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Eugine_Nier comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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Well the fact that race is correlated with things like IQ is pretty well established empirically, and there is no obvious a priori reason to prefer environmental to genetic explanations.
Not a priori, but there has been at least one study performed on black children adopted by white families, this one, which comes to the conclusion that environment plays a key role. In all honesty, I haven't even read the study, because I can't find the full text online, but if more studies like it are performed and come to similar conclusions, then that could be taken as evidence of a largely environmental explanation.
Yes, and I have had numerous twin studies cited at me that purport to show that genetics plays a key role. I can't vouch for the quality of either but it is clear that the research is likely to remain inconclusive for quite so time.
Really? I've seen twin studies that purport a genetic explanation for IQ differences between individuals, but never between racial groups. If you've saved a link to a study of the latter type, I'd be really interested to read it.
Ok, I'm confused. Under what scenario is it at all plausible for individual IQ differences but not racial IQ differences to be genetic?
Well, Down's Syndrome, for example, clearly affects IQ. There's a big genetic IQ difference that is only really relevant to individuals. There aren't Down's-magnitude intelligence variations between races.
In general, there is wide variation in intelligence among people within any particular ethnic group. Showing these to be genetic doesn't seem to be too hard either, since you can find individuals of the same ethnic group having been raised in similar environments. On the other hand, the difference in average IQ between races is quite small, compared to the individual within-race differences. To show how much of this was genetic would require controlling for environment, which one can even now expect to be notably different between races.
To put it simply, it's easy to demonstrate genetic influence, when the effects are of a magnitude such that one can just rule out environment as being the critical factor. Which is not the case for racial differences.
Obviously, you can expect there to exist on average a non-zero genetic component between races, since their genetic material has had time to drift apart. But that's neither here nor there when you want to know how much.
I keep hearing people say that and always wanted to ask which statistics are being compared.
Not about intelligence specifically, but I believe this was the first (well-known) paper making the claim: http://www.philbio.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Lewontin-The-Apportionment-of-Human-Diversity.pdf
The point is that even if the heritable component of (say) intelligence among white people formed a bell curve, and the heritable component of intelligence among black people formed a bell curve, a priori you'd expect the two curves to be pretty much the same.
(Lewontin's other conclusion, that "race" is "biologically meaningless", is separate and doesn't work because what small racial differences there are are statistically clustered: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstract;jsessionid=831B49767DB713DADCD9A1199D7ADC49.d02t02)
Circumstances which look arbitrarily contrived and absurd upon examination but should be acknowledged as at least technically possible. ie. The distributions of IQ within each race are miraculously identical because contrary to expectations the universe really is Fair regarding this one complex trait (but not others).
Or one where the differences are small, or trivial. I don't think this is "miraculous" or "implausible". Before the invention of agriculture, about seven to twelve thousand years ago, I'm not sure what pressures there could have been on Europeans to develop higher intelligence than Africans, so in contrast to physical differences, many of which have well-established links to specific climates, intellectual genetic differences would probably be attributable to genetic drift and >~10,000 years of natural selection. To be clear, my position isn't that I have good evidence for this, merely that I don't know and I don't assign this scenario as low a prior probability as you seem to.
Here it is (pdf link).
Many thanks!
I know of no situation where the race of an individual is the only factor, or the most significant factor in making a decision. Feel free to counterargue.
Huh? What does that have to do with my argument?
In case it wasn't clear I was presenting an argument that there exist genetic differences between races that give rise to behavioral differences.
And I was presenting the argument that it doesn't matter. There is no good reason to base political, social or legal policy on it It's always overwhelmed by other factors.
And yet we do, the "anti-racists" insist on it.
In the grandparent you said that the race of an individual is rarely the only factor. On the other hand, in aggregate it's possible for the other factors to wash out and we are left with race as the main factor.