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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?
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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