Why do black pupils in the US underachieve academically when one factors out poverty?

Great Debates
1002

I explicitly discount that any fundamental other than average genetic differences is driving the marked change in proportional representation for blacks in power sports.

It is not that blacks have suddenly become culturally aware of the opportunity sports gives. It is not that whites have lost interest in trying. It is not that blacks have greater opportunity or superior nurturing.

As the world’s bushes are beaten for successful candidates, we may well see various population cohorts becoming successful.

It is highly unlikely undiscovered sub populations of successful europeans exist. I will not be surprised at all to find successful sprinters emerge from west african pools.

Were there a mechanism for me to put money on whether the Olympics will cycle back to white dominance, I would do so. :wink:

1003

As a cohort, self-identified whites have had a long history of success in sports. Whatever fraction of that average gene pool is non-european has already been reflected in their average success.

In recent decades, a cohort with a new average gene pool has been permitted to compete.

The results are evident.

Two average gene pools. Two average outcomes.

Breathless accounts of how Jamaicans are overwhelmingly nurtured for sprinting ring a bit hollow as an explanation.

If those nurturing explanations are correct, perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to extend to Jamaicans the idea that education is an even more valuable route to success. Apparently they have not been able to figure that out on their own and have mistakenly pursued sprinting for their nurturing initiatives?

1004

I don’t get it. “Blacks” are very obviously not 100% West African, especially in the US. And considering the US dominates many sports, and there’s no indication or evidence that US black athletes with more West African ancestry are better than US black athletes with less West African ancestry, I don’t understand how it’s so easy for anyone conclude that it must be the West African ancestry and not possibly the specific combination of ancestries that make up American black people.

1005

Bolding mine. The point I am trying to make is: By the time you have selected away competitors enough to have only the top performers in the world left, there is nothing average about them. Nothing that affects performance. Not nurture, not motivation, not will, not genetics.

Your argument would hold up if the way top athletes were selected was taking a small group of random people, letting them compete and calling the best “top performers”. If the top then was only African Americans, there would be a real argument for a genetic root.

However, that is not how top athletes are selected. The selection process is much, much more extracting. When you get to the level called “The best in the world”, you’ve selected away those who do not work like maniacs for it, those who did not get the support form their environment, those who could do better with less work in other areas, and those who did not have the genetics for it.

Now, a 3% ingression of west African genes in the white American gene pool is not really a lot. And its an average. You’re going to have self-identified whites with 0 %, and you’re going to have some with much higher percentages, that just didn’t include skin color genes. And exactly which genes you got will vary.

223 million people is a lot. It is a big gene pool. And with that 0 -to- high percentage of African genes sloshing around in it, its going to include all the African genes. (Even the skin color ones, amusingly enough) And in that gene pool you would have white people with all the hypothetical west African genes for running. Rather a small fraction of the pool. But even a small fraction of 223 million people would be enough to utterly saturate the number of people who become top athletes.

White Americans with the west African genes for running would be total outliers, but the selection process will eliminate everyone who isn’t.

So if the genetic explanation held up, we’d see more white Americans become top runners.

1006

I recognize I am not the brightest headlamp in the tunnel, but I am utterly unable to follow this line of reasoning.

We have average genetic source pools separated by 65,000 years.

The white cohort has nearly 100% of its average pool from one source pool, and establishes a performance mark. The black cohort is not permitted to participate.

When a black cohort containing genes from the alternate source pool is permitted to participate, at every level along the development way from middle school onward, they are disproportionately represented. At the highest level they are nearly exclusively represented. The previous white standard is obliterated by the new black cohort for every quantifiable standard (sprinting is a great example), and where a selection process includes blacks, whites are vastly underrepresented (basketball is a great example).

When we look for a nurturing advantage we do not find it. In fact, given the overwhelming quantity advantage of white wannabes, and the overwhelming advantage for coaching, facilities, opportunity of choice to do whatever in life you want, and so on, the nurturing advantage heavily favors whites. For the kinds of sports involved, one would have to postulate that whites voluntarily abandoned them despite showing great promise. Against that notion (other than the fact that excellence in sports is advantageous for whites as it is for blacks) is the stark fact that whites have continue to improve over past white standards–the overwhelming evidence is that more whites than ever are drawn to these sports, and have better nurturing than ever. They didn’t decide it was someone else’s turn.

Let us consider genetics. Evolution diverges. Every physiologic correlation we can make points to fundamentally different phenotypic outcomes driven by genes. Different averages for 577X homozygosity. Different creatine kinase levels. Different maturation. Different testosterone averages for males. Different bone density. Different muscle mass. Different armspan ratios. Different leg/torso ratios…on and on.

And those differences do not point in unexpected directions which then need to be explained. They point in the direction that plain observation points. The differences we see in genetic underpinnings would be predictive that a west african source pool would be an advantageous one over a european geneset, even if these sports were only hobbies and we had no environment in which there were masses of wannabes that created large enough pools for study.

Here’s the point I think you are missing: Although the white pool may contain “all the african genes,” whatever contribution that makes is already calculated into the baseline white standard established before blacks were admitted to the competition pool.

Now you bring in a pool that has an overwhelming majority of advantageous genes for the skillsets, and what would you expect? You would expect that the cohort with a higher percentage of advantageous genes would emerge dominant, and you would expect that pattern at every level of competition from maturity on.*

*Since maturation rates differ, it doesn’t make sense to look at performance outcomes for babies through sexual maturity, but that’s kind of a fine point…

1007

Except not very separated, and there is some small but significant amount of African genes within the “white American” population, and a larger and more significant amount of European (and other) genes in the “black American” population.

If these results were due solely to West African genetics, one would think we would see two things: black athletes with more West African ancestry would be better at these sports on average than black athletes with less West African ancestry (and you’ve presented no evidence that this has been measured), and some small number of white athletes (who happen to have some small but significant portion of West African ancestry) would be just as competitive at the top of these sports. Since there are so many “white” people in the US, there should be some small but significant number of white Americans who have these perfect sprinting genes.

Not necessarily – if black kids play more basketball, on average, then white kids, then it would make sense that black kids would be more likely to ascend to the NBA. This may be the case (or maybe not).

1008

It is simple, among the pool of the white americans there is a percentage as shown that there are the white identifying americans that have up to one half ‘african’ descent although more frequency to one quarter. It is even the case as it is shown in that reference that this is geographically concentrated in the southern states of the USa. a relatively small percentage of a very larger population will produce the gross numbers that are much larger than a larger percentage of a small population. If the key is the genetics… and of course you should be able if it is so strongly the genetics, to grade the effects by “african input” but instead you keep making claims about hte obviousness of the phenotype in the selection… which is culture, not the genetics.

your claims only make sense in an american “one drop blackness” idea…

Eh?

that is not true at all (except in using “average” in a way that is making obfuscation).

There are continuous exchanges between the north africa via the nile and the east Africa in particular and between east africa

The white cohort has nearly 100% of its average pool from one source pool, and establishes a performance mark. The black cohort is not permitted to participate.

across the sahara for at least two thousand years there are exchanges as well, and before the sahara dries there were clearly populations mixing. the 65 thousand is a false number.

you have a very poor understanding of the african genetic contacts with the north africa and thus into europe.

1009

I think the problem is that you may not appreciate how large the US population is, and how top athletics select for outliers.

A 3 % average ingression of west African genes is not a lot -on an individual basis. However, 3 % of the US white genepool is quite a lot, due to the size of the genepool.

For example, it has been estimated that the number of neanderthal genes present in todays population is enough raw material to make 180 million Neanderthals! Because todays population is large. That is an oversimplification of course. Not every Neanderthal gene is present in todays population, only about 20 %. But every West African gene is represented in the US white population.

And if there are genetic causes for the sports performance, some white individuals will have those west African performance genes. A small fraction of the pool. But this is where the size of the pool comes in: A small fraction of 223 million will be a reasonably large number. Possibly larger than the number in Jamiaca. And this is where the heavy selection process comes in: Top athletes, the very top, are selected from a group in which every advantage is present. People lacking one or more advantages will not only fail to reach the group of top athletes, they won’t even be in the group from which they are selected.

If the performance is genetic, the white baseline would have been set by white athletes whose 3 % +/- happened to include the performance genes.

And hence, if the differences were due to genetic factors, the baselines would not differ.

What we have is an average difference in gene pools. That difference will converge the further up you go in performance and more and more non-optimal gene variants are selected out. The sharp end is going to be nearly identical for those genes.

1010

It is true there has been a small amount of genetic backflow into african populations from european ones.
But not much, as an average percentage.

This is why, for example, you can look at post out of africa markers such as Neanderthal genes or MCPH1 haplogroup D and see marked differences in average frequency between eurasian and subsaharan groups.

There is more backflow of out of africa lines into modern east african lines to be sure. Upthread are some numbers related to Neanderthal admixtures.

1011

You have to get one white guy with ALL the right black gene variants, and none of the white genes which are disadvantageous. With a such a tiny admixture percentage, that is not going to happen. And doesn’t.

There aren’t just one or two genes which affect athletic performance. There are dozens.
So it isn’t the case that a white population with a small average admixture would have a small percent of super high performers just because some of those genes might exist.

Suppose that homozygosity for 577R is advantageous, for example. You wouldn’t see a certain number of high performers just because you see some people with that. You need the rest of the advantageous genes–bone density; muscle mass; leg/torso ration…whatever.

A white population with a certain amount of admixture would establish a performance baseline: Say, 10.2 seconds for a hundred meter dash for the very best, perfectly nurtured.

If a black population comes along and gets 9.8 seconds (I’m making up the numbers, but not the idea), what that means is that the genetic combinations in the black population are not seen in the white population because the white population has so many other genes in the milieu that you never get the right combination, even with very large white populations.

This is, in fact, exactly what has happened and what has been observed.

I await some nurturing explanation for why whites have lost out to blacks. Where have their times gone down? Where have whites suffered from disadvantageous nurturing? Where has white incentive to do well dissipated?

1012

This is where I think you need to stop and reflect on the size of the US white gene pool. And the picking of outliers. First off, the 3 % is an average. You’re going to have self-identified whites with 0 % and with 20 %.

You say “It doesn’t happen” but I think we need to look at that more closely.

Now, all the black genes are represented in there, somewhere. In various concentrations, and various variations. 1 percent of that gene pool is millions of people. 1 percent of that 1 percent is tens of thousands of people.

Yes, it does happen. It has to happen, statistically.

And there is more. You speak of “dozens of genes”, although I don’t think there is a cite for that. However, these will not be dozens of genes unique to the West African gene pool. At best, a very few of them would have started out that way before getting admixed. What you’d also have, in the case of the genetic explanation being correct, is a number of genes occurring at a higher frequency in the west African gene pool, while also being present elsewhere. You might also very well have genes in other gene pools that increased performance, but not as much. Genetics are not that simple.

Now, this is where you need to stop and reflect on what the term “outlier” means. You argument would make sense and be a strong one if these times were established by the populations as a whole. Average of every one in the white population, 10.2, average of everyone in the black population 9.8. That would mean that something was going on that made the black population on the average perform better. Not necessarily genetics, but possibly.

The top results, however, are established by outliers, that has little to no genetic similarity to the average population in therms of genes suitable for the sport. If they did, they would not be top performers.

In a “genetic explanation” scenario, the white best time would be established by an outlier with the West African set of genes for running.

None of which is actually related to intelligence or academic achievement.

1013

The pattern which establishes the better average gene pool is not an outlier pattern seen only at the level of the best performance. You would notice a similar pattern of relative over-representation across the board, from middle school through college; from pick up games to organized sporting clubs.

It is a pervasive pattern seen at every level of development and it extends across the breadth of participants. Whether sprinting, or basketball or football, from the starting pool candidates at middle school on, this pattern is very broad, and nurturing advantages for whites does not overcome it.

An advantageous average gene pool for a skillset in one area, such as sprinting, does not have a thing to do with an advantageous average gene pool for a skillset in a different area such as memorizing facts and regurgitating them on an SAT, or solving an engineering problem, or creating an innovative solution with a new invention. It is simply an example of average gene pool differences driving real life success. Resistance to a genetic explanation is an example of resistance to the idea that mother nature would touch any human genes other than those for superficial appearance or disease. The concern from genetic egalitarians is that we not fall down a slippery slope where nature touches genes that have impact for average performance outcomes in arenas that affect real-life success. Mother nature has no such concern.

Genes underpin our maximum potential for any skillset. An average gene pool will drive an average maximum skillset, and where nurturing is reasonably supportive for attaining that maximum, the pattern that emerges will reflect an average difference in gene pools.

Science has proven human lineages are separated by tens of thousands of years, and that the creationist notion humans are exempted from evolutionary divergence is in error.

Where migration patterns intermingle historically separated genetic pools into self-identified cohorts that reflect those source pools, it should not be a surprise that outcome patterns for the full gamut of human skillsets also diverges. Evolution will continue to drive divergence of outcome until the intermingling so homogenizes the gene pools that they no longer have an average separation.

1014

So many straw men, and so much irrelevance, in the last post, and so little actual data… including nothing at all addressing the specific experimental evidence that refutes the genetic explanation for the test score disparity.

1015

Human evolutionary divergence obviously exists. You can generally tell a Chinese man from a native Australian man, and both of them from a Norwegian man, with one simple glance.

But, wait: they all have five fingers on each hand, an ulna and a radius, a four-chambered heart, and so on. No divergence at all: absolute identity.

Divergence is limited. There is nothing to show that “intelligence” behaves like skin color or the conformation of noses or chins, instead of like the outline of the skeletal structure. The fact that people everywhere are about at equal facility in learning each other’s languages suggests that intelligence is probably a deeper kind of thing, common to all in about the same way.

(And this assumes that intelligence is a “thing” at all, which a good many of us dispute. It’s like saying that various populations differ in “kindness” or “playfulness.” Sociologically, yes, they might, but it’s insane to say that these are genetically determined traits – or that these are measureable and identifiable traits at all. You have a playfulness index of 125, I’ve got a kindness quotient of only 95. Not very convincing, and absurd to attribute to genetics.)

1016

Correct. However, the top athletes in the world do in no way represent an average gene pool. If they did they would not be in the top, but average. Their genes are unrelated to the pool average for performance in their area.

Hence, their results do not indicate anything about the average gene pool either way.

A couple of skipped steps here: It is not documented that such a pattern exists. Nor is it documented that it is too broad for it to be cultural. I do not, in fact, think we have any standards for how broad such a pattern has to be for us to dismiss culture as a source.

We have previously raised issues such as Norwegian dominance in winter sports and Jamaican dominance in sprinting over other nations with a similar preponderance of west African genes, to show that we can have a region dominate a sport without there being a genetic explanation.

Also, all the information in this thread supports the performance gap following cultural lines, not genetic ones. Children of African-American high academic performers not performing significantly better that their peers, and west Africans outside the US cultural sphere failing to under-perform academically.

Correct.

Not correct. You are assuming that genetic differences for athletic performance and academic performance change at similar rates just because they are “genetic”. This is not so. Genes change at different rates, and some do not change at all. See Trinopus point above. Functions influenced by genes do not change at the same rate either. Functions influenced by multiple genes working together, or highly complex functions normally change much slower.

Reasoning that there has been time for a change in average athletic performance, therefore there must have been time for a change in academic performance is like reasoning that since a Ferrari can cover 150 miles in a hour, so can a tricycle.

That homogenizing is 50 % from each pool. At the moment we have a 20/80 split. That is nearly halfway there.

More, it being possible that genes driving performance in some areas have diverged, does not men that they actually have. The evidence that they have seem limited to one cultural pool, where the lines seem to follow cultural fractures rather than genetic ones.