DNA, Race, and Intelligence in The New York Times
by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted November 11, 2007 in DNA in General
Much excitement over at Gene Expression today over a New York Times article by Amy Harmon looking at genetic differences between races - In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice.
Jason Malloy was quoted with respect to his defense of James Watson’s comments about blacks last month. He writes of the NY Times article:
Nothing quite like this article has ever really appeared in the press. The underlying message is that the biological information environment is changing rapidly and if we don’t start opening up the tightly monitored public forum for it right now, we are endangering our ability to handle its potential revelations with any sort of real preparedness or rationality. We, as a civilization, can’t just keep silencing and punishing everyone who broaches these topics in a way that challenges our hopes and visions about human equality. The result is to shut down the discussion completely and disarm ourselves to ideas that are most likely - to some degree - correct.
Sure, I’d like to talk but how do I and everybody else go about becoming better educated on the issue first? The average person likely assumes that genes don’t play a huge role in differences between individuals simply because we’re constantly being told that our DNA is more than 99% the same. So what does it mean when we’re told that there are significant genetic differences between races and that these differences influence our physical appearance, susceptibility to disease, intelligence, etc.?
Here’s what I can say about the influence of genetics on intelligence and performance in everyday life - I don’t even think about it. Last week, one of the mothers at my son’s UK school, who’s from Afghanistan and doesn’t speak English well, asked me to explain one of the kids’ homework problems to her. She said neither she nor her husband could figure out what the teacher was asking for so her son wasn’t going to be turning in his homework on time. Do you think genetics figures into this situation much?
Maybe on a big picture level but day-to-day, children’s success today and in the future comes down to having parents who are fluent (or at least semi-fluent) in the local language and organized enough to plan ahead so that they’d know if they had a question about the homework and anything else that’s going on in school. There is no doubt that my son has an advantage when it comes to having motivated parents
What’s important to remember in the discussion about genetics and intelligence is that our genes carry us a certain distance but our environment–the people we come into contact with and the resources that are available to us–is also critically important in determining our future. A person with Albert Einstein’s genes born and raised by Bushmen is going to be very different than his twin born and raised in 21st century Manhattan. Transforming the infrastructure in African countries into a replica of the United States’ will improve people’s living conditions dramatically but there will still be unique differences brought about by differences in the citizens and the locale. It’s actually a relief to think that no matter how many McDonald’s and Starbucks pepper the globe, each place and its people retain their own identity. People are different from one another, but not always in a bad way.
HT: Renata McGriff of CareTALK
Tags: genetics, genes, dna, amy harmon, race, intelligence, iq, jason malloy
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Sorry, but as someone who works in Africa, this view is just a little too Panglossian for my taste. Gene Expression and its writers have historically been hostile to Africans and people of African descent, and it’s not only that good-ole-’liberal’ Jason Malloy who’s happy about this NYT article: the out-and-out racists, like Steve Sailer, are absolutely ecstatic.
Do you actually believe that, were Africans proven to have an IQ of 70, there’d be _any interest whatsoever_ in transforming the continent’s infrastructure into a replica of that of the United States? Get real. At this point, the only interest that Africa holds for the west is as a source of natural resources, and there’s rapidly diminishing commitment to any kind of aid, infrastructural or otherwise, to the place.
Dissemination of this kind of belief would merely make justifying another bout of neo-colonialism and resource-extraction a little easier. What folks like Malloy et al are trying to do is trying to resurrect the old Great Chain of Being, with Africans firmly positioned on the lower rungs. Besides filling whatever obscure psychological impulse lies behind such race-baiting, this will serve to further damage the case that Africans have for Western aid.
The most frustrating part of this is that the data do not actually support these beliefs. The IQ data from the continent is of terrible quality, such Malloy in his defence of James Watson was forced to resort to measures of schooling to shore up his conclusions. (A hint: African schools for the most part do not do a good job of teaching their students: if Malloy had ever been in one, he might have realised that.) But in this gene-crazy age, any explanation that invokes genetics and biology will automatically be privileged over one that invokes environmental effects, even at the New York Times.
Scott, Thanks for your thoughtful comment. You have a special perspective given your time in Africa. As I emphasized in my post, environment is critically important. I realize that my example of transforming African infrastructure is totally unrealistic but I don’t think we can argue that African countries need to be modernized so that its citizens get the clean water, food, healthcare, peace, etc. that they deserve. It is only then that children in Africa can begin to concentrate on anything more than surviving day to day.
I agree that genetic influences and constraints on a person’s potential is frequently overhyped especially coming from the vantage point of privileged people like me who think mostly of us and ourselves. Again, as I said in my post, genes don’t figure into basic living conditions and day-to-day living. A person of average intelligence deserves to live just as comfortably and happily as a person with an IQ of 120 and and same goes for a person of any IQ. So the idea that racists can employ IQ as a reason for continuing to oppress or ignore people with supposedly lower IQ is abhorrent. After all, the IQ cut-off that distinguishes between us and them can be changed at anytime, making some of us into them.
I know the history of the guys at Gene Expression and their affiliations. I may not agree with them on everything but the one thing I agree with is the need for discussion and debate. I know I learned a lot just from your one comment! Thanks again.
Bring Africans, African-Americans, etc. INTO the discourse. We also have opinions about the so-called “intelligence” of others, though knowing how damaging and distorted elevating oneself at the expense of the limitations of others can be — we have thus far remained SILENT — until now.
And for anyone who is wondering, here’s the definition for panglossian (I had to look it up):
characterized by or given to extreme optimism, esp. in the face of unrelieved hardship or adversity
I admit to being an optimist but try not to have my head in the sand all the time.
[...] Smith of Slate included some of my comments in a round-up of blogs discussing the Sunday New York Times article regarding genetics, race, and [...]
One only has to look at New Orleans to see what happens when Africans are given a first world infrastructure. They did not bother updating or improving it over the years and it collapsed when stressed one day. This is why I share James Watson’s lament about the futility of trying to improve Africa.
Whoa, Keith. I don’t know whether to delete you or smack you. According to the US Census, blacks made-up just over 67% of the New Orleans population. I would say the blame lies with many people of various ethnicities and races, and probably includes the man at the top sitting in the Oval Office.
Leave it on. He’s a wonderful illustration of the entrenched attitudes toward Africans and African-Americans that underlie much of this debate. That post lies toward one end of a spectrum of assumptions about people of African descent that we find cropping up again and again in debates about race and genetics.
The other end of that spectrum - and perhaps the most insidious one - involves an unwillingness to learn anything about Africans and African-Americans, and a quiet assumption that there is nothing interesting to learn about that particular portion of humanity. We see those assumptions at work in, for example, Bruce Lahn’s papers on the distribution of microcephalin and ASPM variants, where one of the underlying _assumptions_ is that there’s a lack of cultural progress to be explained in Africa, and genetic results are deployed for that explanation - even if the genetic data don’t actually support that assumption. (They do not, in the microcephalin/ASPM case.)
Lahn made that assumption in his original archaeological speculations in the two 2005 Science papers, and they were repeated credulously and breathlessly by science writers. The ‘nice racism’ of the bloggers
quoted by Amy Harmon in her NYT article generally is of this variety: a built-in, bone-headed assumption that all explanations for human variability must be genetic, and a corresponding moral blindness about the ways in which such intellectual models have been used in the past.
Leave the post up: it’s a good reminder that the other form of racism still exists, that the squeaky-clean, blogger-driven, yuppified racism of the early 21st century isn’t the only variety around.
As an African-American and proud descendent of slaves from Alabama and Virginia, I will be a fully engaged participant in this 21st Century drama — and latest attempt of (fearful) groups to prove (to themselves) they are superior. Only the insecure (in their own position and beliefs of superiority) need impose blanket diminishment of others based upon genetic criteria. I am not a scientist — but a marketer. I would say, from my vantage point, Jazz and its derrvative — Rock and Roll — and the worldwide CULTURAL attraction clearly demonstrate more originality than enslaving and commoditizing human beings (buttressed by scientists of earlier centuries and their religious compadres) represents. If GREED equals intelligence, I concede the argument here and now. Why the fixation/obsession w/Africans/African-Americans, who have SURVIVED legal and institutionalized slavery, legally enforced Apartheid and Segregation — and made quality lives and contributed (original/innovative) some say GENIUS — Jazz from our own distinctive culture(s). I would like to see some of these racist scientists match Louis Armstrong’s GENIUS, on HIS terms. They would look very unintelligent, indeed. Perhaps, in a non-hyper capitalistic driven world, where commoditizing human beings doesn’t underwrite economics of Nations, intelligence might look quite different. Perhaps, if the “superior” races didn’t stack the deck by institutionalizing methods to elevate themselves (legacies at universities, to name one) at the expense of others — we would REALLY see what intelligence is…or not. Gov. George Wallace yelling SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION FOREVER…and the South held America back from its promise and remains a blot on our collective humanity. It also speaks to his underlying FEAR that African-Americans may not be as unintelligent as is widely socialized and believed. Ditto, South Africa. Why impose Segregation and Apartheid on an “unintelligent” people — if they are so..unintelligent? Now, that’s a question to ponder…. Creating tests that skew toward the abilities and institutionalized preferential treatment of one group — to “prove” the limitations of groups not benefiting in the same manner — and using those tests to “prove” superiority — is more of the same. I say this with 21st Century bemusement and a determination I am sure my great-grandparents had when they were likewise challenged during American slavery and Segregation. Is there a gene for COURAGE???
First of all I’d like to point out that vicious personal attacks like this:
. What folks like Malloy et al are trying to do is trying to resurrect the old Great Chain of Being, with Africans firmly positioned on the lower rungs.
Are not only unsupported (and completely false) but are intentionally designed to poison the debate, and replace facts with insults. It isn’t helpful, and it’s ugly.
The IQ data from the continent [Africa] is of terrible quality, such Malloy in his defence of James Watson was forced to resort to measures of schooling to shore up his conclusions
This is incorrect. There are no conceptual or internal test features which differentiate the international assessment tests from the IQ tests. As I showed in my Watson post they are measuring the same construct. (correlation of results = .98)
When you examine the written tests more specifically, the African scores are not the result of some test artifact like a floor effect; item analysis and other measurement checks show the tests lack internal bias.
As I also showed in my post the tests are equally predictive of outcomes within and between African countries as they are in the West.
So the statement that the tests are poor quality are just assertions, and are contradicted by the data. The tests are not biased in the way that psychometricians use this term. It is important to familiarize yourself with how psychometricians actually evaluate test quality before you make assertions about matters like that. Intuition doesn’t cut it, testing is a science.
African schools for the most part do not do a good job of teaching their students: if Malloy had ever been in one, he might have realised that
I have read a number of papers on African schools. If the point here is to imply that poor quality schools invalidate the IQ measures, then this is incorrect; regardless of why the IQs are low, they reflect genuine skill deficits which predict important outcomes of interest.
If the point was I shouldn’t jump to any genetic conclusions for reasons such as poor schools, then my argument is being underestimated. I’m not basing such thinking on one data point, but on the way diverse kinds of evidence converge and more convincingly point in a certain direction.
This is why the media - far from being biased towards genetic explanations for racial gaps - systematically promotes factually incorrect statements about ethnic test score gaps to promote ideological environmental theories. For instance that gaps are explained by variables like income, parents, peers, stereotypes, schooling, or test bias. Meanwhile genetic theories are consistently omitted or are raised only to be mooted with factually incorrect criticisms (e.g. “Race does not exist” and has nothing to do with genetics). It is also why personal attacks are so typically used as a cheap substitute for informed and supported factual criticism.
These extraordinary handicaps are necessary only because no existing or plausible theories about the environment have made successful predictions, while genetics makes a number of successful predictions. (e.g. transracial adoption, cross-cultural consistency and specificity)
> It isn’t helpful, and it’s ugly.
Sorry, but from my perspective that’s not where the ugliness in this debate lies. One would expect that, given what’s at stake, proponents of the belief that Africans are an inferior grade of humanity - see below - would approach the topic with a good deal of moral seriousness, and a willingness to carefully entertain a whole variety of different explanations for, for example, African IQ test score results. Instead, what we see at Gene Expression and similar sites is a kind of adolescent eugenical glee, with genetic and biological explanations and African inferiority accepted a priori, _simply because it’s edgy_, and all objections dismissed as stodgy and ‘politically correct’*. There’s often a pro forma statement by you and yours that you used to be liberals on race issues but have since gotten better, but no evidence that you’ve ever _seriously_ evaluated alternative, confounding factors in these debates.
And there’s no doubt that the ultimate outcome here is to establish Africans and their descendants as an inferior grade of humanity… let’s not have any of that nonsense about how IQ doesn’t matter and _this time_ we can make ’separate but equal’ work. Look at how Lynn’s IQ test results were immediately take by one of his collaborators, Philippe Rushton, and used to buttress a completely nonsensical evolutionary model that depicted Africans as not merely unintelligent, but also violent, criminal, impulsive, promiscuous and selfish. Look at the model that Lynn and Vanhanen have established in _IQ and the wealth of nations_ - one that naturalises the present state of affairs in poor areas and poor countries, making such circumstances a matter of biology and thus more or less unamenable to any sort of amelioration.
This is especially the case in Africa, where IQ test score results are lowest and where people and institutions are poorest… two circumstances that I’d argue are linked, but not in the way that you assume. These data are already being used in arguments that aid of any sort to Africa should be cut, as it merely involves throwing good money after bad. Such arguments - to which you contribute directly, through your defence of Watson’s vapourings - have real consequences, in measures of populational health, disease burdens, social conflict.
Continuing high infant mortality rates, and dead children, are ugly. Having mean things said about you in a blog comment, not so much.
(*That term ‘h-bd realism’ that gets bandied about is illustrative. This goes back to the Human Biodiversity mailing list that Steve Sailer used to maintain seven or eight years ago, on which the Great and the Good of modern racial science - Lynn, Brand, Rushton, Murray, Miller, Whitney and so on - used to complain about the problems with the Lesser Breeds. Now Sailer has gone on more explicitly to immigration restriction and white nationalism at VDare.com [but he _loved_ your defense of Watson], and ‘race realism’ is a little too blunt, so the denizens of Gene Expression have found a nice, discreet substitute.)
> There are no conceptual or internal test features > which differentiate the international assessment
> tests from the IQ tests.
Do you have any idea of the circumstances in which IQ testing was done through the African continent, or for that matter of Richard Lynn’s history with these tests? Have you, for example, gone back and looked at the original papers in which these test results are reported? You will find, time and time again, testing done on small and unrepresentative samples, in cases where testing was taking place in languages in which the testees (often young students) were only marginally familiar, and in which their familiarity with test-taking procedures is poor - besides all of the issues of academic preparation and environments that this implies. (Even in the Rindermann 2007 article that functioned so prominently in your defence of Watson [in fact primarily a defence of Richard Lynn], resort to TIMSS and related test was undertaken in large part because of the weakness of the comparative IQ data [pp. 671-672]!)
What you will see, in a significant number of cases, is test administrators who are more honest than Lynn and Vanhanen, warning about the limitations of their testing environments and advising that the test results should not be accepted as is. This is, for example, the case with the Owen 1989 study of South African students, which Lynn once proclaimed as the “…best single study of the Negroid intelligence.” That claim was quietly dropped, once a sufficient number of people went back and noted that Owen (1989: 60, 62-68) warned that African testees were having language difficulties with the test environments, and did not himself assign IQ scores to the results. Similarly in the Ethiopian case (Kaniel and Fisherman 1991), IQ test results are drawn from an entirely unrepresentative Beit Yisrael/Falasha immigrant population _in Israel_, and the original researchers do not think the test results representative of the groups involved. Those are two examples of the quality of the IQ data that you so enthusiastically deploy to support Watson’s claims about the unintelligence of Africans.
>The tests are not biased in the way that >psychometricians use this term.
Right. Merely in a way that the rest of humanity uses the term.
>I have read a number of papers on African schools. > If the point here is to imply that
> poor quality schools invalidate the IQ measures, then this is incorrect; … I’m not
> basing such thinking on one data point, but on the way diverse kinds of evidence
> converge and more convincingly point in a certain direction.
I was referring to the TIMSS and related data used by Rindermann (2007). You cannot simply make the assumption that a 6th-grade-equivalent student in rural Ghana or Cameroon, for example - both countries that I have worked in - is getting the same education as a 6th-grade-equivalent student in Finland or Canada. And diverse kinds of evidence _do_ point to a certain direction: the extraordinarily non-privileged regimes within which African students take tests, regimes directly associated with poverty and severely underdeveloped educational infrastructures. Actual experience on the continent, however, does _not_ lead to the belief that Africans are on average severely mentally deficient, despite your waffling in the Watson defence about how such deficiency would manifest in population terms.
> Meanwhile genetic theories are consistently omitted or are raised only to be
> mooted with factually incorrect criticisms (e.g. “Race does not exist” and has
> nothing to do with genetics).
Then you need to actually read some substantial criticism. You also need to note that claims like “race does not exist” are quite correct in the context of race-concepts used popularly in America and elsewhere through most of the 20th century. Most of the recent claims that “race exists!” are actually claims that there is structure in the biological variability between human populations - which is unexceptionable, but very far from a claim that human evolutionary units on the subspecies level exist.
So, here’s a rather different criticism of the IQ tests done in Africa. If one accepts that those IQ tests are accurate reflections of average intellectual potentials in African populations, and that these potentials have existed over evolutionarily-significant time-scales (as for example Lynn and Rushton claim), then we would expect that such relatively low intellectual potentials would manifest themselves in a corresponding level of cultural advance, correct. After all, average IQ=70 is a pretty significant level of intellectual deficit: that should manifest itself one way or another. So why are the archaeological and palaeoanthropological records from Africa entirely comparable to those from putatively-more-intelligent parts of the world, over the entire period of modern human occupation of the Earth? Why do we have no continental differences in cultural advance between Africa and other continents?
Charles Murray, of _Bell Curve_ fame, once noted on h-bd that the low IQ test results from Africa were actually a _challenge_ to claims of cross-cultural reliability of such testing, not a substantiation of that testing. Shame he’s never had the guts to say that on a non-closed list….
I was “fortunate” enough to have been sent to a Catholic boarding school circa late 50s and early 60s, at the age of 9 years old through graduation from H.S. The school was based in Bucks County, PA on a former banking family estate. I graduated from H.S. Valedictorian. However, for (literally) ten mos. of the year, while receiving a superb education, it was reinforced that 1. I was different; 2. I was “fortunate” to be away from Harlem; 3. the nuns were doing me a FAVOR; 4. the superiority of Caucasians as the master race of history and justified in the actions they took in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, etc. — and how fortunate I was to NOT live in Africa at this time. There wasn’t a minute of my young life where the nuns didn’t remind me I was different, less and “fortunate.” When will Caucasians STOP relentlessly trying to make this subjective case with their justifications, their tests based upon their value propsitions and skewed to their socialized, European-centric values? Now, I received an excellent education — but at a high price. What it taught me is the FEAR some people have and the extent they will go to either 1. erradicate those unlike themselves (Holocaust?); 2. how important the established pecking order is to maintaining this surreal value system(s) (legacies?); 3. how to be strong in the face of propaganda meant to ensure I would know my place within this pecking order — even if it meant amazing cruelty toward children. There is such a thing as EQ — totally absent from this discourse –and, as a marketer I can tell you becomming VERY valuable indeed. May I live long to see emotional quotient equal IQ — and the scientists, engineers, mathmeticians who have NONE, be subjected to vigorous (re)assessment. Mothers have high EQ, but throughout history been demeaned because of it. My people, though slaves, cared for and still do — the children of our captors/Caucasians. EQ is what Gandhi and MLK had, in spades. India would have exploded/imploded without it. Ditto, the United States. How does one measure EQ? The nuns who taught me and their ilk, sent in to destroy the self-esteem and teach inaccurate histories of indigenous peoples, while celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and Columbus Day — had none. What kind of “intelligence” did it take to survive, thrive my “fortunate” upbringing - while enduring systematic erosion of everything I am, my people were/are — and maintain empathy for the “master race” STILL reduced to such cruelty, and make a productive life? Questions to ponder….
Which Africans are they talking about? While there are genetic differences between races, there are also more than one “type” of black person (haplotypes). Africans are the oldest humans on earth and are therefore the most diverse. Is there any study which shows differences within the continent?
I guess as black people we have moved up from being 3/5 human to 99.99% human. So much for progress.
I suggest the public start reading about Marcus Garvey. Read about the “Black Star Liner”.
Excellent points Scott, but didn’t Malloy’s post say that the TIMSS data and other sets from Rindermann were technically IQ tests? Rindermann threw up more problems with the data in there, but he seems rather… revoltingly politicized with how he treated all the educational problems in SS africa as reflective of the population being mentally retarded, and this gem:
“and many reports of everyday behaviour from officials, traders, journalists, ethnologists and other scientists in 19th century to this day… ”
Yes, yes, because we all know those pre-modern journalists and the like who traveled throughout SS africa saw mass destitution and a profound poverty of development wherever they went. Jesus, how can a credible psychologist go off spewing bile like this?
Scott, again, your moral indignation is not a substitute for knowledge about psychometric testing.
These are empirical matters, and you just can’t argue with me on this topic in any meaningful way while being so uninformed about the issues under discussion.
You will find, time and time again, testing done on small and unrepresentative samples, in cases where testing was taking place in languages in which the testees (often young students) were only marginally familiar, and in which their familiarity with test-taking procedures is poor
Like I said in my post, the scores are just as low in the large, representative samples. When researchers look at how the subjects are answering the test items it does not support that they simply don’t know how to take tests. There are many ways to get a question wrong, and they are getting the questions wrong in predictable ways. When the SSA subjects are tested on nonverbal measures which are instructed in their language, the scores are not appreciably higher. When you test SSA subjects who only speak the written test language at home, the scores are not appreciably higher. When you test SSA subjects on elementary cognitive tasks, which take less than a second to complete (e.g. how quickly you can react to a light on a console), the scores are not appreciably higher.
Even in the Rindermann 2007 article that functioned so prominently in your defence of Watson … resort to TIMSS and related test was undertaken in large part because of the weakness of the comparative IQ data
It isn’t “resorting to” anything, TIMSS is a well conducted international IQ test! This is extremely inconvenient to your arguments, I realize this, so I fully understand why you are trying to gloss over the results from these tests. They show the same exact results as all the other testing references.
You cannot simply make the assumption that a 6th-grade-equivalent student in rural Ghana or Cameroon, for example - both countries that I have worked in - is getting the same education as a 6th-grade-equivalent student in Finland or Canada.
I don’t assume this in any way. Since the best predictor of quality of teaching is the IQ scores of the teachers themselves, it is pretty much axiomatic that the SS African schools are far, far worse than schools you find in Canada and Finland.
I’m a little puzzled (and amused) at the irony in you repeatedly claiming that I believe Africans are “inferior” because I report that they have lower IQ scores. I do not believe this, any more than you believe they are “inferior” because you are saying they have lower quality schools or live in poverty. All of these things are facts, and there is nothing inherent in any of these facts that tell us how to feel about the people themselves. Denying that Africans have low IQ scores will not help Africans anymore than denying that Africans live in poverty will help Africans. In fact both denials greatly reduces our ability to engage problems as they are and work to ameliorate the conditions of this region.
Most of the recent claims that “race exists!” are actually claims that there is structure in the biological variability between human populations - which is unexceptionable, but very far from a claim that human evolutionary units on the subspecies level exist.
I don’t really accept that variation below the species level is better described with a category “subspecies” that means anything substantively different than ‘race’ or ‘population’. Words like ‘demes’, ‘populations’, ‘races’, ‘lineages’, and ’subspecies’ can’t help but to mean the same thing: a selected convenience grouping of phylogenetically related individuals below the species level.
If you are trying to argue that human races are not as genetically differentiated as other animals, you are incorrect. From a quantitative standpoint human races are averagely to highly genetically differentiated in comparison with other widely dispersed mammals.
then we would expect that such relatively low intellectual potentials would manifest themselves in a corresponding level of cultural advance, correct. After all, average IQ=70 is a pretty significant level of intellectual deficit: that should manifest itself one way or another. So why are the archaeological and palaeoanthropological records from Africa entirely comparable to those from putatively-more-intelligent parts of the world, over the entire period of modern human occupation of the Earth?
You are asking if the historical record is consistent with a lower IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa than other parts of the world? The one attempt I’ve seen to actually quantify this question, measuring the sophistication of technology in each world region beginning in 1000 B.C. until today, found that it pretty much is. Sub-Saharan African populations have consistently trailed Europe and Asia, on average, in technological development for at least 3000 years.
I see no reason to travel back any further since the intelligence difference could have feasibly evolved even in the last 1000 years.
More to the point many factors influence history, regional power, and economic development, and this is as true today as it was in the past, so I am not thrilled about any mono-causal IQ ‘theory of history’, nor do I believe viewpoints about genetic differences in traits like intelligence in any way need to be predicated on such a curious idea.
In closing, until people who are convinced that nongenetic theories are the only reputable or meritorious way to understand these issues can offer me any serious theories for why children of African descent adopted into high income white households score so much lower on intelligence tests than their mulatto, Asian, and white adopted siblings, I see no reason to take their bombastic religious rhetoric seriously.
The evidence is more consistent with my viewpoint than it is yours, which is why it is much easier for me to present data, and it is much easier for you to call names.
“You are asking if the historical record is consistent with a lower IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa than other parts of the world? The one attempt I’ve seen to actually quantify this question, measuring the sophistication of technology in each world region beginning in 1000 B.C. until today, found that it pretty much is. Sub-Saharan African populations have consistently trailed Europe and Asia, on average, in technological development for at least 3000 years.
I see no reason to travel back any further since the intelligence difference could have feasibly evolved even in the last 1000 years.”
Yes Malloy, SS africa has always been a profound technological backwater. The Benin empire didn’t exist. Nor the Yoruba city-states. Or the Mali, Songhai, and Ghana empires, or the kanem-bornu empire, or Hausaland, or the Ashanti confederacy, or just the huge array of the afro-islamic states in general. And then there’s Nubia, and the Swahili states, and Ethiopia/Axum. No, they’re all just afrocentric propaganda. We all know East Asia and Europe have always been the same too.
Hell, we also know that the ice age somehow created a difference of 30-38 points between eurasians and SS africans, along with a huge slew of other behavioral, biochemical, and physical differences. And that these have been the sole detriment of every single human historical variable and factor. Oh, and they’ve remained completely unchanged too.
Well wait, no, I’m just parroting what you and many like you believe. That’s what Rushton and Lynn’s work is saying, right? You’ve always seemed to a huge fan of them. Well Malloy, I’m very, very sorry to say that there’s more to sub-saharan african history than the hilarious caricature Rushton painted in his book, which he believed served as the backbone of the 3-way hierarchy being seen throughout history. There’s plenty of real, credible historical work to back this up. It’s not hard to find. So I’m kind of amazed how you can say something that hilariously ignorant.
As for that paper, exactly what is that saying? I, unfortunately, don’t have time to read it now, but are you seriously using that to buttress your thesis about history being so deterministic? Um, yeah, that form of anthropology has been considered a fringe view since the mid 20th century. Unless you’re really out to prove that? The idea that races are just hardwired for failure and success?
I even made a little post about this on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Race%2C_Evolution%2C_and_Behavior#Other_criticisms
Now I wonder if the race realist community will cover this?
But wait:
“More to the point many factors influence history, regional power, and economic development, and this is as true today as it was in the past, so I am not thrilled about any mono-causal IQ ‘theory of history’, nor do I believe viewpoints about genetic differences in traits like intelligence in any way need to be predicated on such a curious idea.”
Well yeah Malloy, it’s pretty obvious that those things are dependent on far more than genetics. Of course, your ideology would collapse if you honestly went with that. Racialism, race realism, whatever is basically dependent on a blinding ignorance of anything non-genetic. makes all sorts of arbitrary
decisions about what values to ascribe to social traits that CURRENTLY are posessed by select populations. It doesn’t take past traits into consideration, or take a realistic measure about the nature of social behaviour. IE, you basically just take a glance at what people are doing worldwide right now, these little snapshots, and conclude they’ve ALWAYS been that way, and that state is largely, if not wholly genetic. Economic collapse in Nigeria? Oh, must be because they’re retarded. East Asia doing fine? Smart orientals again, nothing else. You know those things are driven along by much more than just genes. Change just one little variable, and downstream, the culture, the people, the society etc. change drastically.
“In closing, until people who are convinced that nongenetic theories are the only reputable or meritorious way to understand these issues can offer me any serious theories for why children of African descent adopted into high income white households score so much lower on intelligence tests than their mulatto, Asian, and white adopted siblings, I see no reason to take their bombastic religious rhetoric seriously.”
Alright Malloy, I’ll come out- this is Dresidian here. You know, the same person you decided to ban for a year from your blog because I said “s**t”, acted somewhat abrasively, and misread your posts. I really do love how you told me in those email exchanges how Lynn whole-heartedly believed the real african IQ was 80 after correcting for all those transient environmental variables (though I think that’s still too low), yet now you’re here pushing them off as being retarded again. And then, you even had the gall to wave off those african immigrants in the US as being SOMEHOW purely reflective of those on the top of the populations of retards. Jesus.
As for the minnesota twin study, remember that tidbit I mentioned on how the study is completely invalid because it was looking at home environment, which is now understood to typically exert little effect on IQ? Let’s also not forget how nearly all of the low IQ whites in the sample dropped out before it was completed, and how most of the black adoptees has significantly more difficult pre-placement histories. The IQ’s of the parents wern’t even tested. I mean, were the IQ’s of the adoptees even tested before they went on adoption? Because all I’ve seen were the scores shortly after they were adopted, and then their scores at 17. The vast majority of twin studies show average heritabilities of 50:50, so I’m not sure why you’d need to wave this study around- even if accurate, it’s still a very small sample size- as being so integral to your worldview.
“I’m a little puzzled (and amused) at the irony in you repeatedly claiming that I believe Africans are “inferior” because I report that they have lower IQ scores. I do not believe this, any more than you believe they are “inferior” because you are saying they have lower quality schools or live in poverty. All of these things are facts, and there is nothing inherent in any of these facts that tell us how to feel about the people themselves. ”
What’s this relativistic garbage? High intelligence obviously is a better, more desirable trait than low intelligence, so you could definately call it “superior”. Of course, I don’t think you could really make true labels of “inferiority” and “superiority” if you believed these differences to be innate, but since you’re a heredtiarian, well, I guess you do think africans are inferior. Kind of like Sailer and other racialists trying to sidestep being called racial supremacists because they can admit blacks are better at running, jumping, dancing, and stand-up comedy. Jesus. That really does compare to being able to build advanced civilization, doesn’t it?
“In fact both denials greatly reduces our ability to engage problems as they are and work to ameliorate the conditions of this region.”
Sure. If africans really are mentally retarded, then so be it. But we’re talking about… Africa here. Sub-saharan africa. A place of well over half a million people. How many substantial populations in the world have an average IQ fixed at the mentally retarded range? Beyond just a handful of aboriginal and khoisan tribes here and there? The thing here is that it’s completely INSANE. There’s so much in african history, so many highly intelligent and prosperous people to come out of it, so much that you can just realize by a hilariously cursory glance at it all to realize his surreal it is. A continent of retards. That’s what you believe. The way you hold so hard to it doesn’t say much about the ideal of meritocracy and political you people seem to worship, to act as if it’s the only thing important in this debate. It suggests something kind of deranged. I mean hell, it’s kind of hard to hide any real feelings of malicious intent throughout GNXP’s history. The way you all typically seem to slather at the idea of modern genetics “proving you right”, acting almost gleefuly at the idea of human nature being so fragmented, tearing at people’s senses of humanity, and the various pieces of anti-black bile you’ve published over the years, like that one venemous screed Godless wrote about 3 years back on South Africa. Yet, you claim to despise people like racial nationalists and supremacists, have banned them and permitted them from your boards, even though your tone on the topic of the nature-nurture debate differs barely at all.
I’m not even going to go into the almost fetishistic delight you went at a couple of years ago at Lahn’s work, as insane as the idea of that mechanism was to begin with.
You’re not fooling very many people.
Yeah, it’s just like that. The Great Depression was caused by a nearly worldwide inbreeding depression. The “baby boom” was caused by some large-scale random coincidence activating black genes for hornyness that are somewhat distributed even in the white population, but usually silent due to white decency-genes; or perhaps, by some virus has copied the black gene for hornyness and it spread quicker, so there’s no need to invoke the idea of miscegenation and the genetic coincidence, which perhaps would be insufficient. Somewhat like the gay-germ-theory, or toxoplasmosis.
This idea of viruses stealing black genes and spreading black behavior outside the black population boundaries may explain all the atrocities, crimes, dumbness and indecency committed by pure white breeds. So, despite certain nose shapes revealing character or absence thereof, there’s the noise added by genes spread virally.
Perhaps the nazi holocaust was the black gene’s fault after all, aided with european high-intelligence genes. Then you get combined the genes that determine the individual invention of mass production (probably Henry Ford being the first mutant) and genes for wild, violent and indecent behavior. The sad result were the gas chambers.
This should warn us of the dangers of miscigenation. Different from short-term viral epidemics, it would have phyletically lasting effects. The first generation hybrids are not as terrible since much of the european intelligence is dilluted with african dumbness, but as genes segregate independently eventually we will face genotypes that unite the qualities of immorality and intelligence that brought us the nazis, or even worse.
And they may well look just like white people, like James Watson does, despite of a large amount of black genes, so we would not have the aid of physiognomy to help us seeing who is good and who is not (just like when there are viruses). A dark future may come if we don’t use some terminator-like techonology to induce speciation between blacks and whites.
In the other hand, besides not nearly compensating such danger, perhaps anytime a black person is doing something good, it has something to do with a vius that stole white people’s good genes. The same thing could be applied to asians, so we don’t need to invoke Galton’s idea that the asian civilization was founded by white people. Their genes could have travelled through viruses. That’s something that lends strong support to Diamond’s “guns, germs and steel” idea, make it suddenly appears much more feasible. After all, there are genes.
So the African Question puts us in a dilemma.
Perhaps a genetical aid program, with sperm donation from gifted whites to the African continent could eventually bring enough intelligence to the continent so it will prosper by itself. Just imagine how many Bill Gates, Donald Trump and other generically-gifted folks like them could do for Africa with just a daily wack-off or having sex with condoms! Of course their first generation of mixed children wouldn’t be as smart and rich as if they had children with white women, but eventually the copies of the genes will eventually meet again in single individuals, adding up intelligence. Eventually, only black skin and maybe other harmless features of african populations would remain.
The sperm donation of gifted individuals could bring to Africa such a development rate unseen in the whole history, as usually the natural rate of substitution of genes is far more slow than what would be possible with sperm donation (and viral causes for development don’t last much - probably dumbness viruses have some intrinsic advantage over intelligence viruses in the same niche, and the effect is similar to that of the decreasing virullency of epidemics with time). It’s way much cheaper than any sort of aid with infrastructure and other non-genetic meaningless things like education, and far more effective, longlasting than things like education, as the genes are passed on to the next generation, but the education goes down to zero again.
But that solution has the potential problem I foresaw earlier, multiplied ten-fold by the quality of the genes of theses white-gene donors I imagined. If Germany almost alone did all that harm even after a recession following the First War (a black dumbness virus?), the menace of a whole continent with the genes for such richness and evil is something that the world hasn’t yet seen and probably no one is capable of imagining. Such evil and intelligence combined isn’t present in anyone’s genes, so it’s literally beyond the abilities of any present day human being to grasp what could really mean. All that we can know is that it would be the worst menace whit– humankind ever faced, and possible the one that could lead us all to extinction.
So that isn’t going to be the sort of Final Solution we’d want… as we’re civilized, we can’t really suggest something like the other Final Solution - the one that was brought by the combination of black cruelty and white intelligence genes. We need something more human. The terminator-like technology to induce biological speciation would be the best solution, I think. To kill all black people would be unethical, just like extincting some monkey species. Perhaps if we let them alone in Africa, they would eventually biologically evolve in something like white people, but passing by the natural stages of intelligence development, without the dangerous simultaneity of evil and intelligence that haunts us with nonsegregation and miscegeneation.
…
Yeah, I know, Godwin’s law and all that. But I think it was funny anyway. Don’t take it too seriously. I think that it’s perfectly possible that some people consider other races genetically/inherently inferior in some abilities but at the same time aren’t nazioids. Somewhat like “biological egalitarians” (or something that sounds less strawmanesque) often acknowledge that there are real “proximal” differencies, but that these don’t imply in ultimate genetic causations or less rights for these people or anything. I don’t know in which place most “racial ‘realist’” people stand, anyway.
…
I recall one of the silliest “arguments” against the “skin deep” assertion was to show pictures of african albinos, showing that they don’t have exactly the same patterns of facial features of european people in general. As if “skin deep” was supposed to be taken so literally that we would not expect even differences that exist, say, between europeans themselves. Other argument I recall was someone in a prototype of sarcasm pointing that is odd that the epicanthic fold is a culturally determined trait.
I know that it is somewhat “ad hominem”, but come on, seems like that some people don’t spend much time seeing people in the real world and need these sort of picture to know that facial features do differ geographically.
Ironically it’s somewhat akin to showing a picture of the bush of Socrates to promote afrocentrism.
> Like I said in my post, the scores are just as low in the large, representative samples.
Which are the large, representative samples of African IQ tests, in for example the Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) and Lynn 2006 books? The Ethiopian and South African cases that I mentioned, where Lynn and Vanhanen used data for ‘national IQ’ scores despite the researchers’ explicit argument that the data should not be so used? The case of Equatorial Guinea, where the national IQ estimate is derived from a sample of 48 adolescents in a school for children with developmental disabilities… in Madrid (Fernandez-Ballestros et al 1997)? Sierra Leone, where the researcher involved in the actual testing explicitly noted the culture-boundedness of the administered tests in a limited (Temne) population? Nigeria, where, for one study, Lynn and Vanhanen picked the lower of two average scores for the test group - despite the researcher’s statement that the later and higher average was probably more accurate - and in a second case amalgamated _eight_ group scores for different age groups and degrees of schooling? (The last two examples from Dinkins et al 2007 (’Mind the gaps… in theory method and data: re-examining Kanazawa (2006)’, BJHP 12: 167-178).)
These are not mere words to be ignored because the patterning of test scores is similar to the patterning of test scores in other samples: they are warnings about validity from the people who actually administered the tests.
Should I go on? That Dinkins et al article (p. 175) sums it up: “It is clear that Lynn and Vanhanen’s ‘national’ data are not accurate, representative or valid for the purposes to which they have been put.” Lynn has been massaging IQ test data for years, to the disadvantage of Africans. With anyone else, such contempt for data sources would be properly seen as academic fraud: when claims are being made about issues as fundamental and fraught as the comparative intelligence of populations (especially historically disadvantaged ones), one expects the absolutely highest standards of academic integrity - but not with Lynn, apparently. And you and the rest of his groupies just love him for it.
It is _not_ the case that one can ignore the deficiencies of the African IQ testing data by simply accumulating more poor examples and ignoring the circumstances in which testing was done. At this point, you are on schedule to claim that the TIMSS and similar tests stand in, given the intercorrelations between tests - but these are not IQ tests, they require particular kinds of educational knowledge for good performance, and the correlations between test results are just that - correlations - that do not in fact lead a priori to the conclusion that causality flows from IQ test score to school results. (In a related context, see for example Wilkinson and Pickett [2007], ‘Economic development and inequality affect IQ: a response to Kanazawa’, BJHP 12:161-166.)
> It isn’t “resorting to” anything, TIMSS is a well conducted international IQ test!
Read the section of the Rindermann article on IQ tests that I noted. And really? TIMSS is an IQ test? I’ve actually read some of the literature that TIMSS puts out, plus a number of articles that cover the TIMSS tests, and nowhere do they claim that TIMSS is an IQ test. Thus, the TIMSS User Guide (Martin [ed] 2005) calls it a set of tests of student achievement. Rindermann is also pretty careful about not calling TIMSS and related tests IQ tests (although he quite properly talks about the relationship between knowledge and cognitive ability). It would be convenient for your case if it _was_ an IQ test, given the poor quality of the IQ testing actually done in African countries. However, questions like “…why does a candle go out under a cover. fossil fuels arise from what?” (TIMSS questions from Rindermann 2007) are hardly questions that can be answered without a fair amount of school background. Again from Rindermann (p. 671) “In comparison to the student assessment studies, the representativeness and comparability of the samples used in these studies of intelligence test results is low.”
This is the point that you start to talk about the high correlation of test results with IQ tests in similar circumstances…. including the Rindermann paper. However, that doesn’t make TIMSS an IQ test: that’s not what it was designed for, and it _does_ require a similar quality of schooling in the different countries where it is administered to be truly comparable. Rindermann (2007: 689) is, however, unrealistic about what that involves: “… the quality of environment of children is normally relatively homogenous; parents who speak in their mother tongue in a grammatically correct manner probably also use a large vocabulary, probably also help their children with school problems, also explain their educational rules, also send their children to better schools with better classmates and more demanding instruction…” Do you think that this bourgeois idyll actually holds for the Ghanaian or Botswanan children of subsistence farmers and market traders who made up a large proportion of the students tested through TIMSS?
> Since the best predictor of quality of teaching is the IQ scores of the teachers themselves, it is >pretty much axiomatic that the SS African schools are far, far worse than schools you find in >Canada and Finland.
And the fact that the students don’t have easy access to textbooks, that their teachers have only minimal education in teaching itself, that they may be continually pulled out of school to engage in economic activities, that they are frequently working to theories and programmes of education entirely unchanged from the colonial area, when they were to be trained to be labourers… none of that is significant, eh? It’s all those dumb African teachers…
> All of these things are facts, and there is nothing inherent in any of these facts that tell us how > to feel about the people themselves.
Righty-ho. After all, we have no historical precedents to indicate how people have related to populations thought to be intellectually inferior, do we? No data on that! We can just declare those folks ’separate but equal’ and everything will be fine - this time. Richard Lynn, for example, is vitally concerned with the welfare of people in disadvantaged areas of the world: that’s why he wrote _Dysgenics_ and _IQ and the wealth of nations_. And Gene Expression is just full of concern for those IQ=70 Africans, isn’t it? Man, you folks agonise over the problem of how to best assist such people, don’t you?
Give me a break.
>If you are trying to argue that human races are not as genetically differentiated as other
> animals, you are incorrect.
Sorry, but I know the development of that FAQ pretty well… from the note of origin printed at it’s very top. (It’s ironic that the best argument for subspecies status among humans has been made by a guy who is, IIRC, a forester, but that’s the way it goes.) You’ll note that the author relies on autosomal markers, while discounting the significance of mtDNA markers. That’s because the patterning in mtDNA markers actually supports a distinction between low-diversity humans (and other large mammals without recognised subspecies) and higher Fsts among species with recognised subspecies. The author also doesn’t take any account of the criterion of distinct evolutionary trajectories for subspecies designation, and that is a question on which we have a lot of - negative - palaeoanthropological data.
> The one attempt I’ve seen to actually quantify >this question, measuring the sophistication of technology in each world region beginning >in 1000 B.C. until today, found that it pretty much is.
The authors of that study - no archaeologists - made three fundamental mistakes. The first is that they ignored the warnings in their primary data source (Peregrine and Ember 2001): there’s a correlation between the intensity of archaeological research in a particular region and the likelihood that data on archaeological occurrences - including technological ones - will be uncovered. This is not an issue in the Murdockian model that they use, because that model is concerned with living populations. Second, many of their archaeological claims are simply nonsense: two cases at random thus that iron was being used in Asia Minor in the 3rd millennium BC, for example - meteoric iron was, as it was in many other areas, but smelted iron would not arrive until a thousand years later - or that cities existed in Greece at 1000 BC. Third, they rank technological systems that, while certainly different, are not differentially complex.
Now, I realise that such work articulates with your fundamental take on the world - that quantified data, even if erroneous, are better than non-quantified data, even if more accurate. But for this you’d actually have to get acquainted with some archaeological data, not rely on a drive-by on African history undertaken by a bunch of economists. If you take a look at archaeological data… not merely from the last 3000 years, but from the Middle Pleistocene until the historical period…. you will find no evidence for African cultural lag (MacEachern, S. 2006, Africanist archaeology and ancient IQ: racial science and cultural evolution in the 21st century, _World Archaeology_ 38(1): 72-92 and references therein). Jared Diamond is, perhaps, better-intentioned, but he’s also no authority on African history.
>I see no reason to travel back any further since the intelligence difference could have feasibly >evolved even in the last 1000 years.
On the other hand, your hero Richard Lynn appears to think that modern Africans are the cognitively unchanged descendants of the hominids who occupied the continent 250,000 years ago (p. 141 of Lynn, R. 2003. The geography of intelligence. In _The Scientific Study of General Intelligence: Tribute to Arthur R. Jensen_ (ed. H. Nyborg). Boston, MA: Pergamon). And this is, of course, fundamental to the evolutionary fantasies of Rushton and, more recently, Kanazawa.
>I see no reason to take their bombastic religious rhetoric seriously.
Right. It’s so much more comfortable to believe the writings of a racist who’s been caught out misusing IQ data multiple times over the last decades.
Scott
ME: The tests are not biased in the way that psychometricians use this term.
YOU: Right. Merely in a way that the rest of humanity uses the term.
Yep, this statement pretty much sums up your contribution to this debate. You don’t understand testing, and you don’t need to. It’s incorrect because you say it’s incorrect, no deeper or serious understanding of how it works is necessary.
Then you have the nerve to suggest I’m the ignorant one who is avoiding data:
African inferiority accepted a priori, _simply because it’s edgy_… but no evidence that you’ve ever _seriously_ evaluated alternative, confounding factors in these debates.
Well if I’m really so uninformed about the available research evidence and have never examined alternative theories then it should be pretty easy to expose my dubious arguments with your own literature citations. So if you have citations that contradict my claims or that support a contradictory hypothesis then please provide them, instead of just shouting about how ignorant and evil I am.
Oh, I meant to post this:
“Racialism makes all sorts of arbitrary
decisions about what values to ascribe to social traits that CURRENTLY are posessed by select populations. It doesn’t take past traits into consideration, or take a realistic measure about the nature of social behaviour.”
I lost part of it because my computer locked up while I was posting this. Thank god that doesn’t happen often.
Oh, another edit:
“Of course, I don’t think you could really make true labels of “inferiority” and “superiority” if you believed these differences to be innate,”
I meant to say that you couldn’t make those kinds of judgements of inferiority and superiority if you believed the differences to be non-innate. Vice versa who those that think they are, though.
One last thing Malloy- there’s alot that went unanswered in those emails that I originally asked, such as the EXACT correlation between brain size/cranial capacity and IQ (yes, I know of the correlation, but I meant specific CC’s and how much those translate into IQ differences) and the topic of the IQ’s of the bushmen, aborigines, and papuans. I just dropped out because I lost interest.
So, do you also believe that the bushmen have an IQ of 54, and that the aborigines and papuans have IQ’s in the low 60’s? That extreme?
Dresidian,
Obviously I knew it was you: the clear absence of any sort of comprehension, the breathless outrage…
Yes Malloy, SS africa has always been a profound technological backwater… As for that paper, exactly what is that saying? I, unfortunately, don’t have time to read it now, but are you seriously using that to buttress your thesis about history being so deterministic?
Do you understand what the statement ‘on average’ means? Go argue with Jared Diamond. He’s the one who argued that the trajectory of technological underdevelopment of SS Africa began with the geographic contingencies of the Neolithic.
What I am taking from your absurd and acrid rant is that you didn’t read what I wrote, since I stated the opposite of what you are claiming I did. Scott was the one attempting to use (unquantified) history to refute an intelligence difference, which means Scott is the one who believes that IQ is a deterministic variable.
I’m trying to tease apart how the environment affects modern population groups in modern circumstances using quantitative research evidence, not have a ridiculous and insoluble slapfight about what kind of average IQ it would take to maintain the Ashanti Empire! You have no real evidence for that and neither do I.
Let’s also not forget how nearly all of the low IQ whites in the sample dropped out before it was completed, and how most of the black adoptees has significantly more difficult pre-placement histories
The correction for the white attrition (as well as the attrition of the other groups) was included in the final quoted numbers. It certainly wasn’t “almost all” of them. And even a double correction would still leave a 13 point gap. Furthermore, we already know the IQs of white children adopted by white parents from a number of adoption studies. Even without this group the data is certainly informative. Also adoption studies show that pre-placement variables do not have significant long term effects on IQ. And certainly not to the tune of 18 IQ points. As another example, even severely malnourished Asian war orphans eventually developed IQ scores at the population mean and above. Do you believe the black children in MTRAS had worse preplacement experiences in Minnesota, than the severely malnourished Asian war orphans?
even if accurate, it’s still a very small sample size
The MTRAS had a perfectly informative sample size of 105 black transracial adoptees at follow-up, and it wasn’t even the only American longitudinal study with relevant data. So yes, these are the kind of numbers that permit a measure of confidence.
I really do love how you told me in those email exchanges how Lynn whole-heartedly believed the real african IQ was 80 after correcting for all those transient environmental variables (though I think that’s still too low), yet now you’re here pushing them off as being retarded again
I already explained this to you. 70 is the measured or phenotypic IQ of current SS Africans, I never denied this. It is also apparently an accurate and unbiased score. Lynn believes that the genotypic IQ of SS Africans is 80. That is when nonadmixed white and black environments are equalized (e.g. through adoption) Africans will score 20 points below Europeans.
You don’t “correct” a current IQ score based on the hypothetical genotype. It wouldn’t predict anything. The purpose of the IQ test is not to give you an estimate of genetic potential, it is to predict useful outcomes.
High intelligence obviously is a better, more desirable trait than low intelligence, so you could definately call it “superior”.
Yes, and lack of poverty is better than poverty. Neither one tells anything about the value of a person. That is a metaphysical judgment, not an itemized one.
How many substantial populations in the world have an average IQ fixed at the mentally retarded range? … The thing here is that it’s completely INSANE … A continent of retards. That’s what you believe.
You unsurprisingly did not comprehend my post, where I addressed this specifically: Again, you can call it whatever you’d like, “retarded” or not, but it won’t change the fact that the IQ of 70 is not a biased measurement in the way psychometricians use this term. Do you understand? From an academic and economic standpoint the IQ of 70 means the same thing and has the same measured consequences for Africans as it does for Westerners with an IQ of 70.
This is not a question that is resolved by how it makes you feel. This is not a question that is resolved by how it conforms to your intuition. This is a empirical issue that can only be resolved with quantitative data. Do you understand that, Dresidian?
“Obviously I knew it was you: the clear absence of any sort of comprehension, the breathless outrage…”
Showing anything resembling emotion online means one is “outraged”. Sure.
“Do you understand what the statement ‘on average’ means? Go argue with Jared Diamond. He’s the one who argued that the trajectory of technological underdevelopment of SS Africa began with the geographic contingencies of the Neolithic.”
You didn’t say anything about “averages”. You made some vague allusion to SS africa’s relatively poor overall historical devleopment compared to east asian and europe, and threw up a paper that made little more than a very basic assessment of technological progress. What should I even be following?
And I think Diamond’s work is largely bunk, so why bring him up?
“What I am taking from your absurd and acrid rant is that you didn’t read what I wrote, since I stated the opposite of what you are claiming I did. Scott was the one attempting to use (unquantified) history to refute an intelligence difference, which means Scott is the one who believes that IQ is a deterministic variable.”
I think Scott was simply using abit of historical evidence that calls it into question. Then again, we’ll have to hear what he says.
“I’m trying to tease apart how the environment affects modern population groups in modern circumstances using quantitative research evidence, not have a ridiculous and insoluble slapfight about what kind of average IQ it would take to maintain the Ashanti Empire! You have no real evidence for that and neither do I.”
Oh, maybe. Going in line with a sort of “cognitive elite” paradigram, it probably didn’t require that substantially high intelligence to manage that state, but I’d say it’s quite higher than 70, wouldn’t you?
“The correction for the white attrition (as well as the attrition of the other groups) was included in the final quoted numbers. It certainly wasn’t “almost all” of them.”
Alright, so what sort of correction did they make? Would you care to quote them? How many dropped out?
“Furthermore, we already know the IQs of white children adopted by white parents from a number of adoption studies. Even without this group the data is certainly informative. ”
“Also adoption studies show that pre-placement variables do not have significant long term effects on IQ. And certainly not to the tune of 18 IQ points. As another example, even severely malnourished Asian war orphans eventually developed IQ scores at the population mean and above. Do you believe the black children in MTRAS had worse preplacement experiences in Minnesota, than the severely malnourished Asian war orphans?”
So what exactly what sort of pre-placement problems did the black children have?
And how are these studies even connected to the MTRAS?
“The MTRAS had a perfectly informative sample size of 105 black transracial adoptees at follow-up, and it wasn’t even the only American longitudinal study with relevant data. So yes, these are the kind of numbers that permit a measure of confidence.”
Um, 105 people out of the 30+ million blacks in the US is representative? Do you have anything else beyond the MTRAS? Again, what was the IQ of the children before being put on adoption? And what other longitudal studies are you talking about?
Do you also have anything to say about that tidbit with parental environment? Because, I’ve never seen anyone bring that up, which is kind of bizzare.
“I already explained this to you. 70 is the measured or phenotypic IQ of current SS Africans, I never denied this. It is also apparently an accurate and unbiased score. Lynn believes that the genotypic IQ of SS Africans is 80. That is when nonadmixed white and black environments are equalized (e.g. through adoption) Africans will score 20 points below Europeans.”
So what is your actual stance on the IQ of SS africans? You’re not being very clear, nor have you been in much of your discourse on this.
Also, I fail to see how some “pure” blacks in the south are really representative of anything. Using african-americans as a proxy for the IQ of SS africans is ridiculous to begin with. Most of the admixture for US blacks came from breeding with poor whites, indentured servant whites, and slave whites, who would have come from a huge range of IQ’s to begin with, and since they mostly did this freely, assortive mating obviously would have been going on. Let’s also not forget how the ancestors of african-americans came from a HUGE array of different backgrounds, over such huge timeframes.
Really, acting like the white admixture in american blacks as being so concordent with what whites contributed would basically require all of the whites on the IQ distribution back then (which was somehow exactly the same as it is today) contributing perfectly proportional admixture to all of the black IQ variations, with assortive mating being thrown completely out the window. It’s absurd. It would be interesting for someone to look into the proper demographic history of white admixture in african-americans to truly get a proper picture, so right now, this is very poor speculation.
“You unsurprisingly did not comprehend my post, where I addressed this specifically: Again, you can call it whatever you’d like, “retarded” or not, but it won’t change the fact that the IQ of 70 is not a biased measurement in the way psychometricians use this term. Do you understand? From an academic and economic standpoint the IQ of 70 means the same thing and has the same measured consequences for Africans as it does for Westerners with an IQ of 70.”
Um, why are you arguing such basic semantics? Psychometricians commonly use the term “retardation” for that range. I know that people in that sort of population would be due to familial retardartion, not organic retardation. Why put such emphasis on these definitions?
“This is not a question that is resolved by how it makes you feel. This is not a question that is resolved by how it conforms to your intuition. This is a empirical issue that can only be resolved with quantitative data.”
I was just saying the same to you, but why act like you’re so unique?
“Do you understand that, Dresidian?”
Yes. You can get off your superiority complex now.
“You don’t “correct” a current IQ score based on the hypothetical genotype. It wouldn’t predict anything. The purpose of the IQ test is not to give you an estimate of genetic potential, it is to predict useful outcomes.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have used the term “correct”- I meant after removing the effects of malnutrition, poor health conditions etc.
“Yes, and lack of poverty is better than poverty. Neither one tells anything about the value of a person. That is a metaphysical judgment, not an itemized one.”
This isn’t hard to understand. Higher intelligence is superior to lower intelligence. I mean, that obviously doesn’t tell us much about who’s life is worth more than another, and certainly not in the moral sphere, but in judgements of value, wouldn’t you have to conclude africans are inferior to whites? Be honest.
“What I am taking from your absurd and acrid rant is that you didn’t read what I wrote, since I stated the opposite of what you are claiming I did. Scott was the one attempting to use (unquantified) history to refute an intelligence difference, which means Scott is the one who believes that IQ is a deterministic variable.”
Let me clarify again- I was just offering up some counter-evidence to you using the supposed under-development of SS africa as something against them having IQ’s remotely equivalent to westerners. I was a