Inbreeding depression due to cousin marriage could be a factor?
The only data points you can bring to bear against an overall pattern, repeated all over the world, are tiny isolated subsets.
At issue here is a broad average; not isolated subgroups. But within those subgroups I make the same assertion: if nurturing has been reasonably normalized, any particular subset that outperforms another is genetically advantaged for it, be they black Caribbean women or Bengalis. It is not necessarily the case that a given subset is representative of the average for an entire “race.” If, for instance, I took all the whites who fled the country for the big city, I’d bet dollars to donuts I’d get a higher-IQ subset of whites.
You color your arguments with very carefully-worded statements, spinning where you can. Good on you for being a strong voice for the opposition to genes-as-destiny, and in particular trying to maintain less hysteria than Orcenio. It cannot be an easy task to maintain such optimism when the academic world around us bears so little evidence of success in eliminating the performance gaps.
If I may return to an earlier complaint of yours–that I was changing the bar by not looking at employment in STEM sciences as an evidence point against genes, and that I was being hasty in attributing much of that success to social or cultural pressures (instead of intrinsic performance improvements): I meant to refer you again to MCAT scores. There is an excellent example of the difference. If it were not for a severely preferential and affirmative recruitment of blacks into medicine (an approach which I support wholeheartedly), the profound score disparities would mean we would have barely any black physicians. That we–in medicine, at least–have been able to get black kids into medicine is not a reflection of an improvement in their performance on standardized exams so much as it is a deliberate effort to ignore those scores and make an effort to improve diversity. Therefore the employment-rate improvement in that particular arena is more social and cultural than it is performance-based. That example is rather typical of all our professions and all our industries.
However, a broad average is composed of isolated subgroups. If your hypothesis can’t account for isolated counterexamples, then the fact that your hypothesis is generally consistent with the broad average does not make it convincing.
The trouble with that statement is that you get to define “reasonably normalized” however you feel like it at any given moment, and arbitrarily decide whether or not any given situation meets your “reasonably normalized” standard. This is not science.
There’s no optimism involved. I’m not arguing with you because I’m “optimistic” one way or the other about the influence or non-influence of genetic factors in racial differences. I’m arguing with you because you don’t support your positions convincingly with logic and scientific evidence.
I don’t know whether it is or not, but thank you for at least trying to suggest an explanation consistent with your hypothesis.
The corollary to this is that if , nurturing being reasonably normalised, two groups perform equally then there is no genetic advantage.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report into Tackling Low Educational Achievement found the following:
*FSM = Free School Meals - a measure of deprivation. All bolding is mine.
This seems to show that, having reasonably normalised nurturing, both Africans and Caribbeans are, if anything, genetically advantaged over whites.
This highlights my point about claims of “normalization” being essentially arbitrary:
Emphasis added. This is exactly the sort of arbitrariness I’m talking about. When Chief Pedant wants to explain away, for example, the improved success of blacks in entering medical school, he declares that their “nurturing” was “reasonably normalized”. So the black students’ low scores must reflect their allegedly innately inferior ability.
But when he wants to explain away, for example, the fact that Bangladeshis generate fewer patents annually than Kenyans, he assumes that their “nurturing” WASN’T “reasonably normalized”. So we need to use a different “alternate marker”, such as test scores among immigrants to the UK, that reflects the Bangladeshis’ allegedly innately superior ability.
And whenever you point out any of this special pleading, he falls back on pointing out the existence of the general overall pattern of racial differences, which is not in dispute but which doesn’t do anything to prove his position.
Quite.
Something else I can’t get my head around - Caribbean girls do substantially better than Caribbean boys, even adjusting for deprivation/socio-economic status. Does this mean that Caribbean women have better genes for intelligence than Caribbean men? That implies something really quite extraordinary about heredity.
Alternatively, if we assume for the moment that there is no genetic advantage between a Caribbean girl and her brother, then it implies a very different nurturing environment. But if that nurturing environment explains a gap between Caribbean boys and Caribbean girls, why is it insufficient to explain the gap between Caribbean boys and White or Asian boys?
Unfortunately, the study you cite shows the opposite conclusion, and strongly suggests an inability to perform is innate. It has, of course, been spun to imply what you conclude, but as is often the case, it’s just a spin, and both the patterns of under-performance as well as the failure to eliminate disparities continues year after year; decade after decade.
It’s a study of kids who are already “low-achievers” trying to find out why they are low achievers. It’s not a study of an entire race to find out what proportion of that race achieves what.
If it is the case that “low achievers” perform poorly because they are less enabled for it in the first place, what we’d expect is very little difference once we normalize nurturing when the pool we’ve selected is built around low performance.
Because the genetic influence in how we perform is so strong, selecting out for “low achievers” selects out for a subset of the British population (of all races) which is at the low end of the genetic potential. You cannot infer from this what proportion of a given category has that lower potential, and the study does not pretend to do so. It just says that, when you take the lowest tier, adjusting for nurturing leaves that lower tier roughly equal. Imagine that I took all the basketball wannabes who dropped out and then showed that that they were all about equally lousy at basketball if I adjusted for the quality of their coaching. What have I shown? I’ve shown they are all inherently lousy at basketball and good coaching can only help them so much.
Notice this point in your under cite under Key Points:
“Chinese and Indian pupils are most successful in avoiding low achievement. Afro-Caribbean pupils are the least successful on average, though their results have been improving.”
This is the key pattern in every country in the world. You can take pupils with low ability and improve their performance with better nurturing. You can’t eliminate performance differences among broad race population categories, and you will find the same approximate rank-order of performance be they Chinese in Brazil or Chinese in Britain, competing against the other population groups.
It would be a bad assumption to infer that there shouldn’t be a genetically-based performance difference between girls and boys. In the earlier cite I gave Kimstu you might notice the extraordinarily high “permanent exclusion” rate for the underperforming groups, about twenty times for blacks versus that of Chinese and Indian pupils. (“Exclusion” is a polite way of saying “kicked out of school.”) This rate is higher for boys than girls of all ages, possibly (in my view) related to impulsivity and generally bad behaviour of young males. The idea that boys and girls should somehow perform equally is a bit misguided, I’m afraid. Whether the core issue is intelligence or behavioural differences making education difficult, one thing is clear: males and females differ genetically, and the sum of their performance differences when they have identical nurturing is a clear reflection of those genetic differences.
Kimstu, Kenya has about 2 patents/year; Bangladesh almost none; Taiwan over 2,000. If I were looking at those data points and trying to determine how Bangladeshis performed relative to Kenyans, I’d want to know if there is any evidence how Bangladeshis and Kenyans did in a third or neutral environment as another data point, since they are both obviously lousy at producing US patents, for whatever reason (nurture or nature). If, in another environment the Bangladeshis did well with respect to the Kenyans, I’d discount the home-country patent data as a ranking tool, because I had an alternate data point…
The data you are unable to provide is data that shows any pattern of blacks outperforming asians (in a representative population group) anywhere. And yet you persist in pretending I am cherry-picking data points to show a pattern.
What data point do you want to present to show racial groups are equal?
When do males and females have identical nurturing?
Too easily countered by mongoose agility factor.
Well, of course, your point is well taken: No two individuals have identical nurturing, which is what continually reassures Kimstu that we can’t ever normalize it, and we’ll have to wait until we identify specific genes before we can say with any certainty that something is due to nature and not nurture.
I am not in that camp. If I see, for instance, a particular family with two boys and two girls, and one of the kids excels in school while the other three are mediocre, I am likely to discount nurturing as the most likely explanation without some sort of extenuating explanation for the one kid. When I say “identical” nurturing for the British kids above, I’m saying that the typical nurturing factors advanced–parental education; familiy income; immigrant status; and so on–are the same for both sexes of the same population of immigrants.
But I suspect you know that, and have, like Kimstu, seized on nitpicking to create an argument where your core data–demonstration of equal performance given roughly equal nurturing–is missing, everywhere in the entire world. Still, I don’t deny that one can hide behind the non-identical nurturing argument for a long time, and simply demand nurturing be absolutely identical for group comparisons to be valid. I think it makes a lot of people feel better about the world to just blame external circumstance for our differences, because our altruism wants that to be so.
I did not think that GWAS was a genetic IQ test, if anything, it is trying to identify the “smart” gene. They have been having a hard time finding this because people don’t really have firm grasp on IQ. Its like trying to find the “pretty” gene.
How much mostly? History can be tenacious and even when you pull the kid out of the ghetto the suburbs might still see ghetto when they look at him.
There is little doubt that genetics has SOME effect.
The Flynn effect is real isn’t it and even if it is slowing down doesn’t that at least give lie to all the folks who claimed that the size of the size of the IQ gap was largely genetic? At least SOME significant portion must have been somethign else.
One of the first questions I asked when people started bringing up genetic variance in IQ by race was “and what use is that knowledge to us?” What are we going to do with that information? Noone seems to think that we should use that information to make decisions about individuals so it must be to make determinations about groups. In the end, the only reason I can think of for proving racial disparities in IQ is to justify abolishing affirmative action despite large continuing disparities in income and education.
I am perfectly happy to move away from pure race based affirmative action and more towards a needs based affirmative action but what other reason is there to prove that blacks genetically have lower iq?
Other reasons? Abolition of Head Start, government-funded school lunches, essentially any program designed to compensate for African-Americans’ historical/environmental deprivation in mental development, education and opportunities. There’s a certain kind of RW who hates them all. And if you prove AAs are mentally inferior by heredity, then all such programs are pointless and a waste of tax money, aren’t they?
Also – in The Bell Curve (1994) Murray and Herrnstein made certain policy recommendations based on their theories:
You can never get very good adjustment for “opportunity” You can make best efforts but you never get that close. Putting a black kid in a rich white environment is not really the same thing as putting a white kid in a rich white environment.
I blame rap music.
Well, I guess I meant everythign taht was supposed to level the playing field was the target of the focus on racial IQs. I’m not saying you cane xpect equal result by levelling the playing field but i AM saying taht the playing field is not yet flat and the gap would shrink if it were.
Yeah i read the Bell curve and it sounded like the authors thought it would be a good idea if the government mailed out birth control pills along with food stamps (or better yet make people get birth control shots as they pick up their food stamps and unemployment checks). It made some fairly obvious points about the relationship between education and income, teenage motherhood and socio-economic status, and then correlated IQ to low education and high teen pregnancy, … then it correlated IQ to race. It was almost gratuitous. It also seemed to promote a eugenics program.
My thinking is, race is just a hook here, as it were. Many RWs are hostile to any public action taken to “level the playing field” of society, to enforce or even encourage equality-of-outcome – anything at all in that direction smacks of “socialism” in their view; and programs designed to correct historic racial disparities are merely the most recently highly visible manifestation of that.
Of course, there are other RWs, even today, to whom the idea of a racial hierarchy as such really matters.
Which camp Murray and Herrnstein fall into is open for speculation.