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Vaniver comments on Genetic "Nature" is cultural too - Less Wrong Discussion
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If there are heritable differences between races, mixed-race people should have scores that proportionally track their ancestry. This gives you, among African Americans and Hispanics in general, a correlation between skin color and intelligence, because more European ancestry will mean lighter skin. We can reverse that relationship to suggest that lighter skin color means more European ancestry. Except among siblings--there, which sibling is lighter or darker is random and not related to overall degree of European ancestry.
(Siblings do vary in their genetic inheritance--that's why they're not twins--but because intelligence is highly polygenic and skin color is only mildly polygenic (determined by about 7 genes), knowing that one sibling has lighter skin tells you almost nothing about whether they're more or less European than another sibling.)
So one can consider a sample of mixed-race people (which almost all non-recent immigrant African Americans in the US are) and compare the within-family and the between-family relationship between skin color and intelligence / social outcomes.
What I've seen on this thinks the evidence is inconclusive but favors the heritability theory (that it's the genetic effect, rather than the visual effect, that drives intelligence and outcomes).
This seems to me like it's likely explained by a handful of factors like the following:
People don't capture all of the gains they produce, but those gains do show up somewhere.
Similarly with the benefits of catastrophe avoidance. If smarter people get into fewer accidents, that both reduces their insurance premiums (if insurance companies are able to detect and use that info) and everyone else's insurance premiums, because they're less likely to get rammed.
Grrrrr.... Ok, I'm definitely shifting to the "the field is complicated and the results are uncertain" meta-position on genetics. Still on the "genes are pretty important" side, but no longer willing to rule out environmental explanations (even shared environment is important, apparently, when comparing between countries).
Yes, explanations aren't hard to find. But I would be at least a little bit wary of jumping straight on to "obviously all the economics waffle about externalities and public goods is wrong". Even with those explanations, this means there are other factors influencing country IQ vs country wealth, implying that we can't use that comparison to tell us strong facts about the importance of IQ in outcomes.
I think this is mostly a "small sample size" thing, like with international IQ comparisons. (This specific thing was a case of "the level of A and B are both individually significant, but the difference between A and B isn't significant," as I recall.)