And what happened to the UNIVERSALLY RECOGNIZED racial hierarchy[sup]TM[/sup]? I am very disappointed KLR 650 hasn’t posted it yet! Because I always thought different groups felt they themselves were superior. Certainly the Chinese of the Middle Kingdom felt that way. And so did the Native Americans who felt men’s skin color came from a god’s oven, with black men being overcooked, white people undercooked, and they themselves were “just right.” I had no idea all these groups had thrown their beliefs aside to accept one order of things, and I’m dying to know what it is!
I think the point here is that to even be a doctor or lawyer you probably need an IQ of 115+ in the first place. Basically, the ability to quickly process information becomes more important the more complex the task. This is why the military continues to use psychometric tests because they do a good job of predicting what people will be able to do.
For a useful summary I’d recommend Linda Gottfredson’s paper Why g matters: the complexity of ordinary life. Page 117 sets out the averages across different job types & their complexity.
There is certainly evidence that groups differ in terms of average brain shape/size etc. In terms of Aborigines while they underperform generally on psychometric tests, they do notably well on experiments measuring memory for spatial location of objects. This is the case even in those living in urban environments. A possible explanation for the aboriginal advantage in spatial memory is provided by (Klekamp et al.,1994) who report that Australian aboriginals have a larger visual cortex than Caucasians.
Ed Miller, an Economics Prof provided a paper on this in the 90’s. ‘The Evolution of Australian and Amerindian Intelligence’.
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/miller.html
What seems more likely is that some groups have experienced recent selection leading to average group differences rather than a rigid hierarchy.
Quantitatively that’s right, but qualitatively it’s a similar process (see 1st chaper of ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’).
The dog breeding example is interesting because in selecting for behavioral traits, the Siberian experiments on foxes found resulting changes in superficial aspects like head shape, coat coloring, ear shape, etc. This suggests there isn’t necessarily a clear separation between selection on genes affecting superficial traits and those affecting cognition.
False.
Kevin MacDonaldstill has his job.
So does Michael Levin.
It’s not that the idea may not be broached, it’s that no one’s going to accept your claims without proof. Causation, not correlation heavily influenced by environment.
There is “no looming crisis in genetics”. Though no one can predict the future, the greatest likelihood is that there will never be such a “crisis”. Indeed, advances in genetics will probably create dilemmas for industrial societies, but they won’t have anything to do with American society’s notions about race.
http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2006/12/the_iq_genes_th.html#more
Someone claimed that political correctness was keeping this kind of research from being done. False.
The research was done. It yielded nothing for the academic racialists. It’s been more than three years. Still no proof. Face it. The proof is not coming. Quit waiting in the pumpkin patch.
And that’s hardly surprising: nobody’s going to argue that certain skills and types of intelligence are necessary for doctors and I think just about everyone would agree doctors are going to be more intelligent than average, on the whole. But no, that was not KLR 650’s point, and he’s said so himself.
The Australian aborigine argument is a cute little strawman. From an evolutionary point of view, survival as hunter gatherers in the Australian outback had to demand high IQ. It’s a hell of a lot tougher than growing wheat in Mediterranean Europe. Of course, in order to make the experiment really fair, we’ll need a large group of European volunteers who’ll have the same things done to them as the aborigines. I’ll do a web petition. I fully expect KLR 650 to be the first to register!
What’s weird about you pseudo-scientific racialists is that you can’t keep your arguments straight. Aborigines are dumb, you say, because they didn’t have agriculture, and life was too hard to develop advanced thinking skills. Sub Saharan Africans, you say, are dumb because they did have agriculture, and life was too easy. Come on, KLR650. Admit that you’re trafficking in fairy tales. “How the Elephant Got His Trunk.”
More fun stuff.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200608/s1704016.htm
http://www.prometheism.net/euvolution/blackwhite.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2784758
Chen019 and KRL650, the research you draw on is full of basic errors of fact and methodology. Get some real proof for your claims (good luck with that) and get back to us. Til then, get a hobby.
Well here’s one hierarchy for you:
STEM discipline success (over-representation per population): East and South Asians
Economic success within pursuits requiring higher education: Whites and Asians
Athletic success for power-speed sports such as sprinting: West Africans
Athletic success for long-distance running: Kalenjin
When we argue these nature v nurture threads we seem to visit the same two sticking points over and over:
- Can populations be grouped discretely enough to make any sense? (Notice the broad and haphzard groupings above, e.g.) and
- Is nurture normalizable?
I don’t think your tack of pretending there is no typical hierarchy is likely to pan out as an effective argument. In which culture/society/nation would you want to argue that sub-Saharan African descendants are more economically successful than Asians and Whites? In which culture/society/nation would you want to argue that whites are disproportionately over-represented in basketball or sprinting?
There are lots of arguments about “why” (nurturing) and lots of arguments about grouping (hey; that group has thalassemia and this one has sickle cell; they gotta basically be considered similar gene pools to each other) but if the UNIVERSALLY RECOGNIZED racial hierarchy[sup]TM[/sup] were not there, there would be no debate in the first place. We’d find blacks excelling at STEM pursuits in Sweden, whites being well-represented in the NBA, and Asians on the economic bottom in Uganda (before Mr Amin kicked them out).
Without the “universally recognized hierarchy” we could simply look around and see a disparity in the US completely reversed in a different nation. That would bolster substantially the argument that all differences at a population/group/race level are due to nurture and not nature.
The evidence so earnestly sought here that there are immutable population group average differences is precisely in the persistence of that hierarchy despite all efforts to change it (see my LSAT and MCAT comments, above).
Two other minor comments:
This, by Belowjob2.0:
“From an evolutionary point of view, survival as hunter gatherers in the Australian outback had to demand high IQ.”
Survival is unrelated to intelligence; cockroaches have kicked our ass. Culture follows intelligence; if the best your group can invent is hunting-gathering, that’s what you are stuck with.
One of the commonest misperceptions when comparing groups is that a given group must be genetically related within itself for any group differences to be genetic. The argument is then made that, because there is no mechanism to prove that the putative group is genetically more tightly related than the next group, all further comparison is meaningless. This position is incorrect. Sickle cell is genetic and is more prevalent within blacks regardless of whether or not all blacks are otherwise a reasonably-construed genetic family. Tallness is genetic and the group of all tall people are tall for genetic reasonas whether or not they are otherwise in a group. It is not necessary to show that blacks and whites or any other races are a genetic cohort (I’d argue they are, but it’s irrelevant). When comparing average differences and ascribing them to nature instead of nurture what’s necessary is to show that nurturing was normalized. And that, of course, is ultimately the crux of the real debate to date.
The looming crisis in genetics is that elaboration of the genome will supplant the need to prove normalization. It will clarify which genes are responsible for which phenotypic expressions and eliminate the need to absolutely normalize nurture.
“Race,” or “breed” is defined as “a relatively distinct gene pool.” Usually we use the word “race” because we reserve “breed” for animals, and we like to think of ourselves as different from animals.
What we are discussing here is simply Mendelian inheritance.
Man is not unique among the species in being exempt from Mendelian inheritance. And the brain is an organ like any other, and subject to Mendel’s laws.
The lack of an airtight definition for human sub-groups does not suspend Mendel’s laws. The attack upon definitions of “race” is precious, and jejune.
Advocates of racial equivalence begin with an a priori assumption: that there cannot be racial non-equivalence. Their motives are historical, political, moral and commendable. Since they cannot adduce any evidence to support their theory, they resort to attacks upon definitions. “Race cannot be defined.” “IQ cannot be defined.” Or they resort to attacks ad hominem. “He is a racist.”
Genetic drift in humans is most certainly parallel to breeding in dogs. What we call genetic drift is accidental, and long-term, and produces results exactly similar to intentional breeding.
I realize full well that discussions of race are fraught with … baggage, and the memory of, and potential for, evil. For what it’s worth, I personally advocate individual equality before the law, and where possible, a color-blind “level playing field.”
Now then. It isn’t possible, evidently, to breed dogs (or any other advanced mammals) for gross physiological characteristics like size, conformation, hair length and coloration, etc., without also achieving differences in IQ and behavior. Virtually all Golden Retrievers are intelligent, sociable and trainable. Virtually all Dachshunds are much less so.
It simply isn’t possible to maintain the argument that differences in Golden Retriever and Dachshund behavior are due to social pressures. Nor is it possible to maintain the argument that “Dachshund” is merely a “social construct.”
No matter how unpalatable the fact may be, human beings are susceptible to Mendelian laws, and by accidents of historical migration we have bred ourselves into different races, having different physiological and behavioral characteristics.
If we haven’t bred ourselves into “races,” then please plug in a noun more to your liking. The biological facts remain. If dogs don’t have “IQ” then please plug in … you get the picture.
Incidentally, the argument that genetic drift in humans is not comparable to breeding in dogs, because humans don’t display differences as extreme as Chihuahua to St. Bernard, is a lame argument, and a tacit admission that genetic drift is indeed a species of breeding, albeit less focused.
Finally, it’s worth paying attention to the behavioral characteristics of races, even if this evidence is circumstantial and subject to many variables. AT SOME POINT, we should expect to see some evidence, any evidence, of behavioral racial equivalence. Most especially because we have gone to great lengths and spent a great deal of money attempting to find, or to produce, that result. But no such evidence exists. On the contrary, the behavioral differences we do see tend to be stable across many environments and societies. For example, Ashkenazi Jews tend to be very “successful” (plug in your own “precise” adjective) anywhere in the world, and in any time-frame, whether centuries ago, or today.
Again, the motives in the racial equivalence camp are commendable and moral. But also occasionally social, and financial. Kevin MacDonald and Michael Levin aside, try publishing an article on the heritability of human IQ and behavior, and see how your social sciences career, and your social life, prosper.
You really need to walk away from the sickle cell issue. Whites have sickle cell in the Mediterranean regions where malaria is endemic at about the same rates that blacks have it in similarly affected regions. Where malaria is high, there is a lot of sickle cell and where it is moderate there is less sickle cell. Sticking to just sickle cell, we still see it permeating Corsica, Malta, Sicily, Southern Italy, Greece, and Western Turkey. There just happens to have been a shift in mutation between Turkey and Lebanon that meant that the illness extending across Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and on toward India had a slightly different make up than the one that extends from Sothern Europe down through Africa. In fact, when discussing the distribution rather than the specifics of the disease, groups such as the World Health Organization lump the thalassaemias in with sickle cell. If Malaria was more prevalent in Northern Italy, France, the Slavic region, and up into the Germanic lands, then sickle cell would probably be more prevalent there, too, just as it is pretty much absent from the malaria-free regions of Africa such as South Africa.
If you want to make a case for the disparities among populations, sickle cell is simply a really bad choice as an exemplar.
Tom,
Actually, I’d argue that Sickle Cell Disease (homozygous HbS) is a perfect exemplar for the point I am trying to make…I think you are assuming that I am using SCD to make a case that all blacks must be closely related–or, at least, more closely related to one another than to whites, say. That’s not the point I was trying to make.
In the US, SCD is seen mostly in the black population, with an incidence among (self-described) blacks of something like 1 in 500 births and an incidence in the overall population of something like 1 in 5000 births. (These are from memory, so please feel free to correct them).
The point I am trying to make is that a given population group–even one where there is no specific evidence that they are otherwise more closely genetically related than a comparison group–can have a differing average phenotypic outcome that is entirely dependent on genes, and there is no requirement to prove that the group is otherwise genetically related.
I am making the case that it’s a false premise that we must show racial groups are more closely related within their group than they are to other groups before we can suggest that there could be an average difference which is genetically based.
Let us accept, for the moment, the premise that blacks are no more related to one another than they are to whites or asians. It is nevertheless the case that the group known as “self-described blacks” have a much greater incidence of a genetically-based trait than do whites and asians. No amount of argumentation that race is purely cultural or social changes that.
The difference between two groups for any given trait is caused by the difference in prevalence for genes governing that particular trait. Period. A variety of factors, including but not limited to common ancestry, may account for those prevalence differences.
Chief Pedant,
You state that sickle cell is more prevalent among “self-described” blacks. What’s the purpose of the phrase “self-described?”
Isn’t the group “self-described blacks” virtually identical with the group “blacks,” as described by anyone else?
How would you describe the correlation between “self-described blacks” and sickle cell. For example, why is it incorrect to say that this is a racial trait?
Don’t self-described blacks constitute a relatively discreet gene pool, in that inter-marriage with other groups is relatively uncommon?
Wouldn’t the same be true of say, Ashkenazi Jews and Australian aborigines?
I’m a layman in search of some basic education. What’s wrong with the category “relatively discreet gene pool,” as it applies to heritable traits?
Thanks,
KLR 650
There’s no real objective definition, as it is an arbitrary category.
No, different people have different definitions.
No; IIRC, American blacks have on average about a third white ancestry.
Nothing - but you keep trying to apply it to race.
[bolding mine]
I can only assume you dashed this off without thinking it through.
Der Trihs,
I’m not sure why you say that different people have different ideas as to who is, or is not black. Or white. As I said in my post, there is “virtually” complete agreement on this score, meaning, shall we say, 80% agreement among respondents? Ninety percent or more? Probably the figures would be much higher. I think your statement “different people have different definitions” is a quibble, and refers to a very small margin of people. I suspect you have reasons for wanting the notion of “race” to be as fluid and imprecise as possible.
I’m aware that African Americans have about a third white ancestry. This doesn’t mean that current African American marriages are 33% mixed, black and white. The African American gene pool, having about a third white ancestry, is relatively stable.
You said that nothing is wrong with the idea of “a relatively discreet gene pool.” O-K. Now then, do we have to use all of those eight syllables to reference that category? Why not reduce the phrase to a one syllable word. What’s wrong with “race” as a definition of the eight syllable idea?
In fact, a definition of race is “a population partially isolated reproductively from other populations.” Note the word “partially.” In other words, a relatively discreet gene pool.
Sheesh. What’s the PROB-lem???
P.S. Just read your recent post about how people from different groups “given the same opportunity, perform equivalently.” Sorry, I didn’t realize you’re a light-weight.
It’s called “being right”. Race is arbitrary.
:rolleyes: The stability of a gene pool, by nature has to be considered over a period of many generations. Not just the moment. And the fact that so many have white ancestry demonstrates that the pool isn’t stable. As do the statistics that Belowjob2.0 posted.
Because race is no such thing. “Relatively discrete gene pools” by their nature are much smaller, and more discrete.
That it’s wrong. Race is just an arbitrary distinction, having little to do with reproductive isolation.
In other words, I’m right, you can’t show otherwise so you’ll call me a “lightweight” without actually trying to prove me wrong.
(by CP) :
“Survival is unrelated to intelligence; cockroaches have kicked our ass. Culture follows intelligence; if the best your group can invent is hunting-gathering, that’s what you are stuck with.”
Thanks for defending me, but no; I meant it as it stands.
The notion that survival is necessarily an indicator of intelligence is wrong, and as my proof case, I give you the cockroach which has survived as a species in various environments for longer than I’ve been alive. I was taking issue with your contention that, because aboriginees survived in the harsh climate of Australia, it’s an indicator of intelligence.
(by Belowjob2.0) :
“From an evolutionary point of view, survival as hunter gatherers in the Australian outback had to demand high IQ.”
If you inferred that I was in any way comparing the two groups to one another, please accept my apology.
Dear Der,
Sir, I’m calling you a light-weight because of your patently false assertion that people from different groups perform equally “given the same opportunity.” Where did you get this information? Disney? Oprah? Hallmark Cards?
As far as I can tell from your post, there really is no difference between “race” and “relatively stable gene pool,” given that the category has blurred edges. The absence of clean, sharp edges does not mean that categories don’t exist.
The colors in the rainbow blend imperceptibly one to the next. But you’d still better stop when the light turns “red.” And everybody knows what “red” is. Wait, wait! Some people are color-blind! Therefore “red” doesn’t exist! I’m a phenomenologist! I’m an intellectual! I’m a … Sociologist!!!
-------
But I’d still like to hear from some of the heavy-weights on the subject. That is, the subject of why the word “race” cannot mean what it does mean, namely: a relatively discreet gene pool.
Regards,
KLR 650
P.S. FYI the heavyweights are: Chief Pedant, and one or two others, I forget. Let’s keep a sense of humor, shall we?
Actually, if it weren’t for some degree of reproductive isolation you wouldn’t get such distinct clusters. Note that when you say someone is white you basically mean that their ancestors over the past 30,000 or so years came from Europe.
Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease
Risch et al Genome Biol. 2002; 3(7): comment2007.1–comment2007.12.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=139378
And, while it is a social construction (like adolescence, age etc) it also has a biological basis:
Tang et al ‘Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies’ Am J Hum Genet. 2005 February; 76(2): 268–275.[/