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"Undue" relative to what? Again, I'm not arguing that intelligence isn't mediated by genetics, I'm just arguing that we laack sufficient evidence about specifically race-based genetics. And as per your other comment, while larger sample sized would be nice the problem remain the potential for confounders. At the root of the problem is the fact that races are essentialy pre-confounded; we know for a fact that people of different races lead different lifestyles of consistent but largely non-genetic reasons; any of those things will interfere with any attempt to say a particular trait is caused by genetics. Hell, take skin tone for example. We know unambiguously that genes mediate skin tone, but we also know for a fact that any attempt to survey ethnicities by skin tone and attempt to precisely predict the genetic effect would be confounded by the effect of distribution over latitude and likelyhood to tan.
If you actually believe this, you should be more skeptical of hbd, not less. if there's one perfect brain, and iq is just about how close you are to it, the only selection pressures that would matter would be demerits for isolated populations with tight social structures that allow people with genetic defects to survive and breed. That looks like the exact opposite of the smart-jews HBD hypothesis.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
That we should be testing groups is well taken, but the "similar iq" part i disagree with. Even most nuclear families have significant IQ variation. In particular, I think that when resources (food, parental investment, status) are scarce, groups end up adopting tactics that concentrate iq gains in a few individuals (like by feeding the chief's firstborn son better food and working hard to educate him) while the rest are allowed to be dumber. Also, the "smartest" genes are probably relative to body dimensions... Maybe a gene that causes you to grow more neurons on average is best when combined with genes that predispose you to have a big skull, but actually gives you iq reducing mental illness if poor nutrition or being born female gives you a small head.
Relative to what normal rationalism would say.
The "controversy" is not about what they do in ancestral lifestyles but whether they can function same in WEIRD societes now. So a between-sibling GWAS of persons born in WEIRD society and one or both parents are mixed-races would find answer.
Why? Selection eliminates deleterious alleles from population. What constitutes deleterious depends on current environment. So you may find some population where selection for IQ-lowering alleles intensified but selection for bad running (or immune systems) relaxed.
That was my attempt to make a joke.
Why? I'd agree that non-equal allocation of IQ points can be better, but the premise was to test different IQs. Btw, it might get that you allocated too many IQ points in a person who has no leadership qualities and that might be worse if IQ points were allocated equally.
It would find a very limited version of the answer. Again, even if you find that the measured relative average IQ difference between groups A and B is caused by genetics, it doesn't necessarily prove that the measured relative average IQ difference between group C versus A and B is due to genetics. Even if you find a result that applies to "nigerian immigrants in america" the selection effects of immigration would invalidate extending the result to "nigerians in nigeria."
If there's still a single target "golden brain" it doesn't matter how weak or strong IQ selection effects are for it-- every group will aproach it asymptotically over time, though some groups will take longer than other. For IQ to be traded off versus, say, faster running, you need to start thinking in terms of the actual tradeoffs for having big brains-- mainly metabolic, but also head size, injury likelyhood, pregnancy difficulty, etcetera. And when you start thinking about the biological tradeoffs, it becomes obvious that,
Therefore, at least naively, any aggregate difference between races due to a hypothesized selective effect should be present itself even more sharply within a race. If you want to explain IQ differences between whites and blacks as being caused by earlier or later starts to settled agriculture, feudal societies, democracy, modern medicine, etcenera-- then those same differences should be that much more visible between, say, Italians and Poles, or Madagascarans and Kenyans.
I can't wholly rule out places where this dynamic actually seems to appear-- as in the sharp difference between Azkenazi jews and everyone elser. But at least so far, we've explained only a tiny part of sub-racial and inter-racial IQ differences this way.
If we want to test whether IQ is a good measure of individual intelligence, we want to hold as much as possible as a control versus either modern society or some primitive state of man so we can be sure that it's IQ specifically that's making the difference. Putting people with similar test-taking performance may or may not be a confounder. Probably random group allocation (and group sizes) would be ideal for eventually extracting the most interesting observations. Of course doing that on large enough scale to get good data for every possible combination of IQs is combinatorially impossible, but this whole thought experiment is impossible anyway.
Once we know how genetic variants that Nigerians have affect IQ in f2 hybrids in WEIRD countries, we can get much smaller samples of genomes of Nigerians in Nigeria and extrapolate what IQ they would have if brought to WEIRD countries.
No, evolution doesn't work this way. There always has to be stabilizing selection against novel deleterious mutations. A stronger selection on a gene means weaker selection on another gene. E.g. Europeans have higher rates of color blindness than Africans even if it's single-gene with no tradeoffs. And if "ideal brain" is heterozygous then selection no matter how strong will never reach it.
our industrial society is about 200 years old (much less in many parts of world) and had much weaker selection than past, so it barely affected genetic IQs, except, maybe, reducing inbreeding. In some ways IQ is more important in modern society than past, but it doesn't result in people having more children, so no selection.
in probably existed at some point in past Poland and Italy had difference because Italy became agricultural earlier. Now effect of agriculture reached saturation.
HBD people think that Papuans have higher IQs than Australian aborigines, and that most of remote branches of Africans like pygmies and San have lower IQs than agricultural Africans, so this holds.
Do you know Madagascar was populated long after agriculture and its population originated from mix of agricultural SE Asians and agricultural Africans?
A large part seems to be explained by Cold Winter Theory. We can't always explain how species evolve -- there might be long stages of little change and short pulses of rapid change, this doesn't mean that there are no differences.
Makes enough sense to me. That's exactly the kind of empirical question I want answered before I start accepting the conclusions of racial IQ science.
It doesn't work that way when there's no optimal phenotype. But sharks and dolphins have both converged in bodyplan quite a bit despite a massive disparity in how long they've been in the water. Yeah, there would be some noise-- it's highly unlikely that every population has exactly the same average IQ, and random mutations taking a while to filter out is a plausible source of noise. But if you want to postulate that there are different selection effects on intelligence, then optimal intelligence has to look different for any given group, which rejects the premise of a single "golden brain" that every group is optimizing for.
I'm embarrassed to be citing my dad here, but he is an expert (at least in plant genetics). And he's told me that population growth increases selection effects. Beneficial alleles reach fixation faster. (I used to think otherwise, that selection was strongest when populations shrunk, but he convinced me to believe otherwise.)
Therefore we can assume that the industrial age has been an era of increased selection. That doesn't mean selection specifically for IQ, but I wouldn't rule it out. I'm aware that implies we should find IQ differences between populations who were late or early to industrialize, and I'm not saying we haven't, or wont-- just, as always, I'm being cautious about assuming our data is valid until it starts pointing to a unified theory of how it all works out.
This claim that "saturation" has or can be reached is predicate on my accepting this "golden brain" thing that I still haven't, and directly contradicts the "cold winter" theory you mention later.
No, l was more thinking about how it had an era of feudal kingdoms and metalworking, plus trade relations with the far east.
I would be interested in seeing validation with within-ethnicity IQ variation over climate range... whether Southern Whites are actually dumber than Northern Whites, for example. At a glance I can't rule it out-- California and Louisiana have similar average IQs despite very different ethnic distributions.
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