What is racism?

[MaxTheVool]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

The first people who claimed that they had psychokinesis didn’t face especially high hurdles. But when they got tested, it turned out that every one of them was either a fraud or deluded. Every single one. With every debunking of new theories of psychokinesis, with every new claimant who turns out to be a fraud or to be deluded, the hurdle rises for future claimants.

I think your analogy is grievously flawed.

The problem is that there IS evidence of race-related inferiority, and everyone agrees that there is such evidence. Blacks have lower average SAT scores than whites. There, there’s some evidence. This whole debate is about what the explanation for that evidence is.

For your analogy to make sense, we would have to fairly frequently see pencils hovering in midair, and then there would be two camps explaining the pencil-hovering: one camp claiming that some people have psychokinesis, and one camp claiming that the very atomic structure of pencils somehow interacts with the earth’s magnetic field setting up little mini-pencil-levitation-vortices.

Now, it may be the case, in that very strained hypothetical, that for 200 years people in the people-have-PK camp have put forth scientific theories to explain the mechanism of that PK, and it may be that every one for 200 years has been found faulty. But if the mini-pencil-levitation-vortices theory has also not been conclusively proven, and we continue to see pencils floating around, it is far from unreasonable for people to continue to posit new, more sophisticated, people-have-PK theories.

(It also may be the case that someone has done research which really conclusively proves not just that environmental factors COULD contribute to and explain differences in testing outcome between races, but that they DO in fact completely explain those differences. And someone mentioned something a few posts ago about first generation immigrants which was at least a step in that direction. However, I feel like a really conclusive study in that direction would have gotten an absolute shit-ton of publicity, for obvious reasons, so I will assume that there hasn’t been one.)
Another analogy you use is to analogize skin color to the color of shopping bags. Again, I think this falls down. The claim that various people (and believe me, it makes me feel weird to be arguing on something even resembling the same side as Magellan and Shodan) have been making is that it seems to be fairly well accepted that there are SOME inheritable characteristics that have SOME correlation with skin-color-and-racial-identity, with distance running and sprinting being two of them. Which certainly isn’t to say that every black person is a faster runner than every white person, but one can certainly imagine some bizarre skinnerian box scheme in which we raised 10,000 white American babies and 10,000 black American babies completely identically with no exposure to any racial stereotypes whatsoever, and searched through each group to find the fastest sprinters and marathoners, and then had a race, and I think that a fair number of people who are not generally thought of as racist would say that there are better-than-even odds that the fastest black sprinter and marathoner would be faster than the fastest white sprinter and marathoner. Which is not allowed by your color-of-shopping-bag analogy. And, and this is the key point, if it’s “ok” for this sprinting-and-marathoning thing to be true, why is it possible for there to be a disparity in whatever genes and inheritable traits lead one to be a fast sprinter or marathoner, but not in the genes or inheritable traits relating to “important” things?
I CERTAINLY do not claim to know or be able to demonstrate any race/intelligence correlations, but I think that the logic used to argue against them is often flawed. Including in this thread.

[iiandyiiii]

@Chief_Pedant

You are missing (deliberately?) the other half of the argument, which is that it is exceedingly unlikely mother nature would only fiddle with “superficial” genes.

Which I have not disputed.

Sure; half of the “genes” argument is that no amount of normalization for nurturing erases the very consistent pattern differences for skillsets. We see “blacks” from every political system, and every cultural history excelling in similar skillsets to “blacks” elsewhere. We see asians showing up as the math whizzes even when they had crappy starts to life–again; across every political and cultural system. And when we normalize plausible variables such as income or parental education for SIRE groups in the US, we see marked persistence of various test-taking skillset patterns. So marked that whites from poor and undereducated families outscore blacks from wealthy and educated families on skillsets like SAT -taking, or MCATs, or LSATs, or whatever. (And that pattern persists so that, for example, blacks substantially underscore whites and asians on specialty exams or post-med school exams, despite having had exactly similar exposure to exactly similar training for the prior 4-8 years).

This not only substantially overstates the case (a few decades of decent testing is not particularly convincing) but ignores the many instances in which these patterns do not show up, highlighted by the Frank Sweet article I linked to (see also Ron Unz).

But you are absolutely wrong on the no genes front. You see, any student of human migration, evolution and population genetics concedes that the average gene frequency–the average gene pool–varies among the SIRE groups. Even when folks self-identify, the history of the human race is such that different average gene pools have been created by various splits along the way from 200kya. And where new gene variants have arisen, many are apparently so advantageous that they achieve high enough penetration in descendant groups to create frequencies high enough to be seen as gene clustering for those new genes. It is just such penetration, frequency and clustering that creates physical appearance differences–on average–which drive SIRE grouping in the first place…

None of this disputes anything I’ve said.

So the second part of the argument for genes you are missing is that the most plausible position is that nature drives all genes equally blindly. If that is the case–and surely it is–it is a naive, creationist, faith-based position that genes probably are not the driver for outcome differences that cannot be normalized by nurturing. (I say, “creationist” because they believe in such minimal evolution and a 5kya start, all around mesopotamia)

No, and more straw man crap. For one thing, it’s extremely naive to assume that the outcome differences cannot be normalized by nurturing, just because they haven’t been yet in a paltry few decades of weak effort. This world is far from equal. Considering the different disparate outcomes of the past, it seems ridiculous to assume that outcomes differences now are special. You always ignore this part- why are disparate outcomes now perfect matches for genetic reality?

Egalitarians have to cling to increasingly contorted and extreme “cultural” sorts of totally unsupported putative variables to explain away black sprinting dominance or asian test-taking skillsets. The persistence of pattern in quantified huge studies for such things as test-taking skillset by opportunity level is quite remarkable. The egalitarian earnestness may be beyond question, but it is their science that is lacking. However well-intentioned is their blindspot that drives huffing about over there being “no such thing as a genetically-defined race” or some other irrelevant strawman, it doesn’t make the proposition that mother nature is fair a sound one.

You are truly the Emperor of all Straw-men. Long may you reign. This “persistence” is only remarkable if you want it to be… it’s not that surprising to those of us who understand the unfortunate history and unequal nature of our world. A few decades after weak efforts to correct it does not sound particularly persistent to me.

Because of the highly disparate nature of opportunities to succeed, in this country and others, disparate outcomes are not surprising in the least. Every time someone studies opportunity equality- such as teacher expectations, or resumes with commonly black vs commonly white names, the results are pretty sharp- being black presents unique challenges, regardless of socio-economic background. Many of these have not been quantified. This general (and admittedly vague) “black challenges” hypothesis actually fits the facts, unlike your genetic hypothesis (for reasons, mostly attributed to Sweet, already discussed). Do you really think that when finances and parental education is normalized, everything is just hunky-dory and equal? You can’t possibly be that naive.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@MaxTheVool

I think your analogy is grievously flawed.

The problem is that there IS evidence of race-related inferiority, and everyone agrees that there is such evidence. Blacks have lower average SAT scores than whites. There, there’s some evidence. This whole debate is about what the explanation for that evidence is.

For your analogy to make sense, we would have to fairly frequently see pencils hovering in midair, and then there would be two camps explaining the pencil-hovering: one camp claiming that some people have psychokinesis, and one camp claiming that the very atomic structure of pencils somehow interacts with the earth’s magnetic field setting up little mini-pencil-levitation-vortices.

If you want to add that to the analogy, it works quite well. I often see things hovering in midair, and rather than go with the simplest explanation–PK–I go with a wealth of other explanations. Helicopters do it via propeller action; helium balloons do it because helium is lighter than general atmospheric gases; baseballs hover at the zenith of their arc. PKers deride me for going to this hodgepodge of other explanations: they suggest I’m denying the reality right in front of me, that it’s mystical mind magic. The difference is, the phenomena I use to explain objects hovering in air are well-observed and well-explained. The PKers’ explanation is an article of faith.

In the same way, the decreased scores of African Americans can be traced to a wealth of other factors: some are due to cultural biases on tests, some are due to poverty, some are due to historical racism among real estate offerings, some are due to nepotism, and so forth. The racists deride this plethora of explanations, suggesting nonracists hide behind them to avoid the simple truth that black people are inherently inferior (for whatever reason they’ve come up with this decade). The difference is, the phenomena I use to explain lower test scores are well-observed and well-explained. THe racists’ explanations are articles of faith.

[Chief_Pedant]

@iiandyiiii

Do you really think that when finances and parental education is normalized, everything is just hunky-dory and equal? You can’t possibly be that naive.

“Hunky-dory and equal” sounds a lot like nice rhetorical weasling to me. But yes; I expect that educated parents with means to nurture their children academically should have children whose academic performance is on par with their opportunity-level peers, and certainly well above the academic performance of children from uneducated families with very limited means. I have spent a good part of my career in higher education at the Medical School level, and I find the excuse of SIRE group alone as an explanation for mediocre performance highly unpersuasive, particularly having seen first hand which groups struggle to perform on exams even when their antecedent preparation has been identical, and identical for many years. I find the notion that the “black experience” in education is somehow so crippling that no amount of effort (and the effort has been enormous) can overcome persistent pattern outcomes even for sub-groups of black students who have come from wealthy and educated parents. I might add that many groups–indeed some subgroups of blacks (I can think of Jamaican groups that have been studied, e.g.)–have overcome the exact same “black-specific” barriers you want to advance. This suggests again that there is not very much substance to the idea that we have to make a special case for the black experience in every culture and every political system.

Do you really think Sweet’s feeble explanations (lousy parenting and low teacher expectations) are such impressively putative explanations that they are sufficient to account for the remarkably persistent pattern that wealthy black children from highly educated parents (in large undisputed studies that average tens of thousands of test takers) underscore white test takers from poor families with uneducated parents?
Do you really think that the enormous reversal of the ratio of basketball wannabes in first grade and success in the NBA is because “black culture” can’t figure out that scholastic achievement is a more useful endeavor than practicing basketball, while whites and asians voluntarily abandon their NBA dreams because they’d rather have a desk job?

Which of us is clinging to hope here?

You persistently state “there is no genetic evidence,” confusing “evidence” with “proof.” You cling to the hope that mother nature affects only genes coding for “superficial” characteristics because you hate “racism.” Yet if we look at population groups within a traditional “race” (say, Mbuti v Kalenjin, say), we’d find profound average differences. Remarking on that wouldn’t produce a “no genetic evidence” because it’s not “racist.” But biologically, the concept is identical: groups separated by a splitting point have different average gene pools and because nature is blind to fairness, she drives the gene pools apart even for non-superficial differences.

The evidence for average SIRE group gene pool differences is overwhelming.
The evidence that nature affects any and every gene blindly, and does not limit herself to only “superficial genes” is overwhelming.
The evidence that some evolved gene variants are probably advantageous because they achieve high enough penetration to cluster is very strong.
The evidence that nurturing does not account for differences is persuasive.

You want to describe any ugly position as “racist.” Fine. But the notion that something is less likely to be scientifically correct simply because you think it’s an ugly concept is unpersuasive. So is the notion that “…there is no genetic evidence. None.” You are simply using rhetoric to obfuscate the obvious. And what you mean is, “The genesets that exactly quantify the difference among SIRE groups remain undefined.”

Perhaps that last statement could be a point of agreement between us.

[Richard_Parker]

CP: Have we identified any differences in allele frequency between SIRE groups that correspond to phenotype differences that are both (a) unconnected to the basis for self-selection (.e.g, skin color, facial structure, etc.) and (b) persistent across SIRE groupings regardless of the regional location (i.e., as true of self-selected groups in Italy as they are in Texas)?

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

If you want to add that to the analogy, it works quite well. I often see things hovering in midair, and rather than go with the simplest explanation–PK–I go with a wealth of other explanations. Helicopters do it via propeller action; helium balloons do it because helium is lighter than general atmospheric gases; baseballs hover at the zenith of their arc. PKers deride me for going to this hodgepodge of other explanations: they suggest I’m denying the reality right in front of me, that it’s mystical mind magic. The difference is, the phenomena I use to explain objects hovering in air are well-observed and well-explained. The PKers’ explanation is an article of faith.

In the same way, the decreased scores of African Americans can be traced to a wealth of other factors: some are due to cultural biases on tests, some are due to poverty, some are due to historical racism among real estate offerings, some are due to nepotism, and so forth. The racists deride this plethora of explanations, suggesting nonracists hide behind them to avoid the simple truth that black people are inherently inferior (for whatever reason they’ve come up with this decade). The difference is, the phenomena I use to explain lower test scores are well-observed and well-explained. THe racists’ explanations are articles of faith.

It’s helpful to you in this regard that you’ve chosen to ignore my earlier response to this point, in favor of whining that you were misunderstood (about something else).

Fact is that unlike PK, the process whereby a genetic variation between different group might arise seems to be pretty much accepted as theoretically possible based on current scientific principles. The only question is whether it has in fact happened, not whether it could.

You’ve chosen an analogy in which the hypothesis does not just have no direct evidence for it but also relies on a process which has no theoretical basis. Not a valid comparison at all.

Chief Pedant,

Do you care to address two arguments from evidence against your position?

1. The claim that among recent immigrants there is no difference in intelligence between these different groups.

2. That among people whose ancestry is a mixture of different groups, there is no correlation between the percentage of ancestry from one or another group and intelligence.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@MaxTheVool

it seems to be fairly well accepted that there are SOME inheritable characteristics that have SOME correlation with skin-color-and-racial-identity, with distance running and sprinting being two of them. Which certainly isn’t to say that every black person is a faster runner than every white person, but one can certainly imagine some bizarre skinnerian box scheme in which we raised 10,000 white American babies and 10,000 black American babies completely identically with no exposure to any racial stereotypes whatsoever, and searched through each group to find the fastest sprinters and marathoners, and then had a race, and I think that a fair number of people who are not generally thought of as racist would say that there are better-than-even odds that the fastest black sprinter and marathoner would be faster than the fastest white sprinter and marathoner.

So the choice of a black kid for the win over a white kid isn’t exposure to a racial stereotype? I doubt you are what anyone would call a racist, but you provided a perfect example of racist behavior. There’s literally no reason to pick one or another based on skin color other than what is generally accepted. That’s been the pattern of racist behavior practiced by generally racist and generally nonracist people since the dawn of time.

Why is a correlation between the athletic performance of people from very specific cultures and the top tier of a very specialized behavior practiced by a relatively tiny percentage of every population a good analogy for an average behavioral difference demarcated by the skin color present to varying degrees in entire continents of people?

[Richard_Parker]

Let’s take MaxTheVool’s hypothetical and change it to 10,000 random babies and 10,000 babies including 9,000 randos plus 1000 children of Olympic sprinters.

If I had to choose which randomly selected child from which group will win a race, absent any other information, I choose the group containing the Olympic children. It would be false to say “There’s literally no reason to pick one or another,” even though the reason is very weak.

That may seem like a trivial example, but I think Chief Pedant’s claim is a pretty limited one, as I understand it. It is not that these “SIRE group differences” would rationally justify individual discrimination. But instead that–even though SIRE groups are wholly arbitrary collections of different genetic populations–knowing what percentage of the difference in SIRE group outcomes is a consequence of the genetics of those sub-populations is useful for assessing big picture outcome differences. IOW, if there’s a 5% gap in sprinting speed between SIRE groups because one group contains a sub-population with a particular gene, and we observe a 5% gap in outcomes, then we know the gap is mostly genetic.

So I don’t see how you really refute that just from logic or first principles. It seems to be a genuine scientific question, and the question re: racism is just whether the evidence for this claim is so speculative (or even disproven) right now that to assume the answer is most likely explained by racism rather than something else.

[iiandyiiii]

@Chief_Pedant

“Hunky-dory and equal” sounds a lot like nice rhetorical weasling to me. But yes; I expect that educated parents with means to nurture their children academically should have children whose academic performance is on par with their opportunity-level peers, and certainly well above the academic performance of children from uneducated families with very limited means.

I think your expectations are out of whack, based on the data we’ve seen.

I have spent a good part of my career in higher education at the Medical School level, and I find the excuse of SIRE group alone as an explanation for mediocre performance highly unpersuasive, particularly having seen first hand which groups struggle to perform on exams even when their antecedent preparation has been identical, and identical for many years.

And my experience (generally military and logistics technical education) has been quite different from yours. So what? This isn’t evidence.

I find the notion that the “black experience” in education is somehow so crippling that no amount of effort (and the effort has been enormous)

The effort has been paltry and weak, mostly due to politics, and has obviously failed to get even close to the root of the problem.

I might add that many groups–indeed some subgroups of blacks (I can think of Jamaican groups that have been studied, e.g.)–have overcome the exact same “black-specific” barriers you want to advance.

If so, wouldn’t this actually work against your genetic hypothesis? I’d like to see what you’re talking about here.

This suggests again that there is not very much substance to the idea that we have to make a special case for the black experience in every culture and every political system.

I haven’t suggested this.

Do you really think Sweet’s feeble explanations (lousy parenting and low teacher expectations) are such impressively putative explanations that they are sufficient to account for the remarkably persistent pattern that wealthy black children from highly educated parents (in large undisputed studies that average tens of thousands of test takers) underscore white test takers from poor families with uneducated parents?

Sweet’s explanations, which are probably incomplete (there are most likely other factors involved), still actually fit the facts. The genetic explanation does not.

Do you really think that the enormous reversal of the ratio of basketball wannabes in first grade and success in the NBA is because “black culture” can’t figure out that scholastic achievement is a more useful endeavor than practicing basketball, while whites and asians voluntarily abandon their NBA dreams because they’d rather have a desk job?

I’m not sure what you’re saying here, but it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with genetics.

Which of us is clinging to hope here?

Still you, I think… and, IMO, your hope is that your years of certainty in the inherent genetic superiority and inferiority of various races has not been wasted.

You cling to the hope that mother nature affects only genes coding for “superficial” characteristics because you hate “racism.”

This is a straw man. I have not made this argument.

Yet if we look at population groups within a traditional “race” (say, Mbuti v Kalenjin, say), we’d find profound average differences. Remarking on that wouldn’t produce a “no genetic evidence” because it’s not “racist.” But biologically, the concept is identical: groups separated by a splitting point have different average gene pools and because nature is blind to fairness, she drives the gene pools apart even for non-superficial differences.

I think you’re still fighting a straw man- none of this disputes anything I’ve said.

The evidence for average SIRE group gene pool differences is overwhelming.
The evidence that nature affects any and every gene blindly, and does not limit herself to only “superficial genes” is overwhelming.
The evidence that some evolved gene variants are probably advantageous because they achieve high enough penetration to cluster is very strong.

Whether any of this is true or not, it does nothing to discount anything I’ve said. Still fighting a straw man.

The evidence that nurturing does not account for differences is persuasive.

Ha ha, very funny. No, it’s not even close to persuasive. It’s laughable.

You want to describe any ugly position as “racist.”

No, just the racist ones.

You are simply using rhetoric to obfuscate the obvious. And what you mean is, “The genesets that exactly quantify the difference among SIRE groups remain undefined.”

Perhaps that last statement could be a point of agreement between us.

Putting aside the snark for a moment, we know very little about the genetics of intelligence. We have no idea how many genes, and only the tiny faintest notion of even any genesets at all that are identified as definitively tied to intelligence. Without this data, it is extremely premature to declare that one group is less inherently less intelligent, on average, then another. And this isn’t like other premature scientific declarations- this one has been tied to the most brutal and violent repression in human history. You should be far, far more cautious. This isn’t like a claim about cancer susceptibility, or blood types or something. This is different- it should be treated differently (and it is), and the standards should be different. Science exists in the real world, and has real world consequences.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@iiandyiiii

Putting aside the snark for a moment, we know very little about the genetics of intelligence. We have no idea how many genes, and only the tiny faintest notion of even any genesets at all that are identified as definitively tied to intelligence. Without this data, it is extremely premature to declare that one group is less inherently less intelligent, on average, then another. And this isn’t like other premature scientific declarations- this one has been tied to the most brutal and violent repression in human history. You should be far, far more cautious. This isn’t like a claim about cancer susceptibility, or blood types or something. This is different- it should be treated differently (and it is), and the standards should be different. Science exists in the real world, and has real world consequences.

OK, so here’s a key question for you:

Based on the evidence that we have in front of us at this time, what is the likelihood in your estimation that that there are genetic-based differences in average intellience between different “races”? Is it 0%, conclusively ruled out? Or is it some number above 0%?

[iiandyiiii]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

OK, so here’s a key question for you:

Based on the evidence that we have in front of us at this time, what is the likelihood in your estimation that that there are genetic-based differences in average intellience between different “races”? Is it 0%, conclusively ruled out? Or is it some number above 0%?

I don’t know, and I think it’s unknowable right now. Some number above 0, but it seems like asking what the likelihood is that an alien race will have 2 arms and 2 legs… we don’t have even close to enough data to make a determination.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

OK, I don’t disagree with that. I was just confirming that you are not claiming there is zero likelihood.

[FWIW, AFAICT there is also a non-zero likelihood that blacks are on average more intelligent than whites. It doesn’t get discussed as much, due in part to the fact that it’s not the “starting point” in terms of the present situation. But it would seem possible too.]

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

OK, I don’t disagree with that. I was just confirming that you are not claiming there is zero likelihood.

I don’t think anyone’s claimed there’s zero likelihood.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@Richard_Parker

Let’s take MaxTheVool’s hypothetical and change it to 10,000 random babies and 10,000 babies including 9,000 randos plus 1000 children of Olympic sprinters.

If I had to choose which randomly selected child from which group will win a race, absent any other information, I choose the group containing the Olympic children. It would be false to say “There’s literally no reason to pick one or another,” even though the reason is very weak.

I don’t know. Is there assortative mating? Is the environment they’re raised in conducive to enhancing the assumed genetic potential they gain by having an athletic parent? Is the trait even heritable in this controlled experimental environment?

Those questions are clearly obnoxious but I can ask a number of very reasonable questions based in the facts of genetics that should further emphasize how weak it would be to make this decision based on their parentage alone.

That last question is of particular importance. Heritability is a statistic that estimates the proportion of phenotypic variance that can be attributed to genetic variation in a specific population at a specific time. I can alter the experiment to completely obliterate the role of genes, if any in this environment. For example, how about I cut everyone’s legs off?

How about I take 10,000 random babies and 10,000 other random babies, take the second group and treat them like slaves and second class citizens for generations while the first group is rewarded for their involvement in all aspects of society, especially politics, STEM fields, teaching, and nerdy debating. Then, by generations, starting maybe 3 generations ago, I take a tiny percentage of the 2nd group and treat them no differently than the first other than the fact that I constantly have people debate whether they really are equal to the first group, and each generation I only take a proportion and do the same. Then I measure their IQ scores and expect them all to be equal…would think of me as a scientist or a charlatan?

@Richard_Parker

So I don’t see how you really refute that just from logic or first principles. It seems to be a genuine scientific question…

True, and the hypothesis that that people are consciously or unconsciously supporting can only be tested and never definitively proven. So we have to judge the weight of the evidence. The evidence shows no support for the notion that there are inherent characteristics associated with how we identify race that explains the difference in IQ we see. After several centuries of testing, the best explanation is our social judgment of people based on skin color. The only genes that are needed to explain the phenomenon are genes for skin color.

On other hand we do see that this difference in IQ can change with time and circumstance. Notably, we see this difference decline with greater egalitarianism, better education, and better wealth.

We do see that the difference in inherent characteristics between populations is nothing like what the hypothesis predicts for race. Pygmies, sickle-cell anemia, skin color, alcohol metabolism all vary with the environments in which various human populations evolved. These populations cannot be divided along the lines created by our conception of race. For all these traits, the hypothesis that the difference is at least partially genetic in nature has been tested with varying levels of success.

So on the one hand you have a tested hypothesis that has been found lacking and on the other you have hypotheses that have been tested and found to have explanatory power. It’s a measure of racism to believe so strongly in the unsupported hypothesis and reject the supported alternatives. This is not a logical position.

[MaxTheVool]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

If you want to add that to the analogy, it works quite well. I often see things hovering in midair, and rather than go with the simplest explanation–PK–I go with a wealth of other explanations. Helicopters do it via propeller action; helium balloons do it because helium is lighter than general atmospheric gases; baseballs hover at the zenith of their arc.

Right, and I covered that in my first post…

@me

It also may be the case that someone has done research which really conclusively proves not just that environmental factors COULD contribute to and explain differences in testing outcome between races, but that they DO in fact completely explain those differences

As far as I can tell, and I really only know the things that people cite in SD threads on this topic, there is plenty of evidence that SOME of the disparity comes from a variety of cultural and historical factors, but there has not been some smoking gun study where you correct for X and Y and Z and them BAM everyone’s scores are the same. I’d like there to be such a study, because I want to live in a world where that is the truth, but as far as I know there isn’t one, while there IS in fact a perfectly understandable and convincing scientific explanation for how balloons fly.

[MaxTheVool]

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

So the choice of a black kid for the win over a white kid isn’t exposure to a racial stereotype? I doubt you are what anyone would call a racist, but you provided a perfect example of racist behavior. There’s literally no reason to pick one or another based on skin color other than what is generally accepted. That’s been the pattern of racist behavior practiced by generally racist and generally nonracist people since the dawn of time.

I have no idea what you’re saying here, I’m sorry.

Why is a correlation between the athletic performance of people from very specific cultures and the top tier of a very specialized behavior practiced by a relatively tiny percentage of every population a good analogy for an average behavioral difference demarcated by the skin color present to varying degrees in entire continents of people?

Who said anything was a good analogy with anything? I was responding to a claim/analogy that LHOD was making, which is that you can predict NOTHING about the contents of a shopping bag based on its color, and you can predict NOTHING about a person based on the color of their skin. I don’t think you can predict MUCH about a person based on the color of their skin, but I think LHOD’s claim was overbroad.

I mean, I hate to be arguing on the side of racists, but I think that a claim of the form “there is absolutely zero correlation between the color of a person’s skin and ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL EVER” is not true. I think that there is very little such correlation, and almost almost almost never anything USEFUL to get from such correlations, but I don’t think it’s quite zero.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@MaxTheVool

I think that there is very little such correlation, and almost almost almost never anything USEFUL to get from such correlations, but I don’t think it’s quite zero.

Possibly one or two extra “almosts” in there.

Race and health

[Richard_Parker]

Inbred Mm domesticus, I don’t think we disagree. I might have been disputing a point you hadn’t intended to make or emphasize. I agree with those who see no reason to think outcome differences suggest anything more than the effects of centuries of discrimination.

I don’t think your argument has fully addressed Chief Pedant’s position here, however. The other argument he is making (I think) is that knowing what we know about population genetics and migration, and knowing that intelligence is heritable, we should expect the genes for intelligence to be disparately common across large populations of people.

Now, my amateur intuition would be that intelligence is likely determined by many genes (and therefore takes longer for mutations to substantially affect) and likely subject to selection pressure in all environments (unlike, say, malaria), so we should expect basically homogeneous frequencies of the relevant alleles across the planet. But I have no idea if that’s reasonable or not. Are there traits that are similarly determined by many genes and that we would expect selection pressure for in all environments that nevertheless vary across large populations?

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@Richard_Parker

Now, my amateur intuition would be that intelligence is likely determined by many genes (and therefore takes longer for mutations to substantially affect) and likely subject to selection pressure in all environments, so we should expect basically homogeneous frequencies of the relevant alleles across the planet. But I have no idea if that’s reasonable or not.

My understanding is that there is some randomness involved in mutations. Just because a given mutation or mutations would be equally beneficial to Population A as to Population B doesn’t mean that the fact that it/they occured in Population A means that it/they must also have occured in Population B.

At least that’s my understanding.

And that’s even assuming the selection pressures are the same in all environments, which is an assumption about something we know little about.

[Richard_Parker]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

My understanding is that there is some randomness involved in mutations. Just because a given mutation or mutations would be equally beneficial to Population A as to Population B doesn’t mean that the fact that it/they occured in Population A means that it/they must also have occured in Population B.

Sure. But my understanding is that the more complex the trait–that is, the more genes involved in its expression–the less any single mutation matters. Meaning that for very complex traits, populations have to be separated by much longer time periods, and even then the likelihood of having beneficial mutations is infinitesimally smaller than for traits that involve one or only a handful of genes.

Thus, if the only differences in traits we’re aware of across large populations are those involved in social customs or those involving a small number of genes, that does not lend any support to the proposition that very complex traits also must vary across those populations.