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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 A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted:
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.
Could you rephrase this? It sounds interesting but reads to me like "I'm skeptical of HBD because every single black country has a low IQ, and every black minority population in other countries also has a low IQ." To me this sounds like pretty good first-glance evidence that the HBD story makes sense, even before you look at the genes themselves. Forgive me if I'm tired and completely misreading you.
Could you give a few examples? I'm under the impression that the IQ in say, Afghanistan, is quite high despite the institutions in those areas being incredibly dysfunctional forever. (EDIT: Woah, dead wrong alert. Afghanistan looks to be in the mid eighties. This table looks to be sourced to Richard Lynn's work.)
I left this out because it's pure speculation, but the "Cold Winter" hypothesis is the one you run into the most. Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate. For example, this also explains why Mesoamerican civilizations which were also tropical or subtropical have such a high IQ and had sophisticated premodern science and maths. (Their ancestors had to pass through Siberia and over the Bering Strait.)
Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow. Plus there are temperate climates in Africa. Are there really any climates on the way to Europe from Africa that you couldn't find i.e. in the temperate regions of south africa? If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations? And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?
Europe itself was the cold winter area, leading to a population bottleneck. Pop-sci link.
The more dubious and interesting question would the Middle East and India. It's worth noting though that populations do not move in a linear direction, and those regions have at various points gotten heavy admixture and even outright population replacement from the north -- especially after 3500 BC or so.
I'm completely ignorant of Zulu history, but I'm not really seeing devastating unsurvivable winters anywhere along the migration path. As for the temperature on the highlands and mountains I'm assuming they would descend for winters like foragers, nomadic farmers, and pastoralists have throughout history. Are there any mountain ranges that would take multiple years to cross to South Africa? How was the ice age in middle Africa, I thought pretty mild?
Maybe. I'd be interested in seeing if there was a population bottleneck akin to what happened in Europe above.
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