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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.
This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.
Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
What does "HBD" actually entail? It's a term you never see used outside of this forum, afaik. All I know is that it stands for human bio diversity and means that you take seriously the findings that all sorts of tests like the SAT etc show in terms of group differences? What else?
It's not just IQ but that is certainly the lightning rod of the idea. The kernel of the idea is just that there is no mystical force that means all the obvious variation we see in individuals should cancel out at any given population level. This variation has a pretty obvious genetic component, it is not surprising or controversial that the children of tall people are usually taller than the children of short people. That the children of smart people are smarter tend to be smarter than the children of dim people.
Now there is as much variation in what HBD believers think we should do with this observation as there is variation among those who recognize tidal forces and one doesn't even need to accept it as anything more than a reasonable hypothesis to bring certain political practices into question so most of what you're observing when you see HBD discussed are a degree of two of separation from the immediate point because there really isn't all that much to say about the observation until someone comes in to call everyone who believes it despicable racists.
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My guess is hereditary biological determinism...
I admidettly only scan over this material but the best examples are Askhenazi Jews are inherently smart, in it's worst guise Black people are inherently stupid.
As far as I can tell, the low-IQ version of this argument starts with a racist mindset that then uses a naive attribution of IQ to genetics, and constructs an elaborate just-so story to justify any inequality of black people as a natural consequence of the world.
My guess is that the high-iq version has better arguments and data but is just another elaborate just-so story like evolutionary psychology or blank-slate cultural constructionism or marxism or whatever other thought system that lacks sufficient epistemic humility and likes to draw long-bows.
The inquiry is fine and there may be the beginnings of a genuine science taking shape but easy answers are a lot more fun to post than the complexity of the real world.
This is the definition of a low effort post.
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I think your take is terrible and that if you don't understand a topic you shouldn't opine authoritatively upon it, but something you said piqued my interest.
I'm really, REALLY curious to hear a bit of elaboration on your thought process here. Why is "Ashkenazi jews are inherently smart" the best example, and "black people are inherently stupid" the bad example? What is the precise differentiating point between those two positions that makes one the best and one the worst?
It's a potentially narrow, fairly homogeneous grouping at least for some of history. It's more tractable for study. 'Black people', which at that level, not so much-it would include a plethora of overlapping lineages.
This is not a useful objection, as "black people" can be usefully narrowed to "black American descendants of slaves" (ADOS) -- which informally is often what is being talked about anyway. It is an interesting question about whether sub-Saharan Africans (who do form a useful if large cluster) or e.g. Nigerians (or Igbo or Yoruba) or Congolese are also different, but in the US it's ADOS which are normally most relevant.
Certainly it's an ugly idea that an identifiable group might be on the average significantly less intelligent than the whole population average, but just because it is ugly does not mean it is not true.
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Out of curiosity.
What is «elaborate» or «just-so» about smarts being heritable?
Smarts can be hereditable for sure, but in daily life there's lots of types of smarts in terms of success for environment, and there's not just genetics, there's epigenetics - culture can affect genetic expression.
Epigenetics has fuck all to do with cultural effects on gene expression actually, or with almost anything else. But okay.
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Spent a minute trying to find a charitable basis on which to respond to this, but —
Can't remember the last time I saw someone so casually dismiss an entire concept while openly admitting that he doesn't even know what is being discussed and can't be bothered to spend five seconds at least googling the acronym.
It took you so much longer to write that! And you're so comfortable assuming that HBD-proponents only hold their views because of tawdry character flaws. When you do make it to google maybe look into "projection (psychology)" as well.
I'd thought you were a troll but it looks like you've been around a while?
One of life's mysteries, I guess. Like what 'HBD' means.
It was provocative I admit and I welcome harsh criticism of such a lazy post. But I have read some of the posts here and I stand by my gut feeling of a lack of sufficient nuance for the topic.
As far as I can tell it traverses the full complexity of human complexity - genetics, epigenetics, phenotypics, brain science, interaction of culture with genetics, study design, statistics, intelligence measurement, long history, short history, local history, global history, evolutionary biology, education, development...
Ie, partitioning off causal effects based on aggregate numbers on IQ across partly socially constructed population categories feels 'fraught'. I'd engage with it more (currently reading Charles Murray) if it wasn't for the fact that most posts don't seem to show the slightest glimpse of epistemic humility or acknowledgement of the gaps, difficulties in causal analysis.
But it's an intuition - I could be way off, can you point me to something enlightening and I'll make a start on the topic. I'm picking this would need about 1000 hours of research /thinking as a starter given it's complexity.
Yeah, no, the presumption of good faith is gone here. You do not have the attitude of someone interested in learning and I won't be snookered into wasting more time on you.
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Perfect example of using "nuance" and "complexity" to cloud up an issue.
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– deep Russian wisdoma meme stolen from Ricky GervaisRicky Gervais wisdom
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A major implication of this is that, even if you are able to provide perfect equality of opportunity, groups will still have different outcomes because of their differing inherent ability. As a result, for example, cognitively-demanding (and high-status, high-compensation) professions will never reflect the distribution of groups in society; instead they would be occupied mostly by members of groups with higher ability. The alternative to this is to weigh the scales: to hire based on some attribute other than merit alone, which many find to be unfair.
And these "good" professions are just one example - you would expect to see this phenomenon in every area of human endeavor where ability comes into play.
There are issues associated with what you mention that bother me about the complete anti-HBD stance in the general public. Let's say that groups do not have the same attributes or inclinations on average for higher education and highly cognitively demanding work. Yet most people want "equity". No one wants to hear anything different than "everyone is the same" or a complete non-debate. And let's say that equal opportunities are given. The results are inevitably going to end up skewed due to hereditary (and cultural) reasons. And, given that "everyone is the same" is the accepted truth, someone must take the blame for how a group ended up performing badly. Racism must be the culprit. Professors who were simply doing their job well will be accused. Some will speak up and get cancelled. Others will tip the scales so that their results don't appear "racist". Dumping more qualified students out and including less qualified ones. So there will be false accusations, and dishonesty will reign for others. The grifters who make their living off the existence of systemic racism get to justify their positions. Not to mention the fact that some people who don't have the abilities for doing a demanding job well will get those jobs. Might be dangerous in some cases. And it might be hard to get rid of them, due to the fear of accusations. I wouldn't want my neurosurgeon being an ass-covering, entitled, 100 IQ person.
Right, what you're describing here are major elements of the pro-HBD position. Most people on this forum, including myself, agree with you about this.
Be sure to consider as well the nature of the opposing viewpoint. Many people strongly value what they consider as fairness. The idea that some people are disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own but only through an accident of their birth, strikes them as being unfair. I agree that it is unfair, though it's unfair on a sort of cosmic level, not in a way that should affect who becomes a neurosurgeon for instance.
But there is a worthwhile question to consider in it, one which I think Freddie DeBoer touches on at times: if there is a group of people who are natively less intelligent, does that mean they are destined to have worse lives? Is it right that they should have worse lives? It is important to bear in mind that intelligence is not equal to humanity. I can understand why, when you see one group of people having lives which appear to be worse in many areas, one would feel called upon to try and help that situation and correct it. But as you can see in the real world, when this desire is also motivated by false premises, it can lead to injustice too.
We accept this for other groups. For example, we accept that people from the Congo are probably going to have a rough go of things compared to Swedes. People born with deformities are going to struggle. And what of the extremely ugly? Why are we not guaranteeing them sex and partnership? Do they deserve it less than the beautiful?
How does one who wants equality deal with these questions? There are two ways.
Yeschad.jpg. We need to institute a totalitarian society to remove all inequalities, whether wealth, national, or genetic. Rich people will be taxed and money given to the poor. No borders. Fat chicks on the cover of every magazine, and beautiful people deformed. Communism but for everything.
People can be unequal, but groups can't. It's okay that some people are stupid, fat, and ugly. But it's not okay for a group to be these things. It's very important that all races are equal, because race is the most important thing in the world.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
Equality is impossible. Doubly so because HBD is true. But to fix the problem involves resorting to the extreme ideology of leveling or race-based nationalism. Better to just deny HBD.
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Leftists are very, uh, fair in mainstreaming the adoption of this new concept of «equity». Because fairness is, of course, more about equality of opportunity, about being able to win «fair and square» – or to lose by the same ruleset and accept the loss. Unless we assume that biological heredity is part of the opportunity endowment that's supposed to be equal, this all works.
Of course, there's a big problem here. One can easily see such an assumption «we hold those truths to be self-evident…»
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I think this is not a true general principle. They do not care about the ugly, or the short, or the introverted. Only certain disadvantages count. If they truly believed that principle they'd go full Harrison Bergeron.
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I think all this stuff about fairness is beating around the bush- the African American community is a little over 10% of the population with low and decreasing HBD potential and a broken culture which prevents them from making the best of it. Their TFR is actually above the American average.
You cannot have a 10%ish percentage of the population be a community that’s just destined to mostly live shitty lives without getting a whole lot more mask off authoritarian than the USA is likely to be anytime soon. It’s very important to maintain the illusion that Jayquan and Lashondra have access to meaningful and aboveboard upwards mobility to prevent the entire community from making things a whole lot worse for the country’s social structure. If that entails a playing field that is not perfectly level, then so be it.
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At the same time, we can see how 'tax people with good traits to subsidize the reproduction of people with bad traits' might get us into real trouble. It's the humane thing to do right up until the whole system collapses under its weight and we're back to third-world levels of wealth without the social cohesion which allowed us to climb out of that in the first place.
I like the metaphor of an oared galley. At first all the rowers are strong men. But over time, as the rowers tire out, they begin to be replaced by statues of rowers. This can go on for a while, even as it increases the load on the extant rowers. There comes a tipping point, though, where the boat is dead in the water.
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I would define it as:
The belief that individuals and groups meaningfully differ in nearly all measured attributes for biological and genetic reasons.
That’s really the extent of the belief. The point of contention is what is off limits to scrutiny through that lens. No one would object to the idea that skin color, eye color, or hair texture differ between individuals and populations for genetic reasons.
HBDers (alternately “race realists,” “hereditarians,” “scientific racists,” etc.) are those willing to apply that lens to all human traits.
To borrow your word： apply how? Apply simply in acknowledging the idea as worth further research? Or apply by accepting the hypothesis as axiomatic and then set public policies (re immigration, hiring, voting laws, whatever) in some seemingly reasonable way so that presumably the smarts make the decisions while any member of the dumbs must first pass intellectual muster to be taken half-seriously? Or something else? I ask this question genuinely, and I would be interested to read various answers.
Certainly not. It's not even empirically proven (in the "group differences are genetic" sense; "group differences exist" is easier to measure); it's certainly not axiomatic. I would like to see further research, since it's not empirically disproven either, but so long as the NIH is taking an Index Librorum Prohibitorum attitude to the question perhaps we shouldn't expect progress either way on that front.
So instead, could we just stop accepting the hypothesis' negation as axiomatic? Gifted education that ends up with too few black students might be a red flag worth looking into, but that doesn't mean it necessarily needs to be ended as a "glaring symbol of segregation". It's logical that, "given that "everyone is the same" is the accepted truth, someone must take the blame for how a group ended up performing badly" ... which means that if we want to avoid blaming innocents, we need to either make sure that "accepted truth" is always true or we need to stop always using it as a premise.
The most ironic tragedy behind the "everyone is the same" premise (in the stronger-than-just-anti-HBD sense that's starting to take hold, where even internal cultural differences are denied) is that it becomes so awkward that it ends up getting dropped anyway, just much more clumsily. Harvard goes from using "great emphasis on character and personality" to keep down Jewish numbers in the 1920s to using it to keep down Asian numbers in 2020 ... and yet: is the Personality Quotient test they're using at all detailed? Does it have a respectable inter-rater reliability and internal consistency reliability? Have they tried multiple tests, and what inter-method reliability did they see? Do they have evidence that higher Socio-Economic Status or expensive coaching or anything like that won't greatly affect the results? The SAT eliminated analogy questions because of worries about the SES bias of requiring students to know words (sure hope they don't read anything in college requiring a large vocabulary!), but our elite institutions are thrilled to rely on "does our admissions officer like your personality"?? Anyone truly watching out for racial biases from subjective inaccurate testing should worry that the call is coming from inside the house! An institution that actually cared about personality, rather than hoping it would be a plausible excuse for putting a thumb on the scale, would have been trying much harder to figure out how to evaluate it objectively.
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At this point I would settle for undoing some of the damage that decades of attempts to enforce equal representation and the blank state theory have done to our society e.g. by bringing back tracking in schools, ending affirmative action, admitting that biological explanations are a possibility when investigating group differences in life outcome, prioritizing our immigration and foreign aid policies based on which populations have the most development potential (as crudely and imprecisely measured by national or sub-national IQ), and funding large enough genetic studies to uncover the basis of heritable personality and behavioral differences between groups. Pretty much all of these except for the last were the normal state of affairs prior to the mid-20th century.
... why not as less-crudely and less-imprecisely measured by individual IQ, in the case of immigration? If it's that important then the extra cost of proctoring a test is going to be trivial compared to the advantage of extra accuracy.
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You seem to imply a certain set of policies but not said in a mean way that it would lead to limit the amount of dumb people in your country (immigration, pro-abortion, pro-life policies that encourage more upper class breeding) but it could also encourage more socialism - less spending on trying to educate people into upper class jobs and more just give them money to enjoy life. Previously I think the right even believed in merit and the poor deserved to be the poor and the left said let’s spend a ton of money and teach them to be professionals. The right has adopted hbd in certain forums so that cancels out a lot of the poor deserve to be poor and the lefts in a place where the reforms of the past failed so their doubling down on “structural racism” but now they struggle to point at real legal and opportunity barriers so it’s become this mythical “structural”.
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No need to worry about me doubting your sincerity, this came off as a good faith question.
I would say “apply,” with regards to observed phenomena by considering genetics and biology as at least a perfectly reasonable cause exploration, and probably as the default causal explanation.
To walk through a real world example, we observe that in America, whites are 5’10 on average, blacks are 5’9, and Asians and Hispanics are 5’7. Say we wanted to explain why this is; our first area of investigation should be whether this is just a genetic quirk. If we have reason to believe it’s not, like finding different degrees of heritability across groups, then we might look to cultural or economic factors, like malnutrition rates, or a cultural practice of amputation at the knees (obviously this is exaggerated, but for height, I couldn’t think of another cultural mechanism).
Height is pretty low stakes, of course. Still, HBD sees this as the most effective way to model and understand the world around them, and the topic being controversial, like crime, intelligence, or social status, has no bearing on the use case of the model.
Lifestyle factors resulting in premature age-related shrinking maybe? Like spending more or less time on one's feet. This is fun.
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Most urgently, abandon the idea that perfect representation in education or employment is a desirable goal. Populations have diverse interests and abilities, and that makes the dream of perfect representation a never-ending battle to offset those differing interests and abilities.
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Like anything, it's an imprecise cluster of beliefs, but the core belief is basically what you outlined. It's the belief that intelligence is real and can be measured even if imperfectly, and that our best current measurements indicate both that it has a significant genetic component and that if you take the average intelligence of everyone within various genetic groups of people, then that average is sometimes different when comparing between different groups. I think that's the minimum of what one has to believe for one to believe in "HBD."
Much is made of intelligence and for good reason.
But I'd like to add:
Parental investment
Impulse control
Self-confidence
Time preference
General aggressiveness
Hormonal balances (e.g. testosterone)
Industriousness
Sexual fidelity
Instinct toward hygiene
Propensity to certain diseases
Aesthetic preferences
And so many more!
Yes culture matters, but we have only to look to the animal kingdom for the obvious genetic underpinnings of all of the above.
My current working metaphor is something like, "Culture is a house built upon a genetic foundation. If the foundation, the capacity, is there then the culture can take hold. But for any individual, cultural constructs will collapse to their point of sound genetic foundation."
(And if you don't believe me, try teaching good financial habits to someone with a nasty FOXP2 mutation. Or for that matter a sturgeon.)
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