# The 10,000 Year Explosion - a book review **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 22, 2011, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355 "2011-04-22T14:17:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 15
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/281 "2011-04-28T16:35:04Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > This is totally irrelevant to the discussion. It is as though you simply post “blacks is dumb” any time someone attempts to point out your error. There was no need to say “It is as though” in this post. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/282 "2011-04-28T16:37:54Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > More than 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools could be labeled as failing under No Child Left Behind > [@Marley23](#): > > Unless something like 80 percent of U.S. public school students are black, I think your cite severely undermines your position. No doubt eight out of ten public schools are dragged down by the presence of “infra-black”, the same way Green Lantern would run into “infra-yellow” when a Silver Age comic-book writer found it convenient to disable his power ring with something less cliched than an actual yellow object. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/283 "2011-04-28T16:38:17Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > Yes I do, for reasons explained in The 10,000 Year Explosion. And yet, your reliance on your interpretation of that book is totally not substantitated by anything in that book. You have taken the claim that humanity has begun to evolve more quickly, looked at the supposed example of one small population evolving in intelligence, and extrapolated that a different extremely large population has failed to evolve quickly, even though the large groups that you pretend have evolved are not affected by the conditions to which you attribute them. You look at the fact that some white societies have developed small pockets of urban development over the last 8,000 years and pretend that those would account for some purported leap in development for entire groups of supposed “races,” without any evidence or even a clear mechanism as to how that might work. It is one thing to claim that specific conditions might have aided the Ashkenazim to develop heightened intelligence in a limited population. It is quite another to pretend that the pastoralists and agrarians of all Europe and the Middle East developed because a few people hung out together in Sumer, Memphis, Athens, or Rome while the vast majority of them were still out grubbing on the land until the nineteenth century. You simply pick the things you want to see and ignore any genuine information. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/284 "2011-04-28T17:49:32Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I’m still waiting. NCLB was not created to address racial disparities, so _if_ the have not narrowed or changed (you haven’t posted any data, of course), that doesn’t prove those differences are innate and impossible to address. You also haven’t addressed any confounding factors like poverty. Actually, closing the racial achievement gap was an explicit purpose. Bush, 2001. [No child left behind](http://www.cew.wisc.edu/ewl/resource/nochildleftbehind.pdf) > [@](#): > > The federal government can, and must, help close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their peers. > > To meet that goal, the federal investment in Title I must be spent more effectively and with greater accountability. This proposal changes current law by requiring that states, school districts and schools receiving Title I funds ensure that students in all student groups meet high standards. Schools must have clear, measurable goals focused on basic skills and essential knowledge. Requiring annual state assessments in math and reading in grades 3-8 will ensure that the goals are being met for every child, every year. Annual testing in every grade gives teachers, parents and policymakers the information they need to ensure that children will reach academic success. Refer to Hunt and Carlson’s discussion of this in Hunt and Carlson, 2007. Considerations relating to the study of group differences in intelligence ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/285 "2011-04-28T17:56:56Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > Actually, closing the racial achievement gap was an explicit purpose. Again, wrong. One of the goals is improving results for “disadvantaged” students, but disadvantaged" is a much broader category. It probably includes many black students, but I doubt it includes all of them. No mention is made of closing gapes between races or other groups. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/286 "2011-04-28T18:06:31Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Again, wrong. One of the goals is improving results for “disadvantaged” students, but disadvantaged" is a much broader category. It probably includes many black students, but I doubt it includes all of them. No mention is made of closing gapes between races or other groups. Do you know what title I refers to? I guess not. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/287 "2011-04-28T18:10:31Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > Do you know what title I refers to? I guess not. I think you’re going to want to look that one up. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/288 "2011-04-28T18:20:04Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I think you’re going to want to look that one up. [Title I — Improving The Academic Achievement Of The Disadvantaged](http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html) > [@](#): > > (2) meeting the educational needs of low-achieving children in our Nation’s highest-poverty schools, limited English proficient children, migratory children, children with disabilities, Indian children, neglected or delinquent children, and young children in need of reading assistance; > > (3) **closing the achievement gap between high- and low-performing children, especially the achievement gaps between minority and nonminority students** , and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers; … Are you contending that “Blacks” are not a “minority group.” Do I have to cite a passage showing that they represent one. Do I have to walk you through this? ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/289 "2011-04-28T18:36:36Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > Just so we are all clear, Chuck said: “Actually, closing the racial achievement gap was an explicit purpose.” Chuck then quoted Bush (2001): > [@](#): > > To meet that goal, the federal investment in Title I must be spent more effectively and with greater accountability. This proposal changes current law by requiring that states, school districts and schools receiving Title I funds ensure that students in all student groups meet high standards. And the Department of education: > [@](#): > > Title I — Improving The Academic Achievement Of The Disadvantaged > (3) closing the achievement gap between high- and low-performing children, especially the achievement gaps between minority and nonminority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers; Syllogism: 1. An explicit goal of NCLB was to “close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students” 2. disadvantaged students are defined in context to Title 1. 3. Title 1 deals with “closing the achievement gap between …minority and nonminority students” 4. Blacks are a racial minority group ergo: one purpose of NCLB was to close the racial achievement gap between Blacks and Whites. (I guess we could debate whether this was an explicit purpose or not - legally, it was a clear purpose.) ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/290 "2011-04-28T18:38:32Z")
I think you just proved that minority groups (not just black students) are a subgroup within the larger “disadvantaged” group, which is the same thing I said a couple of posts ago. NCLB was not designed to address racial achievement gaps. It did change some of the rules regarding Title I funds, and Title I funding is intended to address students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Several disadvantaged groups are listed right there in your quote, and the racial achievement gap is one of the issues that is singled out. Again, the failures of NCLB do not establish anything other than the failures of NCLB. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/291 "2011-04-28T18:41:28Z")
Well… that and that letting politicians design educational policy sans a lit review is a somewhat awful way to go about managing our nation’s educational policy. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/292 "2011-04-28T18:46:28Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > Are you contending that “Blacks” are not a “minority group.” Do I have to cite a passage showing that they represent one. Do I have to walk you through this? What is the group of chinese that are treated like “minorities” in China? The southerners or the northerners? I bet you know. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/293 "2011-04-28T18:57:44Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I think you just proved that minority groups (not just black students) are a subgroup within the larger “disadvantaged” group, which is the same thing I said a couple of posts ago. NCLB was not designed to address racial achievement gaps. It did change some of the rules regarding Title I funds, and Title I funding is intended to address students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Several disadvantaged groups are listed right there in your quote, and the racial achievement gap is one of the issues that is singled out. > > Again, the failures of NCLB do not establish anything other than the failures of NCLB. Marley, I agree with your latter point. As for the former, I’m not sure what you mean by “NCLB was not designed to address racial achievement gaps.” Let’s just agree that closing the racial achievement gap was one specific goal. That is, NCLB was not just about closing a generic disadvantaged gap irrespective of race as you implied, saying: " Again, wrong. One of the goals is improving results for “disadvantaged” students, but disadvantaged" is a much broader category. It probably includes many black students, but I doubt it includes all of them. No mention is made of closing gapes between races or other groups." ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/294 "2011-04-28T19:24:21Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > What is the group of chinese that are treated like “minorities” in China? The southerners or the northerners? I bet you know. Why would you bet I know? (I do because I lived there for a bit.) In China, the Han are the dominant group. [They are closely related](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790583/). The North Han-South Han Fst is around .003, which is roughly equivalent to the West Europe, East Europe Fst. (Compare this to a Han-Yoruba Fst of .19) When people talk about north and south Chinese being genetically different, presumably they are not talking about north and south Han. There are [numerous](http://www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/minority/minority.html) ethnic minority groups and there are various affirmative action like programs for them. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/295 "2011-04-28T19:50:56Z")
> [@gcochran](#): > > . Greg, Kind of off topic, but… I’ve been battling Fst fallacies of late. One is that the “low” Fst values between races preclude significant heritable phenotypic differences between members of those races. Barbujani and Colonn (2010) recently trotted this out: “The remaining 85% represents the average difference between members of the same population. One way to envisage these figures is to say that the expected genetic difference between unrelated individuals from distant continents exceeds by 15% the expected difference between members of the same community. (Barbujani and Colonn, 2010. Human genome diversity: frequently asked questions)” IF we partitioned out intraindividual variance (taking into account the lack of variance in MtDNA), what would be the actual % of the “average difference between members of the same population” relative to the total variance? ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2011, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/296 "2011-04-28T20:22:23Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > You seem to be getting off topic. In fact you’re now trying to use emotional rhetoric like “superior” and “inferior”. I’m referring to statistical differences. You know, empirical stuff. I’ve given you an example of how those differences can arise. Chen, Did you catch this last paper I posted? Beaver and Wright, 2011. School-level genetic variation predicts school-level verbal IQ scores: Results from a sample of American middle and high schools Aggregated genetic differences predict school level IQ. A previous paper showed that individual differences in the same genes predict individual differences in IQ. Both papers showed an association between racial differences in IQ and the polymorphisms in question. Also, Volkmar Weiss has a paper out (Weiss, 2011. Racial Differences and the Probability of C2orf16 rs191912 to be the Major Gene Locus of General Cognitive Ability). I’ll try to get a copy of it for you when I can. ---
**Author:** ![PBear42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/297 "2011-04-29T05:30:36Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > I thought it did address math & language/verbal abilities? p 12-13. Yes, they made the claim, but it’s just hand-waving. As I said, plausible, but doesn’t have to be true. Especially the verbal part. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to continue the discussion. I’m just going to mention a few points that occurred to me through the day. Feel free to comment and I’ll try to check back to see what you say, but don’t think I’ll be able to post any more responses. Also, I don’t have time to read the article again for citations and quotes, so feel free to correct me if I get anything wrong. One of the things that bugs me about the article is how it dispatches the competing hypotheses. For example, many have speculated that the Ashkanazi tradition of great respect for book learning and Torah reading may have been why they got smarter. IIRC, this is dismissed with the argument that only 1% of the Ashkanazi became rabbis. Except vocational fitness has nothing to do with it. (That’s _their_ theory.) This was a broad cultural bias. A smart kid was considered a good prospective son-in-law. Talk about reproductive advantage! Notably, this was an advantage available to boys of all classes, not just the wealthy (though, of course, having both was the strongest suit). Or take persecution. Bear in mind the scale of the problem. One source I saw recently estimated that, if the Jews alive in Roman times had grown at the same rate as their contemporaries, there would be 300 million of them alive today, rather than 13 million. Now that’s a selection pressure. It’s perfectly plausible that intelligence would be a reproductive advantage. Their response, IIRC, is that gypsies were discriminated against but they didn’t get smart. First, were they systematically discriminated against on the same scale? Not as I recall. But, more to the point, since when do we expect all populations to respond to a selection pressure in the same way? Gypsies could have used other strategies, which may or may not have had heritable consequences. IMHO, all three theories are plausible. And there are others. Any of them could be true. Or the correct answer might be a combination of two or more. We don’t have enough data to answer the question and probably never will. Forcing an answer when there isn’t enough data is not good science. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2011, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/298 "2011-04-29T22:04:04Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > Why would you bet I know? (I do because I lived there for a bit.) In China, the Han are the dominant group. [They are closely related](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790583/). The North Han-South Han Fst is around .003, which is roughly equivalent to the West Europe, East Europe Fst. (Compare this to a Han-Yoruba Fst of .19) When people talk about north and south Chinese being genetically different, presumably they are not talking about north and south Han. There are [numerous](http://www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/minority/minority.html) ethnic minority groups and there are various affirmative action like programs for them. It is not what I have heared from Chinese themselves. And yes, Chinese could look very different between them, but theirs mythology forces them to say they are all “Han”. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2011, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/299 "2011-04-30T19:24:37Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > It is not what I have heared from Chinese themselves. And yes, Chinese could look very different between them, but theirs mythology forces them to say they are all “Han”. :smack: Many Chinese (8%) are not Han. As to whether or not Han are closely related, let’s defer to the geneticists. [Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies](http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(09)00470-4) > [@](#): > > Our results showed that the Han Chinese population is intricately substructured, with the main observed clusters corresponding roughly to northern Han, central Han, and southern Han. However, simulated case-control studies showed that genetic differentiation among these clusters, although very small (FST = 0.0002 ∼0.0009), is sufficient to lead to an inflated rate of false-positive results even when the sample size is moderate. … Whatever the case, this isn’t particularly relevant to the topic. So why are you riding it? ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2011, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/300 "2011-04-30T20:37:30Z")
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