You’ll see here that you’ve mostly stopped making an actual argument and are just patting yourself on the back for not being PC. That should be your first sign that something is wrong.
The second sign that something is wrong is that you’ve utterly failed to address the points I raised earlier, about the differences between traits like skin tone, eye color, and intelligence.
The third sign that something is wrong is this odd conflation of housing location and natural selection, accompanied by zero evidence to support your expectation.
Again, it’s been explained to you why intelligence-influencing genes are unlikely to vary much among geographically-distributed populations. The only thing you’re adding to the discussion at this point is more capital letters. Care to add substantive responses to the points raised?
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."*
The topic is wealthy blacks v poverty-stricken whites. Focus.
I take it you find this assortment persuasive in that regard?
I find it risible. It’s ridiculous to think this hodgpodge puts a the son of a black physician on par with the son of a white sharecropper for educational opportunity.
Surely you don’t think the average wealthy and educated black parent–or their child–is so stupid as to deny themselves educational opportunity by, for example, opting out voluntarily from AP programs. Sheesh.
At some point you might realize that repeating “focus” doesn’t actually make you look smart.
As I said before, examining the pressures that apply to black students but not white students will show why on average a black student in a given socioeconomic level won’t perform as well as a white student in the same level. Yes, yes, you want to discuss the almost identical question of why that black student WILL perform as well as a white student at a lower level–but you’ve yet to explain why these two discussions are substantively different.
Well, great, glad you enjoy laughing. Why on earth would I care about your laughter, though?
“Stupid” has nothing to do with it. “Opting out”? Do you have no idea how AP programs work?
However, that sentence–stating that I don’t believe that–is about the only accurate sentence you’ve written in this thread, so credit where it’s due.
There are reasons other than beneficial reproductive advantages for gene pool frequencies to vary. Further, just because a gene varies in frequency between populations does not necessarily mean it is “superior” for a given trait.
When we look at large branches on the human migration tree, it becomes obvious that there were gene pool frequency differences driven at the point of those branches. All that does is confirm an understanding that self-identified groups whose recent ancestry is correlated with those branching points will have different gene pool averages.
In other words, if I identify with “black” I am more likely than someone who identifies with “asian” to have a gene pool which does not contain as many of the new genes evolution created for post out of africa descendant lines. Where there is a paucity of founders (a population bottleneck, e.g.), then descendant lines might have a high penetration of a gene where the gene itself has no particular advantage for reproduction. Such a gene pool average difference for that gene may mean nothing at all.
It turns out this has been looked at. For example, Eric Wang looked at single-peptide variations in the Perlegen databank on a million genotypes. His work suggests about 1.6% of those “exhibit the genetic architecture of selection.” Wang used genes from 3 of self-identified groups such as Han, European American, and African American. The 1800 genes represented groups from " host–pathogen interactions, reproduction, DNA metabolismcell cycle, protein metabolism, and neuronal function."
The work suggests that this group of 16,000 SNP variations are not the result of population bottlenecks, inversions or admixtures. What is at play for this subset, at least, is evolutionary (“Darwinian” selection).
There is another interesting line of research being uncovered wrt gene pool average gene frequencies among the various large self-identified cohorts of humans. Research by Svante Paabo and others suggests that when humans moved out of africa they reproduced with Neandertals, and these introgressed genes were signficant enough such that somewhere between 1 and 4% of many eurasian (but not sub-saharan) gene pools are from archaic Neandertal lines. Similar research for Denisovan lines, and who knows how many more.
As an example of the kind of consequence being studied, this researcher thinks “Neanderthal alleles…caused decreased fertility in males when moved to a modern human genetic background.”
So when we talk about gene pools, not only has evolution driven different gene pools from the origin point of “anatomically modern humans,” current average gene pools are not even from the same original pool 200kya! A modern self-identified black has much different average odds of having Neandertal DNA than does a modern self-identified white or asian.
We are one species but we are most definitely not one equivalent gene pool, and as long as we insist on identifying ourselves with groupings which reflect our evolutionary history of gene pools, we are going to see observed average differences in outcomes no matter how hard we try to normalize nurturing.
If you cannot distinguish between the plight of a wealthy black child and a poverty-stricken white child, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you focus.
A wealthy black student with educated parents ONLY performs academically at the level of a poverty-stricken white student. Any putative nurturing influences must be compared with the poverty stricken student.
For example, while black family wealth might be less for the same-income white peer, it is certainly not less than the poverty stricken white. While school peers, school opportunity etc might be somehow different from a wealthy white cohort, it is certainly superior to the poverty stricken white cohort.
If this were not so, we would not need race-based AA. We could simply compare opportunity, accounting for the kind of variables you advance. But to get society where it needs to be for diversity, and for us all to have a shot a participating, we must protect race-alone based AA.
It is a very dangerous road to keep pretending that only nurturing separates self-identified groups from performance outcomes.
“…a gifted black student who sees that the gifted program is overwhelmingly white may conclude that the program isn’t designed for her and may not make the same effort to get into it that a white child would.”
Any nurturing influences also include things like teacher expectations, media depictions and role models, peer pressure, day-to-day racism and discrimination, and nigh-infinite other factors that will be very, very different for black people of any income and white people of any income.
Sure – if we would just go back to the non-nurturing assumptions about black people from the 1800s, we might be in danger of treating black people as well as we did in the 1800s – treatment that was argued to be justified by beliefs about the intelligence of black people.
We don’t have to guess how things would change if everyone “accepted” the belief that black people were inherently inferior on average in intelligence – we have centuries of history that we can look at in which this was widely accepted, and centuries of awful treatment that was believed to be justified because of this supposedly inferior intelligence.
For fuck’s sake. Can someone else explain to Chief Pedant what we’re talking about here? [edit: it’s important to note that I, not you, am the one saying that these are different plights.]
So that deals with items 1-4. What about items 5-9, all of which affect black students but not white students regardless of SES?
“Simply” is a hilarious word to use in this context.
I don’t have raw data and studies to back up my arguments, I am making arguments from common sense more than anything else. Though I understand not wanting to hang ones hat on such a thing.
One thing I think you have wrong though is the distribution of intelligence influencing genes. You clearly do not expect them to vary much at all between geographically varied populations separated over tens of thousands of years of human migration. You even said earlier that intelligence is adaptive everywhere, so how could it not be selected for everywhere.
I do think in human prehistory intelligence was adaptive everywhere, but that does not imply that that the selection pressures for intelligence were equal in all geographic locations and climates. It could easily be the case that a population migrating from Africa and other locales into colder climates had a harder time surviving. Or perhaps they were simply engaged in greater competition with other early human and neanderthal tribes. Those environmental forces putting greater pressure on the migrating human populations could heighten the selection for the more intelligent early humans for survival in a way that did not exist in the same measure elsewhere.
Do I have iron clad data and studies proving this happened in human prehistory? Of course not, but IF it did, then does that confer more pressure to select for higher intelligence or not? I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that it did.
Even population subsets within a larger culture might have selection pressures for higher intelligence. Consider the muslim world where “people of the book” christians and jews lived under a system of Dhimmitude where they had to pay a tithe to the larger muslim society to keep their property and life, convert to Islam, or die.
Imagine that type of societal system/selection pressure went on for hundreds of years in different muslim nations. Would that place any selection pressures on the minority populations? I suspect it would, the wealthier more successful christians could afford to pay the religiously demanded tax and keep their faith and property and life while the more marginal members of the society, perhaps not quite as sharp as their peers is forced to convert to get along. In that kind of system, over time the christian population would be whittled down to higher and higher concentrations of cream, while the crem would be fed into the muslim population forcing the system of dhimmitude. Do we see differences between the christian population in egypt vs the muslim population? I don’t know, but I remember reading that some of the coptic christian immigrants to the US had a higher rate of members becoming doctors. I can’t prove that was not 100% culture as some here might be want to suggest, but I suspect that population has higher average intelligence because of the hostile environment they had survived in for so long. Same goes with some Jewish populations, repeatedly culled through the ages, that might have greater selection pressures for a trait like intelligence than some group having a good life elsewhere.
These are common sense arguments, that is all I have, but they make a lot of sense to me.
This kind of speculation is all fine, but it seems crazy to me to go from these sorts of speculation to the assertion that black people have inferior genes for intelligence on average without any data whatsoever about the genes for high and low intelligence and their relative prevalence in various populations.
I see a serious bias among those who advocate for this view that, somehow, outcomes now are special. If we go back through history, we can probably find times in which any given ethnic group or population was “on top” socio-economically speaking, and probably had all the same educational and other benefits that those at the top have now, and we can find times in which any group was “at the bottom”. So I don’t see why outcomes (test scores, academic outcomes, economic outcomes, etc.) now somehow must represent a true ‘natural order’ or hierarchy, genetically, while outcomes at various times in the past do not.
I think it’s very likely that the same sociological forces that put various groups at the bottom, whether they were black, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Native American, or whatever, at a given time in the past, are still in place today, to varying degrees, such that there’s no reason to think that outcomes now are more representative of the ‘true’ nature of group genetic differences than any specific time in the past.
Everyone wants to believe their generation has lived to see an enlightened society. The world may have been backwards and injust in the past, but OF COURSE that’s not true today. Because we are in the world! And we are awesome!!
These people would have us believe that the “bad ole days” were ancient history, rather than in living memory. And they aren’t just in living memory. The Great Depression and WWII are still in living memory, but the folks with those memories are not really running the world anymore. But I have coworkers who were educated under the societal presumption that they were inferior human beings. They don’t just remember being called “nigger” by ill-mannered children. They remember when it was legal for society to treat them as if that’s what they were.
If you were to look at the age structure of the black staff in my office, a pattern would quickly emerge. With a couple of exceptions, every black person who is 45 or older is employed in the administrative department. However, with a few exceptions, every black person who is younger than 45 is employed in a technical position–scientist, engineer, or IT person.
What could possibly explain such a thing? It can’t be a change in black culture, since we’re not even talking about different generations (in a few years I’ll be in my mid-40s). It can’t be a change in genetics. The only explanation that makes any sense is that a barrier that once existed has now been removed. I attended integrated schools. Almost none of my older black coworkers did. I was encouraged to study the hard sciences in college. My older black coworkers who made it to college were encouraged to study more practical majors, like accounting (quite a few of the accountants where I work are African American). I was born with all the rights and privileges of first-class citizenship. Some of my older black coworkers can’t say this, because they were born under Jim Crow.
There are a few black people in my agency who have made it to management. But almost all of them were born and educated in the North. I don’t think that’s a coincidence (…and I’m usually the first to remind everyone that the North ain’t a bastion of peace and racial love).
To expect black people to be even-stevens with white people is to believe that a single generation worth of inadequate social reform is enough to make up for centuries of oppression. That is absolutely ludicrous.
Well, to be more accurate, the average (mean? median?) scores of black students whose parents have some level of wealth and some level of education, who are attempting to enter college tend to be lower than the average scores of lower-income white kids.
You keep posting in a way that suggests that no black kid ever scores as high as any white kid. Unless you have evidence that no black applicant to college scored higher than 1550 on the old SAT, I doubt that your suggestion is anywhere near to being accurate.
You are working with averaged scores regarding a few populations with only a couple of identifying factors that really do not identify anything resemble the various factors involved. Hypothetically, the numbers (based on income and “education”) could be skewed because a large number of the kids’ parents were black professional athletes with basketweaving degrees. (Obviously, I am exaggerating for effect, but the reality is that “income” and “education” are simply not sufficient filters to identify the multitude of variables that determine test scores.)
That’s actually an interesting point. I’d love to see a breakdown of the professions of high-income African Americans by percentage, compared to the professions of high-income white Americans by percentage.
Now, of course Pedant’s gonna look at that and completely miss the point, show that it’s proof that black people aren’t smart enough to be dentists or something. But of course that’s not the point: the point is, as Tom suggested (I think, not trying to put words in your mouth), that black paths to wealth have traditionally been highly circumscribed, such that whereas any white dude with a DDS can live in a fancy house, a black person who wants wealth better be a sports star or an entertainer, and be among the top names in their field.
If we’re comparing children of high-income earners, we need to be clear on whether black folks who are high earners reach that point disproportionately through entertainment or sports, and therefore may not have the academic background that white folks with similar earning potential have.
To be fair, Chief Pedant has claimed that the comparisons were of wealth and education. Of course, we still don’t know exactly what “education” means in that context.
Since we’ve been through all this before, I’ll probably bow out of the thread soon. But there are some sobering numbers out there, and sobering comments from those who have looked at scores.
*"If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine.
In 2004, 10,370 blacks took the LSAT examination. Only 29 blacks, or 0.3 percent of all LSAT test takers, scored 170 or above. In contrast, more than 1,900 white test takers scored 170 or above on the LSAT. They made up 3.1 percent of all white test takers. Thus whites were more than 10 times as likely as blacks to score 170 or above on the LSAT. There were 66 times as many whites as blacks who scored 170 or above on the test."*
While these scores are not adjusted for opportunity per se, there should be a significant effacement of that variable given that the students who take these exams are already a high-performing subset admitted to college and have had equivalent college curriculums by way of preparation. Yet for the LSAT, for example, the score difference at high levels is ten fold.
It would be ridiculous to pretend that no “blacks” score well. It’s a self-identified group that, for a given individual, doesn’t even necessarily give that particular person a majority of an acestral gene pool. All self-identification does is create an association with a group average. I could be Barack Obama and happily identify as black, either for practical reasons or genuine cultural affiliation. But genetically I would be no more be sub-saharan than european (and perhaps quite a bit more out-of-africa haplotypes depending on my african side).
Based on this and many previous threads, I am sure that you and others can come up with putative nurturing variables ad nauseum. Blacks dominate football, basketball and sprinting because of culture. The Inuit would be just as good, except for nurturing and geographical location. Wealthy blacks have ancestral oppression, teacher expectation and naivete with how to get their children to take advantage of educational opportunity. Educated blacks still have children growing up in a racist world.
I am pretty sure the list of excuses will grow as fast as it needs to, because the traditional list–wealth and opportunity–has crapped out.
I pretty much get it that anytime we see a group average difference, it must be due to something other than evolution and average genetic differences, and if we cannot do a large, rigorous double-blind study from childbirth to death, we shouldn’t implicate genes until we perfectly define every gene.
Implicating genes is bad. Racist, even. Nazi-ish, even.
When SAT scores are adjusted for parental education, and the black cohort as a parent with graduate or above education, and the white cohort has high school or less…