Pardon my confusion, but you were responding to a post asserting that peer-group pressure to under-perform can account for poor test scores among black students.
You link to an excerpt that claims “culturally-neutral” questions on the SAT are more challenging for black students than the “culture-loaded” questions.
Doesn’t this cite discredit your argument that bias in the test can account for the lower test scores and augment the argument that, perhaps, black students struggle with the neutral questions on purpose to appease peer expectations?
Parenting affects IQ, personality, etc., much less than most people think, so I doubt that the differences between Chief Pedant and his siblings have much to do with differences in nurturing. Much more likely that they’re due to genetics.
Fine, let’s leave aside black people for a minute. Do you think that the higher IQs among Ashkenazic Jews are due to genetic differences? Or how about Indians (i.e. from the subcontinent). Indian IQ seems to be really low- do you think that has anything to do with genetics?
I’m mostly black, with about a quarter korean, and it’s pretty clear to me that basic intelligence varies between different groups in the averages. I don’t like the conclusion and the implications, but it seems unavoidable to me.
Intelligence is determined in large part based on our genes. A genetic lottery.
IF we agree that intelligence is partly determined by genes (any part is all we need for the argument to follow), then it stands to reason that some people are smarter than others due to the variation in their gene combinations. And because the allele frequencies for all sorts of physical traits have different distributions between different individuals, then it is virtually certain the frequencies will vary between groups as well.
It is the height of absurdity to me that we can assume that average height between different populations can be different, or skin color, but not ANOTHER trait directly influenced by genes, the physical structure of the brain. When it comes to the brain and the resulting intelligence that arises, ALL group variations we observe in all sorts of physical traits goes to ZERO!
Clearly absurd.
This is not limited to race, this happens within races as well. Take the indian population. Here in the US, the indian population is one of if not THE most successful and highest earning populations of all. Why? Are indians inherently smarter than everyone else?
I think it has more to do with the selection mechanics of the US immigration system. India has over a billion people living there, and the absolute cream of the crop are typically the ones migrating to the US for better job and education opportunities. The indian population in the US is NOT some random sample of the indian population of the mainland. If we game a thousand indians plucked at random in the US an iq test and gave a similar test to a thousand random indians inside India, I am virtually certain the US population would test higher.
Well, if there are those kinds of huge differences between siblings…how can anyone expect there to be rigid conformity among races? If two people with nearly identical genetics are vastly different, why should a billion people who are very distantly related have close similarities?
The fact that he is smart and his sibling is not so smart – and that this is a very commonplace effect – argues against any kind of racial trend in intelligence.
(I’ve always felt that intelligence has to be hugely polygenetic. There isn’t a single gene for it, but hundreds, much the same way as for height. The old story about Napoleon’s wars reducing the average height of Frenchmen is clearly false, and it’s easy to show this using ordinary population genetics mathematics. I’m pretty sure the same is true for intelligence.)
Added bonus - said undiscovered genetic cause spread across an absolutely massive field of genetic diversity, whose evolutionary roots would imply that various other groups descended from that group with no direct genetic connection independently gained some genetic advantage in intelligence.
None of this makes any sense. The genetic hypothesis falls absolutely flat in explaining this issue. The main problem is that people are conflating “race” with “genetics”, and it doesn’t work, because “black” is not any meaningful genetic statement, and the “race” contains more genetic diversity than every other part of humanity combined.
Meanwhile, we have a perfectly workable explanation for dealing with the apparent intellectual disparities of minority groups in the USA - literally centuries of oppression and racism, continuing to this day.
I see no reason at this point to believe that genetics is involved. If we knew the genes for high and low intelligence, and their relative likelihood to be present in different populations, then that would be different (depending on what this genetic data actually told us)… but without such evidence – no.
Yes, I know. What’s your prior? I’d say that your prior should be open to genetics, intrauterine environment, and nurture all explaining part of the difference. Do you disagree?
Salvor, this is a great post, thanks for commenting.
In response to your question, no, I’d suspect Indians are not particularly intelligent. Some Americans think they are because they look at the performance of Indian immigrants in America, but they’re an uninformative highly select minority. Test scores in India are terrible.
Now, India is also a very poor and horribly malnourished country, so it’s likely the low intelligence levels there are partly due to factors other than genetics (same is true of most of Africa- none of the IQ scores from extreme low HDI countries seem reliable to me). If you wanted to know something about how typical Indians performed in the absence of poverty and malnutrition, I’d probably look somewhere like Trinidad. The Indians there were brought over as labourers, not educated professionals, so they presumably represent a more typical population (though they are disproportionately drawn from some of the poorest regions of present day India).
I don’t have an opinion about the causes of the Black-White gap in the United States. There’s a lot we don’t know about why populations differ in IQ, high heritability within a group doesn’t imply that inter-group differences are also due to genetic differences, and there have been other IQ gaps that have been present for a long time and then vanished. Irish people in Ireland traditionally were much less intelligent than Irish Americans or Englishmen (IQ scores in the 1970s were 87), but that gap has vanished in the 40 years or so since then. So no, I don’t think we can conclude much about the causes of the IQ gap, although I’m pretty sure ‘black culture’, ‘acting white’ etc. has little or nothing to do with it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if 50 years from now the white vs. African American gap has gone the way of the low Irish IQ.
Your specific argument here isn’t a good one, though. It amounts to saying ‘African people are polyphyletic’. Sure, that’s true. Fish are polyphyletic too. Some fish are more closely related to bears, humans, and ostriches than they are to other fish. Fish still mostly share some commonalities in physiology and behavior (like the fact that they mostly have gills*) and I’m sure there are genetic roots for that. Because having gills was the ancestral condition.
*Yes, of course, some fish have lungs or other air breathing organs too.
The topic is why black students underachieve when one factors out poverty.
The underachievement is to such a remarkable degree that black families who make more than 100K/year have children who score lower on the SAT than white children from families making less than 10K/yr.
Helping me understand how Grampa’s dilemma kept the wealthy black child from learning…
I am seriously under the impression that ancestral oppression has no more to do with black underachievement when poverty is factored out than it does with Jewish achievement when poverty is factored out.
Genes flow only to descendant populations. Genes introduced at any given split flow only to that branch. It’s trivially easy to use markers to show this has real correlation. For example, MCPH1 haplogroup D is widely distributed across the globe except for sub-saharan africa. This is thought to reflect introduction of this gene after the (main) out of africa migration. At any major split point, only descendant lines benefit from beneficial mutations, and MCPH1 serves as a nice example that there are differences even at the “eurasian/black” self-identification groups.
The genetic diversity within a given group has nothing to do with whether or not an average gene pool difference can drive a phenotypic outcome. For example, if we took all self-identified short people and all self identified tall people, the self identified tall people would have their average height difference mostly because of genes. There isn’t any requirement that the rest of their gene pools be more, or less, diverse.
It may well be silly to divide ourselves into “black,” “white,” or whatever. But when we do, what happens is that we assign ourselves to an average gene pool that reflects historic human migrations and descendant lines. A very dumb asian individual now belongs to a group with an average genetically-driven academic performance outcome that is higher than a very smart black individual.
We are talking average gene pools; average gene frequencies; average outcomes. Not individuals.
To suggest that self-identified race groups don’t roughly correlate with historic human migration patterns is to be ignorant of our evolutionary and migration history as a human species.
I completely agree that many populations are self-selecting, including immigrant ones.
It nevertheless appears that is easier to cull out a subgroup of academically highly successful south asians with crappy ancestral histories than it is to cull out a subgroup of highly successful blacks.
Of course, if we use power sports as our marker, the south asians might get their ass kicked by the west africans. And if we use endurance running, maybe the east africans would do the ass kicking.
But hey…none of that is average gene pools, right?
'Cuz in God’s eyes, and Nature’s benevolence, we are all the same children.
That’s one section of the argument, but sure, let’s look at the factors that can affect it:
High-income black workers tend to have less wealth than high-income white workers, due to less inherited wealth.
Wealthy black families tend to live in poorer neighborhoods than wealthy white families.
A greater percentage of high-income black workers are first-generation college graduates, and first-generation folks of any stripe tend to straddle both worlds. They may practice the child-rearing techniques that their impoverished parents practiced on them rather than the ones that other high-income workers practice.
Children of high-income black families tend to go to poorer schools than children of high-income white families.
Children of high-income black families see far fewer professional adults that look like them than do children of high-income white families (at my last school, about 25% African American student population, there was one black teacher, no black administrators, but nearly all the custodial and cafeteria staff were black). This can translate to fewer role models.
It’s common for programs for gifted students to over-identify white students and under-identify black students. This is a self-perpetuating problem: a gifted black student who sees that the gifted program is overwhelmingly white may conclude taht the program isn’t designed for her and may not make the same effort to get into it that a white child would.
Stereotype threat.
Hostility, explicit or implicit, from teachers.
Other forms of racism.
It’s not impossible, obviously, for a black child with high-income parents to overcome all these factors working against her. But it’s running up an escalator going down, whereas the wealthy white kid can just stand on the up escalator.
I think it’s absurd that a genetic explanation is being thrown around here… most if not all of the differences can be explained through cultural reasons. More specifically, through the various cultures’ emphasis on academics and academic success, and the desirability of high status white collar/professional jobs.
Are Asians and Jews smarter than everyone else? Hardly. But their cultures and religions put an extremely high premium on education and intellectualism. When talking about students, this manifests itself as very high expectations- it’s not enough that they graduate from high school; the question is what dental, law or medical school will they graduate from.
Certain segments of the white population have similar expectations (middle-middle class and above primarily), and perform accordingly. For a personal example, I didn’t get any graduation party, dinner, or anything other than some token gifts from my family for graduating high school. It was merely expected, and not considered much of an accomplishment. Graduating college was expected as well, but recognized as a bigger milestone.
Does Black culture as a whole have such expectations? Is the average Black student expected to even graduate from high school, much less go to college? Is there any negative perception attached to not graduating high school? What about not going to college? Are they viewed as losers if they don’t? Does having a college degree confer a certain amount of positive reputation or cachet, or is it seen as “being white” and viewed as more of a negative thing? Based on conversations I’ve had, I suspect the latter is probably nearer to the mark.
So when you get a high SES black kid whose parents are college-educated and professional, unless he’s got the rest of his community putting the same expectations on him to excel in school, and go on to college, he has a certain built-in disadvantage in terms of motivation relative to your middle/upper class white kid, jewish kid or asian kid whose entire communities entirely expect them to go to college and succeed, and anything less is unacceptable and shameful.
The glaring problem is not between the wealthy black child and the wealthy white one, although it’s true that at every SES layer, the exact same rank exists.
But the thing your explanations need to overcome is that the wealthy black child and the poverty stricken white one perform about on par.
That’s a lotta 'splaining needed. Not just in the US, but across the world. Every culture. Every political boundary. Every national history.
Same average results. Same groups excelling at the same things. Hunh…
So…the children of wealthy black families are encouraged to just meander along, and the children of poverty stricken whites have their asses kicked until they perform?