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THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY is a pretty comprehensive survey (60 pages!) in favor of the hereditarian view on intelligence. I found it to be a good read.
However, it was published in 2005. Does anyone know the current status of that survey? Are its findings still up-to-date with our understanding of race and genetics, or have the evidence its based on since shown to be inaccurate?
Have there been other surveys of similar scope and comprehensiveness since then, whether for or against the hereditarian view?
I'd be interesting to see a follow-up too, since any result other than a regression to a mean would imply that either the initial study or our very concept of IQ is flawed. With greater racial interbreeding ratios and selection pressures in that have returned to favoring fertility rates in people with high educational attainment, if there is any actual of race on intelligence, it should be gradually reducing.
You say fertility rates, but am I reading correctly that in your link the graph is of a raw birthrate in the age 15-50 bracket without controlling for age? How much of that result is just reflecting the fact that a lot more people are going to higher education than they used to? In Census data I'm seeing the ""College 4 years or more" column rise from e.g. 23% of the total "25 to 34 years, Female" section in 1992 to 45% of the total in 2022 (passing through 32.5% in 2002 and 37.5% in 2012). Unless I'm misreading something, women in their childbearing years are much more likely to be well educated than women a decade or three older, so we'd expect birth rates to skew much more strongly toward educated mothers than total fertility rates do.
I think you're right in that there's some fuzziness involved in determining the effect size, especially since the correlation between IQ and educational attainment is strong but not incredibly so. But the objection you bring up means that the graph I posted should be underestimating the size of the new more-smarts-means-more-babies effect, since in the past fertility rates were higher.
That is the bias you would see in a graph of TFR, but your graph is not of TFR.
The TFR data shows what we (sadly) expect:
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/105234/cdc_105234_DS1.pdf
Non diploma women have high TFR of 2.7
high school diploma have 2.05
Then it sinks further with lowest the bachelor degree holders having 1.2 TFR
And then a little bump up again for master degree 1.4 and doctorate degree 1.5 (still brutally below replacement)
I saw the argument that TFR is artificially a bit worse than in real life, because TFR is not catching yet that women are moving their child bearing years up. Similar bachelor degrees having lowest TFR does not mean that women with a bachelor are (in the end) worse than master women in family formation (eg because they earn less money), but can also be explained by that students who have a bachelor and also doing their master additionally are avoiding getting pregnant while still in University.
How much of this is Hasidim, though? Like private religious schools don't always get an actual diploma for their graduates.
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Okay, I've found a graph from 2019 that compared against TFR: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1238575/total-fertility-rate-us-education/. There's also this graph that subdivides by race that shows different race-based curves, which is an objection someone brought up elsewhere.
The hook-shaped curve is evidence for what I'm talking about-- that selection pressures have returned to favor educational attainment (and therefore, by proxy, IQ). Especially since the true strength of the relationship is going to be obscured by older women with less education who already had all their children, and obscured by an inability to differentiate between then-young mothers who won't and will later get additional education.
Elsewhere someone brought up the objection that even if positive selection pressure in favor of education has begun to apply to whites and hispanics, it doesn't seem to apply to blacks, which would mean we should expect to see racial iq differences (if they exist) to continue to diverge. But I reject that reasoning on the basis due to the fact that base rates of education have always been lower for blacks for structural reasons (i.e., racism, poverty), that black TFR started from a higher modern basepoint and has dropped faster, and that therefore the existing obscuring effects of having an older, less-educated cohort would be stronger.
In the interest of honesty I also found this graph for birth rates in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/195970/number-of-births-by-educational-attainment-of-mother-in-the-united-states/ but I'm having a hard time comparing it against the original graph because it splits things up into different brackets.
Thanks for these. I don't see much to argue about with them, though I'm suspicious about that since the hook-shaped curve flatters my priors from other vaguely-recalled studies. The zeitgeist of "I shouldn't have kids while I'm still struggling with the rat race" favors the people who've won (their idea of) the rat race, but not as much as it favors the people who just decide not to run.
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The Statista graph you linked doesn't show positive selection on educational attainment. The fact that the small minority of women with graduate degrees have slightly higher TFR than women with associate's or bachelor's degrees does not make up for the fact that they have lower fertility than the majority of women who have no college degree. It's still clearly the case that the majority of children are being born to women with below-average educational attainment.
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Fertility’s correlation to IQ and education varies quite a bit between American ethnic groups- for blacks it’s sharply negative, for whites it’s positive. Most data I’ve seen shows in particular that’s it’s extremely positive for conservative white men, mildly negative for liberal whites, and basically flat for conservative white women.
This is not a recipe for the races to converge in IQ.
At any given point in time and cultural context, a genetic trait might be positive or negative for fertility. But over the long run, everything reverts to the mean. If IQ is real, it should have some sort of consistent, visible effect visible over long time periods-- and 20 years is a fairly long time period. The reason I pointed to the graph of people with more educational attainment regaining their advantage in fertility is to display exactly this phenomenon. Truly dysgenic phenomenon are intrinsically self-defeating.
And it's worth considering that fertility rates based on genetic traits are a lagging indicator. That we're seeing evidence of a switch to benefiting probably-smart people means that the actual mechanism must have been in place for at least 20-40 years, since all the newly fertile PHDs must have had the genetic components of their IQs determined then.
The fertility rate inversion we're seeing is also not just an american thing, but common cross culturally as more countries go through the stages of the demographic transition.
All that is to say, I trust Darwin and Rudolf Clausius way more than I trust anyone else. Any scientific paper has to get through them before it gets to me.
Unrelated hot take: while mixed race people, as a group, will continue to be average, we should expect the leading geniuses of the mid 20th century to be disproportionately mixed race due to the effects of hybrid vigor. And if theories about genetic intellectual differences between races are correct, we should be able to identify specific combinations likely to produce particularly intelligent hybrids.
I wrote a top level comment a few weeks ago arguing that ‘dysgenics’ was a spook and a dumb argument- oliganthropia is a potentially very serious problem, but dysgenic IQ selection from low fertility rates is not a real thing. I’m not disagreeing with you there.
What I am disagreeing with you is the idea that this will lead to some kind of average IQ convergence- more than likely the black/white gap will grow for a bit and then stay about the same.
There’s a large number of countries where mixed-race people are the majority(most of them Spanish speaking) and the best and brightest from these countries seem to, generally, be not mixed, often specifically descended from high-IQ immigrants. I’m not writing off that there’s going to be a lot of Hapas in the talented tenth of tomorrow, but probably not at a higher rate than Asians(which is what your theory would predict).
Can you give a summary?
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To the extent that any IQ difference is caused by genetics, we should expect to see that IQ difference decline as greater admixture rates have been achieved. To the extent that IQ differences are caused by environmental factors, we should expect to see that IQ difference decline as those environmental differences have been declining.
For the gap to stay the same or increase despite changes to the putative causative factors would imply that something is off about our understanding of IQ and/or racial IQ, though I couldn't say in advance what.
Including my responses to your other comment here
Re-reading my original comment, I think you're right that my hot take doesn't follow from its premises. So I'll alter it a little. "If theories about racial intelligence are correct* we should expect..."
(Here taking "theories about racial intelligence" to mean specifically theories about a genes that have reached fixation due to selection pressures at the race level.)
So far, you're right that we haven't actually seen much evidence of hybrid vigor in the domain of intelligence-- which is kind of the problem with these theories about racial intelligence. If you told me, "different corn breeds have different disease resistance capabilities," then I could posit that "it should therefore be possible to engineer hybrid varieties with superior disease resistance to any heritage line," and prove us both empirically correct. But I'm hearing "different races have different intellectual capabilities," and yet not seeing any of the superlative hybrid strains. I'm aware that isn't proof for the negative case (that no genetic intellectual difference exists), but it makes me unwilling to reject the null hypothesis.
If you (or the original study) do in fact convince me of racial differences, I'll switch to believing that hybrid vigour should occur, and that we just haven't tested the right crossbreeds yet.
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I don't think this is a major factor in humans. In fact there's plenty of reason to think the opposite might be the case, since different populations have evolved different complex sets of alleles to solve particular problems and a child with some of each is liable to end up without either being functional. A well-aligned mind is a difficult thing to code for.
But, there's also some reason to think it's true. Emil talks about that a little bit here.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/is-mixed-race-breeding-bad-for-you/
IIRC he thinks that certain recessive alleles may be hurting cognition, and 'outbreeding' would help with that. But as I understand the situation, even where that's the case, it's still most advantageous to mate with someone as genetically close to you as possible given that they don't share your deleterious recessives.
I don't think hybrid vigor would be a factor in every case, but alleles that manage to reach fixation in a particular population group likely make some sort of balanced tradeoff-- not optimizing for any one thing too hard because doing so would confer metabolic costs while producing no competitive advantages (against a population with the same genes.) So if racial IQ science is real* I'd suspect that in the right-tail of IQ distribution we'd see people with heterozygous alleles that were "intended" to perform some balanced function in isolated groups, but combined by crossbreeding lose any limiting factors and produce people exceptional in some way or another.
*To avoid concern trolling, I should be clear here that I do not have any particular faith in the existing racial IQ science. I can't rule out in principle that racial differences between IQ groups exist, but there are too many confounding factors, and in particular people who talk about race-based IQ support their claims with evidence that matches the pop-sci view of what "evolution" looks like, rather than what any plant or animal breeder would say actually happens in practice with genetics.
I mean, the hybrid vigor hypothesis for IQ specifically seems pre-falsified- most of history's greatest geniuses were purebred members of endogamous groups(many specifically Ashkenazi, but the Indian math geniuses as well. And I'd be remiss not to mention that the Meiji restoration was possible because hyper-isolationist Japan had an existing well of underutilized geniuses.). Additionally the heavily mixed populations of Latin America seem underrepresented in scientific and technical achievements compared to the members of high-IQ groups in those countries.
I'd be interested in watching what happens with hapas over the next few decades, but I don't think hybrid vigor is part of the winning formula. I'm not writing off the idea entirely that the key to producing super geniuses is with Ashkenazi/Tamil Brahmin hybrids. I'm just skeptical.
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Jayman's blog has a lot of more-recent information which you may find interesting. Be sure to check the sidebar for other stuff.
That said you're probably about to get chastised for a low-effort (and probably bad-faith) TLD and I can't say I disagree.
Thanks! What’s the sidebar? The closest thing I see in the drop-down are the rules.
What would a higher effort request for more information look like?
I suspect you have a page rendering issue, or maybe mobile is different. This is the sidebar.
Ah, you meant the sidebar of Jaymans’s blog, not TheMotte. Great resources indeed.
Have there been previous Motte discussions on this topic that are particularly noteworthy?
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Can you link me to literature on individual vs group contributions to cognitive ability ?
I've heard about regressing to the mean, where top percentile parents will the child's cognitive ability move towards their combined group means, rather than the parental mean.
IE, if:
Then what would a & b look like ?
Put simply,
If 2 geniuses from a low group IQ community have a child, then is the child less likely to be genius than children of other geniuses ?
If 2 normies from a group with high group IQ have a child. Is the child more likely to be genius than children of other normies ?
This is a misunderstanding of regressing to the mean. Regression to the mean after selection happens because some part of IQ is non-inherited, and it is IQ as a whole that is selected for. When you go to the next generation, the part of IQ which is non-inherited returns to baseline, while the inherited mean does not, so the next generation will have a lower mean IQ. There's no spooky group inheritance involved.
But the answer to both questions is yes.
So it is environmental.
Wait, wouldn't the contradict your point ?
If it is straight up regression to the mean, then the child of any 2 identical geniuses is just as likely to be a genius as the child of any other 2 geniuses. Because all children of geniuses will regress to the overall mean of mankind at the same rate. (assuming the same environment)
So the answer for both would be 'No'.
I'd phrase my statement as : "Once you control for parents + environment, is the avg IQ of the parents' groups completely irrelevant?".
or
"Obama and Michelle's kids, can be expected to be as smart as a Chinese Obama and Chinese Michelle's kids".
It could be non-linear genetic (like favorable heterozygous combinations), or it could be random.
You speak of "mankind" but bear in mind, that during last hundreds of thousand of years, there were different species of humans (like, say, Flores Hobbit) and divergence started from seemingly small differences at first like we see now in extant populations. ... for a simple one-gene example, think of probability of two dark-eyes Swedes to produce a light eyed child vs probability of two dark-eyed Nigerians to produce a light eyed child. These Sweden parents probably have one recessive copy of allele for light eyes, the Nigerian parents almost certainly don't.
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I mean this politely because I'm glad you're taking the time to understand, but you didn't quite grasp what he was saying.
Let me try to rephrase.
Each individual's IQ (really their g, which IQ measures decently for most purposes) is partly genetic and partly environmental. [EDIT: As I get to below, it's probably best here to understand 'environmental' as meaning 'random'.]
Say we want to define "genius" as starting at IQs of 140. Someone might naturally be at that level regardless of losing out on the potential environmental bonus. Someone else might genetically be somewhat below that level but still attain it because they got lucky on the environmental component. Either way they are 'geniuses' -- but one is substantially more likely to pass that trait on to their descendants, because they're that smart with or without the environmental portion.
With me so far?
Okay, so, imagine two populations. On average, one of them is smarter than the other. This one will produce more geniuses. The less-intelligent population may also produce geniuses, but these are more likely to be individuals who lucked out on the environmental factors. Put another way, some of them are genetically prone to genius, while others got lucky.
If you take the child of two geniuses from the first population, it's possible that those geniuses were also simply both lucky. But it's less likely than in the case of a child of two geniuses from the second population.
Does that make sense?
Now,
No, because there are substantial genetic differences between ancestral groups. The 'mean' in 'regression to the mean' is the mean of that child's ancestral group, and the more specific (say, only looking at the last few generations of ancestors) the more accurate. If an ancestral group has an average IQ of 110, the fact that people somewhere else have an average IQ of 85 doesn't somehow affect their children.
Also, I'm pretty sure that 'environmental' doesn't mean what you think it means here, but it's hard to say more without pressing you for details and either way it's too much to go into right now. I'll say that 'environment' includes all sorts of things like individual experiences and happenstance. Putting kids in the same house, school, and workplace doesn't result in identical kids. In fact at this level it would probably be more helpful for you to understand 'environmental' as meaning 'random' than anything to do with 'setting'.
That said, there are plenty of indications that even things we chalk up to as 'environmental' have their roots in heredity. Suppose someone gets in a fight in the wrong kind of bar and suffers some long-term psychological damage from what happens next. That's environmental, right? Could happen to anyone. But actually, even the tendency to be in such a situation is rooted in heritable personality traits.
No, it's not. Parents carry all sorts of traits which may not be expressed in their generation (their individual phenotype) but still express in their children.
As I understand the question, the answer is 'no' but I'll admit that I'm having a hard time understanding where you're coming from with the Obama thing.
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It is non-inherited. This doesn't mean environmental. It could be; it could be literally random.
No.
It is not, because the IQ of the parents' groups gives you some insight into the hidden variables. A genius from a family of geniuses most likely has a high inherited component to his IQ; a genius from a family of normies most likely has a high non-inherited component.
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