Yeah, in mice. In my opinion, the only half-credible example in humans involve mutations in proteins cleave APP in those with Swedish and Jewish ancestry. The idea is that upregulation of APP in mice lead to enhanced memory formation until senility when cleavage becomes aberrant and leads to a familial form of Alzheimer’s disease. Now, whether Swedish and Jewish people are smarter than the rest of us is something I’ll let you ponder.
Its complex. There are some proteins that are your bread-and-butter like CREB and ATF. Upregulation of these proteins result in enhanced memory in mice. Then you have a bunch of ancillary proteins that are involved in neurotransmission that can modulate learning and memory by themselves or in concert with other gene products. A person with a mutation that allowed for increased synthesis of catcheloamines in the the frontal cortex would certainly score better in tasks that require vigilance and executive function than someone without the mutation. This assumes that the mutation is only expressed in neurons in the frontal cortex, though. If there was increased synthesis of catcheloamines in peripheral nervous system, you’d have an individual with a very short lifespan.
I am skeptical that you’ll be able to find the black-white divide in the genes. If it were that easy, someone could take brain samples from different “races” and run quantitative PCR on a suite of genes involved in memory and attention.
I think the analogy between heritability of intelligence to the heritability of athletic performance is vastly overplayed.
Consider: There is no question that there exists a larger percentage of blacks in professional sports such as basketball, out of proportion to their numbers in the entire population. Certainly it’s likely that (in addition to whatever cultural factors are at work) there are some genetic predispositions here. However, these people are at the top of their field. They’ve practiced untold hours and outlasted all the thousands of people who didn’t have the skills to make it past college basketball, or even high school basketball.
There is an argument that attempts to suggest that if black people have certain genetic traits that might account (however minutely) for their over-representation in basketball and track, why not something similar when it comes to intelligence. I’ll grant that this might be plausible. However, what I take issue with is the application of it at such a basic level as the SAT. Students’ complaints notwithstanding, the SAT is really not all that rigorous a test. It’s an assessment of certain verbal and mathematical abilities, and certainly a baby couldn’t take the test, but the whole idea is that it’s not supposed to requite excessive specialized knowledge to take. Even if there were measurable, quantifiable racial differences in intelligence, I’m extremely skeptical that it would manifest itself at such a simple test as the SAT.
I think it’s a good point that we need to define intelligence better if this thread is going to, as it appears, focus entirely on possible genetic/race connections to disparities in academic achievements.
There are features of intelligence that we know have genetic traits. It’d be weird if there weren’t, since our entire pattern as humans is determined by genes. Victims of William’s Disease have prodigious linguistic abilities but very poor reasoning skills. Autistic children often lack social skills, but have strong memory for detail. Men tend to do better at spatial puzzles than women; women tend to read emotions on faces better than men.
These are all traits that conceivably have genetic markers. Which ones–or are there others–that someone is positing are traits stronger in one race than in another?
Figure that out, and then a study with rigor might be designed.
Daniel
DTNBP1, CHRM2, IGF2R, SNAP-25, ADRB2. cite for one of above, with others having similar (or pubmed them!)These are all genes showing genetic linkages to intelligence (as it can best be defined, which is obviously debatable) in humans. Again, there is no “intelligence” gene, like there is no “height” gene. There are more than likely dozens, or hundreds of interacting genes that put you within a certain range of intelligence (or height).
erislover, you have exactly the same genes as every other person in the world, and every gorilla or chimp, for that matter. (maybe some exceptions here, not sure, but not very many, if any). Hell, you have most of the same genes as a fruit fly.
It’s how and when those genes get turned on (expressed) that determines their function. If your DNA encoding for, say CHRM2, has some of the surrounding DNA telling it to turn on at an earlier stage of development, or at a higher concentration, this will have an effect on your intelligence. Positive or negative, hard to say.
Obviously, a severe mutation in one gene can cause drastic effects, like some of the ones that lead to mental retardation, or dwarfism where the protein ultimately made from the DNA is simply incorrect. But, for the majority of people, it’s just polymorphisms that affect the gene’s temporal expression or level of expression that determine a number of different gene expression patterns that will manifest as what we call “intelligence” or “gorilla” or “red hair”.
By the way I’m NOT arguing race = intelligence! I’m not touching that one!
Just that intelligence pretty clearly has a genetic component.
Until someone describes a race in terms that are unequivocal–i.e., sharing sufficient genetic material as to unite them while separating them from any other group–then I think that any discussion of race as if it was a biological reality, as opposed to a cultural creation imposed using arbitrary rules, is fruitless. Who are “blacks”? The population in the U.S. who carry significant genetic material from both European and (indigenous) North American populations? Pygmies? (Khoi) San? Yoruba? Mandenka? Every one of these groups is genetically distinct, (with the U.S. group being a weird mixture of a lot of different origins). Why put them all into an arbitrary group and then act as though they might share some unidentified trait when they are only in the same group because we assigned them to it?
If someone wishes to discuss genetic populations, that is fine, but there is no such genetic population as “black.”
Apparently, I was, for saying much the same thing…
OK. If you don’t expect to see it based on your understanding of how race works and/or how intelligence works (i.e., on the factual issues regarding the subject matter), then we have no argument. If you don’t expect to see it because you think it would have bad implications and/or don’t want it to be true (i.e., based on your emotional response to the subject matter), then I think that’s a bad thing.
An insufficient proof of exactly what? Chief Pedant provided those statistics to argue against income gaps as explaining the black/white academic disparaties. He seems to have hit his target. Unsurprisingly, the target has now shifted – exactly has he described and predicted.
As I pointed out in the other thread, it’s very easy to play the epicycle game. It’s very easy to invent alternative explanations to explain away facts we don’t like and allowing us to hold on to the hypothesis we do like.
After a while, people who cling to the Egalitarian Hypothesis start to look like a hypothetical tobacco industry executive who simply won’t accept the simple explanation that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer.
You are exactly right. We continually see people shrug off every historical event and cultural factor for the purpose of hanging on to a hypothesis that some ill-defined group is just born that way.
Thank you.
Can you give me two examples of this? Thank you.
I would point out that although measurement may be able to indicate a difference in average intelligence between two groups, that says nothing about the intelligence level of a given individual member of those groups. There are plenty of dumb white people around. God forbid we should start treating people as individuals though.
Until a couple generations ago common sense indicated blacks were clearly and obviously inferior in every way and people felt it was not worth paying any attention to anything which contradicted their common sense. It seems now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme.
"What you call common sense is just prejudice. In this case of opposite sign to the prejudice which used to be so common. Both are prejudice, just of opposite signs.
QFMFT. This is what I’m trying to get at in my exchange with Marley23.
I’m not afraid to conclude that one race may be smarter than another but I’m highly dubious that we could measure something as complex as intelligence and be able to divide two genetic groups into “more” and “less”.
Actually, I’ve heard cultural explanations for both that make a lot of sense: in basketball, you only need one ball (i.e. no bats) and a court that is very common even in lower-class areas (i.e. no need for grass) that you can use just half of (unusual among team sports). In track, all you need is a good pair of shoes and some long, open space; this ease of training shows why poorer countries like those in Africa go for it so well.
But are both necessarily incorrect just because you’ve identified them as “prejudice?” We’re discussing a large group of people and not individuals, so it seems to me that any descriptor of the group could be dismissed as prejudice. What does that prove?
It’s the former. It’s the same as, say, September 11th inside job conspiracy theories, moon landing hoax stories, young earth creationism and a lot of other garbage. I’m not afraid of the ideas, but I’ve seen the arguments and ideas and they’re ridiculous.
groans
One “race” cannot be more intelligent or, uh, anything, because the term is a fraud. It’s meaningless. “Blackness” or “Asianness” or whatever, is not a clue to your genetic makeup.
Since I’m mentioned in the OP, I’ll make a single post in this thread and let it go…I’m not sure these discussions change opinions much.
The point I was making which resulted in the quote in the OP was simply to refute a commonly-held and commonly-mentioned misperception that standardized score differences are a result of income. Scores of any group correlate with income. This makes sense if one considers that on average, groups with high incomes are more likely to have high intelligence (or, more precisely, groups with high intelligence are more likely to have higher incomes).
I don’t think it’s helpful to discuss racial differences ad nauseum.
For the record:
Race is a broad cohort with little (but not no) genetic underpinnings.
I believe there are measurable, innate differences among races and that examples of those differences include raw IQ potential and raw athletic potential. I am aware of the sensitivity and controversy of this position.
It’s true that the extremely broad diversity among the population(s) who self-categorize as “black” makes it a very loosely-constructed cohort. This is not a persuasive argument that racial differences cannot therefore be genetic. If two cohorts are created whose only difference is their height, the short cohort might be substantially more genetically diverse, for instance, than the tall one. This doesn’t mean the tall cohort’s height difference is not genetic.
Within the loose categories of race are more tightly (genetically) defined subpopulations. If one takes a phenotypic expression as the filter to define a population, these subpopulations do not necessarily represent a common ancestry–they represent a common genetic potential. So, for instance, if I took a sub-population of black emigrants and compared their scores with poor white boys, I might see a reversal of an average difference noted in the larger cohort which contains that subpopulation. It may be that only the brightest, or the most industrious of the emigrant’s parent population actually had the wherewithal to emigrate, and the poor white boys are poor because their genetic pool creates a more limited potential for them.
We need to stop with the race stuff. It’s pointless. We need to stop categorizing people, comparing their scores and deciding whether my daddy can outscore your daddy. It’s divisive, it’s directly harmful and for good reason most people are uncomfortable discussing genetically-based potential.
There’s no question bigots, jerks and racists promote race-based comparisons–usually (in my opinion, and most ironically) the lower end of the cognitive spectrum. But race obsession is also promoted by those who want to blame race-based underachievement on the rest of society. And that’s just as wrong, and just as dangerous.
Once you decide your kid’s failure to perform is my fault and that I should be accountable for it, my only defense becomes showing that your kid is not as capable. A claim that blacks in America need to be proportionately represented in all areas of endeavor before we can say that the US is a just society (the claim which raised this point in the other thread) forces those accused of being unjust to examine the possibility of average innate differences.