So, it's June... WHERE THE **** IS THIS LOOMING GENETIC CRISIS!?

Great Debates
41

There is no question the very specific programs specifically targeted at improving the performance of under-represented minorities (read: largely “blacks” in the US) have had some effect. Every college and university takes great pains to solicit, nurture, graduate and place under-represented groups. On the employer side, every major corporation has a deep interest in recruiting and hiring minorities. None of this is evidence (as you seem to suggest I would have to conclude) of a core change in innate ability.

My maximum ability for the skillset of basketball is limited by my genes. Of course I would be better at basketball if, for the first period of my life I had been artificially kept off the court but in the second half I had been given the best possible nurturing for it. The fact that I improved would be a result of that nurturing; my maximum potential would be limited by my genes.

The change in employment success in STEM disciplines has not been accompanied by a commensurate change in quantitative testing (or for that matter, even much of a change in the number of PhDs awarded blacks in the STEM disciplines). It’s incorrect to infer an increase in demonstrated ability because of improved workplace diversity without accounting for differential hiring based on a desire to improve diversity. What needs to be shown is that, given equal educational opportunity, the STEM-related scores of blacks equal the STEM-related scores of whites and asians (or any other groups).

For all of the advanced testing for which I am aware (MCATS; LSATS; GREs…etc), the scoring gap remains rather wide. An employer may have other reasons than test scores to hire into STEM fields, and among those reasons is racial diversity (either voluntarily, or as a means to avoid criticism of being discriminatory). But that is a social-policy-driven success, and not a reflection of nurturing eliminating (or even significantly narrowing) a fundamental difference in ability.

42

It’s my personal opinion that current score differences are likely to remain more or less stable, and the general rank order of asians, whites and blacks will remain more or less immutable, despite any effort at educational nurturing. As a rule of thumb, the best black scores (like the best white scores) are already turned in by those with pretty much maximal opportunity (family income and parental educational nurturing, e.g.). I don’t see what else you can improve for those groups and I don’t think there is some hidden pool of talent somewhere.

I do think the absolute numbers of excellent black students can be increased if we are able to change the wretched situation with so much of our inner city black community. The f-ing government obsession with the “war on drugs,” for instance, (in my personal opinion, again) takes a disparate and idiotic destabilizing toll on young black men over all other groups, and as a consequence, on their entire community. Surely we lose a disproportionate number of bright young black minds simply as a consequence of a dysfunctional community in which they are nurtured. I find that incredibly sad, and I would like to think that we can do better.

43

I can speak for me personally, although perhaps not people “like me.”

My reaction would be surprise (at being wrong :wink: ) followed by “meh.”

There’s no Chest Medal for World’s Best Race, and I personally do not give a rat’s patoot what anyone’s race is, particularly for people in my personal circle. I think the idea that all thinkers who draw a conclusion that there are innate differences in ability among races are somehow closet Klansmen is a bit misguided.

Nor do I disagree with you that race is a somewhat arbitrary grouping (although I suspect I think it has a greater biologic basis than you do). But it’s irrelevant to the key point I make here a dozen times a year: Whatever grouping you use, if you find differences not eliminated by providing equal nurturing, those differences are probably genetic. So if people with brown eyes, normalized for equal nurturing, outscore or outperform people with blue eyes, the difference is genetic even if those groups are not otherwise biologically related.

44

Well now, this appears to be moving the goalposts somewhat. In your earlier post, you were claiming that STEM employment success by itself indicated something meaningful about racial differences in ability:

But now you seem to be arguing that increases in STEM employment success for blacks somehow don’t count unless they’re accompanied by increases in STEM-related test scores. Because you assume (without citing evidence) that increased STEM employment success for blacks must be ascribed to hiring-diversity efforts independent of ability.

In other words, when the performance of blacks improves in some area, you automatically consider it a reflection of policies designed to give blacks an extra advantage, whereas when the performance of blacks doesn’t improve in some area, you automatically consider it an indication of blacks’ innate inferior ability. Hmm.

However, many of the score gaps have markedly narrowed over the past few decades. For instance, on the NAEP math and reading tests blacks have increased their scores significantly more than whites.

It’s true that black scores still noticeably lag behind white scores overall, and we cannot be sure that the score gaps will be narrowed further in the future. Still, as I noted, it seems rather premature to assert with confidence that the score gaps can’t be further narrowed.

Well, they might or might not. We don’t know, but we’ll find out.

45

Well, Kimstu, I hope you are right, but I am not as encouraged as you, especially over the last 20 years, even using your cite which has the usual positive spins where possible.

From figure 10 here for Math: 1986 black-white gaps for 9, 13 and 17 year-olds were 25, 24 and 29. 2008 black-white gaps for the same ages were 26, 28 and 26, respectively.
Reading (Fig 4): 1988 black-white gaps for 9, 13 and 17 year-olds were 29, 18 and 20. 2008 black-white gaps for the same ages were 24, 21 and 29.

It would seem from your cite that we made progress from 1970 to 1985 and then hit a plateau. It’s that plateau that has been hard to overcome…in any case I don’t know much about how well the demographics of the NAEP reflect the whole nation; it would seem from the change in the demographics they report that the schools involved are more urban than, say, suburban. I don’t know how that might affect the scores given the migration of so many whites to the suburbs over that period of time.

As to your complaint that I am changing the criteria I use from employment to scores:
I made a broad statement that I do not expect to see a high success rate on the world stage of sub-saharan Africans in STEM fields. From that you made an inference that my means of quantifying that might be looking at employment diversity in a country that has vigorously advanced diversity as a targeted goal. Well, okay; if you think that makes your point. I think your criticism is a rather weak one. The sort of success I would be looking for is quantifiable against standardized tests or patents or leadership in innovation or creative engineering and the like–the sort of thing we have seen out of Asian countries in the last few decades. Rhetorically, I have put it this way: the world is not flat for sub-saharan Africa.

46

Well, yeah, considering that in other contexts you’ve ascribed performance lags among sub-saharan African nations to the same hypothesized genetic inferiority that you use to explain performance lags among American blacks.

You have a tendency to make rather sweeping or vague assertions about racial groups and performance differentials in general, and then backpedal to more moderate or restricted claims when they’re challenged.

Again, the trouble with these broad statements is that they don’t really account for differences in details. It’s easy to note as a general phenomenon that, for instance, Asian countries currently have many more patents than sub-saharan African ones overall. And it’s easy to hypothesize that this is because Asian countries’ population in general have some kind of cognitive racial advantage over sub-saharan African ones.

But then you have to explain why, for example, Kenya has on average more annual patents than Sri Lanka or Bangladesh or Lithuania, even though the Kenyan population is by your hypothesis “racially disadvantaged” compared to the populations of those other countries. Meanwhile, Israel has far more patents than Saudi Arabia or Poland, even though by your hypothesis they have racially comparable populations in terms of cognitive advantage.

Of course, you’ll explain these discrepancies (and rightly so, IMO) by appealing to differences in particular circumstances involving development levels or legal structures or business environments that impact patent generation. Fine, but in that case, I think you’re obligated to admit the possibility of such circumstantial differences on a continent-level scale as well as on a country-level scale.

You rely on non-genetic ad hoc particular explanations superseding alleged overall racial differences to account for instances that don’t agree with your hypothesis of black genetic disadvantage. But you automatically disallow the possibility of any non-genetic ad hoc particular explanations to account for instances that do agree with your hypothesis.

As I said before, if blacks are doing well by some standard of cognitive achievement, you inevitably explain it by factors unrelated to ability, while if blacks aren’t doing well by some such standard, you inevitably ascribe it to ability factors. I think this double standard makes your arguments less plausible.

47

I think you probably know without me embarrassing you further, what the patent tally for all Asian countries would be versus all sub-saharan African countries, even adjusted for population differences (Hint: Taiwan-77,000; Kenya-73). Like many passionate and earnest holders of your position, you are equally guilty of cherry-picking data points for a good spin.* In this case it’s particularly egregious cherry-picking, but I guess you do what you can. And I am not arguing that patents, per se, are the be-all to measure cognitive differences at a population level. I am simply adding that to an example of a very long list of indicators which all seem to follow the same universal pattern. I would entertain suggestions from you on other indicators of high-cognitive function.

As a reminder, here is the main “vague” assertion I am making:

Racial groups differ–on average, at the level of that grouping–in their innate abilities because their genetic makeup differs–on average. Evidence of those differences can be seen in persistently disparate group average outcomes, even when opportunity is adjusted for.

I do not make any claim that a particular sub-population within the broad group of “race” has superiority for a particular skillset–at least without examining the evidence. For all I know there is a tiny group of innovative black Kenyan geniuses churning out patents to a greater extent than any other subpopulation in the world. If so, however, it is such a small population that it is not affecting the overall average skillset very much.

*This feels so much like arguing with a Creationist…

48

Actually, you know I know that because I just explicitly told you that myself:

Sorry, Chief, but the only person you have at all embarrassed in this discussion so far is yourself.

I know that that’s the vague assertion that you’re making. The problem with it is not that it’s necessarily incorrect; it might be correct or it might not. Rather, the problem with it is that you arbitrarily define “outcomes”, “disparate”, “evidence”, “average”, “racial groups”, “opportunity”, and “adjusted” according to your rhetorical needs of the moment, without any very close attention to precision and consistency.

Well, if so, that would explain Kenya’s atypically high patent numbers for a sub-saharan African population. Then how would you explain Bangladesh’s vanishingly low patent numbers, which are even more atypical for an Asian population? Does Bangladesh perhaps just happen to be made up of a genetic subpopulation of uncharacteristically dumb people?

49

It’s like arguing with those silt people from the Creationist crowd…

Kimstu, you cannot take any one data point and pretend it’s a proxy for the entire genes/nurture on either side, and just because I toss one out there as an example, it’s a bit disingenuous to imply that’s the sum of evidence I offer. You have to look at overall patterns. Individual data points serve as examples; not the entire substance of the argument.

Kenya and Bangladesh, have so few patents as to be negligible contributors to patents, period. And as I stated above, I don’t know how their individual sub-populations relate to one another on an intelligence scale. For example, Pakistan only has a handful of patents, but they have other markers for cognitive ability, including a rocket program and nuclear weapons (along with a high success rate for their emigrants in STEM fields). That’s good alternative evidence there is some significant brainpower there.

What would you suggest I use as some alternate markers for sub-saharan Africa?

I’m not hanging my entire proof case on patents but I am suggesting they are one reasonable proxy to examine as part of an overall pattern. Apparently, the highest (not including SA) country you found in the sub-saharan Africa group for patents is Kenya, with a couple per year. If that satisfies you as effective counter-evidence because it outscores one of the lowest Asian countries, carry on.

What I find compelling is the overall consistency of pattern; not any isolated data point as a proof case. Suppose I were to ask you (and you did not already know) what to predict for, say GCSE scores in the UK by ethnic population, including immigrant populations. Would you bet the Kimstu family car that it’s a total crapshoot, or would you (privately, at least) predict the East Asian groups on top and the black groups on the bottom, and whites and other groups piddling around somewhere in the middle? Hint here. Now that’s just a single isolated data point, with all sorts of nurturing complications tossed in. I don’t deny that at all. And I suspect, if you looked hard enough, you’d find a point case somewhere where that general pattern might be turned upside down. You’d certainly be able to dissect that individual UK GSCE score data point into pieces with various analyses that point to potentially non-genetic factors. But if you stepped back and looked at overall patterns, everywhere in the world, net net, using the sum of all markers and proxies and successes–then what you’d find is the same pattern of successes (at the level of traditional “races”) for various skillsets repeated across the world. That’s the pattern I find most compelling.
Will you be returning to your contention about those continually narrowing test scores here in the US?

50

There IS no pattern, because races are not the meaningful, not to mention narrow groupings you are trying to insist they are. Your attitudes are just a thinly veiled version of “whites are the pure, superior race” with a pseudoscientific gloss.

51

Der Trihs, I realize you have your own agenda, and I recognize both your sincerity and your altruism toward mankind. If the resolution to the core dilemma in your mind is to deny there are racial groupings (and this is certainly a common tactic), that’s fine. I’ve said on many occasions I am not obsessed with defining race; I am obsessed with arguing that, where we find differences among groups and we’ve normalized nurturing, the difference is genetic. This has significant practical implications for public and social policies. If green-eyed people stink, on average, at basketball even if they’ve had equivalent nurturing for it, we shouldn’t get up in arms if they are under-represented in the lucrative professional basketball leagues. Whether or not they can be described as a “race” is not an issue of any consequence to the argument that their inability is genetic.

You are dead wrong in the characterization of me above; I simply have no interest in persuading you otherwise. (Among other things, I have repeatedly characterized “race” as a very broad and loose categorization.) If it makes you feel better to pretend that any conclusion which draws a correlation between race and ability and genes renders the owner of that conclusion as you describe me above, enjoy your delusion that you have adequately squashed the arguments you don’t like.

When you are ready to discuss data, and not name-calling, come back to the debate and post your data.

52

Consider here, for instance, to see how the top grouping (sub-saharan Africans) is different from the second grouping (Caucasoids)…in common, broad terms, “blacks” and “whites.”

Sure; the end-groups are more distinct populations–certainly more distinct than traditional “race” groups. But the idea that there aren’t two meta-groups there is nonsense, and it’s only clever wordplay that wants to pretend that the Danish, English, San and Mbuti are all about equally related to one another or are composed of the same source library of genes.

53

Nah – you want the cobra genes for lightning fast reflexes, to go with the invincible strength of a rogue elephant and the killer instinct of Commodore Puddles.

54

“Source libraries” that for dark skinned people mysteriously aren’t affected by centuries of breeding with other “races” in places like America. You are indulging in the standard racist nonsense of treating whites as the pure and superior type, and having ancestors of other “races” as some sort of contamination.

And of course you keep changing your definitions of “race” as you go along.

55

I think you are trying to be facetious, but as it turns out, the performance of populations which are mainly sub-saharan black have been “affected by centuries of breeding with other races” (to use your verbiage) is somewhere between their principal source heritage and the “race” with which they have interbred. So in the US, for example, there is a large component of Eurasian genes within our “black” population, and the performances of those populations on cognitive g-loaded IQ tests (for example) is somewhere between European whites and sub-saharan blacks.

I don’t remember trying to define race. I’ve given you a chart showing what I think are reasonable population groupings, and how I would generally translate the social/cultural concept of “race” into those populations. While there has been a fair amount of admixture, on average any of the sub-saharan groups still in Africa have not interbred to a huge extent with, say, the Danish group (to take a couple examples from that chart).

The idea that the white race is either pure or superior is ridiculous. I’d say pretty much every race has a habit of getting knocked up by other races. That’s why “race” is such a broad category. As to whites being superior: certainly not for most cognitive skills–especially quantitative ones; that title would probably go to East Asians. And certainly not for skillsets like power-sprinting sports or basketball (Hi, You With the Face :wink: ). Seems like whites kind of just piddle along in the muddy middle.

And while it seems a difficult concept for you to get your biases around, I’m not particularly interested in defining race, or promoting the notion. I simply argue that, where we do find differences between any groups with equivalent nurturing, those differences are genetic. Stop trying to take it personally. Only a very stupid white man would consider himself automatically intellectually superior somehow to an intelligent black man because of some sort of group average. And it’s even stupider to consider a birth accident some sort of accomplishment.

56

Gene expression doesn’t work according to simple ratios. The genes interact with each other and with the environment, so the issue is much more complicated than 4th grade fractions. Once you take several different populations and mix them together, you have a new population, not a simple mixture of parent populations. So generalizations about the widely diverse sub Saharan African populations (based on questionable and in some cases fraudulent data gathering) aren’t particularly useful in discussing black Americans.

A crude example of this is hybridization between tigers and lions. Based on simple ratios, one would expect that the size of lion-tiger hybrids would be somewhere between those of lions and tigers. This is not the case.

The other problem is that centuries of mixing between populations with different phenotypes can and does cause phenotype to decouple from total genetic ancestry. So people who look “black” may not have much African ancestry, and people who look “white” may a have a lot, and there’s no clear way to sort out which intelligence influencing genes have been inherited.

57

I agree with some of this, except that in the case of ligers and tigons, you have the effect of cross-species interbreeding; not simply bringing in a new pool of genes not previously available to that subset of the same species. While speciation is somewhat arbitrary, as a general rule all humans are considered to be the same species, so far. And you are right that it is not simply 4th grade fractions with simple mendelian inheritence.

Still, if I had a plump little white mother and an athletic black father, and became a basketball star, not too many people would credit my mom’s genes for my success on the basketball court. It’s not proof of any kind, but it’s a reasonable inference that a particular skillset is derived from whichever parental side also exhibits that skillset.

And you are right about the cultural and social tendency toward categorizing as “black” someone who has a high percentage of non-sub-saharan (immediate) ancestry. President Obama, Halle Barre and Tiger Woods come to mind as people often categorized by the public as “black” when, genetically speaking, half or more of their genes are not of (direct) sub-saharan ancestry. From a genetic viewpoint, they are not particularly representative of that gene pool.

58

Sure. My complaint is that when any particular individual data point doesn’t happen to support your position (in other words, when it’s a counterexample rather than an example), you don’t candidly confront that anomaly. Rather, you dismiss it as unimportant and point to other data points that do support your position instead.

I’m not claiming that you can’t find a majority of data points that do support your position. I’m just pointing out that you deal with the counterexamples in a scientifically irresponsible way, ignoring them or glossing over them instead of trying to account for them in a manner that’s consistent with your hypothesis.

Yes, I see how that data supports your position. My query was, how do you explain the fact that the data from Bangladesh doesn’t support your position to the same extent?

Do you infer from it that Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are significantly genetically different in terms of “brainpower”? Wouldn’t that be a little surprising, given their close kinship in general?

Or do you think that the differences between Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in several of the areas that you consider “markers of cognitive ability” are better explained by non-genetic factors?

I know you do. The problem is that your process of “stepping back and looking at overall patterns” involves a great deal of sloppy thinking and unscientific treatment of data. For you, “looking at overall patterns” basically means ignoring data that don’t support your position, overstating the implications of data that do support your position, and refusing to acknowledge that any alternative explanation of the data might possibly be valid.

Instead of honestly acknowledging the weaknesses of your position (and those weaknesses don’t necessarily mean that your position is wrong, just that it isn’t yet definitively supported by the science), you fall back on insinuations and sneers about the alleged biases and “agendas” of people who are not convinced by your arguments.

You must mean “test score gaps”, right? Actually, I didn’t make any contention about “continually” narrowing test score gaps; I just pointed out that some black/white test score gaps have significantly narrowed over the past few decades.

Nor did I make any prediction about whether US black/white test score gaps will narrow further in the future. They might, or they might not.

59

Per the cite you gave, there has been no narrowing in the last twenty years despite a substantial emphasis on programs directed specifically at narrowing that gap. I see no data to suggest they will continue to narrow, either with that set of scores or any others. Do you? Score gaps wax and wane, but if you look at the set of MCAT scores I posted for 2009, I doubt you’ll see much evidence that we are anywhere near eliminating them. If you don’t have good data on continual narrowing, on what basis would you conclude score gaps “might” narrow? The residual difference appears to be immutable to improvements in the various nurturing deficiences proposed by those trying to explain the persistent gap on non-genetic grounds.

Bangladeshis seem to have done reasonably well when their environment is improved, which is one of the reasons I gave you the GCSE scores from the UK. You will notice that the same pattern exists–East Asians on the top; blacks on the bottom–for that set of scores, despite all of those groups being in the same new environment. I do not discount environment and political or cultural history and your persistent implication that I do is not a very effective substitute for posting actual data points supporting a position that the gap in performance can be eliminated. Bangladeshis seem to do OK when you give them an improved environment.

60

Again, though, your attempt to focus on the data that support your position and dismiss the data that don’t creates more problems than it solves.

For one thing, you’re automatically assuming that “nation” adequately stands in for “environment”: i.e., that Chinese immigrants and Indian immigrants and Bangladeshi immigrants and African immigrants in the UK are all by definition in “the same new environment”, which AFAICT is a huge overgeneralization.

For another thing, you’re once again focusing on the persistence of what you’ve identified as a “pattern” in the general structure of the data and ignoring the specific counterexamples in its details. For instance, in your GCSE scores data, black African girl immigrants’ scores are much closer to Pakistani girl immigrants’ scores than the Pakistani girls’ scores are to Indian girls’ scores. How is that to be explained, if the Pakistani and Indian immigrants are much more genetically similar than the Pakistani and African immigrants?

You keep clinging to this basic “pattern” of a similar “ranking” in scores performance as though that in itself constitutes any kind of evidence that the ranking must be due to genetic factors. But it doesn’t.

The persistent ranking pattern may well be due to genetic factors, and I’ve never claimed it can’t be. But if you want to argue that the pattern itself is evidence for the influence of genetic factors, then you need to come up with consistent explanations for the apparent anomalies in the pattern.

Just retreating from the individual anomalies and saying “oh look, here’s another set of data where the general pattern persists!” is not an explanation, and doesn’t increase the credibility of your hypothesis.

Your approach is like that of a young-earth creationist arguing that the layers of the fossil record constitute a “proof case” for Noah’s flood, because they “show” that the small creepy-crawlies were drowned first and then the more complex animals who could climb to higher ground (or swim to the surface). Every time somebody points out a specific set of layers that doesn’t match up with the flood hypothesis, the creationist says “Oh, quit cherry-picking isolated data points, here’s another set of fossils that also supports the flood hypothesis, because it shows the same general pattern where the higher animals get drowned last!”

Yes, we recognize and acknowledge the existence of the pattern that you mention. But the EXISTENCE of the pattern does not intrinsically constitute evidence for YOUR PARTICULAR HYPOTHESIS concerning the CAUSE of the pattern.