Part of why I became a hereditarian is not just reading arguments in favor of it but also reading rebuttals like this that lack any sort of coherent worldview. They say you are "purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart," implying but not clearly stating that these are untrue. Are they saying there are IQ differences between races, or that there aren't? If there aren't and you were just making it up, then why would you need access to the data in the first place? If there are, then isn't that interesting and important even if you believe the cause is environmental? We see black people earn less money on average. If you truly believe the cause of that is racism, then isn't it important to know whether this gap disappears once you control for IQ? A model of racism where intelligent black people are irrationally discriminated against is different from one in which black people's intellectual development is stunted due to some sort of effect of racism growing up. They are very different problems that would require very different solutions. If you really believe the environment is to blame, then wouldn't be important to understand that?
Some of you might say that the authors actually believe there are genetic differences in intelligence and that they are just lying about it, but I don't think that's true. If that were the case, then why even write an article like this in the first place, providing examples of hereditarian claims and a reading list of authors who will provide more information? If you wanted to cover it up, you'd just avoid talking about the topic.
It really just reminds me of arguing with a religious person. The belief is based on emotion and faith rather than evidence, and all evidence will be reinterpreted around that axiomatic dogma. Any dissent is heresy that must be decried. This way of thinking has never made sense to me, which I think is why I've been able to change my mind and become an atheist and later a hereditarian. I think I must just have low frequencies of whatever genes predispose someone to religiosity.
I read the NYT article and kept thinking about two things while reading.
1) The Bell Curve and Charles Murray. The article didn't mention him.
2) Crime stats by race and ethnicity and how they will try to hide it.
Neither topic came up. I understand that crime stats might be a tangent, but not mentioning The Bell Curve while writing about race and IQ is just sloppy.
With Trump as president, there is less incentive to hide crime statistics by race now. But this may change if the next US president is a democrat.
The point about selective sample size presentation is sharp. Cherry-picking which subsample sizes to highlight while omitting larger ones is classic misdirection. I've seen this pattern in media coverage of research before, where they focus on methodological limitations that sound damning but ignore whether the findings replicate across multiple datasets. The correlation between ABCD and SAT estimates (0.93) is actually pretty solid considering theage and measurement differences.
I'm afraid your "sample" may have been biased by the low quality schooling encountered by US Blacks. Race has nothing to do with it= environment. + depression at such lousy experiences. Sorry to be subscribed if that's what you think.
There was already an experiment done on this where incompetent black teachers were completely replaced by actually competent teachers in a “hood school”. The result was that the performance of the students didn’t improve whatsoever. It literally has nothing to do with education.
There's a bit more to it than that. The curriculum - in the broad sense, sports, arts, music, is regrettably dependent on community wealth. Behavior is contageous
Just an excuse after excuse. Eastern European nations have higher average IQ despite living in objectively worse conditions and being objectively poorer.
Right, except there's usually a much more rigid educational system. Also, having written many multiple choice questions and reviewed "IQ" tests, IQing right involves the "trick" embedded in the question be identified. That tricky trick is not something most US educators are aware of, while there is much more tradition in the choice of identifiers 'over there.'
Like, are the rich rich because their ancestors occasionally stumbled upon good curriculums, and they are unwilling to share these curriculums with the less fortunate and the poor cannot copy curriculums because it requires large quantities of rare earth metals?
Or, schools pick curriculums to match capacities of their students?
How do you know that to be true? Can you be certain that 2000 generations of mostly separated evolution resulted in the exact same levels of cognitive aptitude, between populations? How can you be sure?
Warne points out a concept useful here (IIRC), “reaction range”, of the genetic component in question. In your example, height. Any postwar (WWII) Japanese (male) under the age of 5 yo at war’s end could be expected to exceed their parents’ height by 2-4 inches. However, the average modern Japanese height does not match the typical Western height, also by 2-4 inches.
In summary, your observation of an “environmental” component to observed racial differences may indeed be (partially) true, but such does not negate observed—and measured—genetic components of such differences. I have never read of a reputable scientific study that attributes racial differences as being 100% genetic, rather that differences observed are composed of genetic, environment, and error. The argument being exactly what percentages of each.
Well said. And Japanese, in addition to longevity, have nutritional components satisfying requirements, but, among the lowest per capita calorie consumption.
I haven't got into it for some years, but the peer reviewed literature no longer mentions genetics, though it should - but the new frontier is relative growth of brain areas related to cognition, that seems to flow from instructional ineptitude
You are using "bias" here improperly. If, say, USA blacks on average had same environment as USA average and the sample due to some issue (i.e. lazy recruiter) had too much USA blacks from some extreme of distirbution, this would be biased sample. But here worse environment is a property of population and sample should reflect just that.
"Bias" would be appropriate, though, if the invent was to use this sample as a stand-in for some Psammeticus-like controlled experiment, but nobody argued for that.
Part of why I became a hereditarian is not just reading arguments in favor of it but also reading rebuttals like this that lack any sort of coherent worldview. They say you are "purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart," implying but not clearly stating that these are untrue. Are they saying there are IQ differences between races, or that there aren't? If there aren't and you were just making it up, then why would you need access to the data in the first place? If there are, then isn't that interesting and important even if you believe the cause is environmental? We see black people earn less money on average. If you truly believe the cause of that is racism, then isn't it important to know whether this gap disappears once you control for IQ? A model of racism where intelligent black people are irrationally discriminated against is different from one in which black people's intellectual development is stunted due to some sort of effect of racism growing up. They are very different problems that would require very different solutions. If you really believe the environment is to blame, then wouldn't be important to understand that?
Some of you might say that the authors actually believe there are genetic differences in intelligence and that they are just lying about it, but I don't think that's true. If that were the case, then why even write an article like this in the first place, providing examples of hereditarian claims and a reading list of authors who will provide more information? If you wanted to cover it up, you'd just avoid talking about the topic.
It really just reminds me of arguing with a religious person. The belief is based on emotion and faith rather than evidence, and all evidence will be reinterpreted around that axiomatic dogma. Any dissent is heresy that must be decried. This way of thinking has never made sense to me, which I think is why I've been able to change my mind and become an atheist and later a hereditarian. I think I must just have low frequencies of whatever genes predispose someone to religiosity.
I read the NYT article and kept thinking about two things while reading.
1) The Bell Curve and Charles Murray. The article didn't mention him.
2) Crime stats by race and ethnicity and how they will try to hide it.
Neither topic came up. I understand that crime stats might be a tangent, but not mentioning The Bell Curve while writing about race and IQ is just sloppy.
With Trump as president, there is less incentive to hide crime statistics by race now. But this may change if the next US president is a democrat.
The point about selective sample size presentation is sharp. Cherry-picking which subsample sizes to highlight while omitting larger ones is classic misdirection. I've seen this pattern in media coverage of research before, where they focus on methodological limitations that sound damning but ignore whether the findings replicate across multiple datasets. The correlation between ABCD and SAT estimates (0.93) is actually pretty solid considering theage and measurement differences.
I'm afraid your "sample" may have been biased by the low quality schooling encountered by US Blacks. Race has nothing to do with it= environment. + depression at such lousy experiences. Sorry to be subscribed if that's what you think.
There was already an experiment done on this where incompetent black teachers were completely replaced by actually competent teachers in a “hood school”. The result was that the performance of the students didn’t improve whatsoever. It literally has nothing to do with education.
There's a bit more to it than that. The curriculum - in the broad sense, sports, arts, music, is regrettably dependent on community wealth. Behavior is contageous
Just an excuse after excuse. Eastern European nations have higher average IQ despite living in objectively worse conditions and being objectively poorer.
Right, except there's usually a much more rigid educational system. Also, having written many multiple choice questions and reviewed "IQ" tests, IQing right involves the "trick" embedded in the question be identified. That tricky trick is not something most US educators are aware of, while there is much more tradition in the choice of identifiers 'over there.'
Like, are the rich rich because their ancestors occasionally stumbled upon good curriculums, and they are unwilling to share these curriculums with the less fortunate and the poor cannot copy curriculums because it requires large quantities of rare earth metals?
Or, schools pick curriculums to match capacities of their students?
Which is more parsimonious?
You've got it exactly right ! Money buys you books, poor districts find it difficult to avoid cheap curricula!
Are you still living in year 1400 when average person couldn't afford books? Today books are cheap as ever and could be copied easily.
you'd have to be wealthy to say that about books, especially those used in schools.
Did you even read this essay?
Amusing critique do you agree, have you ever read any of the literature - peer reviewed, not the cranky author - Does he think the earth is flat?
How do you know that to be true? Can you be certain that 2000 generations of mostly separated evolution resulted in the exact same levels of cognitive aptitude, between populations? How can you be sure?
The quality of education has very little to do with IQ.
Education increases IQ - Dr.
Increase your height by joining NBA.
LOL!
Or increase your looks by becoming a movie idol.
You'd need makeup for that
You bet'ca, exercise and adequate nutrition increases stature
Warne points out a concept useful here (IIRC), “reaction range”, of the genetic component in question. In your example, height. Any postwar (WWII) Japanese (male) under the age of 5 yo at war’s end could be expected to exceed their parents’ height by 2-4 inches. However, the average modern Japanese height does not match the typical Western height, also by 2-4 inches.
In summary, your observation of an “environmental” component to observed racial differences may indeed be (partially) true, but such does not negate observed—and measured—genetic components of such differences. I have never read of a reputable scientific study that attributes racial differences as being 100% genetic, rather that differences observed are composed of genetic, environment, and error. The argument being exactly what percentages of each.
Well said. And Japanese, in addition to longevity, have nutritional components satisfying requirements, but, among the lowest per capita calorie consumption.
I haven't got into it for some years, but the peer reviewed literature no longer mentions genetics, though it should - but the new frontier is relative growth of brain areas related to cognition, that seems to flow from instructional ineptitude
Not at all.
You are using "bias" here improperly. If, say, USA blacks on average had same environment as USA average and the sample due to some issue (i.e. lazy recruiter) had too much USA blacks from some extreme of distirbution, this would be biased sample. But here worse environment is a property of population and sample should reflect just that.
"Bias" would be appropriate, though, if the invent was to use this sample as a stand-in for some Psammeticus-like controlled experiment, but nobody argued for that.
I just don't believe 4000 blacks came from the same pool as 250 whites. It's not a coherent survey!
Hi just out of curiosity where'd you get the SAT IQs for that correlation graph? Those numbers look kinda different from the numbers here: https://humanvarieties.org/2023/09/06/sat-act-scores-by-detailed-race-ethnicity-2021/
Also these numbers just have the single ethnicity data so no comparison points for e.g. "White+Filipino"
From the link I posted.