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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone know of a good overview of the Race and IQ debate for someone who's completely ducked the topic until now and is basically ignorant?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!

People who are see-no-evil-pilled typically need a quick introduction of why anyone would even think races might have varied intelligence. A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted:

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. (popocateptl note: one more recent large study in the 00s puts it at 90, but this was contested by another study that showed no change. As far as I know, no large scales studies on this have been done since.)

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks.

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. (popocateptl note: An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.)

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households.

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. (popocateptl note: the gap is actually narrowing now, but slowly.)

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf


And now for refutations. The most common response to the above syllogism is that whites in America have a shared environment. As such, things like twin studies and adoption studies which purport to show IQ as genetic, actually only show that a smart white child adopted by dumb white parents still benefits from a community and culture that cultivates their intelligence. (Systemic Racism).

For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not versed in the latest state of the art in this debate -- I made my conclusions about ten years ago now and don't find the topic that interesting, except as an example of ideological constraints causing otherwise rational societies to act in incredibly stupid ways.

There's an old meme that the best way to get help for Linux is not to ask for help on X, but to publish an overly-confident flawed diatribe about how Linux sucks because it can't do X. I suspect Race IQ debates work the same way.

I am skeptical of the race and IQ narrative mostly because Africa has an average IQ so much lower than everyone else. It's fairly easy to come up with just-so stories about Europe and East Asia. But nearly the entire world, including the pure indigenous populations of the Americas, scores notably higher than pure blacks do, on average.

It seems like the answer is as much about "the places where blacks with no European ancestry are to be found are extremely badly run societies with very high rates of child malnutrition and a high parasite load, and this depresses IQ scores. This problem is shared with a few other areas that are not majority black, but purely black populations probably have an average IQ similar to the averages in southeast asia and among native americans, while east asians and most whites underwent selection effects for higher IQ" as it is about genetics. Unless there's some selection effect for all nonafrican populations but not subsaharan africans that I've missed(and before "Ice age", humans were already pretty widely dispersed by then).

To put it another way, it doesn't pass my smell test that every population not considered black scores higher than every population considered black with no white admixture, when neither are monogenetic groups in ways that the entire human race is monogenetic.

The Indigenous populations of the Americans came primarily from Asian populations around 18K years ago who underwent one hell of a trek. Funnily enough, 2 day old Navajo and Japanese babies show similar responses on the cloth over nose cognitive test (near complete docility) which would be extremely abnormal in caucasians. The separation between Africans and every other group is over 50K years. Given the standard theory that we all came out of Africa, it makes intuitive sense for the least cognitively capable members of our species to be the ones that didn't make it elsewhere. The Saharan desert is not exactly tolerant of the unintelligent.

Evidence for the horribly run nature of African societies, or malnutritution and parasite load doesn't exactly counter the validity of the genetic hypothesis. All of these are highly indiscriminate, killing the smart at similar rates to the stupid. You need particular conditions for selection pressures to favour intelligence over the simpler traits they might favour (speed, muscle, and high testosterone for example). Note that these are all areas where Africans excel, with African infants showing greater muscle control at birth than caucasians or asians (but not aboriginals).

That hypothesis, to be clear, was that high malnutrition rates and poor general sanitation leading to high parasite load take IQ points off of Africans. It's a competing explanation for African underperformance relative to other parts of the world which also produce few nobel prize winners. The explanation isn't evidence against competing hypotheses; I don't think that South Sudan with the social conditions of Holland or Japan would have an IQ of 100, I think it would have an IQ similar to blacks in rich countries(which is itself similar to southeast Asian and native American IQ).

The argument is more "there's probably a world baseline somewhere in the 80's, and black countries limbo under it by being in youtube ads asking for money to save the children rather than for genetic reasons". I'm open to the alternative that blacks just have genetically low IQ's, but I want to see the explanation for a common selection pressure on Indonesians and Irishmen but not Bantus.

And I believe the sahara was not a desert when early man crossed it.