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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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.

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.

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.

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).

but dysgenic IQ selection from low fertility rates is not a real thing

Can you give a summary?

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.

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

I mean, the hybrid vigor hypothesis for IQ specifically seems pre-falsified- most of history's greatest geniuses were purebred members of endogamous groups

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.

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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