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Notes -
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 A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted: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.
Your premise is not sound. Australasian aboriginals are worse off. Poorest Central Asians like the Kyrghizstani are around black level, judging by PISA results. Ditto, it seems, for lower-caste Indians, which is a group bigger than any majority-black nation. Some purely black populations score higher than some non-blacks; Igbos are stereotyped as crafty and big-brained by Africans and they do comprise a big part of those high-performing Nigerians in the Anglosphere. I suspect that Tutsi are smarter than Hutu and indeed pretty smart in general, which is why they eventually suffered a genocide, as it happens. And the lowest results for specific African nations are suspect. Anyway, someone is bound to end up at the bottom of the totem pole.
On the level of rhetoric, it can be said everyone else are overwhelmingly descendants of a single out-of-Africa migration event (hence the popular factoid that there's more "genetic diversity" in Africa than elsewhere). It stands to reason that everyone else might also be close – and different from the left-behind African population – in some important phenotypic traits. Though of course in actuality Africans we talk about are almost 100% Bantu, and thus fairly homogenous.
But yeah, even hardcore hereditarians allow that with continued successes to eliminate causes of deprivation and sickness, along the lines of GiveWell/Gates Foundation, populations that currently report those absurd scores will almost converge with African Americans. E.g. here's Emil Kirkegaard, who himself believes the B-W gap in the US to be 100% genetic, citing the oft-demonized Lynn:
And Emil himself:
The problem is that the gap may be more than 100% genetic, so to speak. That is, with deliberate interventions to close the gap we can raise individuals from the lower-IQ group above the performance they'd have had, given equal treatment; and on a population level, with humanitarian efforts, we may improve environments of African societies beyond the level they'd be able to sustain on their own, so new South Asian-like averages won't hold if aid program is terminated on account of its success. Still, maintaining optimal African performance would probably be a net moral (and economic) win for humanity.
Is that not true?
It's true inasmuch as we literally talk about "genetic diversity" in the context of anthropological research, but implications that people try to smuggle in with these words are false. I'll just quote Cochran again.
On African genetic variation:
And the venomously sarcastic Economists and biology:
TL;DR: Africans do have greater genetic diversity, but "genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci", i.e., greater genetic diversity does not imply greater phenotypic diversity, and even if there is greater variation in one phenotypic trait (e.g. height), this does not imply that there is greater variation in all traits. Correct?
Pretty much. Actually it's four points.
Most of the asserted "genetic diversity" of Africa as a whole is due to peoples from ancient population clusters, which make up less than 1% of African population and are not associated with colloquial "black people". They are anthropological marvels, but frankly they're not the guys anyone is talking about. Related Razib Khan post.
"Genetic diversity" for a given population is overwhelmingly a measure of ancestral population size and diversity of interchangeable variants that have spread by genetic drift. Out-of-Africa populations have passed through a series of severe bottlenecks, so they've shed some genetic markers we can find in African Bantus. Doesn't have much to do with anything consequential. It's like a JPG that's gone through lossy compression: there are color bands now, and less diversity of color patches or raw pixel values, but it doesn't mean the semantics of the image is altered, or that the range of any color channel is diminished, in fact the opposite can be true.
Local adaptation can very quickly act on non-neutral loci, a few thousand years are more than enough to change a typical polygenic trait by 1 SD. We have no grounds to presume that ancestral (>50KYA) diversity explains modern diversity for groups that have evolved in different environments.
By the same logic, yes, traits are independent products of selection. Just like all Sub-Saharan Africans are pretty dark relative to other races, they can be pretty ... fast runners, putting aside their internal ranking and their variation in toxin resistance or deep-diving talents or cricket skills.
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