best candidates.
Do you support race-alone based AA, or don’t you? I support it. I think that a wealthy black applicant with mediocre scores and highly educated parents from a great neighborhood that has the best schools, should be admitted in front of a high-scoring poor white orphan who lives in the ghetto if the school already has an over-representation of white students, as long as that’s the best black candidate the school can attract.
That’s the dilemma schools face every day. They don’t have the luxury of meandering on about how we’ll never be able to sort out for opportunity because it’s just too complex. For most people, it’s actually pretty simple: Do you have money, and did you have access? And so far, black candidates with money and access still turn in significantly lower scores than whites and asians with less money and less access. So the only way to get to proportionate representation is to say arbitrarily say that we will accept X number from each SIRE group, and to treat each SIRE group against a performance standard specific for that SIRE group.
Perhaps I’m missing something. Are you saying there are no black students who qualify to admission to Harvard, et al., on their own merits?
That’s fine- I just attack that side because part of the premise in your OP is “we are not created equal”, which I’m pretty sure implies the genetic explanation.
A nitpick, but it doesn’t have to be just one reason- I think it’s likely that there are lots and lots of reasons.
Yes, I support it.
I would absolutely oppose such a policy. I see no reason that having Beverly Hills Blacks at a state college is worth twisting the 14th amendment around. Private schools can do whatever the hell they want.
You are conflating evidence with proof.
In that case then any of this evidence-by-ruling-out-other-factors for the genetic explanation is also evidence for my (made up) “melanin-brain-parasites” explanation.
Figure S2 in the linked paper shows that % African Ancestry negatively correlates with education, income, and occupation in the AA population. Since these SES variables correlate with IQ, we can infer that African Ancestry does so likewise. In a parallel manner, African phenotypes in the AA population also negatively correlate with IQ and SES. See here – or was that here? Now, as I was asking – what’s your environmental explanation for this? An obvious possibility is “Colorism.” Accordingly, the intensity of anti-Black discrimination correlates with African appearance and this selective discrimination leads to the ancestry, IQ, SES associations. But this hypothesis is, largely, contradicted by sibling studies, which show trivial outcome differences between full siblings, despite these siblings varying extensively in color.
As for genes, some have been found for aggression. See, for example:
Generally, individual genes have been found which are associated with both low IQ and high antisociality in both the AA and EA populations and which are more prevalent in the former. But this does not tell us much because we are interested in the net additive effects of very many genes and the effects of gene x gene interaction. And almost all of those very many genes are not currently know, so their cumulative effects can not be determined.
Of course, this isn’t to say that between group heritability (BGH) can not as yet be determined. I pointed out prior that one can determine BGH using structural equation modeling, given a few reasonable assumptions. These studies, of course, have been done. And the results are utterly consistent with a partial genetic hypothesis. And no one has been able to give a reasonable alternative explanation for the results that also meshes with other findings. Alternatively, to determine BGH one can use admixture mapping. One would just need to do a study like the one cited above showing a SES, ancestry link and look at the genes underlying the association. If these genes are located in regions of the genome that code for neurological functioning as opposed to anatomical development then one could be pretty sure about the causal pathway.
That said, I haven’t been arguing that there are necessarily congenital racial differences in traits X, Y, and Z. Rather, I’ve been asking for an environmental account of the differences that fits the facts. If you can’t think of one (that I can’t debunk), admit it and agree that claims of ueber-racism are unfounded. As are calls for racial quotas on the grounds of the supposed “legacy of racism.”
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Now, as for affirmative action … it should surprise none here to know that I am not opposed to racial discrimination, so long as it is not egregious and as it promotes the greater good. I see nothing wrong, for example, with historic White Americaand with many of the discriminatory laws made to support and defend it. Likewise, in principle, I see nothing wrong with Multi-racial America and many the equivalent laws. I just don’t like it. But like or not, I agree with the OP’s logic: (1) There’s no reason to suppose that “the gaps” are going to close anytime soon. Intermarriage seems to be the only factor that has any appreciable durable effect on these. And it only narrows the gaps by two-thirds to one-half. As seen from my perspective: given the current social policies (e.g., no mandated miscegenation), it will take generations for full assimilation. (2) These IQ gaps will inevitably lead to outcome disparities in absence of social intervention. (3) If the majority deems that “diversity” or “racial equality” is a national good, than it is. And if so, individual rights need to take a back seat at times. (4) Given (1,2,3), the various quotas are justified.
This is basically what people are arguing, anyways. How else does one make sense of affirmative action for just-off-the-boat Hispanics? The IQ/test gaps for these individuals can be traced directly back to their region of origin. You can compare, for example, the NAEP math scores of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico – tests in Spanish, of course – to those of Puerto Ricans born in the US. A similar point can be made concerning new Black immigrants, who constitute 10% of the Black population and who perform about 0.5 standard units below 3rd generation Whites on various cognitive tests. Racial discrimination justified on the basis of rectifying “historic discrimination” and tailored to meet that justification would look little like the system which we currently have.
It’s not just one. If you just want a non-debunkable explanation, that’s easy- a combination of a myriad of environmental differences- things like nutrition and physical and mental health during pregnancy (including the emotional state and stability of the mother), differences in economics and education, discrimination at multiple levels, childhood nutrition, media role models and portrayals of race, parental involvement (and parental emotional state), community role models and peer pressure, etc. That’s a good start, and there could be pages and pages of potential differences.
Until all (or at least most) of the genes for intelligence and aggression are found (and subsequently analyzed for frequency in various populations), the “genetic explanation” remains a hypothesis.
Exactly so, if you use test scores.
From The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:
"*For admission to the very highest ranked, brand-name schools such as Princeton or MIT, applicants need scores of 750 to be considered for admission. Yet, as we shall see, only a minute percentage of black test takers score at these levels. Thus, if high-ranking colleges and universities were to abandon their policies of race-sensitive admissions, they will be choosing their first-year students from an applicant pool in which there will be practically no blacks.
Let’s be more specific about the SAT racial gap among high-scoring applicants. In 2005, 153,132 African Americans took the SAT test. They made up 10.4 percent of all SAT test takers. But only 1,132 African-American college-bound students scored 700 or above on the math SAT and only 1,205 scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. Nationally, more than 100,000 students of all races scored 700 or above on the math SAT and 78,025 students scored 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Thus, in this top-scoring category of all SAT test takers, blacks made up only 1.1 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the math test and only 1.5 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the verbal SAT.
If we eliminate Asians and other minorities from the statistics and compare just white and black students, we find that 5.8 percent of all white SAT test takers scored 700 or above on the verbal portion of the test. But only 0.79 percent of all black SAT test takers scored at this level. Therefore, whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Overall, there are more than 39 times as many whites as blacks who scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT.*"
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. One idea commonly advanced is that lack of opportunity accounts for low scores; a second idea is that score differentials are not that large; a third is that scores don’t predict success very well; a fourth is that scores are more or less distributed across a continuum of opportunity instead of high scores being clustered with high opportunity. These are all false.
Therefore, under a system of quantitatively tested “merit” alone, it’s correct to say that there are almost no–certainly not enough to go around–black students for the highly competetive universities.
There’s a reason Universities are so aggressively fighting elimination of race-alone policies. They are in competition for a very small pool of qualified black applicants, the competition is fierce, and they won’t find qualified applicants in lower SES pools. That is, you can’t take a kid (on average) who has had crappy opportunity and catch him up with better oportunity inside your college. Kids who come in with crappy scores cluster to easier classes and never get up to snuff. The reason for crappy scores is not nearly so much a lack of opportunity as it is a lack of ability. That’s why there are so many stories of kids with crappy opportunity who end up with great scores and college success. It’s the brain power and not the opportunity that is the primary driver of good quantitative scores.
Can a moderator please delete the above post, # 63? My incomplete reply was submitted by someone else who was using my computer while I was briefly away.
What I was planning to point out was the often unrecognized point that all, or at least nearly all, of Blacks must be affected by the mysterious depressing factors which depress the Black mean. We know this because the heritability of cognitive ability is approximately the same in the native Black population as it is in the native White population, which means that there is no more environmental variance in the former than in the latter. Since there is no more environmental variance, there is no room for some Blacks to be unaffected and others to be more affected.
This phenomena is best illustrated by looking at the differential sibling regression between IQ matched Black and White sibling. See figure 3 in “The Secular Increase in IQ and Longitudinal Changes in the Magnitude of the Black-White Difference.” Environmentally, this regression can be explained by positing shared family effects which depress Black sibs identically relative to White sibs. In of itself, then, this is not interesting. What is, though, is that the effect is no less at the upper end of the bell curve than at the lower end. This means that Blacks with an IQ of 130 are no less depressed by our mysterious factors than Blacks with an IQ of 70. To see the implications of this, imagine if 15% of the native Black population wasn’t affected and that the other 85% was and was so equally. If so, 15% would be depressed in IQ 0 SD and 85% would be depressing in IQ 1.18 SD, averaging out to an average Black-White difference of 1 SD. Were this the case, at an IQ of 130, given a normal distribution, we would have roughly 2.1% x 15% of unaffected Blacks (= 0.315) and 0.1% x 85% of affected Black (= 0.085). The ratio of unaffected to affected Blacks at this IQ would be about three and a half to 1. Were this the case, the sib regression difference (at 130) would be ~30% of what it is at an IQ of 85. And it’s not.
Now, this just illustrates what is implied by the equivalent heritabilities for Blacks and Whites. Whatever is affecting the African American population as a whole, is affecting nearly all African Americans, if not all. This phenomena, of course, doesn’t mean that Blacks aren’t depressed in SES or such factors. It just means that if they are, they are nearly equally so. Let me try to make this more clear: Imagine that SES correlates with IQ at 0.5 within both the Black and White populations. Now imagine that SES is causing the Black-White difference. As such Blacks are depressed relative to their genetic potential by two SD in SES causing a 1 SD depression in IQ. Now this situation could occur in two different ways. The difference could be variables such that some Blacks are more depressed in SES and some are less and not at all. Or it could be constant such that all Blacks are depressed about the same amount. We live in the latter world. And we know this for the reasons discussed above.
What’s this all mean? For one, it means that correlational research isn’t too informative when it comes to determining the cause of the difference. This goes both ways. For example, SES could well be the cause of the whole difference despite there being a substantial difference between SES matched kids. This would be the case if Blacks families were nearly uniformly depressed relative to their geneotypes. You could only know though experimentation (e.g., randomly doling out jobs, income, etc, for sub samples of each population.) Alternatively, showing that SES statistically explains some of the difference is meaningless, since given what was said above, it can readily be show that the explained portion is wholly a genetic effect (i.e., the kids of more intelligent Blacks are being matched with those of less intelligent Whites).
For our purposes, the importance of this point is that whatever the cause almost all if not all Blacks are affected. As such, Affirmative action for John Mace’s Beverly Hills Blacks makes perfect sense, if the justification is to compensate for such and such effects.
(Personally, I find it curious that the various environmental depressors are nearly uniformly distributed acorss the Black population, but others don’t – and what do I know.)
But…as I said in the OP…the dilemma is that high-income blacks and blacks from families with high parental educational achievement still score substantially less than their peers. So you have to prune down your list by everything that is not a factor within that subset. It’s just plain silly–and stubborn–to keep pretending that nutrition, mother’s mental health, parental involvement and a bunch of other poorly defined items somehow exist to a greater extent for blacks in those high income, high parental education groups than they do for poverty stricken whites with uneducated parents.
C’mon.
In any case, one thing is clear: equalizing those opportunity conditions does nothing to bring scores into the range for that peer group. So if we want SIRE group proportionate representation, we are going to have to ignore opportunity and have race-based quotas.
Maybe this analogy would help.
Let’s say the school wants a curling team. We only have enough money for one team. We notice all the best curlers are male, so women rarely make the team.
One group goes off and argues whether or not the problem is a genetically-based one. Half of them think women have crappier opportunity or some other unidentified nurturing disadvantage; half of them think there is an innate difference. The arguments go on…
The school has a different problem. They want women to be represented. So they establish an arbitrary rule: 35% of the curling team must be women.
Now the curling team wants the best possible team members. When they go to select candidates, they are going to ignore which women had more curling opportunity than which men. The school is never going to win either side of the argument about whether or not curling ability is genetically driven. They are going to put women in their own group, and they want to be free to pick the best ones, even if those women who end up being chosen had vastly superior opportunity to some man who is better than all the women but worse than all the men players.
So yeah, there will be many cases where a women who has been curling all her life gets chosen over a male curler who just picked up the game last year. But no other system will get women curlers on the team.