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Lumifer comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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In Africa? It so happens that the world is much bigger than the USA and the people in sub-Saharan Africa test for IQ pretty much the same as African-Americans.
Sure, you can control for wealth/economic status. Or you can go and test poor peasants in China and poor peasants in Africa. You seem to think that this is a white-vs-black US problem. It's not. The highest-average-IQ large group of people is East Asians, like Han Chinese -- not Caucasian whites.
I am curious -- how do you figure out that in a distribution close to normal only 25% are higher than the mean?
Actually much of sub-Saharan Africa has average IQ around 70, whereas African-Americans average around 85.
Yeah. I suspect there are two reasons for that. First, malnutrition as a child can drive your IQ down and malnutrition is much more common in sub-Saharan Africa. And second, many African-Americans have some white ancestors. Look at Obama, for example -- he self-identifies as African-American though only half his genes come from Africans.
Ethiopians have lots of Caucasian admixture too. (But once we know that both genes and environment play an important role, working out which fraction of the variance in IQs is due to each to within three significant figures doesn't sound terribly interesting to me.)
How is that not self-evident given the edge cases (puppies going to human schools / children growing up in a sensory-deprivation tank, both not doing well on IQ tests)? Regarding the significant figures, we need to keep in mind those are to be interpreted as "this is how much of the variance factor X explains given a certain scenario". They will vary across e.g. nations:
In a homogeneous environment (e.g. classless society, higher Gini-index), genes will acount for more of the variance than in a mixed environment with people of the same genetic makeup. IOW, as you e.g. change the school system, or who marries whom, so you change those relative weights of nature v. nurture.
You might say "well, given typical circumstances and typical gene pool variances", but consider that the discussion is in any case comparing e.g. the US to sub-saharan Africa (or whereever), which absolutely cannot have the same relative weights for their respective nature versus nurture, unless the different gene variances in tribal societies and the different "school" environment somehow equalled out, a dubious proposition.