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I started writing a post for the culture war thread, and it got longer than I thought it would so I ended up just posting it as its own thread. I know some people don't always see those threads, so I thought I'd post a link here. I'm open to discussing it in either location:
https://www.themotte.org/post/604/the-case-for-ignoring-race
Adding to what I've said in the thread.
I think @Amadan has written on this a few times; I objected to his normative conclusions, but on facts it's true. You can't have a major European nation's worth of ethnically distinct people – and at that proud, self-assured, suspicious, confident in having been historically slighted, often outright ferocious people (whose self-perception of being Main Characters and moral core of the country is artificially inflated by the media) – with strong common identity, who disproportionately cannot compete in your economy, and expect them to buy the White/Asian "git gud" ethos. They may cope somehow, they may come to fear the punishment for insubordination and value rewards of cooperation, but they won't take it to heart. It's not as stable a form of race relations as the status quo. The whole system needs to be revamped into a drastically smarter thing to make it viable.
P.S. The issue with race comes from tail effects. I think you're underplaying just how bad the crime statistics are for prime age Black men. I'm wary of lily-white gopniks due to several violent encounters, but for most prime age White guys who look kinda sus it's fair to assume more or less good faith. With equivalent Black guys the odds are, like, 10X higher and that's probably an underestimate. I am positive that this one bit weighs too much to realistically discard.
This is, as far was I can tell, the crux of the matter. It’s fine as far as it goes to mathematically prove via HBD that black under representation in intellectual fields and poor achievement in general is largely the fault of them having worse genes, but it’s not an explanation that a population with an average IQ of 100 would accept, much less 85. You can repress sporadic violent outbursts, you can pay them to shut up and come down with maximum force on defectors, you can use affirmative action until they get taken care of, but ‘just letting them fail’ is not a way to deal with an unassimilable ethnic group with a population of 40 million dispersed throughout your country, which has a ready made excuse for failure that blames you.
Can you point me to a name, link that does the genetic proof for HBD. Most of the content I see here already assumes this axiomatically or is low resolution. What id like is something where I can start to 'cleave the arguments at their bones'
Eg, I'm curious what interpretation people have for the Flynn effect, or what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history..
Is what you are looking for, an analysis of a large number of genes that shows that certain genes are associated with high IQs and these genes are more common in certain populations? There are studies. I can't speak to their reliability. Alternately, are you looking for twin studies that show that identical twins are more common than non-identical twins in IQ?
The achievement gap/IQ gap between white and black people in the US is accepted by all sides. The argument is whether or not IQ is genetic, whether it is a meaningful measure, and whether the tests are fair. The arguments for each of these are many.
HBDers, whether they are right or wrong, have put in quite a lot of work.
The evidence that some populations were isolated (genetically and otherwise) is pretty strong. We can trace DNA and know that Australia and the New World were cut off for quite a while. Similarly, we can tell that Europe and North Africa were cut off from Sub-Saharan Africa almost entirely. There is almost no Neanderthal genes in Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.
Yep that's the level of analysis I'm thinking, and how each piece scaffolds to the broader claims around G intelligence over broad groups of lineages. I've read some Charles Murray and I'm underwhelmed by some of the aggregate data presented. I had thought by now a lot of interesting work on phylogenetic trees would be informing the conversation with some controlled natural experiments available.
But even then, 'some populations' being isolated limits representativeness and relevance for other populations.
Also there are different distributional considerations- perhaps some data is a group at the tail, ie Asian Americans. The analysis is very sensitive to what we consider our population and who were measuring etc.
People talk about Koreans being smarter but are they really genetically all that different from other Asians in the region?
I guess I want to learn from conversations on here so they have to actually have substance. I don't get that from the HBD enquiry here. Whereas a recent series of comments on the US and French revolutions gave me a lot.
The Neanderthal gene discovery is pretty fascinating. And aboriginals clearly have had time to become somewhat different. But is this a shorter term phenomenon akin to adaptation rather than a longer evolutionary time. I guess it does get into the overly complex here but I'm suspicious that any group over long enough time wouldn't select for intelligence in some form. When is G not useful in an environment. Similarly there's cultural/environmental factors that can lead to homogeneous populations but over long time the advantage is genetic mixing, so how long do homogeneous populations exist. Can we really assume that much about our current race categorisation around genetic similarity, or are we arguing that early divergence was the key differentiator.
I think ‘g is useful but not always that useful so the opportunity costs from it sometimes select against higher IQ’s’ is a reasonable explanation. And it seems pretty apparent that high IQ people start having sex later and sleep around less when they do, so you already have an evolutionarily-relevant opportunity cost built in.
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No offense but there is just too much material too readily available to go through this again. look it up on /r/heredity
How long? What do you mean by "isolated"? And why would it matter, like, how do you infer the plausible rate of genetic divergence in relevant traits to say whether it's been long and isolated enough? Your questions and implicit objections carry assumptions which would be quite laborious to justify, yet you do not feel the need to do it. You should, just for curiosity's sake. Consider the issue with identical ancestors point. It is often brought up by blank slatists as evidence that genetic pools could not have been all that isolated.
Okay, so over the last ≈180 generations, the Japanese human has been overwhelmingly molded by selection pressures peculiar to Japan. Is that a lot or not? Suppose that over that time the Japanese have improved their genotypic cognitive ability over baseline by 1/3rd of a standard deviation (5 IQ points), 36 generations per point. Assume intelligence is only 50% heritable (this is a very modest model) and intelligence in that environment over that time span has an average +0.1 correlation with number of surviving offspring. Is that too little or not? Is it plausible that in Siberia there was only a +0.05 correlation?
If you think about it, there are many traits apparently useful in all environments – perfect immune system, height, muscle power, running ability and so on. Yet we do not have invincible immune systems nor are we all maximally tall and strong, and there are clear differences between groups (when was the last time a Japanese bested an Icelander in a competition of strongmen?). The most important drawback for all such traits is opportunity cost; and most differences in human phenotypes are not due to evolving new adaptations but simply due to different tradeoffs when preserving beneficial alleles across traits.
I am happy to profess quite a lot of ignorance, but given the scale of the subject matter I think it's something other people should be admitting to as well.
I just think when someone claims superiority based on genetics we should expect a very sophisticated evidence base with all the causal parts in place, and most importantly, acknowledgement of uncertainty and gaps in understanding.
Being wary of our history on 'science proves this about X race' is one of the very few things I align with woke anti-colonials about.
The question of how much isolation is needed is a good one, also how quickly evolutionary adaptation can take place. I take the points about evolutionary trade-offs, these seem very relevant.
I may be applying a critical lens to HBD but I'm open minded about enquiry. But jeez there's an awful lot of stuff I'd want to know about before I came down on one side or another.
First, HBD is usually not a «claim of superiority» in some global sense. I find it extremely wrong that White hereditarians aren't cut any slack for admitting that they are, in terms of genotypic cognitive potential, middling relative to Jews (who are massively dominant per capita) and East Asians (who are even more numerous than White people; nitpicking about muh creative European geniuses has bearing on historical prestige and such, but is largely irrelevant to aggregate population quality). This fact is more crucial to understanding the world than 13/51 type stuff, but gets just dismissed out of hand as some bad faith gotcha. The relative advantage of those groups is also not scrutinized as problematic, but just attributed to virtues like hard work and «culture of learning» (though Asians were covertly discriminated against in higher ed). This shows that the discourse is captured by special interests which only care to assert that «underperforming minorities» in the US are the Main Characters of history, and if they underperform Whites, it can only be for external reasons.
Second, I do not agree that claims of genetic superiority are more inherently suspicious than the alternative hypothesis, which is more or less «hateful conspiracy in plain sight spanning hundreds of millions of people», that is, moral inferiority; vague theorizing about «systemic racism» and «implicit bias» can only go so far to downplay the inescapable claim that White people are, in the current year, acting in an ethnocentric manner to abuse their non-White countrymen. I think people who promote this view do not defend or caveat its wildly libellous implications nearly enough, and must be pressed to do so.
In short, I disagree with the mainstream evaluation of which hypothesis is null, which claim is more extraordinary, and accordingly the assessment of the appropriate burden of proof. And if «'science proves this about X race'» is generally problematic, we must at the very least normalize agnosticism about causes of differences – not say that Science Has Spoken and all races have equal aptitude (ergo race Y is just oppressive, since differences remain).
Of course I'm not agnostic; IMO this horse is very dead. It's been dead since 2012 at the latest. You can just search HBD on this site and get this thread or this comment. Or go through these sources.
I'm not sure you realize how annoying it is to see that the response to HBD «facts that need to be explained» has been to simply make laypeople more confused. For example you ask «what about Flynn effect». What about Flynn effect, indeed? We don't have a reason to think it's relevant to the problem of between-group differences, it happens for everyone at basically the same rate. Likewise for isolated genetic pools; it's not relevant, virtually nothing depends on their existence. How did you arrive at the contrary prior, can you carefully try to trace it? My guess: you think that intelligence, in the HBD model, is mostly dependent on some specific adaptive variants that have emerged among the «superior stock» and failed to spread (in reality, it seems that the same core set of variants is present in all major groups; lower predictive power of European-derived PGS should be due to linkage disequilibrium, as usual). But where did you get that idea from in the first place? Probably just osmosis.
I don't hold it against you, getting reasonable priors would take purposeful work. It's just a thankless job to argue a scientifically nontrivial point against priors that have not been reflected upon. I hope you skim some of the links above.
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Human brains are massive energy sinks which can best be used elsewhere in many many different environments. Consider the size of our muscles vs those of similarly sized chimpanzees and there is a huge difference. Basically as our brains evolved to grow larger our muscles atrophied because the energy required to support both large muscles and large brains was just not present in the environments available to our ancestors. There are plenty of situations where the marginal unit of strength is more useful than the marginal unit of intelligence (e.g. gazelles running from a hungry lion, being smart + slow gets you eaten, being stupid + fast makes you live another day as the lion instead eats the smart + slow members of your herd).
It's a miracle we ever evolved intelligence in the first place. Current theories are not that this happened so that we could better manipulate our physical environments by making tools etc. for personal gain, but rather so that we could get better at manipulating our social environment (i.e. relations with other members of our tribe) by currying favour with the powerful better than other individuals for personal gain instead and then underwent Fischerian Runaway to get to where we are now.
This assumes that IQ is correlated with energy expenditure of the brain, which is not obvious. Especially when we can easily observe that in times where energy is not of concern, high IQ is negatively correlated with fertility.
You extrapolate this correlation between IQ and brain calory expenditure from the fact that human brains are comparatively more energy intensive. But the difference in intelligence between an ape and a human is orders of magnitude larger than between the smartest and dumbest human currently alive. It is entirely plausible that our increased cost is mostly from qualitative difference that sets us apart from animals, not by the microoptimizations that distinguish humans from each other.
But even this relationship between intelligence and metabolic cost of the brain is not as straightforward as is popularly assumed, some animals which are much dumber than us devote a similar percentage of their total energy expenditure to their brains. Excerpt from the article:
For many other animals, it holds true though. That said, I can think of an alternative explanation why we devote so much energy to our brain: Maybe this isn't a tradeoff between intelligence and strength, instead the reason is that enough intelligence makes muscles partially redundant, allowing weak humans to outcompete strong humans at a certain IQ level. At this point it's not about feasibility of acquiring the necessary resources, just intra-species competition.
Of course this would raise the question why humans are the only animal on earth that became this intelligent, since the expensive brain-capabilities theory wouldn't explain it anymore. Maybe the path towards human-level cognition is not straight up the fitness curve and requires some unsusual environment to make it that way, like the Fischerian Runaway you mentioned. I have trouble to imagine other costs that higher intelligence would impose besides energy, maybe it takes longer for animals to mature, but this seems far fetched. Maybe intelligence isn't that useful, especially if you don't have the appendages to use tools. It didn't seem to help humanity very much until we discovered some key technologies a few hundred thousands years later until it really started to pay off.
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Aboriginals have been isolated for 50k years. That is a few thousand generations which is long enough for fairly drastic changes. Whether or not there was enough difference in selective pressure is unclear to me.
The homo floresiensis had tiny brains and it is possible that they traded size for more calorie efficiency. I see claims that they used stone tools, but my sense is that people think they were much dumber than regular humans. A very calorie-restricted location, like an island, can lead to miniaturization of a species, and this can make them trade off seemingly useful talents, like intelligence, for reasons of efficiency.
I think that there will always be clines, and this is visible in England for example, where the East Coast is noticeably blonder than the West. On the other hand, the longer the separation the bigger the differences will be. Some chance is involved, as the difference between Celts and Scandanvians shows. Both are obviously selected for very pale skin over the last 5 to 10 thousand years, but one group became uniformly blonde while the other got quite a bit of red hair. Selecting for less pigment, presumably to absorb enough vitamin D not to have horrible rickets, can be done by many mutations. Some claim that blonde hair spread by sexual selection as well, which is obviously culturally bound.
The major categorization, sub Saharan, New World, Aboriginal, Asian, EMEA is based on large geographical features that blocked population flow. It looks from DNA results that people in the past were more similar than they are now. For example, early Celts were brown-skinned. Once we collect more DNA, this will be obvious, I suppose. As far as I know, there are good reasons to believe that much of the differences in genetics between Asia and Europe are due to selection after leaving Africa. I think that groups in Africa have more diversity and some of this is due to Africa bing inhabited longer. The San and the Pygmies separated very 110kya ago, before humans left Africa. The other splits are earlier.
Humans left Africa 60 to 90k years ago, so these split predate that quite a bit.
There are arguments that claim to distinguish when divergence occurred and to be able to tell whether it was due to the founding population or not. I skipped that part.
I don’t think this is true- there’s no shortage of either red haired Scandinavians or blonde Irishmen. And in fact phenotypically Norwegians and Irish are very difficult to distinguish.
Finland has 2% red hair, while Ireland has 10% and Scotland 13%. This is not quite as big a difference as I expected and presumably comes down to judging what counts as red hair. To have red hair in Ireland requires a lot, while the Finns might have a weaker threshold. With a weaker threshold, Ireland increases to 30%, with this being more common across the Shannon.
80% of Finns are blonde, while "A range of 27%-30% of Irish females have blonde hair, while for males it is much lower: 20%".
I would guess these numbers have changed significantly recently due to immigration. In the past, Ireland had essentially no people with brown eyes. Growing up, I knew two who I met in college. Van Morrison wrote a song "Brown Eyed Girl" when he met one on a train in London, as he was struck by how unusual it was. (Actually, this is the story Van told me, but it seems he has reneged on it, so whatever). In 1952, 0.43% of Irish people had brown eyes, and these were obviously immigrants.
The blondes in Ireland are probably partially from Viking invasions (or immigration, if you like) or related sexual tourism.
I would guess you are neither. There was a time I could reliably tell a Cavan man from someone from the King's County (the king in question was Phillip II of Spain). I doubt I could still do that, unless they both were farmers.
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Ah ha, excellent - you're very modest in your appraisal. Plenty to digest here..
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Why would that be suspicious at all? g is not an unalloyed good, and there's a reason that evolution hasn't turbocharged it beyond what we have now. Even in modern societies the effect of IQ on reproductive success is complicated, to say the least.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612473119
Higher IQ people are more sensitive to the environment while growing up, and that "extended sensitive period" actually represents a serious trade-off in some places. If you're growing up in subsaharan Africa, the combination of a longer development period, larger cranium (cranium size is weakly correlated with IQ) causing potential issues during childbirth, social issues that emerge from difficulties relating to people several SDs away from you in IQ and the (potential, haven't found a good study yet but seems plausible) higher nutrition requirements of higher IQ brains means that a lot of mutations which would lead to an increase in g actually decrease reproductive fitness in many contexts, especially ones where physical violence is a daily reality. Modern societies where you can live in an extended adolescent period until your 20s and then transform a high IQ into vast amounts of financial resources/reproductive success are incredibly new, evolutionarily speaking, and it takes at least two generations for changes in selective pressure like that to start being noticeable.
Lots of good stuff here to think about. Among different isolated niches one can imagine different things playing off and there are always trade-off relationships.
There's plenty to check out, re nutrition requirements but I suppose not having the research base some of it feels a bit 'just so' to me, not to say that it's definitively wrong.
Some of the things you point out re brains and the hip, brain-size, plasticity trade-off could be argued either way. These are the key evolutionary advantages of humans in the first place. This is what allowed cognition, communication, cooperation and group cognition/culture. My understanding of lineage arguments is that advantages in group cooperation were key in strategic specialisation that were advantage in circumstances of resource competition and violence/warfare. The group/culture interacts then with evolutionary adaptation so that specialisation and cognitive, group niches could develop, presumably with systems of caring for young, which it should be noted for humans are universally vulnerable irrespective of intelligence.
G is a measure of cognition and at first blush should confer strategic advantages even in times of violence.
If you can find someone willing to back a study on this topic I'd be more than happy to quit my day-job and put on a lab-coat, but in the modern west I'd probably have more luck funding a study on the unconventional feminism of Adolf Hitler than one which could be uncharitably described as explaining the precise mechanisms behind African stupidity and violence (that's not how I view it but it is absolutely how an academic review board would).
You're right here when you view g in a vacuum. But what happens when that higher g means that you're developmentally behind all of your peers when it comes to physical instrumentality during extremely important stages of your life and development? Sure you might be a much better leader for the tribe in the long run, but good luck convincing the chief that he should abdicate to this weird nerd who isn't even that great at stealing cattle from the neighbouring tribes. That's the point of bringing up those trade-offs - while there are definitely environments and culture that select for higher g, there are also environments and cultures that select against the trade-offs required for that higher g. It is my contention that some of the same mutations and alleles which lead towards higher g impose handicaps during development which impose significant penalties on reproductive success in the kind of brutal Hobbesian environments that you find in a lot of prehistory, and hence evolution will not simply turbocharge g at the cost of everything else.
Of course in the long run optimising for g wins out and societies which select for it eventually acquire overwhelming asymmetrical advantages over those that prioritise nothing but personal, physical violence and charisma, but the nature of the problem means that low g human societies aren't really going to select for g until the environment forces them to. It isn't like our modern society is immune to these pressures either - go look up the data on the correlation between IQ and the number of children/sexual partners one has in the modern day.
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