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I agree. Anyway, it's easy to talk about the God test now because you won't get burned at the stake or anything.
One modern equivalent to the God test is whether the person believes that genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference. This has become an area where stating the (obvious) and rational truth will get you in a lot of social/career trouble.
Heck, it might even get you downvoted on Lesswrong :)
Obvious truth? Maybe it is given all available information — I don't know — but certainly not given the information most people have. (And "rational truth" is just a positive-affect type error.)
I would agree, if "believes" were replaced by "is willing to entertain the hypothesis" or "doesn't think one must be a racist to believe".
Anyone know if there is a racial IQ gap between blacks and whites in the UK?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6176070.stm
Googling the answer appears to be yes. There quite a lot of sources on this, but I wanted to give a news story to show that this is already apparently a source of public concern in the country.
Talk to the experts in psychometrics, and they'll tell you that this is still an open question. It was a plurality (not majority or consensus) view in psychometrics that there was some genetic influence (beyond the obvious, e.g. black skin attracting discrimination, etc) back in 1984, but since then there has been other work that changes the picture, e.g. that of James Flynn, Will Dickens, and Richard Nisbett. It's unclear what a poll done today would reveal.
The experiments that would give huge likelihood ratios just haven't been done. Transracial adoption studies have been very few, flawed in design, and delivered conflicting results. And so far, genomics has revealed almost nothing positive about the genetic architecture of intelligence in any ethnicity, much less differences between ethnicities. Cheap genome sequencing may well bring answers there in the next 5-7 years, pinning down this debate with utterly overwhelming evidence, but it hasn't done so yet.
The problem with discussing racial differences is that when people say "black", they're already making inherent assumptions about genetics. "Black" incorporates an incredible amount of genetic diversity, far more than the label "white". The common error in these debates is that an awful lot of the population will see the label "black" and fail to distinguish between all people labelled as such. People distinguish between, say, east Asians and south-east Asians and Indians, but they say "black" as if all of Africa are the same.
Look at the performance at the Olympics running races. Would you note the fact that "100m winners are always black"? Would you be willing to make the statement that "black people are naturally better sprinters"? How about distance runners? As it turns out, the good sprinters are usually Jamaican or African-American, with little success from Africa itself. The good distance runners almost entirely come from the Nandi area of Kenya - hardly representative of Africa as a whole. Plenty of areas of Africa have fewer good runners, and probably lots of areas have just the same proportion as European countries.
I'd venture to say that there might be black ethnicities which are on average less intelligent, or have behavioural differences - after all, there are black ethnicities that average around 4ft tall. But will that difference makes any meaningful average when you're talking about "black" people? There are for more genetic variations within racial groups than between them, if you're willing to count "black" as a racial group. I personally don't like generalising in such a non-meaningful way. Compare to people of a specific ancestral origin, if you must compare. Comparing with the average of every ethnicity in Africa, without concern for your sampling bias giving you an inaccurate average (by using statements like "blacks are..." or "blacks have..."), does seem a bit, well, racist.
I don't see why this is necessarily a problem. For example, if I observed that generally speaking, the South is warmer than Minnesota, I would be correct even though the South incorporates a lot more geographic diversity than Minnesota.
For purposes of this discussion, it's a reasonable category. If there were a large subgroup of blacks which was highly intelligent, then it might be appropriate to use different categories.
Generally speaking, yes.
Probably not, since sprinting ability seems concentrated in a subgroup of blacks. (Relatively) low intelligence does not seem to be this way.
Perhaps more importantly, either way you look at it, it doesn't change the fact that genetics is partly responsible for the black/white sprinting gap.
I would say "yes" in the same way that the South is generally warmer than Minnesota. Put another way, I'm not aware of any subgroup of blacks which stands out in terms of intelligence. But even if there were, it would not change the fact that there is a black/white IQ gap and genetics is responsible for a lot of it.
Assuming that's true, so what?
It means that there are few contexts where you might ask me "are blacks less intelligent than whites on average" without me saying anything more than "insufficient data: error bars too big".
And any scientist who researches the issue (or indeed anyone taken seriously who discusses the issue) and uses the term "black people" without considering whether or not they really mean "all black people" or even "a representative average of all black people" are being very misleading if they report it using that wording, considering the biases of the general public.
I'm not sure I understand this. Are you denying that there is a statistically significant difference in intelligence (as measured by IQ) between blacks and whites?
So you are saying that special rules need to apply when discussing race and intelligence?
I think the point is, such a statement is not useful, considering the huge number of different groups that can be classed as "black" and "white."
Well when reporting findings, its important to do so in a way which conveys the meaning correctly to the intended audience. And Sarokae did originally say
Does this principle apply just to statements concerning intelligence? Or does it apply to any perceived racial difference which may be due to genetics, in part or in whole?
Also, does it apply only to human racial groups? Or does the same thing apply to all biological groupings?
Perhaps, but I think that when discussing things on this discussion board, the statement "Group X is more Y than Group Z" can be reasonably understood to mean that if you measure quality Y, then in general and on average, members of Group X have a higher measurement for Y than members of Group Z. Further, it doesn't imply that every last member of each group has been measured.
Certainly that's what I mean.
I reckon the principle applies in general - there's too much diversity within the classification "black" for it to be particularly useful, I reckon. Perhaps if it was geographically specific, it might be more useful.
It applies to all biological groupings that are sufficiently broad.
So the same reasoning would apply to the categories commonly referred to as "worms," "birds," "penguins," "bears," "elephants," "baboons," "chimpanzees," "rats," and "mice," Agreed?
I see your point but I'm not sure I agree. Perhaps I'm just reluctant to think in those terms, but I don't think that's it. I'm not thinking of this in terms of PC, just in terms of usefulness.
I'm having trouble thinking up an analogy to explain my point; I'll think about it and see if I can. If not, guess I need to start over.
EDIT: Actually, if we replace "intelligence" with a less loaded or emotive quality, say "height", I think I'd still be inclined not to consider it useful. But as I say, I'll have a think about this.
Nailed it. Racial groups are an idea a few centuries old; we've had a functional understanding of genetics for less than a hundred years.
Long before we had any ability to group people by ancestry in a reliable way, a bunch of distinct populations were grouped by the people of a tiny corner of the globe according to nothing more salient than skin color, and by the fact they often lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles (viewed by the Europeans as unconscionably primitive no matter how happy and prosperous the people themselves were) or low-tech agricultural and pastoralist ones (viewed similarly, insofar as industrializing European populations considered those lifestyles representative of ancestral, earlier times). A whole bunch of these peoples wound up colonial subjects; any intergroup strife between them or conditions they considered normal but Europeans found backward was used to. These marginalized, conquered, exploited peoples did pretty much what marginalized, conquered, exploited peoples anywhere and anytime have done in that situation: their cultures, lifeways, institutions and so on fragmented under the strain, existing tensions amplified, resources became increasingly scarce for the majority, and access to health and wealth plummeted as they went from their own former economies to the bottom rung of another civilization's.
The Europeans with decisionmaking power largely looked at all this and concluded that the members of this group were a sorry lot and perhaps conquest was better for them than leaving them to their own devices. In some places throughout the greater colonial Eurosphere, they were still legal to own as property until relatively recently.
Then, long after their marginalized status had had centuries to take root, someone discovers the basis for genetic inheritance, and a comparitively short time after, that the populations grouped as "black" (which includes a huge number of quite-distinct groups in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia as well as their descendant diasporas elsewhere) are the single most diverse human subgroup on the planet. Oops.
sarcasm Well, no matter -- they clearly haven't done as well on the world stage as European-descended whites, and why are you getting upset that we'd want to ask why? It must be genetic, we've got centuries of evidence that these people just don't do as well! /sarcasm
I'm not sure I agree with your view of colonialism. Europeans did not uniformly judge all of the non-white peoples they encountered so it's not just a matter of ethnic chauvinism.
More importantly, none of what you said changes the facts that (1) there is a group of people in the world known as "blacks"; (2) there is a group of people in the world known as "whites"; (3) there is a large an intractable difference in intelligence between these groups; and (4) it's reasonable to ask whether genetics might play a significant role in this gap.
What specific historical details do you contest?
But they did pretty-uniformly judge the peoples they grouped into the category "black", which just to be clear is the group I specified and the group you're talking about too.
Who were originally grouped long ago, on the basis of the exceedingly superficial detail of skin color, a trait that turned out to be a red herring since they don't form a "natural group" in the sense that was assumed originally.
(2) there is a group of people in the world known as "whites";
See previous, with the added note that this level of grouping didn't take as thoroughly or as readily outside the colonies.
Disagreed. There is a large, thus-far intractable difference in performance on IQ tests between these groups; we do not concur as to what IQ tests are measuring, let alone the reasons for that.
But, given what we now know about the genetics of the groups in question, it's privileging the hypothesis to treat "blacks" as a natural group as opposed to a socially-constructed one, and given the many other plausible hypotheses not contradicted by evidence (and the data about historical power asymmetries in their interactions) it's hardly as primarily or all-consumingly interesting to focus on genetics, when there are so many other relevant factors that turn out not to be undermined by biology.
Just because the genetic evidence has come in does not mean that centuries of racism vanished overnight, and the idea of blacks as a natural group and the differences between them and whites as attributable to genetic factors are quite a bit older than our understanding of what genetics even was. It's no surprise they're still kicking around, influencing white intellectual types who've never personally been on the oppressed side of the equation and can't easily understand what all the fuss is about and why people might get so angry that they're still trying to talk about it in those terms...
I agree that the idea of skin-color defined races as the units you should look for genetic variation between is unhelpful in the context of pure science, but if you politically define all sub-par outcomes compared to the privileged group that are not caused by genes (or something else politically defined as untouchable) as needing to be fixed you need to know about genetic differences between politically defined groups to make sensible decisions.
I apologize, I thought you were referring to non-whites all over the world when you talked about distinct populations being grouped by skin color.
Well what is the criteria for deciding if a group of people form a "natural group"? And what difference does it make if they are a "natural group" or not?
For example, I could divide the world into 3 races as follows:
(1) Ethnic Swedes plus anyone who was born in Maine;
(2) Ethnic Japanese plus anyone who was born in Sri Lanka; and
(3) Everyone else.
Now one could observe that members of Race 1 are more likely to have blue eyes than members of Race 2 and ask whether the difference is genetic. The answer would be yes even though the races have been defined in a completely arbitrary manner.
I disagree, I think it's pretty clear that IQ tests measure intelligence. But perhaps it's not something which needs to be resolved, because one can simply ask whether the IQ gap between blacks and whites is due in large part to genetic differences.
Again, what is the criteria for deciding whether you have a "natural group" or a "socially-constructed one"?
"Black" has been used to refer to indigenous peoples of Subsaharan Africa, many parts of Asia, and Australia. Even some South American groups were once classed as "black."
Genetic relatedness, which I hope you'll agree is kind of relevant when discussing genetics.
Irrelevant; I'm talking about how different groups were actually defined in history, not about the many arbitrary ways which one could choose to split up the world's human population.
One could also observe that members of Race 2 in your scheme are more likely to eat a lot of rice than members of Race 1, and ask whether the difference is genetic. The answer would be no, even if the answer to some other possible question might be yes. People in Sri Lanka plus ethnically Japanese people tend to eat more rice due to history and local circumstances (the agricultural civilizations that most influenced them were rice-farming ones), not innate characteristics that predispose them to a diet high in rice.
You disagree that we disagree? I'm afraid I have to disagree with that.
Right, as I said: we disagree on that point; if you continue to assume it in your arguments with me you will not be inherently more-convincing because I believe your argument rests on flawed premises. I might be wrong about that, but my own priors do not concur with yours, and you won't get me to update mine by merely reasserting yours.
I really recommend you look through the discussion on this subject from Spring 2010 (the ancestors and distant cousins of this thread) to make sure that a) the people you are going back and forth with are likely to argue honestly and productively on this subject and b) your contributions aren't repeating facts or myths that have already been covered many times before.
For obvious reasons, comments on this subject should be in the upper 10-20% of Less Wrong comments in terms of evidence cited, intellectual honesty, tone, grammar etc.
I don't understand this response. I am asking how one decides if a group is a "natural group" or a "socially-constructed" group. Simply answering "genetic relatedness" doesn't answer the question. I prefer not to guess at what you mean.
Then I don't understand your argument. I thought you were arguing that (1) the group known as "blacks" are defined in an arbitrary manner; and therefore (2) it's not legitimate to claim that the black/white IQ gap has a large genetic component.
What exactly are you arguing?
I agree 100%. The point is that it's possible to define a "race" in a completely arbitrary manner; observe that 2 races are different; and reasonably ask whether the difference might be caused in whole or in part by genetics.
I disagree with your claim about IQ tests and intelligence, but it's a separate issue.
What makes you think this is obvious? While racial IQ differences certainly aren't ruled out a priori (Ashkenazi Jews are the quintessential example), Occamian reasoning about the black/white divide doesn't indicate that genetics is part of the best and most parsimonious explanation. There are adequate other factors at work - you can pick up a lot of data from studies on things like stereotype threat, for instance. And the fact that biracial children do better on IQ when the mother is the white parent than when the mother is black seems strong evidence to me that genetics are not the whole story, if they play any part at all.
What sort of human variable doesn't correlate with race? Are any of weight, height, blood pressure, athletic ability, or any other more measurable characteristic uncorrelated? How about if we measure these at birth, to work around environmental effects?
Athletic ability at birth isn't really all that variable. Besides, "at birth" doesn't eliminate in utero environmental effects.
Correlation with race does not mean genetic causation. Having 100% recent African ancestry correlates highly with living in Africa.
I'd like to suggest you taboo "athletic ability", as it seems more like a reference to a common stereotype about black people than a well-defined trait (if nothing else, long-jumping, hockey, cross-country skiing, soccer, distance swimming and mountain climbing seem like very different tasks that nevertheless might get called "athletic")
The point holds if you focus on just one particular tests rather than generalizing across many sports.
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This would predict that the difference would be seen in biracial boys, but not in biracial girls. I've never heard anything to that effect - have you?
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You can edit comments - there's a button to the right of the "parent" link at the bottom of each. That way you can make prompt additions like this without having to double-post.
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Citation please.
I'm confused by this prediction. Can you expand out your logic? Assuming these were X-linked wouldn't the races of the parents be what matters?
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So, there's four cases, which I will give names: boy with a black mom and white dad ("Joe"), boy with white mom and black dad ("Rob"), girl with black mom and white dad ("Sal"), and girl with white mom and black dad ("Eve").
Joe has a black X chromosome and a white Y chromosome.
Rob has a white X chromosome and a black Y chromosome.
Sal and Eve both have one black and one white X chromosome.
If X chromosomes have lots of intelligence-related genes, and if white parents contribute smarter chromosomes than black parents do, then there's no difference between Sals and Eves (they've both got one of each), but Robs should be smarter than Joes on average, because Rob has his g-loaded genes from a white parent and Joe doesn't.
Ah. Ok. That makes sense. Thanks..
It is not evidence for that at all; an alternative explanation for the difference is that a child's intelligence depends to a significant degree on the prenatal environment, which is determined by the mother's genetics exclusively. I predict that the extra degree of correlation between a mother's and child's intelligence over the correlation between a father's and child's intelligence will be very close to equal to the degree of correlation between a genetically unrelated surrogate mother and child's intelligence.
It may not be proof, but it's certainly evidence.
Err, what? Smoking? Just to name the most obvious counter example.
Mitochondrial DNA would also be a possibility ("white" mitochondria being optimized for neurons, "black" mitochondria for muscle cells, say), but environmental factors seems by far the most obvious explanation.
I don't know as I'd call that a possibility, insofar as African populations have the widest variety of mitochondrial haplogroups (black vs white mitochondria? That's not biology, that's indulging the hypothesis so much you're willing to commit mental gymnastics on its behalf...)
African populations also have the greatest genetic variation in general. African Americans have somewhat less (but still a lot of) variation. African Americans also have considerable European ancestry, but little in the female line, and in so far as they have mtDNA of (recent) African origin they all have in common that they lack mtDNA of Euopean origin (which might have innovations that contribute to the effect observed). If you are willing to assume a genetic cause I don't see how you can a priori exclude a mitochondrial cause. I already made clear that it's not a hypothesis I'd ascribe much probability mass to.
I'm not ruling it out a priori, I'm ruling it out based on domain-specific knowledge. There is no reason from first principles of predicate logic to assume half the stuff that's true and important in biology, but it's no less critical to reasoning correctly in that domain.
Ok, using the term a priori was imprecise. I'm not sure what I should have said instead, I can't think of anything that's both reasonably concise and meeting your apparent standards for precision. Maybe "it seems unreasonable that your prior for the hypothesis "a statistically traceable part of racial IQ variation is caused by mitochondrial DNA variation" should be so close to zero that the posterior probability assuming above evidence still is not even worth calling a possibility."?
My prior is based on the following:
-Mitochondrial DNA has 16,569 base pairs but only 13 of them code for protein (and most of those are dedicated to the electron transport chain, a pretty darn fundamental thing), so while the mutation rate of mtDNA is higher than nuclear DNA there's a limited number of possible variations that will have an effect. There's also a very constrained number of functional changes; most mutations of the protein-coding genes correspond to known mitochondrial diseases, which vary in their effects but do so on the basis of impaired mitochondrial activity globally. When mtDNA protein-coding regions shift, the result is usually one of the many known mitochondrial diseases, and it's under those conditions that you see a strong variance in the expressed protein-coding mtDNA between different organs of the body. When mitochondrial genetics produces varying effects between different tissues, it's not subtle -- you're basically talking about major, life-threatening illnesses or mosaic genetics here. Neither are common conditions; it's difficult to imagine a functional shift in protein-coding for this producing a subtle effect that remains undetectable for a long time.
-mtDNA recombines with itself during reproduction, so mutations along the mitochondrial line are very easily tracked (indeed, it's why we know what we do about human mitochondrial haplogroups, and why we can so readily understand which populations vary genetically by how much and when they seperated). Because one's mtDNA is not specific to the individual, there's a low effective population size for mtDNA changes While this does make it relatively easy for such changes to propagate upon mutation, it also makes them harder to miss when you go looking, and changes to protein-coding regions are even more obvious because there's only a few of them and mutations to those usually affect very fundamental elements of cytochemistry.. The suggestion that IQ differences stem from a mitochondrial DNA shift implies that it would be very, very easy to spot and isolate the character responsible. We know a lot about mtDNA and the limited number of functional changes it displays. There's nothing even vaguely like the proposed change sitting in the pool of known variations, and the pool of plausible unknown variations that just happen to look like that seems vanishingly small.
I don't know about exclusively.
You're right that that was too strong; I should have said it's determined largely by the mother's genetics (but also to lesser degrees by the father's genetics and environmental factors.) But note that the strongest known environmental factor, alcohol consumption, is at least somewhat genetic (http://psychiatry.healthse.com/psy/more/alcoholism), and other factors like susceptibility to smoking addiction probably are as well.
Maternal Stress affects offspring.
So does malnutrition.
Any given chemical is not equally likely to cause pleasure for human beings, so of course alcohol and nicotine consumption have a genetic basis. It seems equally obvious that the availability of alcohol and nicotine are part of the environment. Additionally, they are parts of the environment where it is easy to imagine life being substantially similar without them (unlike environmental influences such as oxygen and gravity).
As the mother is usually the more involved parent when it comes to raising the child, mother-based differences strongly suggest nurture-based differences, unless of course there is some specific and identifiable pathway by which the mother's genetic composition could play an outsized role. I'm not aware of any evidence that the prenatal environment provided by black women is systematically different from that of white women for any genetic reason. Though, in your defense, you were decent enough to make a falsifiable prediction based on this.
Looking at the totality of facts without letting my wishes color my judgment.
Believing in "stereotype threat" as the main reason for the black/white IQ gap is like believing in Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God.
Anyway, I'm going to try to avoid getting into the details of the debate, but this little snippet is worthy of note.
In my earlier comment, I talked about genetics "play[ing] a significant role" When you respond with evidence that "genetics are not the whole story," you are not contradicting me in the slightest.
Instead you are attacking a strawman. Why would a person who ordinarily thinks intelligently and logically make such a glaring error? Respectfully, I submit to you that it's because your thinking is muddled on this issue.
The problem is that people today are afraid to believe that genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ gap. As Eliezer would say, it's not like going to school wearing black -- it's like going to school wearing a clown costume. It's like being an atheist back in the day.
The reasonable and helpful interpretation of Alicorn's question was "What evidence are you basing this strongly-held belief on?" Asserting that you are basing your belief on evidence is not an answer. We get that you think this position is tantamount to being an atheist in the past. You don't have to keep making that analogy. Instead, give us the evidence. We can handle the ugly truth if you're right.
Basically you are right. I tried to answer the question without saying anything which would invite a debate on the actual race/iq question.
Looking back at my response, I should have made it clear that I wasn't giving the answer Allicorn was looking for. But I admit it now.
I'm a bit torn, but I will try to put together a blog post which lays out my case and link to it.
Ok, I summarized my views here:
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
I'm happy to go into more detail; to answer questions; and to respond to arguments if you wish.
From what I can tell of your blog post, you said, "there's evidence, it's so obvious, people have alternative explanations but they're bogus, there's evidence, I bet whites do better than blacks on tests, there's tons of evidence."
Where's the evidence?
Here's Rushton and Jensen making their best case for significant genetic influences on intergroup differences in a 2005 review article, and a critical response from Richard Nisbett, one of the leading proponents of the hypothesis that there are no significant B-W genetic differences. Taken together, they are much more informative than selective presentations by amateurs.
I find Nisbett's reply pretty convincing. How do others feel?
Brazil, would you like to reply to the Nisbett article?
Not to excuse the shoddy scholarship of rushton and jensen, but I'd just like to add that a cursory examination of the nisbett article indeed shows some highly dubious claims. In several places he assumes a hypothesis of the form "If the hereditary model is true, then we should see X". But for many of these it seems that X does not necessarily follow from the hereditary hypothesis. the hereditary hypothesis is not a monolithic structure. it is a spectrum of correlation from 0.0 to 1.0. both ends seem equally implausible to me.
My own encounter with Nisbett material: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4257220
Yes, I took the look at the article. I agree that if it's a correct summary of the evidence, it undermines my position.
Obviously I don't have time to run down every reference in the article, so I looked at the very first section, went to the web site of the what the author referred to as the "largest study," and looked at the very first graph I could find showing the gap in scores.
I'm telling you this so that nobody can accuse me of cherry picking. The graph I pulled up was the only data I retrieved which is referenced in the paper. Here is the graph:
http://nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2008/ltt0005.asp
Just eyeballing it, it does not appear to support Nisbett's claim. It appears to show a small narrowing of the black/white gap between 1973 and 1982 and a fairly consistent gap thereafter.
So to put it politely, I am skeptical of the entire article.
You appear to be referring to Nisbett's paragraph starting with
A few sentences below that Nisbett refers to NAEP data to say that the reading score gap could be gone in 25 years and the science score gap in 75 years, if trends continue. [ETA: this is the 'largest study' that Nisbett cites. I'm sad Nisbett didn't give a more specific citation for it.]
The page you link appears to have data on the NAEP tests, but only for the mathematics tests. Clicking on the 'White-Black Gap' button, and then on the 'Age 17' tab (as Nisbett refers to 12th graders, so I am guessing that is what he and you are talking about...?) shows
The data linked do not appear to bear strongly on Nisbett's claims about the NAEP data (because Nisbett refers to the reading and science NAEP scores, not math), and I am also having difficulty seeing the 'small narrowing of the black/white gap between 1973 and 1982 and a fairly consistent gap thereafter.' in the data linked.
All in all, I am having difficulty substantiating your claim that Nisbett's claim is unsubstantiated by the data. I suspect either I am not interpreting your comment correctly, or the link in it happens to point to a data set other than the one you intended. Could you clarify?
(About the bigger question of whether black-white IQ differences have narrowed recently, it may be informative to read William Dickens and James Flynn's 2006 paper, which takes IQ test norming data and shows a narrowing of the IQ gap between 1972 and 2002. (Rushton and Jensen disagreed with the conclusions of that paper, but I find Dickens and Flynn's rebuttal convincing.)
A cultural explanation could exclude a genetic one. Simply put, the culture transmitted by black parents is not conducive to intellectual growth, just as the culture transmitted by Ashkenazi Jews is conducive to intellectual growth. This would also explain Alicorn's example, as the mother is more likely to do most of the cultural transmission, it would explain that data.
I'm not advocating this position, and I'm certainly not generalizing about every single member of a very large group, but this would explain the observed discrepancy and data without requiring a genetic basis. The actual explanation is doubtlessly more complicated; the point is that there are certainly other ways of explaining observed data that do not rely on genetics. That doesn't mean that genetics isn't a factor, only that it's not the case that it must be a significant one.
Also, while we're at it, I hate the term "significant." It's one of the most effective weasel words in existence.
If I wanted to claim that any one of these factors plays a significant role in the difference, I'd need to provide evidence. Because genetics is hard to see and so directly intertwined with other factors (the parents who create you generally raise you), claiming, "Genetics must be a key factor!" requires a significant amount of unambiguous evidence.
I admit there may be better evidence on this than I am familiar with, but I would be very surprised if that were the case. Good data on this topic is very hard to procure funding for.
I agree wholeheartedly with NT's statement, though. People unwilling to entertain the possibility that genetics differ between ethnic subgroups are indeed failing at rationality, though I'd have to say a socially motivated failing at rationality is less blameworthy than a personally motivated one.
Those people are failing at something much more basic than rationality. Likewise for folks who think intelligence does not have any basis in genetics (try to debate a douglas fir!)
It is obviously true that different people differ genetically, and obviously true that intelligence is related to genetics. But it is not obvious in this way that differences in intelligence between two humans would have anything to do with genetics.
I actually find the genetic explanation more hopefull. Genetic engineering would be a cheap and easy fix to the problem at least compared to the price of current and past attempts to close the gap.
If its culture then we are stuck with doing more or less the same things we have already done for 50 or so years, just with more money and more energy this time.
If its a mysterious hereditary factor but not the culture... I'm even less optimistic unless it would turn out to be a family of infectious agents that cause damage in the prenatal environment or alter gene expression.
I'm not too optimistic about genetic engineering. It seems that any engineering process requires a lot of failures before you figure out how to do things right. People can accept that a few astronauts and test pilots will die fiery deaths, but I doubt anyone could accept babies being born with brains messed up due to genetic tinkering.
The other thing is that poor man's genetic engineering -- i.e. eugenics -- has been available for some time now and people are very reluctant to embrace it. Even without forced sterilization, it hardly seems outrageous to tweak public policy so as to incentivize the smartest people to reproduce more and discourage the stupidest. And yet it seems it would be politically very difficult to enact even a mild policy along these lines -- its proponents would surely be condemned as racists.
It is widely employed in the US by parents using (for whatever reason) modern reproductive technology.
Of course we don't call it that, but please what else is it, when the eggs of women with very high SAT or even GRE scores cost thousands of dollars to obtain than those that are merely average? What else is it when you search for a tall/athletic/musically talented/ academically successful sperm donor? Or terminating a pregnancy where the fetus is identified to have a genetic disorder?
I would say it depends what you mean by "widely employed." Among the left half of the American bell curve, what percentage of children would you guess are the result of modern reproductive technology and a voluntary search for a high IQ egg or sperm donor? I would guess it's well under 5%. i.e. not enough to have a big impact on the intelligence of future generations.
Why is this down-voted?
He is right. Reproductive technology is mostly currently employed by people with above average IQ, not just because this is the general pattern with all almost all technology and medical services in general, but because high IQ people are more likley to be infertile at the period in their life when they want to have children.
And, incidentally, are more likely to be fertile overall. (And taller and with an ass that conforms to sex appropriate indicators of 'damn fine'.) Of course, not very much more likely.
By fertile you mean “able to have children, whether they actually have them or not”? Otherwise, that's wrong.
Um, citation needed?
I guess that's true. But it can be framed otherwise. Let me demonstrate:
In a very slow and overly cautious approach of just selecting the best embryo of the mix for implantation or even just picking the best sperm and egg, you would get convergence between the groups rather rapidly. Innovation is expensive, copying is cheap in such circumstances. Any genetic advantages of say Askenazi Jews, other Europeans or East Asians will be pretty cheap source of cognitive enhancement for the third world, while the First world will have to mine its talented fraction, which may have somewhat more unpleasant side effects.
The reason why I believe a very slow and overly cautious approach might be probable, is because we already have a very slow and overly cautious approach when it comes to new medical technology.
I think you are rather over-optimistic about the ability to reduce opposition to your proposal by framing in less explictly race-related terms. There is a long history, at least in the United States, of policies of racist intent being articulated using criteria that are not explicitly related to race: poll taxes and literacy tests; vagrancy laws; the general trope of "states rights". Everyone is already primed to be looking for the racial discrimination, regardless of how you phrase it.
How is this racial discrimination against anyone but European and Asian Americans? They would bear a disproportionate amount of taxation for government services that mostly help non-Asian minorities.
Doesn't sound all that plausible to me. Based on my general observations, the people at the low end of the IQ bell curve tend to reproduce in their late teens and early 20s, i.e. at ages where reproductive technology is not all that necessary.
In this world people use reproductive technology even when perfectly capable of conceiving naturally because it has become much more advanced, more convenient and because children gain a considerable measurable advantage. Also I assume these would be plausible numbers because contraceptive technology has advanced, the male pill for starters or perhaps a safer, more advanced, multi-year version of something like Depo-Provera.
Basically Gattaca to reach for a fictional portrayal.
I wasn't proposing we do anything novel, except the technology needed to modify genes in human eggs and perhaps sperm. Nothing truly transhuman in scope (for now).
I assume (eye-baling what I recall from the data) there are enough similarities between various disparate ethnicities and enough diversity within ethnicities that it wouldn't be that hard to simply spread around the wealth so to speak. Just increase the frequency of a few rare alleles or take a few from other groups. Or if you are feeling extra conservative, identify genes that where sweeping say a century or three ago (not sure exactly how long ago high IQ genes became maladaptive, estimating early dates for dysgenics in recent history is difficult) and are associated with IQ and just spread those.
Sure there are very likley some IQ increasing genes that simply wouldn't work for everyone or would cause some averse result, but again I expect these to be rare considering they've been test driven.
As for messed up brains... Just perfect technology for altering genes in eggs on animals, do only what nature has already done for a exceptional group or individual then simply vigorously screen among a few hundred created embryos to figure out which to implant so one can be certain to avoid bad PR.
Generally speaking I think there really is no reason that anyone needs to suffer a IQ lower than 100 in the late 21st century. I wouldn't however dictate to parents that they can't have low IQ children if they so desired, no more that I would at a later time forbid people from living and reproducing as the Homos Sapiens classic. Nature has tested the design, it works mostly, and the benefit to mankind should we find a way to help the lower half of the bell-curve catch up at least to the current average would be immense. The non-negligible increases in economic productivity would be dwarfed by gains in quality of life. This is why I am and have been for so long a supporter of transhumanism, its potential to improve the human condition through enhancement has always captivated my imagination.
I actually think that having the government step away from barring people access to their genetic information as well as limiting with unnecessary regulation their access to technologies that require in vitro fertilisation (in my own country only infertile couples have access to it), a greater acceptance of genetics and evolution, and a academic culture less biased against hereditarian explanations would result in a strong enough trend of people making eugenic choices to counteract most of the dysgenic decline we are experiencing. Voluntary eugenics is a wonderful way how people can improve the lives of their children.
In the big picture two human generations is a short period from a biological perspective. As long as genetic engineering of humans is available and accepted by 2060 I remain optimistic about humanities long term chances. However if the date would be pushed back to 2090 or if enhancement wasn't accepted in most of the developed world, or perhaps limited to regions with authoritarian regimes then I would be very much concerned.
Maybe, we are pretty much in the realm of speculation here. I am still skeptical but I will concede the possibility that with a conservative approach including animal testing, these sorts of genetic modifications might be done with minimal risk to humans. I tend to doubt it based on the observation I made before. Also, I think it's reasonable to expect that different alleles interact and affect an organism in a lot of subtle, unpredictable ways. Dog breeders know that trying to improve one feature often has deleterious effects on other, seemingly unrelated features.
And getting your typical American of low intelligence (perhaps IQ 85) to a point where he can succeed in college (perhaps IQ 115) would seem to require a pretty big jump.
I kinda doubt that the people towards the bottom of the IQ spectrum have much interest in boosting the intelligence of their children. This is based on general observation of the kind of traits they select for in mating.
Since we're basically talking about IQ, the negative side effects on anything like personality or health would have to be really big to outweigh the sheer socio-economic benefits one can statistically expect for say a boost of 10 or 20 or 30 IQ points.
Depressingly plausible.
The adverse effects quite possibly are that significant in the context of the ancestral environment, but probably not in the context of the modern world.
You need to develop that a bit more. It is important for the benefit of the reader and thinking in general to precisely and clearly separate genetic fitness and general well being in addition to pointing out the environment has changed.
I suggest people read up on Algernon's Law and its loopholes. In short:
Bostrom's formulation, called “evolutionary optimality challenge” (EOC):
The loopholes as given by Bostrom are:
And also in the current context of discussion (possibility of genetic differences between groups), if one accepts that say Askenazi Jews have a one stdv or half a stdv advantage over some populations due to genetic causes, looking at them today, they don't seem to have shorter or less happy lives or be undesirable people, so why not share that specific genetic wealth around? It has the neat side effect of basically rooting out one of the causes of anti-Semitism too, by reducing inequality, so it is hard to say it would hurt their interest as individuals or an ethnicity either.
Actually one doesn't need to demand genetic differences between groups for the argument that what we're seeing here probably fits either the first or the second loopholes, since we also have individual differences that are caused by genetics. We see that people with an IQ of 115 overall seem to statistically speaking today do better in nearly every measure of quality of life and many measures of psychological well being compared to people with an IQ of 85, they also live longer and are generally more desirable to have around.
Assuming intelligence to correlate with wealth, making it more expensive to raise children would seem like it would have a positive effect in that direction... but apparently rich people prefer to have one or two seriously spoiled children than half a dozen children living decently, and poor people prefer to have several children living in hardship than just one living decently. I can't think of any way to change this (which wouldn't have seriously undesirable side effects).
Well if you want to use wealth as a proxy for intelligence, one approach would be to dramatically raise the tax exemption for children. This would have little effect on poor people, since they generally do not itemize their deductions -- if they owe taxes at all.
Still if such a measure were proposed as a way of encouraging smarter people to have more babies, you can bet that a lot of people will scream racism.
I was thinking about solutions which wouldn't significantly affect the total fertility rate, but now that I think about it, increasing it wouldn't be a “seriously undesirable side effect”, at least in (say) continental Europe or Japan.
Now that I think about it, the fertility of lower classes could be decreased by giving out contraception for free and subsidizing abortions, but the latter could be very unpopular. (It shouldn't affect the fertility of upper classes because the price of contraception/abortions isn't one of the reasons why they're not having fewer children.)
(Why was the parent downvoted, BTW? I guess because the downvoter thinks continental Europe/Japan are already overpopulated so sub-replacement fertility there is not bad.)
Possibly because brazil84 is perceived as a troll - someone might be downvoting the entire thread.
In what sense, exactly? Some of his arguments look logical, like the ontological argument, and others like the argument from design look empirical (and falsified by evolution).
Stereotype threat, on the other hand, looks entirely empirical, should be measurable, and can be argued against by pointing to a meta-analysis showing publication bias (I checked just now, and a full paper does not seem to have been published nor is it listed on one of the authors' homepages which otherwise lists all his work; this nonpublication is ironic if the original meta-analysis was correct...)
In the sense that to accept the argument, one needs to allow wishful thinking to overcome basic rationality.
I did not even think of stereotype threat as a possible hypothesis until I read about it, at which point I thought it sounded pretty implausible for the thirty seconds it took me to reach the study results. Your model of the psychology of stereotype threat believers is just plain wrong as a matter of fact.
I'm not sure what your point is here, but if you want to discuss it further (with me), feel free to comment on my blog post.
Which one?
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
More or less.
What's your alternative explanation for lower performance when reminded of a stereotype? Publication bias looks plausible.
What about the "one drop" criterion for race? In the US, someone with 7 great-grandparents from Europe and 1 from Africa is quite often classified as black, not white. If the discrepancy is largely genetic, we should expect much more variance among black subjects (only African ancestors to very few African ancestors) than among white ones (very few to no African ancestors) - more than the width of the gap itself, actually. Is this what we observe?
Why do I need to provide an explanation? It may very well be true that being reminded of a stereotype has a measurable effect on peoples' performance.
Well you would need to quantify the amount of variation among both groups. American whites are pretty diverse too. Also, I would guess that blacks with mostly European blood are pretty unusual among American blacks. So I'm not sure what to expect.
So stereotype threat exists but only explains a smallish part of the gap, with most of the rest due to genetics? 'kay.
Quantifying diversity is hard: genetic variation I don't know (KHAN!), specific genes even less, ancestry data isn't available, samples like "famous people" are skewed, etc. I mostly meant "Barack Obama: a definitely white and a definitely black parent, and he's black in the US race system. That seems common".
But here's a way to test: pick people with a race system in common (typically the US one, and I could do an European replication). Ask them to describe their race (ideally open-ended, but given small samples probably a set list). Take pictures of them and ask a (blinded, racially sampled) jury to guess their race. Measure some objective and hopefully relevant criterion like melanin in skin, or some cleverly chosen gene, or ancestry if you have it handy. Have them do some kind of intelligence test. Possibly split into groups and test conditions like "stereotype threat".
The mostly-genetics hypothesis predicts that the objective criterion will be the best predictor, and the jury estimation will be a better predictor than the self-report because it looks at phenotypical evidence of genome rather than irrelevant things like native language. The mostly-culture hypothesis predicts that the self-report will be the best predictor, and that the results will vary widely depending on local race systems.
Clever stupid "it's all interaction" idea of the day: What about a genetic predisposition to social cues such as stereotype threats?
I don't know if it "exists" or not. But clearly if it does exist it does not satisfactorily explain the gap.
I briefly summarized my position here:
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
I am happy to respond to questions, go into more detail, and respond to arguments if you wish.
Can you make an effort to state in more detailed terms what it would mean to find that "genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference", in other words what precise predictions this theory makes? (And more precisely, what predictions it makes that distinguish it from the predictions of alternative theories, such as "environmental differences resulting from e.g. discrimination play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference".)
I responded to your question here:
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
Not really. Of that (relatively short) post, the only part that counts as a prediction is "you see it pretty much everywhere in the United States and the rest of the world; further, various attempts to eliminate this gap have failed". And this is compatible with a non-genetic explanation: environmental in African countries, and from discrimination in rich countries. Attempts at eliminating other kinds of discrimination (e.g. gender) have also been less than successful.
How does a world in which the causal origin of the black/white IQ gap is genetic look different from a world in which that gap has a different explanation?
I'd imagine there's a pretty strong correlation between belief that race differences are largely innate and belief that gender differences are largely innate. Your point is unlikely to change any minds on either side of the issue.
Assuming there is such a correlation, what kind of thinking would you expect it relies on?
What we really need to see, if this issue is to be approached in a Bayesian manner, is a fully laid-out hypothesis about the causal pathways that go from genes to race to intelligence to IQ, and which of these pathways bypass environmental causal links. If we do have this and are in fact approaching the issue in a Bayesian manner, then success or lack thereof in eliminating gender discrimination can be rigorously treated as evidence.
If someone has not formalized their hypothesis so as to make it testable, then their thinking is anyway of too low a grade to reach reliably correct conclusions based on the evidence, and it does not matter what evidence they look at, they'll end up right or wrong purely by chance.
I don't have a clue either way.