I believe I said “unable to learn on par with peers” and that’s exactly what the issue is. You want to wave a “but I have a special case because I’m black” discrimination flag and use it to obfuscate all reasons except that to account for the observed data.
Specifically, the observed data that privileged blacks cannot perform academically on par with any but unprivileged peers.
Waving that rhetorical flag may be effective to those not living in the academic world, but it is highly unpersuasive to those familiar with the facts.
This idea that a privileged black pupil cannot perform on par academically with his peers–indeed; that the average black scores are so abysmal they are barely on par with seriously underprivileged whites and asians–because some sort of conspiratorial widespread bias against him exists, is patently ridiculous.
I don’t know what “my side” is for science, and I’ll leave you hugging the Scarr study and hoping nobody actually reads it. I’ve commented on it before.
I can tell you this: What is unconvincing (and patronizing) is your set of excuses for why black pupils in the US (and everywhere else in the world, on average) underachieve academically when one factors out poverty.
But if those excuses let you find solace in your faith that mother nature is egalitarian, I guess they let you keep those rose-colored glasses in place.
Interesting dichotomy being presented here. Though, I understand that the ‘non African population’ share more recent common ancestors than when the entire human race is considered as a whole, this binary way of thinking or talking about the global population doesn’t make any sense. And it seems that recent studies mapping the human genome do not agree with it either.
Apparently, these migrations occurred around the same period that one group of the L3 bearers left Africa to populate other parts of the world (But, for some people, the within-Africa splits do not matter simply because they happen to be on the same “continent”).
So the other L3 bearers “populate other parts of the world” by splitting further over the generations, branching off into different territories across the globe (sub-dividing into what has come to be known as two haplogroups N and M). So within the “Eurasian gene pool” there are many different populations that have been** “largely separated by tens of thousands of years”**. Meanwhile, each of these populations had to adapt biologically to their different environments, evolving many different genetic traits in the process. And, of course, further lineage splits have also been taking place within Africa itself.
Yep. It sure makes a lot of sense to talk about the human race in binary terms.
One would almost think you were talking about two different species of animals as opposed to human populations that just happen to be on two arbitrarily chosen sides of the human ancestral tree. By the way, what is a “gene pool”? I’ve always thought of it as somewhat synonymous with the concept of “breeding pool”. I looked up the definition on Wikipedia and got this:
This echoes my observation about it sounding as though we were reading about two different animal species.
No it’s not. I’ve never said I believed any individual was unable to learn on par with anyone. I’ve stated that I believe there are obstacles that make it more difficult (but not impossible) for some to achieve certain levels of success.
No I don’t. You’re making this up.
Completely false. There are plenty of black people, privileged or otherwise, that perform academically as well as anyone on earth.
Such an assertion is trivially easy to refute – all we need to find is a single black student who performs extremely well. Why bother making such easily refutable assertions?
Luckily, no one (besides you, perhaps) is making the absurd suggestion that “a privileged black pupil cannot perform on par academically with his peers”.
This is so ridiculous it almost defies belief. Do you honestly believe that no black students can succeed? Do you really believe that every black student fails?
Yes, you’ve made false comments about it before, and dismissed it for no valid reason. And you’ve continually made excuses about why you or the rest of the “blacks are dumber” crowd are unwilling (due to extreme cowardice, laziness, and lack of interest in actual science) in trying to recreate what would be a very easy study with modern methods.
I’m sure it’s unconvincing to those with 19th century mindsets, and those who feel we can use the same logic to judge the supposed lesser intelligence of black people as we can for cockroaches – if you’re convinced that black people are inherently inferior on average, intellectually, due to their DNA, then you’re probably not going to be convinced that discrimination and oppression that are still around after decades and centuries might still exist and still have some significant effects on society and those who live in it.
More “egalitarian” straw man crap.
God what a load of baloney. You just can’t stop yourself from making up false arguments of those who disagree with you. You’re unable to debate with anyone but this ‘fantasy egalitarian’ who resides nowhere but in your own mind.
A minimal courtesy when entering a thread late is to read the prior posts. I don’t really have the energy to start a whole new series of threads, but as my courtesy to you I’ll let you digest some of the data (along with some free iiandiiii-type explanations upon which to seize.)
"Almost No Blacks Among the Top Scorers
on the Scholastic Assessment Test
For admission to the very highest ranked, brand-name schools such as Princeton or MIT, applicants need scores of 750 to be considered for admission. Yet, as we shall see, only a minute percentage of black test takers score at these levels. Thus, if high-ranking colleges and universities were to abandon their policies of race-sensitive admissions, they will be choosing their first-year students from an applicant pool in which there will be practically no blacks."
And here, e.g.
*“In 2005 the mean combined score for black students who took the Medical College Admission Test was 21.2. (Each of the three sections of the MCAT test is scored on a scale of 1 to 15.) For whites, the mean score on the combined three portions of the MCAT test was 28.5. Therefore, the white score was about 18 percent higher than the mean score for blacks. The racial gap in MCAT scores has been virtually unchanged for the past decade.” *
(Excuse their math–or mine–actually about a 35% difference…)
The fundamental dilemma around genes v nurture is not an academic argument around what mother nature has done. It’s an argument about how, and why, we need to preserve race-alone affirmative action.
If we accept that genes are not equal, we can accept that, in order to get to a society where everyone gets to participate, we are not going to have equal outcomes. Not for basketball; not for academic tests. So we make an accommodation based on self-identified race, which in turn reflects mother nature’s gene pools. (See above threads)
OTOH, if we decide it ain’t genes, then society is going to shift toward opportunity-based affirmative action. In that paradigm, blacks will (and have in the past) lose badly.
At every SES tier, blacks as a group markedly underperform whites and asians academically. So if we turn to “all genes are equal” then we turn to “who had the least opportunity?” That means blacks at the highest tiers of academic performance for blacks will no longer be accepted into competitive universities and no longer have the same opportunity for the high-tier professional jobs. Currently there is fierce competition among the most competitive Universities for black high-scorers, because they are so scarce. What those Universities do is create a separate standard that takes race into account so they can reserve positions for the best (but still markedly under-scoring) black candidates.
This is a disaster for the black community, and the shift toward it is happening under our feet. Indeed; challenges to race-based AA are gaining steam w/ some cases (Fisher, e.g.) headed back to the Supreme Court. And the losses will head all the way down the AA food chain of jobs. (Look up Ricci v DeStefano for a sobering example).
You may do your own due diligence on all of the data, or just read the various threads here.
All of this is covered upthread in posts regarding the out of africa split 65kya, Neandertal introgression…blah blah blah…
I encourage more reading if you want to understand the “interesting dichotomy” and why population geneticists lapse into shorthand gene pool descriptions of “african” and “non-african” for their “binary way of thinking.”
Some good links are upthread to help you out, including pictures.
It’s easy to show such a difference. All you have to do is show one person who has a mediocre IQ score but whose “overall intelligence”, based on his/her academic career and achievements or other social indicators, is clearly high.
Comparing IQ tests across the decades is indeed a ridiculous exercise and it is no less ridiculous than comparing IQ tests across regions with varying socioeconomic circumstances and across groups with varying social castes within each region.
Also, Flynn (unless he has changed his mind within the past few years) believes that the current average black adult male IQ score is 85 due to environmental factors. Furthermore, according to the Flynn effect, several decades ago most adult male whites “were mentally retarded or worse”. And this is with respect to the exact same or similar test questions (test questions did not get dumbed down for later generations; if anything, they only got harder). In fact, one could play the same game with respect to whites of previous generations by insisting (with “evidence”) that their low IQ scores couldn’t have been due to environmental or cultural reasons:
Any reasonable and intellectually honest person who isn’t afraid to deal with “genetic truths” regardless of their implications should conclude that there must have been some kind of miraculous genetic transformation – perhaps an explosion of positive genetic mutations controlling for intelligence within western populations (and, to much lesser extents, other parts of the world). We ought to stop wasting time with trans-generational egalitarian gibberish and deluding ourselves by seeking out all kinds of desperate environmental explanations to make tedious excuses for the poor IQ performances of people of earlier generations such as:
Or pretending that the SAT is synonymous with IQ tests by saying:
Or tiresome liberal machinations such as:
Enough with all this sociological gymnastics. Let’s just face reality, roll up our sleeves and seek to understand the cause of this genetic transformation and the consequences it might imply for mankind. Furthermore, the two groups whose genes ought to be examined and studied most carefully are the Irish and Italians who several decades ago had even much lower IQ scores than the rest of the mentally retarded white population (thereby making them truly clinically retarded) but now score exactly the same as the rest of the white population. This shows that the genetic explosion had greater impact on these groups, or that it began to happen to them earlier. Perhaps not surprisingly, the difference of the magnitude of the effect manifested itself precisely at the very period that these groups ceased to become a marginalized caste within the American society.
On the subject of why an individual (or a group of people) who, by all indications, ought to be bright nevertheless perform below par on aptitude tests or academic achievements even if they work hard; I have a suggestion for understanding why such a phenomenon may be possible. It’s just an idea. I do not know for a fact that it is the real reason, though I would be surprised if it wasn’t a significant factor. I think it may have something to do with self-image (or self concept) and insecurities attached to it and how they relate to concrete and abstract thinking.
There’s the theory of “multiple intelligences”. And people (pretty much everyone) are often good at some intellectual tasks but are inept at others. Like someone who graduates with a 4.0 in Political Science but ‘was totally crap’ at Chemistry and hates it. But I don’t believe that being poor at a particular area is necessarily a permanent feature of one’s brain. It’s likely that one just hasn’t managed to channel his/her ‘general intelligence’ towards that other domain. And it may be because of just lack of effort or it could be because of a subconscious (or unconscious) block or inhibition that is hindering the person from being adept in that intellectual domain. This block could be a deep-seated insecurity or sense of mystique with regards to that area. Even when such a person sincerely approaches the domain and attempts to work (and succeed) in it, they would struggle and would likely only end up confirming their sense of ineptness in it. As an analogy, a child with a deep-seated phobia of bicycles (or/and falling) would struggle a lot more and have much greater difficulty learning to ride a two-wheeled bike, even if she tried, than one with no such fears. Furthermore, the child is more likely to stick with tricycles than move on to the ‘next level’. A similar thing tends be the case with people with regards to cognitive tasks. People are generally more comfortable operating with crystallized intelligence than fluid intelligence. And it is in the former type that they are more comfortable (and adept) at dealing with abstractions (which is the highest stage in cognitive development during a person’s growth).
In other words, mental insecurities tend to hinder abstract reasoning and cause a tendency to restrict oneself, cognitively, to more concrete ways of thinking and problem solving. (Note that this is a problem with the sub-conscious mind that I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter that the person may not be cognizant of their own fears and insecurities). To appreciate why it could be a problem, consider this example: problem 22 of this UK SMC past paper (contains both questions and answers). Given basic geometry that even 9th grade students know, it can be solved without much trouble as long as one is not pathologically restricted to a concrete and rote manner of problem solving. Otherwise, it’s most likely that the student would be going round and round in circles (or, rather, triangles) probably forever without getting anywhere (even if she were actually very bright).
As is commonly known, efficient reasoning and problem solving is a synergy of both concrete and abstract thought which is guided by one’s intuitions (which are derived from experience – albeit from the unconscious). But a tendency to persistently limit one’s thoughts to concrete forms (which happens without the person even thinking about it) retards the level at which at which all of those three things operate. Instead of allowing one’s ability to develop in that area so that the mental objects being concretized become more sophisticated and/or voluminous, both the person’s concrete and abstract thought remain at relatively rudimentary levels. A good example of this is chess. There isn’t much difference in the manner in which a master and a weak player think about their moves, except that both the master’s tactical and strategic plans and considerations usually involve units of much greater ‘chunks’ of moves and heuristics. This is why they don’t even need sight of the board in order to play. Now, a person who has some kind of subconscious insecurity with regards to cognitive tasks that include board games could still develop his/her skill to a fairly good level just by obsession alone and significant exposure but would still be playing well below their actual potential.
As you may have noticed from the above, there is the general and mundane version of this ‘problem’ which is strictly area-specific (or subject-specific) that is characteristic of many people without really affecting their lives in any serious way. But there is a more pathological version of this (as in the example at the end of the previous paragraph). Most people don’t suffer from deep cognitive insecurities that affect them in a broad sense and make them incapable of fulfilling their potentials in any area they are inclined to pursue. But some people do. Furthermore, it’s quite possible that even groups of people that share a common identity which itself may be strongly linked to a very poor self image - particularly with regards to the intellectual domains – can suffer from this problem to some degree. This poor self-concept may be caused by stereotypes and social expectations. And, again, it is a sub-conscious problem. A person could be socially and consciously confident or even arrogant but still be affected by it.
This webpage touches on some of these factors in a more expansive way, though it concerns individuals (not groups). Two sections particularly worth reading are “The four languages of conscious thought” and “Individuation”.
My apologies for coming late to the thread. But i just couldn’t let you get away with some of the rubbish you’ve been writing. There are many other things i would have liked to respond to but it is now clearer than ever that it won’t be of any use.
No. You are the one who chooses to group humans into the largest possible groups (even when those groups are obviously useless relicts of a Victorian mindset long abandoned and disavowed by scientists as a group).
*
I* prefer to use the smallest possible group that has relevance. “Americans” was the appropriate group, since it’s the cultural distinction from “Nigerians” that matters. Since they’re the same on the average genetic front, the American team members being of recent, fairly pure Nigerian stock compared to the high-admixture African-Americans.
Whereas both groups would fall under “self-identified blacks” (in as much as most Nigerians could bother with such a useless-to-them classification). And that would be as useless as a very useless thing.
Yes, yes, all those Zulu and Xhosa members of the NBA totally bear this out :rolleyes:
I recommend obsessing less about intelligence and how to measure it. You can read my comments around Dr Flynn upthread, and elsewhere. There isn’t much value in getting bogged down over “intelligence,” which tends to be a sensitive and highly inflammatory discussion. It is as loaded an issue as racism, with much needless discussion around definitions.
The topic at hand is why black pupils in the US underachieve academically (versus whites) when one factors out poverty.
The answer is that self identification with “black” puts one in an average genetic pool which has been separated from self-identified whites by about 65,000 years. Further, an entirely new genome was introduced by the Neanderthal introgression into one of those groups and not the other (with the minor exceptions noted upthread). That Neanderthal genome represents an additional 200,000+ years of evolution from a common coalescence group.
Evolution diverges. It would be a naive expectation that these two groups have the same outcome for any given skillset, including that for test-taking.
It’s much more likely than not that evolution will have diverged those two populations, driving different observed outcomes.
That eliminating the major factor (SES) thought to be the reason for this marked disparity does not eliminate the observed outcome performance difference is not some sort of surprise to anyone open to a genetic explanation, any more than someone open to a genetic explanation for a BB/sprinting outcome difference would be surprised that eliminating nurturing differences doesn’t create a white NBA.
A persistent gap is, instead, an ordinary and expected outcome.
Of course it’s much easier to assert that black people are inherently inferior in intelligence on average due to genetics if one does so in less overt language.
No it doesn’t, since there are smaller groups in the self-identified “black” group that will be much, much more closely related to various groups in the “non-black” group than 65000 years of separate ancestry, and much more closely related than they are to certain other far-flung “black” groups.
SES is not thought to be the only “major factor” – further, SES is actually a major factor, and is responsible for a significant portion of the gap before it’s taken into account (the gap shrinks significantly when SES is normalized). There are numerous other proposed “major factors”, that have existed through American history and still exist today, which you ignore or dismiss for no reason.
In addition, there is specific experimental evidence against genetics as the cause, from solid science and a good experiment, and you dismiss it for no good reason. And once you dismiss it, you offer nothing but excuses about why supporters of the genetic explanation refuse to try and recreate what would be a cheap and easy experiment with modern methods.
Go ahead and manufacture more “egalitarian” straw-man bullshit, as you’ve done so many times before. Argue with your pretend opponents as opposed to the real arguments presented. Go ahead and blab irrelevant stuff about how populations may have been separated, and evolution can change outcomes… it provides zero support that black people have inferior genes for intelligence, especially considering that there is (once again) good science that refutes this conclusion. And go ahead and make the laughable claim that 19th century ideas about black people’s intelligence would actually be good for black people – I don’t know how on earth you do this with a straight face.
An average gap persists between highly privileged blacks and whites for the exact same reason a gap persists between highly privileged whites and asians: average gene pools for whichever source population happens to be represented. And this would be true anytime two populations are compared, high privilege for SES and opportunity is available to both groups within the same general cultural milieu, and a difference pattern emerges.
This idea that highly privileged black students from backgrounds with high SES and high parental education have some sort of secret cultural millstone preventing them from learning is risible. And the farce that the cultural millstone persists such that the best black students entering college still cannot compete 4 and 8 years later on graduate and specialty exams is not grasping at straws–it’s grasping at thin air.
It’s not as if “blacks” are some kind of special case. It’s just that our insistence for using that particular self-identified lump happens to parallel human migration patterns closely enough to create average gene pools separated by 65,000+ years of evolution, not to mention introgression of a whole new archaic genome into one pool and not the other. Turns out evolution is a bitch for both conservative young earthers and academic liberals, I guess. But betting on young earth creationism to bail yourself out is a bad bet. Evolution is real, and it diverges populations.
LOL on your Scarr study earnestness. Why don’t you pop up that link each time and give everybody who actually bothers to read it the chance to chuckle?
I do wish you the best trying to get rid of these genetically based average performance outcomes. A great deal of effort has gone into this so far; yet the pattern remains. No one is even bothering with Real Soon Now anymore. Elmination of these patterns will happen in school about the same time it happens in the NBA, and about the the same time the 100 meter Olympic dash looks representative of the self-identified races in the world.
I’ve read quite a bit of Flynn’s academic work. Generally, in his academic work, he shies away from direct comments on the influence of genes for maximum potential. His focus has been on the idea that what we measure with IQ ) has been rising for all groups as SES has risen (although the gap between groups has remained). We’ve had discussions elsewhere about the “Flynn effect.”
Dr Flynn is getting a bit more frank about his view of how much intelligence is hereditary now that he’s older…
Brainier mums needed to maintain future generations’ intelligence, says professor “Everyone knows if we only allowed short people to reproduce there would be a tendency in terms of genes for height to diminish. Intelligence is no different from other human traits,” he told the Sunday Star-Times. “A persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually. You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child.”
Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone.
Commissioner for Children Cindy Kiro said Dr Flynn was getting into “dangerous territory.”
He was a little too frank in that particular interview and started backpedaling as soon as it hit the press. Seems that even in NZ, the lower-performing academic groups self-identfy along average gene pool heritage. So not such a safe thing to say out loud when the girls who apparently need birth control in the water so the country can reproduce smarter citizens tend to be from one gene pool and not the other.
So we focus again on the assumptions upon which we disagree. Opportunity and “high privilege” are not equally available to both groups, even when SES is accounted for. Our society is still not equal.
More with this ‘can’t learn’, ‘preventing them from learning’, ‘unable to learn’, ‘cannot compete’ bullshit that no one (except perhaps you) is putting forward.
Quit making up arguments. How can you possibly keep saying this crap as often as I point out that no one is arguing this?
Pathetic nonsense that you repeat ad nauseam despite the fact that no one is saying black people can’t learn except for you.
Chief Pedant – black people can learn. Black people can succeed. Black people can compete. Whatever the cause of the gap, many black people still get past it and score as highly and succeed as greatly as anyone on earth.
Are you fucking kidding? Are you totally ignorant of American history? Most of American history was built on black people being “some kind of special case”.
More Creationist crap. God your arguments are pathetic. You’ve added nothing to them in the years we’ve been having this debate.
You make up “Egalitarian” crap that no one says. You make up “Creationist” crap that no one says. You make up “black people can’t learn” crap that no one says. And you spout irrelevant nonsense (much of it in accurate, like the idea that these gene pools have been separated for 65K+ years) that says nothing about the genes for intelligence for anyone.
LOL on your dismissal of good science and your side’s utter cowardice and laziness in actually doing science.
Little and weak effort has gone into this, and a few decades of weak efforts are not going to fundamentally change a society that has been built on certain ideas about black people for centuries.
Nothing new here – the same confabulated nonsense straw-man arguments that you’ve been knocking down forever, the same irrelevant stuff about genetics (peppered with falsehoods), the same ridiculously ignorant claims that “black people can’t learn”, the same dismissal of actual good science and cowardice and laziness in refusing to try and repeat a good experiment, and the same laughable assertions that 19th century ideas about black people’s intelligence actually would help black people.
I have just two questions that may help reduce you two, and others, talking past each other.
Do you realize that your first paragraph above does not in any way conflict with anything stated in this whole debate? Even if—IF—CP’s premise is correct, do you realize that it does not meant that many individual blacks can succeed greatly. Or even that the smartest person on the planet might be black? Do you realize that?
As far as the part of your second paragraph I bolded, are you of the mind that if we can’t foresee that a theory, or a hypothesis, would be beneficial to black people, that the discussion shouldn’t be had? That the science shouldn’t be pursued? If you are not of that mind, why did you write that?
CP has outright stated things like “black people can’t learn”, “black people can’t succeed”, “black people can’t compete”. I am refuting the things that he’s said, and pointing out the straw-man arguments that he is constantly making up.
I wrote that because CP has stated (using flowery, less overt language) that if everyone only accepted that black people’s intelligence is naturally inferior on average due to genetics, then things would be better for black people.
I think that’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. I’m of the mind that utterly ridiculous assertions like that should be pointed out, filleted, and mocked. We don’t have to hypothesize what would happen if all of America “accepted” this, because for most of American history, this was the overwhelmingly prevailing opinion.
Pardon; your desperation is showing when you resort to outright falsehood.
I think it’s a minimum courtesy–not to mention a minimum standard if you hope to be taken seriously in a debate–to actually quote, and to quote in context.
Feel free to back up those specific lies, with quotes in full context, with a reference to where you found them. :dubious:
But betting on young earth creationism to bail yourself out is a bad bet. Evolution is real, and it diverges populations.
