For the group self-described as “black” who already want to be medical scientists or lawyers (or college students, in the case of SATs)–regardless of what their respective cultures might drive as choices for the culture as a whole–there is persistent, consistent and dramatic underperformance on standardized quantitative tests despite the same or better socio-economic background and identical preparation opportunity with identical curriculae for the material. This difference is not seen with other groups–new immigrant asians, for example.
A cultural explanation for this marked average difference (not in matriculants, but in the pool taking the exams, since matriculants are selected as outliers) must go beyond some vague and unsupported notion that black culture simply doesn’t want their brightest minds to be successful in quantitatively-measured pursuits such as the STEM fields.
What is your speculation, exactly–that black college students who thought they wanted to be doctors (or lawyers, for that matter) got swayed by their culture along the way and elected to underperform on entrance exams?
I should address this notion in particular. While the MCAT is one example, along with LSAT, performance differences among various groups exist in every field, including educational exams and Olympic sprinting, or the Boston marathon.
You will not find a field of academia where there are not race-based performance differences for group averages (where measured). Even if the brightest black minds have all been culturally driven into education, it’s the case that in education those brightest minds have significantly underperformed other self-described race/ethnicity groups. See here on Steve Sailer’s site, for example, but feel free to do your own due diligence.
I don’t know why seeing genes as well as environmental factors makes you a bad person. Note that the ‘Jensenist’ view that group differences are explained by both genetic and environmental variation is pretty widely held. Albeit privately, to avoid castigation.
Sorry, I meant Freedman. There is a brief summary here.
I’m just going on what one of the authors wrote a couple of years ago, that they’d approached some research teams and basically been told it wouldn’t happen.
What barriers are preventing europeans or asians from becoming top sprinters? As for motivation - who do you think the most celebrated athlete was in China before the Beijing olympics? (hint - it wasn’t a ping pong player).
I’m not sure why you keep saying your POV enjoys more scientific support. Did you read the Entine article?
That website’s 2nd table says exactly what I have been saying. It shows that people of different ethnic groups, except those who are white, are specializing in different fields. It is most noticeable with Asians. Following the logic, it shows Blacks biased toward law careers within their group and an overall group bias of avoiding these tests and presumably these careers. I think, in a convoluted sort of way, Sailer is making the argument that there is little specialization and that it should be promoted. I would make the argument that it is not necessary and racist anyway.
From what I can tell, you and Chen019 would make the argument that it is some kind of bias in key alleles of performance-related genes that is well-associated with your SIRE term (I hate to disappoint you but you really need to get up-to-date on the findings in quantitative/molecular genetic studies to realize how cartoonish this is; so far Chen019 is in the mid1900s with adoption studies and complicated but utterly-the-same variance partitioning approaches and you are in the 1800s with your group differences). On the one hand, you would make the argument that all these group differences have nothing to do with a lifetime of interaction upon interaction of a person’s skin tone with his or her society at large. Or on the other hand that they have nothing to do with interaction’s between a person’s recognition of their own talent and how their environs are saying to best express that talent.
At the same time, I have never seen you or Chen019 do anything but post that there are group differences and then post data that people hump those who are most accessible or that human subpopulations can evolve to meet the needs of their immediate environment, particularly if that need can be met by selection for alleles of single genes. You have completely failed to take your argument beyond this, even by analogy to other types of group differences. And you would fail if you tried because the data is not supporting your scientific racist world view.
On the other hand, I actually can get the data that shows relationships between culture and people’s individual decisions and that data comes in the form of description, correlation, and various degrees of experimentation. We both know that this kind of information is present so why are you continuing to argue? Why not go mature in your hobby and actually learn something beyond these group differences on placement tests and the burgeoning field of studies demonstrating people hump. Look at all this data that you like so much but try to shed that racist thinking that affects all your analysis, you’ll see that there are alternative explanations for your group differences that explain a lot more than genes ever could.
I’m guessing you didn’t read the Entine article then? I think it really is pretty incredible that you believe environment & motivation explain the inability of these massive populations to produce some spinters who can do 100metres under 10 seconds. I would suggest is reflects a strong ideological position - is that fair?
I knew I shouldn’t waste any more time on your links but I did anyway because I must be bored. That link was a giant summarization of this entire thread. Jesus Christ at least attack the argument from a different angle. You will never see me say that everyone has the exact same genetic complement leading to the only suitable explanation for individual differences being nurture. So quit wasting my time with links to the subject.
What I will not do is extrapolate from the individual differences to the tidy racial differences racists like you want. You want to explain half a second or so in running speed in a specific event or the domination of a particular group in running marathons to genes and I will not accept it until the evidence is as clear as BRCA mutations and breast/ovarian cancer or MECP2 mutations and Rett Syndrome. Until that point sociology, anthropology and social psychology have more evidence supporting the position that nongenetic factors are the reasons for these group differences.
Why don’t you address the fact that there has been nothing but failure in finding alleles of genes that consistently explain differences in affected and unaffected populations in complex disorders with clearly distinguishable phenotypes? People like you want to take every subtle population difference and make it due to a gene, but our absolute best analogous studies that have actually been done do not support this idea. It’s ignorant and unscientific and only really serves to perpetuate your racist beliefs.
In regards to a strong ideological position, nobody would be here writing if it were not the case. That has no bearing on the fact that my opinion, my speculation, which is the only thing you and your links bring to the table, is based on the best available evidence.
There are two possible explanations for average performance differences between any two groups being measured: Nurture and Nature. There is no question Nurture plays a part. I would be a better golfer with better Nurturing. However no amount of Nurturing would make me Tiger Woods.
It’s a straw-man to pretend the only way of finding supporting evidence for Nature as the cause is to identify the exact genes and their mechanism. I have admitted openly many times that gene science is not there yet, although I’ve cautioned those who advance this straw man that gene science likely will get there some day. I caution you to be careful putting your eggs in that basket.
The alternate way is to control for various putative Nurture variables. When we do that, what we find exclusively is evidence that differences persist among SIRE (Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity) groups despite equivalent nurturing. I’ve given you, for example, data which show the often-advanced explanations of socio-economic status or parental education fail when we look at SAT scores.
I do not pretend that the evidence is absolute. I am personally persuaded by it, however, and I am disappointed that instead of counter-evidence, what you and others offer is a labeling that I am a racist. I’m not interested in whether or not I’m a racist. I am interested in whether or not my position is scientifically correct, and what I’d like in place of labels is some sort of data showing that when nurturing influences were properly controlled for, group average differences disappeared.
To date, no such data exist. In fact, just the opposite is true. In every country, every political system, every historic environment and regardless of majority population you will find asians outperforming in STEM fields and blacks outperforming in sprinting. While you may not find that conclusive, I maintain it’s unreasonable to simply level a charge of “racism” as if that alone were sufficient to diminish the view opposite to your own.
In the US in particular, extraordinary efforts on the part of academia have been unable to erase differences. Not money; not programs; not special treatment. Again, while that is not “absolute,” neither is it evidence for your position. It is evidence for my position that the differences are group average differences immutable to normalization of Nurturing variables, and therefore likely to be genetic. And I have already given examples of why SIRE groups cannot be considered to draw upon the same genetic pools. So the notion that the only differences must be phenotypic appearance differences has no support either.
It saddens me that you continue to discuss a debate in psychology from 50 years ago. Your ignorance of even the oldest studies on gene x environment interaction, the exciting field of epigenetics, and your complete inability to actually formulate a reply to what I wrote betrays this.
Look up Frankel, quantitative trait loci and alcoholism in mice someday and you will see your confidence erode. Also, finding the exact genes, the means of their transcription, the mechanisms of the proteins they code for, and the interaction between all these elements and the environment from the nucleus outward are the only means by which to find conclusive evidence for the biological component of any characteristic.
The only way to do this in humans is completely unethical so it hasn’t been done.
I can’t give you ideal data in humans which would of course leave the hole for your belief system to doubt the information. The best I can give you off the top of my head are the highly repeatable studies on MAOA variants and parenting interacting in the development of various aggression-related traits. On the other hand, name a commonly used laboratory species. The classic example is Tryon Maze Bright and Dull rats.
And you will find their culture reasonably maintained as they go from one place to another as well; strongly correlated with who they prefer to hump.
Of course there are phenotypic differences in appearance, behavior, metabolism, etc. Hell, I agree with you that there are phenotypic differences on a number of traits between people who call themselves black and people who call themselves white.
In the US in particular, extraordinary efforts have been made to discourage achievement, education, and social mobility in the black American ethnic group. For hundreds of years. The efforts that you reference are, by comparison, brief and trivial.
On the one hand, you claim that a small infusion of Neandertal genes -not 3%, but possibly as much as 3% - is meaningful. On the other hand, the fact that black Americans are on average 18% European has no significance for you at all - you’re still making broad, disproven generalizations about “blacks”.
Finally, it’s deeply weird that you don’t understand the meaning of nurture. You’re still claiming that roughly equal socio-economic status is the same as equal nurture.
I’m waiting for CP or Chen, or anybody to argue that the Neandertal component is responsible for the advanced Melanesian civilization.
So Chen, if Native Americans are essentially the same as Chinese, why are you so hostile to Mexican Americans - those European - Central Asian hybrids? And why, in spite of those wonderful, cold adapted genetics, do Mexican Americans have so many problems relative to the US white population? For that matter, why do Native Americans proper, in Canada and the US, have so many problems?
This is not correct. With respect to admixture of genetic pools, what I suggest is that the expectation would be that individuals with a mixture of two populations would perform–as a group–somewhere between the two mixed populations. So, for instance, I’d expect American blacks to perform on IQ tests somewhere between Europeans and sub-saharan africans. This is indeed the case. I’d expect Haiti as a country to underperform the Dominican Republic (another example I’ve already given above).
I don’t claim socio-economic status is exactly the same as equal nurture, but within the US as an example, it is roughly equal. That is to say, socioeconomic status gives one equal access to advantageous nurture. It roughly correlates with higher education and higher income. More importantly, though, I argue that no reasonable nurturing variables have been advanced to explain outcome differences in quantitative scores where socio-economic variables have been normalized.
I recognize that for those who insist our differences must somehow be magically limited to genes which control only phenotypic appearances or disease states or sugar metabolism or anything but intelligence will always find some putative nurturing variable. Unfortunately to date the gap remains wide despite all efforts to address any of those variables. This is not only specific to the US and its history. It is a universally observed gap across the entire world, in every political system and every history. So, for example, a plea to the residual effect of slavery breaks down when one sees a performance difference in countries or populations without an enslavement history.
Higher (and lower) academia–the very group who wants to attack those who consider genes the likely explanation for group performance differences–has the most control over eradicating those variables, and yet has never been able to do it. I consider it profoundly significant that the same educators who openly mock anyone who is not a genetic egalitarian are utterly unable to close the gap among the various Self-Identified Race and Ethnic groups despite extensive study about what the putative non-genetic variables might be and countless programs and funding directed at eliminating them.
Seriously? You’re claiming that college educators have the power to tell black American women how and under what conditions they conceive and raise children?
“Our differences” huh? I have absolutely no problem with our differences, meaning individual differences, being, in some part, explicable by genetic variation. This should be uncontroversial at this point and it is what the nature-nurture argument was about.
It’s really a sign of the racist bent that you think of “our differences” in terms of racial differences or subpopulation differences or SIRE differences or whatever way you want to organize humans into groups. Most people interested in the genetic basis for group differences are interested in classifying, for example, aggressive vs. nonaggressive, addicted vs. nonaddicted, republican vs. democrat, but you are obsessed with your own personal catalog of white skin-related vs. black-skin related differences.
A little help with the term ‘phenotype’: Phenotype is a catch-all term for traits including behaviors.To rephrase what you said to make it appropriate you could say “…insist our differences must somehow be magically limited to genes which control only metabolic and appearance phenotypes but not cognitive phenotypes”. I was really only referring to melanocytes earlier.
I mentioned the Freedman study because it shows infant behaviour seems to differ amongst populations independent of cultural factors. Inbred Mm domesticus seems quite confident that group differences are explainable by cultural factors (even the 100 metre sprint!), but I think he’s determined to avoid any evidence to the contrary.
According to Wikipedia, Tiger Woods is “half Asian (one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Thai), one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American, and one-eighth Dutch” - so not an example of race-based anything - and was introduced to golf at age 2. Your example supports nurture and argues against race-based differences. Glad to see you’ve come round.
I haven’t read the page yet so I really shouldn’t comment, but…
36 hours after birth? That’s 36 hours. How is the brain developing during those 36 hours? Did you know that humans and animals show many developmental critical periods that have permanent consequences on behavior.
Also, are you under the impression that during gestation there is nothing going on? That mothering does not occur during the ~6480 hours prior to birth?
edit: nevermind it only took 5 seconds to read and they could not and did not control for maternal effects.
It’s a legitimately tough problem mathematically/scientifically, and even if true it’ll take some time to figure out, much as it takes time to solve any challenging problem.
This isn’t the “looming genetic crisis” addressed in the OP. It’s got nothing to do with the genetically diverse cultural group called black Americans, or the genetically diverse cultural group called white Americans.
Could you please identify the person in this thread or elsewhere who is “So PC” that they can’t support the idea that there is a genetic variation is a contributor to individual differences in intelligence?